He had lived among people no more than a few months, on the Xeelee seed pod they had called the Sugar Lump; but in that time he had been shown visions, sounds, scents, tactile images from all the worlds of the human empire, and he had formed an impression of the great storm of souls that constituted the human race. Each of those souls, he knew, was like a tiny line drawn in space-time, with a neat start, a thickening into self-awareness and a clean conclusion. The race was -- had been -- a vast, dynamic drawing of billions of such lifelines.

He, Paul, spoiled the picture.

His lifeline began in a tight, acausal knot wrapped around the Sugar Lump -- and was then dragged across the face of the picture like a vandal's scribble -- and finished here, a loose end beyond the conclusion of history.

He felt no privilege to be here. His life was artificial, a construct, a random jotting of the Xeelee. He could see inside stars... but he had never looked into a human heart.

He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in space-time and then so casually abandoned? Had he been correct in detecting a strain of amusement in the vast, crashing symphony of the antiXeelee's thoughts? Was he truly no more than a toy?

The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.

Later he became curious about the aging Universe around him. He had no senses, of course: no eyes, no ears, no fingers; nevertheless he tried to construct a simulacrum of a human awareness, to assign human labels to the objects and processes around him.

There were still stars. He saw sheets of them, bands and rays, complex arrays.

Evidently the Xeelee had remade the Universe.

But there were anomalies. He found many supernova sites, swelling giants, wizened dwarfs: the stars were aged, more aged than he had expected. Clearly many millions of years had passed since his time on the Sugar Lump -- enough time for the Xeelee to have completed their galactic engineering -- yet this immense duration was insignificant on the cosmic scale.

So why did the stars seem so old? He found no answer.

Driven by curiosity he began to experiment with his awareness. Physically he was composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over space-time. Soon it was as if he was flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

He descended through the plane of the Galaxy, his sense-analogues spread wide.