Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Of course we have populations off-Earth now. But I’m told there’s still some doubt that the off-world colonies could survive if Earth were lost altogether. So we have further backups.”

  He spoke of vaults, on Earth and off it; there was one dug into a lunar mountain called Pico, for instance, in the Mare Imbrium. Copies of the wisdom of mankind, on gold leaf and stored electronically. DNA stores. Frozen zygotes. Caches to be retrieved by whoever might come this way, if mankind were exterminated. The “Earthmail,” a desperate firing-off of a fragment of human culture to the stars on the eve of the sunstorm, was another sort of cache.

  “All right, Bill. Do you think this is going to be enough?”

  Paxton said with a hard face, “Do any of you know what space opera was? Fiction of the far future, of wars fought across galaxies, of spaceships the size of worlds. We’re only a century on from World War Two—only a hundred and fifty years since the main transport mechanism for warfare was the horse. And yet we’re faced with a space opera threat. In another thousand years, say, we’ll be scattered so far that nothing short of a Galaxy core explosion could kill us all. But for now, we’re still vulnerable.”

  Bill Carel dared to raise a hand. “Which is actually a logic that suggests a second strike is more likely now, than later.”

  “Yeah,” Paxton growled.

  “And, despite your fine presentation, Admiral, there are obvious flaws in these strategies.” There was an intake of breath, but Carel seemed oblivious. “May I?”

  “Go on,” Bella said quickly.

  “First there is the sparseness of your resources, Admiral. Just because you have a station in the orbit of Jupiter doesn’t mean you can counter a threat coming at the same radius but from the far side of the sun.”

  “We’re aware of that—”

  “And you seem to be thinking in two dimensions, as if this was a land war of the old sort. What if an attack were to come at us out of the ecliptic—I mean, away from the plane of the sun and planets?”

  “I walked on Mars,” Paxton said dangerously. “I know what the ecliptic is. As it happens the present bogey has come sailing in along the plane of the ecliptic. For the future we’re considering out-of-plane options. But you know as well as I do that the energy costs of getting up there are prohibitive. Yes, Professor Carel, the solar system is a mighty big place. Yes, we can’t cover it all. What else can we do but try?”

  Carel almost laughed. “But these efforts are so thinly based it’s virtually futile—”

  Paxton glowered, and Bella held her hand up. “Please, Bill.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Carel. “And then there is the question of the efficacy of all these preparations against the threat we actually face—”

  “Fine.” Angrily Paxton cleared down his displays. “So let’s talk about the anomaly.”

  Bella longed for fresh coffee.

  After his long and detailed discussion of Fortress Sol, Paxton’s presentation on the anomaly was brief.

  He briskly reviewed the principal evidence for the bogey’s existence. “Right now this thing is passing through the J-line, the orbit of Jupiter. In fact we have a window to intercept it, because it’s fortuitously passing close to the Trojan base, and we’re working on mission options. And then it will sail on through the asteroids, past the orbit of Mars, to Earth, where it seems to be precisely targeted. But we still have no idea what it is, or what it might do if and when it gets here.”

  When he sat down there was a brief silence.

  Bill Carel looked at Paxton, and around the room, as if expecting another contribution. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all we got,” Paxton said.

  Carel said softly, “I did not dream you would have so little—it is as well that I came. If I may, Admiral?”

  Bob Paxton glared at Bella, but she gave him a discreet nod, and he gave the floor to Carel.

  “In a way,” Carel said, “my involvement with this ‘bogey’ began in the years before the sunstorm, when I worked with an astronomer called Siobhan McGorran on a probe we called QAP.” He pronounced it “cap.” “The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe…”

  Paxton and his Patriots shifted and grumbled.

  The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe was a follow-up to a craft called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which in 2003 had studied the faint echoes of the Big Bang, and had established for the first time the proportions of the basic components of the universe—baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy. It was dark energy, called by some “quintessence,” that fueled the expansion of the universe. Now the purpose of the QAP was to measure the effects of that cosmic inflation by seeking the echoes of primordial sound waves.

