I started by locking in Calliope’s position 7,000 years ago when the Van Entel picked it up. Then I looked at the positions of the two stars that had drifted off course. They were both located on the right-hand side of Calliope’s projected course and were moving more or less parallel to it.

And I found exactly what I was looking for. There was a trajectory that, if followed by a massive object, would have dragged the marker stars into the positions they now occupy. The process would have begun about 8,000 years ago. So it was already happening while we were watching from the University of Pennsylvania.

The massive object might have been a black hole.

But where is Calliope? The answer to that is painfully obvious. The damned thing got swallowed.

At some point in the next thousand years or so, observers at home should be able to watch the event, from start to finish.

What a mad universe we live in.

—Wednesday, April 2, 2256

15.

O time! The beautifier of the dead,

Adorner of the ruin, comforter

And only healer when the heart hath bled—

Time! The corrector where our judgments err,

The test of truth, love, sole philosopher.

—Lord Byron, Childe Harold IV, 1818

Hutch, Derek, and Ken sat staring at the display, which, for a change, showed a geometric pattern of slowly moving lights. “I cannot disagree,” said Barry. “An object of appropriate mass, following the trajectory you propose, would have destroyed Calliope and caused precisely the changes we have seen in the surrounding stars.”

“Brilliant,” said Ken.

Derek was picturing people all over the world centuries in the future watching the event unfold on their home displays through whatever supertelescopes would be available. “We probably won’t be around to see it,” he said.

Hutch knew what he was thinking.

“So, they’re gone,” he said. “After all these years, we actually locate a high-tech civilization, and they get taken down before we can get to them.”

“Thousands of years before,” said Ken. “Whoever thought it could happen like this?”

Derek tried to rearrange himself in the chair, which, though flexible, was probably still a bit uncomfortable for him. “I just don’t believe it.”

“It’s not a friendly universe,” said Hutch.

“So, what,” asked Ken, “was the waterfall all about?”

“A high-tech civilization,” said Derek, “in the Calliope system would have known for centuries what was coming. My guess is that we saw something that was part of an evacuation effort. If we got the details right, the transmission originated a thousand years before the black hole took out their sun. What we saw, probably, was just a routine transmission from a ship, somebody reporting home about a landscape they’d seen somewhere else. Maybe it was from a planet that was serving as the point of evacuation. A signal designed to encourage everyone.”