(All years given in Earth orbits.)

The Colonisation of Fram: 2084-2093CE

We came to Alpha Centauri and made Planetfall upon Fram in 2084; in the following years, we explored farther and farther afield, and as we did so, our Colony grew.

Shortly after the first Foundation Day, we discovered evidence of methane ice aquifers. The basic human need for water drove prospecting for purer sources of water ice, and technical advances in aeronautics and spaceplanes drove these prospectors farther from the colony. Propelled by the need for resources in situ, the most intrepid of explorers circumnavigated the equator and reached the poles.

The first mission to the north pole of Fram, mounted in our second year, embraced the tradition of Fram, that ship after which we had named our world and which in centuries past bore the explorers Amundsen, Nansen, Sverdrup, Wisting as they explored the poles of our Homeworld. Those who stood at Fram’s north pole watched the complex auroras of two main sequence stars.

We established small-scale, automated mines far from the colonies: some to excavate metals, but most to recover clathrates from the underground aquifers. These mines processed the clathrates, burned away the methane, and stored the water ices for transport back to the colonies. By releasing that trapped methane into the atmosphere, we began the slow process of heating our world.

Exploration was not limited to the surface of Fram. Driven by the mysterious results of a gamma-ray survey in our first year, our scientists took advantage of the noiseless skies and through radio and infrared astronomy watched the heavens in many wavelengths. The surface of Amundsen was mapped and biologists further examined the fossilised remains of methanogens found on that moon. And, if only in the spirit of the age of exploration, small missions were sent to the shepherd moons of Sverdrup and Nansen.

Work began on refitting the wreck of the Quoqasi, so terribly damaged during the Texas Crisis. Most of the drive section had been salvaged, which was fortunate in that the engines were the most important and most difficult to manufacture parts of the ship. The construction of a new fusion reactor was beyond the capabilities of the colony, and so, with some difficulty, we removed the reactor from the Mayflower and installed it in Quoqasi. A new habitat section was constructed – much smaller, and lacking the extensive protection necessary for an interstellar starship – and two orbiters were mated to the ship. After four years of construction and refitting, the ship was christened as Quoqasi II, the first of Fram’s system ships. Never again would she sail across interstellar distances, but she could travel through the solar system as our orbiters could not.

Five years after Planetfall, Quoqasi II and a crew of one hundred left on a two year, round-trip mission to explore the planets of Maud and Belgica, orbiting Alpha Centauri A, over twenty astronomical units from Fram.

Immigration: 2093-2108CE

While the colonies were busy preparing the Quoqasi II for her voyage and expanding infrastructure across the globe, Earth received the first of our messages, tight-beamed back to Sol upon our Planetfall. These messages confirmed that the Quoqasi and Mayflower had safely arrived and that a colony had been established; with that information, the United Nations dispatched the Second Fleet.

Nine years after Planetfall, the Second Fleet arrived. First came the colony ship Alexander, and almost immediately we knew something was wrong. Alexander was of the same design as Quoqasi, and bore four colony pods each with a thousand colonists aboard; however, while in transit between Sol and Alpha Centauri, one of these pods had suffered a critical life support failure. We welcomed only three thousand new colonists to Fram, and, ninety days later, the cargo ship Charlotte.

The surviving colony pods of the Alexander settled, with carefully planned descents, in the same crater as those of the Quoqasi. These pods formed a sparse city, with colonists moving cautiously from pressurised space to pressurised space – and from this city we projected human habitation upon Fram. The city was like the artist’s brush, a concentrated point of ingenuity and creativity, from which an image was painted upon the canvas of Fram’s landscape.

In the year following the arrival of the Second Fleet, the failed colony pod of the Alexander was repaired and refurbished. The pod was settled near the Wisting Base on Amundsen, and, with this improved infrastructure, Wisting grew into its own colony. Together, Wisting and Port Mayflower grew into twin colonies criss-crossed by the traffic of orbiters, shuttles and spaceplanes, and grew also into the gateway between the surface of Fram and the solar system.

Fleets from Earth bearing migrants across the stars arrived every five years. The Third Fleet, of the colony ship Constantine and the cargo ship Justinian, made landing fourteen years after Planetfall; while the Fourth Fleet, of the colony ship Zheng He and the cargo ship Suleiman the Magnificent, made landing nineteen years after Planetfall.

With the landing of the colony pods of the Zheng He, a total of fifteen pods were settled in the same crater. As the colony grew, structures grew up around the dominating bulk of the pods, and, over the course of years, a connected settlement developed. Construction began on a great dome that, anchored on the apron of the crater, would encase the colony pods in a large, pressurised and warmed space, and allow the collection of structures to become a single city. Construction of The Dome took two years, and was completed twenty-one years after Planetfall, and the settlement was inaugurated as the city of Junction.

Yet, these years of progress were not sustained. The completion of a series of great projects in the years after the construction of The Dome raised questions of corruption in the governing Presidium. Dissatisfaction curdled in the government of Junction City until sparked by the contentious contract for the construction of a cracking plant; public objection led to a constitutional crisis and the collapse of the Presidium in popular revolution. Two Consuls and a Senate replaced the Presidium and the Central Committee that had governed the colony of Fram since Planetfall.

And so it was a brave, young Republic of Fram that welcomed the Fourth Fleet to Alpha Centauri, twenty-four years after Planetfall.

The Years of Kohrism: 2108-2120CE

A consequence of the establishment of the Republic was that several members of the Kohrist party suddenly came to enjoy political power. The Kohrists, born of the immigration from Earth, had existed in the years before the revolution, but had been seen less as a political force than a philosophical perspective. They were believers in the writing of Leopold Kohr, and contested the ideas of continued economic growth and ‘the cult of bigness,’ and so too rejected the benefits of unmitigated migration from Earth. The arrival of the Cato and Victoria in the months after the revolution was thus met with growing scepticism in the government of Fram.

The Kohrists might have remained a marginalised ideology. But, while the colonists of the Fourth Fleet were still establishing a second city and the Republic adapting to government beyond the walls of Junction, a journal paper was published estimating that easily accessible and easily refinable aquifers of water ice might be exhausted within fifty years. Limited water restrictions were introduced, and missions to the scattered disc were planned, where astronomers had discovered countless cold, icy objects and dwarf planets.

And then, only two months later, astronomers detected the fusion drive of another colony ship from Earth as it swung about to decelerate – two years ahead of schedule.

The United Nations had dramatically accelerated emigration from our overpopulated Homeworld. The Fifth Fleet arrived only three years after the Fourth – twenty-seven years after Planetfall – and it bore many more colonists than previous fleets. The colony ship Armstrong was of a new, larger design, with capacity for 12,000 colonists.

Tragically, in the rush to flee the population pressures of Sol, poor construction had left the colonists of the Armstrong insufficiently shielded from the ship’s engines and reactor. Almost thirty percent of the crew had died on the journey to Alpha Centauri, and the survivors suffered to varying degrees from prolonged radiation sickness. This ship of the sickly and the dead, limping through the last years of its interstellar journey in appalling conditions, conveyed to Fram eight and a half thousand persons entirely dependent upon the almost twenty-five thousand citizens of Fram. The delayed arrival of the cargo ship Aldrin barely counterbalanced this immense drain on the Colony’s resources.

With the threat to Fram’s aquifers of clathrates and the pressures of growing population, the Kohrists rose in popularity. The election of Consuls in that year, the first election since the revolution, saw the appointment of two prominent Kohrists. With this shift in the political wind came changes to the cultural climate: survivors of the Fifth Fleet were no longer called ‘immigrants’ but ‘refugees,’ and the citizenry grasped for humane solutions to the crisis.

Twenty-seven years after Planetfall, we sent a message to Earth detailing the fate of the Armstrong and requesting that migration be slowed. That message would not reach Sol for four and a half years.

In that time, the Sixth Fleet arrived; in mercifully better condition that that which preceded it. Its colonists settled with those of the Fourth and diminished Fifth Fleets and together formed the city of Lacaille, hundreds of kilometres to the west. Lacaille too had its own space elevator, connected to Port Victoria.

Fram’s population had doubled in less than six years, and now approached fifty thousand.

Earth received our request to slow migration some time in Planetfall +31; it had by then already dispatched the Seventh Fleet, which arrived two years later. The Senate permitted these colonists to settle a new city far to the east of Junction, but internal tensions in the polity were intensified by the arrival of the Eighth Fleet in Planetfall +36. This last fleet had clearly departed Sol after Earth had received Fram’s request, demonstrating the United Nations’ disregard for its extrasolar colony. Senate elections in that year gave a supermajority to the Kohrists.

Among the established citizenry of the early fleets, in the planet’s media and in the chambers of the Senate, vitriol directed against Earth was plainly evident. But this anger was not unanimous. Among the most recent of colonists, those derisively termed ‘refugees’ by those who had come to Fram earlier, there was a nascent loyalty to Earth. The massive numbers of the loyalists – clustered as they were in the young cities of Lacaille and al-Zulmān – were, however, offset by the politically enfranchised separatists, who were concentrated in the capital and enjoyed representation in the Senate.

The Senate and Consuls of the Republic of Fram voted overwhelmingly to secede from the United Nations, and, thirty-six years after our arrival on Fram, we sent a message to Earth declaring our independence and denying entry to any further ships bearing immigrants from Sol.

The Years of Independence: 2120-2145CE

Following secession, Fram looked inward. Development of the colony was focussed in two dimensions: assimilating those colonists who had arrived in the last decade, and further developing water resources. Between the arrival of the Seventh and Eighth Fleets, a mission was launched to the scattered disc; in the first year of independence, this mission arrived at the icy dwarf planet Volumnia.

AI drones constructed mines across one hemisphere of Volumnia: these mines refined water ices into deuterium isotopes, amassed this deuterium into packets, and then installed these packets at points on Volumnia’s surface. These deuterium devices were bombarded by high-density neutrons and achieved thermonuclear fusion. Thus, fusion bombs of tens of gigatons were detonated on Volumnia, and, with each detonation, its orbit was gradually altered.

An entire generation grew up on Fram watching these flashes in the sky, knowing that they were of human design, and that these human hands were shaping the solar system. Volumnia would eventually settle into a close orbit of Alpha Centauri B, would warm and melt, fashioning a watery world close to our own.

This process would take centuries. In the meantime, automated drones headed out into the inner Oort Cloud, and propelled comets into the inner system on looping, centuries-long orbits. System ships darted about the inner system to catch these comets and shift them to refineries at Port Mayflower above Junction, Port Victoria above Lacaille, and Port Golden Horn above al-Zulmān.

A few months after we had declared our independence from Earth, astronomers detected the fusion drive of another colony ship as it began its deceleration. Thirty-nine years after Planetfall, the Ninth Fleet arrived – dispatched from Sol before we had even announced secession, and, of course, received without enthusiasm. These colonists settled in a world very different from that they had anticipated. They related also tales of the effects of population pressures in overcrowded Sol.

The emigration to Alpha Centauri made a negligible difference to the population of Sol. More than eleven billion people crowded the surface of Earth, and another billion lived on the colonies of Luna, Mars and the Galilean moons. The emigration of twelve thousand people every three years to the extrasolar colony barely offset a few hours of solar population growth. But for many of those living on Earth, looking dimly through the glow of light pollution at the brightest stars above, it seemed that the natural direction of these teeming billions was upwards, and that the colonisation of the heavens was manifest destiny.

Many of Fram shared that belief, but many more believed that so negligible a difference to those billions – but so magnified an effect upon Fram – argued rationally against the intensified immigration Fram had experienced.

Earth received our declaration of independence in the year following the arrival of the Ninth Fleet.

The fortieth Foundation Day was marred by strikes and work stoppages in the city of al-Zulmān, which soon spread to sympathetic colonists in Lacaille. While these strikers continued to contribute to the colony those services necessary for survival, many of these essential services were nonetheless affected. Hydroponic crop yields diminished in Lacaille and many crops failed entirely in al-Zulmān. This sudden supply shock, combined with rolling work stoppages outside the capital and the ongoing public costs of the missions in the scattered disc, led to a sharp downturn in productivity. The colonies went on rations for the first time since the Bottleneck. Unemployment rose. The Republic of Fram slipped into a steep, U-shaped recession from which it would not completely emerge for three years.

