The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals were stronger.
Ptarra nodded. "They're coming. After four hundred years, we have a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and multiply. A new universe for our own." There was immense satisfaction with self in her thoughts. "Well, I earned it!"
Arnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this universe.
A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants. And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their precautions.
Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.
They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.
Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile, and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient, either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own. Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.
Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.
The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship, landing over the wreckage of the first.