Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “Not if you were to join us here,” said Status Quo/Mellifluous, “in our great venture.”

  “Become humanity/goel?” Alander asked, remembering the derision that Axford’s hostage had shown the idea.

  “Interspecies cooperation is the norm, here, and the Praxis has let you come this far. It is an option you should consider.”

  And Alander did consider it—very carefully. If Hatzis would agree with Radical/Provocative in calling for a permanent settlement in the wake of the Spinner/Starfish advance, Frank the Ax would undoubtedly go for the second option, of joining the ragtag fleet that were attending the superior aliens like birds picking ticks off hippopotami. That would give him time to collect resources, study the advanced technology, and gather allies for a retaliatory attack against the Starfish.

  But where do I stand? Alander wondered.

  He could see sense in both sides just as readily as he could see the faults. If they opted for Hatzis’s plan and founded a permanent settlement, the remnants of humanity would be vulnerable to outside attack for a long time to come. And if Axford had his way and they joined the Yuhl/Goel, there was a very real risk that humanity would end up exactly the same: feeding off the weak in the wake of the strong.

  “Surely there must be a third option?” he asked. “Couldn’t some of the Yuhl/Goel join with the humans who want to settle, while the rest of humanity joins the migration? I can understand that the travelers wouldn’t want to lose resources to the settlers, but with what we could bring to replace it—”

  The mist of sound billowed with objection and the smell of burning wood:

  “Impossible!”

  “Unthinkable!”

  “Absurd!”

  “Why impossible?” asked Radical/Provocative, his dissenting voice loud and forceful in the storm of protest.

  “How can we trust these creatures?”

  “We know nothing about them.”

  “Then we must learn,” he returned quickly.

  “And if the Yuhl/Goel splits, what then? Our paths will no longer be concurrent. We will be divided; we will be weakened.”

  “We are already weak,” said Radical/Provocative. “Better to be divided in fact rather than essence. I suggest we put the proposal to a vote.”

  “Now?” The single word from Zealot/Shrieking was clearly an objection. “We need time to think about the issues and—”

  “We all know the issues; we have been living with them for millennia,” said Radical/Provocative. “There is an opportunity here for change. We must act before it slips through our fingers.”

  “You mean before humanity is extinct?” asked Status Quo/Mellifluous.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we must move quickly.”

  “Wait,” said Alander. “Why is that the only alternative we have to allying with you?”

  “Because if you do not join the migration,” said Status Quo/Mellifluous, “then you will be cleansed by the Ambivalence. It leaves nothing in its wake.”

  “The Starfish,” he said, feeling cold. “The sneak attacks. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “We have seen this many times before.”

  “Perhaps some survivors manage to escape, but you have never encountered them.”

  “None can hide where the Ambivalence passes. Your species must be fully aware of the risks it faces, should it choose to remain behind.”

  Alander’s hopes fell as the murmuring of the Fit rose around him again. What hope was there when one path promised destruction and the other a life of scavenging? If staying put meant they would be destroyed, then clearly they had to move, and that left them only three options. The obvious one was to join the Yuhl, but they could also jump ahead and ride the front of the Spinner migration forever, afraid to slow down or stop; or they could jump backward, past the Starfish, and see what the wake held. Alander didn’t much like that idea, either; he imagined it full of dead worlds and less sophisticated scavengers still.

  It all seemed hopeless. He wondered how many species had faced the same choice. If the Yuhl and the Praxis were all that remained, maybe the number was small. Or maybe they balked at the end and chose death rather than dishonor. Or they had simply run out of time.

  The hubbub eased for a second.

  “We vote,” said Radical/Provocative.

  Alander wondered how they would go about it when they couldn’t even see each other in the darkness. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The sound of many mingled voices ebbed even further until there was nothing but silence and the mist receded completely. Then every one of them shouted at once, creating a blast of noise that left Alander reeling. It sounded as though all the Fit had cast their vote in the same instant, but with such a dissonant roar, how could anyone tell which side had won?

