Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  But why him? What did he have that the Spinners wanted? The uncertainty nagged at him as he tried to remember the question Kovistra wanted him to relay. Until he could answer that question, there was no way he could fully trust any of the answers he received.

  A wave of dizziness rolled through him. He shook his head to clear it, but the feeling only ebbed. It didn’t go away.

  “Try another door, Peter,” said Sivio. His voice was displaying some of the emotion Alander had felt when the Gifts had first spoken to him: amazement, surprise, the beginnings of excitement. Now all he felt was distant and exhausted.

  “Sure,” he said and stepped forward. This time he made a point of choosing a door that wasn’t so familiar to him: circular except for a slightly truncated base and made of brushed aluminum. It was only when it had slid aside with a faint hiss and he was passing through it that he realized it was familiar after all. Fashioned on late 2020s metallic, it had been the door to his first home in Beijing. He had lived there for less than six weeks.

  This time he was prepared for the brief confusion. By the time the Tipler caught up, he had walked ten meters into the chamber on the other side and was puzzling at some of the things he found there.

  “Look at this stuff,” said Samson, appearing next to him with an excited smile. “It’s incredible.”

  “It reminds me of the nineteenth-century manor houses I used to read about as a kid,” he muttered, focusing more on the architecture of the high-ceilinged room than on the various displays it housed.

  “Maybe that’s where they got the idea,” she said, stepping up to his side.

  He faced her with confusion.

  “Your head,” she explained. “Maybe that’s where they got the idea for the room’s design.”

  Just like the doors, he thought.

  There was a kind of music playing around the room. It was soft and gentle, barely audible, and totally unfamiliar to Alander. It gave the place a serenity he found himself welcoming. He looked about briefly but could not detect where the sumptuous sounds were emanating from. Not that it mattered. The fact that it was playing at all was enough.

  Alander watched as Samson moved over to a couple of the displays on pedestals, leaning in as if to peer at the unusual structures. There were dozens scattered about the place: some simple in design, others more intricate, but all delicately crafted.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” he said, scanning the extensive area.

  “Art,” said Samson simply, indicating the walls. They were literally covered with innumerable images of varying sizes.

  “This is the Gallery,” said the Gifts. “Here you will find a visual cross section of the cultures our builders have encountered in their travels. Such a collection, of course, could not hope to be inclusive, but we have tried our best to give you an impression of the variety awaiting you.”

  “None of them originals, I imagine,” he said. He had stepped over to one of the displays and was examining its contents. They appeared to consist of a ball of liquid suspended within a diaphanous cube made from a material he didn’t recognize.

  “Naturally,” replied the Gifts, as smooth as the music swaying around them. “They are all replicas. Faithful replicas, it must be said.”

  “I’m sure they are,” said Alander distractedly as he stretched his fingers toward the cube. Their tips tingled as they came into contact with it, then effortlessly passed right through. He watched without any hint of apprehension as the watery sphere within the cube distended, as if reaching out to touch him in return. The farther he pushed his hand into the cube, the more the sphere reached out to him, until the two finally connected.

  The effect was instantaneous: he was standing on a beach. Not just seeing it, either; he was actually there. He could feel the water washing around his naked feet, the sand between his toes, and the breeze against his skin. And there was a smell he couldn’t quite place, but it was beautiful and brought forth a thousand memories cascading into his mind like the warm embrace of an old friend.

  But at no time did he believe himself to be anywhere else but in the Gallery. He could see Samson clearly standing before him and could hear everything she said to him over the sharp cries of the unfamiliar creature diving into the bright green waves.

  “What is it, Peter?” she said.

  He laughed aloud. “Wondrous,” he said, removing his hand and examining it. It was completely dry and showed no evidence of tampering whatsoever, but the skin still tingled slightly.

  He stepped over to another one, this time a free-floating crystalline structure balanced barely a decimeter above a black plinth. He reached out toward it, expecting something similar to the last one. But this was cold to the touch, and when he removed his hand, the object suddenly began to spin around on a diagonal axis, the effect of which he found quite striking.

  The next was a twisted piece of matter that reminded him of an Escher painting, only this existed in three dimensions. It had to be an optical illusion—just as Escher’s paintings had—yet he was somehow able to trace a finger along the coarse substance and follow the impossible angles of the structure. Not for very long, however, because he found that doing so made him nauseated.

  He looked down at the base and read the inscription there: Seducat, Fourth Generation, Pre-Altus.

  “That doesn’t tell me very much,” he said.

  “For more information you will need to consult the Library.”

  “Another of the gifts, I presume?”

  “Yes. We can direct you there, if you wish.”

  He didn’t agree immediately. Instead, he moved away from the twisted sculpture, past Samson, who was admiring a painting composed entirely of various and shifting shades of red, and through an archway on the far side of the room.

  He found himself in an almost identical room filled with different works of art. Two more doors led to his left and right. He took the left one. Another room; more art. Two more doors. He chose the left, then left again in the next room, and left once more after that, expecting to find himself back in the original chamber. But he wasn’t, which left him feeling disoriented.

