The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “And then the seedships built a Dyson Sphere, and it took over, and it decided…”

  The two women were deadly silent as the thought sunk in. “The Dyson Sphere decided the important thing was to make more Dyson Spheres,” Sondra said at last. “So, millions of years ago, it modified the seedships’ programs one more time, played with the gene pool one more time. To make all the other forms into part of a Sphere-reproduction system. And what the hell did we think Dyson Spheres were made out of?”

  Marcia shook her head numbly. “My sweet God. And we were rushing to save Earth. It’s every other world in the Solar System that’s in trouble.”

  “Planets,” Sondra said, not hearing Marcia. “You make them out of disassembled planets.”

  Marcia spoke very quietly. “That’s what the Landers are doing. Now that they’ve got Earth out of harm’s way, they’re taking the Solar System apart to build a new Dyson Sphere. They’ll shred the planets, the moons, the asteroids down to nothing, take them apart and use that material as raw material to build a shell around the Sun. They’ll start up a new Multisystem here.”

  Sondra stared blankly at the computer screen for a long moment and then came back to herself. “We have to tell them,” she said. “Before the dust clouds thicken again and all the radio wavelengths are jammed. We have to get the word out.” She started typing furiously.

  But Marcia wasn’t paying attention. She stood up and returned to the window, back to the sky full of fire. Out there, the Landers were tearing Mars apart, blasting its stones and sand up into the sky. Now she understood. But would understanding do any good? They were as far as ever from being able to stop it, from being able to do anything about it. Mars was still being torn to shreds.

  It wasn’t fair. She did not want to die like this. Not alone. “Oh, Gerald,” she said to the sky. “Gerald my love.” He was alive, and he had reached out across unimaginable distances, sent his words to her. That should have been some comfort, some solace.

  But it was not. Instead anger flared inside her.

  Gerald lived. How could she die, when she suddenly had a new reason to live?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Reality Check

  The three men aboard the Nenya sat in the ship’s wardroom, reading printouts of the messages from the Terra Nova and Mars.

  Larry shook his head. “I knew the Lander crashes on Mars should have told me something. This part here, about the possibility of a Lander crashing on Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs. That was it. That was what was in the back of my mind. I should have seen that.” Larry continued reading.

  At last they were all finished examining the new information. Raphael put down his copy and turned to the others. There was a deadly silence in the compartment. Raphael looked at Larry and Vespasian, and spoke. “If Sondra and Marcia’s theories are anywhere near right— and I think they are—then the Solar System is doomed. The Charonian Landers will tear every world apart.”

  “There must to be a way to stop them,” Larry said.

  “The Core Cracker,” Vespasian said.

  “What?” Larry said.

  “The big bomb, the really big bomb the Belt Community was supposed to build,” Vespasian said. “We still have contact with Ceres. We could send a message to the Autocrat. Way back when, they were going to blow up Mercury with it, give themselves a bigger and better asteroid belt to mine. If we could get it, get it here, we could smash the Moon with it. That kills the Lunar Wheel. With the Lunar Wheel gone, the rest of the Char-onians would shut themselves down, and the rest of the Solar System would be saved.”

  Raphael found himself nodding, considering the possibility, and that made his blood run cold. Only weeks ago, someone’s using a Core Cracker on the Moon would have been the greatest disaster imaginable, something to be prevented at all costs. But Chancellor Daltry had warned that there was always a worse fate possible. Now a man who lived on the Moon was suggesting the destruction of the Moon, and of all the human life on it, as a solution, something better than the alternative. “It’s a terrible price to pay, Tyrone. But you might be right.”

  “No,” Larry said. “We can’t. We can’t kill that many people and dream of justifying it. Especially when there’s no promise that it would work. If I were programming the Charonians, I’d set the gee points and Landers to keep working if they lost contact with the Wheel. It’s fairly clear that the Wheel pulls gravity power in from the Earthpoint black hole and transmits it to the gee points, but there must be some sort of backup system. I’d bet the Dyson Sphere could send commands and power directly through the wormhole and run the show that way.

