Orphans of Earth (34 page)

* * *

They came into Sirius cautiously, not certain what would
await them there. The rocky ball of Sothis had changed in recent weeks. McKenzie Base had expanded, and there were numerous hot spots on the surface suggesting that some of the previously dormant installations were up and running again. The number of satellites in orbit had quadrupled. Some of them comprised little more than hardware excised from the UNESSPRO core survey vessels, fitted with attitude jets and shielding, and placed out of the way.

There was a cluster point in geosynchronous orbit above McKenzie Base. Over a dozen hole ships were docked there, looking like a bunch of sun-bleached grapes.

Running home to Mama
, Alander thought. He hoped that was all it was.

“Take us there,” he instructed
Silent Liquidity.
“We’ll hail them when we arrive.”

“Yes, Peter.” He heard the hole ship echo its response in Ueh’s language as the screen faded to black.

“You
cling to planets/are not safe here
.” The alien’s face seemed to fold in on itself in an ascending series of black and white
M
s, indicating thoughtfulness.

“The Spinners ignored Sothis,” said Alander. “Why wouldn’t the Starfish?”

“The Ambivalence obeys its own logic,” he said in accented but comprehensible English. Just as Alander had learned to understand the Yuhl language, so, too, was Ueh becoming more proficient at the human tongues.

“Aren’t you curious about the rules of that logic?” Alander asked. “Wouldn’t understanding it make survival easier?”

“
We are/I am
already surviving,
Peter/Alander.
What
I/we
see as the Ambivalence, you call the
Spinner/Starfish.
The Praxis sees it a third way. But there is no
wrong/right.
There are only degrees of aptness.”

“What the Yuhl call aptness, we humans might call truth.”

“
I/we
do not believe in truth.”

Alander laughed at this. “Does that mean you never lie?” he asked. “Or that you
always
lie?”

“The universe
is the only true thing/cannot be completely known. We perceive the universe through
our senses
are then interpreted through our minds
.”

Even though the statements were somewhat jumbled, Alander thought he understood what the alien was trying to say. “Therefore all experiences of reality are at least partially false, right?”

“
Since we cannot see
the truth
cannot be spoken
.”

Alander mulled this over. If such an opinion was hardwired into the Yuhl, that set them at odds with humanity’s automatic black/white perception of the universe. He couldn’t help but think that the people he knew could benefit from perceiving a little more of the uncertainty of the world. But at the same time he wondered if the Yuhl would envy humanity’s ability to take moral stands and make quick decisions, even if they were wrong.

“I’d keep that thought under your hat for a while,” he told Ueh. “I’m not sure Caryl would understand.”

Ueh acquiesced with the Yuhl equivalent of a nod, its faceplates moving back and forth. “But the fact remains,
Peter/Alander
,” he said, indicating the screen where the image of Sothis had been, “that
you/they
are not safe
here/near
planets.
You/they
should forego them as
I/we
have done.”

“So where
do
you suggest we go, Ueh?”

“Stars
are not safe/are valuable sources of energy
,” said the alien. “We are not so distant from ourselves that we hide in the deeps as
others have/some say we should.
We brave the light, for now, as we pass through.”

“And later?”

Before Ueh had a chance to respond to this, the screen came alive with a close-up view of the grape formation. They had barely been there a second when Caryl Hatzis’s voice came over the cockpit speakers:

“Please identify yourself and state your business.” She didn’t reveal her face. Even via conSense, Hatzis had always been shy of doing that.

“It’s Peter Alander, Caryl,” he answered. “I’d like to dock in McKenzie Base and—”

“Which Peter Alander am I talking to, exactly?” Hatzis cut in quickly.

He found himself frowning at the screen and biting back an impatient retort. Sol, via whichever drone addressing him, was no doubt playing games because he was late reporting in. “The one from Adrasteia, of course. And yourself?”

“Yu-quiang.”

“Well, Yu-quiang, are you going to let me through or not?”

“Just awaiting confirmation from McKenzie Base.” There was a slight pause. “Okay, Peter. Please proceed to A dock—your usual berth. But Sol requests that you leave any biological specimens in isolation for the time being.”

