Firstborn

  And moving through the crowd were Neanderthals. Bisesa recognized them from distant ice-fringe glimpses during her last time on Mir. Now here they were in court. Mostly very young, they walked with their great heads bowed, their eyes empty, their powerful farmers’ hands carrying delicate trays. They wore purple robes every bit as fine as the courtiers’, as if for a joke.

  Bisesa stood before one extraordinary tapestry. Covering a whole wall, it was a map of the world, but inverted, with south at the top. A great swath of southern Europe, North Africa, and central Asia reaching down into India was colored red and bordered in gold.

  “Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai,” said Captain Grove.

  Accompanying Emeline, he wore his British army uniform, and she a sensible-looking white blouse and long skirt with black shoes. They both looked solidly nineteenth-century amid all the gaudiness of Alexander’s court.

  “I envy you your outfit,” Bisesa said to Emeline, self-conscious in her Babylonian gear.

  “I carry my own steam iron,” Emeline said primly.

  Grove asked Bisesa, “How was my pronunciation?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Bisesa confessed. “Yeh-lu?…”

  Grove sipped his wine, lifting his mustache out of the way. “Perhaps you never met him. He was Genghis Khan’s most senior advisor, before Alexander’s Mongol War. A Chinese prisoner-of-war made good. After the war—you’ll recall Genghis was assassinated—his star waned. But he came here, to Babylon, to work with Alexander’s scholars. The result was maps like that.” He indicated the giant tapestry. “All a bit unnecessarily expensive, of course, but pretty accurate as far as we could see. Helped Alexander no end in planning his campaigns of conquest—and in marking its extent later.

  “Alexander’s campaigns were remarkable, Bisesa—an astounding feat of logistics and motivation. He built a whole fleet in the great harbor here at Babylon, and then had to engineer the whole length of the Euphrates to make the river navigable. He had his fleet circumnavigate Africa, raiding the shore to survive. Meanwhile from Babylon his troops drove east and west, laying rail tracks and military roads, and planting cities everywhere. Took him five years to make ready, then another ten years of campaigning before he had taken it all, from Spain to India. Of course he drained the strength of his people in the process…”

  Emeline touched Bisesa’s arm. “Where is your telephone?”

  Bisesa sighed. “It insisted on being taken back to the temple so that Abdi could download as much of his astronomy observations as possible. It is curious.”

  Emeline frowned. “I admit I struggle to follow your words. What is strangest of all is the obvious affection you feel for this phone. But it is a machine. A thing!”

  Captain Grove smiled. “Oh, it’s not so unusual. Many of my men have fallen in love with their guns.”

  “And in my time,” Bisesa said, “many of our machines are sentient, like the phone. As conscious as you or me. It’s hard not to feel empathy for them.”

  Eumenes approached, a rather chill figure who scattered the flimsy courtiers, though he was as gaudily dressed as they were. “You speak of astronomy. I hope the astronomy we perform here is of a quality to be useful to you,” he said. “The Babylonian priest-hood had a tradition of observing long before we came here. And the telescopes designed by the engineers of the Othic School are as fine as we could make them. But who knows what one may read in a sky that is presumably as manufactured as the earth we walk on?”

  Emeline said, “We have astronomers back in Chicago. Telescopes too, that made it through the Freeze—I mean, the Discontinuity. I know they’ve been observing the planets. Which are all changed, they say, from what they were before—you know. Lights on Mars. Cities! I don’t know much about it. Just what I read in the newspapers.”

  Bisesa and Grove stared at her.

  Bisesa said, “Cities on Mars?”

  And Captain Grove said, “You have newspapers?”

  The chiliarch considered. “There are other—” He hunted for the word. “Scientists. Other scientists in Chicago?”

  “Oh, all sorts,” Emeline said brightly. “Physicists, chemists, doctors, philosophers. The university kept working, after a fashion, and they are establishing a new campus in New Chicago, south of the ice, so they can keep working after we close down the old city.”

