Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Until now.

  Thor gradually came back to herself, realizing she was slumped forward on her knees, flailing weakly for support. Sol stood nearby, offering none.

  “Too much,” Thor muttered. “It’s too much....”

  One hundred fifty years of memories had been dumped in her mind; it would probably take at least that again to sift through it all.

  Sol didn’t say anything at first. She just left Thor on her knees in her mental anguish. The only sounds Thor could hear were her own trembling breaths and that thin, far-off crack of a single gunshot in a long-forgotten winter.

  “Do you still want it, Thor?”

  As difficult as it was, she forced herself to steady her breathing and look up into Sol’s penetrating gaze. Marduk and Mahatala were still watching on from nearby, and she knew that this was her first test.

  She swallowed thickly in a vain attempt to moisten her throat, then nodded slowly. “I still want it.”

  Her original loomed over her, and for a split second she thought Sol might offer to help her up. But then Sol turned and left the room without another word, leaving Thor to wonder if she’d passed or failed the test.

  “Give me a hand.” She waved for Mahatala to help her up. Strong android hands gripped her arms and helped her to her feet. Thor felt the world spin around her, but she forced herself to be firm.

  “Run the simulation back to where I was interrupted,” she said, sitting back into her chair, grateful for its support. Every muscle in her body was trembling. “We have work to do.”

  Marduk and Mahatala exchanged brief and uncertain glances but then did as they were told.

  1.2.4

  “You did what?” Alander looked up with some alarm from the schematics he was studying. Sol sat opposite him in Klotho’s cockpit, casually leaning on the desk the hole ship had extruded, and repeated herself with unwavering calm.

  “I gave Thor control of the engrams.”

  He shook his head, temporarily lost for words. “But Thor is unstable! I thought we agreed on that. She colluded with Axford; she disobeys your orders; she—” He stopped. She was the one who told me that Lucia had rejected me, he’d been about to say. He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done it just to hurt him.

  But it was a petty concern, and one he couldn’t waste time dwelling upon. Thoughts of Lucia were a distraction, as was his confusion over his relationship with Caryl. Nevertheless, he found it hard to close off his mind to both of them. Since Lucia’s engram had escaped from Klotho no trace of her had been found anywhere, despite extensive searches of all the hole ships. The emotional part of him felt bad for what had happened, while the more rational side refused to accept grief for what he knew had needed to be done.

  And as for Caryl Hatzis... They had shared a bed once since the meeting at Rasmussen. He had fallen into it, exhausted, and woken an hour later to feel her sliding next to him. The contact had been intimate without being sexual, but memory returned to him of it having been so, once. It had been a distraction, an experiment that hadn’t worked. But the need for something more was still there, and they took what they could from each other while no other alternative existed.

  “Thor can’t be trusted,” he finished instead. With a half-smile, he added, “But then, I suppose I would’ve said much the same thing about you not too long ago.”

  “I hope you still would say it.” There was an edge to her fleeting smirk that said she wasn’t entirely joking. “Thor is different from the others. Who else would you put in charge, Peter? You? Axford?” She smiled wryly. “I can’t really imagine someone like Otto Wyra leading the charge, can you?”

  He shook his head. “Hardly.”

  “Thor’s the only one who’s tried to take the reins of responsibility from me, and that’s why I let her have it. The tweak I gave her engram is resulting in highly original behavior. Sometimes I can’t tell what she’ll do next! And I like that, because I think we need a little unpredictability right now.”

  Hatzis looked down at the schematics. “I thought that taking charge, making sure everything stays the way it’s supposed to, is the only way to get things done. Sometimes it is, but not always. Look at Frank. He works in the background, nudging people forward against their will. Maybe I should try to be more like him.”

  “Spare me that much, Caryl.” Alander stood to stretch his legs, finding the sudden conversational turn discomforting in the extreme. “I’m all for using him, not emulating him.”

  “Nevertheless, out of all of us he’s the one most likely to survive.”

  “And you admire that?” he asked with distaste. “You think the end can justify the means?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  Alander offered a derisive snort as he paced the cockpit. Hatzis had turned in the chair to face him. The posture made her look startlingly vulnerable.

  “Peter, I’m sick of being in charge,” she said after a few more seconds of silence. “I don’t intend to spend what might be my last days bickering with everyone over details that ultimately won’t make a difference. But at the same time, I don’t want to be completely left out, either. If I think Thor’s doing a bad job or becoming unstable, then I’ll pull the plug.”

  “And you’ll take over again?”

  She didn’t need to think about that. “If I have to, yes.”

  “I presume you have a back door into Thor, then.”

  “Unmodified engrams are as leaky as sieves. Christ, if I really wanted to, I could make you dance for my entertainment.” She shrugged. “But that would get boring. And besides which, I’m starting to find your company tolerable.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was joking or throwing a backhanded compliment in his direction, like a person might toss a dog a bone. He would probably always be uncertain where he stood with her. Once part of a mind that spanned an entire solar system, what could she possibly see in him except a marginally nonandroid body able on occasion to provide a modicum of comfort?

  “Besides,” Sol said, “Thor found Lucia, and we have to be grateful for that. Without the information she found, we’d probably be running with the Praxis right now, just another in his pack.”

