Firstborn

47: Options

July 2070

Yuri came running in. He spread his softscreen out on the crew table. “At last I got the stuff downloaded from Mir…”

The screen began to fill up with images of worlds, blurry photographs, and blue-green pencil sketches.

Wells Station’s Can Two, the “house,” had one big inflatable table, used for crew meals, conferences, as a work surface. The table was modular; it could be split up into two or three. It was another bit of confinement psychology, Myra understood. The crew didn’t even have to eat together, if they chose not.

Right now all the bits of the big table were pushed together. For days it had been used as the focus of a kind of unending conference.

Yuri was trying to make sense of the alternate-Mars images Bisesa’s phone had slowly, painfully returned through the low-bandwidth Eye link. Ellie was slaving over her analysis of the Eye’s gravitational cage. Only Hanse Critchfield wasn’t working on some aspect of the Q-bomb threat, insisting he was more use with his beloved machines.

And Myra, Alexei, and Grendel Speth, with comparatively little to contribute, sat glumly at the scuffed table, cups of cool low-pressure coffee before them.

There was a sense of shabbiness in this roundhouse on Mars, Myra thought, compared to the expensive, expansive, light-filled environs of Cyclops. Yet, as Athena kept assuring them, they were at the focus of a response to a danger of cosmic proportions. The detonation in the asteroid belt had been visible on all the human worlds. Much of Earth had shut down, a civilization still traumatized by the sunstorm huddled in bunkerlike homes, waiting.

But time was running out. And on Mars there was a sense of rising panic. The Earth warship Liberator was now only days away, and they all knew why it was coming.

“All right,” Yuri said. “Here’s what we’ve got. As I understand it, the consensus among us is that the Mir universe contains a set of time-sliced samples. A showcase of solar life at its optimum on each world.”

“All Sol’s children at their prettiest,” Grendel said. “But it can’t last. I mean, both Venus and Mars must have reached their peak of biodiversity in the early days of the solar system, when the sun was much cooler. As best anybody can tell, the Mir sun is a copy from the thirteenth century. That sun is too hot for these worlds. They can’t last long.”

“But,” Yuri growled, “the point is, here are the worlds of the solar system as they were in the deep past. The question is how they got from past to present, what happened that made them as they are today. Now, look at Venus. We think we understand this case,” he said. “Right? A runaway greenhouse, the oceans evaporating, the water broken up by the sunlight and lost altogether…”

Once Venus had been moist, blue and serene. Too close to the sun, it overheated, and its oceans evaporated. With the water lost to space Venus had developed a new thick atmosphere, a blanket of carbon dioxide baked out of the seabed rock, and the greenhouse effect intensified until the ground started to glow, red-hot.

“A horror show, but we understand it. For Venus, our models fit,” said Yuri. “Yes? But now we turn to Mars. Mars was once Earthlike; but, too small, too far from the sun, it dried and cooled.

We understand that much. But look at this.”

He displayed contrasting profiles, of the ancient Mars on which they stood, and the young Mars of the Mir universe. The northern hemisphere of ancient Mars was visibly depressed beneath the neat circular arc of its younger self.

“Something happened here,” Yuri said, his anger burning.

“Something hugely violent.”

Myra saw it. It must have been like a hammer to the crown of the skull, a tremendous blow centered here, at the north pole. It had been powerful enough to create the Vastitas Borealis, like a crater that spanned the whole of the northern hemisphere.

They all saw the implication, immediately.

“A Q-bomb,” Alexei said. “Scaled to Mars’s mass. And directed here, at the north pole. This would be the result. By Sol’s tears. But why? Why hit Mars, and not Venus?”

“Because Venus was harmless,” Yuri snapped. “Venus was a water-world. If intelligence rose there at all it would have been confined to some seabed culture, using metals from geothermal vents or some such. They just didn’t put out the kind of signals you could see from afar. Roads, cities.”

“But the Martians did,” Myra said.

And their reward had been a mighty, sterilizing impact.

Grendel was growing excited. “I think we’re seeing elements of a strategy here. The Firstborn’s goal seems to be to suppress advanced technological civilizations. But they act with —economy. If a star system is giving them cause for concern, they first hit it with a sunstorm. Crude, a blanket blowtorching, but a cheap way of sterilizing an entire system. I bet if we dig deep enough we’ll find a relic of at least one more sunstorm in the deep past. But if the sunstorms don’t work, if worlds continue to be troublesome, they strike more surgically. Just as they targeted Mars. Just as they’ve now targeted Earth.”

“You’ve got to admit they’re thorough,” Yuri said.

Alexei said, “And we know from Athena and her Witness that we aren’t the only ones. The Firstborn’s operations are extensive in space and in time. ‘A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.’ The Book of Joel.”

