Prologue
The alien vessel emerged into three-dimensional space
as a burst of coruscating radiation. No human eye was on hand in that
distant corner of nothingness to witness the arrival, nor the many other
flares of deadly light that followed behind it. No human observer would
have survived the experience.
The one entity aboard the fleeing vessel, a being who
would be nicknamed Jeep by a child of a distant world, counted those
chasing her who had survived the leap across space and time. She herself
had survived by a narrow margin. Many of her pursuers had scattered
themselves in the distant reaches of the void in the attempt. Still, too
many had survived to put an end to the wearisome chase.
The vessel within which she had taken refuge had been
engineered for the mind and the senses of another kind of life form. Jeep
used her own eyes to look upon naked space and recalculate the odds of
completing her sojourn across the stars.
The human child she would soon encounter would have
seen a scattering of distant stars. Jeep saw far more, a pinwheel of four
hundred billion suns glaring from the depths of tightly coiled clouds of
gas and dust. She saw, too, the dark radiation of the twin black holes at
its core serving as this island universe's gravitational anchor. She
saw only this one universe among an infinity of probabilities, but only
because she focused on that narrow span of physical reality within which
her destination awaited her.
Despite the murderous intent of those in pursuit, she
did not defend herself. Perhaps her vessel had the capacity. She had not
bothered to investigate. Violence was not a part of her make-up, and her
enemies were guilty of little more than ignorance.
Few species of intelligent life understood the manner
in which she navigated probabilities embedded within the chaos from which
creation arose. To them, her power of simple choice seemed a magical
bending of the forces of nature to her will, although all living things
wove their paths through systems of probability in a similar manner.
They, unlike herself, simply had no conscious awareness of their feat.
Her strange vision, therefore, was not a magical
power. Far from omnipotent, she was dependent upon the craft in which she
rode, and it was dying and would not take her the rest of the way home.
It would, however, reach another population center
with a level of technology sufficient to continue her long journey. She
would look for a species less sophisticated than those who pursued her, a
species less inclined to notice the means by which she accessed the most
unlikely of happenings and misinterpret her behavior as acts of piracy and
interference.
Soon, she would find Myla.
She murmured to the machine she had seduced, coaxing
from its engineered intelligence the correction to a new heading toward
the outer reaches of the new galaxy where life would be found in
abundance. The vessel responded, eagerly sacrificing its unsatisfactory
existence for the adventure and mystery she provided in these, the last
days of its existence. It lived now for no other purpose than to serve
her.
When those following sensed she would warp space a
second time for her new destination, they opened fire vehemently. Her
ship wove a violent, but precise evasion course as she instructed. Bolts
of energy zipped close by. Each had been accurately targeted. Each
should have sheared through her vessel and left in its wake a billowing
cloud of incandescent plasma. But the being with eyes that could see into
the realm of the possible needed only one chance in uncountable trillions
with which to evade destruction. From moment to moment, she occupied only
those probabilities within the infinite spectrum in which a sparse pocket
of gas deflected a beam by a fraction of a degree, or an unseen bit of
flotsam blunted its force by a precious few megawatts.
She was close to home now, no more than a galaxy or
two away. The knowledge gathered along a solitary journey of four million
years was at stake, although she fled alone through the fields of stars in
the physical sense of the word only. The multidimensional perception and
intellectual power of an entire species reached across the intervening
distance to help her calculate and select a path through available
probabilities as it did with each closely monitored Return.
Soon now, given only a single thread of hopeful
probability, she would grasp it and hold tight.
To either side of her vessel, the last of a trillion
stars standing in her way slipped by like a cloud of incandescent dust.
