The Ring of Charon

CHAPTER TEN Naked Purple Logic

The meeting was not going well, Sondra decided. Larry was stubbornly refusing to believe that Earth was destroyed, Webling seemed incapable of anything but shooting down theories—having none of her own to offer—and Sondra found herself helplessly spouting out one damn-fool idea after another. If we three are the big gravity experts who are going to save humanity, we are in big trouble, Sondra thought.

Larry was still in a sulk, and Webling was just on the point of spinning out another objection when suddenly the door burst open. Dr. Raphael rushed into the room, carrying a datablock and a thick sheaf of printout. “The communications duty officer woke me,” he said without preamble. “This just arrived from the VISOR station at Venus,” he said, his voice breathless and weak. “The comm officer woke me to give it to me, and she was right to do so.”

Sondra was surprised. Raphael didn’t like anything disturbing his sleep. She looked at Raphael’s death-white face. Something had scared him, scared him bad. But what the hell could scare anyone more than Earth disappearing?

“Some man McGillicutty, down there at VISOR, has come up with some figures on… on Earth. Do you know him? Is he reliable?” Raphael asked, in a tone that suggested he wanted to be told no.

“I know him by reputation,” Webling replied carefully. “One of the sort that hasn’t been out of the lab in years. No understanding of people, and a tendency to get lost in the details. He often misses the point of what he finds—but his observations and measurements are always first-rate.”

“Well, he seems to have missed the point here all right,” Raphael said grimly. All the anger seemed to have drained out of the man, as if fear and distraction had left no room for anything else. Raphael dropped the papers on the visitor’s side of his desk. “Have a look at these while I call up the computer file. Can’t think as well looking at paper,” he said under his breath, muttering to himself. Sondra looked at Larry, and Larry looked at her. Muttering? For Raphael, this was utter loss of control. The man was frightened.

“I want to see what this report tells you,” Raphael went on. “I don’t want it to be what it told me.”

Larry and Sondra put their heads together over the hard copy of McGillicutty’s report, while Webling read the computer screen over Raphael’s shoulder.

Larry got it first. “The gravity waves are continuing, but with Earth gone there’s nothing there to produce them. And that twenty-one-centimeter radio source is radiating in a complex, regular and repeating pattern. McGillicutty doesn’t say anything about the pattern. He just talks about the signal strength and the distortions caused by the gravity waves. He missed the fact that the signal is complex and repetitive. But that can’t be. Natural signals can’t—”

He stared into space for a moment, until the truth dawned. “But that means these signals aren’t natural,” Larry said in a whisper. “That’s what the data say to me.”

Raphael nodded woodenly. “That was the conclusion I reached,” he said. “The one I hoped was wrong. The signals are not natural in origin. Could one of the radical groups on the Moon have—”

Sondra felt her skin go cold. “Not natural. Now wait a second here—”

But Larry wasn’t listening. He knew the technology required to generate gravity waves. The Ring of Charon was, if anything, a minimal hookup for gravity generation. It was inconceivable that any other group could have built anything remotely capable of such a job and kept it hidden.

At least no human could have done it.

“The signals and the gravity waves are artificial, Sondra. Which means Earth didn’t just disappear,” he said. “Somebody took it.”

“We know that it’s still sending pulses of gravity waves, and that radio signal.” Tyrone Vespasian sat in his office, behind his desk, willing himself to calmness. He knew there was something overcontrolled about his movements, as if he were trying to hold too much in. Was he trying too hard to be rational, logical, to be sensible when sense was useless? “The signal proves it. That’s a deliberate message signal, not some natural radio noise. Even if we can’t read it.”

“And where is that signal coming from?” Lucian asked gently.

Vespasian shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “From here. From somewhere on the Moon. It’s almost as if it’s coming from everywhere at once, out of a whole series of dispersed transmitters. We can’t find it.”

“Don’t you think that might give us a few problems?” Lucian asked. “Earth vanished two-point-six seconds after the beam touched it—the exact time for a speed-of-light signal to go back and forth between the Earth and Moon. If they decide to blame us, Mars and the Belt Community might decide to do something drastic.”

Vespasian nodded, leaned in toward Lucian and lowered his voice. “I’ve thought of that, too. Remember the proposal about ten years ago to blow up Mercury to get at its core metals? They wanted to create a second asteroid belt close enough in to the Sun so they could really get some use out of Solar power. Officially, the Community never got around to building the Core Cracker bomb—but suppose they did, unofficially? The Moon’s about the same size as Mercury, with a lower mass. The Belt Community might figure it’s them or us.”

“But we didn’t do it!” Lucian protested.

