Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Actually it was my idea.” Cassie Duflot approached Bella. “It was just that, you know, we still aren’t sure how today is going to turn out, are we?” She glanced at the sky, as if seeking the Q-bomb.

  “I mean, not really sure. And if things were to go wrong, badly wrong—”

  “You wanted to give the kids their Christmas anyway.”

  “Do you think that’s odd?”

  “No.” Bella smiled. “I understand, Cassie.”

  “It does make it a hell of a day,” Edna said. “And what’s worse, if the world doesn’t get blown up today, we’ll have to do it all again in ten days’ time.”

  “You attracted quite a crowd for your launch, Bella,” Cassie said.

  “Looks like it—”

  “Mum, you haven’t seen the half of it yet,” Edna said. She took her mother’s arm again and walked her toward the glass-walled lip of the building.

  At the roof edge Bella was able to see the ocean to the east, where the low sun hung like a lamp, and the coast to north and south, her view stretching for kilometers in either direction.

  Canaveral was crowded. The cars clustered along the shoreline, and were parked up as far as the Beach Road to the north, and to the south on Merritt Island and the Cape itself, carpeting the old industrial facilities and the abandoned Air Force base. Everywhere, flags fluttered in the strong breeze.

  And out at sea she saw the gray, blocky form of a reused oil rig.

  Rising from it was a double thread, dead straight, visible when it caught the light.

  “They came for the switch-on,” Edna said. “You always were a showman, Mum. Maybe politicians have to be. And reopening America’s elevator today is a good stunt. People feel like a party, I guess.”

  “Oh, it’s more than just another space elevator. You’ll see.”

  “New ways forward, Mum?”

  “I’ve just come down from a conference with Bob Paxton and others on new deep-defense concepts. Big concepts. Terraforming programs, for instance.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Just thinking big. That’s what cutting your teeth on the shield does for you, I guess. And I must talk to Myra Dutt sometime.” She glanced at the sky. “We have to do something about Mir — this other place Myra’s mother went to. They’re humans in there too. If we can speak to them, as Alexei Carel claims they have been able to on Mars, surely we can find a way to bring them home…”

  There was a stir. Bella was aware of people approaching her, hundreds of eyes on her on this roof alone, and that cam robot whirled and glistened at her feet, puppylike. Even those monks by the alligator pond were staring at her, grinning from ear to ear.

  She looked at her watch. “I think it’s time.”

  “Mum, you’re going to have to say something.”

  “I know. Just a minute more.” She looked out to sea, to the shining vertical track of the elevator. “Edna, call the kids so they can see.”

  The children came to join them, clutching their presents, with Cassie and John Metternes, who hoisted Thea up onto his shoulders.

  A flare went up from that oil rig, a pink spark arcing and trailing smoke. Then there was motion along the track of the elevator, shining droplets rising up one of the pair of threads. A ragged cheer broke out around them, soon echoed among the wider throngs scattered across Canaveral.

  “It’s working,” Bella breathed.

  “But what’s it carrying?” Edna murmured, squinting. “Magnify… Damn, I keep forgetting I’m in EVA.”

  “Water,” Bella said. “Sacks of seawater. It’s a bucket chain, love.

  The pods will be lifted to the top of the tower, and thrown off.”

  “Thrown where?”

  “The Moon, initially. Later Venus.”

  Edna stared at the elevator stack. “So where’s the power coming from? I don’t see any laser mounts on that rig.”

  “There aren’t any. There is no power source — nothing but the Earth’s rotation. Edna, this isn’t really an elevator. It’s a siphon.”

  Edna’s eyes lit up with wonder.

  The orbital siphon was an extension of the space-elevator concept that derived from the elevator’s peculiar mechanics. Beyond the point of geosynchronous orbit, centripetal forces tended to throw masses away from the Earth. The trick with the siphon was to harness this tendency, to allow payloads to escape but in the process to draw more masses up from Earth’s surface. Essentially, the energy of Earth’s rotation was being transferred to an escaping stream of payload pellets.

