Firstborn

  “I think you’re crazy, Mum. But it’s magnificent.” Edna grabbed her and kissed her.

  Thales spoke. “This is a secure channel. Bella, Edna—the Q-bomb’s closest approach is a minute away.”

  Secure line or not, the news soon seemed to ripple out. Silence spread through the rooftop marquees, and the massed crowds around Canaveral. Suddenly the mood was soured, fretful. Edna took Thea from John Metternes and clutched her close. Bella grabbed her daughter’s free hand and gripped it hard.

  They looked up into the brilliant sky.

  55: Q-BOMB

  The choice had been made. The bomb was already looking ahead, to the terminus of its new trajectory.

  The blue, teeming world and all its peoples receded behind it.

  Like any sufficiently advanced machine the Q-bomb was sentient to some degree. And its frozen soul was touched by regret when, six months after passing Earth, it slammed into the sands of Mars, and thought ended forever.

  56: MARS 2

  November 2071

  The dust was extraordinary here in Hellespontus, even for Mars, dust museum of the solar system.

  Myra sat in her blister cockpit with Ellie von Devender as the rover plunged over the banks and low dunes. This was the southern hemisphere of Mars, and they were driving through the Hellespontus mountains, a range of low hills not far from the western rim of the Hellas basin. But the rover’s wheels threw up immense rooster-tails, and the stuff just flew up at the windscreens, wiping out any kind of visibility. The infrared scanners, even the radar, were useless in these conditions.

  Myra had been around space technology long enough to know that she had to put her faith in the machinery that protected her. The rover knew where it was going, in theory, and was finding its way by sheer dead reckoning. But it violated all her instincts to go charging blindly ahead like this.

  “But we can’t slow down,” Ellie said absently. “We don’t have time.” She was paging her way through astronomical data—not even looking out the window, as Myra was. But then her primary task was much more significant, the ongoing effort to understand what precisely the Q-bomb had done to Mars since its impact five months ago, an impact that had done little harm in itself, but which had planted a seed of quintessence that would soon shatter Mars altogether.

  “It’s just all this dust,” Myra said. “I didn’t expect these kind of conditions, even on Mars.”

  Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Myra, this area is notorious. This is where a lot of the big global dust storms seem to be born. You didn’t know that? Welcome to Dust Central. Anyhow you know we’re in a rush. If we don’t find that old lady on its hundredth birthday we’re going to let down the sentimental populations of whole worlds.” She grinned at Myra, quite relaxed.

  She was right. As everybody waited for the full extent of the bad news about the planet’s future, the electronic gaze of all mankind had been fixed on Mars and the Martians. It was sympathetic or morbid, depending on your point of view. And of all the frantic activities in advance of the final evacuation of a world, none had caught the public imagination as much as what cynical old hands like Yuri called “treasure hunting.”

  Mars was littered with the relics of the pioneering days of the robot exploration of the solar system, some seventy years of triumph and bitter disappointment that had come to a definitive end when Bob Paxton planted the first human footprint in the red sands. Most of those inert probes and stalled rovers and bits of scattered wreckage still lay in the dust where they had come to rest. The early colonists of Mars had had no energy to spare to go trophy hunting, or a great deal of interest; they had looked to the future, not the past. But now that it appeared that Mars might have no future after all, there had been a clamor to retrieve as many of those old mechanical pioneers as possible.

  It wasn’t a job that required a great deal of specialist skill in Martian conditions, and so it was an ideal assignment for Myra, a Martian by recent circumstance. For safety reasons she couldn’t travel alone on these cross-planet rover jaunts, however, and so she had been assigned Ellie as a companion, a physicist rather than a Mars specialist who might be better employed elsewhere. Ellie had been quite happy to go along with her; she could continue her own work just as well in a moving rover as in a station like Lowell or Wells—better, she said, for there were fewer distractions.

