Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Someone might have screwed around with the system for a while afterward, but she couldn’t be sure about that, either.

  “So what now?”

  Everything was back to normal, no different than it had been a month ago.

  Except for the Linde.

  The silence from the mother ship was complete. No echoes. No stray beacons. No engine flashes.

  “Shit.” She stopped pacing and worried at a virtual hangnail. The only way to confirm what had happened was to get closer, which she was already doing. In twenty days, whether she wanted to or not, she would flash across the system at a sizable percentage of the speed of light. If there was anything there, she would see it clearly enough. But it might also see her, and that was the problem.

  She had a bad feeling that had nothing whatsoever to do with genes. But what was she supposed to do? Her options were limited. If she was wrong about her gut feeling and she went out of her way to act on it, what was the worst that could happen? She might feel foolish. Whereas if she ignored her gut feeling, then whatever killed the Linde and her friends might kill her also.

  The thought was a sobering one and made the argument pretty clear cut, from her point of view. No one else had to know if she was wrong. And if she was right, she would still be alive.

  Simple.

  The problem was that the only way to be sure she wouldn’t be noticed was to switch herself off.

  She thought back to her days on Earth spent training for her mission to the stars. In reality, she was going on many missions at once, since she consisted of over 200 duplicates all kitted up in nearly identical probe vessels, each craft little more than engines with instrument packages attached. While the main missions would go directly to the target systems, the various versions of herself would make a flyby of the numerous smaller and failed stars along the way, surveying brown and white dwarfs, protostars, and stellar remnants, seeking out curiosities rather than Sol-like environments. She was proud to have been chosen for these missions, since they were the dangerous ones—both physically and psychologically. She would be alone for the entire time, completely out of contact with Earth and her crewmates. If something went wrong, there would be no one to help her.

  That thought had never bothered her before. She had learned to rely on herself and was as independent as a person could be. In the end, on this particular mission, she had come to like it—being alone on the new frontiers, seeing things no one else would see. The thought of going back had in fact filled her with a kind of dread. Once the novelty of watching sunsets with Peter wore off on Jian Lao, what would she have to do?

  Risking suicide wasn’t something she’d planned, though. Shutting herself down certainly hadn’t been on the agenda. She could build a simple molecular timer and switch that would power herself back up again, but nothing was perfectly reliable. What if it failed to restart the systems? What would happen to her then? The question was meaningless. Frozen in time like an old photo, doomed to decay into stardust, she would no longer exist. She would never even know what had happened to her. But who was she, anyway? The solo missions incorporated three hard copies of the driving personality into the hardframe, in case of degradation or damage, and she knew that at least one of hers had been compromised in the past. At best she was a piecemeal version of herself; at worst, a completely new template seamlessly taking over where the old one had left off. Not even her memories of life before the program were really hers in the first place.

  Try as she might, whichever way she looked at it, she could come up with no reasonable argument against disconnection. She didn’t believe in God, so the idea of suicide certainly didn’t pose any moral dilemma for her. And on the balance of things, surely it was better to go that way than at the hands of some interstellar murderer.

  And that was that.

  Decided, she didn’t waste any more time. She started immediately with a detailed inventory of the Chung-5’s system and resources. Although she had left Sol sixty-seven years earlier, relativity meant that the probe had only aged about forty. (She herself had aged barely a year, which made it hard to remember, sometimes, how long it had actually been.) Radiation had damaged a thousand little things in those forty years, and she needed everything to be working when she shut herself down.

  What she could do without, she switched off, concentrating all her resources on several key areas and letting the rest lie dormant. Nanorepair systems could look at those later. If the engines never started again, that was a fair trade to ensure that she didn’t die.

  With eighteen days to go to Jian Lao, she retracted the wide-array gain antennae that doubled as the probe’s transmitter and receiver, along with the baseline dishes. She converted their mass to an extra layer of porous material around the probe and radically restructured the interior. When she finished, the most precious parts of the probe were protected from the outside by more material shielding than before. Nothing would stop a direct hit, but this would take some of the sting out of turning off the magnetic deflectors. She wanted be as sure as she could be that she wouldn’t be torn apart on the way through the system.

  Next, in one randomly chosen corner of the probe’s new shell, she hollowed out a small crater, little more than a pockmark on its rugged, gray surface. At the bottom of the crater, she placed a small camera, the design for which she had dredged out of the UNESSPRO archives. Its non-reflective lens, metal shutter, and silver halide film seemed almost ludicrously obsolete compared to the instruments the probe had once possessed, but she didn’t want to use chips or CCD arrays. Anything more than dead matter might give her away. A mechanical trigger would activate the camera at key points in the coming days. The pictures it took would be her only record of the probe’s journey through pi-1 Ursa Major.

  She gave the probe a slight tumble. This, combined with its irregular shape, low density, and lack of electrical activity, would, she hoped, convince a casual observer that the Chung-5 was a perfectly ordinary lump of rock drifting through from out system. She converted the outlets of the thrusters when the tumble was established and added its mass to the shielding, thinking, What if I’m wrong? What if I’m being paranoid? I could be burying myself alive for nothing!

