Echogenesis

by Gary Gibson

  The old man regarded him with exasperation. ‘You hardly got to know them.’ He turned and started to walk away, then glanced back at Sam. ‘Well?’

  Fuck you, you psychotic son of a bitch, thought Sam, before hurrying to catch up with him. He had resumed walking again.

  ‘Whatever this is,’ Sam seethed from beside him, ‘it had better be worth it.’

  Amit picked up speed, lengthening his stride. ‘Believe me,’ he said with quiet assuredness, ‘it is.’

  26

  THE ORBITER

  As they walked, Sam took the opportunity to more closely study the man beside him. Long, hard years had carved deep grooves into the old man’s face: gone was the earnest, geeky individual Sam had got to know in the space of only a few days.

  This Amit, by contrast, truly seemed to be a part of Aranyani, hardy and capable of surviving in circumstances that few others might have endured for more than a few days or weeks. But perhaps it wasn’t so surprising: the other Amit had been tenacious, unswerving in his beliefs and unwilling to give up. He could see how one man could have become the other.

  They drank from the stream near where Piper had died, then continued. Sam wondered out loud at his ability to endure such hardship, even with a wounded shoulder. He’d walked and run further and longer than any time he could recall.

  ‘We were optimised,’ the old man explained bluntly. ‘They’d hardly program the mothership to adapt us to the environment without the option of a few additional tweaks.’

  ‘You think?’

  Old Amit glanced sideways at him. ‘We’re meant to build a colony on a hostile alien world,’ he said, before walking ahead of him with brisk efficiency. ‘Of course we have advantages.’

  * * *

  Amit led him south-east, still walking fast until they came to a wide, shallow river. Dark, sinuous shapes slid through its pale blue waters. Sam caught sight of the mesa in the distance, but the old man was leading him south of the mesa, rather than straight towards it.

  They paralleled the river until afternoon gave way to early evening. A familiar rumbling soon became evident, growing in volume even as the ground beneath their feet became more fractured and difficult to traverse. Sam’s feet had long since become badly blistered, then become agonising. The pain had faded somewhat now, which worried him more.

  At last, they came to the edge of a cliff, staring down at churning waters barely visible in misty granite depths. They were standing on the edge of the same gorge that had earlier blocked the truck’s route to the mesa, but several kilometres further south of where Sam had last been.

  The old man waved him on, and they kept moving south with the gorge to one side, the air becoming misty with vapour. Soon they came within sight of a vast cataract, its waters dropping into the darkness somewhere far beneath their feet. The din was enormous.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ the old man shouted through cupped hands, before hurrying ahead and almost vanishing into the mist.

  The ground dipped, and they picked their way down a steep slope. The roar of the waters faded, and then they arrived at a slope above a glade with a river running through it.

  The river, fed by the cataract, foamed white as it surged through the glade. At first, Sam thought his eyes deceived him: standing on the nearest shore, its legs half-sunk into the loam and its hull a shattered ruin, stood a third lander.

  * * *

  From what Sam could see, much of this third lander’s hull had either been dismantled or had simply collapsed inwards. He couldn’t even begin to guess at its age. Certainly far older than the one at which he had first encountered the old man.

  ‘There’s not far to go after this,’ said old Amit, his voice softer now. ‘And I know how tired you must be, but I wanted you to see the old girl. So you would understand.’

  Sam nodded, mute, and they made their way down into the glade. A tree, massive and ancient, grew out through a hole in this third lander’s upper hull. They picked their way past twisted roots and rocks until they came to the shore of the river. Sam dropped to his knees and drank until he felt fit to burst.

  ‘Start talking,’ Sam croaked, looking up at the old man. The water tasted like wine, but his throat rasped like thousand-year-old parchment.

  Amit nodded, then heaved his knapsack to the ground, followed by the rifle and crossbow. Then he knelt by Sam and took his fill of water.

