He opened himself. New data trickled into his awareness.

The Xeelee ship was semisentient. The function of the ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.

It studied the machines working at the heart of the ancient Jovian, and considered how this might be achieved.

Once this System had been the home of a race who had waged war for hundreds of millennia. The Jovian had been reworked to serve as the hub of an industrial-military conurbation which had launched wave after wave of strikes out at the humans’ perceived foe, the Xeelee. The ship saw how even the moons had been moved to their present altitudes, their orbits regularized, to serve as weapons shops. Power for the shops, and for the great fleets which had poured out of this system, had come from the substance of the Jovian itself.

Now, of course, the war was history, the human fleets brushed aside; the shops were deserted and the Jovian was largely spent — but still, the ship perceived, entities remained brooding at its core, vast machine-minds waiting to fulfill their final purpose—

The last defense of the Solar System.

They saw the Xeelee ship, with its cargo of two primitive humans, as a threat. And they had attacked.

The ship methodically studied the weak tractor beam which was drawing it steadily towards the Jovian.

Gravity wave technology — called by the humans “starbreaker beams” — had been one of the many Xeelee mysteries never solved by man, even after generations of study. The ship now recognized this tractor as a pale imitation of a starbreaker; and it made out, somewhere near the core of the Jovian, the generator which served as the core of the tractor. A group of point-singularities were being impelled, by strong electrical fields, to collide and coalesce. As pairs of the ultradense singularities impacted a new, more massive, hole would form; for some seconds the new hole’s event horizon would vibrate like a soap bubble, emitting intense gravitational waves. By controlling the pattern of such collisions the modes of vibration of the horizons could be controlled — and thus, indirectly, the tractor beam of gravity waves was generated.

It worked. After a fashion.

The ship computed options.

It could simply spread its wings and fly away, of course. But there would be a period, a second or so, when its discontinuity-drive impulse would match the tug of the tractor beam; and when the beam was broken the ship and its occupants could suffer a jolt.

The ship assessed the (low) probability of damage to the humans.

The second option was simpler and, the ship concluded, entailed less risk.

It fired its own starbreaker, straight down the throat of the tractor.

Sura cried out and covered her eyes; Erwal, squinting, saw how the panel’s brightness dimmed to a point where she could see again.

She still looked along the curtain-tube to the Sun-world. But now a beam of intense cherry-red light threaded out of the ship and along the tube’s axis, spearing the heart of the Sun-world. Around the point of impact the Sun-world glowed yellow-white; the stain of light spread until it covered perhaps a quarter of the globe’s huge area.

The curtain flickered, fragmented, faded; the red beam flicked off, as if doused.

Sura lowered her hands cautiously. “Is it over?”

“I think so.”

“What happened?”

Erwal changed the panel view to look out over the blocky building-world landscape, now brightly lit by the revived Sunworld. “I don’t know. It’s worked, whatever it was. We’re no longer rising.”

Sura stared up at the panel. “But — look…”

The world was no longer dead.

Lights flickered on across the landscape; clear yellow or blue radiance poured from the doorways of the abandoned structures. Now some of the buildings began to rise from the ground, and Erwal was reminded of flowers which seek the Sun; soon the buildings were straining up at the Sun-world, their cables singing taut, and amphitheaters reached out like open palms; and for a moment she saw the machine-world as its builders must have intended it: as a place of vibrant power and industry.

Erwal felt her throat constricting. Why, she thought, it is beautiful after all. I just wasn’t seeing it right.

But already the revived Sun-world light was fading; the building sank uncertainly to the ground, their interior illumination cooling to darkness.

It had lasted no more than a minute.

Sura said, “I think I’d like to go home now.”

“Yes.”

The ship spread its wings over the machine-world for the last time.

During his studies on the Sugar Lump Paul had learned of the history of the Qax. Paul’s captor, constructed of the Virtual particle sets of the seething vacuum, resembled its forebears — the odd, vast creatures who had spawned as constructs of convection cells in a boiling ocean — as a laser rifle resembles a piece of chipped stone. But it could trace its consciousness back to that boiling sea.

And it remembered the human, Jim Bolder, who had once caused the Qax sun to nova.

Paul, his awareness tightly focused on the Jovian’s roiling storms, began to piece together an understanding of the future plans of the Qax.

Unlike most baryonic species the Qax would be able to coexist with the dark matter photino birds. The Qax inhabited the turbulent, twilit depths of low-energy systems. It would not matter to the Jovian’s Qax parasite, for example, if, thanks to the photino birds, its host’s distant star failed to shine; as long as the planet turned and its inner core glowed with heat the Qax could survive.

So the Qax might become the last baryonic inhabitants of the Universe.

Eventually, though, the energy sources which fueled the turbulence sustaining the Qax would everywhere run dry. This Jovian would grow cold, exhausted by its own weather. Then, at last, it would be time for the Qax to leave. There would be a second Qax exodus, on a far vaster scale than the first, as the race followed the Xeelee through their Ring to a fresh cosmos. Paul speculated wildly on the container vessel which could store a consciousness based on the rhythms of galactic orbits…

But the Qax weren’t yet troubled by such problems. They were aware that the photino birds’ actions had doomed the Ring. The Ring would close eventually: having won the Universe the photino birds were sealing themselves into it. But, the Qax judged, there was plenty of time.

And besides, the Qax had another project to complete. A loose end.

The final destruction of humanity.

The Qax had waited through the humans’ brief, vainglorious morning as they grew to dominate the species around them — only to waste their strength in the absurd assaults on the Xeelee. Eventually the Xeelee had gently sealed the majority of the surviving humans in the box-world beyond the Eight Rooms. Some small colonies of people in various forms had survived, however, and the Qax had watched as, one by one, these remnants dwindled and expired.

Paul suspected that the Qax had not been reluctant to speed this process.

Now the Universe seemed at last empty of humans. But after the actions of Jim Bolder the Qax judged that even a small group of humans represented a risk to the long-term survival of the Qax. So the Qax would ensure that humans would never again rise to threaten the species with their unpredictable plans.

They waited.

Eventually Teal had appeared in the Eighth Room.

Paul wondered wistfully why the Qax had not been disturbed when the antiXeelee had revived Paul himself; slowly he came to understand that he was not sufficiently human for the Qax to recognize him, and only by his association with the villagers had they come to learn what he was.