  Of course, Ellie’s work was far more important than any trophy-hunting. Ellie was working with a system-wide community of physicists and cosmologists on predictions of what was to become of Mars. Right now she was looking at deep-sky images of star fields. As far as Myra understood, their best data came not from Mars itself but from studies of the sky: though it was hard to grasp, the distant stars no longer looked the same from Mars as they did from the Earth. It defeated Myra’s imagination how that could possibly be so.

  Anyhow the retrieval program had been successful in terms of its own goals. With the help of orbital mapping Myra and others had reached the Vikings, tonnes of heavy, clunky, big-budget Cold War engineering, where they still sat in the dry, rocky deserts to which cautious mission planners had consigned them. The famous, plucky Pathfinder craft with its tiny robot car had been retrieved from its “rock garden” in the Ares Vallis—that one had been easy; it wasn’t far from Port Lowell, site of the first manned landing. Myra knew that British eyes had been on the retrieval of fragments of the Beagle 2, an intricate, ingenious, toylike probe that had not survived its journey to the Isidis Planitia. And then there had been the recovery of the exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, worn out by journeys that far exceeded their design capabilities. All these antique artifacts were destined for Smithsonian establishments on the Earth and Moon.

  The retrieval expeditions had had scientific goals too. There was some interest in how man-made materials had withstood up to a century of exposure to Martian conditions. And the landing sites were of interest in themselves—otherwise the probes would not have been sent there. So Myra and Ellie had worked through a crash last-minute science program of sampling, mapping, and coring.

  There had even been efforts to retrieve some of the elderly orbiters, still spinning around Mars, long silent. There was universal disappointment when it was discovered that Mariner 9, the very first orbiter, was gone; if it had survived into the 2040s it was surely swallowed up when sunstorm heat caused a general expansion of the Martian atmosphere.

  Myra was glad to have something constructive to do. But she hadn’t expected such intense public scrutiny of her treasure-hunting, with every move being followed by a system-wide audience. The crews had been promised that no images would be returned from the rover cabin itself. But Myra tried never to forget that the rover’s systems could easily be hacked; she could be watched at any moment.

  The day wore on, and the daylight, already murky under the rover’s artificial dust storm, began to fade. Myra began to fret that they would not after all find the wreck of Mars 2, as the light ran out on this anniversary day.

  Then Ellie sat back, staring at a complex graph on her softscreen.

  Myra studied her. She had gotten to know this edgy physicist well enough to understand that she wasn’t given to extravagant displays of any emotion save irritation. This sitting-back and staring was, for Ellie, a major outburst.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, there it is.” Ellie tapped her screen. “The destiny of Mars. We’ve figured it out.”

  “All right. So can you say what it means, in simple terms?”

  “I’m going to have to. According to this message I’m to take part in a three-world press conference on it in a couple of hours. Of course the math is always easier. More precise.” She squinted out at the dust, thinking. “Put it this way. If we could see the sky, and if we had a powerful enough telescope, we would see the most distant stars recede. As if the expansion of the universe had suddenly accelerated. But we would not see the same thing from Earth.”

  Myra pondered that. “So what does that mean???
?

  “The Q-bomb is a cosmological weapon. We always knew that. A weapon derived from the Firstborn’s technology of universe creation. Yes?”

  “Yes. And so—”

  “So what it has done is to project Mars into its own little cosmos. A kind of budding-off. Right now the baby Mars universe is connected smoothly to the mother. But the baby will come adrift, leaving Mars isolated.”

  Myra struggled to take this in. “Isolated in its own universe?”

  “That’s it. No sun, no Earth. Just Mars. You can see that this weapon was just supposed to, umm, detach a chunk of the Earth. Which would have caused global devastation, but left the planet itself more or less intact. It’s too powerful for Mars. It will take out this little world altogether.” She grinned, but her eyes were mirthless. “It will be lonely, in that new universe. Chilly, too. But it won’t last long. The baby universe will implode. Although from the inside it will feel like an explosion. It’s a scale model of the Big Rip that will some day tear our universe apart. A Little Rip, I suppose.”

  Myra pondered this, and didn’t try to pursue the paradox of implosions and explosions. “How can you tell all this?”

