The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Travel bag still over her shoulder, she stepped out of the airlock chamber and into the main transport entrance of Dome One, Dreyfuss Station, to be welcomed by the rotting-sweatsock smell that summed up the whole of Dreyfuss Station so far as Marcia was concerned.

  The transport section took up about half the hundred-meter diameter of Dome One. It had all the ambience of a third-rate loading and storage bay—which was, of course, all it really was.

  Everything up here at the Pole had always been rather utilitarian, but the repeated cutbacks in maintenance had turned things positively grim in the last year or two. The air was a trifle too dry. There was just a hint of the ozone odor of overworked electrical system. A few of the light fixtures here and there were dark. A film of dust lay over everything, and a sad greyness seemed to have settled with the dust. The shabby feel of the place never failed to get to Marcia, every time she came back. The place was less than five years old, and yet it all seemed to be moldering away.

  Someday they would get the budget and the resources to refurbish this place. Not for the first time, she considered the likely fact that the people who were around here all the time didn’t even notice it anymore. Maybe that was the saddest thing of all.

  Tunnels and chambers cut into the lunar rock, with a few surface domes. That was Dreyfuss Station. Yet there had been a time—and perhaps there would be a time once again—when those tunnels and domes were and would be something more than that. Once it had been a place with a purpose, a mission, the place where the people of the Moon would wrest the secrets of the Charonians from the ruined Lunar Wheel.

  But no one had made any real progress toward that goal in a long, long time. The researchers had accumulated data, yes—huge masses of it. The people of the Moon now understood the biology and behavior of the Charonians far better than they ever had before. But none of that knowledge got them any closer to finding the Earth.

  And, ultimately, what else mattered besides that?

  Well, one thing did. At least it mattered to Marcia MacDougal. It was why she had signed on to the Lunar Wheel survey in the first place. Her husband, Gerald MacDougal, serving aboard the Terra Nova. She had lost him when the Earth had been Abducted, and if there was one goal in her life, it was it getting him back. Mastering the Charonian symbol language was nothing to her but a way of moving toward that goal. Humanity might be able to undo what the Charonians had done—if humanity learned Charonian.

  None of which did her any good at the moment. Where was Selby? She glanced around the arrival room, half-hoping that Selby wasn’t going to be there. Yes, she had said she would meet her flight, and Marcia had agreed, but she couldn’t help wishing she could slip off to her own quarters and have a little peace and quiet—

  But no. There was Selby, on the far side of the room, waving her hand a bit frantically. Marcia sighed, gave her a token wave, and made her way over to her.

  The theory had been offered more than once that England kept an even keel through the simple expedient of shipping a fair number of the dottier cases off to foreign parts. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton lent credence to the theory. Marcia MacDougal had never met anyone quite like Selby. Normally, she rather enjoyed the other woman’s company—in small doses. Selby never quite seemed to be on the same wavelength as everyone else. There she was, on a day of general public mourning, grinning from ear to ear and literally bouncing up and down with excitement.

  Selby was about forty-five or fifty, something under average height. Her dark brown hair had a bit of grey in it, and was cut in a too-short sort of pageboy. She had pale skin, startling blue eyes, even white teeth, and a strange sort of nonchalant enthusiasm for practically everything. She was a just a trifle on the stocky side, though really still quite trim.

  “Coo-ee! Marcia! Marcia MacDougal! Over here!” As if Marcia couldn’t see her eight meters in front of her face. What was that coo-ee noise supposed to mean, anyway? Marcia stepped forward to greet her. “Hello, Selby,” she said, reaching out to shake her hand.

  “Hello, Dr. MacDougal,” she said with exaggerated emphasis, a chirpy lilt in her voice. Instead of shaking hands, she sidestepped and gave Marcia a rather maternal peck on the cheek. “Always such a pleasure to see you. But you’ve been away so long this time I almost forgot you were gone.”

  “Well, I, ah… what? What did you say?”

