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No, Madeleine thought sadly. No, she is asking for something much more fundamental than that.

She wants you, Malenfant. She wants your soul.

And the Gaijin started talking of mind, and identity, and memes, and idea viruses.

To Cassiopeia, Malenfant was scarcely sentient at all. From the Gaijin's point of view, Malenfant's mind was no more than a coalition of warring idea viruses: uneasy, illogically constructed, temporary. The ideas grouped together in complexes that reinforced each other, mutually aiding replication -- just as those other replicators, genes, worked together through human bodies to promote their own reproduction.

Yes, Madeleine thought, beginning to understand. And the most fundamental idea complex was the sense of self.

A self was a collection of memories, beliefs, possession, hopes, fears, dreams: all of them ideas, or receptacles for ideas. If an idea accreted to the self -- if it became
Malenfant's
idea, to be defended, if necessary, with his life -- then its chance of replication was much stronger. His sense of self, of
him
self, was an illusion. Just a web woven by the manipulating idea viruses.

The Gaijin had no such sense of self. But sometimes, that was what you needed.

Malenfant understood. "Every damn one of the Gaijin has a memory that stretches back to those ugly yellow seas on the Cannonball. But they are... fluid. They break up into their component parts and scatter around and reassemble; or they merge in great ugly swarms and come out shuffled around. Identity for them is a transient thing, a pattern, like the shadow of a passing cloud. Not for us, though. And that's why the Gaijin don't have
this."
He stabbed a finger at his chest. "They don't have a sense of
me."

And without self, Madeleine saw, there could be no self-sacrifice.

That
was why the Gaijin couldn't handle the reboot prevention project. Only humans, it seemed -- slaves of replicating ideas, nurtured and comforted by the illusion of the self -- might be strong enough, crazy enough, for that.

Through the dogged sense of his own character, Malenfant must give the fragmented beings toiling here a sense of purpose, of worth beyond their own sentience. A sense of sacrifice, of faith, of self. To help the Gaijin, to save the Galaxy, Malenfant was going to have to become like the Gaijin. He was going to have to lose himself -- and, in the incomprehensible community that labored over the strands of the sail, find himself again.

Malenfant, standing before the spidery Gaijin, was trembling. "And you think this will work?"

No,
Madeleine thought. But they are desperate. This is a throw of the dice. What else can they do?

The Gaijin didn't reply.

"I can't do this," Malenfant whispered at last, folding his hands over and over. "Don't ask me. Take it away from me."

Madeleine longed to run to him, to embrace him, offer him simple human comfort, animal warmth. But she knew she must not.

And still the Gaijin would not reply.

Malenfant stalked off over the empty grassland, alone.

Madeleine slept.

When she woke, Malenfant was still gone.

She lay on her back, peering up at a sky crowded with stars and glowing dust clouds. The stars seemed small, uniform, few of them bright and blue and young, as if they were deprived of fuel in this crammed space -- as perhaps they were. And the dust clouds were disrupted, torn into ragged sheets and filaments by the immense forces that operated here.

Toward the heart of the Galaxy itself, there was structure, Madeleine saw. Laced over a backdrop of star swarms she made out two loose rings of light, roughly concentric, from her point of view tipped to ellipticity. The rings were complex: She saw gas and dust, stars gathered into small, compact globular clusters, spherical knots of all-but-identical pinpoints. In one place the outer ring had erupted into a vast knot of star formation, tens of thousands of hot young blue stars blaring light from the ragged heart of a pink-white cloud. The rings were like expanding ripples, she saw, or billows of gas from some explosion. But if there had been an explosion it must have been immense indeed; that outermost ring was a coherent object a thousand light-years across, big enough to have contained almost all the naked-eye stars visible from Earth.

And when Madeleine lifted her head, she saw that the inner ring was actually the base of an even larger formation that rose up and out of the general plane of the Galaxy. It was a ragged arch, traced out by filaments of shining gas, arching high into the less crowded sky above. It reminded her of images of solar flares, curving gusts of gas shaped by the Sun's magnetic field -- but this, of course, was immeasurably vaster, an arch spanning hundreds of light-years. And rising out of the arch she glimpsed more immensity still, a vast jet of gas that thrust out of the Galaxy's plane, glimmering across thousands of light-years before dissipating into the dark.