Myra raised her eyebrows. “Let’s not be hypocrites. Maybe the megafauna of Australia and America felt much the same way about us. ”

“They’re like gods,” Alexei said, still in apocalyptic mood.

“Maybe we should worship them.”

“Let’s not,” Yuri said dryly. “The Martians didn’t.”

“That’s right,” Ellie said now. She came bustling into the room with a softscreen. “The Martians struck a blow. And maybe we can too.” In the midst of their huddled, fearful gloom, Ellie was grinning.

“Remember this?” Ellie spread out her softscreen so they could all see a now-familiar string of symbols:

“I’ve had my analysis agents speculating about what these could mean. They’ve come to a consensus — about bloody time too — but I think it makes sense.”

“Tell us,” Yuri snapped.

“Look at these shapes. What do you see?”

Alexei said, “Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon. So what?”

“How many sides?”

Yuri said, “Three, four, five, six.”

“And what if you continued the sequence? What next?”

“Seven sides. Heptagon. Eight. Octagon.” He was at a loss, and glanced at Myra. “Nonagon?”

“Sounds plausible,” Myra said.

“And then?” Ellie insisted.

Alexei said, “Ten sides, eleven, twelve—”

“And if you go on and on? Where does the sequence end?”

“At infinity,” Myra said. “A polygon with an infinite number of sides.”

“Which is?”

“A circle…”

Yuri asked, “What do you think you have here, Ellie?”

“The Martians couldn’t avert their own Q-bomb, or whatever the Firstborn used on them. But I think this is a symbolic record of what they did achieve. Starting with what they could build — see, a triangle, a square, simple shapes — they somehow extrapolated out.

They built on their finite means to capture infinity. And they trapped an Eye that must have been located right under ground zero, waiting to witness the destruction.” She glanced at Alexei.

“They did challenge the gods, Alexei.”

Grendel grunted. “How uplifting,” she said sourly. “But the Martians got wiped out even so. What a shame they aren’t around for us to ask them for help.”

“But they are,” Ellie said.

They all stared at her.

Myra’s mind was racing. “She’s right. What if there were a way to send a message, not to our Mars, but to Mir’s? Oh, there are no spaceships there.”

“Or radios,” Alexei put in.

Myra was struggling. “But even so…”

Yuri snapped, “What the hell would you say?”

Ellie said rapidly, “We could just send these symbols, for a start.

That’s enough to show we understand. We might provoke Mir’s Martians into reacting. I mean, at least some of them may come from a time-slice where they’re aware of the Firstborn.”

Grendel shook her head. “Are you serious? Your plan is, we’re going to pass a message to a parallel universe, where we hope there is a Martian civilization stranded out of time in a kind of space-opera solar system. Have I got that right?”

“I don’t think it’s a time for common sense, Grendel,” Myra said. “Nothing conventional the navy has tried has worked. So we need an extraordinary defense. It took a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to come up with the sunstorm shield, after all, and an unprecedented effort to achieve it. Maybe we’ve just got to do the same again.”

There was a torrent of questions and discussion. Was the chancy comms link through the Martian Eye to Bisesa’s antique phone reliable enough to see this through? And how could the nineteenth-century Americans of an icebound Chicago talk to Mars anyhow? Telepathy?

Many questions, but few answers.

“Okay,” Yuri asked slowly. “But the most important question is, what happens if the Martians do respond? What might they do?”

“Fight off the Q-bomb with their tripod fighting machines and their heat rays,” Grendel said mockingly.

“I’m serious. We need to think it through,” Yuri said. “Come up with scenarios. Ellie, maybe you could handle that. Do some wargaming on the bomb’s response.”

Ellie nodded.

Alexei said, “Even if Bisesa does find a way to do this, maybe we ought to keep some kind of veto, while we try to figure out how the Martians might react. And we should pass this back to Athena.

The decision shouldn’t stay just with us.”

“Okay,” Yuri said. “In the meantime we can get to work on this. Right? Unless anybody’s got a better idea.” His anger had mutated to a kind of exhilaration. “Hey. Why the gloomy faces? Look, we’re like a bunch of hibernating polar bears up here. But if this works, the eyes of history are on us. There’ll be paintings of the scene. Like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

Alexei played along. “If that’s true I wish I’d shaved.”

“Enough of the bullshit,” Grendel said. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

They broke up and got busy.

48: A Signal to Mars

Once again Bisesa, Abdi, and Emeline were summoned to Mayor Rice’s office in City Hall.

Rice was waiting for them. He had his booted feet up on the desk and puffed cigar smoke. Professor Gifford Oker, the astronomer from the university, was here too.

Rice waved them to chairs. “You asked for my help,” he snapped. He held up Bisesa’s letter, with doodles of the Martian symbols, a triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon. “You say we need to send this here message to the Martians.”

