Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  A strange feeling swept through Alander, as though someone had, quite literally, walked over his grave. Lucia had drained the last few moments of coherence from the fading echoes of him like some bizarre sanity vampire. Part of him wanted to be angry, but a bigger part didn’t see the point. Those other versions of him weren’t him anymore; not really. They were just faulty reflections of his original; copies that had lost their resolution in much the same way that he regarded the image of Lucia staring back at him from the screen now. The fact that he had once been one of them didn’t necessarily make him feel any closer to them. He could only empathize with what they’d been going through.

  Still, the desperation in her to do something like that...

  “I don’t know how to fix them,” Lucia was saying with growing panic. “Or even if they can be fixed. And I don’t want to run away now just because I can’t stop feeling the way I—”

  “It’s okay, Lucia,” Sol cut in. “We understand what you’re saying. And I’m happy to try to help you, but I can’t make any promises.”

  “If you like,” said Alander, “I can come across and be with you in the meantime.”

  Her virtual image expressed clear relief. “That would be... appreciated, Peter. Thank you.”

  Alander caught a sharp look from Sol. He wondered if she thought he was reverting to his own old routines, now he had the chance. If challenged, he could honestly say that he wasn’t. He was helping Lucia because he wanted to, not because he had to. When he looked into himself, he saw only himself, not the bones of a long-dead man.

  And the Praxis, he reminded himself. His limbs had reverted to normal once his foot had healed. There was none of the strange tingling that had followed the attack on Axford 1313. He could almost pretend that nothing had happened. Almost...

  Hatzis nodded, either in resignation or acceptance, and looked away. Her eyes were red, and her face had lines that hadn’t been there days earlier.

  Cleo Samson of Sagarsee broke in to announce that their berth was ready. Cleo Samson of Eledone acknowledged and smoothly took them home.

  * * *

  The gifts of Sagarsee weren’t full, but they were definitely crowded. A large number of Yuhl were present in the flesh, coordinating the activities of the Unfit with the makeshift engram infrastructure. Most of the humans weren’t physically present, but the airways were thick with conSense transmissions. Numerous oddly shaped telepresence robots scurried, rolled, climbed, or even flew through the corridors. The return of Thor and her mission to the Starfish brought last-minute preparations for evacuation to a halt. The members of the mission split up almost immediately, heading for numerous debriefing sessions.

  Alander, however, pleaded senescence in order to avoid all the meetings. For all that he’d done in recent weeks, he was still looked upon by many as something of a washout. The stigma of so many breakdowns was hard to erase, and for once he was happy to use it to his advantage.

  Jumping through the Hub to Lucia’s spindle, he sank gratefully into silence.

  “Hello, Peter,” she said immediately upon his arrival, a liquid shimmer casting rainbows out of thin air.

  He didn’t jump, but the urge to do so was strong. “Hello again, Lucia.” He squinted at the half-seen shape before him. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “An I-suit.” She opened her arms as though showing off a new outfit. “Would you like one, too?”

  “Would I—?” He stopped, staring at her ghostly image. “You can actually do that? You can make them to order?”

  “The gifts are more complex than you could possibly imagine.”

  That I can believe, he thought.

  A small silence fell then, with Alander not knowing what to say. He longed for the ease with which he’d once been able to speak with her, but that was in the past. He wasn’t that person anymore; his feelings had changed, become something very different from what they’d once been. Her feelings for him, however, hadn’t changed, but he suspected they hadn’t been that strong in the first place. He was sure she could live without him as long as she had the stars to keep her company. He had struggled just to live.

  Standing there before her now, he could see how different they really were. His body was a continuing mystery to him; hers was even more bizarre. What would happen, he wondered, if they tried something as simple as a kiss? Would her I-suit body feel like a human’s, or would it be cold and slippery like plastic? He was in no hurry to find out, and that fact only reinforced how much he had changed. There had once been a time when he would have given anything just for the chance to press his lips against Lucia’s.

  “I’m monitoring the feeds around us,” she said. “If you like, we could listen in on what’s being said right now.”

  He sensed that she was feeling awkward, too, which wasn’t surprising. The last thing he wanted to do was watch a bunch of people—and nonpeople—arguing over politics, but it had to be better than this awkward silence.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  He thought she smiled, but he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.

  “This way,” she said, turning to move in the direction of the Dark Room.

  He followed her gossamer form down familiar corridors to the blank space in which he’d once recuperated. Blackness enfolded him, and he sank into it as he would a warm bath. The thought made him think of the bath he’d tried to take on Adrasteia, the day the Spinners had come, and that thought gave him an oddly disquieting feeling.

  Strange, he thought. It seems like a million years ago.

  The first time he’d been in the Dark Room, he had been completely alone. This time, however, Lucia was with him. And while he couldn’t see her, he could certainly sense her presence and feel her thoughts and emotions coiling around him like a fine mist.

  Images and words spilled out of the darkness, entering his mind via conSense pathways, but without the usual jarring disorientation. Lucia’s hand was sure and gentle, interfacing with his senses with far more ease than reality itself.

