The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  He sat down and turned his palms upward, a gesture of resignation, an admission of failure. “Or maybe that’s just nuts.” He forced himself to be calm. “We’ve been picking up reports from all over the Solar System, from people working in every discipline, and we’ve sent our own messages. But talking at people from light-hours away isn’t going to help. I think that we all have to get together, in one place, and work together.”

  “Do you mean bring the other teams out here?” Raphael asked. “Get them to the Ring of Charon to help plan our experiments?”

  Larry shook his head. “No, sir, that wouldn’t help. It would leave us focused on gravity. This isn’t about gravity! Gravity is just what these… these things use, the way we use electricity. We’re up against something a thousand times more complex than running little gravity-wave experiments.

  “Besides, the center of action isn’t out here. It’s in the Earth-Moon system. We need to get all the specialists from all the various outposts to the Moon, working on the spot, taking a good hard look at the Lunar Wheel. And the black hole.

  “Somebody built that Wheel inside the Moon. Who? How? Why? Where are they from? We can’t know from here. We have to get inside the Wheel, if we can. Take a look at it, see if we can find out what makes it tick, what its purpose is.”

  Larry stood up, and gazed, more steadily, at the eerie image of a Wheel inside the Moon.

  “And find out how to destroy it,” he said in a whisper.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After the Fall

  The Sphere had to be smarter than the Callers or the Anchors or the Worldeaters, or any of the other forms. The Sphere had far greater responsibilities, and thus had far more need to be cautious, than the others.

  Besides, the Sphere had so much data to keep track of. Handling the gravitic control of a multistar system, keeping tabs on the many Observers and Waiters sleeping in their far-flung hiding places, building and breeding and hoping for the next generation of seedships. A thousand, a million other details. It took tremendous processing power, remarkable flexibility, and adaptability, to handle it all.

  But the Sphere was not immune to shock, or protected against surprise—and many of its reflexes were as unalterable as a Caller’s. When the Caller’s messages exploded into its mind, requiring preemptive Link, the Sphere had no choice but to comply.

  In the normal course of events, it was the Sphere that would signal that it was ready for a new world and then wait for a reply. It was rare that a Caller initiated Link, and there were many fail-safes to prevent it, but it had happened at times, when there was a malfunction, or a spurious signal, or when the life-bearing world in question was in some immediate danger—say, from an asteroid impact.

  Once initiated, failure to complete the Link would not only threaten the destruction of the precious life-bearing world in transit, but the energy destabilization of a failed Link could actually wreck the Sphere and its star system.

  A planet—or any mass—blocked midway through transit would have to express its entire mass as energy— enough uncontrolled energy to rival a supernova, funneled right into the Sphere. And if the Sphere was wrecked, so was the Sphere’s star system, as planets and stars careered out of control. No matter if there was a place prepared for the world, or sufficient energy stores were available to handle the transfer. The Sphere had to complete the Link and take on the new world—or chance its own destruction.

  Now was perhaps the worst of times. Danger pressed the Sphere on all sides, and the energy expenditure of incorporating a new world could scarcely be afforded. Worse, the radiation of that much nonrandomized energy could only draw the danger closer.

  But it had no choice. None whatever. At least the Caller had sent a dataset along with the new world. With a supreme effort, the Sphere set the new world into a holding pattern, shuttling it from one temporary stability point to another while the Sphere prepared a place for it.

  But the danger. The danger was not merely to the Sphere’s domain, but to the Caller’s own planetary system. But there too was hope. If the Caller could build quickly, then perhaps its domain could provide a new, uncharted haven, a direction of retreat. But only if it could build fast, and with a minimum of traceable linkage.

  The Caller would need help from the Sphere. The more help the Sphere sent, the better the odds of the Caller’s success. The risk and the expenditure of resources were worth the possible reward.

  The Sphere rushed to prepare a Portal Anchor, capable of Linking under a Caller’s control, and arranged for new-breed Worldeaters to be transported to the new domain.

  The Sphere also sent a message. An urgent report, that could be boiled down to one simple concept.

  Danger.

  * * *

  Dianne stared out across the sky. Things seemed to have settled down, at least for the moment, though this was no sky of Earth’s. A half-dozen stars, white, yellow-white and red, gleamed brighter than Sirius ever had. A monstrous sullen red disk, the size of the Moon, glowered behind one of the stars. But the star was too far off to show a disk. How large did that disk have to be to seem that big behind a star? Was it a red giant? Dianne remembered reading about such things—huge stars, their outer atmospheres thin, barely more than a red-hot vacuum, with diameters as wide as Saturn’s orbit. But a red giant should appear to grow dimmer at its edges. This star showed a firm, sharp edge.

  A new star—Dianne felt certain it was not the Sun—hung fat and bright, bathing the Earth in light that was not quite the color of sunlight. The terminator was in about the right place.

