The Twilight's Last Gleaming

Prologue

Black velvet, strewn with grains of sand. Some mere dull husks, others sparkling in the light like tiny diamonds-

No.

That was a human view, and humans had never ventured out here.

Start again.

Space. The endless black void of space, seeming all the more empty even as an object made its presence known. It was a ball of ice and rock, too small to be a true planet yet larger than a comet. Not that such distinctions existed yet. Saturn was the fifth and final planet, the seventh celestial object counting the Sun and Moon, all of them orbiting the stationary globe of the Earth.

Soon arguments over that theory would lead to fire and blood. But a long way away, too far away. As far as this little pinkish-grey world of ice was concerned, it barely mattered whether it orbited the Sun or the Earth. To any hypothetical inhabitants of the cold globe, the Sun was merely a bright star, standing out only slightly from its neighbours. And with nothing more than an occasional, transient atmosphere, the skies of that globe were filled with stars. The rich, misty track of the Milky Way spread across them, the wisps of nebulae and distant galaxies, the dead and untwinkling points of light of the fixed stars.

Until, that is, a silhouette blotted out a few of them.

Silhouette; named for Étienne de Silhouette, Controller-General of France under Louis XV. He had not been born yet. Louis XV had not been born yet. France – that tiny scrap of a pale blue dot itself barely visible from these outer reaches of the solar system – was still on Charles VIII of the House of Valois. Louis XV’s Bourbon ancestor was merely Count of Vendôme-

Irrelevant, out here.

Start again.

The black patch passed across the stars, heading inexorably towards the ice globe. It did not take a genius to work out that it was an object of some kind. The cold world-

No, that’s just repetitive. Things need names before they make sense. That is very old human thinking. Ancient magic, in a way.

In another place, in another time, the icy little sub-planet was named Makemake, pronounced not make-make but macky-macky. It was – will be – would have been – named for a Polynesian deity, specifically a bird-themed deity of the people of Easter Island.

Here and now, not even the handful of people on Easter Island (which was yet to bear that name to any race of men upon the Earth) would have recognised the name Makemake. The cult would not yet develop for another two generations, replacing the more pantheistic idea of generalised mana-

Let’s not get distracted. We have a name, and that is enough.

Start again.

Makemake had an unusual orbit, an orbit that took it far from the ecliptic plane of the solar system in which the true planets and most other objects travelled. But the ineluctable diktats of geometry required that it travel through that plane twice in its orbit. Then, collision with one of those other objects briefly became much more likely.

Like now.

The other, much smaller, icy rock was what was called a Kuiper Belt Object – named, in another place, another time, for Gerard Kuiper-

We get the idea.

Silently, softly, anticlimactically, the KBO struck Makemake and doubtless would have led to a very bad day for any hypothetical Makemakeans. But with chauvinism-

(Nicolas Chauvin wouldn’t be born for three centuries, assuming he ever existed)

-with chauvinism, we care not for their fate. We care only for the chunks of ice and rock blown out of the surface of Makemake as it continued intently on its orbit, barely nudged by the collision. Most of those chunks travelled only a short distance, entered unstable orbits about their parents, and rapidly (on cosmological timescales) re-impacted upon its surface. One particularly large chunk managed a stable orbit and became a permanent moonlet. Permanent, that is, by the standards of beings who did not think in millennia.

And, almost as an afterthought, a slightly smaller fragment was flung out at just the right angle to speed away from Makemake’s gravity well altogether and out into the Kuiper Belt. Like tossing a stone into a pond, that action would lead to ripples. There would be consequences. Yet as far as the Inner Solar System was concerned, this might as well be happening in another universe...

Western Atlantic Ocean

October 12th, 1492

Martín Alonso Pinzón did not allow the doubts of his heart to show on his face. It was only by the bold and decisive action of he and his brothers, hanging a handful of mutineers and putting the fear of God into the others, that the three ships remained one fleet. Here, on the edge of the known world, any division was inexcusable. Any infighting was intolerable. If Colombo’s mad mission was to return home to the King and Queen in one piece, ruthlessness in the face of mutiny was essential.

Yet Pinzón feared nonetheless. The mutiny had been six days ago. At that time, Colombo had pledged to him that they would continue westwards for eight days. But Pinzón knew what Colombo was like, and that when the limit was reached in two days’ time, he would probably argue the point all over again and seek to push further yet into the west. Perhaps he would claim that the three ships would not make it back to Spain safely with their depleted supplies and their only chance was to find China or the Indies. And the trouble was, Pinzón wasn’t sure if that argument wasn’t correct.

