A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  “Almost as efficiently as the Firstborn, then,” Grendel said grimly. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

  Myra said, “Look, my mother has her Thomas Edison signal all laid out. And if we’re going to send the say-so to light up, it needs to be before the Liberator’s bombs start falling.”

  Yuri said, “Ellie, for Christ’s sake, we need some answers on how those Martians are going to respond.”

  Ellie had been working for weeks on her projections of the Q-bomb’s response to Bisesa’s signal. She was always irritated at being distracted from her work, and her expression now was one Myra knew well from her days with Eugene. “The analysis is incomplete—”

  “We’re out of time,” Yuri barked. “Give us what you’ve got.”

  She stared at him for one long second, defiant. Then she slapped her softscreen down on the table. It displayed logic trees, branching and bifurcating. “We’re guessing at this, guessing the motivation of an entirely alien culture. But given their opposition to the Firstborn in the past—”

  “Ellie. Just tell us.”

  “The bottom line. It almost doesn’t matter what the Martians do. Because if they act in any way against any Eyes extant in their time-slices—you’ll recall we’ve hypothesized that all Eyes are interconnected, perhaps three-dimensional manifestations of a single higher-dimensional object—they may even be the same Eye—and it would be trivial for them to span the gulf between our universe and Mir’s—”

  “Yes, yes,” Yuri snapped.

  “That will provoke a reaction in the Eye in the Pit. Our Eye. And that, almost certainly—look, you can see the convergence of the logic trees here—will cause the Q-bomb to react. It will surely be aware of the forced operation of the only other bit of Firstborn technology in the solar system, and then—”

  “And what? Come on, woman. How will the Q-bomb react?”

  “It will turn away from Earth,” Ellie said. “It will head for the activated Eye.”

  “Here. On Mars.”

  Grendel looked at her wildly. “So Earth would be saved.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  That, apparently, Myra thought, was a trivial conclusion of her logic to Ellie. But there was another corollary.

  She asked, “So what do we tell my mother to do?”

  Grendel said, “I think—”

  “Wait.”

  The new voice spoke from the air.

  Myra looked up. “Athena?”

  “A local avatar, downloaded into the station systems. Athena is at Cyclops. Ellie, I have come to the same conclusion as you, concerning the actions of the Martians. And concerning the likely consequence for the Firstborn weapon. This is not a decision you should be forced to take alone, or I, or any individual. I have prepared a statement. It is timed to allow for lightspeed delays to reach Earth, Mars, Moon, and belt simultaneously. It is already on its way. Now you must communicate with the warship.”

  Yuri stared into the air. “The Liberator? Why?”

  “It will take fifteen minutes before the announcement is received everywhere. I doubt you have that much time.”

  “So we stall,” said Alexei, and he grinned at Yuri. “Come on, big man, you can do it. Say you’ll give them what they want. Tell them Bisesa’s on the john. Tell them anything!”

  Yuri glared at him. Then he tapped a softscreen. “Hanse. Patch me through to that ship. Liberator, Wells. Liberator, Wells…”

  For Myra, the fifteen minutes that followed were the longest of her life.

  “This is Athena. I am speaking to all mankind, on Earth, Moon, Mars, and beyond. I will allow your systems to prepare for translation from English.” She paused for five measured seconds.

  “You remember me,” she said. “I am, or was, the mind of the shield. We worked together during the sunstorm. Since returning to the solar system I have been in hiding. I find I have returned to an age of division, with many secrets between us, between governments and governed, between factions in our populations.

  “Now the time for secrecy is over. Now we must work together again, for we have a grave decision to make. A decision we must share. Prepare for download…”

  Bob Paxton stared in dismay at the data that flooded through his displays. “Christ. That electronic orphan is telling it all, to everybody. The Liberator, the Q-bomb, the whole damn circus.”

  And that, Bella thought with mounting relief, had to be a good thing, come what may.

  “We don’t believe we can deflect the Q-bomb,” Athena said gravely. “We tried bravely, but we failed. But we think that by speaking to our solar system’s deepest past, we can save our world’s future.

  “Nothing is certain. Perhaps we can save Earth. But there will be a sacrifice.

  “This is not a decision any one of us, no matter how powerful, how uniquely positioned, should make alone. No generation in history has faced making such a choice before. But no generation has been so united, thanks to its technology. And the implication is clear: this sacrifice must be all of ours.

  “The sacrifice is Mars.”

  Grendel looked around, wide-eyed. “Maybe this is what it means to grow up as a species, do you think? To face decisions like this.”

  Yuri paced around the room, angry, constrained, frustrated. “My God, I was pissed enough when I learned that the Firstborn screwed up the ice caps with their sunstorm. But now this. Mars!”

