Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  He tumbled through the black door and into the Hub, stumbling as his full weight returned.

  He picked himself up, rubbing at a knee as he looked around. Another droid pogoed from one door to another and disappeared through it.

  “What’s been going on?”

  “We’ve been busy,” Wyra replied, clearly impatient for Alander to get himself together. The droid tumbled off elsewhere. “The Gifts were as good as their word, giving us access as soon as the assembler was in position. They’re still tight-lipped, though.”

  “They haven’t tried to stop you in any way?”

  “They don’t need to. We’re limited by the design of the gifts—but you’ll see what I mean by that in a moment. They’ve let us roam around and poke into things as much as we can.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Two hours. We have six droids, now, and another’s in the oven.”

  The monotonous hum of the Hub was drowned out by new noises: tapping, whirring, buzzing; the sounds of the robots at work. The acoustic properties of the gifts obviously extended to cover all the spaces of the spindles, no matter how far apart. It was weird to think that the sounds he could hear through a door only feet away could actually be coming from the other side of the planet.

  A familiar voice intruded in his head: “Are you sure you’re feeling better now?”

  “Why the sudden concern, Caryl?”

  “Your dreams were pretty active,” she said.

  He felt strangely naked. They watched them, too? “So what’s your point?” he said irritably.

  “The only room we haven’t studied in any detail is the room you slept in. There’s nothing in there at all, yet an entire spindle is dedicated to it. It doesn’t make any sense. A sealed box would be enough to give you free fall and darkness. I’m just concerned that it could be a brainwashing device or something.”

  He was tempted for a moment to comment that it wouldn’t take that big a job to rearrange his thoughts. But instead he said, “Or maybe it’s where they live—the Spinners, I mean. Perhaps the space I occupied was just a box, and the rest of the spindle is their living quarters.”

  Hatzis was silent for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “It’s an interesting possibility.”

  “How would you go about testing such a theory?” said Wyra.

  “We’ll find a way,” said Hatzis. “If they are testing us, I’m going to test them back just as hard.”

  Wyra rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything in response.

  “So,” Alander said, “what have you found?”

  “Stuff that’ll make your eyes pop. Some of it we’re too nervous to fiddle with.” Wyra indicated a door on his right, one Alander remembered from Entrainment Camp. “This room we’re calling the Science Hall. It contains demonstrations of all sorts of models and theories. Lots of mathematical formulas scribbled on the walls, too. Chrys thinks he’s found turbulence equations in there somewhere, but he needs to look at it more closely to be sure. That’s in Spindle One. Spindle Two—” he moved around one door clockwise, to another memory—”is the Lab. We’re cautious of this one, to be honest. There’s little explanation for what we’ve found in it, but it seems to contain samples of various types of matter and energy. It’s like a chemistry set for gods. We’re reluctant to touch anything until you speak to the Gifts about it, so Caryl has declared it off limits.

  “The next one we went into was Spindle Seven, and it doesn’t seem to contain much at all. There are machines in there, but we don’t know what they do. That’s another one for the Gifts to explain, although we are exploring it pretty closely at the moment.”

  “What about medicine?” said Alander. “Anything along those lines in any of the spindles?”

  Wyra nodded, pointing to a door. “In Spindle Four there’s a fair replica of a modern hospital, complete with regeneration tanks and laser surgery arrays. We call it the Surgery. For the most part, the technology is familiar—apart from an unusual suit we came across.”

  “Unusual in what way?”

  “Well, it looks as though it’s made of water.” There was a pause, as if Wyra was concerned that what he had said might sound foolish. “We’ve no idea what it’s for, although I’m sure that will become evident in the days ahead. Just as I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other strange things like the suit we’ll come across when we explore farther. We suspect that, like the Gallery, there could well be more chambers beyond the one we saw; so who knows what kind of stuff we’re going to find?”

  “Who indeed,” said Alander, thinking of the answer to his own fragile state.

  “It’s off limits, too, for the moment.” Wyra didn’t seem too upset about that, and the reason for it soon became clear. “You might want to check out Spindle Six before you go exploring anywhere else. It’s the biggest of them all, the one that’s been emitting the gravitational waves. They’ve died down now, but we’re no closer to figuring out what exactly caused them.”

  “I would have thought you’d be more interested in the Map Room.”

  “I was until I saw what’s in Six.”

  Alander eyed Wyra closely. He could take a hint. “Okay, so which one is it?”

  Wyra gestured toward a cream-colored door with a picture hanging from it. Alander groaned to himself, feeling the irrational apprehension rise inside of him. This had been the door to the bedroom he had shared with his ex-wife, Emma. The breakup had been a difficult one for both of them, and approaching it now seemed to revive those feelings of failure and bitterness.

  His hand reached out hesitantly for the handle, then pulled it open in a quick and forceful manner, as if doing so would somehow rid him of the unwanted emotions.

  This time, there was no discontinuity in his contact with the Tipler. They knew where to expect him to reappear and had satellite receivers already in place. All he saw was a blur until he’d crossed the threshold, then Wyra was following him into the giant chamber, smiling at Alander’s expression.

