Firstborn Read online

  “I’m glad to hear your voice again.”

  Pause. “And I yours, Bisesa.”

  “Thales—why these response delays? Oh. Are you still lodged on the Moon?”

  “Yes, Bisesa. And I am restricted by lightspeed delay. Just like Neil Armstrong.”

  “Why not bring you down to Earth? Isn’t it kind of inconvenient?”

  “There are ways around it. Local agents can support me when time delay is critical—during medical procedures, for instance. But otherwise the situation is deemed satisfactory.”

  These responses sounded rehearsed to Bisesa. Even scripted. There was more to Thales’s location on the Moon than he was telling her. But she didn’t have the spark to pursue the matter.

  Thales said, “You asked about the roar.”

  “Yes. That sounded like a lion. An African lion.”

  “So it was.”

  “And what is an African lion doing here, in the heart of North America?”

  “The Grand Canyon National Park is now a Jefferson, Bisesa.”

  “A what?”

  “A Jefferson Park. It is all part of the re-wilding. If you will look to your right….”

  On the horizon, beyond the north rim, she saw blocky shapes, massive, like boulders on the move. Thales caused the window to magnify the image. She was looking at elephants, a herd of them complete with infants, an unmistakable profile.

  “I have extensive information on the park.”

  “I’m sure you have, Thales. One thing. What’s the structure over there? It looks like scaffolding.”

  It turned out to be a power mat, the ground station of an orbital power station, a collector for microwaves beamed down from the sky.

  “The whole facility is rather large, ten kilometers square.”

  “Is it safe? I saw vehicles driving around underneath it.”

  “Oh, yes, safe for humans. Animals too. But there is an exclusion zone.”

  “And, Thales, those lights in the sky—the shimmers—”

  “Mirrors and sails. There is a whole architecture off Earth now, Bisesa. It’s really quite spectacular.”

  “So they’re building the dream. Bud Tooke would have been pleased.”

  “I’m afraid Colonel Tooke died in—”

  “Never mind.”

  “Bisesa, there are human counselors you can speak to. About anything you like. The details of your hibernation, for instance.”

  “It was explained to me before I went into the freezer…”

  The Hibernacula were a product of the sunstorm. The first of them had been established in America before the event, as the rich sought to flee through the difficult years ahead to a time of recovery. Bisesa hadn’t entered hers until 2050, eight years after the storm.

  “I can talk you through the medical advances since your immersion,” Thales said. “For example it now appears that your cells’ propensity for hydrogen sulphide is a relic of a very early stage in the evolution of life on Earth, when aerobic cells still shared the world with methanogens.”

  “That sounds oddly poetic.”

  Thales said gently, “There is the motivational aspect as well.”

  She felt uncomfortable. “What motivational aspect?…”

  She had had reasons to flee into the tanks. Myra, her twenty-one-year-old daughter, had married against Bisesa’s advice, and pledged herself to a life off the Earth entirely. And Bisesa had wanted to escape the conspiracy-theory notoriety that had accrued about her because of her peculiar role in the sunstorm crisis, even though much of what had gone on in those days, even the true cause of the sunstorm, was supposed to have been classified.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “going into a Hibernaculum was a public service. So I was told when I signed over my money. My trust fund went to advance the understanding of techniques that will one day be used in everything from transplant organ preservation to crewing centuries-long starship flights. And in a world struggling to recover after the storm, I had a much lower economic footprint frozen in a tank—”

  “Bisesa, there is a growing body of opinion that Hibernaculum sleeping is in fact a sort of sublimated suicide.”

  That took her aback. Aristotle would have been more subtle, she thought. “Thales,” she said firmly. “When I need to speak to someone about this, it will be my daughter.”

  “Of course, Bisesa. Is there anything else you need?”

  She hesitated. “How old am I?”

  “Ah. Good question. You are a curiosity, Bisesa.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”

  She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”

  “Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”

  “Yes. And the other five years?”

  “Are the years you spent on Mir.”

  She nodded. “You know about that?”

  “It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”

  She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.

  “Thank you, Thales.”

  “It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.

  5: LONDON

  Bella Fingal was in the air above London when her daughter first brought her the bad news from the sky.

  Bella had been flown in across the Atlantic, and her plane was heading for Heathrow, out in the suburbs to the west of central London. But the pilot told her the flight path would see them over-fly to the east first and then come back west along the path of the Thames, into the headwinds, and on this bright March morning the city was a glittering carpet spread out for her. Bella had the plane all to herself, one of the new scramjets, a fancy chariot for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother.

  But she really didn’t want to be making this trip. The funeral of James Duflot had been bad enough; coming to the grieving family’s home would be worse. It was however her duty, as Chair of the World Space Council.

  She had wandered into this job almost by accident, probably a compromise choice by the supra-governmental panel that controlled the Space Council. In a corner of her mind she had thought that her new post would be pretty much an honorary one, like most of the university chancellorships and nonexecutive directorships that had come her way as a veteran of the sunstorm. She hadn’t imagined getting shipped across the planet to be plunged into messy, tearful situations like this.