The Pinta’s three little masts creaked in the wind. The dark waters beneath the hull splashed anew, unending. The horizon was bare, a mere line in the night between two shades of black. It was an act of supreme arrogance, of madness, even, to fling two such caravels and Colombo’s larger carrack Santa María halfway ‘round the world in the hope that all the ancient experts had estimated the size of the globe wrongly and that men like Behaim of Nuremberg were right. Pinzón must have been mad to sign on for this journey. Yet there was something inside him that drove him on, a lunatic sense of dreams, perhaps the same sense that had led him to persuade Colombo to alter course after the successful defeat of the mutiny.

Successful, of course, implied that the matter was settled. Pinzón avoided the men’s gaze as he walked from stem to stern, a ridiculously short distance. Some of his crew were pressed criminals; few had shared his desire to sign on with Colombo of their own free will. The Pinta was a powder keg. So too, probably, were his brother’s Niña and Colombo’s Santa María. It did not matter that any mutineers would likely lack the education of Pinzón and the other officers, and would have less than no chance of making their way back to Spain or to another land. They would not accept that argument.

Pinzón shook his head. The sky was dark, it was past midnight and the Pinta was lit only by the moon, the weak flame of a lamp and a strange, intermittent, otherworldly green glow from the sky. That had made some of the men jittery, too, but at least it meant they were more pliable to bold leadership. Assuming they didn’t get used to it...

He clung to the wheel with one hand and tried to make it look as though he wasn’t relying on it for support. This was the end of the tether. The end of the line. Would he ever look upon the humble streets of Palos de la Frontera again, and follow them to see his wife and children? What would his family do if he was lost at sea, here, at the end of the world-

"¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!" Land! Land!

Pinzón snapped out of his reverie in an instant, professional skill coming to the fore. Rodrigo! Was that you?

"Sí, muy capitán! Rodrigo de Triana said excitedly, one hand reflexively shading his eyes as though from the harsh light of day rather than the mere silvery shimmer of moonlight upon the waves. I would swear to it! Land!"

Pinzón quickly gauged the situation. Triana was a solid enough man, and furthermore he didn’t dare risk the men’s reaction if he disputed the claim. Besides, he wanted to believe it himself too much. Load that lombard! he ordered, pulling a tinderbox from his pocket and fiddling with it frantically. The men manhandled the cannon in question into position and slipped powder, wadding and small cannonball into place. Time to let the Admiral know! Pinzón cried, pressing his new flame to the cannon’s touch-hole. The gun jerked back, almost squashing a sailor too distracted by trying to find the land Triana had spoken of, and its barrel emitted a loud coughing bang that carried far over the seas to the distant shape of the Santa María.

Knowing Colombo, Pinzón thought wryly, he would probably claim he’d seen the land before Triana, just in case it interfered with the prize King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had promised for the man first to catch sight of the Indies on the mission. For now, though, excitement flooded his veins. They had found land! China, the Indies... maybe even a new land altogether, one unknown to the ancients?

Only time would tell.

For a hundred years and more, the shard of Makemake sped through the Kuiper belt. A hundred years; more than a human lifetime, but barely an eyeblink from a cosmic perspective. The Kuiper belt might contain many thousands of icy, rocky objects, but they were spread over a vast area and the chances of any particular collision were remote.

This was not to say collisions did not happen; merely that they did not happen very often. Once in a hundred years, perhaps...

Like now.

The child of Makemake struck another KBO at an angle. The second object was more heterogenous, with rocky dust scattered throughout its ice, making it more fragile. The collision was therefore inelastic, the second object exploding outwards into a silent fountain of glittering dust, rather than the kinetic energy being transferred to the other object. The composite object slowed, taking on a new orbit around the sun, the puffs of gas and dust mostly returning to it as they lost momentum within its meagre gravity well.

It seemed as though the drama had ended. But things were seldom permanent, out here on the edge of the solar system. It was only to human eyes that they seemed so.

Ipswich, Kingdom of England

April 5th 1634

It hardly seems... portentous enough, John Sherman grumbled, staring at the iron-grey waters of the German Ocean.

How so? his brother Samuel asked eagerly.

John inwardly sighed at Samuel’s expression. Five years didn’t seem that much of a gulf, but he felt every moment of the time that separated his twenty-one years from Samuel’s sixteen. Or perhaps it was just the time he had spent at Emmanuel College in Cambridge. He already knew more of the world than Samuel, and he had lived in an unpleasant climate of persecution as his fellow graduands had accused his holding Puritan views of being tantamount to treachery to the King. It did not help that his father Edmond, also a Puritan, was known for having... politically dangerous views when it came to King Charles’ move to impose Ship Money and tonnage and poundage upon the people.

