She snapped, not unkindly, “Oh, what is it now, you old relic?”

“If this is your true intention — just be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Of yourself.” He had seen it before, he said: in Elect who had failed, or even mature Transcendents who, for reasons of health or injury, had been forced to withdraw from the great network of mind. “You never forget the Transcendence. You can’t. Not once you have experienced it, for it is an opening-up of your mind beyond the barriers of you. You may think you have put it aside, Alia, but it always lurks within you.”

“What are you saying, Reath?”

“If you are going to roam the stars, be sure it is yourself you are looking for — and not the Transcendence, for that is lost to you forever.”

On impulse she took his hands; they were warm, leathery. “You are a good friend, Reath. And if I am ever in trouble—”

“You will have me to turn to,” Reath said, smiling.

“I know.”

Leropa emerged from the flock of the undying. She approached Alia, as enclosed and enigmatic as ever. The others stood back, uncertain — afraid, Alia saw.

Leropa said: “The Transcendence is dying.”

Alia was shocked. Beside her Reath grunted, as if punched.

Leropa went on, “Oh, it’s not going to implode, today or tomorrow.”

Alia said, “But the grander aims, all that planning for infinity—”

“All that is lost. Perhaps the project was always flawed. We humans are a blighted sort. Too restless to be bucolic, too limited to become gods: perhaps it was always inevitable it would end like this. The Redemption was our best effort to resolve the paradox of an attempt to build a utopia on shifting bloodstained sands — an attempt to mold a god from the clay of humanity. But we succeeded only in magnifying the worst of us along with the best, all our atavistic cravings. And so the Transcendence will die — but at least we tried!

“This is a key time in human history, Alia, a high watermark of human ambition. We’ve been privileged to see it, I suppose. But now we must fall back.”

“And what about the undying? What will you do now?”

“Oh, we aren’t going anywhere. We will get on with things in our own patient way. We still have our ambitions, our plans — on timescales that transcend even the Transcendence, in a sense. And even without the power of the Transcendence behind us, the issues of the future remain to be resolved.”

“Issues?”

Leropa’s leathery, immobile face showed faint contempt. “Alia, you and your antique companion Poole indulged in some wonderful visions about the evolutionary future of mankind — the purpose of intelligence, all of that. Perhaps we can all find a safe place, where we can give up the intelligence we evolved to keep us alive out on the savannah, and subside comfortably back into non-sentience. Yes?”

“It happens. Like the seal-men of the water-world—”

“It’s a bucolic dream. But unfortunately the universe cares little for our wishes, or our dreams.”

Mankind sprawled across the Galaxy it had conquered, speciating, variegating, gradually reunifying. But the wider universe was empty of mankind. And in those vast spaces beyond, enemies circled, ancient and implacable.

Leropa said, “We are still out on the savannah of stars. And there are ferocious beasts out there — beasts we have driven out of the Galaxy altogether — but they are still there.And they are aware of us. Indeed they have a grudge.”

“They will come back,” Alia breathed.

“It’s inevitable. It might take another million years, but they will come.”

“And you undying are planning for war…”

“Earth will endure, you know. One day even all this, even the traces of the Transcendence itself, will be nothing but another layer in Earth’s stratified layer of rocks and fossils, just another incident in a long and mostly forgotten history. But we will still be here, taking care of things.” Her face was hard, set, her dry eyes like bits of stone.

She had never seemed more alien to Alia. And yet, she knew, this grim, relentless inhumanity might in the end be the saving of mankind.

“You frighten me, Leropa.”

Leropa grinned, open-mouthed, showing teeth as black as coal. “But I think you understand why we undying are necessary. Perhaps even we are an evolutionary recourse, do you think? But you aren’t going to take your immortality pill, are you? You aren’t going to join us.”

“No,” Alia said. She had no need of endless life, to become one of these sad old people. And she had no need of Transcendence. She would embrace her own humanity with two hands — that would be enough…

She staggered. The world pivoted around Alia, as if the wind had changed, or gravity had rippled.

Drea took her arm. “Alia? Are you all right?”

Reath asked anxiously, “Is it the Transcendence?”

Leropa said, “It is nearly over.”

Drea grabbed Alia’s hands. “Then we must hurry. There is something I want to show you while I can.

Come. Skim with me. Like when we were kids, before all this. ”

“Drea, I don’t think it’s the time for—”

“Just do it!” Laughing, she Skimmed, and Alia had no choice but to follow.

She found herself suspended over the head of Reath. His upturned face shone in the light, his mouth round with shock. Leropa had turned away, uninterested, already absorbed by her own long projects. They had traveled only a fraction of the height of the great exotic-matter cathedral.

Drea was still laughing. “Again!” she cried. “Three, two, one—”

Clutching each other, the sisters Skimmed again, and again.

I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping into the sea.

I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.

The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.

Alia told me stories of the far future, of her time. Her stories come back to me in dreams.

A half a million years from now, she said, children can Skim. It’s like teleporting, I think, “beaming,” but you don’t need any equipment, any fancy flashing lights and instrument panels and stern-jawed engineers. You just do it. You just decide you don’t want to be here anymore, you would rather be over there, and there you are. Literally.

Children are born this way. Babies learn to Skim before they can walk, or crawl, or climb. Teleporting babies: imagine that. Their parents have to chase them down with butterfly nets. And the problem of droppings is awesome. But nobody minds: on Alia’s starship, people like having a sky full of babies.

Older children use their Skimming in play. These are smart post-human super-kids who can teleport; their games are elaborate, endlessly complicated. One game Alia tried to describe to me sounded like an aerial combination of football and chess.

Adolescence comes late for kids in Alia’s time; you live a long life, and you get to enjoy a very long childhood. But when the hormones do kick in, the Skimming games get sexual, morphing seamlessly into elaborate courtship chases that can thread their way from one end of the ship to the other. The older adolescents are trained up for more formal dances, endlessly complicated quantum ballets.

And then, when you finally grow up, the ability to Skim atrophies.