Firstborn

26: The Stone Man

Year 32 (Mir)

The consul from Chicago met Emeline White off the train from Alexandria.

Emeline climbed down from the open-top carriage. At the head of the train, monkish engineers of the School of Othic tended valves and pistons on the huge oil-burning locomotive. Emeline tried not to breathe in the greasy smoke that belched from the loco’s stack.

The sky was bright, washed-out, the sunlight harsh, but there was a nip of cold in the air.

The consul approached her, hat in hand. “Mrs. White? It’s good to meet you. My name is Ilicius Bloom.” He wore gown and sandals like an oriental, though his accent was as Chicagoan as hers.

He was maybe forty, she thought, though he might have been older; his skin was sallow, his hair glistening black, and a pot belly made a tent of his long purple robe.

Another fellow stood beside Bloom, heavyset, his head down-turned, his massive brow shining with dirt. He said nothing and didn’t move; he just stood there, a pillar of muscle and bone, and Bloom made no effort to introduce him. Something about him was very odd. But Emeline knew that by crossing the ocean to Europe she had come to a strange place, even stranger than icebound America.

“Thank you for welcoming me, Mr. Bloom.”

Bloom said, “As Chicago’s consul here I try to meet all our American visitors. Easing the way for all concerned.” He smiled at her. His teeth were bad. “Your husband isn’t with you?”

“Josh died a year ago.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Your letter to him, about the telephone ringing in the temple—

I took the liberty of reading it. He often spoke about his time in Babylon, those first years just after the Freeze. Which he always called the Discontinuity.”

“Yes. You surely don’t remember that strange day—”

“Mr. Bloom, I’m forty-one years old. I was nine on Freeze day.

Yes, I remember.” She thought he was going to make another manipulative compliment, but her stern glower shut him up. “I know Josh would have come,” she said. “He can’t, and our boys are grown and are busy with their own concerns, and so here I am.”

“Well, you’re very welcome to Babylonia.”

“Hmm.” She looked around. She was in a landscape of fields and gullies, irrigation ditches maybe, though the gullies looked clogged, the fields faded and dusty. There was no city nearby, no sign of habitation save mud shacks sprawled over a low hill maybe a quarter-mile away. And it was cold, not as cold as home but colder than she had expected. “This isn’t Babylon, is it?”

He laughed. “Hardly. The city itself is another few miles north of here. But this is where the rail line stops.” He waved at the hill of shacks. “This is a place the Greeks call the Midden. The local people have some name of their own for it, but nobody cares about that. ”

“Greeks? I thought King Alexander’s people were Macedonians.”

Bloom shrugged. “Greeks, Macedonians. They let us use this place, however. We have to wait, I’m afraid. I have a carriage arranged to take you to the city in an hour, by which time we’re due to meet another party coming down from Anatolia. In the meantime, please, come and rest.” He indicated the mud hovels.

Her heart sank. But she said, “Thank you.”

She struggled to get her luggage off the train carriage. It was a bison-fur pack strapped up with rope, a pack that had crossed the Atlantic with her.

“Here. Let my boy help.” Bloom turned and snapped his fingers.

The strange, silent man reached out one massive hand and lifted the pack with ease, even though he was hefting it at the end of his outstretched arm. One of the straps caught on a bench, and ripped a bit. Almost absently Bloom cuffed the back of his head.

The servant didn’t flinch or react, but just turned and plodded toward the village, the pack in his hand. From the back Emeline could see the servant’s shoulders, pushing up his ragged robe; they were like the shoulders of a gorilla, she thought, dwarfing his boulder of a head.

Emeline whispered, “Mr. Bloom — your servant—”

“What of him?”

“He isn’t human, is he?”

He glanced at her. “Ah, I forever forget how newcomers to this dark old continent are startled by our ancestral stock. The boy is what the Greeks call a Stone Man — because most of the time he’s as solid and silent as if he were carved from stone, you see. I think the bone-fondlers on Earth, before the Freeze, might have called him a Neanderthal. It was a bit of a shock to me when I first came over here, but you get used to it. None of this in America, eh?”

“No. Just us.”

“Well, it’s different here,” Bloom said. “There’s a whole carnival of the beasts, from the man-apes to these robust species, and other sorts. Favorites at Alexander’s court, many of them, for all sorts of sport —if they can be caught.”

They reached the low mound and began to walk up it. The earth here was disturbed, gritty, full of shards of pottery and flecks of ash. Emeline had the sense that it was very ancient, worked and reworked over and over.

“Welcome to the Midden,” Bloom said. “Mind where you step.”

They came to the first of the habitations. It was just a box of dried mud, entirely enclosed, without windows or doors. A crude wooden ladder leaned up against the wall. Bloom led the way, clambering up the ladder onto the roof and walking boldly across it. The Stone Man just jumped up, a single elastic bound of his powerful legs lifting him straight up the seven or eight feet to the roof.

Emeline, uncomfortable, followed. It felt very strange to be walking about on some stranger’s roof like this.

The roof was a smooth surface of dried mud, painted a pale white by some kind of wash. Smoke curled out of a crudely cut hole. This squat house huddled very close to the next, another block whose walls were just inches from its neighbors. And when Bloom strode confidently over the gap to the next roof Emeline had no choice but to follow.

The whole hillside was covered by a mosaic of these pale boxy houses, all jammed in together. And people moved around on the roofs. Mostly women, short, squat and dark, they carried bundles of clothing and baskets of wood up out of one ceiling hole and down through another. This was the nature of the town. All the dwellings were alike, just rectangular blocks of dried mud, jammed up against each other too closely to allow for streets, and climbing about on the roofs was the only way to get anywhere.

She said to Bloom, “They’re people. I mean, people like us.”

“Oh, yes, these are no man-apes or Neanderthals! But this is an old place, Mrs. White, snipped out of an old, deep time — older and deeper than the age of the Greeks, that’s for sure, nobody knows how old. But it’s a time so far back they hadn’t got around to inventing streets and doors yet.”

They came to one more roof. Smoke snaked up from the only hole cut into it, but without hesitation Bloom led the way down, following crudely-shaped steps fixed to the interior wall. Emeline followed, trying not to brush against the walls, which were coated with soot.

The Stone Man came after her with her pack, which he dumped on the floor, and clambered back up the stair, out of sight.

The house was as boxy inside as out. It was just a single room, without partitions. Descending the last steps, Emeline had to avoid a hearth set on slablike stones, which smoldered under the ceiling hole that served as both chimney and doorway. Lamps and ornaments stood in wall alcoves: there were figurines of stone or clay, and what looked like busts, sculpted heads, brightly painted. There was no furniture as such, but neat pallets of straw and blankets had been laid out, and clothing and baskets and stone tools, everything handmade, were heaped up neatly.

The walls were heavy with soot, but the floor looked as if it had been swept. The place was almost tidy. But there was a deep dense stink of sewage, and something else, older, drier, a smell of rot.

A woman, very young, had been sitting in the shadows. She was cradling a baby wrapped in some coarse cloth. Now she gently put the baby down on a heap of straw, and came to Bloom. She wore a simple, grubby, discolored smock. He stroked her pale, dust-colored hair, looked into her blue eyes, and ran his hand down her neck. Emeline thought she could be no more than fourteen, fifteen. The sleeping baby had black hair, like Bloom’s, not pale like hers. The way he held her neck wasn’t gentle, not quite.

“Wine,” Bloom said to the girl, loudly. “Wine, Isobel, you understand? And food.” He glanced at Emeline. “You’re hungry?

Isobel. Bring us bread, fruit, olive oil. Yes?” He pushed her away hard enough to make her stagger. She went clambering up out of the house.

Bloom sat on a heap of coarsely woven blankets, and indicated to Emeline that she should do the same.

She sat cautiously and glanced around the room. She didn’t feel like making conversation with this man, but she was curious. “Are those carved things idols?”

“Some of them. The ladies with the big bosoms and the fat bellies. You can take a look if you like. But be careful of the painted heads.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s exactly what they are. Isobel’s people bury their dead, right under the floors of their houses. But they sever the heads and keep them, and plaster them with baked mud, and paint them — well, you can see the result.”

Emeline glanced down uneasily, wondering what old horrors lay beneath the swept floor she was sitting on.

The girl Isobel returned with a jug and a basket of bread.

Without a word she poured them both cups of wine; it was warm and a bit salty, but Emeline drank it gratefully. The girl carved hunks of bread from a hard, boulder-like loaf with a stone blade, and set a bowl of olive oil between them. Following Bloom’s example, Emeline dunked the bread into the oil to soften it, then chewed on it.

She thanked Isobel for her service. The girl just retreated to her sleeping baby. Emeline thought she looked frightened, as if the baby waking up would be a bad thing.

Emeline asked, “ ‘Isobel’?”

Bloom shrugged. “Not the name her parents gave her, of course, but that doesn’t matter now.”

“It looks to me as if you have it pretty easy here, Mr. Bloom.”

He grunted. “Not as easy as all that. But a man must live, you know, Mrs. White, and we’re far from Chicago! The girl is happy enough however. What kind of brute do you think would have her if not for me?

“And she’s content to be in the house of her ancestors. Her people have lived here for generations, you know — I mean, right here, on this very spot. The houses are just mud and straw, and when they fall down they just build another on the plan of the old, just where granddaddy lived. The Midden isn’t a hill, you see, it is nothing less than an accumulation of expired houses. These antique folk aren’t much like us Christians, Mrs. White! Which is why the city council posted me here, of course. We don’t want any friction.”

“What kind of friction?”

He eyed her. “Well, you got to ask yourself, Mrs. White. What kind of person hauls herself through such a journey as you have made?”

She said hotly, “I came for my husband’s memory.”

“Sure. I know. But your husband came from this area — I mean, from a time slice nearby. Most Americans don’t have any personal ties here, as you do. You want to know why most folks come here?

Jesus.” He crossed himself as he said the name. “They come this way because they’re on a pilgrimage to Judea, where they hope against hope they’re going to find some evidence that a holy time slice has delivered Christ Incarnate. That would be some consolation for being ripped out of the world, wouldn’t it?

“But there’s no sign of Jesus in Judea —this Judea. That’s the grim truth, Mrs. White. All there is to see there is King Alexander’s steam-engine yards. What the unfortunate lack of an Incarnation in this world means for our immortal souls, I don’t know. And when the pious fools come up against the godless pagans who own Judea, the result is what might be called diplomatic incidents.”

But Emeline nodded. “Surely modern Americans have nothing to fear from an Iron Age warlord like Alexander…”

“But, Mrs. White,” a new voice called, “this ‘warlord’ has already established a new empire stretching from the Atlantic shore to the Black Sea — an empire that spans his whole world. It would serve us all well if Chicago were not to pick a fight with him just yet.”

Emeline turned. A man was clambering stiffly down the stairs, short, portly. He was followed by a younger man, leaner. They both wore what looked like battered military uniforms. The first man wore a peaked cap, and an astoundingly luxuriant mustache. But that facial ornament was streaked with gray; Emeline saw that he must be at least seventy.

Emeline stood, and Bloom smoothly introduced her. “Mrs.

White, this is Captain Nathaniel Grove. British Army — formerly, anyhow. And this—”

“I am Ben Batson,” the younger man said, perhaps thirty, his accent as stiffly British as Grove’s. “My father served with Captain Grove.”

Emeline nodded. “My name is—”

“I know who you are, my dear Mrs. White,” Grove said warmly. He crossed the floor and took her hands in his. “I knew Josh well. We arrived here together, aboard the same time slice, you might say. A bit of the North — West Frontier from the year of Our Lord 1885. Josh wrote several times and told me of you, and your children. You are every bit as lovely as I imagined.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” she said sternly. “But he did speak of you, Captain. I’m pleased to meet you. And I’m very sorry he’s not here with me. I lost him a year ago.”

Grove’s face stiffened. “Ah.”

“Pneumonia, they said. The truth was, I think he just wore himself out. He wasn’t so old.”

“Another one of us gone, another one less to remember where we came from — eh, Mrs. White?”

“Call me Emeline, please. You’ve traveled far?”

“Not so far as you, but far enough. We live now in an Alexandria—

not the city on the Nile, but at Ilium.”

“Where’s that?”

“Turkey, as we knew it.” He smiled. “We call our city New Troy.”

“I imagine you’re here because of the telephone call in Babylon.”

“Assuredly. The scholar Abdikadir wrote to me, as he wrote to Bloom, here, in the hope of contacting Josh. Not that I have the faintest idea what it all means. But one has to address these things.”

The baby started crying. Bloom, clearly irritated, clapped his hands. “Well, Babylon awaits. Unless you need to rest, Captain—”

“Let’s get on with it.”

“Mr. Batson, if you would lead the way?”

Batson clambered briskly back up the stair, and Grove and Emeline followed.

Emeline looked back once. She glimpsed Isobel frantically trying to hush the baby, and Bloom stalking over to her, visibly angry, his arm raised. Emeline had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago; she was repelled by this vignette. But there was surely nothing Emeline could do that would not make it worse for the girl.

She climbed the worn stairs, and emerged blinking into the dusty Babylonian sunlight.

27: Phaeton

The passengers and their bits of luggage were loaded onto a crude, open phaeton. Bloom sent his “boy” off to find their draft animals.

Emeline was shocked when the Stone Man returned, not with horses as she had expected, but with four more of his own kind.

Where Bloom’s servant was dressed in his rags, these four were naked. Three of them were men, their genitalia small gray clumps in black hair, and the woman had slack breasts with long pink-gray nipples. Their stocky forms were thickly coated with hair, and that and their musculature and collapsed brows gave them the look of gorillas. But they looked far more human than ape, their hands hairless, their eyes clear. It was a shocking sight as they were settled into the phaeton’s harness, each taking a collar around the neck.

Bloom now took a whip of leather, and cracked it without mal-ice across the backs of the lead pair. The Stone Men stumbled forward into a shambling job, and the phaeton clattered forward.

Bloom’s servant was to walk alongside the carriage. Emeline saw now that the creatures all had stripes, old whip-scars, across their backs.

Bloom produced a clay bottle and made to pass it around.

“Whiskey? It’s a poor grain but not a bad drop.”

Emeline refused; Grove and Batson took a nip each.

Grove asked Emeline politely about her journey from frozen America.

“It took me months; I feel quite the hardened traveler.”

Grove stroked his mustache. “America is quite different from Europe, I hear. No people…”

“None save us. Nothing came over of modern America but Chicago. Not a single sign of humanity outside the city limits has been found — not a single Indian tribe — we met nobody until the explorers from Europe showed up in the Mississippi delta.”

“And none of these man-apes and sub-men and pre-men that Europe seems to be thick with?”

“No.”

Mir was a quilt of a world, a composite of time slices, samples apparently drawn from throughout human history, and the prehis-tory of the hominid families that preceded mankind.

Emeline said, “It seems that it was only humans who reached the New World; the older sorts never walked there. But we have quite a menagerie out there, Captain! Mammoths and cave bears and lions — the hunters among us are in hog heaven.”

Grove smiled. “It sounds marvelous. Free of all the complications of this older world — just as America always was, I suppose.

And Chicago sounds a place of enterprise. I was pleased for him when Josh decided to go back there, after that business of Bisesa Dutt and the Eye.”

Emeline couldn’t help but flinch when she heard that name.

She knew her husband had carried feelings for that vanished woman to his grave, and Emeline, deep in her soul, had always been hopelessly, helplessly jealous of a woman she had never met.

She changed the subject. “You must tell me of Troy.”

He grimaced. “There are worse places, and it’s ours — in a way.

Alexander planted it along with a heap of other cities in the process of his establishment of his Empire of the Whole World. He calls it Alexandria at Ilium.

“Everywhere he went Alexander always built cities. But now, in Greece and Anatolia and elsewhere, he has built new cities on the vacant sites of the old: there is a new Athens, a new Sparta. Thebes, too, though it’s said that’s an expression of guilt, for he himself destroyed the old version before the Discontinuity.”

“Troy is especially precious to the King,” Bloom said. “For you may know the King believes he is descended from Heracles of Argos, and in his early career he modeled himself on Achilles.”

Emeline said to Grove, “And so you settled there.”

“I feared that my few British were overwhelmed in a great sea of Macedonians and Greeks and Persians. And as everybody knows, Britain was colonized in the first place by refugees from the Trojan war. It amused Alexander, I think, that we were closing a circle of causes by doing so, a new Troy founded by descendants of Trojans.

“He left us with a batch of women from his baggage train, and let us get on with it. This was about fifteen years ago. It’s been hard, by God, but we prevail. And there’s no distinction between Tommy and sepoy now! We’re something new in creation altogether, I’d say. But I leave the philosophy to the philosophers.”

“But what of yourself, Captain? Did you ever have a family?”

He smiled. “Oh, I was always a bit too busy with looking after my men for that. And I have a wife and a little girl at home — or did.” He glanced at Batson. “However Ben’s father was a corporal of mine, a rough type from the northeast of England, but one of the better of his sort. Unfortunately got himself mutilated by the Mongols — but not before he’d struck up a relationship with a camp follower of Alexander’s, as it turned out. When poor Batson eventually died of infections of his wounds, the woman didn’t much want to keep Ben; he looked more like Batson than one of hers. So I took him in. Duty, you see.”

Ben Batson smiled at them, calm, patient.

Emeline saw more than duty here. She said, “I think you did a grand job, Captain Grove.”

Grove said, “I think Alexander was pleased, in fact, when we asked for Troy. He usually has to resort to conscripts to fill his new cities, studded as they are in an empty continent; it seems to me Europe is much more an empire of Neanderthal than of human.”

