“So why not take on the Spinners directly?”
“Perhaps the Spinners are too advanced for them. The Starfish are snapping at their heels like jealous puppies.”
Alander snorted. “Those puppies, as you call them, just decimated your home in less than a day.”
“Okay, a bad analogy,” she said. “But you know what I’m saying.”
“So what it amounts to is just an extreme case of bad luck? It would’ve been perfectly all right to use the communicators but for the dumb luck of the Starfish death squads waiting nearby, right?”
He knew that what she was saying made sense, and he appreciated her efforts to make him feel better; nevertheless, her words did little to alleviate the guilt he was feeling.
“The fact is, Peter, if it hadn’t have been you, it would have been someone else. Someone from the Stoker, perhaps. I know that probably doesn’t help you at the moment, but the point is that it was going to happen, regardless. It’s the nature of our species to be curious—Christ, maybe it’s the nature of all life in the galaxy. And maybe the Starfish know that. That’s why they lie in waiting, listening for the first messages from ftl communicators, waiting for the little children to play with their new toys.”
“Which brings us to the obvious question: Where are they hiding?”
“That’s something else I’ve been considering while you were out.” Facing the screen, she said: “Arachne, bring up the maps I was working on earlier.”
A 3-D star chart was suddenly presented on the screen, displaying a section of the galaxy surrounding Sol System. The map zoomed in and retreated in accordance with Hatzis’s verbal prompts. Clearly, this was something she had spent a bit of time thinking through.
“I confirmed with the hole ship that the unilateral signals from the communicator reach approximately two hundred light-years. So, if we put a sphere on the map around Adrasteia, indicating the bubble of space in which the ftl communicator would be effective, here...” A sphere appeared on the display, roughly two hundred light-years in diameter. “... and another centered on Earth, indicating the region in which normal human transmissions would have extended over the last couple of centuries, here.” Another sphere appeared, again roughly two hundred light-years wide, this one overlapping the other. “Now, Arachne, highlight the area on the map that is covered by the ftl communicator but not the Earth transmissions.”
The view of the map rotated around a glowing red section in the shape of a crescentlike shell.
“This area,” she said, facing Alander, “is where the Starfish must have come from to have detected the ftl transmissions without already knowing about Earth.”
“The Spinners, too?”
“Perhaps. Note that it’s pointing in the rough direction of Sculptor, the source of the Tedesco bursts.”
He studied the maps for a few moments longer.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “But how can all of this information help us?”
She shrugged. “Maybe if we get enough information, we’ll be able to see some sort of path.”
“And then what?”
“If the Starfish are simply following in the wake of the Spinners, we’ll have an idea of where Spinners might go next.”
“Do you think they’re aware of what’s happening?”
“I don’t see how. Arachne has no information on the Starfish, suggesting the Spinners have never even encountered them before. Chances are, the Spinners have touched an untold number of civilizations over the millennia they have been doing this, and they have been inadvertently handing them over to the Starfish, too.”
The thought was a disturbing one, and one difficult to fully grasp. All of the information he had seen in the gifts’ Library and Gallery, representing so many different cultures and species—and now it was possibly all that remained of any of them.
“You think we should tell them?”
A look of amazement touched her face. “Don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “But how?”
“Like I said, with more information, we might be able to extrapolate the direction the Spinners are headed in and intercept them.”
“By more information, you mean finding more ruins like Varuna, right?”
She nodded somberly. “Let’s face it, Peter, it’s a possibility that the Spinners have already contacted one of the other the survey missions.”
He felt a surge of adrenaline. “Christ, if they have contacted two already, why not three? Or four? The trick will be trying to find them before they use their communicators—”
“But we won’t be able to use our communicator, either, because if we do, we risk getting caught ourselves. Not immediately, perhaps, but sooner or later, we’d screw up, I’m sure.”
“So we use the hole ship to go looking,” he said. “It’s our only choice.”
She nodded again. “We’ve demonstrated that the Starfish can’t trace it unless it falls inside their light cone, wherever they’re stationed. We should be able to check the nearest systems to see if the Spinners have passed through. Given this system’s proximity to Upsilon Aquarius, it might be safe to assume that they canvassed the area first, before moving on.”
“So we find more gifts, we study them to see if there’s a way to contact the Spinners, we tell them what they’ve been doing, and... what? They reward us by helping us or giving us the tools to rebuild?”
“That’s a frightening possibility, isn’t it?” she said. “Rebuilding humanity on what little we have.” She shook her head. “That could take forever.”
“And how does forever begin, Caryl?”
She smiled at this, nodding. “Slowly,” she said. “Very slowly.”
He stared at her for a while, letting it sink in. The thought she had given the matter had done more than just ease her suicidal depression; it had given them both a direction, if they chose to take it. And why wouldn’t they?
Something they could do would make all the difference to their morale. He could see it in her and could feel it in himself. There was still a long way to go, obviously—emotionally speaking, they still had a lot to deal with—but it was a start, at least.
He may have destroyed humanity, but at least he could take a decent shot at repairing the damage.
“We’ve been saying ‘us’ and ‘we’,” he said cautiously. “Does that mean we’ll work together on this?”
