Echoes of Earth (26 page)

2.1.2

“You knew him, I think,” said Laurie Jetz in a solemn voice.

The greater Hatzis didn’t reply immediately. Her mind trawled through her various povs for an extended moment while she considered her options. She could answer honestly and confirm the Urge’s statement, or she could lie and claim that the old records must have been corrupted. Or she could tell a half truth and say that his information might be right, but she had erased that aspect of her life from her memory. She would have said the last immediately, except her original had as good as stated the opposite at that damned party. Shalhoub had heard her. She had, therefore, inadvertently backed herself into a corner.

But she had no time for vacillating. She had to decide—and quickly.
Shit.

“Yes, I knew him,” she said, choosing honesty over hypocrisy. “We entrained together for UNESSPRO. I think we were even rostered together on several of the missions.”

“Quite a few, according to the records. Four hundred seventeen out of the original thousand, in fact. You were on the Barnard’s Star flyby together, the first survey mission to send back data. What was it called? The
Marcus Chown
?”

“
Michio Kaku
,” she corrected him. There seemed no point holding anything back now.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Jetz. “And tell me, Caryl, in your opinion, did he have what it would take to do something like this?”

The question shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. “I honestly don’t know, Laurie. It was a long time ago.”

“But your memories are still fresh, are they not?” He went on without giving her the chance to refute this: “I know you, Caryl.”

The hell you do,
she thought. He might have known what she had been but certainly not what she was now. No one knew anyone anymore. They had progressed beyond all capacity to be understood. That was part of the problem.

“I knew his original,” she said, keeping a tight rein on her resentment. “Who can say what has happened to him since then?”

“We know his engram failed on the
Kaku
mission. Your engram reported that much in her transmission from Barnard’s Star. There were short-term failures of several different engrams in other missions, but his name recurs more than anyone else’s.”

Hatzis found herself looking at him with both amazement and amusement. “And you believe
that
is somehow connected to
this
?” She indicated the image he had presented to her only minutes earlier. “I hardly think so. The whole madness/genius argument is just bullshit.
Especially
here. Christ, he wasn’t even a real person; he was just a program. And when programs fail, they don’t go off and write a fucking symphony or anything. They just
... fail.
Crediting him with the discovery of something like ftl communication—let alone ftl
travel
—is clutching a bit, Laurie.”

Jetz’s image shuffled uncomfortably, as if embarrassed. “Yes, well, I guess I’d have to agree with you there,” he said. “But goddamn it, Caryl, we’re faced with few alternatives. And the Vincula would very much like to know what it is we’re dealing with before we respond. We don’t want to reveal too much.”

“Why not?” Here she and her original were literally of the same mind. “What is it you’re so afraid of?”

“If we knew the answer to that, Caryl, maybe we wouldn’t be so afraid. But the truth is, the unknown can be terribly intimidating.”

Hatzis fumed silently to herself for a moment. The strength of the Vincula lay in its flexibility, its ability to respond to change far more rapidly than any other human government had before. But its weakness lay in its obsessive and transitive factionalism, which undermined much-needed stability at every step. And, like every government before it, it was obsessed with secrecy, knowing full well that, today as always, information was the key to power.

This time, though, they had come to her with information. She suspected they would have done so regardless of her original’s interference. She had known Peter Alander, unlike any of them, and that gave her a kind of edge. Exactly what sort of edge, though, remained to be seen.

“Do you want me to talk to him?” she asked. “Is that it?”

“Yes, Caryl.” He seemed relieved that she had brought it up first—an artifice, surely, since the appearance of his image was certainly under complete conscious control. “Who better to respond than someone he once knew?”

“We didn’t know each other that well, Laurie. In fact...” She remembered the friction that had existed between them. “We weren’t what you’d call friends.”

“But he knew you, and that’s the most important thing. After all, what else is he going to find familiar?”

“Nothing, I guess.” She sighed, thinking,
Not even me.
But she gave in, anyway. Perhaps the Urges would feel in her debt once this was out of the way; she could always use the extra leverage. “So what is it you’d like me to say?”

“We just want you to find out what he wants, that’s all.”

The brief was surprisingly short. “And where he’s from and why he’s here, I suppose?”

“Those things are secondary,” he said. “I don’t think we’d believe his answers on those matters, anyway, regardless of what he told us. If he wants something from us, though, that’s a different story.”

Once she, like her original, would have thought Jetz’s Vincula-centric view of the universe alarming and reason enough to deny him anything he asked. Now she was deadened to it. They all thought that way, each and every one of the Urges. Their job was to look out for number one, and they did it obsessively. Her only hope was to give up trying to beat them head-on, which was something her original would never understand.

“When?” she asked.

“Now, if you like. Now that he’s using normal means, we can open communications at any time.”

“Live?”

“No. There will be an appreciable delay between responses, so we will record your message and broadcast it immediately. If necessary, you will be called up for further exchanges with him.”

She could see this stretching for days, slumming in real time to communicate with a poor copy of a man she’d never liked in the first place. “Okay,” she said. “But first, play back the message to me again. Remind me of what I’m replying to.”

Jetz complied with no visible effort.

“This is Peter Stanmore Alander hailing any surviving representatives of the 2050 United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program. I have urgent and sensitive information to convey, and I will do so only to the appropriate authorities. I shall await your reply at this location for precisely one hour. Should I receive no response, I will move to the coordinates at the end of this message and try again.”

The audio recording ceased. There had been no accompanying image.

“That was the first message,” Jetz explained. “The second was much the same, from the location he listed.”

“And you’re absolutely sure it’s him?” she asked.

