Hunter's Run Read Free Page A

soon, earlier than expected, and the platform
above Diegotown needed to be fitted out to receive the great ships with their
alien cargos.
     
    It was generations ago that
mankind had raised itself up from the gravity wells of Earth and Mars and
Europa and taken to the stars with dreams of conquest. Humanity had planned to
spread its seed through the universe like a high councilor’s son at a port town
brothel, but it had been disappointed. The universe was already taken. Other
star-faring races had been there before them.
     
    Dreams of empire faded into
dreams of wealth. Dreams of wealth decayed into shamed wonder. More than the
great and enigmatic technologies of the Silver Enye and Turu, it was the nature
of space itself that defeated them, as it had defeated every other star-faring
race. The vast dark was too great. Too big. Communication at the speed
of light was so slow as to barely be communication at all. Governance was
impossible. Law beyond what could be imposed locally was farcical. The outposts
of the Commercial Alliance that humanity had been ‘persuaded’ to join by the
Silver Enye (much as Admiral Perry’s gunships had ‘persuaded’ Japan to open
itself up for trade in a much earlier generation) were wideflung, some outposts
falling out of contact for generations, some lost and forgotten or else put on
a bureaucrat’s schedule of concerns to be addressed another generation hence by
another bureaucrat as yet unborn.
     
    Establishing dominance - or even
much continuity - across that gaping infinity of Night was something that
seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking
up from the bottom of a gravity well. Once you got out amongst the stars, you
learned better.
     
    No race had been able to overcome
such vast distance, and so they had striven to overcome time. And it was in
this that humanity at last found some small niche in the crowded, chaotic
darkness of the universe. Enye and Turu saw the damage done by humanity to
their own environment, the deep human propensity for change and control and
their profoundly limited ability to see ahead to consequences, and they had
found it more virtue than vice. The vast institutional minds, human and alien
both, entered into a glacially slow generational agreement. Where empty planets
were, intractable and inconvenient and dangerous, with wild flora and unknown
fauna, there humans would be put. For the slow decades or centuries that it
required to tame, to break, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution
had put there, the Silver Enye and Cian and Turu and whatever other of the
great races happened by would act as trade ships once had in the ancient days
when mankind had displaced itself from the small islands and insignificant
hills of Earth.
     
    The São Paulo colony was barely
in its second generation. There were women still alive who could recall the
initial descent onto an untouched world. Diegotown, Nuevo Janeiro, San Esteban.
Amadora. Little Dog. Fiddler’s Jump. All the cities of the south had bloomed
since then, like mold on a Petri dish. Men had died from the subtle toxins of
the native foods. Men had discovered the great cat-lizards, soon nicknamed chupacabras, after the mythical goat-suckers of Old Earth, that had stood proud and dumb
at the peak of the planet’s food chain, and men had died for their discovery.
The oyster-eyed Silver Enye had not. The insect-and-glass Turu had not. The
enigmatic Cian with their penchant for weightlessness had not.
     
    And now the great ships were
coming ahead of schedule; each half-living ship heavy, they all assumed, with
new equipment and people from other colonies hoping to make a place for
themselves here on São Paulo. And also rich with the chance of escape for those
to whom the colony had become a prison. More than one person had asked Ramon if
he’d thought of going up, out, into the darkness, but they had misunderstood
him. He had been in space; he had come here.