“You know, we have real food back at the hab,” T’Kxa said. Aelak waved the suggestion away with his big hands, teeth still busy with something he had caught in the field. Suddenly he stopped walking, kneeling and comparing the moss on the ground with the green of his skin.

“Grass here is paler. Could be a structure underneath!” he shouted.

“We’ve scanned it!” T’Kxa snapped back. There was a flock of microsurveyors around her circular head, each inspecting its own alien insect as it landed to drink her sweat. “There’s nothing here,” she continued, swatting the microsurveyors away. Aelak disagreed.

“There has to be something, some remnant of them.” He kicked about in the dirt as if hoping to uncover something. T’Kxa tutted.

“This is the last world Aelak, and we have known there is nothing for a while. We just came here to prove it,” she said. Aelak kept kicking up grass with his enormous boots, lazily digging under mosses and rocks. The Lastar was the furthest edge of their universe, the tip of a cosmos of merely ten thousand stars. It had been this way since prehistory, but their most ancient religions spoke of a night sky that had once been filled with light, long before the gods shattered them. Legends passed down forever had told stories of impossible constellations and conflicts, all ending with the death of nearly all the stars in the universe.

Aelak waited until midnight fell upon the planet. The thin universe lay as a compressed red blur against the blackness of space, the stars sparse and bulging. Even though he was looking up at them, Aelak felt as if he was looming above the stars as he stood. He gathered his tools, the specimen box, and set out into the reeds. They hummed as he brushed past them, phosphorescent gnats exploding in rainbow colours like sparks cast from starship engines. He stopped every few paces to look into the bushes or to imagine the shapes of buildings revealing themselves on weather worn cliff faces. He stopped watch small predators and smaller prey fighting, one to survive, one to ensure the survival of their offspring. Here he was abducting, examining, searching. There had to be something here. Some evidence.

Soon he reached the edge of an open lake, stabbing a long metal staff into the soft dirt. A silvery exploration tent unwound itself, whirling and billowing into the perfect shape like a ship’s sail. Aelak pressed a button, and a small current was passed through the tent from branchlike wiring, sending impulses into sensitive simulant musculature between the tent’s walls. Quickly they bent and snapped into a stiff cuboid, like a box being crushed in reverse, the expanding material a distant descendant of wings. He thought briefly about evolution, then quietly set about the task of organising his things under the gentle glow of the heatsphere in the centre of the room, being careful not to disturb it. He opened the white lid of the specimen box and peered inside. A mole-like thing, no larger than his hand, was pawing and reaching desperately toward him. He held his open notepad above it, and the creature leapt up to get at it. He reasoned that it wanted something to hide under, and so tore off some pages for it to chew and tear up. He watched this for a minute before closing the lid again, sitting down and unrolling a transparent parchment. The edges were nicked, fraying, but the bright green lettering still flickered through the empty space where the parchment was missing. Tiny sensors on the corners of the parchment registered Aelak’s eye movements and presented to him the pages he was looking for. He stared intently with weary reptilian eyes, a slow wheezing sound coming from his throat as he read.

Lastar VII was a strange world. All other planets in this and nearby systems were covered in ruins. Aelak and T’Kxa had been dispatched to find out why this one was lacking them. The cities of the Ancient Ones were their tombstones, left cold and naked for millennia by dead worlds, but swallowed whole by the vines and active tectonics of living ones. Aelak kept telling himself that must have happened here, that the microsurveyor results were wrong. But all the pyramids he had pointed out on this journey were nothing more than hills.

Active volcanoes still pocked the landscape, and these would have churned through cities long before Aelak’s people discovered the first relic on their own world. If the Ancient Ones had abandoned this planet early enough, then their cities would be molten rock now, swilling under the thin crust of this jungle world. All the evidence pointed toward this planet being wild. Still, Aelak felt that something from the Ancient Ones should persist here, something that the geological surveys had missed. So far, this was the only planet with no trace of them.

He looked over the images of other worlds once more, racking both of his brains for something reminiscent. Flashes of his memories appeared on the transparent parchment, but everything had already been checked and cross-referenced. There were no ruins here. There never were. He rolled up the parchment and unzipped the thin airlock to his cuboid tent, stepping outside under the glow of a peanut shaped moon. He sighed and sat down on the edge of the lake.

T’Kxa and Aelak were part of an elite group. It was T’Kxa’s own team that had discovered unlocked records on a water world two solar systems back, and Aelak’s which translated them. There were stories, pictures, star charts. Aelak was one of the first to reason that these were scientific documents written by the Ancient Ones, that the old myriad of stars in their world’s oldest and deepest religions wasn’t a myth. He proposed that the two races, separated by perhaps billions of years, had written of the very same bright night skies not out of coincidence, but because those ancient stars were once real. On Lastar VII, the last untouched planet in the universe, he would prove it.

