Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“I’m not planning to quit until I get my mother back.”

“Fair enough. So I have the instinct that it’s right for me to ac-company you.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you along.”

“Okay,” he said gruffly. “But I’ve told you, my ice cores are much more interesting than anything the bloody Firstborn get up to.”

Yuri, in fact, was at a loss on the Maxwell. In the confines of the lightship’s living quarters he took up a lot of room, a bear of a man with his thick tied-back hair and bushy beard and ample gut. And he fretted, cut off from his beloved Mars. Most days he sent picky demands down to Wells to ensure his crew kept up their routine of monitoring, sampling, and maintenance. He tried to keep up with his own work; he had his softscreens, and a small portable lab, and even a set of samples of deep-core Martian ice. But as the days wore on his frustration grew. He wasn’t bad company, but he sank into himself.

As for Alexei, he was as self-contained as he had been since the moment Myra had met him. He had his own agenda, of which this jaunt to L5 was just the latest item. Clear-thinking, purposeful, he was content, even if he did get a bit bored when nobody played poker with him.

Myra was allowed to try to make contact with Charlie, or even with Eugene, provided she didn’t give away anything sensitive. But her child and ex-husband weren’t to be found even by AI search facilities that spanned the solar system. Either that or they were hiding from her. She kept on looking, fitfully, increasingly depressed at the negative results.

They were a silent and antisocial crew.

But as she settled into the journey, Myra found she was glad to have been lifted up back into the light.

She had gotten used to life at the Martian pole, with its endless night and its lid of unrelenting smoggy cloud. But now she gloried in the brilliant, unfiltered sunlight that swamped the ship. She was of the generation that had lived through the sunstorm, and she suspected she had been wary of the sun ever since. Now she felt, oddly, as if the sun had at last welcomed her back. No wonder half the Spacers were becoming sun-worshipers.

So she made her calls to Charlie, and exercised, and read books, and watched virtual dramas, her skin bathed in the sunlight that blew her toward the orbit of the Earth.

Before the time delays got too long, Myra spoke to Ellie, back on Mars.

“Ellie, you’re a physicist. Help me understand something.

What is Mir? How can another universe exist? Where is my mother? ”

“Do you want the short answer, or the long?”

“Try both.”

“Short answer — I don’t know. Nobody does. Long answer—

our physics isn’t advanced enough yet to give us more than glimpses, analogies maybe, of the deeper truths the Firstborn must possess. What do you know about quantum gravity?”

“Less than you can imagine. Try me with an analogy.”

“All right. Look — suppose we threw your mother into a black hole, a big one. What happens to her?”

Myra thought about it. “She’s lost forever.”

“Okay. But there are two problems with that. First, you’re saying your mother, or more importantly the information that defines your mother, has been lost to the universe…” More importantly.

That was classic Ellie. “But that violates a basic rule of quantum mechanics, which says that information always has to be conserved.

Otherwise any semblance of continuity from past to future could be lost. More strictly speaking, the Schrödinger wave equation wouldn’t work anymore.”

“Oh. So what’s the resolution?”

“Black holes evaporate. Quantum effects at the event horizon cause a hole to emit a drizzle of particles, carrying away its mass-energy bit by bit. And the information that once defined Bisesa is leaked back that way. The universe is saved, hurrah. You understand I’m speaking very loosely. When you get the chance, ask Thales about the holographic principle.”

“You said there were two problems,” Myra said hastily.

“Yes. So we get Bisesa’s information back. But what happens to Bisesa, from her point of view? The event horizon isn’t some brick wall in space. So in her view, the information that defines her isn’t trapped at the event horizon to be leaked away, but rides with her on into the hole’s interior.”

“Okay,” Myra said slowly. “So there are two copies of the mother-information, one inside the hole, one leaking away outside.”

“No. Can’t allow you that. Another basic principle: the cloning theorem. You can’t copy quantum information.”

Myra was starting to lose the thread. “So what’s the resolution to that?”

“Non-locality. In everyday life, locality is an axiom. I’m here, you’re over there, we can’t be in two places at once. But the resolution of the black hole conundrum is that a bit of information can be in two places at once. Sounds paradoxical, but a lot of features of the quantum universe are like that — and quantum gravity is even worse.

“And the two places in which the information exists, separated by a ‘horizon’ like the event horizon, can be far apart — light-years.

The universe is full of horizons; you don’t need a black hole to make one.”

“And you think that Mir—”

“We believe the Firstborn are able to manipulate horizons and the non-locality of information in order to ‘create’ their baby universes, and to ‘transfer’ your mother and other bits of cargo between them. How they do this, we don’t know. And what else they’re capable of, we don’t know either. We can’t even map limits to their capabilities, actually.” Ellie paused. “Does that answer your question?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I need to absorb it.”

“Just thinking through this stuff is revolutionizing physics.”

“Well, that’s a consolation.”

“We found them, Mum. Just where your astronomers predicted.

“It wasn’t a great diversion for the Liberator. To tell the truth we were glad of a chance to give the main drive a shakedown — and for a change of view out of the windows. Up here it’s not like the dramas. Space is empty… ”

It was a fleet of ships, slim pencils slowly rotating, glowing in the light of a distant sun. Moving through the wastes beyond the asteroids, they were moving too rapidly to be drawn back by the sun’s gravity; they were destined for an interstellar journey.

“They’re human,” John Metternes said.

“Oh, yes.”

John peered at the images. “They have red stars painted on their hulls. Are they Chinese?”

“Probably. And probably abandoning the solar system altogether.”

Edna expanded the image. The ships were a variety of designs, seen close to.

She downloaded analysis and speculation from Libby.

“They don’t seem to have anything like our antimatter drive,”

she read. “Even if they did, the journey time would still be years.

There are probably only a few, if any, conscious crew aboard each of those ships. The rest may be in suspended animation; the ships may be flying Hibernacula. Or they may be stored as frozen zygotes, or as eggs plus sperm…” She scrolled down through increasingly baroque suggestions. “One exotic possibility is that there is no human flesh at all aboard the arks. Maybe they’re just carrying DNA strands. Or maybe the informational equivalent is being held in some kind of radiation-tolerant memory store. Not even any wet chemistry.”

“And then you’d manufacture your colonists at the other end.

Look, my bet is they’re using a variety of strategies for the sake of a robust mission design,” said John the engineer. “After all their bid for Mars failed. So they are giving up on the solar system.”