Firstborn to-3 Read online

  The battle remained fortunately distant from the rail line, and the loco plowed on noisily into the gathering light, leaving the battle behind. But they hadn’t traveled much further before another threat loomed.

  “My word,” Emeline said, pointing. “Man-apes. Look, Bisesa!”

  Looking ahead of the train, Bisesa saw hunched figures on a low dune, silhouetted against the morning sky.

  Abdi said, “Sometimes they attack the trains for food. But they’re getting bolder. Following the tracks toward the city.”

  Purposefully, steadily, the man-apes descended the dune. They walked with a squat gait, their human-like legs under heavy gorilla-like torsos. Their movements were imbued with determination and menace.

  From the rattling, wheezing, slow-moving train, Bisesa watched uneasily. And then she thought she recognized the man-ape who led the advance. An animal with a memorable face, she was one of a pair, mother and infant, captured by Grove’s Tommies in the early days after the Discontinuity. Was this that same child? What had the men called her — Grasper? Well, if it was her, she was older, and scarred, and changed. Bisesa remembered how the captive man-apes, left alone with an Eye, had been subject to a Firstborn interaction of their own. Perhaps this was the result.

  Now Grasper raised her arms high in the air, and revealed the burden that had been concealed by her hirsute body. She carried a stout branch, and impaled upon it was the bloody head of a man.

  The mouth had been jammed open with a stick, and broken teeth gleamed white in the rays of the setting sun.

  Bisesa felt fear stab her heart. “I think I asked for that lead man-ape to be let loose, once I was gone into the Eye. What a mistake that was.”

  As the train came on them, the man-apes charged. They were met by a volley of arrows from the carriages, but the moving targets were hard to hit, and few man-apes fell. They hadn’t got their tim-ing quite right, however. As the locomotive’s whistle shrieked, hairy bodies hurled themselves at wooden carriages to be met by fists and clubs, and they couldn’t get purchase. One by one the man-apes fell away, capering and hooting in their frustration.

  Abdi said, “Well, we’re seeing it all today…”

  As the train left the man-ape troop behind, Bisesa’s phone beeped gently. She took it from her pocket, watched curiously by the others.

  “Good morning, Bisesa.”

  “So you’re talking to me now.”

  “I have some bad news, and good news.”

  She considered that. “Bad news first.”

  “I have been analyzing the astronomical data collected by Ab -

  dikadir and his predecessors at Babylon. Incidentally I would ap-preciate the chance to study the sky myself.”

  “And?”

  “This universe is dying.”

  She gazed out at the dusty plain, the rising sun, the capering man-apes by the rail track. “And the good news?”

  “I have a call. From Mars, Wells Station. It’s for you,” it added laconically.

  34: Ellie

  September 2069

  At the Martian north pole, in the unending night of winter, time wore away slowly. Myra read, cooked, cleaned, worked her way through the station’s library of virtuals, and downloaded movies from Earth.

  And she explored Wells Station.

  There were in fact seven pie-on-stilts modules. Each of them was a roomy space divided by a honeycomb floor, built around a central axial cylinder. They had all been landed by rocket and parachute, folding up around their cores, then towed into place by a rover and inflated, the internal honeycomb flooring folded down.

  All this was powered by a big nuclear reactor, cooled by Martian carbon dioxide and buried in the ice a kilometer away, its waste heat slowly digging out a cavern.

  She’d been brought in through Can Six, the EVA unit, and Five, science and medical, through the disused Three, to Two, the galley cum sleeping area everybody just called “the house.” Can Four, the hub of the base, was a garden area, with trays of green plants growing under racks of fluorescents. Can Seven contained the central life-support system. Here Hanse proudly showed her his bioreactor, a big translucent tire-shaped tube containing a greenish, sludgy fluid, where blue-green algae, spirula plantensis, busily produced oxygen. And she was shown a water extraction plant; grimy Martian ice was melted and pumped through a series of filters to remove the dust that could comprise as much as forty percent of its volume.

