Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  * * *

  Sol uploaded the change of plans the moment Thor arrived in the secondary dock. Thor wasn’t happy about it.

  “This is bullshit, Sol,” she said, trying to keep a lid on her annoyance but failing. “I didn’t come all this way to baby-sit.”

  “Try to think of the bigger picture, Thor.” The original Hatzis’s voice was placating. “It makes more sense this way.”

  Thor glowered at the image that came with the words via conSense. The Caryl Hatzis who had survived Sol had done so with a grace her UNESSPRO engrams had never known. She was slimmer, her skeleton was better structured, and she carried herself with confidence. Compared to the circus freak body Thor had been decanted into, she looked like perfection, damn her.

  But envy aside, Sol was right. It made sense that she should go with Alander. It also made sense that she be mobile in the same way he was. It was just her bad luck that she had drawn the short straw.

  “No word from Athena yet?” she asked, deliberately moving on from the subject. Sol had told her about the message they’d received from Head of Hydras on her arrival. She hadn’t heard the transmission from the dying colony while in transit.

  “Gou Mang should be there soon,” said Sol. “Before you leave, why not wait with me over here for news? Then, if we do need to broadcast instructions, you can make a detour along the way.”

  With the lack of anything better to do, Thor accepted Sol’s invitation and made her way from her own hole ship to Arachne.

  The Sothis habitat was spacious and airy compared to the underground structures her crewmates were building on their colony world. Thor was mainly ocean, apart from two diamond-shaped continents and a smattering of islands. The storms were ferocious. She had thought she might welcome Sothis’s arid bleakness, but she was already finding herself missing the distant howl of the wind and moisture in the air. Here the air smelled of nothing but mummification.

  Arachne was identical to the vessel she had flown from HD92719. It had the same cockpit interior, right down to its smell. The AI, when it spoke, had the same voice. She experienced an odd feeling of jamais vu as she walked through the airlock to find someone different there, as though returning to a home she now found unfamiliar. Her original was sitting on the couch in exactly the same pose as the image she’d seen in conSense.

  She looks like a queen waiting to receive guests, Thor thought, resisting an urge to genuflect.

  “So, where is Peter?” she asked.

  “Getting ready,” replied Sol.

  Thor frowned. “Packing? What does he think he’s going to need?”

  “He places great importance on his physicality. It anchors him. I find it simpler to indulge him than to fight him in this instance.”

  Thor snorted a slight laugh and shook her head. “I remember him from entrainment camp,” she said. “They indulged him there, too. He was their favorite son, their star pupil. He could have gotten away with murder if he’d wanted to.”

  “I think you’ll find he’s different now,” said Sol. Her eyes were gray, almost disturbingly human-looking. There was no hint at all of the furious processing taking place behind them. “Besides, we must be tolerant. He just lost his only active copy, and we need him on our side.”

  “Not as much as we used to,” she said. “The Gifts have shown they’re prepared to talk to others, now.”

  “Yes, but only in the absence of Peter,” Sol returned, admiring her own copy’s narrow-mindedness. Alander was a hero, at the very least, for getting off a warning in time.

  “The contact for your mission was Donald Schievenin. He was also the UNESSPRO spy, right?”

  Thor nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “But Peter...?”

  “Quiet. He’s coming.”

  Sol stood as Alander’s artificial body walked up the access ramp and into the cockpit.

  Thor’s body was a match for his in size—both dwarfed her original—but hers had retained the XY body type that was a hangover of the artificial genome’s male origin.

  Some effort had been made to sculpt the final result into forms resembling their original shapes, but they had ended up with the same eye and skin color. They looked to Thor like brother and sister. Frankenstein’s twins, she thought wryly.

  “Hello, Caryl,” he said, shaking her hand. Her name sounded oddly out of context with her original standing beside her. “Welcome to Sothis.”

  She nodded stiffly. “Thank you, Peter.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” said Sol, “he’s not happy you’re going either.”

