Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  They kissed, both of them moving together simultaneously as though thinking with one mind. A pleasant illusion and an ironic one. Just because they liked the same games didn’t mean they thought the same. Indeed, his mind was already drifting back to the survey missions and all the problems they would face. Would pseudorandomly chosen crews really solve some of the psychological problems UNESSPRO anticipated, or could it actually make things worse? There were a couple of the civilian survey managers that he was actively worried about; it would only take one to ruin an entire mission. But he had no real power; he had expressly refused to take any sort of supervisory post, pre- or postlaunch. He was much better at working behind the scenes, getting people to do what he wanted all on their own.

  He was almost surprised when she returned to the topic after only a short time.

  “The question is: Where do we go from here? While the engrams go off into space to visit a thousand different suns, what are we going to do? Do we carry on as we always did before we joined the program? Pretend that none of this has changed us? Will we ever know what our copies do or see? How do we kill time until we find out? What if one of them dies... or we die? Are we immortal, or are we destined to die a thousand times?”

  “I thought you said you weren’t getting tangled in the metaphysics.”

  “I said I was trying not to.” She gestured imperiously, barely hiding the beginnings of a smile. (Yes, he thought; maybe I’ll ask her myself.) “The engrams wake tomorrow. In a year, most of them will be gone. Then it’s back to just us. You and me and Donald and Jene and Chrys and the others. We’re the Viking widows waving off our husbands to be swallowed by the sea. Except they’re not our husbands... or our wives or friends or anyone, for that matter. They’re us.”

  He was suddenly tired of the topic and keen to dismiss it. It was a pointless one unless it was a metaphor, and if so, maybe it was time to talk plainly.

  “They’re not really us, Lucia. They’re just copies.”

  “I’m sure they won’t take too kindly to you saying that, Peter.” She smiled; maybe she was reading his mind. “Remember, this conversation is being recorded for your copies’ memories, and they’ll think they’re real enough.”

  “At this point in time, I don’t particularly care to have a debate about whether or not they are real.” He smiled back, warmth spreading through her skin into his. A year or two of her. He would like that. “Right here in this moment, Lucia, you and I are real, and nothing else matters to me right now. I don’t even care that we’re being recorded.”

  Her smiled echoed his. “Just as long as it doesn’t find its way into the public domain, right?”

  He was happy to cast aside the illusion that they were actually talking about anything at all. If the relationship lasted longer than the six months of Entrainment Camp, he would be happy, but he was old enough to know that sometimes it was best when things ended sooner rather than later. If she left him tomorrow, he would always have these last moments to remember, and they were richer than any others that came to mind. Lucia’s skin, her mind, the way she moved with him—there could be others, but there would be no other exactly like her. This moment would be as precious as it was deliciously fragile, as beautiful as a soap bubble on a breeze. It might slip through his fingers, and the memory might be a thousand times more delicate, but he would always have the latter. If he was careful, he might just have it forever.

  * * *

  Forever...

  All around him was nothing but darkness and silence. His head hurt as though someone had taken an ax to it, and his entire body ached. He was stiff in every joint, and he needed to go to the toilet badly. He felt as though he had been in a coma for a timeless eternity.

  Then, faintly, a noise pierced the quiet: Someone nearby was sobbing.

  Stars danced behind his eyes as he sat up and slowly took stock of his surroundings. Familiarity rushed through him, although not yet with full comprehension. He was lying on the floor of the hole ship cockpit, beside the couch. The bright fight making him wince was a silvery crescent moon displayed on the screen. For a moment, he thought it might be the Earth’s moon, but then remembered that it couldn’t possibly have been. Earth’s moon had been destroyed. Besides which, this one had a large L-shaped blotch near its uppermost edge, a feature not associated with the moon he remembered.

  But if it wasn’t Earth’s moon, then the planet he could see wasn’t Earth, either. The thought troubled him momentarily, then he shook his head and silently chided himself. Of course it wasn’t Earth! The Earth was gone as well, devoured by the Spike AIs and built into something else, which in turn had been destroyed by thousands of shining, star-shaped ships in less than a day. All that remained of Earth and her sister planet Venus was a slowly dispersing cloud of atoms around a now otherwise unremarkable sun.

  He studied the image on the screen closer. The hole ship was orbiting a planet at a fairly low altitude. He couldn’t make out any detail; the sun was on the far side. There were a couple of glowing patches, eerily like cities casting light into the night sky, but that couldn’t be the case. They were too large and too few. Why build only two or three enormous metropolises when the rest of the globe was empty?

  “Caryl?” he called out, looking around him. The cockpit was empty. The stars were dimmed by the light reflecting off the moon, but some bright ones were visible. Planets? He wasn’t sure.

  Again the sobbing, gut-wrenching in its emptiness, eaten away by despair.

  “Arachne?’

  “Yes, Peter.”

  He found himself relieved to hear the AI’s voice.

  “Where are we?” he asked, struggling to his feet.

  “The system you call HD194640.”

