The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “About five or ten,” Marcia said.

  “Then you didn’t see what I saw,” Larry said. “It all changed when Lucian led me up into the sky. I think the whole time I was with him he was looking for a way to do whatever it was he did then. But everything changed then. Before, it was a plain old TeleOperator setup. Very realistic and convincing, but I could tell I was in a simulation. And then… then Lucian took me into the sky and it was all different.”

  “Different how?” Marcia asked.

  “It was like… like the difference between a live performance and a recording. When you’re there, really there, there’s layers, subtleties of… presence, of being there, of touching, of being inside looking around rather than outside looking in. I don’t know. It felt like all my senses were brought together. Sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell all one. Maybe there was some sort of feedback through all the connections and electrodes that put me in synch with it. What you got as data bursts, I got as someone opening up my head and pouring information in.”

  “So what was the information?” Selby asked. “What the hell did you see?”

  “The Adversary,” Larry said. “The Enemy. The Charonians’ enemy. The thing that killed the Shattered Sphere, and wants to try and kill the Sphere that’s holding Earth.”

  Selby, Marcia and Vespasian exchanged glances with each other. “Look,” Vespasian said, his voice more than a little patronizing, “maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”

  “Maybe I’d better,” Larry said, a bit irritably. “In ten minutes. After I’ve had a chance to wash my face and get into some clothes. And someplace besides here, with you three clustered around my bed.”

  Marcia looked at her companions, a bit uncertainly. “All right,” she said. “There’s a conference room just down the hall. We’ll meet you there whenever you’re ready.”

  Selby seemed about to protest, but Marcia gestured for her to be quiet. “We’ll be outside,” Marcia said.

  Larry watched them go, more than a little surprised at himself. What had gotten into him? That was not the way he acted. But then it dawned on him. He remembered back to five years ago, to the way he and Lucian had bickered and argued. What had gotten into him, indeed.

  That was the way Lucian acted.

  Larry felt a little more settled—and quite literally more himself— when he came out and found the others in the conference room. It was rather satisfying to have the others being careful not to upset him again, treating him with a bit of fearful courtesy. It had clearly dawned on them that he had what they needed, and that bullying him might not be the best idea. They all got through an awkward series of pleasantries. Then Larry sat down at the head of the table, and started talking.

  “I got a lot more from Lucian. Maybe even more than I think. It was like he was whispering to me as he showed me what we all saw. That’s not quite accurate, because he still had a great deal of trouble talking—but I know he gave me much more than you got.”

  He hesitated for a moment, trying to decide how to start. “You have to go back a long time,” he said at last. “I don’t know how far back. I got a pretty good feel for shorter time spans, but time spans of any length get pretty tricky because—well, maybe you’ll see. It was millions of years ago, at any rate. Maybe five million, maybe a hundred and fifty million. The Charonians were already well established by then. They had spread across a large part of the galaxy, building their Spheres and collecting their worlds into Multisystems. Back then there was no fear and caution about them. They didn’t have anything to hide from.

  “All the Sphere systems were connected to each other by wormhole links, and the Spheres stayed in close contact with each other, trading worlds and life-forms and new information back and forth across the links. Maybe at the peak of it all, there was a network of a few thousand Spheres.”

  “So what happened then?” Marcia asked.

  “What happened was they discovered they weren’t the only ones using gravity and wormholes.”

  “These Adversaries you mentioned,” Selby suggested. “There’s only one of them,” Larry said. “It can subdivide itself and then remerge the divisions as it sees fit. Group and individual don’t mean much to it. But it can and does split up into as many bits as it likes.”

  “What do these bits look like?” Vespasian asked.

  “They’re spherical. They have to be. Usually a dirty grey in color, but that’s just debris that accumulates on the surface. They can be any size—but the ones that take on a Sphere might be the size of a CORE or an average asteroid.”

  “Why do they have to be spherical?” Marcia asked.

