Echoes of Earth (20 page)

“It’s nothing to do with
me,
Caryl.
You
don’t have any choice! The mission regs—”

“Were written by bureaucrats over one hundred years ago and some four hundred thirty trillion kilometers from here. Are you trying to tell me that they knew more about this situation then than we do now? That they’re better qualified than I am to decide what’s best for this mission?”

Samson seemed startled by the passion of Hatzis’s response. “No, but—”

“I’m sick of hearing ‘but’ from you, Cleo. Everything I say comes back to you disagreeing on some technicality. I
know
you want to hear from the people back home; Christ, I want to hear from them, too! One day I’d even like to
go
home. But that day’s a long way off, and we have to work toward it gradually. Jump too far now, and we may miss the target. I don’t want that to happen, so I’m prepared to listen to other people’s opinions—the people around me, as well as those guidelines given to us by those we left behind. Do you understand, Cleo?”

Samson’s lips were white. Alander had never seen her look so strained. “Yes,” she said.

“Good.” Hatzis paused then, as if to compose herself before continuing. “Look, part of this process includes listening to you, Cleo, but I’m not going to do so indefinitely. Bear that in mind over the next couple of days. You’ve had your say at this meeting, and you might get to have it again before I make a final decision, but for now, I think your contribution is complete. Unless you have something new to add, I suggest you keep quiet.”

“You can’t do this,” Samson said softly, rough-edged.

“Oh, I can, Cleo; I can.” Alander was surprised by Hatzis’s sudden change in tone. Instead of angry, she sounded weary, conciliatory. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure; I know how much you’ve been working. Take some time off to catch up on your sleep, and maybe you’ll feel differently. We’re not going to do anything behind your back, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” For a moment Alander was afraid that Samson might launch into another tirade, but she didn’t seem able to find the words or the strength. “What’s the point in ever trying to reason with you?” she said. “You just don’t see it!”

“Not like you do, Cleo.” The steely tone was returning to Hatzis’s voice. “Go and sleep for a while—and that’s an order. Just because you don’t technically have a body anymore doesn’t mean you’re superhuman. Kingsley?” She turned to Oborn. “Make sure she does as she’s told. The last thing I need right now is another goddamn breakdown on my hands.”

Alander winced at the reference to him. Samson didn’t respond at all. Instead, she just vanished from the simulation as though someone had pulled her plug. That in itself was a response, he supposed; in the world of the engrams, such an abrupt departure was considered extremely rude.

Hatzis sighed heavily. “Does anyone else have anything to add? Because if not, I’m prepared to leave it there for the moment. We can look at it again when we have more data, or when we’ve all had time to think it through.”

Sivio nodded, expressing a general consensus. Samson’s outburst appeared to have lost her the argument even with those who had originally supported her. “I suggest we leave it a week,” he said, “before calling for a general vote. By then we should have a better idea what the hole ship can do, at least... or another opportunity entirely might have presented itself. You never know.”

“True. And that’s the whole problem with the gifts. We may
never
know everything. Until we do, I don’t intend to open us up to any more risk than we have to.”

She stood, and the rest followed suit. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped.

“What—?” Sivio started. “Did anybody else hear that?”

Hatzis frowned, then flinched as though someone had struck her.

“What’s going on?” cried Nalini Kovistra with both hands balled into her eyes.

Alander stared at the screen in alarm, asking himself the same question. He, too, was about to say something when a smell not unlike that of roses, only spicier, assailed his nostrils. He reeled backward from the screen, completely disoriented by the assault. The smell had been his mother’s, long ago, when he had been a child, and brought with it images of the town where they’d lived, the school he’d attended, the face of his best friend in an old photo, the sound of a train rattling by at night. They washed over him, around him, relentless waves that pounded him, threatening to drown him.

He had just enough time to think:
These aren’t my memories
—when they were sucked away from him by a yawning void that opened all around him, drawing him down into a terrible blackness.