  Yet, strangely, he could tell. There was something in the combined noise that indicated that the ayes outweighed the nays. He didn’t know what it was, beyond a gut feeling, but he knew what Status Quo/Mellifluous was going to say before the alien’s words reached him.

  “We agree to explore the possibility of a strategic alliance with humanity/riil. If the Praxis allows it, we will divert resources to ensuring the survival of those who wish to join us. We will hear alternative proposals when they are presented to us in detailed form. Is there anything else we wish to agree to?”

  “To live,” said Radical/Provocative, a sentiment Zealot/Shrieking instantly seconded.

  “It is our duty.”

  Then the babble of the Fit receded, and Alander felt himself being drawn out of the organic helmet and back into the seat. Senses other than sound and smells rushed over him: he was shivering from the cold, and the skin of his face felt slimy when he raised his hands to touch it. Someone pressed a cloth into his hands and wiped at the slime so he could see. Everything was yellow; none of the faces looked quite right. Despite the relative youth of his body, he felt haggard.

  “Did it go as you hoped, Peter?” asked a voice.

  Only he didn’t hear it that way. He heard it direct from the original Yuhl language, with its overtones of commingled realities and overlapping wave fronts. The aliens expressed the concepts of hope and eventuality very differently from humans, with less emphasis on finality and certainty. All things changed; all things happened, somewhere; the issue was, did this Peter/Alander find himself in the universe he wanted to be?

  “Maybe,” he said, and he was relieved to hear his words translated into Yuhl by the I-suit membrane around him. He might have suddenly been able to understand their language, but he certainly didn’t have any idea how to speak it. Or the extra vocal cords.

  What he’d wanted to say, though, was, Yes. This is what I came here to find: answers, a direction, hope.

  The alien who had spoken—Ueh—leaned closer. He retrieved the circular cloth Alander had used to wipe his face and placed it on the desk.

  “We kept you in as long as we could,” the Yuhl said.

  “What’s going on?” The Rorschach patterns on Ueh’s face shifted into an expression of concern. Christ, I can read their expressions, too? he thought. What the hell did the Praxis do to me?

  “Francis Axford has arrived,” said Ueh. “He needs to talk/says it’s urgent.”

  Alander was confused for a moment. “Frank’s arrived? Already? How long was I in there?”

  “Five/hours.”

  That would explain why he was feeling so weak, he imagined, and why an intense headache was pounding behind his eyes. “Put me through to him. Can you do that from here?”

  “I am opening a line,” said the Praxis.

  Alander leaned back to compose himself, wondering what on Earth he was going to tell Axford. He hadn’t exactly secured anything for humanity except a willingness on the behalf of the Yuhl to talk. Hopefully that would be enough.

  “Peter!” A life-size image of Francis Axford appeared beside him. His expression was one of concern mixed with relief. And, carefully buried even dee
per, there was something else, too. Nervousness, perhaps? “I’m relieved you’re back—more so than you imagine, probably. We need to talk.”

  “What is it?”

  “Not here,” said Axford. “Not like this. I’d prefer it if you’d join me in Mercury.”

  Alander nodded. “All right,” he said and closed the line. Axford’s image instantly disappeared.

  He turned his attention to Ueh and the conjugator.

  “I have to go,” he said apologetically. He was going to have to get to Silent Liquidity and relocate to Axford’s position; he just wasn’t sure whether the Yuhl would let him. “I assure you I shan’t be away long.”

  Ueh helped Alander up as he struggled to his feet; he still found himself adjusting to his new body. “You are free to move among us/we will not prevent you,” he said.

  “The Praxis grants you the status,” said the conjugator, but he spoke in a way that suggested to Alander that he didn’t necessarily approve. “You are envoy/catechist.”

  “Thanks,” he said with an acknowledging nod. “I guess.”

