I looked again at the tree-thing. The delicate ship was miles wide. But there were scorch marks on the leaves, and holes in the foliage bigger than cities.

"sWyman, these are wrecks. All of them."

A motion at the edge of my vision. I tried to track it. A black, birdlike shape that seemed familiar--

"Luce, why the junk yard? What's happened here?"

I thought of a shell of lithium-stained light growing out of this place and blossoming around the curve of the Universe. At its touch flocks of ships would rise like birds from the stars... "sWyman, we're maybe the first to travel here from our Galaxy. But races from further in, closer to this event, have been flooding here from the start. As soon as the lithium-7 light reached them they would come here, to this unique place, hoping as we hope to find new understanding. They've been seeking the lithium treasure for billions of years... and dying here. Let's hope there's still something worth dying for."

Something was growing out of the speckled mist ahead. It was a flattened sphere of blood-colored haze; starlight twinkled through its substance.

It was impossible to guess its scale. And it kept growing.

"sWyman. I think that's another ship. It may not be solid... but I know we're going to hit. Where's my intrasystem drive?"

"Fifteen billion light years away."

There was detail in the crimson fog, sparks that chattered around rectangular paths. Now the huge ship shut off half the sky.

"Lethe." I opaqued the window.

There was a soft resistance, like a fall into a liquid. Red light played through the pod walls as if they were paper. Sparks jerked through right angles in the air.

Then it was over. I tried to steady my breath.

"Why worry, Michael?" sWyman said gently. "We've no power; we're ballistic. If another of those babies runs into us there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

"It's getting clearer up ahead."

We dropped out of the mist of ships and shot into a hollow space the size of the Solar System. On the far side was another wall of processed matter -- more ships, I found. There was a sphere of smashed-up craft clustering around this place like gaudy moths.

And the flame at the heart of it all?

Nothing much. Only a star. But very, very old...

Once it had been a hundred times the mass of our sun. It had squirted lithium-7 light over the roof of the young cosmos. It had a terrific time. But the good days passed quickly. What we saw before us was a dried-up corpse, showing only by its gravity signature.

Just an old star... with something in orbit around it.

I focused my instruments. "That thing's about a foot across," I recorded. "But it masses more than Jupiter..."

The monstrous thing crawled past the surface of its wizened mother, raising a blood-red tide.

"So what? A black hole?"