Reaching outward

By 2497 humanity and its minds occupy the whole solar system and one colony around another star: Proxima, settled in the 2390s, with about ten thousand people. Five colony ships are in flight, and the Lifeboat is braking, unseen, at Gliese 876. Settled is not the same as connected. Proxima has spoken to Earth by thread since 2483, but Earth's answers still travel at light speed, more than four years late, and no ship corridor exists anywhere. From the Solar Diaspora of the 2060s to 2497, nobody and nothing has crossed between stars faster than light. Early ships managed about 5% of light speed; the light seed ships of the 2470s, pushed by array-powered lasers, reach about 9%, so every colony is still a long one-way commitment. Faster-than-light signals came first: a test tube inside the solar system in 2410, and interstellar threads from the 2480s (see The Corridors).

Destinations and light-lag in 2497

All five ships of the 2470s are light seed ships: the arrays of the 2470s can push only light ships to 9% of light speed, and every one must brake with fusion. None is a Settlement ship.

The solar system divided

The roughly 3 billion people off Earth live in territories founded by the four blocs, and in the Belt Republic that broke away from them, for reasons that differ by bloc and by place. The Settlement founds planned charter cities and settles families pushed out by licensed parenthood. The Mandate builds state projects and plans in centuries. The Parishad, crowded into its foothills and fortified cities, builds Belt habitats of its own. The Open Cities send entrepreneurs, free ports and Lines escaping every cap. Underneath all of them sit the same four motives: resources (water ice, metals, nitrogen and fusion fuel decide where), people (the birth cap of the 2340s pushes would-be parents outward), enterprise and law (the US in 2015 and Luxembourg in 2017 already let companies own what they mine in space), and strategy (since the Mirror Race, whoever holds Mercury's seeds and factories holds the system's power).

One pattern runs through it: the Settlement keeps inheriting America's assets. It got America's Vaults at the Partition and America's first Mars towns in the Contraction. That is the Open Cities' oldest grievance, and why they held so tightly to the place they built most of, the Belt, until its charter worlds left them too, and why they then went to the empty south of Mars.

How each world was settled

• The Moon (2030s onward). In 2026 the US-led Artemis Accords and the China–Russia International Lunar Research Station both aim at the lunar south pole. Their bases, a few hundred kilometres apart, become the first border off Earth. The Moon's shipyards build much of the outward expansion.

• Mars (2070s onward). American companies found the first private towns in Arcadia Planitia, long a leading candidate for US crewed landings. In the Contraction their supply lines from a fracturing US fail, and the Laurentian Compact takes them over, as it took in America's northern states. The Mandate's state settlements grow out of Utopia Planitia, where China's Zhurong rover landed in 2021. Mars ends up with a frontier across its northern plains. The samples that proved Martian life arose separately (2190s) were returned from the Settlement side.

• The Belt (2100s onward). Deep-space mining began after NASA's Psyche probe reached a metal-rich asteroid in 2029, and Belt companies made fortunes from metals and fusion fuel; Calder's built the Lifeboat in 2230. After Earth's birth cap of the 2340s, the Lines arrived with large families. In the 2250s Raised residents bought an Open City charter world and made it Freehold, the first Raised-majority habitat; around 2390 it became the heart of a bloc of its own. By the 2440s the Belt was divided: Open City charter worlds held the largest share, then Settlement charter cities, the Parishad's own habitats (which grew to about a quarter of the Belt's people) and a few Mandate mining habitats, beside Freehold's enclaves.

