The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Because now, of course, there was no Moon. Instead there was the hateful Moonpoint Ring, hanging neatly in the sky, precisely where the Moon was supposed to be, the Ring and the black hole in the center of the Ring providing exactly one Lunar mass, keeping the tides running in their ancient patterns.

  Maybe that was enough to keep the fish happy. But who would want to look where the Moon was supposed to be and see an artificial Ring instead?

  The whole sky was ruined. Sianna lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, determined that this one night she would not give the Charonians the satisfaction of looking on their sky.

  Foolish thoughts. Why would beings capable of stealing all the worlds and suns of the Multisystem and gathering them in one place care in the slightest if Sianna Colette, nineteen-year-old Columbia University undergraduate and noted troublemaker, snubbed their sky?

  Unless this, now, was the dream, truly was the nightmare. Perhaps this very night the survivors back in the Solar System had mastered gravities, found the Earth, and pulled it home.

  Sianna felt a stirring of hope. But then she snorted to herself, rolled over on her side and hugged at her pillow. In a pig’s eye. Nonsense. Piffle.

  But it could have happened. The sky that had vanished when she was a gawky fourteen-year-old could have returned. After all, it had vanished while she slept, five years ago.

  What a horrible morning that had been, when she awoke. But no, don’t think about it.

  But it could have come back. The people in the Solar System could have rescued Earth, somehow.

  Oh, hell and bother. She tossed the pillow across the tiny room. It struck the wall with a soft whump and slid to the floor. Might as well go take a look. Otherwise Sianna knew she would lie there half the night, torturing herself with the convincing delusions of her dreams.

  She sat upright in bed, swung her feet around, slipped them precisely into her slippers, and stood up. Moving in the darkness, she went to the closet and pulled on her robe, moving carefully so as not to set the floor creaking. She did not wish to waken Rachel, her apartment mate, sleeping in the next room. She made sure she had her key and slipped out into the hallway. She moved confidently through the darkened hall to the stairwell door, her hand smoothly finding the handle in the darkness. She padded up the stairs, her slippers flip-flopping up the elderly treads.

  She climbed the four flights to the roof and pushed open the door. She stepped out into a chilly spring evening and onto the little patch of roofgrass. Nearly every roof in New York sported some sort of greenery. Sometimes she wished that the super would go to the additional expense of planting trees instead of just grass, but then she would not be able to see the sky, and that would never do.

  Sianna Colette needed to see the sky, needed to keep an eye on it, as she would watch a once-trusted friend who had turned on her once and might do so again. Now she looked upward, and felt the same numb, angry disappointment she always felt upon awaking from her dream of the skies of home. Anger at the Universe generally, and the Charonians especially, that the Earth was still in this place. Anger at herself for letting her muzzy-headed dreams trick her into believing, into hoping.

  Sianna Colette looked upward into a firmament nothing like anything Nature had ever intended for the Earth.

  The Moonpoint Ring hung low in the sky to the southwest, where the full Moon belonged. It was a hollow ring hanging edge-on in the grey-black sky, a circle in the sky, the same size as the Moon but much harder to see. At its center was the Moonpoint Singularity, a black hole. It was a most incongruous and alien object to be floating over the spires and skyscrapers and towers of Manhattan. The Naked Purple Habitat, the last surviving human habitation in space besides the Terra Nova, orbited the Moonpoint Singularity as well, actually inside the Moonpoint Ring, but it was too faint to be a naked-eye object in as murky a sky as this one.

  Three Captive Suns were visible at the moment, each casting something like the same light as a full moon, each washing out a large swatch of the night sky. The brightest of the three was actually surrounded by a tiny ring of blue sky, fading out to dark grey at about twice the diameter of a full Moon. Bright as they were, the Captive Suns would have been brighter still, if not for the dust shrouds that begloomed the Multisystem.

  A good round dozen meteors flashed across the firmament in the first minute that Sianna looked at the sky, but she paid them no mind. In the Solar System, so many meteors would have been remarkable, but here they were a routine and distracting nuisance. In the Multisystem, space was chock-full of small debris.

