Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Waiting for Bella in the living room were the generations of Phillippa’s family. They stood when Bella came into the room, lined up before a softwall showing an image of a pretty Scottish lake. Bella had carefully and nervously memorized all their names. Phillippa’s two surviving sons, Paul and Julian, were solid, awkward-looking thirty-something men. Their wives stood by their sides. This slim, pretty woman of twenty-six was Cassie, the widow of the missing son James, and his two children, boy and girl, six and five, Toby and Candida. They were all dressed for a funeral, in black and white, even the children. And they all had ident tattoos on their cheeks.

The little girl’s was a pretty pink flower.

Standing before this group, under the stares of the children, Bella suddenly had no idea what to say.

Phillippa came to her rescue. “It’s most awfully good of you to come.” Her accent was authentic British upper class, a throwback to another age, rich with composure and command. Phillippa said to her grandchildren, “Doctor Fingal is the head of the Space Council. She’s very important. And she flew from America, just to see us.”

“Well, that’s true. And to give you this.” Bella nodded to her guards, and the woman handed her the leather case. Bella opened this carefully, and set it up on a low coffee table. A disc of delicate, sparkling fabric sat on a bed of black velvet.

The children were wide-eyed. The boy asked, “Is it a medal?”

And Candida asked, “Is it for Daddy?”

“Yes. It’s for your father.” She pointed to the medal, but did not touch it; it looked like spiderweb embedded with tiny electronic components. “Do you know what it’s made of?”

“Space shield stuff,” Toby said promptly.

“Yes. The real thing. It’s called the Tooke Medal. There’s no higher honor you can earn, if you live and work in space, than this.

I knew Bud Tooke. I worked with him, up on the shield. I know how much he would have admired your daddy. And it’s not just a medal. Do you want to see what it can do?”

The boy was skeptical. “What?”

She pointed. “Just touch this stud and see.”

The boy obeyed.

A hologram shimmered into life over the tabletop, eclipsing the medal in its case. It showed a funeral scene, a flag-draped coffin on a caisson drawn by six tiny black horses. Figures in dark blue uniforms stood by. The sound was tinny but clear, and Bella could hear the creak of the horses’ harnesses, their soft hoofbeats.

The silent children loomed like giants over the scene. Cassie was weeping silently; her brother comforted her. Phillippa Duflot watched, composed.

The recording skipped forward. Three rifle volleys cracked, and a flight of tiny, glittering jet aircraft swept overhead, one peeling away from the formation.

“It’s Dad’s funeral,” Toby said.

“Yes.” Bella leaned down to face the children. “They buried him at Arlington. That’s in Virginia — America — where the U.S.

Navy has its cemetery.”

“Dad trained in America.”

“That’s right. I was there, at the funeral, and so was your mummy. This hologram is generated by the shield element itself—”

“Why did one plane fly away like that?”

“It’s called the Missing Man formation. Those planes, you know, Toby. They were T-38s. The first astronauts used them to train on. They’re over a hundred years old, imagine that.”

“I like the little horses,” said Candida.

Their uncle put his hands on their shoulders. “Come away now.”

With some relief, Bella straightened up.

Drinks arrived, sherry, whiskey, coffee, tea, served by a subdued young aunt. Bella accepted a coffee and stood with Phillippa.

“It was kind of you to speak to them like that,” Phillippa said.

“It’s my job, I guess,” Bella said, embarrassed.

“Yes, but there are ways of doing it well, or badly. You’re new to it, aren’t you?”

Bella smiled. “Six months in. Does it show?”

“Not at all.”

“Deaths in space are rare.”

“Yes, thank God,” Phillippa said. “But that’s why it’s been so hard to take. I had hoped this new generation would be protected from — well, from what we went through. I read about you. You were actually on the shield.”

Bella smiled. “I was a lowly comms tech.”

Phillippa shook her head. “Don’t do yourself down. You ended up with a battlefield promotion to mission commander, didn’t you?”

“Only because there was nobody else left to do it by the end of that day.”

“Even so, you did your job. You deserve the recognition you’ve enjoyed.”

Bella wasn’t sure about that. Her subsequent career, as an executive in various telecommunications corporations and regulatory bodies, had no doubt been given a healthy boost by her notoriety, and usefulness as a PR tool. But she’d always tried to pull her weight, until her retirement, aged fifty-five — a short one as it turned out, until she was offered this new role, a position she couldn’t turn down.

Phillippa said, “As for me I was based in London during the build-up to the storm. Worked in the mayor’s office, on emergency planning and the like. But before the storm itself broke, my parents took me out to the shelter at L2.”

The shield had been poised above the Earth at the point of per-petual noon, at L1, the first Lagrangian point of gravitational stability directly between Earth and sun. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the same Earth-sun line, but on the planet’s far side, at the midnight point. So while the workers at L1 labored to shelter the world from the storm, at L2 an offworld refuge hid safe in Earth’s shadow, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types — including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals.

The story of L2 had subsequently become a scandal.

“It wasn’t a pleasant place to be,” Phillippa murmured. “I tried to work. We were ostensibly a monitoring station. I kept up the comms links to the ground stations. But some of the rich types were throwing parties.”

“It sounds as if you didn’t have a choice,” Bella said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“It’s kind of you to say that. Still, one must move on.”

James Duflot’s widow, Cassie, approached them tentatively.

“Thank you for coming,” she said awkwardly. She looked tired.

“You don’t need—”

“You were kind to the children. You’ve given them a day to remember.” She smiled. “They’ve seen your picture on the news. I think I’ll put away that hologram, though.”

“Perhaps that’s best.” Bella hesitated. “I can’t tell you much about what James was working on. But I want you to know that your husband gave his life in the best of causes.”

Cassie nodded. “In a way I was prepared for this, you know.

People ask me how it feels to have your husband fly into space. I tell them, you should try staying on Earth.”

Bella forced a smile.

“To tell you the truth we were going through a difficult time.

We’re Earthbound, Doctor Fingal. James just went up to space to work, not to live. This is home. London. And I went into town every day to work at Thule.” Bella had done her research; Thule, Inc., was a big multinational eco-recovery agency. “We’d talked vaguely of separating for a bit.” Cassie laughed with faint bitterness. “Well, I’ll never know how that particular story would have turned out, will I?”

“I’m sorry—”

“You know what I miss? His mails. His softscreen calls. I didn’t have him, you see, but I had the mails. And so in a way I don’t miss him, but I miss the mails.” She looked sharply at Bella. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”