“Empire?” Bloom snapped. “Not a word I’d use. A source of stock, perhaps. The Stone Men are strong, easily broken, with a good deal of manual dexterity. The Greeks tell me that handling a Stone Man is like handling an elephant compared to a horse — a smarter sort of animal; you just need a different technique.”

Grove’s face was a mask. “We use Neanderthals,” he said. “We couldn’t get by if not. But we employ them. We pay them in food.

Consul, they have a sort of speech of their own, they make tools, they weep over their dead as they bury them. Oh, Mrs. White, there are all sorts of sub-people. Runner types and man-apes, and a certain robust sort who seem content to do nothing but chew on fruit in the depths of the forest. The other varieties you can think of as animals, more or less. But your Neanderthal is not a horse, or an elephant. He is more man than animal!”

Bloom shrugged. “I take the world as I find it. For all I know elephants have gods, and horses too. Let them worship if it consoles them! What difference does it make to us?”

They lapsed into a silence broken only by the grunts of the Stone Men, and the padding of their bare feet.

The land became richer, split up into polygonal fields where wattle-and-daub shacks sat, squat and ugly. The land was striped by glistening channels. These, Emeline supposed, were Babylon’s famous irrigation canals. Grove told her that many of them had been severed by the arbitrariness of the time-slicing, to be restored under Alexander’s kingship.

At last, on the western horizon, she saw buildings, complicated walls, a thing like a stepped pyramid, all made gray and misty by distance. Smoke rose up from many fires, and as they drew closer Emeline saw soldiers watching vigilantly from towers on the walls.

Babylon! She shivered with a feeling of unreality; for the first time since landing in Europe she had the genuine sense that she was stepping back in time.

The city’s walls were impressive enough in themselves, a triple circuit of baked brick and rubble that must have stretched fifteen miles around, all surrounded by a moat. They came to a bridge over the moat. The guards there evidently recognized Bloom, and waved the party across.

They approached the grandest of the gates in the city walls.

This was a high-arched passage set between two heavy square towers. Even to reach the gate the Stone Men, grunting, had to haul the phaeton up a ramp to a platform perhaps fifteen yards above ground level.

The gate itself towered twenty yards or more above Emeline’s head, and she peered up as they passed through it. This, Bloom murmured, was the Ishtar Gate. Its surfaces were covered in glazed brickwork, a haunting royal blue surface across which dragons and bulls danced. The Stone Men did not look up at this marvel, but kept their eyes fixed on the trampled dirt at their feet.

The city within the walls was laid out in a rough rectangle, its plan spanning the river, the Euphrates. The party had entered from the north, on the east side of the river, and now the phaeton rolled south down a broad avenue, passing magnificent, baffling buildings. Emeline glimpsed statues and fountains, and every wall surface was decorated with dazzling glazed bricks and molded with lions and rosettes.

Bloom pointed out the sights, like a tour guide at the world’s fair. “The complex to your right is the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, who was Babylon’s greatest ruler. The Euphrates cuts the city in two, north to south. This eastern monumental sector is apparently a survival from Nebuchadnezzar’s time, a couple of centuries before Alexander. In fact this isn’t Alexander’s Babylon any more than it is ours, if you see what I mean. But the western bank, which had been residential, was a ruin, a time slice from a much later century, perhaps close to our own. Alexander has been restoring it for three decades now…”

The roads were crowded, with people rushing here and there, mostly on foot, some in carts or on horseback. Some wore purple robes as grand as Bloom’s, or grander, but others wore more practical tunics, with sandals and bare legs. One grand-looking fellow with a painted face proceeded down the street with an imperious nonchalance. He was leading an animal like a scrawny chimp by a rope attached to its neck. But then it straightened up, to stand erect on hind limbs very like human legs. It wore a kind of ruff of a shining cloth to hide the collar that enslaved it. Nobody Emeline could see wore anything like western clothes. They all seemed short, compact, muscular, dark, another sort of folk entirely compared to the population of nineteenth-century Chicago.

There was an air of tension here, she thought immediately. She was a Chicagoan, and used to cities, and to reading their moods.

And the more senior the figure, the more agitated and intent he seemed. Something was going on here. If they were aware of this, Bloom and Grove showed no signs of it.

The processional way led them through a series of broad walled plazas, and brought them at last to the pyramid-like structure that Emeline had glimpsed from outside the city. It was actually a ziggurat, a stepped tower of seven terraces rising from a base that must have been a hundred yards on a side.

Bloom said, “The Babylonians called this the Etemenanki, which means ‘the house that is the foundation of Heaven and Earth’…”

This ziggurat was, astonishingly, the Tower of Babel.

South of the tower was another tremendous monument, but this was very new, as Emeline could see from the gleam of its finish.

It was an immense square block, perhaps two hundred yards on a side and at least seventy tall. Its base was garlanded with the gilded prows of boats that stuck out of the stone as if emerging from mist, and on the walls rows of bright friezes told a complicated story of love and war. On top of the base stood two immense, booted feet, the roots of a statue that would some day be even more monumental than the base.

“I heard of this,” Grove said. “The Monument of the Son. It’s got nothing to do with Babylon. This is all Alexander…”

The Son in question had been Alexander’s second-born.

Through the chance of the Discontinuity the first son, by the captured wife of a defeated Persian general, had not been brought to Mir. The second was another Alexander, born to his wife Roxana, a Bactrian princess and another captive of war.

Bloom said, “The boy was born in the first year of Mir. We celebrated, for the King had an heir. But by the twenty-fifth year that heir, grown to be a man, was chafing, as was his ambitious mother, for Alexander refused to die.” The War of Father and Son raged across the empire, consuming its stretched resources. The son’s anger was no match for his father’s experience — or for Alexander’s own calm belief in his own divinity. The outcome was never in doubt. “The final defeat is remembered annually,” Bloom said.

“Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary, in fact.”

“Here’s the way I see it, Mrs. White,” Grove said. “That war made Alexander, already a rum cove, even more complicated. It’s said Alexander had a hand in the assassination of his own father. He was definitely responsible for the death of his son and heir — and his wife Roxana come to that. Now Alexander has become even more convinced that he’s nothing less than a god, destined to reign forever.”

“But he won’t,” Bloom murmured. “And we’ll all be heading for a mighty smash when he finally falls.”

South of the Monument of the Son they came at last to a temple Bloom called the Esagila— the Temple of Marduk, the national god of Babylonia. Here they clambered off the phaeton. Looking up, Emeline saw a dome planted on the temple’s roof, with a cylinder protruding from it like a cannon. It was an observatory, and the

“cannon” was a telescope, quite modern-looking.

A dark young man ran up to them. He wore a drab, monkish robe, and twisted his hands together.

“My God,” Grove said, coloring. “You must be Abdikadir Omar. You’re so like your father…”

“So I am told, sir. You are Captain Grove.” He glanced around the party. “But where is Josh White? Mr. Bloom, I wrote for Josh White.”

“I am his wife,” Emeline said firmly. “I’m afraid my husband died.”

“Died?” The boy was distracted and barely seemed to take that in. “Well — oh, you must come!” He headed back toward the temple. “Please, come with me, to the chamber of Marduk.”

“Why?” Emeline asked. “In your letter you spoke of the telephone ringing.”

“Not that.” He said, agitated, almost distressed with his tension. “That was just the start. There has been more, more just today — you must come to see—”

Captain Grove asked, “See what, man?”

“She is here. The Eye — it came back — it flexed —she!” And Abdikadir broke away and sprinted back into the temple.

Bewildered, the travelers followed.

28: Suit Five

It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light.

She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.

She was lying on her back. Her breath was straining, her chest hurting. When she tried to move, her arms and legs were heavy.

Encased. She was trapped, somehow.

Her eyes were open, but she could see nothing.

Her breathing grew more rapid. Panicky. She could hear it, loud in an enclosed space. She was locked up inside something.

She forced herself to calm. She tried to speak, found her mouth crusted and dry, her voice a croak. “Myra?”

“I’m afraid Myra can’t hear you, Bisesa.” The voice was soft, male, but very quiet, a whisper.

Memories flooded back. “Suit Five?” The Pit on Mars. The Eye that had inverted. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “Is Myra okay?”

“I don’t know. I can’t contact her. I can’t contact anybody.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” the suit said miserably. “My primary power has failed. I am in minimum-functionality mode, operating on backup cells. Their expected operating life is—”

“Never mind.”

“I am broadcasting distress signals, of course.”

She heard something now, a kind of scratching at the carapace of the suit. Something was out there — or somebody. She was helpless, blind, locked in the inert suit, while something explored the exterior. Panic bubbled under the surface of her mind.

“Can I stand? I mean, can you?”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve let you down, haven’t I, Bisesa?”

“Can you let me see? Can you de-opaque my visor?”

“That is acceptable.”

Light washed into her field of view, dazzling her.

Looking up, she saw an Eye, a fat silvered sphere, swollen with mystery. And she saw her own reflection pasted on its face, a Mars suit on its back, a helplessly upended green bug.

But was this the same Eye? Was she still on Mars?

She lifted her head within the helmet, trying to see past the Eye.

Her head felt heavy, a football full of sloshing fluids. It was like pulling Gs in a chopper. Heavy gravity: not Mars, then.

She saw a brick wall beyond the Eye. Bits of electronic equipment studded the wall, fixed crudely, linked up with cable. She knew that wall, that gear. She had assembled it herself, scavenged from the crashed Little Bird, when she had set up this chamber as a laboratory to study an Eye.

This was the Temple of Marduk. She was back in Babylon. She was on Mir. “Here I am again,” she whispered.

A face loomed over her, sudden, unexpected. She flinched back, strapped in her lobster suit. It was a man, young, dark, good-looking, his eyes clear. She knew who it was. But it couldn’t be him.

“Abdi?” The last time she saw Abdikadir, her crewmate from the Little Bird, he had been worn out from the Mongol War, his face and body bearing the scars of that conflict. This smooth-faced man was too young, too untouched.

Now another face hovered in her view, illuminated by flickering lamplight. Another familiar face, a tremendous mustache, but this time older than she remembered, grayed, lined. “Captain Grove,” she said. “The gang’s all here.”

Grove said something she couldn’t hear.

Her chest hurt even more. “Suit. I can’t breathe. Open up and let me out.”

“It isn’t advisable, Bisesa. We aren’t in a controlled environment. And these people are not the crew of Wells Station,” the suit said primly. “If they exist at all.”

“Open up,” she said as severely as she could. “I’m overriding any other standing orders you have. Your function is to protect me.

So let me out before I suffocate.”

The suit said, “I’m afraid other protocols override your instructions, Bisesa.”

“What other protocols?”

“Planetary protection.”

The suit was designed to protect Mars from Bisesa as much as Bisesa from Mars. So if she were to die the suit would seal itself up, to keep the remains of her body from contaminating Mars’s fragile ecology. In extremis, Suit Five was programmed to become her coffin.

“Yes, but — oh, this is — we aren’t even on Mars! Can’t you see that? There’s nothing to protect!” She strained, but her limbs were encased. Her lungs dragged at stale air. “Suit Five — for God’s sake—”

Something slammed into her helmet, rattling her head like a walnut kernel in its shell. Her visor just popped off, and air washed over her face. The air smelled of burned oil and ozone, but it was rich in oxygen and she dragged at it gratefully.

Grove hovered over her. He held up a hammer and chisel.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Needs must, eh? But I rather fear I’ve damaged your suit of armor.” Though he had aged, he had the same clipped Noel Coward accent she remembered from her last time on Mir, more than thirty years in the past.

She felt inordinately glad to see him. “Be my guest,” she said.

“All right, Suit, you’ve had your fun. You’ve been breached, so planetary protection is out the window, wherever we are. Now will you let me go?”

The suit didn’t speak. It hesitated for a few seconds, silent, as if sulking. Then with a popping of seals it opened up, along her torso, legs and arms. She lay in the suit, in her tight thermal underwear, and the colder air washed over her. “I feel like a lobster in a cracked shell.”

“Let us help you.” It was the boy who looked like Abdikadir.

He and Grove reached down, got their arms under Bisesa, and lifted her out of the suit.

29: Alexei

It was an hour since Bisesa had vanished into the Eye.

Myra, bereft and confused, sought out Alexei in his storeroom cabin. He was curled up on his bunk, facing the plastic-coated ice wall.

“So tell me about Athena.”

Without turning, he said, “Well, Athena singled you out. She seems to think you’re worth preserving.”

Myra pursed her lips. “She’s the real leader of this conspiracy of yours, isn’t she? This underground group of Boy Scouts, trying to figure out the Martian Eye.”

He shrugged, his back still turned. “We Spacers are a divided lot. The Martians don’t think of themselves as Spacers at all.

Athena is different from all of us, and she’s a lot smarter. She’s someone we can unite around, at least.”

“Let me get it straight,” she said. “Athena is the shield AI.”

“A copy of her. The original AI was destroyed in the final stages of the sunstorm. Before the storm, this copy was squirted to the stars. Somewhere out there, that broadcast copy was picked up, activated, and transmitted back here.”

This was the story she had picked up from the others. “You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”

“Nobody outside Cyclops knows the details.”

“Cyclops. The big planet-finder telescope station.”

“Right. Of course the echo could have been picked up anywhere in the solar system, but as far as we know it’s only on Cyclops that she’s been activated. She’s stayed locked up in the hardened data store on Cyclops. Her choice. As far as Hanse Critchfield can tell, she managed to download a subagent into your ident tattoo.

Nobody knows how. It self-destructed after she gave you that message. I guess she has her electronic eye on you, Myra.”

That was not a comforting thought. “So now my mother has gone through the Eye. What next?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“I guess, for whatever comes of your mother’s mission to Mir.

And for Athena.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, Myra. We have time. It’s still more than eighteen months until the Q-bomb is supposed to reach Earth.

“Look, we’ve done what we could. We delivered your mother to the Eye, and pow, that pretty much short-circuited all the weird-ness in the solar system. No offense. Now we’ve come to a kind of a lull. So, take it easy. You’ve been through a lot — we both have. The traveling alone was punishment enough. And as for that shit down in the Pit with the Eye — I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt for you.”

Myra sat awkwardly on the single chair in the room, and pulled at her fingers. “It’s not just a lull. This is a kind of terminus, for me.

You needed me to get my mother here, to Mars. Fine, I did that.

But now I’ve crashed into a wall.”

He rolled over and faced her. “I’m sorry you feel like that. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re a good person. I’ve seen that. You love your mother, and you support her, even when it hurts you. That’s a pretty good place to be. Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not one to give you counseling. I’m spying on my father. How dys-functional is that?”

He turned back to the wall.

She sat with him a while longer. When he began to snore, she crept out of the room and closed the door.

30: Chiliarch

Grove and Abdi brought Bisesa to a smaller chamber, an office set out with couches and tables. This temple seemed to be full of offices, Emeline observed; she learned it was a center of administra-tion for various cults and government departments as well as a place of worship.

Grove sat Bisesa down and wrapped her in a blanket. Grove shouted at various parties about tea, until a servant brought Bisesa a bowl of some hot, milky drink, which she sipped gratefully.

Two solid-looking Macedonian guards were posted at the door.

They carried the long, brutal-looking pikes they called sarissae. Bisesa’s return had caused a ferment, it seemed, though whether the guards were protecting the people from Bisesa or vice versa Emeline didn’t know.

Emeline sat, and quietly studied Bisesa Dutt.

She looked older than Emeline, but not much more, fifty perhaps. She was just as Josh had described her — even sketched her in some of his journals. Her face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square. Her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair grayed. Though she seemed drained and disoriented, she had a strength about her, Emeline sensed, a dogged enduring strength.

Bisesa, reviving, looked around cautiously. “So,” she said.

“Here we are.”

“Here you are,” Grove said. “You’ve been back home, have you? I mean back to England. Your England.”

“Yes, Captain. I was brought back to the time of the Discontinuity, in my future. Precisely, to within a day. Even though I had spent five years on Mir.”

Grove shook his head. “I ought to get used to the way time flows so strangely here. I don’t suppose I ever will.”

“Now I’m back. But when am I?”

Emeline said, “Madam, it’s well known here that you left Mir in the year five of the new calendar established by the Babylonian astronomers. This is year thirty-two…”

“Twenty-seven years, then.” Bisesa looked at her curiously.

“You’re an American.”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“Of course. The Soyuz spotted you, clear of the North American ice sheet.”

Emeline said, “I am from the year 1894.” She had got used to repeating this strange detail.

“Nine years after Captain Grove’s time slice — that was 1885.”

“Yes.”

Bisesa turned to Abdikadir, who had said little since Bisesa had been retrieved. “And you are so like your father.”

Wide-eyed, Abdi was nervous, curious, perhaps eager to impress. “I am an astronomer. I work here in the Temple — there is an observatory on the roof—”

She smiled at him. “Your father must be proud.”

“He isn’t here,” Abdi blurted. And he told her how Abdikadir Omar had gone south into Africa, following his own quest; if Mir was populated by a sampling of hominids from all mankind’s long evolutionary history, Abdikadir had wanted to find the very earli-est, the first divergence from the other lines of apes. “But he did not return. This was some years ago.”

Bisesa nodded, absorbing that news. “And Casey? What of him?”

Casey Othic, the third crew member of the Little Bird, was no longer here either. He had died of complications from an old injury he had suffered on Discontinuity day itself. “But,” Captain Grove said, “not before he had left quite a legacy behind. A School of Othic.

