Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Home...

  She cautioned herself to stop thinking of it that way, for although it would always be her point of origin, there was nothing of home about it anymore. The only artifact in the entire system was a Yuhl grave marker in close orbit about the sun, an almost insignificant reminder that once upon a time life had existed here. Right now she was the only life in this dead system.

  And she remained unsure, exactly, what she was, still.

  That she remained Lucia Benck was indisputable, but her exact being was unclear. She had no clear sense of a body. She felt limbs when she moved, certainly, but they weren’t remotely like her old ones. These were strange and entirely too numerous. Some of them stretched in directions that didn’t exist in the real universe; others touched things that couldn’t possibly be felt, like the heart of atomic nuclei, or the vacuum, rich in zero-point energy. She was like some arcane, highly evolved octopus, swimming in seas beyond comprehension.

  What’s happened to me?

  Her voice echoed into the void, but was not answered. She felt a great emptiness settle upon her. Even tourists needed somewhere to return to—an anchor, a point of reference. But she no longer had that, and the absence of it was, in a way, far worse than losing the ability to travel.

  Her attention was suddenly attracted to a disturbance in the empty system—a disturbance where just nanoseconds before there had been only inactivity. A point of light blossomed in the darkness. Feathery energy sprayed into the solar wind, causing strange ripple effects to sway and bend around it, like the corona during a total eclipse.

  Recognition came with a thrill of fear. She had heard of such things. Kingsley Oborn, back on Rasmussen, had posted theories in the conSense discussion rooms concerning what he called the fovea, the forerunning spooks of the Starfish. Where the fovea came and saw signs of life, death soon followed.

  Would this one see her? she wondered. She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she could be seen anymore. The last thing she remembered was pleading with the Gifts to move, and then hearing a voice, “this is the final gift we bring.”

  What that meant, she had no idea at all. But it was the last thing she remembered, and for that reason alone it was probably significant.

  The final gift... ?

  I think it’s time to get moving again, she said, feeling myriad mouths echo the words through her, broadcasting the message a thousand ways. We’ve been rumbled.

  There was no answer. Unlike the last time she had called for help, there was no sense of eyes watching her, of vast intelligences lurking just beyond the edge of shadow. Now there was just her, alone but for the eye of the Starfish.

  She could feel it drilling into her, dissecting her and analyzing her every detail. What was it seeing? she wondered. There was no way of knowing. But it knew she was there. Of that, at least, she was certain. And it was calling for the killers.

  If you’re going to do something, now would be the time, she nervously told the void, hoping that whoever had heard her pleas on Rasmussen would hear her now.

  But silence again was her only response. If it had been the Gifts that had lifted her out of Rasmussen, then they hadn’t really helped her at all by dumping her here in Sol System. Far from saving her, they’d just left her helpless in exactly the same situation she’d been in before. The only difference was the setting.

  The fovea flickered and flared, the chaotic rhythms of its powerful glare seeming to taunt her.

  Just wait a little longer, and your concerns will be over, it seemed to be saying. Just a little longer, and we’ll put you out of your misery.

  But I don’t want to die! Her cry of defiance resounded through the nothingness surrounding her strange new body. Not without knowing what I am! If the Starfish were going to put a finish to the charade that had been her recent life, she at least wanted to see what it was they were killing.

  With a small mental effort, she managed to persuade part of herself to disengage itself from “her” and leave, looking back as it did so. She wasn’t entirely sure what was going on as she did this, nor even how she was managing to do it. Many conflicting senses vied for attention; information flowed into her in ways she had trouble understanding, let alone comprehending.

  But when she saw what the sputtering fovea had noticed in the quiet ruins of Sol System—when she finally realized what she had become—she understood everything.

  “THIS IS THE FINAL GIFT WE BRING.”

  Excitement and appreciation for her new self swept through her as she turned her attention to the fovea. It was still watching her. She wondered if it could sense her flexing her new wings.

  Catch me if you can, she goaded it.

  Then she disappeared from Sol System.

  * * *

  Her first jump took her back to Rasmussen, where the ruins of the gifts and the Marcus Chown still bloomed in infrared frequencies. Rasmussen’s perfectly preserved ecosystem was in flames where orbital towers had crashed through the atmosphere and slammed into the crust. The Starfish weren’t long gone, and she had no desire to attract their attention again. With the gentlest flex of her will, she moved on once more.

  She was wary at first of wasting time. In the hole ships, faster-than-light travel wasn’t instantaneous; a day’s travel in the real universe corresponded to approximately eighty light- years, and two days’ time relative to the passengers. She soon realized, however, that her new means of getting around was a lot faster than that. The journey from Sol to Rasmussen took barely an hour, real time. This alone was enough to dispel any lingering doubts she may have had as to the veracity of where she now found herself. Not that this made her situation any less incredible.

  The mind that had spoken to her before the Starfish had destroyed Rasmussen was gone. All she had with her now were smaller subroutines and underlings designed to facilitate her will. She was barely aware of them, unless she really dug deep.

