Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “You want me to suffer,” Witness said bitterly. “That’s really what this is about, isn’t it? I will be the last of my kind, with no hope of procreation. All those who preceded me at least had that.

  You want me to take on all the terrible despair you spared those un-born. You want me to hurt, don’t you?”

  Witness’s mother was very distressed. “Oh, my child, if I could spare you this burden I would!”

  This made no difference to Witness, whose heart was harden-ing. Until their deaths, she struck back at her parents the only way she could, by shunning them.

  But there came a day, at last, when she had been left alone.

  And then the signal from Earth arrived.

  Aristotle, Thales, and Athena, refugee intelligences from Earth, learned how to speak to Witness. And they learned the fate of Witness’s kind.

  Procyon’s pulsation had died away much too early for human astronomers to have observed it. But Aristotle and the others knew Fthe same phenomenon had been seen in a still more famous star: Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris. A baffling decay of the north pole star’s pulsing had begun around 1945.

  “ ‘ But I am constant as the northern star, ’ ” Aristotle said, “ ‘ Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firma-ment. ’ Shakespeare.”

  “So much for Shakespeare!” said Athena.

  “This is the work of the Firstborn.” Thales’s observation was obvious, but it was chilling even so. The three of them were the first minds from Earth to understand that the reach of the Firstborn stretched so far.

  Aristotle said gravely, “Witness, it must hurt very much to watch the end of your kind.”

  Witness had often tried to put it into words for herself. Any death was painful. But you were always consoled that life would go on, that death was part of a continuing process of renewal, an unending story. But extinction ended all the stories.

  “When I am gone, the Firstborn’s work will be complete.”

  “Perhaps,” said Aristotle. “But it need not be so. Humans may have survived the Firstborn.”

  “Really?”

  They told her the story of the sunstorm.

  Witness was shocked to discover that her kind were not the only victims of this cosmic violence. Something stirred inside her, unfamiliar feelings. Resentment. Defiance.

  “Join us!” Athena said with her usual impulsiveness.

  “But,” Thales pointed out, stating the obvious, “she is the last of her kind.”

  “She isn’t dead yet,” Aristotle said firmly. “If Witness were the last human alive, we could find ways to reproduce her, or preserve her. Cloning technologies, Hibernacula.”

  “She isn’t human,” Thales said bluntly.

  “Yes, but the principle is the same,” Athena snapped. “Witness, dear, I think Aristotle is right. One day humans will come here. We can help you and your kind to go on. If you want us to, that is.”

  Such possibilities bewildered Witness. “Why would humans come here?”

  “To find others like themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “To save them,” Athena said.

  “And then what? What if they find the Firstborn?”

  “Then,” Aristotle said blackly, “the humans will save them too.”

  Athena said, “Don’t give up, Witness. Join us.”

  Witness thought it over. The ice of the freezing ocean closed around her, chilling her aging flesh. But that spark of defiance still burned, deep in the core of her being.

  She asked: “How do we start?”

  Part 3 REUNIONS

  26: The Stone Man

  Year 32 (Mir)

  The consul from Chicago met Emeline White off the train from Alexandria.

  Emeline climbed down from the open-top carriage. At the head of the train, monkish engineers of the School of Othic tended valves and pistons on the huge oil-burning locomotive. Emeline tried not to breathe in the greasy smoke that belched from the loco’s stack.

  The sky was bright, washed-out, the sunlight harsh, but there was a nip of cold in the air.

  The consul approached her, hat in hand. “Mrs. White? It’s good to meet you. My name is Ilicius Bloom.” He wore gown and sandals like an oriental, though his accent was as Chicagoan as hers.

  He was maybe forty, she thought, though he might have been older; his skin was sallow, his hair glistening black, and a pot belly made a tent of his long purple robe.

  Another fellow stood beside Bloom, heavyset, his head down-turned, his massive brow shining with dirt. He said nothing and didn’t move; he just stood there, a pillar of muscle and bone, and Bloom made no effort to introduce him. Something about him was very odd. But Emeline knew that by crossing the ocean to Europe she had come to a strange place, even stranger than icebound America.

