But the chances were slim, I supposed. More likely, Ricky had grown up to be whatever sort of man he’d been destined to become, and he had worked and loved, and now . . .

And now was gone.

My son. I had almost certainly outlived him. A father is not supposed to do that.

I felt tears welling in my eyes; tears that had been frozen solid not an hour ago, tears that just sort of pooled there, near their ducts, in the absence of gravity. I wiped them away.

Hollus understood what human tears signified, but she didn’t ask me why I was crying. Her own children, Pealdon and Kassold, must surely now be dead, too. She floated patiently next to me.

I wondered if Ricky had left children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it shocked me to think that I could easily have fifteen or more generations of descendants now. Perhaps the Jericho name echoed on still . . .

And I wondered whether the Royal Ontario Museum still existed, whether they’d ever reopened the planetarium, or if, in fact, cheap spaceflight for all the people had finally, properly, rendered that the institution redundant.

I wondered if Canada still existed, that great country I loved so much.

More, of course, I wondered if humanity still existed, if we had avoided the sting at the end of the Drake equation, avoided blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons. We’d had them for fifty-odd years before I’d left; could we have resisted using them for eight times longer than that?

Or maybe . . .

It was what the natives of Epsilon Indi had chosen.

And those of Tau Ceti.

Of Mu Cassiopeae A, also.

And of Eta Cassiopeae A.

Those of Sigma Draconis, as well.

And even those amoral beings of Groombridge 1618, the arrogant bastards who had blown up Betelgeuse.

All of them, if I was right, had transcended into a machine realm, a virtual world, a computer-generated paradise.

And by now, with four centuries of additional technological advances, surely Homo sapiens had the capability of doing the same.

Perhaps they had done it. Perhaps they had.

I looked at Hollus, floating there: the real Hollus, not the simulacrum. My friend, in the flesh.

Maybe humanity had even taken a hint from the natives of Mu Cassiopeae A, blowing up Luna, giving Earth rings to rival those of Saturn; of course, our moon is relatively smaller than the Cassiopeian one and so contributes less to the churning of our mantle. Still, perhaps now a warning landscape was spread out across some geologically stable part of Earth.

I was floating freely again, too far from any wall; I had a tendency to do that. Hollus maneuvered over to me and took my hand in hers.

I hoped we hadn’t uploaded. I hoped humanity was, well, still human — still warm and biological and real.

But there was no way to know for sure.

And was the entity still there, waiting for us, after more than four centuries?

Yes.

Oh, perhaps it hadn’t stuck around all that time; perhaps it had indeed calculated when we would arrive, and had nipped off to take care of other things in the interim. While the Merelcas was traversing the 429 light-years at a hair below the speed of light, the view ahead had blueshifted into ultraviolet invisibility; the entity could have been gone for much of that time.

And, of course, perhaps it wasn’t really God; perhaps it was just some extremely advanced lifeform, some representative of an ancient, but entirely natural, race. Or maybe it was actually a machine, a massive swarm of nanotechnological entities; there was no reason why advanced technology couldn’t look organic.

But where do you draw the line? Something — some one — set the fundamental parameters for this universe.

Someone had intervened on at least three worlds over a period of 375 million years, a span two million times longer than the couple of centuries intelligent races seem to survive in a corporeal state.

And someone had now saved Earth and Delta Pavonis II and Beta Hydri III from the explosion of a supergiant star, absorbing more energy in a matter of moments than all the other stars in the galaxy were putting out, and doing so without being destroyed in the process.

How do you define God? Must he or she be omniscient? Omnipotent? As the Wreeds say, those are mere abstractions, and possibly unattainable. Must God be defined in a way that places him or her beyond the scope of science?

I’d always believed that there was nothing beyond the scope of science.

And I still believe that.

Where do you draw the line?

Right here. For me, the answer was right here.

How do you define God?

Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

I floated in front of one of the wall screens, Hollus on my left, six more Forhilnors next to her, a string of Wreeds off to my right, and we looked out at him, at it, at the being. It turned out to be about 1.5 billion kilometers wide — roughly the diameter of Jupiter’s orbit. And it was so unrelentingly black that I was told that even the glow of the Merelcas’s fusion exhaust, which had been facing this way for two centuries of braking, had not reflected back from it.

The entity continued to eclipse Betelgeuse — or whatever was left of it — until we were quite close to it. Then it rolled aside, its six limbs moving like the spokes of a wheel, revealing the vast pink nebula that had formed behind it and the tiny pulsar, the corpse of Betelgeuse, at its heart.

But that was its only acknowledgement of our presence, at least as far as I could tell. I wished again for real windows: maybe if it could see us waving at it, it would respond in kind, moving one of its vast obsidian pseudopods in a slow, majestic arc.

It was maddening: here I was, within spitting distance of what might well be God, and it seemed as indifferent to me as, well, as it had been when tumors had started to form in my lungs. I’d tried once before to speak to God and had received no reply, but now, dammitall, surely courtesy if nothing else required a response; we had traveled farther than any human or Forhilnor or Wreed ever had before.

But the entity made no attempt at communication — or, at least, none that I, or Zhu, my ancient Chinese fellow traveler, or Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman, or even Huhn, the silverback gorilla, could detect. Nor did the Forhilnors seem to be able to contact it.

But the Wreeds —

The Wreeds, with their radically different minds, their different way of seeing, of thinking —

And with their unshakeable faith . . .

The Wreeds apparently were in telepathic communication with the being. After years of trying to talk to God, God was now, it seemed, talking to them, in ways only they could detect. The Wreeds could not articulate what they were being told, just as they couldn’t articulate in any comprehensible way the insights about the meaning of life that gave them peace, but nonetheless they started building something in the Wreed centrifuge.

Before it was finished, Lablok, the Merelcas’s Forhilnor doctor, recognized what it was, based on its general design principles: a large artificial womb.

The Wreeds took genetic samples from the oldest member of their contingent, a female named K’t’ben, and from the oldest Forhilnor, an engineer named Geedas, and —

No, not from me, although I wished it had been; it would have brought completion, closure.

No, the human sample they took was from Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer.

There are forty-six human chromosomes.

There are thirty-two Forhilnor chromosomes.

There are fifty-four Wreed chromosomes . . . not that they know that.