  Alander looked as unnerved as she felt by the admission. “Let’s just say,” he said, “I don’t like last-minute changes of plans.”

  “You’ve had hours to get used to it, Peter,” said Sol. “And since when have any of our plans ever been written in stone? Like you said earlier, the Starfish force us to be flexible.”

  “Not just the Starfish.”

  “All right. The Spinners, too. We need a better idea of where they are as much as we need to stay alive.”

  “Agreed. If that was your only motive for sending me away, maybe I’d trust you.”

  Thor felt as though she had walked into the middle of an argument. “Fuck that,” she said. “Is it going to be like this all the way to Groombridge?”

  He turned his attention to her. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll behave. It’s not you I have a problem with. Not yet, anyway.”

  She was about to tell him precisely what he could do with his attitude when Arachne began to vibrate with the ringing tones of an ftl message.

  The cockpit fell silent as all three stopped their bickering to listen to the transmission the hole ship was about to relay.

  “This is Gou Mang in Head of Hydrus,” the message began. “Athena is dead. I repeat: Athena is dead. The gifts are down, and the Michel Mayor is gone. There are no signs of surface life, no observatory beacons—nothing.

  Not even a death marker. Everything’s just... dead.”

  Gou Mang hesitated, and Thor heard all manner of unspoken tension in the silence. What is it like to see a colony destroyed? she wondered. Alander had seen it, as had Sol. Sol had witnessed all of that and more! The destruction of Earth during the Spike, then the destruction of its magnificent remnants by aliens—

  Gou Mang finally came back with: “There’s nothing we can do here. The Starfish can’t be too far away, either, so I’m getting out of here in case the fuckers home in on this transmission and come back to clean up.”

  The transmission ended there, but the silence in Arachne extended until Sol let out a heavy and troubled sigh. It was only then that Thor realized she, too, had been holding her breath.

  “That’s it, Thor,” said Sol sullenly. “We have visual confirmation: the Starfish have changed their tactics.”

  “What about the missing marker?” asked Alander. “Could that be significant?”

  They both stared incredulously at him. His concern for the marker seemed trivial, given what they had just learned. Then again, she thought, perhaps it was easier to focus on something like that than the death of an entire colony.

  “I don’t know, Peter,” said Sol, coming around the cockpit and putting the couch between them. “Maybe Gou Mang arrived too early.” She shrugged. “The most important thing is still to plot the progression of the Spinners. We have enough hole ships now to continue surveying the systems around us. We can afford one to jump ahead, to see how far the leading edge is from us. If we’re going to warn the Spinners about what’s going on, then we have to know at least roughly where they are.”

  “Especially if the Starfish are starting to eat into us from behind.” Alander ran a hand across his eyes.

  He was tired, stressed, that much was obvious. Was he unstable, too? Thor didn’t like the idea of spending a week or two cooped up in a hole ship cockpit with someone constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But then, her original had done it
and survived, so she figured she could also. Perhaps it would become some kind of rite of passage that every version of Hatzis would one day have to endure.

  “The sooner we get started, the better,” she said, more in response to her train of thought than anything else. “I’m ready whenever you are, Peter.”

  He nodded once. “Then let’s get this over with,” he said, turning and walking out of Arachne without looking back.

  Thor tore her eyes from his receding back to look over to her original. “Is he always this charming?”

  Sol shrugged slightly. “And then some,” she said.

  Thor extended her hand, and Sol took it gently in hers. The contrast of olive artificial skin and pale human flesh was shocking, as was the discrepancy in size between their limbs.

  I’m a freak, Thor mused as she followed Alander to her colony’s hole ship. And she’s a goddess, in more ways than one.

  1.1.3

  Six days later, Alander was regretting his promise to behave. As Pearl relocated without incident for the twentieth time that week, in a system classified as AC +48 1595-89, he found himself wishing for an excuse to start an argument. It would certainly have helped the time pass.

