Firstborn

sacrifice worth making, don’t you?”

“I think you’re crazy, Mum. But it’s magnificent.” Edna grabbed her and kissed her.

Thales spoke. “This is a secure channel. Bella, Edna — the Q-bomb’s closest approach is a minute away.”

Secure line or not, the news soon seemed to ripple out. Silence spread through the rooftop marquees, and the massed crowds around Canaveral. Suddenly the mood was soured, fretful. Edna took Thea from John Metternes and clutched her close. Bella grabbed her daughter’s free hand and gripped it hard.

They looked up into the brilliant sky.

55: Q-bomb

The choice had been made. The bomb was already looking ahead, to the terminus of its new trajectory.

The blue, teeming world and all its peoples receded behind it.

Like any sufficiently advanced machine the Q-bomb was sentient to some degree. And its frozen soul was touched by regret when, six months after passing Earth, it slammed into the sands of Mars, and thought ended forever.

56: Mars

2 November 2071

The dust was extraordinary here in Hellespontus, even for Mars, dust museum of the solar system.

Myra sat in her blister cockpit with Ellie von Devender as the rover plunged over the banks and low dunes. This was the southern hemisphere of Mars, and they were driving through the Hellespontus mountains, a range of low hills not far from the western rim of the Hellas basin. But the rover’s wheels threw up immense rooster-tails, and the stuff just flew up at the windscreens, wiping out any kind of visibility. The infrared scanners, even the radar, were useless in these conditions.

Myra had been around space technology long enough to know that she had to put her faith in the machinery that protected her.

The rover knew where it was going, in theory, and was finding its way by sheer dead reckoning. But it violated all her instincts to go charging blindly ahead like this.

“But we can’t slow down,” Ellie said absently. “We don’t have time.” She was paging her way through astronomical data — not even looking out the window, as Myra was. But then her primary task was much more significant, the ongoing effort to understand what precisely the Q-bomb had done to Mars since its impact five months ago, an impact that had done little harm in itself, but which had planted a seed of quintessence that would soon shatter Mars altogether.

“It’s just all this dust,” Myra said. “I didn’t expect these kind of conditions, even on Mars.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Myra, this area is notorious. This is where a lot of the big global dust storms seem to be born. You didn’t know that? Welcome to Dust Central. Anyhow you know we’re in a rush. If we don’t find that old lady on its hundredth birthday we’re going to let down the sentimental populations of whole worlds.” She grinned at Myra, quite relaxed.

She was right. As everybody waited for the full extent of the bad news about the planet’s future, the electronic gaze of all mankind had been fixed on Mars and the Martians. It was sympathetic or morbid, depending on your point of view. And of all the frantic activities in advance of the final evacuation of a world, none had caught the public imagination as much as what cynical old hands like Yuri called “treasure hunting.”

Mars was littered with the relics of the pioneering days of the robot exploration of the solar system, some seventy years of tri-umph and bitter disappointment that had come to a definitive end when Bob Paxton planted the first human footprint in the red sands. Most of those inert probes and stalled rovers and bits of scattered wreckage still lay in the dust where they had come to rest.

The early colonists of Mars had had no energy to spare to go trophy hunting, or a great deal of interest; they had looked to the future, not the past. But now that it appeared that Mars might have no future after all, there had been a clamor to retrieve as many of those old mechanical pioneers as possible.

It wasn’t a job that required a great deal of specialist skill in Martian conditions, and so it was an ideal assignment for Myra, a Martian by recent circumstance. For safety reasons she couldn’t travel alone on these cross-planet rover jaunts, however, and so she had been assigned Ellie as a companion, a physicist rather than a Mars specialist who might be better employed elsewhere. Ellie had been quite happy to go along with her; she could continue her own work just as well in a moving rover as in a station like Lowell or Wells — better, she said, for there were fewer distractions.

Of course, Ellie’s work was far more important than any trophy-hunting. Ellie was working with a system- wide community of physicists and cosmologists on predictions of what was to become of Mars. Right now she was looking at deep-sky images of star fields. As far as Myra understood, their best data came not from Mars itself but from studies of the sky: though it was hard to grasp, the distant stars no longer looked the same from Mars as they did from the Earth. It defeated Myra’s imagination how that could possibly be so.

Anyhow the retrieval program had been successful in terms of its own goals. With the help of orbital mapping Myra and others had reached the Vikings, tonnes of heavy, clunky, big-budget Cold War engineering, where they still sat in the dry, rocky deserts to which cautious mission planners had consigned them. The famous, plucky Pathfinder craft with its tiny robot car had been retrieved from its “rock garden” in the Ares Vallis — that one had been easy; it wasn’t far from Port Lowell, site of the first manned landing.

Myra knew that British eyes had been on the retrieval of fragments of the Beagle 2, an intricate, ingenious, toylike probe that had not survived its journey to the Isidis Planitia. And then there had been the recovery of the exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, worn out by journeys that far exceeded their design capabilities. All these antique artifacts were destined for Smithsonian establishments on the Earth and Moon.

The retrieval expeditions had had scientific goals too. There was some interest in how man-made materials had withstood up to a century of exposure to Martian conditions. And the landing sites were of interest in themselves — otherwise the probes would not have been sent there. So Myra and Ellie had worked through a crash last-minute science program of sampling, mapping, and coring.

There had even been efforts to retrieve some of the elderly orbiters, still spinning around Mars, long silent. There was universal disappointment when it was discovered that Mariner 9, the very first orbiter, was gone; if it had survived into the 2040s it was surely swallowed up when sunstorm heat caused a general expansion of the Martian atmosphere.

Myra was glad to have something constructive to do. But she hadn’t expected such intense public scrutiny of her treasure-hunting, with every move being followed by a system-wide audience. The crews had been promised that no images would be returned from the rover cabin itself. But Myra tried never to forget that the rover’s systems could easily be hacked; she could be watched at any moment.

The day wore on, and the daylight, already murky under the rover’s artificial dust storm, began to fade. Myra began to fret that they would not after all find the wreck of Mars 2, as the light ran out on this anniversary day.

Then Ellie sat back, staring at a complex graph on her softscreen.

Myra studied her. She had gotten to know this edgy physicist well enough to understand that she wasn’t