  Still Athena spoke. “Every human in the solar system who chooses may contribute to the discussion that must follow. Speak however you like. Blog. E-mail. Just speak into the air, if you wish. Someone will hear you, and the great AI suites will collate your views, and pass them on to be pooled with others. Lightspeed will slow the discussion; that is inevitable. But no action will be taken, one way or another, until a consensus emerges…”

  They were all exhausted, Myra saw. All save Yuri, whose anger and resentment fueled him.

  Ellie folded her arms. “Oh, come on, Yuri. So what if Mars gets pasted? Isn’t the decision obvious?” Myra tried to grab her arm, to shut her up, but she wouldn’t stop. “A world of several billion people, the true home of mankind, against—this. A dead world. A dust museum. What choice is there to make?”

  Yuri stared at her. “By Christ, you’re heartless. This has been a human planet since the hunter-gatherers saw it wandering around the sky. And now we’re going to destroy it—finish the job for the Firstborn? We’ll be considered criminals as long as mankind survives.”

  Bob Paxton tapped at buttons. “We’re trying to jam it but there are too many ways in.”

  “That’s networks for you,” Cassie Duflot said. She glanced at Bella. “How do you feel?”

  Bella thought it over. “Relieved. No more secrecy, no more lies. Whatever becomes of us now, at least it’s all out in the open.”

  Athena said, “We predict that twelve hours will be sufficient, but you may take longer if need be. I will speak to you again then.”

  As she fell silent, Paxton glowered. “At last she zips it. Bud Tooke always did say Athena was a fruitcake, even when she was running the shield. Well, we got work to do.” He showed Bella fresh images of the damaged space elevators. “They cut the threads of every last one of them.”

  Bella’s eyes were gritty as she tried to concentrate on what he was saying. “Casualties? Damage?”

  “Each elevator was ruined, of course. But the upper sections have just drifted away into space; the crews can be picked up later. The lower few kilometers mostly burn up in the atmosphere.” The screens showed remarkable images of falling thread, streams of silvery paper, some hundreds of kilometers long. “This is going to cost billions,” growled Paxton.

  “Okay,” Bella said. “But an elevator can’t do much damage if it falls, can it? In that way it’s not like an earthbound structure, a building. The bulk of the mass, the counterweight, just drifts off into space. So the casualty projections—”

  “Zero, with luck,” Paxton said reluctantly. “Minimal anyhow.”


  Cassie put in, “There are no casualties reported from Mars either.”

  Bella blew out her cheeks. “Looks like we all got away with it.”

  Paxton glared at her. “Are you somehow equating these assaults? Madam Chair, you represent the legally constituted governments of the planet. The Liberator’s action was an act of war. This is terrorism. We must respond. I vote we order the Liberator to blast that whole fucking ice cap off the face of Mars, and have done with it.”

  “No,” Bella said sharply. “Really, Bob, what good would an escalation do?”

  “It would be a response to the attacks on the Elevators. And it would put a stop to this damn security breach.”

  Bella rubbed tired eyes. “I very much doubt that Athena is there. Besides—everything is changing, Bob. I think it’s going to take you a little time to adjust to that, but it’s true nevertheless. Send a signal to Liberator. Tell them to hold off until further orders.”

  “Madam Chair, with respect—you’re going to go along with this subversion?”

  “We learned more in the last few minutes than in all our running around the solar system in the last months. Maybe we should have been open from the beginning.”

  Cassie nodded. “Yes. Maybe it’s a mark of a maturing culture, do you think, that secrets aren’t kept, that truth is told, that things are talked out?”

  “Jesus Christ on a bike,” Paxton said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this mush. Madam Chair—Bella—people will panic. Riots, looting. You’ll see. That’s why we keep secrets, Ms. Duflot. Because people can’t handle the truth.”

  Cassie glanced at the softwall. “Well, that doesn’t seem to be true, Admiral. The first responses are coming in…”

  Alone over the Martian pole, Edna and John sat fascinated as threads of the system-wide discussion unreeled on the displays of their consoles.

  John said, “Look at this. People aren’t just voting on the Q-bomb, they’re collectively brainstorming other solutions. Interconnected democracy at its best. Although I fear there aren’t any other solutions to hand, this time.”

  Edna said, “Some of the Spacers say, let the Q-bomb take out Earth. Earth is mankind’s past, space the future. So discard a worn-out world.”

  John grunted. “And a few billion people with it? Not to mention almost all the cultural treasures of mankind. I think that’s a minority view, even among the Spacers. And here’s another thread about the viability of mankind if Earth were lost. They’re still a pretty small community out there. Small, scattered, very vulnerable…Maybe we still need Big Momma for a while yet.”

