Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away?” Alander offered with a wry smile. “Cute.”

  “Are you telling me,” Hatzis asked, “that they think the Spinners and the Starfish are the same things? And they’re worshiping them?”

  “It kind of makes sense when you think about it,” said Axford. “They have a keener sense of dichotomy than we do—if their math is anything to go by—so a god who provides gifts and destroys those that use them might make sense to them.”

  “I don’t trust your translation,” she said bluntly.

  “Or you don’t trust me,” said Axford with a smile.

  Hatzis glared at him. “If you’re fucking with us, so help me, I’ll—”

  “Why would I do that, Caryl?” He opened his arms innocently. “I call them as I see them. We’re in the same boat, here, remember?”

  “Yeah, and according to these guys—” Alander gestured at the aliens from the position he’d taken up on the couch. “—that boat is sinking damned fast.”

  Hatzis bit her tongue. She didn’t know who she was more pissed with: Axford, Alander, or the goddamn Roaches.

  The Yuhl. A voice broke across her thoughts. She was so startled that for a moment she didn’t recognize its source as her original in Arachne. They have a name. If we ‘re going to understand them, then we should use it.

  They’re monsters, Thor returned. They don’t care about us. To them, we ‘re nothing but walking corpses!

  Maybe so, said her original, but we still have to establish communications with them. Let me take over.

  Thor balked at the invasion but then surrendered control without argument. It would probably be much easier to observe for a while, anyway; give her chance to calm down. She wouldn’t have to make any decisions; she wouldn’t have to worry about Sol always looking over her shoulder...

  An odd sensation passed over her as her original took control of her body while she adopted a conSense fix-up inside a nonrepresentational virtual space. She had to have something to hang onto, or else she would suffer severe disorientation similar to Peter’s.

  This way, at least, she felt as though she were floating voluntarily along with her body’s movements, rather than enslaved to them.

  “Tell us about the Ambivalence,” she heard herself say in a voice that was confident and self-assured, free of all the anger it had possessed moments earlier. “We wish to learn everything you know about it: where it came from; when you first encountered it; how you’ve managed to survive it.”

  The second alien removed its hands from its head. It fluted a short passage that, once again, the hole ship failed to completely translate.

  THE AMBIVALENCE [UNKNOWN] HAS ALWAYS [UNKNOWN].

  [UNKNOWN] WE PRESERVE YUHL [UNKNOWN] SANCTUARY

  IN DEPTHS ETERNAL.

  “I can’t make this one out at all,” said Axford.

  “Sounds like ordinary religious gibberish to me,” said Alander. “My guess is we’ve got ourselves a priest, here.”

  “And the other guy is military.” Axford nodded enthusiastically. “That would certainly appeal to their sense of dichotomy.”

  “You visit systems that have been destroyed by the Ambivalence,” Sol continued through Thor’s body. “Why is that?”

  The answer was relatively clear-cut:

  WE LEAVE [UNKNOWN] TO THOSE BEYOND.

  “I think that’s ‘tribute’,” said Axford.

  “Beyond hope? Beyond reach?” Alander frowned. “I can’t work out if they’re mourning the lives lost or the gifts destroyed with them.”

  “The latter, I’d imagine,” said Axford.

  “We are grateful to you for that service,” said Sol, taking Thor off guard not just with the words but also with a simple bow. “Your customs seem strange to us. But we are keen to learn more in order to prepare us for what will come.”

  The alien priest—if that truly was his role—seemed to study Sol carefully through the invisible barrier. When it spoke again, it was without the ambiguity that hampered their previous attempts to communicate.

  “It is always this way,” it said in terms Mercury had no trouble translating. With both sets of vocal cords working in synch, the words came out loud but not as shrill.

  “What is?” Sol asked.

  “There is no point fighting the Ambivalence,” the alien’s vocal cords continued in unison.

  “But why not?” said Sol. “We don’t understand.”

