Space

Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star’s surface. Farther out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris that seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond that there were only the Galaxy core stars — watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.

This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.

Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signal: a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.

In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire Solar System — and the same thing had occurred many times before.

We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.

It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin stargazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from little green men.

In fact it was a killer of little green men.

Chapter 32 Savannah

She woke to the movement of air: the rustle of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.

She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.

And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.

She remembered.

Io. She had been on Io.

Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.

The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.

Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain—

And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.

She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily toward her.

She felt herself tense up farther.

His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.

She whimpered, cowered back. “You are dead.”

He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. “Take it easy, Madeleine.”

“They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ—”

“Don’t ask questions,” he said evenly. “Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you feel? Are you sick, hot, cold?”

She thought about that. “I’m okay, I guess.” She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.

It was Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.

He was studying her. “You were out cold. I thought I’d better leave you be. We don’t seem to have any medic equipment here.”

The smell of the fish reached her. “I’m hungry,” she said, surprised. “You’ve been fishing?”

“Why not? I mined my old space suit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer.”

…Never mind the fish. This guy is dead. “Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns…” But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.

“Just look at me now.” Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. “I haven’t felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me.”

“Who?”

“Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?” And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brushwood.

She got to her feet and followed him.

The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern farther over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.

The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant’s fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.

Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.

She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.

She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish, and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. “I never much liked fish,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Where’s the stream?”

He nodded, beyond the fire. “Thataway. I took a walk.”

“During the daylight?”

“No.” He tilted back his head. “When I woke up it was night, as deep as this. Still is.” He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. “What do you think of the view?”

The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light — stars? — and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.

“That is a star birth nebula,” he said. “It’s probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the center — see the way that glow is roughly spherical? The stars’ radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing protostars that have yet to shine… Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I recognize that thing; it’s visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth.”

In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.

“Ah,” Malenfant said, when she expressed this. “But we’ve come far beyond that, of course.”

She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. “Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw—”

“There are Neandertals here,” he said quickly. “You needn’t fear them. I think they’re from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven’t recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere.”

She tried to follow all that. He didn’t seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.

“We aren’t on Io anymore, are we?”

“No.” He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. “That’s no sky of Earth. Or even of Io.”

Madeleine felt something inside her crack. “Malenfant—”

“Hey.” He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. “Take it easy.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“We’re a long way from home. I know.”

“I’ve got a lot to tell you.” She started to blurt out all that she’d seen since she, Malenfant, and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the Solar System from the Gaijin’s Cannonball home world: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the Sun’s hearth, the Crackers.

He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.

“Madeleine.”

She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.

“None of it matters. Look around, Madeleine. We’re a long way away from all that. There’s nothing we can do to affect any of it now…”

“How far?”

“Questions later,” he said gently. “The first thing I did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump.”

Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.

By the time they’d eaten more fish, and some yamlike fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.

When she woke it was still dark.

Malenfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?

There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake — the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?

She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.

The Neandertals seemed to be a family group: five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant’s scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape-men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.

“Why did you come here, Madeleine?” Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes.

He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. “I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you.”

“Why?”

“I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn’t like the idea of you being alone when—”

“When what?”

She hesitated. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Just remember,” he said coolly, “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.

She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt farther from home than ever.

She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.

“It’s a star map,” she said.

“Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here…”

Some of the points were double.

“The stars have shifted,” she said.

“Here’s where this was yesterday — or before we slept, anyhow. And here’s where it is now.” He shrugged. “The shift is small — hard to be accurate without instruments — but I think it’s real.”

“I noted it too,” she said.

“Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are more stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky—” He swept his arms over his head, toward the bright Milky Way band on the horizon. “ — thataway.”

“Why that way?”

He looked up at her. “Because that’s where we’re headed. Come see.” He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.

Now she saw the galactic band exposed to her full view: It was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied — yellow and blue and orange — and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.

“It looks like the Milky Way,” she said. “But—”

“I know,” he said. “It’s not like this at home… I think we’re looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.”

“Which is not the arm that contains the Sun,” she said slowly.

“Hell, no. That’s just a shingle, a short arc. This mother is the next arm in, toward the center of the Galaxy.” He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. “Look at those nebulae — see? The Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon — a huge region of star birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the Sun, toward the Galaxy center.”

Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Malenfant?”

“I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light-years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the center of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren’t working anymore. Which is a problem if you want to go farther… I think this is just the start of the true journey.”

He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn’t want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.

“And,” she said, “where will that true journey take us?”

He shrugged. “Maybe all the way to the center of the Galaxy.” He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. “Look, Madeleine — the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light-years from Earth.”

And so, therefore, she thought, the year is A.D. 8800, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.

But the center of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light-years from the Sun. Even at light speed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back. Fifty thousand years. This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old…

He was still watching her. “I’ve had time to get used to this.”

“I’m fine.”

“Madeleine…”

“I mean it,” she snapped. She got up, turned her back, and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

Perhaps it’s just as well we humans can’t grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we’d go crazy.

Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.

But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.

She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.

One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrowhead. The woman, with a lopsided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.

“She’s saying he should be careful of the edge,” Malenfant murmured.

She frowned. “I don’t understand how those guys got here.”

He told her what he’d observed of the Neandertals’ burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.

“So you think the Gaijin were rewarding the dying Neandertal workers for all their labors with this — a soapy Heaven.”

He laughed. “If they were, they are the first gods in history to deliver on their afterlife promises.”

She paced, feeling the texture of the grass under her feet, the breeze on her face. “Why is it like this? Trees, grass, streams — it feels like Africa. But it isn’t Africa, is it?”

“No. But if you ask almost any human, anywhere, what type of landscape they prefer, it’s something like this. Open grass, a few flat-topped trees. Even Clear Lake, Houston, fits the pattern: grass out front, maybe a tree or two. And you never put your tree in front of your window; you need to be able to look out of your cave, to see the predators coming. After taking us apart for a thousand years, the Gaijin know us well. And our Neandertal cousins. We’re a hundred millennia out of Africa, Madeleine, and five thousand light-years distant.” He tapped his chest. “But it’s still here, inside us.”

“You’re saying they’ve given us an environment that we’re comfortable with. A Neandertal theme park.”

He nodded. “I think very little of what we see is real.” He pointed at the sky. “But that is real.”

“How so?”

“Because it’s changing.”

She slept and woke again.

And the sky, once more, had changed dramatically. She lay on her back alongside Malenfant, gazing up at the evolving sky.

He started talking about how he had traveled here.

“They put me through a whole series of Saddle Point jumps, taking me across the geography of the Galaxy… First I headed toward Scorpio. Our Sun is in the middle of a bubble in space, hundreds of light-years across — did you know that? A vacuum blown into the galactic medium by an ancient supernova explosion. But the Saddle Point leaps got longer and longer…”

With the Sun already invisible, he had been taken out of the local bubble, into a neighboring void the astronomers called Loop One.

“I saw Antares through the murk,” he said, “a glowing red jewel set against a glowing patch of sky, a burst of young stars they call the Rho Opiuchi complex. Hell of a sight. I looked back for the Sun. I couldn’t find it. But I saw a great sheet of young stars that slices through the galactic plane, right past Sol. They call that Gould’s Belt, and I knew that was where home was.

“And when I looked ahead, there was a band of darkness. I was reaching the inner limit of our spiral arm, looking into the rift between the arms, the dense dark clouds there. And then, beyond the rift, I arrived here — in this place, with the Neandertals…”

“And the stars.”

“Yes.”

While she slept, the stars had continued to migrate. Now they had all swum their way up toward that Sagittarius Arm horizon, the way Malenfant said they were heading. The opposite horizon looked dark, for all its stars had fled. All the stars in the sky, in fact, had crowded themselves into a disc, centered on a point some way above the brighter horizon — at least she guessed it was a disc; some of it was below her horizon. And the colors had changed; the stars had become green and yellow and blue.

Now, in what situation would you expect to see the stars swimming around the sky like fish?

“This is the aberration of starlight, isn’t it, Malenfant? The distortion of the visible universe, which you would see if—”

“If you travel extremely quickly. Yes,” he said softly.

She understood the principle. It was like running in the rain, a rain of starlight. As she ran faster, the rain would hit her harder, in her face, her body. If she ran extremely fast indeed, it would be as if the rain were almost horizontal…

“We’re on a starship,” she breathed.

