Hunted Earth Omnibus

by Roger MacBride Allen

  At the time and distance scales Wally was using, a light beam took long minutes to cross the long reaches of space from Pluto and Charon to the inner worlds. The Ring of Charon had fired ten-minute pulses at each of the inner worlds.

  “Slow down again,” Sianna whispered. She had to see this, understand it perfectly. “Give me a minute per hour.”

  Again the display slowed, and again time seemed to stop before moving on more slowly. Now blood-red spears of light, each ten light-minutes long, were moving down into the Solar System from the Ring of Charon. One to Saturn’s moon Titan, then to Jupiter’s Ganymede, then Mars and Venus. The spears of light touched each world in turn, harmlessly, undetectable save by the most sophisticated of gravity-wave detectors. Now all the beams, all but the last, had struck. “Normal rate time now, Wally,” Sianna whispered.

  Sianna looked down on the shining blue-white globe of Earth, clouds and sea and sky shining, glitter-bright. Somewhere down on that perfect miniature she could imagine that it was just past noon on a perfect June day. She knew where she had been when it happened. Everyone did. Down there, Sianna and her friends were just going outside to have lunch in the school quadrangle, chattering away about how many days of school were left until vacation, what to wear to school next day, how to get the calculus homework done. They were just reaching the crest of the hill when it happened. It was not until much later that she learned where her parents had been, but now she could visualise it all so perfectly that it was almost as if she had been with them, as well. There, down on that tiny jewel of a world, her parents were just about to meet for lunch at one of their favourite spots. A restaurant in a four-hundred-year-old brownstone, probably constructed long before anyone had even thought about building codes.

  Time seemed to slow again, but this time it had nothing to do with Wally adjusting the controls. This was the moment that changed it all, the instant that made Sianna what she was, that changed the life of every human being.

  The last spear of light reached for Earth, touched it, brushed past it and hit the Moon. And inside the Moon the Lunar Wheel awoke. A disk of blue-white something/nothing appeared between Earth and Moon, swept toward the planet—and Earth was gone. The blue-white disk vanished. That was that. Earth was gone.

  “That’s all we have from direct observation for what happened back in the Solar System, Sianna,” Wally said, his voice quiet and reserved. “From here on in, it’s all conjectures and best guesses, and a little bit of hard information from the Saint Anthony data.”

  “Right, Wally.”

  That was the end of what they knew happened in the Solar System, because that was the last moment when Earth was in the Solar System. Earth was gone from the simulation now, just as she had vanished from the Solar System in reality. The Solar System. Think about what happened there, not about what happened to Earth.

  Don’t think about the way the restaurant building collapsed in the pulsequakes, or how no one found them for days. Don’t think that the sight of that blue-white wall of something falling down out of the sky again and again, or about the mad things that happened to the sky afterward—the sky turning to blood, then night turning to day and back again, or the chaotic reports flooding in from all over of spacecraft and habitats gone missing and crashing, of panic and death, fear and disaster everywhere—

  No. Stop. Do not think about it. Do not think at all. Observe. Absorb. She shut her eyes and settled herself down before she faced the next step. Focus on the Solar System. We’ve always thought about our situation—but what about their situation? “Go to a ten-seconds-a-day time scale and give me the best-guess display of what happened next,” she said, keeping her voice steady as she could. The rubble of that restaurant—No. Don’t think about it.

  “Okay,” Wally said. “From here on in we’re guessing.” Time flashed back into high gear. The Moon, bereft of the Earth’s gravitational anchoring, wobbled for a time, and then restabilised as the Multisystem sent the Earthpoint Singularity, to anchor the Moon in its old orbit a black hole of almost precisely the Earth’s mass, and to provide a transit point for the invaders that were on the way. In Wally’s sim, the Earthpoint Singularity, invisible in real life, showed as a ruby-red pinpoint of light.

