set about starving him of resources. Maybe he’ll forgive you later; you’re both going to live a very, very long time. Somewhere deep inside the bunkers, under the Hellas Planitia, under layers of Martian sediment and the fossil bones of ancient beasts, a tiny Brendan Blackstar must be yelling at his tiny general staff, just as a tiny Pren-Dahr coolly teleconferences with his board of directors. Loraq’s got his network of temples on Mercury. Maybe Karoly got there after all. You, Ley-R4, lecture your recalcitrant department heads.
When the meeting ends, you linger on in the fourth-floor meeting room, looking out over the frozen surface of Saturn. You wear a silver-and-blue skintight leotard, your raven hair floating in the low gravity like a mermaid’s. You wear horribly anachronistic glasses.
Why are you in charge? You came up through the classics department, for heaven’s sake. The Milky Way looms, mysterious and welcoming, an unattainable bonus level that lasts forever. Will you ever get there? Will you get there first, or will one of the others?
It’s only a matter of time before a dirty war breaks out. Pren-Dahr and his board of directors declare that for the sake of the stockholders, more stringent measures must be taken, and so ends the First Terran Commonwealth.
And so now, creaking, antiquated spaceships roam the system, some still marked with the names of obsolete Terran nationalities. Their grizzled pilots breathe stale air from groaning compressors and fight with ballistic repurposed mining equipment—rock cutters and mass drivers. It is a war of orbital mechanics, fuel economy, and terrible, violent decompression events. You can take control of individual craft whenever you want—sometimes it’s necessary to execute a plan that the ship AI is just too dim to grasp, or sometimes you might just want the kinetic thrill of piloting an ailing craft through an edge-of-possible near-orbit maneuver.
In the middle of a mission it comes to you what you’re doing—you’re playing Lunar Lander, a game you played on the Commodore PET, the first time you put your hands on a computer keyboard, the first time you felt yourself touch the phantasmal world of simulated reality through that conduit, however primitive. You remember the feel of tipping that little Apollo lander back and forth in a sad dance that always ended in the little craft, its fuel zeroed out, its tiny astronauts probably saying good-bye to their loved ones, plummeting to the lunar rock, shattering on impact, or just as often cannoning into the side of a crag in a burst of poorly judged acceleration.
And it came to me in a flash that Simon must have marched down the same hall to the same computer. I pictured Simon in the same scene, seated in front of the PET. He sensed this was it for him, a portal into the future—into his own future, into the only adult life he could bear to have. They’d handed it to him, saying, in effect, “We don’t know what this is, and we don’t even have time to figure it out; we’re busy being grown-ups and operating the mimeograph machine and pretty much making your lives possible.”
And Simon got it. He recognized its rigid limitations and its endless possibilities at the same time, and the daemon inside him told him how to answer the grown-ups: “Don’t worry. I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. In fact, it’s the thing I’ve been waiting for, the thing that makes my private obsessions, all that thinking I do about numbers and other worlds and all of it, it’s the thing that makes it all work. Trust me, this is going to be great. And thank you.” Of course nobody said those things—it would take years and they’d never remotely understand each other anywhere near this well—but that’s what happened nonetheless.
Until now you didn’t realize. You were staring right at this thing, thinking it was a simulation game about a vicious four-sided intrastellar war. Whereas now you see it is a letter to the future.
I was combing the cometary halo for clues when Lisa came back with a number on a piece of paper.
“So that’s a big number,” she said. “Do you know how big?”
“I know that numbers with an e in them are big, but that meters are not big.”
She said, “It’s just short of a yottameter.”
“You’re saying nothing. These are just sounds.”
“A septillion meters. Yottameters are the largest unit in the metric system. It wouldn’t be inside the solar system. It wouldn’t