Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Focusing her awareness through the senses of her original—and feeling her struggle ever so subtly as her own will was subsumed into the greater part—she took stock of her surroundings. The suite had been cleaned and redecorated following the cocktail party. The study in which she and Sulich had ambushed Shalhoub’s remote was now a bedroom; the bar had gone. The balcony was unchanged, with its swaying pines and concrete balustrade. Beyond, however, the illusion of beach and sunset was gone. Now there was nothing but stars and Frame, rotating slowly around her as the habitat, anchored to the Frame by a glassy spindle, turned to simulate gravity.

  The giant construct seemed to stretch into infinity before her, its seemingly thin threads and girders glinting silver in the sunlight. The sun itself was hidden behind the Shell Proper, which she was thankful for. Seen naked at such a near orbit, it was off-puttingly bloated. Jetz was right about her conservatism in some respects: She still hadn’t fully acclimatized to humanity’s new home. Perhaps, she thought, she never would.

  It was incredible to think that the Frame had been built in just over a year. If its construction hadn’t been interrupted, what would it have looked like now? What would Alander have come home to then?

  When the time came for him to put in an appearance, she felt the presence of the Vincula wrap around her in turn like a heavy shawl. Her original didn’t stir, even though the deal with Alander had been for a conversation in private. For a start, that simply wasn’t possible. To varying degrees, the Vincula really was everywhere. And privacy didn’t accord with either her nor her original’s ultimate desires. She wanted this information spread on principle, whatever it was.

  Although she had seen footage of Alander’s odd vessel in action, she was still startled when it appeared out of nowhere before her, expanding in perfect silence within the complex grid of the frame. How it had matched velocities and taken position so precisely, she couldn’t even begin to imagine, but sensors in the habitat reported the use of mysterious fields to anchor it with respect to the habitat. It appeared to be perfectly motionless, an anomaly in space-time that resisted all attempts to examine it.

  As impressive as this demonstration of its abilities was, it still didn’t look like any ship that Hatzis had seen before. Hanging in vacuum several meters from the balcony, it seemed more like a giant marble than a space vessel. It was so featureless that she couldn’t even tell it was rotating until a black circle appeared on its equator. The circle expanded, became a bump that extruded out still farther, then became a black sphere growing out of the side of its white parent.

  She took a step back as the black satellite whipped around the white sphere, decreasing in speed as the distance between her and it decreased. What purpose the display served, she couldn’t tell, but it soon became apparent to her that the black sphere would eventually come to a halt beside the balustrade near her.

  “I’ll need a short ramp,” said Alander. “I presume you can get a swarm to do the job?”

  Swarm. Use of the archaic term hammered home how removed in time he actually was.

  She instructed a plex to form between the edge of the balcony and where she estimated the black sphere would dock. At the same time, the balustrade folded back to give him an opening. On a whim, she created a red carpet and unrolled it through the opening.

  “Nice touch,” he said, a hint of amusement ameliorating the tension in his voice. “I must warn you, though, while I appreciate your efforts to make me feel welcome, I’m still not totally convinced that I can trust you. Most of the data I have is in hard storage, and I have no intention of bringing it with me to the meeting. If anything should happen to me, the ship has been instructed to leave with the data and return to the Frank Tipler.”

  She smiled to herself. His concern was both hopelessly naive and yet quite justified. The Vincula wouldn’t need to do anything as overt as attack him physically to get what it wanted.

  The black sphere came to a smooth halt exactly where she predicted, and an oval hole opened in its side. From the darkness within stepped Peter Alander.

  He looked exactly the same as he had in the visual transmission he had sent earlier; clearly there had been no fiddling with the image. (She tried to recall the standard overlay program installed on the survey ships, and it came to her after a brief moment: conSense, a distant ancestor of the program her original used a hundred years later.) Alander’s body was tall and efficiently muscled, with no hair. His skin was dark-tinted, almost purplish, and his eyes were a nondescript green. He wore a slightly scruffy-looking, gray environment suit open around the throat. Apart from that, he seemed completely exposed to the vacuum around him.

  “Isn’t that odd?” she privately said to Jetz, who she knew would be watching. “I didn’t think those early remotes could withstand hard space.”

  “They couldn’t,” the Urge replied. “See, he’s covered in something.”

  Looking closer, she saw that he was indeed coated in a thin layer of refractive material that had the appearance of water. It covered his entire body, going into his ears, nose, and mouth, and it even coated his eyes. His clothes were affected, too, although to a lesser extent. A deeper scan revealed the layer to be full of complex polymer chains and other, more exotic molecules. While she didn’t know how it worked, precisely, it was clearly protecting him from the vacuum.

  In the time it had taken her to examine his odd garb, he had taken just one step, his first step out of the ship. She managed to get a glimpse into the ship before the oval door began to contract, although she saw little but a short passageway terminating in a room with a blank screen on the far wall. The air within the craft was held in place by some sort of membrane stretched invisibly thin across the entrance; Alander had passed smoothly through, without breaking it, and it, too, contained many of the complex molecules found in his second “skin.”