  “Cannot fight gravity,” came the reply, with the softer vocal stream following a second later: “All things fall to blackness.”

  “What goes up, must come down,” suggested Alander.

  Hatzis turned to face him. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, Peter, then why don’t you just get back to Pearl and leave it to me.”

  Alander looked genuinely indignant. “Identifying philosophical congruencies is an important part of learning to identify with new cultures,” he said. “If we don’t—”

  “All right.” Sol waved a hand, motioning him to silence. “I just thought you were being flip, that’s all.” She turned back to the alien, still not sure that Alander was completely with her. “How long have you known the Ambivalence?”

  “The Yuhl/Goel has attended it for five hundred/years.”

  “Five hundred years?” said Sol. “That’s a long time.”

  “I don’t think that’s right,” said Axford. “Both sets of vocal cords uttered the number ‘five,’ but they were from two separate sentences. I think the overlap could be a form of multiplying—such as, they’ve been in attendance for five times five hundred years.”

  “Two thousand five hundred years?” Sol exclaimed incredulously.

  “That’s if my guess is right,” said Axford. “It could be five hundred times five hundred. Either way, it’s a long time.”

  “By our standards, that would be many generations,” Sol said to the aliens.

  The alien’s head dropped slightly into its shoulder plates in an almost mechanical fashion. Perhaps, she thought, it was their equivalent to a shrug. “Less than the snap of a wing sheath/to the Ambivalence.”

  “The blink of an eye,” Alander offered from the couch.

  “I got that one, Peter.” To the alien priest she said, “If you’ve been following the Ambivalence all this time, why has it spared you?”

  “We are the Yuhl/Goel.”

  “Could humanity-slash-riil become humanity-slash-goel?”

  The pattern of pigmentation on its face shifted. “Humanity/goel?” it exclaimed. Then it uttered a short burst of noise like a roomful of game show buzzers all going off at once.

  “I think that was intended as an insult,” said Axford.

  Alander shook his head. “We seem caught between military practicality and religious dispassion.”

  “Is there anyone else we can talk to?” she asked the captives.

  “We are the Yuhl/Goel,” said the other alien, without turning. “You are the already/dead.”

  Sol turned to face the others. “This is getting us nowhere,” she said, frustrated. “These aliens have been following the Spinners and Starfish for twenty-five hundred years or more. This is a prime opportunity for us to finally learn something about them—and all they want to do is play word games.” She ran a hand across Thor’s android’s smooth scalp. “Any suggestions? I don’t think we can afford to give up on them just yet.”

  “It sounds like they’re giving up on us,” said Alander dryly.

  “Can you blame them?” said Axford. “They see it as their only chance at survival.”

  Sol frowned. “How so?”

  “Well, assume that what the Yuhl have told us is true, and these Spinners and Starfish have been playing destructive game of interstellar tag for the last two and a half thousand years or so—at least. In that time, the Yuhl might have witnessed many species standing up to the Starfish and being wiped out totally. Perhaps they attempted it themselves to start with but decided that it was hopele
ss. The only way to survive, they could have concluded, was to not get involved.”

  “Stay in the middle, you mean?” said Alander. “Play it safe?”

  “Safer even than that,” said Axford. “In the middle, you could get caught in the cross fire—and for someone like the Yuhl, or anyone trapped between two superpowers, there wouldn’t be much left in the end.” He shook his head. “No. I’m betting the Yuhl are on the sidelines, watching from a safe distance. In their minds, anyone attempting to go up against the Spinners-slash-Starfish are already dead. Taking sides is a quick path to destruction as far as they are concerned.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Sol. “Why not just settle somewhere once the Starfish have gone by? They must have come across thousands of possible planets they could colonize over the years.”

  “They can’t,” said Alander. “Because they can’t be sure that the Starfish wouldn’t come back.” He looked at Axford. “Right?”