“There’s no one else, Peter. Just you, me, and thousands of other engrams, scattered dozens of light-years apart. It’s not much, you’ll have to admit.”
“Better than nothing.”
“I know,” she said. “We’ll just have to find a way to make our goals the same. I know we come from very different backgrounds, but I think we can accomplish more together than apart. At the very least, I want to avoid arguing over the hole ship, since we both have the ability to operate it.”
He studied her carefully in the light reflecting off the planet below them. “It won’t choose between us?”
“No,” she said.
“You’ve asked it?”
“Yes.” Her serious expression eased, just for a moment. “I don’t know what it’d do if we gave it conflicting orders. Make us arm wrestle, perhaps.”
He half smiled at her joke, thinking, But she did ask. How close had she come to ditching his unconscious body and continuing on her own? Possibly only the lack of direction she would have without him around had saved him. He wondered how sincere she was about wanting to warn the Spinners, or even reuniting the far-flung orphans of Earth. Did she really care?
It didn’t matter, anyway. At least she had raised the possibility of working together, for whatever motive. It would be difficult to manage on their own, even with the hole ship’s AI to help. It was a job that could take them years.
“Okay,” he said. “So how do we start? Do we visit systems at random, or do we develop a method? There were over a thousand survey missions. If even half of them failed, that still leaves five hundred, an
d—”
He got no further. The hole ship issued a sound he had never heard before, like a chime ringing backward. At the same instant, the view on the screen changed, revealing a patch of space farther around the arc of the planet. Against the dark of space, a white point had appeared.
“Arachne!” Hatzis asked. “What’s going on? Are the Starfish back?”
“Caryl, wait,” he said, putting a hand on her arm. “Look.”
The white point widened, became a sphere. The sphere grew larger as though inflating like a balloon.
“It can’t be,” she whispered. “We would’ve heard.”
“Maybe we did.” He watched the other hole ship expand in silence. “Maybe the Stoker tested theirs the same way we did. Maybe it’s just coming back!”
He felt her tense beside him as they waited for the cockpit to emerge. What would he say to the pilot? He knew exactly how he or she would be feeling on seeing what had happened to their friends, having been through the experience himself only a few days earlier. Consolation did not come easy with such a loss, and any attempt at offering any would no doubt be met with anger and hostility.
A minute or two passed, but there was no sign of the cockpit emerging. Nor had the hole ship registered any incoming messages.
“Hail them,” he said. “Tell them we’re from Sol System.”
He caught Hatzis looking at him from the corner of his eye; he was sure she would have liked to contest the statement, but in the end, she must have thought better of it.
“Arachne? You sent the message, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Peter.”
“Still no reply?”
“None as yet.”
“Then send it again. And this time—”
“Too late,” said Hatzis, pointing.
“What?” Puzzled, he watched as the hole ship began to shrink again. “It’s leaving?”
“So it would seem,” said Hatzis.
He could do nothing but shake his head as the sphere continued to shrink until it finally disappeared altogether. “I don’t understand.”
“Could it be the Spinners?”
“I doubt it. The stuff they’re giving us is throwaway, remember? They’d be as likely to use it as you would’ve been to drive a Model T Ford, back home.”
He pondered the mystery for a moment, nagged by a thought that there was something missing, something they hadn’t noticed. The central sphere of the second hole ship had appeared from nowhere, then disappeared almost as quickly. What else was there?
Then a thought struck him.
“Arachne, keep an eye out,” he said. “I reckon it’ll come back elsewhere in the system, probably closer to the sun. And soon, I’ll bet.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Hatzis asked, turning to face him.
He looked away from the empty patch of sky where the hole ship had been to where the fires on Varuna burned on, below. It might be years before they went out. The smoke, plus dust and water vapor kicked up by the orbital towers yet to fall, might hide the surface from the sun for still more years. The planet might be plunged into an ice age, or thrust into a period of runaway greenhouse effects. Or it might recover completely. The Earth had recovered from far worse catastrophes in its time. Maybe, he thought, if he returned far enough in the future, the greenery would have recovered. He might be able to see blues skies again.
Twenty years, thirty. .. ?
It was something to hope for, anyway.
“Call it a hunch,” he said.
3.0
EPILOGUE
2160.9.23 Standard Mission Time
25 August 2163 V.T.
Another dawn, another planet
Watching the red star rise over a dark horizon, Caryl Hatzis couldn’t help but wonder whether her life was really that bad. Compared to the crew of the Paul Davies, she didn’t have as much to complain about as she’d once thought.
Where Adrasteia had been arid and Varuna lush, Tatenen was a frozen wasteland, the victim of a tug-of-war between two stars. The stars Zeta-1 and Zeta-2 Reticuli were too far apart to be companions but too close for either to support a stable solar system. Yet either or both had once done so. They were very similar stars to Sol, and three planets still clung to them. Two were gas giants in wildly elliptical orbits. The other was Tatenen, currently drifting the gulf between the two stars and not due to see warmth for several millennia. There might have been more, expelled long ago by the vagaries of gravity, but there was no way of knowing now.
