A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  “That’s good,” Bisesa said uncertainly.

  “He’ll see us this evening. That gives us time to shop.”

  “Shop? Are you kidding?”

  Emeline bustled out. “Lunch will be a half-hour. Help yourself to more tea.”

  44: ATHENA

  The Mars deck was like a corridor that rose gradually in either direction, so that as you walked there was the odd sense that you were always at the low point of a dip, never climbing out of it. The gravity was the easy one-third G Myra had got used to on Mars itself. The décor was Martian red-ocher, the plastic surfaces of the walls, the bits of carpet on the floor. There were even tubs of what looked like red Martian dirt with the vivid green of terrestrial plants, mostly cacti, growing incongruously out of them.

  It was hard to believe she was in space, that if she kept on walking she would loop the loop and end up back in this spot.

  Alexei was watching her reaction. “It’s typical Earth-born architecture,” he said. “Like the bio domes on Mars with the rainstorms and the zoos. They don’t see that you don’t need all this, that it just gets in the way…”

  Certainly it all seemed a bit sanitized to Myra, like an airport terminal.

  Lyla led the three of them to an office just off the main corridor. It was nothing unusual, with a conference table, the usual softscreen facilities, a stand of coffee percolators and water jugs.

  And here Athena spoke to them.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here today.”

  Nobody laughed. Yuri dumped the bags in the corner of the conference room, and they helped themselves to coffee.

  Myra sat down and looked up into the empty air challengingly. “My mother always did say you had a reputation as a comedian.”

  “Ah,” said Athena. “Aristotle called me skittish. I never had the chance to speak to Bisesa Dutt.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “But I spoke to many of those who knew her. She is a remarkable woman.”

  Myra said, “She always said she was an ordinary woman to whom remarkable things kept happening.”

  “But others might have crumbled in the face of her extraordinary experiences. Bisesa continues to do her duty, as she sees it.”

  “You speak of her in the present tense. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you suspect, don’t you, Myra?”

  “I don’t understand how I’m talking to you. Why are you here?”

  “Watch,” Athena said gently.

  The lights in the room dimmed a little, and a holographic image coalesced on the tabletop before them.

  Ugly, bristling, it looked like some creature of the deep sea. In fact it was a denizen of space. It was called the Extirpator.

  The day before the sunstorm, Athena had woken to find herself ten million kilometers from Earth. Aristotle and Thales, mankind’s other great electronic minds, were with her. They had been downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

  The three of them huddled together, in an abstract electronic manner. And then—

  When the images from Procyon died, they all needed a break.

  They went out onto the Mars deck. Myra sipped a cola. While Yuri swung improvised pendulums to study the varying artificial gravity, Alexei and Lyla explored it. If you sat down, you were heavier than when you stood up. If you threw a ball any distance, it would be deflected sideways by the spin. And if you ran against the spin, you grew lighter. Laughing, they raced each other along the corridor in big Moonwalk bounds.

  Watching them play, Myra was reminded just how young these Spacers all really were.

  All of them were reluctant to go back and face Athena again, and talk about what she had discovered on a planet eleven light-years away.

  “So those swimmers bred themselves to extinction,” Alexei said. “Sol, what a thing to do.”

  Yuri said, “Better that than let the Firstborn win.”

  “It took us two years to find a way to beam me back home,” Athena said softly. “We didn’t want to broadcast our existence to a dangerous universe. So we put together an optical laser—quite powerful, but a tight beam. And when the time came, with my data stream encoded into it, we fired it off at Earth. We anticipated that it would be picked up by Cyclops, which was at the planning stage before the sunstorm.”

  “It was risky,” Myra said. “If Cyclops hadn’t been built after all—”

  “We had no choice but to make the gamble.”

  Yuri asked, “Why you, of the three?”

  Athena paused. “We drew lots, after a fashion.”

  “And the others—”

  “The signal took everything we had, everything Witness could give us. Though Witness lived, there was nothing left to sustain the others. They gave themselves for me.”

  Myra wondered how Athena, an AI with such a complicated biography, felt about this. As the “youngest” of the three, it must have felt as if her parents had sacrificed themselves to save her. “It wasn’t just for you,” she said gently. “It was for all of us.”

  “Yes,” Athena said. “And you see why I had to be sent home.”

  Myra looked at Alexei. “And this is what you’ve kept from me for so many weeks.”

  Alexei looked uncomfortable.

  “It was my request, Myra,” Athena said smoothly.

  Yuri was staring at his hands, which were splayed out on the table before him. He looked as stunned as Myra felt. She asked, “What are you thinking, Yuri?”

  “I’m thinking that we have crashed through a conceptual barrier today. Since the sunstorm there has always been something of a human-centered bias to our thinking about the Firstborn, I believe. As if we implicitly assumed they were a threat aimed at us alone—our personal nemesis. Now we learn that they have acted against others, just as brutally.” He lifted his hands and spread them wide in the air. “Suddenly we must think of the Firstborn as extensive in space and time. Shit, I need another coffee.” Yuri got up and shambled over to the percolators.

  Alexei blew out his cheeks. “So now you know it all, Myra. What next?”

