Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Paula nodded. “Erected by the Chinese. They put up a monument like that every place one of their arks came down.”

  So that tremendous structure was a memorial to hundreds of Chinese who had died on Mars on sunstorm day.

  Bisesa ventured, “Paula, I was a little surprised you came along with us.”

  “Surprised?”

  “And that you’re mixed up with this secretive business at the pole of Mars. Alexei, yes, I can see it in his personality.”

  “He is a bit furtive, isn’t he?”

  They shared a laugh. Bisesa said, “But you seem more—”

  “Conformist?” That pretty airline-stewardess smile was still in place, illuminated by the dash lights. “I don’t mind if that’s said of me. Maybe it’s true.”

  “It’s just that you’re so good at your job.”

  Paula said without resentment, “I was probably born to it. My mother is the person most people remember of the Aurora crew, after Bob Paxton—the only one, probably.”

  “And so visitors respond to you.”

  “It could have been a handicap. Why not turn it into an asset?”

  “Okay. But that doesn’t extend to hauling your backside all the way to the north pole for us.” She paused. “You admire your mother, don’t you?”

  Paula shrugged. “I never met her. But how could I not admire her? Bob Paxton came to Mars and sort of conquered it, and then went home again. But my mother loved Mars. You can tell that from her journals. Bob Paxton is a hero on Earth,” she said. “But my mother is a hero here on Mars, our first hero of all.” The stewardess smile flicked back on. “More risotto?”

  In the murky Martian dark, in the warmth of the cabin, Bisesa fell asleep in her seat.

  She woke to a tap on her shoulder. She found she was swathed by a blanket.

  Myra was sitting with her, gazing out of the window into dawn light. Bisesa saw they were driving through a landscape of rolling dunes, some of them tens of meters high, frozen waves a kilometer or two apart. Some kind of frost gathered in their lee.

  “My, I slept the night through.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Bisesa shifted, exploring. “A little stiff. But I guess even a chair like this is comfortable in low gravity. I’ll stretch and have a wash shortly.”

  “You’ll have to wait for Alexei. He’s shaving his head again.”

  “I guess I got hypnotized by the view.”

  “White line fever. Or something.” Myra sounded irritable.

  “Myra? Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong? Christ, Mother, look at that view. Nothing. And yet here you are, sitting up here for hour after hour, just drinking it in.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s you. If there’s something strange, you’re drawn to it. You revel in it.”

  Bisesa glanced around. The others were asleep. She realized that this was the first time she and Myra had effectively been alone since the washed-out days after her waking at the Hibernaculum—there had never been real privacy even on the Maxwell, and certainly not in the elevator spider cabin.

  “We’ve never had a chance to talk,” she said.

  Myra made to stand up. “Not here.”

  Bisesa put her hand on her arm. “Come on. Who cares if the police are listening in? Please, Myra. I don’t feel I know you anymore.”

  Myra sat back. “Maybe that’s the trouble. I don’t know you. Since you came out of the tank—I think I’d got used to living without you, Mum. As if you had died, perhaps. And when you did come out, you aren’t how I remember you. You’re like a sister I’ve suddenly discovered, not my mother. Does that make sense?”

  “No. But we haven’t evolved for Hibernacula time-slips, have we?”

  “What do you want to talk about? I mean, where am I supposed to start? It’s been nineteen years, half my life.”

  “Give me one headline.”

  “Okay.” Myra hesitated, and looked away. “You have a granddaughter.”

  Her name was Charlie, for Charlotte, Myra’s daughter by Eugene Mangles. Now aged fifteen, she had been born four years after Bisesa went into the tank.

  “Good God. I’m a grannie.”

  “When we broke up, Eugene fought me for custody. And he won, Mum. He had the clout to do it. Eugene is powerful and he’s famous.”

  Bisesa said, “But he was never very human, was he?”

  “Of course I had access. But that was never enough. I’m not like you. I don’t want strangeness. I wanted to build a home, for me and Charlie. I wanted—stability. I never got close to that. And in the end he cut me out altogether. It wasn’t hard. They’re hardly ever even on the Earth.”

