Firstborn to-3 Read online

  The Barb cut briskly through the gray waters of an Atlantic summer. The crew worked with a will, their argot a collision of nineteenth-century American English with archaic Greek.

  Bisesa spent as much time as she could on deck. She had once flown choppers, and wasn’t troubled by the sea. Nor was Emeline, but poor landlubber Abdikadir spent a lot of time nursing a heav-ing gut.

  Emeline became more confident in herself once they had cast off from Gibraltar. The ship was owned by a consortium of Babylonians, but its technology was at least half American, and Emeline seemed glad to shake off the dirt of the strange Old World. “We found each other by boat,” she told Bisesa. “We Chicagoans came down to the sea by the rivers, all the way to the Mississippi delta, while the Greeks came across the ocean in their big rowboats, scouting down the east coast and the Gulf. We showed the Alexandrians how to build masts that wouldn’t snap in an ocean squall and better ways to run their rigging, and in turn we have their big rowboats traveling up and down the Mississippi and the Illinois. It was a pooling of cultures, Josh liked to say.”

  “No steamships,” Bisesa said.

  “Not yet. We have a few steamboats on Lake Michigan, that came with us through the Freeze. But we aren’t geared up for the ocean. We may need steam if the ice continues to push south.” And she pointed to the north.

  According to the phone’s star sightings — it grumpily complained about the lack of GPS satellites — they were somewhere south of Bermuda, perhaps south of the thirtieth parallel. But even so far south, Emeline’s pointing finger picked out an unmistakable gleam of white.

  During the voyage, on the neutral territory of the sea, Bisesa tried to get to know her companions better.

  Abdi was bright, young, unformed, refreshingly curious. He was a unique product, a boy who had been taught to think both by his modern-British father, and by Greeks who had learned at the feet of Aristotle. But there was enough of his father about him to make Bisesa feel safe, in a way she had always felt with the first Abdi.

  Emeline was a more complex case. The ghost of Josh always hovered between them, a presence of which they rarely spoke. And, though Emeline had felt impelled to cross the ocean to investigate the phone calls in Babylon, just as her husband would surely have done, she confided to Bisesa that she was uncomfortable with the whole business.

  “I was only nine when the world froze around Chicago. Most of my life has been occupied with ‘the great project of survival’—

  that’s how Mayor Rice puts it. We’re always busy. So it’s possible to put aside the great mystery of why we’re all here in the first place—

  do you see? Rather as one prefers not to contemplate one’s own inevitable death. But now here you are—”

  “I’m an angel of death,” Bisesa said grimly.

  “You’re hardly that, though you haven’t brought us good news, have you? But I can tell you I’ll be glad when we reach Chicago, and I can get back to normal life!”

  During the nights, the phone asked Bisesa to take it up on deck to see the sky. She set up a little wooden stand for it, strapping it down so it wouldn’t tumble as the ship rolled.

  Mir was a turbulent world, its climate as cobbled together as its geology, and not yet healed. For astronomers, the seeing was generally poor. But in mid-Atlantic the skies were as clear of cloud and volcanic ash as Bisesa had seen anywhere. She patiently allowed the phone to peer at the stars, reinforcing the observations it had made itself when Mir had first formed, and the sightings of the Babylonian astronomers since. It sent images back to the Little Bird’s old radio receivers in Babylon, and from there, it was hoped, through the Eye to the true universe.

  And, prompted by the phone, she looked for the cool misty band of the Milky Way, wondering if it was more pale, more scattered than she remembered.

  By assembling the observations made by Abdi and by the phone itself, the phone and the brain trust back on Mars had been able to determine that the universe in which Mir was embedded was expanding, dramatically. For example the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, was receding fast. The cosmologists had likened this to the expansion of Earth’s own universe, fueled by a kind of dark energy, an antigravity field called

  “quintessence.” This quintessence was pulling Bisesa’s universe apart too. It was just that it was happening a lot earlier, here.

