Somehow the real things suddenly felt false. The quacking and fussing of the ducks as they splashed about in the water, the slight residual queasiness in her stomach, even the distant echo of a human voice from some unseen conversation elsewhere in the dome—all seemed part of some grand illusion.
Everything is fine, the dome of the main level told all who came there. Everything is under control. You are safe here, and all is as it should be.
Except the only reason the place existed was that the Earth had been stolen by aliens and nothing was as it should be.
Sianna frowned as she made her way toward the Main Ops building. She entered the place through one of the glass doors in the base of the mushroom stem, and got into one of the elevators that led up to the main body of the building. If the main center for the study of the enemy was so deeply immersed in denial of the situation, if the people researching the problem insisted on seeing the night sky as it ought to be, not as it was—then what hope could there truly be?
Ten minutes later, a mug of good, strong, steaming-hot tea in her hand, her face directed toward the largest and blankest of the windowless walls that made up her cubicle, Sianna felt better. She was alone, her mind was clear, the problem was in front of her.
Quiet and alone, she allowed her mind the pleasure of wrapping itself up in the mystery of those missing thirty-seven minutes. Let’s see, she told herself. Assume there was nothing at all wrong with the Saint Anthony‘s clock. If so, then those thirty-seven minutes were real. So what could cause the probe to jump around in time when—
“Hello, Sianna. Good morning,” a quiet voice said from behind her.
Sianna jumped, splashing tea on the desk. It was Wally, of course.
Damnation, couldn’t he ever make some noise? Or knock? She cursed under her breath and set the mug down. No, he never would change. If she wanted to quit jumping out of her skin, she would have to rearrange the furniture in here so her back wasn’t to the door, or, worse, shut the door. Sianna did not relish being in an enclosed space that small. Besides, she was damned if she would change her space and the way she did things in it to suit someone else.
“Hello, Wally,” she said, her back still to the doorway as she calmed herself, trying to compose her face as she blotted up the spilled tea with a piece of tissue from the dispenser. She felt a strong impulse to bite his head off, but there was no point in scaring the poor guy to death. Wally did not deal well with anger.
Throwing the tissue into the recycle bin, she swiveled her chair around to face the doorway, her expression blandly polite.
Wally Sturgis was standing nervously just outside her door. God only knew how he managed to look shy and nervous without moving a muscle, but he managed it. “Hello Sianna. What brings you, ah— in—so early this morning?” he asked, still not quite daring to make eye contact with her.
Wally was a forty-two-year-old doctoral candidate on loan to the Multisystem Research Institute from the Simulations and Modeling Lab in Columbia’s math department. He was the absolute archetype of the eternal student—locked into one niche in life that he could never escape, and completely unaware that he was locked into anything.
Sianna sighed inwardly, and spoke in a fair imitation of a cheerful voice. “Just had an idea or two I wanted to work on before the rest of the crowd came in,” she said. “I wanted a little peace and quiet, that’s all.” There was some hope, however faint, that he might take the hint.
No such luck. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Wally said, nodding vigorously as he sidled through the door and sat down in the visitor’s chair, keeping himself as far from her as possible. He sat down, folded his hands tightly in his lap and stared intently at a spot on the floor just to the left of her feet.
“I know how that is,” he said. “You can get a lot more done when nobody is around. I hate it when people just barge in and— Ah. Oh.” Suddenly the light went on in his head. He looked up, startled, making eye contact for the first time. Sianna repressed a smile as she watched an expression of dismay slowly appear on Wally’s face. Only he could wander in and disrupt someone and then sympathize about the perils of being disrupted.
Sianna knew she ought to say something, ought to smooth over the awkward moment with a word or two that would make Wally feel better. But half out of mischief, and half because it wouldn’t kill Wally to be embarrassed enough not to barge in the next time, she said nothing.
The first time she had met Wally, back when she was an underage freshman four years ago, Sianna had asked him some polite question about whether he liked doing simulations. Wally had started his reply in a low, quiet, shy voice Sianna could barely hear—but as he started warming to his topic, he spoke louder, faster, his face becoming animated and excited as he described the virtues and perils of pseudo-fractal regressions and high n-dimensional projection arrays. He had gone on for twenty minutes before Sianna could find a way to escape.
Not long after that, Sianna had made it her mission in life to reform Wally, to show him the big wide grown-up world. Why, precisely, a gawky fifteen-year-old should want to do such a thing was not entirely clear to her, even at the time.
Whatever drew him to her, made her feel for him, it certainly wasn’t his looks. He was short and spindly-looking. What there was of his shaggy brown hair hung straggling down about his shoulders, uncombed and unkempt.
A large and prominent bald spot on the top of his head spoke to the fact that this was not a man much given to vanity or appearances. After all, a man could slap a dab of cream on his head twice a day and clear up baldness in a month—but that presupposed that the man cared that he was balding, and could remember to apply the medication every day. Wally didn’t qualify on either score.
His clothes told much the same story, from the slept-in look of his rumpled dark-blue shirt and wrinkled, musty dark grey work pants to the battered look of his ped-slippers. Still, even these clothes suggested some sort of progress. For Wally, wearing any other color but black was a real fashion statement.