“Yeah. We’re moving so fast that most of the stars we see up ahead must be red giants, infrared sources, invisible to us in normal times. All the regular stars have been blue-shifted to invisibility. Wherever we’re going, we’re traveling the old-fashioned way: in a spaceship, pushed up to relativistic speeds. And we’re still accelerating.”

She sat up and dug her fingers into the grass. “But it doesn’t feel like a starship. Where is the crew? Where are we going? What will happen when we get there?”

“When I found you, I hoped you were going to tell me.” He got to his feet. “What do you think we should do now?”

She shrugged. “Walk. There’s nothing to stay for here.”

“Okay. Which way?”

She pointed to the glowing Sagittarius Arm horizon, the place the stars were fleeing, their putative destination.

He smiled. “And add a couple of kilometers an hour to our eighty percent of light speed? Why not? We’re walking animals, we humans.”

Malenfant picked up a sack that turned out to contain his ancient space suit, the wreck she had spent hours fixing up on the Cannonball. Obeying some obscure impulse for tidiness, he scuffed over his dirt-scraped star map. Then they set off.

They passed the Neandertal family, who sat just where they had yesterday.

When Madeleine looked back, the Neandertals were still sitting, unmoving, as the humans receded and the stars flowed overhead.

The next time she woke, there was only a single source of light in the sky. It was a small disc, brighter than a full Moon, less bright than the Sun seen from Earth, tinged distinctly bluish.

Aside from that the cloudless sky was utterly empty.

Malenfant was standing before her, staring at the light. Beyond him she could see Neandertals, a family group of them, standing too, staring into the light, their awkward heads tipped back. Shadows streamed from the light, shadows of people and trees, steady and dark.

She stood beside Malenfant. “What is it? Stars?”

He shook his head. “The stars are all blue-shifted to invisibility. All of them.”

“Then what—”

“I think that’s the afterglow.” The background heat of the universe, left over from the Big Bang, stretched to a couple of degrees above absolute zero. “We’re going so fast now, just a tad lower than light speed, that even that has been crumpled up by aberration, crushed into a tiny disc. Some spectacle, don’t you think?” He held his hand up before him, shading the universe-Sun; she saw its shadow on his face. “You know, I remember the first time I left Earth, en route to the Saddle Point. And I looked back and saw the Earth dwindle to a dot of light smaller than that. Everything I’d ever known — five billion years of geology and biology, of sliding continents and oceans and plants and dinosaurs and people — all of it was crammed into a splinter of light, surrounded by nothing. And now the whole damn universe, stars and galaxies and squabbling aliens and all, is contained in that little smudge.”

He told her he thought they were riding an antimatter rocket.

“…It explains what the Gaijin were doing on Io, tapping the energy of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Probably turned the whole moon into one big atom smasher, and picked the antimatter out of the debris.” The antimatter rocket could be a kind called a beam-core engine, he speculated. “It’s simple, in principle. You just have your tanks of atoms and antiatoms — hydrogen, probably, the antistuff contained in a magnetic trap — and you feed it into a nozzle and let it blow itself up. The electrons make gamma rays, and the nuclei make pions, all high energy stuff. Some of the pions are charged, so that’s what you throw out the back as your exhaust… There are other ways to do it. I don’t imagine the Gaijin have a very advanced design.”

“It must have taken the Gaijin a long time, an immense project, to assemble the antimatter they needed.”

“Oh, yeah. Hauling those superconductor cables all the way out from Venus, and everything. Big engineering.”

“But,” Madeleine said deliberately, “there is no way you could haul all of this—” She indicated the plain, the trees. “ — a ship the size of a small moon up to relativistic speeds, all the way to the Galaxy core. Is there?”

He looked into the sky. “I saw a study that said you would need a hundred tons of antimatter to haul a single ragged-assed astronaut to Proxima Centauri. At the time it would have taken our biggest atom smasher two centuries to produce so much as a milligram. I doubt that whatever the Gaijin built on Io was so terribly advanced over that. So — no, Madeleine. You couldn’t haul a small moon.”

She studied her hand, pinched the flesh. The pinch hurt. “What are we, Malenfant? You think we’re some kind of simulations running inside a giant computer?”

“It’s possible.” His voice contained a shrug, as if it didn’t matter. “It only takes a finite number of bits to encode a human being. That’s because of uncertainty, the graininess of nature… If not for that, the Saddle Point gateways wouldn’t be possible at all. On the other hand—” He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “ — if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark. There are orders of magnitude of scale, structure, beneath the level of a human. Maybe we’re real, but shrunken down somehow. Plenty of room down there.”

She felt a pulse in her head, a pressure. “But,” she said, “if we’re just emulations in some toy starship, we’re dead. I mean, we’re no longer us. Are we? How can we be?”

He eyed her. “The first time you stepped through a gateway you were no longer you. Every transition is a death, a rebirth. Why do you think it hurts so much?”

She felt weak, her legs numb. Carefully, she lowered herself to the grass, dug her hands into the rich cool texture of the ground.

He knelt beside her, took her hand. “Listen. I don’t mean to be so tough on you. What do I know? I only have guesses too. I’ve had more time to get used to this stuff, is all.” He went on with difficulty. “I know you came here to help me. I remember the way you fixed my suit, on the Cannonball. You were… kind.”

She said nothing.

“I just don’t think you can help,” he said. His face was turning hard again. “Or will help.”

That chilled her, his harsh dismissal. “Help with what, Malenfant? Why did the Gaijin go to all this trouble — to train Neandertals to mine antimatter on Io, build a starship, hurl it across light-years?”

He looked troubled at that. “I think — I have this awful feeling, a suspicion — that the purpose of it all was me. A huge alien conspiracy, all designed to give me a ride across the Galaxy.” He studied her, face emptied by wonder. “Or is that paranoid, megalomaniacal? Do you think I’m crazy, Madeleine?”

Beyond him, perhaps a half kilometer away, she made out a new shadow: angular, gaunt, crisp and precise before the cosmos light.

It was a Gaijin.

“Maybe we’ll soon find out,” she said.

They approached the Gaijin. It just stood there impassively, silent. Madeleine saw how the pencil-thin cones that terminated its legs were stained green by crushed grass, and that a little quasi-African dust had settled on the surfaces of its upper carapace.

Malenfant said he recognized it. It was the individual Gaijin he had come to know as Cassiopeia.

“Oh, really? And how do you know that, Malenfant? The Gaijin are just spidery robots. Don’t they all look alike?”

He didn’t try to answer.

Madeleine found the Gaijin’s calm mechanical silence infuriating. She bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. She threw it at the Gaijin; it pinged off that impassive hide, not making so much as a scratch. “You. Space robot. You’ve been playing with us since you showed up in our asteroid belt. I don’t care how alien you are. No more fucking games.”

Malenfant seemed shocked by her swearing. A corner of her found amusement at that. Malenfant really was a man of his time: Here they were hurtling away from Earth at a tad less than light speed, shrunk to quark-sized copies or else trapped in some alien virtual reality, and he was shocked to hear a woman swear. But he just stood and let her rant her heart out. Therapy, for absorbing one shock after another.

She ran out of energy, slumped back to the grass, numbed by tiredness.

The Gaijin stirred, like a turret swiveling. Madeleine thought she heard something like hydraulics, perhaps a creak of metal scraping on metal. The Gaijin spoke, its booming voice a good emulation of a human’s — a woman’s voice, in fact, with a tinge of Malenfant’s own accent.

NO DOUBT YOU’RE WONDERING WHY I ASKED YOU HERE TODAY, Cassiopeia said.

The silence stretched. Malenfant peered up at the Gaijin doubtfully.

“She made a joke,” Madeleine said slowly. “This ridiculous alien robot made a joke.”

Malenfant stared at Madeleine. Then he threw his hands in the air, slumped back on the grass, and laughed.

Pretty soon, Madeleine caught the bug. The laugh seemed to start in her belly and burst out of her throat and mouth, despite her best efforts to contain it.

So they laughed, and kept on laughing, while the Gaijin waited for them.

And, cradling its precious cargo of mind and hope and fear, the ten-centimeters-long starship hurtled onward toward the core of the Galaxy, and its destiny.

Chapter 33 The Fermi Paradox

They drank from a stream, and ate fruit, and lay on the grass, letting the tension drain out. Madeleine thought she slept for a while, curled up against Malenfant in the grass, like they were two exhausted kids.

And then — when they were awake, sitting before Cassiopeia — the Gaijin waved a spidery metal limb, and the world dissolved. It melted like a defocusing image: grass and mud and trees and streams running together, everything but the three of them, two humans and a Gaijin, and that eerie universe-Sun, so that they seemed to be floating, bathed in a deeper darkness than Madeleine had ever known.

