The Librarian enters the room unannounced and alone. It takes a few minutes for this pair, like figures in a broken mirror, to realize that she has arrived.

“Beloved!” she says, stepping forward, arms out, and for a moment, her face is wreathed with hope. Her joy is radiant. And then it fades. The two Didacts observe her with very different expressions. What should have been heartfelt reunion feels painful and incomplete.

“Did you hear my blasphemy, wife?” the Ur-Didact grumbles, looking away. “Do I discredit your belief in the Mantle?”

“It is not ours to receive, not theirs to give, not now,” she says. “Tell me, my husband.” She looks long and hard at the Ur-Didact. “Is this anger, this hatred for your enemies, what stands between us and the joy of reunion?”

The Ur-Didact moves toward his wife with a strangely dominant delicacy, his gaze fixed on her. She regards him with cautious fascination.

“Humans drowned out entire civilizations with the Flood,” he says. “They brought this horrific parasite to our people. Had we acted quicker, had we taken what was rightfully ours, we could have cut off the infection at its source. Know this: the universe will now be turned star by star, world by world, organism by living thing, into even more of a tortured mockery than it already is. Look what it’s done to me!” He spreads wide his powerful arms, bowing his head, as if opening to her gentle fingers, her probing, deep-feeling examination.

Instinctively, she reaches toward him—but holds back at the last instant. He notes her reticence; it may be the final breaking strain on thousands of years of love.

“Everything it touches is afflicted with madness,” he cries out. “It has touched me. I am myself mad!”

The Librarian is stunned. She searches her husband’s features, but he turns aside.

His duplicate cannot convey what he feels. He stands mute before them.

DEPARTURE AND PURSUIT

The reuniting has not gone well.

The Ur-Didact has taken a sphinx to the other side of the planet, where, he says, monitors report a possible intruder. As the arrival of spore-carrying ships cannot be ruled out, he will carry out a direct inspection.

The IsoDidact has returned to orbit to ready their fastest remaining ship—the Audacity, ceded to the Librarian after her historic voyage.

When we depart, the entire planet will be super-cooled, then powered down. From any distance greater than a few dozen kilometers, it will resemble a rocky, frozen residue of recent battles, abandoned for years, stripped of all resources. When we depart, the entire planet will be super-cooled, then powered down. Perhaps this effort, though seemingly futile, will save Nomdagro.

On a parapet, monitors gather in long rows, like servants of old awaiting the departure of their mistress.