Echoes of Earth (13 page)

Instead, she dove into the conSense settings and mulled over which she might utilize. She could plug herself into the ship’s operational levels, as she had done many times before, and experience the steady flow of data pouring in through a thousand senses; or she could follow the progress of the assembler firsthand as it edged its way into geostationary orbit, making droids as it went; or she could even subsume her mind into the complex pool of thoughts that was the crew’s collective consciousness. Since only in Alander’s case could each mental calculation be wrought on an independent processor, everyone else’s virtual experiences were calculated en masse, queued and processed on a bank of machines buried deep in the
Tipler.
Although all the fragmentary thoughts were normally kept separate from one another, it was possible to strip away the aptly named ID tags and dive headfirst into them all at once. A constant kaleidoscope of human minds and bodies, meshed together into one chaotic soup, proved very distracting.

Hatzis called it the gestalt. Sometimes she thought of it as her best and possibly only chance to know God. She always found it oddly restful, like letting someone else’s dream lull her to sleep. That night, it came close to suiting her best.

Even as she felt the dust of other people’s minds swirl around her, burying her in a dune of moments, she knew that for tonight it wouldn’t be enough. So many people’s thoughts kept coming back to the gifts and the sole man sleeping inside them, among them. She smiled wryly to herself. Even with him there, she could not escape from him.

So she did the only thing she could do. She stopped trying and simply...
dove.

* * *

“...You were chosen,” said a disembodied voice.

She (he) tried to move her arms, but they were pinned to her sides. She was trapped in a giant crystal, like an insect in amber. Her eyes were fixed wide open, as was her mouth. But she couldn’t breathe; all she could do was scream, and then only in silence.

“... You were chosen....”

Her crystal prison was tumbling through space, with stars drifting idly past. She couldn’t tell where she was headed until the tumbling of her crystal brought it into view: a purple brown planet with a golden band like a crown around it; the sort of crown a princess might wear in an old folktale.

“... You were chosen....”

Then the planet, along with the crystal, was gone.

She was standing at the base of a large hill, from the top of which grew a tree. The tree’s branches were mostly bare and spread impossibly wide against the sky. From each of its outspread fingers hung a noose.

“There is no catch.”

The voice’s message changed at the sight of the new image, but she couldn’t tell whether one had prompted the other or if both changed independently. A wind sprang up, making the dangling nooses dance. And it did look like they were dancing. The ropes were alive, the open- mouthed loops calling her name.

“There is no catch.”

The tree’s fingers reached down and closed around her throat, obscuring the light of the moon and the stars, dragging her down into darkness.

“There is no catch.”

She was underground, in a maze. Her feet dragged in puddles; her hair caught cobwebs as she brushed by; her ears were deafened by the sound of darkness—and
her.
The air was dank and smelled of decay, and the entrance to the catacomb had fallen far behind; she had lost that along with all hope of finding the center.

“... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

(Ah. The part of her that was still awake in her private quarters, fighting sleep, cottoned onto what Alander’s dream was about. It was some sort of mutation between what the Gifts had told him and what he feared. The crystal was his powerlessness to act; the tree was his fear of failure and death; the maze ...)

“... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

(... the maze was no different from how she felt in the face of the Spinners and their take-it-or-shove-it philanthropy. What were they doing? What were they thinking? What did they want? Negotiating these questions was exactly like being lost underground. She didn’t know if her dream self was going in circles or making progress.)

“... We are only permitted to guide you so far....”

(She was honestly beginning to doubt the Gifts’ ability to guide her anywhere at all. They certainly weren’t making it easy for her. Sure, they had their own agenda and methods; sure, they were alien—if what they said was true, at least—and she shouldn’t judge them by human terms. But how else
could
she judge them? Wasn’t the onus on the Spinners to ensure that their fancy gifts could be understood?)

“In time, you will understand.”

