Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“Aristotle?” But she knew it could not be, even before he answered.

There was an odd delay before he replied. “I’m afraid not. I am Thales.”

“Thales, of course.”

Before the sunstorm there had been three great artificial intelligences on the human worlds, remote descendants of the search engines and other intelligent software agents of earlier technological generations, and all of them friends of mankind. There were rumors that copies of them had been saved, as streams of bits squirted off into interstellar space. But otherwise only Thales had survived the sunstorm, stored in the simpler networks of the sturdy Moon.

“I’m glad to hear your voice again.”

Pause. “And I yours, Bisesa.”

“Thales — why these response delays? Oh. Are you still lodged on the Moon?”

“Yes, Bisesa. And I am restricted by lightspeed delay. Just like Neil Armstrong.”

“Why not bring you down to Earth? Isn’t it kind of inconvenient?”

“There are ways around it. Local agents can support me when time delay is critical — during medical procedures, for instance. But otherwise the situation is deemed satisfactory.”

These responses sounded rehearsed to Bisesa. Even scripted.

There was more to Thales’s location on the Moon than he was telling her. But she didn’t have the spark to pursue the matter.

Thales said, “You asked about the roar.”

“Yes. That sounded like a lion. An African lion.”

“So it was.”

“And what is an African lion doing here, in the heart of North America?”

“The Grand Canyon National Park is now a Jefferson, Bisesa.”

“A what?”

“A Jefferson Park. It is all part of the re-wilding. If you will look to your right… ”

On the horizon, beyond the north rim, she saw blocky shapes, massive, like boulders on the move. Thales caused the window to magnify the image. She was looking at elephants, a herd of them complete with infants, an unmistakable profile.

“I have extensive information on the park.”

“I’m sure you have, Thales. One thing. What’s the structure over there? It looks like scaffolding.”

It turned out to be a power mat, the ground station of an orbital power station, a collector for microwaves beamed down from the sky.

“The whole facility is rather large, ten kilometers square.”

“Is it safe? I saw vehicles driving around underneath it.”

“Oh, yes, safe for humans. Animals too. But there is an exclusion zone.”

“And, Thales, those lights in the sky — the shimmers—”

“Mirrors and sails. There is a whole architecture off Earth now, Bisesa. It’s really quite spectacular.”

“So they’re building the dream. Bud Tooke would have been pleased.”

“I’m afraid Colonel Tooke died in—”

“Never mind.”

“Bisesa, there are human counselors you can speak to. About anything you like. The details of your hibernation, for instance.”

“It was explained to me before I went into the freezer…”

The Hibernacula were a product of the sunstorm. The first of them had been established in America before the event, as the rich sought to flee through the difficult years ahead to a time of recovery.

Bisesa hadn’t entered hers until 2050, eight years after the storm.

“I can talk you through the medical advances since your immersion,” Thales said. “For example it now appears that your cells’

propensity for hydrogen sulphide is a relic of a very early stage in the evolution of life on Earth, when aerobic cells still shared the world with methanogens.”

“That sounds oddly poetic.”

Thales said gently, “There is the motivational aspect as well.”

She felt uncomfortable. “What motivational aspect?…”

She had had reasons to flee into the tanks. Myra, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, had married against Bisesa’s advice, and pledged herself to a life off the Earth entirely. And Bisesa had wanted to escape the conspiracy-theory notoriety that had accrued about her because of her peculiar role in the sunstorm crisis, even though much of what had gone on in those days, even the true cause of the sunstorm, was supposed to have been classified.

“Anyhow,” she said, “going into a Hibernaculum was a public service. So I was told when I signed over my money. My trust fund went to advance the understanding of techniques that will one day be used in everything from transplant organ preservation to crew-ing centuries-long starship flights. And in a world struggling to recover after the storm, I had a much lower economic footprint frozen in a tank—”

“Bisesa, there is a growing body of opinion that Hibernaculum sleeping is in fact a sort of sublimated suicide.”

That took her aback. Aristotle would have been more subtle, she thought. “Thales,” she said firmly. “When I need to speak to someone about this, it will be my daughter.”

“Of course, Bisesa. Is there anything else you need?”

She hesitated. “How old am I?”

“Ah. Good question. You are a curiosity, Bisesa.”

“Thanks.”

“You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”

She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”

“Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”

“Yes. And the other five years?”

“Are the years you spent on Mir.”

She nodded. “You know about that?”

“It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”

She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.

“Thank you, Thales.”

“It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.

Bella Fingal was in the air above London when her daughter first brought her the bad news from the sky.

Bella had been flown in across the Atlantic, and her plane was heading for Heathrow, out in the suburbs to the west of central London. But the pilot told her the flight path would see them over-fly to the east first and then come back west along the path of the Thames, into the headwinds, and on this bright March morning the city was a glittering carpet spread out for her. Bella had the plane all to herself, one of the new scramjets, a fancy chariot for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother.

But she really didn’t want to be making this trip. The funeral of James Duflot had been bad enough; coming to the grieving family’s home would be worse. It was however her duty, as Chair of the World Space Council.

She had wandered into this job almost by accident, probably a compromise choice by the supra-governmental panel that controlled the Space Council. In a corner of her mind she had thought that her new post would be pretty much an honorary one, like most of the university chancellorships and nonexecutive directorships that had come her way as a veteran of the sunstorm. She hadn’t imagined getting shipped across the planet to be plunged into messy, tearful situations like this.

She had done her bit on the shield. She should have stayed retired, she thought wistfully.

And it was when Edna came on line with her bit of bad, strange news that it was driven home to Bella that she really was the commander-in-chief of a space navy.

“For once the trackers think they’ve found something serious, Mum. Something out in the dark — now approaching the orbit of Jupiter, in fact, and falling in on a hyperbolic trajectory. It’s not on the Extirpator map, though that’s not so unusual; long-period comets too remote for Extirpator echoes are turning up all the time.

This thing has other characteristics that are causing them concern…”