Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Not magnetism. Gravity. If the Eye wasn’t in the way, you could walk around on the ceiling. Upside down! There is a gravitational anomaly wrapped around the Eye, obviously an artifact just as much as the Eye is. In fact I’ve been able to detect structure in there. Patterns, right at the limit of detectability. The structure of the gravitational field itself may contain information…”

  Yuri smiled. “This stuff can be rather fun to think about. You see, there are ways in which a two-dimensional creature, living in a watery meniscus, could trap that finger poking through. Wrap a thread around it and pull it tight, so it couldn’t be withdrawn. This gravitational structure must be analogous.”

  “Tell me what you think happened here,” Bisesa said.

  “We think there were Martians,” Yuri said. “Long ago, back when our ancestors were just smears of purple slime. We don’t know anything about them. But they were noisy enough to attract the attention of the Firstborn.”

  “And the Firstborn struck,” Bisesa whispered.

  “Yes. But the Martians fought back. They managed this. A gravitational trap. And it caught an Eye. Here it has remained ever since. For eons, I guess.”

  “We’ve tried to use your insights, Bisesa,” Ellie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you reported of Mir, and your journey back from it. You said the Eye functions as a gateway, at least some of the time. Like a wormhole perhaps. So we’ve experimented. We reflected some of the Eye’s own products back into it, using an electromagnet scavenged from a particle accelerator. Like echoing what somebody says to you.”

  “You tried sending a signal through the Eye.”

  “Not just that.” Ellie grinned. “We got a signal back. A regular pulsing in the decay products. We had it analyzed. Bisesa, it matches the ‘engaged’ tone from a certain archaic model of cell phone.”

  “My God. My phone, in the temple. You sent a message to my phone, on Mir!”

  Ellie smiled. “It was a significant technical success.”

  Myra said, “Why not share this with Earth?”

  “Maybe we’ll have to, in the end,” Alexei said tiredly. “But right now, if they found us, they’d probably just haul the Eye back to the UN Plaza in New York as a trophy, and arrest us. We need a more imaginative response.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” Bisesa said.

  The acceleration was savage.

  Edna and John saw nothing of the detonation, when it came, because all the Liberator’s sensors were shut off or turned aside, the flight deck windows opaque. Pressed back in her couch, fleeing the explosion, Edna was reminded of training simulations she had run of the suicidal missions of Cold War attack pilots, when you were expected to fly your FJ4-B Fury fighter aircraft into enemy territory at three hundred knots, release the nuclear weapon strapped to your belly, and get yourself out of there, trying to outrun a nuclear fireball, forcing the craft up to speeds the designers never intended.

  This mission now had something of that feel — even though, paradoxically, she was safer than any of those heroic, doomed 1960s pilots could ever have been. There were no shock waves to outrun in the vacuum of space; nuclear weapons actually did more damage in an atmosphere.

  The acceleration cut out suddenly enough to throw Edna forward against her restraints. She heard John grunt. With a clatter of attitude thrusters the ship turned, and the windows cleared.

  The fireball from the nuke had already dissipated.

  “And the Q-bomb,” John briskly reported, “is unaffected. Apparently unharmed. It hasn’t deviated from its trajectory at all, as far as I can measure.”

  “That’s absurd. It isn’t that massive.”

  “Apparently something is — well, anchoring it in space more firmly than mere inertia.”

  “Edna,” Libby called, “I’m prepared for pass four.”

  Edna sighed. There was no point backing down now; if nothing else they had made their hostile intentions absolutely clear to the Q-bomb. “Proceed. Arm the fish.”

  Alexei said, “Look, Bisesa — if the Q-bomb is a Firstborn artifact, then we believe that the best way to combat the threat is to use the Firstborn’s own technology against them. This Eye is the only sample of that technology we have. And you may be our only way to un-lock it.”

  As the conversation became more purposeful, Bisesa had the sense that something changed about the Eye above her. As if it shifted. Became more watchful. She heard a faint buzz on her comms link, and her suit seemed to shudder, as if buffeted by a breeze. A breeze?

  Myra, frowning, tapped her helmet with a gloved hand.

  Yuri looked up. “The Eye — oh shit—”

  “Thirty seconds,” said Libby.

  John said, “You know, there’s no reason why the bomb has to be constrained by the range of action it’s shown so far. It could just swat this damn ship like a fly.”

  “So it could,” Edna said calmly. “Check your constraints.”

  John reflexively snapped down his pressure suit visor.

  “Ready?”

  “Fire your damn fish,” John muttered.

  Edna tapped her final enable button. The A-drive cut in, and acceleration bit once more, driving them in their heavy suits back into their couches.