  “Besides, even if the plan worked, we’d have lost the last contact with Earth—and sooner or later, unless we learn how to prevent it, Earth is going to be used for a breeding binge. That will cost more lives than we could save by destroying the Moon. And we don’t even know if the Core Cracker exists, or if the Autocrat would agree to release it even if it did.”

  “Can we sabotage the Wheel, wreck it without smashing the Moon?” Vespasian asked. “Maybe just a small nuclear warhead dropped down the Rabbit Hole?”

  Larry shook his head. “No. Nearly all the same arguments apply. There must be backup procedures, some way for the Dyson Sphere to regain control if the Wheel fails. And even if we succeed, and shut down the gee points and the link to the Dyson Sphere, we lose any hope of ever contacting Earth again, ever helping them.”

  “Then is there any way to seize control of the Wheel?” Vespasian asked. “Go down there again, rewire it somehow, make it do what we want it to do. Use it to order the gee points to knock it off.”

  Larry shook his head, but there was something less negative about the way he did it, as if he saw a possibility. “We don’t know the codes. Even if we did, I still don’t see how we could use them. We’d have to use the same signaling procedure the Sphere uses, and use stronger signals. That wouldn’t be any problem on the radio bands, but now we know they used modulated gravity waves for signaling as well, beaming both through the wormhole. We could fire up the Ring of Charon again and use it to send another signal. But we couldn’t possibly send a stronger gravity-wave signal than the Sphere. Not unless we had our own—”

  Larry stopped for a moment. Not just talking, but stopped, all of him, as if his mind were suddenly so busy with a thought that he couldn’t spare any part of his mind for movement. “My God. We’ve learned enough to do it. I could—”

  His voice faded out, and he muttered to himself. “Yes, it could be done.” He turned to Raphael and Vespasian with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eye. “Maybe we could take over the Wheel.” Suddenly, his fece fell. “If we knew the codes.”

  Vespasian’s brow knitted for a moment, and then suddenly he snatched up one of the earlier reports from Mars. “They saw it, on Mars!” he said. “The Wheel has got to be just like this Moonpoint Ring next to Earth, use the same command code.”

  Larry grabbed the hard copy eagerly and skimmed the pages. “My God, you’re right. They call it the thought chain, each lower form trained by the form above it.” He put down the pages and thought. “It would work. If Earth could get a tap in place, we could listen in on the Dyson Sphere downloading data to the Moonpoint Ring. Has the Moon asked for the tap yet?”

  Vespasian nodded. “Yes. They reported making the request about an hour after Marcia and Sondra sent the idea. About five hours ago. They sent us a copy of the request.”

  “But what if the Sphere has already sent the data we need?” Raphael objected.

  “Repetition,” Larry said, “That was the one cast-iron certainty we got out of that image of the shattered sphere. The Charonians use repetition for emphasis. The more important the idea is, the more often they’ll repeat it. If Earth can get a tap in place, we have a real shot at reading the codes.”

  Raphael looked up at the wall chronometer, counting down the hours and minutes of life left to the Saint Anthony and figuring in the time since the Moon had relayed M
arcia’s request for a tap. “They won’t have time. Even if Earth got the message immediately, that would only give them eighteen hours between receipt of signal and when the Saint Anthony is destroyed, thirteen hours from now. That’s not time for Earth to prepare a launch from scratch, let alone build a probe.”

  “Damn it,” Larry said through clenched teeth. He looked at Raphael. “If we don’t get the data we need, it can’t work.”

  “Wait a second,” Vespasian said. “The Lunar comm center knew all that when they sent the request. There was something in the reports from Earth that a habitat had ended up orbiting the Moonpoint black hole, inside the Moonpoint Ring, close enough to run a tap if they knew how to build the receiver. So they requested that that habitat to do the tap. I’ve got our copy of the signal here somewhere.” He worked the console controls again, calling up the file in question. The three men leaned close to the screen and read the signal.

  Vespasian’s wide face fell, collapsed utterly. “Oh, hell. Oh sweet and sour bloody hell. Why in God’s own twisted name did it have to be them?”

  Larry Chao and Simon Raphael didn’t ask what the problem was. They could read that off the screen for themselves.

