Firstborn

given to extravagant displays of any emotion save irritation. This sitting-back and staring was, for Ellie, a major outburst.

“What is it?”

“Well, there it is.” Ellie tapped her screen. “The destiny of Mars. We’ve figured it out.”

“All right. So can you say what it means, in simple terms?”

“I’m going to have to. According to this message I’m to take part in a three-world press conference on it in a couple of hours. Of course the math is always easier. More precise.” She squinted out at the dust, thinking. “Put it this way. If we could see the sky, and if we had a powerful enough telescope, we would see the most distant stars recede. As if the expansion of the universe had suddenly accelerated. But we would not see the same thing from Earth.”

Myra pondered that. “So what does that mean?”

“The Q-bomb is a cosmological weapon. We always knew that.

A weapon derived from the Firstborn’s technology of universe creation. Yes?”

“Yes. And so—”

“So what it has done is to project Mars into its own little cosmos. A kind of budding-off. Right now the baby Mars universe is connected smoothly to the mother. But the baby will come adrift, leaving Mars isolated.”

Myra struggled to take this in. “Isolated in its own universe?”

“That’s it. No sun, no Earth. Just Mars. You can see that this weapon was just supposed to, umm, detach a chunk of the Earth.

Which would have caused global devastation, but left the planet itself more or less intact. It’s too powerful for Mars. It will take out this little world altogether.” She grinned, but her eyes were mirth-less. “It will be lonely, in that new universe. Chilly, too. But it won’t last long. The baby universe will implode. Although from the inside it will feel like an ex plosion. It’s a scale model of the Big Rip that will some day tear our universe apart. A Little Rip, I suppose.”

Myra pondered this, and didn’t try to pursue the paradox of implosions and explosions. “How can you tell all this?”

Ellie pointed to the obscured sky. “From the recession of the stars we’ve observed with telescopes on Mars, a recession you wouldn’t see from Earth. It’s an illusion, of course. Actually the Mars universe is beginning to recede from the mother. Or, equivalently, vice versa.”

“But we can still get off the surface. Get to space, back to Earth.”

“Oh, yes. For now. There is a smooth interface between the universes.” She peered at her screen and scrolled through more results. “In fact it’s going to be a fascinating process. A baby universe being born in the middle of our solar system! We’ll learn more about cosmology than we have in a century. I wonder if the Firstborn are aware of how much they’re teaching us…”

Myra glanced uneasily about the cockpit. If they were being hack-watched, this display of academic coldness wasn’t going to play too well. “Ellie. Just rejoin the human race for a minute.”

Ellie looked at her sharply. But she backed off. “Sorry.”

“How long?”

Ellie glanced again at her screen and scrolled through her results.

“The data is still settling down. It’s a little hard to say. Ballpark—

three more months before the detachment.”

“Then Mars must be evacuated by, what, February?”

“That’s it. And after that, maybe a further three months before the implosion of the baby cosmos.”

“And the end of Mars.” Just six more months’ grace, then, for a world nearly five billion years old. “What a crime,” she said.

“Yeah. Hey, look.” Ellie was pointing to a crumpled, dust-stained sheet protruding from the crimson ground. “Do you think that’s a parachute?”

“Rover, full stop.” The vehicle jolted to a halt, and Myra peered. “Magnify… I think you’re right. Maybe the twisters whip it up, and keep it from being buried. What does the sonar show?”

“Let’s take a look. Rover…”

And there it was, buried a few meters down under the wind-blown Martian dust, a squat, blocky shape easily imaged by the sonar.

“Mars 2, ” Myra said.

Mars 2 was a Soviet probe that had traveled to the planet in 1971, part of a favorable-opposition flotilla that had included the Americans’ Mariner 9. It had attempted its landing in the middle of the worst global dust storm the astronomers had ever seen.

“It looks like a flower,” Ellie breathed. “Those four petals.”

“It was a ball of metal about the size of a domestic fridge. The petals were supposed to open up and right it, whichever way up it landed.”

“Looks like it was doomed by a twisted-up parachute. After coming all this way…”

Crash-landing not, Mars 2 had been the first human artifact of all to touch the surface of the planet. And it had come down in this very spot precisely a century before, on November 27, 1971. “It made it. And so did we.”

“Yeah. And now it’s two meters deep under the dust.” Ellie un-hooked her harness and got out of her chair. “Fetch a spade.”

57: Babylon

When Captain Nathaniel Grove in Troy heard that Bisesa Dutt had returned to Babylon, he hurried back there with Ben Batson.

At the Ishtar Gate they met Eumenes, still surviving as chiliarch to an increasingly capricious Alexander. “Bisesa is in the Temple of Marduk,” he said to them in his stilted English. “She will not come out.”

Grove grimaced. “I might have expected as much. Had that sort of breakdown before. Bad show, bad show. Can we see her?”

“Of course. But first we must visit another, ah, hermit — and not a voluntary one, I fear. He has been asking to see you, should you return to Babylon. Indeed he has been asking to see any of what he calls ‘the moderns.’ ”

It turned out to be Ilicius Bloom, the “consul” from Chicago.

Just inside the city walls, not far from the Ishtar Gate, Alexander’s guards had stuck him in a cage.

The cage was evidently meant for animals. It was open to the elements, and too small for Bloom to stand straight. A guard stood by the cage, one of Alexander’s phalangists, clearly bored. At the back of the cage hung what looked like an animal skin, scraped bare, shriveled and dry.

Crouched in his filthy rags, his eyes bright white in a grimy face, Ilicius Bloom shuddered and coughed, though the day was not cold, and a stench of raw sewage made Grove recoil. Bloom was pa-thetically grateful to see them, but he was self-aware enough to notice Grove’s flinch. “You needn’t think that’s me, by the way. They kept a man-ape in here before. Flea-bitten bitch.” He dug around in the dirt. “Look at this — dried man-ape scut!” He flung it at the iron bars of the cage. “At night the rats come, and that’s no fun. And guess where they put the she-ape? In the temple with that loon Bisesa Dutt. Can you believe it? Say, you must help me, Grove. I won’t last much longer in here, you have to see that.”

“Calm down, man,” Grove said. “Tell us why you’re here.

Then perhaps we’ll have a chance of talking you out of it.”

“Well, I wish you luck. Alexander is thinking of war, you know.”

“War? Against whom?”

“Against America. Europe isn’t enough for him — how could it be, when he knows there are whole continents to conquer? But the only source of intelligence he has on America, or rather Chicago, is me.