Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “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 down 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 radi-ators, 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.

  Bisesa felt oddly glad she had opted to wear her purple Babylonian clothes, as had Abdi, despite the offer of a more formal “suit”

  by Emeline. She felt she wanted to keep her own identity here.

  She whispered to the others, “So this is 1920s Chicago. I think I’m expecting Al Capone.”

  Her phone murmured, “In 1894 Capone was in New York. He couldn’t be here now—”

  “Oh, shut up.” She said to Emeline, “Tell me about Mayor Jacob Rice.”

  “He’s only about thirty — born after the Freeze.”

  “And the son of a mayor?”

  Emeline shook her head. “Not exactly…”

  The hour of the Discontinuity had been shocking for Chicagoans. After all it had started snowing, in July. Excited steve-dores reported icebergs on Lake Michigan. And from their offices in the upper floors of the Rookery and the Montauk, businessmen looked north to see a line of bone white on the horizon. The mayor had been out of town. His deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

  Things deteriorated quickly in those first days. As the food riots worsened, as old folks began to freeze, as the suburbs began to burn, the deputy mayor made his best decision. Recognizing the limits of his own capacity, he formulated an Emergency Committee, a representative sample of the city’s leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago’s powerful unions. Here too was Jane Addams, “Saint Jane,” a noted social reformer who ran a women’s refuge called Hull House, and Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey.

  And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the Columbian Guard, a dedicated police force for the world’s fair, only a year before. The deputy mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

  Under martial law, the Committee clamped down on the gathering crime wave, and tidied up the deputy mayor’s hasty rationing and curfew proclamations. Rice established new medical centers, where a brisk triage system was put in place, and emergency cemeteries were opened up. And as the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swaths, they began to plan for the future.

  Emeline said, “Eventually the Emergency Committee functions got subsumed back into the mayor’s office, but Rice himself was never elected.”

  “But now his son is the mayor,” Abdi murmured. “An un-elected leader, the son of a leader. I smell a dynasty here.”

  “We can’t afford the paper for elections,” Emeline said primly.

  Mayor Rice bustled in. He was followed by a small posse of nervous-looking men, clerks perhaps, though one older man carried a briefcase.

  “Miss Dutt? And Mister — ah — Omar. Good to meet you. And to see you again, Mrs. White…”

  Jacob Rice was a plump young man dressed in a fine suit that showed no sign of patching. His black hair was slicked back, perhaps by some kind of pomade, and his face was sharp, his cold blue eyes intent. He served them brandy in finely cut glass.

  “Now look here, Miss Dutt,” he began briskly. “It’s good of you to see me, and all. I make a point of speaking to every visitor to the city from outside, even though they’re mostly those Greek sort of fellows who are good for nothing but a history lesson, along with a few British from about our own time — isn’t that right?
”

  “The North — West Frontier time slice was from 1885,” she said.

  “I got caught up in it. But in fact I was from—”

  “The year of Our Lord 2037.” He tapped a letter on the desk before him. “Mrs. White here was good enough to tell me a good deal about you. But I’ll be frank with you, Miss Dutt; I’m only interested in your biography, no matter what time you come from, in-sofar as it affects me and my town. I’m sure you can see that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now you come here first of all with news that the world is ending. Is that right?”

  The older man among the cowed-looking array behind him raised a finger. “Not quite, Mr. Mayor. The lady’s claim is that the universe is coming to an end. But the implication is, of course, that it will take our world with it.” He chuckled softly, as if he had made an amusing academic point.

  Rice stared at him. “Well, if that isn’t the all-mightiest nitpick-ing quibble of all time. Miss Dutt, this here is Gifford Oker—

  professor of astronomy at our brand-new University of Chicago.

  Or it was brand new when we all got froze. I invited him here because it seems you have some astronomical stuff to talk about, and he’s the nearest thing to an expert we got.”

