Suddenly, a great feeling of peace settled over her. Gerald was all right. She found herself quite abruptly believing that, knowing it. Strange as it seemed, Earth was in very good hands, well cared for. Whoever had taken the planet had placed it in a carefully perfect orbit, reproduced its original tides and solar radiation to within three decimal places.
Marcia rubbed her tired eyes. Marcia had yet to rest since the first news from Earth had flashed across the Solar System. The first wave of hopeful excitement had faded long ago, to be replaced by utter bafflement. The new data from Earth merely confused the situation even more.
There was a noise from the other side of the room. Marcia looked up to see Sondra, rolling over in her sleep, caught inside a dream.
The screen dimmed, flared, cleared. Somehow Sondra was watching the display and in it at the same time, watching a readout of her own mind, watching the results of watching the readout, which were caused by the readout.
Feedback. Her mind echoed, shifted places, split into two. Now half of her was Charonian, a scorpion robot. But no, a real scorpion, grown huge, its stinging tail swiveling toward her as the monster stepped through the fun-house mirror that was all that remained of the video screen—
Sondra groaned, raised her hands, rolled over—and fell off of the cot. Hitting the floor woke her, but just barely. She lay there, all but inert, for a long moment, before summoning the energy to move.
She looked up to see Marcia trying to hide a smile.
“Good morning, or evening, or whatever the hell it is,” Sondra said in a growly voice.
“Dead of night, I think,” Marcia said.
Sondra got up carefully, trying to unwrap the sheet that had tangled itself around her legs, feeling decidedly foolish. “Just like the bad old days in grad school,” she said, mostly for the sake of something to say. “Pump the brain full of facts, stumble someplace to sleep, and then semi-reawaken to write the term paper. Should I go somewhere else to work?”
Marcia smiled. “No need. I’m stuck myself at the moment. You can’t disturb thoughts that aren’t happening. What have you got so far?”
Sondra smiled. Nice of Marcia to ask. But then Marcia was nice. Much nicer than Sondra would ever be—or would ever want to be. She went over to her own desk on the far side of the room, sat down at her terminal and picked up her notes. “Some extremely weird stuff,” she said. “The exobiology labs came up with something big while you were out. Inside every one of the creatures they’ve examined, they’ve found not only Earth-type DNA, but at least three other incompatible, nonterres-trial genetic-coding systems. Which means the Charoni-ans’ ancestors—or at least the ancestors of whoever engineered them—visited Earth and stole samples of DNA, and did the same on at least three other life-bearing worlds.” Sondra looked up at Marcia. “That scary enough for you?”
“Oh, yes,” Marcia said, clearly too stunned by the words to say anything more.
Sondra couldn’t blame her for being unsettled. It was no happy thought to realize the Charonians had used Earth life as a genetic spare-parts bin. Knowing they were in some way related to Earth life somehow only made them more… alien. “It confirms something else, too,” Sondra said. “The living Charonian creatures are clearly every bit as artificial as their robots. As if the designers of the living creatures and mechanical devices didn’t make any distinction between life-form and machine, and combined some elements of both types into everything they made. Which might explain why the scorpion robots look like scorpions. They’re patterned after some form of terrestrial arthropod.” She tossed her notes down. “That’s the big news here. What’s new from the field?” she asked.
“We’re getting a lot better at reading the Charonians’ minds,” Marcia said, leaning back in her chair and propping her feet up. “I’ve spent the day pulling together a lot of data on the thought processes of the Charonians. The datataps are collecting more information than we’ll ever use. And we’re getting terrific stuff from the Lunar Wheel taps.
“Unfortunately, Charonian minds make for pretty dull reading,” Marcia said dryly. “It’s almost all concrete imagery, direct visualization with almost no capacity for abstract thought, or reasoning by deduction or induction. Their thoughts are highly repetitive. A lot of what passes for thought seems to be ‘playback’ of another creature’s experiences.”
Sondra frowned. “How does that work?”
“Say a scorpion robot comes across a rock in its path,” Marcia said. “It first calls up the memory of a previous encounter with a rock, to see how it handled the problem before. It then adapts the old thought-image to the existing circumstance, and works out the best route around the rock it currently faces. Then it broadcasts the results, and whoever runs into the rock next already knows how to deal with it. They can run through the whole process very quickly. The whole cycle of obstacle encounter, image call-up, image modification, and then reaction only takes milliseconds. The key is that all the Charonians are constantly broadcasting their own experiences and picking up transmissions from all the other Charonians in the vicinity. One creature can send out a query, and then receive a solution to its problem. If they’re working it right, they ought to be able to store and transfer memories from one generation to the next.
“The only other thing I’ve managed to confirm is so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning,” Marcia said. “The bigger they are, the smarter they are, without any relation to machine versus animal or any other variable. Not really a hot news flash, is it? The carrier bugs are just drones,” Marcia went on. “They can only be programmed to fetch and carry. The scorpion-level animals and robots are a bit more flexible. They’re capable of receiving and handling more information, and of dealing with more varied situations—though not always successfully.