  AC +48 1595-89 consisted of a G-type star corresponding almost precisely to Sol, right down to the sunspots creeping across its face, plus seven planets occupying various positions along the spectrum between rock and hydrogen. There was a fat gas giant with rings; there were numerous moons; there was an asteroid belt and a cometary halo; there were deserts and clouds and ice; there was an Earth-like world in the habitable zone. But there was no sign of the mission sent to study it.

  Pearl, like every hole ship, was equipped with standard radio and laser broadcast equipment. Alander scrolled through the visual data while Hatzis went through the motions of trying to hail the mission.

  “This is Caryl Hatzis of UNESSPRO Mission 154, & V. Krasnikov, hailing UNESSPRO Mission 707. Frank Shu, do you read me? This is UNESSPRO Mission 154 hailing Mission 707. If you can hear me, Vince, please respond.”

  Vince Mohler was the civilian mission supervisor of Mission 707, in charge of operations once the survey vessel had arrived in-system. He had also been in charge of the Paul Davies, one of the first successful missions Alander and Hatzis had found following the destruction of Adrasteia. They had encountered him in various roles in a number of other systems as well. It was hard to imagine him being dead, let alone feel any sense of loss, when he was still noticeably active in so many places.

  That was the problem, Alander thought. There might be hundreds of missions left, each with thirty crewmembers, but all those people were really just the same sixty people copied over and over again. He was beginning to feel suffocated, one of the very few singular people left. With the death of his sole remaining stable copy in the Head of Hydras, he was alone again. Would anyone miss me if I died, too?

  “No sign of any gifts,” he said, shaking the thought. Once he would have lingered over the data coming in from the planets in the system, but he was becoming desensitized to the thrill of exploration. He had seen dozens of similar systems in the previous weeks, and many of them had been dead, like this one. AC +48 1595-89 was a time waster. It would be catalogued with the others; its suitability for future colonists would be noted, so Hatzis and her supporters would have somewhere to live when the settlement faction got their way; the failure of the mission would be a footnote added somewhere at the bottom of the file. Then he could move on.

  “Do you think we should bring Pearl in closer?” Hatzis interrupted her broadcast to look at the screen.

  “I don’t see the point,” replied Alander. “There’s no one here.”

  “What about the Starfish?” she asked. “Any evidence of visitation?”

  Alander shook his head slowly as he examined the data. “No debris, no hot spots, no suspicious gas clouds, no death marker.”

  “Damn it,” she said, then cycled through the message one more time before resigning herself to the fact that there was no one around to hear the message anyway.

  He could understand her frustration. The exploratory mission to the Spinner front had generated ambivalent data at best. Pearl’s first two ports of call, near neighbors Groombridge 1830 and 61 Ursa Major, had contained successful missions untouched by either Spinners or Starfish. Alander and Hatzis had ejected messenger buoys in each system, microsatellites designed to bring the UNESSPRO missions up to date without requiring Pearl to stick around too long. From there, Pearl took them to numerous other systems along the projected front. Many of them had either failed from senescence or simply failed to arrive altogether, including those sent to Tau Ceti, BD+14 2889, Altair, Mufrid, and a high-profile mission sent to Castor and Pollux. Half of the double mission to Procyon and Luyten’s Star had succeeded, and it had been contacted by the Spinners. Gamma Serpens and BD+14 2621 were likewise Spinner drops, thankfully caught in time before they brought the Starfish down upon themselves. Apart from those few active colonies, though, there was just an automated monitoring station around Barnard’s Star to report. Alander doubted any of it would help pin down the Spinners’ progress with much greater accuracy than they already knew.

  He performed a quick mental calculation.

  “We have an hour to the next transmission,” he said. “I suggest we wait to hear it, send our own update along with the usual warning, then get the hell out of here.”

