Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

2068 (Earth); Year 31 (Mir)

On Mir the first hint of the coming strangeness would have been mundane, if not for its utter incongruity.

Abdikadir was irritated when the clerk called him away from the telescope. It was a clear night, for once. The first-generation refugees from Earth always complained about the cloudiness of Mir, this stitched-together world in its own stitched-together cosmos. But tonight the seeing was fine, and Mars swam high in the cloudless sky, a brilliant blue.

Before the clerk’s interruption the observatory on the roof of the Temple of Marduk was a scene of silent industry. The main instrument was a reflector, its great mirror ground by Mongol slaves under the command of a Greek scholar of the School of Othic. It returned a fine if wavering image of the face of Mars. As Abdi observed, his clerks turned the levers that swung the telescope mount around to counterbalance the rotation of the world, thus keeping Mars steadily in the center of Abdi’s field of view. He sketched hastily at the pad strapped to his knee; industry in Alexander’s world-empire had not yet advanced to the point where photogra-phy was possible.

Of Mars, he could clearly see the polar caps, the blue seas, the ocher deserts crisscrossed by bands of green-brown and blue, and even a glimmer of light from the alien cities that were believed to nestle in the dead caldera of Mons Olympus.

It was while he was engaged on his labor, intent on exploiting every second of the seeing, that the clerk came to Abdi. Spiros was fourteen, an Othic student, third-generation Mir-born. He was a bright, imaginative boy but prone to nervousness, and now he could barely stammer out his news to an astronomer not a decade older than he was.

“Calm down, boy. Take a breath. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“The chamber of Marduk—” The very heart of the temple on whose roof they both stood. “You must come, Master!”

“Why? What will I see?”

“Not see, Master Abdi —hear. ”

Abdi glanced once more at his eyepiece, where even now Mars’s blue light glimmered. But the boy’s agitation was convincing.

Something was wrong.

With ill grace he clambered down from his seat at the eyepiece, and snapped at one of his students. “You, Xenia! Take over. I don’t want to waste a second of this seeing.” The girl hurried to comply.

Spiros ran for the ladder.

“This had better be worth it,” Abdi said, hurrying after the boy.

They had to descend, and then climb back up inside the temple’s carcass, for the chamber of the great god Marduk was near the very apex of the complex. They passed through a bewildering variety of rooms lit by oil lamps burning smokily in alcoves. Long after the temple’s abandonment by its priests there was still a powerful smell of incense.

Abdi walked into Marduk’s chamber, peering around.

Once this room had contained a great golden statue of the god.

During the Discontinuity, the event that created the world, the statue had been destroyed, and the walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat. Only the statue’s base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet. The chamber was a ruin, as if wrecked by an explosion. But it had been this way all Abdi’s life.

Abdi turned on Spiros. “Well? Where’s the crisis?”

“Can’t you hear?” the boy asked, breathless. And he stood still, his finger on his lips.

And then Abdi heard it, a soft chirruping almost like a cricket — but too regular, too even. He glanced at the wide-eyed boy, who was frozen with fear.

Abdi stepped into the center of the room. From here he could tell the chirruping was coming from an ornately carved shrine, fixed to one wall. He approached this now, and the sound grew louder.

For the sake of face before the boy, Abdi tried to keep his hand from trembling as he reached out to the small cupboard at the very center of the shrine, and pulled open its door.

He knew what the shrine contained. This pebble-like artifact had come from the Earth to Mir. Belonging to a companion of Abdi’s father’s called Bisesa Dutt, it had been cherished for years, and then lodged here when its power finally failed.

It was a phone.

And it was ringing.

February — March 2069

Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.

In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.

Well, for nineteen years she had had no pulse, no blood, no electrical activity in her brain, her tissues had consumed no oxygen, and she had been held in a fridge almost cold enough to rupture her cells. You had to expect to be a bit sore.

Hibernaculum 786 had changed while she had been in the tank.

Now it felt like an upmarket hotel, all glass walls and white floors and plastic couches, and old, old people — at least they looked old—

in dressing gowns, walking very tentatively.

Most drastically of all the Hibernaculum had been moved.

When she got to a viewing window, she found herself overlooking an immense wound in the ground, a dusty canyon with strata piled up in its scree-littered walls like the pages of a tremendous book. It was the Grand Canyon, she learned, and it was a spectacular sight — rather wasted on the sleepers in the Hibernaculum, she thought.

She found it disturbing in retrospect that the complicated re-frigerator within which she had slept her dreamless sleep had been disconnected, uprooted, and shipped across the continent.

As her convalescence continued she took to sitting before a bubble window, peering out at the canyon’s static geological drama.

She had made only one tourist-trip visit to the canyon before. Judging by the way the sun cycled through the spring sky she must be on the south rim, perhaps somewhere near Grand Canyon Village.

The local flora and fauna seemed to have recovered from the global battering of the sunstorm; the land was littered with cacti, yucca, and blackbush. In her patient watching she spotted a small herd of bighorn sheep, and glimpsed the slinking form of a coyote, and once she thought she saw a rattlesnake.

But if the canyon had recovered, much else seemed to have changed. On the eastern horizon she made out a kind of structure, a flat metallic array raised on legs, like the framework of an un-completed shopping mall. Sometimes she saw vehicles driving around and under it. She had no idea what it could be.

And sometimes in the sky she saw lights. There was one bright, moving spark, panning over the southern evening sky in forty minutes or so: something big in orbit. But there were odder sights to be seen, much more extensive: pale patches in the blue daylight, glimmerings of swimming starlight at night. A strange sky in this new age. She thought she ought to be curious, or possibly afraid, but at first she was not.

That all changed when she heard the roar. It was a deep rumble that seemed to make the very ground shudder, more geological than animal.

“What was that ?”

“Bisesa? You asked a question?”

The voice was smooth, male, a little too perfect, and it came out of the air.