Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “I doubt that would be healthy,” Grove said.

  “Man has worshipped destroying gods before. Come. Let us speak to Bisesa Dutt.”

  Abdi escorted them through the crowd and into the temple’s convoluted interior, all the way up to the chamber of the Eye.

  The small room with its scorched brick walls was utterly dominated by the Eye, which floated in the air. By the light of the oil lamps Grove saw his own reflection, absurdly distorted, as if by a fairground trick mirror. But the Eye itself was monstrous, ominous; he seemed to sense its gravity.

  Bisesa had made a kind of nest in one corner of the chamber, of blankets and paper and clothes and bits of food. When Grove and the others walked in, she smiled and clambered to her feet.

  And there was the man-ape. A lanky, powerful mature female, she sat squat in her cage, as still and watchful as the Eye itself. She had clear blue eyes. Grove was forced to turn away from her gaze.

  “My word,” Batson said, holding his nose. “Ilicius Bloom wasn’t lying when he said the stink wasn’t him but the ape!”

  “You get used to it,” Bisesa said. She greeted Batson with a warm handshake, and an embrace for Grove that rather embarrassed him. “Anyhow Grasper is company.”

  “ ‘Grasper’?”

  “Don’t you remember her, Grove? Your Tommies captured a man-ape and her baby on the very day of the Discontinuity. The Tommies called her ‘Grasper’ for the way she uses those hands of hers, tying knots out of bits of straw, for fun. On the last night before we tried sending me back to Earth through the Eye, I asked for them to be released. Well, I think this is that baby, grown tall. If these australopithecines live as long as chimps, say, it’s perfectly possible. I’ll swear she is more dexterous than I am.”

  Grove asked, “How on earth does she come to be here?”

  Eumenes said, “She rather made her own way. She was one of a pack that troubled the western rail links. This one followed the line all the way back to Babylon, and made a nuisance of herself in the farms outside the city. Kept trying to get to the city walls.

  Wouldn’t be driven off. In the end they netted her and brought her into the city as a curiosity for the court. We kept her in Bloom’s cage, but the creature went wild. She wanted to go somewhere, that was clear.”

  “It was my idea,” Abdi said. “We leashed her, and allowed her to lead us where she would.”

  “And she came here,” Bisesa said. “Drawn here just as I was.

  She seems peaceful enough here, as if she’s found what she wanted.”

  Grove pondered. “I do remember how we once kept this man-ape and her mother in a tent we propped up under a floating Eye—

  do you remember, Bisesa? Rather disrespectful to the Eye, I thought. Perhaps this wretched creature formed some sort of bond with the Eyes then. But how the devil would she know there was an Eye here?”

  “There’s a lot we don’t understand,” Bisesa said. “To put it mildly.”

  Grove inspected Bisesa’s den with forced interest. “Well, you seem cheerful enough in here.”

  “All mod cons,” she said, a term that baffled Grove. “I have my phone. It’s a shame Suit Five is out of power or that might have provided a bit more company too. And here’s my chemical toilet, scavenged from the Little Bird. Abdi keeps me fed and cleaned out.

  You’re my interface to the outside world, aren’t you, Abdi?”

  “Yes,” Grove said, “but why are you here?”

  Eumenes said gravely, “You should know that Alexander thinks she is trying to find a way to use the Eye for his benefit. If not for the fact that the King believes Bisesa is serving his purposes, she would not be here at all. You must remember that when you meet him, Captain.”

  “Fair enough. But what’s the truth, Bisesa?”

  “I want to go home,” she said simply. “Just as I did before. I want to get back to my daughter, and granddaughter. And this is the only possible way. With respect, there’s nothing on Mir that matters to me as much as that.”

  Grove looked at this woman, this bereft mother, alone with all this strangeness. “I had a daughter, you know,” he said, and he was dismayed how gruff his voice was. “Back home. You know. She’d be about your age now, I should think. I do understand why you are here, Bisesa.”

  She smiled, and embraced him again.

  There was little more to be said.

  “Well,” Grove said. “I will visit again. We will be here for several more days in Babylon, I should think. I feel I really ought to try to do something for this wretched fellow Bloom. We moderns must stick together, I suppose.”

  “You’re a good man, Captain. But don’t put yourself in any danger.”

  “I’m a wily old bird, don’t you worry…”

  They left soon after that.

  Grove looked back once at Bisesa. Alone save for the watchful man-ape, she was walking around the hovering sphere and pressed her bare hand against the Eye’s surface. The hand seemed to slide sideways, pushed by some unseen force. Grove was awed at her casual familiarity with this utterly monstrous, alien thing.

  He turned away. He was glad he could hide the wetness of his foolish old eyes in the dark of the temple’s corridors.

  60: House

  March 30, 2072

  Paula called, using the optic-fiber link. Since the secession of the sun, the big AIs at New Lowell had been refining their predictions of when the Rip would finally hit Mars.

  “May 12,” Paula said. “Around fourteen hundred.”

