A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  The Deep Space Monitor’s complex heart was a space probe built to a century-old design philosophy, with an angular frame from which sprouted booms holding sensor pods and radiothermal-isotope power units. But this inner core was surrounded by a rigid shell of “metamaterial,” a mesh of nanotechnological washers and wires that shepherded rays of sunlight away from the probe and sent them on their way along paths they would have taken had the probe not been present at all. The Deep Space Monitor was not blind; the shell sampled the incoming rays. But with light neither reflected nor deflected, it was rendered quite invisible. Similarly it was undetectable on any wavelength of radiation from hard gamma rays to long radio waves.

  DSM X7-6102-016 was not an explorer. Shrouded, silent, it was a sentry. And now it was heading for an encounter of the sort for which it had been designed.

  As it skimmed over the cloud tops of Titan, the moon’s gravity field slingshot X7-6102-016 onto a new trajectory that would take it out of the plane of the Saturn system, high above the rings. All this in radio silence, without a puff of rocket exhaust.

  And DSM X7-6102-016 approached the anomaly.

  It detected cascades of exotic high-energy particles. And it was brushed by a powerful magnetic field, a ferocious electromagnetic knot in space. It reported to Earth, sending a stream of highly compressed data using sporadic laser bursts.

  The Deep Space Monitor had no means of adjusting its course without compromising its shroud, and so it sailed on helplessly. It should have missed the anomaly by perhaps half a kilometer.

  Its last observation, in a sense its last conscious thought, was of a sudden twisting of the anomaly’s strong magnetic field.

  DSM X7-6102-016’s final signals showed it receding at enormous, impossible speeds. They were signals the probe’s makers could neither believe nor understand.

  Like any sufficiently advanced machine the anomaly was sentient to some degree. The destruction it had been designed to inflict was for the future, and did not yet trouble it. But it was touched by a hint of regret at the smashing of the puppyish machine that had followed it so far, with its laughable attempt at concealment.

  Alone, the anomaly sailed through Saturn’s system, harvested momentum and kinetic energy from the giant planet, and flung itself toward the distant sun, and the warm worlds that huddled around it.

  3: ABDIKADIR

  2068 (Earth); Year 31 (Mir)

  On Mir the first hint of the coming strangeness would have been mundane, if not for its utter incongruity.

  Abdikadir was irritated when the clerk called him away from the telescope. It was a clear night, for once. The first-generation refugees from Earth always complained about the cloudiness of Mir, this stitched-together world in its own stitched-together cosmos. But tonight the seeing was fine, and Mars swam high in the cloudless sky, a brilliant blue.

  Before the clerk’s interruption the observatory on the roof of the Temple of Marduk was a scene of silent industry. The main instrument was a reflector, its great mirror ground by Mongol slaves under the command of a Greek scholar of the School of Othic. It returned a fine if wavering image of the face of Mars. As Abdi observed, his clerks turned the levers that swung the telescope mount around to counterbalance the rotation of the world, thus keeping Mars steadily in the center of Abdi’s field of view. He sketched hastily at the pad strapped to his knee; industry in Alexander’s world-empire had not yet advanced to the point where photography was possible.

  Of Mars, he could clearly see the polar caps, the blue seas, the ocher deserts crisscrossed by bands of green-brown and blue, and even a glimmer of light from the alien cities that were believed to nestle in the dead caldera of Mons Olympus.

  It was while he was engaged on his labor, intent on exploiting every second of the seeing, that the clerk came to Abdi. Spiros was fourteen, an Othic student, third-generation Mir-born. He was a bright, imaginative boy but prone to nervousness, and now he could barely stammer out his news to an astronomer not a decade older than he was.

  “Calm down, boy. Take a breath. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “The chamber of Marduk—” The very heart of the temple on whose roof they both stood. “You must come, Master!”

  “Why? What will I see?”

  “Not see, Master Abdi—hear.”

  Abdi glanced once more at his eyepiece, where even now Mars’s blue light glimmered. But the boy’s agitation was convincing. Something was wrong.

  With ill grace he clambered down from his seat at the eyepiece, and snapped at one of his students. “You, Xenia! Take over. I don’t want to waste a second of this seeing.” The girl hurried to comply.

  Spiros ran for the ladder.

  “This had better be worth it,” Abdi said, hurrying after the boy.

  They had to descend, and then climb back up inside the temple’s carcass, for the chamber of the great god Marduk was near the very apex of the complex. They passed through a bewildering variety of rooms lit by oil lamps burning smokily in alcoves. Long after the temple’s abandonment by its priests there was still a powerful smell of incense.

  Abdi walked into Marduk’s chamber, peering around.

  Once this room had contained a great golden statue of the god. During the Discontinuity, the event that created the world, the statue had been destroyed, and the walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat. Only the statue’s base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet. The chamber was a ruin, as if wrecked by an explosion. But it had been this way all Abdi’s life.

  Abdi turned on Spiros. “Well? Where’s the crisis?”