  “In that case, we might as well spend the time collecting as much data as we can.” She shrugged. “Has to be better than sitting around twiddling our thumbs, right?”

  Alander didn’t argue; it was her call. They had spent their time in the hole ship so far trying their best to maintain both distance and politeness. He didn’t know what her original had told her back on Sothis, but she hadn’t brought up the issue of colonization even once, and he had no intentions of rocking the boat now. Not until he’d come up with an alternative, anyway.

  He found himself missing his copy from Athena more than he had expected to. They had met on only a couple of occasions, but that had been enough to cement their relationship. The same but different, they had both struggled with Overseer processing problems and were trying to keep their thoughts together as best they could. Their plans to discuss Sol’s intention in more detail had been put to a dramatic end by the Starfish, and Alander sometimes wondered if his other self had experienced any blinding revelations at the last moment, if suddenly everything had become clear.

  Hatzis instructed Pearl to take them to a medium polar orbit around the fourth planet and, moments later, the hole ship had relocated smoothly to this location. They performed a cursory sweep for transmissions of any kind from their new position but quickly gave it up for a lost cause. Instead, they concentrated on gathering data about the planet, adding it to the many other examples they had of worlds that might one day be capable of supporting human life.

  The globe was unevenly split between land and sea, with only a few small oceans in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere was richly vegetated, relying on deep reserves of groundwater to preserve the water cycle. They christened it Ea, a Babylonian deity whose realm had been the sweetwater ocean under the Earth. It seemed appropriate, Alander felt, as did claiming it in the name of Sol, rather than either of the UNESSPRO missions. Alander didn’t know when there would next be an active government residing in the human home system, but he wasn’t prepared to give up on the idea just yet.

  The familiar ringing of the ftl communicator brought an end to their brief survey of the planet. The broadcast was scheduled to coincide with midday on Sothis, although it might be broadcast from anywhere, and more often than not, it contained little of interest to their mission. But they listened to it when they could, anyway, to see if anything had changed.

  Caryl Hatzis, the voice of hope for many, began the transmission with her usual spiel: “This is an open broadcast from McKenzie Base, Sirius, to all UNESSPRO missions within range of this transmitter. Do
not reply until you have read the entire contents of this message. We are the sole survivors of the human race, and we are united by the goal of rebuilding. Our primary task at the moment is to locate those colonies that have survived and been contacted by the alien race known as the Spinners. All life is precious. All resources are valuable. To ensure that nothing else is lost, we must cooperate in this venture—even if it is to be our last.”

  There followed the standard introductions to new colonies that might have received the gifts but not been contacted by other survivors, warning them not to use their communicators except from their hole ships in positions well away from their home systems. After that, there was the plea to both Spinner and Starfish, requesting the opening of diplomatic channels as a matter of some urgency. Until either of the aliens talked to the humans whose paths they were so dramatically crossing, there was little the survivors could do to prevent the ongoing catastrophes. The long-term goal for all species was peaceful coexistence within human-surveyed space.

  Attached to the message were data files containing the current state of the human survivor network. Alander glanced at it and saw that their last update had been included, along with data gathered from the fringes of surveyed space, where other missions were exploring. A handful of new Spinner drops were also highlighted. Starfish attacks were noted, too, as was their change of tactics, although not in any great detail. A careful perusal of the latest attacks suggested that three more systems had fallen to surprise invasions, one of them the mission found in Beta Hydras, the Carl Sagan, yet there was no talk about evacuation. Alander wondered if Hatzis was trying to play down the new development in order to further her own plans or whether she genuinely wanted to avoid an overreaction.

  Also embedded in the data was something intended specifically for them: “We have a message from Groombridge saying that the Spinners arrived two days after you left. The colony on Perendi did everything your messenger buoy told them to do, and everything went smoothly. Yesterday, though, they were buzzed by one of the anomalies and managed to capture an image. See for yourself, but I think it looks like one of our friends from Varuna.”