  Not counting the Captive Suns, there were no stars to be seen. Blame the dust for that, as well. Whether by design or by accident, thick clouds of dust and gas—thick by astronomical standards— filled and surrounded the Multisystem, blotting out the stars beyond and rendering the Multisystem invisible from the outside Universe. The astrophysicists down at the Multisystem Research Institute calculated that, from the outside, the Multisystem would be nothing more than a dull blob of infrared, undetectable from further off than a few tens of light-years.

  Sianna also could see a dozen planets, two of them close enough to show disks. So close and yet so far, she thought. That so many other worlds were visible was perhaps the cruelest joke of the Earth’s captivity. For no human could reach any of them. The COREs saw to that. COREs did not care if they pulverized a rogue asteroid or a spacecraft. They killed anything on an intercept course with a planet. Not that many of those planets would be pleasant places to be. They were life-bearing worlds, yes—but ruined ones. You could tell that from the telescope images and the spectroscopic data. The best estimate was that a mass landing of Charonians on a planet’s surface would cause enough stress and damage to induce a mass extinction, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. A few revisionists believed it was the Charonians who wiped out the dinosaurs, though that seemed a bit farfetched to Sianna.

  Sianna glanced at her watch and noted the time. Past midnight. She had to get back to bed. Class tomorrow, and she had to study for her exams.

  It all seemed so normal. That was the most infuriating thing. Earth kidnapped, all links with the rest of humanity severed, and yet life went relentlessly on. Earth had been snatched through a black hole, and yet Sianna still had to worry about studying and getting her laundry done. It didn’t seem reasonable. Somehow, everyday life should have been hit harder by the disaster.

  But here she was, worrying about exams. It had to be that way, if she was not to go mad.

  The whole city, the whole world was like that, each person struggling to pull a thick blanket of normalcy down over the terror, the bewilderment, of everyday life. Whenever Sianna walked the streets of the city, she saw too many expressionless eyes, too many faces with that same blank stare. Indeed, numb denial had become the normal state of affairs.

  Sianna felt a thin film of moisture in her eyes and blinked rapidly. Not now. Not tonight. She could cry some other time. Now she had to get back to bed.

  She kept watching the sky. A dim dot of light, crawling slowly across the sky. And there was another one. COREs. Back in the old days, those dots of light would have been brighter, sharper—and they would have been spacecraft, space stations, orbital habitats.

  Once Earth had a mighty empire of satellites, habitats and spacecraft back in the Solar System. Now nearly all of them were gone. Not much had survived the transit to the Multisystem, and most that did make it through had been smashed by the COREs.

  Humanity had exactly two major space assets left, to wit, a habitat and a spacecraft. The Terra Nova, designed as a generational starship and pressed into service exploring the Multisystem as best it could. The habitat was the Naked Purple Habitat, or NaPurHab, and it almost didn’t count. The Naked Purple, the movement that ran NaPurHab, was so far out on the edge that even the other lunatic fringe groups called them extreme. NaPurHab was valuable and important only because it was the only hab left. It was an asset that might someday prove useful, though the Pu
rps hadn’t been the most useful of partners in the struggle so far.

  Everything else had been clobbered by the COREs. The Terra Nova survived because it had left Earth orbit before the COREs arrived. NaPurHab was still there because it had managed a stable orbit, not of the Earth, but of the Moonpoint Ring’s black hole.

  Now Earth, NaPurHab and the Terra Nova were all held at bay by the same enemy: the COREs. A CORE was a self-propelled rock the size of an asteroid. And if one rock was not enough, why then the Charonians would send dozens, hundreds, thousands of rocks. They worked with brutal simplicity. They emitted massively powerful radar and used it to detect their targets. Then they aimed themselves at their targets and crashed into them.

