Allel shifted her weight between her stiff legs. “Xeelee ships,” she croaked. “That’s what you saw. Ships like plucking fingers.” She coughed feebly, feeling the cold of the dying day sink into her flesh. “Listen. I know what you’ve sacrificed to do this. I know you’ve lost everything important to you… But, Teal, you’ve saved us all.”
She reached out a hand to her grandson.
Teal didn’t react. Allel dropped the hand nervously.
“You knew what I’d find, didn’t you?” Teal asked coolly. “You suspected the truth of our history — the completeness of our defeat by the Xeelee.”
Allel sighed, and folded her arms over her concave chest. “Yes. The truth about the past has been hidden from us so long and so well that it had to be painful. The story I learned when I was young was comforting: the Xeelee as marauding monsters bent on destroying us; our valiant fight and honorable defeat. A comforting myth.
“I’ve thought hard about that story… and seen past it to the truth.
“We were a weak and foolish race. We attacked the Xeelee, unable to bear their superiority. We were defeated. But we would have kept on attacking them until we were destroyed.
“And so the Xeelee locked us away like destructive children… for our own good. Just like an elder brother, eh? It’s not easy to accept.”
“No, it isn’t,” Teal murmured. “We didn’t build this world to save us from the Xeelee. The Xeelee built it to save us from ourselves.”
Allel studied his empty face. She thought of seeing the stars: of waking in a place without a roof over the world.
But, of course, the frozen lands to the north made the stars as unattainable for her as her own lost youth.
“Well.” She wiped dampness from her eyes. “Come to my teepee. I’ve got food. And blankets.”
She turned and began to hobble back to her home.
There was a transparent box, half as tall again as a man. It hung in space, in orbit around a cooling white dwarf star, apparently forgotten and purposeless. It would have had no conceivable significance in the long twilight of the Universe… if it had not occupied the site of Earth, the long-vanished original home of man, long consumed by its own sun.
A Qax had once visited the site. It was puzzled. The box was evidently one three-dimensional facet of a hypercube, extending into folded space. Perhaps it was a gateway, an interface to some pocket Universe. Such things had been constructed by the Xeelee elsewhere in the Galaxy.
But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?
The Qax had placed quantum-inseparability markers around the box. The Qax were linked to the markers by single quantum wave functions, ghostly threads that stretched across light years, and they had scattered millions of markers over the spaces once inhabited by humans.
At last the human called Teal walked into the box. He stared, openmouthed, at the stars. He was gaunt, filthy, and dressed in treated tree-bark; a rope tied to his waist snaked around a corner and into another Universe. After some time the rope grew taut and Teal’s limp form was hauled away.
The inseparability markers blared their warnings. A Qax hauled itself like a spider along the quantum web to the box — but it arrived too late; the box was empty. The Qax hissed, settling into space like condensing mist.
With a patience born of millions of years it prepared to wait a little longer.
The event spread like a soft blue dye through the linked quantum phenomena which comprised Paul’s being. At the site of Earth there was a human once more: but a human alone, weak, tired, close to dissolution. Paul, godlike, pondered the implications for an unimaginable interval.
Then he came to a decision. He reconstructed his awareness; a quantum jewel danced against the clear walls of the Eighth Room.
History had resumed.
The Baryonic Lords
Erwal pushed out the greased flap of the teepee. Hot, humid air gushed into the blizzard, turning instantly into fog.
Damen, dozing, grunted and burrowed more deeply into his pile of furs.
Erwal pulled her mummy-cow furs more tightly around her neck and stepped out into the snow — it had drifted some three feet deep against the teepee’s walls — and smoothed closed the flap. Clutching her slop pail she looked about in bewilderment. The world seemed to have collapsed to a small, gray sphere around her; rarely before had she seen snow so heavy. The flakes clung to her eyelids and already she could feel the down on her upper lip becoming stiff with cold. Dropping her head she began her struggle through the blizzard.
Somewhere above the clouds, she thought wistfully, was the Sun, still winding through its increasingly meaningless spiral between the worlds.
Already the snow had soaked through her leggings and was beginning to freeze against her skin. With a sense of urgency she forced her legs through the snow, dragging the slop pail behind her. Soon she was out of sight of the teepee; the rest of the village remained hidden by walls of snow, so that she had to make her way by memory alone.
At last she reached the village’s central stand of cow-trees. She leaned against a tree for a few minutes, sucking at air that seemed thick with the snow. Then she began to dig with her bare hands into the drifts at the base of the tree, finally exposing hard, brown earth. She dumped the contents of her slop pail against the roots of the cow-tree and stamped the waste firmly down against the wood. Then, wearily, she straightened up and began to select some of the tree’s more mature buds, filling her pockets. The meat buds were small, hard, anemic; she bit into one, tasting sourness.
