Hunted Earth Omnibus

by Roger MacBride Allen

  A sadness, a feeling of loss and tragedy, hung over the sullen domain of the Sphere. She glanced behind herself and saw the Earth hanging there, a tiny dot over her left shoulder. She felt a tear in her eye, and blinked to clear her vision.

  “All right, Wally,” she said, her voice not quite steady. She looked back toward the center of the tank, where the Sphere glowed its angry red. “Show me Sakalov’s latest.” She felt relieved to see the Multisystem imagery vanish, and the simulated Sphere swell up into a ball three meters across.

  Sianna watched it grow, some part of her still thinking, still hoping, that maybe Sakalov might have found the key, the answer.

  If he had, it was a neat trick. There was damn all little to go on. The Sphere was perfectly round, rotated slowly about its axis, was 2.15 astronomical units, or just under three hundred million kilometres, in diameter. It was 232 astronomical units from Earth, and its color shifted from one shade of red to another, perhaps in relation to energy input or output. A pattern of lines resembling lines of longitude and latitude were visible on its surface. Its mass was impossible to estimate. It radiated little more than perfectly ordinary visible light, a bit of ultraviolet, a lot of radio frequency energy, and a fair amount of short and long infrared.

  That was all that was truly known. Any ideas about the rest—what it was made of, how or why the Charonians had built it, how old it was, what it was for—were merest guesswork. For the last five years, Professor Yuri Sakalov had been working over that pathetic supply of information, struggling to divine the true nature of the Sphere, to pinpoint the location and nature of Charon Central, the control center for the entire Multisystem. Sianna had lost count of the theories Sakalov had presented.

  Against all sense and logic, Sianna found herself standing there in the darkness, watching Wally’s light show, hoping against hope that Sakalov had finally found Charon Central.

  For even with all her railing against it and objections to it, Sianna had to admit that the whole idea of the Charon Central was a wonderfully seductive, dazzling notion.

  One thing was clear from everything transmitted back from the disaster in the Solar System: the Charonians worked to a very clear hierarchical pattern. There had to be a top to the pyramid.

  Many of each lower-function type served a single, higher-function type, which in turn served a still higher function master. Study of video from the attack on Mars as transmitted back by the Saint Anthony made that clear: a gang of mindless carrier bugs worked under a somewhat more sophisticated scorpion-form, and all the hundreds of scorps were controlled by a single Lander. All the thousands of Landers were controlled by the Lunar Wheel, buried deep under the Moon’s surface.

  Mind, that was a greatly simplified example, leaving out a number of intermediate forms. And there were many other subsidiary forms in other sub-hierarchies, and any number of ideas of how exactly all the hierarchies nested into one another. The whole Sphere system was a rigid hierarchical command structure—but where and what was the ultimate commander?

  Maybe, just maybe, Wally was about to show her. “All right, that’s the Sphere exterior as we know it,” Wally said from behind her.

  Sianna stepped closer and examined the image. “Hold it a second, Wait. Something real small is orbiting the Sphere around its equator. That some part of your theory?”

  “No, that’s real, not hypothetical,” Wally answered, clearly pleased that Sianna had asked. The answer gave him a chance to show off his thoroughness. “Dr. Sakalov detected that body a few weeks ago. Very dark, very faint, real small, not more than a few thousand kilometres across. Just some piece of skyjunk, but it shows how detailed our model of the Multisystem is.”

  “I guess so,” Sianna said, a bit doubtfully.

  “Anyway, that’s what we know about the Sphere,” Wally said. “Now let me show you what Sakalov thinks is inside.”

  Sianna watched the image of the Sphere shift and change, and found herself thinking back on all the old theories she had heard before.

  The Sphere is hollow, with a standard G-type star inside. Charon Central is located on a planet orbiting that star within the Sphere. Except every calculation showed that the infrared waste heat plus the energy needed to keep the stars and planets in their courses required somewhat more energy than a G star could supply. Neither could a G star provide the instantaneous energy to transit the Earth into the system. Assuming that the Sphere had been built around a star in order to collect and store its energy, either that star was of a type more energetic than a G class—unlikely, as the Dyson Sphere seemed to want only G-cIass stars and standard habitable worlds—or else whatever was in there was no longer a star: the Sphere had rebuilt the original star into something different. A matter-antimatter system, a spatial interstitial generator, or something else, something quite beyond human understanding.