  If a shuttlecraft from NaPurHab tried to land on Earth, a CORE would smash the ship to smithereens. If the COREs decided that a craft launching from Earth to NaPurHab was a threat to Earth, then it too would be destroyed. About a third to a half of the resupply flights to NaPurHab made it through. The COREs had humanity quite thoroughly bottled up.

  At least, Sianna thought, she was part of the organization, the Multisystem Research Institute, that was looking for a way out. She was just an undergraduate and part-time researcher, but she was contributing, in some tiny way. Any day now, MRI might find the COREs’ weaknesses, actually solve the problem and let the people of Earth travel freely in space once again.

  And if pigs were horses, then beggars would fly. Or however it goes. No, she had that all muddled. Sianna yawned and hugged her arms around her shoulders. She must be more tired than she thought. Time to go in and get back to bed.

  But there was one more thing in the night sky of New York City, something she had to force herself to look at. Where would it be? High in the east by this time of night.

  She peered fiercely up at the gloomy half-dark sky. The Sphere. Sometimes it would glow a dull and sullen red. The prevailing school of thought was that the red glow meant the Sphere was expending some massive amount of power. Of course, the alternative theory was that the glow meant the Sphere was absorbing power, which just went to show how little anyone knew.

  Ah. There it was. Hard to see it tonight. Just now, the Sphere was charcoal grey, a disk the size of a medium-large coin held at arm’s length. It hung in the deep purple-blue of a patch of sky near one of the Captive Suns. When not indulging in its power surges—unless they were power absorptions—the Sphere was visible only by light reflected off the Sunstar and the other Captive Suns. Sometimes it was slightly backlit by light reflecting off the dust beyond it. In general, the sky inside the Multisystem was a dark charcoal-grey, illuminated by light reflecting off the dust clouds. In a fully dark sky, the Sphere would normally be more or less invisible—but then, there was no longer any such thing as a fully dark sky.

  The Sphere. Calling it by such a simple name made it seem so normal, so harmless. It didn’t look much bigger than the Moonpoint Ring, or some of the nearer planets on their unnervingly close approaches.

  But the Sphere’s circumference was just about the same as that of Earth’s old orbit around the Sun. The Sunstar around which Earth now orbited, and all the other Captive Suns, and all the planets and meteors and dust clouds of the Multisystem, were chained to the Sphere by its artificially generated gravitic power.

  The Sphere was many times farther from Earth than Pluto had been in the old days. At a distance where the Sun itself would be nothing but a bright point of light, the Sphere still showed a disk noticeably larger than a full Moon.

  That harmless-looking Sphere had kidnapped the Earth. No one was exactly certain why the Sphere did it, though there were any number of entertaining theories. Earth had been collected as part of some long-term scientific experiment. Or the Sphere, with its godlike powers, wished to be treated as such, and had gathered Earth in to provide it with a fresh batch of worshipers. Sianna knew of at least three Sphere-worship sects in Manhattan alone. Or the Multisystem, with its many Captive Suns, each with large numbers of life-bearing worlds in attendance, was a wildlife refuge, a safe place to keep Earth while some of the Sphere’s myriad underlings tore the Solar System apart and built a new Sphere around the Sun of the Solar System, thus producing an offspring to the present Sphere.

  The consensus in scientific circles was that the last could well be reasonably close to the truth. The last word from the Solar System before all communication was lost was that the Sphere’s minions had made a shambles of the place.

  But there was no law requiring the consensus to be right. Sianna worked as an intern at Columbia’s Multisystem Research Institute, and she heard things there. Saw papers she wasn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to see.

  Things that were not supposed to get out, ever, period. For if they got out, the sheer horror of the news would most emphatically change everyday life. Numb denial was preferable to mass panic.

  The trouble was, of course, that sooner or later it would get out. The evidence was there to be seen, on the other worlds of the Multisystem.

  Sianna turned her back on the Sphere. She went back inside and down the stairs. She slipped back into the apartment and back into bed, struggling mightily not to think about it all—and failing miserably.

