Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“Wine,” Bloom said to the girl, loudly. “Wine, Isobel, you understand? And food.” He glanced at Emeline. “You’re hungry?

Isobel. Bring us bread, fruit, olive oil. Yes?” He pushed her away hard enough to make her stagger. She went clambering up out of the house.

Bloom sat on a heap of coarsely woven blankets, and indicated to Emeline that she should do the same.

She sat cautiously and glanced around the room. She didn’t feel like making conversation with this man, but she was curious. “Are those carved things idols?”

“Some of them. The ladies with the big bosoms and the fat bellies. You can take a look if you like. But be careful of the painted heads.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s exactly what they are. Isobel’s people bury their dead, right under the floors of their houses. But they sever the heads and keep them, and plaster them with baked mud, and paint them — well, you can see the result.”

Emeline glanced down uneasily, wondering what old horrors lay beneath the swept floor she was sitting on.

The girl Isobel returned with a jug and a basket of bread.

Without a word she poured them both cups of wine; it was warm and a bit salty, but Emeline drank it gratefully. The girl carved hunks of bread from a hard, boulder-like loaf with a stone blade, and set a bowl of olive oil between them. Following Bloom’s example, Emeline dunked the bread into the oil to soften it, then chewed on it.

She thanked Isobel for her service. The girl just retreated to her sleeping baby. Emeline thought she looked frightened, as if the baby waking up would be a bad thing.

Emeline asked, “ ‘Isobel’?”

Bloom shrugged. “Not the name her parents gave her, of course, but that doesn’t matter now.”

“It looks to me as if you have it pretty easy here, Mr. Bloom.”

He grunted. “Not as easy as all that. But a man must live, you know, Mrs. White, and we’re far from Chicago! The girl is happy enough however. What kind of brute do you think would have her if not for me?

“And she’s content to be in the house of her ancestors. Her people have lived here for generations, you know — I mean, right here, on this very spot. The houses are just mud and straw, and when they fall down they just build another on the plan of the old, just where granddaddy lived. The Midden isn’t a hill, you see, it is nothing less than an accumulation of expired houses. These antique folk aren’t much like us Christians, Mrs. White! Which is why the city council posted me here, of course. We don’t want any friction.”

“What kind of friction?”

He eyed her. “Well, you got to ask yourself, Mrs. White. What kind of person hauls herself through such a journey as you have made?”

She said hotly, “I came for my husband’s memory.”

“Sure. I know. But your husband came from this area — I mean, from a time slice nearby. Most Americans don’t have any personal ties here, as you do. You want to know why most folks come here?

Jesus.” He crossed himself as he said the name. “They come this way because they’re on a pilgrimage to Judea, where they hope against hope they’re going to find some evidence that a holy time slice has delivered Christ Incarnate. That would be some consolation for being ripped out of the world, wouldn’t it?

“But there’s no sign of Jesus in Judea —this Judea. That’s the grim truth, Mrs. White. All there is to see there is King Alexander’s steam-engine yards. What the unfortunate lack of an Incarnation in this world means for our immortal souls, I don’t know. And when the pious fools come up against the godless pagans who own Judea, the result is what might be called diplomatic incidents.”

But Emeline nodded. “Surely modern Americans have nothing to fear from an Iron Age warlord like Alexander…”

“But, Mrs. White,” a new voice called, “this ‘warlord’ has already established a new empire stretching from the Atlantic shore to the Black Sea — an empire that spans his whole world. It would serve us all well if Chicago were not to pick a fight with him just yet.”

Emeline turned. A man was clambering stiffly down the stairs, short, portly. He was followed by a younger man, leaner. They both wore what looked like battered military uniforms. The first man wore a peaked cap, and an astoundingly luxuriant mustache. But that facial ornament was streaked with gray; Emeline saw that he must be at least seventy.

Emeline stood, and Bloom smoothly introduced her. “Mrs.

White, this is Captain Nathaniel Grove. British Army — formerly, anyhow. And this—”

“I am Ben Batson,” the younger man said, perhaps thirty, his accent as stiffly British as Grove’s. “My father served with Captain Grove.”

Emeline nodded. “My name is—”

“I know who you are, my dear Mrs. White,” Grove said warmly. He crossed the floor and took her hands in his. “I knew Josh well. We arrived here together, aboard the same time slice, you might say. A bit of the North — West Frontier from the year of Our Lord 1885. Josh wrote several times and told me of you, and your children. You are every bit as lovely as I imagined.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” she said sternly. “But he did speak of you, Captain. I’m pleased to meet you. And I’m very sorry he’s not here with me. I lost him a year ago.”

Grove’s face stiffened. “Ah.”

“Pneumonia, they said. The truth was, I think he just wore himself out. He wasn’t so old.”

“Another one of us gone, another one less to remember where we came from — eh, Mrs. White?”

“Call me Emeline, please. You’ve traveled far?”

“Not so far as you, but far enough. We live now in an Alexandria—

not the city on the Nile, but at Ilium.”

“Where’s that?”

“Turkey, as we knew it.” He smiled. “ We call our city New Troy.”

“I imagine you’re here because of the telephone call in Babylon.”

“Assuredly. The scholar Abdikadir wrote to me, as he wrote to Bloom, here, in the hope of contacting Josh. Not that I have the faintest idea what it all means. But one has to address these things.”

The baby started crying. Bloom, clearly irritated, clapped his hands. “Well, Babylon awaits. Unless you need to rest, Captain—”

“Let’s get on with it.”

“Mr. Batson, if you would lead the way?”

Batson clambered briskly back up the stair, and Grove and Emeline followed.

Emeline looked back once. She glimpsed Isobel frantically trying to hush the baby, and Bloom stalking over to her, visibly angry, his arm raised. Emeline had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago; she was repelled by this vignette. But there was surely nothing Emeline could do that would not make it worse for the girl.

She climbed the worn stairs, and emerged blinking into the dusty Babylonian sunlight.

The passengers and their bits of luggage were loaded onto a crude, open phaeton. Bloom sent his “boy” off to find their draft animals.

Emeline was shocked when the Stone Man returned, not with horses as she had expected, but with four more of his own kind.

Where Bloom’s servant was dressed in his rags, these four were naked. Three of them were men, their genitalia small gray clumps in black hair, and the woman had slack breasts with long pink-gray nipples. Their stocky forms were thickly coated with hair, and that and their musculature and collapsed brows gave them the look of gorillas. But they looked far more human than ape, their hands hairless, their eyes clear. It was a shocking sight as they were settled into the phaeton’s harness, each taking a collar around the neck.

Bloom now took a whip of leather, and cracked it without mal-ice across the backs of the lead pair. The Stone Men stumbled forward into a shambling job, and the phaeton clattered forward.