Orphans of Earth (45 page)

3.0.2
Lucia Benck

2160.9.20 Standard Mission Time

(21 August, 2163 UT)

She had been dreaming. At least she thought she had.
It
was hard to say for sure. At the moment she didn’t know where she was or how she had even come to be there, so who was to say that
this
wasn’t the dream?

She remembered trying to recall something. Something had been missing. Some data? A memory, perhaps? Whatever it was, it had been troubling her for a long time. Something to do with Peter, maybe? A picture of the two of them, which she had misplaced?

She silently scolded herself, wanting to shake the idiotic thought from her head. But she didn’t have a head with which to do this. Nor a body, for that matter. She extended to all directions in a new and strange environment. Whatever it was that held her, it certainly wasn’t the
Chung-5.
It seemed to be a ship, albeit of a sort she hadn’t even imagined before. It was constructed from principles she could barely begin to grasp, and the external structure appeared to have been recently modified, complicating the picture even further. She knew that there was another mind inside with her, coiled up among the strange pathways like a hibernating snake. Presumably the ship’s mind, it ticked slowly over, maintaining esoteric processes she had no hope of understanding. The mind didn’t object to her presence; she sensed that clearly. It gave her free rein to explore and experiment. Perhaps one day, she thought, given the chance, she could learn to fly the ship herself. For now, though, she just wanted to look.

With a simple effort of will, she utilized all of the ship’s scanning equipment to see around her. Outside was a system in ruins, littered with radioactive dust and the residue of what must have once been ships like hers. A desert world sported several new craters beneath a haze of hot dust. The system’s blinding white sun left nothing to the imagination. A war had been fought here. And someone had lost.

As she pondered who it might have been, a white dot disturbed the battlefield. A voice reached out to her.

“
Pearl?
Can you hear me?”

The voice prompted movement within her. Startled, she turned her attention back inside and realized only then that she had missed something absolutely fundamental about the ship’s design. It had no heart, but it wrapped around itself in such a way as to leave a space. And inside that space, there was a person sitting on a narrow couch, staring at a display screen. She could see this person from various povs around the cockpit and even from the inside, and she soon realized that her first thought was wrong. This was no person, except in the broadest possible sense. With its unnaturally large build and its olive-green skin, the body was an android, not naturally born.

“Sol?” said the android, standing. It seemed oblivious to her presence. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. What are you doing here? We thought we’d lost you!”

The voice from outside spoke in reply to the android. She sensed the messages rushing along channels all around her, from the white speck to the chamber within and back again.

“Sol, I’m sorry. I was trying to...” The android stopped and shook its head. Its cheeks were wet. “I—I thought you were dead.”

“Not quite. I wasn’t here when the Starfish came. Gou Mang managed to get about half of the people away in time before they wiped her out with the base. We lost Rama, Hammon, Inari, and Hera as well, and we’re pulling out of everywhere else just in case. I only came back to see if anyone else had turned up; otherwise, you would’ve missed us completely.”

The names were unfamiliar to her, but the voice from outside rang a faint bell. Something about the android looked familiar, too, in a blunt sort of way—although therein lay a paradox: both reminded her of the same person.

“But how did it happen? I thought we were safe here.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve been in transit. It was a long trip.”

“Shit, Thor. So much has changed! We’re based in iota Boötis now, an empty, binary system where no one will think of looking for us. It’s a good place to retool and rethink, for us as well as the Yuhl. The Fit think we’re lunatics, but the Praxis is on our side. It’s listening to reason, and that’s the main thing.”

Swinging her pov to a lower angle, she saw the android frown. Thor seemed to understand what Sol was saying about as much as she did. And there was clearly a lot going unsaid, too.

“We were fighting them, the last I heard.”

“Now we’re either fighting with them or running with them.” Sol paused for a second. “It’s complicated. We’re still trying to work out who’s with who, and who’s making the decisions.”

“Not Axford, I hope.”

“Definitely not. Or Peter.”

The name grabbed her attention immediately. She felt a thrill start somewhere around her and work its way through all sections of her new, extended self. Peter was alive! Suddenly she didn’t want to be a passive observer anymore. She wanted to become active in the conversation, take control of it, guide it to where she wanted it to go.

“Peter is alive?” she said, closing off the incoming message and taking over the communication channels it had used.

The android looked around, bewildered. “Lucia? Is that you?”

Lucia.
Yes, that was her name.
Lucia Benck.
How long had it been since she had even thought of herself as that? So long that she’d almost forgotten it.

“You mentioned Peter,” she said.

The android’s eyes moved about the room, its green-hued face creased with perplexity. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I remember dreaming; I remember being scared. I forgot something, and then...”