England was groaning under the rule of this vapid and incompetent Scottish king, all the more erratic since his father’s pretty-boy favourite Buckingham had been stabbed (good riddance) a few years ago. That was obvious to any man. What was less clear was what the end result would be. Palace intrigue? Secret societies? Another gang of unconvincing Tudor, or even Yorkist, claimants?

Or, most shocking of all, revolt against the very Crown itself?

John was willing to contemplate the concept, and even that shocked himself a bit. It almost made him feel guilty, as though his stringent denials when accused of treason in Cambridge had been hollow. But in the end he had no desire to live out his life here in the old country as it tottered towards some form of localised Armageddon. There were greener pastures to be found, in a wild country under the open stars.

I mean, he finally answered Samuel, that it would be more... appropriate if we were sailing west, leaving England behind us to bob beneath the horizon, he added poetically. As it is, we need to go East first, then dodge pirates in the Channel, and only then will we be out into the ocean.

Samuel’s eyes lit up a bit at the mention of pirates. Surely it doesn’t really matter, he said. "We all know our cousin and the Elizabeth will get us there safely. He patted the rail of the ship. We can trust Captain John."

John nodded disconsolately. Their older cousin, also named John Sherman but known as Captain John, seemed little concerned with questions of religion or politics – he wanted to go and settle in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his own reasons. A cynical part of John had a feeling that brisk, uncomplicated men like Captain John would play a bigger role in defining the future of Christendom than thinkers like John and his brother.

Speak of the devil; Captain John emerged from his conversation with the Ipswich pilot. The latter rowed away in his jolly-boat and the captain appeared on deck, drawing acknowledgement from his crew. A fair wind, Captain John pronounced, rubbing his hands together. Hoist the mains’l and warp us out, Mr. Parker!

John watched his brother’s expression and nodded as, he felt, Samuel slowly began to understand his position. The eager anticipation was replaced with boredom and ennui as the anonymous rocks and mud of the Suffolk coast slipped past on the Elizabeth’s starboard bow. This would have been an exciting adventure to Samuel if he had compared it solely to his former life, limited to the Essex town of Dedham in which their father had lived all his life. But Samuel had filled his head with tales of colonial life, of a man alone testing himself against nature, or leading fellow colonists in battles with Indian savages, and now the cold reality of the first stage of the journey was beginning to pall.

Captain John might have enlivened things a bit if he had been available to tell tales (at least half of which might be true) of pirates and wild weather and other sailors’ stories that involved these headlands of Suffolk and Essex, bringing the dead landscape to life. But Captain John was busy, one eye on navigating their present course, the other on a chart he consulted to plan their upcoming route through the Channel. He needed to be careful of collisions, too, for these scenes were busy; fishermen and trade boats heading to and from the vast Pool of London up and down the Thames and out into its great estuary, meeting their fellows from the United Netherlands, the Spanish Netherlands or France coming the other way. There had been war raging on the Continent for as long as John had been alive, yet it did not seem to impinge on the important matters of Commerce. Regardless, these busy aquatic highways did not do anything to help Samuel’s mood, contrasting sharply with a head full of images of unspoilt colonial wilderness.

Samuel spoke, but to John’s surprise, it was not to condemn the East Anglian landscape for being insufficiently infested with bears, snakes and Indians. You know I was speaking to that man from Cambridge in the pub last night, he began.

John snorted. I’m sure Dad will be pleased to hear it, he said sarcastically, partly to cover his paranoia that Samuel might have heard about something embarrassing he, John, had got up to in his undergraduate years.

We’re safely away from him now, Samuel said complacently, then sobered when the real import of his words sank in. Not so see their father again, or their brother Edmond... this really was a leap into the unknown. With the resilience of youth, Samuel brushed the unpleasant thought aside. No, he was telling me about this Frenchman who’s been writing all kinds of interesting philosophy – Dez Carties.

Day-Cart, John corrected his pronunciation absently. And there’s no good learning that comes from Papists, he added piously, hoping his brother didn’t go on to ask him how, in that case, he knew how to pronounce the name.

Samuel ignored him anyway. There’s all this stuff about ‘I am, therefore I think’ which I didn’t really understand, but he has these ideas about how the mechanics of the heavens work... John let his brother ramble off into third-hand, half-remembered repetition, if only to fill time as the Thames Estuary slipped behind them and Kent became visible to starboard. And that’s how he reckons it all works, Samuel said in conclusion. Everything’s made of particles, and, er, vortices, and it’s all just particles colliding with each other, that’s why the planets orbit the sun.

