Cauchy was the ultimate goal. By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light years across, the GUTship Cauchy would establish a wormhole bridge -- not across space -- but across fifteen centuries, to the future.^[1]

Poole was determined that the Port Sol project -- and the Cauchy itself -- wouldn't be compromised by events here.

He opened up his mind, let the elements of the situation rotate through his thoughts.

Like Bill Dzik, Poole was no biologist. But Bill was surely right that there had to be more to the Baked Alaskan ecology than just the tree stumps. Perhaps, Poole speculated, the stumps had been some sort of favored crop, selected by the toolmakers. And the toolmakers had presumably suppressed the rest of the little world's fauna, as man had depleted Earth's diversity.

But what happened to the toolmakers? Where did they go?

Poole thought about growing to awareness here, in this empty, isolated place. The inner Solar System was just a muddy pool of light. Even Alaska's companion objects were themselves sparsely scattered around the Kuiper Belt. Alone, cold, he shivered. This ice world would yield no raw materials... An intelligent species would be trapped here.

Motion again, to his right. Impossible. But this time, unmistakable.

He turned slowly, his eyes wide.

It was like a tree stump, a cylinder perhaps six feet tall. But it towered on unstretched root-legs, eight of them, like an unlikely spider. And it was moving towards him, over the horizon.

Sculptor 472 howled. Flesh shriveled from his torso and limbs; blood pulsed through his body, fleeing the heat. And yet he moved towards the Sun-person, step after dragging step. The Sun-person was a small, squat box of heat, no taller than Sculptor's torso... A squat box. A made thing? Ancient, half-formed memories stirred at the fringe of Sculptor's bubbling awareness.

He raised his limbs over his head. "Get away!" he screamed. "Leave our world; let us return to our Hills!" He remembered his father's awful, tragic fall, his failure to Consolidate; he let anger drive him forward against the heat.

It was a tower of ice, sparkling in starlight, beautiful despite its bulk. Poole wondered where it got the energy to move such mass. The main body was a cylinder, with windows set around its rim -- no: they were eyes, with lenses of ice. A skeleton, of denser ice, glimmered in the depths of the body.

A sensor blinked on the flitter's tiny control panel. The ship was picking up low-frequency radiation.

Was the thing trying to talk to him?

...And now, with a sudden, shocking loss of grace, it was falling.

No. It is not my time. I have a full day, yet. And I still have not mated, or budded, or found my Hill --

But he never would. His limbs buckled; his body sank towards the ground. Like independent creatures the tips of his limbs pried at the ice, seeking purchase. It was the heat, of course; his blood had been unable to sustain its superfluid properties, and his body had run through its cycle ahead of its time. Now, like his father before him, he would die on this cold, level ground.