Echoes of Earth (8 page)

But a second later the fear passed. There was no way, he realized, that he would have agreed to it, although it might have explained his state of mind.

“It should have been Lucia,” he repeated solemnly. “Not me.”

“Why?”

“Because she was trained for this sort of thing. She’s used to working alone. And she’s willing to take risks I would judge unreasonable. She’s...” It was his turn to pause. “She’s a survivor, I guess.”

“Even risk-takers fail eventually, Peter.”

“What are you trying to say, Cleo?” he said irritably. “And what the hell are you
doing
here, anyway? Trying to lift my morale? Because if you are, you’re doing a piss-poor job of it, I can tell you.”

“I just don’t think you should feel guilty about her, that’s all.”

“I
don’t
feel guilty, Cleo.”

“I think you do, Peter.”

“That’s crap. Why should I? It wasn’t my decision. It was up to the assignment board.”

“But you recommended her.”

“So did you. We all did.”

“But only you were sleeping with her.”

“That’s irrelevant!”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “Your emotions precluded you from being able to look at her objectively, as the rest of us were able to do. It
was
the right decision, Peter. Your personal attachment just doesn’t allow you to see that right now.”

“I know it was the right decision, Cleo.” His tone started angry but was quickly tempered by the realization that what she was saying was true. “I just miss her sometimes, you know? She... Lucia...” The image of her was clear in his artificial recollection; he felt as though he could touch her if he reached out a hand. And with the right cross-matching of memory and sensory input, he was sure that he
could
have touched her—in the false world of conSense. “Lucia loved the unknown and the unpredictable. To deny her that would have been wrong. Not that I could have talked her out of it even had I tried. She was too strong willed. And that’s why I wish she was here now. She’d do a good job, I know, whereas I—”

He shut his mouth on words he didn’t want to say aloud. Thinking them was bad enough.

I’m probably going to fuck it up.

That’s what Caryl Hatzis was thinking, he was sure. And who was he to argue with her? The bath debacle was just the recent in a string of blunders, each worse than the last. Maybe he did have a death wish, deep down.

“You might not know this, but I envied Lucia.” Cleo’s normally rough alto was soft. “Not just over you, but her brief, too. I realized it was dangerous and could even turn out to be deadly boring, but at least she had a chance to find something of her own. Not as a faceless chemist in a group of other faceless technicians. Everything she discovered would be unique to her. No one else would share that experience. Something like that is priceless. I’ve come to appreciate that after so long among our collective.”

Alander listened to Samson, startled by her words. He had imagined Lucia’s journey that way himself: a mind in a box riding the torch of an interstellar drive, little more than sensors and shielding and a large amount of antimatter called
Chung-2.
Most of the minor stars between Sol and Upsilon Aquarius had been hers to fly by, slowing fractionally enough to take pictures but never stopping. What would she see? What strange sights would be hers and hers alone to enjoy?

He had thought of it that way but had never spoken to Cleo Samson about it. Why would he? He had never known that she envied Lucia the mission. He had never really considered that someone other than he might grieve for what Lucia’s failure amounted to: not just a hitch in the overall survey plan, but the failure of a dream.

Chung-2
should’ve been waiting for them at Adrasteia, chock-full of data. It hadn’t been there, and they had neither seen it nor received a signal from it in the year they had waited. Officially, she was assumed dead and her mission a failure, knocked out perhaps by a stray particle in interstellar space or maybe something more substantial closer to one of her targets. Either way, if she had seen anything new, it was lost with her.

And she was lost to him. That was what had obsessed his thoughts upon arriving at Upsilon Aquarius. That, and losing his mind.

“Do you still envy her?” he asked Samson.

She laughed lightly. “Do I envy being dead? No. And I don’t envy being considered expendable by UNESSPRO, which must have been a factor in their decision. The
Tipler
functions perfectly well without her, even if she is missed.”

He nodded. As much he hated to admit it, that was probably true. She was like he had been, spread thin across a large number of disciplines with little depth in any. The perfect person to send alone into the void, to face whatever the universe felt like throwing at her.

