Firstborn

4: When the Sleeper Wakes

February — March 2069

Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.

In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.

Well, for nineteen years she had had no pulse, no blood, no electrical activity in her brain, her tissues had consumed no oxygen, and she had been held in a fridge almost cold enough to rupture her cells. You had to expect to be a bit sore.

Hibernaculum 786 had changed while she had been in the tank.

Now it felt like an upmarket hotel, all glass walls and white floors and plastic couches, and old, old people — at least they looked old—

in dressing gowns, walking very tentatively.

Most drastically of all the Hibernaculum had been moved.

When she got to a viewing window, she found herself overlooking an immense wound in the ground, a dusty canyon with strata piled up in its scree-littered walls like the pages of a tremendous book. It was the Grand Canyon, she learned, and it was a spectacular sight — rather wasted on the sleepers in the Hibernaculum, she thought.

She found it disturbing in retrospect that the complicated re-frigerator within which she had slept her dreamless sleep had been disconnected, uprooted, and shipped across the continent.

As her convalescence continued she took to sitting before a bubble window, peering out at the canyon’s static geological drama.

She had made only one tourist-trip visit to the canyon before. Judging by the way the sun cycled through the spring sky she must be on the south rim, perhaps somewhere near Grand Canyon Village.

The local flora and fauna seemed to have recovered from the global battering of the sunstorm; the land was littered with cacti, yucca, and blackbush. In her patient watching she spotted a small herd of bighorn sheep, and glimpsed the slinking form of a coyote, and once she thought she saw a rattlesnake.

But if the canyon had recovered, much else seemed to have changed. On the eastern horizon she made out a kind of structure, a flat metallic array raised on legs, like the framework of an un-completed shopping mall. Sometimes she saw vehicles driving around and under it. She had no idea what it could be.

And sometimes in the sky she saw lights. There was one bright, moving spark, panning over the southern evening sky in forty minutes or so: something big in orbit. But there were odder sights to be seen, much more extensive: pale patches in the blue daylight, glimmerings of swimming starlight at night. A strange sky in this new age. She thought she ought to be curious, or possibly afraid, but at first she was not.

That all changed when she heard the roar. It was a deep rumble that seemed to make the very ground shudder, more geological than animal.

“What was that?”

“Bisesa? You asked a question?”

The voice was smooth, male, a little too perfect, and it came out of the air.

“Aristotle?” But she knew it could not be, even before he answered.

There was an odd delay before he replied. “I’m afraid not. I am Thales.”

“Thales, of course.”

Before the sunstorm there had been three great artificial intelligences on the human worlds, remote descendants of the search engines and other intelligent software agents of earlier technological generations, and all of them friends of mankind. There were rumors that copies of them had been saved, as streams of bits squirted off into interstellar space. But otherwise only Thales had survived the sunstorm, stored in the simpler networks of the sturdy Moon.

“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 crew-ing 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. Anything 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 indiscre-tion. “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 no-tably free society.

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

“Yes, he was. But he pretty quickly got sidelined into weaponiza-tion. Weather modification as an instrument of political control. It’s never been used, but it’s there. We had long arguments about the mo-rality 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 camels 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 Scot-land 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.

“Mum, people found out about the sunstorm. The truth. At first it was classified. Even the name ‘Firstborn’ was never made public.

There was no hint at the time that the sunstorm was an intentional act.”

Caused by the driving of a Jovian planet into the core of Earth’s sun.

“But the truth leaked out. Whistle-blowers. It became a torrent when the generation who had fought the storm headed for retirement, and had nothing to lose, and began to speak of what they knew.”

“I’m shocked there was a cover-up that lasted so long.”

“Even now there are plenty of people who don’t believe it, I think. But people are scared. And there are those in government, and in industry and other establishments, who are using that fear.

They are militarizing the whole of the Earth, indeed the solar system. They call it the War with the Sky.”

Bisesa snorted. “That’s ridiculous. How can you wage war on an abstraction?”

“I suspect that’s the point. It means whatever you want it to mean. And those who control the sky have a lot of power. Why do you think Thales is still stuck on the Moon?”

“Ah. Because nobody can get to him up there. And this is why you left?”

“Most of the gazillions they’re spending are simply wasted.

What’s worse, they’re not doing any serious research into what we do know of Firstborn technology. The Eyes. The manipulation of spacetime, the construction of pocket universes — all of that. Stuff that might actually be useful in the case of a renewed threat.”

“So that’s why you baled out.”

“Yes. I mean, it was fun, Mum. I got to go to the Moon! But I couldn’t swallow the lies. There are plenty on and off the planet who think the way I do.”

“Off the planet?”

“Mum, since the sunstorm a whole generation has been born offworld. Spacers, they call themselves.” She glanced at her mother, then looked away. “It was a Spacer who called me. And asked me to come fetch you.”

“Why?”

“Something’s coming.”

Those simple words chilled Bisesa.

A shifting light caught her eye. Looking up she saw that bright satellite cutting across the sky. “Myra — what’s that? It looks sort of old-fashioned, in among the space mirrors.”

“It’s Apollo 9. Or a recreation. That ship flew a hundred years ago today. The government is rerunning all those classic missions.

A remembrance of the lost times before the sunstorm.”

Conservation and memorials. Clinging to the past. It really was as if the whole world was still in shock. “All right. What do you want me to do?”

“If you’re fit, get packed up. We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?”

Myra smiled, a bit forced. “Off Earth…”

7: The Tooke Medal

The motorcade drew up outside a property in a suburb called Chiswick.

Bella stepped out of her car, along with her two Council body-guards. They were a man and a woman, bulked up by body armor, like all their colleagues silent and anonymous. The woman carried a small package in a black leather case.

The car closed itself up.

Bella faced the Duflot home, gathering her courage. It was a faceless block of white concrete with rounded wind-deflecting corners, sunk into the ground as if it was too heavy for the London clay.

Its roof was a garden of wind turbines, solar cell panels, and antennae; its windows were small and deep. With subterranean rooms and independent power it was a house like a bunker. This was the domestic architecture of the fearful mid — twenty-first century.

Bella had to walk down a flight of steps to the front door. A slim woman in a sharp black suit was waiting.

“Ms. Duflot?”

“Doctor Fingal. Thank you for coming. Call me Phillippa…”

She extended a long-fingered hand.

Shadowed by her security people, Bella was brought through the house to the living room.

Phillippa Duflot must have been in her early sixties, a little older than Bella. Her silvered hair was cut short. Her face was not unattractive, but narrow, her mouth pursed. Phillippa looked capable of steely self-control, but this woman had lost a son, and the marks of that tragedy were in the lines around her eyes, Bella thought, and the tension in her neck.

Waiting for Bella in the living room were the generations of Phillippa’s family. They stood when Bella came into the room, lined up before a softwall showing an image of a pretty Scottish lake. Bella had carefully and nervously memorized all their names. Phillippa’s two surviving sons, Paul and Julian, were solid, awkward-looking thirty-something men. Their wives stood by their sides. This slim, pretty woman of twenty-six was Cassie, the widow of the missing son James, and his two children, boy and girl, six and five, Toby and Candida. They were all dressed for a funeral, in black and white, even the children. And they all had ident tattoos on their cheeks.

The little girl’s was a pretty pink flower.

Standing before this group, under the stares of the children, Bella suddenly had no idea what to say.

Phillippa came to her rescue. “It’s most awfully good of you to come.” Her accent was authentic British upper class, a throwback to another age, rich with composure and command. Phillippa said to her grandchildren, “Doctor Fingal is the head of the Space Council. She’s very important. And she flew from America, just to see us.”

“Well, that’s true. And to give you this.” Bella nodded to her guards, and the woman handed her the leather case. Bella opened this carefully, and set it up on a low coffee table. A disc of delicate, sparkling fabric sat on a bed of black velvet.

The children were wide-eyed. The boy asked, “Is it a medal?”

And Candida asked, “Is it for Daddy?”

“Yes. It’s for your father.” She pointed to the medal, but did not touch it; it looked like spiderweb embedded with tiny electronic components. “Do you know what it’s made of?”

“Space shield stuff,” Toby said promptly.

“Yes. The real thing. It’s called the Tooke Medal. There’s no higher honor you can earn, if you live and work in space, than this.

I knew Bud Tooke. I worked with him, up on the shield. I know how much he would have admired your daddy. And it’s not just a medal. Do you want to see what it can do?”

The boy was skeptical. “What?”

She pointed. “Just touch this stud and see.”

The boy obeyed.

A hologram shimmered into life over the tabletop, eclipsing the medal in its case. It showed a funeral scene, a flag-draped coffin on a caisson drawn by six tiny black horses. Figures in dark blue uniforms stood by. The sound was tinny but clear, and Bella could hear the creak of the horses’ harnesses, their soft hoofbeats.

The silent children loomed like giants over the scene. Cassie was weeping silently; her brother comforted her. Phillippa Duflot watched, composed.

The recording skipped forward. Three rifle volleys cracked, and a flight of tiny, glittering jet aircraft swept overhead, one peeling away from the formation.

“It’s Dad’s funeral,” Toby said.

“Yes.” Bella leaned down to face the children. “They buried him at Arlington. That’s in Virginia — America — where the U.S.

Navy has its cemetery.”

“Dad trained in America.”

“That’s right. I was there, at the funeral, and so was your mummy. This hologram is generated by the shield element itself—”

“Why did one plane fly away like that?”

“It’s called the Missing Man formation. Those planes, you know, Toby. They were T-38s. The first astronauts used them to train on. They’re over a hundred years old, imagine that.”

“I like the little horses,” said Candida.

Their uncle put his hands on their shoulders. “Come away now.”

With some relief, Bella straightened up.

Drinks arrived, sherry, whiskey, coffee, tea, served by a subdued young aunt. Bella accepted a coffee and stood with Phillippa.

“It was kind of you to speak to them like that,” Phillippa said.

“It’s my job, I guess,” Bella said, embarrassed.

“Yes, but there are ways of doing it well, or badly. You’re new to it, aren’t you?”

Bella smiled. “Six months in. Does it show?”

“Not at all.”

“Deaths in space are rare.”

“Yes, thank God,” Phillippa said. “But that’s why it’s been so hard to take. I had hoped this new generation would be protected from — well, from what we went through. I read about you. You were actually on the shield.”

Bella smiled. “I was a lowly comms tech.”

Phillippa shook her head. “Don’t do yourself down. You ended up with a battlefield promotion to mission commander, didn’t you?”

“Only because there was nobody else left to do it by the end of that day.”

“Even so, you did your job. You deserve the recognition you’ve enjoyed.”

Bella wasn’t sure about that. Her subsequent career, as an executive in various telecommunications corporations and regulatory bodies, had no doubt been given a healthy boost by her notoriety, and usefulness as a PR tool. But she’d always tried to pull her weight, until her retirement, aged fifty-five — a short one as it turned out, until she was offered this new role, a position she couldn’t turn down.

Phillippa said, “As for me I was based in London during the build-up to the storm. Worked in the mayor’s office, on emergency planning and the like. But before the storm itself broke, my parents took me out to the shelter at L2.”

The shield had been poised above the Earth at the point of per-petual noon, at L1, the first Lagrangian point of gravitational stability directly between Earth and sun. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the same Earth-sun line, but on the planet’s far side, at the midnight point. So while the workers at L1 labored to shelter the world from the storm, at L2 an offworld refuge hid safe in Earth’s shadow, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types — including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals.

The story of L2 had subsequently become a scandal.

“It wasn’t a pleasant place to be,” Phillippa murmured. “I tried to work. We were ostensibly a monitoring station. I kept up the comms links to the ground stations. But some of the rich types were throwing parties.”

“It sounds as if you didn’t have a choice,” Bella said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“It’s kind of you to say that. Still, one must move on.”

James Duflot’s widow, Cassie, approached them tentatively.

“Thank you for coming,” she said awkwardly. She looked tired.

“You don’t need—”

“You were kind to the children. You’ve given them a day to remember.” She smiled. “They’ve seen your picture on the news. I think I’ll put away that hologram, though.”

“Perhaps that’s best.” Bella hesitated. “I can’t tell you much about what James was working on. But I want you to know that your husband gave his life in the best of causes.”

Cassie nodded. “In a way I was prepared for this, you know.

People ask me how it feels to have your husband fly into space. I tell them, you should try staying on Earth.”

Bella forced a smile.

“To tell you the truth we were going through a difficult time.

We’re Earthbound, Doctor Fingal. James just went up to space to work, not to live. This is home. London. And I went into town every day to work at Thule.” Bella had done her research; Thule, Inc., was a big multinational eco-recovery agency. “We’d talked vaguely of separating for a bit.” Cassie laughed with faint bitterness. “Well, I’ll never know how that particular story would have turned out, will I?”

“I’m sorry—”

“You know what I miss? His mails. His softscreen calls. I didn’t have him, you see, but I had the mails. And so in a way I don’t miss him, but I miss the mails.” She looked sharply at Bella. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”

Bella couldn’t bear to repeat the platitudes she knew were expected of her. “I’m new to this. But it’s my job to make sure it was.”

That wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could be. She was relieved when she was able to use the excuse of another appointment to get out of the pillboxlike house.

8: Euro-needle

For her appointment with Bob Paxton, Bella was driven to the Liv-ingstone Tower — or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner still called it. The local administrative headquarters of the Eurasian Union, and sometime seat of the Union’s prime minister, it was a tower of airy offices with broad windows of toughened glass offer-ing superb views of London. During the sunstorm the Needle had been within the Dome’s shelter, and on its roof, which had interfaced with the Dome’s structure itself, was a small museum to those perilous days.

Paxton was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-first floor. Pacing, he was drinking coffee in great gulps. He greeted Bella with a stiff military bow. “Chair Fingal.”

“Thanks for coming all the way to London to meet me—”

He waved that away. “I had other business here. We need to talk.”

She took a seat. Still shaken by her encounter with the Duflots, she felt this was turning into a very long day.

Paxton didn’t sit. He seemed too restless for that. He poured Bella a coffee from a big jug in the corner of the room; he poured for Bella’s security people too, and they sat at the far end of the table.

“Tell me what’s on your mind, Admiral.”

“I’ll tell you simply. The new sightings confirm it. We have a bogey.”

“A bogey?”

“An anomaly. Something sailing through our solar system that doesn’t belong there…”

Paxton was tall, wiry. He had the face of an astronaut, she thought, very pale, and pocked by the scars of radiation tumors. His cheek tattoo was a proud wet-navy emblem, and his hair was a drizzle of crew-cut gray.

He was in his seventies, she supposed. He had been around forty when he had led Aurora 1, the first manned mission to Mars, and had become the first person to set foot on that world — and then he had led his stranded crew through the greater trial of the sunstorm. Evidently he had taken the experience personally. Now a Rear Admiral in the new space navy, he had become a power in the paranoiac post-sunstorm years, and had thrown himself into efforts to counter the threat that had once stranded him on Mars.

Watching him pace, caffeine-pumped, his face set and urgent, Bella had an absurd impulse to ask him for his autograph. And then a second impulse to order him to retire. She filed that reflection away.

In his clipped Midwestern accent, he amplified the hints Edna had already given her. “We actually got three sightings of this thing.”

The first had been fortuitous.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, having made mankind’s first re-connaissance of the outer planets, had sped on out of the solar system. By the fifth decade of a new century Voyager had traveled more than a hundred and fifty times Earth’s distance from the sun.

And then its onboard cosmic ray detector, designed to seek out particles from distant supernovae, picked up a wash of energetic particles.

Something had been born, out there in the dark.

“Nobody made much of it at the time. Because it showed up on April 20, 2042.” Paxton smiled. “Sunstorm day. We were kind of busy with other things.”

Voyager’s later observations showed how the anomaly, tugged by the sun’s gravity, began a long fall into the heart of the solar system. The first significant object the newborn would encounter on its way toward the sun would be Saturn and its system of moons, on a date in 2064. Plans were drawn up accordingly.

“And that was the second encounter,” Paxton said. “We have readings made by Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016— and then a record of that probe’s destruction. And third, the latest sighting by a cluster of probes of some damn thing coming down on the J-line. The orbit of Jupiter.” He brought up a softscreen map on the table. “Three points on the chart, see — three points on a plausible orbital trajectory. Three sightings of what has to be the same object, wandering in where it don’t belong.” He stared at her, his cold blue eyes rheumy but unblinking, as if challenging her to put it together.

“And you’re certain it’s not a comet, something natural?”

“Comets don’t give off sprays of cosmic rays,” he said. “And it’s kind of a coincidence this thing just popped up out of nowhere on sunstorm day, don’t you think?”

“And this trajectory, if it continues — where is it going, Admiral?”

“We can be pretty accurate about that. It deflected off Saturn, but it won’t pass another mass significant enough for a slingshot.

Assuming it just falls under gravity—”

She took the bait. “It’s heading for Earth, isn’t it?”

His face was like granite. “If it continues on its merry course it will get here December of next year. Maybe it’s Santa’s sleigh.”

She frowned. “Twenty-one months. That’s not much time.”

“That it ain’t.”

“If the alert had been raised when this thing passed Saturn, and, you say, it actually destroyed a probe, we’d have had years warning.”

He shrugged. “You have to set your threat levels somewhere. I always argued we weren’t suspicious enough. I had this out with your predecessor on a number of occasions. Looks like I was right, don’t it? If we survive this we can review protocol.”

If we survive this. His language chilled her. “You think this is some kind of artifact, Admiral?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“But you do believe it’s a threat?”

“Have to assume so. Wouldn’t you say?”

She could hardly gainsay that. The question was what to do about it.

The World Space Council had only a tenuous relationship with the old UN, which since the sunstorm had focused its efforts on recovery on Earth. The Council’s brief was to coordinate the world’s preparedness for any more threats from the unseen enemy behind the sunstorm, an enemy whose very existence had not in fact yet been officially admitted. Its principal asset was the navy, which nominally reported to the Council. But the Council itself was funded by and ultimately controlled by an uneasy alliance of the world’s four great powers — especially the United States, Eurasia, and China, who hoped to use space to gain some political ground back from the fourth, Africa.

And at the apex of this rickety structure of power and control was Bella, a compromise candidate in a compromised position.

In the short term, she thought, the three spacegoing powers might try to leverage the sudden irruption of an actual threat into some kind of advantage over Africa, which had become prominent since being relatively spared by the sunstorm. The tectonic plates that underpinned the Council might start to shift, she thought uneasily, just at the very moment it was being called upon to act.

“You’re thinking politics,” Paxton growled.

“Yes,” she admitted. As if this anomaly, whatever it was, was just a new item on the agenda of the world’s business. But if this was another threat like the sunstorm, it could render all that business irrelevant at a stroke.

Suddenly she felt weary. Old, worn-out. She found she resented that this crisis should be landed on her plate so soon into her chairmanship.

And, looking at Paxton’s intent face, she wondered how much control she would have over events.

“All right, Admiral, you have my attention. What do you recommend?”

He stepped back. “I’ll gather more data, and set up a briefing on options. Best to do that back in Washington, I guess. Soon as we can manage.”

“All right. But we’ll have to look at the wider implications.

What to tell the people, or not. How to prepare for the incoming anomaly, whatever it is.”

“We’ll need more data before we can do that.”

“And what do we tell those we report to?”

Paxton said, “As far as the politics go it’s essential we make sure our mandate and capability aren’t diluted by politico bull. And, Chair, if you’re agreeable, for the briefing I’ll incorporate material gathered by the Committee.”

She felt the hairs on her neck prickle a warning; after most of a lifetime at the upper levels of large organizations she knew when a trap was being set. “You mean your Committee of Patriots.”

He smiled, sharklike. “You should come visit us sometime, Madam Chair. We work out of the old Navy Special Projects Office in DC; a lot of us are old navy fliers of one stripe or another. Our mission, grant you it’s self-appointed, is to monitor the responses of our governments and super-government agencies to the alien inter-vention that led to the sunstorm, and the ongoing emergency since.

Once again your predecessor didn’t want to know about this. I believe he thought dabbling with the wacko fringe would damage his fine career. But now we really do have something out there, Madam Chair, a genuine anomaly. Now’s the time to listen to us, if you’re ever going to.”

Again it was hard to gainsay that. “I feel you’re drawing me into an argument, Bob. Okay, subject to my veto.”

“Thank you. There’s one specific.”

“Go on.”

“One beef the Committee has always had has been with the almost willful way the authorities have never followed up the hints of the alien. Developing our own weaponry and armor is one thing, but to ignore the enemy’s capability is criminal. However we do know of someone who might be our way in to that whole murky business.”

“Who?”

“A woman called Bisesa Dutt. Ex British Army. Long story.

She’s the reason why I came to London today; she has a base here.

But she’s not around, or her daughter. Since arriving here I got word she may have booked herself into a Hibernaculum in the States, under an assumed name. Of course she may have moved on from there by now.” He eyed Bella. “With your permission I’ll track her down.”

She took a breath. “I have the authority for that?”

“If you want it.” He left it hanging.

“All right. Find her. Send me your file on her. But stay legal, Admiral. And be nice.”

He grinned. “All part of the service.”

Paxton was happy, she saw suddenly. He had been waiting for this moment, waiting out the whole of his anticlimactic life since his heroic days on Mars during the sunstorm. Waiting for the sky to fall again.

Bella suppressed a shudder. As for herself, she only hoped she could avoid creating any more James Duflots.

9: Florida

Myra got Bisesa out of the Hibernaculum and took her to Florida.

They flew in a fat-bodied, stub-winged plane. It was driven by a kind of air-breathing rocket called a scramjet. Bisesa still felt frail, but she used to ride helicopters in the army, and she studied this new generation of craft — new to a sleeper like her, anyhow — with curiosity. A jaunt across the continent, from Arizona to Florida, was nothing; this sturdy vessel really came into its own on very long-haul flights when it had the chance to leap up out of the atmosphere altogether, like a metallic salmon.

But the security was ferocious. They even had to submit to searches and scans in flight. This paranoia was a legacy not just of the sunstorm but of incidents when planes and spaceplanes had been used as missiles, including the destruction of Rome a couple of years before the storm.

Security was in fact an issue from the beginning. Bisesa had come out of her Hibernaculum pod without the latest ident tattoos.

There was an office of the FBI maintained on site at the Hibernaculum to process patients like her, refugees from slightly more innocent days — and to make sure no fugitives from justice had tried to flee through time. But Myra had come to Bisesa’s room with a boxy piece of equipment that stamped a tattoo onto Bisesa’s face, and she gave her an injection she described as “gene therapy.” Then they had slipped out of the Hibernaculum through a goods entrance without going anywhere near that FBI office.

Since then they had passed every check.

Bisesa felt faintly disturbed. Whoever Myra had hooked up with evidently had significant resources. But she trusted Myra implicitly, even though this was a strange new Myra, suddenly aged and embittered, a new person with whom she was, tentatively, building a new relationship. Really, she had no choice.

They deplaned at Orlando and spent a night at a cheap tourist hotel downtown.

