And Mars was gone.
63: A TIME ODYSSEY
A gate opened. A gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.
It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.
She was on her back. There was something enormously bright above her—the sun, yes, the sun, she was outdoors.
She threw herself over onto her belly. Dazzled by the sun, she could barely see.
A plain. Red sand. Eroded hills in the distance. Even the sky looked red, though the sun was high.
This felt familiar.
And Myra was beside her. It was impossible, but it was so.
Bisesa hurriedly crawled through loose sand to get to her daughter. Like Bisesa, Myra was in a green Mars suit. She was lying on her back, an ungainly fish stranded on this strange beach.
Myra’s faceplate retracted, and she coughed in the sharp, dry air. She stared at her right hand. The suit’s glove was missing, the flesh of her hand pale.
“It’s me, darling.”
Myra looked at her, shocked. “Mum?”
They clung to each other.
It got darker. Bisesa peered up.
The sun’s disk was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken. It began to feel colder, and Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground.
Not again, she thought.
“Don’t be afraid.”
They both turned, rolling in the dirt.
A woman stood over them. She was quite hairless, her face smooth. She wore a flesh-colored coverall so sleek it was as if she was naked. She smiled at them. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Myra said, “My God. Charlie?”
Bisesa stared. “Who is ‘we’?”
“We call ourselves the Lastborn. We are at war. We are losing.” She held out her hands. “Please. Come with me now.”
Bisesa and Myra, still hugging each other, reached out their free hands. Their fingertips touched Charlie’s.
A clash of cymbals.
AFTERWORD
Recently the space elevator, as dramatized in Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (1979), has come closer to engineering feasibility. The details given here are based in part on a study funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts program, and written up in The Space Elevator by Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling (Spaego, San Francisco, 2003). See also Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator by Dr. Edwards and Philip Ragan (lulu.com, Seattle, 2006), and papers by Giorcelli, Pullum, Swan, and Swan in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, September 2006. A recent study of the use of space elevators as energy-free “orbital siphons” is given by Colin McInnes and Chris Davis in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 59, pp. 368–74, 2006. We’re very grateful to Dr. Edwards for discussions on the relevant sections. His company “Black Line Ascension” may become a real world counterpart of our Skylift Consortium.
It is remarkable that cultures globally appear to share a “world tree” myth. Some of the more plausible explanations for this range from cloud formations to plasma phenomena (see for example www.maverickscience.com/ladder_aeon.pdf).
The “Cyclops” Fresnel-lens telescope is based on a study by James T. Early (“Twenty-meter space telescope based on diffractive Fresnel lens” by Dr. Early et al., in Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 5166, “UV/Optical/IR Space Telescopes: Innovative Technologies and Concepts,” ed. Howard A. MacEwen, January 2004). Our depiction of the Fresnel shield of Sunstorm also drew on Dr. Early’s studies. We’re very grateful to Dr. Early for discussions on these concepts.
Our depiction of Martian exploration draws partly on a conceptual design study, to which Baxter contributed, of a base at the Martian north pole: see Project Boreas: A Station for the Martian Geographic North Pole, ed. Charles S. Cockell (British Interplanetary Society, 2006). The idea that relic space probes could be used to provide human-interest targets for future Mars expeditions was suggested by Baxter (see “Trophy Fishing: Early Expeditions to Spacecraft Relics on Mars,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 57 pp. 99–102, 2004), and the history of humanity’s interaction with Mars is sketched by Baxter in “Martian Chronicles: Narratives of Mars in Science and SF” (Foundation no. 68, 1996, and in The Hunters of Pangaea, NESFA Press, Feb 2004). Our depiction of a lunar South pole base in Sunstorm foresaw the plans for the colonization of the Moon announced by NASA in December 2006. Our sketch of Titan is based on results returned by the spectacular Huygens Lander in January 2005.
Recent studies confirm that the surface of Mars’s northern hemisphere is very ancient (Watters et al., Nature, vol. 444, pp. 905–8, December 2006) and appears to be a single vast crater created by an immense impact (New Scientist, 24 March 2007). The impact was natural. Probably.
