Cee recognized none of this. Sometime later, Mucel and Wigmund with books in general repose and escaping privacy in Recreation. Wigmund: "Years ago I came up with this proof against the possibility of time travel: no one from the future has ever paid me a visit. Not only would there be family interest, what with everyone it seems building family trees, but I am an excellent spokesman for my day and age. I was a factor in the design of our engines, Hedersett engines. I've been published. The future is infinite, so there's been plenty of opportunity." Pause. "Now ... I am of course aware of the flaw in that reasoning."

Mucel was back reading, so this was Cee's prompt. Cee: "What's that?"

"We didn't last long enough to invent time travel."

Cee plumbed the sonants and spaces between. Wigmund had animated his performance with unmanaged colors -- inquiry, surety, indifference -- that would not bind. He was publicly experimenting with new feelings, then, which Cee found mildly offensive.

But then it was Burch, in his small office. "Why'd he do it?"

"I don't know."

"He didn't leave a note?"

"Nothing but notes, actually."

Burch stood and quietly confronted him, and they waited. When he spoke again his voice was flat a half step. "Brownlee liked to torment me with puzzles." Not just you. "One of his favorites was: why is there something instead of nothing? Eventually I learned it's an old philosopher's gag. I had no answer so I acted like I didn't care, but it did interest me and I would mull it over. And suddenly the other day an answer comes to me. It goes like this: there's your nothing, Brownlee. What are you asking now?"

Cee searched for the arch brow, the tone that signified. The words begged to be made ironical, but Burch gave them nothing, and they floated in Cee's ears without speaking to him.

Now Mucel, in a metal shop, where he'd sought a solitary corner, reading, tracing the words, his face an abandoned expanse, as it had been for a day or more; where, preposterously, a tear made its way. Cee: "Mucel?"

"Do you ever read a poem, Cee?" Voice a bit in tatters.

So it seemed now to Cee that the empty and impenetrable newness had caused the crew of the Mercia to succumb to a frailty of affections, frailty as with an organism in a formative stage. The fuel that informed their behaviors was both volatile and vaguely insipid. Possible responses for Cee lay within the narrow range of his design, and he went on a little lost. "Of course."

"Why?"

"When I'm asked to. That sort of thing."

"And what happens?"

He was referring to emotional reaction. Lately they were curious about it; as if, as the last repository of human emotions, they felt it was perhaps time to understand them. "Generally when I read something that I know is a poem I have an emotional reaction. I do my best."

"What's a poem?"

"By all accounts the meaning is left open."

"Anything, then? A contract? An instruction manual?"

"Probably not on purpose."

"If you don't know just tell me."

"Well, there's this approach. You know what you expect from a piece of verse. Read something and measure the affection made. If it's commensurate with ---"

"But that's not how you do it, is it?"

"Mucel, I'll guess what you're getting at. ---"

Mucel was called away, and walked out; Cee did what he wasn't supposed to do and reached into the reading and looked at it.

Brownlee's planner.

... We have neither luck nor prophecy. We cannot change the past. There are no ghosts or spirits; the dead are dead. ...

Alright. Anything can be a poem.

Scrope a day later. "Ever think about the past, Cee?"

"I used to, if I recall correctly, but not anymore. I'm kidding. Yes, of course. I enjoy it."

"Your thoughts?"

"No thoughts about the past. A loader has broken open a box of magnets in Supplies."

"Well, do me something and think about it now and report."

"Alright. The past is important. In fact, it's required."

"I never used to think about the past. I've already been there. Why would I read that book again? Accomplishes nothing. Now it's all I do." Because that's all we have left. "Someone directed my attention to this songbird at Academy and explained that it was endangered. Probably not going to make it. Overly particular about certain things, what it ate, where it slept. Which struck me as utterly absurd. Didn't it know what was happening? And I made something of a cause out of it. Anyway, here we are, and here I am completely forgetting what it looked like, its name and genus and species. Memory dutifully trying to remind." Scrope wasn't fragile well, faltering. "And ... what was it Bouchet said about after-life?"

