Orphans of Earth (10 page)

The image rotated so he could see it from all angles. That Charlie was a biped was immediately obvious, but its proportions were all wrong. Its legs were much longer than a human’s, compared to its trunk; long, tapering shins flared upward past the knees into enormously strong-looking, triangular thighs. The knees were bent so it looked like it was crouching. Its trunk was barrel-shaped, almost literally a cylinder, with strange, pouchlike folds and flaps in waxy, gray green skin. Partially hanging from this was a coarse-looking vest, while covering upper parts of its legs was a kilt fashioned from the same material. Alander assumed that the garments were decorative, as they offered no real protection. Much like his own, beneath the I-suit.

The creature’s forward-mounted arms were folded protectively across its chest, rising and falling with every rapid breath—the only movement Alander could discern. The hands were small and thin, and had several digits sprouting from each, but it was unclear how many there were or how precisely they were jointed. Two flat plates extended from its back.
Vestigial wings?
Alander wondered. They were more like an insect’s wings than a bird’s, or the sheaths that might once have covered them, at least.

When the image rotated around to the front again, its face captured his full attention. The head was roughly the same shape as a biscuit barrel and seemed smooth all over. There were no obvious protuberances. Instead, it had a marked pattern of pigmentation across its face: stark black lines with a perfect vertical symmetry that reminded Alander of a Rorschach blob. The line of symmetry gave the face a protonose; on either side were blobs that might have been eyes, nostrils, and ears, while a line that stretched from one side to the other could have been a mouth. It was impossible to be certain. For all he knew, the alien could have been wearing a helmet.

“He’s an odd-looking fellow, don’t you think?” said Axford. “I ran him through the gifts when I picked him up, but there’s only so much you can tell without invasive surgery. We’ll have to wait for him to die before we can do that, I guess.”

Alander caught Hatzis’s look of disgust at Axford’s comment, but she didn’t say anything. She was probably as much in awe of what she was seeing as Alander and wouldn’t spoil it by arguing with Axford.

“His biology is very complicated,” Frank the Ax was saying. “Some of it might even be enhanced by nanotech or implants. He has analogs of cells and DNA and blood and stuff, but it’s all slightly skewed. His genes have six bases, for instance, and his blood is sort of yellow.”

“Do the Gifts recognize his species?” Alander asked.

“No, they don’t,” he said, frowning. “And I find that a bit odd, actually. Either the Spinners deliberately kept him and his kind out of the library, or the Roaches themselves wanted to be kept out of it for some reason. For all we know, he could be a renegade Spinner stealing back some of the booty.”

Alander nodded thoughtfully. It was an interesting suggestion. If there were factions within the Spinner race, then maybe they weren’t as all-powerful and mysterious as once thought. In fact, they might be no different than humans.

“Where are you keeping him?” asked Hatzis.

“In the hole ship. The
Mercury
has set up an isolated environment for him, based on what we picked up in the surgery, and is keeping him relatively safe. It’s not perfect, but the I-suit is doing the rest. For now, anyway. I’m not sure how much longer he’s going to last. I think he might be in a coma.”

“You keep saying ‘he,’ “ interrupted Hatzis. “You’re sure that’s its gender?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

A series of anatomical images flashed against the darkness behind the alien, settling after a few seconds on a close-up of the creature’s genital area.

“
Two
...
?
” Hatzis was clearly as amazed as Alander.

“Like snakes,” said Axford. “Whoever these guys are, they take symmetry to the extreme.”

“What about communicating with him?” Alander asked.

“I tried,” he said, nodding to the image display. “See what you can make of it.”

More footage appeared. In it, the alien was awake and active, restrained in a small room. It was pacing backward and forward, its legs moving with a disturbingly jerky gait that left no doubt in Alander’s mind that it wasn’t human.
A person in a suit pretending to be an alien couldn’t move like that,
he told himself.

It was clearly agitated. The wing sheaths growing from its back flexed and snapped. This, combined with its long, angular legs and relatively short arms, reminded Alander of a giant grasshopper. But the creature was clearly warm-blooded, and it lacked the carapace, compound eyes, and mandibles of an insect.

