We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly – so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing – we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.
And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.
Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.
When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.
At first there was a period of stasis – the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.
Then the stars began to go out.
It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.
It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ‘photino birds’ who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes – a conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.
It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.
We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ‘construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries – discovered, even colonised, but never understood.
One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.
People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.
It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.
But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.
When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.
PART SIX: THE FALL OF MANKIND
THE SIEGE OF EARTH
c. AD 1,000,000
I
The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.
Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose – in this case, to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.
His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.
Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.
It was hours since he had stormed out of his parents’ home, though the changeless day made it hard to track the time. Nobody knew where he was. He had instructed the Mist, the ubiquitous artificial mind of Mars, not to follow him. But the journey had been harder than he had expected, and he was already growing hungry and thirsty.
It might have been easier if his journey had a destination, a fixed end. But he wasn’t heading anywhere as much as escaping. He wanted to show his parents he was serious, that his refusal to join the great exodus from reality through the transfer booths wasn’t just some fit of pique. Well, he’d done that. But his flight had a beginning but no end.
Trying to take his mind off his tiredness, he stared into the sliver of sun on the horizon. Sol was so big and red it didn’t hurt his eyes, even when he gazed right into it. The sun never moved, of course, save for its slow rise as you walked towards it.
The sky of Mars had changed, across a million years. Symat knew that Mars’s sky had once had three morning stars, the inner planets. But Venus and Mercury had long been eaten up by the sun’s swelling, Earth wafted away, and Mars was the closest of the sun’s remaining children.
And that sun never shifted in the sky. These days Mars kept one face turned constantly towards the sun, and one face away from it: one Dayside, one Nightside, and a band of twilight between where the last people lived.
Something briefly eclipsed the sun. He stopped, blinking; his eyes were dry and sore. He saw that he had passed through the shadow of a spire.
He walked on.
Soon he entered a city. The buildings were tall and full of sunlight, and bridges fine as spider web spanned the canal water. But there were no people walking over those bridges, no flitters skimming around the spires, and red dust lay scattered over the streets. It was like walking through a museum, solemn and silent.
One building bulged above his head, a ball of smooth, fossil-free Martian sandstone skewered on a spire of diamond. Clinging to the bank of the canal Symat gave it a wide berth: even after all this time human instincts remained shaped by the heavier gravity of Earth, where such an imbalanced structure would have been impossible.
Time had made its mark. Right in the heart of the city one slender bridge had collapsed. He could see its fallen stones in the water, a line of white under the surface.
Before he reached the ruined abutment on the canal bank he came to a scattering of loose stones. He gathered together a dozen or so cobbles and peered up resentfully at one of the more substantial buildings. Its flat windows, like dead eyes, seemed to mock him. He hefted a cobble, took aim, and hurled it. His first shot clattered uselessly against polished stone. But his second shot took out a window that smashed with a sparkling noise. The sound excited him, and he hurled more stones. But the noise stopped every time he quit throwing, reminding him firmly he was alone.
Dispirited, he dumped the last of his cobbles and turned back to the canal. On its bank, he sat with his feet dangling over blue running water, water that ran endlessly from the world’s cold side to the warm.
Symat was very thirsty.
The canal bank was a wall of stone that sloped smoothly down to the water. It would be easy to slide down there, all the way into the water. He could drink his fill, and wash off the dust of Mars. But how would he get out? Glancing down the river he saw the ruins of that bridge. The bank beneath the abutment was broken up; surely he could find handholds.