  “Thank you for welcoming me, Mr. Bloom.”

  Bloom said, “As Chicago’s consul here I try to meet all our American visitors. Easing the way for all concerned.” He smiled at her. His teeth were bad. “Your husband isn’t with you?”

  “Josh died a year ago.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Your letter to him, about the telephone ringing in the temple—

  I took the liberty of reading it. He often spoke about his time in Babylon, those first years just after the Freeze. Which he always called the Discontinuity.”

  “Yes. You surely don’t remember that strange day—”

  “Mr. Bloom, I’m forty-one years old. I was nine on Freeze day.

  Yes, I remember.” She thought he was going to make another manipulative compliment, but her stern glower shut him up. “I know Josh would have come,” she said. “He can’t, and our boys are grown and are busy with their own concerns, and so here I am.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome to Babylonia.”

  “Hmm.” She looked around. She was in a landscape of fields and gullies, irrigation ditches maybe, though the gullies looked clogged, the fields faded and dusty. There was no city nearby, no sign of habitation save mud shacks sprawled over a low hill maybe a quarter-mile away. And it was cold, not as cold as home but colder than she had expected. “This isn’t Babylon, is it?”

  He laughed. “Hardly. The city itself is another few miles north of here. But this is where the rail line stops.” He waved at the hill of shacks. “This is a place the Greeks call the Midden. The local people have some name of their own for it, but nobody cares about that. ”

  “Greeks? I thought King Alexander’s people were Macedonians.”

  Bloom shrugged. “Greeks, Macedonians. They let us use this place, however. We have to wait, I’m afraid. I have a carriage arranged to take you to the city in an hour, by which time we’re due to meet another party coming down from Anatolia. In the meantime, please, come and rest.” He indicated the mud hovels.

  Her heart sank. But she said, “Thank you.”

  She struggled to get her luggage off the train carriage. It was a bison-fur pack strapped up with rope, a pack that had crossed the Atlantic with her.

  “Here. Let my boy help.” Bloom turned and snapped his fingers.

  The strange, silent man reached out one massive hand and lifted the pack with ease, even though he was hefting it at the end of his outstretched arm. One of the straps caught on a bench, and ripped a bit. Almost absently Bloom cuffed the back of his head.

  The servant didn’t flinch or react, but just turned and plodded toward the village, the pack in his hand. From the back Emeline could see the servant’s shoulders, pushing up his ragged robe; they were like the shoulders of a gorilla, she thought, dwarfing his boulder of a head.

  Emeline whispered, “Mr. Bloom — your servant—”

  “What of him?”

  “He isn’t human, is he?”

  He glanced at her. “Ah, I forever forget how newcomers to this dark old continent are startled by our ancestral stock. The boy is what the Greeks call a Stone Man — because most of the time he’s as solid and s
ilent as if he were carved from stone, you see. I think the bone-fondlers on Earth, before the Freeze, might have called him a Neanderthal. It was a bit of a shock to me when I first came over here, but you get used to it. None of this in America, eh?”

  “No. Just us.”

  “Well, it’s different here,” Bloom said. “There’s a whole carnival of the beasts, from the man-apes to these robust species, and other sorts. Favorites at Alexander’s court, many of them, for all sorts of sport —if they can be caught.”

  They reached the low mound and began to walk up it. The earth here was disturbed, gritty, full of shards of pottery and flecks of ash. Emeline had the sense that it was very ancient, worked and reworked over and over.

  “Welcome to the Midden,” Bloom said. “Mind where you step.”

  They came to the first of the habitations. It was just a box of dried mud, entirely enclosed, without windows or doors. A crude wooden ladder leaned up against the wall. Bloom led the way, clambering up the ladder onto the roof and walking boldly across it. The Stone Man just jumped up, a single elastic bound of his powerful legs lifting him straight up the seven or eight feet to the roof.

