Firstborn

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Mars, Mum. Mars.”

  Bisesa was bewildered. “Mars?”

  “Where—well, where something is waiting for you.”

  “But this little pod won’t keep us alive all the way to Mars.”

  “Of course not,” Alexei said. “We’ll be picked up. We’ll rendezvous with a lightship. A solar-sail ship. It’s already on the way.”

  Bisesa frowned. “We have no rockets, do we? Once we’re free of the ribbon we’ll have no motive power at all.”

  “We don’t need it. The ship will rendezvous with us.”

  “My God,” Bisesa said. “And if something goes wrong—”

  Alexei smiled, unconcerned.

  Talking to Alexei through these long days, Bisesa thought she had begun to see something of his psychology—the psychology of a Spacer, subtly different from the Earthbound.

  Alexei had something approaching a morbid fear of failure in the machinery around him, for he was entirely dependent on that for his very life. But on the other hand he had absolutely no doubt in the implacable working-out of orbits and trajectories and interceptions; he lived in a realm where celestial mechanics visibly ruled everything, a mighty, silent clockwork that never developed a flaw. So once his gadgets had cut them loose of the ribbon he believed he would be safe and secure; it was inconceivable to him that their lightship rendezvous could be missed. Whereas Bisesa and Myra were terrified of just that possibility.

  Somewhere in there was the key to understanding Alexei, Bisesa thought, and the new Spacer generation. And she thought she would understand him even better if she could make out the peculiar prayers he seemed to chant softly while distracted: psalms to the “Unconquered Sun.”

  On the twelfth day they sat on their fold-down chairs, with all their loose gear tied down in advance of the jolt of weightlessness that would come when Alexei’s explosive bolts severed the cabin from its pulley.

  Alexei eyed his crewmates. “Anybody want a countdown?”

  “Shut up,” Myra said.

  Bisesa looked down at the ribbon that had been her anchor to reality for twelve days, and up at an Earth reduced to a pebble. She wondered if she would ever see it loom large again—and what lay ahead of her before that could happen.

  Alexei whispered, “Here we go—”

  There was a flash below, on the cabin’s roof that had become a floor. The ribbon fell away, startlingly fast, and gravity evaporated like a dream. Tumbling, loose bits of gear rolling around them, Alexei laughed and laughed.

  15: LIBERATOR

  April 2069

  John Metternes, ship’s engineer, called up to Edna from Achilles. There was another holdup. The techs down there on the asteroid still weren’t satisfied with the magnetic containment of the antimatter pellets.

  Any more delays and the Liberator was going to miss another window for her first trial cruise.

  Edna Fingal looked out of the thick wraparound windows, away from the convoluted surface of the Trojan asteroid beneath her, to find the sun, so far away here on the J-line it barely showed a disk. Surrounded by the flight deck’s calm hum and new-carpet smell, she chafed, restless. She wasn’t good at waiting.

  Intellectually, in her head, she knew she had to wait until the engineers were absolutely sure about what they were doing. The Liberator depended on a new and untried technology, and as far as Edna could tell these magnetic antimatter bottles were never exactly stable; the best you could hope for was a kind of controlled instability that lasted long enough to get you home. It was thought that a failure of containment had been the cause of the loss of the Liberator’s unnamed prototype predecessor, and of Mary Lanchester and Theo Woese, the A-23C’s two-person crew.

  But in OutSys, out there in the dark, something was approaching, something silent and alien and hostile. Already it was inside the J-line, closer to the sun than Edna was. Edna was captain of the world’s only spacegoing warship even close to operational status, the only healthy vessel in the first Space Group Attack Squadron. She itched to confront the alien.

  As she often did, she tried to relieve the stress by thinking of family.

  She glanced at a chronometer. It was set to Houston time, like all master clocks throughout human space, and she mentally made an adjustment for DC. Edna’s daughter Thea, just three, would be in nursery school at this hour. Edna’s own home was on the west coast, but she had chosen the school in Washington so Thea could be close to her grandmother. Edna liked to be able to visualize just where Thea was at any time of the day.

  “Libby, please open my mail file.”