It was a hierarchy of enormity, towering over her, endless expansions of scale up into the dark.

But of the Galaxy center itself, she could only see a tight, impenetrable cluster of stars -- many thousands of them, swarming impossibly close together, closer to each other than the planets of the Solar System. Whatever structure lay deeper still was hidden by those crowded acolyte stars.

The Gaijin still stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the pulsar's glow, hatefully silent.

Malenfant still hadn't returned. Madeleine tried to imagine what was going through his head as he tried to submit himself to an unknown alien horror that would, it seemed, take apart even his humanity.

Madeleine got to her feet and stalked up to the Gaijin, confronting it. She was aware of Neandertals watching her curiously. They signed to each other, obscurely.
Look at crazy flathead.

Madeleine shouted. "Why can't you leave us alone? You came to our planet uninvited, you used up our resources, you screwed up our history--"

The Gaijin swiveled with eerie precision. WE MINEDASTEROIDS YOU PROBABLY WOULD NEVER HAVE REACHED. WITHOUT US YOU WOULD HAVE REMAINED UNAWARE OF THE CRACKERS UNTIL THEY REACHED THE HEART OF YOUR SYSTEM. AS TO YOUR HISTORY, THAT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. WE DID NOT INTERVENE. MOST OF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE WISHED THAT ANYHOW.

"You fucking immortal robots, you're so damn
smug.
But for all your powers, you need Malenfant... But why
Malenfant,
for God's sake?"

REID MALENFANT IS SELF-SELECTED. MADELEINE MEACHER, RECALL THAT HE MADE HIS WAY, SINGLE-HANDED, TO THE CENTER OF OUR PROJECTS
TWICE OVER,
FIRST THROUGH THE ALPHA CENTAURI GATEWAY AND THEN THROUGH IO.

"Reid Malenfant is a stubborn, dogged son-of-a-bitch. But he is still just a human being. Must he die?"

The Gaijin hesitated, for long minutes, then said, HE WILL NOT DIE.

No, she thought. He must endure something much more strange than that. As he seemed to know.

The Gaijin raised one spindly leg, as if inspecting it. MADELEINE MEACHER, IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE HIM, WE WILL COMPLY.

She was taken aback. "What has it to do with me?"

YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE MALENFANT'S FRIEND.
YOU
MADE A SACRIFICE OF YOUR OWN, TO FOLLOW HIM HERE. AND SO YOU HAVE RESPONSIBILITY. IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE MALENFANT, THEN SAY SO. WE WILL COMPLY.

"And then what?"

WE HAVE SADDLE POINT GATEWAYS. WE CAN SEND HIM HOME, TO EARTH. BOTH OF YOU. WE CANNOT AVOID THE TIME DISLOCATION. BUT YOU CAN LIVE ON.

"Even if
he
wants to go on?"

IT IS HARD FOR MALENFANT TO MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE. FOR ANY HUMAN THIS WOULD BE SO. YOUR DECISION OVERRIDES HIS.

"And if you let him go -- then what about the project, the sail?"

WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.

"The reboot would become inevitable."

WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.

Madeleine sank to the grass. Shit, she thought. She hadn't expected this.

The notion of saving a Galaxy of sentient creatures from arbitrary annihilation was
too big
-- too much for her to imagine, too grandiose. But she had lived through the overwhelming destructiveness of the attempted ET colonization of the Solar System, found evidence of the other wasteful waves of horror of the deep past. She had
seen
it for herself.

And you once built a world, Madeleine. You've been known to show a little hubris yourself.

If this project succeeds, perhaps humans, and species like them, would never have to suffer such an ordeal again. Isn't one man's life worth such a prize?

But who am
I
to make that call?

There was another option, she thought, that neither of them had expressed, neither she nor the Gaijin.

It doesn't have to be Malenfant. Maybe
I
could take his place. Save him, and progress the project anyhow.

