Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus by Brian Herbert Read Free Book Online

attention to himself. Usually it was easier to just move on. There were always machines that would help him.
    The sentient machines under his command had done quite well for themselves, rebuilding mechanical life forms that had been discarded by Humans and putting them back into operation. They even manufactured popular computer chips and sold them around the galaxy. Sometimes, though, they seemed overly dependent upon Thinker. At the moment, two of his assistants, Ipsy and Hakko, were standing at a thick glax door staring out at him, as if they could not do anything further without his advice. He waved them off dismissively, and they stepped back, out of his view. He knew, however, that they were still close by, waiting to talk with him the moment he went back inside.
    I should reprogram them , he reminded himself. But this had occurred to him before, and he had never done anything about it. He knew why. Despite the minor irritations he actually enjoyed the relationships, because his subordinates made him feel needed.
    Far off, in the perpetual night of the galaxy, he saw something flash and disappear. He would never know for certain what it was, and could only speculate. Perhaps it was a shooting star, a small sun going nova, or the glinting face of a comet before it turned and veered away from the reflective rays of sunlight that seemed to give it life.
    It is so beautiful out there.
    Since Thinker was a mechanical creature with few internal moving parts, he did not breathe, and was able to function outside the boundaries imposed upon biological life forms. The machines that operated this facility were the sentient remnants of merchant prince industrial efforts. Thrown away and left to rust and decay all over the galaxy, the intelligent robots had sought each other out and formed their own embryonic civilization.
    Among Humans and other biological life forms that visited the inn, these mechanical men were something of a joke, and non-threatening. After all, the machines had an affection for Humans, referring to them in almost godlike terms as their “creators.” The metal people were an eclectic assortment as well, and amusing in appearance to many people. Some of the robots were Rube Goldberg devices that performed tasks in laughable, inefficient ways, taking pratfalls and accomplishing very little. This explained why many of them were abandoned. Others had been cobbled together with spare parts. In all they looked quite different from the standardized robots manufactured by the Hibbils on their Cluster Worlds, under contract to the Doge and to the leaders of various galactic races.
    Thinker didn’t really care how he and his loyal compatriots were viewed. His emotional programs were limited in scope, and while he became mildly irritated at times he did not take offense easily. His thoughts tended toward the intellectual, toward questions of deep purpose and matters involving the origins of the universe. Most of all he found it exhilarating to stand out here in the vacuum of space, gazing into eternity … into all that was, and all that ever would be. Some marvelous power had created this galaxy, and in his most private thoughts he liked to imagine the Supreme Being as a machine, and not some cellular entity. It seemed plausible … perhaps even likely. The galaxy was a machine after all, one that operated on a vast scale, ticking along moment by moment in its journey through time.
    Lights blinked on inside the rooms and public chambers of the Inn of the White Sun. Far below, Ignem gave up its ephemeral translucence and faded to darkness, casting an ebony shadow against the cloth of stars beyond.
    The cerebral robot was about to go back inside when he felt a rumbling in the metal plates of his body, and his metal-lidded eyes detected a distortion in the fabric of the cosmos, with star systems twisted slightly out of their normal alignment. A section of space in front of him became opaque and amorphous, with a wobbly