The Mandate of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

quiet, introspective man, who preferred the solitude of his own company and would never hurt anybody.
    Events later in my life would disprove many of these assumptions, but I am getting ahead of myself.
    The other thing that set me apart from the other children was my education.  Not the reading, writing or basic arithmetic that we learnt during lessons, but the ones I received outside school—from my father.  They started off simply as bedtime stories in my father’s library, surrounded by his books, seated around that blazing fire.  He would read to me until I fell asleep in his arms, but what he was actually doing was giving me an education that went far beyond most.
    For I learnt about history and events from other distant worlds.
    He educated me about the Imperium, the various High-Lords and occasionally Ladies, that ruled it, but not as it was taught in school.  There they taught us these people were Gods that walked among us, nurtured us and guided us.  Instead I learnt the truth, that they were nothing of the sort, but just men and women, like you and I.
    Heresy.
    He would often read me stories about our distant home world, Earth, before the great exodus.  Describing the planet and the massive starships that carried us from there, almost four centuries earlier.  He showed me pictures of both from his library, ancient books that perhaps had been carried on one of those very vessels?  For every picture of such ships gliding through the heavens, he showed me many more of Earth, with such strange plants and creatures.  Many of them made me laugh, as they seemed such fantastical things.  Animals with necks so long that they could reach tall trees and another with a nose long enough that it could consume food and water from the very ground.
    I once asked my father why we would have ever left such a wondrous place, as it sounded so different from our current home.  At this question his expression turned grim and he described an Earth that was groaning under the weight of overpopulation, widespread famine and pollution, lacking even the most basic of resources, as most had long since been depleted.  Eventually it became far more cost effective to mine these on other planets within the System. Firstly, the rare precious metals that underpinned much of our modern technology, then later, with the adoption of fusion power, the raw isotopes that fuelled those reactors.
    The situation on Earth however continued to deteriorate, to the point that many were happy to escape to artificial colonies. First on the Moon and then later the inner planets.  Even more desperate communities, those persecuted for their religious or political beliefs, took the ultimate decision of joining colony ships heading out of the System, for many life-bearing planets had been discovered decades earlier by remote observation.  These were all multi-generational ships, as the nearest systems were dozens of light-years distant and it took decades of acceleration to even approach the speed of light and just as long to decelerate.
    Most were lost.
    The limiting factor being the speed of light, that universal speed limit that stubbornly refused to yield.  In the end it took a brilliant young physicist to turn the problem on its head, to come up with a solution.  For if the speed of light was a universal physical constant, then they just needed to find a different universe!  Building on research conducted early in the twenty-first century by his great-grandfather, Miguel Alcubierre, he built the first working Alcubierre drive.  This involved generating a dimensional bubble of the thirteenth dimension, long having been predicted by string theory, this dimension was unique, a mirror of our own, but consisting of negative mass.   This resulted in an energy-density field lower than that of the surrounding space, causing space in front of the drive to contract and space behind it to expand, resulting in faster-than-light travel.
    With a working