Orphans of Earth (33 page)

“Who says it’s been in-invalidated?”

“The facts speak for themselves, surely?”

“It depends on how you define intelligence.” Alander bristled. “Or, more importantly, what sort of observer is required to collapse the state vector.”

“I don’t understand,” said Axford, looking at Hatzis as though for explanation.

“It’s simple,” said Alander, speaking quickly, almost desperately. “My theory states that the early universe functioned as a quantum computer, existing as a combination of near-infinite but slightly different versions of itself, all overlapped. Under such conditions, the chances of molecules and atoms combining in just the right way to kick-start self-replication are greatly increased. That’s the first hurdle. The second hurdle is evolving this basic form of life up to something conscious, and it’s as big a hurdle as the first. The trouble is, once this new form of life becomes conscious, it collapses the universe back to one version of itself, so it no longer has the advantages of using quantum processing to create life elsewhere. It’s like setting your computer to finding prime numbers, then telling it to reduce its capacity by a million once it has found just one. The existence of one intelligent life form in the universe, therefore, reduces the odds of finding another one to almost zero.”

Axford opened his mouth to say something, but Alander talked right over him. “I assume you’re raising the Starfish as evidence of intelligent life existing concurrently with humanity, thereby either disproving the theory or requiring an extremely unlikely coincidence to explain it away. But neither is the case. You see, according to your daily broadcast, the Starfish and the Spinners both exhibit behavioral traits indicative of machine intelligence. They perform limited functions, such as depositing the Gifts—themselves machine intelligences—and destroying colonies, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any form of external communication. They could easily be robotic benefactors and planet smashers locked in blind, automatic ritual by their makers, millennia ago. Would such minds have true consciousness? Would they be enough on their own to cancel out the quantum-computing function of the universe? I don’t think we can assume that.”

“What about the Yuhl, Peter?” Hatzis managed to get in. “How do you explain them?”

“What about them? Has anyone apart from yourself even seen them?”

“Yes,” put in Axford. “I have, actually.”

“You or another
version
of you?” said Alander.

“What are you suggesting? That these aliens were made up?”

“Why not? The illusion of a common enemy would be just what you’d need to draw people together under you.”

“Make up your mind, Peter,” Hatzis said. “First you come here to berate me for declaring war on them, and now you don’t believe they exist at all. Which is it to be?”

“I—I...” He fell silent as his eyes became vacant once more, his expression touched by the inner turmoil vexing him. Then, just as suddenly, confusion vanished and was replaced by anger. “My point is the same either way,” he announced.

“Which is what, Peter?”

“That you’re completely mishandling this situation. It’s time someone else took over. Someone more levelheaded.”

“Like who?”

“Let the people decide,” he said. “The way it’s supposed to be.”

Coming from him, the accusation of incompetence was like a slap in the face, and for a long while all she could do was stare at him in silence. But, she reminded herself, it wasn’t
really
coming from him. It was coming from the
old
him, the one she remembered from entrainment camp back on Earth. Arrogant, self-confident, and bitingly intelligent, he had been automatically dismissive of anyone he regarded as inferior. The only person close to him had been Lucia; somehow she had seen past the façade and found the person underneath, the one who had emerged after months of struggling to keep his mind together, the fragile, more tolerant Peter Alander who had returned from Adrasteia to report the coming of the Spinners.

That was the Alander Sol had come to know, which this Alander patently wasn’t. From his point of view, entrainment camp had only been days ago. He was still on a high from the launch, buoyed by the knowledge that more copies of him had been sent to the stars than of any other human. He hadn’t yet had to confront the knowledge that none of those copies had worked beyond a few days, and that for all his cutting intellect, he would be regarded as the failure of the engram program.

She waited as his Overseer cycled through once again. He blinked, then shook his head.

“Well?” he snapped. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

She shrugged. “What am I supposed to say, Peter? ‘Thanks for pointing out my failings; how about you take over?’ “

He turned away from her sarcasm to Axford. “And what about you? Are you going to let her run the show?

