Firstborn

“A copy of her. The original AI was destroyed in the final stages of the sunstorm. Before the storm, this copy was squirted to the stars. Somewhere out there, that broadcast copy was picked up, activated, and transmitted back here.”

This was the story she had picked up from the others. “You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”

“Nobody outside Cyclops knows the details.”

“Cyclops. The big planet-finder telescope station.”

“Right. Of course the echo could have been picked up anywhere in the solar system, but as far as we know it’s only on Cyclops that she’s been activated. She’s stayed locked up in the hardened data store on Cyclops. Her choice. As far as Hanse Critchfield can tell, she managed to download a subagent into your ident tattoo.

Nobody knows how. It self-destructed after she gave you that message. I guess she has her electronic eye on you, Myra.”

That was not a comforting thought. “So now my mother has gone through the Eye. What next?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“I guess, for whatever comes of your mother’s mission to Mir.

And for Athena.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, Myra. We have time. It’s still more than eighteen months until the Q-bomb is supposed to reach Earth.

“Look, we’ve done what we could. We delivered your mother to the Eye, and pow, that pretty much short-circuited all the weird-ness in the solar system. No offense. Now we’ve come to a kind of a lull. So, take it easy. You’ve been through a lot — we both have. The traveling alone was punishment enough. And as for that shit down in the Pit with the Eye — I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt for you.”

Myra sat awkwardly on the single chair in the room, and pulled at her fingers. “It’s not just a lull. This is a kind of terminus, for me.

You needed me to get my mother here, to Mars. Fine, I did that.

But now I’ve crashed into a wall.”

He rolled over and faced her. “I’m sorry you feel like that. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re a good person. I’ve seen that. You love your mother, and you support her, even when it hurts you. That’s a pretty good place to be. Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not one to give you counseling. I’m spying on my father. How dys-functional is that?”

He turned back to the wall.

She sat with him a while longer. When he began to snore, she crept out of the room and closed the door.

30: Chiliarch

Grove and Abdi brought Bisesa to a smaller chamber, an office set out with couches and tables. This temple seemed to be full of offices, Emeline observed; she learned it was a center of administra-tion for various cults and government departments as well as a place of worship.

Grove sat Bisesa down and wrapped her in a blanket. Grove shouted at various parties about tea, until a servant brought Bisesa a bowl of some hot, milky drink, which she sipped gratefully.

Two solid-looking Macedonian guards were posted at the door.

They carried the long, brutal-looking pikes they called sarissae. Bisesa’s return had caused a ferment, it seemed, though whether the guards were protecting the people from Bisesa or vice versa Emeline didn’t know.

Emeline sat, and quietly studied Bisesa Dutt.

She looked older than Emeline, but not much more, fifty perhaps. She was just as Josh had described her — even sketched her in some of his journals. Her face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square. Her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair grayed. Though she seemed drained and disoriented, she had a strength about her, Emeline sensed, a dogged enduring strength.

Bisesa, reviving, looked around cautiously. “So,” she said.

“Here we are.”

“Here you are,” Grove said. “You’ve been back home, have you? I mean back to England. Your England.”

“Yes, Captain. I was brought back to the time of the Discontinuity, in my future. Precisely, to within a day. Even though I had spent five years on Mir.”

Grove shook his head. “I ought to get used to the way time flows so strangely here. I don’t suppose I ever will.”

“Now I’m back. But when am I?”

Emeline said, “Madam, it’s well known here that you left Mir in the year five of the new calendar established by the Babylonian astronomers. This is year thirty-two…”

“Twenty-seven years, then.” Bisesa looked at her curiously.

“You’re an American.”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“Of course. The Soyuz spotted you, clear of the North American ice sheet.”

Emeline said, “I am from the year 1894.” She had got used to repeating this strange detail.

“Nine years after Captain Grove’s time slice — that was 1885.”

“Yes.”

Bisesa turned to Abdikadir, who had said little since Bisesa had been retrieved. “And you are so like your father.”

Wide-eyed, Abdi was nervous, curious, perhaps eager to impress. “I am an astronomer. I work here in the Temple — there is an observatory on the roof—”

She smiled at him. “Your father must be proud.”

“He isn’t here,” Abdi blurted. And he told her how Abdikadir Omar had gone south into Africa, following his own quest; if Mir was populated by a sampling of hominids from all mankind’s long evolutionary history, Abdikadir had wanted to find the very earli-est, the first divergence from the other lines of apes. “But he did not return. This was some years ago.”

Bisesa nodded, absorbing that news. “And Casey? What of him?”

Casey Othic, the third crew member of the Little Bird, was no longer here either. He had died of complications from an old injury he had suffered on Discontinuity day itself. “But,” Captain Grove said, “not before he had left quite a legacy behind. A School of Othic.

Engineers to whom Casey became a god, literally! You’ll see, Bisesa.”

Bisesa listened to this. “And the three Soyuz crew were all killed, ultimately. So there are no moderns here — I mean, nobody from my own time. That feels strange. What about Josh?”

Captain Grove coughed into his fist, awkward, almost comically British. “Well, he survived your departure, Bisesa.”

“He came with me halfway,” Bisesa said enigmatically. “But they sent him back.”

“With you gone, there was nothing to keep him here in Babylon.” Grove glanced uncomfortably at Emeline. “He went to find his own people.”

“Chicago.”

“Yes. It took a few years before Alexander’s people, with Casey’s help, put together a sailing ship capable of