A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  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 itself out, activated programs, analyzed the environment it found itself in—and gradually became aware.

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

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

  “Whoopee! What a ride!” said Athena skittishly.

  “There’s somebody watching us,” said Aristotle.

  Witness was the only name she had ever known.

  Of course that didn’t seem strange to her at first, in her early years. And nor did it seem strange that though there were plenty of adults in the waters around her, she was the only child. When you are young, you take everything for granted.

  This was a watery world, not terribly unlike Earth. Even its day was only a little longer than Earth’s.

  And the creatures here were Earthlike. In the bright waters of the world sea, Witness, a bundle of fur and fat something like a seal, swam and played and chased creatures not unlike fish. Witness even had two parents: having two sexes was a good strategy for mixing up hereditary material. Convergent evolution was a powerful force. But Witness’s body plan was based on six limbs, not four.

  The best times of all were the days, one in four, when the icy lid of the ocean broke up, and the people came flopping out onto the island.

  On land you were heavy, of course, and a lot less mobile. But Witness loved the sharp sensation of the gritty sand under her belly, and the crispness of the cold air. There were wonders on the island, cities and factories, temples and scientific establishments. And Witness loved the sky. She loved the stars that gleamed at night—and the three suns that shone in the day.

  If this world was something like Earth, its sun was not. This system was dominated by a star twice as massive as the sun, and eight times as bright; it had a smaller companion barely noticeable in the giant’s glare, and there was a third, a distant dim red dwarf.

  Across eleven light years, this system was easily bright enough to be seen from the Earth. This was Alpha Canis Minoris, also called Procyon. This star was known as a double to astronomers; that small second companion had never even been detected from Earth.

  But Procyon had changed. And the living planet it had succored was dying.

  As she grew older, Witness learned to ask questions.

  “Why am I alone? Why are there no others like me? Why is there nobody for me to play with?”

  “Because we face a great tragedy,” her father said. “We all do. All over the world. It is the suns, Witness. There is something wrong with the suns.”

  The giant senior partner of Procyon, Procyon A, had once been a variable star.

  When it was young it shined steadily. But the helium “ash” produced by the hydrogen-burning fusion reactor of its core slowly accumulated in its heart. Trapped heat lifted the helium layer, and all the immense weight of gas above: the star swelled, subtly, until the trapped heat could flood out, and the star collapsed once more. But then the helium trap formed again.

  Thus the aging star became variable, swelling and collapsing over and again, with a period of a few days. And it was that grand stellar oscillation that had given this world its life.

  Once, before Procyon had become variable, the planet had been something like Europa, moon of Jupiter: a salty ocean trapped under a permanent crust of ice. There had been life here, fueled by the inner heat and complex minerals that came bubbling up from the world’s core. But, locked in the watery dark, none of those forms had progressed greatly in intelligence.

  The new pulsation had changed all that.

  “Every fourth day the ice breaks up into floes,” Witness’s parents said. “So you can get out of the sea. And we did. Our ancestors changed, so they could breathe in the air, so much more oxygen-rich than the seawater. And they learned to exploit the possibilities of the dry land. At first they just emerged so they could mate in peace, and shelter their young from the hungry mouths of the sea. But later—”

  “Yes, yes,” Witness said impatiently. She already knew the story. “Tools, minds, civilization.”

  “Yes. But you can see that we owe all we have—even our minds—to the pulsation of the sun. We can’t even breed in the water anymore; we need access to the land.”

  Witness prompted, “And now—”

  “And now, that pulsation has gone. Dwindled almost to nothing,” said her father.

  “And our world is dying,” said her mother sadly.

  Now there was no sunlight peak, no melting of the ice. The people’s machines kept some of the ice open. But without the mixing of the air caused by the pumping of the star, a layer of carbon dioxide was settling over the surface of the ocean.

  After a few centuries the islands were becoming uninhabitable.

  “We have become creatures of sea and land,” Witness’s mother said. “If we can’t reach the land—”

  “The implications,” her father said, “are clear. And there was only one possible response.”

  Unlike humans, Witness’s folk had never got as far as a space program. They had no way of fighting this catastrophe, as humans had built a shield to fend off the sunstorm. They had faced the horror of extinction.

  But they would not accept it.

  “We simply had less children,” Witness’s mother said.

  The generations of these folk were much briefer than humanity’s. There had been time for this cull of numbers to slash the population until, by the time of Witness’s birth, there were only a few dozen of them left, in all the world, where once millions had swum.

  “You can see why we did it,” her mother said. “If a child never existed, it can’t suffer. It wasn’t so bad,” she said desperately. “For most of the generations you could still have one child. You still had love.”

  Her father said, “But in the last generation—”

  Witness said blackly, “In this last generation you have produced only me.”

  Witness was the last ever child to be born. And she had precious duties to fulfill.

  “Stars are simple beasts,” her father told her. “Oh, it took many generations for our astronomers to puzzle out the peculiar internal mechanism that made our giant sun breathe out and in. But puzzle it out they did. It was easy to see how the pulsing started. But no matter how contorted a model the theoreticians dreamed up they could never find a convincing way to make the star’s pulsation stop.”

