Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Believing that God is to be found in physical laws,” Myra said.

  “Or God is those laws.”

  “I suppose it makes sense,” Bisesa said. “Religions and gods don’t have to go together. Buddhists don’t necessarily believe in a supreme being; you can have religion independent of any god.”

  Myra nodded. “And we can believe in the Firstborn without having any religion at all.”

  Alexei said mildly, “Oh, the Firstborn aren’t gods. As they will learn one day.”

  Bisesa said, “But you aren’t a theist. Are you, Alexei? You like to quote the Bible, but I’ve heard you pray—Thank Sol?”

  He looked sheepish. “You got me.” He lifted his face to the sunlight. “Some of us have a sneaking regard for the Big Guy. The engine that keeps us all alive, the one object you can see however far you roam across the system.”

  Myra nodded. “I heard of this. A cult of Sol Invictus. One of the last great pagan gods—from the Roman empire, just before they proclaimed Christianity their official cult. Didn’t it sprout on Earth again, just before the sunstorm?”

  Alexei nodded. “There was a lot of propitiation of angry gods to be done in those days. But Sol Invictus was the one that took hold with the early Spacers, especially those who had worked on the shield. And he spread.”

  Bisesa remembered another sun god who had interfered in her own life: Marduk, forgotten god of Babylon. She said, “You Spacers really aren’t like the rest of us, are you, Alexei?”

  “Of course not. How could we be?”

  “And is that why you’re taking me to Mars? Because of a different perspective?”

  “More than that. Because the guys down there have found something. Something the Earth governments would never even have dreamed of looking for. Although the governments are looking for you, Bisesa.”

  Bisesa frowned. “How do you know?”

  Alexei looked uncomfortable. “My father is working with the World Space Council. He’s a cosmologist…”

  So there it was, Bisesa thought, this new generational gap set out as starkly as it could be. A Spacer son spying on his Earthbound father.

  But even though they were in deep space he would say no more about where Bisesa was being taken, and what was expected of her.

  Myra pulled her lip. “It’s odd. Sol Invictus—he’s such a contrast to the cool thinking of the theists.”

  “Yeah. But don’t you think that until we get these Firstborn assholes beaten, we need an Iron Age god?” And Alexei grinned, showing his teeth, a shockingly primate expression bathed in the light of sun and Moon.

  Bisesa, worn out by stress and strangeness, retreated to her newly constructed cabin. She rearranged her few possessions and strapped herself to the narrow bunk.

  The partitioned-off room was small, but that didn’t bother her. She had been in the army. As accommodations went, this was a lot better than the UN camp in Afghanistan where she had been stationed before falling into Mir.

  It struck her that this living deck seemed cramped, though, even given the basic geometry of the tuna-can hull. She thought back to her inspection of the utility deck earlier; she had a good memory for spaces and volumes. Sleepy, she murmured aloud, “So why is this deck so much smaller than the utility level?”

  A soft voice spoke. “Because these walls are full of water, Bisesa.”

  “Is that you, Thales?”

  “No, Bisesa. Alexei calls me Max.” The voice was male, softly Scottish.

  “Max, for James Clerk Maxwell. You’re the ship.”

  “Strictly speaking the sail, which is the smartest and most sentient component. I am a Legal Person (Non-Human),” Max said calmly. “I have a full set of cognitive capacities.”

  “Alexei should have introduced us.”

  “That would have been pleasant.”

  “The water in the walls?”

  It was there to protect frail human cargo from the hard radiations of space; even a few centimeters of water was a surprisingly effective shield.

  “Max. Why the name?”

  “It is appropriate…”

  The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had in the nineteenth century demonstrated that light exerted a pressure, the fundamental principle on which mankind’s new fleet of lightships had been built. His work had laid the foundations for Einstein’s conceptual breakthroughs.

  Bisesa smiled. “I suppose Maxwell would have been astonished to see how his basic insight has been translated into technology, two centuries later.”

  “Actually I’ve made something of a study of Maxwell. I have rather a lot of spare time. I think he could have conceived of a solar sail. The physics was all his, after all.”

  Bisesa propped an arm behind her head. “When I read about Athena, the shield AI, I always wondered how it felt to be her. An intelligence embedded in such an alien body. Max, how does it feel to be you?”

  “I often wonder how it feels to be you,” he replied in his soft brogue. “I am capable of curiosity. And awe.”

  It surprised Bisesa that he should say that. “Awe? At what?”

  “Awe at finding myself in a universe of such beauty yet governed by a few simple laws. Why should it be so? And yet, why not?”

  “Are you a theist, Max?”

  “Many of the leading theist thinkers are AIs.”

  Electronic prophets, she thought, wondering. “I think James Clerk would have been proud of you, Maxwell Junior.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Light, please.”