  It took a moment for the name to sink in. HD194640. The statistics were all there: a slightly cooler and brighter star than Sol around thirty-six and a half light-years from Upsilon Aquarius, sixty-two from Earth. A study from Earth had strongly indicated the presence of oxygen and water around a rocky planet orbiting at a distance of roughly two AUs, right in the system’s habitable zone. The survey mission sent to study it had left shortly after the Frank Tipler, but they would have taken less time to arrive. If everything had run to schedule, they would have arrived in 2137, Mission Time. That would have given them an extra fourteen years to survey their system and establish a beachhead.

  It took him a second to recall the name of the ship that had been sent. And when that came, everything fell into place.

  The ship was the Carol Stoker, with Cleo Samson and Donald Schievenin in charge. Samson had called Earth, just as the Frank Tipler had, using Spinner technology. The Spinners had visited someone else!

  He looked more closely at the world—Varuna, Samson had called it—seeking artifacts similar to those that had been built around Adrasteia. The hole ship’s orbit brought the sun over the horizon at that moment, blinding him momentarily. He saw lots of blue and green as his eyes adjusted, and the white of clouds—a far cry from the muddy purple of the world he had briefly lived on. Varuna appeared a beautiful world, obviously teeming with life in all forms.

  But then, as the terminator swept across the globe, he saw the scars.

  The patches that had glowed at night were revealed as black by day. Fires were burning down on the surface— fires so large they covered one entire limb of a continent shaped roughly like a fork. There were widely scattered pockets of brown and white where surface explosions had cast debris into the atmosphere. Two white circles lying over the ocean were clouds of water vapor rising from impact sites. And one looping line glowing brighter and brighter as it fell through the atmosphere had to be the remains of an orbital tower, cut loose and succumbing to gravity.

  The shock waves of its fall would resonate around the globe for days to come, and there were nine more he hadn’t found yet. Maybe they’d fallen already, and he had yet to see their effect. Maybe they were still to come, and the fragile ecosphere he had glimpsed would be gone all too soo
n.

  He stared at battered Varuna for a full minute longer before realizing that the sobbing had ceased. His aching bladder also prompted him to move, so he tore his gaze away from the view, walked around the couch and up the short corridor leading to the crew cubicles.

  He turned left into his cubicle without looking right into Hatzis’s, although her door was open. When he had relieved himself and drunk enough to satisfy the needs of his artificial body, he walked back out again. Looking quickly through her door, he found her sitting on her bed, leaning against the wall, with her head bowed.

  “I’m sorry, Peter,” she said without looking up. Her voice was hoarse.

  He wasn’t ready to absolve her just yet. “What happened?” he asked leaning against the door arch.

  She sighed. “We arrived here two hours ago and relocated a fair way out from the sun, just to be sure. The Starfish were just finishing things off by then. They’d already destroyed the towers and spindles and were working their way through the satellites in orbit and elsewhere through the system. The Stoker was still active. I guess the Starfish thought it a minor installation compared to the towers and left it until the end. The crew was...” She paused, swallowed. “They were trying to make the Starfish stop. They could see what was coming. They were pleading with them. They knew they were going to die.”

  “And you just watched it happen?” He wanted to be angry, but in the end, all he could feel was tired.

  She finally looked up, frowning deeply. “I tried to help them. I didn’t even stop to think. I told Arachne to take us closer, right next to the Stoker. I figured that if I could download them into the hole ship or the SSDS units, maybe I could save something.” She shrugged, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “But it was too late. The Stoker had already been destroyed. I’d forgotten to take the time lag into account. By the time we arrived, there was nothing left but gas, and the Starfish had left.”

  He made no apology for his accusation. Christ, he wasn’t even sure she was telling him the truth. She may simply have been trying to cover her guilt with lies. There was no way for him to really know.

  Eventually, he rubbed at the back of his neck and asked, “What did you do to me, Caryl?”

  “I knocked you out, of course.”

  Remembering their struggle, he said, “The manual access point in my hand.”

  She nodded. “It was a simple matter to override your autonomous system once I had access.”

  He felt at once violated for what had been done to him and unnerved that she displayed no remorse for having done it.

  “So why did you wake me? Why not just leave me like that, out of your way?”

  “What good would that do? You’re no use to anyone unconscious.”

  His hand curled into a fist, not from his anger toward her, but rather to hide the point of his vulnerability.

  “Is that all you did?” he asked, looking deep into himself. The dream of his original’s last night with Lucia was still strong. It resonated with a vividness he hadn’t recalled before. It left him feeling odd, as though he had seen it properly for the first time. The revitalized memory made him feel strangely closer to her, not farther away as it had in the past. What had changed to make him feel that way?

  She didn’t hesitate. “I didn’t make any adjustments, if that’s what you mean. You’re just as fucked up as you were before.” She smiled slightly. “That’s the way I knew you’d want it.”

  He didn’t respond to the attempted joke; he just held her gaze. Steadily, searching her eyes for an indication of sincerity.

  “Look, Peter, I may not have much left to call a life, but not so little that your feelings have become a high priority. If I was going to rewrite your bloody brain, I would’ve done it days ago, I assure you.”