  Eumenes turned to Bisesa. “It seems to me you must travel to this Chicago, a place of science and learning from an age more than twenty centuries removed from the days of Alexander. It is there, perhaps, that you will have the best chance of addressing the great question that has propelled you here.”

  Grove warned, “It will take the devil of a time to get there. Months—”

  “Nevertheless it is clearly necessary. I will arrange your transport.”

  Emeline raised an eyebrow. “It looks as if we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other, Bisesa.”

  Bisesa felt bewildered by the suddenness of Eumenes’s decision-making. “You always did understand,” she said. “More than any other of Alexander’s people, you always saw that the key to this whole situation is the Firstborn, the Eyes. Everything else, empires and wars, is a distraction.”

  He grunted. “If I had lacked perceptiveness I should not have survived long at Alexander’s court, Bisesa. You’ll see few others you’ll remember from those days three decades ago. All dispatched in the purges.”

  “All save you,” she said.

  “Not least because I ensured that it was I who organized those purges…”

  There was a peal of trumpets, and a great shouting.

  A troop of soldiers entered the room, sarissae held high. Following them came a grotesque figure in a transparent toga, stick-thin, trembling a little, his brilliantly painted face twisted into a grin. Bisesa remembered: this was Bagoas, a Persian eunuch and favorite of Alexander’s.

  “No longer so pretty as he was,” Eumenes said sternly. “And yet he survives, as I do.” He raised his wine cup in mock salute.

  And then came the King himself. He was surrounded by a group of tough-looking young men in expensive purple robes.

  Waddling as if already drunk, he staggered and might have fallen if not for the way he leaned on a stocky little page who walked beside him. He wore lurid purple robes, and a headdress of ram’s horns rising from a circlet of gold. His face was a memory of the beauty that Bisesa remembered, with that full mouth, and a strong nose that rose straight to a slightly bulging forehead, from which his hair in ringlets had been swept back. His skin, always ruddy, was blotchy and scarred, his cheeks and jowls heavy, and his powerful frame swaddled in fat. Bisesa felt shocked at the change in him.

  The courtiers threw themselves to the floor in obeisance. The soldiers and some of the senior figures stood their ground, gesturing elaborately. The little page who supported him was a Neanderthal boy, his brutish face shining with cream, the thick hair on his head twisted into tight curls. And as the King passed her, Bisesa smelled a stink of piss.

  “Thus the ruler of the world,” Emeline whispered as he passed, sounding rather nineteenth-century frosty to Bisesa.

  “But so he is,” Grove said.

  “He had no choice but to conquer the world again,” Eumenes murmured. “Alexander believes he is a god—the son of Zeus incarnated at Ammon, which is why he wears the robes of Ammon, and the horns. But he was born a man, and only achieved godhood by his conquests. After the Discontinuity all that was wiped away, and so what was Alexander then? It was not to be tolerated. So he began it all over again; he had to.”

  Bisesa said, “But it isn’t as it was before. You say there are steam trains here. Maybe this is a new start for civilization. A unified empire, under Alexander and his successors, fueled by technology.”

  Grove smiled, wistful. “Do you remember poor old Ruddy Kipling used to say the same sort of thing?”

  “I do not think Alexander shares your ‘modern’ dreams,” Eumenes said. “Why should he? There are more of us than you, fa
r more; perhaps our beliefs, overwhelming yours, will shape reality.”

  “According to my history books,” Emeline said a bit primly, “in the old world Alexander died in his thirties. It’s an un-Christian thing to say. But maybe it would have been better if he had died here, instead of living on and on.”

  “Certainly his son thought so,” Eumenes said dryly. “And that is why—look out!” He pulled Bisesa back.

  A squad of soldiers came charging past, their long sarissae lowered. In the middle of the room there was a knot of commotion. Shouting began, and screaming.

  And Alexander had fallen.

  Alexander, isolated on the floor, cried out in his thick Macedonian Greek. His courtiers and even his guards were backing away from him, as if fearful of blame. A vivid red stain spread over his belly. Bisesa thought it was wine.