Solar sailing is another long-trailed technology whose time may be coming at last. Physicists and science fiction writers Gregory and James Benford were involved in Cosmos 1, an experimental solar-sail spacecraft that, scheduled for launch in June 2005, would have used light pressure to adjust its orbit. The craft carried a CD containing Clarke’s 1964 story “The Wind from the Sun.” Sadly the launch vehicle failed.
Human suspended animation may also be coming closer to fruition; see for example the article by Mark Roth and Todd Nystul in Scientific American, June 2005. And scientists led by Imperial College, London, are edging toward a “metamaterial” invisibility technology of the type sketched here (see http://tinyurl.com/zp6jh). A study of the use of “gravitational tractors” to divert asteroids is given by E. T. Lu et al. in Nature, vol. 438, pp. 177–8, November 2005.
The effects of the “cosmological bomb” featured in this novel are based on predictions made in 2003 of the ultimate fate of a universe permeated by dark energy, given by Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College and others (see Physical Review, www.arxiv.org/abs/ astro-ph/0302506). The variability of Procyon is fictitious, but variable stars do sometimes cease to be fluctuate. It did happen to one of the most famous stars in the sky, the pole star Polaris, an anomaly as yet unexplained; see J. D. Fernie et al., Astrophysical Journal, vol. 416, pp. 820–4, 1993.
The science of “astrobiology,” the study of the possibility of life beyond the Earth, has been revolutionized in the last few years both by the discovery of new variants of life on Earth, by the revelation of possible habitats for life either now or in the past on worlds like Mars, Europa, and Titan, and by new models of “panspermia,” natural mechanisms by which living things could be transferred between the planets. A recent review is Life as We Do Not Know It by Peter Ward (Viking, 2005).
The energy-conservation strategy of the Firstborn, first sketched in Time’s Eye (2004) and Sunstorm (2005), is reflected in some academic thinking on the future of life in the universe. See for instance a paper by Michael Mautner ( Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 57, pp. 167–80, 2005) titled “Life in the Cosmological Future: Resources, Biomass and Populations.”
The idea that stretches of North America could be “re-wilded” with substitute communities of animals to replace the lost megafauna ecology of the past has been put forward by, among others, Paul S. Martin (Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of North America, University of California Press, 2005). But others raise profound objections to the plan (see Rubenstein et al., Biological Conservation, vol. 132, p. 232, 2006). A study of the use of space-based resources in mitigating future disasters (not necessarily caused by malevolent extraterrestrials) is given as two papers by C. M. Hempsell in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 57, pp. 2–21, 2004.
Alexander the Great’s global conquest, sketched here, is based on plans he was actually drawing up before his death for an expansion of his empire from Gibraltar to the Black Sea; see for instance Conques
t and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great by A. B. Bosworth (CUP 1988). An engaging portrait of Chicago at the time of the 1893 world’s fair is The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Random House, 2003). The portrayal of the Babylonian “Midden” is based on the archaeology of the Neolithic city known as Catalhoyuk; see www.catalhoyuk.org.
Chapter 25 is based on a heavily revised version of the story “A Signal from Earth” by Baxter, first published in Postscripts no. 5, Autumn 2005.
Any errors or misconceptions are of course the authors’ sole responsibility.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Stephen Baxter
June 2007
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ARTHUR C. CLARKE is considered the greatest science fiction writer of all time and is an international treasure in many other ways, including the fact that a 1945 article by him led to the invention of satellite technology. Books by Clarke—both fiction and nonfiction—have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. He lives in Sri Lanka.