"He said that if there's an after-life then life is nothing more than waiting in the right way."

"Right, but the next part."

He knew perfectly well. "He said that at the end, ask yourself how you advanced the Project."

"Right. How did I advance the Project. I sure as hell didn't do it by recollecting the name of a dead bird."

Cee could not glare or otherwise convey with his eyes. He could not brandish a wounded silence because it would sound the same as his other silences. For him it always came down to careful choice of words. "We started inventory. First thought: we should find a way to replenish our air. It's under our feet. There for the taking, no one would miss it. --"

An alarm tone. Cee: "Listening." An automated voice that he hated and hadn't the authority to silence redunded, "Message incoming." Now a confusion of other voices, three queries from around the Mercia. Scrope quickly across the corridor to Radio: "Everyone shut up." He sat down and put on an earpiece.

Burch and Wigmund at the door. Burch: "What." But Scrope was listening now, soft, eyes dull. Burch: "Let us hear," leaning as he put it on the overhead. A cold radio susurrance for a long second, then a radio silence for three, then again until it became a cadence. "What is that?"

Cee let Scrope say. "Twenty-three." Kilohertz. Wigmund reading: "High frequency. Twenty-three point three nine. Modulation would be ... upper side band? Upper side band." He coaxed the pots. "Not Earth. Out."

Scrope: "Pinpoint it." Wigmund tapped the screen, which showed a star chart. Virgin, Cup and Crow, perhaps a wisp of Coma Berenices. Scrope: "Identify it, Cee."

"I can't."

"Do it anyway."

"Cannot identify source." Computerese to keep things moving.

"Satellites." Cee: "No satellites."

"I mean long-ranging. Voyager." Cee: "Those aren't satellites. Anyway, long gone."

"Planets in that area?" Cee: "Not right now."

"Ideas." Cee: "Pulsars, magnetars and the like. I consulted the catalogue and there's no match, and anyway it doesn't sound right for that."

As the moment lost its immediacy it began to draw out and narrow; the thinking in it thinned and became ineffectual. The murmurs broke over the listeners and left them each divided: the murmurs perseverated like an admonition, demanding greater stores of interest; and they were empty like a lie, and off-putting -- a sibilant lie, repulsive. Mucel arrived for a bit, asked away, went back repairing. The cadence laid itself over the throb of their engines and kept their time.

Cee: "Hmm. Alright, about air. Our charge membranes and extractors have a lifespan, like anything. Even at reduced needs they'll need rebuilding in about three years, and we don't have a lot of odd fluorine lying around. Alright ... Mucel, please rejoin us in Radio. Thank you." When he spoke again they could hear him fight a tremulation. "I've been thinking about it. As with any puzzle, the first thing is to simplify. Clarify the parts." He looped the transmission for them ritardando until individuated notes of white noise emerged. "Listen." Of course. A light drumbeat, a summoning of sailors, for perhaps ten seconds before it was broken with gaps for another twenty prior to its silence. "We begin with 46 tones before a pause, then groupings of tones. The 46 direct us to an alphabet. There are more than you'd think. Hiragana and Katakana have 46 characters. Slovak. Eskayan, a language from the Pacific. There are old programming languages. Avestan script, which dates from Zarathustra. That would be interesting. No, turns out to be a surprise: Mars Pinyin."

