Much of the Milky Way, he found, had been rebuilt. Huge constructs, some light years across, had been assembled: there were rings, sheets, ribbons of stars, stars surrounded by vast artifacts -- rings, spheres, polyhedra. In these celestial cities the component stars appeared to have been selected -- or, perhaps, built -- with great discrimination. Here, for example, was a ring of a dozen Sol-like yellow dwarfs surrounding a brooding red giant; the dwarfs circled their parent so closely that Paul could see how they dipped into the turbulent outer layers of the giant's red flesh. The dwarfs in that necklet must once have been utterly identical, but now time had taken its toll: one of the dwarfs even appeared to have suffered a minor nova explosion -- the shrunken remnant was surrounded by a shell of expanding, cooling debris -- and the rest were fading to dimness, their hydrogen fuel depleted and vast spots disfiguring their shining surfaces.

Throughout the Galaxy Paul found evidence of such decay.

He was saddened by what he saw... and puzzled. He had noted this star aging before; and the time scales still did not make sense.

Something, some agency, had aged the stars.

Paul soared beneath the plane of the Galaxy. The great disc was a ceiling of curdled gold above him. The spiral arms were devastated: made ragged, the spirals disrupted by the blisters of yellow-red light which swelled across the lanes of dust.

Those blisters were supernova remnants. Enduring forced aging, a lot of the more spectacular, and beautiful, spiral arm stars would simply explode, tearing themselves apart... probably there had been chain reactions of supernovae, with the wreckage of one star destabilizing another.

Paul stared up at the wreckage of the disc, the muddled spiral arms.

Some things remained the same, though. Paul saw how the great star system rotated as one, as if solid. The Galaxy's visible matter was no more than a fraction of its total bulk; a vast, invisible halo of dark matter swathed the bright spiral, so that the light matter lay at the bottom of a deep gravity pit, turning like an oil drop in a puddle.

Now Paul climbed out of that huge, deep gravity well and passed through the halo of dark matter. The ghostly stuff barely impinged on his awareness. Photinos -- the dark matter particles -- interacted with normal matter only through the gravitational force, so that even to Paul the halo was like the faintest mist.

But he perceived odd hints of structure, too elusive to identify.

Were there worlds here, he wondered, cold stars, perhaps even beings with their own goals and ambitions?

Paul turned away from the Galaxy and faced the hostile Universe.