  “Can’t you hear?” the boy asked, breathless. And he stood still, his finger on his lips.

  And then Abdi heard it, a soft chirruping almost like a cricket—but too regular, too even. He glanced at the wide-eyed boy, who was frozen with fear.

  Abdi stepped into the center of the room. From here he could tell the chirruping was coming from an ornately carved shrine, fixed to one wall. He approached this now, and the sound grew louder.

  For the sake of face before the boy, Abdi tried to keep his hand from trembling as he reached out to the small cupboard at the very center of the shrine, and pulled open its door.

  He knew what the shrine contained. This pebble-like artifact had come from the Earth to Mir. Belonging to a companion of Abdi’s father’s called Bisesa Dutt, it had been cherished for years, and then lodged here when its power finally failed.

  It was a phone.

  And it was ringing.

  PART 2

  JOURNEYS

  4: WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES

  February–March 2069

  Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.

  In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.

  Well, for nineteen years she had had no pulse, no blood, no electrical activity in her brain, her tissues had consumed no oxygen, and she had been held in a fridge almost cold enough to rupture her cells. You had to expect to be a bit sore.

  Hibernaculum 786 had changed while she had been in the tank. Now it felt like an upmarket hotel, all glass walls and white floors and plastic couches, and old, old people—at least they looked old—in dressing gowns, walking very tentatively.

  Most drastically of all the Hibernaculum had been moved. When she got to a viewing window, she found herself overlooking an immense wound in the ground, a dusty canyon with strata piled up in its scree-littered walls like the pages of a tremendou
s book. It was the Grand Canyon, she learned, and it was a spectacular sight—rather wasted on the sleepers in the Hibernaculum, she thought.

  She found it disturbing in retrospect that the complicated refrigerator within which she had slept her dreamless sleep had been disconnected, uprooted, and shipped across the continent.

  As her convalescence continued she took to sitting before a bubble window, peering out at the canyon’s static geological drama. She had made only one tourist-trip visit to the canyon before. Judging by the way the sun cycled through the spring sky she must be on the south rim, perhaps somewhere near Grand Canyon Village. The local flora and fauna seemed to have recovered from the global battering of the sunstorm; the land was littered with cacti, yucca, and blackbush. In her patient watching she spotted a small herd of bighorn sheep, and glimpsed the slinking form of a coyote, and once she thought she saw a rattlesnake.

  But if the canyon had recovered, much else seemed to have changed. On the eastern horizon she made out a kind of structure, a flat metallic array raised on legs, like the framework of an uncompleted shopping mall. Sometimes she saw vehicles driving around and under it. She had no idea what it could be.

  And sometimes in the sky she saw lights. There was one bright, moving spark, panning over the southern evening sky in forty minutes or so: something big in orbit. But there were odder sights to be seen, much more extensive: pale patches in the blue daylight, glimmerings of swimming starlight at night. A strange sky in this new age. She thought she ought to be curious, or possibly afraid, but at first she was not.

  That all changed when she heard the roar. It was a deep rumble that seemed to make the very ground shudder, more geological than animal.

  “What was that?”

  “Bisesa? You asked a question?”

  The voice was smooth, male, a little too perfect, and it came out of the air.

  “Aristotle?” But she knew it could not be, even before he answered.

  There was an odd delay before he replied. “I’m afraid not. I am Thales.”

  “Thales, of course.”

  Before the sunstorm there had been three great artificial intelligences on the human worlds, remote descendants of the search engines and other intelligent software agents of earlier technological generations, and all of them friends of mankind. There were rumors that copies of them had been saved, as streams of bits squirted off into interstellar space. But otherwise only Thales had survived the sunstorm, stored in the simpler networks of the sturdy Moon.

  “I’m glad to hear your voice again.”

  Pause. “And I yours, Bisesa.”

  “Thales—why these response delays? Oh. Are you still lodged on the Moon?”

  “Yes, Bisesa. And I am restricted by lightspeed delay. Just like Neil Armstrong.”

  “Why not bring you down to Earth? Isn’t it kind of inconvenient?”

  “There are ways around it. Local agents can support me when time delay is critical—during medical procedures, for instance. But otherwise the situation is deemed satisfactory.”

  These responses sounded rehearsed to Bisesa. Even scripted. There was more to Thales’s location on the Moon than he was telling her. But she didn’t have the spark to pursue the matter.

  Thales said, “You asked about the roar.”

  “Yes. That sounded like a lion. An African lion.”

  “So it was.”

  “And what is an African lion doing here, in the heart of North America?”

  “The Grand Canyon National Park is now a Jefferson, Bisesa.”

  “A what?”

  “A Jefferson Park. It is all part of the re-wilding. If you will look to your right….”

  On the horizon, beyond the north rim, she saw blocky shapes, massive, like boulders on the move. Thales caused the window to magnify the image. She was looking at elephants, a herd of them complete with infants, an unmistakable profile.

  “I have extensive information on the park.”

