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“Yah! Tonight he’s off with Frieda. Don’t think I didn’t see the three of you whispering and the two of them leaving.”

Caitlín nodded. “Aye. She too has a need, I’ve learned. Did you ever try to know more than that big strong body? She felt so low I decided—Well, never mind.”

“How about me? Has it occurred to you I might be, be capable of suffering?”

“Oh, Stefan, ring down the curtain in that theater,” she sighed. “You’ve enjoyed Frieda many a time, and you will again. Here you just thought you saw an opportunity.” She made a fending gesture. “Aye, well I know you miss your darlings at home and dread you’ll nevermore see them. But you’re tough-souled, like me; you don’t bear the final responsibility, like Dan; nor do you—Och, the upshot is, beyond the survival help of a shipmate, we’ve naught to give each other but fun.”

“And you wouldn’t find me fun,” he said bitterly.

She laughed. “Why, fellow, I’ve looked forward to you with much interest for weeks. It’s only that conditions were never suitable.”

He brightened. “Well?”

She shook her head. “Later, maybe. I told you, Dan needs me. He’s being very kind this night, and nonetheless I had to urge him. There’s no harm in a frolic elsewhere, but I can’t risk another affair as intense as with Martti.”

Dozsa looked cheerier yet. “I promise you, Caitlín, a frolic is all I have in mind.”

“But you took for granted you had a right to it.” Her tone was compassionate. “I’m sorry, Stef. I cannot allow that.”

The mate swallowed, stared at his hands where they clutched the chair, and at last said, “I apologize.”

“I felt sure you would be big enough to.” She stroked his cheek. “Now let us truly forget. Let us be a pair of friends, met for the admiring of an enormous beauty.”

J
UMP.

Blackness, nothing, blind and absolute. Folk moaned in a kind of terror.

The beacons around the T machine were not candles, red, violet, emerald, amber, lit against the accursed dark; they shone lost and tiny, as if at any moment they might gutter out. Then afar, the least of glimmers on the edge of being seeable, vision found a single point of light.

“Be calm,” ordered a part of Joelle that she detached from herself for this. “We’re in no immediate danger. I will investigate.” She reunited her mind. With the ship’s organs and senses, she reached forth.

Radar drew the spinning cylinder for her. It was the largest they had yet encountered. Free falling, she nonetheless felt its mass and the power locked within. Optics and radio, vastly amplified, showed her stars scattered thinly and widely, feeble coals smoldering toward oblivion. About the hull was almost a total vacuum. What radiation and material particles she erstwhile knew were almost altogether gone, leaving a hollow that it was meaningless to call empty and cold. She searched and found neighbor galaxies as cindered as this. Their forms were chaotic. She tried to find other whole clusters of them, and should have been able to spy a few of the nearest, such as the Virgo group, by the last photons they would ever breathe out; but she failed. They had receded too far.

Her awareness came back to immediate surroundings. Instruments had accumulated sufficient data for her to realize that the machine was in orbit around a wholly dead sun. Akin to Sol, it had never exploded, being too small, but passed through its red giant and variable phases, shrank to a planet-sized globe of the maximum density whereunder atoms could still be atoms,
and slowly cooled from white heat to a clinker. Some true planets remained, bare rocks or sheathed in their own frozen atmospheres. Save for one—

Joelle remembered she ought to descend from the heights and tell her people what had been revealed unto her.

“We’re in the remote future—spatially, back inside the galaxy, but temporally., sometime between seventy and a hundred billion years after we were born. No stars are left alive except the dimmest
[the meek shall inherit],
and they are now dying, while the galaxy itself is disintegrating. The universe has expanded to four or five times the size it had in our day. If we go much onward, I think we’ll learn whether it really will widen forever, or if the old idea is right after all, that it will collapse inward to a new fireball and a new cosmos.”

“Us go onward?” a crewman cried. She didn’t identify his distorted voice, nor wanted to. “Oh, no, oh, no.”

Brodersen’s came in, carefully pragmatic. “What’s that mite of yellow shine we see? Must be nearby.”

“It is. The black dwarf we’re circling has attendants, and the light source is a satellite of one of those. I have no clear notion of its nature. We ought to take a look. The T machine is in a Trojan position with respect to its primary, and the distance is about one-point-five a.u: not quite four standard days at a full gee.”

