Firstborn

pointing finger picked out an unmistakable gleam of white.

During the voyage, on the neutral territory of the sea, Bisesa tried to get to know her companions better.

Abdi was bright, young, unformed, refreshingly curious. He was a unique product, a boy who had been taught to think both by his modern-British father, and by Greeks who had learned at the feet of Aristotle. But there was enough of his father about him to make Bisesa feel safe, in a way she had always felt with the first Abdi.

Emeline was a more complex case. The ghost of Josh always hovered between them, a presence of which they rarely spoke. And, though Emeline had felt impelled to cross the ocean to investigate the phone calls in Babylon, just as her husband would surely have done, she confided to Bisesa that she was uncomfortable with the whole business.

“I was only nine when the world froze around Chicago. Most of my life has been occupied with ‘the great project of survival’—

that’s how Mayor Rice puts it. We’re always busy. So it’s possible to put aside the great mystery of why we’re all here in the first place—

do you see? Rather as one prefers not to contemplate one’s own inevitable death. But now here you are—”

“I’m an angel of death,” Bisesa said grimly.

“You’re hardly that, though you haven’t brought us good news, have you? But I can tell you I’ll be glad when we reach Chicago, and I can get back to normal life!”

During the nights, the phone asked Bisesa to take it up on deck to see the sky. She set up a little wooden stand for it, strapping it down so it wouldn’t tumble as the ship rolled.

Mir was a turbulent world, its climate as cobbled together as its geology, and not yet healed. For astronomers, the seeing was generally poor. But in mid-Atlantic the skies were as clear of cloud and volcanic ash as Bisesa had seen anywhere. She patiently allowed the phone to peer at the stars, reinforcing the observations it had made itself when Mir had first formed, and the sightings of the Babylonian astronomers since. It sent images back to the Little Bird’s old radio receivers in Babylon, and from there, it was hoped, through the Eye to the true universe.

And, prompted by the phone, she looked for the cool misty band of the Milky Way, wondering if it was more pale, more scattered than she remembered.

By assembling the observations made by Abdi and by the phone itself, the phone and the brain trust back on Mars had been able to determine that the universe in which Mir was embedded was expanding, dramatically. For example the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, was receding fast. The cosmologists had likened this to the expansion of Earth’s own universe, fueled by a kind of dark energy, an antigravity field called

“quintessence.” This quintessence was pulling Bisesa’s universe apart too. It was just that it was happening a lot earlier, here.

It was on this basis that the prediction of a universal ending relatively soon had been made, though the numbers were still im-precise. The phone believed that the recession might already be reaching into the structure of the Galaxy itself, with distant stars showing red shifts. The end of the world might already be visible in the sky, if you knew how to look.

And the phone pointed out the planets to Bisesa: Mars in the evenings, Venus a bright morning star.

“We never saw them, last time,” the phone whispered. “When I studied the sky, trying to date Mir.”

“I remember.”

“The seeing was too poor, always. I never noticed how they were different…”

Both Mars and Venus, siblings of Earth, were chips of sky blue.

36: Hubble

January 2070

Drifting above the Earth, the telescope was a fat double cylinder, thirteen meters long, its two big flat solar-cell panels angled toward the sun.

The slimmer forward cylinder, properly known as the forward shell, was open at the far end, with a hinged cover. At the base of the forward shell — inside the short, squat cylinder known as the aft shroud — was a mirror, a disk over two meters across. The mirror was precision-ground, shaped from low-expansion titanium silicate glass, with a covering of aluminium-magnesium fluoride. Light collected by this primary mirror was focused onto a smaller secondary, and then reflected back through a gap in the primary to a cluster of scientific instruments. The instruments included cameras, spectral analyzers, and light intensity and polarization calibra-tors.

There were handrails fixed to the exterior of the hull. The telescope had been designed to fit into the payload bay of a space shuttle orbiter, and, with its modularity and ease of access, to be capable of regular maintenance by astronaut engineers.

As a space project the telescope had been fraught by expense, delays, and overruns, caught up in the politics of NASA’s long-drawn-out decline. Its launch had been delayed for years by the Challenger disaster. When it was finally deployed, the first images it returned were flawed by a “spherical aberration,” a mirror defect a fraction the width of a human hair that had eluded detection during testing. It took more years before another shuttle flight brought up a corrective lens system to compensate for the aberration.

But it was the culmination of an old dream of the first space visionaries to place a telescope above the murk of Earth’s atmosphere.

The telescope was able to view features two hundred kilometers across on the cloud tops of Jupiter.

The telescope was said to be NASA’s most popular mission with the public since the Moon landings. Decades after its launch the telescope’s images still adorned softwalls and image-tattoos.

But the shuttle maintenance missions were always hugely expensive, and after the Columbia catastrophe became even more infeasible. And the telescope itself aged. Astronauts replaced worn- out gyroscopes, degraded solar panels, and torn insulation, but the optical surfaces were subject to wear from sunlight, micrometeorite and spacecraft debris impacts, and corrosion from the thin, highly reactive gases of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

At last the telescope was made redundant by a younger, cheaper, more effective rival. It was ordered to position itself to reduce atmospheric drag to a minimum: mothballed in orbit, until a more favorable funding environment might prevail in the future.

Its systems were made quiescent. The aperture door over the forward shell closed: the telescope shut its single eye.

Decades passed.

The telescope was fortunate to survive the sunstorm.

And after the storm came a new era, a new urgency, when eyes in the sky were at a premium.

Five years after the sunstorm, a spacecraft at last came climbing up from Earth to visit the telescope once more, not a shuttle but a technological descendant. The spaceplane carried a manipulator arm and kits of antiquated replacement parts. Astronauts replaced the damaged components, revived the telescope’s systems, and returned to Earth.

The telescope opened its eye once more.

More years passed. And then the telescope saw something.

It seemed to many appropriate that the oldest of Earth’s space telescopes should be the first of any system based on or close to the home planet to pick out the approaching Q-bomb.

In her Mount Weather office, Bella Fingal peered at the Hubble images, of a teardrop distortion sliding across the stars. There was less than a year left until the bomb was due to reach Earth. Horror knotted her stomach.

She called Paxton. “Get in here, Bob. We can’t just sit and wait for this damn thing. I want some fresh options.”