A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Emeline negotiated directly with the engine driver; she used dollar notes to pay for their passage. And she was able to buy a loaf, some beef jerky, and a pot of coffee in the town’s small bar. Her money was crisp and new; evidently Chicago had a mint.

  Back in her own environment, Emeline was bright and purposeful. Bisesa had to admit there was a sense of modernity here, even in this scrubby outpost, that had been missing in an Alexandrian Europe that seemed to be sinking back into the past.

  On the train they had a carriage to themselves; the other carriages were mostly full of goods, lumber, fleeces, a catch of salted fish. The windows weren’t glazed, but there were blinds of some kind of hide that would block out the drafts, and heaps of blankets of some thick, smelly orange-brown wool. Emeline assured them that this would be enough to keep them warm until they reached New Chicago. “After that you’ll need cold-weather gear for the ice,” she said. “We’ll pick up something in town.”

  A couple of hours after they had arrived—it was around noon—the locomotive belched white smoke, and the train lumbered into motion. There was a clucking as chickens scattered off the tracks. A few skinny-looking children came running from the rude houses to wave, and Abdi and Bisesa waved back. The wind turned, and smoke from the stack blew into the cabin: wood smoke, a familiar, comforting scent.

  Emeline said they were going to follow the valley of the Mississippi, all the way to the settlement of New Chicago, which was near the site of Memphis in the old world. It was a journey of a few hundred miles that would likely take twenty-four hours to make; they would sleep on the train.

  Bisesa peered curiously from her window. She saw traffic on the river, a real mix, an Alexandrian trireme, what looked like a paddle steamer stranded by the shore—and a couple of canoes that might have been native American, but no native Americans had been brought to Mir.

  Emeline said, “They dug a couple of war canoes out of the city museum and the world’s fair exhibits. Took them apart to see how they were made. They raided William Cody’s Wild West Show too, for bows and arrows and teepees and whatnot. The canoes are pretty, aren’t they? I tried one once, with Josh, for a lark. But the water is dashed cold, even so far south as this. Runoff from the ice. You don’t want to fall in!”

  “Camels,” Abdikadir said, pointing to the road.

  Bisesa saw a kind of baggage train trailing south toward the port. Men and women rode peculiar-looking horses that had a tendency to buck and bite. And, yes, towering over them there were camels, heavily laden, imperious, spitting. “Another import?”

  “Oh, no,” Emeline said. “The camels were here already. Those horses too—lots of breeds of them in fact, not all of them useful. I told you we have a real menagerie here. Mammoths and mastodons and camels and saber-toothed cats—let’s hope we don’t run into any of those.”

  “All of which,” Bisesa’s phone murmured from her pocket, “died out the moment the first human settlers got here. They even ate the native horses. Schoolboy error.”

  “Hush. Remember we’re guests here.”

  “In a sense, so are the Chicagoans…”

  She was aware of Emeline’s faint disapproval. Emeline clearly thought it bad manners to ignore the flesh-and-blood human beings around you and talk into a box.

  Abdikadir, though, who had grown up under the tutelage of his father, was interested. “Is it still able to pick up the signals from Earth?”

  Bisesa had tested the phone’s intermittent connection through the Eye all the way across the Atlantic. “It seems so.”

  “At a low bit rate,” the phone whispered. “Even that is pretty corrupt…”

  A thought struck Bisesa. “Phone—I wonder how close the Chicagoans are to radio technology.”

  For answer, the phone displayed a block of text. Only a generation before the Chicago time slice James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist so admired by Alexei Carel, had predicted that electromagnetic energy could travel through space. The slice itself had been taken in the few years between Heinrich Hertz’s first demonstrations that that was true, with parabolic-mirror transmitters and receivers a few feet apart, and Guglielmo Marconi’s bridging of the Atlantic.

  “We ought to push this on, Abdi. Think how useful a radio link would be to Babylon right now. Maybe when we get to Chicago we’ll try to kick-start a radio shop, you and I.”