  The image of the Sphere transformed itself into a cutaway, showing a featureless interior with an indeterminate bright light at its center.

  The Sphere is a foamed-up solid mass of extremely low density, made up of processing nodes linked by synapse-like filaments, with an unknown power source or sources embedded within it. It is itself the control center, the brain of the Multisystem. Except the Sphere was larger around than Earth’s old orbit, and speed-of-light delays alone would make such a system hopelessly impractical. A thought would take over half an hour to travel from one side of the Sphere and back again. The human brain had a signal delay on the order of one-thirtieth of a second. If that was taken as a rough upper limit for processor delay in a practical thinking machine, and one assumed thoughts moving at the speed of light, that would dictate a “brain” not much larger than the Moon. Besides, even with a hopelessly inefficient architecture and very low capacity processing nodes and synapses, what could there possibly be to think about, what problem could be complex enough, to require a “brain” the size of the Sphere?

  Now the interior of the image began to resolve itself. The brightness at the center resolved itself into a churning roil of energy. Sianna recognised a fairly standard representation of a “white hole,” the point where the mass and energy that vanished down a black hole re-emerged into the outside Universe.

  The Sphere is actually a series of concentric Spheres, nested one inside the other, and the master race, the true Charonians, are ordinary beings, not so different from human beings. They live inside the Sphere and run the Multisystem for their own, unknown purposes. It was a reassuring idea, in that it made the Charonians a bit less god-like. But no evidence of such “ordinary” Charonians had ever been spotted anywhere in Multisystem. Besides, what point in creating and operating thing as huge and complex as the Multisystem if you never ventured out into it? And what need of the planets and the Captive Suns if you lived inside a Sphere that provided limitless living space, millions of times more surface area than Earth?

  The image resolved itself still further. The latitude and longitude lines were visible on the inner surface of the Sphere, and Sianna saw filaments of some sort reaching down toward the power source at the center, drawing energy in, directing it along the longitudinal lines. The lines began to glow, shining brighter and brighter, the power coursing upward toward the north and south poles of the Sphere. Sianna recognised the pulse pattern as a standardised visual notation for gravity generation.

  Suddenly the pattern made sense. Each line of longitude made a complete ring around the planet, going pole to pole. Sakalov was suggesting that each ring was a gravitic wave generator, like the Moonpoint Ring or the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon writ large, with dozens of generators banded together, the better to focus and direct the power stream.

  Now the Sphere tipped over, displaying the north polar region to Sianna. The image flickered and pulsed with power. Wally zoomed in closer and closer, until Sianna took an involuntary step backwards. Now she could see a tiny, detailed cluster of pyramidal structures at the pole, and recognised them as scaled-up versions of the so-called Amalgam Creatures
, the devices—or animals—the Charonians had built on the terrestrial planets and the larger satellites of the Solar System. In the Solar System, the Amalgams had focused and directed the gravity beams used to tear up the planetary surfaces and launch them into free space.

  Here, presumably, they were to transmit the gravity beams outward. That part did not ring true somehow. After the buildup Wally had given Sakalov’s new idea, it came down to some pyramids around the north pole? “Wally,” she asked, stepping back toward where Wally stood at the control panel, “have you guys gotten some new imagery that shows those structures at the poles?”

  Wally cleared his throat in obvious embarrassment. “Ah, no, not exactly,” he admitted. “They are, ah, conjectural. Dr. Sakalov says the control structures are really big, but way below the limits of resolution we can get on images of the Sphere. But they make sense,” he said, with just a little too much emphasis to be convincing.

  “Hold it, Wally. Never mind the pretty pictures. Give it to me in words.”

