They would have needed a nanosecond of warning. They don't get it. 

And he turns around and goes back to Endorë.

The rockets stop firing. The Enemy picks up his encampments and retreats towards his borders and offers terms for peace. 

They had better be really fucking generous terms.

Cam stops to pick up Findekáno.

"Congratulations."

"I thought Eru might stop you, or the Valar might have time to react."

"Nope."

"Yes, I inferred that from the fact you're here. Has the fighting stopped?"

"Yeah."

"All extant backups of his prisoners?"

Cam tried making some timestamped since the black hole on the way home. "Gone."

He nods.

Cam puts Findekáno down accessible to the bunker.

He goes up and fetches the orc family.

They can go home?

Yeah. They can go home.

They cry, a little. They touch their house when they get back, like they're not sure it's not just a dream.

Cam goes and sits in Maitimo's unoccupied lighthouse and tweaks orbital mechanics simulations and tries to find references to somebody actually making a binary star system with planets with moons. It seems to be a surprisingly unpopular project but he's sure it can be done with enough frame-of-reference tricks.

The orcs want pre-war borders. Some people take some prodding along and some are suspicious it's another trap but the Noldor are working nonstop and the treaties mostly go through. The forcefield around Doriath has vanished. Melian is - no one is quite sure what Melian is.

Huan is howling. It bothers everyone who hears it so Tyelcormo takes him to Ossiriand where they can work on making sure the dead have a place to come back to.

Cam gets a simulation working.

Anybody have any correspondence for him before he goes and does his level best to re-hang the stars?

Everything's under control. Should they rebuild cities or just clear the land and wait for him.

He should be done with the star system in two and a half months unless he fucks it up and has to start over. At that time he will be happy to remake cities on cleared areas.

Okay. They'll wait. Will he rebuild things in orcish territory too?

Yeah.

Good skill.

He doesn't fuck up the star system. There they go, orbiting correctly.

Here's Valinor with all its inanimate objects and plants and anything that isn't too smart to function in the wild while demonic. Valinor with sunshine. Valinor waiting to be filled up with most of its inhabitants.

He goes back to Endorë and makes cities.

They make it quick and straightforward. They have teams everywhere and short lists of needed items and where to put them. It is the most efficient demon-aided postwar reconstruction ever.

He's all for efficiency.

Would anyone like to move to New Valinor.

Are their relatives there?

Not yet.

Cam may not be the best welcome wagon.

No one wants to immigrate just for fun. Maitimo asks if he wants people there to handle explaining the situation, or if he'd rather leave it a mystery.

Cam can't make everybody simultaneously enough to manage the mystery thing very well even if he wanted to.

Okay. They'd in any event maybe better have enough people there to get a structured society going. He can have ten thousand people ready to leave in two days. 

Okay then.

Cam brings them to New Valinor. He considers sending somebody to go fetch the thirty families off the planet in intergalactic space and then decides that someone may in fact be angry enough at him to murder a child in order to be rid of him and he had perhaps best wait.

He makes a huge assembly line of chip-reading-and-writing and he reembodies. He doesn't even drink coffee. He just applies caffeine and sugar directly to his blood to stay on his feet.

And they wake up. And there are people to explain, and guide away people who might be tempted to attack Cam, and hold them while they cry, and take them to their houses and show them, see, everything in place.

...unless they had pets. Distant consideration next to the Maiar, but if they had pets, they won't be there.

It's millions of people but he can do dozens at a time in batches that take a couple seconds, if they can handle the throughput. He's getting all the chip and body templates from the same time. It's not complicated the way Endorë is going to be.

No pets. Cam doesn't seem to have pulled off 'no biological decay' either and people are very disconcerted.

It's eighty million people. It's going to take about six months if he does not pause at all.

Why would he pause at all?

Psychological health or something? No one's going to suggest it or anything. The Noldor are inventing refrigeration. A bit shellshocked. There are a couple million memorials to plan.