  Ellie pointed to the obscured sky. “From the recession of the stars we’ve observed with telescopes on Mars, a recession you wouldn’t see from Earth. It’s an illusion, of course. Actually the Mars universe is beginning to recede from the mother. Or, equivalently, vice versa.”

  “But we can still get off the surface. Get to space, back to Earth.”

  “Oh, yes. For now. There is a smooth interface between the universes.” She peered at her screen and scrolled through more results. “In fact it’s going to be a fascinating process. A baby universe being born in the middle of our solar system! We’ll learn more about cosmology than we have in a century. I wonder if the Firstborn are aware of how much they’re teaching us…”

  Myra glanced uneasily about the cockpit. If they were being hack-watched, this display of academic coldness wasn’t going to play too well. “Ellie. Just rejoin the human race for a minute.”

  Ellie looked at her sharply. But she backed off. “Sorry.”

  “How long?”

  Ellie glanced again at her screen and scrolled through her results. “The data is still settling down. It’s a little hard to say. Ballpark—three more months before the detachment.”

  “Then Mars must be evacuated by, what, February?”

  “That’s it. And after that, maybe a further three months before the implosion of the baby cosmos.”

  “And the end of Mars.” Just six more months’ grace, then, for a world nearly five billion years old. “What a crime,” she said.

  “Yeah. Hey, look.” Ellie was pointing to a crumpled, dust-stained sheet protruding from the crimson ground. “Do you think that’s a parachute?”

  “Rover, full stop.” The vehicle jolted to a halt, and Myra peered. “Magnify…I think you’re right. Maybe the twisters whip it up, and keep it from being buried. What does the sonar show?”

  “Let’s take a look. Rover…”

  And there it was, buried a few meters down under the windblown Martian dust, a squat, blocky shape easily imaged by the sonar.

  “Mars 2,” Myra said.

  Mars 2 was a Soviet probe that had traveled to the planet in 1971, part of a favorable-opposition flotilla that had included the Americans’ Mariner 9. It had attempted its landing in the middle of the worst global dust storm the astronomers had ever seen.

  “It looks like a flower,” Ellie breathed. “Those four petals.”

  “It was a ball of metal about the size of a domestic fridge. The petals were supposed to open up and right it, whichever way up it landed.”

  “Looks like it was doomed by a twisted-up parachute. After coming all this way…”

  Crash-landing not, Mars 2 had been the first human artifact of all to touch the surface of the planet. And it had come down in this very spot precisely a century before, on November 27, 1971. “It made it. And so did we.”

  “Yeah. And now it’s two meters deep under the dust.” Ellie unhooked her harness and got out of her chair. “Fetch a spade.”

  57: BABYLON

  When Captain Nathaniel Grove in Troy heard that Bisesa Dutt had returned to Babylon, he hurried back there with Ben Batson.

  At the Ishtar Gate they met Eumenes, still surviving as chiliarch to an increasingly capricious Alexander. “Bisesa is in the Temple of Marduk,” he said to them in his stilted English. “She will not come out.”

  Grove grimaced. “I might have expected as much. Had that sort of breakdown before. Bad show, bad show. Can we see her?”

  “Of course. But first we must visit another, ah, hermit—and not a voluntary one, I fear. He has been asking to see you, should you return to Babylon. Indeed he has been asking to see any of what he calls ‘the moderns.’”

  It turned out to be Ilicius Bloom, the “consul” from Chicago. Just inside the city walls, not far from the Ishtar Gate, Alexander’s guards had stuck him in a cage.

  The cage was evidently meant for animals. It was open to the elements, and too small for Bloom to stand straight. A guard stood by the cage, one of Alexander’s phalangists, clearly bored. At the back of the cage hung what looked like an animal skin, scraped bare, shriveled and dry.

