Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

“He knocked on the door, don’t forget,” Samson said.

  Sivio shrugged expansively and managed a tight smile, his usual good-humored facade creeping back into place.

  “However he got there,” he said, “he’s there now, and that’s the main thing. We’ll keep a close eye on his health in the future, that’s all. There’s so much to learn and do that I think it’s unreasonable to wish for more at once.”

  She nodded; he had a point. No one else could have done more in Alander’s shoes. And the volume of data they had to assimilate was already immense.

  “Very well,” she said. “So what do we have so far? Five chambers in five different spindles...”

  “Beginning with the Hub, which sits at the center of some sort of instantaneous transport system,” Sivio picked up where she left off.

  “The only hard evidence we have that he is actually moving,” said Hatzis, “comes from the sudden jumps in his body’s transmissions, right?”

  Sivio nodded.

  “But can we trust this?” Hatzis asked. “Couldn’t this be faked?”

  “Not easily,” said Sivio. “If he were staying in Spindle Five and his sensory data was merely being relayed to the other locations, there would be an appreciable lag between his responses to our queries. But as this is not the case, I personally think it’s real.”

  “Any naysayers?” she asked. When it was clear there were none, she added, “Anyone care to guess how it works?”

  “We can probably assume that the ring connecting the towers is involved,” hazarded Donald Schievenin, the long-faced, long-limbed physicist who doubled as civilian survey manager on many of the other missions. “After all, we detected no emissions passing between the towers by other means. But I suppose we can’t rule out some sort of method involving neutrinos or WIMPs—or something completely novel, even though that goes against Occam’s razor. We’re looking at technology far in advance of ours.”

  “But it’s not magic,” said Chrys Cunliffe, portly mathematician on the opposite side of the table. “They exist in our universe and therefore must operate by the same laws.”

  “And if we knew all the laws, I’d take your point.” Schievenin lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “I’ve seen things in the last couple of days that I would have bet weren’t possible. The Spinners built ten orbital towers and a complete orbital ring out of nothing but vacuum, as far as we can tell. How did they do that? If you can give me even a hint of what laws they were using to achieve this, then I’ll listen to you.”

  “Clearly it’s going to be up to us to work things out,” said Sivio, easing into the debate. “They’re not going to make things easy for us. I think we can accept that. The Spinners gave us these gifts, it seems, to nudge us forward a little in our intellectual evolution. But they’re not going to spoon-feed us, because that would defeat the purpose of the gifts altogether.”

  Schievenin inclined his head thoughtfully. “I think I agree with Jayme on this,” he said. “And if what he says is the case, then I, for one, shall relish the challenge they are setting for us.”

  That’s the spirit, thought Hatzis. “Next, the Gallery. Does anyone have any comments about this?”

  “Only that I’ll be keen to measure the number and layout of the rooms,” said Kara De Paolis, a structural engineer who had eagerly turned over her extensive experience working in space to UNESSPRO. “The Spinners seem to enjoy the illusion of infinity, and they’re very good at it, too. Since the spindles are clearly not infinite in volume, they must be employing a lot of fancy tricks instead. I’d love the chance to get into those walls to see how they do it.”

  “Mapping is exactly the sort of thing a droid will be good for,” put in Sivio. “We can set one to run independently and wait for it to report. That way, we bypass the delay situation.”

  “True.” Hatzis mentally pushed aside the problem for now. The Gallery was actually the room she had the least interest in. She was looking for the gifts that would be more beneficial to them and their situation. “Okay then, what about the Library? Who wants first access?”

  As expected, everyone spoke at once. She raised her hands to motion for quiet. “All right, all right! We’ll draw a roster and sort it randomly. Does anyone have an objection to that?”

  She saw Otto Wyra open his mouth, then shut it. She faced him squarely and said, “Astrophysics gets first access to the Map Room.”

  He looked immediately appeased.

  “Okay.” She raised her hand and began to tick off her fingers. “The Hub’s in Spindle Five. The Gallery, Library, and Map Room are in Nine, Eight, and Three respectively. Spindles One, Two, Four, Six, and Seven are still unaccounted for. That’s just about all of it covered.”

  “Except for the Dark Room in Spindle Ten,” said Samson. “Nothing has happened to Peter since he went in there. Nothing that we know of, anyway. They could easily fake his biosensory data, if they wanted to.”

  “What did they say about that room?” Hatzis asked.

  “ ‘This is the final gift we bring,’ “ Sivio quoted.

  “Nothingness,” intoned Oborn. “Sounds perfectly Zen to me.”

  “Maybe they made one too many spindles,” suggested Chrys Cunliffe flippantly.

  “Or ran short of gifts,” countered Oborn. “They lied about there being eleven.”

  “Or maybe,” said Hatzis seriously, “we’re just not ready for that gift just yet. Perhaps its purpose will become clear once we’ve come to understand some of the others.”

  There was a general murmur of consent about the room, albeit an uncertain one.

  “Anyway, we can’t do anything about it right now,” she said. “While Alander is out and the droid assembler is on its way, we have the chance to take a short break.

