The Sirens of Space (29 page)

Like its Old Earth predecessors, and for
many of the same reasons, this early empire has now disintegrated
into the many feuding and contentious parts that we know today. And
while their never-ending squabbles no longer threaten their
neighbors, they offer unexpected insights and occasional amusement
to the curious.

This, of course, is the Terran League of the
Second Cosmic Century....

From Volume IV:
THE ASCENSION OF TERRA

In the dying days of the
twenty-first century, a previously unknown amateur mathematician
named Caldwell Covington published his first and last paper,
entitled
Subatomic Particles and Subspace:
An Inferential Analysis
, in an obscure
professional journal. That same year some graduate students at
Earth’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, trying to help a
professor complete a paper of his own before being denied tenure,
thought they saw in its turgid prose the key to unraveling a
mystery of physics: “Irregularities in the behavior of some
subatomic particles,” Covington had written, “are explicable only
by positing the existence of a non-universe, or subspace, where
charged particles can go for a time and then return, almost at
random, and not always in the same place.”

Caldwell Covington was no scientific
radical. In fact, he had intended his paper as a sarcastic riposte
to the sloppy methods and theoretical involutions of a whole school
of subatomic physicists. But however accidentally, he had hit the
mark. And though they failed to save their professor’s job at MIT,
the students soon devised an hypothesis, some rough equations, and
a few crude experiments that cracked the bedrock of
twenty-first-century science.

They found that all atoms, and hence all
objects in the physical universe, produce emissions caused by the
constant, random passage of subatomic particles into subspace. With
proper equipment these emissions are instantly detected across
great distances, since time is not a subspace dimension. Light,
too, has a subspace component called, with typical scientific
poesy, subphotons, and the speed of light is nothing more than the
simultaneous passage of observable phenomena through two separate
universes. While nothing in nature travels faster than light, its
speed could no longer intimidate human ingenuity.

More importantly, these subspace emissions
quickly led scientists to a powerful new energy source, which we
now call gravitronics. Like magnetism, we can control it by using
simple electricity, and researchers soon found that it let us bend
gravity, shred atoms and molecules if focused properly, and carry
images and sound waves. It also lifted Man’s horizons and truly
opened the heavens....

...[M]en and women, machines and molecules
exist, like Light, in the physical universe. With limited
exceptions, we cannot enjoy the instantaneous travel of “pure”
forms of energy, but Science soon realized that, while matter could
not outpace energy beams, it could hitch rides with them. Speed
through space was now limited only by Man’s imagination—or his
technology, which is really the same thing....

* * *

Toward the end of the twenty-first century,
and in Year 1 of the cosmic calendar,* MIT developed the first
spacedrive engine prototype.

By the early twenty-second century—or
cc:4-4009, to be precise—extensive research in high energy physics
had produced the pressure-resistant crystalline metallic alloys
needed to withstand the extreme stress of faster-than-light travel.
Ten years later, the first interstellar flight returned from a
fifteen-month round trip to Alpha Centauri; on its return, the
ever-bickering nations of Earth established the Cosmic Guard, to
direct and control interstellar travel and exploration.

CosGuard discovered the first known
inhabitable planet outside Earth’s solar system by the middle of
the century. Nineteen light years away, Athena became Earth’s
earliest self-sustaining colony. In rapid succession, the Guard
discovered the planets now known as Gaea, New Babylon, and
Zarathustra, and soon had explored and charted all star systems
within fifty light years of Earth....

[*
The cosmic calendar is a
chronometrical system used to standardize astronomical time: 100
seconds = 1 cosmic minute; 100 cosmic minutes = 1 cosmic hour; 10
cosmic hours = 1 cosmic day; 10 cosmic days = 1 cosmic week; 10
cosmic weeks = 1 cosmic month; 10 cosmic months = 1 cosmic year.
Cosmic time differs from solar time, which varies from planet to
planet and time zone to time zone, and is used by science to
compute units of mass, volume, distance, time, and the like. As
used in this book, one cosmic day equals about 27.8 solar hours;
one cosmic year equals about 3.2 solar years, a cosmic century,
about 320 years.