  Myra said, “This material should be shared with the Earth authorities. The Space Council—”

  Alexei pulled a face. “Why? So they can throw more atomic bombs, and arrest us all? Myra, they think too narrowly.”

  Myra stared at him. “Didn’t we all work together during the sunstorm? But now here we are back in the old routine—they lie to you, you lie to them. Is that the way we’re all going into the dark?”

  “Be fair, Myra,” Yuri murmured. “The Spacers are doing their best. And they’re probably right about how Earth would react.”

  “So what do you think we should we do?”

  Yuri said, “Follow the Martians’ example. They trapped an Eye—they struck back.” He laughed bitterly. “And as a result of that, right now the only bit of Firstborn technology we have is there on Mars, sitting under my ice cap.”

  “Yes,” Athena said. “It seems that the focus of this crisis is the pole of Mars. I want you to return there, Myra.”

  Myra considered. “And when we get there?”

  “Then we must wait, as before,” Athena said. “The next steps are largely out of our hands.”

  “Then whose?”

  “Bisesa Dutt’s,” murmured Athena.

  An alarm sounded, and the walls flashed red.

  Lyla tapped her ident patch and listened to the air. “It’s the Astropol cops down on Earth deck,” she said. “We must have a leak. They are coming for you, Myra.” She stood.

  Myra followed her lead. She felt dazed. “They want me? Why?”

  “Because they think you will lead them to your mother. Let’s get out of here. We don’t have much time.”

  They hurried from the room, Alexei muttering instructions to the Maxwell.

  45: MAYOR

  Shopping in Chicago turned out to be just that. Remarkably, you could stroll along Michigan Avenue and other thoroughfares, and inspe
ct the windows of stores like Marshall Field’s where goods were piled up on display and mannequins modeled suits and dresses and coats. You could buy fur coats and boots and other cold-weather essentials, but Emeline would only look at “the fashion,” as she called them, which turned out to be relics of the stores’ 1890s stock, once imported from a vanished New York or Boston, lovingly preserved and much patched and repaired since. Bisesa thought Emeline would have been bewildered to be faced with the modernity of thirty-two years later on Earth, the fashions of 1926.

  So they shopped. But the street outside Marshall Field’s was half-blocked by the carcass of a horse, desiccated, frozen in place where it had fallen. The lights in the window were smoky candles of seal blubber and horse fat. And though there were some young people around, they were mostly working in the stores. All the shoppers, as far as Bisesa could see, were old, Emeline’s age or older, survivors of the Discontinuity picking through these shabby, worn-out relics of a lost past.

  Mayor Rice’s office was deep in the guts of City Hall.

  Hard-backed chairs had been drawn up before a desk. Bisesa, Emeline, and Abdi sat in a row, and were kept waiting.

  This room wasn’t swathed with insulation like Emeline’s apartment. Its walls were adorned with flock wallpaper and portraits of past dignitaries. A fire burned hugely in a hearth, and there was central heating too, a dry warmth supplied by heavy iron radiators, no doubt fed by some wood-burning monster of a furnace in the basement. A telephone was fixed to the wall, a very primitive sort, just a box with a speaking tube, and an ear trumpet you held to your head. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked, defiantly set to Chicago standard railway time, four P.M., just as it had been for thirty-two years, despite the difference of opinion expressed by the world outside.

  Bisesa felt oddly glad she had opted to wear her purple Babylonian clothes, as had Abdi, despite the offer of a more formal “suit” by Emeline. She felt she wanted to keep her own identity here.

  She whispered to the others, “So this is 1920s Chicago. I think I’m expecting Al Capone.”

  Her phone murmured, “In 1894 Capone was in New York. He couldn’t be here now—”

  “Oh, shut up.” She said to Emeline, “Tell me about Mayor Jacob Rice.”

  “He’s only about thirty—born after the Freeze.”

  “And the son of a mayor?”

  Emeline shook her head. “Not exactly…”

  The hour of the Discontinuity had been shocking for Chicagoans. After all it had started snowing, in July. Excited stevedores reported icebergs on Lake Michigan. And from their offices in the upper floors of the Rookery and the Montauk, businessmen looked north to see a line of bone white on the horizon. The mayor had been out of town. His deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

  Things deteriorated quickly in those first days. As the food riots worsened, as old folks began to freeze, as the suburbs began to burn, the deputy mayor made his best decision. Recognizing the limits of his own capacity, he formulated an Emergency Committee, a representative sample of the city’s leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago’s powerful unions. Here too was Jane Addams, “Saint Jane,” a noted social reformer who ran a women’s refuge called Hull House, and Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey.

  And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the Columbian Guard, a dedicated police force for the world’s fair, only a year before. The deputy mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

  Under martial law, the Committee clamped down on the gathering crime wave, and tidied up the deputy mayor’s hasty rationing and curfew proclamations. Rice established new medical centers, where a brisk triage system was put in place, and emergency cemeteries were opened up. And as the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swaths, they began to plan for the future.

  Emeline said, “Eventually the Emergency Committee functions got subsumed back into the mayor’s office, but Rice himself was never elected.”

