“Madam Chair, with respect—you’re going to go along with this subversion?”
“We learned more in the last few minutes than in all our running around the solar system in the last months. Maybe we should have been open from the beginning.”
Cassie nodded. “Yes. Maybe it’s a mark of a maturing culture, do you think, that secrets aren’t kept, that truth is told, that things are talked out?”
“Jesus Christ on a bike,” Paxton said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this mush. Madam Chair—Bella—people will panic. Riots, looting. You’ll see. That’s why we keep secrets, Ms. Duflot. Because people can’t handle the truth.”
Cassie glanced at the softwall. “Well, that doesn’t seem to be true, Admiral. The first responses are coming in…”
Alone over the Martian pole, Edna and John sat fascinated as threads of the system-wide discussion unreeled on the displays of their consoles.
John said, “Look at this. People aren’t just voting on the Q-bomb, they’re collectively brainstorming other solutions. Interconnected democracy at its best. Although I fear there aren’t any other solutions to hand, this time.”
Edna said, “Some of the Spacers say, let the Q-bomb take out Earth. Earth is mankind’s past, space the future. So discard a worn-out world.”
John grunted. “And a few billion people with it? Not to mention almost all the cultural treasures of mankind. I think that’s a minority view, even among the Spacers. And here’s another thread about the viability of mankind if Earth were lost. They’re still a pretty small community out there. Small, scattered, very vulnerable…Maybe we still need Big Momma for a while yet.”
“Hey, look at this thread.” This discussion followed leads from members of something called the Committee of Patriots. “I heard of that,” Edna said. “It advises my mother.” She read, “‘The Firstborn dominate past and future, time and space. They’re so far advanced that compared to them…’” She scrolled forward. “Yes, yes. ‘The existence of the Firstborn is the organizing pole around which all of future human history must, will be constructed. And therefore we should accept their advanced wisdom.’”
John grimaced. “You mean, if the Firstborn choose to destroy the Earth, we should just submit?”
“That’s the idea. Because they know best.”
“I can’t say that strikes a chord with me. What else you got?”
In the silence of Wells Station, Athena spoke again. “It is time.”
Yuri looked around the empty air wildly. “You’re here?”
“I’ve downloaded a fresh avatar, yes.”
“It isn’t twelve hours yet.”
“No more time is needed. A consensus has emerged—not unanimity, but overwhelming. I’m very sorry,” Athena said evenly. “We are about to commit a great and terrible crime. But it is a responsibility that will be borne by all of us, mankind and its allies.”
“It had to be this way, Yuri,” Myra said. “You know it—”
“Well, I won’t fucking leave whatever you do,” Yuri said, and he stamped out of the room.
Alexei said, “Look at this discussion thread. ‘We are a lesser power. The situation is asymmetric. So we must prepare to fight asymmetrically, as lesser powers have always faced off greater ones, drawing on a history of fighting empires back to Alexander the Great. We must be prepared to make sacrifices to strike against them. We must be prepared to die…’”
“A future as a species of suicide bombers,” Grendel said. “But if those Martians in that other reality don’t respond, we still may have no future at all.”
Myra glanced over the summarized discussion threads, symbolized in the air and in the screens spread over the table. Their content was complex, their message simple: Do it. Just do it.
Ellie stood up. “Myra. Please help me. I think it’s time to talk to your mother.”
Myra followed Ellie to the Pit.
50: INTERLUDE: THE LAST MARTIAN
She was alone on Mars. The only one of her kind to have come through the crude time-slicing.
She had built herself a shelter at the Martian north pole, a spire of ice. It was beautiful, pointlessly so, for there was none but her to see it. This was not even her Mars. Most of this time-sliced world, for all the cities and canals that had survived, was scarred by cold aridity.
When she saw the array of symbols burning in the ice of Mir, the third planet, it gave her a shock of pleasure to know that mind was here in this new system with her. But, even though she knew that whatever lived on Mir was cousin to her own kind, it was a poor sort of comfort.
Now she waited in her spire and considered what to do.
The great experiments of life on the worlds of Sol ran in parallel, but with different outcomes.
On Mars, when intelligence rose, the Martians manipulated their environment like humans. They lit fires and built cities.
But a Martian was not like a human.
Even her individuality was questionable. Her body was a community of cells, her form unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mold, perhaps, than a human. She had always been intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures that had drenched Mars. And she was not really a “she.” Her kind were not sexual as humans were. But she had been a mother; she was more “she” than “he.”
