Echoes of Earth (12 page)

He had just enough time to think how different she felt from Lucia when consciousness slipped away, and his worries, for a time, were forgotten.

1.1.10

“This is just great”

For the first time in days, the bridge of the
Tipler
was quiet. Half its active crew roster had taken the opportunity to gather in a conference room designed specifically for an extraordinary debriefing session. Caryl Hatzis and Jayme Sivio sat at one tip of a roughly triangular table facing the ten people they had requested to attend. The walls displayed views of the gifts Alander had so far visited, while the wall behind them showed nothing but darkness.

“He jumps into this without consulting us,” Hatzis went on. “He doesn’t eat. I’m not going to sit back and let him commit suicide—not after all we’ve done to keep him alive.”

“It could be worse,” said Cleo Samson, sitting in one corner of the triangle, hands folded before her. “Peter could have had a complete breakdown much earlier. Given the circumstances, I think he’s performed admirably. Does anyone here believe he could’ve done as well even a month ago?”

A mutter of consent ran around the table. Hatzis vividly recalled Alander’s descent into madness upon their arrival at Upsilon Aquarius, when his engram had been brought fully up to speed. His unexpectedly fragile identity had crumbled in the face of such unfamiliarity, not helped by the loss of Lucia Benck. Within days, they’d had to forcibly shut him down for fear he would tear himself apart. Only the most radical of steps—confining him permanently to one of the remotely operated drone bodies through which the surveyors occasionally stepped on the surface of Adrasteia—had anchored him sufficiently to survive reawakening, and, even then, his recovery had been hesitant. Blackouts had been frequent; strange psychotic episodes had overwhelmed him without warning; frequent agnosia made him difficult to deal with on a professional level. Only in recent weeks had he dared accept conSense overtures at all, too little and too late to avoid isolation from the
Tipler
and those who had once been his colleagues and friends.

His recovery had been uneven and slow and was still incomplete. Hatzis wasn’t prepared to admit that it might yet be permanent.

“And at least we now have an alternative,” Sivio said, affecting his most conciliatory voice. “An assembler is already on its way, manufacturing droids as we speak. Meteorology reports that the disruption to the weather caused by Spindle Six is actually resulting in surface rain. If that spreads as far as Spindle Five or Drop Point One—or any of the refueling points—then we can get some more bodies in place. And once we can, we’ll be home free.”

Again, assent rippled through the group. Close-shaved Ali Genovese looked particularly pleased; Hatzis knew that she was confident of being among the first given access to the gifts, once the opportunity existed. She was right, but Hatzis couldn’t resist spilling a little rain on her parade.

“You and I know, Jayme, that the best droids we can make in an hour or two will be ineffectual: low-range, at best, and only barely self-directing. Then there’s the delay problem, which is fine when dealing with someone self-directed like Peter but will become increasingly drastic when the
Tipler
is on the outer leg of its orbit. Do you really want to send droids bumping along the corridors, smashing into things because our reaction times are too slow and they’re too stupid to know any better?”

“But—”

“Don’t ask for us to be moved closer, Jayme. I won’t authorize something like that until it’s absolutely clear there’s no threat. Also, given that we’ve never seen surface rain in any quantity before, I wouldn’t be investing too much hope in our reaction mass reservoirs quickly filling.”

“You’re right, of course.” Sivio sounded annoyed; finally, she had gotten under his guard. “Everything you say is true: This situation is suboptimal in most respects. We have poor communications, no supply line, and precious little hard intelligence. But we
do
have the chance to change all that in time. Apart from being human—or as close as we can get, out here—I have to agree with Cleo that Peter is doing a pretty good job in a tight situation. He’s got us into these things, and that’s got to be worth something.”

“
He
didn’t get us in. They
let
him in.”

“He knocked on the door, don’t forget,” Samson said.

Sivio shrugged expansively and managed a tight smile, his usual good-humored facade creeping back into place.

“However he got there,” he said, “he’s there now, and that’s the main thing. We’ll keep a close eye on his health in the future, that’s all. There’s so much to learn and do that I think it’s unreasonable to wish for more at once.”

