Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Mum, people found out about the sunstorm. The truth. At first it was classified. Even the name ‘Firstborn’ was never made public. There was no hint at the time that the sunstorm was an intentional act.”

  Caused by the driving of a Jovian planet into the core of Earth’s sun.

  “But the truth leaked out. Whistle-blowers. It became a torrent when the generation who had fought the storm headed for retirement, and had nothing to lose, and began to speak of what they knew.”

  “I’m shocked there was a cover-up that lasted so long.”

  “Even now there are plenty of people who don’t believe it, I think. But people are scared. And there are those in government, and in industry and other establishments, who are using that fear. They are militarizing the whole of the Earth, indeed the solar system. They call it the War with the Sky.”

  Bisesa snorted. “That’s ridiculous. How can you wage war on an abstraction?”

  “I suspect that’s the point. It means whatever you want it to mean. And those who control the sky have a lot of power. Why do you think Thales is still stuck on the Moon?”

  “Ah. Because nobody can get to him up there. And this is why you left?”

  “Most of the gazillions they’re spending are simply wasted. What’s worse, they’re not doing any serious research into what we do know of Firstborn technology. The Eyes. The manipulation of spacetime, the construction of pocket universes—all of that. Stuff that might actually be useful in the case of a renewed threat.”

  “So that’s why you baled out.”

  “Yes. I mean, it was fun, Mum. I got to go to the Moon! But I couldn’t swallow the lies. There are plenty on and off the planet who think the way I do.”

  “Off the planet?”

  “Mum, since the sunstorm a whole generation has been born offworld. Spacers, they call themselves.” She glanced at her mother, then looked away. “It was a Spacer who called me. And asked me to come fetch you.”

  “Why?”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Those simple words chilled Bisesa.

  A shifting light caught her eye. Looking up she saw that bright satellite cutting across the sky. “Myra—what’s that? It looks sort of old-fashioned, in among the space mirrors.”

  “It’s Apollo 9. Or a recreation. That ship flew a hundred years ago today. The government is rerunning all those classic missions. A remembrance of the lost times before the sunstorm.”

  Conservation and memorials. Clinging to the past. It really was as if the whole world was still in shock. “All right. What do you want me to do?”

  “If you’re fit, get packed up. We’re leaving.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Myra smiled, a bit forced. “Off Earth…”

  7: THE TOOKE MEDAL

  The motorcade drew up outside a property in a suburb called Chiswick.

  Bella stepped out of her car, along with her two Council bodyguards. They were a man and a woman, bulked up by body armor, like all their colleagues silent and anonymous. The woman carried a small package in a black leather case.

  The car closed itself up.

  Bella faced the Duflot home, gathering her courage. It was a faceless block of white concrete with rounded wind-deflecting corners, sunk into the ground as if it was too heavy for the London clay. Its roof was a garden of wind turbines, solar cell panels, and antennae; its windows were small and deep. With subterranean rooms and independent power it was a house like a bunker. This was the domestic architecture of the fearful mid–twenty-first century.

  Bella had to walk down a flight of steps to the front door. A slim woman in a sharp black suit was waiting.

  “Ms. Duflot?”

  “Doctor Fingal. Thank you for coming. Call me Phillippa…” She extended a long-fingered hand.

  Shadowed by her security people, Bella was brought through the house to the living room.

  Phillippa Duflot must have been in her early sixties, a little older than Bella. Her silvered hair was cut short. Her face was not unattractive, but narrow, her mouth pursed. Phillippa looked capable of steely self-control, but this woman had lost a son, and the marks of that tragedy were in the lines around her eyes, Bella thought, and the tension in her neck.