  Belittling his simulations was not the best way to get on Wally’s good side. However, he did manage to hold his temper and stick to the subject. “Well, we did a lot of analysis of how much energy would be required to do the work the Sphere does, and a lot of horizon-position relationship analysis.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. We worked through where the stars and planets and so forth were when their orbits and courses were adjusted, and what points on the Sphere they were visible from at that moment. Almost all of the course adjustments came when the star or planet was in direct line-of-sight with one of the poles.”

  Sianna worked that through in her head for a moment. “Wally, that would be equally true for any two points on opposite sides of the Sphere!”

  “Yes, but we detected a slight skew toward—”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It’s the first theory that explains what the longitude lines are,” Wally said, beating a bit of a retreat.

  “Okay, I’ll give you that,” Sianna conceded. “But what about the latitude lines, the ones parallel to the Sphere’s equator. What are they?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Okay, never mind that. Just walk me through the whole idea. You’ve got a white hole in the center. Why is that?”

  “The Charonians use black holes all the time. Stands to reason they’d use the same technology to create power.”

  “But you have no evidence? No new particle detection or anything that might support the idea?”

  “Well, no,” Wally admitted. “But the simulated energy profiles match up pretty well. Anyway, the white hole dumps power into the Sphere. The power shunt beams you see there transfer that energy to the Longitudinal Generators. The LGs focus that energy at the north and south poles of the Sphere, and the gravity-control systems direct it outward to control the Multisystem. You said yourself that it makes sense for the lines of longitude to be gravity generators. If they are, the poles are natural focus points. It only makes sense that Charon Central would be there on the scene to control the gravity power transmission.”

  “But you have no imagery, no evidence, to support that theory, do you?” said Sianna. It was a statement, not a question.

  “We have logic,” Wally responded, now openly defencive. “We have the behavioural evidence. The Sphere puts out gravitic energy— it has to be produced somewhere, and be transmitted from somewhere. Dr. Sakalov is extrapolating from known Charonian structures. We know they tend to stay close to the same designs a lot. COREs are a lot like the Landers they saw in the Solar System. He’s taken the Amalgams and scaled them up to match what we know of the Sphere.”

  “First off,” Sianna said, “the Solar System Amalgams received gravity power transmitted by the Lunar Wheel. You have super-Amalgams transmitting power. Second, the Solar System Amalgams were a few tens of kilometres high at most. You’ve got these things at least, what, a thousand klicks high? But even past that, I don’t like your logic. Amalgam Creatures exist elsewhere, therefore giant Amalgams exist here? We feel they must exist, therefore they do? Come on, Wally. Do you really think that any of this makes sense? It’s right up there with epicycles.”

  “What are epicycles?”

  “A good lesson in why facts can’t follow from theory. The philosophers and astronomers before Copernicus had this whole crazy system worked out with the planets and the Sun and the stars orbiting Earth in perfectly circular orbits, because the circle is the perfect form.”

  “But the planets don’t—”

  “Of course they don’t. They move in ellipses. But when the theory first got trotted out, no one really knew that. As the instruments got better, people started to notice the orbits weren’t perfect circles. So they decided that the planets orbited in small circles that were centred on the big circle of their main orbit, like the Moon going around and around the Earth without the Earth being there.”

  Sianna stopped herself for a moment. Something about the Moon going around an Earth that wasn’t there, something she could not quite put her finger on. It resonated with something. She blinked, came back to the moment, and went on with what she had been saying.

  “Even that didn’t match the observed movement perfectly,” she continued, “so they decided the planets moved around the circle that was moving around their orbital path in another set of perfect circles, like a satellite going around the Moon while the Moon goes around the Earth—except with Earth and Moon not being there. I think they got up to four or five sets of epicycles.”

  “So what’s your point?” Wally asked.

  “My point is Sakalov’s doing the same thing. The facts and his theories don’t fit, so he changes the facts to fit the theories, adjusting reality to match his preconceived notions of how reality should be. Then when that doesn’t fit, he changes the facts a little bit more, and a bit more. Everything here is one conjecture built on other.”