“I checked, and as of five minutes ago, no less than six groups have claimed credit for the quakes, Earth’s vanishment, or both. Three on the Moon, two on board the surviving habitats, and one on Mars. Rad groups, nut groups, and most of them barely know which end of a screwdriver to hold. None of them could possibly have pulled this off. All they’re doing is blowing off steam, trying to upset the applecart and fit the disaster into their ideology. The Final Clan Habitat survived, and I read some guff from those nuts. Claiming they had swept away Earth, the source of all genetic decadence and lower races. Now they’re free to breed their superhumans without interference. No one has taken any of these groups seriously in decades. They always claim responsibility for disasters. But suppose someone is rattled enough to believe them now— and we get caught in the line of fire?” Vespasian said.

“Thanks to that damn fool McGillicutty sending a public message from Venus, everyone—including the nut groups—knows all about the twenty-one-centimeter radio signal, the speed-of-light delay, and the gravity waves. They can talk those things up, sound impressive, like they really did it. But none of them can know about the black hole yet—unless they did do it.”

“So if we keep our mouths shut about it, that might be a way to spot the real culprits,” Vespasian said.

“Or at least prove none of our local crazies did it,” Lucian said.

“Then who did do it?” Vespasian demanded.

Lucian frowned. “Jesus, Vespy. You’re talking about the most horrible crime in history. I can’t imagine anyone being able to do it. Not emotionally, or mentally. I can’t imagine a reason good enough for doing it.” Lucian paused a moment. “Those scientists on Pluto fired the gravity beam. But if they meant to wreck Earth, then why announce the experiment beforehand? Most of them are from Earth, and Earth funded their work. Besides, the beam touched Venus and those outer planet satellites—and the Moon for that matter—and we’re still here. Which suggests the beam was a coincidence, or set off someone else’s hidden system, or that the real baddies timed the thing to look like Pluto did it. Pluto had no motive.

“If anyone had a good enough motive—and I don’t think anyone does—it could be Mars and the Belt Community. They’ve got a lot of weird hardware floating around out there in deep space. Stuff nobody knows about. With Earth out of the way, Mars and the B.C. are suddenly dominant in the Solar System. And they get to blame the disaster on us—or on a bunch of mad scientists on Pluto.”

“But Earth is their biggest market!” Vespasian protested. “Everyone on Mars and in the Belt has some kind of family Earthside! And dammit, they’re human beings. No human being could commit this crime.”

“Which leaves open one other possibility,” Lucian said.

“Oh no. No you don’t.” Vespasian stood up suddenly and began pacing back and forth behind his desk. “Come on, Lucian. Don’t throw aliens from outer space at me. There’s nothing out there. By now we’d have found something.” There was something in Vespasian’s soul that felt chilled by the very thought.

Lucian ignored his friend’s discomfiture. He rubbed his face with tired hands. He felt drained, all capacity for emotion sucked out of him. “Either humans or aliens, Vespy. Take your choice. Either people who couldn’t possibly do it, or beings from another world who don’t exist. Bug-eyed aliens, insane human terrorists, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny gone bad. Somebody did it. And we’re not going to find out who’s guilty sitting here. Just don’t send a public message about the Earthpoint black hole,” Lucian said. “It could only make matters worse, scare people more. Send coded messages to the scientific groups. Let them work on it.”

Vespasian grunted. “Okay, I guess.” He shook his head and looked at the wall clock. “Jesus, those poor bastards on Pluto.”

“What do you mean?” Lucian asked.

“I mean the frigging speed of light. Think about it. Earth went poof ten hours ago. They sent the gravity wave five hours before it reached its target, went to bed, got up, and didn’t find out what they had done until then, five and a half hours after we saw it happen. We’re sending the word about the black hole now. They won’t find out about that until late tonight. It’s like it’s all happening to them in a dream on the other side of the Universe.”

Vespasian stared into space. “Terrible things happen, things you cause accidentally. You don’t learn the consequences of what you’ve done for eleven hours after it happens, and you can’t stop the terror once you’ve set it in motion. If you were the poor son of a bitch who had pushed the button in the first place, how many shocks like that could you take?”

The day the Tycho Purple Penal Fire Department burned down her parent’s house Marcia felt the purest joy of her life. The memory popped into her mind unbidden, and at first she wondered why. Then she understood. Her subconscious was reminding her how much she had already survived.

Remember, Marcia told herself. Remember the turmoil, the chaos you have survived to get here. You can survive this, too. Remember the strange and terrible way you escaped, and the joy you felt that day.

The moment came back to her. The black pall of smoke hazing over the dome’s interior, the gray ashes sifting downward, the firemen laughing and chuckling, putting away their blowtorches. And Marcia watching it all, tears of happiness in her eyes.

It was mere days before her eighteenth birthday, and the fire made her a homeless minor refugee in the eyes of the Lunar Republic, made homeless by an official act that was unquestionably not of her doing. She had a receipt from the fire department to prove that.

The fire was her ticket out of Tycho Purple Penal, because legal refugees were one of the very few categories of souls entitled to pass through the Lunar Republic’s security checkpoints, out of the asylum into the saner world outside.

