Echoes of Earth (14 page)

They were standing on a gantry high up on a curved wall made up of what seemed to be opaque, gray glass. The gantry circumnavigated a spherical chamber at least two hundred meters in diameter. His inner ear registered odd tidal effects stirring through the room, originating from the thing in its center.

The object floating before him was a perfectly white sphere some fifty meters in diameter. How it was floating, he couldn’t tell, since he was still experiencing gravity and it had no visible means of support. Similarly, he
assumed
it was a sphere, but without any hint of shape or detail it simply appeared to Alander’s eyes to be round. It could conceivably have been a disk, but a gut instinct told him it wasn’t.

As he watched, a new detail appeared. Another circle, as perfectly black as the other was white, slid into view. It was smaller than the white one, measuring around five meters in radius. His mind took a second to process the image, but once he had, it was clear: the smaller, black sphere was orbiting the larger, white one.

“What is this?” he asked the astrophysicist. “A giant chemistry model?”

“Hardly.” The astrophysicist pointed as the black sphere passed between them and its white “parent.” Alander felt a wave of...
something
pass through him. It was only slight, but it definitely was there.

“Feel it? That was a tidal surge passing through you, courtesy of a gravity wave. If you’d asked me an hour ago, I would’ve said it was impossible, but there you have it. We’ve had no luck analyzing the spectrum of the wave, before you ask. We don’t have the detectors yet.”

Alander turned to look at Wyra. “What do you want me to do?”

“Ask them what it does, of course.” The astrophysicist was looking up at Alander like a supplicant. “I have my suspicions, given that it’s not fixed and is in the largest of the spindles, but I can’t confirm it. And if it
is
what I think it is...”

The sentence went unfinished, almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to speak the thought out loud.

“What do you think it is?”

“Just ask them, Peter,” Wyra said urgently, trying to suppress his excitement but failing. “We need to know.”

While it was nice to be needed for a change, Alander felt it would have been nicer had it been for his own abilities, not as a result of some arbitrary alien decision.

“Gifts?”

“Yes, Peter?”

“What does Spindle Six contain?”

“A means of traversing space. It will aid you in your exploration of neighboring regions.”

“You mean it’s a spaceship?”

“Yes.”

“A
ship
,” Wyra breathed, his hands gripping the edge of the gantry. “I
knew
it!”

“Where can it take us?” Alander asked.

“Anywhere you wish to go.”

“Can it take us home?”

“If by that you mean your home planet, Earth, then yes, it can.”

“And how long would it take?”

“Less than one Adjusted Planck day.”

“Relative, I presume.” He tried not to seem as stunned as he felt; for so much time dilation, the alien vessel must be capable of coming frighteningly close to the speed of light and enduring crushing accelerations. “What about in real time?”

“What I have given you is the duration of the journey with respect to a stationary observer.”

“One day?”

“That is correct. However, the time measured by the occupant of the craft will in fact be longer.”

“One day...” His head was reeling from the concept of a faster-than-light drive. With the thing in front of him, he could return to Earth and get back again before anyone really missed him. And the Gifts had earlier mentioned some sort of faster-than-light communicator. He could call them when he arrived; he wouldn’t even need to come back.

Wyra was already nudging him and hissing questions for him to ask, but Alander ignored him.

“And you’re
giving
us this?”

“No,” said the Gifts.

The blunt reply was as sobering for Alander as it must have been for Wyra, who abruptly shut up.

“I... I don’t understand,” Alander stammered. “What do we...?”

“We are not giving you anything, Peter,” said the Gifts smoothly. “Our builders are the benefactors of the spindles and their contents. We are merely—”

“Okay, okay,” said Alander impatiently. “I get the distinction you’re trying to make.”

He heard Wyra sigh impatiently beside him.

“What I meant was,” Alander went on, “are these things—the ship and everything else—are they just being given to us? No strings attached? For us to use as we please?”

“That is the nature of a gift, is it not?”

