Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 pa-thetically 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 believe—”

  “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 heatshield 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.

  But it was the last spacecraft that would ever leave the surface of Mars.

  Myra knew this was a symbolic moment. Most of Mars’s human population had long gone, along with all they could lift.

  The various AIs that had inhabited the bases and rovers and bits of equipment had, too, been saved as far as possible, according to laws governing the right to protection of Legal Persons (Non-Human); at the very least copies of them had been transmitted to memory stores off-planet. But there was nothing that touched a human heart as much as seeing the last bundle loaded aboard the last ship out, a last footprint, a last hatch closed.

  Which was why cameras rolled, floated, and flew all around this site. And why a delegate of Chinese stood in a huddle, away from the rest. And why the frantic work of loading was being held up by the presence of Bella Fingal, the now-ousted Chair of the World Space Council, in a Mars suit that looked two or three sizes too big for her, who stood surrounded by a small crowd.

  “One hour,” a soft automated voice said in Myra’s helmet. She saw from the subtle reactions of the others that they had all heard the same warning. One hour left to get off Mars before — well, before something unimaginable happened.

  Myra drifted back to join the small crowd, all in their suits, like a clutch of fat green snowmen.

  Bella said now, “A shame we couldn’t have made this last launch from Port Lowell.” They were in fact fifty kilometers from Lowell, out on the Xanthe Terra, a bay on the perimeter of the great Vastitas Borealis. “It would have been fitting to stage the last human lift-off from Mars at the place Bob Paxton and his crew made the first touchdown.”

  “Well, maybe we could have, if Lowell wasn’t still radioactive,”

  Yuri O’Rourke growled a bit sharply. He summoned Hanse Critchfield, who was proudly carrying a display tray of materials.

  “Madam Chair. Here,” he said unceremoniously. “This is a selection of the scientific materials we have been gathering in these last months. Take a look. Samples from a variety of geological units, from the southern highlands to the northern plains to the slopes of the great volcanoes. Bits of ice core from the polar caps, of particular value to me. And, perhaps most precious of all, samples of Martian life. There are relics of the past, look, you see, we even have a fossil here from a sedimentary lake bed, and native organisms from the present day, and samples of the transgenic life-forms we have been experimenting with.”

  Grendel Speth said dryly, “Martians you can eat.”

  Bella
Fingal was a small, tired-looking woman, now nearly sixty. She seemed genuinely touched by the gesture. She smiled through her faceplate. “Thank you.”

  Yuri said, “I’m only sorry that we can’t give you a vial of canal water. Or the tripod leg from a Martian fighting machine. Or an egg laid by a Princess… I wish I could show you a Wernher von Braun glider, too. That was the first serious scheme to get to Mars, you know. They would have glided down to land on the smooth ice at the poles. And if that’s the past, I’m sorry you won’t see Mars’s future. A mature human world, fully participating in an interplanetary economic and political system…”

  Myra touched his arm, and he fell silent.

  Bella smiled. “Yes. This is the end of a human story too, isn’t it?

  No more Martian dreams. But we won’t forget, Yuri. I can assure you that the study of Mars will continue even when the planet itself is lost. We will continue to learn about Mars, and strive to understand.

  “And in this last moment I want to try to tell you again why this has all been worthwhile — even this terrible cost.”

  She said there had been more results from Cyclops.

  The great observatory had been designed before the sunstorm to search for Earthlike worlds. Since the storm, and especially since the return of Athena, its great Fresnel eyes had been turned aside, to peer into the dark spaces between the stars.

  Bella said, “And everywhere the astronomers look, they see refugees.”

  The Cyclops telescopes had seen infrared traces of generation starships, slow, fat arks like the Chinese ships, whole civilizations in flight. And there were immense, flimsy ships with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, scudding before the light of exploding stars. They had even detected narrow-beam laser signals they thought might be traces of efforts to teleport, desperate attempts to send the essence of a living being encoded into a radio signal.

  Myra felt stunned, imaginatively. There was a story, a whole novel, in every one of these brief summaries. “This is the work of the Firstborn. They are everywhere. And everywhere they are doing what they tried to do to us, and the Martians, and at Procyon —eradicating. Why?”

  “If we knew that,” Bella said, “if we understood the Firstborn, we might be able to deal with the threat they pose. This is how our future is going to be, however far we travel, as far as we can see.

  And that’s how we’ve come to this situation, this desolate beach.”

  Bella handed the sample tray to an aide, and took a step back.

  “Would those of you who are leaving now, please come stand behind me?”

  Most of the group stepped forward, including Ellie von Devender, Grendel Speth, Hanse Critchfield. Among those who remained were Myra, and Yuri, and Paula Umfraville. The Chinese stood back too. One of their delegates approached Bella, and told her again that they planned to stay to tend the memorials they had built to their fallen of sunstorm day.

  Bella faced them all. “I understand you’ve plenty of supplies—

  food, power — to see you through until—”

  Yuri said, “Yes, Madam Chair. It’s all taken care of.”

  “I don’t quite understand how you’ll be able to talk to each other — Lowell to the polar station, for instance. Won’t you lose your comms satellites when the secession comes?”

  “We’ve laid land lines,” Paula said brightly. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Fine?” Bella’s face worked. “Not the word I’d use.” She said impulsively, “Please — come with us. All of you. Even now there’s time to change your minds. We’ve room on the shuttle. And my daughter is waiting in orbit on the Liberator, ready to take you home.”