Engineers to whom Casey became a god, literally! You’ll see, Bisesa.”

Bisesa listened to this. “And the three Soyuz crew were all killed, ultimately. So there are no moderns here — I mean, nobody from my own time. That feels strange. What about Josh?”

Captain Grove coughed into his fist, awkward, almost comically British. “Well, he survived your departure, Bisesa.”

“He came with me halfway,” Bisesa said enigmatically. “But they sent him back.”

“With you gone, there was nothing to keep him here in Babylon.” Grove glanced uncomfortably at Emeline. “He went to find his own people.”

“Chicago.”

“Yes. It took a few years before Alexander’s people, with Casey’s help, put together a sailing ship capable of taking on the Atlantic. But Josh was on the first boat.”

“I was his wife,” Emeline said.

“Ah,” Bisesa said. “ ‘Was’?”

And Emeline told her something of Josh’s life, and how he died, and the legacy he left behind, his sons.

Bisesa listened gravely. “I don’t know if you’d want to hear this,” she said. “Back home, I looked up Josh. I asked Aristotle — I mean, I consulted the archives. And I found Josh’s place in history.”

The “copy” of Josh left behind on Earth had lived on past 1885.

That Josh had fallen in love: aged thirty-five he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons — just as Emeline gave him sons on Mir. But Josh was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, a correspondent covering yet another war, a great world war Emeline had never heard of.

Emeline listened to this reluctantly. It was somehow a diminishing of her Josh to hear this tale of an alternate version of him.

They talked on for a while, of disrupted histories, of the deteriorating climate of Mir, of a new Troy and a global empire. Grove asked Bisesa if she had found Myra, her daughter. Bisesa said she had, and in fact she now had a granddaughter too. But her mood seemed wistful, complicated. It seemed not much of this had made her happy.

Emeline had little to say. She tried to gauge the mood of the people around her as they talked, adjusting to this new strangeness.

Abdi and Ben, born after the Discontinuity, were curious, wide-eyed with wonder. But Grove and Emeline herself, and perhaps Bisesa, were fundamentally fearful. The youngsters didn’t understand, as did the older folk who had lived through the Discontinuity, that nothing in the world was permanent, not if time could be torn apart and knitted back together again at a whim. If you lived through such an event you never got over it.

There was a commotion at the door.

Abdikadir, attuned to life at Alexander’s court, got to his feet quickly.

A man walked briskly into the room, accompanied by two lesser-looking attendants. Abdikadir prostrated himself before this man; he threw himself to the floor, arms outstretched, head down.

Wearing a flowing robe of some expensive purple-dyed fabric the newcomer was shorter than anybody else in the room, but he had a manner of command. He was bald save for a frosting of silver hair. He might have been seventy, Emeline thought, but his lined skin glistened, well treated with oils.

Bisesa’s eyes widened. “Secretary Eumenes.”

The man smiled, his expression cold, calculated. “My title is now ‘chiliarch,’ and has been for twenty years or more.” His English was fluent but stilted, and tinged with a British accent.

Bisesa said, “Chiliarch. Which was Hephaistion’s position, once. You have risen higher than any man save the King, Eumenes of Cardia.”

“Not bad for a foreigner.”

“I suppose I should have expected you,” Bisesa said. “You of all people.”

“As I have always expected you.”

From his prone position on the floor, Abdikadir stammered,

“Lord Chiliarch. I summoned you, I sent runners the moment it happened — the Eye — the return of Bisesa Dutt — it was just as you ordered — if there were delays I apologize, and—”

“Oh, be quiet, boy. And stand up. I came when I was ready. Believe it or not there are matters in this worldwide empire of ours even more pressing than enigmatic spheres and mysterious reve-nants. Now. Why are you here, Bisesa Dutt?”

It was a direct question none of the others had asked her. Bisesa said, “Because of a new Firstborn threat.”

In a few words she sketched a storm on the sun, and how mankind in a future century had labored to survive it. And she spoke of a new weapon, called the “Q-bomb,” which was gliding through space toward Earth — Bisesa’s Earth.

“I myself traveled between planets, in search of answers to this challenge. And then I was brought — here.”

“Why? Who by?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps the same agency who took me home in the first place. The Firstborn, or not the Firstborn. Perhaps some agency who defies them.”

“The King knows of your return.”

Grove asked, “How do you know that?”

Eumenes smiled. “Alexander knows everything I know — and generally before me. At least, that is the safest assumption to make.

I will speak to you later, Bisesa Dutt, in the palace. The King may attend.”

“It’s a date.”

Eumenes grimaced. “I had forgotten your irreverence. It is interesting to have you back, Bisesa Dutt.” He turned on his heel and walked out, to more bowing and scraping from Abdikadir.

Bisesa glanced at Emeline and Grove. “So you know why I’m here. A bomb in the solar system, an Eye on Mars. Why are you here?”

“Because,” Abdikadir said, “I summoned them when your telephone rang.”

Bisesa stared at him. “My phone?”

They hurried back to the Eye chamber.

Abdikadir extracted the phone from its shrine, and handed it to Bisesa reverently.

It lay in her palm, scuffed, familiar. She couldn’t believe it; her eyes misted over. She tried to explain to Abdikadir. “It’s just a phone. I was given it when I was twelve years old. Every child on Earth got a phone at that age. A communications and education program by the old United Nations. Well, it came here with me through the Discontinuity, and it was a great help — a true companion. But then its power failed.”

Abdikadir listened to this rambling, his face expressionless. “It rang. Chirp, chirp.”

“It will respond to an incoming call, but that’s all. When the power went I had no way of recharging it. Still haven’t, in fact.

Wait—”

She turned to her spacesuit, which still lay splayed open on the floor. Nobody had dared touch it. “Suit Five?”

Its voice, from the helmet speakers, was very small. “I have always strived to serve your needs during your extravehicular activity.”

“Can you give me one of your power packs?”

It seemed to think that over. Then a compartment on the suit’s belt flipped open to reveal a compact slab of plastic, bright green like the rest of the suit. Bisesa pulled this out of its socket.

“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Bisesa?”

“No. Thank you.”

“I will need refurbishment before I can serve you again.”

“I’ll see you get it.” She feared that was a lie. “Rest now.”

The suit fell silent with a kind of sigh.

She took the battery pack, flipped open the phone’s interface panel, and jammed the phone onto the cell’s docking port. Male and female connectors joined smoothly. “What was it Alexei said?

Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”

The phone lit up and spoke hesitantly. “Bisesa?”

“It’s me.”

“You took your time.”

31: Operation Order

A new draft operation order was transmitted to Liberator from Bella’s office in Washington.

“We’re to shadow the Q-bomb,” Edna said, scanning the order.

“How far?” John Metternes asked.

“All the way to Earth, if we have to.”

“Christ on a bike, that might be twenty months!”

“Libby, can we do it?”

The AI said, “We will be coasting, like the bomb. So propellant and reaction mass won’t be a problem. If the recycling efficiency stays nominal the life shell will be able to sustain crew functions.”

“Nicely put,” John said sourly.

“You’re the engineer,” Edna snapped. “Do you think she’s right?”

“I guess. But what’s the point, Captain? Our weapons are useless.”

“Best to have somebody on point than nobody. Something might turn up. John, Libby, start drawing up a schedule. I’ll go through the draft order, and if we’re sure it’s feasible from a resources point of view we’ll send our revision back to Earth.”

“Bonza trip this is going to be,” Metternes muttered.

Edna glanced at her softscreen. There was the bomb, silent, gliding ever deeper into the solar system, visible only by the stars it reflected. Edna tried to work out what she was going to say to Thea — how to explain she wasn’t coming home any time soon.

32: Alexander

Bisesa was given a room of her own in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which Alexander had, inevitably, taken over. Eumenes’s staff provided clothes in the elaborate Persian style that had been adopted by the Macedonian court.

And Emeline called in and gave her some toiletries: a comb, creams for her face and hands, a tiny bottle of perfume, even some archaic-looking sanitary towels. They were a selection from the travel kit of a nineteenth-century lady. “You looked as if you didn’t arrive with much,” she said.

The gesture, of one woman far from home to another, made Bisesa feel like crying.

She slept a while. She was weighed down by the sudden return to Earth gravity, three times that of Mars. And her body clock was all over the place; as before, this new Discontinuity, her own personal time slip, left her with a kind of jet lag.

And then she did cry, for herself, the shock of it all, and for the loss of Myra. But these last few extraordinary weeks in which they had been traveling together across space had probably been as long as she had spent alone with Myra since the days of the sunstorm.

That was some consolation, she told herself, even though it seemed they had hardly spoken, hardly got to know each other.

She longed to know more about Charlie. She hadn’t even seen a photo of her granddaughter.

She tried to sleep again.

She was woken by a diffident serving girl, maybe a slave. It was early evening. Time for her reception with Eumenes, and perhaps Alexander.

She bathed and dressed; she had worn Babylonian robes before, but she still felt ridiculous dressed up like this.

The grand chamber to which she was led was a pocket of ob-scene wealth, plastered with tapestries and fine carpets and exquisite furniture. Even the pewter mug a servant gave her for her wine was studded with precious stones. But there were guards everywhere, at the doorways, moving through the hall, armed with long sarissa pikes and short stabbing-swords. They wore no solid armor, but had helmets of what looked like ox-hide, corselets of linen, leather boots. They looked like the infantry soldiers Bisesa remembered from her earlier time here.

Amid the soldiers’ iron and the silver and gilt of the decora-tions, courtiers walked, chatting, dismissive. They wore exotic clothes, predominantly purple and white. Their faces were painted so heavily, men and women, it was hard to tell how old they were.

They noticed Bisesa and they were curious, but they were far more interested in each other and their own web of rivalries.

And moving through the crowd were Neanderthals. Bisesa recognized them from distant ice-fringe glimpses during her last time on Mir. Now here they were in court. Mostly very young, they walked with their great heads bowed, their eyes empty, their powerful farmers’ hands carrying delicate trays. They wore purple robes every bit as fine as the courtiers’, as if for a joke.

Bisesa stood before one extraordinary tapestry. Covering a whole wall, it was a map of the world, but inverted, with south at the top. A great swath of southern Europe, North Africa, and central Asia reaching down into India was colored red and bordered in gold.

“Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai,” said Captain Grove.

Accompanying Emeline, he wore his British army uniform, and she a sensible-looking white blouse and long skirt with black shoes. They both looked solidly nineteenth-century amid all the gaudiness of Alexander’s court.

“I envy you your outfit,” Bisesa said to Emeline, self-conscious in her Babylonian gear.

“I carry my own steam iron,” Emeline said primly.

Grove asked Bisesa, “How was my pronunciation?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bisesa confessed. “Yeh-lu?…”

Grove sipped his wine, lifting his mustache out of the way.

“Perhaps you never met him. He was Genghis Khan’s most senior advisor, before Alexander’s Mongol War. A Chinese prisoner-of-war made good. After the war — you’ll recall Genghis was assassinated — his star waned. But he came here, to Babylon, to work with Alexander’s scholars. The result was maps like that.” He indicated the giant tapestry. “All a bit unnecessarily expensive, of course, but pretty accurate as far as we could see. Helped Alexander no end in planning his campaigns of conquest — and in marking its extent later.

“Alexander’s campaigns were remarkable, Bisesa — an astounding feat of logistics and motivation. He built a whole fleet in the great harbor here at Babylon, and then had to engineer the whole length of the Euphrates to make the river navigable. He had his fleet circumnavigate Africa, raiding the shore to survive. Meanwhile from Babylon his troops drove east and west, laying rail tracks and military roads, and planting cities everywhere. Took him five years to make ready, then another ten years of campaign-ing before he had taken it all, from Spain to India. Of course he drained the strength of his people in the process…”

Emeline touched Bisesa’s arm. “Where is your telephone?”

Bisesa sighed. “It insisted on being taken back to the temple so that Abdi could download as much of his astronomy observations as possible. It is curious.”

Emeline frowned. “I admit I struggle to follow your words.

What is strangest of all is the obvious affection you feel for this phone. But it is a machine. A thing!”

Captain Grove smiled. “Oh, it’s not so unusual. Many of my men have fallen in love with their guns.”

“And in my time,” Bisesa said, “many of our machines are sentient, like the phone. As conscious as you or me. It’s hard not to feel empathy for them.”

Eumenes approached, a rather chill figure who scattered the flimsy courtiers, though he was as gaudily dressed as they were.

“You speak of astronomy. I hope the astronomy we perform here is of a quality to be useful to you,” he said. “The Babylonian priest-hood had a tradition of observing long before we came here. And the telescopes designed by the engineers of the Othic School are as fine as we could make them. But who knows what one may read in a sky that is presumably as manufactured as the earth we walk on?”

Emeline said, “We have astronomers back in Chicago. Telescopes too, that made it through the Freeze — I mean, the Discontinuity. I know they’ve been observing the planets. Which are all changed, they say, from what they were before— you know. Lights on Mars. Cities! I don’t know much about it. Just what I read in the newspapers.”

Bisesa and Grove stared at her.

Bisesa said, “Cities on Mars?”

And Captain Grove said, “You have newspapers? ”

The chiliarch considered. “There are other—” He hunted for the word. “Scientists. Other scientists in Chicago?”

“Oh, all sorts,” Emeline said brightly. “Physicists, chemists, doctors, philosophers. The university kept working, after a fashion, and they are establishing a new campus in New Chicago, south of the ice, so they can keep working after we close down the old city.”

Eumenes turned to Bisesa. “It seems to me you must travel to this Chicago, a place of science and learning from an age more than twenty centuries removed from the days of Alexander. It is there, perhaps, that you will have the best chance of addressing the great question that has propelled you here.”

Grove warned, “It will take the devil of a time to get there.

Months—”

“Nevertheless it is clearly necessary. I will arrange your transport.”

Emeline raised an eyebrow. “It looks as if we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other, Bisesa.”

Bisesa felt bewildered by the suddenness of Eumenes’s decision-making. “You always did understand,” she said. “More than any other of Alexander’s people, you always saw that the key to this whole situation is the Firstborn, the Eyes. Everything else, empires and wars, is a distraction.”

He grunted. “If I had lacked perceptiveness I should not have survived long at Alexander’s court, Bisesa. You’ll see few others you’ll remember from those days three decades ago. All dispatched in the purges.”

“All save you,” she said.

“Not least because I ensured that it was I who organized those purges…”

There was a peal of trumpets, and a great shouting.

A troop of soldiers entered the room, sarissae held high. Following them came a grotesque figure in a transparent toga, stick-thin, trembling a little, his brilliantly painted face twisted into a grin.

Bisesa remembered: this was Bagoas, a Persian eunuch and favorite of Alexander’s.

“No longer so pretty as he was,” Eumenes said sternly. “And yet he survives, as I do.” He raised his wine cup in mock salute.

And then came the King himself. He was surrounded by a group of tough-looking young men in expensive purple robes.

Waddling as if already drunk, he staggered and might have fallen if not for the way he leaned on a stocky little page who walked beside him. He wore lurid purple robes, and a headdress of ram’s horns rising from a circlet of gold. His face was a memory of the beauty that Bisesa remembered, with that full mouth, and a strong nose that rose straight to a slightly bulging forehead, from which his hair in ringlets had been swept back. His skin, always ruddy, was blotchy and scarred, his cheeks and jowls heavy, and his powerful frame swaddled in fat. Bisesa felt shocked at the change in him.

The courtiers threw themselves to the floor in obeisance. The soldiers and some of the senior figures stood their ground, gestur-ing elaborately. The little page who supported him was a Neanderthal boy, his brutish face shining with cream, the thick hair on his head twisted into tight curls. And as the King passed her, Bisesa smelled a stink of piss.

“Thus the ruler of the world,” Emeline whispered as he passed, sounding rather nineteenth-century frosty to Bisesa.

“But so he is,” Grove said.

“He had no choice but to conquer the world again,” Eumenes murmured. “Alexander believes he is a god — the son of Zeus in-carnated at Ammon, which is why he wears the robes of Ammon, and the horns. But he was born a man, and only achieved godhood by his conquests. After the Discontinuity all that was wiped away, and so what was Alexander then? It was not to be tolerated. So he began it all over again; he had to.”

Bisesa said, “But it isn’t as it was before. You say there are steam trains here. Maybe this is a new start for civilization. A unified empire, under Alexander and his successors, fueled by technology.”

Grove smiled, wistful. “Do you remember poor old Ruddy Kipling used to say the same sort of thing?”

“I do not think Alexander shares your ‘modern’ dreams,”

Eumenes said. “Why should he? There are more of us than you, far more; perhaps our beliefs, overwhelming yours, will shape reality.”

“According to my history books,” Emeline said a bit primly, “in the old world Alexander died in his thirties. It’s an un-Christian thing to say. But maybe it would have been better if he had died here, instead of living on and on.”

“Certainly his son thought so,” Eumenes said dryly. “And that is why — look out!” He pulled Bisesa back.

A squad of soldiers came charging past, their long sarissae lowered. In the middle of the room there was a knot of commotion.

Shouting began, and screaming.

And Alexander had fallen.

Alexander, isolated on the floor, cried out in his thick Macedonian Greek. His courtiers and even his guards were backing away from him, as if fearful of blame. A vivid red stain spread over his belly.

Bisesa thought it was wine.

But then she saw the little Neanderthal page standing over him, his expression slack, a knife in his massive hand.