“Yes, I suppose we ought,” Brodersen said.

Joelle reminded him levelly—the wonder of it stayed singing and thundering within her holothetic self—“It’s doubtless a work of the Others, you know.”

Chinook
flew.

The viewscreens in the common room were blanked, and nobody was sure who had first proposed that; there had been no slightest argument. Instead, the data retrievals bore images, forlornly brilliant, of manwork—Pericles, Shah Jehan, Hoku-sai, Monet, Phidias, Rodin, on and on in multiple sequences-while music reveled. Few paid much attention.

Since the vessel was undermanned, a custom had developed that after meals, everyone not on duty helped the quartermaster and her assistant clear things away. Thus Philip Weisenberg found himself walking from the washer beside Caitlín.

“You’re pretty downcast this evening, aren’t you?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Anything I can help with?”

“I thank you, but it’s nothing,” she said, sketching a smile. “A mood, a whimsy.”

“Don’t underrate that, my dear. As isolated as we are—no matter what grandeur is around us, we become more and more defenseless against ourselves.” He brought his lips close to her ear. “You saw me through a bad night. I’ve not forgotten. Call on me whenever you wish.”

“Well—” Abruptly she seized his arm. “Could we go somewhere and talk?”

They sought his cabin. He tuned in
Swan Lake,
a performance recorded on Luna perhaps a hundred million millennia ago, but simply to bring the room alive. No alcohol or marijuana were on hand, and she declined his offer to use the hotplate for making tea. Quietly settling into a chair, he let her pace.

“Aye, you spoke truth,” she said. “About our being so cut off that our own pettinesses take us over till we become monkeys in a cage. I wasn’t quite realizing of that before, for the splendors we found were always too great. But in this tomb of Creation it comes to me at last—things that have happened—and we, are we really to blame if we go mad? At home, when trouble struck, we had sunsets and sunrises, forests, heaths, loughs, larks, or simply a city, a world of fellow humans, where we could go out and
do
. Here, in a metal shell, what is left but staring, the while we follow a marshlight to nowhere?… No, worse than that, for a marshlight would at least beguile us through an honest bog, water chill and a-splash, reeds to rustle, frogs to croak, and in the end, when we drowned, peat to receive us and preserve us for our descendants to find and marvel at, in mere thousands of years!”

“You too, then?” he replied. “You also want to turn back? Nobody imagines any more that we’d find home, but—New Earth? Caitlín, there isn’t a chance.”

“Och, well I know. Yet we’d have stars to see. Or—Earth and Demeter are not the only living worlds. I could die gladly on Danu, among the singers and dancers.”

“We can’t return there either. Inbound is not a straightforward reversal of outbound, and Joelle hasn’t the information, let alone the basic knowledge, to compute a path exactly.”

“That I know too. But we could seek to when the galaxy was alive, could we not?”

Caitlín prowled back and forth for a time. Bright phantoms
leaped where music flowed. At last she halted, stood before Weisenberg, and demanded, “What do you want for us, Phil?”

“To go on,” he said. “As long as necessary, or as long as we can.”

“In the faint hope we may somehow pick up a pilot for Sol?”

“Yes.” From his self-contained leanness, he beheld her desperate fullness, and said, “Caitlín, I think that underneath your longings, you agree. True, it’s easier for me in a lot of ways. I’m no child of open land and skies, I’m an engineer. A machine is as natural to me as a tree or a rainfall. Space was always my love, the stars, the idea of the Others… next to Sarah and the kids, of course, but damn it, exploring further is the sole way to maybe regain them, and meanwhile, whether we win or lose—Oh, hell, I’m getting maudlin.”

She stood and looked at him.

He stirred, shifted his eyes about, and said uncomfortably, “Caitlín, you wouldn’t be this troubled if you weren’t trying to shoulder Dan’s load for him. Would you?”

“He shoulders the crew’s,” she replied.

“And still he has no notion how heavily he’s drawing on you?”

“You exaggerate, Phil. But insofar as I can cheer him who is my life, aye, that’s what I’m for.”

Nearly appalled: “As independent a person as you would say that?”

“Why not? Would he not be doing the same for me, did I have need?”

Weisenberg sat silent, his gaze upon the deck, before he glanced back at her and said, “All right. It’s not so different from what’s—what was—what is between Sarah and me. But Caitlín, if you’d like to let go for a while, just let the control go, remember Ireland aloud or anything else you want, well, here I am too.”