  Abdi looked excited. “I would enjoy that—”

  Emeline snapped, “Perhaps you should keep a hold of your plans to assist us poor Chicagoans, until you’ve seen how much we’ve been able to do for ourselves.”

  Bisesa said quickly, “I apologize, Emeline. I was being thoughtless.”

  Emeline lost her stiffness. “All right. Just don’t go showing off your fancy gadgets in front of Mayor Rice and the Emergency Committee or you really will give offense. And anyhow,” she said more grimly, “it won’t make a blind bit of difference if that toy of yours is right about the world coming to an end. Has it got any more to say about how long we have left?”

  “The data are uncertain,” the phone whispered. “Handwritten records of naked-eye observations, instruments scavenged from a crashed military helicopter—”

  Bisesa said, “I know. Just give us the best number you have.”

  “Five centuries. Maybe a little less.”

  They considered that. Then Emeline laughed; it sounded forced. “You really have brought us nothing but bad news, Bisesa.”

  But Abdikadir seemed unfazed. “Five centuries is a long time. We’ll figure out what to do about it long before then.”

  They spent the night in the train, as advertised.

  The frosty night air, the primal smell of wood smoke, and the steady rattling of the train on its uneven tracks lulled Bisesa to sleep. But every so often the train’s jolting woke her.

  And once she heard animals calling, far off, their cries like wolves’ howls, but deeper, throatier. She reminded herself that this was not a nostalgically reconstructed park. This was the real thing, and Pleistocene America was not a world yet tamed by man. But the sound of the animals was oddly thrilling—even satisfying. For two million years, humans evolved in a landscape full of creatures such as this. Maybe they missed the giant animals when they were gone, without ever knowing it. And so, maybe the Jefferson movement back home had the right idea.

  It was kind of scary to hear them in the dark, however. She was aware of Emeline’s eyes, bright, wide open. But Abdikadir snored softly, wrapped in the immunity of youth.

  38: EVA

  March 2070

  Yuri and Grendel invited Myra out on an excursion.

  “Just a routine inspection tour and sample collection,” Yuri said. “But you might like the chance to go outside.”

  Outside. After months stuck in a box of ice, in a landscape so flat and dark that even when the sun was up it was like a sensory deprivation tank, the word was a magic spell to Myra.

  But when she joined Yuri and Grendel in their rover, by clambering through a soft tube from a hab dome to the rover’s pressurized cabin, she realized belatedly that she was only exchanging one enclosed volume for another.

  Grendel Speth seemed to recognize what Myra was feeling. “You get used to it. At least on this jaunt you’ll get a different view from out the window.”

  Yuri and Grendel sat up front, Myra behind them. Yuri called, “All strapped in?” He punched a button and sat back.

  The hatch slammed shut with a rattle of sealing locks, the tunnel to the hab dome came loose with a sucking sound, and the rover lurched into motion.

  It was northern summer now. Spring had arrived around Christmas time, with an explosive sublimation of dry ice snow that burst into vapor almost as soon as the sunlight touched it, and for a time the seeing had gotten even worse than during the winter. But now, though a diminishing layer of dry-ice snow remained, the worst of the spring thaw was over and the winter hood long dissipated, and the sun rolled low around a clear orange-brown sky.

 
; This was actually the first time Myra had been for a trip in one of the base’s rovers. It was a lot smaller than the big beast she had ridden down from Lowell, its interior cramped by a miniature lab, a suiting-up area, a tiny galley, and a toilet with a sink where she would have to take sponge baths. It towed a trailer, which didn’t contain a portable nuke like Discovery from Port Lowell but a methane-burning turbine.

  “We manufacture the methane using Mars carbon dioxide,” Yuri called back. “More of Hanse’s ISRU.” He pronounced it issroo. In-situ resource utilization. “But it’s a slow process, and we have to wait for the tank to fill up. So we can only afford a few jaunts like this per year.”

  “You need a nuke,” Myra said.

  Yuri grunted. “Lowell’s got all the best gear. We get the dross. But it’s fit for purpose.” And he banged the rover’s dash as if apologetically.

