But only when the results from all the survey ships arrived at Earth would enough evidence exist to judge conclusively. The Tipler’s data was barely on its way, having been sent five months ago, six months after their arrival. He—Peter Alander’s flawed copy—hadn’t been around to witness the discovery of the cyanobacteria; not in real time, anyway. He had been going mad in slow-mo, savoring each second of rational consciousness for far more important things, like staying alive and trying to work out what had gone wrong.
He shifted uneasily in the bath, lifting his chin to breathe through the steam. There was something niggling at the back of his mind, but his thoughts were directed so far inward that he didn’t consciously acknowledge it. How long he had been lying there, he didn’t know. It was silent and peaceful; finally, he felt warm throughout—physically satisfied, if not mentally at ease. He was used to feeling out of sorts; that, after all, defined his situation.
If not for us...?
The memory beat at him like a stick, relentless and painful but brittle itself, as though it could snap at any moment He was as afraid of losing it as he was of trying to own it. If he wasn’t the person in that memory, then who was he? What right did he have to the name Peter Alander? What right did he have to exist at all? Sometimes he felt like the original Alander’s hypothetical protointelligence, struggling out of the slime and just beginning to grasp consciousness when the sad news came: Sorry, you’ve been beaten to it. There’s nothing here for you. Go back where you came from, and you’ll never know the difference.
But he couldn’t go back, and he wasn’t going to lie down and let the problem beat him, either. He was going to survive. If he wasn’t Peter Alander, then he would work out who he actually was and be that person. He was sure Lucia would have understood, wherever she was.
He ducked his chin under the undulating meniscus of water, intending to submerge himself completely.
It was only then that he consciously noted the smell of burning and realized that the trickling of water had ceased long ago.
1.12
Caryl Hatzis closed the line to Cleo Samson with a sense of reluctant resignation. Reluctant because she didn’t like indulging anyone when resources were so tight, but resigned because she knew there was no point feeling any other way. Alander was a problem she had failed to deal with her way; she would therefore give him the concessions the others requested in case their method worked. If it did, she would acknowledge the small defeat and move on. And if it didn’t... well, she would have his new balls and be done with it. She was tired of wasting her time—and his—on looking for a cure that might not exist. If only someone on Earth—
No.
She cut off the thought with a bitter effort of will. She understood herself well enough to know where it would end up. Maybe UNESSPRO had solved all the engram-related problems since they’d left; maybe Alander could be healed by a simple software patch; maybe there was nothing wrong with him that time alone wouldn’t heal. Whatever; a call for help would take a century to arrive, and a reply would take another century to return. The fact that nothing had come from Earth for more than a century suggested that no one would be listening anyway.
They were on their own. Either Alander would have to sort himself out, or he would be frozen and the drone he inhabited returned to normal service. She sometimes wondered if the latter would be for the best in the long run, although she had to admit that initially, the effect on morale would be severe. Some of the crew actually seemed to care what happened to poor old Peter Alander—flawed and fragile, and no use to anyone except as grunt labor. What would his original have thought? What about the program supervisors?
You fuckers, she cursed her long-distant superiors. I’m not an AI psychologist; 1 was never trained to deal with something like this.
As she watched Alander’s bath slowly fill, she wondered what Cleo Samson’s role in all this was. It was an open secret that she had been jealous of Alander and Benck back in entrainment; her engrain had presumably retained that emotion. So, was she looking out for someone she cared about or on the make? Hatzis would be damned if she’d give anyone access to another body, no matter how therapeutic it might be for Alander. She felt like Frankenstein enough as it was without giving the monster a bride.
And if Cleo Samson really did care so much, why was she reporting his latest outrage to the one person least likely to tolerate it?
“We have another glitch.” The voice of Jayme Sivio came from behind her on the bridge. Although the direction did not exist, since the space they called “the bridge” was purely virtual, she turned automatically to face him. The survey manager (military) of the Frank Tipler, a lanky fair man in his early forties, stood with his hands folded in front of him in an unselfconscious, at-ease stance.
“Where this time?”
He patched her into the data, surrounding her in multicolored vector diagrams. “Above the ecliptic. Here.” He indicated a point several AUs farther out than Adrasteia. A pulsing golden light hovered in empty space, a long way from anywhere. “The same spectra as the first one, but more than twice as bright”
“Do we have anything out that way?”
He shook his head. “The signal is being picked up by the solar north array. The nearest thing to it is... well, us.” He shrugged lightly. “Do you want to dispatch a probe?”
She thought about it. They had wasted a probe on the first one: the glitch had shone for less than a day, whereas the probe had taken a week to arrive. It had found no solid bodies, no dusty remnants, no ashes—nothing at all.
“It’s not pumping out anything hard?” she asked, confirming the details he had already implied.
“Nothing that could harm us.”
“And it’s not moving?”
“Not rapidly. We haven’t enough data to work out its precise trajectory.” Another shrug. “Otto and Nalini are looking at it pretty closely, just like they looked at the last one. But they’re drawing a blank.”
“I presume it’s natural.”
“As opposed to...?”