  ‘That mothership up there above us is smart,’ he said when he had finished. ‘Maybe even very smart. But not conscious—not in the way you and I are. It’s still only a machine. The first thing it did when it arrived in this star system was to attach itself to the right kind of asteroid—a carbonaceous chondrite, suitable for raw material.’

  ‘Amit—the other Amit, I mean—said there might be thousands of colonists waiting to be born up there.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, they’re meant to be born down here. Our job as the advance crew was to establish a secure settlement for a new generation of colonists to be brought to term in the same way we were, all of them carrying the memories of people who’d been dead for centuries.’

  Amit heaved a sigh. ‘Except that’s not what happened. Instead, every single expedition that found its way to the surface got wiped out by indigenes within days. And because the crew of each expedition had lost all memory of why they had come here, they could never figure out how to contact the mothership in time to halt the cycle. And then they wound up dead.’ He raised his eyebrows at Sam. ‘So when each of those crews failed to contact it, what do you think that stupid-smart machine up there in orbit did that its creators couldn’t possibly have anticipated?’

  Sam swallowed, a hard lump in his throat. ‘It started again?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the old man, bitterness creeping into his voice. ‘It started again. And it keeps repeating the process again and again and again, like the inflexible, stupid-smart fucking bag of nuts and bolts it is. And if any of the previous expeditions had figured out a way to get the damn mothership to respond, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.’

  ‘You’re telling me that thing up there keeps firing out copies of us, because nobody can figure out how to talk to it?’

  ‘Obviously,’ Amit said dryly, ‘that wasn’t the mission’s original strategy.’

  ‘How the fuck would you know? You lost decades of memories—we all did!’

  A sudden thought struck Sam, an idea so terrible in its plausibility that all of his strength fled him and he sprawled in the grassy mud.

  ‘Amit—the way you talk, you make it sound like there were a lot more than just the three expeditions.’

  ‘There were, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘As far as I’ve been able to figure out,’ said the old man, ‘your expedition is the twelfth.’

  Bile rose up the back of Sam’s throat. ‘You can’t—I mean, it’s not possible. I—’ he stopped abruptly, aware he was babbling.

  ‘Mine was the eleventh expedition. The other landers are scattered over an area a couple of thousand kilometres across.’ The old man crouched down until his face was level with Sam’s. ‘Now what do you think you’d have said if I’d told you all of this, back when I first found you?’

  ‘I’d have said you were a crazy old fuck who’d been lost in the jungle too many years,’ Sam mumbled.

  ‘The next question you’re going to ask is how long all this has been going on. Well, the indigenes slaughtered the rest of my expedition almost exactly fifty years ago. Half a century, Sam. Five whole decades I had to wait before your lander finally came streaking across the sky.’

  He shook his head like his own words amazed him.

  Got to keep a grip, thought Sam: he stared at the ruined, half-collapsed lander, already en route to merging with the rock and loam of the glade. It was almost too much to take in, the thought of God knew how many other Sam Newman’s waking up and being torn to shreds without ever discovering why…

&nb
sp; A sudden pain gripped his belly, and he pressed one hand to it.

  The old man stepped up beside him and placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. ‘We need to get to safety. We’re going to have to backtrack a little, but it was worth it to show this to you. You’ll be able to eat and drink and get some rest—enhanced or not, we all have our limits.’

  ‘And then what?’ Sam demanded. ‘The whole thing happens again in another fifty years?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the old man, helping him stand again. ‘Unless we can break the cycle of birth and rebirth.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There’s a way. But I need your help to do it.’

  Sam stared at him. ‘My help?’

  The old man nodded towards the mesa. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

  Somehow, Sam wasn’t at all surprised. ‘So there is a way up there.’

  ‘There is, but only I know it. Once we get there, I’ll show you exactly what it is I’ve been working on all these years.’

  ‘Traynor and his cronies might still be somewhere out there,’ Sam reminded him.

  ‘Even if some of them survived last night,’ the old man reassured him, ‘I’m quite certain the indigenes will finish them off by nightfall. Now come on,’ he said, picking up his knapsack, ‘one more stretch and we’re home.’

