Firstborn

  There was some traffic on the roads, horse-drawn carts, even a few people cycling—not a single car anywhere in this version of 1920s Chicago, Bisesa reminded herself. Horse manure stood everywhere, frozen hard on the broken tarmac.

  It was extraordinary, a chill carcass of a city. But it was somehow functioning. There was a church with open doors and candlelit interior, a few shops with “open for business” signs—and even a kid selling newspapers, flimsy single sheets bearing the proud banner Chicago Tribune.

  As they walked, Bisesa glimpsed Lake Michigan, to the east. It was a sheet of ice, brilliant white, dead flat as far as the eye could see. Only at the shore was the ice broken up, with narrow leads of black open water, and near the outlet of the Chicago river men labored to keep the drinking-water inlet pipes clear of ice, as they had been forced to since the very first days after the Freeze.

  People moved around on the lake. They were fishing at holes cut into the ice, and fires burned, the smoke rising in thin threads. Somehow the folk out there looked as if they had nothing to do with this huge wreck of a city at all.

  Emeline said, panting as they walked, “The city’s not what it was. We’ve had to abandon a lot of the suburbs. The working town’s kind of boiled down to an area centered on the Loop—maybe a half-mile to a mile in each direction. The population’s shrunk a lot, what with the famine and the plagues and the walkaways, and now the relocation to New Chicago. But we still use the suburbs as mines, I suppose you would say. We send out parties to retrieve anything we can find, clothes and furniture and other stores, and wood for the fires and the furnaces. Of course we’ve had no fresh supplies of coal or oil since the Freeze.”

  It turned out providing lumber was Emeline’s job. She worked in a small department attached to the Mayor’s office responsible for seeking out fresh sources of wood, and organizing the transport chains that kept it flowing into the habitable areas of the city.

  “A city like this isn’t meant to survive in such conditions,” Abdi said. “It can endure only by eating itself, as a starving body will ultimately consume its own organs.”

  “We do what we must,” Emeline said sharply.

  The phone murmured, “Ruddy visited Chicago once—on Earth, after the date of the Discontinuity. He called it a ‘real city.’ But he said he never wanted to see it again.”

  “Hush,” Bisesa said.

  Emeline’s apartment turned out to be a converted office on the second floor of a skyscraper called the Montauk. The building looked skinny and shabby to Bisesa, but she supposed it had been a wonder of the world in the 1890s.

  The apartment’s rooms were like nests, the walls and floors and ceilings thick with blankets and furs. Improvised chimney stacks had been punched in the walls to let the smoke out, but even so the surfaces were covered with soot. But there was some gentility. In the living room and parlor stood upright chairs and small tables, delicate pieces of furniture, clearly worn but lovingly maintained.

  Emeline served them tea. It was made from Indian leaves from carefully hoarded thirty-year-old stock. By such small preservations these Chicagoans were maintaining their identity, Bisesa supposed.

  They hadn’t been back long when one of Emeline’s two sons showed up. Aged around twenty he was the younger by a year, called Joshua after his father. He came in carrying a string of fish; breathing hard, red-faced, he had been out on Lake Michigan. Once he had peeled out of his furs he turned out to be a tall young man, taller than his father had ever been. And yet he had something of Josh’s openness of expression, Bisesa thought, his curiosity and eagerness. He seemed healthy, if lean. His right cheek was marked by a discolored patch that might have been a frostbite scar, and his face glistened with an oil that turned out to be an extract of seal blubber.

  Emeline took the fish away to skin and gut. She returned with another cup of tea for Joshua. He politely took the cup, and swigged the hot tea down in one gulp.

  “My father told me about you, Miss Dutt,” Joshua said uncertainly to Bisesa. “All that business in India.”

  “We came from different worlds.”

  “My father said you were from the future.”

  “Well, so I am. His future, anyhow. Abdikadir’s father came through with me too. We were from the year 2037, around a hundred and fifty years after your father’s time slice.”

  His expression was polite, glazed.

  “I suppose it’s all a bit remote to you.”

