Some of these formed new balls of fire, much smaller than the original one but still quite respectable in size. The balls of fire attracted other, smaller collections, some of which fell into the larger. But others escaped destruction by going into orbit around the larger, which were the stars. Many stars formed aggregations which circled around a common center, and these were the galaxies. And some galaxies had a supercenter around which they circled.

At the same time, while the galaxies were circling a center, they were traveling outward and the space between them increased. However, the process of forming new stars with their planets went on, so that in the spaces between the stars and the galaxies, new stars and planets were born.

This took an incredibly long time. While some stars were being born, others died. Their fires went out, and they sped black and cold through the universe.

"Toward what?" Deyv asked. "Wasn't there a wall they would eventually crash against?"

"Perhaps. But that wouldn't be a tangible wall. It would be a wall composed of limitations. Of principles."

Eventually, the big and small pieces of dust in space were so far apart from each other that they had no aggregate effect on space itself. They couldn't create more space. So, their force lost, they started falling back. And space itself began to shrink, following the retreating matter.

Meanwhile, during this process, one of the stars had gathered to its round bosom some children. The planets. One of these was Earth, the planet on which Deyv and Sloosh were now talking. At this time,

Sloosh didn't want to go into how air and water had been formed on Earth and how life had originated.

But he would say a few words now on how life had developed from a simple one-celled creature to a complex creature with a nervous system capable of self-consciousness.

Deyv later thought that these few words must have been twenty thousand or so.

"Then mankind was the first sapient creature?" Deyv observed.

"Yes. Your kind is much more ancient than mine. And, like the even more ancient rat and cockroach, it's survived in an essentially unchanged form. Though those two have given rise to new forms which survive along with the ancestral forms."

Man had come up from an apelike creature to his present form. He had gone through savagery to a state in which he had had great power. Sloosh described some of this power, which to Deyv seemed like magic. But, time and again, man had reverted to savagery, only to begin the slow painful climb toward power again. Power was the ability to change one's environment and to make the tools, social or physical, with which to do this.

During man's long stay here, he had visitors from other stars and he had ventured to other stars. He had also made new forms of life or altered those preexisting forms.

"Three times the Earth would have been utterly destroyed," Sloosh said. "But, fortunately, during those times man had the power to save himself and his planet."

Deyv grasped only a fraction of the explanations of moons, red giants, and black dwarfs. He could visualize somewhat, though, how the blazing yellow star that was the sun had expanded into a red giant.

Before that occurred, man had moved Earth far out into space. To provide heat and light, man had turned

Earth's moon into a small artificial star. Thus Earth had escaped the vaporization of the sun's inner planets.

"When the sun went into its helium-burning stage," Sloosh said, "Earth was moved back into an orbit closer to it. And it was moved out again, this time with another planet as its little sun, when the sun went into its second red-giant stage. Now the Earth was a moon around the planet-become-a-sun. When this burned out, another planet was used, and then another.

"During all this time, man's civilizations crumbled a number of times. But he was lucky enough to have risen to great power each time his planet had to be saved.

"Long, long before this, matter had reached its limits and was falling back toward the center of all things. Stars died; stars were born. Finally, Earth's sun became a black dwarf. You can see it as a tiny dark speck against the blaze of the jam-packed stars and gas sheets when The Beast is not up. The Beast, by the way, is a gigantic cloud of burned-out galaxies. It shows up during Earth's very slow rotation on its axis."

Deyv looked toward the horizon. A band of bright light existed along it. When The Beast had dipped out of sight, all the sky would blaze, mottled here and there by single black dots or larger black shapes.

These were sometimes referred to as The Beast's Children, the largest of which had names.

Deyv choked a little before he could speak again.

"The time will come, you say, when the stars will be so close together that their heat or other radiation'll kill all life on Earth?"

"If the earthquakes don't destroy it first. The influence of so many celestial bodies so close to Earth is responsible for the quakes. There won't be any volcanic eruptions—I explained those to you—because the center of the Earth has cooled off. One of the sources of power the ancients used was the molten nickel-steel core of this planet. They tapped it, and now the core is cold, or perhaps I should say lukewarm. Also, they mined a certain amount of the core for its nickel and iron. There wouldn't be any iron of any significant amount in the upper levels of the Earth's strata if the metals hadn't been brought up from the core."

"How long do we have?" Deyv asked.

"Perhaps a hundred generations as you humans figure generations. That estimate is based on the death from heat. I can't predict what effect the earthquakes will have. It may be that long before the jampacked stars blind all eyed-life and then cook it. Or this land may be torn up soon and life swallowed by the cataclysms. Or this land may sink into the ocean."

Sloosh had explained that all land was now one mass. Once, there had been a single land mass, long before man evolved, and then this had broken up into land masses. These wandered over the face of the planet, came together again, split, wandered, and coalesced again. Parts of the land masses had sunk and become seas and then risen again. And so on and so on.

"This land stretches along the equator around the planet, but its two ends do not meet. All the rest is water. Not salt water but fresh. The last ancient people removed the salt from the ocean, perhaps two thousand generations ago. It wasn't the first time."

At the moment, the ground felt solid, and Deyv had no sensation of moving. Yet, if what Sloosh said was right, he was falling toward the fiery doom. He wouldn't see it, but his descendants would. Or, if he didn't have any progeny, his brothers' and sisters' would.

Vana had heard all this from the Archkerri when he had resided in her tribe's area. "Sloosh is very wise, and he knows much," she said to Deyv. "But he can be wrong. He is no god or goddess. My shaman said that if Sloosh was right, then our religion would be wrong. Therefore, Sloosh must be wrong."

"But he knows all about the past," Deyv said. "So how could he be wrong about the future?"

"He doesn't know all about the past. What he says about it is a pack of lies."

"Sloosh doesn't know how to lie."

"He says! Would you take the word of a liar? But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Let's say that he isn't a liar but is badly mistaken. That is what our shaman said about him."

Sloosh's account didn't agree with Deyv's religion either. But he felt that perhaps the Archkerri had access to a greater power than did the Turtles' shaman. Wasn't Sloosh a brother to the trees and the grass? And weren't the trees and the grass the hair of Mother Earth herself? Weren't they, according to his tribe's religion, also Her earliest children? He told Vana this.