  It was on this basis that the prediction of a universal ending relatively soon had been made, though the numbers were still im-precise. The phone believed that the recession might already be reaching into the structure of the Galaxy itself, with distant stars showing red shifts. The end of the world might already be visible in the sky, if you knew how to look.

  And the phone pointed out the planets to Bisesa: Mars in the evenings, Venus a bright morning star.

  “We never saw them, last time,” the phone whispered. “When I studied the sky, trying to date Mir.”

  “I remember.”

  “The seeing was too poor, always. I never noticed how they were different…”

  Both Mars and Venus, siblings of Earth, were chips of sky blue.

  36: Hubble

  January 2070

  Drifting above the Earth, the telescope was a fat double cylinder, thirteen meters long, its two big flat solar-cell panels angled toward the sun.

  The slimmer forward cylinder, properly known as the forward shell, was open at the far end, with a hinged cover. At the base of the forward shell — inside the short, squat cylinder known as the aft shroud — was a mirror, a disk over two meters across. The mirror was precision-ground, shaped from low-expansion titanium silicate glass, with a covering of aluminium-magnesium fluoride. Light collected by this primary mirror was focused onto a smaller secondary, and then reflected back through a gap in the primary to a cluster of scientific instruments. The instruments included cameras, spectral analyzers, and light intensity and polarization calibra-tors.

  There were handrails fixed to the exterior of the hull. The telescope had been designed to fit into the payload bay of a space shuttle orbiter, and, with its modularity and ease of access, to be capable of regular maintenance by astronaut engineers.

  As a space project the telescope had been fraught by expense, delays, and overruns, caught up in the politics of NASA’s long-drawn-out decline. Its launch had been delayed for years by the Challenger disaster. When it was finally deployed, the first images it returned were flawed by a “spherical aberration,” a mirror defect a fraction the width of a human hair that had eluded detection during testing. It took more years before another shuttle flight brought up a corrective lens system to compensate for the aberration.

  But it was the culmination of an old dream of the first space visionaries to place a telescope above the murk of Earth’s atmosphere.

  The telescope was able to view features two hundred kilometers across on the cloud tops of Jupiter.

  The telescope was said to be NASA’s most popular mission with the public since the Moon landings. Decades after its launch the telescope’s images still adorned softwalls and image-tattoos.

  But the shuttle maintenance missions were always hugely expensive, and after the Columbia catastrophe became even more infeasible. And the telescope itself aged. Astronauts replaced worn-out gyroscopes, degraded solar panels, and torn insulation, but the optical surfaces were subject to wear from sunlight, micrometeorite and spacecraft debris impacts, and corrosion from the thin, highly reactive gases of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

  At last the telescope was made redundant by a younger, cheaper, more effective rival. It was ordered to position itself to reduce atmospheric drag to a minimum: mothballed in orbit, until a more favorable funding environment might prevail in the future.

  Its systems were made quiescent. The aperture door over the forward shell closed: the telescope shut its single eye.

  Decades passed.

  The telescope was fortunate to survive the sunstorm.

  And after the storm came a
new era, a new urgency, when eyes in the sky were at a premium.

  Five years after the sunstorm, a spacecraft at last came climbing up from Earth to visit the telescope once more, not a shuttle but a technological descendant. The spaceplane carried a manipulator arm and kits of antiquated replacement parts. Astronauts replaced the damaged components, revived the telescope’s systems, and returned to Earth.

  The telescope opened its eye once more.

  More years passed. And then the telescope saw something.

  It seemed to many appropriate that the oldest of Earth’s space telescopes should be the first of any system based on or close to the home planet to pick out the approaching Q-bomb.

  In her Mount Weather office, Bella Fingal peered at the Hubble images, of a teardrop distortion sliding across the stars. There was less than a year left until the bomb was due to reach Earth. Horror knotted her stomach.

  She called Paxton. “Get in here, Bob. We can’t just sit and wait for this damn thing. I want some fresh options.”

