Echoes of Earth (40 page)

The tears were streaming freely down her cheeks now. “No,” she muttered.

“Me to talk you out of it, perhaps? Despite what you say?”

“No!”

“Good, because—what was it you said?” Her apathy made him lash out, more angry now than frustrated. “Oh yes, that’s right. I’m dead on the inside, apparently. ‘Not truly human’—that was another one, wasn’t it? Although my favorite was: ‘a shortcut that went wrong.’ Maybe you should take some of your own advice regarding morale boosting.”

“Fuck you, Peter,” she said weakly.

“You know, Caryl, if your opinion of my life is so small, why don’t you just go ahead right now and switch off your fucking brain? Because you’re right; there
is
nothing left but me. Nothing worth worrying yourself about, anyway.”

Hatzis’s face had gone a mottled pinkish white color. She opened her mouth to say something—but at that moment, a vibration shivered through the hole ship, as though someone had tapped its hull and made it ring like a bell.

“I am receiving a message,” said the hole ship.

The announcement took Alander completely by surprise. His anger instantly abated and was replaced by confusion.

“
What?
” he said at the same instant and in the same tone as Hatzis.

Then a voice he recognized—piercingly, like a knife to the gut—filled the cockpit. “This is Cleo Samson, civilian survey manager of the
Carol Stoker
, United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission S35, calling any surviving authority on or near Earth. In the course of our exploration of HD194640 and its sole habitable planet, Varuna, we have been contacted by an advanced civilization whose artifacts have enabled this communication. Please respond if you are able. We need your advice, I repeat, this is Cleo Samson...”

The message cycled through three times, then ended. Alander listened to it in stunned silence, hardly daring to believe his ears.

“
Another
one?” He turned to Hatzis, whose expression was as shocked as his. “
Arachne
, did you know about this?”

“No, Peter.”

“Oh my God,” he said, barely listening to the AI’s reply. “The Spinners went elsewhere! This changes everything!”

“It changes nothing,” Hatzis said, regaining her composure.

His brow furrowed deeply. “Of
course
it does! It’s not just
us,
now, Caryl. We have to call them, tell them what’s happened. Then we can go there, join forces—”

“We can’t do that. They’re as good as dead, Peter.”

He felt rage rush through him like he had never felt before. “I’ve had enough of your defeatist attitude. You may be in your original body—you may have been part of a hyperevolved human or whatever—but I’m still alive, and always have been. Everyone on the
Frank Tipler
was alive. Cleo Samson and everyone on the
Stoker
—they’re alive, too, along with God knows how many others in the survey program.”
Even Lucia,
he thought wildly to himself. “You have no right to condemn us before we even try, like—”
Like my original’s dead-end bacteria.

He turned away from her. “
Arachne
, I want to send—”

Before he completed the instruction, Hatzis was physically across the room and throwing him into the wall with surprising force.

He wheeled on her angrily. “What the hell are you
doing
?”

“Shut up, you idiot!” she hissed.

“Look, kill yourself if you want, Caryl, but you’re not taking the rest of us with you! They’re
alive,
dammit!”

“You don’t understand!” she shouted. “They’re already dead—”

“
Arachne
,” he started again, without listening to her. But again, before he could finish his sentence, she had thrown herself at him.

They grappled with one another, their ugly, graceless movements dictated more by force than leverage.

“You’re making a mistake,” she managed. “You must—”

“
Arachne
!” He raised his voice over hers. “Send a reply to Cleo Samson. Tell her—”

Hatzis twisted in his grasp, slipping one hand free and bringing it into contact with his own. In an instant, something fiery burst behind his eyes. He screamed and let go of her, falling back onto the floor with his free hand over his face. His mind exploded with images of pain and despair. He was alone, dying, burning up in the same flames that had consumed an entire solar system.

For an agonizing split second, he
was
Caryl Hatzis.

Then his mind went blank, and he was nothing at all.

* * *

“If not for us, then for who?”