He had bushy eyebrows, deep-set eyes of indeterminate color, a rather beakish nose, and an unfashionably large and unkempt beard that didn’t somehow seem to match his handlebar mustache. His rumpled face held that pallor peculiar to people who never see the Sun at all, and never expose themselves to the weather. It looked as if he had not slept in a while.
None of that meant anything, of course. He always looked that way. Wally could have been in those clothes for three days, nursing a computer run nonstop—or he could have just rolled out of bed, taken a bracing hot shower, and stepped into clean fresh clothes. Sianna had concluded that Wally’s unchanging appearance was a result of years of effort, the cumulative effect of decades in the student life-style. He had been pulling all-nighters at random intervals all his adult life, each one etching the lines of exhaustion and rumpledness a little deeper.
The consensus around the Institute was that Wally would develop normal social skills—and complete his doctorate—just about the time he was due to retire.
Clearly he didn’t have the skills yet. He still hadn’t apologized for barging in. He sat there, with that damned hangdog look on his face. She could never read that look. Was he embarrassed? Was he trying to think of something to say? Did he think that he had already said enough? Was he waiting for her to speak?
Sianna gave in. She would have to break the ice, as usual.
“Oh, it’s all right, Wally. Life goes on. But how about you?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, in a daydreamy voice. At a guess, he had already forgotten asking her why she was here.
What went on in that head? Sianna spoke in her calmest voice, for all the world like a patient grade-school teacher dealing with a slow student. “Why are you here, Wally?” she asked.
“Huh? What? Well, uh, I was transferred over from Columbia because—”
“No, Wally,” Sianna said, struggling to keep her voice from rising. “Why are you here this morning? You look a little punchy. Have you be
en here all night?”
Wally looked surprised and glanced down at himself, clearly wondering what about his appearance would make someone think he was short of sleep. “Me? Nope. Got to bed about nine last night. I’m just coming in for the day. Dr. Sakalov wants me to set up his Sphere-interior simulation. He thinks he’s finally figured out where Charon Central is.”
“Not Charon Central again. Don’t they ever quit?”
Wally smiled, and his eyes crinkled up with pleasure. “I guess not. Dr. Sakalov really thinks he has it this time. But—ah—ah—I almost hope he’s wrong again. Every time he is, he gets me higher-priority access to sim time so I can prove his next theory.” Wally grinned broadly, very much amused.
Sianna frowned. “Maybe it’s a joke to you, but not to me, Wally. It’s all guesses and theory and philosophy and logic-chopping. Sakalov’s trying to prove the Multisystem is controlled from the Sphere core because he wants to believe it, not because there’s any proof. Because it fits his theories—hell, his theology—about how the Charonians work.” Maybe that was a bit overstated, but Sianna wasn’t the only one who thought Sakalov got a bit mystical at times. “It’s about as scientific as the quest for the Holy Grail, or creating the Philosopher’s Stone, or squaring the circle. You look for something so hard you end up trying to invent it when it turns out not to exist.”
“But… well… I don’t know,” Wally said. Wally didn’t like arguing, or any sort of confrontation, and he wasn’t very good at it.
“Look,” Sianna said, “someday, yes, maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll find Charon Central—if it even exists—and maybe that will be vital information. But for the time being, the Charonians have us penned up pretty damned tight. What use is proving Charon Central is in the Sphere when we can’t get to the Sphere? No one can even get off-planet!”
“Sure they can,” Wally objected, clearly unconscious that he was using “they” to refer to the human race. “They send supplies to NaPurHab and the Terra Nova.”
“Come on, Wally, where have you been? Yes, we can send supplies, but we can’t send people. The COREs in Earth orbit smash one outbound cargo ship out of two during boost phase. And nothing can come inbound to Earth from NaPurHab or the Terra Nova. The COREs smash up anything that even gets close to an intercept course with Earth.”
“Well, okay, it isn’t easy,” Wally said. “Maybe we can’t get to Charon Central yet, but what’s wrong with trying to figure out where it is?”
“Nothing, except that all the time and effort they put into chasing the Center is lost to doing research that might get us out of this mess. Like getting past the COREs so we can land ships, maybe.”
“I like doing the Charon Central sims!” Wally said, a bit petulantly. “I’ve done COREs a million times. They’re boring.”
Only Wally would see relative degrees of fun as a reason to do one simulation over another.
“It isn’t a question of what you like, Wally,” Sianna said. “It’s a question of which is going to help the most. The COREs are—”
“COREs, COREs, COREs,” Wally said, losing his temper. “That’s all you ever talk about. It seems to me that you’re as obsessed with them as Sakalov is with Charon Central. You don’t ever seem to get anywhere, either.”
Sianna opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. There was too much justice in what he said for her to say anything. Maybe the COREs represented a more immediate problem, but if so, the problem didn’t show any more sign of being solved than the Charon Central mystery. He had a point. Dammit, now she was the one who had to apologize.
But Wally was already out of the visitor’s chair, stomping off down the hall to his own cubicle. Hell. Sianna wanted to get up and go after him, but she knew Wally wouldn’t listen to an apology—or anything else—until he calmed down. On the plus side, at least he had left her cubicle.
