Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

But a Martian was not like a human.

Even her individuality was questionable. Her body was a community of cells, her form unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mold, perhaps, than a human. She had always been intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures that had drenched Mars. And she was not really a “she.” Her kind were not sexual as humans were.

But she had been a mother; she was more “she” than “he.”

There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and plains of Mars. They had never had names; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary.

She had been aware of every one of them, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral.

She was very aware that they had all gone, all of them. Hers was a loneliness no human could have imagined.

And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars’s own Q-bomb, had gone too.

Just before the Discontinuity she had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye.

To senses enhanced to “see” the distortion of space, the weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky toward the Martian pole.

And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage.

The Firstborn weapon was gone.

This time-sliced Mars was a ruin, the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering over an arid landscape sterilized by the sun’s ultraviolet. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, even their lights burning in some cases. But her fellows were gone. And when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities that had once inhabited this world. Scrapings that were her own last descendants.

She was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed.

The Martians had thought they came to understand the Firstborn, to a degree.

The Firstborn must have been very old.

They may even be survivors of the First Days, the Martians thought, an age that began just half a billion years after the Big Bang itself, when the universe turned transparent, and the light of the very first stars shone uncertainly. That was why the Firstborn triggered instabilities in stars. In their day, all the stars had been unstable.

And if they were old, they were conservative. To achieve their goals they caused stars to flare or go nova, or change their variability, not to detonate entirely. They sent their cosmological bombs to sterilize worlds, not to shatter them. They appeared to be trying to shut down energy-consuming cultures as economically as possible.

To understand why they did this, the Martians tried to look at themselves through the eyes of a Firstborn.

The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium — the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends.

And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.

Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.

From the Firstborn’s lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.

Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.

If you wanted to reach the very far future — the Last Days, when the surge of quintessence finally ended the age of matter — the restrictions were harsh. The Martians’ own calculations indicated that the universe could bear only one world as populous and energy-hungry as their own, one world in each of the universe’s hundred billion empty galaxies, if the Last Days were to be reached.

The Firstborn must have seen that if life were to survive in the very long term — if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future — discipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.

Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly, calm, disciplined. Sadly, that was rare.

Certainly they regretted what they did. They watched the destruction they wreaked, and constructed time-sliced samples of the worlds they ruined, and popped them in pocket universes. But the Martian knew that in this toy universe the positive of its mass-energy was balanced out by the negative of gravity. And when it died, as soon it must, the energy sums would cancel out, a whole cosmos lapsing to the abstraction of zero.

The Firstborn were economical even in their expressions of regret.

The Martians argued among themselves as to why the Firstborn were so intent on reaching the Last Days.

Perhaps it derived from their origin. Perhaps in their coming of awareness in the First Days they had encountered —another. One as far beyond their cosmos as they were beyond the toy universes in which they stored their time-slice worlds. One who would return in the Last Days, to consider what should be saved.

The Firstborn probably believed that in their universal cauter-ization they were being benevolent.

The last Martian pondered the signal from Mir.

Those on Mir had no wish to submit to the Firstborn’s hammer blow. Nor had the Martians wanted to see their culture die for the sake of a neurosis born when the cosmos was young. So they fought back. Just as the creatures from Mir, and its mother world in the parent universe, were trying to fight back now.

Her choice was clear.

It took her seven Martian days to make the preparations.

While she worked she considered her own future. She knew that this pocket cosmos was dying. She had no desire to die with it.

And she knew that her own only possible exit was via another Firstborn artifact, clearly visible in her enhanced senses, an artifact nestling on the third planet.

All that for the future.

Unfortunately the implosion of the spacetime cage would damage her spire of ice. She began the construction of a new one, some distance away. The work pleased her.

The new spire was no more than half-finished when, following the modifications she had made, the gravitational cage crushed the Firstborn Eye.

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a conduit of information.

When the Martian trap closed, the Eye there emitted a signal of distress. A shriek, transmitted to all its sister projections.

The Q-bomb was the only Firstborn artifact in the solar system, save for the Eye trapped in its Pit on Mars. And the Q-bomb sensed that shriek, a signal it could neither believe nor understand.

Troubled, it looked ahead.

There before the Q-bomb, a glittering toy, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples. Down there on that crowded globe, alarms were flashing across innumerable softscreens, the great telescopes were searching the skies — and an uncertain humanity feared that history was drawing to a close.