The ravaged asteroid started to die. The spin stresses were sheering off massive boulders and environment huts from the main body of the asteroid. The main mass of the asteroid was soon surrounded by a thin, rapidly dispersing cloud of fragments large and small, falling, diving into the piece of space where Earth should have been.
Down, down, closer and closer, moving not in a straight line toward Earth’s old position, but in a tight parabola that spiraled in, moving faster every moment.
At about the point where Earth’s surface should have been, tidal stresses began to make themselves felt, even over the relatively short distances involved. The gravity gradient started shredding larger chunks off the asteroid. Lucifer’s tumble got faster, adding to the stresses tearing it apart. Impacts between fragments came faster and faster, each smashing more fragments free. Lucifer disintegrated altogether, with no one piece of rock any longer distinguishable as the parent body.
The cloud of debris that had once been Lucifer spiraled down into the gravity well, falling deeper and deeper, whirling in a tighter and tighter spiral, faster and faster, approaching significant fractions of lightspeed. Bright flashes erupted in the depths of the gravity well as massive fragments smashed into each other at utterly incredible speeds.
The flashes and sparks rose to a crescendo, leapt up to a whole new level of violence. Bursts of radiation flared out across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio blazed out from the gravity source. Then, just as suddenly as it had peaked, the violence ebbed away. A flash, a flicker, and then one last ember red flare that snuffed itself out with the suddenness of a candle flame caught by the wind.
And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.
“Radar, give me a scan of Earth-space,” Vespasian said.
“Running now,” Janie’s voice replied. “No return. I say again, no return signal of any kind.”
Lucian leaned in closer to the screen. “Jesus, Vespy, how could that be? What the hell happened to the asteroid? Shouldn’t there at least be debris?”
“It’s gone,” Vespasian said. “Think about it. Think about your college astronomy courses. What sort of gravity source can suck up an entire asteroid and leave nothing behind? No debris, no signal, no radiation, nothing. Lucifer just got sucked down into a black hole.” And now Vespasian knew how Earth could have gained five percent more mass. He had just seen a demonstration. Wherever Earth had gone for those few hours, it had been crushed down to nothing just as Lucifer had been crushed. Maybe Earth had got caught by a black hole with five percent of Earth’s mass. Either way, it didn’t matter. There was no more doubt, at least in his mind. He knew what had happened to Earth. Not how, or where, or why, but what. “A black hole with the mass of planet Earth,” he whispered. “A black hole that used to be Earth.”
Part Three
CHAPTER TEN
Naked Purple Logic
The meeting was not going well, Sondra decided. Larry was stubbornly refusing to believe that Earth was destroyed, Webling seemed incapable of anything but shooting down theories—having none of her own to offer—and Sondra found herself helplessly spouting out one damn-fool idea after another. If we three are the big gravity experts who are going to save humanity, we are in big trouble, Sondra thought.
Larry was still in a sulk, and Webling was just on the point of spinning out another objection when suddenly the door burst open. Dr. Raphael rushed into the room, carrying a datablock and a thick sheaf of printout. “The communications duty officer woke me,” he said without preamble. “This just arrived from the VISOR station at Venus,” he said, his voice breathless and weak. “The comm officer woke me to give it to me, and she was right to do so.”
Sondra was surprised. Raphael didn’t like anything disturbing his sleep. She looked at Raphael’s death-white face. Something had scared him, scared him bad. But what the hell could scare anyone more than Earth disappearing?
“Some man McGillicutty, down there at VISOR, has come up with some figures on… on Earth. Do you know him? Is he reliable?” Raphael asked, in a tone that suggested he wanted to be told no.
“I know him by reputation,” Webling replied carefully. “One of the sort that hasn’t been out of the lab in years. No understanding of people, and a tendency to get lost in the details. He often misses the point of what he finds—but his observations and measurements are always first-rate.”
“Well, he seems to have missed the point here all right,” Raphael said grimly. All the anger seemed to have drained out of the man, as if fear and distraction had left no room for anything else. Raphael dropped the papers on the visitor’s side of his desk. “Have a look at these while I call up the computer file. Can’t think as well looking at paper,” he said under his breath, muttering to himself. Sondra looked at Larry, and Larry looked at her. Muttering? For Raphael, this was utter loss of control. The man was frightened.
“I want to see what this report tells you,” Raphael went on. “I don’t want it to be what it told me.”
Larry and Sondra put their heads together over the hard copy of McGillicutty’s report, while Webling read the computer screen over Raphael’s shoulder.
Larry got it first. “The gravity waves are continuing, but with Earth gone there’s nothing there to produce them. And that twenty-one-centimeter radio source is radiating in a complex, regular and repeating pattern. McGillicutty doesn’t say anything about the pattern. He just talks about the signal strength and the distortions caused by the gravity waves. He missed the fact that the signal is complex and repetitive. But that can’t be. Natural signals can’t—”
He stared into space for a moment, until the truth dawned. “But that means these signals aren’t natural,” Larry said in a whisper. “That’s what the data say to me.”
