The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Wait a second. There was an external view control, right? She could look out. Yes. That would help a lot. She stared intently at the control panel directly over her face. Which one was it? She stabbed a nervous finger at one button, then another. There. That turned the monitor on, anyway. The flat screen came to life, about thirty centimeters in front of her face. Good. Nothing on it but a status display. Air good, temp good, clock showing the time. But what about the external view? External. There! An old-fashioned selector knob. She twisted it hard to the right and—

  There! Her breath came out in gasps of relief. The outside world was still there, just outside. Granted, it was nothing but a view of the suiting room ceiling, but it was there, and it was outside this tiny box she was trapped in. Trapped. No. Don’t think about being trapped. Trapped in this box for three long, long days with no way—

  Hold it. Hold it. Three deep breaths. She was going to have to spend three days in this box. No sense panicking just yet. Plenty of time for that later. The permod was all toughened padding inside, the comm and display and dispenser controls carefully recessed so you couldn’t switch them on by accident. Damn thing was a miniaturized spacegoing padded cell.

  Well, that made sense. A padded cell was going to be all she was good for by the end of this.

  There was a clunk and a thump and a bump on the outside of the permod, and Sianna could feel it moving. She looked up at the exterior view, and could see the ceiling moving around.

  This was it, she realized. She was being moved, about to be loaded into the cargo hold of the booster that would lift her toward God only knew what.

  Out into space, out toward a visit with the lunatics of the Naked Purple, there to wait for the Terra Nova and a journey toward the Lone World, and whatever awaited them all there.

  Suddenly spending a few days in a nice, quiet tin can seemed like the least of her problems.

  Come on, she told herself. Wally was doing this. An old man like Sakalov was doing this. She could do it.

  Couldn’t she?

  Seventeen

  Conversations with the Dead

  Q: Clearly everything was put together in a rush, and the team had to be ready to improvise. What was the most surprising part of the encounter?

  A: The most unexpected thing about the effort to contact Lucian Dreyfuss, the thing we had done the least to prepare for, was success. We had gone to all sorts of extremes finding a way to communicate with him, but there was absolutely no way to know what to expect if we did get through. And when we did make contact, conditions were less than ideal.

  Q: In what way?

  A: By the time Lucian Dreyfuss finally responded, we—that is, the contact team—had been at it for eight hours. That doesn’t seem like such a long time, but anyone who’s ever run a TeleOperator unit can tell you just how tiring it can be. The systems monitors didn’t have an easy time of it, either. Everything was new, untried, and it was damned difficult to keep it all going. We all knew that if the illusion was broken, even for a moment, it could all be over.

  When we did break through to Lucian, at the end of that eight hours, all of a sudden, the workday wasn’t over—it had just begun. I was there in the TeleOperator exoskeleton, drenched with sweat, ready to quit, just wanting to go home and go to sleep—and all of a sudden, there he was. Also, bear in mind that Lucian Dreyfuss had been in a very different place, existing in a very different way, for the previous five years. His perception of time was very different from ours. I couldn’t explain to him it had already been a long day and I was going to knock off. We had no idea whether he was aware any time had passed, or if he would experience a rest period as five minutes or ten years. I had to go to work and stay at it, then and there.

  Q: So what thought went through your mind at that moment?

  A: The same one as everyone else on the team: Now what?

  —Larry Chao, interview with The Rabbit Hole, house magazine of the Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station. Volume IV, Number 6 (August 2431)

  I am who? Who? Lu-cian Drey-fuss, yes or was, and am dead. Cannot see, cannot hear, cannot move—and yet do those things, and more. They find me. I remember them. I was one them. Am one them. Body mine lies inert, mind lost and broken—but awake, rise I do, and walk, yet do not. They wake me, come for me. Robot Larry come. I before dream long time. Dream truth, dream in enemy’s mind, enemy’s fear. Must tell them. But words lost, or near. Mind lost. Life lost. But must try. Try help, tell. Am one them. Yes or was.

