Orphans of Earth (2 page)

1.1
PLANETS IN THEIR STATIONS

2160.9.3 Standard Mission Time

(30 July, 2163 UT)

1.1.1

The Head was setting with a wild profusion of purples and
blues into the western horizon while Achernar, a brilliant blue star, watched coldly from the north. To the south auroras whipped through the upper atmosphere, humming and crackling with startling energy. Opposite the sunset, setting around the far side of Athena, was the glint of light that was all that could be seen of the
Mayor
; directly above that hung another speck of light: the alien installation designated Spindle Nine. In between, at the summit of a mighty chunk of rock and ice thirty kilometers high, stood Peter Alander.

The potential extinction of his species had never concerned him less than at that precise moment.

Athena was an unusual world—but then, he thought, they all were. In most respects—radius, mass, density, gravity, etc.—this one was up the scale from Earth. Its sun was the B3V star called Head of Hydras, bluer and more intense than Sol. Athena’s magnetic field was bombarded by all manner of radiation and particles every one of its seventeen and a half hour days, and Alander would have been dangerously exposed to the interplanetary elements so high up in the atmosphere, had he not been wearing a Spinner Immortality Suit, or I-suit, as they were increasingly being called. Several hundred kilometers to his left crouched the base of the orbital tower connecting the planet to the spindle above. Where he stood, on the highest point of the planet, was just one of several very large and very tall mountain-islands girdling the equator. But for the solar weather, Athena could have been made for skyhooks.

The planet’s signature quirk revolved around those mountainous islands, jutting out of the surface of the planet like strange volcanic growths. Over many millions of years, the seas had evaporated into the upper atmosphere Mid deposited themselves as ice on the mountains, increasing their bulk even more. As a result, most of the planet’s water had been trapped in solid form, leaving only a thin, salty scum of an ocean behind. Life blossomed around the bases of the giant islands in strange, linear landscapes. Caught between salt and ice and separated by great distances, each coastal biozone had become home to enough wildly diverse phyla to keep a whole army of xenobiologists busy for centuries. A handful of them that had been scooped up and examined by robotic probes from the
Michel Mayor
had shown such unique chemistry that they would have caused a scientific revolution back home—had the Earth existed any longer, that is.

Alander watched the sunset fade from deep purple to black. Stars were starting to poke through the growing darkness, twinkle-free in the thin air. He had seen nights fall on more than a dozen different planets, but this one beat them all for sheer splendor. The night sky was so vivid that if he stood absolutely still and tilted his head back so that all he could see were the stars, it felt as if he was actually
in
space.

“You cooled off yet?” said a voice in his ear.

He didn’t allow himself a smile. Cleo would note the expression from his bioreadings, and he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

“This isn’t just a bad mood,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

“I realize more than you give me credit for,” she replied. “You hate being outvoted, for one.”

“I’m glad you noticed. That’s one of the few human traits I have left.”

“Not so few. You also hate feeling like an idiot.”

He shivered from purely psychosomatic cold but didn’t say anything.

“And you love a good argument for its own sake,” she went on. “You
love
picking fights—and I dare you to tell me otherwise!”

He swallowed an automatic retort. “I think you’re mistaking me for Caryl Hatzis.”

“Some people would take that as a compliment, you know.”

“Would you?”

He heard a faint noise from behind him and turned to see her image walking to join him across the crusty high-altitude ice pack. She wasn’t really there, being the product of a conSense illusion piped into his artificial nerve endings by the processors on the
Mayor,
but he would have been hard pressed to tell the difference, had she still had a physical body to compare it to. He could even hear her feet crunching in the ice as she approached.

“You know how I voted,” she said, coming to a halt in front of him, her blond hair buffeted by the wind. She was wearing a khaki oversuit sealed at wrists and ankles; her face was exposed and caught the light of the auroras in a convincingly eerie way. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“After Adrasteia—”

“I know what you’re going to say, Peter,” she interrupted. “After Adrasteia, you don’t trust anyone. Well, that’s something you need to get over, pal. With UNESSPRO gone, there are no traitors in the system anymore. You know that. They either owned up or went psychotic. And if it’s me you’re worried about—”

“It’s not you, Cleo,” he cut in quickly.

