The warm-up room faded away, and Larry Chao stood in uncharted darkness.
“All right,” MacDougal said. “Here we go.” The darkness faded, and the base of the Rabbit Hole—the base of the Hole as it had been five years before—bloomed up out of blackness. “This is our feed now,” MacDougal whispered in his ear. “We’re feeding the same scene to both you and Lucian.”
Larry felt his heart pounding, and his vision blurred for a moment. But then it cleared, and nothing had changed. This was the place, the horrible place where he had died. And there was Lucian, directly ahead of him, standing there in his pressure suit, looking past Larry’s shoulder at whatever was behind him. Lucian, alive, exactly as he had been.
It seemed as if time stopped in that one moment—and maybe it did. Maybe it was not some trick of his mind, but a glitch in the computer program, that had frozen time.
Where am I? Larry asked himself. Am I inside the computer, inside Lucian’s mind, just here to feed a figment to his imagination? Am I inside the TeleOperator the computer is simulating? Who is the puppet, and who is pulling the string?
Yes, I know I’m in the VR exoskeleton, but what does that matter? The VR video is not what I see, or hear. I see the past, the real past, the moment just before I died.
And suddenly he realised that it was not just Lucian who needed to break out of this moment. He had died here too, and had lived to tell the tale. But I never did tell the tale to anyone, not really. Never talked about it. Never dealt with it. Never faced it. Now I can. I can make it go away, make it never happen.
“Behind you!” Lucian called, the dead man speaking the dead man’s words in the dead man’s voice.
Larry turned around, and saw the two wheeled Charonians, just as they had been. For a moment, fear flared anew in his heart. But this time he would not let them kill him. This time the computers were controlling the sims, and the Charonians were programmed to lose.
With a strange sense of exaltation, Larry lunged for the closer Charonian, grabbed at one of its manipulator arms, yanked it from its socket and hurled it away. Larry smashed the TeleOperator’s fist through the thing’s carapace, and the machinery inside sparked and flared. He spun about, kicked the other one in the midsection, flipped it over so that its wheels spun helplessly in mid-air. He grabbed at the left rear wheel and pulled it off.
“Oh my God,” Lucian said. Larry spun around and looked at— what? at Lucian? at Lucian’s computer projection as directed by the simulator? At a projection of Lucian’s body as controlled by his mind?
“He’s still in it,” MacDougal’s voice, whispering. “We’re getting his visual output here, and he still sees it the old way. It’s a bit muddled here and there, but he’s seeing what he’s always seen—”
“They know we’re here,” Larry’s voice said through the headphones, though he had not spoken. It was Lucian’s memory of his voice, of what he had said five years before. Larry was hearing his own ghost, and the idea terrified him.
Then Lucian’s body flew up in the air, lifted by invisible arms, and he was carried away, down the tunnel, by enemies unseen.
“Good God,” MacDougal said. “I’m watching Lucian’s optic nerve output, and he saw the Charonian you just killed pick him up and run out of the tunnel with him. He didn’t see your actions at all. The computer sim matched what Lucian thought was happening to him and carried him out, even if the simulated Charonians weren’t there to move him. Incredible.”
“Yeah,” Larry agreed, panting. He realised he was still holding the Charonian’s left rear wheel, and he flung it away.
“We’re going to have to reset, try again to snap him out of it,” MacDougal said. “Do you think you can do it again?”
Larry looked down at the computer-generated phantoms of the things that attacked him, killed him five years before. He was whole, and they were bits of mangled metal. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I can do that as often as you like.”
Two more times, three, four, a dozen more times, until Larry lost track of how long ago he had lost track, until even the idea of revenge had lost its savour. The simulated Charonians would always lose. Killing them the first few times had been good for Larry’s soul, but by the twentieth time—if this was the twentieth time—his strongest reaction to killing the wheeled Charonians was that his arms were getting tired. He grabbed at the second one and kicked a hole clean through this time, just to give his arms a rest.
Larry turned around and watched Lucian being borne away by invisible hands once again—but there was definitely something jerky, uncertain, about the motion. Lucian was still heading down that damned tunnel, but it was less smooth every time.