  She smiled and pulled Marcia along by the arm, eager to get moving. “Welcome back,” she said, ignoring her question. “It’s been nothing but dull going since you left—until the excitement started, of course. Non-stop, all-out, all-go ever since we got started,” she went on, the sentences tumbling out of her, one after the other. “We’ve been down there doing the—well, you’ll see. No matter. Working round the clock and then some. But I swear we’ve been at it so hard I didn’t know the date until I realized what today was.”

  MacDougal never quite knew how to react to Selby’s scrambled syntax. For her part, Selby never seemed to understand why people were constantly confused around her. It was as if she were speaking a private language of her own, one that made perfect sense to her, and that only resembled English by sheer chance. Marcia knew Tycho Purple Penal folk who were more understandable. “Sounds as if you’ve been busy,” she said, for want of anything better to say.

  “Oh, I suppose so. Maybe not all that much,” she said, quite casually contradicting everything she had just said with an obviously spurious nonchalance. “Are you glad to be here?” she asked, quite out of the blue.

  It was an absurd question, and Marcia was in no mood for nonsense, but at least it had the benefit of allowing a clear answer. “Not really,” she said. “Today’s not exactly a happy day. But you said you had something for me. Is it—”

  Selby’s voice turned serious, at least for the moment. She stopped and looked her straight in the eye. “Yes. I said it might be a breakthrough. Our Rosetta Stone, the key that might let us learn… learn everything. If we have the stomach for it. Don’t bother getting back to your quarters. Just toss your gear in a locker and let’s go right now,” Selby said. “This will make better sense if you see for yourself. If it even makes sense then.”

  It was not until that moment that Marcia realized Selby was still wearing her own pressure suit. She hated wearing that thing. She always stripped out of it the first chance she got. And she usually bent Marcia’s ear for at least a good fifteen minutes no matter what the topic under discussion. If Selby stayed in her suit, and didn’t stop to chat, then something was definitely up.

  Selby seemed too excited. Marcia started to feel a nervous, queasy sensation in her stomach as she crossed to the single bank of luggage lockers and tossed her bag into one of the lockers that still worked. She came back, with more certainty in her stride than her heart. The sooner she found out what the hell they had found, the better. “All right, Selby,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  The entrance complex to the Rabbit Hole took up most of the rest of Dome One. They made their way through the redundant airlock sealing off the Vertical Transit Center from the rest of the dome. There was normal pressure on either side of the lock, and perhaps it would have been more convenient to leave both doors open and allow easier access—but this was a station on a shoestring, and lots of things could change air pressure on either side of that lock. Safety regs required full standard lock cycling and sealed airlocks at all times. They went through the lock. “All set to see what we shall see?” Selby asked, her tone more serious than her words.

  “All set,” Marcia said, trying hard to read Selby’s expression through her helmet. She was always a bit strained and tense, but something about her cheeriness seemed even more forced than usual.

  MacDougal followed Selby into the transit elevator and took a seat on the opposite side of the car from her, trying to get far enough away that it would be awkward for Selby to start a conversation. She buckled her seatbelt and waited.

  The Rabbit Hole. At some time in the deep past, the Cha
ronians had dug the Lunar Wheel cavity, wrapping clear around the Moon forty kilometers beneath the surface. As part of that process, they had dug twin boreholes at the lunar North and South poles. They had dug these upward from the forty-kilometer level, almost but not quite to the surface, leaving the surface layers of rock undisturbed. As with most things regarding the Charonians, there were many theories as to why this might be so, but no real answer.

  Five years before, search teams had used alternate-mode gravity detectors to locate the top of the North Pole borehole, which was promptly dubbed the Rabbit Hole. Back then, Lucian Dreyfuss and Chao’s TeleOperator had ridden a jury-rigged sort of cable car down the forty-kilometer shaft.

  Today, a sophisticated system of four vertical-shuttle cars, each with twenty seats, handled the traffic.