The recession was an inauspicious beginning to the independence of the Republic. It began also as much a social crisis as a financial one. The established colonists of the capital blamed the strikes in the other cities for the crisis, and resented the distribution of Junction’s crops to feed the starving of al-Zulmān; while the loyalist colonists in the regional centres suspected that the separatists had sabotaged their hydroponic facilities to weaken the pro-Earth power base.

But, instead of driving the centre against the periphery and cleaving the Colony along established lines, the deepening of the recession banded these disparate camps together. By the third consecutive quarter of contracted growth – and the growing risk of Lacaille and al-Zulmān dragging the entire Colony down into a narrowing of the bottleneck – a sense of cooperation pervaded the colonies. Living standards declined, foremost in al-Zulmān where they had never been as high as the capital, but starvation and poverty were avoided. There were a bumpy series of small jumps in growth before the bottom of the recession; at its depth, the Senate voted to expand the Consulship to include a third Consul, and this reform enfranchised each of the cities in a manner they had not previously enjoyed.

No fleet from Earth arrived during the recession. It seemed that our declaration of independence was received with more concern than our earlier request to slow immigration. Over the next five years, astronomers detected bursts of gamma rays in the vast spaces between Sol and other stars in the neighbourhood: first Wolf 359, then Barnard’s Star, then Lalande 21185. These bursts were from starships ploughing through the interstellar medium, impacting dust particles at significant fractions of the speed of light. It seemed that the United Nations had begun to colonise other stars.

What we did not detect was the approach of a series of reconnaissance drones from Earth. These drones did not decelerate as they neared the system, meaning that we were unable to observe their fusion drives as they turned to face their destination; we detected them only when they swung around Proxima and angled into the Alpha Centauri system. There were three drones that fanned out across the Solar System, and, travelling at a velocity close to 80% the speed of light, they shot through the system in under a fortnight. The drones rapidly tight-beamed intelligence data back to Earth as they receded away in the direction of the constellation Circinus.

That data reached Earth some fifty-five years after Planetfall, and, with a certainty our astronomers had not felt since they turned their instruments toward Sol to search for signs of the earliest fleets, the emissions of a decelerating fusion drive were detected four years later.

This ship, however, aimed not for Alpha Centauri B and Fram but for Alpha Centauri A and the twin worlds of Maud and Belgica. The ship disappeared behind the ultraviolet glow of Alpha A while Maud was at superior conjunction from Fram. It did not reply to any of our messages.

And so Earth established a beachhead in our solar system.

The War with Earth: 2145-2156CE

In the following year – the sixty-first of the Fram colony and the twenty-fifth of an independent Republic of Fram – United Nations mining ships spread out from Maud and moved into the debris of asteroids and failed planets of the solar system. The polity regarded these mining ships with suspicion and with resentment and with debate: loyalist and separatist alike considered the resources of the solar system more Fram’s than Earth’s, but there was no consensus for a course of action; the impasse was broached when high-quality images of the Maud colony from our missions in the scattered disc suggested that much of it was automated – certainly the mining ships, and possibly even the base itself. The removal of considerations of human life simplified the debate and rendered it unambiguous: the Senate advised the Consuls to launch a pre-emptive strike.

Republic system ships and AI drones engaged the United Nations’ mining ships across the system, often fighting over ranges of many AUs. Flashes of fusion fire dotted the skies of Fram over the next eighteen months as the mining ships and their refineries were one by one destroyed. The drones then converged on the Maud base; however, MKVs and ASAT missiles dismantled the Republic attack with ease.

Fram’s response was dramatic. The drive sections of ten colony ships were installed on the surface of a large piece of the disintegrating Amundsen, some eight kilometres in diameter. The impactor was propelled up and out of the gravity well of Fram, slingshot around Alpha B, and fired across the solar system at Maud. As it crossed the barycentre the impactor was peppered with missiles from Maud, and this string of medium-yield detonations traced the trajectory of the impactor as it pressed on to its target.

It took three years for the impactor to cover the more than twenty AUs to its target. The impact briefly outshone Alpha Centauri A, then hanging low on the horizon as seen from Junction and Lacaille. That point of light flared and grew in brightness, diminishing only after several hours. Alpha A had fallen below the horizon in the city of al-Zulmān, but the moons and the ring were brightened in the light of the impact. The energy of the impact was estimated at tens of teratons; the surface of Maud was devastated for a second time in its history.

Fram spent the next years studying the Maud impact – and preparing for Earth’s response. We made efforts to catch up with the technical developments evident in Earth’s use of ASAT weapons and kinetic interceptors. We seeded spy satellites and anti-ship warheads around Belgica and the molten, cooling Maud. And our system ships hurled small asteroids along the path between Sol and Alpha Centauri – these latter on the infinitesimal chance that an incoming ship would strike an object at a velocity of hundreds of kilometres a second.

The Colony also grew. The quiet years of the war were years of growth and prosperity, as the united cities pursued a common agenda and substantial public spending drove the Colony. Vast shipyards were constructed in orbit, suspended in a web of traffic from the space elevators and Wisting. From these orbital shipyards, our eight remaining system ships came and went on their missions around the solar system, or were docked for resupply or refitting. These tremendous vessels – kilometres in length, adapted from the colony ships that bore us to Fram – were balanced between a lattice of connected girders and beams, and surrounded by tugs and repair bots. Observers on Fram’s surface could hold a hand to the glare of Alpha B and watch the system ships in the orbital shipyards.

Fram’s was a sky full of wonders, striated as it was at most times by dozens of slow-moving comets. These were sent looping into the inner system by the automated drones in the scattered disc and were chased down by manned system ships. The comets were refined in Wisting, our space city, and, with the low escape velocity from Amundsen, water and hydrocarbons were easily shipped to the Ports and then down to the cities of the surface of Fram.

Shortly before the seventieth Foundation Day, astronomers detected the deceleration of a number of starships from Sol. The celebration of our seventieth year on Fram was thus subdued as we prepared for the coming storm. The system ships slipped their moors and spread out in a cordon across the system; the shipyards appeared as empty and delicate as the wings of a dragonfly without a body.

The Republic of Fram lost three system ships before the taskforce from Earth had passed the orbit of Proxima. While at the peak velocity of their interstellar journey, the Earth ships had fired relativistic missiles ahead of them – moving so close to the speed of light, these warheads were almost impossible to detect or avoid. The remaining system ships began high-gee manoeuvres and squadrons of drones swept the space around them; a fourth ship was nonetheless crippled and left adrift near the barycentre.

AI drones from both sides engaged one another in a battle that spread across hundreds of AU and lasted nine months. The Earth drones gained the upper hand, and one by one Fram’s AI drones were destroyed. Our surviving system ships were heavily damaged or scattered and beaten back, and the Earth taskforce bypassed Alpha A and speared directly toward Fram.

The battle of Alpha Centauri became the battle of Fram, and it was a rapid and spectacular affair. The ships of the Earth taskforce laid down blankets of thermonuclear explosions ahead of them, and the x-rays and gamma rays produced in these explosions reflected the acquisition radars of Fram’s ASAT and MKV weapons. The confused radars were then bombarded with decoys and penetration aids. Kinetic interceptors managed to take out a pair of escort ships, but the main troop ships easily got through Fram’s defences. And then they were suddenly in orbit of Fram, deploying dropships to the surface, and those troops rapidly encircled the capital.

The Consuls of the Republic surrendered Junction to the United Nations, and the other cities capitulated thereafter. Seventy-two years after Planetfall, and thirty-six years after secession, the Republic of Fram was annexed by Earth.

After the Storm, the Sun: 2156-2167CE

There were troops in the streets of the cities and there was increased surveillance of the citizenry – but life on occupied Fram was not immediately different from life beforehand. The surviving system ships stood down and returned to Fram, or commenced operations to assist the ships from both sides damaged and adrift throughout the system. The Senate was dissolved and power transferred to a Governor, but society functioned along lines almost the same as years past.

We learned that Alpha Centauri was important to Earth as a springboard to further expansion into the spiral arm. The limit of endurance for both ships and crew of interstellar voyages was roughly ten light years, and there were approximately as many systems within ten light years of Alpha Centauri as there were from Sol. Immigration to Fram would resume, but, the Governor promised, this might be offset by emigration of the generations born on Fram farther out into other star systems.

The Governor spoke on behalf of a government four and a half light years away. That distance imposed limits on administration, just as the distance between Moscow and Siberia, or between London and Australia, did upon colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Directives from Earth arrived half a decade after they were issued, and many were redundant by the time they arrived. Moreover, Fram could be selective in its obeisance to Earth’s dictates – protected by that same distance that lightened the heavy foot of interstellar government.

Like the refugee generation that settled in the cities of Lacaille and al-Zulmān, the occupiers gradually came to be assimilated into a self-determined polity of Fram, as was the manner of humans mutually reliant on one another for survival and for progress. New cities were settled as immigration increased, and, eventually, natural, native population growth matched the numbers of migrants from Sol.

Eventually, Volumnia settled into orbit of Alpha Centauri B, and was bombarded with comets from the inner Oort Cloud. This small water world became an oasis in a cold and dark desert, and fuelled by this bounty of water, our colony grew from Fram to the moons and eventually to the other planets of the system.

Eighty-three years after Planetfall, the last of the colonists of the Quoqasi passed away. Xu Sze Leng was one of the first humans to dig her gloved hands into the regolith of Fram. She was 112 years old when she died, and her passing was a sombre and solemn occasion. Those who had founded the Colony, struggled through the Bottleneck, explored the world and its moons, and received each of the subsequent colony ships, had at last passed from their world, and left it to their heirs.

*

Fram’s experience was not unique.

Within the lifetime of the first Quoqasi colonists, humanity had migrated across the space between stars and continued to grow outwards into the galaxy. That small bubble of colonisation stretched ten light years in all directions from Sol, with colony ships on their way to Sirius, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Indi. But the limits imposed by the speed of light upon both travel and communications between these stars, isolated as they were by unimaginable distances, disconnected the colonies from one another. This isolation encouraged an affection of independence in the young colonies that usually preceded secession. The nations of Earth imposed their will upon these colonies only with an implicit, if deferred, military threat; they were obliged to exercise this threat on many occasions, and each time the weight of her numbers and her vast economy made Earth victorious.

The colonies of these stars grew independently from one another, and would in time expand farther into the Orion Arm. Some went to war with one another, most cooperated; all existed as tiny points of light suspended in an infinite night.

The vast imperfections of the Universe made life harsh for the colonists. Around every star, the habitability of planets and their moons was determined by the vagaries of orbital tilting, eccentricity, atmosphere, magnetosphere, the dim infrared glow of red dwarfs. Another Earth was not found in this tiny bubble around Sol, and existence was always eked out of the best of a hardscrabble selection.

And so the human mind, evolved on the most habitable and exceedingly rare planet in local space, spread out into that space – and in so doing brought the purpose of that mind to a mindless cosmos and the dance of its blind energies…

*

Farewell, Fram, and thanks for all the fun. AC and DB.

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts, opinions and feelings regarding the colonisation of Fram.

A Stroke of State

An Orbital Shipyards Story

Dave Blades

Alae Iacta Est

Anastas withdrew from Clarendon’s attack.

‘–the hell would you do, Faliste?’ Clarendon asked angrily. ‘What the hell do you want to do? Shoot them down as they arrive? You can’t turn these ships away. You can’t stop what’s coming.’

‘Charles, please don’t,’ Anastas replied with a hint of nervousness. ‘Don’t do this. If the full Presidium ratifies the Enabling Act, you’ll tear down the government.’

‘Oh come on, Faliste. At least I’m doing something. You sit there at your paper, and you print these – these defamatory, liberal articles.’ Clarendon waved a hand dismissively. ‘But you’re too weak to put blood on the chamber floor.’

The Speaker of the Presidium mounted the podium.

‘I hereby declare,’ said the Speaker, ‘this Plenum of the Presidium of the Colonies open. The Speaker recognises the Member for Alpha-3 and Chairman of the Presidium.’

Clarendon turned away from Anastas and nodded to the Speaker. Anastas opened his mouth to reply to Clarendon, but no words were formed. As Clarendon gathered his tablet and stylus he locked eyes with Anastas and, without any emotion, proceeded to the floor of the Presidium chamber. Anastas leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his head held in his hand.

‘Members of the Presidium,’ Clarendon began. He addressed the members gathered for the plenum: sitting in rows ranked by candidature and organised into the various colonies were the sixty full and thirty candidate members of the Presidium. ‘Today is a significant day. Since we landed on this world and named it Fram – and brought the light of human civilisation to the light of another star – this new home of ours has orbited Alpha Centauri B almost seven times. But in that time, our homeworld has orbited the Sun twenty-four times.

