Echoes of Earth (29 page)

“Will she agree to us riding her?”

“I doubt it.”

“Yes, so do we.” He bit his lip thoughtfully. “Where did you have in mind to meet him?”

“Echo Park. It’s neutral enough, I thought.”

“And Matilda Sulich has her tentacles there, too.”

“Which is what I meant by
neutral
.” She felt an anger flash through her such as she hadn’t felt for a long while. “Look, you know you can’t keep this to yourselves, Laurie. The Vincula has an obligation to its members. It can’t ignore that.”

“You have an antiquated view of the world, Caryl. You think in terms of spies and espionage.” He shook his head, as if he was disappointed in her. “Reality is much more complex than that. There are large but delicately poised forces on the move around us at all times, and we must be careful not to disturb their interplay too much, lest we find ourselves crushed between them. Swimming with icebergs—that’s what we’re doing, Caryl. I, for one, don’t want to end up a stain on the side of something too big for me to deflect.”

She didn’t respond to that. There wasn’t any point. People had used the “higher forces” argument to justify everything from small treacheries to gross inhumanity. Dismaying though it was to hear it from someone supposedly evolved above such conceits, she was also aware of her own lingering frailties. It wasn’t easy leaving one’s biological niche, becoming a god.

She didn’t hide her disapproval, however, and perhaps because of that Jetz didn’t stay much longer. She agreed to continue cooperating with the Vincula in the matter of Peter Alander—assuming, of course, her original pov also agreed to cooperate. Part of her was hoping she wouldn’t. The greater part, though, wanted to know what was going on. She had been out of the loop for too long. Maybe it was time to get back in there,
all
of her, and see what she could do.

* * *

Almost an hour passed before her original confirmed that
she would go ahead with the meeting. While communication between her povs—and between them and her distributed self—was not the same as with external intelligences, she did sense a certain delight in her original’s tone. The Vincula couldn’t ignore her forever. At last, they had been forced to notice her and her work.

The business of Sel Shalhoub’s violation hadn’t been forgotten, naturally. Although overshadowed by this new development, there was still a lot of ill feeling about the data theft. Technically, it wasn’t illegal, because there were meant to be no secrets in the Vincula. But no one liked having povs attacked, especially at private functions, and Matilda Sulich’s links with the Gezim were just a little too close. Shalhoub was calling for an inquiry into the behavior of Hatzis’s original, with a view to censure her, maybe even to have her shut down. She couldn’t tell how much he knew about the Alander engram; perhaps he knew nothing at all. But she knew the Vincula wouldn’t give him his way while Jetz’s “icebergs” were lumbering around so dangerously.

She was at the focus, however temporarily and spuriously. It was a weird feeling. As Alander agreed to the rendezvous and she began making preparations for it, she wondered how long it would last. They would probably dump her the moment her usefulness expired—once Alander proved that he was willing to talk to someone else or gave them the mysterious information he proffered so tentatively. Then she would be out. She was under no illusions as to the permanence of her new status, which was why she felt she should milk the situation for all it was worth. This was a chance for her to become an iceberg of her own.

Focusing her awareness through the senses of her original—and feeling her struggle ever so subtly as her own will was subsumed into the greater part—she took stock of her surroundings. The suite had been cleaned and redecorated following the cocktail party. The study in which she and Sulich had ambushed Shalhoub’s remote was now a bedroom; the bar had gone. The balcony was unchanged, with its swaying pines and concrete balustrade. Beyond, however, the illusion of beach and sunset was gone. Now there was nothing but stars and Frame, rotating slowly around her as the habitat, anchored to the Frame by a glassy spindle, turned to simulate gravity.

The giant construct seemed to stretch into infinity before her, its seemingly thin threads and girders glinting silver in the sunlight. The sun itself was hidden behind the Shell Proper, which she was thankful for. Seen naked at such a near orbit, it was off-puttingly bloated. Jetz was right about her conservatism in some respects: She still hadn’t fully acclimatized to humanity’s new home. Perhaps, she thought, she never would.

It was incredible to think that the Frame had been built in just over a year. If its construction hadn’t been interrupted, what would it have looked like now? What would Alander have come home to then?

