The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “And then compare that against any old rejected data,” Wally said, cutting in eagerly. “We could look at stuff from what we now know to be the Lone World’s orbital track,” he went on, leaning forward eagerly. “I bet we’ve got a big old stack of old data labeled ‘static’ that came from the Lone World—even though we didn’t know the Lone World was there until just a little while ago.”

  “Yes! Right!” Sianna said.

  Sianna stood up and started pacing excitedly. “For five years we’ve been observing the Sphere, and for all that time there’s been this tiny, hard-to-see dot going around it, sometimes at the edge of the Sphere as seen from Earth, sometimes in front of it, sometimes behind. We’re bound to have picked up all sorts of stuff from the Lone World without knowing what it was.” She paused for a second and thought. “Hey, data coming from the now-known coordinates of the co-orbital R-H sets too! They’d make a perfectly good signal-relay network.” She paused in her pacing and turned toward Dr. Sakalov. “The data archives will still have all that, won’t they?”

  “They never erase anything down there,” Dr. Sakalov said, quite cheerfully. “Tell me, Wally: do you think that you could set up a search that would find what we’re looking for?”

  “Sure I could,” Wally said. “All it would take is a good ArtInt searching for vague source coding in the old data, correlating the backtracked orbital coordinates in question. Next we run that against Gruber’s new data, and then…” His voice trailed off as he caught the boss’s eye.

  Bernhardt glared at Wally and then at Sianna with something of the irritation and impatience he was famous for. “None of this has very much to do with why I wanted to see you all.”

  “It doesn’t?” Sianna asked, suddenly feeling quite deflated. She sat back down in her chair.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Bernhardt said. “Oh, I suppose there is a tangential connection, but it is merely—” Bernhardt stopped dead and shook his head. “Dear God, now you have me doing it. No. We will stay on the subject this time. In my job, sometimes I have to act like a scientist with a theory, and sometimes like a general fighting a war. A scientist would wait until there was proof that the Lone World was Charon Central. A general has to take more chances than that, gamble that the proof will be forthcoming. I have to take a chance like that now.

  “As you know, the SCOREs are on their way—and we all know the probable aftermath of their arrival. We must assume that, once they get here, it will be impossible to launch anything off Earth. As you know, we have a massive effort under way to resupply our off-Earth assets before that time. We are launching everything we can toward NaPurHab. Food, equipment, fuel, what have you. I have already ordered Terra Nova to break off her attempt to land a prize crew on a CORE. She has confirmed that she intends to return to Earth space and dock with NaPurHab.

  “From there, she intends to proceed, however her captain sees fit, toward precisely one goal. If Captain Steiger decides to pursue the immediate goal at once, so be it. However, I would expect that she will instead invest in months, perhaps years, of research, study, rehearsal and simulation. However, sooner or later, she is to proceed toward the Lone World, land on that planet, and attempt to seize control of the Multisystem.”

  “Good God,” Sakalov said. “But how has there been time to plan this, work out procedures?”

  “There hasn’t,” Bernhardt said. He stood up and turned to face the window wall, a mere thickness of glass between him and the deep canyons of Manhattan. “We have been setting up the resupply mission for weeks, based on standing contingency plans, ever since we spotted the incoming SCOREs.

  “But that is almost incidental. If the Lone World is Charon Central, and if we can somehow get to it and make it ours, even if we merely find a way to kill it, cripple it—then we will have won. The risks are great, and there are any number of guesses piled on guesses. But if I wait until I am sure of my facts, then we will have lost the moment. The SCOREs will have reached Earth, and God only knows what happens then.

  “But there is something else. The Terra Nova has asked for more than supplies. She has asked that we send her… send her some expertise. I have reached that conclusion that to do so would be very risky—but potentially, most valuable.