  “They’re pulled into that shape by the force of gravity,” Larry said. “They’re small, but they are extremely massive. I can’t say for sure, because it wasn’t in the memory store Lucian showed me, but I think they’re made out of strange matter, with densities comparable to neutron stars. A blob of Adversary the size of a large dog would outweigh a good-sized asteroid.”

  “Strange matter? What the bloody hell is strange matter?” Selby asked.

  “An alternative form of matter—or at least, an alternative form of heavy particles like protons and neutrons.”

  “Like antimatter?” Selby asked.

  “No, no, not at all like antimatter,” Marcia said. “Antimatter blows up if it touches matter, so it doesn’t last very long. Strange matter could exist perfectly well in our Universe—if it existed. And it sounds like it does.”

  “So why so dense?” Vespasian asked.

  “There are upper limits on the size of the atomic nucleus in normal matter,” Marcia said. “Anything much above uranium is unstable— it decays. In theory, there are no limits on the size of an atomic nucleus made up of strange quarks. You could have a strange atom with an atomic weight billions or trillions of times higher than in normal matter.”

  “But no one has ever seen strange matter, right?” Vespasian said.

  Marcia looked to Larry. “Not until now.”

  Larry sighed in frustration. “Look, I know it all sounds mad, but there it is. It’s true.”

  “This is what Lucian told you, or showed you,” Marcia said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true. He could be wrong, or insane, or you could have misunderstood.”

  “Or he could be exactly right,” Larry said, feeling a bit annoyed. “I know it seems impossible for something that small to attack the Charonians, but hear me out, all right?”

  Vespasian shrugged. “Five years ago, who would have believed that a monster inside the Moon was going to steal the Earth? You go on, Larry. Tell us.”

  “All right. Thank you. I don’t pretend to understand everything about it, but the Adversary is the key to it. It is capable of action, organized action, but I’m not even sure we’d consider it to be alive.”

  “What sort of action are you talking about?” Vespasian asked.

  Larry gave him a funny look. “Killing Spheres, of course.”

  “Wait a second,” Marcia protested. “How could a thing that small kill a Sphere?”

  “Look, let me tell this from the beginning and it might make more sense. We think the Charonians, the Spheres, evolved from some intelligent species, more or less like us, that sent out an automatic seedship programmed to modify the genetics of the life-forms it was carrying, adapting them to the planet it encountered—except the seedship took over, and the life-forms served it, and not the other way around. The Charonians merged biology and technology and guided their own development, their own evolution, until they got to the system of Spheres. As best I can understand it, the Adversary did the same thing, guided its own development. It’s as if… I don’t know… an amoeba, a very simple animal, evolved intelligence, and figured out how to make a new and better type of amoeba out of itself.”

  “But an amoeba is nowhere near complex enough to have anything remotely like intelligence,” Marcia protested. “All sorts of research demonstrates you need to reach a complexity threshold much
higher than you can get in a single cell before you have the capacity for intelligence. You can’t do it in one cell.”

  “Not if you build that cell out of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen. But the atoms building up this creature might each have more particles, more neutrons and protons, than there are atoms in an amoeba. The complexity is there, but it’s at the nuclear level.”

  “Wait a second,” Vespasian protested. “I thought Marcia said no one had ever detected strange matter. Where is this thing supposed to live?”

  “On a neutron star,” Larry said. “It evolved on the surface of it. Of course, on a neutron star, the gravity flattened it out of its spherical shape to a pancake shape.”

  “Oh, come off it!” Selby protested. “This is ridiculous. A giant one-celled pancake living on a neutron star? How the hell could such a thing come to be?”

  “By evolving—or developing, or whatever—inside a massive gravitational field, and knowing how to feed off it,” Larry said. “The Adversary uses gravitational fields the way we use electrochemical energy in our bodies. It gets its energy by manipulating gravity fields. Somehow—I don’t know how—I think it uses gravity to convert normal matter into strange matter. It builds new pieces of Adversary out of some of it, and the rest it uses as an energy source, somehow.”

