Firstborn

  “And none of these man-apes and sub-men and pre-men that Europe seems to be thick with?”

  “No.”

  Mir was a quilt of a world, a composite of time slices, samples apparently drawn from throughout human history, and the prehistory of the hominid families that preceded mankind.

  Emeline said, “It seems that it was only humans who reached the New World; the older sorts never walked there. But we have quite a menagerie out there, Captain! Mammoths and cave bears and lions—the hunters among us are in hog heaven.”

  Grove smiled. “It sounds marvelous. Free of all the complications of this older world—just as America always was, I suppose. And Chicago sounds a place of enterprise. I was pleased for him when Josh decided to go back there, after that business of Bisesa Dutt and the Eye.”

  Emeline couldn’t help but flinch when she heard that name. She knew her husband had carried feelings for that vanished woman to his grave, and Emeline, deep in her soul, had always been hopelessly, helplessly jealous of a woman she had never met. She changed the subject. “You must tell me of Troy.”

  He grimaced. “There are worse places, and it’s ours—in a way. Alexander planted it along with a heap of other cities in the process of his establishment of his Empire of the Whole World. He calls it Alexandria at Ilium.

  “Everywhere he went Alexander always built cities. But now, in Greece and Anatolia and elsewhere, he has built new cities on the vacant sites of the old: there is a new Athens, a new Sparta. Thebes, too, though it’s said that’s an expression of guilt, for he himself destroyed the old version before the Discontinuity.”

  “Troy is especially precious to the King,” Bloom said. “For you may know the King believes he is descended from Heracles of Argos, and in his early career he modeled himself on Achilles.”

  Emeline said to Grove, “And so you settled there.”

  “I feared that my few British were overwhelmed in a great sea of Macedonians and Greeks and Persians. And as everybody knows, Britain was colonized in the first place by refugees from the Trojan war. It amused Alexander, I think, that we were closing a circle of causes by doing so, a new Troy founded by descendants of Trojans.

  “He left us with a batch of women from his baggage train, and let us get on with it. This was about fifteen years ago. It’s been hard, by God, but we prevail. And there’s no distinction between Tommy and sepoy now! We’re something new in creation altogether, I’d say. But I leave the philosophy to the philosophers.”

  “But what of yourself, Captain? Did you ever have a family?”

  He smiled. “Oh, I was always a bit too busy with looking after my men for that. And I have a wife and a little girl at home—or did.” He glanced at Batson. “However Ben’s father was a corporal of mine, a rough type from the northeast of England, but one of the better of his sort. Unfortunately got himself mutilated by the Mongols—but not before he’d struck up a relationship with a camp follower of Alexander’s, as it turned out. When poor Batson eventually died of infections of his wounds, the woman didn’t much want to keep Ben; he looked more like Batson than one of hers. So I took him in. Duty, you see.”

  Ben Batson smiled at them, calm, patient.

  Emeline saw more than duty here. She said, “I think you did a grand job, Captain Grove.”

  Grove said, “I think Alexander was pleased, in fact, when we asked for Troy. He usually has to resort to conscripts to fill his new cities, studded as they are in an empty continent; it seems to me Europe is much more an empire of Neanderthal than of human.”

  “Empire?” Bloom snapped. “Not a word I’d use. A source of stock, perhaps. The Stone Men are strong, easily broken, with a good deal of manual dexterity. The Greeks tell me that handling a Stone Man is like handling an elephant compared to a horse—a smarter sort of animal; you just need a different technique.”

  Grove’s face was a mask. “We use Neanderthals,” he said. “We couldn’t get by if not. But we employ them. We pay them in food. Consul, they have a sort of speech of their own, they make tools, they weep over their dead as they bury them. Oh, Mrs. White, there are all sorts of sub-people. Runner types and man-apes, and a certain robust sort who seem content to do nothing but chew on fruit in the depths of the forest. The other varieties you can think of as animals, more or less. But your Neanderthal is not a horse, or an elephant. He is more man than animal!”

  Bloom shrugged. “I take the world as I find it. For all I know elephants have gods, and horses too. Let them worship if it consoles them! What difference does it make to us?”

  They lapsed into a silence broken only by the grunts of the Stone Men, and the padding of their bare feet.

  The land became richer, split up into polygonal fields where wattle-and-daub shacks sat, squat and ugly. The land was striped by glistening channels. These, Emeline supposed, were Babylon’s famous irrigation canals. Grove told her that many of them had been severed by the arbitrariness of the time-slicing, to be restored under Alexander’s kingship.

  At last, on the western horizon, she saw buildings, complicated walls, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance. Smoke rose up from many fires, and as they drew closer Emeline saw soldiers watching vigilantly from towers on the walls.

  Babylon! She shivered with a feeling of unreality; for the first time since landing in Europe she had the genuine sense that she was stepping back in time.

  The city’s walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched fifteen miles around, all surrounded by a moat. They came to a bridge over the moat. The guards there evidently recognized Bloom, and waved the party across.

