The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Great, good to know,” Sianna said. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”

  “It doesn’t?” Wally asked. Clearly he felt that the next stage in the reasoning was utterly self-evident.

  Sianna looked to Eyeball and shrugged. “Does it?”

  “Not so I suss, nohow. Come on, Walls—what would be popping at Earthpoint ifwhen Charos drop SCOREs down Moonpoint tube?”

  Wally had not ever shown the slightest trouble understanding Purpspeak. “Earthpoint ought to ring like a bell, resonate in all sorts of gravitic frequencies. Sympathetic vibration. We’ve always assumed that a lot of the hardware on a Ring-and-Hole pair was to damp out that sort of vibration.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Sianna said. “Okay. Would the people back in the Solar System be able to detect that? If they were running any sort of gravitic detection gear hooked to the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon?”

  “They’d be lucky if it didn’t blow every circuit breaker on the detector grid. Absolutely. In fact, I doubt they’d need detectors. The Lunar Wheel itself would react. No way they could miss it.”

  “Charon Ring?” Eyeball asked.

  Wally thought for a second. “Maybe. If they were running in the right sort of detection mode, they might pick it up. If the folks on the Moon warned them, they could certainly recalibrate and listen for the next one. Of course, we don’t know for sure anyone is still running the Ring, or if anyone is observing the Lunar Wheel.”

  “Okay,” Sianna said. “Good. Great. There have been lots of openings and closings, lots of SCOREs headed through. Something like a hundred so far, and maybe another dozen to go.”

  “And they’d have been watching them,” Wally said, getting I he idea. “And they know reverb theory as well as we do. They’ll know it means something is up with us.”

  “Holdit holdit holdit,” Eyeball said. “We’re going through, right? We’re gonna send a command set to pop the hatch on that thing and dive in. That command set. Has to go through to your Point X so’s the other end of the hole knows to open. Right?”

  “Sure, right. We’ll send the signal the same way the Charonians do. Earth will send a radio beam to the Ghoul Modules. The Ghouls will respond by sending out command modulations on a gravitic carrier beam,” Wally said.

  Eyeball leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and thought for a moment. “Now how ’bout folks back home in Solar, at Charon? They be able to detect commands, maybe read ’em and reap?”

  Wally shrugged. “Read them, sure, but I don’t know what they’ll get out of them. All the signals are virtually identical. Without some sort of code key, like we got off the Lone World, it’ll just be the same burst of noise over and over.”

  “No,” Sianna said. “They have a code key, sort of. They knew enough Charonian visual symbol language to close the wormhole five years ago. They’ll know it’s a wormhole transit signal, and they’ll have enough of the syntax to be able to get something out of it. Besides, the signals aren’t precisely identical. There are timing variables and mass variables.”

  “Okay, they’ll be able to parse the signal, work out the grammar. Maybe even mimic the signal. But there won’t be anything in the signal they’ll be able to read and understand.”

  Sianna stood up straight rather suddenly and put her hand over her mouth. “Wait a second. Wally, stick around. I get my best ideas around you. There will be nothing they can read in the signal—unless we put it there.”

  “Say what?”

  “There’s a null sequence in the command set,” Sianna said. “Like a comment line. It’s preceded by a symbol telling the Ghoul Modules’ processors to disregard the following sequences. Probably it’s a place to put in the Charonian equivalent of a manifest name, or an explanatory note. We could use it.”

  “Could we put something in there?” Wally asked, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he was not concerned with the technical challenge, but whether they would be allowed to do so, as if the grown-ups wouldn’t let them fool around with the equipment that way.

  Sianna nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t see why not. Wally, pull up that diagram of the signal syntax. I want to see how much room we have.”

  Wally got out his notepack and worked the controls. He shook his head. “Not much. About thirty characters, tops. Can’t say much in that.”

  “But enough to tell them it’s us,” Sianna said. “Enough to say it’s Earth, it’s people going through.”

