“What?” Larry jumped to his feet. “What the hell gives you the right to—”
“Nothing gives me the right!” Marcia spun around, looked him straight in the eye, her face set and determined. “But this discovery gives us the chance. We are in a war, Larry. The last battle we fought ended five years ago, with our enemy’s forces wiped out here in the Solar System and the Earth held hostage. Call that one a draw, because both sides lost a lot more than they won. God knows what battles Earth has fought on its own since then.
“But we here in the Solar System have been losing ground every day since that fight. You know that. The Moon is the strongest of all the surviving worlds, but things here just keep getting a little worse every day. We took too much damage, too many casualties, to be fully self-sufficient. Always more power cuts and shortages and rationing and making-do without. Perhaps some day we’ll get down to a low enough level that things will stabilize—or perhaps we’ll just keep going down and down without ever noticing when it’s too late. I don’t want things to end up that way. I want to fight back.”
“Against who?” Larry asked. “Lucian?”
“No, of course not,” she said, lowering her voice, the moment of anger gone. Her hands were trembling, and she folded her arms tight against her body to hide it. “Against the Charonians. Against the Sphere and the bloody Multisystem that’s got Earth. But what’s left of Lucian Dreyfuss just might be the best weapon we’ve ever had against them.”
Larry looked from one woman to the other. “What kind of weapon is a man who might as well be dead? What can he do for you?”
“Maybe, just maybe, he can get us information,” Selby said in a very quiet voice. “Information straight from the dead horse’s mouth.”
“God damn it, stop babbling in riddles. Tell me what you’re talking about!”
“The Wheel, that’s what we’re talking about,” Selby said. “All the data that’s locked up in the Wheel. Half my skills are in information retrieval. Marcia and I have both spent five years working on ways to get through to the Wheel’s Heritage Memory. It ought to contain the accumulated memory of all the previous generations of Charonians.”
“The Wheel is dead,” Larry said. “How could its memory be intact?”
“It’s not dead, it’s off. Yes, what we would regard as the living portions of it are so badly damaged as to be irreparable, but the Wheel was almost entirely electronic and mechanical. The machine portion is only turned off, so to speak. The trouble is, we haven’t been able to find the switch. Until now.”
“Go on,” Larry said, deeply suspicious. “What’s different now?”
“Lucian is different,” Marcia said. “I told you we were detecting brain activity in a body that hasn’t had any metabolic activity in five years. His brain should have died, suffered irreversible harm, four minutes after his heart stopped pumping blood, five years ago. But it didn’t. Somehow it is being sustained, and we are reasonably certain that reason has to do with the neural links attached to his head.”
“The tendrils.”
“Exactly, more or less,” Selby said. She polished off the rest of her drink in one swig. “We can detect a lot of—activity—in the links. Of what sort, we don’t know. Perhaps the Wheel was in the midst of taking down a copy of everything in Lucian’s brain at the moment the Wheel died, and the connection stayed open. We just don’t know, to echo the bloody chorus of the day. But the activity is repetitive, as if he is thinking the same thing over and over again, in extreme slow motion. The basic theory is that whatever was on his mind at the time they put him in there is still on his mind.
“But we have established that the connections through those— well, I suppose tendrils is as good a word as any—that those connections are two-way. Information going both ways, to and from Lucian, to and from the Wheel. Somehow, in some way, whatever part of Lucian’s brain that is functional is in conversation with the Charonians.”
“We’ve studied those tendrils very carefully,” Marcia said, struggling to keep her voice steady, trying not to think about what they were asking this man to do. She forced herself to look Larry Chao straight in the eye. “We know exactly where the tendrils are positioned. One of them seems to be linked straight into Broca’s area— one of the key speech centers in the brain. Another seems to connect into the optic nerve. We think we can hook into it. If Lucian Dreyfuss is still there, and sane, to at least some degree, we can take advantage of that, using off-the-shelf medical technology to reconnect sight and hearing. We should be able to tap into the tendrils, and pump sight and sound stimuli right to him. That part is standard virtual reality stuff. The technology is doable—but the psychology is tricky.”
“What psychology?” Larry asked.
“Lucian Dreyfuss was kidnapped by monsters,” Selby said. “He was then put into suspended animation, and is now exhibiting brain activity. It seems reasonable that he has had low-level brain activity for all that time. He has been in a place of darkness and terror, paralyzed, unable to move or breathe or speak, for five years. His time sense should have slowed with everything else, and that might have saved him, made that five years seem like a few hours or days or weeks. If he is in some analog of REM sleep, it might seem to be nothing more than a bad dream to him. Or it might not. He might have spent five years in a living nightmare.”
“We must assume that he is insane,” Marcia said, “or at the very least in a very tenuous mental state.”
“But?” Larry asked. “It sounds like there is a but in all this.”
