He picked up a busted-open camera. There was a fine layer of regolith over the exposed workings. The gold-foil insulating blanket was blackened, cracked and peeling, and the paintwork on exposed metal was flaking away. He ran his gloved finger under a plastic-coated cable that stuck out of the interior. The discolored plastic just crumbled away.

He wondered how long an exposure to vacuum, the sun’s raw ultraviolet, and the hard radiation of space you’d need to do this much damage. Years, maybe. There was no guarantee that their subjective time during their jaunt across the manifold universes had to match up with the time elapsed here.

Anyhow it sure looked as if nobody had been back here since they had left in such a hurry. He felt his heart sink at the thought.

He placed the camera back where he had found it and let it resume its slow, erosive weathering.

Taking up the familiar routine of moving around the asteroid — piton, tether, glide, always at least two anchors to the regolith — he glided over Cruithne’s claustrophobic, close-curved horizon, pressing on, farther and farther.

There was little left of the O ‘Neill, or the troop carrier: just scattered wreckage, crumpled and charred, a few new blue-rimmed craters punched into Cruithne’s patient hide. He supposed most of the debris created by the various attacks had been thrown off into space. He rummaged through the remains of the ships and the hab shelters. What wasn’t smashed and vacuum-dried was crumbling from sunlight and cosmic irradiation. Still, maybe there was something he could use here.

He came across a firefly, inert, half dug into the regolith. He tried to haul it out, but it was dead, its power-indicator panel black.

He found only one body.

It was a trooper, a young man — not much more than a boy, really — wadded into the shadow of a crater. He wasn’t in a suit. His body was twisted, bones broken, and his skin, freeze-dried in the vacuum, was like scorched, brittle paper. His chest cavity was cracked open, presumably by the explosion that had taken out the troop carrier. His heart, stomach, and other organs seemed to have desiccated, and the cavity in his body gaped wide, empty, somehow larger than Malenfant had expected.

Maybe Tybee had taken the time to bury her other fallen companions, Malenfant thought. Or maybe this was the only body that had finished up here, and the rest — burned, broken, and shattered — were somewhere out there in a dispersing shell of debris.

And meanwhile, Cruithne spun on. How strange, he thought, that Cruithne had waited out five billion years in cold silence and then endured a few months of frenetic activity as life from Earth, bags of water and blood and flesh, had come here and built their enigmatic structures, fought and blown everything apart, and departed, leaving Cruithne alone again, with a few new craters and a scattering of shattered structures at the center of a dispersing cloud of glittering rubble.

That, and the enigmatic blue circle put there by the downstreamers.

He passed into Cruithne’s long shadow.

The stars wheeled over his head, the familiar constellations of his boyhood, but crowded now with the dense stars of deep space. At last, at the heart of the sparse constellation of Cygnus, he found a bright blue star. He gazed into that watery light, savoring photons that had bounced off Earth’s seas and clouds just seconds before entering his eyes. It was the closest he would ever come, he supposed, to touching home again.

He thought of the lifeless corridors he had traveled, of the long, painful gestation of physics and fire, birth and collapse, that had finally, it seemed, evolved to this: a universe of carbon and supernovae and black holes and life, and that beautiful blue spark. But Earth was an island of light and life surrounded by abysses.

In the shelter, he found Emma dying.

He did what he could. He massaged her limp hands, trying to keep the blood pumping, and upped the oxygen concentration in the air. He pulled a lightweight silver-foil emergency blanket around her, did everything he could think of to keep her body from deciding this was the end. But her decline, rapid, seemed irreversible.

Her fingertips had turned dead white, the skin pasty and lifeless, even bluish.

Not yet, not yet. How can it end here? It’s wrong.

The sun was a ball of light that glared through the fabric, its glow soaking into the warp and weft of the fabric. Malenfant watched as it edged across the dome of the tent. Cruithne was turning patiently, just as it always had.

But the air in here was growing stale. The carbon dioxide scrubbers and other expendables built into the mil-spec backpack were presumably reaching the end of their design lifetimes; the pack wouldn’t be able to sustain this habitat much longer.

She woke up. Her eyes turned, and her gaze settled on his face, and she smiled, which warmed his heart. He fed her sips of water. “Try to take it easy.”

“It isn’t so bad,” she whispered.

“Bullshit.”

“Really. I don’t hurt. Not much, anyhow.”

“You want some more dope?”

“Save it, Malenfant. You might need it. Anyhow I’d prefer a shot of tequila.”

He told her about the radio beacon. “Somebody will be coming.”

“Oh, bull, Malenfant,” she said gently. “Nobody’s going to come. It wasn’t meant to end like that, a cavalry charge from over the hill. Not for us. Don’t you know that yet?” She gripped his hand. Her touch was like a child’s. “This is all we have, Malenfant. You and me. We’ve no future or past, because we don’t have kids, nobody who might carry on the story. Just bubbles, adrift in time. Here, shimmering, gone.” She seemed to be crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Never apologize,” she whispered. “We’ve come a long way together, haven’t we? All those universes without life. And the downstream. Life slowly crushed out of existence… You need stars and supernovae to make black holes, to make more universes. Fine. You need those things to make life, too. But is that how come we’re here? Are we just a by-product? Are minds just something that happens to rise out of the blind thrashings of matter?”

“I don’t know. Try to take it easy—”

“But it doesn’t feel like that, Malenfant. Does it? I feel like I’m the center of everything. I can feel time flowing deep inside me. I’m not a kind of froth on the surface of the universe. I am the universe.”

“I’m listening,” he said, wiping her mouth.

“Oh, horseshit,” she hissed softly. “You never did listen to anybody. If you had you wouldn’t have fucked up our entire relationship, from beginning to end.”

“Emma—”

“Maybe the children know,” she said. “The new children. Michael, wherever he is now. You know. …”

She drifted between sleeping and waking. He soaked a cloth in water and moistened her lips when he could. When she was asleep he infused her with more morphine. There was nothing he could do but watch as her body shut itself down. He had never seen anybody die this way before, up close, peacefully. She actually seemed to be getting more comfortable as the end got closer, as if there were mechanisms to comfort her.

She licked her lips. “You know, I guess we couldn’t manage to live together, but at least we got to die together. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Malenfant. For all the worlds …And wear your damn ribbon. It’s a med-alert. They gave it to you for a reason.”

“I will.”

“You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself…” She opened her eyes, and smiled. But her eyes were unfocused. Her hand fluttered, and he took it.

“What is it?”

“I saw a light,” she whispered. “Like the phoenixes. The light of creation, all around everything. And I could smell the high desert. Isn’t that strange?”