The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “I agree completely,” Dianne said. “Your imaginary control center could cover as much area as Earth’s surface and still get lost on something that big. And what would it look like? What would we be searching for? And while we’re searching that Sphere, what are the people who run the Sphere going to be doing?”

  There was the faintest flicker of a smile on Wolf’s face. “I see that you are already behaving as a captain should. Protecting your command. Very well. How would you use the Terra Nova!”

  Dianne thought for a long moment and then spoke, choosing her words carefully. “I would explore a sampling of the worlds and stars in the Multisystem, perhaps gradually working in toward the Dyson Sphere itself—if we learned enough to give the Sphere mission some hope of success that would justify the risk. I would do everything I could to avoid risks to the ship or her personnel. I’d be extremely conservative about landings—and I’d run like hell if I was challenged.”

  “And what would you do if I ordered you to do it my way?” Wolf asked. “What if I drafted you into the service of the DSI they’ve cooked up, and ordered you to head straight for the Sphere?”

  Dianne shrugged. If the man wanted to ask hypothetical questions… “A captain in space is the absolute master of her ship, particularly as regards the safety of the ship and crew. I’d do it my way. Legally, I don’t know who’d be right. But as a practical matter, the Terra Nova was designed to take longer trips than this without help from Earth. You couldn’t do anything to stop me.”

  Bernhardt grinned and looked up at Gerald, then back to Dianne. “I like this. I always appreciate a little ambiguity in circumstances. I find it brings out the best in people. As I’m sure it will in Gerald here. I’ve just decided to make him second-in-command as well as chief scientist.”

  Gerald blinked and stood up straight. “What?”

  “It only makes sense,” Wolf said smoothly. “After all, the main concern of this mission will be the research of extraterrestrial life, specifically the creatures that have done this to Earth. And you are an exobiologist. You have thought on all these matters. Besides, as we’ve just seen, the two of you clearly think alike.”

  “But I know nothing of ship handling, or navigation, or anything related to running a spacecraft. If anything happened to Dianne—”

  “Then I suggest you see to it that nothing does happen to Dianne until you have learned all those things. We have no time for all the precautions we should take. We need data now. And what Dianne Steiger will need from you is advice.”

  Wolf turned his attention back to Dianne. “Very well, Captain Steiger. I hereby draft you into the service of the Directorate of Spatial Investigation and appoint you master of the starship Terra Nova, with orders to proceed directly for the Dyson Sphere. Have a pleasant trip. Our lawyers will have a nice fight when you get back.”

  He leaned back over his desk, checked off one more item on his list of things to do, and got on with his work, leaving Dianne and Gerald to find their own way out.

  * * *

  NaPurHab, the Naked Purple Habitat, was the scene of bedlam, but that was nothing new. It was routine bedlam, the usual chaos. Ohio Template Windbag had an idea that many among the brothersandsisters (“blisters,” in the latest approved parlance, though many were holding out for “sisthers,” or perhaps “sibsters,” instead) didn’t even know something farout had happened.

  Ohio sat in the graffiti-splattered comm and control room, behind Chelated Noisemaker Extreme. Ohio’s eyes were fixed on the main monitor. He stared at the image of the Big Ring, hands wrapped around the wide girth of his belly.

  Even before the Earth had done its little dance, taking NaPurHab with it, NaPurHab had ridden a rather eccentric orbit, figure-eighting between Earth and Moon, swinging close over each world before flying out to the other. It wasn’t all that stable an orbit for a habitat, and NaPurHab had always needed a lot of course corrections. It had been about the only orbit slot in the Earth-Moon system open to a habitat when the old owners of the hab had built the thing, long before the Purples took it over.

  NaPurHab had been close to Earth, just about to swing around the planet and head back toward the Moon, when the Big Jump had gone down. The first pass over the Big Ring hadn’t been that bad. Scary and low, and that was one weird thing to fly over, but the run was double-you slash oh incident. Still, it had been nice to get away from the alien Big Ring, and swing back toward the familiar— if sinfully life-corrupted—face of Earth.

  But all good things come to an end, and the pass over Earth was done with now. NaPurHab was headed back out to where the Moon oughta be, out toward the Big Ring. And therein was the flaw. NaPurHab’s orbit had gotten a bit more jostled than anyone had thought. On this second pass, NaPurHab was going to go inside the Big Ring.

  Worse, NaPurHab would strike the Earth on the return trip, just north of Johannesburg. Not good. And Earth wasn’t in much position to help there. The Mom planet had her own probs at the moment, to put it mildly—and NaPurHab had never done much to make itself popular to groundhogs. After all, the whole Earthside crazies movement had sprouted from NaPurHab, and the whole farging point of the crazies was to cheese off the normals.

  No, never mind help what couldn’t come in time no-how: privately, at least, Ohio couldn’t blame the Earthsquares for nuking NaPurHab if it came to that. NaPurHab would be a goner anyway. Why flatten a chunk of southern Africa too? Given a choice between Jo-Berg and NaPurHab, the answer came back as about twenty kilotons rocketed into the collective Purple keister. Of course, in his public capacity of Maximum Windbag, Ohio would have to come down hard on Earth for the dastardly deed. Better do it beforehand, tho, cause there weren’t gonna be a chance on the flipside. Best to hope that Chelated could pull this one out.