  Bisesa reached for her hand; it was cold and unresponsive. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Well, for one thing you didn’t ask. And, look, here we are on Mars! And we’re here because you’re the famous Bisesa Dutt. You have much more important issues to worry about than a lost granddaughter.”

  “Myra, I’m sorry. When this is all over—”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mum. It never is over, with you. But I’ll support you even so. I always will. Look, forget about it. You had a right to know. Well, now you do.” Her face was intent, her mouth pinched. Green light was reflected in her eyes.

  Green?

  Bisesa sat up with a jolt, and looked out of the blister window.

  Under a salmon-pink dawn sky, the rutted tracks snaked across a plain that was painted a deep dull green.

  Paula joined them. “Discovery. Slow down so we can see.” The truck obligingly slowed, with a distant grinding of gears.

  Myra and Bisesa sat uncomfortably; Bisesa wondered how much Paula had heard of their conversation.

  Now Bisesa could see that the green was a carpet of tiny plants, each no larger than her thumb. Each plant looked like a leather-skinned cactus, but it had translucent sections—windows to catch the sunlight, Bisesa supposed, without losing a precious drop of moisture. There were other plants too. She picked out small black spheres—round to retain heat, black to soak it up during the day? She wondered if they turned white, chameleon-like, to avoid dissipating heat at night. But the cacti predominated.

  Myra said, “The cacti are what Helena discovered, in the wake of the sunstorm. Life on Mars.”

  “Yes,” Paula said. “The most common multicelled organism we’ve found yet on Mars. The subsurface bacterial mats and the stromatolites in Hellas are more widespread—a lot more biomass. But the window cacti are still the stars of the show. The species has been named for my mother.”

  Each window cactus was a survivor from deep ages past, Paula said.

  When the solar system was young, the three sister worlds were briefly similar: Venus, Earth, Mars, all warm, wet, geologically active. It was impossible to say on which of them life spawned first. Mars was certainly the first to accumulate an oxygen atmosphere, the fuel for complex, multicelled life-forms, billions of years before the Earth. But Mars was also the first to cool and dry.

  Paula said, “But this took time, hundreds of millions of years. You can achieve a lot in hundreds of millions of years—why, the mammals filled out an ecology vacated by the dinosaurs in less than sixty-five million years. The Martians were able to evolve survival strategies.”

  The roots of the cacti were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. They didn’t need oxygen, but fueled their glacial metabolism with hydrogen released by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of water ice. Thus they and their ancestors had survived aeons.

  “There were always volcanic episodes,” Paula said. “The Tharsis calderas thicken the air every ten to a hundred million years. The cacti grow, propagate, grow dormant again, surviving as spores until the next episode. And then the sunstorm caused rain, water rain. The air has stayed thick and wet enough to keep them out of their dormant stages right through the year.

  “And, the biologists say, they are related to our sort of lif
e. It’s a different sort of DNA here,” Paula said. “Using a different set of bases—six, not four—and a different kind of coding. The same with Martian RNA and proteins, not quite like ours. It’s thought the amino acid set that’s used here is subtly different too, but that’s still controversial. But it is DNA and RNA and proteins, the same toolbox as on Earth.”

  Mars was young in an age of continuing massive bombardment, as the relics of the solar system’s violent formation smashed into the new worlds. But that battering ensured that an immense amount of material, blasted off the roiling surfaces, was transferred between the planets. And that material contained life.

  Bisesa gazed out at the patient cacti. “So these are our cousins.”

  “But more distantly related than we are to any other life-forms from Earth. The last significant biomass transfer must have been so early that the final form of DNA coding wasn’t yet settled on either world. But the relationship is close enough to be useful.”

  “Useful? How?”

  Paula tapped a softscreen on the Discovery’s dashboard, and produced images showing how Lowell scientists were finding ways to splice Martian genes into terrestrial plants. And that was how a new breed of plant was being developed, neither purely terrestrial nor purely Martian, able to grow outside the pressurized domes of the colonies, and yet capable of providing food for humans—and of injecting oxygen into the air. Some of the biologists thought it was a route to terraforming, a first step toward making Mars like Earth. An informal grouping of them even had a slogan: All These Worlds Are Ours.

