“Another parable, Louise?”

Louise shrugged, looking smug.

Spinner felt, she decided, like one of Morrow’s Under-men. She was no longer free; she was bowed down by the need to serve Louise’s vast, amorphous project.

“All right, Louise, you’ve made your point. Let’s go back to the nightfighter.”

For the first time, Lieserl understood the photino birds.

She thought of novae, and supernovae.

As the newly shining stars had settled into their multi-billion-year Main Sequence lifetimes, the Universe must have seemed a fine place to the photino birds. The stars had appeared stable: eternal, neat little nests of compact gravity wells and fusion energy.

Then had come the first instabilities.

Red giant expansions and novae must have been bad enough. But even a nova was a limited explosion, which could leave a star still intact: survivable, by the infesting birds. A supernova explosion, however, could destroy a star in seconds, leaving behind nothing more than a shriveled, fast-spinning neutron star.

Lieserl tried to see these events from the point of view of the photino birds. The instabilities, the great explosions, must have devastated whole core-flocks. Perhaps, she speculated now, the birds had even evolved a civilization in the past; she imagined huge, spinning cities of dark matter at the heart of stars cities ripped apart by the first star-deaths.

If she were a photino bird, she wouldn’t tolerate this.

The birds didn’t need spectacular, blazing stars. They certainly didn’t need instability, novae and supernovae, the disruption of dying stars. All they demanded from a star was a stable gravity well, and a trickle-source of proton photino interaction energy.

She thought of Sol.

When the birds were finished with the Sun — after the superwind had blown through the wrecked System — a white dwarf would remain: a small, cooling lump of degenerate matter smaller than the Earth. The Sun’s story would be over. It could expect no change, except a slow decline; there would certainly be no cataclysmic events in Sol’s future…

But the dwarf would retain over half the Sun’s original mass. And there would be plenty of dense matter to interact with, and energy from the slow contraction of the star.

The Sun would have become an ideal habitat for photino birds.

Lieserl saw it all now, with terrifying clarity.

The photino birds were not prepared to accept a Universe full of young, hot, dangerous stars, likely to explode at any moment. So they had decided to get it over with — to manage the aging of the stars as rapidly as possible.

And when the birds’ great task was done, the Universe would be filled with dull, unchanging white dwarfs. The only motion would come from the shadowy streams of photino birds sailing between their neutered star-nests.

It was a majestic vision: an engineering project on the grandest possible of scales — a project which could never be equalled.

But it was making the Universe — the whole of the Universe — into a place inimical to humans.

She studied the swelling core of the Sun. Its temperature climbed higher almost daily; the helium flash was close — or might, indeed, already have occurred.

The humans seemed to have assimilated the data she had sent them. A reply came to her, via her tenuous maser-light pathways.

She translated it slowly. A smiling face, crudely encoded in a binary chain of Doppler-distorted maser bursts. Words of thanks for her data. And — an invitation.

Join us, the human said.

Once again, Spinner-of-Rope sat in the cage of the Xeelee nightfighter. Arcs of construction material wrapped around her; beyond them the bloated bulk of the Sun loomed, immense and pale, like some vast ghost.

She tried to settle into her couch. Between each discontinuity-drive jaunt she’d had Mark adjust the couch’s contours, but still it didn’t seem to fit her correctly. Maybe it was because of the biostat sensors with which she continued to be encrusted, for each flight…

Or maybe, she thought dispiritedly, it was just that she was so tired of this bombardment of strangeness.

She fingered her chest, against which — under her suit — lay her father’s arrowhead. Before her was the black horse shoe of the Xeelee control console, with its three grafted-on waldoes. She stared at the waldo straight ahead of her — the one which controlled the hyperdrive. Superficially the waldo was just another box of metal and plastic, its telltale lights glowing warmly; but now it seemed to loom large in her vision, larger even than the corpse of the Sun…

“Spinner. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Louise. I’m here.”

“Are you all right? You’re in your couch?”

Spinner allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. “Yes, I’m in my couch, just where you saw me not five minutes ago.”

Louise laughed. “All right, Spinner, I’m sorry. I’m in the life-lounge. Look whatever risks you take in this, I’ll be right here sharing them…”

Now Spinner laughed. “Thanks, Louise; that’s making me feel a lot better.”

Louise was silent for a moment, and Spinner imagined her lopsided, rather tired grin. “I never was much of a motivator. It’s amazing I ever got as far as I did in life… Are you ready to start?”

Spinner took a deep breath; her throat was tight, and she felt light, remote as if this were all some Virtual show, not connected to anything real.

“I’m ready,” she said.

There was silence; Louise Ye Armonk seemed to be holding her breath.

“Spinner-of-Rope, if you need more time — ”

“I said, I’m ready.” Spinner opened her eyes, settled into her crash couch, and flexed her gloved fingers. Before her, the touchpads on the hyperdrive waldo glowed.

“Tell me what to do, Louise.”

The Sun was a brooding mass to her right hand side, flooding the cage with dull red light.

There were three touchpads in a row, all shining yellow. Without thinking about it. Spinner stabbed her forefinger at the middle touchpad.

The ambient light — changed.

She was aware that she had stopped breathing; even her pulse, loud in her ears inside this helmet, seemed to have slowed to a crawl.

She was staring at her gloved hand, the outstretched forefinger still touching the surface of the waldo; beyond that, in her peripheral vision, she could see the ribs of the construction-material cage. It was all just as it had been, a heartbeat before.

…Except that the shadows which her hand cast across the waldo box had altered, subtly.

Before, the diffuse globe of the Sun had flooded her field of view with a crimson, bloody glow, and her cage was filled with streaky, soft-edged shadows. But now the shadows had moved around, almost through a hundred and eighty degrees. As if the Sun — or whatever light source was acting now — had moved around to her left.

She lifted her hand and turned it over before her face, studying the way the light fell across her fingers, the creases in the glove material. The quality of the light itself had changed, too; now it seemed more diffuse — the shadows still softer, the light pinker, brighter.

She dropped her hand to her chest. Through layers of suit material she could feel the hard edges of her father’s arrow blade, pressing against her chest. She pushed the point of the head into her body, feeling her skin break; the tiny pinpoint of pain was like a single, stationary point of reality amid this Universe of wheeling light.

She turned her head, slowly.

The Sun had gone. Where its immense bulk had coated the sky with crimson smoke, there was only emptiness — blackness, a smearing of wizened stars.