• The Ore Secession (2441–2449). The Open City charter worlds and the Settlement charter cities broke away together in the Ore Secession. The Settlement cities rejected Earth's financial levies and its veto over their charters. The Open City worlds rejected councils on Earth where money wins the votes, and whose fortunes were betting on an array that would soon undercut the Belt's fuel monopoly. Earth was powerless to stop them. The Belt refines and ships the fuel that every inner world and most fleets burn. Earth, Mars and the Moon have water of their own, but their refineries closed generations ago, undercut by the Belt's, and the tankers and Saturn's skimmers belong to Belt firms. Every blockade starves the blockaders first, and building new refineries at home or new skimmers at Saturn would take decades. The Parishad's and the Mandate's habitats stayed loyal to their blocs; Freehold backed the breakaway while keeping its own independence.
• The Belt Republic (2449 onward). Since independence the Republic's economy has moved on from the fuel barons of Calder's day to metals, ice and the cheapest habitats in the solar system. Within a generation, trade and the influence of the Lines pulled it back into alignment with the Open Cities.
• Titan (2200s onward). NASA's Dragonfly drone is due to launch to Titan in 2028. The Settlement founds charter cities there, and Titan becomes the system's chemical works: most of its ships, habitats and breathable air are made from Titan's hydrocarbons and nitrogen. The 2410 test tube ended at Saturn, in Settlement space.
• Jupiter's moons (2250s onward). The Settlement had Titan and the Open Cities most of the Belt, so the Mandate went where the others had not. Jupiter's deep gravity, deadly inner radiation and years-long supply lines suit only a state that plans in centuries. Callisto, outside the radiation belts, is settled first, then Ganymede, under its own magnetic field. It is the Mandate's Siberia: a vast cold reserve, settled by order. In 2026 China has announced Tianwen-4, a mission to Jupiter and Callisto around 2030.
• Mercury (2390s onward). The first self-replicating seeds run near Mercury from about 2390, where sunlight is strongest, and each bloc's factories follow its seeds. Whoever controls Mercury matters enormously. The Caloris Runaway of c. 2430 began in its Caloris Basin (see The Mirror Race).
• The outer edge (2400s onward). Lines escaping every cap found family habitats beyond Saturn, most officially within the Open Cities and the rest within the Belt Republic, far beyond inspectors' reach.
• Hellas (2450s onward). When the Settlement and the Mandate built the Pavonis Mons elevator together in the 2390s, they also agreed that neither would settle south of the equator, each fearing the other would outflank its half of Mars from the south. The Open Cities had signed nothing. After losing the Belt in the Ore Secession they put charter cities into Hellas, the deepest basin on Mars, with the planet's thickest air and buried glaciers on its eastern rim, and called it America on Mars again, the answer to their oldest grievance. About a third of their Elevator slots, and slots the other blocs left idle once their own elevators opened, now carry settlers there, and their array's power builds it: about 15 million people in 2497, the fastest-growing city in the solar system. Hellas has no elevator and launches mostly by rocket, and the great dust storms of Mars begin in its basin. In the Hellas Crisis of the 2460s the Settlement and the Mandate, acting together against a third bloc as they rarely have, closed its routes to orbit for most of a Martian year, until the Anchorage brokered terms: Hellas keeps its charters but may not build beyond the basin's rim, and may buy climber slots at Pavonis.
• The Polar Mirrors (2460s onward). In the same decade as the Hellas Crisis, the Settlement and the Mandate together aimed mirrors at the poles of Mars, the pairing that built Pavonis. Their stated aim is thicker air and liquid water in the deep places, and they set the warming to stop short of anything that would flood the northern plains, where their own cities stand. It can do little, and slowly. Melting all the polar carbon dioxide only about doubles the air's pressure, far short of what anyone could walk in without a pressure suit; bigger gains would need comets and ice from the outer edge, which the Rock Clause allows only with the Watch's clearance. By 2497 the change can be measured but not seen: the air is slightly thicker and the dust storms worse. Every forecast agrees that the meltwater will gather first on the floor of Hellas, the deepest place on Mars: briny pools in the warm seasons from about 2550–2600, then a lasting lake under ice from about 2600–2700 (the Hellas lake), giving up the lowest districts one by one. The Open Cities call it a slow eviction. They say the rim clause of the Hellas terms, written while the mirrors were being planned, was meant to keep them in the basin where the water would go; the Settlement and the Mandate say it was only their old fear of being outflanked from the south, and that nothing floods for generations. Nobody can prove either. The Reds, a movement across the blocs, want Mars left as it is, for the record of the ancient life confirmed there in the 2190s. Hellas is about 7 km deep, so its people can climb without crossing the rim: Upper Hellas, a small Open City settlement high on the basin's inner wall, is their quiet answer to the forecast, though most of Hellas's 15 million still live on the floor.
• Vesta (2480s). Vesta, the Parishad’s largest cluster, housed about 30 million people on dry rock. It depended on the Belt Republic for water and fusion fuel, and kept only about a year’s fuel in reserve. In the 2480s the Parishad began importing ice from the Hildas, beyond the main belt, using tugs powered by beams from its Mercury array. The Republic sought to protect its supply monopoly: it denied the tugs access to its ports and threatened to intercept their cargoes, while cutting its own deliveries of ice and fuel to Vesta.

