Even Kumar was subdued, yet he was the first to speak.

“One of the colonies must have found us.”

Brant shook his head slowly but without much conviction.

“Why should they bother? They must have the old maps — they’ll know that Thalassa is almost all ocean. It wouldn’t make any sense to come here.”

“Scientific curiosity?” Mirissa suggested. “To see what’s happened to us? I always said we should repair the communications link…”

This was an old dispute, which was revived every few decades. One day, most people agreed, Thalassa really should rebuild the big dish on East Island, destroyed when Krakan erupted four hundred years ago. But meanwhile there was so much that was more important — or simply more amusing.

“Building a starship’s an enormous project,” Brant said thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that any colony would do it — unless it had to. Like Earth..”

His voice trailed off into silence. After all these centuries, that was still a hard name to say.

As one person, they turned towards the east, where the swift equatorial night was advancing across the sea.

A few of the brighter stars had already emerged, and just climbing above the palm trees was the unmistakable, compact little group of the Triangle. Its three stars were of almost equal magnitude — but a far more brilliant intruder had once shone, for a few weeks, near the southern tip of the constellation.

Its now-shrunken husk was still visible, in a telescope of moderate power. But no instrument could show the orbiting cinder that had been the planet Earth.

2. The Little Neutral One

More than a thousand years later, a great historian had called the period 1901–2000 ‘the Century when everything happened’. He added that the people of the time would have agreed with him — but for entirely the wrong reasons.