Firstborn

there was a third, a distant dim red dwarf.

Across eleven light years, this system was easily bright enough to be seen from the Earth. This was Alpha Canis Minoris, also called Procyon. This star was known as a double to astronomers; that small second companion had never even been detected from Earth.

But Procyon had changed. And the living planet it had suc-cored was dying.

As she grew older, Witness learned to ask questions.

“Why am I alone? Why are there no others like me? Why is there nobody for me to play with?”

“Because we face a great tragedy,” her father said. “We all do. All over the world. It is the suns, Witness. There is something wrong with the suns.”

The giant senior partner of Procyon, Procyon A, had once been a variable star.

When it was young it shined steadily. But the helium “ash” produced by the hydrogen-burning fusion reactor of its core slowly accumulated in its heart. Trapped heat lifted the helium layer, and all the immense weight of gas above: the star swelled, subtly, until the trapped heat could flood out, and the star collapsed once more. But then the helium trap formed again.

Thus the aging star became variable, swelling and collapsing over and again, with a period of a few days. And it was that grand stellar oscillation that had given this world its life.

Once, before Procyon had become variable, the planet had been something like Europa, moon of Jupiter: a salty ocean trapped under a permanent crust of ice. There had been life here, fueled by the inner heat and complex minerals that came bubbling up from the world’s core. But, locked in the watery dark, none of those forms had progressed greatly in intelligence.

The new pulsation had changed all that.

“Every fourth day the ice breaks up into floes,” Witness’s parents said. “So you can get out of the sea. And we did. Our ancestors changed, so they could breathe in the air, so much more oxygen-rich than the seawater. And they learned to exploit the possibilities of the dry land. At first they just emerged so they could mate in peace, and shelter their young from the hungry mouths of the sea.

But later—”

“Yes, yes,” Witness said impatiently. She already knew the story. “Tools, minds, civilization.”

“Yes. But you can see that we owe all we have — even our minds — to the pulsation of the sun. We can’t even breed in the water anymore; we need access to the land.”

Witness prompted, “And now—”

“And now, that pulsation has gone. Dwindled almost to nothing,” said her father.

“And our world is dying,” said her mother sadly.

Now there was no sunlight peak, no melting of the ice. The people’s machines kept some of the ice open. But without the mixing of the air caused by the pumping of the star, a layer of carbon dioxide was settling over the surface of the ocean.

After a few centuries the islands were becoming uninhabitable.

“We have become creatures of sea and land,” Witness’s mother said. “If we can’t reach the land—”

“The implications,” her father said, “are clear. And there was only one possible response.”

Unlike humans, Witness’s folk had never got as far as a space program. They had no way of fighting this catastrophe, as humans had built a shield to fend off the sunstorm. They had faced the horror of extinction.

But they would not accept it.

“We simply had less children,” Witness’s mother said.

The generations of these folk were much briefer than humanity’s.

There had been time for this cull of numbers to slash the population until, by the time of Witness’s birth, there were only a few dozen of them left, in all the world, where once millions had swum.

“You can see why we did it,” her mother said. “If a child never existed, it can’t suffer. It wasn’t so bad,” she said desperately. “For most of the generations you could still have one child. You still had love. ”

Her father said, “But in the last generation—”

Witness said blackly, “In this last generation you have produced only me.”

Witness was the last ever child to be born. And she had precious duties to fulfill.

“Stars are simple beasts,” her father told her. “Oh, it took many generations for our astronomers to puzzle out the peculiar internal mechanism that made our giant sun breathe out and in. But puzzle it out they did. It was easy to see how the pulsing started. But no matter how contorted a model the theoreticians dreamed up they could never find a convincing way to make the star’s pulsation stop. ”

Her parents allowed Witness to think that through.

“Oh,” she said. “This was a deliberate act. Somebody did this.”

Witness was awed. “Why? Why would anybody do such a terrible thing?”

“We don’t know,” her father said. “We can’t even guess. But we have been trying to find out. And that’s where you come in.”

Listening stations had been established on many of the planet’s islands. There were clusters of telescopes sensitive to optical light, radio waves, and other parts of the spectrum: there were neutrino detectors, there were gravity wave detectors, and a host of still more exotic artificial ears.

“We want to know who has done this,” said her father bitterly,

“and why. And so we listen. But now our time is done. Soon only you will remain…”

“And I am Witness.”

Her parents clustered around her, stroking her belly and her six flippers as they had when she was a baby. “Tend the machines,” her father said. “Listen. And watch us, the last of us, as we go into the dark.”

“You want me to suffer,” Witness said bitterly. “That’s really what this is about, isn’t it? I will be the last of my kind, with no hope of procreation. All those who preceded me at least had that.

You want me to take on all the terrible despair you spared those un-born. You want me to hurt, don’t you?”

Witness’s mother was very distressed. “Oh, my child, if I could spare you this burden I would!”

This made no difference to Witness, whose heart was harden-ing. Until their deaths, she struck back at her parents the only way she could, by shunning them.

But there came a day, at last, when she had been left alone.

And then the signal from Earth arrived.

Aristotle, Thales, and Athena, refugee intelligences from Earth, learned how to speak to Witness. And they learned the fate of Witness’s kind.

Procyon’s pulsation had died away much too early for human astronomers to have observed it. But Aristotle and the others knew Fthe same phenomenon had been seen in a still more famous star: Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris. A baffling decay of the north pole star’s pulsing had begun around 1945.

“ ‘ But I am constant as the northern star, ’ ” Aristotle said, “ ‘ Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firma-ment. ’ Shakespeare.”

“So much for Shakespeare!” said Athena.

“This is the work of the Firstborn.” Thales’s observation was obvious, but it was chilling even so. The three of them were the first minds from Earth to understand that the reach of the Firstborn stretched so far.

Aristotle said gravely, “Witness, it must hurt very much to watch the end of your kind.”

Witness had often tried to put it into words for herself. Any death was painful. But you were always consoled that life would go on, that death was part of a continuing process of renewal, an unending story. But extinction ended all the stories.

“When I am gone, the Firstborn’s work will be complete.”

“Perhaps,” said Aristotle. “But it need not be so. Humans may have survived the Firstborn.”

“Really?”

They told her the story of the sunstorm.

Witness was shocked to discover that her kind were not the only victims of this cosmic violence. Something stirred inside her, unfamiliar feelings. Resentment. Defiance.