Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

The Q-bomb could become master of this world. But the cry it had heard caused it conflict. Conflict that had to be resolved by a decision.

The bomb marshaled its cold thoughts, brooding over its still untested powers.

And it turned away.

Bisesa and Emeline stepped out of the apartment for the last time.

They were both laden with backpacks and valises. The sky was a lid, but at least it wasn’t snowing.

Emeline locked up her apartment carefully, and tucked the keys away in a pocket in her thick fur coat. Of course she would never come this way again, and it wouldn’t be long before the ice came and crushed the building. But Emeline locked up even so.

Bisesa said nothing; she would have done exactly the same.

Bisesa made sure one more time that she had brought out the only possession of real importance to her: her phone, tucked into an inside pocket with its spacesuit battery packs.

Then they set off for Michigan Avenue.

Michigan, a canyon of concrete and brick running between blackened skyscrapers and shut-up stores, was always a wind tunnel, and Emeline and Bisesa turned away from the north to protect their eyes.

But the procession was already gathering, thousands of people standing around in the frozen mud, gradually forming up into an orderly column. Bisesa hadn’t known there were still so many left in Chicago. There were carriages of every kind, from farmyard carts to graceful phaetons and stanhopes, with those stocky Arctic-adapted horses harnessed up. Even the city’s grip-car streetcars were standing ready to roll one last time, full of passengers.

Most people, though, were on foot, with bundles on their backs or in barrows, and with their children or grandchildren holding their hands. Many of the Chicagoans were bundled up in their Arctic furs, but today some defied the elements and wore what looked like their Sunday best, frock coats and sweeping gowns, top hats and fur coats. Even the city’s many prostitutes had come out into the light. With painted lips and rouged cheeks and defiant flashes of ankle or cleavage, they laughed and flirted like colourful birds.

There was an excited buzz of conversation.

The parade was to be led by gleaming black carriages that lined up outside the Lexington Hotel. These would carry the city’s dignitaries, principally Mayor Rice’s relatives and allies. Thomas Edison, it was rumored, was wrapped up in blankets in a carriage of his own design, heated and lit by a portable electric generator.

Rice’s own carriage of polished wood and black ribbon was at the very head of the procession, and Bisesa was astounded to see that it was to be drawn by a woolly mammoth. The animal was restless. It raised its head with that odd bulge over the crown, and its long tusks curled bright in the air. As its nervous handlers beat at it with rods and whips, it trumpeted, a brittle call that echoed from the windows of the skyscrapers. It was quite a stunt for Rice, Bisesa admitted grudgingly — just as long as the mammoth didn’t wreck the carriage it was supposed to haul.

The whole thing was a spectacle, just as it was meant to be, and Bisesa admired Rice and his advisors for setting it up this way, and for choosing the date. On Mir this was July 4, according to the calendars devised by the university astronomers.

But this Independence Day parade was actually the final abandonment of old Chicago. These were not revelers but refugees, and they faced a great trial, a long walk all the way down through the suburbs and out of the city, heading south, ever south, to a hopeful new home beyond the ice. Even now there were some who refused to join the flight, hooligans and hedonists, drunks and deadbeats, and a few stubborn types who simply wouldn’t leave their homes.

Few expected these refuseniks to survive another winter.

Human life would go on here, then. But today saw the end of civilized Chicago. And beyond the bright human chatter Bisesa could hear the growl of the patient ice.

Emeline led Bisesa to their place among the respectable folk who massed behind the lead carriages. Drummers waited in a block, shivering, their mittened hands clutching their sticks.

They quickly found Harry and Joshua, Emeline’s sons. Harry, the older son and walkaway, had returned to help his mother leave the city. Bisesa was glad to see them. Both tall, lean, well-muscled young men, dressed in well-worn coats of seal fur and with their faces greased against the cold, they looked adapted for the new world. With the boys, Bisesa thought her own chances of surviving this trek were much improved.

Gifford Oker came pushing out of the crowd to meet them. He was encased in an immense black fur coat, with a cylindrical hat pulled right down to his eye line. He carried only a light backpack with cardboard tubes protruding from it. “Madam Dutt, Mrs.

White. I’m glad to have found you.”

Emeline said playfully, “You’re not too heavily laden, Professor.

What are these documents?”

“Star charts,” he said firmly. “The true treasure of our civilization. A few books too — oh, what a horror it was that we were not able to empty the libraries! For once a book is lost to the ice, a little more of our past is gone forever. But as to my personal effects, my pots and pans, I have my own troop of slave bearers to help me with all that. They are called graduate students.”

Another stiff professor’s joke. Bisesa laughed politely.

“Madam Dutt, I suppose you know that Jacob Rice is looking for you. He’ll wait until the procession is underway. But he wants you to come see him in his carriage. He has Abdikadir at his side already.”

“He does? I had hoped Abdikadir would be with you.” Abdi had been working on astronomy projects with Oker and his students.

But Oker shook his head. “What the mayor asks for, the mayor gets.”

“I suppose it might be worth a ride in the warmth for a bit.

What does he want?”

Oker cocked an eyebrow. “I think you know. He wants to drain your knowledge of Alexander and his Old World empire. Sarissae and steam engines — I admit I’m intrigued myself!”

She smiled. “He’s still dreaming of world domination?”

“Look at it from Rice’s point of view,” Oker said. “This is the completion of one great project, the migration from the old Chicago to the new, a work that has consumed his energies for years. Jacob Rice is still a young man, and a hungry and energetic one, and I suppose we should be glad of that or we surely wouldn’t have got as far as this. Now he looks for a new challenge.”

“This world is a pretty big place,” Bisesa said. “Room enough for everybody.”

“But not infinite,” Oker said. “And after all we have already made tentative contacts across the ocean. Rice is no Alexander, I’m convinced of that, but neither he nor the Great King are going to submit to the other.

“And, you know, there may be something worth fighting for.

Rice has accepted what you and Abdikadir have said of the future.

He has demanded of his scientists, specifically of me, to explore ways to avert the end of the universe — or perhaps even to escape it.”

“Wow. He does think big.”

“And, you see, he suspects that the dominance of this world may be a necessary first step to saving it.”

Rice might actually be right, Bisesa thought. If the only way back to Earth was through the Eye in Babylon, war over possession of that city might ultimately be inevitable.

Oker sighed. “The trouble is, however, that once you are in the pocket of a man like Rice, it’s hard to climb out again. I should know,” he said ruefully. “And you must decide, Bisesa Dutt, what you want.”