Its face was the most startling thing. Transformed from a lifeless biscuit barrel, it was almost unnaturally mobile. Muscles under the skin flexed the patterns of pigmentation into new shapes, breaking the symmetry then re-forming it with unnerving speed. Its eyes, opened, revealed glassy orbs with internal lenses that constantly changed position, like the inside of an antique camera. Its mouth was the slit he’d identified earlier, but it wasn’t that of a lifeless dummy. It was extraordinarily mobile, opening and shutting in shapes that had no parallel on a human face. Behind narrow lips Alander glimpsed a yellowish tongue and two rows of protrusions that might have been teeth. And its voice...

Alander put his hands over his ears when Axford cranked up the volume. It sounded like a fight between two giant parrots, dropped in pitch.

‘Two sets of vocal cords that operate simultaneously,” Axford explained, reducing the volume again. “It’s not so strange when you think about it. There were species of birds back home that sang this way. You can cram a lot of information into the combined sounds, using not just pitch and timbre but interference and counterpoint as well. I’m sure under other circumstances, it could be quite beautiful, but at this point, Charlie wasn’t trying to endear himself to me, I’m afraid. He wanted out. That much was obvious.”

“Did you communicate with it at all?” Hatzis asked. Her expression was one of cautious fascination as she watched the alien pounding on the walls of his cell, shrieking in harshly dissonant tones that echoed through
Pearl
. She flinched every time its double voice reached a new peak of intensity.

Axford shook his head. “The language is simply too complicated,” he said with obvious disappointment. “Besides which, I didn’t get enough of it to make a detailed study. I’ve had a dozen of me working full time on it, but so far we haven’t had any breakthroughs.”

Alander looked at Axford in mild surprise. He kept forgetting that there were hundreds of the man scattered across Vega, and yet most of the time he spoke as if there was only one of him. But then, as the original Hatzis had said, that was the problem with engrams: it didn’t matter that they were simulations run on software, they were all essentially locked to their original state and could not change. Even if there were a million Axfords, they would all still behave like the original. Deviation would simply not be tolerated.

If only
his
engram had been so robust, Alander thought. Just two out of all the systems they had surveyed wasn’t very good odds at finding someone else he could trust.

The symmetry of the alien continued to bother him. “Could it be an artificial body,” he suggested, “like ours?”

“Possibly,” Axford replied, nodding. “But then, I’d have to see an original before I could tell the difference.”

“And that’s where we come in?” Hatzis asked. “You want us to go looking for you? To find out where they come from, perhaps?”

He shook his head again. “Frankly, where he comes from doesn’t particularly interest me,” he said. “It’s what he’s doing
now
that matters.”

A star map appeared, showing Vega and its near neighbors. Some were UNESSPRO targets—including Altair, Kruger 60, and Gamma Serpens—but there were others Alander wasn’t familiar with.

“Your clone on Sothis,” Axford went on, “she said in her last broadcast that the Roaches had bothered a system not far from here.” The map moved to show Groombridge 1830.

“Perendi,” said Hatzis, automatically naming the colony. She didn’t seem to take offense at her original being referred to as a clone.

“Whatever. You also spotted a number of kills, through here.” Axford indicated an area between Vega Mid Groombridge 1830. “Now, there have been two unsuccessful Roach attacks in the last week, but the bait signals I picked up suggest they must have been successful elsewhere. And given that it’s all happening in roughly the same spot—cosmologically speaking, that is—I can’t help but wonder if they have a base somewhere nearby.”

“But we haven’t seen evidence of any alien installation around here,” said Hatzis.

“Nor would you if you were looking in the wrong spot,” said Axford. “But maybe the aliens don’t like G- type stars. They could like M- or K- or F-types instead. For all we know, they might even go for brown dwarfs, drifting through interstellar space.”

“Surely they wouldn’t be able to support life?” said Hatzis.

“They can support life if their cores are still active,” offered Alander.

“Maybe,” said Hatzis. “But they’d still be damn near impossible to find.”

Axford shrugged. “I’m just thinking out loud here,” he said. “I’m not really suggesting we go on a Roach hunt just yet. I have another idea.”

Alander had thought ahead. “61 Ursa Major,” he said.