  “In fact,” Paula said, “I’m glad we happened on the cacti. It’s important you know about this, Bisesa.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can understand what they’ve found at the pole.”

  “I can’t wait,” Myra said dryly.

  “And I can’t wait for the bathroom,” Bisesa said. She pushed her way out of her chair, letting the blanket drop. “Alexei? Are you done in there yet?”

  The Discovery rolled on, patient, silent, for kilometer after kilometer, a cybernetic Stakhanovite. By the middle of that day they were through the green, and rolled across a dull, undulating plain.

  After that, each day of the journey the sun climbed lower. At last it panned around the horizon, and there was no full daylight, only a kind of twilight glow that washed around the obscured sky.

  Bisesa understood. Mars was tilted on its axis, just as was Earth; in northern winter the pole pointed away from the sun, and as she headed north she was driving into a twelve-month-long Arctic night. What was different about Mars was how quickly the changes came; here, the lines of latitude clicked away rapidly. She had a very clear sense that she was driving over the surface of a small round world, an ant crawling over an orange.

  One sunset they saw a bank of clouds on the northern horizon.

  By dawn they were under it. The polar hood was thick enough to obscure all but the brightest stars; Deneb and the celestial pole were lost.

  By midday it had begun to snow.

  20: LIBERATOR

  “It’s taken us under five days to cross the solar system, Thea. Think of that. And now there’s only a few hours to go before Q-hour, our rendezvous with the bomb…”

  The Liberator had the mass and rough dimensions of the old Saturn V launchers. But whereas most of a Saturn’s mass would have burned itself up and been discarded in minutes, leaving its payload to coast unpowered most of the way to its destination, the Liberator’s mighty engine could maintain a thrust of a full gravity or more for days, even weeks. That had enabled the ship to cut a straight-line trajectory from one point on the J-line to another, from the Trojan base to the position of the bomb. Its path was a rectilinear oddity in a solar system of circles and ellipses.

  And Edna had crossed half the distance between Jupiter and the distant sun in a hundred hours.

  “We’re actually slowing down now. We’re approaching the Q-bomb tail-first, our exhaust blasting out…

  “Most of the officers serving in space have been transferred from the U.S. Navy, because most spacecraft are more like submarines than anything else. But the Liberator is different. We’ve so much energy to burn that we have more room on this ship than on any spacecraft since Skylab. If you’ve never heard of that, look it up. John Metternes and I share a kind of big apartment, with bedrooms, showers, and a stateroom with softscreens and coffee-makers. When we go to the ports and look down at the flank of the ship, it’s like looking out of the window of a high-rise hotel on Earth. But most hotels don’t have antennae and sensor booms. Or gun ports.

  “I need to go, love. The drive’s about to be cut, and it would be embarrassing to meet the bogey with me stranded in midair!…

  “How do I feel? I’m frightened. Excited. I have confidence in my abilities, and John’s, and in the Liberator, which has already proven herself a fine ship. I just hope that’s enough to carry the day. I—I guess that’s all, Libby. Close file.”

  “Yes, Edna. It is time.”

  “I know. Call John, would you?”

  21: POLE

  Bisesa couldn’t see a thing.

  The Discovery plowed its way through a half-meter thickness of carbon dioxide snow. The fragile dry-ice stuff sublimated before the rover’s heat, so they drove into a blinding mist, and even beyond the mist it was a murky dark. Nobody said anything, the poker players continuing their endless tournaments. Bisesa just had to put up with the unnerving drive alone.

  Then, through the gloom, she saw bright green lights, brilliant sparks. The rover slowed to a halt. The rest of the crew hurried forward.

  A vehicle of some kind sat on the ice, with big balloon wheels and straddled by two spacesuited occupants. Their helmets were illuminated, but Bisesa couldn’t make out their faces. When they caught the rover’s lights they waved.