It all sounds rather atheistic to me, John said critically. If you can explain everything by particles impacting other particles, then surely the universe is nothing more than a clockwork automaton – all that matters if how the particles are set up in the first place, like pieces on a chessboard; but unlike pieces on a chessboard, there is no choice in how they may be used, they may only click along one path. What room in such a cosmos is there for God?

Samuel laughed. I could say the same about Mr Calvin’s predestination, he said craftily.

John gave him an upset look. That is entirely different, for reasons that will come to me, he muttered. Now shut up, and start winding up your own clockwork for when we arrive at Boston.

It was a long way to America.

The shard of Makemake drifted through the Kuiper Belt. There was a channel of emptiness carved through the belt, though visible only in a statistical sense, for the belt’s icy objects were too thinly dispersed to even stand out as a distinct area to the naked eye. Which was not important, as there was no naked eye out here to see it anyway.

The channel was swept out by the gravity well of an unusually large object which affected everything around it. It had one large moon and several smaller ones. Like Makemake, it was pinkish, and had a surface feature that looked like a giant heart, suggesting the world’s most over-ambitious Valentine’s Day marketing scheme.

The shard of Makemake was not destined to have much interaction with this ice world, so much like the one which had given birth to it, yet larger still.

But then, what is destiny?

On a distant pale blue dot, beings with no knowledge of the Kuiper Belt’s existence were arguing, fighting and dying over whether destiny was ineluctable, whether the universe had no place for human free will and decision-making (perhaps even no room for God himself) or whether choices could make a difference. And, if they could not, then what would be the point of living?

There was another factor which had not occurred to many of the philosophers and theologians over on the blue dot, for few of them played cards.

The factor of random chance.

The theory of elements was still rather underdeveloped, but those beings knew roughly what potassium was, or at least the potash which gave it its name. They knew that another chemical related to it, the so-called nitrate of potash (potassium nitrate) or saltpetre, was a vital constituent of gunpowder. Therefore, there might have been a nodding acquaintance with the idea that potassium could play a role in changing the world forever.

But not like this.

Atoms were still discredited, the old and largely philosophical concept of Democritus which had been obviated by Aristotle’s refusal to accept the existence of vacuums. Clever men with air pumps in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond were even now discovering that vacuums were possible after all, but atoms had not yet made a comeback. So there would be little profit in explaining that potassium atoms came in three varieties: potassium(39), which made up ninety-three percent of all potassium; potassium(41), with two additional neutrons making it heavier but otherwise chemically indistinguishable, which made up most of the remaining seven percent...

And then there was potassium(40).

Rare potassium(40), making up barely a tenth of one percent of all potassium, was the black sheep of the family. It had one more neutron than 39, one fewer than 41. Both of those were stable. But oddly, by going in between, 40 was unstable. Its nucleus could not hold forever. One day, something would have to happen.

‘One day’ was probably a long way away. Potassium(40) was not like its fellow radioactive isotopes, iron(60) and aluminium(26), which broke down and vanished over the course of a mere million years or so. Those isotopes had been important in warming up cometary objects in the early years of the solar system, but had now long since decayed. Potassium(40) was relatively far more stable. It took over a billion years for half of a given amount of potassium(40) to break down in one of three possible ways.

This is what is known as a ‘half-life’, and is often misunderstood. A half-life is merely a statistical measure based on the probability of an unstable atom breaking down, measured over a population of many identical atoms. It need not apply solely to atoms, either. Imagine giving 100 people 100 coins and telling them to each flip their coin repeatedly, heads or tails, heads or tails, until a flip finally results in the coin landing on its edge. This is an unlikely circumstance, and so one can imagine it would take hours, days, weeks for half of the coins to land on their edge; that figure would be the half-life of coins decaying to their on-edge state.

But this statistical figure does not say when a particular coin will land on its edge. That could happen at any time. So, too, with unstable radioactive atoms.

In this universe, for example, it might be now that an atom of potassium(40) near the surface of the shard of Makemake decayed to rare but stable calcium(40), one neutron in that unstable nucleus becoming a proton by losing an electron and expelling it as a beta particle. It was the transmutation of one element to another; alchemy, the very thing which natural philosophers on a pale blue dot four and a half thousand million miles away were currently trying to disprove as a relic of the unenlightened past.

Normally, one atom decaying to another meant nothing. Bananas contain potassium(40) and yet are safe to eat. It took many, many atoms decaying at once – meaning an isotope with a far briefer half-life than potassium(40) boasted – to produce enough radiation to expose a photographic plate, shred the DNA of a life form, or (more relevantly) produce the radiogenic heat needed to melt a comet. But, just as one man in the right place at the right time could change the course of history, one infinitesimal injection of radiogenic heat could still have a huge impact.

