Firstborn

52: Parade

Bisesa and Emeline stepped out of the apartment for the last time.

They were both laden with backpacks and valises. The sky was a lid, but at least it wasn’t snowing.

Emeline locked up her apartment carefully, and tucked the keys away in a pocket in her thick fur coat. Of course she would never come this way again, and it wouldn’t be long before the ice came and crushed the building. But Emeline locked up even so.

Bisesa said nothing; she would have done exactly the same.

Bisesa made sure one more time that she had brought out the only possession of real importance to her: her phone, tucked into an inside pocket with its spacesuit battery packs.

Then they set off for Michigan Avenue.

Michigan, a canyon of concrete and brick running between blackened skyscrapers and shut-up stores, was always a wind tunnel, and Emeline and Bisesa turned away from the north to protect their eyes.

But the procession was already gathering, thousands of people standing around in the frozen mud, gradually forming up into an orderly column. Bisesa hadn’t known there were still so many left in Chicago. There were carriages of every kind, from farmyard carts to graceful phaetons and stanhopes, with those stocky Arctic-adapted horses harnessed up. Even the city’s grip-car streetcars were standing ready to roll one last time, full of passengers.

Most people, though, were on foot, with bundles on their backs or in barrows, and with their children or grandchildren holding their hands. Many of the Chicagoans were bundled up in their Arctic furs, but today some defied the elements and wore what looked like their Sunday best, frock coats and sweeping gowns, top hats and fur coats. Even the city’s many prostitutes had come out into the light. With painted lips and rouged cheeks and defiant flashes of ankle or cleavage, they laughed and flirted like colourful birds.

There was an excited buzz of conversation.

The parade was to be led by gleaming black carriages that lined up outside the Lexington Hotel. These would carry the city’s dignitaries, principally Mayor Rice’s relatives and allies. Thomas Edison, it was rumored, was wrapped up in blankets in a carriage of his own design, heated and lit by a portable electric generator.

Rice’s own carriage of polished wood and black ribbon was at the very head of the procession, and Bisesa was astounded to see that it was to be drawn by a woolly mammoth. The animal was restless. It raised its head with that odd bulge over the crown, and its long tusks curled bright in the air. As its nervous handlers beat at it with rods and whips, it trumpeted, a brittle call that echoed from the windows of the skyscrapers. It was quite a stunt for Rice, Bisesa admitted grudgingly — just as long as the mammoth didn’t wreck the carriage it was supposed to haul.

The whole thing was a spectacle, just as it was meant to be, and Bisesa admired Rice and his advisors for setting it up this way, and for choosing the date. On Mir this was July 4, according to the calendars devised by the university astronomers.

But this Independence Day parade was actually the final abandonment of old Chicago. These were not revelers but refugees, and they faced a great trial, a long walk all the way down through the suburbs and out of the city, heading south, ever south, to a hopeful new home beyond the ice. Even now there were some who refused to join the flight, hooligans and hedonists, drunks and deadbeats, and a few stubborn types who simply wouldn’t leave their homes.

Few expected these refuseniks to survive another winter.

Human life would go on here, then. But today saw the end of civilized Chicago. And beyond the bright human chatter Bisesa could hear the growl of the patient ice.

Emeline led Bisesa to their place among the respectable folk who massed behind the lead carriages. Drummers waited in a block, shivering, their mittened hands clutching their sticks.

They quickly found Harry and Joshua, Emeline’s sons. Harry, the older son and walkaway, had returned to help his mother leave the city. Bisesa was glad to see them. Both tall, lean, well-muscled young men, dressed in well-worn coats of seal fur and with their faces greased against the cold, they looked adapted for the new world. With the boys, Bisesa thought her own chances of surviving this trek were much improved.

Gifford Oker came pushing out of the crowd to meet them. He was encased in an immense black fur coat, with a cylindrical hat pulled right down to his eye line. He carried only a light backpack with cardboard tubes protruding from it. “Madam Dutt, Mrs.

White. I’m glad to have found you.”

Emeline said playfully, “You’re not too heavily laden, Professor.

What are these documents?”

“Star charts,” he said firmly. “The true treasure of our civilization. A few books too — oh, what a horror it was that we were not able to empty the libraries! For once a book is lost to the ice, a little more of our past is gone forever. But as to my personal effects, my pots and pans, I have my own troop of slave bearers to help me with all that. They are called graduate students.”

Another stiff professor’s joke. Bisesa laughed politely.

“Madam Dutt, I suppose you know that Jacob Rice is looking for you. He’ll wait until the procession is underway. But he wants you to come see him in his carriage. He has Abdikadir at his side already.”

“He does? I had hoped Abdikadir would be with you.” Abdi had been working on astronomy projects with Oker and his students.

But Oker shook his head. “What the mayor asks for, the mayor gets.”

“I suppose it might be worth a ride in the warmth for a bit.

What does he want?”

Oker cocked an eyebrow. “I think you know. He wants to drain your knowledge of Alexander and his Old World empire. Sarissae and steam engines — I admit I’m intrigued myself!”

She smiled. “He’s still dreaming of world domination?”

“Look at it from Rice’s point of view,” Oker said. “This is the completion of one great project, the migration from the old Chicago to the new, a work that has consumed his energies for years. Jacob Rice is still a young man, and a hungry and energetic one, and I suppose we should be glad of that or we surely wouldn’t have got as far as this. Now he looks for a new challenge.”

“This world is a pretty big place,” Bisesa said. “Room enough for everybody.”

“But not infinite,” Oker said. “And after all we have already made tentative contacts across the ocean. Rice is no Alexander, I’m convinced of that, but neither he nor the Great King are going to submit to the other.

“And, you know, there may be something worth fighting for.

Rice has accepted what you and Abdikadir have said of the future.

He has demanded of his scientists, specifically of me, to explore ways to avert the end of the universe — or perhaps even to escape it.”

“Wow. He does think big.”

“And, you see, he suspects that the dominance of this world may be a necessary first step to saving it.”

Rice might actually be right, Bisesa thought. If the only way back to Earth was through the Eye in Babylon, war over possession of that city might ultimately be inevitable.

Oker sighed. “The trouble is, however, that once you are in the pocket of a man like Rice, it’s hard to climb out again. I should know,” he said ruefully. “And you must decide, Bisesa Dutt, what you want.”

She was clear about that. “I’ve achieved what I came here for.

Now I have to get back to Babylon. That’s the way I came into this world, and it’s my only connection to my daughter. And I think I ought to take Abdikadir back home too. The court of Alexander needs clear intelligences like his.”

Oker thought that over. “You have given us much, Madam Dutt — not least, an awareness of our place in this peculiar panoply of multiple universes. Jacob Rice’s wars are not your wars; his goals are not your goals. At some point we will help you get away from him.” He glanced at Emeline and her sons, who nodded their support.

“Thank you,” Bisesa said sincerely. “But what about you, Professor?”

“Well, the foundation stone of the new observatory at New Chicago has already been laid. Building that might be enough to see me through. But beyond that—” He looked up at the dense mass of cloud above. “Sometimes I feel privileged just to be here, you know, on the world you call Mir. I have been projected into an entirely new universe, in which different worlds are suspended, studied by no astronomer before my generation! But the seeing is always poor. I would love to travel above the clouds of Mir — to sail to the Moon and the other worlds in some aerial phaeton. It beggars my imagination as to how that might be achieved, but if Alexander the Great can run a steam-train service, perhaps New Chicago can reach the stars. What do you think?” He grinned, suddenly boyish.

Bisesa smiled. “I think that’s a marvelous idea.”

Emeline clung to the arm of Harry, her son. “Well, you can keep the stars. All I want is a plot of land that’s ice-free at least some of the time. And as for the future — five hundred years, you say?

That will see me out, and my boys. It’s time enough for me.”

“You’re very wise,” Oker said.

There was a blast on a hunting horn.

An anticipatory cheer went up. Men, women and children shuffled, adjusting the packs on their backs. The horses neighed and bucked, harness rattled, and the somewhat shapeless crowd, crammed into the muddy street, began to take on the appearance of a procession.

Lights flared, startling Bisesa. Electric searchlights suspended from the skyscrapers splashed light over walls that were now revealed to be draped in bunting and the Stars and Stripes. The cheers grew louder.

“All scavenged from the world’s fair,” Emeline said, smiling, a bit tearful. “I have my reservations about Jacob Rice, but I’d never deny he has style! What a way to say good-bye to the old lady.”

A walking beat was sounded by the massed drummers.

With a protesting trumpet Rice’s harnessed mammoth led the march, jolting the Mayor’s carriage into motion. The crowd was packed so tightly that the movement took time to ripple through its ranks; it was some minutes before Bisesa, Emeline, and the others had room to walk. At last all the great crowd shuffled forward, heading south along Michigan Avenue toward Jackson Park. Armed troopers wearing yellow armbands walked to either side of the dense column, to fend off the wild animals. Even the yellow streetcars clattered into motion, one last time, though they couldn’t carry their passengers far along their journey.

As they marched the Chicagoans began to sing, the rhythm driven by the drums and the slow beat of the steps of their swaddled feet. At first they plumped for patriotic songs: “My Country

’Tis of Thee,” “America,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But after a while they settled into a song Bisesa had heard many times here, a Tin Pan Alley hit of the 1890s from which Chicago had been plucked. It was a sweet dirge about an old man who had lost his love. The mournful voices rose up, echoing from the brick, glass, and concrete faces of the abandoned buildings around them, singing of the hopes that had vanished “after the ball.”

Bisesa heard a crash of glass, drunken laughter, and then a dull crump. Looking back, she saw that flames were already licking out of the darkened upper windows of the Lexington Hotel.

53: Aurora

December 7, 2070

With Bill Carel and Bob Paxton at her side, Bella Fingal gazed out of the shuttle’s small blister window as they approached one of the most famous spacecraft in human history.

Bella felt exhausted, deep in her bones, after the strain of the last months. But now it was almost over. Only a few more days remained to the Q-bomb’s closest approach to Earth: “Q-day,” as the commentators called it. The astronomers and the military assured her daily that the bomb had stuck to the path to which it had been deflected after the Eye on Mars had suddenly flared to life; the Q-bomb would come close, even sailing between Earth and Moon, but it would not impact the planet.

Bella had to plan her affairs as if that were true. Today, for instance, she had to get through this conference on Aurora, fulfilling one of her last self-appointed duties, the kick-starting of a new debate about the future of mankind. But she suspected that like the rest of the human race she wouldn’t quite believe it until the Q-bomb really had passed by harmlessly. And like much of mankind she planned to spend Q-day itself with her family.

After that she could lay down the burden of office at last, and submit herself to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, and somebody else would have to make the decisions. She was content with that. Content even at being relieved of office before the final act of this lethal drama was played out, in the abandonment of Mars.

The shuttle turned. She was maundering; she had almost forgotten where she was. She peered out of her window, concentrating on a remarkable, and familiar, view.

Shining in raw sunlight, Aurora 2 was ungainly, fragile-looking. She looked something like a drum majorette’s baton, a slim spine two hundred meters long connecting propulsion units and habitable compartments. The ship was badly scarred, paint peeling, solar-cell arrays blackened and curled up, and in one place the hull of the crew dome had burned and wrinkled back, exposing struts and partitions. Aurora had visibly withstood a terrible fire.