When UNESSPRO had conducted its catalogue of Earth-like planets, Tatenen had been close enough to Zeta-2 to exhibit signs of liquid water and gaseous oxygen, and that had been sufficient to make this particular system a target. It was only after the survey team had arrived that they realized their target would never be suitable as a colony world.
The crew of the Paul Davies had had time to come to terms with their ill fortune, however. They had immediately set to work, mapping the bedrock with radar and drilling into the frozen atmosphere, seeking reclaimable material. The planet had had no forms of multicellular life, after being expelled from its sun, but what there had been had left a thick layer of carbon and other useful compounds behind, several meters down. Nanomachines drilled to exploit the planet’s dwindling geothermal energy sources, set up miniature factories scattered wildly across the buried continents, and repopulated the surface with spiderlike constructs designed to skate across the ice and report what they found. More complex devices served as remotes for the minds in orbit above. But they were nothing like the artificial bodies Alander inhabited, of course, for they would have ceased functioning within moments of exposure to the icy wastes. Instead, these creatures were spindly robots with many-pointed feet, capable of assuming a number of shapes depending on their environment. They had odd, mechanical faces by which the colonists could express emotion when not using conSense to overlay the harsh reality with more appealing images. They were building a small outpost on the planet’s south pole, from which to conduct astronomical observations.
And that, as far as she could work out, was as much as they had accomplished in the forty-nine years since they’d arrived. With no solar power to speak of and progress accordingly gradual, much of the crew’s time had been spent in slow-mo, reducing their clock rates so that five or more seconds in the real world passed for every one in their subjective experience. That way, they had unintentionally avoided the fate of older surveying missions such as the one sent to Delta Pavonis, which she and Alander had found to be lifeless and hollow, apart from the most basic AIs. Had she needed proof to convince Alander of the truth of her reservations about engrams, the Martyn Fogg, silently orbiting the world its crew had once called Egeria, had certainly provided it.
He had stared at the pitted shell of the Fogg for a long time, thinking, then asked, “You offered to fix me, once. Could you have fixed them, too, if we’d gotten here in time?”
She shook her head. “Your problem is different—a fault in the wiring of a flawed design. To fix the flaw we’d need to completely rebuild every individual from the base up. The Vincula could have done it, but that’s obviously not possible anymore. Maybe,” she said, fighting emotions that still ran very deep, “maybe we can rebuild something, somewhere, that will do the trick.”
“We’ll have to,” he said. “Or pretty soon there’ll just be you... along with a handful of people in cold storage who opted out to avoid burning out.”
It was a grim scenario. She didn’t know yet whether hoping to avoid it was noble or simply futile.
At least, she thought, the crew of the Davies had an interesting astronomical situation to observe before the possibility of degradation became a reality for them. There were actually three stars in close conjunction around Tatenen. As well as Zeta-1 and Zeta-2, there was also a red dwarf only 0.8 of a light-year away, given the unromantic name of 8869-308-1 by twentieth-century astronomers, but renamed Kurukulla by its surveyors after the red-skinned Buddhist goddess
of riches. Construction was well under way on an interferometer powerful enough to tell whether the planets orbiting it were Earth-like; fuel-hoarding had already begun to power a probe to visit a suitable target, should one eventuate. Vince Mohler and his crew were all too aware of the limitations of the world they had adopted as their own; given a choice, they would happily move. But they were only prepared to leap if they could look first.
She and Alander had been happy to do the looking for them. Data from a relatively short hop to Kurukulla had given the crew of the Davies both hope and disappointment. There was a world in the habitable zone, barely, but it would never be fit for natural human colonization. It was, however, preferable to their present location, having at least a solar power source relatively close at hand. Half of the crew, headed by the mission’s military survey manager, Faith Jong, had decided to go, once the present installation could spare both resources and staff. The rest would wait out Tatenen’s long journey to Zeta-2, and spring.
One of those who had decided to stay was Caryl Hatzis. As assistant to the civilian survey manager, rather than manager herself, the Hatzis engram of this mission had had a much less stressful time of things, judging by the incomplete memories Alander had brought with him from the Tipler. There had been an inevitable moment of awkwardness when she had been introduced to her evolved original, but that had passed, and she had ended up volunteering her memories for inclusion. The engram had balked at the idea of becoming an active node—and Hatzis wasn’t even sure it would be possible, given the limitations of the software—but it was still an intriguing thought. One day, there might be enough of her left to re-create what she had lost, since even alone, without the multiplicity she had lost with Sol—along with Matilda Sulich, JORIS, the Urges, everyone—she was still more complex than all the UNESSPRO engrams combined.
One day...
In the meantime, there was still a great deal of work to be done. Once Alander had got over his fears of meeting versions of either himself, Cleo Samson, or Lucia Benck (the latter two had not been on the Davies’s manifest, and the version of him had permanently crashed on arrival), he had rapidly got down to business. The Spinners clearly hadn’t come anywhere near Tatenen, but they might yet do so. Mohler had to be prepared, not only for the aliens and their gifts but for the dangers within his own crew. The lesson learned by Cleo Samson’s betrayal of the Tipler would have to be passed on to every mission they encountered, even if UNESSPRO no longer existed.
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