1.2.5

Time passed. He didn’t know how much. Engrams were
supposed to have an innate time sense, given that they were intimately linked to the many processors working in tandem aboard the
Tipler,
and even he, running independently on his own processor, inside his artificial skull, should have possessed the same ability, too. But when the darkness pulled back and he was able to think again, he had no idea at all how many hours or minutes or even days had elapsed since the memories of his original’s childhood had risen up and attacked him.

Something, clearly, had gone seriously wrong.

He opened his eyes but was still only met by blackness. And, oddly, that seemed to reassure him. He had been floating in the Dark Room during the meeting; if anything had changed that darkness, he would have known that the Gifts were behind the breakdown. But everything was as still and empty as it had ever been. All he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, which rang loud in his ears.

He groped for the exit. A limp droid brushed his hand and rotated off into the void.
Had
the Gifts struck at last, exposing their true nature and destroying the
Tipler
when they had least expected it? Hatzis had expressed reservations about the Spinners’ motives, but even she had become less cautious with time. Naturally so, too; in the absence of tangible threat, there was no point maintaining constant alertness. Perhaps the Gifts had simply been waiting for the best opportunity to strike.

But the idea was as preposterous as it was stupid. The Spinners could have wiped them out at any time. A single electromagnetic pulse would have fried the
Tipler
and the engrams with it; one chunk of matter dropped from orbit would have finished him off without any trouble. If it really had been their intention from the beginning to eliminate the human surveyors, then they could have done so without even being seen.

So had something changed their minds? Or was something else behind it? Alander had to find out what was going on and whether there was anything he could do about it.

He got a grip on the door to the Dark Room and hauled himself through to the Hub.

“Caryl? Jayme? Are you there?”

He waited a moment, while his legs gradually reaccustomed themselves to gravity and his eyes adjusted to the brightness around him.

“Caryl?”

He took a couple of steps toward the door that led to Spindle Four, in front of which stood another immobile droid, balanced almost surreally on wildly splayed legs.

“Can anyone up there hear me?”

Nothing. Could a solar storm have killed satellite communications? It seemed unlikely—they would have had plenty of advance warning from the various solar observers stationed around the sun—but it was a possibility. It would certainly explain the lack of contact, if not the peculiar memory surge that had preceded it.

“What about you, Gifts? Can
you
hear me?”

“Perfectly well, Peter,” came the reply, doing little for his growing paranoia.

“What’s happened to the
Tipler
?”

“We cannot say with any certainty.”

“Don’t give me that! I know you’ve been watching us. If
anyone
knows what’s going on, it’s you. Whether you’re responsible or not, I want you to tell me.”

“We can assure you, Peter, we are in no way responsible for whatever has happened here. Normal transmissions from the
Frank Tipler
ceased approximately five minutes ago, in conjunction with an anomalous and disruptive break in data processing. Some processing has resumed, but not at its previous level.”

Alander struggled to think this through. Communications had died at the same time something had knocked out data processing. Could a power surge have blown the engrams aboard the ship? It was impossible to say for sure. He did know the design tolerances of the reactor and the processors’ durability, but calculating the odds were beyond him. They had to be astronomical.

“
Some processing has resumed
,” the Gifts had said. That could mean that someone was still alive aboard the
Tipler.
If he could just figure out a means of contacting them, maybe he could find out what had gone wrong and perhaps even help in some way.

His first thought was to head for the climber and take it out of the spindle. If it was just a case of reduced signal strength, possibly caused by the failure of the satellites nearby, getting out in the open might clear things up. Barely had he gone a dozen steps, however, when a sound like static came from behind him.

He turned, but there was nothing there except the closed doors.

“Gifts, was that you?”

“Was what us, Peter?”

The sound came again. A scraping noise, accompanied by a flicker of movement by the door leading to the Lab.

