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  For Edmond Hamilton—Captain Future’s creator and the father of space opera

  PROLOGUE

  The Solar Age

  It was an age of miracles. It was an era of wonder. It was a time of new frontiers.

  In the twenty-first century, humankind gradually came to the realization that its home world—crust depleted of nearly all usable resources, ice caps melted and coastal cities flooded, skies tinted a sickly reddish-orange hue at sunset from overdependence upon fossil fuels—could no longer support everyone, and therefore long-term survival lay in the colonization of space. Because the stars were too far away (at least for the time being) this left the other worlds of the solar system as the only places to go.

  Gradually, tentatively, with small and reluctant baby steps that soon became a confident pace and finally a headlong sprint, the human race left Earth and went out into the void, exploring worlds previously visited only by unmanned rovers and flyby probes, transforming them into humanity’s new home.

  At first, few efforts were successful. The effort to terraform Mars into Earth’s companion took longer than expected and eventually would have to draw upon the resources of the rest of the system. Venus has always been Hell in real life, and the catastrophic failure of the first expedition there reinforced the belief that it always will be. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn, along with the minor planets of the asteroid and Kuiper belts, possessed seemingly endless resources, but were cold and hostile places that could kill a careless person in seconds. For a time, it seemed that the solar system would never be anything more than a remote frontier populated only by the desperate and the crazy-brave, until it was realized that the answer didn’t lie in trying to conquer these planets, but adapting to them.

  And so humankind tinkered with its own genome and eventually created cousins who could live comfortably on these distant worlds. By the first years of the twenty-fourth century, the human race and its relatives had become a spacefaring species that inhabited more than one world.

  It was a golden age. From the sky city of Venus to the desert settlements of Mars, from the craterhabs of the Moon to the underground burrows of Titan and Ganymede, from the mining stations of Ceres and Vesta to Pluto’s prisons and Sedna’s border outposts, there were politicians and poets, scientists and wanderers, dancers and soldiers, savants and holy fools, the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the destitute, those who fought the good fight and those whose intentions were selfish, if not downright evil.

  It was a time of troubles. Wasn’t it always?

  It was all of these things and more … except there were no heroes.

  Naturally, one had to be born.

  PART ONE

  Encounter at the Straight Wall

  I

  The Straight Wall is considered one of the great sights of explored space. Included in 100 Wonders of the Universe as the Moon’s sole entry, it’s one of the only three planetary formations on the list visible from Earth, the other two being the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and Saturn’s ring system. It’s located in the southeast quadrant of Mare Nubium, in the lunar southern hemisphere just east of Birt Crater; a good telescope can find it on a cloudless night.

  A sheer and unbroken row of bluffs about eight hundred feet tall, the Straight Wall runs southeast by northwest across the flat volcanic mare until it disappears over the horizon. Sixty-eight miles long and a mile and a half wide, it resembles a dark gray tidal wave suddenly suspended and petrified in place. If one stands at its base and looks up, it can even appear as if the Wall is about to fall forward, crushing everything beneath it.

  Although its origins as a fault scarp are well understood by lunar geologists, some have claimed that the Wall is anything but a natural feature. It is instead, they say, an extraterrestrial artifact, an immense sculpture carved from native rock by visiting aliens for reasons that remain mysterious. The Sons of the Two Moons in particular hold this belief, but it goes back as far as the late twentieth century, when pseudoscience was but one of the many problems bedeviling the inhabitants of that dark time. This notion was discredited long before the first explorers set foot in the Mare Nubium at the dawn of the Solar Age, and it might have remained a lunatic theory—no pun intended—were it not for the discovery of the Deneb Petroglyphs.

  The petroglyphs are a major reason why the Straight Wall is considered one of the Wonders of the Universe.

  It took years for scientists and historians to get their way, but they finally persuaded the Solar Coalition Senate to pass a resolution declaring the site a System Monument, thereby enabling the Lunar Republic to take measures protecting the petroglyphs from souvenir collectors. The petroglyphs were treated with a chemical preservative and shielded behind a glass screen, then the entire site was enclosed by a pressurized dome erected against the cliffside. When the work was finished, it appeared that the western flank of the wall due east of Birt Crater had sprouted a semitransparent blister that glowed from within, making it brightly visible when the Moon entered its waning phases and the Wall cast a slowly lengthening shadow across the adjacent plain.

  It was the dedication of the Straight Wall System Monument that drew Curt Newton. He’d visited the Wall a couple of times, and only two years earlier he’d spent a week hiking the entire length of its upper parapets, an ordeal he’d undertaken with no company except Grag as his quiet but indispensible sherpa. Yet the petroglyphs had fascinated him since childhood, and when the Brain finally gave him permission to leave Tycho, this was one of the first places he asked Simon and Otho to take him.

