Firstborn(Time Odyssey 3) - By Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,2

breath. Tell me whats wrong.

The chamber of Marduk The very heart of the temple on whose roof they both stood. You must come, Master!

Why? What will I see? Not see, Master Abdihear.

Abdi glanced once more at his eyepiece, where even now Marss blue light glimmered. But the boys agitation was convincing. Something was wrong.

With ill grace he clambered down from his seat at the eyepiece, and snapped at one of his students. You, Xenia! Take over. I dont want to waste a second of this seeing. The girl hurried to comply.

Spiros ran for the ladder. This had better be worth it, Abdi said, hurrying after the boy.

They had to descend, and then climb back up inside the temples carcass, for the chamber of the great god Marduk was near the very apex of the complex. They passed through a bewildering variety of rooms lit by oil lamps burning smokily in alcoves. Long after the temples abandonment by its priests there was still a powerful smell of incense.

Abdi walked into Marduks chamber, peering around.

Once this room had contained a great golden statue of the god. During the Discontinuity, the event that created the world, the statue had been destroyed, and the walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat. Only the statues base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet. The chamber was a ruin, as if wrecked by an explosion. But it had been this way all Abdis life.

Abdi turned on Spiros. Well? Wheres the crisis?

Cant you hear? the boy asked, breathless. And he stood still, his finger on his lips.

And then Abdi heard it, a soft chirruping almost like a cricketbut too regular, too even. He glanced at the wide-eyed boy, who was frozen with fear.

Abdi stepped into the center of the room. From here he could tell the chirruping was coming from an ornately carved shrine, fixed to one wall. He approached this now, and the sound grew louder.

For the sake of face before the boy, Abdi tried to keep his hand from trembling as he reached out to the small cupboard at the very center of the shrine, and pulled open its door.

He knew what the shrine contained. This pebble-like artifact had come from the Earth to Mir. Belonging to a companion of Abdis fathers called Bisesa Dutt, it had been cherished for years, and then lodged here when its power finally failed.

It was a phone. And it was ringing.
PART 2 JOURNEYS 4: WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES
FebruaryMarch 2069

Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.

In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.

Well, for nineteen years she had had no pulse, no blood, no electrical activity in her brain, her tissues had consumed no oxygen, and she had been held in a fridge almost cold enough to rupture her cells. You had to expect to be a bit sore.

Hibernaculum 786 had changed while she had been in the tank. Now it felt like an upmarket hotel, all glass walls and white floors and plastic couches, and old, old peopleat least they looked oldin dressing gowns, walking very tentatively.

Most drastically of all the Hibernaculum had been moved. When she got to a viewing window, she found herself overlooking an immense wound in the ground, a dusty canyon with strata piled up in its scree-littered walls like the pages of a tremendous book. It was the Grand Canyon, she learned, and it was a spectacular sightrather wasted on the sleepers in the Hibernaculum, she thought.

She found it disturbing in retrospect that the complicated refrigerator within which she had slept her dreamless sleep had been disconnected, uprooted, and shipped across the continent.

As her convalescence continued she took to sitting before a bubble window, peering out at the canyons static geological drama. She had made only one tourist-trip visit to the canyon before. Judging by the way the sun cycled through the