  Something caught at Dianne. A strange star where the Sun should be. A wave of irrational anger swept over her. The Sun that had nurtured Earth for four billion years was gone. In its place this substitute shone in Earth’s sky. No counterfeit deserved the true Sun’s name. She decided to call it the Sunstar to distinguish it both from Earth’s proper Sun and the other nearby stars.

  Her eyes swept further across the sky, were drawn again to Earth. If the Sunstar’s light was not precisely correct, neither was the darkness over the Earth quite so dark as it should have been—not with a half-dozen stars and that massive disk shedding light upon it.

  Opposite the Sunstar in the sky, about where the Moon should have been, a roughly toroidal structure of indeterminate size hung in the darkness at some unknown distance. It was a bit larger than a ring for a fat man’s finger held at arm’s length. It sat in space, gleaming in the light of the Sunstar. Acting on impulse, she fired a radar-ranging beam at it, and got a response 2.5 seconds later. The ranging computer wasn’t really meant to work at that sort of range, but it returned a calculated distance of about 300,000 kilometers. The toroid was roughly at the Moon’s distance from Earth. Sweet God in the sky. That made it roughly as large as the Moon.

  Somehow, of all the terrible wonders she saw, it was the least of them, the toroid, that scared her most. New stars, a substitute sun, even that massive, far-off, glowing red thing in the sky she could accept. It was at least possible, albeit highly improbable, that they were natural, understandable objects. But the toroid was obviously—and impossibly—artificial. A made thing, built by someone, a wheel in the sky as big around as Earth’s Moon.

  Enough of stargazing. If Dianne wanted to survive, she had work to do. She strapped herself more firmly into her command chair and started running checks.

  Wait a second. NaPurHab. Where the hell was—there. There it was. Already nothing more than a tiny shape, moving down toward the Earth before sweeping back out onto the Lunar half of its figure-eight orbit. Much good that it did her. She certainly couldn’t reach NaPurHab, and with the Moon missing, the Purps’ orbit was going to get plenty screwed up. It might well not be a good place to be.

  Never mind. Survival issues first. Get this ship dancing, then worry other people’s worries. She started running down her checklists.

  But routine system checks could not stop her mind working. Someone had taken them here. Earth had been stol
en. This was no accident. They had done it on purpose.

  Whoever they were.

  * * *

  Owing to lack of interest, the end of the world has been canceled. Gerald did not know what irreverent part of his hindbrain the thought had come from, but it was true. He was still here, and so was the Universe. He came to himself, and told himself to stay where he was, lying on his back. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his arm and felt the lump on his head. His hand came away sticky with blood. What had happened? Perhaps a rock shaken loose by the quakes had beaned him, knocking him out.

  But that did not matter. The world was still here. The ground was still beneath him, the night breezes still blew, the stars still shone down, peeking through a high, hazy band of thin clouds that had blown in from the Pacific. The sky had been clear before. Some time must have passed. He felt cold.

  The stars. Gerald thought the stars looked a bit strange, even through the haze, although he had never been much for stargazing. Too many bright stars. And the Moon was either greatly changed or else replaced by something he could not see clearly through the late-night haze.

  What had happened? The experiment. Marcia had mentioned something about an experiment, a beam being pointed at Earth just after ten a.m. her time.

  Gerald checked his watch by the too-bright starlight and figured the time out in his head, allowing for the time zones and the speed-of-light delay.

  That beam had been scheduled to hit at precisely the moment the world had gone mad.

  A coincidence. A devil of a big coincidence.

  He stood up and hurried back to the house. He went to the printer bin and dug out the document she had sent. He started to read inside—but being inside just after an earthquake didn’t sit right with him. He went to the kitchen, fished a flashlight out of the junk drawer, and took the papers outside to read.

  Ring of Charon. Gravity waves. High power. Earth-side target lab: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But how could a gravity beam do this? Gerald asked.

  But then he asked an even more fundamental question.

  Do what? What, exactly, has happened? Gerald required of himself that he face things squarely, examine the evidence and reach conclusions based on what was so, not on what he wanted to be so. His nonreligious friends were confused that a man of faith would operate that way. But his faith was, paradoxically, a result of facing the evidence. God, in some form, was the only possible explanation for Creation.

  But that was beside the point.

  New stars in the sky. Several of them incredibly bright. Bright enough that he almost did not need his light to read by. That great sphere he had seen earlier must now be hidden away on the other side of Earth. He looked up again at the thing where the Moon should have been. The skies had cleared, and he could see plainly that it was a ring-shaped form.

  Face the evidence and accept the obvious answer to his question. The Earth, the entire planet, had been moved to a new place.

  By a gravity beam? It seemed absurd. Maybe the gravity experiment happening when it did was sheer chance. If not—

  He looked again the paper. JPL. If the experiment happening when it did was not just a mad coincidence, then JPL would be the place to be. To find out what had gone wrong.

  And the place to get involved in fixing it.

  What can be moved, can be moved back. Gerald smiled with a rare thrill of gallows humor. If faith can move mountains, then maybe faith plus determination can move planets.

  Gerald knew where he was going.

