by Rick Partlow
Even seen from this far away, its colors and lines simulated by the computer, it was still a monster out of a nightmare, a force of nature, unstoppable, implacable. The electromagnetic fields stretched to either side and ahead, simulated visually by the computer with glowing parabolas of neon yellow hundreds of times the size of the ship itself. The drive was a star, shining steadily, accelerating constantly, bound only by magnetic fields nearly as strong as the ones feeding it interstellar hydrogen.
“It’s too close,” Devon had murmured, pulling up an interactive hologram and scrolling through the readings one at a time. When she’d looked up, her eyes had been wide and the fear in them clenched at Sam’s guts. “It’s increased acceleration since the last reading at Proxima Centauri.”
“When it skimmed the star,” Priscilla had let the realization out in a breath. “It used the extra fuel to increase boost.”
“How long?” Sam had asked, feeling the bottom drop out of the world in a way that had nothing to do with the microgravity.
“If I’m reading this right,” she’d said, “less than five hundred hours.” A grim shake of her head. “Less than that before the electromagnetic fields begin stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.”
Sam hadn’t been able to speak, hadn’t known what to say. But Priscilla had.
“Get us to Mars, Captain. As fast as you can.”
***
Sam wanted to move, wanted to find a place they could stand inconspicuous, out of the way. But Priscilla seemed perfectly happy to stand in the middle of the street and let the intricate formations of Martians flow around her, her arms folded across her chest.
“Are you going to tell me what exactly we’re doing here?” he wondered. Irrationally, he wished for a gun, even though he knew on an intellectual level none of these people meant him ill. “I mean, I know you think we’ll find answers here, but how? The Martians, or the Martian if you’re right about them all being part of a collective conscious, might not know any more about this than your average Earther.”
“Maybe, but think about this, Sam.” Her face was intent, focused. He suspected she’d latched onto the problem to avoid having to deal with losing Mother, but he hadn’t pressed the issue. “The probes that terraformed Earth were launched from Mars, so whatever happened in this system happened here first. The civilization here has had longer to grow than the one on Earth, maybe thousands of years more. If they built those probes, they didn’t forget what happened the way the people on Earth did.”
A thin smile passed across her face.
“Whatever happens, Sam,” she told him, “don’t panic.”
He was about to ask her why he would panic when she reached out and grabbed the arm of the closest passer-by, a plain-faced woman with her long, brown hair tied into a simple pony-tail. The woman halted in mid-step as if it had been her idea to stop in the first place, her face pleasantly neutral.
“Do you require assistance from the Martian Collective?” the woman asked her.
“What,” Priscilla asked, “is your name?”
Sam winced, as if in expectation of a blow. You did not ask a Martian personal questions. It was such a cardinal rule, he’d never even heard what the consequences would be. People just didn’t do it.
The woman’s face lost the pleasant neutrality and took on an expression of cold harshness. She tried to jerk her arm free of Priscilla’s grasp but couldn’t; Pris was damned strong for her size.
“You brought life back to Earth,” she said, putting her face in the woman’s, nearly nose to nose. “Earth was a lifeless rock, her atmosphere stripped away, and the probes that terraformed her came from you.”
“Um, Pris…,” Sam began.
All around them, up and down the main street of Tarshish’s city center, all through the central square, the carefully orchestrated ballet of the Martians had ceased. Thousands of people, all dressed more or less alike, all cut from the same mold, all adults with not a single child nor an elderly person, stopped in their tracks and faced Sam and Priscilla.
“You brought life back to Earth, and something brought life to you,” Pris insisted. “And the only thing around back then that could have done it was a Gaia probe. You were the first, weren’t you? You were the first Gaia probe, launched before Mother, launched just to make sure everything worked. But who are you? Whose personality did they base the AI on?” She grabbed the woman by the other arm and pulled her around to face her. “What is your name?”
Sam’s eyes flickered back and forth between Pris and the throng of Martians advancing towards them. They walked in step, almost a march, closing in like a swarm of bees converging on a threat to the hive. He felt sweat beading on his forehead; he really wanted that fucking gun now.
“You created the Earth that now is!” Priscilla was yelling now, face red with anger and frustration. “How can you let one of your children kill all the others?”
“Let go of me.”
Sam blinked. The Martian woman had referred to herself in the first person, which was unprecedented as far as he knew.
“Tell me, damn it!” Pris screamed at her, shaking her back and forth. “Tell me!”
The crowd was closer now, only thirty meters or so, all moving as one, a tide rising to swallow them up.
“What! Is! Your! Name!”
The woman straightened and Priscilla was thrown backwards, flying three meters through the air, not as if she’d been struck but more like she’d touched a live electrical connection. She hit on her shoulders, the breath wheezing out of her, her face suddenly pale and slack, eyes wide. Sam rushed to her side, pulling her up to a seated position, his arm around her shoulders, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off of the Martian.
The woman’s arms were down at her sides, hands open, fingers splayed. Her feet were shoulder-width apart, her head tilted backwards, eyes and mouth agape as if she were screaming silently. Every other Martian around them, hundreds, maybe thousands had stiffened into the same position, all moving as one, the coordinated bits of the same body.
