He lost his balance and fell screaming. The bugs were over him instantly, a roiling shroud, and on the several men behind him, whose screams shortly drowned out his own.

“Shoot the stragglers,” Tom said. “Now.”

Guilford fired as often as the rest, but it was the frontiersman’s rifle that found a mark most often. Three more Partisans fell; others fled the sound of screams.

The screaming didn’t last long, mercifully. The lead man’s body, rigid with poison, angled up like the prow of a sinking ship. A glint of bone gleamed through the black swarm. Then the whole man disappeared beneath the churning moist soil.

Guilford was transfixed. The Partisans would become part of the midden, he thought. How long until their skulls and ribs were cast up like broken coral on a beach? Hours, days? He felt ill.

“Guilford,” Keck whispered urgently.

Keck was bleeding vigorously from the thigh. Best bind that, Guilford thought. Staunch the blood. Where is the medical kit?

But that wasn’t what Keck wanted to say.

“Guilford!” Eyes wide, grimacing. “Your leg!”

Something crawling on it.

Maybe the insect had been thrown out of the nest by the Partisan’s thrashing. It scuttled up Guilford’s boot before he could react and drove its mandibles through the cloth of Guilford’s trousers.

He gasped and staggered. Keck caught him under the arms. Sullivan brushed the insect away with his pistol butt, and Keck crushed it under his heel.

“Well, damn,” Guilford said calmly. Then the venom reached an artery, a dose of hypodermic flame, and he closed his eyes and fainted.

This happened near the End of Time, as the galaxy collapsed into its own singularity — a time when the stars were few and barren, a time when the galaxies themselves had grown so far apart that even distortions in the Higgs field did not propagate instantly.

Elsewhere in the universe the voices of galactic noospheres grew faint, as they resigned themselves to dissolution or furiously constructed vast epigalactic redoubts, fortresses that would withstand both the siren song of the black holes and the thermal cooling of the universe. In time, as white dwarfs and even neutron stars dissipated and died, the only coherent matter remaining would be these strongholds of sentience.

A trillion-year autumn had passed. Noospheres, huge constructs which housed the remnants of planetary civilizations, had drifted for eons among the fossil stars of the galaxy’s spiral arms. They had recomplicated and segmented themselves, meeting in million-year cycles to exchange knowledge and to create hybrid offspring, metacultures embedded in infant noospheres dense as neutron stars. They vectored themselves through space along distortion lines in the Higgs field, calling out across their own event horizons, singing their names. They knew each other intimately. There had not been a war for countless ages — not since the self-immolation of the Violet Empire, the last of the Biotic Prefectures, 10⁹ years ago.

But autumn was drawing to a close, and the harsh reality of universal winter loomed ahead.

Time to cleave together. Time to build, to restore, to protect, and to remember. Time to gather the summer’s harvest; time to conserve warmth.

The galaxy’s noospheres shared memories that ranged back to the Eclectic Age, when death was abolished, long before the Earth or its mother star had formed. Now it was time to pool those memories — to make a physical Archive that would outlast even the loss of free energy, an Archive linked isostatically with other Archives in the universe, an Archive which would harbor sentience well into the Heat Death and might even create an artificial context in which new sentiences would eventually flourish.

To that end noospheres gathered above the ecliptic of the dying galaxy, their immense new labors fed by plumes of antimatter that seethed from the pole of the central singularity. The Archive, when it was finished, would contain all that the galaxy had been since the Eclectic Age.

Age by age the Archive grew, a physical object as wide as a dozen stellar systems, braced against the tides of its own mass by systematic distortions of local space. A machine operating at stellar temperatures, it radiated a burnished amber light into an increasingly lightless void — even this sparse radiation a residual inefficiency that would be eliminated over the next several million years.

The Archive was a temporal telescope, a recording, a memory — in essence, a book. It was the ultimate history book, fed and refreshed by temporal discontinuities built into its matrix, a record of every known sentient act and thought since the dawn of the Eclectic Age. It was unalterable but infinitely accessible, aloof and antientropic.

It was the single largest act of engineering ever attempted by galactic sentience. It pressed the noospheres to their technological limit and often, it seemed, beyond. Its construction required ceaseless work, by the noospheres and their sentient nodes, by Turing constructors large and small, by virtual machines embedded in the isostatic lattices of reality itself, a labor that endured for more than ten million years.

But it was finished at last, a holistic library of galactic history and a fortress against the evaporation of matter. Noospheres ringed the Archive in a joyous orbital dance. Perhaps, beyond the still-inviolable boundaries of the singularities, new universes were being born from the ashes of the old. That possibility was being investigated; faint signals flashed between this and other Archives, proposals for universe-building that daunted all of Sentience Itself. Perhaps one day…

But that was speculation. For now, galactic sentience reveled in what it had created.

Monofilaments of Higgs distortion swept the Archive, spooling history in sequential order. Sentient nodes and subnodes delighted in exploring the past — one, two, three times, as the Archive was read and reread. Knowledge became involute, knew itself; sophants among the noospheres debated the difference between the Knowing and the Known.

Tragedy struck without warning and without explanation some 10³ years after the structure was finished.

The Archive, the noospheres discovered, had been quietly infiltrated and corrupted. Semisentient entities — self-propagating, evolving parasite codes hidden in the network of Higgs signals that passed between galaxies — had commandeered the Archive’s structural protocols. Information was being lost, irretrievably, moment by moment.

Worse, information was being changed.

The Archive evolved in to a new and distorted form. Subsentient virtual entities, relics of a war that had devastated a distant galaxy long before the beginning of this galaxy’s Eclectic Age, were using the Archive as a platform to preserve their algorithms against thermal death. They lacked moral regard for any entity not themselves, but they were fully aware of the purpose of the Archive and of its designers. They had not simply captured the structure, they had taken it hostage.

Static memories embedded in the Archive as records became, in effect, new seed-sentiences: new lives, trapped in an epistructure they could never perceive and manipulated by entities beyond their conception. These new lives, though products of the Archive’s corruption, could not be terminated or erased. That would stain the conscience of Sentience beyond redemption. In theory, the Archive could be emptied, cleansed, and rewritten… but that would be equivalent to murder on a collosal scale.

Moreover, these lives must be saved, must be remembered. It was the goal Sentience had pursued since its inception, to redeem itself from death. The new and strange quasi history evolving inside the Archive could not simply be abandoned.