Time

from the pack, jammed it into Cruithne soil, and started it up.

Then he shook out the bubble shelter, zipped himself and Emma into it, and inflated it. Once more it was a welcome relief to huddle with Emma’s warmth.

He took a careful look at Emma’s damaged leg. Much of the flesh seemed to have been destroyed by its exposure to the vacuum. But at the fringe of the damaged area mere was discoloration, green and purple, and a stench of rot, of sickly flowers. He drenched the bad flesh in an antiseptic cream he found in the backpack until the place smelled like a hospital ward. But at least that stink of corruption was drowned.

And she didn’t seem to be in any pain. Maybe all this would be over, one way or the other, before they got to that point.

He sacrificed a little more of their power on warming up some water. He mixed up orange juice in it, and they savored the tepid drink. They ate more of the backpack’s stores, dried banana and what seemed to be yogurt. He used scraps of cloth torn from their micrometeorite garments to improvise washcloths, and then he opened up their suits and gently washed Emma’s armpits and crotch and neck. Malenfant took their filled urine bags and dumped their contents into the military backpack’s water recycler, and he filled up their suit reservoirs with fresh water. Almost routine, almost domestic.

He was, he realized, on some bizarre level, content.

And then the shit hit the fan.

“Malenfant.”

He turned. She was holding his personal med kit. With her gloved hands, she had pulled out a blister pack of fat red pills. And a silver lapel ribbon.

Oh, he thought. Oh, shit. There goes the Secret.

“Tumor-busters. Right?” She let the stuff go; it drifted slowly to the floor. Her face was a yellow mask overlaid with Big Bang sunburn; her eyes were sunk in dark craters. “You’re a cancer victim.”

“It’s manageable. It’s nothing—”

“You never told me, Malenfant. How long?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“This is why. Isn’t it? This is why you washed out of NASA. And it’s why you pushed me away. Oh, you asshole.” She held out her arms.

He pulled himself over to her, held her shoulders, then dipped his head. He felt her stroke his bare scalp. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not? What did you think I’d do, run away?”

“No. If I thought that I’d have told you immediately. I thought you’d stay. Care for me. Sacrifice yourself.”

“And you couldn’t stand that. Oh, Malenfant. And the affair, that damn Heather—”

“The cancer wasn’t going to kill me, Emma. But it screwed up my life. I couldn’t have kids, I couldn’t reach space… I didn’t want it to screw your life too — ow.”

She’d slapped him. Her face was twisted into a scowl. She slapped him again, hard enough to sting, and pushed at his chest. She was weak, but she was pushing them apart. “What right did you have to mess with my head like that?” And she aimed more slaps at him.

He lifted his hands, let her dismally feeble blows rain on his arms. “I did it for you.”

“You control freak. And then, even after you engineer a divorce, for Christ’s sake, you still can’t let me go. You recruit me into your company, you even drag me into interplanetary space.”

“I know. I know, I know. I’m fucked up. I’m sorry. I wanted to let you go. But I couldn’t bear it. I could never let go. But I tried. I didn’t want to wreck your life.”

“My God, Malenfant.” Now her eyes were wet. “What do you think you did? What do you think life is for?”

“Emma—”

“Get out. Leave me alone, you cripple.” And she turned her face to the wall.

He stayed, watching her, for long minutes. Then he closed up his suit.

He found remnants of human presence on Cruithne: footprints, scuff marks, even handprints. There were pitons stuck in the re-golith, dangling lengths of tether, a few abandoned scraps of kit, film cartridges and polystyrene packing and lengths of cable. There were a few fresh, deep craters that looked as if they might have been dug by the bullets of troopers’ guns.

A few yards from the portal itself he found the battery of instruments which, a million years ago, Cornelius Taine had set up to monitor the artifact: cameras, spectrometers, Geiger counters, other stuff Malenfant had never been able to name, let alone understand. The instruments were still in their rough circle, centered on the portal. But they were uniformly smashed, lenses broken, casings cracked open, cabling and circuit boards ripped out. The regolith here was much disturbed. It was obvious somebody had deliberately done this, taken the time and effort to wreck the instruments. Tybee J., maybe, while she prepared to chase them into the portal.

He picked up a busted-open camera. There was a fine layer of regolith over the exposed workings. The gold-foil insulating blanket was blackened, cracked and peeling, and the paintwork on exposed metal was flaking away. He ran his gloved finger under a plastic-coated cable that stuck out of the interior. The discolored plastic just crumbled away.

He wondered how long an exposure to vacuum, the sun’s raw ultraviolet, and the hard radiation of space you’d need to do this much damage. Years, maybe. There was no guarantee that their subjective time during their jaunt across the manifold universes had to match up with the time elapsed here.

Anyhow it sure looked as if nobody had been back here since they had left in such a hurry. He felt his heart sink at the thought.

He placed the camera back where he had found it and let it resume its slow, erosive weathering.

