Echoes of Earth (24 page)
Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
But ultimately, the timing of when he actually departed was being left up to him. With Samson now gone, there was nothing to hold him back. Except perhaps one nagging uncertainty.
* * *
He took his leave of the meeting and went back to Spindle
Seven, the home of the Gifts. He stood before the gray structures that comprised their central processors, staring with renewed awe at the mighty machines responsible for building the ring. There was something both breathtaking and intimidating about the strange and silent edifices surrounding him, something he found terribly unsettling. He remained there for a long while, unable to bring himself to ask the question that was foremost in his thoughts, almost fearing the answer they would give.
“A vote was taken,” he said eventually. “I’ll be taking the hole ship back to Earth.”
“We can see how you would deem that to be the most prudent action,” the Gifts said in return, “given the circumstances.”
“Yeah, well not everyone is convinced.” He shrugged. “What it means is that this might be my last chance to speak to you in person. Unless, of course, we could fit you into the hole ship.”
“That is not possible,” they said.
“Not even a fragment?”
“Our place is here, Peter, in the spindles.”
He nodded. “Among the gifts.”
“We
are
the gifts, Peter.”
He smiled at their pedantry. Their tone was so human and natural that it was hard to remember that their origins—and nature—were purely alien.
“While I’m away, I don’t suppose you’ll communicate with anyone else.”
“We will communicate only through you.”
He shook his head, frustrated. “But
why
?” he said, finally releasing the question. “Why
me
?”
“What do you mean, Peter?”
“I mean you’ve made your point about restricting our development. I can understand the importance of us not learning too much too quickly. I can appreciate that. But what I don’t see is why someone else can’t continue the investigations while I’m gone. We’re all limited in our own ways; we’re all flawed. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“You were the one chosen,” they replied without hesitation.
“That’s what I don’t understand!” he said, throwing up his arms in exasperation. “You’ve never told me
why
I was chosen.”
“We have explained to you that we do not have the answer you seek. Our builders chose you because you best suited their needs. What their criteria was for choosing you, however, we do not know. We recognized you only when the scan we made of you matched the data our builders gave us.”
“But you must have an idea,” he said. “You
must
.”
“It would be possible to speculate, as indeed you already have, based on the information available to you. But we would rather cease all communication than create or perpetuate a misunderstanding.”
He stared at the monolithic Gifts, incensed by their stubbornness. That this was exactly the kind of response he had been anticipating didn’t make it any less frustrating.
“Okay,” he said with some resignation. “Maybe I’ll understand things better when I return.”
“You should not concern yourself with here, Peter,” said the Gifts.
He frowned deeply now. “Why not?”
“The Spinners are best served by you returning to Earth,” they said.
“And why is that? Just what is their purpose? What is it they stand to gain by giving us all of these things?”
“We have told you why the gifts were given. Beyond that we are not permitted to say.”
“But you
do
know, don’t you?”
There was a moment’s hesitation before they answered. “Yes.”
Although he pressed them, they would reveal nothing more to him. The Spinners wanted him to return to Earth, so in voting to do it, the survey mission had unwittingly played into their hands. But to do what? Was it simply to spread the knowledge that they had been given? Did they wish nothing more than for all life-forms to ultimately be at a level similar to each other, thereby attaining some form of harmony within the galaxy or something? Or was their intention more malicious? Whatever it was, there was only one way to find out, and that was to take the hole ship, as planned, back to Earth.
“You know,” he said after a while. “I don’t think I trust these Spinners of yours.”
There was no response from the Gifts, so he turned and made to leave, saying casually over his shoulder: “I guess I’ll speak to you on my return.”
Then he strode away toward the exit.
It was only when he was about to step through the doorway that he heard the alien artifacts say: “Good-bye, Peter Alander.”