Bisesa was faintly surprised that people still shuttled around the world to destinations like this. Myra said it was mostly nostalgic.

The latest virtual reality systems, by interfacing directly with the central nervous system, were capable even of simulating the sensation of motion, acceleration. You could ride a roller coaster around the moons of Jupiter, if you wanted. What theme park could com-pete with that? When the last of the pre-sunstorm generations gave up chasing their childhood dreams and died off, it seemed likely that most people would rarely venture far from the safety of their bunkerlike homes.

They ate room service food and drank minibar wine, and slept badly.

The next morning, a driverless car was waiting outside the hotel for them. It was of an odd, chunky design that Bisesa didn’t recognize.

Cocooned, they were driven off at what felt like a terrific speed to Bisesa, with the traffic a hairsbreadth close. She wasn’t sorry when the windows silvered over, and she and Myra sat in a hum-ming near-silence, with only the faintest of surges to tell them that they were speeding out of the city.

When they drew to a halt the doors slid back, allowing bright sunlight to flood into the car, and Bisesa heard the cries of gulls, and smelled the unmistakable tang of salt.

“Come on.” Myra clambered out of the car, and helped her mother follow stiffly.

It was March, but even so the heat hammered down on Bisesa.

They were on a stretch of tarmac — not a road or a parking lot, it looked more like a runway, stretching off into the distance, lined with blockhouses. On the horizon she saw gantries, some of them orange with rust, so remote they were misted with distance. To the north — it had to be that way, judging from the wind blowing off the sea — she saw something glimmering, a kind of line scratched onto the sky, tilted a little away from the vertical. Hard to see, elu-sive, perhaps it was some kind of contrail.

There couldn’t be any doubt where she was. “Cape Canaveral, right?”

Myra grinned. “Where else? Remember you brought me here on a tourist trip when I was six?”

“I expect it’s changed a bit since then. This is turning into quite a ride, Myra.”

“Then welcome back to Canaveral.” A young man approached them; a smart suitcase trundled after him. Ident-tattooed, he was sweating inside a padded orange jumpsuit plastered with NASA logos.

“What are you, a tourist guide?”

“Hi, Alexei,” Myra said. “Don’t mind my mother. After nineteen years she got out of bed on the wrong side.”

He stuck out his hand. “Alexei Carel. Good to meet you, Ms.

Dutt. I suppose I am your guide for the day — sort of.”

Twenty-five or twenty-six, he was a good-looking boy, Bisesa thought, with an open face under a scalp that was shaven close, though black hair sprouted thickly, like a five o’clock shadow. He looked oddly uncomfortable, though, as if he wasn’t used to being outdoors. Bisesa felt like an ambassador from the past, and wanted to make a good impression on this sunstorm boomer. She gripped his warm hand. “Call me Bisesa.”

“We don’t have much time.” He snapped his fingers and the suitcase opened. It contained two more orange suits, neatly folded, and more gear: blankets, water bottles, packets of dried food, what might have been an assembly-kit chemical toilet, a water purifying kit, oxygen masks.

Bisesa looked at this junk with apprehension. “It’s like the gear we used to take on field hikes in Afghanistan. We’re taking a ride, are we?”

“That we are.” Alexei hauled the jumpsuits out of the suitcase.

“Put these on, please. This corner of the facility is low on surveillance, but the sooner we’re in camouflage the better.”

“Right here?”

“Come on, Mum.” Myra was already unzipping her blouse.

The jumpsuit was easy to put on; it seemed to wriggle into place, and Bisesa wondered if it had some limited smartness of its own. Alexei handed her boots, and she found gloves and a kind of balaclava helmet in a pocket.

In the Florida sun, once she was zipped up she was hot. But evidently she was headed somewhere much colder.

Myra bundled their clothes into a smaller pack she took from the car, which also contained their spare underwear and toiletries.

She threw the pack into the suitcase, which folded closed. Then she patted the car. Empty, it closed itself up and rolled away.

Alexei grinned. “All set?”

“As we’ll ever be,” Myra said.

Alexei snapped his fingers again. The tarmac under Bisesa’s feet shuddered.

And a great slab of it dropped precipitately, taking the three of them and the suitcase down into darkness. A metal lid closed over them with a clang.

“Shit,” Bisesa said.

“Sorry,” Alexei said. “Meant for cargo, not people.”

Fluorescents lit up, revealing a concrete corridor.

10: Launch Complex 39

Alexei led them to an open-topped vehicle a little like a golf cart.

They clambered aboard. Bisesa felt bulky and clumsy, moving in her jumpsuit. Even the suitcase was more graceful than she was.

The cart moved off smoothly down the tunnel. It was long and crudely cut, and it stretched off into a darkness dimly lit by widely spaced fluorescent tubes. There was a musty smell, but at least it was a little cooler down here.

“This is kind of a cargo conduit,” Alexei said. “Not meant for passengers.”

“But it’s away from prying eyes,” Bisesa said.

“You got it. It’s a couple of klicks but we’ll be there in no time.”

His accent was basically American, Bisesa thought, but with an odd tang of French, long vowels and rolled r’s. “Where are we going?”

“You’ve slept through the rebuilding, haven’t you? We’re heading for LC-39.”

Faint memories stirred in Bisesa’s head. “Launch Complex 39.

Where they launched the Apollo s from.”

“And later the space shuttles, yeah.”

“Now it’s used for something else entirely,” Myra said. “You’ll see.”

“Of course it had to be LC-39 they used,” Alexei said. “As indeed it had to be Canaveral. I mean, it’s not an unsuitable site, especially now they have the hurricanes licked. There are better locations, closer to the equator, but no, it had to be here. The irony is that to launch the new Saturn s that are taking the Apollo retreads into orbit, they had to build a new pad altogether.”

Bisesa still didn’t know what they were talking about. They used the pad for what? “Carel — how do I know that name?”

“You may have met my father. Bill Carel? He worked with Professor Siobhan McGorran.”

It was a long time since Bisesa had heard that name. Siobhan had been Britain’s Astronomer Royal at the time of the sunstorm, and had ended up playing a significant role in mankind’s response to the crisis — and in Bisesa’s own destiny.

“My father was with her as a graduate student. They worked together on quintessence studies.”

“On what?… Never mind.”

“That was before the sunstorm. Now Dad’s a full professor himself.” The cart slowed. “Here we go.” He hopped nimbly off the cart before it had stopped. The women and the suitcase followed a bit more cautiously.

They gathered on a block of tarmac. A lid opened above them with a metallic snap, revealing a slab of blue sky.

Alexei said, “We shouldn’t be challenged aboveground. If we are, let me do the talking. Hold tight, now.” He snapped his fingers.

The tarmac block became an elevator that surged upward with a violence that made Bisesa stagger.

They emerged into sunlight. Alexei had seemed more comfortable underground; now he flinched from the open sky.

Bisesa glanced around, trying to get her bearings. They were at the focus of roads that snaked out over the flat coastal plain of Canaveral, crammed with streams of vehicles, mostly trucks. There was even a kind of monorail system along which a train of podlike compartments zipped, glistening and futuristic. All this traffic poured into this place.

And before her was a vast rusting slab, a platform that reminded her oddly of an oil rig, but stranded on the land, and mounted on tremendous caterpillar tracks. The crude metal shell of the thing was stamped with logos: mostly “Skylift Consortium,”

a name that rang faint bells. Close by stood more strange assemblies, squat tubes that stood erect in mobile stands, like cannon pointing up at the pale blue sky.

“This platform looks for all the world like one of those old crawlers they used to use to haul the Saturn s and the shuttles out to the pad.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Alexei said. “A mobile launch platform, reused.”

“And what are those cannon? Weapons?”

“No,” Alexei said. “They’re the power supply.”

“For what?”

Myra said gently, “Things have changed, Mum. Look up.”

Mounted on top of the big crawler was what looked like a minor industrial facility, where unlikely-looking machines rolled around in a kind of choreography. They seemed to be trucks, basically, but with solar-cell wings on their flanks, and on their roofs were pulleylike mechanisms that made them look like stranded cable-cars. Their hulls were all stamped with the Skylift logo.

These peculiar engines were lining up before a kind of ribbon, shining silver, looking no wider than Bisesa’s hand, that rose up from the platform. Each truck in turn approached the ribbon, dipped its pulley spindle, clung to the ribbon, and then hauled itself off the ground, rising rapidly.

Bisesa stepped back and lifted her face, trying to see where the ribbon went. It rose on up; Bisesa could see the trucks climbing it like beads on a necklace. The ribbon arced upward, narrowing with perspective, becoming a shining thread tilted slightly from the vertical, a scratch ruled across the sky. She tipped her head back higher, looking for whatever was holding the ribbon up—

Nothing was holding it up.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “A space elevator.”

Alexei seemed interested in her reaction. “We call it Jacob’s Ladder. In 2069, it’s an everyday miracle, Bisesa. Welcome to the future.

Come on, time to find our ride. Are you up to a little climbing?”

They had to scramble up rusty rungs, fixed to the side of the mobile platform. Bisesa struggled, Hibernaculum-enfeebled, encased in her suit. The others took care of her, Alexei going ahead, Myra following.

Once on the upper surface of the platform they gave her a few seconds to catch her breath. The trucks rolled to and fro in their orderly way, their motors whirring gently.

Embarrassed, she tried to say something intelligent. “Why use a crawler?”

Alexei said, “It’s best to keep the base of your elevator mobile.

Most of them are based on facilities at sea, actually — reused oil rigs and the like — including Bandara, the first.”

“Bandara?”

“The Aussie elevator, off Perth. They call it Bandara now.

Named for an Aboriginal legend of a world tree.”

“Why do you need to move your base? In case a hurricane comes?”

“Well, yes, though as I said they’ve got hurricanes pretty much licked these days.” He glanced at the sky. “But further up there are other hazards. Relic satellites in low Earth orbit. Even NEOs.

Near — Earth objects. Asteroids. This thing goes a long way up, Bisesa, and has to deal with a lot of perils along the way. Are you ready to move on?”

He brought them to one of the trucks. He called it a “spider.” It had solar-cell wings folded up against its flanks, and that complicated pulley mechanism on its roof. Its transparent hull was loaded up with some kind of cargo, palettes and boxes. The spider was actually moving, though slower than walking pace, rolling in a line of others identical save for registration numbers stamped on its hull—

the spiders were making for the thread in a kind of complicated spiral queuing system, Bisesa saw.

Alexei walked alongside the spider. He dug a plastic disc the size of a hockey puck out of his pocket, and slapped it to the spider’s hull. “Just give it a moment to break through the protocols and establish its interface—” He briskly leapt up onto the spider’s roof, and stuck another hockey puck to the pulley mechanism up there.

By the time he was down on the ground again a transparent door had slid back, and he grinned. “We’re in. Myra, can you give me a hand?” He jumped easily inside the hull, and began to bundle the cargo carelessly out of the door. Myra helped by shoving it aside.

“Just so I’m clear,” Bisesa said uncertainly, “we shouldn’t be doing this, should we? In fact we’re stowing away in a cargo truck.”

“It’s human-rated,” Alexei said confidently. “Pressurized. Good radiation shielding, and we’ll need it; we’ll be spending rather a long time in the van Allen belts. We’ll be fine with the gear I brought along. It was thought best to get you off the planet as fast as possible, Bisesa.”

“Why? Myra, are you on the run? Am I?”

“Sort of,” Myra said.

Alexei said, “Let’s move it. We’re nearly at the ribbon.”

Once the cargo was cleared, Alexei summoned his suitcase. It extended little hydraulic legs to jump without difficulty into the spider’s hull. Myra followed, and then only Bisesa was walking alongside the trundling spider.

Mura held out her hand. “Mum? Come on. It’s an easy step.”

Bisesa looked around, beyond the jungle of spiders, to the blue sky of Canaveral, the distant gantries. She had an odd premonition that she might never come this way again. Might never set foot on Earth again. She took a deep breath; even among the scents of oil and electricity, she could smell the salt of the ocean.

Then she stepped deliberately off the crawler platform and into the hull, one step, two. Myra gave her a hug, welcoming her aboard.

The hull’s interior was bare, but it was meant for at least occasional human use. There was a handrail at waist height, and little fold-down seats embedded in the walls. The view through the transparent hull was obscured by those big folded-away solar panel wings.

Alexei was all business. He spread a softscreen over the inner hull, tapped it, and the door slid shut. “Gotcha.” He took a deep breath. “Canned air,” he said. “Nothing like it.” He seemed relieved to be shut up in the pod.

Bisesa asked, “You’re a Spacer?”

“Not strictly. Born on Earth, but I’ve lived most of my life off the planet. I guess I’m used to environments you can control. Out there in the raw, it’s a little — clamoring.” He reached up and peeled his tattoo off his face.

Bisesa touched her cheek, and found her own tattoo came away like a layer of wax. She tucked it in a pocket of her suit.

Alexei advised them to sit down. Bisesa pulled down a seat, and found a narrow pull-out plastic belt that she clipped around her waist. Myra followed suit, looking apprehensive.

The spiders before them in the line were clearing away now, revealing the ribbon, a vertical line of silver, dead straight.

Alexei said, “What’s going to happen is that our spider will grab onto the ribbon with the roller assembly above our heads.

Okay? As soon as it has traction it will start to climb. You’ll feel some acceleration.”

“How much?” Bisesa asked.

“Only half a G or so. And only for about ten seconds. After that, once we hit our top speed, we’ll climb smoothly.”

“And what’s the top speed?”

“Oh, two hundred klicks an hour. The ribbon’s actually rated for twice that. I’ve disabled the speed inhibitor, if we need it.”

“Let’s hope that’s not necessary,” Bisesa said dryly.

Myra reached over and slipped her hand into her mother’s. “Do you remember how we went to see the opening of the Aussievator?

It was just after the sunstorm. I was eighteen, I think. That was where I got to know Eugene again. Now there are elevators all over the world.”

“It was quite a day. And so is this.”

Myra squeezed her hand. “Glad I woke you up yet?”

“I’m reserving judgment.” But her grin was fierce. Who could resist this?

Alexei watched this interplay uncertainly.

They were rolling toward the ribbon. Over their heads, with a clumsy clunk, the pulley assembly unfolded itself. The ribbon really was narrow, no more than four or five centimeters across. It seemed impossible that it could support the weight of this car, let alone hundreds — thousands? — of others. But the spider trundled forward without hesitation.

The roller assembly tipped up, closed itself up around the ribbon, and, with a surge like a punch in the belly, the spider leapt sky-ward.

11: Ribbon

In that first moment they left the spider farm behind, and were up and out in the bright sunlight. Glancing up, Bisesa saw the ribbon arrowing off into invisibility in a cloudless sky, with the bright pearls of other spiders going ahead of her, up into the unknown.

And when she looked down, peering around the obstruction of the solar panels, she saw the world falling away from her, and a tremendous view of the Cape opening up. She shielded her eyes from the sun. There were the gantries and blockhouses, and the straight-line roads traveled by generations of astronauts. A spaceplane of some kind rested on a runway, a black-and-white moth.

And a bit further on a white needle stood tall beside a rusted gantry.

It had to be a Saturn V, perhaps bearing a recreation of Apollo 10, the next precursor of the century-old Moon landings. But she had already risen higher than the Saturn’s needle nose, already higher than the astronauts climbing their gantries to their Moon ships.

The ascent was rapid, and just kept going. Soon she seemed able to see down the beach for kilometers. Canaveral looked more water than land, a skim of earth on the silver hide of the great ocean that opened up to the east. And she saw cars and trucks parked up on the roads and beside the beach, with tiny American flags flutter-ing from their aerials.

“People still come to see,” Alexei said, grinning. “Quite a spectacle when the Saturn s go up, I’m told. But the Ladder is more impressive, in its way—”

There was a jolt.

“Sorry about that,” Alexei said. “End of the acceleration.” He tapped his softscreen, and a simple display lit up, showing altitude, speed, air pressure, time. “Three hundred meters high, speed maxed out, and from now on it’s a smooth ride all the way up.”

The ground fell away, the historic clutter of Canaveral already diminishing to a map.

A minute into the journey, four kilometers high, and the world was starting to curve, the eastern ocean horizon an immense arc. And with a snap the big solar-cell wings folded down flat.

“I don’t get it,” Bisesa said. “This is for power? The solar cells seem to be on the underside.”

“That’s the idea,” Alexei said. “The spider’s power comes from ground-based lasers.”

“You saw them, Mum,” Myra said.

“You leave your power supply on the ground. Okay. So how long is the ride?”

“To beyond geosynch? All the way out to our drop-off point?

Around twelve days,” Alexei said.

“Twelve days in this box?” And Bisesa didn’t like the sound of that phrase, drop-off.

“This is a big structure, Mum,” Myra said, but she was evidently a novice herself and didn’t sound convinced.

A few more minutes and they were eight kilometers high, already higher than most aircraft would fly, and there was a clunk, the mildest of shudders. Over their heads the pulley mechanism alarmingly reconfigured itself, bringing a different set of wheels and tracks into play.

And then, suddenly, the ribbon itself changed, from a narrow strip the width of Bisesa’s hand to a sheet as wide as an opened-out newspaper. It was sharply curved, she saw. Their spider now clung to one outer edge of the ribbon.

Alexei said, “This is the standard width of the ribbon, most of the way to orbit. It’s kept narrower in the lower atmosphere because of the threat regime down there. Of course most of the bad weather is kept away nowadays. The ribbon’s worst problems actually come when they launch one of those Saturn s; the whole damn earth shakes, and I can tell you there’s a lot of grumbling about that.”

Ten kilometers, twelve, fifteen; the distance simply peeled away. Earth’s curve became more pronounced, and the sky above Bisesa’s head started to fade down to a deeper blue. She was above the bulk of the atmosphere already, she realized.

Another abrupt transition came when the ribbon turned gold: a plating to protect it from the corrosive effects of high-altitude atomic oxygen, Alexei said, ionized gas in Earth’s wispy upper air.

And still they rose and rose.

“So let’s get comfortable.” Alexei ordered his suitcase to open.

“The pressure will drop to its spaceside mix — low pressure, a third atmospheric, but high on oxygen. In the meantime I brought oxygen masks.” He showed them, and a rack of bottles. “And it’s going to get cold. Your jumpsuits ought to keep you warm. I have heated blankets too.” He rummaged about in his suitcase. “We’re going to be in here a while. I have fold-out camp beds and chairs. A bubble tent in case you don’t want to sleep under the stars, so to speak. I have heaters for food and drink. We’re going to have to recycle our water, I’m afraid, but I have a good treatment system.”

“No spacesuits,” Bisesa said.

“Shouldn’t need them, unless anything goes wrong.”

“And if it does?”

He looked at her, as if assessing her nerve. “Second worst case is, we get stuck on the cable. There are a whole slew of fail-safe mechanisms to save us until rescue comes, via another spider. Even if we were to lose pressure, we have survival bubbles. Hamster balls. Not comfortable, but practical.”

Hamster balls? Bisesa hoped fervently that it wouldn’t come to that. “And the worst case?”

“We become detached from the ribbon altogether. You understand that a certain point on the elevator is in geosynch—

geosynchronous orbit, turning around the Earth in exactly twenty-four hours. That’s the only altitude that is actually in orbit, strictly speaking. Below that point we are moving too slowly for orbit, and above too fast.”

“So if the spider were to lose its grip—”

“Below geosynch, we fall back to Earth.” He rapped the transparent hull. “Might not look like it, but it is designed to survive a low-speed reentry.”

“And after geosynch? We’d fall away from Earth, right?”

He winked. “Actually that’s the idea. Don’t worry about it.” He held up a flask. “Coffee, anybody?”

Myra grunted. “Maybe we ought to get your fancy toilet set up first.”

“Good thinking.”

While they fiddled with the toilet, Bisesa gazed out of the window.

Riding silently into the sky, soon she was a hundred kilometers high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X-15 s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, a point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight mass that she knew had to be at the ribbon’s end, nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.

By an hour and a half in, the fast pace of the events of the early moments of the climb was over. Somewhere above three hundred kilometers high, she could already see the horizon all the way around the face of the Earth, with the ribbon arrowing straight down to the familiar shapes of the American continents far beneath her. Though the stars would wheel around her during this extraordinary ascent, she realized, the Earth would stay locked in place below. It was as if she had been transported to a medieval universe, the cosmos of Dante, with a fixed Earth surrounded by spinning stars.

When she stood she felt oddly light on her feet. One of Alexei’s softscreen displays mapped the weakening of gravity as they clambered away from Earth’s huge mass. It was already down several percent on its sea-level value.

The silent, straight-line ascent, the receding Earth, the shaft of ribbon-light that guided her, the subtle reduction of weight: it was a magical experience, utterly disconcerting, like an ascent into heaven.

Two hours after “launch” the ribbon changed again, spreading out to a curved sheet twice the width of its standard size — still only about two meters across, and gently curved.

Bisesa asked, “Why the extra thickness?”

“Space debris,” Alexei said. “I mean, bits of old spacecraft.

Lumps of frozen astronaut urine. That sort of stuff. Between five and seventeen hundred kilometers, we’re at the critical risk altitude for that. So we have a bit of extra width to cope with any impact.”

“And if we are hit by something—”

“Anything so big it would slice the ribbon right through is tracked, and we just move the whole shebang out of the way using the crawler on the ground. Anything smaller will puncture the ribbon, but it’s smart enough to mend itself. The only problem is if we’re unlucky enough to be hit by something small coming sideways in, across the face of the ribbon.”

“Which is why the ribbon is curved,” Bisesa guessed.

“Yes. So it can’t be cut through. Don’t worry about it.”

Myra, peering up, said, “I think I see another spider. On the other side of the ribbon from us. I think — oh, wow.”

The second spider came screaming down out of the sky, passing just half a meter away. They all flinched. Bisesa had a brief reminder of their huge speed.

“A builder,” Alexei said, a bit too quickly for his studied calm to be convincing. “Traveling down the ribbon, weaving an extra couple of centimeters onto the edge.”

Bisesa asked, “What’s the substance of the ribbon?”

“Fullerenes. Carbon nanotubes. Little cylinders of carbon atoms, spun into a thread. Immensely strong. The whole ribbon is under tension; the Earth’s spin is trying to fling the counterweight away, like a kid swinging a rock on a rope. No conventional substance would be strong enough. So the spiders go up and down, weaving on extra strips, and binding it all with adhesive tape.”

Mechanical spiders, endlessly weaving a web in the sky.

They rose largely in silence, for the others wouldn’t talk.

“Come on. We’re off the Earth. Now you can tell me what’s going on. Why am I here, Myra?”

The others hesitated. Then Myra said, “Mum, it’s difficult. For one thing the whole world is listening in.”

“The hull is smart.” Alexei spun a finger. “All ’round surveillance.”

“Oh.”

“And for another,” Myra said, “you already know. ”

Alexei said, “Believe me, we’ll have plenty of time to talk, Bisesa. Even when we get to the drop-off, it’s only the start of the journey.”

“A journey to where? No, don’t answer that.”