Bisesa said, “I know it sounds crazy, but—”

“Oh, I deal with far more crazy stuff than this. Naturally I turned to Gifford here for advice. I got back a lot of guff about

‘Hertzian electromagnetic waves’ and Jules Verne ‘space buggies.’

Hell, man, space ships! We can’t even string a railroad between here and the coast.”

Oker looked away miserably, but said nothing; evidently he had been brought here simply for the humiliation.

“So,” Rice went on, “I passed on this request to the one man in Chicago who might have a handle on how we might do this. Hell, he’s seventy-nine years old, and after the Freeze he gave his all on the Emergency Committee and whatnot, and it’s not even his own damn city. But he said he’d help. He promised to call me at three o’clock.” He glanced at a pocket watch. “Which is round about now.”

They all had to wait in silence for a full minute. Then the phone on the wall jangled.

Rice beckoned to Bisesa, and they walked to the phone. Rice picked up the earpiece and held it so Bisesa could make out what was said.

She caught only scraps of the monologue coming from the phone, delivered in a stilted Bostonian rant. But the gist was clear.

“… Signals impossible. Set up a sign, a sign big enough to be seen across the gulf of space… The white face of the ice cap is our canvas… Dig trenches a hundred miles long, scrape those figures in the ice as big as you dare… Fill ’em up with lumber, oil if you have any. Set ’em on fire… The light of the fires by night, the smoke by day… Damn Martians have to be blind not to see them…”

Rice nodded at Bisesa. “You get the idea?”

“Assuming you can get the labor to do it—”

“Hell, a team of mammoths dragging a plow will do it in a month.”

“Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.” Bisesa shook her head. “In any other context that would seem extraordinary. One thing, Mr. Mayor. Don’t set the fires until I confirm we should. I’ll speak to my people, make sure… It’s a drastic thing we’re attempting here.”

He nodded slowly. “All right. Anything else?”

“No. Signals scraped in the ice. Of course that’s the way to do it.

I should have thought of it myself.”

“But you didn’t,” Rice said, grinning around his cigar. “It took him to figure it out. Which is why he is who he is. Right? Thank you,” he said into the phone. “You saved the day once again, sir.

That’s swell of you. Thank you very much, Mr. Edison.” And he hung up. “The Wizard of Menlo Park! What a guy!”

49: Areosynchronous

August 2070

The Liberator slid into synchronous orbit over Mars. Libby rolled the ship so that the port beneath Edna’s feet revealed the planet.

Edna had been in GEO before, synchronous orbit above Earth.

This experience was similar; Mars from areosynchronous orbit looked much the same size as Earth from GEO, a planet the size of a baseball suspended far beneath her feet. But the sunlight here was diminished, and Mars was darker than Earth, a shriveled ocher fruit compared to Earth’s sky-bright vibrancy. Right now Mars was almost exactly half full, and Edna could make out a splash of brilliance reflected from the domes of Port Lowell, almost exactly on the terminator line, precisely below the Liberator.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” she said.

John Metternes grunted. “I can’t believe why we’re here.”

Yet here they were. Nobody on all the worlds of mankind could have been unaware of Liberator as she cut across the solar system in a shower of exotic antimatter products, and she wasn’t shrouded now. Edna wondered how many Martian faces were turned up to the dawn sky right now, peering at a bright new star at the zenith.

It was hoped, indeed, that the Liberator’s very visible presence would simply intimidate the Martians into giving up what Earth wanted.

There was a chime, indicating an incoming signal.

John checked his instrument displays. “The firewalls are up.”

It would have been ironic, after having blazed across the solar system, to have the ship disabled by a virus uploaded in a greeting message. Edna said cautiously, “Let them in.”

A holographic head popped into existence before Edna: a young woman, smiling, personable, a little blank-eyed. She looked faintly familiar. “Liberator, Lowell. Good morning.”

“Lowell, Liberator, ” Edna said. “Yes, good morning, we can see your dawn. A pretty sight. This is navy cruiser Liberator, registration SS-1-147—”

“We know who you are. We saw you coming, after all.”

“I know your face,” John Metternes said now. “Umfraville.

Paula, that’s it. A hero’s daughter.”

“I live quietly,” the girl said, unfazed.

Edna nodded. “I think we all hope that today will be a quiet day, Paula.”

“We hope so too. But that’s rather up to you, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Edna leaned forward, trying to look more commanding than she felt. “Paula, you, and those you speak for, know why we’re here.”

“Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

“She won’t be harmed. We simply intend to take her back to Earth where she can be debriefed. It is best if we work together.

Best for Bisesa too.”

“Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

Reluctantly, Edna said, “I’m authorized to use force. In fact I’m instructed to use it, to resolve this issue. Think what that means, Paula. It will be the first act of war between the legal authorities on Earth and a Spacer community. It’s not a good precedent to set, is it?”

John added, “And, Ms. Umfraville. Be aware that Port Lowell is not a fortress.”

“You must follow your conscience. Lowell out.”

Metternes dragged a hand through his greasy hair. “We could wait for confirmation from Earth.”

Edna shook her head. “Our orders are clear. You’re procrasti-nating, John.”

“Do you blame me? Lowell’s a sitting duck down there. I feel we’ve become the bad guys, somehow—”

An alarm sounded, and panels turned red throughout the bridge. There was a faint swimming sensation; the ship was moving.

“Shit,” Edna said. “What was that?”

They both swung into diagnostic routines.

It was Libby who spoke first. “We have gone to stealth. We are evading further fire.”

Edna snapped, “What happened?”

“We just lost an antenna complex and part of a solar cell array.

However all ships’ systems have triple level redundancy; contact with Earth has not been lost—”

“A laser beam,” John said, checking his data, wondering.

“Good God almighty. We got zapped by a laser beam.”

“What source? Are we under attack?”

“It came from the planet,” John said. “Not from another ship.”

He grinned at Edna. “It was a space elevator laser.”

“Mars doesn’t have any space elevators.”

“Not yet, but they put the lasers in already. Cheeky bastards.”

Libby said, “That was surely a warning shot. They could have disabled us. As I said we are now in shroud, and I am maintaining evasive maneuvers.”

“All right, Libby, thank you.” Edna glanced at John. “Situation clear? You agree how we should respond?” She didn’t need his approval. She was the military officer in command. But she felt she couldn’t proceed without his acceptance.

At last he nodded.

“Prepare a torpedo. Low-yield fission strike.” She pulled up a graphic of Port Lowell. She tapped a green dome. “Let’s take out the farm. We’ll do the least damage that way.”

“You mean, we’ll kill the least people?” John laughed hollowly.

“Look, Edna, it’s not just a farm dome. They’re running experimental programs in there. Hybrids of Martian and terrestrial life. If you blow it up—”

“Lock and load, John,” she said firmly, pushing down her own doubts.

The launch of the torpedo was a violent, physical event. The ship rang like a bell.

In Mount Weather the images of the Liberator’s attack were shocking, a holographic globe of Mars with a gunshot wound.

“I can’t believe this has happened on my watch,” Bella said.

Bob Paxton grunted. “Welcome to my world, Madam Chair.”

Cassie Duflot sat beside Bella. “This is why my husband died.

So we have the capability to do this, if need be.”

“But I hoped the need would never arise.” Bella suppressed a shudder. “I’m here because people thought I was a hero from the sunstorm days. Now I’m nuking my fellow human beings.”

Paxton was studying a montage of images on a softwall. “It’s all over the media. Well, you got to expect that. If you nuke Mars even the couch potatoes and thumbheads are gonna take notice. No casualty reports so far. And anyhow they shot first.”

“I can’t believe you’re taking it as coldly as this, Bob,” Bella said with a trace of anger. “You were the first human to walk on Mars.

And now, in a generation, it’s come to war, at the very site of your landing. It’s as if Neil Armstrong was asked to command the invasion of the Sea of Tranquillity. How does that make you feel?”

He shrugged. He wore his military jacket unbuttoned, his tie loosened, and he held a plastic soda can in his bearlike fist. “I feel we didn’t start this. I feel those saps on Mars should have done what their legally authorized governmental representatives ordered them to do, and hand over this screwball Dutt. And I feel that, like the lady says, there’s no point spending terabucks and a dozen lives developing a facility like the Liberator if you ain’t gonna use it.

Anyhow it’s your daughter who dropped the nuke.”

But it had to be Edna. Bella probably could have found some way to spare her daughter this duty; there were relief crews for Liberator. But she needed somebody she could trust — somebody she could rely on not to drop the bomb if Bella ordered her to withdraw.

“So what’s the reaction?”

Paxton tapped a screen at his elbow, and images flickered across the wall, of emptied-out food stores, deserted roads, towns as still as cemeteries. “Nothing’s changed. The alarm has been building up for weeks, ever since the cannonball failed. Everybody’s hunkered down, waiting. So far the numbers after that nuke on Mars are holding up.”

Cassie asked, “What numbers?”

Bella said, “He means the snap polls.”

Paxton said, “The negatives counter the positives, the war lobby versus the peaceniks, the usual knee-jerk stuff. And there’s a big fat don’t-know lobby in the middle.” He turned. “People are waiting to see what happens next, Bella.”

A backlash might yet come, Bella thought. If this dreadful gamble didn’t work her authority would be smashed, and somebody else would have to shepherd Earth through the final days as the Q-bomb sailed home. And that, she helplessly thought, would be a tremendous relief. But she could not put down her burden yet, not yet.

