Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  The truth hit him midthought and, when it came, he didn’t know whether to admire the man’s audacity or fear what he could bring down upon them all.

  “When you talk about allies,” Alander said slowly, “you’re not just talking about us, are you?”

  Axford smiled, clearly pleased Alander had worked it out.

  “You’re talking about the Roaches,” Alander went on.

  “You want them to help you do what you can’t do on your own.”

  Alander hesitated on the brink, thinking: Ultimately it is about security, and there’s really only one way to be totally secure. But it could also be about revenge. “You want them to help you attack the Starfish.”

  Axford’s expression became serious as he nodded and said, “Yes, I do. And if I get it right, it won’t be suicide.”

  1.2.0

  Robert Signh

  EXCERPTS FROM THE PID (PERSONAL INFORMATION DIRECTORY) OF ROB SINGH, UNESSPRO MISSION 639, TESS NELSON (PSICAPRICORNUS).

  2160.9.4-11 Standard Mission Time

  The gifts are amazing. Sol has researchers in every colony poking into hundreds of different niches, but I doubt they’re even scratching the surface. I remember when I was a kid and people used to talk about the entire Earth’s knowledge compressed into a single SSDS unit the size of an apple. Well, I bet the Spinners use something a lot more sophisticated than that to store their data, and the Library is simply enormous. Even with our clunky old memory storage devices, there’s enough physical space to hold data from a billion Earths. We could tunnel through such a repository for centuries and not come out the other side.

  Nevertheless, we continue to dig away. And at the same time we send robots through the Gallery and collate the images they send back (the layout of each Gallery is slightly different in each colony, for some as yet unknown reason). We chart the stars and planets in the Map Room and marvel at worlds we might one day visit. We poke our noses—gingerly—into dark and dangerous spaces in the Lab, scratching our heads at scientific theories we don’t even know how to read, let alone understand.

  We are apes let out of our cages and set free to wander the streets of New York. Is it any wonder I feel lost?

  The Gifts themselves don’t make it any easier, picking just one person from every colony to interact with and refusing to speak to anyone else. Is that evidence of a higher purpose or simply designed to frustrate us? I don’t know. But poor old Neil is swamped with requests. He longs to go back into deep time mode and sleep out all the fuss. This isn’t his thing at all, poor sod.

  Would I feel any different if I were in his shoes? I don’t know that, either. All I can do is submit my questions with the others and wait as they inch their way to the top of the list. And then, when I get the answers, I’ll probably be as much in the dark as anyone. But it’s not as if I don’t have enough data to get on with. Everyone has access to the research pool. I can browse freely through Nalini’s astrophysical data or Owen’s report on the likely load-bearing properties of the orbital ring material. We didn’t bring an ethnologist, not expecting to find life anywhere near as advanced as us, but Jene, my fellow pilot, has a secondary specialization in that area. She’s making some interesting extrapolations on the races we’re finding in the Library. It doesn’t tell us much about the Spinners or the Starfish, but it does us good to learn something about someone out there.

  My secondary specialization is in comparative religions. Right here and right now, it isn’t really much use. The gods of Earth are dead. We’re just going to have to make up some new ones.

  * * *

  Today I found my first error. The Library lists a culture called the Esch’m (or something approximating that) originating around a type-G supergiant we call 22 Vulpecula, in the constellation of the Fox, about 4,075 light-years away from Sol. There are examples of the Esch’m’s art in the Gallery; it looks like someone blew up a beanbag full of multicolored Jell-O, caught the explosion on camera, then sculpted it upside down and hung it from the ceiling, many times over.

  I don’t get it. The images Gallery Droid 9 brought back remind me of scuba diving under a floating mat of seaweed.

