The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Science is meant to be a means of increasing knowledge by taking a skeptical look at the real world. The contemporary conventional approach to science is becoming little more than a credulous glance at a simulation.”

  — Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on NaPurno/Knowway (The Naked Purple Way of Knowing), Datastreem-dream Prezz, NaPurHab, published 100101111110 (a.d. 2430) (translation by the author)

  Multisystem Research Institute

  New York City

  Earth

  THE MULTISYSTEM

  The simulation came toward its ending, again. The images froze in front of a gaggle of excited scientists and researchers, again. Half of them promptly began arguing every possible point raised by the sim with the other half. Again.

  Sianna Colette was close to asleep on her feet. She had long ago lost all track of time. But now, down in this subterranean hole, in the dark, with the same depiction of imaginary times to come being shown backwards and forwards at various rates of passage, over and over again—each time with minor improvements and refinements, courtesy the relentlessly eager and energetic Wally—she had lost all connection with time as well.

  Yesterday, they had gotten to the top people by blundering into them. No such luck today. Sakalov was nowhere to be found, and none of Bernhardt’s people would think of disturbing him on the say-so of an undergrad and an overage sim hack. Seeing Bernhardt, as she had the day before—if it had been the day before, and not merely some far-off frontier of the same endless day—was no more an everyday occurrence than getting a good hard look at the Easter Bunny. In the normal course of events, Sianna would have as much chance of seeing Wolf Bernhardt as she would of getting the Autocrat of Ceres to come to lunch.

  The only way to get this thing to anyone’s attention was to move it up the food chain, one step at a time. They had to show it to each person’s superior, convince that superior of the idea’s logic, and then get that person to get his or her superiors to come down and have a look for themselves.

  This was the third showing of the sim, each time to a slightly larger and more prestigious audience. None of the lower ranks seemed interested in clearing out, once they had dragged their bosses down, with the result that it was getting more than a little crowded in the sim tank. The air conditioning was not quite able to hold its own. That in and of itself tended to degrade the authenticity of the presentation. Outer space was not supposed to smell like a locker room.

  The lights came up a bit so that everyone could see each other and talk more easily. It worked; the decibel level went up almost as fast as the lights. Sianna looked toward Wally at the controls. Nice touch, knowing that people don’t like to talk in the dark. But then, it made sense that the only insight Wally would have on the human psyche would involve how they reacted to a sim.

  Look at him over there. Wally should have been as exhausted as Sianna, but instead he was glorying in it all. Very probably more people were paying attention to him right now, taking him seriously, than at any other time in his life. He was surrounded by a whole mob of researchers who usually paid him just enough mind to make jokes about him, all of them asking questions, making suggestions, in short treating him like a colleague rather than as some lower form of life.

  Sianna blinked awake as her head sagged forward. Dammit! Had she dozed off? For how long? A minute? An hour? She peered through the darkness and the clamor of the crowd. Something was happening. A knot of people was standing about the latest arrival on the scene, Dr. Ursula Gruber, director of Observational Research, and one of the most dignified-looking women Sianna had ever seen. Her iron-grey hair was done up in a bun, and pulled back tight. She was in a stiff white lab suit, and her grey eyes had a firm and steady gaze.

  Gruber was surrounded by her own subordinates, and seemed to be in the midst of a spirited conversation with them, judging by the expression on her face. Sianna could not hear much of the discussion, but at last Gruber raised her hands and spoke in a louder tone. “All right. Settle down so I can make the call.” Gruber pulled her phone from her pocket and punched in a code.

  Gruber was far enough up the food chain that it might be Bernhardt’s office she was calling, and that Bernhardt would take the call. Gruber was gesturing toward the simulation, clearly talking about it.

  At last Sianna couldn’t take it any longer. She ventured close enough to hear what Gruber was saying.

  “Yes, yes, we are all here in the Simulation Center. In the tank. I have just seen it. It has some real internal logic. It might well be significant. What? I am sorry, they are all talking here. Oh. That Wally Sturgis fellow is running it. Yes, Sturgis. No, I don’t think he—I’m sorry, please say again. What was that?” She waved her hand, gesturing for silence, and then covered her free ear up with her hand and listened for a moment. “One moment. I will ask.” Gruber hit the mute button on her phone and looked around the room, a rather sharp expression on her face. “Which one is Colette?” she called out. “Sianna Colette?”

  Sianna felt a sudden cold lump in the pit of her stomach. She stepped forward, and was all too aware that the people around her were stepping aside, making way. Suddenly she was alone in the middle of a circle of eyes. Behind her, the simulated Dyson Sphere went on building itself out of the rubble of a ruined imaginary Solar System.

  “I’m Sianna Colette,” she said, her voice sounding a bit high and squeaky, even to herself.

  “Dr. Bernhardt wants to know if this is your idea?” Gruber asked. She gestured at the simulation, at the highlighted image of what everyone was already calling the Lone World. “Did you think of this?”