  But then she saw the little Neanderthal page standing over him, his expression slack, a knife in his massive hand.

  “I was afraid of this,” Eumenes snapped. “It is the anniversary of the War with the Son—and you and your Eye have everybody stirred up, Bisesa Dutt. Captain Grove, get them out of here, and out of the city, as fast as you can. Either that or risk them getting swept up in the purges that will follow.”

  “Understood,” Grove said quietly. “Come, ladies.”

  As Grove shepherded them away, Bisesa looked back over her shoulder. She saw the Neanderthal boy raise his blade again, and step toward Alexander. He moved dully, as if completing a chore. Alexander roared in rage and fear, but still none of the guards moved. In the end it was Eumenes, stiff old Eumenes, who charged through the crowd and barreled the little boy off his feet.

  Outside the city was alight; smoke curled up from torched buildings as news of the assassination attempt spread.

  33: FLIGHT

  In the pale dawn light of the next morning, Bisesa and the others left the city, accompanied by a unit of Eumenes’ personal troops assigned to travel with them all the way to Gibraltar. A scared-looking Abdikadir was assigned too, to go on to America with Bisesa.

  So, only twelve hours after falling out of the Eye, Bisesa was on the move again. She couldn’t even bring her spacesuit with her. All she had of the twenty-first century was her phone, and the power packs from the suit.

  Surprisingly, Emeline comforted her. “Wait until we get to Chicago,” she soothed. “I’ll take you to Michigan Avenue and we’ll go shopping.”

  Shopping!

  Even the first leg of the journey was astonishing.

  Bisesa found herself in an open cart drawn by four beefy Neanderthals, naked as the day they were born, while Macedonian troopers jogged alongside. These “Stone Men” were the property of a man called Ilicius Bloom, who called himself Chicago’s consul at Babylon. He was a shifty type Bisesa immediately distrusted.

  They came to a railway terminus at a place called the Midden, a strange heaped-up little town of houses and ladders and greasy smoke. The terminus itself was a confluence of narrow tracks, a place of huge sheds and brooding locomotives.

  Their carriage was just a crude covered cart with wooden benches, and Emeline made a spiky comment about the contrast with Pullman class. But the locomotive was extraordinary. It looked like a huge animal, an immense black tank that sprawled over the narrow tracks and emitted belches of filthy smoke. Ben Batson said the locos ran on oil, which the trains hauled along in great tanker-cars; oil from Persia was more accessible to Alexander than coal, and Casey Othic had drawn up his designs that way.

  In this unlikely train Bisesa was going to ride to the Atlantic coast. First they would head through Arabia to the great engine yards at Jerusalem, then south and west across the Nile delta where the King had reestablished Alexandria. And then they would journey all the way along the coast of North Africa, through what would have been Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, to the port of the small oceangoing fleet at the Pillars of Hercules.

  Ilicius Bloom said the Midden was as far as he would go with them. He was nervous. “Never known a night like it in Babylon in all these years,” he said. “Not since the War with the Son himself. Bloody Greeks. But I got my job to do; I got my contacts.”

  “And you have a child,” Emeline said sternly.

  “Not my responsibility,” he said. “The mother’s, not mine. Anyhow I’m sticking. Just don’t let them forget I’m here, back home. All right? Don’t forget me!”

  Grove parted from them here too; he was catching a train back to New Troy. But he assigned Ben Batson to escort them to Gibraltar.

  As the train pulled out, Bisesa thought she heard chanting coming from the loco.

  “The engineers are from the School of Othic,” Abdikadir said. “Casey Othic taught them well. He taught them that to do their work as perfectly as possible is to offer worship to the gods—just as a farmer offers a tithe of his crops. So as they work they worship; and as they worship they work.”

  “So the train driver’s a monk,” Bisesa said. “Oh, Casey, what have you done?”

  Ben Batson grinned. “Actually it’s a way of keeping them focused on the job. You have to do your work exactly right, said Mr. Othic, for your homage to be acceptable to the gods. But the trouble is they do things by rote; they don’t like change, which they fear is heretical.”