  Curt was nine the first time he visited the Wall. Eleven years later, he came back again. Now he had returned once more.

  Curt dropped the hopper at the edge of the landing field. He was still shutting down the engine nacelles when Otho turned to him. “All right, now listen,” he said to the young man sitting beside him in the bubble cockpit. “There’s going to be a crowd here, maybe more folks than you’ve seen before. So whatever you do—”

  “Don’t stare.” Curt unsnapped his seat harness and stood up to squeeze past him. “Don’t stare and don’t talk to anyone.”

  “Not unless you have to. Let me handle the security detail. Is your tattoo still in place?”

  Curt checked his left hand. The temporary (and fake) ID he’d let Otho heat-transfer to the back of his hand was still there. Its code attested that his name was Rab Cain and that he was a freighter crewman from Earth, North American Province; Otho’s tattoo stated that he was Vol Cotto, a native selenian, resident of Port Kepler. “What if I meet someone interesting?”

  “Then it’s okay to talk, but just enough not to be rude.” Otho
followed him into the aft compartment. Like Curt, he was already wearing his vacuum suit; all they needed to do was put on the rest of their gear from the suit rack. “You know the rules. Nothing about yourself. You have no name—”

  “I have no home, and it’s nobody’s business who I am.” Curt recited the edict from memory. It had been drilled into him from the very first time he’d been allowed to come up from beneath the crater. Obeying the rules was the only way the Brain let him journey out from Tycho Base; if he broke them, he’d spend the next three lunar days underground, an isolation that had become increasingly hard to stomach.

  —We’re serious about this, Curtis. You’re still becoming acclimated to dealing with others on their own terms, and your safety depends on maintaining anonymity. No one must learn who you are … particularly now!

  The Brain’s voice coming through his Anni implant caused Curt to glance at the large ring on his left hand. He hadn’t yet pulled on his gloves, so he could see the central jewel in its platinum setting. The diamond glowed with a light of its own, affirming that the Brain was connected to him via augmented neural-net interface.

  —What do you mean by that, Simon? he thought. Why not, “particularly now”?

  A reluctant pause, unusual for Simon Wright. —All will be explained. Just stay close to Otho and don’t speak to—

  “Sure,” he said aloud. “Got it.” He glanced at Otho, who was tapped into the conversation. He was expecting the sly wink the android often gave him when Simon lectured him. Yet Otho’s face—stark white, hairless, and unblemished—was solemn. For some reason, his closest friend wasn’t in a joking mood today.

  They pulled on their gloves, airpacks, and helmets, and then depressurized the hopper, opened the side hatch, and stepped down the ladder to the landing pad. It was crowded with transports of all kinds, from short-range craft like their own to big lunar buses chartered from the big cities in Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Imbrium to the north. The fanciest, though, was a limo that had touched down beside the blister itself, with a pressurized ramp leading to the monument’s main airlock. Curt admired the ornate and utterly nonfunctional scrollwork around its landing gear, and the cherubs holding its lamps and communications array, and knew at once that it belonged to a wealthy individual. Exactly whom, he could not say, but apparently the dedication was being attended by some very rich and powerful people.

  This impression was confirmed once he and Otho cycled through the airlock, removed their suits in the ready-room, and made their way through the security checkpoint. Lunar society had a class system of its own, and one way of telling who belonged to the upper crust was how they entered the blister. The elite didn’t have to bother with the messy business of standing for five minutes in the scrubber while electrostatic brushes whisked away the regolith, or having to peel out of pressure suits. They walked straight into the dome through the enclosed gangways mated with taxis sent to collect them from their private transports; the rich never needed to put on or take off helmets, or put up with filthy decontamination procedures.

  Past the main entrance was the monument’s central atrium, a geodesic half-hemisphere of radioactive-filter lunaglass built against the lower bluffs of the Straight Wall, illuminated by light fixtures within the support rafters. The floor was crowded with visitors, both those who’d received invitations and the hoi polloi who’d somehow managed to get in. The former were dressed for the occasion: the men in frock coats, striped trousers, and mandarin collars, the women in sleek gowns with plunging necklines and thigh slits, their shoulders warmed by brocaded silk capes. Even the weighted ankle bracelets worn by those who weren’t born and raised on the Moon were fancy; some were made of gold or silver, with elaborate designs inscribed upon them. The waiters came to them with champagne stems and canapé platters, pointedly ignoring those wearing functional yet unadorned bodysuits commonly found beneath a loony’s vacuum gear. Clearly anyone dressed like that would’ve had to come in through the public airlock, and those weren’t the people on the guest list. The Lunar Republic prided itself on its efforts at democratic inclusiveness, but the fact remained that, as always, the rich were different.

