Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

The cocktail effect took hold, and soon he could hear little more than his own name, over and over: “Peter... Alander... Peter...”

  He leaned his head against the wall behind him, wanting to switch off his feed to the Tipler but not particularly wanting the silence either. It was a choice between thoughts of Lucia or listening to the others talk about him.

  Not that they were really talking about him, per se. Their interest was with the gifts; he was just the channel through which they could get to them.

  The babble in his head was incessant, reminding him just how different he was from them. He needed time to himself, while the others in the Tipler seemed quite happy to work together forever: analyzing the data they had, poring over the information given to them by the gifts, discussing strategies on how they should go about studying each of the items in the spindles. Hatzis had been annoyed at his inability to continue, because he had a need to rest, and maybe she had every right to be. He was different from them, not as efficient or...

  A realization struck him suddenly, one that made him feel a thousand times more isolated than if he were to simply shut off the feed to the Tipler.

  He reached out through conSense, seeking Cleo Samson.

  She materialized an instant later, sitting on the floor beside him with her arms folded around her knees.

  “Does this mean you’re back?” she said. “Otto is having kittens.”

  “Not just yet. Sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Any time.” She didn’t look as though she had been sleeping, despite what Wyra had said. “So what’s up? Have the Gifts told you something?”

  “No, nothing like that. But I think I know why they picked me.”

  She leaned closer. “Tell me.”

  He held the thought in his mind for a moment, disliking the way it tasted. It tasted true. “I’m a bottleneck.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Don’t look so puzzled. You know I am.”

  “That’s not why I’m puzzled. You mean they chose you for that reason?”

  He nodded. “To slow things down.”

  “But why? Why give us all this stuff, then make it hard to talk to us about it?”

  “So we’ll work it out for ourselves. They even said something along those lines when—”

  “ ‘We are only permitted to guide you so far,’ they said.” She was quoting directly from the recordings, via the conSense record.

  “Exactly,” he said. “They want us to go slowly, working everything out as we go along.” A memory came to him, from his original. “Did you ever play the old computer games?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “No, why?”

  “My father used to like them,” he said. “The preimmersion type, on a monitor only. Some of them had elements of role-playing, but they weren’t terribly sophisticated; they could be worked out fairly easily. But they did take time and could be quite challenging. Naturally, there were people who didn’t want to solve the puzzles for themselves; they’d rather walk though it, getting nothing more from them than the nice scenery. They would use cheats downloaded from the World Wide Web to crack the game wide open.” The words were almost identical to the ones his father had used, years ago. It was uncanny how he knew them so well, even though he himself had never heard them spoken before.

  Samson smiled now. “And we on the Tipler are these people, right? Wanting the cheats?”

  “The Gifts have the same attitude as my father in respect to this,” he said. “If you are to play, then you play it properly. Otherwise, there’s no point.”

  She watched him with some sympathy. “And that’s why you think they chose you?”

  “Yes. Not because I’m special, but because I’m slow. I’m forcing the others to think, rather than ask. They’ll give us a push now and then, sure, but essentially, we have to put in the effort to learn and understand ourselves. We can’t cheat.”

  Her hand reached out to touch his shoulder. “You could be right, Peter,” she said. “But it doesn’t really change anything.”

  “No, it doesn’t. I’m still the one everyone wants to talk to, all of a sudden, for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Well, there’s something to be said for that. It’s not often Caryl Hatzis lets herself be dangled from someone else’s string.”

  He laughed at this. “True enough,” he said. Then, earnestly: “Tell me, how are the others coping with all this?”

  “Generally well. There’s plenty to keep their minds occupied, which keeps them from dwelling on the enormity of it all, you know?”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Jayme’s way out of his depth, though,” she said with a smile. “You can tell by the way he’s not really talking to anyone. He’s just going through the motions, as though everything on the inside has been knocked out cold. It’ll take him a while to unfreeze, I think.”

  “And Caryl?”

  “Handling it, I think. You can never tell with her, though. She always acts as though she’s about to snap.”

  “That’s her way of coping, I think.” He shifted on his buttocks; the floor was getting hard. “We all have our own methods.”

  “I guess so.”

  They were silent for a long moment. Alander stared at the gray processors and wondered what was going on inside them. He doubted humanity would ever know all of their secrets, no matter how hard they looked.

  “Listen, Cleo—”

  “Don’t say it, Peter.”

  “Don’t say what?”

  “That you’re sorry for being such a crabby old bastard.”

  “Why would I say that?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “What—a crabby bastard or sorry for it?”

  “Both, if you like.” Her smile widened. “Depends on how big an argument you’re looking for.”

  “I really wasn’t going to say that,” he said. “I was just going to say thanks. And don’t ask for what, either. You know what I’m talking about, this time.”

  “Maybe. But I reserve the right to disagree. I know what I’m letting myself in for, and I choose to put up with it.”

