Heirs of Earth (8 page)

And if there was anything wrong with that, she couldn’t see it.

She returned her attention to the sluggish rush of information. Of the many probes that had been sent, only twelve had remained in operation at the end of the experiment. The behavior of those probes would be examined in the finest possible detail to ascertain what, exactly, had enabled them to survive for so long in the hostile environment of a cutter while the others had failed. Was it the location they found themselves in, perhaps? Or the way they behaved? Whatever the reason, she was determined to find it. No possibility would go unexplored; every piece of information would be thoroughly investigated.

The only thing they couldn’t know was how long those probes had survived
for.
When the cutters had left zeta Dorado, all ftl transmissions from the probes had ceased, meaning either they’d been taken out of range or simultaneously destroyed. Thor was keeping her fingers firmly crossed for the former. She wasn’t intent on throwing herself into the lion’s mouth without having at least some hope of getting out again afterward.

“Is there something you’d like to get off your chest?”

The voice—hers from another’s mouth—snapped her out of the data flow. With quicksilver smoothness, her pov was back in her android body and staring at her original.

So much more beautiful and capable
, came the involuntary thought.
So much more... me.

Thor forced it down.

“I thought you were going to let others make the decisions,” she said as she sat up. “That was the deal after Beid, right?”

“And it’s still the deal,” Sol replied. “Unless you’d
prefer
me to be in charge?”

Thor tore her eyes from Sol’s forearms and their shockingly natural skin tones. Human flesh was available in abundance by conSense, the communal illusion inhabited by most of the engrams, but in the real world its scarcity was a source of constant despair.

“You
are
in charge, Sol,” Thor said. “And well you know it, too. Worse, you encourage it. Everything’s gone back to the way it was on Sothis. You let them worship you like a goddess.”

Something flickered across the face of her original, then, and Thor smiled smugly for a moment, convinced she’d hit a nerve. But Sol’s next words took her by surprise.

“What if it was
you
they worshiped, Thor? Would that please you more?”

She didn’t have to think to answer that question, but it did take her a second to decide whether to say it aloud. Marduk and Mahatala were watching over Sol’s shoulder, just as nervous and compliant as all the others were around Sol.

“Yes,” Thor admitted finally. “I guess it would.”

“And you think you could do a better job than me?”

It was uncertainty that made her hesitate this time. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

Sol shrugged. “I never asked for this job, Thor, nor do I particularly want it.” Her perfectly white eyes regarded Thor intently. “I was serious about leaving it up to someone else after Beid, but no one else stepped forward. You could’ve presented Axford’s plan yourself to the Survivors’ Council, but instead you went through me. And they listened to me, as you knew they would. And they’re
still
listening to me, whether I want them to or not. But it’s not too late. I’ll happily step down any time you want me to. I’ll endorse your leadership. That’ll be the last order I give.”

Thor studied her in return for a long moment. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

“No, Thor, I’m not. It would be a relief to be rid of the responsibility.”

“Very well.” Thor felt a slight tremor run through her. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement. “Then I shall relieve you of the burden.”

Sol nodded once as she extended a hand. Thor took it instinctively, doubt flaring briefly in her gut as Sol’s expression hardened as their palms locked together.

“But first” said a voice in Thor’s head, “you’re going to need this.”

An explosion of memories and emotions blossomed in her mind. Thoughts, touches, doubts, tastes... The details poured through the channel Sol had opened between them, each one linking up to dozens more, catapulting her headlong into her original’s experiences. The rush was inexorable and wild. It was far more intense and detailed than the high-level simulation of the test in zeta Dorado—and far more authentic than the patchwork approximation that substituted for an engram’s activation memories. These were the intimate, firsthand experiences of a woman who had lived over 150 years, and they were pouring into Thor’s head like a flood unleashed from a broken dam, sweeping everything away in its path.