2.1
SWIMMING WITH ICEBERGS
2160.8.27 Standard Mission Time
23 July, 2163 U.T.
2.1.1
Caryl Hatzis was studying an ethane plume on Titan at the
time of the Discord. She was also riding a comet out to the Oort cloud and joining in on the volunteer effort to sculpt an upturned human face on the Cydonia region on Mars. Part of her was still watching the slow sunrise on Mercury, while yet another part was working as a supervisor on the Shell Proper, ensuring the Edge accreted properly. A quick stocktaking of her various povs would have revealed as many as fifty, ranging anywhere from a single human equivalent to four or five, scattered across the solar system and beyond. Where
she
was at any given time depended purely on her mood.
That year had seen her in a relatively stable state of mind. Although regarded as a conservative—as well as something of a reactionary—by the Vincula, she had finally embraced some of the new architecture spreading through the Frame. With so much consciousness design still haphazard or idiosyncratic, it was often hard to tell what was genuine progress and what a fad, but she never ignored the former when she found it. Her latest upgrade allowed her to ride the crest of information from her various part-selves across the system, smeared in a fluctuating “present” from the first data packet to the last, but she was still able to focus at will on a single moment in any one of those part-selves. Thus she suffered less from the occasional fragmentation arising from the fact that one pair of eyes was a hundred light-hours distant from the rest, while at the same time having none of the vagueness that some of her less cautious colleagues still displayed: she could still take the time to marvel at the feathery fringe of a plume, if she so desired.
Of course, her friends among the Gezim weren’t so understanding. Although in theory they treated all who strayed from their so-called Human Principles equally—terror tactics being ultimately worthless unless someone was at risk from them—something special was reserved for those that had once been close to them. Not that Hatzis had ever truly been one of them, but she did sympathize. She had even argued on their behalf before the Vincula, back when there had been a chance of reconciliation; and she still agreed with a lot of what they said. But there was a limit to how long and how effectively one could buck the system and remain relevant. The Gezim were an issue only because of their activism, not because of what they stood for.
That struck her as terribly sad. There were few enough of them as it was without scaring away potential recruits. In some ways, it was one of the few jarring notes remaining to her, outside of her memories. Or so she preferred to think.
The Discord shivered through the device known as McKirdy’s Machine on the fifteenth of July, 2163. As Hatzis understood it—and she had never paid much attention to the theory, before the Discord—the Machine was some sort of gravitational wave detector being built on the edge of the system, far away from anything it might interfere with. Since some of its components were hyper-dense, bordering on singularities, there had been an uproar when the plans had first been submitted for approval. It was a hazard to shipping, its detractors had said, likely to perturb orbits if not disintegrate without warning into a million, high-velocity fragments. Hence its location out past Pluto, near a nameless icy planetoid simply designated KLB2025R.
Upon further research, Hatzis learned that McKirdy’s Machine was a prototype long-range communicator, employing arcane properties of space itself rather than any usual forms of mass or radiation. The math was beyond her, but she didn’t feel the need to send one of her parts off to catch up. The summary was enough. The important thing was that the Machine wasn’t supposed to work yet. Its components had only been loosely assembled and lacked both fine-tuning and testing. So the Discord was completely unexpected—a resonance through the structure that resembled a transmission, yet from no known source.
Optimists hailed it as the first unequivocally alien signal since the Tedesco bursts of the late twenty-first century—a series of untranslated broadcasts from the region of the sky containing the constellation Sculptor that had ended as suddenly as they had begun. Skeptics thought it was simply a glitch in the design, random noise elevated anomalously to the appearance of an external signal. The Machine’s architects and engineers were sitting on the fence: They couldn’t say for certain that the signal wasn’t noise, but it resembled nothing any of the simulations had predicted. Either the simulations were wrong and the Machine didn’t work as expected, or the Discord had external origins.
