IGMS Issue 22 (11 page)

I Linked over my latest findings, and after a few minutes, Wanda Linked back.

"Maybe it is God," she said.

"Getting religion in your old age?" I teased.

"No. But like Sherlock Holmes said, when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"Doesn't help us a bit," I said.

"No, but have you spent any time on the surface of Eden itself?"

"I thought anthropological studies had been assigned to Kaman and Jorge?"

"Not the Edenites themselves, dummy, their
ruins
. Old villages and camps, long abandoned. They go back thousands of years. There are glyphs and markings in the caves."

"Think it's worth a shot?" I said.

She linked me a smiley face.

I spent a few days Link-talking with Kaman and Jorge, who'd manufactured Edenite bodies for themselves and were going
incognito
on two separate land masses. They pointed me to some of the oldest ruins; sites which had been deemed interesting but not of pressing value. I built my own Edenite body and dropped it onto the surface near one of the planet's poles. Tundra territory. Cold, with not much natural flora and even less fauna. The ruins were a collection of mounded stones in the foothills of a substantial, ice-capped mountain range.

As always, my mechanical self was impervious to local temperature, but I wore what I thought would be appropriate attire should any of the locals discover me -- and did a Link update on the dialects that Kaman and Jorge were learning. Might help -- or it might not. I didn't really care. My ship in orbit didn't show any large animal life for at least fifty kilometers. Only the insects of the tundra kept me company as I spent a few days carefully pawing through the rock mounds, and the bloodsuckers must have bent their beaks trying to penetrate my artificial skin.

Eventually I wandered up into the foothills themselves. I'd found some burial cairns, but nothing which might tell me where the original inhabitants had gone to. The glaciers were gorgeous and reminded me of photos I'd seen of Earth's glaciers, before things had gotten warmer and all the glaciers melted. At night, the air was full of distant groaning and popping as the ice made its eternal, ponderous flow off the mountains and down through the valleys toward an eventual meeting with the far away sea.

My luck turned when I stumbled into the cave.

The skeletons of what appeared to have been families were huddled around its interior, half-buried by the detritus of time. The absence of large scavengers meant that the skeletons had remained relatively intact, and the cave's ceiling had a spectacular array of glyphs painted on it. I imaged everything extensively and Linked the information to a grateful Kaman and Jorge, who incorporated these files into their growing picture of the migrating evolution of human life on Eden.

One image in particular snared my attention as I paced the cave walls, using a hand lamp to keep the ceiling illuminated. Like the ancient glyphwork of Earth, these pictograms were child-like in their rendering: stick people and stick animals, representations of rituals and hunts, killing, feasting, dying, and living again. But one image seemed remarkably unlike the others. It was a particularly precise diamond, inset with what appeared to be three eyes. The middle eye was larger than the other two, and each of them was split through with what appeared to be triskele-shaped irises.

If I'd had any blood in me, it would have run stone cold.

I Linked to the first person who came to my mind.

"Yes?" Wanda said.

"Take a look at this," I told her, Linking the image of the diamond with the three eyes.

"My God," Wanda said.

"Show this to the others. We need to talk."

"The Swarmers were here," I said.

Wanda, Ormond, Jorge, Bana, and anyone else who could be spared all sat around the fire that crackled in the pit I'd built. We could have Linked the entire discussion, but nobody argued when they saw the image of the diamond-with-eyes and received my subsequent request for a face-to-face quorum.

"Coincidence," Ormond said, waving his huge, copper-colored hand at me. "If the Swarmers had found Eden they'd have destroyed it, just as they've destroyed
any
planet where they've found humans. Swarmer behavior is 100% predictable in this regard. Why would the Swarmers make an exception for Eden?"

"Maybe they found the Edenites in their primitive state," said Bana, "and, considering them to be harmless, left the Edenites in peace."

"It's possible," Jorge said, still clad in his Edenite form. "We've never known the Swarmers to destroy any species which has not first reached a sufficient technological level to appear threatening. The Edenites have fire and they have stone, but they've not so much as smelted tin from what I can discern. Dozens of cultures and languages, and each of them is thoroughly steeped in religious imagery and explanation for the world. The scientific mindset has never found purchase."

"Who needs technology when they're happy the way things are?" Bana said, her four arms crossed. "Long life, neither disease nor parasites; they've got relatively little to complain about."

"And relatively little tribal competition," Jorge added.

I stared at my friends.

"You admire the Edenites," I said.

"Is that a problem?" Bana said defensively.

"These people are dumb as hammers," I said. "It would take us decades to teach them even a small fraction of our knowledge."

"I thought we'd agreed not to pollute their culture," Jorge said, rising confrontationally.

