Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It was kind of scary to hear them in the dark, however. She was aware of Emeline’s eyes, bright, wide open. But Abdikadir snored softly, wrapped in the immunity of youth.

  38: EVA

  March 2070

  Yuri and Grendel invited Myra out on an excursion.

  “Just a routine inspection tour and sample collection,” Yuri said. “But you might like the chance to go outside.”

  Outside. After months stuck in a box of ice, in a landscape so flat and dark that even when the sun was up it was like a sensory deprivation tank, the word was a magic spell to Myra.

  But when she joined Yuri and Grendel in their rover, by clambering through a soft tube from a hab dome to the rover’s pressurized cabin, she realized belatedly that she was only exchanging one enclosed volume for another.

  Grendel Speth seemed to recognize what Myra was feeling.

  “You get used to it. At least on this jaunt you’ll get a different view from out the window.”

  Yuri and Grendel sat up front, Myra behind them. Yuri called,

  “All strapped in?” He punched a button and sat back.

  The hatch slammed shut with a rattle of sealing locks, the tunnel to the hab dome came loose with a sucking sound, and the rover lurched into motion.

  It was northern summer now. Spring had arrived around Christmas time, with an explosive sublimation of dry ice snow that burst into vapor almost as soon as the sunlight touched it, and for a time the seeing had gotten even worse than during the winter. But now, though a diminishing layer of dry-ice snow remained, the worst of the spring thaw was over and the winter hood long dissipated, and the sun rolled low around a clear orange-brown sky.

  This was actually the first time Myra had been for a trip in one of the base’s rovers. It was a lot smaller than the big beast she had ridden down from Lowell, its interior cramped by a miniature lab, a suiting-up area, a tiny galley, and a toilet with a sink where she would have to take sponge baths. It towed a trailer, which didn’t contain a portable nuke like Discovery from Port Lowell but a methane-burning turbine.

  “We manufacture the methane using Mars carbon dioxide,”

  Yuri called back. “More of Hanse’s ISRU.” He pronounced it iss-roo. In-situ resource utilization. “But it’s a slow process, and we have to wait for the tank to fill up. So we can only afford a few jaunts like this per year.”

  “You need a nuke,” Myra said.

  Yuri grunted. “Lowell’s got all the best gear. We get the dross.

  But it’s fit for purpose.” And he banged the rover’s dash as if apologetically.

  “This trip isn’t too exciting,” Grendel warned.

  “Well, it’s new to me,” Myra replied.

  “Anyhow you’re doing us a favor,” Yuri called. “Standing orders say we should take three out on every excursion more than a day’s walk back to the station. I mean, we can do what we like; we override. Sometimes I even do this route alone, or Grendel does.

  But the AIs get pissy about rules, you know?”

  “We are undermanned,” Grendel said. “Nominally Wells Station should house ten people. But there’s just too much to do on Mars.”

  “And I guess Ellie is pretty much locked up with her work in the Pit.”

  Grendel pulled a face. “Well, yes. But she isn’t one of us anyhow. Not a Martian.”

  “What about Hanse?”

  “Hanse’s a busy guy,” Yuri said. “When he’s not running the station, or drilling his holes in the ice, he’s running his ISRU experiments. Living off the land, here on Mars. You might think the north pole of Mars is an odd place to come try that. But, Myra, there’s water here, sitting right here on the surface, in the form of ice. There’s nowhere else on the inner worlds, save a scraping at the poles of the Moon, where you can say that.”

  “And,” Grendel said, “Hanse is thinking bigger than that.”

  Yuri said, “Myra, there are a lot of similarities between trying to live here on the Martian ice cap and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are generally nothing but big balls of frozen ice around nuggets of rock. So Hanse is trialing technologies that might enable us to survive anywhere out there.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “Sure,” Yuri said. “Well, he’s a South African on his mother’s side. And you know what the Africans are like nowadays. They were the big winners out of the sunstorm, politically, economically.

  Hanse’s committed to Mars, I think. But he’s an African Martian, and he has deeper goals…”

  After a couple of hours driving they came to the lip of a spiral canyon.

  The wall of eroded ice was shallow, and the canyon wasn’t terribly deep; Myra thought the rover would easily be able to skim down to its floor, and indeed the rutted track they were following snaked on down into the canyon. But she could see that further ahead the canyon broadened and grew deeper, curving smoothly into the distance like a tremendous natural freeway.

  They didn’t descend into the canyon immediately. Yuri tapped the dashboard, and the rover lumbered along the canyon’s lip until an insectile form loomed out of the dark before them. It was a complex platform maybe fifty centimeters across laden with instruments, and it stood on three spindly legs. The rover had a manipulator arm, which now unfolded delicately to reach out to the tripod.

  “This is a SEP,” Yuri said. “A surface experiment package.

  Kind of a weather station, together with a seismometer, laser mirrors, other instruments. We’ve been planting a whole network of them across the polar cap.” He spoke with a trace of pride.

  To keep him talking she asked, “Why the legs?”