“I was going to say that if it was me you’re worried about, then you can go to hell,” she said. “Because even if you didn’t already know that Otto was the rotten apple in the
Michel Mayor
I think I’ve proved myself a dozen times over. I’m on your side, Peter, except when you’re obviously wrong or just being an idiot.”

He raised one hand to brush the hair out of her face. Although she was nothing more than an illusion, his fingers registered every pressure, texture, and temperature he would have expected of the real thing.

“
Am
I being an idiot?”

Her expression softened. “In the long run, no, I don’t think you are,” she said. “But things are changing too fast for the rest to focus on anything but the short term—the present. Christ, Peter, in a single day, the Spinners came and gave them gifts beyond their wildest dreams. Then they heard about the Starfish. First, they were given everything, and now they’re being told they’ve lost everything. You can’t blame them for not liking what you’ve got to say—or at least for being resistant to it. They want a future.” She paused to sigh. “Besides, I don’t think they’re even listening to what you have to say; they’re just hearing the voice of the person saying it. It’s you again: the oracle of doom and gloom. Believe me, Peter, pushing isn’t going to help.”

He knew she was right, and she knew he knew, too. He could see it in her expression. There was no point arguing when they were both, more or less, on the same side.

She leaned in close to put her arms around him. He wanted to hug her back, but conSense hadn’t quite perfected a convincing full-body squeeze. Her illusory warmth was enough to take some of the chill out of the brisk night wind, and he was comforted by the contact, even though part of him still thought of Lucia with regret, and probably always would.

“This could be our home, if we let it,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by his shoulder. “We can expand the existing bases, put habitats down on the strands, build more bodies—”

“I know how it goes, Cleo. Dig in, delve into the gifts, build up resources until we’re able to diversify, disseminate the human race across the stars.” The four Ds made perfect sense on the surface, and he felt their calling more deeply than maybe even Cleo imagined. The argument was fundamentally flawed, though; it assumed that nothing would get in the way of the dream becoming reality. “But can we do this with the Starfish still out there? Would you be prepared to take a chance on raising children here without ever really knowing whether or not they’ll be back to finish us off?”

“Children?” She pulled away from him so she could look at his face. “Who’s talking about children?”

“Some of them are,” he said.

“But
I’m
not one of them.” She frowned. “I thought that was already established. I just want a little time to heal.”

“I’m not denying anyone that.”

“Yes you
are,
Peter. You want us to make a decision that will affect the rest of our lives. You want us to avoid settling down on the grounds that it might not be safe. But what are you offering instead? Can you tell us when it
will
be safe?”

He shook his head, tight lipped.

“I think I know what my decision will be,” she went on, “but I’m not ready to make it right now. Not yet. I don’t want to commit myself to anything before I feel as though I can support it one hundred percent. Especially something like this, which will affect my entire future.”

“If we have one—”

She cut him off with a sigh. “Save the speeches for the next meeting,” she said, letting go and stepping back.

“I’m sorry.”

She hugged herself, rubbing her arms as though cold. On another world, in another time, her lean frame, broad face, and high cheekbones would have lent her enough of a Nordic air that he might have been surprised by her apparent chill. On Athena, though, seventy light-years from the remains of Earth, at thirty below freezing, Alander was very aware that, his hypnotized nerve endings aside, he was interacting with little more than a phantom, invisible to anybody else but him.

“If you need to talk to me about anything else,” she said, “you know where I’ll be.”

“Thanks, Cleo,” he said, meaning it.

She walked around him, having learned the habit of vanishing when she was out of sight so as not to disorient him. His mental state was still disturbingly fragile at times.

“By the way,” she said at the last moment, “Caryl wants you to bring the hole ship back. There are some emissions she wants you to check out.”

