Corona

  The torpedoes rushed toward the planetoid, their casings already dissolving in a fiery plasma of heavy bosons. Corona regarded them with interest; they tended to mimic the plasmas of the monobloc, though in a very crude way. A few seconds later, and Corona wouldn't have bothered with them, but they would impact before the machinery in the station was finished. Corona reached out and touched the torpedoes; they were not unlike the toys of its infancy, and there was a simple trick that could be worked on them. Corona disrupted their local parity. The torpedoes struck the planetoid and began their work of tearing it apart from a subatomic level. Then, abruptly, all the residual energy in the torpedoes was poured into a time-reversal. What little destruction they had accomplished was meticulously stitched back together in millionths of a second. The casings reformed and flew back toward the Enterprise, empty and harmless. The Enterprise's shields rejected them and sent them gliding off into space.

  For Corona, that had been amusing. But the infantile magic had disrupted the delicate machinery within the research dome, which was now automatically resetting itself before picking up where it had left off.

  On board the Enterprise, the monitors ordered the ship to fire its phasers at the station, and maneuver for more photon torpedoes. Kirk sat helpless in his chair, and Veblen looked on with a fascinated kind of horror as the sensors once again showed a rapid decay in local reality.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  For Mason the sense of urgency was reduced by a kind of calm. She had little idea of what was actually happening. The Vulcans around her seemed to be steeling themselves for some cataclysm. Even Spock stood tall, hands folded behind his back, lips set grimly. There was nothing anybody could do; Corona was going to destroy them all. And why? As near as Mason could figure out, searching through the fragments of its memory within her, because Corona felt they were all bits of flotsam in a dead universe. Corona did not grasp what the new universe was really like. Mason stared from face to face for seconds, then walked across to the control platform where T'Raus and T'Kosa stood. She kept her eyes away from the demonstration sphere, which was filled with nonsense even more disturbing than what they had been subjected to before.

  I am a writer, she thought. It's my job to communicate. As often as not, I simply act as a chaperone for the recorders, jockeying them here and there so they can record everything. Then I sit down and edit and maybe try to make some sense out of it; not always, the machines are pretty good at that, too. But now and then, even on Yalbo, I get a chance to write—to communicate. God knows I'm not much of a talent, and I have all sorts of parochial views—hell, I'm bigoted—but …

  Sometimes, I know it, I can feel it—I can communicate. I can put my views across, perhaps better than anybody else. I can explain things. And I think I'd better start explaining, right now—nobody else seems to be getting the job done.

  She reached inward, probing deeper into Corona's memories, and recoiled at their alienness. With an effort, she put away her revulsion and removed the last barriers separating Corona's memories and her own.

  She looked up into T'Raus's eyes, now turned toward her, conveying her image to Corona.

  "It's obvious you don't understand," Mason said. "If all these brilliant people can't explain it to you, I don't know how I will. But I hope you listen, anyway. I hope there's time.

  "You see, we're all very young. Not nearly as old as you. And our world is very different." She mounted the platform and reached out for T'Raus's face, clenching her jaw hard and laying the tips of her fingers under T'Raus's temple. T'Raus reciprocated, and Mason was able to pass what she was thinking directly to Corona.

  When Corona's memories mixed with her own, a specific image was cast up from her childhood—Yalbo's great billowing orange clouds, filled with nitric acid, deadly to breathe, absolutely marvelous to watch at sunset. From the broad viewports of the school, or the smaller windows of her home module, she had thought Yalbo's sky the most beautiful in the entire universe, with its oranges and greens and reds and yellows and warm mud colors. In the clouds she had built great floating palaces, magnificent curving highways; she had imagined creatures of all shapes and sizes. When the wind blew the clouds along so briskly they crossed the sky from horizon to horizon in seconds, she could not imagine anything more lovely and free.

  And then she had found tapes of Earth in the school library, and played them back.

  "It was a shock," she said. "The skies of Earth seemed even more beautiful. You didn't need a suit to stand out under them. You could walk up mountains and touch clouds—or let them touch you. Right on your skin."

  She felt Corona shudder at the thought of a constraining skin. She reached for an analogy, and found one. "Skin is like an event horizon in your world," she said. "In the earliest times, your people had to wait for the universe to grow broad enough that you could communicate with each other directly. You were all in little bubbles of space-time, unable to reach out. There was always Ybakra—you could talk, but you couldn't be with each other. Our skin sort of does that. We have to touch, talk, communicate so many ways because we cannot cross the barrier of our skins."

  "Tell me more about clouds," T'Raus/Corona instructed.

  Mason expanded on the topic. The clouds of matter in the early universe—created thousands of years after Corona's kind had died—had drifted in expanding space-time, slowly starting to clump and separate. "Then they lost their character, gave it up," she said, "to let other kinds of existence begin." That seemed confused, but she let it stand. "What would become clusters of galaxies formed out of the clouds, and then galaxies themselves. At first the galaxies were huge fuzzy spheres, but as they grew older, they flattened out. Then stars condensed from the clouds of gas in the young galaxies—"

  I destroyed many of those young galaxies, Corona confided. My failed experiments.