  “That’s a tricycle,” Myra said, wondering.

  “Actually,” Paula said mildly, “they call it a General Utility Vehicle. For operations close to the pole station—”

  “I want one.”

  Alexei tapped a softscreen. “Yuri. Is that you?”

  “Hi, Alexei. We cleared a path for you with the sublimation blade. The snow’s heavier than usual this season.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “Discovery, just follow us and you’ll be fine. Eleven, twelve hours or so and we’ll be home with no trouble. See you at Wells.” The vehicle turned and drove ahead. Mist burst around it in a spray, brightly illuminated by the floods.

  With Discovery following easily, the little convoy’s speed soon passed forty kilometers an hour.

  As they roared on into the dark, the hard ground under the snow began to change. It was layered, alternating light and dark in strata as thick as Bisesa’s arm, like a vast sedimentary bed. And it looked polished, with a fine patina that glistened in the trucks’ lights.

  After a couple of hours of this they crunched up onto a firmer, paler surface, a grimy white tinged with Mars red.

  “Water ice,” Paula announced. “Mostly, anyhow. This is the permanent ice cap, the residue that’s left after the carbon dioxide snow sublimes away every spring. Here at the edge we’re about five hundred klicks from Wells Station, which is near the geographic pole. The drive will be smoother now. The rover’s wheels are reconfigurable for different surface types.”

  Bisesa said, “I’m surprised Discovery isn’t lowering a set of skis.”

  Alexei looked at her, a bit pained. “Bisesa, this is Mars. The temperature out there is the freezing point of dry ice—at this pressure, that’s about a hundred fifty K.”

  She worked that out. “A hundred and twenty degrees below freezing.”

  “Right,” Paula said. “At these temperatures water ice is so hard it would be like skiing on basalt.”

  Bisesa was chagrined. “You’ve given this little lecture a dozen times, haven’t you?”

  “You didn’t have time for the usual orientation. Don’t worry about it.”

&
nbsp; Now that they were on the ice Bisesa expected a smooth, straight ride on to the pole. But the lead truck soon turned aside from its dead-straight northern track, and embarked on a grand, sweeping detour, turning clockwise. Peering out of the left-hand window, Bisesa glimpsed a canyon.

  She swallowed her pride and asked Paula about it.

  Paula said it was a “spiral canyon,” one of many gouged into the ice cap. She pulled up an image of the whole cap, taken from space in the summer, when the dry ice snow wasn’t there to obscure it. The ice cap looked like a twisting storm system, with those spiral canyons twisting in from the edge and reaching almost to the pole. It was astounding, like nothing Bisesa knew of on Earth. But after her jaunt across the solar system there wasn’t much wonder left in her soul.

  As they drove on the snow grew deeper, until they were driving along a path between two walls of snow heaped up maybe two meters deep. The snow looked compact, harder than snow on Earth, denser maybe.

  She was relieved when she saw a cluster of lights ahead, and the rounded shoulders of living modules.

  A row of green lights stretched off into the distance, as if they were driving down a runway. As the rover rolled closer Bisesa saw that the lights were on poles maybe four meters high, perhaps to keep above the snow. Glancing back, she saw that looking the other way the lights were bright white—so, in the murk of a Martian blizzard, you could always tell if you were heading toward or away from the base.

  The structures that loomed out of the dark, lifted up off the ground on stilts, were not domes but flattened pie-shapes, round above and below. They were colored bright green, and huddled close together, interlinked by short tunnels. Bisesa saw that these big hab modules were in fact mounted on wheels, and had been tied down to the ice by cables fixed to pitons. They were like monstrous caravans, she thought.

  As the rover neared the station, the walls of dry ice snow thinned away, until the rover was driving over an ice surface almost clear of snow but covered with an open black mesh. Heating elements, perhaps, designed to keep off the dry ice. The rover nuzzled up to a low dome at the foot of one of the stilts. Two station vehicles were already parked here, heavy-looking, smaller than the rover from Lowell.