But there was nobody there. She felt disappointed, wistful.

“That was Morrow, butting in,” Louise was saying. “I’m sorry, Spinner. Do you want me to patch you into the conversation?… Spinner? Did you hear me? I said — ”

“I heard you, Louise,” she Said. “I’m sorry. Yes, patch me in, please.”

“…straight ahead of us, at the end of this gouge,” Morrow was saying. “There… there… See?”

“Spinner, I’ll download our visuals to you,” Louise said.

Spinner’s faceplate image was abruptly overlaid with false colors: gaudy reds, yellows and blues, making detail easy to discriminate.

The glowing walls of the star valley dwindled into a dull mist at infinity. And at the end of the valley — almost at the vanishing point itself — there was a structure: a sculpture of thread, colored false blue.

“I see it,” Spinner breathed. Subvocally, she called for magnification.

“Do you know what you’re looking at, Spinner?” Louise’s flat voice contained awe, humility. “It’s what we suspected must have gouged out this valley. It’s a fragment of cosmic string…”

At the center of an immense cavity, walled by crowded galaxies, Lieserl and Mark rotated slowly around each other, warm human planets.

The sky was peppered with the dusty spirals of galaxies, more densely than the stars in the skies of ancient Earth. But the cavity walls were ragged and ill defined, so that it was as if Lieserl was at the center of some immense explosion. And every one of the galaxies was tinged by blue shift: the light from each of these huge, fragile star freights was compressed, visibly, by its billion-year fall into this place.

Mark took her hand. His palm was warm against hers, and when he pulled gently at her arm, her body slowly rotated in space until she faced him.

“I don’t understand,” Lieserl said. “This — cavity — is empty. Where’s the Ring?”

The light of a hundred thousand galaxies, blue-shifted, washed over his face. Mark smiled. “Have patience, Lieserl. Get your bearings first.

“Look around. We’ve arrived at a cavity, almost free of galaxies, ten million light-years across: a cavity right at the site of the Great Attractor. The whole cavity is awash with gravitational radiation. Nothing’s visible, but we know there’s something here, in the cavity… It just isn’t what we expected.”

Lieserl raised her face to stare around the crowded sky, at the galaxies embedded in the walls of this immense cave of sky. One galaxy with an active nucleus — perhaps a Seyfert emitted a long plume of gas from its core; the gas, glowing in the search-light beam of ionizing radiation from the core, trailed behind the infalling galaxy like the tail of some immense comet. And there was a giant elliptical which looked as if it was close to disintegration, rendered unstable by the fall into the Attractor’s monstrous gravity well; she could clearly see the elliptical’s multiple nuclei, orbiting each other within a haze of at least a thousand billion stars.

Some of the galaxies were close enough for her to make out individual stars — great lacy streams of them, in disrupted spiral arms — and, in some places, supernovae glared like diamonds against the paler tapestry of lesser stars. She picked out one barred-spiral with a fat, gleaming nucleus, which trailed its loosening arms like unraveling bandages. And there was a spiral heartbreakingly like her own Galaxy — undergoing a slow, stately collision with a shallow elliptical; the galaxies’ discs had cut across each other, and along the line where they merged exploding stars flared yellow-white, like a wound.

It was, she thought, as if the Universe had been wadded up, compressed into this deep, intense gravity pocket.

Everywhere she caught a sense of motion, of activity: but it was motion on an immense scale, and frozen in time. The galaxies were like huge ships of stars, Lieserl thought, voyaging in toward here, to the center of everything — but they were ships caught suspended by the flashbulb awareness of her own humanity. She longed for the atemporal perspective of a god, so that she could run this immense, trapped diorama forward in time.

“It’s all very beautiful,” she said. “But it almost looks artificial — like a planetarium display.”

Mark grunted. “More like a display of trapped insects. Moths, maybe, drawn in to an invisible gravitational flame. We’re still sifting through the data we’re gathering,” he said softly. “I wonder if any astronomers in human history have ever had such a rich sky to study… even if it does mark the end of time.

“But we’ve found one anomaly, Lieserl.”

“An anomaly? Where?”

He raised his arm and pointed, toward an anonymous-looking patch of sky across the cavity. “Over there. A source in the hydrogen radio band. As far as we can tell it’s coming from a neutron star system — but the neutron star is moving with an immense velocity, not far below lightspeed. Anomalies all round, right? The source is difficult to pick out against all this galactic mush in the foreground. But it’s undoubtedly there…”

“What’s so special about it?”

He hesitated. “Lieserl, it seems to be a signal.”

“A signal? From who?”

“How should I know?”

“Maybe it’s a freak; an artifact of our instruments.”

“Quite possibly. But we’re thinking of checking it out anyway. It’s only a million light-years away.” He smiled ruefully. “That’s all of eight hours’ travel, if you hitch a ride on a nightfighter…”

A signal, here at the end of space and time… Was it possible the motley crew of the Northern wasn’t alone after all?

The hair at the base of her skull prickled. At the end of this long, long life, she’d thought there was nothing left to surprise her.

Evidently, she was wrong.

Mark said, “Lieserl, what you’re looking at here is visible light: the Virtual display we’re drifting around inside is based on images from right at the center of the human visible spectrum. You’re seeing just what any of the others would see, with their unaided vision. But the image has been enhanced by blue shift: red, dim stars have been made to look blue and bright.”

“I understand.”

Now the blue stain faded from the galaxy images, seeping out like some poor dye.

A new color flooded the galaxy remnants, but it was the color of decay dominated by flaring reds and crimsons, though punctuated in places by the glaring blue-white of supernovae. And without the enhancement offered by the blue shift, some of the galaxies faded from her view altogether.

The galaxies had turned into ships of fire, she thought.

Mark’s profile was picked out, now, in colors of blood. “Take a good look around, Lieserl,” he said grimly. “I’ve adjusted out the blue shift; this is how things really are.”

She looked at him curiously; his tone had become hostile, suddenly. Though he still held her hand, his fingers felt stiff around hers, like a cage. “What are you saying?”

“Here’s the result of the handiwork of your photino bird pets,” he said. “In the week since we arrived, we’ve been able to catalog over a million galaxies, surrounding this cavity. In every one of those million we see stars being pushed off the Main Sequence, either explosively as a nova or supernova or via expansion into the red-giant cycle. Everywhere the stars are close to the end of their lifecycles — and, what’s worse, there’s no sign of new star formation, anywhere.”

Suddenly she understood. “Ah. This is why you’ve set up this display for me. You’re testing me, aren’t you?” She felt anger build, deep in her belly. “You want to know how all this makes me feel. Even now — even after we’ve been so close — you’re still not sure if I’m fully human.”

He grinned, his red-lit teeth like drops of blood in his mouth. “You have to admit you’ve had a pretty unusual life history, Lieserl. I’m not sure if any of us can empathize with you.”