Firstborn

Zheng He, after their great fifteenth-century explorer—”

“Do you think they will make it?”

“It’s possible. We’re certainly not going to stop them. I’m not sure if we could; no doubt those arks are heavily armed. I think I rather hope they succeed. The more mankind is scattered, the better chance of survival we have in the long term.”

John said, “But it’s also possible the Firstborn will follow them to Alpha Centauri, or wherever the hell, and deal with them in their turn.”

“True. Anyhow it makes no difference to our mission.”

“It’s another complication for the future, Mum, if the world gets through the Q-bomb assault: an encounter a few centuries out, our A-drive starships meeting whatever society the Chinese managed to build out there under the double suns of Centauri.

“Maybe Thea will have to deal with that. Give her my love.

Okay, back to business, we’re now resuming our cruise alongside the Q-bomb. Liberator out.”

42: Cyclops

As they neared Cyclops Station Myra glimpsed more mirrors in space. They were lightships, swimming around the observatory.

After many days suspended alone in the three-dimensional dark, it was a shock to have so much company.

The Maxwell pushed through the loose crowd of sails and approached the big structure at the heart of the station. Alexei said it was called Galatea. It was a wheel in space.

The Maxwell bored in along the axis of the wheel, heading straight for the hub. Galatea was a spindly thing, like a bicycle wheel with spokes that glimmered, barely visible. But there were concentric bands at different radii from the center, painted different colors, silver, orange, blue, so that Galatea had something of the look of an archery target. Galatea turned on its axis, in sunlight every bit as bright as the light that fell on Earth itself, and long shadows swept across its rim and spokes like clock hands.

Alexei said, “Looks luxurious, doesn’t it? After the sunstorm an awful lot of money was pumped into planet- finder observatories. And this was how a good deal of it was spent.”

“It reminds me of a fairground ride,” Myra said. “And it looks sort of old-fashioned.”

Alexei shrugged. “It’s a vision from a century ago, of how the future was supposed to be, which they finally got the money to build, just for once. But I’m no history buff.”

“Umm. I suppose it’s spinning for artificial gravity.”

“Yep. You dock at the stationary hub and take elevators down to the decks.”

“And why the colors — silver, red, blue?”

He smiled. “Can’t you guess?”

She thought it over. “The further you go from the hub, the higher the apparent gravity. So they’ve painted the lunar-gravity deck silver — one-sixth G.”

“You’ve got it. And the Mars deck is orange, and the Earth-gravity deck is blue. Galatea is here to serve as a hub for the Cyclops staff, but it has always been a partial-gravity laboratory. There are pods suspended from the outermost deck — see? The biologists are trying out higher gravities than Earth’s, too.” He grinned. “They’ve got some big-boned lab rats down there. Maybe we’ll need that research someday, if we’re going to go whizzing about the solar system on antimatter drives.”

As the wheel loomed closer Myra lost her view of the outer rim, and her vision was filled with the engineering detail of the inner decks, the spinning hub with its brightly lit ports, the spokes and struts, and the steadily shifting shadows.

A pod came squirting out of an open portal right at the center of the hub. When it emerged it was spinning on its own axis, turning with the angular momentum of Galatea, but with a couple of pulses of reaction-jet gas it stabilized and approached the Maxwell cautiously.

“Max isn’t going in any closer,” Alexei said. “Lightship sails and big turning wheels don’t mix. And you always take Galatea’s own shuttles in to the hub rather than pilot yourself. They have dedicated AIs, who are good at that whole spinning-up thing…”

The docking was fast, slick, over in minutes. Hatches opened with soft pops of equalizing pressure.

A young woman came tumbling out of the shuttle, and threw herself zero-gravity straight into Alexei’s arms. Myra and Yuri exchanged mocking glances.

The couple broke, and the girl turned to Myra. “You’re Bisesa’s daughter. I’ve seen your picture in the files. It’s good to meet you in the flesh. My name is Lyla Neal. Welcome to Cyclops.”

Myra grabbed a strut to brace herself and shook her hand.

Lyla was maybe twenty-five, her skin a rich black, her hair a compact mass, her teeth brilliant white. Unlike Yuri and Alexei, like Myra, she wore an ident tattoo on the smooth skin of her right cheek.

Myra said, “You evidently know Alexei.”

“I met him through his father. I’m one of Professor Carel’s students. I’m up here, ostensibly, to pursue academic projects. Cosmological. Distant galaxies, primordial light, that sort of thing.”

Myra glanced at Alexei. “So this is how you spy on your father for the Spacers.”

“Yeah, Lyla is my mole. Neat, isn’t it?” His tone was flat; perhaps there was some guilt in there under the flippancy.

They all clambered into the shuttle with their bits of luggage.

Once aboard Galatea, they were hurried through the hub structure and loaded into a kind of elevator car.

Lyla said, “Grab onto a rail. And you might want your feet down that way,” she said, pointing away from the axis of spin.

The elevator dropped with a disconcerting jolt.

They passed quickly out of the hub complex, and suddenly they were suspended in space, inside a car that was a transparent bubble dangling from a cable. As they descended the centrifugal-acceleration pull gradually built up, until their feet settled to the floor, and that unpleasant Coriolis-spin sensation faded. They were dropping through a framework of spokes toward the great curving tracks of the wheel’s decks below. All this was stationary in Myra’s view, but the sun circled slowly, and the shadows cast by the spokes swept by steadily. But there was no ground under this huge funfair ride, no floor but the stars.

Lyla said, “Look, before we go on — elevator, pause.”

The car slowed to a halt.

Lyla said, “You ought to take a look at the view. See what the station is all about. It’s much harder to see from within the decks.

Elevator. Show us Polyphemus.”

Myra looked out through the hull. She saw stars whirling slowly, the universe become a pinwheel. And an oval of gold lit up on the window and began to track upward, slowly, countering the rotation to pick out a corner of the star field. There Myra made out a faint disc, misty-gray and with rainbows washing across its face.

A smaller station hung behind it, a knot of instruments.

“That, ” Lyla said, “is a telescope. One big, spinning, fragile Fresnel lens. Nearly a hundred meters across.”

Myra asked, “Wasn’t the sunstorm shield a Fresnel lens?”

“It was…”

So this was yet another technological descendant of the tremendous shield that had once sheltered the Earth.

Lyla said, “They call that fellow Polyphemus, the Cyclops, after the most famous of the one-eyed giants of