Her words were clear and terrible. “Eighty percent of humanity is…no, not dead. It's much worse than that. Transformed. ‘More than human,’ the Nahn says—as much as it has ever said anything to us. All those people changed. Lost to us. We were bright and we were brilliant, Captain Sixsmyth. We shone. Our culture, our technology, our achievements, they were the envy of the Nine Worlds, even Earth 4—because they were our own achievements. Perhaps we were arrogant. Perhaps we were dazzled by what our Heisenberg Gates showed us of how different those other worlds could be. Perhaps it was because we were Earth 1, the first world to develop the Heisenberg jump—in this very college, Captain Sixsmyth. And we were the founders of the Plenitude of Known Worlds. We had to lead by example. Or perhaps we saw how huge the Panoply was—all those billions of other Earths—and knew we could never explore them all. There would always be another Earth beyond, and another, and another.