  Cans One and Three were sleeping quarters, roomy enough for a crew of ten. Both these modules had been abandoned by the crew, but there were some neat bits of equipment. Everything was inflatable, the bed, the chairs, with partition walls filled with Mars-ice water to provide some soundproofing. And there were biolumines-cent light panels that you could just peel off the wall and fold up.

  Myra took some of these away, to brighten up her cave in the ice.

  Under the panels the design schemes of the modules were exposed: where Two was a city landscape, Five mountains and Six the sea, Can One was a pine forest and Three a prairie. With a bit of experimentation she found you could animate these virtual landscapes. But these fancy features had evidently been quickly abandoned, as the crew had moved into “the house,” Can Two, where they lived together in the round.

  Yuri grinned about this. “They spent a lot of money on this place,” he said. “Various Earth governments and organizations, in the days after the sunstorm when money flowed into space. Some kind of spasm of guilt, I guess. They knew this is an extreme environment. So they tried to make it as much like Earth as possible. You can be an ‘internal tourist.’ That’s what they told me in training. Ha!”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Look, you need a few pictures of your family, and some blue-green paintwork to soothe the eyes — although remind me to show you Mars through a wavelength-shift filter sometime; there are colors here, deep reds, we don’t even have names for. But all these pictures of places that I’ve never been to, put up by city types who’ve probably never been there either — nah. You can keep it.”

  She thought there was a pattern emerging here, spanning Lowell and now Wells Station, expensive facilities misconceived on Earth, and now half-abandoned by the Spacer generations who had to use them.

  But Myra suspected there was something deeper about the way the crew shared that partition-free space in Can Two, living in the round. A few brief queries to the station’s AI brought up images of roundhouses, Iron Age structures that had once been common across Europe and Britain: big structures, cones of wood built around a central pole, with a bare circular floor and no internal walls. Here at the pole of Mars, all unconsciously, the inhabitants of Wells Station had abandoned the urban prejudices of the base architects and had reverted to much older ways of living. She found that somehow pleasing.

  Of course that seven-module structure did serve one clear purpose, which was to do with the psychology of confinement. There were always at least two ways to get from any point in the station to any other. So if Ellie felt like strangling Yuri, say, there were ways for her to avoid bumping into him until she’d got those feelings under control. People locked up together like this, kept in the dark for a full Earth year at a time and unable even to step out the door, were always going to turn on each other. All you could do was engineer the environment to defuse the tensions.

  Gradually Myra found herself work to do.

  There were always chores in the garden, in Can Four, tending the plants, the rice and spinach and potatoes and peas, and cleaning out the gear that supported the hydroponic beds. Grendel Speth happily accepted Myra’s untrained help. There was even a stand of bamboo. Previous crew members had found ways to eat the fast-growing stuff, and they had made things with it; a wind-chime mobile of scrimshaw-like carvings was suspended from one corner of the Can. The garden only provided a few percent of the base’s food supply, and if you were strictly logical about it, it would have been better to use this space and power to store more dried food from
Lowell. But Myra found tending these familiar living things profoundly satisfying, which of course was its true purpose.

  No matter how she kept herself busy she was always drawn back to the Pit.

  That, after all, was the center of the mystery here; that was the place she had lost her mother. The trouble was she needed specialist help to get down there, and the station crew were busy with their own projects.

  It took weeks before she inveigled Hanse Critchfield into suiting her up and taking her down into the deep interior of the ice cap, and into the Pit once more.

  Ellie and Myra moved uncomfortably around the Pit. They were like two huge green pupae, Myra thought, bounding around these roughly melted chambers under the harsh light of the floods.

  Ellie von Devender tolerated her presence, but barely. Busy, driven, full of a sense of herself and the importance of her work, Ellie wasn’t the type to make space for nursemaiding. She was prepared to talk about her work, however, if Myra was able to ask intelligent questions.

