S P Q R
Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as they watched, astonished, a hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.
As soon as he reached the ground the man started towards them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.
Yuri called, “Who the hell are you?”
The man, striding steadily, started shouting back: “Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae ‘Malleus Jesu’. Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?
Always another door, Yuri thought. “Let me handle this.” He spread his hands and walked forward, towards the angry stranger.
In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –
Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –
In the chthonic silence –
There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.
But time was short, and ever shorter.
In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.
Afretworld
This novel is about life on an “exoplanet”, a planet beyond the solar system. The first such planet orbiting a normal star (as opposed to a pulsar) was discovered as recently as 1995. At time of writing we have discovered thousands of such worlds (for a recent survey see Ray Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds, Princeton, 2011). The first discovery of a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system was announced in October 2012 (see “An Earth Mass Planet Orbiting Alpha Centauri B” by Xavier Dumusque et al., Nature, 17 October 2012).
Could Per Ardua exist? At the time of writing no planet of Proxima has been detected, but a careful inspection of the star’s apparent movements has put upper limits on the sizes of any possible planets (for a technical paper see Zechmeister, M., Kürster, M., Endl, M., “The M Dwarf Planet Search Programme at the ESO VLT+UVES: A Search for Terrestrial Planets in the Habitable Zone of M Dwarfs’, Astron. Astrophys., vol. 505, pp. 859–71, 2009). The planetary system I have invented for this novel fits these limits. Proxima is a red dwarf—an “M dwarf”. We used to think that only sunlike stars could host Earthlike worlds. Now we suspect that M dwarfs like Proxima could after all host habitable worlds (see “A Reappraisal of the Habitability of Planets Around M Dwarf Stars”, J. Tarter et al., Astrobiology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 30–65, 2007).
The idea of starships driven by very lightweight “smart sails” pushed by microwave beams was suggested by Robert Forward (‘Starwisp: An Ultralight Interstellar Probe’, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, vol. 22, pp. 345–50, 1985) and revisited by Geoffrey A. Landis (‘Microwave Pushed Interstellar Saiclass="underline" Starwisp Revisited’, paper AIAA-2000-3337, presented at the AIAA 36th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Huntsville AL, July 17–19, 2000). I have extrapolated wildly beyond these respectable works.
The classic work Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, ed. Ben Finney and Eric Jones (Berkeley, 1985), contains much speculation on the anthropology and ethics of the colonisation of space.
I’m deeply grateful to Professor Adam Roberts for a brief injection of Latin.
Any errors or inaccuracies are, of course, my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
December 2012
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2013
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The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
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This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz.
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ISBN 978 0 575 11686 3
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