Firstborn

“Hey, look at this thread.” This discussion followed leads from members of something called the Committee of Patriots. “I heard of that,” Edna said. “It advises my mother.” She read, “ ‘The Firstborn dominate past and future, time and space. They’re so far advanced that compared to them…’ ” She scrolled forward. “Yes, yes. ‘The existence of the Firstborn is the organizing pole around which all of future human history must, will be constructed. And therefore we should accept their advanced wisdom.’ ”

John grimaced. “You mean, if the Firstborn choose to destroy the Earth, we should just submit?”

“That’s the idea. Because they know best.”

“I can’t say that strikes a chord with me. What else you got?”

In the silence of Wells Station, Athena spoke again. “It is time.”

Yuri looked around the empty air wildly. “You’re here?”

“I’ve downloaded a fresh avatar, yes.”

“It isn’t twelve hours yet.”

“No more time is needed. A consensus has emerged — not una-nimity, but overwhelming. I’m very sorry,” Athena said evenly.

“We are about to commit a great and terrible crime. But it is a responsibility that will be borne by all of us, mankind and its allies.”

“It had to be this way, Yuri,” Myra said. “You know it—”

“Well, I won’t fucking leave whatever you do,” Yuri said, and he stamped out of the room.

Alexei said, “Look at this discussion thread. ‘We are a lesser power. The situation is asymmetric. So we must prepare to fight asymmetrically, as lesser powers have always faced off greater ones, drawing on a history of fighting empires back to Alexander the Great. We must be prepared to make sacrifices to strike against them. We must be prepared to die…’ ”

“A future as a species of suicide bombers,” Grendel said. “But if those Martians in that other reality don’t respond, we still may have no future at all.”

Myra glanced over the summarized discussion threads, symbolized in the air and in the screens spread over the table. Their content was complex, their message simple: Do it. Just do it.

Ellie stood up. “Myra. Please help me. I think it’s time to talk to your mother.”

Myra followed Ellie to the Pit.

50: Interlude: The Last Martian

She was alone on Mars. The only one of her kind to have come through the crude time-slicing.

She had built herself a shelter at the Martian north pole, a spire of ice. It was beautiful, pointlessly so, for there was none but her to see it. This was not even her Mars. Most of this time-sliced world, for all the cities and canals that had survived, was scarred by cold aridity.

When she saw the array of symbols burning in the ice of Mir, the third planet, it gave her a shock of pleasure to know that mind was here in this new system with her. But, even though she knew that whatever lived on Mir was cousin to her own kind, it was a poor sort of comfort.

Now she waited in her spire and considered what to do.

The great experiments of life on the worlds of Sol ran in parallel, but with different outcomes.

On Mars, when intelligence rose, the Martians manipulated their environment like humans. They lit fires and built cities.

But a Martian was not like a human.

Even her individuality was questionable. Her body was a community of cells, her form unfixed, flowing between sessile and motile stages, sometimes dispersing, sometimes coalescing. She was more like a slime mold, perhaps, than a human. She had always been intimately connected to the tremendous networked communities of single-celled creatures that had drenched Mars. And she was not really a “she.” Her kind were not sexual as humans were.

But she had been a mother; she was more “she” than “he.”

There had only ever been a few hundred thousand of her kind, spread across the seas and plains of Mars. They had never had names; there were only ever so few that names were unnecessary.

She had been aware of every one of them, like voices dimly heard in the echoes of a vast cathedral.

She was very aware that they had all gone, all of them. Hers was a loneliness no human could have imagined.

And the approaching Firstborn weapon, Mars’s own Q-bomb, had gone too.

Just before the Discontinuity she had been working at the Martian pole, tending the trap of distorted spacetime within which she and her fellow workers had managed to capture the Firstborn Eye.

To senses enhanced to “see” the distortion of space, the weapon was very visible, at the zenith, driving straight down from the sky toward the Martian pole.

And then came the time-slicing. The Eye remained in its cage.

The Firstborn weapon was gone.

This time-sliced Mars was a ruin, the atmosphere only a thin veneer of carbon dioxide, only traces of frost in the beds of the vanished oceans, and dust storms towering over an arid landscape sterilized by the sun’s ultraviolet. In places the cities of her kind still stood, abandoned, even their lights burning in some cases. But her fellows were gone. And when she dug into the arid, toxic dirt, she found only methanogens and other simple bacteria, thinly spread, an echo of the great rich communities that had once inhabited this world. Scrapings that were her own last descendants.

She was alone. A toy of the Firstborn. Resentment seethed.

The Martians had thought they came to understand the Firstborn, to a degree.

The Firstborn must have been very old.

They may even be survivors of the First Days, the Martians thought, an age that began just half a billion years after the Big Bang itself, when the universe turned transparent, and the light of the very first stars shone uncertainly. That was why the Firstborn triggered instabilities in stars. In their day, all the stars had been unstable.

And if they were old, they were conservative. To achieve their goals they caused stars to flare or go nova, or change their variability, not to detonate entirely. They sent their cosmological bombs to sterilize worlds, not to shatter them. They appeared to be trying to shut down energy-consuming cultures as economically as possible.

To understand why they did this, the Martians tried to look at themselves through the eyes of a Firstborn.

The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium — the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy”—that life depends.

And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.

Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.

From the Firstborn’s lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.

Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.

If you wanted to reach the very far future — the Last Days, when the surge of quintessence finally ended the age of matter — the restrictions were harsh. The Martians’ own calculations indicated that the universe could bear