  Six weeks. “Well, now we know,” Myra said.

  “I’m told that in the end they will get the prediction down to the attosecond.”

  “That will be useful,” Yuri said dryly.

  Paula said, “Also we’ve been running predictions of the state of your nuclear power plant. You’re aware you’re running out of fuel.”

  “Of course,” Yuri said stiffly. “Resupply has been somewhat problematic.”

  “We predict you’ll make it through to the Rip. Just. It might not be too comfortable in the last few days.”

  “We can economize. There are only two of us here.”

  “Okay. But there’s always room for you here at Lowell.”

  Yuri glanced at Myra, who grinned back. She said, “And leave home? No. Thanks, Paula. Let’s finish it here.”

  “I thought you’d say that. All right. If you change your mind the rovers are healthy enough to pick you up.”

  “I know that, thanks,” Yuri said heavily. “Since one of them is ours.”

  They talked of bits of business, and how they were all coping.

  It was as if Mars’s last summer had been cut drastically short.

  The sun had vanished two months before what should have been midsummer, and the planet’s terminal winter had begun.

  In a way it didn’t make much difference here at the pole, where it had been dark half the time anyhow. Myra’s main loss was the regular download from Earth of movies and news, and letters from home. She didn’t miss Earth itself as much as she missed the mail.

  But if there was a winter routine to fall back on here at Wells, they weren’t so used to darkness down at Lowell, near the equator, and it was a shock when the air started snowing out there. They had none of the equipment they needed to survive. So Yuri and Myra had loaded up one of the pole station’s two specialized snowplow rovers with sublimation mats and other essentials. They left one rover at Lowell for the crew’s use there, and then drove the other rover all the way back to Wells. That journey, a quarter of the planet’s circumference each way through falling dry-ice snow, had been numbing, depressing, exhausting. Myra and Yuri hadn’t left the environs of the base since.

  “We’ll speak again,” Paula said. “Take care.” Her image disappeared.

  Myra looked at Yuri. “So that’s that.”

  “Back to work,” he said.

  “Coffee first?”

  “Give me an hour, and we’ll break the back of some of the day’
s chores.”

  “Okay.”

  The routine work had got a lot harder since the final evacuation.

  Without the scheduled resupply and replacement drops it wasn’t just the nuke that was failing but much of the other equipment as well. And now there were only two of them, in a base designed for ten, and Myra, though she was a quick learner, wasn’t experienced here.

  However Myra had thrown herself into the work. This morning she tended clogging hydroponic beds, and cleaned out a gunged-up bioreactor, and tried to figure out why the water extraction system was failing almost daily. She also had work to do with the AI, managing the flood of science data that continued to pour in from the SEPs and tumbleweed balls and dust motes, even though the sensor systems were steadily falling silent through various defects, or were simply getting stuck in the thickening snow.

  Mostly the AI was able to work independently, even setting its own science goals and devising programs to achieve them. But today was PPP day, planetary protection, when she had to make her regular formal check to ensure the environment was properly sampled in a band kilometers wide around the station, thus monitoring the slow seepage of their human presence into the skin of Mars. There was even a bit of paper she had to sign, for ultimate presentation to an agency on Earth. The paper was never going to get to Earth, of course, but she signed it anyway.

  After an hour or so she had the AI hunt for Yuri. He was supposed to be out in the drill rig tent, mothballing equipment that had been shut down for the final time, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to Hanse Critchfield. In fact he was in Can Six, the EVA station.

  She made some coffee, and carried it carefully through the locks to Six. She kept a lid on the cups; she still hadn’t quite got used to one-third-G coffee sloshes.

  She found Yuri kneeling on the floor of Six. He had gotten hold of a Cockell pulk, a simple dragging sled; adapted for Martian conditions it was fitted with fold-down wheels for running over basalt-hard water ice. He was piling up this little vehicle with a collapsed tent, food packets, bits of gear that looked to have been scavenged from life support.

  She handed him his coffee. “So what now?”

  He sat back and sipped his drink. “I’ve got an unfulfilled ambi-tion. I’ve got many, actually, but this one’s killing me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “An unsupported solo assault on the Martian north pole. I always planned to try it myself. I’d start at the edge of the permanent cap, see, just me and an EVA suit and a sled. And I’d walk, dragging the sled all the way to the pole. No drops, no pickup, nothing but me and the ice.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a thousand kilometers tops, depending on the route you take. The suit would slow me down — and no suit we’ve got is designed for that kind of endurance and mobility; I’d have to make some enhancements. But remember, with one-third G I can haul three times as much as I could in Antarctica, say four hundred kilograms. And in some ways Mars is an easier environment than the Earth’s poles. No blizzards, no white-outs.”

  “You’d have to carry all your oxygen.”

  “Maybe. Or I could use one of these.” He picked up some of his life-support gadgets, a small ice-collector box, an electrolysis kit for cracking water into oxygen and hydrogen. “It’s a trade-off, actually.