He shook his head, amazed by the woman’s arrogance. “I’m not her goddamn dogsbody, Cleo,” he said without facing her.

“Neither am I,” she said. “Nevertheless, here we are.”

He turned then, expecting to see her standing there smiling at him. But she had already gone, her disappearance leaving him seemingly isolated on the giant mountaintop, although in reality he was no more alone than he had been before.

Slowly, reluctantly, he returned to where he’d left the hole ship. Apparently unaffected by gravity and whiter than the snow it hung above, the enormous spherical mass of the craft floated over a shallow rift about a hundred meters away. The black cockpit was ready for his return with the light from its open airlock now easily the brightest thing in the landscape around him.

He briefly considered complying with Caryl Hatzis’s wishes and returning immediately, but then he decided against it.

To hell with her,
he thought. There was no cause to hurry. The aurora was particularly spectacular tonight, and making her wait half an hour while he enjoyed it wasn’t going to kill her. God knew he’d certainly earned the break.

* * *

The emissions were coming from a point roughly seven
AUs from the Head and twenty-five degrees above the ecliptic. They consisted of a semiregular pulsing in the upper microwave band and didn’t correlate to any satellite, active or inactive, placed in-system by the
Mayor.
Hatzis had thought it might be a piece of Spinner flotsam, which warranted checking it out. Alander agreed.

The more the Spinner artifacts were investigated, the clearer it became that the spindles were built by machines, that the Spinners themselves had had nothing actually to do with it. Alander thought that mapping that single fact onto humanity’s experiences with AIs might be misleading, but even he couldn’t resist the assumption that something would inevitably go wrong with any automated process. Somewhere, eventually, the Gifts would make a mistake and leave something behind, some clue that would speak more about their origins than they had ever been willing to reveal.

The question of whether the Gifts would let him return with anything like a clue occupied his mind as he instructed the hole ship AI to take him to a position closer to the source of the emissions. They were programmed not to reveal the origin of their makers; indeed, at times it seemed as though they didn’t even know it themselves. But were they also programmed to keep that knowledge a secret if the humans were to stumble across it? How far would they go to protect their makers? Alander didn’t know, and it worried him.

“We’ve had word from Sothis,” Hatzis had said to him when he’d checked back in for duty. “They’ve found three more drops.”

Drops.
Alander remembered his first sight of a Spinner skyhook unraveling its way from orbit and thought the term very apt. Not every Spinner drop had the same number of towers, but title method was the same in each, as were the number of the gifts.

“Any joy?” he asked.

“Two markers,” she answered. “One contact.”

A
marker
was the euphemism for a destroyed colony, so called because of the strange, inert sculptures left behind in systems visited by the Starfish. These artifacts seemed to serve no function, and some had taken them to be the equivalent of death markers or gravestones. Who planted them, however, remained a mystery. They seemed to employ a similar technology to the hole ships the Spinners left behind, but beyond that, nothing was known.

“What’s the contact?”

“Beta Hydras. Borderline senescent, but the Gifts managed to reactivate some of the archived engrams.” She hesitated before adding, “You weren’t one of them.”

“That was the
Carl Sagan
,” he said dismissively. “Not one of my missions.”

Even if it had been one of his missions, the chances of his persona remaining intact for so long would have been minimal. All of the engrams were unstable, but his was particularly so. He would’ve been lucky to last a year, let alone the seventy-four years since the
Sagan
had arrived.

“Who did they choose this time?” he asked.

“Neil Russell. Deep-time physicist; kept himself in extreme slow-mo to observe changes on a larger scale than the human. For him, only a few hours had elapsed since the mission arrived. He wasn’t happy about being dragged back up, apparently.”

Alander could imagine. He remembered Russell well enough, although they’d never been friends. He’d gone through entrainment on a hard science ticket, whereas Alander had strictly generalized. When he pictured him in his mind, he saw a tall, scraggy man with black, wiry hair, prone to long, furiously defended silences.