But she had achieved what had been asked of her.

Aurora had been the second manned ship to Mars. She had been intended to pick up Bob Paxton and his crew, who would have sailed home to their heroes’ welcome. But the sunstorm had put paid to those plans, and Aurora 2, one of the largest spacecraft of its day, was needed for other purposes than exploration, and she was brought back to Earth. L1, a stationary point between sun and Earth, was the logical place to hang a shield intended to shelter the Earth from the raging of the sunstorm. So it was here that Aurora had been stationed, to serve as a shack for the construction crews.

The shield was gone now. The storm had left it a monumental wreck, that had then been cannibalized to build new stations in space and on the Moon. But the Aurora herself remained here at L1, a permanent memorial to those astonishing days, and a stub of the shield had been kept in place around the ship, its glistening surface spiralling out from the embedded hull like a spiderweb.

Bella glanced at her fellow passengers. Bill Carel, frail, trembling slightly, his face full of anger at the betrayal by his son, barely seemed able to see the approaching ship.

Bob Paxton’s expression was harder to read.

Bella herself had served on the shield during the sunstorm, and had been up here many times since, for memorials, dedication services, museum openings, anniversaries. But for Bob Paxton it was different. As soon as he got back to Earth after the storm, he had gotten through the medals-and-presidents stuff as quickly as possible. Then he had thrown himself back into his military career, and had ultimately devoted his life to the issue of how to deal with the future Firstborn threat. Paxton had never visited L1, and probably hadn’t even seen Aurora 2 since he glimpsed her from the surface of Mars, sliding through the sky on its flyby pass, abandoning him and his crew. Now the old sky warrior’s face was creased, clamped, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

The shuttle turned with a remote clatter of attitude thrusters and nestled belly-down on the curving hull of Aurora’s habitable compartment. The sun was directly below Bella now, casting vertical shadows, and through a small window set over her head she saw the Earth, a blue lantern hanging directly opposite the position of the sun. Earth was full, of course; it always was, as seen from L1.

She wished she could see it more clearly.

With the docking complete, the shuttle closed its systems down.

“Welcome to Aurora 2, and the Shield Memorial Station.”

The soft female voice sent a shiver of familiarity through Bella.

This was different from all her previous visits. “Hello, Athena.

Welcome home.”

“Bella. It’s good to speak to you again. Please come aboard.”

A hatch opened in the floor. Bella released her seat restraint and floated into the air.

Alexei Carel and Lyla Neal were waiting for them on the bridge of Aurora.

This was the ship’s single most prestigious site, the location where Bud Tooke had once masterminded the salvation of the Earth. Now it was a museum, and the antique-looking softscreen displays, headsets, clipboards, and other bits of detritus from the days of crisis had been lovingly preserved under layers of transparent plastic. It always made Bella feel old to come back here.

Bill Carel was the last to come through onto the bridge. Clumsy in microgravity, evidently feeble, he looked oddly comical in his orange jumpsuit. But when he faced his son his expression was twisted. “You bloody little fool. And you, Lyla. You betrayed me.”

Alexei and Lyla clung to each other, drifting a little in the microgravity, nervous, defiant. Alexei was a skinny kid, only twenty-seven, and Lyla looked even younger. But then, reflected Bella, all true Spacers were just kids.

Alexei said, “We don’t see it like that, Dad. We did what we had to do. What we thought was best.”

“You spied on me,” Carel snapped. “You stole my work. You were a brilliant student, Lyla. Brilliant. And you’ve come to this.”

Lyla was cooler than her lover. “We were forced into it by your own actions, sir. You kept secrets. You wouldn’t tell people what they needed to know. You lied! If we were at fault, so were you.”

“And that,” Bella broke in, “is the first sensible thing anybody’s said.”

“I agree,” Athena said dryly. “Perhaps you should all sit down.

A small educational area has been set aside at the rear of the bridge…”

It was a plastic table, its top drenched with kid-friendly sunstorm info, with small seats set around it with microgravity bars to hook your feet onto. The five of them sat here, over the glimmering primary colors of the table, glowering.

“Well, I’m glad to be here, at any rate,” Athena said.

Bella looked up. “Was that a joke, Athena?”

“You remember me, Bella. I always was a joker.”

“You thought you were. So you’re pleased we brought you home from Cyclops.” If a distributed intelligence like Athena could be said to “be” anywhere, she, or rather her most complete definition, was now lodged in a secure memory store in one of Aurora’s abandoned engine rooms.

Athena said, “I was made welcome at Cyclops. I was protected there. But I was born to run the shield, born to be here. Of course I, this copy of me, have no memory of the sunstorm itself. It is actually educational for me to be here, to access the data stores. To learn what happened that day, as if I were any other visitor. It is humbling.”

“And may I humbly ask,” Bob Paxton asked sourly, “why the fuck you have dragged us all up here?” It was the first time he had spoken since coming aboard.

Bella laid her hand flat on the table, a gentle gesture that nevertheless commanded their attention. “Because this is neutral ground for Earthborn and Spacers, or as near as I could come up with.

Somehow we seem to have gotten through the Q-bomb crisis, though we fought like cats in a sack in the process. Well, now we need a new way of getting along.”

Alexei said, “I heard you’re standing down after Christmas.”

“More than that,” Paxton growled. “Madam Chair here is probably going to face a war crimes tribunal. As, in fact, am I.”

Lyla frowned. “But what of the attacks on the elevators? Who’s going to be held responsible for that?”

“I am happy to stand trial,” Athena said firmly, “if it will protect those whose actions I influenced.”

Alexei laughed. “They can’t put an AI on trial.”

“Of course they can,” Bella said. “Athena has rights. She is a Legal Person (Non-Human). But with rights come responsibilities.

She can be tried, just as much as I can be. Though I don’t think anybody has worked out what her sentence might be, if she’s found guilty…”

Athena said, “These trials will be played out in full public view, before courts representing both Earth and Spacer communities.

Whatever the outcome I hope it will be part of the reconciliation process. The healing.”

Bella said, “We all did what we thought we had to do. But that’s all in the past. The Q-bomb changed everything. It’s all different now.”

Lyla studied her curiously. “Different how?”

“For one thing, the politics…”

The species-wide debate forced by Athena on the decision to deflect the bomb had been a brief, traumatic shock to the political system. Perhaps it was a culmination of tensions that had been building up for decades among an increasingly interconnected mankind. Afterward, it hadn’t proven possible to shut down the debate.

“Everything is fluid, since the vote. There are new factions, new interest and protest groups, new sorts of lobbies. On Earth the last barriers between the old nations are being kicked down. Across the system people are ignoring the old categories, and are uniting with others with whom they find common cause, whichever world they happen to live on. An interconnected democracy is taking over, a mass, self-correcting wisdom, whether we like it or not.

Maybe it was good that our first great exercise in using our collective voice was over something we could pretty much unite around — in the end, perhaps, the Firstborn have done us a favor.

But that voice hasn’t been stilled.”

Alexei faced his father. “Look, Dad. Things have got to change in space, too. I mean the relationship between Spacers and Earth.”

“Between you and me, you mean,” said Bill Carel.

“That too. The idea that Earth can impose its will on space is a fantasy, no matter how many antimatter warships you build.”

In December 2070, there had been no declaration of independence; there were no Spacer nations, and at present all Spacers were colonists, formally owing their allegiance to one of Earth’s old nations or another. The Spacers had their own internal rivalries, of course. But as they looked back to an Earth reduced to a blue lamp in the sky, if they could see it at all, it was increasingly difficult for them to think of themselves as American Spacers versus Albanian, British Spacers versus Belgian…

“ ‘Spacer’ is an absurd label, really. A negative one that actually means ‘not of Earth.’ We’re all different, and we all have our own opinions.”

“You got that right,” Bob Paxton growled. “More opinions than fucking Spacers.”

“My point is, you can’t control us anymore. We can’t even control ourselves — and wouldn’t want to. We’re on a new road, Dad, and even we don’t know where it will lead.”

“Or what you will become,” said Carel. “But I have to let you go come what may, don’t I?”

Alexei smiled. “I’m afraid so.”

And there, Bella knew, was the subtext in the conversation between Earth and Spacers. If the mother world released her grip, she would lose her children forever.

Bob Paxton grunted. “Christ, I feel like blubbing.”

“All right, Bob,” Bella said. “Look, it’s a serious point. One of my last executive orders will be to initiate a new constitutional convention for all of us — Earth and the whole solar system—

based on recognized human rights precedents. We do not want a world government, I don’t think. What we do need are new mechanisms, new political forms to recognize the new fluidity. No more power centers,” she said. “No more secrets. We still need mechanisms to unify us, to ensure justice and equality of resource and opportunity — and fast-response agencies when crises hit.”

“Such as when the Firstborn take another swipe,” Paxton said.

“Yes. But we need ways to cope with threats without sacrificing our liberties.” She looked around at their faces, open or cynical.

“We have no precedent for how a civilization spanning several worlds is supposed to run itself. Maybe the Firstborn know; if they do they aren’t telling. I like to think that this is the next stage in our maturity as a culture.”

“Maturity? That sounds utopian,” Bill Carel said cautiously.

Bob Paxton grunted. “Yeah. And let’s just remember that however many heads you Spacer mutants grow, we’re all going to continue to be united by one thing.”

“The Firstborn,” Lyla said.

“Damn right,” Paxton said.

“Yes,” said Bella. “So take us through the new proposals, Bob.

The next phase of Fortress Sol.”

He looked at her, alarmed. “You sure about that, Madam Chair?”

“Openness, Bob. That’s the watchword now.” She smiled at the others. “Bob and his Committee of Patriots have been working on priorities. Even though their own legal status is under review, following events.”

Alexei smiled. “Can’t keep you old sky warriors down, eh, Admiral Paxton?”

Paxton looked ready to murder him. Bella laid a hand on his arm until he had calmed.

“Very well. Priority one. We need to act now. Between the sunstorm and the Q-bomb we had a generation to prepare. Granted we didn’t know what was coming. But in retrospect we didn’t do enough, and we can’t make that mistake again. The one good thing about the Q-bomb is the way it’s going to mobilize public opinion and support for such measures.

“Priority two. Earth. A lot of us were shaken up when you ragged-ass Spacers snipped the space elevators. We always knew how vulnerable you were in your domes and butterfly spaceships.

We didn’t know how vulnerable Earth was, though. The fact is we’re interconnected to a spaceborne economy. So we’re talking about robustifying Earth.”

Lyla grinned. “Nice word.”

“Homes like bunkers. Ground-based power sources, comms links, via secure optic-fiber cables. That kind of thing. Enough to withstand a planetary siege. Parameters to be defined.

“Priority three. And here’s the key,” Paxton said now, leaning forward, intent. “We got to disperse. We’ve got significant colonies off Earth already. But the wargamers say that if Earth had been taken out by the Q-bomb, it’s unlikely the Spacer colonies could have survived into the long term. Just too few of you, a gene pool too small, your fake ecologies too fragile, all of that.

“So we have to beef you up. Make the species invulnerable even to the loss of Earth.” He grinned at the young Spacers. “I’m talking massive, aggressive migration. To the Moon, the outer planet moons, space habs if we can put them up fast enough. Even Venus, which was so fucked over by the sunstorm it might be possible to live there. Maybe we can even start flinging a few ships to the stars, go chase those Chinese.”