She reached out and grabbed Malenfant’s hand. It was warm, solid; she could see him, the folds on his jumpsuit picked out by the cosmic glow. She dug the fingers of her other hand into loamy soil beneath her. It was still there, cool and friable, invisible or not. She clung to its texture, to the pull of the fake world sticking her to the ground.

But Malenfant was staring upward, past the Gaijin’s metal shoulder. “Look at that. Holy shit.”

She looked up unwillingly, reluctant to face new wonders.

Above them, a ceiling of curdled light spanned the sky. It was a galaxy.

It was a disc of stars, flatter and thinner than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars — a granularity of light — and with dark lanes traced between each arm. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light-years across.

But the familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

The Gaijin hovered before the image, silhouetted, like the spidery projector cluster at the center of a planetarium.

“So, a galaxy,” said Madeleine. “Our Galaxy?”

“I think so,” Malenfant said. “It matches radio maps I’ve seen.” He pointed, tracing patterns. “Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.” The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other “arms” were really just scraps, she saw — the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected — but still, she thought, the Sun is in one of those scattered “fragments.”

The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.

“A galactic day,” Malenfant breathed. “Takes two hundred million years to complete a turn…”

Madeleine could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.

And now, Madeleine saw, a new kind of evolution was visible in the disc. Like the pulsing bubbles of supernovae, each was a ripple of change that began at an individual star before spreading across a small fraction of the disc. Within each wave front the stars went out, or turned red, or even green; or sometimes the stars would pop and flare, fizzing with light.

“Life,” she said. “Dyson spheres. Star Crackers—”

“Yes,” Malenfant said grimly. “Colonization bubbles. Just like the one we got caught up in.”

THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED, the Gaijin said somberly.

Life, Cassiopeia said, was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy.

Characteristically life took hundreds of millions of years to accrue the complexity it needed to start manipulating its environment on a major scale. On Earth, life had stuck at the single-celled stage for billions of years, most of its history. Still, on world after world, complexity emerged, mind dawned, civilizations arose.

Most of these cultures were self-limiting.

Some were sedentary. Some — for instance, aquatic creatures, like the Flips — lacked access to metals and fire. Some just destroyed themselves, one way or another, through wars, or accidents, or obscure philosophical crises, or just plain incompetence. The last, Madeleine suspected, might have been mankind’s ultimate fate, left to its own devices.

Maybe one in a thousand cultures made it through such bottlenecks.

That fortunate few developed self-sustaining colonies off their home worlds, and — forever immune to the eggs-in-one-basket accidents that could afflict a race bound to a single world — they started spreading. Or else they made machines, robots that could change worlds and rebuild themselves, and sent them off into space, and they started spreading.

Either way, from one in a thousand habitable worlds, a wave of colonization started to expand.

There were many different strategies. Sometimes generations of colonists diffused slowly from star to star, like a pollutant spreading into a dense liquid. Sometimes the spread was much faster, like a gas into a vacuum. Sometimes there was a kind of percolation, a lacy, fractal structure of exploitation leaving great unspoiled voids within.

It was a brutal business. Lesser species — even just a little behind in the race to evolve complexity and power — would simply be overrun, their worlds and stars consumed. And if a colonizing bubble from another species was encountered, there were often ferocious wars.

“It’s hard to believe that every damn species in the Galaxy behaves so badly,” Madeleine said sourly.

Malenfant grinned. “Why? This is how we are. And remember, the ones who expand across the stars are self-selecting. They grow, they consume, they aren’t too good at restraining themselves, because that’s the way they are. The ones who aren’t ruthless predatory expansionists stay at home, or get eaten.”

Anyhow, the details of the expansion didn’t seem to matter. In every case, after some generations of colonization, conflicts built up. Resource depletion within the settled bubble led to pressure on the colonies at the fringe. Or else the colonizers, their technological edge sharpened by the world-building frontier, would turn inward on their rich, sedentary cousins. Either way the cutting-edge colonizers were forced outward, farther and faster.

Before long, the frontier of colonization was spreading out at near light speed, and the increasingly depleted region within, its inhabitants having nowhere to go, was riven by wars and economic crisis.

So it would go on, over millennia, perhaps megayears.

And then came the collapse.

It happened over and over. None of the bubbles ever grew very large — no more than a few hundred light-years wide — before simply withering away, like a colony of bacteria frying under a sterilizing lamp. And one by one the stars would come out once more, shining cleanly out, as the red and green of technology and life dispersed.

“The Polynesian syndrome,” Madeleine said gloomily.

“But,” Malenfant growled, “it shouldn’t always be like this. Sooner or later one of those races has got to win the local wars, beat out its own internal demons, and conquer the Galaxy. But we know that not one has made it, across the billions of years of the Galaxy’s existence. And that is the Fermi paradox.”

YES, Cassiopeia said. BUT THE GALAXY IS NOT ALWAYS SO HOSPITABLE A PLACE.

Now a new image was overlaid on the swiveling Galaxy: a spark that flared, a bloom of lurid blue light that originated close to the crowded core. It illuminated the nearby stars for perhaps an eighth of the galactic disc around it. And then, as the Galaxy slowly turned, there was another spark — and another, then another, and another still. Most of these events originated near the Galaxy core: something to do with the crowding of the stars, then. A few sparks, more rare, came from farther out — the disc, or even the dim halo of orbiting stars that surrounded the Galaxy proper.

Each of these sparks caused devastation among any colonization bubbles nearby: a cessation of expansion, a restoring of starlight.

Death, on an interstellar scale.

Their virtual viewpoint changed, suddenly, swooping down into the plane of the Galaxy. As the spiral arms spread out above her, dissolving into individual stars that scattered over her head and out of sight, Madeleine cried out and clung to Malenfant. Now they swept inward, toward the Galaxy’s core, and she glimpsed structure beyond the billowing stars, sculptures of gas and light and energy.

Her attention came to rest, at last, on a pair of stars — small, fierce, angry. These stars were close, separated by no more than a few tens of their diameters. The two stars looped around each other on wild elliptical paths, taking just seconds to complete a revolution — like courting swallows, Madeleine thought — but the orbits changed rapidly, decaying as she watched, evolving into shallower ellipses, neat circles.

A few wisps of gas circled the two stars. Each star seemed to glow blue, but the gas around them was reddish. Farther out she saw a lacy veil of color, filmy gas that billowed against the crowded background star clouds.

“Neutron stars,” Malenfant said. “A neutron star binary, in fact. That blue glow is synchrotron radiation, Madeleine. Electrons dragged at enormous speeds by the stars’ powerful magnetic fields…”

The Gaijin said, PERHAPS FIFTY PERCENT OF ALL THE STARS IN THE GALAXY ARE LOCKED IN BINARY SYSTEMS — SYSTEMS CONTAINING TWO STARS, OR PERHAPS MORE. AND SOME OF THESE STARS ARE GIANTS, DOOMED TO A RAPID EVOLUTION.

Malenfant grunted. “Supernovae.”

MOST SUCH EXPLOSIONS SEPARATE THE RESULTANT REMNANT STARS. ONE IN A HUNDRED PAIRS REMAIN BOUND, EVEN AFTER A SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION. THE PAIRED NEUTRON STARS CIRCLE EACH OTHER RAPIDLY. THEY SHED ENERGY BY GRAVITATIONAL RADIATION — RIPPLES IN SPACETIME.

The two stars were growing closer now, their energy ebbing away. The spinning became more rapid, the stars moving too fast for her to see. When the stars were no more than their own diameter apart, disruption began. Great gouts of shining material were torn from the surface of each star and thrown out into an immense glowing disc that obscured her view.

At last the stars touched. They imploded in a flash of light.

A shock wave pulsed through the debris disc, churning and scattering the material, a ferocious fount of energy. But the disc collapsed back on the impact site almost immediately, within seconds, save for a few wisps that dispersed slowly, cooling.

“Has to form a black hole,” Malenfant muttered. “Two neutron stars… too massive to form anything less. This is a gamma-ray burster. We’ve been observing them all over the sky since the 1960s. We sent up spacecraft to monitor illegal nuclear weapons tests beyond the atmosphere. Instead, we saw these.”

THERE IS INDEED A BURST OF GAMMA RAYS — VERY HIGH-ENERGY PHOTONS. THEN COMES A PULSE OF HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLES, COSMIC RAYS, HURLED OUT OF THE DISC OF COLLAPSING MATTER, FOLLOWING THE GAMMA RAYS AT A LITTLE LESS THAN LIGHT SPEED.

