The objective was to have selected a final cohort of seven or eight individuals by the time the children had reached the age of five or six, and then to ship them to the Moon and offer them to the Blues up there. And then to have the Blues’ new friends betray them.

She came to a list of candidate infants. One of them was Billie Tybee: daughter of Bill Tybee, who, a thousand years ago, had turned to Maura for help, and June Tybee, who had died during the failed assault on Cruithne, and the sibling of Tom, one of the children who had gone to the Moon, lost forever to his grieving father.

As if we haven’t done enough to that family.

Maura hadn’t yet worn her conscience completely smooth. This is, she thought, a war against our own children. And we’re using every dirty method on them that we dreamed up in a million years of waging war against ourselves.

But she knew she had to put her conscience aside, once again.

The children on the Moon, whatever they were doing up there, had to be understood, controlled, stopped.

By any means necessary.

Anyhow, if these really are the dying days of humankind, at least we’re going out true to ourselves. God help us all, she thought, as she pushed the report into the incinerator.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant cradled Emma, gently helped her eat, drink, let her sleep, tried to answer her questions. But she seemed less interested in the fate of the multiple universes through which she’d traveled, unconscious, than in Cornelius and Michael.

“Poor Cornelius,” she said. “I wonder if he found what he

wanted, in the end.”

“I doubt it. But he gave his life for us.”

“But only because he knew immediately there was no other choice. That the trooper would otherwise have killed all three of us. He knew he was going to die, one way or the other.”

“It didn’t have to be that way,” Malenfant said.

“Oh, it did.” Her voice was steady, but weak. “Cornelius was dead from the moment he destroyed that troop carrier. As long as he left one trooper alive, one who knew she or he wouldn’t be going home again…”

“But for the trooper to follow us through the portal, through those multiple universes—”

“There is a human logic that transcends all of this.” She waved a hand. “All the incomprehensible cosmological stuff. And that’s what killed Cornelius.”

“Human logic,” he said. “You think there’s a logic that has brought the two of us here? Wherever the hell here is.”

“The only two souls in a universe,” she said weakly. “It would sound romantic if—”

“I know.”

She was silent a while. Then, “Malenfant?”

“Yeah?”

“You think we can find a way back home?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, babe. But we can try.”

“Yes,” she said, and she snuggled closer to his space-suited form, seeking warmth. “We can try, can’t we?” She closed her eyes.

He let her rest for six hours.

Then he sealed up their suits, collapsed the bubble, checked their tethers, attached trooper Tybee’s backpack to his waist.

Then, hand in hand, Malenfant and Emma slid through the blue-circle portal, steps of just a few feet taking them gliding between realities.

Universe after universe after universe.

Sometimes they encountered more chains of fast-collapsing phoenixes, imploding skies that washed them with a transient light, and they huddled in the portal as if escaping the rain. But most of the cosmoses they encountered now were long past their first expansion, far from their final collapse, and were empty even of the diseased light of creation or destruction.

Nowhere was there any sign of life: nothing but the empty logic of physical law.

Sometimes Emma slept inside her suit, allowing Malenfant to haul her back and forth through the portal, whole universes going by without waking her: not even looking, even though they might be, he supposed, the only conscious entities ever to visit these places, these starless deserts.

An immense depression settled on Malenfant. This desolate parade of universe after universe — spacetime geometries utterly empty of warmth and mind and life save for himself and Emma — seemed to have been arranged to demonstrate to him that even the existence of a place in which structure and life could evolve was an unlikely accident. All his adult life he had fought for the future of the species. What was his ambition now? That squads of humans should follow him through these portals and settle these dead places, wrestle with space and time and the physical laws to make another place to live?

He came to a place that was, at least, different. The sky was huge, black, without stars or galaxies. But there was something: a texture to the sky, a swath of redness, just at the limit of his vision. In trooper Tybee’s backpack he had found a visor attachment with a night-vision setting. He wrapped the attachment over his helmet; it fit like huge goggles.

He peered around. His own body and Emma’s shone like false-color stars, the brightest objects in the universe.

The sky itself showed a dull red glow, the relic Big Bang radiation of this pocket universe. And there were clouds — diffuse, without structure — that covered much of the sky. The clouds showed up as thin gray-white in Malenfant’s enhanced vision, something like high cirrus. “Almost like home,” he murmured. Actually, not. But it was better than bland nothingness.

“Malenfant.”

He looked into Emma’s helmet. She was awake, smiling at him.

“Did you dream?”

“No,” she said. “I wish that fancy backpack had a coffee spigot.”

“And I wish I could say it’s a pretty view.”

“I suppose it is, in its way,” Emma said. “At least there’s something”

“I wonder why there are no stars. There’s clearly some kind of matter out there, and it’s clumpy. But it hasn’t made stars.”

“Maybe the clumps aren’t the right size here,” she said.

“What difference would that make?”

“I don’t know.”

“It might be something more bizarre,” he said. He told her about Cornelius’ speculations on how physical laws, shaken up by each emergence from the Crunch-Bang cycle, might deliver different forms of matter. “For instance, those clouds might not even be hydrogen.”

She sighed. “I don’t think it makes a lot of difference, Malen-fant. All that matters is that this isn’t home. Do you think we’re getting any nearer?”

“I don’t even know what nearer means.” He checked his wristwatch. They had been traveling for hours through how many universes — dozens, a hundred?

“If not for the resources of this trooper’s backpack,” Emma said, “we’d be dead by now. Wouldn’t we, Malenfant?” Her voice was an insect whisper. “I wonder if Cornelius knew that, if he figured that we would need the backpack to survive.”

“To kill for a backpack—”

“Cornelius was the coldest, most calculating human being I ever knew. It was exactly the kind of thing he would do.” She closed her eyes. “I think I want to sleep now.”

He let her rest for an hour. Then they moved on.

They passed through more glowing-cloud universes. Sometimes the clouds would be sparser or denser, showing more or less structure. But they did not find galaxies or stars, nothing resembling the familiar structures of home.

Then they came to something new. They stopped, drifting in the unchanging blue light of the portal.

It was another red-sky universe. But this time it seemed as if the sparse clouds had been gathered up like cotton wool and wadded together into a single roseate mass that dominated half the sky. There was a single point of light at the center of it all, easily bright enough to be visible with the naked eye. Two splinters of light seemed to be protruding from the point, like lens flares, or poles from a toy globe. Malenfant thought he could trace structure in the cloud that surrounded the central point: a tight spiral knot at the center, glowing a brighter red than its surroundings, and farther out streamers and elongated bubbles, all of it swirling around the center. It was actually beautiful, in a cold, austere way, like a watercolor done in white, gray, red.