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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks unexpectedly kind readers for their words of encouragement, his family for their sacrifices, his publisher for his patience, and certain higher powers (you know who you are!) for their inspiration and grace.

Quotes from The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson are used with thankfulness.

Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

PART FIVE

The Armadas of the Hyades

1

A Lost World

A.D. 11049

1. Ghost Ship

The Earth was gone.

“Damnification and pestilential pustules. You’d better be dead wrong on your dead reckoning, Blackie.”

The nigh-to-lightspeed starship Emancipation hung in space in the spot where Tellus, the home of man, was in theory supposed to be. Sol hovered to one side, an endless roar of radio white noise and high-energy particles.

“Restrain your ire, my dear smelly Cowhand. With the navigation beacons wiped out, our precise position is hard to determine. But the sun is at the correct size and distance, and the other planets also. This is where Earth should be.”

“Blackie! You think the enemy done her in?”

As a ship, the Emancipation was a titaness: one hundred thousand metric tons displacement, her overall length twice that of a skyscraper’s height from the First Space Age, with a sail spread of five hundred miles, requiring seventy-five thousand terawatts of laser energy to propel. With her sails folded, she looked like the skeleton of an umbrella with absurdly long and spindly arms, or perhaps like some microscopic marine animal. She had been designed for a complement of four hundred and eighty fully human persons, a complement of twenty posthuman Melusine, whose cetacean members would occupy the fore cistern, and an additional complement of twenty packs of subhuman dog-things, who would occupy kennels and factory volumes amidships. But the miles of conduits and inflatable tunnels connecting the fore ramscoop array with the long spine of the aft drive shaft, the rotating living quarters and nonrotating slumber quarters, the workhouses, shroud houses, laboratories, mind-core and launch collar (where an arsenal of pinnaces, probes, landers, missiles, and robotools where docked) were empty. The vast ship was a floating ghost town.

Like an arrow, even when at rest, the shape of the star-vessel suggested flight, as if she yearned to soar. Newtonian space and time was not suited to her lines: the paradoxes of Einstein were in her, implied by the heavy armor, the drag-reducing streamlines.

Neither ramscoop nor drivespine had ever once been heated up to form the ship’s vast magnetic funnels fore and aft, nor had her polymer sails, brightest mirrors of weightless gossamer, ever been run out to their full multimile-wide diameter. Despite her name, the nigh-to-lightspeed vessel had never achieved near-lightspeed, nor even left the Solar System.

“Cowhand, whatever do you mean by ‘done her in’?”

“Blackie, I mean beefed her!”

The ship had two crewmen, or three, depending on how one counted. The two humans (or technically, incarnate posthumans) aboard were Menelaus Illation Montrose, who had once been the Judge of Ages before his abdication, and Ximen del Azarchel, who had once been the Master of the World before his exile. They were the best of friends and deadliest of foes, as well as being the only members of their subspecies, homo sapiens posthominid, called Elders or Early Posthumans, and both in love with the same long-lost girl, the Princess Rania of Monaco, and both unwilling, during this particular protracted interval of time, to take up weapons and murder each other as they both so dearly wished to do. Each one was, in his own way, a very lonely man.

“Beef what? That is hardly more clear.”

“Blackie, don’t you speak proper Texan? I mean, d’you reckon the Varmint destroyed the Earth?”

At the moment, both men had their bodies safely tucked away in biosuspension coffins, with four quarts of submicroscopic fluid machinery occupying all the major cells and cell clusters in their corpses. Whether the bodies were alive or dead was a matter of semantic nicety. The nanomachinery slowed the biological processes to a rate indistinguishable from stasis, except that at the moment enough of their neural tissue was at an activity level to house their consciousnesses. The coffins were clinging by their crablike legs to surfaces that could be called bulkhead, or deck, or overhead (in zero gee the distinction is also a semantic nicety) of the forward storage locker used as the ship’s bridge. Calling this the bridge was yet another semantic nicety, since the control interfaces and guidance systems could be piped into any cabin in the ship where the pilot found himself, and several spots on the hull.

“As for that, my dear friend, I, ah, ‘reckon’ it to be unlikely.”

“Issat so? Gimme your whys and wherefores, Blackie.”

The third member of the crew (if it could be called that) was visible at the aft of the locker, filling the space where the entire wall (or bulkhead) had been removed, and reaching back along the ship’s major axis some nine hundred yards. This third was a single monomolecular diamond, tinted amber due to nanotechnological impurities: lattices of fluorine-based chemicals like submicroscopic irregular camshafts were woven through the diamond matrix, and formed the basis of a rod-logic computation appliance wherein the ship’s softbrain was housed. The crystal was semitranslucent, and shed some of its waste heat in the form of photons in the visible light spectrum, so a dull erubescent glow, like coals in a grate, filled the amber well of crystal with a smoky red gold.

“What we know of the Virtue—to use Rania’s name for entities on the hyperpostsuperposthuman level of intellectual topography—comes from the inscription left behind on the Monument at V 886 Centauri, which, even after millennia, the human and posthuman civilizations of Earth cannot fully decipher. But that inscription hints that the Virtue of Hyades was coming here to rule and uplift the Earth, not destroy it.”