She reduced her clock-speed to human perception. The black hole flew at her face—

The misty giant companion star ballooned over Gage’s head, its thin gases battering at her face.

Chiron’s lower belly dipped fifty yards into the ergosphere. The gravitational pull of the hole gripped her. It felt like pliers in her gut. She was hurled around; she was a helpless child in the grip of some too-strong adult. The fabric of Chiron cracked; Solar System ice flaked into this black hole, here on the edge of the Galaxy, flaring X-radiation as it was crushed.

Then the gravity grip released. The hole system was behind her, receding. The pit dug in spacetime by the hole’s mass felt like a distant, fading ache.

She watched the patient GUTspark of the Squeem missile as it approached the hole. It matched her path almost exactly, she saw with grudging admiration.

The missile grazed the lip of the hole. There was a flare of X-radiation.

The GUTspark was gone.

It’s worked. By Lethe, after all these years, it’s worked.

Suddenly Gage felt utterly human. She wanted to cry, to sleep, to be held.

Cydonia, her home arcology, was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken Sun. The ambient Martian light was like a late sunset, with the arcology drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against its surface its windows were rectangles of fluorescent light glowing a harsh pearl gray, startlingly alien.

Her boots had left crisp marks in the duricrust.

Gage wasn’t nostalgic, usually, but since the hole flyby she had felt the need to retreat into the scenes and motifs of her childhood.

Moro and Mackenzie met her on this simulated Martian surface.

“It was simple,” she said.

Mackenzie smiled.

Moro growled. “You’ve told us.”

“We took so much spin from the black hole that we almost stopped it rotating altogether. It became a Schwarzschild hole. Without spin, its event horizon expanded, filling up the equatorial belt where the ergosphere had been.”

Chiron had clipped the ergosphere safely. The missile, following Chiron’s trajectory exactly, had fallen straight into the expanded event horizon.

The long chase was over.

“I guess the missile wasn’t an expert on relativistic dynamics after all,” Mackenzie said.

“But we’re not so smart either,” Moro said sourly. “After all we’re still falling out of the Galaxy — even faster than before the hole encounter, in fact. A million years pass for every month we spend in here; we might be the only humans left alive, anywhere.” He looked down at his arms, made the pixels swell absurdly. “If you can call this life. And we don’t have enough reaction mass left to slow down. Well, space pilot Gage, where are we heading now?”

Gage thought about it. They could probably never return to their home Galaxy. But there were places beyond the Galaxy, massive stars and black holes that a pilot could use to decelerate, if she was smart enough.

And if they could find a place to stop, they could rest. Maybe Gage’s awareness could be loaded back into some flesh-and-blood simulacrum of a human form. Or maybe not; maybe the role of Gage and the rest would simply be to oversee the construction of a new world fit for her child, and the other frozen zygotes.

She smiled. “At this speed, we’ll be there in a couple of subjective months.”

“Where?”

“Andromeda…”

Even under the oppressive Squeem occupation, humans learned much.

They learned, for example, that much of the Squeem’s high technology — their hyperdrive, for instance — was not indigenous. It was copied, sometimes at second or third hand, based on the designs of an older, more powerful species…

“It was the first time,” Eve said, “that the name ‘Xeelee’ entered human discourse.”

I shuddered.

The Xeelee Flower

I still get tourists out here, you know. Even though it’s been so long since I was a hero. But then, I’m told, these days the reopened Poole wormholes will get you from Earth to Miranda in hours.

Hours. What a miracle. Not that these tourist types appreciate it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the company. It just bugs me that every last one, after he’s finished looking over my villa built into the five-mile cliffs of Miranda, turns his face up to the ghostly blue depths of Uranus, and asks the same dumb question:

“Say, buddy, how come you use a fish tank for a toilet?”

But I’m a good host, and I merely smile and snap my fingers. After a while, my battered old buttlebot limps in with a bottle of valley bottom wine, and I settle back and begin:

“Well, my friend, I use the fish tank for a toilet for the same reason you would. Because my boss used to live in it.”

And that’s how I got where I am today.

By working for a bunch of fish, I mean, not pissing in the tank. Although I don’t know what stopped me from doing just that by the time we reached Goober’s Star eight months out from Earth.

“The resolution, Jones, the resolution!” The shoal of Squeem darted anxiously around their tank, griping at me from the translator box taped to one glass wall.

I put down the spare tank I’d been busy scraping out, and blinked across the cluttered little cabin. The buttlebot — yes, the same one, squeaky-clean in those days — scuttled past, humming happily in its chores. I picked my way to the control panel. I got out my adjustable spanner and gingerly tweaked the fiddly little enhancement vernier. Like most Xeelee-based technology it was too fine for human fingers. The secretive Xeelee evidently have great brains but tiny hands. Then again, some people haven’t managed to evolve hands at all, I reflected, as the Squeem flipped around in their greenish murk.

“Ah,” enthused the Squeem as the monitors sharpened up. “Our timing is perfect.”

I gloomily considered a myriad beautiful images of two things I didn’t want much to be close to: Goober’s Star — about G-type, about two Earth orbits away, and about to nova; and a planet full of nervous Xeelee.

And the most remarkable feature of the whole situation was that we weren’t running for our lives. In fact, we were going to get closer — a lot closer — drawn mothlike by the greed of the Squeem for stolen Xeelee treasure.

The buttlebot squeezed past my leg, extended a few pseudopodia, and began pushing buttons with depressing enthusiasm. I sighed and turned back to my fish tank. At least I had one up on the ’bot, I reflected; at least I was getting paid. Although, like most of the rest of humanity at that time, I hadn’t exactly had a free choice in the nature of my employment—

The Squeem’s rasp broke into my thoughts. “Jones, our planet-fall is imminent. Please prepare the flitter for your descent.”

Your descent. Had they said “your” descent? I nearly dropped the fish tank.

Carefully, I got up from my knees. “Into Lethe’s waters with that.” I defiantly straightened my rubber gloves. “No way. The Xeelee wouldn’t let me past the orbit of the moons—”

“The Xeelee will be fully occupied with their flight from the imminent nova. And your descent will be timed to minimize your risk.”

“That’s a lot of ‘you’ and ‘your,’ “ I observed witheringly. “Show me where my contract says I’ve got to do this.”

Can fish be said to be dry? The Squeem said drily, “That will be difficult as you haven’t got a contract at all.”

They had a point. I reluctantly took off my pinafore and began to tug at the fingers of my rubber gloves. The buttlebot smugly opened up the suit locker. “You ought to send that little tin cretin,” I said; and the Squeem replied, “We are.”