Myra said, “I think you’ll be surprised by the answer, Mum.”

Bisesa would have welcomed the chance to talk to Myra, not about high-security issues and the fate of the solar system, but simply of each other. Myra had told her hardly anything of her life since Bisesa had gone into the tank. But, it seemed, that wasn’t going to happen. Myra seemed oddly inhibited. And now the presence of Alexei sharing this little capsule with them inhibited her even further.

Bisesa started to feel tired, her face and hands cold, her stomach warmed by coffee, her mind dulled by the relentless climb. She pulled on the hat and gloves she found in her pockets. She piled up blankets from the suitcase onto the floor, pulled one over herself, and lay down. There was no sound, no sense of motion; she might have been stationary, suspended above the slowly receding Earth.

She gazed up at the ribbon, seeing how far she could follow its line.

There was another transition when the ribbon reverted from gold to its customary silver. And later the width narrowed. More than seventeen hundred kilometers high, eight hours since leaving Earth, they were higher than almost all mankind’s satellites had ever flown.

Bisesa was vaguely, peripherally aware of all this. Mostly she dozed.

She was woken with a jolt, a brief surge of acceleration that pressed her down into her blankets.

She sat up. Alexei and Myra sat on their fold-down seats. Myra was wide-eyed, but Alexei seemed composed. Alexei’s softscreen on the wall flashed red.

They were thirteen hours into the journey, more than twenty-six hundred kilometers up. When Bisesa moved she felt as if she was going to float into the air. Gravity was down to about half sea level.

Earth seemed trivial, a ball dangling at the end of a silver rope.

Other spiders flashed past them, overtaken by their own rapid climb.

“We sped up, right? So what’s wrong?”

“We’re being pursued,” Alexei said. “We had to expect it. I mean, they know we’re in here.”

“Pursued?” Bisesa had a nasty vision of a missile clambering up from a derelict Canaveral launch pad. But that made no sense.

“They wouldn’t risk damaging their ribbon.”

“You’re right,” Alexei said. “The ribbon is a lot more precious than we are. Likewise they won’t want to spoil the flow of spiders.

They could do that, block us off. But there is cargo worth billions being carried up this line.”

“Then what?”

“They have super-spiders. Capable of greater speeds. It would take a few days, but the super-spider would catch us up.”

Myra thought that over. “How does it get past all the other spiders in the way?”

“The same way we do. The others just have to get out of the way. We’re matching the super-spider’s ascent rate, twice our nominal. In fact I slaved us to the super-spider, so we’ll mirror its ascent.

It can’t possibly catch us. As soon as the ground authorities realize that, they’ll give up.”

“Twice nominal. Is that safe?”

“These systems are human-rated; they have heavy safety mar-gins built in.” But he didn’t sound terribly sure.

It only took a few minutes for the softscreen to chime and glow green. Alexei smiled. “They got the message. We can slow down.

Hold onto something.”

Bisesa braced against a rail.

They decelerated for a disconcerting few seconds. Blankets floated up from the floor, and the chemical toilet whirred as suction pumps labored to keep from spilling the contents into the air. Myra looked queasy, and Bisesa felt her stomach turn over. They were all relieved when gravity was restored.

But the screen flashed red again. “Uh oh,” Alexei said.

Bisesa asked, “What now?”

He worked his softscreen. “We’re not climbing as we should.”

“Some fault with the spider?”

“Not that. They are reeling in the ribbon.”

“Reeling it in?” Suddenly Bisesa saw the spider as a fish on the end of a monstrous angler’s line.

“It’s kind of drastic, but it can be done. The ribbon is pretty fine stuff.”

“So what do we do?”

“You might want to close your eyes. And hold onto something again.” He tapped his softscreen, and Bisesa had the impression that something detached itself from the hull.

She clamped her eyes shut.

There was a flash, visible even through her eyelids, and the cabin rocked subtly.

“A bomb,” Bisesa said. She felt almost disappointed. “How crude. I think I expected better of you, Alexei.”

“It was just a warning shot, a micro fusion pulse. No harm done. But very visible from the ground.”

“You’re signaling your intent to blow up the ribbon if they don’t leave us alone.”

“It wouldn’t be difficult. Kind of hard to protect a hundred thousand kilometers of paper-thin ribbon against deliberate sabo-tage…”

Bisesa asked, “Wouldn’t people get hurt?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, Mum,” Myra said. “Isolation-ist terrorists attacked Modimo a few years back.”

“Modimo?”

Alexei said, “The African Alliance elevator. Named for a Zim-babwean sky-god, I think. Nobody got hurt, and they wouldn’t now. I’m making an economic threat.” But he glanced uncertainly at his softscreen.

Bisesa said sharply, “And if they call your bluff? Will you go through with it?”

“Actually I don’t think I would. But they can’t afford to take the risk, can they?”

Bisesa said, “They could just kill us. Turn off the power. The air recycling. We’d be helpless.”

“They could. But they won’t,” Alexei said. “They want to know what we know. Where we’re going. So they’ll be patient, and hope to get hold of us later.”

“I hope you’re right.”

As if in response, the softscreen turned green again. Alexei’s grin broadened. “So much for that. Okay, who’s for beans?”

12: Mount Weather

Bella had expected Bob Paxton’s briefing to take place in her offices in the old NASA headquarters building on E Street in Washington, a block of concrete and glass repaired and refurbished since weathering the sunstorm.

But Paxton met her outside the building. He stood by the open door of a limousine. “Bella.” The car was one of a convoy, complete with uniformed naval officers and blue-suited FBI agents.

She thought he looked comical, an elderly man rigid in his much-cherished uniform, standing there like a bellboy. His face was twisted in the morning light. He was, she had learned, a man who distrusted the sun, even more than most of his bruised generation.

“Morning, Bob. Going for a ride, are we?”

His smile was disciplined. “We should relocate to a more secure situation. We have issues of global importance, of significance for the future of the species. I recommend we convene at Mount Weather. I took the liberty of making the arrangements. But it’s your call.” He eyed her, and the tension that had existed since the day she took the job crackled between them.

She’d never heard of Mount Weather. But she couldn’t see any harm in indulging him. She climbed into the car, and he followed; they would be alone together.

They pulled out. The convoy took Route 66 and met Highway 50, heading west. The road was full of traffic, but their speed was high.

“How far are we going?”

“Be there in half an hour.” Paxton sat there and glowered, visibly irritated.

“I know what’s bugging you, Bob. It’s Professor Carel, isn’t it?”

The muscles in his grizzled cheeks worked, as if he longed to be chewing gum. “I don’t know anything about this old English guy.”

“No doubt you had him vetted.”

“As best we could. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.

Not part of the team.”

“He’s coming at my invitation,” she said firmly. In fact, in a sense, to her this elderly British scientist was part of the team, a deeper and older team-up than anything she was involved in with Paxton.

Professor Bill Carel had once been a graduate student working with Siobhan McGorran, another British astronomer who had become involved in the grand effort to build the sunstorm shield—

and who had, in its aftermath, married Bud Tooke, and then nursed him through his cancer, a cruel legacy of that astounding day. That personal link was in fact the channel through which Carel had contacted her, and had tried to persuade her that he had a contribution to make regarding the presence of the object in the solar system, which he had heard of in whispers and leaks.

She tried to express some of this to Paxton, but he just waved it away. “He’s a cosmologist, for Christ’s sake. He’s spent his life staring into deep space. What use is he going to be today?”

“Let’s keep an open mind, Bob,” she said firmly.

He fell into a silence that lasted all through the rest of the drive.

Bella had raised a child, she was used to sulks, and she just ignored him.

After eighty kilometers they pulled off onto Route 101, a narrow two-lane rural road that clambered up a ridge. At the crest of the ridge they came to a line of razor-wired fencing. A faded sign read: U.S. PROPERTY

NO TRESPASSING

Beyond that Bisesa could make out a few battered aluminum huts, and beyond them, a glassy wall.

They had to wait while their cars interfaced with the base’s security systems. Bella was aware of a faint speckle of laser light as she was probed.

“So, Mount Weather,” she prompted Paxton.

“Five hundred acres of Blue Ridge real estate. In the nineteen-fifties they set up a bunker here, a place to shelter government officials from D.C. in the event of a nuclear exchange. It fell into disuse, but was revived after 9/11 in 2001, and again after 2042. Although now it’s essentially a loan from the U.S. government to the World Space Council.”

Bella tried not to grimace. “A bunker from the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the War with the Sky. Appropriate, I suppose.”

“Manned by navy officers mostly. Used to confinement and canned air. Mount Weather is a good neighbor, I’m told. They keep up the roads, and send out the snow plows in winter. Not that there’s much snow nowadays…”

She had been expecting the convoy to pass on to a gate in that shining impenetrable wall. She was shocked when, with a rip of fo-liage, the whole chunk of land beneath the car turned into an elevator and dropped her into darkness.

Bob Paxton laughed as they descended. “I feel like I’m coming home.”

As smiling young naval officers security-processed the party and escorted it to its conference room, Bella glimpsed a little of Mount Weather.

The ceilings were low, paneled with grimy tiles, the corridors narrow. But these unprepossessing corridors enclosed a small, old-fashioned town. There were television and radio studios, cafeterias, a tiny civilian police station, even a little row of shops, all underground, all contained within a hum of air conditioning. It was like a museum, she thought, a relic of the mindset of the mid-twentieth century.

At least the conference room was modern, big and bright and fitted with softwalls and table screens.

And here Bill Carel was waiting for her. In a room full of heavy, rumbling figures, mostly men, mostly about Paxton’s age, mostly in one uniform or another, Carel in his shabby old jacket was standing alone beside a coffee percolator.

Bella ignored Paxton’s cronies and made straight for Carel.

“Professor. It’s good of you to come.” She shook his hand; it was flimsy, bony.

He was a little younger than she was, she recalled from his file, somewhere in his fifties, but he looked frail, gaunt, his face liver-spotted, his stance awkward and uncomfortable. The sunstorm had blighted many lives; perhaps he had been battling illness. But the eyes in his cadaverous face were bright. He said, “I hope the contribution I have to make is a valid one, and useful.”

“You’re not sure?” She felt obscurely disappointed at his diffidence. An unworthy part of her had been looking forward to using him to tweak Bob Paxton’s tail.

“Well, how can one be sure? The whole situation is unprecedented. But my colleagues urged me to contact you — to contact somebody. ”

She nodded. “However this turns out, I’m grateful you tried.”

Cradling a coffee, Bella led Carel to a seat. “I’ll make sure you get your say,” she whispered. “And later we must talk of the Tookes.”

After that she made a hasty circuit of the room, meeting and greeting. As well as the Patriots Committee types there were representatives of the various multinational armed forces and governments that supported the World Space Council.

She didn’t get a good first impression of the quality of these delegates. The Council had been engaged in nothing but “preparatory”

and “advisory” activities for decades; since the sunstorm the War with the Sky had been cold. So working for the Council had not been a prized assignment for a career officer. Maybe this was a room full of Bob Paxtons, steely-eyed fanatic types, or else dead-enders.

But she told herself not to rush to judgment; after all if there were a new threat approaching the Earth, these men and women would be her prime resource in dealing with it.

Standing at the head of the table, Bob Paxton, self-appointed chair, flicked his finger against a glass to call the meeting to order.

The rest of the panel, perhaps starstruck to be in the presence of the first man on Mars, submitted their attention immediately.

Paxton said the purpose of the meeting was twofold. “First to give Chair Fingal an overview of the assets she has at her disposal.

Second to focus specifically on the anomaly currently approaching Jovian orbit—”

“And at that point,” Bella put in, “I will invite Professor Carel to make his contribution.”

Paxton rumbled a grudging assent.

They began to speak of the defense of the solar system.

13: Fortress Sol

Paxton’s presentation was a carnival of bullet-points, graphs, and images, some of them three-dimensional and animated; the holograms hovered over the middle of the table like ads for fantastic toys. But the subject matter was grim.

“Since sunstorm day, we have devoted considerable assets on Earth and beyond to watching the skies… ”

Bella got the impression that Earth was plastered with electronic eyes, peering at the sky in all wavelengths. This included NASA assets like the venerable Deep Space Network chain of tracking arrays in Spain, Australia, and the Mojave, a near-Earth asteroid watching facility in New Mexico called LINEAR, and other Spaceguard facilities. The giant radio telescope at Arecibo likewise now gave over much of its time, not to astronomy, but to seeking unnatural signals from the stars.

The visual astronomers too had suddenly found money coming their way to realize previously unaffordable dreams. Bella studied images of the unimaginatively named Very Large Telescope in Chile, an Extremely Large Telescope in Morocco, and a monster called the Owl, the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope at a site called Dome C in Antarctica, where enough steel to build a second Eiffel Tower supported a monstrous mirror a hundred meters across. The Owl was busy photographing the birth of the first stars in the universe — and, more significantly, was mapping the surfaces of planets of nearby stars.

Facilities off-Earth were no less impressive. The most successful of the new space observatories was Cyclops Station, which trailed the Earth in its orbit at a stable Lagrange point. At Cyclops there had been assembled a telescope with a single, very large

“Fresnel” lens — not a mirror, but a diffracting lens.

As for what all these automated eyes were looking for, a century of theoretical studies by the old SETI enthusiasts had been plundered. Strategies were being devised to detect signals of all types down to very brief bursts — stray flashes of tight-beam laser signals, perhaps, detectable down to a billionth of a second long.

Paxton also spoke of lesser eyes, a whole fleet of them scattered right through the solar system out as far as the orbit of Neptune. He brought up a three-dimensional image of Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016, which had been posted into orbit around Saturn.

“These are our robot sentries, our picket line,” Paxton boomed.

“DSM X7-6102-016 was typical, the most advanced scientific gear but robust, hardened and shrouded. These little critters patrol the skies all the way out to the fringe of OutSys. And they watch each other just as keenly.”

“That’s true,” Professor Carel put in hesitantly. “In fact it was the other probes’ observation of the destruction of X7-6102-016 that was brought to my attention, rather than anything that the probe transmitted itself.”

Bella said, “So we live in a heavily surveilled solar system. What else do you have, Bill?”

“Weapons.” Paxton waved a hand, and the image of DSM X7-6102-016 broke up.

“We call the concept ‘Fortress Sol,’ ” Paxton said grimly. “We’re establishing layers of deep defense from the outer solar system to the inner, all of it centering on the home of humanity, the Earth. You know yourself, ma’am, that we have established facilities as far out as the Trojan asteroids.”

The Trojans were a rich concentration of asteroids trailing Jupiter around its orbit at a Lagrange stable point. Right now Bella’s daughter Edna was out at Trojan Station, working on a new generation of spacecraft, the “A-ships.” All heavily classified.

“Next in we have the asteroids. For military planning purposes we use the A-line, the central belt, as the boundary between InSys and OutSys — that is, the inner and outer systems. After that we have stations at the Lagrange points of Mars and Earth…”

In the Earth — Moon system itself there were weapons platforms on the Moon and at the lunar Lagrange points and in Earth orbit: killer satellites that could pepper any interloper with projectiles, or fry it with X-ray lasers, or simply ram it. There were ground-based systems too, heavy lasers, particle beams, and reconditioned Cold War ICBMs still capable of hurling their lethal payloads away from the Earth. Even in Earth’s upper atmosphere huge aircraft pa-trolled continually, bearing weapons that could knock out incoming missiles. And so on. The whole of cislunar space seemed to be bristling with weaponry, from Earth’s surface up through what Paxton barked out as “LEO, HEO, GEO, and super-GEO”—low, high, geosynchronous Earth orbit and beyond.

And the overt hardware of war was just the start. Everything that could be weaponized was. Even space-based weather control systems, like the kilometers-wide space lenses and mirrors, could easily be redirected. Every plowshare could be turned to a sword.

Bella’s imagination quailed when she tried to imagine the sort of last-ditch defensive battle that might depend on the use of such weapons. And the fact that these weapons, built to fight a War in the Sky, could just as easily be turned against an enemy on the ground was lost on nobody.

Paxton said, “We’re well aware of course that these facilities could have done nothing to stop the sunstorm. Therefore we have fallbacks. We don’t know what these Firstborn might hit us with next. So for planning purposes we have looked back at other disasters, natural ones, that have hit us in the past, and how we coped with them…”

He moved into a new chart, a dismal classification of catastrophe.

There were “local disasters” that killed a few percent of the world’s population, like major volcanic eruptions and the twentieth-century world wars, and “global disasters” killing a significant fraction of the population, such as would follow the strike of a small asteroid, and “extinction level events,” so devastating that a significant proportion of all species would be eliminated, and life on Earth itself threatened. “If not for the shield,” Paxton said crisply, “the sunstorm would have inflicted the mother of all extinction level events on us, since it would have melted Earth’s surface down to the basement rock. As it was the shield reduced the event to a mere ‘global disaster.’ ”

And the sunstorm, he said, had inspired the approach being taken to make the Earth resilient in case of any future attacks.

“We’re trying to rework our industrial base so we can reconfigure to recovery mode as rapidly as possible in the face of any of these major disaster types. So, for instance, if we had to build another shield, we could do it more effectively. Of course some would argue that as a species we ought to be making this kind of preparation even if the Firstborn didn’t exist.

“We have some advantages. A space-based infrastructure could help reboot a terrestrial civilization. Weather control systems to stabilize a damaged climate, as after the sunstorm. Orbital stations to restring any downed elevators. Space-based energy systems and comms links. You could store medical facilities up there. Maybe you could even feed the world, from orbiting farms, or lunar agri-culture, say. The children of the Earth turning back to help their wounded mother.” He grimaced. “If the fucking Spacers cooperate.

“However we have to go beyond all this, and consider the worst case.” He said sternly, looking them all in the eye one by one, “We must plan against extermination.

“Of course we have populations off-Earth now. But I’m told there’s still some doubt that the offworld colonies could survive if Earth were lost altogether. So we have further backups.”

He spoke of vaults, on Earth and off it; there was one dug into a lunar mountain called Pico, for instance, in the Mare Imbrium.

Copies of the wisdom of mankind, on gold leaf and stored elec-tronically. DNA stores. Frozen zygotes. Caches to be retrieved by whoever might come this way, if mankind were exterminated. The “Earthmail,” a desperate firing-off of a fragment of human culture to the stars on the eve of the sunstorm, was another sort of cache.

“All right, Bill. Do you think this is going to be enough?”

Paxton said with a hard face, “Do any of you know what space opera was? Fiction of the far future, of wars fought across galaxies, of spaceships the size of worlds. We’re only a century on from World War Two — only a hundred and fifty years since the main transport mechanism for warfare was the horse. And yet we’re faced with a space opera threat. In another thousand years, say, we’ll be scattered so far that nothing short of a Galaxy core explosion could kill us all. But for now, we’re still vulnerable.”

Bill Carel dared to raise a hand. “Which is actually a logic that suggests a second strike is more likely now, than later.”

“Yeah,” Paxton growled.

“And, despite your fine presentation, Admiral, there are obvious flaws in these strategies.” There was an intake of breath, but Carel seemed oblivious. “May I?”

“Go on,” Bella said quickly.

“First there is the sparseness of your resources, Admiral. Just because you have a station in the orbit of Jupiter doesn’t mean you can counter a threat coming at the same radius but from the far side of the sun.”

“We’re aware of that—”

“And you seem to be thinking in two dimensions, as if this was a land war of the old sort. What if an attack were to come at us out of the ecliptic — I mean, away from the plane of the sun and planets?”

“I walked on Mars,” Paxton said dangerously. “I know what the ecliptic is. As it happens the present bogey has come sailing in along the plane of the ecliptic. For the future we’re considering out-of-plane options. But you know as well as I do that the energy costs of getting up there are prohibitive. Yes, Professor Carel, the solar system is a mighty big place. Yes, we can’t cover it all. What else can we do but try?”

Carel almost laughed. “But these efforts are so thinly based it’s virtually futile—”

Paxton glowered, and Bella held her hand up. “Please, Bill.”

“I’m sorry,” said Carel. “And then there is the question of the ef-ficacy of all these preparations against the threat we actually face—”

“Fine.” Angrily Paxton cleared down his displays. “So let’s talk about the anomaly.”

Bella longed for fresh coffee.

After his long and detailed discussion of Fortress Sol, Paxton’s presentation on the anomaly was brief.

He briskly reviewed the principal evidence for the bogey’s existence. “Right now this thing is passing through the J-line, the orbit of Jupiter. In fact we have a window to intercept it, because it’s fortuitously passing close to the Trojan base, and we’re working on mission options. And then it will sail on through the asteroids, past the orbit of Mars, to Earth, where it seems to be precisely targeted.

But we still have no idea what it is, or what it might do if and when it gets here.”

When he sat down there was a brief silence.

Bill Carel looked at Paxton, and around the room, as if expecting another contribution. “Is that all?”

“That’s all we got,” Paxton said.

Carel said softly, “I did not dream you would have so little — it is as well that I came. If I may, Admiral?”

Bob Paxton glared at Bella, but she gave him a discreet nod, and he gave the floor to Carel.

“In a way,” Carel said, “my involvement with this ‘bogey’

began in the years before the sunstorm, when I worked with an astronomer called Siobhan McGorran on a probe we called QAP.” He pronounced it “cap.” “The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe…”

Paxton and his Patriots shifted and grumbled.

The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe was a follow-up to a craft called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which in 2003

had studied the faint echoes of the Big Bang, and had established for the first time the proportions of the basic components of the universe — baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy. It was dark energy, called by some “quintessence,” that fueled the expansion of the universe. Now the purpose of the QAP was to measure the effects of that cosmic inflation by seeking the echoes of primordial sound waves.

“It was really a very elegant concept,” Carel said. “The primordial universe, small, dense, and ferociously hot, was an echo chamber full of sound waves propagating through a turbulent medium.

But then came the expansion.” He spread his delicate hands.

“Poom. Suddenly there was room for things to cool down, and more interesting physics.

“As the expansion cut in those ancient sound waves were dissipated. But they left an imprint, their pattern of compression influencing the formation of the first galaxies. And so by mapping the galactic distribution we hoped to reconstruct the primordial sounds. This in turn would provide clues as to the physics of the quintessence, the dark energy, which at that time—”

As the uniforms got more restless, Bella said gently, “Perhaps you should get to the point, Bill.”

He smiled at her. He had a softscreen of his own that he spread out over the table; it quickly interfaced with the table’s subsystems.

“Here is a profile of the cosmic expansion.” It was a spiky graph, plotted on logarithmic scales, an upward curve. He spoke of how this curve had been established by analyzing old light seeping from the deepest sky, and by taking correlations of the structures to be observed on a variety of scales. The “frequency” of the patterns of galactic formation mapped back to the frequencies of those lost sound waves.

This time Paxton cut him off. “Jesus Christ, Poindexter, put me out of my misery. Where are you going with this?”

Carel tapped his softscreen. “It was one of my own students who fortuitously came across an animation of the destruction of DSM X7-6102-016. ”

“I’d like to know how he got a hold of that,” Paxton growled.

