The Wreeds had announced that today would be the day; the child was now whole and would be removed from the artificial womb. “May she express the best in all of us,” said T’kna, the Wreed I’d first met by telepresence all those months — and all those centuries — ago.

Hollus bobbed her torso. “A” said one of her mouths, and “men” concluded the other.

I was groggy from the suspended animation, but I watched in fascination as Wibadal was decanted from the womb. She came into the universe crying, just as I had done, and just as all the billions who had gone before me had.

Hollus and I spent hours simply looking at her, a strange, bizarre form, already half as big as I was.

“I wonder what her life span will be,” I said to my Forhilnor friend; perhaps an odd question, but life spans were very much on my mind.

“Who” “knows?” she replied. “The lack of telomeres does not seem to be an impediment for her. Her cells could go on reproducing forever, and—”

She stopped.

“And they will,” she said after a few moments of reflection. “They will. That entity” — she gestured at the space-faring blackness centered on one of the wall-sized viewing screens — “survived through the last big crunch and big bang. Wibadal, I suspect, will survive though the next, becoming God to the universe that follows this one.”

It was a staggering notion, although perhaps Hollus was right. But I wouldn’t live long enough to know for sure.

Wibadal was behind a glass window in a specially built maternity ward with a single circular crib. I tapped on the glass, the way parents on my world had done millions of time before. I tapped, and I waved.

And Wibadal stirred, and waved a stubby, chubby appendage back at me. Maybe the current God had never acknowledged my presence — even when I’d come right up to him, he’d still been indifferent to me — but this god-to-be had noticed me, at least once, at least for a moment.

And, for that moment, I felt no pain.

But soon, the agony was back; it had been growing worse, and I had been growing weaker.

Time was running short.

I wrote a final, long letter to Ricky in case, by some miracle, he was still alive. Hollus transmitted it to Earth for me; it would reach there almost half a millennium hence. I told my son what I’d seen here and how much I loved him.

And then I asked Hollus for a last favor, a final kindness. I asked her for the sort of thing only a good friend could request of another. I asked her to help release me, to help me pass on. I’d brought only a few things with me from Earth, besides my cancer medication and pain pills. But I did bring a biochemistry text with enough information for the Merelcas’s doctor to synthesize something that would painlessly and swiftly end my life.

Hollus herself administered the injection, and she sat by my bed, holding my emaciated hand in one of hers, her bubblewrap skin the last thing I felt.

I told Hollus to write down my final words and transmit them back to Earth, as well, so that Ricky, or whoever was still there, would know what I’d said. As I mused before, perhaps he, or one of my great-to-the-nth grandchildren, might even put together a book about the first contact between an extraterrestrial and someone who, I suppose, was all too human.

I was surprised by what my last thoughts turned out to be. “You know,” I said to Hollus, her eyes weaving back and forth, “I remember when I first became fascinated with fossils.”

Hollus listened.

“I’d been at the beach,” I said, “playing with some rocks, and I was amazed to find a stone shell embedded in one of them. I’d found something then that I’d never even known I’d been looking for.” The pain was easing; everything was slipping away. I squeezed the Forhilnor’s hand. “I guess I’m a lucky man,” I said, feeling peace come over me. “It’s happened a second time.”