To further complicate matters, one cosmic
light year is called a “parsec;” a “light year” refers to the
distance light in nature travels in a standard solar year ie, one
Earth year. A “meter” remains as defined on twentieth century
Earth; however, the standard unit of distance in the twenty-sixth
century is the “foot,” which is defined as the distance light
travels in 0.000000001 seconds (give or take a decimal point), and
roughly corresponds to the “foot” used in the old English system of
measurement. An “astrometer,” by contrast, is defined as the
distance light travels in 1 second; and an “astrokilometer” is
1,000 astrometers, or the distance light travels in 1,000
seconds—defined as the average diameter of the orbit of Planet
Earth around its sun. A “second,” correspondingly, was redefined in
2206 as the time it takes light to travel 1/1,000 of an
astrokilometer—or one astrometer, which is approximately 186,000
miles, calculating under the old English system.

Aside from the use of
local time by every planet, this system of measurement finds
acceptance everywhere in twenty-sixth-century Terra, except for a
few provinces on the North American continent of
Earth.
]

* * *

Like moths drawn by the beacon of adventure,
Earth’s brightest, best trained, most curious minds drifted
skyward. The end of the twenty-second century saw human colonies on
nine planets, including large settlements on New Babylon and
Zarathustra; and still the mass exodus continued. Humanity formed
the Terran League, to govern itself and help the Cosmic Guard keep
the fractious and stubborn member planets from warring among
themselves over such cosmically significant causes as tariffs,
trade, and immigration....

* * *

New Babylon itself enjoyed many advantages,
conferred both by nature and by accident. It was among the first
inhabitable planets discovered outside the planetary system of
Earth; and like the planet Zarathustra, which was discovered at
roughly the same time, it was a garden teeming with life lovingly
spawned from its warm and salty seas. But the twelve parsecs—about
thirty-eight light years—east to New Babylon took a full solar year
less to travel in the early days of interstellar flight than the
ninety-six parsecs west to Zarathustra, and most of the major
inhabitable planets that the early Cosmic Guard discovered were to
the cosmic east of Earth—Athena, Gaea; later Ceres and Demeter. And
of the fifteen member planets of the Terran League through first
half of the twenty-sixth century, the only planet west of
Zarathustra was tiny Isis, a small outpost on the way to the
then-as-yet unvisited Rigel star system. So, by default as much as
by the beauty and bounty of the land itself, New Babylon became the
Mecca for the first flood of emigrants from Earth; and the Cosmic
East became the focus of Humanity’s destiny, while the two planets
of the West seemed destined to be Man’s forgotten
stepchildren....

* * *

What historians call the Babylonian Exodus
stirred the human soul like no event since the dawn of
civilization. The cream of a generation, dazzled by the chance to
participate in the greatest adventure they could imagine, and
anxious to escape the squalor and misery of Earth, scratched and
clawed for the chance to claim the future for their descendants.
Soon, they had flooded the virgin world with shining cities and
great universities, with roads and factories and great modern farms
stretching endlessly into the horizon. Before long the planet
blossomed with a modern, cosmopolitan culture, embracing all human
accomplishments while leaving most of Humanity’s problems behind
them on Earth....

* * *

As what was now called Terra expanded
eastward, Earth remained its most populous planet. But with each
succeeding generation, the skilled and educated fled as far as
their money and talent could take them, searching for a new life
and a less dismal future. The constant flow of Earth’s boldest,
most energetic, and most adventuresome offspring to the beckoning
new worlds of the East drained her vitality and robbed her of hope.
And the very eagerness with which the East welcomed its immigrants,
often including relocation subsidies for professionals in fields
suffering critical shortages, gave the talented and ambitious few
reasons to stay behind. Meanwhile, Earth’s ancient problems—hunger,
poverty, ignorance, mindless and contentious division—chased away
all but the poor and the helpless, and the most hopeless of
idealists....