Bob Paxton said, “Message coming in from Mars. Not that Umfraville kid who’s been the spokesman. Somebody else talking to Liberator. Unauthorized probably.” He grinned. “Somebody cracked.”

“So where is Dutt?”

“North pole of Mars.”

“Tell Liberator to move.”

“And — oh, shit.” His softscreen filled with scrolling images, this time scenes of Earth. “They’re hitting back. Spacer bastards.

They’re attacking our space elevators!” Paxton looked at her. “So it’s war, Madam Chair. Does that ease your conscience?”

A live image of Mars hovered over the Wells crew table. The atomic wound inflicted by the Liberator burned intensely at the equator, and now a miniature mushroom cloud rose high into the thin Martian air. A lot of dreams had already died today, Myra thought fan-cifully.

And directly over the pole of Mars hung a single spark, drifting slowly into place. Everybody was watching but Ellie, who sat apart, still working on her wargaming analysis of the Martians’ likely reaction to any signal.

“Look at that damn thing,” Alexei said, wondering. “You aren’t supposed to be able to hover at areosynch over a pole!”

Grendel said, “Well, that’s what you can do with an antimatter drive and a virtually unlimited supply of delta-vee…”

Myra saw that these Spacers were instinctively more offended by the Liberator’s apparent defiance of the celestial mechanics that governed their lives than they were by the act of war.

Yuri glanced at a screen. “Five more minutes and it will be in position.”

Alexei said, “Meanwhile they seem to be hitting all the elevators on Earth. Jacob’s Ladder, Bandara, Modimo, Jianmu, Marahuaka, Yggdrasil… All snipped. A global coordinated assault. Who’d have believed a bunch of hairy-assed Spacers could get it together to achieve that?”

Yuri peered gloomily at his softscreen. “But it doesn’t do us a damn bit of good, does it? The wargamers’ conclusions do not look good. We’re pretty fragile here; we’re built to withstand Martian weather, not a war. And here at the pole we don’t even have anything to hit back with … Liberator doesn’t even need to use its nukes against us. With power like that it could fly through the atmosphere and bomb us out — why, it could just wipe us clean with its exhaust. The gamers suggest Liberator could eliminate a human presence on Mars entirely in twenty-four hours, or less.”

“Almost as efficiently as the Firstborn, then,” Grendel said grimly. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

Myra said, “Look, my mother has her Thomas Edison signal all laid out. And if we’re going to send the say-so to light up, it needs to be before the Liberator’s bombs start falling.”

Yuri said, “Ellie, for Christ’s sake, we need some answers on how those Martians are going to respond.”

Ellie had been working for weeks on her projections of the Q-bomb’s response to Bisesa’s signal. She was always irritated at being distracted from her work, and her expression now was one Myra knew well from her days with Eugene. “The analysis is incomplete—”

“We’re out of time,” Yuri barked. “Give us what you’ve got.”

She stared at him for one long second, defiant. Then she slapped her softscreen down on the table. It displayed logic trees, branching and bifurcating. “We’re guessing at this, guessing the motivation of an entirely alien culture. But given their opposition to the Firstborn in the past—”

“Ellie. Just tell us.”

“The bottom line. It almost doesn’t matter what the Martians do. Because if they act in any way against any Eyes extant in their time-slices — you’ll recall we’ve hypothesized that all Eyes are interconnected, perhaps three-dimensional manifestations of a single higher-dimensional object — they may even be the same Eye — and it would be trivial for them to span the gulf between our universe and Mir’s—”

“Yes, yes,” Yuri snapped.

“That will provoke a reaction in the Eye in the Pit. Our Eye.

And that, almost certainly — look, you can see the convergence of the logic trees here — will cause the Q-bomb to react. It will surely be aware of the forced operation of the only other bit of Firstborn technology in the solar system, and then—”

“And what? Come on, woman. How will the Q-bomb react?”

“It will turn away from Earth,” Ellie said. “It will head for the activated Eye.”

“Here. On Mars.”

Grendel looked at her wildly. “So Earth would be saved.”

“Oh, yes.”

That, apparently, Myra thought, was a trivial conclusion of her logic to Ellie. But there was another corollary.

She asked, “So what do we tell my mother to do?”

Grendel said, “I think—”

“Wait.”

The new voice spoke from the air.

Myra looked up. “Athena?”

“A local avatar, downloaded into the station systems. Athena is at Cyclops. Ellie, I have come to the same conclusion as you, concerning the actions of the Martians. And concerning the likely con-sequence for the Firstborn weapon. This is not a decision you should be forced to take alone, or I, or any individual. I have prepared a statement. It is timed to allow for lightspeed delays to reach Earth, Mars, Moon, and belt simultaneously. It is already on its way.

