47: OPTIONS

July 2070

Yuri came running in. He spread his softscreen out on the crew table. “At last I got the stuff downloaded from Mir…”

The screen began to fill up with images of worlds, blurry photographs, and blue-green pencil sketches.

Wells Station’s Can Two, the “house,” had one big inflatable table, used for crew meals, conferences, as a work surface. The table was modular; it could be split up into two or three. It was another bit of confinement psychology, Myra understood. The crew didn’t even have to eat together, if they chose not.

Right now all the bits of the big table were pushed together. For days it had been used as the focus of a kind of unending conference. Yuri was trying to make sense of the alternate-Mars images Bisesa’s phone had slowly, painfully returned through the low-bandwidth Eye link. Ellie was slaving over her analysis of the Eye’s gravitational cage. Only Hanse Critchfield wasn’t working on some aspect of the Q-bomb threat, insisting he was more use with his beloved machines.

And Myra, Alexei, and Grendel Speth, with comparatively little to contribute, sat glumly at the scuffed table, cups of cool low-pressure coffee before them.

There was a sense of shabbiness in this roundhouse on Mars, Myra thought, compared to the expensive, expansive, light-filled environs of Cyclops. Yet, as Athena kept assuring them, they were at the focus of a response to a danger of cosmic proportions. The detonation in the asteroid belt had been visible on all the human worlds. Much of Earth had shut down, a civilization still traumatized by the sunstorm huddled in bunkerlike homes, waiting.

But time was running out. And on Mars there was a sense of rising panic. The Earth warship Liberator was now only days away, and they all knew why it was coming.

“All right,” Yuri said. “Here’s what we’ve got. As I understand it, the consensus among us is that the Mir universe contains a set of time-sliced samples. A showcase of solar life at its optimum on each world.”

“All Sol’s children at their prettiest,” Grendel said. “But it can’t last. I mean, both Venus and Mars must have reached their peak of biodiversity in the early days of the solar system, when the sun was much cooler. As best anybody can tell, the Mir sun is a copy from the thirteenth century. That sun is too hot for these worlds. They can’t last long.”

“But,” Yuri growled, “the point is, here are the worlds of the solar system as they were in the deep past. The question is how they got from past to present, what happened that made them as they are today. Now, look at Venus. We think we understand this case,” he said. “Right? A runaway greenhouse, the oceans evaporating, the water broken up by the sunlight and lost altogether…”

Once Venus had been moist, blue and serene. Too close to the sun, it overheated, and its oceans evaporated. With the water lost to space Venus had developed a new thick atmosphere, a blanket of carbon dioxide baked out of the seabed rock, and the greenhouse effect intensified until the ground started to glow, red-hot.

“A horror show, but we understand it. For Venus, our models fit,” said Yuri. “Yes? But now we turn to Mars. Mars was once Earthlike; but, too small, too far from the sun, it dried and cooled. We understand that much. But look at this.”

He displayed contrasting profiles, of the ancient Mars on which they stood, and the young Mars of the Mir universe. The northern hemisphere of ancient Mars was visibly depressed beneath the neat circular arc of its younger self.

“Something happened here,” Yuri said, his anger burning. “Something hugely violent.”

Myra saw it. It must have been like a hammer to the crown of the skull, a tremendous blow centered here, at the north pole. It had been powerful enough to create the Vastitas Borealis, like a crater that spanned the whole of the northern hemisphere.

They all saw the implication, immediately.

“A Q-bomb,” Alexei said. “Scaled to Mars’s mass. And directed here, at the north pole. This would be the result. By Sol’s tears. But why? Why hit Mars, and not Venus?”

“Because Venus was harmless,” Yuri snapped. “Venus was a water-world. If intelligence rose there at all it would have been confined to some seabed culture, using metals from geothermal vents or some such. They just didn’t put out the kind of signals you could see from afar. Roads, cities.”

“But the Martians did,” Myra said.

And their reward had been a mighty, sterilizing impact.

Grendel was growing excited. “I think we’re seeing elements of a strategy here. The Firstborn’s goal seems to be to suppress advanced technological civilizations. But they act with—economy. If a star system is giving them cause for concern, they first hit it with a sunstorm. Crude, a blanket blowtorching, but a cheap way of sterilizing an entire system. I bet if we dig deep enough we’ll find a relic of at least one more sunstorm in the deep past. But if the sunstorms don’t work, if worlds continue to be troublesome, they strike more surgically. Just as they targeted Mars. Just as they’ve now targeted Earth.”

