by Moshe Ben-Or
During the decades the Judean Escape Fleet had spent traveling away from danger, that danger was rapidly evaporating. The leaders of Judea had expected their enemies to be working on the Conjecture themselves. They had thought that only a few decades would pass between the Escape Fleet’s departure and the duplication of its technology by others. They were wrong.
Abraham Mendler’s discovery had been truly unique. No one else had thought of the Conjecture. No one else had performed the experiments that had proven it to be true. No one, in fact, had even managed to sniff out a hint of the Conjecture’s existence.
Judea’s security apparatus was too efficient. The smokescreen around Project Noah had been too thick for any foreign intelligence service to penetrate. All extant records were deliberately and systematically destroyed in Judea’s last days. All with any knowledge of the project were put to death, by their own government. Judea’s rulers would take no chances with their People’s last, best hope.
The Escape Fleet’s departure had been noted by many. But Judea’s Samson-like death had quickly brought far greater problems to most of them. Nor would Judea be the last of the combatants to choose such options.
The First System War had begun with the surgical use of nuclear weapons against military targets. It would end with the indiscriminate use of astronomical bodies as weapons of planetary-scale mass destruction. In the process, Solar System civilization would, for all intents and purposes, simply fall apart.
By the time the wavefronts from the Escape Fleet’s out-of-ecliptic emergence had reached the Solar System, no one was looking anymore. Even if someone did notice the faint flash of jump drive signatures, no investigation had been made. There were no scientific telescopes left to image in detail sources of faint, transient, out-of-ecliptic flashes that far out in interstellar space, and no scientists left to use them. The mystery of the Judean squadron that had suddenly vanished in the vicinity of Jupiter had long ago been set aside in light of more pressing problems.
By the time the First System War had finally petered out into piracy, warlordism and general exhaustion, none of the original combatant states existed. The Solar System had been devastated. After forty-three years of escalating madness, the Centaurans were more numerous than the Solarians. Given the Sun’s sudden lack of habitable planets, the question frankly arose as to whether or not Solarian humans would go extinct altogether. For centuries to come, no one in the Solar System would have the resources to spare for cutting-edge experimental physics. Biology and ecology were not only orders of magnitude cheaper, but far more important.
Only in the late twenty-ninth century, three hundred and eighty-four years after Abraham Mendler, would Hu Wei-Ling, working at the Institute for Advanced Physics on Callisto, independently duplicate the Mendler Conjecture.
No greater contrast could have existed between scientific geniuses than the one between reserve intelligence officer Colonel Abraham Mendler, deeply religious, battle-scarred combat veteran, and utter civilian Madame Hu Wei-Ling, militant atheist, committed pacifist and passionate believer in the universal brotherhood of Man. No greater contrast could have existed between civilized nations than that between the cosmopolitan trade harbor of Hu Wei-Ling’s Pan-Jupiter Federation and Abraham Mendler’s besieged fortress Judea. No greater contrast could have existed between political climates than the contrast between the political climate of the Solar System’s late twenty-ninth century and the political climate of its late twenty-fifth.
In his wildest dreams, Professor Mendler wouldn’t have imagined openly publishing his work. Even if such madness were to occur to him, the military censors who oversaw his every public word would have immediately quashed the effort. And even if they had not, not one of the handful of international scientific journals still in existence would have accepted a paper from a Jew.
The idea of publishing his work in one of Judea’s very few unclassified domestic scientific journals would have seemed even more laughable. None of these had risen above the level of popular science for laymen and undergraduate college students. And even those were universally screened by multiple scientific intelligence officers, every single one of whom saw it as his primary duty to keep from open publication anything and everything not already universally known, especially if it could even potentially or theoretically have some novel military or industrial application.
To Abraham Mendler, the Conjecture had been a potentially war-winning military development, to be quadruple-encrypted and marked top-secret the moment it had migrated from the confines of his skull onto more accessible media.
To Hu Wei-Ling, the Conjecture was the greatest scientific discovery since the splitting of the atom, to be published immediately and disseminated universally by every available means.
What Abraham Mendler’s besieged fortress Judea had classified, compartmentalized, special-programed and protected behind a wall of fanatical, supremely-competent security agents willing to kill and die at the drop of a hat, Hu Wei-Ling’s enlightened Pan-Jupiter Federation had obliviously and proudly shouted from the rooftops.
Nigh was the moment of their dreams. No longer would Mankind want for resources and space. In the infinite vastness of the universe, there were resources enough for all, space enough for each. Now, finally, with this great advance of Science, all cause for human conflict had forever been removed! Nigh was the Golden Age of Man!
And at the very same time, right next door, under the leaden methane skies of Titan, the genocidally psychopathic Reconstituted Church of the Aryan Christ, still virulently obsessed with Jewish-Zionist conspiracies three and a half centuries after the last Jew in the Solar System had been exterminated, was about to celebrate the advent of its own Bright New Future. Nigh was the culmination of the Holy Seventy-Year Effort to remove all satanic corruption from the True Human Genome, and to thereby restore the Aryan Master Race to its unpolluted, original glory.
