But even this lonely planet had been subject to destructive exploitation by colonists; there were signs, Malenfant learned, of giant strip-mine gouges in the ocean floors, huge machines now abandoned, perhaps deliberately wrecked.

Everywhere, he had learned, life had emerged. But every world, every system, had been overrun by waves of colonization, followed by collapse or destructive wars — not once, but many times. Everywhere the sky was full of engineering, of ruins.

And the bad news continued. The universe itself could prove a deadly place. He was taken through a region a hundred light years-wide where world after world was dead, land and oceans littered with the diverse remains of separately evolved life.

There had been a gamma-ray burster explosion here, the Gaijin told him: the collision of two neutron stars, causing a three-dimensional shower of high-energy electromagnetic radiation and heavy particles that had wiped clean the worlds for light-years around. It had been a random cosmic accident that had cared nothing for culture and ambition, hope and love and dreams. Some life survived — on Earth, the deep-ocean forms, perhaps pond life, some insects would have endured the lethal showers. But nothing advanced made it through, and certainly nothing approaching sentience; after the accident, its effects over in weeks or months, it would require a hundred million years of patient evolution to fix the rent in life’s fabric suffered in this place.

But nothing was without cost, he learned; nothing without benefit. The intense energy pulse of nearby gamma-ray bursts could shape the evolution of young star systems; primordial dust was melted into dense iron-rich droplets that settled quickly to the central plain of a dust cloud and so accelerated the formation of planets. Without a close-by gamma-ray burst, it was possible that star systems like the Solar System could never have formed. Birth, amid death; the way of the universe.

Maybe. But such cold logic was no comfort for Malenfant.

The Gaijin seemed determined to show him as much as possible of this vast star-spanning graveyard, to drive home its significance. After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: that if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would.

Sometimes a spark within him rebelled. Does it have to be like this? Can’t we find another way?

But he was very weak now, very lonely, very old.

He huddled in his shelter, eyes closed, while the years, of the universe and of his life, wore away, drenched in blue Saddle Point light.

There is only so much, all things considered, that a man can take.

PART THREE

Trenchworks

A.D. 2190-2340

The Gaijin had a somewhat mathematical philosophy. Malenfant thought it sounded suspiciously like a religion.

The Gaijin believed that the universe was fundamentally comprehensible by creatures like themselves — like humans, like Malenfant. That is, they believed it possible that an entity could exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well.

And they had a further principle that mandated that if such a being could exist, it must exist.

The catch was that they believed there was a manifold of possible universes, of which this was only one. So She may not exist in this universe.

It — She — was the final goal of the Gaijin’s quest.

But until the God of the Manifold shows up, there’s only us, Malenfant thought. And there is work to do. We have to fix the bugs in this universe we’re all stuck in. Hence, we throw a net around a star.

Hence, my sacrifice.

But, almost from the beginning, we fought back. We barely understood a damn thing, and nothing we did alone was going to make a difference, and the whole time we were swept along by historical forces that we could barely understand, let alone control, much as it had always been. We didn’t even know who the bad guys were. But, by God, we tried.

At whatever cost to ourselves.

Chapter 18

Moon Rain

There were only minutes left before the comet hit the Moon.

“You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! Believe me, I’ve been there. Look around you, pal. You guys have lasted a hundred and fifty years up here, in your greenhouses and your mole holes. A hell of an achievement. But the Moon can’t support you…”

Xenia Makarova had a window seat, and she gazed out of the fat, round portholes. Below the shuttle’s hull she could see the landing pad, a plain of glass microwaved into lunar soil, here on the edge of the green domes of the Copernicus Triangle. And beyond that lay the native soil of the Moon, just subtle shades of gray, softly molded by a billion years of meteorite rain.

And bathed, for today, in comet light.

Xenia knew that Frank J. Paulis thought this day, this year 2190, was the most significant in the history of the inhabited Moon, let alone his own career. And here he was now, a pile of softscreens on his lap, hectoring the bemused-looking Lunar Japanese in the seat alongside him, even as the pilot of this cramped, dusty evacuation shuttle went through her countdown check.

Xenia had listened to Frank talk before. She’d been listening to him, in fact, for 15 years, or 150, depending on what account you took of Albert Einstein.

“…You know what the most common mineral is on the Moon? Feldspar. And you know what you can make out of that? Scouring powder. Big fucking deal. On the Moon, you have to bake the air out of the rock. Sure, you can make other stuff, rocket fuel and glass. But there’s no water, or nitrogen, or carbon—”

The Japanese, a businessman type, said, “There are traces in the regolith.”

“Yeah, traces, put there by the Sun, and it’s being sold off anyhow, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, to the Gaijin. Bleeding the Moon even drier…”

A child was crying. The shuttle was just a cylinder-shaped cargo scow, hastily adapted to support this temporary evacuation. It was crammed with people, last-minute refugees, men and women and tall, skinny children, subdued and serious, in rows of canvas bucket seats like factory chickens.

And all of them were Lunar Japanese, save for Frank and Xenia, who were American; for, while Frank and Xenia had taken a time-dilated 150-year jaunt to the stars — and while America had disintegrated — the Lunar Japanese had been quietly colonizing the Moon.

“You need volatiles,” Frank said now. “That’s the key to the future. But now that Earth has fallen apart nobody is resupplying. You’re just pumping around the same old shit.” He laughed. “Literally, in fact. I give you another hundred years, tops. Look around. You’ve already got rationing, strict birth control laws.”

“There is no argument with the fact of—”

“How much do you need? I’ll tell you. Enough to future-proof the Moon.”

“And you believe the comets can supply the volatiles we need for this.”

“Believe? That’s what Project Prometheus is for. The random impact today, which alone will deliver a trillion tons of water, is a piece of luck. It’s going to make my case for me, pal. And when we start purposefully harvesting the comets, those big fat babies out in the Oort cloud—”

“Ah.” The Lunar Japanese was smiling. “And the person who has control of those comet volatiles—”

“That person could buy the Moon.” Frank reached for a cigar, a twentieth-century habit long frustrated. “But that’s incidental…”

But Xenia knew that Frank was lying about the comets, and their role in the Moon’s future. Even before this comet hit the Moon, Project Prometheus was already dead.

A month ago, Frank had called her into his office.

He’d had his feet up on his desk and was reading, on a softscreen, some long, text-heavy academic paper about deep-implanted volatiles on the Earth. She had tried to talk to him about work in progress, but he patently wasn’t interested. Nor was he progressing Prometheus, his main project.