  “The Unfit have sent several hole ships ahead to find the Praxis,” she explained, showing him navigation charts pinpointing the locations or destinations of numerous hole ships, scattered across Surveyed Space and beyond. “We don’t know where he’s gone, though. It’s been seven days since he and the others left, and in that time they could have traveled three hundred light-years or more, putting them well outside the ftl communication bubble.”

  “Maybe that’s what Thor is looking for,” he said.

  “Maybe.” He sensed a shrug to her voice and understood that, even from her privileged point of view, there was no way of telling what Thor was doing.

  “What about the Unfit?” he asked. “Do they think the Praxis will return if he hears of Thor’s success in contacting the Starfish?”

  “That would depend on how the Starfish react, I imagine. It’s possible, if everything goes well. But even if he didn’t, even if he decides to keep going, I’m sure some of the Yuhl would return.”

  Alander nodded. “What about Geb? Any news from there?”

  “Yes, and it’s not good.” She called up reports from scouts sent to the stricken colony. The data showed the Starfish destruction conducted in the usual style: brisk, methodical, remorseless.

  “I don’t understand why they still did this,” said Lucia as Alander studied the data. “Thor told them what was going on, so they know we’re innocent now.”

  Like everybody else, she was clinging to that one simple thought, and he didn’t want to disabuse her of the notion. Nevertheless, he did outline what the Asteroid had said upon seeing Lucia in the vicinity of pi-1 Ursa Major, shortly before the star had exploded. She needed to know his worst fears, in case they came true.

  There is reason to suspect that we have been misled.

  He remembered the spindle shining against a deep and hostile black backdrop.

  My makers suspect you have led us into a trap.

  “You think—”
she began, then stopped, obviously considering what he was telling her. “You think they’re coming after us, don’t you? That they blame us for what happened to them in pi-1 Ursa Major.”

  “Lucia, I honestly have no idea what these beings think,” he said. “But yes, it’s a possibility.”

  She was silent for more than a minute as she thought about this some more.

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” she said eventually, quietly.

  “No,” he replied. “No, it doesn’t.”

  He remembered how it had felt when he’d learned that he was responsible for the destruction of Sol System, that he had inadvertently called the Starfish down on the last true humans by careless use of his hole ship’s ftl communicator. At first the feeling of guilt had been overwhelming. It didn’t matter what he told himself, that there was no way he could have possibly known what would happen. No one even knew about the Starfish at that point, let alone that using the Spinner technology could incur their wrath. He had been like a minnow taken from his small, freshwater pond and dropped into some vast ocean, rejoicing in his newfound freedom until the inevitable shark appeared.

  Time, though, had brought the realization that all he’d done was precipitate Sol System’s destruction, not been the cause of it. The Starfish would have reached Earth soon enough, as they swept through Surveyed Space. A few days’ notice wouldn’t have made any difference to the final result whatsoever.

  Maybe, he pondered, it would be different to be the one who had brought destruction down upon the last human colony. Then again, these wouldn’t be the last humans. There were still others out there somewhere, jumping from star to star on the Praxis’s back. And then, of course, there was always Axford. No doubt he was out there somewhere, too, continuing to spread through the galaxy like some malignant cancer.

  Alander and Lucia continued to eavesdrop on the others in silence. They listened in on discussions ranging from long-range policy to everyday trivia. Coordinating the activities of several hundred traumatized engrams called for the sort of leadership and infrastructure that the UNESSPRO survey missions hadn’t been designed to accommodate. Various improvisational methods were springing into being, often revolving around identical engrams from different missions. A surly collective of Otto Wyras wanted an increased allocation for scientific processing, especially in the wake of the pi-1 Ursa Major nova. Others sought solace and therapy in discussions with themselves or in groups comprised of just two or three templates. It was common to see the same associations repeated everywhere: if overseer rules stated that Owen Norsworthy and Nalini Kovistra should be friends, then so they would be, always. Rifts formed along ancient fracture lines, tracing enmities laid down on Earth and propagated to the stars.

  It was amazing, Alander thought, that the engrams had made it as far as they had. Given the odds stacked against them, they should have all turned out like him. The whole project should have fallen flat on its collective face before any of the missions had even left Sol’s neighborhood.

  After a while, the wash of information became oddly soothing. Floating in a sea of faux humanity, his mind began to wander, his thoughts slowed, and he gradually drifted into sleep. It was hard to differentiate between the darkness of the Dark Room and unconsciousness, so sliding from one to the other was easy. Nor did he fight it when he realized what was happening. He just accepted it, allowing himself sink even deeper into that sleep, drifting with the babble of all the streams of conversation taking place around Sagarsee.

  “Sleep well, Peter,” was the last thing he heard before unconsciousness claimed him completely.

  He didn’t dream.

