Echoes of Earth (7 page)

“But we can—” She stopped. “What are you doing now?”

“Landing,” he said.

“What?”

He could hear her confusion and tried to imagine her expression.

“Well, now that I have your attention,” he said, “I figure we can take some time to actually plan what we’re going to do.”

“Thanks, Peter,” she said after a few moments, her voice quiet and controlled. “I appreciate this.”

“Listen, Caryl,” he said. “I’m the one going into the lion’s den. In some ways I’d rather face you than the Spinners. In fact, to tell the truth, if you
had
brought down the shuttle, it would have come as something of a relief.”

“And yet you were prepared to go through with it?”

“Had you not listened to reason? Yes, I would have.”

“But now you’re willing to talk?” It sounded as though she still couldn’t quite believe what he was doing.

He shrugged in the darkness. “It’s the diplomatic thing to do.”

“It’s good to see you have regained some common sense, at least,” she said.

The ghost of a smile in her voice was reward enough, for now. He may only have won a battle, but that was sufficient to make him feel a little more confident about the war.

1.1.6

The manipulative little fuck,
Hatzis thought as she watched
the satellite images of the shuttle descending onto a rough plateau some 400 kilometers away from the base of Tower Five. She handed the conversation back to Sivio while she took a moment to collect her thoughts. Giving ground to Alander had galled her more than she would ever admit. Not because she thought she was infallible—far from it—but because it was
Alander.
Had it been the
real
him, she might have felt better about it, although the chances were it would still have been difficult for her pride to accept. As it was, it ate into her like acid.

Dr. Peter Alander had been aboard the
Frank Tipler
as its resident generalist, not a physicist or chemist or programmer or any of the other specialties the ship carried, but someone who professed to know a lot about everything: the wide-world equivalent of a physician. His role had been to act as adviser to the survey managers, someone who kept in touch with all the various disciplines at once, making sure their work didn’t conflict and noticing when close focus might obscure a bigger picture.

As such, he commanded a great deal of respect among the other survey staff. Even among the other generalists—and there were ten of them scattered randomly through the missions—he was regarded highly. He was supposed to be good.

She could respect that, and she would have valued his input at any time during her leg of the mission. But not this damaged Peter Alander who had the potential to forget where he was if distracted. Giving any concessions at all to
him
just incensed her. And she wasn’t above resenting the fact that a key component of her management team was missing, either, making her job all the more difficult.

Still, she would bear it as gracefully as she could. She was determined to, and she didn’t doubt that leaders all through history had been forced into similar situations, with or without neural net advisers. That was what she had to do if she was going to be a good leader herself.

As Sivio walked Alander through basic preparations for his mission, a call came through for her from Cleo Samson.

“I’ve been watching what’s going on,” said the woman.

“Why?” Hatzis knew she was being unnecessarily blunt but couldn’t help it. Samson was a chemist; she should have been making space for more relevant disciplines.

“Owen asked me to help him out with spectrographic analyses of the spindle hulls. I’ve only been real-timing it.”

She accepted the explanation. “So what’s your interest in this situation?”

“I’d like to talk to Peter. I think I can help him.”

“How?”

“He needs someone to keep his mind on track. You and Jayme have other things to do. I’m on real time, like him, and he’ll listen to me.”

Hatzis mulled over Samson’s suggestion. It seemed to make sense. They wouldn’t want Alander distracted at a crucial point in the proceedings. But she also didn’t want him distracted by Samson, either.

“Okay,” she said, “we’ll give you the bandwidth.”

“ConSense?”

“Yes. He doesn’t like hearing voices in his head.”

“Good.” Samson smiled openly, making her seem even younger than she already was.

Christ,
thought Hatzis.
What does she see in him?
They were opposites in almost every respect: she a pale-complexioned blond in her thirties, he a rejuvenated sixty-year-old, formerly mixed African/Cuban stock but now in the body of a vat-grown android barely six months old. More importantly, she was still in possession of all of her faculties, while he—

Give it a rest,
Hatzis chided herself, tiring of her own maligning of Alander.