But it wasn’t like she was being invaded or being subsumed by another’s mind. This came from
her
—or at least another version of her—and in a very real sense these memories already
belonged
to her. And because of this, the initial shock and fright of the experience soon wore off, and she found herself welcoming these aspects of herself.

Still, there was far too much information to assimilate. Image after image flowed through her, bringing all manner of emotional baggage with it. Seeing Sol fall to the Starfish and feeling her higher self die, piece by piece, was the culmination of a great knot of emotional scar tissue that had begun in the vicious turmoil of the Spike, during which she had witnessed the destruction of Earth and all her loved ones: her mother, her sister, her father.

Her father! She confronted a memory that had no analogue in her own mind. She remembered her father with great sadness. She had loved him, worshiped him, before his death on Io. It was that loss from which her grief sprang—or so she had always thought.

But there was so much she had never known. A tangle of memories unfolded before her now, filling spaces in her mind that until that moment she’d never realized had even been empty, each one more tragic than the last: the long and painful death of her dog, Scotty, after someone had fed him broken glass; the death of a teenage boyfriend in a car crash, and herself trapped in the wreckage with her body up against his for four hours as authorities tried to get her out; her sister on the sofa sobbing after telling her mother and father that she’d been molested by her uncle...

Her uncle? Until that moment she never even knew she’d
had
an uncle. He was ruddy and short with thick hair and hazel eyes. Something of a drifter, he had come to stay at the Hatzis property to “recuperate” from some grueling job. Young Caryl remembered his hands. They were smooth-skinned and pale; his fingers were tapered and slim. They were not the hands of a hard worker; they were the hands of a pedophile.

After her sister’s teary and embarrassing admission, her father had chased Uncle Ren into the orchard and shot him. Young Caryl had witnessed the murder from behind the gray trunk of an apple tree. She remembered the feel of the bark against her clutching fingers, the sickness in her gut and hot tears on her cheeks, the flash of bright red that coincided with the crack of a gunshot.

She had buried the memory as deeply as she could, keeping it from her engrams when the time came to construct their activation memories. The shame of her family was a secret she did not want spread throughout the galaxy. It was a memory too ugly to be shared with anyone else.

Until now.

Thor gradually came back to herself, realizing she was slumped forward on her knees, flailing weakly for support. Sol stood nearby, offering none.

“Too much,” Thor muttered. “It’s too much....”

One hundred fifty years of memories had been dumped in her mind; it would probably take at least that again to sift through it all.

Sol didn’t say anything at first. She just left Thor on her knees in her mental anguish. The only sounds Thor could hear were her own trembling breaths and that thin, far-off crack of a single gunshot in a long-forgotten winter.

“Do you still want it, Thor?”

As difficult as it was, she forced herself to steady her breathing and look up into Sol’s penetrating gaze. Marduk and Mahatala were still watching on from nearby, and she knew that this was her first test.

She swallowed thickly in a vain attempt to moisten her throat, then nodded slowly. “I still want it.”

Her original loomed over her, and for a split second she thought Sol might offer to help her up. But then Sol turned and left the room without another word, leaving Thor to wonder if she’d passed or failed the test.

“Give me a hand.” She waved for Mahatala to help her up. Strong android hands gripped her arms and helped her to her feet. Thor felt the world spin around her, but she forced herself to be firm.

“Run the simulation back to where I was interrupted,” she said, sitting back into her chair, grateful for its support. Every muscle in her body was trembling. “We have work to do.”

Marduk and Mahatala exchanged brief and uncertain glances but then did as they were told.

1.2.4

“You did
what?”
Alander looked up with some alarm from the
schematics he was studying. Sol sat opposite him in
Klotho’s
cockpit, casually leaning on the desk the hole ship had extruded, and repeated herself with unwavering calm.

“I gave Thor control of the engrams.”

He shook his head, temporarily lost for words. “But Thor is unstable! I thought we agreed on that. She colluded with Axford; she disobeys your orders; she—” He stopped.
She was the one who told me that Lucia had rejected me,
he’d been about to say. He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done it just to hurt him.