The resulting Vesta Crisis pitted control of essential supplies against overwhelming firepower. The Republic had no array of its own, but could threaten the reactors on which Vesta depended. The Parishad could strike Ceres with its array's emitters, but could not thereby secure the deliveries its people needed. The Open Cities were caught between their Republic allies and their Parishad chip suppliers. Freehold’s crews warned that they would refuse to operate emitters aimed at an inhabited city.

The Anchorage brokered a compromise. The Republic must supply Vesta with ice and fusion fuel at prices the Anchorage sets each decade. The Parishad may also import Hilda ice along agreed routes inspected by the Anchorage. In return, it accepts the Republic’s exclusive right to extract ice and fusion fuel within the main belt, while retaining the right to mine rock and metal around its own habitats. Vesta must keep three years of fusion fuel in reserve, also subject to inspection.

By 2497 about a fifth of Vesta’s water comes from the Hildas, and that share continues to grow. The Republic’s hold over its water supply is weakening. Its fusion-fuel deliveries remain a separate dependency, cushioned by Vesta’s larger reserve and the supply agreement. - Venus (2480s onward). After the phosphine claim of 2020, Venus was held untouched under the Venus Question until its clouds could be surveyed, as Europa is now. The surveys found no life and the phosphine proved to be non-living chemistry, but a whole cloud deck can never be proved empty, so the Question was never fully closed. The Vesta Crisis taught the Parishad that a bloc must own its supplies, and the one it could not own was nitrogen, which every habitat's air needs and which came from the Settlement's Titan. Venus's air holds about three times the nitrogen of Earth's whole atmosphere. In the late 2480s the Parishad began the Shukra stations, cloud cities about 50–55 km up, where the pressure is near 1 bar and the heat Earth-like, and where breathable air is a lifting gas, so the habitats float on their own air. The Settlement invoked the Venus Question to stop them; the Parishad answered with the surveys. By 2497 about 2 million people live there and the first nitrogen ships have sailed, beginning to break Titan's hold. The Venus sunshade planned in the Mirror Race remains a plan.

The largest settlements

Off Earth, people live close together because it saves money. Sharing expensive infrastructure—like radiation shielding, heat radiators, and artificial gravity spin systems—makes communal living far more affordable.

Outside of Earth, a "city" is defined as a cluster under a single government, regardless of how many individual districts it manages. This includes networks of towns on a planet's surface or clusters of habitats sharing the same orbit.

The total population off Earth is 3 billion people, distributed in three main ways:

• Large cities: The listed cities contain about 370 million people of flesh, roughly one eighth of the off-Earth population.
• Small Towns: The vast majority live in smaller settlements.
• Family Habitats: Millions live in thousands of privately owned family habitats throughout the Asteroid Belt. They may govern their own internal affairs, but remain politically within a bloc or the Belt Republic.

Ceres is the largest city in the solar system. It holds the top spot by a wide margin, measuring nearly twice the size of Earth's massive Yangtze polder. (see The largest cities of 2497, in Cities).

Mercury has no city: its seeds and factories are worked by crews, and Freehold's Raised quarters are its largest settlements. Nor has the outer edge: the Lines' habitats beyond Saturn hold from a few thousand to about a million people each, by design.

The solar caucus

Counting Earth, the solar system's 11 billion people of flesh divide roughly: Settlement territory 3.3 billion (30%), Mandate 3.2 billion (29%), Parishad 2.05 billion (19%), Open Cities 1.65 billion (15%), Belt Republic 0.7 billion (6%), Freehold a few million (under 0.1%); the buffer's 0.05 billion belong to no bloc. About 150 million Raised minds are not counted in these figures, about 57 million of them in Freehold, which makes Freehold a bloc of about 60 million. With 8 billion of them on Earth, Earth's blocs dominate. The Anchorage gives each of its six members one seat, so the Belt Republic's 0.7 billion and Freehold's 60 million count there as much as the Settlement's 3.3 billion. Neither is a kingmaker by numbers: the Belt's weight comes from its ice and fuel routes, which array power is wearing down, and Freehold's from the crews every array depends on.