  There was no use denying it. Not when she knew half this crowd of people, and she and Wally had called them all in to see her clever new theory. “Yes ma’am. I did,” Sianna admitted, feeling very much the way she had back in school when she was caught red-handed doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Having you dead to rights was never enough. They always wanted you to admit it as well.

  Gruber nodded, raised her phone, and spoke into it again. “Yes, it was Colette,” Gruber said, and then listened for a moment longer before nodding to the voice on the other end of the line. “Very well,” she said. “I will tell her.” She shut off the phone and dropped it in her pocket. “Dr. Bernhardt wishes me to tell you he will be down right away.”

  And the cold lump in Sianna’s stomach turned into a solid block of ice.

  The waiting seemed an eternity to Sianna. Would Bernhardt fire her from MRI? Order her public expulsion from Columbia for misuse of institute facilities and wasting people’s time? Or would he merely humiliate her, give her a public dressing-down in front of everyone and leave her to draw her own conclusions about her future prospects?

  The crowd stood around her, a mass of irresolute faces. All the talking had died out, and the excitement seemed to have drained out of the room.

  Sianna looked toward Wally, still sitting at his precious control board. She caught his eye, but he just looked at her in bafflement and shook his head.

  At last the main doors of the sim chamber swung open, and in walked Wolf Bernhardt, Yuri Sakalov once again in tow. Sianna stood, alone, in the center of the semi-darkened room. She braced herself for what was to come, even as a wave of exhaustion swept over her.

  Bernhardt was coming closer. She felt sure that she was going to faint. Her knees turned weak, and the room got a bit wobbly. He was almost to her—but then he marched right past her without breaking stride. Maybe his eyes weren’t adapted to the dim illumination and he hadn’t seen her. Maybe he didn’t recognize her. Or maybe she was utterly beneath his notice.

  Sakalov saw her, though, and gave her a completely unreadable look as he walked past.

  The two of them walked right over to Gruber, who was standing over Wally at the control center. “Now then,” Bernhardt said. “Dr. Gruber tells me there is a new theory that might provide certain insights. I wish to know more.”

  “Shall I, ah, run it, ah, the ah, simulatio
n, for you, Dr. Bernhardt?” Wally sounded even more hesitant and nervous than usual.

  Bernhardt looked down at him in cold annoyance. “I do not, Mr. Sturgis, need to look at pretty pictures in order to follow an argument.” He looked up at Dr. Gruber. “Frau Doktor Gruber. Please summarize for me, if you would.”

  “Certainly.” Gruber, Bernhardt and Sakalov went off to one side of the room. The three of them spoke in low tones for five long minutes, Bernhardt mostly listening, nodding now and then, Sakalov asking an occasional question in a voice too low for Sianna to hear. Bernhardt had no reaction at all to what Gruber said, but Sakalov seemed to grow more and more agitated.

  At last Bernhardt had heard enough. He nodded one last time, gave Gruber a pat on the shoulder, and turned toward Wally. “Perhaps I will have a look at the simulation after all. You will transmit a recording of the finalized run to my office within one hour. In the meantime, I will speak to you, Miss Colette, and Dr. Sakalov out in the corridor. Miss Colette? Come, if you please.”

  He turned, rather abruptly, and walked out into the hall without looking to see if any of them were following.

  Sakalov followed dutifully behind. Wally saved the current settings on the simulation and stood up to follow, a bit slowly. Sianna trailed behind the others, once again struggling to ignore the forest of eyes that surrounded her.

  She reached the open door and stepped from dark into light, from the gloom of the sim tank to the over-bright glare of the white-on-white hallway.

  She closed the door behind her and paused, squinting, peering about to see where the others had gone. There they were, just up the hall to the right. All three waiting, stern-faced, for her to catch them up.

  She forced herself to walk toward them, stiff-legged, her arms folded protectively in front of her chest. Her eyes locked with Bernhardt’s grim-faced gaze.

  But then, as she got to them, Bernhardt’s face lost its fixed expression. He grabbed her by the arm, looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was behind her, and pulled her around the corner, Wally and Sakalov following behind.

  Sianna glanced over her shoulder, but saw for herself there was nothing there worth looking at. But then she looked back toward Bernhardt, and saw something most remarkable indeed.

  He was grinning. Grinning. Sianna had never even thought German face muscles could move that way. “You’ve got it!” he said to an astonished Sianna. “We need to be careful, and collect the proof, but there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that you’re right. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Sakalov?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sakalov said, taking her right hand and shaking it vigorously. “At the cost of admitting I was wrong, I have to admit your theory holds together far better than anything I’ve ever done.”

  “But… I… I…” Sianna’s voice trailed off for a moment before she managed to say anything more. “But, the way you came in just now, and the way you acted—”

  Bernhardt laughed out loud. “Psychology,” he said. “There’s very little of my job left that has to do with being a scientist. Always it is politics and psychology. Five years ago, I was instructed to find a captain for the Terra Nova and send the ship off to explore the Dyson Sphere—straight to the Sphere itself with no precautions. That would have been a suicide mission. So I chose Captain Steiger and gave her orders I knew she would disobey the moment she could. You have to know your people. After the way you argued with Dr. Sakalov yesterday, I didn’t think that you would put forward a theory that you had not thought out carefully, so I came down ready to listen.