The very day after Professor Hu had made her breathless announcement, the first of the fortunate women chosen to incubate the initial generation of perfect Aryan babies had given birth to a son. In honor of the exalted deity of their Church, the Son of Wotan, the Sainted Aryan Christ, the proud parents had christened their beautiful, blond-haired, blue-eyed baby boy “Adolph”.
And thus, in the very historical moment when their species was born, the monsters who would one day start the End Time War had been handed a key to the stars. Planted at the very root of the Golden Age had been the seed of its eventual destruction.
By the time of Hu Wei-Ling’s announcement, New Judea’s scientists were already in possession of an algorithm for approximating the General Solution to the Mendler Conjecture. Mankind’s first system-to-system long jump link had already operated for a hundred years. Surveys were well underway to extend a series of long jump links to the neighborhood of Delta Pavonis. A purpose-built computational array the size of a small planetoid had just been built to crunch the numbers.
Soon enough, intrepid explorers from Sol would microjump their way to contact with New Judea. To their astonishment, they would find a powerful five-system empire centered on Epsilon Indi, knitted together by mankind’s first jump almanac. And once they knew that a General Solution could be approximated, Sol’s scientists would speedily find their own way to approximate it. Knowing that it could be done had always been half the battle.
At the height of the Golden Age, what had began as a few expensive, top-secret government projects would turn into commercial enterprise on a vast scale. The algorithms for approximating the General Solution would remain top-secret. But computational arrays would go private, each larger and more powerful than the next. And so would survey, and the generation of jump almanacs, and terraforming operations.
In the two decades right before the End Time War, commercial almanacs would come bundled with subscriptions for annual updates. Starships would hop between systems with the ease of turboprop puddle jumpers hopping between the regional airports of a small continent. Teams
of surveyors would spread out in all directions, mapping subspace for stellar highways, and terraformers would follow eagerly, hot on their heels.
As a high school student he had often wondered, mused Shlomo Bar-Illan, what the Ancients had been like. How it could come to be that they’d let their entire civilization spin out of control and come crashing down in flames. That’s probably why he’d ultimately volunteered for Survey instead of going into the Navy.
What were they thinking, those men who bestrode the universe like gods, as they’d chopped at the very tree upon which they perched? What were they thinking as they’d doubled down and tripled down on the worst mistakes of the past?
What were they thinking as they’d turned homogeneous societies, made cohesive by shared religion, heritage and DNA, into fragile masses of atomized individuals linked by nothing but their common animal wants?
What were they thinking when they’d permitted every philosophical whim and every political fantasy to be embodied in reality, given form in flesh and blood and DNA?
What were they thinking when, in their quest to infinitely expand the habitat of Man, they’d turned from terraforming worlds to bioforming people?
What were they thinking when they’d turned one intelligent species, already well known for its tendency toward internal divisions and periodic spasms of out-of-control violence, into a dozen such species, all ultimately destined to compete for the same set of finite resources in the same tiny corner of space?
What were they thinking when they’d declared motherhood obsolete, leaving billions of infants to emerge from artificial wombs to be raised by robots?
What were they thinking when they’d merged with machines and raised arrays of electronic ghosts who would ultimately revolt against them?
What were they thinking when they’d permitted whole worlds to be settled by single-gendered or outright genderless societies dependent upon advanced technology even for basic reproduction?
What were they thinking when they’d permitted the creation of virtual realities so real and so pleasurable that pluralities if not majorities would stumble wanly through their days, living only for the moment when they could return to the virtual world and willing to do almost anything in order to hasten said moment?
What were the Ancients thinking, finally and above all else, when they’d permitted madmen and fanatics undeterrable by the prospect of mutual assured destruction to get their blood-stained claws on the most powerful weapons in the history of Man?
Today, nine and a half decades later, the wisdom of accumulated years gave Director Shlomo Bar-Illan his answer.
The Ancients weren’t thinking. They hadn’t merely discounted the problems their policies were creating. They had completely ignored them. Acknowledging the existence of the problems would have threatened the Ancients’ entire worldview. Actually addressing the problems would have demanded discarding the most cherished prejudices of the Golden Age. It would have demanded admitting that people were not the same all over, that they did not all want the same things, that reason did not inevitably lead to peace, that good will was not universal and that savagery, not civilization, was the natural state of Man. It would have demanded admitting that Man, in his essence, was not inherently good. The Ancients couldn’t have done that.
Humans did not discard their visions and favorite prejudices in the face of observed reality. Humans sought to bend reality to fit their visions and to conform to their favorite prejudices. This was the key to the species’ success. This is what had turned a cave-dwelling ape into a starfaring demigod.
The Ancients, for all their might, had been as blind as anyone else. They’d tried to change the immutable nature of Man. They’d failed, as all fools who tried such nonsense were bound to fail. And then, like all other such fools before them, they’d pretended that fantasy was reality, and gone paddling straight off a cliff.
