Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “These systems are human-rated; they have heavy safety margins built in.” But he didn’t sound terribly sure.

  It only took a few minutes for the softscreen to chime and glow green. Alexei smiled. “They got the message. We can slow down. Hold onto something.”

  Bisesa braced against a rail.

  They decelerated for a disconcerting few seconds. Blankets floated up from the floor, and the chemical toilet whirred as suction pumps labored to keep from spilling the contents into the air. Myra looked queasy, and Bisesa felt her stomach turn over. They were all relieved when gravity was restored.

  But the screen flashed red again. “Uh oh,” Alexei said.

  Bisesa asked, “What now?”

  He worked his softscreen. “We’re not climbing as we should.”

  “Some fault with the spider?”

  “Not that. They are reeling in the ribbon.”

  “Reeling it in?” Suddenly Bisesa saw the spider as a fish on the end of a monstrous angler’s line.

  “It’s kind of drastic, but it can be done. The ribbon is pretty fine stuff.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You might want to close your eyes. And hold onto something again.” He tapped his softscreen, and Bisesa had the impression that something detached itself from the hull.

  She clamped her eyes shut.

  There was a flash, visible even through her eyelids, and the cabin rocked subtly.

  “A bomb,” Bisesa said. She felt almost disappointed. “How crude. I think I expected better of you, Alexei.”

  “It was just a warning shot, a micro fusion pulse. No harm done. But very visible from the ground.”

  “You’re signaling your intent to blow up the ribbon if they don’t leave us alone.”

  “It wouldn’t be difficult. Kind of hard to protect a hundred thousand kilometers of paper-thin ribbon against deliberate sabotage…”

  Bisesa asked, “Wouldn’t people get hurt?”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking, Mum,” Myra said. “Isolationist terrorists attacked Modimo a few years back.”

  “Modimo?”

  Alexei said, “The African Alliance elevator. Named for a Zimbabwean sky-god, I think. Nobody got hurt, and they wouldn’t now. I’m making an economic threat.” But he glanced uncertainly at his softscreen.

  Bisesa said sharply, “And if they call your bluff? Will you go through with it?”

  “Actually I don’t think I would. But they can’t afford to take the risk, can they?”

  Bisesa said, “They could just kill us. Turn off the power. The air recycling. We’d be helpless.”

  “They could. But they won’t,” Alexei said. “They want to know what we know. Where we’re going. So they’ll be patient, and hope to get hold of us later.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  As if in response, the softscreen turned green again. Alexei’s grin broadened. “So much for that. Okay, who’s for beans?”

  12: MOUNT WEATHER

  Bella had expected Bob Paxton’s briefing to take place in her offices in the old NASA headquarters building on E Street in Washington, a block of concrete and glass repaired and refurbished since weathering the sunstorm.

  But Paxton met her outside the building. He stood by the open door of a limousine. “Bella.” The car was one of a convoy, complete with uniformed naval officers and blue-suited FBI agents.

  She thought he looked comical, an elderly man rigid in his much-cherished uniform, standing there like a bellboy. His face was twisted in the morning light. He was, she had learned, a man who distrusted the sun, even more than most of his bruised generation.

  “Morning, Bob. Going for a ride, are we?”

  His smile was disciplined. “We should relocate to a more secure situation. We have issues of global importance, of significance for the future of the species. I recommend we convene at Mount Weather. I took the liberty of making the arrangements. But it’s your call.” He eyed her, and the tension that had existed since the day she took the job crackled between them.

  She’d never heard of Mount Weather. But she couldn’t see any harm in indulging him. She climbed into the car, and he followed; they would be alone together.

  They pulled out. The convoy took Route 66 and met Highway 50, heading west. The road was full of traffic, but their speed was high.

  “How far are we going?”

  “Be there in half an hour.” Paxton sat there and glowered, visibly irritated.

  “I know what’s bugging you, Bob. It’s Professor Carel, isn’t it?”

