Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  That’s right, she thought, remembering how Peter had famously announced to the scientific community in the 2010s that humanity should be alone in the universe, if certain quantum mechanical assumptions held true. That the UNESSPRO missions had initially found only single-celled and other equally primitive life-forms had initially borne his opinion out. But now...

  “The Spinners must have come as a shock,” she said.

  He bristled slightly at that. “They don’t prove my theory wrong, if that’s what you’re implying. They could be non-conscious AIs. If they perform no truly observational act, and if their makers died out before complex life on Earth evolved, it could all still be just as I said,”

  “What about the Starfish?” she said. “Or the Yuhl? Or the Praxis?”

  “The Starfish could be AIs, too. As for the others, I don’t know anything about them.”

  “They’re flesh and blood. I’ve seen them.”

  He faltered only for a moment. “There are possible explanations. If the Spinners and the Starfish are universe-hopping, looking for intelligent life in each, they could be picking up passengers as they go. The Yuhl could be from a completely different continuum than ours; their evolution would have had no effect on the way we evolved.”

  “That’s one possible explanation,” said Lucia. “But not a very likely one. I think you’re clutching at straws here, Peter.”

  “Is it any more unlikely than this entire situation?” He seemed very much alive and stable in the grip of an intellectual debate. “And I can think of a second explanation, if the first isn’t good enough for you. The Spinners and Starfish could be riding a reverse time flow from the future, bringing conscious aliens back with them. Have we ever spoken to them, interacted with them face-to-face?” When she shook her head, he seized that admission as proof. “That would be because our notions of causality are fundamentally different. We may not be able to interact, except via intermediaries, because their arrow of time is opposite to ours. We’re riding a wave of expansion out from the big bang, while they’re coasting inward to the big crunch. If they evolved in the future, they would, again, have had no influence on our own evolution.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “Actually, that’s quite an interesting theory,” she said, meaning it. “But does it help us at all? Can it keep us alive any longer?”

  He shrugged. “That’s up to you. Understanding the problem is just the first step.”

  “Which is why we need you, Peter, to take the next step. You have to stay with us.” With me, she added silently. “Can’t you at least try it?”

  His stare tightened, and he seemed to stick for a second, as though tripping over his thoughts.

  “I chose the dark,” he said. “It was the only choice I could make.”

  “But you have more options now!”

  “You misunderstand me, Lucia. It was the only choice I could make. This me, not the other one, or my original. Me. I know I’m a faulty program; I know I can’t work on my own; but this is something I have that’s mine, and I’m clinging to it. Unless you can offer me a foolproof way to keep me awake while retaining my mind, then...”

  The unfinished sentence lingered, an unspoken question: Could she do this? After a few seconds she sighed and shook her head; there was no way she could guarantee that this would be possible.

  “Then I afraid I’m going to have to insist you shut me down. I’ll take my chances. The dark will part again, one day. Maybe, then there’ll be a solution.”

  She looked away as his image began to flicker again. He almost certainly didn’t have much time left before he froze like the others, but he had been the best to date. She didn’t know what gave him the edge—meeting the other Alander, or having been forced to confront his condition and make a life-or-death choice—but she was reluctant to let all hope slip through her fingers.

  “And if there is no solution?” she asked him solemnly. “If you die?”

  “Then that solves all my problems, I guess.”

  He looked apologetic and uncharacteristically fragile as she instructed the overseer to bring his simulation to a halt. Her virtual environment fell silent. She fought a sense of pointlessness that threatened to overtake her. The temptation to give up and run was too strong, she couldn’t trust herself not to give in to it if she gave it the slightest encouragement. Living longer was all very well, but she didn’t want to do it with a guilty conscience.

  For the first time, she wondered how long she could live inside Spindle Ten. If she found a way to circumvent her programming and her engram didn’t seize up, might she be risking immortality by staying with the other survivors? She could see no real reason why not. She was just a tangle of electrons—or some other means of carrying information—swirling around the innards of the Spindle. If nothing destroyed the mainframe or the software, a program could run forever.

  Unless, she thought, there was something else the Spinners hadn’t told them.

  The thought of a gestalt Peter Alander made up of all the Graveyard engrams running parallel, the group propping itself up even as they individually stumbled, had just begun to seem vaguely workable when she arrived at Sagarsee with her refugees in tow. The first thing she noticed was an unusual degree of activity around the planet’s gifts; hole ships were coming and going at a rapid rate. The second thing was the intense level of ftl communications flowing through the system. Information was flooding in. Even as her charges began to stir in their electronic bunkers, she was dipping into the stream in an attempt to work out what was going on.

  What she found was disturbingly familiar.

  “Lucia, thank God you’re back,” said Cleo Samson when her presence had registered on the Frank Drake’s sensors. Her voice was urgent. “We need you immediately.”

  “Why? What’s happening?” she asked. “All I’m seeing is pi-1 Ursa Major and flashes of something else.” Something much like ball lightning encircling the sun, thousands of tiny, fiercely radiant points strung out in curving lines, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

  “We can’t get close enough to figure it out right now.” Cleo’s face in conSense perfectly mirrored the anxiety she was feeling. “Three scouts have already been taken out by whatever’s going on in there, and I don’t want to risk any more.”

