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In the middle of the First Space Age, astroseismological analysis of its pulsation rhythms indicated that the core had solidified into one huge crystal of carbon ash. This core was a ten-decillion-caret diamond of degenerate matter, some 2500 miles in diameter, a single teaspoon of which would have weighed five tons on Earth. The discovery was mentioned as a curiosity in even some popular press.

This curio became a celebrity that fascinated the world many years later when gamma-ray spectrography suggested that the astronomical diamond was not matter at all, but antimatter. High-energy radiation activity from the star was consistent with micrometeorite or dust particles encountering a star-sized furnace burning antihydrogen into anticarbon, and disappearing in a total-conversion flash of mutual annihilation. The plasma atmosphere of the star maintained the proportions of positrons to antiprotons expected from an “anti-star”—a kind of body, until then, entirely hypothetical.

That this invalidated the standard model of astronomical evolution was merely one of the tremendous implications.

Criswell mining, also called “Star-Lifting,” was a process that theoretically could be used to create artificial mass-ejections from a star. A flotilla of equatorial satellites, each pair exchanging two counterdirectional beams of oppositely charged ions with its neighbors, could form a complete circuit around the star, to initiate a ring current. The magnetic field thus generated would deflect the solar wind, and channel prominences from the star into a pair of ejection streams at the north and south poles. Next, artificial solar storms could be created by a sufficiently powerful particle beam. The stellar atmosphere of even a cool star was hellishly hot; but anything, no matter how hot, boiled more fiercely when energy was added to it. If enough energy were added, the plasma could, in spots, be set to boiling savagely enough to throw its inner substance into space for easy retrieval.

The physics of Criswell mining was simple, but the economics less so. It had never been attempted on Sol. Mankind simply had no current need for a cloud of hydrogen plasma so pressing as to justify the astronomical energy costs involved. But economics of mining V 886 Centauri, a star both smaller and cooler than Sol, were different. The gravity well was less steep.

And the ejected material was infinitely more precious, even if infinitely more dangerous.

The plasma of V 886 Centauri, ejected into orbit and stratified into its elements by using extremely large-scale mass spectrometry, could then be condensed by laser cooling into antimatter.

The antihydrogen would prove too fugitive and fine to collect. But a beam of positrons would turn anticarbon-12 into anticarbon-14, and the ions could then be painstakingly captured by a magnetic funnel. The chemical properties of anticarbon were the same as carbon, of course, so that sufficient magnetically induced temperatures and pressures could be used to compress the material into anticarbon crystaclass="underline" a snow-white diamond no one and nothing made of matter could touch.

These last two operations would be expensive only at first, because the gathered antimatter could then be used to power ever-larger arrangements of ionization screens and magnetic bottles, which would gather more of the cloud, so the arrangement could generate a larger magnetic field, and so on. The snowball would simply grow.

The Diamond Star was a fountain of wealth, for all practical purposes, infinitely rich.

The only problem was that the fountain of wealth was fifty lightyears away. Is it worth it to climb a mountain to get a pot of gold? The taller the mountain is, the bigger the pot must be, and the more precious the gold.

How precious was this gold? Unlike other forms of energy, antimatter has the most efficient transportation cost versus its mass, since every particle was annihilated to liberate energy. Pound for pound, it was the cheapest form of power there could ever be. It required very little by way of refinement or processing: drop anything, anything made of matter into it, and the equal mass was converted spectacularly to energy. No waste; no pollution. A perfect fuel source. The problem? To make antimatter out of matter was preposterously costly, absurdly energy-inefficient, and cost far more than it was worth.

But what if a big chunk of the stuff, a mother lode, was merely sitting idly up in the starry heavens, waiting?

How big? V 886 Centauri was 2 × 1027 kilograms in mass. One gram of anticarbon would liberate 9 × 1013 joules of energy when annihilated with a gram of carbon, meaning that the Diamond Star was worth roughly 1040 joules of energy. For comparison, the annual energy consumption of the whole world in the days of the Second Space Age was less than 1018 joules. In other words, every man, woman, and child on the globe, and all his cats and dogs, could have more power at his disposal than the whole world had used in a century—if only there was a way to go get it.

And the will and the wealth. By a providential accident of history, Earth in A.D. 2050 happened to be at the apex of a period its friends called the “Age of the Sovereign Individual”; its foes called it “The Plutocracy.” Nine men, no more, controlled 90 percent of the world’s wealth. They estimated that an unmanned starship returning in a century would ensure the perpetual power of their international system of banks and industries. Their power collapsed amid hyperinflation—but not until after a vessel was launched that only they could afford to send.

The Croesus achieved orbit around V 886 Centauri in A.D. 2112, and laboriously constructed a radio-laser larger than itself to beam back to Sol news of its successful first pass at mining the antimatter star.

The message consisted of tediously correct, robot-compiled reports of loads, processes, and outputs, and only in the final section, under anomalies, did the Croesus brain, without any particular emphasis, report that Man was not the only creature who had placed an artifact near the Diamond Star. First Contact had been made fifty lightyears away, with no living human aware of the event. The robotic mining ship had discovered an object, an artifact, a black sphere the size of a small moon, left by intelligent nonhumans.

But by the time the signal reached Sol, the generation that had sent out the NTL Croesus had passed away. There were no orbital dishes open to receive its message. The broadcasts that passed through the Solar system in 2162 and 2166 were lost. The Wars of Religion of the late Twenty-First Century were more brutal and more reckless than the Wars of Economic Theory from the Twentieth, because the main purpose of the belligerents (first on one, but eventually on both sides of the conflict) was not to preserve honor, gain terrain, or win political concessions, or for any rational reason, but to wipe out as many infidels as possible, as cruelly as possible, in order to please a particularly cruel conception of God.

Croesus was programmed to repeat its broadcasts every four years, and the signal took half a century to cross the void to Sol. In its thoughtless, patient, automatic way, it did. It was not until A.D. 2170 that the Kshatriya battle-satellites received the message that man was not alone in the universe.

2. The Hermetic Expedition

A.D. 2215–2235

After decades of delay, the second expedition to the Diamond Star was organized. The waning Indosphere, in an act of conspicuous consumption meant to awe the world, and the up-and-coming Hispanosphere, eager to show her new-found strength, for the same motive, though rivals, joined each other in the venture.

The amount of resources consumed in this expedition was almost beyond calculation; but the odd mixture of semi-religious zeal and cultural pride prevented either of the partners from flinching away from the massive public debt and private ruin the ostentatious project absorbed.