“I was afraid of this,” Eumenes snapped. “It is the anniversary of the War with the Son —and you and your Eye have everybody stirred up, Bisesa Dutt. Captain Grove, get them out of here, and out of the city, as fast as you can. Either that or risk them getting swept up in the purges that will follow.”

“Understood,” Grove said quietly. “Come, ladies.”

As Grove shepherded them away, Bisesa looked back over her shoulder. She saw the Neanderthal boy raise his blade again, and step toward Alexander. He moved dully, as if completing a chore.

Alexander roared in rage and fear, but still none of the guards moved. In the end it was Eumenes, stiff old Eumenes, who charged through the crowd and barreled the little boy off his feet.

Outside the city was alight; smoke curled up from torched buildings as news of the assassination attempt spread.

33: Flight

In the pale dawn light of the next morning, Bisesa and the others left the city, accompanied by a unit of Eumenes’ personal troops assigned to travel with them all the way to Gibraltar. A scared-looking Abdikadir was assigned too, to go on to America with Bisesa.

So, only twelve hours after falling out of the Eye, Bisesa was on the move again. She couldn’t even bring her spacesuit with her. All she had of the twenty-first century was her phone, and the power packs from the suit.

Surprisingly, Emeline comforted her. “Wait until we get to Chicago,” she soothed. “I’ll take you to Michigan Avenue and we’ll go shopping.”

Shopping!

Even the first leg of the journey was astonishing.

Bisesa found herself in an open cart drawn by four beefy Neanderthals, naked as the day they were born, while Macedonian troopers jogged alongside. These “Stone Men” were the property of a man called Ilicius Bloom, who called himself Chicago’s consul at Babylon. He was a shifty type Bisesa immediately distrusted.

They came to a railway terminus at a place called the Midden, a strange heaped-up little town of houses and ladders and greasy smoke. The terminus itself was a confluence of narrow tracks, a place of huge sheds and brooding locomotives.

Their carriage was just a crude covered cart with wooden benches, and Emeline made a spiky comment about the contrast with Pullman class. But the locomotive was extraordinary. It looked like a huge animal, an immense black tank that sprawled over the narrow tracks and emitted belches of filthy smoke. Ben Batson said the locos ran on oil, which the trains hauled along in great tanker-cars; oil from Persia was more accessible to Alexander than coal, and Casey Othic had drawn up his designs that way.

In this unlikely train Bisesa was going to ride to the Atlantic coast. First they would head through Arabia to the great engine yards at Jerusalem, then south and west across the Nile delta where the King had reestablished Alexandria. And then they would journey all the way along the coast of North Africa, through what would have been Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, to the port of the small oceangoing fleet at the Pillars of Hercules.

Ilicius Bloom said the Midden was as far as he would go with them. He was nervous. “Never known a night like it in Babylon in all these years,” he said. “Not since the War with the Son himself.

Bloody Greeks. But I got my job to do; I got my contacts.”

“And you have a child,” Emeline said sternly.

“Not my responsibility,” he said. “The mother’s, not mine.

Anyhow I’m sticking. Just don’t let them forget I’m here, back home. All right? Don’t forget me!”

Grove parted from them here too; he was catching a train back to New Troy. But he assigned Ben Batson to escort them to Gibraltar.

As the train pulled out, Bisesa thought she heard chanting coming from the loco.

“The engineers are from the School of Othic,” Abdikadir said.

“Casey Othic taught them well. He taught them that to do their work as perfectly as possible is to offer worship to the gods — just as a farmer offers a tithe of his crops. So as they work they worship; and as they worship they work.”

“So the train driver’s a monk,” Bisesa said. “Oh, Casey, what have you done?”

Ben Batson grinned. “Actually it’s a way of keeping them focused on the job. You have to do your work exactly right, said Mr.

Othic, for your homage to be acceptable to the gods. But the trouble is they do things by rote; they don’t like change, which they fear is heretical.”

“So there’s no innovation,” Bisesa said. “And as Casey’s locos break down one by one—”

Emeline said, “It is just as in Alexander’s court. Despite their exposure to modernity, these ancient Greeks are slipping back into superstition.”

Abdi said, “My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.”

Bisesa studied him. “You’ll have to tell me about your father.”

Emeline said dryly, “Well, we’ll certainly have time for that.”

There was no pursuit from Babylon, a capital city in turmoil. But an hour out from Babylon they saw a pitched battle going on, somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, only a couple of kilometers from the rail track.

Bisesa had lived through Alexander’s war with the Mongols, and she recognized the characteristic formations of the Macedonians. There were the phalanxes of infantry with their bristling sarissae, blocks of men trained to maneuver with such compactness and flexibility that they seemed to flow over the ground without a break in their ranks. The famous cavalry units, the Companions, were wedge-shaped formations driving into the field with their thrusting lances and shields. But this time Macedonian was fighting Macedonian.

“It’s a serious rebellion then,” Ben Batson murmured. “Of course somebody or other has been trying to bump off Alexander since even before the Discontinuity. Never saw it go this far before.

And, look, can you see that stolid-looking bunch over there? Neanderthals. The Macedonians have been using them since their campaigns in Europe. Their handlers say they won’t fight unless you force them. Good for shocking the enemy though.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good morning, Bisesa.”

“So you’re talking to me now.”

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

She considered that. “Bad news first.”

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

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

“And?”

“This universe is dying.”

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

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

34: Ellie

September 2069

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

And she explored Wells Station.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It didn’t work?”

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

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

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

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

Gradually Myra found herself work to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Ellie called her back.

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

“Tell me.”

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

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

“Yes. Possibly.”

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

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

“Clusters of glyphs. Words?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess you won the argument.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35: Poseidon’s Barb

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No steamships,” Bisesa said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I remember.”

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

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

36: Hubble

January 2070

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decades passed.

The telescope was fortunate to survive the sunstorm.

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

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

The telescope opened its eye once more.

More years passed. And then the telescope saw something.

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

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

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

37: New New Orleans

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those aren’t elephants, are they?”

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

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

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

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

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

The passengers disembarked, with their few items of luggage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t want to fall in!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Hush. Remember we’re guests here.”

“In a sense, so are the Chicagoans…”

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

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

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

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

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

For answer, the phone displayed a block of text. Only a generation before the Chicago time slice James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist so admired by Alexei Carel, had predicted that electromagnetic energy could travel through space. The slice itself had been taken in the few years between Heinrich Hertz’s first demonstrations that that was true, with parabolic-mirror transmit-ters and receivers a few feet apart, and Guglielmo Marconi’s bridg-ing of the Atlantic.

“We ought to push this on, Abdi. Think how useful a radio link would be to Babylon right now. Maybe when we get to Chicago we’ll try to kick-start a radio shop, you and I.”

Abdi looked excited. “I would enjoy that—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Five centuries. Maybe a little less.”

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

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

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

They spent the night in the train, as advertised.

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

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

It was kind of scary to hear them in the dark, however. She was aware of Emeline’s eyes, bright, wide open. But Abdikadir snored softly, wrapped in the immunity of youth.

38: EVA

March 2070

Yuri and Grendel invited Myra out on an excursion.

“Just a routine inspection tour and sample collection,” Yuri said. “But you might like the chance to go outside.”

Outside. After months stuck in a box of ice, in a landscape so flat and dark that even when the sun was up it was like a sensory deprivation tank, the word was a magic spell to Myra.

But when she joined Yuri and Grendel in their rover, by clambering through a soft tube from a hab dome to the rover’s pressurized cabin, she realized belatedly that she was only exchanging one enclosed volume for another.

Grendel Speth seemed to recognize what Myra was feeling.

“You get used to it. At least on this jaunt you’ll get a different view from out the window.”

Yuri and Grendel sat up front, Myra behind them. Yuri called,

“All strapped in?” He punched a button and sat back.

The hatch slammed shut with a rattle of sealing locks, the tunnel to the hab dome came loose with a sucking sound, and the rover lurched into motion.

It was northern summer now. Spring had arrived around Christmas time, with an explosive sublimation of dry ice snow that burst into vapor almost as soon as the sunlight touched it, and for a time the seeing had gotten even worse than during the winter. But now, though a diminishing layer of dry-ice snow remained, the worst of the spring thaw was over and the winter hood long dissipated, and the sun rolled low around a clear orange-brown sky.

This was actually the first time Myra had been for a trip in one of the base’s rovers. It was a lot smaller than the big beast she had ridden down from Lowell, its interior cramped by a miniature lab, a suiting-up area, a tiny galley, and a toilet with a sink where she would have to take sponge baths. It towed a trailer, which didn’t contain a portable nuke like Discovery from Port Lowell but a methane-burning turbine.

“We manufacture the methane using Mars carbon dioxide,”

Yuri called back. “More of Hanse’s ISRU.” He pronounced it iss-roo. In-situ resource utilization. “But it’s a slow process, and we have to wait for the tank to fill up. So we can only afford a few jaunts like this per year.”

“You need a nuke,” Myra said.

Yuri grunted. “Lowell’s got all the best gear. We get the dross.

But it’s fit for purpose.” And he banged the rover’s dash as if apologetically.

“This trip isn’t too exciting,” Grendel warned.

“Well, it’s new to me,” Myra replied.

“Anyhow you’re doing us a favor,” Yuri called. “Standing orders say we should take three out on every excursion more than a day’s walk back to the station. I mean, we can do what we like; we override. Sometimes I even do this route alone, or Grendel does.

But the AIs get pissy about rules, you know?”

“We are undermanned,” Grendel said. “Nominally Wells Station should house ten people. But there’s just too much to do on Mars.”

“And I guess Ellie is pretty much locked up with her work in the Pit.”

Grendel pulled a face. “Well, yes. But she isn’t one of us anyhow. Not a Martian.”

“What about Hanse?”

“Hanse’s a busy guy,” Yuri said. “When he’s not running the station, or drilling his holes in the ice, he’s running his ISRU experiments. Living off the land, here on Mars. You might think the north pole of Mars is an odd place to come try that. But, Myra, there’s water here, sitting right here on the surface, in the form of ice. There’s nowhere else on the inner worlds, save a scraping at the poles of the Moon, where you can say that.”

“And,” Grendel said, “Hanse is thinking bigger than that.”

Yuri said, “Myra, there are a lot of similarities between trying to live here on the Martian ice cap and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are generally nothing but big balls of frozen ice around nuggets of rock. So Hanse is trialing technologies that might enable us to survive anywhere out there.”

“Ambitious.”

“Sure,” Yuri said. “Well, he’s a South African on his mother’s side. And you know what the Africans are like nowadays. They were the big winners out of the sunstorm, politically, economically.

Hanse’s committed to Mars, I think. But he’s an African Martian, and he has deeper goals…”

After a couple of hours driving they came to the lip of a spiral canyon.

The wall of eroded ice was shallow, and the canyon wasn’t terribly deep; Myra thought the rover would easily be able to skim down to its floor, and indeed the rutted track they were following snaked on down into the canyon. But she could see that further ahead the canyon broadened and grew deeper, curving smoothly into the distance like a tremendous natural freeway.

They didn’t descend into the canyon immediately. Yuri tapped the dashboard, and the rover lumbered along the canyon’s lip until an insectile form loomed out of the dark before them. It was a complex platform maybe fifty centimeters across laden with instruments, and it stood on three spindly legs. The rover had a manipulator arm, which now unfolded delicately to reach out to the tripod.

“This is a SEP,” Yuri said. “A surface experiment package.

Kind of a weather station, together with a seismometer, laser mirrors, other instruments. We’ve been planting a whole network of them across the polar cap.” He spoke with a trace of pride.

To keep him talking she asked, “Why the legs?”

“To lift it above the dry ice snow, which can reach a depth of a few meters by the end of the winter. And there are surface effects—

you can get major excursions of temperature and pressure over the first few meters up from the ground. So there are sensors mounted in the legs too.”

“It looks spindly. Like it will fall over in the first gust of wind.”

“Well, Mars is a spindly kind of planet. I calculated the wind loading moment. This baby won’t get knocked over in a hurry.”

“You designed it?”

“Yes,” said Grendel, “and he’s bloody proud of it. And any resemblance of these toy weather stations to the Martian fighting machines of certain books and movies is purely coincidental.”

“They’re my babies.” Yuri threw his head back and laughed through his thick black beard.

While it was halted the rover released other, more exotic bits of gear: “tumbleweed,” cage-like balls a meter across that rolled away over the dry ice snow, and “smart dust,” a sprinkling of black soot-like powder that just blew away. Each mote of dust was a sensor station just a millimeter across, with its own suite of tiny instruments, all powered by microwave energy beamed from the sky, or simply by being shaken up by the wind. “We have no control over where the weed and the dust goes,” Yuri said. “It just blows with the wind, and a lot of the dust will just get snowed out. But the idea is to saturate the polar cap with sensors, to make it self-aware, if you like. Already the data flows are tremendous.”

With the SEP seen to, the rover began its descent into the canyon. The ice wall was layered, like stratified rock, with thick dark bands every meter or so deep, but much finer layers in between — very fine, like the pages of a book, fine down to the limits of what Myra could see. The rover drove slowly and carefully, its movements evidently preprogrammed. Every so often Yuri, or more rarely Grendel, would tap the dashboard, and they would stop, and the manipulator arm would reach out to explore the surface of the wall. It scraped up samples from the layers, or it would press a box of instruments against the ice, or it would plant a small instrument package.

Grendel said to Myra, “This is pretty much the drill, all the way in. Sampling the strata. I’m testing for life, or relics of life from the past. Yuri here is trying to establish a global stratigraphy, mapping all the cap’s folded layers as read from the cores and the canyon excursions against each other. It’s not very exciting, I guess. If we see something really promising, we do get out and take a look for ourselves. But you get tired of the suit drill, and we save that for special occasions.”

Yuri laughed again. The rover rolled on.

“I spoke to Ellie,” Myra said uncertainly. “Down in the Pit. She told me something of her experiences of the sunstorm.”

Grendel turned, her eyebrows raised. “You’re honored. Took me three months to get to that point. And I’m her nominated psy-chiatric counselor.”

“Sounds like she had it kind of tough.”

“Myself, I was ten,” Grendel said. “I grew up in Ohio. We were a farming family, far from any dome. Dad built us a bunker, like a storm shelter. We lost everything, and then we were stuck in the refugee camps too. My father died a couple of years later. Skin cancers got him.

“In the camps I worked as a volunteer nurse at triage stations.

Gave me the taste for medicine, I guess. I never wanted to feel so helpless in front of a person in pain again. And after the sunstorm, after the camps, I worked on ecological recovery programs in the Midwest. That got me into biology.”

Yuri said cheerfully, “As for me, I was born after the sunstorm.

Born on the Moon, Russian mother, Irish father. I spent some time on Earth, though. As a teen I worked on eco-recovery programs in the Canadian Arctic.”

“That’s how you got a taste for ice.”

“I guess.”

“And now you’re here,” Myra said. “Now you’re Spacers.”

“Martians,” Grendel and Yuri said together.

Yuri said, “The Spacers are off on their rocks in the sky. Mars is Mars, and that’s that. And we don’t necessarily share their ambi-tions.”

“But you do over the Eye in the Pit.”

Yuri said, “Over that, yes, of course. But I’d rather just get on with this.” He waved a hand at the sculptures of ice beyond the windscreen. “Mars. That’s enough for me.”

“I envy you,” Myra blurted. “For your sense of purpose. For having something to build here.”

Grendel turned, curious. “Envy’s not a good feeling, Myra. You have your own life.”

“Yes. But I feel I’m kind of living in an aftermath of my own.”

Grendel grunted. “Given who your mother is that’s under-standable. We can talk about it later, if you like.”

Yuri said, “Or we can talk about my mother, who taught me how to drink vodka. Now that’s the way to put the world to rights.”

An alarm chimed softly, and a green panel lit up on the dash.

Yuri tapped it, and it filled up with the face of Alexei Carel. “You’d better get back here. Sorry to interrupt the fun.”

“Go on,” said Yuri.

“I’ve two messages. One, Myra, we’ve been summoned to Cyclops.”

“The planet-finder station? Why?”

“To meet Athena.”

Yuri and Grendel exchanged glances. Yuri said, “What’s your second message?”

Alexei grinned. “Something Ellie von Devender has dug out of the Pit. ‘The most common glyph sequence’—Myra, she said you’d understand that. She’ll explain to the rest of us when you get back.”

“Show us,” said Myra.

Alexei’s face disappeared, and the screen filled with four stark symbols:

39: New Chicago

They reached New Chicago around noon.

There was a proper rail station here, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy actual tickets.

But the track terminated; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

Emeline led them off the train and into the town. She said it might take days to organize their onward travel. She hoped there would be room for them to stay at one of the town’s two small hotels; if not they would have to knock on doors.

New Chicago was on the site of Memphis, but there was no trace of that city here. With the wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails, and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of towns of the old Wild West. The streets were a pleasant bustle, adults coming and going on business, children hanging around outside a schoolhouse. Some of the adults even rode bicycles — safety bicycles that they called “Wheels,” an invention only a few years old at the time of the Discontinuity. But many of the townsfolk were bundled up in furs, like Arctic seal trappers, and there were camels tied up outside the saloons alongside the horses.

They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. In the lobby hung a framed newspaper front page. It was a Chicago Tribune late edition, dated July 21, 1894, and its headline read: world cut off from chicago.

They left their bags. Emeline bought them a roast beef sand-wich each for lunch. And in the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city.

New Chicago was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But it was big. Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people.

