Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

But was this the same Eye? Was she still on Mars?

She lifted her head within the helmet, trying to see past the Eye.

Her head felt heavy, a football full of sloshing fluids. It was like pulling Gs in a chopper. Heavy gravity: not Mars, then.

She saw a brick wall beyond the Eye. Bits of electronic equipment studded the wall, fixed crudely, linked up with cable. She knew that wall, that gear. She had assembled it herself, scavenged from the crashed Little Bird, when she had set up this chamber as a laboratory to study an Eye.

This was the Temple of Marduk. She was back in Babylon. She was on Mir. “Here I am again,” she whispered.

A face loomed over her, sudden, unexpected. She flinched back, strapped in her lobster suit. It was a man, young, dark, good-looking, his eyes clear. She knew who it was. But it couldn’t be him.

“Abdi?” The last time she saw Abdikadir, her crewmate from the Little Bird, he had been worn out from the Mongol War, his face and body bearing the scars of that conflict. This smooth-faced man was too young, too untouched.

Now another face hovered in her view, illuminated by flickering lamplight. Another familiar face, a tremendous mustache, but this time older than she remembered, grayed, lined. “Captain Grove,” she said. “The gang’s all here.”

Grove said something she couldn’t hear.

Her chest hurt even more. “Suit. I can’t breathe. Open up and let me out.”

“It isn’t advisable, Bisesa. We aren’t in a controlled environment. And these people are not the crew of Wells Station,” the suit said primly. “If they exist at all.”

“Open up,” she said as severely as she could. “I’m overriding any other standing orders you have. Your function is to protect me.

So let me out before I suffocate.”

The suit said, “I’m afraid other protocols override your instructions, Bisesa.”

“What other protocols?”

“Planetary protection.”

The suit was designed to protect Mars from Bisesa as much as Bisesa from Mars. So if she were to die the suit would seal itself up, to keep the remains of her body from contaminating Mars’s fragile ecology. In extremis, Suit Five was programmed to become her coffin.

“Yes, but — oh, this is — we aren’t even on Mars! Can’t you see that? There’s nothing to protect!” She strained, but her limbs were encased. Her lungs dragged at stale air. “Suit Five — for God’s sake—”

Something slammed into her helmet, rattling her head like a walnut kernel in its shell. Her visor just popped off, and air washed over her face. The air smelled of burned oil and ozone, but it was rich in oxygen and she dragged at it gratefully.

Grove hovered over her. He held up a hammer and chisel.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Needs must, eh? But I rather fear I’ve damaged your suit of armor.” Though he had aged, he had the same clipped Noel Coward accent she remembered from her last time on Mir, more than thirty years in the past.

She felt inordinately glad to see him. “Be my guest,” she said.

“All right, Suit, you’ve had your fun. You’ve been breached, so planetary protection is out the window, wherever we are. Now will you let me go?”

The suit didn’t speak. It hesitated for a few seconds, silent, as if sulking. Then with a popping of seals it opened up, along her torso, legs and arms. She lay in the suit, in her tight thermal underwear, and the colder air washed over her. “I feel like a lobster in a cracked shell.”

“Let us help you.” It was the boy who looked like Abdikadir.

He and Grove reached down, got their arms under Bisesa, and lifted her out of the suit.

It was an hour since Bisesa had vanished into the Eye.

Myra, bereft and confused, sought out Alexei in his storeroom cabin. He was curled up on his bunk, facing the plastic-coated ice wall.

“So tell me about Athena.”

Without turning, he said, “Well, Athena singled you out. She seems to think you’re worth preserving.”

Myra pursed her lips. “She’s the real leader of this conspiracy of yours, isn’t she? This underground group of Boy Scouts, trying to figure out the Martian Eye.”

He shrugged, his back still turned. “We Spacers are a divided lot. The Martians don’t think of themselves as Spacers at all.

Athena is different from all of us, and she’s a lot smarter. She’s someone we can unite around, at least.”

“Let me get it straight,” she said. “Athena is the shield AI.”

“A copy of her. The original AI was destroyed in the final stages of the sunstorm. Before the storm, this copy was squirted to the stars. Somewhere out there, that broadcast copy was picked up, activated, and transmitted back here.”

This was the story she had picked up from the others. “You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”

“Nobody outside Cyclops knows the details.”

“Cyclops. The big planet-finder telescope station.”

“Right. Of course the echo could have been picked up anywhere in the solar system, but as far as we know it’s only on Cyclops that she’s been activated. She’s stayed locked up in the hardened data store on Cyclops. Her choice. As far as Hanse Critchfield can tell, she managed to download a subagent into your ident tattoo.

Nobody knows how. It self-destructed after she gave you that message. I guess she has her electronic eye on you, Myra.”

That was not a comforting thought. “So now my mother has gone through the Eye. What next?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“I guess, for whatever comes of your mother’s mission to Mir.

And for Athena.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, Myra. We have time. It’s still more than eighteen months until the Q-bomb is supposed to reach Earth.

“Look, we’ve done what we could. We delivered your mother to the Eye, and pow, that pretty much short-circuited all the weird-ness in the solar system. No offense. Now we’ve come to a kind of a lull. So, take it easy. You’ve been through a lot — we both have. The traveling alone was punishment enough. And as for that shit down in the Pit with the Eye — I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt for you.”

Myra sat awkwardly on the single chair in the room, and pulled at her fingers. “It’s not just a lull. This is a kind of terminus, for me.

You needed me to get my mother here, to Mars. Fine, I did that.

But now I’ve crashed into a wall.”

He rolled over and faced her. “I’m sorry you feel like that. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re a good person. I’ve seen that. You love your mother, and you support her, even when it hurts you. That’s a pretty good place to be. Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not one to give you counseling. I’m spying on my father. How dys-functional is that?”

He turned back to the wall.

She sat with him a while longer. When he began to snore, she crept out of the room and closed the door.

Grove and Abdi brought Bisesa to a smaller chamber, an office set out with couches and tables. This temple seemed to be full of offices, Emeline observed; she learned it was a center of administra-tion for various cults and government departments as well as a place of worship.

Grove sat Bisesa down and wrapped her in a blanket. Grove shouted at various parties about tea, until a servant brought Bisesa a bowl of some hot, milky drink, which she sipped gratefully.

Two solid-looking Macedonian guards were posted at the door.

They carried the long, brutal-looking pikes they called sarissae. Bisesa’s return had caused a ferment, it seemed, though whether the guards were protecting the people from Bisesa or vice versa Emeline didn’t know.