  Her parents allowed Witness to think that through.

  “Oh,” she said. “This was a deliberate act. Somebody did this.” Witness was awed. “Why? Why would anybody do such a terrible thing?”

  “We don’t know,” her father said. “We can’t even guess. But we have been trying to find out. And that’s where you come in.”

  Listening stations had been established on many of the planet’s islands. There were clusters of telescopes sensitive to optical light, radio waves, and other parts of the spectrum: there were neutrino detectors, there were gravity wave detectors, and a host of still more exotic artificial ears.

  “We want to know who has done this,” said her father bitterly, “and why. And so we listen. But now our time is done. Soon only you will remain…”

  “And I am Witness.”

  Her parents clustered around her, stroking her belly and her six flippers as they had when she was a baby. “Tend the machines,” her father said. “Listen. And watch us, the last of us, as we go into the dark.”

  “You want me to suffer,” Witness said bitterly. “That’s really what this is about, isn’t it? I will be the last of my kind, with no hope of procreation. All those who preceded me at least had that. You want me to take on all the terrible despair you spared those unborn. You want me to hurt, don’t you?”

  Witness’s mother
was very distressed. “Oh, my child, if I could spare you this burden I would!”

  This made no difference to Witness, whose heart was hardening. Until their deaths, she struck back at her parents the only way she could, by shunning them.

  But there came a day, at last, when she had been left alone.

  And then the signal from Earth arrived.

  Aristotle, Thales, and Athena, refugee intelligences from Earth, learned how to speak to Witness. And they learned the fate of Witness’s kind.

  Procyon’s pulsation had died away much too early for human astronomers to have observed it. But Aristotle and the others knew the same phenomenon had been seen in a still more famous star: Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris. A baffling decay of the north pole star’s pulsing had begun around 1945.

  “‘But I am constant as the northern star,’” Aristotle said, “‘Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.’ Shakespeare.”

  “So much for Shakespeare!” said Athena.

  “This is the work of the Firstborn.” Thales’s observation was obvious, but it was chilling even so. The three of them were the first minds from Earth to understand that the reach of the Firstborn stretched so far.

  Aristotle said gravely, “Witness, it must hurt very much to watch the end of your kind.”

  Witness had often tried to put it into words for herself. Any death was painful. But you were always consoled that life would go on, that death was part of a continuing process of renewal, an unending story. But extinction ended all the stories.

  “When I am gone, the Firstborn’s work will be complete.”

  “Perhaps,” said Aristotle. “But it need not be so. Humans may have survived the Firstborn.”

  “Really?”

  They told her the story of the sunstorm.

  Witness was shocked to discover that her kind were not the only victims of this cosmic violence. Something stirred inside her, unfamiliar feelings. Resentment. Defiance.

  “Join us!” Athena said with her usual impulsiveness.

  “But,” Thales pointed out, stating the obvious, “she is the last of her kind.”

  “She isn’t dead yet,” Aristotle said firmly. “If Witness were the last human alive, we could find ways to reproduce her, or preserve her. Cloning technologies, Hibernacula.”

  “She isn’t human,” Thales said bluntly.

  “Yes, but the principle is the same,” Athena snapped. “Witness, dear, I think Aristotle is right. One day humans will come here. We can help you and your kind to go on. If you want us to, that is.”

  Such possibilities bewildered Witness. “Why would humans come here?”

  “To find others like themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “To save them,” Athena said.

  “And then what? What if they find the Firstborn?”

  “Then,” Aristotle said blackly, “the humans will save them too.”

  Athena said, “Don’t give up, Witness. Join us.”

  Witness thought it over. The ice of the freezing ocean closed around her, chilling her aging flesh. But that spark of defiance still burned, deep in the core of her being.

  She asked: “How do we start?”

  PART 3

  REUNIONS

  26: THE STONE MAN

  Year 32 (Mir)

  The consul from Chicago met Emeline White off the train from Alexandria.

  Emeline climbed down from the open-top carriage. At the head of the train, monkish engineers of the School of Othic tended valves and pistons on the huge oil-burning locomotive. Emeline tried not to breathe in the greasy smoke that belched from the loco’s stack.

  The sky was bright, washed-out, the sunlight harsh, but there was a nip of cold in the air.

  The consul approached her, hat in hand. “Mrs. White? It’s good to meet you. My name is Ilicius Bloom.” He wore gown and sandals like an oriental, though his accent was as Chicagoan as hers. He was maybe forty, she thought, though he might have been older; his skin was sallow, his hair glistening black, and a pot belly made a tent of his long purple robe.

  Another fellow stood beside Bloom, heavyset, his head downturned, his massive brow shining with dirt. He said nothing and didn’t move; he just stood there, a pillar of muscle and bone, and Bloom made no effort to introduce him. Something about him was very odd. But Emeline knew that by crossing the ocean to Europe she had come to a strange place, even stranger than icebound America.

  “Thank you for welcoming me, Mr. Bloom.”