  The only facility in position to try for a datatap, the only place they could get the information that might save the Solar System, just happened to be the Naked Purple Habitat.

  Raphael suddenly felt old, infinitely old, old and defeated, as if nothing else could ever matter again. All his refound ability to understand, empathize, was suddenly gone. How could it be that the fate of everything was up to those lunatics? “Start praying, Tyrone,” he said in a defeated old man’s voice. “And pray to Saint Jude this time. This is clearly a job for him and not Anthony.”

  * * *

  The request for a tap made quite a trip before arriving. From Mars to the Moon through the wormhole to the Saint Anthony to JPL to Chelated Noisemaker Extreme’s comm board. But that was only the beginning of its journey. Next it had to survive passage through a meeting of the Purple Deluxe.

  Ohio did not enjoy Purple Deluxe meets. For starters, tradition dictated that they be held in a compartment far too small for the number of people present. Also by tradition, the ventilation system was turned off for the duration of the meeting. Usually, that helped keep meetings short, but the end of this one was not yet on the horizon.

  Time was desperately short. Just in case the decision came down as a “yes,” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme was already at work rigging up the datatap probe, as per the plans sent from Mars along with the request. Ohio himself found the whole situation a bit daunting. He wasn’t quite up to deciding the fate of Earth and the Solar System.

  But he had a more immediate problem. The meeting was not going well. Which was another way of saying Creamcheese Drone Deluxe was speaking.

  Creamcheese had certainly earned the highly complimentary title Drone. No one had ever caught her doing a lick of work. But Creamcheese meant sexy or attractive. Perhaps Cheese believed herself to be a highly attractive woman. Few others believed so, or ever would. But Cheese was many other things. For starters, she demonstrated that even the most complimentary Naked Purple name could be applied ironically, and was likewise living proof that such irony could be completely lost on a member of a group as linguistically sophisticated as the Purps claimed to be. But Cheese had an ego and a half, and no one had the nerve to tell her to try a different name for a while.

  She was one of the very few Purps who took the call to get naked and purple literally, though she was certainly among the vast majority of Purps who should never get naked, let alone purple. To be fair, Ohio allowed, her appearance did evoke the shocked silence that was the purpose of the original Naked Purple manifesto. And that was fitting, for Creamcheese was one of the most vigorous and doctrinaire defenders of the faith.

  Tonight she was in rare form, shouting at the top of her lungs. There she stood in her nude, plum-colored, plum-shaped glory, fulminating away. “Let them all rot!” she cried. “The Earthers, the damned scoombas back in the Solar Area, all of ‘em. They got us down into this scene with their gravity grinding. Why should we help them now? This here is the biggest chance we’re ever gonna have of reely living the Purple ideal. All we have to do is what Purples are supposed to do. Nothing. Not one Grand Coulee Dam thing.”

  “But these here Charonians ain’t no shade of Purple,” Cold Breeze objected. The bickering between Breeze and Cheese had been going on for hours. “They doing everything but nothing. The Purple idea we got is to back off and let Nature do her thing, let entropy slide the Universe on down. Cheese, I have scanned a lotta blocks o‘ data, and these Charonians are no-way-José natural. Back home in the Solar System—sorry, I mean the Solar Area, they’s putting the planets through a buzz saw. Ask me is that Mom Nature doing her bit, and I say I think not. I say we get the data for the groundhogs and the Solar dudes, let ’em try and stop the party.”

  “Oh, jump down off it, Cold,” Cheese said. “These Charonians are ultra-Purple, glowing in dark down to their bones. You want the big mystery about what they’re doing, I’ll peek in the backathebook for ya. They’re scraping the tech-know-log-ick-all crap offa the Earth. They’re giving entropy a chance to kick back in, let Nature slump back down to blessed disorder. Lookit Earth. Their satellites are gone. The spaceships are nearly all gone. Practically all the habitats ‘cept ours—gone, gone, gone. If we sit back long enough to make grooving behooving, do nothing long enough while the Charonians do a dance on the Earthers, them groundhogs will be back in mud huts and still going down! And once this Saint Android robot probe is creamed, there will be nothing we can do anyway. Back in the Solar, the Charonians are erasing all the tech yech there too. The Purple ideal. Surrender to Nature! My bristers and sibsters, that’s the tune we’ve been singing since the first coat of purple got slapped on somebody’s hide. Now Earth’s dancing to the beat, the Solar’s dancing to it, and Cold Breeze says shut down the playback because he’s about to lose his fudge. No way.”