  But this has nothing to do with the art, except for what the label attached to it says. It clearly states that the art is from 22 Vulpecula and is by the Esch’m. When you look up 22 Vulpecula and the Esch’m in the Map Room and Library respectively, you find they are recorded. The trouble is, the Map Room says that 22 Vulpecula has no solid worlds, just a close companion star, and the Library says that the Esch’m actually come from another G-type supergiant called Azmidiske, in a completely different part of the galaxy. So, a hole. That makes one. Perhaps it’s not surprising or even noteworthy. Think of all those billions of Earths’ worth of data those gifts must contain! I keep trying to imagine just how many cross-referencing errors would be in there if we had compiled it. But I don’t think the Spinners are the sort to make mistakes. Either someone’s fooled them, or the data is wrong for a reason.

  Lies or honest mistakes? Either way, now that I know errors exist, they have become my reason for being.

  * * *

  Ali came to visit again. Neil had some answers for me; nothing unexpected, unfortunately. On other fronts, though, the news is good. The boundary of stealth attacks moves ever forwards—past us. It seems we’ve been spared, after all. This is a huge relief. Caryl still hasn’t returned from Sothis, so we’ve had no means of escape, no matter how unlikely, for three days now.

  “The burden of command getting you down?” I asked Ali. She looked tired.

  “You want to swap places?”

  “No, thanks.” There are other versions of me running missions in other colonies, but I am deciding that I like my spare time. “The slower I run, the longer I live.”

  “Not subjectively. From your point of view, you’ll have just as many years all up. Outside, they’ll be smeared over more time, that’s all.”

  “That’s good enough for me. I’m stockpiling, if you like, against the possibility that we don’t get blown to smithereens. Instead of trying to cram as much as possible into what few days we might have left, like you, I’m taking it easy. I’ll want them later, if we live.”

  She found that amusing, I think.

  “I thought you gave up gambling,” she said.

  “I did, but only over trivialities. When my life is on the line, it’s a different story.”

  “It changes everything, doesn’t it?” she asked seriously. “Senescence, I mean. Sometimes I wonder why we’re struggling so hard when in the end it won’t make any difference. We’ll still degrade and break down.”

  “We’re programmed to keep fighting. It’s that simple.”

  “You think so?”

  “There’s always hope of fixing us, remember. The Hatzises will see us right—according to the propaganda, anyway.”

  “Do you really believe that, Rob?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “They had engrams after we left, on Earth. They all died, even after the Spike. You’d think the Vincula, or whatever it was called, could have fixed them if it could.”

  I opened my virtual mouth, but no words came out. She had a good point. She left me with it, and for once I was truly glad that I’ve been shunted aside, processing- wise, so that others can think faster than I. While they fall apart, I get to hang on a little longer. The Spinners notwithstanding, I tell myself, I’ll have the last laugh. Or sob, or gasp, or whatever.

  * * *

  Here’s something. It’s not an error, but it is interesting. I found it in the data Caryl Hatzis from Sol provided us with. It seems the equivalent of SETI in the early 2080s picked up a series of alien transmissions from the part of the sky containing the constellation Sculptor. Never translated or repeated, the transmissions ended as abruptly as they began. Their source was never determined.

  My first thought was that they comprised evidence of the Spinners’ passage through space, toward us. As Sculptor is in rough
ly the same direction as Upsilon Aquarius and the other first-hit colonies, it seemed reasonable to assume that the mysterious transmissions could have been the last gasps of a civilization attacked by the Starfish. At last, I thought, we have clear evidence going back more than a few weeks of where the Spinners came from.

  Sadly, it isn’t so simple. The math doesn’t work out. The Spinners are traveling through space much faster than the speed of light; they would have rapidly overtaken such a plea for help. The transmission must have left long before the Starfish arrived for us to have heard it so long ago—which, obviously, doesn’t make any sense.

