Machine, who wasn’t sure if she was talking to him, kept a polite silence as another song began.
PART FOUR
* * *
The Heirs of Earth
1
* * *
Trillions upon trillions of wave functions collapsed into particle-strings. Shedding a cocoon of false photons, the battered cargo tug burst into urspace.
For Dorthy, everything changed between one heartbeat and the next. Green-white light blew away like flames scattered by a great wind to reveal Earth’s marbled blue crescent, the small shining crescent of her sister world tipped beyond. All the indices and readouts printed across her wraparound vision adjusted in great silent swings. The ship was in geosynchronous orbit, some thirty-five thousand kilometres above the Horn of Africa.
Radar overlays showed the narrow ring of debris tilted around Earth—orbital junk, some of it almost a thousand years old, continually swept up by drones and kept in place by two tiny shepherd asteroids. And showed too more than a hundred of the structures which shared the geosynchronous orbital shell, from manufacturing platforms through transit terminals to habitats like the one where Dorthy had spent her strange childhood, the Kamali-Silver Institute…there, black binary string blocked in red beside its radar trace, was its call sign!
That was when it became real to Dorthy. Gazing upon the sister worlds, she was swept far out on a great tide of emotion, neither happiness nor relief nor peace but a solution of all of these: the lifting of the heart near journey’s end; hunter, home from hill; the small movements of grace, of return.
A hand gripped her shoulder. It was Robot. Dorthy pulled away the sensor mask and blinked at him. Unshed tears starred her vision.
He said, ‘I think we might still be in trouble. Didn’t you notice there’s no radio traffic out there?’
It wasn’t exactly true. There were the automatic beacons with which every piece of orbital equipment signalled its position and identity, and there was a mess of low-power signals leaking from Earth itself, atmospheric traffic that would need more sensitive equipment than the tug carried to resolve into separate transmissions. And there were powerful bursts of noise in the microwave band, a ragged pulse as if someone was trying to bounce radar waves off the next galaxy. But there was none of the constant crosstalk between habitat and habitat, ship and ship, and no trace of the web of traffic control either, which surely should have been yammering away from the moment their ship appeared out of contraspace impossibly deep in Sol’s gravity well.
‘The L5 powersat farms are gone, and there are no ships,’ Dorthy said, after she’d had the computer search blink-comparison radar maps for non-orbital vectors. ‘No Earth—Luna traffic, no intrasystem ships, no intersystem ships at the transit terminals. No yachts, no flitters, no cargo haulers. Not so much as a suborbital tug, just the autonomic drones which sweep up orbital debris. Where are all the ships, Robot? What’s happened here?’
‘You think maybe the marauders got here somehow? Maybe the same way we did?’
‘There are people on Earth. There’s radio traffic.’
‘Someone’s radio traffic. Someone, something. What about the rest of the system? Mars, Titan. What about the fucking Moon?’ Robot worried at the strip of blond hair that crested his head. Bare-chested and bare-legged, he was sitting zazen beside the command couch, a portable terminal in his lap. Its green light glowed on his face. ‘I’ve been using some of the ranging equipment to check out a few of the habitats. I can’t find any neutrino signatures from their fusion plants, and they’re not radiating heat through their cooling grids, but passively. They’re dead, Dorthy, every one of them. Abandoned. Suppose it was the marauders. What else could have done it? I mean, we were gone less than a year.’
‘I know,’ Dorthy said, ‘I know.’ The edge of Robot’s panic was cutting across her own thoughts. ‘Well, we’ve two options. We can cruise on out of here and try and raise someone elsewhere in the system. Or we can go down and find out for ourselves.’
Robot stretched out a leg so he could reach into one of the pockets of the only piece of clothing he wore, baggy linen shorts slashed with zippers, little tools hanging from a dozen loops around its wide waist-band. He held up a coin, one face tarnished green, the other crusted with smooth white calcite.
‘My lucky piece,’ he said, rubbing it on the side of his nose. ‘Found it when I was a kid, diving old wrecks sunk centuries ago for the foundation of a new reef. It makes a neat binary decision-making machine.’ He flipped and caught it, covered it on the back of his right hand with the metal-banded plastic of his left. ‘Heads Earth, tails out, okay?’