“Tell her she’ll have to come to me, then,” he replied. “If the specimens I have
are
dangerous, I’m already infected, aren’t
I
?”
In more ways than one,
he added to himself.

Another pause, longer this time. “Understood,” she said finally. “They’ll be ready for you.”

One final quick jump took them down to the surface of Sothis where they proceeded to dock. No sooner had
Silent Liquidity’s
airlock opened than Sol strolled in with a look of superiority, entering the hole ship as if she owned the thing. She stopped dead in her tracks, however, when she saw Alander.

“What—?” Her mouth opened as she examined his new appearance. Finally, she managed: “What the hell happened to you?”

He shrugged. “New times call for new beginnings,” he said. “Apparently.”

She was about to ask something else when Ueh moved forward in his half of the hole ship. He acknowledged Hatzis with the simple pointing gesture that Alander now knew indicated respect.

“Hello again
Caryl/Hatzis
,” he said. “I am
Ueh/Ellil, envoy/catechist
of the
Yuhl/Goel
.”

“We’ve met before?” she said, frowning as she faced the alien. “In
Mercury
? You were the quiet one?”

“Quiet no longer.” Ueh’s teeth made a rare appearance from between his thin, shell-like lips. “The Praxis now demands that I talk.”

“The what?” she said. Before he could reply, however, she raised a hand and, shaking her head, said, “No, that can wait. We’ll interview you in due course. Thank you, Peter,” she added, turning to face Alander, “for finally bringing us some valuable intelligence. I’ll take it from here.”

“I don’t think so, Caryl,” Alander said. He wanted to place himself between Hatzis and his Yuhl companion. There was something about her—an edge, perhaps—that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t know what she would do next or even what her Vincula-modified body was capable of. “I’m not your delivery boy,” he said steadily. “And Ueh here is not your prisoner.”

“Wordplay.” Her gaze was cold as it met his. “We both know how the land lies, Peter.”

“I don’t care,” he insisted. “You so much as lay a finger on him, and I’m leaving—and I take him with me, too.”

“So you’d rather we just sat around and had a little chat?” she said with a slight and humorless laugh. “Is that it? The three of us chewing the fat like we’re old friends?” Her expression tightened noticeably as she said: “For fuck’s sake, Peter, we’re at
war
.”

“No, Caryl.
You’re
at war.
I’m
not.”

She folded her arms across her stomach. “Really? You’re turning traitor, then?”

“No,” he said, “I’m doing the sensible thing. Look, we have an opportunity here, and we’d be insane to waste it. If it’s intelligence you’re after, the Yuhl are a gold mine. They could be our allies against the
real
enemy.”

Sol rolled her eyes. “Not you, too, please,” she said with annoyance. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

“Well, I’m happy to disappoint you,” he said. “Forgive me for not jumping on your bandwagon, this time, Caryl. If you intend to fight the Yuhl, then you’ll be doing it without me.”

She sighed through her nose and looked away briefly. When she looked up again, some of the coldness had gone from her expression. Nevertheless, she still looked a little frustrated, as though out on a limb. “Well, before you go and ride off into the sunset like some dark avenger,” she said, “I have a situation I need you to help me with.”

“What do you mean? What situation?”

“Just come with me, and you’ll see,” she said. Then, glancing at Ueh, she added, “And I give you my word your friend here won’t be harmed.”

“I don’t need your word,” Alander said. “He has joint control over
Silent Liquidity.
He can escape any time he wants.”

Hatzis looked Ueh up and down as the alien’s wing sheaths quickly snapped out and back in. Alander recognized it as a gesture of satisfaction; he was clearly okay with the arrangement.

“How very cozy,” she said. She took one final look at him, then turned and led the way out of the cockpit. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

“You bitch!”

Peter Alander paced the stateroom in which he’d been placed by the copy of Hatzis from the colony called Gou Mang. His anger was pure and driving; it overrode everything else. It gave him a line he could cling to when everything else was slipping away.
Continuity.
That was what he needed to keep himself together. The terrible mindless moments when his thoughts seemed to trip up like an athlete with his sneakers tied together were happening more and more—and the more they happened, the closer to madness he felt himself slip. It was starting to feel as though the world was being pulled out from under him—as though
he
was being pulled out from under him. Nothing was certain anymore.