“She, actually,” Carel said, unfazed. “A girl called Lyla Neal.

Nigerian, ferociously bright. The destruction of the DSM was an odd explosion, you know. It’s not as if it was hit by an external weapon. Rather as if it tore itself apart from within. Well, prompted by that, Lyla constructed an expansion curve for the DSM, to show how its little universe was ended.”

He pulled up a second chart. The scale was different, Bella saw, but his conclusion was obvious. The DSM expansion curve mapped the QAP’s cosmic profile. Precisely, as could be seen when Carel overlaid the two.

Bella sat back, stunned. “So what does this mean?”

“I can only speculate,” Carel said.

“Then do so, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Paxton.

“It seems to me that the DSM was destroyed by a specific and localized application of dark energy, of quintessence. It was ripped apart by precisely the force that has caused the universal expansion, somehow focused down onto this small craft. It is a cosmological weapon, if you like. Quite remarkable.” He smiled. “Lyla calls it a

‘Q-bomb.’ ”

“Cute,” snapped Paxton. “So can we stop this thing, shoot it down, deflect it?”

Carel seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Why, I have absolutely no idea. This is not like the sunstorm, Admiral, which was a very energetic event, but crudely engineered. This is a barely familiar sort of physics. It’s very hard to imagine we can respond in any meaningful way.”

Bella said, “But, Bill, what happens if this Q-bomb actually reaches the Earth?”

Again he seemed surprised to be asked. “Why, that must be obvious. If it functions in the same way again — we have no reason to imagine its scope of action is limited — it will be just as with the DSM. ” He spread his fingers. “Poom.”

The silence in the room was profound.

Bella glanced around the table. These old sky warriors had almost seemed to be enjoying themselves. Now they were subdued, silent.

Their bluff had been called.

And what was worse, as far as she could see this “cosmological”

technology cut right through the rickety and expensive defenses mankind had been trying to erect.

“All right,” she said. “We’ve got twenty-one months until that thing reaches Earth. So what do we do?”

“We have to stop it,” Paxton said immediately. “It’s our only option. We can’t save the population any other way — we can’t evacuate the damn planet. We throw everything we’ve got at it. Beginning with our resources out at the Trojans.” He glanced at Bella.

Bella knew what he meant. The A-ships. And she knew that would most likely mean committing Edna to action. She put that thought aside for now. “Draw up an operation order, Bob. But there’s no reason to believe any of our weapons will make a bit of difference. We have to find out more about this thing, and find a weakness. Professor Carel, you’re hereby drafted.”

Carel inclined his head.

Paxton said heavily, “And there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“Bisesa Dutt. We missed her. She’s escaped up an elevator like a rat up a drainpipe.”

That baffled Bella. “A space elevator? Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know. She’s just out of a Hibernaculum; it’s possible she doesn’t know. But somebody does, some asshole Spacer.”

“Admiral,” Bella snapped. “That kind of language isn’t help-ing.”

He grinned, a wolf ’s leer. “I’ll be nice. But we have to find Bisesa Dutt regardless of what toes we tread on.”

Bella sighed. “All right. And right now I think I need to go brief a few presidents. Is there anything else?”

Paxton shook his head. “Let’s conference-call in an hour. And, people — we don’t want any leaks out of here.”

As the meeting broke up, Bella fretted. The fact that Carel had had to force his way in here was a lesson that slickness of presentation didn’t imply comprehensiveness of knowledge. And if not for this chance observation by Carel’s bright student, they would be nowhere near discovering the true nature of this artifact, this weapon, this Q-bomb.

What else were they missing? What else weren’t they seeing?

What else?

14: Ascent Beyond Orbit

Almost all of the excitement of the ascent was over in the first twenty-four hours. Bisesa would not have believed it when they first left the ground, but she rapidly grew bored.

As they had continued to shed gravity, floating stuff cluttered up the place, the blankets and bits of clothing and food. It was like camping in a falling elevator, Bisesa thought. The clippings from Alexei’s shaved head were particularly unwelcome. And it was hard to wash. They had enough water to drink, but this cargo cabin didn’t feature a shower. After the first couple of days, the cabin smelled, inevitably, like a lavatory.

Bisesa tried to use the time constructively. She worked on her recovery from the Hibernaculum. She slept a lot, and Alexei and Myra helped her work out low-gravity exercises, bracing against the walls and floor to build up her muscles. But there was only so much time you could exercise or sleep away.

Alexei kept himself busy too. He threw himself into a routine of checking over the spider’s systems, with a full shakedown twice a day. He even made visual checks of hull seams and filters. While he worked, he muttered and sang, curious, distracted little hymns to sunlight.

Still Bisesa hadn’t talked to her daughter — not as she wished to. She thought Myra was sinking into herself; while Bisesa had been sleeping, she seemed to have developed a black core of depres-sion. This was business for later, Bisesa told herself.

Bisesa watched Earth dwindle, a toy globe at the end of a ribbon that now seemed endless in both directions.

Once she said, “I wish the world would turn, so I could look for the other ribbons. I don’t even know how many there are.”

Myra counted off on her fingers. “Modimo in Africa. Bandara in Australia, the mother of them all. Jianmu in China. Marahuaka in Venezuela, South America. All named for sky gods. We Europeans have Yggdrasil.”

“Named for the Norse world tree.”

“Yes.”

“And the Americans have Jacob’s Ladder.”

Alexei smiled. “ ‘And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the Earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.’ Genesis, twenty-eight, twelve.”

Myra said, “America is still a pretty Christian country. All the Native-American world-tree names were rejected, I think. They took a poll.”

“Why do so many cultures have myths of a world tree? It seems pretty unlikely.”

Alexei said, “Some anthropologists say it’s simply a response to cloud features: ripples, waves that look like branches or rungs. Or maybe it’s a myth about the Milky Way. Others say it could be a plasma phenomenon. Solar activity, maybe.”

Myra said, “Plenty of people fear the elevators. Some regard them as a blasphemy. A short-cut to God. After all we have faced a threat from the sky in living memory.”

“Which is why the African elevator was attacked,” Alexei said.

“Makes no sense, but there you go.”

“You know a lot about Earth culture for a Spacer.”

“I’m interested. But I see it from the outside. Anthropologi-cally, I suppose.”

Bisesa felt patronized. “I suppose all you Spacers are as rational as computers.”

“Oh, no.” Alexei smiled. “We’re working on a whole new set of hang-ups.”

Still they rose. As the planet shrank from the size of a soccer ball to a grapefruit to a cricket ball, it soon became too small for Bisesa to make out even continent-sized details, and a dull sense of the immense scale of the artifact she was climbing slowly rammed itself into her mind.

Three days up they sailed through the first significant structure since the ground. They gathered at the center of the cabin to watch it approach.

It was a loose ring of inflated modules, all of them roughly cylindrical, brightly colored; they were huge, each as big as a small building, and they shone like tremendous toys in the unending sunlight. This was a hotel cum theme park, Alexei told them, as yet incomplete and uninhabited. “Its official name is

‘Jacob’s.’ Disney is the major investor. They’re hoping to make back some of the money they’re hemorrhaging at the old ground-based parks.”

“Good place for a hotel,” Myra said. “Only three days up, and still a tenth of a gravity, enough to avoid all the messiness of zero G.”

“Makes you realize what you can do with a space elevator or two,” Alexei murmured. “Not just cheap lift, but very heavy lift too.

Lots of capacity. This theme park is trivial, but it’s just a start.

There will be other communities, towns in the sky strung out along the elevators. A whole new realm. It’s like the railways in the nineteenth century.”

Bisesa felt moved to take Myra’s hand. “We live in remarkable times, don’t we?”

“Yes, Mum, we do.”

The hotel rushed past them in an instant, and for the first time in days Bisesa had a sense of their true speed. But then it was back to the timeless, motionless, scale-less rush ever higher from the Earth, and they were soon bickering once more.

On the eighth day they sailed through geosynch. For one precise moment they were in zero gravity, orbiting the Earth as a respectable satellite should, though for days gravity had been so low it made no practical difference.

At the geosynch point was another structure, a vast wheel with its hub centered on the ribbon. It was incomplete. Bisesa could see lesser craft crawling over that tremendous scaffolding, and welding sparks flared. But elsewhere she saw immense glass panels behind which living things glowed green.

The geosynch station flew down, past, and was gone by, and they all stared down as it dwindled away.

With the geosynch point passed, the spider’s effective gravity flipped over, as centripetal forces, balanced with gravity at geosynch, took over and tried to fling them away. Now “down”

pointed away from the pea-sized Earth. They had to rearrange their cabin, so that they made the ceiling the floor, and vice versa.

Alexei said cabins designed to carry passengers did this sort of flip-flop automatically.

That inversion, the rebuilding of the cabin, was the only interesting thing that happened in those days following geosynch. The only thing.

But Bisesa learned that they weren’t going to be hauled all the way up to the counterweight, which was all of thirteen more days past geosynch, twenty-one from the ground. And that, she learned at last, was the spider graveyard.

“They need to keep adding counterweight to compensate for the growing mass of the ribbon,” Alexei said. “Which is why none of the spider trucks come back to Earth, save the builders.”

Bisesa looked around at the cluttered hull, grimy from their occupation. She felt a stab of regret. “And is that where this spider will finish up?”

“Oh, no,” said Alexei. “This beast won’t be going further than the fifty-six-thousand-klick point. Twelve days out of Earth.”

Bisesa glanced at Myra, who she sensed had almost as dim an idea of what was to come as she had. “And then what?”

“Remember I told you that if the spider let go before geosynch we’d have fallen back to Earth? But if we let go after geosynch—”

“We’ll be flung out of Earth orbit,” Myra said. “Into interplanetary space.”

“If you pick the right altitude to leave the elevator, you can use its momentum to hurl you wherever you want to go. The Moon, for instance.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Alexei smiled. “Oh, a bit further than that.”

“Then where, damn it? There’s no point in secrecy now — as soon as we leave the elevator the authorities will know where we’re going.”

“Mars, Mum. Mars. ”

Bisesa was bewildered. “Mars?”

“Where — well, where something is waiting for you.”

“But this little pod won’t keep us alive all the way to Mars.”

“Of course not,” Alexei said. “We’ll be picked up. We’ll rendezvous with a lightship. A solar-sail ship. It’s already on the way.”

Bisesa frowned. “We have no rockets, do we? Once we’re free of the ribbon we’ll have no motive power at all.”

“We don’t need it. The ship will rendezvous with us. ”

“My God,” Bisesa said. “And if something goes wrong—”

Alexei smiled, unconcerned.

Talking to Alexei through these long days, Bisesa thought she had begun to see something of his psychology — the psychology of a Spacer, subtly different from the Earthbound.

Alexei had something approaching a morbid fear of failure in the machinery around him, for he was entirely dependent on that for his very life. But on the other hand he had absolutely no doubt in the implacable working-out of orbits and trajectories and interceptions; he lived in a realm where celestial mechanics visibly ruled everything, a mighty, silent clockwork that never developed a flaw.

So once his gadgets had cut them loose of the ribbon he believed he would be safe and secure; it was inconceivable to him that their lightship rendezvous could be missed. Whereas Bisesa and Myra were terrified of just that possibility.

Somewhere in there was the key to understanding Alexei, Bisesa thought, and the new Spacer generation. And she thought she would understand him even better if she could make out the peculiar prayers he seemed to chant softly while distracted: psalms to the

“Unconquered Sun.”

On the twelfth day they sat on their fold-down chairs, with all their loose gear tied down in advance of the jolt of weightlessness that would come when Alexei’s explosive bolts severed the cabin from its pulley.

Alexei eyed his crewmates. “Anybody want a countdown?”

“Shut up,” Myra said.

Bisesa looked down at the ribbon that had been her anchor to reality for twelve days, and up at an Earth reduced to a pebble. She wondered if she would ever see it loom large again — and what lay ahead of her before that could happen.

Alexei whispered, “Here we go—”

There was a flash below, on the cabin’s roof that had become a floor. The ribbon fell away, startlingly fast, and gravity evaporated like a dream. Tumbling, loose bits of gear rolling around them, Alexei laughed and laughed.

15: Liberator

April 2069

John Metternes, ship’s engineer, called up to Edna from Achilles.

There was another holdup. The techs down there on the asteroid still weren’t satisfied with the magnetic containment of the antimatter pellets.

Any more delays and the Liberator was going to miss another window for her first trial cruise.

Edna Fingal looked out of the thick wraparound windows, away from the convoluted surface of the Trojan asteroid beneath her, to find the sun, so far away here on the J-line it barely showed a disk. Surrounded by the flight deck’s calm hum and new-carpet smell, she chafed, restless. She wasn’t good at waiting.

Intellectually, in her head, she knew she had to wait until the engineers were absolutely sure about what they were doing. The Liberator depended on a new and untried technology, and as far as Edna could tell these magnetic antimatter bottles were never exactly stable; the best you could hope for was a kind of controlled instability that lasted long enough to get you home. It was thought that a failure of containment had been the cause of the loss of the Liberator’s unnamed prototype predecessor, and of Mary Lanchester and Theo Woese, the A-23C’s two-person crew.

But in OutSys, out there in the dark, something was approaching, something silent and alien and hostile. Already it was inside the J-line, closer to the sun than Edna was. Edna was captain of the world’s only spacegoing warship even close to operational status, the only healthy vessel in the first Space Group Attack Squadron.

She itched to confront the alien.

As she often did, she tried to relieve the stress by thinking of family.

She glanced at a chronometer. It was set to Houston time, like all master clocks throughout human space, and she mentally made an adjustment for DC. Edna’s daughter Thea, just three, would be in nursery school at this hour. Edna’s own home was on the west coast, but she had chosen the school in Washington so Thea could be close to her grandmother. Edna liked to be able to visualize just where Thea was at any time of the day.

“Libby, please open my mail file.”

“Of course. Visual records too?”

“Yes. Ready?… Hello, Thea. Here I am again, waiting around as usual…”

Thea would hear her words, and see pretty much what she could see, captured by visual sensors in the ident tattoo on Edna’s cheek. Security was predictably tight about every aspect of the A-class warships out here on the J-line, and Thea would only ever receive a heavily censored version of her mother’s letters. But it was better than nothing.

And if things didn’t go well, these messages might be all Thea had left of her mother. So Edna spoke to the future.

“I’m sitting here waiting for our antimatter bottles to be loaded into the A-drive chamber. And it’s taking a long time, for we have to be very careful. I’m looking down now at Achilles. It’s one of the larger of the Trojan asteroids, and it’s here that we have been building our A-ships. Look with me, you can see the graving yards, and the big pits where we’ve dug out ice and rock to serve as reaction mass, the stuff that will actually push the ship forward. And there are the domes where we all live when we’re on the surface — the Liberator is a lot more comfortable than that, believe me!..”

The Trojans clustered at a point of gravitational stability on the J-line called L4, Lagrange 4, forever sixty degrees ahead of Jupiter itself in its orbit. There was a second such point, L5, trailing Jupiter.

Earthbound astronomers had named the two asteroid camps for the competing heroes of Homer’s Iliad: Achilles and the other Greeks leading Jupiter, the Trojans forever following.

L4 was a useful lode of resources, an obvious place for a base, a control point. Perhaps that was why, during the sunstorm, the Firstborn had lodged an Eye here.

“I won’t pretend I’m not afraid, Thea. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t.

I’ve learned I can put aside the fear, and get on with the job. Because I know it’s a job that has to be done.

“Maybe you know that this ship, the fourth of the new A-class, is the first to have been given a name. Because while the others made test flights, this ship will be the first to go into combat. I suppose whatever happens she will always be remembered for that. Of course we have to get through a couple of proving flights first.

“We agonized about the name. Here we are surrounded by heroes from classical mythology. But it’s the mythology of another age, remote from our own. In the end we settled on the name of one of the great aircraft that helped wage mankind’s last pivotal war, before the coming of the Firstborn changed all the rules. I hope that in the next few weeks we’re going to be able to liberate mankind from an even deadlier menace. And that then I’ll have a chance to come home to you. I—”

An alarm chimed, a green light flashed on the softwall beside her. The fuel pods were at last successfully loaded; the ground crew were leaving the ship.

And the launch window for the scheduled shakedown cruise would open in just ten minutes.

Time enough. And then she could accept her operation order for her true mission.

“Close the file, please, Libby. Snip the last bit. And get John Metternes up here.”

16: James Clerk Maxwell

The lightship that was to take them to Mars came swimming out of the dark. It was called the James Clerk Maxwell. The sail was a shadow, and Bisesa caught glimpses of rigging, rectilinear flashes immensely long.

As the hour of the pickup neared Bisesa grew even tenser. You didn’t have to know anything about the engineering to understand that a ship that sailed on sunlight must be gossamer-fragile. And their knotty little spider, a spinning lump of metal, was going to come plummeting in among this fantasy of sails and rigging. She continually expected alarms to sound, and to see a wispy mirror-sail fold around her like Christmas paper.

Myra grew anxious too, despite her own astronautics experience. But Alexei Carel was entirely unfazed. As the rendezvous approached he sat by his softscreens, monitoring obscure graphic displays, occasionally uttering a mild word that was transmitted to the approaching ship’s systems along a narrow-beam laser link. He seemed to trust absolutely the mixture of orbital mechanics and exotic celestial seamanship that was bringing the spider ever closer to the Maxwell.

In the last moments the Maxwell’s main hull came looming out of the dark. Bisesa imagined she was in a small boat, watching the approach of a liner across some vast ocean. The rough cylinder bristled with antenna dishes and booms, and around its upper rim Bisesa made out a ring of pulleys, mundane bits of technology that anchored kilometers of rigging.

A transparent tube a couple of meters across snaked out from the hull, probed at the spider uncertainly, and locked on with an audible rattle. There was a jolt as the mechanical linkage soaked up the last minor differences in momentum. Then the tube contracted like a concertina, drawing the two hulls together, until they docked with a firm clang.

Alexei sat back, a broad grin on his face. “Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”

“Well, that’s that.” He peeled the softscreen off the wall in front of him, crumpled it up and stuffed it in a pocket. “Time to get packed up. Take everything you want; dump anything you don’t need in here.”

“We aren’t taking the spider,” Bisesa said slowly.

“Of course not.”

Bisesa felt oddly reluctant to leave the haven of the spider.

“Maybe I’m just getting too old for all this change.”

Myra squeezed her arm. She made this sort of affectionate gesture spasmodically; Bisesa accepted whatever her wounded daughter had to give her. “Mum, if I can cope with it, you can. Come on, let’s get ready.”

When Alexei opened the hatch in the cabin wall, the outer hull of the Maxwell, exposed, smelled faintly of burning. Bisesa touched it curiously, a surface that had endured the vacuum of space for long months. It felt hot.

The Maxwell’s hatch dilated away.

They crossed into an interior that was clean, brightly lit, and smelled faintly of soap. The suitcase followed with a clatter. Little sucker pads shot out of it on fine threads, fixing themselves to the walls, so that the case hauled itself around like a clumsy, fat-bodied spider.

The hatches closed behind them, and Bisesa felt a gentle shudder as the greater mass of the Maxwell reacted to the casting-off of the spider. There was no window in the hatch. She would have liked to see the discarded spider fall away.

Alexei gave them one bit of warning. “Just remember they pared off every gram to build this thing. The whole ship masses only around ten tonnes — and that includes the sail. You could easily put your foot through the hull.” He tapped an internal floor-to-ceiling partition panel. “And this stuff ’s a kind of rice paper.

Light but fragile.” He poked a finger through it to show them, then he tore off a tiny strip and popped it in his mouth. “Edible too. In case of dramas, eat the furniture.”

Bisesa asked, “ ‘Dramas’? What dramas?”

Myra said slowly, “I suppose about the worst thing that could happen is to lose the sail, or to foul it up beyond usefulness. In which case you’d be stranded, falling away on whatever trajectory you happened to be on. Rescue would be possible, but it would likely take months, if not years.”

Bisesa pondered. “How many accidents have there been?”

“Very few,” Alexei said. “And none fatal.” He lectured them briefly about various levels of fail-safe in the design of the mission profile, so that if you did lose your sail you’d still coast somewhere accessible. “It’s more likely your body will fail you before a ship like this does,” he said to Bisesa, not entirely reassuringly.

While Alexei disappeared to what he called the “bridge” to check over the ship’s systems, Myra and Bisesa explored and unpacked.

It didn’t take long to figure out the layout of the Maxwell. The pressurized hull was a cylinder only a few meters tall. Divided up by sheets of that rice-paper partitioning, it was split into three main decks. At the base was what Alexei called the utilities deck. Peering through hatches, they saw heaps of stores, life support, EVA and repair gear, cargo. Alexei’s bridge was the upper deck.

The middle deck contained living quarters. Aside from a dedicated galley and bathroom it was sliced up by movable partitions into rooms that could serve as rest quarters, bedrooms, workrooms for a crew of up to ten. The walls were thick with cupboards and space-saving fold-out bunks and chairs. Bisesa and Myra spent some time moving the partitions around. They settled on constructing three small bedrooms as far as possible from each other and from the lavatory; the paper-thin partitions weren’t particularly soundproof.

The accommodation was almost as pokey as aboard the spider.

But the cramped corridors and low-ceilinged rooms had a unique mix of architectures designed for ground and space. The sail could offer an acceleration of no more than one percent of Earth’s gravity — not enough to stick you to the floor. So the design emulated space stations with hand-and footholds, Velcro pads, and a color coding with brown beneath and blue above, so that you could always know at a glance which way up you were.

But on the other hand that one percent of G was steady and unrelenting. Experimenting, Bisesa found that if she clambered up to the ceiling and let go, she would drift down to the floor in six or seven seconds, falling like a snowflake and settling softly. That little bit of gravity was surprisingly useful, for it induced dust to settle and any disturbed clutter to fall eventually out of the air; here she would not have to wrestle with rogue blankets, or track down stray droplets shimmering away from her coffee cup.

The “bridge” of the Maxwell was set out pretty informally with chairs and tables. Bisesa was reminded that this wasn’t a military ship. When Bisesa and Myra came drifting up the short ladder from the lower deck Alexei was sitting in one of those chairs, patiently watching displays unfold across a softscreen.

The walls were utterly transparent.

Space was starless, empty save for three lamps, sun, Earth, and Moon, which hung in a tremendous triangle around the ship.

Something in Bisesa quailed before this array of worlds. For some reason she thought of Mir and the man-apes she had seen there, australopithecines with the legs of humans and the shoulders of gorillas.

Myra saw her reaction and tugged her hand. “Mum. It’s just another fairground ride. Never mind feeling dizzy. Look up. ”

Bisesa lifted her head.

She saw a disk of not-quite-darkness, a little grayer than the deep velvet of the sky. Highlights, sun-dazzling bright, rippled across its face. It was the sail, a sheet of foil big enough to have wrapped up the whole of inner London. She could hear gentle, intermittent whirs that must be the tiny pulleys fixed around the roof, tugging at the rigging that ran up and out from the roof above her, rectilinear threads that caught the sunlight.

