Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “If these Spinners do come here, what should we do about it?” Mohler’s image in conSense was of a slender man in his forties with prematurely gray hair and olive skin. An extremophile biologist by trade, he had some of the emotional isolation required of someone used to traveling to peculiar places for extended periods in order to study a hardy species of bacteria. Maybe that was why he made such a competent leader, Hatzis thought.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Alander told him, interacting with Mohler the same way he had with Cleo Samson, going far enough to let conSense fool him into thinking she was standing in front of him but still not accepting full immersion. “The gifts will be delivered; you’ll have no choice about that. Just don’t use the communicator from here, whatever you do. We think this is what alerts the Starfish to your presence. Take the hole ship somewhere else and call us from there instead. But go a fair way, because we don’t know yet if something else can tip the Starfish off at a closer range. We do know that their travel times are similar to ours; it took both them and us about a day in real time to travel from Sol to the outer reaches. That means they’ll only be hours away from you if you do let something slip.”

  Mohler nodded gravely. He had accepted without question their explanation of what had happened to Sol and Upsilon Aquarius. What choice had he in the face of an ftl starship and the original of Caryl Hatzis?

  “We’d also like you to broadcast a warning to the Spinners,” Alander went on. “I’m not sure they’ll listen, but it’s worth a try. They need to know about the Starfish. If they’re going to give other colonies communicators, there might be a safer design they can provide... something the Starfish can’t home in on.”

  “And if someone else comes?” Mohler asked.

  Alander didn’t answer immediately. So far, he and Hatzis had visited ten high-profile systems targeted by UNESSPRO. Four were empty of all life; the missions had clearly failed to arrive, for whatever reason. The crews of three relatively close to Earth, such as the Martyn Fogg, had suffered engram failure. Two had been destroyed in similar fashions to Adrasteia and Sol, although precisely when 94 Aquarius and BSC8477 had used their communicators and thereby summoned the Starfish had not been determined. The calls should have been detected by the hole ship Arachne, since both systems were on the Upsilon Aquarius side of surveyed space. Hatzis suspected that it had happened during her and Alander’s three long trips: from Sol to Adrasteia and back, then from Sol to Varuna and the ruined Carol Stoker. They obviously couldn’t receive such transmissions while in transit, something else the Gifts had omitted to tell them.

  Given that four systems had been visited by the Spinners in only a week or two, that put the dispersal of the gifts at a higher rate than she had expected. This was potentially a good thing: It was only a matter of time and persistence before they found another survey mission either just before or just after contact, in time to warn them about the Starfish. Even if they missed such a mission, there was a chance that survivors would escape the Starfish as she and Alander had and begin their own quest among the systems. Should such a group come to Tatenen, they would at least be made aware of others’ efforts and hopefully even agree to combine forces to make the job easier.

  This was in fact her greatest hope: that out of terrible adversity, a handful of surviving survey missions could be united, and that humanity could, ultimately, rebuild itself. Contact with Tatenen could very well mark the beginnings of such a process.

  “The weak shall inherit the Earth, huh?” Mohler had commented the first time he’d heard her plans, adding, “Pity there isn’t an Earth left to inherit.”

  But she knew that Mohler wasn’t referring to other survey missions when asking about visitors. He was talking about the second mysterious hole ship that he’d seen from the footage that she and Alander had taken from HD194640, shortly before they’d left Varuna. As Alander had predicted, the ship had eventually returned, but not until a full day later. And when it did, all they were able to do was watch it with interest. Its distant location meant the images they were looking at were already an hour old; they knew that should they attempt to move Arachne closer, the other hole ship would have long since relocated elsewhere.

  During its second appearance, the cockpit had emerged as normal. It was different from the one she and Alander had become accustomed to; it had been modified, somehow, and looked as though barnacles or coral had grown over its normally smooth surface, encrusting it with strange lumps and projections. What purpose they served, neither they nor the hole ship could guess.

  The strange cockpit had orbited the central body as normal for a minute, then decelerated to a halt. Then, just as slowly, a hole had opened in the mottled side, and something had emerged.

  Hatzis recognized it immediately, as did Alander. The object was identical to the death markers they had found previously in Upsilon Aquarius and Sol, and later found in 94 Aquarius and BSC8477. Slowly, nudged from the inside by an invisible force, it had drifted out into space and assumed, they confirmed later, a similar orbit to the others.

  “The one thing HD194640 was missing,” Alander explained, looking slightly smug, “was a death marker. We’d hunted everywhere and hadn’t found one. Also, we knew that the death markers had no propulsion systems, therefore someone had to physically put them in place. A hole ship would have been perfect for the job. That’s how I guessed it would return.”