A villager approached through the storm. At first Erwal made out only a blur of rags against the snow, but the villager noticed Erwal and leaned into the wind, making towards her.
Erwal shouted: “Good day!”
From within a voluminous hood there came a muffled, brittle laugh; then the hood was pushed back to reveal the thin, pretty features of Sura, wife of Borst. “It’s hardly that, Erwal.” Sura had dragged her own slop pail across the drifts; now she dumped her waste alongside Erwal’s. As she worked Sura’s shapeless fur blanket fell open and Erwal made out a bundle suspended over her thin chest, a sling of skin from which protruded tiny hands, a small, bare leg. Erwal frowned; the baby’s exposed flesh seemed blue-tinged.
Once Sura had finished Erwal held her head close to the girl’s. “How are you, Sura? How are your family?”
“Borst is ill.” Sura smiled, her eyes oddly bright. “His lungs will not clear; he has been barely able to stand.” Absently she patted the bundle against her chest.
“Sura, will you let me visit your teepee? At home there is only myself and Damen…”
“Thanks, my friend, but I’m sure I can manage.” Again that bright look entered the girl’s pale eyes and she brushed a wisp of hair back from a high forehead. “The child is a burden, but she’s such a comfort.”
“I’m sure she is,” Erwal said evenly. The pain of her own lost child — stillborn soon after Teal’s first mysterious voyage away from the village — was too long ago to mean anything now, and the dismal fact that she and Damen had proven unable to bear another child had come to seem trivial compared to the huge, greater tragedy sweeping down over their little community.
“How is the baby? Will you allow me?…” Erwal opened Sura’s blanket just a few inches, tenting the flaps so that the snow was kept from the child, and ran her fingers over the hot bundle. Sura looked on, a vacant smile hovering about her mouth. The child’s breathing was rapid, ragged; the tiny hands were as if carved from ice. “Sura, you must take the child indoors. Keep her covered. I am afraid her limbs are frozen—”
“She needs air,” Sura said, her voice high. “It’s so musty in the teepee.”
Erwal stared into Sura’s eyes. Her skin was smooth but her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Sura was little more than a child herself. “Sura,” Erwal said urgently, “you aren’t thinking clearly. The child is too cold.”
The shallow smile evaporated. Sura brushed Erwal’s hands away resentfully, and began to paw at the baby. “She’ll be all right.” She cupped one tiny hand in her own and began to rub vigorously.
“Sura, take care, I beg you.”
“She just needs to get warm—”
There was a soft crackle, as if a thin crust of ice had broken.
It was a sound that Erwal knew she would remember to her dying day.
Sura’s head jerked down; her jaw seemed to be swinging loose, the muscles in her cheeks slack. Erwal, watching in horror, felt as if she would faint; it was as if she saw the whole tableau, Sura, the child and the snow, from a great distance.
Sura opened the hands which had cupped the child’s. Detached fingers lay like tiny jewels on Sura’s callused flesh. The child whimpered, stirred against its mother. Sura jerked her hands back, so that the frozen pieces of flesh fell to the snow. She pulled her blanket tight around her and ran, oblivious to the drifting snow.
Erwal bent and scooped up the tiny fingers, the fragments of palm and wrist.
When she returned to the teepee, Damen had woken. Wrapped in a blanket, he held a pot of water over the fire with wooden tongs, and he scowled at the draught Erwal made. The smoke from the fire, disturbed, swirled around the teepee walls in search of the vent at the apex.
Erwal, wrapped in her furs, felt like something inhuman, a gigantic animal intruding into this place of warmth. She pushed away the furs, hauled off her frozen leggings and huddled near the fire; Damen wrapped a heavy arm around her until the shivering stopped. When the water boiled Damen poured it over fragments of mummy-tree bark. Erwal sucked at the thin, steaming tea.
Then she opened her hand.
Damen picked up one tiny finger. His face gray, he studied the tiny nail, the knuckle’s bloodless termination. Then he took the rest of the fragments from Erwal and dropped them into the fire. “Whose child?”
“Borst and Sura; I met her at the tree stand with her slops. I have to go to her, Damen.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“…No. It’s best if I go alone, I think. You keep the teepee warm.” She drank her tea, deeply reluctant to don her furs once more. “Damen, we can’t go on like this. Every year is worse than the last. I suspect the trees are starting to die, and even the mummy-cows aren’t immortal.”
“I know, love. But what can we do? We have to survive until the Sun recovers, and then—”
“But what if it doesn’t recover? It’s been failing since your grandmother’s day. Allel told us so herself. And now — Damen, it’s only early autumn, but the blizzard out there is blind; if we’re not
