Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Who are we trying to kid? she wanted to say. There’s no way we can possibly fight this thing!

  But her mouth stayed shut as the orders went out to the hole ship fleet, now depleted to half the size it had been before. Asellus Primus was a graveyard of radiation and hole ship debris.

  Slowly at first, and then with great speed, the hole ships began to wink out.

  “Godspeed, Caryl,” came the voice of Kingsley Oborn over the ftl communicator.

  Then Eledone was jumping, too, and they were committed.

  * * *

  Alander felt a moment of déjà vu. Just under three weeks earlier, in the Mantissa, the Praxis had sucked him into his gullet and smothered him. As Eledone relocated into the heart of the damaged cutter, there was no sense of suffocation or pressure—or indeed of any movement at all, for the hole ships traveled unspace with no sense of motion—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were diving into the belly of some vast beast to be eaten again.

  What they would find there was anyone’s guess. For all the probes and sensors dispatched in zeta Dorado and Asellus Primus, the interior of the cutter was as alien as the heart of the sun. There could be anything inside it—anything at all...

  A vibration suddenly shook the cockpit, as though the hole ship was countering resistance in unspace. Sol looked at him, and he met her gaze helplessly. They both knew that for the moment there was nothing they could do. The team had taken every possible precaution. All they could do now was wait.

  Eledone shuddered again.

  Thor glanced over to Samson. “Is everything all right?”

  “We’re entering a highly turbulent region of space-time,” she said. “Perhaps the task is too difficult for Eledone. The locus is moving in a circle at many thousands of kilometers per second.”

  “Eledone,” Thor addressed the hole ship. “Will we be able to occupy the coordinates you were given?”

  “That is presently unknown.”

  “Then should we fall back and try somewhere else?”

  “That is not possible,” said the hole ship. “My course is set, and it cannot be changed.”

  Thor frowned. “What happens if we can’t make it?”

  “The voyage will remain open-ended.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It means,” said Axford, “that we’ll never arrive at our destination.”

  Alander watched Thor’s eyes widen at this, and sympathized. The possibility that a hole ship might fail in a jump had simply never arisen before.

  “We’ll be trapped in unspace?” she asked.

  “That is correct,” said Eledone.

  “Someone should’ve thought of this before we left.”

  “Agreed,” said Cleo Samson. “I didn’t even bring a good book to read.”

  Thor ignored her. “Then just make sure you do get us there, Eledone. Otherwise—”

  The hole ship jolted violently to one side, causing Alander to stumble. Sol caught him by the arm to steady him, but she had to let go a second later to balance herself when another jolt shook the ship. An instant later a third one struck, making him feel as though he’d been rotated clockwise half a turn.

  All eyes fell upon the pilot for an explanation.

  “I think we’ve arrived,” she obliged.

  “Okay, power down. Right down.” Thor’s expression as she faced the flickering screens was one of intense concentration. “Passive sensors only. Keep all transmissions to a minimum. Eledone, I want the smallest possible profile.”

  “Understood, Caryl.” The voice of the hole ship was smooth and unruffled. All the hole ships were able to reduce their intrusion on real space to a startling degree, with a barely basketball-sized shape performing many of the sensory functions of their usual meters-wide design.

  “What’s outside, Eledone?” asked Axford. “Are you sustaining damage at all?”

  “My present environment is not optimal, but I am not in any immediate danger.”

  “Then let’s take a look,” said Sol, turning to face the screens.

  A low-power and zero-emission regime left the hole ship blind except in incident frequencies. There would be no spotlights, no lasers, no radar—no broadcasts of any kind until they were absolutely certain of their safety. The few instruments Thor would allow were of ultimate simplicity. Infrared detectors painted pictures out of the heat bathing the hole ship’s much-reduced profile. Visible light showed nothing but darkness irregularly punctuated by flashes of purple, while image-enhancement algorithms weren’t having much luck teasing details from the murk. Ultraviolet was ambiguous at best, as were other frequencies.

  “I’m picking up some weird gravitational effects,” said Inari from her station. “They could be the result of the rotational slowdown.”

  Axford was peering at the screens from another station, leaning forward as though shortsighted. “The navigation beacons put us right on target.”

  A dwindling number of unoccupied hole ship fragments were broadcasting ftl signals in and around the dying cutter to help Eledone pin down its position.

  “No sign of countermeasures?” asked Thor.

  Cleo Samson had adopted a more relaxed stance, but Alander could tell from her tight expression and the way her hands gripped the control stalk that she was as anxious as everyone else in the cockpit. Data flowed through the nerves of her hands, keeping her constantly updated on the hole ship’s disposition.

  “None yet,” she said.

  Thor let out a long sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath for a hundred years. “Then I guess it’s safe to assume we’ve successfully completed the first leg.”

  “What about the shepherds?” asked Sol. Her tone suggested that she wasn’t about to celebrate just yet. “Where are they?”

  “Telemetry puts them almost in position,” Axford replied. “One above and one below, exactly as in Beid.” He looked up with a satisfied smile. “Fasten your seat belts, everybody. It looks like we’re going for a ride.”

