Of course they can’t both be true.

And it’s amazing that you have stock market crashes and suicide cults and wackos who think they need to rip up the cities because the end of the world is coming, and another bunch of nuts doing exactly the same thing because the end of the world isn ‘t coming.

Of course the far future visions are all genuine.

This is our fate. And it’s fantastic! Wonderful! Don’t you think so?

Have you even thought where you’d like to travel if you had a time machine, and could go anywhere, past or future? Maybe you would go hunt T Rex, or listen to Jesus preach, or sail with Columbus. What do you think? I know what I’d do. I’d ride off to join the black-hole miners in the Incredible Year A.D. Four Hundred Billion. Man, will those guys party.

What? How come I know the future stuff is real? Because I’ve seen it myself. Also, as you probably know, there were secret codes in the L.A. Times write-up comprehensible only by other Travelers, confirming the veracity of the pictures.

I have a Cap — careful with it! — and when I wear it, it projects my sense of selfastrally…

Emma Stoney:

This time the golden beach ball was visible as soon as the firefly emerged from the blue flash of transition. The beach ball was standing on a smooth, featureless plain, square in the middle of the softscreen. An arc of the portal was visible beside the beach ball, a bright blue stripe.

The sky was dark. The black hole rose had disappeared. The only light falling on the beach ball seemed to be the glow of the firefly’s dimming floods. The belt of horizon Emma could see looked like a perfect circular span, unmarked by ridges or craters.

The squid swam through her bubble of water, lethargic.

Emma watched the Cruithne landscape slide past the firefly’s panning camera lens. Its smoothness was unnerving, unnatural. She felt no awe, no wonder, only a vague irritation.

“That damn asteroid has taken a beating,” Malenfant said. “Look at that mother. Smooth as a baby’s butt—”

“You don’t understand,” Cornelius said testily. “I — or rather my electronic friends — think there’s more than simple erosion here. The gravimeters on the firefly are telling me the morphology of Cruithne has changed. I mean, the asteroid’s shape has changed. Out here in the dark, it has flowed into a sphere.”

Malenfant said, “A sphere? How the hell?”

“I thj.nk this is liquefaction. If that’s so, it means that proton decay lifetimes must exceed ten to power sixty-four years — and that means—”

“Whoa, whoa.” Malenfant held up his hands. “Liquefaction? You’re saying the asteroid flowed like a liquid? How? Did it heat up, melt?”

“No. What is there to heat it up?”

“What, then?”

“Malenfant, over enough time, the most solid matter will behave like a very viscous liquid. All solid objects flow. It is a manifestation of quantum mechanical tunneling that—”

Malenfant said, “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re seeing it,” Cornelius said tightly. “Malenfant, the far future is not the world you grew up in. Marginal processes can come to dominate, if they’re persistent, over long enough time scales.”

“How long?” Malenfant snapped.

Cornelius checked his softscreen. “A minimum of ten to power sixty-five years. Umm, that’s a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Look. Start with a second. Zoom out; factor it up to get the life of the Earth. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth’s lifetime is like one second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again…”

The camera image swept away from the beach ball, away from the blank liquefied ground, and swept the sky.

Malenfant pointed. “What the hell is thatT

It was a blur of gray-red light in an otherwise empty sky. The firefly switched to infrared, and Cornelius cleaned up the image. Emma saw a rough sphere, a halo of motes of dim light that hovered, motionless, around—

Around what? It was a ball of darkness, somehow darker even than the background sky. It looked about the size of the sun, seen from Earth; the motes were like dimly glowing satellites closely orbiting a black planet.

Cornelius sounded excited. “My God. Look at this.” He magnified the image, picking out a point on the rim of the central ball, enhancing as he went.

Emma saw rings of red light running around the rim, parallel to the surface.

“What is it?”

“Gravitational lensing. Bent light. That means… It must be…” He scrolled through expert system interpretations, speed-reading. “We’re looking at a black hole. A giant.

“This is probably the remnant of a supercluster. Just as what’s left of a Galaxy after star evaporation collapses into the central hole, so galactic clusters will collapse in turn, and then the superclusters.

“That hole might have a mass of anything from a hundred trillion to a hundred thousand trillion solar masses, an event-horizon radius measured in hundreds of light-years.”

“I don’t understand,” said Emma. “Where did the Galaxy go?”

“Our Galaxy hole was surely carried to the heart of the local galactic cluster black hole, and then the supercluster.”

“And we were dragged along with it.”

“If it’s a hole it has no accretion disc,” Malenfant said.

“Malenfant, this thing is ancient. It ate up everything a hell of a long time ago.”

“So how come those motes haven’t been dragged down?” Malenfant said.

“Life,” Emma said. “Even now. Feeding off the great black holes. Right?”

“Maybe,” Cornelius said, grimly. “Maybe. But if so they aren’t doing enough. Even gravity mines can be exhausted.”

“Hawking radiation,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Black holes evaporate. The smaller the hole, the faster they decay. Solar mass holes must have vanished already. In their last seconds they become energetic, you know. Go off with a bang, like a nuke.” He smiled, looking tired. “The universe can still produce occasional fireworks, even this far downstream. But ultimately even this, the largest natural black hole, is going to evaporate away. What are the downstreamers going to do then? They should be planning now, working. There will be a race between the gathering and management of energy sources and the dissipative effects of the universe’s general decay.”

Malenfant said, “You’d make one hell of an after-dinner speaker, Cornelius.”

The camera had panned again, and it found the Sheena in her beach ball.

“I think her movements are getting labored,” Emma said.

Cornelius murmured, “There’s nothing we can do. It’s cold out there, remember, in the far downstream. Her heater will surely expire before long. Maybe she won’t even suffocate.”

They watched in silence.

Sheena’s firefly, tethered to the beach ball, jerked into motion. It floated toward Emma’s viewpoint, across the eerily smooth surface of the liquefied asteroid.

It drifted to a halt and reached out with a grabber arm to touch its human-controlled cousin. In the softscreen image, the arm was foreshortened, grotesquely huge.

Then the firefly turned and drifted out of shot, toward the portal, towing the beach ball.

“Onward,” Emma whispered.

Another transition, another blue flash.

The camera performed a panorama, panning through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. The portal, a glaring blue ring still embedded in the asteroid ground, slid silently across the softscreen. There was the Sheena’s bubble, resting on the surface, lit only by the robot’s lights and by the soft blue glow of the portal itself. The Sheena tried to swim, a dim dark ghost behind the gold. But she fell, languidly, limbs drifting.

And then, beneath a black sky, there was only the asteroid surface, smooth: utterly featureless, rubbed flat by time.