  The muscles in his grizzled cheeks worked, as if he longed to be chewing gum. “I don’t know anything about this old English guy.”

  “No doubt you had him vetted.”

  “As best we could. He doesn’t have anything to do with this. Not part of the team.”

  “He’s coming at my invitation,” she said firmly. In fact, in a sense, to her this elderly British scientist was part of the team, a deeper and older team-up than anything she was involved in with Paxton.

  Professor Bill Carel had once been a graduate student working with Siobhan McGorran, another British astronomer who had become involved in the grand effort to build the sunstorm shield—and who had, in its aftermath, married Bud Tooke, and then nursed him through his cancer, a cruel legacy of that astounding day. That personal link was in fact the channel through which Carel had contacted her, and had tried to persuade her that he had a contribution to make regarding the presence of the object in the solar system, which he had heard of in whispers and leaks.

  She tried to express some of this to Paxton, but he just waved it away. “He’s a cosmologist, for Christ’s sake. He’s spent his life staring into deep space. What use is he going to be today?”

  “Let’s keep an open mind, Bob,” she said firmly.

  He fell into a silence that lasted all through the rest of the drive. Bella had raised a child, she was used to sulks, and she just ignored him.

  After eighty kilometers they pulled off onto Route 101, a narrow two-lane rural road that clambered up a ridge. At the crest of the ridge they came to a line of razor-wired fencing. A faded sign read:

  U.S. PROPERTY

  NO TRESPASSING

  Beyond that Bisesa could make out a few battered aluminum huts, and beyond them, a glassy wall.

  They had to wait while their cars interfaced with the base’s security systems. Bella was aware of a faint speckle of laser light as she was probed.

  “So, Mount Weather,” she prompted Paxton.

  “Five hundred acres of Blue Ridge real estate. In the nineteen-fifties they set up a bunker here, a place to shelter government officials from D.C. in the event of a nuclear exchange. It fell into disuse, but was revived after 9/11 in 2001, and again after 2042. Although now it’s essentially a loan from the U.S. government to the World Space Council.”

  Bella tried not to grimace. “A bunker from the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the War with the Sky. Appropriate, I suppose.”

  “Manned by navy officers mostly. Used to confinement and canned air. Mount Weather is a good neighbor, I’m told. They keep up the roads, and send out the snow plows in winter. Not that there’s much snow nowadays…”

  She had been expecting the convoy to pass on to a gate in that shining impenetrable wall. She was shocked when, with a rip of foliage, the whole chunk of land beneath the car turned into an elevator and dropped her into darkness.

  Bob Paxton laughed as they descended. “I feel like I’m coming home.”

  As smiling young naval officers security-processed the party and escorted it to its conference room, Bella glimpsed a little of Mount Weather.

  The ceilings were low, paneled with grimy tiles, the corridors narrow. But these unprepossessing corridors enclosed a small, old-fashioned town. There were television and radio studios, cafeterias, a tiny civilian police station, even a little row of shops, all underground, all contained within a hum of air conditioning. It was like a
museum, she thought, a relic of the mindset of the mid-twentieth century.

  At least the conference room was modern, big and bright and fitted with softwalls and table screens.

  And here Bill Carel was waiting for her. In a room full of heavy, rumbling figures, mostly men, mostly about Paxton’s age, mostly in one uniform or another, Carel in his shabby old jacket was standing alone beside a coffee percolator.

  Bella ignored Paxton’s cronies and made straight for Carel. “Professor. It’s good of you to come.” She shook his hand; it was flimsy, bony.

  He was a little younger than she was, she recalled from his file, somewhere in his fifties, but he looked frail, gaunt, his face liver-spotted, his stance awkward and uncomfortable. The sunstorm had blighted many lives; perhaps he had been battling illness. But the eyes in his cadaverous face were bright. He said, “I hope the contribution I have to make is a valid one, and useful.”

  “You’re not sure?” She felt obscurely disappointed at his diffidence. An unworthy part of her had been looking forward to using him to tweak Bob Paxton’s tail.