  * * *

  They retraced their steps north until the gorge became increasingly narrow, shrinking to a width of a few metres and funnelling the river to yet greater speeds as it rushed south toward the great cataract. The sheer wall of the mesa rose high above them, so close Sam felt he could almost reach out across the gorge and touch it. Through the mist, he saw a flat metal panel supported by a hinge on its lower end, standing upright against the side of the mesa directly opposite them.

  ‘What is that?’ Sam yelled over the noise.

  Amit looked up from where he’d been rummaging around inside his knapsack. ‘A drawbridge,’ he shouted back, then grinned. ‘Suppose that makes me king of the castle, eh?’

  The old man withdrew a handheld device from the knapsack and pointed it at the metal panel. Sam heard a metallic clunk, and the drawbridge, rattling and squealing, lowered towards them before landing at their feet with a dull thump. Beyond lay the mouth of a dark cave.

  On closer inspection, Sam realised the drawbridge had originally been the ramp from a lander.

  ‘Now let’s get inside,’ said the old man, waving him forward.

  * * *

  As soon as Sam stepped off the drawbridge and inside the cave, the sound of the river became muffled. The old man touched something on the wall of the cave and electric lights flickered into life, the drawbridge raising itself back up with a squeal of unoiled metal.

  He looked around. The chassis of a truck stripped of its engine and most of its seats stood parked nearby.

  ‘Been meaning to repair that for a while,’ said the old man, nodding towards it. ‘I needed the parts for something much more important, however.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  Amit directed his attention to the rear of the cave. Sam saw the mouth of a tunnel. Unlike the cave, its walls and floor were too smooth to be natural. It rose upwards at a steep incline, lit throughout its length by more electric lights.

  ‘All this,’ Amit explained, ‘was built by the first expedition.’ He nodded towards the tunnel. ‘I’ll show you the rest.’

  He led the way, Sam following. The tunnel was long, perhaps thirty or forty metres. When they finally emerged on top of the mesa, Sam saw the sky had darkened sufficiently for the first stars to reveal themselves.

  They were surrounded by more forest. When Sam looked around, he saw where the trees came to an abrupt end, marking the edge of the mesa. The river was barely audible, far below.

  The old man led him along a path worn into the not-grass, headed for the centre of the mesa. Sam noted patches of cultivated land here and there between the trees.

  The path soon intersected with a second, lined with stones. They followed this second path to a small clearing, at the centre of which stood some manner of spacecraft, albeit one that was tiny compared to the landers.

  In profile, the craft resembled a cargo launcher—an upright pillar of burnished metal standing upon four fragile-looking legs, with an exhaust nozzle on its underside. The ground beneath the nozzle was blackened, while something that might have been a crew capsule was mounted on its nose.

  Might have been, because the craft had a ramshackle look about it as if it had been assembled from a collection of random and mismatched parts taken from other craft. And the more he looked at it, the more Sam suspected that was exactly what it was.

  ‘My orbiter,’ the old man explained with pride. ‘Big and powerful enough to carry one man back up to the mothership and dock with it. Eventually, anyway.’

  Sam stared at him. ‘So you haven’t flown it?’

  ‘For reasons I’ll explain, no. But I have tested it. It’ll fly, I know that much.’ He turned to look at Sam. ‘Did your Amit ever tell you about the Starship Initiative?’

  ‘He said he—I mean, you—helped run it. He made it sound like you were pretty central to the entire project.’

  ‘In fairness, I was, and having a senior role gave me certain access privileges with the computer systems inside the landers. I’ve been using them to communicate with the mothership for some years now.’

  Sam stared at him, astonished. ‘But…I thought the whole reason we were in this mess was that we couldn’t communicate with it!’

  ‘It took me years before I got a response,’ Amit explained. ‘Nobody else could, because in most cases they barely had a week to figure out what had gone wrong before the indigenes slaughtered them all.’