‘Today marks twenty-four Earth-years since Planetfall.’

Anastas heard a brief murmur among the members. He rubbed the tiredness from his eyes. He put one hand over his mouth and watched Clarendon.

‘In those twenty-four years we have achieved great things. We have built this great city; we have welcomed three more colony ships to Fram; and we now number close to twenty thousand. We have walked on the moons; sent explorers to the other planets; and we have built space stations to orbit our new home. We have begun to warm our world and have established outposts across its globe. Days like today, though they might seem arbitrary, allow us to reflect on what we have accomplished in these twenty-four years.’

Two rows ahead of Anastas and to his right, in the section of the chamber for the members for Alpha-2, Gina Divero looked over her left shoulder. Her eyes, a piercing blue not diminished by her years, found Anastas’ own. She subtly raised an eyebrow, and Anastas imperceptibly nodded in return. The edges of his mouth tightened and his lip trembled, although he hid this by running his hand through his beard.

‘Still I recall,’ continued Clarendon, ‘those grim days of the Bottleneck. Those nine years when the first of us, borne here by Quoqasi, struggled alone to secure our place on this world–’

With a flourish of anger, Anastas grabbed his own stylus and quickly stood. He ascended the steps to the back row of the chamber and traced its curvature around to the exit. The section for the original Alpha colonies was farthest to the right of the chamber, and his steps echoed on the basalt floor, punctuating Clarendon’s words. Anastas felt Clarendon’s eyes on him. He kept his own gaze fixed ahead, the muscles of his neck taught.

Anastas heard Gina’s voice behind him.

‘Charles, please,’ she interrupted. ‘If I might address the floor…’

At the entrance to the Presidium chamber, Anastas was met by Ruslan. His friend was smiling. Shining on his collar was a platinum emergency services badge.

‘Are you okay?’ Ruslan asked.

Anastas took a deep breath and steadied himself.

‘Yes. Dizzy.’

‘You’ll be okay. Are we on?’

Anastas nodded. ‘Seal the chamber. No one gets in or out unless Gina or I say so.’

Ruslan handed a tablet to Anastas, on which a voip program was running and connected to a number of tablets across the city.

‘We’re on, ladies and gentlemen,’ Anastas said. ‘Good luck.’

The door to the Presidium chamber sealed shut behind Anastas, immediately silencing the argument developing on the floor between Clarendon and Gina. Anastas handed the tablet back to Ruslan, and put a hand to his friend’s shoulder.

‘Alae iacta est,’ Ruslan said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. The die has been cast.’

Anastas smiled, briefly.

‘You’re the second person to mention Caesar to me this week.’ Anastas took his hand from Ruslan’s shoulder. ‘Can you manage here?’

Ruslan nodded. ‘I’ve got some of my security team closing off this floor. You should go. You’ve places to be.’

The sound of alarms began to wail outside.

The Loudest Voice

Gina entered Clarendon’s office and he stood to greet her.

‘Ah, Georgiana,’ said Clarendon as he gestured across his desk, ‘please, take a seat.’

‘Thank you, Charles.’

He leaned back into his chair. Gina ran her finger along the edge of his desk.

‘Very nice,’ she said.

Charles smiled. ‘Chairman of the Presidium. For what that’s worth.’

‘Oh,’ Gina replied. ‘Quite something, I expect.’

She leaned back into her own chair and stared at Clarendon across the desk.

‘Let’s talk about the cracking plant,’ she said.

‘We’ve discussed the plant in the last plenum,’ Clarendon answered, ‘and it will doubtless be discussed further in the next Congress of the Central Committee.’

‘Let’s talk about why the contract went to Alpha-3 and not one of the newer colonies.’

Clarendon laughed. ‘First it was the location, now it’s the contractors.’

Gina continued. ‘Gamma-4 submitted a proposal with a much shorter construction time. Beta-2’s proposal used less refined metals. And yet, somehow, the contract went to your own colony of Alpha-3.’

‘You know,’ Clarendon said, ‘sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that you’ve been on the Presidium for as long as I have–’

‘You know that I have budget oversight, Charles.’

‘–only you and I, from the beginning. Do you remember the First Congress, Gina?’

‘We could also discuss the northern hemisphere aquifers, or the atmospheric heating stations. Are you deliberately suppressing competition?’

Clarendon abruptly pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the window of his office. Cranes were moving slowly around the grounding station away to the west. The distorted shadow of the space elevator was cast on the curved surface of the Dome; as the elevator descended to the surface, its shadow climbed the dusty roof over the city to meet its source.

‘I remember the First Congress,’ he said after a moment. ‘You encouraged us all down this path of governance. You were very passionate. Very eloquent.’

Gina managed a half-smile with one corner of her mouth. ‘Something not lost, I hope, in my old age. This could be very serious, Charles.’

Clarendon was snapped from his reverie.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he waved a hand dismissively. ‘Contracts of this sort are decided by a committee. I make them neither alone nor arbitrarily. And the one truism of politics is that voices will be raised against any decision – especially one where there are obvious and clear-cut losers.’

‘I will agree with you there,’ Gina conceded. ‘But never forget that this isn’t Earth. Economics is at its most basic the application of finite resources. On Fram our resources are scarce, and so much more precious as a result. Our lives depend on their careful management. The people won’t take corruption light–’

‘Corruption!’ Clarendon exclaimed. He turned to face Gina. ‘Corruption? For God’s sake. I took you for another sort of woman.’

‘Oh?’

‘One who would choose her words with more care. One who would not so casually throw weighty terms about. You talk about construction projects. I built this planet! When you and the rest of Alpha-2 were leeching off the rest of us, Alpha-3 was building a world.’ Clarendon turned back to his window and gazed out upon the city. ‘Do you think this city would be here without Alpha-3? Do you think there would be a world here to greet the Cato in six months? You know that there a more ships coming after it, and more after them, and after them. Fram isn’t ready for the population boom that is coming.’

Gina rose from her own chair, and moved to stand beside Clarendon. As she gazed out across the city, she could make out the far side of the Dome, enclosing the irregular western edge of the crater. Clarendon saw where her gaze fell.

‘Nothing I have done,’ he said more calmly, ‘is any different to your own lobbying for your home. My God, in those days, you would never shut up about Alpha-2.’

‘I won’t let this go, Charles.’

‘As ever, Gina, you’ll make a mountain out of a molehill. And after you’ve screamed yourself hoarse on the floor of the Presidium, you’ll see that our colleagues are pragmatic, and have no time for your self-indulgent brand of liberalism.’

Gina shook her head despairingly.

‘Voices are raised against any decision, yes, but thousands of voices are raised against this decision, Charles.’

‘I remind you that some voices are louder than others. And none louder than the Chairman of the Presidium.’

Gina turned and walked to the door. She sighed.

‘On your tablet is a subpoena to appear before the oversight committee. I’m launching an investigation. You’ve been served.’

She hovered in the doorway.

‘Are not the people the loudest, Charles?’

A Stroke of State

Anastas emerged into the shadow of the Chancery, a tall, dark building made of native basalt and built high on the eastern wall of the crater. It afforded a commanding view of the city, spread across the bowl of the crater. Rushing through the classical columns of the forecourt of the Presidium chambers, Anastas stole glances at this great city: the space elevator, descending through the eye of the Dome to the grounding station at Charlotte Station; the dozens of massive cargo cranes that surrounded the cable, dwarfing rows of cargo containers in the storage yards; the colony pods, almost a dozen, bulky shapes that still dominated the cityscape; and the thin streets lined with cherry blossoms that flowered close to periapsis and turned the boulevards into garments of white and pink.

Sirens were blaring throughout the city. Between the disorientating wails was a repeated civic message: ‘Evacuate. Please proceed to the nearest pressurised space. Evacuate. Please proceed to the nearest…’

As Anastas left the Chancery for his offices, he could see throngs of pedestrians rushing across the forum and frantically running for the nearest buildings. Some of them wore facemasks and breathing equipment, although many did not; those who did had taken the equipment from emergency stations in the streets. All of these people were looking up at the Dome.

The Dome stretched across the crater like a bubble of steel and hardened plastic, and enclosed the city and its atmosphere. The evacuation alarm warned citizens that the Dome had been breached and that the thick, mostly-carbon dioxide environment of Fram was rushing into the lower-pressure, oxygenated atmosphere of the city.

Anastas proceeded across the forum and along the tramline; here, a number of street-cleaning bots had gone into hibernation mode. His offices were located in the government quarter, a short run from the Chancery. In the lobby, a crowd had gathered, mostly of pedestrians who had been near the building when the alarms started, but also some curious office workers.

‘Meteorite?’ asked one of Anastas’ graphic designers as he entered.

‘Likely,’ Anastas lied.

The woman snorted. ‘We’ll be here for days. Last time it took city maintenance thirty hours to repair.’

In the conference room, Anastas met another candidate member of the Presidium, Woei-Hann Liu. He shook her hand. He placed his tablet on the conference table and turned to the smallest wall, on which a softscreen had been spread out. On the screen were a half-dozen video links to various groups of conspirators scattered throughout the city. Some of those video feeds jumped erratically; these were fed from tablets held in the hands of owners still running through the streets of the city.

Anastas tapped the screen with his hand, and the feed from Environmental Control expanded and was superimposed over the others.

‘The city is in lockdown,’ the man reported. ‘Of course, there is no breach, but we have immobilised the city’s population.’

Anastas nodded.

‘Excellent.’

‘It will take maintenance a little while to work out that there is nothing wrong with the Dome. When they do, though, we won’t be able to keep them in lockdown without changing their access privileges.’

‘It may come to that,’ Woei-Hann replied.

Anastas tapped the softscreen and the feed collapsed back into the lattice of other feeds.

‘We’ve immobilised the Presidium in the Chancery,’ he reported to all the groups. This information was the go-ahead for the next stage. A series of grim and nervous faces nodded back at Anastas. ‘We can proceed.’

One by one the conspirators logged out and the screen went blank. Anastas started to pace the length of the conference room. Woei-Hann leaned over the table; shoulder muscles tensing like a cat, her straight black hair falling over her neck.

‘You and I,’ she said, ‘we’re the only members of the Presidium involved in this coup–’

Anastas cut her off quickly.

‘It’s not a coup.’

‘Don’t fool yourself, Anastazy. We’re usurping the state apparatus. We’re deposing the government and replacing it with something else. And you and I are the only ones absent from that plenum.’

‘There’re no military or paramilitary forces here.’ Anastas was chewing on his thumbnail. ‘This isn’t the insinuation of some small, critical part of the government. This is a popular movement. There will be no violence.’

‘We hope.’

Anastas looked into her eyes. ‘There will be political change. And this change will be sudden, yes, and it will be engineered. But it shall not be violent.’

Woei-Hann put her hands on her hips.

‘A bloodless coup d’état is still a coup d’état.’ She sighed. ‘And if we fail, you and Gina and I–’

‘It’s not failing that I am fucking worried about,’ Anastas snapped. ‘If we fail, we fail. But if we neither succeed nor fail, this could drag on for weeks, and we’d tear the city apart.’

‘Oh please,’ Woei-Hann replied. ‘We’re all too educated for a civil war.’

‘But not too educated for the Presidium to exact some petty revenge on you and I? No. We’ll succeed – if we seize and occupy all of our objectives.’ Anastas stopped pacing, and stared at the blank screen. He felt his hand shaking, and put it in his pocket. ‘Ungh. I feel sick.’

What Have You Done?

Gina sipped a ginger tea as she read from her tablet.

‘Have you read Maley’s article?’

Woei-Hann, candidate member of the Presidium for Alpha-2 as Gina was full member, sat down across from her. She was sipping her own roasted chicory and soya bean drink.

‘Yeah,’ she replied.

‘I wonder if our Chairman has read it yet.’

Woei-Hann nodded. ‘Mmm. There’s been a lot of chatter online.’

‘“Where Does the Buck Stop in Presidium Corruption Scandal?”’ Gina read from the headline of that morning’s edition of The Praeco. ‘Bold enough to catch the eye of even the most apolitical of citizens, don’t you think? This has to be Anastazy.’

‘I think you give him too much credit,’ Woei-Hann replied. She blew on her drink, and the smell of roasted chicory wafted toward Gina. ‘The decision to run with a story is the editor’s – not the newspaper’s representative to the Presidium.’