There was a handsome clock fixed to a tower on the town hall, which Emeline said was carefully set to “Chicago standard railway time,” a standard that the Chicagoans had clung to despite the great disruption of the Discontinuity — even though it was about three hours out according to the position of the sun. There were other signs of culture. A note pinned on a ragged scrap of paper to the town hall door announced a meeting:

A WORLD WITHOUT A POPE?

WHERE NEXT FOR CHRISTIANS?

WEDNESDAY, EIGHT O’CLOCK.

NO LIQUOR. NO GUNS.

And one small house was labeled edison’s memorial of chicago.

Bisesa bent down to read the details on the poster: The FATE Of

CHICAGO

On the NIGHT

The WHOLE WORLD FROZE

JULY 1894

A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope U.S. Patent Pending

A WONDER

TEN CENTS

Bisesa glanced at Emeline. “Edison?”

“He happened to be in the city that night. He’d been advising on the world’s fair, a year or two before. He’s an old man now, and poorly, but still alive — or he was when I set out for Babylon.”

They walked on, tracing the dusty streets.

They came to a little park, overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, it must have been a hundred feet tall or more. Its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

“Big Mary,” said Emeline, with a trace of pride in her voice.

“Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centerpiece of the world’s fair, that is the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which we held a year before the Freeze. When we chose this site for New Chicago, Mary was one of the first items we hauled down here, even though we barely had the capacity to do it.”

“It’s magnificent,” Abdikadir said, sounding sincere. “Even Alexander would be impressed.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Emeline said, obscurely pleased. “You have to make a statement of intent, you know. We’re here, and here we will stay.”

There had been no real choice but to move from Old Chicago.

It had taken the Chicagoans weeks, months to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit. The crisis wasn’t merely some local climatic disaster, as had first been thought; something much more extraordinary had happened. Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, a bit of the nineteenth century stranded in antique ice.

And as far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over.

Emeline said the first emigrants from Chicago proper had left for the south in the fifth year after the Freeze. New Chicago was the product of thirty years’ hard work by Americans who for many years had believed themselves entirely alone in an utterly trans-formed world.

But even in the heart of the new town, the wind from the north was persistent and cold.

They came to farmland on the edge of the town. As far as the eye could see, sheep and cattle were scattered over a green-brown prairie that was studded with small, shabby farm buildings.

Emeline walked them to a kind of open-air factory she called the Union Stock Yards. The place stank of blood and ordure and rotting meat, and a strange sour smell turned out to be incinerated hair. “The core of it is from old Chicago, torn down and rebuilt here. Before the Freeze we used to slaughter fourteen million animals a day, and twenty-five thousand people worked here. We don’t process but a fraction of that now, of course. In fact it’s lucky the Yards were always so busy, for if we hadn’t been able to breed from the stock in its holding pens we would have starved in a year or two. Now they send the butchered meat up to feed the old city.

Don’t have to worry about freezing it; nature takes care of that for us…”

As she spoke, Bisesa looked to the horizon. Beyond the farmland she saw what looked like a herd of elephants, mammoths or mastodons, walking proud and tall. It was astonishing to think that if she walked off, beyond those unperturbed mastodons, she could travel all the way to the ocean’s shore without seeing another glimpse of the work of mankind, not so much as a footprint in the scattered snow.

That night Bisesa retired to the shared hotel room early, exhausted from the traveling. But she had trouble sleeping.

“Another day ahead of me and once again I don’t know what the hell it will be like,” she whispered to the phone. “I’m too old for this.”

The phone murmured, “Do you know where we are? I mean, right here, this location. Do you know what it would have become, if not for the Discontinuity?”

“Surprise me.”

“Graceland. The mansion.”

“You’re kidding.”

“But now Memphis will never exist at all.”

“Shit. So I’m stuck in a world without Myra, and diet cola, and tampons, and I’m about to go jaunting over an ice cap to the decay-ing carcass of a nineteenth-century city. And now you tell me the King will never be born.” Unaccountably, she was crying again.

The phone softly played her Elvis tracks until she fell asleep.

40: Sunlight

May 2070

In response to Athena’s mysterious summons, Myra returned to Port Lowell and was taken up to Martian orbit, where she rejoined the lightship James Clerk Maxwell.

And she was wafted away on pale sunlight on a weeks-long jaunt back to the orbit of Earth — but not to Earth itself.

“L5,” Alexei Carel told her. “A gravitationally stable point sixty degrees behind Earth.”

“I had a whole career in astronautics,” Myra said testily. “I know the basics.”

“Sorry. Just trying to prepare you.”

It infuriated her that he wouldn’t say any more, and retreated once again into his shell of secrecy.

There were in fact three of them aboard the Maxwell. Myra was surprised when Yuri O’Rourke tore himself away from his mission on Mars.

“I wouldn’t call myself the leader of Wells Station,” he said slowly. “I mean, that’s actually my formal title on the contracts we signed with our backers, the universities and science foundations on Earth and Mars. But the others would kill me if I started acting that way. However, all of this is obviously affecting the station. And I have a feeling you’ll be coming back to trouble us further.”

“I’m not planning to quit until I get my mother back.”

“Fair enough. So I have the instinct that it’s right for me to ac-company you.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you along.”

“Okay,” he said gruffly. “But I’ve told you, my ice cores are much more interesting than anything the bloody Firstborn get up to.”

Yuri, in fact, was at a loss on the Maxwell. In the confines of the lightship’s living quarters he took up a lot of room, a bear of a man with his thick tied-back hair and bushy beard and ample gut. And he fretted, cut off from his beloved Mars. Most days he sent picky demands down to Wells to ensure his crew kept up their routine of monitoring, sampling, and maintenance. He tried to keep up with his own work; he had his softscreens, and a small portable lab, and even a set of samples of deep-core Martian ice. But as the days wore on his frustration grew. He wasn’t bad company, but he sank into himself.

As for Alexei, he was as self-contained as he had been since the moment Myra had met him. He had his own agenda, of which this jaunt to L5 was just the latest item. Clear-thinking, purposeful, he was content, even if he did get a bit bored when nobody played poker with him.

Myra was allowed to try to make contact with Charlie, or even with Eugene, provided she didn’t give away anything sensitive. But her child and ex-husband weren’t to be found even by AI search facilities that spanned the solar system. Either that or they were hiding from her. She kept on looking, fitfully, increasingly depressed at the negative results.

They were a silent and antisocial crew.

But as she settled into the journey, Myra found she was glad to have been lifted up back into the light.

She had gotten used to life at the Martian pole, with its endless night and its lid of unrelenting smoggy cloud. But now she gloried in the brilliant, unfiltered sunlight that swamped the ship. She was of the generation that had lived through the sunstorm, and she suspected she had been wary of the sun ever since. Now she felt, oddly, as if the sun had at last welcomed her back. No wonder half the Spacers were becoming sun-worshipers.

So she made her calls to Charlie, and exercised, and read books, and watched virtual dramas, her skin bathed in the sunlight that blew her toward the orbit of the Earth.

Before the time delays got too long, Myra spoke to Ellie, back on Mars.

“Ellie, you’re a physicist. Help me understand something.

What is Mir? How can another universe exist? Where is my mother? ”

“Do you want the short answer, or the long?”

“Try both.”

“Short answer — I don’t know. Nobody does. Long answer—

our physics isn’t advanced enough yet to give us more than glimpses, analogies maybe, of the deeper truths the Firstborn must possess. What do you know about quantum gravity?”

“Less than you can imagine. Try me with an analogy.”

“All right. Look — suppose we threw your mother into a black hole, a big one. What happens to her?”

Myra thought about it. “She’s lost forever.”

“Okay. But there are two problems with that. First, you’re saying your mother, or more importantly the information that defines your mother, has been lost to the universe…” More importantly.

That was classic Ellie. “But that violates a basic rule of quantum mechanics, which says that information always has to be conserved.

Otherwise any semblance of continuity from past to future could be lost. More strictly speaking, the Schrödinger wave equation wouldn’t work anymore.”

“Oh. So what’s the resolution?”

“Black holes evaporate. Quantum effects at the event horizon cause a hole to emit a drizzle of particles, carrying away its mass-energy bit by bit. And the information that once defined Bisesa is leaked back that way. The universe is saved, hurrah. You understand I’m speaking very loosely. When you get the chance, ask Thales about the holographic principle.”

“You said there were two problems,” Myra said hastily.

“Yes. So we get Bisesa’s information back. But what happens to Bisesa, from her point of view? The event horizon isn’t some brick wall in space. So in her view, the information that defines her isn’t trapped at the event horizon to be leaked away, but rides with her on into the hole’s interior.”

“Okay,” Myra said slowly. “So there are two copies of the mother-information, one inside the hole, one leaking away outside.”

“No. Can’t allow you that. Another basic principle: the cloning theorem. You can’t copy quantum information.”

Myra was starting to lose the thread. “So what’s the resolution to that?”

“Non-locality. In everyday life, locality is an axiom. I’m here, you’re over there, we can’t be in two places at once. But the resolution of the black hole conundrum is that a bit of information can be in two places at once. Sounds paradoxical, but a lot of features of the quantum universe are like that — and quantum gravity is even worse.

“And the two places in which the information exists, separated by a ‘horizon’ like the event horizon, can be far apart — light-years.

The universe is full of horizons; you don’t need a black hole to make one.”

“And you think that Mir—”

“We believe the Firstborn are able to manipulate horizons and the non-locality of information in order to ‘create’ their baby universes, and to ‘transfer’ your mother and other bits of cargo between them. How they do this, we don’t know. And what else they’re capable of, we don’t know either. We can’t even map limits to their capabilities, actually.” Ellie paused. “Does that answer your question?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I need to absorb it.”

“Just thinking through this stuff is revolutionizing physics.”

“Well, that’s a consolation.”

41: Arks

“We found them, Mum. Just where your astronomers predicted.

“It wasn’t a great diversion for the Liberator. To tell the truth we were glad of a chance to give the main drive a shakedown — and for a change of view out of the windows. Up here it’s not like the dramas. Space is empty… ”

It was a fleet of ships, slim pencils slowly rotating, glowing in the light of a distant sun. Moving through the wastes beyond the asteroids, they were moving too rapidly to be drawn back by the sun’s gravity; they were destined for an interstellar journey.

“They’re human,” John Metternes said.

“Oh, yes.”

John peered at the images. “They have red stars painted on their hulls. Are they Chinese?”

“Probably. And probably abandoning the solar system altogether.”

Edna expanded the image. The ships were a variety of designs, seen close to.

She downloaded analysis and speculation from Libby.

“They don’t seem to have anything like our antimatter drive,”

she read. “Even if they did, the journey time would still be years.

There are probably only a few, if any, conscious crew aboard each of those ships. The rest may be in suspended animation; the ships may be flying Hibernacula. Or they may be stored as frozen zygotes, or as eggs plus sperm…” She scrolled down through increasingly baroque suggestions. “One exotic possibility is that there is no human flesh at all aboard the arks. Maybe they’re just carrying DNA strands. Or maybe the informational equivalent is being held in some kind of radiation-tolerant memory store. Not even any wet chemistry.”

“And then you’d manufacture your colonists at the other end.

Look, my bet is they’re using a variety of strategies for the sake of a robust mission design,” said John the engineer. “After all their bid for Mars failed. So they are giving up on the solar system.”

“Perhaps it’s a rational thing to do, if the Firstborn are going to keep on hammering us. Ah. According to Libby, since we found them, we’ve had some contact with the Chinese authorities. The flagship is called the Zheng He, after their great fifteenth-century explorer—”

“Do you think they will make it?”

“It’s possible. We’re certainly not going to stop them. I’m not sure if we could; no doubt those arks are heavily armed. I think I rather hope they succeed. The more mankind is scattered, the better chance of survival we have in the long term.”

John said, “But it’s also possible the Firstborn will follow them to Alpha Centauri, or wherever the hell, and deal with them in their turn.”

“True. Anyhow it makes no difference to our mission.”

“It’s another complication for the future, Mum, if the world gets through the Q-bomb assault: an encounter a few centuries out, our A-drive starships meeting whatever society the Chinese managed to build out there under the double suns of Centauri.

“Maybe Thea will have to deal with that. Give her my love.

Okay, back to business, we’re now resuming our cruise alongside the Q-bomb. Liberator out.”

42: Cyclops

As they neared Cyclops Station Myra glimpsed more mirrors in space. They were lightships, swimming around the observatory.

After many days suspended alone in the three-dimensional dark, it was a shock to have so much company.

The Maxwell pushed through the loose crowd of sails and approached the big structure at the heart of the station. Alexei said it was called Galatea. It was a wheel in space.

The Maxwell bored in along the axis of the wheel, heading straight for the hub. Galatea was a spindly thing, like a bicycle wheel with spokes that glimmered, barely visible. But there were concentric bands at different radii from the center, painted different colors, silver, orange, blue, so that Galatea had something of the look of an archery target. Galatea turned on its axis, in sunlight every bit as bright as the light that fell on Earth itself, and long shadows swept across its rim and spokes like clock hands.

Alexei said, “Looks luxurious, doesn’t it? After the sunstorm an awful lot of money was pumped into planet-finder observatories. And this was how a good deal of it was spent.”

“It reminds me of a fairground ride,” Myra said. “And it looks sort of old-fashioned.”

Alexei shrugged. “It’s a vision from a century ago, of how the future was supposed to be, which they finally got the money to build, just for once. But I’m no history buff.”

“Umm. I suppose it’s spinning for artificial gravity.”

“Yep. You dock at the stationary hub and take elevators down to the decks.”

“And why the colors — silver, red, blue?”

He smiled. “Can’t you guess?”

She thought it over. “The further you go from the hub, the higher the apparent gravity. So they’ve painted the lunar-gravity deck silver — one-sixth G.”

“You’ve got it. And the Mars deck is orange, and the Earth-gravity deck is blue. Galatea is here to serve as a hub for the Cyclops staff, but it has always been a partial-gravity laboratory. There are pods suspended from the outermost deck — see? The biologists are trying out higher gravities than Earth’s, too.” He grinned. “They’ve got some big-boned lab rats down there. Maybe we’ll need that research someday, if we’re going to go whizzing about the solar system on antimatter drives.”

As the wheel loomed closer Myra lost her view of the outer rim, and her vision was filled with the engineering detail of the inner decks, the spinning hub with its brightly lit ports, the spokes and struts, and the steadily shifting shadows.

A pod came squirting out of an open portal right at the center of the hub. When it emerged it was spinning on its own axis, turning with the angular momentum of Galatea, but with a couple of pulses of reaction-jet gas it stabilized and approached the Maxwell cautiously.

“Max isn’t going in any closer,” Alexei said. “Lightship sails and big turning wheels don’t mix. And you always take Galatea’s own shuttles in to the hub rather than pilot yourself. They have dedicated AIs, who are good at that whole spinning-up thing…”

The docking was fast, slick, over in minutes. Hatches opened with soft pops of equalizing pressure.

A young woman came tumbling out of the shuttle, and threw herself zero-gravity straight into Alexei’s arms. Myra and Yuri exchanged mocking glances.

The couple broke, and the girl turned to Myra. “You’re Bisesa’s daughter. I’ve seen your picture in the files. It’s good to meet you in the flesh. My name is Lyla Neal. Welcome to Cyclops.”

Myra grabbed a strut to brace herself and shook her hand.

Lyla was maybe twenty-five, her skin a rich black, her hair a compact mass, her teeth brilliant white. Unlike Yuri and Alexei, like Myra, she wore an ident tattoo on the smooth skin of her right cheek.

Myra said, “You evidently know Alexei.”

“I met him through his father. I’m one of Professor Carel’s students. I’m up here, ostensibly, to pursue academic projects. Cosmological. Distant galaxies, primordial light, that sort of thing.”

Myra glanced at Alexei. “So this is how you spy on your father for the Spacers.”

“Yeah, Lyla is my mole. Neat, isn’t it?” His tone was flat; perhaps there was some guilt in there under the flippancy.

They all clambered into the shuttle with their bits of luggage.

Once aboard Galatea, they were hurried through the hub structure and loaded into a kind of elevator car.

Lyla said, “Grab onto a rail. And you might want your feet down that way,” she said, pointing away from the axis of spin.

The elevator dropped with a disconcerting jolt.

They passed quickly out of the hub complex, and suddenly they were suspended in space, inside a car that was a transparent bubble dangling from a cable. As they descended the centrifugal-acceleration pull gradually built up, until their feet settled to the floor, and that unpleasant Coriolis-spin sensation faded. They were dropping through a framework of spokes toward the great curving tracks of the wheel’s decks below. All this was stationary in Myra’s view, but the sun circled slowly, and the shadows cast by the spokes swept by steadily. But there was no ground under this huge funfair ride, no floor but the stars.

Lyla said, “Look, before we go on — elevator, pause.”

The car slowed to a halt.

Lyla said, “You ought to take a look at the view. See what the station is all about. It’s much harder to see from within the decks.

Elevator. Show us Polyphemus.”

Myra looked out through the hull. She saw stars whirling slowly, the universe become a pinwheel. And an oval of gold lit up on the window and began to track upward, slowly, countering the rotation to pick out a corner of the star field. There Myra made out a faint disc, misty-gray and with rainbows washing across its face.

A smaller station hung behind it, a knot of instruments.

“That, ” Lyla said, “is a telescope. One big, spinning, fragile Fresnel lens. Nearly a hundred meters across.”

Myra asked, “Wasn’t the sunstorm shield a Fresnel lens?”

“It was…”

So this was yet another technological descendant of the tremendous shield that had once sheltered the Earth.