“But it won’t work,” Alexei said. “Not even if you have a million people on Venus, say, under domes, and breathing machine air.

They’ll be just as vulnerable as we are now.”

“Sure. So we go further.” Paxton’s grin widened. He seemed to be enjoying shocking them. “Nice to know an old fart like me is still capable of thinking bigger than you kids. What’s the most robust hab we know? A planet.”

Lyla stared at him. “You’re talking of terraforming.”

“Making the Moon or Venus into worlds enough like Earth that you could walk around in the open, more or less unprotected.

Where you could grow crops in the open air. Where humans could survive, even if civilization fell, even if they forgot who they were and how they got there in the first place.”

“They’ve been thinking about this on Mars,” Lyla said. “Of course now—”

“We’ll lose Mars, but Mars wasn’t the only option. In the very long term it’s the only robust survival solution,” Paxton said.

Alexei looked skeptical. “This is the kind of program space ad-vocates have been pressing for since the days of Armstrong and Aldrin, and never got close to. It’s going to mean a massive transfer of resources.”

“Oh, yes,” Bella said. “In fact Bob’s view is already widely accepted. And it’s going to start soon.”

“What is?” Lyla asked, curious.

“You’ll see. Leave me one last surprise…”

“We’re serious about this,” Bob Paxton said, challenging, au-thoritative. “As serious as I’ve been about anything in my entire life.

To gain access to the future, we have to secure the present. That’s the bottom line.”

They fell back to talking over details of Paxton’s vision, argu-ing, fleshing out some aspects, rejecting others. Soon Paxton cleared the tabletop of its colorful sunstorm factoids and started to make notes.

Bella murmured to Athena, “Looks like it worked. I would never have thought I’d see the likes of Bob Paxton and Alexei Carel working together.”

“We live in strange times.”

“That we do, Athena. And they get stranger all the time. Anyhow it’s a start.” She glanced at her watch. “I hate to do it, but I ought to go check through my messages. Athena, will you bring them coffee? Anything they want.”

“Of course.”

She pushed herself out of her chair and drifted off the bridge, heading for the shuttle and her secure softscreens. Behind her the conversation continued, animated. She heard Alexei say, half-seriously, “I tell you what will unite us all. Sol Invictus. A new god for a new age…”

54: Q-Day

December 15, 2070

The shuttle landed Bella at Cape Canaveral.

Thales spoke to her. “Welcome home, Bella.”

Bella, bent over her softscreen, was startled to find she was down. All the way from L1 she had been working her messages, and monitoring the progress of the two great events that were due to take place today: the switching-on of the Bimini, the new space elevator system in the Atlantic, and the closest approach of the Q-bomb to the Earth. Both were on schedule, as best anybody knew. But it was hard not to keep checking.

The wheels stopped rolling, and the shuttle’s systems sighed to silence.

She shut down her softscreen and folded it up. “Thank you, Thales. Nice to be back. Athena sends her regards.”

“I’ve spoken to her several times.”

That made Bella oddly uneasy. She had often wondered what conversations went on between the great artificial intelligences, all above the heads of mankind. Even in her role as Council Chair, she had never fully found out.

“There’s a car waiting for you outside, Bella. Ready to take you to the VAB, where your family is waiting. Be careful when you stand up.”

It still hurt to be returned to a full gravity. “It gets tougher every damn time. Thales, remind me to order an exoskeleton.”

“I will, Bella.”

She clambered down to the runway. The day was bright, the sun low, the air fresh and full of salt. She checked her watch, which had corrected itself to local time; she had landed a little before ten a.m. on this crisp December morning.

She glanced out to sea, where a fine vertical thread climbed into the sky.

Thales murmured, “Just an hour to the Q-bomb pass, Bella.

The astronomers report no change in its trajectory.”

“Orbital-mechanics analyses are all very well. People have to see it.”

“I’ve encountered the phenomenon before,” Thales said calmly.

“I do understand, Bella.”

She grunted. “I’m not sure if you do. Not if you call it a ‘phenomenon.’ But we all love you anyhow.”

“Thank you, Bella.”

A car rolled up, a bubble of glass, smart and friendly. It whisked her away from the cooling hulk of her shuttle, straight toward the looming bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building.

At the VAB she was met by a security guard, a woman, good humored but heavily armed, who shadowed her from then on.

Bella crossed straight to a glass-walled elevator, and rose quickly and silently up through the interior of the VAB. She stared down over rockets clustered like pale trees. Once the rocket stacks of Saturn s and space shuttles had been assembled in this building.

Now a century old and still one of the largest enclosed volumes in the world, the VAB had been turned into a museum for the launchers of the first heroic age of American manned space exploration, from the Atlas to the shuttle and the Ares. And now the building was operational again. A corner had been cleared for the assembly of an Apollo — Saturn stack: a new Apollo 14, ready for its centennial launch in February.

Bella loved this immense temple of technology, still astonishing in its scale. But today she was more interested in who was waiting for her on the roof.

Edna met her as she stepped out of the elevator car. “Mum.”

“Hello, love.” Bella embraced her.

As Bella and Edna walked the security guard shadowed them, and a news robot rolled after them, a neat sphere glistening with lenses. Bella had to expect that; she did her best to ignore the silent, all-encompassing scrutiny. It was an historic day, after all. By scheduling the Bimini switch-on today, she had meant to turn Q-day into one of celebration, and so it was turning out to be — even if, she sensed, the mood was edgy rather than celebratory right now.

The tremendous roof of the VAB had long since been made over as a viewing platform. Today it was crowded, with marquees, a podium where Bella would be expected to make a speech, people swirling around. There was even a small park, a mock-up of the local flora and fauna.

Two oddly dressed men, spindly, tall, in blue-black robes marked with golden sunbursts, stared at a baby alligator as if it were the most remarkable creature they had ever seen, and perhaps it was. Looking a little uncertain on their feet, their faces heavily creamed with sunscreen, they were monks of the new church of Sol Invictus: missionaries to Earth from space.

Edna walked with the caution of a space worker restored to a full gravity, and she winced a bit in the brilliant light, the breeze, the uncontrolled climate of a living world. She looked tired, Bella thought with her mother’s solicitude, older than her twenty-four years.

“You aren’t sleeping well, are you, love?”

“Mum, I know we can’t talk about this right now. But I got my subpoenas yesterday. For your hearing and my own.”

Bella sighed. She had fought to keep Edna from having to face a tribunal. “We’ll get through it.”

“You mustn’t think you need to protect me,” Edna said, a bit stiffly. “I did my duty, Mum. I’d do the same again, if ordered.

When I get my day in court I’ll tell the truth.” She forced a smile.

“Anyway the hell with it all. Thea’s longing to see you. We’ve made camp, a bit away from the marquees and the bars…”

Edna had colonized an area of the VAB roof close to the edge.

It was perfectly safe, blocked in by a tall, inward-curving wall of glass. Edna had spread out picnic blankets and fold-out tables and chairs, and had opened up a couple of hampers. Cassie Duflot was already here, with her two kids, Toby and Candida. They were playing with Thea, Edna’s daughter, Bella’s four-year-old granddaughter.

In this corner of the VAB roof it was Christmas, Bella saw to her surprise. The kids, playing with toys, were surrounded by wrapping paper and ribbons. There was even a little pine tree in a pot. An older man in a Santa suit sat with them, a bit awkwardly, but with a grin plastered over his tired face.

Thea came running. “Grannie!”

“Hello, Thea.” Bella submitted to having her knees hugged, and then she bent down and cuddled her granddaughter properly. The other kids ran to her too, perhaps vaguely remembering the nice old lady who had come with a memento to their father’s funeral. But the kids soon broke away and went back to their presents.

Santa Claus shook Bella’s hand. “John Metternes, Madam Chair,” he said. “I flew with your daughter on the Liberator. ”

“Yes, of course. I’m very glad to meet you, John. You did good work up there.”

He grunted. “Let’s hope the judge agrees. Look, I hope you don’t think I’m butting in — I can see there’s a family thing going on here—”

“I forced him down for some shore leave,” Edna said, a bit acidly. “This weird old obsessive would sleep on the Liberator if the maintenance crew would let him.”

“Don’t let her bug you, John. It’s good of you to do this. But —

Christmas, Edna? It’s only the fifteenth of December.”

“Actually it was my idea.” Cassie Duflot approached Bella. “It was just that, you know, we still aren’t sure how today is going to turn out, are we?” She glanced at the sky, as if seeking the Q-bomb.

“I mean, not really sure. And if things were to go wrong, badly wrong—”

“You wanted to give the kids their Christmas anyway.”

“Do you think that’s odd?”

“No.” Bella smiled. “I understand, Cassie.”

“It does make it a hell of a day,” Edna said. “And what’s worse, if the world doesn’t get blown up today, we’ll have to do it all again in ten days’ time.”

“You attracted quite a crowd for your launch, Bella,” Cassie said.

“Looks like it—”

“Mum, you haven’t seen the half of it yet,” Edna said. She took her mother’s arm again and walked her toward the glass-walled lip of the building.

At the roof edge Bella was able to see the ocean to the east, where the low sun hung like a lamp, and the coast to north and south, her view stretching for kilometers in either direction.

Canaveral was crowded. The cars clustered along the shoreline, and were parked up as far as the Beach Road to the north, and to the south on Merritt Island and the Cape itself, carpeting the old industrial facilities and the abandoned Air Force base. Everywhere, flags fluttered in the strong breeze.

And out at sea she saw the gray, blocky form of a reused oil rig.

Rising from it was a double thread, dead straight, visible when it caught the light.

“They came for the switch-on,” Edna said. “You always were a showman, Mum. Maybe politicians have to be. And reopening America’s elevator today is a good stunt. People feel like a party, I guess.”

“Oh, it’s more than just another space elevator. You’ll see.”

“New ways forward, Mum?”

“I’ve just come down from a conference with Bob Paxton and others on new deep-defense concepts. Big concepts. Terraforming programs, for instance.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Just thinking big. That’s what cutting your teeth on the shield does for you, I guess. And I must talk to Myra Dutt sometime.” She glanced at the sky. “We have to do something about Mir — this other place Myra’s mother went to. They’re humans in there too. If we can speak to them, as Alexei Carel claims they have been able to on Mars, surely we can find a way to bring them home…”

There was a stir. Bella was aware of people approaching her, hundreds of eyes on her on this roof alone, and that cam robot whirled and glistened at her feet, puppylike. Even those monks by the alligator pond were staring at her, grinning from ear to ear.

She looked at her watch. “I think it’s time.”

“Mum, you’re going to have to say something.”

“I know. Just a minute more.” She looked out to sea, to the shining vertical track of the elevator. “Edna, call the kids so they can see.”

The children came to join them, clutching their presents, with Cassie and John Metternes, who hoisted Thea up onto his shoulders.

A flare went up from that oil rig, a pink spark arcing and trailing smoke. Then there was motion along the track of the elevator, shining droplets rising up one of the pair of threads. A ragged cheer broke out around them, soon echoed among the wider throngs scattered across Canaveral.

“It’s working,” Bella breathed.