  He shrugged. “It just doesn’t make any difference. All that history isn’t going to happen now, is it? We won’t have to fight in your world wars, and so on. This is the world we’ve got, and we’re stuck with it. But that’s fine by me.”

  Emeline pursed her lips. “Joshua rather enjoys life, Bisesa.”

  It turned out he worked as an engineer on the rail lines out of New Chicago. But his passion was ice-fishing, and whenever he got time off he came back up to the old city to get into his furs and head straight out on the ice.

  “He even writes poems about it,” Emeline said. “The fishing, I mean.”

  The young man colored. “Mother—”

  “He inherited that from his father, at least. A gift for words. But of course we’re always short of paper.”

  Bisesa asked, “What about his brother—your older son, Emeline? Where is he?”

  Her face closed up. “Harry went walkaway a couple of years back.” This was clearly distressing to her; she hadn’t mentioned it before. “He said he’d call back, but of course he hasn’t—they never do.”

  Joshua said, “Well, he thinks he’s going to be put under arrest if he comes back.”

  “Mayor Rice declared an amnesty a year ago. If only he’d get in touch, if only he’d come back just for a day, I could tell him he has nothing to fear.”

  They spoke of this a little, and Bisesa began to understand. Walkaway: some of Chicago’s young people, born on Mir and seduced by the extraordinary landscape in which they found themselves, had chosen to abandon their parents’ heroic struggle to save Chicago, and the even more audacious attempt to build a new city south of the ice. They simply walked off, disappearing into the white, or the green of the grasslands to the south.

  “It’s said they live like Eskimos,” said Joshua. “Or maybe like Red Indians.”

  “Some of them even took reference books from the libraries, and artifacts from the museums, so they could work out how to live,” Emeline said bitterly. “No doubt many of these young fools are dead by now.”

  It was clear this was a sore point between mother and son; perhaps Joshua dreamed of emulating his older brother.

  Emeline cut the conversation short by standing to announce she was off to the kitchen to prepare lunch: they would be served Joshua’s fish, cleaned and gutted, with corn and green vegetables imported from New Chicago. Joshua took his leave, going off to wash and change.

  When they had gone, Abdi eyed Bisesa. “There are tensions here.”

  “Yes. A generation gap.”

  “But the parents do have a point, don’t they?” Abdi said. “The alternative to civilization here is the Stone Age. These walkaways, if they survive, will be illiterate within two generations. And after that their only sense of history will be an oral tradition. They will forget their kind ever came from Earth, and if they remember the Discontinuity at all, it will become an event of myth, like the Flood. And when the cosmic expansion threatens the fabric of the world—”

  “They won’t even understand what’s destroying them.” But, she thought wistfully, maybe it would be better that way. At least these walkaways and their children might enjoy a few generations of harmony with the world, instead of an endless battle with it. “Don’t you have the same kinds of conflict at home?”

  Abdi paused. “Alexander is building a world empire. You can think that’s smart or crazy, but you’ve got to admit it’s something new. It’s hard not to be swept up. I don’t think we have too many walkaways. Not that Alexander would allow it if we did,
” he added.

  To Bisesa’s astonishment a telephone rang, somewhere in the apartment. It was an old-fashioned, intermittent, very uncertain ring, and it was muffled by the padding on the walls. But it was ringing. Telephones and newspapers: the Chicagoans really had kept their city functioning. She heard Emeline pick up, and speak softly.

  Emeline came back into the lounge. “Say, it’s good news. Mayor Rice wants to meet you. He’s been expecting you; I wrote him from New Chicago. And he’ll have an astronomer with him,” she said grandly.

  “That’s good,” Bisesa said uncertainly.

  “He’ll see us this evening. That gives us time to shop.”

  “Shop? Are you kidding?”

  Emeline bustled out. “Lunch will be a half-hour. Help yourself to more tea.”