  He shrugged. “The point is, I’m grateful,” he said. “Of all the people on the Tipler, you’re the only one who has consistently treated me like a human being.”

  “Well, it seemed perfectly obvious to me.”

  “What did?”

  “That you needed a friend,” she said. “And still do, I think.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No, let me finish. I like you, Peter, a whole lot more than I did before we left. That isn’t to say I love you or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not some soppy schoolgirl hanging around waiting for some ungrateful drip to glance in her direction. Although I was jealous of Lucia during entrainment, it was only because I didn’t know you very well, and she was coming between us. I thought we could’ve been friends, first and foremost, and was sad that we didn’t have that chance to find out. Later, when we arrived here and you were in such a bad way, you were abandoned by almost everyone; you frightened them, showed them what they didn’t want to see. I could’ve abandoned you, too, quite easily; I didn’t because that would have been a betrayal of my initial feelings. If I like someone, I don’t just like them when they’re happy; I don’t believe in part-time friendships. I’ve been your friend even when you didn’t know it, and I think it’s starting to pay off, now. Don’t you?”

  He couldn’t help it: He laughed. “Your investment is finally paying dividends. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Not so crudely, perhaps,” she said smiling, “but yes, I guess in the end we always look out for our own best interests first.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best to ensure you are suitably rewarded for your troubles.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she said. “And maybe sooner than you think.”

  He narrowed his eyes, trying to fathom the meaning behind her words, but before he could consider quizzi
ng her, she was gone—disappearing from one moment to the next, as though she had never been there at all.

  He looked up at the Gifts, then down at his feet. Although physically rested, he still felt tired. Most of all, he was tired of games. Whatever Samson was playing at, he didn’t have the spare energy to worry about it.

  It was time to get serious and take control of the situation and find out exactly what they had here. While the others were working hard to decipher the mystery of the gifts, he couldn’t afford the luxury of being a loner for too long. Bottleneck or not, he had to join the group effort and let himself be monopolized.

  “Caryl, are you there?”

  The voice of the survey manager responded immediately, as though she had been waiting. “Of course.”

  “Is everyone listening in?”

  “They can be, if you think it’s necessary.”

  “It might be. I think it’s time we stopped stumbling around in the dark.”

  “I agree. Give me a minute.”

  “Okay, Gifts,” he said, getting up and pacing around while directing his attention upward. “I’m going to start relaying questions from my colleagues on the Tipler. I want you to answer them as openly as you can. You don’t have to give us specifics, necessarily, merely an overview so we can work out where to concentrate our efforts. Just this...” He indicated the monoliths. “This alone would keep us busy for months.”

  “We are prepared to answer any question you put to us, Peter,” replied the Gifts, “provided only that it doesn’t conflict with the wishes of our builders.”

  He nodded but said nothing until Hatzis returned. His mind wandered across the cloudscape of Adrasteia below, to the darkness of space. Somewhere out there was an alien race the details of which he might never know. What did they look like? Where did they come from, and where were they going?

  There was only one way, at the moment, that they had any hope of finding out.

  “We’re here, Peter.”

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

  Spindle Map

  1: Science Hall

  2: Lab

  3: Map Room

  4: Surgery

  5: Hub

  6: Dry Dock

  7: Gifts

  8: Library

  9: Gallery

  10: Dark Room

  1.2

  THE VIKING WIDOWS

  1.2.1

  The Frank Tipler, like all the other survey vessels, allowed a number of ways in which the engrams could interact with their environment that flesh-and-blood humans could not share. The most frequently utilized was the ability to speed up or slow down the internal clock, so that one could compress a thirty-year period into an hour, if necessary, or speed up one external day and make it feel like three. Engrams could also shut themselves down when necessary for a brief time, although the process was discouraged; it was too much like death, to suspend one’s thoughts completely, and few were prepared to take a chance on never returning. After all, who knew? The theory of the soul had taken a beating in the twenty-first century, but no one was immune to the superstitious leftovers of the past.

  One facility that hadn’t been included, although it had been raised several times, was the ability to clone individual crew members. This had been deemed too problematic for missions such as these. If someone was copied, that created an immediate imbalance in resources; why should one person have more than their fair share of processing time than the others? The situation would be unsustainable. And supposing that the copy was ultimately “retired,” who was to say that it had any less right to continue existing than the original? What if there were more than one copy? The moral and ethical arguments were many and had the potential of leading to disastrous circumstances.

  Caryl Hatzis was one of those who had always been opposed to the idea of replication. After two days of talking with the Gifts, however, she was beginning to wish she hadn’t. For a start, she could have cloned Alander and put as many copies as she wanted in new bodies and set them to work, and each could have communicated with the Gifts. She would not have been forced to wait until he was ready. She never thought it would be something she would hear herself say, but one Alander simply wasn’t enough!