The heat energy released from the radioactive decay happened to break a crucial hydrogen bond in a messy crystalline arrangement of water and methanol molecules on the surface of the shard of Makemake. The bond might simply have reformed, but the ice had formed under kinetic conditions and the freed water molecule was not in its optimum bonded state. To an anthropomorphising eye (equipped with an X-ray crystal spectrometer), the water molecule might seem to hesitate between two or three possible hydrogen bonds to reform. And as it was stuck in that fatal hesitation, the slowly turning shard of Makemake rotated further and sunlight fell upon its surface.

The detached water molecule, given enough energy by even the weak light of the distant sun, evaporated. Sunlight fell on the water-methanol ice. Before, the shiny surface had always reflected that light, content to retain its hydrogen-bonded structure rather than break up in the hope of reforming in a lower-energy arrangement. But now that keystone hydrogen bond was gone.

Hairline cracks spread across the pane of water-methanol ice as the sunlight poured into it rather than being reflected from it. The reflective mirror was gone. Sunlight was absorbed, absorbed, absorbed. More hydrogen bonds snapped as the energy input was greedily swallowed. And then suddenly there was nothing left to hold up a chunk of silica that had once sat on the surface of a dwarf planet far from here. The rocky chunk slid sidewards, resettling closer to the centre of the shard’s meagre gravity, and exposed a pocket of compressed nitrogen gas.

As the shard of Makemake rotated that surface away from the sun again, the gas was released in a jet like a thruster. There was not much compressed nitrogen. If the flare had continued a long time, the spin of the shard would have caused the jet to fire equally in all directions, more or less. But it was expended briefly, all in one direction, and therefore it had the effect of shoving the shard slightly off course.

Not by much. But it didn’t have to be by much. As days and months and years passed, the nudge was just enough to fire the shard at the dwarf planet and its moon (named Pluto and Charon in another place and time) at the right angle to pick up a gravity assist. The shard neither spun off back into the Kuiper Belt, nor impacted on the surface of Pluto.

Instead, its path was kinked by the gravity of Pluto and given a kick as it accelerated away from the icy dwarf planet and its heart. The shard took on a new course, hurtling off along the plane of the ecliptic, heading towards the Sun... and the Inner Solar System.

There was a place for God in the cosmos still.

Certainly for what insurance companies defined as his Acts.

Cambridge Village/Newtowne, Province of Massachusetts Bay

April 4th 1693

And as you may see from this next image – thank you, Vesey, Thomas Brattle FRS said complacently, as the young student inserted the next slide into his magic lantern, -no, not that one, the next- ah, there we are- er, I think that’s backwards- (much flickering of candles) Finally! Better late than never, Vesey. William Vesey’s cheeks reddened beyond what the heat of the candles warranted, and he muttered something under his breath about moving to New York City.

Yes, there ‘tis, Brattle continued. A remarkable illustration, if you will. Not only do we discuss Mr Huygens’ astronomical discoveries, but we employ one of his own inventions to do so – do not believe that Danish pretender who rudely claims the notion was his own, he added complacently, gesturing extravagantly to the magic lantern.

Despite Brattle’s warm words and as many candles as Vesey could safely load into the steaming magic lantern, the projection on the back wall of Goffe House was dim and wavering. Nonetheless, it was clear enough to see the ink lines which Brattle had painstakingly copied onto the glass plate from Christiaan Huygens’ original writings. There was the distinctive shape of Saturn, with the mysterious disc about it that Huygens had discovered. There was the orbit of Saturn about the sun, with the ring tilting and vanishing as it became edge-on from the Earth’s perspective, proving that it must be very thin. And there was Huygens’ sketch of Saturn’s large moon...

Titan, Brattle said, as proudly as, mayhaps, he had discovered it himself. Galileo proved the Papists wrong when he found the moons of Jupiter – when he proved beyond doubt that there were objects which did not circle the Earth according to their doctrine. But Huygens has shown that Jupiter is not unique. Saturn, too, has a partner. More recently, he added sourly, Signor Cassini has found four smaller moons and named them for the Beast himself, King Louis. The obligatory round of boos and hisses echoed throughout the room.

But who is to say that Saturn has only five moons? Brattle said, twirling his wooden pointer through his fingers, seeming to point at each of the rapt students and guests in turn as they watched him. Once we have shattered the past misbelief of false doctrine once, who may say that our picture can ever be complete?