‘Why not?’
It was heads.
‘Shit,’ Robot said. ‘How about best of three?’
‘Maybe the angels are still with us. They wanted us to go back to Earth, after all. Keep tossing the coin and we’ll find out.’
Robot turned the coin back and forth between the elongate fingers of his prosthetic hand, so swiftly it was a white blur. ‘One thing I don’t need to know,’ he said. ‘They’ll always be with us, in a way.’
Dorthy had forgotten all about her baby, until then.
No voice challenged them, no police vessel tried to intercept them when she took the ship out of orbit. Robot stayed beside her, hunched over the console he’d appropriated, his prosthetic hand clattering on the keyboard as he typed in string after string of instructions.
Hooded by the sensor mask, eyes filled with Earth’s blue-white glory, Dorthy said, ‘I think you should know that I’ve never had to land one of these before.’
‘No shit.’
‘I mean, perhaps you’d better go strap yourself into a crash web.’
Robot’s frantic typing didn’t skip a beat. ‘I’m trying to figure something out here. I guess if we crash, we crash and burn and that’s it.’
Dorthy scanned the lines of green and amber indicators projected over…where was it? One of the indicators told her it was the Indian Ocean. Early morning, the most tremendous sunrise in the rear part of her wraparound vision, a band of orange from horizon to horizon that shaded up through layers of darkening reds to black. She was getting used to the three hundred and sixty degree projection now: you just pretended it was a band, focused on any part you wanted to look at and ignored the fact it seemed to go all the way around your head. She looked for the islands where she’d spent a couple of weeks, back when she was whoring her Talent, but there was too much cloud and she had trouble figuring out which coastline she was looking at. She told Robot, ‘There’s a few minutes before we hit the outer edge of the atmosphere. I’m letting it fly itself as much as possible.’
‘Her. Ships are female. You want to know what I’ve found, or does it have to wait?’
‘What have you found, Robot?’ He wasn’t as scared as he had been, but there was still an edge to him that could sharpen into panic.
‘Well, we’re headed for Galveston Port, right? We went over it as we came around to go in. I’ve been looking through the pictures the belly camera took, there’s this amazing enhancement package, algorithms that just unpack the detail right out of all the murk—’
‘Just tell me what you found.’
‘It’s more what I didn’t find. The city, for one thing. And, well, the spaceport for another.’
‘You’re sure you’re looking in the right place?’
The edge was her panic, now, like a knife blade drawn through her blood.
Robot said, ‘Well, sure. There’s this bitmap subroutine, and the fit for the coastline is pretty good. I mean, I was born in Galveston. I recognize Pelican Island, all right, but the fields just aren’t there. Nor’s the waterfront of the city, though I can still make out some of the street plan. And there’s something new there, just along the coast. A whole bunch of high albedo circles.’
Dorthy caught and corrected a minute drift in attitude control. The tug was beginning to skim the outer edge of the stratosphere, pushing a vast shell of
superheated ions in front of it. There was just the faintest wavering in about half her wraparound vision. The tug’s gravity field damped out any vibration. Basically, it was flying itself, a blunt arrowhead slicing through thin upper air, keeping itself on track. She didn’t really have much to do but worry, while ahead of her the east coast of Africa grew at the rim of the world, tawny under a feathering of high cirrus…and behind her the violet band of the upper atmosphere rose as the tug descended. An inset showed her right hand resting on the saddle-shaped keyboard; she could feel the worn spot at the edge, faintly greasy, where Talbeck Barlstilkin’s hand had rested…
She said, ‘Tell me the rest of it.’
‘Well, that’s where some of these pulses are coming from, the ones on the twenty-one centimetre band.’
‘The waterhole,’ Dorthy said.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what it used to be called. It’s a region of low activity between the emission lines of neutral hydrogen gas and hydroxyl ions. It used to be thought that if an alien civilization was going to signal its presence, it was the obvious part of the radio spectrum to use. Twentieth-century radio astronomers called it the waterhole in analogy with the waterholes on the African plains, where animals gather to drink.’
