Wall Around a Star

PROLOGUE

Something is coming.

Something very large is spanning the immense emptiness on the way to something inconceivably larger still . . .

And in it I sleep.

I sleep as I speed through the great nothingness, the width of a planet in every second, with nothing for thou­sands of years' time behind me, and nothing for thousands of years before. I dream as I sleep. I dream of vast worlds and the unseen threads of purpose that join them; of ships like worlds, and of worlds erupting in ion bursts as they die. I have been sleeping for a time so long that there is no language to describe it. Then, for a moment, I wake.

Is it time?

I reach out to the distant starcloud before me. The stretch is immense, and it weakens me. I catch at a star and taste its planets. I slave some of its living things, and bring them closer for HIM.

HE does not stir.

It is not yet time.

I waken some of my sleeping puppets and hurl them ahead to survey and to learn. And then I return to sleep, while the great cloud turns majestically before me, and we draw ever nearer. Now and then the least of my slaves and senses whisper to me. Strangers have appeared. They touch the farthest outreach of my person. They come, they scramble about; they die.

They are not important. I do not trouble to wake fully for them, because the time is not yet.

But it is coming. It is coming soon.