But he couldn’t maintain the rage indefinitely. It had to give way eventually, and when it did, despair would rush over him. He didn’t want to lose his mind. It was the one thing he could be certain of. He would rather lose his sense of self than his faculties. Or so he thought, anyway. He’d been told on Earth that his engrams would be able to think as well as his original, for the rational processes of thought were the one thing that could be copied with absolute precision. Memories and emotions, those nebulous, erratic ephemera that did little more than differentiate one dysfunctional personality from another, were the hard stuff. Sometimes he wondered why they’d even bothered trying to copy it at all. The exercise was futile; he was proof of
that.

They’re not really us, Lucia.
He’d told her that the night before his engrams had been activated. Or rather his
original
had told her and had bequeathed the memory to his other selves.

They’re not really us
, Lucia, he’d said.
They’re just copies.

At that moment, his pain was more real than anything else. More real than the bland android body they had siphoned his mind into. When he looked into the mirror, he saw no sign of the self within it. All he saw was a blank, hideous visage with eyes empty of everything but tears.

“Where’s Lucia? Why isn’t she here? Where have you taken her?” -

It made sense that Hatzis had taken Lucia away, along with everything else. They’d taken
Betty.
They’d taken his freedom. But why? Because he’d spoken his mind? Was voicing his thoughts a crime in this terrible new age? Apparently it was, and he—

—he—

He was gone for a moment. Then the anger pulled him back.

“Goddamn you, Caryl! Let me out of here!”

Pounding on the door did nothing but rattle the seals. No one responded. He prowled the room again, his feet disturbing the wreckage of the chair he’d broken earlier.

He remembered doing it but couldn’t remember why. He bent down now and picked up the splintered remains of one of its legs and flung it viciously at the wall. Apart from leaving a slight silver scratch, it didn’t make any impact. But the release of energy did enliven him for a moment, flooding his body with endorphins and other chemicals.

The biological high wouldn’t last—no more than his rage could. Either simulated by the Overseer or genuinely felt by his android body, a fatigue rolled powerfully over him, as though a truck had hit him. He fell into a crouch with his back against the door, fighting the irrational urge to sob. What was
wrong
with him? Why couldn’t he think straight? It wasn’t fair that he should be suffering like this. He’d been the bright one, the golden boy, and now he was a wreck. Why couldn’t it have happened to one of the others?

“Why couldn’t this have happened to
you,
Caryl? You
bitch
!”

A thought caught him momentarily, then slipped away. Something about Lucia. What was it she’d said?
Shit.
It had been in his mind only a moment ago. Yes, that was it:
This conversation is being recorded for your copies’ memories, and
they’ll
think they’re real enough.

Oh yes. He thought he was real, all right. There was no getting around that. He was programmed to think that way.

“Is Lucia here?” he called out. “Just let me talk to her, won’t you? She’ll understand. Caryl? Can you hear me?”

No one answered. He shook his head. No. Hatzis wasn’t stupid. His memories—the memories of his original—from entrainment camp were clear on that. She was capable and strong. She was just wrong, that was all, and someone had to stop her before she dragged humanity down with her. It was either that or—

—or—

—or something he could no longer remember. A flash of anger burned the thought completely out of his mind.

“Open this bloody door before I go out of my goddamn mind!”

He continued to stalk the interior of his cell, striking out angrily at the walls and door and furniture—or what he hadn’t destroyed of it, anyway. Not that it would do any good. He knew that. No one was ever going to respond to him or help him. That Hatzis bitch would make sure of
that.

When the door did open moments later, he was so surprised that he took a few cautious steps back from it. He stared at the figure walking into the room, confusion wrestling with his anger. Then the door closed again, and the two of them were alone.

“
You?
” His thoughts logjammed; the cycle flew apart under centripetal stress, sending fragments spinning into the far corners of his mind. “It can’t be. It’s not possible. They tell me you’re dead.”

Doubt flickered across the face before him. “I’m not our original, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The flesh-colored, life-sized Peter Alander took a wary step closer. “I’m just like you—except, perhaps, that I’ve been around a little longer. I was on Mission 842 to Upsilon Aquarius.”

