He nodded toward the other personnel working on the silent cybe-hibe pods. “They’re recalling my people?”
“Yes, sir. But the orders were to wake you first. Then your command staff. Protocol. Your brigade will not be revived until you’ve received a full briefing, and give the appropriate orders.”
“Okay. You know, you didn’t answer my question, Captain.”
“Which one, sir?”
“Is there a crisis?”
“So I gather. I don’t have any details, though. You’ll get that in your briefing download.”
“I expect I will.” Carefully, he swung his legs out of the pod recess, his bare feet reaching for the deck. Most of the nanogel was gone, now. He glanced down at himself, then at Captain Schilling. “Hm. I trust there are no nudity taboos in this century.”
She smiled. “No, sir. Nothing like that. But I have a uniform for you, if you want to be presentable for your constellation when they come around.”
“Good idea. But food first, I think. Uh, no … maybe a shower …”
“Both are waiting for you, General. Do you feel like you can stand, yet?”
“Not sure. But I sure as hell intend to try.” His feet found the deck. He swayed alarmingly, but with Schilling’s help, he managed to stay on his feet. She had a floater chair waiting for him in case he needed it, but full muscular control reasserted itself swiftly and he waved it away, preferring to do this on his own if he could. The cybe-hibe procedure permeated the body with molecule-sized machines that did everything from arresting cell metabolism to keeping muscle groups healthy, if inactive. There was some stiffness, and a few unsteady moments as he relearned how to keep his balance, but surprisingly few aftereffects of an eight-century sleep.
Eight centuries? How much had the world, the Galaxy, changed? How much had Humankind changed? When he’d entered cybe-hibe—it seemed literally like just last night—there’d been the bright promise of a new, golden age. The dread, ancient enemy, the xenophobic Xul, had been defeated at last. Across a Galaxy that had seemed a desert in terms of sentient life—where only a handful of reclusive or unusually sequestered intelligent species had survived the Xul predations—more and more nonhuman cultures were being discovered, contacted, and invited to join the loose and somewhat freewheeling association that was then being called the Galactic Commonwealth.
Now it was being called the Associative? There would be other changes, of course, besides the name. He found himself anxious to learn them … as well as a bit afraid.
The shower proved to be a transparent cylinder giving him a choice of traditional water at any temperature, high-frequency sound waves, or total immersion in a thin, hazy nano-parafluid programmed to cleanse his skin while permitting him to continue breathing normally. He chose water, more for the stimulation of the pounding on his skin than anything else. Garroway found he needed the liaison officer’s help, though. Without his implant, he couldn’t interact with the damned shower controls.
When he was clean and dry, Schilling gave him a button-sized pellet that, when pressed against his chest and activated by her thought, swiftly grew into a skin-tight set of dark gray neck-to-soles utilities. It was, he thought grimly, downright embarrassing. Here he was a Marine major general, and he couldn’t even bathe or dress himself without the captain’s help.
Then she led him into the mess hall, and he realized just how much things had really changed as he’d slept down through the centuries. …
The compartment was large and spherical, with much of one entire half either transparent, or, more likely, a deck-to-overhead viewall with exceptional clarity. The view was … stunning, a blue and white swatch of dazzling light, a sharp-edged crescent, arcing away beneath a brilliant, pinpoint sun.
But for a moment, Garroway was utterly lost. It looked like Earth, with those piercing, sapphire blues and swirls of cloud-whites. But the sun was all wrong, far too tiny, far too brilliant, a spark, not a disk.
For just a moment, he wondered if something had happened to the sun during his long sleep. Then he wondered if he’d misunderstood the captain, that this Eris was not the frigid dwarf planet in Sol’s outer system, but an Earthlike world of some other, utterly alien star.
“That can’t be Earth’s sun,” he said, squinting at the pinpoint. “It’s way too bright.” He could see a distinct bluish tinge to the intense white of its glare.
“No, sir,” Schilling told him. She smiled.
“And since when do tiny little icebox planetoids have their own atmosphere and water?”
“Terraforming has come a long way, General,” Schilling told him. “That’s not Sol. It’s Dysnomia.”
“Dysnomia.” He blinked. In his day, Eris had been an ice, rock, and frozen methane worldlet 2500 kilometers in diameter, about eight percent larger than, and 27 percent more massive than, Pluto. Discovered in the early twenty-first century, it had a highly inclined, highly eccentric orbit, but he couldn’t remember the exact numbers without his implant. He knew the place was cold, though, down around twenty-five Kelvins or so, a scant twenty-five degrees above zero absolute. Dysnomia had been a tiny satellite of Eris, like Pluto’s Charon, but smaller, a rock only 150 kilometers across.
“The Eridian satellite,” Schilling told him. “About five hundred years ago, they planted a quantum converter on it and turned it into a microstar. It’s tiny, but it’s only about thirty-seven thousand kilometers from the planet. Orbits once in fifteen standard days. The converter provides enough heat to warm Eris, and the nanoforming matrix is doing the rest.”
“You’re losing me, Captain. They turned a 150-kilometer asteroid into a star, and then … what? Nanoforming?”
“Terraforming, using nanoreplicators and assemblers. Breaking methane, ammonia, and water ice into water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.”
“And the star goes around the planet, instead of the other way around?”
“Exactly. Eris still rotates beneath it, though, and has a day …” She paused, closing her eyes as she checked a data base through her implant, “of twenty-eight hours and some.”
He looked into the achingly beautiful blue of the planet’s crescent. “Terraforming a planet doesn’t happen overnight. How long before people are living there?”
“Oh, they’re living there now. Not many … a few hundred thousand. Mostly military at this point. Most of them are Eulers, actually, in the Deeps. The atmosphere won’t be breathable for another few centuries, and the storms are still pretty bad, but they started colonizing it as soon as stable continents emerged from the world ocean.”
“Continents.”
A globe appeared in the air as Schilling sent a request through her implant, blue and brown, without cloud cover.
“Three main continents,” she said, and each highlighted itself on the projection in turn as she named it. “Brown, Trujillo, and Rabinowitz. Those were the discoverers of Eris, way back when. Two minor continents over here … Xena and Gabrielle.” She paused, then frowned. “Strange. No data on where those names came from.”
Garroway thought about this as Schilling led him to a table and two chairs that seemed to grow out of the deck as they approached. The technology had changed, and changed tremendously if Humankind was able now to create stars, even small ones. That was only to be expected, of course. Human technology had been in a rapidly upward-lunging, almost logarithmic curve since the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
He took one of the chairs, as Schilling sat in the other. She placed one hand, palm down, on a colored patch on the table. “What would you like to eat?”
“Captain, I have no idea. Choose something for me.”
A white, plastic hemisphere