  37: New New Orleans

  On the last day of the voyage, the Barb nosed through a complex delta system. Even Abdikadir came on deck to see. This was the outflow of the Mississippi, but sea levels were so much lower in this world of an incipient ice age that the delta pushed far out into the Gulf. There was certainly no New Orleans in this version of the world. And amid dense reed banks, watched by nervous crew, alligators the size of small trucks nosed into the water.

  The Barb was rowed cautiously into a small harbor. Bisesa glimpsed wharves and warehouses; one jetty had a kind of wooden crane. Behind the port buildings was a tiny township of huddled wooden shacks.

  “Welcome to New New Orleans,” Emeline said dryly. “There really isn’t much of it. But we do what we can.”

  Abdikadir murmured what sounded like a prayer in guttural Greek. “Bisesa. I had been wondering what machines these Americans have used to dredge out their harbors. Look over there.”

  Through the mist rising off the open water, Bisesa glimpsed what looked like elephants, treading slowly. Harnessed with thick ropes in a team of four, they were dragging some immense engine.

  But the beasts had odd profiles, with small domed skulls and humps on their backs. The men who drove them with goads and whips were dwarfed by their beasts, which looked tremendously tall, surely taller than the African elephants of Bisesa’s day. Then one of them lifted its head and trumpeted, a thin, stately sound, and Bisesa saw extraordinarily long tusks curved in loose spirals.

  “Those aren’t elephants, are they?”

  “Welcome to America,” Emeline said dryly. “We call these Jefferson’s mammoths. Some say ‘imperial’ and some ‘Columbian,’

  but in Chicago we’re patriots, and Jefferson it is.”

  Abdikadir was intrigued. “Are they easy to tame?”

  “Not according to the stories in the newspapers,” Emeline said.

  “We imported some elephant trainers from India; our men were just carnie folk who had been making it up as they went along. The Indians grumbled that the thousands of years they had put into breeding their own strain of elephant into docility had all been rubbed out here. Now come. We have a train to catch…”

  The passengers disembarked, with their few items of luggage.

  The dockworkers didn’t show much interest in the new arrivals, despite their Macedonian garb.

  It was summer, and they were somewhere south of the latitude of old New Orleans. But the wind from the north was chill.

  There was no train station here, just a place where a crudely-laid line came to an end amid a heap of sleepers and rusty, reused rails.

  But a row of carriages sat behind a hissing, old-fashioned-looking loco that hauled a fuel cart full of logs.

  Emeline negotiated directly with the engine driver; she used dollar notes to pay for their passage. And she was able to buy a loaf, some beef jerky, and a pot of coffee in the town’s small bar. Her money was crisp and new; evidently Chicago had a mint.

  Back in her own environment, Emeline was bright and purposeful. Bisesa had to admit there was a sense of modernity here, even in this scrubby outpost, that had been missing in an Alexandrian Europe that seemed to be sinking back into the past.

  On the train they had a carriage to themselves; the other carriages were mostly full of goods, lumber, fleeces, a catch of salted fish. The windows weren’t glazed, but there were blinds of some kind of hide that would block out the drafts, and heaps of blankets of some thick, smelly orange-brown wool. Emeline assured them that this would be enough to keep them warm until they reached New Chicago. “After that you’ll need cold-weather gear for the ice,” she said. “We’ll pick up something in town.”

  A couple of hours after they had arrived — it was around noon — the locomotive belched white smoke, and the train lumbered into motion. There was a clucking as chickens scattered off the tracks. A few skinny-looking children came running from the rude houses to wave, and Abdi and Bisesa waved back. The wind turned, and smoke from the stack blew into the cabin: wood smoke, a familiar, comforting scent.

  Emeline said they were going to follow the valley of the Mississippi, all the way to the settlement of New Chicago, which was near the site of Memphis in the old world. It was a journey of a few hundred miles that would likely take twenty-four hours to make; they would sleep on the train.

  Bisesa peered curiously from her window. She saw traffic on the river, a real mix, an Alexandrian trireme, what looked like a paddle steamer stranded by the shore — and a couple of canoes that might have been native American, but no native Americans had been brought to Mir.

