Firstborn

”

“Ah. And so he’s been questioning you.”

Bloom held up hands with bloodied fingertips. “You could call it that. Naturally I’ve talked myself hoarse. Now, don’t look down your nose at me, Captain Grove. I’m no British Army officer. And besides I can’t see what difference it makes. Have you seen Alexander recently? I can’t believe the bloated brute will live much longer, let alone oversee a war across the Atlantic. I’ve told him everything I could think of, and when he wanted more I lied freely. What else could I do?

“But it was never enough, never enough. Look at this.” He shuffled in his cage. Through the thin, grimy cloth of his shirt, Grove saw the striping of whip marks on his back. “And look!” He pointed a clawlike hand at the rag of skin that hung on the wall outside his cage.

Ben Batson asked, “What is that?”

“I loved her, you know,” Bloom said now.

“Who, man?” Grove asked patiently. “Who did you love?”

“Isobel. You remember, Grove, the girl from the Midden. She gave me a brat! Oh, I was cruel, I was selfish, but that’s me, that is Ilicius Bloom.” He laughed and shook his head. “And yet I loved her, as best my flawed soul was capable. Truly I did.

“They did this to break me, of course,” Bloom whispered, staring at Grove. “Two Companions, it was. They did it before my eyes. Peeled her like a grape. They took her face off. She lived for long minutes, flayed. Every inch of her body must have been a locus of exquisite agony — think of it! And then—”

Batson looked at the bit of skin. “My word, Captain, I do believe—”

“Come away,” Grove said, pulling him back.

Bloom flew into a panic. “You can see how I’m fixed. Speak to Eumenes. Tell Mayor Rice. Oh, how I long to hear an American voice again! Please, Grove—” He managed to get his whole arm through the bars of the cage. The guard casually slapped his flesh with the flat of his stabbing-sword. Bloom howled and withdrew.

Eumenes shepherded Grove and Batson away. “Ilicius Bloom is a dead man. He put himself in danger when he tried to bargain with Alexander over his scraps of knowledge. Then he doomed himself with his lies. He would be in his grave already were it not so cheap to keep him alive. If you wish I will arrange an audience with Alexander about his fate, though I warn you it is likely to do little good, and you would put yourselves in danger… But first,”he said, “you must visit Bisesa Dutt.”

58: Secession

February 27, 2072

The shuttle stood on the drab, dusty plain. The sun was a pale disk riding high in the orange sky; it was close to local noon, here on the Xanthe Terra. The ship was a biconic, a fat, clumsy-looking half-cone. It stood at the end of a long scar in the dust, a relic of its own glide-down landing. Right now it stood on end, ready to hurl itself away from Mars and up into orbit. The shuttle’s exposed underside, plastered with dark heatshield tiles, was scarred from multiple reentries, and the paintwork around its attitude-thruster nozzles was blistered. Rovers stood by, their tracks snaking away to the horizon. Hatches were open in the shuttle’s belly, and men, women and spidery robots labored to haul packages into its hold.

There was nothing special about this bird, Myra thought, as she stood watching in her Mars suit. This was just a ground-to-orbit truck that had made its routine hops a dozen times, maybe more.

But it was the last spacecraft that would ever leave the surface of Mars.

Myra knew this was a symbolic moment. Most of Mars’s human population had long gone, along with all they could lift.

The various AIs that had inhabited the bases and rovers and bits of equipment had, too, been saved as far as possible, according to laws governing the right to protection of Legal Persons (Non-Human); at the very least copies of them had been transmitted to memory stores off-planet. But there was nothing that touched a human heart as much as seeing the last bundle loaded aboard the last ship out, a last footprint, a last hatch closed.

Which was why cameras rolled, floated, and flew all around this site. And why a delegate of Chinese stood in a huddle, away from the rest. And why the frantic work of loading was being held up by the presence of Bella Fingal, the now-ousted Chair of the World Space Council, in a Mars suit that looked two or three sizes too big for her, who stood surrounded by a small crowd.

“One hour,” a soft automated voice said in Myra’s helmet. She saw from the subtle reactions of the others that they had all heard the same warning. One hour left to get off Mars before — well, before something unimaginable happened.

Myra drifted back to join the small crowd, all in their suits, like a clutch of fat green snowmen.

Bella said now, “A shame we couldn’t have made this last launch from Port Lowell.” They were in fact fifty kilometers from Lowell, out on the Xanthe Terra, a bay on the perimeter of the great Vastitas Borealis. “It would have been fitting to stage the last human lift-off from Mars at the place Bob Paxton and his crew made the first touchdown.”

“Well, maybe we could have, if Lowell wasn’t still radioactive,”

Yuri O’Rourke growled a bit sharply. He summoned Hanse Critchfield, who was proudly carrying a display tray of materials.

“Madam Chair. Here,” he said unceremoniously. “This is a selection of the scientific materials we have been gathering in these last months. Take a look. Samples from a variety of geological units, from the southern highlands to the northern plains to the slopes of the great volcanoes. Bits of ice core from the polar caps, of particular value to me. And, perhaps most precious of all, samples of Martian life. There are relics of the past, look, you see, we even have a fossil here from a sedimentary lake bed, and native organisms from the present day, and samples of the transgenic life-forms we have been experimenting with.”

Grendel Speth said dryly, “Martians you can eat.”

Bella Fingal was a small, tired-looking woman, now nearly sixty. She seemed genuinely touched by the gesture. She smiled through her faceplate. “Thank you.”

Yuri said, “I’m only sorry that we can’t give you a vial of canal water. Or the tripod leg from a Martian fighting machine. Or an egg laid by a Princess… I wish I could show you a Wernher von Braun glider, too. That was the first serious scheme to get to Mars, you know. They would have glided down to land on the smooth ice at the poles. And if that’s the past, I’m sorry you won’t see Mars’s future. A mature human world, fully participating in an interplanetary economic and political system…”

Myra touched his arm, and he fell silent.

Bella smiled. “Yes. This is the end of a human story too, isn’t it?

No more Martian dreams. But we won’t forget, Yuri. I can assure you that the study of Mars will continue even when the planet itself is lost. We will continue to learn about Mars, and strive to understand.

“And in this last moment I want to try to tell you again why this has all been worthwhile — even this terrible cost.”

She said there had been more results from Cyclops.

The great observatory had been designed before the sunstorm to search for Earthlike worlds. Since the storm, and especially since the return of Athena, its great Fresnel eyes had been turned aside, to peer into the dark spaces between the stars.

Bella said, “And everywhere the astronomers look, they see refugees.”

The Cyclops telescopes had seen infrared traces of generation starships, slow, fat arks like the Chinese ships, whole civilizations in flight. And there were immense, flimsy ships with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, scudding before the light of exploding stars. They had even detected narrow-beam laser signals they thought might be traces of efforts to teleport, desperate attempts to send the essence of a living being encoded into a radio signal.

Myra felt stunned, imaginatively. There was a story, a whole novel, in every one of these brief summaries.