They escorted the young man to the front yard, where remotes had finished the unloading and were now tracting back into their holds in the craft’s underside. Ram Olmy boarded and the craft rose quickly, spinning about to head west against the fading skyglow.

Karen put her arm around him and kissed his cheek. “Well said.”

“He seems to be a good fellow,” Lanier said. “Still, he’s one of them. Heart and soul.”

“His father’s son, more than his mother’s.”

Lanier kissed the top of her head. Twilight was blending into night. He looked up expectantly and shivered. “What magic is the old wizard going to work this evening?” “I’ll bring out the blankets,” Karen said. “And the heater.”

For a moment, standing alone in the yard with the stars coming out above him, Lanier did not know whether it was good or horrible to be alive. He could not stop the gooseflesh from rising on his arms. This is real, he reminded himself. I’m awake.

Soon, Korzenowski—and perhaps a part of Patricia Vasquez—would be playing with the ghosts of universes. Karen returned and they prepared a place on the grass.

“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” she said softly. “They’re bastards, but they’re brilliant bastards.”

Lanier nodded, clutching her hand.

“I love you,” he said, tears coming to his eyes.

She lay her head against his shoulder.

Early the next morning, on his notepad, Lanier wrote: We saw the point of Thistledown low to the northwest, soft and ill-defined. The night was warm and my old bones did not ache; my mind is more clear than it’s been in recent memory, shockingly clear. I had my Karen lying next to me. We were among the few on Earth who knew what to expect this evening—or did we?

We owe them so much, these determined angels, our distant children. A lump came to my throat, simply watching the Thistledown—the Stone—ascend a few degrees. I feared for them. What if they made a mistake and destroyed themselves? What if Mirsky’s gods at the end of time decide to intervene? Where are we then?

Straight beams of clear white light fanned out from the Stone and crossed three quarters of the sky, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space, pointing away from Earth. I do not know what they were; not light alone, surely, for lasers or some similar phenomenon could only be reflected by dust, and there is not so much dust in space. We sat almost as ignorant as savages. The lines of light faded abruptly, and for a moment there was nothing but the stars and the Stone, brighter now, higher in the northwest. I thought perhaps Korzenowski had thrown a rough sketch across the heavens, and this was all we would see.