  “But now his son is the mayor,” Abdi murmured. “An unelected leader, the son of a leader. I smell a dynasty here.”

  “We can’t afford the paper for elections,” Emeline said primly.

  Mayor Rice bustled in. He was followed by a small posse of nervous-looking men, clerks perhaps, though one older man carried a briefcase.

  “Miss Dutt? And Mister—ah—Omar. Good to meet you. And to see you again, Mrs. White…”

  Jacob Rice was a plump young man dressed in a fine suit that showed no sign of patching. His black hair was slicked back, perhaps by some kind of pomade, and his face was sharp, his cold blue eyes intent. He served them brandy in finely cut glass.

  “Now look here, Miss Dutt,” he began briskly. “It’s good of you to see me, and all. I make a point of speaking to every visitor to the city from outside, even though they’re mostly those Greek sort of fellows who are good for nothing but a history lesson, along with a few British from about our own time—isn’t that right?”

  “The North–West Frontier time slice was from 1885,” she said. “I got caught up in it. But in fact I was from—”

  “The year of Our Lord 2037.” He tapped a letter on the desk before him. “Mrs. White here was good enough to tell me a good deal about you. But I’ll be frank with you, Miss Dutt; I’m only interested in your biography, no matter what time you come from, insofar as it affects me and my town. I’m sure you can see that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now you come here first of all with news that the world is ending. Is that right?”

  The older man among the cowed-looking array behind him raised a finger. “Not quite, Mr. Mayor. The lady’s claim is that the universe is coming to an end. But the implication is, of course, that it will take our world with it.” He chuckled softly, as if he had made an amusing academic point.

  Rice stared at him. “Well, if that isn’t the all-mightiest nitpicking quibble of all time. Miss Dutt, this here is Gifford Oker—professor of astronomy at our brand-new University of Chicago. Or it was brand new when we all got froze. I invited him here because it seems you have some astronomical stuff to talk about, and he’s the nearest thing to an expert we got.”

  About fifty, grayed, his face all but hidden behind thick spectacles and a ragged mustache, Oker was clutching a battered leather briefcase. His suit was shabby with frayed cuffs and lapels, and his elbows and knees padded with leather. “I can assure you that my credentials are not to be questioned. At the time of the Freeze I was a student under George Ellery Hale, the noted astronomer—perhaps you’ve heard of him? We were hoping to establish a new observatory at Williams Bay, which would have featured a suite of modern instruments, including a forty-inch refractor—it would have been the largest such telescope in the world. But it wasn’t to be, of course, it wasn’t to be. We have been able to maintain a program of observations with telescopes that were preserved within the ‘time slice,’ as you put it, Miss Dutt, necessarily smaller and less powerful. And we have performed some spectroscopy, whose results are—well, surprising.”

  Abdi leaned forward. “Professor, I myself have practiced astronomy in Babylon. We obtained the results that are in part the basis of Bisesa’s prediction. We must exchange information.”

  “Certainly.”

  Rice glanced at Emeline’s letter. He read slowly, “‘The recession of the distant stars.’ This is what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s right,” Abdi said. “Simply put, it’s as if the stars are fleeing from the sun in all directions.”

  Rice nodded. “Okay. I got that. So what?”

  Oker sighed. He took of
f his spectacles, to reveal deep-set, weary eyes, and rubbed the lenses on his tie. “You see, Mr. Mayor, the problem is this. Why should the sun be uniquely located at the center of such an expansion? It violates the most basic principles of mediocrity. Even though we have been through the Freeze, the most extraordinary event in recorded history, such principles surely still hold true.”

  Bisesa studied this Professor Oker, wondering how much he could understand. He obviously had a keen enough mind, and had managed to sustain an academic career, of sorts, in the most extraordinary of circumstances. “So what’s your interpretation, sir?”

  He replaced his spectacles and looked at her. “That we are not privileged observers. That if we were living on a world of Alpha Centauri we would observe the same phenomenon—that is to say, we would see the distant nebulae receding from us uniformly. It can only mean that the ether itself is expanding—that is, the invisible material within which all the stars swim. The universe is blowing up like a pudding in an oven, and the stars, like currants embedded in that pudding, are all receding from each other. But to each currant it would seem as if it was the sole point of stillness at the center of the explosion…”

  Bisesa’s knowledge of relativity was restricted to a module in a college course decades ago—that and science fiction, and you couldn’t trust that. But the Chicago time slice had come when Einstein was only fifteen years old; Oker could know nothing of relativity. And relativity was founded on the discovery that the ether, in fact, didn’t exist.

  But she thought Oker had got the picture, near enough.

  She said, “Mr. Mayor, he’s right. The universe itself is expanding. Right now the expansion is pushing the stars apart, the galaxies. But eventually that expansion is eventually going to work its way down to smaller scales.”

  Abdi said, “It will pull the world apart, leaving us all flying in a crowd of rocks. Then our bodies will break up. Then the very atoms of which our bodies are composed.” He smiled. “And that is how the world will end. The expansion that is now visible only through a telescope will fold down until it breaks everything to bits.”