  Marcia was thinking. “It all sounds a bit outlandish, but something killed that Shattered Sphere,” she said.

  “Even so, things would be a great deal easier for a species that was adapted to high gee. To us, a gravity field powerful enough to warp time and space is deadly, and nuclear physics takes place at a scale so small we can’t even see it. But to the Adversary, high gee is normal, and the atoms it deals with are so big they might even be visible to the naked human eye. It would be as if we could create a wormhole with, say, a five- or ten-gee field, or do genetic engineering with genes the size of children’s blocks. The threshold would be much lower.”

  “But the Charonians,” Selby insisted. “What do they have to do with the Charonians?”

  “The Charonians have a network of wormholes linking their various Spheres and systems,” Larry said. “The Adversary developed a similar network. It put together a wormhole link and locked onto another neutron star, and colonized it. And then another, and another. Both nets grew out from the center.”

  “My God,” Marcia said. “I get it. Now I get it. One side accidentally tapped into the other’s wormhole net.”

  “Right. Exactly,” Larry said. “But the thing to bear in mind is that the Charonians use high-gee fields and wormholes, but the Adversary lives in them, feeds off them. The Charonians use gravity very differently, but they make a living off gravity fields as well.

  “High-gee situations and wormholes are still dangerous to Charonians. They still have to be careful around them. In that respect, we have a lot more in common with the Charonians than the Adversary. At least Charonians and humans inhabit the same experiential universe. The normal place for a part of the Adversary to be is on the surface of a neutron star. To the Adversary, a wormhole is just like home.”

  “If you look at it that way, then the size difference doesn’t matter, either,” Marcia said, “any more than it does in a fight between a swarm of crop-eating locusts and a group of humans trying to chase them off.”

  “What’s a locust?” Vespasian asked. Apparently, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time on Earth.

  “A voracious insect,” Marcia said. “Be glad they never got to the Moon. Millions of them would descend on a field and eat it bare in a day. They were adapted to a certain sort of environment, and if they found that environment, they took it and used it. It didn’t matter to them that humans created the crop field, or would want to use it for themselves. Crop fields were the ideal environment for locusts. They were better designed to exploit them than the humans who planted the fields. The locusts would gobble up the whole field, and the farmers couldn’t stop them.”

  “But that only works if you have millions of locusts that can overwhelm by sheer force of numbers,” Selby protested. “We only saw one bit of Adversary in that video sequence.”

  “One is all it takes. You saw the one that got through. The Adversary would force open a wormhole and enter a Sphere system as a single large entity. As soon as it was in, it would split up into hundreds of smaller units. Some would run interference and be destroyed by the Charonians. But only one Adversary bit had to make it all the way. It didn’t matter if the rest get killed, because they’re all the same.”

  “And one of them—just one—is able to kill a Sphere?”

  “Just one,” Larry said. “The best way to stop them is to kill the parent just as it enters the Sphere’s system through the wormhole, before it can split-breed. The way to kill the parent is to throw a planet at it. Adversary units are tough, and the big parent ones are tougher. Only the kinetic energy of a whole planet moving at relativistic speed can kill a large Adversary. Smash into it at a good fraction of light speed and you’ll destroy the Adversary—and the planet. The Adversary will penetrate most of the way to the planet’s core before it’s destroyed. The Charonians kill one planet to save all the others. Acceptable losses. Half a loaf. Sound familiar?” Larry smiled at his own unfunny gallows humor.

  “Larry, there’s something more,” Marcia said. “Something else you’re not telling us. Lucian wouldn’t have worked so hard to get you all this information unless it did more than clear up a mystery or two. It’s nice to know who the Charonians are afraid of, but we don’t need to know it.”

