He opened the door.

It was the Eighth Room.

For the first time in a hundred thousand generations, starlight entered human eyes.

Orange had no way of telling the time.

She couldn’t even count well enough to keep track of her thumping heartbeats. Holding her rope she hummed a song to herself.

She sang it over and over, ever faster.

The rope had been slack for too long now, surely. Trembling, she shuffled to the open door and fanned out one great ear.

Silence.

Was he dead?

Her hands slipping in anxiety, she began to pull the rope towards her. There was a weight at the end that moved unevenly—

— and then there was a bump and a slackening of the rope, as if the weight had fallen a considerable distance.

She waited, urging the silence to yield up its secrets. But she didn’t dare go beyond that door.

She began hauling at the rope again. Now it moved easily. At last Teal’s limp form came through the door, still clutching his grandmother’s knife.

His eyes were open. They stared through her, and the walls, at… something that made her shiver.

She gathered him to the warmth of her underbelly and bathed his face with antiseptic saliva, longing for him to wake.

She waited in the alien place for days.

Teal’s breath was even but his eyes never flickered. Hunger growled in her own belly. Soon she wouldn’t even be able to feed him…

Finally she wrapped his face in his hood and, with difficulty, loaded the man and his tools over her broad back. With her delicate fingers she pried open the entrance.

She emerged into a blizzard.

Keeping her trunk arched back over her precious cargo she battered her way through the storm, stumbling as her great stumps of legs buried themselves in drifts and slurries.

The blizzard wouldn’t stop. She found she couldn’t even detect the passing of night and day.

Finally she sank to her knees, exhausted. She lowered Teal to the snow. His lips were gray.

Snowflakes like flat stones battered unnoticed at her huge eyes. So she had failed, and Teal would die…

She raised her trunk and bellowed out her defiance. Then she searched among Teal’s effects for his stone knife.

Standing away from Teal, she held the knife in both her hands, point towards her, and worked her fingers around the handle.

Then she jerked the point backwards into her chest and ripped it down her underbelly, as far as she could reach.

The pain was astonishing. It didn’t seem fair.

She dropped the knife and wrapped her hands around the slit flesh. Then she shuffled towards Teal, leaving a streak like a bloody snail.

She covered him with her ripped body, let the soft stuff inside gush over him. With the last of her strength she held her head high, to make sure all of Teal was tucked inside her. Then she let go. Her head slumped forward, and now the snow was as soothing as her mother’s trunk had once been.

Her body had been designed, from the cellular level up, to serve humans; and now, she knew, it was performing one last miracle. Oxygen-bearing blood would bathe the shocked man like amniotic fluid, while her internal organs, now independent semi-sentient creatures, would cluster round him in this ultimate emergency and cradle him against the cold for as long as he needed.

She felt her thoughts break up and crumble.

Her mother came towards her across the snow. She was carrying a Sun on her back, but it wasn’t orange, old, failing like the real Sun. It was yellow, and it melted the snow.

Allel heard the shouting from the gloom of her teepee.

Nobody shouted these days. With the Sun never brighter than the twilights of her youth, there wasn’t much to shout about.

Except…

She unhinged her stiff old legs and rose from her leather mat. Outside, Home was a bloodstained raft floating over the landscape. The Sun was bright enough to sting her watery eyes, and the breeze pricked at the scar bisecting her face.

All the excitement was at the north of the little settlement. She saw her grandson Damen standing there, massive and obstructive. A few other villagers were walking towards Damen, dull curiosity brightening their drab faces.

Someone brushed past Allel: Erwal, Teal’s wife. When she realized what was happening Erwal began to run.

It was him. It had to be. He’d survived, and returned. Allel hobbled over the icy mud.

Damen heard Erwal coming. He turned and spread his arms to catch her. “No! Ignore him. Don’t hurt yourself anymore…”

Beyond them a silent figure stood alone. Allel squinted, but found it hard to make out a face.

Erwal shook her small fist. “Keep away from here. Keep away! I lost my baby because of the hurt you caused me, you… madman. Keep away from me.” Then, deliberately, she pulled Damen’s head down towards her and kissed him full on the lips. Teal watched this with no sign of emotion.

Damen wrapped his arm round Erwal’s shoulder and turned to Teal. “You’ll have to stay away, brother,” he said sadly. “There’s nothing for you here. You’re an exile.”

Allel came alongside Damen, gasping with the exertion. It was the furthest she’d walked from her teepee since her injury. “Why?” she asked. “Why bother, Damen? He’s lost his family already — lost everything. What more can you do to him?” She looked around at the dozen or so villagers clustered around them. They were an array of shabby indifference, their eyes large and slack in malnourished faces. A baby cried feebly at its mother’s shriveled breast. “We’re at the end of things. Who cares anymore?”

Damen frowned doubtfully. Then he turned and led Erwal away.

The other villagers drifted back to their chores.

Allel was left alone.

In the gathering darkness Teal was obscure… changed. Allel walked towards him, wrapping her skinny arms around herself.

“Tell me what you saw. Tell me what was in the Eighth Room.”

Teal smiled.

The far wall of the Eighth Room had been a great window, he said. He’d stepped cautiously through the door — and then the other sides of the cubical room had faded to clarity.

Dressed in skins, and brandishing a stone weapon, a human being once more stared out of a cave at the stars.

The stars were points of light unimaginably far away… much further than the distance between Shell and Home. He turned around and around, stepping over the rope that led back to Orange. There was no sign of the world he’d folded out of; the crystal box was suspended in space.

Gradually he began to make out patterns.

There was a great ball of stars over there on the right, neat as a mummy-cow’s meat pod — but he guessed that this star pod was bigger than a million of his worlds. Above his head there were fragments of a cubical lattice, draped with wisps of violet gas… and behind him, most spectacular of all, a sextet of varicolored stars that rotated visibly around an empty center. Great arches of fire leapt between the sisters’ surfaces.

There were loops of stars, knots of stars, stars in sheets like the cloaks of a god.

He remembered Allel describing the stars in the old days, randomly scattered like seeds. Well, since humans had hidden away, someone had rebuilt the Universe.

…Something moved past the stars. And again—

Nameless objects, black as night, were moving around him. They stroked at this fragile container like the hands of a huge parent.

He felt no threat. There was a sense of reassurance, of welcome, in their gestures.

I was meant to be here, he realized abruptly. Allel was right: the world is freezing by design. It spat me out, and these creatures have been waiting for me.

The half-dozen shapes now drew away from his box and gathered together in a great blur transiting the stars. They moved past and through each other, ever faster, weaving themselves into a tight knot of darkness—