  “So there’s no innovation,” Bisesa said. “And as Casey’s locos break down one by one—”

  Emeline said, “It is just as in Alexander’s court. Despite their exposure to modernity, these ancient Greeks are slipping back into superstition.”

  Abdi said, “My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.”

  Bisesa studied him. “You’ll have to tell me about your father.”

  Emeline said dryly, “Well, we’ll certainly have time for that.”

  There was no pursuit from Babylon, a capital city in turmoil. But an hour out from Babylon they saw a pitched battle going on, somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, only a couple of kilometers from the rail track.

  Bisesa had lived through Alexander’s war with the Mongols, and she recognized the characteristic formations of the Macedonians. There were the phalanxes of infantry with their bristling sarissae, blocks of men trained to maneuver with such compactness and flexibility that they seemed to flow over the ground without a break in their ranks. The famous cavalry units, the Companions, were wedge-shaped formations driving into the field with their thrusting lances and shields. But this time Macedonian was fighting Macedonian.

  “It’s a serious rebellion then,” Ben Batson murmured. “Of course somebody or other has been trying to bump off Alexander since even before the Discontinuity. Never saw it go this far before. And, look, can you see that stolid-looking bunch over there? Neanderthals. The Macedonians have been using them since their campaigns in Europe. Their handlers say they won’t fight unless you force them. Good for shocking the enemy though.”

  The battle remained fortunately distant from the rail line, and the loco plowed on noisily into the gathering light, leaving the battle behind. But they hadn’t traveled much further before another threat loomed.

  “My word,” Emeline said, pointing. “Man-apes. Look, Bisesa!”

  Looking ahead of the train, Bisesa saw hunched figures on a low dune, silhouetted against the morning sky.

  Abdi said, “Sometimes they attack the trains for food. But they’re getting bolder. Following the tracks toward the city.”

  Purposefully, steadily, the man-apes descended the dune. They walked with a squat gait, their human-like legs under heavy gorilla-like torsos. Their movements were imbued with determination and menace.

  From the rattling, wheezing, slow-moving train, Bisesa watched uneasily. And then she thought she recognized the man-ape who led the advance. An animal with a memorable face, she was one of a pair, mother and infant, captured by Grove’s Tommies in the early days after the Discontinuity. Was this that same child? What had the men calle
d her—Grasper? Well, if it was her, she was older, and scarred, and changed. Bisesa remembered how the captive man-apes, left alone with an Eye, had been subject to a Firstborn interaction of their own. Perhaps this was the result.

  Now Grasper raised her arms high in the air, and revealed the burden that had been concealed by her hirsute body. She carried a stout branch, and impaled upon it was the bloody head of a man. The mouth had been jammed open with a stick, and broken teeth gleamed white in the rays of the setting sun.

  Bisesa felt fear stab her heart. “I think I asked for that lead man-ape to be let loose, once I was gone into the Eye. What a mistake that was.”

  As the train came on them, the man-apes charged. They were met by a volley of arrows from the carriages, but the moving targets were hard to hit, and few man-apes fell. They hadn’t got their timing quite right, however. As the locomotive’s whistle shrieked, hairy bodies hurled themselves at wooden carriages to be met by fists and clubs, and they couldn’t get purchase. One by one the man-apes fell away, capering and hooting in their frustration.

  Abdi said, “Well, we’re seeing it all today…”

  As the train left the man-ape troop behind, Bisesa’s phone beeped gently. She took it from her pocket, watched curiously by the others.

  “Good morning, Bisesa.”

  “So you’re talking to me now.”

  “I have some bad news, and good news.”

  She considered that. “Bad news first.”

  “I have been analyzing the astronomical data collected by Abdikadir and his predecessors at Babylon. Incidentally I would appreciate the chance to study the sky myself.”

  “And?”

  “This universe is dying.”

  She gazed out at the dusty plain, the rising sun, the capering man-apes by the rail track. “And the good news?”

  “I have a call. From Mars, Wells Station. It’s for you,” it added laconically.