  The ex-general nodded. “Maybe. If there’s a mighty whale swimming through the ocean gobbling up every fish that gets in its way, where would be the safest place? Near its tail, of course. That’s all the Yuhl are doing. If they hang back, how do they know the whale won’t turn about and come back for them? While they’re at the tail end and keeping up, they’ll never get eaten.”

  “Nice imagery, Frank,” said Sol, “but meanwhile, they’re exploiting all of the other races that stand in the path of the Starfish.”

  “I didn’t say I approved,” Axford responded. “I just said I could understand where they’re coming from. To them, survival is the most important thing—not fighting and dying.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Sol. “But it doesn’t help us much, does it? If we’re to stand any chance against the Starfish, then we’re going to need all the information we can on them and the Spinners. And so far, they haven’t told us anything that might be useful.”

  “Look,” said Alander, “it’s too early to jump to conclusions. I mean, these two can’t possibly represent their entire race. Maybe they’re extremists—the only ones fool enough to volunteer for seek-and-destroy missions such as this. And if they are extremists, then what are the moderates like? Would they be more inclined to talk to us and help us? Instead of wasting our time here, maybe we should be looking to talk to others that might be more cooperative and sympathetic.”

  Sol nodded. “If we only knew where they were...”

  Axford cleared his throat for their attention. “The records in their hole ship are locked with some sort of numerical key I can’t get around, yet,” he said. “However, I can tell you their destination after 61 Ursa Major. It’s Alsafi—a KOV star not on the main mission register. Main sequence but older than Sol, and not far from here. They had it programmed in case they needed a quick getaway.”

  “I know it,” said Sol. “The mission to Dsiban had a scheduled flyby. But why there? It’s not even close to Hera.”

  “I have no idea,” admitted Axford. “I’m just telling you what was in the hole ship AI when it merged with Mercury.”

  “We could check Dsiban to see if the survey team arrived there,” suggested Alander. “The Geoffrey Landis wouldn’t have flown by Alsafi itself, but its secondary mission would have.”

  “Who piloted that one?” asked Sol. “Lucia, I suppose?”

  “It was,” he said. “But that’s hardly relevant.”

  “Her track record is far from irrelevant, Peter,” said Sol. “We have no record of her ever arriving at her target system, so why should she be at Dsiban?”

  “There’s always a chance, Caryl,” he said. “You can’t afford to ignore the possibility that she might have useful data.”

  Thor stirred in her insulated, virtual space but didn’t intrude upon the argument.

  “You’re forgetting something,” said Axford. “It would’ve only taken her twenty-five years to get there. She would have been long gone by the time the Roaches even arrived.”

  Alander looked at him, then nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “I guess we have no choice but to jump in blind.”

  Axford’s grin was wide. “Any volunteers?”

  The rolling resonance of an ftl transmission rang through the expanded cockpit. On the far side of the invisible boundary, the alien captives looked up, chittering between themselves as if in alarm.

  Or amusement, thought Thor. Are they laughing at us?

  “Time for the daily bulletin already?” Axford said to her. “My, doesn’t time fly when you’re entertaining aliens?”

  Sol ignored the comment. When the transmission was complete, Mercury played its contents in full. It began the usual way, with Sol’s plea for cautious contact between the colonies and the various alien races traveling through surveyed space. Several new drops had been discovered as a result of all the exploration taking place along the Spinner front. Failed missions were downplayed, as were the latest Starfish kills. Hatzis felt herself grow cold when the figure appeared. Nine dead colonies. Not all had died in the previous twenty hours—they were still finding the ruins of colonies unlucky enough to have missed the warnings—but not all of them were old, either. A significant number of them must have been victims of sneak attacks.

  She skipped to the bottom of the transmission, to the roll call of dead systems. The coldness in her gut turned to stabbing ice as she read that one of them was HD92719: her home system.

