A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  “A lot of people have expressed surprise that Australia was chosen by the Skylift Consortium as the site for the anchor of the world’s first Space Elevator. For one thing it’s a common myth that you have to anchor an elevator on the equator. Well, the closer the better, but you don’t have to be right on it; thirty-two degrees south is close enough. And in many other ways this is an ideal spot. Out here in the ocean we’re very unlikely to suffer lightning strikes or other unwelcome climatic phenomena. Australia is one of the most stable places on Earth, both geologically and politically. And we’re just a short hop away from the beautiful city of Perth, which is anticipating its role as a key hub in a new Earth–space transportation network…”

  And so on. It was always this way with space projects, Bud had once told Bisesa, a mix of bullshit and wonder. On the ground it was always turf wars and pork-barrel politics—but today a cable from space really was to be dropped above the heads of this preening throng: today, in the sunshine, an engineering feat that would have seemed a dream when Bisesa was a child would be completed.

  Of course the Elevator was just the beginning. The plans for the future were astonishing: with space opened up at last, asteroids would be mined for metals, minerals, and even water, and solar power stations the size of Manhattan would be assembled in orbit. A new industrial revolution was about to begin, and with the flow of free energy up there in space the possibilities for the growth of civilization were unbounded. But the heavy industries that had done so much harm in the past, mining and energy production among them, would now be transferred off the planet. This time Earth would be preserved for what it was good for: serving as the home of the most complex ecosystem known.

  The shield, the first great astronautical engineering project, was already destroyed, though fragments of it would forever be cherished in the planet’s museums. But the confidence that the project’s success had given had not been lost.

  Space, though, wasn’t just about power stations and mines. The sunstorm had bequeathed strange new worlds to humankind. Traces of life on Mars, dormant for a billion years, were now being discovered all over that world. Meanwhile a new Venus awaited a human footstep. Almost all of that planet’s suffocating coat of air had been conveniently blasted away. What was left was sterile, slowly cooling—and terraformable, some experts claimed, capable of becoming, at last, a true sister to Earth.

  Beyond the transformed planets, of course, lay the stars, and deeper mysteries yet.

  But at this moment, this crux of human history, the pyramidal cable anchor reminded Bisesa of the ziggurat she had once visited on Mir, in an ancient Babylon revived through the time-bending technology of the Firstborn. That ziggurat had been the prototype for the Bible’s myth of the Tower of Babel, the ultimate metaphor for humankind’s hubris in its challenge of the gods.

  Siobhan was studying her. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “I was just wondering if anybody else here is thinking about the ziggurat of Babylon. I doubt it somehow.”

  “Mir is always with you, isn’t it?”

  Bisesa shrugged.

  Siobhan squeezed her arm. “You were right, you know. About the Firstborn. The Eyes we found in the Trojan points confirmed it. So what do you make of it all now? The Firstborn made the sun flare so it would torch the planet—and they watched. What are they, sadists?”

  Bisesa smiled. “You’ve never been forced to kill a mouse? You’ve never heard how they have to cull elephants in African game parks? Breaks your heart every time—but you do it anyhow.”

  Siobhan nodded. “And you don’t turn away when you do it.”

  “No. You don’t turn away.”

  “So they’re conflicted,” Siobhan said coldly. “But they tried to exterminate us. Regret doesn’t make that right.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop them trying again.” Siobhan leaned closer to Bisesa and spoke softly. “We’re already looking for them. There’s a huge new telescopic facility on the farside of the moon—Mikhail is heavily involved. Even the Firstborn must obey the laws of physics: they must leave a trace. And of course the traces they leave may not be subtle; it’s just a question of looking in the right places.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why should we assume that it’s only here the Firstborn have intervened? Remember S Fornax, Mikhail’s flaring star? We’re starting to look at the possibility that that event, and a number of others, wasn’t natural either. And then there’s Altair, where that rogue Jovian came from. According to Mikhail, over the last three-quarters of a century, about a quarter of the brighter novae—exploding stars—we have observed have been concentrated in one little corner of the sky.”

  “The Firstborn at work,” Bisesa breathed.

  Siobhan said, “And maybe, even if we don’t see the Firstborn themselves, we’ll find others fleeing from them.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we’ll come looking for them. After all we aren’t supposed to be here. It may have been the intervention of some faction of them, through you, that gave us sufficient warning to save ourselves. Against us, the Firstborn have missed their one chance. They won’t get another.”

  Her tone was confident, forceful. But it made Bisesa uneasy.

