Concord and the New Age

Concord itself grew over the centuries, an establishment mostly Outsider, still with the colonial government Earth installed and maintained—and, unique to Concord, at least one, and perhaps a handful of ondatobservers. This arrangement made it an overwhelmingly important station, a very influential Earth governorship, and an equally potent Outsider chairmanship, in many ways independent from the Outsider Council at Apex. No one was sure about the ondat.

On the planet, life reasserted itself and interlaced in biological cooperation. The doors of the Refuge opened and human scouts traveled out into a vastly changed world, to hand-spread more seeds prepared by Outsider science—and to shed their own nanisms into the world, hoping for the best. Seeding operations began to spread hardy plant life the Outsiders claimed contained remediating nanoceles, creations intended to spread throughout the biosphere, attracting and eliminating certain of the runaways, themselves changing and reproducing into beneficent microorganisms.

Nothing dangerous in the original sense had yet turned up—but, certain doubters could point out, there was necessarily one place where the Ila’s nanoceles still flourished: in the Ila herself, and in a handful of other survivors, whose lives had passed ordinary human limits, notably Marak Trin Tain, who was the earliest and hardiest explorer of this new world. Hebecame a contact point for the observers aloft; hebecame a known quantity, a continuing, reliable guide, about whose doings the ondatwere extraordinarily curious, whose activities they wanted to know, at all points—one single human being, a benchmark, perhaps, about whom their records were continuous, who perhaps embodied their understanding of the species with whom they shared, and did not share, a station.

The original team likewise availed themselves of that long life. They had become living laboratories of Outsider attempts to contain the Ila’s science. The nanotrackers, potent against the runaways, failed to attack the First Movement modifications in the Outsider team and in the Ila—a circumstance that some pessimists aloft called proof of the danger inherent in First Movement tech, and others, more optimistic, called proof of the fine control the Outsider team already exerted, on their way to remediation.

The Outsider team simply said it was not to their advantage to kill themselves—since with those internal nanisms, they were, in effect, immortal—a rumor that caused nervous shivers far beyond Concord.

Nobody wanted a return to the bad old days of the Gene Wars: no one wanted the ondatto resume their attacks or retaliate in kind. The ondatseemed happy as long as they had regular reports from Marak Trin Tain, and apparently cared little for communications from the station itself.

But rumors of immortality scared Earth. Earth, overpopulated as it was, could see social collapse if the immortality modification ever reached the black market…and only the information needed travel. The Outsiders’ entire hope to remediate the political situation with the ondathinged on their team’s efforts to rehabilitate Marak’s World—and on the contact they maintained with the ondat,and on the ondat’sfixation on Marak’s successful, healthy life. The Outsiders wanted no provocative new tech to exit the world, but they were glad enough to know their team was as immortal as Marak—the team, by now, having a tremendous accumulated knowledge…and being, like Marak, one constant that transcended the careers of individual administrators in orbit.

So everyone stayed. Everyone carried on above, on Concord, as if this ages-long occupation of a ruined world and a handful of immortals were the modus vivendi they had discovered. To Concord Station, the curious situation was forever, a condition of life like light and warmth, essential, but the maintenance of which happened outside the understanding of nine-tenths of the lives inside Concord’s spinning wheel. The population had diversified far, far beyond the scientific mission.

Commerce went on. Human lives did, briefer than what they observed. In the mind-bogglingly long time since the Gene Wars, new civilizations sprang up. Governments and institutions rose and fell. Languages and cultures changed. The Ruined Worlds deep inside Outsider territory grew stranger and stranger, one with continents nearly covered in algaes and slimes, one with a population that could no longer be called in any sense human.

Marak’s World, however, showed signs of health. The population had been ordinary humans in most particulars: they still were. The surface of the world was metal-poor. Newly arrived metals, largely aimed to miss the area of human habitation, were mostly inaccessible to them. That had not changed. But the reawakened geologic forces that were rearranging the planet would change that picture, bringing up metals from the core—slowly, over time only the immortals could survive.

Meanwhile the Refuge maintained a few aircraft of fused fiber; it used trucks of metal, fused fiber, and cast ceramics. It had brought down fusion for its own needs. It harnessed water, wind, biomass, and solar power, the latter fragile in the vast, long-lasting sandstorms. Fuel cells provided power for outlying installations, but the fuel cells themselves used scarce materials. Life showed signs of health in this new age. Technology struggled, not according to ancient patterns, but making ample use of exotic, synthesizing nanochemistry. For civilization, it was still an uphill climb.

The Concord Station that now monitored the planet was the third station to orbit there, the other two outmoded and abandoned, the ondathaving transferred their section as a unit to each in turn. A fourth station was under construction, a subject of the usual debate and wrangling, but nothing important was likely to change when the population migrated over to it. Concord still spoke the language it had always spoken. It still believed what it had believed. The ondatstill sought their daily information on Marak. Only outward appearances and trends underwent revision, never the laws that governed its interaction with others.

Life was comfortable for all concerned at Concord.

Biological change on Marak’s World was a slow process…and a constant guarantee of employment.

ii Positional Map

iii Power

Earth and Its Environs

EARTH, WITH ITS FEDERATION of the Sol System planets and moons, Luna, Mars, et al. Its current center of government: Adacion, in New Brazil, its legislature comprised of representatives of ten regional earthly councils, plus five space-based councils.