  Alander’s skin puckered into gooseflesh at the thought. As far as he was concerned, this journey they were about to take was far more terrifying than any open-ended jump through un- space.

  They had no clear view of the outside of the cutter. The hole ship fleet had long since departed, leaving only faint impressions from surviving probes and extrapolations based on previous experience.

  Experience told them that that the damaged cutter was about to be taken elsewhere. Where that elsewhere was, Alander didn’t know. No one did. He only hoped it wasn’t an alien wrecking yard, because if it was, leg two of their mission might prove to be something of a disappointment.

  The hole ship jolted again, then began to shake with a teeth-rattling, sight-blurring vibration. Alander instinctively gripped Sol’s arm. Her eyes were closed, and he imagined she had opted to view the interior of the cockpit via conSense. Even now, in his new body and with the confidence of a changing personality behind it, he still found himself shying away from the virtual realm. He preferred reality over illusion any day, even when reality was as terrifying as it was now.

  “How long is this going to last?” asked Thor in a raised voice.

  “The ship is decelerating now,” said Axford. “But there’s an awful lot of angular momentum to shed. We should be thankful this is all it’s doing.”

  The vibrations continued for another fifteen seconds, then slowly settled.

  “We’ve stopped,” said Samson, examining the instruments before her with unblinking concentration. “I think it’s over.”

  “I think it’s just beginning,” muttered Gou Mang.

  Alander caught a twinkle out of the corner of his eye. Looking around, he realized that the very air itself in the cockpit seemed to be sparkling!

  Thor was looking warily about her, too. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s happening,” said Sol. “I think we’re going!”

  Alander tensed as the glow grew brighter. Sparkling motes gathered in clum
ps, then joined up to form intense hanging sheets that shifted in motions that suggested they were being blown in a breeze. They swirled and gleamed and continued to grow steadily brighter, until he was hard-pressed to see any of the other cockpit occupants around him. He squinted at the intensifying light, finding it almost impossible to keep his eyes open. Even Sol standing beside him appeared as a faint, shadowy blur through the burning white radiance. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t keep out the light. The glow shone through the skin of his eyelids, and white sparks seemed to dance inside his brain. Light blossomed in his eyeballs, his retinas, his optic nerves. He had time to wonder briefly whether such a light might be dangerous, and then, suddenly, as though his legs had been kicked out from under him, the floor was gone and he was falling.

  2.1.2

  Thor dreamed. Somewhere in the distance she sensed great pain, physical and emotional, but for the time being she could hide from it, pretend it didn’t exist. It was just her and the darkness. Her and her own memories.

  She dreamed of a conversation she had had with Ueh before the alien had departed with Mantissa A. The recollection was perfectly clear. The alien had smelled faintly of olives basted in a chemical broth, but not offensively. Ueh’s head was cylindrical and domed, with expressions delineated in sheets of black and white that slid in and out of view in constantly changing, perfectly symmetrical patterns. When he spoke, he did so through two windpipes, conveying as much meaning through the beating of two different pitches as he did by timbre alone.

  “How old are you, Ueh? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  His head tilted to face her. “My age/why do you ask?”

  “I’m just curious,” she said, remembering the first member of the Yuhl/Goel she had ever seen. Nicknamed Charlie, he had died while in Axford’s custody. A post mortem had revealed extensive plaques and neural scarring that would have indicated great age in a human. Possibly centuries, Axford had said. There was also an abundance of foreign genetic material in his tissues, suggestive of highly advanced biotech including antisenescence treatments.

  “Yuhl/Goel lifetimes differ from humanity/riil. I fear that you would not understand.”

  “What’s not to understand? You’re born; you live for a while; you die. How hard is it to tell me how long it’s been since you were born?”

  “It is hard because the concept of birth/identity differs between our species. I am not a discrete individual as you imagine yourself to be/have changed.”

  “We change, too,” she said. “Isn’t that the way of life?”

  “Yet you still regard yourself as a continuous being from birth/body to death/body. Parts of me/us are older than others. I am/ Ueh is different to the birth/body that was. How can l/we then reason our/my aggregate age?

  “I don’t know,” she said, beginning to wish she’d never asked the question. “Like I said, I was just curious.”

  The alien had thought for a moment, then, considering her with an almost sympathetic expression. Then: “In Caryl/Hatzis units, I was born four hundred/eighty-six years ago.”

  Thor thought she’d been ready for something like that, but the answer still startled her on a very deep level. She was talking to someone who had been alive ten times longer than she had, who was older than the entire human space program, than most countries, than the modern English language itself.

  “Do you remember that far back?”

  “I have memories from that time are not mine,” he’d answered, obviously having difficulty trying to convey the meaning of what he was trying to say. “I was not me then/someone else. Those incidents/memories occurred to someone else. They do not interest me/us except as a source of wisdom/accrued experience.”

  “You mean you have no emotional attachment to those memories?”

  “This is not what I mean the memories do record emotions.”

  “So how can you be so disconnected from them? Don’t you feel sad when you remember something sad? Or happy when you remember something happy?”

