Echoes of Earth (35 page)

“
Arachne
?” She spoke with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. “Thanks for talking to me. I’m surprised but pleased.”

“You’re welcome, Caryl.”

“Do we have to just talk, though? I have numerous other senses I can utilize.”

“I am aware of them and can interface with any you wish to utilize.”

“Okay, then.” She abandoned her external eyes and groped outward by subtler means. “I’d like to see where we’re going, if that’s possible. Is there any way—?”

Before she had finished, she found herself surrounded by a flawless simulation of the gifts on Adrasteia: the ten orbital towers and spindles, each unique and glinting in the bright sunlight. The illusion was so perfect, it was as though she was actually there. Moving through it was as easy as willing herself elsewhere; and she jumped in rapid succession through all of the various rooms: from the text-based Science Hall to the more hands-on Lab; through the Map Room, with its millions of glowing stars; the Gallery and the Library, all holding promise of a universe rich in life and wonders; pausing at the Surgery; the Hub; and the hole ship’s Dry Dock, rich in alien technology; but none so rich as the great hall holding the tower-building machines and the Gifts themselves, vast and mysterious, seeming more concrete somehow than the spindles.

She stopped in the Dark Room and floated for a while in its empty blackness.

“
This is the final gift we bring
,” the Gifts had said. She understood that comment about as much as Alander did. Did they mean infinity? Serenity? The purity of the void?

Or maybe there was something here she simply couldn’t see, that humanity would only discover once they could penetrate the geometries of space itself.

She didn’t know, and right now probably wasn’t the time to worry about it, either.

“Why did the Spinners come?” she asked, wondering if a more powerful means of communication gave her access to higher-level information.

“That has already been explained to Peter Alander,” said the hole ship.

She smiled at the rebuke. Yes, this was definitely more sophisticated than simple instruction-confirmation. “Okay. But the Spinners are travelers, yes? Wandering across the galaxy, helping out needy, less fortunate races wherever they go, right?”

“That statement is more or less true.”

She sensed evasion and pursued it. “What do you mean by that?”

“The behavior of the builders of the gifts is much more complex than humanity’s. Would an ant understand your motivations? A unicellular bacteria?”

“Some motivations, yes. All species need to find resources and to reproduce—”

“All
Earth
species,” interrupted the AI.

“There are other biological models? Will I find them in the Library?”

“You will find much that is alien to you there, Caryl Deborah Hatzis.”

She shook her head in irritation. “Please don’t use my middle name. I can’t stand it.”
But it must know that already,
she thought,
if it knows my name.
And to know
that,
the hole ship must have scanned either her or Alander at some point.
It’s deliberate; the hole ship is trying to put me off guard.

“Will you at least tell me which model the Spinners belong to then?”

“All information regarding the Spinners is confidential.”

“Why? What are they so afraid of?”

“They have no reason to be afraid of anything.”

She laughed lightly. “Everyone is afraid of something.”

The hole ship didn’t respond, though. Nor had it any cause to; after all, she hadn’t asked it anything.

“What about the other colonies?” she asked. “You told Peter that none of them have been contacted. Is that true?”

“Nothing is known of our builders since leaving Upsilon Aquarius. It is possible they may have contacted other colonies, yes, but that would depend on where their journey takes them.”

“This is different from what you told Peter. You said Adrasteia was the only one.”

“At that stage, that was the case.”

‘To your knowledge, has the situation changed?”

“To my knowledge, no.”

“I’m beginning to have doubts about your knowledge, to be honest.”

Again, silence. This time she didn’t push it. The brief conversation, combined with Alander’s memories, had confirmed the intractability of the Spinners’ AIs when it came to details about themselves. She was beginning to suspect that it was more than just intractability, though: The information simply wasn’t there to be accessed. If the Spinners didn’t want to impart too much of themselves into their gifts, then there had to be something they were afraid to reveal, something they didn’t want other species to find out about. But what? And why?