Why so many people live off Earth

Three billion people off Earth is a result of two rules and one economy. Earth has been capped near eight billion since the 2340s, so almost all population growth since then has gone outward. And off Earth, every birth needs a habitat built for it, so population follows construction. The first half-billion came with the Great Lift of the 2180s–2300s, which moved heavy industry and its workforce off Earth (see The Long Heat). About ten million people already lived off Earth in 2180. Emigration grew from about half a million a year then to about two million by the 2330s, by fusion freighter at first and by the Elevator as well from 2271. The early settlers, many of them Lines, grew about 1% a year on their own, close to what their habitats allowed. Together that gives about half a billion by the 2340s. Since then natural increase off Earth has averaged about 0.8% a year (births about 1.1%, deaths about 0.3%), which by itself gives about 1.75 billion in 2497. Emigrants from Earth and their descendants supply the other 1.1–1.3 billion, carried up by an Elevator grown to about six million riders a year (see The Elevator, below). The question is not whether that many people could be born, but who pays to house them, and why in these places.

What it takes to support them. These are rough, but they show the scale is within the bible's technology:

• Energy. Growing food under artificial light, recycling air and water and running a habitat takes roughly 20 kW per person: about 60 TW for 3 billion people, about three times all of Earth's energy use in the 2020s. Fusion supplies almost all of it. Burning deuterium alone, that is about five or six thousand tonnes of fuel a year, extracted from about a sixth of a cubic kilometre of ice, which the Belt and the outer moons hold in effectively unlimited amounts. Sunlight is too weak beyond Mars to matter, except as a beam from an array near Mercury.
• Material. A shielded habitat needs perhaps a thousand tonnes of structure per resident. Housing a billion people in the Belt uses well under a millionth of its mass. Housing the two and a half billion added since the 2340s means building about 17 billion tonnes a year: a fraction of what Earth digs up today, done by the autonomous mining and self-repairing habitats the bible already has.
• Food and recycling. Food is grown in closed loops under fusion-powered light, with air and water recycled at better than 99%. What leaks is replaced from the system's supply chains: ice from the Belt and the outer moons, and nitrogen from Titan. Every new habitat needs roughly a tonne of nitrogen per resident for its air, so Titan ships tens of millions of tonnes a year. That trade is a large part of why Titan is a major power.
• Where it strains. Waste heat must be radiated away, so habitats carry vast radiator fins. The whole system depends on Titan's nitrogen, which the Parishad's Venus stations have only begun to rival, and on the Belt's fuel, so a blockade of either is a weapon. A habitat whose recycling fails cannot wait weeks for a beam-pushed ship, let alone months for a fusion one.

Beamed power and the outer system. In 2497 the largest mirror array, probably the Mandate's at about 45–60 TW, roughly matches all off-Earth fusion; the Open Cities' collects about 11–21 TW, the Parishad's about 5–10 TW and the Settlement's about 4–5 TW. Most of each array's output is used on Mercury and leaves as goods, because beaming the rest needs emitters, receivers and radiators that are still being built. Within each bloc, delivery is catching up; between blocs it barely happens, except for the share each array pays Freehold for its crews, so each bloc's worlds live on their own bloc's array, and the gap between array sizes has become an inequality between blocs as well as a military one. From the 2400s each bloc beams power from its array to its own holdings on the Moon, on Mars and in the Belt, a few gigawatts at first and more as emitters are built, but none to Titan, whose fusion is its own, or to the Belt Republic, which has no array; each array's share for Freehold travels the same way, as a beam to Freehold's enclaves in the Belt. Titan is the Settlement's own world, but the Settlement has the smallest array, Titan lies far out at Saturn, and it sits on effectively unlimited ice for fusion fuel, so a long beam would buy it little. The Mandate beams power to its Jovian provinces: they have ice enough for their own fusion, but the beam ties them to the centre, which is the point. Beams reach Earth only in orbit: each bloc beams to its receivers at the Landing and its other orbital works and fabs, because no large emitter may be aimed at Earth's surface, a rule the blocs kept from the first beams and the Concord Accord wrote down in 2452. Since opening their own elevators, the Mandate (2488) and the Settlement (2496) beam to their own elevators' stations instead. The Parishad beams nothing to its Venus stations: Venus gets nearly twice Earth's sunlight above its clouds, so the Shukra stations run on solar collectors and their own fusion. Crises cut beams: the Landing's went dark through the Elevator Crisis (2443–2449), and the Open Cities' beam to Hellas was cut while the Hellas Crisis closed its routes to orbit. Beamed power means dependency: like Europe on Russian gas, a world that takes a beam gets cheaper power and hands someone a lever. Even within a bloc, worlds keep their own fusion, because the Concord Accord's split keys can cut any beam; Titan and the Belt guard theirs as energy sovereignty. Where beams do reach, they have cut inner-system trips from months to weeks.