“But we think that we should be able to revive him to some degree, if we can reach him.” She swallowed hard and forced herself to say the rest of it. “Our best shot would be contact with someone who knows him. We think someone who knew Lucian—someone Lucian knew—might be able to get through to him. That person could then guide him into the Wheel’s Heritage Memory. Lucian would then be able to tell us… tell us any number of things. But it will have to be someone that Lucian knew, and trusted. Someone he won’t be afraid of when he appears in a nightmare.”
Larry looked from one woman to the other, neither of them willing to return his gaze. “What the hell are you saying?” he demanded.
“Bloody hell,” Selby said, emptying the dregs of the bottle into her glass. “It’s perfectly simple, love. We were just wondering if you’d mind terribly much being hooked up to some ghoulish hardware, with all sorts of clever little wires coming out of it and stuck into those tendrils coming out of Lucian. We’d use a virtual reality system to insert you into his sight and hearing, and then you could have a lovely, lovely chat with him.”
She lifted her glass and emptied it in one swallow before looking at him, her face haggard and drawn. “We’d like you to help us violate your friend’s corpse,” she said, all the masks and playfulness gone, nothing left in her voice but loathing and disgust. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
Four
The Autocrat Arrives
“Not so long ago, the Autocrat of Ceres, aside from his official position as the ruler of the minor planet Ceres, was the de facto head of state and sovereign leader of the entire Asteroid Belt, home to the smallest and most dispersed population in the Solar System. However, the Charonians killed so many people on the larger worlds, and forced so many refugees into the Belt, that the Asteroid Belt might now well have the largest aggregate population of any of the surviving geopolitical units in the Solar System.
“No one knows for sure. The Charonians left chaos in their wake, and the Belt was of course famous for being chaotic long before the Charonians awoke. Even before the Abduction, the population of the Belt was so dispersed—and cantankerous—that it was hard to get even a rough idea of how many people lived there.”
—Kings of Infinite Space—A History of the Cerean Autocracy by Jerta Melsan
Hera Dwellmod Press, 2468
Aboard the Autarch
In Transit from Ceres to Plutopoint
June 12, 2431
“June twelfth, 2431,” he began. “Nineteen days out from Titan, the ship now almost completely decelerated. Assuming constant boost, we will arrive at Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon this afternoon. I find that I have had much time for quiet reflection on this long journey—perhaps too much. I must admit that the rather austere circumstances of my travel are in some ways a pleasure. I do not miss the company of my usual retinue, for example, and the ceremonies of state dinners can become most tiresome.
“But it has been a long journey to Pluto—or rather, to where Pluto once was. It is hard to escape one’s own thoughts in such quiet and tranquil surroundings. The crew knows I wish privacy, and grants it to me.
“I find that I am paying less and less attention to my everyday work as it is radioed in to me from Ceres. I handle it all, but not with the relentless attention demanded of me at my court. Somehow the cases recede in importance as the distance between myself and home grows greater. But it is part of the task of the Autocrat to know when to step outside the everyday. Should my people rely too much on my presence to adjudicate and execute the laws, they would fail to rely on themselves. It is part of my duty not to do my duty too well. The Autocracy is meant as a counterweight to the Belt’s anarchy—not as a replacement for it. Neither must become too strong.
“It is not that I neglect my duties, but rather that I view them in a different way. The journals and diaries of my predecessors make it clear that the tradition of the Autocrat’s Progress was established precisely to expand the Autocrat’s horizons, alter the worldview of the Autocrat, and so it is with myself.
“Every artist should, now and again, step back from the day-to-day work on this detail or that, and examine the whole canvas. There is an art to governance, of that I have no doubt. More so under the Autocracy than other forms of government, I think. I govern by what I might do, or what I do not do, as much as by direct action.
“And so I step back and think over, not Xeg Mortoi’s accusation of claim-jumping against his wife, but the circumstances of all humankind, and my place in them.
“I now understand more fully why I chose to take this trip at a time when I would be away from Ceres on the fifth terrestrial anniversary of Abduction Day. It is now time to stop mourning that catastrophe and to stop living with it as a part of the present. Now it must be accepted as part of the past. Now we must move forward, toward the future.”
Pleased with the entry, the Autocrat closed the autoscribe and stepped to his compartment’s single small porthole to look upon the unchanging stars. Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were close now, very close, even if he could not see them from this port.
The Autocrat had a subtle and important agenda at Plutopoint. He had to prevent the Ring from coming under his control. Forces were combining to make it likely to happen, but Belt control of the Ring of Charon might well be the first step in producing far too great a concentration of power—political, technical, and economic—in the Solar System.
A Solar System dominated by Ceres would be unstable, ungovernable. Centralizing sufficient power to control the entire Solar System would require a tremendous investment in the tools of control. The Autocracy would be forced to become more powerful, too powerful, if it were to survive. It would have to deal in massive repression and control. The forces of anarchy would, quite inevitably, grow in power as well, forcing the Autocracy to respond. Terrorism, rebellion, and war could well be the final result. A classic case of the crisis of empire. No, the Autocracy—and the Autocrat—dared not become mightier than they were.