  Two days... In that time, she had watched as the droids completed a map of the Gallery, which turned out not to be as infinite as it had first seemed, although it still contained more works of art than the Tipler had memory to record. This was without taking into account the Library and the Science Hall, where another droid had scanned the numerous equations covering the thousands of square meters of walls. Some of the math seemed to pertain to a theory underlying the Kempe-Larner superstring GUT, a possibility that had her mathematicians completely stumped. The Gifts wouldn’t explain what any of the equations were; that, they had said, was humanity’s task.

  They were less reticent in the chambers known as the Lab, but no less mysterious. Huge tanks lined the walls—some of them metal, others made of energies the likes of which could merely be wondered at by her scientists—all containing samples of various exotic types of matter. All could be examined by sensors within the room, although at times it was far from clear just what the sensors were actually measuring.

  In other rooms there were vast standing waves of vibrations in space-time and energy that could be similarly measured on instruments that were as likely to be as completely mysterious as they were familiar. Her material engineers and physicists had positively confirmed samples of Bose-Einstein condensate and positronium in the main chamber, and thought they’d found neutronium and quark matter in another room, but they hesitated to even guess at many of them.

  Too much too soon, she thought. Riddles within riddles...

  The Gifts had been relatively frank in their discussions of the Surgery. First revealed was an analysis of the human genome, with a list of proteins and their uses, which filled a few gaps still remaining in human knowledge. Then came a complete dissection of the human form, detailing how it arose from birth—including answers to questions of fetal development that had eluded medical researchers on Earth for centuries—through the various stages of development, maturity, and senescence. Hatzis watched detailed simulations of neurons at work in the brain, followed with some difficulty a procedure designed to trigger cell death in all known cancers with 100 percent effectiveness, became completely lost in arguments, via Alander, over whether quantum effects really played a role in human consciousness, and was ultimately reduced to dumb amazement at the real gift the spindle contained.

  They had earlier noted the presence of a human-shaped suit apparently made out of water in one corner of the main room. Initially, her expert in that area, Kingsley Oborn, had dismissed it as little more than decoration. But when he realized that everything within the Surgery had a purpose, he was forced to reassess the suit.

  “Any ideas?” Hatzis had asked him.

  “Well, it’s not a model,” he had replied while running a hand over his virtual beard. “And I’m guessing it’s not an examination or a diagnostic tool, either. They’ve already given us enough noninvasive methods to last us a century. Some sort of therapy, perhaps?”

  But she knew they could speculate all they wanted and not get anywhere. The only way to find out exactly what is was for was to ask the Gifts. As always, they would only speak directly to Alander, regardless of who else was actually asking the question.

  “Place your hand within the device, Peter,” they told him.

  Apprehensively, Alander stepped up to the suit and did as he was instructed.

  “Like this?” he said, reaching nervously out to the watery surface.

  “Don’t be nervous, Peter,” said the Gifts. “You can’t damage it.”

  “It’s not the suit I’m worried about,” he said.

  Nevertheless, he extended his hand the few centimeters and touched the suit. The surface trembled for a second, then parted beneath his fingertips. Then, before he had chance to even flinch, the suit
had dissolved and run up Alander’s arm; in the second it took him to call out in alarm, it had fully enveloped him.

  “Peter?” Hatzis felt a wave of panic as she watched him standing there, completely immersed in the watery substance. If they lost him ...

  “I’m okay,” he replied after a moment, although his tone indicated a high degree of tension.

  “It will not harm you, Peter,” assured the Gifts. “Note that you can breathe normally, and that your movements are unimpeded.”

  Through the rippling fluid, Alander’s android features were slightly blurred, but his voice was only a bit muffled.

  “And now what?”

  “We shall demonstrate,” said the Gifts.

  What followed were sights Hatzis never wished to see again. Alander’s artificial body had been displayed in more ways than she could imagine: as though his skin had become transparent, revealing subcutaneous layers of fat and muscle; in detail, with close-ups of cells and fibers displayed on the surface of the watery suit; in pieces, dismantled like a machine and blown up within an aqueous gel, all without any apparent dysfunction or discomfort. She knew she’d never forget the sight of him with his arm magnified five times its normal thickness, reduced to individual bones and tissues, yet apparently still working with perfect ease. Likewise, she would never forget the look on his face.

  “So it is another tool for analysis?” Oborn looked surprised, but professional curiosity quickly took over. “Like X ray, CAT scan, PET, and MRI all rolled into one!”

  “The suit is capable of repairing damage on every level,” the Gifts explained to Alander, again ignoring the comments of the others. “It can treat everything from gross tissue damage to DNA copying errors. It can knit bones, restore cerebral lesions, replace blood, and erase scars. It can—”

  “Ask if it can extend telomeres,” broke in Oborn.

  “Yes,” the Gifts replied when Alander asked.

  “All of them?” Oborn pressed excitedly. “Not just a few here and there?”

  “Where such intervention would be beneficial to the subject, yes.”