  By the time Alander had taken his second step, the door had closed completely, shutting her out from the mysteries it contained.

  “Note how they’ve custom-fit the remote to his original specifications,” said Jetz, his tone scornful. “Why go to so much trouble to make a standard-issue surface model look like something else? Engrams were so fixated on their primary patterns, it’s almost embarrassing to look at. I find it hard to believe that such inflexible creatures were ever chosen to be sent to the stars.”

  She wanted to remind him that one of his fellow Urges, Sel Shalhoub, did the same with his remotes and that humanity in 2050 had had few other options, but she decided against it.

  “Whatever your feelings toward them, Laurie,” she said, “the fact is, they’ve returned with a faster-than-light ship.”

  “It has to be some sort of trick. It simply isn’t possible.”

  Alander’s foot came down softly on the red carpet. The limb passed smoothly through the Vincula’s own air-retaining boundary, albeit one much thicker and clumsier than the one on his ship. He had to lean slightly forward to bring the rest of his body through.

  There was a blur of activity around her as she watched him approach through the fresh-smelling atmosphere of the balcony. Pulses of high-frequency sound brushed her ears and skin. In a tiny fraction of a second, Alander was assaulted with all the covert tricks the Vincula possessed in order to determine what made him tick, both software and hardware.

  Another step.

  “Well? What did you find out?” She would be damned if she was going to let them keep this information from her.

  “He thinks they’ve discovered aliens!” There was a note of mockery in Jetz’s voice.

  “Really? Where?”

  “In Upsilon Aquarius, of course. Some sort of artifact—more than one, actually. They’re...” He stopped, chuckling. “Apparently they’re supposed to be gifts.”

  “Gifts? What sort of gifts? Come on, Laurie! I want details.”

  “Well, the ship, for starters. And that...thing he’s wearing. The others are back where he came from. He’s brought some data these suppo
sed aliens gave him, hoping to convince us to help them study the rest.”

  “And why shouldn’t we?”

  “Let’s just wait until we see the data, Caryl. I wouldn’t get your hopes up too soon.”

  “What about him? What have you learned?”

  “Not much of any significance. He was damaged, yes, in a similar fashion to the others. To be honest, he’s lucky to have his sanity. Putting him into the remote seems to have gained him a little time, although it’s unlikely he will hold up indefinitely.”

  “Could he be fixed?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But why would we?”

  “Is it reasonable that I should want him not to collapse on me while I’m trying to talk to him?”

  “You’re still planning to go through with this?” She felt Jetz’s surprise as Alander came to a halt before her. “You’re not going to learn any more than we already know, Caryl.”

  “Knowledge is a progression, Laurie,” she said, holding back her anger. “A snapshot of someone’s head isn’t necessarily all there is to know about them.”

  She knew that Laurie Jetz had never had any experience with engrams; he had certainly never had one made of himself. Very few people alive in 2163 had. After UNESSPRO had met its launch target, the technology had flourished for a brief while, enjoying the patronage of the rich, always on the lookout for a sort of immortality, but the Spike had ended all that. Most had been erased as the information surge had devoured every useful byte in the system; many were wiped when the uploaded realized just how useless they were, compared to new technologies. What few engrams remained were frozen as historical records or tucked away in long-forgotten storage areas, frozen. Occasionally one that had been running in isolation for decades was found, insane but still valiantly bluffing at life; these were instantly, humanely erased.

  Hatzis felt vague feelings of sorrow for these lost children of her past. She’d had many engrams made of herself for UNESSPRO, and although each of them had been but fragments of herself then—and even less in comparison to herself now—they were still parts of her. They were worth pity, at the very least. She had always sworn to accept any that returned into her fold. Its patterns might be flawed, but its new memories would be worth something. Only then would she erase it.

  Would the original Peter Stanmore Alander have absorbed this engram’s memories? She didn’t know. Perhaps, out of curiosity, to see what it had seen, at only one remove. But she doubted it. Her recollections of him—buried away in deep memory, but still there—suggested that he had been proud of his powers of cognition and would have become even more so, had he survived the Spike. He wouldn’t want to feel what it had been like to be crippled and lost, the way this one was. Only its knowledge would have made it valuable, and someone else could have collected that.

  It’s a hard life, she silently told the engram of Peter Alander, feeling the pity she hoped she would show one of her own. But I’m sure you already know that.

  2.1.5

  “Are you sure we’re not being monitored here?” he asked as he stopped on the balcony before Caryl Hatzis. He tried to ignore the spinning of the sky above him as the tear-shaped habitat revolved. The carpet was soft beneath his feet, the air slightly more humid than the interior of the hole ship, and there was a faint smell of frangipani. It was almost as though he were standing somewhere in the tropics, rather than in a bubble clinging midway along one stem of the largest artifact he had ever seen—the thing Hatzis had referred to as the Frame.

  Still, it did give him a strange feeling of returning. He was home, more or less. At least, he assumed this was where the majority of the remaining humans lived, in physical form. There were no other pressurized habitats to be found in the system, unless they were either expertly camouflaged or buried underground, which made sense in engineering terms.