If the signal had contained any readable information or the source could have been identified, the matter might have been quickly resolved. Sadly, however, the Machine was not able to pinpoint its origins, and the data consisted of just one short stretch of undecipherable information repeated three times, with unequal gaps of time between each repetition. A different burst followed shortly thereafter, then three more transmissions came within a day, none of them repeated. The Vincula had posted the repeated stretches across the system in the hope that someone would crack it. In the day following the Discord and its successors, no one made any headway. Within two days, interest had already begun to fade. Only those peculiar obsessives to whom such problems posed direct interest gave it any further thought. Everyone else in the Vincula or the Gezim went about life as always, so full of richness and complexity that looking elsewhere for wonder was as ridiculous as begging for more freedom with which to enjoy it.
* * *
“Personally, I think it’s one of the colonies,” said Sel Shalhoub
. Hatzis was sharing a drink with him in Echo Park, her natural body’s current location. The old-fashioned art of cocktail parties was back in vogue for a season, and she had dressed for the occasion in an open-throated outfit that cycled through the work of Vasili Kandinsky. Vibrant images trickled from her shoulders, cascaded down her waist, then disappeared with a hint of compression at her perfectly straight hem. Shalhoub was in a remote that held a striking resemblance to his official appearance, even without virtual overlays. Its tuxedo was freshly pressed, real, and therefore priceless.
“Nonsense,” rapid-fired JORIS, a nominally (but only temporarily) male
merge
from Uranus Platform. He was speaking in hyperlite, the current version of accelerated slang. “Those engrams wouldn’t be advanced enough to do something like this. They wouldn’t have the sophistication required—”
“You don’t know that,” said Shalhoub. “Who of us can say for sure what advancements they might have made?”
“We only lost a couple of decades to the Spike,” said JORIS. “They would have been in transit almost a century. The suggestion that they could have developed beyond us is ludicrous.”
“They may have gotten lucky,” said Hatzis.
“You were one of them, weren’t you, Caryl?” asked Shalhoub.
“Copies of me were sent on the original missions, yes,” she admitted. “But I personally didn’t go anywhere.”
“Very sensible,” said JORIS flatly. “Why would you want to? Why would
anyone
wish to go anywhere with only half a mind? What would be the point in that? Better not to have gone at all, I say.”
Hatzis was surprised that Shalhoub had known about her involvement in the defunct United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program, since it was not something she advertised. Not many people remembered anything about those almost ancient missions. (Then again, very little got past him, a fact she would do well to keep in mind.) Over the years, contact had been made with some of the nearby survey systems, albeit by more mundane methods. At least two missions—Beta Hydrus and Delta Pavonis—had reported on arrival and would have received communications from Earth responding to those reports, before communications had been discontinued altogether. It wasn’t exactly a dialogue, but it was a beginning. In time, as public interest gradually revived, she thought there might be a chance to reestablish some sort of communications with those long-lost children of Earth.
The trouble was, most these days were like the
merge.
The engram fad had been a disaster almost from the beginning. She was somewhat surprised that any of the missions had succeeded at all. As JORIS implied, a crew made up of brain-damaged fake humans would have been worse than no crew at all. And there was no chance that any such crew could have built something like McKirdy’s Machine and sent the Discord. It simply wasn’t possible. There had to be an alternative explanation.
“Maybe it’s aliens,” she joked.
“I have no doubt about that.” JORIS seemed to take the suggestion seriously. “If it
is
a transmission, then it had to come from
somewhere.
And who else but aliens
could
have sent it?”
“It could be an echo from the future,” Hatzis offered more seriously. “Since the Machine violates causality—”
“It doesn’t,” said the
merge.
“McKirdy has proven that there is no possibility of countercontinuum information transfer.”
“If you say so.” Hatzis shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand all this ftl stuff.”
“So according to you, J,” said Shalhoub, “it must be aliens.”
“Of course,” said JORIS. “I don’t see how it could possibly be anything else.”
“So what should we do now?” Shalhoub asked. “Reply?”
“God, no,” said the
merge,
reverting to oldspeak. “Why in the Frame would we do that?”
“Curiosity, perhaps?” suggested Hatzis.
