“Lieserl, your experiences have been designed — George and I were selected, even — to ensure that the first few days of your existence would imprint you with humanity.”

“The first few days?” Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming towards her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she was a counter on some immense, invisible chutes-and-ladders board.

“I don’t want this. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida.”

“No, Lieserl. You’re not free, I’m afraid; you never can be. You have a goal.”

“What goal?”

“Listen to me. The Sun gave us life. Without it — without the other stars — we couldn’t survive.

“We’re a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars — for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we’ve had — glimpses — of the future, the far distant future… disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that future — to work on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition…

“Lieserl, you’re one of those projects.”

“I don’t understand.”

Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.

“Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; something — or someone — is killing it.”

Phillida’s eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. “Don’t be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which I — and everyone else who has ever lived — can only dream.”

Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. “But you don’t envy me. Do you, Phillida?”

Phillida’s smile crumbled. “No,” she said quietly.

Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.

She cried out.

Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

The woman Lieserl — engineered, distorted, unhappy — receded from my view, her story incomplete.[4]

Humans diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. In the increasing fragmentation of mankind, the shock of the Poole wormhole incursion faded — despite the ominous warnings of Superet — and it remained a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.

Squeem ships burst into the System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn’t count, for instance. But eventually common ground was found.

The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system, which was beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies.

The Squeem seemed friendly enough. Trade and cultural contacts were initiated.

And then, in orbit around every inhabited world in the Solar System, hyperdrive cannon-platforms appeared…

PART 2

ERA: Squeem Occupation

Pilot

When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was halfway through a year-long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.

Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.

Resistance had imploded quickly.

Anna Gage — shocked, alone, stranded between worlds — tried to figure out what to do.

She was seventy-nine years old, thirty-eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she’d carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.

Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn’t stay out here for long. But she couldn’t return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.

Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.

She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.

After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.

Chiron…

She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.

Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.

It had never been very interesting.

When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.

A Virtual — of a man’s head — rustled into existence in the middle of Gage’s cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot’s cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet’s surface.

“I’m Moro. You look clean.” He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.

“Thanks a lot.”

“You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission.”

“Of course—”

“I’m a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship.”

“I’m no trouble,” she said tiredly.

“Make sure you aren’t.”

With Moro’s pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.

She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.

The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.

Moro met her in person.

“You’re taller than you look on TV,” she said.

He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.

Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. “You’re welcome here.” He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.

Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurized; the wall surface — Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under her hand.

Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. “Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I’ll find you a work unit; there’s plenty to be done.”

Work unit?

“I’m not a colonist,” she growled. “You think we’ll be here that long?”

Moro looked sad. “Don’t you?”

She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin — Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.

There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars-Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers — mostly business types and tourists — the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry-looking, AntiSenescence-preserved, wearing patched in-ship uniforms, and they bore expressions — uneasy, hunted — that Gage recognized. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.