Nah, he can take care of psychological health after the absolute minimum number of people are dead because he murdered them. If they need fridges he can take a minute to do fridges as a stopgap. Hell Library will have stuff on food preservation from humans and fairies.

And when he's handled all that he flies to Endorë and takes heavy advantage of an enforced five-day break and then he goes and puts everyone back in Mithrim, because that's simple too, they all blew up at the same time - someone please find out if Dwarves can summon, now -

Dwarves can summon, now; they are taught the safe angel circle that Cam used earlier, if Cam doesn't have more specific instructions, and they give angels blessing necklaces and tell them that lightleapers are a thing now Earth should be told to ask for them. Men can summon, too. 

Good. They should all do that. Cam can take a resurrection break long enough to set up an assembly line so there's no risk of misdrawn circles. And then he goes back to putting Elves and orcs back where they belong.

There are even more than eighty million people dead here, not even counting ones who were in Mandos long before Cam arrived.

Yeah, here he will take occasional breaks, especially when people have to get him lists of when to pull chips and bodies from and don't have them all organized yet. Every now and then he will eat something or take a nap or introduce anyone who wants to loiter nearby to Bach.

The war crimes tribunal gets up and running. They don't really want any input from Cam because, you know. Ossiriand is forty million but at least straightforward in terms of dates for chips and bodies. Alqualonde too. Maitimo brings him those ones and does not stay for an introduction to Bach.

Wouldn't expect him to. He'd have to wait a few months. Cam does not need that many breaks. Though he's going to start running a serious deficit on his century and a half of near-unbroken leisure time any year now.

It was 1496, before. They started counting again from 1. Momentous events mark the end of Ages. By the year 7 everyone anyone cares to name a chip and body time for will be back. (The Noldor are screening to make sure people are naming times of death and capture).

Thank you Noldor.

Cam goes to see if people on Valinor would like dinosaur eggs or something.

Yeah. Couple thousand different species. At least they were all well-catalogued. Also other animals, if Cam doesn't mind. Living on a planet with no animals that weren't dumb enough to make in the original go is a bit eerie.

Anything that doesn't lay eggs is tricky, but he can do a demonic generation of those and they'll just have to kind of aggressively look after them until the first non-demonic generation is self-sufficient.

Okay.

Also, they're not calling it Valinor, Valinor meant 'land of the Valar'. 

Okay. They can call it whatever.

Has anybody notified the thirty families on the intergalactic planet that they can get on their lightleaper and go to Endorë?

Not yet.

He can go do that once not-Valinor has enough demonic animals to be getting on with for the time being.

Yeah. They're calling the place Afterlife and they'd actually rather he work his magic on Endore from here forward. People can immigrate from there.

Sure.

Cam goes and parks on Endorë and is available if anybody wants anything. If anybody is going to ask whether 'anything' includes 'to punch him in the face personally' the answer is yes as long as the volume of requests doesn't get too high.

Endorë is a painful mix of appreciative and horrified. And Melian still can't reliably maintain a physical form and anyone who tries to osanwe her gets mental anguish so debilitating they sob for a month, and Huan still won't stop howling though Tyelcormo's taken him somewhere uninhabited. But also. The war's over. There are no requests to punch him in the face. Lightleapers, lots of people want lightleapers. Is there a design for a personal-use lightleaper.

If there's not yet Cam can try whipping one up. He did go to engineering school too.

There are two Noldorin kingdoms. They split along the obvious lines. They are on opposite uninhabited bits of the planet. Each of them have detailed designs for cities, if he wants to make them.

Sure.

"I would like a large greenhouse with the climate and soil of Limbo, while you're here," Fëanáro says to him. 

"...insofar as I can do climate, sure," Cam says. Greenhouse.

"Thanks. Silmarils might help with this project, if you happen to feel like waltzing into Angband and taking them back, but I think I can do it without.