  “I’m sure you have, Thales. One thing. What’s the structure over there? It looks like scaffolding.”

  It turned out to be a power mat, the ground station of an orbital power station, a collector for microwaves beamed down from the sky.

  “The whole facility is rather large, ten kilometers square.”

  “Is it safe? I saw vehicles driving around underneath it.”

  “Oh, yes, safe for humans. Animals too. But there is an exclusion zone.”

  “And, Thales, those lights in the sky—the shimmers—”

  “Mirrors and sails. There is a whole architecture off Earth now, Bisesa. It’s really quite spectacular.”

  “So they’re building the dream. Bud Tooke would have been pleased.”

  “I’m afraid Colonel Tooke died in—”

  “Never mind.”

  “Bisesa, there are human counselors you can speak to. About anything you like. The details of your hibernation, for instance.”

  “It was explained to me before I went into the freezer…”

  The Hibernacula were a product of the sunstorm. The first of them had been established in America before the event, as the rich sought to flee through the difficult years ahead to a time of recovery. Bisesa hadn’t entered hers until 2050, eight years after the storm.

  “I can talk you through the medical advances since your immersion,” Thales said. “For example it now appears that your cells’ propensity for hydrogen sulphide is a relic of a very early stage in the evolution of life on Earth, when aerobic cells still shared the world with methanogens.”

  “That sounds oddly poetic.”

  Thales said gently, “There is the motivational aspect as well.”

  She felt uncomfortable. “What motivational aspect?…”

  She had had reasons to flee into the tanks. Myra, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, had married against Bisesa’s advice, and pledged herself to a life off the Earth entirely. And Bisesa had wanted to escape the conspiracy-theory notoriety that had accrued about her because of her peculiar role in the sunstorm crisis, even though much of what had gone on in those days, even the true cause of the sunstorm, was supposed to have been classified.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “going into a Hibernaculum was a public service. So I was told when I signed over my money. My trust fund went to advance the understanding of techniques that will one day be used in everything from transplant organ preservation to crewing centuries-long starship flights. And in a world struggling to recover after the storm, I had a much lower economic footprint frozen in a tank—”

  “Bisesa, there is a growing body of opinion that Hibernaculum sleeping is in fact a sort of sublimated suicide.”

  That took her aback. Aristotle would have been more subtle, she thought. “Thales,” she said firmly. “When I need to speak to someone about this, it will be my daughter.”

  “Of course, Bisesa. Is there anything else you need?”

  She hesitated. “How old am I?”

  “Ah. Good question. You are a curiosity, Bisesa.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”

  She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”

  “Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”

  “Yes. And the other five years?”

  “Are the years you spent on Mir.”

  She nodded. “You know about that?”

  “It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”

  She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.

  “Thank you, Thales.”

  “It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.

  5: LONDON

  Bella Fingal was in the air above London when her daughter first brought her the bad news from the sky.

  Bella had been flown in across the Atlantic, and her plane was heading for Heathrow, ou
t in the suburbs to the west of central London. But the pilot told her the flight path would see them over-fly to the east first and then come back west along the path of the Thames, into the headwinds, and on this bright March morning the city was a glittering carpet spread out for her. Bella had the plane all to herself, one of the new scramjets, a fancy chariot for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother.

  But she really didn’t want to be making this trip. The funeral of James Duflot had been bad enough; coming to the grieving family’s home would be worse. It was however her duty, as Chair of the World Space Council.

  She had wandered into this job almost by accident, probably a compromise choice by the supra-governmental panel that controlled the Space Council. In a corner of her mind she had thought that her new post would be pretty much an honorary one, like most of the university chancellorships and nonexecutive directorships that had come her way as a veteran of the sunstorm. She hadn’t imagined getting shipped across the planet to be plunged into messy, tearful situations like this.

  She had done her bit on the shield. She should have stayed retired, she thought wistfully.

  And it was when Edna came on line with her bit of bad, strange news that it was driven home to Bella that she really was the commander-in-chief of a space navy.

  “For once the trackers think they’ve found something serious, Mum. Something out in the dark—now approaching the orbit of Jupiter, in fact, and falling in on a hyperbolic trajectory. It’s not on the Extirpator map, though that’s not so unusual; long-period comets too remote for Extirpator echoes are turning up all the time. This thing has other characteristics that are causing them concern…”

  Bella had seen a rendering of the “Extirpator map,” set up like a planetarium inside her own base, the old NASA headquarters building in Washington. An immense, dynamic, three-dimensional snapshot of the whole of the solar system, it had been created on the very eve of the sunstorm by the deep-space explosion of a ferocious old nuke called the Extirpator—a detonation that had also broadcast to the silent stars a wistful concatenation of human culture called “Earthmail,” within which were embedded copies of the planet’s greatest artificial minds, called Aristotle, Thales, and Athena. Within a few hours of the explosion the radio telescopes on Earth had logged X-ray echoes of the blast coming back from every object larger than a meter across inside the orbit of Saturn.