  “To lift it above the dry ice snow, which can reach a depth of a few meters by the end of the winter. And there are surface effects—

  you can get major excursions of temperature and pressure over the first few meters up from the ground. So there are sensors mounted in the legs too.”

  “It looks spindly. Like it will fall over in the first gust of wind.”

  “Well, Mars is a spindly kind of planet. I calculated the wind loading moment. This baby won’t get knocked over in a hurry.”

  “You designed it?”

  “Yes,” said Grendel, “and he’s bloody proud of it. And any resemblance of these toy weather stations to the Martian fighting machines of certain books and movies is purely coincidental.”

  “They’re my babies.” Yuri threw his head back and laughed through his thick black beard.

  While it was halted the rover released other, more exotic bits of gear: “tumbleweed,” cage-like balls a meter across that rolled away over the dry ice snow, and “smart dust,” a sprinkling of black soot-like powder that just blew away. Each mote of dust was a sensor station just a millimeter across, with its own suite of tiny instruments, all powered by microwave energy beamed from the sky, or simply by being shaken up by the wind. “We have no control over where the weed and the dust goes,” Yuri said. “It just blows with the wind, and a lot of the dust will just get snowed out. But the idea is to saturate the polar cap with sensors, to make it self-aware, if you like. Already the data flows are tremendous.”

  With the SEP seen to, the rover began its descent into the canyon. The ice wall was layered, like stratified rock, with thick dark bands every meter or so deep, but much finer layers in between — very fine, like the pages of a book, fine down to the limits of what Myra could see. The rover drove slowly and carefully, its movements evidently preprogrammed. Every so often Yuri, or more rarely Grendel, would tap the dashboard, and they would stop, and the manipulator arm would reach out to explore the surface of the wall. It scraped up samples from the layers, or it would press a box of instruments against the ice, or it would plant a small instrument package.

  Grendel said to Myra, “This is pretty much the drill, all the way in. Sampling the strata. I’m testing for life, or relics of life from the past. Yuri here is trying to establish a global stratigraphy, mapping all the cap’s folded layers as read from the co
res and the canyon excursions against each other. It’s not very exciting, I guess. If we see something really promising, we do get out and take a look for ourselves. But you get tired of the suit drill, and we save that for special occasions.”

  Yuri laughed again. The rover rolled on.

  “I spoke to Ellie,” Myra said uncertainly. “Down in the Pit. She told me something of her experiences of the sunstorm.”

  Grendel turned, her eyebrows raised. “You’re honored. Took me three months to get to that point. And I’m her nominated psy-chiatric counselor.”

  “Sounds like she had it kind of tough.”

  “Myself, I was ten,” Grendel said. “I grew up in Ohio. We were a farming family, far from any dome. Dad built us a bunker, like a storm shelter. We lost everything, and then we were stuck in the refugee camps too. My father died a couple of years later. Skin cancers got him.

  “In the camps I worked as a volunteer nurse at triage stations.

  Gave me the taste for medicine, I guess. I never wanted to feel so helpless in front of a person in pain again. And after the sunstorm, after the camps, I worked on ecological recovery programs in the Midwest. That got me into biology.”

  Yuri said cheerfully, “As for me, I was born after the sunstorm.

  Born on the Moon, Russian mother, Irish father. I spent some time on Earth, though. As a teen I worked on eco-recovery programs in the Canadian Arctic.”

  “That’s how you got a taste for ice.”

  “I guess.”

  “And now you’re here,” Myra said. “Now you’re Spacers.”

  “Martians,” Grendel and Yuri said together.

  Yuri said, “The Spacers are off on their rocks in the sky. Mars is Mars, and that’s that. And we don’t necessarily share their ambi-tions.”

  “But you do over the Eye in the Pit.”

  Yuri said, “Over that, yes, of course. But I’d rather just get on with this.” He waved a hand at the sculptures of ice beyond the windscreen. “Mars. That’s enough for me.”

  “I envy you,” Myra blurted. “For your sense of purpose. For having something to build here.”

  Grendel turned, curious. “Envy’s not a good feeling, Myra. You have your own life.”

  “Yes. But I feel I’m kind of living in an aftermath of my own.”

  Grendel grunted. “Given who your mother is that’s under-standable. We can talk about it later, if you like.”

  Yuri said, “Or we can talk about my mother, who taught me how to drink vodka. Now that’s the way to put the world to rights.”

  An alarm chimed softly, and a green panel lit up on the dash.

  Yuri tapped it, and it filled up with the face of Alexei Carel. “You’d better get back here. Sorry to interrupt the fun.”

  “Go on,” said Yuri.

  “I’ve two messages. One, Myra, we’ve been summoned to Cyclops.”

  “The planet-finder station? Why?”

  “To meet Athena.”

  Yuri and Grendel exchanged glances. Yuri said, “What’s your second message?”

  Alexei grinned. “Something Ellie von Devender has dug out of the Pit. ‘The most common glyph sequence’—Myra, she said you’d understand that. She’ll explain to the rest of us when you get back.”