—Long afterward, she bade him goodnight. They had snuggled somewhat but otherwise talked, only talked, he as much as she, though now and then her words came through tears. “Sleep well, Phil,” she said, “and thank you, thank you.”

“If any thanks are due,” he answered, “I owe them.”

Garbed in air whose clouds gleamed white, laved by oceans in hues of sapphire and lapis lazuli, continents green with growth,
the planet shone. Its nearby moon burned, sun-brilliant.

Chinook
swung around the world and around while instruments yearned. “Earthlike,” Susanne whispered.

“I fear not quite,” Rueda told her. “We’ve obtained spectra. That isn’t chlorophyl you see, and indications are that the biochemistry differs from ours in more fundamental ways still. There isn’t anything that might nourish us. But it lives.”

Joelle reported on the intercom: “The satellite is a gigantic nuclear reactor, consuming its own mass, apparently with an almost total conversion to energy. That violates the laws of physics we have formulated, but clearly those laws express a special case. I suspect that here we see a forced interaction directly between quarks. Probably the apparatus that brings it about is in a hollow space at the center, protected by the very fields that drive the process. Doubtless this artifical sun was originally a natural moon with the right properties—it should be good for five or six billion years—and that is why the Others chose this planet to resurrect.”

“The Others?” Frieda asked shakenly.

“Who else?” Brodersen said. “I wonder, did they seed it with life, or let chemical evolution work?”

“Either way,” Caitlín said in a radiant tone, “here
is
life again. Maybe—we’ve seen no signs, but they might be woodsrunners yet—maybe beings that think. Even though they’ll never see stars, what might they become and do and love?” After a moment, softer: “Could the Others have done this because they hoped to see that question answered once more?”

The ship drove back toward the transport engine.

Gathered in the common room, her crew heard Brodersen declare: “We’ve got to decide. Joelle can’t navigate us to any predictable exact point in space-time, though she can give us a general direction. Sooner or later, if we keep traveling, we’ll pass through a gate with no T machine at the far end. That’ll be where we end up, for good. It could at least be in our proper time, give or take some megayears, when the universe is bright and sort of familiar. Of course, that means dropping any hopes of finding the Others, and likely of surviving longer than our rations last. However, the plan we’ve been operating under has taken us to places more and more strange. The next might kill us—” he snapped his fingers—“like that. Or slowly.”

He tamped the tobacco in his pipe, struck fire, drank smoke. “Okay,” he said, “let’s hear what each of you wants.”

Seated near him, pallid and expressionless, Joelle said, “I prefer to continue. But, to be honest, that is because we may indeed encounter the Others. The idea of homecoming in itself leaves me indifferent. Whichever way we bear, once we come to rest I can search into Reality.”

Leino: “Turn back. What’s in the future except a universe completely burnt out? If it’s cyclical, its collapse will destroy everything. If it isn’t, it’ll hold nothing but darkness, for eternity. Why should the Others
want
to be there?”

Weisenberg: “No, we can’t quit.”

Rueda: “Is it necessarily quitting? We do have a chance, microscopic, yes, but finite, a chance of getting help in the young galaxy.”

Susanne: “If we tried two or t’ree more forward leaps before we reverse—”

Dozsa: “No. The likelihood of being trapped in this flying coffin is too great. I want to die in action, exploring a planet, anything, but in action!”

Frieda: “I was about to vote we continue, but what you say, Stef, makes me think twice.”

Caitlín trod forth. “Do none of you understand?” rang from her. “Oh, for a while I lost heart myself, but Phil upbore me in a long talk we had, and then when I saw yonder world Do you not understand? The Others live for life. They are death’s great adversaries. Where else are we quite sure to find an outpost of theirs but at his very gates, on the very day of doom? And how else dare we ask for their aid but in the same high spirit that is theirs?”

Nightwatch.

Through her electronic senses, integrated by her electronic extra brain and its memories (Fidelio, Fidelio) into an ever more meaningful and magnificent whole, the Noumenon entered Joelle and made her one with itself. Space-time curved, strongly, subtly, mysteriously, through dimension upon dimension; energies flowed, matter like a wave that came and went across their tides; the Law, immanent and omnipotent, was no changeless equation but a music which she had begun faintly to hear.