“I’m happy enough here.”

“Alone?”

“Alone, yes.”

“Do you understand what you’re sentencing yourself to? Solitary confinement—for eternity, or until your sense of self erodes and becomes chaotic.”

“I can take precautions against that.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me. “What do you mean to do, then? Tumble through the galaxy until the end of time?”

Like a bottle on the sea.

“Long ago,” I said, “my father owned a library of books. One of the authors I read there was a man named Rabelais. When he learned he was dying, Rabelais said, Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être. It means, I go to seek a great perhaps.”

“But all he found was death.”

I smiled. “Peut-être.”

She smiled in return, though I think she felt sorry for me.

*   *   *

I said good-bye to Allison and Turk. Allison begged me to take up the offer the ambassador had made and stay here, embodied or not. She wept when I refused, but I was adamant. I didn’t want another incarnation. I hadn’t sought or wanted this one.

Turk stayed a while after Allison left the room. He said, “I sometimes wonder whether something singled us out for all this—for everything that happened to us. It all seems so strange, doesn’t it? Not like other people’s lives.”

Not much like, I agreed. But I didn’t think we had been singled out. “It all could have happened countless other ways. There’s nothing special about us.”

“You think you’ll find something at the end of it? Something that makes it all make sense?”

“I don’t know.” Peut-être. “We all fall. We all land somewhere.”

“You have a long trip ahead of you.”

“It won’t seem long to me. I’m traveling light.”

“You carry what you carry,” Turk Findley said.

*   *   *

I enclosed the city in its bubble of slowtime and borrowed sunlight for acceleration. Vox Core soared beyond the orbit of the system’s outermost planet, out into the interstellar vacuum and far from Cloud Harbor. From my vantage point this took only a moment. The city’s clocks ticked seconds for centuries.

I had no destination. Occasional brushes with massive stars skewed my trajectory in unpredictable vectors, a drunkard’s walk through the galaxy. Apart from avoiding obstacles, I did nothing to intervene.

In the physical body of Isaac Dvali I often wandered the tiers and passageways of Vox Core. The city persisted in its daily rhythms, regulating its atmosphere, tending its empty parks and gardens. On these walks I occasionally passed robotic maintenance machines as they rolled down public passageways, steel monks hurrying to their matins. They resembled people but they lacked moral agency, and I resisted the unreasonable urge to speak to them.