Noah stepped out of the record and back into the present.
He arrived where the Dimensional Provenance Train had been cut open, where Vakochev had cleaved it in two and an architect had died and a frost-visage had planted its forest. Hours had passed here while he had been figuring out the Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin.
The frost-forest had grown thicker, its rimed boughs heavier with frozen Dimensions, and the region for gigaparsecs around had emptied out, the hunters gone, the watchers gone, the snow still falling silent over the ruin. It looked, at a glance, like an abandoned place. A dead one.
Then Noah looked at it with the eyes he had now, and he saw that it was nothing of the kind.
...!
Existence was not empty. It had never been empty! He simply had never been able to see.