He wondered how many of her other engrams had also failed in their missions, just as he had wondered how many of
his
had suffered breakdowns similar to his own. Perhaps they were doomed to miss each other wherever they went, jinxed by the send-off their originals had given them back on Earth.

His train of thought was broken as the shuttle banked steeply and began to descend.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” said Caryl Hatzis over the open line.

“I know that,” he replied. “But I’m not going to.” I’m doing this because I want to, not just because I have to. If I can’t be myself any longer, maybe I can try being someone else for a change.

ConSense maintained the illusion that Samson was squashed in the cargo hold with him as the shuttle shuddered down toward the ground. Her body bounced with his, one hand on his forearm as if for support. He knew better than to try to hold onto her, however; the moment he tried—and failed, since she wasn’t really there—he would lose all pretense of balance. He didn’t know if his new body could suffer from motion sickness, but it wasn’t something he particularly wanted to find out at this stage.

Sitting silently in the darkness, he rode the silent descent out as patiently as he could. At that point in time, he was little more than freight; if something disastrous happened to the shuttle, he figured he’d be better off not knowing, because there was little he could do to avoid it. Right now his fate lay in the hands of the autopilot and, possibly, whoever was responsible for the towers. If they had wanted him to come in the first place, then it was likely they would want to ensure his safe passage also. And he had no doubt they would have the technology to be able to do just that.

Interesting, he suddenly thought, how we put faith in the unknown when our lives are most at risk

When the faint whine of the shuttle’s engines peaked in volume and the descent slowed to a halt, he felt almost disappointed. The moment of truth had come.

He sat up. “We’re down?”

“Yes.” The autopilot was brisk and to the point, as ever.

“What are conditions like outside?”

“I am displaying atmospheric data—”

“Just tell me.”

“Ambient temperature is 180 Adjusted Planck degrees Kelvin. Wind speed is atypically high for the equator as a result of atmospheric disturbances to the east. There is a significant amount of suspended particulate debris still circulating—”

“You mean dust?”

“—from the building of the artifact in our vicinity. Yes, I mean dust.”

“Great.” He pulled the hood of his environment suit up over his head and sealed it at his throat, not just against the dust. One hundred and eighty K was warmer than he had expected but still below freezing. “What’s the approximate time out there?”

“Immediately prior to sunrise.”

He took a deep breath, making sure the filters on his suit were passing air. In a better life, he could have used conSense to “erase” the mask in front of his eyes, but as it was, he had to make do with it there, uncomfortably tight and imperfectly transparent.

His stomach churned. His nervousness must have shown, for he felt Samson’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing again. That was as good a reason as any to get moving.

“Open the door,” he said.

The cargo hatch hissed open, letting in an icy gust of dusty air. “Immediately prior to sunrise” on Adrasteia meant that it was still as black as night. Dawn brought only a vague brightening of the clouds to the east, rarely visible from Alander’s camp in the canyon. From where the shuttle had landed, however, he expected to see clearly in most directions, as the orbital tower had anchored itself into level high ground.

When he stepped outside, he was greeted by a severely limited view. The shuttle’s landing lights shone fitfully through the dust-laden air at what looked like the base of a giant tree. Curved, irregularly spaced “roots” spread out and down from a tapering “trunk” that vanished up into the darkness. Both the roots and trunk were made of a glistening, black substance. The stony soil around the structure had been violently disturbed in recent times but showed no present sign of activity.

Alander took a dozen or so steps closer. This, he assumed, was the base of the orbital tower, although it looked nothing like he had imagined. It looked grown, not designed. There was no sign as yet of the object he had seen descend from orbit.

“Don’t go too close, Peter.” Samson’s voice from behind him brought him to a halt.

“I wasn’t going to.”

She walked forward to join him, dressed in a suit identical to his and similarly fastened against the dust. He smiled at that: She was going to some lengths, against form, to preserve the illusion that she was really there with him. Whether that was to discourage him from banishing her or to preserve his mental stability, he wasn’t sure.

