There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of mankind, but she’d long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the death of the Sun.

She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.

The lounge was basic — it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of the Northern’s hull material, the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a malevolent parasite — utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully. The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless gray, making the lounge rather dingy and claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.

She reached for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling really dry.

The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.

She’d always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with building things out there. But there was more to her than that — there were elements which Mark had recognized and treasured during their marriage. Sex had always been important to her: not just for the physical pleasure of it but also for what it symbolized: something deep and old within her, an echo of the ancient sea whose traces humans still carried, even now. The contrast of that oceanic experience with her work had made her more complete, she thought.

After she and Mark had reconciled — tentatively, grudgingly, in recognition of their joint isolation in the Northern — they had revived their vigorous sex life. And it had been good, remaining vital for a long time. Longer than either of them had a right to expect, she supposed. She wrapped the towel around her back and began to rub at her buttocks. Maybe if Mark had stayed alive -

The lounge walls snapped to transparency; space darkness flooded over her.

Louise cried out and pulled the towel around her body.

From her comms desk came the sound of laughter.

She scrambled in a locker for fresh clothes. The door of the jury-rigged locker jammed and she hauled at it, swearing, aware of the towel slipping around her.

“By Lethe’s waters, Spinner, what do you think you’re doing?”

Louise could just make out Spinner’s cage, a box of winking lights at the prow of the nightfighter. A shadow moved across the lights — Spinner, probably, twisting in her couch to take a mocking look at her. “I’m sorry. I knew you’d be embarrassed.”

Louise had found a coverall; now she thrust her legs into it. “Then why,” she said angrily, “did you invade my privacy by doing it?”

“What difference does it make? Louise, there’s no one to see; we’re a billion miles from the nearest living soul. And you’re a thousand years old. You really ought to rid yourself of these taboos.”

“But they’re my taboos,” Louise hissed. “I happen to like them, and they make a difference to me. If you ever get to my age, Spinner-of-Rope, maybe you’ll learn a little tolerance.”

“Well, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t de-opaque your walls just to catch you with your pants off.” She sounded mischievous.

Suspiciously, Louise asked, “Why, then?”

“Because — ” Spinner hesitated.

“Because what?”

“Look ahead.”

There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face -

Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.

Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.

“Because,” Spinner said softly, “we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.”

Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.

Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.

Spinner was laughing softly.

Louise said slowly, “Spinner — if this is Saturn — where are the rings?”

“Rings? What rings?”

The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolor streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.

But the rings had gone.

Louise hurried to her data desk.

“…Louise? Are you all right?”

From the surface of the city-world of Titan, the rings had been a line of light, geometrically precise, vivid against the autumn gold of Saturn…

Louise made herself reply. “I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were ours.”

“But,” said Spinner, “there is a ring here. I can see it. Look…”

Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.

The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.

Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colorless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.

And where were the other moons?

Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now — as far as she could tell from their orbits — only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface — always broken, uneven — had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.

The rest of the moons — even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice had gone.

Louise remembered the ancient, beautiful names. Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus… Names almost as old, now, as the myths from which they had been taken; names which had outlived the objects to which they’d been assigned.

“Louise?”

“I’m sorry, Spinner.”

“Still mourning?”

…Janus, Mimas, Tethys, Telesto…

“Yes.”

“I guess somebody has to.”

“Spinner, what happened here?”

“A battle,” Spinner said quietly. “Obviously.”

Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe…

The nightfighter spread its hundred-mile wings, eclipsing the debris of the shattered moons.

Milpitas sat in his office. From throughout the Temple, there were the sounds of shouting, of screams, of yelled words too indistinct for him to hear.

The shouting seemed to be coming closer.

He cleared his magnetized desk top, putting his paper, pens, data slates away into drawers. He folded his hands and held them over the desk.