THESE EVENTS ARE HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE.

A NEARBY PLANET WOULD RECEIVE — IN A FEW SECONDS, MOSTLY IN THE FORM OF GAMMA RAYS — SOME ONE-TENTH ITS ANNUAL ENERGY INPUT FROM ITS SUN. BUT THE GAMMA-RAY SHOWER IS ONLY THE PRECURSOR TO THE COSMIC RAY CASCADES, WHICH CAN LAST MONTHS. BATTERING INTO AN ATMOSPHERE, THE RAYS CREATE A SHOWER OF MUONS — HIGH-ENERGY SUBATOMIC PARTICLES. THE MUONS HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF PENETRATING POWER. EVEN HUNDREDS OF METERS OF WATER OR ROCK WOULD NOT BE A SUFFICIENT SHIELD AGAINST THEM.

“I saw what these things can do, Madeleine,” Malenfant said. “It would be like a nearby supernova going off. The ozone layer would be screwed by the gamma rays. Protein structures would break down. Acid rain. Disruption of the biosphere—”

A COLLAPSE IS OFTEN SUFFICIENT TO STERILIZE A REGION PERHAPS A THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS WIDE. IN OUR OWN GALAXY, WE EXPECT ONE SUCH EVENT EVERY FEW TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS — MOST OF THEM IN THE CROWDED GALAXY CORE.

Madeleine watched as the Galaxy image was restored, and bursts erupted from the crowded core, over and over.

Malenfant glared at the dangerous sky. “Cassiopeia, are you telling me that these collapses are the big secret — the cause of the reboot, the galactic extinction?”

Madeleine shook her head. “How is that possible, if each of them is limited to a thousand light-years? The Galaxy is a hundred times as wide as that. It would be no fun to have one of these things go off in your backyard. But—”

BUT, Cassiopeia said, SOME OF THESE EVENTS ARE… EXCEPTIONAL.

They were shown a cascade, image after image, burst after burst.

Some of the collapses involved particularly massive objects. Some of them were rare collisions involving three, four, even five objects simultaneously. Some of the bursts were damaging because of their orientation, with most of their founting, ferocious energy being delivered, by a chance of fate and collision dynamics, into the disc of the Galaxy, where the stars were crowded. And so on.

Some of these events were very damaging indeed.

FROM THE WORST OF THE EVENTS THE EXTINCTION PULSE PROCEEDS AT LIGHT SPEED, SPILLING OVER THE GALAXY AND ALL ITS INHABITANTS, ALL THE WAY TO THE RIM AND EVEN THE HALO CLUSTERS. NO SHIELDING IS POSSIBLE. NO COMPLEX ORGANISM, NO ORGANIZED DATA STORE, CAN SURVIVE. BIOSPHERES OF ALL KINDS ARE DESTROYED…

So it finishes, Madeleine thought: the evolution and the colonizing and the wars and the groping toward understanding. All of it halted, obliterated in a flash, an accident of cosmological billiards. It was all a matter of chance, of bad luck. But there were enough neutron-star collisions that every few hundred million years there was an event powerful enough, or well-directed enough, to wipe the whole of the Galaxy clean.

It had happened over and over. And it will happen again, she saw. Again and again, a drumbeat of extinction. That is what the Gaijin have learned.

“And for us,” Malenfant growled, “it’s back to the fucking pond, every damn time… So much for Fermi’s paradox. Nemoto was right. This is the equilibrium state for life and mind: a Galaxy full of new, young species struggling out from their home worlds, consumed by fear and hatred, burning their way across the nearby stars, stamping over the rubble of their forgotten predecessors.”

…And this is what the Gaijin tried to show me, Madeleine recalled, on my first Saddle Point jaunt of all, to the burster neutron star: the star lichen, fast-evolving life-forms wiped out by a stellar fluke every fourteen seconds. It was a fractal image of this, the greater truth.

The Galaxy image abruptly receded, the spiral arms and the core and the surrounding halo imploding on itself like a burst balloon. Madeleine gasped at the sudden illusory motion. The world congealed around her: grass and trees and that black sky, all of it illuminated by fierce blue cosmic light. She was flooded with intense physical relief, as if she could breathe again.

But her mind was racing. “There must be ways to stop this. All we have to do is evade one collapse — and gain the time to put aside the wars and the trashing, and get a little smarter, and learn how to run the Galaxy properly. We don’t have to put up with this shit.”

Malenfant smiled. “Nemoto always did call you a meddler.”

BUT YOU ARE RIGHT, the Gaijin said. SOME OF US ARE TRYING…

Ahead of them, she saw a group of Neandertals. They were dancing, signing furiously to each other, jumping up and down in the light of the cosmos. Something was changing in the sky, and the Neandertals were responding.

She looked that way. That cosmic light point seemed to be expanding.

The unwrapping sky was full of stars. It was the center of the Galaxy.

Malenfant was confronting the Gaijin. “Cassiopeia,” he said softly, “what has all this got to do with me?”

MALENFANT, the Gaijin said, YOU ARE OUR BEST HOPE.

And now the Gaijin turned with a scrape of metal, a soft hiss as her feet sank deeper into the loam.

IT IS RISING.

She turned and began to stalk across the meadow, with that stiff, three-legged grace of hers, away from the stand of trees. Madeleine saw the Neandertals were following, a shadowy group of them, their muscles prominent in the starlight.

Malenfant grabbed her hand.

They walked through a meadow. The grass was damp, cool under her feet, and dew sparkled, a shattered mirror of the stars.

They were all immersed in diffuse shadowless light, in this place where every corner of the sky glowed as bright as the surface of the Moon. The light was silvery, the colors bleached out of everything; the grass was a deep green, the leaves on the trees black. Madeleine wondered vaguely if there was enough nourishment in that Galaxy light to fuel photosynthesis, if life could survive on a rogue, sunless planet here, just eating the dense starlight.

They topped a ridge and looked down over a broad, shallow valley. There were scattered trees and standing water, ribbons and pools of silver-blue, all of it still and a little eerie in the diffuse starlight.

The Gaijin, Cassiopeia, had stopped, here at the crest. The Neandertals had gathered a little way away, along the ridge, and they were looking out over the valley.

But now one of the Neandertals came shambling toward Malenfant, with that clumsy, inefficient gait of theirs. It was a man, stoop-shouldered, the flesh over his ribs soft and sagging, and sweat slicked over his shoulders. That great brow pulled his face forward, so that his chin almost rested on his chest.

“Hello, Esau—” Malenfant said.

Esau slapped him, and his fingers rattled, his fist thumping his forehead.

Malenfant grinned, and translated. “Hello, Stupid.” Malenfant seemed genuinely pleased to see this old Neandertal geezer again.

But now Cassiopeia stirred, and Madeleine grabbed his arm. “Malenfant. Look. Oh, shit.”

A new star was rising above the valley, over the newly revealed horizon, brighter than the background wash.

It was a neutron star, a brilliant crimson point. Near the star there were multiple lobes of light. They contained structure: veins and streamers, something like the wings of a butterfly around that ferocious, dwarfed body. They glowed pink and an eerie blue, perhaps through the synchrotron radiation of accelerated electrons.

And there was something alongside the star. It looked like netting — scoop shaped, like a catcher’s mitt, facing the star as if endeavoring to grasp it.

Obviously artificial.

Cassiopeia spoke. OUR JOURNEY IS NOT YET DONE, MALENFANT. WE MUST PENETRATE THE GALACTIC CENTER ITSELF. THIS IS WHAT WE WILL SEEK.

“This is the site of a gamma-ray burster,” Malenfant said. “A future reboot event. I’m right, aren’t I, Cassiopeia?”

THE STAR’S COMPANION IS AS YET SOME DISTANCE AWAY — BILLIONS OF KILOMETERS, IN FACT, TOO REMOTE TO SEE. AND YET THE CONVERGENCE HAS BEGUN. THE COLLISION IS INEVITABLE. UNLESS—

“Unless somebody does something about it,” Madeleine whispered.

That strange artifact continued to ride higher in the sky, like a filmy, complex moon. It was a net, cast across the stars. It must have been thousands of kilometers wide.

Madeleine found it impossible to believe it wasn’t a few meters above her head, almost close enough for her to just reach out and touch. The human mind was just not programmed to see giant planet-spanning artifacts in the sky. Think of an aurora, she told herself, those curtains of light, rippling far above the air you breathe. And now imagine that: It would hang there far beyond any aurora, suspended in space, perhaps beyond the Moon…

But there was something wrong: the netting was obviously unfinished, and great holes had been rent into its structure.