Raphael nodded woodenly. “That was the conclusion I reached,” he said. “The one I hoped was wrong. The signals are not natural in origin. Could one of the radical groups on the Moon have—”
Sondra felt her skin go cold. “Not natural. Now wait a second here—”
But Larry wasn’t listening. He knew the technology required to generate gravity waves. The Ring of Charon was, if anything, a minimal hookup for gravity generation. It was inconceivable that any other group could have built anything remotely capable of such a job and kept it hidden.
At least no human could have done it.
“The signals and the gravity waves are artificial, Sondra. Which means Earth didn’t just disappear,” he said. “Somebody took it.”
* * *
“We know that it’s still sending pulses of gravity waves, and that radio signal.” Tyrone Vespasian sat in his office, behind his desk, willing himself to calmness. He knew there was something overcontrolled about his movements, as if he were trying to hold too much in. Was he trying too hard to be rational, logical, to be sensible when sense was useless? “The signal proves it. That’s a deliberate message signal, not some natural radio noise. Even if we can’t read it.”
“And where is that signal coming from?” Lucian asked gently.
Vespasian shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “From here. From somewhere on the Moon. It’s almost as if it’s coming from everywhere at once, out of a whole series of dispersed transmitters. We can’t find it.”
“Don’t you think that might give us a few problems?” Lucian asked. “Earth vanished two-point-six seconds after the beam touched it—the exact time for a speed-of-light signal to go back and forth between the Earth and Moon. If they decide to blame us, Mars and the Belt Community might decide to do something drastic.”
Vespasian nodded, leaned in toward Lucian and lowered his voice. “I’ve thought of that, too. Remember the proposal about ten years ago to blow up Mercury to get at its core metals? They wanted to create a second asteroid belt close enough in to the Sun so they could really get some use out of Solar power. Officially, the Community never got around to building the Core Cracker bomb—but suppose
they did, unofficially? The Moon’s about the same size as Mercury, with a lower mass. The Belt Community might figure it’s them or us.”
“But we didn’t do it!” Lucian protested.
“I checked, and as of five minutes ago, no less than six groups have claimed credit for the quakes, Earth’s vanishment, or both. Three on the Moon, two on board the surviving habitats, and one on Mars. Rad groups, nut groups, and most of them barely know which end of a screwdriver to hold. None of them could possibly have pulled this off. All they’re doing is blowing off steam, trying to upset the applecart and fit the disaster into their ideology. The Final Clan Habitat survived, and I read some guff from those nuts. Claiming they had swept away Earth, the source of all genetic decadence and lower races. Now they’re free to breed their superhumans without interference. No one has taken any of these groups seriously in decades. They always claim responsibility for disasters. But suppose someone is rattled enough to believe them now— and we get caught in the line of fire?” Vespasian said.
“Thanks to that damn fool McGillicutty sending a public message from Venus, everyone—including the nut groups—knows all about the twenty-one-centimeter radio signal, the speed-of-light delay, and the gravity waves. They can talk those things up, sound impressive, like they really did it. But none of them can know about the black hole yet—unless they did do it.”
“So if we keep our mouths shut about it, that might be a way to spot the real culprits,” Vespasian said.
“Or at least prove none of our local crazies did it,” Lucian said.
“Then who did do it?” Vespasian demanded.
Lucian frowned. “Jesus, Vespy. You’re talking about the most horrible crime in history. I can’t imagine anyone being able to do it. Not emotionally, or mentally. I can’t imagine a reason good enough for doing it.” Lucian paused a moment. “Those scientists on Pluto fired the gravity beam. But if they meant to wreck Earth, then why announce the experiment beforehand? Most of them are from Earth, and Earth funded their work. Besides, the beam touched Venus and those outer planet satellites—and the Moon for that matter—and we’re still here. Which suggests the beam was a coincidence, or set off someone else’s hidden system, or that the real baddies timed the thing to look like Pluto did it. Pluto had no motive.
“If anyone had a good enough motive—and I don’t think anyone does—it could be Mars and the Belt Community. They’ve got a lot of weird hardware floating around out there in deep space. Stuff nobody knows about. With Earth out of the way, Mars and the B.C. are suddenly dominant in the Solar System. And they get to blame the disaster on us—or on a bunch of mad scientists on Pluto.”
“But Earth is their biggest market!” Vespasian protested. “Everyone on Mars and in the Belt has some kind of family Earthside! And dammit, they’re human beings. No human being could commit this crime.”
“Which leaves open one other possibility,” Lucian said.
“Oh no. No you don’t.” Vespasian stood up suddenly and began pacing back and forth behind his desk. “Come on, Lucian. Don’t throw aliens from outer space at me. There’s nothing out there. By now we’d have found something.” There was something in Vespasian’s soul that felt chilled by the very thought.
Lucian ignored his friend’s discomfiture. He rubbed his face with tired hands. He felt drained, all capacity for emotion sucked out of him. “Either humans or aliens, Vespy. Take your choice. Either people who couldn’t possibly do it, or beings from another world who don’t exist. Bug-eyed aliens, insane human terrorists, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny gone bad. Somebody did it. And we’re not going to find out who’s guilty sitting here. Just don’t send a public message about the Earthpoint black hole,” Lucian said. “It could only make matters worse, scare people more. Send coded messages to the scientific groups. Let them work on it.”