Something moved in the water. Aelak crouched, not as scientist, but as hunter. A swarm of microsurveyors saw this and dipped out of the way, choosing to watch from a distance, their childlike intelligence affording them safety. Something with arms and fins writhed just below the surface. Aelak lifted a small gun and fired quickly, watching as a net opened and swallowed the creature. He pulled it back to the shore, retrieving an empty specimen box and dropping the thing inside.

He watched as the creature learned it could not escape. He pushed the box under a scanner, noting similarities between its skeleton and that of the mole creature he had collected the night before. He admired its strange form, a backward looking dorsal fin propelling it through the water, weird arms with devolving fingers helping it move around on the shores of the lake. It seemed caught between two forms, stood awkwardly at a fork in evolution. He turned once more to the mole creature in the other box. Seemingly developed for burrowing, its arms had an odd spade-like curve to their palms and flat, wide fingers. It pawed around in the box, sensing the fishlike one next door and scratching at the white plastic. Aelak moved them away from one another and gave the mole some more paper to chew up, adding some more lake water to the aquatic one and sitting between them. He spent the rest of the night inspecting the creatures. He scanned them again, dissecting them in virtual reality. He loomed over his parchment screen until the early morning, arguing with himself over what he had found. It unsettled him, and for a fourth night he did not sleep on Lastar VII.

The next morning T’Kxa visited the tent. Storm clouds were building overhead, and the air around the lake felt tense and hot. By now Aelak had tiredly gathered a third creature. This was smaller still, and had robust opaque wings that glistened like the parchment screens. When he captured it several others had followed mindlessly, and he now had a sideways box full of them, a thin mesh separating them from the rest of the tent. The noise of their wings buzzing was almost unbearable.

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“I see you have been busy,” T’Kxa said, raising her voice.

Aelak hummed, “Yes, and you?”

“No sign of artificial materials in volcanic records. There’s nothing. The Ancient Ones must not have come here,” T’Kxa replied.

“There has to be hope,” Aelak said. He looked at the equipment around the tent. He knew that most of it was derived from technology the Ancient Ones had left behind on other worlds. It was millions of years old, entombed in fossilised cities and petrified mountains, and yet it still worked.

“The Ancient Ones knew their world was ending. They were entering into an age where no more stars could be born,” Aelak said confidently. T’Kxa sighed.

“You know better than most that stars don’t age. Not once have we seen one being born.”

“But we have seen them die, or at least the effects. The star explosion on the other end of our universe, the records the Ancient Ones left. Your team found those, my team decided that our people didn’t need to know. If stars can die then there must have been more in the past, there had to have been,” Aelak pleaded. T’Kxa shook her head.

“We have no proof that the Ancient One’s accounts are correct, that they are scientific fact. All we have is stories from a time before our kind climbed out of the caves. You would be wise not to base your theories off those ancient tales.”

“You know the supernova was real T’Kxa. Admit it.”

“It could have been weaponry.”

“Nonsense. The people need to know if the universe is dying,” Aelak said defiantly. He lowered his head as he glared at T’Kxa, a universal sign of a confrontation waiting to happen.

“Raise your face scientist. You might hurt your neck,” T’Kxa said, stepping forward. Her gills billowed open as she growled. Aelak complied, backing away and standing beside his notes. T’Kxa eyed him carefully, assessing his movements before talking again.

“Not one star has died or been born since history began. And if it can happen, the people are happier when they are ignorant. If we find more evidence of supernovae here, and we do not find how the Ancient Ones survived such a cataclysm, then we shall take the information to our graves and let the world live in peaceful ignorance for its final years. That is the agreement we made when we landed.” Aelak nodded nervously. T’Kxa moved to pick up his notes but he covered them up, getting in her way.

“What if this world holds none of the secrets we came here for. What if the Ancient Ones aren’t here?” he asked suddenly.

“Then there is little hope for us. Us who have ventured into space on the back of excavated technology, who have created a society on the moral standards of a long-dead alien race. We leapt forward millennia with their relics. We have earned none of our luxuries or excesses. Perhaps it is fitting we were born into a doomed universe, for we have lived twice as fast as the Ancient Ones will have lived,” T’Kxa said. Aelak swallowed and handed her his notebook, opening it to the most recent page, looking away as she read it.

“Is this another one of your theories?” she asked.

“No,” Aelak said, pointing her to the creatures in the boxes. She glanced at them, then back at the notes, then back at the creatures.

“Is this true?” she asked, pointing at a drawing.

“It is.”

“It makes no sense,” she said.

“I always hoped if we found them they might have something to say to us, to save us from the dying stars,” Aelak replied. He stood close to her as she compared the notes and the creatures, mumbling to herself in denial of what she was seeing.