“It’s broken,” Malenfant said.

YOU WOULD CALL THIS A SHKADOV SAIL, the Gaijin said.

It would be a thing of matter and energy, of lacy rigging and magnetic fields: a screen to reflect the neutron star’s radiation and solar wind. But it was bound to the star by invisible ropes of gravity.

“Ah,” Madeleine said. “You disturb the symmetry of the solar wind. You see, Malenfant? The wind from the star will push at the sail. But the sail isn’t going anywhere, relative to the star, because of gravity. So the wind gets turned back…”

“It’s a stellar rocket,” Malenfant said. “Using the solar wind to push aside the star.”

THAT IS THE PURPOSE. WHEN COMPLETE IT WILL BE A DISC A HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS ACROSS, ALL OF IT LACED WITH INTELLIGENCE, A DYNAMIC THING, CAPABLE OF SHAPING THE STAR’S SOLAR WIND, RESPONDING TO ITS COMPLEX CURRENTS.

Malenfant grinned. “Hot damn. Somebody is fighting back.”

“Who is building this thing? You?” Madeleine asked.

NOT US ALONE. MANY RACES HAVE COME HERE, COOPERATED ON THE SAIL’S CONSTRUCTION. IT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN A RELIC FROM A PREVIOUS CYCLE, FROM BEFORE A PREVIOUS REBOOT.

“Like the Saddle Point network.”

Madeleine peered doubtfully at the huge, unlikely structure. “How can a sail like that move a neutron star — an object more massive than the Sun?”

THE THRUST IS VERY SMALL, THE ACCELERATION MINUSCULE. BUT OVER LONG ENOUGH PERIODS, SMALL THRUSTS ARE SUFFICIENT TO MOVE WORLDS. EVEN STARS.

“And will that be enough to stop the coalescence of this binary, to stop the reboot?” Madeleine asked.

NOT TO STOP IT. TO POSTPONE IT GREATLY, BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. IF WE CAN DELAY THIS STERILIZATION EVENT—

“We might win time,” Malenfant said.

Madeleine challenged the Gaijin. “Is this really the best option? Haven’t you come up with anything smarter?”

Malenfant eyed her. “Like what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You could use antigravity. Einstein’s cosmological constant, the force that makes the universe expand. Or you could interfere with the fundamental constants of physics. For example there is a particle called the Higgs boson, which gives matter its mass. If you took it away, switched it off, you could make your neutron stars lighter, and then just push them aside. In fact, take all the mass away and they would fly off at the speed of light. Easy. Give me a lever and I will move the world…”

WE HAVE NO SUCH POWERS, Cassiopeia said, and Madeleine thought she detected sadness in that synthesized voice. WE HAVE SEARCHED. THERE IS NO CIVILIZATION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE ADVANCED THAN OUR OWN — EVEN BEYOND THE GALAXY.

IT IS LIKE YOUR FERMI PARADOX. IF THEY EXISTED, WE WOULD SEE THEM. IMAGINE A GALAXY WITH ALL THE STARS FARMED, COVERED BY DYSON SPHERES, THEIR PHYSICS ALTERED PERHAPS TO EXTEND THEIR LIFETIMES. IMAGINE THE GALAXY ITSELF ENCLOSED BY A DYSON STRUCTURE. AND SO ON. EVEN SUCH CLUMSY ENGINEERING, ON SUCH A SCALE, WOULD BE VISIBLE. WE SEE NO SUCH THING, AS FAR OUT AS WE LOOK, AS DEEP INTO SPACE AND TIME.

But it wasn’t a surprise, Madeleine thought. How long would it take a galactic civilization to rise — even supposing somebody could survive the wars and assorted despoliation? Because of light speed, it would take a hundred thousand years for a message to cross the Galaxy just once. How many such exchanges would it take to homogenize the shared culture of a thousand species, born of different stars and biochemistries, creatures of flesh and metal, of rock and gas? A thousand Galaxy crossings, minimum?

But that would take a hundred million years, and by that time the next burster would have blown its top, the next reboot driven everybody back to pond scum.

So maybe this clumsy net really was the best anybody could do. But still, good intentions weren’t enough.

“Tens of millions of years,” she said. “You’d have to maintain that damn thing for tens of millions of years, to make a difference. How can any species remotely like us, or even you, maintain a consistency of purpose across megayears? None of us even existed in anything like our present forms so long ago.”

BUT, Cassiopeia said slowly, WE MUST TRY.

“We?” Malenfant said.

YOU MUST JOIN US, MALENFANT.

Madeleine clutched at Malenfant’s hand. But he pushed her away. She looked up at him. His face was pinched, his eyes narrow. He was starting to feel scared, she realized, drawn out, as if pulled into space by the thing in the sky, up toward the zenith.

Because, she realized, this is his destiny.

Malenfant stood before the alien robot, silhouetted against Galaxy core light. He looked helplessly weak, Madeleine thought, a ragamuffin, before this representative of a cool, immeasurably ancient galactic power.

Yet it was Cassiopeia who was supplicating before Malenfant, the human.

“You can’t do it,” he said, wondering. “You can’t complete this project. There is something… missing in you.”

THERE IS CONTROVERSY, Cassiopeia said.

Madeleine glared up at that filmy structure. There were holes in the netting you could have passed a small planet through, places where thousand-kilometer threads seemed to have been burned or melted or distorted. Controversy.

“Wars have been fought here,” Malenfant said bluntly.

THE RACES OF THE GALAXY ARE VERY DIVERGENT. UNITY DISSOLVES. THERE IS FREQUENT CONFLICT. SOMETIMES A RACE WILL SEEK TO TAKE THIS TECHNOLOGY AND USE IT FOR ITS OWN PURPOSES; THE OTHERS MUST MOUNT A COALITION TO STOP THE ROGUE. SOMETIMES A RACE WILL SIMPLY ATTEMPT TO IMPOSE ITS WILL ON OTHERS. THAT USUALLY ENDS IN CONFLICT, AND THE EXPULSION OR EXTERMINATION OF THE AMBITIOUS.

Malenfant laughed. “Infighting. Sounds like every construction project I ever worked on.”

THERE ARE DIVERGENCES AMONG US.

Madeleine looked up, startled. “You mean, even among the Gaijin?”

THERE ARE FACTIONS WHO WOULD ARGUE THAT WE SHOULD ABANDON THE PROJECT TO OTHER RACES, CALCULATING—

Malenfant grunted. “Calculating that the others will finish the job for you — without you incurring the costs of the work. Gambling on the altruism of others, while acting selfishly. Games theory.”

OTHERS SEEK A TIME SYMMETRY…

Malenfant seemed baffled by that, but Madeleine thought she understood. “Like the Moon flowers, Malenfant. Do you know of them? If the Gaijin could train themselves to think backward in time, then they needn’t face this… terminus… in the future.”

Malenfant laughed at the Gaijin, mocking.

Madeleine felt disturbed at this blatant evidence of discord among the Gaijin. Weren’t they supposed to merge into some kind of supermind, make decisions by consensus, with none of the crude arguing and splits of human beings? Dissension like this, so visible, must represent an agony of indecision in the Gaijin community, faced by the immense challenge of the star sail project. Indecision — or schizophrenia.

Malenfant said, still challenging, “But your factions are wrong. Aren’t they? Completing this project isn’t a question of a game, theoretical or not. It is a question of sacrifice.”

Sacrifice? Madeleine wondered. Of what — or who?

MALENFANT, YOU ARE SHORT-LIVED — YOUR LIVES SO BRIEF, IN FACT, THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE NONE OF THE UNIVERSE’S SIGNIFICANT PROCESSES. YOUR RESPONSE TO OUR PRESENCE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS SPLINTERED, CHAOTIC, FLUID. YOU DO NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND YOURSELVES.

AND YET YOU TRANSCEND YOUR BREVITY. HUMANS, DOOMED TO BRIEF LIVES, CHOOSE DEATH VOLUNTARILY — FOR THE SAKE OF AN IDEA. AND WITH EVERY DEATH, THAT IDEA GROWS STRONGER.

WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED MANY SPECIES ON OUR TRAVELS. RARELY HAVE WE ENCOUNTERED SUCH A CAPACITY FOR FAITH.

Malenfant stalked back and forth on the hillside, obviously torn. “What are you talking about, Cassiopeia? Do you expect me to start a religion? You want me to teach faith to the toiling robots and cyborgs and whatnot who are building the neutron-star sail — something to unite them, to force them to bury their differences, to persist and complete the project across generations… Is that it?”

