The stars were points of light unimaginably far away... much further than the distance between Shell and Home. He turned around and around, stepping over the rope that led back to Orange. There was no sign of the world he'd folded out of; the crystal box was suspended in space.

Gradually he began to make out patterns.

There was a great ball of stars over there on the right, neat as a mummy-cow's meat pod -- but he guessed that this star pod was bigger than a million of his worlds. Above his head there were fragments of a cubical lattice, draped with wisps of violet gas... and behind him, most spectacular of all, a sextet of varicolored stars that rotated visibly around an empty center. Great arches of fire leapt between the sisters' surfaces.

There were loops of stars, knots of stars, stars in sheets like the cloaks of a god.

He remembered Allel describing the stars in the old days, randomly scattered like seeds. Well, since humans had hidden away, someone had rebuilt the Universe.

...Something moved past the stars. And again--

Nameless objects, black as night, were moving around him. They stroked at this fragile container like the hands of a huge parent.

He felt no threat. There was a sense of reassurance, of welcome, in their gestures.

I was meant to be here, he realized abruptly. Allel was right: the world is freezing by design. It spat me out, and these creatures have been waiting for me.

The half-dozen shapes now drew away from his box and gathered together in a great blur transiting the stars. They moved past and through each other, ever faster, weaving themselves into a tight knot of darkness--

-- and then, in a sprinkle of prismatic light, they shot away to... somewhere else.

They'd finished with the Universe, abandoned it. But they'd left something behind.

It was a ship. It nuzzled against his box, a great shell big enough to hold his village and a hundred more. The Universe would be his.

The stars began to spin like sparks in a fire. They tilted, overwhelming him.

His next memory was of crawling out of the corpse of the mummy-cow.

Allel shifted her weight between her stiff legs. "Xeelee ships," she croaked. "That's what you saw. Ships like plucking fingers." She coughed feebly, feeling the cold of the dying day sink into her flesh. "Listen. I know what you've sacrificed to do this. I know you've lost everything important to you... But, Teal, you've saved us all."

She reached out a hand to her grandson.

Teal didn't react. Allel dropped the hand nervously.

"You knew what I'd find, didn't you?" Teal asked coolly. "You suspected the truth of our history -- the completeness of our defeat by the Xeelee."