This afternoon Jan and I will make a somber little pilgrimage. It was her idea. "We have to thank them," she said.
"How can we? They're beyond any kind of communication."
"Even so. We owe them so much, Tom."
"I say we ought to leave them in peace."
"Are you afraid to go down there?"
"Afraid? No."
"Then come with me. Because I'm going."
"I'll go too, then. After lunch?"
"After lunch, yes."
Jan will be here soon. We will go down into the depths of Mirt. She's right: we owe them so much. This sharing of minds, my new ability to reach out to Lorie ... so much. One final visit, then, to bid farewell to the Mirt Korp Ahm, and try to thank them for what they have left to us. We'll stand before a crystal wall and peer at some incredibly ancient High One, lost in its dreams of an era of greatness, and we'll tell it that we're the new people, the ones now filling the universe they once owned, the busy little seekers. And I think we'll ask it to pray for us, if there's anything that High Ones ever prayed to, because I have a feeling we're going to make plenty of mistakes before we know how to handle these powers we've so strangely acquired.
* * *
Jan is here now. Down to the High Ones we go.
End of cube. End of more than that: end of a whole era. We don our amplifiers. We touch minds. I sense the presence of Lorie and say hello to her. She responds warmly.
—Stay in touch, I say. We'll show you something interesting, in a weird way. We'll show you the oldest living things in the universe. Our benefactors, but they'll never know it.
Down we go to say good-bye to the Mirt Korp Ahm.
THE END
Robert Silverberg, Across a Billion Years
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