  They were standing on a gantry high up on a curved wall made up of what seemed to be opaque, gray glass. The gantry circumnavigated a spherical chamber at least two hundred meters in diameter. His inner ear registered odd tidal effects stirring through the room, originating from the thing in its center.

  The object floating before him was a perfectly white sphere some fifty meters in diameter. How it was floating, he couldn’t tell, since he was still experiencing gravity and it had no visible means of support. Similarly, he assumed it was a sphere, but without any hint of shape or detail it simply appeared to Alander’s eyes to be round. It could conceivably have been a disk, but a gut instinct told him it wasn’t.

  As he watched, a new detail appeared. Another circle, as perfectly black as the other was white, slid into view. It was smaller than the white one, measuring around five meters in radius. His mind took a second to process the image, but once he had, it was clear: the smaller, black sphere was orbiting the larger, white one.

  “What is this?” he asked the astrophysicist. “A giant chemistry model?”

  “Hardly.” The astrophysicist pointed as the black sphere passed between them and its white “parent.” Alander felt a wave of... something pass through him. It was only slight, but it definitely was there.

  “Feel it? That was a tidal surge passing through you, courtesy of a gravity wave. If you’d asked me an hour ago, I would’ve said it was impossible, but there you have it. We’ve had no luck analyzing the spectrum of the wave, before you ask. We don’t have the detectors yet.”

  Alander turned to look at Wyra. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Ask them what it does, of course.” The astrophysicist was looking up at Alander like a supplicant. “I have my suspicions, given that it’s not fixed and is in the largest of the spindles, but I can’t confirm it. And if it is what I think it is...”

  The sentence went unfinished, almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to speak the thought out lo
ud.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Just ask them, Peter,” Wyra said urgently, trying to suppress his excitement but failing. “We need to know.”

  While it was nice to be needed for a change, Alander felt it would have been nicer had it been for his own abilities, not as a result of some arbitrary alien decision.

  “Gifts?”

  “Yes, Peter?”

  “What does Spindle Six contain?”

  “A means of traversing space. It will aid you in your exploration of neighboring regions.”

  “You mean it’s a spaceship?”

  “Yes.”

  “A ship,” Wyra breathed, his hands gripping the edge of the gantry. “I knew it!”

  “Where can it take us?” Alander asked.

  “Anywhere you wish to go.”

  “Can it take us home?”

  “If by that you mean your home planet, Earth, then yes, it can.”

  “And how long would it take?”

  “Less than one Adjusted Planck day.”

  “Relative, I presume.” He tried not to seem as stunned as he felt; for so much time dilation, the alien vessel must be capable of coming frighteningly close to the speed of light and enduring crushing accelerations. “What about in real time?”

  “What I have given you is the duration of the journey with respect to a stationary observer.”

  “One day?”

  “That is correct. However, the time measured by the occupant of the craft will in fact be longer.”

  “One day...” His head was reeling from the concept of a faster-than-light drive. With the thing in front of him, he could return to Earth and get back again before anyone really missed him. And the Gifts had earlier mentioned some sort of faster-than-light communicator. He could call them when he arrived; he wouldn’t even need to come back.

  Wyra was already nudging him and hissing questions for him to ask, but Alander ignored him.

  “And you’re giving us this?”

  “No,” said the Gifts.

  The blunt reply was as sobering for Alander as it must have been for Wyra, who abruptly shut up.

  “I... I don’t understand,” Alander stammered. “What do we...?”

  “We are not giving you anything, Peter,” said the Gifts smoothly. “Our builders are the benefactors of the spindles and their contents. We are merely—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Alander impatiently. “I get the distinction you’re trying to make.”

  He heard Wyra sigh impatiently beside him.

  “What I meant was,” Alander went on, “are these things—the ship and everything else—are they just being given to us? No strings attached? For us to use as we please?”

  “That is the nature of a gift, is it not?”

  Alander couldn’t tell if they were playing with him or not. The Gifts had used that exact phrase earlier, upon his introduction to the Hub.

  “Peter...?”

  Wyra’s hand, via the droid, plucked at his sleeve at the same moment another gravity wave swept through him. He backed away from the alien vessel, using the wall to guide him through the door to the Hub.

  “Peter, are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry, Otto. Give me a minute.” He looked at the doors surrounding him, momentarily bewildered. Had Wyra told him where they all led? He couldn’t remember. There had to be one he still didn’t know about.

  “Gifts, where are you?”

  “Our physical location is unimportant—”

  “But you do have one, right? I want to know where it is.”

  “Spindle Seven.”

  He counted around the circle. Everything Wyra had told him suggested that the doors followed a logical progression. If that was case, the door to Spindle Seven wasn’t one he recognized. Reinforced, smoky glass with an aluminum handle, it reminded him of a school or office door. Like the others, it was obviously from somewhere in his past, but damned if he could remember where exactly.