How are you doing?"

"Adequately."

"I was terrified I'd think of another way the day after but I did not. Or that I'd stumble on a path to stationary-takeoff lightleapers with a few years' effort but I haven't."

"Yeah. I didn't think of anything else either," murmurs Cam.

"If you need anything non-material or not yet invented we are here."

"Thanks. A way to straightforwardly help out in Limbo would actually be great for my psychology right about now."

"I can show you the concept? I'll use you for prototypes too obviously but we're not at that stage yet. One of the things the Silmarils could do was terraform. I'm trying to build a stripped-down Silmaril that retains only that capacity so it's not too complicated for you to make - I did some tests on the dummy one the refugees had, it doesn't suffice. But here's what a Silmaril would do to any rock whose orbit you placed it in -" he pulls up simulations - "ten years out, a hundred years out - and unless the dirt in Limbo is magic it should work there too. Then things'll grow, and from there we can just send in all of Afterlife's lovely tasty nutritionally-complete plants. Those work for Men of this world, who match humans as far as we can tell."

"Sounds good. I think the consensus is that the dirt is just dirt and it's gravity itself that acts oddly in Limbo same as in Fairyland. Limbo doesn't have orbit per se but I could send it a hover drone - it does have atmosphere as high up as we've checked, will that interfere with the propagation of Silmaril-ness? Does it matter that it doesn't rain?"

"Original Silmarils are smart enough to work around atmosphere, demon-summonable ones might have to be programmed to do it manually. Some crops will need water but not all of them and not much of it and it certainly needn't come from rain, is anyone willing to turn their kitchen sink into an irrigation source? It'd be lovely if doing that for long enough creates a water cycle, but I can get the place terraformed either way."

"Yeah, it's customary to run most sources of water constantly, if there were going to be plants people could drink it less often for a while."

"I can at least promise to get them nice edible results in a couple weeks so it seems worth it." His fingers dance and the screen fades. "When's the next concordance?"

"With Hell? Hell/Fairyland, in a couple months. They'll forward things to Limbo and about half of it will even get there."

"...fairies aren't that competent?"

"It's admittedly challenging to reliably hedge out telekinetic thieves."

"I can still try to have it done by then but they seem particularly likely to be telekinetically thieved, being extremely pretty and exciting and so forth."

"Well, everything would be boxed up - letters go missing through Fairyland, they just take stuff in case it's good stuff."

"...we can also just summon fairies and angels whenever a concordance with Limbo is coming up for them and give them lots of stuff, right?"

"There's a process to get stuff on the trains and it's more elaborate in non-Hell worlds because they can't just figure it all out digitally and then conjure the train at the last minute."

"Okay. I will trust you with the process once I have a result worth the space it'll take up. Silmarils don't take up much space, but still."

"I can probably multi-track it, people are delighted about light leapers and I should be able to convert that into extra space on the train for multiple packages and then one will probably get through.'

"Thank you." Back to the screen. "Maitimo says I shouldn't tell you to go away I'm busy. Though he conceded it was infinitely better than 'you're dismissed, I'm busy' and that learning social finesse was not among the immediate best uses of my time."

"You can tell me to go away, it's fine." Cam goes away.

Unless he wants to see anyone else in this city he's gotten through its requests list and could go on to the other one.

So he goes.

Other Noldorin city-in-design-stage. It has a King Cam hasn't met. Findekano's father. It has a very neatly and usefully organized requests list and then notes that pharmacology's finally been sorted, here's how to get it, could they have this new lightleaper design that's better for surveying.

Sure, however many they like.

"Thirty. Thank you. There's space to park them on the map."

And now they are parked.

"That's the whole of our requests list. Are you planning to stick around on Endore?"

"Probably. In orbit maybe."

"Thank you for everything."

"You're welcome."

"I did not get the sense you were running around looking for absolution but - better than I expected, so far. If this is really it it was worth it."

"Thanks."