Soon, like the dawn that follows the sunset,
Terra’s cultural center followed the emigrants, and before the end
of the First Cosmic Century, the Terran Senate moved the capital.
The debate was emotional and traumatic, but history had already
decided the outcome; and in the Earth Year 2334, Terra finally
abandoned the Old Earth for New Babylon, and the gleaming and
ascendant city of Covington....

...Once its leaders had escaped the filth
and squalor of our ancestral home, Terra found it could focus on
nobler aspirations. Freed from constant reminders of Humanity’s
humbler beginnings, art and science soon bloomed in a new
Renaissance, a phoenix rising from the ashes of Earth.

And freed from the clamorous misery of
Mother Earth, Man was free to conquer the stars.

From Volume V:
THE DEMETRIAN REVOLT
:

[A]s lush as any planet in Terra, and
jealous of the attention lavished on New Babylon merely because
that lucky planet was the focus of the First Migration, Demeter
loomed sullenly in the east, like a younger brother resentful of a
doting parent’s praise of a prodigious sibling....Just south of the
galactic plane, and forty parsecs to anticenter of a line drawn
between Earth and the new Terran capital, Demeter’s hospitable
climate and ambitious people produced an industrial colossus that
quickly rivaled and soon surpassed the early settlements of the
older worlds....

* * *

[By] the Earth Year 2349, barely a century
after its discovery, Demeter found itself the center of a social
upheaval and ferment unknown since the darkest days of the Bloody
Century...[as the] stubbornly independent worlds of the eastern
frontier rose in revolt against the very concept of union as
defined by the ruling Federalists, preferring to chart their own
course in the pursuit of the riches to be found in the giant gas
clouds and uncharted systems of eastern Terra, rather than
suffering the indignities imposed by the government of Austin
Prendergast.

* * *

[But] the rebel faction of the Terran Civil
War was doomed from the start....All the factories and farmlands of
Demeter, Ceres, and their outlands could not long stand against the
rest of Humanity—or, at least, against the troops of the Terran
Army, and the ships of the Cosmic Guard. So, inevitably, peace
descended on the brooding planet, and its leaders were taken to
judgment. And though its populace grudgingly accepted union as a
practical necessity, they quickly took to heart the concept of
planetary sovereignty advanced by the nascent Tory Party. In the
meantime, the devastation of war soon faded into memory with the
rebuilding of the ecomonic muscle of a people too proud to allow
the lack of victory to spell defeat....

* * *

And in its own way, Demeter finally had its
revenge, for by the twenty-sixth century, Demeter would come to
dominate the economy of eastern Terra in much the same way as New
Babylon dominated the West....

Though inconceivable in the war’s immediate
aftermath, the same planet that chafed at the visible presence of
the Cosmic Guard would later feel wounded by the decision to move
Eastern Fleet headquarters “from Mullinberry’s Star to Ishtar,”
and the factories of Demeter would soon outbid and outperform their
eastern rivals in building ships and equipment for their old
nemesis. And as surely as one day it would lead the agitation
against a new menace from the East—which by then would sport a
reptile’s countenance rather than a lilting Demetrian brogue—the
pocketbooks of its citizens continued to fatten with the advance of
technology. Two centuries after his forces reduced New Dublin to
ruins, the velvet voice of Prendergast would find a Demetrian echo
in the crescendo of warnings from another silver-haired prophet of
doom determined to profit in the next election by proving his
manhood; and another chapter of History—alas, requiring another
volume—would loom in the blackness of space.

From Volume VI:
THE CONFLAGRATION
:

By the year 2496, reckoning by the Old Earth
calendar, the Terran League had grown to fifteen full members, each
with colonies of its own....

In midyear, a CosGuard monitoring station
detected the faint but unmistakable subspace blips of alien vessels
in the space far beyond the planet Ishtar....