  Dreyfuss Memorial Research Center

  The North Pole

  The Moon

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  The world was a mist, the universe was a fog, and two bizarre figures—a ghost in a pressure suit, and an angular robotic machine— strode through the nonexistent cosmos together. It was the landscape of Lucian’s mind, a ghost’s mind, his visual outputs picked up by the computers and reprocessed to present the same image from Larry’s perspective.

  And they were walking through it. But why walk? They were walking through Lucian’s imagination. Why couldn’t Lucian just will them to be wherever it was they were going? The fogs and mists shifted again, rather abruptly, and Larry braced himself for the change. Now, suddenly, they were walking through a tunnel—not quite the Wheelway, but not quite the homier, human tunnels of a Lunar settlement, either. Something in between. The scale was that of the Charonian tunnel, but this passage had the walkways and lighting and direction signs of Central City or Tycho Under. Larry tried to read a few of the signs, but they seemed to be nonsense words, random characters that weren’t quite the alphabet.

  Why the hell is he still in the suit? Larry wondered, not for the first time. Lucian was projecting his own image of himself into the system now. He could have visualized himself in street clothes, or stark naked, or as a giant chicken, and the sim computers would have presented him to Larry that way. Perhaps he had seen himself inside that suit for so long he could not imagine any other way of being. How much time had passed for him since the Charonians had taken him? Had the five years seemed like five years to him, or five minutes, or five centuries?

  Larry stumbled again, and almost fell. An imaginary landscape created in a ghost’s mind and processed through a computer—and he was tripping over it. He was tired, dead tired, barely able to stay on his feet.

  “Lucian. Stop,” he called out. “Please, wait. Where are we going?

  Lucian’s image turned around and walked back toward him, clearly unhappy at the delay, his movement agitated and a bit jerky and awkward. “Place. Place near,” he said, plainly struggling for the words. “Moving close. Getting here near. Hurry please.” The words seemed pulled out of him, as if each syllable was a struggle.

  “No, Lucian,” Larry said, squatting down. It was time to try and talk this out. “We aren’t getting near. We aren’t moving. We’re in the same place as when we started.”

  “Come,” Lucian said. “Come. Hurry.”

  But Larry did not move. “Lucian—do you know what has happened? Do you know how it is you are seeing me?”

  “Yes no hard.” That was about as ambiguous as an answer got. Lucian had spoken very little since his awakening, and then only in those awkward, cryptic phrases.

  Instead of speaking, he walked, leading Larry along, clearly intent on bringing him to see something. What that something might be, Larry could not imagine.

  “Come,” Lucian said, gesturing vigorously, urging him on.

  “No. Not yet,” Larry said. “Soon. But I must rest. This is very hard for me. I am very tired.”

  “Hard me,” Lucian said. “But you rest okay. But fast.”

  “Okay,” Larry said. “I’ll rest fast.” He sat down on the tunnel floor and leaned back against the wall. Not that the wall was there, of course. Just the computers putting some pressure and resistance against the exoskeleton where the wall was supposed to be, the visual system shifting his perspective to produce a view of the tunnel from a seated position. Hard to remem
ber it was all illusion. Larry used the chin switch and keyed over to the control room intercom channel. “How long now?” he asked.

  “Six hours since he woke up,” Marcia said. “Fourteen since we started. How are you holding up?”

  “Not so good,” Larry said, “I’ll keep going as long as I can, but I’m about to fall on my face here.”

  “We know, Larry, we know. I’m dead beat too, and I’m not driving the TeleOperator. We just don’t want to lose him again. We’re afraid if you take a long enough break to get out of the suit and sleep, he’ll think you’ve abandoned him. Maybe he won’t want to talk anymore.”

  “Can’t you bring someone else? Bring Tyrone Vespasian in, throw his image in here for a while?” Lucian had known Tyrone well, and the two of them had been friends. Surely Lucian—or whatever Lucian was now—would be able to relate to Tyrone.