But how to force others to remain independent? How to use one’s power to prevent the absorption of further power?
A pretty question. A very pretty question indeed.
But there were hopeful signs. The Ring was in the process of becoming a more powerful place. The Autocrat needed to find some way of using the enemy’s strength against the Autocrat.
An interesting challenge.
The Ring of Charon Command Station
Plutopoint (Orbital Position of Destroyed Pluto-Charon System)
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Sondra Berghoff stood—or, more accurately, floated—at the entrance to the airlock, waiting, more than a bit nervously, for no less a personage than the Autocrat of Ceres himself. The Autocrat was a him, wasn’t it? No, wait a second. A woman. She remembered seeing a picture in a news report. No, that had been some history article, about the last Autocrat but two. Well, the office was supposed to be depersonalized, to be held by someone willing to subsume all private concerns to the needs of justice and the good of the Belt. Or something. She had never followed Asteroid Belt politics or history that carefully.
Which was too bad, as a big dose of both was just about to be dumped in her lap. The Autocrat wanted to get a look at the Ring of Charon—and at Sondra.
Sondra didn’t like that aspect of the situation, either. Five years ago she had gotten a lifetime supply of notoriety. The theft of the Earth was a defining moment in everyone’s life. Fine, so be it—but Sondra had no desire for her role in those events to be all there was to her life, the one thing that summed her up.
She remembered her long-dead Great-uncle Sanchez. He had died at an advanced age when she was a child. A century before, Sanchez had been a teenager, working odd jobs at this station and that on the Moon.
Uncle Sanchez had been one of the last ones to evacuate Farside Station, just before that mispiloted asteroid piled into it and turned lunar history upside down. But Sondra did not remember Uncle Sanchez as a witness to history, but as a boring old man who told the same stories over and over again, who spent his adult and elder years focused on the single day, the single moment of his youth, when he had happened to stumble, quite by accident, into the sweep of great events.
Uncle Sanchez had belonged to any number of clubs and organizations dedicated to researching and remembering the great impact. He had told his eyewitness account of that day so often Sondra could recite it from memory.
He had kept a fifty-kilo lump of rock in his living room, and told anyone who came within a kilometer of the place that it was the largest intact fragment of the asteroid.
A month after he died, his widow, Aunt Sally, lived up to her reputation for being unsentimental. Tired of having her front parlor cluttered up, she had the reputed asteroid fragment dumped out into the back yard, and good riddance. Somehow, Sondra had always thought of the big rock as being Uncle Sanchez, picked up and heaved out.
No thank you. Not for her. Okay, maybe she had been a witness to history. Maybe she had even been a part of history. She had no desire to bore generations of relatives and strangers telling the same story over and over again.
And yet here she was, being trotted out as a curiosity, a historical artifact to be examined by an important visitor.
Besides which, she was not at all sure she wanted to meet the Autocrat of Ceres. If Simon Raphael were still alive, he would have gotten stuck with this duty—and done a better job of it as well. But he had died in his sleep two years before, and thanks to her damned notoriety Sondra had been appointed the new director of the Gravities Research Station.
What sort of person had a title but not a name, anyway? It must be one hell of a job if you had to give up your name in order to take it. And why did they do that, anyway? Sondra knew she could get every boring detail of the boring tradition if she asked the right person, or if she trolled through the right datastore, but there wasn’t any point. The Autocrat giving up his name was a bizarre and inexplicable tradition. Any purported explanation of it would merely serve to paper over the fact that it made no se
nse.
There was a clunk and a thud and a whir from the other side of the airlock and Sondra moved forward just a trifle. But no, there was always that moment when the lock seemed as if it were about to open, and then the inexplicable delay while everyone waited for something or other. It seemed likely to Sondra that such unexplained pauses had been going on long before there were airlocks, that there was always that gap of a few minutes between things seeming ready and really being ready.
What was he doing here, anyway? The common room had been buzzing with speculation for weeks. He was just here on a tour of inspection, someone would say, a traditional Autocrat’s Progress. But then someone would point out that such progresses were normally confined to those places that recognized the Autocrat’s authority. He was coming here to lay claim to the station in the name of the Asteroid Belt. He wanted to take over the Graviton project. He was just here as a tourist. He had a secret plan to use the Ring as some sort of superweapon—against whom and on whose behalf was not clear.
The airlock swung open, and the Great Man—he was a man, after all—floated through the lock door, moving himself along rather neatly on the guidebars set into the bulkhead. He was short and pale-skinned, his face sharp-featured, his sand-colored hair cut bottle-brush short. He had a somewhat prominent nose and his mouth fell naturally into a rather disapproving frown. And yet his eyes had some glimmer of lightness and humor in their grey gaze. He was dressed in a dark grey, loose-fitting tunic and baggy black pants— comfortable and practical. He wore no insignia or pendant or ring of office that Sondra could see. He had no need to put his power, his authority, on display.
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