  Waiting for Bella in the living room were the generations of Phillippa’s family. They stood when Bella came into the room, lined up before a softwall showing an image of a pretty Scottish lake. Bella had carefully and nervously memorized all their names. Phillippa’s two surviving sons, Paul and Julian, were solid, awkward-looking thirty-something men. Their wives stood by their sides. This slim, pretty woman of twenty-six was Cassie, the widow of the missing son James, and his two children, boy and girl, six and five, Toby and Candida. They were all dressed for a funeral, in black and white, even the children. And they all had ident tattoos on their cheeks. The little girl’s was a pretty pink flower.

  Standing before this group, under the stares of the children, Bella suddenly had no idea what to say.

  Phillippa came to her rescue. “It’s most awfully good of you to come.” Her accent was authentic British upper class, a throwback to another age, rich with composure and command. Phillippa said to her grandchildren, “Doctor Fingal is the head of the Space Council. She’s very important. And she flew from America, just to see us.”

  “Well, that’s true. And to give you this.” Bella nodded to her guards, and the woman handed her the leather case. Bella opened this carefully, and set it up on a low coffee table. A disc of delicate, sparkling fabric sat on a bed of black velvet.

  The children were wide-eyed. The boy asked, “Is it a medal?”

  And Candida asked, “Is it for Daddy?”

  “Yes. It’s for your father.” She pointed to the medal, but did not touch it; it looked like spiderweb embedded with tiny electronic components. “Do you know what it’s made of?”

  “Space shield stuff,” Toby said promptly.

  “Yes. The real thing. It’s called the Tooke Medal. There’s no higher honor you can earn, if you live and work in space, than this. I knew Bud Tooke. I worked with him, up on the shield. I know how much he would have admired your daddy. And it’s not just a medal. Do you want to see what it can do?”

  The boy was skeptical. “What?”

  She pointed. “Just touch this stud and see.”

  The boy obeyed.

  A hologram shimmered into life over the tabletop, eclipsing the medal in its case. It showed a funeral scene, a flag-draped coffin on a caisson drawn by six tiny black horses. Figures in dark blue uniforms stood by. The sound was tinny but clear, and Bella could hear the creak of the horses’ harnesses, their soft hoofbeats.

  The silent children loomed like giants over the scene. Cassie was weeping silently; her brother comforted her. Phillippa Duflot watched, composed.

  The recording skipped forward. Three rifle volleys cracked, and a flight of tiny, glittering jet aircraft swept overhead, one peeling away from the formation.

  “It’s Dad’s funeral,” Toby said.

  “Yes.” Bella leaned down to face the children. “They buried him at Arlington. That’s in Virginia—America—where the U.S. Navy has its cemetery.”

  “Dad trained in America.”

  “That’s right. I was there, at the funeral, and so was your mummy. This hologram is generated by the shield element itself—”

  “Why did one plane fly away like that?”

  “It’s called the Missing Man formation. Those planes, you know, Toby. They were T-38s. The first astronauts used them to train on. They’re over a hundred years old, imagine that.”

  “I like the little horses,” said Candida.

  Their uncle put his hands on their shoulders. “Come away now.”

  With some relief, Bella straightened up.

  Drinks arrived, sherry, whiskey, coffee, tea, served by a subdued young aunt. Bella accepted a coffee and stood with Phillippa.

  “It was kind of you to speak to them like that,” Phil
lippa said.

  “It’s my job, I guess,” Bella said, embarrassed.

  “Yes, but there are ways of doing it well, or badly. You’re new to it, aren’t you?”

  Bella smiled. “Six months in. Does it show?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Deaths in space are rare.”

  “Yes, thank God,” Phillippa said. “But that’s why it’s been so hard to take. I had hoped this new generation would be protected from—well, from what we went through. I read about you. You were actually on the shield.”

  Bella smiled. “I was a lowly comms tech.”

  Phillippa shook her head. “Don’t do yourself down. You ended up with a battlefield promotion to mission commander, didn’t you?”

  “Only because there was nobody else left to do it by the end of that day.”

  “Even so, you did your job. You deserve the recognition you’ve enjoyed.”