  “Vespasian’s here, and he’s eager to try it. Believe me, we’ve almost had to tie him down. We’ll use Tyrone soon enough, once we’re settled in. Once we’re sure Lucian isn’t going to jump back in his hole and pull it in after him.”

  “Look, I can’t do this forever,” Larry said. “Doesn’t Lucian understand that? That people need rest?”

  “We can’t know what he understands,” Marcia said. “We don’t even know if that really is Lucian, in any normal sense of the word.”

  “The longer this goes on, the more I think it isn’t him,” Larry agreed, looking toward Lucian’s pressure-suited figure as it stood anxiously watching Larry. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow he’s not really there. It’s like he’s a recording, an image of himself.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “People change, minute to minute. They show you different sides, different aspects. You and I are treating each other differently now than we did at the beginning of the day. Reactions vary. Moods vary. Not Lucian. He’s exactly the same as he was at the start. It’s like he’s locked into one mood, one moment, one idea. We only get to see one aspect, because that’s all there is.”

  “Hmmmm. Could be the rest of it is there, and he just needs to figure how to let it out?”

  “Not likely we’ll understand him if he does,” Larry said darkly. “He’s not exactly easy to follow. In more ways than one.”

  “Ah, something new on that,” Marcia said. “We’ve been pulling in every expert we can, and they believe he’s got some sort of damage to his speech centers—or else the Charonians didn’t do such a good job connecting to them.”

  “In other words, he can’t talk very well,” Larry said. “That much I could have told you.”

  “He may not be very good at it, but he’s trying,” Marcia said. “Trying very hard. Our tame experts tell me he probably can’t understand speech very well, either, that’s he’s having trouble with words in any form. Massive dyslexia. The signs in that imaginary tunnel you’re in aren’t intelligible, for example.”

  “So?”

  “So if he can’t talk, and he can’t write, all he’s got left is visual signaling, and he’s having trouble with that, too.”

  “Wait a minute. So he’s walking me through this imaginary maze to show me something he can’t talk about? Showing me is the only language he’s got left?”

  “Right.”

  “Then why doesn’t he take me straight to what I need to see? Bring up the image I need to see?”

  Marcia did not answer at first. “Marcia? Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. I was just trying to work up the nerve to answer you. Look, this next is just my idea, all right? I haven’t talked it through, and there’s no data to back it up.”

  “All right. You’ve got me good and nervous,” Larry said.

  “Okay. I was thinking. Yes, he’s walking through a mind. But why are we assuming it’s his mind?”

  “My God. The Wheel.” Larry looked around the tunnel in sudden alarm, half-expecting to see a horde of Charonians materialize.

  “Why not? The Wheel’s dead, but most of it was electronics and circuits and memory blocks. They’re not going to rot. The circuits, the pathways, are still there, if you know how to read and interpret them.”

  “But wait,” Larry protested. “This tunnel looks halfway like humans made it. Charonians don’t make signs or light fixtures.”

  “You’re seeing some element of the Wheel’s dead, frozen memory as perceived and interpreted by Lucian. His mind is making analogs and interpretations of what’s really there. That’s why he can’t lead you directly to what it is he wants to show you. He’s in the Wheel’s memory system, and the Wheel’s dead, with half the circuits destroyed. He’s trying to find his way through, trying to find a way forward and lead you there.”

  “Sweet God. That almost makes sense.” Larry stood up, and winced as the exoskeleton chafed against his shoulder. Walking through an alien mind… The back of his neck tingled, and he felt the overwhelming urge to look behind himself—as if there could be something there. Suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore. He toggled back to the comm circuit. “Come on,” he said to Lucian. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Come,” Lucian said. “Times goes. Not long.”