  They approached the grandest of the gates in the city walls. This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers. Even to reach the gate the Stone Men, grunting, had to haul the phaeton up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen yards above ground level.

  The gate itself towered twenty yards or more above Emeline’s head, and she peered up as they passed through it. This, Bloom murmured, was the Ishtar Gate. Its surfaces were covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced. The Stone Men did not look up at this marvel, but kept their eyes fixed on the trampled dirt at their feet.

  The city within the walls was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the river, the Euphrates. The party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river, and now the phaeton rolled south down a broad avenue, passing magnificent, baffling buildings. Emeline glimpsed statues and fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes.

  Bloom pointed out the sights, like a tour guide at the world’s fair. “The complex to your right is the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, who was Babylon’s greatest ruler. The Euphrates cuts the city in two, north to south. This eastern monumental sector is apparently a survival from Nebuchadnezzar’s time, a couple of centuries before Alexander. In fact this isn’t Alexander’s Babylon any more than it is ours, if you see what I mean. But the western bank, which had been residential, was a ruin, a time slice from a much later century, perhaps close to our own. Alexander has been restoring it for three decades now…”

  The roads were crowded, with people rushing here and there, mostly on foot, some in carts or on horseback. Some wore purple robes as grand as Bloom’s, or grander, but others wore more practical tunics, with sandals and bare legs. One grand-looking fellow with a painted face proceeded down the street with an imperious nonchalance. He was leading an animal like a scrawny chimp by a rope attached to its neck. But then it straightened up, to stand erect on hind limbs very like human legs. It wore a kind of ruff of a shining cloth to hide the collar that enslaved it. Nobody Emeline could see wore anything like western clothes. They all seemed short, compact, muscular, dark, another sort of folk entirely compared to the population of nineteenth-century Chicago.

  There was an air of tension here, she thought
immediately. She was a Chicagoan, and used to cities, and to reading their moods. And the more senior the figure, the more agitated and intent he seemed. Something was going on here. If they were aware of this, Bloom and Grove showed no signs of it.

  The processional way led them through a series of broad walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Emeline had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred yards on a side.

  Bloom said, “The Babylonians called this the Etemenanki, which means ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth’…”

  This ziggurat was, astonishingly, the Tower of Babel.

  South of the tower was another tremendous monument, but this was very new, as Emeline could see from the gleam of its finish. It was an immense square block, perhaps two hundred yards on a side and at least seventy tall. Its base was garlanded with the gilded prows of boats that stuck out of the stone as if emerging from mist, and on the walls rows of bright friezes told a complicated story of love and war. On top of the base stood two immense, booted feet, the roots of a statue that would some day be even more monumental than the base.

  “I heard of this,” Grove said. “The Monument of the Son. It’s got nothing to do with Babylon. This is all Alexander…”

  The Son in question had been Alexander’s second-born. Through the chance of the Discontinuity the first son, by the captured wife of a defeated Persian general, had not been brought to Mir. The second was another Alexander, born to his wife Roxana, a Bactrian princess and another captive of war.

  Bloom said, “The boy was born in the first year of Mir. We celebrated, for the King had an heir. But by the twenty-fifth year that heir, grown to be a man, was chafing, as was his ambitious mother, for Alexander refused to die.” The War of Father and Son raged across the empire, consuming its stretched resources. The son’s anger was no match for his father’s experience—or for Alexander’s own calm belief in his own divinity. The outcome was never in doubt. “The final defeat is remembered annually,” Bloom said. “Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary, in fact.”

  “Here’s the way I see it, Mrs. White,” Grove said. “That war made Alexander, already a rum cove, even more complicated. It’s said Alexander had a hand in the assassination of his own father. He was definitely responsible for the death of his son and heir—and his wife Roxana come to that. Now Alexander has become even more convinced that he’s nothing less than a god, destined to reign forever.”

  “But he won’t,” Bloom murmured. “And we’ll all be heading for a mighty smash when he finally falls.”

  South of the Monument of the Son they came at last to a temple Bloom called the Esagila—the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia. Here they clambered off the phaeton. Looking up, Emeline saw a dome planted on the temple’s roof, with a cylinder protruding from it like a cannon. It was an observatory, and the “cannon” was a telescope, quite modern-looking.

  A dark young man ran up to them. He wore a drab, monkish robe, and twisted his hands together.

  “My God,” Grove said, coloring. “You must be Abdikadir Omar. You’re so like your father…”

  “So I am told, sir. You are Captain Grove.” He glanced around the party. “But where is Josh White? Mr. Bloom, I wrote for Josh White.”

  “I am his wife,” Emeline said firmly. “I’m afraid my husband died.”

  “Died?” The boy was distracted and barely seemed to take that in. “Well—oh, you must come!” He headed back toward the temple. “Please, come with me, to the chamber of Marduk.”

  “Why?” Emeline asked. “In your letter you spoke of the telephone ringing.”

  “Not that.” He said, agitated, almost distressed with his tension. “That was just the start. There has been more, more just today—you must come to see—”

  Captain Grove asked, “See what, man?”