  Curt didn’t care. Standing against the curved lunaglass wall behind him, he quietly observed the crowd. Regardless of what the Brain had told him about staring, he couldn’t help himself. Seldom had he seen so many people before, and never in such variety. Here were not only terrans and selenians such as himself, baseline Homo sapiens whose genomes remained unaltered, but also the cousins of humankind, Homo cosmos: red-skinned, raven-haired aresians of Mars, barrel-chested and thin-limbed; the ebony, platinum-haired aphrodites of Venus, elegantly slender, the women in particular possessing a haunting beauty; the pale and hairy jovians of the Galilean moons, taller and more muscular than anyone else, the men bearded and perpetually scowling. And here and there, scattered among them, individuals who superficially resembled terrans but whose clothing and manners revealed them to be kronians and tritons. There was even a pair of kuiperians, visitors from the outermost reaches of the system rarely seen this close to Earth, their features hidden by veils and cowls, shunned by everyone around them as the cannibals they were reputed to be.

  Curt had seen inhabitants of the Solar Coalition worlds before, but never this many at once. He wanted very much to speak with a few, and his desire must have been obvious to Otho, for his companion stepped closer to him to speak softly in his ear.

  “No,” he murmured. “I know what you’re thinking … and I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

  —It’s much too dangerous, the Brain added.

  “What’s so dangerous about talking to people?” Curt asked aloud, keeping his voice low. He tried to take a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, but the tuxedoed servant sidestepped him without so much as a glance; the drinks were not for riffraff like him. “C’mon, Simon … how am I supposed to learn more about them if you won’t let me speak to some?”

  —At any other time, my boy, I’d agree. But now isn’t the time. The reason why members of all these different races are here is because most of them are representatives of the Coalition Senate or members of their staffs. Others are corporate executives, business representatives, planetary traders, and the like. President Carthew will be speaking, so security is tight. The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself.

  “I hate to say it, but Simon’s right,” Otho said. “There’s a reason why we’re here … and I don’t want to do anything that may put you at risk.”

  Curt gave him a sharp look. “What are you talking about? We came here to view the Deneb Petroglyphs.”

  “And we will, but—”

  —There is something else as well. Something that is very important to you.

  Curt knew better than to argue with either Simon or Otho. Indeed, it often seemed that the only member of his family with whom he was ever able to win a fight was Grag. All the same, though, he was puzzled, and a bit irritated as well. But he kept his mouth shut as he and Otho slowly made their way through the atrium, slipping between knots of people as they headed toward the front of the room. Curt did his best to avoid colliding with anyone, but this was the first time he’d been in a crowd this size; he jostled a couple of elbows and stepped on someone’s foot, and by the time they reached the temporary stage set in front of the Wall, several people had hissed curses at him and Otho.

  Several rows of chairs were roped off for the VIPs. A security officer in the dark blue uniform of the Interplanetary Police Force wordlessly waved them away from the seating area, so they found a place off to the side where they could still view the podium and—more important, so far as Curt was concerned—the petroglyphs.

  The Deneb Petroglyphs were considered the most mysterious object in the solar system. No one had even suspected their existence until men ventured into this region of the Moon in the mid-twenty-first century, and in the 250 years that had passed since then, none who’d studied them had learned more about their meaning
or origins than that which had been deduced shortly after their discovery.

  First, the petroglyphs were old, very old. One hundred feet tall by seventy feet in length, carved into a smooth, semirectangular slab of lunar basalt by some form of focused energy; the presence of overlaying surface erosion caused by tectonic movements and micrometeorite impacts led selenologists and archeologists to determine an approximate age of one million years, give or take a millennium or two. This meant that the aliens who’d made them had passed through the solar system during the Pleistocene, when humankind was little more than a few Homo erectus tribes that still hadn’t made their way out of Africa.

  Second, the aliens who’d come here had provided a clue about the place from which they came. At the very top of the slab, in the petroglyphs’ first horizontal row, was a cruciform with a pair of long, crooked arms. The nine dots at its center and along the arms helped identify it as the constellation Cygnus; the largest dot, located at the head of the cruciform and surrounded by radiating lines, was the star Deneb. Because a long horizontal line led straight to the next figure in the top row—eight small dots in a halo of unevenly spaced concentric circles surrounding a large central dot, with the sixth dot surrounded by a small circle, obviously an ideograph for Earth’s solar system—it was determined that this indicated that the aliens had come from Deneb … quite a journey, considering that the star system is estimated to be about 870 parsecs from Earth.

  Third: of the dots represented within the figure of Earth’s solar system, two apparently had some significance, for they were surrounded by crosshatches. These were the third and fourth dots: Earth and Mars. But while the petroglyphs themselves attested to the fact that the aliens had visited Earth’s moon, whether they’d ever actually visited Earth or Mars was still a matter of debate, for no other extraterrestrial artifacts had ever been found on either of those worlds.