“There might be people there,” he said. “The Rift was swept clean of stars once, somehow. Jake claims that that’s an overdramatic way of putting it, that the mean motions of the stars probably opened the gap naturally. But either way that sun
must be a recent arrival, going at quite a clip, since it’s moving counter to the general tendency. It could have been colonized while it was still passing through a populated area. Runaway stars tend to collect hunted criminals as they go by, Mark.”
“Possibly,” Hazleton admitted. “By the way, that image is coming in from your lead proxy, ‘way out across the valley. Don’t you have any outriggers? I ordered them sent.”
“Sure. But I don’t use them except for routine. Cruising the Rift lengthwise would be suicide. We’ll take a look if you like.”
He touched the board. On the screen, the far wall was wiped away. Nothing was left but thin haze; down at that end, the Rift turned, and eventually faded out into a nh of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars.
“Nothing there. Lots of nothing.”
Amalfi moved the switch again.
On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.
SPACE flight got its start, as a war weapon, amid the collapse of the great Western culture of Earth. In the succeeding centuries it was almost forgotten. The new culture, that vast planar despotism called by historiographers the Bureaucratic State, did not think that way.
Not that the original Soviets or their successors forbade space travel. They simply never thought of it. Space flight had been a natural, if late, result of Western thought-patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite, but the geometrically flat dialectic of the succeeding culture could not include it. Where the West had soared from the rock like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the very bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.