Emma barely listened.

The camera swung from the bright black-hole structure, to the folded asteroid dirt, to sweeping empty sky.

“No sign of Sheena,” she murmured. “Maybe the portals don’t always work consistently. Maybe she’s been sent on somewhere else, out of our reach—”

Malenfant briefly hugged her. “Emma, she’s been out of our reach since the first time she bounced through that portal. Whether we see her or not hardly matters.”

“But it feels like it does. Because we’re responsible for her being there.”

“Yes,” he said at length.

They fell silent, but they stayed close to each other. Emma welcomed Malenfant’s simple human warmth, the presence of his flesh, the soft wash of his breath on her face. It seemed to exclude the endless dark of the future.

Meanwhile Cornelius was staring up at the image, interrogating the smart systems, speculating, theorizing, obsessing.

“The light we see is coming from that central accretion disc, where matter is falling into the black hole and being absorbed. Intensely bright, of course; probably more energetic than the combined fusion energy of all the Galaxy’s stars in their heyday. The hole itself is probably a few light-months across. Those beams coming from the poles — perhaps they are plasma directed by the magnetic field of the disc, or maybe the hole itself. Like a miniature quasar.” He frowned. “But that’s wasteful. It’s hard to believe they don’t have a way to harness that radiant energy. Perhaps they’re signaling—”

“Wasteful?” Malenfant snapped. “What are you talking about, Cornelius? Wasteful to who?”

“The downstreamers, of course,” Cornelius said. “The down-streamers of this era. Can’t you see them?” Cornelius froze the camera’s shuddering image. “Can’t you see? Look at these smaller satellite holes. Look how uniform their size is, how regular the spacing.”

“You’re saying this arrangement of black holes is artificial,” Emma said.

“Why, of course it is. I suspect the downstreamers are using the smaller holes to control the flow of matter into the central hole. They must be regulating every aspect of this assemblage: the size of the satellite holes, the rate at which they approach the central core. I think the downstreamers are mining the Galaxy-core black hole of its energy.”

“Mining? How?”

He shrugged. “There are a whole slew of ways even we can dream up. If you coalesce two black holes, you get a single, larger hole — with an event horizon ringing like a bell — but you also get a monumental release of gravitational energy. Much of a spinning hole’s energy is stored in a great tornadolike swirl of space and time, dragged around by the hole’s immense inertia. You could tap this energy by enclosing the hole in a great mesh of superconducting cables. Then you could thread the tornado swirl with a magnetic field, to form a giant electrical power generator. Or you can just throw matter into the central hole, feeding off the radiation as it is crushed… No doubt there are better ways. They’ve had a long time to work it out.”

“How long?”

Cornelius tapped his softscreen. “A guess, based on the nature of that black hole? Ten to power twenty-four years: a trillion trillion years. Ten billion times as old as the last images we saw, the age of the star farmers.”

“Jesus,” Malenfant said. “A long time.”

Cornelius said testily, “Remember the zoom factors. We just zoomed out again. The universe must have expanded to, umm, some ten thousand trillion times its size in our day. Compared to the age of the Galaxy remnant we see here, the evolution of our universe was as brief, as insignificant, as the first three hours after the Big Bang is to us.”

“And yet there is still life.”

“The Sheena,” Malenfant said.

There was the golden beach ball, lurching over the surface, cables glimmering in the firefly’s floods. A cephalopod was clearly visible within, swimming back and forth, curious. The camera swept the Cruithne landscape as the firefly turned to follow the Sheena.

“She’s going back to the portal,” Malenfant said. “She’s going on.”

Something shrank, deep inside Emma. Not again, she thought.

“Perhaps it’s a kind of morbid curiosity,” Cornelius said dryly. “To keep on going forward, on and on, to the end of things.”

“No,” Emma said. “You saw her. She’s not morbid.”

“Then what?”

“It’s as if she’s looking for something. But what? The more I see of this future universe, the more it seems—”

“Pointless?” asked Malenfant.

She was surprised at that, from him. “Yes, exactly.”

His face wore a complex expression. He’s taking it hard, she thought, this cold, logical working-out of his dreams. Malenfant campaigns for an expansive future for humankind: survival, essentially, into the far downstream. Well, here it is, Malenfant: everything you dreamed of.

And it is appalling, terrifying: proof that if we are to survive we must sacrifice our humanity.

Cornelius shrugged. “Pointless? What a trivial response. We are the first, the only intelligence in the universe. We have no objective, save endurance: nothing to do but survive, as long as we can.

“And in fact this era may be the peak, when we learn to tap these giant energy sources, the greatest in the universe, sources so great they outshine our fusion-driven stars as if they were candles.”

“The manhood of the race,” Emma said dryly.

“Perhaps. And—”

“And are they like us?” Emma asked.

“What does it matter? Your thinking is so small. Modern humans could never handle such projects as this. We can’t imagine how it is to be such a creature, to think in such a way.

“Perhaps there is no real comparison between them and us, no contact possible. But it does not matter. They are magnificent.”

She was repelled. She thought: You’re wrong. There had to be something more to strive for than that, more than simple survival in a running-down universe.

But then, she had no children. So these black-hole miners, however remote, however powerful, were not her descendants; she was cut off, a bubble of life lost in the far upstream.

The firefly worked its painful way across the time-smoothed landscape toward the portal.

Damien Krimsky:

…Anyhow that’s why I went AWOL for so long, Mr. Hench. I hope you can understand that.

I support Bootstrap. I’m a big fan of Reid Malenfant and everything he’s trying to do. The time I spent working with you on those BDBs in the Mojave desert was probably the most meaningful of my life.

It’s just that when all that Carter stuff came out of the media, well, maybe I went a little crazy. If the world’s going to end anyhow, what’s the point of paying taxes?

That was why I, umm, disappeared.

Anyhow I saw what Malenfant broadcast, the galaxies and the black holes and all. And now I feel different. Who wouldn’t? Now I know my children have a chance to grow old and happy, and their children too, on and on until we’ve conquered the stars.

Life is worth living again.

I know there are those who say it doesn’t matter. That if the fu ture is going to be so wonderful anyhow we don’t need to do anything now. But I feel a sense of duty. It’s the same way I felt when I saw my own kid in my wife’s arms for the first time. At that moment I knew how I would spend the rest of my life.

So I’m coming back to the Mojave. I have clearances from the rehab and detox clinics, as well as from the parole board. I hope you’ll welcome me back.

Your friend,

Damien Krimsky

“Moondancer”:

People have been arguing for months about whether this Carter stuff can be correct. And now they’re arguing about whether the far-future visions are hoaxes.