The black mass continued to flow out. It had definite edges; stars winked into invisibility as its perimeter passed over them. Assuming it really was near Betelgeuse, it must have been huge; the rip would have been more than a hundred million kilometers in length, and the object pouring out of it several times that in diameter. Of course, since the thing was utterly, overwhelmingly black, neither radiating nor reflecting any light, it had no spectrum to analyze for Doppler shifts, and there would be no easy way to do a parallactic study to determine the object’s distance.

Shortly, the entire mass had passed out of the rip. It had a palmate structure — a central blob with six distinct appendages. No sooner was it free than the rift in space closed up and disappeared.

Dying Betelgeuse was contracting again, falling in upon itself. What had happened so far, said Donald Chen, was just the preamble. When the infalling gas hit the iron core for a second time, the star would really blow up, flaring so brightly that even we — four hundred light-years distant shouldn’t look directly at it.

The black object was moving through the firmament by rolling like a spiked wheel, as if — it couldn’t be; no, it couldn’t — as if its six extensions were somehow gaining purchase on the very fabric of space. The object was moving toward the contracting disk of Betelgeuse. The perspective was tricky to work out — it wasn’t until one of the limbs of the blackness touched, then covered, the edge of the disk that it became clear that the object was at least slightly closer to Earth than Betelgeuse was.

As the star continued to collapse behind it, the blackness further interposed itself between here and there, until in short order it had completely eclipsed Betelgeuse. From the ground, all we could see was that the superbright star had disappeared; Sol no longer had a rival in the daytime sky. Through the Merelcas’s telescopes, though, the black form was clearly visible, a multiarmed inkblot against the background dusting of stars. And then —

And then Betelgeuse must have done as Chen said it would, exploding behind the blackness, with more energy than a hundred million suns. As seen from worlds on the opposite side, the great star must have flared enormously, an eruption of blinding light and searing heat, accompanied by screams of radio noise. But from Earth’s perspective —

From Earth’s perspective, all that was hidden. Still, the inkblot seemed to surge forward, toward the telescopes’ eyes, as if it had been punched from behind, its central blob expanding to fill more of the field of view as it was hurtled closer. The six arms, meanwhile, were blown backward, like the tentacles of a jet-propelled squid seen head on.

Whatever this object was, it bore the brunt of the explosion, shielding Earth — and presumably the Forhilnor and Wreed homeworlds, too — from the onslaught that otherwise would have destroyed each world’s ozone layer.

Standing outside the ROM, we didn’t know what had happened — not yet, not then. But slowly realization dawned, even if the supernova didn’t. The three homeworlds were going to be spared, somehow.

Life would go on. Incredibly, thankfully, miraculously, life would go on.

At least for some.

31

I did finally make it home that night; word filtered down to those in the subways that, somehow, the disaster had been averted. By eight in the evening I was able to get a packed train heading south to Union station; I took it, even though I had to stand all the way home. I wanted to see Susan, to see Ricky.

Susan hugged me so hard it hurt, and Ricky hugged me, too, and we all moved to the couch and Ricky sat in my lap, and we hugged some more, a family.

Eventually Susan and I put Ricky to bed, and I kissed him good night, my boy, my son, whom I loved with all my heart. As with so much that was impinging on his life lately, he was too young to understand what had happened today.

Susan and I settled back onto the couch, and at 10:00 P.M., we watched the images taken by the Merelcas’s telescopes, broadcast as the lead story on The National. Peter Mansbridge looked more dour than usual as he went on about the close call Earth had had today. After showing the footage, the ROM’s Donald Chen joined him in the studio — the CBC Broadcasting Centre was more or less due south of the museum — to explain in detail what had happened, and to confirm that the black anomaly (that was the word Don used) was still interposed between Earth and Betelgeuse, shielding us.

Mansbridge concluded the interview by saying, “Sometimes we get lucky, I guess.” He turned to the camera. “In other news today—”

But there was no other news — none that mattered in the slightest, none that could compare with what had happened this afternoon.

“Sometimes we get lucky,” Mansbridge had said. I put an arm around Susan, pulled her close to me, felt the warmth of her body, smelled the fragrance of her shampoo. I thought of her, and, for once, not of how little time we had left together, but of all the wonderful times we’d had in the past.

Mansbridge was right. Sometimes we do indeed get lucky.

It came to me the next day, on the subway on the way down to the Museum; full-blown, a revelation, it came to me.

It was more than an hour after I got to my office before the Hollus avatar appeared. I fidgeted the entire time, waiting for her.

“Good morning, Tom,” she said. “I wish to apologize for the harshness of my words yesterday. They were—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We all go a little nuts when we first realize we might be dying.” I didn’t pause, didn’t allow her to take back control of the conversation. “Forget that. But look, something hit me this morning, while I was riding the subway, packed up there with all those other people. What about the ark? What about that ship sent from Groombridge 1618 to Betelgeuse?”

“Surely the ark was incinerated,” said Hollus. She sounded sad. “The first spasm of the dying star would have accomplished that.”

“No,” I said. “No, that’s not what happened.” I shook my head, still stunned by the enormity of it. “Damn it, I should have realized that earlier — and he should have, too.”

“Who?” said Hollus.

I didn’t answer her — not yet. “The natives of Groombridge didn’t abandon their planet,” I said. “They transcended into a virtual realm, just like all the others.”

“We found no warning landscape on the surface of their world,” said Hollus. “And why, then, would they send a ship to Betelgeuse? Do you propose that it contained a splinter group who did not wish to transcend?”

“No one would go to Betelgeuse to live there; as you said, it’s just not suitable. And four hundred light-years is an awfully long way to travel just to get a gravitational boost. No, I’m sure the craft you detected had no crew or passengers; all of the Groombridge natives are still back on their home planet, uploaded into a virtual-reality world. What the Groombridge natives sent to Betelgeuse was an unmanned ship containing a catalyst of some sort — something to trigger the supernova explosion.”

Hollus’s eyestalks stopped moving. “Trigger? Why?”

My head was swimming; the thought was almost too much. I looked at the Forhilnor. “To sterilize all the worlds in this part of the galaxy,” I said. “To wipe them clean of life. If you were going to bury some computers and then transfer your consciousness into those computers, what would your greatest fear be? Why, that someone would come along and dig up the computers, damaging them or vandalizing them. On many of the worlds your starship visited, warning landscapes were created to scare people away from unearthing what was buried beneath. But on Groombridge, they decided to go one better. They tried to make sure that no one, not even anyone from another nearby star, could possibly come along and interfere with them. They knew Betelgeuse — the biggest star in local space — was eventually going to go supernova. And so they hurried things up by a few millennia, sending a catalyst, a bomb, a device that caused the supernova explosion to happen as soon as it arrived.” I paused. “In fact — in fact, that’s why you could still see the ship’s fusion exhaust, even though it was almost all the way to Betelgeuse. Of course, it had never turned around to brake — because it never intended to slow down. Instead, it rammed itself right into the star’s heart, setting off the supernova explosion.”