  A clock display by the car door reported that the car would descend in five minutes. The car had been empty when Marcia and Selby arrived, but two or three other people came in and sat down in the middle of the car. Good. It made it that much easier to avoid talking to Selby. In practical terms, yes, they could have set their comm systems to a private frequency and had a lovely chat. Normally Selby would have done just that, no matter if they were two meters or ten kilometers away. But for whatever reason, just now it seemed she actually did not want to speak.

  Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton, Ph.D., was a Leftover, that being the rather unfortunate and semi-derogatory term for anyone from Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. Most of the Leftovers on the Moon had come to the Moon as tourists, and thus represented a more or less random cross-section of terrestrial affluence; well-to-do travelers from all walks of life. Most had adapted to their new circumstances reasonably well in the past few years.

  Still, even the most stable and best-readjusted of them had been wounded pretty badly. To Marcia, and to most people who lived on the Moon, the Earth had been a pretty thing in the sky, a distant place that people and things came from and went to. Marcia had been to Earth, but she was not of the Earth. It was important to her, she mourned its passing as deeply as anyone, but it was not her home. To her, and for most folk on the Moon, it was more of an abstraction than a location, with the whole planet, all its myriad places and endless variety, lumped together under the name “Earth.”

  But the Leftovers never spoke of themselves as being from Earth. They were from London, or Greenwich Village, or Cambridge or Fresno, from Kiev or Montevideo or Bangkok or Warsaw. Each of them had lost a different home, a different place, a different family. Everything they knew was gone, vanished. They had no way of knowing if their daughters or husbands or grandmothers lived. They knew that they themselves were lost to their loved ones. Their families might as well be dead, and, so far as their families were concerned, the Leftovers might as well be dead.

  Marcia had only lost her husband, and she at least knew he had survived, where he had ended up. Her loss was trivial compared to Selby’s. How could she bear up under a loss of her world, of her everything?

  Some Leftovers had remarried, started new lives, new families. Some lived their lives as if Earth was just about to return at any moment.

  But all of them, all of them, had that look in their eyes. No matter how they dealt with it, or refused to deal with it, that pain, that wound, bright and clear, was just beneath the surface. Perhaps the only thing different about Selby was that she wore her wounds a bit more obviously—and pretended harder than most they weren’t there at all.

  The departure clock counted down to zero, the door slid shut, and the car began its descent down the Rabbit Hole. It rolled downward, but only a few meters. Another airlock.

  There was air pressure, if not air as such, on the other side of the lock. The Lunar Wheel was surrounded by a cloud of dismal green gas, a miasma of complex, foul-smelling compounds, residual gaseous waste products of the Wheel’s biochemistry. It had been a lot worse five years ago, when they had first drilled the shaft and punched through into the environment the Wheel had built for itself. But no airlock was perfect. A lot of the muck had leaked away into Dreyfuss Station since then, necessitating extra-heavy-duty air-scrubbers. Even they couldn’t get all of it. Dreyfuss Station would never smell good. Some further fraction of it seemed to have been reabsorbed by the Wheel, or else some undetected vent was allowing it to escape. In any event, the gas pressure inside the Wheel cavity had been dropping steadily for years.

  The lock doors cycled, and the car moved downward again.

  There were windows in the car, but not much outside the car to look at. The walls of the shaft and the support cables for the transit elevators were illuminated by the car’s running lights, turned a sickly green by the intervening gas. Usually you could spot a car headed toward the surface about halfway through the ride. A gleaming blob of light far below, moving upward at a most impressive speed, would rush past the downward car with a swoosh of noise and a noticeable jostling of the down car. It was disconcerting to a Conner like Marcia, quite unused to the effects of air pressure on vehicles. The other riders got up and went to the window to see the show.

  But Marcia had seen it before. Right now, she was more interested in her traveling companion. Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton was an atypical Leftover. She had not come here as a tourist. She had come to the Moon to work. As an archaeologist. The only one on this world, though it might seem one more than was needed.