(She laughed aloud at that, and relished the sound echoing off the impossibly solid walls of her chambers.
Enough,
she thought. This was getting her nowhere. If she kept this up, delving as she was into the man’s psyche, she risked becoming as confused and fucked up as Alander himself, and that was something to be avoided at all costs.)

“In time, you will understand.”

She (he) floated upon a golden pool lapping at the walls of an ancient stone cathedral. The setting sun cast pinkish highlights through empty windows and painted surreal shadows on the walls to her left. The shadows formed words she could read and that made her feel at ease, but which she couldn’t actually understand. When she moved her arms, the ripples made sounds like the chiming of a bell.

“In time, you will understand.”

(
Yeah, right,
she thought, and left him to it.)

1.1.11

Alander woke to the sensation of being poked in the ribs.

“Rise and shine, Peter.”

As the sensation continued, he realized that this wasn’t a conSense illusion. Someone was
actually
poking him in the ribs. He tried to roll over and away but couldn’t get purchase on anything. His stomach told him he was falling, and his arms flailed in desperation.

“Hey, take it easy, Peter.”

An unfamiliar face greeted him when he opened his eyes; whoever it was, he could feel their hand on his shoulder, attempting to steady him. Only it wasn’t a hand, really. Under the conSense illusion he could make out an extendible manipulator attached to some sort of robot.

Then the face fell into place: Otto Wyra. They’d been friends before the mission left but had hardly spoken since Alander’s breakdown. In fact, Alander had received the distinct impression that the astrophysicist had been avoiding him.

“Otto? What’s going on? Where’s Cleo?”

“She’s asleep. I was the one chosen to come and wake you in person. How do you feel, Peter?”

He stretched in the darkness and yawned. Everything was gradually falling into place. The tower, the gifts—”
You were chosen to act as mediator
”—and now Otto Wyra and a droid were in the Dark Room, waking him up.

“Has it really been five hours?”

“Not a second less. How do you feel?”

The repetition of the question made Alander realize that Wyra wasn’t simply making light conversation; he was probably being prompted by Hatzis to determine exactly what Alander’s condition was.

“Like shit, to be honest,” he said. “My stomach hurts.”

“You still need food, and we’re working on that. What about mentally?”

“I’m okay. Or I will be soon enough, anyway.”

Wyra smiled. “Good, because we have work for you to do.”

Realization hit.
Of course.
He scrabbled once again for balance in an environment lacking any reference points and finally gave in to the futility of even trying.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” he said. “This place is freaking me out.”

He used the nearest manipulator to lever himself closer to the door, wondering as he did so how he would have managed had Otto not arrived. Perhaps the Gifts would have helped him. Right now he was just glad the droid was there to assist him.

The robot itself wasn’t massive, comprising little more than a frame to hold together various sensors and communication devices, with several stubby limbs designed to act as either legs or manipulators depending on their orientation. Based on a zero-g design, it had no defined axes, and looked a bit like a tumbleweed with a purpose. Yet its grip was strong, and the lenses that watched him were almost too attentive.

He tumbled through the black door and into the Hub, stumbling as his full weight returned.

He picked himself up, rubbing at a knee as he looked around. Another droid pogoed from one door to another and disappeared through it.

“What’s been going on?”

“We’ve been busy,” Wyra replied, clearly impatient for Alander to get himself together. The droid tumbled off elsewhere. “The Gifts were as good as their word, giving us access as soon as the assembler was in position. They’re still tight-lipped, though.”

“They haven’t tried to stop you in any way?”

“They don’t need to. We’re limited by the design of the gifts—but you’ll see what I mean by that in a moment. They’ve let us roam around and poke into things as much as we can.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two hours. We have six droids, now, and another’s in the oven.”

The monotonous hum of the Hub was drowned out by new noises: tapping, whirring, buzzing; the sounds of the robots at work. The acoustic properties of the gifts obviously extended to cover all the spaces of the spindles, no matter how far apart. It was weird to think that the sounds he could hear through a door only feet away could actually be coming from the other side of the planet.

A familiar voice intruded in his head: “Are you sure you’re feeling better now?”