  “But it is not just a question of knowing you are right. It is a question of being heard, of the signal not being lost in the noise. I know that I am not the most popular man down here. They know I am careful and efficient, but that I refuse to write the checks they want; I say no to their projects. So sometimes the people at MRI are for whatever I am against. Besides that, Dr. Sakalov is well thought of. If I charged down here and endorsed a theory that refuted much of his work—well, for some, that would be enough to turn them against your ideas for good. By being standoffish, I make them determined to prove me wrong.” Bernhardt reached out and patted Sianna on the arm. “You have done superb work. Now you must go home and get some rest.”

  Sianna could do nothing more than stand there, blinking in astonishment. She had always thought being a scientist just meant working to find out the truth.

  A lot she knew.

  Sianna’s feet were dragging as she left the Sim Center. She got herself across the underground campus fairyland of the MRI Main Level and made her way up to the elevator banks. She was tired enough, and emotionally flattened enough, that getting into the steel coffin of the elevator and watching the doors close her in didn’t bother her at all. She was too numb to react to anything.

  It seemed as if life had broken every promise it had ever made to her. Life had pulled her away from her childhood home, plopped her down in a foreign land, killed her parents, delivered her into an age of crisis and emergency that had no time to deal with teenage orphans.

  Anything good and hopeful had always been snatched away. In the general scheme of things, it was high time that Columbia and MRI rejected her as well. And yet, somehow, they had failed to do so, even when given a prize opportunity to do so. They were congratulating her.

  The elevator slowed to a halt at ground level and the doors opened. Sianna stepped blinking into the sunlight, disoriented by the bright light and open spaces, the sharpness and clarity of it all. She walked out onto the broad expanses of the central plaza, feeling more than a bit muzzy and lost.

  It was like the feeling she got coming out of a matinee, stepping from a darkened theater into the sunlit street after her eyes had spent two or three hours telling her body that it was after dark. Sianna felt like that, only a dozen times more so. She felt like she had indeed been out of time for a while, and now was being thrust, most unwillingly, back into it.

  In any event, it was still daytime. She looked toward the Sunstar, and gauged its position in the sky. About three in the afternoon, she decided. Or had they been down there more than a whole day? No, that couldn’t be. Or maybe it could. Bother to all of it.

  She looked up at the late-afternoon sky, gleaming perfect robin’s-egg blue. The air was sweet, with just a hint of new-mown grass in the air, wafting down from the roof gardens and Central Park. The air was alive with sound as well—laughter and conversation, the whirring hum of traffic, the busy background bustle of the city, awake and alive. Even in the midst of her exhaustion, it gave her a lift, put a bounce back in her step. She still wanted to go home and get to bed, but home and bed were suddenly a destination, a reward, rather than a place to go hide.

  It was amazing what the simple sight of the real open sky, even the Multisystem sky, could do for her spirits.

  She got back to her apartment, freshened up, and got ready for bed, grateful that her roommate was still out. She set the phone to take messages without disturbing her and went to bed. It was over now. She had done her bit, found the idea that everyone had been looking for. Now the really smart people could work on it. She could get some rest, get up early, and get cracking on those books. She snuggled down into her pillow and went to sleep.

  Next morning Sianna woke up at five a.m., and was out of bed in an instant, feeling quite virtuous, and perhaps a little bit smug. One exam today, and she had never felt readier for work in her life.

  She breezed through breakfast and set to work on studying for her finals, happily working through a series of transformational analyses just for practice. She got to her exam at noon and plowed through the problems in no time. She was the third one to finish—even with having triple-checked all her work.

  She treated herself to a browse through a bookshop on the way home, and got back to her apartment about three. She made herself a late lunch and indulged herself by reading half a novel instead of studying for her history exam.

  It wasn’t until nearly eight-thirty that, looking
up from her hook, she thought to check her message system. She had forgotten that she had left the comm switched to message-taking. Dozens of people could have called and she never would have known it.

  But there was only one text, the time tag showing that it had come in some time at about five a.m.

  Be in my office at 0900 hours tomorrow. W. Bernhardt.

  No request, no please. Just the flat order. There was a sudden knot in her throat, and her hands turned sweaty. She had thought she had done her part, that she could let everyone else worry about it.

  A lot she knew. Again.

  Thirteen

  Carrot and Stick

  “Is the Multisystem all one creature? A complex ecology of interdependent forms? Something in between, like a huge coral reef of tiny beings making up a greater whole? Or is the question utterly meaningless? Is there no analog or pattern available to the human mind that would provide a useful understanding of what a Charonian is?

  “All we can know for certain is that the Charonians had once been very different, and then came to be what they are. Coming into the Universe leaves a scar or two, and change is never complete. The same is true of humanity: our navels are the scars of umbilicals we lost, and the white blood cells that swim in our veins are the descendants of parasitic amoebae that survived by turning from foe to friend. In the process of remaking themselves, the Charonians surely kept some mark of their old selves—and their old weaknesses—behind.