Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “Immediately prior to sunrise.”

  He took a deep breath, making sure the filters on his suit were passing air. In a better life, he could have used conSense to “erase” the mask in front of his eyes, but as it was, he had to make do with it there, uncomfortably tight and imperfectly transparent.

  His stomach churned. His nervousness must have shown, for he felt Samson’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing again. That was as good a reason as any to get moving.

  “Open the door,” he said.

  The cargo hatch hissed open, letting in an icy gust of dusty air. “Immediately prior to sunrise” on Adrasteia meant that it was still as black as night. Dawn brought only a vague brightening of the clouds to the east, rarely visible from Alander’s camp in the canyon. From where the shuttle had landed, however, he expected to see clearly in most directions, as the orbital tower had anchored itself into level high ground.

  When he stepped outside, he was greeted by a severely limited view. The shuttle’s landing lights shone fitfully through the dust-laden air at what looked like the base of a giant tree. Curved, irregularly spaced “roots” spread out and down from a tapering “trunk” that vanished up into the darkness. Both the roots and trunk were made of a glistening, black substance. The stony soil around the structure had been violently disturbed in recent times but showed no present sign of activity.

  Alander took a dozen or so steps closer. This, he assumed, was the base of the orbital tower, although it looked nothing like he had imagined. It looked grown, not designed. There was no sign as yet of the object he had seen descend from orbit.

  “Don’t go too close, Peter.” Samson’s voice from behind him brought him to a halt.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  She walked forward to join him, dressed in a suit identical to his and similarly fastened against the dust. He smiled at that: She was going to some lengths, against form, to preserve the illusion that she was really there with him. Whether that was to discourage him from banishing her or to preserve his mental stability, he wasn’t sure.

  “Biotech,” asked Sivio from orbit, “or nanotech swarm?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, we would use swarms to build something like this, since we tend not to think of biology as a suitable tool for mega-engineering. But I think we should be careful not to impose our preconceptions on the Spinners. Biotech could theoretically build something like this—”

  “Yeah,” put in Samson, “if your version of biology involved diamond strand fibers and buckyball cells.”

  “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”

  “If they’ve evolved to eat this stuff, I don’t want to get any closer to their teeth.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Alander. “Where do I go now, Jayme? Has that thing moved?”

  “It’s on the far side,” Sivio explained. “The shuttle scanned it before landing, and it does indeed look like some sort of climbing device, although it hasn’t moved an inch. Check it out when you’re ready.”

  Alander turned to his left and began walking around the trunk of the orbital tower. The base was easily thirty meters across, allowing for stray roots and the structure’s odd asymmetry. He kept looking upward to see the tower itself, but it was still too dark to see very far. It was hard to imagine that he was standing next to something that stretched all the way up to geostationary orbit, over twelve thousand kilometers up. The two orbital towers humanity had built on Earth to facilitate UNESSPRO stretched twice as high but had taken years to build. The thought that this tower had descended from the sky literally overnight made his skin crawl.

  This feeling was only enhanced as the “climbing device” came into view in stages. The first was a high, rounded hump not dissimilar to a snail’s shell, but ribbed, black, and peaked along its extensive axis. This split down its flanks, like a hand did into fingers, to leave wide strips of plating around a number of openings, from which issued a multitude of close-packed, insectile legs. The more Alander looked at it, the more it resembled a wingless fly, albeit one thousands of times larger and strangely squashed, as though its backside had been moved toward its nose and its upper carapace had cracked and risen to accommodate the change.

  At the front, instead of a head, was an opening wide enough for a person to step into. Alander couldn’t see what lay inside and was in no great hurry to find out.

  “You realize you’re going to have to get in that thing, don’t you?” said Hatzis from orbit.

  Attempting humor to cover his fear and uncertainty, he said: “I was expecting something more sophisticated. This is just a big bug.”

  “Are you still okay with this, Peter?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. “It just looks as if it’s going to eat me, that’s all.”

  He resigned himself to the inevitable and moved closer.

  Samson followed as he stooped slightly to enter the bug. The inside was made of a similar dark material to the outside, but there were no controls or windows of any kind to be seen. It was cramped, too, but not as close as the shuttle’s cargo hold had been.

  He sat down in one of the two crudely fashioned seats to the rear of the cabin; Samson settled next to him with a quizzical look.

  “It’s almost as if they knew there would be two of us,” she said.

  Alander nodded, even though there weren’t two of them at all. The notion had already occurred to him, and he wondered just how far the Spinners were prepared to go to reassure him.

  “What happens n—uh!” The ground suddenly moved out from underneath them as the bug’s legs stirred into life. The “mouth” closed in front of them, and Alander fell heavily back into his seat as its orientation suddenly changed.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Sivio answered, “You’re climbing up the base and onto the tower itself.” Alander reluctantly allowed an image: of the bug rocking and swaying up the roots, the tips of its many legs sticking to the resinlike material with the ease of magnets to iron. They weren’t using pincers, grippers, or even suction pads. How it stayed on he couldn’t tell.