‘Hey, I know what a waterhole is.’
‘I can guess what those circles are, Robot, and which part of the sky they’re aimed at, too. I think—’
A blare of pure noise pierced Dorthy’s ears: something began to go wrong with her vision, a square patch right in front of her breaking down into dancing dots of light, like snow blowing past a window. And then the snow scattered and someone was looking in at her. A smug, fat, perfectly bald man, washed out blue eyes, snub nose and prim little mouth squashed together in the centre of his white jowly face.
He said, ‘We’re about to download the treaties you’re breaking, citizen. You’ve seventy-five seconds to tell us why we shouldn’t blow you out of Gaia’s air. Counting now.’ English, with a strong Badlands accent.
‘We’re from the Vingança,’ Dorthy said.
The fat man’s lips parted to form a perfect o of astonishment. He looked at something offscreen, looked back at Dorthy. ‘This had better not be some land of freetrader shucksma. You’ve proof for us, citizen?’
‘I have all kinds of proof, if you let us land.’ Robot’s hand was on her arm; she motioned for him to keep quiet. She said, ‘For a start, you can check this ship’s registration.’
There was a pause as the man looked offscreen again. His ear was pierced; a glittery spiral hung from it. He turned back to Dorthy and said, ‘Our craft will escort you to a landing field.’
‘We’re heading in for Galveston. I don’t think I can turn the ship around now.’
‘We realize that. Our craft will rendezvous with you three hundred klicks from Galveston. In…two hundred twenty-four seconds. We suggest you do not deviate from your track.’ The window vanished like a popped soap bubble.
Dorthy told Robot, ‘They’re Witnesses. Those things you saw were their radio telescopes. I think I know what happened, but there isn’t time to tell you. Go find a crash web, I think we’re in for a tough time.’
‘What I wanted to say, I have this bunch of hardcopy documents that started spitting out. Official looking stuff. The dates—’
‘There’s no time, Robot!’
‘—just listen! Thirty-two. Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-fucking-five! We started nought-two, we were gone less than a year. We’re in the fucking future!’
‘I know! I don’t want you killed, Robot, so please. Get to a crash web!’
‘The fucking future,’ he said, and then he was gone and Dorthy glimpsed the escort ahead, black flecks in an arrowhead formation racing towards the tug above the cloud deck. A dozen heavily-armoured aircars, bellies bristling with single-shot X-ray lasers, they peeled away either side and looped back, holding just above and a klick behind. There was a moment of streaming whiteness as the tug pierced the cloud deck, and then the ocean was below and the coast was a brown stain at the horizon, rushing up at her.
The fat Witness said, ‘We see your contrail, citizen. Overshoot the island three klicks. There’s an airfield. Use it.’
Indicators were flashing all along the base of Dorthy’s vision. The tug couldn’t find the spaceport. She reached for the attitude stick and kicked in override, felt the stick come alive in her hand. The horizon tilted, steadied. She said, ‘I should warn you I’m not too good at atmospheric flying. We used to be part of the science crew.’ The stick trembled as the ship dropped through mach one.
The Witness told her, ‘It would be better for you if you crashed than missed the airfield.’
Airspeed was down to a couple of hundred klicks per hour now, altitude so low Dorthy could make out the whitecaps on the lines of breakers that marched shoreward. The aircars were still astern: the ship was the apex of their vee formation. She could feel her heartbeat in her thumb and fingers where they rested on the pistol grip of the stick. Shoreline, then scrubby trees, glimpses of ruined buildings amongst them.
No time to wonder how old the ruins were. A wide river channel, a silver glimmer off to the south, fat cigar shapes (airships!) clustered ahead, suddenly caught amongst a forest of thready red lights that stabbed upwards into the clouds.
The Witness said, ‘That’s where you land, citizen.’
‘Of course,’ Dorthy said politely, and hauled the stick diagonally back and kicked in the tug’s reaction motor.