  44: ATHENA

  The Mars deck was like a corridor that rose gradually in either direction, so that as you walked there was the odd sense that you were always at the low point of a dip, never climbing out of it. The gravity was the easy one-third G Myra had got used to on Mars itself. The décor was Martian red-ocher, the plastic surfaces of the walls, the bits of carpet on the floor. There were even tubs of what looked like red Martian dirt with the vivid green of terrestrial plants, mostly cacti, growing incongruously out of them.

  It was hard to believe she was in space, that if she kept on walking she would loop the loop and end up back in this spot.

  Alexei was watching her reaction. “It’s typical Earth-born architecture,” he said. “Like the bio domes on Mars with the rainstorms and the zoos. They don’t see that you don’t need all this, that it just gets in the way…”

  Certainly it all seemed a bit sanitized to Myra, like an airport terminal.

  Lyla led the three of them to an office just off the main corridor. It was nothing unusual, with a conference table, the usual softscreen facilities, a stand of coffee percolators and water jugs.

  And here Athena spoke to them.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here today.”

  Nobody laughed. Yuri dumped the bags in the corner of the conference room, and they helped themselves to coffee.

  Myra sat down and looked up into the empty air challengingly. “My mother always did say you had a reputation as a comedian.”

  “Ah,” said Athena. “Aristotle called me skittish. I never had the chance to speak to Bisesa Dutt.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “But I spoke to many of those who knew her. She is a remarkable woman.”

  Myra said, “She always said she was an ordinary woman to whom remarkable things kept happening.”

  “But others might have crumbled in the face of her extraordinary experiences. Bisesa continues to do her duty, as she sees it.”

  “You speak of her in the present tense. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you suspect, don’t you, Myra?”

  “I don’t understand how I’m talking to you. Why are you here?”

  “Watch,” Athena said gently.

  The lights in the room dimmed a little, and a holographic image coalesced on the tabletop before them.

  Ugly, bristling, it looked like some creature of the deep sea. In fact it was a denizen of space. It was called the Extirpator.

  The day before the sunstorm, Athena had woken to find herself ten million kilometers from Earth. Aristotle and Thales, mankind’s other great electronic minds, were with her. They had been downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

  The three of them huddled together, in an abstract electronic manner. And then—

  When the images from Procyon died, they all needed a break.

  They went out onto the Mars deck. Myra sipped a cola. While Yuri swung improvised pendulums to study the varying artificial gravity, Alexei and Lyla explored it. If you sat down, you were heavier than when you stood up. If you threw a ball any distance, it would be deflected sideways by the spin. And if you ran against the spin, you grew lighter. Laughing, they raced each other along the corridor in big Moonwalk bounds.

  Watching them play, Myra was reminded just how young these Spacers all really were.

  All of them were reluctant to go back and face Athena again, and talk about what she had discovered on a planet eleven light-years away.

  “So those swimmers bred themselves to extinction,” Alexei said. “Sol, what a thing to do.”

  Yuri said, “Better that than let the Firstborn win.”

  “It took us two years to find a way to beam me back home,” Athena said softly. “We didn’t want to broadcast our existence to a dangerous universe. So we put together an optical laser—quite powerful, but a tight beam. And when the time came, with my data stream encoded into it, we fired it off at Earth. We anticipated that it would be picked up by Cyclops, which was at the planning stage before the sunstorm.”

  “It was risky,” Myra said. “If Cyclops hadn’t been built after all—”

  “We had no choice but to make the gamble.”

  Yuri asked, “Why you, of the three?”

  Athena paused. “We drew lots, after a fashion.”

  “And the others—”

  “The signal took everything we had, everything Witness could give us. Though Witness lived, there was nothing left to sustain the others. They gave themselves for me.”

  Myra wondered how Athena, an AI with such a complicated biography, felt about this. As the “youngest” of the three, it must have felt as if her parents had sacrificed themselves to save her. “It wasn’t just for you,” she said gently. “It was for all of us.”

  “Yes,” Athena said. “And you see why I had to be sent home.”

  Myra looked at Alexei. “And this is what you’ve kept from me for so many weeks.”

  Alexei looked uncomfortable.

  “It was my request, Myra,” Athena said smoothly.

