Then she saw the body. They carried it between them in the light gravity. "Rin!"
Dawn asked a Supra man, "What happened?"
"He . . . gave . . . too much." The man-child's throat sounded raw and unused, as though he had seldom spoken before.
Dawn gazed into Rin's open eyes. A rosy pattern of burst veins gave them the look of small, trapped seas. Blood lakes. Ruin at a cellular level.
Dawn sighed. There was no pulse.
Dawn looked at Rin's troubled, fractured eyes and tried to imagine what he had finally faced. She knew suddenly, certainly, that he had somehow helped her when she was in the Malign's grip.
She had been the conduit, and he the guardian. And his cost had been to have his own mind burned away, the brain itself fused.
He had dignity in death. She felt a pang of loss. He had been strange but majestic, in his way. Searcher was wrong; the Supras were still essentially human, though she would never be able to define just what that meant.
* * *
That night they did the ancient human thing: drank alcohol.
No matter how many millennia of chemical research had come and gone, something about that elemental chemical still resonated in the human soul.
Dawn did not mingle with the Supras. They kept to themselves anyway, and unlike every other party she had ever attended, she felt no need to go over and try to work herself into conversation with them. She let them be. Even the Supra men had no particular gravitational attraction for her. It felt good.
Instead, the childlike Ur-humans drew her. They were amusing, and their innocence she found touching. Their humor provoked her own giggles; and it was not just the alcohol.
Dawn looked around the room—actually, a bower the Captain had ordered to be worked forth from a vine cloister in the Leviathan—and felt an odd feeling creep over her. She knew humanity's role in the biome. Knew it in her gut. The mighty Supras did not; somehow she could tell. She very well might be the only person in the room who felt the meaning of that.
And her own retinue of her genetic identicals—they had not a clue.
Neither had she, until now. Until the long struggle with the Malign. Some Supra had noted, off-hand, that the battle had lasted seven days. It had felt like years. Dawn could feel the fatigue like an ache in her bones and knew that she would sleep for a week, once she closed her eyes. But not yet. Not yet.
She had to take it all in. There was so much to do now. The young versions of herself milled and spoke and tipped back their crystal glasses—after all, they were her, and she was doing a lot of that, too—all blithely adorable. Hers.
"We're going back together," she said to one of the young men. "Tomorrow."
"Really? Where?" he asked, blank-faced.
"Earth. Home."
"I dunno, we were all speed-grown in tanks, fast-taught, had a lot of time in the crucibles . . ."
"You need bringing up," Dawn said softly.
"Do we?" His face was open and could take any impression, she realized. The lasting imprint of a soft touch.
A strange form of adulthood beckoned to her. She would take these back to Earth and bring them up. They were of her kind, and she had to honor that. She would make a home.
And then, too, there was her father. He would help, she knew that somehow without asking. But he was a rover, too, and would be off to the great reaches of the sky in the long run.
Hell, in the long run, she would go, too. It was in the genes.
She felt a dawning wonder and joy. She finally had a place, a home to make. In forest or plain, no matter—a home.
Searcher came by, sipping suspiciously at a cup of a Supra punch. Dawn fell upon the procyon with glad cries. "You made all this happen! And I never thanked you."
"Not necessary. I was following my nose."
Dawn tweaked the long snout. "That must be easy; it's so big."
"I see you have gathered your kind," Searcher said pensively.
"All there are, right."
"Not all."
"But you said my kind were gone."
"Gone into the Singular, some of them."
"There are Originals in those branes of yours?"
"Yes—but they are not mine." Searcher eyed Dawn. "Nor yours. The higher dimensionals have incorporated humans, and those too fought in the battle with the Malign."
Dawn dropped her drink and it shattered on the stones. "My kin? How can I reach them?"
"That expedition would be more difficult than the one we have just finished." Searcher raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Are you willing?"
"Huh? Hey, first I have to get these kids back, find a place to live, make—"
"I know. There will be time for that. Shall I come calling in, say, three hundred megaseconds?"
"Uh, sure. But wait—last time we spoke, you owned up to being, well—"
"God?"
"Yes. But so are you."
"What?!"
"Of course, you need some polishing. But you show definite promise. I shall see you in a while."
Searcher walked away, still sipping.
"Wait! I don't understand!"
"Welcome to our society of the happily ignorant," Searcher said. And as Searcher departed, Dawn wondered whether she would ever see the remarkable beast again.
THE END
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Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 40