  “Of course. Visual records too?”

  “Yes. Ready?…Hello, Thea. Here I am again, waiting around as usual…”

  Thea would hear her words, and see pretty much what she could see, captured by visual sensors in the ident tattoo on Edna’s cheek. Security was predictably tight about every aspect of the A-class warships out here on the J-line, and Thea would only ever receive a heavily censored version of her mother’s letters. But it was better than nothing.

  And if things didn’t go well, these messages might be all Thea had left of her mother. So Edna spoke to the future.

  “I’m sitting here waiting for our antimatter bottles to be loaded into the A-drive chamber. And it’s taking a long time, for we have to be very careful. I’m looking down now at Achilles. It’s one of the larger of the Trojan asteroids, and it’s here that we have been building our A-ships. Look with me, you can see the graving yards, and the big pits where we’ve dug out ice and rock to serve as reaction mass, the stuff that will actually push the ship forward. And there are the domes where we all live when we’re on the surface—the Liberator is a lot more comfortable than that, believe me!…”

  The Trojans clustered at a point of gravitational stability on the J-line called L4, Lagrange 4, forever sixty degrees ahead of Jupiter itself in its orbit. There was a second such point, L5, trailing Jupiter. Earthbound astronomers had named the two asteroid camps for the competing heroes of Homer’s Iliad: Achilles and the other Greeks leading Jupiter, the Trojans forever following.

  L4 was a useful lode of resources, an obvious place for a base, a control point. Perhaps that was why, during the sunstorm, the Firstborn had lodged an Eye here.

  “I won’t pretend I’m not afraid, Thea. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t. I’ve learned I can put aside the fear, and get on with the job. Because I know it’s a job that has to be done.

  “Maybe you know that this ship, the fourth of the new A-class, is the first to have been given a name. Because while the others made test flights, this ship will be the first to go into combat. I suppose whatever happens she will always be remembered for that. Of course we have to get through a couple of proving flights first.

  “We agonized about the name. Here we are surrounded by heroes from classical mythology. But it’s the mythology of another age, remote from our own. In the end we settled on the name of one of the great aircraft that helped wage mankind’s last pivotal war, before the coming of the Firstborn changed all the rules. I hope that in the next few weeks we’re going to be able to liberate mankind from an even deadlier menace. And that then I’ll have a chance to come home to you. I—”

  An alarm chimed, a green light flashed on the softwall beside her. The fuel pods were at last successfully loaded; the ground crew were leaving the ship.

  And the launch window for the scheduled shakedown cruise would open in just ten minutes.

  Time enough. And then she could accept her operation order for her true mission.

  “Close the file, please, Libby. Snip the last bit. And get John Metternes up here.”

  16: JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

  The lightship that was to take them to Mars came swimming out of the dark. It was called the James Clerk Maxwell. The sail was a shadow, and Bisesa caught glimpses of rigging, rectilinear flashes immensely long.

  As the hour of the pickup neared Bisesa grew even tenser. You didn’t have to know anything about the engineeri
ng to understand that a ship that sailed on sunlight must be gossamer-fragile. And their knotty little spider, a spinning lump of metal, was going to come plummeting in among this fantasy of sails and rigging. She continually expected alarms to sound, and to see a wispy mirror-sail fold around her like Christmas paper.

  Myra grew anxious too, despite her own astronautics experience. But Alexei Carel was entirely unfazed. As the rendezvous approached he sat by his softscreens, monitoring obscure graphic displays, occasionally uttering a mild word that was transmitted to the approaching ship’s systems along a narrow-beam laser link. He seemed to trust absolutely the mixture of orbital mechanics and exotic celestial seamanship that was bringing the spider ever closer to the Maxwell.

  In the last moments the Maxwell’s main hull came looming out of the dark. Bisesa imagined she was in a small boat, watching the approach of a liner across some vast ocean. The rough cylinder bristled with antenna dishes and booms, and around its upper rim Bisesa made out a ring of pulleys, mundane bits of technology that anchored kilometers of rigging.