“You wouldn’t stick your head up if you heard a gunshot, would you?”
“A gunshot is fundamentally different from an alien species trying to communicate with us,” said Hatzis.
“I fail to see the difference,” said the
merge.
Shalhoub laughed, but it was Hatzis who responded.
“Well, for one thing, there is no evidence to suggest that these aliens—if that is indeed what they are—are in any way attempting to blow our heads off. You’re just clouding the issue with small talk.”
And deliberately so,
she thought. The use of such an archaic metaphor must have been aimed squarely at her, since she was the oldest person present. “For all we know, it could be a cry for help.”
“If that’s the case, then it is intended for someone other than us, someone who has the ability to understand the message in the first place and, presumably, to do something about it.” JORIS flexed one long, honey-textured arm and performed a graceful pirouette. In the short time before the
merge
was facing her way again, he had become female, morphing mass away from shoulders and thighs into hips and breasts, angular facial features seeming to have melted into more gentle terrain. (Real or virtual? Hatzis couldn’t decide. Either way, it was an effective conversational gambit.) Only her voice remained unchanged, complete with its needling tone. “If someone with the ability to communicate by ftl is in trouble, I for one have no desire to offer assistance, which at best might be considered ineffectual.” Smiling, JORIS lifted her glass of liqueur in way of a toast. “Here’s to keeping our noses clean, I say.”
“Coward.” Hatzis took a step back from the topic, realizing then that JORIS saw the discussion as nothing more than a diversionary amusement. For too many, she thought, life’s meaning lay in the interaction with others, rather than the interaction with the universe around them. She couldn’t help but feel that humanity would be better off—more vital, more driven—if there were less like JORIS to dilute what little forward impetus remained.
But that was another argument entirely, and she refused to allow herself to be drawn into it by a
merge.
Shalhoub was watching her shrewdly over his glass, her dress reflecting in his eyes. He might not be inclined to bait her, he might even seem to be cordial and open in social situations, but she didn’t like to think what one of the Frame’s foremost Urges might do if she started mouthing off in public. His stand on eisegetes like JORIS wasn’t in the public domain. Not yet, at least.
“... anticipated the possibilities of trade,” he was saying in his bland, steady drawl. He had taken the look of a white-haired politician, and the remote mimicked it well: tall but not too imposing, solid without being either fat or overmuscled, and pleasantly aged in a nonjowly kind of way. He had even managed the knack of appearing to be interested in anything anyone had to say. “But if what
you’re
saying is true, then...”
Her attention drifted away completely, adopting the nebulous, smeary focus typical of her current, whole incarnation. The part of her that still resided in her original body didn’t have it so easy. The party may have been losing its momentum, but she couldn’t just opt out now. She needed to stay focused on why she was there in the first place.
She put her hand on Shalhoub’s remote’s arm. “Sel,” she whispered, “when you’re done here, I’ll be in the study. There’s a simulation from Mati I think you should see.”
“Mati?” He half-turned, conversation with the
merge
forgotten. “You mean, Matilda Sulich?”
“You knew she was here,” said Hatzis, keeping her voice low. “That’s why you came, wasn’t it? That’s why everyone came.”
His gaze flitted about the room. “So where is she? I don’t see her anywhere.”
“She’s not stupid, Sel.” She squeezed the remote’s arm lightly. “The study; ten minutes. We’ll talk to you there—
alone
.”
He nodded, permitting himself a smile at the game she was playing. “I’ll be there,” he said. “Especially if you can find me some more of this wonderful Scotch.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She walked away, keeping her step casual and unhurried. The original Caryl Hatzis had vestiges of ambition masquerading most often as ideology that the overarching being she’d become hadn’t quite managed to completely erase. But she’d never learned to enjoy the game, to “think outside the square,” as had been the saying, once. Now that she had made the move, her heart was pounding; fear roiled her insides in ways the rest of her had mostly forgotten. There was no turning back now.