  “What are you doing, Peter?” The illusion of Wyra danced nervously after him as he walked unsteadily to the door.

  “I need to think,” he said, pushing the door open. As the Hub receded behind him, he added to the Gifts, “Don’t let anyone follow.”

  The Gifts were as good as their word. The door swung shut behind him, and he was alone.

  * * *

  He switched off conSense as the alien AIs gave him directions. Spindle Seven contained the machines that had built the orbital tower below. In all the other spindles, these devices had been dismantled and reconstituted as other things. The Spinners seemed to have mastered assembly on an atomic scale, along with energy/matter conversion and elemental transmutation. Alander wasn’t surprised; in fact, humanity had been making steps toward the last two before he had left Earth, a hundred years and more before. It was simply the scale that astonished him: The Spinners had built structures larger than cities in hours out of thin air, then on a whim rebuilt them into whatever they wanted.

  A small, flat platform took him along a transparent transit tube that snaked through the massive structures. It moved at an alarming speed, yet he felt no sense of inertia as the transport slowed or accelerated.

  It was an unnerving experience, passing between machines larger than Earth’s tallest buildings, yet in some cases as slender as the Frank Tipler itself. Some were many limbed, like giant praying mantises; others hung like folded dragonfly wings, translucent and gleaming all the colors of the spectrum. Massive cylinders lurked almost out of sight at the top of the spindle, while at the bottom the structure was open to space. When he looked down, he could see Adrasteia, the planet’s atmosphere still recovering from the gravitational disturbances of Spindle Six. He stared down at the landscape with something approaching wistfulness, which he thought strange. He had never particularly cared for it before, but here, now, he found its familiarity a welcome sight. Indeed, compared to the machines around him, it felt almost like home.

  The transit tube terminated at the point where the orbital ring passed through the spindle. There hung a cluster of boxlike structures, looking for all the world like a small mining outpost on the Earth’s moon. It was into one of these boxes that Alander was led by the platform beneath him. There, as per his request, he finally came face-to-face with the Gifts.

  They didn’t look like much. In a space barely larger than an average-sized bedroom stood eleven gray, featureless, three-meter-high artifacts. They were roughly the same proportions as a playing card, complete with rounded corners. He reached out to touch one and was surprised to find neither heat nor vibrations coming from it. Nor could he detect any sounds issuing from them. For all intents and purposes, they were totally inert.

  But these were, Alander was assured, the equivalent of CPUs for each of the gifts. Here, the maintenance of the giant structures was directed. This was the true center of the enigma that had been presented to humanity in Upsilon Aquarius, the place where the absent Spinners had the greatest influence.

  He didn’t bother prying for more information about the builders of the gifts. He knew very well that it would be pointless. Instead, he took a seat by the entrance to the chamber and sat staring in awe at the monolithic machines that were the Gifts. The Spinner AIs might not be fundamentally different from the AIs he was used to, but they were nevertheless made by superior intelligences. That immediately set them apart. There was no reason why the Spinners’ creations could not themselves be thousands of times more intelligent than a single human.

  Yet part of him was still resisting the evidence and wondering if the Spinners might not be human, after all. Back on Earth when he had left, AI research had begun its steep upward trajectory that some said would lead inevitably to a technological and social Spike beyond which any prediction was impossible. If the Earth had passed this Spike and developed artificial superminds, he wouldn’t put it past them to try a stunt like this. It seemed incomprehensible, certainly, but since everything about them would be incomprehensible,
it made an odd kind of sense.

  He knew, though, that he was probably just clinging to the shreds of his original’s theory, in much the same way a child from a broken home might cling to the ideal of a happy family. If it was wrong, then it was wrong, and he should feel under no obligation to cling to it.

  He sighed and closed his eyes. This was the first time he had felt alone since his ill-fated bath. As then, with little to distract him, the memories of Lucia surfaced once more. He saw her in perfect clarity, cursed with the machinelike recall of his artificial memories. Her hand propping her head as up as she lay next to him, her hair falling in a cascade across her shoulder and down onto the pillow, her rich brown eyes staring out to him.

  And when she spoke, her voice...

  “Where do we go from here?”

  An overwhelming sense of loss washed over him, and he cursed himself out loud, irritated for having let such maudlin thoughts intrude upon what was supposed to be a moment of peace.

  To distract himself, he broke his self-imposed isolation from conSense and listened to what was going on. At first he could make out little more than a babble of voices, dozens of them overlapping and talking at once. Then, slowly, he began to tease out individual, if still fragmentary refrains:

  “—needs material input if it’s to keep assembling so—”

  “—not what they told Alander—”

  “—just isn’t enough bandwidth to—”

  “—reaction tanks filling nicely—”

  “—and tell Peter to straighten out—”

  “—if you can’t find the key then I suggest—”

  “—Spinners don’t have bodies because there aren’t any—”

  “—when Alander comes back—”

  “—air filtration system outlets—”

  “—Drop Point One in range—”

  “—Get Peter to ask them—”