At last it was all done, every iteration played out, and in not one of them had the universe been saved: not in the branches where Khan, Rove or someone else had actually put a plan into action; certainly not where they had been interrupted. After all the personal embarrassments and outrages had burned themselves out, that message remained. They were going to fail.

Kay, Ertil and Murther had a bit of a confab after that, with Auruthmer standing between them to translate. Everyone else drifted away for half an hour or so. And Alison sat with Julian and tried to be there for him, whilst also tapping back into the Ice Mind. Now she’d met Charen there, it felt as though she was stepping into the lair of a dragon—one that might or might not be hungry. Off Rove’s leash, she didn’t know quite what Charen wanted, save to preserve her communion with the Posticthyan entity. If there’d been a scenario where she could’ve let the rest of the timelines unravel but held on to that one, Alison had no doubt she’d have done it.

“That is correct.”

She jumped. That voice was in the room again; Julian was on his feet, glancing wildly around.

“I have modelled the logistics of preserving a single secondary timeline,” Charen continued. “It was part of the job Rove set me. I had thought it would be possible when I was subservient to him.” Charen’s voice lacked the contempt Alison would have expected, remaining graciously regal. Her Snow Queen avatar shimmered and danced briefly before fading. “Given what we have seen, I do not think it is possible now. The waveforms always collapse to zero. You cannot isolate and preserve a single timeline. You cannot maintain the separation of one, or some, or indeed all of the timelines. Without the constant intervention of the Ediacaran, they all decay to entropy.”

“Oh, that’s jolly,” Julian muttered. “So why show us all those failures? Was it just to rub them in?”

Charen’s icy face waxed visible again. “I don’t know.” And then, more human than Alison had yet seen her since their long-ago face-to-face meeting: “I was never very good at knowing why people did things. People never interested me like things did. I knew where I was, with things.”

Right then, Kay burst in, scattering the icy particles of Charen’s image to the four winds, asking for everyone to come back in.