Then she saw only sky ahead of her and the tug’s contrail twisted behind, and black specks scratching smoke trails as they fell out of the sky, burning. Robot and the Witness were yelling different things at her and there was a colourless flash and her vision greyed out for a second, came back with red damage reports scattered all over it, went away in another colourless flash. She was slammed against the couch’s restraints as the tug’s generated gravity cut out for a second; saw a blurred rush of burning treetops through a haze of red code strings, pushed the attitude stick all the way forward. The tug climbed, listing to port. She saw the ocean far behind her, beyond a haze of smoke. For a minute she thought she had made it. Then there was another flash. The tug’s frame shuddered. Half the lifting surface gone, it began to lose speed.
Dorthy levelled out as best she could, hand sweating on the stick, trying to let the tug glide in to any sort of landing. Everything kept changing angles, as if the tug were a live thing trying to throw off her control. She glimpsed sky, a wide brown river snaking through level green, sky again, and then the horizon rising to meet her. Proximity alarms were blaring in her ears. Trees, then what looked like grassland. She had time to think that if the generated gravity cut off again the impact of the crash would probably kill her, shoved the stick all the way back to try and get stall speed, and with a long rending shudder the tug ploughed the earth…and stopped.
When Dorthy reached the airlock she found all three of its doors open. The fresh air of the Earth blew in her face. Vivid greens stretched out before her, tipped at forty-five degrees, all of the world a hill to the tug’s gravity field.
Robot, standing at an angle beneath the hatch, shouted up to her that she better jump, the ship was on fire, more than one place. Crab-things clattered around him, their crusted carapaces verdigrised bronze, tarnished silver.
Dorthy took a breath and jumped, but gauged it wrong. The hill became flat ground that slapped her ribs and hip and knocked all the wind out of her. She had to be supported by Robot for the first couple of hundred metres. Earth was cold under her bare feet. Lush wet grass soon soaked her coveralls to her waist. The crab-things had vanished into it somewhere.
‘A gun,’ he kept saying. ‘That’s what I should have got. All I could think about were the fucking crabs, and after I got them out and jumped down after them there wasn’t any way back. But I should have got a gun.’
‘What would you do with a gun,’ Dorthy managed to say at last. ‘Come on, Rob
ot, let’s try going a little faster. The reaction motor blew our escort away, but the Witnesses will have other aircars. They’ll be all over here any minute.’
Behind them, smoke was pouring from the stern of the tug (where its blunt arrowhead would have attached to a shaft, if it had been a real arrowhead); its thick greasy black column rose into the darkening sky. It was early evening, here. The air had a chill edge to it.
Dorthy couldn’t help looking back every few seconds: it was strange not to be able to see behind her head. A haze of smoke rose above the horizon, forest set alight by the Witnesses’ weapons. Grassland saddled away south and north, only shade trees breaking its green sea; ahead, to the east, was the liquid gleam of water, the wide river Dorthy had glimpsed from the air. The Mississippi, she supposed, or one of its tributaries.
She tried to remember how far that meant they’d be from Galveston, but her head wasn’t working properly: nothing would cling there for more than a few seconds. Her fear, suspended since the Witness had chipped into the ship’s communications, was finally breaking through. She had a stitch; her knees felt unhinged. Robot soon forged ahead of her, and so it was he who found the road.
It was unpaved, a wide strip of packed red dirt raised above a deep ditch Dorthy had to jump over. She fell down on the other side and winded herself all over again. ‘I’m too old for this,’ she said, picking herself up. ‘Too old and too pregnant.’
Robot was looking up and down the road. He said, ‘I can’t see those little fuckers anywhere. Do you think they followed us?’ Then he said, ‘Listen, you hear something?’
And before they could move, the wagon came around the clump of trees in the elbow of the wide road’s curve, its driver rising from the bench as he hauled back on the reins of the two horses.
The wagon driver’s name was Sugar Jack Durras; he came from a place called Kingman Seven. ‘Soon as we saw the flashes,’ he said, ‘we knew something was coming down our way. I saw where you came down and thought I’d better take a look before the Witnesses got here. Didn’t think I’d pick up honest to God spacemen. Begging your pardon, Ma’am.’
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