The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Core material. The Charonians had bored down through the crust of the planet, used their gravity systems to pull the molten magma out of the planet and heave it into space. The Charonians were taking not just the crustal rock, but they were sucking out the core matter as well. It wasn’t a volcano. It was a vampire.

  * * *

  Marcia MacDougal and Sondra Berghoff sat in the Martian darkness, feeling the cold creep in. The power had died again. Marcia was getting restless. She desperately wanted to get outside, but that was impossible. There had been too many holes punched in the dome, and the engineers had bled the pressure off to conserve air. The entire population of Port Viking had been forced to retreat to the airtight buildings.

  Marcia wrapped her blanket more tightly around her. Perhaps the engineers would be able to bring the power back on again. But then another fragment of sky-tossed stone would smash into some other vital piece of equipment again, or a quake would trip every circuit breaker in the city again, or the dome supports would finally take one more strike than they could handle and collapse. There would be the struggle to fix whatever it was—and then another disaster would strike.

  Sooner or later the engineers would no longer be able to patch it over. Port Viking would die in the dark.

  How long had it been? How much time had passed since the Saint Anthony had died, and taken so much of their hope with it? On Earth, wherever she was, they had marked the transit of four days and nights. The Moon had rolled through a sixth of her leisurely, month-long rotation. On those worlds, time moved much as it always had, for the Charonians left the Earth and Moon untouched.

  But on Mars, on Venus, on all the other worlds, time had lost its old measure and meaning. On dust-choked Mars there was no night, no day, just a series of catastrophes in the dust-shrouded gloom under the sullen glowing sky. There was no meaningful way to mark the time on Mars, on Ganymede, on Titan. Or was it time itself ending for all those places?

  * * *

  The Nenya rushed at full throttle toward Pluto, the engines roaring at powers far beyond safety margin, Vespasian forcing every possible scrap of thrust, without regard for a return trip. If the flight succeeded, there would be more than enough time to mount a rescue mission. If it failed, there would be no point to one. Never mind that. Larry stared grimly at the display screen, determined to focus on the data there. Updates from the Gravities Research Station, refinements of the models he had done the night before. Good people there. All of them. Maybe he had done the flashy, exciting work, but it had all been based on the research they had done. But he had needed more help than theirs. And gotten it.

  God only knew why, but the Purples had cooperated. The data had come through the Saint Anthony before it died. Not just data, but in a very real sense, the voice of the Sphere, the precise equivalent of words handed down from the intelligence that ruled the Charonian empire.

  It wasn’t language, not in any human sense. It was an image set, closer to a system of notation for computer programming than anything else. Larry had enough data to get a start on the Charonian command set. The Nenya computers weren’t really built for this sort of analysis, but they were the best he was going to get. Communication was still spotty, but the engineers on all the worlds were improvising desperately, finding the sending and receiving frequencies that still worked. Word was coming in from all over, and the word was not good.

  Venus was reporting a huge structure pumping magma from the interior. Ganymede reported that Io was coming apart at the seams, its chaotic surface all but completely liquified. The tiny world was melting away into a cloud of sulfur and complex hydrocarbons. Somehow the Charonians were amplifying the tidal effects that had always torn at the giant moon, focusing the stress at weak points, concentrating the internal pressure until the moon simply tore itself apart. Several of Jupiter and Saturn’s smaller ice moons just weren’t there anymore, already completely digested by whatever monstrosities had landed there.

  He checked the wall chronometer. Fourteen days out from the Moon, two more days until arrival at Pluto. Larry didn’t even want to think about the Nenya’s terrifying velocity.

  Two days. That would barely be enough time to prepare.

  Could it be done? Would it work?

  Damn it, would it work? As far as the gravity side of it went, he had no doubts. He had learned from the Charonians, watched what they did, how they turned gravity on its ear to do their bidding. He could see the way to configure the Ring, knew instinctively what must be done.

  But what should be done? Did he have the right answer to that question? Larry stared at the datascreen in front of him, then glanced down at the notes on the desk, turned and looked into the mirror set into the opposite wall of the tiny cabin. But he saw none of those things. Instead, his eye turned inward, toward places in his soul he had never imagined. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands. If it was not an attitude of prayer, it was close enough. How many worlds was he trying to save tonight?

  How many had he already helped to destruction?

  He lifted his head a bit and found himself staring at his hands, as if he had never seen them before. These were the hands that had done it, that had shaped the commands, set the Ring configuration, pressed that damnable start button. These were the hands that had made the Earth vanish, turned the entire Solar System upside down, awakened monsters that had slept since before humanity existed.

  He thought back, and remembered deliberately setting the controls so the actual start command had to be sent manually, and tried to remember why. He knew, intellectually, it was because pushing that button meant rebellion against Raphael. But that emotion no longer made sense to him. Had the whole disaster been caused by nothing more than that? Larry O’Shawnessy Chao’s childish need to show that he was smarter than anyone else? How many worlds were wrecked, how many people were dead already because he had pushed that button? How many ships were lost, how much treasure destroyed?