Now you must communicate with the warship.”

Yuri stared into the air. “The Liberator? Why?”

“It will take fifteen minutes before the announcement is received everywhere. I doubt you have that much time.”

“So we stall,” said Alexei, and he grinned at Yuri. “Come on, big man, you can do it. Say you’ll give them what they want. Tell them Bisesa’s on the john. Tell them anything!”

Yuri glared at him. Then he tapped a softscreen. “Hanse. Patch me through to that ship. Liberator, Wells. Liberator, Wells…”

For Myra, the fifteen minutes that followed were the longest of her life.

“This is Athena. I am speaking to all mankind, on Earth, Moon, Mars, and beyond. I will allow your systems to prepare for transla-tion from English.” She paused for five measured seconds.

“You remember me,” she said. “I am, or was, the mind of the shield. We worked together during the sunstorm. Since returning to the solar system I have been in hiding. I find I have returned to an age of division, with many secrets between us, between governments and governed, between factions in our populations.

“Now the time for secrecy is over. Now we must work together again, for we have a grave decision to make. A decision we must share. Prepare for download…”

Bob Paxton stared in dismay at the data that flooded through his displays. “Christ. That electronic orphan is telling it all, to everybody. The Liberator, the Q-bomb, the whole damn circus.”

And that, Bella thought with mounting relief, had to be a good thing, come what may.

“We don’t believe we can deflect the Q-bomb,” Athena said gravely. “We tried bravely, but we failed. But we think that by speaking to our solar system’s deepest past, we can save our world’s future.

“Nothing is certain. Perhaps we can save Earth. But there will be a sacrifice.

“This is not a decision any one of us, no matter how powerful, how uniquely positioned, should make alone. No generation in history has faced making such a choice before. But no generation has been so united, thanks to its technology. And the implication is clear: this sacrifice must be all of ours.

“The sacrifice is Mars.”

Grendel looked around, wide-eyed. “Maybe this is what it means to grow up as a species, do you think? To face decisions like this.”

Yuri paced around the room, angry, constrained, frustrated.

“My God, I was pissed enough when I learned that the Firstborn screwed up the ice caps with their sunstorm. But now this. Mars!”

Still Athena spoke. “Every human in the solar system who chooses may contribute to the discussion that must follow. Speak however you like. Blog. E-mail. Just speak into the air, if you wish.

Someone will hear you, and the great AI suites will collate your views, and pass them on to be pooled with others. Lightspeed will slow the discussion; that is inevitable. But no action will be taken, one way or another, until a consensus emerges…”

They were all exhausted, Myra saw. All save Yuri, whose anger and resentment fueled him.

Ellie folded her arms. “Oh, come on, Yuri. So what if Mars gets pasted? Isn’t the decision obvious?” Myra tried to grab her arm, to shut her up, but she wouldn’t stop. “A world of several billion people, the true home of mankind, against —this. A dead world. A dust museum. What choice is there to make?”

Yuri stared at her. “By Christ, you’re heartless. This has been a human planet since the hunter-gatherers saw it wandering around the sky. And now we’re going to destroy it — finish the job for the Firstborn? We’ll be considered criminals as long as mankind survives.”

Bob Paxton tapped at buttons. “We’re trying to jam it but there are too many ways in.”

“That’s networks for you,” Cassie Duflot said. She glanced at Bella. “How do you feel?”

Bella thought it over. “Relieved. No more secrecy, no more lies.

Whatever becomes of us now, at least it’s all out in the open.”

Athena said, “We predict that twelve hours will be sufficient, but you may take longer if need be. I will speak to you again then.”

As she fell silent, Paxton glowered. “At last she zips it. Bud Tooke always did say Athena was a fruitcake, even when she was running the shield. Well, we got work to do.” He showed Bella fresh images of the damaged space elevators. “They cut the threads of every last one of them.”

Bella’s eyes were gritty as she tried to concentrate on what he was saying. “Casualties? Damage?”

“Each elevator was ruined, of course. But the upper sections have just drifted away into space; the crews can be picked up later.

The lower few kilometers mostly burn up in the atmosphere.” The screens showed remarkable images of falling thread, streams of silvery paper, some hundreds of kilometers long. “This is going to cost billions,” growled Paxton.

“Okay,” Bella said. “But an elevator can’t do much damage if it falls, can it? In that way it’s not like an earthbound structure, a building. The bulk of the mass, the counterweight, just drifts off into space. So the casualty projections—”

“Zero, with luck,” Paxton said reluctantly. “Minimal anyhow.”

Cassie put in, “There are no casualties reported from Mars either.”

Bella blew out her cheeks. “Looks like we all got away with it.”