  Before he became hopelessly lost, he retraced his steps to where he had started. Then, without hesitating, he walked back through the metallic door and was promptly returned to the Hub.

  “Okay,” he said, glancing at the doors surrounding him. “Show me the Library.”

  The Gifts guided him toward a large, stout oak door with an enormous brass handle. At first he didn’t recognize it, but as he took the handle and pushed, he felt the memory return: The great arched door had lead into the expansive library of the university he had attended in his late teens. It was almost as if the memory was being channeled to him directly from the cold metal of the brass handle itself. This concerned him; how could he be sure that the memories were genuine? How could he know whether the memories weren’t planted simply to give him a sense of familiarity, to make the doors more inviting to walk through?

  The thought that he might be manipulated disturbed him, but he also knew that for now he didn’t have any choice but to play their games. The only way he was going to find out what was behind each of these doors was to walk through them.

  He entered an immense reading chamber that must have reached four stories high. Dozens of aisles opened up before him, their book-filled shelves stretching out over impossible distances. Closer to where he was standing, he saw what he thought to be computerized search facilities and virtual jack-in points.

  This has got to be an illusion, he thought. The enormity of the place, the sheer wealth of knowledge that it promised—

  “You may seek the answers to most questions here,” said the Gifts.

  Alander wanted to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. It was just all so overwhelming for him.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said after a while.

  “You were curious about the Seducat from the Gallery,” offered the Gifts.

  H
e nodded lamely. He had been curious, but with the knowledge of so many races suddenly at his fingertips, it seemed almost trivial to be looking up a type of artwork. Nevertheless, if he was to learn how to use the Library effectively, then he was going to have to start somewhere.

  Advanced voice-recognition systems took his inquiry about the Escher-like sculpture and told him that it came from a species living several thousand light-years away. He was offered a detailed biochemical and sociological analyses of their culture, but he took only a brief tour of their home solar system. Twelve planets, two of them inhabited. One yellow gas giant larger than Jupiter. A greenish sun. The aliens looked like lizards on stilts.

  He reeled at that. A sense of deep otherness was beginning to well up in him. It was too much, way too much. He was drowning in information and losing himself in the process.

  “Peter?”

  The voice barely registered. It wasn’t until a hand gripped his shoulder that he realized that he had faded out.

  “Peter? Are you all right?” Samson was standing in front of him, peering worriedly into his face.

  “Cleo? I, uh... Sorry. I drifted out for a moment, there. I’m okay now.”

  “We all did,” said Hatzis. “And you’re not. This wasn’t the usual, Peter. We’ve checked your biostats. Your body is suffering the effects of prolonged stress and fatigue. When was the last time you ate?”

  He shook his head. His body could survive for a long time on internal reserves, but there were protein concentrates back at the camp he was supposed to ingest every day or two. He had forgotten to bring them when he had left for Drop Point One. “I’m not sure. A while ago, I guess.”

  “Dammit, Peter,” Hatzis chided him. “You should know better. We can’t afford to lose your mobility right now.”

  “You need to take a break,” said Samson.

  “This is hardly the ideal time for taking a nap, Cleo,” he said.

  “Be that as it may,” she returned, “you still need one. We don’t have another body handy, if you’ll recall.”

  “ConSense will knock you out,” said Hatzis. “Just put yourself in a comfortable position and let us do the rest. We can flush the toxins from your system in less than six hours.”

  “Perhaps.” For the first time, he cursed the fact that he was stuck in a material body when he could have been operating virtually, like the others. It didn’t seem fair that he should have to stop while they kept going.

  But he knew they were right. He wasn’t invincible. And they had it all organized.

  “Okay,” he conceded. “I’ll shut down for a couple of hours to get my strength back.”

  “If it is recuperation you seek, Peter,” said the Gifts, “perhaps we can help.”

  “Not unless you have a bed I can lie on for a while,” he said wryly.

  “Return to the Hub,” said the Gifts, “and take the black door.”

  A few steps later, he was back in the Hub examining his options. It wasn’t difficult to spot the door the Gifts had referred to. It seemed more like a hole than anything else.

  “This one?” asked Alander.

  “The contents of that room should be suitable for your needs, Peter.”

  He moved slowly forward, irrationally nervous of what that room might hold. The black door seemed a little too symbolic for him, as though it were offering a more permanent sleep.

  But what he discovered on the far side was just... nothing. He found himself floating in a void containing no sensory information whatsoever—at least not until Samson joined him again, drifting next to him.

  “What’s the point of this?” He spoke to Samson, but it was the Gifts that replied:

  “This is the final gift we bring,” said the voice. “In time, you will understand.”

  He hung there for a long moment, wondering if he could stand the oppressive nothingness. Perhaps if he used a bit of subtle conSense tinkering, even just a slight background noise to dispel the void a little ...

