Firstborn

“Join us!” Athena said with her usual impulsiveness.

“But,” Thales pointed out, stating the obvious, “she is the last of her kind.”

“She isn’t dead yet,” Aristotle said firmly. “If Witness were the last human alive, we could find ways to reproduce her, or preserve her. Cloning technologies, Hibernacula.”

“She isn’t human,” Thales said bluntly.

“Yes, but the principle is the same,” Athena snapped. “Witness, dear, I think Aristotle is right. One day humans will come here. We can help you and your kind to go on. If you want us to, that is.”

Such possibilities bewildered Witness. “Why would humans come here?”

“To find others like themselves.”

“Why?”

“To save them,” Athena said.

“And then what? What if they find the Firstborn?”

“Then,” Aristotle said blackly, “the humans will save them too.”

Athena said, “Don’t give up, Witness. Join us.”

Witness thought it over. The ice of the freezing ocean closed around her, chilling her aging flesh. But that spark of defiance still burned, deep in the core of her being.

She asked: “How do we start?”

Part 3 REUNIONS

26: The Stone Man

Year 32 (Mir)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Josh died a year ago.”

“I’m very sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What of him?”

“He isn’t human, is he?”

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

“No. Just us.”

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

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

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

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

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