7. Lords of the Last Days

It was hard to believe that he was really and truly awake, and that life could begin again.

Lieutenant Commander Loren Lorenson knew that he could never wholly escape from the tragedy that had shadowed more than forty generations and had reached its climax in his own lifetime. During the course of his first new day, he had one continuing fear. Not even the promise, and mystery, of the beautiful ocean-world hanging there below Magellan could keep at bay the thought: what dreams will come when I close my eyes tonight in natural sleep for the first time in two hundred years?

He had witnessed scenes that no one could ever forget and which would haunt Mankind until the end of time. Through the ship’s telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.

That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen…

… the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone…

… the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift…

… the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before…

… the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away…

… the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air…

In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts — not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities — even countries — had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History’s closing act.

It was a time of strange paradoxes, of wild oscillations between despair and feverish exhilaration. Many, of course, sought oblivion through the traditional routes of drugs, sex, and dangerous sports — including what were virtually miniature wars, carefully monitored and fought with agreed weapons. Equally popular was the whole spectrum of electronic catharsis, from endless video games, interactive dramas, and direct stimulation of the brain’s centres.

Because there was no longer any reason to take heed for the future on this planet, Earth’s resources and the accumulated wealth of all the ages could be squandered with a clear conscience. In terms of material goods, all men were millionaires, rich beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, the fruits of whose toil they had inherited. They called themselves wryly, yet not without a certain pride, the Lords of the Last Days.

Yet though myriads sought forgetfulness, even more found satisfaction, as some men had always done, in working for goals beyond their own lifetimes. Much scientific research continued, using the immense resources that had now been freed. If a physicist needed a hundred tons of gold for an experiment, that was merely a minor problem in logistics, not budgeting.

Three themes dominated. First was the continual monitoring of the Sun — not because there was any remaining doubt but to predict the moment of detonation to the year, the day, the hour…

Second was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, neglected after centuries of failure, now resumed with desperate urgency — and, even to the end, with no greater success than before. To all Man’s questioning, the Universe still gave a dusty answer.

And the third, of course, was the seeding of the nearby stars in the hope that the human race would not perish with the dying of its Sun.

By the dawn of the final century, seedships of ever-increasing speed and sophistication had been sent to more than fifty targets. Most, as expected, had been failures, but ten had radioed back news of at least partial success. Even greater hopes were placed on the later and more advanced models, though they would not reach their distant goals until long after Earth had ceased to exist. The very last to be launched could cruise at a twentieth of the speed of light and would make planetfall in nine hundred and fifty years — if all went well.

Loren could still remember the launching of Excalibur from its construction cradle at the Lagrangian point between Earth and Moon. Though he was only five, even then he knew that this seedship would be the very last of its kind. But why the centuries-long programme had been cancelled just when it had reached technological maturity, he was still too young to understand. Nor could he have guessed how his own life would be changed, by the stunning discovery that had transformed the entire situation and given mankind a new hope, in the very last decades of terrestrial history.

Though countless theoretical studies had been made, no one had ever been able to make a plausible case for manned space-flight even to the nearest star. That such a journey might take a century was not the decisive factor; hibernation could solve that problem. A rhesus monkey had been sleeping in the Louis Pasteur satellite hospital for almost a thousand years and still showed perfectly normal brain activity. There was no reason to suppose that human beings could not do the same — though the record, held by a patient suffering from a peculiarly baffling form of cancer, was less than two centuries.

The biological problem had been solved; it was the engineering one that appeared insuperable. A vessel that could carry thousands of sleeping passengers, and all they needed for a new life on another world, would have to be as large as one of the great ocean liners that had once ruled the seas of Earth.

It would be easy enough to build such a ship beyond the orbit of Mars and using the abundant resources of the asteroid belt. However, it was impossible to devise engines that could get it to the stars in any reasonable length of time.

Even at a tenth of the speed of light, all the most promising targets were more than five hundred years away. Such a velocity had been attained by robot probes — flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit. But there was no way in which they could slow down for rendezvous or landing; barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever.

This was the fundamental problem with rockets — and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.

A full-scale hibership could indeed be built to reach a tenth of the speed of light. It would require about a million tons of somewhat exotic elements as propellant; difficult, but not impossible.

But in order to cancel that velocity at the end of the voyage, the ship must start not with a million — but a preposterous million, million tons of propellant. This, of course, was so completely out of the question that no one had given the matter any serious thought for centuries.

And then, by one of history’s greatest ironies, Mankind was given the keys to the Universe — and barely a century in which to use them.