hat evening, as he had many evenings before, Isaac purged his disgust at the Mind by escaping. He woke from his after-dinner lucid in a warm sense of triumph that heated his insides like a bath.
He and Billy had assayed the demon-planet, and at the end of the dream, he’d looked out over the planetspace they’d cleared as it stretched out, the orderly towns of colonists rebuilding what the demons had destroyed, taking it back with the honest strength of limbs flushed with work. He could feel the blessings of sons and daughters born into freedom, he had lived happy generations. They had done good work, and he was glad for a friend like Billy.
But as he thought back on his day at the Assembly he found some of the details hazy. When he pressed into them he found only a vague sense of unease, until his thoughts glided to that final starscape at the end, the beautiful data visualization pulsing and glowing like luminescent jellyfish in the Marinaras Trench. And that’s when sleep found him.