  “Well, how can one be sure? The whole situation is unprecedented. But my colleagues urged me to contact you—to contact somebody.”

  She nodded. “However this turns out, I’m grateful you tried.” Cradling a coffee, Bella led Carel to a seat. “I’ll make sure you get your say,” she whispered. “And later we must talk of the Tookes.”

  After that she made a hasty circuit of the room, meeting and greeting. As well as the Patriots Committee types there were representatives of the various multinational armed forces and governments that supported the World Space Council.

  She didn’t get a good first impression of the quality of these delegates. The Council had been engaged in nothing but “preparatory” and “advisory” activities for decades; since the sunstorm the War with the Sky had been cold. So working for the Council had not been a prized assignment for a career officer. Maybe this was a room full of Bob Paxtons, steely-eyed fanatic types, or else dead-enders.

  But she told herself not to rush to judgment; after all if there were a new threat approaching the Earth, these men and women would be her prime resource in dealing with it.

  Standing at the head of the table, Bob Paxton, self-appointed chair, flicked his finger against a glass to call the meeting to order. The rest of the panel, perhaps starstruck to be in the presence of the first man on Mars, submitted their attention immediately.

  Paxton said the purpose of the meeting was twofold. “First to give Chair Fingal an overview of the assets she has at her disposal. Second to focus specifically on the anomaly currently approaching Jovian orbit—”

  “And at that point,” Bella put in, “I will invite Professor Carel to make his contribution.”

  Paxton rumbled a grudging assent.

  They began to speak of the defense of the solar system.

  13: FORTRESS SOL

  Paxton’s presentation was a carnival of bullet-points, graphs, and images, some of them three-dimensional and animated; the holograms hovered over the middle of the table like ads for fantastic toys. But the subject matter was grim.

  “Since sunstorm day, we have devoted considerable assets on Earth and beyond to watching the skies….”

  Bella got the impression that Earth was plastered with electronic eyes, peering at the sky in all wavelengths. This included NASA assets like the venerable Deep Space Network chain of tracking arrays in Spain, Australia, and the Mojave, a near-Earth asteroid watching facility in New Mexico called LINEAR, and other Spaceguard facilities. The giant radio telescope at Arecibo likewise now gave over much of its time, not to astronomy, but to seeking unnatural signals from the stars.

  The visual astronomers too had suddenly found money coming their way to realize previously unaffordable dreams. Bella studied images of the unimaginatively named Very Large Telescope in Chile, an Extremely Large Telescope in Morocco, and a monster called the Owl, the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope at a site called Dome C in Antarctica, where enough steel to build a second Eiffel Tower supported a monstrous mirror a hundred meters across. The Owl was busy photographing the birth of the first stars in the universe—and, more significantly, was mapping the surfaces of planets of nearby stars.

  Facilities off-Earth were no less impressive. The most successful of the new space observatories was Cyclops Station, which trailed the Earth in its orbit at a stable Lagrange point. At Cyclops there had been assembled a telescope with a single, very large “Fresnel” lens—not a mirror, but a diffracting lens.

  As for what all these automated eyes were looking for, a century of theoretical studies by the old SETI enthusiasts had been plundered. Strategies were being devised to detect signals of all types down to very brief bursts—stray flashes of tight-beam laser signals, perhaps, detectable down to a billionth of a second long.

  Paxton also spoke of lesser eyes, a whole fleet of them scattered right through the solar system out as far as the orbit of Neptune. He brought up a three-dimensional image of Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016, which had been posted into orbit around Saturn.

  “These are our robot sentries, our picket line,” Paxton boomed. “DSM X7-6102-016 was typical, the most advanced scientific gear but robust, hardened and shrouded. These little critters patrol the skies all the way out to the fringe of OutSys. And they watch each other just as keenly.”

  “That’s true,” Professor Carel put in hesitantly. “In fact it was the other probes’ observation of the destruction of X7-6102-016 that was brought to my attention, rather than anything that the probe transmitted itself.”

