Apart from this huge wound in the fleshy floor caused by the Crab (a wound which pooled with what looked un-nervingly like blood) there were a number of pockmarks in which metal glistened — weapons emplacements? — and others… eyes, huge, dimmed analogues of her own eyeballs.

There was a sense of suffering here, she thought: of pain, on an immense scale the agony of a wounded god.

She peered more closely at the nearest pockmark, trying to make out the nature of the device embedded there. But the image was little more than a sketch — a suggestion of form, rendered in shining chrome.

Virtual-Poole, with Mark, Uvarov and Milpitas, stood beside her. The Virtual studied the flesh landscape somberly. “The wormhole route to the future became a channel for invasion — by the Qax, an extraSolar species which had occupied the System by the time the bridge was established. You’re seeing here a reconstruction of one of the two Qax warships which came back through the wormhole. These are Spline — living creatures, perhaps even sentient — a technology unlike anything we’ve developed.”

Uvarov pointed to the sketchy surface of the Spline. “Your reconstruction isn’t so impressive.”

Virtual-Poole seemed more composed now, Louise thought — more Virtual, less Poole. She felt grateful for that. He said, “We know little about the Spline, save their name and gross form. I — Poole — with the help of the rebel humans from the occupation future, destroyed the invading Spline ships.” He peered down at the Crab’s spine, the huge, disrupted epidermis. “You can see how I — how he — rammed one of the warships, spearing it with the Crab’s GUTdrive. The warship was disabled — but not destroyed; in fact it was possible to take over some of the warship’s higher functions.

“I’m going to show you a reconstruction of the last few minutes of Michael Poole’s known existence.”

The sky-blue light around them started to shift, to slide over the equipment desks. Louise looked up. The Interface above the ship was moving gracefully across the sky; one triangular face, three miles wide, opened up -

— and, like some immense mouth, descended toward them.

Serena Milpitas said, “Lethe. We’re going through it, aren’t we? We’re going into the future.”

Louise looked at Poole. The Virtual gazed upwards, his eyes hardening with memory. “I drove the Spline into the wormhole. The wormhole had to be destroyed — the bridge to the future closed… That was my only goal.”

The triangular frame passed around the bulk of the Spline warship now; the lifedome shuddered — delicately, but convincingly. Blue-white flashes erupted all around the perimeter of the lifedome — damage inflicted on the flesh of the Spline, Louise guessed, by grazing collisions with the exotic-matter framework.

Suddenly they were inside the tetrahedral Interface — and the wormhole itself opened up before them. It was a tunnel, above the lifedome, delineated by sheets of autumn-gold light — and leading (impossibly) beyond the Interface framework, and arcing to infinity.

Louise wished she could touch Poole. This copy was closer to Michael Poole than any cloned twin; he shared Poole’s memories, his consciousness even. How must it be to relive one’s death like this?

Poole said, “The flashes in the wormhole throat represent the decay of heavy particles, produced in turn by the relaxing of shear energy in the curved spacetime walls of the wormhole, which — ”

Uvarov growled, “Skip the fairground ride; just tell us what happened. How did Poole destroy the wormhole?”

The Virtual turned his face toward Louise, his strong, aged features outlined by shuddering wormhole light. “The Spline ships had a hyperdrive, of unknown nature. I opened up my captive hyperdrive here — ”

The Virtual raised his hands.

The floor bucked beneath them. The wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue white light which raced toward them and down past the lifedome, giving Louise the sudden impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

Poole shouted, “However the hyperdrive works, it must be based on manipulating the multidimensionality of space. And if so — and if it were operated inside a wormhole, where spacetime is already distorted…”

Now the sheets of light gathered into threads, sinuous snakes of luminosity which curved around the GUTship, sundering the spacetime walls.

Mark said, “So the hyperdrive made the wormhole collapse?”

“Perhaps. Or — ” Virtual-Poole lifted his simulated head to the storm of wormhole light.

The threads of light seemed to sink into the fabric of the wormhole itself. Defects — cracks and sheets — opened up in the wormhole walls, revealing a plethora of wormhole tunnels, a hydra-like explosion of ballooning wormholes.

The Hermit Crab, uncontrolled, plunged down one wormhole after another into the future.

The Crab, at last, came to Virtual rest.

The last wormhole mouth closed behind it, the stresses of its distorted spacetime fabric finally yielding in a gush of heavy particles.

The sky beyond the lifedome was dark — almost empty, save for a random scattering of dimmed, reddened stars. There was no sign of life: no large-scale structure, no purposeful motion.

The sudden flood of darkness was startling. Louise, looking up, shivered; she had a feeling of intense age. “Michael — you surely expected to die, in the destruction of the wormhole.”

“Yes… but as you can see — perhaps — the wormhole didn’t simply collapse.” He looked confused. “I’m a simulacrum, Louise; I don’t share these memories with Poole… But there is evidence. Some of the particles which emerged from the collapsing Interface, in our own time, were of much too high energies to have been generated in the collapse of a single wormhole.

“We think the impact actually created — or at any rate widened — more, branching wormholes, which carried the Crab further into the future. Perhaps much further.

“We have simulations which show how this could happen, given the right form of hyperdrive physics — particularly if there were other cross-time wormholes already extant in the Solar System of the occupation era — perhaps set up by the Qax. In fact, the assumption that the branching did occur is allowing us to rule out classes of hyperdrive theory…”

The Virtual stood, and paced slowly across the transparent floor. “I was determined to close off the time bridge — to remove the threat of invasions from the future. But — I have to tell you — Superet thinks this was a mistake.” The Virtual twisted his hands together. “After all, we had already beaten off one Spline incursion. After Poole’s departure the study of the Qax incident became the prime focus of Superet. But because the wormhole is closed, Superet is reduced to inferring the truth about the future of our species from fragments, from indirect shards of evidence…”

Louise said, “You don’t believe it was a mistake, Michael.”

Poole looked haunted; again, Louise realized with an inner ache, his personality was conflicting with the programming imposed on it by Superet.

Mark peered up at the dying stars. “So. Did Poole survive?”

Louise said, “I’d like to think he did. Even just for a short while, so that he could understand what he saw.”

Milpitas lay back in her couch and stared up at the scattering of dim, reddened stars. “I’m no cosmologist… but those stars look so old. How far in time did he come?”

The Virtual did not reply.

Uvarov said, “Why have you shown us all this? What do you want?”

Virtual-Poole raised his thin arms to the desolate sky. “Look around you, Uvarov. Perhaps this is the end of time; it is certainly the end of the stars, of baryonic life. Perhaps there are other life forms out there, not perceived by us — creatures of dark matter, the non baryonic stuff which makes up nine-tenths of the Universe. But — where is man? In fact there’s no evidence of life at all here, human or otherwise.