By pumping away the gas, and the heat it carried, the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive — with its precious, fragile cargo of datastores…
The stores which sustained the awareness of herself, Lieserl.
She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.
At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing. And overlaid on that was the logical structure of data storage and access paths which represented the components of her mind.
Good… good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data. How are you feeling?
“You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel—”
Enhanced…
No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone behind eyes made of jelly.
What made her conscious? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and what had happened in the past.
By any test, she was more conscious than any other human — because she had more of the machinery of consciousness.
She was supremely conscious — the most conscious human who had ever lived.
If, she thought uneasily, she was still human.
Good. Good. All right, Lieserl. We have work to do.
She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form. Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting… and yet, she thought, restrictive.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this last vestige of humanity. And then what?
Lieserl?
“I hear you.”
She turned her face towards the core.
“There is a purpose, Lieserl,” her mother said. “A justification. You aren’t simply an experiment. You have a mission.” She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. “Most of the people here, particularly the children, don’t know anything about you. They have jobs, goals — lives of their own to follow. But they’re here for you.
“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.