A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Twenty-seven years after the sunstorm the human worlds and space itself were full of eyes, tracking anything that moved. Anything not shown in the map must be a new entrant. Most newcomers, human or natural, could be identified and eliminated quickly. And if not—well, then, Bella was learning, the bad news quickly filtered up the Council’s hierarchy to her own ears.

  In the cocooned, silent warmth of the plane cabin, she shivered. Like many of her generation, Bella still had nightmares about the sunstorm. Now it was Bella’s job to listen to the bad dreams.

  Edna’s face, in the softscreen on the seat back before Bella, was flawlessly rendered in three dimensions. Edna was only twenty-three, one of the first generation of “Spacers,” as Bella had learned to call them, born in space during Bella’s post-sunstorm rehabilitation stay on the Moon. But Edna was already a captain. Promotions were fast in a navy with few crew in ships so smart, or so Edna said, they even had robots to swab the decks. Today, with her Irish-dark hair pulled severely back and her uniform buttoned up around her neck, Edna looked tense, her eyes shadowed.

  Bella longed to touch her daughter. But she couldn’t even speak to her in a natural way. Edna was out in the navy’s operations HQ in the asteroid belt. The vagaries of orbits dictated that at this moment Edna was some two astronomical units away from her mother, twice Earth’s distance to the sun, a tremendous gap that imposed an each-way time delay of sixteen minutes.

  And besides there was a question of protocol. Bella was in fact her daughter’s commanding officer. She tried to focus on what Edna was saying.

  “This is just a head’s-up, Mum,” Edna said now. “I don’t have any details. But the scuttlebutt is that Rear Admiral Paxton is flying to London to brief you about it…”

  Bella flinched. Bob Paxton, heroic footprints-and-flags explorer of Mars, and a royal pain in the butt.

  Edna smiled. “Just remember, he’s got a chest full of fruit salad, but you’re the boss! By the way—Thea is doing fine.” Edna’s daughter, Bella’s three-year-old granddaughter, a second-generation Spacer. “She’ll be on her way home soon. But you should see how she’s taken to microgravity in the low-spin habitats!…”

  Edna spoke on of human things, family stuff, lesser events than the destiny of the solar system. Bella hung on every word, as a grandmother would. But it was all so strange, even to Bella, who had served in space herself. Edna’s language was peppered with the unfamiliar. You found your way around a spinning space habitat by going spinward or antispinward or axisward… Even her accent was drifting, a bit of Bella’s own Irish, and a heavy tinge of east coast American—the navy was essentially an offshoot of the old U.S. seaborne navy, and had inherited much of its culture from that source.

  Her daughter and granddaughter were growing away from her, Bella thought wistfully. But then, every grandmother back to Eve had probably felt the same.

  A soft chime warned her that the plane was beginning its final approach. She stored the rest of Edna’s message and transmitted a brief reply of her own.

  The plane banked, and Bella peered down at the city.

  She could clearly make out the tremendous footprint of the Dome. It was a near-perfect circle about nine kilometers in diameter, centered on Trafalgar Square. Within the circumference of the Dome much of the old building stock had been preserved from the sunstorm’s ravages, and something of the character of the old confident London remained, a pale sheen of sandstone and marble. But Westminster was now an island, the Houses of Parliament abandoned as a monument. After the sunstorm the city had given up its attempts to control its river, and had drawn back to new banks that more resembled the wider, natural course that the Romans had first mapped. Londoners had adjusted; you could now go scuba diving among the concrete ruins of the South Bank.

  Outside that perimeter circle, much of the suburban collar of London had been razed by the fires of sunstorm day. Now it was a carpet of blocky new buildings that looked like tank traps.

  And as the plane dipped further she saw the Dome itself. The paneling had long been dismantled, but some of the great ribs and pillars had been allowed to stand; weather-streaked and tarnished they cast shadows kilometers long over the city the Dome had preserved. It was only a glimpse. And in a way it was mundane; twenty-seven years on, you still saw the scars of the sunstorm wherever you traveled, all over the world.

