"I'm sorry." She pushed back her hair. She reached out to me again.

This time, when her fingers settled in mine, they were warm and soft; her hand was like a bird, living and responsive.

"Oh, Eve." I couldn't help myself.

"Jack, you must understand."

Behind her, the wall turned black.

Eve's hand was still warm in mine. "You must watch," she told me, "and learn. It is a long story..."

There was a patch of light, diffuse, in the center of the wall. It resolved into the blue Earth. Ships swam around it, on sparks of light.

PART 1
ERA: Expansion

It was, I saw, the morning of mankind, two thousand years before my own birth.

"It's difficult now to recapture the mood of those times," Eve said. "Confidence -- arrogance..."

Earth was restored. Great macroengineering projects, supplemented by the nanoengineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer off-planet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved the planet's fragile ecosystem. There was more woodland covering the temperate regions than at any time since the last glaciation, locking in much of the excess carbon dioxide which had plagued previous centuries. And the great decline in species suffered after the industrialization of previous millennia was reversed, thanks to the use of genetic archives and careful reconstruction -- from disparate descendants -- of lost genotypes.

Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.

Meanwhile the Solar System was opened up.

Based in the orbit of Jupiter, an engineer called Michael Poole industriously took natural microscopic wormholes -- flaws in space-time -- and expanded them, making transit links big enough to permit spaceships to pass through.

Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jovian orbit and set up all over the System. The wormholes which connected the Interfaces enabled the inner System to be traversed in a matter of hours, rather than months. The Jovian system became a hub for interplanetary commerce.

And Port Sol -- a Kuiper ice-object on the rim of the System -- was to be established as the base for the first great interstellar voyages...

The Sun-People

A.D. 3672

At the instant of his birth, a hundred impressions cascaded over him.

His body, still moist from budding, was a heavy, powerful mass. He stretched, and his limbs extended with soft sucking noises. He felt blood -- thick with mechanical potency -- surge through the capillaries lacing his torso.

And he had eyes.

There were people all around him, crowding, arguing, hurrying. They seemed tense, worried; but he quickly forgot the thought. It was too glorious to be alive! He stretched up his new limbs. He wanted to embrace all of these people, his friends, his family; he wanted to share with them his vigor, his anticipation of his life to come.

Now a cage of jointed limbs settled around him, protecting him from the crush. He stared up, recognized the fast-healing wound of a recent budding. He called out -- but his speech membrane was still moist, and the sound he made was indecipherable. He tried again, feeling the membrane stiffen. "You are my father," he said.