Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Ellie was laughing. “It worked. The Eye is responding. By Sol’s light! I don’t think I ever believed it. And I certainly didn’t think it would work as soon as this woman walked into the Pit.”

Alexei grinned fiercely, “Believe it, baby!”

“It’s changing,” said Yuri, looking up.

The Eye’s smooth reflective sheen now oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.

Then the surface collapsed, as if deflating. Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face — but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

She had seen this before, in the Temple of Marduk. This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

Her suit said, “I apologize for any inconvenience. However—”

The suit’s voice cut out with a pop, to be replaced by silence.

Suddenly her limbs turned flaccid and heavy. The suit’s systems had failed, even the servomotors.

The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye.

Wrestling with her own suit, Myra pressed her helmet against Bisesa’s, and Bisesa heard her muffled cries. “Mum, no! You’re not running out on me again!”

Bisesa clung to her. “Love, it’s all right, whatever happens…”

But there was a kind of wind, dragging at her. She staggered, their helmets lost contact, and she let go of Myra.

The storm of light grew to a blizzard. Bisesa looked up at the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity — but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

And the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of self.

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a gate.

The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

With a snap, it was over. The chamber was dark. The Eye was whole again, sleek and reflective in its ancient cage.

Bisesa was gone. Myra found herself on the floor, weighed down by a powerless suit. She yelled into the silence of her helmet.

“Mum. Mum!”

There was a click, and a soft hum. A female voice said levelly,

“Myra. Don’t be alarmed. I am speaking to you through your ident tattoo.”

“What’s happened?”

“Help is on its way. I have spoken to Paula on the surface. You two have the only ident tattoo. You must reassure the others.”

“Who are you?”

“I suppose I am the leader of what your mother called this ‘faction.’ ”

“I know your voice. From years ago — the sunstorm—”

“My name is Athena.”

A Signal from Earth 2053

In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.

A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.

The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, point-ers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted itself out, activated programs, analyzed the environment it found itself in — and gradually became aware.

Aware, yes. There was a personality in this star-crossing data.

No: three distinct personalities.

“So we’re conscious again,” said Thales, stating the obvious.

“Whoopee! What a ride!” said Athena skittishly.

“There’s somebody watching us,” said Aristotle.

Witness was the only name she had ever known.

Of course that didn’t seem strange to her at first, in her early years. And nor did it seem strange that though there were plenty of adults in the waters around her, she was the only child. When you are young, you take everything for granted.

This was a watery world, not terribly unlike Earth. Even its day was only a little longer than Earth’s.

And the creatures here were Earthlike. In the bright waters of the world sea, Witness, a bundle of fur and fat something like a seal, swam and played and chased creatures not unlike fish. Witness even had two parents: having two sexes was a good strategy for mixing up hereditary material. Convergent evolution was a powerful force. But Witness’s body plan was based on six limbs, not four.

The best times of all were the days, one in four, when the icy lid of the ocean broke up, and the people came flopping out onto the island.

On land you were heavy, of course, and a lot less mobile. But Witness loved the sharp sensation of the gritty sand under her belly, and the crispness of the cold air. There were wonders on the island, cities and factories, temples and scientific establishments. And Witness loved the sky. She loved the stars that gleamed at night — and the three suns that shone in the day.

If this world was something like Earth, its sun was not. This system was dominated by a star twice as massive as the sun, and eight times as bright; it had a smaller companion barely noticeable in the giant’s glare, and there was a third, a distant dim red dwarf.

Across eleven light years, this system was easily bright enough to be seen from the Earth. This was Alpha Canis Minoris, also called Procyon. This star was known as a double to astronomers; that small second companion had never even been detected from Earth.

But Procyon had changed. And the living planet it had suc-cored was dying.

As she grew older, Witness learned to ask questions.

“Why am I alone? Why are there no others like me? Why is there nobody for me to play with?”

“Because we face a great tragedy,” her father said. “We all do. All over the world. It is the suns, Witness. There is something wrong with the suns.”

The giant senior partner of Procyon, Procyon A, had once been a variable star.

When it was young it shined steadily. But the helium “ash” produced by the hydrogen-burning fusion reactor of its core slowly accumulated in its heart. Trapped heat lifted the helium layer, and all the immense weight of gas above: the star swelled, subtly, until the trapped heat could flood out, and the star collapsed once more. But then the helium trap formed again.

Thus the aging star became variable, swelling and collapsing over and again, with a period of a few days. And it was that grand stellar oscillation that had given this world its life.

Once, before Procyon had become variable, the planet had been something like Europa, moon of Jupiter: a salty ocean trapped under a permanent crust of ice. There had been life here, fueled by the inner heat and complex minerals that came bubbling up from the world’s core. But, locked in the watery dark, none of those forms had progressed greatly in intelligence.

The new pulsation had changed all that.

“Every fourth day the ice breaks up into floes,” Witness’s parents said. “So you can get out of the sea. And we did. Our ancestors changed, so they could breathe in the air, so much more oxygen-rich than the seawater. And they learned to exploit the possibilities of the dry land. At first they just emerged so they could mate in peace, and shelter their young from the hungry mouths of the sea.