  He nodded, having pondered long and hard what Lucia had revealed, as relayed through Thor. Something in pi-1 Ursa Major had eliminated the Andre Linde, the mission she’d been due to rendezvous with in 2117. A month before Lucia’s arrival, faint emissions had heralded the destruction of the Linde and the wholesale reorganization of the system. Days later, everything had returned to normal. Fearing that she was in danger, too, Lucia had disguised herself as an asteroid and tumbled through the system, taking snapshots as she went. Only upon awakening months later did she discover that the photos showed nothing unusual. However, upon further examination, she made another discovery: One of the photos was missing.

  In Lucia’s mind, the absence of that photo constituted hard evidence of foul play. Thor agreed with her findings, and so did Alander. The only problem was that the interference had taken place decades before the Spinners and the Starfish had arrived in the area. As there had been no further disturbances that Lucia had noted while continuing on her journey beyond pi-1 Urea Major, the question was open as to what exactly was in the system, and why it was there at all.

  Frank Axford reasoned that it was a Spinner base designed to coordinate the local gift-dropping exercise, or some sort of advance party. All attempts to look in the system resulted in rapid destruction and a thorough cleanup, so it was hard to tell for sure. The time lag between arrival in pi-1 Ursa Major and the deposition of the gifts was symptomatic of a galactic time-scale, he said. Forty years was nothing to beings who might cross the gulf between galaxies as if it were nothing more than a stroll across a road.

  The other alternative, of course, was that Lucia was wrong—or worse, crazy—which meant the whole plan was founded upon nothing whatsoever. And in that case, Alander had nothing to be thankful to Thor for except possibly an early grave.

  �
��We have no choice but to accept Lucia’s findings,” he said. “Time is ticking, and we’re no closer to finding another way out of this.”

  Sol nodded as she turned back to the schematics. “Is there anything I should know here? And I ask only out of curiosity, you understand. Strictly as an observer.”

  He came back to the table but didn’t sit down. “Some of the probes were attacked by forces the gifts could help us resist. It’s pretty exotic stuff, and I’m not sure I follow half of it, but there are nanofacturers working on some sort of shield effect that will protect us from the worst of it. If we keep quiet and don’t disturb anything, we’ll probably have a chance.”

  She nodded as her eyes scanned the sheaves of electronic paper before her. Diagrams and explanations scrolled up and down at her touch. There was no way to tell just how much she absorbed from the casual glance, but he knew better than to underestimate her.

  “This is hairy stuff,” she said. “Playing around with fundamental constants is not something you do lightly or easily. I’m not sure I like the idea of being on either end of this sort of technology, especially when we only have the Gifts’ word that it’ll work.”

  “If it doesn’t, I guess we won’t have long to curse the fact,” said Alander. “I can’t imagine the Starfish taking prisoners.”

  “Except in a specimen jar.” She sagged back into her seat, sighing. Despite advanced biomods and incredible hormonal control, she was still a victim of stress.

  He came around behind her and rubbed at the muscles in her neck.

  “I don’t want to die, Peter.”

  “So take a leaf out of Axford’s book. Copy yourself; leave a backup somewhere. Bury it deep enough, and it might just slip through the Starfish net.”

  A strange expression crossed her face. “Why should it when nothing else we’ve left behind has managed to survive the wake?” she asked. “If only the Gifts would fight with us. But they won’t even defend themselves!”

  He didn’t say anything; this was ground they’d covered many times before.

  “I know I shouldn’t hang my hopes on someone stepping in to save us at the last minute,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I just can’t believe that humanity could—” She shrugged, helplessly searching for the right word. Then, finally. “Could just die!”

  “Maybe we’re already dead,” he said dryly. “Maybe we just haven’t realized it yet.”

  She slipped out from under his hands and turned in her seat to face him, her expression torn between amusement and amazement.

  “Of all the people I could be spending my last days with,” she said, shaking her head, “why did it have to be with such a miserable bastard like you?”

  “I’ve actually been asking myself the same thing.” There was no humor in his response, just grim awareness that their situation really didn’t make any sense. “Maybe it’s just because our scars match.”

  She snorted a short laugh. “Misery loves company. Is that it?”

  He turned away from her, from her facetiousness, and moved back to look at the schematics again. “How long do you think we have?” he asked after a moment’s reflection.

  “Until the mission, or until the end?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, unless Thor changes the timetable, then we leave in twenty-five hours. And unless the plan works, the Starfish will be here in three days.”

  Her tone carried uncertainty and fear, but he had no reassurances to offer her. He had little enough for himself. All he could think of was Axford’s words: Better to run to your death than run from it.

  In the grim silence of Klotho’s cockpit, he found himself almost ready to believe it.

  1.2.5

  There were ten orbital towers in all, each linked by a super-strong and superconducting circuit. At first, Lucia was apprehensive about exploring them, feeling small and insignificant against the alien marvels. But the more she ventured into them, the less her trepidations bothered her.