  “But there is little time, and little cargo space available. If I had my way, the Terra Nova would rendezvous with a full complement of our greatest experts on the Charonians. But that cannot be. I have no time to examine all the personnel reports, interview candidates, request volunteers, all of that. So I am left with my own instincts, my hunches, my feelings.

  “So I am going to send them you three.”

  There was dead silence in the room. Sianna could not believe what she was hearing.

  “I will send you three,” Bernhardt said again. “A wise old man who still knows how to learn, a genius who does not know all that she is, and a dreamer of visions that lead to truth. I will not make any pretense that you have any choice in the matter, or that I am looking for volunteers. There is no time. The charter establishing my office gave me the power to draft whomever I wish for whatever task I wish in order to protect the people of Earth.”

  Sianna stood up, feeling a bit dizzy, and opened her mouth to protest. But no words came. Bernhardt just kept right on talking.

  “So. There is only one question I have for each of you,” he said. “How soon can you leave?”

  Fifteen

  Puppet on a String

  “We forget what our lives were like back then, before it all happened, back when Earth and Moon shared a sky, and the Solar System was whole and complete. We thought we were alone in the Universe. We thought we were safe. No one had ever heard of the Charonians. No one even knew the Wheel was buried under the Lunar surface until Larry woke it up and it dropped Earth through a black hole.

  “We will never regain that innocence—but we can only judge Larry Chao by the standards of the Universe that existed up until the moment he pressed that button.

  “In that lost world of the innocent past, he must be found not guilty of committing any intentional wrong. But Larry Chao has never stopped trying to atone for what he did—at a cost to himself that few of us would be willing to face.”

  —Dr. Sondra Berghoff, statement for Gravitics Research Station Oral History Project, Charon DataPress, 2443

  Wheelway

  The Moon

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Three days after the first attempt to contact Lucian Dreyfuss, they were almost ready to try again.

  Larry Chao was doing his best to sit still as the techs hooked him in to the virtual reality system, trying not to think about what came next. They were going to fire this thing up and run him through the moments leading up to his own death. All right, not his death, but as close to it as Larry wished to come. When the Charonians had attacked in the tunnel five years ago, the T.O. had been destroyed while Larry was controlling it, and it had been realistic enough to convince Larry he had died, at least for a while. The nightmares had taken a long time to go away—and they had come back last night. But no, don’t think about it. The one bright side was that Larry had been “killed” a few seconds after the Charonians grabbed Lucian and made off with him. Lucian, therefore, had not witnessed Larry’s death and, therefore, was not reliving it, over and over again. Larry would not have to re-enact his own decapitation.

  The down side was that, for whatever reason, the slice of time Lucian was looping through over and over started just a few seconds before the Charonians attacked. The idea was to break the loop before the Charonians hit, force Lucian to perceive a sequence of events fed to his optical and audio centers, not by the Charonians, but by the human virtual reality teams. In effect, they would feed Lucian a hallucination to break him out of psychosis. Of course, Larry had been dropped into psychosis by experiencing the real events through the TeleOperator five years ago, but that was beside the point. Even Larry had to admit the possible reward was worth the risk.

  They had used
a limited-mobility setup the first time they had tried to break through to Lucian, but this time they were using a full TeleOperator control rig, identical to the one Larry had used five years ago in the Rabbit Hole. This time, the T.O.‘s inputs and outputs were not hooked up to an actual robot body, but to a computer simulation of a robot body.

  Larry’s entire body still had to be completely encased in the T.O. control unit, which was, in effect, an exoskeleton with the operator inside. Later, when they had the thing powered up, the machinery would respond to his slightest motion, and he would be able to move his arms and legs and head freely. But until the power-amp circuits were on, the T.O. was so much inert metal and his body was completely immobilized by the weight of the machinery. Even when the thing was powered up, Larry would not actually walk when he moved his legs—the rig had him suspended in mid-air. His body would stay still while his simulated self moved about. He was, and would be, in the center of it all, but absolutely unable to move. That summed up the last five years of Larry’s life pretty well.