  “She is here. The Eye—it came back—it flexed—she!” And Abdikadir broke away and sprinted back into the temple.

  Bewildered, the travelers followed.

  28: SUIT FIVE

  It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

  She was lying on her back. Her breath was straining, her chest hurting. When she tried to move, her arms and legs were heavy. Encased. She was trapped, somehow.

  Her eyes were open, but she could see nothing.

  Her breathing grew more rapid. Panicky. She could hear it, loud in an enclosed space. She was locked up inside something.

  She forced herself to calm. She tried to speak, found her mouth crusted and dry, her voice a croak. “Myra?”

  “I’m afraid Myra can’t hear you, Bisesa.” The voice was soft, male, but very quiet, a whisper.

  Memories flooded back. “Suit Five?” The Pit on Mars. The Eye that had inverted. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “Is Myra okay?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t contact her. I can’t contact anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” the suit said miserably. “My primary power has failed. I am in minimum-functionality mode, operating on backup cells. Their expected operating life is—”

  “Never mind.”

  “I am broadcasting distress signals, of course.”

  She heard something now, a kind of scratching at the carapace of the suit. Something was out there—or somebody. She was helpless, blind, locked in the inert suit, while something explored the exterior. Panic bubbled under the surface of her mind.

  “Can I stand? I mean, can you?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve let you down, haven’t I, Bisesa?”

  “Can you let me see? Can you de-opaque my visor?”

  “That is acceptable.”

  Light washed into her field of view, dazzling her.

  Looking up, she saw an Eye, a fat silvered sphere, swollen with mystery. And she saw her own reflection pasted on its face, a Mars suit on its back, a helplessly upended green bug.

  But was this the same Eye? Was she still on Mars?

  She lifted her head within the helmet, trying to see past the Eye. Her head felt heavy, a football full of sloshing fluids. It was like pulling Gs in a chopper. Heavy gravity: not Mars, then.

  She saw a brick wall beyond the Eye. Bits of electronic equipment studded the wall, fixed crudely, linked up with cable. She knew that wall, that gear. She had assembled it herself, scavenged from the crashed Little Bird, when she had set up this chamber as a laboratory to study an Eye.

  This was the Temple of Marduk. She was back in Babylon. She was on Mir. “Here I am again,” she whispered.

  A face loomed over her, sudden, unexpected. She flinched back, strapped in her lobster suit. It was a man, young, dark, good-looking, his eyes clear. She knew who it was. But it couldn’t be him. “Abdi?” The last time she saw Abdikadir, her crewmate from the Little Bird, he had been worn out from the Mongol War, his face and body bearing the scars of that conflict. This smooth-faced man was too young, too untouched.

  Now another face hovered in her view, illuminated by flickering lamplight. Another familiar face, a tremendous mustache, but this time older than she remembered, grayed, lined. “Captain Grove,” she said. “The gang’s all here.”

  Grove said something she couldn’t hear.

  Her chest hurt even more. “Suit. I can’t breathe. Open up and let me out.”

  “It isn’t advisable, Bisesa. We aren’t in a controlled environment. And these people are not the crew of Wells Station,” the suit said primly. “If they exist at all.”

  “Open up,” she said as severely as she could. “I’m overriding any other standing orders you have. Your function is to protect me. So let me out before I suffocate.”

  The suit said, “I’m afraid other protocols override your instructions, Bisesa.” br />
  “What other protocols?”

  “Planetary protection.”

  The suit was designed to protect Mars from Bisesa as much as Bisesa from Mars. So if she were to die the suit would seal itself up, to keep the remains of her body from contaminating Mars’s fragile ecology. In extremis, Suit Five was programmed to become her coffin.

  “Yes, but—oh, this is—we aren’t even on Mars! Can’t you see that? There’s nothing to protect!” She strained, but her limbs were encased. Her lungs dragged at stale air. “Suit Five—for God’s sake—”

  Something slammed into her helmet, rattling her head like a walnut kernel in its shell. Her visor just popped off, and air washed over her face. The air smelled of burned oil and ozone, but it was rich in oxygen and she dragged at it gratefully.

  Grove hovered over her. He held up a hammer and chisel. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Needs must, eh? But I rather fear I’ve damaged your suit of armor.” Though he had aged, he had the same clipped Noel Coward accent she remembered from her last time on Mir, more than thirty years in the past.

  She felt inordinately glad to see him. “Be my guest,” she said. “All right, Suit, you’ve had your fun. You’ve been breached, so planetary protection is out the window, wherever we are. Now will you let me go?”

  The suit didn’t speak. It hesitated for a few seconds, silent, as if sulking. Then with a popping of seals it opened up, along her torso, legs and arms. She lay in the suit, in her tight thermal underwear, and the colder air washed over her. “I feel like a lobster in a cracked shell.”

  “Let us help you.” It was the boy who looked like Abdikadir. He and Grove reached down, got their arms under Bisesa, and lifted her out of the suit.

  29: ALEXEI

  It was an hour since Bisesa had vanished into the Eye.