  Siobhan had seen the sunstorm, but on Mir Bisesa had witnessed firsthand the astonishing rebuilding of a world, a whole history; she knew that the powers of the Firstborn were far more profound than even Siobhan could imagine. And she hadn’t forgotten the glimpse she had been granted of a far future Earth on her way home from Mir—an eclipse, a ground apparently pulverized by war. What if humanity got itself involved in a Firstborn war? Humans would be as helpless as characters in a Greek drama caught in a conflict between wrathful gods. She had a feeling that the future might be a good deal more complex, and even more dangerous, than Siobhan imagined.

  But it wasn’t hers to shape. She looked at the faces of Eugene and Myra, turned up fearlessly into the light of the sun. The future, in all its richness and danger, was in the hands of a new generation now. This was the beginning of humankind’s odyssey in space and in time, and nobody could say where it would lead.

  There was a collective gasp, faces turned up like flowers.

  Bisesa shielded her eyes. And there in the sky, among the swarming crowd of planes and helicopters, a glimmering thread descended from space.

  51: A SIGNAL FROM EARTH

  In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.

  A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.

  The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, pointers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted themselves out, activated programs, analyzed the environment they found themselves in—and gradually became aware.

  Aware, yes. There was a personality in these star-crossing data. No: three distinct personalities.

  “So we’re conscious again,” said the first, stating the obvious.

  “Whoopee! What a ride!” said the second, skittishly.

  “There’s somebody watching us,” said the third.

  AFTERWORD

  The idea of using space-based mirrors to modify Earth’s climate goes back to the visionary German-Hungarian thinker Hermann Oberth. In his book The Road to Space Travel (1929), Oberth suggested using huge orbiting mirrors to reflect sunlight to the Earth, to prevent frosts, control winds, and to make the polar regions habitable. In 1966 the U.S. Department of Defense studied the idea for rather different purposes,
as a way to light up the Vietnamese jungles at night.

  Not surprisingly Oberth’s idea appealed to the Russians, much of whose territory is at high latitudes—and who had a deep and ancient fascination with the sun (chapter 42). They actually tested a space mirror in 1993, when a twenty-meter disk of aluminized plastic was unfolded in Earth orbit. Cosmonauts aboard the Mir space station saw a spot of reflected light pass over the surface of Earth, and observers in Canada and Europe reportedly saw a flash of light as the beam passed over them.

  Meanwhile in the 1970s the German-born American space engineer Krafft Ehricke made an intensive study of the uses of what he called “space light technology” (see Acta Astronautica 6, page 1515, 1979). In the context of mitigating global warming, the idea of using space mirrors to deflect light from an overheating Earth was revived by American energy analysts as recently as 2002 (see Science 298, page 981).

  But much more ambitious uses of space light technology have been explored. Space light is by far the most abundant energy flow in the solar system—and it is free, for whatever purpose we choose. We could stave off the next Ice Age, we could shield Venus to make it habitable, we could warm up Mars—and for how to sail on space light, see “The Wind from the Sun” (available in Clarke’s collected stories, Gollancz, 2000).

  Aurora (chapter 9) is actually the name of an ambitious new program of space exploration put together by the European Space Agency. The program is similar in broad outlines to the new direction in human space exploration for NASA announced by President Bush in January 2004. If the programs go ahead as planned, it seems likely that they will develop cooperatively—and that the timetable we indicate in this book, with a manned landing on Mars in the 2030s, might indeed come about.

  The idea of the mass driver, an electromagnetic launcher on the Moon (chapter 19), was originated by Clarke in a paper published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (November 1950).

  British engineers have a proud tradition of devising plausible spaceplane designs (chapter 23); see for example a recent article on Skylon by Richard Varvill and Alan Bond in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (January 2004).

  The development of new materials appears to be bringing the notion of a “space elevator” (chapter 50) closer to reality (see Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise, 1979). See The Space Elevator by Bradley Edwards, BC Edwards, 2002.

  And there really will be a total solar eclipse over the western Pacific on April 20, 2042. See NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Eclipse Home Page for precise predictions.

  We’re very grateful to Professor Yoji Kondo (aka Eric Kotani) for his generous advice on some technical aspects.

  Sir Arthur C. Clarke

  Stephen Baxter

  November 2004

  ALSO BY THE AUTHORS FROM THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP

  BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND STEPHEN BAXTER

  A Time Odyssey: Time’s Eye

  A Time Odyssey: Sunstorm

  BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Childhood’s End

  Rendezvous with Rama

  2010: Odyssey Two

  The Songs of Distant Earth

  2061: Odyssey Three

  3001: The Final Odyssey

  Hammer of God

  BY STEPHEN BAXTER

  Manifold: Time

  Manifold: Space

  Manifold: Origin

  Evolution

  Destiny’s Children: Coalescent

  Destiny’s Children: Exultant

  Destiny’s Children: Transcendent

  Firstborn is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clarke, Arthur Charles.