But it was a petty concern, and one he couldn’t waste time dwelling upon. Thoughts of Lucia were a distraction, as was his confusion over his relationship with Caryl. Nevertheless, he found it hard to close off his mind to both of them. Since Lucia’s engram had escaped from
Klotho
no trace of her had been found anywhere, despite extensive searches of all the hole ships. The emotional part of him felt bad for what had happened, while the more rational side refused to accept grief for what he knew had needed to be done.

And as for Caryl Hatzis... They had shared a bed once since the meeting at Rasmussen. He had fallen into it, exhausted, and woken an hour later to feel her sliding next to him. The contact had been intimate without being sexual, but memory returned to him of it having been so, once. It had been a distraction, an experiment that hadn’t worked. But the need for something more was still there, and they took what they could from each other while no other alternative existed.

“Thor can’t be trusted,” he finished instead. With a half-smile, he added, “But then, I suppose I would’ve said much the same thing about you not too long ago.”

“I hope you still would say it.” There was an edge to her fleeting smirk that said she wasn’t entirely joking. “Thor is different from the others. Who else would you put in charge, Peter? You? Axford?” She smiled wryly. “I can’t really imagine someone like Otto Wyra leading the charge, can you?”

He shook his head. “Hardly.”

“Thor’s the only one who’s tried to take the reins of responsibility from me, and that’s why I let her have it. The tweak I gave her engram is resulting in highly original behavior. Sometimes I can’t tell
what
she’ll do next! And I like that, because I think we need a little unpredictability right now.”

Hatzis looked down at the schematics. “I thought that taking charge, making sure everything stays the way it’s supposed to, is the only way to get things done. Sometimes it is, but not always. Look at Frank. He works in the background, nudging people forward against their will. Maybe I should try to be more like him.”

“Spare me that much, Caryl.” Alander stood to stretch his legs, finding the sudden conversational turn discomforting in the extreme. “I’m all for using him, not emulating him.”

“Nevertheless, out of all of us he’s the one most likely to survive.”

“And you admire that?” he asked with distaste. “You think the end can justify the means?”

“Doesn’t it?”

Alander offered a derisive snort as he paced the cockpit. Hatzis had turned in the chair to face him. The posture made her look startlingly vulnerable.

“Peter, I’m sick of being in charge,” she said after a few more seconds of silence. “I don’t intend to spend what might be my last days bickering with everyone over details that ultimately won’t make a difference. But at the same time, I don’t want to be completely left out, either. If I think Thor’s doing a bad job or becoming unstable, then I’ll pull the plug.”

“And you’ll take over again?”

She didn’t need to think about that. “If I have to, yes.”

“I presume you have a back door into Thor, then.”

“Unmodified engrams are as leaky as sieves. Christ, if I
really
wanted to, I could make you dance for my entertainment.” She shrugged. “But that would get boring. And besides which, I’m starting to find your company tolerable.”

He wasn’t sure if she was joking or throwing a backhanded compliment in his direction, like a person might toss a dog a bone. He would probably always be uncertain where he stood with her. Once part of a mind that spanned an entire solar system, what could she possibly see in him except a marginally nonandroid body able on occasion to provide a modicum of comfort?

“Besides,” Sol said, “Thor found Lucia, and we have to be grateful for that. Without the information she found, we’d probably be running with the Praxis right now, just another in his pack.”

He nodded, having pondered long and hard what Lucia had revealed, as relayed through Thor. Something in pi-1 Ursa Major had eliminated the
Andre Linde,
the mission she’d been due to rendezvous with in 2117. A month before Lucia’s arrival, faint emissions had heralded the destruction of the
Linde
and the wholesale reorganization of the system. Days later, everything had returned to normal. Fearing that she was in danger, too, Lucia had disguised herself as an asteroid and tumbled through the system, taking snapshots as she went. Only upon awakening months later did she discover that the photos showed nothing unusual. However, upon further examination, she made another discovery: One of the photos was missing.