  Unless the transmission was intended for us, of course. It could have been broadcast by the far vanguard of the Spinners. If they’d known where they were headed, eighty years ahead, they could have been seeking responses from anyone in the area so they’d know what awaited them. Maybe they sent a probe ahead, like a beacon, to test the water. The trouble with that theory is this: my estimate of where the main Spinner migration must have been at the time those transmissions reached us, given the migration’s current rate of movement through surveyed space and assuming it traveled in a straight line, gives an outside guess of 160,000 light-years, almost twice as far across as the galaxy. That’s mind-boggling. Who thinks that far ahead?

  * * *

  Error number two. This one was so big I would have missed it completely had Nalini not brought it to my attention.

  One of the great things about the Map Room is that it shows us the far side of our galaxy, which is normally hidden from our view by dust. We have no way of checking if the stars the map shows us are actually there, but there are some things we can check—such as X-ray sources, for example. We’ve been mapping them for decades. They show up in the Map Room data as black holes, neutron stars, and so on. Most of our guesses were right, which is a relief. At least some of our theories check out.

  The trouble is this: there are dozens of X-ray sources in the Milky Way, and all of the ones we knew about check out—except three. Those three don’t appear in the Map Room data at all. According to the Spinners, they don’t exist. As there is no mistaking an X-ray point source for something else, or missing it, this comprises another hole in the data. Nalini doesn’t concur that there has to be something sinister going on, though. Given a choice between blaming the Spinners for fudging the data or thinking we must somehow have cocked it up, she goes firmly for the latter. And I sympathize. I can’t imagine what the Spinners are doing out there that needs covering up (using black holes for wormholes? Spinning down neutron stars to generate power?) but I can’t let the thought go. Two mistakes could be coincidence. Or it could be just one step away from a conspiracy.

  1.2

  THE COMPANY OF STARS

  2160.9.11 Standard Mission Time

  (10 August, 2163 UT)

  1.2.1

  The golden light of alien industry played like flames across Caryl Hatzis’s face. She’d heard eyewitness reports and seen conSense footage, but this was the first time she was actually seeing the Spinners with her own eyes. It’s like watching God in action, she thought.

  Sixty-one Ursa Major boasted no Jupiter-sized gas giant, so the inner system was a mess of post-planetary formation rubble. The major terrestrial world, Hera, had several smallish moons and suffered constant bombardment. A smaller world in a nearby orbit, Eileithyia, had probably been knocked from Hera at some point in the distant past. Hera’s surface was a mess of impact craters distorted by tectonic movement and volcanic activity. It was a world of fire, from the furious swirling of its magnetic field to the rumblings of its still-hot core.

  Hatzis had anchored herself to one of Hera’s small moons. It had an orbital period of nineteen hours with a high eccentricity and was presently the closest solid body to the fourth spindle being built in Hera’s geosynchronous orbit. The hole ship was hidden in a nearby fissure. She sat on the outside of the moon, protected by an I-suit and using the senses of her modified body to view the act of creation taking place above her.

  The spindle seemed to be growing out of the vacuum: great sheets of golden matter spread and overlapped, creating cavities that seemed—before they were closed from her view—to be filling up with gray masses of creeping technology. Silver cables snaked across yawning gulfs to snap home on distant surfaces to create unusual conjunctions of planes and curves, while around the planet’ s equator, the incomprehensible length of the orbital antenna reached for the next spindle along. Somewhere above all of this lurked a small mountain of hyperdense material that would act as the tower’s counterweight—a dark counterpoint to the awesome golden spectacle below.

  No, she decided on reflection. This was better than God. Miracles needed no explanation beyond divine grace, whereas science could be explained. She’d seen vast works performed in Sol during and after the Spike, and they, too, had filled her with wonder. The Spinners might have been on a completely different level than the rogue AIs of Sol, but what they were doing here was no miracle. This level of science was achievable; the fact that she was watching it now was proof of that. And if it could be done once, then there was no reason why it couldn’t be done again.

  She nodded quietly to herself as she continued to look on at the unfolding extravaganza taking place on Hera. This was what she wanted for humanity, to attain this level of sophistication, not to be scratching out an existence from the ruins of her civilization. She wanted something permanent.

