Jeean looked up at the blackness and sighed.

 

“You’ve been in the archives again, haven’t you?” said a voice behind her. Jeean turned to face her mother.

 

“There’s no law against it,” Jeean said, more than a little sullenly.

 

“Perhaps there should be.”

 

Casta sat down on the planter next to Jeean and looked up at the featureless expanse above them. “The dome needs cleaning,” she said.

 

“The dome always needs cleaning. It doesn’t change what’s on the other side of it.”

 

“Nothing is on the other side of it, dear.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

They stared sat and stared at the infinite blackness for a long moment before Casta took a long breath and shifted her weight. Jeean braced herself for today’s lesson.

 

“Pining for what we no longer have is bad for your soul, Jee. There is no point in dwelling on things we cannot control.”

 

Jeean threw her arms up. “There is no point in anything anymore. That’s the point!”

 

“That may be so,” Casta replied calmly, “but what else is there?”

 

“Nothing,” Jeean said, her head lowered, “and maybe that is the point, too.”

 

“My child,” Casta said, “eleven years old is too young for such cynicism.”

 

* * *

 

The excitement throughout the ship was palpable. Jeean would have loved the excitement to be for her twenty-sixth birthday, but it was typical of her luck that the start of her adult life would fall upon the most momentous occasion Legacy’s long and tired history, and certainly the biggest thing to happen to any living crew member.

 

Almost everyone had gathered in the observatory for the turn, faces tilted upwards like so many flowers reaching for a light source that wasn’t there. Legacy was an intergalactic vessel that, from the outside, rather absurdly, resembled a snow globe balanced on the tip of a stick. The “stick” was a reaction stack almost a mile long, and housed the engines that powered Legacy’s now five thousand subjective year voyage. The snow globe, fragile as it seemed, contained quite possibly the last remnants of the human species.

 

Perhaps the last life in the universe at all.

 

Five millennia travelling fast enough to touch the speed of light had resulted in dozens of generations knowing only various hues of featurelessness through the aged alloys of the hull. The past centuries of deceleration had provided a steady one gee of gravity, but today that was about to change.

 

“All passengers please be aware that we will be entering freefall shortly,” said a voice over the ship’s announcement system. It was the kind of voice that pressed and folded its underwear.

 

“Hey, Jee,” said a different voice behind Jeean. She turned to find Grathm standing, his expression as eager and earnest as ever.

 

“Hi,” she said with a smile.

 

“Are you looking forward to the big moment?”

 

“Sure,” she said unconvincingly. “What’s with the glide?”

 

Grathm looked down at the cleaning tool in his hand as though he’d only just realised it was there. “Oh,” he said, a little sheepishly, “me and some of the others figured, you know, the dome is pretty hard to clean under gravity so—”

 

“So you’re going to use the biggest thing to happen on this ship for thousands of years to clean the windows? That’s very… you, Grathm,” Jeean said, not unkindly.

 

Grathm shifted uneasily, and Jeean felt the usual twang of guilt she felt when she enjoyed watching the poor boy fumble for words around her.

 

Finally, he said, “I could grab another glide if you… no, I suppose not. Woah!” Grathm stumbled and Jeean steadied him. “I guess we’re finally coming to a stop,” she said, feeling a flutter in her stomach.

 

Sure enough, a few moments later, the observatory was a comical sea of gently bobbing heads as each spectator floated at the end of their short tethers. Some people vomited. Thankfully, everyone who did managed to use the receptacles that had been handed out on entering the observatory.

 

Across the other side of the dome, a cat yowled as it floated across the observatory, and someone yelled angrily at someone else for not securing the animal.

 

And then the engines cut out.

 

Engines that had been firing continuously for thousands of years, unnoticed by most of the humans on the ship, powered down completely. Every living person — and generations upon generations before them — had lived their entire lives with the almost imperceptible hum and vibration of the engines. It was more than a cessation of a noise you didn’t realise was there; it was a paranoia-inducing sense that something was wrong with the universe.

 

Before this sensation could really set in, the ship began its turn, and the black hole came into view. It was enormous, Jeean knew, though the scale of a black hole to a tiny monkey brain hardly mattered. She had been told it was bigger than the supermassive black holes that had once sat at the heart of galaxies, back when there were galaxies. Faceless titans roaming through the dying universe, eating anything they encountered.

 

And this one was eating.

 

The accretion disk wrapped around and under the black hole, twisted into unintuitive shapes by the enormous gravity well. It was the first discernable feature anyone had seen in the blackness beyond the dome for longer than it had taken ancient Earth civilisations to rise and fall.

 

Some people were crying, perhaps overwhelmed by the sight, perhaps terrified by it.

 

“I’ll catch you in a bit, yeah?” Grathm said, detaching his tether and pushing off towards the dome to do his good deed.

 

“Yeah, in a bit,” Jeean said.

 

Legacy would likely remain in orbit around this black hole for the rest of her life as it scraped up energy and particles for reaction mass. Where her mother had known only blackness, her children would know only this.

 

She thought about children. She thought about the endless, pointless voyage ahead and behind. Legacy really was a cruel thing to name this vessel, she thought.