  “So you don’t need any external energy input at all,” Edna said.

  “I studied this concept at USNGS. The big problem was always thought to be keeping the damn thing fed — you’d need a fleet of trucks working day and night to maintain the payload flow. But if all you’re throwing up there is seawater—”

  “We call it Bimini,” Bella said. “It’s appropriate enough. The native Americans told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of youth on an island called Bimini. He never found it, but he stumbled on Florida…”

  “A fountain of youth?”

  “A fountain of Earth’s water to make worlds young again. The Moon first, then Venus. Look, Edna, I wanted this as a demonstration to the Spacers that we’re serious. It will still take centuries, but with resource outputs like this, terraforming becomes a practical possibility for the first time. And if Earth lowers its oceans just a fraction and slows its rotation an invisible amount to turn the other worlds blue again, I think that’s a sacrifice worth making, don’t you?”

  “I think you’re crazy, Mum. But it’s magnificent.” Edna grabbed her and kissed her.

  Thales spoke. “This is a secure channel. Bella, Edna — the Q-bomb’s closest approach is a minute away.”

  Secure line or not, the news soon seemed to ripple out. Silence spread through the rooftop marquees, and the massed crowds around Canaveral. Suddenly the mood was soured, fretful. Edna took Thea from John Metternes and clutched her close. Bella grabbed her daughter’s free hand and gripped it hard.

  They looked up into the brilliant sky.

  55: Q-bomb

  The choice had been made. The bomb was already looking ahead, to the terminus of its new trajectory.

  The blue, teeming world and all its peoples receded behind it.

  Like any sufficiently advanced machine the Q-bomb was sentient to some degree. And its frozen soul was touched by regret when, six months after passing Earth, it slammed into the sands of Mars, and thought ended forever.

  56: Mars

  2 November 2071

  The dust was extraordinary here in Hellespontus, even for Mars, dust museum of the solar system.

  Myra sat in her blister cockpit with Ellie von Devender as the rover plunged over the banks and low dunes. This was the southern hemisphere of Mars, and they were driving through the Hellespontus mountains, a range of low hills not far from the western rim of the Hellas basin. But the rover’s wheels threw up immense rooster-tails, and the stuff just flew up at the windscreens, wiping out any kind of visibility. The infrared scanners, even the radar, were useless in these conditions.

  Myra had been around space technology long enough to know that she had to put her faith in the machinery that protected her.

  The rover knew where it was going, in theory, and was finding its way by sheer dead reckoning. But it violated all her instincts to go charging blindly ahead like this.

  “But we can’t slow down,” Ellie said absently. “We don’t have time.” She was paging her way through astronomical data — not even looking out the window, as Myra was. But then her primary task was much more significant, the ongoing effort to understand what precisely the Q-bomb had done to Mars since its impact five months ago, an impact that had done little harm in itself, but which had planted a seed of quintessence that would soon shatter Mars altogether.

  “It’s just all this dust,” Myra said. “I didn’t expect these kind of conditions, even on Mars.”

/>   Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Myra, this area is notorious. This is where a lot of the big global dust storms seem to be born. You didn’t know that? Welcome to Dust Central. Anyhow you know we’re in a rush. If we don’t find that old lady on its hundredth birthday we’re going to let down the sentimental populations of whole worlds.” She grinned at Myra, quite relaxed.

  She was right. As everybody waited for the full extent of the bad news about the planet’s future, the electronic gaze of all mankind had been fixed on Mars and the Martians. It was sympathetic or morbid, depending on your point of view. And of all the frantic activities in advance of the final evacuation of a world, none had caught the public imagination as much as what cynical old hands like Yuri called “treasure hunting.”

  Mars was littered with the relics of the pioneering days of the robot exploration of the solar system, some seventy years of tri-umph and bitter disappointment that had come to a definitive end when Bob Paxton planted the first human footprint in the red sands. Most of those inert probes and stalled rovers and bits of scattered wreckage still lay in the dust where they had come to rest.