No, Madeleine thought sadly. No, she is asking for something much more fundamental than that.

She wants you, Malenfant. She wants your soul.

And the Gaijin started talking of mind, and identity, and memes, and idea viruses.

To Cassiopeia, Malenfant was scarcely sentient at all. From the Gaijin’s point of view, Malenfant’s mind was no more than a coalition of warring idea viruses: uneasy, illogically constructed, temporary. The ideas grouped together in complexes that reinforced each other, mutually aiding replication — just as those other replicators, genes, worked together through human bodies to promote their own reproduction.

Yes, Madeleine thought, beginning to understand. And the most fundamental idea complex was the sense of self.

A self was a collection of memories, beliefs, possession, hopes, fears, dreams: all of them ideas, or receptacles for ideas. If an idea accreted to the self — if it became Malenfant’s idea, to be defended, if necessary, with his life — then its chance of replication was much stronger. His sense of self, of him self, was an illusion. Just a web woven by the manipulating idea viruses.

The Gaijin had no such sense of self. But sometimes, that was what you needed.

Malenfant understood. “Every damn one of the Gaijin has a memory that stretches back to those ugly yellow seas on the Cannonball. But they are… fluid. They break up into their component parts and scatter around and reassemble; or they merge in great ugly swarms and come out shuffled around. Identity for them is a transient thing, a pattern, like the shadow of a passing cloud. Not for us, though. And that’s why the Gaijin don’t have this.” He stabbed a finger at his chest. “They don’t have a sense of me.”

And without self, Madeleine saw, there could be no self-sacrifice.

That was why the Gaijin couldn’t handle the reboot prevention project. Only humans, it seemed — slaves of replicating ideas, nurtured and comforted by the illusion of the self — might be strong enough, crazy enough, for that.

Through the dogged sense of his own character, Malenfant must give the fragmented beings toiling here a sense of purpose, of worth beyond their own sentience. A sense of sacrifice, of faith, of self. To help the Gaijin, to save the Galaxy, Malenfant was going to have to become like the Gaijin. He was going to have to lose himself — and, in the incomprehensible community that labored over the strands of the sail, find himself again.

Malenfant, standing before the spidery Gaijin, was trembling. “And you think this will work?”

No, Madeleine thought. But they are desperate. This is a throw of the dice. What else can they do?

The Gaijin didn’t reply.

“I can’t do this,” Malenfant whispered at last, folding his hands over and over. “Don’t ask me. Take it away from me.”

Madeleine longed to run to him, to embrace him, offer him simple human comfort, animal warmth. But she knew she must not.

And still the Gaijin would not reply.

Malenfant stalked off over the empty grassland, alone.

Madeleine slept.

When she woke, Malenfant was still gone.

She lay on her back, peering up at a sky crowded with stars and glowing dust clouds. The stars seemed small, uniform, few of them bright and blue and young, as if they were deprived of fuel in this crammed space — as perhaps they were. And the dust clouds were disrupted, torn into ragged sheets and filaments by the immense forces that operated here.

Toward the heart of the Galaxy itself, there was structure, Madeleine saw. Laced over a backdrop of star swarms she made out two loose rings of light, roughly concentric, from her point of view tipped to ellipticity. The rings were complex: She saw gas and dust, stars gathered into small, compact globular clusters, spherical knots of all-but-identical pinpoints. In one place the outer ring had erupted into a vast knot of star formation, tens of thousands of hot young blue stars blaring light from the ragged heart of a pink-white cloud. The rings were like expanding ripples, she saw, or billows of gas from some explosion. But if there had been an explosion it must have been immense indeed; that outermost ring was a coherent object a thousand light-years across, big enough to have contained almost all the naked-eye stars visible from Earth.

And when Madeleine lifted her head, she saw that the inner ring was actually the base of an even larger formation that rose up and out of the general plane of the Galaxy. It was a ragged arch, traced out by filaments of shining gas, arching high into the less crowded sky above. It reminded her of images of solar flares, curving gusts of gas shaped by the Sun’s magnetic field — but this, of course, was immeasurably vaster, an arch spanning hundreds of light-years. And rising out of the arch she glimpsed more immensity still, a vast jet of gas that thrust out of the Galaxy’s plane, glimmering across thousands of light-years before dissipating into the dark.

It was a hierarchy of enormity, towering over her, endless expansions of scale up into the dark.

But of the Galaxy center itself, she could only see a tight, impenetrable cluster of stars — many thousands of them, swarming impossibly close together, closer to each other than the planets of the Solar System. Whatever structure lay deeper still was hidden by those crowded acolyte stars.

The Gaijin still stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the pulsar’s glow, hatefully silent.

Malenfant still hadn’t returned. Madeleine tried to imagine what was going through his head as he tried to submit himself to an unknown alien horror that would, it seemed, take apart even his humanity.

Madeleine got to her feet and stalked up to the Gaijin, confronting it. She was aware of Neandertals watching her curiously. They signed to each other, obscurely. Look at crazy flathead.

Madeleine shouted. “Why can’t you leave us alone? You came to our planet uninvited, you used up our resources, you screwed up our history—”

The Gaijin swiveled with eerie precision. WE MINEDASTEROIDS YOU PROBABLY WOULD NEVER HAVE REACHED. WITHOUT US YOU WOULD HAVE REMAINED UNAWARE OF THE CRACKERS UNTIL THEY REACHED THE HEART OF YOUR SYSTEM. AS TO YOUR HISTORY, THAT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. WE DID NOT INTERVENE. MOST OF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE WISHED THAT ANYHOW.

“You fucking immortal robots, you’re so damn smug. But for all your powers, you need Malenfant… But why Malenfant, for God’s sake?”

REID MALENFANT IS SELF-SELECTED. MADELEINE MEACHER, RECALL THAT HE MADE HIS WAY, SINGLE-HANDED, TO THE CENTER OF OUR PROJECTS TWICE OVER, FIRST THROUGH THE ALPHA CENTAURI GATEWAY AND THEN THROUGH IO.

“Reid Malenfant is a stubborn, dogged son-of-a-bitch. But he is still just a human being. Must he die?”

The Gaijin hesitated, for long minutes, then said, HE WILL NOT DIE.

No, she thought. He must endure something much more strange than that. As he seemed to know.

The Gaijin raised one spindly leg, as if inspecting it. MADELEINE MEACHER, IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE HIM, WE WILL COMPLY.

She was taken aback. “What has it to do with me?”

YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE MALENFANT’S FRIEND. YOU MADE A SACRIFICE OF YOUR OWN, TO FOLLOW HIM HERE. AND SO YOU HAVE RESPONSIBILITY. IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE MALENFANT, THEN SAY SO. WE WILL COMPLY.

“And then what?”

WE HAVE SADDLE POINT GATEWAYS. WE CAN SEND HIM HOME, TO EARTH. BOTH OF YOU. WE CANNOT AVOID THE TIME DISLOCATION. BUT YOU CAN LIVE ON.

“Even if he wants to go on?”

IT IS HARD FOR MALENFANT TO MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE. FOR ANY HUMAN THIS WOULD BE SO. YOUR DECISION OVERRIDES HIS.

“And if you let him go — then what about the project, the sail?”

WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.

“The reboot would become inevitable.”

WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.

Madeleine sank to the grass. Shit, she thought. She hadn’t expected this.

The notion of saving a Galaxy of sentient creatures from arbitrary annihilation was too big — too much for her to imagine, too grandiose. But she had lived through the overwhelming destructiveness of the attempted ET colonization of the Solar System, found evidence of the other wasteful waves of horror of the deep past. She had seen it for herself.

And you once built a world, Madeleine. You’ve been known to show a little hubris yourself.

If this project succeeds, perhaps humans, and species like them, would never have to suffer such an ordeal again. Isn’t one man’s life worth such a prize?

But who am I to make that call?

There was another option, she thought, that neither of them had expressed, neither she nor the Gaijin.

It doesn’t have to be Malenfant. Maybe I could take his place. Save him, and progress the project anyhow.

She wrapped her arms around herself. Malenfant is full of doubt and fear. Even now he might not be able to make it, make the sacrifice. But he is out there gathering his strength, his purpose. I could never emulate that.

The Gaijin waited with metallic patience.

“Take him,” she whispered, hating herself as she uttered the words. “Take Malenfant.” Take him; spare me.

And, as soon as she made the choice, she remembered Malenfant’s inexplicable coldness when she had arrived here.