“It can’t be true.”

That evening Aelak and T’Kxa took the creatures in the boxes back to the edge of the lake. Aelak opened each box individually, saving the small mole-like creature for last. He picked it up, looking at its strange flat hands, and stroked it gently. T’Kxa took the mole out of Aelak’s hands, staring into its eyes. She wept as she held it. Deep inside she prayed it might suddenly speak, or that some billion year old code was embedded within it, something they might make sense of.

“Why do you think they did it?” she asked. Aelak watched the mole in her hands and thought hard about the question. He reached over and guided T’Kxa’s hands to open, releasing the mole. They watched as it scurried into the long grass, then, finally, Aelak answered.

“Perhaps after conquering the universe there was little else left but to return to the nature they had commanded, surrendering themselves to it as a final acceptance that there was nothing more to do. Perhaps they lost their instinct to survive somewhere along the way, and with it their motivation, and so wanted to return to something primal.” Aelak suggested. T’Kxa turned to the flashing storm clouds in the distance, listening intently to the thunder.

“Or perhaps they are everywhere. They could be storms, maybe even the planets themselves,” T’Kxa suggested.

“The end of technology being not just a mastery of nature, but a unity with it,” Aelak added. He reached back and gathered the notes he had brought outside with him, stacking them into a neat pile. T’Kxa picked up a little spade and started digging by the water’s edge, making a hole deep enough to fit the scraps of paper Aelak was pulling loose from his notes. Finally he lit a small blowtorch and lowered it reluctantly to a scrap of paper. T’Kxa reassured him as the fire began to spread. He took his parchment screen and tore it in two, watching sparks of green lettering as they dissipated in the midnight air. Once all was burnt to ashes the clouds overhead opened, dousing the last dying embers of the fire. Aelak and T’Kxa sat there for a while in the heavy rain, thinking about what they had seen, wondering if the clouds themselves had wanted to help erase all trace of it.

“I thought they would tell us how to survive,” T’Kxa admitted.

“How long have we got?” Aelak asked.

“What?”

“Before the first star explodes. How long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do. I know you do. It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone,” Aelak said softly. He held T’Kxa’s muscular hand and squeezed.

“Less than a century, we can’t be more precise,” T’Kxa explained sorrowfully. She looked out at the peanut shaped moon and tried not to cry.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Aelak asked.

“I didn’t want you to be afraid,” T’Kxa said. At that moment a flock of small birds fluttered past them, hovering for a moment above the obsidian surface of the lake. Memory superimposed the blue face of an Ancient One over each of their beaks, and Aelak remembered the holograms he had found a decade earlier. The records and stories had promised a huge civilisation waiting at the edge of the universe, but there was none. He thought about the fishlike creature, about how its little brain seemed perfect for accommodating Ancient One circuitry. Part of him wondered if perhaps he could plug one into a neural interface and glean some information from it, if perhaps some instinct or inherited dream had passed knowledge from the Ancient Ones to their distant cousins on Lastar VII. He turned to T’Kxa and knew she was sharing the same daydream.

“Do you think everything on this world holds their fingerprint?” T’Kxa asked.

“I think everything on every world does, but this one is the key. I think tomorrow we should start checking the paths of ancient riverbeds, see if there is some secret pattern we could follow, like a map,” Aelak said.

“Geoengineering a treasure trail. This is why I wanted to work on your team,” T’Kxa said. She bumped her circular head against Aelak’s, a sign of affection, and pointed to a distant star.

“That’s where we met, you and I, if you remember. The moon libraries of Hartepp XIII,” T’Kxa said.

“Of course I remember. All those books and not a single word,” Aelak said, smiling sadly.

“A trillion pages fossilised. There is so much we don’t know, so much we presumed. What if this isn’t the end of the universe, but the middle? Just as there is an infinity of knowledge behind us, so too is there another ahead,” T’Kxa said. Aelak didn’t believe her, but his sensitivities as a thinking, caring being far outweighed his scepticism in this moment. If this truly was one of the last moments of the universe, he wanted it to be spent with hope.

“It’s possible,” Aelak said. Reluctantly he pulled a final crumpled note from his pocket, opening it in front of T’Kxa. She shook her head at him and smiled as he read it one last time.

“You were going to smuggle that off world.”

“Of course,” Aelak whispered.

The drawing depicted the ribcage of a small rodent, its ribs grown into the familiar shape of the symbol found on almost all ruins left behind by the Ancient Ones. Aelak rested the piece of paper on the ground and weighed it down with a small stone, stepping back with T’Kxa. They sat and waited as the sun began to rise over the small strange planet, sitting in silence until another mole-like creature had found the paper and chewed it up for bedding.