“What happened?” Madeleine asked.

“Starved to death.”

Malenfant went on, as if talking to himself. “They aren’t like us. They don’t glom onto a new idea so fast as we do—”

“Their minds are not receptive to memes,” Dorothy said. “They have no sense of self—”

“But,” Malenfant said, “the Gaijin are interested in us. Don’t know why, but they are. And creatures like us: religious types, folks who mount crusades and kill each other and even sacrifice their lives for an idea.”

Madeleine remembered the Chaera, orbiting their black-hole God, futilely worshiping it. Maybe Nemoto had been right; maybe it hadn’t been black-hole technology the Gaijin were interested in, but the Chaera themselves. But why?

Dorothy leaned forward. “Have the Gaijin ever talked about creatures like us? What becomes of us?”

“I gather we mostly wipe ourselves out. Or think ourselves to extinction. Memes against genes. That’s if the colonization wars don’t get us first.” He opened his rheumy eyes. “Earth, the Solar System, might be swept aside by the incoming colonists. It’s happened before, and will happen again. But it isn’t the whole story. It can’t be.”

Dorothy was nodding. “Equilibrium. Uniformity. Nemoto’s old arguments.”

Madeleine didn’t understand.

Malenfant smiled toothlessly at her. “Why does it have to be this way? That’s the question. Endless waves of exploitation and trashing, everybody getting driven back down to the level of pond life… You’d think somebody would learn better. What stops them all?

“If what stopped an expansion was war, you’d have to assume that there are no survivors of such a war — not a single race, not a single breeding population. Or, if intelligent species are trashed by eco collapse, you have to assume that every species inevitably destroys itself that way.

“You see the problem. We can think of a hundred ways a species might get itself into trouble. But whatever destructive process you come up with, it has to be one-hundred-percent effective. If a single species escapes the net… wham! It covers the Galaxy at near light speed.

“But we don’t see that. What we see is a Galaxy that fills up with squabbling races — and then blam. Some mechanism drives them all back down to the pond. There has to be something else, some other mechanism. Something that destroys them all. A reboot.”

“A Galaxy-wide sterilization,” Madeleine murmured.

“And,” Chaum said, “that explains Nemoto’s first-contact equilibrium.”

“Yeah,” Malenfant said. “That’s why they come limping around the Galaxy in dumb-ass ramscoops and teleport gates and the rest, time after time; that’s why nobody has figured out, for instance, how to bust light speed, or build a wormhole. Nobody lasted long enough. Nobody had the chance to get smart.”

Madeleine stood, stretching in the dense gravity of this Cannonball world. She looked out the window at the dismal, engineered sky.

Could it be true? Was there something out there even more ferocious than the world-shattering aliens whose traces humans had encountered over and over, even in their own Solar System? Some dragon that woke up every few hundred megayears and roared so loud it wiped the Galaxy clean of advanced life?

And how long before the dragon woke up again?

“You think the Gaijin know what it is?” Madeleine asked. “Are they trying to do something about it?”

“I don’t know,” Malenfant said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Madeleine growled. “If they are just as much victims as we are, why don’t they just tell us what they are doing?”

Malenfant closed his eyes, as if disappointed by the question. “We’re dealing with the alien here, Madeleine. They don’t see the universe the way we do — not at all. They have their own take on things, their own objectives. It’s amazing we can communicate at all when you think about it.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “they don’t want to go through a reboot.”

“No,” he conceded. “I don’t think they want that.”

“Perhaps this is the next step,” Dorothy said, “in the emergence of life and mind. Species working together, to save themselves. We need the Gaijin’s steely robotic patience, just as they need us, our humanity…”

“Our faith?” Madeleine asked gently.

“Perhaps.”

Malenfant laughed cynically. “If the Gaijin know, they aren’t telling me. They came to us for answers, remember.”

Madeleine shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Malenfant. Not from you. You’re special to the Gaijin, somehow. You were the first to come out and confront them, the human who’s spent longest with them.”

“And they saved your life,” Dorothy reminded him. “They brought us here, to save you. You were dying.”

“I’m still dying.”

“Somehow you’re important, Malenfant. You’re the key,” Madeleine said. Right there, right then, she had a powerful intuition that must be true.

But the key to what?

He held up skeletal hands, mocking. “You think they’re appointing me to save the Galaxy? Bullshit, with all respect.” He rubbed his eyes, lay on his side, and turned to face the lander’s silver wall. “I’m just an old fucker who doesn’t know when to quit.”

But maybe, Madeleine thought, that’s what the Gaijin cherish. Maybe they’ve been looking for somebody too stupid to starve to death — a little bit like that damn ass.

Dorothy said slowly, “What do you want, Malenfant?”

“Home,” he said abruptly. “I want to go home.”

Madeleine and Dorothy exchanged a glance.

Malenfant had been a long time away. He could return to the Solar System, to Earth, if he wished. But they both knew that for all of them, home no longer existed.

PART FOUR

Bad News from the Stars

A.D. 3256-3793

At the center of the Galaxy there was a cavity, blown clear by the ferocious wind from a monstrous black hole. The cavity was laced by gas and dust, particles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas crisscrossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself.

And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity — and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light-years long.

Stars like comets.

He exulted. I, Reid Malenfant, got to see this, the heart of the Galaxy itself, by God! He wished Cassiopeia were here, his companion during those endless Saddle Point jaunts to one star after another…

Again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

But the Gaijin were never our enemy, not really. They learned patience among the stars. They were just trying to figure it all out, step by step, in their own way.

But it took too long for us.

It was after all a long while before we could even see the rest of them, the great wave of colonizers and miners that followed the Gaijin, heading our way along the Galaxy’s spiral arm.

The wave of destruction.