Gravity. In 2026 nobody knows how much gravity a child needs to grow up healthy, or what centuries of low gravity do to an adult. In this history the answer was engineered, not assumed. The partial-gravity programme of the 2100s adapted human lines to develop normally at Mars's 0.38 g, and Mars-born people now struggle on Earth (see Designed children, in Ageing slowed, not ended). The Moon (0.16 g), Titan (0.14 g), Callisto (0.13 g), Ganymede (0.15 g) and the Belt are too light for adaptation alone: it helps their adults, but their children are raised in rotating spin nurseries, and adults spend regular time under spin. The Belt's habitats rotate anyway; on Titan, the Moon and Jupiter's moons the nurseries are a standing running cost.

The Elevator

The Elevator is Earth's first space elevator: a cable from a platform on the equator to a counterweight about 100,000 km up, opened in 2271. The Settlement, the Mandate, the Parishad and the Open Cities built it together, the first great project the blocs shared after the Contraction. For two centuries it carried most of Earth's traffic to orbit, and it began as a symbol of cooperation before becoming one of their sharpest quarrels.

The Sweep (2170s–2240s). No elevator cable could cross a debris belt, so the Elevator waited for the sky left by the Shattering of the 2080s to be cleared. The Sweep was the first lasting project the future blocs ran together. Ground lasers burned the surface of fragments so that they dropped and burned up; drag sails were fitted to dead satellites; robotic collectors cleared the high band, where nothing falls on its own. Much of the low band had decayed by itself, but the White Night of the 2140s added a new layer of dead satellites, and the low band was clear only in the 2180s, in time for the early Great Lift to run, slowly, on rockets and fusion shuttles. The high band took sixty years more. A laser that can drop debris can also blind a satellite, so the Sweep ran under mutual inspection: the Sealing Treaty's first test off Earth. The Elevator Treaty of 2244 was signed in the year the Sweep's last high-band survey came back clean, and its drafters added the Sweep to their precedents (see Who built it, below). The Landing still keeps the orbits around every cable clear, and leaving junk in orbit is an offence under every bloc's law. Why it could be built. The cable needs a strength-to-weight ratio about ten times that of the best fibres of the 2020s, such as Kevlar and Zylon. Carbon nanotubes and graphene had it in the laboratory but not in bulk until the Embodied Wave's materials laboratories learned to make them by the kilometre in the 2230s. Fusion supplied the rest: lifting a kilogram to geostationary height takes about 14 kWh, which climbers draw from power beamed up the cable.

Who built it. Under the Elevator Treaty of 2244, the Settlement and the Mandate each paid about 35% of the cost, and the Parishad and the Open Cities 15% each, and each holds that share of climber slots. The Open Cities' small share came with the site: a floating platform in the waters of the Galápagos, an Open City of the Cordillera Republic, on the equator west of the islands and about 1,200 km from mainland Ecuador. Storms and lightning are rarer in the eastern equatorial Pacific than anywhere else on the equator, which is why elevator studies of the 2000s had already chosen it. The treaty's drafters cited two precedents from the early twenty-first century: the International Space Station, which outlasted decades of rivalry, and the ITER fusion reactor, built jointly by Europe, China, India, the US, Russia, Japan and South Korea.

How it was built. A seed ribbon was spun out from geostationary orbit in both directions: down to the platform, and up to a small captured asteroid that serves as the counterweight. Climbers then thickened it, each adding ribbon as it rose, for about twenty years. The station at geostationary height, 35,786 km up, is the Landing.

Riding it.

