And so she had crossed a thousand starry light-years to the little lonely sun which had been her home. She brought ships, machines, troops. Sol would have a military base sufficient to protect it. Climate engineers would drive the glacial winter of Earth back to its poles and begin the resettlement of the other planets. There would be schools, factories, civilization. Sol would have cause to remember its Empress.

Saunders came along because he couldn’t quite endure the thought of leaving Earth altogether without farewell. Vargor, grown ever more silent and moody, joined them, but otherwise the old comradeship of Brontothor was dissolving in the sudden fury of work and war and complexity which claimed them.

And so they stood again in the old ruined castle, Saunders and Taury, looking out at the night of Earth.

It was late, all others seemed to be asleep. Below the balcony, the black walls drooped dizzily to the gulf of night that was the main courtyard. Beyond it, a broken section of outer wall showed snow lying white and mystic under the moon. The stars were huge and frosty, flashing and glittering with cold crystal light above the looming pines, grandeur and arrogance and remoteness wheeling enormously across the silent sky. The moon rode high, its scarred old face the only familiarity from Saunders’ age, its argent radiance flooding down on the snow to shatter in a million splinters.

It was quiet, sound seemed to have frozen to death in the bitter windless cold, Saunders had stood alone, wrapped in furs with his breath shining ghostly from his nostrils, looking out on the silent winter world and thinking his own thoughts, He had heard a soft footfall and turned to see Taury approaching.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

She came out onto the balcony to stand beside him. The moonlight was white on her face, shimmering faintly from her eyes and hair, she seemed a dim goddess of the night.

“What were you thinking, Martin?” she asked after a while.

“Oh—I don’t know,” he said. “Just dreaming a little, I suppose. It’s a strange thought to me, to have left my own time forever and now to be leaving even my own world.”

She nodded gravely. “I know I feel the same way.” Her low voice dropped to a whisper. “I didn’t have to come back in person, you know. They need me more at Polaris. But I thought I deserved this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength. It was hard and bitter, yes, but I don’t think we’ll· have time for laughter anymore. When you work for a million stars, you don’t have a chance to see one peasant’s wrinkled face light with a deed of kindness you did, or hear him tell you what you did wrong—the world will all be strangers to us—”

For another moment, silence under the far cold stars, then, “Martin—I am so lonely now.”