“I...” The pieces of his mind were in a tangle, and he couldn’t put them back together. His legs found a chair behind them, and he collapsed gratefully into it. “We ...”

“I know how you’re feeling. Believe me. I went through it myself.”

The version of himself from Upsilon Aquarius—
the ghost,
he thought feverishly—came closer still, almost near enough to touch.

“It’s hard to see from the inside.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he managed slowly.

“Yes, there is. You’re in the final stages of engram breakdown. You’re unstable, not thinking clearly. Right now you’re not even really
you.
The Overseer is patching up so many software errors that you’re more its work than your own. No amount of willpower can make up for the fact that what lies underneath is falling apart.”

He glared at the ghost, thinking,
If he’s right, then this could all be a dream. But if he’s a dream, then how could he be right?
“How do I know that you’re not something that Hatzis sent to finish me off? She’s the one behind my engram failures. I’m sure of it.”

“I’m not a conSense illusion.” The ghost smiled and offered his hand. “Here. Touch me.” The ghost’s flesh was warm and pliable. “Listen to me, Peter: you’ve been locked in a cycle for some hours, now. Are you aware of that? Your android body badly needs maintenance, and you’re not getting the sleep you need. If you keep on like this, you’re going to end up psychotic. Or worse.”

He snorted his derision at the idea. “What could be worse than losing my mind?”

“Shutdown,” the ghost said simply as it took back its hand. Alander realized that he might have been gripping it a touch too tightly. “Being switched off is a big risk for an unstable engram. Sometimes it never comes back together again. If your pattern won’t reboot, you’re as good as dead. You know that.”

Dead.
Alander couldn’t look the ghost in the eye.
He
already
was
the ghost, not the revitalized, impossibly organic creature sitting in front of him. Everything was around the wrong way.

“Why isn’t it happening to you?” he asked. “Why aren’t you like me?”

The ghost looked uncertain for a moment. It was strange to watch himself openly display something he himself rarely admitted to.

“Well,” the ghost said, “for starters, I’ve had longer to deal with it. It’s not something you can fix overnight; I went through a lot of difficult times at first, back on Adrasteia.” The ghost was looking at him but clearly seeing somewhere else. “You’ve no idea what it was like. But I was lucky, too. Someone came up with the idea of personalizing an android body just for me. It looked as much like me as they could make it, and they gave it the ability to run me on its own, if it had to. Some of its subroutines were still distributed through the Overseers, but I was always aware that I could exist apart, as an independent creature. It made me feel more real to be in my own body, with my own mind. It gave me an anchor to hang on to while I pulled myself together.” The ghost’s attention returned to the present. “They tried the same trick with another version of me in Head of Hydras, a colony called Athena, and it worked, too. They must’ve caught him in time, before the instabilities really dug in. But it wasn’t easy for him, either. For months I felt like I was balancing on the edge every moment I was awake—not dissimilar to how everyone feels today, I guess. I never knew whether I was thinking right. For all I knew, I might have slipped back into dysfunction without noticing.”

“And the others,” he said. “They accepted that you—got better? You showed them, right?”

“Actually, no,” said the ghost sadly. “They died before I got the chance. And even then, they hadn’t finished the job. It was Caryl Hatzis—the Hatzis from Earth, the one you talked to when you arrived—who took my recovery one step further. I don’t know what she did exactly.” The ghost’s expression was sour, even if its words were intended to be gracious. “But she did
something
to me—something to my mind. It seemed to stop the thoughts piling up. I wasn’t as trapped as I was before, by what I’d
been
.”

“She killed me,” he said, his mind skating over the concept as though it was ice, then plunging through a crack. “She killed our original?”

The ghost shook his head firmly. A faint dusting of stubble caught the light, emphasizing his biological higher ground. “No, Peter,” it said. “She killed the crippled, wounded creature I had become, and she allowed it to become something else. I’ve put the past behind me. I’ve become
me
.”

“Is that why you came? To show that you’ve made it? To rub it in?” He couldn’t help the bitterness.

