It was so cold in the tower when Jack woke, his breath turned to smoke as he breathed out. From the windows of the overlook, dawn's pale light revealed no telling glitter of frost on the asphalt below. Nor was there any on the patches of green among the tall buildings that they'd deemed pasture and hay field. The wind carried the scent of autumn leaves but nothing of grass sheared by the cold.

"So we have at least one more day?" Renard yawned, showing off his mouth full of sharp teeth and then stretched lazily.

"How could you tell?"

"Your tail."

Jack glanced at his backside and saw that the white stub of his tail was indeed wagging. "Traitor."

The cat laughed as he strutted toward the nearest window and thumbed the latch. "Honestly you're as easy to read as a book with big bold font and little bitty words. That little tail is shouting 'yay, yay, let's make hay.'"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to catch my breakfast."

"Don't let the cold in." Jack trotted to the opening. "And make sure you don't catch anything that can talk."

"If it can talk, I'll thank it kindly for its brave sacrifice."

Jack huffed out a cloud that wisped away on the bitter cold wind. He hated the idea of eating anything you could argue morality with, but the simple truth was that they were losing the luxury every moment as the world turned colder. Last winter they barely survived. "Go on, let me shut the window. The cold is going to get to the bird."

Renard glanced across the room at the jury—rigged nest. "Too late."

“It’s hot as Hades today!” gasped Alexander, heaving a great sigh as they entered the fortified camp at the foot of Mount Agriliki.

Myron, son of Epilycos, gave his friend a sharp look. What a curious thing for Alexander to say!

Granted, the August afternoon was miserably hot. And in some ways it was even worse for ekdromoi or light-armed troops like Alexander and himself than it was for the bronze-encased hoplites. The latter only had to don their heavy and uncomfortable panoplies for a short time each morning, form up outside the earthworks, and go through the daily ritual of facing off against the Persians and refusing to be drawn down onto the plain where the dreaded Eastern cavalry could have outflanked and encircled them. The Persians, on the other hand, weren’t about to hurl their lightly equipped troops uphill against the solid ranks of the phalanx. Thus it had gone for four days. But all that time the ekdromoi had been sent out on daily patrols into the surrounding hills, sometimes fighting skirmishes against the Persian foragers they were hunting. Even now they were returning from such a patrol, and as Myron gratefully took off his light helmet, set down his two javelins and small round shield, and began to unlace his leather shirt, he mentally agreed it was most certainly hot.

But… hot as Hades? What did that mean?

Everyone knew what the domain of the dead was like. Apart from the Fields of Elysium, where the shades of heroes and initiates of the mysteries of Eleusis spent an agreeable eternity, it was a dreary, featureless place where most of the shades led a pointless, frustrating shadow existence—although even that was to be preferred to the tortures endured by a few truly terrible transgressors against the gods. No doubt about it, Zeus’s brother and his consort Persephone ruled over a pretty cheerless realm, to which Myron was in no hurry to go.

And yet, nobody had ever described it as being especially hot.

Yes, Myron thought, it was an odd thing to say. Alexander often said odd things.

(1) Introduction: A Personal Evolution

I have spent most of my scientific career investigating in-space propulsion, interstellar travel, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), methods of imaging extra-solar planets and planetary atmospheres. Never in my wildest dreams that I expect that I would someday consider consciousness-the most researched and least understood topic of contemporary science and ancient philosophy. Never did I suspect that I would uncover a clue hinting at the possible emergence of stellar consciousness from myth and science fiction into the realm of speculative science. But during the last year or so, this is the quest I have been engaged in.

When one engages in such a ”magical” quest in a computer game, he or she often encounters a wise person as guide or teacher. During the 1970s, when I was a young graduate student pursuing his Ph.D., I had such an encounter. With a colleague, the late Al Fennelly, I had written a paper describing a magnetic method of interstellar travel that we hoped was a conceptual breakthrough. We submitted the manuscript to Science, a foremost journal and eagerly awaited the reviewers’ comments.

No, we had not stumbled upon the doorway to the universe! One reviewer rejected the manuscript outright; explaining why it was the concept was a “dud.” The second reviewer, in a much kinder mode, discussed how we could retrieve something useful from the concept and publish it in one of the first Interstellar Studies issues of The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Our concept became a magnetic scoop proposal for use with the interstellar ramjet and eventually morphed into the “magsail,” a method of reflecting interstellar ions to decelerate a speeding spacecraft that was investigated in depth by Dana Andrews and Robert Zubrin.