Her discomfort with the whole scenario wasn’t helped by the fact that all contact had been lost with Upsilon Aquarius. Not knowing what had happened to the survey team was undermining her conviction that Alander had made a mistake by leaving Sol when he did. They needed to know, and this was the only way to find out. But that realization came with its own problems. Just what was she and Alander heading into?

There are civilizations who take delight in the destruction of others.

The thought haunted her as she lay on the cot, staring at the ceiling.

2.2.2

The velvet blackness of space was peppered with distant, exploding hellfires drowning in bubbles of choking dust, feathery nebulae stirred by violent shock waves, and enigmatic singularities brought forth naked, screaming and howling in X-ray frequencies....

Alander was haunted by such images during his waking hours all the way back to Adrasteia. Had they been nightmares, he might have felt less troubled, but they were inspired by his growing perception of the universe: that it was an unsettled, angry place in which humans didn’t belong. If the Spinners themselves were afraid to show their real faces, what chance did he or anyone he knew stand?

But he had no real reason yet to be afraid for the
Frank Tipler.
As he and Hatzis sat in the cockpit to consider why his crewmates might not have responded to the ftl transmission, he was reminded of how his Hatzis and her team of projectors had tried to work out why Earth had fallen silent on them, years earlier. For all their deliberating, they hadn’t come anywhere close to the simple in essence (yet complicated in detail) truth of the Spike. A large part of him hoped that the silence from Adrasteia would have a similarly noncatastrophic explanation. But hope, he knew, wasn’t enough; at times it could even be a dangerous thing.

Alander and Hatzis put aside their differences in the hour and a half leading up to their arrival. She hadn’t slept for the entire trip, as far as he knew; he had a couple of times, succumbing to mental exhaustion if not physical. They needed to be able to anticipate every possibility and prepare to deal with them all, and they wouldn’t be able to do that while in conflict. But still the tension between them was palpable, and he wasn’t sure he fully understood why, although he suspected it had something to do with both of them being incomplete. She reminded him of his original, while he possibly reminded her of the reason why she was an isolated fragment of a much greater mind. Their individual inadequacies were rubbed in their faces, albeit in very different ways.

What would my original have done now?
he wondered. But he knew that unless he was prepared to ask Hatzis, there would be no simple answer to that question. She had known his original, after all, and as such was the only continuous, external link remaining to his past. Engram memory was too unreliable and subjective, according to her. It could be changed too easily. Had his original given him an edited version of the truth that had ultimately led to his breakdown? Was what had happened to him all that different from what had happened to Cleo Samson?

Too many questions and no one left to answer them. According to Hatzis, his original had probably been killed in the Great Subsuming of North America, taken apart and reused by a tide of nanotech transmuters along with everything else in its path. Cities, forests, mountains: nothing had been spared. For a while, observers had hoped that patterns had been retained of the people absorbed; some rampant AIs, like those in Europe and on the Moon, had at least done that much to preserve the past. But not this one. It had cut a wide swath across an entire continent and left him, like many others in the survey program, an orphan.

And not even a truly human orphan at that. According to Hatzis, he was little more than a “shortcut that went wrong.”

A flash of Lucia nearly blinded him as the time came for them to relocate at Upsilon Aquarius.

Remember, this conversation is being recorded for your copies’ memories, and they’ll think they’re real enough.

He was getting used to it. Maybe one day, if he ever found her, he could tell her himself.

* * *

“Oh, fuck,” were the first words Hatzis said on arriving at
Upsilon Aquarius. It was so perfectly in character with her engram that for a fleeting moment he felt torn between two realities: one with the
Tipler,
where most of his experiences of the system originated, and the other trapped in the hole ship, forced to watch the terrible new reality unfold.

They had relocated by the gas giant where Alander had tested
Arachne
for the first time. There they had conducted a quick survey of the system, using the hole ship’s precise senses to look for emissions of all kinds before scanning the visible wavelengths for images.