  “Show us,” said Myra.

  Alexei’s face disappeared, and the screen filled with four stark symbols:

  39: New Chicago

  They reached New Chicago around noon.

  There was a proper rail station here, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy actual tickets.

  But the track terminated; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

  Emeline led them off the train and into the town. She said it might take days to organize their onward travel. She hoped there would be room for them to stay at one of the town’s two small hotels; if not they would have to knock on doors.

  New Chicago was on the site of Memphis, but there was no trace of that city here. With the wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails, and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of towns of the old Wild West. The streets were a pleasant bustle, adults coming and going on business, children hanging around outside a schoolhouse. Some of the adults even rode bicycles — safety bicycles that they called “Wheels,” an invention only a few years old at the time of the Discontinuity. But many of the townsfolk were bundled up in furs, like Arctic seal trappers, and there were camels tied up outside the saloons alongside the horses.

  They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. In the lobby hung a framed newspaper front page. It was a Chicago Tribune late edition, dated July 21, 1894, and its headline read: world cut off from chicago.

  They left their bags. Emeline bought them a roast beef sand-wich each for lunch. And in the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city.

  New Chicago was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But it was big. Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people.

  There was a handsome clock fixed to a tower on the town hall, which Emeline said was carefully set to “Chicago standard railway time,” a standard that the Chicagoans had clung to despite the great disruption of the Discontinuity — even though it was about three hours out according to the position of the sun. There were other signs of culture. A note pinned on a ragged scrap of paper to the town hall door announced a meeting:

  A WORLD WITHOUT A POPE?

  WHERE NEXT FOR CHRISTIANS?

  WEDNESDAY, EIGHT O’CLOCK.

  NO LIQUOR. NO GUNS.

  And one small house was labeled edison’s memorial of chicago.

  Bisesa bent down to read the details on the poster: The FATE Of

  CHICAGO

  On the NIGHT

  The WHOLE WORLD FROZE

  JULY 1894

  A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope U.S. Patent Pending

  A WONDER

  TEN CENTS

  Bisesa glanced at Emeline. “Edison?”

  “He happened to be in the city that night. He’d been advising on the world’s fair, a year or two before. He’s an old man now, and poorly, but still alive — or he was when I set out for Babylon.”

  They walked on, tracing the dusty streets.

  They came to a little park, overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, it must have been a hundred feet tall or more. Its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

  “Big Mary,” said Emeline, with a trace of pride in her voice.

  “Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centerpiece of the world’s fair, that is the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which we held a year before the Freeze. When we chose this site for New Chicago, Mary was one of the first items we hauled down here, even though we barely had the capacity to do it.”

  “It’s magnificent,” Abdikadir said, sounding sincere. “Even Alexander would be impressed.”

  “Well, it’s a start,” Emeline said, obscurely pleased. “You have to make a statement of intent, you know. We’re here, and here we will stay.”

  There had been no real choice but to move from Old Chicago.

  It had taken the Chicagoans weeks, months to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit. The crisis wasn’t merely some local climatic disaster, as had first been thought; something much more extraordinary had happened. Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, a bit of the nineteenth century stranded in antique ice.

  And as far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over.

  Emeline said the first emigrants from Chicago proper had left for the south in the fifth year after the Freeze. New Chicago was the product of thirty years’ hard work by Americans who for many years had believed thems
elves entirely alone in an utterly trans-formed world.

  But even in the heart of the new town, the wind from the north was persistent and cold.

  They came to farmland on the edge of the town. As far as the eye could see, sheep and cattle were scattered over a green-brown prairie that was studded with small, shabby farm buildings.

  Emeline walked them to a kind of open-air factory she called the Union Stock Yards. The place stank of blood and ordure and rotting meat, and a strange sour smell turned out to be incinerated hair. “The core of it is from old Chicago, torn down and rebuilt here. Before the Freeze we used to slaughter fourteen million animals a day, and twenty-five thousand people worked here. We don’t process but a fraction of that now, of course. In fact it’s lucky the Yards were always so busy, for if we hadn’t been able to breed from the stock in its holding pens we would have starved in a year or two. Now they send the butchered meat up to feed the old city.

  Don’t have to worry about freezing it; nature takes care of that for us…”

  As she spoke, Bisesa looked to the horizon. Beyond the farmland she saw what looked like a herd of elephants, mammoths or mastodons, walking proud and tall. It was astonishing to think that if she walked off, beyond those unperturbed mastodons, she could travel all the way to the ocean’s shore without seeing another glimpse of the work of mankind, not so much as a footprint in the scattered snow.

  That night Bisesa retired to the shared hotel room early, exhausted from the traveling. But she had trouble sleeping.

  “Another day ahead of me and once again I don’t know what the hell it will be like,” she whispered to the phone. “I’m too old for this.”

  The phone murmured, “Do you know where we are? I mean, right here, this location. Do you know what it would have become, if not for the Discontinuity?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Graceland. The mansion.”

  “You’re kidding.”