Lyla said, “They call that fellow Polyphemus, the Cyclops, after the most famous of the one-eyed giants of the myths. Galatea was actually the name of the Nereid he loved, according to some ver-sions of the stories. Polyphemus is the oldest but still the most impressive instrument they have here.”

Yuri, an instrument man himself, was fascinated, and peppered Lyla and Alexei with questions.

Big mirrors were on the face of it easier to manufacture than big lenses, but it turned out that a lens was the preferred technology for building really huge telescopes because of its better optical tolerance; the longer pathways traversed by light rays gathered up by a mirror tended to amplify distortions rather than to diminish them, as a lens would. A Fresnel lens was a compromise design, a composite of many smaller lenses fixed into a lacy framework and spun up for stability. Lyla said the sub-lenses at the rim of the structure were thin enough to roll up like paper. There were technical issues with Fresnel lenses, the main one being “chromatic aberration”; they were narrow-bandwidth devices. But there was an array of corrective optics—“Schupmann devices,” Lyla said — installed before the main lens itself to compensate for this.

“The lens itself is smart,” she said. “It can correct for thermal distortions, gravitational tweaks… With this one big beast alone you can detect the planets of nearby stars, and study them spectroscopically, and so on. And now they are working on an interferom-eter array. More mirrors, suspended in space. Elevator, show us…”

More tracking ovals lit up on the wall.

“They’re called Arges, Brontes, and Steropes. More Cyclops giants. Working together they are like a composite telescope of tremendous size.

“It’s no coincidence that she came here. Athena, I mean. Her transmission back home was picked up by Polyphemus. Very faint laser light. Elevator, resume.”

The elevator plunged without slowing through the first of the decks. Myra glimpsed a floor that curved upwards, a décor of silver-gray and pink, and people who walked with slow bounds.

“The Moon deck,” she said.

“Right,” Lyla said. “You understand that Galatea is centrifugally stratified. We’ll be stopping on the Mars deck, where you’ll be meeting Athena.”

As Myra absorbed that, Yuri nodded. “It will help if we can stay in condition in the G conditions we’re used to.”

“Yeah,” said Lyla. “Not many go further than that. Nobody but our ambassadors from Earth, in fact.”

“Ambassadors?” Myra asked.

“Actually cops. Astropol.” She pulled a face. “We encourage them to stay down there, in their own lead-boot gravity field. Keeps them from getting in the way of the real work.”

“They don’t know we’re here, do they?”

“No reason why they should,” Alexei said.

Myra guessed, “And they don’t know about Athena.”

“No, they don’t,” Lyla said. “At least I don’t think they do.

They really are just cops; they should have sent up a few astronomers.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Myra confessed. “Where Athena has ‘been.’ How she ‘came back.’ And I don’t understand why I’m here.”

“All your questions will be answered soon, Myra,” a voice spoke from the air.

It was the second time Athena had spoken to Myra. The others looked at her curiously, even a little enviously.

43: Chicago

Emeline, Bisesa, and Abdi traveled the last few kilometers to Chicago in a western-movie-style covered wagon. It was drawn by muscular, hairy ponies, a round-bodied native stock that turned out to be particularly suited to working in the deep cold. The road followed the line of a pre-Freeze rail track, but Emeline said it wasn’t practical to run trains this far north, because of ice on the rails and frozen points.

By now Bisesa was wrapped up like an Inuit, with layers of wool and fur over her thin Babylonian clothes, and her phone lost somewhere deep underneath. Emeline told her that the russet-brown wool came from mammoths. Bisesa wasn’t sure if she believed that, for surely it would be easier to shear a sheep than a mammoth. It looked convincing, however.

Despite the furs, the cold dug into her exposed cheeks like bony fingers. Her eyes streamed, and she could feel the tears crackling to frost. Her feet felt vulnerable despite the heavy fur boots she wore, and, fearing frostbite, she dug her gloved hands into her armpits.

“It’s like Mars,” she told her companions.

Abdi grimaced, shivering. “Are you sorry you came?”

“I’m sorry I don’t still have my spacesuit.”

The phone, tucked warmly against her belly, murmured something, but she couldn’t hear.

Chicago was a black city lost in a white landscape.

The disused rail track ran right into Union Station. It was a short walk from the station to Emeline’s apartment. In the streets, huge bonfires burned, stacked up under dead gas-lamps and laboriously fed with broken-up lumber by squads of men, bundled up, their heads swathed in helmets of breath-steam. The fires poured plumes of smoke into the air, which hung over the city like a black lid, and the faces of the buildings were coated with soot. The people were all bundled up in fur so they looked almost spherical as they scurried from the island of warmth cast by one bonfire to the next.

There was some traffic on the roads, horse-drawn carts, even a few people cycling — not a single car anywhere in this version of 1920s Chicago, Bisesa reminded herself. Horse manure stood everywhere, frozen hard on the broken tarmac.

It was extraordinary, a chill carcass of a city. But it was somehow functioning. There was a church with open doors and candle-lit interior, a few shops with “open for business” signs — and even a kid selling newspapers, flimsy single sheets bearing the proud banner Chicago Tribune.

As they walked, Bisesa glimpsed Lake Michigan, to the east. It was a sheet of ice, brilliant white, dead flat as far as the eye could see. Only at the shore was the ice broken up, with narrow leads of black open water, and near the outlet of the Chicago river men labored to keep the drinking-water inlet pipes clear of ice, as they had been forced to since the very first days after the Freeze.

People moved around on the lake. They were fishing at holes cut into the ice, and fires burned, the smoke rising in thin threads.

Somehow the folk out there looked as if they had nothing to do with this huge wreck of a city at all.

Emeline said, panting as they walked, “The city’s not what it was. We’ve had to abandon a lot of the suburbs. The working town’s kind of boiled down to an area centered on the Loop—

maybe a half-mile to a mile in each direction. The population’s shrunk a lot, what with the famine and the plagues and the walkaways, and now the relocation to New Chicago. But we still use the suburbs as mines, I suppose you would say. We send out parties to retrieve anything we can find, clothes and furniture and other stores, and wood for the fires and the furnaces. Of course we’ve had no fresh supplies of coal or oil since the Freeze.”

It turned out providing lumber was Emeline’s job. She worked in a small department attached to the Mayor’s office responsible for seeking out fresh sources of wood, and organizing the transport chains that kept it flowing into the habitable areas of the city.

“A city like this isn’t meant to survive in such conditions,” Abdi said. “It can endure only by eating itself, as a starving body will ultimately consume its own organs.”

“We do what we must,” Emeline said sharply.

The phone murmured, “Ruddy visited Chicago once — on Earth, after the date of the Discontinuity. He called it a ‘real city.’

But he said he never wanted to see it again.”

“Hush,” Bisesa said.

Emeline’s apartment turned out to be a converted office on the second floor of a skyscraper called the Montauk. The building looked skinny and shabby to Bisesa, but she supposed it had been a wonder of the world in the 1890s.

The apartment’s rooms were like nests, the walls and floors and ceilings thick with blankets and furs. Improvised chimney stacks had been punched in the walls to let the smoke out, but even so the surfaces were covered with soot. But there was some gentility. In the living room and parlor stood upright chairs and small tables, delicate pieces of furniture, clearly worn but lovingly maintained.

Emeline served them tea. It was made from Indian leaves from carefully hoarded thirty-year-old stock. By such small preserva-tions these Chicagoans were maintaining their identity, Bisesa supposed.

They hadn’t been back long when one of Emeline’s two sons showed up. Aged around twenty he was the younger by a year, called Joshua after his father. He came in carrying a string of fish; breathing hard, red-faced, he had been out on Lake Michigan.

Once he had peeled out of his furs he turned out to be a tall young man, taller than his father had ever been. And yet he had something of Josh’s openness of expression, Bisesa thought, his curiosity and eagerness. He seemed healthy, if lean. His right cheek was marked by a discolored patch that might have been a frostbite scar, and his face glistened with an oil that turned out to be an extract of seal blubber.

Emeline took the fish away to skin and gut. She returned with another cup of tea for Joshua. He politely took the cup, and swigged the hot tea down in one gulp.

“My father told me about you, Miss Dutt,” Joshua said uncertainly to Bisesa. “All that business in India.”

“We came from different worlds.”

“My father said you were from the future.”

“Well, so I am. His future, anyhow. Abdikadir’s father came through with me too. We were from the year 2037, around a hundred and fifty years after your father’s time slice.”

His expression was polite, glazed.

“I suppose it’s all a bit remote to you.”

He shrugged. “It just doesn’t make any difference. All that history isn’t going to happen now, is it? We won’t have to fight in your world wars, and so on. This is the world we’ve got, and we’re stuck with it. But that’s fine by me.”

Emeline pursed her lips. “Joshua rather enjoys life, Bisesa.”

It turned out he worked as an engineer on the rail lines out of New Chicago. But his passion was ice-fishing, and whenever he got time off he came back up to the old city to get into his furs and head straight out on the ice.

“He even writes poems about it,” Emeline said. “The fishing, I mean.”

The young man colored. “Mother—”

“He inherited that from his father, at least. A gift for words.

But of course we’re always short of paper.”

Bisesa asked, “What about his brother — your older son, Emeline? Where is he?”

Her face closed up. “Harry went walkaway a couple of years back.” This was clearly distressing to her; she hadn’t mentioned it before. “He said he’d call back, but of course he hasn’t — they never do.”

Joshua said, “Well, he thinks he’s going to be put under arrest if he comes back.”

“Mayor Rice declared an amnesty a year ago. If only he’d get in touch, if only he’d come back just for a day, I could tell him he has nothing to fear.”

They spoke of this a little, and Bisesa began to understand.

Walkaway: some of Chicago’s young people, born on Mir and se-duced by the extraordinary landscape in which they found themselves, had chosen to abandon their parents’ heroic struggle to save Chicago, and the even more audacious attempt to build a new city south of the ice. They simply walked off, disappearing into the white, or the green of the grasslands to the south.

“It’s said they live like Eskimos,” said Joshua. “Or maybe like Red Indians.”

“Some of them even took reference books from the libraries, and artifacts from the museums, so they could work out how to live,” Emeline said bitterly. “No doubt many of these young fools are dead by now.”

It was clear this was a sore point between mother and son; perhaps Joshua dreamed of emulating his older brother.

Emeline cut the conversation short by standing to announce she was off to the kitchen to prepare lunch: they would be served Joshua’s fish, cleaned and gutted, with corn and green vegetables imported from New Chicago. Joshua took his leave, going off to wash and change.

When they had gone, Abdi eyed Bisesa. “There are tensions here.”

“Yes. A generation gap.”

“But the parents do have a point, don’t they?” Abdi said. “The alternative to civilization here is the Stone Age. These walkaways, if they survive, will be illiterate within two generations. And after that their only sense of history will be an oral tradition. They will forget their kind ever came from Earth, and if they remember the Discontinuity at all, it will become an event of myth, like the Flood.

And when the cosmic expansion threatens the fabric of the world—”

“They won’t even understand what’s destroying them.” But, she thought wistfully, maybe it would be better that way. At least these walkaways and their children might enjoy a few generations of harmony with the world, instead of an endless battle with it.

“Don’t you have the same kinds of conflict at home?”

Abdi paused. “Alexander is building a world empire. You can think that’s smart or crazy, but you’ve got to admit it’s something new. It’s hard not to be swept up. I don’t think we have too many walkaways. Not that Alexander would allow it if we did,” he added.

To Bisesa’s astonishment a telephone rang, somewhere in the apartment. It was an old-fashioned, intermittent, very uncertain ring, and it was muffled by the padding on the walls. But it was ringing. Telephones and newspapers: the Chicagoans really had kept their city functioning. She heard Emeline pick up, and speak softly.

Emeline came back into the lounge. “Say, it’s good news. Mayor Rice wants to meet you. He’s been expecting you; I wrote him from New Chicago. And he’ll have an astronomer with him,” she said grandly.

“That’s good,” Bisesa said uncertainly.

“He’ll see us this evening. That gives us time to shop.”

“Shop? Are you kidding?”

Emeline bustled out. “Lunch will be a half-hour. Help yourself to more tea.”

44: Athena

The Mars deck was like a corridor that rose gradually in either direction, so that as you walked there was the odd sense that you were always at the low point of a dip, never climbing out of it. The gravity was the easy one-third G Myra had got used to on Mars itself. The décor was Martian red-ocher, the plastic surfaces of the walls, the bits of carpet on the floor. There were even tubs of what looked like red Martian dirt with the vivid green of terrestrial plants, mostly cacti, growing incongruously out of them.

It was hard to believe she was in space, that if she kept on walking she would loop the loop and end up back in this spot.

Alexei was watching her reaction. “It’s typical Earthborn architecture,” he said. “Like the bio domes on Mars with the rainstorms and the zoos. They don’t see that you don’t need all this, that it just gets in the way…”

Certainly it all seemed a bit sanitized to Myra, like an airport terminal.

Lyla led the three of them to an office just off the main corridor.

It was nothing unusual, with a conference table, the usual softscreen facilities, a stand of coffee percolators and water jugs.

And here Athena spoke to them.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here today.”

Nobody laughed. Yuri dumped the bags in the corner of the conference room, and they helped themselves to coffee.

Myra sat down and looked up into the empty air challengingly.

“My mother always did say you had a reputation as a comedian.”

“Ah,” said Athena. “Aristotle called me skittish. I never had the chance to speak to Bisesa Dutt.” Her voice was steady, controlled.

“But I spoke to many of those who knew her. She is a remarkable woman.”

Myra said, “She always said she was an ordinary woman to whom remarkable things kept happening.”

“But others might have crumbled in the face of her extraordinary experiences. Bisesa continues to do her duty, as she sees it.”

“You speak of her in the present tense. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t know where she is.”

“But you suspect, don’t you, Myra?”

“I don’t understand how I’m talking to you. Why are you here?”

“Watch,” Athena said gently.

The lights in the room dimmed a little, and a holographic image coalesced on the tabletop before them.

Ugly, bristling, it looked like some creature of the deep sea. In fact it was a denizen of space. It was called the Extirpator.

The day before the sunstorm, Athena had woken to find herself ten million kilometers from Earth. Aristotle and Thales, mankind’s other great electronic minds, were with her. They had been downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

The three of them huddled together, in an abstract electronic manner. And then—

When the images from Procyon died, they all needed a break.

They went out onto the Mars deck. Myra sipped a cola. While Yuri swung improvised pendulums to study the varying artificial gravity, Alexei and Lyla explored it. If you sat down, you were heavier than when you stood up. If you threw a ball any distance, it would be deflected sideways by the spin. And if you ran against the spin, you grew lighter. Laughing, they raced each other along the corridor in big Moonwalk bounds.

Watching them play, Myra was reminded just how young these Spacers all really were.

All of them were reluctant to go back and face Athena again, and talk about what she had discovered on a planet eleven light-years away.

“So those swimmers bred themselves to extinction,” Alexei said. “Sol, what a thing to do.”

Yuri said, “Better that than let the Firstborn win.”

“It took us two years to find a way to beam me back home,”

Athena said softly. “We didn’t want to broadcast our existence to a dangerous universe. So we put together an optical laser — quite powerful, but a tight beam. And when the time came, with my data stream encoded into it, we fired it off at Earth. We anticipated that it would be picked up by Cyclops, which was at the planning stage before the sunstorm.”

“It was risky,” Myra said. “If Cyclops hadn’t been built after all—”

“We had no choice but to make the gamble.”

Yuri asked, “Why you, of the three?”

Athena paused. “We drew lots, after a fashion.”

“And the others—”

“The signal took everything we had, everything Witness could give us. Though Witness lived, there was nothing left to sustain the others. They gave themselves for me.”

Myra wondered how Athena, an AI with such a complicated biography, felt about this. As the “youngest” of the three, it must have felt as if her parents had sacrificed themselves to save her. “It wasn’t just for you,” she said gently. “It was for all of us.”

“Yes,” Athena said. “And you see why I had to be sent home.”

Myra looked at Alexei. “And this is what you’ve kept from me for so many weeks.”

Alexei looked uncomfortable.

“It was my request, Myra,” Athena said smoothly.

Yuri was staring at his hands, which were splayed out on the table before him. He looked as stunned as Myra felt. She asked,

“What are you thinking, Yuri?”

“I’m thinking that we have crashed through a conceptual barrier today. Since the sunstorm there has always been something of a human-centered bias to our thinking about the Firstborn, I believe.

As if we implicitly assumed they were a threat aimed at us alone—

our personal nemesis. Now we learn that they have acted against others, just as brutally.” He lifted his hands and spread them wide in the air. “Suddenly we must think of the Firstborn as extensive in space and time. Shit, I need another coffee.” Yuri got up and shambled over to the percolators.

Alexei blew out his cheeks. “So now you know it all, Myra. What next?”

Myra said, “This material should be shared with the Earth authorities. The Space Council—”

Alexei pulled a face. “Why? So they can throw more atomic bombs, and arrest us all? Myra, they think too narrowly.”

Myra stared at him. “Didn’t we all work together during the sunstorm? But now here we are back in the old routine — they lie to you, you lie to them. Is that the way we’re all going into the dark?”

“Be fair, Myra,” Yuri murmured. “The Spacers are doing their best. And they’re probably right about how Earth would react.”

“So what do you think we should we do?”

Yuri said, “Follow the Martians’ example. They trapped an Eye — they struck back.” He laughed bitterly. “And as a result of that, right now the only bit of Firstborn technology we have is there on Mars, sitting under my ice cap.”