The dramatic pause stretched until it bathetically became awkward. NEXT PLATE, Vesey, Brattle said irritably, glaring his way.

A distant sound of clinking glass replaced the traced images of Huygens’ sketches with new ones which clearly had originated in a different hand. There was Saturn again, there was Titan, two of the so-called Sidera Lodoicea moons, and...?

This is a representation of what I glimpsed through my new telescope mere days ago, Brattle pontificated. The audience collectively leaned forward in their mismatched collection of seats. You shall observe the same features from Mr Huygens’ longstanding discoveries and those of Signor Cassini. But there is something else. He turned his pointer to indicate the small but distinct black blot of ink beside Titan.

Is this another moon of Saturn? Brattle said importantly, glaring around the room, as though to look each student in turn in the face. That was the question that had been posed on the broadsheets communicating this lecture. "I do not know. No man knows, yet. You may know, however, that I have some expertise on the matter of Comets – my observations of diverse comets were used by Sir Isaac himself in his Principia, as he thanked me for on my visit to London some years ago-" If Brattle swelled slightly at the name-drop, ‘twas justified. Every man in the room knew and respected the name of Sir Isaac Newton, the man some named the ‘intellectual dictator of the age’.

Brattle pulled himself together. "I identified this object as anomalous and novel as it does not match the established map of the fixed stars. True, ‘tis faint, which introduces an element of Doubt, which the true sceptical Philosopher must never fail to employ. But what if this object is truly novel – not merely unobserved to this day, you understand, but truly new? And what are the only bodies in the universe that are known to appear in such a manner?"

Comets! chanted a number of students. Brattle nodded. Comets. They seem to appear close to the sun and then disappear months later. But ongoing work by myself, Sir Isaac and Mr Halley suggests that the same comets come and go on regular, perhaps even predictable, orbits. If the same comet may appear again and again, what happens to it in between? If its glorious tail fades, could we even find it in the sky?

Murmurs of discussion broke out in the room, but Brattle had been too controversial. A young man rose and wagged his finger. You go too far, sir, he squeaked, his voice breaking. First you believe you know better than the Court of Oyer and Terminer and you have allowed several witches to escape justice – now you seek to remodel the heavens in your own blasphemous image-

The teenager must have known that his opinion was in the minority, and that the room was full of men who respected Thomas Brattle. Perhaps he felt the invincibility of the young convinced their cause is just. Or perhaps he sought a martyrdom.

Which mattered not. Before his colleagues could lay hands on him, a hand emerged amid the flickering shadows, holding something which gleamed metallically in the glow of the magic lantern’s candles. There was the blinding white spark of flint on steel accompanied by a sharp BANG. The room fell silent in shock as fragments of plaster crumbled from the ceiling.

A boy arose, lowering his smoking gun as he did so. I came to Boston to study the latest that theology and natural philosophy has to offer, he said. He was a young student, perhaps a first-year. One or two knew who he was, and the words Anthony Stoddard – Woodbury passed around the room in a murmur. Connecticut – yes, Connecticut proper, not New Haven. In another generation those distinctions might be forgotten.

Stoddard gave the crowd a withering look. I did not come here to participate in a bar brawl. My fellow students of these diverse Colonies’ greatest School of Learning should know better. With his force of will alone, he made his colleagues stare at their feet in shame. He turned back to Brattle. Mr Brattle, with your leave, did you have anything remaining to say?

Brattle opened and shut his mouth, then shook his head. No, Reverend.

Good, Stoddard said pleasantly. I may disagree with some of the doctrines that you attest to, Mr Brattle, but your great learning and Royal Society membership will always have my ear, as is right and good. He looked around the room again. I assume the rest of you have somewhere you need to be?

When the other students had left, their argument subdued, Stoddard had a long discussion with Brattle. The latter shared his ambition to open up a new Congregational church according to his more liberal views, both on theological doctrine and on matters such as music in church. I do not say I agree with you, sir, Stoddard said again, but we came to this land to escape persecution and a King who sought to impose a single, flawed creed on us all. Witch trials and riots... that is not who we are.

I’m glad you agree, Brattle said, feeling oddly humbled to say that on paper his position was far more elite and privileged than that of this young boy of Connecticut who had never left New England. Brattle had travelled the world, received praise from Sir Isaac Newton himself, yet there was something about Stoddard...

Brattle did not think that Stoddard himself would change the world. His horizons were too local, at least by the standards of a colonial. But his line, those who would come after him... if he passed that vigour down, if such things could be inherited, well...

Neither man discussed much about Saturn.

