They had stepped clear out to the edge of the galaxy, where the fringing stars were lost in the outer void and the dead suns swept forever through the entombing dark, where even the memory of creation was gone, blotted out by unimaginable time. No delimited frontier was here, but a border region between the swarming star-sparks and the black abyss beyond.
Trehearne tried to remember how long it had been since they had taken off from Thuvis. He couldn’t. Time seemed oddly elastic when you lost all the familiar frames of reference. He gave it up. It didn’t matter. He peered with aching bloodshot eyes into the lightless seas that lie beyond the island universes and tried to remember why he had come here. And that too was dim in his mind.
Edri was bent over a table that had been set up in th
