Free Omega Point Trilogy by George Zebrowski

Completely homeostatic, requiring no medical care except in serious accident cases, the race had been designed for endurance; in terms of the need for rest, recovery from infection and general vitality, a Herculean could outperform a traditional Earthborn by a factor of three to five.
    Historically, Earth citizens had been shy of biological engineering, fearing the loss of versatility to specialization if the practice grew out of hand; but as the Federation grew, pockets of humankind diverged from one another, culturally and biologically, until the first settlements in the Hercules Cluster reached out for a truly improved human type, creating the long-lived Herculeans. Few were left now, he thought sadly, himself and his father and the handful on Myraa’s World. He had not heard of any others. Genocide had been all but complete; but in failing to be complete, the Earthborn had made a fatal error, one which he would live to see them regret.
    “Let’s get going,” he said to his father.
    Turning from the open lock, he led the way into the control room. He sat down in the station chair and waited for the lock to close. His father came and stood at his right.
    “Well, what are your plans?” There was an almost light-hearted tone in the older man’s voice.
    Gorgias touched the map retrieval plate and the screen lit up, revealing a solar system of twelve planets. “Here, six hundred light-years from Earth, lies New Mars, fourth planet from the twin suns. The various settlements have more than twenty million people. The planet has no heavy defenses, and no reason to expect us.…”
    “What’s your idea?”
    “I’m going to destroy most of the life on the planet,” Gorgias said.
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IX. The Ring
    “One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.”
    — G. K. Chesterton
    “… the love of a man for a woman is like an attempt at transmigration, at going beyond ourselves, it inspires migratory tendencies in us.”
    — Ortega y Gasset
    HE WAS ALONE, going where he wished, and the fact made him feel guilty.
    As he stood looking out the window of his resort room, Rafael Kurbi realized that he did not know where he was going. The green mountainside was peaceful outside his window. Here in the sun settlements of Earth’s ring, a quarter of a million worlds, each a different environment and subculture, beckoned with the promise of novelty and human contact; he could change worlds as he would clothing.
    From inside, the ring was a cloud of glittering insects, rivaling the stars in brightness, a milky way of human living spaces cutting across the galactic background; at the center was Earth, oasis of origins, a place to be looked at, admired, even worshipped, but not lived on. People found it strange that he had cared to dwell there so long; even though a large population shared his preference, it was a tiny minority compared to the population of the ring.
    The North American mountain landscape outside his window — peaks and fir trees, outcroppings and boulders — was all perfectly safe and accurate. The weather could be varied to taste, streams stocked with perfect fish, woods filled with replaceable game, the air filled with birds. If only he could order a glider with Grazia in it.
    He was standing with his head toward the center of the small world; across a space of air he could see houses and roadways attached to the opposite surface fifty kilometers away. Sunlight shafted down the center of the egg-shaped air space, reflected in by a large mirror at one end of the environment; sunpower also ran the recycling plant located on the outside at the other end of the worldlet.
    Less than twenty kilometers away in space hung another world, one filled with water, where visitors’ hotels provided a view of aquatic human life; there one could swim to a sun window and look out at the stars.
    Pulling aside the slide window, Kurbi stepped