  It all became much worse when the bug acquired the tower proper. At an angle of ninety degrees to the ground, he sank deeper into the seat as the bug put on a sudden burst of acceleration. He didn’t want to look at the image to see how fast the climber was going or how high he was getting, so he switched off the conSense feed. It was bad enough that he could imagine it. He felt like Jack ascending the mighty beanstalk, oblivious to what perils awaited him at the top.

  Avoiding the image wasn’t as simple as just turning off conSense, however. Twenty-five seconds into their journey, the carapace of the bug suddenly turned transparent. Not perfectly see-through—he could see mysterious rods and planes shifting between the walls of his chamber and the outer skin—but clear enough to take in the view.

  He twisted around to look behind him. The sun was up enough to illuminate the world falling rapidly below; the base was just visible through the dust and receding quickly. He swallowed and let the seat take him again. The top was lost in the sky. The wall of clouds seemed to be rushing at him, and he was already dreading passing through them. He didn’t want to see the stars; he didn’t want to be that high.

  “Your skin is registering roughly Earth-normal atmospheric pressure,” said Sivio. “Do you want to test it?”

  “If you remove your mask,” added Samson, “you’ll be able to breathe easier.”

  He hadn’t realized he was breathing heavily. Lifting the mask a centimeter, he hesitantly tasted the air, then waited for analysis.

  “It’s good, Peter; better than you’re used to, in fact.”

  He tugged the mask off completely and sucked in a chestful of clean-smelling, oxygenated air, the most satisfying breath he had taken for weeks. The ability of his artificial body to breathe Adrasteian air came from within, involving complex chemical processes in its lungs, but it was perfectly capable of breathing Earth-normal air.
Indeed, he felt that it might work slightly better, as a flood of well-being swept through his body.

  More calmly, he surveyed the view below. The surface of Adrasteia spread out below him like a desiccated pancake, buckled and split in thousands of places, uniformly brown, uninteresting from any height. It vanished as the bug reached the warmer cloud layer and climbed rapidly into mist. Its carapace crawled with droplets of water startled out of the air by the appearance of something solid.

  They ascended in silence for a good five minutes before the cloud layer began to thin.

  “Watch out for your eyes,” said Samson, gripping his hand.

  He took her advice in time as they burst out of the clouds and into the upper atmosphere. The sun, hanging over the bowed horizon to his left, burned brightly into the bug’s interior, blinding him for a second even through his upraised hand. His eyes soon adjusted to the onslaught, however, allowing him to see normally. As a result, when he looked up, the stars weren’t visible; all he could see was the sunward edge of the tower stretching higher and higher above him. Somewhere up there, an orange point shone; this, he assumed, was the terminus of their journey: Spindle Five.

  Below, the tower descended in a perfectly straight line into the clouds. Alander couldn’t guess how far they had come or how fast they were traveling.

  “How long until we get there?” He wasn’t that concerned; he just wanted the sounds of the others to distract him from his growing fears.

  “If you continue at this rate,” said Hatzis, “one hour.”

  “What do I do until then?”

  “That’s up to you, Peter. This is your project, after all. Maybe you should be putting your questions to the Spinners themselves instead of us.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. She was right; he had got himself into this and should expect to bear the brunt of it, be it boredom, apprehension, or outright fear. Whatever was awaiting him, though, there was little he could do to avoid it now.

  1.1.8

  Hatzis watched in silence as the alien machine carried Alander to the top of Spindle Five. It was hard to obtain a direct view of him, since his eyes were the only things remotely resembling a camera in the climber. Now and again, Hatzis would jump to Samson’s viewpoint, but the image she received merely showed what he would look like if she were actually sitting there beside him, a reconstruction created from what little data was available. The Tipler had full access to every piece of information gathered by his body, but it couldn’t perform miracles, so at best the pictures from Samson’s viewpoint were alternately fuzzy and blocky. It made her wish they had planted nanotech surveillance devices on him.

  Nevertheless, it all added to the show, thought Hatzis. This way there was a sense of the ambiguous, of mystery, that anything could happen.

  The bug barely slowed as it neared the spindle, although its frantic legwork did gradually ease until it seemed to be drifting along under momentum alone. For a brief, worrying moment, it looked to Hatzis as though the bug was moving so fast that it was going to crash into the base of the imposing edifice toward which it was ascending; but at the last possible second, a section of red gold hull opened up and swallowed the climber whole.

  Hatzis’s worst fear was that Alander would be cut off the moment he entered the spindle, but these concerns were quickly laid to rest. The signal through his eyes was as strong as ever, revealing little more than the interior of the bug. Either it was dark outside, or the climber’s carapace had resumed its earlier opacity.

  There was one slight difference, though.

  “Can you hear that, Caryl?” he asked.

  The question seemed to Hatzis at first to be unnecessary, because he knew that whatever he heard, she would hear also. But she realized that he had no way of knowing whether or not his signal was still getting through.

  “We can hear it,” Samson answered for her.