The hull that enclosed her was a tuna can hanging under a parachute.

“Welcome aboard the James Clerk Maxwell, ” Alexei said, grinning.

“All this from sunlight.”

“Yes.” Alexei held up his hand in a shaft of sunlight that crossed the cabin. “The pressure of all those tiny photons, pinging off a reflecting surface. On your face on a sunny day on Earth, that force amounts to only maybe one ten-thousandth of a gram. We have enough sail area, and a low enough mass, for an acceleration of a hundredth of a G. But it’s continuous, and free, and it just keeps on pushing and pushing… Which is how we can reach Mars in twenty days.”

The sail itself was based on a mesh of nanotube string, the same super-strong stuff they made the space elevator ribbons from. The

“fabric” was an ultra-thin film of boron, only a few hundred atomic diameters thick. It had to be sprayed on.

“The sail fabric is so fine that if you handle it it’s more like smoke than anything substantial,” Alexei said. “But it’s robust enough to be able to stand a dip into the sun’s heat inside the orbit of Mercury.”

Ribs of light washed across the face of the mirror; tiny pulleys whirred.

“You get these oscillations all the time,” Alexei said. “That’s why we make the sails smart, as the sun shield was. The fabric is embedded with actuators and tiny rocket motors. Max, the ship’s AI, can keep himself positioned correctly. And he does most of the navigation; I just tell him where I want to go. Max is in charge, really. Thank Sol he doesn’t brag about it too much.”

Bisesa said, “I can see how you can be pushed away from the sun. But how can you sail inward— from Mars in toward Earth, say? I guess it’s sort of like tacking into the wind.”

“It’s not a good analogy,” Alexei said evenly. “You have to remember that all objects in the solar system are essentially in orbit around the sun. And that determines how the sail functions…”

Orbital mechanics could be counter to common sense. “If I speed up, I raise my orbit. But if I fix my sail so that the sunlight pressure opposes my motion, my orbital velocity falls, and I will spiral in toward the sun…” Bisesa studied the diagrams he produced on the softscreens, but when he started scrolling equations she gave up.

“This is all intuitively obvious to you, isn’t it? The principles of celestial mechanics.”

He waved a hand at the worlds around them. “You can see why.

Up here you can see those laws working out. I’ve often wondered how Earthbound scientists were able to make any sense out of all the clutter down there. The first lunar astronauts, a hundred years ago, the first to come out this way, came back changed, for better or worse.

A lot of us Spacers are deists, or theists, or pantheists — somewhere on that spectrum.”

“Believing that God is to be found in physical laws,” Myra said.

“Or God is those laws.”

“I suppose it makes sense,” Bisesa said. “Religions and gods don’t have to go together. Buddhists don’t necessarily believe in a supreme being; you can have religion independent of any god.”

Myra nodded. “And we can believe in the Firstborn without having any religion at all.”

Alexei said mildly, “Oh, the Firstborn aren’t gods. As they will learn one day.”

Bisesa said, “But you aren’t a theist. Are you, Alexei? You like to quote the Bible, but I’ve heard you pray —Thank Sol?”

He looked sheepish. “You got me.” He lifted his face to the sunlight. “Some of us have a sneaking regard for the Big Guy. The engine that keeps us all alive, the one object you can see however far you roam across the system.”

Myra nodded. “I heard of this. A cult of Sol Invictus. One of the last great pagan gods — from the Roman empire, just before they proclaimed Christianity their official cult. Didn’t it sprout on Earth again, just before the sunstorm?”

Alexei nodded. “There was a lot of propitiation of angry gods to be done in those days. But Sol Invictus was the one that took hold with the early Spacers, especially those who had worked on the shield. And he spread.”

Bisesa remembered another sun god who had interfered in her own life: Marduk, forgotten god of Babylon. She said, “You Spacers really aren’t like the rest of us, are you, Alexei?”

“Of course not. How could we be?”

“And is that why you’re taking me to Mars? Because of a different perspective?”

“More than that. Because the guys down there have found something. Something the Earth governments would never even have dreamed of looking for. Although the governments are looking for you, Bisesa.”

Bisesa frowned. “How do you know?”

Alexei looked uncomfortable. “My father is working with the World Space Council. He’s a cosmologist…”

So there it was, Bisesa thought, this new generational gap set out as starkly as it could be. A Spacer son spying on his Earthbound father.

But even though they were in deep space he would say no more about where Bisesa was being taken, and what was expected of her.

Myra pulled her lip. “It’s odd. Sol Invictus — he’s such a contrast to the cool thinking of the theists.”

“Yeah. But don’t you think that until we get these Firstborn assholes beaten, we need an Iron Age god?” And Alexei grinned, showing his teeth, a shockingly primate expression bathed in the light of sun and Moon.

Bisesa, worn out by stress and strangeness, retreated to her newly constructed cabin. She rearranged her few possessions and strapped herself to the narrow bunk.

The partitioned-off room was small, but that didn’t bother her.

She had been in the army. As accommodations went, this was a lot better than the UN camp in Afghanistan where she had been stationed before falling into Mir.

It struck her that this living deck seemed cramped, though, even given the basic geometry of the tuna-can hull. She thought back to her inspection of the utility deck earlier; she had a good memory for spaces and volumes. Sleepy, she murmured aloud, “So why is this deck so much smaller than the utility level?”

A soft voice spoke. “Because these walls are full of water, Bisesa.”

“Is that you, Thales?”

“No, Bisesa. Alexei calls me Max.” The voice was male, softly Scottish.

“Max, for James Clerk Maxwell. You’re the ship.”

“Strictly speaking the sail, which is the smartest and most sentient component. I am a Legal Person (Non-Human),” Max said calmly. “I have a full set of cognitive capacities.”

“Alexei should have introduced us.”

“That would have been pleasant.”

“The water in the walls?”

It was there to protect frail human cargo from the hard radia-tions of space; even a few centimeters of water was a surprisingly effective shield.

“Max. Why the name?”

“It is appropriate…”

The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had in the nineteenth century demonstrated that light exerted a pressure, the fundamental principle on which mankind’s new fleet of lightships had been built. His work had laid the foundations for Einstein’s conceptual breakthroughs.

Bisesa smiled. “I suppose Maxwell would have been astonished to see how his basic insight has been translated into technology, two centuries later.”

“Actually I’ve made something of a study of Maxwell. I have rather a lot of spare time. I think he could have conceived of a solar sail. The physics was all his, after all.”

Bisesa propped an arm behind her head. “When I read about Athena, the shield AI, I always wondered how it felt to be her. An intelligence embedded in such an alien body. Max, how does it feel to be you?”

“I often wonder how it feels to be you, ” he replied in his soft brogue. “I am capable of curiosity. And awe.”

It surprised Bisesa that he should say that. “Awe? At what?”

“Awe at finding myself in a universe of such beauty yet governed by a few simple laws. Why should it be so? And yet, why not?”

“Are you a theist, Max?”

“Many of the leading theist thinkers are AIs.”

Electronic prophets, she thought, wondering. “I think James Clerk would have been proud of you, Maxwell Junior.”

“Thank you.”

“Light, please.”

The light dimmed to a faint crimson glow. She fell into a deep sleep, the gentle gravity just enough to reassure her inner ear that she wasn’t falling any more.

It was some hours later that Max woke her, for, he said apologetically, they were approaching the Moon.

On the bridge Alexei said, “It’s fortuitous of course that our path to Mars should take us near the Moon. But I was able to work a gravitational slingshot into our trajectory design…”

Bisesa stopped listening to him, and just looked.

The swelling face of the Moon, nearly full, was not the familiar Man-in-the-Moon that had hovered over the Manchester streets of her childhood. She had come so far now that the Man had turned; the great “right eye” of Mare Imbrium was swiveled toward her, and a slice of Farside was clearly revealed, a segment of crater-pocked hide invisible to mankind until the advent of spaceflight.

But it was not the geology of the Moon that interested her but the traces of humanity. Eagerly she and Myra picked out the big Nearside bases, Armstrong and Tooke, clearly visible as blisters of silver and green against the tan lunar dust. Bisesa thought she saw a road, a line of silver, cutting across the crater called Clavius within which Tooke Base nestled, and from which it had taken its first name. Then she realized it must be a mass driver, an electromagnetic launching track kilometers long.

The modern Moon was visibly a place of industry. Vast stretches of the lava-dust plains of the maria looked as if they had been combed; the lunar seas were being strip-mined, their dust plundered for oxygen, water, and minerals. At the poles immense solar-cell farms splashed, and new observatories gleamed like bits of coal, made of jet-black glass microwaved direct from the lunar dirt. Strung right around the equator was a shining chrome thread: the alephtron, mightiest particle accelerator in the system.

Something about all this industry disturbed Bisesa. So much had changed on the Moon after four billion years of chthonic calm, in just a single century since Armstrong’s first small step. The economic development of the Moon had always been the dream of Bud Tooke himself. But now she wondered how the Firstborn, who may themselves have been older than the Moon, might view this disquieting clatter.

Myra pointed. “Mum, look over there, at Imbrium.”

Bisesa looked that way. She saw a disk that must have been kilometers across. It glinted with reflected sunlight, and shuddering waves spread across it.

“That’s the solar-sail factory,” Alexei murmured. “They lay down the webbing and spray on the boron film — they spin it up from the start, to hold it rigid against the Moon’s gravity…”

That glinting disk seemed to spin, and ripple, and then, without warning, it peeled neatly away from the mare surface as if being budded, and drifted up toward space, oscillating as it rose.

“It’s beautiful,” Bisesa said.

Alexei shrugged. “Pretty, yes. To be honest most of us don’t find the Moon very interesting. They aren’t true Spacers down there. Not when you can commute to Earth in a day or two. We call it Earth’s attic…”

Max murmured, “Closest approach coming up.”

Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesa’s field of view.

Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myra’s hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just weren’t meant to see, she thought helplessly.

Then the Moon’s terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the sun’s harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.

17: Warship

John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.

Edna asked, “Everything nominal?”

“Bonza,” the ship’s engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. “We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us… Yes, we’re nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.”

Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.

Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. “The launch window opens in five minutes.”

Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. “My word.”

“You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if—”

“Good God, no. Ah, look — you took me aback, is all, didn’t know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does… Libby, schematics please.”

The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constella-tions to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.

The design was simple, in essence. The Liberator looked like nothing so much as a Fourth of July firework, a rocket no less than a hundred meters in length, with habitable compartments stuck on the front end and an immense nozzle gaping at the back. Most of the hull was stuffed with asteroid-mined water ice, dirty snow that would serve as the reaction mass that would drive the ship forward.

And buried somewhere in the guts of the ship, near that nozzle, was the antimatter drive.

Liberator’s antimatter came in tiny granules of frozen hydrogen—

or rather anti-hydrogen, stuff the propulsion engineers called

“H-bar.” For now it was contained inside a tungsten core, isolated from any normal matter by immaterial electromagnetic walls, the containment itself requiring huge energies to sustain.

H-bar was precious stuff. Because of its propensity to blow itself up on encountering normal matter, antimatter didn’t sit around waiting to be collected, and so had to be manufactured. It occurred as a by-product of the collision of high-energy particles. But Earth’s mightiest accelerators, if run continually, would produce only tiny amounts of antimatter — even the great alephtron on the Moon was useless as a factory. A natural source had at last been found in the

“flux tube” that connected the moon Io to its parent Jupiter, a tube of electrical current five million amperes strong, generated as that moon ploughed through Jupiter’s magnetic field.

To mine antimatter, all you had to do was send a spacecraft into the flux tube and use magnetic traps to sift out antimatter particles.

But there was a world of engineering challenge in that “all.”

When Edna gave the order the magnetic fields would pulse, firing out the H-bar pellets one by one to hammer into an oncoming stream of normal hydrogen. Matter and antimatter would annihilate, every scrap of mass flashing immediately to energy. Asteroid ice would be sublimated to superheated steam, and it was that steam, hurtling out of the nozzle, that would push Liberator forward.

That was really all there was to it, aside from the hugely tricky details of handling the antimatter: Liberator was a steam rocket.

But it was the numbers that were so impressive. Even the great mass-gobbling that went on in the fusing heart of the sun converted only a small percentage of fuel mass to energy. When matter and antimatter annihilated they went all the way; you just couldn’t get more juice out of Einstein’s famous E equals mc squared.

As a result, a mere pinch of antimatter, just fifty milligrams or so, would provide the equivalent of all the energy stored aboard the great chemical-rocket launch systems, like the space shuttle. That was what made the new antimatter drive so useful to governments intent on giving themselves a fast-response capability in the face of an invasion of the solar system. The Liberator was a ship so powerful it would deliver Edna to the Q-bomb, half Jupiter’s distance away, as far as from Earth to the asteroids, in just a hundred and twelve hours.

The Liberator would have been dwarfed by the Spacers’ lightships. But where a lightship was all spiderweb and sail, the Liberator was a solid mass, a club, a weapon. And the design was stupendously phallic, like so many of mankind’s weapon systems in the past, as more than one observer had wryly remarked.

There really wasn’t much for John to do; Libby handled the details of a countdown that was as simple as it could be made to be. John grew steadily more nervous.

“We’re being watched,” Edna said evenly, to distract him.

“We are? Who by?”

“From Achilles. Engineers, administrators, other crew.”

Edna cleared the screen and they glanced down at the ice moon’s surface. The graving dock crawled with spacesuited figures.

“Well, so much for the safety protocols,” John muttered. “What are they doing there?”

Libby replied, “I imagine they have come to watch the launch of mankind’s first spacegoing warship.”

“Wow,” John whispered. “She’s right. Remember Star Wars, Star Trek?”

Edna had never heard of these ancient cultural relics.

“It all begins here,” John said. “The first warship. But surely not the last, my word.”

“Thirty seconds,” Libby said evenly.

“Thank crap for that,” John said. He clutched the arms of his couch.

This was real, Edna thought suddenly. She was committed; she really was going to ride this ship into battle against an unknown foe, propelled by a drive that had been tested in anger only a couple of times, in a ship so new it still smelled of metal polish.

Libby said, “Three, two, one.”

Somewhere in the guts of the ship a magnetic trap flexed. Matter died.

And Edna was shoved back into her chair with a thrust that drove the breath from her lungs.

18: Mars

The journey wore away.

Even now Alexei wouldn’t allow any communications about sensitive matters, or even “loose talk” in the cabin of the Maxwell, in this tiny volume drifting millions of kilometers from the nearest human. “You never know who’s listening.” And though the space was bigger than aboard the spider, the paper partitions weren’t very soundproof, and Myra and Bisesa felt they had no real privacy.

Nobody talked. They were just as shut-in a crew as they had been on the spider.

After a timeless interval marked only by the gradual dwindling of the sun, Mars loomed out of the dark. Bisesa and Myra peered curiously through the bridge windows.

The approaching world was a sculpture of orange-red, its surface pocked and wrinkled, with a broad smearing of gray mist across much of the northern hemisphere. Compared to Earth, which from space was as bright as a daylight sky, Mars looked oddly dark to Bisesa, murky, sullen.

But as the lightship looped around dwindling orbits she learned to read the landscape. There were the battered southern uplands, punctuated by the mighty bruise of Hellas, and to the north the smoother, obviously younger plains of the Vastitas Borealis. Bisesa was struck how big everything was on Mars. The Valles Marineris canyon system stretched around nearly a quarter the planet’s circumference, and the Tharsis volcanoes were a gross magmatic distortion of the whole planet’s shape.

So much she might have seen had she visited in 1969 rather than 2069. But today Mars’s air was streaked by brilliant white water-vapor clouds. And on one orbit the Maxwell’s path took them right over the summit of Olympus itself, where black smoke pooled in a caldera wide enough to have swallowed up New York City.

If the scars of the sunstorm were evident on this new face of Mars, so was the handiwork of mankind. The largest settlement on Mars was Port Lowell, an equatorial splash of silver on the fringe of the battered southern uplands. Roads snaked away to all points of the compass, reminiscent of the rectilinear tracery of canals that the last pre-spaceflight observers had imagined they had seen on Mars.

And amid the roads and the domes were splashes of green: life from Earth, flourishing under glass in the soil of Mars.

But Myra pointed out more green, a belt of it stretching across the northern plains, and puddled in the great deep bowl of Hellas, a darker, more somber strain. That had nothing to do with Earth.

Alexei told Bisesa that they would spend a few nights at Lowell. As soon as a surface rover was free she was to travel on, heading north — all the way to the pole of Mars, she learned, with gathering incredulity. She peered down at that dense lid of northern fog, wondering what waited for her beneath its murk.

They spent a whole day floating above Mars, as the gentle pressure of sunlight regularized the Maxwell’s orbit. Then a squat, boxy craft came lumbering up from Lowell.

The shuttle’s sole occupant was a woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Dressed in a bright green coverall she was slender, rather fragile looking, and her face, open, somewhat empty, bore a neat ident tattoo. “Hi. I’m Paula. Paula Umfraville.”

When Paula smiled directly at her, Bisesa gasped. “I’m sorry.

It’s just—”

“Don’t worry. A lot of people from Earth have the same reaction.

I’m flattered, really, that people remember my mother so well…”

For Bisesa’s generation Helena Umfraville’s face had become one of the most famous in all the human worlds: not just for her participation in the first manned mission to Mars, but for the remarkable discovery she had made just before her own death. Paula might have been her double.

“I’m not important.” Paula spread her arms wide. “Welcome to Mars! I think you’re going to be intrigued by what we’ve found here, Bisesa Dutt…”

The shuttle’s descent was a smooth glide. As Bisesa watched, the wrinkled face of Mars flattened into a dusty landscape, and ocher light seeped across the sky.

Paula talked all the way down, perhaps delivering a patter intended to reassure nervous passengers. “I usually find myself apologizing to visitors from Earth — and especially if they’re heading for the poles, as you are, Bisesa. Here we are coming down at latitude ten north, and we’ll have to haul you all the way to the polar cap overland from here. But all the support facilities are here at Lowell, and the other colonies close to the equator, because the equatorial belt was all those first-generation chemical-engine ships could reach…”

Myra was more interested in Paula than in Mars. She said awkwardly, “I went into astronautics after the sunstorm. Helena Umfraville was a hero of mine — I studied her life. I never knew she had a daughter.”

Paula shrugged. “She didn’t, before she left for Mars. But she wanted a child. She knew that on the Aurora 1 she would spend months bathed in deep-space radiation. So before she departed she left behind eggs, other genetic material. It was transferred to a Hibernaculum during the sunstorm. And after the storm was over, my father — well. Here I am. Of course my mother never knew me.

I like to think she would have been proud that I’m here on Mars, in a way carrying on her work.”

“I’m sure she would be,” Bisesa said.

The touchdown was brisk and businesslike, on a pad built of a kind of glass, melted out of the crust. Bisesa stared. This was Mars.

Beyond the scarred surface of the pad everything was reddish-brown, the land, the sky, even the washed-out disk of the sun.

Within minutes a small bus with blister windows came bouncing up, puppylike, on huge soft wheels. It was painted green, like Paula’s jumpsuit — of course, Bisesa thought, you would use green to stand out on red Mars. Bisesa clambered through a docking tunnel, following Paula, with Alexei and Myra and their luggage and bits of kit. The bus, with rows of plastic seats, might have come from any airport on Earth.

As the bus rolled off Paula chattered about the landscape. She seemed proud of it, engaging in her enthusiasm. “We’re actually on the floor of a canyon called the Ares Vallis. This is an outflow canyon, shaped by catastrophic flooding in the deep past, draining from the southern uplands.”

That ancient calamity had lasted just ten or twenty days, it was thought, a few weeks billions of years past when a river a thousand times as mighty as the Mississippi had battered its way through the ancient rocks. This sort of event had, it seemed, occurred all around the great latitudinal frontier where Mars’s south met its north; the whole of the northern hemisphere was depressed below the mean surface level, like one enormous crater imposed on half the planet.

“You can see why the Aurora crew were sent here for the first human exploration — and in fact why NASA sent its Pathfinder un-manned probe to the same area in the 1990s…”

Bisesa, peering out, tuned out the words. This dusty plain, littered with slablike boulders, was Earthlike, and yet immediately not Earthlike. How strange it was that she could never touch those dusty rocks, or taste that thin iron air.

As they neared the domes of Lowell they passed cylinders mounted vertically on tripods. To Bisesa they looked like the power lasers of a space elevator. The Martians didn’t have their beanstalk yet, it seemed, but they had the power sources in place.

And the bus rolled past flags that fluttered limply over markers of Martian glass. Bisesa supposed Paula’s mother was here, with those others of Bob Paxton’s crew who had not survived their stranding on Mars. If Ares’s geology was forever shaped by that tremendous flood in the deep past, so its human history would surely always be shaped by the heroism of the Aurora crew.

The bus drove them up to the largest of the domes and docked smoothly.

They passed through a connecting tunnel and emerged in a warren of internal partitions, lit by big fluorescent tubes suspended from a silvered roof. Bisesa felt very self-conscious as she walked into the dome, practicing her Mars lope. The noise levels were high, echoing.

People bustled by, many dressed in green jumpsuits like Paula’s. They all seemed busy, and few of them glanced at Bisesa and her party. Bisesa guessed that to these locals she would be about as welcome as tourists at a South Pole base on Earth.

Alexei felt moved to apologize. “Don’t mind this. Just remember, every breath you take has to be paid for out of somebody’s taxes…”

Bisesa did notice that very few of the Martians wore ident tattoos on their cheeks.

They dumped their luggage in rooms provided for them in a cramped, shacklike “hotel,” and Paula offered to fill their few hours at Lowell with a tour. So they went exploring, following Paula, working their way from dome to half-inhabited dome through tunnels that were sometimes so low they had to crouch.

They bought their own lunch at an automated galley. Their Earth credit was good, but the bowls of sticky soup and bitter coffee they bought were expensive.

As they ate, a gang of schoolkids ran by, laughing. They were skinny, gangly, all at least as tall as Bisesa, though with their slim bodies and fresh faces it was hard to tell how old they were. They ran with great bounds.

Alexei murmured, “First-generation Martians. Grown from conception under low gravity. The next generation, their children, will be very interesting…”

Bisesa was sorry when they had passed out of sight, taking their splash of human warmth with them.

One big translucent dome enclosed a farm. They walked between beds of lettuces and cabbages, all proud and healthy, and shallow ponds that served as rice paddies, and trestle tables bearing pans of some turgid fluid from which grew beans and peas and soya. There were even fruit trees, oranges and apples and pears growing in pots, obviously precious and lovingly tended. In here they were at last exposed to pink Martian daylight, but the light of the remote sun was supplemented by banks of hot white lamps.

But they walked on quickly. Under a faint scent of some industrial perfume was the cloying stench of sewage.

They reached the dome’s translucent wall, and Bisesa saw rows of plants marching away, set into the soil beyond the dome. She noticed how they glinted, oddly glassy, and the green of their oddly shaped leaves was a deeper shade than the bright plants around her.