  The city fled beneath her, and the plane swept down over anonymous, hunkered suburbs toward its landing at Heathrow.

  6: MYRA

  Myra sat with Bisesa before the bubble window, sipping iced tea. It was early in the morning, and the low light seemed to catch the wrinkles in Myra’s face.

  “You’re staring,” Myra said.

  “I’m sorry, love. Can you blame me? For me, you’ve aged nineteen years in a week.”

  “At least I’m still younger than you.” Myra sounded resentful; she had a right to be.

  Myra was wearing a comfortable-looking blouse and pants of some smart material that looked as if it kept her cool. Her hair was swept back from her face, a style that was a bit severe to Bisesa’s out-of-date eyes, but which suited Myra’s bones, her fine forehead. She had no ring on her finger. Her movements were small, contained, almost formal, and she rarely looked at her mother.

  She didn’t look happy. She looked restless.

  Bisesa didn’t know what was wrong. “I should have been here for you,” she said.

  Myra looked up. “Well, you weren’t.”

  “Right now, I don’t even know—”

  “You know I married Eugene, not long before you went into the tank.” Eugene Mangles, whiz-kid scientist, all but autistic, and after his heroic computations during the sunstorm the nearest thing to a savior the world had recently seen. “Everybody was marrying young in those days,” Myra said. The post-sunstorm years had been a time of a rapid population boom. “We broke up after five years.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Has there been nobody else?”

  “Not serious.”

  “So where are you working now?”

  “I went back to London, oh, ten years ago. I’m back in our old flat in Chelsea.”

  “Under the skeleton of the Dome.”

  “What’s left of it. That old ruin is good for property prices, you know. Snob value, to be under the Dome. I guess we’re rich, Mum. Whenever I’m short of money I just release a bit more equity; the prices are climbing so fast it soon gets wiped out.”

  “So you’re back in the city. Doing what?”

  “I retrained as a social worker. I deal in PTSD.”

  “Post-traumatic stress.”

  “Mostly it’s your generation, Mum. They’ll carry the stress with them to their graves.”

  “But they saved the world,” Bisesa said softly.

  “They did that.”

  “I never saw you as a social worker. You always wanted to be an astronaut!”

  Myra scowled, as if she was being reminded of some indiscretion. “I grew out of that when I found out what was really going on.”

  Apparently unconsciously, she touched the tattoo on her cheek. It was in fact an ident tattoo, a compulsory registration introduced a few years after Bisesa went into the tank. Not a symptom of a notably free society.

  “Wasn’t Eugene working on weather modification systems?”

  “Yes, he was. But he pretty quickly got sidelined into weaponization. Weather modification as an instrument of political control. It’s never been used, but it’s there. We had long arguments about the morality of what he was doing. I never lost the argument, but I never won, either. Eugene just didn’t get it.”

  Bisesa sighed. “I remember that about him.”

  “In the end his work was more important than I was.”

  Bisesa was profoundly sorry to see this disappointment in a daughter who, from her point of view, had been a bright twenty-one-year-old only weeks ago.

  She looked out of her window. Something was moving on the far side of the canyon. Came
ls, this time. “Not everything about this new world seems so bad to me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “I quite like the idea of camels and elephants wandering around North America—though I’m not quite sure why they’re here.”

  “We’re in the middle of a Jefferson,” Myra said.

  “Named for Jefferson the president?”

  “I learned a lot more about the American presidents when I lived with Eugene’s family in Massachusetts,” Myra said dryly. The purposeful re-wilding of the world was an impulse that had come out of the aftermath of the sunstorm. “In fact Linda had something to do with devising the global program. She wrote me about it.”

  “My cousin Linda?”