  The kits are lighter than oxygen bottles would be, but using them daily would slow me down. I know it’s a stunt, Myra. But it’s one hell of a stunt, isn’t it? And nobody’s tried it before. Who better but me?”

  “You’ve got some mission designing to do, then.”

  “Yes. I could figure it all out during the winter. Then when the summer comes, I could pick some period when Earth is above the horizon to try it. I could get the gear together and try it out on the ice around the base. The darkness wouldn’t make any difference to that.” He seemed pleased to have found this new project. But he looked up at her, uncertain. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “No crazier than any of us. I mean, I don’t think I believe in May 12. Do you? None of us believes it’s ever going to happen, that death will come to us. If we did we couldn’t function, probably. It’s just a bit more definite for us on Mars, that’s all.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she said firmly. She knelt down with him on the cold floor. “Show me how you’re going to pack this stuff up. How would you eat? Unpack the tent twice a day?”

  “No. I thought I’d unpack it in the evening, and eat overnight and in the morning. Then I could have some kind of hot drink through the suit nozzle during the day…”

  Talking, speculating, fiddling with the bits of kit, they planned the expedition, while the frozen air of Mars gathered in snowdrifts around the stilts of the station modules.

  61: Grasper

  It was Grasper who first noticed the change in the Eye.

  She woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of trees. Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images — her mother’s face, the warmth of the nest where she had been born. And the cages. Many, many cages.

  She yawned hugely, and stretched her long arms, and looked around. The tall woman who shared this cave still slept. There was light on her peaceful face.

  Light?

  Grasper looked up. The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the stone chamber.

  Grasper raised a hand toward the Eye. It gave off no heat, only light. She stood and gazed at the Eye, eyes wide, one arm raised.

  Now there was something new again. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.

  And then a fourth set of lines appeared — Grasper tried to follow where they went — but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly.

  She cried out. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her watering eyes. She felt warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood.

  The sleeping woman stirred.

  62: Little Rip

  May 12, 2072

  They began the day wordlessly.

  They followed the routine they had established in the months they had spent together. Even though, when Myra woke, there were only a few hours left before the Little Rip. She couldn’t think of anything else they should be doing.

  Yuri had to begin the day, as he did every day now, by getting suited up for an ice collection expedition. The ISRU water extraction system had finally broken down. So Yuri had to go outside daily to a trench he was digging in the water ice, and with an improvised pickax he broke off slabs of the ice, to carry into the warmth of the house to melt. In fact it wasn’t so difficult; the heavily stratified ice was like a fine-grained sandstone, and it split easily. Once they got the ice inside the house they had to filter out the dust from the sludge that resulted on melting it.

  When he was done with that, Yuri disappeared to do Hanse’s job, as he put it, tending to the power plant and the air system and the other mechanical support systems that kept them alive. He went off whistling, in fact. Yesterday he had got hold of some stuff he had been waiting for. An unpiloted rover had turned up, sent down by the crew of New Lowell; Paula and the crew there had been scavenging equipment from the radioactive ruin of Lowell itself. Yuri had been pleased with what he had found in this last de-livery, and he had been looking forward to his work this morning.

  He had sent the rover back th
e way it came, although the journey would take several days to complete, beyond the day of the Rip.

  Yuri seemed to have an instinct that their sentient machines needed to be kept occupied as much as their human masters, and Myra had no reason to argue with him.

  Myra too went off to work. She had one job she had been saving up for today.

  She scrambled into her EVA suit, as always fully respecting all planetary protection protocols, and went out to the little garden of outdoor plants that were weathering this new Martian winter. A regular task was to blow away the snow, the frozen air that con-gealed out every day. She used a hot-air blower like a fat hairdryer.

  As she worked, Myra was aware of an Eye hovering over the garden. There were Eyes all over the place, even inside some of the base’s hab elements. As usual she deliberately ignored it.

  She made an extra effort today. She left the equipment in as good a condition as she could manage. And she touched the sturdy leathery leaves of each of the plants, wishing she could feel them through her thick-gloved fingers.

  On the last day Bella came back to the locus of Mars.

  From space, from the flight deck of the Liberator, you could see that there was still something there. The thing that had replaced Mars was roughly spherical, and it glowed a dull, dim red, a dying ember. It returned no echoes, and attempts to land a probe on it had ended in the loss of the spacecraft, and if you studied it with a spec-troscope you would see that that strange surface appeared to be receding, that its light was reduced to crimson weariness by redshift.

  It was a knot of mass-energy orbiting where Mars should have been. It exerted a gravity field sufficient to tether a flock of watching spacecraft, and even to keep Mars’s small moons, Phobos and Deimos, circling in their ancient tracks. But it was not Mars.

  Edna said, “It’s just the scar that was left when Mars was cut away.”

  “And today that scar heals,” Bella said.

  She watched softscreen displays that showed more ships arriving, more ghoulish spectators for this last act of the drama. She wondered what was happening on Mars itself — if Mars still existed in any meaningful sense at all.