Free Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds Page B

unremembered.
    Something
had to be done.
    “The
lines have been gnawing at the lightspeed problem for half a million years,”
Burdock said. “It won’t crack. It’s just the way the universe is. Faced with
that, you have two other possibilities. You can reengineer human nature to slow
history to a crawl, so that starfarers can keep pace with planetary time. Or
you can consider the alternative. You can reengineer the Galaxy itself, to
shrink it to a human scale.”
    In
an eye blink of comprehension we understood the Great Work, and why it had been
necessary for Grisha’s people to die. The Great Work concerned nothing less
than the relocation of entire stars and all the worlds that orbited them.
    Moving
stars was not actually as difficult as it sounded. The Priors had moved stars
around many times, using many different methods. It had even taken place in the
human era: demonstration projects designed to boost the prestige of whichever
culture or line happened to be sponsoring it. But the Great Work was not about
moving one or two stars a few light years, impressive as such a feat
undoubtedly was. The Great Work was about the herding of stars in numbers too
large to comprehend: the movement of hundreds of millions of stars across
distances of tens of thousand of light years. The Advocates dreamed of nothing
less than compactifying the Milky Way; taking nature’s work and remaking it
into something more useful for human occupation. For quick-witted monkeys, it
was no different than clearing a forest, or draining a swamp.
    Burdock
told us that the Advocates had been covertly resurrecting Prior methods of
stellar engineering, contesting them against each other to find the most
efficient processes. The methods that worked best seemed to be those that
employed some of the star’s own fusion power as the prime mover. They used
mirrors to direct the star’s energy output in a single direction, in the manner
of a rocket motor. If the star’s acceleration were sufficiently gentle, it
would carry its entire family of worlds and rubble and dust with it.
    Of
all the Prior methods tested so far, none were able to accelerate a sunlike
star to anything faster that one percent of the speed of light. This was
laughably slow compared to our oldest ships, but it didn’t matter to the
Advocates. Even if it took two or three more million years to move all their
target stars, this was still a price worth paying. Everything that had happened
to date, they liked to say, was just a prologue to history. Real human
affairs would not begin in earnest until the last star was dropped into its
designed Galactic orbit. Set against the billions of years ahead of us (before
the Galaxy itself began to wither, or suffered a damaging encounter with
Andromeda) what was a mere handful of millions of years?
    It
was like delaying a great voyage by a few hours.
    When
they were done, the Galaxy would look very different. All life-bearing stars
(cool and long-lived suns, for the most part) would have been shunted much
closer to the core, until they fell within a volume only five thousand light
years across. Superhot blue stars— primed to explode as supernovae in mere
millions of years—would be prematurely triggered, or shoved out of harm’s way.
Unstable binaries would be dismantled like delicate time bombs. The unwieldy
clockwork of the central black hole would be tamed and harnessed for human
consumption. Stars that were already on the point of falling into the central
engine would be mined for raw materials. New worlds would be forged, vast as
stars themselves: the golden palaces and senates of this new galactic empire.
With a light-crossing time of only fifty centuries, something like an empire
was indeed possible. History would no longer outpace starfarers like Purslane
and I. If we learned of something magical on the other side of human space,
there would be every hope that it would still be there when we arrived. And
most of humanity would be packed