To Greq Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin, Killer Bees and COSMIC craftsmen PART ONE
To follow knowledge like a sinking star.
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The story is of a man, a woman, and a world. But ghosts pass through it, and gods. Time does, which is more mysterious than any of these.
A boy stood on a hilltop and looked skyward. The breeze around him was a little cold, as if it whispered of the spaces yonder. He kept his parka hood up. Gloves didn’t make his fingers too clumsy for the telescope he had carried here.
Already now, before the autumnal equinox, summer was dying out of the Tanana valley and the nights lengthening fast. Some warmth did linger in the forest that enclosed this bare height: he caught a last faint fragrance of spruce.
The dark reached brilliant above him, the Milky Way cleaving it with frost, the Great Bear canted and Capella outshining Polaris in the north, ruddy Arcturus and Altair flanking steely Vega in the west, a bewilderment of stars.
Though the moon was down, treetops lifted gray beneath their light.
A spark rose among them, a satellite in a high-inclination orbit. The boy’s gaze followed it till it vanished. Longing shook him. To be out there!