  The early colonists of Mars had had no energy to spare to go trophy hunting, or a great deal of interest; they had looked to the future, not the past. But now that it appeared that Mars might have no future after all, there had been a clamor to retrieve as many of those old mechanical pioneers as possible.

  It wasn’t a job that required a great deal of specialist skill in Martian conditions, and so it was an ideal assignment for Myra, a Martian by recent circumstance. For safety reasons she couldn’t travel alone on these cross-planet rover jaunts, however, and so she had been assigned Ellie as a companion, a physicist rather than a Mars specialist who might be better employed elsewhere. Ellie had been quite happy to go along with her; she could continue her own work just as well in a moving rover as in a station like Lowell or Wells — better, she said, for there were fewer distractions.

  Of course, Ellie’s work was far more important than any trophy-hunting. Ellie was working with a system-wide community of physicists and cosmologists on predictions of what was to become of Mars. Right now she was looking at deep-sky images of star fields. As far as Myra understood, their best data came not from Mars itself but from studies of the sky: though it was hard to grasp, the distant stars no longer looked the same from Mars as they did from the Earth. It defeated Myra’s imagination how that could possibly be so.

  Anyhow the retrieval program had been successful in terms of its own goals. With the help of orbital mapping Myra and others had reached the Vikings, tonnes of heavy, clunky, big-budget Cold War engineering, where they still sat in the dry, rocky deserts to which cautious mission planners had consigned them. The famous, plucky Pathfinder craft with its tiny robot car had been retrieved from its “rock garden” in the Ares Vallis — that one had been easy; it wasn’t far from Port Lowell, site of the first manned landing.

  Myra knew that British eyes had been on the retrieval of fragments of the Beagle 2, an intricate, ingenious, toylike probe that had not survived its journey to the Isidis Planitia. And then there had been the recovery of the exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, worn out by journeys that far exceeded their design capabilities. All these antique artifacts were destined for Smithsonian establishments on the Earth and Moon.

  The retrieval expeditions had had scientific goals too. There was some interest in how man-made materials had withstood up to a century of exposure to Martian conditions. And the landing sites were of interest in themselves — otherwise the probes would not have been sent there. So Myra and Ellie had worked through a crash last-minute science program of sampling, mapping, and coring.

  There had even been efforts to retrieve some of the elderly orbiters, still spinning around Mars, long silent. There was universal disappointment when it was discovered that Mariner 9, the very first orbiter, was gone; if it had survived into the 2040s it was surely swallowed up when sunstorm heat caused a general expansion of the Martian atmosphere.

  Myra was glad to have something constructive to do. But she hadn’t expected such intense public scrutiny of her treasure-hunting, with every move being followed by a system-wide audience. The crews had been promised that no images would be returned from the rover cabin itself. But Myra tried never to forget that the rover’s systems could easily be hacked; she could be watched at any moment.

  The day wore on, and the daylight, already murky under the rover’s artificial dust storm, began to fade. Myra began to fret that they would not after all find the wreck of Mars 2, as the light ran out on this anniversary day.

  Then Ellie sat back, staring at a complex graph on her softscreen.

  Myra studied her. She had gotten to know this edgy physicist well enough to understand that she wasn’t given to extravagant displays of any emotion save irritation. This sitting-back and staring was, for Ellie, a major outburst.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, there it is.” Ellie tapped her screen. “The destiny of Mars. We’ve figured it out.”

  “All right. So can you say what it means, in simple terms?”

  “I’m going to have to. According to this message I’m to take part in a three-world press conference on it in a couple of hours. Of course the math is always easier. More precise.” She squinted out at the dust, thinking. “Put it this way. If we could see the sky, and if we had a powerful enough telescope, we would see the most distant stars recede. As if the expansion of the universe had suddenly accelerated. But we would not see the same thing from Earth.”

  Myra pondered that. “So what does that mean?”

