The first colonists built with slabs of stabilized dirt extruded by vast machines carried in the bellies of four starships. In the artist’s rendering, bladed tractors crawled across a forested landscape, leaving behind them fields green with human crops.
But the tractors and the furnaces forming construction material wore out. Later buildings were of wood, stone, and concrete, because Cinnabar’s industry was incapable of repairing the equipment which had come from Earth. Cattle imported for meat and milk drew the plows.
Because the colony was less than a generation old when the Population Wars began, Cinnabar wasn’t dragged into the fighting as a participant. The complete collapse of interstellar transport threw the planet onto her own weak resources, but she escaped the rain of redirected asteroids which wreaked cataclysmic destruction on the more developed worlds—Earth herself foremost among the victims.
There were perhaps more humans alive in the universe today than there had been at the start of the Population Wars, but the most populous single planet had only a fraction of the numbers which had caused the Earth government to pursue a policy of forcing its excess on daughter worlds because sending out further organized colonies would have been too expensive.
The population of the few remaining habitable portions of Earth was modest. In a manner of speaking, Adele thought with a cold smile, Earth’s policy had achieved its stated objective.
The final panels at the tunnel’s upper end showed the rebirth of space travel on Cinnabar. To the left, a multistage rocket rose on a plume of chemical flame; to the right, a starship using rediscovered principles spread its sails, slipping from the sidereal universe in a haze of Casimir radiation.
Adele stepped into daylight again. The church rose before her in polished splendor; if she turned, she would look out over the length of Pentacrest Vale to the notch between Dobbins Hill and the Castle, with the western suburbs of Xenos visible as far as the eye could see.
A starship was rising from Harbor Three. It was huge, though despite wearing the uniform of the RCN Adele didn’t pretend to be able to identify vessels.
She sighed and walked across the marble pavers to the cantilevered gateway of the Library of Thomas Celsus, which filled both levels of the church’s west portico. On the pediment was a statue of the founder—business agent to Speaker Ramsey, the unchallenged ruler of the Republic two centuries in the past—offering a scroll to the People, represented as a woman in flowing robes.
The Celsus served as the national collection and was the greatest library on Cinnabar. When Adele was nine, her tutor had told her that the Celsus was the foremost repository of knowledge in the human universe. Adele had immediately used the resources of the library to check his statement—and learned there were several collections on the older worlds of the Alliance which could put the Celsus to shame.
Adele had immediately ordered the man out of her sight with a fury that shocked her parents and frightened him—rightly, because at that age she might well have shot him if he’d attempted to justify his falsehood. He’d lied to her out of patriotism; error has no right to exist!
The usher inside the bronze doors nodded warmly to Adele. She blinked in surprise. “Fandler, isn’t it? Good to see you still here.”
The usher stepped out from his kiosk so that he could bow properly to her. “Good to see you, Ms. Mundy. All of us here at the Celsus were afraid something had happened to you during the late unpleasantness.”
“Nothing worth mentioning, Fandler,” Adele said. That was true enough, in absolute terms—what human activity is really worth mentioning?—and true also relative to those whose heads had decorated the Speaker’s Rock.
She strode on through the cool rotunda, her steps echoing. It really was like coming home.
Banks of data consoles, separated from one another by panels of soundproofing foam for modest privacy, lined the tables of the wings on either side of the rotunda. There were three hundred and twelve consoles; there had been when Adele last entered the Celsus, at any rate, and it all appeared the same. Forty or so were occupied at the moment.