Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

She saw her own reflection looking back at her.

It was the archetypal Firstborn artifact. It was an Eye.

A distorted image of the Liberator slid across the face of the Q-bomb, all lights blazing. Edna felt a stab of satisfaction. Mankind had come here with intent.

Their first pass at the Q-bomb was unpowered, a scouting run.

At closest approach the ship shuddered, once, twice: the launch of two small probes, one injected into low orbit around the Q-bomb, and the other aimed squarely at its surface.

Then the smooth, mirrored landscape receded as the Liberator swept away.

They scrolled through their displays. No harm had come to the ship. The Q-bomb was no more massive than a small asteroid — it had the density of lead — and the ship’s trajectory was not deflected significantly by its gravity.

“But we learned some things,” John reported. “Nothing we didn’t expect. It’s a sphere to well within the tolerances any human manufacturing process could manage. Then there’s that usual anomalous geometry.”

“Pi equals three.”

“Yes. Our probe went into orbit around it. The bomb’s mass is so low that it’s a slow circuit, but the probe ought to stay with it all the way in from now on. And the lander is coming down—”

The ship shuddered, and Edna grabbed her seat. “What the hell was that? Libby?”

“Gravity waves, Edna.”

“The pulse came from the Q-bomb,” John said, tense, almost shouting. “The lander.” He replayed images of a gray hemisphere bursting from the flank of the Q-bomb, swallowing the lander, and then dissipating. “It just ate it up. There was a sort of bubble. If Bill Carel is right,” he said heavily, “what we just saw was the birth and death of a whole baby cosmos. A universe used as a weapon.” He laughed, but without humor. “Strewth, what are we dealing with here?”

“We know what we’re dealing with,” Edna said evenly. “Technology, that’s all. And so far it hasn’t done anything we wouldn’t have expected. Hold it together, John.”

He snapped, irritable, scared, “I’m only human, for Christ’s sake.”

“Libby, are we ready for pass two?”

“All systems nominal, Edna. The flight plan calls for an engine fire thirty seconds from now. Do you need a countdown?”

“Look, just do it,” John said tightly.

“Please check your restraints…”

Bisesa walked slowly around the chamber in the ice. It was a rough sphere, and the Eye filled it. She looked up and saw her own distorted reflection, her head grotesque in the spacesuit helmet. She could feel there was something there. A presence, watching. “Hello, boys,” she murmured. “Remember me?”

Ellie, Alexei, Yuri, crowding with Myra into the chamber, exchanged excited, nervous glances. “This is why we brought you here, Bisesa,” Yuri said.

“Okay. But what the hell is it doing here? All the Eyes in the solar system disappeared after the sunstorm.”

“I can answer that,” said Ellie. “The Eye has evidently been here since before the sunstorm — long before. It is radiating high-energy particles in all directions — a radiation with a distinctive sig-nature. Which is why I was brought in. I worked at the lunar alephtron. I am something of an authority on quantum black holes.

I was thought a good candidate to study this thing…”

It was the first time Ellie had spoken to Bisesa at any length. Her manner was odd; she spoke without eye contact, and with random smiles or frowns, and emphases in the wrong places. She was evidently the kind of individual whose high intelligence was founded on some complex psychological flaw. She reminded Bisesa of Eugene.

The lunar alephtron was mankind’s most powerful particle accelerator. Its purpose was to probe the deep structure of matter by hurling particles against each other at speeds approaching that of light. “We are able to reach densities of mass and energy exceeding the Planck density — that is, when quantum mechanical effects overwhelm the fabric of spacetime.”

Myra asked, “And what happens then?”

“You make a black hole. A tiny one, more massive than any fundamental particle, but far smaller. It decays away almost immediately, giving off a shower of exotic particles.”

“Just like the Eye’s radiation,” Bisesa guessed.

“So what,” Myra asked, “have tiny black holes got to do with the Eye?”

“We believe we live in a universe of many spatial dimensions—

I mean, more than three,” said Ellie. “Other spaces lie next to ours, so to speak, in the higher dimensions, like the pages in a book. More strictly it’s probably a warped compactification of — never mind, never mind. These higher dimensions determine our fundamental physical laws, but they have no direct influence on our world — not through electromagnetism, or nuclear forces —save through gravity.

“And that’s why we make black holes on the Moon. A black hole is a gravitational artifact, and so it exists in higher dimensions as well as in the world we see. By investigating our black holes we can probe those higher dimensions.”

“And you believe,” Bisesa said, “that the Eyes have something to do with these higher dimensions.”

“It makes sense. The receding surface that doesn’t move. The anomalous pi-equals-three geometry. This thing doesn’t quite fit into our universe…”

Like you, Bisesa thought, a little spitefully.

“So maybe it’s a projection from somewhere else. Like a finger pushing through the surface of a puddle of water — in the universe of the meniscus you see a circle, but in fact it’s a cross-section of a more complex object in a higher dimension.”

Somehow Bisesa knew this was right; somehow she could sense that higher interconnection. An Eye wasn’t a terminus, a thing in itself, but an opening that led to something higher.

Myra said, “But what’s this Eye doing here?”

“I think it’s trapped,” said Ellie.

Once more the ship ran in at the Q-bomb. Deep in her guts antimatter and matter annihilated enthusiastically, and superheated steam roared.

And at closest approach the ship swung around, engine still firing, so that its exhaust washed over the face of the Q-bomb. It was their first overtly hostile act; it would have been enough to kill any humans on that mirrored surface.

The drive cut out, and the ship sailed on unpowered.

“No apparent effect,” John reported immediately.

Edna glanced at him. “Keep checking. But I guess we know the result. So do we use the weapons or not?”

The final decision was the crew’s. A signal to the Trojan base and back would take a round-trip time of forty-five minutes, a signal to Earth even longer.

John shrugged, but he was sweating, edgy. “The operational order is clear. We’ve had no reaction from the Q-bomb to a non-threatening approach, we’ve seen the destruction of a friendly probe, we’ve had no reaction to the exhaust wash. Nobody might get this close again. We have to act.”

“Libby?” Officially the AI was the ship’s executive officer, and, formally, had a say in the decision.

“I concur with Mr. Metternes’s analysis.”

“All right.”

Edna extracted a softscreen from her coverall, unrolled it and spread it out over the console before her. It lit up as it interfaced with the Liberator ’s systems, and then flashed red with stern commandments about security. Using a virtual keypad Edna entered her security details, and leaned forward so the screen could scan her retinas and cheek tattoo. The softscreen, satisfied, turned amber.

“Ready for the third pass,” Libby announced.