Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

“…Anlic?”

“I feel — odd,” she said.

“Don’t worry.”

“Who am I?”

“Come back to us.”

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, “No!” And, willfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage that had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses that had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole’s ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look harder.” He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

“They are the remnants of stars,” he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. “It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then.… Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose. Us, Anlic.”

She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

She looked back at the gravity mine.

At its center was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.