“I have my own show to run, Peter.” Frank the Ax gestured with apparent nonchalance. “Survival is the game, and I’ll accept any means to that end.”

“Even if she gets us killed in a war we don’t need to fight?”

“
You
don’t have to fight it, Peter,” she said. “Opt out, or don’t sign up. Other colonies have seceded. No one’s forcing you onto the front line.”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Caryl!” He turned on her, and for the first time the undercurrent of hysteria running beneath his surface behavior showed clearly through. His eyes showed too much white and his hands shook. Alander knew he wasn’t in control, but he refused to give in to his weakness. He would maintain the pretense until he fell apart completely.

“We
are
the front line,” he went on heatedly. “Vahagn will be dragged in whether it wants to be or not. If you don’t get us, the Yuhl will. And if the Yuhl don’t, then the Starfish will. How do you think we feel facing such possibilities? You can’t blame us for wanting an alternative.”

But there is no us
, she wanted to say.
You stole your crew’s hole ship and came here to vent your tensions to the one person who’s trying to do something constructive
.

“No one’s treating you like an idiot, Peter,” she said calmly, not wanting to aggravate his growing hysteria any further.

He stared at her with tight lips, as though biting back the urge to contradict her.

GOU MANG.

YES, SOL?

I WANT YOU TO SEND SOMEONE TO HIS HOLE SHIP—WHAT WAS IT CALLED?

BETTY.

GET INSIDE AND PUT IT IN ORBIT. HE OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T REALIZE THAT THE HOLE SHIPS WILL TALK TO ANYONE, UNLIKE THE GIFTS.

Gou Mang hesitated.

ARE YOU SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA, SOL?

POSITIVE. IT’S ABOUT TIME SOMEONE TAUGHT THIS ARROGANT PRICK A LESSON IN HUMILITY.

2.1.4

In cosmological terms, Beid and Sirius were close neighbors,
with only ten light-years separating the two. The trip between them took just five subjective hours—half that in the real universe. Nevertheless, for Alander it felt like forever.

In the pre-Spinner relativistic universe, Einstein’s laws had promised interstellar travel in the blink of an eye, no matter how many decades they actually took. Becoming an engram with UNESSPRO had offered another way to solve that problem. An impatient traveler could slow down their thought processes or even halt them completely, so that a century could pass in a few seconds for them. Alander knew of very few people, personally or secondhand, who had decided to sit out the journey in real time. He supposed if they had, they would never have arrived intact. According to Hatzis, engram senescence became a problem between fifty and seventy years, and most of the survey missions were that long. In his darker moments, he imagined what a disaster it would have been had the option to abbreviate the journey not been open to the engrams. What would the Spinners have made of a fleet of probes orbiting a thousand different stars around Sol, all completely dead?

After his own experiences with engram breakdown, he was reluctant to tinker with his time sense unless he had to. Without knowing exactly what the Praxis had done to him—or what Hatzis herself had done, for that matter—he wasn’t taking any chances with his sanity. Just because he felt perfectly fine didn’t mean that something wouldn’t suddenly trip him up and take him all the way back to where he had been on Adrasteia, picking up the pieces of his personality and trying to put them back together in a way that made sense. Any sort of sense.

So he sat out the trip in real time, thinking over his experiences with the Yuhl and the Praxis, and wondering what he was going to do when he arrived at Sothis. Of course,
that
depended on what state of mind Hatzis was in and how far her network had advanced. Or degraded, he supposed. If the Starfish sneak attacks had taken as deep a bite into the colonies as he sometimes feared, panic and self-preservation could tear apart what little remained of the old UNESSPRO team spirit.

Sometimes, when the silence grew too loud, he talked to Ueh. His fellow
envoy/catechist
was back behind
Silent Liquidity’s
invisible barrier, comfortable in his own atmosphere and gravity. From what Alander could make out, the alien didn’t seem to mind the journey or the isolation. If anything, he took the isolation much as Alander did, only venturing out of it when his thoughts became too much.