  But he couldn’t have known. No one could have known. The search for gravity control had started before he was born. Sooner or later someone would have found a way to make a graser beam, and would have brushed the Moon with it. Someone would have pushed that button. Dr. Raphael had said quite clearly that the entire Gravities Research Station had to bear its share of the blame…

  No. Larry looked up again, caught his own eye in the mirror, and stared back at himself. All of it, in his favor and against him, was true, but now was not the time. Now he had to push it all away, the guilt and the justification. He would have his whole life for that. Wallowing in either right now would interfere with the amends he had to make.

  He stared again at his hands. But his act of atonement would itself be a terrible crime. No one else knew that, no one knew what he had planned, and no one would, not until it was too late to stop. This crime, this guilt, this sin he was determined to carry on his own shoulders alone, without ambiguity, fully aware of exactly what he was doing.

  For Larry had realized that, in the event he got it wrong, it was that ambiguity, far more than the guilt itself, that he feared.

  * * *

  It had been a long and lonely wait on Pluto. One hundred twenty people at the edge of the Solar System, struggling to clean up after the geniuses. The science staff had been working around the clock, trying to keep up with the torrents of gravities data pouring in. They had learned a great deal—in fact, too much. There had been no time to assimilate any of the information, to ponder it. As soon as one new discovery was made, a dozen new and urgent mysteries would pop up, requiring more urgent overtime and study.

  And now it could only get harder. Chao and Raphael were returning.

  There! A flare of brightness halfway across the sky from Charon and the Ring. Jane Webling watched as the Nenya performed her final braking burn.

  But Webling frowned. There was something strange about that burn. She pulled out her notepack. Strange indeed. The Nenya was not dropping into her no
rmal parking orbit, but instead placing herself into the bary-center of the Pluto-Charon system. The barycenter was the balance point, the center of gravity for the whole Pluto-Charon system, the point in space around which both planet and satellite rotated.

  But the Nenya was never placed in the barycenter, for the very good reason that it could interfere with communication between the Ring and the Gravities Station. It only made sense if the Ring was to be controlled from the ship, instead of the Station.

  But why the hell would they need to run the Ring from there? And why hadn’t the situation been explained? Jane Webling found a seat in the deserted observation dome and sat down. What the hell was Larry Chao hoping to accomplish here? She knew the official explanation, that Larry hoped to use the Ring to control the Lunar Wheel, and thus shut down the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

  Ironically, the Charonian Landers had beat the Nenya home. The first of them had arrived a few days ago. Now there were dozens of the huge things, dotting the surface of Pluto and Charon, home to their namesake.

  The Nenya had been gone a long time, stranding the entire staff in the cold and the dark. It was a quite distinct relief to have her back home again. They had a way out again—even if home, if Earth, was no longer there.

  With Larry, Dr. Raphael, and Sondra Berghoff away, she was the only scientist at the Gravities Research Station who fully understood Larry’s work. In order to take over the Wheel, the Ring would have to send it a more powerful signal than the Dyson Sphere was sending. The Ring of Charon did not have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed to overcome the Sphere.

  Therefore if Larry was not lying to everyone, he was at least misleading them. Which suggested he was up to something.

  But what, and why? It was a question of some importance. After all, here was a young man who had acted on his own, in secret, once before—and torn the Solar System apart. She could produce proofs, demonstrate to the other scientists that Larry’s stated plan of action was impossible. Until Raphael returned a few hours from now, she was the acting director of the station. And if she could demonstrate that Raphael was part of the plot, then she would have every right and duty to prevent him from taking over the job again. And perhaps she ought to clap the two of them in irons.

  Yes, beyond question, there were many things she could do. But should she do them? What did Larry intend?

  Jane Webling did not know Larry well, but she had gotten a good look at his character in those chaotic first days after Earth vanished. He had seemed a very open and decent young man under incredible pressure. She had sensed nothing venal in him, nothing underhanded.

  No, the most dangerous possibility was that he meant well, but had some plan, some scheme in mind he knew would not be permitted, some idea he thought would be the answer to everything and solve all their problems. Under cover of the experiment he professed to be running, he would instead do whatever it was he did not wish anyone to know about.

  In other words, Webling concluded, he would do exactly what had gotten them all into this mess in the first place, when he had suborned her graser experiment and fired that damned beam at Earth.

  And he had meant well then, too.

  Damn it! What the hell was she supposed to do?

  Think. Think. That was what she had to do. All right then. Larry was up to something, because his stated plan could not possibly work, and he knew it. However, he meant to do something that would do what the stated plan was meant to do: stop the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

  And no doubt he was hiding his real plan because no one would let him near the Ring if they knew what he was really scheming.

  And then she figured it out. She pulled out her notepack, ran through a series of calculations, and got the answers she knew she would get. She stared at them, utterly shocked that Larry would do such a thing.

