Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

from the shadows, and began to act.
    We established a new centralising government called the
Commonwealth. Slowly - so slowly most mayflies lived and died without
ever seeing what we were doing - we strove to challenge time, to dam
the flow of history. To gain control, at last.
    And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the
Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in
its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the
benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and
god proved too wide to bridge.
    Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the
Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.
    When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.
     
    At first there was a period of stasis - the Long Calm, the
historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The
stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its
usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.
    Then the stars began to go out.
    It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior,
unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.
    It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a
greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ’photino birds’ who were
meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes - a
conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the
human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.
    It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not
forgotten.
    We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple
strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an
impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ’construction material’. It
was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of
the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been
stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion,
then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries - discovered, even
colonised, but never understood.
    One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when
humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed
stars.
    People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy,
and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the
scattered stars faded one by one.
    It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a
million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees
became visible in the skies of Earth.
    But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own
cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.
    When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter
canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.

 
     
     
PART SIX
     
     
THE FALL OF MANKIND

 
THE SIEGE OF EARTH
c. AD 1,000,000
 
 
I
     
    The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape,
arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.
    Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer
scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose - in
this case, to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the
cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a
world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.
    His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer.
But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this
wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the
first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was
growing silent once more.
    Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how
old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate
reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.
    It was hours since he had stormed out of his parents’ home, though
the changeless day made it hard to track the time. Nobody knew where
he was. He had instructed the Mist, the ubiquitous artificial mind of
Mars, not to follow him. But the journey had been harder than he had
expected, and he was already growing hungry and thirsty.
    It might have been easier if his journey had a destination, a
fixed end. But he wasn’t heading anywhere as much as escaping. He
wanted to show his parents he was serious, that his refusal to join
the great exodus from reality through the transfer booths wasn’t just
some fit of pique. Well, he’d done that. But his flight had a
beginning but no end.
    Trying to take his mind