  Movement was initially slow—relatively speaking—as she followed the complex circuitry from spindle to spindle. But once she’d touched upon each of the gifts, it became easier for her to go back to them, and before long she was jumping between the spindles with instinctive ease. She just had to think of the spindle that she wanted to go to, and she immediately knew the route to take. The entire process took barely nanoseconds.

  Each of the enigmatic installations had very distinct purposes: Spindle One was the Science Hall, where the Spinners provided arcane theorems in order to educate their primitive charges; Spindle Two allowed for companion experiments and materials in order to elucidate those theorems. The Library in Spindle Eight contained a vast knowledge base that would take millennia to examine thoroughly, given the chance; while the Gallery in Spindle Nine demonstrated that artistic expression was as diverse across the galaxy as it had been on Earth. There was a Surgery in Spindle Four that provided tools for medical analysis and treatments that appeared to be designed specifically for humans, although it displayed a flair for Yuhl physiognomy as well. Spindle Ten housed the Dark Room, the very depths of which she still avoided, despite her growing confidence; there was a hole ship Dry Dock in Spindle Six, and the Gifts themselves—the AIs who oversaw the entire complex—occupied Spindle Seven. Spindle Five was the Hub of the instantaneous matter transmission system, a room consisting of ten doors that offered access to each of the gifts.

  Why ten? she found herself wondering. Only nine doors would be required to access the other spindles, surely?

  Investigating this anomaly, she discovered that one of the doors looped back upon itself, back to the Hub. She remembered Rob Singh’s talk of glitches in the gifts, and wondered if this was one such—evidence that the authors of these astonishing gifts were capable of error.

  The Gifts themselves wouldn’t talk to her as she explored, despite her attempts to ask them questions. But neither did they obstruct her, and the lesser machines in the spindles were willing to take her instructions. It was a weird feeling, seeing these alien artifacts from the inside. It felt as though she could extend herself into any of the gifts, becoming a part of them, mentally flexing here and there to examine and explore any aspect of the items contained within them. As her pov moved between the cracks in those spaces, she found that the gifts weren’t as clear-cut as they appeared from an outside perspective. The Surgery, for instance, revealed to her that it could construct another I-suit to replace the demonstration model that had been appropriated by Cleo Samson, Rasmussen’s mission supervisor. Furthermore, the dimensions of the I-suit could be customized to almost any setting. That raised possibilities Lucia found particularly exciting.

  The more she explored the gifts, the more proficient she became at using them, effortlessly jumping between each of the spindles to further her understanding of the knowledge she found. Having examined a piece of art, for example, she could jump to the Library and find information on the species responsible for that piece of art, then cross-reference that information with star charts from the Map Room that would pinpoint the system or systems occupied by them. From there it would be just a quick trip to the Dry Dock where, had there been a hole ship available, she could have traveled to that system and witnessed the species firsthand.

  That none of these species visited by the Spinners existed anymore, thanks to the Starfish, weighed heavily upon her after a while. It was depressing to think that so many lives, so many diverse cultures, had been wiped out forever. The longer she explored, the more depressed she became, until soon she felt totally exhausted and found herself needing to rest.

  In no time at all, Lucia had returned to the confines of the Dark Room. With her mind expanded to the degree it was, it seemed as though an entire year had passed, when in truth it had only been a couple of hours—but she felt like an entirely different person than she had been at the start. She’d learned things, seen things, experienced things that had given her a new perspective on life. And yet she had still o
nly touched the surface of everything within the gifts.

  They were the most incredible things she’d ever seen, and she had managed to touch them. She alone had seen the awesome and beautiful mask the Gifts hid behind from their side. And it was a sight more wondrous than anything she could have imagined. The marvels of the Map Room rotated in her mind as she floated in the darkness, trying to absorb the information she had just accessed.

  The gifts orbiting Sagarsee were the same as those deposited on all the other Earth-like worlds in Surveyed Space. It was a simple arrangement repeated on dozens of worlds. Only where physical conditions forbade it did the pattern vary. Around Hammon, where a dense cloud of orbiting rubble left over from a disintegrated moon posed a threat to geosyncronous orbits, the gifts adopted a rosette arrangement well out of danger. Sol had noted a different arrangement again in the system of Vega. There, the gifts had been built inside the core fragments of a disintegrated gas giant, where Frank Axford had built himself a sanctuary. And although these had been effectively hidden from view, the Starfish had still managed to root them out and destroy them.

  That the gifts could be destroyed set Lucia’s mind spinning. They contained such a wealth of technology and knowledge; their very nature spoke of advancements far beyond anything Earth had ever achieved. Neither human engrams nor Yuhl/Goel had managed to damage one nor even get close to seeing how one worked. Yet the Starfish effortlessly reduced them to slag heaps, to clouds of energetic dust.

  Humanity, she was beginning to understand, stood between the benevolence of one superpower and the destructive wrath of another. They were refugees in an incomprehensibly vast war, doing all they could just to survive.

  Perhaps, then, the gifts were aid drops. She wondered if they existed to help new civilizations weather the oncoming destruction that was the Starfish migration. Maybe the Starfish weren’t following the Spinners at all; maybe the Spinners were simply running ahead, doing what they could to minimize the damage to those who fell in the Starfish’s path.