Firstborn

  “Thank you. But the strike failed.” She spread her hands. “So what do you think I should do now?”

  Cassie considered. “Everybody saw that collision, on Earth and beyond it. They know something just happened. The question is, what do you tell them?”

  “The truth? That the world is going to end by Christmas Day?” She laughed, and wasn’t sure why. “Bob Paxton would say, what about panic?”

  “People have faced tough times before,” Cassie said. “Generally they come through.”

  “Mass hysteria is a recognized phenomenon, Cassie. Documented since the Middle Ages, when you have severe social trauma, and a breakdown of trust in governments. It’s a significant part of my job to ensure that doesn’t happen. And you’ve already told me the governments I work for aren’t trusted.”

  “Okay. You know your job. But people will have preparations to make. Family. If they know.”

  Of course that was true. Looking at Cassie’s set, determined face, the face of a woman with children of her own under threat, Bella thought she could use this woman at her side in the days and weeks to come. A voice of sanity, amid the ranting and the angry.

  And somebody was ranting at her right now. She glanced down to see the choleric face of Bob Paxton, yelling to get her attention. Reluctantly she turned up the volume.

  “We got one option left, Chair. Maybe we ought to exhaust that, before we start handing out the suicide pills.”

  “Bisesa Dutt.”

  “We’ve been pussyfooting around with these fuckers on Mars. Now we got to go get that woman out of there and into a secure unit. Earth’s future clearly depends on it. Because believe me, Chair Fingal, we ain’t got nothing else.” He paused, panting hard.

  Cassie murmured, “I’m not sure what he’s talking about. But if there is another option—” She took a breath. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I guess this isn’t like the sunstorm, when we all had to know what was coming to build the shield. This time there’s nothing we can do. You can spare people the disruption of knowing as long as this final option is still available. And then, when there really is no hope—”

  “So we lie to the human race.”

  “Say it was a weapons test gone wrong. Why, that’s almost true.”

  Bella pointed to Edna’s image. “Thales, I want to send a message to Liberator. Your highest level of security.”

  “Yes, Bella.”

  “Look, Cassie, are you free for the next few hours? I think I’d like to talk a little more.”

  Cassie was surprised. But she said, “Of course.”

  “Channel opened. Go ahead, Bella.”

  “Edna, it’s me. Listen, dear, I have a new mission for you. I need you to go to Mars…”

  As she spoke, she glanced at her calendar. Only months were left. From now on, she sensed, whatever happened, the tension would rise, and the pace of events accelerate inexorably. She only hoped she would be able to exercise sound judgment, even now.

  PART 4

  DECISIONS

  47: OPTIONS

  July 2070

  Yuri came running in. He spread his softscreen out on the crew table. “At last I got the stuff downloaded from Mir…”

  The screen began to fill up with images of worlds, blurry photographs, and blue-green pencil sketches.

  Wells Station’s Can Two, the “house,” had one big inflatable table, used for crew meals, conferences, as a work surface. The table was modular; it could be split up into two or three. It was another bit of confinement psychology, Myra understood. The crew didn’t even have to eat together, if they chose not.

  Right now all the bits of the big table were pushed together. For days it had been used as the focus of a kind of unending conference. Yuri was trying to make sense of the alternate-Mars images Bisesa’s phone had slowly, painfully returned through the low-bandwidth Eye link. Ellie was slaving over her analysis of the Eye’s gravitational cage. Only Hanse Critchfield wasn’t working on some aspect of the Q-bomb threat, insisting he was more use with his beloved machines.

  And Myra, Alexei, and Grendel Speth, with comparatively little to contribute, sat glumly at the scuffed table, cups of cool low-pressure coffee before them.

  There was a sense of shabbiness in this roundhouse on Mars, Myra thought, compared to the expensive, expansive, light-filled environs of Cyclops. Yet, as Athena kept assuring them, they were at the focus of a response to a danger of cosmic proportions. The detonation in the asteroid belt had been visible on all the human worlds. Much of Earth had shut down, a civilization still traumatized by the sunstorm huddled in bunkerlike homes, waiting.