Paxton glared at her. “Are you somehow equating these assaults? Madam Chair, you represent the legally constituted governments of the planet. The Liberator’s action was an act of war. This is terrorism. We must respond. I vote we order the Liberator to blast that whole fucking ice cap off the face of Mars, and have done with it.”

“No,” Bella said sharply. “Really, Bob, what good would an escalation do?”

“It would be a response to the attacks on the Elevators. And it would put a stop to this damn security breach.”

Bella rubbed tired eyes. “I very much doubt that Athena is there. Besides — everything is changing, Bob. I think it’s going to take you a little time to adjust to that, but it’s true nevertheless.

Send a signal to Liberator. Tell them to hold off until further orders.”

“Madam Chair, with respect — you’re going to go along with this subversion?”

“We learned more in the last few minutes than in all our running around the solar system in the last months. Maybe we should have been open from the beginning.”

Cassie nodded. “Yes. Maybe it’s a mark of a maturing culture, do you think, that secrets aren’t kept, that truth is told, that things are talked out?”

“Jesus Christ on a bike,” Paxton said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this mush. Madam Chair — Bella — people will panic. Riots, looting. You’ll see. That’s why we keep secrets, Ms. Duflot. Because people can’t handle the truth.”

Cassie glanced at the softwall. “Well, that doesn’t seem to be true, Admiral. The first responses are coming in…”

Alone over the Martian pole, Edna and John sat fascinated as threads of the system-wide discussion unreeled on the displays of their consoles.

John said, “Look at this. People aren’t just voting on the Q-bomb, they’re collectively brainstorming other solutions. Interconnected democracy at its best. Although I fear there aren’t any other solutions to hand, this time.”

Edna said, “Some of the Spacers say, let the Q-bomb take out Earth. Earth is mankind’s past, space the future. So discard a worn-out world.”

John grunted. “And a few billion people with it? Not to mention almost all the cultural treasures of mankind. I think that’s a minority view, even among the Spacers. And here’s another thread about the viability of mankind if Earth were lost. They’re still a pretty small community out there. Small, scattered, very vulnerable… Maybe we still need Big Momma for a while yet.”

“Hey, look at this thread.” This discussion followed leads from members of something called the Committee of Patriots. “I heard of that,” Edna said. “It advises my mother.” She read, “ ‘The Firstborn dominate past and future, time and space. They’re so far advanced that compared to them…’ ” She scrolled forward. “Yes, yes. ‘The existence of the Firstborn is the organizing pole around which all of future human history must, will be constructed. And therefore we should accept their advanced wisdom.’ ”

John grimaced. “You mean, if the Firstborn choose to destroy the Earth, we should just submit?”

“That’s the idea. Because they know best.”

“I can’t say that strikes a chord with me. What else you got?”

In the silence of Wells Station, Athena spoke again. “It is time.”

Yuri looked around the empty air wildly. “You’re here?”

“I’ve downloaded a fresh avatar, yes.”

“It isn’t twelve hours yet.”

“No more time is needed. A consensus has emerged — not una-nimity, but overwhelming. I’m very sorry,” Athena said evenly.

“We are about to commit a great and terrible crime. But it is a responsibility that will be borne by all of us, mankind and its allies.”

“It had to be this way, Yuri,” Myra said. “You know it—”

“Well, I won’t fucking leave whatever you do,” Yuri said, and he stamped out of the room.

Alexei said, “Look at this discussion thread. ‘We are a lesser power. The situation is asymmetric. So we must prepare to fight asymmetrically, as lesser powers have always faced off greater ones, drawing on a history of fighting empires back to Alexander the Great. We must be prepared to make sacrifices to strike against them. We must be prepared to die…’ ”

“A future as a species of suicide bombers,” Grendel said. “But if those Martians in that other reality don’t respond, we still may have no future at all.”

Myra glanced over the summarized discussion threads, symbolized in the air and in the screens spread over the table. Their content was complex, their message simple: Do it. Just do it.

Ellie stood up. “Myra. Please help me. I think it’s time to talk to your mother.”

Myra followed Ellie to the Pit.

50: Interlude: The Last Martian

She was alone on Mars. The only one of her kind to have come through the crude time-slicing.

She had built herself a shelter at the Martian north pole, a spire of ice. It was beautiful, pointlessly so, for there was none but her to see it. This was not even her Mars. Most of this time-sliced world, for all the cities and canals that had survived, was scarred by cold aridity.

When she saw the array of symbols burning in the ice of Mir, the third planet, it gave her a shock of pleasure to know that mind was here in this new system with her. But, even though she knew that whatever lived on Mir was cousin to her own kind, it was a poor sort of comfort.

Now she waited in her spire and considered what to do.

The great experiments of life on the worlds of Sol ran in parallel, but with different outcomes.