  Emeline, uncomfortable, followed. It felt very strange to be walking about on some stranger’s roof like this.

  The roof was a smooth surface of dried mud, painted a pale white by some kind of wash. Smoke curled out of a crudely cut hole. This squat house huddled very close to the next, another block whose walls were just inches from its neighbors. And when Bloom strode confidently over the gap to the next roof Emeline had no choice but to follow.

  The whole hillside was covered by a mosaic of these pale boxy houses, all jammed in together. And people moved around on the roofs. Mostly women, short, squat and dark, they carried bundles of clothing and baskets of wood up out of one ceiling hole and down through another. This was the nature of the town. All the dwellings were alike, just rectangular blocks of dried mud, jammed up against each other too closely to allow for streets, and climbing about on the roofs was the only way to get anywhere.

  She said to Bloom, “They’re people. I mean, people like us.”

  “Oh, yes, these are no man-apes or Neanderthals! But this is an old place, Mrs. White, snipped out of an old, deep time — older and deeper than the age of the Greeks, that’s for sure, nobody knows how old. But it’s a time so far back they hadn’t got around to inventing streets and doors yet.”

  They came to one more roof. Smoke snaked up from the only hole cut into it, but without hesitation Bloom led the way down, following crudely-shaped steps fixed to the interior wall. Emeline followed, trying not to brush against the walls, which were coated with soot.

  The Stone Man came after her with her pack, which he dumped on the floor, and clambered back up the stair, out of sight.

  The house was as boxy inside as out. It was just a single room, without partitions. Descending the last steps, Emeline had to avoid a hearth set on slablike stones, which smoldered under the ceiling hole that served as both chimney and doorway. Lamps and ornaments stood in wall alcoves: there were figurines of stone or clay, and what looked like busts, sculpted heads, brightly painted. There was no furniture as such, but neat pallets of straw and blankets had been laid out, and clothing and baskets and stone tools, everything handmade, were heaped up neatly.

  The walls were heavy with soot, but the floor looked as if it had been swept. The place was almost tidy. But there was a deep dense stink of sewage, and something else, older, drier, a smell of rot.

  A woman, very young, had been sitting in the shadows. She was cradling a baby wrapped in some coarse cloth. Now she gently put the baby down on a heap of straw, and came to Bloom. She wore a simple, grubby, discolored smock. He stroked her pale, dust-colored hair, looked into her blue eyes, and ran his hand down her neck. Emeline thought she could be no more than fourteen, fifteen. The sleeping baby had black hair, like Bloom’s, not pale like hers. The way he held her neck wasn’t gentle, not quite.

  “Wine,” Bloom said to the girl, loudly. “Wine, Isobel, you understand? And food.” He glanced at Emeline. “You’re hungry?

  Isobel. Bring us bread, fruit, olive oil. Yes?” He pushed her away hard enough to make her stagger. She went clambering up out of the house.

  Bloom sat on a heap of coarsely woven blankets, and indicated to Emeline that she should do the same.

  She sat cautiously and glanced around the room. She didn’t feel like making conversation with this man, but she was curious. “Are those carved things idols?”

  “Some of them. The ladies with the big bosoms and the fat bellies. You can take a look if you like. But be careful of the painted heads.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s exactly what they are. Isobel’s people bury their dead, right under the floors of their houses. But they sever the heads and keep them, and plaster them with baked mud, and paint them — well, you can see the result.”

  Emeline glanced down uneasily, wondering what old horrors lay beneath the swept floor she was sitting on.

  The girl Isobel returned with a jug and a basket of bread.

  Without a word she poured them both cups of wine; it was warm and a bit salty, but Emeline drank it gratefully. The girl carved hunks of bread from a hard, boulder-like loaf with a stone blade, and set a bowl of olive oil between them. Following Bloom’s example, Emeline dunked the bread into the oil to soften it, then chewed on it.

  She thanked Isobel for her service. The girl just retreated to her sleeping baby. Emeline thought she looked frightened, as if the baby waking up would be a bad thing.

