Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

They spent a whole day floating above Mars, as the gentle pressure of sunlight regularized the Maxwell ’s orbit. Then a squat, boxy craft came lumbering up from Lowell.

The shuttle’s sole occupant was a woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Dressed in a bright green coverall she was slender, rather fragile looking, and her face, open, somewhat empty, bore a neat ident tattoo. “Hi. I’m Paula. Paula Umfraville.”

When Paula smiled directly at her, Bisesa gasped. “I’m sorry.

It’s just—”

“Don’t worry. A lot of people from Earth have the same reaction.

I’m flattered, really, that people remember my mother so well…”

For Bisesa’s generation Helena Umfraville’s face had become one of the most famous in all the human worlds: not just for her participation in the first manned mission to Mars, but for the remarkable discovery she had made just before her own death. Paula might have been her double.

“I’m not important.” Paula spread her arms wide. “Welcome to Mars! I think you’re going to be intrigued by what we’ve found here, Bisesa Dutt…”

The shuttle’s descent was a smooth glide. As Bisesa watched, the wrinkled face of Mars flattened into a dusty landscape, and ocher light seeped across the sky.

Paula talked all the way down, perhaps delivering a patter intended to reassure nervous passengers. “I usually find myself apologizing to visitors from Earth — and especially if they’re heading for the poles, as you are, Bisesa. Here we are coming down at latitude ten north, and we’ll have to haul you all the way to the polar cap overland from here. But all the support facilities are here at Lowell, and the other colonies close to the equator, because the equatorial belt was all those first-generation chemical-engine ships could reach…”

Myra was more interested in Paula than in Mars. She said awkwardly, “I went into astronautics after the sunstorm. Helena Umfraville was a hero of mine — I studied her life. I never knew she had a daughter.”

Paula shrugged. “She didn’t, before she left for Mars. But she wanted a child. She knew that on the Aurora 1 she would spend months bathed in deep-space radiation. So before she departed she left behind eggs, other genetic material. It was transferred to a Hibernaculum during the sunstorm. And after the storm was over, my father — well. Here I am. Of course my mother never knew me.

I like to think she would have been proud that I’m here on Mars, in a way carrying on her work.”

“I’m sure she would be,” Bisesa said.

The touchdown was brisk and businesslike, on a pad built of a kind of glass, melted out of the crust. Bisesa stared. This was Mars.

Beyond the scarred surface of the pad everything was reddish-brown, the land, the sky, even the washed-out disk of the sun.

Within minutes a small bus with blister windows came bouncing up, puppylike, on huge soft wheels. It was painted green, like Paula’s jumpsuit — of course, Bisesa thought, you would use green to stand out on red Mars. Bisesa clambered through a docking tunnel, following Paula, with Alexei and Myra and their luggage and bits of kit. The bus, with rows of plastic seats, might have come from any airport on Earth.

As the bus rolled off Paula chattered about the landscape. She seemed proud of it, engaging in her enthusiasm. “We’re actually on the floor of a canyon called the Ares Vallis. This is an outflow canyon, shaped by catastrophic flooding in the deep past, draining from the southern uplands.”

That ancient calamity had lasted just ten or twenty days, it was thought, a few weeks billions of years past when a river a thousand times as mighty as the Mississippi had battered its way through the ancient rocks. This sort of event had, it seemed, occurred all around the great latitudinal frontier where Mars’s south met its north; the whole of the northern hemisphere was depressed below the mean surface level, like one enormous crater imposed on half the planet.

“You can see why the Aurora crew were sent here for the first human exploration — and in fact why NASA sent its Pathfinder un-manned probe to the same area in the 1990s…”

Bisesa, peering out, tuned out the words. This dusty plain, littered with slablike boulders, was Earthlike, and yet immediately not Earthlike. How strange it was that she could never touch those dusty rocks, or taste that thin iron air.

As they neared the domes of Lowell they passed cylinders mounted vertically on tripods. To Bisesa they looked like the power lasers of a space elevator. The Martians didn’t have their beanstalk yet, it seemed, but they had the power sources in place.

And the bus rolled past flags that fluttered limply over markers of Martian glass. Bisesa supposed Paula’s mother was here, with those others of Bob Paxton’s crew who had not survived their stranding on Mars. If Ares’s geology was forever shaped by that tremendous flood in the deep past, so its human history would surely always be shaped by the heroism of the Aurora crew.

The bus drove them up to the largest of the domes and docked smoothly.

They passed through a connecting tunnel and emerged in a warren of internal partitions, lit by big fluorescent tubes suspended from a silvered roof. Bisesa felt very self-conscious as she walked into the dome, practicing her Mars lope. The noise levels were high, echoing.

People bustled by, many dressed in green jumpsuits like Paula’s. They all seemed busy, and few of them glanced at Bisesa and her party. Bisesa guessed that to these locals she would be about as welcome as tourists at a South Pole base on Earth.

Alexei felt moved to apologize. “Don’t mind this. Just remember, every breath you take has to be paid for out of somebody’s taxes…”

Bisesa did notice that very few of the Martians wore ident tattoos on their cheeks.

They dumped their luggage in rooms provided for them in a cramped, shacklike “hotel,” and Paula offered to fill their few hours at Lowell with a tour. So they went exploring, following Paula, working their way from dome to half-inhabited dome through tunnels that were sometimes so low they had to crouch.

They bought their own lunch at an automated galley. Their Earth credit was good, but the bowls of sticky soup and bitter coffee they bought were expensive.

As they ate, a gang of schoolkids ran by, laughing. They were skinny, gangly, all at least as tall as Bisesa, though with their slim bodies and fresh faces it was hard to tell how old they were. They ran with great bounds.

Alexei murmured, “First-generation Martians. Grown from conception under low gravity. The next generation, their children, will be very interesting…”

Bisesa was sorry when they had passed out of sight, taking their splash of human warmth with them.

One big translucent dome enclosed a farm. They walked between beds of lettuces and cabbages, all proud and healthy, and shallow ponds that served as rice paddies, and trestle tables bearing pans of some turgid fluid from which grew beans and peas and soya. There were even fruit trees, oranges and apples and pears growing in pots, obviously precious and lovingly tended. In here they were at last exposed to pink Martian daylight, but the light of the remote sun was supplemented by banks of hot white lamps.

But they walked on quickly. Under a faint scent of some industrial perfume was the cloying stench of sewage.

They reached the dome’s translucent wall, and Bisesa saw rows of plants marching away, set into the soil beyond the dome. She noticed how they glinted, oddly glassy, and the green of their oddly shaped leaves was a deeper shade than the bright plants around her.

But she wasn’t yet used to Mars. It took a beat before it struck her that these rows of plants were happily growing in the Martian air outside the pressurized dome. “Oh, my,” she said.