There was detail in the crimson fog, sparks that chattered around rectangular paths. Now the huge ship shut off half the sky.

“Lethe.” I opaqued the window.

There was a soft resistance, like a fall into a liquid. Red light played through the pod walls as if they were paper. Sparks jerked through right angles in the air.

Then it was over. I tried to steady my breath.

“Why worry, Michael?” sWyman said gently. “We’ve no power; we’re ballistic. If another of those babies runs into us there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“It’s getting clearer up ahead.”

We dropped out of the mist of ships and shot into a hollow space the size of the Solar System. On the far side was another wall of processed matter — more ships, I found. There was a sphere of smashed-up craft clustering around this place like gaudy moths.

And the flame at the heart of it all?

Nothing much. Only a star. But very, very old…

Once it had been a hundred times the mass of our sun. It had squirted lithium-7 light over the roof of the young cosmos. It had a terrific time. But the good days passed quickly. What we saw before us was a dried-up corpse, showing only by its gravity signature.

Just an old star… with something in orbit around it.

I focused my instruments. “That thing’s about a foot across,” I recorded. “But it masses more than Jupiter…”

The monstrous thing crawled past the surface of its wizened mother, raising a blood-red tide.

“So what? A black hole?”

I shook my head. “The densities are wrong. This is a different ball game, sWyman. That stuff’s quagma.”

The largest piece of quagma I’d had to work with before had been smaller than a proton. This was my field, brought within miraculous reach. I stammered observations—

Things started to happen.

The quagma thing veered out of orbit and shot towards us. I watched in disbelief. “It’s not supposed to do that.”

I felt a tingle as it hurtled past, mere yards from my window. It looked like a lump of cooling charcoal. Its gravity field slapped the pod as if it were a spinning top, and centripetal force threw me against the wall.

Clinging to the window frame I caught a glimpse of the quagma object whirling away from the pod and neatly returning to its orbit.

Then a shadow fell across the window.

“That’s shot us full of all sorts of funny stuff,” shouted sWyman. “Particles you wouldn’t believe, radiation at all wavelengths—”

I didn’t reply. There was a shape hovering out there, a night-dark bird with wings hundreds of miles across.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “That’s what I saw in the ship swarm. The Xeelee are here. That’s a nightfighter—”

sWyman roared in frustration.

The Xeelee let us have it. I saw the exterior of the window glow cherry-red; gobbets melted and flew away. The Xeelee dipped his wings, once; and he flew away.

Then the window opaqued.

Something hit my head in the whirling darkness. The noise, the burning smells, sWyman’s yelled complaints — it all faded away.

“…Damn those Xeelee. I should have known they can beat anything we’ve got. And of course they would police this lithium beacon. It wouldn’t do to let us lesser types get our hands on stuff like this; oh no…”

I was drifting in a steamy darkness. There was a smell of smoke. I coughed, searched for a coffee globe. “At least the Xeelee attack stopped that damn rotation.” sWyman shut up, as if cut off. “What’s our status, sWyman?”

“Nothing that counts is working. Oh, there’s enough to let us interpret the quagma encounter… But, Luce, the inseparability packet link is smashed. We can’t talk to home.” Cradling the cooling globe I probed at my feelings. There was despair, certainly; but over it all I felt an unbearable shame.

I’d let my life be stolen. And, in the end, it was for nothing.

sWyman hissed quietly.

“How’s the life support, by the way?” I asked.

“What life support?”

I let the globe join the cabin’s floating debris and felt my way to the opaqued window. It felt brittle, half-melted. It would stay opaqued forever, I realized.

“sWyman. Tell me what happened. When that quagma droplet lunged out of its orbit and sprayed us.”

“Yeah. Well, the particles from the quagma burst left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through.” I remembered how that invisible shower had prickled. The scars laced everything — the hull, the equipment, even your body. And the tracks weren’t random. There was a pattern to them. There was enough left working in here for me to decipher some of the message…”

I felt my skin crawl. “A message. You’re telling me there was information content in the scar patterns?”

“Yes,” said sWyman casually. I guess he’d had time to get used to the idea. “But what we can’t do is tell anyone about it.”

I held my breath. “Do you want to tell me?”

“Yeah…”

It was less than a second after the Big Bang.

Already there was life.

They swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

But the quagma was cooling. Their life-sustaining fluid was congealing into cold hadrons. Soon, the very superforce which bound their bodies would disintegrate.

They were thinking beings. Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold. There was nothing they could do about it.

They could not bear to be forgotten.

So they built… an ark. A melon-sized pod of quagma containing all their understanding. And they set up that unmistakable lithium-7 flare, a sign that someone had been here, at the dawn of time.

For trillions of seconds the ark waited. At last cold creatures came to see. And the ark began to tell its story.

I floated there, thinking about it. The scars lacing the pod — even my body — held as much of the understanding of the quagma creatures as they could give us. If I could have returned home engineers could have dissected the pod, doctors could have studied the tracery of tracks in my flesh; and the patterns they found could have been unscrambled.

Perhaps we would never decipher it all. Perhaps much of it would be meaningless to us. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. For the existence of the ark was itself the quagma datum, the single key fact:

That they had been here.

And so the ark serves its purpose.

sWyman fell silent.

I drifted away from the buckled walls and began to curl up. There was a band of pain across my chest; the air must be fouling.

How long since I’d dropped out of Susy-space? Had my four days gone?

My vision started to break up. I hoped sWyman wouldn’t speak again.

Something scraped the outside of the pod.

“Luce?” sWyman whispered. “What was that?”

The scrape went the length of the pod; then came a more solid clang over the mid-section. “I’d say someone’s trying to get hold of us.”

“Who, damn it?”

I pressed my ear to a smooth patch of hull. I heard music, a bass harmonization that rumbled through the skin of the pod.

“Of course. The Ghosts. They’re right on time.”

“No.” There was a bray in his voice. “They’re too late. Our Susy-drive took the Xeelee by surprise, but if the Ghosts try to get any closer to the quagma you can bet they’ll be stopped.”

“But—” I stopped to suck oxygen out of the thick air. “The Ghosts don’t need to get any closer. The quagma data is stored in the scarred fabric of the pod itself. So if they take the pod they’ve won…”

Then, incredibly, I felt a glimmer of hope. It was like a thread of blue oxygen.