The Cassini Division shipped us back to Earth. The transfer orbit took long enough for Meg and I to get properly acquainted, and to become world famous. Everybody over the age of about six had a good laugh when they discovered we’d come to save them from Jupiter’s mad uploaded computer whizz-kids getting to the end of time.
World fame has its disadvantages, especially in a world of thirty billion people. But it comes as something of a relief, after living on a world where the ideas I advocated were the basis of society, and my memory was immortal. In this world, they’re forgotten, and I’m a footnote in old books.
So we wander the Earth, Meg and I, and we talk to people. When we tell them about Ship City, the more they understand the less they like. It seems to them not an anarchy, like they have here in the Solar system, but a divided – and hence multiplied – authority. So we don’t talk much about Ship City. We talk about the desert, and we wait for these strange but somehow familiar folk to ask us, yet again, if we remember the way through the wormhole to New Mars. It is the only subject which brings envy to their eyes. I can see why. The thirty billion have refuted Malthus: everybody’s rich. They’ve refuted Mises: nobody’s paid. They’ve refuted Freud: nobody’s sad.
But it’s kind of crowded.
The probe continues on its near-lightspeed path; the information it sends back is always new, always unexpected. But the most profound datum, to me, was one that came through quite early in its course: the Hubble expansion is local. The probe has gone beyond it, into other, expanding or contracting, regions of space. There was a Big Bang, but it was not the beginning, for there was none. No heat death, no Big Crunch awaits us. These dooms (it now is said) for all their shining mathematical elaborations, were but reflections of a society facing its limits.
There is no end.
Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for love (and peace) while writing the book; to Iain Banks for reading the draft in good drinking time; to Mic Cheetham for believing in it; to John Jarrold for keeping his nerve; to the partisans of Libertaria, and of Nowhere (you know who you are); to Lara Byrne, for an inspiration (and a genotype).
Books by Ken MacLeod
From Tom Doherty Associates
THE FALL REVOLUTION
The Star Fraction
The Stone Canal
The Cassini Division
The Sky Road
THE ENGINES OF LIGHT
Cosmonaut Keep
Dark Light
Engine City
Newton’s Wake
Learning the World
The Execution Channel
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FRACTIONS: THE FIRST HALF OF THE FALL REVOLUTION
Copyright © 2008 by Ken MacLeod
The Star Fraction copyright © 1995 by Ken MacLeod
The Stone Canal copyright © 1996 by Ken MacLeod
All rights reserved.
An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dataa
MacLeod, Ken.
[Star fraction]
Fractions / Ken MacLeod.—1st trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.—(Fall revolution series)
“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6552-1
1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Computer programs—Fiction. I. MacLeod, Ken Stone canal. II. Title.
PR6063.A2515S734 2008
823'.914—dc22
2008034635