Echoes of Earth (36 page)

“I’m sorry, but you’re being ridiculous if you think you could have prevented this.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he returned with equal sharpness. “What if something went wrong with the Gifts because I wasn’t here to talk to them?”

“This wasn’t done by the Gifts, Peter.”

“How can you know that?” He felt angry but only because he knew that what she was saying made sense. Why would they destroy themselves?

She didn’t respond directly. “
Arachne
, what could have caused this?”

“From the evidence at hand,” said the AI, “it would appear that the planet was attacked.”

As incredible as it seemed, that rang true. But Alander’s anger was still there, so he spat it out in the most obvious response:

“Attacked? By
who
? Who the fuck would want to attack a goddamn survey mission, for Christ’s sake?”

“I am unable to answer that question.”

“Unable because you don’t know, or unable because you’re not allowed?”

“There is not enough evidence at hand to identify the perpetrator.”

“But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have suspicions. In all of the data recorded on other species, isn’t there anything that might give us a clue as to who could have done this?”

“I’m sorry, Peter, but there is nothing in the memory that I have been allocated.”

“Great,” he said, falling back heavily onto the couch.

Hatzis stepped forward. “Can you at least tell us when it happened,
Arachne
?
”

“Approximately two days ago.”

“Just after I left,” Alander said with a further sinking feeling.

Hatzis looked down at him. “Didn’t the towers have any defenses?”

Alander remembered a probe straying too close and being destroyed. “Some, yes.”

“
Arachne,
could the Gifts have fought off an attack?”

“They would have mounted resistance,” said the AI.

“Then whoever did this must have had a technology that was even superior to the Spinners.”

“Not necessarily,” Alander said. “Only superior to the technology the Spinners gave
us.
The towers were nothing to them but trinkets, remember?”

“What if the towers had been about to fall into enemy hands?” she asked. “Is it possible they would have self-destructed?”

Alander had already seen the hole in that argument. “And taken out every long-range satellite in the system? No, this was systematic. Someone came here and wiped out every sign of life—human
or
Spinner.”

A strange look passed over Hatzis’s face. “And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, where did they go from here?”

He shrugged. “How the fuck should I know?”

“And why did they come here in the first place? Out of all the other systems in the region, what led them to Upsilon Aquarius?”

“Christ, Caryl, I don’t
know
! Your guess is as good as mine. If we had more data, maybe we could work out what happened to them, but all we have is...” He indicated the screen, feeling nothing but a suffocating sense of futility. “What’s the point? We’re never going to know who did this. It’s just...
done
... and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Hatzis came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t mean to be insensitive. I’m just trying to figure it out, that’s all.”

He wasn’t mollified by her efforts at reconciliation. “We have no evidence.”

“We have what we can see,” she said. “It has the precision of a military strike. Whoever it was left nothing behind. They were thorough and didn’t care about environmental damage. That tells us something, doesn’t it? If the Gifts are beneficial pacifists, then whoever did this must be something else entirely.”

“Listen, Caryl,” he said tiredly. “The truth is, we don’t really know anything. For all we know, maybe the skeptics on the
Tipler
were right. Maybe the Spinners never did mean us well, and the gifts were nothing more than a trap.”

“A trap? What sort of trap?”

He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know, Caryl. I just don’t know anymore. Don’t know
anything
anymore. A week ago I—”

“A search of the system has revealed an anomalous artifact orbiting the sun,” interrupted the hole ship.

Alander sat forward with a start. “What? What sort of artifact?” He felt his stomach tighten nervously.
Could
it be them? Was it possible they had survived?

A white blob, distinct from the starry background, appeared on the screen.

“Its precise nature is unknown at this stage,” said the AI. “I have determined that it has a roughly four-day orbit that doesn’t match that of any of your survey satellites.”

He felt his hopes sink as quickly as they had surfaced. “So it isn’t the
Tipler
?”

“No,” the hole ship replied bluntly.