She had ended up betraying him. Just as, she realized now, he had known she would, right from the beginning.

She buried her face in her hands.

After maybe a full day, Malenfant returned. Madeleine was sitting beside a sluggish stream, desultorily watching the evolution of Galaxy-core gas streamers.

Malenfant came running up.

He threw himself to the grass beside her. He was sweating, his bald pate slick, and he was breathing hard. “Jogging,” he said. “Clears the head.” He curled to a sitting position, catlike. “This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it, Madeleine? Who would have thought it?… Nemoto should see me now. My mom should see me now.” The change in him was startling. He seemed vigorous, rested, confident, focused. Even cheerful.

But she could see the battered photograph of his dead wife tucked into his sleeve.

She hugged her knees, full of guilt, unable to meet his eyes. “Have you decided what to do?”

“There’s no real choice, is there?”

Tentatively she reached for his hand; he grabbed it, squeezed hard, his calm strength evident. “Malenfant, aren’t you afraid?”

He shrugged. “I was afraid the first time I climbed aboard a shuttle orbiter, sitting up there on top of millions of tons of high explosive, in a rickety old ship that had been flying thirty years already. I was afraid the first time I looked into a Saddle Point gateway, not knowing what lay beyond. But I still climbed aboard that shuttle, still went through the gateway.” He glanced at her. “What about you? After…”

“After you’re dead?” she snapped impulsively.

He flinched, and she instantly regretted it.

She told him about the Gaijin’s offer of a ride home.

“Take it. Go see Earth, Madeleine.”

“But it won’t be my Earth.”

He shrugged. “What else is there?”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said shyly. “What if we — the sentients of the Galaxy, of this generation — do manage to come through the next reboot? What if this time we don’t have to go back to the ponds? What if we get a chance to keep on building? If I keep on rattling around the Saddle Point gateways, maybe I’ll get to see some of that.”

He nodded. “Beaming between the stars, while the network gets extended. Onward and onward, without limit. I like it.”

“Yeah.” She glanced up. “Maybe I’ll get to see Andromeda, before I die. Or maybe not.”

“There are worse ambitions.”

“Malenfant. Come with me.”

He shook his head. “Can’t do it, Madeleine. I’ve thought it over. And I bought Cassiopeia’s pitch.” He looked up at the sky. “You know, as a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive — hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. But I used to wonder what would be the point of my life, of human existence, if the universe really was empty. What would there be for us to do but survive, doggedly, as long as possible? Which didn’t seem too attractive a prospect to me.

“Well, now I know the universe isn’t empty, but crowded with life. And, even with the wars and extinctions and all, isn’t that better than the alternative — better than nothing? And you know, I think I even figured out the purpose of our lives in such a universe — mine, anyhow. To make it better for those who follow us. What else is there to do?” He glanced at her, eyes cloudy. “Does that make any sense?”

“Yes. But, Malenfant, the cost—”

“Nemoto said it would be like this. Humans can’t change history, except this way. One of us, alone, going to the edge—”

Suddenly it was too much for her; she covered her face with her hands. “Fuck history, Malenfant. Fuck the destiny of the universe. We’re talking about you.”

He put an arm around her shoulders; he was warm, his body still hot from his run. “It’s okay,” he said, trying to soothe her. “It’s okay. You know what? I think the Gaijin are jealous. Jealous, of us wretched little pink worms. Because we got something they don’t, something more precious than all the Swiss-Army-knife body parts in the universe, something more precious than a billion years of life.”

But now the Gaijin stood before them, suddenly there, tall and stark.

“So soon, Cassiopeia?” Malenfant said, his voice unsteady.

I AM SORRY, MALENFANT.

Malenfant straightened up, withdrew his arm from Madeleine’s shoulders. She felt the reluctance in the gesture. She’d provided him comfort after all, she realized; by caring for her, he had been able to put off confronting the reality of it all. But now, in the silent person of the Gaijin, the reality was here, and he had to face it alone.

But here was old Esau, grinning from one side to the other of his flat face, deep eyes full of starlight. He was signing: the fistto the forehead, then left palm flat upright, supporting the right fist, which was making a thumb’s-up gesture. Hey, Stupid. I’ll help you.

Malenfant signed back. What help me what what?

Forefinger and middle finger together, on both hands, held out like a knife; a sharp chop downward, a stark, unmistakable sign. To die.

Chapter 34 The Children’s Crusade

Cassiopeia embraced him.

He was pulled into her body, articulating arms folding about him. He could smell the burning tang of metal that had been exposed to vacuum, to the light of a hundred different Suns. And now finer arms, no more than tendrils, began to probe at his body, his skin, his mouth, his eyes.

Through a mist of metal cilia, he could see Madeleine on the hillside before him, weeping openly. “Tell them about me, Madeleine. Don’t let them forget.”

“I will. I promise.”

Now warm metal probed at his ears, the membranes of his mouth, even his eyes. Probed and pierced, a dozen stabs of sharp pain. Then came an insidious penetration, and he could taste blood. “It hurts, Madeleine.” He cried out; he couldn’t help it. “Oh, God!”

But now Esau was before him, signing vigorously. Stupid Stupid. Watch me me.

Malenfant tried to focus as the pain deepened.

Esau sat on the hillside. By the light of Galaxy-center stars, he held out a core of obsidian.

Malenfant reached forward. His bare arms trailed long shining tendrils, back to the cold body of the Gaijin, within which he was merging. He could move his fingers, he found. But they glinted, metallic.

Esau was still holding out the glassy rock, thrusting it at him.

Malenfant took the rock. He could feel its rough texture, but remotely, as if through a layer of plastic. He turned it over in his hands.

Esau held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He signed bluntly to Malenfant. Same as me, Stupid. Do same as me. Copy.

Obediently, Malenfant set to work, tapping clumsily at the rock, emulating Esau’s movements, practicing this most ancient of human crafts twenty-five thousand light-years from home.

“The Buddhists have a doctrine of anatta,” Madeleine murmured. “It means, no self. Or rather, the self is only temporary, like an idea or a story. ‘Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not’… It won’t be so bad, Malenfant. Some people can do this for themselves. Some choose it…”

She was weeping, he saw, the tears leaking out of closed eyes. Weeping for him. But he must not think about her. He tried to bury himself in the tasks. He focused on the work, the movements of his hands and arms. He would think about Madeleine — and put the thought aside. The differences between his own hands and the Neandertal’s struck him, frustrating him with his own clumsiness. But he must put aside that thought too.

For brief periods, he got it. It was as if he saw the stone, the tool he was making, with a kind of stunning clarity: the thing itself, not the geologic processes that had produced the raw material, not the mysterious interstellar gateways that had brought him and the stone to this place, not even the tool’s ultimate purpose. Just the thing, and the act.

But then the spell would be broken, and plans and analyses and self-consciousness would return to clutter up his head, an awareness of Madeleine and Cassiopeia, and Esau, the trees and grass and the heart of the Galaxy, and the pain, that penetrated right to his core.

“You have to let it go, Malenfant,” Madeleine whispered. “Don’t think. Live in the now, the present moment. If ideas come up, reflections, memories, hopes, fears, let them go. Butterflies, flitting out the window. Treat everything equally. Don’t filter, don’t focus. Watch Esau…”

Esau, yes.

Malenfant was like an observer. But Esau was the rock he worked in its deep chthonic richness, in a way Malenfant perhaps could never be. It was a smooth, rolling, fleeting form of awareness, without past or future, memory or anticipation. It was like driving a car while holding a conversation. Like being stoned. Or like being five years old, and every moment a delicious Saturday morning.

Madeleine was still talking, but he could make out no words. She was receding, as if dissolving.

Good-bye, good-bye.

He closed his eyes.

…No, it wasn’t like that:

Eyes that were closed.

There was a blue flash, a moment of searing pain.

“Emma!” he cried.

And then—

Limbs that worked. Tactile, graceful. Tasks that were progressed.

The rope: complex, multilevel, a thing of monomolecular filaments, superconducting threads within. The extension of the rope, the repair of breaks, the tasks of the limbs.

Visual receptors, eyes. A repositioning.

Data nets above, below, all around, a great curving wall. At extremes, a flat-infinite plane, in every direction: the sail.

Above, the spitting neutron star, its envelope of gas.

Here, a body, a spiderlike form of many limbs, a dodecahedral box at the center. Multiple tasks for those limbs. The sail that was repaired, extended; the body that was maintained, adjusted, itself extended; records that were kept; a mesh of communications with others that was maintained, extended.

