Heirs of Earth (42 page)

3.0
EPILOGUE

2160.10.7 Standard Mission Time

(12 September 2163 UT)

It had been three whole days since the Starfish had last been
seen by anyone—three days of almost unnatural calm and unspoken apprehensions. Sol understood those apprehensions well, and as she faced her third sunset on the ancient regolith of Luna, she couldn’t help but wonder if humanity would ever stop holding its breath in anticipation of death striking once again from the skies.

“You okay, Sol?”

She glanced over to where the barely visible shimmer that was Lucia Benck’s new body stood. If she looked above the north horizon she would have seen the golden gleam of the orphaned spindle from which Lucia was conducting her part of the conversation.

Sol nodded, smiling. “I was thinking of that carbon disk Peter found in 53 Aquarius,” she half-lied. “The one that you—that one of your engrams—left behind. Do you know what it said?”

“I had a list of quotes,” said the former scout pilot. “Was it Noël Coward? ‘Why, oh why do the wrong people travel, when the right ones stay at home?’ “

Sol laughed at this, and realized as it lasted just how
good
it felt. “Actually, I think it was Wordsworth.”

“Ah, yes,” said Lucia, taking another step forward, glancing in the direction of the sun. “ ‘Bliss was it, in that dawn to be alive.’ “

“That’s the one.”

“Why were you thinking of that?”

Sol shrugged, sobering. “I guess because this doesn’t feel much like bliss to me.”

“But we
are
alive, Sol, and that’s what matters. As long as we stay that way, there’s a chance things could get better; then we can find the bliss.”

“He still wears the disk around his neck, you know.”

Lucia didn’t respond immediately, and when she did, her tone was defensive. “We’ll figure out how to change. We have to.”

“Not all people want to change.”

“Then maybe we should just figure out how to be people again.”

“You make it sound like that’s a good thing.”

Her bitterness surprised even herself. After all, she
was
still alive, like Lucia said. Surely she should be grateful for that? She should be grateful for every day she got to see a new dawn.

Sol shook her head, smiling wryly to herself. That was crap, and well she knew it. She tilted her head to look up at the sky, where the stars would have been had not the glare of the sun swamped them—and where Earth might have been had it not been destroyed ninety-eight years ago. Human nature being what it was, survival alone wasn’t enough. There were precious few people left with which to rebuild, and none of them were more than passably human; Lucia, Alander, and herself were extreme examples.

Since the destruction of Sagarsee and the last of the gifts three days earlier, she had remained on Luna, here in Sol System, waiting for humanity’s end—waiting for the Starfish to come and trample the remaining survivors underfoot. But they had never come, and this had left her feeling profoundly exhausted. She was tired of the apparently endless ebb and flow of change. She wanted to settle down and grow old as humans were supposed to, to quietly die on some porch while sitting in a rocking chair and watching her grandchildren playing around her feet.

She almost laughed again. The image was a ludicrous one.

She’d never been interested in children, let alone grandchildren! And with Peter, the closest thing to a lover she had had for over a century? The thought was absurd. The circumstances that had brought them together were passing; both the whim and the need were gone. And the sports they might produce didn’t bear contemplation.

No, her engrams had been the closest she’d come to offspring, and they had been imperfect and resentful, just like her.

The truth was, she didn’t know
what
she wanted. But she knew what she
didn’t
want, and what she didn’t want was to be sitting around waiting for death to come and take her.

“I called you here to ask you a favor, Lucia,” she said.

Lucia’s I-body moved closer, kicking up moondust that slid unimpeded off her invisible legs and fell with unnatural rapidity back to the regolith.

“I’ve already agreed to act as a shuttle for people between Ellil and here, if that’s what you want,” said Lucia. “The Unfit asked me to do that yesterday.”

“And I’ll put you onto that as soon as Yu-qiang arrives. Once I see through her eyes what happened there, we’ll know better what to do.”

Sol still didn’t quite believe the testimony of those that had followed the Praxis in the wake of the Starfish. A new world flowering from the nanotech dust of Ueh’s body; the Praxis gone, vanishing with a significant chunk of
Mantissa A
to destinations unknown; no sign of the Starfish anywhere, for hundreds of light-years ahead or to either side...? It seemed almost incomprehensible.