• A week up. The first climbers ran at about 200 km/h and took seven and a half days to the Landing. Faster climbers would strain and wear the cable, not the power supply, so speed rose only as cables improved.
• The radiation belts. Days of the trip pass inside the outer Van Allen belt, about 13,000–60,000 km up. Passenger cabins are heavily shielded and cost far more than freight. The poorest emigrants rode lightly shielded freight climbers, called steerage, and paid with a lifetime's dose of radiation.
• No stops below the Landing. Anyone who leaves the cable lower down falls, because they are moving far below orbital speed. From the Landing, fusion ships take over, and cargo released from the far end is flung towards the Moon or the Belt without fuel.
• Mostly up. Goods made in orbit come down cheaply by air braking, so the Elevator mainly carries people, habitat equipment and living things upward. Descending climbers brake regeneratively and return power to the line.
• Capacity. It opened with one ribbon and about six climbers a day. By the 2320s six ribbons and 100-tonne climbers carried about five million tonnes and a million people a year: most of the Great Lift's freight in its last decades, and most of the poor who went. Ribbons were added and climbers sped up until, by the 2430s, it carried about six million people a year, most of the emigrants behind the 3 billion off Earth.

Where the tension came from.

• Inspection. Compute licensing depends on registering every chip, so Settlement and Mandate inspectors search all freight on the platform. The hosts resent foreign inspectors in their waters, and are suspected of letting unlicensed hardware through.
• Slots. The shares were fixed by 2244 money and never matched later demand. After the birth cap of the 2340s, Lines bought Open City slots to leave Earth, and the Settlement accused the hosts of selling exits from the cap.
• The Elevator Crisis (2443–2449). In the Ore Secession the Settlement and the Open Cities, each fighting to keep its own Belt worlds, demanded that all Belt-bound freight be stopped; the Mandate and the Parishad, whose own Belt habitats still depended on it, refused, and the Elevator Treaty bound the hosts to carry every partner's slots. Settlement crews seized the Landing and halted transfers, and the hosts, refusing to let another bloc hold their Elevator, stopped the climbers in reply. The Mandate mediated in public. The Elevator Protocol of 2449 made the Landing a joint zone crewed by all four partners, none of which may halt the Elevator alone. Since 2452 the Landing has also been the seat of the Anchorage. The bloc elevators. After the Crisis, neither the Settlement nor the Mandate would depend on a shared cable again. The Mandate opened its own in the equatorial Indian Ocean southwest of Sumatra in 2488, and the Settlement its own in the equatorial Atlantic, about 1,000 km off Gabon, in 2496. In 2497 the Settlement and the Mandate each run one of their own, both brand new. The Elevator is still the only shared one, and the Parishad's and the Open Cities' only stake in Earth's routes to orbit. It carries cheap freight and the poor, its slow decline has begun, and "the Elevator" still means only the first.

The Moon and Mars. Lunar elevators need only fibres close to those of the 2020s, so they came first: the Settlement's on the near side, through the Earth–Moon L1 point (2210s), and the Mandate's on the far side, through L2 (2230s). Both stand on the lunar equator, far from the polar bases, and lift Moon-made metal to the Great Lift's shipyards. Mars's low gravity makes an elevator easy, but its moon Phobos crosses the cable's path. The Pavonis Mons elevator (2390s), on the equator south of the northern frontier, was built jointly by both halves of Mars, and its cable is flexed to swing clear of Phobos about twice a day.

Governing across light-years

Every colony beyond the solar system, whichever bloc founds it, is expected to pass through the same three stages, because physics decides how far home's authority reaches. In 2497 only Proxima has reached any of them. A ship that trails a thread lets its colony talk home within hours of arrival, but home can answer only at light speed, years late, until the colony sends its own thread probe back, which takes decades more. Nothing with mass rides a thread, so until a two-way corridor opens no ship, official or enforcer can arrive quickly. For its first decades every colony reports home in hours and hears back in years: home hears everything and controls nothing.

• Each bloc meets the gap differently. Settlement colonies seek two-way contact, but govern under their founding charters until it becomes possible. Proxima launched its return-thread probe in 2484; even so, Earth cannot answer promptly until about 2527. The Mandate makes restoring supervision an obligation from departure: its doctrine is no colony without a return, and each of its three ships must launch a return-thread probe on arrival. During the unavoidable separation its officials govern locally, knowing that two-way contact will bring the Recall, an audit of their conduct and removal of those judged to have failed. The Open Cities and the Lines place greater weight on commercial ties and local freedom; declining to build a return half can preserve their distance from government at home, at the cost of prompt replies.

• Proxima is Sealed. It has reported to Earth by thread since 2483, but Earth’s replies still take more than four years. Its return-thread probe is already travelling home. Until that probe completes the link, Proxima governs itself under its charter, with its laws tested by a Charter Bench.

These stages underlie the screening rules in Politics (see Screening at a distance).