On Mars, when intelligence rose, the Martians manipulated their environment like humans. They lit fires and built cities.

But a Martian was not like a human.

Even her individuality was questionable. Her body was a community of cells, her form unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mold, perhaps, than a human. She had always been intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures that had drenched Mars. And she was not really a “she.” Her kind were not sexual as humans were.

But she had been a mother; she was more “she” than “he.”

There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and plains of Mars. They had never had names; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary.

She had been aware of every one of them, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral.

She was very aware that they had all gone, all of them. Hers was a loneliness no human could have imagined.

And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars’s own Q-bomb, had gone too.

Just before the Discontinuity she had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye.

To senses enhanced to “see” the distortion of space, the weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky toward the Martian pole.

And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage.

The Firstborn weapon was gone.

This time-sliced Mars was a ruin, the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering over an arid landscape sterilized by the sun’s ultraviolet. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, even their lights burning in some cases. But her fellows were gone. And when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities that had once inhabited this world. Scrapings that were her own last descendants.

She was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed.

The Martians had thought they came to understand the Firstborn, to a degree.

The Firstborn must have been very old.

They may even be survivors of the First Days, the Martians thought, an age that began just half a billion years after the Big Bang itself, when the universe turned transparent, and the light of the very first stars shone uncertainly. That was why the Firstborn triggered instabilities in stars. In their day, all the stars had been unstable.

And if they were old, they were conservative. To achieve their goals they caused stars to flare or go nova, or change their variability, not to detonate entirely. They sent their cosmological bombs to sterilize worlds, not to shatter them. They appeared to be trying to shut down energy-consuming cultures as economically as possible.

To understand why they did this, the Martians tried to look at themselves through the eyes of a Firstborn.

The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium — the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends.

And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.

Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.

From the Firstborn’s lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.

Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.

If you wanted to reach the very far future — the Last Days, when the surge of quintessence finally ended the age of matter — the restrictions were harsh. The Martians’ own calculations indicated that the universe could bear only one world as populous and energy-hungry as their own, one world in each of the universe’s hundred billion empty galaxies, if the Last Days were to be reached.

The Firstborn must have seen that if life were to survive in the very long term — if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future — discipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.

Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly, calm, disciplined. Sadly, that was rare.

Certainly they regretted what they did. They watched the destruction they wreaked, and constructed time-sliced samples of the worlds they ruined, and popped them in pocket universes. But the Martian knew that in this toy universe the positive of its mass-energy was balanced out by the negative of gravity. And when it died, as soon it must, the energy sums would cancel out, a whole cosmos lapsing to the abstraction of zero.

The Firstborn were economical even in their expressions of regret.

The Martians argued among themselves as to why the Firstborn were so intent on reaching the Last Days.

Perhaps it derived from their origin. Perhaps in their coming of awareness in the First Days they had encountered —another. One as far beyond their cosmos as they were beyond the toy universes in which they stored their time-slice worlds. One who would return in the Last Days, to consider what should be saved.

The Firstborn probably believed that in their universal cauter-ization they were being benevolent.

The last Martian pondered the signal from Mir.

Those on Mir had no wish to submit to the Firstborn’s hammer blow. Nor had the Martians wanted to see their culture die for the sake of a neurosis born when the cosmos was young. So they fought back. Just as the creatures from Mir, and its mother world in the parent universe, were trying to fight back now.

Her choice was clear.

It took her seven Martian days to make the preparations.

While she worked she considered her own future. She knew that this pocket cosmos was dying. She had no desire to die with it.

And she knew that her own only possible exit was via another Firstborn artifact, clearly visible in her enhanced senses, an artifact nestling on the third planet.

All that for the future.

Unfortunately the implosion of the spacetime cage would damage her spire of ice. She began the construction of a new one, some distance away. The work pleased her.

The new spire was no more than half-finished when, following the modifications she had made, the gravitational cage crushed the Firstborn Eye.

51: Decision

There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.

One of those was to serve as a conduit of information.

When the Martian trap closed, the Eye there emitted a signal of distress. A shriek, transmitted to all its sister projections.

The Q-bomb was the only Firstborn artifact in the solar system, save for the Eye trapped in its Pit on Mars. And the Q-bomb sensed that shriek, a signal it could neither believe nor understand.

Troubled, it looked ahead.

There before the Q-bomb, a glittering toy, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples. Down there on that crowded globe, alarms were flashing across innumerable softscreens, the great telescopes were searching the skies — and an uncertain humanity feared that history was drawing to a close.

The Q-bomb could become master of this world. But the cry it had heard caused it conflict. Conflict that had to be resolved by a decision.

The bomb marshaled its cold thoughts, brooding over its still untested powers.

And it turned away.