“Okay,” MacDougal said. “One more time, from the top.”
“Right,” Larry said, his voice weary. The base of the Rabbit Hole faded to darkness, then reappeared once again. Lucian—or at least the computer image of Lucian in his pressure suit—was back where he had started.
But Lucian’s image—Lucian—didn’t stay there. He stepped forward toward Larry, did not cry out a warning. He had changed.
Changed. Larry turned and saw the wheeled Charonians there. Should he attack again? No. Nothing brutal, nothing violent this time. Enough of destruction. Show Lucian something else. Make it different. Larry raised his hand, palm out, to the simulated Charonians, praying that whoever was operating their images would have the wit to follow his lead. “Stop,” Larry said. “Go away. Don’t bother us anymore. We don’t want you here.”
The two alien machines regarded him for a moment—and then wheeled backwards, turned around, and rolled away. Larry watched them going, knowing that at least some of his own nightmares were leaving with them. He had exorcised his own demons.
But what of Lucian?
Larry turned back, toward Lucian’s image as it came toward him, moving slowly, awkwardly, the image a bit jerky, Lucian’s mind moving his body in ways it had not used in a long time. “Lar-ree?” Lucian asked. “Lar-ree… tha you?”
chapter 16: The Only Way to Travel
“It is almost impossible, and certainly pointless, to explain the Naked Purple Movement. Even the term ‘Movement’ is misleading, as it implies a large group moving purposefully toward a goal. While the number of the Purple has at times been large, no one would say they have ever moved toward any clear goal. They are not known as the Pointless Cause for nothing.
”At least the term ‘Naked Purple’ is meaningful. Paint yourself purple, and wander around naked in public, and you will achieve what at least passes for the basic Naked Purple goal: you will be annoying, disconcerting, and confusing to outsiders. In their strange dress, in their often belligerent—and yet whimsical—rejection of the norms and ideas of society, in their deliberately incomprehensible speeches and writings, the Naked Purple work to shake things up, turn things upside down, force us to look at things in a new way. While it is true that this is often a good thing to do, few would deny that the Purple tend to overdo it…
“…The catastrophe of the Abduction wiped out every other orbital facility. Only NaPurHab, the Naked Purple Habitat, survived. While that can be ascribed mostly to luck, I for one would like to suggest that it was destiny as well. Who else better suited to spend their lives in close orbit of a black hole?”
—Memoirs, Dr. Simon Raphael, First Director of the Gravities Research Institute, Pluto. Published posthumously, 2429
NaPurHab
Orbiting the Moonpoint Singularity
THE MULTISYSTEM
“And here be coming numero uno,” Mudflap Shooflyer announced as the first of the Charonian things arrived.
“Thanks, Mud, but they didn’t name me for my hearing,” Eyeball growled as she stared out the porthole. “I can see it.”
“No harm in saying it,” Mud replied.
“But what the foggy blue that thing gone do?” asked Ohio Template Windbag. “Weirdest looking thing seen in some time. ‘Cepting you, ’course, Mudflap.”
“Thanks fo
r nod, hefe,” Mudflap said, clearly pleased with the compliment.
“Pipe down anytime you like, boys,” Eyeball said, struggling to concentrate on her instruments. Bad enough that Mudball smelled the way you’d expect a chap with that label would. Chatter made it worse. “Else clear out and watch from elsewheres.”
“Sorry. Will zip it,” Ohio said. At least Ohio had a reason for being here. He did, after all, run the hab. But why did he have to bring a schnorrer like Mud along? Maybe it was Be Nice to Losers Day. Eyeball knew it was sometime this week, but she’d been too busy to check her calendar.
Her hardware was all ticking along fine, recording everything. What was the thing going to do? She punched up the long-range scope and set it to auto-track the thing.