  “It was really a very elegant concept,” Carel said. “The primordial universe, small, dense, and ferociously hot, was an echo chamber full of sound waves propagating through a turbulent medium. But then came the expansion.” He spread his delicate hands. “Poom. Suddenly there was room for things to cool down, and more interesting physics.

  “As the expansion cut in those ancient sound waves were dissipated. But they left an imprint, their pattern of compression influencing the formation of the first galaxies. And so by mapping the galactic distribution we hoped to reconstruct the primordial sounds. This in turn would provide clues as to the physics of the quintessence, the dark energy, which at that time—”

  As the uniforms got more restless, Bella said gently, “Perhaps you should get to the point, Bill.”

  He smiled at her. He had a softscreen of his own that he spread out over the table; it quickly interfaced with the table’s subsystems. “Here is a profile of the cosmic expansion.” It was a spiky graph, plotted on logarithmic scales, an upward curve. He spoke of how this curve had been established by analyzing old light seeping from the deepest sky, and by taking correlations of the structures to be observed on a variety of scales. The “frequency” of the patterns of galactic formation mapped back to the frequencies of those lost sound waves.

  This time Paxton cut him off. “Jesus Christ, Poindexter, put me out of my misery. Where are you going with this?”

  Carel tapped his softscreen. “It was one of my own students who fortuitously came across an animation of the destruction of DSM X7-6102-016.”

  “I’d like to know how he got a hold of that,” Paxton growled.

  “She, actually,” Carel said, unfazed. “A girl called Lyla Neal. Nigerian, ferociously bright. The destruction of the DSM was an odd explosion, you know. It’s not as if it was hit by an external weapon. Rather as if it tore itself apart from within. Well, prompted by that, Lyla constructed an expansion curve for the DSM, to show how its little universe was ended.”

  He pulled up a second chart. The scale was different, Bella saw, but his conclusion was obvious. The DSM expansion curve mapped the QAP’s cosmic profile. Precisely, as could be seen when Carel overlaid the two.

  Bella sat back, stunned. “So what does this mean?”

  “I can only speculate,” Carel said.

  “Then do so, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Paxton.

  “It seems to me that the DSM was destroyed by a specific and localized application of dark energy, of quintessence. It was ripped apart by precisely the force that has caused the universal expansion, somehow focused down onto this small craft. It is a cosmological weapon, if you like. Quite remarkable.” He smiled. “Lyla calls it a ‘Q-bomb.’”

  “Cute,” snapped Paxton. “So can we stop this thing, shoot it down, deflect it?”

  Carel seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Why, I have absolutely no idea. This is not like the sunstorm, Admiral, which was a very energetic event, but crudely engineered. This is a barely familiar sort of physics. It’s very hard to imagine we can respond in any meaningful way.”

  Bella said, “But, Bill, what happens if this Q-bomb actually reaches the Earth?”

  Again he seemed surprised to be asked. “Why, that must be obvious. If it functions in the same
way again—we have no reason to imagine its scope of action is limited—it will be just as with the DSM.” He spread his fingers. “Poom.”

  The silence in the room was profound.

  Bella glanced around the table. These old sky warriors had almost seemed to be enjoying themselves. Now they were subdued, silent. Their bluff had been called.

  And what was worse, as far as she could see this “cosmological” technology cut right through the rickety and expensive defenses mankind had been trying to erect.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ve got twenty-one months until that thing reaches Earth. So what do we do?”

  “We have to stop it,” Paxton said immediately. “It’s our only option. We can’t save the population any other way—we can’t evacuate the damn planet. We throw everything we’ve got at it. Beginning with our resources out at the Trojans.” He glanced at Bella.

  Bella knew what he meant. The A-ships. And she knew that would most likely mean committing Edna to action. She put that thought aside for now. “Draw up an operation order, Bob. But there’s no reason to believe any of our weapons will make a bit of difference. We have to find out more about this thing, and find a weakness. Professor Carel, you’re hereby drafted.”

