Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

A soft voice spoke. “Because these walls are full of water, Bisesa.”

“Is that you, Thales?”

“No, Bisesa. Alexei calls me Max.” The voice was male, softly Scottish.

“Max, for James Clerk Maxwell. You’re the ship.”

“Strictly speaking the sail, which is the smartest and most sentient component. I am a Legal Person (Non-Human),” Max said calmly. “I have a full set of cognitive capacities.”

“Alexei should have introduced us.”

“That would have been pleasant.”

“The water in the walls?”

It was there to protect frail human cargo from the hard radia-tions of space; even a few centimeters of water was a surprisingly effective shield.

“ Max. Why the name?”

“It is appropriate…”

The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had in the nineteenth century demonstrated that light exerted a pressure, the fundamental principle on which mankind’s new fleet of lightships had been built. His work had laid the foundations for Einstein’s conceptual breakthroughs.

Bisesa smiled. “I suppose Maxwell would have been astonished to see how his basic insight has been translated into technology, two centuries later.”

“Actually I’ve made something of a study of Maxwell. I have rather a lot of spare time. I think he could have conceived of a solar sail. The physics was all his, after all.”

Bisesa propped an arm behind her head. “When I read about Athena, the shield AI, I always wondered how it felt to be her. An intelligence embedded in such an alien body. Max, how does it feel to be you?”

“I often wonder how it feels to be you, ” he replied in his soft brogue. “I am capable of curiosity. And awe.”

It surprised Bisesa that he should say that. “Awe? At what?”

“Awe at finding myself in a universe of such beauty yet governed by a few simple laws. Why should it be so? And yet, why not?”

“Are you a theist, Max?”

“Many of the leading theist thinkers are AIs.”

Electronic prophets, she thought, wondering. “I think James Clerk would have been proud of you, Maxwell Junior.”

“Thank you.”

“Light, please.”

The light dimmed to a faint crimson glow. She fell into a deep sleep, the gentle gravity just enough to reassure her inner ear that she wasn’t falling any more.

It was some hours later that Max woke her, for, he said apologetically, they were approaching the Moon.

On the bridge Alexei said, “It’s fortuitous of course that our path to Mars should take us near the Moon. But I was able to work a gravitational slingshot into our trajectory design…”

Bisesa stopped listening to him, and just looked.

The swelling face of the Moon, nearly full, was not the familiar Man-in-the-Moon that had hovered over the Manchester streets of her childhood. She had come so far now that the Man had turned; the great “right eye” of Mare Imbrium was swiveled toward her, and a slice of Farside was clearly revealed, a segment of crater-pocked hide invisible to mankind until the advent of spaceflight.

But it was not the geology of the Moon that interested her but the traces of humanity. Eagerly she and Myra picked out the big Nearside bases, Armstrong and Tooke, clearly visible as blisters of silver and green against the tan lunar dust. Bisesa thought she saw a road, a line of silver, cutting across the crater called Clavius within which Tooke Base nestled, and from which it had taken its first name. Then she realized it must be a mass driver, an electromagnetic launching track kilometers long.

The modern Moon was visibly a place of industry. Vast stretches of the lava-dust plains of the maria looked as if they had been combed; the lunar seas were being strip-mined, their dust plundered for oxygen, water, and minerals. At the poles immense solar-cell farms splashed, and new observatories gleamed like bits of coal, made of jet-black glass microwaved direct from the lunar dirt. Strung right around the equator was a shining chrome thread: the alephtron, mightiest particle accelerator in the system.

Something about all this industry disturbed Bisesa. So much had changed on the Moon after four billion years of chthonic calm, in just a single century since Armstrong’s first small step. The economic development of the Moon had always been the dream of Bud Tooke himself. But now she wondered how the Firstborn, who may themselves have been older than the Moon, might view this disquieting clatter.

Myra pointed. “Mum, look over there, at Imbrium.”

Bisesa looked that way. She saw a disk that must have been kilometers across. It glinted with reflected sunlight, and shuddering waves spread across it.

“That’s the solar-sail factory,” Alexei murmured. “They lay down the webbing and spray on the boron film — they spin it up from the start, to hold it rigid against the Moon’s gravity…”

That glinting disk seemed to spin, and ripple, and then, without warning, it peeled neatly away from the mare surface as if being budded, and drifted up toward space, oscillating as it rose.

“It’s beautiful,” Bisesa said.

Alexei shrugged. “Pretty, yes. To be honest most of us don’t find the Moon very interesting. They aren’t true Spacers down there. Not when you can commute to Earth in a day or two. We call it Earth’s attic…”

Max murmured, “Closest approach coming up.”

Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesa’s field of view.

Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myra’s hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just weren’t meant to see, she thought helplessly.

Then the Moon’s terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the sun’s harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.

John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.

Edna asked, “Everything nominal?”

“Bonza,” the ship’s engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. “We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us… Yes, we’re nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.”

Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.

Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. “The launch window opens in five minutes.”

Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. “My word.”

“You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if—”

“Good God, no. Ah, look — you took me aback, is all, didn’t know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does… Libby, schematics please.”

The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constella-tions to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.