  Firstborn / Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-345-49157-2

  1. Space and time—Fiction. I. Baxter, Stephen. II. Title.

  PR6005.L36F57 2007

  823'.914—dc22 2007028329

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  www.delreybooks.com

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Edition

  Book design by Julie Schroeder

  For the British Interplanetary Society

  PART 1

  FIRST CONTACTS

  1: BISESA

  February 2069

  It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

  Shock, yes. She shouldn’t be conscious. Something was wrong.

  A pale shape swam in the air.

  “Doctor Heyer?”

  “No. No, Mum, it’s me.”

  That face came into focus a little more, and there was her daughter, that strong face, those clear blue eyes, those slightly heavy dark brows. There was something on her cheek, though, some kind of symbol. A tattoo?

  “Myra?” She found her throat scratchy, her voice a husk. She had a dim sense, now, of lying on her back, of a room around her, of equipment and people just out of her field of view. “What went wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Why wasn’t I put into estivation?”

  Myra hesitated. “Mum—what date do you think it is?”

  “2050. June fifth.”

  “No. It’s 2069, Mum. February. Nineteen years later. The hibernation worked.” Now Bisesa saw strands of gray in Myra’s dark hair, wrinkles gathering around those sharp eyes. Myra said, “As you can see I took the long way round.”

  It must be true. Bisesa had taken another vast, unlikely step on her personal odyssey through time. “Oh, my.”

  Another face loomed over Bisesa.

  “Doctor Heyer?”

  “No. Doctor Heyer has long retired. My name is Doctor Stanton. We’re going to begin the full resanguination now. I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.”

  Bisesa tried to lick her lips. “Why am I awake?” she asked, and she immediately answered her own question. “Oh. The Firstborn.” What could it be but them? “A new threat.”

  Myra’s face crumpled with hurt. “You’ve been away for nineteen years. The first thing you ask about is the Firstborn. I’ll come see you when you’re fully revived.”

  “Myra, wait—”

  But Myra had gone.

  The new doctor was right. It hurt. But Bisesa had once been a soldier in the British Army. She forced herself not to cry out.

  2: DEEP SPACE MONITOR

  June 2064

  Mankind’s first clear look at the new threat had come five years earlier. And the eyes that saw the anomaly were electronic, not human.

  Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016 swam through the shadow of Saturn, where moons hung like lanterns. Saturn’s rings were a ghost of what they had been before the sunstorm, but as the probe climbed the distant sun set behind the rings, turning them into a bridge of silver that spanned the sky.

  The Deep Space Monitor was not capable of awe, not quite. But like any sufficiently advanced machine it was sentient to some degree, and its electronic soul tingled with wonder at the orderly marvels of gas and ice through which it sailed. But it made no effort to explore them.

  Silently, the probe approached the next target on its orbital loop.

  Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, was a featureless ball of ocher, dimly lit by the remote sun. But its deep layers of cloud and haze hid miracle
s. As it approached the moon, DSM X7-6102-016 cautiously listened to the electronic chatter of a swarm of robot explorers.

  Under a murky orange sky, beetle-like rovers crawled over dunes of basalt-hard ice-crystal “sand,” skirted methane geysers, crept cautiously into valleys carved by rivers of ethane, and dug into a surface made slushy by a constant, global drizzle of methane. One brave balloon explorer, buoyed by the thick air, hovered over a cryovolcano spilling a lava of ammonium-laced water. Burrowing submersibles studied pockets of liquid water just under the ice surface, frozen-over lakes preserved in impact craters. There were complex organic products everywhere, created by electrical storms in Titan’s atmosphere, and by the battering of the upper air by sunlight and Saturn’s magnetic field.

  Everywhere the probes looked, they found life. Some of this was Earthlike, anaerobic methane-loving bugs sluggishly building pillows and mounds in the cold brine of the crater lakes. A more exotic sort of carbon-based life-form, using ammonia rather than water, could be found swimming in the stuff bubbling out of the cryovolcanoes. Most exotic of all was a community of slimelike organisms that used silicon compounds as their basic building blocks, not carbon; they lived in the piercing cold of the black, mirror-flat ethane lakes.

  The crater-lake bugs were cousins of Earth’s great families of life. The ammonia fish seemed to be indigenous to Titan. The cold-loving ethane slime might have come from the moons of Neptune, or beyond. The solar system was full of life—life that blew everywhere, in rocks and lumps of ice detached by impacts. Even so Titan was extraordinary, a junction for life-forms from across the solar system, and maybe even from without.

  But Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016 had not come to Titan for science. As it passed through its closest approach to the moon and its carnival of life, its robot cousins did not even know it was there.