“But what’s it carrying?” Edna murmured, squinting. “Magnify… Damn, I keep forgetting I’m in EVA.”

“Water,” Bella said. “Sacks of seawater. It’s a bucket chain, love.

The pods will be lifted to the top of the tower, and thrown off.”

“Thrown where?”

“The Moon, initially. Later Venus.”

Edna stared at the elevator stack. “So where’s the power coming from? I don’t see any laser mounts on that rig.”

“There aren’t any. There is no power source — nothing but the Earth’s rotation. Edna, this isn’t really an elevator. It’s a siphon.”

Edna’s eyes lit up with wonder.

The orbital siphon was an extension of the space-elevator concept that derived from the elevator’s peculiar mechanics. Beyond the point of geosynchronous orbit, centripetal forces tended to throw masses away from the Earth. The trick with the siphon was to harness this tendency, to allow payloads to escape but in the process to draw more masses up from Earth’s surface. Essentially, the energy of Earth’s rotation was being transferred to an escaping stream of payload pellets.

“So you don’t need any external energy input at all,” Edna said.

“I studied this concept at USNGS. The big problem was always thought to be keeping the damn thing fed — you’d need a fleet of trucks working day and night to maintain the payload flow. But if all you’re throwing up there is seawater—”

“We call it Bimini,” Bella said. “It’s appropriate enough. The native Americans told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of youth on an island called Bimini. He never found it, but he stumbled on Florida…”

“A fountain of youth?”

“A fountain of Earth’s water to make worlds young again. The Moon first, then Venus. Look, Edna, I wanted this as a demonstration to the Spacers that we’re serious. It will still take centuries, but with resource outputs like this, terraforming becomes a practical possibility for the first time. And if Earth lowers its oceans just a fraction and slows its rotation an invisible amount to turn the other worlds blue again, I think that’s a sacrifice worth making, don’t you?”

“I think you’re crazy, Mum. But it’s magnificent.” Edna grabbed her and kissed her.

Thales spoke. “This is a secure channel. Bella, Edna — the Q-bomb’s closest approach is a minute away.”

Secure line or not, the news soon seemed to ripple out. Silence spread through the rooftop marquees, and the massed crowds around Canaveral. Suddenly the mood was soured, fretful. Edna took Thea from John Metternes and clutched her close. Bella grabbed her daughter’s free hand and gripped it hard.

They looked up into the brilliant sky.

55: Q-bomb

The choice had been made. The bomb was already looking ahead, to the terminus of its new trajectory.

The blue, teeming world and all its peoples receded behind it.

Like any sufficiently advanced machine the Q-bomb was sentient to some degree. And its frozen soul was touched by regret when, six months after passing Earth, it slammed into the sands of Mars, and thought ended forever.

56: Mars

2 November 2071

The dust was extraordinary here in Hellespontus, even for Mars, dust museum of the solar system.

Myra sat in her blister cockpit with Ellie von Devender as the rover plunged over the banks and low dunes. This was the southern hemisphere of Mars, and they were driving through the Hellespontus mountains, a range of low hills not far from the western rim of the Hellas basin. But the rover’s wheels threw up immense rooster-tails, and the stuff just flew up at the windscreens, wiping out any kind of visibility. The infrared scanners, even the radar, were useless in these conditions.

Myra had been around space technology long enough to know that she had to put her faith in the machinery that protected her.

The rover knew where it was going, in theory, and was finding its way by sheer dead reckoning. But it violated all her instincts to go charging blindly ahead like this.

“But we can’t slow down,” Ellie said absently. “We don’t have time.” She was paging her way through astronomical data — not even looking out the window, as Myra was. But then her primary task was much more significant, the ongoing effort to understand what precisely the Q-bomb had done to Mars since its impact five months ago, an impact that had done little harm in itself, but which had planted a seed of quintessence that would soon shatter Mars altogether.

“It’s just all this dust,” Myra said. “I didn’t expect these kind of conditions, even on Mars.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Myra, this area is notorious. This is where a lot of the big global dust storms seem to be born. You didn’t know that? Welcome to Dust Central. Anyhow you know we’re in a rush. If we don’t find that old lady on its hundredth birthday we’re going to let down the sentimental populations of whole worlds.” She grinned at Myra, quite relaxed.

She was right. As everybody waited for the full extent of the bad news about the planet’s future, the electronic gaze of all mankind had been fixed on Mars and the Martians. It was sympathetic or morbid, depending on your point of view. And of all the frantic activities in advance of the final evacuation of a world, none had caught the public imagination as much as what cynical old hands like Yuri called “treasure hunting.”

Mars was littered with the relics of the pioneering days of the robot exploration of the solar system, some seventy years of tri-umph and bitter disappointment that had come to a definitive end when Bob Paxton planted the first human footprint in the red sands. Most of those inert probes and stalled rovers and bits of scattered wreckage still lay in the dust where they had come to rest.

The early colonists of Mars had had no energy to spare to go trophy hunting, or a great deal of interest; they had looked to the future, not the past. But now that it appeared that Mars might have no future after all, there had been a clamor to retrieve as many of those old mechanical pioneers as possible.

It wasn’t a job that required a great deal of specialist skill in Martian conditions, and so it was an ideal assignment for Myra, a Martian by recent circumstance. For safety reasons she couldn’t travel alone on these cross-planet rover jaunts, however, and so she had been assigned Ellie as a companion, a physicist rather than a Mars specialist who might be better employed elsewhere. Ellie had been quite happy to go along with her; she could continue her own work just as well in a moving rover as in a station like Lowell or Wells — better, she said, for there were fewer distractions.

Of course, Ellie’s work was far more important than any trophy-hunting. Ellie was working with a system-wide community of physicists and cosmologists on predictions of what was to become of Mars. Right now she was looking at deep-sky images of star fields. As far as Myra understood, their best data came not from Mars itself but from studies of the sky: though it was hard to grasp, the distant stars no longer looked the same from Mars as they did from the Earth. It defeated Myra’s imagination how that could possibly be so.

Anyhow the retrieval program had been successful in terms of its own goals. With the help of orbital mapping Myra and others had reached the Vikings, tonnes of heavy, clunky, big-budget Cold War engineering, where they still sat in the dry, rocky deserts to which cautious mission planners had consigned them. The famous, plucky Pathfinder craft with its tiny robot car had been retrieved from its “rock garden” in the Ares Vallis — that one had been easy; it wasn’t far from Port Lowell, site of the first manned landing.

Myra knew that British eyes had been on the retrieval of fragments of the Beagle 2, an intricate, ingenious, toylike probe that had not survived its journey to the Isidis Planitia. And then there had been the recovery of the exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, worn out by journeys that far exceeded their design capabilities. All these antique artifacts were destined for Smithsonian establishments on the Earth and Moon.

The retrieval expeditions had had scientific goals too. There was some interest in how man-made materials had withstood up to a century of exposure to Martian conditions. And the landing sites were of interest in themselves — otherwise the probes would not have been sent there. So Myra and Ellie had worked through a crash last-minute science program of sampling, mapping, and coring.

There had even been efforts to retrieve some of the elderly orbiters, still spinning around Mars, long silent. There was universal disappointment when it was discovered that Mariner 9, the very first orbiter, was gone; if it had survived into the 2040s it was surely swallowed up when sunstorm heat caused a general expansion of the Martian atmosphere.

Myra was glad to have something constructive to do. But she hadn’t expected such intense public scrutiny of her treasure-hunting, with every move being followed by a system-wide audience. The crews had been promised that no images would be returned from the rover cabin itself. But Myra tried never to forget that the rover’s systems could easily be hacked; she could be watched at any moment.

The day wore on, and the daylight, already murky under the rover’s artificial dust storm, began to fade. Myra began to fret that they would not after all find the wreck of Mars 2, as the light ran out on this anniversary day.

Then Ellie sat back, staring at a complex graph on her softscreen.

Myra studied her. She had gotten to know this edgy physicist well enough to understand that she wasn’t given to extravagant displays of any emotion save irritation. This sitting-back and staring was, for Ellie, a major outburst.

“What is it?”

“Well, there it is.” Ellie tapped her screen. “The destiny of Mars. We’ve figured it out.”

“All right. So can you say what it means, in simple terms?”

“I’m going to have to. According to this message I’m to take part in a three-world press conference on it in a couple of hours. Of course the math is always easier. More precise.” She squinted out at the dust, thinking. “Put it this way. If we could see the sky, and if we had a powerful enough telescope, we would see the most distant stars recede. As if the expansion of the universe had suddenly accelerated. But we would not see the same thing from Earth.”

Myra pondered that. “So what does that mean?”

“The Q-bomb is a cosmological weapon. We always knew that.

A weapon derived from the Firstborn’s technology of universe creation. Yes?”

“Yes. And so—”

“So what it has done is to project Mars into its own little cosmos. A kind of budding-off. Right now the baby Mars universe is connected smoothly to the mother. But the baby will come adrift, leaving Mars isolated.”

Myra struggled to take this in. “Isolated in its own universe?”

“That’s it. No sun, no Earth. Just Mars. You can see that this weapon was just supposed to, umm, detach a chunk of the Earth.

Which would have caused global devastation, but left the planet itself more or less intact. It’s too powerful for Mars. It will take out this little world altogether.” She grinned, but her eyes were mirth-less. “It will be lonely, in that new universe. Chilly, too. But it won’t last long. The baby universe will implode. Although from the inside it will feel like an ex plosion. It’s a scale model of the Big Rip that will some day tear our universe apart. A Little Rip, I suppose.”

Myra pondered this, and didn’t try to pursue the paradox of implosions and explosions. “How can you tell all this?”

Ellie pointed to the obscured sky. “From the recession of the stars we’ve observed with telescopes on Mars, a recession you wouldn’t see from Earth. It’s an illusion, of course. Actually the Mars universe is beginning to recede from the mother. Or, equivalently, vice versa.”

“But we can still get off the surface. Get to space, back to Earth.”

“Oh, yes. For now. There is a smooth interface between the universes.” She peered at her screen and scrolled through more results. “In fact it’s going to be a fascinating process. A baby universe being born in the middle of our solar system! We’ll learn more about cosmology than we have in a century. I wonder if the Firstborn are aware of how much they’re teaching us…”

Myra glanced uneasily about the cockpit. If they were being hack-watched, this display of academic coldness wasn’t going to play too well. “Ellie. Just rejoin the human race for a minute.”

Ellie looked at her sharply. But she backed off. “Sorry.”

“How long?”

Ellie glanced again at her screen and scrolled through her results.

“The data is still settling down. It’s a little hard to say. Ballpark—

three more months before the detachment.”

“Then Mars must be evacuated by, what, February?”

“That’s it. And after that, maybe a further three months before the implosion of the baby cosmos.”

“And the end of Mars.” Just six more months’ grace, then, for a world nearly five billion years old. “What a crime,” she said.

“Yeah. Hey, look.” Ellie was pointing to a crumpled, dust-stained sheet protruding from the crimson ground. “Do you think that’s a parachute?”

“Rover, full stop.” The vehicle jolted to a halt, and Myra peered. “Magnify… I think you’re right. Maybe the twisters whip it up, and keep it from being buried. What does the sonar show?”

