Gathered in time's long tapestry, aback the eagle. They milled and fought and saw only their limited moment. They did not know that they flew between unreadable spheres, in the perfumed air of vast night.

             As the bird flapped past her, it turned. The glinting black eyes looked at her once, the beak opened slightly. Then it turned away and flew on. Intent. Resolute.

             There came a moment like an immense word on the verge of being spoken.

             And then it was over.

             She sat up. The vines holding her were like rasping hot breaths.

             She vomited violently. Coughed. Gasped.

             Brown blood had caked thick and crusty at her wrists. Her fingernails had snapped off. The tips were buried in her palms. Numbly Cley licked them clean.

             "Have a rat," Seeker said. It held up a green morsel on a forked stick.

             Alvin!

             She shook her head and was sick again.

             "It's done," Seeker said.

             "I . . . Who won?"

             "We did."

             "What . . . what . . ."

             "Losses?" Seeker paused as though listening to a pleasant distant song. "Billions of lives. Billions of loves, which is another way to count."

             She closed her eyes and felt a strange dry echo of Seeker's voice. This was Seeker's talent. Through it she witnessed the gray, blasted wastes that stretched throughout the solar system. Bodies crushed and scorched. Leviathans boiling away their guts into vacuum. Moons melted to slag.

             "The Mad Mind?"

             "Eaten by us," Seeker said.

             "Us?"

             "Life. I'he Galactic Mind."

             She Still caught frayed strands of Seeker's ebbing vision. "You see it all, don't you?"

             "Only within the solar system. The speed of light constrains."

             "All life? On all the worlds?"

             "And between them."

             "How can you do that?"

             Seeker pricked up its outsized ears. Waves of amber and yellow chased each other around its pelt. "Like this."

             "Well, what's that?''

             "This."

             In a glimmering she saw fragile, lonely Earth, now the most blighted of all the worlds. But it had been diminished by humans, she saw; the Mad Mind had not injured it. Sentinel Earth had played its role and now could return to obscurity. Or greatness.

             "What will happen to it?" Cley asked quietly. Her body ached but she put that fact aside.

             "Earth? I imagine the Supras will dream on there." Seeker nipped at the rat with obvious relish.

             "Just dream?"

             Seeker shook one paw, which it had just burned on the cooking stick. It whimpered at the pain. Cley saw by the hollow look to Seeker's eyes that it had suffered much since she last saw it, but the animal gave no hint in its speech. "Human dreams can be powerful, as we have just witnessed," it said.

             For a long moment Cley then saw, through Seeker's strangely boundless talent, the Earth shrink into insignificance. It became a speck inside a great sphere—the same glowing ball she had seen in the struggle.

             "What is it?"

             "An oasis."

             "The whole solar system?"

             "An oasis biome, one of billions strewn through the galaxy. Between them live only the magnetic minds. And passing small travelers bound upon their journeys, of course."

             "This is your 'higher cause,' isn't it? When Alvin asked if you would help defend human destiny?"

             Seeker farted loudly. "He was guilty of the heresy of humanism."

             "How can that be heresy?"

             "The narcissistic devotion to things human? 'Man is the measure of all things?' Easily."

             "Well, he has to speak for his species."

             "His genus, you mean, if you would include yourself."

             Cley frowned. "I don't know how close to them I am. Or what use they'll have for me now."

             "You share the samenesses of your order, which are perhaps the most important."

             "Order?"

             "The order of primates. A useful intermediate step. You possess the general property of seeing events in close focus. Your ears hear sounds proportional to the logarithm of the intensity. Otherwise you could not hear a bee hum and still tolerate a handclap next to your ear. Or see both by moonlight and at high noon; your eyesight is the same."

             "Those are all damn useful," Cley said defensively. She could not see Seeker's point.

             "True, but you also consider time the same way. Your logarithmic perception stresses the present, diminishing the past or the future. What happened at breakfast clamors for attention alongside the origin of the universe."

             Cley shrugged. "Hell, we have to survive."

             "Yes, and hell is what you would bear if you had continued with your heresy."

             She shot Seeker an inquiring look. These were grave words, but Seeker rolled lazily and swung from two vines, using them to cavort in midair with flips and turns and airy leaps. Between its huffs and puffs it said, "You would have prevented our oasis biome from integrating, with your grandiose plans."

             Cley felt a spurt of irritation. Who was this animal, to deride humanity's billion-year history? "Look, I might not like Alvin and the rest all that much, but—"

             "Your trouble is that contrary to the logarithmic time sense, evolution proceeds exponentially. And the argument of the exponent is the complexity of life-forms."

             "And what's that mean?" Cley asked, determined to sail through this airy talk on a practical tack.

             "One-celled organisms took a billion years to learn the trick of marrying into two or more. From dinosaurs to Ur-humans took only a hundred million. And then intelligent machines—admittedly, a short-lived experiment—required only a thousand." Seeker did a flip and caught itself on a limb, its tongue lolling.

             "You don't seem all that advanced beyond us," Cley said.

             "How would you tell? If my kind had evolved into clouds, I couldn't have the fun of this, could I?" Seeker gulped down the rest of the rat.

             "Or the fun of dragging me all the way across the solar system?"

             "There is duty, too."

             "To what?"

             "To the system solar. The biome."

             "I—" she began, but then a piercing cry burst through her mind.

             It was Seranis. Her talent-wail broke like a wave of hopeless grief, discordance boiling with shards of sound.

             Cley scrambled away, driven by the mournful, grating power. She nearly collided with a man in the foliage. He gazed blankly at her. Something in his expressionless face reminded her suddenly of her father.

             "Who're you?" she asked.

             "I have ... no name."

             "Well, what—" and then she fully sensed him. Ur-human, a tiny speck of talent-talk purring in him.