In the Heart of Darkness(105)

A great wheeling spiral. Made up of millions of points of light. The view swept closer. Each of those lights was a sun. Most suns were circled by worlds. Billions of worlds. Each different.



Closer.



Small bodies moved through that incredible black vastness. Slow, slow, slow, slow. Machines, Sanga realized. Vessels of some kind.



"SPACECRAFT. LIMITED BY THE SPEED OF LIGHT."



Sanga understood the words: "speed" "of" "light." But they seemed meaningless. Light was. How could it have a speed?



"IT DOES. 186,300 MILES PER SECOND. NOTHING IN THE UNIVERSE CAN MOVE FASTER. IT TOOK THESE SPACECRAFT CENTURIES TO REACH THE NEAREST STARS. BUT REACH THEM THEY DID. AND THEN, CENTURIES LATER, STARS BEYOND. AND THEN, MILLENIA LATER, STARS BEYOND. AND BEYOND AND BEYOND. AND BEYOND AND BEYOND.



"MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF YEARS."



Sanga's sense of time expanded. He saw the spacecraft spreading through the heavens. Saw an immense duration compressed into an instant. Saw the seeds of his world scattered throughout the spiral.



"GALAXY. THIS GALAXY. THE MILKY WAY, YOU CALL IT. HUMANS WILL ALSO REACH ANDROMEDA, AND THE MAGELLANIC CLOUDS—ALL THE GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL GROUP. NO OTHER CONSCIOUS LIFEFORM HAS EVER BEEN FOUND. NOW THAT HUMANS—FORMER HUMANS—HAVE SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY AND ITS NEIGHBORS, THEY HAVE FILLED THAT ECOLOGICAL ZONE WHICH YOU CALL 'INTELLIGENCE.' NO OTHER WILL EVER ARISE.



"AND HUMANITY HAS DESTROYED ITSELF. IT HAS BECOME NOTHING BUT MONSTROSITIES. A DISEASE. THE POLLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE."



A world of gigantic trees. Large monkey-like creatures swung through its branches. They were hairless, however, and wore clothing. Cloth strips tightly bound, allowing free movement of their limbs. And a short, muscular tail. Their fingers were long, their toes grotesquely so. For all essential purposes, they were quadrupedal. One of them swung into view.



Its face was human. Had once been human.



A world of water, landless, pocketed by vast floating sargassoes. Fish-like creatures swam through that world-girdling ocean. Once of them was suddenly seized by another shape darting from under a ledge of sargasso weed. Odd shape. Bastard shape. Its flukes moved up and down, like a dolphin, and its body was a streamlined torpedo. But it retained very short, stubby arms—barely more than hands thrusting forward from vestigial shoulders. The hands stuffed the "fish" into a wide mouth lined with needle teeth. Then, carefully separated the fish bones and placed them in a pouch tied to its neck.



A closer view. That face, too—that wide-eyed, gape-mouthed, needle-toothed, almost noseless face—had once been human.



A heavy world, thick with atmosphere. Crab-like shapes scuttled across its low-lying surface, busily constructing edifices of some kind. Their arms and hands, though bulky, were still close to human. But they moved on six legs. The rear limbs retained a faint trace of their bipedal origin. But the mid-limbs were sheer nightmare. Adaptations of the ribcage.



Once human.



Monstrosity followed monstrosity. Some were so bizarre that Sanga could not see any remnant in them of humanity.



Nor was Earth the only planet blasted into lifelessness. Sanga saw thousands of those worlds, ravaged and destroyed by—"nuclear fire," "kinetic bolides"—other things. "DNA plague," eight times. Three planets, drifting together in an empty void beyond time and space itself, had been "rotated about their axis." Many were not even planets, any longer. Simply shards drifting in space. "Very large kinetic bolides."



Sanga understood none of the terms, but he understood the reality. He was a soldier. Horror was no stranger to him. Though he had never, in his worst nightmares, imagined devastation on such a scale.



"YOU WONDER IF I AM LYING TO YOU."



No, he did not. He was inside the mind of Link, now, and understood its basic nature. Link was a "divine being," yes—Sanga could sense the reality of the great new gods which had created it. He could see those perfect, beautiful faces. (The beauty, oddly, did not move him. It was like Sati's beauty, magnified a thousand times. But he had no doubt they were beautiful. And perfect. And divine.)



Nor did he doubt that Link was showing him a true vision. It was not in the nature of the being called Link to lie. Its mind followed the path given to it, like a waterwheel turns with the stream. It could no more lie than a waterwheel could decide to turn against the current.



"THE FINAL ABOMINATION HAS NOW APPEARED."



A luminous shape swam in the void. At first, Sanga thought it to be some kind of ethereal moth, until he grasped the scale of the thing. Whale-sized. Bigger. He could not make out the precise shape of the creature's body. It was not entirely material, he sensed. Much of that shape was—magical?