  Carel inclined his head.

  Paxton said heavily, “And there’s something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Bisesa Dutt. We missed her. She’s escaped up an elevator like a rat up a drainpipe.”

  That baffled Bella. “A space elevator? Where’s she going?”

  “I don’t know. She’s just out of a Hibernaculum; it’s possible she doesn’t know. But somebody does, some asshole Spacer.”

  “Admiral,” Bella snapped. “That kind of language isn’t helping.”

  He grinned, a wolf’s leer. “I’ll be nice. But we have to find Bisesa Dutt regardless of what toes we tread on.”

  Bella sighed. “All right. And right now I think I need to go brief a few presidents. Is there anything else?”

  Paxton shook his head. “Let’s conference-call in an hour. And, people—we don’t want any leaks out of here.”

  As the meeting broke up, Bella fretted. The fact that Carel had had to force his way in here was a lesson that slickness of presentation didn’t imply comprehensiveness of knowledge. And if not for this chance observation by Carel’s bright student, they would be nowhere near discovering the true nature of this artifact, this weapon, this Q-bomb.

  What else were they missing? What else weren’t they seeing? What else?

  14: ASCENT BEYOND ORBIT

  Almost all of the excitement of the ascent was over in the first twenty-four hours. Bisesa would not have believed it when they first left the ground, but she rapidly grew bored.

  As they had continued to shed gravity, floating stuff cluttered up the place, the blankets and bits of clothing and food. It was like camping in a falling elevator, Bisesa thought. The clippings from Alexei’s shaved head were particularly unwelcome. And it was hard to wash. They had enough water to drink, but this cargo cabin didn’t feature a shower. After the first couple of days, the cabin smelled, inevitably, like a lavatory.

  Bisesa tried to use the time constructively. She worked on her recovery from the Hibernaculum. She slept a lot, and Alexei and Myra helped her work out low-gravity exercises, bracing against the walls and floor to build up her muscles. But there was only so much time you could exercise or sleep away.

  Alexei kept himself busy too. He threw himself into a routine of checking over the spider’s systems, with a full shakedown twice a day. He even made visual checks of hull seams and filters. While he worked, he muttered and sang, curious, distracted little hymns to sunlight.

  Still Bisesa hadn’t talked to her daughter—not as she wished to. She thought Myra was sinking into herself; while Bisesa had been sleeping, she seemed to have developed a black core of depression. This was business for later, Bisesa told herself.

  Bisesa watched Earth dwindle, a toy globe at the end of a ribbon that now seemed endless in both directions.

  Once she said, “I wish the world would turn, so I could look for the other ribbons. I don’t even know how many there are.”

  Myra counted off on her fingers. “Modimo in Africa. Bandara in Australia, the mother of them all. Jianmu in China. Marahuaka in Venezuela, South America. All named for sky gods. We Europeans have Yggdrasil.”

  “Named for the Norse world tree.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Americans have Jacob’s Ladder.”

  Alexei smiled. “‘And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the Earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.’ Genesis, twenty-eight, twelve.”

  Myra said, “America is still a pretty Christian country. All the Native-American world-tree names were rejected, I think. They took a poll.”

  “Why do so many cultures have myths of a world tree? It seems pretty unlikely.”

  Alexei said, “Some anthropologists say it’s simply a response to cloud features: ripples, waves that look like branches or rungs. Or maybe it’s a myth about the Milky Way. Others say it could be a plasma phenomenon. Solar activity, maybe.”

  Myra said, “Plenty of people fear the elevators. Some regard them as a blasphemy. A short-cut to God. After all we have faced a threat from the sky in living memory.”

  “Which is why the African elevator was attacked,” Alexei said. “Makes no sense, but there you go.”

  “You know a lot about Earth culture for a Spacer.”

  “I’m interested. But I see it from the outside. Anthropologically, I suppose.”