  “As sure as we can be,” Caryl Hatzis said, stepping forward to take his hand. She wore an elegant gown of dark purple velvet with her hair tied back in a bun. Her skin was flawless and soft to the touch. Her face and throat were unadorned, but around one wrist she wore a simple silver band. It was the only decoration he could see.

  She was like something out of an old immersion soap: almost too perfect to be real. And maybe she wasn’t, he thought. He had no way of knowing if this really was Caryl Hatzis.

  “I hope you’ll forgive my paranoia,” he said, feeling conspicuously underdressed beside her. He let her guide him away from the balustrade and over to a wrought-iron setting consisting of two chairs and a table, on which a couple of glasses and a jug of ice water rested. He could see drops of condensation trickling down the jug’s curved belly as he sat down heavily. The centrifugal gravity was almost Earth-normal. “UNESSPRO regs specifically instructed us to communicate anything important to no one but those in authority. I guess they were worried about sensitive information getting out—”

  “You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” she said firmly.

  “How can you say that without knowing what I’m going to tell you? For all you know, it could have serious destabilizing effects on your society.”

  “Nothing you can tell us will be worse than anything we’ve been through in the past.”

  He regarded her suspiciously. “This Vincula thing,” he said. “It’s not some sort of group mind, is it?”

  She smiled and eased herself into a chair. “Far from it, Peter. It’s simply very flexible. It can cope with change.”

  “Can it cope with the existence of intelligent alien life?” He asked the question on an impulse, hoping for a reaction. Her response was altogether too smug.

  “It has in the past,” she said evenly, “and continues to. Not long after the Spike, when some sort of coordination was returning to the system, a series of brief transmissions were recorded from a number of distant sources in the direction of Sculptor.”

  He frowned. “What sort of transmissions?”

  “You weren’t aware of them? I’m surprised. Upsilon Aquarius is in roughly the same direction as the transmissions. Perhaps your detectors were concentrating on Earth at the time. Had they been facing the other way, I’m sure you would have noticed.” She shrugged. “The transmissions didn’t come from survey teams, if that’s what you’re wondering. Not human ones, anyway. That they were of intelligent origin cannot be doubted, even though they ceased abruptly a year later, never to recur. To this day, they remain untranslated.” Her chin lifted slightly. “Their existence conclusively put your original’s theory to rest, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t care about that,” he said, although part of him was still irked by the fact. “If anything, I’m actually relieved. If you didn’t believe in the possibility of life elsewhere, then you would have had much more difficulty accepting what I have to tell you.”

  “That your ship is of alien origin?” she asked blandly. “As well as the membrane coating your body?”

  “And more,” he said.

  “We already guessed as much, Peter. And the Vincula is coping with the confirmation of that suspicion, in case you are still wondering.” Her smile returned. “We would like access to the data you have brought. Your discovery promises to be one of the more... interesting in human history.”

  “Interesting?” He felt that she was she trying to downplay the importance of the find. But if so, why? “I hope it will be much more than that. This ship and others like it could reunite Earth with the survey worlds. I can travel from here to Adrasteia in less than—”

  “To where?”

  “Adrasteia. That’s the name we gave the proposed colony world we found. It took me less than a day in real time to get from there to here. And I have the ability to communicate with the Tipler instantly. Access to this sort of technology will radically alter the way human society operates, much as the wireless radio or the Internet did in the past.”

  She nodded. “We detected your transmissions in our own prototype communicator. At first we thought it was just noise—we called t
he first one the Discord—but gradually we realized that it was more than that. You called Upsilon Aquarius on several occasions, the first four days ago; is that correct?”

  “No. The first few transmissions must’ve been the test we performed, when we tried to contact Earth from Upsilon Aquarius. Not long after, we tested it again, using the hole ship. The most recent transmissions took place when I arrived yesterday, looking for instructions.” He was glad to tell her something she hadn’t already guessed, even if it was just a minor detail. The conversation wasn’t going at all as he had expected; he had clearly underestimated the capabilities of the Vincula and its... What could he call them? Components, perhaps? “But are you telling me that you’re close to having this sort of technology anyway?”

  “I can’t answer that, Peter, without knowing more about the technology you have access to. Looking at your ship doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “I guess not.” He sagged back into the seat, wishing he could trust them. At the moment, though, he didn’t feel confident enough even to drink the water offered to him. “Look, I’m sorry. I must seem like some primitive yokel to you, blustering on about stuff you already know more about than I do.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “Not at all, Peter.”

  “It’s just that I want you to realize that I’m not treating this lightly—and to make sure that you won’t, either. This is the real thing, Caryl.” He leaned forward again. “This is why we went out there in the first place.”

  “I didn’t go anywhere, Peter.”

  “I know, I know. You didn’t, but versions of you did.” He experienced a brief flashback to his last conversation with Lucia: If not for us, then for whom? “But you, the old you from a century ago, would have gone if she’d had the chance, just like my original would have. This is what we were all looking for, hoping for.”