Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

When the moment of launch came, the shuttle lifted without fuss. Mars gravity was light; it had always been easy to climb out of its gravity well. The dust kicked up from this last launch quickly fell back through the thin air to the ground, and the shuttle receded into the orange-brown sky, becoming a pale jewel, its vapor trail all but invisible.

“Well, that’s that,” said Paula. “How long until the light show?”

Yuri made to look at his watch, and then thought better of it.

“Not long. Do you want to go back into the rover, get out of these suits?”

None of them did. Somehow it seemed right to be out here, on the Martian ground, under its eerie un-blue sky.

Myra looked around. The landscape was just a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. But in a deep ditch not far away there was a mosslike vegetation, green. Life, returned to Mars by the sunstorm and cherished by human hands. She held tightly to her companions. “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this,” she said.

Yuri said, “Yes—”

And the light went, just like that, the sky darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. The sun rushed away, sucking all the light with it. The sky turned deep brown, and then charcoal, and then utterly black.

Myra stood in the dark, clinging to Yuri and Paula. She heard the cameras clatter about, confused.

It had only taken seconds.

“I hope the cameras got that,” Yuri murmured.

“It feels like a total eclipse,” Paula said. “I went to Earth once to see one. It was kind of exciting, oddly…”

Myra felt excited too, stirred in an unexpected way by this primeval, extraordinary event. Strange lights in the sky. But, standing there in the dark, she felt a flicker of fear when she reminded herself that the sun was never, ever going to shine on Mars again.

“So we’re alone in this universe,” Yuri said. “Us and Mars.”

The ground shuddered gently.

“Mars quake,” Paula said immediately. “We expected this. We just lost the sun’s tides. It will pass.”

The rover’s lights came on, flickering before settling to a steady glow. They cast a pool of light over the Martian ground, and Myra’s shadow stretched long before her.

And there was a circle in the air before her. Like a mirror, full of complex reflections, highlights from the rover’s lamps. Myra took a step forward, and saw her own reflection approach her.

The thing in the air was about a meter across. It was an Eye.

“You bastard,” Yuri said. “You bastard!” He bent awkwardly, picked up handfuls of Martian rocks, and hurled them at the Eye.

The rocks hit with a clatter that was dimly audible through the thin, cold air.

The ground continued to shake, the small, hard planet ringing like a bell.

And then a white fleck drifted past Myra’s faceplate. She followed it all the way down to the ground, where it sublimated away.

It was a snowflake.

Abdikadir Omar met them at the Temple of Marduk.

A loose crowd had gathered around the Temple precinct. Some even slept here, in lean-tos and tents. Vendors drifted slowly among them, selling food, water, and some kind of trinkets, holy tokens.

They were pilgrims, Abdi said, who had come from as far as Alexandria and Judea.

“And are they here for the Eye of Marduk?”

Abdi grinned. “Some come for the Eye. Some for Marduk himself, if they remember him. Some for Bisesa. Some even for the man-ape that’s in there with her.”

“Remarkable,” Grove said. “Pilgrims from Judea, come here to see a woman of the twenty-first century!”

Eumenes said, “I sometimes wonder if a whole new religion is being born here. A worship of the Firstborn, with Bisesa Dutt as their prophet.”

“I doubt that would be healthy,” Grove said.

“Man has worshipped destroying gods before. Come. Let us speak to Bisesa Dutt.”

Abdi escorted them through the crowd and into the temple’s convoluted interior, all the way up to the chamber of the Eye.

The small room with its scorched brick walls was utterly dominated by the Eye, which floated in the air. By the light of the oil lamps Grove saw his own reflection, absurdly distorted, as if by a fairground trick mirror. But the Eye itself was monstrous, ominous; he seemed to sense its gravity.

Bisesa had made a kind of nest in one corner of the chamber, of blankets and paper and clothes and bits of food. When Grove and the others walked in, she smiled and clambered to her feet.

And there was the man-ape. A lanky, powerful mature female, she sat squat in her cage, as still and watchful as the Eye itself. She had clear blue eyes. Grove was forced to turn away from her gaze.

“My word,” Batson said, holding his nose. “Ilicius Bloom wasn’t lying when he said the stink wasn’t him but the ape!”

“You get used to it,” Bisesa said. She greeted Batson with a warm handshake, and an embrace for Grove that rather embarrassed him. “Anyhow Grasper is company.”

“ ‘Grasper’?”

“Don’t you remember her, Grove? Your Tommies captured a man-ape and her baby on the very day of the Discontinuity. The Tommies called her ‘Grasper’ for the way she uses those hands of hers, tying knots out of bits of straw, for fun. On the last night before we tried sending me back to Earth through the Eye, I asked for them to be released. Well, I think this is that baby, grown tall. If these australopithecines live as long as chimps, say, it’s perfectly possible. I’ll swear she is more dexterous than I am.”

Grove asked, “How on earth does she come to be here?”

Eumenes said, “She rather made her own way. She was one of a pack that troubled the western rail links. This one followed the line all the way back to Babylon, and made a nuisance of herself in the farms outside the city. Kept trying to get to the city walls.

Wouldn’t be driven off. In the end they netted her and brought her into the city as a curiosity for the court. We kept her in Bloom’s cage, but the creature went wild. She wanted to go somewhere, that was clear.”

“It was my idea,” Abdi said. “We leashed her, and allowed her to lead us where she would.”

“And she came here,” Bisesa said. “Drawn here just as I was.

She seems peaceful enough here, as if she’s found what she wanted.”

Grove pondered. “I do remember how we once kept this man-ape and her mother in a tent we propped up under a floating Eye—

do you remember, Bisesa? Rather disrespectful to the Eye, I thought. Perhaps this wretched creature formed some sort of bond with the Eyes then. But how the devil would she know there was an Eye here ?”

“There’s a lot we don’t understand,” Bisesa said. “To put it mildly.”

Grove inspected Bisesa’s den with forced interest. “Well, you seem cheerful enough in here.”

“All mod cons,” she said, a term that baffled Grove. “I have my phone. It’s a shame Suit Five is out of power or that might have provided a bit more company too. And here’s my chemical toilet, scavenged from the Little Bird. Abdi keeps me fed and cleaned out.

You’re my interface to the outside world, aren’t you, Abdi?”

“Yes,” Grove said, “but why are you here?”

Eumenes said gravely, “You should know that Alexander thinks she is trying to find a way to use the Eye for his benefit. If not for the fact that the King believes Bisesa is serving his purposes, she would not be here at all. You must remember that when you meet him, Captain.”

“Fair enough. But what’s the truth, Bisesa?”

“I want to go home,” she said simply. “Just as I did before. I want to get back to my daughter, and granddaughter. And this is the only possible way. With respect, there’s nothing on Mir that matters to me as much as that.”