But Adrasteia was silent. They detected no broadcasts on any of the UNESSPRO frequencies: no beacons, no data feeds, no narrow-band laser pipes. There were numerous flashes in a number of bands consistent with lightning, but nothing apart from that. When Alander directed the search away from the planet and its moon, looking for various probes stationed across the system, again he found nothing. The noisy crackle of the gas giants and the booming of the sun were the only obvious radio sources in the system.

“Are you going to try to hail anyone?” she asked after a few minutes.

He didn’t answer immediately. He just stared numbly at the images of Adrasteia that were trickling in. The cloud cover hung in tatters, replaced for the most part by a vast pall of dust. Everywhere he looked, lightning flashes indicated the immense atmospheric storms raging below. The planet’s ecosphere had been severely disrupted. Admittedly, there hadn’t been much of one to begin with, but what there had been was now in ruins. Something had pummeled the planet and pummeled it hard.

“No,” he mumbled finally, without facing her. “Not yet.”

Even with the distance between the gas giant and Adrasteia, the orbital ring and the spindles should have been visible, but they weren’t. They were nowhere to be seen. In fact, no matter how much the ship’s AI searched, it could find no evidence of anything larger than a pea in orbit around the planet. No towers. No satellites. No
Frank Tipler.

There was, however, a lot of debris smaller than a pea. If left undisturbed, Adrasteia would soon have a small ring around it—less dramatic than Saturn’s, perhaps, but of a similar composition. It was hard to tell exactly how large the particles were that comprised it, but he knew they were small.

Dust
, he thought.
Ashes.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, finally turning to her.

“Neither can I.” Hatzis’s face was pale. “When you left, everything was all right, wasn’t it?”

“As right as it could be.” Looking up slightly, he said, “
Arachne
, can you tell what happened here?”

“I am unable to answer that, Peter.”

“Maybe if we move closer,” he said. Hatzis didn’t argue as he directed the hole ship to bring them into orbit about Adrasteia. In a way, he had hoped she would; he was looking for an excuse not to search too closely. Although engrams had no bodies to leave behind, the thought of what else they might find scared him anyway.

From orbit, the view was more spectacular and horrific in equal proportions, more so than he had allowed himself to believe it could be. Radar revealed terrible gashes where the orbital towers had crashed into the surface of the planet. All the ground settlements, automatic or otherwise, had been razed. Wide craters marked any concentration of technology, no matter how small. The atmosphere roiled in waves, anguished and traumatized. He wondered if any of the cyanobacteria would survive.

Of course they would,
he chided himself. On a microscopic level, little had changed, really. The extra energy in the system combined with environmental disturbance could even favor them in the long run, with increased likelihood of speciation leading to evolution and, ultimately, the creation of new life-forms. In a billion years or so, Adrasteia could be a very different place indeed.

But what could have caused destruction on such a scale? The dust in orbit was hot, both thermal and radioactive. Nuclear weapons, maybe? Had the Vincula lied about not having ftl transportation and sent an attack fleet to Upsilon Aquarius to wipe out the uppity engrams and steal their secrets? No, it was unlikely, not in so short a space of time. He doubted the Vincula could have dealt with the gifts so casually, if at all. In just two days, everything living—or at least active—in the system had been destroyed.
Everything.

Or had it? There was nothing left that might qualify as wreckage, although isotope ratios in a handful of grains scooped up by the hole ship suggested a terrestrial origin for at least some of the debris. Whatever had happened to the gifts might not have necessarily happened to the
Tipler.
Caryl Hatzis, Jayme Sivio, Otto Wyra, Jene Avery, Donald Schievenin, Kingsley Oborn, Nalini Kovistra, and the rest might still be alive, somehow. But the notion was a foolish one. If the gifts had succumbed to the attack, what chance had a few dozen fake minds contained in a metal box?

“I shouldn’t have left them,” he said as he watched the catalog of disaster scrolling down the screen.

“Don’t be pathetic,” Hatzis said sharply.

The rebuke surprised him, and he faced her again, frowning.