Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Yuri said, “Myra, there are a lot of similarities between trying to live here on the Martian ice cap and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are generally nothing but big balls of frozen ice around nuggets of rock. So Hanse is trialing technologies that might enable us to survive anywhere out there.”

“Ambitious.”

“Sure,” Yuri said. “Well, he’s a South African on his mother’s side. And you know what the Africans are like nowadays. They were the big winners out of the sunstorm, politically, economically.

Hanse’s committed to Mars, I think. But he’s an African Martian, and he has deeper goals…”

After a couple of hours driving they came to the lip of a spiral canyon.

The wall of eroded ice was shallow, and the canyon wasn’t terribly deep; Myra thought the rover would easily be able to skim down to its floor, and indeed the rutted track they were following snaked on down into the canyon. But she could see that further ahead the canyon broadened and grew deeper, curving smoothly into the distance like a tremendous natural freeway.

They didn’t descend into the canyon immediately. Yuri tapped the dashboard, and the rover lumbered along the canyon’s lip until an insectile form loomed out of the dark before them. It was a complex platform maybe fifty centimeters across laden with instruments, and it stood on three spindly legs. The rover had a manipulator arm, which now unfolded delicately to reach out to the tripod.

“This is a SEP,” Yuri said. “A surface experiment package.

Kind of a weather station, together with a seismometer, laser mirrors, other instruments. We’ve been planting a whole network of them across the polar cap.” He spoke with a trace of pride.

To keep him talking she asked, “Why the legs?”

“To lift it above the dry ice snow, which can reach a depth of a few meters by the end of the winter. And there are surface effects—

you can get major excursions of temperature and pressure over the first few meters up from the ground. So there are sensors mounted in the legs too.”

“It looks spindly. Like it will fall over in the first gust of wind.”

“Well, Mars is a spindly kind of planet. I calculated the wind loading moment. This baby won’t get knocked over in a hurry.”

“You designed it?”

“Yes,” said Grendel, “and he’s bloody proud of it. And any resemblance of these toy weather stations to the Martian fighting machines of certain books and movies is purely coincidental.”

“They’re my babies.” Yuri threw his head back and laughed through his thick black beard.

While it was halted the rover released other, more exotic bits of gear: “tumbleweed,” cage-like balls a meter across that rolled away over the dry ice snow, and “smart dust,” a sprinkling of black soot-like powder that just blew away. Each mote of dust was a sensor station just a millimeter across, with its own suite of tiny instruments, all powered by microwave energy beamed from the sky, or simply by being shaken up by the wind. “We have no control over where the weed and the dust goes,” Yuri said. “It just blows with the wind, and a lot of the dust will just get snowed out. But the idea is to saturate the polar cap with sensors, to make it self-aware, if you like. Already the data flows are tremendous.”

With the SEP seen to, the rover began its descent into the canyon. The ice wall was layered, like stratified rock, with thick dark bands every meter or so deep, but much finer layers in between — very fine, like the pages of a book, fine down to the limits of what Myra could see. The rover drove slowly and carefully, its movements evidently preprogrammed. Every so often Yuri, or more rarely Grendel, would tap the dashboard, and they would stop, and the manipulator arm would reach out to explore the surface of the wall. It scraped up samples from the layers, or it would press a box of instruments against the ice, or it would plant a small instrument package.

Grendel said to Myra, “This is pretty much the drill, all the way in. Sampling the strata. I’m testing for life, or relics of life from the past. Yuri here is trying to establish a global stratigraphy, mapping all the cap’s folded layers as read from the cores and the canyon excursions against each other. It’s not very exciting, I guess. If we see something really promising, we do get out and take a look for ourselves. But you get tired of the suit drill, and we save that for special occasions.”

Yuri laughed again. The rover rolled on.

“I spoke to Ellie,” Myra said uncertainly. “Down in the Pit. She told me something of her experiences of the sunstorm.”

Grendel turned, her eyebrows raised. “You’re honored. Took me three months to get to that point. And I’m her nominated psy-chiatric counselor.”

“Sounds like she had it kind of tough.”

“Myself, I was ten,” Grendel said. “I grew up in Ohio. We were a farming family, far from any dome. Dad built us a bunker, like a storm shelter. We lost everything, and then we were stuck in the refugee camps too. My father died a couple of years later. Skin cancers got him.

“In the camps I worked as a volunteer nurse at triage stations.

Gave me the taste for medicine, I guess. I never wanted to feel so helpless in front of a person in pain again. And after the sunstorm, after the camps, I worked on ecological recovery programs in the Midwest. That got me into biology.”

Yuri said cheerfully, “As for me, I was born after the sunstorm.

Born on the Moon, Russian mother, Irish father. I spent some time on Earth, though. As a teen I worked on eco-recovery programs in the Canadian Arctic.”

“That’s how you got a taste for ice.”

“I guess.”

“And now you’re here,” Myra said. “Now you’re Spacers.”

“Martians,” Grendel and Yuri said together.

Yuri said, “The Spacers are off on their rocks in the sky. Mars is Mars, and that’s that. And we don’t necessarily share their ambi-tions.”

“But you do over the Eye in the Pit.”

Yuri said, “Over that, yes, of course. But I’d rather just get on with this.” He waved a hand at the sculptures of ice beyond the windscreen. “Mars. That’s enough for me.”

“I envy you,” Myra blurted. “For your sense of purpose. For having something to build here.”

Grendel turned, curious. “Envy’s not a good feeling, Myra. You have your own life.”

“Yes. But I feel I’m kind of living in an aftermath of my own.”

Grendel grunted. “Given who your mother is that’s under-standable. We can talk about it later, if you like.”

Yuri said, “Or we can talk about my mother, who taught me how to drink vodka. Now that’s the way to put the world to rights.”

An alarm chimed softly, and a green panel lit up on the dash.

Yuri tapped it, and it filled up with the face of Alexei Carel. “You’d better get back here. Sorry to interrupt the fun.”

“Go on,” said Yuri.

“I’ve two messages. One, Myra, we’ve been summoned to Cyclops.”

“The planet-finder station? Why?”

“To meet Athena.”

Yuri and Grendel exchanged glances. Yuri said, “What’s your second message?”

Alexei grinned. “Something Ellie von Devender has dug out of the Pit. ‘The most common glyph sequence’—Myra, she said you’d understand that. She’ll explain to the rest of us when you get back.”

“Show us,” said Myra.

Alexei’s face disappeared, and the screen filled with four stark symbols:

They reached New Chicago around noon.

There was a proper rail station here, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy actual tickets.