“We’ve examined the information stored in the ice,” Khan began. “And, in light of that, we’ve looked into how the Ediacaran is exerting force on the fields that maintain the timelines. We’d already noted a lot of fluctuations, but we’d kind of written it off as the thing, you know, dying off. We thought it was simply on its last legs—not that it has any. Except now we think it was creating new temporary branches. One after the other, over and over, dozens of them. Or one of them, dozens of times, might be a better description. It springs a new timeline, then another one on the heels of the first, and then…like you’ve got a length of rope and you’re shaking loops in it over and over. Each one gets to the point of failure and collapses, but there’s another one a moment behind where things were done differently, little changes, new outcomes. Basically it’s doing what it did before, whatever the fuck it did, to bring all our timelines into being. But now it’s gone into complete overdrive.” She was making wild gestures, trying to encompass the ocean in a nutshell. “Everyone with me?”

Ertil and Murther seemed to be following, and presumably Cam; everyone else was decidedly glassy-eyed.

“Where does this get us, though?” Lucas asked. It was the first time he’d actually addressed the floor, and he was standing on his own now, no longer in Rove’s shadow.

“We look through what we did, in other waveforms, for stuff that didn’t work. We find out what went wrong. We refine our equations. We keep an eye on the ice archives for more data. Because we’ve been given another chance, maybe not even for the first time. We adapt. That’s what life does,” Kay explained.

But Alison was recalling Charen’s words. The waveforms always collapse to zero. They were all living in what was simply a possibility. All of reality, which had seemed so robust and enduring, was merely the fevered dream of a dying god. In much the same way, a single-celled creature might see its drop of water as a vast and eternal ocean even as the sun came out of the clouds to dry it up.

II

Evening found Mal and Lee sitting atop Cam’s carapace, looking at the strangely underwhelming sunset. The sun was descending into the western sea without fuss or fanfare. And although it would rise again here, who knew if any other Earth would see the dawn. All the rituals and invocations Dr. Khan and the rest could devise were insufficient to guarantee another day.