  Bella wasn’t sure about that. Her subsequent career, as an executive in various telecommunications corporations and regulatory bodies, had no doubt been given a healthy boost by her notoriety, and usefulness as a PR tool. But she’d always tried to pull her weight, until her retirement, aged fifty-five—a short one as it turned out, until she was offered this new role, a position she couldn’t turn down.

  Phillippa said, “As for me I was based in London during the build-up to the storm. Worked in the mayor’s office, on emergency planning and the like. But before the storm itself broke, my parents took me out to the shelter at L2.”

  The shield had been poised above the Earth at the point of perpetual noon, at L1, the first Lagrangian point of gravitational stability directly between Earth and sun. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the same Earth-sun line, but on the planet’s far side, at the midnight point. So while the workers at L1 labored to shelter the world from the storm, at L2 an offworld refuge hid safe in Earth’s shadow, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types—including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals. The story of L2 had subsequently become a scandal.

  “It wasn’t a pleasant place to be,” Phillippa murmured. “I tried to work. We were ostensibly a monitoring station. I kept up the comms links to the ground stations. But some of the rich types were throwing parties.”

  “It sounds as if you didn’t have a choice,” Bella said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “It’s kind of you to say that. Still, one must move on.”

  James Duflot’s widow, Cassie, approached them tentatively. “Thank you for coming,” she said awkwardly. She looked tired.

  “You don’t need—”

  “You were kind to the children. You’ve given them a day to remember.” She smiled. “They’ve seen your picture on the news. I think I’ll put away that hologram, though.”

  “Perhaps that’s best.” Bella hesitated. “I can’t tell you much about what James was working on. But I want you to know that your husband gave his life in the best of causes.”

  Cassie nodded. “In a way I was prepared for this, you know. People ask me how it feels to have your husband fly into space. I tell them, you should try staying on Earth.”

  Bella forced a smile.

  “To tell you the truth we were going through a difficult time. We’re Earth-bound, Doctor Fingal. James just went up to space to work, not to live. This is home. London. And I went into town every day to work at Thule.” Bella had done her research; Thule, Inc., was a big multinational eco-recovery agency. “We’d talked vaguely of separating for a bit.” Cassie laughed with faint bitterness. “Well, I’ll never know how that particular story would have turned out, will I?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You know what I miss? His mails. His softscreen calls. I didn’t have him, you see, but I had the mails. And so in a way I don’t miss him, but I miss the mails.” She looked sharply at Bella. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”

  Bella couldn’t bear to repeat the platitudes she knew were expected of her. “I’m new to this. But it’s my job to make sure it was.”

  That wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could be. She was relieved when she was able to use the excuse of another appointment to get out of the pillboxlike house.

  8: EURO-NEEDLE

  For her appointment with Bob Paxton, Bella was driven to the Livingstone Tower—or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner still called it. The local administrative headquarters of the Eurasian Union, and sometime seat of the Union’s prime minister, it was a tower of airy offices with broad windows of toughened glass offering superb views of London. During the sunstorm the Needle had been within the Dome’s shelter, and on its roof, which had interfaced with the Dome’s structure itself, was a small museum to those perilous days.

  Paxton was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-first floor. Pacing, he was drinking coffee in great gulps. He greeted Bella with a stiff military bow. “Chair Fingal.”

  “Thanks for coming all the way to London to meet me—”

  He waved that away. “I had other business here. We need to talk.”

  She took a seat. Still shaken by her encounter with the Duflots, she felt this was turning into a very long day.

  Paxton didn’t sit. He seemed too restless for that. He poured Bella a coffee from a big jug in the corner of the room; he poured for Bella’s security people too, and they sat at the far end of the table.

  “Tell me what’s on your mind, Admiral.”

  “I’ll tell you simply. The new sightings confirm it. We have a bogey.”

  “A bogey?”

  “An anomaly. Something sailing through our solar system that doesn’t belong there…”

  Paxton was tall, wiry. He had the face of an astronaut, she thought, very pale, and pocked by the scars of radiation tumors. His cheek tattoo was a proud wet-navy emblem, and his hair was a drizzle of crew-cut gray.