He doesn't say anything else.

Cam goes around making things for people. And when there is a lull in people wanting things he goes and makes himself a cozy little space station and he moves in and he sleeps for the first time in a while.

Fëanáro gets partial replicas of the terraforming capacity of the Silmarils up and running and making bushes dense with berries. The Noldor have children for the first time since the start of the war. Hell's library isn't censored on Endore and maybe someday divine decree will be taken less seriously.

That'd be nice. They can get library updates occasionally; the curators produce particular files of 'changes since...'.

Cam secures enough train space to have Silmarils and Silmaril-related equipment sent to Limbo care of each of his parents and one of his mom's foster kids and Norman Borlaug.

People start asking for more unusual things with the chips - can they clone themselves?

...they could. Cam would like to do this only when it is not such a new idea. Waiting period or something. They don't have a way to merge regretted forks.

Fair enough. Lots of people submit applications for the waiting period. No asking for forks of other people, presumably.

Yeah that's a no.

If people's applications sit in the queue long enough and they don't have second thoughts when called up and asked he will do forks.

The Noldor are by far the most enthusiastic adopters of this and all ask for four or five. 

...that slightly weirds Cam out and he would like them to all make sure they get along with single forks first but after that okay.

They have a tiny population compared to Endore's other civilizations - Feanaro's kingdom has only two hundred thousand people - and this seems like a good way to have enough people to benefit from economies of scale in shipping demon things and so forth. Everyone gets along with their forks at least reasonably well. Universities open so the forks can specialize. There's a international conference on ethics of this sort of thing; Cam's invited.

...yes, sure, the genocidal demon will go to the ethics conference.

Well, the Feanorians are invited, and it's widely known by now they helped. The ethics conference has representatives from all the Dwarven kingdoms, eight orcish ones, ten Elvish ones, and the Men who aren't numerous enough to have kingdoms yet. Findekano's with the representative of the Men; they've apparently been tentatively taken under the wing of the non-Feanorian Noldor kingdom. 

Forks? Forks rolled back to the past, for reasons other than capture by the Enemy? Raising baby versions of yourself? Chips for Men? There are a lot of talks.

It's all very interesting. Chips for Men are technologically a long way off since they aren't literally born cyborgs, but probably at least one summoner Man has died in a freak accident so they know if they can be daeva, by now?

Yes! With the Valar gone summoning seems to work perfectly normally, here. Everyone's been accordingly warned not to draw on floors. It's also not clear if chips do the same things for any minds but Elven and orc ones. 

Also, on the third day of the conference Cam receives convincing proof that he is not the least-qualified person to be attending the ethics conference. He hasn't seen Maitimo in six or seven years and when he seeks him out today he stares a bit searchingly as if he's trying to figure Cam out. "Thauron is here."

"...that's. Interesting."

"Isn't it. My father put Enemy-killing on the back burner trying to get Limbo started, I do not think I'll add 'assassination at a peace conference' to my crimes. Though only for the lack of means, honestly. He's not here openly. But I have met him before so I noticed."

"What's he look like these days?"

"I am not a sketch artist and can't send you the mental image, want me to find him with you and point him out?"

"Yeah, I'd rather not be talking to Thauron and not know it."

"I did not think so, which is why I notified everyone I could trust with the information as soon as I noticed it." He falls into step beside him. "I'm glad you came."

"The irony was irresistible, but apparently I've got competition."

"You are not a bad person, and I expect bad people need places to engage with ethics as badly as the rest. And it is not a competition."

"Relax, my sense of humor recovering is an excellent sign."

"All right. We helped you do it, you know, your thought processes are probably familiar." And then - "there."

Handsome Elf, black-haired and tastefully dressed, surrounded by a crowd. He turns to catch their eye.

Cam's not exactly going to say 'hi'. He considers and discards 'in case you were still curious, no, Hitler's a Limboite, not a demon'.