  He shook his head, turning again to the memory of Lucia. It was the same as it had been before, only now there was an entirely new level of meaning attached to it. Perhaps it had always been there, or else he was just looking at it differently now, adding his own interpretations to what had been said that night. Did that mean he was now closer to the memories of his old self, or farther away?

  He looked again at Hatzis on her bed. There was still no evidence of remorse in her expression. She just sat there waiting for him to say something. So he obliged her.

  “Next time, don’t wake me, okay?”

  She narrowed her eyes slightly, puzzled. “But—?”

  “It’s a warning,” he interrupted, “not a request. Because if you ever do that to me again, I swear I’ll kill you. I’m having enough trouble being me without you fucking things up.”

  She broke away from his stare after a few seconds, nodding her understanding but saying nothing.

  “How did you know, anyway?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “About the Starfish, I mean. That’s why you tried to stop me, wasn’t it? You knew they’d be waiting for us.”

  She nodded again.

  “But how?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said, her gaze meeting his again, challengingly. “Think about it, Peter. What do we know about the Starfish?”

  “Not much.” Puzzled, he went through the meager evidence they had gathered to date. “They’re much more advanced than we are. You thought the Spinners might have destroyed Upsilon Aquarius, but the Starfish ships look different; that could be a ruse, of course, although I don’t know why they’d bother.”

  “What else?”

  He thought, looking for specifics rather than speculation. “Well, they have ftl drives, like the Spinners do, and maybe other technologies that are similar. They didn’t know about Sol System, or else they would’ve gone there first. So they must’ve learned about it after Upsilon Aquarius, maybe from the data banks in the Tipler, or some other way. That could be where they heard about here, as well, although we didn’t know the mission had been successful then. Maybe...” He stopped, frowning. Something was itching to fall into place. The missing piece that would make the picture complete.

  How had the Starfish known about HD194640? How had they known about Sol? How had they even known about the mission to Upsilon Aquarius?

  And then it hit him.

  “Oh my God,” he breathed. “The ftl communicator?”

  “It’s the only explanation,” she said. “The transmissions aren’t unilateral. Every time you tried to talk to someone, you were telling the whole universe about it. Well, not actually the whole universe,” she quickly amended, “because they have a limited range. But you know what I mean.”

  The notion troubled him, because if this were true, then...

  He shook off the troubling thought.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  She shrugged. “It does make sense,” she said. “Back on the Frame, one of the remotes had commented on the Discord—the first transmission we had received—saying that whoever had sent it was ‘spraying the skies with it.’ It only occurred to me when we got that transmission from Cleo Samson. Then it all made sense.”

  “But why—?” He fumbled with the words. Already dead... “Why weren’t we warned? The Gifts could have told us about this, surely. In remaining silent they caused the deaths of everyone—”

  “No, Peter,” she cut in. “They can’t be blamed for that. The Starfish are the only ones responsible for all the killing that has been taking place. The most that the Gifts are guilty of is reticence.”

  “But it was their technology.”

  “The Spinners’ technology, which we happily used,” she said calmly. “You can’t blame the tools, Peter; and that’s all the gifts are.”

  The uncomfortable thought rose inside of him again. If the tools weren’t to blame...

  “They could have still warned us,” he spat. Then, turning his back on her, he moved back down to the cockpit. On the screen, the image of the planet was catching the sun. It was beautiful and brutalized at the same time.

  He only realized Hatzis had followed him down whe
n she spoke suddenly from behind him. “I know what you’re thinking, Peter.”

  He faced her with an expression that was both challenging and threatening. Had she tampered with his mind? But the emotions quickly dissipated. They were merely a diversionary tactic by him to avoid the thought that kept struggling to be free: I killed humanity.

  He dropped his gaze and shook his head.

  “You’re not to blame,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I called the Tipler from Sol. I led them there—”

  “You weren’t to know,” she went on. “There’s no way you could have known.”

  “Nevertheless, the history books will all say that Peter Alander was the one who led the Starfish to Sol, the one who sealed humanity’s fate.” He added wryly, “Though I guess I should take some consolation in the fact that there’ll be no one around to write any history books... nor anyone to read them for that matter.”

  “Now who has the defeatist attitude?”

  “All I’m saying is that I—”

  “Listen,” she said, dismissing his protests, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this over the last couple of days. The way I see it, the Starfish are more than just random planet-smashers. They’re aware of what the Spinners are doing. They’re following along behind, listening for the ftl communicators and then moving in when the coast is clear, like scavengers or sharks, waiting for the smell of blood, picking off the smaller races the Spinners have touched.”

  “But why?” he said, appalled that the picture she was painting was the same as the one in his own head.

  “To stop us using the gifts, perhaps? To stop us? Maybe they feel we’d become threats in the long run, if left to study the Spinners’ technology. They could just be trying to prevent any competition arising in the galaxy. Just because the Spinners might not be threatened by the idea doesn’t mean others wouldn’t be.”