  “This trip isn’t too exciting,” Grendel warned.

  “Well, it’s new to me,” Myra replied.

  “Anyhow you’re doing us a favor,” Yuri called. “Standing orders say we should take three out on every excursion more than a day’s walk back to the station. I mean, we can do what we like; we override. Sometimes I even do this route alone, or Grendel does. But the AIs get pissy about rules, you know?”

  “We are undermanned,” Grendel said. “Nominally Wells Station should house ten people. But there’s just too much to do on Mars.”

  “And I guess Ellie is pretty much locked up with her work in the Pit.”

  Grendel pulled a face. “Well, yes. But she isn’t one of us anyhow. Not a Martian.”

  “What about Hanse?”

  “Hanse’s a busy guy,” Yuri said. “When he’s not running the station, or drilling his holes in the ice, he’s running his ISRU experiments. Living off the land, here on Mars. You might think the north pole of Mars is an odd place to come try that. But, Myra, there’s water here, sitting right here on the surface, in the form of ice. There’s nowhere else on the inner worlds, save a scraping at the poles of the Moon, where you can say that.”

  “And,” Grendel said, “Hanse is thinking bigger than that.”

  Yuri said, “Myra, there are a lot of similarities between trying to live here on the Martian ice cap and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are generally nothing but big balls of frozen ice around nuggets of rock. So Hanse is trialing technologies that might enable us to survive anywhere out there.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “Sure,” Yuri said. “Well, he’s a South African on his mother’s side. And you know what the Africans are like nowadays. They were the big winners out of the sunstorm, politically, economically. Hanse’s committed to Mars, I think. But he’s an African Martian, and he has deeper goals…”

  After a couple of hours driving they came to the lip of a spiral canyon.

  The wall of eroded ice was shallow, and the canyon wasn’t terribly deep; Myra thought the rover would easily be able to skim down to its floor, and indeed the rutted track they were following snaked on down into the canyon. But she could see that further ahead the canyon broadened and grew deeper, curving smoothly into the distance like a tremendous natural freeway.

  They didn’t descend into the canyon immediately. Yuri tapped the dashboard, and the rover lumbered along the canyon’s lip until an insectile form loomed out of the dark before them. It was a complex platform maybe fifty centimeters across laden with instruments, and it stood on three spindly legs. The rover had a manipulator arm, which now unfolded delicately to reach out to the tripod.

  “This is a SEP,” Yuri said. “A surface experiment package. Kind of a weather station, together with a seismometer, laser mirrors, other instruments. We’ve been planting a whole network of them across the polar cap.” He spoke with a trace of pride.

  To keep him talking she asked, “Why the legs?”

  “To lift it above the dry ice snow, which can reach a depth of a few meters by the end of the winter. And there are surface effects—you can get major excursions of temperature and pressure over the first few meters up from the ground. So there are sensors mounted in the legs too.”

  “It looks spindly. Like it will fall over in the first gust of wind.”

  “Well, Mars is a spindly kind of planet. I calculated the wind loading moment. This baby won’t get knocked over in a hurry.”

  “You designed it?”

  “Yes,” said Grendel, “and he’s bloody proud of it. And any resemblance of these toy weather stations to the Martian fighting machines of certain books and movies is purely coincidental.”

  “They’re my babies.” Yuri threw his head back and laughed through his thick black beard.

  While it was halted the rover released other, more exotic bits of gear: “tumbleweed,” cage-like balls a meter across that rolled away over the dry ice snow, and “smart dust,” a sprinkling of black soot-like powder that just blew away. Each mote of dust was a sensor station just a millimeter across, with its own suite of tiny instruments, all powered by microwave energy beamed from the sky, or simply by being shaken up by the wind. “We have no control over where the weed and the dust goes,” Yuri said. “It just blows with the wind, and a lot of the dust will just get snowed out. But the idea is to saturate the polar cap with sensors, to make it self-aware, if you like. Already the data flows are tremendous.”