  She had done her bit on the shield. She should have stayed retired, she thought wistfully.

  And it was when Edna came on line with her bit of bad, strange news that it was driven home to Bella that she really was the commander-in-chief of a space navy.

  “For once the trackers think they’ve found something serious, Mum. Something out in the dark—now approaching the orbit of Jupiter, in fact, and falling in on a hyperbolic trajectory. It’s not on the Extirpator map, though that’s not so unusual; long-period comets too remote for Extirpator echoes are turning up all the time. This thing has other characteristics that are causing them concern…”

  Bella had seen a rendering of the “Extirpator map,” set up like a planetarium inside her own base, the old NASA headquarters building in Washington. An immense, dynamic, three-dimensional snapshot of the whole of the solar system, it had been created on the very eve of the sunstorm by the deep-space explosion of a ferocious old nuke called the Extirpator—a detonation that had also broadcast to the silent stars a wistful concatenation of human culture called “Earthmail,” within which were embedded copies of the planet’s greatest artificial minds, called Aristotle, Thales, and Athena. Within a few hours of the explosion the radio telescopes on Earth had logged X-ray echoes of the blast coming back from every object larger than a meter across inside the orbit of Saturn.

  Twenty-seven years after the sunstorm the human worlds and space itself were full of eyes, tracking anything that moved. Any
thing not shown in the map must be a new entrant. Most newcomers, human or natural, could be identified and eliminated quickly. And if not—well, then, Bella was learning, the bad news quickly filtered up the Council’s hierarchy to her own ears.

  In the cocooned, silent warmth of the plane cabin, she shivered. Like many of her generation, Bella still had nightmares about the sunstorm. Now it was Bella’s job to listen to the bad dreams.

  Edna’s face, in the softscreen on the seat back before Bella, was flawlessly rendered in three dimensions. Edna was only twenty-three, one of the first generation of “Spacers,” as Bella had learned to call them, born in space during Bella’s post-sunstorm rehabilitation stay on the Moon. But Edna was already a captain. Promotions were fast in a navy with few crew in ships so smart, or so Edna said, they even had robots to swab the decks. Today, with her Irish-dark hair pulled severely back and her uniform buttoned up around her neck, Edna looked tense, her eyes shadowed.

  Bella longed to touch her daughter. But she couldn’t even speak to her in a natural way. Edna was out in the navy’s operations HQ in the asteroid belt. The vagaries of orbits dictated that at this moment Edna was some two astronomical units away from her mother, twice Earth’s distance to the sun, a tremendous gap that imposed an each-way time delay of sixteen minutes.

  And besides there was a question of protocol. Bella was in fact her daughter’s commanding officer. She tried to focus on what Edna was saying.

  “This is just a head’s-up, Mum,” Edna said now. “I don’t have any details. But the scuttlebutt is that Rear Admiral Paxton is flying to London to brief you about it…”

  Bella flinched. Bob Paxton, heroic footprints-and-flags explorer of Mars, and a royal pain in the butt.

  Edna smiled. “Just remember, he’s got a chest full of fruit salad, but you’re the boss! By the way—Thea is doing fine.” Edna’s daughter, Bella’s three-year-old granddaughter, a second-generation Spacer. “She’ll be on her way home soon. But you should see how she’s taken to microgravity in the low-spin habitats!…”

  Edna spoke on of human things, family stuff, lesser events than the destiny of the solar system. Bella hung on every word, as a grandmother would. But it was all so strange, even to Bella, who had served in space herself. Edna’s language was peppered with the unfamiliar. You found your way around a spinning space habitat by going spinward or antispinward or axisward… Even her accent was drifting, a bit of Bella’s own Irish, and a heavy tinge of east coast American—the navy was essentially an offshoot of the old U.S. seaborne navy, and had inherited much of its culture from that source.

  Her daughter and granddaughter were growing away from her, Bella thought wistfully. But then, every grandmother back to Eve had probably felt the same.

  A soft chime warned her that the plane was beginning its final approach. She stored the rest of Edna’s message and transmitted a brief reply of her own.

  The plane banked, and Bella peered down at the city.

  She could clearly make out the tremendous footprint of the Dome. It was a near-perfect circle about nine kilometers in diameter, centered on Trafalgar Square. Within the circumference of the Dome much of the old building stock had been preserved from the sunstorm’s ravages, and something of the character of the old confident London remained, a pale sheen of sandstone and marble. But Westminster was now an island, the Houses of Parliament abandoned as a monument. After the sunstorm the city had given up its attempts to control its river, and had drawn back to new banks that more resembled the wider, natural course that the Romans had first mapped. Londoners had adjusted; you could now go scuba diving among the concrete ruins of the South Bank.

  Outside that perimeter circle, much of the suburban collar of London had been razed by the fires of sunstorm day. Now it was a carpet of blocky new buildings that looked like tank traps.

  And as the plane dipped further she saw the Dome itself. The paneling had long been dismantled, but some of the great ribs and pillars had been allowed to stand; weather-streaked and tarnished they cast shadows kilometers long over the city the Dome had preserved. It was only a glimpse. And in a way it was mundane; twenty-seven years on, you still saw the scars of the sunstorm wherever you traveled, all over the world.