The trouble was, Wally had a point, one that she had not quite faced for herself—and when Wally Sturgis could see something you could not, then you were pretty damned self-absorbed.
Here she was, completely distracted from her own area of research, off on an ill-defined wild goose chase, listening to whispered hints from her subconscious, looking for messages in dreams, working on hunches and instinct. What the devil kind of science would that sort of nonsense produce?
Maybe it all was hopeless. Maybe nothing was left to any of them but the need to keep busy, keep the mind and body occupied. Maybe all of MRI was nothing but a huge distraction from a cruel and unchangeable reality. Maybe humankind was utterly, totally helpless in the face of the Charonians, and humanity would be wiped out in the exact moment that best suited the Charonian whim.
But Sianna was not quite ready to descend into gloom. Maybe they were all doomed. Well, even if that was the case, it could do no harm to solve the puzzle. The hell with it. She turned back to the question at hand.
Seven
Rules and Exceptions
The Mind of the Sphere was afraid. It was obvious by now that the tremors, the vibrations, in the wormhole net were no flaw, no illusion, no mistake. The Adversary was awake and on the move. But there was still time, if not much of it. The Sphere had been preparing its battle forces, its plan of attack for some time now. Already, great forces were on the move, not only to fight, but to serve as diversions, to shore up weak points in defenses, to serve as scouts and sensors. But now. Now there could be no doubt. What had been a possibility was now a certainty. The Adversary would attack.
It had been the trouble with that new world that had done it. There was no doubt of that. The capture of that world had been a more awkward bit of business than nearly anything the Sphere could find in the whole of its Heritage Memory. It was a wonder that the awkward, unshielded—and, in some cases, unexplained—bursts of gravitic radiation hadn’t attracted the Adversary sooner.
But perhaps the scales were soon to be balanced. Since it was the new world’s wormhole link that had attracted the Adversary, it would be the new world’s link that the Adversary would most likely attack.
And if there was one thing clear from all the data in the Sphere’s Heritage Memory, it was that the world closest to the Adversary’s arrival point was always the first casualty of the attack.
Multisystem Research Institute
New York City
Three hours of staring at the wall had Sianna no further ahead than before. What the hell did that thirty-seven minutes mean? What was the source on that number, anyway? She had never seen the actual raw data for herself.
Maybe some systematic error no one had ever noticed, some glitch in the datastream, accounted for some or all of the discrepancy.
Clearly, it was time to examine the primary source material. Sianna reached for her notepack and started a search of MRI’s databanks. There were a lot of references, of course. It would take a while to go through all of them.
There was certainly enough material to examine. She had seen clips and snippets of the Anthony data before, of course, but she had never looked at it in any organized way. A strange thought, that. This entire Institute had been founded to study information from just two sources: observations made here in the Multisystem, and the data transmitted from the Solar System after the Abduction. The Saint Anthony, named for the patron saint of lost objects, was the sole and only source of post-Abduction Solar System information.
Sianna checked the reference-use codes on the main index to the Anthony data. The data did get used—but not much. According to the use log, whole weeks often passed without a single researcher accessing the primary data.
Even though Sianna knew the hard-edged facts of what had happened back in the Solar System, the words and numbers and pictures from the Anthony were shocking, devastating. The Charonians had left the Solar System half-wrecked.
Once it had been awakened by that infamous gravity-beam test, the Lunar Wheel sent out a wake-up call to the thousands of Charonians that had lain dormant in the Solar System for millions of years. The
Landers, massive Charonians that had been hidden in the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud, set to work tearing the worlds of the Solar System apart. The planets were to serve as the raw material out of which the Charonians would build a new Dyson Sphere, the center of a new Multisystem.
The Landers used a sort of reactionless gravitic propulsion that allowed them to travel fast, and they had made a good start of their work before the people of the Solar System sent the Saint Anthony through the wormhole. The Anthony, using a tight comm beam aimed straight through the wormhole, had transmitted a tremendous amount of information back and forth between Earth and the Solar System before a CORE smashed into the Anthony, cutting the link with the home system.
Then the wormhole link itself shut down, the Moonpoint Ring on the Multisystem side of the wormhole stopped functioning as well and all hope of further contact with Earth was lost.
The best guess for what that meant—and the most hopeful explanation—was that the people of the Solar System had managed to send a self-destruct command through the Charonian communications system, killing all the Solar System Charonians. In any event, something had killed the Moonpoint Ring here in the Multisphere and cut the wormhole link.
But suppose the Charonians had cut the link for their own, unknowable purposes, and then proceeded to disassemble the Solar System at their leisure? No one on Earth had any way of knowing. It was an article of faith, and nothing more, that the Solar System survived.
No sense in being gloomy, though. Sianna sat up a little straighter, blinked, and shifted in her seat to get a bit more comfortable. The Solar System was still there. It had to be.
The images told a horrible story. The dust clouds around Mars, the horrible damage done to Saturn’s rings, the chaotic disruption of Jupiter’s weather patterns.
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