When the time came for him to put in an appearance, she felt the presence of the Vincula wrap around her in turn like a heavy shawl. Her original didn’t stir, even though the deal with Alander had been for a conversation in private. For a start, that simply wasn’t possible. To varying degrees, the Vincula really was everywhere. And privacy didn’t accord with either her nor her original’s ultimate desires. She
wanted
this information spread on principle, whatever it was.

Although she had seen footage of Alander’s odd vessel in action, she was still startled when it appeared out of nowhere before her, expanding in perfect silence within the complex grid of the frame. How it had matched velocities and taken position so precisely, she couldn’t even begin to imagine, but sensors in the habitat reported the use of mysterious fields to anchor it with respect to the habitat. It appeared to be perfectly motionless, an anomaly in space-time that resisted all attempts to examine it.

As impressive as this demonstration of its abilities was, it still didn’t look like any ship that Hatzis had seen before. Hanging in vacuum several meters from the balcony, it seemed more like a giant marble than a space vessel. It was so featureless that she couldn’t even tell it was rotating until a black circle appeared on its equator. The circle expanded, became a bump that extruded out still farther, then became a black sphere growing out of the side of its white parent.

She took a step back as the black satellite whipped around the white sphere, decreasing in speed as the distance between her and it decreased. What purpose the display served, she couldn’t tell, but it soon became apparent to her that the black sphere would eventually come to a halt beside the balustrade near her.

“I’ll need a short ramp,” said Alander. “I presume you can get a swarm to do the job?”

Swarm.
Use of the archaic term hammered home how removed in time he actually was.

She instructed a plex to form between the edge of the balcony and where she estimated the black sphere would dock. At the same time, the balustrade folded back to give him an opening. On a whim, she created a red carpet and unrolled it through the opening.

“Nice touch,” he said, a hint of amusement ameliorating the tension in his voice. “I must warn you, though, while I appreciate your efforts to make me feel welcome, I’m still not totally convinced that I can trust you. Most of the data I have is in hard storage, and I have no intention of bringing it with me to the meeting. If anything should happen to me, the ship has been instructed to leave with the data and return to the
Frank Tipler
.”

She smiled to herself. His concern was both hopelessly naive and yet quite justified. The Vincula wouldn’t need to do anything as overt as attack him physically to get what it wanted.

The black sphere came to a smooth halt exactly where she predicted, and an oval hole opened in its side. From the darkness within stepped Peter Alander.

He looked exactly the same as he had in the visual transmission he had sent earlier; clearly there had been no fiddling with the image. (She tried to recall the standard overlay program installed on the survey ships, and it came to her after a brief moment: conSense, a distant ancestor of the program her original used a hundred years later.) Alander’s body was tall and efficiently muscled, with no hair. His skin was dark-tinted, almost purplish, and his eyes were a nondescript green. He wore a slightly scruffy-looking, gray environment suit open around the throat. Apart from that, he seemed completely exposed to the vacuum around him.

“Isn’t that odd?” she privately said to Jetz, who she knew would be watching. “I didn’t think those early remotes could withstand hard space.”

“They couldn’t,” the Urge replied. “See, he’s covered in something.”

Looking closer, she saw that he was indeed coated in a thin layer of refractive material that had the appearance of water. It covered his entire body, going into his ears, nose, and mouth, and it even coated his eyes. His clothes were affected, too, although to a lesser extent. A deeper scan revealed the layer to be full of complex polymer chains and other, more exotic molecules. While she didn’t know how it worked, precisely, it was clearly protecting him from the vacuum.

In the time it had taken her to examine his odd garb, he had taken just one step, his first step out of the ship. She managed to get a glimpse into the ship before the oval door began to contract, although she saw little but a short passageway terminating in a room with a blank screen on the far wall. The air within the craft was held in place by some sort of membrane stretched invisibly thin across the entrance; Alander had passed smoothly through, without breaking it, and it, too, contained many of the complex molecules found in his second “skin.”

By the time Alander had taken his second step, the door had closed completely, shutting her out from the mysteries it contained.