“You’ve got to admit they’re thorough,” Yuri said.

Alexei said, “And we know from Athena and her Witness that we aren’t the only ones. The Firstborn’s operations are extensive in space and in time. ‘A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.’ The Book of Joel.”

Myra raised her eyebrows. “Let’s not be hypocrites. Maybe the megafauna of Australia and America felt much the same way about us.”

“They’re like gods,” Alexei said, still in apocalyptic mood. “Maybe we should worship them.”

“Let’s not,” Yuri said dryly. “The Martians didn’t.”

“That’s right,” Ellie said now. She came bustling into the room with a softscreen. “The Martians struck a blow. And maybe we can too.” In the midst of their huddled, fearful gloom, Ellie was grinning.

“Remember this?” Ellie spread out her softscreen so they could all see a now-familiar string of symbols:

“I’ve had my analysis agents speculating about what these could mean. They’ve come to a consensus—about bloody time too—but I think it makes sense.”

“Tell us,” Yuri snapped.

“Look at these shapes. What do you see?”

Alexei said, “Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon. So what?”

“How many sides?”

Yuri said, “Three, four, five, six.”

“And what if you continued the sequence? What next?”

“Seven sides. Heptagon. Eight. Octagon.” He was at a loss, and glanced at Myra. “Nonagon?”

“Sounds plausible,” Myra said.

“And then?” Ellie insisted.

Alexei said, “Ten sides, eleven, twelve—”

“And if you go on and on? Where does the sequence end?”

“At infinity,” Myra said. “A polygon with an infinite number of sides.”

“Which is?”

“A circle…”

Yuri asked, “What do you think you have here, Ellie?”

“The Martians couldn’t avert their own Q-bomb, or whatever the Firstborn used on them. But I think this is a symbolic record of what they did achieve. Starting with what they could build—see, a triangle, a square, simple shapes—they somehow extrapolated out. They built on their finite means to capture infinity. And they trapped an Eye that must have been located right under ground zero, waiting to witness the destruction.” She glanced at Alexei. “They did challenge the gods, Alexei.”

Grendel grunted. “How uplifting,” she said sourly. “But the Martians got wiped out even so. What a shame they aren’t around for us to ask them for help.”

“But they are,” Ellie said.

They all stared at her.

Myra’s mind was racing. “She’s right. What if there were a way to send a message, not to our Mars, but to Mir’s? Oh, there are no spaceships there.”

“Or radios,” Alexei put in.

Myra was struggling. “But even so…”

Yuri snapped, “What the hell would you say?”

Ellie said rapidly, “We could just send these symbols, for a start. That’s enough to show we understand. We might provoke Mir’s Martians into reacting. I mean, at least some of them may come from a time-slice where they’re aware of the Firstborn.”

Grendel shook her head. “Are you serious? Your plan is, we’re going to pass a message to a parallel universe, where we hope there is a Martian civilization stranded out of time in a kind of space-opera solar system. Have I got that right?”

“I don’t think it’s a time for common sense, Grendel,” Myra said. “Nothing conventional the navy has tried has worked. So we need an extraordinary defense. It took a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to come up with the sunstorm shield, after all, and an unprecedented effort to achieve it. Maybe we’ve just got to do the same again.”

There was a torrent of questions and discussion. Was the chancy comms link through the Martian Eye to Bisesa’s antique phone reliable enough to see this through? And how could the nineteenth-century Americans of an icebound Chicago talk to Mars anyhow? Telepathy?

Many questions, but few answers.

“Okay,” Yuri asked slowly. “But the most important question is, what happens if the Martians do respond? What might they do?”

“Fight off the Q-bomb with their tripod fighting machines and their heat rays,” Grendel said mockingly.

“I’m serious. We need to think it through,” Yuri said. “Come up with scenarios. Ellie, maybe you could handle that. Do some wargaming on the bomb’s response.”

Ellie nodded.

Alexei said, “Even if Bisesa does find a way to do this, maybe we ought to keep some kind of veto, while we try to figure out how the Martians might react. And we should pass this back to Athena. The decision shouldn’t stay just with us.”

“Okay,” Yuri said. “In the meantime we can get to work on this. Right? Unless anybody’s got a better idea.” His anger had mutated to a kind of exhilaration. “Hey. Why the gloomy faces? Look, we’re like a bunch of hibernating polar bears up here. But if this works, the eyes of history are on us. There’ll be paintings of the scene. Like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

Alexei played along. “If that’s true I wish I’d shaved.”

“Enough of the bullshit,” Grendel said. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

They broke up and got busy.