Firstborn

enough mind, and had managed to sustain an academic career, of sorts, in the most extraordinary of circumstances. “So what’s your interpretation, sir?”

He replaced his spectacles and looked at her. “That we are not privileged observers. That if we were living on a world of Alpha Centauri we would observe the same phenomenon — that is to say, we would see the distant nebulae receding from us uniformly. It can only mean that the ether itself is expanding — that is, the invisible material within which all the stars swim. The universe is blowing up like a pudding in an oven, and the stars, like currants embedded in that pudding, are all receding from each other. But to each currant it would seem as if it was the sole point of stillness at the center of the explosion…”

Bisesa’s knowledge of relativity was restricted to a module in a college course decades ago — that and science fiction, and you couldn’t trust that. But the Chicago time slice had come when Einstein was only fifteen years old; Oker could know nothing of relativity. And relativity was founded on the discovery that the ether, in fact, didn’t exist.

But she thought Oker had got the picture, near enough.

She said, “Mr. Mayor, he’s right. The universe itself is expanding. Right now the expansion is pushing the stars apart, the galaxies. But eventually that expansion is eventually going to work its way down to smaller scales.”

Abdi said, “It will pull the world apart, leaving us all flying in a crowd of rocks. Then our bodies will break up. Then the very atoms of which our bodies are composed.” He smiled. “And that is how the world will end. The expansion that is now visible only through a telescope will fold down until it breaks everything to bits.”

Rice stared at him. “Cold-blooded little cuss, aren’t you?” He glared down at Emeline’s letter. “All right, you got my attention.

Now, Miss Dutt, you say you’ve been talking about this with the folks back home. Right? So when is this big bubble going to burst?

How long have we got?”

“About five centuries,” Bisesa said. “The calculations are difficult — it’s hard to be sure.”

Rice stared at her. “Five fucking centuries, pardon me. When we haven’t got food stock to last us five weeks. Well, I think I’ll put that in my ‘pending’ tray for now.” He rubbed his eyes, energetic but obviously stressed. “Five centuries. Jesus Christ! All right, what’s next?”

Next was the solar system.

Gifford Oker breathed, “I read your letter, Miss Dutt. You traveled to Mars, in a space clipper. How marvelous your century must be!”

He preened. “When I was a small boy, you know, I once met Jules Verne. Great man. Very great man. He would have understood about sailing to Mars, I should think!”

“Can we stick to the point?” Rice snarled. “Jules Verne, Jesus Christ! Just show the lady your drawings, Professor; I can see that’s what you’re longing to do.”

“Yes. Here is the result of our exploration of the solar system, Miss Dutt.” Oker opened his briefcase, and spread his material over the mayor’s desk. There were images of the planets, some blurry black-and-white photographs, but mostly color images laboriously sketched in pencil. And there were what looked like spectrograph results, like blurred barcodes.

Bisesa leaned forward. Almost subvocally she murmured, “Can you see?”

Her phone whispered back, “Well enough, Bisesa.”

Oker pushed forward one set of images. “Here,” he said, “is Venus.”

In Bisesa’s reality Venus was a ball of cloud. The spaceprobes had found an atmosphere as thick as an ocean, and a land so hot that lead would melt. But this Venus was different. It looked, at first glance, like an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth from space: swaths of cloud, gray-blue ocean, small caps of ice at the poles.

Oker said, “It’s all ocean, ocean and ice. We’ve detected no land, not a trace. The ocean is water.” He scrabbled for a spectrograph result. “The air is nitrogen, with some oxygen — less than Earth’s—

and rather a lot of carbon dioxide, which must seep into the water.

The oceans of Venus must fizz like Coca Cola!” It was a professor’s well-worn joke. But now he leaned forward. “And there is life there: life on Venus.”

“How do you know?”

He pointed to green smudges on some of the drawings. “We can see no details, but there must be animals in the endless seas—

fish perhaps, immense whales, feeding on the plankton. We can expect it to be more or less like terrestrial analogues, due to processes of convergence,” he said confidently.

Oker showed more results. On the bare face of the Moon, transient atmospheres and even glimmers of open water pooled in the deep craters and the rills; and again the Chicagoan astronomers thought they saw life.

There were some extraordinary images of Mercury. These were blurred sketches of structures of light, like netting, flung over the innermost planet’s dark side, glimpsed at the very limits of visibility. Oker said there was once a partial eclipse of the sun, and some of his students reported that they had seen similar “webs of plasma,” or “plasmoids,” in the tenuous solar air. Perhaps this too was a form of life, much stranger, a life of superhot gases that swam from the fires of the sun to the face of its nearest child.

Under the cover of a coughing spasm, Bisesa withdrew and murmured to her phone. “Do you think it’s likely?”

“Plasma life is not impossible,” the phone murmured. “There are structures in the solar atmosphere, bound together by magnetic flux.”

Bisesa replied grimly, “Yes. We all became experts on the sun in the storm years. What do you think is going on here?”

“Mir is a sampling of life on Earth, taken during the period when intelligence, mankind, has arisen. The planetologists think Venus was warm and wet when very young. So perhaps Venus has been similarly ‘sampled.’ This seems to be a sort of optimized version of the solar system, Bisesa, each of the worlds, and perhaps slices within those worlds, selected for the maximality of its life. I wonder what’s happening on Europa or Titan in this universe, beyond the reach of the Chicagoans’ telescopes…”

Now Professor Oker, with a glimmer of a showman’s instinct, was unveiling the climax of his presentation: Mars.

But this wasn’t the Mars Bisesa had grown up with, and even visited. This blue-gray Mars was more Earthlike even than watery Venus, for here there was plenty of dry land, a world of continents and oceans, capped by ice at the poles, swathed in wispy cloud.

There was some familiarity. That green stripe might be the Valles Marineris; the blue scar in the southern hemisphere could be the tremendous basin of Hellas. Most of the northern hemisphere appeared to be dry.

The phone whispered, “Something’s wrong, Bisesa. If Mars, our Mars, were flooded, the whole of the northern hemisphere would be drowned under an ocean.”

“The Vastitas Borealis.”

“Yes. Something dramatic must happen to this Mars in the future, something that changes the shape of the entire planet.”

Rice listened to Oker impatiently, and at last cut him off.

“Come on, Gifford. Get to the good stuff. Tell her what you told me, about the Martians.”

Oker grinned. “We see straight-line traces cutting across the Martian plains. Lines that must be hundreds of miles long.”

“Canals,” Abdi said immediately.

“What else could they be? And on land we, some of us, believe we have glimpsed structures. Walls, perhaps, tremendously long.

This is controversial; we are at the limits of seeing. But about this, ”

Oker said, “there is no controversy at all.” He produced a photograph, taken in polarized light, which showed bright lights, like stars, scattered over the face of Mars. “Cities,” breathed Professor Oker.

Emeline leaned forward and tapped the image. “I told her about that,” she said.