There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and plains of Mars. They had never had names; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary. She had been aware of every one of them, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral.
She was very aware that they had all gone, all of them. Hers was a loneliness no human could have imagined.
And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars’s own Q-bomb, had gone too.
Just before the Discontinuity she had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye. To senses enhanced to “see” the distortion of space, the weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky toward the Martian pole.
And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage. The Firstborn weapon was gone.
This time-sliced Mars was a ruin, the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering over an arid landscape sterilized by the sun’s ultraviolet. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, even their lights burning in some cases. But her fellows were gone. And when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities that had once inhabited this world. Scrapings that were her own last descendants.
She was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed.
The Martians had thought they came to understand the Firstborn, to a degree.
The Firstborn must have been very old.
They may even be survivors of the First Days, the Martians thought, an age that began just half a billion years after the Big Bang itself, when the universe turned transparent, and the light of the very first stars shone uncertainly. That was why the Firstborn triggered instabilities in stars. In their day, all the stars had been unstable.
And if they were old, they were conservative. To achieve their goals they caused stars to flare or go nova, or change their variability, not to detonate entirely. They sent their cosmological bombs to sterilize worlds, not to shatter them. They appeared to be trying to shut down energy-consuming cultures as economically as possible.
To understand why they did this, the Martians tried to look at themselves through the eyes of a Firstborn.
The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a wa
ter-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium—the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends.
And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.
Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.
From the Firstborn’s lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.
Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.
If you wanted to reach the very far future—the Last Days, when the surge of quintessence finally ended the age of matter—the restrictions were harsh. The Martians’ own calculations indicated that the universe could bear only one world as populous and energy-hungry as their own, one world in each of the universe’s hundred billion empty galaxies, if the Last Days were to be reached.
The Firstborn must have seen that if life were to survive in the very long term—if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future—discipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.
Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly, calm, disciplined. Sadly, that was rare.
Certainly they regretted what they did. They watched the destruction they wreaked, and constructed time-sliced samples of the worlds they ruined, and popped them in pocket universes. But the Martian knew that in this toy universe the positive of its mass-energy was balanced out by the negative of gravity. And when it died, as soon it must, the energy sums would cancel out, a whole cosmos lapsing to the abstraction of zero.
The Firstborn were economical even in their expressions of regret.
The Martians argued among themselves as to why the Firstborn were so intent on reaching the Last Days.
Perhaps it derived from their origin. Perhaps in their coming of awareness in the First Days they had encountered—another. One as far beyond their cosmos as they were beyond the toy universes in which they stored their time-slice worlds. One who would return in the Last Days, to consider what should be saved.
The Firstborn probably believed that in their universal cauterization they were being benevolent.
The last Martian pondered the signal from Mir.
Those on Mir had no wish to submit to the Firstborn’s hammer blow. Nor had the Martians wanted to see their culture die for the sake of a neurosis born when the cosmos was young. So they fought back. Just as the creatures from Mir, and its mother world in the parent universe, were trying to fight back now.
Her choice was clear.
It took her seven Martian days to make the preparations.
While she worked she considered her own future. She knew that this pocket cosmos was dying. She had no desire to die with it. And she knew that her own only possible exit was via another Firstborn artifact, clearly visible in her enhanced senses, an artifact nestling on the third planet.
All that for the future.
Unfortunately the implosion of the spacetime cage would damage her spire of ice. She began the construction of a new one, some distance away. The work pleased her.
The new spire was no more than half-finished when, following the modifications she had made, the gravitational cage crushed the Firstborn Eye.
51: DECISION
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 conduit of information.
When the Martian trap closed, the Eye there emitted a signal of distress. A shriek, transmitted to all its sister projections.
The Q-bomb was the only Firstborn artifact in the solar system, save for the Eye trapped in its Pit on Mars. And the Q-bomb sensed that shriek, a signal it could neither believe nor understand.
Troubled, it looked ahead.
There before the Q-bomb, a glittering toy, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples. Down there on that crowded globe, alarms were flashing across innumerable softscreens, the great telescopes were searching the skies—and an uncertain humanity feared that history was drawing to a close.
The Q-bomb could become master of this world. But the cry it had heard caused it conflict. Conflict that had to be resolved by a decision.
The bomb marshaled its cold thoughts, brooding over its still untested powers.
And it turned away.
