Space

down to the pond. There has to be something else, some other mechanism. Something that destroys them all. A reboot.”

“A Galaxy-wide sterilization,” Madeleine murmured.

“And,” Chaum said, “that explains Nemoto’s first-contact equilibrium.”

“Yeah,” Malenfant said. “That’s why they come limping around the Galaxy in dumb-ass ramscoops and teleport gates and the rest, time after time; that’s why nobody has figured out, for instance, how to bust light speed, or build a wormhole. Nobody lasted long enough. Nobody had the chance to get smart.”

Madeleine stood, stretching in the dense gravity of this Cannonball world. She looked out the window at the dismal, engineered sky.

Could it be true? Was there something out there even more ferocious than the world-shattering aliens whose traces humans had encountered over and over, even in their own Solar System? Some dragon that woke up every few hundred megayears and roared so loud it wiped the Galaxy clean of advanced life?

And how long before the dragon woke up again?

“You think the Gaijin know what it is?” Madeleine asked. “Are they trying to do something about it?”

“I don’t know,” Malenfant said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Madeleine growled. “If they are just as much victims as we are, why don’t they just tell us what they are doing?”

Malenfant closed his eyes, as if disappointed by the question. “We’re dealing with the alien here, Madeleine. They don’t see the universe the way we do — not at all. They have their own take on things, their own objectives. It’s amazing we can communicate at all when you think about it.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “they don’t want to go through a reboot.”

“No,” he conceded. “I don’t think they want that.”

“Perhaps this is the next step,” Dorothy said, “in the emergence of life and mind. Species working together, to save themselves. We need the Gaijin’s steely robotic patience, just as they need us, our humanity…”

“Our faith?” Madeleine asked gently.

“Perhaps.”

Malenfant laughed cynically. “If the Gaijin know, they aren’t telling me. They came to us for answers, remember.”

Madeleine shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Malenfant. Not from you. You’re special to the Gaijin, somehow. You were the first to come out and confront them, the human who’s spent longest with them.”

“And they saved your life,” Dorothy reminded him. “They brought us here, to save you. You were dying.”

“I’m still dying.”

“Somehow you’re important, Malenfant. You’re the key,” Madeleine said. Right there, right then, she had a powerful intuition that must be true.

But the key to what?

He held up skeletal hands, mocking. “You think they’re appointing me to save the Galaxy? Bullshit, with all respect.” He rubbed his eyes, lay on his side, and turned to face the lander’s silver wall. “I’m just an old fucker who doesn’t know when to quit.”

But maybe, Madeleine thought, that’s what the Gaijin cherish. Maybe they’ve been looking for somebody too stupid to starve to death — a little bit like that damn ass.

Dorothy said slowly, “What do you want, Malenfant?”

“Home,” he said abruptly. “I want to go home.”

Madeleine and Dorothy exchanged a glance.

Malenfant had been a long time away. He could return to the Solar System, to Earth, if he wished. But they both knew that for all of them, home no longer existed.

PART FOUR Bad News from the Stars A.D. 3256-3793

At the center of the Galaxy there was a cavity, blown clear by the ferocious wind from a monstrous black hole. The cavity was laced by gas and dust, particles 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…

Again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

But the Gaijin were never our enemy, not really. They learned patience among the stars. They were just trying to figure it all out, step by step, in their own way.

But it took too long for us.

It was after all a long while before we could even see the rest of them, the great wave of colonizers and miners that followed the Gaijin, heading our way along the Galaxy’s spiral arm.

The wave of destruction.

Chapter 24 Kintu’s Children

Two hundred kilometers above the glowing Earth, a Gaijin flower-ship folded its electromagnetic wings. Drone robots pulled a scuffed hab module out of the ship’s stringy structure and launched it on a slow, precise trajectory toward the Tree.

Malenfant, inside the module, watched the Tree approach.

The bulk of the Tree, orbiting the Earth, was a glowing green ball of branches and leaves, photosynthesizing busily. It trailed a trunk, hollowed out and sealed with resin, that housed most of the Tree’s human population. Long roots trailed in the upper atmosphere: There were crude scoops to draw up raw material for continued growth, and cables of what Malenfant eventually learned was superconductor, generating power by being dragged through Earth’s magnetosphere.

The Tree was a living thing twenty kilometers long, rooted in air, looping around Earth in its inclined circular orbit, maintaining its altitude with puffs of waste gas.

It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.

He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of A.D. 3265.

Malenfant was exhausted. Physically, he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-zero-zero-zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.

All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat potato chips, and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn’t possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their good-byes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn’t his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.

At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.

His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.

There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.

Ridiculous. He fell asleep.

When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.

He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He didn’t even need a leak.

He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.

Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn’t want this, he thought. I didn’t ask for it. He cradled his resentment.

He propped himself up before his window and looked out at Earth.

He could see its curve, a blue-and-white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of gray and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.

Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit — how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn’t know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man’s now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.

One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.

When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn’t see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns; a gray, angular patchwork; a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.

And in the higher latitudes, toward the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography had always been lousy — and now it was a thousand years out of date — but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.

He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been A.D. 1000 down there, not 3265.