Alander couldn’t tell if they were playing with him or not. The Gifts had used that exact phrase earlier, upon his introduction to the Hub.

“Peter...?”

Wyra’s hand, via the droid, plucked at his sleeve at the same moment another gravity wave swept through him. He backed away from the alien vessel, using the wall to guide him through the door to the Hub.

“Peter, are you all right?”

“I’m sorry, Otto. Give me a minute.” He looked at the doors surrounding him, momentarily bewildered. Had Wyra told him where they all led? He couldn’t remember. There had to be
one
he still didn’t know about.

“Gifts, where are you?”

“Our physical location is unimportant—”

“But you do have one, right? I want to know where it is.”

“Spindle Seven.”

He counted around the circle. Everything Wyra had told him suggested that the doors followed a logical progression. If that was case, the door to Spindle Seven wasn’t one he recognized. Reinforced, smoky glass with an aluminum handle, it reminded him of a school or office door. Like the others, it was obviously from somewhere in his past, but damned if he could remember where exactly.

“What are you doing, Peter?” The illusion of Wyra danced nervously after him as he walked unsteadily to the door.

“I need to think,” he said, pushing the door open. As the Hub receded behind him, he added to the Gifts, “Don’t let anyone follow.”

The Gifts were as good as their word. The door swung shut behind him, and he was alone.

* * *

He switched off conSense as the alien AIs gave him directions.
Spindle Seven contained the machines that had built the orbital tower below. In all the other spindles, these devices had been dismantled and reconstituted as other things. The Spinners seemed to have mastered assembly on an atomic scale, along with energy/matter conversion and elemental transmutation. Alander wasn’t surprised; in fact, humanity had been making steps toward the last two before he had left Earth, a hundred years and more before. It was simply the scale that astonished him: The Spinners had built structures larger than cities in hours out of thin air, then on a whim rebuilt them into whatever they wanted.

A small, flat platform took him along a transparent transit tube that snaked through the massive structures. It moved at an alarming speed, yet he felt no sense of inertia as the transport slowed or accelerated.

It was an unnerving experience, passing between machines larger than Earth’s tallest buildings, yet in some cases as slender as the
Frank Tipler
itself. Some were many limbed, like giant praying mantises; others hung like folded dragonfly wings, translucent and gleaming all the colors of the spectrum. Massive cylinders lurked almost out of sight at the top of the spindle, while at the bottom the structure was open to space. When he looked down, he could see Adrasteia, the planet’s atmosphere still recovering from the gravitational disturbances of Spindle Six. He stared down at the landscape with something approaching wistfulness, which he thought strange. He had never particularly cared for it before, but here, now, he found its familiarity a welcome sight. Indeed, compared to the machines around him, it felt almost like home.

The transit tube terminated at the point where the orbital ring passed through the spindle. There hung a cluster of boxlike structures, looking for all the world like a small mining outpost on the Earth’s moon. It was into one of these boxes that Alander was led by the platform beneath him. There, as per his request, he finally came face-to-face with the Gifts.

They didn’t look like much. In a space barely larger than an average-sized bedroom stood eleven gray, featureless, three-meter-high artifacts. They were roughly the same proportions as a playing card, complete with rounded corners. He reached out to touch one and was surprised to find neither heat nor vibrations coming from it. Nor could he detect any sounds issuing from them. For all intents and purposes, they were totally inert.

But these were, Alander was assured, the equivalent of CPUs for each of the gifts. Here, the maintenance of the giant structures was directed. This was the true center of the enigma that had been presented to humanity in Upsilon Aquarius, the place where the absent Spinners had the greatest influence.

He didn’t bother prying for more information about the builders of the gifts. He knew very well that it would be pointless. Instead, he took a seat by the entrance to the chamber and sat staring in awe at the monolithic machines that were the Gifts. The Spinner AIs might not be fundamentally different from the AIs he was used to, but they were nevertheless made by superior intelligences. That immediately set them apart. There was no reason why the Spinners’ creations could not themselves be thousands of times more intelligent than a single human.