Instead of looking annoyed that Alander had stolen his thunder, Axford seemed delighted. “I’m impressed, Doctor.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

Axford frowned. “But that’s your title, isn’t it?”

“Just Peter will be fine,” he said.

Both Hatzis and Axford stared at him for a moment, Hatzis with curiosity, Axford in puzzlement. The protest sounded childish and irrelevant even to his own ears, but each time he heard the title, he felt as if everything he had done to make his new self stable was being undone again. “Dr. Alander” had died on Earth in the Spike; he wasn’t entirely sure who
he
was, yet, but it felt inappropriate to be addressed by someone else’s title. He didn’t think he had earned that right.

If not for us, then for whom?

He had rarely thought of his last conversation with Lucia Benck since the destruction of the post-Spike civilization in Sol system. It didn’t have the same resonance as it used to, in the context of the new, hostile universe he’d been thrown into. What did it matter who you were, he thought, when you were only one of a bare handful of humans left anyway?

Axford shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “If that’s what makes you happy, then Peter it is.” He turned to Hatzis. “And what about you, Caryl? Anything in particular you like to be addressed as? Madam President, perhaps? Or maybe I should be swearing allegiance to your Congress of Orphans?”

“How did you—?” Hatzis stopped with a furious flush on her face.

Axford’s laugh echoed through
Pearl.
“You really should tell your mother superior to find a better way of broadcasting her secrets,” he said. “I’m sure she doesn’t want just anyone listening in, does she?”

Hatzis’s gazed flicked to Alander, then back. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

Alander observed the exchange with fascination. What had Axford caught Hatzis doing? And not just this Hatzis, but
all
of them. Whatever the Congress of Orphans was, and however the information was being disseminated, he obviously wasn’t supposed to know about it. He would have to take a closer look at the broadcasts from Sothis in the future.

“When you two have finished,” Alander said, deliberately playing down the matter, “do you think we could get back to the business of 61 Ursa Major?”

“Right.” Hatzis was obviously relieved that he was changing the subject.

“If the Spinners are progressing the way we think they are,” Alander went on, “then they’ll be arriving there any time—with the Roaches not far behind them. So, my guess, General, is that you want to set an ambush, right?”

“Of sorts.” Axford brought the image of the alien back into the foreground. “We have here an important piece of intelligence, but he’s no use unless we can figure out how to talk to him. The Gifts have no record of this species and therefore no record of their language, oral or written. We could try digging magnetic electrodes into its brain—the regions that were most active when it was shouting before might tell us
something
—but that’s a desperate measure, and a short-term one at best. If Charlie dies, for whatever reason, then we’re right back where we started.”

“Then what
are
you proposing?” asked Hatzis.

“Well, I’m presuming that their hole ships speak to them in their own language and know something about their physical needs,” said Axford. “If we can get close enough to one, I can merge the nodes of the AIs and get my hands on that information. Once we’ve got
that,
I can use it on Charlie here to make him useful.”

“You mean torture him?” she asked with distaste.

“If reviving him, feeding him, and asking him a few questions about where he comes from counts as torture, then, yes, I guess we’ll be torturing him.” Axford’s eyes flashed dangerously. “What do you take me for? I’m not in the CIA anymore, you know.”

“Yet you deliberately wiped out your crewmates and—”

“Okay, okay,” Alander cut in. “Once we talk to it, what then?”

“Then we see what it has to say, I guess.” Axford leaned back into his chair with a sigh. “Who knows who these people are? Or what they want?
That
information is our priority, not what we do with it once we’ve got it.”

“But they haven’t tried to communicate with us before now,” said Hatzis. “Who’s to say they’ll want to communicate with us at all?”

“I’m aware of that,” he said. “But I don’t see that we have much choice right now.” His gaze studied both of them in turn. “So what do you say? Are you in, or not?”

“What exactly is it you want us to do?” Hatzis asked after a moment’s consideration.

“Well, for a start, surveillance will be a whole lot easier with two hole ships rather than one,” he said. “We’ll need to keep a low profile, otherwise they’ll think the gifts have already been opened and move on. Once they
are
there, then you can distract them while I move in. I don’t know how long it’ll take, so I don’t know how long we have to pin them down for—”