Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “What the—?”

  His question was cut short when the data stream returned as abruptly as it had disappeared, only this time they were accompanied by cries of alarm and panic from the other Yuhl-human hole ship pairs. The cutters, realizing that their targets had moved, had relocated to continue the attack. Two of the pairs instantly vanished under heavy fire as the giant ships appeared directly over them, lashing out with terrifying lethality. The cutters then jumped to another location and repeated the tactic, slicing through space with an ease that belied their size.

  In four of them, starlike probes still gleamed.

  “We have what we came here for,” said Axford 1041. He sounded surprisingly calm, given their circumstances. “I suggest we get away while we still can.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” said Alander. He’d seen enough.

  The probes were winking out one by one, their numbers steadily eroded by conditions Alander couldn’t begin to imagine.

  “Just a little longer,” said Samson.

  “Taking evasive action,” announced the hole ship a second later.

  Axford called out in alarm as a cutter appeared directly over their tetrad. Vicious colors leapt out of the screen.

  “I am sustaining damage.” The hole ship bucked beneath them, sending Alander and Axford into the far wall. Samson remained standing, gripping the control stalk with both hands and bracing herself.

  “Klotho, get us out of here!”

  Alander’s shout echoed into silence as the hole ship entered unspace. He sagged gratefully into the sudden peace, feeling his heart pounding in his throat.

  “That was a little close,” he said, painfully climbing to his feet.

  “Too damned close,” muttered Axford, doing likewise. Then, to Samson: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Samson stepped away from the controls to face Axford. “Trying to get as much data as possible,” she said. “That’s what we came here for, wasn’t it? I only intended to stay a few seconds longer—”

  “Seconds in which we could have all been killed!” Axford growled.

  “Take it easy, Frank,” said Alander. “She only—”

  “It was a stupid and unnecessary risk,” Axford cut in.

  “We got out in one piece, didn’t we?” said Samson.

  “But we might not have,” returned Axford. “What good is data if we’re too dead to use it!”

  “If I remember rightly, the incident at Beid was an information-gathering exercise, too. Wasn’t it?” She met his glare evenly. “Funny, but I don’t recall you having much concern about safety issues back then.”

  The ex-general glowered at her for a moment, then stormed from the cockpit, shaking his head.

  Samson turned to Alander with an apologetic shrug. “He’s probably right. But we won’t win this fight if we don’t take chances.”

  He took a deep breath. “I know. Just don’t cut it so fine, next time.”

  “Hopefully there’ll only be one more ‘next time.’ “

  Alander nodded. If the data told them what they needed to hear, there was no reason not to plough ahead with Axford’s plan. He still wasn’t entirely sure what he thought about that.

  “Ours is not to question why...”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing, Cleo. Just get us back home so we can see who didn’t make it. We’ll worry about what happens next then.”

  1.2.2

  The total blackness was unsettling at first but Lucia soon grew used to it. It was calm in the dark—safe. She had plenty of space to put herself back together, to sort out the tangle of her thoughts and examine the snarled knots in her emotions that talking to Peter had exposed. An engram was a complicated computer program designed to simulate the thoughts, emotions, memories, and actions of a human being. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an excellent compromise between primitive AIs and energy-hungry humans. The UNESSPRO supervisors had anticipated problems and openly discussed the possibility of providing editing suites for the engrams, should problems arise. In the end, however, they’d opted not to allow the engrams to actively tamper with themselves, in much the same way that natural humans couldn’t.

  That was a shame, Lucia thought, because such an ability would have enabled Peter to fix himself without having to rely on others. He could simply shut down unreliable modules until he found the source of the instability, then modify that one to ensure that he worked properly. The idea of tinkering with one’s own thoughts was discomforting, but it was better, she thought, than the notion of death and—

  She forced herself to change her train of thought, to focus more on herself. Remembering Peter only reminded her of why she was in this darkness in the first place.

  What are my faulty modules? she wondered. What conflicts are responsible for the panic I feel at losing Peter?

  She soon discovered that, as Thor had said, the problem lay in the definitional components of her engram model. They didn’t affect the process of her thoughts, but they definitely influenced the initial conditions and the operating boundaries. She was constrained by certain “facts” about herself: she liked to travel, but she missed Peter; she preferred cats over dogs; she had no interest in sports; the ending of Silent Running still made her cry; and so on. While they existed, she was trapped by them. She couldn’t change her mind, because the “her” in this case was the Lucia Benck on Earth, who had died a century before.

  Engram Lucia gave up the attempt on confirming everything she’d been told, for the moment. There had to be a way to correct the problem without appealing to the others for help. She couldn’t trust herself to interact coherently with them. She was beginning to assume that the only thing that had kept her alive in Chung-5 for so long was her isolation from external input. Like a train on a roller coaster, she was perfectly safe as long as she remained on the track. The slightest nudge could send her careening to madness or even brainlock. But if she could just switch tracks...