Burch dropped down next to Scrope and put a finger on the monitor. "Everything you're saying, I want to see it right here." He would brutally crosscheck. Cee took down the star map and ran a transcript, including his words from just before. "Mars Pinyin -- Huoxing Pinyin -- wasn't around all that long. Developed for Long Reach. Used for all the uncoded machine text. It was regular Sixth Revised Pinyin plus two additional characters to accommodate their international guests. You people fiddling with your languages." For the people, these asides were a torture which wouldn't let them make a sound. "The individual groupings denote characters. First we hear a single tone. That's a B. Then 32 tones." He played it for them but there were no doubters. "Ang. Now notice: two pauses. Hard to hear. That's how Mars Pinyin tells that a diacritic comes next, one of a possible four. One tone. So Ang is High Level, and takes a macron. Next, 15 tones. Zh. 28 tones. U. Two pauses, four tones: U is High-Falling, and takes a grave accent. So, gentlemen, we have Bāngzhù. 'Help is coming.' "

From Scrope, two directives ("Request identification." Cee: "Jiàndìng. Have been doing." Scrope: "Ask when." Cee: "Will do."); Burch, consulting dictionaries and language primers, who would be cruel with the facts if he could, said nothing for a gaudy minute. Then a confluence of voices, swollen after a thaw, each offer earning ridicule, careful thought. Perhaps there was something wrong with the radio. That made it speak in pinyin. Surely the Chinese had established a distant installation which could not possibly have been secretly built and supplied for years. An elaborate scheme that had sister-ship Osburgh launched a month early on a day's notice didn't fool them for a moment. They tried to imagine old messages from Earth bouncing back at them now from crusts of space-time, and did not do well. Quantum mechanics was invoked, of course, to respectful nods and a topic change. Perhaps it was one of them at a practical joke; a quick look at present company established this as most preposterous of the lot. Cee provided points of clarity, daring little else; he boiled with calculations. Naturally the imperatives of doubt and emergency, the competing needs of their deep and reluctant disbelief, carried them from the mad to the fantastical. They were being watched by a stranger. The stranger had a familiar's way with words; who had also been a listener, then. Learned the language of the ascendant clan, conqueror of a world. The listener was also a protector.

They rested, walking up and down Brownlee's corridors, deferring to duties, numb in two ways. One way from the nothing that had come from their effort at a plan; the second from the thing that had come of it, wondrous and quite beyond them: they were not alone; and they were not alone.

A day later Mucel called a quorum. "I found this in Brownlee's planner. It's from just before he died. He knew something." Mucel played it and they heard him, calm and pleased with himself, his singsong and his monotone.

"The patterns of nature, drawing the ear and the eye, incited first learning. Interruptions in these patterns stirred original ontological inquiry: the macrophenomena of nature are the forgotten foundation of religion. And of course dedicated questions in reference to gods and their disposition eventually create science and all its answers.

"Two premises allow us to walk this path back to its beginning.

"Science believes that the universe hews to the Cyclic Model: matter and energy are drawn together into a single point -- a closed spherical space-time of zero radius -- which then explodes; repeat. Challenges to the theory -- including the monopole, horizon and flatness questions -- were resolved in recent decades by the discovery of the critical attractor, dark energy; thermodynamic issues were addressed by way of simple improvements in analytical rigor. Proven: our universe fluctuates between expanding and contracting states and always has done. This bears repeating. When did this cycle begin? It did not begin. How many times has it occurred? No number of times is possible. The cycle is the only phenomenon that can be safely said to both exist and to have never come into existence.

"And science abides by the truism that, given tools and time, the dead soil begets life, the molecule with the odd imperative, suddenly governed by Evolution, which commands that it become aware someday, causa sui, the self-actuating curiosity. Autogenesis first requires, naturally, the absence of life, one life being the enemy of the next. Beyond this, there are several competing and complementary models. Simplest: a pool of water -- critical biosolvent -- and ammonia and phosphoric salts, provisioned with light, warmth, the occasional spark to keep things going. Or perhaps silicate clays formed the vessel. The Lambert-Hornbach hypothesis credits the work of iron and sulfur. It hardly matters. The wet soil makes the replicating molecule that in time ascertains that beginning and seeks to forestall its end.

"If the second premise is true -- if earth makes life makes sapient life, as surely as the movements of a timepiece -- then it is also true that this sapient life will discover the first premise and do what it possibly can to make it untrue.