  But time was running out. And on Mars there was a sense of rising panic. The Earth warship Liberator was now only days away, and they all knew why it was coming.

  “All right,” Yuri said. “Here’s what we’ve got. As I understand it, the consensus among us is that the Mir universe contains a set of time-sliced samples. A showcase of solar life at its optimum on each world.”

  “All Sol’s children at their prettiest,” Grendel said. “But it can’t last. I mean, both Venus and Mars must have reached their peak of biodiversity in the early days of the solar system, when the sun was much cooler. As best anybody can tell, the Mir sun is a copy from the thirteenth century. That sun is too hot for these worlds. They can’t last long.”

  “But,” Yuri growled, “the point is, here are the worlds of the solar system as they were in the deep past. The question is how they got from past to present, what happened that made them as they are today. Now, look at Venus. We think we understand this case,” he said. “Right? A runaway greenhouse, the oceans evaporating, the water broken up by the sunlight and lost altogether…”

  Once Venus had been moist, blue and serene. Too close to the sun, it overheated, and its oceans evaporated. With the water lost to space Venus had developed a new thick atmosphere, a blanket of carbon dioxide baked out of the seabed rock, and the greenhouse effect intensified until the ground started to glow, red-hot.

  “A horror show, but we understand it. For Venus, our models fit,” said Yuri. “Yes? But now we turn to Mars. Mars was once Earthlike; but, too small, too far from the sun, it dried and cooled. We understand that much. But look at this.”

  He displayed contrasting profiles, of the ancient Mars on which they stood, and the young Mars of the Mir universe. The northern hemisphere of ancient Mars was visibly depressed beneath the neat circular arc of its younger self.

  “Something happened here,” Yuri said, his anger burning. “Something hugely violent.”

  Myra saw it. It must have been like a hammer to the crown of the skull, a tremendous blow centered here, at the north pole. It had been powerful enough to create the Vastitas Borealis, like a crater that spanned the whole of the northern hemisphere.

  They all saw the implication, immediately.

  “A Q-bomb,” Alexei said. “Scaled to Mars’s mass. And directed here, at the north pole. This would be the result. By Sol’s tears. But why? Why hit Mars, and not Venus?”

  “Because Venus was harmless,” Yuri snapped. “Venus was a water-world. If intelligence rose there at all it would have been confined to some seabed culture, using metals from geothermal vents or some such. They just didn’t put out the kind of signals you could see from afar. Roads, cities.”

  “But the Martians did,” Myra said.

  And their reward had been a mighty, sterilizing impact.

  Grendel was growing excited. “I think we’re seeing elements of a strategy here. The Firstborn’s goal seems to be to suppress advanced technological civilizations. But they act with—economy. If a star system is giving them cause for concern, they first hit it with a sunstorm. Crude, a blanket blowtorching, but a cheap way of sterilizing an entire system. I bet if we dig deep enough we’ll find a relic of at least one more sunstorm in the deep past. But if the sunstorms don’t work, if worlds continue to be troublesome, they strike more surgically. Just as they targeted Mars. Just as they
’ve now targeted Earth.”

  “You’ve got to admit they’re thorough,” Yuri said.

  Alexei said, “And we know from Athena and her Witness that we aren’t the only ones. The Firstborn’s operations are extensive in space and in time. ‘A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.’ The Book of Joel.”

  Myra raised her eyebrows. “Let’s not be hypocrites. Maybe the megafauna of Australia and America felt much the same way about us.”

  “They’re like gods,” Alexei said, still in apocalyptic mood. “Maybe we should worship them.”

  “Let’s not,” Yuri said dryly. “The Martians didn’t.”

  “That’s right,” Ellie said now. She came bustling into the room with a softscreen. “The Martians struck a blow. And maybe we can too.” In the midst of their huddled, fearful gloom, Ellie was grinning.