She nodded; he had a point. No one else could have done more in Alander’s shoes. And the volume of data they had to assimilate was already immense.

“Very well,” she said. “So what do we have so far? Five chambers in five different spindles...”

“Beginning with the Hub, which sits at the center of some sort of instantaneous transport system,” Sivio picked up where she left off.

“The only hard evidence we have that he is actually moving,” said Hatzis, “comes from the sudden jumps in his body’s transmissions, right?”

Sivio nodded.

“But can we trust this?” Hatzis asked. “Couldn’t this be faked?”

“Not easily,” said Sivio. “If he were staying in Spindle Five and his sensory data was merely being relayed to the other locations, there would be an appreciable lag between his responses to our queries. But as this is not the case, I personally think it’s real.”

“Any naysayers?” she asked. When it was clear there were none, she added, “Anyone care to guess how it works?”

“We can probably assume that the ring connecting the towers is involved,” hazarded Donald Schievenin, the long-faced, long-limbed physicist who doubled as civilian survey manager on many of the other missions. “After all, we detected no emissions passing between the towers by other means. But I suppose we can’t rule out some sort of method involving neutrinos or WIMPs—or something completely novel, even though that goes against Occam’s razor. We’re looking at technology far in advance of ours.”

“But it’s not magic,” said Chrys Cunliffe, portly mathematician on the opposite side of the table. “They exist in our universe and therefore must operate by the same laws.”

“And if we knew all the laws, I’d take your point.” Schievenin lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “I’ve seen things in the last couple of days that I would have bet weren’t possible. The Spinners built ten orbital towers and a complete orbital ring out of nothing but vacuum, as far as we can tell. How did they do that? If you can give me even a hint of what laws they were using to achieve this,
then
I’ll listen to you.”

“Clearly it’s going to be up to us to work things out,” said Sivio, easing into the debate. “They’re not going to make things easy for us. I think we can accept that. The Spinners gave us these gifts, it seems, to nudge us forward a little in our intellectual evolution. But they’re not going to spoon-feed us, because that would defeat the purpose of the gifts altogether.”

Schievenin inclined his head thoughtfully. “I think I agree with Jayme on this,” he said. “And if what he says is the case, then I, for one, shall relish the challenge they are setting for us.”

That’s the spirit,
thought Hatzis. “Next, the Gallery. Does anyone have any comments about this?”

“Only that I’ll be keen to measure the number and layout of the rooms,” said Kara De Paolis, a structural engineer who had eagerly turned over her extensive experience working in space to UNESSPRO. “The Spinners seem to enjoy the illusion of infinity, and they’re very good at it, too. Since the spindles are clearly
not
infinite in volume, they must be employing a lot of fancy tricks instead. I’d love the chance to get into those walls to see how they do it.”

“Mapping is exactly the sort of thing a droid will be good for,” put in Sivio. “We can set one to run independently and wait for it to report. That way, we bypass the delay situation.”

“True.” Hatzis mentally pushed aside the problem for now. The Gallery was actually the room she had the least interest in. She was looking for the gifts that would be more beneficial to them and their situation. “Okay then, what about the Library? Who wants first access?”

As expected, everyone spoke at once. She raised her hands to motion for quiet. “All right, all right! We’ll draw a roster and sort it randomly. Does anyone have an objection to that?”

She saw Otto Wyra open his mouth, then shut it. She faced him squarely and said, “Astrophysics gets first access to the Map Room.”

He looked immediately appeased.

“Okay.” She raised her hand and began to tick off her fingers. “The Hub’s in Spindle Five. The Gallery, Library, and Map Room are in Nine, Eight, and Three respectively. Spindles One, Two, Four, Six, and Seven are still unaccounted for. That’s just about all of it covered.”

“Except for the Dark Room in Spindle Ten,” said Samson. “Nothing has happened to Peter since he went in there. Nothing that we know of, anyway. They could easily fake his biosensory data, if they wanted to.”

“What did they say about that room?” Hatzis asked.

