“The warrior Raiel,” Ilanthe said. “Sworn to destroy you. Ask this wretched remnant of their invasion if you require confirmation. They seek to cut you off from your source of energy, to starve you to death. They will be rendered irrelevant by the change I can instigate. In time, in the new universe, they will learn to celebrate your liberation.”

“Do you seek to destroy us?” the Firstlife asked.

“We require you to end your absorption of this galaxy and the threat of extinction it brings to all life,” Makkathran said. “If you will not undertake this freely, we have the right to stop you.”

“You don’t have to stop,” Ilanthe said. “Inversion circumvents everything. All of us will achieve the promise of our evolution. Give me your governing parameters.”

“Wait!” Gore demanded. “I think my alternative just became available.” He lifted his golden head and gave Ilanthe a sweetly evil grin. “And guess who made that happen.” And he dreamed of his life back outside the Void.

The Delivery Man watched in horror as the twin quantum signatures expanded at hyperluminal velocity. Marius had fired novabombs into the star. He couldn’t believe it. This was genocide.

Diverted energy functions absorbed the energy liberated from the first activation pulse, modifying it to expand the annihilation effect. A volume of the star’s interior the size of a super-Jovian gas giant converted directly into energy. The convection zone bulged around the periphery. It was the first act in a sequence that would see the star’s core squeezed beyond stability.

Monstrous shock waves raced toward the Last Throw at close to lightspeed. “Ozziefuckit!”

By the time he’d said it, his accelerated thoughts had ordered the smartcore to trigger the ultradrive. It was never designed to operate within a stellar gravity field, but he was dead, anyway.

The universe clearly hated such an aberration, sending a vengeful force to tear savagely at the perpetrator. Finally the cabin was alive with noise and shaking and alarms just as he’d thought he wanted. Bulkheads split, hundreds of tiny cracks ripping open. Sparks and sprays of gooey fluid shot through the air, churned by a cyclone of gravity waves that pulled the Delivery Man violently in every direction. He screamed in terror-

Two seconds. The time it took the ultradrive to claw the Last Throw out of the star’s stupendous gravity gradient. The time in which an astonishing amount of pain went surging along the Delivery Man’s nervous system. The time the ship’s overstressed components had to hold together. Most of them did.

The Delivery Man’s world steadied. Gravity stopped its wild fluctuations. The vibrations beating the starship’s fuselage faded away. His screaming dribbled off to a whimper.

And far away in a dream Ilanthe was entreating the Firstlife to give her the key to the Void’s nature.

“Gore!” he called.

“What’s happening?” the golden man asked. “There’s a power surge from the siphon.”

“Hell, you mean it’s survived that?”

“Survived what?”

“Marius! Sweet Ozzie, he used novabombs. Gore, the star is going nova. It’s already begun. That fucking deranged maniac has killed everything in the system. Tyzak! Warn Tyzak. I’m coming to get you.” Already the Last Throw was approaching the Anomine homeworld. The Delivery Man was designating a vector to take him around to the city where he’d left Gore.

“They know,” Gore said.

The Third Dreamer had abandoned Makkathran to dream of the Anomine city. The fantastical lights within the empty buildings were blazing with solar glory now. In its last minutes the city was waking defiantly to face its doom. Gore turned to Tyzak, who was staring straight up at the few quiet stars still visible directly above the plaza. The small remaining patch of dark sky was fading away as the light of the buildings grew ever stronger. Finally the old alien’s thoughts were slipping through whatever variant of the gaiafield was establishing itself around the planet. Every system and device the ancient Anomine had left behind was coming alive. Thousands of borderguards were materializing into orbit.

The Delivery Man knew it was all useless. Nothing could save the planet now.

“It was us,” Gore told Tyzak. “Humans. We did this. I’m so sorry.”

“You did not,” Tyzak replied. “Your song remains pure.”

“I have failed so many times today.”

“I believe you are to have your greatest success. They seem to think so.”

Gore saw that the plaza was now lined with hundreds of Silfen, all of them keeping back from the rim of the elevation mechanism.

“This is the fate our planet has brought us to,” Tyzak said. “I did not expect this, but what is, is. And perhaps the planet knew all along what it would be called upon to do. I will depart believing this one thing.”

Anomine began teleporting in, appearing all across the plaza. Hundreds, then thousands. Youngsters were agitated, squeaking loudly. It was happening in every city on the planet.

“Gore?” the Delivery Man asked. “What’s happening?”

Gore smiled at Tyzak even as he was being jostled by Anomine who were crowding in. “Go home,” he told the Delivery Man. “You deserve it.”

“Gore-?”

Gore shut down the TD link. He folded all his secondary routines back into his mind. There was only one consciousness now, making him as close to human as he’d been for many a century. His dream showed him Justine with an expression of alarm spreading over her beautiful face. She knew.

Tyzak called for the elevation mechanism.

“I feel you,” the elevation mechanism said. “You are Tyzak.”

“I am.”

“Do you wish to attain transcendence from your physical existence?”

“Yes.”

“Dad?” Justine asked.

Gore’s thoughts had calmed. He brought his arms out and glided gently across the square to the waiting Firstlife. “This is evolution,” he told the giant alien. “The omega you have sought for so long.”

“No, Dad, you can’t. You’re not Anomine.” Justine started to run. Edeard’s third hand caught her.

“Today I am,” Gore said benignly.

“No!” she sobbed. “Dad, please.”

Far outside the Void’s boundary the elevation mechanisms on the Anomine homeworld absorbed the power thundering out of the escalating nova. They adapted it and offered it up to the remainder of their species and one other who waited with them.

Gore felt his mind began to change, to rise. His perspective of the universe grew elegant.

“This is how it is done,” he told the Firstlife as they grew apart, gathering up everything the elevation mechanism was performing, the method and the outcome he now rushed toward. The union was so tenuous now, infused with the poignancy of Justine’s grief as she stretched herself between the two. “This is what you can become. This is destiny. Leave your past behind and reclaim the dream you started with. Like so …” He gifted the whole experience of his elevation to the Firstlife, who in turn shared it with the Heart. And after a while he was gone.

Edeard stood at the head of the group, facing up to the Firstlife. “You must choose,” he said to the daunting alien, aware of the Heart focusing on him. And Ilanthe.

“We do,” the Firstlife replied. “We choose evolution. It is why we created this place; it is what we aspired to so long ago. Anything else would betray all we were, all we aspired to. It could never be any other way.”

“Thank you.”

“It is the wrong choice,” Ilanthe declared.

“You should go with the Heart,” Inigo told her in disgust. “There is no place for you in this universe. You wanted to be a god; this is your chance. If it will take you.”

“You many come with us,” the Firstlife told the inversion core. “We offer to take all of you.”