Eventually the comparatively thin shells of ice over the magma — the ancient ammonia oceans — melted, exposing the primal seas once more. Ammonia and water vapor enriched the air and boosted the greenhouse effect still further.

It got warm.

The remnants of ancient biologies stirred. A story of life, interrupted billions of years earlier, was able to resume.

For a while. But it was a life which would not have long to flourish.

Soon, the sun neared the end of its stable Main Sequence lifetime; it began its final, deadly bloom.

When the sun’s core hydrogen was exhausted, the fusion fire there dimmed. For ten million years the core contracted. Then a shell of hydrogen outside the core started to burn. That started the expansion of the outer layers.

The sun grew gigantic, its surface billowing towards what was left of the inner planets. Confronted by the huge face of the sun, Earth’s surface temperature reached three thousand degrees, only a little less than the surface of the expanding sun.

Life on Titan shrivelled, baked, as even the water ice bedrock began to melt.

…Like a desiccated dragonfly corpse adrift on a breeze, Voyager One circled the heart of the Galaxy.

At last the slow sublimation of metal caused the aluminum structure to weaken to the point where its ten-sided framework collapsed. The fragments of the spacecraft — instrument booms and power generator, pitted and tarnished, metal walls reduced to a paper thickness — drifted away from each other. The directional antenna, as thin as a dried autumn leaf, crumbled away from the curving spars that supported it, so that the ruin of the spacecraft was surrounded by a cloud of glittering aluminum dust.

Voyager was a fragment of American technology, a thing of metal dug from the vanished Earth, some twenty thousand light years from the sun. It was the last human artifact in existence.

…Rosenberg was lying on his back.

His eyes were closed. He was warm, comfortable. He was aware of his body — his face, arms, legs were a tangible, solid, massy physical presence — but there was no EVA suit around him, no sleeping bag.

He seemed to be rising. As if he was in some huge elevator.

He opened his eyes.

He was in darkness. He could see only the fuzzy patterns, star-bursts and whorls, generated by the hard-wiring of his own nervous system.

He could hear nothing.

Maybe he was in some kind of sensory deprivation tank.

He tried to remember how he’d got here. He remembered Titan — the Cronos EVA, those damn carrots, Benacerraf nursing him back in Discovery…

I ought to be dead, he thought.

Was this some kind of hallucination? Was he still propped up in that lumpy Apollo couch in the hab module, wrapped in Beta-cloth, his senses failing as his body slowly fell apart?

He felt a stab of panic.

He reached up to his face. He felt his cheeks, the pressure of his hands, the bones of his nose.

His cheeks were smooth. Free of stubble. And when he ran his palms up over his face, there wasn’t a hair on his head: no eyebrows, no eyelashes.

He reached down to his groin. He was naked. His hands cupped his genitals, warm lumps of flesh. No pubic hair.

He jammed a finger up his left nostril. No hairs there, either.

Puzzling.

And, he thought, you’re moving pretty well for a guy in the last stages of Vitamin A poisoning, Rosenberg.

Anyhow, this was no hallucination. I can feel my balls, therefore I am.

He dropped his hands to his sides. His hands hit something. It was a soft, pliable floor of what felt like plastic. It seemed to have no temperature, neither hot nor cold.

He felt to left and right. The floor stretched under him. He could push his fingers an inch or so into the material before he reached the limits of pliability, where it became tough and hard.

Maybe he was in some kind of bubble.

He didn’t have enough data to work on. He ought to wait. Maybe he could sleep.

Sleep, right.

He tried to control his fear.

Be logical, Rosenberg. Whoever has brought you here, wherever here is, can’t mean you any harm.

He ought to separate the world into pieces he could understand. Dismiss the problems he could do nothing about.

Like, the air. Where was it coming from? How was it replenished? Was it poisoned?

Here’s my plan: don’t breathe, until we know more…

He had to accept the air. He had to accept the temperature, the living conditions.

Later, he would be hungry, thirsty. He would have to deal with those problems when he could.

Great logic. He found he’d cupped his hands over his genitals again. A primate reflex, he thought. I’m just a scared monkey, alone in the dark.

On impulse, he spoke. “Hey.”

He could hear his voice.

“Testing, one, two. How about that.” He clapped his hands. He heard no echo, just the dead sound of the clap itself. So, a little more data. This bubble, or rubber room, whatever, was anechoic…

Something changed.

There was a light above him, deep crimson, barely visible. The intensity varied as he moved his head from left to right.

Work it out, Rosenberg. That means the light is external to you. There’s something above, which is differentiated from what is below.

The light seemed to spread, as if across a flat surface. He thought he could see ripples, scattering oily highlights. Maybe he was rising up through some fluid, towards a meniscus.

He looked down at himself. He could see his body, emerging in the gathering light, chest and legs stretching away before him, his nipples dark against a hairless chest, a faint landscape of flesh.

He was bald, but healthy. No sign of the Vitamin A crap that had killed him.

…The light brightened. Suddenly he was approaching the surface. It was indeed a meniscus, the surface of some body of fluid, and he could see slow, fat ripples, streaks of some scummy deposit—

The surface broke, in a pulsing circle, directly above him. The fluid spilled down over the hull of his protective bubble.

He saw a sky. It was high and tall, and scattered with thin, ice-white cirrus clouds. There was a fat red sun — too big — near the zenith, bright enough to dazzle him, surrounded by a fine halo. Contrails criss-crossed the sky.

That sun really was too damn big, and the sky was a rich blue-green.

The fluid fell away. The chamber was dimly visible around him, like a soap bubble, in glimmerings of refracted light.

Rosenberg sat up.

All around him, beyond his bubble, a solid mass was breaking the liquid.

The surface was corrugated, and it glistened, deep green. And as it rose, he could see how the platform bulged upwards, a dome perhaps fifty yards across. His filmy bubble perched, squat, on the top of the corrugated dome, as if on the back of some immense turtle.

Rosenberg got to his knees. He pressed his face and hands flat against the warm surface of his bubble, and stared out.

The dome, still rising from the liquid, was an island in an oily sea that stretched to the horizon. The fluid wasn’t clear; it was overlaid by a purplish scum, frothing in places. There were a couple of pink-white ice floes, clustering amid the scum islands.

The air was clear, if green-tinged, and he could see thick, fat ripples proceeding in concentric circles away from the rising mass he rode. Further out there were waves — they looked gigantic, mounds of liquid maybe a hundred feet tall — and they drifted across the sea, driven by the prevailing winds.

He could see land.

Perhaps a mile from him, there was a shallow beach; and beyond that, a cliff, steep, grey-green and heavily eroded.