Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Emeline sat, and quietly studied Bisesa Dutt.

She looked older than Emeline, but not much more, fifty perhaps. She was just as Josh had described her — even sketched her in some of his journals. Her face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square. Her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair grayed. Though she seemed drained and disoriented, she had a strength about her, Emeline sensed, a dogged enduring strength.

Bisesa, reviving, looked around cautiously. “So,” she said.

“Here we are.”

“Here you are,” Grove said. “You’ve been back home, have you? I mean back to England. Your England.”

“Yes, Captain. I was brought back to the time of the Discontinuity, in my future. Precisely, to within a day. Even though I had spent five years on Mir.”

Grove shook his head. “I ought to get used to the way time flows so strangely here. I don’t suppose I ever will.”

“Now I’m back. But when am I?”

Emeline said, “Madam, it’s well known here that you left Mir in the year five of the new calendar established by the Babylonian astronomers. This is year thirty-two…”

“Twenty-seven years, then.” Bisesa looked at her curiously.

“You’re an American.”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“Of course. The Soyuz spotted you, clear of the North American ice sheet.”

Emeline said, “I am from the year 1894.” She had got used to repeating this strange detail.

“Nine years after Captain Grove’s time slice — that was 1885.”

“Yes.”

Bisesa turned to Abdikadir, who had said little since Bisesa had been retrieved. “And you are so like your father.”

Wide-eyed, Abdi was nervous, curious, perhaps eager to impress. “I am an astronomer. I work here in the Temple — there is an observatory on the roof—”

She smiled at him. “Your father must be proud.”

“He isn’t here,” Abdi blurted. And he told her how Abdikadir Omar had gone south into Africa, following his own quest; if Mir was populated by a sampling of hominids from all mankind’s long evolutionary history, Abdikadir had wanted to find the very earli-est, the first divergence from the other lines of apes. “But he did not return. This was some years ago.”

Bisesa nodded, absorbing that news. “And Casey? What of him?”

Casey Othic, the third crew member of the Little Bird, was no longer here either. He had died of complications from an old injury he had suffered on Discontinuity day itself. “But,” Captain Grove said, “not before he had left quite a legacy behind. A School of Othic.

Engineers to whom Casey became a god, literally! You’ll see, Bisesa.”

Bisesa listened to this. “And the three Soyuz crew were all killed, ultimately. So there are no moderns here — I mean, nobody from my own time. That feels strange. What about Josh?”

Captain Grove coughed into his fist, awkward, almost comically British. “Well, he survived your departure, Bisesa.”

“He came with me halfway,” Bisesa said enigmatically. “But they sent him back.”

“With you gone, there was nothing to keep him here in Babylon.” Grove glanced uncomfortably at Emeline. “He went to find his own people.”

“Chicago.”

“Yes. It took a few years before Alexander’s people, with Casey’s help, put together a sailing ship capable of taking on the Atlantic. But Josh was on the first boat.”

“I was his wife,” Emeline said.

“Ah,” Bisesa said. “ ‘Was’?”

And Emeline told her something of Josh’s life, and how he died, and the legacy he left behind, his sons.

Bisesa listened gravely. “I don’t know if you’d want to hear this,” she said. “Back home, I looked up Josh. I asked Aristotle — I mean, I consulted the archives. And I found Josh’s place in history.”

The “copy” of Josh left behind on Earth had lived on past 1885.

That Josh had fallen in love: aged thirty-five he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons — just as Emeline gave him sons on Mir. But Josh was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, a correspondent covering yet another war, a great world war Emeline had never heard of.

Emeline listened to this reluctantly. It was somehow a diminishing of her Josh to hear this tale of an alternate version of him.

They talked on for a while, of disrupted histories, of the deteriorating climate of Mir, of a new Troy and a global empire. Grove asked Bisesa if she had found Myra, her daughter. Bisesa said she had, and in fact she now had a granddaughter too. But her mood seemed wistful, complicated. It seemed not much of this had made her happy.

Emeline had little to say. She tried to gauge the mood of the people around her as they talked, adjusting to this new strangeness.

Abdi and Ben, born after the Discontinuity, were curious, wide-eyed with wonder. But Grove and Emeline herself, and perhaps Bisesa, were fundamentally fearful. The youngsters didn’t understand, as did the older folk who had lived through the Discontinuity, that nothing in the world was permanent, not if time could be torn apart and knitted back together again at a whim. If you lived through such an event you never got over it.

There was a commotion at the door.

Abdikadir, attuned to life at Alexander’s court, got to his feet quickly.

A man walked briskly into the room, accompanied by two lesser-looking attendants. Abdikadir prostrated himself before this man; he threw himself to the floor, arms outstretched, head down.

Wearing a flowing robe of some expensive purple-dyed fabric the newcomer was shorter than anybody else in the room, but he had a manner of command. He was bald save for a frosting of silver hair. He might have been seventy, Emeline thought, but his lined skin glistened, well treated with oils.

Bisesa’s eyes widened. “Secretary Eumenes.”

The man smiled, his expression cold, calculated. “My title is now ‘chiliarch,’ and has been for twenty years or more.” His English was fluent but stilted, and tinged with a British accent.

Bisesa said, “Chiliarch. Which was Hephaistion’s position, once. You have risen higher than any man save the King, Eumenes of Cardia.”

“Not bad for a foreigner.”

“I suppose I should have expected you,” Bisesa said. “You of all people.”

“As I have always expected you.”

From his prone position on the floor, Abdikadir stammered,

“Lord Chiliarch. I summoned you, I sent runners the moment it happened — the Eye — the return of Bisesa Dutt — it was just as you ordered — if there were delays I apologize, and—”

“Oh, be quiet, boy. And stand up. I came when I was ready. Believe it or not there are matters in this worldwide empire of ours even more pressing than enigmatic spheres and mysterious reve-nants. Now. Why are you here, Bisesa Dutt?”

It was a direct question none of the others had asked her. Bisesa said, “Because of a new Firstborn threat.”

In a few words she sketched a storm on the sun, and how mankind in a future century had labored to survive it. And she spoke of a new weapon, called the “Q-bomb,” which was gliding through space toward Earth — Bisesa’s Earth.

“I myself traveled between planets, in search of answers to this challenge. And then I was brought — here.”

“Why? Who by?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps the same agency who took me home in the first place. The Firstborn, or not the Firstborn. Perhaps some agency who defies them.”

“The King knows of your return.”

Grove asked, “How do you know that?”

Eumenes smiled. “Alexander knows everything I know — and generally before me. At least, that is the safest assumption to make.