  “I advise all of us to bring the next shift in early and do whatever we need to do to get ready for the next wave of exploration. And that includes sleeping. Unless the Gifts— or the Spinners or whoever they are—make another move, I think we can be fairly certain nothing will change while we’re gone.”

  “I’ll take the helm, if you like,” said Sivio.

  “No.” Although he hid it well, she knew he was as tired as she. “Jene can do it. We’re only a call away if anything crops up.”

  He nodded—gratefully, she thought. “I’ll bring her up to speed.”

  “Then that’s it” As she stood, she nodded her thanks to everyone in the room. Conversation sprang up immediately. Knowing that it would be a while before some of them dispersed, she left first of all, walking toward one of the room’s unbroken walls and fading like a ghost before she reached it.

  * * *

  Confident that Sivio would lock the place down as per her instructions, she went straight to her private environment. There, wrapped in the comforting atmosphere of her father’s New York offices—which she had always wanted to build into a home and, with the willing complicity of conSense, was finally able to do so—she did her best to wind down.

  Images of the gifts flickered in her mind’s eye as she tried to sleep, her virtual body turning this way and that in the hope of shaking the persistent and troubling thoughts. Whoever the Spinners were, and wherever they had gone, they had left her one hell of a tricky situation. She felt like a child given free access to a high-tech immersion gaming system but only allowed to touch it with a broom handle. The Library could hold the answers to thousands of speculations about life in the universe. That life existed at all, apart from on Earth, was enough of a revelation to keep her occupied for weeks; that it was literally teeming with life and that they had access to unimagined cultures was enough to keep her occupied for a dozen lifetimes—or a dozen versions of her for just one.

  She stopped in midthought. Thus far, the Gifts had managed to avoid mentioning anything beyond the bare minimum about their builders. No doubt that was deliberate. What was it they had said? There are civilizations who take delight in the destruction of others. The Spinners were probably being cautious unt
il they were certain that humanity, or another race humanity was in communication with, wasn’t such a civilization. Now that contact was established, she was sure the Spinners would be reassured on that score.

  In the meantime, there was still the Alander problem. Why had the Spinners insisted upon this seemingly senseless restriction to communicate only through him? Why refuse to talk directly to the people you were supposed to be helping? She couldn’t see the point the Spinners were trying to make. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he had an actual body, and that they had an aversion to, or even mistrust of, life forms that did not possess something as fundamental as a physical presence. After all, just because humans had shucked their bodies in order to get into space quicker, that didn’t mean that other cultures wouldn’t be phobic about the idea.

  Then again, maybe they were just being perverse, deliberately keeping it from being too easy for the survey team. If it was some sort of test, it was going right over Hatzis’s head.

  She rolled again onto her back with a heavy sigh, frustrated by her inability to switch off, as it were, and get some sleep. But she knew there was no point forcing something that wouldn’t come, so instead she decided to stop trying to wrestle with her restless mind and put her time to better use. In the long run, it would probably help her to sleep better, anyway. If it didn’t, she always had conSense to force the issue.

  She called up the settings and overrides panel, accessible only by either of the survey managers on the Tipler—her and Sivio. She vacillated over the codes for a long moment, wondering if she should change them all to prevent Alander getting up to more mischief in the future, but in the end decided against it. Not because she trusted him, necessarily, but because she suspected it might be futile: If he really was the plant, the ship would probably notify him of any changes she made. Otherwise he could be rendered toothless too easily.

  Instead, she dove into the conSense settings and mulled over which she might utilize. She could plug herself into the ship’s operational levels, as she had done many times before, and experience the steady flow of data pouring in through a thousand senses; or she could follow the progress of the assembler firsthand as it edged its way into geostationary orbit, making droids as it went; or she could even subsume her mind into the complex pool of thoughts that was the crew’s collective consciousness. Since only in Alander’s case could each mental calculation be wrought on an independent processor, everyone else’s virtual experiences were calculated en masse, queued and processed on a bank of machines buried deep in the Tipler. Although all the fragmentary thoughts were normally kept separate from one another, it was possible to strip away the aptly named ID tags and dive headfirst into them all at once. A constant kaleidoscope of human minds and bodies, meshed together into one chaotic soup, proved very distracting.

  Hatzis called it the gestalt. Sometimes she thought of it as her best and possibly only chance to know God. She always found it oddly restful, like letting someone else’s dream lull her to sleep. That night, it came close to suiting her best.

  Even as she felt the dust of other people’s minds swirl around her, burying her in a dune of moments, she knew that for tonight it wouldn’t be enough. So many people’s thoughts kept coming back to the gifts and the sole man sleeping inside them, among them. She smiled wryly to herself. Even with him there, she could not escape from him.

  So she did the only thing she could do. She stopped trying and simply... dove.

  * * *

  “...You were chosen,” said a disembodied voice.

  She (he) tried to move her arms, but they were pinned to her sides. She was trapped in a giant crystal, like an insect in amber. Her eyes were fixed wide open, as was her mouth. But she couldn’t breathe; all she could do was scream, and then only in silence.

  “... You were chosen....”

