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She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily toward her.

She felt herself tense up farther.

His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.

She whimpered, cowered back.
"You are dead."

He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. "Take it easy, Madeleine."

"They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ--"

"Don't ask questions," he said evenly. "Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you
feel?
Are you sick, hot, cold?"

She thought about that. "I'm okay, I guess." She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.

It
was
Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.

He was studying her. "You were out cold. I thought I'd better leave you be. We don't seem to have any medic equipment here."

The smell of the fish reached her. "I'm hungry," she said, surprised. "You've been
fishing?"

"Why not? I mined my old space suit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer."

...Never mind the fish. This guy is
dead.
"Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns..." But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.

"Just look at me now." Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. "I haven't felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me."

"Who?"

"Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?" And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brushwood.

She got to her feet and followed him.

The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern farther over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.

The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant's fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.

Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.

She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.

She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish, and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. "I never much liked fish," she said.

"Sorry."

"Where's the stream?"

He nodded, beyond the fire. "Thataway. I took a walk."

"During the daylight?"

"No." He tilted back his head. "When I woke up it was night, as deep as this. Still is." He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. "What do you think of the view?"

The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light -- stars? -- and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.

"That is a star birth nebula," he said. "It's probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the center -- see the way that glow is roughly spherical? The stars' radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing protostars that have yet to shine... Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I
recognize
that thing; it's visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth."

In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.

"Ah," Malenfant said, when she expressed this. "But we've come far beyond
that,
of course."

She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. "Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw--"

"There are Neandertals here," he said quickly. "You needn't fear them. I think they're from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven't recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere."

She tried to follow all that. He didn't seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.

"We aren't on Io anymore, are we?"

"No." He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. "That's no sky of Earth. Or even of Io."

Madeleine felt something inside her crack.
"Malenfant--"

"Hey." He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. "Take it easy."

"I'm sorry. It's just--"

"We're a long way from home. I know."

"I've got a lot to tell you." She started to blurt out all that she'd seen since she, Malenfant, and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the Solar System from the Gaijin's Cannonball home world: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the Sun's hearth, the Crackers.

He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.

"Madeleine."

She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.

"None of it matters.
Look around, Madeleine. We're a long way away from all that. There's nothing we can do to affect any of it now..."

"How far?"

"Questions later," he said gently. "The first thing
I
did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump."

Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.

By the time they'd eaten more fish, and some yamlike fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.

When she woke it was still dark.

Malenfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?

There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake -- the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?

She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.

The Neandertals seemed to be a family group: five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant's scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape-men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.

"Why did you come here, Madeleine?" Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes.

He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. "I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you."

"Why?"

"I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn't like the idea of you being alone when--"

"When what?"

She hesitated. "Do
you
know why you're here?"

"Just remember," he said coolly, "I didn't ask you to follow me." He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.

She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt farther from home than ever.

She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.

"It's a star map," she said.

"Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here..."

Some of the points were double.

"The stars have shifted," she said.

"Here's where
this
was yesterday -- or before we slept, anyhow. And here's where it is now." He shrugged. "The shift is small -- hard to be accurate without instruments -- but I think it's real."

"I noted it too," she said.

"Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are
more
stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky--" He swept his arms over his head, toward the bright Milky Way band on the horizon. " -- thataway."

"Why that way?"

He looked up at her. "Because that's where we're headed. Come see." He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.

Now she saw the galactic band exposed to her full view: It was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied -- yellow and blue and orange -- and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.

"It looks like the Milky Way," she said. "But--"

"I know," he said. "It's not like this at home... I think we're looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm."

"Which is
not
the arm that contains the Sun," she said slowly.

"Hell, no.
That's
just a shingle, a short arc.
This
mother is the next arm in, toward the center of the Galaxy." He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. "Look at those nebulae -- see? The Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon -- a huge region of star birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy's two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the Sun, toward the Galaxy center."

Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. "We've come a long way, haven't we, Malenfant?"

"I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light-years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the center of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren't working anymore. Which is a problem if you want to go farther... I think this is just the start of the true journey."

He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn't want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.

"And," she said, "where will that
true journey
take us?"

He shrugged. "Maybe all the way to the center of the Galaxy." He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. "Look, Madeleine -- the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light-years from Earth."

And so, therefore, she thought, the year is A.D. 8800, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.

But the center of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light-years from the Sun. Even at light speed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back.
Fifty thousand years.
This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old...

He was still watching her. "I've had time to get used to this."

"I'm fine."

"Madeleine..."

"I mean it," she snapped. She got up, turned her back, and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

Perhaps it's just as well we humans can't grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we'd go crazy.

Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.

But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.

She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.

One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrowhead. The woman, with a lopsided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.

"She's saying he should be careful of the edge," Malenfant murmured.

She frowned. "I don't understand how those guys got here."

He told her what he'd observed of the Neandertals' burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.