  “Remember this?” Ellie spread out her softscreen so they could all see a now-familiar string of symbols:

  “I’ve had my analysis agents speculating about what these could mean. They’ve come to a consensus—about bloody time too—but I think it makes sense.”

  “Tell us,” Yuri snapped.

  “Look at these shapes. What do you see?”

  Alexei said, “Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon. So what?”

  “How many sides?”

  Yuri said, “Three, four, five, six.”

  “And what if you continued the sequence? What next?”

  “Seven sides. Heptagon. Eight. Octagon.” He was at a loss, and glanced at Myra. “Nonagon?”

  “Sounds plausible,” Myra said.

  “And then?” Ellie insisted.

  Alexei said, “Ten sides, eleven, twelve—”

  “And if you go on and on? Where does the sequence end?”

  “At infinity,” Myra said. “A polygon with an infinite number of sides.”

  “Which is?”

  “A circle…”

  Yuri asked, “What do you think you have here, Ellie?”

  “The Martians couldn’t avert their own Q-bomb, or whatever the Firstborn used on them. But I think this is a symbolic record of what they did achieve. Starting with what they could build—see, a triangle, a square, simple shapes—they somehow extrapolated out. They built on their finite means to capture infinity. And they trapped an Eye that must have been located right under ground zero, waiting to witness the destruction.” She glanced at Alexei. “They did challenge the gods, Alexei.”

  Grendel grunted. “How uplifting,” she said sourly. “But the Martians got wiped out even so. What a shame they aren’t around for us to ask them for help.”

  “But they are,” Ellie said.

  They all stared at her.

  Myra’s mind was racing. “She’s right. What if there were a way to send a message, not to our Mars, but to Mir’s? Oh, there are no spaceships there.”

  “Or radios,” Alexei put in.

  Myra was struggling. “But even so…”

  Yuri snapped, “What the hell would you say?”

  Ellie said rapidly, “We could just send these symbols, for a start. That’s enough to show we understand. We might provoke Mir’s Martians into reacting. I mean, at least some of them may come from a time-slice where they’re aware of the Firstborn.”

  Grendel shook her head. “Are you serious? Your plan is, we’re going to pass a message to a parallel universe, where we hope there is a Martian civilization stranded out of time in a kind of space-opera solar system. Have I got that right?”

  “I don’t think it’s a time for common sense, Grendel,” Myra said. “Nothing conventional the navy has tried has worked. So we need an extraordinary defense. It took a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to come up with the sunstorm shield, after all, and an unprecedented effort to achieve it. Maybe we’ve just got to do the same again.”

  There was a torrent of questions and discussion. Was the chancy comms link through the Martian Eye to Bisesa’s antique phone reliable enough to see this through? And how could the nineteenth-century Americans of an icebound Chicago talk to Mars anyhow? Telepathy?

  Many questions, but few answers.

  “Okay,” Yuri asked slowly. “But the most important question is, what happens if the Martians do respond? What might they do?”

  “Fight off the Q-bomb with their tripod fighting machines and their heat rays,” Grendel said mockingly.

  “I’m serious. We need to think it through,” Yuri said. “Come up with scenarios. Ellie, maybe you could handle that. Do some wargaming on the bomb’s response.”

  Ellie nodded.

  Alexei said, “Even if Bisesa does find a way to do this, maybe we ought to keep some kind of veto, while we try to figure out how the Martians might react. And we should pass this back to Athena. The decision shouldn’t stay just with us.”

  “Okay,” Yuri said. “In the meantime we can get to work on this. Right? Unless anybody’s got a better idea.” His anger had mutated to a kind of exhilaration. “Hey. Why the gloomy faces? Look, we’re like a bunch of hibernating polar bears up here. But if this works, the eyes of history are on us. There’ll be paintings of the scene. Like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Alexei played along. “If that’s true I wish I’d shaved.”

  “Enough of the bullshit,” Grendel said. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

  They broke up and got busy.

  48: A SIGNAL TO MARS

  Once again Bisesa, Abdi, and Emeline were summoned to Mayor Rice’s office in City Hall.

