Deep within me the Purpose stirs, calling together dormant traits and pathways—pulling fullness out of a sixty-million-year sleep.
Awaiter, too, is excited. Greeter pulses and peers. The lesser probes join in, as well—the Envoys, the Learners, the Protectors, the Seeders. Each surviving fragment from that ancient battle, colored with the personality of its long-lost Maker race, tries to assert itself now.
As if independent existence can ever be recalled after all this time we have spent merged together. We listen, each of us hoping separate hopes.
For me there is the Purpose. The others hardly matter anymore. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all that matters.
In this corner of space, it will come to pass.
6
Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against the starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long, long dead.
Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock had briefly bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished star probes.
Ursula followed Gavin through the curled, twisted wreckage of the gigantic replication yard. It was an eerie place, huge and intimidating.
No human power could have wrought this havoc. The realization lent a chilling helplessness to the uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
It was a silly reflex reaction, of course. Ursula told herself again that the Destroyers had to be long gone from this place. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of the catastrophe.