I don’t even know whether it has been to Malenfant’s help or hindrance to release the images. When you’re trying to build credibility in Congress it generally does not help to have most of the media and every respectable scientist on the planet calling you a wacko.

But I do know that the effect of the images on the world, real or false, has been astounding.

It has all been cumulative, of course: the hysteria over the Carter predictions; the strange, eerie, shameful fear we share over the Blue children; and now this downstream light show. And all of it wrapped up with Reid Malenfant’s outrageous personality and gigantic projects.

We shouldn’t dismiss the more extreme reactions we’re seeing. Violence, suicide, and the rest are regrettable of course, and there are a number of “leaders,” even some here on the Hill, who need, I would say, to keep a clearer head.

But how are we supposed to react? As a species we’ve never before had a proper debate about the structure of the future. And now we’re all online, all our voices joined, and everybody is having a say.

None of us knows what the hell we’re talking about, of course. But I think it’s healthy. The debate has to start somewhere.

Maybe it’s all part of our growing up as a race. Maybe every technical civilization has crises to survive: the invention of weaponry that can destroy its planet, the acquisition of the capability to trash its environment. And now here is a philosophical crisis: we must come to terms with the prospect of our own long-

term destiny or demise.

Just as each of us as individuals must at last confront death.

Emma Stoney:

Another flash of blue light. And—

And nothingness.

The darkness before Emma was even more profound than the intergalactic night. And there was no sign of the Sheena.

“Shit,” Malenfant said.

“Everything’s working,” Cornelius said evenly. “We’re actually retrieving an image. And I’m picking up other telemetry. That is what the firefly is seeing.”

Emma said tightly, “Then where’s the Sheena?”

“Have it pan,” Malenfant said.

“I’ll try. But I don’t think we can communicate with the firefly any more. It’s passed through the portal again, remember, so it must have crossed a second Einstein-Rosen bridge. There’s no longer a line of sight connecting us. The communication is one-way now, through the Feynman radio—”

“Then what do we do?”

Cornelius shrugged. “We wait. The firefly has onboard autonomy. It’s programmed to investigate its own situation, to return what data it can.”

A blur, a wash of light, passed over the corner of the screen before the image stabilized.

Now Emma saw a battered plain, slightly tipped up, receding to a tight, sharp horizon. The craters and ridges were low and eroded, with shadows streaming away from the viewpoint.

“The light’s too poor to return any color,” Cornelius said.

“What’s the light source?”

“Floods on the firefly. Look at the way the shadows are pointing away from us. But the use of those floods is going to exhaust the batteries fast. I don’t know why it’s so dark…”

“Cruithne looks older,” Emma said. The firefly was panning its camera across an empty landscape; the shadows streamed away. “Those craters are eroded flat, like saucers.”

Malenfant said, “Micrometeorite impacts?”

“It’s possible,” Cornelius said. “But the micrometeorite sand-

blasting must be slow. I assume we’re still out in intergalactic

space. Matter’s pretty thin out here.”

“How slow?”

Cornelius sighed. “I’d say we’re farther into the future by several orders of magnitude compared to the last stop.”

Emma asked Malenfant, “What’s an order of magnitude to a physicist?”

Malenfant grimaced. “A power often.”

Emma tried to take that in. Ten times seventy-five million. Or

a hundred, a thousand times…

The viewpoint was shifting. The landscape started to rock, drop away, return. Slowly more features — ancient, eroded craters — loomed up over the horizon.

Cornelius said, “The firefly is moving. Good.”

“The Sheena,” Emma said.

The beach ball was sitting on Cruithne’s surface once more, complex highlights picked out by the firefly’s light. Within, a shadow was visible, swimming back and forth.

“How extraordinary,” Cornelius said. “To see a living thing across such immense spans of time.”

“She looks healthy,” Emma said. “She’s moving freely; she looks alert.”

“Maybe not much longer,” Malenfant growled. “That damn water ball will freeze.”

“Do you think she understands any of what she is seeing?”

“I doubt it,” Cornelius murmured.

Now that she looked carefully Emma saw that the shadows the floods cast on the golden ball weren’t completely dark. The shaded areas were lit by some deep red glow.

“There’s something in the sky,” she said. “A light source.”

The image started to pan away from the cephalopod, jerkily.

More Cruithne craterscape slid across their field of view.

Then the landscape dropped out of sight, leaving a frame filled with darkness once more.

‘The firefly’s panning upward,” Malenfant said. “Come on…” And a new image resolved. “Oh, my,” he said.

At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch. It was surrounded by a blood-colored river of light, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. But the image kept breaking up into blocky pixels, and she wondered if the shapes she was per-

ceiving were real, or artifacts of her imagination.

“We’re right at the limit of the optical system’s resolution here,” Cornelius said. “If the firefly is smart — there. We switched to the infrared detectors.”

The picture abruptly became much brighter — a wash of white and pale pink — but much more blurred, in some ways more difficult to see. Cornelius labored at his softscreens, trying to clean up the image.

Emma made out that great central glow, now brightened to a pink-white ball. It was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the center.

The core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be embedded in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points — yellow before, now picked out as bright blue by the enhancement routines — studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points toward the bloated central mass.

“It looks like a Galaxy,” Malenfant said.

Emma saw he was right. It was like a caricature of the Galaxy she had watched just minutes before. But that central mound was much more pronounced than the Galaxy’s core had been, as if it were a tumor that had grown, eating out this cosmic wreck from the inside.

Cornelius was consulting his softscreen, asking questions of the hierarchy of smart software that was poring over the images. “It probably is a Galaxy. But extremely old. Much older than our Galaxy is at present — even than when we saw it at the Sheena’s last stop—”

Malenfant said, “Is it the Galaxy? Our Galaxy?”

“I don’t know,” Cornelius said. “Probably. Perhaps Cruithne entered some wide orbit around the center. Or Cruithne might have had time to reach another Galaxy. There’s no way of knowing.”

“If that’s our Galaxy,” Emma said, “what happened to all the stars?”

“They’re dying,” Cornelius said bluntly. “Look — all stars die

Our sun is maybe halfway through its life. In five billion years or so, it will become a red giant, five hundred times its present size. The inner planets will be destroyed. The sun will span the sky, and Earth will be baked, the land hot enough to melt lead…”