‘Come now, Anastazy Faliste all but owns this paper.’ She motioned toward the tablet. ‘This is his powerbase on the Presidium. My God, would you read this:

“Chair of the Budget Oversight Committee, Georgiana Divero, will convene a hearing this week that is expected to investigate dubious, anti-competitive practices including influence peddling and kickbacks between high-ranking members of the Presidium and a number of industry contractors.”

‘It’s the section later on in the article that will most interest you,’ Woei-Hann said.

“Representatives of Thirty Four Design Bureau, a subsidiary of the Alpha-3 and Alpha-4 construction conglomerate, have declined to comment…”

‘No, further down.’

Gina skimmed the next paragraphs, which outlined a series of projects that Maley had identified and linked with the investigation. She read aloud again:

“Where does the buck stop? The Praeco has learned that the current Chairman of the Presidium, Charles Clarendon, has been implicated and a subpoena issued for his testimony before the hearing–”

Woei-Hann: ‘Yeah. That’s it.’

“–and, if true, the connections between the Chairman and Alpha-3 would come under intense and public scrutiny.”

Gina paused. She leaned back into her chair, and cupped her tea between her hands. ‘Clarendon is going to think that I leaked this.’

‘Almost certainly,’ Woei-Hann responded, ‘although the question is whether he will respond to Maley, or come after us directly.’

‘You know,’ Gina said after a sip of tea, ‘in some ways it doesn’t matter. The public are outraged. Look at the comments on this article. Whether he’s found guilty or not, it’s out there for all to see.’

‘Mud sticks?’

‘Mud sticks,’ Gina repeated. ‘And whether he thinks I leaked it doesn’t matter; I called for the investigation that brought the whole affair out of the Presidium chambers and into the public sphere. In fact, he’ll probably just assume that I leaked it in an attempt to unseat him. Now I understand why he reacted the way he did.’

Woei-Hann drained the last of her ersatz coffee, then cleared her thoat.

‘You could, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Unseat him. Call for a vote of no confidence. Have him impeached.’

Gina shook her head.

‘Not after calling for the investigation. It would be seen as at best as a pretext and at worst as a stunt. Besides, there are larger issues. I genuinely believe that he is misusing resources and giving preferential treatment to the richer colonies. This isn’t about leadership; this is about what is best for the people.’

Woei-Hann leaned forward conspiratorially.

‘So have another full member introduce the motion,’ she said. ‘Obviously not Faliste for the same reasons you just outlined. If this story gets bigger as the hearing goes on…’

‘Which it likely will.’

‘…well, the Chairman and anyone tied to him will be teetering on the brink. All they would need is a push.’

Gina suddenly set her tea on the desk and stood up.

‘My God, Woei-Hann,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re the leak! You leaked it to the press!’

‘You have an opportunity here,’ she replied. ‘You’ve served on the Presidium as long as he has, and you don’t even have a cabinet portfolio. He’s a corrupt kleptocrat. What you could do for this planet!’

Gina walked away from the desk and started pacing. She kept one hand on her hip, and with the other held one finger up to silence Woei-Hann.

‘Don’t speak to me. Don’t say a word. I can’t speak to you without counsel present.’ Gina scrolled through the directory on her tablet, pushed it away, held her hands to her forehead and pushed back her hair. ‘I’ll have to make a statement. Announce that we’ve found the leak. I have to distance myself from this. I don’t think you’ll keep your job, but we might transfer you to another position–’

There was a noise from outside, a roar like that of the surf, diminished by distance. Riding above that noise was a single voice, reduced to the harshest syllables as though a voice whispered in the next room.

Gina moved to the window, which looked down on the forum before the Chancery.

‘Oh my God,’ she said.

Woei-Hann joined her, and together they looked down as, several stories below them, a crowd of hundreds gathered in the forum. The crowd roared in surges, like crashing waves, agitated not by wind or tide but by the voice bellowing out from a loudspeaker. Reduced even by the distance and the window, the edge of rage in that roar was noticeable.

‘Look at them, Gina,’ Woei-Hann said with timidity. ‘Look at the anger. It’s unforgiveable that a man like Clarendon, a man who lived through the Bottleneck as you and I did, could be so careless with the colony’s resources. These are our lives, this is our future. They’ll lynch him and burn the Chancery to ashes if you don’t direct that anger.’

‘You’re being disingenuous,’ Gina replied. ‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Maybe. But look. There must be nearly a thousand people there. A thousand people. How many more are thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same anger? If this isn’t resolved at the next Congress, the people will resolve it themselves.’

Gina watched the crowd with a concerned frown, watched the crowd condense and fluctuate, watched hundreds of educated minds meet and cry out together in frustration. Her tablet chimed.

‘A message from Charles,’ she said to Woei-Hann. She shook her head with disappointment, then read aloud: ‘‘You ambitious bitch. What have you done?’’

O’er the Ramparts We Watched

Anastas nervously coordinated the movements of the conspirators across the city. Before any other sites were secured, the priority was to seize the city’s servers. It was through the servers that almost all of the city’s communications passed, and all data was stored here. The first to report, thus, was the group assigned to occupy the various, decentralised hubs of the server, found in each of the colony pods.

‘We immediately took the Chancery offline,’ reported the face on the soft screen. ‘Without wireless access, neither the Presidium nor its staff can use their tablets to communicate with the rest of the city.’

Woei-Hann was standing next to Anastas.

‘And their access to the server?’

‘Nothing not already in their local history.’

As each of the hubs was taken offline, sections of the city lost online access. Only Anastas’ group of conspirators was online. Much of the city’s population would assume that this outage was related to whatever had damaged the Dome.

Ruslan logged on. Woei-Hann tapped the notification and soon his smiling face was filling the softscreen.

‘The Chancery is ours.’ He paused. ‘We’ve moved most of the people over to the city council building. My teams have cleared every floor and there’s a guard at every entrance.’

Over Ruslan’s shoulder, Anastas could see a red-haired woman wearing the same ES badge as Ruslan.

‘And the Presidium?’

‘We can hear them arguing. Whatever Divero said, I’d say it’s worked.’

Woei-Hann noticeably relaxed.

‘Why the hell are you smiling so much?’ Anastas snapped.

‘Aren’t you excited?’ Ruslan replied. ‘Change is in the air.’

Another window appeared next to Ruslan’s.

‘Ruslan, I have to go. Let me know if anything changes with the Presidium.’ Ruslan giggled and was minimised; Anastas switched to the next face on the screen. ‘Myke. Give me good news.’

Mykelle smiled.

‘I’ve evacuated most of my staff. The broadcast station is yours. Assuming that you have things under control over at that salubrious little newspaper of yours, then you now control the planet’s media.’

Anastas looked out over the open-plan office beyond the conference room’s glass wall. The only people in the bull pit were the editor and lead investigative journalist, Maley, who had first broken the story. The two were leaning over the editor’s desk, gesturing animatedly. Anastas caught the editor’s eyes, who indicated that they would soon be ready.

‘Excellent. Stay on this line; they’re just finishing up and we’ll have something shortly.’

The next group to report in was that tasked with securing Charlotte Station. Charlotte was the centre of the city in both geographical and infrastructural senses: built at the basin of the crater, it was equidistant to the crater rims and the natural transit centre for the public transportation network. Moreover, material unloaded in orbit would have to pass through the grounding station of the space elevator.

‘We need emergency services down here! Oh God, its framming awful–’

‘What’s happened?’ yelled Anastas.

The face on the screen was shaking. ‘God, the tram hit them, two of them, I think they’re from Beta-3, God we need paramedics here in two minutes or they’re going to die–’

Woei-Hann interrupted. ‘Have you secured Charlotte?’

‘What? Yes, yes, all the tramlines are locked down. Jesus, where are the emergency services?’

Anastas again began to pace and rub his forehead nervously.

‘We’ll send someone out,’ Woei-Hann said. ‘One of Ruslan’s team.’

‘With the trams down, it would take them fifteen or twenty minutes to get there,’ Anastas replied. ‘We have to call it in.’

‘Oh, please, Anastas. Think. ES will wonder why we have comms and they don’t. They’ll know something is up.’

‘They’ll know anyway, in a short while. I won’t let those two die.’ Anastas shook his head, but kept his hand to his forehead. ‘I won’t be responsible for that.’

‘We’ll lose Charlotte.’

Anastas looked Woei-Hann in the eye, and took a deep breath.

‘We might lose the people if they die.’

Regents Pretending to be Kings

Gina stepped into the cabinet offices and, arranged around the long table, were fifteen other pairs of eyes assiduously avoiding her own.  This was the core of Presidium – its Chairman and the fifteen deputies that each represented a colony. The remaining seventy-four members of this bloated yet entrenched political body had not been invited to the closed session.

Clarendon sat at the centre of the long side of that table, conferring in whispers with the representative of his own colony, Yi Jianyu, a man seemingly untouched by age. By comparison, lines furrowed Clarendon’s forehead, and his blue eyes were hooded beneath his brow; there were clutches of wrinkles gathered at the corners of his eyes. Clarendon ran a hand over his baldpate as Gina took her seat across the table and to his right.

‘The circumstances of this meeting could have been better,’ Clarendon began. He did not look at Gina, but a handful of his cronies did, and she managed to look them each in the eyes. ‘Let’s start with the productivity figures, I think.’

One of the deputies for the new Gamma colonies, and also the cabinet minster for industry, rattled off a series of figures indicating a significant slowdown in many sectors of industry.

‘It’s very hard to avoid the conclusion,’ Clarendon said, ‘and it was not a conclusion that I was that keen to draw myself for quite a while, but you can’t avoid concluding I think on all the figures we have that productivity growth has slowed. Now it has slowed in a number of colonies, not just in the city. But I think I’d be right in saying it seems more pronounced in the city.’

‘I remain unconvinced,’ Gina ventured.

‘I don’t see how you can refute these figures,’ said the Minister for Industry, waving his tablet emphatically.

‘I don’t dispute your numbers,’ Gina responded sharply. ‘I remain unconvinced that your notion of constant and continuous growth is appropriate here.’

‘Here?’

‘Fram. The colonies. This isn’t some banana republic emerging from a civil war. When did this, all of this–’ Gina waved her hand expansively to indicate the world around her ‘–stop being about colonising distant stars and become instead just some microeconomy? Why are these meetings about productivity and inflation and stimulus?’

Clarendon cleared his throat and began to speak, but did not immediately look down the table at Gina.

‘We all knew that, eventually, Earth would send more and more colony ships. We had five years between the second and third and fourth fleets, but the Cato will be the first of many, many more.’ Clarendon placed his hands together. ‘Fram isn’t ready, and it won’t be unless we dramatically improve productivity now.’

‘Productivity,’ Gina repeated.

His hands still folded together, Clarendon turned to look at Gina and she caught the venom in his eyes.

‘There is a bigger picture here, Gina. There are twenty thousand people living on this planet, and twenty billion crowding and overcrowding the inner planets of Sol.’

‘Perhaps you might explain this bigger picture before the oversight committee. Maybe you could explain how mismanaging scarce and vital resources might qualify as ‘improved productivity.’’

There was the sound of whispering and of cabinet members shuffling in their seats.

Clarendon ignored her invitation. ‘Yes, I suppose we should thank you for the current controversy. This periodic bounce of uncertainty and anxiety will be with us for a few years. Anxious and turbulent markets.’

‘You’ll answer to the Central Committee, when the Congress convenes next month.’

Clarendon put his hands flat on the table and looked down the table to his various cronies.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Gina opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off by Yi, sitting at Clarendon’s right hand, who leaned forward and interjected.

‘I’m distributing,’ Yi said, as he sent digital copies of the bill to the tablets of each of the deputies, ‘copies of an Act that I propose we vote on today. Please take a moment.’

Gina locked eyes with Clarendon. After several long seconds, he said:

‘Read.’

The document was titled Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Colony, and there were five articles within it. After a short preamble, this bill launched into successive attacks on the executive function of the Central Committee and its powers of oversight over the Presidium. It concluded by postponing the next Congress of the Central Committee until the current political crisis had been resolved.

‘This is astonishing,’ Gina managed. ‘This is disgusting. You’re proposing to indefinitely postpone the legitimate assembly of the government of this planet.’

Yi said, ‘The Presidium is the government.’

‘No,’ Gina argued, ‘the Presidium is a body of caretakers, caretakers who preside between sessions of the Central Committee.’

Clarendon smiled a syrupy smile, and spread his hands.

‘We are the de facto government,’ he said, ‘and the Enabling Act merely recognises that. Makes it de jure.’

‘Crap. At best, we’re regents pretending to be kings. Enabling Act? You’re afraid. You don’t want to go to elections; you don’t want to dilute the power base you’ve built here in this room. What do you think the Central Committee will make of this? Do you think they’ll surrender their prerogatives to decide questions and make policy?’

The Minister of Industry scoffed.

‘The Central Committee is a swollen, distended monstrosity. Point me to an example in history of a civilisation in which a full four percent of its population were politicians?’

Clarendon held up a hand.

‘We’re not replacing the government. We’re…well, we’re rescheduling a meeting.’

‘Rescheduling a meet–’ Gina stopped, disgusted, overcome by frustration. ‘Why am I the only one challenging this?’

She looked from face to face, the faces of Clarendon’s cronies, who held her gaze, and the faces of those unaligned deputies, who looked to the table and avoided her eyes. At last she came to Clarendon, and saw in his eyes a glimmer of spite, and realised suddenly that she had played to him, done his bidding, a queen that had reacted to the blundering thrust of his rook by exposing her king, and now, at checkmate, the government she had built and protected for two decades was at risk.

Clarendon smiled, a little, imperceptibly, just at the corner of his mouth.

‘Shall we call the vote?’ he asked.

The only ‘no’ vote stormed out of the cabinet room.

We, the Central Committee

Anastas sent through the file to the broadcast studio.

‘Okay, Myke. That’s it.’

Mykelle’s eyes looked away from her screen briefly as she passed her tablet to someone out of picture.

‘Last chance to write this off as a bad idea,’ she said.

‘Alas, we’ve crossed that Rubicon.’

Mykelle nodded. ‘Sending it out now.’

Woei-Hann and Anastas picked up their tablets. Anastas tapped his stylus nervously on the conference table. He thumbed refresh – again, and again, and again.

‘Oh, come on.’

A message from the ombudsman of the Central Committee appeared in his inbox. Moments later, the same message appeared in Woei-Hann’s inbox. And, Anastas knew, the same message was received on the tablets of the sixteen thousand voters of majority age around the city; minutes later, relayed by Port Mayflower and orbital satellites, this message appeared in the inbox of those three thousand citizens in the mines and colonies across the planet.

‘Citizens of Fram,’ began the media message, read by one of the newsreaders over at Mykelle’s network, ‘we are faced by a political crisis without parallel in the history of our world. We, the Central Committee, propose a solution to this current crisis. Attached you will find the text of a referendum, the results of which will determine…’

Anastas stopped the video preamble and opened the referendum document.

A Proposed Law: To alter the Constitution to establish the Colony of Fram as a republic with the Central Committee being replaced by a Senate directly elected by the People, and the Presidium being replaced by two Consuls elected by a two-thirds majority of the Members of the Colonial Senate.

Do you approve this proposed alteration?

Anastas moved to tap the screen with a finger sore from his nervous nail biting; his hand froze, and, for a moment, his mouth parted and the colour drained from his face.

He clicked: Yes.

Anastas put both hands atop his head and interlaced his fingers. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

‘We need eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy one votes,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘Eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy one ‘yes’ votes for a majority.’

‘We’ll get them,’ Woei-Hann replied. ‘And then we’ll have our fait accompli.’

Anastas brought his hands down on the table.

‘It’s a little more than that.’

‘It’s an accomplished fact, Anastas. A done deal. We return civic services to the city and free the Presidium and we present them with something that has already happened. Something they cannot reverse. Evidence of the people’s support for us.’

‘No, that’s not what this is about,’ Anastas insisted. ‘This is legal. It has to be legal. We use the laws of the government to change the government. We work within the framework of the law; we’re not some revolutionary mob acting with violent, extra-judicial abandon.’

Woei-Hann snorted.

‘Sure, this is legal, but barely. Open source democracy, e-democracy, whatever, it only goes so far. We’ve asked the people of Fram to agree to a radical change of government based on, what? Twenty words? This is a referendum in twenty-five-words-or-less. The first thing the Presidium will say, the first thing Clarendon will say, is that the people made an uninformed decision. This referendum–’ she gestured toward her tablet, lying on the table beside her ‘–is the fait accompli by which we wrest control of the government.’

Anastas scratched at his beard, and used his hand to mask the involuntary snarl that suddenly twisted his face.

‘Do you really see the world in such realist–’

He was interrupted by the vibration of his tablet. The face of one of the Charlotte Station group appeared, and Anastas transferred the call to the softscreen.

‘We’ve lost Charlotte,’ the face reported.

Woei-Hann: ‘God damnit.’

‘Emergency services have cleared most of the platforms. I think we still have the line heading to the North Gate. Most of us have fallen back to the cable, and have barricaded ourselves in the grounding station.’

‘All right,’ Woei-Hann said. ‘Stay there. We still control the elevator.’

‘Was anyone hurt?’ Anastas asked.

‘I don’t think so. There was a scuffle. I think Goulburn and Davies were arrested.’

‘And the pedestrians hit by the tram?’

‘I saw them wheeled away on a stretcher. The paramedics didn’t appear to be in a rush, so I guess they’re going to be fine.’

‘Or, they’re too far gone,’ Anastas said.

He closed the feed. He put one hand to his forehead as he paced before the softscreen.

‘Ruslan’s team can be here in five minutes,’ Woei-Hann said. When Anastas did not reply, she reminded him: ‘The head of ES is a Clarendon crony.’

Anastas rubbed his temple. ‘The Presidium still can’t communicate with the rest of the government. We have to keep it that way.’

‘We need to hold the broadcasting studio, so that we can announce the results of the referendum to the people.’

Anastas stared through the softscreen with unfocused eyes.

‘You’re right, but I don’t think ES will go for the studios. The referendum has already gone out. They know we’re moving against the Presidium, and they’ll know the Central Committee is behind it. I think they’ll move on the Chancery.’

‘Okay.’

‘There’s nothing more we can do from here. Let’s get over to there and hope that the referendum closes before ES arrive. What do you think?’

Woei-Hann smiled.

‘There’s no better image for a coup than the people surrounding the site of government.’

The Romans are but Sheep

Gina repeated: ‘A republic?’

Anastas nodded.

‘A classical republic, on the Roman model. A Senate elected by the people, which in turn elects two consuls to one-year terms.’

Gina thought to herself.

‘One Earth year, or one Fram year?’

Anastas smiled. ‘A Fram year.’

As they moved through the museum, Anastas – in hushed tones – broadly explained the conspiracy to Gina. The immobilisation of the Presidium and then the city, the seizure of key facilities, the referendum. Anastas framed the plan in terms of a revolution, but reflexively allowed that it was a coup d’etat, a stroke of state, a stroke made by a disenfranchised body through an established executive.

‘You must understand my reservations,’ Gina said quietly, her voice lost in the museum crowd. ‘I’ve just tried to stop another man from destroying our government. You’re proposing nothing dissimilar. Like Charles, you’re illegally seizing the government for yourself.’

‘It will be legal. All changes to the constitution must go to a general referendum. We wrote that into the constitution.’

‘The legality will be disputed.’

‘Maybe,’ Anastas replied. ‘But the Central Committee is behind this. Seven hundred and fifty men and women, elected by their contemporaries. Clarendon doesn’t even have the entire Presidium: he has the parliament, sixteen people, none of whom were elected by the people.’

‘Fifteen.’ Gina looked away sadly.

‘Sorry. Fifteen.’

‘And the Central Committee will just stand aside, when the dust settles?’

‘Win or lose,’ Anastas replied with a skittish nervousness. He and Gina came to a display that featured sections of Quoqasi’s hull, recovered in various states from across the surface of Fram. Anastas ran his fingers longingly along the melted, blackened edges.

‘Do you remember the First Congress?’ he asked.

‘You know, Charles asked me the same thing,’ Gina said. ‘Yes. I remember. Six and a half years ago.’

‘Nearly twenty-four Earth years. Almost half my life.’ Anastas pulled back his hand, turned to look at Gina. ‘I remember you standing at the front of that crowd, arguing for a change of government.’

‘And I remember you,’ she replied, ‘making some offhand remark that led to our constitution and our government.’

 ‘The Presidium and the Committee worked, Gina, they worked well for twenty years. But now our population is too large, our economy too developed. We’ve lost that human scale that we started with.’

Gina put her hand over her mouth.

‘Leopold Kohr,’ she said through her fingers. ‘The problem is bigness itself.’

 ‘And Clarendon has commandeered our government, as simple as can be.’ Anastas smiled wryly. ‘I think I know, now, how Cicero and Cato felt, watching Caesar erode the foundations of their government. I’m angry at Clarendon, don’t get me wrong, but I’m more sorry that our form of government is so clearly crippled if it can be so easily usurped.’

Gina nodded to herself, lost in her own thoughts.

‘I know that he would not be a wolf,’ she said with melancholy, ‘but that he sees the Romans are but sheep.’

‘What’s that?’ Anastas asked.

‘Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, actually.’

‘Are you saying that the people of Fram get the politicians they deserve?’

‘No, not at all,’ Gina replied. ‘But…what if he’s right?’

‘Clarendon?’

‘Yes. Look at this. We waited nine years for the second fleet to arrive from Earth. They had to be sure the colony had made it before sending more ships. Then the third and the fourth fleets were five years apart, enough time to absorb the influx of colonists, expand our infrastructure, you know.’ She ran her own hands over the remnants of Quoqasi, the ship that had borne Gina and Anastas and Clarendon and Woei-Hann and Ruslan and four thousand others to Fram, all those decades ago. ‘The Cato is just the first in a massive surge of ships from Earth. Are we ready for these migrants?’

‘Many of us against unregulated immigration from Sol. Not just the Kohrists.’

‘It’s not just that,’ Gina said. ‘I think that’s why he’s been pushing these projects through. Using the normal processes, we may not be able to cope with what’s coming.’

 ‘Come on.’ Anastas stiffened. ‘How would we have a better chance, inefficiently wasting away resources and time? The tender process is there to assure maximum economy.’

Gina shook her head. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’

‘Who? Clarendon?’

‘Yes. If you succeed.’

Anastas paused. ‘He’ll be brought before the Procurator General on charges of corruption, including influence peddling, patronage, accepting kickbacks, and gerrymandering.’

Gina pressed her hand against the piece of Quoqasi’s hull. Her eyes were misted by nostalgia and the passage of time. She appeared a defeated woman.

‘And the entire Central Committee is behind you?’ she confirmed.

‘All of them.’

Gina sighed.

‘All right. Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. Tell me what I have to do.’

Turning a New Page

Gina and Anastas, telecast across the planet, went before the crowd that had spontaneously gathered in the forum. They stood together on the steps of the Chancery, and waves of energy from the crowd crashed over them. Their faces were lit by flashes of light.

‘Citizens of Fram, my brothers and sisters,’ Gina began. ‘We did it!’

The crowd erupted in a prolonged roar. Anastas watched thousands of beaming, excited faces, and, despite himself, he felt a smile form across his own face. He looked over at Gina and saw her enthusiasm and genuine affection for the people expressed in the lines around her eyes.

Anastas held both hands out above his head, and the crowd slowly drew quiet.

‘We should celebrate and honour the way in which we conduct this great democracy. It’s been on display again tonight. The will of the people has triumphed over those who would deny the gathering of our voice.’ Another roar, loud and enthusiastic, and again quieted by Anastas’ outstretched arms. ‘We acknowledge the people of Fram, who today made a resounding choice; who today looked to the future; who today turned a new page in our world’s history. Ours is a common pride in this great endeavour, and today, when we chose to make that great endeavour even greater, I feel that pride as never before. Thank you, my friends and family of Fram.’

Another howl from the crowd, and again Anastas could not keep the warmth and happiness in his chest from spreading across his face in a broad, deep smile.

 ‘We are each now citizens of a young and brave republic, a republic chosen by the people,’ Gina yelled across the sea of gathered faces. ‘We thank all of you for the trust you have placed in that republic. I want to say to all of you tonight that never will your sacred trust be taken for granted. And, while the referendum passed with a supermajority, we know that there were many who did not support the idea of a republic. I want to say to everyone who voted ‘no’ that this will be a republic for every colonist and citizen of Fram, and your voice shall always be heard.’

‘In its last act before voluntarily surrendering its power, the Central Committee has elected both Gina and myself–’ Anastas put his hand on Gina’s shoulder ‘–acting Consuls of the Republic until elections are held for the Senate next week. Candidates for the Consulship will be nominated once a Senate elected by the people of Fram has convened.’

The crowd shouted out again, a sound punctuated by applause. Anastas moved his hand from Gina’s shoulder, brushing down her arm – he placed his hand in hers and raised both above their heads. Waves of sound and light crashed over them.

Holding their linked hands high in the air, both Anastas and Gina yelled:

‘To the republic!’

Submitted with the concurrence of: the European Union, the Eurasian Union, the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China, Japan, the Republic of India, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Forum of Mars and the Galilean Federation.

RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

125/1. International Cooperation in Peaceful and Extrasolar Colonization.

The General Assembly,

Having considered the report of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on the work of the one hundred and twenty-third session,

Recognizing the common interest of mankind in furthering the colonization of outer space and the need to coordinate international cooperation in this field,

Believing in the common interest of mankind in expanding the use of outer space, as the province of all mankind, for peaceful purposes and in continuing efforts to extend to all States the benefits derived therefrom, and also of the importance of international cooperation in this field, for which the United Nations should continue to provide a focal point,

Convinced of the benefits to all Members derived from the expansion of human economy and population to stars other than our own,

1. Requests the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, in co-operation with the Secretary General and making full use of the resources of the Member States of the General Assembly;

(a)   To develop capabilities for extrasolar colonization, recalling its resolution 1721 (XVI) of 20 December 1961, in particular article A;

(b)  To coordinate the exchange of information of Member States relating to extrasolar colonization through an international Project, on a voluntary basis;

2. Invites the Member States of the Security Council to contribute space capabilities to the successful realization of the goals of the Project, including but not limited to those outlined in resolutions 119/10 of 18 September 2064, 120/11 of 28 November 2065, 122/2 of 29 May and 123/9 of 20 September 2068.

3. Further requests the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to continue its work, in accordance with the present resolution, to consider, as appropriate, new projects in extrasolar activities and to submit a report to the General Assembly at its one hundred and twenty-sixth session, including its views on which subjects should be studied in the future.

It was thus a clear, cold day as Mierhof and I stepped from the crawler and out onto Fram’s surface.

We were four hours’ north of the Colonies, just over two hundred kilometres from the Yom Kippur mining site. Here there was a clear plain, hundreds of kilometres wide, between two ranges of mountains formed by the uplifted ejecta of massive, ancient craters. The regolith was shallow and, with the bedrock, we made good speed on this relatively flat terrain.

There was a light wind stirring the regolith, and, due to Coriolis force, it came from the northeast. Mierhof swore.

“God damn it’s cold,” he said, tensing up against the wind and holding his body heat jealously. “Reminds me of winter back Home.”

The average atmospheric temperature had dropped as we moved away from perihelion. I tapped at my tablet with the stylus.

“Nine degrees,” I replied.

We both wore knit caps to cover our heads, the most exposed parts of our bodies. Mierhof wrapped a thick scarf around his neck; I enjoyed the bracing cold on my skin. I took a deep breath and pulled away my facemask. I exhaled slowly, watching the steam roll away from my mouth. My breath looked strange, stunted, suppressed as it was by the thick atmosphere. I smiled, and quickly replaced my mask.

“It’s not a Goldilocks world,” I said to Mierhof, “but we could have done a lot worse.”

To the west, the plain rose in a long but gentle incline, and the horizon was far above us. The parallel tracks of our crawler diminished into a point at the crest of that incline. The constancy of that incline belied the violence of its formation: we stood in the basin of a astoundingly large impact crater, so large and so old that it was almost unrecognisable to human eyes. This basin was almost a thousand kilometres across, a depression in Fram’s surface that had been weathered by three billion years of anabatic winds and pockmarked by thousands of younger craters. The force of the impact had punched the surrounding crust upwards, forming extensive highlands that planed away to the far hemisphere.

Mierhof and I unpacked the ground-penetrating radar system from the flatbed of the crawler. Mierhof was remarking at how long it had been since we had used the survey system. We cleared an area of regolith with snow shovels, creating a flat space to deploy the rig.

“You get on that side and get that plate locked down,” he said.

With a thump-thump-thump I hadn’t missed at all, we drilled a borehole and then inserted the GPR antenna into the shaft. I attached my tablet to the rig and brought up the radargram. The terrain at the edge of the basin was heterogeneous, composed of brecciated, smashed bedrock suspended in regolith. With the GPR we might penetrate fifty meters below the surface, far less than had we been working on basalt bedrock.

With Mierhof and I holding each side of the rig for stability, the A44 began to thump out subterranean radar pulses of ultra-high frequency microwave and radio energy. Immediately, reflections reached the rig’s sensors, creating a blurry radargram on my tablet that was clarified with each pulse.

“God damn,” Mierhof said. “They might have been right.”

“Fram!” I replied. “Let me see!”

There were a series of colours, moving like infrared from the warm surface down through yellows and greens to a deep blue. But those colours between red and blue were arranged in parallel bars, and from those bars I could see what was buried beneath me as though staring up at a cross-section of the strata.

There were half a dozen elliptical shapes, like the bow wakes of ships moving up the screen, that showed the presence of large bolides of basalt, and these shapes were suspended on strata lines at various depths. But most interesting was the bottom half of the image. The various stratigraphic layers of regolith and spalled bedrock, written in yellow and green, trailed away into featureless blue; beneath this area of ultrafine regolith there was a second section, an area of high reflectivity, a strata of green highlighted yellow and arrayed in a smooth, flat strata.

“Huh,” I managed.

“Clathrates,” Mierhof replied.

“Looks like it.”

Forty meters beneath my feet, it seemed, in the basin of this impact crater, was a layer of methane ice, a clathrate compound of methane trapped within a lattice of ice. This was a deep sedimentary structure, buried beneath a billion years of regolith. And this layer was thick: from this preliminary GPR pulse, possibly tens of meters thick.

We had found methane ices pooled in the basins of craters near the Colonies, but these had been thin sheets, preserved by the regolith that covered them, ices so thin that once exposed to the thick and warm atmosphere of Fram, sublimated away like magical vespers. But calculations had suggested that, assuming similar ices to be found in craters across Fram, the total amount of water ice was much higher than we had ever expected from the hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere.

The theory went that methane produced by the methanogens was trapped within water ices deposited by cometary impacts, and that, in the deep winter of aphelion, water and methane snowed from the skies. This snow was buried by the movement of regolith and, preserved in the depths of craters by the cold of that surface regolith, large reservoirs of methane clathrates might form in the oldest and deepest basins.

Aquifers of vital water and methane might exist across Fram’s surface, undetected and in unimaginable quantities. And so we looked to the largest and most ancient craters for proof.

“Imagine it,” Mierhof said. “All that water, there all the time, waiting to be mined.”

I smiled.

“Think of the energy! We could burn the ice for power and heat. Natural gas. God. Water – and a warmer world.”

That was when it happened.

I had just told Mierhof to get the equipment for a core sample when, from the corner of my eye, I saw a streak of blue-white light, arcing downwards toward the horizon in the north-east. As I turned, I saw that streak begin to fragment into pieces, and as I stared at that cone of smaller arcs of light, I immediately knew what I was looking at.

“Christ, get down!”

I jumped at Mierhof, and with both hands on his shoulders I pulled him to the ground. There was a flash of light. I closed my eyes and buried my face in the regolith, but still I could see the light, and the back of my neck grew hot.

After a moment, Mierhof stirred.

“’The Fram was that?”

We both got to our knees. I wiped away dust from my faceplate. Suspended on the horizon was a dirty column of brown and black, a thick stem of fire and dust balanced on an expanding cloud at its base. Separated from that firestorm were a series of geysers, high plumes of regolith shot up into the sky by dispersed impacts.

“Air burst,” I said at length.

“God damn,” Mierhof replied, rubbing one hand through his beard. “Look at all those impacts. Broke up in the air and shot all those fragments down like a shotgun.”

“What do you think, five or six kilotons?”

Mierhof laughed. “More like ten! My God, look at it.”

The base cloud continued to expand, driven by a pressure shock in the atmosphere. It engulfed the geysers of suspended material that surrounded the airburst cloud. That airburst cloud rose upwards as the heated column of air rose, drawing in cooler air around it; the rolling updraft slowly formed a sinister mushroom cloud. But the wind from the high-pressure front pushed the cloud south-east, and it began to disperse even as it was still rising, raining regolith and vapourised comet across the basin.

Then the sound wave rolled over us, a massive clap that trailed away into a low roar punctuated by the a series of crisp bangs that might have been the impact of the fractured pieces. With that roar came a ground tremor to announce the violent creation of Fram’s youngest crater.

“Here’s a scary thought,” I ventured. “That comet must have travelled billions and billions of kilometres. Imagine if it had fallen just twenty kilometres short.”

Mierhof looked at me with eyes that held little patience for cynicism.

“Here’s a nicer thought: imagine that much force hitting a clathrate deposit. All that methane and water vapour quickly dumped into the atmosphere. We might warm Fram in decades, not centuries…”

We watched the cloud disperse for half an hour before we began to drill the bore for the core sample.

He moved away from the trough of methanogens and retrieved a tablet from his workbench. The tablet awoke from hibernation, and, in the reflection on Ngan’s faceplate, Lindenmeyr saw a series of brightly coloured images, rotating in imitation of three dimensions.

“If you’ll indulge me,” Ngan began, “I might ask you a question. How do you imagine alien life? How do you imagine something entirely new?”

Lindenmeyr paused for a moment.

“Is this a philosophical question?”

“Oh yes,” Ngan replied. “Imagine, if you will, a new colour. A colour no one has even seen before. Or imagine a taste you’ve never tasted. Anything you imagine in your mind is based on what you know, what you’ve experienced, what is familiar.”

“Of course.”

“We can’t possibly imagine something entirely new and different. And if we saw it, we likely wouldn’t recognise it.”

Lindenmeyr cleared her throat. “Like Stanislaw Lem.”

“Exactly.” Ngan returned to the trough of methanogens with the tablet. “The likelihood that any kind of life that evolved away from Earth would be recognisable to us, much less look like humans with pointy ears, is infinitesimal.”

“And yet we recognise these methanogens.”

“Oh yes. And here we return to that philosophical question.”

Ngan explained that the basic building blocks of life as humans had experienced it were readily and widely available in the Universe. Organic compounds such as hydrocarbons and amino acids were found in comets along with methanol, formaldehyde, ethanol and ethane, even hydrogen cyanide. The emergence of life was not some religious miracle, but rather a simple matter of chemistry – the interaction of methane, water, ammonia, hydrogen and the creation of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

Astonishingly, more complex nucleobases could also be formed on meteorites, asteroids and comets. Together with amino acids, these nucleobases could under the right conditions evolve into complex proteins, nucleotides, DNA.

Ngan showed a series of slides to Lindenmeyr who, although not an expert in organic chemistry, recognised the association of molecules of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen into an amino acid.

“So we took it back to the beginning,” Ngan said. “Because the end product is so different, we go back to the building blocks that the methanogens must have started with.”

“Ah. Now I see the point of your question. Here is the experience we use to recognise the alien.”

Ngan nodded.

“To continue with the ‘building blocks’ analogy, we figured that all life starts with the same materials and then goes about building different shapes, forms, assemblies.”

He flipped to another slide that showed a complex structure of tangled lines branching from a single curved strand. Where the tangles were clustered they grew away from the thicker strand, and bunched together like fruit on the limb of a tree.

“What is it?” Lindenmeyr asked.

Ngan chuckled. “Oh, this is the only macromolecule that composes the methanogens.”

Ngan continued and grew more animated as he explained. When tested, the methanogens had not demonstrated chirality because they were composed of neither proteins nor DNA. But here, rotating in false colours, was their analogy for both.

“It is somewhat similar to RNA,” Ngan said. “Essential for all life on Earth. In fact, viruses use RNA for genetic material. But it’s not RNA. We don’t know what to call it. We liken it to RNA only because we need that anchor of familiarity. It is only similar to RNA in so far as both are single-stranded molecules with shorter chains of nucleobases, that in turn produce some quite complex three-dimensional structures.”

Lindenmeyr turned from the spinning macromolecule on the tablet screen to the methanogens arrayed in a line between her and Ngan.

“Wow,” she managed.

“Oh yes,” Ngan replied. “At the moment, we’re half-jokingly calling it FNA.”

“FNA?”

Ngan grinned. “Framnucleic acid.”

And, arrayed around that single-strand backbone, were many of the building blocks seeded throughout the Universe: the primary nucleobases of adenine, guanine, the A, and G from DNA-based life, along with uracil, the U found in RNA; and the modified purine bases xanthine and hypoxanthine. Of these four nucleobases, FNA clustered into groups of two, rather than the groups of three into which DNA clustered.

“Actually,” Ngan said, “the simplicity of FNA is more akin to very, very early precursors to DNA than RNA as we know it. Say, four billion years ago. The precursor used only two nucleobases and a handful of amino acids, and worked well long before life evolved the triplet code it uses now. These doublets seem to work well for such a simple lifeform.”

Conspicuously absent from the image of the FNA macromolecule were thymine and cytosine, two of the nucleobases of DNA. Lindenmeyr asked Ngan why C and T were missing from FNA.

“We have a theory about that,” he explained. “Thymine and cytosine bonds are most susceptible to damage from ultraviolet light; in fact, most skin cancers from exposure to ultraviolet are a result of a thymine dimer, where ultraviolet photons damage the bonds between nucleobases and distort the macromolecule. Because of the direct exposure to ultraviolet light, we think the methanogens have evolved without thymine and cytosine.”

“A clever adaptation to the environment,” Lindenmeyr ventured, “but it cripples their genetic complexity.”

“Oh yes. Unfortunately, the methanogens won’t teach us a new way to deal with ultraviolet light; they’ve simply evolved away that part of them damaged by UV.”

Ngan brushed through the next slides. The absence of proteins dramatically simplified the process of replication, he explained. The FNA in the methanogens did not appear to articulate with a Fram version of ribosomes, and so did not communicate instructions to assemble amino acids into proteins through protein biosynthesis.

But it was so much easier to describe what life on Fram didn’t do, rather than what it did do. This difficulty was related, Ngan said, to his earlier comments about conceptualising ideas through the familiar.

Nonetheless, early work suggested that the FNA contained some amount of genetic information, but rather than communicating that information to assemble cells, the FNA duplicated itself in a manner similar to a virus; it did so, however, without a host cell. This duplication was in part related to the complex structures that the single-strand backbone of FNA allowed. The form of that structure was repeated in each duplication – limiting the opportunity to evolve, but allowing for very durable structures once natural selection identified a viable arrangement of nucleobases.

“These methanogens don’t so much ‘grow’ as they ‘self-copy,’” Ngan concluded. “We still don’t know how FNA forms these fronds, in the absence of both proteins and cells.”

Lindenmeyr turned over the fronds in her hands.

“Is it life?”

Ngan paused. “Yes and no. They are subject to natural selection, as evidenced by the absence of thymine. They possess analogues of genes. But they grow through self-assembly, rather than cell division.”

“Life,” Lindenmeyr said again. “Wow, I don’t even know how to communicate what I’m trying to say. I mean, we’re life, you and I, and we evolved from amino acids and nucleobases, and we go out into the Universe and we find these methanogens, and we stand here in this room and…and life asks if life is life.”

Ngan chuckled.

“Oh yes. I think of it like this: spread around the Universe are kits containing all the parts to make something. But there are no sets of instructions, no recipes, in these kits; not even someone or something to assemble the parts.”

Lindenmeyr nodded. “That’s the magic, I think. As best they can…the kits assemble themselves.”

Ngan spread his hands.

“And here we are.”

They sat in the lee of the dune, slightly beneath the crest. Sze Leng sat in front of Ruslan and her slender body was huddled up against him. Stretching away before them was a rippled surface, a sea of regolith wrinkled into dunes and gathered in parallel curves by katabatic winds. This was Fram’s softer landscape: kilometres of deep regolith uninterrupted by outcroppings of fractured bedrock or by the spalling of craters, although both underlay this basin, Ruslan knew, tens of meters below the surface.

Ruslan adjusted his faceplate by rubbing his chin against the top of Sze Leng’s head.

“Well worth the hike,” Sze Leng said.

Her voice was quiet, and Ruslan tapped the volume on his mike.

“We first noticed it in an areomagnetic survey,” Ruslan explained. “You can’t tell from the regolith, but this entire basin is pockmarked with craters that show up on the magnetometer. We think they’re quite ancient, based on the layering of regolith. The deeper layers have lithified into eolianite .”

“Oh.”

Alpha Centauri B was almost below the horizon. Its orange-yellow light illuminated the sky above its disc in a stunning stratum of incandescent orange through a fiery spectrum to vermillion. The ocean of dunes stretched off to the horizon. The setting suns lit the crests as darkness gathered in the troughs between dunes, creating alternating bands of gold and deep purple. Fram’s ring bisected the sunset, and cast an almost translucent shadow across the sky and landscape – offset from Alpha B by Fram’s marginal axial tilt.

Separated from Alpha B by an apparent distance of perhaps half the diameter of its disc was Alpha Centauri A, an intensely bright point a thousand times brighter than the full moon from Earth, but which could be entirely blocked out by a thumb held outstretched. Although higher in the sky than Alpha B, Alpha A was following B below the horizon.

“Tell me there’s nothing to mine out here,” Sze Leng said. “It would be such a shame.”

She turned her head over her right shoulder to face him and Ruslan sensed that she was grinning, but the gesture was lost in the glaring reflection of the sunsets in her faceplate.

“The underlying bedrock showed concentrations of magnetite and iron oxide. That’s how we detected the craters. But they’re not rich concentrations.”

Sze Leng’s head rolled lazily back into that comfortable space where Ruslan’s neck met his shoulder at the collarbone, and she stared upwards. The stars had begun to populate the darkening sky with glimmers of white, red and blue, flickering in the shifting atmosphere. Her eyes immediately sought familiarity: the trinity of stars that composed Orion’s Belt, and the brightening sparks of Rigel and Betelgeuse, a formation of lights unchanged by the distance from Home.

“Sometimes, when I’m out surveying,” Ruslan whispered, “I try to think of what will be here in a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years. We’re just starting out. Imagine a city that stretches from the Colonies out here to the Periphery, a great city, like those we left behind on Earth. Maybe someone will live here, eat here, sleep here, right where we are sitting, and will watch the suns set like us.”

Sze Leng smiled.

“Maybe.” she replied, dreamily. “Maybe, when we’ve warmed Fram and thinned the atmosphere, this plain will be a forest, filled with tall, spindly trees, creating soil and turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. And lovers will walk through the gardens, maybe even without suits, dreaming of some place called Earth.”

Sze Leng turned around so that she was facing Ruslan, and, without the tall reflection of the sunsets in her faceplate, Ruslan could see the look of wonder on her face.

Alpha B slipped beneath the dusty horizon, and the twilight deepened. Ruslan imagined Fram spinning, and the terminator line between light and dark crawling over its face. The sky above him grew blue-black, chasing the plum, vermillion and deep red toward the horizon. Amundsen was behind them, close to setting in the east; lit by both stars, it glowed brighter as the day dwindled away, turning the blackness around it into the colour of faded rubber.

The intoxicating majesty of the sunsets diminished, and Ruslan’s thoughts became darker.

“Maybe nations will rise and fall and fight over these dusty plains.”

Caught between day and night, framed by the light of both moon and star, Sze Leng stirred and asked,

“Should we head back?”

Fram’s orbit was highly eccentric, meaning that it was a not a simple circle around Alpha B, but rather an elongated ellipse. Traced simply, Alpha B sat inside one end – called an apsis – of that ellipse, while the other apsis stretched away toward Alpha A. But neither Alpha A nor B were stationary, and themselves orbited a mutual barycentre. Their own orbit greatly complicated Fram’s orbit. The apsides changed with each orbit relative to the position of both stars. This was called apsidal precession. Each time Fram completed an orbit of Alpha B, Alpha A had moved relative to its binary partner, and its gravity tugged at Fram. As a result, each completed ellipse reorientated itself toward Alpha A.

Astronomers explained apsidal precession by tracing a complex spiral that represented Fram’s orbit. The lines of that spiral converged at periapsis – the apsis that coincided with perihelion, Fram’s closest approach to Alpha B – but diverged in wandering arcs near aphelion, as each orbit traced a different apoapsis. Fram was moving away from periapsis and, slowly, methodically, irrevocably, gliding toward apoapsis. Fram had only in the last week passed periapsis, and took roughly three Earth years to complete an orbit, meaning that the apoapsis of that orbit was about eighteen months away.

There were many concerns about the habitability of Fram, almost all of which had been foreseen and discussed long before the Quoqasi left Sol. Only one among these was its wandering orbit, which itself posed the major problem of exposure to ultraviolet light.

Alpha B was less of a concern than Alpha A. Alpha A was larger, hotter and brighter than Sol, while Alpha B was similarly smaller and cooler. We knew that hot objects preferentially emitted radiation at shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies. Wien’s displacement law described the relationship between temperature and peak frequency. The hotter the object, in this case a star, the shorter the wavelength at which it emitted radiation. This was why hot, A-type stars like Sirius tended to emit blue light in the visible spectrum, while cooler M-type stars like Proxima tended toward red light.

But visible light was only one component of the electromagnetic spectrum. Higher up the spectrum according to frequency were ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays. Hotter stars not only pumped out more light, but also preferentially emitted these higher frequency, shorter wavelength types of electromagnetic radiation.

Not only did Alpha A pump out more energy than both Sol and Alpha B, but it also preferred to emit more dangerous energy.

Humans had evolved while sheltered from most ultraviolet radiation by Earth’s ozone layer, a belt of the stratosphere where the interaction of molecular oxygen and solar ultraviolet light continuously interconverted oxygen from O₂ to O₃; the process also converted ultraviolet radiation into thermal energy. But Fram, of course, possessed no ozone layer. Almost all of the oxygen in Fram’s atmosphere was covalently bonded with a carbon atom to form carbon dioxide, which was not only poisonous to breath but offered no shelter from ultraviolet light.

From Earth, it was easy to miss some of the features of Fram that would challenge our early efforts, such as the damage that the regolith would pose to our vehicles and equipment. But it was comparatively simpler to understand the stellar system, and we were prepared for the worst of the ultraviolet light. Equipment at risk of UV degradation, like synthetic polymers, had been reinforced with stabilisers and absorbers – such as benzophenones, zinc oxide, and titanium dioxide. Moreover, the same lack of independent oxygen in the atmosphere that prevented the development of an ozone layer also suppressed the reaction between ultraviolet rays and free radicals that led to the worst of polymer degradation.

All of these measures would be tested at apoapsis, when Fram was suspended between the two stars and at its closest approach to the more threatening Alpha A. At that point there would be no real night, but rather a bright twilight, the sky dark blue and the terrain of the planet lit with a quality of light like the totality of a solar eclipse on Earth. Exposure to ultraviolet would be highest at apoapsis.

Some of the biologists noted the similarity of the colonisation of Fram to the emergence of life on Earth. Early prokaryotes approached the surface of Earth’s oceans billions of years ago, before Earth had developed an ozone layer, and, exposed to the worst UV light, promptly died out. Those that survived had developed the necessary enzymes, base excision repair enzymes, which identified and corrected the genetic damage caused by exposure to ultraviolet.

And so, as Fram continued gracefully along its complex orbit, we began to study how the methanogens had evolved to tolerate such intense ultraviolet light…

“It’s like polarization modulation.”

Stepan Eshkol and Elzette Skovgaard stood together awkwardly, cradling their drinks. Stepan pushed his glasses up his nose and articulated analogies for the clashing sounds of the party, while Elzette watched him discreetly from the corner of her eye. The glimmer in those eyes suggested that she was already abuzz from the kava. She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear.

Jacques Renard slipped past them. He saw Ruslan Rusakov, whose arm was wrapped around the shoulders of Xu Sze Leng, and both were engaged in conversation with Allesandro Mierhof and another colleague whose back was to Jacques. Mierhof was quite animated, speaking loudly and gesturing with his hands. Jacques caught Ruslan’s attention. Jacques gave a smile and a nod, which Ruslan coyly returned. Ruslan mouthed the words: thank you.

The crowd was densest around the bar. Here they served a number of juices, grown on Fram for the first time from seed stocks frozen during the trip on the Quoqasi. There were limited supplies of these first crops, but the occasion merited their enjoyment. There were orange, strawberry, carrot and tomato juices, and these were poured atop ice and shots of kava. Vessels containing sticks of celery flanked the bar.

“I won’t lie to you,” Mierhof exclaimed over the hum of the crowd, “I do miss a good drink. Honest to goodness alcohol. It’s been years!”

Vetsera Lindenmeyr and Leroy Stohlberg wormed their way through the crowd, Vetsera leading and, holding hands, pulling Leroy behind her. They stopped at the bar and Lindenmeyr ordered two drinks; Stohlberg wrapped his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. They giggled. Both smelled of smoke – a blend of zornia latifolia, pedicularis densiflora, Egyptian water lily and Turkistan mint.

Yi Jianyu and Harlan Zimmerman were speaking with Konrad Faraday, describing the progression of Fram through its orbit in the time since Planetfall.

“Winter is coming,” Yi said. “One Earth year is less than a third of a Fram year.”

He held two fists up to demonstrate the orbit of Fram around Alpha Centauri B.  He described the dropping temperatures as Fram receded from Alpha B. Yi was oblivious to Faraday’s boredom.

Spread across one wall of the cargo bay was a softscreen, on which footage of the Foundation Day festivities was cycling. Disinterested members of the crowd watched this footage. There were gala balls in each of the colonies, and Charles Clarendon and Gina Divero – representing the Presidium – were celebrating on Port Mayflower. Smiling for the cameras, Gina and Clarendon were shaking the hands of Tomasz Borzęcki and Chesney Perrine – both of whom had been named in the Colonial Honours List.

The youngest recipient of that award was in the arms of his mother. Peregrine, with a thin clutch of dark hair, looked upon the ball with curious but tired eyes. He shied away from the most enthusiastic of partygoers, and laid his head on his mother’s shoulder. Sanna Winslow hitched him up on her hip as she spoke with well-wishers.

On the softscreen now was the sombre procession of images of those who had died in the past year: twenty-nine faces, happy and smiling, lives cut short in the accident at the mining site, the loss of the Harry Gold in a solar flare, the depressurisation of Alpha-2, cut short by suicide and by murder. Sanna pointed out the face of her late husband to Peregrine.

Naftali Nassimatissi stepped around the bar. He tapped a spoon to his glass of tomato juice.

“I don’t really have anything prepared,” he began, to a ripple of polite laughter. “We’ve seen tough and we’ve seen wonderful times. We’ve all seen triumph and tragedy. I think what says it best is that, nine months ago, we were enduring rationing – and tonight we have fruit and vegetable juice.”

Applause.

“I’ve heard many people tonight discussing this anniversary, and some saying that we should move away from the Earth calendar. I just want to say that we still call Earth ‘Home.’ I don’t think it’s wrong to celebrate these occasions.”

He raised his glass to the crowd.

“So, here is to our first year on Fram. May there be many, many more.”

“Cheers!”

“Bravo!”

The murmur of the crowd returned, and the Foundation Day celebrations continued into the night…

It was a stasis of silent, sure, sweeping movements.

In that silence, a narrow and forever imperilled form of life emerged. The impact of comets and carbonaceous chondrite asteroids gave the moon that humans would one day call Amundsen a burgeoning atmosphere, and, with that carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia, deposited organic compounds, long-chain hydrocarbons and amino acids. While the planets and moons spun in mean motion resonances, these compounds evolved into a primitive life that consumed carbon dioxide and hydrogen and produced methane.

These methanogens, exceptional and precious and delicate though they were, would never look at the stars and give them names; would never write equations to explain the motion of the planets; would never manipulate the fundamental building blocks of the Universe and use that knowledge to propel themselves across the gulf between stars. For two billion years these methanogens evolved in complexity and function from those cometary hydrocarbons – and then their evolution plateaued, unable to expand from their niche. Fragile fronds caressed the thin air of Amundsen with neither mind nor purpose.

When Amundsen’s surface was shattered by a devastating impact, these methanogens rode debris to the surface of Fram, and, in the overabundance of Fram’s dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, thrived and exploded in numbers.

By contrast, the life that had evolved on Earth was diverse and abundant. It had likewise taken billions of years to evolve, but had done so in an environment of plentiful oxygen, which readily bound with the structural molecules of living organisms – carbohydrates, proteins – and, as an oxidiser, was an energetic component of cellular respiration. Fuelled by oxygen and liquid water, simple cells blossomed over almost four billion years into multi-cellular life; and, in a burst of less than half a billion years, arthropods, fish, plants, and insects appeared; and then, over another 150 million years, reptiles, mammals, birds. After a series of extinction events and periods of climatic change, humans appeared, roughly recognisable after 4.2 billion years of evolution, and certainly within the last 200,000 years as the species that would spread among the stars.

In the space between chords of the musica universalis, humans began to communicate and share knowledge, and to congregate in settlements and farm the lands around them; through agriculture they developed empires and republics and began to speculate about the Universe in which they had evolved. In a flicker of time imperceptible to the patient stars, humans spread across the face of and came to rapidly dominate their planet, first split and then fused the atom, walked on their Moon, developed radio telescopes and studied the stars. As they did so, humans imparted upon the Universe both mind and purpose.

They searched for other worlds like their own. At first they listened to the stars for radio messages, assuming that life had evolved elsewhere as humanity had, and that this life would communicate in the same way that humanity did. They then used increasingly sophisticated technology to monitor the brightness of stars, watching for the transit of planets across the face of those stars; measured the movements of those stars to determine the gravitational influence of large planets upon their star; and, with orbiting space observatories, developed telescopes that could eventually resolve individual planets light years away.

Despite their relative proximity to Sol, Fram and Belgica evaded easy detection. Both were small planets, and many of the methods were biased toward the detection of large gas giants. Belgica orbited close to Alpha Centauri A, and was, at a distance of over four light years, indistinguishable from the light of its parent star. And Fram’s slow, elliptical orbit did not frequently transit the face of Alpha Centauri B – and, when it did, it did so quickly, as Einstein had theorised of an object that moved deeper into the curvature of space-time created by a massive body.

Nonetheless, observations of other stars encouraged humans to believe that small, undetected worlds orbited their nearest neighbours. They sent sophisticated, robotic probes to the closest stars, even as they exploded in number and expanded from their damaged homeworld to colonise the nearest planets and moons of their solar system.

Thus, decelerating from nine-tenths light speed, a robotic mind appeared in the Alpha Centauri system, and reported to the distant minds that had evolved in nearby Sol. This probe noted Fram, noted also its atmosphere and magnetosphere, concluded that human settlement would be possible upon its surface, compiled a report detailing these conclusions to relay to Earth. And with the receipt of those conclusions, two separate star systems – which had, perhaps, in the distant past formed from the same molecular cloud, but which had developed in vastly divergent ways – enjoyed the beginnings of convergence.

Alpha Centauri A and B had not completed two orbits of their mutual barycentre in the time between the arrival of the first, primitive, crackling radio signals from Sol and the arrival of the first interstellar starship. Immediately, the colonists borne from Sol by that ship went to work making Alpha Centauri their home. Intelligence evolved of another star, but an intelligence nonetheless, came to explore and appreciate Fram. Philosophers among those colonists would ask whether Fram had even existed before colonisation, without a sentient, rational mind to observe its orbit, the movement of regolith across the duricrust, the disintegration of Amundsen.

And, then, the life which had come so recently to Alpha Centauri discovered the life that had in so limited a fashion evolved there. At that point, two divergent paths taken by the Universe toward the emergence of complexity, separated by five billion years and four light years, converged…

The breather unit strapped across her mouth and nose muffled her voice. She stood across from the leading molecular biologist of the colonies. They were standing in a geodesic greenhouse, an igloo of polymers and plastics, connected to Alpha-2’s hydroponics shed by a tented walkway. Regolith had built up on the windward side of the igloo.

The molecular biologist was also head of hydroponics for Alpha-2, Lindenmeyr’s counterpart, and he was an ebullient man in his fifties named Ngan. He ran his hand over a frond of the methanogen. The alien plants were lined in a nutrient trough not unlike the lettuce and soy that Lindenmeyr so delicately tended each day; these plants were, however, immersed in a solution of hydrates, and existed in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and methane.

“Oh yes,” Ngan spoke eagerly. He chuckled. “Very alien. You don’t know the half of it.”

“Even the name,” Lindemmeyr ventured, “is anthropomorphic.”

“Oh yes.”

Buried deep within Earth’s mantle, microbial communities existed that were almost entirely isolated from the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Within those depths, hydrogen was dissociated from water by heat and pressure and radioactivity, and this hydrogen combined with dissolved carbon dioxide and powered the microbial biomass, which metabolically produced methane. These were the methanogens after which we had, somewhat unimaginatively, named the biomass of Fram.

Lindenmeyr ran her bare fingers through the fronds. The texture of the plant was more like soft rubber, or maybe putty; it offered an unnerving resistance to her touch. On closer inspection, she could see that these fronds were in fact wide, tube-like structures, fatter at their base but which inevitably narrowed into a mouth at the tip.

“The methanogens on Earth,” she said, “they’re microbes. They could be studied only through a microscope. This I can touch, feel, plant.”

“Microbial methanogens,” Ngan said, referring to the Terran variety, “are thermophiles. They thrive on heat. By comparison, these methanogens are psychrophiles. That they live through Fram’s winters speaks to their extreme tolerance of cold.”

“Should we even be calling them ‘methanogens’?”

“I don’t see why not. They produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, just as their microbial counterparts do. And both are extremophiles.”

“But comparisons end there,” Lindenmeyr prompted.

On Earth, all life emerged from the same soup of primordial microbes, three or four billion years ago. This emergence was the spark of life, a miracle, a random assembly of strings of amino acids into coherent structures that spawned nucleotides, proteins and enzymes – a moment of such unimaginable unlikeliness that humans would later deify it and call it Genesis. From that point, life blossomed and developed and was subjected to the pressures of evolution, and diversified into the branches of the tree of life.

We know that all life came from the same point of origin because all the life on Earth – humans, bacteria, tomatoes, pigeons, everything – shared the same structure and were organised by the same system. DNA and RNA stored information; proteins and enzymes composed structures; adenosine triphosphate (ATP) released energy. Identical genes were found in vastly divergent species – although organised in different structures, humans shared 63 percent of their genetic material with mice and 38 percent with yeast.

From the data stored in DNA, genetic code translated instructions for ribosomes to make proteins by stringing together amino acids in a determined order. The information was stored as molecular units named nucleotides; there were four different nucleotides that were labelled G, C, A and T based on the nucleobases guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine. What distinguished Lindenmeyr and Ngan from their childhood pets or from the soya they drank that morning were the sequence of those letters. DNA grouped these nucleotides into clusters of three: there were sixty-four different possible triplet combinations that together specified twenty-one different types of amino acids. There was a huge range of possible permutations of nucleotides and amino acids, and it was this range that generated the enormous, diverse, elegant abundance of life on Earth.

All life on Earth used these structures to exist.

“Before we even got to a genetic profile, we knew something was different,” Ngan said. “You know that microbial methanogens use chemiosmosis to generate ATP, where hydrogen is the reducing agent and carbon dioxide is the substitute electron acceptor in the absence of oh-two.”

“Anaerobic respiration, yes.”

“Well, the methanogens on Fram don’t produce ATP through chemiosmosis. At first we thought that they produced ATP through oxidation of carbohydrates, with an endogenous electron acceptor, maybe sulphate…”

“Wait,” Lindenmeyr said. “Fermentation?”

“Oh yes, that’s what we thought. Based on these tube-like fronds and these plants’ preference for carbon dioxide and hydrogen. But it seems that these methanogens, well, they don’t produce ATP.”

“Umm.”

Botanists had subjected the Fram methanogens to the Levin test, a labelled release of two liquids, one of sugars and the other of amino acids. The test was to determine chirality, the preference of genetic material for right-handed sugars or left-handed amino acids. The tests reacted equally to both mixtures, suggesting a chemical rather than biological reaction.

“My god,” Lindenmeyr whispered. “There’s no chirality. No right-handed DNA spiral.”

“No,” Ngan replied. “Because there’s no DNA. No ATP. No nucleotides. This is alien life, Vetsera.”

Lindenmeyr took a moment.

“Even so, it’s pretty god damned alien.”

“Oh yes,” Ngan chuckled. “Let me show you what we’ve learned so far…”