“Yes,” Athena said. “It seems that the focus of this crisis is the pole of Mars. I want you to return there, Myra.”

Myra considered. “And when we get there?”

“Then we must wait, as before,” Athena said. “The next steps are largely out of our hands.”

“Then whose?”

“Bisesa Dutt’s,” murmured Athena.

An alarm sounded, and the walls flashed red.

Lyla tapped her ident patch and listened to the air. “It’s the Astropol cops down on Earth deck,” she said. “We must have a leak.

They are coming for you, Myra.” She stood.

Myra followed her lead. She felt dazed. “They want me?

Why?”

“Because they think you will lead them to your mother. Let’s get out of here. We don’t have much time.”

They hurried from the room, Alexei muttering instructions to the Maxwell.

45: Mayor

Shopping in Chicago turned out to be just that. Remarkably, you could stroll along Michigan Avenue and other thoroughfares, and inspect the windows of stores like Marshall Field’s where goods were piled up on display and mannequins modeled suits and dresses and coats. You could buy fur coats and boots and other cold-weather essentials, but Emeline would only look at “the fashion,” as she called them, which turned out to be relics of the stores’ 1890s stock, once imported from a vanished New York or Boston, lovingly preserved and much patched and repaired since. Bisesa thought Emeline would have been bewildered to be faced with the modernity of thirty-two years later on Earth, the fashions of 1926.

So they shopped. But the street outside Marshall Field’s was half-blocked by the carcass of a horse, desiccated, frozen in place where it had fallen. The lights in the window were smoky candles of seal blubber and horse fat. And though there were some young people around, they were mostly working in the stores. All the shoppers, as far as Bisesa could see, were old, Emeline’s age or older, survivors of the Discontinuity picking through these shabby, worn-out relics of a lost past.

Mayor Rice’s office was deep in the guts of City Hall.

Hard-backed chairs had been drawn up before a desk. Bisesa, Emeline, and Abdi sat in a row, and were kept waiting.

This room wasn’t swathed with insulation like Emeline’s apartment. Its walls were adorned with flock wallpaper and portraits of past dignitaries. A fire burned hugely in a hearth, and there was central heating too, a dry warmth supplied by heavy iron radi-ators, no doubt fed by some wood-burning monster of a furnace in the basement. A telephone was fixed to the wall, a very primitive sort, just a box with a speaking tube, and an ear trumpet you held to your head. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked, defiantly set to Chicago standard railway time, four p.m., just as it had been for thirty-two years, despite the difference of opinion expressed by the world outside.

Bisesa felt oddly glad she had opted to wear her purple Babylonian clothes, as had Abdi, despite the offer of a more formal “suit”

by Emeline. She felt she wanted to keep her own identity here.

She whispered to the others, “So this is 1920s Chicago. I think I’m expecting Al Capone.”

Her phone murmured, “In 1894 Capone was in New York. He couldn’t be here now—”

“Oh, shut up.” She said to Emeline, “Tell me about Mayor Jacob Rice.”

“He’s only about thirty — born after the Freeze.”

“And the son of a mayor?”

Emeline shook her head. “Not exactly…”

The hour of the Discontinuity had been shocking for Chicagoans. After all it had started snowing, in July. Excited steve-dores reported icebergs on Lake Michigan. And from their offices in the upper floors of the Rookery and the Montauk, businessmen looked north to see a line of bone white on the horizon. The mayor had been out of town. His deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

Things deteriorated quickly in those first days. As the food riots worsened, as old folks began to freeze, as the suburbs began to burn, the deputy mayor made his best decision. Recognizing the limits of his own capacity, he formulated an Emergency Committee, a representative sample of the city’s leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago’s powerful unions. Here too was Jane Addams, “Saint Jane,” a noted social reformer who ran a women’s refuge called Hull House, and Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey.

And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the Columbian Guard, a dedicated police force for the world’s fair, only a year before. The deputy mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

Under martial law, the Committee clamped down on the gathering crime wave, and tidied up the deputy mayor’s hasty rationing and curfew proclamations. Rice established new medical centers, where a brisk triage system was put in place, and emergency cemeteries were opened up. And as the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swaths, they began to plan for the future.

Emeline said, “Eventually the Emergency Committee functions got subsumed back into the mayor’s office, but Rice himself was never elected.”

“But now his son is the mayor,” Abdi murmured. “An un-elected leader, the son of a leader. I smell a dynasty here.”

“We can’t afford the paper for elections,” Emeline said primly.

Mayor Rice bustled in. He was followed by a small posse of nervous-looking men, clerks perhaps, though one older man carried a briefcase.

“Miss Dutt? And Mister — ah — Omar. Good to meet you. And to see you again, Mrs. White…”

Jacob Rice was a plump young man dressed in a fine suit that showed no sign of patching. His black hair was slicked back, perhaps by some kind of pomade, and his face was sharp, his cold blue eyes intent. He served them brandy in finely cut glass.

“Now look here, Miss Dutt,” he began briskly. “It’s good of you to see me, and all. I make a point of speaking to every visitor to the city from outside, even though they’re mostly those Greek sort of fellows who are good for nothing but a history lesson, along with a few British from about our own time — isn’t that right?”

“The North — West Frontier time slice was from 1885,” she said.

“I got caught up in it. But in fact I was from—”

“The year of Our Lord 2037.” He tapped a letter on the desk before him. “Mrs. White here was good enough to tell me a good deal about you. But I’ll be frank with you, Miss Dutt; I’m only interested in your biography, no matter what time you come from, in-sofar as it affects me and my town. I’m sure you can see that.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now you come here first of all with news that the world is ending. Is that right?”

The older man among the cowed-looking array behind him raised a finger. “Not quite, Mr. Mayor. The lady’s claim is that the universe is coming to an end. But the implication is, of course, that it will take our world with it.” He chuckled softly, as if he had made an amusing academic point.

Rice stared at him. “Well, if that isn’t the all-mightiest nitpick-ing quibble of all time. Miss Dutt, this here is Gifford Oker—

professor of astronomy at our brand-new University of Chicago.

Or it was brand new when we all got froze. I invited him here because it seems you have some astronomical stuff to talk about, and he’s the nearest thing to an expert we got.”

About fifty, grayed, his face all but hidden behind thick spectacles and a ragged mustache, Oker was clutching a battered leather briefcase. His suit was shabby with frayed cuffs and lapels, and his elbows and knees padded with leather. “I can assure you that my credentials are not to be questioned. At the time of the Freeze I was a student under George Ellery Hale, the noted astronomer—

perhaps you’ve heard of him? We were hoping to establish a new observatory at Williams Bay, which would have featured a suite of modern instruments, including a forty-inch refractor — it would have been the largest such telescope in the world. But it wasn’t to be, of course, it wasn’t to be. We have been able to maintain a program of observations with telescopes that were preserved within the ‘time slice,’ as you put it, Miss Dutt, necessarily smaller and less powerful. And we have performed some spectroscopy, whose results are — well, surprising.”

Abdi leaned forward. “Professor, I myself have practiced astronomy in Babylon. We obtained the results that are in part the basis of Bisesa’s prediction. We must exchange information.”

“Certainly.”

Rice glanced at Emeline’s letter. He read slowly, “ ‘The recession of the distant stars.’ This is what you’re talking about.”

“That’s right,” Abdi said. “Simply put, it’s as if the stars are fleeing from the sun in all directions.”

Rice nodded. “Okay. I got that. So what?”

Oker sighed. He took off his spectacles, to reveal deep-set, weary eyes, and rubbed the lenses on his tie. “You see, Mr. Mayor, the problem is this. Why should the sun be uniquely located at the center of such an expansion? It violates the most basic principles of mediocrity. Even though we have been through the Freeze, the most extraordinary event in recorded history, such principles surely still hold true.”

Bisesa studied this Professor Oker, wondering how much he could understand. He obviously had a keen enough mind, and had managed to sustain an academic career, of sorts, in the most extraordinary of circumstances. “So what’s your interpretation, sir?”

He replaced his spectacles and looked at her. “That we are not privileged observers. That if we were living on a world of Alpha Centauri we would observe the same phenomenon — that is to say, we would see the distant nebulae receding from us uniformly. It can only mean that the ether itself is expanding — that is, the invisible material within which all the stars swim. The universe is blowing up like a pudding in an oven, and the stars, like currants embedded in that pudding, are all receding from each other. But to each currant it would seem as if it was the sole point of stillness at the center of the explosion…”

Bisesa’s knowledge of relativity was restricted to a module in a college course decades ago — that and science fiction, and you couldn’t trust that. But the Chicago time slice had come when Einstein was only fifteen years old; Oker could know nothing of relativity. And relativity was founded on the discovery that the ether, in fact, didn’t exist.

But she thought Oker had got the picture, near enough.

She said, “Mr. Mayor, he’s right. The universe itself is expanding. Right now the expansion is pushing the stars apart, the galaxies. But eventually that expansion is eventually going to work its way down to smaller scales.”

Abdi said, “It will pull the world apart, leaving us all flying in a crowd of rocks. Then our bodies will break up. Then the very atoms of which our bodies are composed.” He smiled. “And that is how the world will end. The expansion that is now visible only through a telescope will fold down until it breaks everything to bits.”

Rice stared at him. “Cold-blooded little cuss, aren’t you?” He glared down at Emeline’s letter. “All right, you got my attention.

Now, Miss Dutt, you say you’ve been talking about this with the folks back home. Right? So when is this big bubble going to burst?

How long have we got?”

“About five centuries,” Bisesa said. “The calculations are difficult — it’s hard to be sure.”

Rice stared at her. “Five fucking centuries, pardon me. When we haven’t got food stock to last us five weeks. Well, I think I’ll put that in my ‘pending’ tray for now.” He rubbed his eyes, energetic but obviously stressed. “Five centuries. Jesus Christ! All right, what’s next?”

Next was the solar system.

Gifford Oker breathed, “I read your letter, Miss Dutt. You traveled to Mars, in a space clipper. How marvelous your century must be!”

He preened. “When I was a small boy, you know, I once met Jules Verne. Great man. Very great man. He would have understood about sailing to Mars, I should think!”

“Can we stick to the point?” Rice snarled. “Jules Verne, Jesus Christ! Just show the lady your drawings, Professor; I can see that’s what you’re longing to do.”

“Yes. Here is the result of our exploration of the solar system, Miss Dutt.” Oker opened his briefcase, and spread his material over the mayor’s desk. There were images of the planets, some blurry black-and-white photographs, but mostly color images laboriously sketched in pencil. And there were what looked like spectrograph results, like blurred barcodes.

Bisesa leaned forward. Almost subvocally she murmured, “Can you see?”

Her phone whispered back, “Well enough, Bisesa.”

Oker pushed forward one set of images. “Here,” he said, “is Venus.”

In Bisesa’s reality Venus was a ball of cloud. The spaceprobes had found an atmosphere as thick as an ocean, and a land so hot that lead would melt. But this Venus was different. It looked, at first glance, like an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth from space: swaths of cloud, gray-blue ocean, small caps of ice at the poles.

Oker said, “It’s all ocean, ocean and ice. We’ve detected no land, not a trace. The ocean is water.” He scrabbled for a spectrograph result. “The air is nitrogen, with some oxygen — less than Earth’s—

and rather a lot of carbon dioxide, which must seep into the water.

The oceans of Venus must fizz like Coca Cola!” It was a professor’s well-worn joke. But now he leaned forward. “And there is life there: life on Venus.”

“How do you know?”

He pointed to green smudges on some of the drawings. “We can see no details, but there must be animals in the endless seas—

fish perhaps, immense whales, feeding on the plankton. We can expect it to be more or less like terrestrial analogues, due to processes of convergence,” he said confidently.

Oker showed more results. On the bare face of the Moon, transient atmospheres and even glimmers of open water pooled in the deep craters and the rills; and again the Chicagoan astronomers thought they saw life.

There were some extraordinary images of Mercury. These were blurred sketches of structures of light, like netting, flung over the innermost planet’s dark side, glimpsed at the very limits of visibility. Oker said there was once a partial eclipse of the sun, and some of his students reported that they had seen similar “webs of plasma,” or “plasmoids,” in the tenuous solar air. Perhaps this too was a form of life, much stranger, a life of superhot gases that swam from the fires of the sun to the face of its nearest child.

Under the cover of a coughing spasm, Bisesa withdrew and murmured to her phone. “Do you think it’s likely?”

“Plasma life is not impossible,” the phone murmured. “There are structures in the solar atmosphere, bound together by magnetic flux.”

Bisesa replied grimly, “Yes. We all became experts on the sun in the storm years. What do you think is going on here?”

“Mir is a sampling of life on Earth, taken during the period when intelligence, mankind, has arisen. The planetologists think Venus was warm and wet when very young. So perhaps Venus has been similarly ‘sampled.’ This seems to be a sort of optimized version of the solar system, Bisesa, each of the worlds, and perhaps slices within those worlds, selected for the maximality of its life. I wonder what’s happening on Europa or Titan in this universe, beyond the reach of the Chicagoans’ telescopes…”

Now Professor Oker, with a glimmer of a showman’s instinct, was unveiling the climax of his presentation: Mars.

But this wasn’t the Mars Bisesa had grown up with, and even visited. This blue-gray Mars was more Earthlike even than watery Venus, for here there was plenty of dry land, a world of continents and oceans, capped by ice at the poles, swathed in wispy cloud.

There was some familiarity. That green stripe might be the Valles Marineris; the blue scar in the southern hemisphere could be the tremendous basin of Hellas. Most of the northern hemisphere appeared to be dry.

The phone whispered, “Something’s wrong, Bisesa. If Mars, our Mars, were flooded, the whole of the northern hemisphere would be drowned under an ocean.”

“The Vastitas Borealis.”

“Yes. Something dramatic must happen to this Mars in the future, something that changes the shape of the entire planet.”

Rice listened to Oker impatiently, and at last cut him off.

“Come on, Gifford. Get to the good stuff. Tell her what you told me, about the Martians.”

Oker grinned. “We see straight-line traces cutting across the Martian plains. Lines that must be hundreds of miles long.”

“Canals,” Abdi said immediately.

“What else could they be? And on land we, some of us, believe we have glimpsed structures. Walls, perhaps, tremendously long.

This is controversial; we are at the limits of seeing. But about this, ”

Oker said, “there is no controversy at all.” He produced a photograph, taken in polarized light, which showed bright lights, like stars, scattered over the face of Mars. “Cities,” breathed Professor Oker.

Emeline leaned forward and tapped the image. “I told her about that,” she said.

Rice sat back. “So there you have it, Miss Dutt,” he said. “The question is, what use is any of this to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I need to talk to my contacts at home.”

“And,” Abdi said to Oker, “I’d like to get to work with you, Professor. We have much to share.”

“Yes,” said Oker, smiling.

“All right,” Rice said. “But when you have something, you come tell me, you hear?” It was a clear order.

“So. Enough spooky stuff for one day. Let’s talk of other things.” As the professor stowed away his images, Rice sat back in his chair, rested his feet on the desk — he wore cowboy boots, with spurs — and blew out cigar smoke. “Would you like another drink, a smoke? No? For one thing,” he said to Abdi, “I would very much like to hear about what’s going on across the Atlantic. Alexander the Great and his ‘world empire’—sounds like my kind of guy.”

Abdi glanced at Bisesa and Emeline, and shrugged. “Where would you like me to begin?”

“Tell me about his armies. And his navies, too. Does he have steamships yet? How soon before he can cross the Atlantic in force?…”

With Rice’s attention occupied by Abdi, Bisesa murmured to her phone again. “What do you think?”

“I need to get to work transferring all this data back to Mars. It will take a long time.”

“But?”

“But I have a feeling, Bisesa, that this is why you were summoned to Mars.”

46: A-line

June 2070

“Since coming through the A-line we aren’t alone with Q any more, Mum. There’s a regular flotilla escorting the thing now, like a navy flag day, all the rock miners and bubble-dwellers coming out to see the beast as it passes. It’s kind of strange for us. After a cruise of fourteen months, we’ve got all this company. But they don’t know we’re here. The Liberator is staying inside her stealth shroud, and there are a couple other navy tubs out here, keeping the sight-seers at a good distance and coordinating the latest assault on Q…”

“Bella,” Thales said softly.

“Pause.” Edna’s talking head froze, a tiny holographic bust suspended over the surface of Bella’s desk. “Can’t it wait, Thales?”

“Cassie Duflot is here.”

“Oh, crap.” Wife of dead hero space-worker, and professional pain in the backside.

“You did ask me to inform you as soon as she arrived.”

“I did.”

The message from Edna was still coming in. Bella was a mother as well as a politician; she had rights too. “Ask her to wait.”

“Of course, Bella.”

“And Thales, while she’s waiting, don’t let her mail, record, comment, blog, explore, analyze, or speculate. Give her coffee and distract her.”

“I understand, Bella. Incidentally—”

“Yes?”

“It’s little more than an hour to the principal strike. The Big Whack. Or rather until the report reaches us.”

She didn’t need reminding of that. The Big Whack, mankind’s last hope against the Q-bomb — and perhaps the end of her daughter’s life. “Okay, Thales, thank you, I’m on it. Resume.”

Edna’s frozen image came alive again.

Edna’s voice, having spent twenty-four minutes crawling across the plane of the solar system, sounded strongly in Bella’s Mount Weather office. And Thales smoothly produced pictures to match the words, images captured by a variety of ships and monitors.