  He urged his legs to carry him in a straight line past the rows of tables, each with a Yuhl hunched over, heads lost in their grotesque biological helmets. He wondered which one of them might be Radical/Provocative or Zealot/ Shrieking, but he had no real way of telling. Once they all might have looked the same to him, but as he moved among the aliens now, he realized he was starting to perceive differences in skin colors and other features.

  The conjugator fell behind when they reached the hole ship dry dock but Ueh kept coming. Alander stopped at the entrance to Silent Liquidity and put a hand on the alien’s chest. The interaction of their I-suits made his fingers skate slightly, as though he was pressing on ice.

  “You can stay here if you like,” said Alander. “I really will be coming back soon.”

  “I am envoy/catechist as is Peter/Alander,” said the alien cryptically. Then, seeing Alander’s puzzlement, he added: “I am remade.”

  “The Praxis?” said Alander.

  “I am remade,” Ueh repeated, the plates on its face shifting back and forth, “to perform this function.”

  Alander shook his head.

  New times for new beginnings...?

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh, glancing past Ueh to where the conjugator stood watching on from the entrance to the dry dock. “But don’t try anything.”

  “That’s not my role is to observe and mediate,” said Ueh.

  Alander studied the Yuhl for a moment. There was something in the alien’s manner that was different, and it was more than just an improvement in his own ability to observe the aliens’ nuances. Ueh was becoming more self-confident.

  A bizarre thought struck him. He had received a number of hints that the Yuhl were of avian origin. Some birds on Earth had been known to grow new sections of their brains when new talents were required—such as singing during mating season—then lose them again when the need for those skills went away. What if the Yuhl did something like that, and he was looking at an individual who was literally more than he had been only a few hours earlier?

  It didn’t matter right now. All he needed to be sure of was that the Yuhl wouldn’t jump when he had the chance, and for the moment, Alander was as sure of that as he could be.

  He led the way into Silent Liquidity and instructed it to match positions with Mercury. Axford was lurking on the edge of the system, well away from the “asteroid belt” full of Yuhl vessels. With half the cockpit restored to a human-suitable atmosphere and the impermeable barrier dividing it in two again, Alander allowed himself to relax slightly. He might have been eaten, tinkered with, and perhaps even taken advantage of, but he had come out of it all ahead. That was something, at least.

  When they arrived seconds later, Silent Liquidity quickly docked with Mercury. The airlock connecting them opened, and Alander walked unhesitatingly through, leaving Ueh behind without an explanation. When the airlock shut again, he was finally alone with Axford.

  On seeing Alander, the ex-general started and took a hasty step back.

  “Holy Hades!” he said, looking Alander over in amazement. “I thought there was something different about you, but it wasn’t clear via conSense.” He took a hesitant step forward and reached out to touch Alander’s new body. “What did they do to you?”

  Chewed me up and spat me out, Alander thought wryly, but he said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Axford pinched the skin between his fingers, testing it. “This looks as good as new,” he said, unable to lose the astonishment from his tone.

  “Better, I suspect,” said Alander. Axford’s android body looked green-skinned and blunt-featured, now that he could allow himself to observe it objectively. “But we’ll have time for that later. What was so important that I had to drop everything and come all the way across-system to hear it?”

  “You missed the latest midday report from Sothis.”

  Alander shrugged. “I was a little busy at the time.”

  “Getting refitted?” Axford gestured to Alander’s body.

  “And trying to strike a deal,” he replied. “I was talking to the Yuhl’s equivalent of a senate or parliament. I’ve made some progress. But again, this can wait.”

  “I’m not sure it can wait,” said Frank the Ax. “It’s vitally important to know just how far we can push these guys, Peter. It might be the only hope we have left.”

  “What do you mean? What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s the news from home,” he said. “It’s not good.”

  “More sneak attacks?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But that’s not it. It’s our friend Hatzis; she’s declared war.”

