“Consequences?” Cole asked.

“Everything in the universe is indeed traveling in a straight line. Which means—” He frowned, pursing his thin lips as if formulating a dumbed-down version for a child. “Imagine we’re sitting on the North Pole of your planet.”

Cole looked up at the snow flurries, at the large spire behind him. His imagination hardly needed to exert itself. “Done,” he said.

“Now picture the matter of the universe spreading out from here, all of it heading in every direction possible around your planet. Where is it going?”

“Back to where it started, just like when I go walking in a straight line.”

“Except you were traveling alone,” Byrne pointed out. Cole could almost imagine the armless man wagging his finger like Professor Phister used to. “Don’t forget,” Byrne said, “that there’s a lot of stuff in this example. If it’s all moving roughly the same speed—”

“The South Pole!” As soon as Cole uttered the answer, a lot more fell into place; he could almost hear his brain click audibly. The leading theory of their day, hundreds of years old and mostly unchanged, remained the Big Bang theory. Even with the problems of inflationary theory and dark energy, it was still the best they had, as messy and patchwork as it had become.

Cole thought about all that matter spreading out across the surface of a sphere, all heading away from the North Pole. He could see it traveling through the dips and rises, thinning out as it moved away. And then he could see it starting to come back together. All of it—all of everything—meeting in a big crunch at the South Pole. He considered the expanding universe and pictured for the very first time where it was expanding to!

“That’s why the expansion is speeding up,” Cole murmured. It was one of the mysteries of cosmology, the odd fact that expansion was accelerating when gravity should be slowing it down. Now he knew why. He turned to Byrne. “We’re halfway there, aren’t we? The matter is no longer flying away from itself, it’s now coming closer together! Gravity is working the other way, speeding it along.”

Byrne nodded. “Precisely how we like to put it. We are ‘past the universal equator.’ Well past, in fact.”

Cole forgot where he was, all the trouble he’d seen, all the matters relatively inconsequential. His brain went giddy with the possibilities, scrambling to assemble them into a coherent whole.

“That also explains hyperinflation,” he said. “It explains why things are going so quick in the beginning. All that matter just finished its downward swoop, so it would be absolutely flying as it came together!” He paused, finding a problem with the theory. “But why don’t we see it coming if we’re getting closer?” he asked. “Where’s all the other stuff?”

“All that stuff is over the horizon, to extend the metaphor.”

Cole pictured that. “But not because the light fails to bend, right? Is it because of the speed everything’s traveling?” Cole held up his finger, seeing it clearly. “It’s because of the direction it’s traveling through this fourth dimension.”

Byrne smiled broadly at Cole. “You are the one, aren’t you? I can see it, now. I never could in Mollie.”

Hearing her name elicited a shiver from Cole, snapping the descent into philosophy and cosmology. He remembered where he was, felt it like an icicle stabbing through his chest. He pictured Molly strapped to the gurney in Byrne’s ship, and the vision angered him, breaking the physics lesson. It helped him see another flaw in Byrne’s theory.

“That can’t be right,” he said. “The Big Bang didn’t happen in a place, it happened everywhere. It created space. Hell, the Big Bang happened just as much in my Portugal as it did in the Andromeda galaxy!”

Byrne laughed at this, bending at the waist and uncrossing his legs. It was a jolly laugh, very Human-like. When he settled down, he turned to Cole: “Son, we aren’t talking about hypotheticals, here. I’m not discus-sing theory. This is what we know, what we’ve known for a very long time. We’ve observed it.”

“That’s impossible,” Cole spat. “How can you observe something that destroys everything?”

“Oh, but it doesn’t. Very nearly but not quite. Not everything arrives at the same time, and some of it gets deflected. Besides, the South Pole of the universe, if you like to consider it that, is a very big place. As hot as it gets—and it gets hot enough to melt down nature’s laws—there are ways to get information through. Just as a particle can escape a black hole now and then, we can make sure data survives the Great Passing.”

Cole’s jaw dropped. “You’ve done this? This isn’t the first time we’ve been here?”

“Literally? You and I?” Byrne looked at the world zipping around them. “Of course it is.” He laughed. “There’s nothing mystical here, none of that repeating-our-actions nonsense. No, no, in fact, each universe is vastly different. That’s our job. That’s why I say this is our universe.”

Cole shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“What is life but information, my young friend? We are just—well you are just chemical programs and mindless routines. Ahh, you frown, and you are right to do so. Sentient things cannot grasp the accidental nature of their existence, and they are correct to feel this way. Tell me, do you know why Humans and the Bern look so similar?”

Cole looked at his hands and considered the question. “Convergent evolution?” he guessed. “The simplest solutions predominate?” But he knew that wasn’t right. Hadn’t Dani given him clues in the hallway of that Drenard prison?

“Nonsense. The odds are prohibitive. Look at the diversity of life on any one planet. An honest account of them is more bizarre than the differences between you and a filthy Bel Tra. No, my little Chosen One, the reason the Bern look alike all across the universe, the way they are able to rule all of creation with an iron and beneficent embrace, is simple: we set everything up in advance.”

Cole continued to stare at his palms; he peered at the lines in them. “You made us?”

“Almost,” Byrne said. “There are problems now and then. We just get the—to use a Terran expression—the ball rolling. And most times, the ball is kind enough to go downhill, following the route we set up in advance. It’s all about rules, you see. If the laws of nature are within certain parameters, you get a universe conducive to life. And when you can rig impervious seeds full of genetic information, seeds that can only be blown apart by the forces present at the end of the universe, seeds that ablate just right during the creation process, then you achieve what all life seeks.”

“Which is?” Cole asked.