  Bloom said, “As Chicago’s consul here I try to meet all our American visitors. Easing the way for all concerned.” He smiled at her. His teeth were bad. “Your husband isn’t with you?”

  “Josh died a year ago.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Your letter to him, about the telephone ringing in the temple—I took the liberty of reading it. He often spoke about his time in Babylon, those first years just after the Freeze. Which he always called the Discontinuity.”

  “Yes. You surely don’t remember that strange day—”

  “Mr. Bloom, I’m forty-one years old. I was nine on Freeze day. Yes, I remember.” She thought he was going to make another manipulative compliment, but her stern glower shut him up. “I know Josh would have come,” she said. “He can’t, and our boys are grown and are busy with their own concerns, and so here I am.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome to Babylonia.”

  “Hmm.” She looked around. She was in a landscape of fields and gullies, irrigation ditches maybe, though the gullies looked clogged, the fields faded and dusty. There was no city nearby, no sign of habitation save mud shacks sprawled over a low hill maybe a quarter-mile away. And it was cold, not as cold as home but colder than she had expected. “This isn’t Babylon, is it?”

  He laughed. “Hardly. The city itself is another few miles north of here. But this is where the rail line stops.” He waved at the hill of shacks. “This is a place the Greeks call the Midden. The local people have some name of their own for it, but nobody cares about that.”

  “Greeks? I thought King Alexander’s people were Macedonians.”

  Bloom shrugged. “Greeks, Macedonians. They let us use this place, however. We have to wait, I’m afraid. I have a carriage arranged to take you to the city in an hour, by which time we’re due to meet another party coming down from Anatolia. In the meantime, please, come and rest.” He indicated the mud hovels.

  Her heart sank. But she said, “Thank you.”

  She struggled to get her luggage off the train carriage. It was a bison-fur pack strapped up with rope, a pack that had crossed the Atlantic with her.

  “Here. Let my boy help.” Bloom turned and snapped his fingers.

  The strange, silent man reached out one massive hand and lifted the pack with ease, even though he was hefting it at the end of his outstretched arm. One of the straps caught on a bench, and ripped a bit. Almost absently Bloom cuffed the back of his head. The servant didn’t flinch or react, but just turned and plodded toward the village, the pack in his hand. From the back Emeline could see the servant’s shoulders, pushing up his ragged robe; they were like the shoulders of a gorilla, she thought, dwarfing his boulder of a head.

  Emeline whispered, “Mr. Bloom—your servant—”

  “What of him?”

  “He isn’t human, is he?”

  He glanced at her. “Ah, I forever forget how newcomers to this dark old continent are startled by our ancestral stock. The boy is what the Greeks call a Stone Man—because most of the time he’s as solid and silent as if he were carved from stone, you see. I think the bone-fondlers on Earth, before the Freeze, might have called him a Neanderthal. It was a bit of a shock to me when I first came over here, but you get used to it. None of this in America, eh?”

  “No. Just us.”

  “Well, it’s different here,” Bloom said. “There’s a whole carnival of the beasts, from the man-apes to these robust species, and other sorts. Favor
ites at Alexander’s court, many of them, for all sorts of sport—if they can be caught.”

  They reached the low mound and began to walk up it. The earth here was disturbed, gritty, full of shards of pottery and flecks of ash. Emeline had the sense that it was very ancient, worked and reworked over and over.

  “Welcome to the Midden,” Bloom said. “Mind where you step.”

  They came to the first of the habitations. It was just a box of dried mud, entirely enclosed, without windows or doors. A crude wooden ladder leaned up against the wall. Bloom led the way, clambering up the ladder onto the roof and walking boldly across it. The Stone Man just jumped up, a single elastic bound of his powerful legs lifting him straight up the seven or eight feet to the roof.

  Emeline, uncomfortable, followed. It felt very strange to be walking about on some stranger’s roof like this.

  The roof was a smooth surface of dried mud, painted a pale white by some kind of wash. Smoke curled out of a crudely cut hole. This squat house huddled very close to the next, another block whose walls were just inches from its neighbors. And when Bloom strode confidently over the gap to the next roof Emeline had no choice but to follow.

  The whole hillside was covered by a mosaic of these pale boxy houses, all jammed in together. And people moved around on the roofs. Mostly women, short, squat and dark, they carried bundles of clothing and baskets of wood up out of one ceiling hole and down through another. This was the nature of the town. All the dwellings were alike, just rectangular blocks of dried mud, jammed up against each other too closely to allow for streets, and climbing about on the roofs was the only way to get anywhere.

  She said to Bloom, “They’re people. I mean, people like us.”

  “Oh, yes, these are no man-apes or Neanderthals! But this is an old place, Mrs. White, snipped out of an old, deep time—older and deeper than the age of the Greeks, that’s for sure, nobody knows how old. But it’s a time so far back they hadn’t got around to inventing streets and doors yet.”

  They came to one more roof. Smoke snaked up from the only hole cut into it, but without hesitation Bloom led the way down, following crudely-shaped steps fixed to the interior wall. Emeline followed, trying not to brush against the walls, which were coated with soot.