“Let’s take a look. Rover…”

And there it was, buried a few meters down under the wind-blown Martian dust, a squat, blocky shape easily imaged by the sonar.

“Mars 2, ” Myra said.

Mars 2 was a Soviet probe that had traveled to the planet in 1971, part of a favorable-opposition flotilla that had included the Americans’ Mariner 9. It had attempted its landing in the middle of the worst global dust storm the astronomers had ever seen.

“It looks like a flower,” Ellie breathed. “Those four petals.”

“It was a ball of metal about the size of a domestic fridge. The petals were supposed to open up and right it, whichever way up it landed.”

“Looks like it was doomed by a twisted-up parachute. After coming all this way…”

Crash-landing not, Mars 2 had been the first human artifact of all to touch the surface of the planet. And it had come down in this very spot precisely a century before, on November 27, 1971. “It made it. And so did we.”

“Yeah. And now it’s two meters deep under the dust.” Ellie un-hooked her harness and got out of her chair. “Fetch a spade.”

57: Babylon

When Captain Nathaniel Grove in Troy heard that Bisesa Dutt had returned to Babylon, he hurried back there with Ben Batson.

At the Ishtar Gate they met Eumenes, still surviving as chiliarch to an increasingly capricious Alexander. “Bisesa is in the Temple of Marduk,” he said to them in his stilted English. “She will not come out.”

Grove grimaced. “I might have expected as much. Had that sort of breakdown before. Bad show, bad show. Can we see her?”

“Of course. But first we must visit another, ah, hermit — and not a voluntary one, I fear. He has been asking to see you, should you return to Babylon. Indeed he has been asking to see any of what he calls ‘the moderns.’ ”

It turned out to be Ilicius Bloom, the “consul” from Chicago.

Just inside the city walls, not far from the Ishtar Gate, Alexander’s guards had stuck him in a cage.

The cage was evidently meant for animals. It was open to the elements, and too small for Bloom to stand straight. A guard stood by the cage, one of Alexander’s phalangists, clearly bored. At the back of the cage hung what looked like an animal skin, scraped bare, shriveled and dry.

Crouched in his filthy rags, his eyes bright white in a grimy face, Ilicius Bloom shuddered and coughed, though the day was not cold, and a stench of raw sewage made Grove recoil. Bloom was pa-thetically grateful to see them, but he was self-aware enough to notice Grove’s flinch. “You needn’t think that’s me, by the way. They kept a man-ape in here before. Flea-bitten bitch.” He dug around in the dirt. “Look at this — dried man-ape scut!” He flung it at the iron bars of the cage. “At night the rats come, and that’s no fun. And guess where they put the she-ape? In the temple with that loon Bisesa Dutt. Can you believe it? Say, you must help me, Grove. I won’t last much longer in here, you have to see that.”

“Calm down, man,” Grove said. “Tell us why you’re here.

Then perhaps we’ll have a chance of talking you out of it.”

“Well, I wish you luck. Alexander is thinking of war, you know.”

“War? Against whom?”

“Against America. Europe isn’t enough for him — how could it be, when he knows there are whole continents to conquer? But the only source of intelligence he has on America, or rather Chicago, is me. ”

“Ah. And so he’s been questioning you.”

Bloom held up hands with bloodied fingertips. “You could call it that. Naturally I’ve talked myself hoarse. Now, don’t look down your nose at me, Captain Grove. I’m no British Army officer. And besides I can’t see what difference it makes. Have you seen Alexander recently? I can’t believe the bloated brute will live much longer, let alone oversee a war across the Atlantic. I’ve told him everything I could think of, and when he wanted more I lied freely. What else could I do?

“But it was never enough, never enough. Look at this.” He shuffled in his cage. Through the thin, grimy cloth of his shirt, Grove saw the striping of whip marks on his back. “And look!” He pointed a clawlike hand at the rag of skin that hung on the wall outside his cage.

Ben Batson asked, “What is that?”

“I loved her, you know,” Bloom said now.

“Who, man?” Grove asked patiently. “Who did you love?”

“Isobel. You remember, Grove, the girl from the Midden. She gave me a brat! Oh, I was cruel, I was selfish, but that’s me, that is Ilicius Bloom.” He laughed and shook his head. “And yet I loved her, as best my flawed soul was capable. Truly I did.

“They did this to break me, of course,” Bloom whispered, staring at Grove. “Two Companions, it was. They did it before my eyes. Peeled her like a grape. They took her face off. She lived for long minutes, flayed. Every inch of her body must have been a locus of exquisite agony — think of it! And then—”

Batson looked at the bit of skin. “My word, Captain, I do believe—”

“Come away,” Grove said, pulling him back.

Bloom flew into a panic. “You can see how I’m fixed. Speak to Eumenes. Tell Mayor Rice. Oh, how I long to hear an American voice again! Please, Grove—” He managed to get his whole arm through the bars of the cage. The guard casually slapped his flesh with the flat of his stabbing-sword. Bloom howled and withdrew.

Eumenes shepherded Grove and Batson away. “Ilicius Bloom is a dead man. He put himself in danger when he tried to bargain with Alexander over his scraps of knowledge. Then he doomed himself with his lies. He would be in his grave already were it not so cheap to keep him alive. If you wish I will arrange an audience with Alexander about his fate, though I warn you it is likely to do little good, and you would put yourselves in danger… But first,”he said, “you must visit Bisesa Dutt.”

58: Secession

February 27, 2072

The shuttle stood on the drab, dusty plain. The sun was a pale disk riding high in the orange sky; it was close to local noon, here on the Xanthe Terra. The ship was a biconic, a fat, clumsy-looking half-cone. It stood at the end of a long scar in the dust, a relic of its own glide-down landing. Right now it stood on end, ready to hurl itself away from Mars and up into orbit. The shuttle’s exposed underside, plastered with dark heatshield tiles, was scarred from multiple reentries, and the paintwork around its attitude-thruster nozzles was blistered. Rovers stood by, their tracks snaking away to the horizon. Hatches were open in the shuttle’s belly, and men, women and spidery robots labored to haul packages into its hold.

There was nothing special about this bird, Myra thought, as she stood watching in her Mars suit. This was just a ground-to-orbit truck that had made its routine hops a dozen times, maybe more.

But it was the last spacecraft that would ever leave the surface of Mars.

Myra knew this was a symbolic moment. Most of Mars’s human population had long gone, along with all they could lift.

The various AIs that had inhabited the bases and rovers and bits of equipment had, too, been saved as far as possible, according to laws governing the right to protection of Legal Persons (Non-Human); at the very least copies of them had been transmitted to memory stores off-planet. But there was nothing that touched a human heart as much as seeing the last bundle loaded aboard the last ship out, a last footprint, a last hatch closed.

Which was why cameras rolled, floated, and flew all around this site. And why a delegate of Chinese stood in a huddle, away from the rest. And why the frantic work of loading was being held up by the presence of Bella Fingal, the now-ousted Chair of the World Space Council, in a Mars suit that looked two or three sizes too big for her, who stood surrounded by a small crowd.

“One hour,” a soft automated voice said in Myra’s helmet. She saw from the subtle reactions of the others that they had all heard the same warning. One hour left to get off Mars before — well, before something unimaginable happened.

Myra drifted back to join the small crowd, all in their suits, like a clutch of fat green snowmen.

Bella said now, “A shame we couldn’t have made this last launch from Port Lowell.” They were in fact fifty kilometers from Lowell, out on the Xanthe Terra, a bay on the perimeter of the great Vastitas Borealis. “It would have been fitting to stage the last human lift-off from Mars at the place Bob Paxton and his crew made the first touchdown.”

“Well, maybe we could have, if Lowell wasn’t still radioactive,”

Yuri O’Rourke growled a bit sharply. He summoned Hanse Critchfield, who was proudly carrying a display tray of materials.

“Madam Chair. Here,” he said unceremoniously. “This is a selection of the scientific materials we have been gathering in these last months. Take a look. Samples from a variety of geological units, from the southern highlands to the northern plains to the slopes of the great volcanoes. Bits of ice core from the polar caps, of particular value to me. And, perhaps most precious of all, samples of Martian life. There are relics of the past, look, you see, we even have a fossil here from a sedimentary lake bed, and native organisms from the present day, and samples of the transgenic life-forms we have been experimenting with.”

Grendel Speth said dryly, “Martians you can eat.”

Bella Fingal was a small, tired-looking woman, now nearly sixty. She seemed genuinely touched by the gesture. She smiled through her faceplate. “Thank you.”

Yuri said, “I’m only sorry that we can’t give you a vial of canal water. Or the tripod leg from a Martian fighting machine. Or an egg laid by a Princess… I wish I could show you a Wernher von Braun glider, too. That was the first serious scheme to get to Mars, you know. They would have glided down to land on the smooth ice at the poles. And if that’s the past, I’m sorry you won’t see Mars’s future. A mature human world, fully participating in an interplanetary economic and political system…”

Myra touched his arm, and he fell silent.

Bella smiled. “Yes. This is the end of a human story too, isn’t it?

No more Martian dreams. But we won’t forget, Yuri. I can assure you that the study of Mars will continue even when the planet itself is lost. We will continue to learn about Mars, and strive to understand.

“And in this last moment I want to try to tell you again why this has all been worthwhile — even this terrible cost.”

She said there had been more results from Cyclops.

The great observatory had been designed before the sunstorm to search for Earthlike worlds. Since the storm, and especially since the return of Athena, its great Fresnel eyes had been turned aside, to peer into the dark spaces between the stars.

Bella said, “And everywhere the astronomers look, they see refugees.”

The Cyclops telescopes had seen infrared traces of generation starships, slow, fat arks like the Chinese ships, whole civilizations in flight. And there were immense, flimsy ships with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, scudding before the light of exploding stars. They had even detected narrow-beam laser signals they thought might be traces of efforts to teleport, desperate attempts to send the essence of a living being encoded into a radio signal.

Myra felt stunned, imaginatively. There was a story, a whole novel, in every one of these brief summaries. “This is the work of the Firstborn. They are everywhere. And everywhere they are doing what they tried to do to us, and the Martians, and at Procyon —eradicating. Why?”

“If we knew that,” Bella said, “if we understood the Firstborn, we might be able to deal with the threat they pose. This is how our future is going to be, however far we travel, as far as we can see.

And that’s how we’ve come to this situation, this desolate beach.”

Bella handed the sample tray to an aide, and took a step back.

“Would those of you who are leaving now, please come stand behind me?”

Most of the group stepped forward, including Ellie von Devender, Grendel Speth, Hanse Critchfield. Among those who remained were Myra, and Yuri, and Paula Umfraville. The Chinese stood back too. One of their delegates approached Bella, and told her again that they planned to stay to tend the memorials they had built to their fallen of sunstorm day.

Bella faced them all. “I understand you’ve plenty of supplies—

food, power — to see you through until—”

Yuri said, “Yes, Madam Chair. It’s all taken care of.”

“I don’t quite understand how you’ll be able to talk to each other — Lowell to the polar station, for instance. Won’t you lose your comms satellites when the secession comes?”

“We’ve laid land lines,” Paula said brightly. “We’ll be fine.”