  ‘In that case,’ asked Sam, ‘why not simply tell the mothership to stop sending people down?’

  Something shifted behind the old man’s eyes. ‘Because somebody reprogrammed it to keep me from accessing certain of its primary systems. I can talk to it all I like, but without access to those systems, I can’t change a thing.’

  Sam shook his head, almost too weary to take more in. He remembered the other Amit had wondered the same thing when he couldn’t access some of their own lander’s systems. ‘Who reprogrammed it?’

  ‘Well, that’s another question—one we’ll get to in a little while.’ The old man turned away from the orbiter and nodded towards a second stone-lined path leading deeper into the heart of the mesa. ‘Come on, and I’ll show you the centre of operations. Then we can have something to eat and drink and talk about all the rest of it.’

  Thick cables ran along the ground from the underside of the orbiter and along the second stone-lined path. They followed the cables to a cluster of prefabricated structures, all arranged in a circle on a patch of cleared ground. The cables terminated at a portable Tokamak generator set in the middle of the buildings; more cables trailed from the generator and inside a few of the prefabs.

  Amit led Sam inside a shed-like building filled with screens that he guessed had been scavenged from the flight deck of a lander. Sam sank onto a low couch built from dried branches and webbing, his feet feeling like they were made of concrete.

  Amit was saying something, but he couldn’t take in the words. His eyelids became impossibly heavy and without really meaning to, he sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  27

  THE MESA

  He woke much later to darkness.

  Sam sat up, breathing hard and feeling momentarily disoriented. He looked around, seeing dimmed screens. His head felt heavy and thick, like it had been stuffed with mud and branches, but he forced himself to get up out of the couch despite the protest of overworked muscles.

  Amit had left a jug of water on a table next to the door. Sam drank it all down in one long swallow, washing the dust out of his mouth, then shuffled towards the nearest screen. It came to life as he approached it, showing him a view of the orbiter in half-silhouette beneath starlight.

&nbs
p; Another screen mounted on a rickety wooden shelf showed a view of the circle of buildings, while a third screen showed a view angled down the side of the mesa; he could just make out the edge of the raised drawbridge, far below. A fourth screen remained blank. The old man had turned the building into the equivalent of a command deck.

  Sam caught sight of movement on the first screen. Stepping closer, he watched as the old man climbed a ladder mounted on the side of the orbiter’s hull. Stopping just short of the crew capsule, he flipped open a panel and reached inside, making adjustments. Routine maintenance work, Sam presumed.

  Next Sam turned to the fourth, still dark screen. It came to life when he touched a keyboard mounted beneath it, displaying a list of numbered options. He went through the list, one by one, finding that each option displayed a different view of yet other parts of the mesa.

  The last one of all showed him the one thing he’d been afraid he would find: a view of his own lander, as seen from the camera Jess had discovered at the edge of the clearing, and which Kevin had put back where they had found it.

  * * *

  Sam found his way through the forest to the orbiter and saw the old man making his way down the ladder bolted to the side of the craft.

  ‘Ah,’ said the old man, coming towards him. ‘You’re awake at last. I was wondering if you ever would.’

  ‘How long was I out?’

  ‘The best part of twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Jesus…’ Sam pushed his hand through his hair and looked up at the night sky. He’d made the mistake of thinking it was still the previous day. ‘That long?’

  Amit nodded at Sam’s shoulder. ‘If you don’t mind, I redressed that wound of yours. You managed to sleep through that as well.’

  He took a step past Sam, gesturing to him to follow. ‘You need to eat—you look about ready to collapse as it is. God knows all that running around took a lot out of me.’

  This time, Sam followed him to another building, which turned out to be a combination storeroom and kitchen. Amit retrieved a bowl of typically weird-looking Aranyanian roots and leaves from a refrigerator and placed it on a table with a single chair next to it. He gestured again to Sam, and Sam sat and watched as the old man fetched a second chair from the corner before sitting across from him.