Звезда Пандоры

The Intersolar Commonwealth occupied a roughly spherical volume of space with Earth at the center, measuring four hundred light-years across. Gralmond was two hundred forty light-years from Earth, among the last of the second expansion phase planets to be settled. It didn’t require a great deal of calculation for Dudley to find that the next planet to witness the envelopment would be Tanyata, right on the edge of phase two space. Tanyata was even less developed than Gralmond—there was certainly no university yet—but a unisphere datasearch did find him a list of local amateur astronomers. There was one name on it.

Five months and three days after the evening he’d seen Dyson Alpha vanish, Dudley nervously waved good-bye to his wife as the Carlton pulled out of their driveway. She thought his trip to Tanyata was legitimate, sanctioned by the university. Even after eleven years of marriage, he didn’t have the courage to tell her the absolute truth. Or maybe it was that after five marriages he knew what to keep quiet about.

The Carlton drove him directly to the CST planetary station, on the other side of Leonida City from the university campus. Spring was just arriving, bringing a sprinkling of vivid green buds to the terrestrial saplings in the city’s parks. Even the full-grown native trees were responding to the longer, brighter days; their dark purple bark had acquired a new lustrous sheen as they prepared to unfurl their leaf awnings. Dudley watched the city’s residents from his seat: businesspeople striding about with purpose; parents being tolerant or exasperated with their kids; first-life adolescents milling about together outside coffeehouses and mall entrances, hopelessly gauche yet still managing to look like the most lethal gang members in human history. All of them so bright and normal. Dudley had chosen to settle here late in his second life because frontier planets always had an infectious air of expectation and hope; this was where new dreams really could take root and grow. And he’d done so little with that second life. His slightly desperate relocation here was an acknowledgment of that.

CST had opened their planetary station on Gralmond over twenty-five years ago. About the time Dudley was getting his colorful OCtattoo, in fact—an irony that hadn’t escaped him. The planet had done well for itself during its first quarter century of human history. Farmers had set their tractorbots and herds loose on the land. Urbanites brought prefab buildings that they lined up in neat grids and called cities in homage to the great metropolises they hoped would one day evolve from such humble beginnings. Factories were imported, riding in on the strong tide of investment money; hospitals, schools, theaters, and government offices multiplied fruitfully around them. Roads expanded out from the population center, sending exploratory tendrils across the continent. And as always, the trains came after them, bearing the greater load of commerce.

Dudley’s Carlton drove along the side of the Mersy rail route as he neared CST’s planetary station. A simple chain-link fence and a plastic safety barrier was all that separated the dual lane highway from the thick lines of carbon-bonded steel rails. The Mersy rail route was one of five major track lanes that had so far been laid out of the station. Gralmond’s population was rightly proud of them. Five in twenty-five years: a good sign of a healthy expanding economy. Three of the rail routes, including the Mersy, led away to vast industrial parks squatting on the outskirts of Leonida City, while the remaining two stretched out into the countryside, where forking again and again, they connected with the principal agricultural towns. Goods flowed in and out of the CST planetary station day and night, slowly increasing in quantity as the years progressed; circulating money, material, and machinery across fresh lands, advancing the human boundary month by month.

A big freight train grumbled alongside, going only slightly faster than the Carlton. Dudley looked over at the sound, seeing long olive-green wagons rolling along steadily, the sulfur-yellow lettering on their sides faded from age and sunlight. There must have been fifty of them linked together, all pulled along by a giant twenty-wheel engine. It was one of the GH7-class engines, he thought, though which particular marque he wasn’t sure; those brutes had been in use for nearly eighty years, a thirty-five-meter body filled with superconductor batteries, powering massive electric axle motors. Gralmond wouldn’t see anything bigger until the planet reached full industrialization status, in maybe another seventy years or so.