  She knew. She knew the answer. There was no other possible explanation.

  But that left her with her original problem. What was she going to do about it?

  She sat there, alone, with only Charon and the Ring bulking in the sky for company, and thought for a cold and lonely time. Larry Chao, for whatever reason—choice, necessity, guilt, panic, mischievousness or a cold, hard, adult feeling of responsibility, was playing God with the survival of the Solar System. Again. And by second-guessing him, deciding what to do about it, she found herself playing a little God all by herself. Suppose, strange and impossible as it seemed, Larry had it right, and she moved to stop him? Or suppose he were wildly, disastrously wrong, and she stood by and did nothing?

  The Nenya was meant to double as a bare-bones, extremely barren backup to the station in an emergency— and this situation certainly qualified. The ship could house the entire staff, albeit under rather Spartan and crowded conditions. With the external tanks installed on the Moon, she could begin taking on passengers immediately, without reconverting the ship first. But was that the right choice?

  Jane Webling knew she had to choose, and time was running out. At last she stood up, returned to the Director’s office, and used the intercom station there to give her orders. She could have done it anywhere on the station, but even the modest trapping of an office made her feel as if she had more authority.

  Pushing the intercom button, she drew in her breath, and spoke as slowly and clearly as she could, resisting the temptation to blurt her words out all at once.

  “This is Acting Director Webling,” she said. “All personnel are to prepare for the immediate and permanent evacuation of this station. Pack your personal items and prepare copies of all data for transfer to the Nenya. Work as quickly as you can, take only what you need— and work on the assumption that we are never coming back.”

  She shut down the intercom.

  “Because we never can come back,” she whispered. The station wasn’t going to be there very long, a very high price to pay—but if she understood the situation, that station’s destruction would be the cheapest of prices.

  Or should she instead call it a down payment?

  For if the race survived, humanity would be paying the balance on this bill for a long, long time.

  * * *

  Another feature to the Nenya’s design that reflected its purpose as a backup: the ship had a Ring control room, a duplicate of the four control rooms on the station. Larry, unaware of the station evacuation, sat there, working a simulation of his plan. It ought to work. All of it ought to work. And maybe that was what troubled him. Each step in the sequence seemed logical, sensible. But when he stepped back and looked at the entirety, it seemed ridiculous. Insane.

  A knock at the control room door, and Simon Raphael came in. “Something interesting has come up,” he said quietly. “I was just about to order the immediate evacuation of the station’s staff up onto to the Nenya, when a message came in from Dr. Webling, saying that she had just ordered the very same thing.” Raphael lowered himself into a seat by the wall, and pulled the belt across his lap, as if he planned to stay there a long time.

  Larry felt his blood running cold, felt confusion sweep over him. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Sometimes if you give two people the same problem with the same set of clues, they come up with the same answer.” There was a pause. “And sometimes, even three people can come up with it.”

  “You and Dr. Webling both saw right through me,” Larry said. “No point in even trying to hide it.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Raphael said, staring very intently at a point just over Larry’s left shoulder.

  The silence dragged for a long time, until it became apparent that the older man wasn’t going to say anything else.

  “Can I take it from the fact that you haven’t stopped me, that you both approve of my actions?” Larry asked, in a voice that was struggling to be calm and steady.

  “No one,” Dr. Raphael said, with an effort, “no one is ever going to approve of your plans, especially given recent events. They seem too much like a disaster we have already
witnessed. But neither Dr. Webling nor myself see any choice in the matter.

  “You obviously planned not to tell anyone until it was too late. Just out of curiosity, how were you going to string us along? What were you going to say or do to allay our suspicions?”

  Larry shook his head, his expression blank. “I don’t know. That was the thing I hadn’t figured out.”

  “Then I suggest,” Raphael said coldly, “that you get on with the parts you did figure out.”

  * * *

  Power, Larry told himself.

  Power. That was what it was all about. Power, gravity power, was what the Charonians had. Power allowed them to take over solar systems, steal planets, tear worlds apart—without any thought of objections from the inhabitants.

  Larry checked the next step on his list. Shift the override control to manual. It was the absence of power that left the people of the Solar System helpless.

  So, the question came back, how to get some of that power into humanity’s hands? Rotate colliding beam focus transfer to 270 degrees. Ultimately, of course, the Dyson Sphere was the source of that power, and there was not a hope, not a dream of matching that.

  But even the Sphere needed conduits to send its power outward. Fusion boosters to third-stage warming. Larry was deep into his work now, barely aware that the outside world, that anything outside the Ring, its control room, and his intellect existed.

  As far as power was concerned, the Lunar Wheel barely entered into the issue. It used the power, yes. Directed it and controlled it. But all its power came from elsewhere.

  The power could not come from the Earthpoint black hole, either. By definition, nothing could come out of a black hole, except through the process of its own evaporation. The stream of elementary particles caused by that process was nowhere near enough to drive the vast operations going on in the Solar System.