“Fine?” Bella’s face worked. “Not the word I’d use.” She said impulsively, “Please — come with us. All of you. Even now there’s time to change your minds. We’ve room on the shuttle. And my daughter is waiting in orbit on the Liberator, ready to take you home.”

“Thank you,” Yuri said evenly. “But we’ve decided. Somebody ought to stay. There ought to be a witness. Besides, this is my home, Madam Chair.”

“My mother is buried here,” said Paula Umfraville. “I couldn’t abandon that.” Her smile was as professional as ever.

“And I lost my mother here too,” Myra said. “I couldn’t leave with that unresolved.”

Bella faced Myra. “You know we’ll do what we can to build on the contact that’s been achieved with Mir. I gave you my word on that, and I’ll ensure it’s a promise that’s kept.”

“Thank you,” Myra said.

“But you’re going to a stranger place yet, aren’t you? Is there anybody you’d want me to speak to for you?”

“No. Thank you, Madam Chair.” In the months since the Q-bomb strike, Myra had tried over and over to contact Charlie, and Eugene. There had been no reply. But then they had seceded from her own personal universe long ago. She had tidied her affairs. There was nothing left for her, anywhere but on Mars.

“With respect, Madam Chair, you must leave now,” Yuri said, glancing at his suit chronometer.

There was a last flurry of movement around the shuttle, as ladders were dumped, hatches closed. Myra took part in a last round of embraces, of Ellie and Grendel and Hanse, of the Chinese, even of Bella Fingal. But the Mars suits made the hugs clumsy, unsatisfying, deprived of human contact.

Bella was the last to stand at the foot of the short ramp that led to the biconic’s interior. She looked around. “This is the end of Mars,” she said. “A terrible crime has been committed here, and we humans have been made complicit in it. That is a dreadful burden for us to carry, and our children. But I don’t believe we should leave with shame. More has happened on Mars in the last century than in the previous billion years, and everything that is good has flowed from the actions of mankind. We must remember that. And we must remember lost Mars with love, not with shame.” She glanced down at the crimson dust beneath her feet. “I think that’s all.”

She walked briskly up the ramp, which lifted to swallow her up inside the belly of the shuttle.

Myra, Paula, and Yuri had to hurry back to the rover, which drove them off through a kilometer, a safe distance from the launch.

When the rover stopped they clambered out again, squeezing into their outer suits.

They stood in a row, Myra between Yuri and Paula, holding hands. They found themselves surrounded by a little crowd of robot cameras, which had rolled or flown or hopped after them.

When the moment of launch came, the shuttle lifted without fuss. Mars gravity was light; it had always been easy to climb out of its gravity well. The dust kicked up from this last launch quickly fell back through the thin air to the ground, and the shuttle receded into the orange-brown sky, becoming a pale jewel, its vapor trail all but invisible.

“Well, that’s that,” said Paula. “How long until the light show?”

Yuri made to look at his watch, and then thought better of it.

“Not long. Do you want to go back into the rover, get out of these suits?”

None of them did. Somehow it seemed right to be out here, on the Martian ground, under its eerie un-blue sky.

Myra looked around. The landscape was just a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. But in a deep ditch not far away there was a mosslike vegetation, green. Life, returned to Mars by the sunstorm and cherished by human hands. She held tightly to her companions. “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this,” she said.

Yuri said, “Yes—”

And the light went, just like that, the sky darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. The sun rushed away, sucking all the light with it. The sky turned deep brown, and then charcoal, and then utterly black.

Myra stood in the dark, clinging to Yuri and Paula. She heard the cameras clatter about, confused.

It had only taken seconds.

“I hope the cameras got that,” Yuri murmured.

“It feels like a total eclipse,” Paula said. “I went to Earth once to see one. It was kind of exciting, oddly…”

Myra felt excited too, stirred in an unexpected way by this primeval, extraordinary event. Strange lights in the sky. But, standing there in the dark, she felt a flicker of fear when she reminded herself that the sun was never, ever going to shine on Mars again.

“So we’re alone in this universe,” Yuri said. “Us and Mars.”

The ground shuddered gently.

“Mars quake,” Paula said immediately. “We expected this. We just lost the sun’s tides. It will pass.”

The rover’s lights came on, flickering before settling to a steady glow. They cast a pool of light over the Martian ground, and Myra’s shadow stretched long before her.

And there was a circle in the air before her. Like a mirror, full of complex reflections, highlights from the rover’s lamps. Myra took a step forward, and saw her own reflection approach her.

The thing in the air was about a meter across. It was an Eye.

“You bastard,” Yuri said. “You bastard!” He bent awkwardly, picked up handfuls of Martian rocks, and hurled them at the Eye.

The rocks hit with a clatter that was dimly audible through the thin, cold air.

The ground continued to shake, the small, hard planet ringing like a bell.

And then a white fleck drifted past Myra’s faceplate. She followed it all the way down to the ground, where it sublimated away.

It was a snowflake.

59: Temple

Abdikadir Omar met them at the Temple of Marduk.

A loose crowd had gathered around the Temple precinct. Some even slept here, in lean-tos and tents. Vendors drifted slowly among them, selling food, water, and some kind of trinkets, holy tokens.

They were pilgrims, Abdi said, who had come from as far as Alexandria and Judea.

“And are they here for the Eye of Marduk?”

Abdi grinned. “Some come for the Eye. Some for Marduk himself, if they remember him. Some for Bisesa. Some even for the man-ape that’s in there with her.”

“Remarkable,” Grove said. “Pilgrims from Judea, come here to see a woman of the twenty-first century!”

Eumenes said, “I sometimes wonder if a whole new religion is being born here. A worship of the Firstborn, with Bisesa Dutt as their prophet.”

“I doubt that would be healthy,” Grove said.

“Man has worshipped destroying gods before. Come. Let us speak to Bisesa Dutt.”

Abdi escorted them through the crowd and into the temple’s convoluted interior, all the way up to the chamber of the Eye.

The small room with its scorched brick walls was utterly dominated by the Eye, which floated in the air. By the light of the oil lamps Grove saw his own reflection, absurdly distorted, as if by a fairground trick mirror. But the Eye itself was monstrous, ominous; he seemed to sense its gravity.

Bisesa had made a kind of nest in one corner of the chamber, of blankets and paper and clothes and bits of food. When Grove and the others walked in, she smiled and clambered to her feet.

And there was the man-ape. A lanky, powerful mature female, she sat squat in her cage, as still and watchful as the Eye itself. She had clear blue eyes. Grove was forced to turn away from her gaze.

“My word,” Batson said, holding his nose. “Ilicius Bloom wasn’t lying when he said the stink wasn’t him but the ape!”

“You get used to it,” Bisesa said. She greeted Batson with a warm handshake, and an embrace for Grove that rather embarrassed him. “Anyhow Grasper is company.”

“ ‘Grasper’?”

“Don’t you remember her, Grove? Your Tommies captured a man-ape and her baby on the very day of the Discontinuity. The Tommies called her ‘Grasper’ for the way she uses those hands of hers, tying knots out of bits of straw, for fun. On the last night before we tried sending me back to Earth through the Eye, I asked for them to be released. Well, I think this is that baby, grown tall. If these australopithecines live as long as chimps, say, it’s perfectly possible. I’ll swear she is more dexterous than I am.”

Grove asked, “How on earth does she come to be here?”

Eumenes said, “She rather made her own way. She was one of a pack that troubled the western rail links. This one followed the line all the way back to Babylon, and made a nuisance of herself in the farms outside the city. Kept trying to get to the city walls.

Wouldn’t be driven off. In the end they netted her and brought her into the city as a curiosity for the court. We kept her in Bloom’s cage, but the creature went wild. She wanted to go somewhere, that was clear.”

“It was my idea,” Abdi said. “We leashed her, and allowed her to lead us where she would.”

“And she came here,” Bisesa said. “Drawn here just as I was.

She seems peaceful enough here, as if she’s found what she wanted.”

Grove pondered. “I do remember how we once kept this man-ape and her mother in a tent we propped up under a floating Eye—

do you remember, Bisesa? Rather disrespectful to the Eye, I thought. Perhaps this wretched creature formed some sort of bond with the Eyes then. But how the devil would she know there was an Eye here?”

“There’s a lot we don’t understand,” Bisesa said. “To put it mildly.”

Grove inspected Bisesa’s den with forced interest. “Well, you seem cheerful enough in here.”

“All mod cons,” she said, a term that baffled Grove. “I have my phone. It’s a shame Suit Five is out of power or that might have provided a bit more company too. And here’s my chemical toilet, scavenged from the Little Bird. Abdi keeps me fed and cleaned out.

You’re my interface to the outside world, aren’t you, Abdi?”

“Yes,” Grove said, “but why are you here?”

Eumenes said gravely, “You should know that Alexander thinks she is trying to find a way to use the Eye for his benefit. If not for the fact that the King believes Bisesa is serving his purposes, she would not be here at all. You must remember that when you meet him, Captain.”

“Fair enough. But what’s the truth, Bisesa?”

“I want to go home,” she said simply. “Just as I did before. I want to get back to my daughter, and granddaughter. And this is the only possible way. With respect, there’s nothing on Mir that matters to me as much as that.”

Grove looked at this woman, this bereft mother, alone with all this strangeness. “I had a daughter, you know,” he said, and he was dismayed how gruff his voice was. “Back home. You know. She’d be about your age now, I should think. I do understand why you are here, Bisesa.”

She smiled, and embraced him again.

There was little more to be said.

“Well,” Grove said. “I will visit again. We will be here for several more days in Babylon, I should think. I feel I really ought to try to do something for this wretched fellow Bloom. We moderns must stick together, I suppose.”

“You’re a good man, Captain. But don’t put yourself in any danger.”

“I’m a wily old bird, don’t you worry…”

They left soon after that.

Grove looked back once at Bisesa. Alone save for the watchful man-ape, she was walking around the hovering sphere and pressed her bare hand against the Eye’s surface. The hand seemed to slide sideways, pushed by some unseen force. Grove was awed at her casual familiarity with this utterly monstrous, alien thing.

He turned away. He was glad he could hide the wetness of his foolish old eyes in the dark of the temple’s corridors.

60: House

March 30, 2072

Paula called, using the optic-fiber link. Since the secession of the sun, the big AIs at New Lowell had been refining their predictions of when the Rip would finally hit Mars.

“May 12,” Paula said. “Around fourteen hundred.”

Six weeks. “Well, now we know,” Myra said.

“I’m told that in the end they will get the prediction down to the attosecond.”

“That will be useful,” Yuri said dryly.

Paula said, “Also we’ve been running predictions of the state of your nuclear power plant. You’re aware you’re running out of fuel.”

“Of course,” Yuri said stiffly. “Resupply has been somewhat problematic.”

“We predict you’ll make it through to the Rip. Just. It might not be too comfortable in the last few days.”

“We can economize. There are only two of us here.”

“Okay. But there’s always room for you here at Lowell.”

Yuri glanced at Myra, who grinned back. She said, “And leave home? No. Thanks, Paula. Let’s finish it here.”

“I thought you’d say that. All right. If you change your mind the rovers are healthy enough to pick you up.”

“I know that, thanks,” Yuri said heavily. “Since one of them is ours.”

They talked of bits of business, and how they were all coping.

It was as if Mars’s last summer had been cut drastically short.