“The Lander creatures are smarter than the scorpion-level types—but not by so much as might be expected. I’d score them as being about as bright as cocker spaniels. I assume the Lunar Wheel is far above the Landers in intellect. Sort of a thought chain instead of a food chain.
“But I’ve got a theory I haven’t really proved yet. Down on the lower levels, each creature or robot seems to receive its initial ‘education’ by means of a massive data download from the next level up on the thought chain. I’ve got a great tape of a Lander ‘teaching’ a batch of new scorpions by downloading subsets of its own information to the scorps.”
“Wait a second.” Sondra stood up. There was an answer in there somewhere, a big one. “You’ve been out in the field looking at the Charonians on Mars, and I’ve been here looking at what the Wheel and the Sphere have been doing. We haven’t put the two halves together.” Even as she spoke, Sondra suddenly saw it. The answer was staring them all in their faces! She forced herself to move forward in an orderly fashion, making sure all the links of the logic chain were there. “Before I dozed off, I was watching a transmission from the Wheel to a Lander. It could be interpreted as the Wheel ‘teaching’ the Lander a subset of its information. So how far up does it go?”
Marcia nodded, her face betraying slowly mounting excitement. “So scorps teach bugs. Landers teach scorps. The Wheel teaches the Landers. But who teaches the Wheel?” she asked.
Sondra grinned in triumph. “Bingo.” She was on the right track. That was the real question, the one all the others led towards. “It’s got to be the Sphere, or whoever it is that runs the Sphere. They must be the ones who teach entities on the level of the Wheel.”
“Wait a second,” Marcia said. “The reports from Earth show that the Moonpoint Ring thing orbiting Earth in the Multisystem is just like the Lunar Wheel inside the Moon in our system, except that the Earth’s Moon-point Ring isn’t buried inside a satellite. It had no need for camouflage. But if the Moonpoint Ring is new, it will need teaching. The Sphere could be doing a memory download to the Moonpoint Ring right now.”
Sondra nodded eagerly. “I get it! If Earth could listen in, they might get some real answers. They’d hear from the
real masters, the real Charonians who created all. these nightmares.”
“Yes! My God, yes. We could tap right into their instructions to their machines.” Marcia stood up, tried to think. They would have to transmit this idea to the Moon at once, have the Saint Anthony’s controllers radio instructions to the probe through the wormhole.
Marcia glanced at the wall clock, trying to figure how much time was left before they lost the Anthony. Just under thirty-six hours. There was time to send the message, if they started now. She was about to say that to Sondra. But then the quakes started.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Ages of Life and Death
The Sphere had sent its orders, and Sphere orders were something the Caller could not even conceive of resisting.
And the orders said that now was the time. The Caller ran a last check of all its far-scattered underlings. Not all, or even a majority, were ready for action. But many units were prepared, and the Sphere had placed the highest urgency on the Caller’s task. Strange that a job that might take decades, or centuries, should have to be so rushed—but a century from now, the crisis would surely come, and survival might well depend on the hours, the minutes, the seconds saved now.
The Caller focused gravity beams of massive power and fired them at the worlds. The beams of gravity were infinitely more powerful than the ones fired by the Ring of Charon—and no effort had been made to render these beams harmless. Far from it.
The Caller sent the command coursing over the gravity beams to all the completed installations, all across this star system. Along with the commands, embedded in the very gravity beams that sent the orders, it sent power as well. The Worldeaters sucked it all in, eager for more.
On Mars, on Venus and Mercury, on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, the Worldeaters began to earn their names. The Worldeaters took the beams, formed them into gravity fields that did what nature never intended. Around each amalgam of Worldeaters, in whatever shape they formed, the planetary crust began to tear itself open, to heave itself up into the air. The Worldeaters themselves, deeply anchored into the planetary subsurfaces, clung tight, held on.
All but a few. Even Worldeaters could fail, and die. On Mars one failed, and another on Mercury, the huge beings torn up from their moorings, flung up into the sky by their own gravity beams, tumbling insanely across the sky until they crashed and died.
But their fellows strove on, ripping down into the subsurface rock. The debris was pulled in toward the artificial gravity sources that hovered, like so many children’s balloons, over every cluster of Worldeaters. Now fully energized, the gee sources grabbed violently at anything below them that was not strongly secured. But matter pulled in by the gee sources did not accumulate around them. Second-stage gravity beams, wrenchingly manipulated by the Worldeaters, threw the debris up, out, directly away from the planet, accelerating it at incredible rates.
Within minutes, from every rocky or icy world inside Saturn’s orbit, streams of pulverized planetary crust were fountaining up into space. The red stone of Mars, the ice of Ganymede, the acid-leached rock of Venus, and the Sun-scorched skin of Mercury were blasted up into free space, arcing out into clouds of dust that rapidly enveloped the planets.
Huge vortices, hurricanes and tornadoes of fantastic size, roared up from the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The huge spin-storms stretched out from the gas giants, extending their reach far beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere, stretching themselves into bizarre tendrils of gas that arced and spiraled across the sky, releasing megatons of atmosphere into free orbit.