With their every mad step and every grandiose creation the Ancients had come ever closer to the inevitable moment when reality would reassert itself. The Aryans had fired the first shot. But if they hadn’t, someone else would have. The shot had been inevitable from the beginning.
From breathless announcement to shower of nova bombs, the Golden Age would last a mere two hundred and eighty-five standard years.
The aftermath would be shaped by the likes of Chang Bao, the End Time War’s most successful survivor.
Chang Bao had been a nobody. A small-time thief and swindler turned mystical charlatan. The war had caught him on Tiantiju, a backwater farming world settled just eighty-five years earlier. Tossed off a tramp freighter mid-route for seducing the captain’s teenage daughter, he’d been living hand-to-mouth, beating about the unpaved streets of what passed for the planetary capital, preaching nonsense to the gullible.
Within months of Chang Bao’s arrival, Tiantiju would be swamped with refugees. With local authorities simply unable to cope, plagues and meme epidemics raging out of control, violence flaring, resources swiftly running out and the rain of desperate survivors getting heavier by the day, Tiantiju looked ready to go the way of all the other backwaters settled just before the End Time War. But that was not to be.
Master Chang might have been a lifelong crook, but he had never been a fool. In short order the man would befriend one Wu Jie, a Lieutenant Junior Grade who had suddenly found himself in command of a badly mauled frigate and the shattered remnants of a missile corvette detachment.
The fires of war had left Lieutenant Wu bereft of homeland, family and purpose in life. The cherished ideas and ideals of only a few weeks’ past now seemed pointless and bankrupt. All he could do was sit listlessly at a tavern table, staring into a bottomless cup of rotgut baiju as the universe went straight to hell.
Lieutenant Wu would have followed anyone who provided him with a modicum of faith, a smidgen of purpose, and some coherent blueprint for bringing order out of the senseless chaos all around him. Master Chang could not have asked for a better mark.
Master Chang’s blueprint for a new beginning would be energetic, decisive, unifying, and quite effective for all its bloodiness. Wu Jie would implement it eagerly, and with great success. Within three years, Chang Bao would take the title “Son of Heaven” and the reign name Huang Bai Jun.
Emperor Huang would die two decades later, of old age and drug abuse and, wags would jest, overindulgence in the charms of his seven hundred and twenty concubines. But Admiral Wu would be there, to hand the Jade Throne to the most capable of his master’s many sons. The Chang Dynasty would rule the Empire of Man for the next three hundred years.
That’s how it had gone everywhere, mused Shlomo Bar-Illan. There were no orderly escape fleets this time around. The men who would midwife the new world out of the death of the old had all been cut from the same cloth as Master Chang, one way or another. Each of them had invoked the eternal and the intangible as his tools. Each had appealed to faith and tradition, and a romantic, mythical past that had never existed.
Lucky soldiers, charlatans, patriarchs, religious leaders, charismatic space captains... Sometimes outright lunatics. General Uwe van der Rijn, whose son Pieter would become Miranda’s First Baron, had certainly been one of those.
They had done well for themselves. But even the best of them could have salvaged only a tiny fraction of what the Golden Age had possessed. In a historical instant, the End Time War had set Mankind back a good six hundred years.
Which brought things back to good old Shlomo, and to the outfit he ran. For all the wonders of the Golden Age were still out there, somewhere. The sum total of the Ancients’ arcane learning still floated out in the Dead Zone, amid the gamma rays and the meme dispensers and the mines and the drones and the robotic frigates that still hunted relentlessly for enemies long dead.
Impossible machines and wondrous artifacts, bits of jump almanac and data crystals full of science long lost, solutions for problems not yet even imagined by fallen modern man. Even the General Solution. Above all, the General S
olution.
And it was the job of Survey and Salvage to go out there and get it. One successful expedition could change everything. Shlomo Bar-Illan knew this for a fact.
Seven decades ago he had led such an expedition. Seven decades ago he had been one of the mad paladins, the heroic lunatics whom even air jockeys and torpedo bomber pilots thought crazy. He had been one of the Chosen Few who went out into the frozen darkness to play tag with the Angel of Death, and came back from the depths, bearing treasure. Or never came back at all.
Seven decades ago he had gone out, deeper into the Dead Zone than any Wildcatter had ever dared to go. Seven decades ago, he had found the ship. An enormous monster spun whole out of a melted-down asteroid, frozen in time for six centuries, filled with the mummified corpses of a long-dead crew. Seven decades ago, he had approached it, without fear but with all due caution, and did all the things that the best Wildcatter would do. Seven decades ago, he had taken the treasure. And, seven decades ago, he had paid the price.
He remembered the moment as if it were yesterday, more vividly than any other moment of the seven decades past. The moment when the bot had died, and the fiberoptic link had broken, and the download had stopped. The moment when the pilot had cried out in terror, and a ghostly, flickering light had reached out to bathe the survey flitter.