  A transparent tube a couple of meters across snaked out from the hull, probed at the spider uncertainly, and locked on with an audible rattle. There was a jolt as the mechanical linkage soaked up the last minor differences in momentum. Then the tube contracted like a concertina, drawing the two hulls together, until they docked with a firm clang.

  Alexei sat back, a broad grin on his face. “Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”

  “Well, that’s that.” He peeled the softscreen off the wall in front of him, crumpled it up and stuffed it in a pocket. “Time to get packed up. Take everything you want; dump anything you don’t need in here.”

  “We aren’t taking the spider,” Bisesa said slowly.

  “Of course not.”

  Bisesa felt oddly reluctant to leave the haven of the spider. “Maybe I’m just getting too old for all this change.”

  Myra squeezed her arm. She made this sort of affectionate gesture spasmodically; Bisesa accepted whatever her wounded daughter had to give her. “Mum, if I can cope with it, you can. Come on, let’s get ready.”

  When Alexei opened the hatch in the cabin wall, the outer hull of the Maxwell, exposed, smelled faintly of burning. Bisesa touched it curiously, a surface that had endured the vacuum of space for long months. It felt hot.

  The Maxwell’s hatch dilated away.

  They crossed into an interior that was clean, brightly lit, and smelled faintly of soap. The suitcase followed with a clatter. Little sucker pads shot out of it on fine threads, fixing themselves to the walls, so that the case hauled itself around like a clumsy, fat-bodied spider.

  The hatches closed behind them, and Bisesa felt a gentle shudder as the greater mass of the Maxwell reacted to the casting-off of the spider. There was no window in the hatch. She would have liked to see the discarded spider fall away.

  Alexei gave them one bit of warning. “Just remember they pared off every gram to build this thing. The whole ship masses only around ten tonnes—and that includes the sail. You could easily put your foot through the hull.” He tapped an internal floor-to-ceiling partition panel. “And this stuff’s a kind of rice paper. Light but fragile.” He poked a finger through it to show them, then he tore off a tiny strip and popped it in his mouth. “Edible too. In case of dramas, eat the furniture.”

  Bisesa asked, “‘Dramas’? What dramas?”

  Myra said slowly, “I suppose about the worst thing that could happen is to lose the sail, or to foul it up beyond usefulness. In which case you’d be stranded, falling away on whatever trajectory you happened to be on. Rescue would be possible, but it would likely take months, if not years.”

  Bisesa pondered. “How many accidents have there been?”

  “Very few,” Alexei said. “And none fatal.” He lectured them briefly about various levels of fail-safe in the design of the mission profile, so that if you did lose your sail you’d still coast somewhere accessible. “It’s more likely your body will fail you before a ship like this does,” he said to Bisesa, not entirely reassuringly.

  While Alexei disappeared to what he called the “bridge” to check over the ship’s systems, Myra and Bisesa explored and unpacked.

  It didn’t take long to figure out the layout of the Maxwell. The pressurized hull was a cylinder only a few meters tall. Divided up by sheets of that rice-paper partitioning, it was split into three main decks. At the base was what Alexei called the utilities deck. Peering through hatches, they saw heaps of stores, life support, EVA and repair gear, cargo. Alexei’s bridge was the upper deck.

  The middle deck contained living quarters. Aside from a dedicated galley and bathroom it was sliced up by movable partitions into rooms that could serve as rest quarters, bedrooms, workrooms for a crew of up to ten. The walls were thick with cupboards and space-saving fold-out bunks and chairs. Bisesa and Myra spent some time moving the partitions around. They settled on constructing three small bedrooms as far as possible from each other and from the lavatory; the paper-thin partitions weren’t particularly soundproof.

  The accommodation was almost as pokey as aboard the spider. But the cramped corridors and low-ceilinged rooms had a unique mix of architectures designed for ground and space. The sail could offer an acceleration of no more than one percent of Earth’s gravity—not enough to stick you to the floor. So the design emulated space stations with hand- and footholds, Velcro pads, and a color coding with brown beneath and blue above, so that you could always know at a glance which way up you were.

