By this point in the passage, observation screens had been placed throughout the ship, turning the areas around them into mini lounges. When Cherene found her father, less than a minute after the nova was announced, he and Justin were already occupying one of the lounges and were watching the Sun brighten until it drowned out all the stars on the wallscreen.

“Can you get a neutrino reading?” one voice called to another over the intercom.

Justin and Joshua ignored the exchange. They were busy guessing at the technology and the energies involved in what they were witnessing, and Cherene was thankful that her family had voted for moving the Cat a safe distance away from Sunspace. All three understood what was happening but not why.

“Difficult to believe,” Cherene observed, “that the first electrons to race through a porphyrin molecule on primeval Earth and to fuel a protocell started a chain of events that have led to this immense destruction.”

“Perhaps in such a universe it would be better to return to nothingness,” Justin said. “Embrace the oblivion and count oneself lucky.”

“It’s always better to survive,” Joshua said, with his old pride. “You don’t experience anything when you’re nothing, so you can’t tell if it’s better. You can only think so when you’re alive. Basic logic, Justin. Think, think, think.”

Justin smiled. “Perhaps there are safer ways for interstellar cultures to contact each other. It might be done subtly, so that they could get used to each other, first to the very idea of there being other civilizations, long before the development of interstellar flight triggers the conclusion that relativistic attack is rational and necessary.”

A voice called across the intercom, announcing that the neutrino flux at the core of the nova appeared to be dropping off.

“Do you think it might rebound?” another voice speculated. “Do you think the Sun may re-collect itself and burn steadily again?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” someone called back. “Nothing can be left alive back there.”

Justin shook his head and managed a weak smile. It seemed ludicrous to him that anyone could be concerned with solar physics at a time like this, but he did not laugh. They were still trying to adapt; and, all things considered, they were doing a better job of that than he had expected—better than he felt he could. In spite of the best efforts of immunogenetic technicians to slow the aging process, his hair was graying and thinning under the assault of a deepening depression, and he was gaining weight.

He said, “Maybe someone had tried to soften us up for a peaceful contact, but failed. It could have been going on for the last twenty-five hundred years, beginning with the rise of prophets who preached mercy and culminating with literary and media obsessions with alien contact. Sure. Emerging civilizations must be too rare and too important to just bushwhack without first making an attempt to save them—if not for assimilation, then at least for study. Maybe someone was trying to avoid the production of future killers by implanting peace religions in every new human culture. And one by one these religions failed. The Gospels were not very effective in teaching evolution’s warriors to love one another, in turning them into holy men.”