  The light dimmed to a faint crimson glow. She fell into a deep sleep, the gentle gravity just enough to reassure her inner ear that she wasn’t falling any more.

  It was some hours later that Max woke her, for, he said apologetically, they were approaching the Moon.

  On the bridge Alexei said, “It’s fortuitous of course that our path to Mars should take us near the Moon. But I was able to work a gravitational slingshot into our trajectory design…”

  Bisesa stopped listening to him, and just looked.

  The swelling face of the Moon, nearly full, was not the familiar Man-in-the-Moon that had hovered over the Manchester streets of her childhood. She had come so far now that the Man had turned; the great “right eye” of Mare Imbrium was swiveled toward her, and a slice of Farside was clearly revealed, a segment of crater-pocked hide invisible to mankind until the advent of spaceflight.

  But it was not the geology of the Moon that interested her but the traces of humanity. Eagerly she and Myra picked out the big Nearside bases, Armstrong and Tooke, clearly visible as blisters of silver and green against the tan lunar dust. Bisesa thought she saw a road, a line of silver, cutting across the crater called Clavius within which Tooke Base nestled, and from which it had taken its first name. Then she realized it must be a mass driver, an electromagnetic launching track kilometers long.

  The modern Moon was visibly a place of industry. Vast stretches of the lava-dust plains of the maria looked as if they had been combed; the lunar seas were being strip-mined, their dust plundered for oxygen, water, and minerals. At the poles immense solar-cell farms splashed, and new observatories gleamed like bits of coal, made of jet-black glass microwaved direct from the lunar dirt. Strung right around the equator was a shining chrome thread: the alephtron, mightiest particle accelerator in the system.

  Something about all this industry disturbed Bisesa. So much had changed on the Moon after four billion years of chthonic calm, in just a single century since Armstrong’s first small step. The economic development of the Moon had always been the dream of Bud Tooke himself. But now she wondered how the Firstborn, who may themselves have been older than the Moon, might view this disquieting clatter.

  Myra pointed. “Mum, look over there, at Imbrium.”

  Bisesa looked that way. She saw a disk that must have been kilometers across. It glinted with reflected sunlight, and shuddering waves spread across it.

  “That’s the solar-sail factory,” Alexei murm
ured. “They lay down the webbing and spray on the boron film—they spin it up from the start, to hold it rigid against the Moon’s gravity…”

  That glinting disk seemed to spin, and ripple, and then, without warning, it peeled neatly away from the mare surface as if being budded, and drifted up toward space, oscillating as it rose.

  “It’s beautiful,” Bisesa said.

  Alexei shrugged. “Pretty, yes. To be honest most of us don’t find the Moon very interesting. They aren’t true Spacers down there. Not when you can commute to Earth in a day or two. We call it Earth’s attic…”

  Max murmured, “Closest approach coming up.”

  Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesa’s field of view. Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myra’s hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just weren’t meant to see, she thought helplessly.

  Then the Moon’s terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the sun’s harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.

  17: WARSHIP

  John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.

  Edna asked, “Everything nominal?”

  “Bonza,” the ship’s engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. “We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us…Yes, we’re nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.”

  Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.

  Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. “The launch window opens in five minutes.”

  Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. “My word.”

  “You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if—”

  “Good God, no. Ah, look—you took me aback, is all, didn’t know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does…Libby, schematics please.”

  The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constellations to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.

  The design was simple, in essence. The Liberator looked like nothing so much as a Fourth of July firework, a rocket no less than a hundred meters in length, with habitable compartments stuck on the front end and an immense nozzle gaping at the back. Most of the hull was stuffed with asteroid-mined water ice, dirty snow that would serve as the reaction mass that would drive the ship forward.

  And buried somewhere in the guts of the ship, near that nozzle, was the antimatter drive.

  Liberator’s antimatter came in tiny granules of frozen hydrogen—or rather anti-hydrogen, stuff the propulsion engineers called “H-bar.” For now it was contained inside a tungsten core, isolated from any normal matter by immaterial electromagnetic walls, the containment itself requiring huge energies to sustain.

  H-bar was precious stuff. Because of its propensity to blow itself up on encountering normal matter, antimatter didn’t sit around waiting to be collected, and so had to be manufactured. It occurred as a by-product of the collision of high-energy particles. But Earth’s mightiest accelerators, if run continually, would produce only tiny amounts of antimatter—even the great alephtron on the Moon was useless as a factory. A natural source had at last been found in the “flux tube” that connected the moon Io to its parent Jupiter, a tube of electrical current five million amperes strong, generated as that moon ploughed through Jupiter’s magnetic field.

  To mine antimatter, all you had to do was send a spacecraft into the flux tube and use magnetic traps to sift out antimatter particles. But there was a world of engineering challenge in that “all.”

