Birthright

Zenorra nodded sadly.

“Cancel all previous directives,” said Vestolian presently. “We'll simply have to make do with things as they are, and drink an occasional bittersweet toast to things as they could never have been.” And the Director of the Commonwealth, wishing that he were anyone else in the universe, ate a solitary dinner and retired early.

That evening an emigration proclamation issued sixty-three years earlier by his grandfather was finally put into effect on a world that had not yet been incorporated into most maps of the Commonwealth. He was awakened in the middle of the night to be informed that he was at war again. 18: THE SYMBIOTICS

...It was inevitable that Man should ultimately turn his eyes toward other galaxies. The problems confronting him as he attempted to reach outward beyond his immediate stellar group dwarfed in both magnitude and difficulty every other challenge he had ever faced. Indeed, the mere act of survival on a trip of more than a million light-years to the nearest neighboring galaxy required the most innovative approach...

—Man: Twelve Millennia of Achievement (No mention of the symbiotics can be found inOrigin and History of the Sentient Races .)

Things had been going pretty well for Man. He owned, and ran, about as much of the galaxy as he was ever going to. There were still some worlds and a few entire systems that he had not assimilated, but only because he had thoroughly examined them and found them wanting. There were still a handful of races that existed outside the Commonwealth's enormous economic web, but only because they had so little of value to offer that Man hadn't gotten around to them yet. And so, seeking new challenges, Man turned his vision outward. The notion had existed for centuries, perhaps for millennia, and had finally been put into words by the current Director of the Floating Kingdom: Man's destiny had only begun in this galaxy. It would come to fruition with nothing less than the entire universe.

There was a lot of patriotic and philosophic gobbledegook, but the gist of it was quite simple: Man, for all practical purposes, now ruled the galaxy as completely as the galaxy could be ruled. The next step was the exploration and ultimate annexation of the Andromeda galaxy. The most immediate and serious problem was the unbelievably vast distance which, for the first time in Man's history, would not be measured in inches or feet or miles or parsecs, but in hundreds of thousands of light-years.

The initial plans called for a miles-long spaceship, populated with ten or twelve couples to begin with, and able to hold not only them but five generations of their progeny. The cost was prohibitive, but what the Director wanted the Director usually got, regardless of cost. Then, a few years into the project, an obscure scientist on one of the domed Capellan colonies came up with another breakthrough in spaceflight, or rather, with the first truly major improvement in almost seven thousand years. It was nothing more than a complex formula for a Reduced Tachyon Drive (which, paradoxically, produced far greater speed than the standard model), but it seemed to check out and was submitted to those in charge of the project. They tested it, discovered to their surprise that it worked as