They had occupied Earth simply because it was so easy — because they could.

The only law governing the squabbling junior races of the Galaxy was, Lieserl realized, the iron rule of economics. The Qax enslaved mankind simply because it was an economically valid proposition.

They had to learn the techniques of oppression from humans themselves. Fortunately for the Qax, human history wasn’t short of object lessons.

The wormhole station maintaining contact with Lieserl was abandoned, once again, during the Qax occupation.

Finally the Qax were overthrown. The details hadn’t been clear to Lieserl; it was something to do with a man named Jim Bolder, and an unlikely flight in a stolen Xeelee derelict craft, to the site of the Xeelee’s greatest project: the Ring…

This was the first time Lieserl had heard of the Ring.

After the overthrow, once more humans returned to the Sun, and restored contact with the aging, increasingly incongruous artifact that contained Lieserl.

This time, Lieserl was shocked by the humans who greeted her.

The Qax, during the occupation, had withdrawn Anti-Senescence technology. Death, illness, had returned to the worlds of mankind. It hadn’t taken long for toil and disease to erase most of the old immortals — some of whom had still remembered the days before the Squeem, even — and, within a few generations, humans had forgotten much of their past.

The discontinuity in human culture after the Qax was immeasurably greater than that arising from the Squeem occupation. The new people who emerged from the Qax era — and who now peered out of sketchy images at Lieserl in her cocoon of Solar plasma — seemed alien to her, with their shaven heads and gaunt, fanatical expressions.

Expansion had begun again, but this time fueled by a hard-edged determination. Never again would humanity be made to serve some alien power. Lieserl in her whale-dream, watching centuries flicker by in fragments of image and speech, saw humans erupt out of their systems once more. A new period began — a period called the Assimilation.

During the Assimilation, humans — aggressively and deliberately — absorbed the resources and technologies of other species.

Human culture evolved rapidly in this period. The link with Lieserl was maintained, but with increasingly long interruptions. The motivation of these remote humans seemed to be a brand of hostile curiosity; she saw only calculation in the faces presented to her. She was seen, she suspected, only as another resource to be exploited for the continuing, endless expansion of mankind.

Soon — astonishingly quickly — humans became the dominant of the junior races. Humanity’s growth in power and influence grew exponentially.

At last, only the Xeelee themselves were more potent than mankind… And the legend of the Xeelee’s achievements — the construction material, the manipulation of space and time, the Ring itself — grew into a deep-rooted mythology.

Then, for the last time, her wormhole telemetry link was shut down.

Drifting through her endless, unchanging ocean of plasma, she felt a distant twinge of regret — a feeling that soon dispersed into the peaceful, numb silence around her.

Humans had become alien to her. She was better off without them.

The birds must have some lifecycle, she thought; a circle of birth and life and death, much like every baryonic creature. Individual photino birds moved past her too rapidly to follow; but still, she studied them carefully, and was rewarded with glimpses — she thought — of growth.

Eventually she saw a bird reproduce.

She could see there was something unusual about this bird, even as it approached. The bird was fat, swollen with proton heat-energy. It seemed somehow more solid — more real, to Lieserl’s baryonic senses — than its neighbors.

The bird shuddered — once, twice — its lenticular rim quivering. She almost felt some empathy with the creature; it seemed in agony.

Abruptly — startling Lieserl — the bird shot away from its orbital path. It hovered for a moment — then it hurtled down into the heat-rich core of the Sun once more. Lieserl’s processors told her that the bird seemed a little less massive than before.

And it had left something behind.

Lieserl enhanced her senses as far as they would go. The mother-bird had left behind a copy of herself — a ghostly copy, rendered in clumps of higher density in the plasma proton-electron mix. It was a three-dimensional image of the mother, in baryonic matter. Within fractions of a second the clumps had started to disperse — but not before more photinos had clustered around the complex pattern of baryonic matter, rapidly plating over its internal structure.

The whole process took less than a second. At the end of it, a new photino bird, sleek and small, moved away from the site of its birth; the last traces of the higher-density baryonic material left behind by the mother bird drifted away.

Lieserl ran the image sequence over and over. As a method of reproduction, it was a long way from any Earth-bound form — even cloning. It was more like making a straight copy — an imprint from a three-dimensional mold, mediated by baryonic matter.

The newborn must be an almost exact copy of its parent — more exact than any clone, even. Presumably it carried a copy of its parent’s memories — even, perhaps, of its awareness…

And, presumably, a copy too of the generation before that — and before that, and…

Lieserl smiled. Each photino child must carry within it the soul of all of its grandmothers, a deep tree of awareness reaching right back to the dawn of the species.

And all mediated by baryonic matter, she thought wonderingly. The birds depended on the relative transparency of dark and baryonic matter to take their detailed, three-dimensional copies of themselves.

But this meant, she realized, that the photino birds could only breed in places where they could find high densities of baryonic matter. They could only breed in the hearts of stars.

She replayed the birth images, over and over.

There was something graceful, immensely appealing, about the photino birds, and she found herself warming to them. Spiritually she felt much closer to the birds, now, than to the hard-eyed humans of the Assimilation, beyond the Solar ocean.

She hoped her theory — that the birds were deliberately destroying the Sun — was wrong.

The return journey seemed much longer. Morrow felt angry, disappointed, weary. “I can’t understand how Milpitas reacted.” He shook his head. “It’s as if he didn’t even see you people…”

“Oh, I understand.” Uvarov twisted his head. “I understand. We are all too old, you see. In a way Milpitas was right about me; after all I share some of these flaws myself.” Uvarov’s voice, while still distorted by age, was calmer, more rational than at any point during the interview with Milpitas, Morrow thought.

Uvarov went on, “But at least I can recognize my limitations — the tunnel-vision of my age and condition. And, by recognizing it, deal with it.”

Spinner-of-Rope had been leading the way up the hundred-yard ramp to Deck One. Now, as she neared the top, she slowed. Her hand dropped, seemingly automatically, to her blowpipe and the little sack of feathered darts at her waist.

“What is it?” Morrow asked drily. “More problems with human body odor?”

She turned, her eyes huge behind her spectacles. “Not that. But something… Something’s wrong.”

Arrow Maker raised his face. “I can smell it, too.”

“Describe,” Uvarov snapped.

“Sharp. Smoky. A little like fire, but more intense…”

Uvarov grunted. He sounded somehow satisfied. “Cordite, probably.”

Arrow Maker looked blank. “What?”