  “So, Chelated, talk to me,” Ohio said. “We got the gas in tank for the gig?” They could have had their talk in straight English, but the former Frank Barlow needed the practice in Purpspeak. It was a key precept of the Purple philosophy that Humpty Dumpty was right: the speaker, and not the words spoken, should be the master. But even for a temporary contract employee, the man’s grasp of the lingo was pretty bad. Too logical a mind, or something.

  Ohio could see the man moving his lips, parsing out his response to himself before answering. “Not even close, Bossmeister. Nothing like the fuel to be cool and raise the Earthside half of the ride.” Not bad, Ohio thought. For Purpspeak, that was fair, if a little too readily understandable.

  “Then we dead, Ned?” Ohio asked.

  Chelated had to think again. “Be steady, Teddy. We got one other set of dice to roll. We got the gas, barely, to lay down an orbit inside the Big Ring.”

  “Inside? We dunno even what the hell izzat the center of the Ring.”

  “Hell, bossman, something at the center has mass, fershure. Even if we can’t see it. Uhh… we got those unwhiteblue flashes coming from it every hundred twenty-eight seconds. And they’s some kinda big herd o‘ unheard of thangs, big dude thangs, nearly the size of the habitat, in damnclose close orbit of the blueflasher at the center. They moving plentydamnscary quick. And after every blueflash, they’s one less big dude around the blueflasher.”

  “Say what? Oh, the hell with it, Frank, switch to English. You’re giving me a headache.”

  Chelated/Frank breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Walter. I’ve got one already. What I was trying to say was that there is definitely something at the center.”

  “Just how big a mass?”

  “Well, I derived that from our own motion. The blueflasher weighs just about as much as the Moon. Pretty wild for something so small we can’t even see it through the big telescopes.”

  “And the ‘big dude thangs’? What does that translate to?”

  Frank shrugged. “Actually, that’s as good a name as any. Large objects, roughly the size of this habitat, several hundred of them, moving very fast in very close orbit around the blueflasher at the center. Beats the hell out of me what
they are. But after every flash, the tracking computer says there’s one less of them. Like the large objects are going into the blueflasher. Or through it.”

  Ohio/Walter sighed and wished for the old days, back when he was teaching high school in Columbus, and not trying to keep ten thousand yahoos alive inside a tin can in space. Things were bad when setting up a close orbit around a wormhole was the solution to a problem. Better to pretend it wasn’t true. Lying to himself beat going crazy. “Frank, I’m a reasonable man, so I know you’re not trying to tell me what you seem to be trying to tell me. I refuse to believe in wormholes. But circularize us around the centerpoint anyway. If you think that’s our best shot.”

  “With the fuel we’ve got, it’s our only shot,” Frank said, a bit worriedly. “I don’t see any other way of getting into a safe orbit.”

  “ ‘Safe.’ You suggest putting us in orbit around the wormhole or black hole or whatever it is that I refuse to believe in—that thing that’s where the Moon should be. You suggest putting us in orbit inside the circumference of the Big Ring. And you call it ‘safe.’ ” Ohio Template Windbag shook his head sadly. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about your command of Purpspeak. Obviously you can make a word do whatever you want it to do.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Shattered Sphere

  Coyote Westlake had remembered a lesson of her childhood back in Nevada: live with what you could not change. Her bizarre predicament was now routine. She was trapped without a ship or a radio aboard an asteroid that was accelerating smoothly to absurdly high velocities by means she could not understand. She had even gotten used to it all, even used to the impossibility of it all.

  Up until a few days ago, space had made sense. She had known the rules. She was a rock miner. She tracked down smaller asteroids, rocks too small to interest the big-time boys. She bored through the rocks, refined whatever metals and volatiles she could find on the spot, and hauled her refined goods back to make a sale. She had some fun on Ceres or one of the big habs, and then back out again. It was a stable, understandable life.

  The world surrounding her was equally understandable. The asteroids moved in predictable patterns, and she knew how to keep her ship ticking, knew she would die if she got it wrong, knew how to play a dicker with the traders. It was simple.

  Back on Earth, that had never been true of her world. Hell, she had never been sure who or even what she was. Never sure if she was completely human, natural born, a woman who just got born ugly; or if she was a bioengineered “upgrade” that didn’t quite work out. Big boned, too tall, her too-white face too hard edged.

  Maybe her parents were a pair of drifters who dumped her on the creche steps—or maybe instead of parents mere was a lab somewhere that did the same after the technicians realized they had blended the genes wrong. She had held all the Nevada jobs—prostitute, card dealer, con grifter, divorce lawyer—and had never been happy. The freaks of Earth generally, and of Las Vegas specifically, disturbed her. L. V. Freestate drew them all: Cyborgs, Purples, head-clears, twominders. They all started to get to her, because she was never quite sure if she was one of them.

  Out here, she still didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She was herself. Taking care of herself. Even if that was a mite tricky in the present circumstances.