  About fifty, grayed, his face all but hidden behind thick spectacles and a ragged mustache, Oker was clutching a battered leather briefcase. His suit was shabby with frayed cuffs and lapels, and his elbows and knees padded with leather. “I can assure you that my credentials are not to be questioned. At the time of the Freeze I was a student under George Ellery Hale, the noted astronomer—

  perhaps you’ve heard of him? We were hoping to establish a new observatory at Williams Bay, which would have featured a suite of modern instruments, including a forty-inch refractor — it would have been the largest such telescope in the world. But it wasn’t to be, of course, it wasn’t to be. We have been able to maintain a program of observations with telescopes that were preserved within the ‘time slice,’ as you put it, Miss Dutt, necessarily smaller and less powerful. And we have performed some spectroscopy, whose results are — well, surprising.”

  Abdi leaned forward. “Professor, I myself have practiced astronomy in Babylon. We obtained the results that are in part the basis of Bisesa’s prediction. We must exchange information.”

  “Certainly.”

  Rice glanced at Emeline’s letter. He read slowly, “ ‘The recession of the distant stars.’ This is what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s right,” Abdi said. “Simply put, it’s as if the stars are fleeing from the sun in all directions.”

  Rice nodded. “Okay. I got that. So what?”

  Oker sighed. He took off his spectacles, to reveal deep-set, weary eyes, and rubbed the lenses on his tie. “You see, Mr. Mayor, the problem is this. Why should the sun be uniquely located at the center of such an expansion? It violates the most basic principles of mediocrity. Even though we have been through the Freeze, the most extraordinary event in recorded history, such principles surely still hold true.”

  Bisesa studied this Professor Oker, wondering how much he could understand. He obviously had a keen enough mind, and had managed to sustain an academic career, of sorts, in the most extraordinary of circumstances. “So what’s your interpretation, sir?”

  He replaced his spectacles and looked at her. “That we are not privileged observers. That if we were living on a world of Alpha Centauri we would observe the same phenomenon — that is to say, we would see the distant nebulae receding from us uniformly. It can only mean that the ether itself is expanding — that is, the invisible material within which all the stars swim. The universe is blowing up like a pudding in an oven, and the stars, like currants embedded in that pudding, are all receding from each other. But to each currant it would seem as if it was the sole point of stillness at the center of the explosion…”

  Bisesa’s knowledge of relativity was restricted to a module in a college course decades ago — that and science fiction, and you couldn’t trust that. But the Chicago time slice had come when Einstein was only fifteen years old; Oker could know nothing of relativity. And relativity was founded on the discovery that the ether, in fact, didn’t exist.

  But she thought Oker had got the picture, near enough.

  She said, “Mr. Mayor, he’s right. The universe itself is expanding. Right now the expansion is pushing the stars apart, the galaxies. But eventually that expansion is eventually going to work its way down to smaller scales.”

  Abdi said, “It will pull the world apart, leaving us all flying in a crowd of rocks. Then our bodies will break up. Then the very atoms of which our bodies are composed.” He smiled. “And that is how the world will end. The expansion that is now visible only through a telescope will fold down until it breaks everything to bits.”

  Rice stared at him. “Cold-blooded little cuss, aren’t you?” He glared down at Emeline’s letter. “All right, you got my attention.

  Now, Miss Dutt, you say you’ve been talking about this with the folks back home. Right? So when is this big bubble going to burst?

  How long have we got?”

  “About five centuries,” Bisesa said. “The calculations are difficult — it’s hard to be sure.”

  Rice stared at her. “Five fucking centuries, pardon me. When we haven’t got food stock to last us five weeks. Well, I think I’ll put that in my ‘pending’ tray for now.” He rubbed his eyes, energetic but obviously stressed. “Five centuries. Jesus Christ! All right, what’s next?”

  Next was the solar system.

  Gifford Oker breathed, “I read your letter, Miss Dutt. You traveled to Mars, in a space clipper. How marvelous your century must be!”