  Yuri was staring at his hands, which were splayed out on the table before him. He looked as stunned as Myra felt. She asked, “What are you thinking, Yuri?”

  “I’m thinking that we have crashed through a conceptual barrier today. Since the sunstorm there has always been something of a human-centered bias to our thinking about the Firstborn, I believe. As if we implicitly assumed they were a threat aimed at us alone—our personal nemesis. Now we learn that they have acted against others, just as brutally.” He lifted his hands and spread them wide in the air. “Suddenly we must think of the Firstborn as extensive in space and time. Shit, I need another coffee.” Yuri got up and shambled over to the percolators.

  Alexei blew out his cheeks. “So now you know it all, Myra. What next?”

  Myra said, “This material should be shared with the Earth authorities. The Space Council—”

  Alexei pulled a face. “Why? So they can throw more atomic bombs, and arrest us all? Myra, they think too narrowly.”

  Myra stared at him. “Didn’t we all work together during the sunstorm? But now here we are back in the old routine—they lie to you, you lie to them. Is that the way we’re all going into the dark?”

  “Be fair, Myra,” Yuri murmured. “The Spacers are doing their best. And they’re probably right about how Earth would react.”

  “So what do you think we should we do?”

  Yuri said, “Follow the Martians’ example. They trapped an Eye—they struck back.” He laughed bitterly. “And as a result of that, right now the only bit of Firstborn technology we have is there on Mars, sitting under my ice cap.”

  “Yes,” Athena said. “It seems that the focus of this crisis is the pole of Mars. I want you to return there, Myra.”

  Myra considered. “And when we get there?”

  “Then we must wait, as before,” Athena said. “The next steps are largely out of our hands.”

  “Then whose?”

  “Bisesa Dutt’s,” murmured Athena.

  An alarm sounded, and the walls flashed red.

  Lyla tapped her ident patch and listened to the air. “It’s the Astropol cops do
wn on Earth deck,” she said. “We must have a leak. They are coming for you, Myra.” She stood.

  Myra followed her lead. She felt dazed. “They want me? Why?”

  “Because they think you will lead them to your mother. Let’s get out of here. We don’t have much time.”

  They hurried from the room, Alexei muttering instructions to the Maxwell.

  45: MAYOR

  Shopping in Chicago turned out to be just that. Remarkably, you could stroll along Michigan Avenue and other thoroughfares, and inspect the windows of stores like Marshall Field’s where goods were piled up on display and mannequins modeled suits and dresses and coats. You could buy fur coats and boots and other cold-weather essentials, but Emeline would only look at “the fashion,” as she called them, which turned out to be relics of the stores’ 1890s stock, once imported from a vanished New York or Boston, lovingly preserved and much patched and repaired since. Bisesa thought Emeline would have been bewildered to be faced with the modernity of thirty-two years later on Earth, the fashions of 1926.

  So they shopped. But the street outside Marshall Field’s was half-blocked by the carcass of a horse, desiccated, frozen in place where it had fallen. The lights in the window were smoky candles of seal blubber and horse fat. And though there were some young people around, they were mostly working in the stores. All the shoppers, as far as Bisesa could see, were old, Emeline’s age or older, survivors of the Discontinuity picking through these shabby, worn-out relics of a lost past.

  Mayor Rice’s office was deep in the guts of City Hall.

  Hard-backed chairs had been drawn up before a desk. Bisesa, Emeline, and Abdi sat in a row, and were kept waiting.

  This room wasn’t swathed with insulation like Emeline’s apartment. Its walls were adorned with flock wallpaper and portraits of past dignitaries. A fire burned hugely in a hearth, and there was central heating too, a dry warmth supplied by heavy iron radiators, no doubt fed by some wood-burning monster of a furnace in the basement. A telephone was fixed to the wall, a very primitive sort, just a box with a speaking tube, and an ear trumpet you held to your head. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked, defiantly set to Chicago standard railway time, four P.M., just as it had been for thirty-two years, despite the difference of opinion expressed by the world outside.