Vespasian grunted. “Okay, I guess.” He shook his head and looked at the wall clock. “Jesus, those poor bastards on Pluto.”
“What do you mean?” Lucian asked.
“I mean the frigging speed of light. Think about it. Earth went poof ten hours ago. They sent the gravity wave five hours before it reached its target, went to bed, got up, and didn’t find out what they had done until then, five and a half hours after we saw it happen. We’re sending the word about the black hole now. They won’t find out about that until late tonight. It’s like it’s all happening to them in a dream on the other side of the Universe.”
Vespasian stared into space. “Terrible things happen, things you cause accidentally. You don’t learn the consequences of what you’ve done for eleven hours after it happens, and you can’t stop the terror once you’ve set it in motion. If you were the poor son of a bitch who had pushed the button in the first place, how many shocks like that could you take?”
* * *
The day the Tycho Purple Penal Fire Department burned down her parent’s house Marcia felt the purest joy of her life. The memory popped into her mind unbidden, and at first she wondered why. Then she understood. Her subconscious was reminding her how much she had already survived.
Remember, Marcia told herself. Remember the turmoil, the chaos you have survived to get here. You can survive this, too. Remember the strange and terrible way you escaped, and the joy you felt that day.
The moment came back to her. The black pall of smoke hazing over the dome’s interior, the gray ashes sifting downward, the firemen laughing and chuckling, putting away their blowtorches. And Marcia watching it all, tears of happiness in her eyes.
It was mere days before her eighteenth birthday, and the fire made her a homeless minor refugee in the eyes of the Lunar Republic, made homeless by an official act that was unquestionably not of her doing. She had a receipt from the fire department to prove that.
The fire was her ticket out of Tycho Purple Penal, because legal refugees were one of the very few categories of souls entitled to pass through the Lunar Republic’s security checkpoints, out of the asylum into the saner world outside.
Life didn’t get easier after leaving home. There were only two nations on the Moon: Tycho Purple Penal and the Lunar Republic. Getting by in the feisty Republic, confronted on all sides with the legendary touch of cheerful surliness burned into the Lunar character—now that had been a challenge. She was astonished to discover that she missed the parents she could never see face-to-face again. She spent far too much on videocalls to Tycho. But if life among the Naked Purples had any virtue, it was that the experience prepared you to cope with anything.
Gerald. Gerald. Earth had been taken, and Gerald, her loving, perfect husband had gone with the planet. Could she learn to cope with that?
There had to be an explanation. They must have missed something, something that would make sense of it all. Marcia knew that. They must have. Even wrapped up in a fetal ball on her bed, struggling to block out the world, her mind demanded that she find the missing answer, make sense of the madness.
The desire to find sense in order to survive madness was a deep-seated reflex for Marcia, after being raised in the Naked Purple scene, struggling to be the ordinary child of extraordinary—even mad—parents. Whenever, as a child and a teenager, she had been surrounded by madness, she had clung to the hope, the urgently needed faith that the Purple weirdness was itself surrounded by a larger world of sanity. The sort of sanity and decency that Gerald had always represented. But no, don’t think of him now, she thought. Calm yourself. Sanity existed. She believed that, had to believe it now, just as she always had.
She had been born into the Naked Purple movement not long after it expanded from its orbital habitat into the former home of the Tycho Penal Colony on the Moon. After eighteen years of hearing only the Purple version of events, the straight version of history sounded strange to her.
Tycho Purple Penal Station had started out centuries before as the Soviet Lunar base, and had passed to the United Nations’ control with the final Soviet breakup. In the bad old days when UNLAC—the United Nations Lu
nar Administration Council—ran the Moon, Tycho had been made into a U.N. penal colony, and had rapidly devolved into the final dumping ground for the human refuse of the Earth, the Moon, and the Settlement Worlds.
Tycho Penal was specifically intended to be not only escape-proof, but reprieve-proof. No prisoner was ever sent there under any sentence except life without parole.
When the Lunar Republic was declared, eighty years before Marcia was born, the Lunar Colonists—the Conners—were very careful not to lay claim to the Tycho Penal Colony and environs. They were quite happy to let the United Nations administer the nightmare it had created for itself.
Even after the Republic, the United Nations let Tycho Penal stagger along a few years as a prison, until a resolution passed the General Assembly banning the placement of any more prisoners at Tycho. UNLAC was stuck with the bills for a prison populated with old men and women too mean to die. The costs of running the place rapidly got out of hand—until it dawned on UNLAC that it would be cheaper to declare the place a separate republic, and announce that all current residents were naturalized citizens.
The Lunar Republic promptly decreed that any bearer of a Tychoean passport found in the Republic would be escorted back to the Tycho border—with or without a pressure suit. Every nation on Earth, and all of the Settlement Worlds, refused to honor Tycho passports.
So the convicts—and, by this time, their descendants— were technically free, but legally they couldn’t travel.
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