In one of those little ironies that history is littered with, Thomas Brattle was right for the wrong reasons. There was indeed a comet, or at least a cometary fragment, presently in the vicinity of Saturn. But without a tail, the small object could not be seen by the telescopes that Earth in the closing years of the seventeenth century could produce. Brattle had caught a brief glimpse of yet another Cronic moon, Mimas, which would not be confirmed until William Herschel’s work a century later.

Right now, any hypothetical passenger on the shard of Makemake would have had their vision filled with the gorgeous sight of Saturn and its rings, a wide crescent of the planet illuminated by the slowly growing light of the Sun – no longer the mere bright star which the Makemakeans might have seen back in the Kuiper Belt. There seemed to be a neat cut through the rings which was, of course, the shadow of Saturn itself. There was the great amber globe of Titan, so much larger than all the other moons, and also visible were many more moons; the handful that Earth observers had so far learned of, the dozens more which they had not yet glimpsed.

Saturn itself, as opposed to the dramatic and complex bands of the rings, seemed almost featureless to the naked eye. There was little in the way of the diverse coloured bands and spots that its bigger brother Jupiter sported. Saturn was also not very dense, famously less so even than water. But it still had a great deal of mass – almost one hundred times that of the Earth. And if it had mass, it had gravity.

The shard of Makemake sped around Saturn, glinting in the reflection from the sparkling ice of the rings, and was slingshotted deeper into the Solar System. It approached the orbit of Jupiter, though that world itself was too far away to affect it directly. The Inner Solar System lay open to it; but there was a barrier in its path...

Westminster, Kingdom of Great Britain

October 11th 1727

The storied arches of Westminster Abbey loomed far above George Augustus’ head as he stolidly paced down the carpet, dear Caroline at his side, to finally inherit his birthright. A niggling demon of doubt in his mind made him fear that those ancient stones would fall upon his head, the Abbey collapsing like the walls of Jericho, rejecting this changeling King who had not spoken English until his later childhood, who had not even seen the country until he was in his thirties. The words of his detractors echoed in his mind, alongside the echoing gunshot of the failed assassin at Drury Lane Theatre several years before.

Unsinnig, he told himself: absurd. The Abbey had stood for five hundred years, his courtiers told him, and it and its predecessors had paid host to the coronation of countless kings who did not speak English at all, back in Norman times when the House of Guelph had been a going concern in Bavaria as well as what would become Hanover. If it had not squashed his cruel ape of a father, it would hardly elect to slay a man who had made every effort since his arrival to boast that not one drop of his blood was anything but English in spirit.

The coronation was not going smoothly. The wonderful hymns Handel had written were being played in the wrong places, men were missing their cues. And then there was his blasted son. George Augustus resisted the urge to look behind him at the twenty-year-old Prince Frederick Lewis with his irritating smirk at the difficulties. When it came to writing official histories of this affair, George Augustus decided, it would be worth his while slipping a few guineas to the men of the Daily Courant and its rivals to imply that Frederick had not arrived from Hanover until the new year. That would teach a son to disrespect his father, he thought, with no sense of irony.

George Augustus was startled from his vindictive reverie by a trumpet blast. He blinked, almost losing the rhythm of his steps, but sweet Caroline was there to get him back on track. He could count on her brilliant mind to always foresee obstacles in his way-

Wait, no. There was one thing she hadn’t seen. An ugly rumple in the coronation carpet. George Augustus carefully stepped over it.

The rest of the ceremony was not entirely without incident, but George Augustus thought it wouldn’t take too many guineas and promises of favour to get a favourable write-up in the press. Handel had surpassed himself, and that was all many people would remember. The words of William Wake, the Archbishop of Canterbury, would echo in his head forever after.

Sirs, I here present unto you George, your undoubted King. Wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service, are you willing to do the same?

The assembled great and good within the Abbey had roared their acclamation, and a little of that demon of doubt in George Augustus’ mind faded away. Then there had been the Oath itself.

Sir, is your Majesty willing to take the Oath?

I am willing, George had managed, simple English words he had known since childhood threatening to flee from his memory. The leather-bound King James Bible, treacherously named for the patriarch of the overthrown house whose scions still lurked and plotted against him in France, felt slippery in his hands.

Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the dominions thereto belonging, according to the customs of the same?

I solemnly promise so to do, George Augustus managed.

Will you, to the extent of your power, cause law and justice, in mercy, to be executed in all your judgements?

An image of his father’s face hovered in George Augustus’ mind’s eye. I will.

