Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Myra sat down and looked up into the empty air challengingly.

“My mother always did say you had a reputation as a comedian.”

“Ah,” said Athena. “Aristotle called me skittish. I never had the chance to speak to Bisesa Dutt.” Her voice was steady, controlled.

“But I spoke to many of those who knew her. She is a remarkable woman.”

Myra said, “She always said she was an ordinary woman to whom remarkable things kept happening.”

“But others might have crumbled in the face of her extraordinary experiences. Bisesa continues to do her duty, as she sees it.”

“You speak of her in the present tense. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t know where she is.”

“But you suspect, don’t you, Myra?”

“I don’t understand how I’m talking to you. Why are you here ?”

“Watch,” Athena said gently.

The lights in the room dimmed a little, and a holographic image coalesced on the tabletop before them.

Ugly, bristling, it looked like some creature of the deep sea. In fact it was a denizen of space. It was called the Extirpator.

The day before the sunstorm, Athena had woken to find herself ten million kilometers from Earth. Aristotle and Thales, mankind’s other great electronic minds, were with her. They had been downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

The three of them huddled together, in an abstract electronic manner. And then—

When the images from Procyon died, they all needed a break.

They went out onto the Mars deck. Myra sipped a cola. While Yuri swung improvised pendulums to study the varying artificial gravity, Alexei and Lyla explored it. If you sat down, you were heavier than when you stood up. If you threw a ball any distance, it would be deflected sideways by the spin. And if you ran against the spin, you grew lighter. Laughing, they raced each other along the corridor in big Moonwalk bounds.

Watching them play, Myra was reminded just how young these Spacers all really were.

All of them were reluctant to go back and face Athena again, and talk about what she had discovered on a planet eleven light-years away.

“So those swimmers bred themselves to extinction,” Alexei said. “Sol, what a thing to do.”

Yuri said, “Better that than let the Firstborn win.”

“It took us two years to find a way to beam me back home,”

Athena said softly. “We didn’t want to broadcast our existence to a dangerous universe. So we put together an optical laser — quite powerful, but a tight beam. And when the time came, with my data stream encoded into it, we fired it off at Earth. We anticipated that it would be picked up by Cyclops, which was at the planning stage before the sunstorm.”

“It was risky,” Myra said. “If Cyclops hadn’t been built after all—”

“We had no choice but to make the gamble.”

Yuri asked, “Why you, of the three?”

Athena paused. “We drew lots, after a fashion.”

“And the others—”

“The signal took everything we had, everything Witness could give us. Though Witness lived, there was nothing left to sustain the others. They gave themselves for me.”

Myra wondered how Athena, an AI with such a complicated biography, felt about this. As the “youngest” of the three, it must have felt as if her parents had sacrificed themselves to save her. “It wasn’t just for you,” she said gently. “It was for all of us.”

“Yes,” Athena said. “And you see why I had to be sent home.”

Myra looked at Alexei. “And this is what you’ve kept from me for so many weeks.”

Alexei looked uncomfortable.

“It was my request, Myra,” Athena said smoothly.

Yuri was staring at his hands, which were splayed out on the table before him. He looked as stunned as Myra felt. She asked,

“What are you thinking, Yuri?”

“I’m thinking that we have crashed through a conceptual barrier today. Since the sunstorm there has always been something of a human-centered bias to our thinking about the Firstborn, I believe.

As if we implicitly assumed they were a threat aimed at us alone—

our personal nemesis. Now we learn that they have acted against others, just as brutally.” He lifted his hands and spread them wide in the air. “Suddenly we must think of the Firstborn as extensive in space and time. Shit, I need another coffee.” Yuri got up and shambled over to the percolators.

Alexei blew out his cheeks. “So now you know it all, Myra. What next?”

Myra said, “This material should be shared with the Earth authorities. The Space Council—”

Alexei pulled a face. “Why? So they can throw more atomic bombs, and arrest us all? Myra, they think too narrowly.”

Myra stared at him. “Didn’t we all work together during the sunstorm? But now here we are back in the old routine — they lie to you, you lie to them. Is that the way we’re all going into the dark?”

“Be fair, Myra,” Yuri murmured. “The Spacers are doing their best. And they’re probably right about how Earth would react.”

“So what do you think we should we do?”

Yuri said, “Follow the Martians’ example. They trapped an Eye — they struck back.” He laughed bitterly. “And as a result of that, right now the only bit of Firstborn technology we have is there on Mars, sitting under my ice cap.”

“Yes,” Athena said. “It seems that the focus of this crisis is the pole of Mars. I want you to return there, Myra.”

Myra considered. “And when we get there?”

“Then we must wait, as before,” Athena said. “The next steps are largely out of our hands.”

“Then whose?”

“Bisesa Dutt’s,” murmured Athena.

An alarm sounded, and the walls flashed red.

Lyla tapped her ident patch and listened to the air. “It’s the Astropol cops down on Earth deck,” she said. “We must have a leak.

They are coming for you, Myra.” She stood.

Myra followed her lead. She felt dazed. “They want me?

Why?”

“Because they think you will lead them to your mother. Let’s get out of here. We don’t have much time.”

They hurried from the room, Alexei muttering instructions to the Maxwell.

Shopping in Chicago turned out to be just that. Remarkably, you could stroll along Michigan Avenue and other thoroughfares, and inspect the windows of stores like Marshall Field’s where goods were piled up on display and mannequins modeled suits and dresses and coats. You could buy fur coats and boots and other cold-weather essentials, but Emeline would only look at “the fashion,” as she called them, which turned out to be relics of the stores’ 1890s stock, once imported from a vanished New York or Boston, lovingly preserved and much patched and repaired since. Bisesa thought Emeline would have been bewildered to be faced with the modernity of thirty-two years later on Earth, the fashions of 1926.

So they shopped. But the street outside Marshall Field’s was half-blocked by the carcass of a horse, desiccated, frozen in place where it had fallen. The lights in the window were smoky candles of seal blubber and horse fat. And though there were some young people around, they were mostly working in the stores. All the shoppers, as far as Bisesa could see, were old, Emeline’s age or older, survivors of the Discontinuity picking through these shabby, worn-out relics of a lost past.

Mayor Rice’s office was deep in the guts of City Hall.

Hard-backed chairs had been drawn up before a desk. Bisesa, Emeline, and Abdi sat in a row, and were kept waiting.

This room wasn’t swathed with insulation like Emeline’s apartment. Its walls were adorned with flock wallpaper and portraits of past dignitaries. A fire burned hugely in a hearth, and there was central heating too, a dry warmth supplied by heavy iron radi-ators, no doubt fed by some wood-burning monster of a furnace in the basement. A telephone was fixed to the wall, a very primitive sort, just a box with a speaking tube, and an ear trumpet you held to your head. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked, defiantly set to Chicago standard railway time, four p.m., just as it had been for thirty-two years, despite the difference of opinion expressed by the world outside.