There was a clunk and a thud and a whir from the other side of the airlock and Sondra moved forward just a trifle. But no, there was always that moment when the lock seemed as if it were about to open, and then the inexplicable delay while everyone waited for something or other. It seemed likely to Sondra that such unexplained pauses had been going on long before there were airlocks, that there was always that gap of a few minutes between things seeming ready and really being ready.
What was he doing here, anyway? The common room had been buzzing with speculation for weeks. He was just here on a tour of inspection, someone would say, a traditional Autocrat’s Progress. But then someone would point out that such progresses were normally confined to those places that recognised the Autocrat’s authority. He was coming here to lay claim to the station in the name of the Asteroid Belt. He wanted to take over the Graviton project. He was just here as a tourist. He had a secret plan to use the Ring as some sort of superweapon—against whom and on whose behalf was not clear.
The airlock swung open, and the Great Man—he was a man, after all—floated through the lock door, moving himself along rather neatly on the guidebars set into the bulkhead. He was short and pale-skinned, his face sharp-featured, his sand-coloured hair cut bottle-brush short. He had a somewhat prominent nose and his mouth fell naturally into a rather disapproving frown. And yet his eyes had some glimmer of lightness and humour in their grey gaze. He was dressed in a dark grey, loose-fitting tunic and baggy black pants— comfortable and practical. He wore no insignia or pendant or ring of office that Sondra could see. He had no need to put his power, his authority, on display.
His eyes caught hers as he came out of the lock, and he gave her a rather engaging smile.
For a split second, she allowed herself to believe that it was going to be all right. This was someone she could deal with. But then it struck her—she had no idea whatsoever of the proper mode of address for an Autocrat. What should she call him? Excellence? Sir? Your Autocracy? How the hell did you talk to someone who didn’t have a damned name?
She decided to finesse the question of form of address by avoiding it altogether. “Ah, um, welcome to the Ring of Charon,” she blurted out. “I am Dr. Sondra Berghoff, director of the facility.” She stuck out her hand, not sure if that was the thing to do or not. Apparently it was, because the Autocrat accepted her hand. She pumped it, a bit too vigorously, and held onto it a moment or two longer than she should have.
“I am pleased to meet you, Doctor,” the Autocrat replied. His voice was quiet, firm, and deep. “I have been looking forward to this visit for some time.”
“And we have been looking forward to having you here, um, ah, ah…”
“Most people find it most convenient to treat ‘Autocrat’ as if it were my name and address me by it,” her guest said, a hint of amusement at the corners of his mouth. “You may also simply address me as ‘sir’ without causing an interplanetary incident.” Plainly, the man had come across this problem before.
“Ah, yes sir, very good sir,” Sondra said, the words tumbling out. “I understand that you want an immediate tour of the facility?”
“Yes, indeed. I have been looking forward to it for some time.”
“As we’re nearly at peak view conditions, would you like to get a look at the Ring itself first?”
“Yes, by all means,” the Autocrat said.
“Are you ready to go now, or is there anything you need to do about your ship?”
“My crew will see to all that,” the Autocrat said, with a dismissive gesture. “They will remain aboard for some time yet, I am told.”
“Very good, then. Won’t you come this way?”
“Certainly.”
She led him out of the airlock and docking complex and into a small, odd-looking elevator car. “Things are a little jury-rigged around here,” she said as the doors pulled shut and sealed themselves. “We’re going to be moving out of zero gee as the car descends,” Sondra said. “Are you ready for it?”
“I’ve been moving in and out of varying gravity conditions my whole life,” the Autocrat replied.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Sondra said, embarrassed. “I wasn’t thinking. In any event, here we go.” Sondra pushed the button and the car started to move down.
“You were saying things were a bit jury-rigged,” the Autocrat prompted.
“We used to control the Ring from the surface of Pluto,” she said, “and of course we had to evacuate the surface in a hurry when the planet was destroyed and drawn into the black hole. We had to improvise the whole operation, rebuild from scratch. Pluto was destroyed, everyone got crammed onto the Nenya, the supply ship that serviced the research station.
“Once things were settled down, and we were getting supply ships coming in again, we sent as many people back toward the Inner System as we could on the empty ships, so as to cut down on the number of mouths to feed.” Sondra could feel weight returning as the car moved from the rotation axis down toward the living quarters.
“Some of the supply ships we didn’t send back at all,” she went on. “Instead we rebuilt them into additional crew quarters and working space. Finally we built a long rigid connection frame with the Nenya at one end and the rest of the quarters at the other, with the airlock axis you just came from right at the center of gravity, in zero gee. Sort of a dumbbell shape with the airlock in the middle of the long arm. Once we spun it up, we had artificial gravity at the two ends of the dumbbell. It’s a little ironic, actually.”
“What is?” the Autocrat asked.
“This is the foremost gravity research station there is, and we have a gravity generator of incredible power. But we’re still using centrifugal force to make artificial gravity. Someday we’ll know enough to develop a controlled gravity field. We’re learning a lot with the Graviton project. Until we get it right, though, we spin away. In any event, the station is essentially complete. We’re still adding bits and pieces, upgrading, that sort of thing. It’s almost gotten to the point where it’s comfortable. But it’s still hard here,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very hard.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence as the car moved downward into the high-gee sections of the station. The doors opened and Sondra ushered the Autocrat out. “This way,” she said, trying to sound bright, clipped, efficient.
