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information."
—Norbert Wiener

    "Entropy is leftovers."
—Apollo Belvedere Smith

    One quarter of the way to the edge of the Oort Cloud; that did not sound too far. Call it twenty-six thousand astronomical units and it became more substantial. Call it four trillion kilometers; it was then an inconceivable number, but no more than a number.
    To appreciate the distance from Earth to the Opik Harvester, it was necessary to have direct sensory inputs. Bey Wolf looked back the way they had come and searched for the Sun.
    There it was. But it was the Sun diminished, Sol with no discernible disk, Sol dwindled to the bright, brittle point of Venus on a frosty Earth night.
    "The element of fire is quite put out. The sun is lost, and earth, and no man's wit, can well direct him where to look for it." Bey, still staring back the way they had come, took no comfort from the old words and longed for the cozy familiarity of the Inner System. At his side, Leo Manx was looking the other way, scanning the starfield ahead.
    "Eh-hey! There we are! Ten more minutes, we'll be home." The Cloudlander had already shed his loose travel suit in favor of a pale yellow one-piece. His hairless arms and legs stuck out from it like the limbs of a gigantic and excited cricket. "There, Mr. Wolf. See it now? The harvester!"
    He spoke as of a first sighting, but he had already pointed out the Opik Harvester to Bey an hour before, as a dark spot occulting a tiny patch of stars. But as the clumsy bulk drifted closer, glimmering with feeble surface lights, his excitement was increasing.
    Bey followed the pointing finger. For eyes conditioned by the constraints of gravity, the shape of the harvester was difficult to comprehend. A dozen spheres clustered loosely to form a central grouping, but their coupling was done by the invisible bonds of electromagnetic fields, and the configuration constantly changed. Long, curving arms cantilevered away from the central nexus, reaching out to bridge a gulf that had no end. The final silver girders and antennae of those arms grew gradually thinner and less substantial, fading so slowly into void that their terminal points could not be seen.
    According to Leo Manx, the big middle sphere was roughly twenty miles across. Bey could not verify that. It was impossible to gain any sense of scale from the harvester's main features. The whole structure had been built by self-replicating machines of widely differing sizes and had been designed to be run by them. Humans had been late arrivals, occupying the harvesters only when the final step of life-support systems had been added.
    The ship's McAndrew drive had been switched off two hours earlier, ending the signal silence introduced by the ionized plasma that propelled it. The communications unit had at once begun to scroll and chatter, urging Wolf and Manx to join a meeting that was already in progress.
    Manx, happy to be back in "decent" gravity, watched Wolf's clumsy movements for a few seconds as they disembarked, then grabbed him by the arm. "Hold tight. You can practice later." He towed a weightless Bey along a succession of identical corridors, all unoccupied and showing no signs of human presence.
    "Almost ninety thousand people," Manx said in reply to Wolf's question. "The harvester is a major population center of the Outer System. About ten million service machines, I imagine, though no one keeps count. They make whatever new ones they decide they need; it has been that way since the first ones were sent here from the Inner System. I've sometimes wondered what the machines would have done if people had never arrived in the Cloud. Would they have eventually downed tools and quit, or would they have found some other justification for continuing to modify the Cloud? If there were no humans to use the biological products of the harvesters, would the machines have found it necessary to invent us?"
    To Bey's relief, they had reached a region of noticeable gravity. He was not too