  “What good would that do?” Wally asked.

  “At least it would tell them we’re still alive,” Sianna said. “We’ve been out of contact for five years. They have no idea whether or not we’re still here.”

  “Could do more than that,” Eyeball said. “Would let them know they could use same command set on Earthpoint Singu—no, no, that fish ain’t tunable no more. The Ring of Charon, though. Maybe they could tweak it up enough to scoot a ship, send it thru true to Point X.”

  “Wherever that is. Is that going to be doing them any favors?” Sianna asked. “Suppose we all get killed the second we go through, just after we’ve sent them an invitation to join us?”

  “Risk worth it,” Eyeball said. “Think ’bout it. We can’t make passage to Solar Space nohow now. Suppose we find a real, perm way to get forth and back, use Point X place for long shortcut. Worth plenty, that.” Eyeball thought for a second. “Risk they might miss it, though. Mebbe we could send own shout, longer message? Just talk, without sending something through?”

  “Not now,” Sianna said. “Maybe not ever. The only command set we know is the one the Lone World’s been sending. We don’t know any other way to do it, any other code set. And I don’t want to mess with a wormhole if I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t forget this whole mess started when that Chao guy accidentally switched on the Earthpoint-Moonpoint wormhole. We might send a text message that also told the wormhole to convert its mass into energy, or something.”

  “Could we do like that with this nullset thing, the comment line?” Eyeball asked.

  Sianna frowned. “My God, I hadn’t thought of that. Wally? Could we do any damage using the nullset area?”

  Wally shook his head, serenely—and disconcertingly—confident. “No way. Impossible. That null sequence area is safe. That’s the whole point of it.” But then he cocked his head to one side, and thought about it a little more. “At least I don’t think it could do any damage. Don’t see how it could. But, ah, I’m not quite sure I can make any promises.”

  “Beautiful, Walls,” Eyeball said. “Glad you cleared that one up.”

  “So? Well?” Sianna asked, looking toward Eyeball. “It’s your hab, your home,” she said. “You’re the pilot. Your call.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Wish weren’t.” Eyeball turned her back on the other two, and stepped over to the porthole. She looked out onto the depths of space, at the Moonpoint Ring, at the Multisystem beyond. “I got family Earthward,” she said. “Sis and pop live, mom longdead. Never gonna seem ’em again, likeward. But let ’em know I’m alive, that we made it? Gotta do that. Be sweet to let ’em know we all reet. Risk so high on diving the Hole anyhoo, it ain’t no nevermind to bet one more leetle chip.”

  Sianna thought she had followed that, but she wasn’t sure. She looked at Wally. “She’s going to do it?” she asked.

  Wally gave Sianna a strange look. “Of course,” he said. “Isn’t that what she just said?”

  Multisystem Research Institute

  New York City

  EARTH

  “This is madness,” said Wolf Bernhardt, watching the displays in his office. “I cannot believe that you agreed to this.”

  “I didn’t agree to it, Wolf,” Ursula Gruber replied. “I suggested it, as you know perfectly well. And, I might add, you approved it.”

  “For which I should have my head examined most carefully,” Wolf said. “Was there no other way? No way for them to escape at lower risk?”

  “No,” Ursula said. “Nothing. Thi
s is their last, best, desperate hope.”

  “We are ready to send the command set?” Wolf asked. “You have the latest update?”

  “Yes, Wolf, yes. Everything has been made as ready as possible. We send the wormhole command in approximately sixty-five minutes. And they are already very much committed. They did the first burn an hour ago, changing their course. They are spiraling in on the wormhole, and they don’t have the power to pull out.”

  “And the sensors and the cameras?”

  “Up and running. We don’t think we’ll get more than about sixty seconds of transmission radioed back before the wormhole closes down. Maybe much less. With some luck, that will be enough to know what sort of place they are in.”

  “And then the hole slams shut, and we know nothing much?”

  “Precisely.”

