Earth

Earth is the home world of the human race, twenty light years from Kern’s World. The Old Empire’s war and the later decline of Earth’s environment led humanity to leave in ark ships.

Description

From the Brin 2 station the world below shows on the wall screens as “the green marble to match the blue marble of home, twenty light years away”. Earth had been green in Doctor Avrana Kern’s day, though her colours had faded since. The crew of the ark ship Gilgamesh carry a poorer memory. When Karst’s last drone brings back a scan of Kern’s World, one scientist asks whether the picture has been recoloured, and Vitas says the colour is old Earth green. Any such growth on Earth had been locked away in the years before the ice and never came back after the thaw.

Earth also carried its own past in orbit. Blasted hulls and dead ships circled it, with the vacuum dried bodies of their crews in place after thousands of years.

The Old Empire

Earth was the home of the Old Empire. Kern’s messages and the distress beacon that brought the Gilgamesh across twenty light years used Imperial C, which Holsten could translate as a classicist.

The Gilgamesh was not sent out blind. Its crew followed star maps taken from failed satellites, from fragments of ship and from the broken shells of orbital stations, all of it saved from decay by vacuum and stable orbits while the ice scoured the planet below.

The fall

Kern slept through the end. Woken in the Sentry Pod, she asked the hub for the date, then found that the signals from Earth had stopped. The last twelve hours she could recover were mostly pleas for help, and the record went back no further than two and a half days. She believed the war on Earth had gone hot, that neither side backed down, and that the whole global conflict lasted less than a week. One of the final transmissions was a virus broadcast on every frequency and in every direction, made to shut down any system that received it. Eliza surmised that the virus had shut down the colonies’ systems. Kern understood that a system failure on Mars or Europa meant swift death in the cold, airless environment.

Holsten’s account of it, given thousands of years later, is a civil war between factions of the Empire, fought with weapons he does not understand, which destroyed higher civilisation on Earth and wiped out the colonies. People on Earth went back to barbarism. A society that survived the war may have lasted nearly a century, until the choked atmosphere hid the sun and the ice came. Scientists thought the whole remnant population was no more than ten thousand, living in caves around the equator and looking out at a horizon rigid with cold.

The world the ark ships left

The ice retreated and humanity spread, fought small wars and rebuilt its industry. The melting ice released poisons and sicknesses that it had trapped. Holsten explains that his people could not counterbalance the worsening toxicity, so they built ark ships. The Gilgamesh carries five hundred thousand people in suspension. Other ark ships took different courses, but none had sent a transmission saying it had found a place to stay.

What Earth means

Kern’s politics were built on the planet she left. Her people had met no aliens and heard from none, which is why her faction meant to spread Earth life across the galaxy in as many forms as it could: it was the only life there was. To the ark ship she says that its crew are not from her Earth, and asks whether they are Sering’s people or her own. When the spiders finally answer her, she decides that they are Earth too, and that their form does not matter. By then her memories of old Earth have been overwritten by their conversations.

Unanswered questions

• Whether anyone was left alive on Earth after the war, the ice and the poison.
• Which side won Sering’s war.
• Whether any of the other ark ships found a home.

Trivia

• When Kern wakes, the hub reports that fourteen years and seventy two days have passed by Earth standard time.