“No… not necessarily.”

Louise speculated about the closing stages of the Xeelee conflicts. She imagined mankind trapped within its home System, sliding toward the final defeat. Toward the end, even communication between the worlds might have broken down. Humanity would have been reduced to isolated pockets, cowering under the Xeelee onslaughts.

But some might have seen a way out — a way to try to escape the final investing of the System by the Xeelee.

Louise said, “Imagine this little worldlet following its semi-stable path — say, between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. It wouldn’t have taken much to push it far enough out of its orbit to bring on orbital instability. And once equilibrium was lost, the drift away from the standard orbital elements could have been quite rapid — say, within a few orbits — and the decay wouldn’t have required any further deliberate — and observable — impulses, perhaps.”

Silently, all but invisibly to anyone watching, the little world, with its precious cargo of cowering, fearful humans, had looped through its increasingly perturbed orbit, falling at last — after many orbits, perhaps covering centuries — into the gravitational field of one of the major planets.

Then, finally, the worldlet was slingshot out of the Solar System.

“If they’d got it right,” Louise said, “maybe it would have been a viable plan. If. These people were going to the stars, by the lowest-tech way you can imagine. It would have taken tens of thousands of years to get to even the nearest star — but so what? They had tens of thousands of years to play with, thanks to AS — or the equivalent they’d developed by then. And locked up in the ice of the worldlet there was probably as much water as in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean… Going to the stars in an ice moon was certainly a better chance than staying here to be creamed by the Xeelee with the rest — it was a viable way to get out of all this, all but undetectable.

“The scheme obviously attracted support. You can see the bits of ships, littering the surface… People must have fled here, quietly, from all over the collapsing System. The mission was a beacon of hope, I guess.

“But — ”

“But what?”

“But they got it wrong.

“I’m going to go deeper now, Spinner.”

“Be careful, Louise.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Louise’s shallow breath. Spinner filled her faceplate once more with cool, green leaf-light and stared into it, trying not to imagine what Louise was finding, down there inside the little tomb-world.

At length, Louise said: “Well, that’s it. I guess I’m here: the last place they occupied… the one place they couldn’t tidy up after themselves.”

Spinner stared into green emptiness. “What can you see?”

“Abandoned clothes.” Hesitation. “Dust everywhere. No bones, Spinner; no crumbling corpses… you can put your imagination away.”

After five megayears, there would only be dust, Spinner thought: a final cloud, of flakes of bone and crumbled flesh, settling slowly.

“If they left records, I can’t find them,” Louise said. She sounded as if she were trying to be unconcerned — to maintain control — but Spinner thought she could hear fragility in that level voice. “Perhaps there’s something in the electronics. But that would take years of data mining to dig out, even if we could restore the power. And we’re probably looking at technology a hundred thousand years beyond ours anyway…”

“Louise, there’s nothing you can do in there. I think you should come out.”

“…Yes. I guess you’re right, Spinner-of-Rope. We don’t have time for this.”

Spinner thought she heard relief in Louise’s tone.

The little Northern pod clambered up from the worldlet’s shallow gravity well, toward the Xeelee craft.

Louise, safe inside her life-lounge, said: “They couldn’t control the slingshot well enough. Or maybe the Xeelee interfered with their plans.

“They weren’t thrown out of the System as they’d planned, on an open-ended hyperbolic trajectory; instead they were put into this wide, and deadly, elliptical orbit — an orbit which was closed, taking them nowhere, very slowly.

“I guess they tried to stick it out. Well, they’d broken up their ships; they had no choice. Maybe if we had time for a proper archaeological study here we could work out how long they lasted. Who knows? Hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they were hoping for rescue, for all that time, from some brave new future when humans had thrown out the Xeelee once more.

“But it was a future that never came.

“By the time they set up their beacon, their final plea for help, they must have known they were through — and that there was nobody to come to their aid.”

“Nobody except us.”

“Yes,” Louise growled. “And what can we offer them now?”

“What about the beacon?”

“I shut it down,” Louise said softly. “It’s served no purpose… not for five million years.”

Spinner sat in her Xeelee-crafted cabin, watching the grim little tomb of ice turn beneath her prow. “Louise? Where to now?”

“The inner System. I think I’ve had it with all this bleakness and dark. Spinner-of-Rope, let’s go to Saturn.”

Surrounded by swooping photino birds, Lieserl sailed around the core of the Sun. She let hydrogen light play across her face, warming her.

The helium core, surrounded by the blazing hydrogen shell scorching its way out through the thinning layers, continued to grow in the steady hail of ash from the shell. Inhomogeneities in the giant’s envelope — clouds and clumps of gas, bounded by ropes of magnetic flux — moved across the face of the core, and the core-star actually cast shadows outwards, high up into the expanding envelope.

The photino birds swept, oblivious, through the shining fusion shell and on into the inert core itself. Lieserl watched as a group of the birds broke away and sailed off and out, to their unknowable destination beyond the Sun. She studied the birds. Had their rate of activity increased? She had the vague impression of a greater urgency about the birds’ swooping orbits, their eternal dips into the core.

Maybe the birds knew the ancient human spacecraft, the Northern, was here. Maybe they were reacting to the humans’ presence… It seemed fanciful — but was it possible?

The processes unfolding around the Sun were quite remarkably beautiful. In fact, she reflected now, every stage of the Sun’s evolution had been beautiful whether accelerated by the photino birds or not. It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process.

Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?

She smiled at herself. Ironic. Here she was, an AI five million years old, accusing herself of too much anthropomorphism…

But, she thought uneasily, perhaps her true fault lay in not enough anthropomorphism.

The sudden communication from the humans outside — the whispers of maser light which had trickled down the flanks of the huge, dumb convection cells — had shaken her to her soul.

She’d undertaken her cycle of messages, she suspected strongly, because she was driven to it by some sinister bit of programming, buried deep within her: not out of choice, or because she believed she might actually get a reply. So she’d packed her data with pictures of herself, and small, ironic jokes — all intended, she supposed, to signal to herself that this wasn’t real: that it was all a game, unworthy of being taken seriously because there was no one left out there to hear.