Pandora's Star

ONE

The star vanished from the center of the telescope s image in less time than a single human heartbeat. There was no mistake, Dudley Bose was looking right at it when it happened. He blinked in surprise, drawing back from the eyepiece. That s not right, he muttered.

He shivered slightly in reaction to the cold air around him, slapping gloved hands against his arms. His wife, Wendy, had insisted he wrap up well against the night, and he d dutifully left the house in a thick woolen coat and sturdy hiking trousers. As always when the sun fell below Gralmond s horizon, any warmth in the planet s thinner-than-average atmosphere dissipated almost immediately. With the telescope housing open to the elements at two o clock in the morning, the temperature had dropped enough to turn his every breath into a stream of gray mist.

Dudley shook the fatigue from his head, and leaned back into the eyepiece. The starfield pattern was the same there had been no slippage in the telescope s alignment but Dyson Alpha was still missing. It couldn t be that fast, he said.

He d been observing the Dyson Pair for fourteen months now, searching for the first clues of the envelopment that would so dramatically alter the emission spectrum. Until tonight there had been no change to the tiny yellow speck of light twelve hundred forty light-years away from Gralmond that was Dyson Alpha.

He d known there would be a change; it was the astronomy department at Oxford University back on Earth that had first noticed the anomoly during a routine sky scan back in 2170, two hundred and ten years ago. Since the previous scan twenty years earlier, two stars, a K-type and an M-type three years apart, had changed their emission spectrum completely to nonvisible infrared. For a few brief months the discovery had caused some excited debate among the remnants of the astronomy fraternity about how they could decay into red giants so quickly, and the extraordinary coincidence of two stellar

Peter F. Hamilton is the author of numerous novels, including A Night Without Stars, The Abyss Beyond Dreams, Great North Road, The Evolutionary Void, The Temporal Void, The Dreaming Void, Judas Unchained, Pandora s Star, Misspent Youth, Fallen Dragon, and the acclaimed epic Night s Dawn trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God). He lives with his family in England.

The depth and clarity of the future Hamilton envisions is as complex and involving as they come. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The author s expansive vision of the future combines action and intrigue on a panoramic scale. Library Journal

Astounding . . . Thrilling . . . Hamilton uses technology to excellent effect. Science Fiction Age

Shows how thought-provoking yet entertaining science fiction can be. Some of the best fiction . . . in years. Midwest Book Review

[Hamilton is] taking on one of sf s (and maybe all of literature s) primal jobs: the creation of a world with the scale and complexity of the real one. Locus

[Hamilton is] a rare talent. The Denver Post