She scowled at him. “You know what I mean.”
His smile rebuked her. “If I thought it was artificial, I’d tell you.”
“Okay then, do you think it isn’t artificial?”
“That’s a completely different question.”
And you didn’t answer it, Hatzis thought to herself.
“What else have we got?” she said.
“We’ve been watching it for an hour, now,” Sivio obliged. “The pulsing is regular, but not regular enough to be suspicious. If our detectors were any less sharp, we’d probably mistake it for a pulsar, if we saw it at all.”
“Maybe it’s a piece of antimatter,” she mused. “An antimatter meteor of irregular shape tumbling into the system and burning up as it hits the solar wind. The emissions change as it rotates. Could that be a possibility?”
“If it is, I’m sure Otto and Nalini are looking into it. They’re doing triple time on this.”
She nodded. The same variable-clock facility that had allowed her crew to slow their thoughts to a near standstill during the journey out also gave them the capacity to speed up their thoughts when required. For every one of her minutes, her two astrophysicists would be experiencing three, near the upper limit of engram processing speed.
“I keep hoping you’ll tell me it’s a signal from Earth,” she confessed. “Something ftl that isn’t coming through properly, or something we don’t understand. They’ve had a lot of time to advance, after all. Their technology could be very different now.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Sivio. The last signal from Earth had been broadcast while the Tipler was in transit, dated 2062.3.3 Mission Time; it had warned them that there might be a break in transmission, but there was nothing to suggest that the break might last more than a hundred years. Such a break could have been the result of something as simple as a misaligned transmitter, but it could also have been something as severe as the collapse of civil
ization in Sol System. From Upsilon Aquarius, there was no way to tell.
Few doubted that contact would be regained. When was the issue. And how.
Hatzis sighed and brought her attention back to the bridge. Although a fake, it was convincingly solid to all her senses. She seemed to be in a large room highly reminiscent of the fictional starships found in late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century science fiction: a semicircular wall contained a large screen; several duty stations lay scattered around a central chair; a rail at the back segregated visitors from active crew. Sivio was even in some sort of uniform, although she didn’t recognize it.
Playacting, she thought. We’re kids at heart, even now.
The illusion was comforting and necessary but still that: an illusion. The Frank Tipler, orbiting around Adrasteia’s equator twice every one of the planet’s short days, was in actuality little more than a box with few moving parts and no empty spaces to speak of. Designed to travel the void between stars and set up shop when it arrived, the ten-meter-square structure was the embodiment of practicality. Its nanofacturing plants had built several hundred satellites in the year they had been in orbit; it had put them down on the ground and given them one reusable shuttle; it had even grown a half-dozen bodies into which those willing could temporarily inhabit the surface for work purposes. But it was limited and vulnerable, and the people it contained needed to be reminded of that fact every now and again. Including herself.
“How did you say we picked this up, Jayme?”
“On the solar north array. We haven’t had a match from anything else yet, but we’re hopeful.”
“So, same as last time,” she said. “One glitch, one sensor, no confirmation. If it is real, it’s either so faint we were lucky to pick it up at all, or we screwed up by not being quick enough off the mark to get it looked at from something else. But if it’s just a glitch—which is the way I’m leaning right now—then we need to find the fault. The last thing we need is crappy data.”
“I agree.” Sivio looked serious for the first time. She knew he was glad that she had assumed command of the survey mission once it had arrived at Upsilon Aquarius. She also knew that he had definite opinions on how it should be ran, opinions she valued, especially when they concurred with her own.
“Any recommendations?”
“I think we should wait,” he said. “And monitor everything.”
A slight narrowing of echoes indicated that he had chosen to make the remark privately, along a security channel only the two survey managers could access.
“Do you think this could be sabotage of some kind?” she asked via the same route.
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “Directed or otherwise. Maybe something installed in the software before we left. It could be a remnant of an old test routine gone haywire, perhaps. Who knows? We’ve had destructive mutations come out of the genetic algorithms before, although nothing so subtle or convincing as this. If that’s what it is, we’ll break it soon enough.”
She wanted to be reassured by his confidence. “And if it isn’t?”
“Then chances are we’ll learn something new.” His smile was wide and genuine. “That’s what we’re here for, after all.”
She nodded halfheartedly. Sabotage had been a possibility in everyone’s minds prior to departure. Although they had no way of knowing what had happened to ail the other survey missions, theirs had gone without a major hitch thus far, and she planned to keep it that way. But the fear kept her awake some nights, and there had been rumors.
“This couldn’t be the work of our supposed plant, could it?”
“The company spy?” He came down the bridge toward her. “I can’t believe you’d really worry about something like that, Caryl.”
“I’m not,” she said, biting down on a sharper denial. “It does feel like we’re being tested, though.”
“By whom?”
“Other than Earth, you mean?”
He laughed. “Aliens on one side, spies on the other. That’s not much of a choice. I’m glad it’s you and not me who has to make it.”