The massive Charonian sure as hell wasn’t like any SCORE or CORE Eyeball had ever heard tell of. Most of them were shaped like short, fat cigars. This thing was more or less rectilinear, and about twenty times the size of the biggest CORE on record. It had what appeared to be cantilevered swivel capture latches running along the edges of one long face. It was also dazzle-brite white in color, a definite departure for the Charonians, who usually favored a dirty grey for most of their gear. Sum up, a big white shoe-box shape with legs. There were fifteen more just like it on the way.
Now it was hanging in space, inside the Moonpoint Ring, and exactly abeam of the Ring’s interior surface, lining up with it perfectly. And then, suddenly the thing was moving, straight for the Ring, fast, like maybe it was going to ram it or some such. Oh, God damn, don’t let it be. “Were those things here to smash up dead Moonpoint Ring, clear the way for something else? The hab would get caught in debris for sure, beat to rubble.
But the big white box stopped moving as sudden as it had started, less than a hundred meters from the Ring’s inner surface. Its legs unfolded and it moved gently in, settling itself neatly into place before the legs wrapped themselves around the ring.
It sat there, quiet and peaceful, and that was that.
“Now what the hell was that ‘bout?” Mudflap demanded.
“Won’t know for sure till rest of them arrive,” Eyeball said. “But my guess is the Charonian docs is paying a housecall.”
Kourou Spaceport
Guiana, South America
EARTH
The briefing room was a dreary, windowless grey box. It was aseptic rather than antiseptic, too grey and too drenched with disinfectants for anything to grow, but a grimy, cold little spot for all that. Even without the disinfectants, it was too dispirited a place for any but the most determined of germs, and nothing around here seemed all that determined.
The air conditioning was winning out over the ferocious heat of the launch base. Maybe winning by a little too much. The spaceport was only a few hundred kilometres north of the equator, and every time Sianna stepped outside, she felt as if she were walking into a sodden wall of heat.
Sianna, Wally, and Sakalov sat on one side of a rickety, stained old table, the debris of some previous meeting still in evidence here and there—crumbled bits of paper, a dried-up spot of spilled tea. A far cry from the luxurious appointments in Bernhardt’s office only two weeks before.
Bailey, the briefing officer, sat on the other side of the table. His coveralls were rumpled, and he hadn’t shaved in quite a while. He was a slouchy, sallow-faced, rubbery-skinned little man, with what appeared to be the stub of a cigarette hanging out of the edge of his mouth. He looked as if he had not been to bed in ten years, and did not care.
“Aw right,” Bailey said, taking a noisy slurp from his coffee mug, “let’s get this thing started. You folks mind if I don’t throw ninety-four different sims up on the screen? I’d rather just use plain English.”
Wally seemed as if he were about to say something, but then he thought better of it. Bailey nodded, scratched himself, and went on.
“Good. Then here’s the short form: We’ve started the massive cargo lift to NaPurHab. We’re lifting at least fifteen major cargo craft a day, every day for the next three weeks, plus all the smaller stuff we can manage. We want to send everything we can, with lots of spares, because a lot of it won’t get there.”
“The loss rate is still close to thirty percent, isn’t it?” Sakalov asked, as if he were asking about the price of onions, rather than his own odds of survival.
“Worse than that,” Bailey said, a bit reluctantly. “The COREs have been getting more and more aggressive. We expect the loss rate to get a hell of a lot worse real soon. We have to assume that once the main body of SCOREs hits town, we will lose whatever remaining access to space we still have. The odds on a given cargo getting through will go way down. Say, to one in a hundred. We might be able to launch in radar-transparent stealthships, but that is very tough engineering.
“The good news is that we have gotten better and better at analysing what the COREs do. Over the years, we have thrown a lot of cargoes at NaPurHab—and seen which ones get taken out. We know what sort of craft, moving in what sort of trajectories, the COREs are most likely to attack. We can send our cargoes in the lower-risk trajectories—and send you people in the lowest-risk ones of all. But there is a better-than-zero chance that the COREs will attack any given object more than two meters long within about three hundred thousand kilometres of Earth. If the COREs decide that you might impact on Earth, they will attack you.”
“Wonderful,” Sianna said. “How about if we bend over and you send us in one-meter-long ships?”