Other workers.

Some near. Some far. Some as this body, a common design. Millions of them. Some not. Tasks that were progressed.

The structure. Vibrations, the shudder of torn threads. Complex modes, wave forms in space and time.

War, in a remote part of the sail.

A position that was adjusted, an anchoring of the body that was improved and secured.

The work that was progressed in one part of the sail, war in other parts.

The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

The universe, of tasks, of things.

No center.

…And he felt as if he were drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, toward the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream — but he had no mouth, and no words. What would he scream?

I.

I am.

I am Malenfant…

No. Not just Malenfant. Malenfant / Esau / Cassiopeia.

The pain!

The shuddering of the net. The anchoring. The work that was progressed…

No! More than that. I feel the shudder. I must hold on to the net; I must continue the work, in the hope that sanity will prevail, the conflict is resolved, the work is continued, the greater goal achieved.

Thus it must be. Oh, God, the pain.

Terror flooded over him. And love. And anger.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place. And within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

Beautiful. Scary.

And he saw it with eyes beyond the human.

He saw the sleeting rays that flowed beyond the human spectrum: the sail’s dazzle of ultraviolet, the sullen infrared glower of the star itself. He saw the sail, its curves, the star, from a dozen angles, as if the whole impossible, unlikely structure was a mote that swam within his own Godlike eyeball, visible from all sides at once, as if it had been flayed and pinned to a board before him.

And he saw the whole project embedded in time, the sail unfurling, growing, the star’s slow, reluctant deflection. He saw its origins — the sail shared design features with the artifact that had been found cupping a black hole in the system of the species called Chaera; perhaps it too was a relic of those vanished builders.

And he even saw it all through the gauzy eyes of mathematics. He could see the brutal equations of gravity and electromagnetism that governed the drag of the star’s remote companion, the push of star on sail and sail on star; and he could see, like shining curves extending ahead of and back from this single moment, how those equations would unfold, the evolution of the system through time, out of the past, through the now, and into the future.

Not enough, he saw.

Still the construction of the sail was outpaced by the neutron stars’ approach. The project was projected to fail; the stars were mathematically destined to collide before the sail’s deflection was done, the great gamma-ray burst lethally mocking their efforts. But they must, they would, try harder, the toiling communities here.

…And if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are you? God knows you’re no mathematician.

He looked down at himself.

Tried to.

His gaze swiveled, yes, his vision sparkling with superhuman spectra. But his head did not turn.

For he had no head.

A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail’s gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the center of the Galaxy.

A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind. What was he truly? A partial personality, downloaded into a clumsy robot, clinging to this monstrous structure, bathed by the lethal radiation of a neutron star?

And even now the robot he rode was working, knitting away at the net. This body was working, without having to be told, directed, by me, or anybody else.

But that’s the way it is, Malenfant. Self is an illusion, remember. You’ve always been a passenger, riding inside that bony cage of a skull of yours. It’s just that now it’s a little more… explicit.

Welcome to reality.

But if I’m a robot, why the pain?

He looked for Cassiopeia, for any of the Gaijin, reassuring dodecahedral bulks. He saw none, though the unwelcome enhancements of his vision let him zoom and peer through the spaces all around him.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy simulated plain… Hadn’t it?

How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

In renewed terror, lost in space and time — in helpless, desolating loneliness — he tried again to scream. But he could not, of course.

The sail shuddered. Great ripples of disturbance, thousands of kilometers long, wafted through the net. As the waves passed, he saw others shaken loose, equipment hurled free, damaged.

Without his conscious control, he was aware how his body — or bodies? How do you know you’re even in one place, Malenfant? — grasped tighter to the fine structure.

He felt a clustering of awareness around him. Other workers here, perhaps. Other parts of himself.

Frightened.

Have faith, he told his companions, his other parts. Or his disciples.

But that was the problem. They didn’t have faith. Faith was a dangerous idea. The only thing less dangerous, in fact, was the universe itself, this terrible rebooting accident of celestial mechanics.

All this had happened before: the wars, the destruction, the abandonment of work, the resumption, the patient repairs.

There was a species he thought of as the Fire-eaters. They were related to the Crackers, who had tried to disrupt Earth’s Sun. But these more ambitious cousins wanted to steal part of the sail and wrap up a hypernova, one of the largest exploding stars in the Galaxy. As best he understood it they would try to capture a fraction of that astonishing energy in order to hurl themselves out of the Galaxy within an ace of light speed. And that way, their subjective experience stretched to near immobility by time dilation, they would outlive this reboot, and the one after it, and the one after that. He remembered a diversion of resources, a great war, huge damage to the sail, before the Fire-eaters were driven off.

…He remembered.

Yes. He had surfaced, like this, become Malenfant before, cowering under a sky full of silent, deadly, warring ETs, in a corner of the sail where the threads buckled and broke.

Surfaced more than once.

Many times.

How long have I been here? And between these intervals of half-remembered awareness, how long have I toiled here, awake but unaware?

Ah, yes, but take a look at where you are, Malenfant.

He looked up from the rippling sail, away from the lethal neutron star, and into the complex sky.

He was at the heart of the Galaxy, within the great central cluster of stars, no more than a couple of dozen light-years from the very center. At that center there was a cavity some twenty light-years wide, encased by a great shell of crowded, disrupted stars; the neutron star binary huddled at the inner boundary of this shell.

The emptiness of the “cavity” was only relative. There was a great double-spiral architecture of stars, like a miniature copy of the Galaxy, trapped here at its heart. The spiraling stars were dragged into their tight orbits around the object at the Galaxy’s gravitational core itself: a black hole with a broad, glowing, spitting accretion disc, a hole itself with the mass of some three million Suns. It was the violent winds from the vast accretion disc that had created this relative hollowness.

But still the cavity was crammed with gas and dust, itsparticles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas crisscrossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself. And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity — and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light-years long.

Stars like comets.

He exulted. I, Reid Malenfant, got to see this, the heart of the Galaxy itself, by God! He wished Cassiopeia were here, his companion during those endless Saddle Point jaunts to one star after another…

But again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

And now, his reassembled mind clearer, he remembered why.

He had found out after submitting to Cassiopeia’s cold, agonizing embrace, after arriving here, an unknown time later.

He had learned that even if all went well here — if the wars ceased, if the supplies of raw materials didn’t fail, even if the neutron-star sail, this marvelous artifact, was completed and worked as advertised — even then, it wouldn’t do him a blind bit of good.

Because it would already be too late. For him. And his people.

This binary, yes: this implosion was far enough in the future to affect, with this low-tech solution, robots and nets and solar-wind rockets. But this wasn’t the next scheduled to blow up.

There was another coalescing neutron-star binary, buried still deeper in the Galaxy’s diseased heart, another reboot. And it was already too late to stop that one, too late to avert the coming catastrophe.

This unlikely sail would work. But it was too long-term. The project would avert the next reboot but one.

We were always doomed. All we could do was make it better for the next cycle, advance the project far enough that they — the next to evolve from the pond scum of the Galaxy, the next to stumble on the half-finished sail after another few tens of millions of years — they would understand a little better than we had, would know what to do, how to finish it.

The first designers of the sail, sometime before the last reboot, had known it. Cassiopeia had known it.

She hadn’t thought to tell him, though, before he… died. Maybe she didn’t think it was significant. After all a sacrifice was a sacrifice. Maybe he simply hadn’t understood; maybe she’d expected him to be able to think it through himself. After all, she could see the mathematics.

He remembered how it felt, to find out. It had been the final betrayal.

And hence, the anger.

But it didn’t matter. In fact, it made his work, the role here, still more important.

Humans, Gaijin, Chaera, all of the current “generation” of galactic sentients — all of those who contributed to the sail’s slow building — they were all doomed, no matter what happened here.

But this was all they could do: to make things better for the next time.

And, he told himself, thinking of Madeleine, the alternative to all this pain — a lifeless universe doomed to nothing but meaningless expansion — would be much worse.

Have courage, he told himself/themselves. We have a noble goal. Our death doesn’t matter. The future, the children… Even if they are not our children, they are what matters. We will prevail.

He must continue. He must reach out to others, working here. Infect them.

Convert them.

This wasn’t a project, after all. It was a crusade.

The net shuddered again. That damn war.

He was dissolving, sinking back. He didn’t fight it. It was good.

Malenfant sighed, metaphorically. You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.

Blue light that gathered around him. Pain that intensified.

Cassiopeia, he flared. Why did you betray me?

No center.

The universe, of tasks, of things.

The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

Always the work.