  Meanwhile, even before their allies came through Earthpoint, the Charonians in the Solar System gave up more of their secrets. Landers that had slept for thousands or millions of years, camouflaged as asteroids, started moving out from the Asteroid Belt and the distant Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, shown in the display as dimmer points of red.

  The Charonian Landers swarmed out across the Solar System, heading toward all the major worlds and attacking them. Landers from the Multisystem starting coming through Earthpoint, streaming to the attack everywhere—everywhere except the Moon.

  She needed to see better. “Okay, Wally. Magnify planet and satellite images by a factor of five hundred.” Mars, Jupiter, Venus, all the worlds were suddenly huge, with vivid detail plain to see. Chaos boiled everywhere. A dust cloud started to form around Mars. Jupiter’s Red Spot started to churn. Saturn’s rings disintegrated. Then, out at the edge of the Solar System, something strange started to happen. Charon shrank away to nothing, and then Pluto started to collapse in on itself. The Ring of Charon crushed one world, then the other, swallowing them up to form a human-controlled black hole with the power to strike back—at least once—at the invaders. Planet and satellite vanished, their place taken by a ruby-red spot of light at the centerpoint of the Ring.

  “How sure are we on this?” Sianna asked, gesturing toward the image of the new Plutopoint black hole. Even just looking at it made her feel a little bit queasy, a little bit soiled. There was something fundamentally wrong, indecent, about destroying a world, no matter how great the necessity.

  “The computers put the probability at over ninety-five percent, but I’d say that’s on the low side. Something back in the Solar System developed enough power to kick a massive jolt of gravity power through the Lunar Wheel and on through it to the Moonpoint Ring here in the Multisystem.”

  Wally worked the controls and expanded the image of the Ring until it was five meters top to bottom, spinning smoothly around the angry red eye at its center. His voice was deep and thoughtful, as if this were one of the few realities he had faced—perhaps because the way he could face was it in a simulator. “Over the years I’ve run, a—a million sims of what must have happened back there,” he said.

  “And it had to be this way?” Sianna asked. “No other choice?”

  Wally shut his eyes and nodded—his way of emphasising a point.

  He opened them again and pointed at the blood-red image of the black hole. “Unless they learned how to spin a massless black hole somehow—and I don’t think they could have—then, well, the only way to punch that much power through would be by drawing on at least a Pluto’s worth of mass in a black hole. Dr. Sakalov says that might be conservative. He thinks they might have been forced to pull in some of the Neptunian moons as well. But I don’t think they would have had time to do that. Things were moving fast—and the— the System was in pretty bad shape by then. Hard to do anything.”

  “But God Almighty,” Sianna protested, “what a thing to do! They smashed a world, a four-billion-year old world, just to save a bunch of over-brainy apes from being eaten.”

  “No,” Wally said, a bit sharply. Clearly he had thought about this for a while. The hesitation was gone from his voice. “Saving themselves—saving the only species with our kind of intelligence that we know of—that was reason enough to do it. But they had better reasons than that.” He walked over to the simulator controls and brought the imagery back to its previous state, with enlarged images of the worlds hanging in their correct relative positions. “They did it to save all of this. If the people in the Solar System hadn’t stopped them, the Charonians would have taken Pluto apart anyway. They had to sacrifice one planet, and one satellite, to save all the rest.”

  “If they did manag
e to save them,” Sianna said.

  Wally nodded sadly. “We’re just guessing at that. For all we know, the Solar System Charonians didn’t die, and there’s nothing left back there at all. We think they fought them off, but there’s—there’s no way to be sure,” Wally replied. He seemed about to say something more, but then he stopped himself. Sianna nodded sadly. What more was there to say?

  “I know,” she said. Strange to hear Wally saying such things. But he was, after all, a human being. How could any living person not brood about such things now and again? Even Wally had to look outside himself once in a while. “No one ever likes to think about that—but it’s exactly that possibility that I want to look at. That’s why we’re here right now. To look at… at that. At the Solar System dying.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Because I think there are some answers there, in the way it would have died. The way it might have died,” Sianna said. “I know there are.”

  chapter 10: Do It Yourself

  “In the most cold-blooded analysis, and speaking on a purely logical level, without reference to theology or philosophy, life is not reasonable. Life does not make any sense. It has no purpose other than its own perpetuation.

