They had their masks on, ones Cam had made, which also added an unusual dimension to the experience. Lee did her best to stop this detracting from the moment as she held hands with Mal, trying to ignore the faint prickling of alien air on her skin. Below them she could see that both land and sea, where shallow enough, were carpeted with corrugated and quilted patterns. But within these patterns were enormous denuded circles, where life was already mouldering or dead.

“You know what, though?” If Mal leant in to her, mask to mask, they could carry on something of a conversation. “If you look at all those splinters of timeline, all those versions of us…”

“Mm?”

“We never fucked it up, between us.” Mal hugged her tight. “In not one did we have that argument, the one we couldn’t come back from. We never broke up. You and me against the world, all of the worlds, every single time.”

“We argued, though, in some of them.”

“And we made up. Seriously made up, in some cases.”

“Which everyone saw.” Lee hadn’t known where to put herself.

Mal, predictably, hadn’t cared much. “Screw them,” she said casually, giving Lee a squeeze. “You reckon that means we’re destined?”

Lee had something scathing to say on that topic, but she bit down on it. Destined, why not? Now all they needed was a universe to be destined in.

“Poor old dying sponge-god,” she said, staring into the sea, those depths that only hid more decay. “Does it think we can save it?”

Mal paused, then said, “Does it think, even? Does it want anything? Or maybe it just is…Maybe this whole business of producing timelines is like breathing? Just a thing it does—rather than being entertainment, or something else. Maybe the process even generates some by-product it feeds off, and creating us is just a side effect.”

“No.” Lee’s reply was immediate, automatic. She had to go back and examine precisely why she thought this. “Because it’s trying to help us. Why give us all this other timeline data, showing us how we got it wrong? That’s active, that’s it doing something. It’s aware of us…” She stared down past the slope and spines of Cam’s shell, feeling suddenly very small. It knows us. “It’s as if we were a part of its immune system, or something—except we’re part of its ‘many-worlds’ system. Although that doesn’t help us know why it built this system in the first place.”

“Change,” Mal said.

“What?”

“It encompassed a whole world and it was alone, so it wanted to make something new.”

“That’s a very human view.”