It was as if some of those fragments had hurtled through me. The glowing rock battered its way through my awareness, and dwindling off into space.

And then it was done! Now there was only the sun… and a disc of rubble and gas, formless, eddying, which spun about the shining star.

A sort of ripple passed through our cloud of Time Ships, as if the reversed coalescence of the earth had sent a physical shock through that loose armada.

This is a strange Age, Nebogipfel, I said.

Look around you…

I did so, and saw that, from all around the sky, there were several stars — perhaps a dozen — which were growing in brightness. Now the stars had reached a sort of formation, an array scattered over the sky, though still so distant they showed only as points. Gas wisps seemed to be collecting into a cloud, scattered over the sky and wrapped about this collection of stars.

These are the sun’s true companions, Nebogipfel said. Its siblings, if you like: the stars which shared the sun’s nursery-cloud. Once, they formed a cluster as bright and as close as the Pleiades… but gravity will not hold them together, and before the birth of life on earth they will drift apart.

One of the young stars, directly over my head, flared. It expanded, soon becoming large enough to show a disc, but growing more red, and fainter… until at last it expired, and the glow of that part of the cloud died.

Now another star, almost diametrically opposed in position to the first, went through the same cycle: the flare, followed by the expansion into a brilliant crimson disc, and then extinction.

All of this magnificent drama, you must imagine, was played out against a background of utter silence.

We are witnessing the birth of stars, I said, but in reverse.

Yes. The embryonic stars light up their birthing gas cloud such nebulae are a beautiful sight but after the stellar ignition, the lighter gases are made to flee the heat, leaving only heavier rubble —

A rubble which condenses into worlds, I said.

Yes.

And now — so soon! — it was the turn of the sun. There was that uncertain flaring of yellow-white light, a glare that glinted from the Time Ships’ Plattnerite prows — and the rapid swelling into an immense globe, which briefly swamped the armada of Time Ships in a cloud of crimson light… and then, at last, that final dispersal into the general void.

The Ships hung in the sudden darkness. The last of the sun’s companions flared, ballooned out, and died; and we were left in a cloud of cold, inert hydrogen, which reflected our glow of Plattnerite green.

Only the remote stars marked the sky, and I saw how they too shimmered and flared, fading in their turn. Soon the skies grew darker, and I surmised that fewer and fewer stars yet existed.

Then, suddenly, a new breed of stars flared across the sky. There was a whole host, it seemed: dozens of them were close enough to show a disc, and the light of these new stars was, I was sure, bright enough to read a newspaper by — not that I was in a position to try such an experiment!

Confound it, Nebogipfel, what an astonishing sight! Astronomy should have been a little different under a sky like this — eh?

This is the very first generation of stars. These are the only lights, anywhere in the new cosmos… Each of these stars amass a hundred thousand times as much as our sun, but they burn their fuel prodigiously — their life-spans are counted in mere millions of years.

And indeed, even as he spoke, I saw that the stars were expanding, reddening, and dispersing, like great, overheated balloons.

Soon it was done; and the sky was left dark again — dark, save only for the green glow of the Time Ships, which forged, steady and determined, into the past.

A new, uniform glow began to permeate space around me. I wondered if some earlier generation of stars was shining in this primeval age — a generation undreamed of by Nebogipfel and the Constructors with whom he communed. But I soon saw that the glow did not come from an array of point sources, like stars; rather, it was a light which appeared to shine, all about me, as if from the structure of space itself — although here and there the glow was mottled, as, I surmised, dense clumps of embryonic star-matter shone more brightly. This light was the deepest crimson at first — it reminded me of a sunset breaking through clouds — but it brightened, and escalated through the familiar spectrum colors, through orange, yellow, blue, towards violet.

I saw that the fleet of Time Ships had gathered more closely together; they were rafts of green wire, silhouetted against the dazzling emptiness, and clustering as if for comfort. Tentacles — ropes of Plattnerite — snaked out across the glowing void between the Ships, and were connected, their terminations assimilated into the Ships’ complex structures. Soon, the whole armada about me was connected by a sort of web of cilia filament.

Even at this early stage, Nebogipfel told me, the universe has structure. The nascent galaxies are present as pools of cold gas, gathered in gravitational wells… But the structure is imploding, contracting, as we travel back towards the Boundary.

It is like an explosion in reverse, then, I suggested to Nebogipfel. Cosmic shrapnel, collapsing to site of detonation. At last, all the matter in the universe will merge in a single point — at some arbitrary center of things — and it will be as if a great Sun has been born, in the midst of infinite and empty space.

No. It’s rather more subtle than that…

He reminded me of the bending-about of the axes of Space and Time — the distortion which lay behind the principle of time travel. That twisting of axes is going on now, all around us, he said. As we travel back through time, it is not that matter and energy are converging through a fixed volume, like a gathering of flies at the center of an empty room… Rather, space itself is folding up — compressing — crumpling, like a deflated balloon, or like a piece of paper, crushed in the hand.

I followed his description — but it filled me with awe, and dread, for I could not see how life or Mind could survive such a crumpling!

The universal light grew in intensity, and it climbed the spectral scale to a glaring violet with startling speed. Clumps and eddies in that sea of hydrogen swirled about, like flames within a furnace; the Time Ships, connected by their ropes, were barely visible as gaunt silhouettes against that uneven glow. At last the sky was so bright I had only an impression of white-ness; it was like staring into the sun.

There was a soundless concussion — I felt as if I had heard a clash of cymbals — the light rushed in towards me, like some encroaching liquid — and I fell into a sort of white blindness. I was immersed in the most brilliant light, a light which seemed to suffuse my being. I could no longer make out those mottled clumps, and nor could I see the Time Ships — not even my own!

I called to Nebogipfel. I cannot see. The light —

His voice was small and calm, in that clamor of illumination.

We have reached the Epoch of Last Scattering… Space is now everywhere as hot as the surface of the sun, and filled with electrically charged matter. The universe is no longer transparent, as it will be in our day…

I could see why the Ships had been joined up by those ropes of Constructor stuff, for surely no signal could propagate through this glare. The dazzle grew more intense, until I was sure that it must have passed far beyond the range of visibility of normal human eyes — not that a man could have lasted for a moment in that glowing cosmic furnace!