  “So what is it you want me to do?” Lucia asked.

  “You can move faster than the hole ships; you might be able to get in and out before anyone sees you.”

  And if I can’t? she wanted to ask, but instead said, “I’m not designed for combat, Cleo.”

  “No one’s expecting you to fight, Lucia. We just need to know what’s going on. If it’s the Starfish, then maybe Thor achieved what she set out to do. But if it’s not...”

  Cleo didn’t need to finish the sentence. Pi-1 Ursa Major was the great unknown. If it wasn’t the Starfish, there was no telling what it could be instead. The engrams were like a child poking at the lid of a trap-door spider’s lair. If something unexpected came out, they might not be able to put it back in.

  “Okay,” she said, even as she fought her reservations about returning to the system where, apart from herself, everyone on her survey mission had died. “But I’m not going until I’ve unloaded my passengers.”

  Cleo nodded. “Reconnect with the Hub and send the refugees through, then go straight to pi-1 Ursa Major and see what you can find out. Come back to us afterward or transmit the information via ftl; either way is fine. I really don’t want you to take any chances, Lucia, so don’t be afraid to pull out if things get hairy in there. We’re going to need you here to help us put things back together, afterward.”

  With that, Cleo’s image blinked out.

  Lucia shook her head in the emptiness of her virtual world. Put things back together, Cleo had said. Not escape. The strictures of her programming were still limiting her decision making and planning. But there was nothing Lucia could do about that, except hope for the best that Thor had indeed
done what she’d set out to do.

  Resigned to taking a more active role than she’d intended, she quickly busied herself by emptying her corridors and rooms of everyone who had left Zemyna. Then she put one graveyard aside in order to possibly head directly into another.

  2.3.2

  Axford turned from the screen and looked at Caryl Hatzis. “I’m going out there.”

  Alander knew Sol was going to let him before she’d even opened her mouth. She nodded after a few moments’ consideration and said, “Eledone, I want you to divide yourself into two distinct habitats. One for myself, Inari, and Cleo, and the other for Peter, Frank, and Gou Mang.” Her eyes met Alander’s briefly. “I want you to allow the second habitat a discrete personality, answerable to Peter.”

  “Yes, Caryl.”

  He moved to stand with Axford and a disgruntled-looking Gou Mang just as a wall of energy split the cockpit in half. The transparent boundary retreated around the edges, shrinking rapidly into a window, then a porthole, then closed entirely. Alander watched Sol as her half of the hole ship went its own way. There was a look of weary unease on her face, and she offered no expression of reassurance or encouragement as she disappeared from view.

  Nor should she, he thought. Although the Gatherer—the AI that had collected from the vicinity of the damaged cutter and brought them to the Trident—had reassured them that they would be perfectly safe, there were no guarantees. His understanding of safe didn’t include being sealed up in a chamber with apparently no exits and told to wait.

  “Still doesn’t trust me, does she?” Axford said when Sol was out of sight. His tone had a hint of amusement to it

  “Maybe she has no reason to,” said Gou Mang.

  “My behavior on the mission so far has been exemplary.”

  She snorted. “So far being the operative phrase.”

  Axford shook his head in mock disappointment. “I’m surprised at your lack of forgiveness, Caryl. This is a war zone; you have to learn to accept help when it’s offered.”

  “And what exactly is it you’re offering?” Alander piped in.

  “I really can’t tell you that,” said Axford, sounding genuinely regretful. Then he smiled. “You see, I don’t particularly trust you, either.”

  It was Gou Mang’s turn to shake her head. “Let’s just get on with this, can’t we?”

  Alander let them fall into a sullen silence. Their irritation was borne as much out of tiredness as anything else, he imagined. That made it understandable, if not excusable. He couldn’t decide if Axford was trying to pick a fight or had some other agenda. He’d been trying to divide the already fractious team ever since they’d set out from Asellus Primus. Perhaps, Alander thought he was just getting cocky at having achieved a measure of success.

  A ring of new screens appeared around them. They showed the same view visible through Eledone: a bone-colored, curved chamber large enough to hold several cathedrals.

  “Hole ship? From now on you’ll answer to the name Selene,” he said, choosing the name of one of Eledone’s component vessels. “When we’re completely separated, I want you to set us down by the edge of the chamber. We’ll want to disembark there.”

  “Yes, Peter.”

  “Is it safe?” asked Gou Mang.

  She asked Alander, but Selene answered: “Conditions outside are within tolerance levels of your I-suits.”

  Gou Mang chuckled. “Actually, that’s not what I meant.”

  “I can only provide you with the information at my disposal. I no longer have sufficient resources for speculation.”

  Alander nodded. He’d never known the hole ships to speculate much anyway, before or after the sort of damage Eledone had received.

  The hole ship coasted smoothly to the point he’d indicated. The chamber was truly enormous and bulged around them like a hollow pumpkin. Its shape was distinctly organic, but its smoothness suggested that it had been made. Once again the comparison with biological systems was easy to make but probably misleading.

