Then, even as she watched, she saw him come to a decision, expressed purely through his interaction with the model. Rove looked at the whole tangled structure, Kay’s grand plan and his own parasitic addendum, and took a step back. Pragmatically, probably even reluctantly, Rove packed up his own subversions and decided to back the home team—rather than trying to short-sell the universe. Alison wouldn’t have credited it, but it seemed that even a man like Rove could decide saving everything was more important than a narrower chance at a more singular victory. Glancing at him, she had the impression of a weird release of pressure, as though his ambitions had cramped him out of shape for years and now he was freed to be someone else.

Lee Pryor held her hand up now, looking profoundly embarrassed to be the focus of attention.

“What about the thing?” she asked. “What does it want?”

Kay frowned. “The thing? Oh, the Ediacaran, the pancreator, whatever you want to call the sod. We don’t know that it wants anything. We don’t know why it’s done what it’s done, to be honest. I mean, possibly it all just happened as a side effect of some other purpose we can’t even guess at.” Her manic grin was back, wider than ever, and Alison wondered if Cam had been dispensing some pharmaceuticals for her as well. “So, best answer to your question: no fucking idea, love, none at all.”

The time it took to save the universe was approximately a week. This was nonetheless a lot of time to be cooped up inside an arthropod. Three days in, Cam fabricated some breathing gear, allowing for excursions outside. However, Alison found that after the initial strangeness wore off, there was precious little diversion to be found out there. She and Julian went on a hike for hours across the blighted landscape, treading across the folds and convolutions of the planet’s brain, as Cam sailed overhead like a vast and ghastly kite. Aside from a faint sighing of wind and the unpleasant squish of their footsteps, there was no sound. Nothing moved in their sight. They were in a world that had been held in stasis for half a billion years by the will of the conglomerate organism that had evolved on it. All its activity was focused elsewhere, unseen, imposing pressure on the universe through a means that owed nothing to limbs or organs as humans might understand them. Even the Posticthyans could offer no insight. It was simultaneously a living and a dead world—and Alison knew the scales were tilting towards the latter.