  Emeline asked, “ ‘Isobel’?”

  Bloom shrugged. “Not the name her parents gave her, of course, but that doesn’t matter now.”

  “It looks to me as if you have it pretty easy here, Mr. Bloom.”

  He grunted. “Not as easy as all that. But a man must live, you know, Mrs. White, and we’re far from Chicago! The girl is happy enough however. What kind of brute do you think would have her if not for me?

  “And she’s content to be in the house of her ancestors. Her people have lived here for generations, you know — I mean, right here, on this very spot. The houses are just mud and straw, and when they fall down they just build another on the plan of the old, just where granddaddy lived. The Midden isn’t a hill, you see, it is nothing less than an accumulation of expired houses. These antique folk aren’t much like us Christians, Mrs. White! Which is why the city council posted me here, of course. We don’t want any friction.”

  “What kind of friction?”

  He eyed her. “Well, you got to ask yourself, Mrs. White. What kind of person hauls herself through such a journey as you have made?”

  She said hotly, “I came for my husband’s memory.”

  “Sure. I know. But your husband came from this area — I mean, from a time slice nearby. Most Americans don’t have any personal ties here, as you do. You want to know why most folks come here?

  Jesus.” He crossed himself as he said the name. “They come this way because they’re on a pilgrimage to Judea, where they hope against hope they’re going to find some evidence that a holy time slice has delivered Christ Incarnate. That would be some consolation for being ripped out of the world, wouldn’t it?

  “But there’s no sign of Jesus in Judea —this Judea. That’s the grim truth, Mrs. White. All there is to see there is King Alexander’s steam-engine yards. What the unfortunate lack of an Incarnation in this world means for our immortal souls, I don’t know. And when the pious fools come up against the godless pagans who own Judea, the result is what might be called diplomatic incidents.”

  But Emeline nodded. “Surely modern Americans have nothing to fear from an Iron Age warlord like Alexander…”

  “But, Mrs. White,” a new voice called, “this ‘warlord’ has already established a new empire stretching from the Atlantic shore to the Black Sea — an empire that spans his whole world. It would serve us all well if Chicago were not to p
ick a fight with him just yet.”

  Emeline turned. A man was clambering stiffly down the stairs, short, portly. He was followed by a younger man, leaner. They both wore what looked like battered military uniforms. The first man wore a peaked cap, and an astoundingly luxuriant mustache. But that facial ornament was streaked with gray; Emeline saw that he must be at least seventy.

  Emeline stood, and Bloom smoothly introduced her. “Mrs.

  White, this is Captain Nathaniel Grove. British Army — formerly, anyhow. And this—”

  “I am Ben Batson,” the younger man said, perhaps thirty, his accent as stiffly British as Grove’s. “My father served with Captain Grove.”

  Emeline nodded. “My name is—”

  “I know who you are, my dear Mrs. White,” Grove said warmly. He crossed the floor and took her hands in his. “I knew Josh well. We arrived here together, aboard the same time slice, you might say. A bit of the North — West Frontier from the year of Our Lord 1885. Josh wrote several times and told me of you, and your children. You are every bit as lovely as I imagined.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said sternly. “But he did speak of you, Captain. I’m pleased to meet you. And I’m very sorry he’s not here with me. I lost him a year ago.”

  Grove’s face stiffened. “Ah.”

  “Pneumonia, they said. The truth was, I think he just wore himself out. He wasn’t so old.”

  “Another one of us gone, another one less to remember where we came from — eh, Mrs. White?”

  “Call me Emeline, please. You’ve traveled far?”

  “Not so far as you, but far enough. We live now in an Alexandria—

  not the city on the Nile, but at Ilium.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Turkey, as we knew it.” He smiled. “We call our city New Troy.”

  “I imagine you’re here because of the telephone call in Babylon.”

  “Assuredly. The scholar Abdikadir wrote to me, as he wrote to Bloom, here, in the hope of contacting Josh. Not that I have the faintest idea what it all means. But one has to address these things.”