  With the SEP seen to, the rover began its descent into the canyon. The ice wall was layered, like stratified rock, with thick dark bands every meter or so deep, but much finer layers in between—very fine, like the pages of a book, fine down to the limits of what Myra could see. The rover drove slowly and carefully, its movements evidently preprogrammed. Every so often Yuri, or more rarely Grendel, would tap the dashboard, and they would stop, and the manipulator arm would reach out to explore the surface of the wall. It scraped up samples from the layers, or it would press a box of instruments against the ice, or it would plant a small instrument package.

  Grendel said to Myra, “This is pretty much the drill, all the way in. Sampling the strata. I’m testing for life, or relics of life from the past. Yuri here is trying to establish a global stratigraphy, mapping all the cap’s folded layers as read from the cores and the canyon excursions against each other. It’s not very exciting, I guess. If we see something really promising, we do get out and take a look for ourselves. But you get tired of the suit drill, and we save that for special occasions.”

  Yuri laughed again. The rover rolled on.

  “I spoke to Ellie,” Myra said uncertainly. “Down in the Pit. She told me something of her experiences of the sunstorm.”

  Grendel turned, her eyebrows raised. “You’re honored. Took me three months to get to that point. And I’m her nominated psychiatric counselor.”

  “Sounds like she had it kind of tough.”

  “Myself, I was ten,” Grendel said. “I grew up in Ohio. We were a farming family, far from any dome. Dad built us a bunker, like a storm shelter. We lost everything, and then we were stuck in the refugee camps too. My father died a couple of years later. Skin cancers got him.

  “In the camps I worked as a volunteer nurse at triage stations. Gave me the taste for medicine, I guess. I never wanted to feel so helpless in front of a person in pain again. And after the sunstorm, after the camps, I worked on ecological recovery programs in the Midwest. That got me into biology.”

  Yuri said cheerfully, “As for me, I was born after the sunstorm. Born on the Moon, Russian mother, Irish father. I spent some time on Earth, though. As a teen I worked on eco-recovery programs in the Canadian Arctic.”

  “That’s how you got a taste for ice.”

  “I guess.”

  “And now you’re here,” Myra said. “Now you’re Spacers.”

  “Martians,” Grendel and Yuri said together.

  Yuri said, “The Spacers are off on their rocks in the sky. Mars is Mars, and that’s that. And we don’t necessarily share their ambitions.”

  “But you do over the Eye in the Pit
.”

  Yuri said, “Over that, yes, of course. But I’d rather just get on with this.” He waved a hand at the sculptures of ice beyond the windscreen. “Mars. That’s enough for me.”

  “I envy you,” Myra blurted. “For your sense of purpose. For having something to build here.”

  Grendel turned, curious. “Envy’s not a good feeling, Myra. You have your own life.”

  “Yes. But I feel I’m kind of living in an aftermath of my own.”

  Grendel grunted. “Given who your mother is that’s understandable. We can talk about it later, if you like.”

  Yuri said, “Or we can talk about my mother, who taught me how to drink vodka. Now that’s the way to put the world to rights.”

  An alarm chimed softly, and a green panel lit up on the dash. Yuri tapped it, and it filled up with the face of Alexei Carel. “You’d better get back here. Sorry to interrupt the fun.”

  “Go on,” said Yuri.

  “I’ve two messages. One, Myra, we’ve been summoned to Cyclops.”

  “The planet-finder station? Why?”

  “To meet Athena.”

  Yuri and Grendel exchanged glances. Yuri said, “What’s your second message?”

  Alexei grinned. “Something Ellie von Devender has dug out of the Pit. ‘The most common glyph sequence’—Myra, she said you’d understand that. She’ll explain to the rest of us when you get back.”

  “Show us,” said Myra.

  Alexei’s face disappeared, and the screen filled with four stark symbols:

  39: NEW CHICAGO

  They reached New Chicago around noon.

  There was a proper rail station here, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy actual tickets. But the track terminated; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

  Emeline led them off the train and into the town. She said it might take days to organize their onward travel. She hoped there would be room for them to stay at one of the town’s two small hotels; if not they would have to knock on doors.