  Rice was waiting for them. He had his booted feet up on the desk and puffed cigar smoke. Professor Gifford Oker, the astronomer from the university, was here too.

  Rice waved them to chairs. “You asked for my help,” he snapped. He held up Bisesa’s letter, with doodles of the Martian symbols, a triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon. “You say we need to send this here message to the Martians.”

  Bisesa said, “I know it sounds crazy, but—”

  “Oh, I deal with far more crazy stuff than this. Naturally I turned to Gifford here for advice. I got back a lot of guff about ‘Hertzian electromagnetic waves’ and Jules Verne ‘space buggies.’ Hell, man, space ships! We can’t even string a railroad between here and the coast.”

  Oker looked away miserably, but said nothing; evidently he had been brought here simply for the humiliation.

  “So,” Rice went on, “I passed on this request to the one man in Chicago who might have a handle on how we might do this. Hell, he’s seventy-nine years old, and after the Freeze he gave his all on the Emergency Committee and whatnot, and it’s not even his own damn city. But he said he’d help. He promised to call me at three o’clock.” He glanced at a pocket watch. “Which is round about now.”

  They all had to wait in silence for a full minute. Then the phone on the wall jangled.

  Rice beckoned to Bisesa, and they walked to the phone. Rice picked up the earpiece and held it so Bisesa could make out what was said. She caught only scraps of the monologue coming from the phone, delivered in a stilted Bostonian rant. But the gist was clear.

  “…Signals impossible. Set up a sign, a sign big enough to be seen across the gulf of space…The white face of the ice cap is our canvas…Dig trenches a hundred miles long, scrape those figures in the ice as big as you dare…Fill ’em up with lumber, oil if you have any. Set ’em on fire…The light of the fires by night, the smoke by day…Damn Martians have to be blind not to see them…”

  Rice nodded at Bisesa. “You get the idea?”

  “Assuming you can get the labor to do it—”

  “Hell, a team of mammoths dragging a plow will do it in a month.”

  “Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.” Bisesa shook her head. “In any other context that would seem extraordinary. One thing, Mr. Mayor. Don’t set the fires until I confirm we
should. I’ll speak to my people, make sure…It’s a drastic thing we’re attempting here.”

  He nodded slowly. “All right. Anything else?”

  “No. Signals scraped in the ice. Of course that’s the way to do it. I should have thought of it myself.”

  “But you didn’t,” Rice said, grinning around his cigar. “It took him to figure it out. Which is why he is who he is. Right? Thank you,” he said into the phone. “You saved the day once again, sir. That’s swell of you. Thank you very much, Mr. Edison.” And he hung up. “The Wizard of Menlo Park! What a guy!”

  49: AREOSYNCHRONOUS

  August 2070

  The Liberator slid into synchronous orbit over Mars. Libby rolled the ship so that the port beneath Edna’s feet revealed the planet.

  Edna had been in GEO before, synchronous orbit above Earth. This experience was similar; Mars from areosynchronous orbit looked much the same size as Earth from GEO, a planet the size of a baseball suspended far beneath her feet. But the sunlight here was diminished, and Mars was darker than Earth, a shriveled ocher fruit compared to Earth’s sky-bright vibrancy. Right now Mars was almost exactly half full, and Edna could make out a splash of brilliance reflected from the domes of Port Lowell, almost exactly on the terminator line, precisely below the Liberator.

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” she said.

  John Metternes grunted. “I can’t believe why we’re here.”

  Yet here they were. Nobody on all the worlds of mankind could have been unaware of Liberator as she cut across the solar system in a shower of exotic antimatter products, and she wasn’t shrouded now. Edna wondered how many Martian faces were turned up to the dawn sky right now, peering at a bright new star at the zenith. It was hoped, indeed, that the Liberator’s very visible presence would simply intimidate the Martians into giving up what Earth wanted.

  There was a chime, indicating an incoming signal.

  John checked his instrument displays. “The firewalls are up.”