Cole was on the bridge when David Copperfield stepped out of the airlift and approached him.

"Well?" said Cole.

"We have three offers so far," reported Copperfield. "And I anticipate more almost every day. We're not in the Republic, so there was no reason to hide the identity of the ship or its captain."

"I don't know if that was a good idea," said Cole. "Officially I'm still a mutineer."

"Most people out here consider that a plus," said Copperfield with a smile.

"What kind of pay are they offering?"

"It varies, but the least attractive offer is still more than you would ever have made as a pirate."

"That's a definite comfort," said Cole.

"Stick with me, my dear Steerforth," said David Copperfield. "Before we're through we could end up owning this damned Frontier."

"I suppose I could live with that," admitted Cole.

It happened in the 1970s. Carol and I were watching a truly awful movie at a local theater, and about halfway through it I muttered, "Why am I wasting my time here when I could be doing something really interesting, like, say, writing the entire history of the human race from now until its extinction?" And she whispered back, "So why don't you?" We got up immediately, walked out of the theater, and that night I outlined a novel called Birthright: The Book of Man, which would tell the story of the human race from its attainment of faster-than-light flight until its death eighteen thousand years from now.

It was a long book to write. I divided the future into five political eras—Republic, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, and Anarchy—and wrote twenty-six connected stories ("demonstrations," Analog called them, and rightly so), displaying every facet of the human race, both admirable and not so admirable. Since each is set a few centuries from the last, there are no continuing characters (unless you consider Man, with a capital M, the main character, in which case you could make an argument—or at least, I could—that it's really a character study).

I sold it to Signet, along with another novel, titled The Soul Eater. My editor there, Sheila Gilbert, loved the Birthright Universe and asked me if I would be willing to make a few changes to The Soul Eater so that it was set in that future. I agreed, and the changes actually took less than a day. She made the same request—in advance, this time—for the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and Walpurgis III. Looking back, I see that only two of the thirteen novels I wrote for Signet were not set there.

When I moved to Tor Books, my editor there, Beth Meacham, had a fondness for the Birthright Universe, and most of my books for her— not all, but most—were set in it: Santiago, Ivory, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost, and The Return of Santiago.

When Ace agreed to buy Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet from me, my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, assumed that of course they'd be set in the Birthright Universe—and of course they were, because as I learned a little more about my eighteen-thousand-year, two-million-world future, I felt a lot more comfortable writing about it.

In fact, I started setting short stories in the Birthright Universe. Two of my Hugo winners—"Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties"—are set there, and so are perhaps fifteen others.

When Bantam agreed to take the Widowmaker trilogy from me, it was a foregone conclusion that Janna Silverstein, who purchased the books but had moved to another company before they came out, would want them to take place in the Birthright Universe. She did indeed request it, and I did indeed agree.

I recently handed in a book to Meisha Merlin, set—where else?— in the Birthright Universe.

And when it came time to suggest a series of books to Lou Anders for the new Pyr line of science fiction, I don't think I ever considered any ideas or stories that weren't set in the Birthright Universe.

I've gotten so much of my career from the Birthright Universe that I wish I could remember the name of that turkey we walked out of all those years ago so I could write the producers and thank them.

The most heavily populated (by both stars and inhabitants) section of the Birthright Universe is always referred to by its political identity, which evolves from Republic to Democracy to Oligarchy to Monarchy. It encompasses millions of inhabited and habitable worlds. Earth is too small and too far out of the mainstream of galactic commerce to remain Man's capital world, and within a couple of thousand years the capital has been moved lock, stock, and barrel halfway across the galaxy to Deluros VIII, a huge world with about ten times Earth's surface and near-identical atmosphere and gravity. By the middle of the Democracy, perhaps four thousand years from now, the entire planet is covered by one huge sprawling city. By the time of the Oligarchy, even Deluros VIII isn't big enough for our billions of empire-running bureaucrats, and Deluros VI, another large world, is broken up into forty-eight planetoids, each housing a major department of the government (with four planetoids given over entirely to the military).

Earth itself is way out in the boonies, on the Spiral Arm. I don't believe I've set more than parts of a couple of stories on the Arm.

At the outer edge of the galaxy is the Rim, where worlds are spread out and underpopulated. There's so little of value or military interest on the Rim that one ship, such as the Theodore Roosevelt, can patrol a couple of hundred worlds by itself. In later eras, the Rim will be dominated by feuding warlords, but it's so far away from the center of things that the governments, for the most part, just ignore it.