“But that wasn’t what I was going to ask,” said Sol. “This is more of a personal favor.”

Lucia’s ghostly image inclined her head slightly, as if curious. “What kind of favor?”

“It’s going to take a while to work out exactly who’s going to live where, and how. I’m intending to stay right here, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to.” Sol imagined a similar transformation of the lunar surface as was occurring on Ellil, the new Yuhl home world. Set free from Earth and nudged by the Ais of the Spike, Earth’s old moon rotated once every ten hours and followed a stable, life-supporting orbit around Sol. Enough raw material—in the form of shattered molecule chains and radioactive ions—had fallen from the destruction of the Shell to make nanofacturing a habitable biosphere a relatively easy task. It wouldn’t be Earth when she finished, but it would be somewhere to call home. With the exception of Venus, another victim of the Spike, the starscape was reassuringly familiar. Her ancient genes responded to its call.

Sol told Lucia, “I want you and Peter to find the others.”

“What others?”

“The missions that didn’t arrive at their target systems. The ones who drifted off course, whose acceleration or deceleration phases were mistimed, or who ran into any one of a dozen different types of trouble. Some will have been destroyed, and some won’t be what they’re supposed to be—if Axford is to be believed—but not all of them will be out of commission. Some might be waiting for rescue. They’re needles in a very large haystack, I know, but I’m sure the spindle will make it easier for you to search that haystack. And it’s worth it. We need everyone we can get, Lucia.”

Lucia didn’t respond immediately, but Sol could tell that she was taken by the idea.

“You can get started as soon as things settle down,” Sol said into the silence.

“There are more of me out there,” Lucia said finally. “As well as more Peters.”

Sol nodded. “And you’ll get to explore, too.”

“What if I come across Axford?”

“Ignore him,” she said. “Don’t listen to anything he has to say and get the hell away from him as quickly as possible.”

“Okay. Why not? It might be fun. And who knows: we might even find Thor in the process.”

Sol didn’t feel the same enthusiasm with which Lucia clearly viewed the possibility. She’d heard all about her hybridized engram’s dance with the fovea and its climax in HD92719. Thor hadn’t been seen since, and neither had the Starfish or any of their attendant species. She hoped her attempted, futile, final stand in Sol System hadn’t driven Thor to do something equally self-destructive. As if diving into the Source of All hadn’t been enough.

If it
was
true that Thor had tried to sacrifice herself again, the fact that it appeared to have worked made Sol’s vague feelings of guilt even worse. Had the memories she’d given the engram contributed to her demise? Was she in some way responsible?

“If you do find her,” said Sol, “then tell her she’s welcome back here any time. Tell her—” She paused for a moment, thinking of the last time she had seen Thor back in the cutter. “Tell her I’m tired of being in charge.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling faintly at her own routines, and the traps from which even she couldn’t quite escape. “Sometimes I do.”

“Bliss was it...”

Even as she smiled, the quote haunted her. Lucia’s disks, like the Yuhl death markers, were totems that were never truly intended to be seen. They were gestures flung defiantly out to the stars, as if daring the universe to ignore them. That they would be ignored was indisputable. The universe as a whole didn’t care if the disks or totems—or engrams or humans—faded to dust and were forgotten forever.

Still, she was determined to fight the natural progression. She would write her will large across the stars by any means possible. And if she failed in the attempt, then so be it. But having come so close to pointless immolation, she vowed to do her best to avoid it happening again. Whatever life brought her, it had to be better than the alternative.

* * *

“So we still don’t know, then?” Alander looked away from
Rob Singh’s virtual representation. His ability to participate in conSense events was improving, but it still unnerved him. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

Singh cleared his throat. A slim, tall man with dark hair graying at the temples, he looked more like a high school teacher than an astronaut pilot.

“That’s it in a nutshell,” he said. “At least I can tell you the difference between what we don’t know for certain, and what we only
think
we don’t know.”

“I can do that for myself.” Alander raised a hand and began ticking off points on his fingers. “We don’t know where the Starfish and the Spinners came from.”