  Four torpedoes were fired in a single broadside from cannon mounted on the Liberator’s hull. They were antimatter torpedoes, so unstable they had to be armed with their H-bar pellets in flight, rather than back in dry dock.

  One detonated early, its magnetic containment failing.

  The others went off simultaneously in a cluster around the Q-bomb, as planned.

  The Q-bomb sailed on unperturbed. Mankind’s most powerful weapons, delivered by its first and only space battleship, had not been able to scar the bomb’s hide, or dislodge it from its chosen trajectory by a fraction of a degree.

  “So that’s that,” Edna said. “Libby, log it.” While they waited for further orders from Achilles, the Liberator stood off at a safe distance from the Q-bomb, matching its trajectory.

  “Christ,” John Metternes snapped, releasing his restraints. “I need a drink. Another shower, and a bloody drink.”

  Mars dust and loose bits of ice were churning on the floor, whip-ping up to collide with the shining face of the Eye. Bisesa felt fear and exhilaration. Not again. Not again!

  Myra ran clumsily to her mother, and grabbed her. “Mum!”

  “It’s all right, Myra—”

  Her voice was drowned out in her own ears by a rising tone, a sweep up the frequency scale into inaudibility, loud enough to be painful.

  Yuri studied a softscreen sewn into his sleeve. “That signal was a frequency chirp — like a test—”

  Ellie was laughing. “It worked. The Eye is responding. By Sol’s light! I don’t think I ever believed it. And I certainly didn’t think it would work as soon as this woman walked into the Pit.”

  Alexei grinned fiercely, “Believe it, baby!”

  “It’s changing,” said Yuri, looking up.

  The Eye’s smooth reflective sheen now oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.

  Then the surface collapsed, as if deflating. Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face — but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

  She had seen this before, in the Temple of Marduk. This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

  Her suit said, “I apologize for any inconvenience. However—”

  The suit’s voice cut out with a pop, to be replaced by silence.

  Suddenly her limbs turned flaccid and heavy. The suit’s systems had failed, even the servomotors.

  The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye.

&nbs
p; Wrestling with her own suit, Myra pressed her helmet against Bisesa’s, and Bisesa heard her muffled cries. “Mum, no! You’re not running out on me again!”

  Bisesa clung to her. “Love, it’s all right, whatever happens…”

  But there was a kind of wind, dragging at her. She staggered, their helmets lost contact, and she let go of Myra.

  The storm of light grew to a blizzard. Bisesa looked up at the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity — but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

  And the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of self.

  There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

  One of those was to serve as a gate.

  The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

  With a snap, it was over. The chamber was dark. The Eye was whole again, sleek and reflective in its ancient cage.

  Bisesa was gone. Myra found herself on the floor, weighed down by a powerless suit. She yelled into the silence of her helmet.

  “Mum. Mum!”

  There was a click, and a soft hum. A female voice said levelly,

  “Myra. Don’t be alarmed. I am speaking to you through your ident tattoo.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Help is on its way. I have spoken to Paula on the surface. You two have the only ident tattoo. You must reassure the others.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I suppose I am the leader of what your mother called this ‘faction.’ ”

  “I know your voice. From years ago — the sunstorm—”

  “My name is Athena.”

  25: Interlude:

  A Signal from Earth 2053

  In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.

  A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.

  The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, point-ers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted itself out, activated programs, analyzed the environment it found itself in — and gradually became aware.

  Aware, yes. There was a personality in this star-crossing data.

  No: three distinct personalities.

  “So we’re conscious again,” said Thales, stating the obvious.

  “Whoopee! What a ride!” said Athena skittishly.

  “There’s somebody watching us,” said Aristotle.

  Witness was the only name she had ever known.

  Of course that didn’t seem strange to her at first, in her early years. And nor did it seem strange that though there were plenty of adults in the waters around her, she was the only child. When you are young, you take everything for granted.

  This was a watery world, not terribly unlike Earth. Even its day was only a little longer than Earth’s.

  And the creatures here were Earthlike. In the bright waters of the world sea, Witness, a bundle of fur and fat something like a seal, swam and played and chased creatures not unlike fish. Witness even had two parents: having two sexes was a good strategy for mixing up hereditary material. Convergent evolution was a powerful force. But Witness’s body plan was based on six limbs, not four.

  The best times of all were the days, one in four, when the icy lid of the ocean broke up, and the people came flopping out onto the island.

  On land you were heavy, of course, and a lot less mobile. But Witness loved the sharp sensation of the gritty sand under her belly, and the crispness of the cold air. There were wonders on the island, cities and factories, temples and scientific establishments. And Witness loved the sky. She loved the stars that gleamed at night — and the three suns that shone in the day.