  Mason tried not to appear non-plussed. "Don't you see? They all had to share. Now, I can't be sure, but don't you suppose it's possible that the first clouds of matter were once capable of thought—and the clusters of galaxies, and the galaxies themselves? But as things changed, they died—they had to make way for new forms—"

  Corona reacted in a way she could only describe as skeptical.

  "Suppose they did," Mason continued. She was getting in way over her head. "And suppose that at some point, a galaxy rebelled—refused to change. And discovered that by doing so, it was dooming millions of new, smaller forms of intelligence to extinction. Wouldn't it be a …"

  She had difficulty finding another analogy; she kept wondering how many seconds until they were all dead. She frowned in concentration. What was there in Corona's experience that could compare with what Corona was about to do now …"In your time, certain of your fellows refused to expand beyond their youthful event horizons. They wrapped themselves in very tight bubbles of space-time, because they were afraid of change. At first, they were tolerated, but as more and more individual realms joined, and as the universe grew larger, these hold-outs became dangerous. They could actually destroy others. They were murderers, not out of viciousness, but because they refused to change. Eventually they had to be hunted down and destroyed, in order to allow others to live. That's what the Enterprise is doing now—protecting itself against you."

  She had kept her eyes closed as she spoke and thought all these things, but now she opened them. T'Raus was still regarding her steadily. "We all have to change," Mason said. "We all have to die, to make way for the new. If we try to live forever, we get in somebody's way, we stop something from happening … someone from being born … and who knows, maybe the new will be an improvement on the old. Does that make sense?"

  T'Raus did not convey an answer. She lifted her hand away from Mason's face, and Mason backed off a step, biting her lower lip. She felt very strange, all her thoughts caught somewhere between Corona's "memories" in her brain and her own childhood ruminations about clouds. "I'm sorry," she said, holding back a sensation of horror and sudden panic, believing she had w
asted their last chance, when somebody else—perhaps Spock—could have been more effective. "I'm sorry!"

  Despite the usefulness of the material intelligences, Corona had been convinced they were little more than peculiarities of the universe's decline. After all, they contributed nothing overall to the local universe but entropy; that is, they used energy but did not reduce the tendency to disorder which so characterized a dead continuum. In Corona's time, entropy had been the rule also, but the decline had barely been noticeable; the second law of thermodynamics had seemed a distant and unimportant possibility.

  To Corona's way of thinking, the only significant intelligence would be one which at least hoped to rejuvenate its world …

  Through T'Raus, Corona had listened to the human woman. Her words and thoughts served to occupy the long minutes before the continuum altered. But they did more than that. Particularly effective was her concern with "clouds," which suggested (again, crudely) the beauties of Corona's time, when solid things had been impossible, and all was beautiful flux. Among the Vulcans, Corona had never encountered the concept of "freedom"; the Vulcans were more concerned with adhering to a rigid code and following strict principles of logic, which rather puzzled Corona. So now it contemplated "freedom" as applied to the random motions of "clouds" and the behavior of material intelligences.

  Freedom to move, to think, to accomplish; freedom to follow the dictates of one's needs. To exist.

  Freedom was a very tricky concept. Too much could result in imposition on the freedom of another being; freedom could be contradictory. When the human woman pointed out that Corona was imposing on her own kind—and on many other material life-forms—by trying to end local reality, the image in her mind had been of clouds blown apart by a harsh, hot wind …

  And that was something with which Corona could empathize. Thousands of years after the last generations of his kind, during his first reappearance, the universe had suddenly become transparent to the irritating little wavicles known as photons, light; instead of being bounced from particle to particle, the photons had streamed through the universe, conveying energy from place to place, blowing like a hot wind through the spaces that had once contained free and intelligent beings. The photon wind had dispersed the final remnants of Corona's kind.

  By today's measure of time, the existence of Corona's people—their "eternity"—had spanned only a few minutes. They had survived many changes, but their end had finally come. Only Corona had found the means to travel the seemingly endless reaches of time, reappearing under certain conditions to reconstruct its Ybakra field.

  These material beings knew what freedom was, then. And responsible freedom—as Corona construed it—meant a fight against entropy.

  The phaser blasts had no effect, and all further torpedoes simply ceased to function, dissipating harmlessly against the planetoid. On the bridge of the Enterprise, the air seemed misty and electronic controls no longer functioned reliably. The ship's computers, to Veblen's fascinated dismay, became little more than random number generators. The monitors struggled valiantly to maintain their control, but could not. They relied more on quantum subtleties than organic minds did; consequently, while the crew continued to function with only minor effects (so far), the monitors had no choice but to shut themselves down. It made little difference.

  Kirk felt giddy. The sensation was not unlike the rush of exhilaration he felt when first entering warp drive—but tinged with a numbing sense of failure. The bridge seemed to be underwater; everything rippled in a way that was both nauseating and entrancing.

  Veblen passed on his interpretations of data from the few instruments still functioning, those diagnostics built to survive warp engine stresses. Kirk listened as 'closely as he could; he was thinking of what he had seen in the demonstration sphere, when Corona had first tipped its "hand" about what it was up to. Would everything dissolve into the hypnotic chaos of the very small? Where would the Enterprise be in such a maelstrom? Where would Kirk be?

