“No,” Uvarov said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

“I’m simply grateful that, because Lieserl exists, we’ve managed to learn something of humanity’s five-megayear past… and of the photino birds.”

“Photino birds?”

The timbre of Mark’s voice changed; Uvarov imagined his stupid, pixel-lumped face splitting into a grin. “That’s Lieserl’s phrase. She found what she was sent in to find — dark matter energy flows, sucking the energy out of the core of the Sun. But it wasn’t some inanimate process, as her designers had expected: Lieserl found life, Uvarov. She’s not alone. She’s surrounded by photino birds. And I think she rather enjoys the company…”

“Lieserl…” Uvarov rolled the name around his mouth, savoring its strangeness. “An unusual name, even a thousand years ago.” Uvarov’s patchy, unreliable memory fired random facts into his tired forebrain. “Einstein had a child called Lieserl. I mean Albert Einstein, the — ”

“I know who he was.”

“His wife was called Mileva,” Uvarov said. “Why do I remember this?… They bore a child, Lieserl — but out of wedlock: a source of great shame in the early twentieth century, I understand. The child was adopted. Einstein had to choose between his child, and his career in science… all that beautiful science of his. What a choice for any human to have to make!

“So this woman has the name of a bastard,” he said. “A name redolent of isolation. How appropriate. How lonely she must have been…

“And now she enjoys the company of dark matter life forms,” he mused. “I wonder if she still remembers she was once human.”

Port Sol was twenty light-hours from the source of the beacon, Louise estimated. The nightfighter would be able to complete the trip in fifty hours.

Spinner-of-Rope, working her rudimentary controls with growing confidence, opened up the sail-wings of the nightfighter. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the wings. Her view was partially obscured by Louise’s life-lounge, an improvised encrustation which sat, squat, on the thick construction material shoulders of the ship’s wing-mountings, just behind her own cage. One of the Northern’s small, glass-walled pods had been fixed there too.

The nightfighter used its domain wall antigravity effect to protect the lounge, with Louise in it, from its extremes of acceleration. After a lot of experimentation they had found that securely attaching the lounge, and other artifacts, to the structure of the Xeelee nightfighter was enough to fool the craft into treating the enhancements as part of its structure.

But still, despite the human obstructions, Spinner could see the sparkle of the cosmic-string rims of the wings as they wound out across hundreds of miles of space, hauling open the night-blackness of the domain wall wings themselves. As they unfurled, the wings curved over on themselves with a grace and delicacy astonishing, Spinner thought, in artifacts so huge — and yet those curves seemed imbued with a terrific sense of vigor, of power.

She touched the waldoes.

The wings pulsed, once.

There was an instant in which she could see Port Sol recede from her, a flashbulb impression of squat human buildings and gaping ice-wounds which imploded to a light-point with a terrifying, helpless velocity.

And then the worldlet was gone. Within a heartbeat, Port Sol had become too dim even to show up as a point — and there was no longer a frame of reference against which she could judge her speed.

Then, with slow sureness as her speed built up, blue shift began to stain the stars ahead of her once more. For a few hours relativistic effects would spuriously restore those aged lights to something like the brilliance they had once enjoyed.

…And again she had the sense, almost undefinable, of someone here with her, inside the cage — a presence, surely human, staring out wistfully at the blue shifted stars as she did.

She wondered whether she should tell Louise about this. But — real or not, external to her own, fuddled mind or not — her companion wasn’t threatening.

And besides, what would Louise make of it? What could she do about it?

As the starbow coalesced around her once more, Spinner-of-Rope opaqued her faceplate, wriggled in her couch until an irritating wrinkle of cloth behind her back had smoothed itself out, and tried to sleep.

The slow, wide orbits of Port Sol and the beacon source had left them ninety degrees apart, as seen from the center of the Sun. Louise had laid in a course which took the nightfighter on a wide, high trajectory high above the plane of the System, arcing across its outer regions. The nightfighter’s path was like a fly hopping across a plate, from one point on the plate’s rim to another.

The Sun sat like a bloated, grotesque spider at the heart of its ruined System. All of the inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth/Luna — were gone… save only Mars, which had been reduced to a scorched cinder, surely barren of life, its orbit taking it skimming through the outer layers of the new red giant itself.

In a few more millennia that fragile orbit would erode, pitching Mars, too, into the flames.

Of the outer gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — all had survived with little change, save imploded Jupiter. But the outermost planet of all — the double world Pluto/Charon — had disappeared.

Spinner listened to Louise describe all this. “So where did Pluto go?”

“I’ve no idea,” Louise said. “There’s not a trace to be seen, anywhere along its old orbital path. Maybe we’ll never know.

“Spinner, a lot of the minor bodies of the System seem to have taken a real beating. Some of that is no doubt due to the Sun’s new, extreme state… but maybe some of it has been deliberate, too.”

Once, the Solar System had served as host to billions of minor bodies. The Oort Opik Cloud was — had once been — a swarm of a hundred billion comets circling through an immense, sparse shell of space, between four light-months and three light-years from the Sun. Now, that cloud was denuded.

Louise said, “Many of the comets must have been destroyed by the growth of the Sun — flashed to steam by its huge outpouring of heat energy, in one last, extravagant fling… They would have been visible from other systems, actually; they’d have inserted water lines, briefly, in the spectrum of the Sun: a kind of spectral Last Post for the Solar System, if there was anybody left, anywhere, to see.”

Further in toward the Sun, there were the Kuiper objects, like Port Sol; icy worldlets, orbiting not far outside the widest planetary orbits. And throughout the System there were more rings of small objects — like the asteroids, shepherded into semi-stable orbits by the gravitational interaction of the major planets.

“But all those worldlet rings are depleted,” Louise said. “Now, some of that depletion must be due to the Sun’s forced evolution, not to mention the loss of three of the inner planets. But many of the small objects must have been populated, by the era of the Xeelee wars.”

“So the objects might have been deliberately destroyed — more casualties of war.”

“Right.”

Spinner swilled apple-juice around her mouth, wishing she had some way to spit it out — or better still, to clean her teeth.

Spinner had learned of the Solar System only through Louise’s bookslates and records, but she’d gained an impression of an immense, bustling, prosperous world-system. There had been huge orbital habitat-cities, heavily populated worlds laced together by wormhole transit routes, and ships like immense, extravagant diamonds crossing the face of the yellow-gold Sun. Somewhere inside her — despite all the dire warnings of Superet — she’d hoped to arrive here and find it all just as she’d read.