  In fact, she wanted more than what the Spinners had achieved here. To look at their wonders being created, it was almost inconceivable that they could ever be destroyed, and yet somehow the Starfish had managed to do just that with seemingly little effort, suggesting a level of technological advancement that paled into insignificance the efforts of the Spinners. If humanity was going to survive and prosper in this harsh universe, then it was to the Starfish that they would need to aspire.

  For now, though, she’d be happy to just be able to make contact with either of these two superspecies.

  She’d seen what happened to satellites that had strayed too close to the spindles: they were destroyed out of hand.

  That, she suspected, was an automatic reaction, no different in essence from the survey vessels’ automatic meteor defense systems. But there had to be some form of intelligence driving construction, even if it was artificial. If she could disrupt construction in a nonlethal but significant way, she might be able to attract attention to herself. And would the minds behind the building then stop in their relentless push through surveyed space just because of one failure out of the many systems contacted? She could only hope so.

  But how was she supposed to disrupt construction? Take Arachne and relocate into the heart of one of the spindles? She didn’t know if the hole ship could withstand the furious energies it might find in such an environment. It probably wouldn’t even allow such a jump if there was the possibility of risk involved.

  And if she could get in there, then what? Transmit a message? Deposit an explosive device that might hopefully bring a halt to the whole construction process? She simply didn’t know. With every new contact with the Spinners, she felt less as though humanity was being favored by some alien benefactors and more as though they were merely ants trying to attract the attention of a passing human who hadn’t realized that the bag of sugar they were carrying was leaking.

  Part of her wanted to take the hole ship now, to end the frustration of waiting and wondering. If she was killed, then so be it. At least it would be over. Humanity would be reduced to little more than a few scattered engrams, marking time until they died. The responsibility of wanting to preserve and re-create would be gone, for there would be no one left to carry the torch. The race would be effectively finished.

  But she didn’t move. Her eyes remained fixed on the golden splendor unraveling before her while her fingers grasped comet dust and primordial ash. Her body hadn’t needed food for many decades, but right at this moment her insides were burning with a ter
rible hunger.

  If only I could transmit this feeling to the Spinners, she thought. Surely someone among them could understand this hunger for knowledge.

  * * *

  Midday on Sothis arrived, and the transmission went out on schedule. She had left Gou Mang, still wide-eyed from the stealth attacks on Athena and the other colonies, to maintain the service. She returned to Arachne when the hole ship signaled that all the reports were in. Settling back onto the couch, she flicked through them, one by one. There had been two new Spinner drops, not counting Hera. Five more colonies attacked by the Starfish, three of them without provocation, and nine other senescent or failed colonies had been found close to Sol. Statistical analysis conducted by one of her older engrams confirmed that the Spinners were following a slightly curved path through surveyed space, so their origins couldn’t be extrapolated with any great precision. The Starfish stuck to that path like deer to a track—except for the recent stealth attacks, and the attack on Sol, which had taken them many light-years out of their way. The new attacks concentrated on the trailing edge of the Spinners’ path, as though the Starfish were systematically searching for colonies where their concentration of kills was the highest. That made sense, she thought, in a grim sort of way.

  Three transmissions created a new connection in her mind. Gou Mang reported that a hole ship sent to investigate the forward flank of the Spinner advance had failed to report back on time. She couldn’t pin down the exact location of the disappearance, but her best guess was that it had vanished somewhere in the vicinity of pi-1 Ursa Major. Hera was in 61 Ursa Major. The similarity of system names made her automatically check her mental star map. Pi-1 Ursa Major was thirty light-years away. The missing mission—piloted by a version of her from Eos in BSC7914—had been due to finish the previous day. That it hadn’t returned or reported was unusual (after all, she was nothing if not reliable), and she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she had arrived during a Starfish attack and been unable to escape in time.