“I’ll allow this
only
on the condition that he actually wants you there,” she said. “The minute he asks for you to leave, you’re gone. Understood?”

Samson nodded. “Understood.”

“Okay.” She brought Sivio up to speed and gave permission for the line to Alander to be opened. The conSense link was a small risk, but a meaningless one if what Alander had said about the Spinners being able to access the
Tipler
was really true.

She didn’t stick around to listen in on the conversation. There was far too much work to be done for her to afford to be able to just hang about eavesdropping. She had her projections team concentrate their efforts on the fifth tower and spindle, in order to anticipate what Alander might find there. She didn’t want him going in there blind, despite her feelings toward the man.

Engineering reported that they could guarantee constant satellite coverage of the spindle with only a dozen or so orbital maneuvers. She okayed the procedures; as long as the
Tipler
was safely out of the way, she was prepared to risk a few minor satellites in order to increase surveillance.

The issue of alien versus human origins of the Spinners wasn’t going away in a hurry, despite Alander’s beliefs on the subject. Certainly, the pictures filtering through spoke of massive capability. Such architecture required enormous material strength and a high degree of engineering sophistication, but none of it rang false to her. The angles and planes displayed an appreciable aesthetic, as she understood it. There were three ways to explain it: Architecture throughout the universe followed similar rules; the builders came from the same place she did; or the builders made the spindles the way they did in order to meet human aesthetics, not their own. The first possibility struck her as being unlikely, as did the last, but she was unsure if that reasoning alone justified accepting the second possibility.

Spindle Five consisted of a central, seed-shaped structure approximately one-half kilometer in height. The orbital tower connecting it to the ground was anchored in a slight tapering at its bottom, similar in reverse to the counterweight on the far side. The orbital ring seemed to pass through the entire structure unhindered, vanishing on one side into a deep dimple only to reappear on the other in exactly the same fashion. Apart from that, there were no obvious openings in the central structure’s surface; it was apparently smooth all over.

Surrounding it, however, were seventeen freestanding rings, like streamers encircling a Christmas tree, though never actually touching the branches. They kept a minimum 100-meter distance from the central “seed” and were spaced equally apart around it. From edge to edge, they were ten meters wide and three meters thick. All of them were irregularly dotted with slight, rectangular indentations that the projections team suspected might be windows or airlocks, although none of them were open.

Electromagnetic emissions were minimal. The entire structure uniformly reflected a slight bronze light, but there were no lights, no radars, no lasers. For all Hatzis and her crew could tell, the structure could have been completely dead. But the cable car suggested otherwise.

“Could it really be so easy, though?” she mused aloud.

“Could what be so easy?” asked Sivio.

She looked at him and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, slightly embarrassed for having voiced her thought. “I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else going on. Something we’re not seeing.”

“You think it’s a test?”

“Think, no.
Fear,
yes.” What had Alander called it?
A rabbit trap
. She found herself hoping more than she had ever hoped for anything that he was wrong.

“He’s preparing to move off again,” said Sivio. “I can tell him to hold off a little longer, if you like.”

She briefly considered waiting another hour or so to see if the Spinners would make a move. But what would the point of that be? If Alander was right, then they were listening in and would know what they were doing anyway.

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “Tell him he can go whenever he’s ready.”

Sivio went off to confer with Alander, and this time she followed him to see how the human representative to the Spinners was faring.

Alander’s image, based on scans taken from the interior of the shuttle, looked tired. His artificial body possessed the same basic chemistry as a natural human, plus a few modifications designed to make survival easier in the difficult environments found on Adrasteia. It was ironic, she thought, that their mental states should share a common feeling of fatigue despite neither of them having a genuine body.
How far we have come,
she thought,
yet how unchanged we remain.

“I’m ready to leave, Caryl.” For all his appearance, Alander sounded alert.

“Are you sure?”