  “Thank you,” Yuri said evenly. “But we’ve decided. Somebody ought to stay. There ought to be a witness. Besides, this is my home, Madam Chair.”

  “My mother is buried here,” said Paula Umfraville. “I couldn’t abandon that.” Her smile was as professional as ever.

  “And I lost my mother here too,” Myra said. “I couldn’t leave with that unresolved.”

  Bella faced Myra. “You know we’ll do what we can to build on the contact that’s been achieved with Mir. I gave you my word on that, and I’ll ensure it’s a promise that’s kept.”

  “Thank you,” Myra said.

  “But you’re going to a stranger place yet, aren’t you? Is there anybody you’d want me to speak to for you?”

  “No. Thank you, Madam Chair.” In the months since the Q-bomb strike, Myra had tried over and over to contact Charlie, and Eugene. There had been no reply. But then they had seceded from her own personal universe long ago. She had tidied her affairs. There was nothing left for her, anywhere but on Mars.

  “With respect, Madam Chair, you must leave now,” Yuri said, glancing at his suit chronometer.

  There was a last flurry of movement around the shuttle, as ladders were dumped, hatches closed. Myra took part in a last round of embraces, of Ellie and Grendel and Hanse, of the Chinese, even of Bella Fingal. But the Mars suits made the hugs clumsy, unsatisfying, deprived of human contact.

  Bella was the last to stand at the foot of the short ramp that led to the biconic’s interior. She looked around. “This is the end of Mars,” she said. “A terrible crime has been committed here, and we humans have been made complicit in it. That is a dreadful burden for us to carry, and our children. But I don’t believe we should leave with shame. More has happened on Mars in the last century than in the previous billion years, and everything that is good has flowed from the actions of mankind. We must remember that. And we must remember lost Mars with love, not with shame.” She glanced down at the crimson dust beneath her feet. “I think that’s all.”

  She walked briskly up the ramp, which lifted to swallow her up inside the belly of the shuttle.

  Myra, Paula, and Yuri had to hurry back to the rover, which drove them off through a kilometer, a safe distance from the launch.

  When the rover stopped they clambered out again, squeezing into their outer suits.

  They stood in a row, Myra between Yuri and Paula, holding hands. They found themselves surrounded by a little crowd of robot cameras, which had rolled or flown or hopped after them.

  When the moment of launch came, the shuttle lifted without fuss. Mars gravity was light; it had always been easy to climb out of its gravity well. The dust kicked up from this last launch quickly fell back through the thin air to the ground, and the shuttle receded into the orange-brown sky, becoming a pale jewel, its vapor trail all but invisible.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Paula. “How long until the light show?”

  Yuri made to look at his watch, and then thought better of it.

  “Not long. Do you want to go back into the rover, get out of these suits?”

  None of them did. Somehow it seemed right to be out here, on the Martian ground, under its eerie un-blue sky.

  Myra looked around. The landscape was just a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. But in a deep ditch not far away there was a mosslike vegetation, green. Life, returned to Mars by the sunstorm and cherished by human hands. She held tightly to her companions. “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this,” she said.

  Yuri said, “Yes—”

  And the light went, just like that, the sky darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. The sun rushed away, sucking all the light with it. The sky turned deep brown, and then charcoal, and then utterly black.

  Myra stood in the dark, clinging to Yuri and Paula. She heard the cameras clatter about, confused.

  It had only taken seconds.

  “I hope the cameras got that,” Yuri murmured.

  “It feels like a total eclipse,” Paula said. “I went to Earth once to see one. It was kind of exciting, oddly…”

  Myra felt excited too, stirred in an unexpected way by this primeval, extraordinary event. Strange lights in the sky. But, standing there in the dark, she felt a flicker of fear when she reminded herself that the
sun was never, ever going to shine on Mars again.

  “So we’re alone in this universe,” Yuri said. “Us and Mars.”

  The ground shuddered gently.

  “Mars quake,” Paula said immediately. “We expected this. We just lost the sun’s tides. It will pass.”

  The rover’s lights came on, flickering before settling to a steady glow. They cast a pool of light over the Martian ground, and Myra’s shadow stretched long before her.

  And there was a circle in the air before her. Like a mirror, full of complex reflections, highlights from the rover’s lamps. Myra took a step forward, and saw her own reflection approach her.

  The thing in the air was about a meter across. It was an Eye.

  “You bastard,” Yuri said. “You bastard!” He bent awkwardly, picked up handfuls of Martian rocks, and hurled them at the Eye.

  The rocks hit with a clatter that was dimly audible through the thin, cold air.

  The ground continued to shake, the small, hard planet ringing like a bell.

  And then a white fleck drifted past Myra’s faceplate. She followed it all the way down to the ground, where it sublimated away.

  It was a snowflake.

  59: Temple

  Abdikadir Omar met them at the Temple of Marduk.

  A loose crowd had gathered around the Temple precinct. Some even slept here, in lean-tos and tents. Vendors drifted slowly among them, selling food, water, and some kind of trinkets, holy tokens.

  They were pilgrims, Abdi said, who had come from as far as Alexandria and Judea.

  “And are they here for the Eye of Marduk?”

  Abdi grinned. “Some come for the Eye. Some for Marduk himself, if they remember him. Some for Bisesa. Some even for the man-ape that’s in there with her.”

  “Remarkable,” Grove said. “Pilgrims from Judea, come here to see a woman of the twenty-first century!”

  Eumenes said, “I sometimes wonder if a whole new religion is being born here. A worship of the Firstborn, with Bisesa Dutt as their prophet.”