He was in Lucia’s room, lying on her bed. Both of them were naked, having just had sex. He felt pleasantly warm and relaxed despite an intermittent tingle just behind and above his navel. He was afraid of admitting, even to himself, just how terrified he was. He wondered if everyone else felt the same and if they had found the same sort of distraction to take their minds off it.

“Or whom? I can never remember which.”

She seized upon the chance like a shark. She was at least as smart as him, and they both knew it. Neither of them knew why they got on so well, though—especially considering the disparity in their ages—but neither had even tried to fight it. It was more than just a physical attraction, although that was strong. He suspected it might be nothing more than the fact that they enjoyed playing the same games.

“It won’t be us, Peter,” she said. “And yet it will be. I try not to get tangled in the metaphysics of it all. I just prepare as well as I can in order to prepare each of
them.
I don’t want to let anyone down, least of all myself.”

“But
you
won’t be one of them.”

“No.” She looked puzzled for a second, wondering, perhaps, where this was all leading. What game was this? “And neither will you. There’s no way the program could afford to send even one of our bodies. We weigh too much; we sleep and eat too much; we get bored too easily—”

“I know, I know.” He wasn’t sure where he was going, either. Maybe he was more afraid of staying behind than he was of leaving. The emphasis had been so much on the latter that he had begun to feel as if he really
was
leaving. But he wasn’t. It would just be his engrams.

He rolled onto his back, and she followed him without hesitation. Her body slid smoothly next to his. He could feel the warm pressure of her hips and breasts against his side as keenly as her gaze on his face. Her hand rested flat upon his chest.

“
We’ll
still be
here
,” she said, pressing down on his heart. “And that bothers me.”

“It does?” He felt a new surge of alarm. Was she about to propose to him? Surely not! Not Lucia, of all people!

If she did, he was sorely tempted to say yes, just to throw her a curveball. She wouldn’t expect
that.

But her next words reassured him.

“Of course. I want to be one of them, Peter... out there, exploring, seeing things no one else has ever seen before.” She shrugged. “How could I not want that? I thought you did, too.”

“Exploring, yes,” he said. “But not just to sightsee. I want to find answers, explanations for the things we still don’t understand.”

“Knowledge is the payoff by which people like me have justified the entire program. I think the tourists outnumber the truth seekers, don’t you?”

“Undoubtedly. And the truth seekers are happy to go along for the ride.”

He kissed her. Christ, sometimes he thought he really could settle down with her, if only for a while. A year or two, perhaps; find an apartment in Kyoto or take a cruise; get to know each other
really
well in the process. It could be fun. The fact that it couldn’t possibly be permanent didn’t tarnish the notion. It never did. He’d had five short-term bonds with five women in his life, one of them, Emma, for seven years, and none of them had been as fascinating as Lucia. But what did
she
want?

They kissed, both of them moving together simultaneously as though thinking with one mind. A pleasant illusion and an ironic one. Just because they liked the same games didn’t mean they thought the same. Indeed, his mind was already drifting back to the survey missions and all the problems they would face. Would pseudorandomly chosen crews really solve some of the psychological problems UNESSPRO anticipated, or could it actually make things worse? There were a couple of the civilian survey managers that he was actively worried about; it would only take one to ruin an entire mission. But he had no real power; he had expressly refused to take any sort of supervisory post, pre- or postlaunch. He was much better at working behind the scenes, getting people to do what he wanted all on their own.

He was almost surprised when she returned to the topic after only a short time.

“The question is: Where do we go from here? While the engrams go off into space to visit a thousand different suns, what are
we
going to do? Do we carry on as we always did before we joined the program? Pretend that none of this has changed us? Will we ever know what our copies do or see? How do we kill time until we find out? What if one of them dies... or we die? Are we immortal, or are we destined to die a thousand times?”

“I thought you said you weren’t getting tangled in the metaphysics.”

“I said I was
trying
not to.” She gestured imperiously, barely hiding the beginnings of a smile.
(
Yes,
he thought;
maybe I’ll ask her myself
.) “The engrams wake tomorrow. In a year, most of them will be gone. Then it’s back to just us. You and me and Donald and Jene and Chrys and the others. We’re the Viking widows waving off our husbands to be swallowed by the sea. Except they’re not our husbands... or our wives or friends or anyone, for that matter. They’re us.”

