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The pilot answered: "Ach, no, Timmy

- military, it is." And Malibert said:

"They wouldn't put one of those here, Timothy. It's too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland."

And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him "Daddy."

In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books, Fermi's terrible third answer was the right one after all.

But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants - two generations or a dozen generations later - one was alive on the day when Fermi's paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner's fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.

Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy...

But that is in fact what did happen!

At least, one would like to think so.

SLEEPOVER

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is one of Britain's most popular and bestselling writers of science fiction. He began selling stories to Interzone in 1990, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that his output increased significantly. He made a big impact with his first novel, Revelation Space (2000), which was shortlisted for both the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His second novel, Chasm City (2001) won the BSFA Award. Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency until 2004 when he turned to writing full time. The following story, specially written for this anthology, is not part of the Revelation Space series. It was developed from notes for an unwritten novel and maybe one day that novel will be completed, for we need to know the fate of the Earth. Here we have one of the more unusual apocalyptic ideas, but I'll let Reynolds do the explaining.

* * *

THEY BROUGHT GAUNT out of hibernation on a blustery day in early spring. He came to consciousness in a steel-framed bed in a grey-walled room that had the economical look of something assembled in a hurry from prefabricated parts. Two people were standing at the foot of the bed, looking only moderately interested in his plight. One of them was a man, cradling a bowl of something and spooning quantities of it into his mouth, as if he was eating his breakfast on the run. He had cropped white hair and the leathery complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outside. Next to him was a woman with longer hair, greying rather than white, and with much darker skin. Like the man, she was wiry of build and dressed in crumpled grey overalls, with a heavy equipment belt dangling from her hips.

"You in one piece, Gaunt?"