  Thor felt herself lift out of the illusion that she was Sol as she reviewed the Overseer files that had come in at the same time as the Sothis transmission. Grief flooded through her as she fought to comprehend the simple but painful truth: everyone on the Krasnikov was dead! Rob Singh, Vince Mohler, Donald Schievenin, Nalini Kovistra, Angela Wu—everyone. The planet of Thor, if the other destroyed systems were anything to go by, lay in ruins right now, its biosphere traumatized by the falling of the orbital towers tethering the gifts to the ground.

  And she hadn’t been there because Peter Alander needed baby-sitting.

  Flashes of memories from the other engrams filtered through her via Sol. She experienced new worlds and old ones, felt fresh insights from distant facets of her own mind, learned the names of more Orphans... But it was all meaningless to her.

  Then a new memory burst across her mind: she saw golden machines bursting in two while sheets of unimaginable energy brighter than the sun effortlessly tore great holes in a small, green planet’s atmosphere. Silver star shapes, rotating like the blades of giant saws, gathered energy and then hurled it back at anything within range. She recognized the fear of the mind witnessing it and knew also that she, Caryl Hatzis, was sacrificing herself in order that others might see more closely just how the Starfish operated.

  This is 64 Pisces, called the mind of the dying woman. This was Ilmarinen; this was my home...

  Debris rained down upon the helpless world, while fire burned its sky. The work of the aliens was almost done. She felt the ringing of the hole ship around her as the aliens closed in for the kill, wondered if the transmission was still continuing, forced herself through the onset of personality breakdown as her engram found itself thrust into experiences her original had never anticipated, gathered her resolve around her—she would survive; she would see it through; if it saved one life, if it saved Sol, it would be worth it—and—

  The transmission from Ilmarinen ended abruptly and in blackness. A tag had been added to the file, and Thor watched as Sol read it. The Overseer file from 64 Pisces had been broadcast while the kidnap mission had been en route to Vegas from 61 Ursa Major, and had gone out with no thought to subtlety. The final thoughts of Hatzis of Ilmarinen had been detected by every colony within two hundred light-years. There was no mistaking the transmission for what it was, given that it came on its own. The deathbed experiences, even secondhand, were sparking panic all across surveyed space.

  “There’s a problem,” said Sol, pushing forward through Thor until she was back in full control.

  “So I gather.” Axford di
dn’t look smug, and she was grateful for that.

  Alander looked confused for a moment. “What’s going on? Is this to do with the transmissions you—?”

  “I can’t explain right now,” she cut in. “It’ll take too long, and I have to go.”

  Then Sol was gone, and Thor was thrust back into her artificial body before she was entirely prepared. Her confusion overrode automatic balance systems, and she pitched forward onto her knees with a gasp.

  “Are you all right?”

  Alander was halfway across the cockpit before she was fully aware of what was happening.

  “They’re all dead,” she said through gritted teeth, brushing aside his outstretched hand. “Thor is dead.”

  “Your colony?”

  She nodded, using the couch to help her climb to her feet.

  I will not cry. I will not cry.

  Alander straightened with her. “I know how that feels, Caryl,” he said.

  She shot him a sharp glare. “You patronizing little fuck,” she said viciously.

  He took a step back. “No, I didn’t mean it like—”

  She shook her head, and he shut up, throwing his arms up in defeat and turning away from her.

  “That’s a whole heap of trouble old Sol is going back to,” Axford mused. “People will be howling for evacuation and resettlement. Hole ships will become the most precious commodity on the market. Everyone will be looking for somewhere safe to hide. And guess what, people? There’s nowhere safe. You either fight or you die. They’re the only options. It’s survival of the fittest, dressed in spaceships not bearskins.”

  “Or we could do what our alien friends here have done for the last twenty-five hundred years,” suggested Alander. “Tail the Starfish and not let ourselves be seen, scavenging what we can, when we can.”

  It was only intended as a quip, but it gave Hatzis the urge to strike out at him. She knew her anger wasn’t really for him, though. As much as he pissed her off at times—all the time, these days, it seemed—lashing out at him simply wouldn’t satisfy the fiery emotions she felt needed immediate release.