Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“They did that.”

“I never saw you as a social worker. You always wanted to be an astronaut!”

Myra scowled, as if she was being reminded of some indiscre-tion. “I grew out of that when I found out what was really going on.”

Apparently unconsciously, she touched the tattoo on her cheek.

It was in fact an ident tattoo, a compulsory registration introduced a few years after Bisesa went into the tank. Not a symptom of a no-tably free society.

“Wasn’t Eugene working on weather modification systems?”

“Yes, he was. But he pretty quickly got sidelined into weaponiza-tion. Weather modification as an instrument of political control. It’s never been used, but it’s there. We had long arguments about the mo-rality of what he was doing. I never lost the argument, but I never won, either. Eugene just didn’t get it.”

Bisesa sighed. “I remember that about him.”

“In the end his work was more important than I was.”

Bisesa was profoundly sorry to see this disappointment in a daughter who, from her point of view, had been a bright twenty-one-year-old only weeks ago.

She looked out of her window. Something was moving on the far side of the canyon. Camels, this time. “Not everything about this new world seems so bad to me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.

“I quite like the idea of camels and elephants wandering around North America — though I’m not quite sure why they’re here.”

“We’re in the middle of a Jefferson,” Myra said.

“Named for Jefferson the president?”

“I learned a lot more about the American presidents when I lived with Eugene’s family in Massachusetts,” Myra said dryly. The purposeful re-wilding of the world was an impulse that had come out of the aftermath of the sunstorm. “In fact Linda had something to do with devising the global program. She wrote me about it.”

“My cousin Linda?”

“She’s Dame Linda now.” A student of bioethics, Linda had shared a flat with Bisesa and Myra during the period before the sunstorm. “The point is, long before Columbus the first Stone Age immigrants knocked over most of the large mammals. So you had an ecology that was full of gaps evolution hadn’t had time to fill. ‘A concert in which so many parts are wanting.’ Thoreau said that, I think. Linda used to quote him. When the Spanish brought horses here, their population just exploded. Why? Because modern horses evolved here…”

In the new “Jefferson Parks” there had been a conscious effort to reconstruct the ecology as it had been at the end of the last Ice Age, by importing species that were close equivalents of those that had been lost.

Bisesa nodded. “African and Asian elephants for mammoths and mastodons.”

“Camels for the extinct camelids. More species of horses to flesh out the diversity. Even zebras, I think. For the ground sloths they brought in rhinos, herbivores of a similar mass and diet.”

“And lions as the capstone, I suppose.”

“Yes. There are more parks overseas. In Britain, half of Scot-land is being given over to native oak forest.”

Bisesa looked at the haughty camels. “I suppose it’s therapeutic.

But these are aftermath activities. Healing. I’ve woken up to find we still live in an aftermath world, after all this time.”

“Yes,” Myra said grimly. “And not every post-sunstorm response is as positive as building a Pleistocene park.

“Mum, people found out about the sunstorm. The truth. At first it was classified. Even the name ‘Firstborn’ was never made public.

There was no hint at the time that the sunstorm was an intentional act.”

Caused by the driving of a Jovian planet into the core of Earth’s sun.

“But the truth leaked out. Whistle-blowers. It became a torrent when the generation who had fought the storm headed for retirement, and had nothing to lose, and began to speak of what they knew.”

“I’m shocked there was a cover-up that lasted so long.”

“Even now there are plenty of people who don’t believe it, I think. But people are scared. And there are those in government, and in industry and other establishments, who are using that fear.

They are militarizing the whole of the Earth, indeed the solar system. They call it the War with the Sky.”

Bisesa snorted. “That’s ridiculous. How can you wage war on an abstraction?”

“I suspect that’s the point. It means whatever you want it to mean. And those who control the sky have a lot of power. Why do you think Thales is still stuck on the Moon?”

“Ah. Because nobody can get to him up there. And this is why you left?”

“Most of the gazillions they’re spending are simply wasted.

What’s worse, they’re not doing any serious research into what we do know of Firstborn technology. The Eyes. The manipulation of spacetime, the construction of pocket universes — all of that. Stuff that might actually be useful in the case of a renewed threat.”

“So that’s why you baled out.”

“Yes. I mean, it was fun, Mum. I got to go to the Moon! But I couldn’t swallow the lies. There are plenty on and off the planet who think the way I do.”

“Off the planet?”

“Mum, since the sunstorm a whole generation has been born offworld. Spacers, they call themselves.” She glanced at her mother, then looked away. “It was a Spacer who called me. And asked me to come fetch you.”

“Why?”

“Something’s coming.”

Those simple words chilled Bisesa.

A shifting light caught her eye. Looking up she saw that bright satellite cutting across the sky. “Myra — what’s that? It looks sort of old-fashioned, in among the space mirrors.”

“It’s Apollo 9. Or a recreation. That ship flew a hundred years ago today. The government is rerunning all those classic missions.

A remembrance of the lost times before the sunstorm.”

Conservation and memorials. Clinging to the past. It really was as if the whole world was still in shock. “All right. What do you want me to do?”

“If you’re fit, get packed up. We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?”

Myra smiled, a bit forced. “Off Earth…”

The motorcade drew up outside a property in a suburb called Chiswick.

Bella stepped out of her car, along with her two Council body-guards. They were a man and a woman, bulked up by body armor, like all their colleagues silent and anonymous. The woman carried a small package in a black leather case.

The car closed itself up.

Bella faced the Duflot home, gathering her courage. It was a faceless block of white concrete with rounded wind-deflecting corners, sunk into the ground as if it was too heavy for the London clay.

Its roof was a garden of wind turbines, solar cell panels, and antennae; its windows were small and deep. With subterranean rooms and independent power it was a house like a bunker. This was the domestic architecture of the fearful mid — twenty-first century.

Bella had to walk down a flight of steps to the front door. A slim woman in a sharp black suit was waiting.

“Ms. Duflot?”

“Doctor Fingal. Thank you for coming. Call me Phillippa…”

She extended a long-fingered hand.

Shadowed by her security people, Bella was brought through the house to the living room.

Phillippa Duflot must have been in her early sixties, a little older than Bella. Her silvered hair was cut short. Her face was not unattractive, but narrow, her mouth pursed. Phillippa looked capable of steely self-control, but this woman had lost a son, and the marks of that tragedy were in the lines around her eyes, Bella thought, and the tension in her neck.