But already the birds were gathering around the Ring, intent on its destruction.

Paul brooded on what he had learned, on the desolation of the baryonic Universe which lay around him. Though the Ring survived still, the Xeelee had gone, evacuated.

Baryonic life was scattered, smashed, its resources wasted -- largely by humanity -- on absurd, failed assaults against the Xeelee.

Paul was alone.

At first Paul described to himself the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.

All about him were quantum wave functions.

They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.

The functions filled space-time and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.

He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star's gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons -- or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves...

Soon there was little of the human left in him. Then, at last, he was ready for the final step.

After all, he reflected, human consciousness itself was an artificial thing. He recalled Green, on the Sugar Lump, gleefully describing tests which proved beyond doubt that the motor impulses initiating human actions could often precede the willing of those actions by significant fractions of a second. Humans had always been adrift in the Universe, creatures of impulse and acausality, explaining their behavior to each other with ever more complex models of awareness. Once they had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles through human form. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Paul saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. Why should he, perhaps the last human, cling to such outmoded comforts?

There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.

With the equivalent of a smile he relaxed. His awareness sparkled and subsided.

He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light which lay behind all phenomena.

Space had never been empty.

Within the tight space-time limits of the Uncertainty Principle, "empty" vacuum was filled with Virtual particle sets which blossomed from nothing, flew apart, recombined and vanished as if they had never been -- all too rapidly for the laws of mass/energy conservation to notice.