  “How’s that feel?” the VR tech asked.

  “Hmm? Oh, ah, fine, I guess,” Larry said. Actually, the straps were rather tight, but minor things like that didn’t seem to matter just now. They wanted him to die again, and no one seemed to think that was asking a lot.

  But even if they had understood his terror, they would have strapped him into the TeleOperator control system all the same. Even a chance of cracking open the Lunar Wheel’s Heritage Memory could easily be worth a life or two—even if the lives in question were his and Lucian’s.

  “So was he a friend of yours?” the tech asked.

  “Hmm? What?” Larry said.

  “Lucian Dreyfuss.”

  “Oh, I knew him all right.”

  “So you were friends.”

  “No,” Larry said, looking straight ahead, determined not to look at the tech. “We weren’t friends. I never much liked him. And he blamed me for… for well, what happened.”

  “Oh,” the tech said. “Sorry. I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay,” Larry said. Now he turned to look at the man, and forced himself to smile. “It was a while ago. I’ve gotten over it.” Now there was a lie. The Abduction, the disaster in the Rabbit Hole, pushing the button that killed Pluto and saved the rest of the Solar System. He was nowhere near over those things. There were days he had hopes of getting past those memories—but this was no such day.

  “Oh. Well, um… ah, hold still now while I attach the electrodes,” the tech said, clearly embarrassed.

  But Larry was only vaguely aware that the tech was still there. Memories. This whole thing revolved around memories. His, Lucian’s, and the Wheel’s. The Wheel’s Heritage Memory, with the sum total not only of its own experience, but that of all its ancestors as well. Find that, and they could read the history of the Charonians.

  There was no end to the information, the answers, the discoveries that might be found there—if the Heritage memory had not been destroyed when the Lunar Wheel died, if it were still accessible, if Lucian’s dead mind could show them the way in.

  “Okay, VR view-helmet coming down,” the tech said. “You’re going to be in the dark for a second until we get this thing hooked up.”

  The tech placed the helmet on Larry’s head and swung the visor down, and Larry’s world went black.

  He sat there, waiting in the dark, wishing it wouldn’t happen at all, wishing it would hurry up and be over with.

  Dream on. If Larry was sure of one thing, it was that this was going to be a long haul.

  Finally, after some space of time that might have been a minute or an hour, it began. The exoskeleton came alive, a tiny thrill of motion quivering through it as the power came on. The view-helmet visors lit up, a miniaturized video screen in front of each eye, their views just slightly offset from each other so as to provide realistic binocular vision and depth perception. Larry found himself—or his simulated robot body—in a featureless room, with various rather generic objects and obstacles scattered about. A warm-up room.

  Marcia MacDougal’s voice came over the helmet’s earphones.

  “All right, Larry. We’re all set here in control. Try out the suit for a few minutes, and then let’s see if you can get Lucian’s attention.”

  “Okay,” Larry said, “but bear with me for a few minutes. It’s, ah, been a while since I did this. I’m probably very rusty.”

  “That’s all right, love,” Selby said in some sort of attempt at an encouraging tone of voice. “Once you learn, you never forget. Just like riding a bicycle.”

  “That’s good to know,” Larry said. “But I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”

  Larry stood up, and the exoskeleton moved with him, smoothly, all but silently. He lifted his left foot, moved it forward, set it down. The feedback system provided him with a slight jolt as his foot came down. He moved his right foot, set it down a bit more gently, and he was walking. His field of view lurched from side to side a bit as he moved. He came to a set of steps in the imaginary warm-up room. He paused at the foot of the stairs, then walked up them as carefully as he could, tottering a bit here and there. There was a wide platform at the top. He turned around and made his way back down the stairs, having a bit more trouble keeping his balance. He got back to ground level without incident, though, then walked over to a pair of pyramid-shaped objects, each with a handle at its apex. The red one was marked “100 kilograms” while the blue one said “300 kilograms.” Larry bent down and moved “his” arm to pick up the red one. The exoskeleton was far stronger than a human being, and Larry was able to pick the weight up easily. The weight might be wholly imaginary, but the computer simulator did a very credible job of giving it a realistic heft. Larry straight-armed the weight, held it out to his side, and let it go. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and Larry felt the non-existent floor vibrate beneath his feet. “Very realistic,” he said to the team in the control room.

