Tasaya Belocq

      The Voyage of the Emissary

      999 A.C.

      Humanity’s motto in what were quite literally its darkest days seems to have been “Nobody Knows.” It was not in any way an official slogan. It wasn’t a popular catch phrase coined by the media, nor were people quoting a comedian or politician who famously used it in a speech. Those two words exist in the historical record any time there was a major discussion of the Cataclysm simply because they were true. The words were as true then as they still are when spoken today.

      “Nobody knows what caused the Cataclysm”.

      – Astronomer Hal Harris, The InterNight Show, 2056 C.E.

      “Nobody knows what caused the other Cataclysm, either”.

      -- Modern folk saying, used esp. in business and team sports after an unexpected and overwhelming loss

      All these years later and we still don’t know what caused the Cataclysm; a thousand years of ignorance.

      The obvious candidate was some sort of monstrous energy dispersal in the distant past; a titanic explosion which sent the ruined debris of dozens of star systems on a long and deadly path through space like a randomly directed shotgun blast of epic proportion. Whatever powerful forces in the ancient past precipitated the Cataclysm left no direct clues to their nature; their angry light had long since raced away and whatever ironically beautiful shell of expanding gas might have been left behind was either long attenuated and dissipated or beyond the considerable reach of humanity’s ability at the time to observe the universe around them. Nor was there even an attempt at an accurate estimate as to how long ago this event had happened; initially there was simply no clue to be had other than the fact that an enormous field of debris was rapidly approaching our area of space, moving faster than could be explained by known galactic processes.

      “Nobody knows how big the Cataclysm will be, or how long post-Cataclysm effects will last.”

      -- Secretary General of the United Nations, Dr. Kristina Shaw, 2051 C.E.

      The limits of the rapidly approaching debris field extended beyond our ability to detect them. We wouldn’t even have known the Cataclysm was approaching had the debris field been more sparse, but along with the rocks and iceballs there was dust which was dimming the stars in a wide arc of the sky a little to the imaginary east of galactic center. It wasn’t anything dramatic like part of the sky going black; in fact, at first the dimming of those stars was not even noticeable to the naked eye. It was noticeable to computers, however, and those computers quickly calculated that the cause had to be what at first was called the Great Dust Cloud. We didn’t yet know the event would soon be renamed the Cataclysm.

      The Great Dust Cloud of course became a subject of much interest in the sky-watching community, so the world’s astronomical interest was already focused in the right direction when the first occlusions occurred. It wasn’t just a dust cloud out there. There were moving solid bodies as well, large enough to measurably cut the light output from nearby stars. That meant objects the size of dwarf planets. With renewed interest the scientific community plunged into a full-scale investigation; and the results of their work, the famous Predictive Analysis of Incipient Meteoric Bombardment and Gravitational Disturbance, changed humanity forever.

      The Great Dust Cloud was light-years wide and seemed to be composed of dust, gas, and solid bodies of varying composition: ice, rock, metal. It appeared to be the remnants of an entire region of space destroyed by some unknown force hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. By cosmic cloud standards it was sparse and virtually unnoticeable; had you floated in the mathematically densest part of the cloud you probably wouldn’t have actually seen a single object or noticed any dust. Yet the objects were there, each millions of kilometers from its nearest companion, and there were an awful lot of them and they were headed our way.

      But we had plenty of time to prepare. We had about eighty-five years.

      This was the point at which the formerly named Great Dust Cloud became known as the Cataclysm.

      “Nobody knows if we’ll get hit.”

      -- United States Senator Chris W. Tomkins, explaining his “Nay” vote on the Cataclysm Act, 2061 C.E.

      The odds of any individual object in the Cataclysm actually striking Earth were fairly low. In a perfect vacuum, Earth might not have been hit at all. But space is not a perfect vacuum. It includes things like planets and asteroids and comets and gravity. As the Cataclysm passed through the solar system it was inevitable there would be impacts, near-misses, and gravitational disturbances. Any object, even some