  “She’s Dame Linda now.” A student of bioethics, Linda had shared a flat with Bisesa and Myra during the period before the sunstorm. “The point is, long before Columbus the first Stone Age immigrants knocked over most of the large mammals. So you had an ecology that was full of gaps evolution hadn’t had time to fill. ‘A concert in which so many parts are wanting.’ Thoreau said that, I think. Linda used to quote him. When the Spanish brought horses here, their population just exploded. Why? Because modern horses evolved here…”

  In the new “Jefferson Parks” there had been a conscious effort to reconstruct the ecology as it had been at the end of the last Ice Age, by importing species that were close equivalents of those that had been lost.

  Bisesa nodded. “African and Asian elephants for mammoths and mastodons.”

  “Camels for the extinct camelids. More species of horses to flesh out the diversity. Even zebras, I think. For the ground sloths they brought in rhinos, herbivores of a similar mass and diet.”

  “And lions as the capstone, I suppose.”

  “Yes. There are more parks overseas. In Britain, half of Scotland is being given over to native oak forest.”

  Bisesa looked at the haughty camels. “I suppose it’s therapeutic. But these are aftermath activities. Healing. I’ve woken up to find we still live in an aftermath world, after all this time.”

  “Yes,” Myra said grimly. “And not every post-sunstorm response is as positive as building a Pleistocene park.

  “Mum, people found out about the sunstorm. The truth. At first it was classified. Even the name ‘Firstborn’ was never made public. There was no hint at the time that the sunstorm was an intentional act.”

  Caused by the driving of a Jovian planet into the core of Earth’s sun.

  “But the truth leaked out. Whistle-blowers. It became a torrent when the generation who had fought the storm headed for retirement, and had nothing to lose, and began to speak of what they knew.”

  “I’m shocked there was a cover-up that lasted so long.”

  “Even now there are plenty of people who don’t believe it, I think. But people are scared. And there are those in government, and in industry and other establishments, who are using that fear. They are militarizing the whole of the Earth, indeed the solar system. They call it the War with the Sky.”

  Bisesa snorted. “That’s ridiculous. How can you wage war on an abstraction?”

  “I suspect that’s the point. It means whatever you want it to mean. And those who control the sky have a lot of power. Why do you think Thales is still stuck on the Moon?”

  “Ah. Because nobody can get to him up there. And this is why you left?”

  “Most of the gazillions they’re spending are simply wasted. What’s worse, they’re not doing any serious research into what we do know of Firstborn technology. The Eyes. The manipulation of spacetime, the construction of pocket universes—all of that. Stuff that might actually be useful in the case of a renewed threat.”

  “So that’s why you baled out.”

  “Yes. I mean, it was fun, Mum. I got to go to the Moon! But I couldn’t swallow the lies. There are plenty on and off the planet who think the way I do.”

  “Off the planet?”

  “Mum, since the sunstorm a whole generation has been born offworld. Spacers, they call themselves.” She glanced at her mother, then looked away. “It was a Spacer who called me. And asked me to come fetch you.”

  “Why?”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Those simple words chilled Bisesa.

  A shifting light caught her eye. Looking up she saw that bright satellite cutting across the sky. “Myra—what’s that? It looks sort of old-fashioned, in among the space mirrors.”

  “It’s Apollo 9. Or a recreation. That ship flew a hundred years ago today. The government is rerunning all those classic missions. A remembrance of the lost times before the sunstorm.”

  Conservation and memorials. Clinging to the past. It really was as if the whole world was still in shock. “All right. What do you want me to do?”

  “If you’re fit, get packed up. We’re leaving.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Myra smiled, a bit forced. “Off Earth…”

  7: THE TOOKE MEDAL

  The motorcade drew up outside a property in a suburb called Chiswick.

  Bella stepped out of her car, along with her two Council bodyguards. They were a man and a woman, bulked up by body armor, like all their colleagues silent and anonymous. The woman carried a small package in a black leather case.

  The car closed itself up.

