"We took so much spin from the black hole that we almost stopped it rotating altogether. It became a Schwarzschild hole. Without spin, its event horizon expanded, filling up the equatorial belt where the ergosphere had been."

Chiron had clipped the ergosphere safely. The missile, following Chiron's trajectory exactly, had fallen straight into the expanded event horizon.

The long chase was over.

"I guess the missile wasn't an expert on relativistic dynamics after all," Mackenzie said.

"But we're not so smart either," Moro said sourly. "After all we're still falling out of the Galaxy -- even faster than before the hole encounter, in fact. A million years pass for every month we spend in here; we might be the only humans left alive, anywhere." He looked down at his arms, made the pixels swell absurdly. "If you can call this life. And we don't have enough reaction mass left to slow down. Well, space pilot Gage, where are we heading now?"

Gage thought about it. They could probably never return to their home Galaxy. But there were places beyond the Galaxy, massive stars and black holes that a pilot could use to decelerate, if she was smart enough.

And if they could find a place to stop, they could rest. Maybe Gage's awareness could be loaded back into some flesh-and-blood simulacrum of a human form. Or maybe not; maybe the role of Gage and the rest would simply be to oversee the construction of a new world fit for her child, and the other frozen zygotes.

She smiled. "At this speed, we'll be there in a couple of subjective months."

"Where?"

"Andromeda..."

Even under the oppressive Squeem occupation, humans learned much.

They learned, for example, that much of the Squeem's high technology -- their hyperdrive, for instance -- was not indigenous. It was copied, sometimes at second or third hand, based on the designs of an older, more powerful species...

"It was the first time," Eve said, "that the name 'Xeelee' entered human discourse."

I shuddered.

The Xeelee Flower

The Xeelee Flower

A.D. 4922

I still get tourists out here, you know. Even though it's been so long since I was a hero. But then, I'm told, these days the reopened Poole wormholes will get you from Earth to Miranda in hours.

Hours. What a miracle. Not that these tourist types appreciate it. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the company. It just bugs me that every last one, after he's finished looking over my villa built into the five-mile cliffs of Miranda, turns his face up to the ghostly blue depths of Uranus, and asks the same dumb question:

"Say, buddy, how come you use a fish tank for a toilet?"

But I'm a good host, and I merely smile and snap my fingers. After a while, my battered old buttlebot limps in with a bottle of valley bottom wine, and I settle back and begin: