The physics of Criswell mining was simple, but the economics less so. It had never been attempted on Sol. Mankind simply had no current need for a cloud of hydrogen plasma so pressing as to justify the astronomical energy costs involved. But economics of mining V 886 Centauri, a star both smaller and cooler than Sol, were different. The gravity well was less steep.

And the ejected material was infinitely more precious, even if infinitely more dangerous.

The plasma of V 886 Centauri, ejected into orbit and stratified into its elements by using extremely large-scale mass spectrometry, could then be condensed by laser cooling into antimatter.

The antihydrogen would prove too fugitive and fine to collect. But a beam of positrons would turn anticarbon-12 into anticarbon-14, and the ions could then be painstakingly captured by a magnetic funnel. The chemical properties of anticarbon were the same as carbon, of course, so that sufficient magnetically induced temperatures and pressures could be used to compress the material into anticarbon crystal: a snow-white diamond no one and nothing made of matter could touch.

These last two operations would be expensive only at first, because the gathered antimatter could then be used to power ever-larger arrangements of ionization screens and magnetic bottles, which would gather more of the cloud, so the arrangement could generate a larger magnetic field, and so on. The snowball would simply grow.

The Diamond Star was a fountain of wealth, for all practical purposes, infinitely rich.

The only problem was that the fountain of wealth was fifty lightyears away. Is it worth it to climb a mountain to get a pot of gold? The taller the mountain is, the bigger the pot must be, and the more precious the gold.

How precious was this gold? Unlike other forms of energy, antimatter has the most efficient transportation cost versus its mass, since every particle was annihilated to liberate energy. Pound for pound, it was the cheapest form of power there could ever be. It required very little by way of refinement or processing: drop anything, anything made of matter into it, and the equal mass was converted spectacularly to energy. No waste; no pollution. A perfect fuel source. The problem? To make antimatter out of matter was preposterously costly, absurdly energy-inefficient, and cost far more than it was worth.

But what if a big chunk of the stuff, a mother lode, was merely sitting idly up in the starry heavens, waiting?

How big? V 886 Centauri was 2 × 1027 kilograms in mass. One gram of anticarbon would liberate 9 × 1013 joules of energy when annihilated with a gram of carbon, meaning that the Diamond Star was worth roughly 1040 joules of energy. For comparison, the annual energy consumption of the whole world in the days of the Second Space Age was less than 1018 joules. In other words, every man, woman, and child on the globe, and all his cats and dogs, could have more power at his disposal than the whole world had used in a century—if only there was a way to go get it.

And the will and the wealth. By a providential accident of history, Earth in A.D. 2050 happened to be at the apex of a period its friends called the “Age of the Sovereign Individual”; its foes called it “The Plutocracy.” Nine men, no more, controlled 90 percent of the world’s wealth. They estimated that an unmanned starship returning in a century would ensure the perpetual power of their international system of banks and industries. Their power collapsed amid hyperinflation—but not until after a vessel was launched that only they could afford to send.

The Croesus achieved orbit around V 886 Centauri in A.D. 2112, and laboriously constructed a radio-laser larger than itself to beam back to Sol news of its successful first pass at mining the antimatter star.

The message consisted of tediously correct, robot-compiled reports of loads, processes, and outputs, and only in the final section, under anomalies, did the Croesus brain, without any particular emphasis, report that Man was not the only creature who had placed an artifact near the Diamond Star. First Contact had been made fifty lightyears away, with no living human aware of the event. The robotic mining ship had discovered an object, an artifact, a black sphere the size of a small moon, left by intelligent nonhumans.

But by the time the signal reached Sol, the generation that had sent out the NTL Croesus had passed away. There were no orbital dishes open to receive its message. The broadcasts that passed through the Solar system in 2162 and 2166 were lost. The Wars of Religion of the late Twenty-First Century were more brutal and more reckless than the Wars of Economic Theory from the Twentieth, because the main purpose of the belligerents (first on one, but eventually on both sides of the conflict) was not to preserve honor, gain terrain, or win political concessions, or for any rational reason, but to wipe out as many infidels as possible, as cruelly as possible, in order to please a particularly cruel conception of God.

Croesus was programmed to repeat its broadcasts every four years, and the signal took half a century to cross the void to Sol. In its thoughtless, patient, automatic way, it did. It was not until A.D. 2170 that the Kshatriya battle-satellites received the message that man was not alone in the universe.

2. The Hermetic Expedition

A.D. 2215–2235

After decades of delay, the second expedition to the Diamond Star was organized. The waning Indosphere, in an act of conspicuous consumption meant to awe the world, and the up-and-coming Hispanosphere, eager to show her new-found strength, for the same motive, though rivals, joined each other in the venture.

The amount of resources consumed in this expedition was almost beyond calculation; but the odd mixture of semi-religious zeal and cultural pride prevented either of the partners from flinching away from the massive public debt and private ruin the ostentatious project absorbed.

To be sure, public figures solemnly intoned pieties concerning the long-term usefulness of this scientific wonder to the future generation of man: but it was on their haughty contemporaries their eyes were fixed.

Not so the officers and crew. Ion drive allowed them to leave the world lightyears behind, and Montrosian biosuspension technique allowed them to leave the years behind. Each crewman of the complement aboard had his eyes fixed on the future; each was assured that history would make him immortal.

The Earth would be strangely changed ere the errant travelers returned, the generation that sent them out long gone, their once-loved homes now foreign.

And the travelers would be changed even more strangely.

3. Thaw

A.D. 2399

Menelaus Montrose woke to a sensation of floating serenity. His thoughts seemed focused and sharp, but his head ached as if it had been filled with helium. Had he been drugged?

He sat up in bed. That was the first surprise: because it was a bed, an old-fashioned four-poster, big enough to hold a family of bounders, their first cousins, and their dogs. It was hung with heavy drapes, with sheets and coverlets around him like a snowfield, and a real down pillow where his head had lain.

Vaguely, he remembered a previous room—a white, empty place with padded walls—A hospital of some sort, albeit not smelling of blood, puke, and feces like the field-hospitals he knew back in Texas. But now where was he?

Menelaus spit up into the air, and watched the spittle as it fell, making a ugly yellow splatter on the nice silk sheets. It seemed to fall in a parabola, and not curve left or right. No visible Coriolis force, as someone in a carousel might see: but he was clearly under one gravity of acceleration.