  Alander frowned. “On the Starfish?”

  “No,” he said, his expression and body language taut. “She’s declared war on the Yuhl.”

  2.1.3

  THE DELEGATION FROM JUNO IS HERE, SOL...

  The words failed to register. Caryl Hatzis sat staring into space in Arachne and didn’t consciously notice the world around her.

  Am I doing the right thing? she asked herself. Am I accepting a convenient target in exchange for one I can’t even see?

  A roll call of lost hole ships and their pilots scrolled through her mind. The colonies she couldn’t help, but these she had sent to their death. Adammas, Tatenen, Eos, Rama... The list was getting longer every day. She may not have been directly responsible for their deaths, but she still felt complicity. She couldn’t shake the thought that maybe opting out, seceding from her own dream, might well be the simplest way to keep them safe.

  But no, she couldn’t allow herself to believe that. The dissenters are dreamers, she told herself, and likely to die as a consequence, too.

  But that didn’t necessarily make her right.

  SOL?

  Convenience be damned, she thought. It wasn’t so much that the Yuhl were there; it was that they were fighting over the same things. The Yuhl needed the resources as much as she did; the gifts were the only things keeping humanity alive at the moment, and having them stolen from under her nose galled her more than she could say.

  While a hole ship stolen from its rightful recipient was bad enough, having one destroyed for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time was utterly devastating. But there was nothing she could do about the Starfish. They were becoming increasingly machinelike in her mind, jumping from transmission to transmission, then spreading out in circles from each locus, scouring every sign of humanity when they found it. They were unstoppable and incommunicable.

  Some people were beginning to blame the Spinners, suggesting that the silence of the alien benefactors belied their generosity in providing the gifts in the first place. What sort of person, went the argument, gives a savage a shotgun, then ignores the resulting carnage? Is that the sign of a caring society? But Hatzis didn’t accept this; she was reluctant to believe that all the wonders of the gifts could comprise such a trivial, th
rowaway item in the eyes of their makers. She might not be able to explain the aliens’ silence, but she refused to assign blame indiscriminately.

  The Yuhl, though, they were something else altogether. Here was a tangible enemy. Calling for retaliation wasn’t indiscriminate soapboxing. It was a matter of survival.

  A hand touched her shoulder, and she started out of her thoughts.

  I’M SORRY, SOL.

  THAT’S ALL RIGHT, MY MIND WAS JUST ELSEWHERE, IS IT JUNO?

  YES.

  SEND THEM IN.

  Three android bodies filed into the cockpit, waved on by Gou Mang. The space seemed crowded as Sol stood up to greet them. The meeting could have been conducted virtually, but where possible, she preferred physical contact with the engrams. It reminded them who was boss, she felt. And right now, that was something needing constant reinforcement.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, nodding in turn to Kingsley Oborn, Materials Specialist Owen Norsworthy, and the colony’s own version of herself. She came straight to the point. “I want to know what sort of progress you’re making.”

  Norsworthy glanced at Oborn and swallowed nervously. “Some,” he said. “I have files on several promising weapons systems we’ve found in the Library, as well as a variant on the I-suit envelope, which could cover a much larger volume.”

  “Anything we can use right now?”

  “Not really. But then, it has only been—”

  She didn’t give him time to finish his excuse. “Things can move very quickly when they have to,” she said. “And believe me when I say that right now I expect them to. I’ve given you extra Overseer resources so you can run as fast as necessary. I’ve given you as many Spinner contacts as we can spare, to ensure communications flow smoothly. If you pushed hard enough, Owen, three days could equate to a month.”

  “We have been pushing, Sol,” he objected.

  “Then is it a problem of cooperation, perhaps? Is someone getting in the way?”

  Her android copy stepped forward. “Everything is running as smoothly as can be expected,” she said. “The facility will reach optimum efficiency within eight hours. After then, progress will be rapid, I assure you.”