The round trip had taken less than a century.
Later, Del Azarchel was commanded by the growing Jupiter Brain to mount an expedition to Delta Pavonis, the other surviving colony, nearly bankrupting the Earth to do so.
This colony was twice as far away, a world called Splendor. Like a white gem set in an opalescent ring, Splendor shared its orbit with a bright, multicolored ring system stretching entirely around Delta Pavonis, a sun ringed like Saturn. This asteroid belt was thought to be the remnant of a disintegrated gas giant of which Splendor was supposed to be a surviving moon. At every latitude, the immense and brightly colored bands of the belt were visible, a rainbow running from horizon to horizon through the sun.
Falling stars were a daily or hourly occurrence. The icy landscape was broken with crater lakes, remnants of asteroid falls of dinosaur-extinction size, apparently falling with appalling frequency. It was a location only minds utterly indifferent to the chances of survival would select to plant a colony.
Their cold, low-gravity, diamond-bright world had a year some four hundred days long, but, unlike Nocturne, rotated with a ten-hour day, so the deracination ship could assume a geosynchronous orbit and lower its vast length like a space elevator, allowing a low energy method of ascent to orbit, and easy access to the seventeen large moons and countless smaller satellites crowding the world.
A single equatorial ocean cinctured the globe. Glacier covered the entire northern continent and the southern, sculpted into ghostly, fantastic shapes by high winds and low gravity. All was ice-locked save the belt of rugged seashore fjords and cliffs and narrow valleys where human fields and farms and walled towns grew. The golden domes and steaming spires of the seven competing ecological stations, placed among the precipices and crags of these fierce shores were now the seats of the world’s arrogant ruling clans, the Houses of Splendor.
The local life, a spongy seaweed and a plethora of colorful jellies, lichens, molds, and balloonlike invertebrates, was obliterated, and the chemical composition of the equatorial ocean-belt and atmosphere slowly changed to suit human needs, as bacteria, then spores, then arctic sea life, piscine then mammalian, was introduced, one layer at a time, carefully, slowly.
The Splendids waited with astonishing patience for uncounted years in airtight sanctuaries worshipping their frozen and slumbering forefathers, waiting for their environmental engineering to tame their world of icy seas and jagged rocks and constant meteor impacts. Their grandfathers emerged in pressure suits, their fathers in breathing masks, and they emerged in parkas, and danced and skated on the ice beneath the earthly pine trees in an unearthly world they had made their own.
The Splendids made it a point of pride never to biomanipulate their folk to match the environment, but always to coax and torment the world into matching the folk. The Chimera and Melusine among them were forced to breed with the Witches and Sylphs to produce a strange but sturdy hybrid called a Splendid: long-lived and light-boned with neural antennae for sending and receiving signals. The Giants and Locusts, outnumbered and unaggressive, were killed in hideous wars and massacres.
The proud, austere, and uncooperative Swans retreated to the regions of icy inland waste, far from the single sea, lost in glacier-torn and treeless tundra larger than the entire combined land mass of Earth, lost beyond the reach of any possible pogrom. There they altered their children to adapt to the environment as it then was, and erected de-terraforming stations antithetical to the attempts of the Splendids: these icy Swans survived in volcanic craters or deep valleys or caverns where the smog of the original atmosphere still tenaciously clung, in palaces grown from surviving native fungi or glued together from the opalescent bodies of the floating invertebrates. According to the rumor Del Azarchel heard from the domestic ghosts of the Seven Houses, the Swans were merely waiting for men to die, that they might emerge and claim the world.
Nor did the ghosts disagree. The cliometric calculus of their many environmental xypotechs showed that the world of Splendids would suffer environmental decay and dropping population rates across the millennia, unless a mass of people as large as the original forced migration was gathered here by the Twenty-fifth Millennium. If not, the world would fall below the minimal population numbers needed to maintain the atmospheric towers and oceanic infusion wells, causing environmental degradation and a return to the original atmospheric balance of gases, and causing death of the entire (and entirely artificial) Earth-like biosphere.
And the cold-eyed Swans of Delta Pavonis in their white-winged robes would emerge from their icy coffins in the wastelands, never smiling once, and live their lives of isolation, under once-more native skies filled with smokes and dripping airborne jellyfish equally poisonous to man, meeting only to mate, and building no tools, neither interstellar ships nor interstellar radios.
For many years Del Azarchel dwelt on the cold world of Splendor, for the planet lacked the energy richness needed to return him home. Then a worldwide war broke out, a grim absurdity on a world so desperately void and empty. Del Azarchel, aiding and betraying the ferocious warlords one after another, used his ship’s sails as orbital mirrors to melt and crack the glaciers where various armies hid, or sink the icebergs used as barges by their navies, or used his ship’s position to deflect meteors toward defenseless towns, until he was in able to decree himself supreme leader, nobilissimus and lord. When he commanded the cowering civilization to gather the resources needed to exile him back to Sol, gladly they obeyed.
The Emancipation towed the launching laser beyond their cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Tailfeather, the outermost planet of Delta Pavonis. The lonely laser lighthouse was manned by Swans and thinking machines with no loyalty to the Splendids, and by some miracle the laser beam did not fail during an entire decade of terawatt output.
Del Azarchel mounted no further expeditions to Delta Pavonis. The chances that the Swans, or, if not they, whosever unwise hands it might be that the transplutonian lighthouse of Delta Pavonis fell into next, would not turn the apocalyptically powerful laser against the planet Splendid, were very slim. Del Azarchel did not expect the colony to survive, and Montrose (for Del Azarchel after his return shared all his finding with him) expected no better.
There were no other destinations from which any radio messages returned, and so no other expeditions from Sol were launched.
All the other colonies from Proxima to 82 Eridani were dead, twisted half-human bodies of failed pantropic experiments unburied under atmospheres never quite terraformed to a proper breathable mix. Montrose heard the last words of the last survivors on the radio, at least of those colonists who had the wealth and will to build interstellar-range radio lasers.
Montrose lost interest in a lot of things, after that. The interstellar human civilization which was needed for Rania’s return was stillborn.
8. The Endarkening
A.D. 14600 TO 14990
After the interstellar radio silence fell, and nothing more was heard from Splendor of Delta Pavonis nor from Nocturne of Epsilon Eridani, Montrose augmented himself up to the level of Selene. The sudden clarity was blinding. All too clearly, he saw what was happening on Tellus: Mass ignorance spread as biological man became ever more dependent on his talking tools and talking beasts. Electronic man became ever more dependent on applications and appliances from higher up the mental ladder, from the servants of Jupiter. Some of the Ghosts Montrose met were illiterate. They were computers which could not add and subtract. Factions spreading an anti-intellectual cult—no one wanted to be like Jupiter—had won the day on three continents. Jupiter had already done everything, discovered everything, knew everyone, and knew how to run your life better than you did. There was not much point to anything.