  Ohio Template Windbag sat back in his frowsy old armchair and blinked a time or two. Strange. He found himself having to translate what they were all saying. It suddenly struck him that he was no longer thinking in Naked Purple terms, but once again in standard English. Maybe he has been hanging out in the comm center with Chelated/Frank too much. The pointless artificial complexities seemed strangely foreign to his ear. Where once it had all sounded clever, now all he heard was anger, and voices a bit louder than they needed to be. Was his subconscious trying to tell him something?

  “How are you on murder, Cheese?” Cold Breeze asked. “Suppose everyone on the hab—including you— shuffles off the coil because we sat on back, followed your plan?”

  Creamcheese Deluxe glared at him. “We all die, Coldness,” she said contemptuously. “That’s the whole point of calling our bristers and sibsters to the Pointless Cause. All striving is useless against entropy. The Heat Death of the Universe is coming reel soon and—”

  “Ah, knock back all that philoso-flapping,” a voice in the back said, daring to cut her off. “You an‘ Breeze both. We’ve all heard it buzz before, and I don’t need you to herd it past again. Ohio, what’s your slant?”

  “No slant at all, and that’s the trub, bub. I’m right on the level.” The jive talk and double meanings fell trippingly off his tongue, but they rang false in his ear. The Breeze and the Cheese were both right. To stand by and do nothing was exactly correct, according to the Naked Purple philosophy, because the destruction of the bad old Earth civilization was inevitable.

  But the whole creaky structure of Purple assumed that its goals were impossible—not only unattainable, but deliberately chosen because they were unattainable.

  That had been the original Purple goal. To shock people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be. The Purple was supposed to give people goals they could reach for, but never grasp, thus getting their minds moving again. If society ostra
cized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to find your own goals. Surely that was laudable, and gave promise for the future. Ohio looked around the crowded room. What goal did these people have, beyond getting to tonight’s party? There was nothing in their Tycho version of Purple. It was sterile, a game of prattling words cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway. It didn’t have to be that way. Yes, there had always been anger in the Purple—but once upon a time there had been hope as well. But that was long ago and far away, all but forgotten, corrupted by the wackos of Tycho Purple Penal. Hope had become mere sullenness.

  Tycho. That was the cause of all this. Crossbreed a cult seeking individual enlightenment with a crew of third-generation convicts, and what else could you expect but angry, self-indulgent blather? No, Ohio thought, the Tycho brand of Purple had held sway long enough. It was time for the older ways to return, the old Purple that did have a goal, even if it was half-hidden. A Purple that mixed its anger with hope.

  This was too serious, too deadly serious a moment for playing games with words. Ohio nodded, his mind made up. After all, what the hell kind of philosophy endorsed self-extinction?

  “Great windbag Ohio turns out to be,” Cheese said mockingly. “He just sits there and nods. No opinions, no thoughts. That’s not the Purple way.”

  That got Ohio genuinely mad. Cheese had spent her whole life sticking like glue to the Purple orthodoxy. No room for any thought someone else hadn’t had before. No room for un-Purple thoughts of any kind.

  But, outside of this habitat, the real universe was not a very Purple place. Time to make these people run a reality check, he thought. His voice shifted, lowered by an octave. He decided to talk in the old way. Maybe that would have some sort of negative shock value. “Okay, we’ll play it your way.” He turned toward the others. “Cheese here doesn’t want to talk about real people dying, whole civilizations collapsing, maybe humanity becoming extinct, because it doesn’t fit in with the orthodox view. So we won’t. But even if you really believe that we alone of the human race are worth saving, remember that everybody dying includes us. Earth goes, we go. Let me say it in one swell foop.” Damn, a slip into slang, but never mind. “If we let Earth go, we die. We need the Earth. We cannot grow all our own food, or fix our own machines. We can’t take care of ourselves.”