  “Do you feel the same sadness as someone else when they tell you one of their sad memories?”

  “The same sadness? No, but—”

  “Because the sadness is for the person/not for the incident. You are removed/disconnected. So it is with us. We do not connect. Our past selves are gone/passed.”

  Thor nodded, although she was still struggling to grasp the ramifications of what he was saying. “But if you think like that, how do you go from day to day? What’s to say you won’t wake up feeling like a new person, and the old one has gone? What if the old one didn’t want to go?”

  “Why would I resist changing? Do you fight the constant recycling of skin cells throughout your body? Do you object to the falling out of your hair?”

  Remembering this, Thor smiled to herself in the darkness. It had been difficult trying to explain to Ueh that although humans changed on a cellular and psychological level, they still saw themselves as the same person.

  “We think we’re the same,” she said, “despite the evidence that we change on a cellular and psychological level. You distinguish different versions of yourself despite the fact that you’re inhabiting the same body and using the same name.” She peered at him through the blackness. “You do use the same name, don’t you?”

  “That is an incorrect assumption, Thor/Hatzis. My present name is Ueh/Ellil. Before that, it was Ashir/Ueh. And before that it was Baah/Ashir. One day it will change again.”

  This was a detail Thor could follow. “To Ellil-slash-something. Right. That does make sense. I’m sorry for assuming otherwise.”

  “There is no need to apologize, Thor/Hatzis. The misunderstanding has been corrected.”

  Had it? she asked herself in the darkness of her dream. Consciousness was calling, and although she fought it, she could feel it looming inexorably closer. Whatever was happening to her wouldn’t wait. She couldn’t put it off to another version of her, like Ueh could. For a moment, she envied him.

  The way he regarded his life unnerved her. Continuity of identity underlined so much of human nature that to deal with aliens who didn’t value it was to risk persistent misunderstanding and confusion. Future consequences of present actions took on a whole new light when a different person might have to deal with them, not oneself. She couldn’t help but wonder what crime she might commit if she knew she wouldn’t have to pay the price.

  But that wasn’t so different, she supposed, to the engram situation. What would one Axford or Hatzis do in the light of the knowledge that others existed to pick up the pieces—or to carry the torch, if things went truly badly? Thor patently wasn’t the same as the other Hatzis engrams, but she still shared a sense of kinship. She wasn’t a clone, sister, or child of the original Caryl Hatzis; the bond between them was something much stranger. Perhaps, she thought, it would have been stronger under other circumstances.

  Consciousness came closer, bringing with it pain and fear. Yet some relief, too. The thought of spending any great length of time in the darkness of her mind made her uncomfortable. The overwhelming slab of Sol’s past sat heavily, weighing her down. Keeping herself busy was one way to avoid confronting the burden of it all, but that was impossible while she was asleep. The gunshot still echoed...

  Besides, if something had gone wrong, she needed to be awake to deal with it. She was the leader; the team was her responsibility. She couldn’t sleep while the mission went to hell in a handbasket.

  She woke feeling as though her head had been split open like a watermelon under a sledgehammer. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, and she tried in vain to sit up. Most disorienting of all was the fact that, although she knew she was awake—the intensity of the pain dispelled all doubts of that—and her eyes definitely were open, she still couldn’t see anything.

  * * *

  “Hello?” The weak cry came from somewhere on Alander’s left. “What’s going on? Where are the lights?”

  “Try switching to IR,” Alander replied, unable to keep the
wince out of his own voice.

  “Shit.” He heard scrabbling from where Thor was lying. Her body moved, sat up. She wavered for a moment as though considering passing out again. The hand clutching her head suggested that she had the same headache as him. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not thinking straight.”

  He didn’t have the heart to make her feel worse than she already did. “We’re the only ones awake. But the others are alive.” He glanced at where they lay sprawled where they’d fallen, vivid blotches of heat against the hole ship’s cool background. “I’m assuming that the jump did this to us,” he went on. “Whatever method the cutters use to get around, it clearly doesn’t agree with us.”

  “We could have been hit with some kind of weapon,” she said.

  “And lived?” He shook his head slowly, gingerly. “It wouldn’t make sense to just knock us out.”

  “When has anything they’ve done ever made sense?” she muttered. “What does Eledone say?”

  “Eledone isn’t saying anything,” Alander replied, his voice grim. “The hole ship isn’t answering us.”

  “Fuck.” She swore with little energy.

  He had nothing to add. The obvious was better left unsaid for the time being. If Eledone had been more than just knocked out like its passengers—if it was dead—then that left the team in a very bad place.

  One by one, the others stirred. Alander noted the order with which they woke. He and Thor had been first. Next were Gou Mang and Inari, closely followed by Cleo Samson. Sol and Axford were the last to struggle back to consciousness and their sluggish irritability demonstrated how much pain they were in.

  A flicker of light came from the walls, overlaying the IR view with a brief flash of white. His thoughts froze in midbeat. He looked around in anticipation of it happening again.

  “Eledone? Was that you?”