  Her crystal prison was tumbling through space, with stars drifting idly past. She couldn’t tell where she was headed until the tumbling of her crystal brought it into view: a purple brown planet with a golden band like a crown around it; the sort of crown a princess might wear in an old folktale.

  “... You were chosen....”

  Then the planet, along with the crystal, was gone.

  She was standing at the base of a large hill, from the top of which grew a tree. The tree’s branches were mostly bare and spread impossibly wide against the sky. From each of its outspread fingers hung a noose.

  “There is no catch.”

  The voice’s message changed at the sight of the new image, but she couldn’t tell whether one had prompted the other or if both changed independently. A wind sprang up, making the dangling nooses dance. And it did look like they were dancing. The ropes were alive, the open- mouthed loops calling her name.

  “There is no catch.”

  The tree’s fingers reached down and closed around her throat, obscuring the light of the moon and the stars, dragging her down into darkness.

  “There is no catch.”

  She was underground, in a maze. Her feet dragged in puddles; her hair caught cobwebs as she brushed by; her ears were deafened by the sound of darkness—and her. The air was dank and smelled of decay, and the entrance to the catacomb had fallen far behind; she had lost that along with all hope of finding the center.

  “... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

  (Ah. The part of her that was still awake in her private quarters, fighting sleep, cottoned onto what Alander’s dream was about. It was some sort of mutation between what the Gifts had told him and what he feared. The crystal was his powerlessness to act; the tree was his fear of failure and death; the maze ...)

  “... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

  (... the maze was no different from how she felt in the face of the Spinners and their take-it-or-shove-it philanthropy. What were they doing? What were they thinking? What did they want? Negotiating these questions was exactly like being lost underground. She didn’t know if her dream self was going in circles or making progress.)

  “... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

  (She was honestly beginning to doubt the Gifts’ ability to guide her anywhere at all. They certainly weren’t making it easy for her. Sure, they had their own agenda and methods; sure, they were alien—if what they said was true, at least—and she shouldn’t judge them by human terms. But how else could she judge them? Wasn’t the onus on the Spinners to ensure that their fancy gifts could be understood?)

  “In time, you will understand.”

  (She laughed aloud at that, and relished the sound echoing off the impossibly solid walls of her chambers. Enough, she thought. This was getting her nowhere. If she kept this up, delving as she was into the man’s psyche, she risked becoming as confused and fucked up as Alander himself, and that was something to be avoided at all costs.)

  “In time, you will understand.”

  She (he) floated upon a golden pool lapping at the walls of an ancient stone cathedral. The setting sun cast pinkish highlights through empty windows and painted surreal shadows on the walls to her left. The shadows formed words she could read and that made her feel at ease, but which she couldn’t actually understand. When she moved her arms, the ripples made sounds like the chiming of a bell.

  “In time, you will understand.”

  (Yeah, right, she thought, and left him to it.)

  1.1.11

  Alander woke to the sensation of being poked in the ribs.

  “Rise and shine, Peter.”

  As the sensation continued, he realized that this wasn’t a conSense illusion. Someone was actually poking him in the ribs. He tried to roll over and away but couldn’t get purchase on anything. His stomach told him he was falling, and his arms flailed in desperation.

  “Hey, take it easy, Peter.”

  An unfamiliar face greeted him when he opened his eyes; whoever it was, he could feel their hand on his shoulder, attempting to steady him. Only it wasn’t a hand, really
. Under the conSense illusion he could make out an extendible manipulator attached to some sort of robot.

  Then the face fell into place: Otto Wyra. They’d been friends before the mission left but had hardly spoken since Alander’s breakdown. In fact, Alander had received the distinct impression that the astrophysicist had been avoiding him.

  “Otto? What’s going on? Where’s Cleo?”

  “She’s asleep. I was the one chosen to come and wake you in person. How do you feel, Peter?”

  He stretched in the darkness and yawned. Everything was gradually falling into place. The tower, the gifts—”You were chosen to act as mediator”—and now Otto Wyra and a droid were in the Dark Room, waking him up.

  “Has it really been five hours?”

  “Not a second less. How do you feel?”

  The repetition of the question made Alander realize that Wyra wasn’t simply making light conversation; he was probably being prompted by Hatzis to determine exactly what Alander’s condition was.

  “Like shit, to be honest,” he said. “My stomach hurts.”

  “You still need food, and we’re working on that. What about mentally?”

  “I’m okay. Or I will be soon enough, anyway.”

  Wyra smiled. “Good, because we have work for you to do.”

  Realization hit. Of course. He scrabbled once again for balance in an environment lacking any reference points and finally gave in to the futility of even trying.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here,” he said. “This place is freaking me out.”

  He used the nearest manipulator to lever himself closer to the door, wondering as he did so how he would have managed had Otto not arrived. Perhaps the Gifts would have helped him. Right now he was just glad the droid was there to assist him.

  The robot itself wasn’t massive, comprising little more than a frame to hold together various sensors and communication devices, with several stubby limbs designed to act as either legs or manipulators depending on their orientation. Based on a zero-g design, it had no defined axes, and looked a bit like a tumbleweed with a purpose. Yet its grip was strong, and the lenses that watched him were almost too attentive.