Physically he seemed to be composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over spacetime. Soon it was as if he were flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

Throughout the Galaxy he found the works of man. He lingered over places and artifacts abandoned by history, dwelling as long over a drifting child’s toy as over some huge space-going fortress.

Everywhere he found relics of war. Ruined stars and worlds, squandered energy.

He found no people — no sentience — anywhere.

At first Michael labeled the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.

All about him were quantum wave functions.

They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced, and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.

The functions filled spacetime and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.

He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star’s gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons — or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves…

Soon there was little of the human left in him.

Then, at last, he was ready for the final step.

Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles through human form. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michael saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide.

He, the last man, need no longer cling to such outmoded comforts.

There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.

With the equivalent of a smile he relaxed. His awareness sparkled and subsided.

He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed the universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.

Time wore away, unmarked.

And then -

There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. A rope woven of bark trailed behind him, out of sight. The human was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

He stared out at the stars, astonished.

Michael’s extended awareness stirred. Something had changed…

History resumed.