  Ellie had set up a kind of suite of sensors around the Eye, some in the Eye chamber itself and others in bays she had had melted into the Martian ice. “High-energy particle detectors. Radiation sensors.

  A neutrino detection tank.” This was a chamber blown into the ice, full of liquid carbon dioxide.

  Ellie had active ways to probe the Eye too. She had set up an array of lasers and small particle guns, trained on the Eye like the rifles of a firing squad. These could mimic the Eye’s own leakage of radiation and particles — and it was through manipulating this input to the Eye that Ellie had, remarkably, been able to send signals to Bisesa’s mobile phone, abandoned in another world.

  The neutrino work was a little coarse however, the particle-detection array standard off-the-shelf gear. Ellie was most animated by her gravity wave detector.

  She had devised this herself for the peculiar conditions of the Martian cap. She’d borrowed Hanse’s moles, smart little hot-nosed burrowers intended to explore the interior of the ice. She had had them create a network of long straight-line tunnels through which high-frequency laser light was passed back and forth. The theory was that any change in the peculiar gravity field of the Eye itself, or of the Martian containment cage, would cause the emission of gravity waves. The waves would make the polar ice shudder, and those minute disturbances would be detected as subtle shifts in the laser light.

  “It’s a tricky setup,” Ellie said with some pride. “Gravity waves are notoriously weak. Mars is geologically quiet, but you do get the odd tremor. And the polar ice itself flows, minutely. But you can factor all that out. I have secondary arrays on the surface and in orbit. The most impressive is based on a couple of stations on the moons, Phobos and Deimos; when they are in line of sight of each other you get a good long baseline…”

  “And with all this stuff you’re studying the Eye.”

  “Not just the Eye. The Martian cage as well.”

  Ellie said the Eye and the cage of folded spacetime that contained it were like two components of a mutually interlocked system, yin and yang. And it was a dynamic system; the components continually tested each other. This silent, eons-long battle spilled particles and radiation and gravity waves that Ellie was able to detect and analyze.

  “In a sense the Martian technology is more interesting to me,”

  she told Myra. “Because I have a feeling it’s closer to our own in development level, and therefore we’ve got a better chance of understanding it.”

  “Right. And if you can figure it out? What then?”

  She shrugged, her motion magnified clumsily by the servos in her suit. “If we could manipulate spacetime there’s no limit to what we might achieve. Architecture beyond the constraints of gravity.

  Artificial gravity fields. Anti gravity fields. Reactionless space drives.

  Tractor beams. Why, we might even make our own toy universes, like the Mir universe.”

  Myra grunted. “You ought to patent this stuff.”

  Ellie looked at her through her visor, coolly. “I think ensuring a technology like that gets into the right hands is more important than making money. Don’t you?”

  Ellie had a self-righteous streak that Myra didn’t particularly take to. “Sure. Joke.” She was reminded that she was basically unwelcome here. She prepared to leave.

  But Ellie called her back.

  “There is something else,” she said, more hesitantly.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m not sure…” Ellie paused. “Put it this way. I don’t think every element of the gravity-field structure I’m detecting has to do with engineering. There’s a level of detail in there that’s so intricate — I think of it as baroque — it has to have a meaning beyond the functional.”

  Myra had lived with Eugene Mangles long enough to be able to detect academic caution, and she decoded that negative statement with ease. “If it’s not functional, then what? Symbolic?”

  “Yes. Possibly.”

  Myra’s imagination raced. “You think there are symbols in there? In the gravity field? What kind of symbols — writing, images? Recorded in a lattice of spacetime? That’s incredible.”

  Ellie ignored that last remark. Myra realized she wouldn’t be saying anything about this unless it were, in fact, credible, and demonstrable. “Writing is a closer analogy, I think. I’m finding symbols of certain kinds, repeated across the field. Glyphs. And they come in clusters. Again, some of those clusters are repeated.”

  “Clusters of glyphs. Words?”