“It’s a rough match to the vocal records of his original, for what that’s worth, but we need confirmation,” he said. “Now, when we send your message, it will go to a third location, since he will have moved again. Quite a clever trick, actually. He lets us know where he is and then tells us precisely where he’s going—not in time for us to get anything there to intercept him, of course, but so we can see how he travels. The gesture is quite cruel.” He smiled in appreciation.

Hatzis recalled the footage Jetz had shown him. Alander was near enough to Earth that they could see him, albeit fuzzily. The white dot that was his craft had demonstrated a knack for crossing distances, not instantaneously, but certainly much faster than light. This made him doubly difficult to catch. He could be right on top of someone well before they even saw him move.

“Do you want me to talk him in?” she said, adding to herself,
Into your clutches?

“No, that’s not a priority at the moment. Just get him talking for now, then we’ll see what happens.”

The answer sounded a bit pat, as if he was telling her what she wanted to hear, but ultimately she didn’t care. Alander was a stranger from a century ago. Their originals hadn’t kept in touch after entrainment; she didn’t know what had happened to him during the Spike. She didn’t particularly care if the Vincula even shot him out of the sky, except she would never know, then, where he had come by his ship. And she couldn’t deny that her curiosity in regards to this was most definitely piqued.

“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

She opened new channels of communication and felt them mesh with those of the Vincula observers attending her and Jetz. Her mind raced as she tried to think of something to say and ultimately settled on the practical.

“Peter, this is Caryl Hatzis. We’ve picked up your beacon, but we don’t know what you want us to do beyond that. You’re going to have to give us a clue as to what you’d like us to do. Please, try not to be alarmed by what you see here.” She added that on impulse, trying to imagine what he might think upon seeing the Frame for the first time. “A lot has happened since you’ve been gone, Peter. But essentially we’re still the same old people.”
More or less literally, in my case,
she thought.

She indicated that she had finished, and the recording ended.

“Thank you, Caryl,” said Jetz. “Brief, to the point, reassuring: just what we wanted. The message has already been sent, and we will notify you once we have received his reply.”

“If there is one.”

“Why wouldn’t there be?” He seemed amused at the suggestion. “He comes here asking for ‘surviving representatives’ of UNESSPRO, claiming to possess some ‘urgent and sensitive information.’ If you and we together don’t constitute ‘the appropriate authorities,’ then who does?”

As before, his open-palmed shrug of bemusement left Hatzis as cold as a quick dip on Pluto. They’d only come to her to get Alander talking; if he had nothing interesting to say, they’d brush him aside. They would no doubt keep his ship, of course, but they cared little about him. For all their smiles and courteous behavior, she wasn’t fooled for a moment.

And just what did he have to say, anyway? She didn’t believe in parapsychology—as a depressingly large percentage of the human race still did—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Alander’s reappearance in Sol System was an omen. A ghost rising out of a past long thought forgotten, he would be more difficult to ignore than mere electromagnetic transmissions from survey teams dozens of light-years away. He was
here;
he was tangible. And if she knew one thing, she knew that this was something her original would never allow to be kept a secret.

2.1.3

Arachne’s
sensors were much sharper than anything Alander
was used to. He could examine views in all electromagnetic frequencies with a high degree of resolution and no appreciable delay. He could see shadows on Pluto from the orbit of Mercury or examine shepherd moons in Saturn’s rings without changing location. When he had first seen the hole ship, there had been no evidence of instrumentation breaking its smooth, spherical surface. In fact, he was beginning to suspect that the instruments were completely separate from the ship. Some of the observations he had made since arriving in Sol could only have been possible with a very wide-based interferometer—kilometers wide—and that could only have been possible if the ship had sent out parts of itself to act as components in such an array.

Either that, or the onboard AI was making it all up. But he seriously doubted that this was the case. What he had seen was too detailed and too bizarre to be a fabrication.

“Okay.” He sighed as he watched the main screen from his position on the curved couch. “The hour is up. Let’s move. I feel too exposed here, especially while no one’s talking to us.”

That someone would eventually talk to him, he had no doubt. He could see things moving through the giant structure—things much like spaceships with bulbous midsections and bright thruster emissions flaring from their tails. Someone had to be piloting them. Someone, or
something.

“Moving to preprogrammed coordinates now.” The voice of
Arachne
broke across his thoughts, and at the same moment the screen went blank as the hole ship performed the jump.

Despite having spent two days sealed in its interior, he was still no closer to understanding how the ship was fueled or how it traveled. The trip from Upsilon Aquarius had taken twice as long as the one day that had apparently elapsed in the real universe, but it had been entirely uneventful—dangerously so, given his constant battle to remain focused. About the only thing he had learned in his time aboard the hole ship was that it had the facilities to comfortably accommodate four people almost indefinitely. The air always seemed fresh, and the AI had assured him that the food supply was virtually inexhaustible. There were also separate sleep areas. He had appropriated one and forced himself to sleep for at least part of the journey.

The only break had been at 53 Aquarius, where he had stopped over briefly to look halfheartedly for Lucia and
Chung-2. Arachne
had taken just four hours to cross the ten light-years separating it from Adrasteia. The binary system itself had been an amazing sight. There were no planets, but that didn’t mean the system was empty. There were numerous asteroid belts twisting in loops around the two suns, stretching and bunching under the changeable forces of gravity acting on them. There were clouds of molecules and atoms, heated to great temperatures by magnetic fields and solar winds, glowing softly in numerous frequencies. And there were multitailed comets slowly evaporating between the stars.

In short, there was a lot that a small ship like
Chung-2
could have collided with while moving through the system at speed. But that didn’t mean she
had
died there. A system was a very large place to explore, even with the sensors of the hole ship at his disposal; any sort of wreckage would be hard to find against such an active background. And he was acutely aware of the many other systems she had flown through during her solo mission, and therefore the many other chances she would have had to find disaster.