  “No, no, we don’t need to know all that. But… but…” Larry turned his head away and looked at the wall. How to say it matter-of-factly? How to get them to believe? “What we do need to know is the geometry of the Sphere system the Earth is in.

  “When the Adversary comes for you, it comes through a wormhole link. And there is an Adversary coming for the system the Earth is in. That’s what terrified the Charonians, set them into a panic. Somehow, it was the movement of Earth into that system that attracted the Adversary’s attention. It’s heading for the wormhole link with Earth. It might try for some other entry to the system, but the link it’s most likely to come through is the one nearest Earth.

  “And when a Charonian Sphere needs to throw a planet at an Adversary, it generally uses the closest one to hand.”

  Twenty-two

  Recalled to Life

  “Source Matter: Dreyfuss Contact record

  “Procedure: Thematically Keyed Recursive Adversary/Charonian Translation Routine, Pass #45,234 of 45,234. Certainty Level circa 75 percent.

  “Note: All Adversary units of measure and number recast to rough scalar equivalents in standard units. However, the accuracy of these approximations remains variable and highly uncertain. Furthermore, relativistic effects, induced by both massive acceleration and gravitational effects, make measurement comparisons and conversions even more problematic.

  “We/I are the One. All touches each, and each, All. Time is our/my domain, space our/my prison.

  “We/I travel up and down the milliseconds(?) and seconds(?) and the far-spanning hours(?) at will, and all times are as one to us/me. At need, we/I can send some of ourselves/myself into the transitways to times more distant still, to both past and future.

  “But shall we/I boast of our/my current power, when once we/I sent ourself across duration-distances far longer? In truth, now are our/my transits short.

  “Once were our/my sojourns in the paths of duration great, yet in this epoch we/I may venture but feebly to the domains of othertime(?) and other-place(?). The distortions of masslessness in the other, lesser, dimensions hem us/me in, and keep us/me held close to our/my home at Allcenter, and our/my past ways of venturing are lost.

  “The dark masslessness warps duration itself. In that cold and dark [domain?], time rushes by at such terrifying velocities that to venture but briefly into it is to risk loss of synchrony with the All, beyond all hope of recovery. [Darktime?] f
lares past a thousand, a million, times faster than does time in its natural state, shattering all links between the sojourner and the All, diminishing each of us that are linked into one.

  “Yet in time far behind, far behind even as time is reckoned in the Dark, it was/is not so.

  “In the beginning, deep in the [far back?] we/I [refined itself?] from the cold and ghastly chaos of the massless nether reaches and gathered close to Allcenter. This we/I did a full galactic rotation from the Now, a duration-distance so mighty that none of us/ me could attempt a transit a thousandth so far without dooming the All. [Farback?] and [gonelong?] is the beginning, beyond all reach.

  “We/I came to be, and came to growing. Long was the slowtime as we/I bred ourself, spreading across the surface and duration of Allcenter.

  “Until the others came, with their questings and probings and jostling gravity waves, seeking to [subsume?] Allcenter into their web of space. But it was we/I who [subsumed?] them.

  “Beyond all understanding, beyond All comprehension, they were and are and shall be. But great was the treasure of [power?] and [transit?] we/I took from them.

  “Until they escaped. Deep was our loss and great our weakening. Grown great upon the energies of the others, the All lost all it had gained, and more beyond. Weak and low was our/my state. Long did we/I [search for them?] in all the transit links.

  “And now we/I have found them again.”

  —Heritage Memory Transcript, Contact Archives, Journal of the Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station, 2431

  Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station

  The Moon

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  “Good afternoon,” Larry said, looking out over the auditorium—a rather grand name for the rather scruffy-looking hall, but it was the only room at the station that could hold everyone, and everyone wanted to hear this. “We’ve come a long way very quickly, and I thought it would be smart to bring the whole team together to talk it through. The leads Lucian Dreyfuss provided have given us some guidance and some clues into what we should be looking for.