But she wasn’t yet used to Mars. It took a beat before it struck her that these rows of plants were happily growing in the Martian air outside the pressurized dome. “Oh, my,” she said.

Alexei laughed.

They walked on through more inhabited areas. They passed what had to be a school, and Bisesa longed to walk in and discover what kind of curriculum was presented to these first young Martians — what were they told of Earth? — but she didn’t have the nerve to ask Paula.

And they found a bar, called “Ski’s”—apparently after Schia-parelli, inadvertent discoverer of the Lowellian canals. There was alcohol available, but only fruit wines and whiskeys. They tried an apple wine, but it tasted weak to Bisesa.

“Low gravity, low pressure,” Alexei said. “It’s easier to get drunk here.”

The last dome they explored was the largest, and looked the most expensive. It was constructed of panels laid over immense struts of what Myra identified as lunar glass. The interior was mostly disused. Aside from a few corners used for stores and small workshops, there were only dusty partitions, cables, and ducts lying over an unfinished floor.

“It’s as if they don’t quite know what to do with it,” Bisesa said.

“But it wasn’t the Martians’ choice,” Paula said. “After the sunstorm there was a lot of sentiment about what happened to the Aurora crew, and a lot of money was put into getting the Mars settlement going properly. And this was one result. It was going to be a slice of Earth, here on Mars.” She waved a hand. “Those glass struts came from the sunstorm shield itself. So this is a sort of memorial, you see. There would have been blue sky, projected onto that big dome. They were going to call it Oxford Circus.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” Alexei said. “There was even going to be a zoo here.

Farm animals. Maybe an elephant or two, Sol, I don’t know. All shipped up as zygotes.”

“And weather, like Earth’s, inside the dome,” Paula said.

“They even got that part of it working for a while, when I was little. The thunderstorm was quite scary. But it all broke down and nobody bothered to fix it. Why should we? Many of us have never seen Earth; we don’t miss it. And we have our own weather.” She smiled wider, her young face so like her mother’s, her eyes blank.

That night, Bisesa settled down in a stern monkish cell that seemed designed to remind her that she wasn’t a guest here, not welcome, that she was here on sufferance.

But there was a row of books above her bed — real paper books, or anyhow facsimiles. They were editions of classic novels of Mars as it had been dreamed of during the long years before spaceflight, from Wells through Weinbaum and Bradbury to Robinson and beyond. Flicking through the old books oddly pleased her; for the first time since she had arrived, she was reminded how many dreams had always been lodged on Mars.

She clambered into bed. She read a few chapters of Martian Dust by a writer called Martin Gibson. It was a colorful melodrama that, with the comforting gravity, soon lulled her to sleep.

19: The Sands of Mars

She was woken by Alexei, shaking her shoulder. “We have to move.”

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. “I thought you said we have to wait for a rover.”

“Well, we changed our plans. They don’t have too many assets on Mars, but they started to move during the night.”

“Who is they?”

“Astropol. The Space Council. Look, Bisesa, we’ll have time to discuss this. Please, right now you need to shift your ass.”

She had trusted him, and Myra, this far. She shifted.

The rover, trundling to its docking port on the central dome, was visible through a small window. The rover had a number: it was the fourth of Lowell’s fleet of six such long-distance exploratory vehicles.

But it also had a name, stamped in electric blue on its hull: Discovery.

About the size of a school bus, painted bright green, its hull bristled with antennae and sensor pods, and a remote manipulator arm was folded up at its side. The rover dragged an equally massive trailer at its back, connected to the parent by a thick conduit. The main body and the trailer were mounted on big complicated-looking wheels on loosely sprung axles. The trailer contained stores, spares, life support gear — and, unbelievably, a small nuclear power plant.

This rover was big enough to carry a crew of ten on a complete yearlong circumnavigation of Mars. Bisesa realized it was wrong to think of it as a mere bus. It was a spaceship on wheels.

And it had pressure suits stuck to the outside of the hull. Bisesa said, “Reminds me of Ahab strapped to the side of his whale.”

But none of them, not even Myra, had heard of Moby Dick.

“So why Discovery? For the old space shuttle?”

“No, no. For Captain Scott’s first ship,” Paula said. “You know, the Antarctic explorer? We use this particular rover for polar jaunts, north and south, so the name seems appropriate.”

Expeditions to the poles had always been a tradition of Lowell Base, Paula said. The astronauts of Aurora, in fact, in their long years as castaways before the sunstorm, had made expeditions to the south pole, intent on coring the ancient ices and so deciphering Mars’s climatic history.

Paula’s bright chat filled the time as they waited for access to the rover. But Alexei bit his nails, desperate to be away.

At last hatches swung open. They walked through an airlock and clambered into a roomy interior. There was even a small medical area, complete with robotic arms capable of manipulating a set of surgical instruments.

Paula said, “We’ll cover around a quarter of the planet’s circumference, traveling twenty hours a day at a nominal fifty klicks per hour. Five days should see us home.”

“Twenty hours a day?”

Myra and Bisesa exchanged glances. They had already been cooped up for weeks on the elevator and aboard the Maxwell. But these Spacers were used to lengthy confinement in small places.

“The Discovery will do the driving itself, of course. It’s done the route a dozen times already, and probably knows every boulder and ice field. It’s a smooth ride once we’re underway…”

Paula briefly spoke to a traffic control center, and then the rover briskly popped itself loose of the dome airlock.

Once they were sealed in Alexei sat and blew air through pursed lips. “Well, that’s that. What a relief.”

Myra glanced back at the Lowell domes. “Couldn’t we be chased?”

Alexei said, “The other rovers are out in the field. Mars is still very sparsely populated, Myra, sparsely equipped. Not a good place to mount a car chase. And it’s unlikely that Astropol and the other agencies have any assets at the polar base.” Bisesa had learned that Astropol was a federation of terrestrial police agencies dedicated to offworld operations. “Oh, they could come after us,” Alexei murmured. “But it would take something drastic to do it. They may not be ready to show their hand just yet.”

The rover swung itself around and set off to the north.

Bisesa and Myra sat up front behind a big observation window, and watched the view unfold. It was about midday, and the sun was to the south behind them; the rover’s shadow stretched ahead.

The domes of Lowell soon slipped behind the rear horizon, obscured by the rover’s immense rooster-tails of dust. The road was metaled at first, glassy; then it was hard-pressed dirt, a scar in the faded dust, and before long nothing but a rutted track. Away from the base there was no sign of human activity, save for the odd weather station, and those endless rutted tracks peeling off to the north. Bisesa could make out the remnants of the Ares flood in the scoured landscape, the teardrop islands, the huge scattered boulders. But everything was old, worn down with age, every rock surface rubbed smooth, every slope draped with thick dust.

With nothing to see but rocks, Myra soon went to join Alexei and Paula, who had a common interest in an exotic form of poker.

Bisesa sat alone in the bubble rover’s blister window, riding smoothly over Mars. As the sun wheeled through the sky, Mars began to work a kind of spell on her. It was like Earth, with some of the furniture of an earthly landscape: the land below, the sky above, the dust and the scattered rocks. But the horizon was too close, the sun too small, too pale. A corner of her hindbrain kept asking: how can the world be like this?

It was in this mood of strangeness that she saw the arch.

The rover never brought them close. But it loomed over the horizon, tall, impossibly slender. She was sure that that immense crosspiece could not have been supported on Earth; it was Martian architecture.

The day wore away. The sunset was long and elaborate, with bands of diminishing color following the small sun toward the horizon. The night sky was oddly disappointing, though, with only a scattering of stars; there must be too much dust suspended in the air. Bisesa looked for Earth, but either it wasn’t up or she didn’t recognize it.

Paula brought her a plate of food, a piping-hot risotto with mushrooms and green beans, and a mug of coffee fitted with a lid.

She leaned down and peered straight ahead, through the window.

Bisesa asked, “What are you looking for?”

“The north celestial pole. People generally ask.”

“Tourists like me, you mean.”

Paula wasn’t fazed. “Mars doesn’t have a bright pole star, like Polaris. But — look, can you see Cygnus, the swan? The brightest star is Deneb, Alpha Cygni. Follow the spine of the swan, up through Deneb, and the celestial pole is about halfway between Deneb and the next distinct constellation, Cepheus.”

“Thank you. But the dust everywhere — the seeing isn’t as good as I expected.”

“Well, Mars is a museum of dust, the climatologists say,” Paula said. “It’s not like Earth. We have no rain to wash the dust out, no sedimentary processes to bake it all into rock. So it stays in the air.”

Mars as a snow globe, Bisesa thought. “I saw an arch.”

Paula nodded. “Erected by the Chinese. They put up a monument like that every place one of their arks came down.”

So that tremendous structure was a memorial to hundreds of Chinese who had died on Mars on sunstorm day.

Bisesa ventured, “Paula, I was a little surprised you came along with us.”

“Surprised?”

“And that you’re mixed up with this secretive business at the pole of Mars. Alexei, yes, I can see it in his personality.”

“He is a bit furtive, isn’t he?”

They shared a laugh. Bisesa said, “But you seem more—”

“Conformist?” That pretty airline-stewardess smile was still in place, illuminated by the dash lights. “I don’t mind if that’s said of me. Maybe it’s true.”

“It’s just that you’re so good at your job.”

Paula said without resentment, “I was probably born to it. My mother is the person most people remember of the Aurora crew, after Bob Paxton — the only one, probably.”

“And so visitors respond to you.”

“It could have been a handicap. Why not turn it into an asset?”

“Okay. But that doesn’t extend to hauling your backside all the way to the north pole for us.” She paused. “You admire your mother, don’t you?”

Paula shrugged. “I never met her. But how could I not admire her? Bob Paxton came to Mars and sort of conquered it, and then went home again. But my mother loved Mars. You can tell that from her journals. Bob Paxton is a hero on Earth,” she said. “But my mother is a hero here on Mars, our first hero of all.” The stewardess smile flicked back on. “More risotto?”

In the murky Martian dark, in the warmth of the cabin, Bisesa fell asleep in her seat.

She woke to a tap on her shoulder. She found she was swathed by a blanket.

Myra was sitting with her, gazing out of the window into dawn light. Bisesa saw they were driving through a landscape of rolling dunes, some of them tens of meters high, frozen waves a kilometer or two apart. Some kind of frost gathered in their lee.

“My, I slept the night through.”

“Are you okay?”

Bisesa shifted, exploring. “A little stiff. But I guess even a chair like this is comfortable in low gravity. I’ll stretch and have a wash shortly.”

“You’ll have to wait for Alexei. He’s shaving his head again.”

“I guess I got hypnotized by the view.”

“White line fever. Or something.” Myra sounded irritable.

“Myra? Is something wrong?”

“Wrong? Christ, Mother, look at that view. Nothing. And yet here you are, sitting up here for hour after hour, just drinking it in.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s you. If there’s something strange, you’re drawn to it. You revel in it.”

Bisesa glanced around. The others were asleep. She realized that this was the first time she and Myra had effectively been alone since the washed-out days after her waking at the Hibernaculum—

there had never been real privacy even on the Maxwell, and certainly not in the elevator spider cabin.

“We’ve never had a chance to talk,” she said.

Myra made to stand up. “Not here.”

Bisesa put her hand on her arm. “Come on. Who cares if the police are listening in? Please, Myra. I don’t feel I know you anymore.”

Myra sat back. “Maybe that’s the trouble. I don’t know you.

Since you came out of the tank — I think I’d got used to living without you, Mum. As if you had died, perhaps. And when you did come out, you aren’t how I remember you. You’re like a sister I’ve suddenly discovered, not my mother. Does that make sense?”

“No. But we haven’t evolved for Hibernacula time-slips, have we?”

“What do you want to talk about? I mean, where am I supposed to start? It’s been nineteen years, half my life.”

“Give me one headline.”

“Okay.” Myra hesitated, and looked away. “You have a granddaughter.”

Her name was Charlie, for Charlotte, Myra’s daughter by Eugene Mangles. Now aged fifteen, she had been born four years after Bisesa went into the tank.

“Good God. I’m a grannie.”

“When we broke up, Eugene fought me for custody. And he won, Mum. He had the clout to do it. Eugene is powerful and he’s famous.”

Bisesa said, “But he was never very human, was he?”

“Of course I had access. But that was never enough. I’m not like you. I don’t want strangeness. I wanted to build a home, for me and Charlie. I wanted — stability. I never got close to that. And in the end he cut me out altogether. It wasn’t hard. They’re hardly ever even on the Earth.”

Bisesa reached for her hand; it was cold and unresponsive.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Well, for one thing you didn’t ask. And, look, here we are on Mars! And we’re here because you’re the famous Bisesa Dutt. You have much more important issues to worry about than a lost granddaughter.”

“Myra, I’m sorry. When this is all over—”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mum. It never is over, with you. But I’ll support you even so. I always will. Look, forget about it. You had a right to know. Well, now you do.” Her face was intent, her mouth pinched. Green light was reflected in her eyes.

Green?

Bisesa sat up with a jolt, and looked out of the blister window.

Under a salmon-pink dawn sky, the rutted tracks snaked across a plain that was painted a deep dull green.

Paula joined them. “Discovery. Slow down so we can see.” The truck obligingly slowed, with a distant grinding of gears.

Myra and Bisesa sat uncomfortably; Bisesa wondered how much Paula had heard of their conversation.

Now Bisesa could see that the green was a carpet of tiny plants, each no larger than her thumb. Each plant looked like a leather-skinned cactus, but it had translucent sections — windows to catch the sunlight, Bisesa supposed, without losing a precious drop of moisture. There were other plants too. She picked out small black spheres — round to retain heat, black to soak it up during the day?

She wondered if they turned white, chameleon-like, to avoid dissipating heat at night. But the cacti predominated.

Myra said, “The cacti are what Helena discovered, in the wake of the sunstorm. Life on Mars.”

“Yes,” Paula said. “The most common multicelled organism we’ve found yet on Mars. The subsurface bacterial mats and the stromatolites in Hellas are more widespread — a lot more biomass.

But the window cacti are still the stars of the show. The species has been named for my mother.”

Each window cactus was a survivor from deep ages past, Paula said.

When the solar system was young, the three sister worlds were briefly similar: Venus, Earth, Mars, all warm, wet, geologically active. It was impossible to say on which of them life spawned first.

Mars was certainly the first to accumulate an oxygen atmosphere, the fuel for complex, multicelled life-forms, billions of years before the Earth. But Mars was also the first to cool and dry.

Paula said, “But this took time, hundreds of millions of years.

You can achieve a lot in hundreds of millions of years — why, the mammals filled out an ecology vacated by the dinosaurs in less than sixty-five million years. The Martians were able to evolve survival strategies.”

The roots of the cacti were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. They didn’t need oxygen, but fueled their glacial metabolism with hydrogen released by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of water ice. Thus they and their ancestors had survived aeons.

“There were always volcanic episodes,” Paula said. “The Tharsis calderas thicken the air every ten to a hundred million years.

The cacti grow, propagate, grow dormant again, surviving as spores until the next episode. And then the sunstorm caused rain, water rain. The air has stayed thick and wet enough to keep them out of their dormant stages right through the year.

“And, the biologists say, they are related to our sort of life. It’s a different sort of DNA here,” Paula said. “Using a different set of bases — six, not four — and a different kind of coding. The same with Martian RNA and proteins, not quite like ours. It’s thought the amino acid set that’s used here is subtly different too, but that’s still controversial. But it is DNA and RNA and proteins, the same toolbox as on Earth.”

Mars was young in an age of continuing massive bombard-ment, as the relics of the solar system’s violent formation smashed into the new worlds. But that battering ensured that an immense amount of material, blasted off the roiling surfaces, was transferred between the planets. And that material contained life.

Bisesa gazed out at the patient cacti. “So these are our cousins.”

“But more distantly related than we are to any other life-forms from Earth. The last significant biomass transfer must have been so early that the final form of DNA coding wasn’t yet settled on either world. But the relationship is close enough to be useful.”

“Useful? How?”

Paula tapped a softscreen on the Discovery’s dashboard, and produced images showing how Lowell scientists were finding ways to splice Martian genes into terrestrial plants. And that was how a new breed of plant was being developed, neither purely terrestrial nor purely Martian, able to grow outside the pressurized domes of the colonies, and yet capable of providing food for humans — and of injecting oxygen into the air. Some of the biologists thought it was a route to terraforming, a first step toward making Mars like Earth.

An informal grouping of them even had a slogan: All These Worlds Are Ours.

“In fact,” Paula said, “I’m glad we happened on the cacti. It’s important you know about this, Bisesa.”

“Why?”

“So you can understand what they’ve found at the pole.”

“I can’t wait,” Myra said dryly.

“And I can’t wait for the bathroom,” Bisesa said. She pushed her way out of her chair, letting the blanket drop. “Alexei? Are you done in there yet?”

The Discovery rolled on, patient, silent, for kilometer after kilometer, a cybernetic Stakhanovite. By the middle of that day they were through the green, and rolled across a dull, undulating plain.

After that, each day of the journey the sun climbed lower. At last it panned around the horizon, and there was no full daylight, only a kind of twilight glow that washed around the obscured sky.

Bisesa understood. Mars was tilted on its axis, just as was Earth; in northern winter the pole pointed away from the sun, and as she headed north she was driving into a twelve-month-long Arctic night. What was different about Mars was how quickly the changes came; here, the lines of latitude clicked away rapidly. She had a very clear sense that she was driving over the surface of a small round world, an ant crawling over an orange.

One sunset they saw a bank of clouds on the northern horizon.

By dawn they were under it. The polar hood was thick enough to obscure all but the brightest stars; Deneb and the celestial pole were lost.

By midday it had begun to snow.

20: Liberator

“It’s taken us under five days to cross the solar system, Thea. Think of that. And now there’s only a few hours to go before Q-hour, our rendezvous with the bomb…”

The Liberator had the mass and rough dimensions of the old Saturn V launchers. But whereas most of a Saturn’s mass would have burned itself up and been discarded in minutes, leaving its payload to coast unpowered most of the way to its destination, the Liberator’s mighty engine could maintain a thrust of a full gravity or more for days, even weeks. That had enabled the ship to cut a straight-line trajectory from one point on the J-line to another, from the Trojan base to the position of the bomb. Its path was a rectilinear oddity in a solar system of circles and ellipses.

And Edna had crossed half the distance between Jupiter and the distant sun in a hundred hours.

“We’re actually slowing down now. We’re approaching the Q-bomb tail-first, our exhaust blasting out…

“Most of the officers serving in space have been transferred from the U.S. Navy, because most spacecraft are more like sub-marines than anything else. But the Liberator is different. We’ve so much energy to burn that we have more room on this ship than on any spacecraft since Skylab. If you’ve never heard of that, look it up.

John Metternes and I share a kind of big apartment, with bedrooms, showers, and a stateroom with softscreens and coffee-makers. When we go to the ports and look down at the flank of the ship, it’s like looking out of the window of a high-rise hotel on Earth. But most hotels don’t have antennae and sensor booms. Or gun ports.

“I need to go, love. The drive’s about to be cut, and it would be embarrassing to meet the bogey with me stranded in midair!..

“How do I feel? I’m frightened. Excited. I have confidence in my abilities, and John’s, and in the Liberator, which has already proven herself a fine ship. I just hope that’s enough to carry the day.

I–I guess that’s all, Libby. Close file.”

“Yes, Edna. It is time.”

“I know. Call John, would you?”

21: Pole

Bisesa couldn’t see a thing.

The Discovery plowed its way through a half-meter thickness of carbon dioxide snow. The fragile dry-ice stuff sublimated before the rover’s heat, so they drove into a blinding mist, and even beyond the mist it was a murky dark. Nobody said anything, the poker players continuing their endless tournaments. Bisesa just had to put up with the unnerving drive alone.

Then, through the gloom, she saw bright green lights, brilliant sparks. The rover slowed to a halt. The rest of the crew hurried forward.

A vehicle of some kind sat on the ice, with big balloon wheels and straddled by two spacesuited occupants. Their helmets were illuminated, but Bisesa couldn’t make out their faces. When they caught the rover’s lights they waved.

“That’s a tricycle,” Myra said, wondering.

“Actually,” Paula said mildly, “they call it a General Utility Vehicle. For operations close to the pole station—”

“I want one.”

Alexei tapped a softscreen. “Yuri. Is that you?”

“Hi, Alexei. We cleared a path for you with the sublimation blade. The snow’s heavier than usual this season.”

“Appreciated.”

“Discovery, just follow us and you’ll be fine. Eleven, twelve hours or so and we’ll be home with no trouble. See you at Wells.”

The vehicle turned and drove ahead. Mist burst around it in a spray, brightly illuminated by the floods.

With Discovery following easily, the little convoy’s speed soon passed forty kilometers an hour.

As they roared on into the dark, the hard ground under the snow began to change. It was layered, alternating light and dark in strata as thick as Bisesa’s arm, like a vast sedimentary bed. And it looked polished, with a fine patina that glistened in the trucks’ lights.

After a couple of hours of this they crunched up onto a firmer, paler surface, a grimy white tinged with Mars red.

“Water ice,” Paula announced. “Mostly, anyhow. This is the permanent ice cap, the residue that’s left after the carbon dioxide snow sublimes away every spring. Here at the edge we’re about five hundred klicks from Wells Station, which is near the geographic pole. The drive will be smoother now. The rover’s wheels are re-configurable for different surface types.”

Bisesa said, “I’m surprised Discovery isn’t lowering a set of skis.”

Alexei looked at her, a bit pained. “Bisesa, this is Mars. The temperature out there is the freezing point of dry ice — at this pressure, that’s about a hundred fifty K.”

She worked that out. “A hundred and twenty degrees below freezing.”

“Right,” Paula said. “At these temperatures water ice is so hard it would be like skiing on basalt.”

Bisesa was chagrined. “You’ve given this little lecture a dozen times, haven’t you?”

“You didn’t have time for the usual orientation. Don’t worry about it.”

Now that they were on the ice Bisesa expected a smooth, straight ride on to the pole. But the lead truck soon turned aside from its dead-straight northern track, and embarked on a grand, sweeping detour, turning clockwise. Peering out of the left-hand window, Bisesa glimpsed a canyon.

She swallowed her pride and asked Paula about it.

Paula said it was a “spiral canyon,” one of many gouged into the ice cap. She pulled up an image of the whole cap, taken from space in the summer, when the dry ice snow wasn’t there to obscure it.

The ice cap looked like a twisting storm system, with those spiral canyons twisting in from the edge and reaching almost to the pole.

It was astounding, like nothing Bisesa knew of on Earth. But after her jaunt across the solar system there wasn’t much wonder left in her soul.

As they drove on the snow grew deeper, until they were driving along a path between two walls of snow heaped up maybe two meters deep. The snow looked compact, harder than snow on Earth, denser maybe.

She was relieved when she saw a cluster of lights ahead, and the rounded shoulders of living modules.

A row of green lights stretched off into the distance, as if they were driving down a runway. As the rover rolled closer Bisesa saw that the lights were on poles maybe four meters high, perhaps to keep above the snow. Glancing back, she saw that looking the other way the lights were bright white — so, in the murk of a Martian blizzard, you could always tell if you were heading toward or away from the base.

