Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

The shuttle turned with a remote clatter of attitude thrusters and nestled belly-down on the curving hull of Aurora ’s habitable compartment. The sun was directly below Bella now, casting vertical shadows, and through a small window set over her head she saw the Earth, a blue lantern hanging directly opposite the position of the sun. Earth was full, of course; it always was, as seen from L1.

She wished she could see it more clearly.

With the docking complete, the shuttle closed its systems down.

“Welcome to Aurora 2, and the Shield Memorial Station.”

The soft female voice sent a shiver of familiarity through Bella.

This was different from all her previous visits. “Hello, Athena.

Welcome home.”

“Bella. It’s good to speak to you again. Please come aboard.”

A hatch opened in the floor. Bella released her seat restraint and floated into the air.

Alexei Carel and Lyla Neal were waiting for them on the bridge of Aurora.

This was the ship’s single most prestigious site, the location where Bud Tooke had once masterminded the salvation of the Earth. Now it was a museum, and the antique-looking softscreen displays, headsets, clipboards, and other bits of detritus from the days of crisis had been lovingly preserved under layers of transparent plastic. It always made Bella feel old to come back here.

Bill Carel was the last to come through onto the bridge. Clumsy in microgravity, evidently feeble, he looked oddly comical in his orange jumpsuit. But when he faced his son his expression was twisted. “You bloody little fool. And you, Lyla. You betrayed me.”

Alexei and Lyla clung to each other, drifting a little in the microgravity, nervous, defiant. Alexei was a skinny kid, only twenty-seven, and Lyla looked even younger. But then, reflected Bella, all true Spacers were just kids.

Alexei said, “We don’t see it like that, Dad. We did what we had to do. What we thought was best.”

“You spied on me,” Carel snapped. “You stole my work. You were a brilliant student, Lyla. Brilliant. And you’ve come to this.”

Lyla was cooler than her lover. “We were forced into it by your own actions, sir. You kept secrets. You wouldn’t tell people what they needed to know. You lied! If we were at fault, so were you.”

“And that,” Bella broke in, “is the first sensible thing anybody’s said.”

“I agree,” Athena said dryly. “Perhaps you should all sit down.

A small educational area has been set aside at the rear of the bridge…”

It was a plastic table, its top drenched with kid-friendly sunstorm info, with small seats set around it with microgravity bars to hook your feet onto. The five of them sat here, over the glimmering primary colors of the table, glowering.

“Well, I’m glad to be here, at any rate,” Athena said.

Bella looked up. “Was that a joke, Athena?”

“You remember me, Bella. I always was a joker.”

“You thought you were. So you’re pleased we brought you home from Cyclops.” If a distributed intelligence like Athena could be said to “be” anywhere, she, or rather her most complete definition, was now lodged in a secure memory store in one of Aurora ’s abandoned engine rooms.

Athena said, “I was made welcome at Cyclops. I was protected there. But I was born to run the shield, born to be here. Of course I, this copy of me, have no memory of the sunstorm itself. It is actually educational for me to be here, to access the data stores. To learn what happened that day, as if I were any other visitor. It is humbling.”

“And may I humbly ask,” Bob Paxton asked sourly, “why the fuck you have dragged us all up here?” It was the first time he had spoken since coming aboard.

Bella laid her hand flat on the table, a gentle gesture that nevertheless commanded their attention. “Because this is neutral ground for Earthborn and Spacers, or as near as I could come up with.

Somehow we seem to have gotten through the Q-bomb crisis, though we fought like cats in a sack in the process. Well, now we need a new way of getting along.”

Alexei said, “I heard you’re standing down after Christmas.”

“More than that,” Paxton growled. “Madam Chair here is probably going to face a war crimes tribunal. As, in fact, am I.”

Lyla frowned. “But what of the attacks on the elevators? Who’s going to be held responsible for that?”

“I am happy to stand trial,” Athena said firmly, “if it will protect those whose actions I influenced.”

Alexei laughed. “They can’t put an AI on trial.”

“Of course they can,” Bella said. “Athena has rights. She is a Legal Person (Non-Human). But with rights come responsibilities.

She can be tried, just as much as I can be. Though I don’t think anybody has worked out what her sentence might be, if she’s found guilty…”

Athena said, “These trials will be played out in full public view, before courts representing both Earth and Spacer communities.

Whatever the outcome I hope it will be part of the reconciliation process. The healing.”

Bella said, “We all did what we thought we had to do. But that’s all in the past. The Q-bomb changed everything. It’s all different now.”

Lyla studied her curiously. “Different how?”

“For one thing, the politics…”

The species-wide debate forced by Athena on the decision to deflect the bomb had been a brief, traumatic shock to the political system. Perhaps it was a culmination of tensions that had been building up for decades among an increasingly interconnected mankind. Afterward, it hadn’t proven possible to shut down the debate.

“Everything is fluid, since the vote. There are new factions, new interest and protest groups, new sorts of lobbies. On Earth the last barriers between the old nations are being kicked down. Across the system people are ignoring the old categories, and are uniting with others with whom they find common cause, whichever world they happen to live on. An interconnected democracy is taking over, a mass, self-correcting wisdom, whether we like it or not.

Maybe it was good that our first great exercise in using our collective voice was over something we could pretty much unite around — in the end, perhaps, the Firstborn have done us a favor.

But that voice hasn’t been stilled.”

Alexei faced his father. “Look, Dad. Things have got to change in space, too. I mean the relationship between Spacers and Earth.”

“Between you and me, you mean,” said Bill Carel.

“That too. The idea that Earth can impose its will on space is a fantasy, no matter how many antimatter warships you build.”

In December 2070, there had been no declaration of independence; there were no Spacer nations, and at present all Spacers were colonists, formally owing their allegiance to one of Earth’s old nations or another. The Spacers had their own internal rivalries, of course. But as they looked back to an Earth reduced to a blue lamp in the sky, if they could see it at all, it was increasingly difficult for them to think of themselves as American Spacers versus Albanian, British Spacers versus Belgian…

“ ‘Spacer’ is an absurd label, really. A negative one that actually means ‘not of Earth.’ We’re all different, and we all have our own opinions.”

“You got that right,” Bob Paxton growled. “More opinions than fucking Spacers.”

“My point is, you can’t control us anymore. We can’t even control ourselves — and wouldn’t want to. We’re on a new road, Dad, and even we don’t know where it will lead.”

“Or what you will become,” said Carel. “But I have to let you go come what may, don’t I?”