  But on the other hand that one percent of G was steady and unrelenting. Experimenting, Bisesa found that if she clambered up to the ceiling and let go, she would drift down to the floor in six or seven seconds, falling like a snowflake and settling softly. That little bit of gravity was surprisingly useful, for it induced dust to settle and any disturbed clutter to fall eventually out of the air; here she would not have to wrestle with rogue blankets, or track down stray droplets shimmering away from her coffee cup.

  The “bridge” of the Maxwell was set out pretty informally with chairs and tables. Bisesa was reminded that this wasn’t a military ship. When Bisesa and Myra came drifting up the short ladder from the lower deck Alexei was sitting in one of those chairs, patiently watching displays unfold across a softscreen.

  The walls were utterly transparent.

  Space was starless, empty save for three lamps, sun, Earth, and Moon, which hung in a tremendous triangle around the ship. Something in Bisesa quailed before this array of worlds. For some reason she thought of Mir and the man-apes she had seen there, australopithecines with the legs of humans and the shoulders of gorillas.

  Myra saw her reaction and tugged her hand. “Mum. It’s just another fairground ride. Never mind feeling dizzy. Look up.”

  Bisesa lifted her head.

  She saw a disk of not-quite-darkness, a little grayer than the deep velvet of the sky. Highlights, sun-dazzling bright, rippled across its face. It was the sail, a sheet of foil big enough to have wrapped up the whole of inner London. She could hear gentle, intermittent whirs that must be the tiny pulleys fixed around the roof, tugging at the rigging that ran up and out from the roof above her, rectilinear threads that caught the sunlight.

  The hull that enclosed her was a tuna can hanging under a parachute.

  “Welcome aboard the James Clerk Maxwell,” Alexei said, grinning.

  “All this from sunlight.”

  “Yes.” Alexei held up his hand in a shaft of sunlight that crossed the cabin. “The pressure of all those tiny photons, pinging off a reflecting surface. On your face on a sunny day on Earth, that force amounts to only maybe one ten-thousandth of a gram. We have enough sail area, and a low enough mass, for an acceleration of a hundredth of a G. But it’s continuous, and free, and it just keeps on pushing and pushing…Which is how we can reach Mars in twenty days.”

  The sail itself was based on a mesh of nanotube string, the same super-strong stuff they made t
he space elevator ribbons from. The “fabric” was an ultra-thin film of boron, only a few hundred atomic diameters thick. It had to be sprayed on.

  “The sail fabric is so fine that if you handle it it’s more like smoke than anything substantial,” Alexei said. “But it’s robust enough to be able to stand a dip into the sun’s heat inside the orbit of Mercury.”

  Ribs of light washed across the face of the mirror; tiny pulleys whirred.

  “You get these oscillations all the time,” Alexei said. “That’s why we make the sails smart, as the sun shield was. The fabric is embedded with actuators and tiny rocket motors. Max, the ship’s AI, can keep himself positioned correctly. And he does most of the navigation; I just tell him where I want to go. Max is in charge, really. Thank Sol he doesn’t brag about it too much.”

  Bisesa said, “I can see how you can be pushed away from the sun. But how can you sail inward—from Mars in toward Earth, say? I guess it’s sort of like tacking into the wind.”

  “It’s not a good analogy,” Alexei said evenly. “You have to remember that all objects in the solar system are essentially in orbit around the sun. And that determines how the sail functions…” Orbital mechanics could be counter to common sense. “If I speed up, I raise my orbit. But if I fix my sail so that the sunlight pressure opposes my motion, my orbital velocity falls, and I will spiral in toward the sun…” Bisesa studied the diagrams he produced on the softscreens, but when he started scrolling equations she gave up.

  “This is all intuitively obvious to you, isn’t it? The principles of celestial mechanics.”

  He waved a hand at the worlds around them. “You can see why. Up here you can see those laws working out. I’ve often wondered how Earthbound scientists were able to make any sense out of all the clutter down there. The first lunar astronauts, a hundred years ago, the first to come out this way, came back changed, for better or worse. A lot of us Spacers are deists, or theists, or pantheists—somewhere on that spectrum.”