He nerved himself to investigate. Had something hostile somehow got aboard the spindle? He cursed his irrationality. There was nothing on the planet to get aboard, and even if there had been, how could it have possibly reached him as high up as he was? Nevertheless, he started when a many-limbed shape suddenly tumbled from behind the nearest door, jerking spastically.

Relief washed over him. It was just one of the droids. He knelt down in front of it. Its many black eyes rolled blindly at him for a long moment, then settled into a fixed configuration. He had the distinct sensation that someone was looking at him.

“Caryl?” he said.

“Peter!” The voice came from the speaker built into the droid, not through conSense. And it didn’t belong to Hatzis. “Thank God I’ve found you!”

“Cleo? Is that you? What’s going on?”

“ConSense is down. This is the only way I can communicate. I’m fiddling with the overrides as we speak, trying to make it safe, but I don’t know how much more I can bring back on-line without risking a takeover.”

He rocked back on his heels, mind reeling. “Takeover? We’ve been attacked?”

She hesitated, and he imagined the worst: aliens transmitting software viruses to infiltrate the
Tipler,
erasing engrams and disabling conSense as it went; the only way to halt such an invasion would be to shut everything down, then bring it back up piece by piece, watching for signs of relapse every step of the way. But why would Samson be performing the reconstruction and not Faith Jong or one of the other software specialists?

“The mission has been threatened,” she said.

There was something odd about her voice. “By what, Cleo? I don’t understand.”

“Peter, I had to do it.” She sounded very small all of a sudden, as though she had shrunk back from the imaginary microphone, torn by self-doubt. “I had no choice.”

Realization struck him. “You did this?
You
knocked out conSense?”

“I had to,” she repeated. “Peter—”

“What about the others? What’s happened to them?”

“Don’t be angry, Peter. I’ve just frozen them for a while. They’ll be okay. I just need them out of the way for—”

“
Why,
Cleo? Why do you need them out of the way?”

She was silent again for a long time. Or was she crying? He couldn’t tell. A sound like static could have been anything.

When she did speak again, her voice was less panicky but no less brittle, as though she might shatter at any moment.

“We have to contact Earth,” she said. “It’s a clear mission objective. Any survey that finds advanced alien artifacts must advise Earth by the earliest means possible.”

“I know the regs, Cleo, but—”

“No,
listen
to me, Peter! You don’t understand! When all we had was normal channels, everything was fine. I sent a message the day the Spinners came, and another one later, when we were given the
Gifts.
That was enough. But then we found the communicator and the hole ship. These gave us the opportunity to advise Earth more rapidly. But first the communicator didn’t work, then the mission in the hole ship was delayed—”

“For good reasons, Cleo—”

“
By the earliest means possible!
” she shouted, and the desperation in her voice was frightening. “We don’t have any choice, Peter, don’t you see? We have to do it. We
have
to!”

“But why, Cleo? What happens if we don’t?”

“What happens?” She seemed to collapse into herself again. “We fail, Peter. Don’t you see that? The mission fails. We haven’t done our job properly. We haven’t followed the regs. We’ve let them down.”

“Them?”

“UNESSPRO, of course,” she said, her voice quavering. “We would have failed everyone back on Earth.”

“But Cleo, there might not be anyone
left
on Earth!”

“That doesn’t matter. We owe it to them to try.” Her voice firmed. “We have no choice. I have no choice. Don’t you see?”

Only then did the knowledge come bubbling up from deep in his original’s memories. UNESSPRO had modified one engram on every ship to make sure the mission stuck to the guidelines. Each plant had a complete set of override codes and the ability to use them, should they be required, but they weren’t consciously aware of having been modified. Only when a mission broke the regulations would the plant awaken to enforce them, by force, if necessary.

Samson was the plant, and it sounded to Alander as if she was about to snap in two, torn as she was between her own personality and the will of the survey programmers on Earth. He wasn’t even sure if she truly knew why she was behaving the way she was.