“But not for billions of years after we’re gone.”

Spinner turned to Louise, her eyes large, her expression fragile, troubled. Her hands tugged at each other’s fingers, and played with the arrow-head pendant at her chest. “Louise, nothing we build could survive such a length of time. No conceivable monument, or record, could persist. We’ll be forgotten. No one will ever know we were here.”

Louise reached over the back of her chair and took Spinner’s hands in hers, stilling their nervous motions. Again she felt a surge of responsibility for Spinner’s fragile state. “That’s not true, Spinner,” she said gently. “We’ll still be there. These VMOs will leave traces in the microwave background — peaks of energy against the smooth radiation curves. There were traces like that in the microwave spectrum of our own Universe — that’s how we know of our own primordial VMOs. And there will be other traces, relics of this time. These giant proto-stars will enrich the substance of the young galaxies here, with heavy elements. Without the heavy elements stars like old Sol could never form… and we’ll be part of that enrichment, Spinner-of-Rope, tiny traces, atoms which formed in a different universe.”

Spinner-of-Rope frowned. “A blip in the microwave background? Is that to be our final monument?”

“It might be sufficient to let the people of the future work out that we were here, perhaps. And besides, we might have a billion years ahead of us, Spinner. Time enough to think of something.” She stroked Spinner’s hands. “It would take a long time, but we could build a planet for ourselves, out here on the lip of New Sol’s gravity well.” She smiled. Maybe they could construct an ocean, wide enough for the Great Britain to sail again. What would old Isambard have made of that? And -

“No,” Morrow said mildly.

Louise turned to him, surprised. His face, gaunt, shaven of hair, was smooth and confident-looking in the light of New Sol.

“What did you say?” Louise asked.

He turned to her. “Planets are inefficient, Louise. Oh, they’re convenient platforms if they exist already. But — to build a planet? Why bury all that painfully extracted matter inside your habitable surface?”

Louise found herself frowning; she was aware of Mark grinning at her, irritatingly. “But what’s the alternative?”

Morrow said, “We can build structures in space: rings, hollow spheres — the point is to maximize the habitable surface available for a given mass — to spread it out as much as possible. Louise, a spherical planet gives you a minimum surface for a given mass.”

Louise studied Morrow curiously. His motion sickness was still evident in the pallor of his thin face, but he spoke with a vigor, a clarity she wouldn’t have believed possible when she’d first met him, soon after his emergence from the Decks. Was it possible that the centuries of oppression, of body and soul, which he had endured in there, were at last beginning to lift?

Mark smiled at her. “You’d better face it, Louise. You and I grew up on worlds, and so we think in terms of rebuilding what we’ve lost. We’d better move aside, and leave the future to these bright young kids.”

She found herself grinning back. She whispered, “Okay, I take your point. But Morrow, as a bright young kid?”

“Maybe we’ll just build ships,” Spinner said intently. “Whole armadas of them. We can simply fly; who needs to land, anyway? We could spread out, here. Maybe the Xeelee are here already — we came through their gateway, after all. We could see if we can find them…”

Mark scratched his chin. “That’s a good agenda, Spinner-of Rope. You know, I think Garry Uvarov would be proud of you.”

She glared at him. She pulled her hands away from Louise, and for a moment with her streak of scarlet face paint, and spectacles glinting with New Sol light — Spinner reminded Louise of the savage little girl she’d once been.

“Maybe he would,” Spinner snapped. “But so what? I’m not a creation of Garry Uvarov. Uvarov was an oppressor, insane.”

Louise shrugged. “Perhaps he was, in the end — and capricious. But he was also insightful, iconoclastic. He never let us turn away from the truth, in any situation, no matter how uncomfortable that was…”

Uvarov hadn’t deserved to die, blind and alone, in a remote, deserted future.

Maybe Uvarov had been right, too, in the motives behind his great eugenics experiment. Not in his methods, of course… But perhaps a natural, technology independent immortality was a valid goal for the species.

Louise was aware that she and her crew had gone to a great deal of trouble to preserve the essence of humanity, through the collapse of the baryonic Universe. They hadn’t sent mere records of humankind through the Ring, or Virtual representations of what man had been: they’d brought people, with all their faults and ambiguities and weaknesses, and plumbing. And now that they’d succeeded, perhaps it was time for human stock to begin to develop: to face up to and exceed the limitations, of body and spirit, which had, at last, caused the extinction of humanity in the old, abandoned Universe.

She wondered if in several generations’ time, the descendants of Spinner-of-Rope would indeed sail through this new universe in their sparkling ships. Perhaps when they finally met the Xeelee, it would be on equal terms; perhaps the new humans would be strong, immortal — and sane.

“…It’s starting!” Morrow said, his voice high and tense. He pointed, his sleeve riding up his arm. “Look at that.”

In a sudden eruption of light, gas blossomed from the four faces of the Interface. Still fusion-burning as it emerged, the gas rapidly expanded into a growing, cooling cloud. Louise could see the tetrahedral form of the Interface itself at the blazing heart of this animated sculpture of gas.

Diffuse light flooded the pod. It was as if a new, tiny star had ignited, here on the fringe of New Sol’s gravity well. The drones flickered open their electromagnetic scoops and moved into the glowing, dispersing clouds, browsing patiently.

“Lethe’s waters,” Morrow breathed. “It’s beautiful. It’s like a flower.”

“More than that,” Mark said with a grin. “It’s beautiful because it’s bloody worked.” He turned to Louise, his blue eyes brilliant, and his face looked youthful and alive.

“Louise,” he said, “I think we might live through this after all.”

Louise reached for the pod’s controls. The first loads of atmospheric gases would be arriving soon. And there were homes to be built. It was time to return to the Northern and get back to work.

Life would go on, she thought: as complicated, and messy, and precious, as ever.

Once again Lieserl spread her arms and soared through the interior of a star. But now her playground was no mere G type yellow dwarf like the Sun: this was New Sol — a super giant, salvaged for her from the dawn of time, fully ten million miles across.

Lethe’s waters. I’d forgotten how wonderful this feels how restrictive a human body could be…

I was born for this, she thought.

She arced upwards toward the photosphere — the star’s surface was a wall of gas which seared space at a temperature of a hundred thousand degrees — and then she dived, yelling, down into the core. In Sol, the fusing core had been confined to the innermost few percent of the diameter. Here, the core was the star, extending out almost to the photosphere itself. There was fusion burning everywhere. All around her helium burned into oxygen, dumping prodigious quantities of heat energy into the star’s opaque flesh. In response, immense convective cells — some of them large enough to have swallowed Sol itself surged through the interior.