  But archaeology was not as absurd as it sounded. Not quite, anyway. She was not, as some people assumed, some nut come to dig up the graves of imaginary ancient astronauts from Atlantis or from beyond the stars or something. People—regular, human people— had been on the Moon for centuries, and they had left more than a few interesting and important things behind. A good deal of her job was done just sitting at a comm panel, tooling through the historical data. She would dig through long-forgotten infobases, sift old records, go through long-forgotten datacubes and hardcopy records, finding the old details and key facts no one had seen in generations.

  But she did fieldwork as well. Abandoned settlements, crashed vehicles, trash heaps and so on were scattered about the lunar surface. Selby had done some impressive digs under difficult circumstances, and had found enough evidence to rewrite a page or two of lunar history. Chancellor Daltry had talked about conversations with the dead at the memorial service. Selby had spent her working life talking with them.

  From the archaeological point of view, the Lunar Wheel could be considered as one huge artifact—or one huge carcass, if you liked. Tyrone Vespasian, the director of Dreyfuss Station, had hired Selby his first day on the job—and, as he had told Marcia once or twice since, there had been few days since when he did not both congratulate himself on the choice and regret his decision. Selby was good at her job, there was no doubt about that. She had done any amount of first-class work. But she was also a royal pain in the neck.

  The car began to slow as it came to the end of its journey. Smoothly, neatly, perfectly, it arrived at the base of the Rabbit Hole.

  There was a slight pause as the car unsealed and matched air pressure with the outside. Marcia’s suit whirred and hummed, adjusting to the increase in pressure. The elevator door opened and a few tendrils of greenish smog drifted into the car. Marcia undid her seatbelt, sealed her helmet, and followed the other passengers out the door. She stepped out to stand on the corpse of the Lunar Wheel. The greenish tinge was not quite as noticeable down here. The techs had fooled with the lights to mask it somewhat. But no one was going be tricked into thinking there was normal air down here.

  Selby was leading the way forward, down to the tunnel entrance, but Marcia hesitated for a moment. Beneath her feet was a continuous ribbon of material that wrapped clear around the Moon. She looked ahead, down a gaping tunnel that led off into the darkness. The surface she was standing on entered that tunnel like a road going though a mountain.

  The tunnel itself was high and rounded, about twenty meters high at the center point, and about forty across. She turned around
and looked the other way. There was the other end of the same damn tunnel, coming back to the same damn point, having wrapped clear around the Moon. She could set off down that tunnel and keep on walking until she was back where she started.

  Incredible. And all of it built God knows how just to house the thing, the Wheel under her feet. The survey teams were just starting to explore the whole Wheel, but the drillings and sounding and excavations they had done so far suggested that most of it had the cross-section of a rounded-off oval about forty meters side to side and thirty top to bottom. In places it bulged out vertically or horizontally, the tunnel enlarging to accommodate it.

  This one thing, this one object, went clear around the world. She had to look down at it, stare at it, marvel at it every time she came down here. Maybe that was why lately she came down so rarely. Hell, we built the Ring of Charon, and that’s practically the same size, Marcia told herself. The difference was, of course, that the Ring had been built in open space. Digging a tunnel clear around a world was far beyond human capability—or, for that matter, human necessity. There had been no reason to hide the Ring of Charon. There was the question that nagged at the back of everything: what the devil had the Lunar Wheel been hiding from? It had taken tremendous effort to hide it. What could be so powerful that something as huge and mighty as the Wheel feared it, hid from it?

  The surface of the Wheel was a dark, hard, flaky brown substance. It was, in effect, the thing’s dead, dried-out skin. When the first teams had come down here, the area at the base of the Rabbit Hole had been covered in a layer of thin, flat, broken-up pieces of the stuff, with a consistency like that of dried leaves that crunched when you walked on them. The surface had been littered with bits of Charonian junk. Bits of dead carrier bug, carapaces from unknown Charonian forms, broken pieces that seemed a cross between the mechanical and the biological.

  All of that had been cleared away, leaving the lower epidermal layers exposed. Bit by bit, those were drying up and flaking away as well. Bits of dead wheelskin were constantly drifting in from the tunnel. It was a struggle to keep the area clear.