  But there was no point going down that path again. Such a train of thought was counterproductive. For peace of mind, she had to assume that she was being prudent. If she woke up and viewed the pictures and found nothing out of the ordinary, then she could call herself foolish and paranoid. She could laugh about it later, when it was over.

  Once her disguise was in place, there was only one thing left to do.

  Before that, though, she took a moment to say goodbye to the stars.

  Pi-1 Ursa Major was growing brighter every day and easily outshone the brightest of its neighbors. If that was the last thing she ever saw, she didn’t really have any right to complain. At least she had a chance of surviving, unlike the crew of the Andrei Linde. And if she did survive, the universe was her oyster. Originally, she had planned to keep going to Muscida, the next major star out from Sol, but her ambitions hadn’t been satisfied with that thought for long. A course change or two could take her out to rho UMA, then by a number of stars in the Hipparcos catalogue, and on her way out of the galaxy. If the probe held up—and she wasn’t really naïve enough to hope that it would, although the dream was romantic—the end of that journey promised Bode’s Nebula and the galaxies M82, NGC3077, NGC2976, IC2574, millions of light-years away.

  Although she didn’t pray as she shut herself down for the long sleep through pi-1 Ursa Major, she did express a hope to the universe in general that she might at least survive.

  For you, Peter, she thought, as darkness closed around her. For all you truth seekers. I hope we get to compare notes, one day.

  1.1

  PLANETS IN THEIR STATIONS

  2160.9.3 Standard Mission Time

  (30 July, 2163 UT)

  1.1.1

  The Head was setting with a wild profusion of purples and b
lues into the western horizon while Achernar, a brilliant blue star, watched coldly from the north. To the south auroras whipped through the upper atmosphere, humming and crackling with startling energy. Opposite the sunset, setting around the far side of Athena, was the glint of light that was all that could be seen of the Mayor; directly above that hung another speck of light: the alien installation designated Spindle Nine. In between, at the summit of a mighty chunk of rock and ice thirty kilometers high, stood Peter Alander.

  The potential extinction of his species had never concerned him less than at that precise moment.

  Athena was an unusual world—but then, he thought, they all were. In most respects—radius, mass, density, gravity, etc.—this one was up the scale from Earth. Its sun was the B3V star called Head of Hydras, bluer and more intense than Sol. Athena’s magnetic field was bombarded by all manner of radiation and particles every one of its seventeen and a half hour days, and Alander would have been dangerously exposed to the interplanetary elements so high up in the atmosphere, had he not been wearing a Spinner Immortality Suit, or I-suit, as they were increasingly being called. Several hundred kilometers to his left crouched the base of the orbital tower connecting the planet to the spindle above. Where he stood, on the highest point of the planet, was just one of several very large and very tall mountain-islands girdling the equator. But for the solar weather, Athena could have been made for skyhooks.

  The planet’s signature quirk revolved around those mountainous islands, jutting out of the surface of the planet like strange volcanic growths. Over many millions of years, the seas had evaporated into the upper atmosphere Mid deposited themselves as ice on the mountains, increasing their bulk even more. As a result, most of the planet’s water had been trapped in solid form, leaving only a thin, salty scum of an ocean behind. Life blossomed around the bases of the giant islands in strange, linear landscapes. Caught between salt and ice and separated by great distances, each coastal biozone had become home to enough wildly diverse phyla to keep a whole army of xenobiologists busy for centuries. A handful of them that had been scooped up and examined by robotic probes from the Michel Mayor had shown such unique chemistry that they would have caused a scientific revolution back home—had the Earth existed any longer, that is.

  Alander watched the sunset fade from deep purple to black. Stars were starting to poke through the growing darkness, twinkle-free in the thin air. He had seen nights fall on more than a dozen different planets, but this one beat them all for sheer splendor. The night sky was so vivid that if he stood absolutely still and tilted his head back so that all he could see were the stars, it felt as if he was actually in space.

  “You cooled off yet?” said a voice in his ear.

  He didn’t allow himself a smile. Cleo would note the expression from his bioreadings, and he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

  “This isn’t just a bad mood,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  “I realize more than you give me credit for,” she replied. “You hate being outvoted, for one.”

  “I’m glad you noticed. That’s one of the few human traits I have left.”

  “Not so few. You also hate feeling like an idiot.”

  He shivered from purely psychosomatic cold but didn’t say anything.

  “And you love a good argument for its own sake,” she went on. “You love picking fights—and I dare you to tell me otherwise!”

  He swallowed an automatic retort. “I think you’re mistaking me for Caryl Hatzis.”

  “Some people would take that as a compliment, you know.”

  “Would you?”

  He heard a faint noise from behind him and turned to see her image walking to join him across the crusty high-altitude ice pack. She wasn’t really there, being the product of a conSense illusion piped into his artificial nerve endings by the processors on the Mayor, but he would have been hard pressed to tell the difference, had she still had a physical body to compare it to. He could even hear her feet crunching in the ice as she approached.