  When Edna gave the order the magnetic fields would pulse, firing out the H-bar pellets one by one to hammer into an oncoming stream of normal hydrogen. Matter and antimatter would annihilate, every scrap of mass flashing immediately to energy. Asteroid ice would be sublimated to superheated steam, and it was that steam, hurtling out of the nozzle, that would push Liberator forward.

  That was really all there was to it, aside from the hugely tricky details of handling the antimatter: Liberator was a steam rocket. But it was the numbers that were so impressive. Even the great mass-gobbling that went on in the fusing heart of the sun converted only a small percentage of fuel mass to energy. When matter and antimatter annihilated they went all the way; you just couldn’t get more juice out of Einstein’s famous E equals mc squared.

  As a result, a mere pinch of antimatter, just fifty milligrams or so, would provide the equivalent of all the energy stored aboard the great chemical-rocket launch systems, like the space shuttle. That was what made the new antimatter drive so useful to governments intent on giving themselves a fast-response capability in the face of an invasion of the solar system. The Liberator was a ship so powerful it would deliver Edna to the Q-bomb, half Jupiter’s distance away, as far as from Earth to the asteroids, in just a hundred and twelve hours.

  The Liberator would have been dwarfed by the Spacers’ lightships. But where a lightship was all spiderweb and sail, the Liberator was a solid mass, a club, a weapon. And the design was stupendously phallic, like so many of mankind’s weapon systems in the past, as more than one observer had wryly remarked.

  There really wasn’t much for John to do; Libby handled the details of a countdown that was as simple as it could be made to be. John grew steadily more nervous.

  “We’re being watched,” Edna said evenly, to distract him.

  “We are? Who by?”

  “From Achilles. Engineers, administrators, other crew.”

  Edna cleared the screen and they glanced down at the ice moon’s surface. The graving dock crawled with spacesuited figures.

  “Well, so much for the safety protocols,” John muttered. “What are they doing there?”

  Libby replied, “I imagine they have come to watch the launch of mankind’s first spacegoing warship.”

  “Wow,” John whispered. “She’s right. Remember Star Wars, Star Trek?”

  Edna had never heard of these ancient cultural relics.

  “It all begins here,” John said. “The first warship. But surely not the last, my word.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Libby said evenly.

  “Thank crap for that,” John said. He clutched the arms of his couch.

  This was real, Edna thought suddenly. She was committed; she really was going to ride this ship into battle against an unknown foe, propelled by a drive that had been tested in anger only a couple of times, in a ship so new it still smelled of metal polish.

  Libby said, “Three, two, one.”

  Somewhere in the guts of the ship a magnetic trap flexed. Matter died.

  And Edna was shoved back into her chair with a thrust that drove the breath from her lungs.

  18: MARS

&nbs
p; The journey wore away.

  Even now Alexei wouldn’t allow any communications about sensitive matters, or even “loose talk” in the cabin of the Maxwell, in this tiny volume drifting millions of kilometers from the nearest human. “You never know who’s listening.” And though the space was bigger than aboard the spider, the paper partitions weren’t very soundproof, and Myra and Bisesa felt they had no real privacy.

  Nobody talked. They were just as shut-in a crew as they had been on the spider.

  After a timeless interval marked only by the gradual dwindling of the sun, Mars loomed out of the dark. Bisesa and Myra peered curiously through the bridge windows.

  The approaching world was a sculpture of orange-red, its surface pocked and wrinkled, with a broad smearing of gray mist across much of the northern hemisphere. Compared to Earth, which from space was as bright as a daylight sky, Mars looked oddly dark to Bisesa, murky, sullen.

  But as the lightship looped around dwindling orbits she learned to read the landscape. There were the battered southern uplands, punctuated by the mighty bruise of Hellas, and to the north the smoother, obviously younger plains of the Vastitas Borealis. Bisesa was struck how big everything was on Mars. The Valles Marineris canyon system stretched around nearly a quarter the planet’s circumference, and the Tharsis volcanoes were a gross magmatic distortion of the whole planet’s shape.

  So much she might have seen had she visited in 1969 rather than 2069. But today Mars’s air was streaked by brilliant white water-vapor clouds. And on one orbit the Maxwell’s path took them right over the summit of Olympus itself, where black smoke pooled in a caldera wide enough to have swallowed up New York City.

  If the scars of the sunstorm were evident on this new face of Mars, so was the handiwork of mankind. The largest settlement on Mars was Port Lowell, an equatorial splash of silver on the fringe of the battered southern uplands. Roads snaked away to all points of the compass, reminiscent of the rectilinear tracery of canals that the last pre-spaceflight observers had imagined they had seen on Mars. And amid the roads and the domes were splashes of green: life from Earth, flourishing under glass in the soil of Mars.