Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Bisesa felt oddly glad she had opted to wear her purple Babylonian clothes, as had Abdi, despite the offer of a more formal “suit”

by Emeline. She felt she wanted to keep her own identity here.

She whispered to the others, “So this is 1920s Chicago. I think I’m expecting Al Capone.”

Her phone murmured, “In 1894 Capone was in New York. He couldn’t be here now—”

“Oh, shut up.” She said to Emeline, “Tell me about Mayor Jacob Rice.”

“He’s only about thirty — born after the Freeze.”

“And the son of a mayor?”

Emeline shook her head. “Not exactly…”

The hour of the Discontinuity had been shocking for Chicagoans. After all it had started snowing, in July. Excited steve-dores reported icebergs on Lake Michigan. And from their offices in the upper floors of the Rookery and the Montauk, businessmen looked north to see a line of bone white on the horizon. The mayor had been out of town. His deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

Things deteriorated quickly in those first days. As the food riots worsened, as old folks began to freeze, as the suburbs began to burn, the deputy mayor made his best decision. Recognizing the limits of his own capacity, he formulated an Emergency Committee, a representative sample of the city’s leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago’s powerful unions. Here too was Jane Addams, “Saint Jane,” a noted social reformer who ran a women’s refuge called Hull House, and Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey.

And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the Columbian Guard, a dedicated police force for the world’s fair, only a year before. The deputy mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

Under martial law, the Committee clamped down on the gathering crime wave, and tidied up the deputy mayor’s hasty rationing and curfew proclamations. Rice established new medical centers, where a brisk triage system was put in place, and emergency cemeteries were opened up. And as the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swaths, they began to plan for the future.

Emeline said, “Eventually the Emergency Committee functions got subsumed back into the mayor’s office, but Rice himself was never elected.”

“But now his son is the mayor,” Abdi murmured. “An un-elected leader, the son of a leader. I smell a dynasty here.”

“We can’t afford the paper for elections,” Emeline said primly.

Mayor Rice bustled in. He was followed by a small posse of nervous-looking men, clerks perhaps, though one older man carried a briefcase.

“Miss Dutt? And Mister — ah — Omar. Good to meet you. And to see you again, Mrs. White…”

Jacob Rice was a plump young man dressed in a fine suit that showed no sign of patching. His black hair was slicked back, perhaps by some kind of pomade, and his face was sharp, his cold blue eyes intent. He served them brandy in finely cut glass.

“Now look here, Miss Dutt,” he began briskly. “It’s good of you to see me, and all. I make a point of speaking to every visitor to the city from outside, even though they’re mostly those Greek sort of fellows who are good for nothing but a history lesson, along with a few British from about our own time — isn’t that right?”

“The North — West Frontier time slice was from 1885,” she said.

“I got caught up in it. But in fact I was from—”

“The year of Our Lord 2037.” He tapped a letter on the desk before him. “Mrs. White here was good enough to tell me a good deal about you. But I’ll be frank with you, Miss Dutt; I’m only interested in your biography, no matter what time you come from, in-sofar as it affects me and my town. I’m sure you can see that.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now you come here first of all with news that the world is ending. Is that right?”

The older man among the cowed-looking array behind him raised a finger. “Not quite, Mr. Mayor. The lady’s claim is that the universe is coming to an end. But the implication is, of course, that it will take our world with it.” He chuckled softly, as if he had made an amusing academic point.

Rice stared at him. “Well, if that isn’t the all-mightiest nitpick-ing quibble of all time. Miss Dutt, this here is Gifford Oker—

professor of astronomy at our brand-new University of Chicago.

Or it was brand new when we all got froze. I invited him here because it seems you have some astronomical stuff to talk about, and he’s the nearest thing to an expert we got.”

About fifty, grayed, his face all but hidden behind thick spectacles and a ragged mustache, Oker was clutching a battered leather briefcase. His suit was shabby with frayed cuffs and lapels, and his elbows and knees padded with leather. “I can assure you that my credentials are not to be questioned. At the time of the Freeze I was a student under George Ellery Hale, the noted astronomer—

perhaps you’ve heard of him? We were hoping to establish a new observatory at Williams Bay, which would have featured a suite of modern instruments, including a forty-inch refractor — it would have been the largest such telescope in the world. But it wasn’t to be, of course, it wasn’t to be. We have been able to maintain a program of observations with telescopes that were preserved within the ‘time slice,’ as you put it, Miss Dutt, necessarily smaller and less powerful. And we have performed some spectroscopy, whose results are — well, surprising.”

Abdi leaned forward. “Professor, I myself have practiced astronomy in Babylon. We obtained the results that are in part the basis of Bisesa’s prediction. We must exchange information.”

“Certainly.”

Rice glanced at Emeline’s letter. He read slowly, “ ‘The recession of the distant stars.’ This is what you’re talking about.”

“That’s right,” Abdi said. “Simply put, it’s as if the stars are fleeing from the sun in all directions.”

Rice nodded. “Okay. I got that. So what?”

Oker sighed. He took off his spectacles, to reveal deep-set, weary eyes, and rubbed the lenses on his tie. “You see, Mr. Mayor, the problem is this. Why should the sun be uniquely located at the center of such an expansion? It violates the most basic principles of mediocrity. Even though we have been through the Freeze, the most extraordinary event in recorded history, such principles surely still hold true.”

Bisesa studied this Professor Oker, wondering how much he could understand. He obviously had a keen enough mind, and had managed to sustain an academic career, of sorts, in the most extraordinary of circumstances. “So what’s your interpretation, sir?”

He replaced his spectacles and looked at her. “That we are not privileged observers. That if we were living on a world of Alpha Centauri we would observe the same phenomenon — that is to say, we would see the distant nebulae receding from us uniformly. It can only mean that the ether itself is expanding — that is, the invisible material within which all the stars swim. The universe is blowing up like a pudding in an oven, and the stars, like currants embedded in that pudding, are all receding from each other. But to each currant it would seem as if it was the sole point of stillness at the center of the explosion…”

Bisesa’s knowledge of relativity was restricted to a module in a college course decades ago — that and science fiction, and you couldn’t trust that. But the Chicago time slice had come when Einstein was only fifteen years old; Oker could know nothing of relativity. And relativity was founded on the discovery that the ether, in fact, didn’t exist.