Taking up the familiar routine of moving around the asteroid — piton, tether, glide, always at least two anchors to the regolith — he glided over Cruithne’s claustrophobic, close-curved horizon, pressing on, farther and farther.

There was little left of the O ‘Neill, or the troop carrier: just scattered wreckage, crumpled and charred, a few new blue-rimmed craters punched into Cruithne’s patient hide. He supposed most of the debris created by the various attacks had been thrown off into space. He rummaged through the remains of the ships and the hab shelters. What wasn’t smashed and vacuum-dried was crumbling from sunlight and cosmic irradiation. Still, maybe there was something he could use here.

He came across a firefly, inert, half dug into the regolith. He tried to haul it out, but it was dead, its power-indicator panel black.

He found only one body.

It was a trooper, a young man — not much more than a boy, really — wadded into the shadow of a crater. He wasn’t in a suit. His body was twisted, bones broken, and his skin, freeze-dried in the vacuum, was like scorched, brittle paper. His chest cavity was cracked open, presumably by the explosion that had taken out the troop carrier. His heart, stomach, and other organs seemed to have desiccated, and the cavity in his body gaped wide, empty, somehow larger than Malenfant had expected.

Maybe Tybee had taken the time to bury her other fallen companions, Malenfant thought. Or maybe this was the only body that had finished up here, and the rest — burned, broken, and shattered — were somewhere out there in a dispersing shell of debris.

And meanwhile, Cruithne spun on. How strange, he thought, that Cruithne had waited out five billion years in cold silence and then endured a few months of frenetic activity as life from Earth, bags of water and blood and flesh, had come here and built their enigmatic structures, fought and blown everything apart, and departed, leaving Cruithne alone again, with a few new craters and a scattering of shattered structures at the center of a dispersing cloud of glittering rubble.

That, and the enigmatic blue circle put there by the downstreamers.

He passed into Cruithne’s long shadow.

The stars wheeled over his head, the familiar constellations of his boyhood, but crowded now with the dense stars of deep space. At last, at the heart of the sparse constellation of Cygnus, he found a bright blue star. He gazed into that watery light, savoring photons that had bounced off Earth’s seas and clouds just seconds before entering his eyes. It was the closest he would ever come, he supposed, to touching home again.

He thought of the lifeless corridors he had traveled, of the long, painful gestation of physics and fire, birth and collapse, that had finally, it seemed, evolved to this: a universe of carbon and supernovae and black holes and life, and that beautiful blue spark. But Earth was an island of light and life surrounded by abysses.

In the shelter, he found Emma dying.

He did what he could. He massaged her limp hands, trying to keep the blood pumping, and upped the oxygen concentration in the air. He pulled a lightweight silver-foil emergency blanket around her, did everything he could think of to keep her body from deciding this was the end. But her decline, rapid, seemed irreversible.

Her fingertips had turned dead white, the skin pasty and lifeless, even bluish.

Not yet, not yet. How can it end here? It’s wrong.

The sun was a ball of light that glared through the fabric, its glow soaking into the warp and weft of the fabric. Malenfant watched as it edged across the dome of the tent. Cruithne was turning patiently, just as it always had.

But the air in here was growing stale. The carbon dioxide scrubbers and other expendables built into the mil-spec backpack were presumably reaching the end of their design lifetimes; the pack wouldn’t be able to sustain this habitat much longer.

She woke up. Her eyes turned, and her gaze settled on his face, and she smiled, which warmed his heart. He fed her sips of water. “Try to take it easy.”

“It isn’t so bad,” she whispered.

“Bullshit.”

“Really. I don’t hurt. Not much, anyhow.”

“You want some more dope?”

“Save it, Malenfant. You might need it. Anyhow I’d prefer a shot of tequila.”

He told her about the radio beacon. “Somebody will be coming.”

“Oh, bull, Malenfant,” she said gently. “Nobody’s going to come. It wasn’t meant to end like that, a cavalry charge from over the hill. Not for us. Don’t you know that yet?” She gripped his hand. Her touch was like a child’s. “This is all we have, Malenfant. You and me. We’ve no future or past, because we don’t have kids, nobody who might carry on the story. Just bubbles, adrift in time. Here, shimmering, gone.” She seemed to be crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Never apologize,” she whispered. “We’ve come a long way together, haven’t we? All those universes without life. And the downstream. Life slowly crushed out of existence… You need stars and supernovae to make black holes, to make more universes. Fine. You need those things to make life, too. But is that how come we’re here? Are we just a by-product? Are minds just something that happens to rise out of the blind thrashings of matter?”

“I don’t know. Try to take it easy—”

“But it doesn’t feel like that, Malenfant. Does it? I feel like I’m the center of everything. I can feel time flowing deep inside me. I’m not a kind of froth on the surface of the universe. I am the universe.”

“I’m listening,” he said, wiping her mouth.

“Oh, horseshit,” she hissed softly. “You never did listen to anybody. If you had you wouldn’t have fucked up our entire relationship, from beginning to end.”