  Crouched in his filthy rags, his eyes bright white in a grimy face, Ilicius Bloom shuddered and coughed, though the day was not cold, and a stench of raw sewage made Grove recoil. Bloom was pathetically grateful to see them, but he was self-aware enough to notice Grove’s flinch. “You needn’t think that’s me, by the way. They kept a man-ape in here before. Flea-bitten bitch.” He dug around in the dirt. “Look at this—dried man-ape scut!” He flung it at the iron bars of the cage. “At night the rats come, and that’s no fun. And guess where they put the she-ape? In the temple with that loon Bisesa Dutt. Can you believe it? Say, you must help me, Grove. I won’t last much longer in here, you have to see that.”

  “Calm down, man,” Grove said. “Tell us why you’re here. Then perhaps we’ll have a chance of talking you out of it.”

  “Well, I wish you luck. Alexander is thinking of war, you know.”

  “War? Against whom?”

  “Against America. Europe isn’t enough for him—how could it be, when he knows there are whole continents to conquer? But the only source of intelligence he has on America, or rather Chicago, is me.”

  “Ah. And so he’s been questioning you.”

  Bloom held up hands with bloodied fingertips. “You could call it that. Naturally I’ve talked myself hoarse. Now, don’t look down your nose at me, Captain Grove. I’m no British Army officer. And besides I can’t see what difference it makes. Have you seen Alexander recently? I can’t believe the bloated brute will live much longer, let alone oversee a war across the Atlantic. I’ve told him everything I could think of, and when he wanted more I lied freely. What else could I do?

  “But it was never enough, never enough. Look at this.” He shuffled in his cage. Through the thin, grimy cloth of his shirt, Grove saw the striping of whip marks on his back. “And look!” He pointed a clawlike hand at the rag of skin that hung on the wall outside his cage.

  Ben Batson asked, “What is that?”

  “I loved her, you know,” Bloom said now.

  “Who, man?” Grove asked patiently. “Who did you love?”

  “Isobel. You remember, Grove, the girl from the Midden. She gave me a brat! Oh, I was cruel, I was selfish, but that’s me, that is Ilicius Bloom.” He laughed and shook his head. “And yet I loved her, as best my flawed soul was capable. Truly I did.

  “They did this to break me, of course,” Bloom whispered, staring at Grove. “Two Companions, it was. They did it before my eyes. Peeled her like a grape. They took her face off. She lived for long minutes, flayed. Every inch of her body must have been a locus of exquisite agony—think of it! And then—”

  Batson looked at the bit of skin. “My word, Captain, I do bel
ieve—”

  “Come away,” Grove said, pulling him back.

  Bloom flew into a panic. “You can see how I’m fixed. Speak to Eumenes. Tell Mayor Rice. Oh, how I long to hear an American voice again! Please, Grove—” He managed to get his whole arm through the bars of the cage. The guard casually slapped his flesh with the flat of his stabbing-sword. Bloom howled and withdrew.

  Eumenes shepherded Grove and Batson away. “Ilicius Bloom is a dead man. He put himself in danger when he tried to bargain with Alexander over his scraps of knowledge. Then he doomed himself with his lies. He would be in his grave already were it not so cheap to keep him alive. If you wish I will arrange an audience with Alexander about his fate, though I warn you it is likely to do little good, and you would put yourselves in danger…But first,” he said, “you must visit Bisesa Dutt.”

  58: SECESSION

  February 27, 2072

  The shuttle stood on the drab, dusty plain. The sun was a pale disk riding high in the orange sky; it was close to local noon, here on the Xanthe Terra. The ship was a biconic, a fat, clumsy-looking half-cone. It stood at the end of a long scar in the dust, a relic of its own glide-down landing. Right now it stood on end, ready to hurl itself away from Mars and up into orbit. The shuttle’s exposed underside, plastered with dark heat-shield tiles, was scarred from multiple reentries, and the paintwork around its attitude-thruster nozzles was blistered. Rovers stood by, their tracks snaking away to the horizon. Hatches were open in the shuttle’s belly, and men, women and spidery robots labored to haul packages into its hold.

  There was nothing special about this bird, Myra thought, as she stood watching in her Mars suit. This was just a ground-to-orbit truck that had made its routine hops a dozen times, maybe more.