  Bella said, “So we live in a heavily surveilled solar system. What else do you have, Bill?”

  “Weapons.” Paxton waved a hand, and the image of DSM X7-6102-016 broke up.

  “We call the concept ‘Fortress Sol,’” Paxton said grimly. “We’re establishing layers of deep defense from the outer solar system to the inner, all of it centering on the home of humanity, the Earth. You know yourself, ma’am, that we have established facilities as far out as the Trojan asteroids.”

  The Trojans were a rich concentration of asteroids trailing Jupiter around its orbit at a Lagrange stable point. Right now Bella’s daughter Edna was out at Trojan Station, working on a new generation of spacecraft, the “A-ships.” All heavily classified.

  “Next in we have the asteroids. For military planning purposes we use the A-line, the central belt, as the boundary between InSys and OutSys—that is, the inner and outer systems. After that we have stations at the Lagrange points of Mars and Earth…”

  In the Earth–Moon system itself there were weapons platforms on the Moon and at the lunar Lagrange points and in Earth orbit: killer satellites that could pepper any interloper with projectiles, or fry it with X-ray lasers, or simply ram it. There were ground-based systems too, heavy lasers, particle beams, and reconditioned Cold War ICBMs still capable of hurling their lethal payloads away from the Earth. Even in Earth’s upper atmosphere huge aircraft patrolled continually, bearing weapons that could knock out incoming missiles. And so on. The whole of cislunar space seemed to be bristling with weaponry, from Earth’s surface up through what Paxton barked out as “LEO, HEO, GEO, and super-GEO”—low, high, geosynchronous Earth orbit and beyond.

  And the overt hardware of war was just the start. Everything that could be weaponized was. Even space-based weather control systems, like the kilometers-wide space lenses and mirrors, could easily be redirected. Every plowshare could be turned to a sword.

  Bella’s imagination quailed when she tried to imagine the sort of last-ditch defensive battle that might depend on the use of such weapons. And the fact that these weapons, built to fight a War in the Sky, could just as easily be turned against an enemy on the ground was lost on nobody.

  Paxton said, “We’re well aware of course that these facilities could have done nothing to stop the sunstorm. Therefore we have fallbacks. We don’t know what these Firstborn might hit us with next. So for pl
anning purposes we have looked back at other disasters, natural ones, that have hit us in the past, and how we coped with them…”

  He moved into a new chart, a dismal classification of catastrophe.

  There were “local disasters” that killed a few percent of the world’s population, like major volcanic eruptions and the twentieth-century world wars, and “global disasters” killing a significant fraction of the population, such as would follow the strike of a small asteroid, and “extinction level events,” so devastating that a significant proportion of all species would be eliminated, and life on Earth itself threatened. “If not for the shield,” Paxton said crisply, “the sunstorm would have inflicted the mother of all extinction level events on us, since it would have melted Earth’s surface down to the basement rock. As it was the shield reduced the event to a mere ‘global disaster.’”

  And the sunstorm, he said, had inspired the approach being taken to make the Earth resilient in case of any future attacks.

  “We’re trying to rework our industrial base so we can reconfigure to recovery mode as rapidly as possible in the face of any of these major disaster types. So, for instance, if we had to build another shield, we could do it more effectively. Of course some would argue that as a species we ought to be making this kind of preparation even if the Firstborn didn’t exist.

  “We have some advantages. A space-based infrastructure could help reboot a terrestrial civilization. Weather control systems to stabilize a damaged climate, as after the sunstorm. Orbital stations to restring any downed elevators. Space-based energy systems and comms links. You could store medical facilities up there. Maybe you could even feed the world, from orbiting farms, or lunar agriculture, say. The children of the Earth turning back to help their wounded mother.” He grimaced. “If the fucking Spacers cooperate.

  “However we have to go beyond all this, and consider the worst case.” He said sternly, looking them all in the eye one by one, “We must plan against extermination.