His body went on eating, sucking at the stars.
He listened to the slow drip of blood falling from his body and splashing on the floor.
His mind was clouding and he let it cloud, for there was nothing to do…there was no need to use it, he did not know how to use it. He did not know what he could do or what he couldn't do, nor how to go about it.
He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the world of Cygni VII lay beneath his hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he'd done.
The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his visionplate.
It was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the gray fog of his mind, as if it were yesterday or this very moment.
He reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising panic that exploded into fear.
One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact…he was about to crash.
He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear or terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting.
Awareness came back…in a moment or an aeon — which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which it seemed he had held forever.