Rhoda thought it through.
The Squeem occupation had changed human perceptions of the Galaxy, and humanity’s place in it. A historic loss of innocence.
Now humans were tentatively moving out beyond the Solar System once more. And everywhere they went, they found life. Intelligences swarming and squabbling. A kind of Galactic society, a ramshackle pecking order based on avarice, theft and the subjugation of junior races.
And for humanity, a future that contained nothing but threat.
The black holes in Jupiter were clues to a closely guarded secret, which Rhoda hadn’t even shared with Reg Kaser. The Squeem invasion hadn’t been the first hostile alien incursion into the Solar System. Some centuries back invaders, who would occupy Earth in their turn some time in the future, had come back in time to secure their victory over mankind. They had crossed a kind of time bridge built by the legendary, or notorious, engineer Michael Poole, and created a crisis the historians called ‘The Emergency’. And in the course of the final battle to exclude them, miniature black holes had been hurled into Jupiter. During the Squeem occupation, knowledge of this event had mostly been lost, and was only now being pieced back together by the historians. But the mortal wound inflicted on Jupiter was unarguable. Some analysts, poring over the historical reconstructions, argued that the source of the Emergency invasion might lie only decades away, in the future.
And even beyond that hazard lay: not least the Xeelee, secretive, xenophobic, indifferent. And so advanced they made the rest of the Galaxy’s inhabitants look like tree-dwellers.
The future held hierarchies of enemies. And that was the basis on which Rhoda had to make her decision.
Rhoda stared down at the ice landscape of Rhea, imagining the stranded Squeem swarming within. ‘It won’t be revenge,’ she said. ‘Call it insurance. Look at what the Squeem did to us. This will be one danger eliminated.’
‘We’re setting a precedent for the future.’
‘The future leaves us no choice. And if this makes us tougher as a species, good. When the weapon’s ready, make sure Hume is online when the signals reach Earth, would you? He ought to watch this, as the Squeem made Harry Gage watch. Let this be remembered.’
Kaser stood. ‘I’ll call the weapons crew.’
In retrospect, the yoke of the Squeem had been thrown off with comparative ease. Humans moved out into the Galaxy again, in new ships based on the Squeem hyperdrive . . . a technology stolen, at second-hand, from the Xeelee.
Then humans encountered their next conquerors, just as had been predicted in the fragmented histories of the Emergency. Those shards of foreknowledge proved of little use. The new overlords were called the Qax. Once more the worlds of mankind were taken. Once more people were made to grow old.
And, even at such a distance in time, the hubristic feats of Michael Poole continued to affect human lives.
ENDURANCE
AD 5274
1
Chael smiled at Mara. Beside Chael stood the sullen Engineer he had introduced only as Tasqer. And with them, in Mara’s living room, stood the Virtual avatar of Jasoft Parz, probably the most powerful human being in the Qax dominion of mankind.
Mara had never trusted Chael, her husband’s brother, even before Pell had died, and she didn’t trust him now. But here he was with these extraordinary characters, telling her about the most outlandish project she’d ever heard of.
A project to which, it seemed, her own son Juq was somehow the key.
‘We even have a name for the ship we’re going to build,’ Chael said.
‘The ship you’re going to build for the Qax,’ Mara pointed out.
‘For the Qax, yes. Everything we do is for the Qax. But this is a chance for humans to achieve something for themselves, under the yoke of the Occupation – even with the encouragement of the Qax Governor—’
‘The ship you want my son and his toys to contribute to, somehow.’
The unreal spectre of Jasoft Parz, Ambassador to the Qax, smiled with an odd serenity. ‘Time is short, Mara. The Governor wants this craft, a Poole-technology GUTship towing a navigable wormhole mouth, built and launched within six months. GUTship engineers we have . . .’
And he nodded to the taciturn Tasqer, the Engineer. In dark, practical-looking clothes, Tasqer was perhaps forty, and though heavy-set he had the pallid look of the space-born. Since this little party had come floating down to Mellborn in a flitter from the sky, Tasqer had said not a word, and he said nothing now, meeting Mara’s gaze coolly.
‘But,’ Parz went on, ‘wormhole builders are another matter. And so when my old friend Chael here came to me and pointed out your son’s experiments . . .’
Mara found it difficult even to listen to this nonsense. Jasoft Parz himself was a distracting presence. Parz looked around seventy years old, with a round face, white hair, finely robed. But he moved with the ease of a younger man, Mara thought suspiciously. She looked at him more closely.
And were there black roots showing under that mop of white?
She tried to suppress her reaction, the shock of recognition. But Parz smiled at her. He wasn’t hard to read – or rather, he was more than skilful at projecting his true meaning. Yes, he was saying, she saw suddenly, that through this strange scheme the ultimate prize was indeed available: AntiSenescence treatment. Life itself. All she had to do was play along.
Suddenly Mara’s attention was fully focused.
Chael said now, ‘Juq’s experiments, yes. Young people building spacetime wormholes in their bedrooms and back yards! It’s a remarkable story – it turns out there’s a kind of global craze for such things, loose societies of enthusiasts communicating and sharing. It’s just like the rocket clubs that formed before the first age of space.’
Parz said, ‘Well, not all the ingenuity mankind showed in the heroic days of Michael Poole has been lost, evidently. Here is something we can build on. And your son, Mara, is in the vanguard of developments.’
Actually, Mara thought, not so much her son, not handsome, plausible Juq, but his smarter but lower-class buddy Tiel. She wasn’t so blinded by her love for her son that she couldn’t see where the brains in that partnership lay.
Chael said, ‘We see Juq as a potential leader of this aspect of the project, young as he is.’
She eyed her brother-in-law, and Parz. That made sense, at least. ‘Hm. A bright, good-looking son of an old military family? Yes, he’d be a good front for this operation, wouldn’t he? You’ve an eye for figureheads if nothing else, Ambassador.’
Chael said seriously, ‘It’s not a trivial point. Image matters. Both my family and yours, Mara, do have respectable pedigrees dating back to Navy service in the days of the rebellion against the Squeem.’
Parz said carefully, ‘And now you serve in a different way, as I strive to do, in making life bearable for billions under the administration of the Qax.’
Of course that was true, in its way. When the Qax had almost effortlessly taken over the Solar System, rich old families like Mara’s, seamlessly embedded in hierarchies of wealth, privilege and power, had seemed to find it easy to transfer their loyalties to the new alien rulers. Their justification was that without their selfless negotiating with the Qax, the lot of the rest of mankind could be considerably worse.
But especially since Juq had started bringing his friend Tiel home to play with their wormhole experiments – and Tiel had let leak a few details of the lives he and his family led, brief lives spent labouring on the coastal algae farms, or on the great sea-bound transport canals and sewage ducts, until ending in old age or terminated by diseases that had once been banished from Earth – Mara had become uncomfortably aware, here in her grand home in the heart of ancient Mellborn, what privileges she and her family enjoyed, and how morally compromised she had become . . .