“I recognize some of this,” Louise said. “Some of the geography, I mean. I could even tell you place names. Can you believe that — after five megayears?

“…But I guess that’s just telling us that Port Sol was abandoned not long after my time. Once the Squeem hyperdrive was acquired, the GUTship lines — even the worm-hole route operators — must have become suddenly obsolete. There was no longer any economic logic to sustain Port Sol. I wonder what the last days were like… Perhaps the Port was kept going by tourism, for a while. And, thinking back, there would have been a few who wouldn’t want to return to the crowded pit of the inner System. Perhaps some of them stayed here until their AS treatment finally failed them…

“Maybe that’s how it was,” she said. “But I think I’d rather imagine they closed the place up with one major party.”

“How did Port Sol survive the wars?”

“Who would want to come here?” Louise said drily. “What is there to fight over? There’s nothing that’s even worth destroying. Spinner, Port Sol must have been abandoned for most of the five megayears since the Northern’s departure. It’s drifted around the rim of the System, unremarked and never visited, while the tides of the Xeelee wars washed over the inner worlds. The System is probably littered with sites like this — abandoned, too remote to be worth tracking down for study, or exploitation, or even to destroy. All encrusted with bits of human history — and lost lives, and bones.”

Spinner laughed uneasily; she wasn’t used to such reflection from the engineer.

She twisted her head, looking around the sky. “I don’t like it here, Louise,” she said. “It’s barren. Abandoned. I thought the Jupiter system was bad, but — ”

Apart from the Sun and Port Sol, only the distant dimmed stars shone here, impossibly remote. Spinner felt cowed by the dingy immensity all around her: she felt that her own spark of human life and warmth was as insignificant against all this darkness as the dim glow of the touch-pad lights on her waldoes.

Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations. The Northern forest-Deck — the whole of that enclosed world which had seemed so huge to her, as a child — was nothing but a remote scrap of incongruous green, irrelevant in all this emptiness.

Louise said, “I know how you’re feeling. At least at Jupiter there was something in the sky. Right? Listen to me, Spinner; it’s all a question of scale. Port Sol is a Kuiper object — a ball of ice traveling around the Sun about fifty AUs out. AUs — astronomical units — that means — ”

“I know what it means.”

“Spinner, Jupiter is only five AUs from the center of the Sun. So we’re ten times further out from the heart of the System than Northern is… so far out that we’re on the edge of the Solar System, so far that the other bodies in the System — save Sol itself — are reduced to points of light, invisible without enhancement. Spinner, emptiness is what you have to expect, out here.”

“Sure. So tell me how it makes you feel.”

Louise hesitated. “Spinner-of-Rope, five million years ago I came here to work in the old days, while the Great Northern was being constructed…”

Louise spoke of bustling, sprawling, vigorous human communities nestling among the ancient ice-spires of the Kuiper object. The sky had been full of GUTships and stars, with Sol a bright yellow gleam in Capricorn.

“But now,” Louise said, her voice tight, “look at the Sun… Spinner-of-Rope, even from this far out — even from fifty AUs — the damn thing is twice as wide as the Moon, seen from old Earth. It’s obscene to me. It makes it impossible for me to forget, even for a moment, what’s been done.”

Spinner sat silently for a moment. Memories of Earth meant nothing to her, but she could feel the pain in Louise’s voice.

“Louise, do you want to land here?”

“No. There’s nothing for us down there… It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I’m sorry, Spinner.”

Spinner sighed. “Where to now?”

“Well, since we’re out here in the dark, let’s stay out. We’re still picking up that remote beacon.”

“Where’s the signal coming from?”

“Further out than we are now — about a hundred AUs — and a goodly distance around the equatorial plane from Port Sol. Spinner-of-Rope, we’re looking at another few days in the saddle, for you. Can you stand it?”

Spinner sighed. “It’s not getting any easier. But it’s not going to get any worse, is it?” …And, she thought, it wasn’t as if the base they had established amid the ruins of the Jupiter system was so fantastically inviting a place to get back to. “Let’s get it over.”

“All right. I’ve already laid in your course…”

There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl — the strange, lonely exile in the Sun — and the crew of the returned Great Northern.

The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the center of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl’s maser messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense convection cells. So communications roundtrips — between the Northern and the antiquated wormhole terminus that supported Lieserl’s awareness — took several days.

Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back and forth across the tenuous link.

“Incredible,” Mark murmured. “She dates from our own era — she was placed within the Sun at almost exactly the same time as our launch.”

It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov’s own head. Uvarov swiveled his sightless face about the dining saloon. “You’re forgetting your spatial focus again,” he snapped. “I know you’re excited, but — ”

There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the saloon. “Sorry,” Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov’s head.

“As far as I can tell, she’s human,” Mark said. “A human analogue, anyway. The woman’s been in there, alone, for five million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won’t have endured all that time at a normal human pace, but still…

“She’s another Superet project — just as we are. Which is why there’s such a coincidence in dates. We must both date from Superet’s most active period, Uvarov.”

Uvarov smiled. “Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Superet was planning to adjust the future of mankind — to ensure the success of the species. But what is the outcome? We have: one half-insane relic of a woman-Virtual, wandering about inside the Sun, one broken-down GUTship, the Northern… and a Sun become a giant in a lifeless Solar System.” He worked his numb mouth, but there was no phlegm to spit. “Hardly a triumph. So much for the abilities of humans to manage projects on such timescales. So much for Superet!”

“But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race — in patches, and from a distance, but she knows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct competition with the Xeelee.”

Uvarov couldn’t wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. “But, I wonder, are these few, pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by this unfortunate Lieserl, in the heart of a dying star?”

Mark synthesized a sniff. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “Maybe you’re a better philosopher than I am, Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgments on the moral value of data. At this moment I don’t really care where this information has come from.”