  He turned toward the heavier weight and tried lifting it. At first, he couldn’t budge it. He pulled harder and managed to get it off the ground, though it felt as if he was about to pull his arm out of its socket. “Maybe too realistic,” he said, and set it down.

  Larry worked the warm-ups for a minute or two longer, getting the feel of the suit, finding that his old training was coming back to him after all. Someday he would have to learn to ride a bike.

  “All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready for it. Link me into Lucian whenever you’re ready.”

  “Ah, you don’t want to do a few dry runs first?” Selby asked. “We can put you in the virtual reality sim of the Rabbit Hole without Lucian in it for a while. Let you get used to it first. Beat up on some simulated Charonians for a while?”

  “No,” Larry said, his voice a bit sharper than he had intended. “Maybe that makes sense, but to be perfectly honest, I’m more worried about losing my nerve than not being well-rehearsed. This isn’t easy for me.”

  “That I can believe,” Selby said. “Stand by. We have to jam the optical and audio signals coming from the Wheel and substitute our own. Might take a minute to get it working.”

  “Just give me a heads-up when you’re ready,” Larry said.

  “Will do. Selby out.” The line went dead as Selby cut her mike, and Larry moved around the warm-up room a bit more as he waited. He tried a few jumping-jacks and push-ups, just to see what the hardware could do. Very smooth. Very nice work indeed. Intellectually, he knew that he was still right where he had started, in the exoskeleton, not in the imaginary warm-up room he saw through the video screens. He had lifted nothing at all when he had picked up the hundred-kilo weight, and exactly the same amount of nothing when he had strained over the three-hundred-kilo one. The exoskeleton had simply put the appropriate strain on his arm and body to mimic the weights. But there was no point in reminding him that it was not real. Not when the whole point was to make the illusion as believable as possible.

  What was taking them so long?
You’d think they’d have had the whole thing set up before getting him into the suit. Take it easy, he told himself. This is a complicated lash-up. Any number of things might go wrong or need a last-minute adjustment. Larry knew he was being unreasonable, but he didn’t care. He was scared.

  He realized he was pacing nervously, back and forth, up and down around the warm-up room. He drew himself up short, forced himself—or at least his projected self inside the VR simulation—to stand still.

  “Larry?” It was Marcia MacDougal’s voice. “Ready when you are.”

  Larry suddenly realized he was sweating profusely. “Go—go ahead,” he said, his voice tight and dry.

  The warm-up room faded away, and Larry Chao stood in uncharted darkness.

  “All right,” MacDougal said. “Here we go.” The darkness faded, and the base of the Rabbit Hole—the base of the Hole as it had been five years before—bloomed up out of blackness. “This is our feed now,” MacDougal whispered in his ear. “We’re feeding the same scene to both you and Lucian.”

  Larry felt his heart pounding, and his vision blurred for a moment. But then it cleared, and nothing had changed. This was the place, the horrible place where he had died. And there was Lucian, directly ahead of him, standing there in his pressure suit, looking past Larry’s shoulder at whatever was behind him. Lucian, alive, exactly as he had been.

  It seemed as if time stopped in that one moment—and maybe it did. Maybe it was not some trick of his mind, but a glitch in the computer program, that had frozen time.

  Where am 1? Larry asked himself. Am I inside the computer, inside Lucian’s mind, just here to feed a figment to his imagination? Am I inside the TeleOperator the computer is simulating? Who is the puppet, and who is pulling the string?