  Bella faced the Duflot home, gathering her courage. It was a faceless block of white concrete with rounded wind-deflecting corners, sunk into the ground as if it was too heavy for the London clay. Its roof was a garden of wind turbines, solar cell panels, and antennae; its windows were small and deep. With subterranean rooms and independent power it was a house like a bunker. This was the domestic architecture of the fearful mid–twenty-first century.

  Bella had to walk down a flight of steps to the front door. A slim woman in a sharp black suit was waiting.

  “Ms. Duflot?”

  “Doctor Fingal. Thank you for coming. Call me Phillippa…” She extended a long-fingered hand.

  Shadowed by her security people, Bella was brought through the house to the living room.

  Phillippa Duflot must have been in her early sixties, a little older than Bella. Her silvered hair was cut short. Her face was not unattractive, but narrow, her mouth pursed. Phillippa looked capable of steely self-control, but this woman had lost a son, and the marks of that tragedy were in the lines around her eyes, Bella thought, and the tension in her neck.

  Waiting for Bella in the living room were the generations of Phillippa’s family. They stood when Bella came into the room, lined up before a softwall showing an image of a pretty Scottish lake. Bella had carefully and nervously memorized all their names. Phillippa’s two surviving sons, Paul and Julian, were solid, awkward-looking thirty-something men. Their wives stood by their sides. This slim, pretty woman of twenty-six was Cassie, the widow of the missing son James, and his two children, boy and girl, six and five, Toby and Candida. They were all dressed for a funeral, in black and white, even the children. And they all had ident tattoos on their cheeks. The little girl’s was a pretty pink flower.

  Standing before this group, under the stares of the children, Bella suddenly had no idea what to say.

  Phillippa came to her rescue. “It’s most awfully good of you to come.” Her accent was authentic British upper class, a throwback to another age, rich with composure and command. Phillippa said to her grandchildren, “Doctor Fingal is the head of the Space Council. She’s very important. And she flew from America, just to see us.”

  “Well, that’s true. And to give you this.” Bella nodded to her guards, and the woman handed her the leather case. Bella opened this carefully, and set it up on a low coffee table. A disc of delicate, sparkling fabric sat on a bed of black velvet.

  The children were wide-eyed. The boy asked, “Is it a medal?”

  And Candida asked, “Is it for Daddy?”

  “Yes. It’s for your father.” She pointed to the medal, but did not touch it; it looked like spiderweb embedded with tiny elect
ronic components. “Do you know what it’s made of?”

  “Space shield stuff,” Toby said promptly.

  “Yes. The real thing. It’s called the Tooke Medal. There’s no higher honor you can earn, if you live and work in space, than this. I knew Bud Tooke. I worked with him, up on the shield. I know how much he would have admired your daddy. And it’s not just a medal. Do you want to see what it can do?”

  The boy was skeptical. “What?”

  She pointed. “Just touch this stud and see.”

  The boy obeyed.

  A hologram shimmered into life over the tabletop, eclipsing the medal in its case. It showed a funeral scene, a flag-draped coffin on a caisson drawn by six tiny black horses. Figures in dark blue uniforms stood by. The sound was tinny but clear, and Bella could hear the creak of the horses’ harnesses, their soft hoofbeats.

  The silent children loomed like giants over the scene. Cassie was weeping silently; her brother comforted her. Phillippa Duflot watched, composed.

  The recording skipped forward. Three rifle volleys cracked, and a flight of tiny, glittering jet aircraft swept overhead, one peeling away from the formation.

  “It’s Dad’s funeral,” Toby said.

  “Yes.” Bella leaned down to face the children. “They buried him at Arlington. That’s in Virginia—America—where the U.S. Navy has its cemetery.”

  “Dad trained in America.”

  “That’s right. I was there, at the funeral, and so was your mummy. This hologram is generated by the shield element itself—”

  “Why did one plane fly away like that?”