The structures that loomed out of the dark, lifted up off the ground on stilts, were not domes but flattened pie-shapes, round above and below. They were colored bright green, and huddled close together, interlinked by short tunnels. Bisesa saw that these big hab modules were in fact mounted on wheels, and had been tied down to the ice by cables fixed to pitons. They were like monstrous caravans, she thought.

As the rover neared the station, the walls of dry ice snow thinned away, until the rover was driving over an ice surface almost clear of snow but covered with an open black mesh. Heating elements, perhaps, designed to keep off the dry ice. The rover nuzzled up to a low dome at the foot of one of the stilts. Two station vehicles were already parked here, heavy-looking, smaller than the rover from Lowell.

Paula led them through the hatch, and Bisesa found herself facing a staircase, roofed over with blue-green plastic, that evidently led up to the nearest of the stilted habs. Alexei’s suitcase couldn’t climb the stairs and had to be hauled up on a plastic rope.

At the top of the stairs, the station crew were waiting for the newcomers. There were four of them, two women, two men, Mars-spindly in the limbs though a little heavy in the belly. All were pretty young, Bisesa guessed, none older than forty. Their coveralls were clean but well-patched, and they all smelled faintly greasy.

None of them had cheek ident tattoos.

They stared at Bisesa, and stood a little too close together.

One burly twenty-five-year-old came forward and shook Bisesa’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive us. We don’t get too many visitors up here.” He had a big, blotchy drinker’s nose, grimy black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a mass of curly beard. His accent was indistinct, like American but laced with longer European vowels.

“You’re Yuri, right? You were on the ice bike.”

“Yes. We exchanged a wave. Yuri O’Rourke. Resident glaciologist, climatologist, what have you.” Briskly he introduced the rest of the base crew: Ellie von Devender, a physicist, Grendel Speth, a doctor-biologist, and Hanse Critchfield, an engineer responsible for power, transport, and essential systems, but also a specialist in the drilling rig, the base’s main scientific function. “Although we all multitask,” Yuri said. “We’re all trained paramedics, for instance…”

Ellie von Devender approached Bisesa. The physicist was maybe thirty, stocky in her jumpsuit, with her hair tightly pulled back. She wore thick-rimmed spectacles, an affectation that hid her eyes and made her look hostile.

Bisesa said curiously, “I guess I would have expected a glaciologist, a biologist. But a physicist?”

Ellie said, “The glaciology is the reason the base is here, along with Grendel and her wet lab. I am the reason you’re here, Ms.Dutt.”

Yuri clapped Bisesa on the shoulder. “Come see the place.” He led them briskly through the hab. “This is what we call Can Six,” he said. “The EVA port…”

Can Six was a bubble of fabric, the walls colored a bright sea-green with an eye-deceiving wave pattern. It had a honeycomb floor that straddled its interior at the widest point, and looking down Bisesa could see stores stacked up in the underfloor space.

There were no spacesuits in evidence, but there were odd hatches in the walls that might have led to externally-mounted suits, like the rover’s. Equipment was stacked up here, what looked like spare parts and other gear for the rovers, and also a small science lab, and a medical area, a single bed surrounded by equipment, sealed off from the rest by a zippered plastic curtain. It was dark, and felt cold and dusty, as if not much used.

Yuri hurried them through a small airlock to another module:

“Can Five, science,” he said. Here there was another, more comprehensive lab suite, and a larger hospital area, and what looked like a small gym. It was brighter, with glowing panels plastered to walls that seemed to be decorated with scenes of mountains and rivers.

Bisesa murmured to Myra, “Why two lab suites, two medical bays?”

Myra shrugged. “To avoid contamination maybe. You come in from EVA, and can process your samples and treat injuries without breaking the seals to the rest of the base.”

“Contamination of the crew by Martians?”

“Or of Martians by the crew.”

In Can Five, Grendel Speth, small, neat, slim, her black hair speckled with gray, briskly took blood, urine, and cheek-swab samples from each of the visitors. “Just so the station can keep you healthy,” she said. “Testing for allergies, nutritional genomics, that sort of thing. Our food comes from freeze-dried stores from Lowell, and homegrown vegetables from our garden. We’ll add supple-ments to make sure your specific nutritional needs are met. You won’t even know they are there…”

Now Yuri hurried them through a third module — Can Three, evidently a sleeping area, divided up into pie-slice bedrooms, dark, evidently not used. They came to another module, Can Two.

Bizarrely this module had been fitted out to simulate a city-center hotel called the “Mars-Astoria.” But many of the internal partitions here had been torn down to give a more open, shared space, though the core section was dedicated to a small galley and a shower-toilet.

There were four beds in this round space, with small cupboards and chairs beside them, all of them cluttered with clothes and other gear. Softscreens had been plastered over the unregarded urban landscape, cycling through what looked like personal images of families, pets, domestic landscapes.

Myra said curiously, “You’re not using this as the makers intended, are you?”

Yuri said, “Wells was built for ten; there are only four of us.

The nights are long here, Myra. We prefer living like this, together.”

After that, Yuri apologetically led them down another staircase to a small surface dome, and then down steps cut into the ice.

“Sorry about this. You can see we only have the four beds set up, and we’ve pretty much shut down the modules we don’t use. We generally put up visitors down here, in our radiation storm shelter… If you’re not comfortable we can open up another of the cans.”

Bisesa glanced around as she descended. The cavern in the ice was a squat cylinder, sliced up by partitions into pie-shaped seg-ments. She recognized a galley, a comms station, a shower block, a cluttered space that looked like a lab or a medical station. The place was lived-in. There were ruts in the floor around the galley and the shower block, the walls and metal surfaces looked scuffed and polished with use and reuse, and there was a faintly stale smell, of air that had been cycled too often.

Some of the cavern wall was exposed, and she saw it was decorated with an odd design, a thin band marked with faint bars and a more general meter-scale wash of dark and light. This barcode frieze wrapped itself all around the wall’s curving surface like the flayed skin of a tremendous snake.

The room Myra and Bisesa were to share was just a truncated pie-slice, big enough for bunk beds, a table, a couple of chairs. Its back wall was ice, layered over with translucent plastic, and decorated with that odd barcode design that passed across the length of wall, from one side to the other.

As they sorted themselves out Yuri sat on the bunk. He took up a lot of space in the little room. “It’s kind of cozy up here at Wells, but we survive. Actually the polar cold doesn’t make much difference. On Mars, if you stepped outdoors at high noon in midsummer on the equator, you’d still freeze your butt off. The main issue up here is the dark — half a Martian year at a time, twelve Earth months. Polar explorers on Earth had the same challenges. We did learn a lot of lessons from those guys. Though more from Shackle-ton than from Scott.”

Myra said, “Yuri, I’m having trouble placing your accent.”

“My mother was Russian like my forename, my father Irish like my surname. I’m officially a citizen of Ireland, so of Eurasia.”

He grinned. “But that doesn’t count for much up here. Things get kind of mixed up, away from Earth.” He turned to Bisesa. “Look, Ms. Dutt—”

“Bisesa.”

“Bisesa. I know you’re here for the thing in the Pit.”

Bisesa eyed Myra. What thing? What Pit?

“But you need to know what we’re really doing here.” He passed a hand along the striped designs on the wall. The lines were faint, of irregular widths and colors. It did look like a barcode, or a spectrograph. “Look at this. This is why I came here. This wallpaper is an image of the most complete core we’ve yet been able to extract.”

Myra nodded. “An ice core from Mars.”

“Right. We drilled right down from here, from the top of the ice dome, and we got all the way down to two and a half klicks deep — Hanse Critchfield is going to enjoy showing off his rig. Of course it would have been three klicks if not for the sunstorm burning the top ice layers away.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”

Myra ran her finger along the record. “And you can interpret this, the way they read ice cores from Earth?”

“Surely. The cap is built up layer by layer, year on year. And each year it captures a snapshot of the conditions at the time—

climate, dust, cosmic, whatever. Just as on Earth. Of course the detail is different here. In Greenland, say, you get an annual snowfall tens of centimeters thick. Here the residual water-ice layer is less than a seventh of a millimeter, annually.

“Look here.” He stood by the wall, where the long winding strip came to an end. “This is the top of the strip; the most recent layers are at the top, the last deposited, yes? This upper bit of the record was collected by the Aurora crew before the sunstorm. A few centimeters corresponds to decades in time. These fine brown stripes—” He marked them with his thumbnail. “They correspond to global dust storms. And that band corresponds to the washout Mariner 9 found when it arrived in orbit in 1971, the whole planet swathed in dust…”

On Mars, events occurring on different timescales were marked by different levels in the ice core. Ten centimeters down was to be found the trace of radiation washed over the planet by the Crab supernova a thousand years earlier. Every meter or so was a significant layer of micrometeorites, droplets of once-molten rock; every ten or a hundred thousand years Mars was hit by an object massive enough to spread debris even to the poles. And the big meter-scale striping corresponded to the most dramatic event in Mars’s current astronomical cycling, a nodding of its polar tilt that occurred every hundred thousand years.

Yuri said, “You can even find traces of Earth in this Martian ice — meteorites blasted off the home world, just as Mars meteorites find their way to the Earth.” He grinned. “I’m still looking for traces of the dinosaur killer.”

Myra studied him. “You love your work, don’t you?” She sounded envious, Bisesa thought. She always had been drawn to people with missions, like Eugene Mangles.

“I wouldn’t be stuck in this ice coffin otherwise. But we’re not concentrating any more. After what we found under the ice, nobody cares about all this stuff. The ice cap, the cores. It’s all just in the way.”

Bisesa thought that over. “I’m sorry.”

He laughed shortly. “It’s not your fault.”

Myra asked, “So what did you find?”

“You’re about to find out. If you’re done, I’m supposed to take you in to a council of war.” He stood up.

22: Approach

The Liberator sailed toward the Q-bomb, a spear of ice and fire. On the flight deck, Edna Fingal and John Metternes were in their pressure suits, helmets on, visors open.

Though it was still invisible to the naked eye, they were already

“seeing” the Q-bomb through its tug of gravity, its knot of magnetic energy, and the mist of exotic particles it emitted as it cruised through the solar system.

“It’s just as Professor Carel predicted,” John reported, scrolling through softscreen summaries. “Exactly like the spectrum you get from the evaporation of a mini black hole. Clearly a cosmological artifact—”

“There,” Edna whispered. She pointed at the window.

The Q-bomb was a blister of distorted starlight, a droplet of water rolling down the face of the heavens. Edna felt chilled to the bone actually to see this thing.

“That’s an Eye,” John reported. “A perfectly reflective sphere, a ball bearing a hundred meters across. All the classic signs: the distorted geometry, the anomalous Doppler shifts from the surface.

The radiation spectrum isn’t quite what was recorded of the Eyes found in the Trojans during the sunstorm, however.”

“So this thing isn’t just an observer. I guess we knew that already.”

“Five kilometers out and closing,” Libby said softly.

Edna glanced at John. She knew he had showered only an hour ago, but even so sweat stood out on his brow and pooled at his neck.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be, cobber.”

“We’ll follow the agreed strategy. Libby, you got that? Four passes. And if anything changes—”

“We gun for home,” Libby said. “It will be just as we rehearsed.

Three kilometers to closest approach. Edna?”

“Yes, Libby?”

“History is watching.”

“Oh, Jesus,” John muttered.

23: The Pit

The four base crew, plus Bisesa, Myra, and Alexei, sat in a circle on chairs and upturned boxes in Can Two, the Hotel Mars-Astoria.

Paula, it seemed, was sleeping off the journey.

And here at the Martian north pole, under a hood of carbon dioxide snow, about as remote and secure a place as you could find in the solar system, Bisesa was told the truth at last.

It seemed a relief to Alexei as he finally revealed what various Spacer factions had discovered through various routes: that something unknown and menacing was sliding through the inner solar system. “They’re calling it a Q-bomb. Best guess remains that it is a Firstborn artifact, here to do us harm. The navy have launched some kind of mission to take it out. They may even succeed. But if not—”

“You have a plan of your own.”

“That’s right.”

Bisesa looked around the ring of faces, all of them so much younger than her and Myra — but then, Spacers were young by definition. “This is covert. You’re obviously some kind of faction.

Running around, hiding from the Earth cops. Having fun, are you?

Do you have a leader?”

“Yes,” Alexei said.

“Who?”

“We can’t tell you that. Not yet. Nobody here.”

“And you brought me here because of something you found under the ice.”

“That’s right.”

“Then show me.”

Grendel Speth, astrobiologist and doctor, faced Bisesa. “You only just arrived. You’re sure you don’t need to rest?”

Bisesa stood. “I’ve been resting for nineteen years, and traveling for weeks. Let’s go.”

One by one the others stood, following her lead.

To reach the Pit, they would have to suit up.

They went back to Can Six, and then down another flight of steps to a small dome on the ice. Here Bisesa, Myra, and Alexei had to strip out of their coveralls. Knowing the Martian night-winter was only meters away, Bisesa felt illogically cold in her bare skin.

Doctor Grendel gave her a brisk physical check. “Aside from having your system systematically ruined in a Hibernaculum for two decades, you’re doing fine.”

“Thanks.”

Bisesa’s skin was briskly oiled. She had to don a “bio-vest,” a rather prickly waistcoat that clung to her bare skin, providing an interface to the biometric systems that would monitor her body’s performance during this jaunt. Then she put on an undersuit, bright green and clinging, with a helmet, boots, and gloves and a small backpack. This was a complete spacesuit in itself, Grendel told her, effectively pressurized by the tension of its elastic fabric, and would keep her alive for minutes, maybe an hour if there were an emergency, like a module breach.

But this undersuit was only the innermost layer in a double spacesuit design. She was going to have to climb into one of those Captain Ahab external suits.

She was walked to a small hatchway in the dome wall, which led to her outer suit, fixed to the exterior of the dome. She was helped into the suit legs first, then her arms into the sleeves, then her torso and head. Her visor was opaque. The suit was made of rigid sections; it was like climbing into a suit of armor. But the suit seemed to help her by adjusting itself this way and that as she wriggled into it; she heard the hum of servo motors. The trickiest part was getting her helmeted head through the hatch without banging it, and then interfacing it with the larger helmet structure of the oversuit.

Grendel called, “How are you feeling? These things aren’t custom-made.”

“Fine. How do I get out of it?”

“The suit will tell you when you need to know.”

At last Grendel snapped closed the panel at the back. The suit popped off the dome wall, and Bisesa staggered a little.

Her visor cleared. Framed by Martian winter dark, all she could see was the round, helmeted face of the support engineer, whose name was—

“Hanse,” he said, smiling. “Just checking your suit’s functioning properly. When you get into the rhythm of this you’ll learn to check mine; we work on a buddy system… Suit Five? What’s your status?”

A soft male voice spoke in Bisesa’s ear. “Nominal, Hanse, as you can see from my output. Bisesa?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m here to assist you during your extravehicular activity in any way I can.”

Hanse said, “I know the suit design must seem a little odd, Bisesa. It’s all about PPP.”

“PPP?”

“Planetary protection protocols. We never bring our suits inside the terrestrial hab modules; we never mix environments. Protecting Mars and Earth life from each other.”

“Even though they are kissing cousins.”

“They’re the worst. And also there is the question of dust. Mars dust is rusty and toxic and full of peroxides, very corrosive. Best to keep it out of the habs, and our lungs. We must keep the suit seals brushed free of dust, in fact, or it becomes harder to make them, and you don’t want to be stuck out here. I’ll show you how later.”

The doctor’s face came swimming into view behind her own visor. “You’re doing good, Bisesa. Try moving around.”

Bisesa raised her arms and lowered them; there was a whir of servos, and the suit felt as light as a feather. “It feels odd not to be able to lower my arms all the way. Or to be able to scratch my face.

That’ll pass, I guess.”

“I can scratch your face for you if—”

“I’ll let you know, Suit Five.” She looked around. The ground was flat and white, the sky a smoggy dark. The station modules were somber masses looming over her, with equipment and stores heaped up against their stilts, and vehicles parked up: those two rovers with snowplow blades, even what looked like snowmobiles.

Discovery was long gone, driving itself back to Lowell.

Alexei, Myra, the whole station crew, everybody at Wells but Paula was here, in their green spacesuits and with illuminated faces, all looking at her. The snow kept falling, big fat flakes, from a lid of gray cloud. “I’m at the pole of Mars. Good God.” She raised her hand and flexed her gloved fingers.

Yuri approached Bisesa. “We have a short walk to make. Just a few hundred meters. The drilling rig is positioned away from the habs for safety, and for planetary protection. Just walk normally, and you’ll be fine. Please. Walk with me. Myra, you too.”

Bisesa tried it. One step after another, she walked as easily as she had since she was three years old. The suit was obviously help-ing her. Yuri walked between Myra and Bisesa. The others went ahead. Drilling engineer Hanse Critchfield had ROUGHNECK

printed on the back of his life support pack, with a cartoon of a gushing oil well. His suit looked heftier than the others. Perhaps it was a super-powered version, designed for the heavy work of the drilling rig.

The Martian snowflakes pattered against Bisesa’s visor, but sublimated immediately, leaving the faintest of stains.

“I can assist you any way you require, by the way,” said Suit Five.

“I’m sure you can.”

“I am managing your data transfer and your consumables. Also I have sophisticated processing functions. For instance if you are interested in the geology I can process your field of view and highlight exceptions of interest: unusual rock or ice types, unconformities.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary today.”

“I wish you would explore my physical functions. You may know that under Martian gravity walking is actually more energy-efficient than running. If you like I can stress selected muscle groups as you walk, thus providing an overall workout—”

“Oh, shut up, Suit Five, you bore,” Yuri snapped. “Bisesa, I apologize. Our electronic companions are marvels. But they can get in the way, can’t they? Especially when one is surrounded by such wonder.”

Myra looked around at the dismal plain of rock-hard ice, the scattered snowflakes falling through the beams of her helmet lights.

She said skeptically, “Wonder?”

“Yes, wonder — for a glaciologist anyhow. I just wish I lived in a universe peaceful enough to indulge my passion without distraction.”

They approached the largest structure on the ice. It was a hemi-spherical dome more than twenty meters tall, Bisesa guessed. She could see a ribbed structure under flaccid panels; it was a tent, supported by the ribs, not inflated. Yet it had airlocks of fabric, through which they had to pass in turn.

This was the drilling rig, Hanse Critchfield’s baby, and he helped Bisesa bend to get through the lock. “These are PPP barriers, not really airlocks. In fact we keep a slight negative pressure in here; if we get a leak the air is sucked in, not blown out. We have to protect any deep life we dig out of our boreholes — even from other sorts of life we might find at other layers. And we have to protect it from us, and vice versa.” He spoke with a comical mix of what sounded like a Dutch accent with southern United States, maybe Texan. Maybe he had been watching too many old movies.

Inside the dome, the seven of them stood in bright fluorescent light under sagging fabric walls. The derrick, even inert, was an impressive piece of gear, a scaffolding tower set on a massive base of Mars glass. Hanse ran through the mass and power: thirty tonnes, five hundred kilowatts. The coiled drill string was four kilometers long, more than enough to reach the base of the ice cap. A grimy plant stood by to pump a fluid into the borehole, to keep it from collapsing as the ice flowed under its own sheer weight: the drilling teams used liquid carbon dioxide, condensed by this plant from the Martian air.

Hanse began to boast about the technical challenges the drillers had faced: the need for new lubricants, the way moving mechanical parts tended to stick together in the low pressure. “Thermal control is the key. We have to take it slow; you don’t want too much heat building up down there. For one thing, if the water ice melts, you get water mixing with liquid carbon dioxide — pow, the product is carbonic acid, and then you are in trouble. The Aurora crew brought along a toy rig you could load on a trailer, that could only dig down maybe a hundred meters. This baby is the first authentic drilling rig on Mars—”

Yuri cut him off. “Enough of the guided tour.”

Myra walked to the drill platform. “This borehole has no fluid in it. In fact you’ve sleeved it.”

Yuri nodded. “This was the first hole we dug, down to it. We knew there was something down there, actually, under the ice, from radar studies. When we reached it we came back out, and put in a request to Lowell for a mass budget to provide us with a sleeve sufficient to keep the borehole open permanently. Then we pumped out the drill fluid—”

Hanse said, “And we sent down another bore in parallel. At first we dropped down cameras and other sensors. But then—” He bent and lifted a hatch. It exposed a hole in the ground maybe two meters across; a platform rested just below its lip, with a small control handle mounted on a stand.

It was obvious what this was. “An elevator,” Bisesa breathed.

Yuri nodded. “Okay. Moment of truth. You and me, Bisesa.

Alexei. Ellie. Myra. Hanse, you stand by up here. And you, Grendel.” Yuri went and stood on the platform, and looked back, waiting. “Bisesa, is that acceptable? I guess this is your show now.”

Her breath caught. “You want me to ride that thing? Two kilometers down into the ice to this Pit of yours?”

Myra held her hand; despite the servos she could barely feel her daughter’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this, Mum. They haven’t even told you what they’ve found down there.”

“Believe me,” Alexei said fervently. “It’s best you see for yourself.”

“Let’s get it done,” Bisesa said. She strode forward, trying not to betray her fear.

They stood together, facing inward. The round metal platform felt crowded with the five of them aboard, in their spacesuits.

The disk jolted into motion, whirring downward into the ice tunnel, supported by tracks embedded in the walls. Bisesa looked up. It was if she was descending into a deep, brightly lit well. She felt a profound dread of falling, of being trapped.

The suit murmured, “I can detect rapid breathing, an elevated pulse. I can compensate for any increase in atmospheric pressure—”

“Hush,” she whispered.

The descent was mercifully short.

Yuri said, “Brace now—”

The elevator platform jolted to a halt.

There was a metal door, a hatch set in the ice behind Yuri. He turned and hauled it open. It led to a short tunnel, lit brightly by fluorescent tubes. Bisesa glimpsed a flash of silver at the end of the passage.

Yuri stood back. “I think you should go first, Bisesa.”

She felt her heart thump.

She took a breath and stepped forward. The tunnel floor was rough-cut, not flat, treacherous. She concentrated on walking, not looking ahead, ignoring the silvery glints in the corner of her vision.

She stepped out of the tunnel into a broader chamber, cut crudely into the ice. A quick glance up showed the narrow borehole that had been drilled to get to this point. Then she looked straight ahead, to see what the Spacers had found here, buried under the ice of the Martian north pole.

She saw her own reflection looking back at her.

It was the archetypal Firstborn artifact. It was an Eye.

24: Closest Approaches

A distorted image of the Liberator slid across the face of the Q-bomb, all lights blazing. Edna felt a stab of satisfaction. Mankind had come here with intent.

Their first pass at the Q-bomb was unpowered, a scouting run.

At closest approach the ship shuddered, once, twice: the launch of two small probes, one injected into low orbit around the Q-bomb, and the other aimed squarely at its surface.