The sun had vanished two months before what should have been midsummer, and the planet’s terminal winter had begun.

In a way it didn’t make much difference here at the pole, where it had been dark half the time anyhow. Myra’s main loss was the regular download from Earth of movies and news, and letters from home. She didn’t miss Earth itself as much as she missed the mail.

But if there was a winter routine to fall back on here at Wells, they weren’t so used to darkness down at Lowell, near the equator, and it was a shock when the air started snowing out there. They had none of the equipment they needed to survive. So Yuri and Myra had loaded up one of the pole station’s two specialized snowplow rovers with sublimation mats and other essentials. They left one rover at Lowell for the crew’s use there, and then drove the other rover all the way back to Wells. That journey, a quarter of the planet’s circumference each way through falling dry-ice snow, had been numbing, depressing, exhausting. Myra and Yuri hadn’t left the environs of the base since.

“We’ll speak again,” Paula said. “Take care.” Her image disappeared.

Myra looked at Yuri. “So that’s that.”

“Back to work,” he said.

“Coffee first?”

“Give me an hour, and we’ll break the back of some of the day’s chores.”

“Okay.”

The routine work had got a lot harder since the final evacuation.

Without the scheduled resupply and replacement drops it wasn’t just the nuke that was failing but much of the other equipment as well. And now there were only two of them, in a base designed for ten, and Myra, though she was a quick learner, wasn’t experienced here.

However Myra had thrown herself into the work. This morning she tended clogging hydroponic beds, and cleaned out a gunged-up bioreactor, and tried to figure out why the water extraction system was failing almost daily. She also had work to do with the AI, managing the flood of science data that continued to pour in from the SEPs and tumbleweed balls and dust motes, even though the sensor systems were steadily falling silent through various defects, or were simply getting stuck in the thickening snow.

Mostly the AI was able to work independently, even setting its own science goals and devising programs to achieve them. But today was PPP day, planetary protection, when she had to make her regular formal check to ensure the environment was properly sampled in a band kilometers wide around the station, thus monitoring the slow seepage of their human presence into the skin of Mars. There was even a bit of paper she had to sign, for ultimate presentation to an agency on Earth. The paper was never going to get to Earth, of course, but she signed it anyway.

After an hour or so she had the AI hunt for Yuri. He was supposed to be out in the drill rig tent, mothballing equipment that had been shut down for the final time, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to Hanse Critchfield. In fact he was in Can Six, the EVA station.

She made some coffee, and carried it carefully through the locks to Six. She kept a lid on the cups; she still hadn’t quite got used to one-third-G coffee sloshes.

She found Yuri kneeling on the floor of Six. He had gotten hold of a Cockell pulk, a simple dragging sled; adapted for Martian conditions it was fitted with fold-down wheels for running over basalt-hard water ice. He was piling up this little vehicle with a collapsed tent, food packets, bits of gear that looked to have been scavenged from life support.

She handed him his coffee. “So what now?”

He sat back and sipped his drink. “I’ve got an unfulfilled ambi-tion. I’ve got many, actually, but this one’s killing me.”

“Tell me.”

“An unsupported solo assault on the Martian north pole. I always planned to try it myself. I’d start at the edge of the permanent cap, see, just me and an EVA suit and a sled. And I’d walk, dragging the sled all the way to the pole. No drops, no pickup, nothing but me and the ice.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a thousand kilometers tops, depending on the route you take. The suit would slow me down — and no suit we’ve got is designed for that kind of endurance and mobility; I’d have to make some enhancements. But remember, with one-third G I can haul three times as much as I could in Antarctica, say four hundred kilograms. And in some ways Mars is an easier environment than the Earth’s poles. No blizzards, no white-outs.”

“You’d have to carry all your oxygen.”

“Maybe. Or I could use one of these.” He picked up some of his life-support gadgets, a small ice-collector box, an electrolysis kit for cracking water into oxygen and hydrogen. “It’s a trade-off, actually.

The kits are lighter than oxygen bottles would be, but using them daily would slow me down. I know it’s a stunt, Myra. But it’s one hell of a stunt, isn’t it? And nobody’s tried it before. Who better but me?”

“You’ve got some mission designing to do, then.”

“Yes. I could figure it all out during the winter. Then when the summer comes, I could pick some period when Earth is above the horizon to try it. I could get the gear together and try it out on the ice around the base. The darkness wouldn’t make any difference to that.” He seemed pleased to have found this new project. But he looked up at her, uncertain. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No crazier than any of us. I mean, I don’t think I believe in May 12. Do you? None of us believes it’s ever going to happen, that death will come to us. If we did we couldn’t function, probably. It’s just a bit more definite for us on Mars, that’s all.”

“Yes. But—”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said firmly. She knelt down with him on the cold floor. “Show me how you’re going to pack this stuff up. How would you eat? Unpack the tent twice a day?”

“No. I thought I’d unpack it in the evening, and eat overnight and in the morning. Then I could have some kind of hot drink through the suit nozzle during the day…”

Talking, speculating, fiddling with the bits of kit, they planned the expedition, while the frozen air of Mars gathered in snowdrifts around the stilts of the station modules.

61: Grasper

It was Grasper who first noticed the change in the Eye.

She woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of trees. Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images — her mother’s face, the warmth of the nest where she had been born. And the cages. Many, many cages.

She yawned hugely, and stretched her long arms, and looked around. The tall woman who shared this cave still slept. There was light on her peaceful face.

Light?

Grasper looked up. The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the stone chamber.

Grasper raised a hand toward the Eye. It gave off no heat, only light. She stood and gazed at the Eye, eyes wide, one arm raised.

Now there was something new again. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.

And then a fourth set of lines appeared — Grasper tried to follow where they went — but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly.

She cried out. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her watering eyes. She felt warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood.

The sleeping woman stirred.

62: Little Rip

May 12, 2072

They began the day wordlessly.

They followed the routine they had established in the months they had spent together. Even though, when Myra woke, there were only a few hours left before the Little Rip. She couldn’t think of anything else they should be doing.

Yuri had to begin the day, as he did every day now, by getting suited up for an ice collection expedition. The ISRU water extraction system had finally broken down. So Yuri had to go outside daily to a trench he was digging in the water ice, and with an improvised pickax he broke off slabs of the ice, to carry into the warmth of the house to melt. In fact it wasn’t so difficult; the heavily stratified ice was like a fine-grained sandstone, and it split easily. Once they got the ice inside the house they had to filter out the dust from the sludge that resulted on melting it.

When he was done with that, Yuri disappeared to do Hanse’s job, as he put it, tending to the power plant and the air system and the other mechanical support systems that kept them alive. He went off whistling, in fact. Yesterday he had got hold of some stuff he had been waiting for. An unpiloted rover had turned up, sent down by the crew of New Lowell; Paula and the crew there had been scavenging equipment from the radioactive ruin of Lowell itself. Yuri had been pleased with what he had found in this last de-livery, and he had been looking forward to his work this morning.

He had sent the rover back the way it came, although the journey would take several days to complete, beyond the day of the Rip.

Yuri seemed to have an instinct that their sentient machines needed to be kept occupied as much as their human masters, and Myra had no reason to argue with him.

Myra too went off to work. She had one job she had been saving up for today.

She scrambled into her EVA suit, as always fully respecting all planetary protection protocols, and went out to the little garden of outdoor plants that were weathering this new Martian winter. A regular task was to blow away the snow, the frozen air that con-gealed out every day. She used a hot-air blower like a fat hairdryer.

As she worked, Myra was aware of an Eye hovering over the garden. There were Eyes all over the place, even inside some of the base’s hab elements. As usual she deliberately ignored it.

She made an extra effort today. She left the equipment in as good a condition as she could manage. And she touched the sturdy leathery leaves of each of the plants, wishing she could feel them through her thick-gloved fingers.

On the last day Bella came back to the locus of Mars.

From space, from the flight deck of the Liberator, you could see that there was still something there. The thing that had replaced Mars was roughly spherical, and it glowed a dull, dim red, a dying ember. It returned no echoes, and attempts to land a probe on it had ended in the loss of the spacecraft, and if you studied it with a spec-troscope you would see that that strange surface appeared to be receding, that its light was reduced to crimson weariness by redshift.

It was a knot of mass-energy orbiting where Mars should have been. It exerted a gravity field sufficient to tether a flock of watching spacecraft, and even to keep Mars’s small moons, Phobos and Deimos, circling in their ancient tracks. But it was not Mars.

Edna said, “It’s just the scar that was left when Mars was cut away.”

“And today that scar heals,” Bella said.

She watched softscreen displays that showed more ships arriving, more ghoulish spectators for this last act of the drama. She wondered what was happening on Mars itself — if Mars still existed in any meaningful sense at all.

Yuri and Myra were making lunch.

It would be dried eggs, reconstituted potatoes, and a little Martian greenery, rubbery but flavorsome. Yuri suggested wine, a Martian vintage from a domed vineyard at Lowell, once remarkably expensive. But it didn’t seem appropriate, and he left the bottle un-opened. Anyhow it was poor wine, Myra had always thought, expensive or not.

They worked together on the lunch, setting the base’s table and preparing the food, without once getting in each other’s way.

“We’re like an old married couple,” Yuri had said, more than once.

So they were, Myra supposed, though they had their spats — and though there had never been any physical intimacy between them, nothing save hugs for comfort, and you had to expect that of the only two human beings at the pole of a world.

It hadn’t been a bad interval in her life, these last months. She had always been in somebody’s shadow, she thought: first her mother’s, then Eugene’s. She’d never had a chance to build a home of her own. She couldn’t say she had done that here on Mars. But this was where Yuri had put down his own roots, this was the world he’d built. And in these last months she’d been able to share his home with him. Sex or not, she’d had far worse relationships than with Yuri.

But she missed Charlie with an intensity she wouldn’t have believed possible. As Rip day approached, it was like a steel cable tear-ing at her belly, ever harder. She didn’t know if Charlie would know what had become of her mother. She didn’t even have any up-to-date images, still or animated, she could look at. She had done her best to put this aside, to keep it in a compartment in her mind. Yuri knew, of course.

She glanced at the clock. “It’s later than I thought. Only an hour left.”

“Then we’d better tuck in.”

They sat down.

Yuri said, “Hey, I had a good morning, by the way. The Lowell guys finally sent down those replacement filters I asked for. Now our air ought to stay sweet for another year. And I shut down the reactor. We’re running on cell power, but it will see us out. I wanted that old tub of uranium to be closed down in an orderly way. I was kind of rushing to get it all done, but I mothballed it well enough, I think.”

She could see that his work had pleased him, just as her own had pleased her.

“Oh, there was another package from Paula, in the rover yesterday. She said we should open it about now.” He fetched it from the heap of equipment he’d sorted to find his filters. It was a small plastic box that he put on the table.

He opened it up to reveal a padded interior, within which nestled a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball. A plastic bag of pills had been tucked into the box, under the ball. He put these out on the table.

Myra took the sphere. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.

Yuri said, “I was expecting this. It’s coated with the stuff they make heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat.”

“So it will survive the planet breaking up?”

“That’s the idea.”

“I don’t see what good that will do.”