  She worked outward from Sol, looking for survivors, tracing the terrible wake of the Starfish, and seeing for herself what they’d done. Groombridge 1830, lambda Auriga, Theta Perseus, and many, many others were all barren of life. The last segment of humanity’s bold exploration of the space around its home was dwindling, almost vanishing as she watched.

  An impulse took her to iota Boötis, where the colony had been called Candamius in honor of its rugged mountains. The Can, as she’d heard some of the colonists refer to it, had been a harsh world, not dissimilar to Peter’s old home of Adrasteia, but people had lived and worked there for many years, nonetheless. The human compulsion to explore and make familiar, to own, had taken root there as firmly as anywhere else. And from there, too, it had been expunged just as ruthlessly as with every other colony.

  A terrible fatalism swept over her then. What is the point? she thought. The Starfish were indefatigable. Whether the engrams stayed behind or ran, the Starfish would catch up with them eventually. There was no hope, no future. The history of humanity had come to an abrupt end—something that not even the terrors of the Spike had managed to achieve.

  But she couldn’t let go. Although theoretically she could have run at any time, she felt a kinship with the survivors. She had been plucked from death at the last moment; what they were facing, she had somehow endured—if only by being in the right place at the right time. She would rather ascribe her continued existence to luck than to any special quality within her. And even if it was just dumb luck, she couldn’t walk away from it. It felt as though she should make it mean something.

  She was supposed to be a tourist, but every tourist needed a home to return to, or else what was the point? Similarly, she was supposed to want to be with Peter, despite her decision to explore the universe without him. How could that definition of herself survive his rejection of her? She needed new definitions now, and she needed to find a way to write them into her old overseer. To do that, she needed other people; she needed alternatives.

  The only alternatives open at the moment remained in the Alkaid Gr
oup, probably the last human-occupied systems left in all of Surveyed Space. Rasmussen was gone, but it was the closest of the five. The other four had two or three days left before the Starfish would reach them. She knew the order of them, as did anyone who had been on Rasmussen. After BSC5070 came BSC5423 and Zemyna, then HD132142 and Demeter. They were the next two in the firing line. After them came BSC5581 and Geb; then, last of all, BSC5148 and Sagarsee. Familiar names with familiar fates awaiting them. If she could replicate her success and offer them a way out of their predicament, perhaps they could help her find peace of mind.

  With this thought, she jumped straight to Sagarsee, translating without effort into a polar orbit around its seething atmosphere, rich in protolife. She was scanned instantly upon arrival and felt alarms go off all around her. The colonists, having heard about Rasmussen, were understandably jumpy and regarded any unexpected arrival as a potential threat. The fact that she looked so familiar didn’t ease their concerns.

  Some of Lucia’s new limbs reached easily into the command systems of the colony’s survey ship, the Frank Drake, and shut off the alarms. With the sirens silent, a clamor of voices rose around her, wanting to know what she was and what she was doing there. She could understand their confusion; she didn’t fully comprehend how she had come to be this way either.

  Hole ships flickered in and out of real space around her, probing her, testing her defenses. She effortlessly kept them at bay as she pondered the best way to introduce herself. There were no easy options. Through their senses, she could see what she looked like to them: half a kilometer long, shaped roughly like a cylinder tapering at both ends, with tiny dimples and indentations dotted seemingly at random across her surface. She was gold in color, and an identical twin to another in geosynchronous orbit around the planet below.

  She was Spindle Ten, the Dark Room. She was the final gift the Spinners had left for humanity.

  2.2.2

  An argument filled the cockpit of Eledone. This was nothing new, and Alander might have been tempted to switch himself off to it, slow down his clock rate until it was resolved and everyone could move on, had it not been for two important facts. The first was that there was too much to see: In the background, Cleo Samson was guiding the hole ship along the path given to them by the demolition crew, and the scenery was just incredible. The second was that the argument taking place wasn’t among the usual suspects; it involved all four Hatzises, and that’s what made it so compelling. Axford obviously agreed, as he sat off to one side, watching with a look of supreme satisfaction on his face.

  “There are no obvious command structures and no clear lines of communication,” Gou Mang was saying heatedly. “How the fuck are we going to talk to someone in charge if we can’t even find them?”

  “We’ve just been looking in the wrong places, that’s all,” Thor responded. Her expression looked haggard to Alander; beneath her anger lurked deep exhaustion. She was starting to show the pressure they’d all been under since the mission began.

  “I don’t think you truly comprehend the scale of what we’re trying to do here, Thor,” said Inari. “We’re like microbes trying to flag down a fucking whale!”

  “She’s right,” said Gou Mang. “We’re never going to get them to notice us.”

  “Not like this, we won’t, no,” Thor agreed.

  “Then why have you got us banging our heads against this brick wall? You’re just going to get us all killed!”

  “At least we will have died trying!” Thor glared at Gou Mang and Inari, livid at them for defying her. “But we are not going back until we’ve explored every option. I won’t allow it.”

  “You won’t allow it?” Gou Mang echoed. “And what gives you the right to make decisions that affect the rest of us?”

  “You did, actually,” said Thor evenly, “when you volunteered.”

  “None of us volunteered for a suicide mission,” said Inari. “We came along because we believed we had a chance!”