  “They could all die the moment after the wormhole closes, and we would not know. Any hope of reopening the wormhole afterwards?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gruber said. “So long as we have a mass, a large one—to send through it.”

  “Why should the wormhole care if we send something or nothing through?” Bernhardt asked.

  “Because we don’t think the Ghoul Modules are smart enough to do the compensations a full Ring can do,” Gruber explained. “The amount of mass to be transferred is a major variable in a wormhole transfer. Get it wrong by any substantial amount, and the Ghoul Modules won’t have the capacity to absorb the excess power. They’ll burn out.”

  “So tell the Ghouls we are sending nothing—or something very small—through.”

  “The minimal mass is too high. We don’t know any way of doing a zero-load setting on the Ghoul Modules. After all, the reason they are there is to manage mass transfers. Maybe we can find ways around that, but we don’t know how yet.”

  “ ‘We don’t know.’ The motto for our era.” Wolf stood up, turned around, and looked out his glass-wall window at the great city outside, the sun just setting over the gleaming towers. “ ‘We don’t know,’ ” he said again. “Ah, well. We’re about to start learning very quickly.”

  NaPurHab

  Somewhere in the aft areas of the habitat, the main maneuvering thrusters cut off. “Second main trim burn complete,” Eyeball announced. “We are in the groove. I think.”

  Sometimes talking—or thinking—in Purpspeak was not such a good idea, and more or less standard English was a wiser choixe. Eyeballer Maximus Lock-On figured that piloting a habitat through a wormhole with groundhogs for assistants was just such a time.

  And they were heading through, and no mistake. Of course, a mistake, they would be heading in, not through. Either NaPurHab made it through, or the singularity at this end of the wormhole was just about to gain a little weight.

  The hab was as battened down as it was ever going to be. They had spun it down to zero rotation, zero gee. The solar collectors were stowed, all the loose cargo was in theory strapped down, all personnel had been ordered to emergency stations until further notice— producing the usual number of protests from the kneejerker set—and all the docshops were standing by. Everything that could be done had been. But everything sure as hell wasn’t much.

  Closer, closer, drifting closer.

  Eyeballer swallowed hard and tweaked back the attitude controls by just half a hair. She was not piloting by the numbers anymore, but by feel, by guess. They were deep inside the probabilities now, so tangled up in the variables that there was no longer time to set up the problem, let alone work through logical, mathematical solutions.

  Too slow, Eyeball told herself. They were too slow, by the tiniest bit. What would happen if the wormhole slammed shut while the stern of the hab was still moving through?

  “Stand by,” Sturgis said. “Variable projection shows us coming up on another Ghoul pulse. Probability peak in ten seconds.”

  Eyeball glanced toward the prob display, absorbed the data on the display without really seeing it. “Got it, Walleye. Hanging.” Had to hand to the groundhog—he was good.

  Obviously, the Ghouls were adjusting for the mass imbalance caused by NaPurHab itself. At least that gave Wall some sort of way of guessing what they would do next. If the Ghouls followed the trim pattern he was predicting, then the hab would have to slow down its approach again—by almost exactly the amount she had just gotten through speeding them up. Damnation! This was getting out of control. The Ghoul Modules were doing their best to stabilize the worm-hole, and Eyeball was constantly adjusting NaPurHab’s trajectory, trying to move with sufficient precision to make it through the hole, even as the hab’s movement destabilized the gravity patterns the Ghouls were trying to maintain. Two feedback loops combining to set up a meta-unstable synergy. Or something. She could write learned papers about it later. If they survived.

  “Coming up on wormhole transit link activation,” Wally said. “MRI will send the command sequence to the Ghoul Mods in five seconds. Four, three, two, one—MRI sending commands.”

  Eyeball felt her stomach turn to ice as nothing, nothing happened.