She turned back to the main screen to watch Alander soaking in his bath, and for a brief moment she envied him. He looked so peaceful, so unconcerned, so real. He wasn’t some ghost bouncing around the inside of an electron trap, conjuring up experiences and calling them authentic. He wasn’t fooled for a moment.
But then, that may have been as much his problem as it was his fortune. In their circumstances, if you didn’t allow yourself that self-deception, the whole house of cards came tumbling down—as they had with Peter. As soon as your doubts set in, you were as good as lost.
It was like that with command, she thought. Jayme had the right idea, for all that he was the military guy and she was the civilian. The hardest part of the mission was probably over (since the greatest physical risk to the Tipler and to them had been while in transit, when Sivio was in charge), but that didn’t make the job of juggling priorities any easier. Caryl Hatzis’s job was like that of a university administrator trying to deal with an overworked staff and limited resources—with no possibility of a funding increase.
Glitches she didn’t need. She had enough on her plate already.
She had been unconsciously watching Alander while she thought. He hadn’t moved, but the water level had, inching up his chest and to the top of the bath. Part of her had been waiting for him to switch off the flow, so when he didn’t, she started to feel concerned.
“Jayme, does that tank have a volume sensor?”
“It does.” The main screen rearranged itself, revealing a red line inching down a vertical scale.
She pursed her lips. “Will someone call him before I do and tell him to shut off the goddamn water? If we lose that reaction mass, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”
“Sounds like you already are.” He paused. “I’ll let him know as soon—”
An alarm cut him off, and Hatzis found herself back in the vector display.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re picking up something,” said a new voice: Ali Genovese of telemetry.
“Where from?” asked Sivio. “Which satellites?”
“Everywhere! All of them! Whatever it is, it’s bright, and it flared up just seconds ago—but it’s not from the sun. It seems to be coming from Adrasteia.”
“Show us,” Hatzis ordered.
There was a moment’s silence as the conSense view changed.
Then: “Jesus fucking Christ!”
It was the first time Caryl Hatzis had ever heard Jayme Sivio swear.
1.1.3
The cold hit Alander’s shoulders like an open-palmed slap as he sat upright and reached for the controls of the heating element. Cursing under his breath, he shut off the current and stood up. The bath was surrounded by a spreading muddy stain. He lifted out the end of the black hose and grimaced at the slow drip that issued from it.
“Shit.”
Swearing wasn’t going to solve anything, and neither was telling himself what he ought to have done. Yes, a cutoff switch of some kind would have stopped the tank from draining empty, but he hadn’t thought of it. It had never even occurred to him, because all he’d needed to do was keep an eye on the flow, and there wouldn’t have been a problem.
But he hadn’t. His mind had drifted, and the mistake was made. His biggest problem now was how to explain it to Caryl Hatzis.
An alarm pinged inside his head a split second before the communicator on the ground near his muddy environment suit did likewise. He stepped out of the bath and grabbed the makeshift towel he had prepared earlier, already dreading the call. He knew who it would be from. The tank must have had some sort of internal sensor, so the Tipler would’ve known the moment it had emptied. If only he’d thought.
“Yes?” he said, clipping the headset over his scalp. He tried to sound casual, but the chill in the air was already making him shiver, giving a tremor to his voice.
“It’s Jayme.”
>
He felt a flicker of surprise and relief: not Hatzis. Not quite. “Listen,” he began, deciding to brave it out, “it was a mistake and I can fix it—”
“Forget that, Peter. Just look up.”
“What?” All he could see was a pale patch where the sun tried feebly to shine through the clouds. He was about to say as much when a streak of gold swept from one side of the sky to the other, above the clouds but moving as fast as he could swing his arm over his head, and so bright it left a faint afterimage. The line to the Tipler crackled furiously at the same time, momentarily deafening him.
Another appeared a second later, heading in a different direction across the sky; then a third. All three paths intersected at a point behind the cliff wall against which his shelter huddled. He headed for the edge of the ledge to see better.
“You should probably get dressed first, Peter,” said Sivio with some impatience. “We can’t afford to lose your body.”
With some embarrassment, Alander clutched his environment suit to his chest and headed for the relative warmth of the shelter, where he dressed with as much haste as he could muster. Through the translucent material of the tent he caught the brief glow of another golden flash.
“What’s going on, Jayme?” he asked when the interference passed.
“We’re not sure. They arrived not long ago, and we’ve been trying to hail them. So far there has been no response.”
Alander zipped the last seal shut. “Who arrived, Jayme?”
“I don’t have time to describe it to you right now. See for yourself. There’s a direct feed available on conSense. I just wanted you to know that it looks like they’re heading your way.”
Sivio’s voice dissolved completely into static. Alander put down the headset and went outside. The sky was on fire with a wave of crisscrossing golden lines. He shielded his eyes with a hand and tried to work out what he was seeing. Some sort of aurora? Had the sun flared unexpectedly? It had all happened so suddenly and was taking place so silently that he almost doubted that it was real. Yet he knew it wasn’t anything coming through the conSense network, as had been the illusion of Cleo Samson; his eyes were seeing nothing but the sky, despite how unlikely that appeared.
Echoes of Earth Page 2