"Now that we know the Swarmers know the Edenites exist, we can't
not
begin teaching them," I said, coming to my own feet. I scanned the group, looking into their eyes. "How long will it take to bring the Edenites to a Classical level of technology? Renaissance level? True industrialism? Space-age automation? This planet is defenseless. To leave the Edenites in their current state would be criminal."

"I disagree," Wanda said. I shot her a look.

"Explain," I said, controlling my temper.

"These people have no awareness whatsoever of Earth," Wanda continued. "Their languages are their own, their cultures -- though somewhat similar to Earth's most primitive cultures -- are their own. They don't give a damn about the war we lost with the Swarmers."

"When the Swarmers come back," I said, "the Edenites will learn to give a damn, and they'll learn quickly."

I couldn't believe any of them would so easily disregard what had happened to Earth -- what had happened to
us.
We had no real weapons when the first colony was attacked. We still had nothing that would make a difference when the Swarmers reached Sol. We -- the others and I, our ships -- were the last-ditch attempt to fight back. But the shipyards at Jupiter and Ceres were only able to build a few hundred of us before the Swarmers' annihilation waves came to the inner system and by then it was too late; they'd launched the sun-killer.

Who'd have thought a yellow dwarf could go supernova?

Physics said it was impossible -- not enough stellar mass.

But the Swarmers had found a way to make it happen anyway.

"Perhaps it's best if we leave," Carlos said quietly. He'd grown dour as the conversation continued, and he stared morosely into the firelight as he talked. "Eden has existed without incident for thousands of years. We don't know how humans came here, but even if the Swarmers know the Edenites are here, it doesn't matter, because unless the Swarmers discover that
we're
here . . ."

Carlos looked up suddenly, his mouth stuck open.

"What?" Wanda said.

"You don't think . . ." I said, catching Carlos's drift.

Bana, Jorge, they stared.

"A trap," Carlos and I said in unison.

"Oh, please, no," Wanda whispered.

Just then, a near-blinding light flashed in the sky above. It glared brighter than the noon sun for a few seconds, then slowly began to fade.

We tried the Link to our friends in the outer parts of the system, and got silence.

"They're here," I said.

Bana gasped, and Wanda hugged her knees, burying her face.

"
They
brought humans here," I suddenly intuited. "Once Earth and the colonies were gone, the Swarmers knew our ships still existed. They couldn't find us to kill us, so they needed a way to bring us all together. So they could finish the job."

"It had been so long," Wanda said, voice muffled. "Real people. Real, live people. The Swarmers knew we couldn't resist such bait. They waited for us to find this place, however long it took, and --"

More flashes sprang into the sky -- a fantastic, if grotesque, fireworks display.

The air remained silent, though we guessed that our friends in space were dying.

"What do we do now?" Bana asked, looking genuinely sick.

"What else can we do?" I said. "We fight!"

Leaving our bodies abandoned by the side of the fire, we instantaneously returned to our ships. Each of the vessels was essentially a huge, empty cylinder -- the reaction chamber necessary for transluminal travel. We'd have liked to jump instantly to the front line, but jumps were suicide this deep inside Edenstar's gravity well.

A few of us Linked a predictable question to each other:
why didn't the detectors warn us??
But I knew why. The Swarmers had been here all along, waiting in the distant reaches of Edenstar's Oort Cloud. Silently. Coldly. Dark, in the same way we'd often traveled dark, to avoid detection. Until they were satisfied that enough of us had arrived to make the trap worth springing.

Deep space telemetry told us the awful truth: the Swarmers were coming from all sides and all directions, a three-hundred-sixty degree, three-axis-wide attack pattern. The big mother ships -- converted asteroids, just like when they attacked Earth -- disgorged smaller ships, which in turn disgorged smaller ships still. We pulsed madly away from Eden, the blue world shrinking quickly to a point of light, and fell back on our battle training of old: staggered formations, twos and threes covering one another, the big antiproton generator on the bow of each ship slowly charging from our antimatter reactors.

Gee was of little concern. Each ship had been originally built to house no crew. We had no flesh-and-blood bodies to suffer the ravages of extreme delta-vee. Our minds and personalities -- our souls -- had been recorded into the control computers of each ship just prior to the shipyards being hit and humanity's capacity for self defense obliterated. Thousands of years evaporated as I recalled the battle fleet that had vainly fought to protect Earth. Then, as now, Wanda was on my flank, the others spread out a few hundred kilometers apart, trying to maximize distance without causing too much spread in the antiproton discharge.

We fired in unison, our beams spreading and converging to form a single, massive column of antiprotons moving at near light-speed towards our intended targets, still interplanetary distances away. We didn't wait for results. We pulsed into a new formation which would cover a new firing arc, paused for the generators to reach green, then fired again. And again. And again. Over hours.