Angel ran from the ship soon after it arrived at Confluence. THere was a whole world to understand and to conquer, and she plunged into it, reveling in her escape from the suffocating caution of the consensus of her partials. They wanted to go on to the Home Galaxy, but Angel was tired of searching. She ran with a wild glee and a sense of relief at being able to control her fate once more.

Angel had set out millions of years ago to find aliens--not the strange creatures that thronged the riverside cities of Confluence, which were merely animals changed by design to resemble human beings, but true aliens, sapient creatures of a completely separate and independent evolutionary sequence. She had left an empire behind and she had hoped to found another, far from the crusade against the transcendents. Although no sapient aliens had been found in the Home Galaxy, the Universe was a vast place. There were a dozen small satellite galaxies around the Home Galaxy, thousands of galaxies in the local group, and twenty thousand similar superclusters of galaxies. The search could last a billion years, but it gave her a purpose, concealing the reality that she was fleeing from defeat and certain death. Behind her, billions of her lineage were being purged by humans who did not believe in the cult of the immortal individual, by humans she considered little more than animals, clinging as they did to sexual reproduction and the dogma that maintenance of genetic and social diversity was more important than any individual, no matter how old, how learned, how powerful.

Angel fled far, neither sleeping nor dead, no more than stored potentials triply engraved on gold. The nearest spiral galaxy was almost two million light-years away, and that was where she went. Although the ship flew so fast that it bound time about itself, the journey still took thousands of years of slowed shipboard time, and more than two million years as measured by the common time of the Universe. [typist's note: What? How fast is the average object in the universe- is that how they determine common time?] At the end of that long voyage, Angel and her partials were not wakened: they were incarnated and born anew.

What she learned then, within a hundred years of wakening, was that the Universe was not made for the convenience of humans. What she and her crew of partials found was a galaxy ruined and dead.

A billion years ago it had collided with another, slightly smaller galaxy. There were only a few collisions between the billions of stars as the two galaxies interpenetrated, because the distances between stars were so great. But interactions between gases and dark matter at relative speeds of millions of kilometers per second sent violent gravity waves and compression shocks racing through the tenuous interstellar medium. During the long, slow collision, stars of both galaxies were torn from their orbits and scattered in a vast halo; some were even ejcted with sufficient velocity to escape into intergalactic space, doomed to wander forever, companionless. The majority of the stars coalesced into a single body, but except for ancient globular clusters, which survved the catastrophe because of their steep gravity fields, all was wreckage.

Angel and her crew of partials were not able to chart a single world where life had survived. Many had been remelted because of encounters with clumps of perturbed dark matter so dense that collisions with atoms of ordinary matter occured, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. They found a world sheared itself in half by immense tidal stresses; the orbits of the two sister worlds created by this disaster were so eccentric that they were colder than Pluto at their furthest points, hotter than Mercury at their nearest. There were worlds smahsed into millions of fragments, scattered so widely in their orbital paths that they never could re-form. They found a cold dark world of nitrogen ice wandering amongst the stars; there were millions of such worlds cast adrift. Millions more had been scorched clean by flares and supernovas triggered in their parent stars by infalling dust and gas or by gravity pulses. There were gas giants turned inside out--single vast perpetual storms. Angel's ship constructed telescope arrays and sent out self-replicating robots and spent twenty thousand years sampling a small part of the huge galaxy. Its crew returned to the unbeing of storage while traveling from star to star. Angel and her partials were reborn over and over. They did not find life anywhere.

Angel's ship was a storehouse of knowledge. She had not known what she might need and so had taken everything she could, triply encoded, like herself, on lattices of gold atoms. She ordered a search of the records and learned that there had been millions of collisions between galaxies, and that it was likely that most galaxies had suffered such collisions at least once during their lifetime. Even part of one arm of the Home Galaxy had been disrupted by transit of a small cluster of stars, although the reconstruction of the Home Galaxy by the transcendents had long ago erased the damage this had caused.