“No,” said Singh. “But—”

“We don’t know where they
went
.”

“Again, no; however—”

“We don’t know if they’ll come back.”

“If you’ll just let me—”

“And we don’t even know why they came here in the first place, right?”

“Ah, now that I think we
do
know.” The enthusiasm in Singh’s tone was short-lived, however. “Well, actually, we don’t think they
had
a reason at all. I think we just happened to be in their path.”

“So they’re not time-reversed humans from the distant future covering their own tracks?” Alander had heard that rumor within a day of returning to Sol System. It had the merit and pull of a satisfactory narrative, but he wasn’t convinced.

Neither was Singh. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. The chances of humanity surviving the near-heat death state at the other end of the universe are very slim. And even if we did make it, we’d be so unrecognizable as to be effectively alien anyway. The time scales we’re talking here are fantastic.”

“How long?”

“The current estimate puts the entropy switch to occur at five to ten times the current age of the universe.”

Such a length of time was too much to grasp, especially given that humanity had barely managed to survive just the last few weeks. That it could last not just to the end of the universe, but back again, seemed utterly impossible.

“Not that I’m dismissing the reverse time arrow scenario,” Singh went on. “In fact, I don’t think we should be ruling anything out just yet. Personally, I think there’s a real chance that one of the migrations came from another universe—perhaps even both of them. As well as the—what did the
A|kak|a/riil
call it? The Exclusion?”

Alander nodded. “That was their word for the Spinner ecosystem.”

“If all of the races came from different universes, you know what that means, don’t you?”

Alander frowned. “No, what?”

Singh smiled broadly. “That your theory of quantum evolution could still be right, of course. Humanity might still be the only intelligent life to have evolved in this universe.”

Alander acknowledged the gesture, even though he was no longer as convinced of the idea as his original had been.

“It would also explain the gaps in the Map Room and the Library,” said Inari, one of the many who had gathered to hear Singh’s analysis of the situation. The simulated lecture hall was a fair approximation of one from the late twentieth century, with scuffed walls and graffitied desks that strongly echoed the ones from Alander’s artificial memories. In reality, humanity’s surviving minds were huddled in a complex assembled from seventy hole ships presently in a lunasynchronous orbit above the ruins of the Moon’s Yi Base.

“If the Spinners came from another universe,” Inari went on, “albeit one slightly different from ours, then the gaps aren’t deliberate at all. They’re just evidence of those differences.”

Singh nodded. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“As much as anything does around here,” said Cleo Samson, glowering from her end of the table. She was still smarting over the loss of Sagarsee, her own colony, in the last of the Starfish attacks. “If they’re not from around here and we don’t really matter to them, then why the gifts? Why bother with us at all?”

“Well, we mattered to somebody. If not the Starfish or the Spinners themselves, then perhaps a subspecies traveling with them. We know of at least six attendant species in the Exclusion.”

“Which might have been seven, had things gone badly for us.”

“You think they
didn’t
go badly?” said Ali Genovese of Demeter.

“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Singh was grim-faced but determined in his opinion. “Without the gifts, there’s no way we could have survived the Starfish.”

“Without the gifts,” said Jayme Sivio of Zemyna, “maybe we wouldn’t have had to face the Starfish in the first place.”

“That’s the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?” said Alander. “Were the Spinners trying to give us a fighting chance against the Starfish with the gifts, or were we just being used as a diversion for the Starfish while the Spinners hid out in pi-1 Ursa Major?”

“Maybe both,” said Singh. “I know that sounds crazy, but we need to remember what we’ve been dealing with here. We have a large number of species interacting around a core of hyperintelligent beings. Whether the core is comprised of organic life-forms or Ais, or something else entirely, we’ll probably never know—and neither is it terribly important. It’s the peripherals we’re interacting with that matter—the lesser species. They might have their own priorities, within or alongside those of the Spinners. Two different groups with quite different agendas could have arrived at the same simple tactic with equally mixed results: one gave us the gifts; another instructed them to talk only to Peter; a third selected Lucia, the first human they encountered, to be the one who could inhabit the Dark Room. I see lots of possibilities but little consensus.”