  The moment she’d fled Peter was a blur. She had no clear memory of where exactly she had fled. She suspected that she wasn’t in a hole ship; in none of the alien vessels she had explored had she found anywhere like this—so dark and empty, so accommodatingly vacant. Here she wasn’t cohabiting; she had her own space to stretch and recover. It was better even than Chung-5, for in the tiny probe she had been constantly aware of its constraints. Here, in the dark space, there was nothing but her.

  Tentatively at first, then with greater confidence, Lucia began to explore her surroundings. Probing her dark sanctuary, she immediately became aware of three things. The first was that the dark space was permeable but defined. Beyond its boundaries, flexing and stirring like the muscles of a whale as seen from the inside, she could sense vast minds working.

  There was a depth to the darkness she shied away from. Apart from that, she felt completely unthreatened.

  The second thing she noticed was that her sanctuary was just a tiny fragment of the semantic world beyond. She sensed vast complexities and vistas just outside her reach. Molelike, she peered out of her burrow at a world more rich and varied than any she had expected.

  The third thing she found, as she made her first cautious explorations of her new environment, was that she was being watched. Barely had the darkness begun to part around her, allowing her access to the light-filled world beyond, when she felt eyes lock on her from outside her dark sanctuary, from beyond the glowing vistas, from somewhere else entirely.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  The voice was male and carried a hint of a familiar European accent. Close on the heels of this familiarity, though, was a sense of disorientation and confusion.

  “Rob?” she said tentatively.

  The owner of the voice paused slightly before answering. “Who is this? How did you get in here?”

  She hesitated also, still wary of outside influences. Every instinct told her to flee, to avoid a relapse. But she knew Rob Singh; she and the good-natured pil
ot had entrained together in the flight simulators back on Earth. She could trust him, she was sure.

  “It’s Lucia.”

  “Lucia? When did you get back?”

  His question gave her a sense of relief. If he wasn’t aware of her return, then clearly her escape hadn’t been broadcast, which meant she wasn’t being actively pursued by everyone in the engrain camp.

  “Thor found me and brought me here,” she answered. “I was in a bad way. I hid in here because it seemed safe.”

  Rob chuckled lightly. “I guess you could call it safe. The Dark Room is a good place to come if you’re freaking out. Apparently Peter Alander used to sleep in the one on Adrasteia, back when he was unstable. Others have tried, but they say it’s too empty for them. I’m not partial to it, myself.”

  Only a handful of his words registered. “Peter used to come here?”

  “Not to this Dark Room specifically. This is Rasmussen, not Adrasteia. Adrasteia is gone; has been for weeks now. Peter has never used this particular Dark Room. I haven’t actually spoken to him since he came here, but I’m told he’s a lot better now than he was.”

  The pieces were slowly settling into place. “So that’s where I am now? Rasmussen?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Inside—” Her mind grappled with difficulty at the notion. “I’m inside the gifts?”

  “You didn’t know that?” he asked, surprised. “That’s why I found you. I was having a poke around on behalf of another one of me, one who died when Sothis took the bullet. He’d been finding anomalies in the Library and noting them in his PID. The records survived the attack, shipped out in a hole ship full of solid-state backups. I inherited them, if you like, and figured I’d pick up where he left off—try to see if I could add anything to his findings.” A small silence encapsulated all the grief and weirdness of discussing the legacy of another version of oneself. “I’ve been looking into areas he ignored, hoping to find something new. But the last thing I expected to find was you, Lucia. To be honest, you scared the hell out of me. I thought you might be some kind of Spinner virus, come to eat me!”

  The self-deprecation in his voice was a welcome relief to the strident urgencies of Alander and Hatzis, and for the first time in what felt like eons, she found herself wanting to laugh. She fought back the urge, though, nervous of any sudden, out-of-character impulses.

  “Can I ask a favor of you, Rob?”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “Would you mind not telling anyone that I’m here right now? Everything has been kind of strange and overwhelming; I’d appreciate a little space.”

  “I understand. We’re all a bit freaked out at the moment.”

  She followed his voice to its source and found a many-limbed droid gripping the edge of a doorway through which bright light streamed. Still seduced by the warm darkness, it took Lucia a moment to realize that this image was real; it wasn’t virtual. It was the world outside the Dark Room in which she’d taken refuge. She was seeing the inside of one of the gifts for the first time.

  “What’s the Dark Room for?” she asked.

  “No one’s managed to work that out yet,” he said. “It’s a mystery. All the other spindles have a clear purpose: the Dry Dock, the Gallery, the Hub, et cetera. But not this one. It has a bunch of corridors and empty chambers, and this one room, full of darkness. Light is sucked into it, and we can’t find the edges. It’s very odd.”

  Lucia agreed. She didn’t know much about the gifts—only the information that Thor had given her access to on the way back from pi-1 Ursa Major—but that was enough to capture the weirdness of the objects and the aliens that had left them behind. They were simultaneously a great boon for humanity and an irksome mystery that might never be unraveled. And they were dangerous, too, as misuse of the ftl transmitters had demonstrated. If a single word could bring down the wrath of the Starfish, eradicating all the Spinners’ good works in a single stroke, what other unknown perils might lurk in the alien halls?

