SLIDE 12.
A trillion years will
pass.
The universe beyond
the necrosun’s reach is black. Far behind it, the final stars of
the Local Group have burned out. White dwarfs have cooled to the
temperature of liquid water; red dwarfs have guttered into chilly
darkness. Occasionally stellar remnants collide, then the void is
illuminated by flashes of lightning, titanic blasts of radiation as
the supernovae and gamma-ray bursters flare.
But the explosions
are becoming rare. Now it isn’t just planets that are migrating
away from the chilly corpses of the galaxies. Stellar remnants are
ejected into the void as the galaxies themselves fall apart with
age.
Space is empty and
cold, barely above absolute zero. The necrostar’s course has passed
through what was once the Bootes Void, but there is no end to the
emptiness in sight: there are voids in all directions now. The
Stasis and their clients have abandoned the practice of astronomy.
They maintain a simple radar watch in the direction of travel,
sending out a gigawatt ping every year against the tiny risk of a
rogue asteroid, but they haven’t encountered an extrasolar body
larger than a grain of sand for billions of years.
As for the necrosun’s
planetary attendants . . .
One day they will
burn Jupiter to keep themselves warm. And Saturn, and icy Neptune,
water bunker for the oceans of Earth. These days have not yet come,
for they are still working through the titans, through Rhea and
Oceanus, Crius and Hyperion—the brown dwarfs built with Sol’s
stolen mass, and the other dwarfs stolen from the Milky Way during
the Long Burn. Each brown dwarf burns for many times the age of the
universe at the birth of humanity; black holes are nothing if not
efficient. But one day they will be used up, the last titan reduced
to a dwarfish cinder; and it will be time to start eating the
planets.
Not long thereafter,
it will be time for the final Reseeding.