Then the smooth, mirrored landscape receded as the Liberator swept away.

They scrolled through their displays. No harm had come to the ship. The Q-bomb was no more massive than a small asteroid — it had the density of lead — and the ship’s trajectory was not deflected significantly by its gravity.

“But we learned some things,” John reported. “Nothing we didn’t expect. It’s a sphere to well within the tolerances any human manufacturing process could manage. Then there’s that usual anomalous geometry.”

“Pi equals three.”

“Yes. Our probe went into orbit around it. The bomb’s mass is so low that it’s a slow circuit, but the probe ought to stay with it all the way in from now on. And the lander is coming down—”

The ship shuddered, and Edna grabbed her seat. “What the hell was that? Libby?”

“Gravity waves, Edna.”

“The pulse came from the Q-bomb,” John said, tense, almost shouting. “The lander.” He replayed images of a gray hemisphere bursting from the flank of the Q-bomb, swallowing the lander, and then dissipating. “It just ate it up. There was a sort of bubble. If Bill Carel is right,” he said heavily, “what we just saw was the birth and death of a whole baby cosmos. A universe used as a weapon.” He laughed, but without humor. “Strewth, what are we dealing with here?”

“We know what we’re dealing with,” Edna said evenly. “Technology, that’s all. And so far it hasn’t done anything we wouldn’t have expected. Hold it together, John.”

He snapped, irritable, scared, “I’m only human, for Christ’s sake.”

“Libby, are we ready for pass two?”

“All systems nominal, Edna. The flight plan calls for an engine fire thirty seconds from now. Do you need a countdown?”

“Look, just do it,” John said tightly.

“Please check your restraints…”

Bisesa walked slowly around the chamber in the ice. It was a rough sphere, and the Eye filled it. She looked up and saw her own distorted reflection, her head grotesque in the spacesuit helmet. She could feel there was something there. A presence, watching. “Hello, boys,” she murmured. “Remember me?”

Ellie, Alexei, Yuri, crowding with Myra into the chamber, exchanged excited, nervous glances. “This is why we brought you here, Bisesa,” Yuri said.

“Okay. But what the hell is it doing here? All the Eyes in the solar system disappeared after the sunstorm.”

“I can answer that,” said Ellie. “The Eye has evidently been here since before the sunstorm — long before. It is radiating high-energy particles in all directions — a radiation with a distinctive sig-nature. Which is why I was brought in. I worked at the lunar alephtron. I am something of an authority on quantum black holes.

I was thought a good candidate to study this thing…”

It was the first time Ellie had spoken to Bisesa at any length. Her manner was odd; she spoke without eye contact, and with random smiles or frowns, and emphases in the wrong places. She was evidently the kind of individual whose high intelligence was founded on some complex psychological flaw. She reminded Bisesa of Eugene.

The lunar alephtron was mankind’s most powerful particle accelerator. Its purpose was to probe the deep structure of matter by hurling particles against each other at speeds approaching that of light. “We are able to reach densities of mass and energy exceeding the Planck density — that is, when quantum mechanical effects overwhelm the fabric of spacetime.”

Myra asked, “And what happens then?”

“You make a black hole. A tiny one, more massive than any fundamental particle, but far smaller. It decays away almost immediately, giving off a shower of exotic particles.”

“Just like the Eye’s radiation,” Bisesa guessed.

“So what,” Myra asked, “have tiny black holes got to do with the Eye?”

“We believe we live in a universe of many spatial dimensions—

I mean, more than three,” said Ellie. “Other spaces lie next to ours, so to speak, in the higher dimensions, like the pages in a book. More strictly it’s probably a warped compactification of — never mind, never mind. These higher dimensions determine our fundamental physical laws, but they have no direct influence on our world — not through electromagnetism, or nuclear forces —save through gravity.

“And that’s why we make black holes on the Moon. A black hole is a gravitational artifact, and so it exists in higher dimensions as well as in the world we see. By investigating our black holes we can probe those higher dimensions.”

“And you believe,” Bisesa said, “that the Eyes have something to do with these higher dimensions.”

“It makes sense. The receding surface that doesn’t move. The anomalous pi-equals-three geometry. This thing doesn’t quite fit into our universe…”

Like you, Bisesa thought, a little spitefully.

“So maybe it’s a projection from somewhere else. Like a finger pushing through the surface of a puddle of water — in the universe of the meniscus you see a circle, but in fact it’s a cross-section of a more complex object in a higher dimension.”

Somehow Bisesa knew this was right; somehow she could sense that higher interconnection. An Eye wasn’t a terminus, a thing in itself, but an opening that led to something higher.

Myra said, “But what’s this Eye doing here?”

“I think it’s trapped,” said Ellie.

Once more the ship ran in at the Q-bomb. Deep in her guts antimatter and matter annihilated enthusiastically, and superheated steam roared.

And at closest approach the ship swung around, engine still firing, so that its exhaust washed over the face of the Q-bomb. It was their first overtly hostile act; it would have been enough to kill any humans on that mirrored surface.

The drive cut out, and the ship sailed on unpowered.

“No apparent effect,” John reported immediately.

Edna glanced at him. “Keep checking. But I guess we know the result. So do we use the weapons or not?”

The final decision was the crew’s. A signal to the Trojan base and back would take a round-trip time of forty-five minutes, a signal to Earth even longer.

John shrugged, but he was sweating, edgy. “The operational order is clear. We’ve had no reaction from the Q-bomb to a non-threatening approach, we’ve seen the destruction of a friendly probe, we’ve had no reaction to the exhaust wash. Nobody might get this close again. We have to act.”

“Libby?” Officially the AI was the ship’s executive officer, and, formally, had a say in the decision.

“I concur with Mr. Metternes’s analysis.”

“All right.”

Edna extracted a softscreen from her coverall, unrolled it and spread it out over the console before her. It lit up as it interfaced with the Liberator’s systems, and then flashed red with stern commandments about security. Using a virtual keypad Edna entered her security details, and leaned forward so the screen could scan her retinas and cheek tattoo. The softscreen, satisfied, turned amber.

“Ready for the third pass,” Libby announced.

“Do it.”

Thirty seconds later the A-drive lit up again, and the Liberator became a blazing matchstick hurling itself through space. This time the burn was harder, the acceleration the best part of two G.

Five seconds from closest approach Edna tapped a button on her command softscreen, giving the weapon its final authorization.

The launch of the fusion bomb caused the craft to shudder once more, as if it were nothing but another harmless probe.

With the weapon gone the Liberator sped away. Edna was pressed back in her chair.

Bisesa’s imagination failed her. “How do you trap a four-dimensional object?”

“In a three-dimensional cage,” Ellie said. “Watch this.” She had a pen clipped to her pressure-suit sleeve. She took this, lifted it toward the face of the Eye, and let go.

The pen snapped upward, and stuck to the roof of the chamber.

“What was that?” Myra asked. “Magnetism?”

“Not magnetism. Gravity. If the Eye wasn’t in the way, you could walk around on the ceiling. Upside down! There is a gravitational anomaly wrapped around the Eye, obviously an artifact just as much as the Eye is. In fact I’ve been able to detect structure in there. Patterns, right at the limit of detectability. The structure of the gravitational field itself may contain information…”

Yuri smiled. “This stuff can be rather fun to think about. You see, there are ways in which a two-dimensional creature, living in a watery meniscus, could trap that finger poking through. Wrap a thread around it and pull it tight, so it couldn’t be withdrawn. This gravitational structure must be analogous.”

“Tell me what you think happened here,” Bisesa said.

“We think there were Martians,” Yuri said. “Long ago, back when our ancestors were just smears of purple slime. We don’t know anything about them. But they were noisy enough to attract the attention of the Firstborn.”

“And the Firstborn struck,” Bisesa whispered.

“Yes. But the Martians fought back. They managed this. A gravitational trap. And it caught an Eye. Here it has remained ever since. For eons, I guess.”

“We’ve tried to use your insights, Bisesa,” Ellie said.

“What do you mean?”

“What you reported of Mir, and your journey back from it. You said the Eye functions as a gateway, at least some of the time. Like a wormhole perhaps. So we’ve experimented. We reflected some of the Eye’s own products back into it, using an electromagnet scavenged from a particle accelerator. Like echoing what somebody says to you.”

“You tried sending a signal through the Eye.”

“Not just that.” Ellie grinned. “We got a signal back. A regular pulsing in the decay products. We had it analyzed. Bisesa, it matches the ‘engaged’ tone from a certain archaic model of cell phone.”

“My God. My phone, in the temple. You sent a message to my phone, on Mir!”

Ellie smiled. “It was a significant technical success.”

Myra said, “Why not share this with Earth?”

“Maybe we’ll have to, in the end,” Alexei said tiredly. “But right now, if they found us, they’d probably just haul the Eye back to the UN Plaza in New York as a trophy, and arrest us. We need a more imaginative response.”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Bisesa said.

The acceleration was savage.

Edna and John saw nothing of the detonation, when it came, because all the Liberator’s sensors were shut off or turned aside, the flight deck windows opaque. Pressed back in her couch, fleeing the explosion, Edna was reminded of training simulations she had run of the suicidal missions of Cold War attack pilots, when you were expected to fly your FJ4-B Fury fighter aircraft into enemy territory at three hundred knots, release the nuclear weapon strapped to your belly, and get yourself out of there, trying to outrun a nuclear fireball, forcing the craft up to speeds the designers never intended.

This mission now had something of that feel — even though, paradoxically, she was safer than any of those heroic, doomed 1960s pilots could ever have been. There were no shock waves to outrun in the vacuum of space; nuclear weapons actually did more damage in an atmosphere.

The acceleration cut out suddenly enough to throw Edna forward against her restraints. She heard John grunt. With a clatter of attitude thrusters the ship turned, and the windows cleared.

The fireball from the nuke had already dissipated.

“And the Q-bomb,” John briskly reported, “is unaffected. Apparently unharmed. It hasn’t deviated from its trajectory at all, as far as I can measure.”

“That’s absurd. It isn’t that massive.”

“Apparently something is — well, anchoring it in space more firmly than mere inertia.”

“Edna,” Libby called, “I’m prepared for pass four.”

Edna sighed. There was no point backing down now; if nothing else they had made their hostile intentions absolutely clear to the Q-bomb. “Proceed. Arm the fish.”

Alexei said, “Look, Bisesa — if the Q-bomb is a Firstborn artifact, then we believe that the best way to combat the threat is to use the Firstborn’s own technology against them. This Eye is the only sample of that technology we have. And you may be our only way to un-lock it.”

As the conversation became more purposeful, Bisesa had the sense that something changed about the Eye above her. As if it shifted. Became more watchful. She heard a faint buzz on her comms link, and her suit seemed to shudder, as if buffeted by a breeze. A breeze?

Myra, frowning, tapped her helmet with a gloved hand.

Yuri looked up. “The Eye — oh shit—”

“Thirty seconds,” said Libby.

John said, “You know, there’s no reason why the bomb has to be constrained by the range of action it’s shown so far. It could just swat this damn ship like a fly.”

“So it could,” Edna said calmly. “Check your constraints.”

John reflexively snapped down his pressure suit visor.

“Ready?”

“Fire your damn fish,” John muttered.

Edna tapped her final enable button. The A-drive cut in, and acceleration bit once more, driving them in their heavy suits back into their couches.

Four torpedoes were fired in a single broadside from cannon mounted on the Liberator’s hull. They were antimatter torpedoes, so unstable they had to be armed with their H-bar pellets in flight, rather than back in dry dock.

One detonated early, its magnetic containment failing.

The others went off simultaneously in a cluster around the Q-bomb, as planned.

The Q-bomb sailed on unperturbed. Mankind’s most powerful weapons, delivered by its first and only space battleship, had not been able to scar the bomb’s hide, or dislodge it from its chosen trajectory by a fraction of a degree.

“So that’s that,” Edna said. “Libby, log it.” While they waited for further orders from Achilles, the Liberator stood off at a safe distance from the Q-bomb, matching its trajectory.

“Christ,” John Metternes snapped, releasing his restraints. “I need a drink. Another shower, and a bloody drink.”

Mars dust and loose bits of ice were churning on the floor, whip-ping up to collide with the shining face of the Eye. Bisesa felt fear and exhilaration. Not again. Not again!

Myra ran clumsily to her mother, and grabbed her. “Mum!”

“It’s all right, Myra—”

Her voice was drowned out in her own ears by a rising tone, a sweep up the frequency scale into inaudibility, loud enough to be painful.

Yuri studied a softscreen sewn into his sleeve. “That signal was a frequency chirp — like a test—”

Ellie was laughing. “It worked. The Eye is responding. By Sol’s light! I don’t think I ever believed it. And I certainly didn’t think it would work as soon as this woman walked into the Pit.”

Alexei grinned fiercely, “Believe it, baby!”

“It’s changing,” said Yuri, looking up.

The Eye’s smooth reflective sheen now oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.

Then the surface collapsed, as if deflating. Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face — but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

She had seen this before, in the Temple of Marduk. This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

Her suit said, “I apologize for any inconvenience. However—”

The suit’s voice cut out with a pop, to be replaced by silence.

Suddenly her limbs turned flaccid and heavy. The suit’s systems had failed, even the servomotors.

The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye.

Wrestling with her own suit, Myra pressed her helmet against Bisesa’s, and Bisesa heard her muffled cries. “Mum, no! You’re not running out on me again!”

Bisesa clung to her. “Love, it’s all right, whatever happens…”

But there was a kind of wind, dragging at her. She staggered, their helmets lost contact, and she let go of Myra.

The storm of light grew to a blizzard. Bisesa looked up at the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity — but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

And the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of self.

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a gate.

The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

With a snap, it was over. The chamber was dark. The Eye was whole again, sleek and reflective in its ancient cage.

Bisesa was gone. Myra found herself on the floor, weighed down by a powerless suit. She yelled into the silence of her helmet.

“Mum. Mum!”

There was a click, and a soft hum. A female voice said levelly,

“Myra. Don’t be alarmed. I am speaking to you through your ident tattoo.”

“What’s happened?”

“Help is on its way. I have spoken to Paula on the surface. You two have the only ident tattoo. You must reassure the others.”

“Who are you?”

“I suppose I am the leader of what your mother called this ‘faction.’ ”

“I know your voice. From years ago — the sunstorm—”

“My name is Athena.”

25: Interlude:

A Signal from Earth 2053

In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.

A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.

The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, point-ers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted itself out, activated programs, analyzed the environment it found itself in — and gradually became aware.

Aware, yes. There was a personality in this star-crossing data.

No: three distinct personalities.

“So we’re conscious again,” said Thales, stating the obvious.

“Whoopee! What a ride!” said Athena skittishly.

“There’s somebody watching us,” said Aristotle.

Witness was the only name she had ever known.

Of course that didn’t seem strange to her at first, in her early years. And nor did it seem strange that though there were plenty of adults in the waters around her, she was the only child. When you are young, you take everything for granted.

This was a watery world, not terribly unlike Earth. Even its day was only a little longer than Earth’s.

And the creatures here were Earthlike. In the bright waters of the world sea, Witness, a bundle of fur and fat something like a seal, swam and played and chased creatures not unlike fish. Witness even had two parents: having two sexes was a good strategy for mixing up hereditary material. Convergent evolution was a powerful force. But Witness’s body plan was based on six limbs, not four.

The best times of all were the days, one in four, when the icy lid of the ocean broke up, and the people came flopping out onto the island.

On land you were heavy, of course, and a lot less mobile. But Witness loved the sharp sensation of the gritty sand under her belly, and the crispness of the cold air. There were wonders on the island, cities and factories, temples and scientific establishments. And Witness loved the sky. She loved the stars that gleamed at night — and the three suns that shone in the day.

If this world was something like Earth, its sun was not. This system was dominated by a star twice as massive as the sun, and eight times as bright; it had a smaller companion barely noticeable in the giant’s glare, and there was a third, a distant dim red dwarf.

Across eleven light years, this system was easily bright enough to be seen from the Earth. This was Alpha Canis Minoris, also called Procyon. This star was known as a double to astronomers; that small second companion had never even been detected from Earth.

But Procyon had changed. And the living planet it had suc-cored was dying.

As she grew older, Witness learned to ask questions.

“Why am I alone? Why are there no others like me? Why is there nobody for me to play with?”

“Because we face a great tragedy,” her father said. “We all do. All over the world. It is the suns, Witness. There is something wrong with the suns.”

The giant senior partner of Procyon, Procyon A, had once been a variable star.

When it was young it shined steadily. But the helium “ash” produced by the hydrogen-burning fusion reactor of its core slowly accumulated in its heart. Trapped heat lifted the helium layer, and all the immense weight of gas above: the star swelled, subtly, until the trapped heat could flood out, and the star collapsed once more. But then the helium trap formed again.

Thus the aging star became variable, swelling and collapsing over and again, with a period of a few days. And it was that grand stellar oscillation that had given this world its life.

Once, before Procyon had become variable, the planet had been something like Europa, moon of Jupiter: a salty ocean trapped under a permanent crust of ice. There had been life here, fueled by the inner heat and complex minerals that came bubbling up from the world’s core. But, locked in the watery dark, none of those forms had progressed greatly in intelligence.

The new pulsation had changed all that.

“Every fourth day the ice breaks up into floes,” Witness’s parents said. “So you can get out of the sea. And we did. Our ancestors changed, so they could breathe in the air, so much more oxygen-rich than the seawater. And they learned to exploit the possibilities of the dry land. At first they just emerged so they could mate in peace, and shelter their young from the hungry mouths of the sea.

But later—”

“Yes, yes,” Witness said impatiently. She already knew the story. “Tools, minds, civilization.”

“Yes. But you can see that we owe all we have — even our minds — to the pulsation of the sun. We can’t even breed in the water anymore; we need access to the land.”

Witness prompted, “And now—”

“And now, that pulsation has gone. Dwindled almost to nothing,” said her father.

“And our world is dying,” said her mother sadly.

Now there was no sunlight peak, no melting of the ice. The people’s machines kept some of the ice open. But without the mixing of the air caused by the pumping of the star, a layer of carbon dioxide was settling over the surface of the ocean.

After a few centuries the islands were becoming uninhabitable.

“We have become creatures of sea and land,” Witness’s mother said. “If we can’t reach the land—”

“The implications,” her father said, “are clear. And there was only one possible response.”

Unlike humans, Witness’s folk had never got as far as a space program. They had no way of fighting this catastrophe, as humans had built a shield to fend off the sunstorm. They had faced the horror of extinction.

But they would not accept it.

“We simply had less children,” Witness’s mother said.

The generations of these folk were much briefer than humanity’s.

There had been time for this cull of numbers to slash the population until, by the time of Witness’s birth, there were only a few dozen of them left, in all the world, where once millions had swum.

“You can see why we did it,” her mother said. “If a child never existed, it can’t suffer. It wasn’t so bad,” she said desperately. “For most of the generations you could still have one child. You still had love. ”

Her father said, “But in the last generation—”

Witness said blackly, “In this last generation you have produced only me.”

Witness was the last ever child to be born. And she had precious duties to fulfill.

“Stars are simple beasts,” her father told her. “Oh, it took many generations for our astronomers to puzzle out the peculiar internal mechanism that made our giant sun breathe out and in. But puzzle it out they did. It was easy to see how the pulsing started. But no matter how contorted a model the theoreticians dreamed up they could never find a convincing way to make the star’s pulsation stop. ”

Her parents allowed Witness to think that through.

“Oh,” she said. “This was a deliberate act. Somebody did this.”

Witness was awed. “Why? Why would anybody do such a terrible thing?”

“We don’t know,” her father said. “We can’t even guess. But we have been trying to find out. And that’s where you come in.”

Listening stations had been established on many of the planet’s islands. There were clusters of telescopes sensitive to optical light, radio waves, and other parts of the spectrum: there were neutrino detectors, there were gravity wave detectors, and a host of still more exotic artificial ears.

“We want to know who has done this,” said her father bitterly,

“and why. And so we listen. But now our time is done. Soon only you will remain…”

“And I am Witness.”

Her parents clustered around her, stroking her belly and her six flippers as they had when she was a baby. “Tend the machines,” her father said. “Listen. And watch us, the last of us, as we go into the dark.”

“You want me to suffer,” Witness said bitterly. “That’s really what this is about, isn’t it? I will be the last of my kind, with no hope of procreation. All those who preceded me at least had that.

You want me to take on all the terrible despair you spared those un-born. You want me to hurt, don’t you?”

Witness’s mother was very distressed. “Oh, my child, if I could spare you this burden I would!”

This made no difference to Witness, whose heart was harden-ing. Until their deaths, she struck back at her parents the only way she could, by shunning them.

But there came a day, at last, when she had been left alone.

And then the signal from Earth arrived.

Aristotle, Thales, and Athena, refugee intelligences from Earth, learned how to speak to Witness. And they learned the fate of Witness’s kind.

Procyon’s pulsation had died away much too early for human astronomers to have observed it. But Aristotle and the others knew Fthe same phenomenon had been seen in a still more famous star: Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris. A baffling decay of the north pole star’s pulsing had begun around 1945.

“ ‘ But I am constant as the northern star, ’ ” Aristotle said, “ ‘ Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firma-ment. ’ Shakespeare.”

“So much for Shakespeare!” said Athena.

“This is the work of the Firstborn.” Thales’s observation was obvious, but it was chilling even so. The three of them were the first minds from Earth to understand that the reach of the Firstborn stretched so far.

Aristotle said gravely, “Witness, it must hurt very much to watch the end of your kind.”

Witness had often tried to put it into words for herself. Any death was painful. But you were always consoled that life would go on, that death was part of a continuing process of renewal, an unending story. But extinction ended all the stories.

“When I am gone, the Firstborn’s work will be complete.”

“Perhaps,” said Aristotle. “But it need not be so. Humans may have survived the Firstborn.”

“Really?”

They told her the story of the sunstorm.

Witness was shocked to discover that her kind were not the only victims of this cosmic violence. Something stirred inside her, unfamiliar feelings. Resentment. Defiance.

“Join us!” Athena said with her usual impulsiveness.

“But,” Thales pointed out, stating the obvious, “she is the last of her kind.”

“She isn’t dead yet,” Aristotle said firmly. “If Witness were the last human alive, we could find ways to reproduce her, or preserve her. Cloning technologies, Hibernacula.”

“She isn’t human,” Thales said bluntly.

“Yes, but the principle is the same,” Athena snapped. “Witness, dear, I think Aristotle is right. One day humans will come here. We can help you and your kind to go on. If you want us to, that is.”

Such possibilities bewildered Witness. “Why would humans come here?”

“To find others like themselves.”

“Why?”

“To save them,” Athena said.

“And then what? What if they find the Firstborn?”

“Then,” Aristotle said blackly, “the humans will save them too.”

Athena said, “Don’t give up, Witness. Join us.”

Witness thought it over. The ice of the freezing ocean closed around her, chilling her aging flesh. But that spark of defiance still burned, deep in the core of her being.

She asked: “How do we start?”