Chapter 1:
- Prologue 1
- Prologue 2
“CHANDIER”
- Blackbie Centralized Communications Mining Colony E348-3
- B.C.C. population: 57,825
- Value at last appraisal: §89,773B
Scene
Space wobbled. It was a beginning.
Spirit begat Mind, and Mind begat Form. First came the stars. Brilliant loci of light and energy, radiant evangelists of Creation, anchors of the warrior souls – they nurtured the void, and in time, with patience, they bore fruit.
Form, the artful expression of Mind, itself begat mind. Spirit rejoiced, and declared that it was a Beginning, indeed.
The Universe was as stable and peaceful a place as it had ever been. The last war had been just that.
After the collapse of the Boundary, all of the prophecies had been proven true. The Fates were in retirement. The finely tuned complexes of social order that balanced power among the sentient species had been more than upset; they had been shattered. Countless species rejoiced; countless rent their flesh in terror.
Man had overthrown the dominion of the supremals wherever they had been interested enough to bother, but they had escaped the temptation to replace them. The children of Adam were more interested in commerce, invention, and discovery than slaving. Their empires did not need slaves to thrive. They needed room.
Scene
Space wobbled. It was the preface of things to come, a transfer of energies and mass.
A blue and white speck sleep-danced in loops and swirls through the void, absently humming her part in the Perpetual Canticle. The ice planet basked as she rolled slow circles around her sun. Yellow light washed over the rippled surface of frozen oceans and refracted into rainbow compositions few eyes ever saw; they were the planet’s private consolation. Ripe white clouds of every type and texture wandered the atmosphere, signs of a climate just rich enough to support a sparse native ecology. In one coastal basin on the southwestern arc of the planet’s smallest continent, a non-native ecosystem of metal and plastics and ceramics had sprung up almost overnight. The small mining colony of Chandier recorded its founding date with much celebration and all of the expected hooplah. The colony expanded, and various peripheral ecosystems developed in its shadow.
Many miles above the surface, the sparkling green wink of the nav-beacon on the fixed-orbit station marked the passing of the seconds, days, and years with pleasant regularity.
Man came first to Chandier simply because it was in between here and there.
They didn’t know and didn’t care about her history. They didn’t know of her allegiances in the Wars of Consumption or of her Poetry denouncing her mortal foes. They didn’t know of her retirement-in-exile, of her sacrifice to stillness, to silence, to service, to bask in the distant love of her hearth star. Like most self-stilled Minds, she had intended herself for Life, and was seeped in her own Life-blood: Water. Water, the Active Humor of the Incarnate-Planet-Goddess, was the manifestation of her gaia and the cord-blood of the Life she birthed.
But Chandier (and we must agree to call her Chandier, for her true name was lost long ago) was ill-fated in the choice of her hearth star. Whether through poor health or some forgotten treachery, the star had cooled and no longer smiled on the planet with strength enough to keep her blood flowing. So, amidst the worried dreams of the sleeping planet, all but the hardiest of her species succumbed to ice.
Man returned to Chandier a dozen years later, after data collected statistically had been processed singularly, and the computer in charge told them she was a likely source of diatherine. She had, in fact, a particular intersection of crust plates and coastal cliffs where the probable success of a mine warranted further investigation. First came the budgetary meeting, followed by orbiters, landers, probes, drones, expeditions, and at last a formal contract and a mining colony. The computer had predicted as much net as three-tenths of a cubic decimeter of diatherine, and probably no less than seventeen-hundredths. Any amount in between would be dividended by the shareholders.
Diatherine, of the resources Man desired, was both the most tenuous and the most valuable. It had a nasty habit of melting to simple sugars and dirty water at temperatures so low that the water would instantly refreeze. This was particularly frustrating for Man, who wanted to drive enough energy through each crystacule to boil tungsten. Further, diatherine was produced exclusively as a result of organic compounds suspended in ice, subjected to microKelvin temperatures and teraPascal pressures (which of course are nearly always mutually exclusive) But diatherine had been the only solution to the Extra-Boundary Problem. Man had all the energy and desire they needed to move beyond the watchful eye of their own star, but their science and maths had stuck them with the practical problem of light-speed communication, and even slower travel. And light, amenable as it was, could not be persuaded to hurry.
When the theocrats of Ohida – the scientists – first cracked the diatherine crystacule, they were hoping to reveal a source of power. What they found instead was the opposite: inter-atomic stability. Within the crystal-like matrix of the super-tight, inwardly-stacked hydrocarbons and hydroxides was a type of bond previously mythologized between matter and anti-matter – a bond that created “spooky” action at a distance. This meant that a pseudo-electric charge acting on one half of a correctly-split diatherine molecule would instantly align the electrons in the other half as well, no matter the physical distance between the two halves!
Man, always ingenious and industrial, was able to parlay this advantage into the fields of circuitry, weaponry, and – most importantly – transportation.
And Man, who could now traffic data and material beyond the speed of light, found more room in the Universe than they could ever need.