  He preened. “When I was a small boy, you know, I once met Jules Verne. Great man. Very great man. He would have understood about sailing to Mars, I should think!”

  “Can we stick to the point?” Rice snarled. “Jules Verne, Jesus Christ! Just show the lady your drawings, Professor; I can see that’s what you’re longing to do.”

  “Yes. Here is the result of our exploration of the solar system, Miss Dutt.” Oker opened his briefcase, and spread his material over the mayor’s desk. There were images of the planets, some blurry black-and-white photographs, but mostly color images laboriously sketched in pencil. And there were what looked like spectrograph results, like blurred barcodes.

  Bisesa leaned forward. Almost subvocally she murmured, “Can you see?”

  Her phone whispered back, “Well enough, Bisesa.”

  Oker pushed forward one set of images. “Here,” he said, “is Venus.”

  In Bisesa’s reality Venus was a ball of cloud. The spaceprobes had found an atmosphere as thick as an ocean, and a land so hot that lead would melt. But this Venus was different. It looked, at first glance, like an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth from space: swaths of cloud, gray-blue ocean, small caps of ice at the poles.

  Oker said, “It’s all ocean, ocean and ice. We’ve detected no land, not a trace. The ocean is water.” He scrabbled for a spectrograph result. “The air is nitrogen, with some oxygen — less than Earth’s—

  and rather a lot of carbon dioxide, which must seep into the water.

  The oceans of Venus must fizz like Coca Cola!” It was a professor’s well-worn joke. But now he leaned forward. “And there is life there: life on Venus.”

  “How do you know?”

  He pointed to green smudges on some of the drawings. “We can see no details, but there must be animals in the endless seas—

  fish perhaps, immense whales, feeding on the plankton. We can expect it to be more or less like terrestrial analogues, due to processes of convergence,” he said confidently.

  Oker showed more results. On the bare face of the Moon, transient atmospheres and even glimmers of open water pooled in the deep craters and the rills; and again the Chicagoan astronomers thought they saw life.

  There were some extraordinary images of Mercury.
These were blurred sketches of structures of light, like netting, flung over the innermost planet’s dark side, glimpsed at the very limits of visibility. Oker said there was once a partial eclipse of the sun, and some of his students reported that they had seen similar “webs of plasma,” or “plasmoids,” in the tenuous solar air. Perhaps this too was a form of life, much stranger, a life of superhot gases that swam from the fires of the sun to the face of its nearest child.

  Under the cover of a coughing spasm, Bisesa withdrew and murmured to her phone. “Do you think it’s likely?”

  “Plasma life is not impossible,” the phone murmured. “There are structures in the solar atmosphere, bound together by magnetic flux.”

  Bisesa replied grimly, “Yes. We all became experts on the sun in the storm years. What do you think is going on here?”

  “Mir is a sampling of life on Earth, taken during the period when intelligence, mankind, has arisen. The planetologists think Venus was warm and wet when very young. So perhaps Venus has been similarly ‘sampled.’ This seems to be a sort of optimized version of the solar system, Bisesa, each of the worlds, and perhaps slices within those worlds, selected for the maximality of its life. I wonder what’s happening on Europa or Titan in this universe, beyond the reach of the Chicagoans’ telescopes…”

  Now Professor Oker, with a glimmer of a showman’s instinct, was unveiling the climax of his presentation: Mars.

  But this wasn’t the Mars Bisesa had grown up with, and even visited. This blue-gray Mars was more Earthlike even than watery Venus, for here there was plenty of dry land, a world of continents and oceans, capped by ice at the poles, swathed in wispy cloud.

  There was some familiarity. That green stripe might be the Valles Marineris; the blue scar in the southern hemisphere could be the tremendous basin of Hellas. Most of the northern hemisphere appeared to be dry.

  The phone whispered, “Something’s wrong, Bisesa. If Mars, our Mars, were flooded, the whole of the northern hemisphere would be drowned under an ocean.”