Firstborn

She shrugged, her motion magnified clumsily by the servos in her suit. “If we could manipulate spacetime there’s no limit to what we might achieve. Architecture beyond the constraints of gravity.

Artificial gravity fields. Anti gravity fields. Reactionless space drives.

Tractor beams. Why, we might even make our own toy universes, like the Mir universe.”

Myra grunted. “You ought to patent this stuff.”

Ellie looked at her through her visor, coolly. “I think ensuring a technology like that gets into the right hands is more important than making money. Don’t you?”

Ellie had a self-righteous streak that Myra didn’t particularly take to. “Sure. Joke.” She was reminded that she was basically unwelcome here. She prepared to leave.

But Ellie called her back.

“There is something else,” she said, more hesitantly.

“Tell me.”

“I’m not sure…” Ellie paused. “Put it this way. I don’t think every element of the gravity-field structure I’m detecting has to do with engineering. There’s a level of detail in there that’s so intricate — I think of it as baroque — it has to have a meaning beyond the functional.”

Myra had lived with Eugene Mangles long enough to be able to detect academic caution, and she decoded that negative statement with ease. “If it’s not functional, then what? Symbolic?”

“Yes. Possibly.”

Myra’s imagination raced. “You think there are symbols in there? In the gravity field? What kind of symbols — writing, images? Recorded in a lattice of spacetime? That’s incredible.”

Ellie ignored that last remark. Myra realized she wouldn’t be saying anything about this unless it were, in fact, credible, and demonstrable. “Writing is a closer analogy, I think. I’m finding symbols of certain kinds, repeated across the field. Glyphs. And they come in clusters. Again, some of those clusters are repeated.”

“Clusters of glyphs. Words?”

“Or maybe sentences. I mean, if each glyph represents a concept in itself — if a glyph is an ideogram rather than a letter.” Ellie seemed to lose a little confidence; she clearly had a scientist’s deep desire not to make a fool of herself. When she spoke again her voice was a bray, her volume control poor, her social skills evaporating with her tension. “You realize how unlikely all this is. We have plenty of models of alien intelligences with no symbolic modes of communication at all. If you and I were telepathic, you see, we wouldn’t need letters and spoken words to talk to each other. So there’s no a priori reason to have expected the Martian builders of this cage to have left any kind of message.”

“And yet, if you’re right, they did.” Myra glared up at the trapped Eye. “Maybe we should have expected this. After all, they made a strong statement just by leaving this Eye here, trapped.

Look what we did. We fought back. We cut off the arm of the monster… I don’t suppose—”

“No, I haven’t decoded any of it. Whatever is in there is complex; not a linear array of symbols, like letters in a row, but a matrix in three-space, and maybe even higher dimensions. If the glyphs are real, they are surely given meaning positionally as well as from their form.”

“There has to be a starting point,” Myra said. “A primer.”

Ellie nodded inside her suit. “I’m trying to extract some of the most common symbol strings.”

Myra studied her. Ellie’s eyes were masked, even behind her faceplate, by her spectacles; her expression was cold. Myra realized she knew almost nothing about this woman, who might be in the middle of making the discovery of the age; they had barely spoken in the long months Myra had been here.

Myra fetched them both coffees. These came in pouches you had to dock to a port on the side of your helmet. She asked, “Where are you from, Ellie? The Low Countries?”

“Holland, actually. Delft. I am a Eurasian citizen. As you are, yes?”

“Forgive me but I’m not sure how old you are.”

“I was two years old when the sunstorm hit,” Ellie snapped. So she was twenty-nine now. “I do not remember the storm. I do remember the refugee camps where my parents and I spent the next three years. My parents discouraged me from following my voca-tion, which was an academic career. After the storm there was much reconstruction to be done, they said. I should work on that, be an architect or an engineer, not a physicist. They said it was my duty.”

“I guess you won the argument.”

“But I lost my parents. I think they wished me to suffer as they had suffered, for the sunstorm had destroyed their home, all they had built, their plans. Sometimes I think they wished they had failed, that the storm had smashed everything up, for then they would not have raised ungrateful children who did not understand.”

This torrent of words took Myra aback. “When you open up, you open up all the way, don’t you, Ellie? And is that why you’re here, working on this Eye? Because of what the sunstorm did to your family?”

“No. I am here because the physics is fascinating.”

“Sure you are. Ellie — you haven’t told anybody else about the cage symbology, have you? None of your crewmates here. Then why me?”

Unexpectedly Ellie grinned. “I needed to tell somebody. Just to see if I sounded completely crazy. Even though you aren’t qualified to judge the quality of the work, or the results.”

“Of course not,” Myra said dryly. “I’m glad you told me, Ellie.”

An alarm chimed softly in her helmet, and her suit told her she was due to meet Hanse for her ride back to the surface. “Let me know when you find out something more.”

“I will.” And Ellie turned back to her work, her cage of instruments, and the invisible gravitational battle of alien artifacts.

35: Poseidon’s Barb

Bisesa, Emeline White, and the young Abdikadir Omar were to cross the Atlantic Ocean aboard a vessel called Poseidon’s Barb. She was, to Bisesa’s eyes, an extraordinary mixture of Alexandrian trireme and nineteenth-century schooner: the Cutty Sark with oars.

She was under the command of an English-speaking Greek who treated his passengers with the utmost respect, once Abdikadir had handed over a letter of safe conduct from Eumenes.

They had to spend weeks at the rudimentary port at Gibraltar, waiting for a ship. Transatlantic travel wasn’t exactly common yet in this world. It was a relief when they got underway at last.

The Barb cut briskly through the gray waters of an Atlantic summer. The crew worked with a will, their argot a collision of nineteenth-century American English with archaic Greek.

Bisesa spent as much time as she could on deck. She had once flown choppers, and wasn’t troubled by the sea. Nor was Emeline, but poor landlubber Abdikadir spent a lot of time nursing a heav-ing gut.

Emeline became more confident in herself once they had cast off from Gibraltar. The ship was owned by a consortium of Babylonians, but its technology was at least half American, and Emeline seemed glad to shake off the dirt of the strange Old World. “We found each other by boat,” she told Bisesa. “We Chicagoans came down to the sea by the rivers, all the way to the Mississippi delta, while the Greeks came across the ocean in their big rowboats, scouting down the east coast and the Gulf. We showed the Alexandrians how to build masts that wouldn’t snap in an ocean squall and better ways to run their rigging, and in turn we have their big rowboats traveling up and down the Mississippi and the Illinois. It was a pooling of cultures, Josh liked to say.”

“No steamships,” Bisesa said.

“Not yet. We have a few steamboats on Lake Michigan, that came with us through the Freeze. But we aren’t geared up for the ocean. We may need steam if the ice continues to push south.” And she pointed to the north.

According to the phone’s star sightings — it grumpily complained about the lack of GPS satellites — they were somewhere south of Bermuda, perhaps south of the thirtieth parallel. But even so far south, Emeline’s