Allel sighed, and folded her arms over her concave chest. "Yes. The truth about the past has been hidden from us so long and so well that it had to be painful. The story I learned when I was young was comforting: the Xeelee as marauding monsters bent on destroying us; our valiant fight and honorable defeat. A comforting myth.

"I've thought hard about that story... and seen past it to the truth.

"We were a weak and foolish race. We attacked the Xeelee, unable to bear their superiority. We were defeated. But we would have kept on attacking them until we were destroyed.

"And so the Xeelee locked us away like destructive children... for our own good. Just like an elder brother, eh? It's not easy to accept."

"No, it isn't," Teal murmured. "We didn't build this world to save us from the Xeelee. The Xeelee built it to save us from ourselves."

Allel studied his empty face. She thought of seeing the stars: of waking in a place without a roof over the world.

But, of course, the frozen lands to the north made the stars as unattainable for her as her own lost youth.

"Well." She wiped dampness from her eyes. "Come to my teepee. I've got food. And blankets."

She turned and began to hobble back to her home.

There was a transparent box, half as tall again as a man. It hung in space, in orbit around a cooling white dwarf star, apparently forgotten and purposeless. It would have had no conceivable significance in the long twilight of the Universe... if it had not occupied the site of Earth, the long-vanished original home of man, long consumed by its own sun.

A Qax had once visited the site. It was puzzled. The box was evidently one three-dimensional facet of a hypercube, extending into folded space. Perhaps it was a gateway, an interface to some pocket Universe. Such things had been constructed by the Xeelee elsewhere in the Galaxy.

But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?

The Qax had placed quantum-inseparability markers around the box. The Qax were linked to the markers by single quantum wave functions, ghostly threads that stretched across light years, and they had scattered millions of markers over the spaces once inhabited by humans.

At last the human called Teal walked into the box. He stared, openmouthed, at the stars. He was gaunt, filthy, and dressed in treated tree-bark; a rope tied to his waist snaked around a corner and into another Universe. After some time the rope grew taut and Teal's limp form was hauled away.

The inseparability markers blared their warnings. A Qax hauled itself like a spider along the quantum web to the box -- but it arrived too late; the box was empty. The Qax hissed, settling into space like condensing mist.

With a patience born of millions of years it prepared to wait a little longer.