“Why the sudden concern, Caryl?”

“Your dreams were pretty active,” she said.

He felt strangely naked.
They watched them, too?
“So what’s your point?” he said irritably.

“The only room we haven’t studied in any detail is the room you slept in. There’s nothing in there at all, yet an entire spindle is dedicated to it. It doesn’t make any sense. A sealed box would be enough to give you free fall and darkness. I’m just concerned that it could be a brainwashing device or something.”

He was tempted for a moment to comment that it wouldn’t take that big a job to rearrange
his
thoughts. But instead he said, “Or maybe it’s where they live—the Spinners, I mean. Perhaps the space I occupied
was
just a box, and the rest of the spindle is their living quarters.”

Hatzis was silent for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “It’s an interesting possibility.”

“How would you go about testing such a theory?” said Wyra.

“We’ll find a way,” said Hatzis. “If they are testing us, I’m going to test them back just as hard.”

Wyra rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything in response.

“So,” Alander said, “what have you found?”

“Stuff that’ll make your eyes pop. Some of it we’re too nervous to fiddle with.” Wyra indicated a door on his right, one Alander remembered from Entrainment Camp. “This room we’re calling the Science Hall. It contains demonstrations of all sorts of models and theories. Lots of mathematical formulas scribbled on the walls, too. Chrys thinks he’s found turbulence equations in there somewhere, but he needs to look at it more closely to be sure. That’s in Spindle One. Spindle Two—” he moved around one door clockwise, to another memory—”is the Lab. We’re cautious of this one, to be honest. There’s little explanation for what we’ve found in it, but it seems to contain samples of various types of matter and energy. It’s like a chemistry set for gods. We’re reluctant to touch anything until you speak to the Gifts about it, so Caryl has declared it off limits.

“The next one we went into was Spindle Seven, and it doesn’t seem to contain much at all. There are machines in there, but we don’t know what they do. That’s another one for the Gifts to explain, although we are exploring it pretty closely at the moment.”

“What about medicine?” said Alander. “Anything along those lines in any of the spindles?”

Wyra nodded, pointing to a door. “In Spindle Four there’s a fair replica of a modern hospital, complete with regeneration tanks and laser surgery arrays. We call it the Surgery. For the most part, the technology is familiar—apart from an unusual suit we came across.”

“Unusual in what way?”

“Well, it looks as though it’s made of water.” There was a pause, as if Wyra was concerned that what he had said might sound foolish. “We’ve no idea what it’s for, although I’m sure that will become evident in the days ahead. Just as I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other strange things like the suit we’ll come across when we explore farther. We suspect that, like the Gallery, there could well be more chambers beyond the one we saw; so who knows what kind of stuff we’re going to find?”

“Who indeed,” said Alander, thinking of the answer to his own fragile state.

“It’s off limits, too, for the moment.” Wyra didn’t seem too upset about that, and the reason for it soon became clear. “You might want to check out Spindle Six before you go exploring anywhere else. It’s the biggest of them all, the one that’s been emitting the gravitational waves. They’ve died down now, but we’re no closer to figuring out what exactly caused them.”

“I would have thought you’d be more interested in the Map Room.”

“I was until I saw what’s in Six.”

Alander eyed Wyra closely. He could take a hint. “Okay, so which one is it?”

Wyra gestured toward a cream-colored door with a picture hanging from it. Alander groaned to himself, feeling the irrational apprehension rise inside of him. This had been the door to the bedroom he had shared with his ex-wife, Emma. The breakup had been a difficult one for both of them, and approaching it now seemed to revive those feelings of failure and bitterness.

His hand reached out hesitantly for the handle, then pulled it open in a quick and forceful manner, as if doing so would somehow rid him of the unwanted emotions.

This time, there was no discontinuity in his contact with the
Tipler.
They knew where to expect him to reappear and had satellite receivers already in place. All he saw was a blur until he’d crossed the threshold, then Wyra was following him into the giant chamber, smiling at Alander’s expression.