Then there are the Inner and Outer Frontiers. The Outer Frontier is that vast but sparsely populated area between the outer edge of the Republic/Democracy/Oligarchy/Monarchy and the Rim. The Inner Frontier is that somewhat smaller (but still huge) area between the inner reaches of the Republic/etc. and the black hole at the core of the galaxy.

It's on the Inner Frontier that I've chosen to set more than half of my novels. Years ago the brilliant writer R. A. Lafferty wrote, "Will there be a mythology of the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?" I decided that I'd like to spend at least a part of my career trying to create those myths of the future, and it seems to me that myths, with their bigger-than-life characters and colorful settings, work best on frontiers where there aren't too many people around to chronicle them accurately, or too many authority figures around to prevent them from playing out to their inevitable conclusions. So I arbitrarily decided that the Inner Frontier was where my myths would take place, and I populated it with people bearing names like Catastrophe Baker, the Widowmaker, the Cyborg de Milo, the ageless Forever Kid, and the like. It not only allows me to tell my heroic (and sometimes antiheroic) myths, but lets me tell more realistic stories occurring at the very same time a few thousand light-years away in the Republic or Democracy or whatever happens to exist at that moment.

Over the years I've fleshed out the galaxy. There are the star clusters—the Albion Cluster, the Quinellus Cluster, a few others. There are the individual worlds, some important enough to appear as the title of a book, such as Walpurgis III, some reappearing throughout the time periods and stories, such as Deluros VIII, Antares III, Binder X, Keepsake, Spica II, and some others, and hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of worlds (and races, now that I think about it) mentioned once and never again.

Then there are, if not the bad guys, at least what I think of as the Disloyal Opposition. Some, like the Sett Empire, get into one war with humanity and that's the end of it. Some, like the Canphor Twins (Canphor VI and Canphor VII), have been a thorn in Man's side for the better part of ten millennia. Some, like Lodin XI, vary almost daily in their loyalties depending on the political situation.

I've been building this universe, politically and geographically, for a quarter of a century now, and with each passing book and story it feels a little more real to me. Give me another thirty years and I'll probably believe every word I've written about it.

Novels not set in this future

Adventures (1922-1926 A.D.)

Exploits (1926-1931 A.D.)

Encounters (1931-1934 A.D.)

Stalking the Unicorn ("Tonight")

The Branch (2047-2051 A.D.)

Second Contact (2065 A.D.)

Bully! (1910-1912 A.D.)

Kirinyaga (2123-2137 A.D.)

Lady with an Alien (1490 A.D.)

Dragon America: Revolution (1779—1780 A.D.)

Players

Two

The Board

Any flat surface

The Pieces

Twenty roughly similar tokens (coins, pebbles, candies, etc.)

Setup

The twenty tokens, called Floats, are arranged on the flat surface in 4 rows of 5. The complete set of Floats is called the Known Universe.

Play

On a player's turn, he or she moves two Floats in opposite directions either horizontally or vertically. Players alternate orientations, so if Player 1 moves Floats horizontally, Player 2 must move Floats vertically. Players may move Floats toward each other or away from each other.

Examples of initial move:

or

Illegal Moves

Players may not move both Floats just played by the previous player, though players may combine one of the two Floats just moved with another Float.

The moves must also not separate any Float(s) from the Known Universe. All Floats must be connected, at least diagonally. So a move from this:

to this:

would be illegal because the bottom Float is no longer a part of the Known Universe.

Penalties

Should a player decide he cannot move two Floats in the required orientation, he may switch orientations to that of the other player. As a penalty to the switching player, the nonswitching player moves only one Float instead of the normally required two.

(Example: Player 1 moves two Floats horizontally and Player 2 cannot move two Floats vertically, so Player 2 switches and moves his Floats horizontally as well. Player 1 is required to move his Floats vertically now, but only has to move one Float up or down instead of the normally required two.)

Should a player be unable to move two Floats in any orientation (without using an illegal move described above), that player must remove a Float from the Known Universe. This Float is now Lost and the player must keep a pile of all of his Lost Floats. The removal of the Lost Float must not separate or divide any remaining Float from the Known Universe.

Object

Bilsang ends when only one Float remains in the Known Universe. The player with the fewest Lost Floats in his pile at the end is the winner.

Strategy

A veteran bilsang player will know how to use his own penalties to his advantage, to switch orientation when it is advantageous—instead of only when required—and to wisely choose which Floats he removes as Lost.

Alex Wilson (www.alexwilson.com