Space

Chapter 13: The Roads of Empire (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14: Dreams of Ancestral Fish (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15: Colonists (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16: Icosahedral God (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17: Lessons (#litres_trial_promo)

Part III: Trenchworks (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18: Moon Rain (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19: Dreams of Rock and Stillness (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20: The Tunnel in The Moon (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21: Homecoming (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22: Triton Dreamtime (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23: Cannonball (#litres_trial_promo)

Part IV: Bad News From The Stars (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24: Kintu’s Children (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25: Wanpamba’s Tomb (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26: Kimera’s Breath (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27: The Face of Kintu (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28: People Came From Earth (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29: Bad News From The Stars (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30: Refuge (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31: End Game (#litres_trial_promo)

Part V: The Children’s Crusade (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32: Savannah (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33: The Fermi Paradox (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34: The Children’s Crusade (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Stephen Baxter (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_8cbe2a10-a81d-5c74-9886-a3e710c35173)

My name is Reid Malenfant.

You know me. And you know I’m an incorrigible space cadet.

You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right?

So tonight I want to be a little more personal. Tonight I want to talk about why I gave over my life to a single, consuming project.

It started with a simple question:

Where is everybody?

As a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow.

But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy.

As I lay there staring at the stars – the thousands I could pick out with my naked eyes, the billions that make up the great wash of our Galaxy, the uncounted trillions in the galaxies beyond – I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?

But if not, where are they? Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us?

Consider this. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Of course it took a good long time to evolve us. Nevertheless we have to believe that what applies on Earth ought to apply on all the other worlds out there, like or unlike Earth; life ought to be popping up everywhere. And, as there are hundreds of billions of stars out there in the Galaxy, there are presumably hundreds of billions of opportunities for life to come swarming up out of the ponds – and even more in the other galaxies that crowd our universe.

Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Again, this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.

So, if life sprouts everywhere, and spreads as fast and as far as it can, how come nobody has come spreading all over us?

Of course the universe is a big place. There are huge spaces between the stars. But it’s not that big. Even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed – ships we could easily start building now – we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. One hundred million, tops.

One hundred million years: it seems an immense time – after all, a hundred million years ago the dinosaurs ruled Earth. But the Galaxy is a hundred times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.

Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it.

But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them. I seemed to be surrounded by emptiness and silence.