Photino birds swooped around the wound as if in a huge triumphant dance.

The vast structure had no mechanism to recover from such a wound. Now there was only its long, slow death to play out; and the photino birds, evidently incurious, began to depart, returning their attention to their own mysterious projects.

Like sea waves from the wreck of some immense ship gravity radiation surged out of the Ring's gravitational well, and at last the vast pit in spacetime began to close.

The observers -- the Qax, the last photino bird flocks -- began to leave the scene. Paul grasped his quantum threads and slipped into the gathering darkness.

The Xeelee ship emerged from the Kerr-metric Interface. It furled its wings, slid to a halt, and sent its sensors probing into the new Universe.

Erwal stared at a screen that had become suddenly a blank pane of silver, reflecting only her own tired face.

Sura asked, "What does it mean?"

Erwal frowned. "I don't know." She tried to move the focus of the screen, but there was no response. And the gloves around her hands were like dead things, inert.

The ship no longer responded to her touch. She withdrew her hands.

"I don't understand," Sura said. "Did we pass through the Ring? What should we do?"

"How could I know?" Erwal snapped. "We wait, I suppose."

Sura stepped away, uncertain.

After some hours, Erwal climbed out of her chair and stretched painfully.

Trying to overcome her enormous sense of anticlimax she established a routine. After each of the next few sleeps she crossed to the control table and slipped her hands into the gloves. But the ship remained inert, sealed off.

Gradually her routine broke down.

She was tired, and she had had enough mystery. She tried to settle into life inside this odd ship-village and forget the strangeness outside.

The function of the Xeelee ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.

It studied the purposeless emptiness stretching around it and considered how this might be achieved.

Gas clouds, dark and cooling, reached to the limits of this expanding Universe. There were no stars. There was no evidence of intelligence, or life.

The ratio of helium to hydrogen here was about twenty-five percent. This, and various other cosmological relics, told the Xeelee ship that this Universe had emerged from its singularity in a broadly similar fashion to that of the Universe of its origin, with comparable ratios between the fundamental forces.

This, of course, was good.

The semisentient ship was capable of independent speculation. Perhaps some property of the Ring had guided them to an inhabitable environment, the ship wondered.

It did not spend much processing time on such theorizing. After all, speculation was not its primary function; and even if it were, there was no one to report back to.

So the Universe was broadly similar to that once shared by humans and Xeelee. With one important difference.

It was much younger.