She led him toward the rather cramped confines of the main wardroom. Ring-viewing conditions varied constantly. They were almost at the peak of their six-day cycle, and she didn’t want the Autocrat—or herself—to miss the sight. Everyone loved looking at the ring. It had taken some doing to chase everyone else out of the wardroom for the Autocrat’s tour.
The lights in the wardroom were lowered to make it easier to see out into the sky. The room was quiet. In the gloom, it was a trifle hard to see the wardroom’s oversized porthole—a mere spot of star-sprinkled greater darkness in the dark. But Sondra knew where it was, of course, from long practise. Even if she had not, her eye would have been caught by the movement of the heavens, slowly wheeling past the porthole.
“Ah,” the Autocrat said. “There.” He crossed the room, threading his way between the tables and chairs, and stood in front of the porthole, staring out. Sondra followed a step or two behind. Perhaps it would have been more respectful, more gracious, if she had allowed him to stand there alone, drink it all in by himself—but she could not resist. She had spent endless hours before that window, gazing on the ring, and would gladly have spent twice as many.
In the days of the dim, forgotten past, the first astronauts orbiting the Earth had stolen every moment they could from their tasks in order to gaze on the blue-white marvel sweeping past below. Ring-watching was like that—except that there had never been a sense of danger, or melancholy, in looking at the Earth.
For the Earth was gone—and it was, after all, the Ring that had sent it away. The Ring of Charon was, by any measure, the most powerful machine ever built by human hands. It had crushed Pluto and Charon d
own to quite literally nothing at all, down into a black hole. The Ring’s beauty was a fearful thing.
The Ring was just that, a hollow toroid 1,600 kilometres in diameter, the Plutopoint Singularity at its centerpoint. The Ring was the direct descendant of the ever-larger particle accelerators built on Earth, and later in free space. When originally built, the Ring had circled the moon Charon, and had been designed to deal with its gravitational field alone. Now it circled the far more massive Pluto-point, and was stressed by far greater gravitic energies, energies that would have torn the Ring apart long ago if Sondra and the rest of her team had not found a way to mask and refocus some of the singularity’s expressed mass.
The command center revolved around the Ring and the singularity at right angles to the Ring’s plane, in a circular orbit roughly 20,000 kilometres out from the singularity. Twice an orbit the Ring was edge-on as seen from the station, and it was likewise face-on twice an orbit. The best time to see the ring was when it was face-on, with the Sun behind the station, lighting up the ring—albeit faintly.
The Ring hung in the sky, massive, perfect, gleaming, its running lights bright in the darkness. The cold stars floated, uncaring, behind it, in the silence of space. And at the Ring’s center was the source of all its power.
The black hole, the singularity itself, was of course invisible. The event horizon was only a few meters across, and it was, after all, merely blackness in the black. Now and again, some bit of debris would be pulled into the horizon, and a bright spark would flare up as the bit of dust or misplaced screwdriver was torn apart by tidal forces, giving up some part of its mass as energy as it was sucked down into the singularity. But those flashes of light were rare, weak, tiny. The singularity pulled in nearly all the light and energy of the impact events.
Sondra stood next to the Autocrat in the gloom of the wardroom, staring out at the mighty Ring. “There it is,” she said. “Our one weapon against the Charonians. Our one hope for finding the Earth. Though God knows what we could do if we ever found it.”
“How long will it take, finding Earth?” the Autocrat asked.
Sondra shook her head. “We have no way of knowing. It’s not as if we’re actually going to open up a hole, look through it, and see the Earth. What we’re doing is a tuning hunt, searching for the right gravity resonance pattern. If we can get our singularity resonating with a Charonian black hole, the resonance will induce a wormhole between the two. That’s oversimplifying, of course, but that’s the basic idea. The trouble is that there are millions, maybe billions, of combinations. We’ve hit on six that might be something, that make the meters twitch in ways that make us think we almost induced wormhole formation. We’ve worked the hell out of all the near-misses, run every conceivable variation on them—and gotten nowhere. Maybe one of them is this Multisystem place that stole Earth, and we just haven’t got enough data. Maybe all of them were false positives. So how long until we find Earth? We don’t know.”
“Could you induce a wormhole if you got the pattern match?” the Autocrat asked. “Do you have the power, and the know-how?”
“Oh, yes,” Sondra said. “God yes. Don’t forget we’ve had a whole Solar System full of dead Charonians to take apart—and we’ve got this Plutopoint Singularity and the Earthpoint Singularity to play with. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about gravity—and manipulating gravity—in the last five years.”
“That’s one thing I’ve never understood. The Charonians placed a black hole—a singularity—there, and used it as one end of a worm-hole link connecting back to their Multisystem. Why can’t we do the same? Do a pattern match with the Earthpoint Singularity and establish a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint? Or reactivate Earthpoint as a link to where Earth is?”
