“And so,” Sally said, working her way through Nemoto’s thinking, “the Gaijin built the gateways. Right?”

“Oh, no,” Nemoto said gently. “The Gaijin are much too… primitive. They were limited to their system, as we are to ours. In their crude ram-jet flower-ships, exploring the rim of the system, they stumbled on a gateway — or perhaps they were guided to look there by others, as we have been by the Gaijin in turn.”

“If not the Gaijin, then who?” Maura asked.

“For now, that is unknowable.” Nemoto gazed at her clumsy apparatus, as if studying the possibilities it implied.

Sally Brind got to her feet and moved slowly around the cramped apartment, drifting dreamily in the low lunar gravity. “It takes years for a signal, even a teleport signal, to travel between the stars. This must mean that nobody out there has developed faster-than-light technology. No warp drives, no wormholes. Kind of low tech, don’t you think?”

“In such a galaxy, processes — cultural contacts, conflicts — will take decades, at least, to unfold,” Nemoto said. “If Malenfant is heading to a star, it will take years for his signal to get there, more years before we could ever know what became of him.”

“And so,” Maura said dryly, “what must we do in the meantime?”

Nemoto smiled, her cheekbones sharp. “Why, nothing. Only wait. And try not to die.”

In the silent years that followed, Maura Della often thought of Malenfant.

Where was Malenfant?

Even if Nemoto was right, with his body destroyed — as the detailed information about the contents and processes of his body and brain shot toward the stars — where was his soul? Didit ride the putative Gaijin laser beam with him? Was it already dispersed?

And would the thing that would be reconstructed from that signal actually be Malenfant, or just some subtle copy?

Still, in all this obscure physics there was a distinct human triumph. Malenfant had found this mysterious gateway. And passed through. She remembered the resentment she had felt while watching the Gaijin’s calm appropriation of Solar System resources in the asteroid belt, their easy taking of the Bruno. Now Malenfant had fired himself back through the transport system the Gaijin themselves had used, back to the nest of the Gaijin, and Maura felt a stab of savage satisfaction.

Hey, Gaijin. You have mail…

But these issues weren’t for Maura.

She had done her best to use Nemoto’s insights and other inputs to rouse minds, to shape policy. But the time had come for her to retire, to drive out of the Beltway at last. She went home, to a small town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, her old state, the heart of the Midwest.

Her influence was ended. Too damn old.

I don’t have decades left; I don’t have the strength to stay alive, waiting, like Nemoto, while the universe ponderously unfolds; for me, the story ends here. You’ll just have to get along by yourself, Malenfant.

Godspeed, Godspeed.

Chapter 7

Reception

The blue light faded.

He realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out, gasping; his chest ached. He was grasping the MMU hand controllers compulsively. He flexed his hands; the gloves were stiff.

The blue artifact was all around him, inert once more. He couldn’t see any difference; the Sun’s light glimmered from its polished surface, casting double shadows—

Double?

He looked up, to the Sun, and flipped up his gold visor.

The Sun seemed a little brighter, a strong yellow-white. And it was a double pinprick now, two jewels on a setting of velvet. The light was actually so bright it hurt his eyes, and when he looked away there were tiny double spots on his retina, bright yellow against red mist.

It wasn’t the Sun, of course. It was a binary star system. There was a misty lens-shaped disc around the twin stars: a cloud of planetary material, asteroids, comets — a complex inner system, illuminated by double starlight. Even from here, just from that smudge of diffuse light, he could see this was a busy, crowded place.

He worked his controller and swiveled. Beyond the gate, the Perry was gone.

No. Not gone. Just parked a few light-years away, is all.

He had no idea how the artifact had worked its simple miracle. Nor, frankly, did he care. It was a gateway — and it had worked, and had taken him to the stars.

Yes, but where the hell, Malenfant?

He looked around the sky. The stars were a rich carpet, overwhelming the familiar constellations.

After some searching he found Orion’s belt, and the rest of that great constellation. The hunter looked unchanged, as far as he could see. Orion’s stars were scattered through a volume of space a thousand light years deep, and the nearest of them — Betelgeuse, or maybe Bellatrix, he couldn’t recall — was no closer than five hundred light-years from the Sun.

That told him something. If you moved across interstellar distances your viewpoint would shift so much that the constellation patterns would distort, the lamps scattered through the sky swimming past each other like the lights of an approaching harbor. He couldn’t have come far, then — not on the scale of the distances to Orion’s giant Suns. A handful of light years, no more.

And, given that, he knew where he was. There was only one system like this — two Sol-like stars, bound close together — in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood. This was indeed Alpha Centauri, no more remote from Sol than a mere four light-years plus change. Just as he had expected.

Alpha Centauri: the dream of centuries, the first port of call beyond Pluto’s realm — a name that had resonated through a hundred starship studies, a thousand dreams. And here he was, by God. He felt his mouth stretch wide in a grin of triumph.

He blipped his thrusters and swiveled, searching the sky until he found another constellation: a neat, unmistakable W shape picked out by five bright stars. It was Cassiopeia, familiar from his boyhood astronomy jags. But now there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag. He knew what that new star must be, too.

Suspended in immensity, here at the rim of the Alpha Centauri system, Malenfant raised his visor and looked back at the Sun.

The Sun is a star — just a star. Giordano Bruno was right after all, he thought.

But if it took light four years to get here, it had surely taken him at least as long, however the portal worked. Suddenly I am four years into the future. And, even if I was to step home now — assuming that was possible — it would be another four years before I could feel the heat of the Sun again.

How strange, he thought, and he felt subtly cold.

Movement, just ahead of him. He rotated again.

It was a spider robot like the one he had seen on the other side of the portal. There was a puff of what looked like reaction-control engines, little sprays of crystals that glittered in the remote double light. Crude technology, he thought, making assessments automatically. It was heading toward the gate, its limbs writhing stiffly.

It seemed to spot him.

It stopped dead, in another flurry of crystals, a good distance away, perhaps a kilometer. But distances in space were notoriously hard to estimate, and he had no true idea of the robot’s size.

Those articulated limbs were still writhing. Its form was complex, shifting — obviously functional, adaptable to a range of tasks in zero gravity. But overall he saw that the limbs picked out something like a W shape, like the Cassiopeia constellation, centered on a dodecahedral core. He had no idea what it was doing. Perhaps it was studying him. He could barely see it, actually; the device was just an outline in Alpha Centauri light.