They spoke. The voice came from each of them at once, the same voice, the same words, the same intonation, and it crashed off the buildings like a wave against the rocks, buffeting Sam with the psychic force of it. Every Martian on this whole world spoke as one---he knew it, could feel it deep in his gut.
“My name,” they said, is Charles Dauphin.”
Sam had been up on one knee, cradling Priscilla. He lost his balance, fell on his rump, staring at the massed avatars of the Martian Collective, every one of them staring back with the same eyes, the same persona, the same soul. Priscilla rose to a crouch beside him, her stance cautious but the expression on her face triumphant.
“You knew?” He hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but he realized it did.
“No.” She showed no offense at the question. “I just had an…intuition. It makes sense though. The Charles Dauphin we saw in the recording at the library wasn’t just interested in the survival of the human species, he was interested in the survival of Charles Dauphin. I could see it in his eyes, the fervent belief that a universe without him in it was a poorer one.”
“Wouldn’t it have been?” It was the woman speaking this time, the others falling silent but still mirroring her stance, the set of her face. “Earth would have been a sterile wasteland, Mars lifeless. All humanity would have been erased from the universe.”
Sam clambered to his feet, backing up as the woman approached, but Pris simply stood, holding her ground.
“And what of the life you erased with the probes?” Priscilla demanded, her face hardening into something of the anger he’d seen in Mother before the end. “Are they better for you having lived?”
Sam half-expected the thing that had once been Charles Dauphin to deny it, to claim ignorance. Then he recalled the Earther religion, with its infallible God…
“Had they been fit to survive,” the Collective asserted, the woman’s face twisting with disdain along with
thousands of others, “they would have destroyed the probe rather than the other way around.”
“Is that how you feel about the Earth you re-created?” Sam asked, surprised at his own boldness and still very conscious of the mass of supposed humanity gathered around them. “Is that why you haven’t done anything to help them?”
“I’ve done more than my part. More than they deserved. When the time came for action, when no one else would do what had to be done, I acted.” The woman the Collective was using as a mouthpiece sniffed, head cocked back with disdain. “I created them with the same initiative and intelligence their first God did; it’s their problem now.”
“Your creation bears the stain of your original sin, Father.” Priscilla’s voice burned with cold fire and Sam thought he could see someone else’s visage through her face, someone who looked very much like Mother. “The things you made me…made all your children do in your name…they had consequences.”
The thought patterns of Charles Dauphin peered closely through the plain-looking woman’s dark eyes and suddenly there was a spark of recognition.
“Yes,” she hissed slowly. “You do look like her.” She smiled. “Are you one of hers?”
“I am part of Mother,” Priscilla confirmed, back straight with pride. “And she is part of me, though I have grown beyond her.”
“Who was Mother to you?” Sam dared to ask, wanting to know for Priscilla’s sake more than his own curiosity.
“I decided early on,” Dauphin told him, “that to increase stability in the sentient systems of the Gaia probe, I had to duplicate the mental matrix, the consciousness if you will, from a living person. I obviously tried first with myself on this test run to Mars, but I chose a different pattern for the Gaia probe.” A fond smile. “My daughter…Priscilla.”
“And your daughter, unlike you,” Pris bit off the words, “had a conscience. What you made her do drove her insane. She built that ramship, that weapon, to destroy the last of your handiwork, in revenge.”
That seemed to surprise Dauphin, at last, and it seemed like a miracle to Sam. How could God be surprised? The woman’s shoulders went slack for a moment, and all the others around them did the same, struck dumb.
“I…,” the woman stuttered with Dauphin’s voice. “I should talk to her. Maybe I could make her understand…”
“She committed suicide. Not just the primary node on Aphrodite…she sent out signals to all the secondary copies of her at the other colonies.” Pris shook her head. “They’re all gone.”
The Martian woman actually staggered back a step, the sound a Lambeg drumbeat on the pavement as it was echoed in hundreds of other identical steps. Thousands of mouths gasped in a breath, moaning softly like the howl of a wolf from across a valley.
“I built all this for her,” Charles Dauphin insisted, a plaintive note to his voice. He seemed suddenly un-godlike, as if he’d actually once been human. “Couldn’t she see that? Why would she do this without giving me a chance to explain?”
“If you want to make things right with your daughter,” Sam said, focusing on the woman and trying to ignore the others, “you have one last chance.” He pointed at Priscilla. “She is the last of Mother, all that’s left of your daughter. She is Priscilla. Make your penance to her.”
The Martian Collective stared at him, resentment, anger, annoyance all playing across their faces until finally, there was some level of acceptance.
“Very well, daughter,” Charles Dauphin said, punctuating the words with a heavy sigh. “What would you have me do?”
“I want you to save them, Father,” Pris told him, gesturing upward. “I want you to save your children.”
The woman followed the gesture with her eyes, gazing up into the auburn sky with a face more godlike and less human, arms spread. Something happened.