  If this world was something like Earth, its sun was not. This system was dominated by a star twice as massive as the sun, and eight times as bright; it had a smaller companion barely noticeable in the giant’s glare, and there was a third, a distant dim red dwarf.

  Across eleven light years, this system was easily bright enough to be seen from the Earth. This was Alpha Canis Minoris, also called Procyon. This star was known as a double to astronomers; that small second companion had never even been detected from Earth.

  But Procyon had changed. And the living planet it had suc-cored was dying.

  As she grew older, Witness learned to ask questions.

  “Why am I alone? Why are there no others like me? Why is there nobody for me to play with?”

  “Because we face a great tragedy,” her father said. “We all do. All over the world. It is the suns, Witness. There is something wrong with the suns.”

  The giant senior partner of Procyon, Procyon A, had once been a variable star.

  When it was young it shined steadily. But the helium “ash” produced by the hydrogen-burning fusion reactor of its core slowly accumulated in its heart. Trapped heat lifted the helium layer, and all the immense weight of gas above: the star swelled, subtly, until the trapped heat could flood out, and the star collapsed once more. But then the helium trap formed again.

  Thus the aging star became variable, swelling and collapsing over and again, with a period of a few days. And it was that grand stellar oscillation that had given this world its life.

  Once, before Procyon had become variable, the planet had been something like Europa, moon of Jupiter: a salty ocean trapped under a permanent crust of ice. There had been life here, fueled by the inner heat and complex minerals that came bubbling up from the world’s core. But, locked in the watery dark, none of those forms had progressed greatly in intelligence.

  The new pulsation had changed all that.

  “Every fourth day the ice breaks up into floes,” Witness’s parents said. “So you can get out of the sea. And we did. Our ancestors changed, so they could breathe in the air, so much more oxygen-rich than the seawater. And they learned to exploit the possibilities of the dry land. At first they just emerged so they could mate in peace, and shelter their young from the hungry mouths of the sea.

  But later—”

  “Yes, yes,” Witness said impatiently. She already knew the story. “Tools, minds, civilization.”

  “Yes. But you can see that we owe all we have — even our minds — to the pulsation of the sun. We can’t even breed in the water anymore; we need access to the land.”

  Witness prompted, “And now—”

  “And now, that pulsation has gone. Dwindled almost to nothing,” said her father.

  “And our world is dying,” said her mother sadly.

  Now there was no sunlight peak, no melting of the ice. The people’s machines kept some of the ice open. But without the mixing of the air caused by the pumping of the star, a layer of carbon dioxide was settling over the surface of the ocean.

  After a few centuries the islands were becoming uninhabitable.

  “We have become creatures of sea and land,” Witness’s mother said. “If we can’t reach the land—”

  “The implications,” her father said, “are clear. And there was only one possible response.”

  Unlike humans, Witness’s folk had never got as far as a space program. They had no way of fighting this catastrophe, as humans had built a shield to fend off the sunstorm. They had faced the horror of extinction.

  But they would not accept it.

  “We simply had less children,” Witn
ess’s mother said.

  The generations of these folk were much briefer than humanity’s.

  There had been time for this cull of numbers to slash the population until, by the time of Witness’s birth, there were only a few dozen of them left, in all the world, where once millions had swum.

  “You can see why we did it,” her mother said. “If a child never existed, it can’t suffer. It wasn’t so bad,” she said desperately. “For most of the generations you could still have one child. You still had love. ”

  Her father said, “But in the last generation—”

  Witness said blackly, “In this last generation you have produced only me.”

  Witness was the last ever child to be born. And she had precious duties to fulfill.

  “Stars are simple beasts,” her father told her. “Oh, it took many generations for our astronomers to puzzle out the peculiar internal mechanism that made our giant sun breathe out and in. But puzzle it out they did. It was easy to see how the pulsing started. But no matter how contorted a model the theoreticians dreamed up they could never find a convincing way to make the star’s pulsation stop. ”

  Her parents allowed Witness to think that through.

  “Oh,” she said. “This was a deliberate act. Somebody did this.”

  Witness was awed. “Why? Why would anybody do such a terrible thing?”

  “We don’t know,” her father said. “We can’t even guess. But we have been trying to find out. And that’s where you come in.”

  Listening stations had been established on many of the planet’s islands. There were clusters of telescopes sensitive to optical light, radio waves, and other parts of the spectrum: there were neutrino detectors, there were gravity wave detectors, and a host of still more exotic artificial ears.

  “We want to know who has done this,” said her father bitterly,

  “and why. And so we listen. But now our time is done. Soon only you will remain…”

  “And I am Witness.”

  Her parents clustered around her, stroking her belly and her six flippers as they had when she was a baby. “Tend the machines,” her father said. “Listen. And watch us, the last of us, as we go into the dark.”