“Yes. It’s likely to be the Flow stream from here to Terhathum. The model predicts it will collapse within the next six weeks.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But it’s probable.”

“How probable? Give me a percentage.”

“I’d say about eighty percent chance you’ll have the Hub–Terhathum collapse within six weeks. After that it’s hazy but there’s an almost one hundred percent chance within a year.”

“That’s the streams to Terhathum and back?”

Marce shook his head. “No. The Flow streams to a system and from a system are not actually related.” He caught the emperox’s look at this. “I know, that’s not a fact anyone’s brain is comfortable with, but it’s true. Our model has a prediction from the stream from Terhathum to Hub, but it’s very fuzzy because it’s further out in time. It could happen in as soon as thirty-eight months and as late as eighty-seven months from now. The second of those dates is when we expect the final streams to close.”

“What will be the last stream to close?”

“Right now our prediction models have the stream to End closing sometime between eighty and eighty-seven months from now.”

“You carry all these numbers in your head?” the emperox asked.

“Not all of them,” Marce confessed. “Just the ones I thought you would ask me about. I have fifteen minutes with you, ma’am. I wanted to be efficient.”

“Do you find it at all ironic that End has the first Flow stream to collapse, and also might have the last?”

“It’s not ironic, ma’am, it’s coincidental. But I’m happy it’s likely to be the case. I want to be able to go home.”

The emperox gave Marce a look. “You traveled for the better part of a year without knowing whether or not you’d get a meeting with me.”

“Begging your pardon, but I wasn’t expecting to have a meeting with you at all. I was expecting your father. My condolences to you, also, ma’am.”

“Thank you. What would you have done if I hadn’t decided to see you?”

“I imagine I would have presented our data to the physicists at the University of Hubfall and told them it was their problem to get the information out to whomever wanted to listen. Then I might have taken a couple of days to sightsee and then headed out on the first ship going to End.”

“Is that your plan now? To return to End immediately?”