Alander nodded. “The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

“Sounds like you’re having second thoughts.”

“Try third or fourth,” he quipped humorlessly. “I’m terrified, if that’s what you want to hear, Caryl.”

“If you’d told me you weren’t, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

He instructed the autopilot to resume its journey to the base of Tower Five. Nothing was said as the burn began, and silence reigned until the craft was cruising rapidly above Adrasteia’s swirling cloud layer.

“Answer me one question,” Hatzis asked him. “Where did you get the shuttle overrides from?”

Alander didn’t hesitate. “I’ve always known them.”

“Really? They’re supposed to be top secret.”

He smiled. “I can’t explain it. My original knew them, so I do, too. I never expected to need them, but they were there if I did.”

“What other overrides do you know, Peter?”

“I’d hate to say, really. You’ll just change them.”

“You’re damn right I would.”

“Why, Caryl? It’s not as if I’m going to use them to harm the mission. I haven’t so far; why should I now?”

“That’s a moot point, Peter. I’m still not happy about the way you’ve handled yourself in the last few hours. How do I know you won’t subvert my authority again next time we disagree on something?”

“You don’t,” he admitted. “But you must know that it would take more than a simple spat for me to use them. We’ve had plenty of those in recent weeks, and I’ve managed to avoid the temptation.”

True enough,
she thought, but she still didn’t like it.

Switching to a private channel, she sent a brief message to Sivio: “Still think I’m paranoid for worrying about a company spy?”

“Less so, now, I must admit.” His tone wasn’t entirely serious. “If Alander
is
the plant, though, they miscalculated rather badly.”

Hatzis thought back to the rumors she had heard during entrainment and preflight preparations: that on each of the missions, one crew member had been subtly altered in order to make them a dupe for UNESSPRO back home. Each plant had been preprogrammed to respond to certain stimuli in order to ensure that the missions ran the way the survey protocol demanded. But no one knew exactly what those stimuli might be, and no one could name who might be affected by the subconscious programming. Indeed, the most sinister rumor ran that a different crew member was chosen for each mission, so that if Peter Alander was the plant for the
Frank Tipler,
it might be Ali Genovese on the
Frank Drake
, or Caryl Hatzis on the
Andre Linde.
The plants themselves might not even know until the right circumstances occurred and the programming sprang into life.

The worst thing was that she could see how it made sense. There was no other way the UNESSPRO managers could oversee the program once the probes left. This was their only way to protect against such catastrophes as mutinies, she supposed.

But if Alander
was
the plant, why would he become active now? If anything, he was provoking dissent, not discouraging it.

Maybe the failure of his engram lay at the heart of that mystery. Or not. As he himself had said, there had been plenty of opportunities for him to defy her in the past. Maybe his original had earned the respect of the other generalists by being smart enough to steal the overrides from UNESSPRO’s programmers and not use them until he’d had no other choice.

Or perhaps he was right, and the Spinners were into everything. Maybe they had hacked directly into his mind and put the overrides there, along with the urge to use them, to go the tower. She was beyond being surprised by their actions, whoever they were. Although their adopted name suited them, given the manner in which they had appeared, spinning their threads like shining interstellar weevils, she couldn’t help but think of spiders instead: giant, malign intelligences drawing the human surveyors into a web they couldn’t even see.

1.1.7

“What are you thinking, Peter?”

Cleo Samson’s voice brought Alander out of his deep reflection.

“That it shouldn’t be me,” he said.

“Visiting the Spinners, you mean?”

“Yeah.” The shuttle was back on course, buffeting in the steadily worsening turbulence. “It should have been Lucia.”

There was a slight pause. He felt Samson’s illusory body shift next to his in the darkness. The sensation insinuated itself into his mind with such intimacy that for a moment he was uncertain what she was even doing there. Had they had sex, he plugged into conSense and she immersed in her virtual world, thousands of kilometers away? And if so, how had she convinced him to do that, with everyone watching?