  Marcia MacDougal watched the repeater video through eyes numbed with weariness. The central display on her terminal was repeating the imagery being fed to the VR system’s right-eye display. It jerked and wobbled and swayed with every movement of Larry’s head. It was important for her to see what he saw, but it was not easy to watch. Selby, sitting at the console next to Marcia’s, wasn’t having a much easier time of it. She looked like death warmed over, and Tyrone Vespasian was not in much better shape.

  Larry was standing up, turning, facing forward, following Lucian as they moved through the world that Lucian was imagining for them. The tunnel shimmered, shook, dissolved, and suddenly the two of them were walking along the lunar surface, the now-vanished Earth riding in the sky. Larry must have been having a hell of a time dealing with the abrupt changes of scenery. It seemed as if they were moving through random images dredged from Lucian’s past.

  “Bloody mess, isn’t it?” Selby asked.

  Marcia sighed, nodded, and rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t quite sure which mess Selby was referring to. There were so many to chose from. She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the confusion of the control center. That was a laugh. If there was one thing completely absent here, it was control. It was a jumble of hardware in a bubble tent inside a side tunnel of the Wheelway. No one even understood exactly what was going on. They had used Lucian Dreyfuss’s preserved body as their lab rat—but now the lab rat had taken over the experiment, and sent the research staff scuttling in all directions. There was nothing here but too many bodies and too much computer gear crammed into too small a space, all the consoles and computers and simulators jammed in every which way, all the experts they had pulled in from everywhere hovering about, trying to watch and understand and be helpful. The most help most of them could offer would be to go home, but Marcia couldn’t think of any polite—or effective—way of telling them that.

  They had pulled in experts in brain structure, in abnormal psychology, in virtual reality simulation systems and TeleOperator op-erations and Charonian artifacts and medical imaging and vision systems and a half-dozen other disciplines besides. There were no experts in putting them all together. Yet. Maybe there would be when this was over.

  For the moment, Marcia would have traded the whole roomful of brainpower for one person who could give her solid, definitive answers to a pair of questions: What in the world was Lucian Dreyfuss doing? Was there any purpose to his actions, or was Lucian just wandering some hallucinatory interior landscape at random, his mind unhinged, with Larry forced to follow behind?

  Sooner or later—almost certainly sooner—they were going to have to get Larry out of that suit and give him some rest. Then would be the moment to bring out Vespasian, let him try and keep Lucian company for a while.

  But Marcia knew, better tha
n anyone, just how fragile their link to Lucian was, how many variables were tangled up together. No one completely understood the hookup they were using. If Marcia was right, somewhere on the other side of the circuit the human VR system was indirectly linked into the Lunar Wheel’s memory system, with Lucian Dreyfuss serving as the link between them. They were that close to breaking into the enemy’s Heritage Memory. She wasn’t about to make any changes that might break that link before she had to. If that meant driving Larry to and beyond the point of exhaustion, then so be it.

  She looked back to the display terminal and saw the image change again—no, not change. Take flight. She watched as Lucian Dreyfuss looked up into the stars as seen from the Moon—and then stepped up into the sky.

  She blinked and looked again. Yes. Lucian was walking on nothing, striding upward and forward.

  “Marcia—he just started flying!” Larry said over her headphones.

  “Follow him,” she said. “This is the first impossible thing he’s done since he woke up. It could be important. He’s been in fog, tunnels, and enclosed, covered spaces. Maybe he’s been looking for the sky all this time. He wanted to show us something in the sky.”

  “But he’s not walking on anything!”

  “Neither have you been,” she said. “You’ve been in illusion the whole time. You think that’s the real lunar surface under your feet? Just walk like you’re climbing stairs, the way he is. He’s controlling the illusion. If he thinks you’re moving upward, you’ll move upward. Follow him!”

  “Um, ah, okay.” The image lurched from side to side as Larry moved in exaggerated upward steps. “I’m, ah, climbing,” he said. “My God, it’s working. I’m following him up. My God!”