He was suddenly tired of the topic and keen to dismiss it. It was a pointless one unless it was a metaphor, and if so, maybe it was time to talk plainly.

“They’re not really us, Lucia. They’re just copies.”

“I’m sure they won’t take too kindly to you saying that, Peter.” She smiled; maybe she was reading his mind. “Remember, this conversation is being recorded for your copies’ memories, and
they’ll
think they’re real enough.”

“At this point in time, I don’t particularly care to have a debate about whether or not they are real.” He smiled back, warmth spreading through her skin into his. A year or two of
her.
He would like that. “Right here in this moment, Lucia, you and I are real, and nothing else matters to me right now. I don’t even care that we’re being recorded.”

Her smiled echoed his. “Just as long as it doesn’t find its way into the public domain, right?”

He was happy to cast aside the illusion that they were actually talking about anything at all. If the relationship lasted longer than the six months of Entrainment Camp, he would be happy, but he was old enough to know that sometimes it was best when things ended sooner rather than later. If she left him tomorrow, he would always have these last moments to remember, and they were richer than any others that came to mind. Lucia’s skin, her mind, the way she moved with him—there could be others, but there would be no other exactly like her. This moment would be as precious as it was deliciously fragile, as beautiful as a soap bubble on a breeze. It might slip through his fingers, and the memory might be a thousand times more delicate, but he would always have the latter. If he was careful, he might just have it forever.

* * *

Forever...

All around him was nothing but darkness and silence. His head hurt as though someone had taken an ax to it, and his entire body ached. He was stiff in every joint, and he needed to go to the toilet badly. He felt as though he had been in a coma for a timeless eternity.

Then, faintly, a noise pierced the quiet: Someone nearby was sobbing.

Stars danced behind his eyes as he sat up and slowly took stock of his surroundings. Familiarity rushed through him, although not yet with full comprehension. He was lying on the floor of the hole ship cockpit, beside the couch. The bright fight making him wince was a silvery crescent moon displayed on the screen. For a moment, he thought it might be the Earth’s moon, but then remembered that it couldn’t possibly have been. Earth’s moon had been destroyed. Besides which, this one had a large L-shaped blotch near its uppermost edge, a feature not associated with the moon he remembered.

But if it wasn’t Earth’s moon, then the planet he could see wasn’t Earth, either. The thought troubled him momentarily, then he shook his head and silently chided himself. Of course it wasn’t Earth! The Earth was gone as well, devoured by the Spike AIs and built into something else, which in turn had been destroyed by thousands of shining, star-shaped ships in less than a day. All that remained of Earth and her sister planet Venus was a slowly dispersing cloud of atoms around a now otherwise unremarkable sun.

He studied the image on the screen closer. The hole ship was orbiting a planet at a fairly low altitude. He couldn’t make out any detail; the sun was on the far side. There were a couple of glowing patches, eerily like cities casting light into the night sky, but that couldn’t be the case. They were too large and too few. Why build only two or three enormous metropolises when the rest of the globe was empty?

“Caryl?” he called out, looking around him. The cockpit was empty. The stars were dimmed by the light reflecting off the moon, but some bright ones were visible. Planets? He wasn’t sure.

Again the sobbing, gut-wrenching in its emptiness, eaten away by despair.

“Arachne?’

“Yes, Peter.”

He found himself relieved to hear the AI’s voice.

“Where are we?” he asked, struggling to his feet.

“The system you call HD194640.”

It took a moment for the name to sink in.
HD194640.
The statistics were all there: a slightly cooler and brighter star than Sol around thirty-six and a half light-years from Upsilon Aquarius, sixty-two from Earth. A study from Earth had strongly indicated the presence of oxygen and water around a rocky planet orbiting at a distance of roughly two AUs, right in the system’s habitable zone. The survey mission sent to study it had left shortly after the
Frank Tipler
, but they would have taken less time to arrive. If everything had run to schedule, they would have arrived in 2137, Mission Time. That would have given them an extra fourteen years to survey their system and establish a beachhead.