There was the Q-bomb, a ghostly droplet of smeared starlight, hovering over Bella’s desk. It was passing through the asteroid belt right now — the navy’s A-line — and she was shown a distant sprinkling of rocks, magnified and brightened for her benefit. There was something awesome about the image; six years almost to the day since the object had first been spotted swimming past Saturn’s moons, here it was among the asteroids, home to a branch of mankind. The Q-bomb was here, in human space. And in just six more months — at Christmas time in this year of 2070—the Q-bomb was destined to make its rendezvous with Earth itself.

But the bomb’s passage through the belt gave one more chance for an assault.

Edna was talking about the attempts so far. Thales showed images of nuclear weapons blossoming against the bomb’s impassive surface, and ships, manned and robotic, deploying energy weapons, particle beams, and lasers, even a stream of rocks thrown from a major asteroid fitted with a mass driver, an electromagnetic cata-pult.

“Pea shooters against an elephant,” Edna commented. “Except it isn’t quite. Every time we hit that thing it loses a little mass-energy, a loss in proportion to what we throw at it. Just a flea-bite each time, but it’s non-zero. Lyla Neal has been doing some modeling of this; Professor Carel will brief you. In fact we hope one outcome of the Big Whack, assuming we don’t knock the thing off its rails altogether, is to confirm Lyla’s modeling, with a data point orders of magnitude away from what we’ve been able to deploy so far.

Anyhow we’ll find out soon.

“As for the cannonball, the tractor is doing its job so far. All systems are nominal, and the cannonball’s deflection is matching the predictions…” In her quiet, professional voice, Edna summarized the status of the weapon.

When she was done, she smiled. Despite her peaked cap, she looked heartbreakingly young.

“I’m doing fine in myself. After more than a year aboard this tub I need some fresh air, or fresher anyhow. And under a dictio-nary definition of ‘stir crazy’ you could write down ‘John Metternes.’ But at least we haven’t killed each other yet. And if you look at this cruise as an extended shakedown of the Liberator she’s performed fine. I think we have a good new technology here, Mum.

Not that that’s much consolation if we fail to deflect Q, I guess; we’ll all be in deep yogurt then.

“The other crews are doing fine too. I guess this is an operational test for the navy itself. A few veterans of the old wet navy say they feel out of place on board ships where even the rawest nugget has passed out of the USNPG.” That was the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey. “Right now, while we’re waiting for the drama to begin, there’s a sort of open-loop church service going on. Those who choose to are saying their prayers to Our Lady of Loreto, the patron saint of aviators.

“As for the Spacers, they are cooperating, mostly, with the cordon and other measures. But we’re ready to take whatever action you see fit for us to take, Mum.

“Sixty minutes to showtime. I’ll speak to you after the Whack, Mum. Love you. Liberator out.”

Bella had time for only a short reply, for it would reach Edna with only minutes left before the strike. “I love you too,” she said.

“And I know you’ll do your duty, as you always do.” She was hor-ribly aware that these might be the last words she ever spoke to Edna, and that in the next hour she might lose her only daughter, as poor, angry Cassie Duflot, waiting outside, had already lost her husband. But she could think of nothing else to add. “Bella out.

Thales, close this down.”

The holographic display popped out of existence, leaving a bare desk, with only a chronometer counting down to the time of the Big Whack assault, and the still more important moment when news of it would reach the Earth.

Bella composed herself. “Show Cassie in.”

Somehow Bella had expected Cassie Duflot to show up in black, as when Bella had last met her when she had handed over her husband’s Tooke medal: still in widow’s weeds, after all this time. But Cassie wore a suit of a bright lilac color, attractive and practical.

And nor, Bella reminded herself, was Cassie going to be sunk in grief as she had been during that visit. It would be easy to under-estimate her.

“It’s good of you to see me,” Cassie said formally, shaking Bella’s hand.

“I’m not sure if I had much choice,” Bella said. “You’ve been making quite a splash since we last met.”

Cassie smiled, a cold expression almost like a politician’s. “I didn’t mean to make any kind of ‘splash,’ or to cause anybody any trouble. All I am is the widow of a navy engineer, who started asking questions about how and why her husband had died.”

“And you didn’t get good enough answers, right? Coffee?”

Bella went to the percolator herself. She used the interval to size up her opponent, for that was how she had to think of Cassie Duflot.

Cassie was a young woman, and a young mother, and a widow; that gave her an immediately sympathetic angle to snag the public’s attention. But Cassie also worked in the public relations department of Thule, Inc., one of the world’s great eco-conservation agencies, specializing in post-sunstorm reconstruction in the Canadian Arctic. Not only that, her mother-in-law, Phillippa, had moved in senior circles in London before the sunstorm, and had no doubt kept up a web of contacts since. Cassie knew how to use the media.

Cassie Duflot looked strong. Not neurotic, or resentful, or bitter. She wasn’t after any kind of revenge for her husband’s death or for the disruption of her life, Bella saw immediately. She was after something deeper, and more satisfying. The truth, perhaps. And that made her more formidable still.

Bella gave Cassie her coffee and sat down. “Questions with no answers,” she prompted.

“Yes. Look, Chair Fingal—”

“Call me Bella.”

Cassie said she had known a little of her husband’s activities in his last years. He had been a space engineer; Cassie knew he was working on a secret program, and roughly where he was stationed.

“And that’s all,” she said. “While James was alive that was all I wanted to know. I accepted the need for security. We’re at war, and during wartime you keep your mouth shut. But after he died, and after the funeral and the ceremonials — you were kind enough to visit us—”

Bella nodded. “You started to ask your questions.”

“I didn’t want much,” Cassie said. She was twisting the wed-ding ring on her finger, self-conscious now. “I didn’t want to en-danger anybody, least of all James’s friends. I just wanted to know something of how he died, so that one day the children, when they ask about him — you know.”

“I’m a mother myself. In fact, a grandmother. Yes, I do know.”

It seemed the navy had badly mishandled queries that had initially been valid and quite innocent. “They stonewalled me. One by one, the navy’s liaison officers and the counselors stopped returning my calls. Even James’s friends drew away.” This blank shutting-out had, quite predictably, incensed Cassie. She had consulted her mother, and had begun her own digging.

And she had started drafting queries for Thales.

“I think because Thales exists, whispering in the ear of anybody on the planet who asks him a question, people believe that our society is free and open. In fact Thales is just as much an instrument of government control as any other outlet. Isn’t that true?”

Bella said, “Go on.”

“But I found out there are ways even to get information out of an AI’s nonanswers as well as its answers.” She had become something of a self-taught expert on the analysis of an AI traumatized by being ordered to lie. She produced a softscreen from her bag and spread it over the desk. It showed a schematic of a network laid out in gold thread, with sections cordoned off by severe red lines. “You can’t just dig a memory out of an AI without leaving a hole. Everything is interconnected—”

Bella cut her off. “That’s enough. Look, Cassie. Others have asked the same sort of questions before. It’s just that you, being who you are, have become more prominent than most.”

“And where are those others? Locked away somewhere?”

In fact some were, in a detention center in the Sea of Moscow, on the far side of the Moon. It was Bella’s own darkest secret. She said, “Not all of them.”

Cassie took back her softscreen and leaned forward, her face intent. “I’m not intimidated by you,” she said softly.

“I’m sure you’re not. But, Cassie —sit back. The office has various features designed to respond to any threat made against me.

They’re not always very clever at decoding body language.”

Cassie complied, but she kept her eyes fixed on Bella. “Space-based weapons systems,” she said. “That’s what my husband was working on, wasn’t it?”

And she spoke of hints from the sky, traces, fragmentary clues that had been assembled by conspiracy theorists and sky-watchers of varying degrees of sanity and paranoia. They had seen the straight-line exhaust trail of a ship sliding across the sky at impossible speeds. The Liberator, of course. And they had seen another vessel, slow, ponderous, massive, moving in the asteroid belt, leaving behind the same kind of trail. That was clearly the tractor, preparing for the Big Whack. These ships had all been shrouded, but mankind’s invisibility shields were not yet perfect.

Bella asked, “So what do you think all this means?”

“That something is coming,” Cassie said. “Another sunstorm, perhaps. And the governments are preparing to flee with their families, in a new generation of superfast ships. That’s not a consensus view, but a common suspicion, I’d say.”

Bella was shocked. “Do people really think so little of their governments that they imagine we’re capable of that?”

“They don’t know. That’s the trouble, Bella. We live in the aftermath of the sunstorm. Maybe it’s rational to be paranoid.” Cassie folded away her softscreen. “Bella, I have followed this path not for my husband’s sake, or my own, but for my children. I think you are hiding something — something monstrous, that might affect their future. And they have a right to know what that is. You have no right to keep it from them.”

Time for Bella to make her judgment about what to do about this woman. Well, Cassie was not a criminal. She was in fact the sort of person Bella had been appointed to protect.

“Look, Cassie,” Bella said. “You’ve picked up some of the pieces of the jigsaw. But you’re assembling them into the wrong picture. I don’t want any harm to come to you, but on the other hand, I don’t want you to do any harm either. And by spreading this sort of theory around, harm is what you may inflict. So I’m going to take you into my confidence — the confidence of the Council. And when you know what I know, you can use your own judgment on how best to use the information. Is that a deal?”

Cassie thought it over. “Yes, Bella, that’s fair.” And she looked at Bella, apprehensive, excited. Scared.

Bella glanced at the clock on the wall. Thirty minutes before she would receive news of what had become of the Big Whack experiment. That desperate drama must be playing itself at this very moment, out among the asteroids, twenty-eight light-minutes away.

She put that aside. “Let’s start with the Liberator, ” she said.

“Your husband’s legacy. Graphics, please, Thales.”

They spoke of the Liberator. And of the Q-bomb it had been shadowing for months.

And then Bella showed Cassie Bob Paxton’s last option.

“It’s just another asteroid, drifting through the belt,” Bella said. “It has a number in our catalogs, and whoever landed that mining sur-vey probe on it”—it was a metallic spark on the asteroid’s coal-dust surface—“probably gave it a name. We just call it the cannonball.

And here is the ship whose exhaust your conspiracy-theorists saw.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Cassie murmured. She leaned forward to see. “It looks like another asteroid,” she said. “A rock with a silver net around it.”

That was pretty much what the tractor was: a minor asteroid, much smaller than the flying-mountain cannonball. The rock had had a net of tough nanotube rope cast around it, and an antimatter-drive engine was fixed to its surface. “We used one of the early prototype engines from the Trojan shipyards. Not human-rated but it’s pretty reliable.”

Cassie began to see it. “You’re using this to steer the bigger asteroid, the cannonball.”

“Yes — with gravity. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to deflect an asteroid…”

Turning aside the path of an asteroid had been studied for a century or more, since it had become understood that some asteroids crossed the path of the Earth, and, at statistically predictable intervals, collided with the planet.

A dangerous rock was generally too big to destroy. An obvious idea was to knock it aside, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Or you could attach a drive to it and just push it. Or you could attach a solar sail to it, or even paint it silver or wrap it in foil, so the pressure of sunlight pushed it aside. Such methods would deliver only a small acceleration, but if you could catch the rock early enough you might do just enough to keep the rock from hitting its undesired target.

As the asteroid belt was gradually colonized, all these methods had been tried; all failed, to varying degrees. The trouble was that many larger asteroids weren’t solid bodies at all, but swarms of smaller rocks, only loosely bound by gravity — and they were generally rotating too. Try to push them, or blow them up, and they would just fragment into a cloud of smaller impactors that would be almost as lethal and all but impossible to deal with.

So the idea of the gravitational tractor was developed. Position another rock near your big problem asteroid. Push the second rock aside, gently. And its gravity field would tug at its larger sibling.

“You see the idea,” Bella said. “You have to keep pushing your rock just too feebly to be able to escape the asteroid’s gravity field, so your tractor remains bound to the target. And the target will be drawn away no matter how broken-up it is. The only tricky part is orienting your tractor’s exhaust plume so it doesn’t impact the target’s surface.”

Cassie nodded, a little impatiently. “I get the idea. You’re deflecting the orbit of this rock, this cannonball—”

“So that it hits the Q-bomb. The bomb and the cannonball are on radically different trajectories; the impact will be fast—

high-energy.”

“When will this happen?”

“In fact,” Thales said gently, “it did happen, nearly half an hour ago. Two minutes until the report comes in, Bella.”

The graphics of tractor and cannonball vanished, to be replaced by a steady image of the Q-bomb, that eerie sphere visible only by reflected starlight, floating in a cloud of velvet above Bella’s desk.

And beside it was a matchstick spacecraft.

Cassie understood. It took her a few seconds to compose herself. Then, wide-eyed, she said, “It’s happening now. This impact.

And your daughter is out there, in her shrouded battleship, observing. You brought me in at a time like this?”

Bella found her voice was tight. “Well, I need to keep busy.

And besides — I think I needed to see your reaction.”

“Thirty seconds, Bella.”

“Thank you, Thales. You see, Cassie—”

“No. Don’t say any more.” Impulsively Cassie leaned across the table and grabbed Bella’s hand. Bella hung onto it hard.

In the graphic, bomb and escort hung silently in space, like ornaments.

Something came flying into the desktop image from the left-hand side. Just a blur, a gray-white streak, too fast to make out any details. The impact brought a flash that filled the virtual tank with light.

Then the projection fritzed and disappeared.

Bella’s desk delivered scrolling status reports and talking heads, all reporting aspects of the impact. And there were calls from across Earth and the Spacer colonies, demanding to know what was going on in the belt; the explosion had been bright enough to be seen with the naked eye in the night skies of Earth, as well as across much of the rest of the system.

By pointing, Bella picked out two heads: Edna, and then Bob Paxton.

“… Just to repeat, Mum, I’m fine, the ship’s fine, we stood off sufficiently to evade the debris field. Quite a sight, all that white-hot rock flying off on dead straight lines! We got good data. It looks as if Lyla’s projections on the likely loss of mass-energy by the Q-bomb have been borne out. But—”

Bella flicked to Bob Paxton; his face ballooned before her, ruddy, angry. “Madam Chair, we haven’t touched the damn thing.

Oh, we bled off a bit of mass-energy, even the Q couldn’t eat a fucking asteroid without burping, but not enough to make a bit of difference when that thing gets to Earth. And get here it will. It’s not been deflected at all, not a hairsbreadth. It defies everything we know about inertia and momentum.

“And — okay, here it comes. We got the numbers now to do some extrapolating about what happens to the Earth if the Q-bomb hits, on the basis of how the rocks we have been throwing seemed to have drained the bomb. Umm. The bomb is not infinite. But it’s big. The bomb is big enough to destroy Mars, say. It won’t shatter Earth. But it will deliver about as large an impact as the planet could sustain without breaking up. It will leave us with a crater the size of Earth’s own radius.” He read, “ ‘This will be the most devastating event since the mantle-stripping impact that led to the formation of the Moon…’ ” He ran down, and just stared at the numbers off camera. “I guess that’s that, Madam Chair. We did our best.”

Bella had Thales hush his voice. “Well, there you are, Cassie. Now you know everything. You’ve seen everything.”

Cassie thought it over. “I’m glad your daughter is okay.”

“Thank you. But the strike failed.” She spread her hands. “So what do you think I should do now?”

Cassie considered. “Everybody saw that collision, on Earth and beyond it. They know something just happened. The question is, what do you tell them?”

“The truth? That the world is going to end by Christmas Day?” She laughed, and wasn’t sure why. “Bob Paxton would say, what about panic?”

“People have faced tough times before,” Cassie said. “Generally they come through.”

“Mass hysteria is a recognized phenomenon, Cassie. Documented since the Middle Ages, when you have severe social trauma, and a breakdown of trust in governments. It’s a significant part of my job to ensure that doesn’t happen. And you’ve already told me the governments I work for aren’t trusted.”

“Okay. You know your job. But people will have preparations to make. Family. If they know. ”

Of course that was true. Looking at Cassie’s set, determined face, the face of a woman with children of her own under threat, Bella thought she could use this woman at her side in the days and weeks to come. A voice of sanity, amid the ranting and the angry.

And somebody was ranting at her right now. She glanced down to see the choleric face of Bob Paxton, yelling to get her attention.

Reluctantly she turned up the volume.

“We got one option left, Chair. Maybe we ought to exhaust that, before we start handing out the suicide pills.”

“Bisesa Dutt.”

“We’ve been pussyfooting around with these fuckers on Mars.

Now we got to go get that woman out of there and into a secure unit. Earth’s future clearly depends on it. Because believe me, Chair Fingal, we ain’t got nothing else.” He paused, panting hard.

Cassie murmured, “I’m not sure what he’s talking about. But if there is another option—” She took a breath. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I guess this isn’t like the sunstorm, when we all had to know what was coming to build the shield. This time there’s nothing we can do. You can spare people the disruption of knowing as long as this final option is still available. And then, when there really is no hope—”

“So we lie to the human race.”

“Say it was a weapons test gone wrong. Why, that’s almost true.”

Bella pointed to Edna’s image. “Thales, I want to send a message to Liberator. Your highest level of security.”

“Yes, Bella.”

“Look, Cassie, are you free for the next few hours? I think I’d like to talk a little more.”

Cassie was surprised. But she said, “Of course.”

“Channel opened. Go ahead, Bella.”

“Edna, it’s me. Listen, dear, I have a new mission for you. I need you to go to Mars…”

As she spoke, she glanced at her calendar. Only months were left. From now on, she sensed, whatever happened, the tension would rise, and the pace of events accelerate inexorably. She only hoped she would be able to exercise sound judgment, even now.