“
Peter/Alander
and
Francis/Axford
,” Ueh said at one point. “What is the relation?”

“Relation?”

“Between
Peter/Alander
and
Francis/Axford.
”

Alander thought his answer through carefully, presuming that Ueh didn’t mean relation in the physical sense. The Yuhl had a strong sense of hierarchy—as did humanity, with its various ranks, titles, and power plays—but Alander hadn’t quite managed to grasp the subtleties of it yet.

“Frank was part of a razor gang for the military,” he said. “A cost-cutter. He had a reputation for being ruthless and interested in only one thing: the bottom line. A real throwback to the 1980s.” Remembering who he was talking to, he tried to put it in more objective terms. “He and my original moved in different circles. Their paths—or swords—only crossed over budgets, so in that sense I guess he did have some sort of power over...”

He stopped, realizing only then that he had been talking about his original in the third person. Saying “me” felt wrong, and there was no other word in the English language for it. He needed a new pronoun.

“That’s all in the past, of course,” he went on. “Now it’s different. He has his world, and I have mine. We’re only working together because each of us has something the other wants. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he thinks he’s got the upper hand, but I think it’s in his nature to assume that, anyway—while at the same time building contingency plans in case it ever changes.”

Ueh’s head tilted. At the same time his facial plates shifted in a way that Alander recognized to be a nod of acknowledgment. “Your
genders/relationships
are unclear to
me/us. There were three of you
when we first met
I was confused.
I thought one was the
bearer/favored
to the others, but I could not decide which.”

Alander sympathized. “
Bearer/favored
” was a notion the Praxis had implanted in him, and one he was still trying to unravel. His guess about the implantation of egg and sperm by both genders of the Yuhl seemed to be correct, but the identity of the third sex implied by the new term eluded him. Clusters of identical organs in both aliens he had studied so far might have been dormant wombs, waiting for implantation. In that case, either sex could gestate a child implanted by one or two others, which meant that maybe the third gender might not exist at all. It wasn’t so different to the surrogate parent technique employed by infertile couples back on Earth.

If that was the case, Alander could understand Ueh’s confusion. Supposing that humanity sent its frontier pilots out in reproductive pairs to ensure the continuity of the species, should the pair become separated from the Mantissa, then Ueh had been faced with the difficult decision of who had been what. Was Alander the male, Axford the female and Hatzis the
bearer/favored
? The question could only have been complicated by the fact that there had actually been
four
of them, counting the copy of Hatzis from Thor. Alander noted that Ueh made no distinction between the two Hatzises, either assuming that they shared the same mind or that Thor did not exist in her own right. Both Yuhl had, after all, refused to talk to Axford at first because he didn’t have a body. Maybe that bias extended to copies when the original was present.

“Are you any clearer now?” Alander asked the alien, unsure that he himself was.

“The data
you have given/is helping
.” The Yuhl had access to the abbreviated information Axford had left in
Silent Liquidity.
“
I/we
are still
learning/growing
.”

“Well, don’t kill yourself over it.” He was about to say that Ueh had plenty of time to catch up, but that wasn’t the case. If humanity didn’t find a way to survive the Starfish, the last of them could be gone within weeks.

“Will
Francis/Axford
join us
at Sothis/soon
?”

“I don’t know.” Axford had returned to Vega to impart what they had learned to the rest of his collective. Alander had no idea what he would do with the information. Or his captive, for that matter. So far neither the Praxis nor any of the Yuhl had shown much interest in the half of the helot pairing that Axford held captive, and that made Alander curious.

When he asked about it, all Ueh said was: “
Asi/Holina
is no longer favored.”

“In the sense of bearer-slash-favored?”

The alien’s facial markings became sharply triangular, an expression that meant irritation—although Alander sensed it wasn’t at him or his question. “In the sense of
multifurcate/isometry.”

And there they hit a brick wall of incomprehension that Alander didn’t have the energy to climb over. He had too many problems with members of his own species to worry about conflicts within another. If it came up later, he might pursue it. Otherwise, it was something that would simply have to wait.