The Time Surgeons
Epilogue

Hireld Banekaro stood on the beach, holding his daughter’s hand. The dark ocean gently lapped against the sand, the force of its waves blunted by the reef far off shore.

The glow of the sun was beginning to appear on the horizon, its advance rays dipping the edges of the clouds in gold and crimson.

Behind them the coastal trees grew lush and green, though in the predawn light the green was more black than verdant. Still, a few birds had noticed the lightening sky and had begun their tentative greetings to the new day.

It feels like the Earth in its dawn. The rhythms of nature, as they have been for millions of years.

And so it was, though he knew that deep beneath his feet and extending under the ocean before him and the forest behind him was a mighty city, home to millions of souls.

The rest of the Earth was much the same. Men no longer needed to despoil the Earth to live. Much of it was left to return to its natural state, where people were free to wander, enjoy and commune with a world as it had been when their species was young. However far mankind had travelled, at some level of their souls they still needed that. Perhaps they always would.

Yet in many places the cities burst forth from the earth and towered above the landscape in all their glowing glory. For the works of man were honored too, their achievements a source of pride. If raw nature was something to admire for its beauty and even its savagery, humanity saw itself as nature’s crowning glory.

Over the long existence of the race it had been a crown they sometimes wore precariously. But today, they knew, they would earn it.

Hireld and his daughter looked toward the sky. At a thought, their modified eyes, part biology, part machine, magnified and identified; when it was needed they would protect their sight from the brightest radiation, yet let them see the subtlest play of colors. Both of them were looking at two bright points of light, dancing impossibly close to each other impossibly far away.

“Daddy, who was Pachmeny?”

“She was a very wise woman. The first person to discover the stars that even we call by her name. She lived in a different timeline from ours. But the wormhole engineers found the traces of that timeline, and others. We honor her, for without her and her people, our race would have ended and we would never have reached the stars.”

They had not needed to come here. The same eyes that extended their natural sight could have shown them this scene no matter where they were. But even now, humans felt the need to be there. For their physical presence to mark their witness. Perhaps if they advanced even further they would no longer need it. Or perhaps, like the forest behind them, they always would.

Then the heavens turned white, as the front of the supernova’s rage finally reached Earth. When they looked away, they saw the violent colors of the aurora streaming past the birthplace of mankind, as the electromagnetic and quantum shields diverted the deadly radiation safely into space. So it would be for a long time, until the death throes of the stars finally abated.

Hireld held his daughter close, as they watched the end of the world pass them by.