
orbiting the star 16 Alpha Leonis, six billion years ago.
That's about one decade for every death, in case you're counting.
***
Prologue
16 Alpha Leonis One, six billion years ago
16 Alpha Leonis One is not exactly what you might call honeymoon potential. It's a bit like Venus. Not the
Venus of Burroughs or Bradbury. The real Venus. The Venus where they used to remember things by eating
each other's brains. The Venus where the sky consists principally of carbon dioxide and the seas are boiling
sulphuric acid, and what little solid ground you might find is really nothing more than the peaks of a chain of
highly active volcanoes girdling the planet's equator.
Ah ha, I hear you thinking. Life here sounds like a rough ride. Well maybe you're right. Any species capable
of evolving intelligence and basic technology in such a volatile environment is one I wouldn't want to meet in a
dark alley at midnight. Then again, if I did meet a member of this particular species in a dark alley at midnight
the chances are it would be as dead as you or I would be if caught unprotected on its world. That would be a
shame because, despite looking like three-metre-wide, crystal-armoured sea anemones, the Cthalctose are
really rather a civilized species.
It's true. Their culture is fairly well developed - philosophically about the level of the ancient Greeks. The
Cthalctose have reasoning minds, a knowledge of principles such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, even
astronomy (they do it by feeling tidal movement in the sulphuric acid seas). But like the ancient Greeks they
are playing with the ideas as intellectual amusements. Their level of practical technology doesn't even
encompass something as sophisticated as a steam engine. It's a shame really. If they'd had the steam
engine they might have made it in evolutionary terms. Well, made it without all the damnable fuss and bother
I've just been through, that is.
The Cthalctose live in buildings shaped like coral reefs. They 'bury' their dead by leaving them on the
projecting atolls to decompose in the acidic atmosphere. The dead bodies thus form a steady rain of food for
the young, which are born attached to the sides of the reefs.
On this particular day, some six billion years ago, the Astronomer Royal lazed in the deepest trench of the
deepest ocean and watched the sky. Well, he didn't think of it as the sky as such, not having eyes. But he
knew it was there. He could feel it move tides of sulphuric acid around his three-hundred-metre-long
tentacles. A land-based species; one possessing eyes, might have thought the sky an empty mess of murky
clouds. Not the Astronomer Royal. To him the sky was as full as the oceans with movement and life. Masses
which moved in intricate patterns, with rhythms which added and subtracted to shape the seas around him; a
vast design, of which small parts might be reiterated once or twice in an average lifespan.
He could feel the movement of the sun and the moon though he would never know their light or warmth. They
were quite close and moved relatively quickly. Further away were the two large gas giants which acted as
shepherd moons to a ring of stellar dust about six times their combined mass. He could feel the distant tug of
a third, even larger gas giant beyond that, and then the delicate ripples of the Oort cloud right at the very edge
of the Solar System.
The Astronomer Royal was very good at observing the sky. He had spent the last three hundred years
planning a performance of his observations to the rest of his species. Performance art wasn't a new thing to
the Cthalctose, but when you spend half your life fixed to a large reef and the rest dodging predators there
were really only a limited number of things about which you could perform. The Astronomer Royal was going
to change all that. He wanted to put on the best show in the history of Art. No more romances or mythic