“Don’t think we haven’t thought about it,” Bailey said, “but we’d have to launch you rolled in a ball. You wouldn’t survive the boost phase. We’ve also learned that the odds don’t change much for smaller-size craft. Once you’re over that two-meter threshold, it doesn’t much matter if you’re two and a half meters or two hundred fifty.”
“Great,” Sianna said.
“I know,” Bailey said. “But the best we can do is get you up and out of here at the lowest-risk trajectories during the launch windows we’ve calculated to be lowest risk. And we want to get you up there sooner rather than later. The SCOREs are headed this way. We don’t know what they will do when they get here, but we have to assume they will join the COREs in attacking our ships.”
“So when do the SCOREs arrive?” Wally asked.
“We don’t know that, either,” Bailey admitted sourly. “One cluster of them will boost and then coast, and then another, and another, while the first drifts off course until there’s a course correction.”
“Sounds like limits on the ability of the Sphere to transmit gravity power,” Sakalov said. “It must be directing a single gravity-power beam from one cluster of SCOREs to the next, nudging each group when it can spare the power from some other need. The Sphere is spreading itself pretty thin.”
Bailey looked annoyed. “You know so much, you want to give out the info?”
“Ah, no, no. Please, forgive me.”
“Okay, we think their arrival has something to do with the Ghoul Modules—”
“The what?” Sianna interrupted.
“Oh, right, you weren’t around for that one,” Bailey said. “That’s what the Purps are calling the large Charonian devices that are docking themselves to the Moonpoint Ring. The last of them docked to the ring this morning, and they seem to be pumping power into the ring. It looks very much to us as if they are there to bring the dead ring back to life, reactivate it. Ghouls.”
“But why?” Sianna asked.
“To proceed with the Sphere’s original purpose in setting up the Moonpoint Ring,” Sakalov said. “To get through to the Solar System and start building a new Multisystem there.”
“Hey, real smart,” Bailey said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “But our team has been thinking on this for more than five seconds, and if you can prepare yourself for a shock, they see another possibility. We think it’s meant to be used as a bolt-hole. We’ve known for years the Sphere was afraid of something. Maybe that something is getting close and the Spher
e wants a back door. Some hole it can open up, go through, and pull the hole in after itself.”
“The Dyson Sphere is way too big to get through the Moonpoint wormhole,” Wally objected.
“But the Lone World is the real Sphere,” Sianna reminded him. “It’s the brains of the outfit. The Lone World could go through the hole with a whole slew of smaller Charonians and set up shop someplace new, build a new Sphere.”
“What would it use for power once it was cut off from the gravity generators in the Dyson Sphere?” Wally asked.
“Who knows?” Sianna replied. “Maybe it can store power. Maybe it could absorb solar power in a pinch. If the Lone World drops itself through a wormhole, it’ll have done its homework so it can survive on the other side.
“The bigger question is—why is it setting up our Moonpoint Ring for its bolt-hole? It must have links to a zillion wormholes. Why does it want to go through ours?”
Bailey nodded, as if he were actually conceding that someone else besides himself might be capable of having an idea. “Good question. The answer is it isn’t going to go through the Moonpoint Hole. Best we can tell, the Sphere is getting dozens of old wormholes ready. At least we see a lot of things that look like Ghoul Modules headed toward a lot of other inactive rings in the Multisystem.”
“Misdirection,” Sakalov said thoughtfully. “Another little bit of evidence that the Sphere—or the Lone World—is in a war, a battle, a fight, with somebody. You don’t set up deception plans unless there is someone who needs deceiving.”
“Or if you want someone to think you’ve run when you haven’t,” Sianna cut in. “The Lone World creates a hundred places it might run, and then it hides in-system, leaving its enemy thinking it’s gone through one of the holes.”
“So where would it hide?” Bailey asked. “You’re talking about a world the size of Earth’s Moon here.”
Sianna shrugged. “Hide in plain sight. Disguise itself as a normal planet. Hide inside the Dyson Sphere. For all we know, its interior is a whole maze, designed specifically to conceal the Lone World in time of danger. Who knows?”
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