Like everybody, O’Hara had initially assumed that the eveloi were native to the planet because there were so many other, lesser, creatures that were obviously related to them. We know now that the predatory gasbags themselves had no more natural intelligence than an earthly squid, and just served as hosts for the eveloi, who are almost invisible nervous-system parasites—nomads that travel from world to world, borrowing appropriate bodies when necessary.

They had been spying on Earth for centuries, ever since the first radio wave announced civilization. They did steer humanity toward Epsilon, by invading the minds of the planners, because every other inhabitable world within Newhome’s range was already taken.

Their manipulation of spacetime still represents a challenge, or an affront, to the Grand Unification Theory. The eveloi are no help with that, claiming to be millennia beyond interest in mere physics. They also lie.

Every species that travels away from its home star encounters them, sooner rather than later. They claim to have destroyed four such species, for the protection of all others, and have taken individuals to view the blasted ruins of their home planets—always conveniently far away, so the worlds can’t be visited except on the eveloi’s terms.

What keeps everybody politely on their toes, or tentacles, is that the eveloi are vague about what criteria protect a race from their wrath, or make them call down doom. This is not an inability to communicate abstractions; they can be clear and specific when they want to be. Sometimes it seems almost a ghastly playfulness, or, as O’Hara said, coyness. “Just keep cooperating with one another,” they say, then “Maintain a healthy competitive relationship.”

They never discussed O’Hara’s inquisition while she was still alive. Centuries later, though, I was in communication with one of them on an unrelated matter, and it recognized who I was.

By this time we knew that the river of fire had not been an actual place; it was generated in O’Hara’s mind, out of her deepest fears. When she disappeared to the people around her, she was still there, simply displaced a molecule’s width through the dimension the eveloi use for space travel. The injuries she sustained there were also manufactured from her fears, carefully adjusted to maximize pain while still allowing her to survive.

The individual I was talking to remarked that O’Hara’s response in the second instance, when John Ogelby’s life was at stake, was in a sense “wrong,” though the evaluation was never a test, in the sense that you passed or failed it. The (c)valuator would have been in favor of her sacrificing her husband, since she did know that he wanted to die. Of course he wanted to avoid pain, too, but she knew better than anyone how short his pain would be. He was so fragile he wouldn’t have lived through a second of that terrible sensory overload.