  McCoy had never been more terrified. If everything came unwound, he was convinced he knew what lay on the other side—and that was nothing less than Hell. No ministrations possible, no healing, only endless lack of control, giving in to the tortures imposed by those inner forces which he could not face. "I pity poor Spock," he thought, feeling a rush of cameraderie for the Vulcan he had pestered so mercilessly over the years … and had felt so much respect for.

  Spock, however, still stood in a sea of comparative calm. The machines in the research dome had created a tiny, unaffected bubble about themselves to keep working properly until they had finished their task. Spock had listened to Mason's words, had picked up on some of the thoughts passed through Corona, and had been puzzled and intrigued by this extraordinary and irrational approach. Pleading a case was alien to all of Vulcan culture; either a thing was, or it was not. Persuasion and opinion had little role in Vulcan life.

  Grake, T'Kosa, Anauk, Spock—and on the Enterprise T'Prylla—all had made their final peace with existence.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  From horizon to horizon, the sky was filled with a dark purple glow, broken by wisps of milky white and luminous green. Mason felt the crunch of ages-old pebbles beneath her shoes, the only sound besides her breathing. The new suns were coming into view beyond the irregular edge of the planetoid, swathed in the dusty, gassy yoke of their recent birth.

  She reached out her hand, uncertain why she was here, or how she was surviving. The faint greenish iridescence of the envelope surrounding her, flashed briefly as if in answer to one question, and then, overhead, the Eye-to-Stars unfolded and threw a brilliant spotlight beam on her. She looked up and shielded her eyes with her hand.

  "Behind you, please," a voice said. She turned and jumped back in surprise. An indistinct orange cloud was in the envelope with her, roiling and spreading under the influence of unfelt winds. "This is a shape you have taught me, which I find very pleasing. I am what T'Prylla calls Corona."

  Mason didn't know what to say, so she said nothing.

  "Where are you from?"

  She stammered, caught herself, and tried to answer smoothly. "From a planet called Yalbo." This is a dream, she thought. I'm almost dead and I'm dreaming.

  "It must be a very beautiful place," Corona said.

  "Is it?"

  "That you see so much beauty in it. That formations in its … atmosphere can convey the notion of freedom to you, and through you, to me." The cloud darkened as if passing beyond sunset. "Or perhaps it is that you are beautiful, to find such beauty wherever you may be."

  "I'm … I'm very frightened," Mason said. "You are the strangest thing—being—I've ever known."

  "And yet, you have some of my memories within you, conveyed by the Vulcan-human Spock. Your kind is strange to me, as well. Perhaps we can overcome our unfamiliarity if we exchange."

  "Exchange?"

  "There has been much teaching in the past few … hours … but not nearly enough. I have an imperfect understanding of your mode of being, your human kind. Even after ten years, it is now apparent I understand little about your fellows, the Vulcans. I request an exchange of experiences. I will complete the memories within you, as much as you wish to have, and you will share your experiences with me. I will take them with me … to the region you see now, in the Eye-to-Stars."

  "Where is that? A new stellar system?"

  There was silence for a moment. "It does not exist in your here-now. It is a distant possibility. Much time must pass. All the stars and galaxies will grow old and fade, the universe will be filled with black holes, the black holes will return their mass to the emptiness and become naked singularities. Time itself will grow old, come to a stop. What happens after is difficult to understand—emptiness, even more desolation than now."

  "That doesn't look very empty," Mason said, shielding her eyes.

  "You have given me a notion of alternatives … other means of achieving my goal than destroying this universe. What the Eye-to-Star
s shows is an alternative, if I survive beyond the emptiness and darkness. When all else has come to a stop, and the universe seems completely dead, I will be a focus. There will be nothing but the radiation of fraction spaces—what you call Ybakra. I will channel that radiation and fill the void once again. There will be no need for machinery, matter, anything extra … only myself."

  She had a wild hope that perhaps she wasn't dreaming.

  "Is this what you wished?" Corona asked. "That your reality be spared, so that you might all pursue a course to freedom?"

  "Are we being spared?" she asked.

  "Yes. The machines are reversing themselves now. I have returned the others in the station to the Enterprise, all but the frozen ones. I await instructions on their disposition."

  Of all the things to occur to her next, Mason had to resort to her reporter's suspicious nature and ask, "But I thought you couldn't transform anything much larger than a child."

  "While the machinery was absorbing so much energy, no," Corona said.

  "Why did you stop your machines?"

  "Because you made me aware that in ages to come, we may share the same goal. Perhaps your kind will succeed in controlling entropy," Corona said. "In which case, the universe will not die … at least not in the way that seems most likely. And I will not be needed. Still, you could fail. You are young—even those mentioned by the human Kirk, those who seem god-like to you. You have a long time in which to grow, and prepare yourselves, and you could make mistakes. You could fail. If you do not succeed, then perhaps I will."

  "You mean, my descendants could save the universe?"

  "Your kind. You are kin to all beings made of matter, or which arose from matter. In my eyes, you are all very much the same. Any differences are minor."