  * * *

  “If we have been saved,” a voice said an undetermined time later, “then the work is only beginning. We’re pretty much all that’s left of humanity, so where do we go from here? Where do we live? How do we even govern ourselves? Christ, how are we going to make a viable society out of the same sixty-odd people repeated over and over again?”

  Alander vaguely recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it. He blinked into the darkness, clutching for reference points. He could make out an open door in the distance, and leaning through it a spindly, matte-gray creature, glass eyes gleaming.

  “That’s what people are trying to work out right now.” There was no mistaking that voice: it was Lucia. “Perhaps you should be out there talking with them instead of in here talking to me, Rob.”

  The mention of the name helped Alander place the voice: Rob Singh. He was one of several mission pilots disenfranchised by the arrival of the Spinners and their hole ships.

  “Politics isn’t my bag,” said Singh. “I’m more interested in finding out why all of this had to happen. Just because the problem might have gone away doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to pick at it. All of the questions we’ve found in the gifts still haven’t been answered. The Spinners are just as much a mystery as they ever were.”

  “What’s going on?” Alander asked finally.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Peter,” said Lucia. “We didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “How long was I out?”

  “Not long,” said Lucia. “Only about an hour.”

  “Is that all?” He had the mental equivalent of a creased face from having slept in an awkward position; nothing was quite lining up yet. “I think I’m going to need at least a week before I’m fully rested.”

  “You’re not the only one,” said Singh via the telepresence robot.

  Alander tried to shake the sleep from his thoughts. “What’s happening in pi-1 Ursa Major?” he asked. “Does anyone know yet?”

  “It’s still impossible to get in close enough to tell,” said Singh. “The light cone of the explosion is expanding, keeping our scouts a fair distance from the center. There’s still fighting going on in there, we know that much—although who’s actually winning we have no idea. Would you believe, though, that some are quibbling over naming what’s left of the star?”

  Alander smiled weakly. Sadly, he could well believe it: it was just the kind of petty-minded nonsense that invariably occupied people’s thoughts.

  “And yourself?” asked Alander. “What have you been doing while you wait?”

  “I’ve been going over the mission reports filed since you got back. They’re quite fascinating, you know. We’ve all learned a lot in the last few days.”

  “I glanced at them, too,” Lucia said. “I found them more confusing than anything.”

  “Maybe,” said Singh, “but there are some answers to be found if you’re prepared to look.” He was sounding pleased with himself. “I was reminded at one point of a conversation you said you had with one of Peter’s engrams. The one from chi Hercules.”

  Alander remembered that engram. He had tried to convince him to merge his memories with his, but he had refused. Now, presumably, his last moments of life had been sucked dry by Lucia. “Why? What did he say?”

  “He talked about his theory, the various ways the Spinners and Starfish could have evolved without affecting our own evolution—quantumly speaking. One of the theories he raised was that they’re moving in a reverse time direction to us, heading for the big crunch rather than the long cold or big bang or whatever lies ahead.”

  “Mind games,” said Lucia. “He was just following his operating parameters.”

  “That doesn’t mean the thought doesn’t have merit,” said Singh. “Do you remember the Asteroid? The way it only spoke in statements?”

  Alander did: the strange, spherical creature that had claimed, or at least implied, that it was a close link to the Starfish. He couldn’t imagine how it related to the stuttering thoughts of his failed copy, though. “Yeah. So?”

  “Did you ever work out why it did this?”

  Alander hadn’t. “You have a theory, I take it.”

  Singh’s robot shifted position at the door. “I believe it was only able to speak in statements because the normal conversational r
ules didn’t apply to it. More specifically, because the progression of question and answer wouldn’t work—not if its superiors were viewing time in reverse. How could the Asteroid provide an answer before it had heard the question? Or better yet, why would it bother asking a question when, from its point of view, you’d already answered it?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lucia.

  “I think I do,” said Alander. He moved toward the doorway where the robot twitched and whirred. “Rob’s saying that conversation between beings in opposite flows of time is only possible by statements.”

  “Exactly,” said Singh. “It was an interface between two completely contradictory ways of being. Or might have been.”

  Alander thought back to the strange and awkward conversation, and recalled wondering at the time why beings as advanced as the Starfish would have trouble communicating with them. Singh had come up with a possible explanation, and if he was right, it opened a whole new can of worms.

  “That could make things terribly complicated,” said Lucia.

  “It would mean that they see a universe of decreasing entropy, right? Where things become more ordered with time, not less?”

  Three eyestalks on the robot rotated as if to examine the darkness of the room. “That’s the gist of it, yes. As bizarre as it may seem, they may come from a time beyond the universe’s turnaround point, when the arrow of time swings back. To them, they’re still traveling forward, into their future, and it’s the rest of the universe that’s traveling backward.”

  “So from their point of view,” she went on, “they’re not destroying the gifts at all—they’re building them. To the Starfish, it would be the Spinners who are destroying them!”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “But we don’t know if the Spinners are following the same time arrow as the Starfish. If they’re not, it gets even more complicated.”

  “Jesus wept, Rob,” said Lucia. “Is this even possible?”