“No, Peter.” The ghost’s voice was tinged with sadness, but the firmness was still there. “I can’t offer you the same thing I have. I’ve gone another stage further, and I don’t know where that’s going to take me. The most I can offer you is another body, one built to approximate who we used to be rather than just something off the rack. That won’t be a miracle cure, I know, but it’s a start. Caryl can make the same alteration to you that she did to me. It will help, too. Once the pressure is off, you can start putting everything back together.”

Alander remembered the rage he had felt for Hatzis. The rage, the self-pity, his longing for Lucia—all mixed up in some murky emotional cocktail. “Is there an alternative?” he asked.

The ghost nodded. “Of course,” it said. “There are three. Firstly, we can leave you exactly as you are and watch you break down.”

“That’s a certainty?”

“Yes.” The blankness of the answer convinced him. “Moreover, you won’t be allowed out into the compound because we don’t know what you might do. At the very least, you’ll upset people. We’re all facing the specter of senescence, and the last thing any of us need at the moment is a reminder of it.”

Alander nodded. He could understand that. “Go on,” he said after a few moments. “What’s the next option?”

“We shut you down temporarily with the intention of starting you up later,” said the ghost. “When we have more resources and, perhaps, a better understanding of the problem. It’d be like the cryogenics programs back home: putting you on ice until we find a cure for cancer.”

“And with just as little hope for success, I imagine,” he scoffed. “You said yourself you might not be able to start my simulation again.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, then I’m guessing you have to be saving the best option until last,” he said. “It certainly couldn’t be worse than the first two.”

The ghost didn’t say anything for a moment. “The third option is to voluntarily accept immersion into my personality,” it said eventually. “Your patterns might be faulty, but your memories are intact. I can take those and incorporate them into mine. Caryl insists it can be done; she’s been doing it with herselves for—”

“But what about me?” he interrupted. “What happens to
me
?”

“Nothing,” said the ghost. “You’ll still have to choose between the first two options. But this way, you’ll know that what you’ve done and felt will go on in
some
form, at least. In that sense, you will survive.” The ghost’s expression was blank, as though trying not to give an opinion either way, but his eyes were eager.

Alander couldn’t face it. He turned away, thinking of chi Hercules, the fiery F-type variable around which he had awoken just a handful of days before, when the Spinners had revived him to talk to the Gifts. He thought of Vahagn, the colony his fellow colonists had founded on a boiling rock of a world, still pounded by rubble left over from the formation of the system. Did any of those memories really belong to him? To the
real
him, back on Earth? But that Peter Alander was dead, apparently, and so was Earth. He was all that remained—he and all the other copies of him scattered throughout the survey missions. And the ghost.

If not for us, then for whom?

“Do you believe her?” he asked.

“Who, Caryl?”

“Yes. Do you believe her when she says she can save the part of me that’s unique, which doesn’t exist anywhere else?”

“Yes,” it said somberly. “Actually, I do.”

“And what about everything else she says? How far do you trust her?”

The ghost took a long time responding, and when it did, it was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into the answer.

“I trust her to do what she thinks is right,” it said. “That’s as much as I trust anyone. You know that.”

He did. It was written in the rules that made him who he was. He didn’t trust anyone absolutely, and he had found plenty of justification for that stance. It was the only rational one to take.

Yet here he was, being asked to put his faith in someone else’s words with no way at all to test the outcome. If he was being lied to, he might never know. But then, he thought, that they were taking the effort to lie to him might actually be a good sign. They could have erased him more easily than convinced him to believe them. A solid magnetic pulse anywhere near his head would knock out his Overseer and effectively be the end of him, memories and all. Caryl Hatzis could do that to all of them at any time. She’d already done it to the ghost twice, metaphorically speaking, anyway. She’d stuck him in a body when he was falling apart, and then she’d messed with his head later. He didn’t know how anyone could live with that....

“Shut me down,” he said after some consideration. “I’ll take my chances in the dark.”

The ghost frowned. “Are you sure?” There was disappointment in its voice. “Your memories—”

“I doubt I have anything unique to add to the Peter Alander collective, he said. “Another planet; another sun. What’s that to you?”

The ghost looked unnerved. “I’m surprised. That’s not the decision I would’ve made.”

“Well, I had a choice. I wonder which way you would have gone if they’d stopped to ask you first. Would you risk losing your mind when it’s the only thing you have left? Would
you
?”