Wake came to the important part. Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion established by law? And will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the united Church of England and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established within England and Ireland, and the territories thereunto belonging? And will you preserve unto the bishops and clergy of England and Ireland, and to the churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

All this, George Augustus said softly, I promise to do. At the altar he placed his right hand on a Bible open at the Gospels. The things which I have here before promised I will perform and keep. So help me God! He signed a transcript of the oath he had sworn.

He felt the oil on his forehead sizzling in the heat of the packed Abbey with its countless candles. One of Caroline’s ladies of the bedchamber took out a silk handkerchief to discreetly wipe away the droplets as she too was anointed. The Archbishop spoke once again: Be thou anointed with holy oil, as kings, priests, and prophets were anointed. And as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be you anointed, blessed and consecrated king over this people, whom the Lord your God hath given you to rule and govern. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The power of the words was still washing over George Augustus as he exchanged the Spurs with the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Huntingdon presented the great two-handed Sword of State to the Archbishop. Hadn’t the choir been meant to sing another of Handel’s new songs right now—? He missed the first part of Wake’s speech. With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order; that doing these things, you may be glorious in all virtue, and so faithfully serve our Lord Jesus Christ in this life that you may reign for ever with Him in the life which is to come. Amen.

The heat made George Augustus’ vision blur (the oil dripping into his eyes did not help) and the rest of the ceremony was a vague memory as he took up Orb, Sceptre and robes, save for the act of crowning itself. The crown had been made for his father, but had recently been adjusted and the stones reset for this coronation. George Augustus couldn’t help noticing that the large red balas ruby at the front, the so-called Black Prince’s Ruby, looked rather loose in its mounting. It stayed in place as the Archbishop lowered the heavy crown upon his head, but George Augustus wouldn’t be surprised if it had worked its way loose by the time of the next coronation. He wondered whether he should have a quiet word afterwards with Thomas Rowley, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, but then vindictively decided that a great jewel dropping out of the crown at Frederick’s eventual coronation would be a suitable final revenge from beyond the grave. His own coronation had seen enough embarrassments; let the boy get a taste of his own medicine.

GOD SAVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE KING! roared the crowd as the crown touched his forehead. Startled into action, the forgetful choir began to sing Handel’s masterpiece that had been meant to accompany the anointing:

"ZAAAAAAADOK the PRIEST! ...AND NAAAAAATHAN THE PROPH-ET!

ANOINTED! SOL-O-MON! KING!

...and all the people re-joi-oi-oi-oiced!

Rejoiced!

Rejoiced

And all the people rejoiced!

Rejoiced! Rejoiced!

Rejoiced! Rejoiced!

And said:

GOD SAVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE KING!

May the King live for e-e-e-ver!

Amen! Amen! Allelujah! Amen! Allelujah!"

George Augustus closed his eyes. There would be difficulties ahead. The Sun King might be in the grave, but the French still sought to dominate Europe. Walpole and his Whig cronies had their own motives. And there was his son. But he had Caroline by his side, and even now the the Royal Dukes and temporal Peers came forward to swear allegiance to him in the old Saxon formula.

He had England, and all was right with the world.

The hypothetical Makemakeans upon the shard would have learned that the asteroid belt was not so different to the Kuiper Belt from which they had originated, though with more rocks and less ice. Both the belts, though littered with countless objects, were far less dense than many might have imagined. In another place and time, a dozen space probes would travel from the Inner to the Outer Solar System without any precautions, gaily drifting through the asteroid belt without ever coming close to an impact. The chances of colliding with an asteroid were small.

But the shard of Makemake came close to the outlying Hilda asteroid group, which like the Trojans orbited farther out from the sun than the rest of the asteroids, driven into Lagrangian points (Lagrange was a baby right now...) by the awesome gravity of Jupiter. Yes, the King of the Planets itself might be too far away to affect the shard, but its gravity was a long arm stretching across the Solar System.

The Hilda asteroids’ own gravity tilted the shard’s path slightly. The shard could easily have passed through the asteroid belt cleanly and headed for the Inner Solar System. Perhaps it could have become a true comet, visible from, and remarked upon by, the inhabitants of the pale blue dot. Perhaps it might have collided with an inner world – say, Venus. It would have dissolved in the Venerean atmosphere of boiling acid long before it could reach the surface.

Instead, it now had a different destiny...

Lexington, Province of Massachusetts Bay

April 19th, 1775

Captain John Parker surveyed the dark landscape disconsolately. It was too dark to see his pocket-watch, but he estimated it was perhaps four hours past midnight. Four hours since that damn’d half-Frenchman Paul Revere had ridden up and came out with dark promises of redcoats marching on Concord, either to take Sam Adams and John Hancock or to capture the weapons