Firstborn

Even the first leg of the journey was astonishing.

Bisesa found herself in an open cart drawn by four beefy Neanderthals, naked as the day they were born, while Macedonian troopers jogged alongside. These “Stone Men” were the property of a man called Ilicius Bloom, who called himself Chicago’s consul at Babylon. He was a shifty type Bisesa immediately distrusted.

They came to a railway terminus at a place called the Midden, a strange heaped-up little town of houses and ladders and greasy smoke. The terminus itself was a confluence of narrow tracks, a place of huge sheds and brooding locomotives.

Their carriage was just a crude covered cart with wooden benches, and Emeline made a spiky comment about the contrast with Pullman class. But the locomotive was extraordinary. It looked like a huge animal, an immense black tank that sprawled over the narrow tracks and emitted belches of filthy smoke. Ben Batson said the locos ran on oil, which the trains hauled along in great tanker-cars; oil from Persia was more accessible to Alexander than coal, and Casey Othic had drawn up his designs that way.

In this unlikely train Bisesa was going to ride to the Atlantic coast. First they would head through Arabia to the great engine yards at Jerusalem, then south and west across the Nile delta where the King had reestablished Alexandria. And then they would journey all the way along the coast of North Africa, through what would have been Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, to the port of the small oceangoing fleet at the Pillars of Hercules.

Ilicius Bloom said the Midden was as far as he would go with them. He was nervous. “Never known a night like it in Babylon in all these years,” he said. “Not since the War with the Son himself.

Bloody Greeks. But I got my job to do; I got my contacts.”

“And you have a child,” Emeline said sternly.

“Not my responsibility,” he said. “The mother’s, not mine.

Anyhow I’m sticking. Just don’t let them forget I’m here, back home. All right? Don’t forget me!”

Grove parted from them here too; he was catching a train back to New Troy. But he assigned Ben Batson to escort them to Gibraltar.

As the train pulled out, Bisesa thought she heard chanting coming from the loco.

“The engineers are from the School of Othic,” Abdikadir said.

“Casey Othic taught them well. He taught them that to do their work as perfectly as possible is to offer worship to the gods — just as a farmer offers a tithe of his crops. So as they work they worship; and as they worship they work.”

“So the train driver’s a monk,” Bisesa said. “Oh, Casey, what have you done?”

Ben Batson grinned. “Actually it’s a way of keeping them focused on the job. You have to do your work exactly right, said Mr.

Othic, for your homage to be acceptable to the gods. But the trouble is they do things by rote; they don’t like change, which they fear is heretical.”

“So there’s no innovation,” Bisesa said. “And as Casey’s locos break down one by one—”

Emeline said, “It is just as in Alexander’s court. Despite their exposure to modernity, these ancient Greeks are slipping back into superstition.”

Abdi said, “My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.”

Bisesa studied him. “You’ll have to tell me about your father.”

Emeline said dryly, “Well, we’ll certainly have time for that.”

There was no pursuit from Babylon, a capital city in turmoil. But an hour out from Babylon they saw a pitched battle going on, somewhere in the middle of the Arabian desert, only a couple of kilometers from the rail track.

Bisesa had lived through Alexander’s war with the Mongols, and she recognized the characteristic formations of the Macedonians. There were the phalanxes of infantry with their bristling sarissae, blocks of men trained to maneuver with such compactness and flexibility that they seemed to flow over the ground without a break in their ranks. The famous cavalry units, the Companions, were wedge-shaped formations driving into the field with their thrusting lances and shields. But this time Macedonian was fighting Macedonian.

“It’s a serious rebellion then,” Ben Batson murmured. “Of course somebody or other has been trying to bump off Alexander since even before the Discontinuity. Never saw it go this far before.

And, look, can you see that stolid-looking bunch over there? Neanderthals. The Macedonians have been using them since their campaigns in Europe. Their handlers say they won’t fight unless you force them. Good for shocking the enemy though.”

The battle remained fortunately distant from the rail line, and the loco plowed on noisily into the gathering light, leaving the battle behind. But they hadn’t traveled much further before another threat loomed.

“My word,” Emeline said, pointing. “Man-apes. Look, Bisesa!”

Looking ahead of the train, Bisesa saw hunched figures on a low dune, silhouetted against the morning sky.

Abdi said, “Sometimes they attack the trains for food. But they’re getting bolder. Following the tracks toward the city.”

Purposefully, steadily, the man-apes descended the dune. They walked with a squat gait, their human-like legs under heavy gorilla-like torsos. Their movements were imbued with determination and menace.

From the rattling, wheezing, slow-moving train, Bisesa watched uneasily. And then she thought she recognized the man-ape who led the advance. An animal with a memorable face, she was one of a pair, mother and infant, captured by Grove’s Tommies in the early days after the Discontinuity. Was this that same child? What had the men called her — Grasper? Well, if it was her, she was older, and scarred, and changed. Bisesa remembered how the captive man-apes, left alone with an Eye, had been subject to a Firstborn interaction of their own. Perhaps this was the result.

Now Grasper raised her arms high in the air, and revealed the burden that had been concealed by her hirsute body. She carried a stout branch, and impaled upon it was the bloody head of a man.

The mouth had been jammed open with a stick, and broken teeth gleamed white in the rays of the setting sun.

Bisesa felt fear stab her heart. “I think I asked for that lead man-ape to be let loose, once I was gone into the Eye. What a mistake that was.”

As the train came on them, the man-apes charged. They were met by a volley of arrows from the carriages, but the moving targets were hard to hit, and few man-apes fell. They hadn’t got their tim-ing quite right, however. As the locomotive’s whistle shrieked, hairy bodies hurled themselves at wooden carriages to be met by fists and clubs, and they couldn’t get purchase. One by one the man-apes fell away, capering and hooting in their frustration.

Abdi said, “Well, we’re seeing it all today…”

As the train left the man-ape troop behind, Bisesa’s phone beeped gently. She took it from her pocket, watched curiously by the others.

“Good morning, Bisesa.”

“So you’re talking to me now.”

“I have some bad news, and good news.”

She considered that. “Bad news first.”

“I have been analyzing the astronomical data collected by Ab -

dikadir and his predecessors at Babylon. Incidentally I would ap-preciate the chance to study the sky myself.”

“And?”

“This universe is dying.”

She gazed out at the dusty plain, the rising sun, the capering man-apes by the rail track. “And the good news?”

“I have a call. From Mars, Wells Station. It’s for you,” it added laconically.