I am a spaceship. I am about the size of the Martian moon Phobos, although not nearly as dense. I am also a human being. That a spaceship can be a human being is a fact commonly accepted today, but there was once a time when everyone didn’t believe such things at all. Many people believed the opposite.
I am an old ship. Let me unwind my tale.
This is the story of the civil war that once tore our solar system to pieces, and of the events that led to the founding of the government that we have today. But to tell such a tale as merely a dry rattling off of facts would be to miss the point. History isn’t facts; history is people—in all the myriad forms they come.
What makes a human being? In the end, that is what we were fighting for—to determine what makeup the human race would take to the stars.
We are entering, then, upon a period of turmoil and transformation. An empire rose and fell. Democracy was put to the fire and hammered into an almost unrecognizable configuration. Low deeds were perpetrated, and it often seemed that evil had the upper hand. Heroes emerged from the obscurity, and some died gloriously, while others were beaten and broken. Children killed children, and old men and women were driven from their homes and murdered. Millions died; billions suffered. It was a hard time to be alive.
Yet it was a time of incredible ingenuity and fervent creativity. New sciences were born. Great literature was written. People who ordinarily would have never known one another came together to face a common foe. Necessity abolished prejudice, and humans became brothers and sisters—and, in some cases, lovers—with those whom they would scarcely have acknowledged as persons before.
Nobody really won. But everyone who somehow managed to live through the war achieved a kind of victory.
And, in the end, all of the horror and heroism was the reflection of the soul of an anguished poet. For the war was really the birth throes of a new sort of human, and Thaddeus Kaye was both the cause and the victim of it all.
This is the story of what humans made of the times in which they found themselves in the years after the turn of the third millennium. And since time is now proving to be exactly as malleable as the human spirit, I set it adrift upon the future and the past from these shores of my present. I do not know precisely what guise it may come to you in—perhaps only as a myth or a cautionary tale. So be it. I have faith that what it all really means, what it all comes down to, will somehow, somewhere twinkle through, at least in a glimmer here and there. That is all this old ship can rightfully hope for.
So let us begin where all history begins: in the broken heart of a poet and the contemplation of a priest.