  Wally pointed at the image of the Sphere as it hung in mid-air. “Nothing in there contradicts anything we know,” he said.

  “That’s not good enough,” Sianna snapped back. “You can’t present a theory on the basis of there being no evidence against it. Where’s the evidence for it?”

  “My dear, you are quite right,” a new voice said. The voice was gentle and low, with just a hint of a cultured Russian accent. “We have not one bit of evidence.”

  Sianna gasped and spun around. Wally, standing by the control panel, brought the house lights up a bit to reveal that two visitors had arrived. Two men. One of them Sianna did not recognise, but the other was none other than Dr. Yuri Sakalov. Oh. great, Sianna thought. There goes my career. How long has he been standing there?

  Dr. Sakalov and his companion stepped further into the room. “I must confess that I had thought of the parallels with epicycle theory myself,” Sakalov said. “However, I am not lost and confused on account of theology, or a need to be proven right. We desperately need an answer—any answer we can find. It almost doesn’t matter what question it answers. Anything would be a starting place. One right idea might be the key in the lock that sets us all free.”

  Sakalov looked thoughtfully at Sianna for a moment, and then turned his gaze toward the model of the Sphere. He was an elderly man, dressed in a rumpled worksuit, his hair silver-grey and pulled back in a rather old-fashioned-looking pony tail. His face was deeply lined, with sad, quiet eyes, a slightly bulbous nose, and an expressive mouth. He wore a small, neatly trimmed beard. There was a rather distracted air about him.

  “I chose to focus on Charon Central,” he went on, “because I believe that when we know where and what it is, and how it works, we will have that key in the lock. We will understand our enemies, and have some hope of defeating them. I believe that my new model has some real merit. It sounds as if you hold my previous ideas in low regard. Tell me, with the new idea—do you think I am grasping at straws?”

  Sianna looked at the old man, her heart pounding with fear. Sakalov. Why did it have to
be Sakalov? And who was that with him in the dark? His silent companion was standing in shadow, and it was hard to see much of him in the dim light. He was a younger man, blond-headed, his expression guarded. There was something rather severe about his whole demeanour. Suddenly she placed him, and she broke out into a cold sweat. Unless she was very much mistaken, he was Wolf Bernhardt himself, head of the DSI, the man who wrote most of the checks that kept the Multisystem Research Institute going. One wrong word in front of him and—

  “Miss Colette?” Dr. Sakalov asked.

  “Um, ah… ah. I don’t know what to say, doctor,” she said, stalling for time.

  “Surely you have some opinion. You were speaking most forcefully a moment ago.”

  Sianna swallowed hard and looked the old man in the eye. She battled back her fear, made herself look at the man and not the caricature of the doddering old eccentric she carried in her head. Maybe his ideas were wrong, even mad, maybe he was building castles in the air, but at least he was trying to make sense of it all. How many people his age—mercy, he must be at least a hundred—even tried that much, instead of sticking their heads in the sand and pretending everything was all right?

  Sianna was used to the world as it was. For all the short years of her adolescence and young adulthood, humanity had been a hunted, threatened species, knowing itself to be hopelessly outmatched by an invincible opponent. But Dr. Sakalov had lived his whole life, up until his twilight years, in a Universe where humankind was unchallenged and alone. What must it have been like to see all that destroyed and brought low at the end of his days? What would it be like for an astronomer to have the night sky stolen from him?

  Dr. Sakalov was asking for the truth, for her honest opinion. She had to give it to him. “Well, all right, yes sir,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “With all due respect, as best I can see, your only concrete reason for thinking Charon Central is at one of the poles seems to be that the longitudinal features meet up there.” She hesitated a moment more, marshaling her thoughts, trying to find the proper words. “You, ah, ah, offer the theory that longitudinal lines are actually huge gravity generators. That’s a reasonable assumption, and makes a lot of sense—but you have no proof. Building on that assumption, you make a series of completely unwarranted further assumptions about what it would mean if the longitudinal lines were gravitic generators, and based on those, you conclude Charon Central is at one of the poles. Your conclusion is based on pure conjecture, not proof.”