Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Mechanical spiders, endlessly weaving a web in the sky.

They rose largely in silence, for the others wouldn’t talk.

“Come on. We’re off the Earth. Now you can tell me what’s going on. Why am I here, Myra?”

The others hesitated. Then Myra said, “Mum, it’s difficult. For one thing the whole world is listening in.”

“The hull is smart.” Alexei spun a finger. “All ’round surveillance.”

“Oh.”

“And for another,” Myra said, “you already know. ”

Alexei said, “Believe me, we’ll have plenty of time to talk, Bisesa. Even when we get to the drop-off, it’s only the start of the journey.”

“A journey to where? No, don’t answer that.”

Myra said, “I think you’ll be surprised by the answer, Mum.”

Bisesa would have welcomed the chance to talk to Myra, not about high-security issues and the fate of the solar system, but simply of each other. Myra had told her hardly anything of her life since Bisesa had gone into the tank. But, it seemed, that wasn’t going to happen. Myra seemed oddly inhibited. And now the presence of Alexei sharing this little capsule with them inhibited her even further.

Bisesa started to feel tired, her face and hands cold, her stomach warmed by coffee, her mind dulled by the relentless climb. She pulled on the hat and gloves she found in her pockets. She piled up blankets from the suitcase onto the floor, pulled one over herself, and lay down. There was no sound, no sense of motion; she might have been stationary, suspended above the slowly receding Earth.

She gazed up at the ribbon, seeing how far she could follow its line.

There was another transition when the ribbon reverted from gold to its customary silver. And later the width narrowed. More than seventeen hundred kilometers high, eight hours since leaving Earth, they were higher than almost all mankind’s satellites had ever flown.

Bisesa was vaguely, peripherally aware of all this. Mostly she dozed.

She was woken with a jolt, a brief surge of acceleration that pressed her down into her blankets.

She sat up. Alexei and Myra sat on their fold-down seats. Myra was wide-eyed, but Alexei seemed composed. Alexei’s softscreen on the wall flashed red.

They were thirteen hours into the journey, more than twenty-six hundred kilometers up. When Bisesa moved she felt as if she was going to float into the air. Gravity was down to about half sea level.

Earth seemed trivial, a ball dangling at the end of a silver rope.

Other spiders flashed past them, overtaken by their own rapid climb.

“We sped up, right? So what’s wrong?”

“We’re being pursued,” Alexei said. “We had to expect it. I mean, they know we’re in here.”

“Pursued?” Bisesa had a nasty vision of a missile clambering up from a derelict Canaveral launch pad. But that made no sense.

“They wouldn’t risk damaging their ribbon.”

“You’re right,” Alexei said. “The ribbon is a lot more precious than we are. Likewise they won’t want to spoil the flow of spiders.

They could do that, block us off. But there is cargo worth billions being carried up this line.”

“Then what?”

“They have super-spiders. Capable of greater speeds. It would take a few days, but the super-spider would catch us up.”

Myra thought that over. “How does it get past all the other spiders in the way?”

“The same way we do. The others just have to get out of the way. We’re matching the super-spider’s ascent rate, twice our nominal. In fact I slaved us to the super-spider, so we’ll mirror its ascent.

It can’t possibly catch us. As soon as the ground authorities realize that, they’ll give up.”

“Twice nominal. Is that safe?”

“These systems are human-rated; they have heavy safety mar-gins built in.” But he didn’t sound terribly sure.

It only took a few minutes for the softscreen to chime and glow green. Alexei smiled. “They got the message. We can slow down.

Hold onto something.”

Bisesa braced against a rail.

They decelerated for a disconcerting few seconds. Blankets floated up from the floor, and the chemical toilet whirred as suction pumps labored to keep from spilling the contents into the air. Myra looked queasy, and Bisesa felt her stomach turn over. They were all relieved when gravity was restored.

But the screen flashed red again. “Uh oh,” Alexei said.

Bisesa asked, “What now?”

He worked his softscreen. “We’re not climbing as we should.”

“Some fault with the spider?”

“Not that. They are reeling in the ribbon.”

“Reeling it in?” Suddenly Bisesa saw the spider as a fish on the end of a monstrous angler’s line.

“It’s kind of drastic, but it can be done. The ribbon is pretty fine stuff.”

“So what do we do?”

“You might want to close your eyes. And hold onto something again.” He tapped his softscreen, and Bisesa had the impression that something detached itself from the hull.

She clamped her eyes shut.

There was a flash, visible even through her eyelids, and the cabin rocked subtly.

“A bomb,” Bisesa said. She felt almost disappointed. “How crude. I think I expected better of you, Alexei.”

“It was just a warning shot, a micro fusion pulse. No harm done. But very visible from the ground.”

“You’re signaling your intent to blow up the ribbon if they don’t leave us alone.”

“It wouldn’t be difficult. Kind of hard to protect a hundred thousand kilometers of paper-thin ribbon against deliberate sabo-tage…”

Bisesa asked, “Wouldn’t people get hurt?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, Mum,” Myra said. “Isolation-ist terrorists attacked Modimo a few years back.”

“Modimo?”

Alexei said, “The African Alliance elevator. Named for a Zim-babwean sky-god, I think. Nobody got hurt, and they wouldn’t now. I’m making an economic threat.” But he glanced uncertainly at his softscreen.

Bisesa said sharply, “And if they call your bluff? Will you go through with it?”

“Actually I don’t think I would. But they can’t afford to take the risk, can they?”

Bisesa said, “They could just kill us. Turn off the power. The air recycling. We’d be helpless.”

“They could. But they won’t,” Alexei said. “They want to know what we know. Where we’re going. So they’ll be patient, and hope to get hold of us later.”

“I hope you’re right.”

As if in response, the softscreen turned green again. Alexei’s grin broadened. “So much for that. Okay, who’s for beans?”

Bella had expected Bob Paxton’s briefing to take place in her offices in the old NASA headquarters building on E Street in Washington, a block of concrete and glass repaired and refurbished since weathering the sunstorm.

But Paxton met her outside the building. He stood by the open door of a limousine. “Bella.” The car was one of a convoy, complete with uniformed naval officers and blue-suited FBI agents.

She thought he looked comical, an elderly man rigid in his much-cherished uniform, standing there like a bellboy. His face was twisted in the morning light. He was, she had learned, a man who distrusted the sun, even more than most of his bruised generation.

“Morning, Bob. Going for a ride, are we?”

His smile was disciplined. “We should relocate to a more secure situation. We have issues of global importance, of significance for the future of the species. I recommend we convene at Mount Weather. I took the liberty of making the arrangements. But it’s your call.” He eyed her, and the tension that had existed since the day she took the job crackled between them.