Well, Thauron will stride over, after shaking the hands of everyone in his immediate vicinity. "The man of the Age! I was pleasantly surprised to see you on this event's guest list."

"Were you."

"I take it you don't reciprocate the sentiment."

"I did not identify you via guest list, so it would have been challenging."

"I go by Annatar, these days. Means 'Lord of Gifts.' Did Maitimo point you out for me? He has a gift for that."

"I don't think we met in Valinor," Maitimo says. 

"Oh, not in Valinor, dear, I had your soul. We were good friends."

"Wow that's creepy," Cam says.

"I am just trying to make you feel better about your life choices."

"It's working, actually."

He smiles broadly. "Good! I assume you cannot fork me but the outcome of this week's debates will someday be very relevant for my children."

...

"Shall we go," Maitimo says.

"You two complement each other," Thauron says, looking between them.  

"Oh, for the love of - I swear I have not seen Cam in seven years, didn't particularly miss him, am confident he felt the same, and have never had any interactions with him that were not about war logistics."

"I wasn't going to be jealous, dear, you don't even remember me."

Cam is not even going to ask how that works with an upload because the answer is certainly 'horribly as all fuck'.

They walk off. Maitimo's shaking. He recovers after a few seconds. "Well. Now you know what face he's wearing today. I do not really want to continually identify him by having interactions with him, but."

"If I have to conjure one-inch-tall replicas of whatever body he's wearing on any occasion it is conceivable I might encounter him I can do that instead."

"Why don't you do that instead. I was going to go to the talk on stillborn children and chip problems; unless you want to ruin our perfect record of talking exclusively about war logistics I'll leave you here."

"Yeah, I was going to the one on long term population projections. Later."

Lightleapers: make long term population much less of a concern. Are they likely to run out of demons interested in being summoned if they span a hundred planets in a thousand years?

Probably not. The perennial problem of demons being difficult to pay remains but Elves seem likely to be uniquely good at producing commissioned art that the demons could not possibly get any other way.

Elves would delightedly do that. There have not actually been any demons other than Cam summoned yet because of concerns about making it obvious that this society had demon-aided resurrection. 

Yeah, that's definitely worth some caution. Maybe they want to do nonrandom summons and vet their demons via remote correspondence first, at least until the information leaks some other way.

This idea is discussed and meets with general approval. The conference includes meals, or in Cam's case just a menu, and everyone breaks for dinner and discussion. 

Mmmm, menu.

And does he want to be seated next to random people or does he want to join anyone in particular? Maitimo and FIndekano are at the same table with some orcs, some Dwarves and Ossiriand's new Prime Minister.

Eh, he'll sit with the people he knows.

They wave him over. The food's delicious. The conversation is fast-paced and covers most of the day's talks and there's not even a second's glares or pauses or recognition between the two Noldorin nations' respective crown princes. One would think they'd met today.

That is so much better than constant drama!

Makes for more pleasant conversation for everyone else, certainly! When dessert's served Thauron walks across the room toward them.

"Cam," Maitimo says, "can you summon my father's project undying prototype 11, has a button, and push it?"

"...uh, what is it?"

"Failed enemy-killing effort that I'm sure he already knows we have, it creates a very high-pitched buzzing noise only Maiar can hear."

Cam produces and pushes the button.

Thauron does not come sit down with them. Everyone watches Maitimo a little alarmedly. "I don't think he's even trying to pretend he's reformed," Maitimo says, "and he seems to want to pick a fight. I was actually distracted for the first few minutes of the talk on babies and chips, was anyone else attending it?"

They wrap up fairly early in the evening, because there'll be more the next day.

Cam doesn't sleep; he sits up and spies on what Afterlife's up to.

Building memorials, still. Very pretty ones. Writing down everything they remember of Valinor. They are not moving on but Elves do not, in fact, move on very well at all. They are moving.

Moving's something.

Cam goes for a flight in the chilly starlight.