They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.

As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of the Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habitats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.

Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.

But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here. And even natural hazards like Earth’s naturally occurring radioactivity in soil and stone could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.

And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.

The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree’s own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the Sun itself flickered and died.

There was more than one Tree.

In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and spidery airborne tendrils, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.

The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travelers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins’ motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity — maybe even just politeness.

The Bad Hair Day twins’ variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.

“Where did you travel?” they asked.

“I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn’t always tell. I kind of bounced around.”

“What did you find?”

He thought about that. “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand much.”

It was true. But now — just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave — so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he’d gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.

There were no other travelers here.

He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artifacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. “You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in ’93 — 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then…”

The twins would listen politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.

If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?

He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of A.D. 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their specialty, which was a limited — if very advanced — medicine. It was… disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year A.D. 1000?

He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.

He would have to find out for himself.

He still had the softscreenlike sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multispectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.

Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.

Earth was indeed depopulated.

There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn’t even see signs of large-scale agriculture.

Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.

In A.D. 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks, and parking lots, but they were green rectangles covered with mosses, lichens, and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves, deer, feral pigs. And there were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock.

Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multilane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn’t just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semisentient highway over which no car had traveled for centuries.

Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.

When Malenfant had left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had had a chance to have children together. But he’d had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.

Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.

For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.