  “You know how I voted,” she said, coming to a halt in front of him, her blond hair buffeted by the wind. She was wearing a khaki oversuit sealed at wrists and ankles; her face was exposed and caught the light of the auroras in a convincingly eerie way. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “After Adrasteia—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Peter,” she interrupted. “After Adrasteia, you don’t trust anyone. Well, that’s something you need to get over, pal. With UNESSPRO gone, there are no traitors in the system anymore. You know that. They either owned up or went psychotic. And if it’s me you’re worried about—”

  “It’s not you, Cleo,” he cut in quickly.

  “I was going to say that if it was me you’re worried about, then you can go to hell,” she said. “Because even if you didn’t already know that Otto was the rotten apple in the Michel Mayor I think I’ve proved myself a dozen times over. I’m on your side, Peter, except when you’re obviously wrong or just being an idiot.”

  He raised one hand to brush the hair out of her face. Although she was nothing more than an illusion, his fingers registered every pressure, texture, and temperature he would have expected of the real thing.

  “Am I being an idiot?”

  Her expression softened. “In the long run, no, I don’t think you are,” she said. “But things are changing too fast for the rest to focus on anything but the short term—the present. Christ, Peter, in a single day, the Spinners came and gave them gifts beyond their wildest dreams. Then they heard about the Starfish. First, they were given everything, and now they’re being told they’ve lost everything. You can’t blame them for not liking what you’ve got to say—or at least for being resistant to it. They want a future.” She paused to sigh. “Besides, I don’t think they’re even listening to what you have to say; they’re just hearing the voice of the person saying it. It’s you again: the oracle of doom and gloom. Believe me, Peter, pushing isn’t going to help.”

  He knew she was right, and she knew he knew, too. He could see it in her expression. There was no point arguing when they were both, more or less, on the same side.

  She leaned in close to put her arms around him. He wanted to hug her back, but conSense hadn’t quite perfected a convincing full-body squeeze. Her illusory warmth was enough to take some of the chill out of the brisk night wind, and he was comforted by the contact, even though part of him still thought of Lucia with regret, and probably always would.

  “This could be our home, if we let it,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by his shoulder. “We can expand the existing bases, put habitats down on the strands, build more bodies—”

  “I know how it goes, Cleo. Dig in, delve into the gifts, build up resources until we’re able to diversify, disseminate the human race across the stars.” The four Ds made perfect sense on the surface, and he felt their calling more deeply than maybe even Cleo imagined. The argument was fundamentally flawed, though; it assumed that nothing would get in the way of the dream becoming reality. “But can we do this with the Starfish still out there? Would you be prepared to take a chance on raising children here without ever really knowing whether or not they’ll be back to finish us off?”

  “Children?” She pulled away from him so she could look at his face. “Who’s talking about children?”

  “Some of them are,” he said.

  “But I’m not one of them.” She frowned. “I thought that was already established. I just want a little time to heal.”

  “I’m not denying anyone that.”

  “Yes you are, Peter. You want us to make a decision that will affect the rest of our lives. You want us to avoid settling down on the grounds that it might not be safe. But what are you offering instead? Can you tell us when it will be safe?”

  He shook his head, tight lipped.

  “I think I know what my decision will be,” she went on, “but I’m not ready to make it right now. Not yet.
I don’t want to commit myself to anything before I feel as though I can support it one hundred percent. Especially something like this, which will affect my entire future.”

  “If we have one—”

  She cut him off with a sigh. “Save the speeches for the next meeting,” she said, letting go and stepping back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She hugged herself, rubbing her arms as though cold. On another world, in another time, her lean frame, broad face, and high cheekbones would have lent her enough of a Nordic air that he might have been surprised by her apparent chill. On Athena, though, seventy light-years from the remains of Earth, at thirty below freezing, Alander was very aware that, his hypnotized nerve endings aside, he was interacting with little more than a phantom, invisible to anybody else but him.

  “If you need to talk to me about anything else,” she said, “you know where I’ll be.”

  “Thanks, Cleo,” he said, meaning it.

  She walked around him, having learned the habit of vanishing when she was out of sight so as not to disorient him. His mental state was still disturbingly fragile at times.

  “By the way,” she said at the last moment, “Caryl wants you to bring the hole ship back. There are some emissions she wants you to check out.”

  He shook his head, amazed by the woman’s arrogance. “I’m not her goddamn dogsbody, Cleo,” he said without facing her.

  “Neither am I,” she said. “Nevertheless, here we are.”

  He turned then, expecting to see her standing there smiling at him. But she had already gone, her disappearance leaving him seemingly isolated on the giant mountaintop, although in reality he was no more alone than he had been before.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he returned to where he’d left the hole ship. Apparently unaffected by gravity and whiter than the snow it hung above, the enormous spherical mass of the craft floated over a shallow rift about a hundred meters away. The black cockpit was ready for his return with the light from its open airlock now easily the brightest thing in the landscape around him.