“Where is it?” Hatzis’s question was answered by a new image showing a map of the system.

An arrow pointed at the far side. “It is electromagnetically inert and quite small, but it does have a high albedo. Until now, it was occluded by the solar disk.”

“Do you think we were
supposed
to detect it?” she asked.

“I am unable to answer that question.”

Alander rolled his eyes; he was growing rapidly tired of hearing that phrase. Whatever was going on, it was certainly pushing the boundaries of
Arachne’
s understanding.

“So what do we do?” she asked. “Do we take a look?”

He shrugged hopelessly. “This could be a trap, too.”

“Well, if it is, at least we’ll die in the knowledge that we learned
one
truth.”

She didn’t smile, but the attempt at a joke was as welcome as it was surprising.

“I don’t think we have many options, Peter. Do you?”

Instead of replying, he arranged for the hole ship to make a short jump to the object’s orbit: not right on top of it, but a hundred kilometers away.

As the screen went blank, Hatzis asked, “Do you still think it’s your fault, Peter?”

He shook his head, expressing a certainty he wasn’t sure he felt. “There’s nothing I could’ve done. But I wish I had been here when it happened. I feel like I abandoned them.”

“If you
had
been here, you’d be dead now, too,” she said. “At least you’re alive.”

“Yeah, but I don’t feel grateful for that,” he said. “Right now, I just feel terribly guilty. I mean, what right—?”

“We’ve arrived,” she said, cutting him off and nodding at the screen.

The image displayed a roughly spherical object two meters across, cut in facets like a mirror ball, but instead of reflective panes in each facet there were only circular holes leading to its interior. The outside appeared to be made of an odd mixture of black and white materials, as though two dyes had mixed ineffectively in the molding of it, while the inside held a crystalline structure Alander couldn’t make out clearly.

“Quartz,” declared the hole ship upon examining it. “The object is inert.”

“Has it ever been active?” Hatzis asked.

“No,” replied the AI. “Every indication is that it has never been intended to function.”

“What’s it
for
then? Does your database contain anything on such an object?”

“No, Caryl.”

“It’s a marker of some kind,” Alander said, watching the object rotate on the screen before him, glinting strongly in the sunlight. The mixture of black, white, and reflective crystal made his eyes water.

“A death marker?” Hatzis sounded skeptical. “ ‘We came and we destroyed’? That kind of thing?” She shook her head. “I don’t buy it, Peter. I mean, what would be the point?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “And I daresay we’ll remain clueless until we know who actually put the damned thing here in the first place.”

She began to stalk the cockpit interior. “None of this makes sense!” Her arms swung as though wanting to strike out. “Who does something like this? And why here? The Gifts have as good as said that there are aggressive races out there—somewhere—but how would they know to come
here
? What singled Adrasteia out from the rest? It was in the middle of nowhere, a small and insignificant colony. It wasn’t a threat to anyone.”

“Not yet, anyway.” She was making Alander feel tired, walking so quickly. “Given the technology we were given access to, though, maybe we could have become a threat”

She stopped, staring at the image on the screen. “You think this might be a warning?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s nothing more than the alien equivalent of a headstone.”

“That doesn’t make sense, either. Why go around destroying civilizations, then honoring them with a grave?”

“Christ, I don’t know, Caryl.” He was suddenly angry at her for forcing him to defend what had been little more than a throwaway notion. “Perhaps we should hunt the flickers down and ask them personally.”

The sarcasm fell flat.

“I just want to go home,” she said.

Home.
The word stabbed at an emptiness inside of him, and for the first time he realized how much of an orphan he really was. The
Tipler
, the closest thing to a home he’d ever had, outside his original’s memories, was gone. Where else did he have to go to? Sol and its post-Spike menagerie?