  “So you’re saying it’s one of ours? Another survey mission?”

  “All I’m saying is that it’s someone else who’s been contacted by the Spinners.”

  “Someone not human?”

  He had shrugged. “It’s possible. They might be the source of the Tedesco bursts. We might be seeing the tail end of a convoy, here...”

  Too far away to contact it, they could only watch as the hole ship airlock had contracted shut, the cockpit had begun to rotate again, and their reticent visitor once again disappeared.

  But the possibility that it had been piloted by a member of an alien race, also contacted by the Spinners and attacked by the Starfish, added credence to the plot she was making of the Spinners’ movement through surveyed space from somewhere in the direction of Sculptor, through Upsilon Aquarius, then to BSC8477 and 94 Aquarius, and lastly to HD194640. Without a more accurate idea as to when the middle two systems had been contacted, they could only guess as to what rate the Spinners were moving through surveyed space. The best she could say was that only three days—and a distance of thirty-six light-years—had separated the destruction of Adrasteia and Varuna. If that was how fast the Spinners were moving, they would reach the ruins of Sol in a couple of weeks and pass out the other side of surveyed space in about a month.

  That gave the remaining humans a relatively brief time span in which to contact them, or at least to make the most of the gifts they left behind. There had to be some way to get their attention.

  Even if they didn’t, for better or for worse, life would go on. Hatzis couldn’t blame her engram for seeking a happier alternative. Although there were presently few for the occupants of Arachne, their number of options had increased after only two weeks of exploring. They had found survivors; they had found abandoned beachheads that could serve as a base, if needed; they weren’t alone.

  And that was why, perhaps, she was beginning to think that she wasn’t as unfortunate as she had believed after the destruction of the Vincula. Never had things seemed darker than when she had gone to Io in the hope that one of the povs she had warned might have survived and gone there—and heard nothing. But even on her own, she was self-sufficient within herself and capable of adjusting to change. It would have been easy to turn her back on the engrams and rebuild from scratch on her own, but the simple fact was that it could be simpler with their help. They had resources she did not; even with the hole ship at her sole command, she would have faced a tough time making any progress at all, at first. This way, she would have allies, at least for a while, if not permanently. And it wasn’
t impossible that their goals would one day be the same. If she could find a way to get around their flaw, they might form a sort of community resembling something Sol would have been proud of. There was still a chance, as her mother might have put it, of turning their weakness into strength.

  She stayed in the background as Alander evaded Mohler’ s last question—”And if someone else comes?”—and wrapped up his final dealings with Mohler, preparatory to moving on. Despite her connection to one of their crew members, the Davies’s survey team still regarded her as something other. And she was; there was no denying that. If they were afraid that she might exploit them, they were absolutely correct. Her plans to bootstrap the engrams to a higher stage of human evolution, using Spinner or Spike technology, as necessary, might not accord with the plans of at least one of them.

  She smiled to herself. Alander had noticed the slight change within himself, but he seemed to have accepted the lie that she hadn’t tampered with him while he was unconscious. Perhaps he thought it had come from within himself. If so, that was good; that was what he was supposed to think. And besides, in a sense it was true. All she’d done was randomized the fine-tuning of some of his responses, so he wouldn’t be locked into old or new destructive patterns, trapped in stifling regularity. Like the beating of a living heart, he needed a touch of chaos to make him truly live. No one could predict, now, exactly what he would be—even her—but it seemed to be helping.

  And he would always have his memories. They all would.

  For whom?

  If her engram ever asked her that question, she knew what she would say. There was only one answer to that question, even if it was different for every person who asked it.

  For me, she would say. Always for me.

  APPENDIX 1

  The Adjusted Planck Standard

  International Unit

  After several notable mission failures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an attempt was made for the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program (UNESSPRO) to develop a single system of measurement to prevent conflict between data or software from nations contributing to joint space projects. A working group was established in 2043 to examine the issue, drawing on expertise within both scientific and political communities. Two of the main criteria of the working group was that such a system of units should be as similar as possible to existing systems, in order to ease the transition between them, and that it should be as independent of arbitrary criteria as possible. That the system would be decimal was a starting assumption.

  The working group chose Planck units as an early starting point. These values are based on fundamental constants of the universe and thus make a good foundation for a system of units. The basic Planck measures for mass, length, and time are:

  These values are too small to be useful for everyday measurements. One Imperial inch would be equivalent to over 157 billion quadrillion quadrillion Planck meters; a thin person might be alarmed to discover that they now weighed almost three trillion Planck kilograms; one old hour would drag on for over a trillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion Planck minutes. Clearly, these units would not be suitable either as a mission standard or for general usage.