“Note how they’ve custom-fit the remote to his original specifications,” said Jetz, his tone scornful. “Why go to so much trouble to make a standard-issue surface model look like something else? Engrams were so fixated on their primary patterns, it’s almost embarrassing to look at. I find it hard to believe that such inflexible creatures were ever chosen to be sent to the stars.”

She wanted to remind him that one of his fellow Urges, Sel Shalhoub, did the same with his remotes and that humanity in 2050 had had few other options, but she decided against it.

“Whatever your feelings toward them, Laurie,” she said, “the fact is, they’ve returned with a faster-than-light ship.”

“It has to be some sort of trick. It simply isn’t
possible
.”

Alander’s foot came down softly on the red carpet. The limb passed smoothly through the Vincula’s own air-retaining boundary, albeit one much thicker and clumsier than the one on his ship. He had to lean slightly forward to bring the rest of his body through.

There was a blur of activity around her as she watched him approach through the fresh-smelling atmosphere of the balcony. Pulses of high-frequency sound brushed her ears and skin. In a tiny fraction of a second, Alander was assaulted with all the covert tricks the Vincula possessed in order to determine what made him tick, both software and hardware.

Another step.

“Well? What did you find out?” She would be damned if she was going to let them keep this information from her.

“He thinks they’ve discovered aliens!” There was a note of mockery in Jetz’s voice.

“Really? Where?”

“In Upsilon Aquarius, of course. Some sort of artifact—more than one, actually. They’re...” He stopped, chuckling. “Apparently they’re supposed to be gifts.”

“Gifts? What sort of gifts? Come on, Laurie! I want details.”

“Well, the ship, for starters. And that...
thing
he’s wearing. The others are back where he came from. He’s brought some data these supposed aliens gave him, hoping to convince us to help them study the rest.”

“And why shouldn’t we?”

“Let’s just wait until we see the data, Caryl. I wouldn’t get your hopes up too soon.”

“What about him? What have you learned?”

“Not much of any significance. He was damaged, yes, in a similar fashion to the others. To be honest, he’s lucky to have his sanity. Putting him into the remote seems to have gained him a little time, although it’s unlikely he will hold up indefinitely.”

“Could he be fixed?”

“Of course,” he said. “But why would we?”

“Is it reasonable that I should want him
not
to collapse on me while I’m trying to talk to him?”

“You’re still planning to go through with this?” She felt Jetz’s surprise as Alander came to a halt before her. “You’re not going to learn any more than we already know, Caryl.”

“Knowledge is a progression, Laurie,” she said, holding back her anger. “A snapshot of someone’s head isn’t necessarily all there is to know about them.”

She knew that Laurie Jetz had never had any experience with engrams; he had certainly never had one made of himself. Very few people alive in 2163 had. After UNESSPRO had met its launch target, the technology had flourished for a brief while, enjoying the patronage of the rich, always on the lookout for a sort of immortality, but the Spike had ended all that. Most had been erased as the information surge had devoured every useful byte in the system; many were wiped when the uploaded realized just how useless they were, compared to new technologies. What few engrams remained were frozen as historical records or tucked away in long-forgotten storage areas, frozen. Occasionally one that had been running in isolation for decades was found, insane but still valiantly bluffing at life; these were instantly, humanely erased.

Hatzis felt vague feelings of sorrow for these lost children of her past. She’d had many engrams made of herself for UNESSPRO, and although each of them had been but fragments of herself then—and even less in comparison to herself now—they were still parts of her. They were worth pity, at the very least. She had always sworn to accept any that returned into her fold. Its patterns might be flawed, but its new memories would be worth something. Only then would she erase it.

Would the original Peter Stanmore Alander have absorbed this engram’s memories? She didn’t know. Perhaps, out of curiosity, to see what it had seen, at only one remove. But she doubted it. Her recollections of him—buried away in deep memory, but still there—suggested that he had been proud of his powers of cognition and would have become even more so, had he survived the Spike. He wouldn’t want to feel what it had been like to be crippled and lost, the way this one was. Only its knowledge would have made it valuable, and someone else could have collected that.