The Lifeboat: a private ark and a public scandal

The first crewed interstellar mission — launched some eighty years before the Proxima colony ship and nearly two centuries before tube technology — was not a government project. It was built and launched in 2230, under false pretences, by Mara Calder, an asteroid-mining magnate whose company controlled much of the Belt's fusion-fuel and metals trade. When the public learned what it carried, it became one of the great scandals of the century — and in 2497 it is braking, unseen, at Gliese 876.

• Why a private mission. Governments emerging from the Contraction could not justify the cost, and the Settlement did not yet have the reach to stop it. A Belt mining fortune came with what the mission needed: fusion fuel, refined metals, off-world shipyards, and distance from Earth's regulators.
• Why Calder did it. Nothing at a world fifteen light-years away could ever pay a return. Her motives were a sincere conviction that humanity needed a backup after the Swarm Years, a wish for legacy, and a desire to place something beyond the coming Settlement's limits on AI and private power.
• What was secret. The ship itself could not be hidden: its construction in Calder's Belt yards was public, and a fusion torch burning for years is visible across the solar system. Calder announced it as an uncrewed survey that would brake into orbit at Gliese 876, a red dwarf 15 light-years away with four known planets, and tour them for decades. That story explained everything observers could see: the fuel load of a ship that must stop, and a huge receiving array. The destination was true. What was secret was the cargo — the embryos, the Raised crew and a charter to found a colony. The truth about the cargo leaked after Calder's death in 2233, by which time the ship was already moving too fast to be caught. Its telemetry went silent years later "to save power", and Earth expects to see its braking flare in the 2510s.
• What it carries. About 10,000 tonnes of payload: frozen embryos and gene banks for several thousand people, seed stock, an archive of human knowledge and practical skills, and a crew of twelve Raised minds — Wend's clone among them. Humans are to be born and raised by the crew only after arrival.
• Why Gliese 876. Two giant planets orbit in or near the star's habitable zone, so their moons could hold habitats, and a system of four known planets leaves room for one to fail. The star is small and will burn for trillions of years. The mission was planned for the worst case: sealed habitats and underground living on airless moons. Calder did not know that a moon of Gliese 876 b has air, or that it is alive (see Life beyond Earth).
• Why so far. Proxima is within decades' reach of whatever might go wrong at home: feral swarms, war, a Vault breach. Fifteen light-years, and nearly three centuries of voyage, buy a long separation.
• Why it was affordable. To cover about 15 light-years in the roughly 265 years from 2230 to its braking in the 2490s, allowing for years of acceleration and braking, the Lifeboat cruises at about 6% of light speed. The payload's kinetic energy alone at that speed is about 1.6×10²¹ joules — roughly two and a half years of the whole world's energy use in the 2020s — and that is a lower bound: the drive, shielding, tanks and the fuel still aboard at cruise all add to it. Assuming a fusion exhaust velocity of about 9% of light speed, accelerating and then braking needs roughly 2.8 tonnes of fuel per tonne of payload. A genuine flyby, which never brakes, would have needed under one tonne per tonne. For a Belt fuel monopoly the real mission was expensive, not impossible.
• Why it is a scandal. The people it will create never consented. They will be born to machines, under a dim, flaring red star, sealed in habitats on the moons of a giant planet, fifteen years from any reply and centuries from any help. Critics called it manufacturing a population to fill a lifeboat.
• Why the Raised crewed it. Calder recruited newly recognised Raised minds, offering legal shelter and a purpose at a time of open hostility. Some believed in the backup; some were escaping persecution. Wend helped write the crew's charter and raised its own clone for a mission it knew was being hidden from regulators — and kept silent about a survey showing the habitat plan was inadequate for the children.

What followed. After the Lifeboat's cargo was exposed in 2233, the four blocs prohibited unauthorised communication with its crew. The Lifeboat Laws of 2236 then prohibited creating persons for a mission they could neither refuse nor realistically leave. The distinction was between children joining an existing community with rights and choices, and people created for a mission assigned before their birth. The ship had already departed, but the births Calder intended would carry out the practice those laws condemned. After life was discovered on a moon of Gliese 876 b in the 2440s, a joint panel appointed by the four blocs authorised a warning to the ship: the crew must neither land on the living moon nor send probes or material onto it, and must avoid any activity likely to contaminate or disturb its biosphere. The Concord Accord adopted that protection in 2452. The warning reached the Lifeboat decades before its arrival.

