She knew of Uvarov’s eugenics experiments on the forest Deck, inspired by a drive to improve the species directly. Maybe this gathering, with its mute testimony to the limitations of AS technology, was a partial justification of Uvarov’s project, she thought.

Louise Ye Armonk gently rapped her empty brandy glass with a spoon; it chimed softly. “All right, people,” she said. “I guess it’s time for us to get down to business.”

Uvarov grinned toward Lieserl, showing a mouth bereft of teeth. “Welcome to the council of war,” he hissed.

“Well, perhaps this is a war,” Louise said seriously. “But at the moment, we’re just bystanders caught in the crossfire. We have to look at our options, and decide where we’re going from here.

“We’re in — a difficult situation.” Louise Armonk looked enormously tired, worn down by the responsibilities she had taken on, and Lieserl felt herself warm a little to this rather intimidating engineer. “Our job was to deliver a wormhole Interface to this era, to the end of time, and then travel back through the Interface to our own era. Well, we know that didn’t work out. The Interface is wrecked, the wormhole collapsed — and we’ve become stranded here, in this era.

“What I want to decide here is how we are going to preserve the future of our people. Everything else — everything — is subordinate to that. Agreed?”

For a moment there was silence around the table; Lieserl noticed how few of them were prepared to meet Louise’s cold eyes.

Morrow leaned forward into the light. Lieserl saw, with gentle amusement, how his bony wrists protruded from his sleeves. “I agree with Louise. We have one priority, and one only. And that’s to protect the people on this ship: the two thousand of them, on the Decks and in the forest. That’s what’s real.”

Louise smiled. “Morrow, you have the floor. How, exactly?”

“It’s obvious,” Morrow said. “For better or worse, we’re now the custodians of a thousand-year-old culture — a culture which has evolved in the conditions which were imposed on it during the flight. The confined space, the limited resources… and the constant, one-gee gravity.

“But now the flight is over. And we took away the gravity, virtually without notice. You know we managed to break up the Temple sieges, without much injury or loss of life. But, Louise, I can’t tell you that life in the Decks has gone back to normal. How could it? Most people are barely retaining their sanity, let alone returning to work. No one’s producing any food. At the moment we’re working our way through stores, but that’s not going to last long.”

Trapper pushed her face forward. “And in the forest, too, the biota are — ”

Louise held up her hands. “Enough. Morrow has made the point. Give me a suggestion, please.”

Morrow and Trapper exchanged glances. “If there was an Earth to return to,” Morrow said slowly, “I’d say return there.”

“But there isn’t,” Uvarov said acidly. His voice was a rasp, synthesized by some device in his throat. “Or had you missed the point?”

Morrow was clearly irritated, but determined to make his case. “I know there’s no Earth.”

“So?” Louise asked.

“So,” Morrow said slowly, “I suggest we stay in the ship. We overhaul it, quickly, and retrieve more reaction mass. Then we send it on a one-gee flight.”

“Where?” Mark asked.

“Anywhere. It really doesn’t matter. We could loop around the Sun in some kind of powered orbit, for all I care. The point is to restart the drive: to restore acceleration-induced gravity inside the ship. Let us — let the people in there get back to normal again, and start living.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Spinner-of-Rope said, “Actually, in this scenario, it surely would be better to stay in the Solar System, on a powered orbit. The new chunk of reaction mass would be used up, in time; wouldn’t it be better to stay close enough to the Sun to be assured of being able to refuel later?… Even if that’s not for another thousand years from now.”

“Perhaps.” Louise rubbed her nose thoughtfully. “But I’m not sure it’s going to be viable to stay in the ship. Not in the long term.” She sighed. “The dear old Northern did her job superbly well — she exceeded all her design expectations. And maybe she could last another thousand years.

“But, in the end, she’s going to fail. It may not be for ten thousand years, but failure will come. And then what?” She frowned. “Then, we might not be around to oversee any transition to another environment.”

“There’s a more fundamental point,” Mark said seriously. “The engineering — the nuts and bolts — may have survived the trip, but the social fabric of the Northern didn’t stand the strain so well. Consider the behavior of the Planners, toward the end; their messianic visions, which had had a thousand long years to incubate, became psychotic delusions, virtually.” He looked pointedly at Uvarov. “And we had one or two other little local difficulties along the way.”

“Yes.” Louise’s tiredness was etched into her face. “I guess, in the end, we didn’t do a very good job of preserving our rationality, across the desert of time we’ve traversed…”

Mark looked around the table. “People, we aren’t Xeelee. We aren’t designed to live with each other for centuries, or millennia. We just don’t know how to build a society that could survive, indefinitely, in a cramped, enclosed box like the ship. We’ve already failed to do so.”

“Do you have an alternative?” Louise asked.

“Sure. We stay in the System. But we get out of the damn ship. We could try to colonize some of the surviving moons. They can give us raw materials for habitats, at least. We could break up the Northern to give the new colonies a start… Louise, what I’m advocating is giving ourselves space, before we kill each other.”

Uvarov turned his face toward the Virtual; his blind smile was like a snake’s, Lieserl thought. “A nice romantic thought,” he said. “But not viable, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the helium flash.” Uvarov turned, disconcertingly, straight to Lieserl; his eyes were shadowed pits. “The flash: the coming gift from Lieserl’s cute dark matter chums inside the Sun. Our best predictions are that it will blossom from the Sun within — at the most — a few centuries.” He swiveled his head toward Louise. “And after that we can expect the carbon flash, and the oxygen flash, and… My friends, thanks to the photino birds the Solar System is, in practical terms, uninhabitable.”

Mark glared at the old surgeon. “Then come up with a better idea.”

Louise held up her hands. “Wait. Let’s talk around the photino birds a little.” She glanced at Lieserl. “You know more about the birds than any of us. Uvarov’s projections are right, I suppose.”

“About the continuing forced evolution of the Sun? Oh, yes.” Lieserl nodded, feeling uncomfortable to be at the center of attention; she was aware of the flickering candlelight playing around her nose and eyes. “I’ve watched the birds for five million years. They’ve maintained their behavior pattern for all of that time; I’ve no reason to believe they are going to change now. And your observations show that every other star, as far as we can tell, is inhabited — ”

Uvarov scowled. “Infested. These birds of yours — these creatures of dark matter — they are our true enemy.”

Louise regarded Lieserl. “Do you think he’s right about that, too?”

Lieserl thought carefully. “No. Not exactly. Louise, I don’t think the birds really know we are here. After all, we’re as marginally visible to them as they are to us.” She closed her eyes; the illusion of inner eyelids was remarkably accurate, she thought absently. “I think they became aware of me, quite early… I’ve told you I think they tried to find ways to keep me alive. But they never showed any inclination to go seeking more of my kind. And they never tried to communicate with me… Still,” she said firmly, “I don’t think it’s true that the photino birds are an enemy.”