  The wormhole would not open. They would crash into the singularity. But no. Speed-of-light delay, command-activation delay. It would take a little time, just a few seconds before—

  Eyeball took her eyes off her control panels and risked a look through the main viewport. The wormhole came suddenly alive, pulsing, swirling, a strange serpentine tunnel with walls of swirling not-blue. The begloomed black-grey sky of the Multisystem brooded in the background, set off here and there with the dull red glow of reflected Spherelight on a dust cloud.

  The undead Moonpoint Ring was a ring no more, but a band across the sky, too close to see more than a small piece of it at once. But she had no eyes for the ring. She looked back at the growing power of the wormhole.

  “Pray God to save us, pray God to save us, pray God to save us.” A small voice at the back of the compartment was chanting the words over and over again, and, Eyeball realized, had been for some time. She glanced overshoulder. Sianna. Poor kid. How n hell had she got dropped into this mess? How any of them? Notime to thinkitall now.

  Back to the transit calculations. Yawing just a bit, losing alignment, don’t over compensate, just the lightest of micropulses on the thrusters. Easy now. Easy.

  Terra Nova

  “Tracking, tracking—the hab is closing on the singularity. A great deal of interference is being produced by the Moonpoint Ring and its interaction with the singularity,” DePanna said, as if she were talking about a little static during a call from her Aunt Minnie.

  Dianne wished, not for the first time, that her detection officer could be a trifle more excitable. That hunk of iron and glass out there, with thousands of people on it, was about to drop straight on through into the unknown. Yet DePanna seemed more concerned by the fact that her display screens were difficult to interpret.

  Of course, if DePanna had gotten emotional, Dianne would have relieved her of her duty. But being upset with someone else’s reaction helped keep Dianne from getting too upset herself.

  “They shouldn’t have done it,” Gerald said. “It’s suicide.”

  “What choice did they have?” Dianne asked. “It was suicide to stay where they were.”

  “I know,” Gerald said. “I know—but even so.”

  All the Earth was watching NaPurHab’s battle, its struggle to ride the rapids of gravity, the shoals of warping space, fighting past doom and disaster—toward what?

  A dozen screen displays were running at once, and Dianne was trying to watch all of them. But the direct feeds from NaPurHab’s external cameras meant the most. They would show what sort of place NaPurHab got to.

  Assuming it got to anywhere at all.

  NaPurHab

  Getting closer, closer, toodamn close. The gaping mouth of the hole was getting larger and larger—but was it large enough? Did those straights back on Earth really think they had a strong enough capiche on this thing to pry the hole open big enough for something the size of a hab to punch
through?

  Back off. Bail out. Abort this. This is crazy. But there was very little point in listening to the panicked gibberings of her hindbrain. They had passed the point of no return long, long ago. We’re going to slam into that damned hole anyhow, anyway, she told herself. Shush. Quiet, concentrate.

  “Ghoul Modules commencing compensation,” Sturgis reported. “Attempting to use gravitics control to pilot us in. Right on predicted schedule.”

  “Oh, good,” Eyeball said. Wally had predicted that the Charos might try and manipulate the hab’s course, setting it into the ideal transit path for a SCORE with the mass of the hab—which was not the right path for the hab. Eyeball would have to compensate for the attempted corrections as well.

  “Confirming attempt at gravitic course compensation,” Wally said.

  Eyeball suppressed the urge to swear. The man sounded pleased that the Charonians were going to take another crack at killing them all. After all, it proved that he had gotten the problem right. Wally was born to the Naked Purple. “I’m getting the distortion now,” Eyeball said.

  Then the sounds started. The hab itself creaked, once, quietly, and then subsided. Too many shifting stresses were grabbing at the structure and the fabric of the poor old hab. Eyeball knew it was but a precursor of some truly serious noise. The tidal stresses were going to build up ferociously in the next few minutes.

  The theory was that the hab could take it—but the damn thing was so old. NaPurHab had passed through a lot of hands before the Purps had taken possession. Eyeball was reasonably sure the original designers had not intended the thing to hold together for 150 years, let alone be dropped through a wormhole.