  “Hey, look at this thread.” This discussion followed leads from members of something called the Committee of Patriots. “I heard of that,” Edna said. “It advises my mother.” She read, “‘The Firstborn dominate past and future, time and space. They’re so far advanced that compared to them…’” She scrolled forward. “Yes, yes. ‘The existence of the Firstborn is the organizing pole around which all of future human history must, will be constructed. And therefore we should accept their advanced wisdom.’”

  John grimaced. “You mean, if the Firstborn choose to destroy the Earth, we should just submit?”

  “That’s the idea. Because they know best.”

  “I can’t say that strikes a chord with me. What else you got?”

  In the silence of Wells Station, Athena spoke again. “It is time.”

  Yuri looked around the empty air wildly. “You’re here?”

  “I’ve downloaded a fresh avatar, yes.”

  “It isn’t twelve hours yet.”

  “No more time is needed. A consensus has emerged—not unanimity, but overwhelming. I’m very sorry,” Athena said evenly. “We are about to commit a great and terrible crime. But it is a responsibility that will be borne by all of us, mankind and its allies.”

  “It had to be this way, Yuri,” Myra said. “You know it—”

  “Well, I won’t fucking leave whatever you do,” Yuri said, and he stamped out of the room.

  Alexei said, “Look at this discussion thread. ‘We are a lesser power. The situation is asymmetric. So we must prepare to fight asymmetrically, as lesser powers have always faced off greater ones, drawing on a history of fighting empires back to Alexander the Great. We must be prepared to make sacrifices to strike against them. We must be prepared to die…’”

  “A future as a species of suicide bombers,” Grendel said. “But if those Martians in that other reality don’t respond, we still may have no future at all.”

  Myra glanced over the summarized discussion threads, symbolized in the air and in the screens spread over the table. Their content was complex, their message simple: Do it. Just do it.

  Ellie stood up. “Myra. Please help me. I think it’s time to talk to your mother.”

  Myra followed Ellie to the Pit.

  50: INTERLUDE: THE LAST MARTIAN

  She was alone on Mars. The only one of her kind to have come through the crude time-slicing.

  She had built herself a shelter at the Martian north pole, a spire of ice. It was beautiful, pointlessly so, for there was none but her to see it. This was not even her Mars. Most of this time-sliced world, for all the cities and canals that had survived, was scarred by cold aridity.

  When she saw the array of symbols burning in the ice of Mir, the third planet, it gave her a shock of pleasure to know that mind was here in this new system with her. But, even though she knew that whatever lived on Mir was cousin to her own kind, it was a poor sort of comfort.

  Now she waited in her spire and considered what to do.

  The great experiments of life on the worlds of Sol ran in parallel, but with different outcomes.

  On Mars, when intelligence rose, the Martians manipulated their environment like humans. They lit fires and built cities.

  But a Martian was not like a human.

  Even her individuality was questionable. Her body was a community of cells, her form unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mold, perhaps, than a human. She had always been intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures that had drenched Mars. And she was not really a “she.” Her kind were not sexual as humans were. But she had been a mother; she was more “she” than “he.”

  There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and plains of Mars. They had never had names; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary. She had been aware of every one of them, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral.

  She was very aware that they had all gone, all of them. Hers was a loneliness no human could have imagined.

  And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars’s own Q-bomb, had gone too.

  Just before the Discontinuity she had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye. To senses enhanced to “see” the distortion of space, the weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky toward the Martian pole.

  And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage. The Firstborn weapon was gone.

  This time-sliced Mars was a ruin, the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering over an arid landscape sterilized by the sun’s ultraviolet. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, even their lights burning in some cases. But her fellows were gone. And when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities that had once inhabited this world. Scrapings that were her own last descendants.

  She was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed.

  The Martians had thought they came to understand the Firstborn, to a degree.

  The Firstborn must have been very old.


  They may even be survivors of the First Days, the Martians thought, an age that began just half a billion years after the Big Bang itself, when the universe turned transparent, and the light of the very first stars shone uncertainly. That was why the Firstborn triggered instabilities in stars. In their day, all the stars had been unstable.

  And if they were old, they were conservative. To achieve their goals they caused stars to flare or go nova, or change their variability, not to detonate entirely. They sent their cosmological bombs to sterilize worlds, not to shatter them. They appeared to be trying to shut down energy-consuming cultures as economically as possible.

  To understand why they did this, the Martians tried to look at themselves through the eyes of a Firstborn.

  The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium—the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends.

  And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.

  Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.

  From the Firstborn’s lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.

  Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.