  She tried desperately to think about her upcoming exams, her laundry, the way her roommate slept till noon, about anything that did not matter. But none of that would come to mind, of course. Not with Fermi’s Paradox scuttling about in her brain.

  Hundreds of years before, a scientist named Enrico Fermi had posited a famous question: Where are they? Where were the other intelligences in the Universe? Assume any sort of reasonable distribution of Earth-like planets, and assign any probability meaningfully higher than zero for intelligent life arising and surviving on such worlds. There were so many stars in the sky that even if only a microscopic fraction of them produced intelligent life, the skies should have been full of interstellar radio traffic at the very least, and perhaps starships as well. They should have been easy to detect. So why couldn’t humanity find anything?

  Earth’s astronomers were now able to get a good close look at all the other Earth-like worlds in attendance on the Sphere. Explanatory evidence was plainly visible on those worlds. Now, at last, there was a simple, straightforward answer to Fermi’s question. Now they knew.

  Sianna stared again at the crack in her ceiling and swore silently. Now she had done it. She was going to lie awake half the night, worrying about it. But who could blame her, once she had seen the confidential reports?

  Humankind could not detect any other intelligent races in the galaxy for a very simple reason:

  The Charonians had, in effect, eaten them.

  And soon, it would be humanity’s turn.

  What was left of the night passed in strange and uncomfortable dreams that skipped back and forth over Sianna’s life, back to the comfortable certainties of her childhood, ignoring the fragile present, looking toward to her doubtful future. She saw visions of herself as a youth, as a hale and hearty old woman, as a shriveled young corpse being gobbled up by a Charonian worldeater. She saw the face of the first boy to kiss her, years before, and the faces of her children to be in years not yet come. Those futures and pasts, and many others besides, flickered through her mind, all seeming strangely cut off from her present, as if there were some barrier, some gap, between them. She found herself trying to reach the future, trying to walk toward it—but instead falling, falling into the gap that held her back from it.

  Falling, falling, into deepness and darkness—

  It seemed to Sianna that her eyes snapped open with an almost audible click, that her mind spontaneously uplinked into fully-awake turbo mode without her having any say in the matter. She shook her head bemusedly. She must be doing too much computer work if she was thinking of her own mind in programming terms.

  The Sunstar gleamed in her window, the almost-right-colored light relentlessly cheerful. She popped up out of bed, her feet hitting the floor just as the invigorating odor of fresh,
hot coffee wafted into her nose from the automatics in the kitchen. She blinked, stretched, and looked about herself eagerly, as if it were Easter morning and there were presents and painted eggs to be found.

  Why on Earth did she feel so good? She should have felt like death warmed over after a night like that, not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  No, wait. It was not that she felt good, exactly. She considered for a moment. She felt stretched, taut, ready. She was tired and stiff. But the restless night had primed her somehow. She felt strangely pulled along by outside forces, as if someone or something else were full of energy and enthusiasm, were lifting her up, poking her to get her moving and alert.

  Alert. That was the word for it. Ready for something that was going to come her way, something she could not pursue. Reaching for it would only make it recede into the grey distance.

  A thought, an idea—no, a whole line of reasoning, was simmering there in the back of her head, biding its time, waiting for its moment.

  Let it come. Let it alone. Leave it alone and it will come home, wagging its tail behind it. Sianna had learned the hard way, early on, that she could not force ideas. Thoughts and ideas were delicate things. Touch them and the bloom was gone.

  She headed for the bathroom and a good hot shower, moving carefully, trying to keep her mind from pouncing on whatever-it-was in the back of her head. She tried to think quietly, thinking of the little, the light, the unimportant, so as not to disturb her subconscious. She found herself moving quietly, like a host tiptoeing about when a guest is sleeping.

  Think of other things. Enjoy the shower. Tell yourself you can find something nice to wear, even if the laundry should have been done a week ago. Go to the kitchen, get your coffee, make toast and think about putting jam on it. But don’t do it. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day, she told herself with mock seriousness.