PART 5
LAST CONTACTS
52: PARADE
Bisesa and Emeline stepped out of the apartment for the last time. They were both laden with backpacks and valises. The sky was a lid, but at least it wasn’t snowing.
Emeline locked up her apartment carefully, and tucked the keys away in a pocket in her thick fur coat. Of course she would never come this way again, and it wouldn’t be long before the ice came and crushed the building. But Emeline locked up even so. Bisesa said nothing; she would have done exactly the same.
Bisesa made sure one more time that she had brought out the only possession of real importance to her: her phone, tucked into an inside pocket with its spacesuit battery packs.
Then they set off for Michigan Avenue.
Michigan, a canyon of concrete and brick running between blackened skyscrapers and shut-up stores, was always a wind tunnel, and Emeline and Bisesa turned away from the north to protect their eyes.
But the procession was already gathering, thousands of people standing around in the frozen mud, gradually forming up into an orderly column. Bisesa hadn’t known there were still so many left in Chicago. There were carriages of every kind, from farmyard carts to graceful phaetons and stanhopes, with those stocky Arctic-adapted horses harnessed up. Even the city’s grip-car streetcars were standing ready to roll one last time, full of passengers.
Most people, though, were on foot, with bundles on their backs or in barrows, and with their children or grandchildren holding their hands. Many of the Chicagoans were bundled up in their Arctic furs, but today some defied the elements and wore what looked like their Sunday best, frock coats and sweeping gowns, top hats and fur coats. Even the city’s many prostitutes had come out into the light. With painted lips and rouged cheeks and defiant flashes of ankle or cleavage, they laughed and flirted like colourful birds. There was an excited buzz of conversation.
The parade was to be led by gleaming black carriages that lined up outside the Lexington Hotel. These would carry the city’s dignitaries, principally Mayor Rice’s relatives and allies. Thomas Edison, it was rumored, was wrapped up in blankets in a carriage of his own design, heated and lit by a portable electric generator.
Rice’s own carriage of polished wood and black ribbon was at the very head of the procession, and Bisesa was astounded to see that it was to be drawn by a woolly mammoth. The animal was restless. It raised its head with that odd bulge over the crown, and its long tusks curled bright in the air. As its nervous handlers beat at it with rods and whips, it trumpeted, a brittle call that echoed from the windows of the skyscrapers. It was quite a stunt for Rice, Bisesa admitted grudgingly—just as long as the mammoth didn’t wreck the carriage it was supposed to haul.
The whole thing was a spectacle, just as it was meant to be, and Bisesa admired Rice and his advisors for setting it up this way, and for choosing the date. On Mir this was July 4, according to the calendars devised by the university astronomers.
But this Independence Day parade was actually the final abandonment of old Chicago. These were not revelers but refugees, and they faced a great trial, a long walk all the way down through the
suburbs and out of the city, heading south, ever south, to a hopeful new home beyond the ice. Even now there were some who refused to join the flight, hooligans and hedonists, drunks and deadbeats, and a few stubborn types who simply wouldn’t leave their homes. Few expected these refuseniks to survive another winter.
Human life would go on here, then. But today saw the end of civilized Chicago. And beyond the bright human chatter Bisesa could hear the growl of the patient ice.
Emeline led Bisesa to their place among the respectable folk who massed behind the lead carriages. Drummers waited in a block, shivering, their mittened hands clutching their sticks.
They quickly found Harry and Joshua, Emeline’s sons. Harry, the older son and walkaway, had returned to help his mother leave the city. Bisesa was glad to see them. Both tall, lean, well-muscled young men, dressed in well-worn coats of seal fur and with their faces greased against the cold, they looked adapted for the new world. With the boys, Bisesa thought her own chances of surviving this trek were much improved.
Gifford Oker came pushing out of the crowd to meet them. He was encased in an immense black fur coat, with a cylindrical hat pulled right down to his eye line. He carried only a light backpack with cardboard tubes protruding from it. “Madam Dutt, Mrs. White. I’m glad to have found you.”
Emeline said playfully, “You’re not too heavily laden, Professor. What are these documents?”
“Star charts,” he said firmly. “The true treasure of our civilization. A few books too—oh, what a horror it was that we were not able to empty the libraries! For once a book is lost to the ice, a little more of our past is gone forever. But as to my personal effects, my pots and pans, I have my own troop of slave bearers to help me with all that. They are called graduate students.”
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