  “Which we still do.”

  “Not if you continue the way you’re going.”

  Thor opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it again, biting down on her retort. She didn’t have to say a word for Alander to know what she was thinking; it was right there in her eyes. She felt betrayal at the way her command had been questioned and fear that it had been so openly challenged. She might not call it fear but that was what it was. She had been fighting fear of substitution ever since Rasmussen, with her obvious successor only meters away from where she was now standing.

  “I don’t see what else Thor could have done,” said Sol. Had Alander been in physical contact with her, he would have urged her to remain quiet, to let the others sort it out without her input. But then, silence wasn’t the Hatzis way, as was evidenced by this ongoing debate.

  “We knew before we went in that it was unlikely we’d succeed,” Sol continued, addressing both Inari and Gou Mang. “I don’t think you’re being fair to Thor by recanting now.”

  “Things have changed,” said Gou Mang. Sol’s former second-in-command stared at her with uneasy defiance. “When we knew nothing, it was easy to imagine that we had a chance of succeeding. But we know more than we did back then! Continuing on now when we know what we’re up against is both futile and counterproductive.”

  Inari nodded in agreement. “The only way we can make this mission count for anything is to return to the others and convey what we’ve learned.”

  “And what have we learned?” Thor asked. “That we found a couple of warring factions of other aliens existing within the cutter? What could they do with that?”

  “They could decide to join them,” said Gou Mang. “We could decide to find a niche of our own in a cutter just like the A|kak|a/riil and the Pllix did.”

  Thor shook her head as she laughed. “Just like that? We hitch a ride and everything will be fine?”

  Gou Mang shrugged. “It’s a possibility, at least. One that the others should be made aware of.”

  “And what do you think the others have been doing since we’ve been gone?” said Sol. “Sitting on their hands doing nothing?” She shook her head. “The Unfit will be looking for alternatives, in case we don’t return. They might even attempt to send other missions to try to contact the Starfish. I don’t think we should consider going back until we are absolutely certain that success is not possible. At least this way we save others the anguish and frustration of trying.” She glanced at Thor, to all appearances wary of undermining the other’s authority. “That’s just my opinion, anyway.”

  Thor nodded slowly with weary gratitude. “We keep going. That’s my decision.”

  Gou Mang shook her head. “You’re going to get us all killed, Thor. The Starfish may be the ones holding the gun, but you’re the one hell-bent on pressing our heads against the barrel.”

  Gou Mang’s normally olive skin was pale and blotchy, and Alander realized that she was terrified. Not that he could blame her. They’d seen nothing since the battle between the A|kak|a/riil and the Pllix that could remotely be described as reassuring. The swathe of destruction left by the demolition crew in the vast body of the cutter led through chambers more enormous than anything humanity had ever managed to build. Roiling energies still surged through the chambers, pouring out of the ragged mouths of severed veins, but the closer to the exterior they moved, the more noticeably quiescent the craft became. They passed through layers of structural material, folded silver sheets stacked in layers dozens deep, shot through with bright blue threads as wide as tree trunks. Bundles of fibers that looked like optical information conduits—but which probably served a very different purpose—spewed forth washes of multicolored light where they’d been roughly severed. The charcoal remains of angular Pllix vessels could be seen everywhere Eledone passed. Perhaps as a result of the governors’ destruction by the demolition crews, the hole ship wasn’t challenged or intercepted again. As the A|kak|a/riil had promised, the way was clear.

  But that still didn
’t make it easy. There were frequent hazards: dead ends where punctured chambers had begun to collapse; rivers of energy that even Eledone had to skirt, weird ripples in space-time that swept through the ruins as incomprehensible field effects failed. The last came and went like ghosts in a digital image, and were all the more startling for it. Thus far none had come too close. Alander was glad not to know what effects they might have on the damaged hole ship.

  “Your point is moot, anyway,” said Axford 1313, standing to address Gou Mang. “We don’t have the means to go anywhere at the moment. We’re stuck here whether we like it or not.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t at least try to find a way.” Grim defiance carved her mouth into a sharp line. “We could hitch a ride with another cutter, perhaps, or convince the A|kak|a/riil to repair us.”

  Axford dismissed her comment with a self-righteous smirk and a shake of the head. “What makes you think we could succeed where others before us have clearly failed? They’ve kept to themselves for God only knows how many millennia; they’re clearly not interested in being contacted.”

  “The Praxis knew about them,” said Inari, glancing at Alander.

  “All the Praxis knew,” Axford said, “or thought he knew, was that the A|kak|a/riil had been destroyed by the Starfish. He obviously didn’t know they’d survived; otherwise he would have mentioned them—right, Peter?”

  Alander shrugged but didn’t say anything. The fact that the Praxis had invaded his memories as well as his mind and body still unnerved him. There had been no subsequent revelations since his conversation with the A|kak|a/riil, and he had consoled himself with the thought that there might be no more until something in his environment triggered a match in the data he had been given. But just because he had been granted access to certain information didn’t automatically make him an expert on what the Praxis did or didn’t know.

  What other surprises lurked inside him was of greater concern.