But in the meantime I'd have to find a job. My adventure was over and I faced the dreary prospect of spending the rest of my life paying off the Spline -- among others. I reached for my suit and dug out my handful of Great Attractor fragments. Cold as ice, and just as worthless, they sparkled even in the Spline's blood-tinged light--

Worthless?

Suddenly I imagined these stones set in platinum and resting against tanned flesh: Xeelee-made gems from half a billion light years away.

Maybe I had a way to pay off my debts after all. Soon, AS technology would be available again. And after that I could buy my own ship, start a small line...

I put away the stones and began to dream again.

Eve said, "Jim Bolder was a brave, impulsive man. But he thought big. He immediately saw the significance of the knowledge of the Xeelee artifact, the thing he called the Great Attractor, to mankind.

"Bolder lived for the moment. But his actions would resound through millions of years. It is entirely appropriate that, for humans, the artifact he found would always bear his name:

"Bolder's Ring.

"But the impact of his actions on the Qax was devastating..."

The pathetic Qax evacuation armada consisted of hundreds of Spline ships.

The craft, their spherical hulls open, settled into the Qax ocean. Each hull was lined with heaters designed to simulate the volcanism of that mother sea; convection cells were stirred to life inside the ships, and the awareness of a Qax slid reluctantly aboard each craft.

The Spline carriers lifted cautiously from the amniotic ocean. Flares like human fists already punched out of the sun, and gales howled through the atmosphere, buffeting the stately rise of the Spline. With each jolt the delicate convection patterns were disrupted; the Qax endured the gradual paring away of their awareness.

Over half the race expired.

But after the evacuation, the inventiveness and enterprise of the Qax were reasserted. Soon traders were once more spreading Qax goods and services through the neighboring star systems. And the Qax, adrift in their Spline fleet, began to explore new homes for their delicate structures.

They were creatures of turbulence, and they found turbulence everywhere.

Qax awareness took root in the roiling air of Jovians... in the slow, stately gravitational rhythms of galactic orbits... and at last they learned how to colonize the structure of seething space itself.

On their reemergence as an interstellar power the Qax sought out humanity, but -- as Bolder in his blundering way had evidently hoped -- the Qax's long, forced withdrawal from affairs had given mankind time to grow powerful.

The history of the two species diverged, with humanity resuming its vigorous expansion, and the Qax beginning an introspective retreat into the structure of space.

Soon the Qax were numberless, and had become immortal.

But they remembered the moment at which a single human being had brought them to the brink of extinction.

Meanwhile, humans prospered.