“Because that singularity was controlled by the Lunar Wheel, and the Lunar Wheel is dead. You need a functional ring accelerator— like the Ring of Charon—to modulate the gravitic energy and establish a resonance pattern in the first place. The Lunar Wheel’s resonance match was lost, randomised, when the Wheel died, and we can’t get it back—just as we lost the link to where Earth is. If we built a Ring about Earthpoint, we could set up a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint, I suppose. But without the tuning data, it wouldn’t let us link up with the Multisystem. Besides, building an Earthpoint Ring would bankrupt the Solar System. That one I know. We’ve run the numbers. If you want faster transport, the Graviton is the way to go.”
“Ah, yes,” the Autocrat said, his eyes not moving off the Ring. “The Graviton. You will be surprised to learn that I do not have much interest in her.”
Sondra was surprised—and then suspicious. “No interest in a ship that should be able to make a run from the Moon to Plutopoint in no more than two or three days?”
“In a word, no. Not so long as such ships are based on technology we don’t understand, and are built with parts stripped from dead aliens. How can we rely on Charonian machinery when Charonian machinery has been so full of unpleasant surprises in the past? If we humans could build gravity-beam ships that were entirely our own, then I would be fascinated by them.”
“But it will require a great deal of research before that is possible.”
“The Autocracy has always been eager to fund worthy research projects.”
“Our current sponsors on Mars and the Moon might not welcome that,” Sondra said. “They hope to develop such ships, and use our gravity beams to power them.
“Your gravity beams. They are yours, quite true. But we Belters are traders, and we fear monopoly. Your Ring is the only possible source of gravity beams, correct? No one else in the Solar System could produce them at present? Save the Earthpoint Ring we cannot now build?”
“You are right,” Sondra said, choosing her words carefully. “It is a point which disturbs me as well,” Sondra said. “A monopoly source of a vital commodity can very easily become a target, either for destruction or empire building—or both.”
“All quite true. It would be in everyone interests to forestall these problems before the first ships are built. We have a great deal to talk about, you and I.” The Autocrat paused, and then spoke again in a more thoughtful tone. “It is possible that I will be forced to extend my stay.”
Which will definitely drive the Moon and Mars crazy, Sondra thought. But you know that. So why do you want to upset them? This is going to be more interesting than I thought. “Feel free to stay as long as you wish,” she said evenly. As if I could stop you, with the Autarch and her crew armed to the teeth.
“I thank you for your hospitality,” he said.
“You are most welcome,” Sondra said. “Is there more you wish to say regarding the Graviton?”
“Perhaps at another time. Just now, I wish to focus on the central issue. Earth,” the Autocrat said. “Is there any hope at all of finding her?”
“There is more than hope,” Sondra said, surprising herself with the vehemence of her tone. “We will get a tuning lock and find the Earth. Every other use of the Ring is secondary to our hunt for Earth, and nothing else will be allowed to interfere with it. If we get a tuning lock in the next five minutes, or if it takes a thousand years, until the Hunt for Earth is a religion, an act of faith, we will keep on until we find her. We have to believe that. We have to know that. We are the only hope the Solar System has for finding the Earth and undoing at least some of the damage.”
“Then you see the Hunt for Earth as your mission, as your duty?” asked the Autocrat.
“Oh, no,” Sondra said. “Not duty. Not mission. That’s not it at all.” She stared out the porthole at the massive ring and the tiny, invisible singularity that had once been Charon and Pluto. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the lost Earth, the sundered families, the dead of all the disasters caused by the Charonians that the Ring had awakened. “Finding Earth is not our mission,” she said. “Finding the Earth is our penance.”
chapter 5: Jam To-day
“…No previous generation w
as ever forced to look on mortality in quite the way mine was. Ours was the first generation wherein the matter was no longer in human hands, and the first in a long time when universal mortality was a reasonable possibility.
”For the last five hundred years, humanity has had the ability to destroy itself—and has come horrifyingly close to using that ability more than once. But we were at least secure in the knowledge that humanity, and life, and Earth itself would survive so long as we ourselves did not destroy them. We were the only threat to our own survival, and to that of the planet.
“But then dawned the day of the Charonians, and all things changed. We survived on their sufferance. We could die, at their whim, at any moment. In spite of all our learning, all our wisdom, all our power and technology, the people of Earth were suddenly as helpless as medieval peasants watching a cloud of locusts descend on their crops. There was nothing we could do. More galling still, there was not the slightest evidence the Charonians even knew we existed, any more than the locusts knew or cared who planted the crops they consumed.
”Since I was fourteen years old, I have been forced to face the possibility of my own imminent death, of Earth’s destruction, of the extinction of virtually all terrestrial life, and of the subversion, the perversion, of whatever remnant of life survived in the service of the conqueror. I grew up knowing my species and my planet were completely at the mercy of beings ready and able to destroy our world if it suited their purposes.
“There is no end to the ways this knowledge has shaped—and warped—every aspect of life and thought for my generation.”
—Memoirs by Dr. Sianna Colette, Columbia University Press, 2451
New York City
Earth
THE MULTISYSTEM
Abduction Day, June 7, 2431
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 51