  He stood up and looked across the valley below him. All was quiet, and still. A few houses here and there had lights on, and faint voices whispered across the distance. Only a few had been awakened, perhaps only those who had once lived where earthquakes were frequent.

  It struck him that there would be those who had slept through the whole thing, who wouldn’t check the news the next day, who might go for days without noticing that the Universe had been transmogrified. He looked up at the stranger’s sky above and shivered.

  He could find it in himself to envy such people.

  * * *

  Across the wide expanse of the Earth, by greater and lesser degrees, people realized what had happened—or at least that something had happened. Governments, news services, private comm systems, rumor mills—all were overloaded with speculation, wild rumors, sober and reasoned discussions, panicky tirades.

  Two or three of the more unstable governments collapsed. Rabblerousers appeared in village squares, on obscure vid channels and on what was left of the major networks with the satellites gone. The Final Clanners, the Naked Purples and the other culture rads took to the streets.

  Generals mobilized their armies, navies put to sea, air forces and what space forces there were surviving in orbit went on alert. All of it was useless. What use was an army against a power that moved worlds?

  Within a few hours, riots, demonstrations, debates, and emergency meetings of world bodies were in full swing across the globe. None of it was of any use at all. Nothing could be, unless and until people could understand what had happened.

  The post-Knowledge Crash world needed information, and started turning toward the people who could provide it.

  But those people were more than a bit busy themselves, at the moment.

  * * *

  Time had passed. That much Wolf knew. How much time he could not tell without a deep act of concentration. Dreamlike, the hours were passing like seconds. Wolf Bernhardt looked up, bleary-eyed, from his console and checked the wall chronometer. Two p.m., local time. Something like twelve hours, then.

  The tomblike quiet of JPL at nighttime had given way to a day of chaos, as every scientist with the remotest connection to JPL descended on the place, chasing after answers, charging about in panic. The printer was spitting out another telegram from the International Astronomical Union every few seconds, the JPL computers logging in the new data as it arrived. The IAU’s Telegram Office in Massachusetts was the clearinghouse for all new astronomical discoveries.

  The sheer volume of data was daunting. Earth may have suffered a Knowledge Crash, may have lost many of its communications satellites, may have lost much of its power grid when half the power satellites vanished, but even so the information flowed in a torrent from endless sources. Less than twelve hours after the Big Jump, Earthbound observatories and the surviving orbital stations were reporting discoveries faster than JPL could log them in.

  Wolf prided himself on being flexible. That flexibility was being put to the test this morning. It fell to him to pull the facts together, for the very basic reason that no one else seemed able to believe the facts. Not even the people who were finding them.

  The observatories were forced to confront the impossible situation first and most directly. Every astronomical observation ever made back in the Solar System was worthless—the objects that had once been observed were all missing. Even more seriously, all the astronomical frames of reference were gone. The background stars, likewise gone from their old points in the sky, could no longer be used as positional aids.

  In a new star system, with no frame of reference set, it was difficult to get one’s bearings. The word came down from the IAU: they were arbitrarily assigning Earth’s orbital plane as the zero-reference plane for the system. They decreed that Earth’s orbital motion was from west to east, approximating the conditions of Earth’s old orbit.

  It was of some help in getting organized, but the astronomers had a more basic problem: quite understandably, they could not believe their eyes. But Wolf quickly discovered that their electronic assistants were able to handle the changed circumstances without skipping a beat. Most of the IAU grams came from robotic observation stations. Robots didn’t have to worry about believing in what they saw: discoveries, major ones, were literally being made on automatic.

  With the loss of nearly all the spaceside instruments, modern astronomy had been decapitated. Suddenly astronomy was back in the mid twentieth century, dependent on crotchet
y instruments and crotchety observers perched on lonely mountaintops all over the world.

  Some modern hardware was earning its keep. The most fruitful data was coming from the ground-based wide-scan telescopes. These instruments tracked the sky, watching for objects that moved against the fixed background of Earth’s sky. They were designed to spot uncharted and potentially profitable asteroids or incoming comets, and to watch for spacecraft on collision courses with each other. The skyscanners had spotted a number of comets and asteroids, over the years, doing their part in the history of astronomy, but suddenly they were spotting dozens of full-blown planets, both around Earth’s new sun and around the other stars.

  It was too soon to establish much about the properties of the new planets, except that they existed. There weren’t even resolvable images for most of them yet. They were merely dots of light that moved against the stars. JPL’s computers quickly nailed positions and provisional orbits for many of them.

  Wolf knew at first glance that those orbits were damnably odd. No two planets in any system seemed to be moving in the same orbital plane. Many of the planets were in highly inclined orbits. Some were traveling in opposite directions from each other. The differing orbital planes Wolf could deal with. Natural mechanisms could cause that. If two worlds came close to each other, the interaction of their gravity fields might deflect them into new orbital planes, each flinging the other off into a new orbital inclination. Something like that had happened to Pluto, billions of years ago. But the close distancing and the retrograde orbits shook Wolf. There was no conceivable way planets could form in those positions, moving in opposite directions.