  The solution was to apply a simple fix to each unit, bringing them into more familiar territory. The Adjusted Planck second was simply derived from the “pure” Planck second by multiplying it by 1043. The other twp base units were derived in a similar fashion. Thus:

  All other fundamental units (electric current, magnetic flux, energy, etc.) can be derived from these three units plus a number of other universal constants such as e (the magnitude of charge on a single electron) and the Boltzmann constant. Since the layperson is most likely to encounter the units of mass, space, time, and temperature, we will restrict our discussion mainly to these four units.

  1. Time

  The length of a second, along with the number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, the number of hours in a day, the number of days in a week or a month, and the number of months in a year, are all arbitrarily determined figures. They are not fixed by nature. The only two units of time that could be considered to be relatively permanent (for humans in the relative short term) are the rotational period of the Earth and the sidereal year. These two durations were key considerations in development of the Adjusted Planck time scale, although neither were considered essential for a system of time measurement intended primarily for use on missions to other solar systems, upon which relativistic effects would play havoc with calendars.

  As the following chart shows, the new scale of time measurement bears a strong resemblance to the old: The new minutes and years are particularly close, and days, weeks, and months are not radically removed, either. The division of minutes and hours into 100 equal portions facilitates more intuitive timekeeping; a day of two ten-hour halves preserves a sense of familiarity without sacrificing practicality; ten months of six five-day weeks allows great flexibility when it comes to scheduling rosters and planning in the medium term. Nations used to decimal measurements in other areas would, it was assumed, adapt naturally to the new scale, while those unfamiliar with them would still find “natural” time periods more or less unchanged.

  It is true that over time the year as recorded by the Adjusted Planck method (which was adopted by UNESSPRO on 1/1/2050, the midpoint of the twenty-first century and projected launch date of the first crewed interstellar mission) would drift from that recorded on Earth. As mentioned above, however, this was considered immaterial for missions to other solar systems. Adjustment is readily made between the two calendars. The need to provide space-going humanity with a practical method of timekeeping ultimately outweighed the need to maintain an impractical terrestrial tradition.

  2. Space

  While the Adjusted Planck decimal time scale was perhaps the most contentious issue facing the working group, the issue of measuring distance, area, and volume was considered no less important since a handful of contributing nations—notably the United States of America— had still not adopted a metric system of measurement. Although the change to metric was widely considered inevitable in the long term, the following compromise was agreed upon because of its congruence with old units.

  The Adjusted Planck meter is still considered by many to be too large for everyday use, but its derived unit, the decimeter has many practical applications. The centimeter, falling neatly between the old centimeter and the inch, has also been touted as a compromise between the two systems. But the similarity between the old mile and the new kilometer and the new liter and the old gallon—plus a number of other convenient measures arising naturally out of the figures (see point 4)—convinced the U.S. delegates that to change would be advantageous.

  3. Mass, Current, and Temperature

  Once measures for space and time had been accepted, the fundamental units of mass, current, and temperature were foregone conclusions. The mantra that five old pounds equals one new kilogram was concocted to ease the transition for Imperial users. Confusion between Fahrenheit and Celsius scales was already common, especially when combined with the shifting zero arising from scientific usage of the Kelvin scale. The new scale, with its base set firmly on absolute zero, was adopted alongside the others to ensure congruity between data sets.

  1 new ampere = 2.972 old ampere

  4. Contributing Factors

  Adopting an entirely new set of unit measurements is nothing to take lightly. The working party took many considerations into account, one of them being inelegance. This property, although ill defined, is a factor in the acceptance of any novelty, be it a scientific theory, a fashion of dress, or a style of writing. The simple annotation of several frequently used constants in Adjusted Planck units contributed to the decision to adopt them. For instance:

  These figures have many practical applications in space exploration (the field for which these units were developed). The simplicity with which they can be expressed in the new units contributes to t
he ease of communication between scientists—the main point the new system was created to address.

  5. Conversion Table

  The following conversions were provided for rapid calculation from the old International System of Units to the new Adjusted Planck Standard International Units.

  APPENDIX 2

  Mission Register

  NB: All measurements are made in Adjusted Planck units and all dates are recorded in Standard Mission Time.

  Upsilon Aquarius

  UNESSPRO Mission: 842

  Core survey ship: Frank Tipler

  Primary survey world: UA-2 aka Adrasteia

  Survey manager (military): Jayme Sivio

  Survey manager (civilian): Caryl Hatzis

  Secondary mission: Chung-2

  Secondary mission pilot: Lucia Benck

  Distance from Sol: 72.5 ly

  Mission duration (Sol-relative): 99.9 years