He thought of his father, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in a parked car in Florida. Of his mother, dying of cancer in a hospital in Kansas. Of his friends and relatives and colleagues and acquaintances instantly immolated in the furnace of the Death, that scorching, ashing breath that lingered so briefly on the Earth. Their achievements, their courage, their foolishness and mistakes, their dreams and thoughts, harvested as if a combine swept over them, threshing their kernels of grain away from the husks and chaff of death. All the simple people, and the brilliant, the swift contentious birds of the air and the sheep of the green cloud-shadowed fields, fish and strange beasts of the sea, insects, people, people, people, swept up and saved. Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?

And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on the infinitesimal.

Even in his present form, he found this hard to accept, impossible to understand.

Am I being harvested, too? Is that what you’re doing now—carrying me away?

We have a different path and a different role.

What are we—spirit, energy?

We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which particles of matter and energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they are—pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.

Where are we going?

First, to Thistledown.

58

Thistledown

The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski’s control center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown, official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corpreps.

Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing smaller and dimmer.

Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine, he “felt” through the link and explored what lay beyond.

Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma tube.

The frequency of light matched that of the Way’s own variety of plasma tube.

A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the Engineer whisper, “It’s here.”