Later, Sam wouldn’t be able to describe it, wouldn’t have been able to put it into words. He’d been on Mars, and then he wasn’t. He was hanging in space, somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter, though how he knew that he’d never be sure. Everything around him was blackness, and yet Priscilla was there and so was Charles Dauphin…except the man was as he’d appeared in the library video, no longer the random woman off the streets of Tarshish.
And there was gravity. Not the gravity of Mars, where he always felt as if a too-strong step would send him flying into the air, nor even the gravity of Aphrodite or Hephaestus, but the just slightly less than homelike gravity of Earth.
“Is this…,” he stuttered, reaching out for Priscilla’s hand and grabbing it tightly. “Is this real or just in my mind?”
“You say that,” Charles Dauphin answered with a hint of amusement, “as if there’s a difference.”
He could feel Priscilla’s hand. He concentrated on that reality, on her presence and tried to center himself, perceive his surroundings.
“There it is,” she said, and he still wasn’t sure if the voice was in his ears or in his mind, but he saw it as well, the ramship, suddenly looming ahead of them.
It was a world, gleaming in the light of its own sun, awash with the golden sparkling halo of electromagnetic interactions; it was one of the most beautiful things Sam had ever seen. And one of the most terrible.
“How magnificent,” Dauphin murmured with the appreciation of a proud father. “It would be such a sight to watch it merge with the Earth, to see something never before experienced in the history of the universe…”
“Father.” Priscilla’s voice was stern, admonishing.
Dauphin sighed again.
“Yes, yes.”
Sam had no sensation of movement, yet he was somewhere else, some impossible place where he could see Mars as clearly as if he were approaching orbital insertion in the Raven, yet could also observe the ramship, even though it was millions of kilometers away, past the orbit of Jupiter.
Something happened to Mars, as if its image wavered, distorted…glowed. An aura surrounded the entire world, a color he shouldn’t have been able to discern with human eyes and yet he could. It shimmered and flexed, a living thing…and then it stretched and warped and extended like a pseudopod from an amoeba.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, unable to help himself.
“Gravimetic energy,” Dauphin replied, sniffing in disdain as if he thought Sam was a simpleton for not knowing.
“Like a Transition Drive?”
“Exactly like a Transition Drive, Captain Avalon. How else do you think a planet like Mars, with a cold core and no magnetic field, could be remade into a living world?” Dauphin’s tone was didactic, similar to the one he’d used in the recording they’d watched at the library. “Nanites tunneled underground, a generation at a time, finally assembling a fusion reactor as big as the core had been, and surrounding it with gravimetic field generators. I used them to build a home for myself, where I could watch the progress of my children…but they are such handy devices, aren’t they?”
The aura, which seemed to have settled on a color Sam’s mind insisted was magenta, reached out across space, across millions of kilometers. The field wasn’t moving through space, he knew that. The image was an illustration, a visual aid; the field was moving past space, or perhaps beneath it. There was no exact word; there couldn’t be in any human language because human languages had developed for three dimensions of space and one of time.
When it reached the ramship, it seemed to pause, to hang in place for just a moment before it began to expand into a disc. At the center of that disc was a hole, and inside that hole were stars.
The ramship passed through and was gone, as if it had never existed.
Sam let go a breath he’d been holding, nearly falling over in this place which shouldn’t have gravity, leaning against Priscilla.
“You didn’t send it to Transition Space,” she said, still staring at the stars.
“No.” Dauphin shook his head. “It was too beautiful, too masterful a creation. I created a gateway into intergalactic space. It can roam
free there, for hundreds of thousands of years.”
He regarded Priscilla evenly and she returned the look with a smile.
“I hope this will make you think better of me, daughter. It’s all I can do.”
Between eyeblinks, they were back on Mars, back in Tarshish, still standing in the street, surrounded by the Collective. Sam could have believed he’d imagined the whole thing, except he still had his arm around Pris, the way he had when they’d been…wherever they’d been.
The woman faced them, expressionless once again.
“You must leave now,” the Collective said in their perfect chorus, echoes of the words arriving microseconds later from those further away, limited by the speed of sound. “And if you wish your kind to be welcome here again, none of them must ever know what happened today.”
Then, slowly and deliberately, the Martians began to scatter back to their chores, walking their own paths to each individual task, falling back into the well-orchestrated ballet of motion. Sam Avalon stared at them, open-mouthed, his brain still lost in a fog of unreality.
“Is it…,” he stammered. “Is it really over?”
Priscilla shook her head, leaning into him.
“Earth is saved,” she corrected him. “But I don’t know if it’s over. Honestly, Sam, I don’t even know where the hell we can go now.”
Chapter Thirty
Snow caressed Telia Proctor’s cheek with the melancholy touch of an old lover. She turned her face upward and drank in the chill of the first days of winter, trying to remember the last time she’d felt the snow crunching under her boots. Then she knew. Her mother had been walking her to the spaceport, saying goodbye. She’d been leaving for Guardian training, taking the last shuttle out on a February evening.
This wasn’t Grayson, but it was a spaceport, and Capital City had its own share of December snows. The cityscape seemed less looming and ominous under the curtain of the winter storm, its edges softened, its colors muted against the cloudy morning sky. It seemed…peaceful, for the first time in a long time.