  Hatzis paid closer attention to the auditory information coming through from his ears. Below the mingled sounds of breathing, heartbeat, and involuntary muscle activity, she could make out a faint sound. It was like a mechanical hum or perhaps a rushing of air. But she couldn’t be sure what it was. The signal was too distorted with him still sitting in the bug.

  “It sounds like a subway,” said Samson.

  The bug came to a halt and its mouth opened. Alander’s eyes saw little more than a white floor before him. The noise was slightly louder.

  The view danced as Alander eased out of the chair and exited the climber. His movements were cautious, nervous, and Hatzis couldn’t begrudge him that. She would have been the same in his position—not that she would have allowed herself to be in his position, of course.

  Outside, he took a moment to look around. The bug was squatting on the floor of a tube barely large enough to contain it. The walls were white and smooth, and from them emanated a faint glow. There was enough light to see that Alander was standing in a tubular corridor that stretched ahead of him with no end in sight.

  The rushing noise was also stronger, now that he was out of the bug, although there was still no obvious source.

  “I guess I just walk, then,” he said nervously, taking his first couple of apprehensive steps along the tunnel. “Any idea where the gravity comes from?”

  It was Sivio who answered, “Beats me. Hopefully, you’ll get the chance to ask someone soon.”

  He headed off away from the bug. The conSense version of Cleo Samson followed close by, barely visible in his peripheral vision. After a moment or so of walking down the unchanging corridor, Alander looked behind to find that the bug appeared to have vanished, as though it had been absorbed into the white glow from the walls.

  “I don’t feel right about this,” he breathed. His gaze was moving erratically from nothing to nothing, desperately searching for a reference point.

  “Look at me.” Samson waved a hand in front of his face. “Peter, don’t lose it now.”

  The sound of his breathing was loud through the conSense link. Hatzis held hers as his vision gradually stabilized, focusing on Samson’s concerned expression. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath, but she couldn’t quite make it out.

  “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m fine. Let’s just keep going. This thing has to end somewhere, surely. We’re in a goddamn satellite, for Christ’s sake.”

  Hatzis could relate to his sentiments. The featureless and seemingly endless passage unsettled her. It was unnecessary, dramatic, irrational. What sort of creature would build something like that?

  Alander walked for a further hundred meters or so in silence, Samson staying close and keeping a firm grip on his arm. Then, without warning, the light from the walls increased in intensity. In a matter of moments it went from a dull glow to a burning brightness, and Alander had to shield his eyes. He stopped dead in his tracks, his hand reaching for a wall as if to steady himself.

  “Peter?” Samson said.

  “What the hell is going on?” he called out, his voice showing signs of panic.

  Before anyone could respond, however, the light dimmed and the rushing sound that had accompanied him since his arrival finally faded into silence. He slowly opened his eyes and looked around with some bewilderment, his outstretched hand still reaching out for a wall that was no longer there.

  “Are you getting this?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” said Samson with some amazement. “We can see it, all right.”

  “They must be hacking into me,” he said.

  The two of them were now standing on an immense, flat plateau that stretched out around them. There were no walls as such, just a panoramic view of Adrasteia, lit from the partial moon that hung overhead among the million specks of lights dotting the night sky. But Hatzis knew this was not possible. From the vantage point of the Tipler, she could see there had been no physical alterations to the outside of the spindle itself since they had entered. This was an illusion, just as t
he corridor must have been.

  Hatzis tried to imagine how they did it. Some sort of 3-D image surrounding a floor that could move to simulate walking when in fact the viewer stayed still? That might work when Alander alone was the only viewer, but what if there were more than one?

  However they did it, Alander wasn’t equipped with the right devices to penetrate the illusion. All he could do was gawp at it.

  A sound not unlike a thousand birds chirping simultaneously broke the silence. Alander spun to face behind him, obviously unnerved, but he stood his ground, nonetheless.

  “What in Christ’s name is that?”

  The noise gradually increased in pitch for a few moments and, as it did, Hatzis detected a faint flickering of orange light around Alander. Before she had chance to comment, though, the lights disappeared, and the noise abruptly ceased.

  “Can anyone tell me what that was?” She kept her inquiry private, out of Alander’s scope.

  “I’m not sure,” said Sivio, “but I think he was just scanned.”

  Then another voice, smooth, precise, neither male nor female, and issuing from nowhere in particular, broke the tense silence in Spindle Five: “Welcome, Peter.”

  Alander glanced around as if for the source of the voice but saw only Cleo Samson. “I’m starting to have serious reservations about all of this,” he muttered. “If this is you, Caryl—”

  “That’s not us,” said Hatzis, keen to reinforce the fact that this wasn’t another symptom of his instability. This was real.

  “No shit?”

  Samson took a step closer to him. “Take it easy, Peter. That was a greeting you heard, not a threat”

  “How do I know it isn’t part of the illusion, too? Something to put me off balance?”

  “This is no illusion, Peter.” Again came the voice, calming, dreamlike, seductive.

  Alander looked around again, but the space around them remained still and empty. “Are you...?” He faltered for a second. “Are you the Spinners?”