— and then, in a sprinkle of prismatic light, they shot away to… somewhere else.

They’d finished with the Universe, abandoned it. But they’d left something behind.

It was a ship. It nuzzled against his box, a great shell big enough to hold his village and a hundred more. The Universe would be his.

The stars began to spin like sparks in a fire. They tilted, overwhelming him.

His next memory was of crawling out of the corpse of the mummy-cow.

Allel shifted her weight between her stiff legs. “Xeelee ships,” she croaked. “That’s what you saw. Ships like plucking fingers.” She coughed feebly, feeling the cold of the dying day sink into her flesh. “Listen. I know what you’ve sacrificed to do this. I know you’ve lost everything important to you… But, Teal, you’ve saved us all.”

She reached out a hand to her grandson.

Teal didn’t react. Allel dropped the hand nervously.

“You knew what I’d find, didn’t you?” Teal asked coolly. “You suspected the truth of our history — the completeness of our defeat by the Xeelee.”

Allel sighed, and folded her arms over her concave chest. “Yes. The truth about the past has been hidden from us so long and so well that it had to be painful. The story I learned when I was young was comforting: the Xeelee as marauding monsters bent on destroying us; our valiant fight and honorable defeat. A comforting myth.

“I’ve thought hard about that story… and seen past it to the truth.

“We were a weak and foolish race. We attacked the Xeelee, unable to bear their superiority. We were defeated. But we would have kept on attacking them until we were destroyed.

“And so the Xeelee locked us away like destructive children… for our own good. Just like an elder brother, eh? It’s not easy to accept.”

“No, it isn’t,” Teal murmured. “We didn’t build this world to save us from the Xeelee. The Xeelee built it to save us from ourselves.”

Allel studied his empty face. She thought of seeing the stars: of waking in a place without a roof over the world.

But, of course, the frozen lands to the north made the stars as unattainable for her as her own lost youth.

“Well.” She wiped dampness from her eyes. “Come to my teepee. I’ve got food. And blankets.”

She turned and began to hobble back to her home.

There was a transparent box, half as tall again as a man. It hung in space, in orbit around a cooling white dwarf star, apparently forgotten and purposeless. It would have had no conceivable significance in the long twilight of the Universe… if it had not occupied the site of Earth, the long-vanished original home of man, long consumed by its own sun.

A Qax had once visited the site. It was puzzled. The box was evidently one three-dimensional facet of a hypercube, extending into folded space. Perhaps it was a gateway, an interface to some pocket Universe. Such things had been constructed by the Xeelee elsewhere in the Galaxy.

But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?

The Qax had placed quantum-inseparability markers around the box. The Qax were linked to the markers by single quantum wave functions, ghostly threads that stretched across light years, and they had scattered millions of markers over the spaces once inhabited by humans.

At last the human called Teal walked into the box. He stared, openmouthed, at the stars. He was gaunt, filthy, and dressed in treated tree-bark; a rope tied to his waist snaked around a corner and into another Universe. After some time the rope grew taut and Teal’s limp form was hauled away.

The inseparability markers blared their warnings. A Qax hauled itself like a spider along the quantum web to the box — but it arrived too late; the box was empty. The Qax hissed, settling into space like condensing mist.

With a patience born of millions of years it prepared to wait a little longer.

The event spread like a soft blue dye through the linked quantum phenomena which comprised Paul’s being. At the site of Earth there was a human once more: but a human alone, weak, tired, close to dissolution. Paul, godlike, pondered the implications for an unimaginable interval.

Then he came to a decision. He reconstructed his awareness; a quantum jewel danced against the clear walls of the Eighth Room.

History had resumed.

“Allel was right,” I said. “The defeat, the imprisonment, by the Xeelee was complete. Unbearably so. What a humiliating scenario.”

“Perhaps. Humans as Eloi, to the Xeelee’s Morlocks.”

“…Eloi?”

“Never mind. Another prophecy, much older than mine…”

Inside the hypersphere cage, the human story seemed over. But the rhythms of life persisted, and with them the unwelcome urge to survive…

The Baryonic Lords

Erwal pushed out the greased flap of the teepee. Hot, humid air gushed into the blizzard, turning instantly into fog.

Damen, dozing, grunted and burrowed more deeply into his pile of furs.

Erwal pulled her mummy-cow furs more tightly around her neck and stepped out into the snow — it had drifted some three feet deep against the teepee’s walls — and smoothed closed the flap. Clutching her slop pail she looked about in bewilderment. The world seemed to have collapsed to a small, gray sphere around her; rarely before had she seen snow so heavy. The flakes clung to her eyelids and already she could feel the down on her upper lip becoming stiff with cold. Dropping her head she began her struggle through the blizzard.

Somewhere above the clouds, she thought wistfully, was the Sun, still winding through its increasingly meaningless spiral between the worlds.

Already the snow had soaked through her leggings and was beginning to freeze against her skin. With a sense of urgency she forced her legs through the snow, dragging the slop pail behind her. Soon she was out of sight of the teepee; the rest of the village remained hidden by walls of snow, so that she had to make her way by memory alone.

At last she reached the village’s central stand of cow-trees. She leaned against a tree for a few minutes, sucking at air that seemed thick with the snow. Then she began to dig with her bare hands into the drifts at the base of the tree, finally exposing hard, brown earth. She dumped the contents of her slop pail against the roots of the cow-tree and stamped the waste firmly down against the wood. Then, wearily, she straightened up and began to select some of the tree’s more mature buds, filling her pockets. The meat buds were small, hard, anemic; she bit into one, tasting sourness.

A villager approached through the storm. At first Erwal made out only a blur of rags against the snow, but the villager noticed Erwal and leaned into the wind, making towards her.

Erwal shouted: “Good day!”

From within a voluminous hood there came a muffled, brittle laugh; then the hood was pushed back to reveal the thin, pretty features of Sura, wife of Borst. “It’s hardly that, Erwal.” Sura had dragged her own slop pail across the drifts; now she dumped her waste alongside Erwal’s. As she worked Sura’s shapeless fur blanket fell open and Erwal made out a bundle suspended over her thin chest, a sling of skin from which protruded tiny hands, a small, bare leg. Erwal frowned; the baby’s exposed flesh seemed blue-tinged.

Once Sura had finished Erwal held her head close to the girl’s. “How are you, Sura? How are your family?”

“Borst is ill.” Sura smiled, her eyes oddly bright. “His lungs will not clear; he has been barely able to stand.” Absently she patted the bundle against her chest.

“Sura, will you let me visit your teepee? At home there is only myself and Damen…”

“Thanks, my friend, but I’m sure I can manage.” Again that bright look entered the girl’s pale eyes and she brushed a wisp of hair back from a high forehead. “The child is a burden, but she’s such a comfort.”