At Saturn, the gas jets slammed into the ring plane, disrupting orbits of the ring particles, knotting the gorgeous patterns of Saturn’s diadem into chaos. The jets of atmospheric hydrogen and methane and complex hydrocarbons boiled up from inside the huge world to splash across space.
All across the Solar System, the stuff of worlds was thrown into orbit. The spaceside Worldeaters set to work, grabbing at the gas and dust and rubble, spreading gravity nets to gather it all up.
And it did not end. The jets, the rubble streams, the storms gathered force, tearing at the fabric of all the worlds. From Mercury to Saturn, the Worldeaters tore away, clawing the flesh from the planets.
The Solar System began to die.
* * *
The images streamed unendingly across the video screen. Towering pillars of flying stone and dust and ice and gas surging up into the skies of Mars, Mercury, Venus, Ganymede, Titan, Tethys. Monstrous spin-storms arcing up into orbital velocity from Jupiter and Saturn. The Landers were attacking.
Endless as the terror seemed, yet the end was coming. One by one, the commlinks to the other worlds were dying as clouds of ionized dust jammed radio and laser signals.
Larry sat before the Nenya’s comm station and shook his head, watching the signals come through. How could humans stand against all this? How could the Charonians be stopped, when no one even understood what they were doing? Larry found himself breathing hard, fear and exhaustion overtaking him. He forced himself to lean back, eyes closed, and relax. He felt the tension ease out of him, at least for a moment. Better. Better.
“We’ve lost contact with Mars again,” Raphael was saying, his voice quiet and somber. “The ionized dust is jamming out radio and laser. The Lunar comm stations are sending to all the planets and listening on every alternate frequency they can think of, but there’s no way of knowing if Mars can hear us, or if they’re sending on some frequency we haven’t tried. And the Saint Anthony has got problems. Earth warned us there was some sort of Charonian spacecraft or robot or something homing in on it.”
“We won’t have the probe too much longer,” Vespasian said, with a hint of sadness.
Dr. Raphael remembered how much pride Vespasian had taken in naming the probe, how attached to it he felt. “Good Saint Anthony has already done the most important job,” Raphael said in as comforting a voice as he could manage. “He found Earth for us again. That should be some comfort if all else is lost.”
* * *
The skies were full of fire.
Marcia looked up into the Martian night, to where the stars had been replaced by terror. To the southeast, the closest jet of matter was being blasted into space. It was a glowing pillar of flame, air friction, ionization effects, electrical discharges, and whatever strange side effects the Charonian gravity beam caused, all combining to set the matter jet flickering and shimmering with power. Out on the surface, there was a constant splashing of dust jets as random bits of debris fell back from the central matter jet and slammed into the ground. Pieces of debris, some of them boulder-size or larger, were also falling in the city.
The sky itself was glowing, sheets and plumes of dust and rubble streaming off the matter jets, spreading across space, far out enough to be free of the planet’s shadow, free to catch the glow of the hidden Sun. Another dust storm suddenly snapped into being, ruddy sands swept up into the lower atmosphere by the chaos to the south, shrouding the world in blood.
“Do you honestly think they mean us no harm?” Marcia whispered to herself, remembering Larry’s question, the memory of his recorded voice echoing in her mind. He had asked that of Raphael, somewhere in the hours and hours of records that she had played back. But the horrifying answer to the question was that they had no intentions at all toward humans. Nothing so small and insignificant ever entered into the Charonians’ calculations. Marcia had a sudden strange image of herself as a microbe looking up from its glass slide, suddenly realizing the cleaning solution is about to splash down, cascading down onto her world, wiping her away, clearing her away to make room for something new.
She glanced back toward the research library, where Sondra worked the communications console, desperately searching the radio spectrum for any word from anywhere.
But there was nothing to hear. All contact with the outside universe had been lost. Never, in all her life, had all the lines been so utterly cut. The lines to Earth, to her husband,
to her work at VISOR, to her whole life. All of it was gone.
So what happened now? she wondered.
There was a new series of flashing explosions in the southern sky. Marcia looked out the windows, past the terrible sights plain to the eye. She tried to see the future, the days still coming. Even Port Viking could not hold together if these storms continued. The dome had taken a year’s worth of punctures in the last day. The air would leak out. Power would fail as the dust blew in, as the Charonian onslaught smashed equipment and threw it into the sky. The Charonians would work their will. Humanity would be wiped clean off Mars.
And then the same on all the other worlds of the Solar System. That would be the end of the human future in the Solar System. And then… her throat choked up, and she began to cry, watching the flaming sky through tear-fogged eyes.
And then, the rest was silence.
* * *
Sondra awoke slumped over the comm console. She must have dozed off mere. There was a beeping noise coming from somewhere. She blinked, still half-asleep, and looked around. There was Marcia, collapsed on one of the couches. But what the hell was that beeping? Suddenly she realized it was coming from the comm system. The status board was flashing a message, “COMM CHANNEL CLEAR, TEXT MESSAGE INCOMING FROM LUNAR TRANSMITTER,” it read.
Sondra snapped awake. The jamming had cleared, at least for the moment. The signal’s status-coding sideband showed that the incoming message had been repeating for over an hour.
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