  Emeline said, “They dug a couple of war canoes out of the city museum and the world’s fair exhibits. Took them apart to see how they were made. They raided William Cody’s Wild West Show too, for bows and arrows and teepees and whatnot. The canoes are pretty, aren’t they? I tried one once, with Josh, for a lark. But the water is dashed cold, even so far south as this. Runoff from the ice.

  You don’t want to fall in!”

  “Camels,” Abdikadir said, pointing to the road.

  Bisesa saw a kind of baggage train trailing south toward the port. Men and women rode peculiar-looking horses that had a tendency to buck and bite. And, yes, towering over them there were camels, heavily laden, imperious, spitting. “Another import?”

  “Oh, no,” Emeline said. “The camels were here already. Those horses too — lots of breeds of them in fact, not all of them useful. I told you we have a real menagerie here. Mammoths and mastodons and camels and saber-toothed cats — let’s hope we don’t run into any of those. ”

  “All of which,” Bisesa’s phone murmured from her pocket,

  “died out the moment the first human settlers got here. They even ate the native horses. Schoolboy error.”

  “Hush. Remember we’re guests here.”

  “In a sense, so are the Chicagoans…”

  She was aware of Emeline’s faint disapproval. Emeline clearly thought it bad manners to ignore the flesh-and-blood human beings around you and talk into a box.

  Abdikadir, though, who had grown up under the tutelage of his father, was interested. “Is it still able to pick up the signals from Earth?”

  Bisesa had tested the phone’s intermittent connection through the Eye all the way across the Atlantic. “It seems so.”

  “At a low bit rate,” the phone whispered. “Even that is pretty corrupt…”

  A thought struck Bisesa. “Phone — I wonder how close the Chicagoans are to radio technology.”

  For answer, the phone displayed a block of text. Only a generation before the Chicago time slice James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist so admired by Alexei Carel, had predicted that electromagnetic energy could travel through space. The slice itself had been taken in the few years between Heinrich Hertz’s first demonstrations that that was true, with parabolic-mirror transmit-ters and receivers a few feet apart, and Guglielmo Marconi’s bridg-ing of the Atlantic. />
  “We ought to push this on, Abdi. Think how useful a radio link would be to Babylon right now. Maybe when we get to Chicago we’ll try to kick-start a radio shop, you and I.”

  Abdi looked excited. “I would enjoy that—”

  Emeline snapped, “Perhaps you should keep a hold of your plans to assist us poor Chicagoans, until you’ve seen how much we’ve been able to do for ourselves.”

  Bisesa said quickly, “I apologize, Emeline. I was being thought-less.”

  Emeline lost her stiffness. “All right. Just don’t go showing off your fancy gadgets in front of Mayor Rice and the Emergency Committee or you really will give offense. And anyhow,” she said more grimly, “it won’t make a blind bit of difference if that toy of yours is right about the world coming to an end. Has it got any more to say about how long we have left?”

  “The data are uncertain,” the phone whispered. “Handwritten records of naked-eye observations, instruments scavenged from a crashed military helicopter—”

  Bisesa said, “I know. Just give us the best number you have.”

  “Five centuries. Maybe a little less.”

  They considered that. Then Emeline laughed; it sounded forced. “You really have brought us nothing but bad news, Bisesa.”

  But Abdikadir seemed unfazed. “Five centuries is a long time.

  We’ll figure out what to do about it long before then.”

  They spent the night in the train, as advertised.

  The frosty night air, the primal smell of wood smoke, and the steady rattling of the train on its uneven tracks lulled Bisesa to sleep. But every so often the train’s jolting woke her.

  And once she heard animals calling, far off, their cries like wolves’ howls, but deeper, throatier. She reminded herself that this was not a nostalgically reconstructed park. This was the real thing, and Pleistocene America was not a world yet tamed by man. But the sound of the animals was oddly thrilling — even satisfying. For two million years, humans evolved in a landscape full of creatures such as this. Maybe they missed the giant animals when they were gone, without ever knowing it. And so, maybe the Jefferson movement back home had the right idea.