“ ‘This is the final gift we bring,’ “ Sivio quoted.

“Nothingness,” intoned Oborn. “Sounds perfectly Zen to me.”

“Maybe they made one too many spindles,” suggested Chrys Cunliffe flippantly.

“Or ran short of gifts,” countered Oborn. “They lied about there being eleven.”

“Or maybe,” said Hatzis seriously, “we’re just not ready for that gift just yet. Perhaps its purpose will become clear once we’ve come to understand some of the others.”

There was a general murmur of consent about the room, albeit an uncertain one.

“Anyway, we can’t do anything about it right now,” she said. “While Alander is out and the droid assembler is on its way, we have the chance to take a short break.

“I advise all of us to bring the next shift in early and do whatever we need to do to get ready for the next wave of exploration. And that includes sleeping. Unless the Gifts— or the Spinners or whoever they are—make another move, I think we can be fairly certain nothing will change while we’re gone.”

“I’ll take the helm, if you like,” said Sivio.

“No.” Although he hid it well, she knew he was as tired as she. “Jene can do it. We’re only a call away if anything crops up.”

He nodded—gratefully, she thought. “I’ll bring her up to speed.”

“Then that’s it” As she stood, she nodded her thanks to everyone in the room. Conversation sprang up immediately. Knowing that it would be a while before some of them dispersed, she left first of all, walking toward one of the room’s unbroken walls and fading like a ghost before she reached it.

* * *

Confident that Sivio would lock the place down as per her
instructions, she went straight to her private environment. There, wrapped in the comforting atmosphere of her father’s New York offices—which she had always wanted to build into a home and, with the willing complicity of conSense, was finally able to do so—she did her best to wind down.

Images of the gifts flickered in her mind’s eye as she tried to sleep, her virtual body turning this way and that in the hope of shaking the persistent and troubling thoughts. Whoever the Spinners were, and wherever they had gone, they had left her one hell of a tricky situation. She felt like a child given free access to a high-tech immersion gaming system but only allowed to touch it with a broom handle. The Library could hold the answers to thousands of speculations about life in the universe. That life existed at all, apart from on Earth, was enough of a revelation to keep her occupied for weeks; that it was literally teeming with life and that they had access to unimagined cultures was enough to keep her occupied for a dozen lifetimes—or a dozen versions of her for just one.

She stopped in midthought. Thus far, the Gifts had managed to avoid mentioning anything beyond the bare minimum about their builders. No doubt that was deliberate. What was it they had said?
There are civilizations who take delight in the destruction of others.
The Spinners were probably being cautious until they were certain that humanity, or another race humanity was in communication with, wasn’t such a civilization. Now that contact was established, she was sure the Spinners would be reassured on that score.

In the meantime, there was still the Alander problem. Why had the Spinners insisted upon this seemingly senseless restriction to communicate only through him? Why refuse to talk directly to the people you were supposed to be helping? She couldn’t see the point the Spinners were trying to make. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he had an actual body, and that they had an aversion to, or even mistrust of, life forms that did not possess something as fundamental as a physical presence. After all, just because humans had shucked their bodies in order to get into space quicker, that didn’t mean that other cultures wouldn’t be phobic about the idea.

Then again, maybe they were just being perverse, deliberately keeping it from being too easy for the survey team. If it
was
some sort of test, it was going right over Hatzis’s head.

She rolled again onto her back with a heavy sigh, frustrated by her inability to switch off, as it were, and get some sleep. But she knew there was no point forcing something that wouldn’t come, so instead she decided to stop trying to wrestle with her restless mind and put her time to better use. In the long run, it would probably help her to sleep better, anyway. If it didn’t, she always had conSense to force the issue.

She called up the settings and overrides panel, accessible only by either of the survey managers on the
Tipler
—her and Sivio. She vacillated over the codes for a long moment, wondering if she should change them all to prevent Alander getting up to more mischief in the future, but in the end decided against it. Not because she trusted him, necessarily, but because she suspected it might be futile: If he really was the plant, the ship would probably notify him of any changes she made. Otherwise he could be rendered toothless too easily.