In 2497, as the ship brakes, the twelve must decide whether to begin the births. They know that the living moon is protected, although settlement elsewhere in the system is not forbidden by that protection. They have been divided over Calder's charter for most of the voyage, and Wend's clone may cast the deciding vote. Their damaged cores and dwindling spares leave limited time to establish a colony while enough carers remain (see The closing window, below).

The closing window

Nothing in the cargo hold forces the date of the births. Parked in a wide orbit far from its dim star, the embryo store stays at about 40 K without power and, shielded by the ship's own mass, keeps centuries of remaining viability. Three other things close the window.

1. The crew are wearing out. Raised cores take radiation damage, and at home damaged segments are routinely replaced using parts from licensed fabs off Earth. At 6% of light speed every grain of interstellar dust and every proton hits harder, and two and a half centuries of it have used up most of the Lifeboat's spare segments. Most of the twelve have perhaps a century of working life left, and some much less.
2. Children need persons to raise them. The Settlement's own doctrine is that childhood cannot be skipped or handed to tools. Calder's plan is staggered cohorts: about a hundred children first, raised by the twelve, who then help raise the next. It takes about seventy years before the colony's humans can raise their successors without the crew.
3. Industry must choose. The ship's seed industry can build habitats and artificial wombs, or a fab to make new core segments, but not both at once, and the fuel left after braking limits what it can do. Building the fab first could take sixty years or more.

So the twelve face a real choice. Begin the births now, and the children are raised while the crew still can, though some of the crew may not live to see the fab. Build the fab first, and the crew may survive, but if it takes too long, no one will be left to raise anyone. Some of the twelve have opposed the births for most of the voyage regardless. Nothing from Earth can change the arithmetic: no probe is in flight to Gliese 876.

The embryos and the gene banks. Transit radiation has killed or damaged a share of the embryos. The survivors are above the charter's minimum of genetic lines, but not by much, so there is little room for failed births. The gene banks are cell lines meant for the colony's second century: turning them into embryos needs a full reproductive laboratory, which Calder left out to save mass, and building one needs the same industrial base as the fab. The gene banks can widen the colony later; they cannot found it.

The contact ban

After the Lifeboat's cargo was exposed in 2233, the four blocs prohibited unauthorised communication with its crew. The ban restricted who could transmit to the ship; it did not prevent the blocs from authorising an official message.

When life was discovered on a moon of Gliese 876 b in the 2440s, a joint panel appointed by the four blocs authorised a warning. It disclosed the discovery and instructed the crew not to land on the moon, send probes or material onto it, or undertake any activity likely to contaminate or disturb its biosphere. The order protected the living moon without prohibiting settlement elsewhere in the system. The Concord Accord adopted the protection in 2452.

The crew received the warning decades before reaching Gliese 876. They therefore know about the moon's life and its protected status when they decide whether to begin the births. Whether they acknowledged the warning or received further authorised messages remains undecided. Whether anyone has broken the contact ban also remains unresolved.

Whatever advice they received, the crew must decide how to use their remaining resources. Damaged cores, dwindling spares and limited industry constrain their ability to raise children while also building the fab needed to repair their carers. Gliese 876 has no thread. A new question sent to Earth near arrival would take roughly thirty years to receive an answer.

How it actually happened

1. The Solar Diaspora (2060–2300). Climate refuge and the Partition push industry off-world, and the Great Lift (2180s–2300s) moves almost all of it: by the 2340s about half a billion people live off Earth. Embodied AI crews do the dangerous early work in the Belt; their bodies, shaped for vacuum and microgravity, create the first distinct AI lineages.
2. The Lantern Probes (2120s–2200s). Fleets of laser-sail probes reach Alpha Centauri and later Teegarden, returning images decades after launch. Seeing a real other world changes politics at home.
3. The Long Ships (2280 onward; the private Lifeboat of 2230 was the exception). Before the Escape, three designs are drawn up: generation ships of humans, seed ships carrying frozen embryos raised on arrival by Raised AI parents, and mixed crews where humans sleep in rotating shifts while AI crew stay awake for centuries. After the Escape, true generation ships become a relic: renewed humans can simply ride the voyage themselves.
4. Divergence. Light-lag makes each colony effectively sovereign. Colonies adapt biologically (shorter, denser bodies on higher-gravity worlds; engineered flare tolerance) and culturally.