  ”The only purpose of life is more life, a fact which does not seem to bother us—though one would think it might. We mock organisations whose only purpose seems to be their own survival. We are offended by makework projects which seem to accomplish nothing beyond keeping workers working. We are scandalised when some opportunistic person shoves a fellow creature aside in order the reach for the main chance.

  “How is it then, in the grander scheme of things, that we are not bothered that the only reason for making babies is to make more babies as a way of making more babies after that? Why are we not upset to see a mother determined to protect her family at any and all costs to others, as well as to herself? How many otherwise immoral acts are excused because they are for the sake of a child?

  ”The answer, of course, is that we know life must perpetuate itself, at all cost, for if it fails to do so, all is lost. This is our most basic instinct. No living thing could survive without this knowledge embedded in its every gene…

  “…Life must live off life, which is to say it must live off death. Even the most gentle of vegetarian species lives by killing and eating plants. Life’s perpetuation, its renewal, and acts of creation, are of necessity exactly balanced by acts of destruction.”

  —Gerald MacDougal, Aspects of Life, MRI Press, 2429

  Multisystem Research Institute

  New York City

  “All right, then,” Sianna said. “You’re in charge, Wally. Start from where we left off and assume the Charonians won. Take apart the whole damn Solar System and build me a Dyson Sphere, a Multisystem. I want to see how it’s done.”

  “But, um, ah… I don’t know if I have the simulation routines.

  “Then we’ll write new routines,” Sianna said, cutting him off. “I’m near the answers, Wally. Damned near. If things break the way I think they will, then”—she paused to choose her words—“then all sorts of things might be possible.”

  Wally blinked at her, a bit owlishly, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want the sim results to be?”

  There! That was the question that had crippled them for so long. Not what are the results, but what do you want the results to be? That mindset, and a distinct reluctance to consider the possibility of ultimate, final disaster in the Solar System, were the two reasons no one had seen the answer.

  “I want the sim to do whatever it wants to do,” she said. “Reset to the moment the Lunar Wheel woke up. Factor out all human interference, and let’s see what the Charonians would do with the cards they were dealt.”

  In that sense, at least, the Charonians were like everyone else. They had to work with what they had; not deal with what was logical, but with the available Universe.

  That was the point that everyone missed. Sakalov viewed them as supremely logical beings, and maybe they were. But the Charonians did not live in a logical or rational Universe—and they did not spring from nowhere. Like every other life-form—if you considered them a life-form—they had evolved. There seemed little doubt that they had directed their own evolution, but all the same, the current form had to keep itself alive while it was on its way to creating the new one. Whales still had toe bones. Birds still had lizard feet. You used the structures you had and modified them.

  And if one thing was certain about the Charonians, it was that they had not always been what they were now. Sometime, somehow in the past, creatures had built starships, filled them with the lifecode, the DNA equivalent, of the life from the home world and sent the starships out into space. But the starships had the ability to modify their cargo of living beings, and they had taken over. Life served machinery instead of machinery serving life, until the two merged into one. The end result of that was the strange complex webs of interdependent beings that humans called Charonians.

  Coming into the Universe tends to leave some scars. Humans had belly buttons. Sianna was very close to certain she knew what Charonians had.

  “Think like a Charonian,” Sianna said, going over to where Wally was working. “You’ve got the whole Solar System for raw materials, and you want to build a Dyson Sphere. How would you go about doing it?”

  Wally looked thoughtful. “What sort of assumptions do I make?”

  “No assumptions. Just aim for the end result of a Sphere like the one here. Just do your best guess,” Sianna said.