  “Okay,” he decided. He had no other option, except to run his body into the ground and possibly kill it. Even in the midst of such wonders—or perhaps because of them— he needed to switch off for a while. “Give me five hours, Caryl. No more.”

  “Understood. Give us the okay first, though, to get someone else in there. We think we can have a telepresence droid of some sort ready within a couple of hours. But we need to know whether they will they let it in through the climber entrance.”

  He passed the request on, and the Gifts allowed it. “We will permit such devices,” they said, “but we will continue to communicate only with you, Peter. Your people must understand that any additional surveillance of our interior comes at its own risk.”

  “Tell them we understand,” said Hatzis. “We can look after ourselves.”

  “I hope so.” Alander let his limbs relax into a familiar, zero-g sleeping posture. It brought back memories of training in orbit, before he had been chosen for the survey program. Then: “Will you stay with me, Cleo? Please? I’d feel better if there was someone to watch my back.”

  She smiled. “How can I watch it, Peter, when your eyes will be closed?”

  “Well, you can pretend to, at least.” He let conSense and weightlessness wash over him and fought disorientation from both. Samson wrapped herself around him, and, despite himself, he was comforted by her presence. She was reassuringly solid, even though he knew she wasn’t. The illusion was sufficient for his needs.

  He had just enough time to think how different she felt from Lucia when consciousness slipped away, and his worries, for a time, were forgotten.

  1.1.10

  “This is just great”

  For the first time in days, the bridge of the Tipler was quiet. Half its active crew roster had taken the opportunity to gather in a conference room designed specifically for an extraordinary debriefing session. Caryl Hatzis and Jayme Sivio sat at one tip of a roughly triangular table facing the ten people they had requested to attend. The walls displayed views of the gifts Alander had so far visited, while the wall behind them showed nothing but darkness.

  “He jumps into this without consulting us,” Hatzis went on. “He doesn’t eat. I’m not going to sit back and let him commit suicide—not after all we’ve done to keep him alive.”

  “It could be worse,” said Cleo Samson, sitting in one corner of the triangle, hands folded before her. “Peter could have had a complete breakdown much earlier. Given the circumstances, I think he’s performed admirably. Does anyone here believe he could’ve done as well even a month ago?”

  A mutter of consent ran around the table. Hatzis vividly recalled Alander’s descent into madness upon their arrival at Upsilon Aquarius, when his engram had been brought fully up to speed. His unexpectedly fragile identity had crumbled in the face of such unfamiliarity, not helped by the loss of Lucia Benck. Within days, they’d had to forcibly shut him down for fear he would tear himself apart. Only the most radical of steps—confining him permanently to one of the remotely operated drone bodies through which the surveyors occasionally stepped on the surface of Adrasteia—had anchored him sufficiently to survive reawakening, and, even then, his recovery had been hesitant. Blackouts had been frequent; strange psychotic episodes had overwhelmed him without warning; frequent agnosia made him difficult to deal with on a professional level. Only in recent weeks had he dared accept conSense overtures at all, too little and too late to avoid isolation from the Tipler and those who had once been his colleagues and friends.

  His recovery had been uneven and slow and was still incomplete. Hatzis wasn’t prepared to admit that it might yet be permanent.

  “And at least we now have an alternative,” Sivio said, affecting his most conciliatory voice. “An assembler is already on its way, manufacturing droids as we speak. Meteorology reports that the disruption to the weather caused by Spindle Six is actually resulting in surface rain. If that spreads as far as Spindle Five or Drop Point One—or any of the refueling points—then we c
an get some more bodies in place. And once we can, we’ll be home free.”

  Again, assent rippled through the group. Close-shaved Ali Genovese looked particularly pleased; Hatzis knew that she was confident of being among the first given access to the gifts, once the opportunity existed. She was right, but Hatzis couldn’t resist spilling a little rain on her parade.

  “You and I know, Jayme, that the best droids we can make in an hour or two will be ineffectual: low-range, at best, and only barely self-directing. Then there’s the delay problem, which is fine when dealing with someone self-directed like Peter but will become increasingly drastic when the Tipler is on the outer leg of its orbit. Do you really want to send droids bumping along the corridors, smashing into things because our reaction times are too slow and they’re too stupid to know any better?”

  “But—”

  “Don’t ask for us to be moved closer, Jayme. I won’t authorize something like that until it’s absolutely clear there’s no threat. Also, given that we’ve never seen surface rain in any quantity before, I wouldn’t be investing too much hope in our reaction mass reservoirs quickly filling.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Sivio sounded annoyed; finally, she had gotten under his guard. “Everything you say is true: This situation is suboptimal in most respects. We have poor communications, no supply line, and precious little hard intelligence. But we do have the chance to change all that in time. Apart from being human—or as close as we can get, out here—I have to agree with Cleo that Peter is doing a pretty good job in a tight situation. He’s got us into these things, and that’s got to be worth something.”

  “He didn’t get us in. They let him in.”