“I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.”

“In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.Everywhere they found life.Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.There was despair and loneliness.There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh.Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—”

“We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.”

“This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.”

“Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns”

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.”

“The lessons of rocks, stars,and life are clear. To understand Earth, you must divorce yourself for the inconsequential temporal or spacial scale of human life. We live on a single tiny world in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. Similarly, we live day by day in a cosmos aged hundreds of billions of days. If you seek meaning and purpose in the cosmos, you will not find it in any privileged moment or place tied to human existence.”