Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Swinging her pov to a lower angle, she saw the android frown. Thor seemed to understand what Sol was saying about as much as she did. And there was clearly a lot going unsaid, too.

  “We were fighting them, the last I heard.”

  “Now we’re either fighting with them or running with them.” Sol paused for a second. “It’s complicated. We’re still trying to work out who’s with who, and who’s making the decisions.”

  “Not Axford, I hope.”

  “Definitely not. Or Peter.”

  The name grabbed her attention immediately. She felt a thrill start somewhere around her and work its way through all sections of her new, extended self. Peter was alive! Suddenly she didn’t want to be a passive observer anymore. She wanted to become active in the conversation, take control of it, guide it to where she wanted it to go.

  “Peter is alive?” she said, closing off the incoming message and taking over the communication channels it had used.

  The android looked around, bewildered. “Lucia? Is that you?”

  Lucia. Yes, that was her name. Lucia Benck. How long had it been since she had even thought of herself as that? So long that she’d almost forgotten it.

  “You mentioned Peter,” she said.

  The android’s eyes moved about the room, its green-hued face creased with perplexity. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I remember dreaming; I remember being scared. I forgot something, and then...”

  Then there had been a strange white orb hanging off her stern, twice the length of the Chung-5 in radius—the same sort of craft, she now realized that Sol was talking from. (Lucia had suppressed the transmission so the android couldn’t hear her. She wanted Thor all to herself for the moment.) Images recorded by her ailing sensors revealed that it had literally appeared out of nowhere. Her processing speed accelerated from glacial slowness to the highest her Overseer could manage as another sphere emerged from the first one’s side: black, orbiting like a miniature moon. This second sphere slowed to a halt so it seemed to point at Chung-5. Then a voice had spoken to her in English.

  “You were experiencing brainlock when I found you,” the android was saying, back in the present. “You would have experienced smaller events leading up to it: déjà vu, dissociation from your senses, things like that—all symptoms of engram senescence. Chung-5 wasn’t faring much better. I uploaded you to my hole ship, the only place I had to put you, but I wasn’t sure it would work. I’m sorry if this is confusing for you—”

  “I feel different,” Lucia said. “I’m part this ship, now. This Pearl. It makes me feel good, knowing that I can do so many things.”

  “You feel that?” Something approximating disbelief glinted momentarily in the android’s eyes. “You’re part of the workings of Pearl?”

  “I think so,” Lucia said. “Most of it, anyway. Why should that surprise you? You put me in here.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t expect that to happen. I don’t think anyone’s tried to do this before. Can I talk to—?”

  “Caryl,” Lucia interrupted, having reasoned with a fair degree of confidence that this was indeed the android’s name (even though that meant that Sol had to be another Hatzis, judging by the increasingly frustrated voice match). “You mentioned Peter. Where is he?”

  Android Hatzis stopped, frowned. “He’d be in iota Boötis now, I guess. That’s where Sol said the others were. But you should know that he’s not the Alander from your mission. He comes from Mission 842, the one to Upsilon Aquarius. He’s changed since you knew him.”

  Lucia stopped listening. It didn’t matter to her which one he was. It just mattered that he was Peter.

  “I want to go there,” she said.

  “Yes, we will, but—”

  “I want to go there now.”

  “What’s the hurry, Lucia? We only just got here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Sirius.”

  “Sirius? But that’s...”

  Her mind tripped over the absurdity of android Hatzis’s statement and simultaneously accepted it without question. While she couldn’t remember anything between blacking out in Chung-5 and waking up in Pearl, she did have a sense of crossing an enormous gulf of space. She also had a feeling that time had passed, more time than could be accounted for by all the days and years she had been awake.

  “What year is it, Caryl?”

  “Twenty-one sixty, Mission Time.”

  She wanted to shout, Impossible! That made her 130 years old! But she was beginning to understand that she was very much out of her depth. For all the capacity of her new home—and her sudden age—she was like a newborn blinking to focus on a very puzzling world.

  What’s happened to us all? she wanted to ask. It would have been the beginning of a torrent of questions: What are we doing in Sirius? Why did you come find me? Who is Axford, and why are we fighting? What are the Starfish and the Yuhl and the Praxis? How had Peter been changed?

  What came out, though, was, “Why did you bring me back?” The plaintive tone to her voice surprised even her.

  Android Hatzis looked regretful. “We needed to know what’s going on in pi-1 Ursa Major, and you were the closest person to it. I was hoping you might have seen something recently, but your memories were scrambled. I had no idea you’d be in such shape, and even when I did know, I couldn’t very well leave you there. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing.”

  The wrong thing? Lucia wasn’t sure. The mention of pi-1 UMA did trigger an unexpected series of memories: a sunset; the name Jian Lao; the pressure of Peter’s hand in hers; a strong pang of sadness. Was this what she had been trying to remember—or trying to forget?

  Then another memory came. There had been photographs. The probe had absorbed them decades ago. The evidence was gone, except for her.

