To my nephew, Thomas Baxter. And Simon Bradshaw and Eric Brown
Innumerable Suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these Suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds…
—GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600)
If they existed, they would be here.
—ENRICO FERMI (1901–1954)
Sections of this novel appeared in substantially different versions in Science Fiction Age magazine and in Moonshots, an anthology edited by Peter Crowther.
My name is Reid Malenfant.
You know me. And you know I’m an incorrigible space cadet.
You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids.
In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right?
So tonight I want to be a little more personal. Tonight I want to talk about why I gave over my life to a single, consuming project.
It started with a simple question:
As a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive—hell, to be ten years old, anyhow.
But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy.