  Bisesa felt patronized. “I suppose all you Spacers are as rational as computers.”

  “Oh, no.” Alexei smiled. “We’re working on a whole new set of hang-ups.”

  Still they rose. As the planet shrank from the size of a soccer ball to a grapefruit to a cricket ball, it soon became too small for Bisesa to make out even continent-sized details, and a dull sense of the immense scale of the artifact she was climbing slowly rammed itself into her mind.

  Three days up they sailed through the first significant structure since the ground. They gathered at the center of the cabin to watch it approach.

  It was a loose ring of inflated modules, all of them roughly cylindrical, brightly colored; they were huge, each as big as a small building, and they shone like tremendous toys in the unending sunlight. This was a hotel cum theme park, Alexei told them, as yet incomplete and uninhabited. “Its official name is ‘Jacob’s.’ Disney is the major investor. They’re hoping to make back some of the money they’re hemorrhaging at the old ground-based parks.”

  “Good place for a hotel,” Myra said. “Only three days up, and still a tenth of a gravity, enough to avoid all the messiness of zero G.”

  “Makes you realize what you can do with a space elevator or two,” Alexei murmured. “Not just cheap lift, but very heavy lift too. Lots of capacity. This theme park is trivial, but it’s just a start. There will be other communities, towns in the sky strung out along the elevators. A whole new realm. It’s like the railways in the nineteenth century.”

  Bisesa felt moved to take Myra’s hand. “We live in remarkable times, don’t we?”

  “Yes, Mum, we do.”

  The hotel rushed past them in an instant, and for the first time in days Bisesa had a sense of their true speed. But then it was back to the timeless, motionless, scale-less rush ever higher from the Earth, and they were soon bickering once more.

  On the eighth day they sailed through geosynch. For one precise moment they were in zero gravity, orbiting the Earth as a respectable satellite should, though for days gravity had been so low it made no practical difference.

  At the geosynch point was another structure, a vast wheel with its hub centered on the ribbon. It was incomplete. Bisesa could see lesser craft crawling over that tremendous scaffolding, and welding sparks flared. But elsewhere she saw immense glass panels behin
d which living things glowed green.

  The geosynch station flew down, past, and was gone by, and they all stared down as it dwindled away.

  With the geosynch point passed, the spider’s effective gravity flipped over, as centripetal forces, balanced with gravity at geosynch, took over and tried to fling them away. Now “down” pointed away from the pea-sized Earth. They had to rearrange their cabin, so that they made the ceiling the floor, and vice versa. Alexei said cabins designed to carry passengers did this sort of flip-flop automatically.

  That inversion, the rebuilding of the cabin, was the only interesting thing that happened in those days following geosynch. The only thing.

  But Bisesa learned that they weren’t going to be hauled all the way up to the counterweight, which was all of thirteen more days past geosynch, twenty-one from the ground. And that, she learned at last, was the spider graveyard.

  “They need to keep adding counterweight to compensate for the growing mass of the ribbon,” Alexei said. “Which is why none of the spider trucks come back to Earth, save the builders.”

  Bisesa looked around at the cluttered hull, grimy from their occupation. She felt a stab of regret. “And is that where this spider will finish up?”

  “Oh, no,” said Alexei. “This beast won’t be going further than the fifty-six-thousand-klick point. Twelve days out of Earth.”

  Bisesa glanced at Myra, who she sensed had almost as dim an idea of what was to come as she had. “And then what?”

  “Remember I told you that if the spider let go before geosynch we’d have fallen back to Earth? But if we let go after geosynch—”

  “We’ll be flung out of Earth orbit,” Myra said. “Into interplanetary space.”

  “If you pick the right altitude to leave the elevator, you can use its momentum to hurl you wherever you want to go. The Moon, for instance.”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  Alexei smiled. “Oh, a bit further than that.”

  “Then where, damn it? There’s no point in secrecy now—as soon as we leave the elevator the authorities will know where we’re going.”