Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

I will speak to you later, Bisesa Dutt, in the palace. The King may attend.”

“It’s a date.”

Eumenes grimaced. “I had forgotten your irreverence. It is interesting to have you back, Bisesa Dutt.” He turned on his heel and walked out, to more bowing and scraping from Abdikadir.

Bisesa glanced at Emeline and Grove. “So you know why I’m here. A bomb in the solar system, an Eye on Mars. Why are you here?”

“Because,” Abdikadir said, “I summoned them when your telephone rang.”

Bisesa stared at him. “My phone?”

They hurried back to the Eye chamber.

Abdikadir extracted the phone from its shrine, and handed it to Bisesa reverently.

It lay in her palm, scuffed, familiar. She couldn’t believe it; her eyes misted over. She tried to explain to Abdikadir. “It’s just a phone. I was given it when I was twelve years old. Every child on Earth got a phone at that age. A communications and education program by the old United Nations. Well, it came here with me through the Discontinuity, and it was a great help — a true companion. But then its power failed.”

Abdikadir listened to this rambling, his face expressionless. “It rang. Chirp, chirp.”

“It will respond to an incoming call, but that’s all. When the power went I had no way of recharging it. Still haven’t, in fact.

Wait—”

She turned to her spacesuit, which still lay splayed open on the floor. Nobody had dared touch it. “Suit Five?”

Its voice, from the helmet speakers, was very small. “I have always strived to serve your needs during your extravehicular activity.”

“Can you give me one of your power packs?”

It seemed to think that over. Then a compartment on the suit’s belt flipped open to reveal a compact slab of plastic, bright green like the rest of the suit. Bisesa pulled this out of its socket.

“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Bisesa?”

“No. Thank you.”

“I will need refurbishment before I can serve you again.”

“I’ll see you get it.” She feared that was a lie. “Rest now.”

The suit fell silent with a kind of sigh.

She took the battery pack, flipped open the phone’s interface panel, and jammed the phone onto the cell’s docking port. Male and female connectors joined smoothly. “What was it Alexei said?

Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”

The phone lit up and spoke hesitantly. “Bisesa?”

“It’s me.”

“You took your time.”

A new draft operation order was transmitted to Liberator from Bella’s office in Washington.

“We’re to shadow the Q-bomb,” Edna said, scanning the order.

“How far?” John Metternes asked.

“All the way to Earth, if we have to.”

“Christ on a bike, that might be twenty months!”

“Libby, can we do it?”

The AI said, “We will be coasting, like the bomb. So propellant and reaction mass won’t be a problem. If the recycling efficiency stays nominal the life shell will be able to sustain crew functions.”

“Nicely put,” John said sourly.

“You’re the engineer,” Edna snapped. “Do you think she’s right?”

“I guess. But what’s the point, Captain? Our weapons are useless.”

“Best to have somebody on point than nobody. Something might turn up. John, Libby, start drawing up a schedule. I’ll go through the draft order, and if we’re sure it’s feasible from a resources point of view we’ll send our revision back to Earth.”

“Bonza trip this is going to be,” Metternes muttered.

Edna glanced at her softscreen. There was the bomb, silent, gliding ever deeper into the solar system, visible only by the stars it reflected. Edna tried to work out what she was going to say to Thea — how to explain she wasn’t coming home any time soon.

Bisesa was given a room of her own in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which Alexander had, inevitably, taken over. Eumenes’s staff provided clothes in the elaborate Persian style that had been adopted by the Macedonian court.

And Emeline called in and gave her some toiletries: a comb, creams for her face and hands, a tiny bottle of perfume, even some archaic-looking sanitary towels. They were a selection from the travel kit of a nineteenth-century lady. “You looked as if you didn’t arrive with much,” she said.

The gesture, of one woman far from home to another, made Bisesa feel like crying.

She slept a while. She was weighed down by the sudden return to Earth gravity, three times that of Mars. And her body clock was all over the place; as before, this new Discontinuity, her own personal time slip, left her with a kind of jet lag.

And then she did cry, for herself, the shock of it all, and for the loss of Myra. But these last few extraordinary weeks in which they had been traveling together across space had probably been as long as she had spent alone with Myra since the days of the sunstorm.

That was some consolation, she told herself, even though it seemed they had hardly spoken, hardly got to know each other.

She longed to know more about Charlie. She hadn’t even seen a photo of her granddaughter.

She tried to sleep again.

She was woken by a diffident serving girl, maybe a slave. It was early evening. Time for her reception with Eumenes, and perhaps Alexander.

She bathed and dressed; she had worn Babylonian robes before, but she still felt ridiculous dressed up like this.

The grand chamber to which she was led was a pocket of ob-scene wealth, plastered with tapestries and fine carpets and exquisite furniture. Even the pewter mug a servant gave her for her wine was studded with precious stones. But there were guards everywhere, at the doorways, moving through the hall, armed with long sarissa pikes and short stabbing-swords. They wore no solid armor, but had helmets of what looked like ox-hide, corselets of linen, leather boots. They looked like the infantry soldiers Bisesa remembered from her earlier time here.

Amid the soldiers’ iron and the silver and gilt of the decora-tions, courtiers walked, chatting, dismissive. They wore exotic clothes, predominantly purple and white. Their faces were painted so heavily, men and women, it was hard to tell how old they were.

They noticed Bisesa and they were curious, but they were far more interested in each other and their own web of rivalries.

And moving through the crowd were Neanderthals. Bisesa recognized them from distant ice-fringe glimpses during her last time on Mir. Now here they were in court. Mostly very young, they walked with their great heads bowed, their eyes empty, their powerful farmers’ hands carrying delicate trays. They wore purple robes every bit as fine as the courtiers’, as if for a joke.

Bisesa stood before one extraordinary tapestry. Covering a whole wall, it was a map of the world, but inverted, with south at the top. A great swath of southern Europe, North Africa, and central Asia reaching down into India was colored red and bordered in gold.

“Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai,” said Captain Grove.

Accompanying Emeline, he wore his British army uniform, and she a sensible-looking white blouse and long skirt with black shoes. They both looked solidly nineteenth-century amid all the gaudiness of Alexander’s court.

“I envy you your outfit,” Bisesa said to Emeline, self-conscious in her Babylonian gear.

“I carry my own steam iron,” Emeline said primly.

Grove asked Bisesa, “How was my pronunciation?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bisesa confessed. “Yeh-lu?…”

Grove sipped his wine, lifting his mustache out of the way.

“Perhaps you never met him. He was Genghis Khan’s most senior advisor, before Alexander’s Mongol War. A Chinese prisoner-of-war made good. After the war — you’ll recall Genghis was assassinated — his star waned. But he came here, to Babylon, to work with Alexander’s scholars. The result was maps like that.” He indicated the giant tapestry. “All a bit unnecessarily expensive, of course, but pretty accurate as far as we could see. Helped Alexander no end in planning his campaigns of conquest — and in marking its extent later.