The screen began showing them themselves, and everybody quietened down. Charen had taken information deposited by the Ediacaran, all their failed timelines, and reconstituted it into familiar images. Now they were all able to see themselves on TV—or whatever the equivalent was for the various sentients watching. This time, now Alison wasn’t receiving the information via the Ice Mind, she felt…echoes, perhaps. It seemed that when the “her” on screen said a thing or did a thing, a kindred string was plucked within her. A shadow of that alternate Alison’s emotional state bled through. Glancing at her fellow voyeurs, she guessed something similar was happening for them.

It all played out, branch by branch, the recursions of the world tree’s final shoots. Kay Amal Khan saw her schemes go south. Rove saw his own backstabbing come back at him. And there were other alternatives, too. In one, Cam and his people gave up and flew away into the vastness of space, abandoning everything, returning to solitary and unthinkable lives amongst the stars. In another, the rat kings came thundering through the interdimensional boundaries with their machines and their numbers, dead set on reclaiming Ertil for retributive justice, and the rent they tore in reality expanded until there was nothing left of anything. The branching universe came to this point of final collapse again and again, leaving only a singular cosmos containing a dead Earth somewhere within its uncaring vastness.

“We…” Julian said, sitting beside Alison. “We actually…” He couldn’t look at her, or at anyone else—given that the entire crew was now voyeur to his foibles. “Matchbox, I’m sorry. I don’t know how I could…”

“You could,” she said firmly. “That’s the point. We went there. It was a thing we might have done, that we didn’t in this timeline. Like all the other scenarios.”

“I don’t know how to process this,” he complained. “I’m feeling guilty over something I decided not to do. That’s…Actually, that’s damned unfair.”

Alison hugged him, one-armed, her eyes still on the glittering screen. “It’s okay, Spiker. We’re okay. Well, the whole of creation is falling apart…but you and me, we’re golden.” He didn’t answer, and she knew he would be thinking through the maze of it. At least part of him would be trying to work out whether—if the damage was already done—it gave him a moral get-out clause, should he fall again…That was the sly suggestion her own id had been making ever since.

From behind her, she heard Rove curse. “Lucas, you…killed me?”

“If you’re going to fire me, I fucking resign,” Lucas said flatly. “Jesus, that was your plan?”