Firstborn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else?

14: Ascent Beyond Orbit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Named for the Norse world tree.”

“Yes.”

“And the Americans have Jacob’s Ladder.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Makes no sense, but there you go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Mum, we do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Bisesa learned that they weren’t going to be hauled all the way up to the counterweight, which was all