  “By the by,” Rob asked, “mind telling me how you’re doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Being... yourself.” The telesensing robot looked like a cross between a monkey and a sea anemone, but somehow it managed a convincing shrug, “You’re in engram form, you don’t have a body, and yet you can obviously still see me. Do you have a processor in there or something? Or are you operating on remote, like me?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “When Thor found me, she uploaded me into her hole ship’s operating memory.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that was possible.”

  She wanted to shrug but lacked the physical form with which to do so. “It seems to have worked well enough.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “I became... upset,” she said, keen to avoid the details. “I came here to hide, to be alone.”

  “And here I am, interrupting you, blathering on like an idiot. Christ, Lucia, I’m sorry.” Rob’s voice was genuinely contrite. His robot immediately let go of the door, started to roll away like a surreal tumbleweed. “I should leave you alone.”

  “It’s not your fault, Rob. You weren’t to know.” Astronaut training had reinforced in all the engrams the need for personal space, even in a virtual world. She had been alone for so long in Chung-5, with nothing but her thoughts to keep her amused. But Rob was a completely different person than the others she had spoken to since coming back. He seemed to have no agendas, no demands to make of her.

  “Will you come back later?” she called after him.

  “You can count on it.” There was a smile in his voice. “I’ve still got work to do around here.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” she said, meaning it. “I appreciate it.”

  “Sure thing. Maybe I can show you around the spindles, if you haven’t seen them properly yet.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Good. Then it’s a date.” With that, the robot trundled off down the wide, white corridor. It tumbled around a comer and disappeared.

  Lucia felt herself relax instantly. She wasn’t ready for people, not without proper control over who she was. She knew that it might not be so easy to attain, but the question of what she was could be more easily explored. In truth, although she had agreed to let Rob show her around the spindles, she didn’t know if she could leave the Dark Room. She had been interrupted in the middle of trying. As she tentatively extended herself now to test her boundaries, she found that she had an awareness of the structure that housed her—an awareness that could neither be put into words or thoughts. It was just there, a part of her, like the innate instinct a normal human had of their body’s posture. With it, also, came a vague understanding of all the other spindles that girded the planet and of the transmitter they comprised.

  Deciding not to wait on Rob’s return. Lucia took the virtual equivalent of a deep breath and urged her pov toward the doorway.

  The darkness fell smoothly behind her as she suddenly found herself—or her pov, at least—in bright light.

  Embracing this newfound freedom, she began to explore.

  1.2.3

  A haze of stars surrounded Caryl Hatzis like a glowing mist. She took a moment to admire it, to bathe in the light of 200 billion suns. When she breathed in, she imagined that she wasn’t breathing ordinary air but the ionized atoms and far-flung molecules that bubbled and roiled in interstellar space. She felt like a god, existing on star stuff, bathing in the primordial fires of creation.

  She exhaled, letting the dream go with the breath she’d been holding. It was a dream she had once cherished, of being part of a mind that spanned the galaxy, infinite in possibility and incomprehensible in form. Now she felt she’d be lucky to see out the month in one piece.

  “Do you know what a fovea is?”

  Kingsley Oborn’s voice came from behind her, followed by the sound of footsteps. She turned to face the biotechnician as he walked down into the pit of the Map Room.


  “I’m sorry, Kingsley?”

  “A fovea,” he repeated. “Have you heard of the term?”

  She nodded, still confused. “It’s the part of the eye we look at things with, isn’t it? The part that takes in all the detail?”

  “That’s right. The rest of the cornea sees things only vaguely, which is why we move our eyes around a lot without knowing.” Oborn came to a halt in front of her. “The eye is constantly scanning our field of view, filling in the details. That movement is called a saccade. Both saccade and fovea evolved in different senses for a number of different animals, mainly in an attempt to keep the mass and complexity of the brain down. If every part of our cornea was as sensitive as the fovea, our heads would have to be fifty times larger to deal with all the information.”

  “I presume this is going somewhere.”

  He nodded significantly. “I think this is how the Starfish are sweeping the wake for anything—or anyone—we leave behind.”

  Hatzis frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Oborn seemed almost pleased with himself for having thought of something she hadn’t. “There’s no possible way the Starfish could sweep every cubic centimeter across such a vast front. It would take unimaginable resources to do such a thing. But they may have ways to conduct a low-level survey, looking for suspicious points, then focus in on those points with their equivalent of a fovea. This fovea confirms a suspicious sighting, then the cutters move in and get rid of it.”

  Her mind leapt ahead of him. “So if we want to fall behind and not be destroyed, we’re going to have to find a way to evade the fovea.”

  He nodded again. “There’s not much we can do about the low-level survey, because we have no idea how that’s being conducted. But the fovea, that’s a different story altogether. Look.”

  He held out a hand and she took it, accepting the data that flowed smoothly into her through their palms.