"So an earlier universe carried a sapient race. Speculations as to their physical form -- or if the word 'race' is appropriate for what we might recognize as a fungus, a global colony of unspeciated polyps, or any organism so evolved as to have shed its corporeal shell -- have no meaning and at any rate are unnecessary, because what concerns us is their predilection, about which we know all we need to: our sapients carried the imperative of self-protection. Life not so endowed doesn't last a lazy day.

"Let's make them 15 billion years old. They've outgrown disease, folly and rotten luck, and more than once they've fled a dying sun. Now consider their technologies: they are incomprehensible to us. Our own brilliant skills are those of a genus only fully scientific for a thousand years. The sapients are at a further remove from us than we are from the bacteria in our skin. Telekinetic movement through the heavens, complete mastery over matter ... we can't imagine. We can't even know what kind of imagination could.

"For them the second part of the cycle has begun, the great concordance, wherein we are all drawn together, disassembled, made ready to be sent out again refreshed. Bland gravity -- insidious, impossible to ignore -- is the engine, perhaps in the form of a black hole at the center of things, whose appetite can only grow. And there's been guesswork about quantum bridges, and orbifold planes or membranes have been concocted with great promise. We don't know, but they would've known. And invested every ounce of their energy, wisdom and fear. And when the time comes they decamp into the exoskeletons of well-stocked moons which they've furnished with propulsion perhaps, it doesn't matter, the point is they miscalculate, and find themselves pressed into the general blend, and bequeath to the future not a footprint or a strand, not an echo, not a remembered word. If they ever existed, now they never existed.

"All of this changes history, of course -- in the sense that history is stripped of its lessons and bleached clean -- and we begin again. At the end our new sapients float safely in a bubble of pan-dimensional flux or something, it doesn't matter, they miscalculate: the singularity takes a good long rest, ten to the fortieth power years, a trice from its perspective, where time has stopped. And atop whatever other travails this wait imposes on our survivors, the very protons that compose them crumble from exhaustion, becoming positrons and pions and eventually photons of gamma radiation. Perhaps we've seen these old ghosts.

"But nothingness is impossible. So it has a quiddity, made of impossible parts. And at long last they come upon a common cause and burst into being and we begin again. At the end our next sapients not only nest in a stasis cocoon but have arranged for a tuned collapsar to make its way into the singularity as a way of getting things going. And it works, a brilliancy for the ages. One miscalculation: the new universe is principally anti-matter; the numerical ratio of the proton's mass to that of the electron is no longer 1,836 but is, shockingly, now nearly 2,000; Planck's constant is nowhere to be found; or pi is a whole number, it doesn't matter, but it's interesting to think of their demise, and how it would've fascinated their scientists.

"More beginnings, of which there are no end. And we continue to begin and end until they come to a point: until our sapients are good enough to get it right. It's not a matter of lessons learned, since in each case the aspirants start with nothing, and fancy themselves the first. It's a matter of the machinery of the natural realm -- Nature, which experiments without rest until better ways are made -- which is another way of saying it's a matter of time. That which can happen will happen, given time, which is what there is the most of.

"So in regard to the ontological query as to the existence of gods: how could there not be gods? Time demands it.

"Now we speculate, which can become something of a game. Would they have seeded their new universe with places - planets and moons -- whose physical qualities comported with their needs? We can no more explain why they might do something than we can how, but let's say yes, of course. Would they have sown life into these lands? Again, a guess here can have no predictive value. But if they had, they might've done so for the same reason that would make us important to them even if they hadn't: entertainment.

"I write this because I am drawn to an interruption in the pattern: the curiosity that turns at the perfect speed in the perfect orbit around the perfect star. The gift of an iron core. Washed by water. This is written in consideration of Earth, suspiciously suited for the formation and propagation of life."

Mucel: "I think --"

Scrope: "Fine." He stood and took a vast breath. Scrope could monopolize the air. "Thanks for the catlap. Evidently it takes a gone man to tell us how it goes." Off he went.