  The airlock irised smoothly open in one wall of the cockpit. There were no telltale air currents to indicate that the hole ship was open to the alien atmosphere outside; a thin skin of energy still maintained a barrier between them. Feeling nervous, Alander preceded the others along the short corridor to the egress airlock and stepped outside.

  There was no sense of resistance as he stepped through the meniscus, nor did he feel the I-suit tighten around him in response to the alien conditions. In Upsilon Aquarius, he had leapt into a vacuum protected by nothing but the I-suit, and he’d been fine. If the hole ship assured him that he was safe from the elements, then he had no reason to doubt it.

  He walked several paces across the bony floor. The surface was hard beneath his feet but, like the walls of the chamber, perfectly smooth. There were no breaks or seams, no edges anywhere. The nearest wall sloped steeply upward, then curved over him, culminating in a domed ceiling. At the center of this was a circular depression. A forest of slender cylinders dozens of meters long hung suspended from the depression, looking like dangling tree roots. According to radar, these “roots” were solid and unmoving, showing no evidence of any degree of swaying whatsoever, regardless of the motion of the Trident around it.

  Axford and Gou Mang joined Alander outside, taking positions on either side of him.

  “So now what happens?” asked Gou Mang. Her voice rang clearly in his ears; he couldn’t tell if it came through the air across the distance between them or if there was some sort of linkup with the I-suits. “Is this a visitor’s lounge or a holding cell?”

  He took another look around but didn’t answer, assuming that she hadn’t really expected one. Meanwhile, Axford had wandered off to examine the rising curve of the wall.

  “Is anyone here?” Alander called. There was no reply, but he couldn’t help the feeling that they were being watched. “Hello!”

  There was a tearing sound, as though the air around them had been ripped aside, and abruptly he found himself face-to-face with a gray sphere half as wide across as he was tall, floating in the air four meters away from him. He jumped back a step in alarm, as did Gou Mang. The side of the sphere facing him was etched with deep gouges in an intricate but apparently random pattern.

  “Hello,” it said, and promptly disappeared.

  Axford looked up sharply. “What was that?”

  Gou Mang had a hand on her chest and was looking around wildly. “Never mind that! Where the hell did it go?”

  “Are you okay out there?” asked Sol from Eledone. The hole ship was hanging safely in the distance like a milky soap bubble.

  “You saw it, too?” asked Alander.

  “Very clearly. Radar picked it up, so it wasn’t an illusion. Eledone thinks it’s hollow.”

  “Is it still here?” asked Axford. “Hidden perhaps?”

  “No. According to the information we have, it’s definitely gone.”

  “So what’s the point of saying hello and then vanishing like that?” asked Gou Mang.

  Axford chuckled uneasily. “Maybe we frightened it when—”

  He called out in alarm as the thing reappeared as suddenly as it had before—and in exactly the same spot. All three jumped back from the mysterious sphere.

  “I desire to communicate,” it said. Its scarred face rotated once, as though turning to look at them in turn.

  “Okay,” said Alander, taking a deep breath to steady his pounding heart. “But what’s your name, first? And who sent—?”

  With the same tearing sound as before, the sphere disappeared again.

  “What the—?” Gou Mang looked around, wide-eyed and confused. “Where the fuck has it gone now?”

  Alander shook his head, casting his gaze around also. Then, to the chamber in general, he said: “You said you wanted to communicate!”

  “The facilitation of communication is my primary objective,” said the sphere, appearing at a point closer to him this time. Alander started again, but this time
he didn’t retreat.

  “Then why don’t you answer us?” he asked.

  It was silent for a beat, then disappeared again.

  “It’s playing with us,” said Axford.

  Alander nodded in agreement. “Either that or it’s stalling.”

  “I am conversing according to my operational parameters,” the sphere assured him, popping into existence close by his side. The gouges were deep and shadowy, possibly bottomless. He thought for an instant that he could smell iodine.

  “And what exactly are those parameters?” he asked. In the second it hesitated, Alander knew what was about to happen, so before it had a chance to disappear, he quickly tried another tack: “If you explain those parameters to us, maybe we’ll be able to communicate properly. Otherwise we might as well just give up!”

  “My parameters reflect those of my maker,” said the sphere, “as do yours.”

  “Who is your maker?” asked Gou Mang.

  The sphere didn’t respond, and as it disappeared for the fourth time, Alander thought he might be beginning to understand.

  “We are copies of our original,” he said. “We are flawed, but we function well enough.”

  The sphere returned. “I represent an aspect of my higher self—one of many dispatched to facilitate various duties.”

  “I’m going to assume, then, that everything we say is being reported back to that higher self.”

  “All data is collated and analyzed for meaning.”

  An interesting way of putting it, Alander thought. He nodded. “My name is Peter Alander.”

  “I am called the Asteroid.”

  “The Asteroid?” Gou Mang asked. “What sort of name is that?”

  The sphere rotated as though to look at her, then disappeared.

  Axford laughed out loud. “Good work, Peter. I think we’re finally getting somewhere.”

  Gou Mang looked suspiciously between them. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Asteroid only responds to statements,” Alander explained. “Specifically, statements about us that it can reciprocate about itself. It ignores questions.”