“Biotech,” asked Sivio from orbit, “or nanotech swarm?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, we would use swarms to build something like this, since we tend not to think of biology as a suitable tool for mega-engineering. But I think we should be careful not to impose our preconceptions on the Spinners. Biotech could theoretically build something like this—”

“Yeah,” put in Samson, “if your version of biology involved diamond strand fibers and buckyball cells.”

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”

“If they’ve evolved to eat this stuff, I don’t want to get any closer to their teeth.”

“
You
don’t have to,” said Alander. “Where do I go now, Jayme? Has that thing moved?”

“It’s on the far side,” Sivio explained. “The shuttle scanned it before landing, and it does indeed look like some sort of climbing device, although it hasn’t moved an inch. Check it out when you’re ready.”

Alander turned to his left and began walking around the trunk of the orbital tower. The base was easily thirty meters across, allowing for stray roots and the structure’s odd asymmetry. He kept looking upward to see the tower itself, but it was still too dark to see very far. It was hard to imagine that he was standing next to something that stretched all the way up to geostationary orbit, over twelve thousand kilometers up. The two orbital towers humanity had built on Earth to facilitate UNESSPRO stretched twice as high but had taken years to build. The thought that this tower had descended from the sky literally overnight made his skin crawl.

This feeling was only enhanced as the “climbing device” came into view in stages. The first was a high, rounded hump not dissimilar to a snail’s shell, but ribbed, black, and peaked along its extensive axis. This split down its flanks, like a hand did into fingers, to leave wide strips of plating around a number of openings, from which issued a multitude of close-packed, insectile legs. The more Alander looked at it, the more it resembled a wingless fly, albeit one thousands of times larger and strangely squashed, as though its backside had been moved toward its nose and its upper carapace had cracked and risen to accommodate the change.

At the front, instead of a head, was an opening wide enough for a person to step into. Alander couldn’t see what lay inside and was in no great hurry to find out.

“You realize you’re going to have to get in that thing, don’t you?” said Hatzis from orbit.

Attempting humor to cover his fear and uncertainty, he said: “I was expecting something more sophisticated. This is just a big bug.”

“Are you still okay with this, Peter?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. “It just looks as if it’s going to eat me, that’s all.”

He resigned himself to the inevitable and moved closer.

Samson followed as he stooped slightly to enter the bug. The inside was made of a similar dark material to the outside, but there were no controls or windows of any kind to be seen. It was cramped, too, but not as close as the shuttle’s cargo hold had been.

He sat down in one of the two crudely fashioned seats to the rear of the cabin; Samson settled next to him with a quizzical look.

“It’s almost as if they knew there would be two of us,” she said.

Alander nodded, even though there weren’t two of them at all. The notion had already occurred to him, and he wondered just how far the Spinners were prepared to go to reassure him.

“What happens n—uh!” The ground suddenly moved out from underneath them as the bug’s legs stirred into life. The “mouth” closed in front of them, and Alander fell heavily back into his seat as its orientation suddenly changed.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Sivio answered, “You’re climbing up the base and onto the tower itself.” Alander reluctantly allowed an image: of the bug rocking and swaying up the roots, the tips of its many legs sticking to the resinlike material with the ease of magnets to iron. They weren’t using pincers, grippers, or even suction pads. How it stayed on he couldn’t tell.

It all became much worse when the bug acquired the tower proper. At an angle of ninety degrees to the ground, he sank deeper into the seat as the bug put on a sudden burst of acceleration. He didn’t want to look at the image to see how fast the climber was going or how high he was getting, so he switched off the conSense feed. It was bad enough that he could imagine it. He felt like Jack ascending the mighty beanstalk, oblivious to what perils awaited him at the top.

Avoiding the image wasn’t as simple as just turning off conSense, however. Twenty-five seconds into their journey, the carapace of the bug suddenly turned transparent. Not perfectly see-through—he could see mysterious rods and planes shifting between the walls of his chamber and the outer skin—but clear enough to take in the view.