The truth was settling heavily upon him, like a thick cloak. They were dead, all of them: Otto Wyra and his obsessive pursuit of knowledge; long-faced Donald Schievenin; temperate Jayme Sivio, the one who had kept them alive during the long journey out; the engram Caryl Hatzis, who had always been there, even when he had hated her for it. Every single one of them was gone. The mission to Upsilon Aquarius had failed.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

His expression must have revealed more of his thoughts than he had intended, because at that moment, Hatzis spoke softly.

“I’m sorry, Peter.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “Whatever happened here, it’s not your fault.” Turning back to face the enigmatic object on the screen, he took a deep breath. “
Arachne
, I want to send a message to Earth, telling them what we’ve found. That Machine of yours should pick it up okay, shouldn’t it, Caryl?”

“They won’t be able to send a reply,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. I just want them to know and to tell them I’ll be bringing you back straightaway.”

Her face was still for a moment, then softened. “Thank you, Peter.”

She didn’t ask if he was going to stay when he dropped her off, and for that he was grateful. The Vincula—or what remained in its wake—would want the hole ship, but they couldn’t take it from him. They couldn’t make him stay if he didn’t want to. Maybe, he thought, he would come back to Upsilon Aquarius to see if the killers returned. He didn’t know if they would or what he would do if they did, but it was at least some sort of plan. It was better than nothing.

The only thing of which he was completely certain was how little he would be missed.

2.2.3

For Hatzis, the trip back to Sol was unbearable. It wasn’t
because of the destruction they’d witnessed at Upsilon Aquarius, either, although that had affected her deeply. It was Alander himself. He was like a dead thing, barely reacting to anything she said, spending most of the time in his cubicle, emerging only to pace in circles like a caged bear. After twenty hours stuck in the hole ship with him, with another twenty still to go, she felt like she was going to explode from frustration.

She caught him standing immobile in the corridor on more than one occasion, dissociated and lost, staring blankly at the wall as though it held a window to a better world. Each time she had to snap him out of it and remind him what had happened, the shock on his face was like a fist to her stomach; then came denial, as though there was still some hope that by some freak of chance or whim his colleagues might be alive somewhere. She couldn’t understand why he found acceptance so hard; despite the lack of concrete evidence, it seemed obvious to her that the
Frank Tipler
had been destroyed along with the orbital ring. And it wasn’t as if any of his colleagues had been particularly close to him, apart from Cleo Samson, but she had died before he’d even left. Maybe it was that, she thought. Without the
Tipler,
his primary purpose was gone: He was adrift, alone.

With this, at least, she could empathize. How frightening it still was for her to be severed from her other parts. Her mind ached to rejoin the rest of herself. The edges of her being itched for reconnection, like stumps that were beginning to heal over. Once she had been perfectly happy in such a body; now, she was a cripple learning to deal with her new handicap. There were so many things she couldn’t do anymore that finding something to distract her was becoming increasingly difficult. The hole ship wasn’t much of a conversationalist; it rebuffed all her attempts to probe the depths of its stated ignorance and otherwise piloted itself back to Sol—however it did that—in complete silence.

“What if the Vincula isn’t there when you arrive?” Alander had asked on one of the rare occasions when he did acknowledge her. “What if the Gezim have finished it off? What then?”

She shrugged, unwilling to get into an involved discussion on the politics of Sol System. It was bad enough that she was cut off from herself and even worse that she was stuck with someone who didn’t even use the most basic forms of nonverbal communication to facilitate understanding. The fact that he was probably trying to provoke her wasn’t helping, either.

“We’re used to change, Peter,” she said. “Losing the Vincula will destabilize things for a while, but something new will grow out of that. Maybe something better. There’s more than one optimal point for humanity to occupy.”

“But...” He seemed to struggle for words, as though the concept bothered him or he was irritated by her patient acceptance. “Well, what about the Frame? If you lose that, what then?”

“The Frame was built by AIs decades ago. It was a grand venture for its time, but we weren’t its architects, and it’s not as if it was even finished. Its loss will probably affect us less than the loss of Earth, I think, and we survived that well enough.”