  The city fled beneath her, and the plane swept down over anonymous, hunkered suburbs toward its landing at Heathrow.

  6: MYRA

  Myra sat with Bisesa before the bubble window, sipping iced tea. It was early in the morning, and the low light seemed to catch the wrinkles in Myra’s face.

  “You’re staring,” Myra said.

  “I’m sorry, love. Can you blame me? For me, you’ve aged nineteen years in a week.”

  “At least I’m still younger than you.” Myra sounded resentful; she had a right to be.

  Myra was wearing a comfortable-looking blouse and pants of some smart material that looked as if it kept her cool. Her hair was swept back from her face, a style that was a bit severe to Bisesa’s out-of-date eyes, but which suited Myra’s bones, her fine forehead. She had no ring on her finger. Her movements were small, contained, almost formal, and she rarely looked at her mother.

  She didn’t look happy. She looked restless.

  Bisesa didn’t know what was wrong. “I should have been here for you,” she said.

  Myra looked up. “Well, you weren’t.”

  “Right now, I don’t even know—”

  “You know I married Eugene, not long before you went into the tank.” Eugene Mangles, whiz-kid scientist, all but autistic, and after his heroic computations during the sunstorm the nearest thing to a savior the world had recently seen. “Everybody was marrying young in those days,” Myra said. The post-sunstorm years had been a time of a rapid population boom. “We broke up after five years.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Has there been nobody else?”

  “Not serious.”

  “So where are you working now?”

  “I went back to London, oh, ten years ago. I’m back in our old flat in Chelsea.”

  “Under the skeleton of the Dome.”

  “What’s left of it. That old ruin is good for property prices, you know. Snob value, to be under the Dome. I guess we’re rich, Mum. Whenever I’m short of money I just release a bit more equity; the prices are climbing so fast it soon gets wiped out.”

  “So you’re back in the city. Doing what?”

  “I retrained as a social worker. I deal in PTSD.”

  “Post-traumatic stress.”

  “Mostly it’s your generation, Mum. They’ll carry the stress with them to their graves.”

  “But they saved the world,” Bisesa said softly.

  “They did that.”

  “I never saw you as a social worker. You always wanted to be an astronaut!”

  Myra scowled, as if she was being reminded of some indiscretion. “I grew out of that when I found out what was really going on.”

  Apparently unconsciously, she touched the tattoo on her cheek. It was in fact an ident tattoo, a compulsory registration introduced a few years after Bisesa went into the tank. Not a symptom of a notably free society.

  “Wasn’t Eugene working on weather modification systems?”

  “Yes, he was. But he pretty quickly got sidelined into weaponization. Weather modification as an instrument of political control. It’s never been used, but it’s there. We had long arguments about the morality of what he was doing. I never lost the argument, but I never won, either. Eugene just didn’t get it.”

  Bisesa sighed. “I remember that about him.”

  “In the end his work was more important than I was.”

  Bisesa was profoundly sorry to see this disappointment in a daughter who, from her point of view, had been a bright twenty-one-year-old only weeks ago.

  She looked out of her window. Something was moving on the far side of the canyon. Camels, this time. “Not everything about this new world seems so bad to me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “I quite like the idea of c
amels and elephants wandering around North America—though I’m not quite sure why they’re here.”

  “We’re in the middle of a Jefferson,” Myra said.

  “Named for Jefferson the president?”

  “I learned a lot more about the American presidents when I lived with Eugene’s family in Massachusetts,” Myra said dryly. The purposeful re-wilding of the world was an impulse that had come out of the aftermath of the sunstorm. “In fact Linda had something to do with devising the global program. She wrote me about it.”

  “My cousin Linda?”

  “She’s Dame Linda now.” A student of bioethics, Linda had shared a flat with Bisesa and Myra during the period before the sunstorm. “The point is, long before Columbus the first Stone Age immigrants knocked over most of the large mammals. So you had an ecology that was full of gaps evolution hadn’t had time to fill. ‘A concert in which so many parts are wanting.’ Thoreau said that, I think. Linda used to quote him. When the Spanish brought horses here, their population just exploded. Why? Because modern horses evolved here…”

  In the new “Jefferson Parks” there had been a conscious effort to reconstruct the ecology as it had been at the end of the last Ice Age, by importing species that were close equivalents of those that had been lost.

  Bisesa nodded. “African and Asian elephants for mammoths and mastodons.”

  “Camels for the extinct camelids. More species of horses to flesh out the diversity. Even zebras, I think. For the ground sloths they brought in rhinos, herbivores of a similar mass and diet.”

  “And lions as the capstone, I suppose.”

  “Yes. There are more parks overseas. In Britain, half of Scotland is being given over to native oak forest.”

  Bisesa looked at the haughty camels. “I suppose it’s therapeutic. But these are aftermath activities. Healing. I’ve woken up to find we still live in an aftermath world, after all this time.”

  “Yes,” Myra said grimly. “And not every post-sunstorm response is as positive as building a Pleistocene park.