She wrapped her arms around herself. Malenfant is full of doubt and fear. Even now he might not be able to make it, make the sacrifice. But he is out there gathering his strength, his purpose. I could never emulate that.

The Gaijin waited with metallic patience.

"Take him," she whispered, hating herself as she uttered the words. "Take Malenfant."
Take him; spare me.

And, as soon as she made the choice, she remembered Malenfant's inexplicable coldness when she had arrived here.

She had ended up betraying him. Just as, she realized now, he had known she would, right from the beginning.

She buried her face in her hands.

After maybe a full day, Malenfant returned. Madeleine was sitting beside a sluggish stream, desultorily watching the evolution of Galaxy-core gas streamers.

Malenfant came running up.

He threw himself to the grass beside her. He was sweating, his bald pate slick, and he was breathing hard. "Jogging," he said. "Clears the head." He curled to a sitting position, catlike. "This is a hell of a thing, isn't it, Madeleine? Who would have thought it?... Nemoto should see me now. My mom should see me now." The change in him was startling. He seemed vigorous, rested, confident, focused. Even cheerful.

But she could see the battered photograph of his dead wife tucked into his sleeve.

She hugged her knees, full of guilt, unable to meet his eyes. "Have you decided what to do?"

"There's no real choice, is there?"

Tentatively she reached for his hand; he grabbed it, squeezed hard, his calm strength evident. "Malenfant, aren't you afraid?"

He shrugged. "I was afraid the first time I climbed aboard a shuttle orbiter, sitting up there on top of millions of tons of high explosive, in a rickety old ship that had been flying thirty years already. I was afraid the first time I looked into a Saddle Point gateway, not knowing what lay beyond. But I still climbed aboard that shuttle, still went through the gateway." He glanced at her. "What about you? After..."

"After you're dead?" she snapped impulsively.

He flinched, and she instantly regretted it.

She told him about the Gaijin's offer of a ride home.

"Take it. Go see Earth, Madeleine."

"But it won't be my Earth."

He shrugged. "What else is there?"

"I've been thinking," she said shyly. "What if we -- the sentients of the Galaxy, of this generation --
do
manage to come through the next reboot? What if this time we
don't
have to go back to the ponds? What if we get a chance to keep on building? If I keep on rattling around the Saddle Point gateways, maybe I'll get to see some of that."

He nodded. "Beaming between the stars, while the network gets extended. Onward and onward, without limit. I like it."

"Yeah." She glanced up. "Maybe I'll get to see Andromeda, before I die. Or maybe not."

"There are worse ambitions."

"Malenfant. Come with me."

He shook his head. "Can't do it, Madeleine. I've thought it over. And I bought Cassiopeia's pitch." He looked up at the sky. "You know, as a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive -- hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. I just couldn't believe, even then, that there was nobody out
there
looking back at me down
here.
But I used to wonder what would be the point of my life, of human existence, if the universe really was empty. What would there be for us to do but survive, doggedly, as long as possible? Which didn't seem too attractive a prospect to me.

"Well, now I know the universe isn't empty, but crowded with life. And, even with the wars and extinctions and all, isn't that better than the alternative -- better than
nothing?
And you know, I think I even figured out the purpose of our lives in such a universe -- mine, anyhow. To make it better for those who follow us. What else is there to do?" He glanced at her, eyes cloudy. "Does that make any sense?"

"Yes. But, Malenfant, the cost--"

"Nemoto said it would be like this. Humans can't change history, except
this
way. One of us, alone, going to the edge--"

Suddenly it was too much for her; she covered her face with her hands. "Fuck history, Malenfant. Fuck the destiny of the universe. We're talking about
you."

He put an arm around her shoulders; he was warm, his body still hot from his run. "It's okay," he said, trying to soothe her. "It's okay. You know what? I think the Gaijin are jealous. Jealous, of us wretched little pink worms. Because we got something they don't, something more precious than all the Swiss-Army-knife body parts in the universe, something more precious than a billion years of life."

But now the Gaijin stood before them, suddenly
there,
tall and stark.