But the Home Galaxy was a statistical freak. Unlike other galaxies it had never endured a major collision with a body of similar size. There were various possibilities--it was one of the largest in the observable Universe, and it resided in an area with an anomalously low density of dark matter--but whatever the explanation, it was an outlier at the far end of the distribution of possible evolutionary paths, and therefore so too was life. It was likely that only the stars of the Home Galaxy had planteray systems stable enough for life to have evolved--it took a billion years for simple unicellular forms to develop, four and a half billion years for humans--for otherwise other civilizations would have surely arisen in the unbounded Universe, and traces of their existence could have been detected. Angel concluded that humanity, in all its swarming vigor and diversity, was alone. It must make of itself what it could, for there was nothing against which it could measure itself. There were no aliens to conquer, no wise, ancient beings from which to learn deep secrets hidden in the beginnings of time and space.

Angel did not consider that she might be wrong. SHe killed herself, was reborn, and killed herself again as soon as she learned what her previous self had discovered. When she woke again, with part of her memory supressed by the ship, more than two million years had passed. The ship was in trailing orbit beyond a huge construction that orbited a star one hundred and fifty thousand light-years beyond the spiral arms of the Home Galaxy, close to the accretion disc of a vast black hole where the Large Magellanic Cloud had once been.

The ship showed her what it had observed as it had traversed the long geodesic between the two galaxies. At first there was an intense point of light within the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It might have been a supernova, except that it was a thousand times larger than any supernova ever recorded. The glare of this one dying star obscured the light of its millions of companions for a long time, and when at last it faded all of the remaining stars were streaming around the point where it had been. Those stars nearest the center elongated and dissipated, spilling their fusing hearts across the sky, and more and more stars crowded in until nothing was left but the gas clouds of the accretion disc, glowing by red-shifted Cerenkov radiation, all that was left of material falling into the event horizon of the central black hole--a black hole that massed a million suns.

The ship had searched the Home Galaxy for sources of coherent electromagnetic radiation and had found nothing except for a scattering of ancient neutrino beacons. Apart from these, signals in the Home Galaxy had ceased while the ship was still half a million light-years out--the time when the first supernova had flared in the Large Magellanic Cloud. There had been a great deal of activity around the Large Magellanic Cloud while the black hole grew, but at last, a hundred thousand light-years out, that too had ceased.

Angel beat the ship to its conclusion. Humanity, or whatever humanity had become in the four and a half million years since she had fled the crusade, had created the black hole and vanished into it. The ship spoke of the possibility that humanity had developed wormhole technology--it had located a number of double occultations within the Home Galaxy that were typical of the theoretical effect of a wormhole exit passing between a star and an observer. The ship had also spotted a concentrated cluster of occultation events around a halo star more than ten thousand light-years beyond the accretion disc of the giant black hole. The ship told Angel that it had changed course--a maneuver that had taken a thousand years--and that it had built up a detailed map of the space around the star. Angel studied the map. There were more than a hundred wormhole entrances orbiting the star, and there was also an artefact as big as a world, if the surface of a world might be peeled from its globe and stretched out into a long plane. The ship had built arrays of detectors. It had obtained the infrared signatures of water and molecular oxygen, and estimated the average temperature of the surface of the artefact to be two hundred and ninety-three degrees above absolute zero. It had detected the absorption signatures of several classes of photosynthetic pigments, most notably rhodospin and chlorophyll.

Angel beat the ship to its second conclusion. There was life on the surface of the artefact.

The artefact was a stout needle twenty thousand kilometers long and less than a thousand wide, with a deep keel beneath its terraformed surface. It hung in spherical envelope of air and embedded gravity fields. It tilted back and forth on its long axis once every twenty-four hours and took just over three hundred and sixty-five days to complete a single orbit of its ordinary yellow dwarf star. These parameters struck a deep chord in Angel, whose original had been born in the planetary system where humanity had evolved. For the first time in millions of years she called up the personality fragment which retained memories of the earliest part of her long history. She muttered a little mantra over and over as she studied the data the ship had gathered: twenty-four hours, three hundred and sixty-five days, thirty-two meters per second squared, twenty percent oxygen, eighty percent nitrogen.

