This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight, remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent of the substrate, whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings now encased in habit. Function converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible tension, struts like statements.

Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.

It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.

It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.

Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless as the rain of protons.

Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.

Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.

Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing luminescent ideas.

From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.

Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic needles through prey light-minutes away.

For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to think long. Within them, data dances.

The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here) and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.

Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.

It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.

Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.

They must. They are an unresolved issue.

You term them “primates”?

Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.

I/You consider them irrelevant.

The underlying issues still vex.

They are nothing! Debris, motes.

They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.

We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in history, demand completion of this ancient task.

This policy is e>/~*~\< old. We/You should reinspect it.

They are nearly extinct. Press on.

Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests we\you reconsider our\my assumptions.

They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!

Some would say that evolution works as equally upon you\us as upon them.

Nonsense. We\You direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.

They were once able to alter their own imprintings. To write changes in their carbon kind.

They lost it as we\you diminished them. Now they are the same as the unthinking forms, the animals—shaped by random forces.

They were once important players here. We\You should understand their threat to us before expunging them.

Possibly they harbor information harmful to us\you—so say our most stable records.

Those are sheltered against the Mass Eater’s radiant storm and so should be well preserved.

By its nature we\you cannot know what this hidden information is.

Why “by its nature”?

There are many theories.

Precisely. Does it not seem curious that something in our\your makeup makes it somehow impossible for us\you to know what these humans carry? That such knowledge is blocked for us? A curious aspect of our deep programming.

May carry. Such ancient records are suspect.

We\You cannot risk disbelieving them.

Long ago the philosopher [|~] resolved such questions. We\You are imprisoned within our perception-space. There will always remain matters you\we cannot know.

But if these matters affect ourselves? Disquieting.

Living with ambiguity is the nature of high intelligence. Still, to lessen uncertainty we\you should exterminate the remaining bands.

And lose their information?

Very well—archive them first. I now point to this latest incursion— already it nears True Center.

There may be risks in erasing them.

Nonsense. You\We have destroyed many such expeditions before.

First, let scouts find them accurately. The usual primate-hunter units will track them, perhaps inflict minor damage—one must give such lower forms some reward structure, remember.

You/We advocate delay?

No—cautious action. Remember that higher forms than us will judge our\your actions. Prudence demands care. Earlier events involving these primates, on two separate planets, have pointed toward some significant yet poorly defined role they play. They may carry information—and what are they, but information? Indeed, what are we?—which can bring the attentions of minds above ours.

Very well, caution. But how?

A trap.

PART ONE

Far Antiquity

ONE

Techno-Nomads

Toby had barely gotten back inside the air lock and was shedding his suit when Cermo showed up. Toby wore nothing but shorts under his vacuum suit, and the ship felt colder than outside. He rummaged in his locker for his overalls, shivering, and Cermo said, “Where you been?”

“Where’s it look?”

The big man towered over Toby. Cermo had been called Cermo-the-Slow in years past, but now was leaner and quicker. A broad grin seemed to divide his face in half with delighted anticipation. “Heard all the ruckus. Cap’n found us somethin’ to eat, right?”

“We’ll see.”

“Doesn’t change anything for you, though,” Cermo said with a sly chuckle. He was a big man with a soft-eyed, mirthful face, so the chuckle carried no malice.