Then there had been a strange white orb hanging off her stern, twice the length of the
Chung-5
in radius—the same sort of craft, she now realized that Sol was talking from. (Lucia had suppressed the transmission so the android couldn’t hear her. She wanted Thor all to herself for the moment.) Images recorded by her ailing sensors revealed that it had literally appeared out of nowhere. Her processing speed accelerated from glacial slowness to the highest her Overseer could manage as another sphere emerged from the first one’s side: black, orbiting like a miniature moon. This second sphere slowed to a halt so it seemed to point at
Chung-5.
Then a voice had spoken to her in English.

“You were experiencing brainlock when I found you,” the android was saying, back in the present. “You would have experienced smaller events leading up to it: déjà vu, dissociation from your senses, things like that—all symptoms of engram senescence.
Chung-5
wasn’t faring much better. I uploaded you to my hole ship, the only place I had to put you, but I wasn’t sure it would work. I’m sorry if this is confusing for you—”

“I feel different,” Lucia said. “I’m part this ship, now. This
Pearl.
It makes me feel good, knowing that I can do so many things.”

“You feel that?” Something approximating disbelief glinted momentarily in the android’s eyes. “You’re part of the workings of
Pearl
?”

“I think so,” Lucia said. “Most of it, anyway. Why should that surprise you? You put me in here.”

“Yes, but I didn’t expect that to happen. I don’t think anyone’s tried to do this before. Can I talk to—?”

“Caryl,” Lucia interrupted, having reasoned with a fair degree of confidence that this was indeed the android’s name (even though that meant that Sol had to be another Hatzis, judging by the increasingly frustrated voice match). “You mentioned Peter. Where is he?”

Android Hatzis stopped, frowned. “He’d be in iota Boötis now, I guess. That’s where Sol said the others were. But you should know that he’s not the Alander from your mission. He comes from Mission 842, the one to Upsilon Aquarius. He’s changed since you knew him.”

Lucia stopped listening. It didn’t matter to her which one he was. It just mattered that he was Peter.

“I want to go there,” she said.

“Yes, we will, but—”

“I want to go there now.”

“What’s the hurry, Lucia? We only just got
here
.”

“Where is here?”

“Sirius.”

“
Sirius?
But that’s...”

Her mind tripped over the absurdity of android Hatzis’s statement and simultaneously accepted it without question. While she couldn’t remember anything between blacking out in
Chung-5
and waking up in
Pearl,
she did have a sense of crossing an enormous gulf of space. She also had a feeling that time had passed, more time than could be accounted for by all the days and years she had been awake.

“What year is it, Caryl?”

“Twenty-one sixty, Mission Time.”

She wanted to shout,
Impossible!
That made her 130 years old! But she was beginning to understand that she was very much out of her depth. For all the capacity of her new home—and her sudden age—she was like a newborn blinking to focus on a very puzzling world.

What’s happened to us all?
she wanted to ask. It would have been the beginning of a torrent of questions:
What are we doing in Sirius? Why did you come find me? Who is Axford, and why are we fighting? What are the Starfish and the Yuhl and the Praxis? How had Peter been changed?

What came out, though, was, “Why did you bring me back?” The plaintive tone to her voice surprised even her.

Android Hatzis looked regretful. “We needed to know what’s going on in pi-1 Ursa Major, and you were the closest person to it. I was hoping you might have seen something recently, but your memories were scrambled. I had no idea you’d be in such shape, and even when I did know, I couldn’t very well leave you there. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing.”

The wrong thing? Lucia wasn’t sure. The mention of pi-1 UMA did trigger an unexpected series of memories: a sunset; the name Jian Lao; the pressure of Peter’s hand in hers; a strong pang of sadness. Was this what she had been trying to remember—or trying to forget?

Then another memory came. There had been photographs. The probe had absorbed them decades ago. The evidence was gone, except for her.

“There
was
something odd about pi-1 Ursa Major,” she said. “It destroyed the
Linde.
It might have killed me, too, but I hid. It couldn’t find me.”

“It came after you, you mean?”

“No, when I flew through the system.”

“But that was over forty years ago, Lucia. That can’t be right.”

She felt again the terrible gulf of time and space that she had crossed. Forty years since the
Linde
had died, since she had switched herself off to survive the flyby? It felt like hours. An eternity of seconds.

“I want know what’s going on, Caryl,” she told the android.

The android laughed low and uneasily. “To be honest, I feel the same way.”

“I want you to explain it to me.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

“And when you’re finished, we’ll go to iota Boötis.”

There was a silence filled only by the persistent calling of Sol-Hatzis. (“For fuck’s sake, Thor. Answer me!”) Lucia switched off the part of
Pearl
that persisted in listening.

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” the android asked, as though projecting her own uncertainty.

“Yes. I want to see Peter. I want to tell him...” She stopped, not sure
what
she wanted to say to her old lover, so many years after they had parted. Her thoughts moved in strange ways through the conduits of the ship, complicating every emotion. “I want to tell him that the tourist has come home,” she finished after a moment.

And that she has changed.