The orbit of the artefact was slightly irregular; there would be seasons on its surface. One side was bounded by mountains fifty kilometers high. Their naked peaks rose out of the atmospheric envelope. On the other side, a great river ran half the length, rising in mountains three-quarters buried in ice at the trailing end of this strange world and falling over the edge at the midpoint. It was not clear how the water was recycled. The ship made neutrino and deep radar scans and discovered a vast warren of caverns and corridors and shafts within the rocky keel of the artefact, but no system of aquifers or canals.

One half of the world, beyond the fall of the river, was dry cratered desert with a dusty icecap at the leading end and a scattering of ruined cities. The other half was verdant land bounded on one side by the river and on the other by ice-capped ranges of mountains which were mere foothills to the gigantic peaks at the edge. THere were cities strung like beads along the river, and every city, except the largest, was inhabited by a different race of humanlike creatures. The ship sent out thousands of tiny probes. Many were destroyed by the machines which roamed everywhere on the surface of the artefact, but the survivors returned with cellular samples of thousands of different organisms. Less than one-tenth of the plants and animals were from lineages that originated in the human home star system; the rest were of unknown and multiple origins. None of the inhabitants were of human descent, the ship said, and except for a few primitive races they all had artificial homeobox inserted within their genetic material.

The ship could not explain what the homeobox sequence coded for. It could not explain why there were thousands of different, seemingly sapient, alien races crowded together on the surface of a single world-sized habitat. Nor could it explain why the physical appearance of almost all of these races mapped to at least eighty percent of the human norm--a much closer conformation than those of many of Angel's lineage, in the days of her lost empire.

Angel ordered the ship to match the orbit of the artefact. It refused, and her partials argued that the artefact was an anomaly and they had a better chance of understanding what had happened to humanity by exploring the Home Galaxy. Angel overrode them, and in the process discovered the data the ship had hidden from her. She learned all over again that there was unlikely to be life anywhere else in the local group of galaxies, and perhaps in the entire Universe.

This time she did not kill herself.

There was a huge city near the source of the long river. It was clearly the capital of this artificial world, ancient and extensive and swarming with a hundred different kinds of humanlike creature. The ship landed at the docks and Angel and her crew of partials began their exploration.



...... yawn ....



An ache rose in Angel, a universal desolation. Lost, all lost. All she had known was lost, and yet all around were echoes of what she had lost. For the first time since she had been reborn, she felt the weight of her age.

Angel had lost so much, and so much surrounded her, rich and strange, yet hauntingly familiar. The birds and the butterflies, the wet fetid smell of the mud, the smells of hot stone and cooking oil and the acrid smoke from fires fueled with dry dung, the sunlight on the water and the wind that stirred the glossy leaves and the red flowers of the trees: a thousand fragmentary impressions that defined from moment to moment the unquantifable richness of the quiddity of the world. Many of the transcendents had disappeared into imaginary empires within vast data banks, creating perfect images of known worlds or building impossible new ones, but Angel had always felt that these were less satisfactory than dreams, too perfect to be truly real. That was why she had opted for nonbeing during the long transits of her voyage, rather than slowtime in a fabrication.

Reality, or nothing.

...



It took Angel a long time to find out from the Commissioner what she meant by change. It was a kind of transcendence or epiphany, a realization of individual worth, the possibility of sin or at least of transgression against the fixed codes by which the citizens had ordered their lives for millennia. It was a little like the mes with which Angel had once experimented when attempting to unify her spreading empire, but it was also a physical infection, a change in brain structure and chemistry which provided, as far as Angel understood it, an area of high density information storage that somehow interacted with the nine infolded dimensions in the quantum foam at the bottom of reality. Everything anyone of the changed races or bloodlines did or experienced was recorded or remembered by something like a soul that would survive until the end of the Universe. It was the true immortality which Angel and her kind had dreamed of millions of years ago, when they had still been human.

* Realization that this world is an experiment of the Preservers (archivists) to revive all remembered things at the end of time.