“But you understand how the Q-expansion works,” Yuri said, speaking around a mouthful of egg. “The Rip works down the scales, larger structures breaking up first. The planet will go first, then the human body. This little gadget ought to survive the end of the planet, even if it’s cast adrift in space, and it should last a bit longer than a suited human, say. Surrounded by debris, I suppose.

Rocks popping into dust, at smaller and smaller scales.”

“Are there instruments inside?”

“Yes. It should keep working, taking data until the expansion gets down to the centimeter scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Even then there’s a plan. The sphere will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It’s nanotechnology, Myra, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales. There’s nothing they could come up with beyond that. Paula says the design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way.”

“Then it’s worth doing.”

“Oh, yes.”

Myra hefted the sphere. “What a wonderful little gadget. It’s a shame nobody will be able to use its data.”

“Well, you never know,” Yuri said.

She set the sphere on the table. “And these pills?”

He fingered the bag of pills dubiously. “Jenny at Lowell said she would prepare something like this.” Jenny Mortens was New Lowell’s doctor, the only one left on Mars. “You know what they are. It might be easier, this way, just to take them.”

“It would be a shame to come this far and then give up at the last minute. Don’t you think? And besides, I have my mother to think about.”

“Fair enough.” He grinned, and with a flip he lobbed the pill bag into a waste bin.

She looked at her watch. “I think we’d better get moving.

There isn’t much time.”

“Right.” He stood, and stacked the dishes. “I think we can waste a little water and wash up.” He glanced back at her. “How are you feeling about using the suits?”

They both wanted to be outside the base in the final moments.

But she had been unsure about wearing a suit. “I do think I’ll want a bit of human contact, Yuri.”

He smiled. “Quaintly put. Too late to be embarrassed now.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, a bit irritated to be teased about it.

“Of course I do. Look — I’ve fixed it. Come out with me into the suits and see what I’ve done. Trust me. I think you’ll like it. And there’ll always be time to come back inside if not.”

She nodded. “All right. Let’s get this place shipshape first.”

So they tidied up. After one last gulp of coffee — her last ever mouthful, she thought — Myra cleaned the dishes in a little of their precious hot water, and stacked them away. She went to the bathroom, washed her face and brushed her teeth, and used the lavatory. The suits had facilities, of course, but she’d rather not have to resort to that.

She was running down through a list of simple human actions for the last time, the very last. She would never sleep again, or eat, or drink coffee, or even use a bathroom. She had begun to think this way since waking this morning, despite her best efforts to maintain business as usual.

With Yuri, she walked around the station one last time. Yuri was carrying the black sensor globe from Lowell. They had already shut most of Wells down, but now they ordered the station AI to run the systems down to minimum, and to turn off the lights, so that as they walked they left gathering pools of darkness behind them. Everything was tidy, put away where it should be, cleaned up. Myra felt proud of how they had left things.

At last only one fluorescent tube was left burning, in the EVA dome, illuminating the small hatchways through which they had to climb to get into their suits. They pulled on their inner suits, and Yuri passed the sensor ball out through an equipment hatch.

“You go left, I go right,” he said. “If you need to scratch your nose, now’s the time.”

They paused. Then they hugged, and Myra drank in his scent.

They broke. “Lights,” Yuri called. The last tube died, leaving the station dark. “Goodbye, H.G.,” Yuri said softly to his base.

Myra had never heard him use that name before.

Myra opened her hatch, and with a skill developed over her months on Mars she slid feet-first into her suit. When she wormed her right hand into its sleeve, she got a surprise. The glove she had been expecting wasn’t there. Instead her hand slid into a warm grasp.

She leaned forward. By her suit lights she saw that the glove of her suit had been cut away, and her right sleeve had been stitched to Yuri’s left.

Yuri was looking out of his helmet. “How do you like my needlework?”

“Good work, Yuri.”

“The suits don’t like it, of course. They both think they are breached. But the hell with them. The temporary seal hasn’t got to hold for long. Of course we’re going to have to do everything together, like Siamese twins. How’s your suit?”

She had already run it through its diagnostic check. She looked over Yuri’s chest display, to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, and he did the same for her. “All fine, apart from bleating about the gloves.”

“Very good,” he said. “So we stand. Three, two, one—”

Their hands locked together, they straightened up. Her exoskeletal multipliers whirred, and her suit came loose of the dome with a sucking sound.

Out of habit she turned, picked up a soft brush, and swept the dome seals clean of Mars dust. Yuri did the same. It was a bit awkward with their hands locked together.

Then Yuri bent to pick up the sensor ball in his right hand, and they walked forward.

It was pitch dark, and the snow fell steadily, shapeless flakes of frozen Martian air illuminated by their suit lights. But the ground was reasonably clear; they had got a path swept yesterday.

A little robot camera rolled after them, even now recording, recording. It got stuck in a snow bank. Myra kicked it clear and it rolled ahead, red lights glowing.

Yuri stopped, and put the sensor sphere down on the ground before them. “Here, do you think?”

“I guess so. I don’t imagine it matters much.”

He straightened up. The snow continued to fall. Yuri held out a hand and caught flakes. They looked like fat moths settling on his gloves, before they sublimated away. “Ah, God,” he said, “there’s so much wonder here. You know, these flakes have structure. Each snowflake nucleates around first a grain of dust, then water ice, and only then an outer shell of dry ice. It is like an onion. And it all falls here, every winter. Thus three global cycles, of dust, water and carbon dioxide, intersect in every snowflake. We barely began to understand Mars.” His voice had an edge of bitterness she hadn’t heard in him in months. “To some this would be hell,” he said.

“The cold, the darkness. Not to me.”

“Nor me,” she whispered, squeezing his hand inside their stitched-together sleeves. “Yuri.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. These last few months, for me—”

“Better not to say it.”

There was a sound like a door slamming, transmitted to them through their suits. An alarm chimed in Myra’s ears, and lights lit up on her chin display.

The ground shuddered.

“Right on cue,” Yuri said.

They looked at each other. It was the first real sign since the disappearance of the sun that something remarkable was happening.

Fear fluttered in her throat. Suddenly she wished this were not happening, that they could go back into the station and carry on with their day. She clung to Yuri’s hand, and they bumped against each other in the bulky suits, like two green sumo wrestlers. Yuri twisted, trying to see the watch strapped to his arm outside his suit.

The ground shook more violently. And then ice spurted around them, fine splinters of it. They turned to see, hands still clasped. A hab can had ruptured, and its air and water were escaping, instantly freezing in a shower that drifted down around the can’s stilts.

“We’d better get a bit further away,” Myra said.

“All right.” They walked forward, unsteady as the ground shuddered again. Yuri said, “It’s going to be a hell of a job to fix that rip.”

“So call Hanse back.”

“Bastard’s never there when you need him —ow. ” He stumbled, pulling at her so that she staggered too.

“What is it?”

“I hit my head.” They turned. An Eye hovered before them, this one maybe a meter across, its lowest point just below head height. “Bastard.” Yuri swung a punch at it with his free right hand. “Shit. Like hitting concrete.”

“Ignore it,” said Myra.

Just for a moment, the shuddering stopped. They stood together, near the Eye, breathing hard.

“You were right to have us come outside,” Myra said.

“And you were right to ask for a bit of ‘human contact.’ I think we got most things right these last few months, Ms. Dutt.”

“I think I’d agree, Mr. O’Rourke.” She breathed deep, and squeezed his hand. “You know, Yuri—”

The ground burst open.

In the temple chamber, the tall woman woke. Slowly at first.

And then with a start as she saw the Eye.

“Shit, shit. It would have to be now, when I need a pee. Come on, Suit Five, you’re as dead as a dodo but you’re the best protection I’ve got…” As Grasper watched, she began to pull herself into her green carcass thing, and she placed a glowing pebble on the floor.

“You’re leaving me again, Bisesa?”

“Look, phone, don’t guilt-trip me now. We worked this out. You’re the only link back to Earth. And if Abdi succeeds in his program of power-cell manufacture you’ll be powered up indefinitely.”

“Cold comfort.”

“I won’t forget you.”

“Goodbye, Bisesa. Goodbye…”

“Shit. The Eye. What’s it doing?”

Grasper was still standing, trembling but upright, gazing up at the washing lights, which cast complex patterns of shadows around the chamber. A fifth set of lines — a sixth set, disappearing in impossible directions—

The tall woman screamed.

Myra was lying face-down on a scrap of rock-hard water ice, her faceplate pressed against the surface. Yuri had fallen awkwardly somewhere behind her, and her right arm was wrenched back. She felt a pressure in her belly, as if she was being lifted up by an elevator.

She struggled to raise her head. The suit’s multipliers whined as they strained to help her.

She looked down, into Mars.

She saw ice chunks and rocks and even sprays of magma, all illuminated by a deeper red glow from within. All this filled her view, as far as she could see, to left and right. It was like looking down into a deep chasm.

And when she looked up a little further, she saw the Eye, maybe the same one, rising up before her, tracking her.

The fear was gone. Clinging to the bit of ice, still squeezing Yuri’s hand, she felt almost exhilarated. Maybe they could live through this, just a little longer.

But then a gout of molten rock like an immense fist came bar-relling up, out of the heart of disintegrating Mars, straight at her.

The scar in space became transparent, so Bella could see the stars shining through it, their light curdled and faded.

Then it cleared altogether, as if evaporating.

She hugged her daughter.

“So that’s that,” Edna said.

“Yes. Take me home, love.”

The Liberator’s blunt nose turned away, toward Earth.

Released from their parent’s gravity field, Mars’s small moons drifted away from their paths. Now they would orbit the sun, becoming just two more unremarkable asteroids. The thin cloud of satellites humans had put in place around Mars began to disperse too. For a time gravitational waves crossed the system, and the sun’s remaining planets bobbed, leaves on a pond into which a pebble had been thrown. But the ripples soon subsided.

And Mars was gone.

63: A Time Odyssey

A gate opened. A gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

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 on her back. There was something enormously bright above her — the sun, yes, the sun, she was outdoors.

She threw herself over onto her belly. Dazzled by the sun, she could barely see.

A plain. Red sand. Eroded hills in the distance. Even the sky looked red, though the sun was high.

This felt familiar.

And Myra was beside her. It was impossible, but it was so.

Bisesa hurriedly crawled through loose sand to get to her daughter. Like Bisesa, Myra was in a green Mars suit. She was lying on her back, an ungainly fish stranded on this strange beach.

Myra’s faceplate retracted, and she coughed in the sharp, dry air. She stared at her right hand. The suit’s glove was missing, the flesh of her hand pale.

“It’s me, darling.”

Myra looked at her, shocked. “Mum?”

They clung to each other.

It got darker. Bisesa peered up.

The sun’s disk was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken. It began to feel colder, and Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground.

Not again, she thought.

“Don’t be afraid.”

They both turned, rolling in the dirt.

A woman stood over them. She was quite hairless, her face smooth. She wore a flesh-colored coverall so sleek it was as if she was naked. She smiled at them. “We’ve been expecting you.”

Myra said, “My God. Charlie? ”

Bisesa stared. “Who is ‘we’?”

“We call ourselves the Lastborn. We are at war. We are losing.”

She held out her hands. “Please. Come with me now.”

Bisesa and Myra, still hugging each other, reached out their free hands. Their fingertips touched Charlie’s.

A clash of cymbals.