“Immortality, of course.”

Byrne smiled. “And not the temporary sort. We’re not talking organ transplants, or colonies on a different egg but still in the same solar basket. We’re talking about real descendants surviving the end of time and making it through to the next beginning.”

“But it’s all your life, right? Only what you decide lives and ever gets that chance.”

“Most of it. But then, we’re setting up our universes to be warm and wet, which is a habitat conducive to other sorts of breeding, mutating brands of scum. The problem for these life forms is that we’ve given ourselves a head start. And the . . . unique method we use to communicate with the next generation is tied to our DNA, so we know what’s going on first. Of course, there have been mutations in the past that outpaced our local representatives, but since intergalactic spaceflight is—or has been thought to be—impossible, these were just pockets of annoyance scrubbed away every twenty billion years or so, motes that contaminated a mere galaxy or two, but what are a few galaxies in the grand scheme of things? Practically nothing.”

“So why are you flanking with us now?” Cole asked. “Give us our twenty billion years and leave our galaxy alone.”

Byrne shook his head. “No can do, Chosen One. Everything is dif-ferent now. Past mutations were a mere bump in the road compared to what happened in your Milky Way. The rules have been rewritten. Our entire empire has been thrown into discord. This isn’t one of those changes we log in the master program and tweak our next go-around.”

“I don’t understand. What’s different? And why do you keep calling me the Chosen One?”

“Hyperspace is what’s different. We never knew it was there. A twenty-fifth dimension? It made no sense. Twenty-four is such a perfect number. Now, keep in mind, my ancestors were just like you thousands of iterations ago. They were a single species trapped inside the gravity well of their home galaxy with no chance of escape. When they realized the end of the universe was approaching, they could watch the Big Crunch coming—mathematically, of course, not visibly—but they were powerless to stop it. But then the seeds were invented, and the first program was written.

“And what looked like a problem at first, the Big Crunch, actually turned out to be a golden opportunity. Travelling between galaxies was prohibitively expensive. Space begins stretching faster than you can cross it, so there’s no way for one species to spread out and ensure their survival. Even if you got there, what had you accomplished? Long term, I mean? Even galaxies are doomed as they collide into one another. That means no one place is safe, and even with hyperspace, not all places can be reached. How much better, then, to wait until all places come to you!” Byrne beamed at Cole, clearly excited to be having the conversation.

“The first seed made the next universe even more conducive to life. The very laws of nature were tweaked. Carbon was made more eager to chain with itself. Water was given a wider range of fluid temperatures. The primordial elements, the building blocks of life, were put into place ahead of time. Everything needed to create more Bern and to educate them, to prepare them for the next trip around—”

“I’m sorry,” Cole interrupted, “even if all this is true, I don’t see what it has to do with us. Besides, why didn’t we stumble onto this Program? If we were made just like you, why don’t we know this stuff?”

“You do stumble onto them,” Byrne said. “Fragments, anyway. You see them in visions and dreams, and you hear them as voices in your heads. They are the very elements of your religions and your superstitions. This is why so many of them have so much in common. Your species plays these slices of our instructions over and over, but you hear only small chunks, and you hear them out of order. You inspect shards of the Program as if they were the whole.”

“You say that like we’re some sort of computer drive.”

“That’s a perfect analogy. Only, we write with four bits instead of two, and we coil them together in what you call DNA. The problem is, your drives are fragmented. Everything is haphazard, even as you continue to read them sequentially.” Byrne laughed. “The priceless irony is that you label as junk the most important parts of your DNA!”

Cole shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

“Look around you and say that again.”

Cole didn’t have to. It sounded foolish and naive the first time he had said it.

“This entire cluster of galaxies is infected. That’s why you’re different, why our code didn’t take, not fast enough anyway. There’s a mutation here that threatens everything. Everything my people—billions of generations of them over thousands of cycles—have worked to create.”

“What?” Cole placed a hand on his chest. “Us? We’re the mutation?” He crossed his arms, shoving his hands in his pits to keep them warm. “So being the Chosen One isn’t really a compliment, huh?”

“Not from our perspective, no. The Drenards in your galaxy named you that. They hold out hope for our extinction, thinking a Human will be the one to effect it. Some crazy old bat foresaw the end of our entire race. A complete impossibility, of course, but enough of her other predictions hit home that some of my people became worried. As this Prophecy spread, it made many of us nervous. We began looking for the signs, for someone both a Human and Drenard. We had a few scares, years ago, but now—after thousands of years—things are finally playing out in our favor. And as everything falls together, new programs are being written for the next passing, new defenses erected in case of—”

“Defenses? Against us? Or against the Drenards?”

“The Drenards?” Byrne laughed. “They are a non-issue. There’s always a few species that evolve and put up a noble fight. None of them matter, even if they defeat an entire galaxy full of Bern. What is their conquest? Temporary lordship over a small cluster of stars for twenty billion years? The end will consume them, and our seeds will spread on the winds of finality.

“No, the real threat is much smaller and more nefarious. It’s the substance that polluted this entire galaxy, the mutation that threatens all of creation—” Byrne’s voice climbed and continued to climb as he went on, “—it’s the foul slime that coats and smothers our program, eating all!”

Cole leaned away from the outburst, pulling his arms tighter to his chest.

“Cyclidinous,” Byrne hissed, his voice full of venom.

“Do what?”

“The organisms, the single-celled monsters that move the stuff of life through hyperspace, spreading throughout your cluster of galaxies. Cyclidinious is what they’re called. That’s the mutation I speak of, not you.”

“Never heard of it,” Cole said. “But if it’s screwing you guys and help-ing us, I’m a fan.”