  “The Q-bomb is a cosmological weapon. We always knew that.

  A weapon derived from the Firstborn’s technology of universe creation. Yes?”

  “Yes. And so—”

  “So what it has done is to project Mars into its own little cosmos. A kind of budding-off. Right now the baby Mars universe is connected smoothly to the mother. But the baby will come adrift, leaving Mars isolated.”

  Myra struggled to take this in. “Isolated in its own universe?”

  “That’s it. No sun, no Earth. Just Mars. You can see that this weapon was just supposed to, umm, detach a chunk of the Earth.

  Which would have caused global devastation, but left the planet itself more or less intact. It’s too powerful for Mars. It will take out this little world altogether.” She grinned, but her eyes were mirth-less. “It will be lonely, in that new universe. Chilly, too. But it won’t last long. The baby universe will implode. Although from the inside it will feel like an ex plosion. It’s a scale model of the Big Rip that will some day tear our universe apart. A Little Rip, I suppose.”

  Myra pondered this, and didn’t try to pursue the paradox of implosions and explosions. “How can you tell all this?”

  Ellie pointed to the obscured sky. “From the recession of the stars we’ve observed with telescopes on Mars, a recession you wouldn’t see from Earth. It’s an illusion, of course. Actually the Mars universe is beginning to recede from the mother. Or, equivalently, vice versa.”

  “But we can still get off the surface. Get to space, back to Earth.”

  “Oh, yes. For now. There is a smooth interface between the universes.” She peered at her screen and scrolled through more results. “In fact it’s going to be a fascinating process. A baby universe being born in the middle of our solar system! We’ll learn more about cosmology than we have in a century. I wonder if the Firstborn are aware of how much they’re teaching us…”

  Myra glanced uneasily about the cockpit. If they were being hack-watched, this display of academic coldness wasn’t going to play too well. “Ellie. Just rejoin the human race for a minute.”

  Ellie looked at her sharply. But she backed off. “Sorry.”

  “How long?”

  Ellie glanced again at her screen and scrolled through her results.

  “The data is still settling down. It’s a little hard to say. Ballpark—
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br />   three more months before the detachment.”

  “Then Mars must be evacuated by, what, February?”

  “That’s it. And after that, maybe a further three months before the implosion of the baby cosmos.”

  “And the end of Mars.” Just six more months’ grace, then, for a world nearly five billion years old. “What a crime,” she said.

  “Yeah. Hey, look.” Ellie was pointing to a crumpled, dust-stained sheet protruding from the crimson ground. “Do you think that’s a parachute?”

  “Rover, full stop.” The vehicle jolted to a halt, and Myra peered. “Magnify… I think you’re right. Maybe the twisters whip it up, and keep it from being buried. What does the sonar show?”

  “Let’s take a look. Rover…”

  And there it was, buried a few meters down under the wind-blown Martian dust, a squat, blocky shape easily imaged by the sonar.

  “Mars 2, ” Myra said.

  Mars 2 was a Soviet probe that had traveled to the planet in 1971, part of a favorable-opposition flotilla that had included the Americans’ Mariner 9. It had attempted its landing in the middle of the worst global dust storm the astronomers had ever seen.

  “It looks like a flower,” Ellie breathed. “Those four petals.”

  “It was a ball of metal about the size of a domestic fridge. The petals were supposed to open up and right it, whichever way up it landed.”

  “Looks like it was doomed by a twisted-up parachute. After coming all this way…”

  Crash-landing not, Mars 2 had been the first human artifact of all to touch the surface of the planet. And it had come down in this very spot precisely a century before, on November 27, 1971. “It made it. And so did we.”

  “Yeah. And now it’s two meters deep under the dust.” Ellie un-hooked her harness and got out of her chair. “Fetch a spade.”

  57: Babylon

  When Captain Nathaniel Grove in Troy heard that Bisesa Dutt had returned to Babylon, he hurried back there with Ben Batson.