Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

The apartment’s rooms were like nests, the walls and floors and ceilings thick with blankets and furs. Improvised chimney stacks had been punched in the walls to let the smoke out, but even so the surfaces were covered with soot. But there was some gentility. In the living room and parlor stood upright chairs and small tables, delicate pieces of furniture, clearly worn but lovingly maintained.

Emeline served them tea. It was made from Indian leaves from carefully hoarded thirty-year-old stock. By such small preserva-tions these Chicagoans were maintaining their identity, Bisesa supposed.

They hadn’t been back long when one of Emeline’s two sons showed up. Aged around twenty he was the younger by a year, called Joshua after his father. He came in carrying a string of fish; breathing hard, red-faced, he had been out on Lake Michigan.

Once he had peeled out of his furs he turned out to be a tall young man, taller than his father had ever been. And yet he had something of Josh’s openness of expression, Bisesa thought, his curiosity and eagerness. He seemed healthy, if lean. His right cheek was marked by a discolored patch that might have been a frostbite scar, and his face glistened with an oil that turned out to be an extract of seal blubber.

Emeline took the fish away to skin and gut. She returned with another cup of tea for Joshua. He politely took the cup, and swigged the hot tea down in one gulp.

“My father told me about you, Miss Dutt,” Joshua said uncertainly to Bisesa. “All that business in India.”

“We came from different worlds.”

“My father said you were from the future.”

“Well, so I am. His future, anyhow. Abdikadir’s father came through with me too. We were from the year 2037, around a hundred and fifty years after your father’s time slice.”

His expression was polite, glazed.

“I suppose it’s all a bit remote to you.”

He shrugged. “It just doesn’t make any difference. All that history isn’t going to happen now, is it? We won’t have to fight in your world wars, and so on. This is the world we’ve got, and we’re stuck with it. But that’s fine by me.”

Emeline pursed her lips. “Joshua rather enjoys life, Bisesa.”

It turned out he worked as an engineer on the rail lines out of New Chicago. But his passion was ice-fishing, and whenever he got time off he came back up to the old city to get into his furs and head straight out on the ice.

“He even writes poems about it,” Emeline said. “The fishing, I mean.”

The young man colored. “Mother—”

“He inherited that from his father, at least. A gift for words.

But of course we’re always short of paper.”

Bisesa asked, “What about his brother — your older son, Emeline? Where is he?”

Her face closed up. “Harry went walkaway a couple of years back.” This was clearly distressing to her; she hadn’t mentioned it before. “He said he’d call back, but of course he hasn’t — they never do.”

Joshua said, “Well, he thinks he’s going to be put under arrest if he comes back.”

“Mayor Rice declared an amnesty a year ago. If only he’d get in touch, if only he’d come back just for a day, I could tell him he has nothing to fear.”

They spoke of this a little, and Bisesa began to understand.

Walkaway: some of Chicago’s young people, born on Mir and se-duced by the extraordinary landscape in which they found themselves, had chosen to abandon their parents’ heroic struggle to save Chicago, and the even more audacious attempt to build a new city south of the ice. They simply walked off, disappearing into the white, or the green of the grasslands to the south.

“It’s said they live like Eskimos,” said Joshua. “Or maybe like Red Indians.”

“Some of them even took reference books from the libraries, and artifacts from the museums, so they could work out how to live,” Emeline said bitterly. “No doubt many of these young fools are dead by now.”

It was clear this was a sore point between mother and son; perhaps Joshua dreamed of emulating his older brother.

Emeline cut the conversation short by standing to announce she was off to the kitchen to prepare lunch: they would be served Joshua’s fish, cleaned and gutted, with corn and green vegetables imported from New Chicago. Joshua took his leave, going off to wash and change.

When they had gone, Abdi eyed Bisesa. “There are tensions here.”

“Yes. A generation gap.”

“But the parents do have a point, don’t they?” Abdi said. “The alternative to civilization here is the Stone Age. These walkaways, if they survive, will be illiterate within two generations. And after that their only sense of history will be an oral tradition. They will forget their kind ever came from Earth, and if they remember the Discontinuity at all, it will become an event of myth, like the Flood.

And when the cosmic expansion threatens the fabric of the world—”

“They won’t even understand what’s destroying them.” But, she thought wistfully, maybe it would be better that way. At least these walkaways and their children might enjoy a few generations of harmony with the world, instead of an endless battle with it.

“Don’t you have the same kinds of conflict at home?”

Abdi paused. “Alexander is building a world empire. You can think that’s smart or crazy, but you’ve got to admit it’s something new. It’s hard not to be swept up. I don’t think we have too many walkaways. Not that Alexander would allow it if we did,” he added.

To Bisesa’s astonishment a telephone rang, somewhere in the apartment. It was an old-fashioned, intermittent, very uncertain ring, and it was muffled by the padding on the walls. But it was ringing. Telephones and newspapers: the Chicagoans really had kept their city functioning. She heard Emeline pick up, and speak softly.

Emeline came back into the lounge. “Say, it’s good news. Mayor Rice wants to meet you. He’s been expecting you; I wrote him from New Chicago. And he’ll have an astronomer with him,” she said grandly.

“That’s good,” Bisesa said uncertainly.

“He’ll see us this evening. That gives us time to shop.”

“Shop? Are you kidding?”

Emeline bustled out. “Lunch will be a half-hour. Help yourself to more tea.”

The Mars deck was like a corridor that rose gradually in either direction, so that as you walked there was the odd sense that you were always at the low point of a dip, never climbing out of it. The gravity was the easy one-third G Myra had got used to on Mars itself. The décor was Martian red-ocher, the plastic surfaces of the walls, the bits of carpet on the floor. There were even tubs of what looked like red Martian dirt with the vivid green of terrestrial plants, mostly cacti, growing incongruously out of them.

It was hard to believe she was in space, that if she kept on walking she would loop the loop and end up back in this spot.

Alexei was watching her reaction. “It’s typical Earthborn architecture,” he said. “Like the bio domes on Mars with the rainstorms and the zoos. They don’t see that you don’t need all this, that it just gets in the way…”

Certainly it all seemed a bit sanitized to Myra, like an airport terminal.

Lyla led the three of them to an office just off the main corridor.

It was nothing unusual, with a conference table, the usual softscreen facilities, a stand of coffee percolators and water jugs.

And here Athena spoke to them.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here today.”

Nobody laughed. Yuri dumped the bags in the corner of the conference room, and they helped themselves to coffee.