  “There was something odd about pi-1 Ursa Major,” she said. “It destroyed the Linde. It might have killed me, too, but I hid. It couldn’t find me.”

  “It came after you, you mean?”

  “No, when I flew through the system.”

  “But that was over forty years ago, Lucia. That can’t be right.”

  She felt again the terrible gulf of time and space that she had crossed. Forty years since the Linde had died, since she had switched herself off to survive the flyby? It felt like hours. An eternity of seconds.

  “I want know what’s going on, Caryl,” she told the android.

  The android laughed low and uneasily. “To be honest, I feel the same way.”

  “I want you to explain it to me.”

  “All right. I’ll try.”

  “And when you’re finished, we’ll go to iota Boötis.”

  There was a silence filled only by the persistent calling of Sol-Hatzis. (“For fuck’s sake, Thor. Answer me!”) Lucia switched off the part of Pearl that persisted in listening.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” the android asked, as though projecting her own uncertainty.

  “Yes. I want to see Peter. I want to tell him...” She stopped, not sure what she wanted to say to her old lover, so many years after they had parted. Her thoughts moved in strange ways through the conduits of the ship, complicating every emotion. “I want to tell him that the tourist has come home,” she finished after a moment.

  And that she has changed.

  APPENDIX ONE - Planch Units

  The Adjusted Planck Standard International Unit

  After several notable mission failures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program (UNESSPRO) developed a single system of measurement to prevent conflict between data or software from nations contributing to joint space projects. The following charts summarize the results, as adopted by UNESSPRO in 2050, using Planck units and other physical constants as starting points.

  1 new ampere = 2.972 old ampere

  APPENDIX TWO

  Dramatis Personae

  Human

&n
bsp; Peter Alander (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Peter Alander (Geoffrey Marcy)

  Peter Alander (Michel Mayor)

  Peter Alander (Frank Tipler)

  Jene Avery (Andrei Linde)

  Jene Avery (Tess Nelson)

  Francis Axford (Matthew Thornton)

  Lucia Benck (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Lucia Benck (Geoffrey Landis)

  Lucia Benck (Andrei Linde)

  Ali Genovese (Jack Lissauer)

  Ali Genovese (Michel Mayor)

  Ali Genovese (Tess Nelson)

  Caryl Hatzis (Sol)

  Caryl Hatzis (Miguel Alcubierre)

  Caryl Hatzis (Roger Angel)

  Caryl Hatzis (Robert Haberle)

  Caryl Hatzis (Stephen Hawking)

  Caryl Hatzis (Martin Heath)

  Caryl Hatzis (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Caryl Hatzis (Michel Mayor)

  Caryl Hatzis (Tess Nelson)

  Caryl Hatzis (Fred Rasio)

  Tarsem Jones (Fred Adams)

  Faith Jong (David Deutsche)

  Nalini Kovistra (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Nalini Kovistra (Tess Nelson)

  Vince Mohler (Paul Davies)

  Vince Mohler (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Vince Mohler (Frank Shu)

  Owen Norsworthy (Tess Nelson)

  Neil Russell (Carl Sagan)

  Neil Russell (Tess Nelson)

  Cleo Samson (Geoffrey Marcy)

  Cleo Samson (Michel Mayor)

  Cleo Samson (Tess Nelson)

  Cleo Samson (Steven Vogt)

  Donald Schievenin (Ronald Bracewell)

  Donald Schievenin (Stephen Hawking)

  Donald Schievenin (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Rob Singh (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Rob Singh (Tess Nelson)

  Jayme Sivio (Stephen Hawking)

  Jayme Sivio (Andrei Linde)

  Angela Wu (S. V. Krasnikov)

  Otto Wyra (V. S. Safronov)

  Yuhl/Goel

  Asi/Hofina (helot)

  Seria/Hile (conjugator)

  Ueh/Ellil (helot, envoy/catechist)

  Vaise/Ashu (conjugator)

  Probing/Inquisitive (Fit)

  Radical/Provocative (Fit)

  Status Quo/Mellifluous (Fit)

  Stoic/Enduring (Fit)

  Zealot/Shrieking (Fit)

  APPENDIX THREE

  Mission Register

  APPENDIX FOUR

  Timetable

  AFTERWORD

  Once again we are indebted to a large number of people for helping make this book possible. These include Simon Brown (to whom this book is gratefully dedicated) and Chris Lawson, who provided invaluable feedback at an early stage; Shaun Thomas; the real Neil Russell; everyone at Ace and HarperCollinsPublishers Australia, Ginjer Buchanan and Stephanie Smith in particular; Richard Curtis and Danny Baror for services rendered; Erik Max Francis, for first proposing a scale based on Planck units; Winchell Chung, for his weird world of 3-D star maps and other resources; and Claus Bornich, author of the invaluable program It’s Full of Stars, for putting our star maps on his site. Other programs that came in handy were Cinegram Media’s Red Shift 4 and Pro- Fantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 2 and Fractal Terrain.

  Finally, we would like to emphasize that any factual errors found in this novel are, despite the best efforts of those listed above, entirely our fault.