Yet part of him was still resisting the evidence and wondering if the Spinners might not be human, after all. Back on Earth when he had left, AI research had begun its steep upward trajectory that some said would lead inevitably to a technological and social Spike beyond which any prediction was impossible. If the Earth had passed this Spike and developed artificial superminds, he wouldn’t put it past them to try a stunt like this. It seemed incomprehensible, certainly, but since everything about them would be incomprehensible, it made an odd kind of sense.

He knew, though, that he was probably just clinging to the shreds of his original’s theory, in much the same way a child from a broken home might cling to the ideal of a happy family. If it was wrong, then it was wrong, and he should feel under no obligation to cling to it.

He sighed and closed his eyes. This was the first time he had felt alone since his ill-fated bath. As then, with little to distract him, the memories of Lucia surfaced once more. He saw her in perfect clarity, cursed with the machinelike recall of his artificial memories. Her hand propping her head as up as she lay next to him, her hair falling in a cascade across her shoulder and down onto the pillow, her rich brown eyes staring out to him.

And when she spoke, her voice...

“Where do we go from here?”

An overwhelming sense of loss washed over him, and he cursed himself out loud, irritated for having let such maudlin thoughts intrude upon what was supposed to be a moment of peace.

To distract himself, he broke his self-imposed isolation from conSense and listened to what was going on. At first he could make out little more than a babble of voices, dozens of them overlapping and talking at once. Then, slowly, he began to tease out individual, if still fragmentary refrains:

“—needs material input if it’s to keep assembling so—”

“—not what they told Alander—”

“—just isn’t enough bandwidth to—”

“—reaction tanks filling nicely—”

“—and tell Peter to straighten out—”

“—if you can’t find the key then I suggest—”

“—Spinners don’t have bodies because there aren’t any—”

“—when Alander comes back—”

“—air filtration system outlets—”

“—Drop Point One in range—”

“—Get Peter to ask them—”

The cocktail effect took hold, and soon he could hear little more than his own name, over and over: “Peter... Alander... Peter...”

He leaned his head against the wall behind him, wanting to switch off his feed to the
Tipler
but not particularly wanting the silence either. It was a choice between thoughts of Lucia or listening to the others talk about him.

Not that they were really talking
about
him, per se. Their interest was with the gifts; he was just the channel through which they could get to them.

The babble in his head was incessant, reminding him just how different he was from them. He needed time to himself, while the others in the
Tipler
seemed quite happy to work together forever: analyzing the data they had, poring over the information given to them by the gifts, discussing strategies on how they should go about studying each of the items in the spindles. Hatzis had been annoyed at his inability to continue, because he had a need to rest, and maybe she had every right to be. He
was
different from them, not as efficient or...

A realization struck him suddenly, one that made him feel a thousand times more isolated than if he were to simply shut off the feed to the
Tipler.

He reached out through conSense, seeking Cleo Samson.

She materialized an instant later, sitting on the floor beside him with her arms folded around her knees.

“Does this mean you’re back?” she said. “Otto is having kittens.”

“Not just yet. Sorry if I woke you up.”

“Any time.” She didn’t look as though she had been sleeping, despite what Wyra had said. “So what’s up? Have the Gifts told you something?”

“No, nothing like that. But I think I know why they picked me.”

She leaned closer. “Tell me.”

He held the thought in his mind for a moment, disliking the way it tasted. It tasted
true.
“I’m a bottleneck.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Don’t look so puzzled. You know I am.”

“That’s not why I’m puzzled. You mean they chose you for that reason?”

He nodded. “To slow things down.”

“But why? Why give us all this stuff, then make it hard to talk to us about it?”

“So we’ll work it out for ourselves. They even said something along those lines when—”

“ ‘We are only permitted to guide you so far,’ they said.” She was quoting directly from the recordings, via the conSense record.