  She had worked as well as she could with the limited hardware aboard the tank—as she now thought of the hab shelter. She spent her days at the bottom of a cylinder five meters across and fifteen meters high, and was determined at least to make her situation as tolerable as she could. She had gotten her bunk off the ceiling and put it on the floor. She’d rigged lines and ropes so she could climb up to the control panel, and had reset all the restraints and handholds to allow her to move more easily.

  The trickiest job was reprogramming the hab’s tiny position-reporter computer to provide her with tracking data. She felt a real need to keep at least a rough track of where the hell she was going. If she was doing her crude astrogation right, and assuming a constant acceleration and turnaround halfway there, RA45 was headed straight for Mars.

  She still had not the faintest idea as to why this was happening. Who was doing this? Toward what goal? And how? She had rigged her exterior-view camera on the longest cable she could manage and spooled the cable out far enough for the camera to give her a view of the asteroid’s aft end, trying to get a look at the engines that were doing this.

  But there were no engines, there was nothing at all back there. Just more rock. Damn it, something was accelerating this rock. If the something wasn’t outside the rock, it had to be inside the asteroid, somehow. But then how was the acceleration even happening? A rocket inside the rock couldn’t work. That meant a reactionless drive.

  Enough of the anything-for-a-buck Las Vegas Free-state tradition had stuck with her that it occurred to her, even in her current predicament, that a reactionless drive ought to be worth something.

  That, and the risk of madness by boredom, were enough to set her to work trying to solve the puzzle. She took her first crack at it by sitting and thinking. This drive seemed to have some attributes of a rocket, and some attributes of a gravity field. Like a rocket, it obviously could be started and presumably stopped at will. Like gravity, it worked without throwing mass in one direction to move in another.

  But gravity couldn’t be pointed in one direction—it radiated out spherically from the center of a mass.

  But if the whole rock were simply falling forward under the influence of some sort of external gravity field, her body would have been pulled along by the gee field precisely as much as the asteroid itself. The relative acceleration between herself and the asteroid would be exactly zero—in other words, she should have been in free-fall, effectively in zero gee.

  But she was in a very definite five-percent field. Or was it five? That was still just a guess. There had to be a way to measure it.

  What was accelerating her? A magic rocket that didn’t need propellant or fuel or nozzles, or magic gravity you could point in any direction?

  She sat there on the bottom of her tank and worried at the puzzle, perfectly aware of what she was really doing: struggling to keep her mind off another little problem. No matter how the propulsion system worked, she was going to be in a hell of a mess when this rock piled into Mars.

  * * *

  Chancellor Daltry was demonstrating a fair talent for running tight meetings, Larry decided. Things were moving right along.

  And Larry was also getting the very clear impression that Daltry was going to be the one making the final decisions here.

  “I now call on Dr. Marcia MacDougal,” the chancellor said. “We have heard some stunning facts today, but I believe Dr. MacDougal can match them. I had the opportunity to talk with her before the meeting, and I must say that she has come up with some remarkable results. Dr. MacDougal.”

  Larry watched the wiry, ebony-skinned woman stand and cross to the audiovisual controls at the far end of the room. She was plainly nervous. “Thank you, Chancellor. I’ve made what I think might be a real breakthrough—but I don’t know what it all means. I know this will sound backwards, but I think it might be best if I start at the end, and then jump back to the beginning and work my way forward.”

  She plugged a datablock into place and punched a few buttons. The lights dimmed and an image appeared in the air over the table. A massive sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the air, spinning slowly. Larry frowned and stared at it. A red dwarf star? But why so dim? And why were its edges so well defined?

  Then he noticed faint lines etched into the surface of the object, barely visible against the dark background. “Could you enhance those surface lines a bit?” he asked. Marcia worked the controls and the lines brightened.

  “Longitude and latitude,” someone in the darkness said.

  “That’s what I thought, at first,” Marcia said. “It’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.”

  “What the hell are we looking a
t?” Lucian’s voice asked.

  “A movie,” MacDougal replied. “A three-dee, alien movie. What it’s a film of, I don’t know. Watch for a moment.”

  Suddenly the sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the sphere’s interior and vanished out of the frame. The sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface.

  The image blanked, and then the sphere reappeared, unbroken and whole. “The sequence loops at that point,” Marcia said. “It was repeated at least a hundred times, far more often than any other message unit. That suggests to me that whatever that showed us was damned important to the Charonians.”

  “To the who?” Larry asked.

  Marcia shrugged. “The aliens. I had to name them something. The Ring of Charon was what woke them up, so Charonians seemed as good as anything.”

  “Where did these images come from?” Raphael asked.

  “From the wormhole,” Marcia replied. “It was sent, as a binary-code signal, by whatever is on the other side of the wormhole. And I’m sorry, Hiram, but I’m convinced that’s what the Earthpoint mass is. I don’t know who or what on this end is supposed to see it.”

  “How was it sent?” Lucian asked.

  “Forty-two-centimeter radio signals, sent in burst patterns. Answering the twenty-one-centimeter signal coming from the Moon.”