  “But what about—”

  “Just make it up as you go along,” Sianna said. She didn’t want to say as much to Wally, but she was relying more on his hunches and guesses and instincts than the results of deliberate thought. Sometimes, when he tried too hard, Wally thought like a regular person. Sianna was half-hoping that the way he looked at the world when he worked at his own level would be closer to the Charonian viewpoint. Not that she could say any of that, of course. “You’ve been doing these sims right along. Do it by feel. Take the tools that make the most sense to you.”

  “Okay, then,” Wally said, leaning back in his chair. “I have a lot of stuff in the data library, and a bunch of ideas I never had a chance to try out. You understand I’ll have to do a lot of guessing. We don’t know how the Charonians do a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Ah, well, for starters, they must have some way to do easy, efficient, straightforward matter transmutation. That’s the big thing,” he said. “Hydrogen and helium make up something like ninety percent of the Solar System. They’d have to be able to turn hydrogen and helium into other elements. We’ll just have to do a black box on that. Let’s see. We’ll need some Charonian forms we haven’t seen yet. Sphere constructors, transporters, energy collectors. Probably some sort of interim structures along the way…” Wally kept talking, but his voice got lower and less distinct until he was just muttering to himself, and Sianna could not follow it. But he was caught up in the spirit of the thing, and that was all that mattered. Once Wally got his teeth into a problem, he did not let it go.

  Suddenly the interior of the Sim Center chamber began to shift and change, slowly at first, but then with greater and greater violence. The darkened room flared into glaring light. The images of the planets turned ghostly pale, then transformed into ghostly white wire balls, mere schematics rather than true images. Wally was conserving processing power, doing bare-bones imaging while he set up. Then the wire balls began to shift position, zipping and flashing across the darkened sky as Wally brought the setup to where he wanted it. Sianna found herself ducking, a bit too late, as the wireframe image of Jupiter skimmed across the room—and right through her.

  “Okay,” Wally said, clearly talking to himself, “we’ll need places to store and process raw materials, and, ah, transmuters, and transporters, and oh, let’s see…” His voice started to take on a strange enthusiasm, and an odd little gleam came into his eye.
Sianna had asked him to play God, and it was obvious he liked the idea.

  Strange shapes, changing and evolving, appeared in the air around Sianna, and then vanished before they completed themselves. Wally was trying out ideas, scenarios, procedures half in his head and half in the sim chamber. It was all most disconcerting.

  But then quite suddenly, it all stopped, and the room dropped into total darkness. “Okay,” Wally’s voice announced from the midst of the utter blackness. “I think I have it. At least a first-draft idea, anyway. Here we go.”

  The room remained in darkness for a moment. Then the planets reappeared, moving fast enough that even Saturn’s motion was visible. Sianna checked the time display—Wally had gone back to the moment the Lunar Wheel had awakened, and was running the system at a year every thirty seconds. At that speed, the individual Charonians were barely visible, little more than a hazy cloud about each of the planets. But Sianna could see the results of their handiwork quite plainly.

  The planets were coming apart at the seams, dissolving before her eyes as the Charonians tore up the worlds and hurled their component matter out into free space. The Lunar Wheel, hidden deep inside the Moon, commanded the operation, sending out stabbing bolts of gravity power for the other Charonian forms to absorb. The time display rolled forward at a frantic pace, quickly sweeping past the time when the Solar System had managed to stop the Charonians—or at least the moment where everyone hoped they had been stopped.

  The pace of destruction accelerated as more and more Charonians poured through the wormhole links. The smaller and then the larger satellites of the gas giants evaporated. Mars was the first planet to go, shredded away until its component mass was nothing but a cloud of dust and rubble. One by one, the rest of the worlds of the Solar System followed suit, ground down to nothing. At last, even Jupiter wasn’t there anymore, the king of the planets reduced to a cloud of gas and dust. All the worlds were gone. All but the Moon. All but the Moon—the Moon, where the Lunar Wheel lived.