The Crystal Spheres

2

The project was under a total news blackout. The Sol-Gov psychists were of the opinion that the race could not stand another disappointment. They feared an epidemic of greatdepression, and a few of them even tried to stop us from mounting the expedition.

Fortunately, the Worldcomps remembered their ancient promise. We deepspacers long ago agreed to stop exploring, and raising people’s hopes with our efforts. In return, the billion robot farprobes were sent out, and we would be allowed to go investigate any report they sent back of a cracked shell.

By the time Alice and I arrived at Charon, the others had almost finished recommissioning the ship we were to take. I had hoped we would be using the Robert Rodgers, or Ponce de León, two ships I had once commanded. But they had chosen instead to use the old Pelenor. She would be big enough for the purposes we had in mind, without being unwieldy.

Sol-Gov tugs were loading about ten thousand corpsicles even as the shuttle carrying Alice and me passed Pluto and began rendezvous maneuvers. Out here, ten percent of the way to the Edge, the Shards glimmered with a brightsheen of indescribable colors. I let Alice do the piloting, and stared out at the glowing fragments of Sol’s shattered crystalsphere.

When my grandfather was a boy, Charon had been a site of similar activity. Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the size of the little moon itself, taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be colonists, their animals, and their goods.

Those early explorers knew they would never see their final destination. But they were not sad. They suffered from no great-depression. Those people launched forth in their so-primitive first starship full of hope for their great-grandchildren—and for the world which their sensitive telescopes had proved circled, green and pleasant, around the star Tau Ceti.

Ten thousand waityears later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards of Charon as we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to ram-shippers and greatstrutted wormhole-divers.

They all lay below, all except the few that were destroyed in accidents, or whose crews killed themselves in despair. They had all come back to Charon, failures.

I looked at the most ancient hulks, the generation ships, and thought about the day of my grandfather’s youth, when the Seeker cruised blithely over the Edge, and collided at one percent of light speed with the inner face of Sol’s crystalsphere.

They never knew what hit them, that firstcrew.

They had begun to pass through the outermost shoals of the solar system… the Oort Cloud, where billions of comets drifted like puffs of snow in the sun’s weakened grasp.

Seeker’s instruments sought through the sparse cloud, touching isolated, drifting balls of ice. The would-be colonists planned to keep busy doing science throughout the long passage. Among the questions they wanted to solve on their way was the mystery of the comets’ mass.

Why was it, astronomers had asked for centuries, that virtually all of these icy bodies were nearly the same size—a few miles across?

Seeker’s instruments ploughed for knowledge. Little did her pilots know she would reap the Joke of the Gods.

When she collided with the crystalsphere, it bowed outward with her over a span of lightminutes. Seeker had time for a frantic lasercast back to Earth. They only knew that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart, even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!

Then the crystalsphere shattered.

And where there had once been ten billion comets, now there were ten quadrillion.

Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she had vaporized. Almost half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.

We never did find out how, by what accident, she managed to crack the shell. There are still those who contend that it was the crew’s ignorance that crystalspheres even existed that enabled them to achieve what had forever since seemed so impossible.

Now the Shards illuminate the sky. Sol shines within a halo of light, reflected by the ten quadrillion comets… the mark of the only goodstar accessible to man.

“We’re coming in,” Alice told me. I sat up in my seat and watched her nimble hands dance across the panel. Then Pelenor drifted into view.

The great globe shone dully in the light from the Shards. Already the nimbus of her drives caused space around her to shimmer.

The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists abroad, and were departing. The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we dozen deepspacers would be free to explore. But if the goodstar did, indeed, shine into an accessible goodworld, we would awaken the men and women from frozen-sleep and deliver them to their new home.

No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back.

“Let’s dock,” I said eagerly. “I want to get going.”

Alice smiled. “Always the impatient one. The deepspacer’s deepspacer. Give it a day or two, Joshua. We’ll be winging out of the nest soon enough.”

There was no point in reminding her that I had been latewaiting longer than she—indeed, longer than nearly any other human left alive. I kept my restlessness within and listened, in my head, to the music of the spheres.