“You aren’t thinking it through,” virtual Nemoto whispered. “The Chaera have eyes filled with salty water. They must have evolved on a world with oceans. They can’t have evolved here.”

“Then,” Madeleine snapped, “why are they here?”

“Because they had no place else to go,” Nemoto said. “They fled here — even modified themselves, perhaps. They huddled around an artifact left by an earlier wave of colonization. They knew that nobody would follow them to such a dangerous, unstable slum area as this.”

“They are refugees.”

“Yes. As, perhaps, we will become in the future.”

“Refugees from what?”

“From the resource wars,” Nemoto said. “From the hydrogen suffocation of their world. Like Polynesia.”

The core artifact trembled.

And Nemoto kept talking, talking. “This universe of ours is a place of limits, of cruel equations. The Galaxy must be full of light-speed cages like this, at most a few hundred light-years wide, traps for their exponentially growing populations. And then, after the ripped-up worlds have lain fallow, after recovery through the slow processes of geology and biology, it all begins again, a cycle of slash and burn, slash and burn… This is our future, Meacher: our future and our past. It is after all a peculiar kind of equilibrium: the contact, the ruinous exploitation, the crash, the multiple extinctions — over and over. And it is happening again, to us. The Gaijin are already eating their way through our asteroid belt. Now do you see what I’m fighting against?”

Madeleine remembered the burster, the slaughter of the star lichen fourteen times a second. She remembered Venus and Australia, the evidence of ancient wars even in the Solar System — the relics of a previous, long-burned-out colonization bubble.

Must it be like this?

Something in her rebelled. To hell with theories. The Chaera were real, and millions of them were about to die.

And there was — she realized, thinking quickly — something she could do about it.

“Oh, damn it… Ben. Help me. Go down to the FGB module. Get everything out of there you think we have to save.”

For long seconds, Ben thought it over. Then he nodded. “I’ll trust your instincts, Madeleine.”

“Good,” she said. “Now I have a little figuring to do.” She rushed to the instrument consoles.

Ben gathered their research materials: the biological and medical samples they’d taken from their bodies, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks, results of the astrophysical experiments they had run in the neighborhood of the black hole. There was little personal gear in here, as their sleeping compartments were in the Service Module. He pulled everything together in a spare sleeping bag, and hauled it all up into the Service Module.

Madeleine glanced down for the last time through the FGB module’s picture window, at smoky accretion-disc light. The flower-ship skimmed past the flank of “God”; the netting structure swarmed around the pulsing core.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

Ben pulled down the heavy hatch between the modules — it hadn’t been closed since the flower-ship had swept them up from the surface of Earth’s Moon — and dogged it tight.

Madeleine was running a hasty computer program. “Remember the drill for a pressure-hull breach?” she called.

“Of course. But—”

“Three, two, one.”

There was a clatter of pyrotechnic bolts, an abrupt jolt.

“I just severed the FGB,” she said. “The explosive decompression should fire it in the right direction. I hope. I didn’t have time to check my figures, or verify my aim—”

Bits of radiation spat out like javelins as the core began to open.

“What have you done, Meacher?” Nemoto thundered.

She saw the FGB module for one last instant, its battered, patched-up form silhouetted against the gigantic cheek of “God.” In its way it was a magnificent sight, she thought: a stubby twentieth-century human artifact orbiting a black hole, fifty-four light-years from Earth.

And then the core opened.

The FGB Module got the X-ray pulse right in the rear end. Droplets of metal splashed across space… But the massive Russian construction lasted, long enough to shield the Chaera worldlets.

Just as Madeleine had intended.

The core closed; the surface of the net smoothed over. The slowly cooling stump of the FGB module drifted around the curve of the hole. Madeleine saluted it silently.

“The journey back is going to be cramped,” Ben said dryly.

The Saddle Point gateway hung before them, anonymous, eternal, indistinguishable from its copies in the Solar System, visible only by the reflected light of the accretion disc.

“You saved a world, Madeleine,” Ben said.

“But nobody asked you to,” virtual Nemoto said, her voice tinny. “You’re a meddler. Sentimental. You always were. The Chaera are still protesting. ‘Why did you hide God from us?’…”

Ben shrugged. “God is still there. I think all Madeleine has done is provide the Chaera with a little more time to consider how much perfection they really want to achieve.”

“Meacher, you’re such a fool,” Nemoto said.

Perhaps she was. But she knew that what she was learning — the dismal, stupid secret of the universe — would not leave her. And she wondered what she would find, when she reached home this time.

The blue glow of transition flooded over them, and there was an instant of searing, welcoming pain.

Chapter 17

Lessons

World after world after world.

He saw worlds something like Earth, but with oceans of ammonia or sulphuric acid or hydrocarbons, airs of neon or nitrogen or carbon monoxide. All of them alive, of course, one way or another.

But such relatively Earthlike planets turned out to be the exception.

He was shown a giant world closely orbiting a star called 70 Virginis. This world was a cloudy ball six times the mass of Jupiter. The Gaijin believed there were creatures living in those clouds: immense, whale-like beings feeding off the organics created in the air by the central star’s radiation. But colonists had visited here, long ago. At one pole of the planet there was what appeared to be an immense mining installation, perhaps there to extract organics or some other valuable volatile like helium-3. The installation was desolate, apparently scarred by battle.

Close to a star called Upsilon Andromedae, forty-nine light-years from Earth, he found a planet with Jupiter’s mass orbiting closer than Mercury to its Sun. It had been stripped of its cloud decks by the Sun’s heat, leaving an immense rocky ball with canyons deep enough to swallow Earth’s Moon. Malenfant saw creatures crawling through those deep shadows, immense beetlelike beings. They were protected from the Sun’s heat by tough carapaces and had legs like tree trunks strong enough to lift them against the ferocious gravity. Perhaps they fed off volatiles trapped in the eternal shadows, or seeping from the planet’s deep interior. Here the battles seemed to have been fought out over the higher ground; Malenfant saw a plain littered with the wreckage of starships.

Not far from the star Procyon there was a nomadic world, a world without a Sun, hurled by some random gravitational accident away from its parent star. It was in utter darkness, of course: a black ball swimming alone through space. But it was a big planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere; it warmed itself with the dwindling heat of the radioactive elements in its core, with volcanoes and earthquakes and tectonic shifts. Thus, under a lightless sky, there were oceans of liquid water — and in their depths life swarmed, feeding off minerals from the deeper hot rocks, not unlike the deep-sea animals that clustered around volcanic vents in Earth’s seas. Here, though, life was doomed, for the world’s core was inexorably cooling as the heat of its formation was lost.