Rachel nodded, her smile gone. “I have only a minute or two here,” she said. “And much to tell you.”

“No,” said Sol, taking his grown daughter’s hand, “you have to stay. I want you to stay with me.”

Rachel smiled again. “I will stay with you, Dad,” she said softly, raising her other hand to touch the baby’s head. “But only one of us can… and she needs you more.” She turned to the group below.

“Listen, please, all of you.”

As the sun rose and touched the broken buildings of the Poets’ City, the Consul’s ship, the western cliffs, and the taller Time Tombs with its light, Rachel told her brief and tantalizing story of being chosen to be raised in a future where the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit. It was, she said, a future of terrifying and wonderful mysteries, where humankind had spread across this galaxy and had begun to travel elsewhere.

“Other galaxies?” asked Theo Lane.

“Other universes,” smiled Rachel.

“Colonel Kassad knew you as Moneta,” said Martin Silenus.

“Will know me as Moneta,” said Rachel, her eyes clouding. “I have seen him die and accompanied his tomb to the past. I know that part of my mission is to meet this fabled warrior and lead him forward to the final battle. I have not truly met him yet.” She looked down the valley toward the Crystal Monolith. “Moneta,” she mused. “It means 'Admonisher' in Latin. Appropriate. I will let him choose between that and Mnemosyne—'memory'—for my name.”

Sol had not released his daughter’s hand. He did not do so now.

“You’re traveling back in time with the Tombs? Why? How?”

Rachel lifted her head, and reflected light from the far cliffs painted her face in warmth. “It is my role, Dad. My duty. They give me means to keep the Shrike in check. And only I was… prepared.”

Sol lifted his infant daughter higher. Startled from sleep, she blew a single bubble of saliva, turned her face into her father’s neck for warmth, and curled her small fists against his shirt.

“Prepared,” said Sol. “You mean the Merlin’s sickness?”

“Yes,” said Rachel.

Sol shook his head. “But you weren’t raised in some mysterious world of the future. You grew up in the college town of Crawford, on Fertig Street, on Barnard’s World, and your…” He stopped.

Rachel nodded. “She shall grow up… up there. Dad, I’m sorry, I have to go.” She freed her hand, drifted down the stairs, and touched Melio Arundez’s cheek briefly. “I’m sorry for the pain of memory,” she said softly to the startled archaeologist. “To me it was, literally, a different life.”

Arundez blinked and held her hand to his cheek a moment longer.

“Are you married?” asked Rachel softly. “Children?”

Arundez nodded, moved his other hand as if he were going to remove the pictures of his wife and grown children from his pocket, and then stopped, nodded again.

Rachel smiled, kissed him quickly on the cheek again, and moved back up the steps. The sky was rich with sunrise, but the door to the Sphinx was still brighter.

“Dad,” she said, “I love you.”

Sol tried to speak, cleared his throat. “How… how do I join you… up there?”

Rachel gestured toward the open door of the Sphinx. “For some it will be a portal to the time I spoke of. But, Dad…” She hesitated. “It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.”

Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel.” He changed arms holding the sleeping infant, and shook his head again.

“Will there be a time when… the two of you… ?”

“Coexist again?” smiled Rachel. “No. I go the other way now. You can’t imagine the difficulty I had with the Paradox Board to get this one meeting approved.”

“Paradox Board?” said Sol.

Rachel took a breath. She had stepped back until only her fingertips touched her father’s, both their arms extended. “I have to go, Dad.”

“Will I…” He looked at the baby. “Will we be alone… up there?”

Rachel laughed, and the sound was so familiar that it closed around Sol’s heart like a warm hand. “Oh no,” she said, “not alone. There are wonderful people there. Wonderful things to learn and do. Wonderful places to see…” She glanced around. “Places we have not imagined yet in our wildest dreams. No, Dad, you won’t be alone. And I’ll be there, in all my teenage awkwardness and young-adult cockiness.”

She stepped back, and her fingers slipped away from Sol.

“Wait a while before stepping through. Dad,” she called, moving back into the brilliance. “It doesn’t hurt, but once through you can’t come back.”

“Rachel, wait,” said Sol.

His daughter stepped back, her long robe flowing across stone, until the light surrounded her. She raised one arm. “See you later, alligator!” she called.

Sol raised a hand. “After a while… crocodile.”

The older Rachel was gone in the light.

The baby awoke and began to cry.

It was more than an hour before Sol and the others returned to the Sphinx. They had gone to the Consul’s ship to tend to Brawne’s and Martin Silenus’s injuries, to eat, and to outfit Sol and the child for a voyage.

“I feel silly packing for what may be like a step through a farcaster,” said Sol, “but no wonder how wonderful this future is, if it doesn’t have nursing paks and disposable diapers, we’re in trouble.”

The Consul grinned and patted the full backpack on the step. “This should get you and the baby through the first two weeks. If you don’t find a diaper service by then, go to one of those other universes Rachel spoke about.”

Sol shook his head. “Is this happening?”

“Wait a few days or weeks,” said Melio Arundez. “Stay here with us until things get sorted out. There’s no hurry. The future will always be there.”

Sol scratched his beard as he fed the baby with one of the nursing paks the ship had manufactured. “We’re not sure this portal will always be open,” he said. “Besides, I might lose my nerve. I’m getting pretty old to raise a child again… especially as a stranger in a strange land.”

Arundez set his strong hand on Sol’s shoulder. “Let me go with you. I’m dying of curiosity about this place.”

Sol grinned and extended his hand, shook Arundez’s firmly. “Thank you, my friend. But you have a wife and children back in the Web… on Renaissance Vector… who await your return. You have your own duties.”

Arundez nodded and looked at the sky. “If we can return.”

“We’ll return,” the Consul said flatly. “Old-fashioned Hawking drive spaceflight still works, even if the Web is gone forever. It’ll be a few years’ time-debt, Melio, but you’ll get back.”

Sol nodded, finished feeding the baby, set a clean cloth diaper on his shoulder, and patted her firmly on the back. He looked around the small circle of people. “We all have our duties.” He shook hands with Martin Silenus. The poet had refused to crawl into the nutrient recovery bath or have the neural shunt socket surgically removed. ‘I’ve had these things before,’ he’d said.

“Will you continue your poem?” Sol asked him.

Silenus shook his head. “I finished it on the tree,” he said. “And I discovered something else there, Sol.”

The scholar raised an eyebrow.

“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God… or anything approaching a God… he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”

The baby burped.

Martin Silenus grinned and shook Sol’s hand a final time. “Give them hell up there, Weintraub. Tell ’em you’re their great-greatgreatgreat-great grandaddy, and if they misbehave, you’ll whop their butts.”

Sol nodded and moved down the line to Brawne Lamia. “I saw you conferring with the ship’s medical terminal,” he said. “Is everything all right with you and your unborn child?”

Brawne grinned. “Everything’s fine.”

“A boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

Sol kissed her on the cheek. Brawne touched his beard and turned her face away to hide tears unbecoming a former private investigator.