  He was in his seventies, she supposed. He had been around forty when he had led Aurora 1, the first manned mission to Mars, and had become the first person to set foot on that world—and then he had led his stranded crew through the greater trial of the sunstorm. Evidently he had taken the experience personally. Now a Rear Admiral in the new space navy, he had become a power in the paranoiac post-sunstorm years, and had thrown himself into efforts to counter the threat that had once stranded him on Mars.

  Watching him pace, caffeine-pumped, his face set and urgent, Bella had an absurd impulse to ask him for his autograph. And then a second impulse to order him to retire. She filed that reflection away.

  In his clipped Midwestern accent, he amplified the hints Edna had already given her. “We actually got three sightings of this thing.”

  The first had been fortuitous.

  Voyager 1, launched in 1977, having made mankind’s first reconnaissance of the outer planets, had sped on out of the solar system. By the fifth decade of a new century Voyager had traveled more than a hundred and fifty times Earth’s distance from the sun.

  And then its onboard cosmic ray detector, designed to seek out particles from distant supernovae, picked up a wash of energetic particles.

  Something had been born, out there in the dark.

  “Nobody made much of it at the time. Because it showed up on April 20, 2042.” Paxton smiled. “Sunstorm day. We were kind of busy with other things.”

  Voyager’s later observations showed how the anomaly, tugged by the sun’s gravity, began a long fall into the heart of the solar system. The first significant object the newborn would encounter on its way toward the sun would be Saturn and its system of moons, on a date in 2064. Plans were drawn up accordingly.

  “And that was the second encounter,” Paxton said. “We have readings made by Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016—and then a record of that probe’s destruction. And third, the latest sighting by a cluster of probes of some damn thing coming down on the J-line. The orbit of Jupiter.” He brought up a softscreen map on the table. “Three points on the chart, see—three points on a plausible orbit
al trajectory. Three sightings of what has to be the same object, wandering in where it don’t belong.” He stared at her, his cold blue eyes rheumy but unblinking, as if challenging her to put it together.

  “And you’re certain it’s not a comet, something natural?”

  “Comets don’t give off sprays of cosmic rays,” he said. “And it’s kind of a coincidence this thing just popped up out of nowhere on sunstorm day, don’t you think?”

  “And this trajectory, if it continues—where is it going, Admiral?”

  “We can be pretty accurate about that. It deflected off Saturn, but it won’t pass another mass significant enough for a slingshot. Assuming it just falls under gravity—”

  She took the bait. “It’s heading for Earth, isn’t it?”

  His face was like granite. “If it continues on its merry course it will get here December of next year. Maybe it’s Santa’s sleigh.”

  She frowned. “Twenty-one months. That’s not much time.”

  “That it ain’t.”

  “If the alert had been raised when this thing passed Saturn, and, you say, it actually destroyed a probe, we’d have had years warning.”

  He shrugged. “You have to set your threat levels somewhere. I always argued we weren’t suspicious enough. I had this out with your predecessor on a number of occasions. Looks like I was right, don’t it? If we survive this we can review protocol.”

  If we survive this. His language chilled her. “You think this is some kind of artifact, Admiral?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “But you do believe it’s a threat?”

  “Have to assume so. Wouldn’t you say?”

  She could hardly gainsay that. The question was what to do about it.

  The World Space Council had only a tenuous relationship with the old UN, which since the sunstorm had focused its efforts on recovery on Earth. The Council’s brief was to coordinate the world’s preparedness for any more threats from the unseen enemy behind the sunstorm, an enemy whose very existence had not in fact yet been officially admitted. Its principal asset was the navy, which nominally reported to the Council. But the Council itself was funded by and ultimately controlled by an uneasy alliance of the world’s four great powers—especially the United States, Eurasia, and China, who hoped to use space to gain some political ground back from the fourth, Africa.