  “Or maybe sentences. I mean, if each glyph represents a concept in itself — if a glyph is an ideogram rather than a letter.” Ellie seemed to lose a little confidence; she clearly had a scientist’s deep desire not to make a fool of herself. When she spoke again her voice was a bray, her volume control poor, her social skills evaporating with her tension. “You realize how unlikely all this is. We have plenty of models of alien intelligences with no symbolic modes of communication at all. If you and I were telepathic, you see, we wouldn’t need letters and spoken words to talk to each other. So there’s no a priori reason to have expected the Martian builders of this cage to have left any kind of message.”

  “And yet, if you’re right, they did.” Myra glared up at the trapped Eye. “Maybe we should have expected this. After all, they made a strong statement just by leaving this Eye here, trapped.

  Look what we did. We fought back. We cut off the arm of the monster… I don’t suppose—”

  “No, I haven’t decoded any of it. Whatever is in there is complex; not a linear array of symbols, like letters in a row, but a matrix in three-space, and maybe even higher dimensions. If the glyphs are real, they are surely given meaning positionally as well as from their form.”

  “There has to be a starting point,” Myra said. “A primer.”

  Ellie nodded inside her suit. “I’m trying to extract some of the most common symbol strings.”

  Myra studied her. Ellie’s eyes were masked, even behind her faceplate, by her spectacles; her expression was cold. Myra realized she knew almost nothing about this woman, who might be in the middle of making the discovery of the age; they had barely spoken in the long months Myra had been here.

  Myra fetched them both coffees. These came in pouches you had to dock to a port on the side of your helmet. She asked, “Where are you from, Ellie? The Low Countries?”

  “Holland, actually. Delft. I am a Eurasian citizen. As you are, yes?”

  “Forgive me but I’m not sure how old you are.”

  “I was two years old when the sunstorm hit,” Ellie snapped. So she was twenty-nine now. “I do not remember the storm. I do remember the refugee camps where my parents and I spent the next three years. My parents discouraged me from following my voca-tion, which was an academic career. After the storm there was much reconstruction to be done, they said. I should work on that, be an architect or an engineer, not a physicist. They said it was my duty.”

  “I guess you won the
argument.”

  “But I lost my parents. I think they wished me to suffer as they had suffered, for the sunstorm had destroyed their home, all they had built, their plans. Sometimes I think they wished they had failed, that the storm had smashed everything up, for then they would not have raised ungrateful children who did not understand.”

  This torrent of words took Myra aback. “When you open up, you open up all the way, don’t you, Ellie? And is that why you’re here, working on this Eye? Because of what the sunstorm did to your family?”

  “No. I am here because the physics is fascinating.”

  “Sure you are. Ellie — you haven’t told anybody else about the cage symbology, have you? None of your crewmates here. Then why me?”

  Unexpectedly Ellie grinned. “I needed to tell somebody. Just to see if I sounded completely crazy. Even though you aren’t qualified to judge the quality of the work, or the results.”

  “Of course not,” Myra said dryly. “I’m glad you told me, Ellie.”

  An alarm chimed softly in her helmet, and her suit told her she was due to meet Hanse for her ride back to the surface. “Let me know when you find out something more.”

  “I will.” And Ellie turned back to her work, her cage of instruments, and the invisible gravitational battle of alien artifacts.

  35: Poseidon’s Barb

  Bisesa, Emeline White, and the young Abdikadir Omar were to cross the Atlantic Ocean aboard a vessel called Poseidon’s Barb. She was, to Bisesa’s eyes, an extraordinary mixture of Alexandrian trireme and nineteenth-century schooner: the Cutty Sark with oars.

  She was under the command of an English-speaking Greek who treated his passengers with the utmost respect, once Abdikadir had handed over a letter of safe conduct from Eumenes.

  They had to spend weeks at the rudimentary port at Gibraltar, waiting for a ship. Transatlantic travel wasn’t exactly common yet in this world. It was a relief when they got underway at last.