STEPHEN BAXTER is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and Southampton universities. Baxter is the acclaimed author of the Manifold novels and Evolution. He is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award, the Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Contents
TIME'S EYE
Title Page
Copyright
Authors’ Note
Epigraph
PART 1 DISCONTINUITY
1: SEEKER
2: LITTLE BIRD
3: EVIL EYE
4: RPG
5: SOYUZ
6: ENCOUNTER
7: CAPTAIN GROVE
8: ON ORBIT
9: PARADOX
PART 2 CASTAWAYS IN TIME
10: GEOMETRY
11: STRANDED IN SPACE
12: ICE
13: LIGHTS IN THE SKY
14: LAST ORBIT
15: NEW WORLD
16: REENTRY
17: A HARD RAIN
PART 3 ENCOUNTERS AND ALLIANCES
18: EMISSARIES OF HEAVEN
19: THE DELTA
20: THE CITY OF TENTS
21: RETURN TO JAMRUD
22: THE MAP
23: CONFERENCE
24: THE HUNT
PART 4 THE CONFLUENCE OF HISTORY
25: THE FLEET
26: THE TEMPLE
27: THE FISH-EATERS
28: BISHKEK
29: BABYLON
30: THE GATE OF THE GODS
31: HAM RADIO
32: COUNCIL OF WAR
33: A PRINCE OF HEAVEN
34: “DWELLERS ALL IN TIME AND SPACE”
35: CONFLUENCE
36: AFTERMATH
PART 5 MIR
37: LABORATORY
38: THE EYE OF MARDUK
39: EXPLORATIONS
40: THE BOATING LAKE
41: ZEUS-AMMON
42: LAST NIGHT
43: THE EYE OF MARDUK
PART 6 TIME’S EYE
44: FIRSTBORN
45: THROUGH THE EYE
46: GRASPER
47: RETURN
A Conversation with Stephen Baxter and Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Other Alexanders by Stephen Baxter
SUNSTORM
Title Page
Copyright
PART 1 A BALEFUL SUN
1: RETURN
2: THE PEAK OF ETERNAL LIGHT
3: ROYAL SOCIETY
4: VISITOR
5: EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
6: FORECAST
7: MASS EJECTION
PART 2 PRESAGINGS
8: RECOVERY
9: LUNAR DESCENT
10: CONTACT LIGHT
11: TIME’S EYE
12: BRIEFING
13: NEUTRINOS
14: MISSING IN ACTION
15: BOTTLENECK
16: DEBRIEF
17: BRAINSTORM
18: ANNOUNCEMENT
PART 3 THE SHIELD
19: INDUSTRY
20: HUMAN RESOURCES
21: SHOWSTOPPERS
22: TURNING POINT
23: HEATHROW
24: BDO
25: SMOKING GUN
PART 4 PERTURBATION
26: ALTAIR
27: THE TIN LID
28: THE ARK
29: IMPACT
30: TELESCOPE
31: PERSPECTIVES
32: LEGAL PERSON
33: CORE
34: SUNSET (I)
35: SUNSET (II)
36: SUNSET (III)
37: SUNSET (IV)
38: FIRSTBORN
PART 5 SUNSTORM
39: MORNING STAR
40: DAWN
41: THE PALACE IN THE SKY
42: NOON
43: SHIELD
44: SUNSET
45: MARTIAN SPRING
46: AFTERSHOCK
47: BAD NEWS
48: CERENKOV RADIATION
PART 6 A TIME ODYSSEY
49: PACIFIC
50: ELEVATOR
51: A SIGNAL FROM EARTH
AFTERWORD
FIRSTBORN
TitlePage
Copyright
Dedication
PART 1 FIRST CONTACTS
1: BISESA
2: DEEP SPACE MONITOR
3: ABDIKADIR
PART 2 JOURNEYS
4: WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES
5: LONDON
6: MYRA
7: THE TOOKE MEDAL
8: EURO-NEEDLE
9: FLORIDA
10: LAUNCH COMPLEX 39
11: RIBBON
12: MOUNT WEATHER
13: FORTRESS SOL
14: ASCENT BEYOND ORBIT
15: LIBERATOR
16: JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
17: WARSHIP
18: MARS
19: THE SANDS OF MARS
20: LIBERATOR
21: POLE
22: APPROACH
23: THE PIT
24: CLOSEST APPROACHES
25: INTERLUDE: A SIGNAL FROM EARTH
PART 3 REUNIONS
26: THE STONE MAN
27: PHAETON
28: SUIT FIVE
29: ALEXEI
30: CHILIARCH
31: OPERATION ORDER
32: ALEXANDER
33: FLIGHT
A Time Odyssey Omnibus Page 98