Life didn’t get easier after leaving home. There were only two nations on the Moon: Tycho Purple Penal and the Lunar Republic. Getting by in the feisty Republic, confronted on all sides with the legendary touch of cheerful surliness burned into the Lunar character—now that had been a challenge. She was astonished to discover that she missed the parents she could never see face-to-face again. She spent far too much on videocalls to Tycho. But if life among the Naked Purples had any virtue, it was that the experience prepared you to cope with anything.

Gerald. Gerald. Earth had been taken, and Gerald, her loving, perfect husband had gone with the planet. Could she learn to cope with that?

There had to be an explanation. They must have missed something, something that would make sense of it all. Marcia knew that. They must have. Even wrapped up in a fetal ball on her bed, struggling to block out the world, her mind demanded that she find the missing answer, make sense of the madness.

The desire to find sense in order to survive madness was a deep-seated reflex for Marcia, after being raised in the Naked Purple scene, struggling to be the ordinary child of extraordinary—even mad—parents. Whenever, as a child and a teenager, she had been surrounded by madness, she had clung to the hope, the urgently needed faith that the Purple weirdness was itself surrounded by a larger world of sanity. The sort of sanity and decency that Gerald had always represented. But no, don’t think of him now, she thought. Calm yourself. Sanity existed. She believed that, had to believe it now, just as she always had.

She had been born into the Naked Purple movement not long after it expanded from its orbital habitat into the former home of the Tycho Penal Colony on the Moon. After eighteen years of hearing only the Purple version of events, the straight version of history sounded strange to her.

Tycho Purple Penal Station had started out centuries before as the Soviet Lunar base, and had passed to the United Nations’ control with the final Soviet breakup. In the bad old days when UNLAC—the United Nations Lunar Administration Council—ran the Moon, Tycho had been made into a U.N. penal colony, and had rapidly devolved into the final dumping ground for the human refuse of the Earth, the Moon, and the Settlement Worlds.

Tycho Penal was specifically intended to be not only escape-proof, but reprieve-proof. No prisoner was ever sent there under any sentence except life without parole.

When the Lunar Republic was declared, eighty years before Marcia was born, the Lunar Colonists—the Conners—were very careful not to lay claim to the Tycho Penal Colony and environs. They were quite happy to let the United Nations administer the nightmare it had created for itself.

Even after the Republic, the United Nations let Tycho Penal stagger along a few years as a prison, until a resolution passed the General Assembly banning the placement of any more prisoners at Tycho. UNLAC was stuck with the bills for a prison populated with old men and women too mean to die. The costs of running the place rapidly got out of hand—until it dawned on UNLAC that it would be cheaper to declare the place a separate republic, and announce that all current residents were naturalized citizens.

The Lunar Republic promptly decreed that any bearer of a Tychoean passport found in the Republic would be escorted back to the Tycho border—with or without a pressure suit. Every nation on Earth, and all of the Settlement Worlds, refused to honor Tycho passports.

So the convicts—and, by this time, their descendants— were technically free, but legally they couldn’t travel.

Tycho was still tough to get out of illegally, for that matter. But the convicts could write their own laws, and own their own property. The Lunar Republic did allow some amount of legitimate trade, which provided ample cover for smuggling operations. It gave the convicts a window on the outside world.

All in all, it wasn’t much of an opening. But it was enough for the smart cons to get rich, while the dumb ones starved. After a while, the inevitable happened, and one of the smartest, meanest convicts managed to muscle everyone else out of power and set himself up as the King of Tycho: Redeye Sid the First.

That much was history—confirmable facts. The rest was half legend, half outright lie. Marcia had never quite decided which was which. The story went that Redeye Sid won the last open tract of Tycho in a poker game. A crooked game, some whispered. But no one could be sure, as Redeye was the only player to survive the game. Unless that tale was circulated by Sid to keep enemies in line.

And then, in the tenth year of his reign, Redeye Sid dropped dead (or was poisoned) and left it all to his idiot (or perhaps mad genius or political malcontent) son Jasper, who listened to off-planet broadcasts a bit too often. More particularly, Redeye Jasper listened to the Purple Voice beaming down from NaPurHab. He got religion. Or philosophy. Or paranoid delusions. No one could ever decide which.

Whatever the Purple was, it had earned itself a prominent place in any history of the irrational. What the Purps were for, what they were against, what their goals were—all those issues were meaningless to the Purps. Alienating themselves from society, offending the world and then protesting the world for taking offense, that was the Purple way. The Purples drenched themselves in anger, anger for its own sake, absurdity as an art and a political policy, the overturning of any and all existing forms. That was the closest the Purps came to a goal, a Naked Purple ideal.

Marcia thought back to the allegory that named the movement: Get naked, paint yourself purple, and walk down the street. If people were surprised, shocked, offended, or merely amused, rail at them for their small-minded, bourgeois ways. If they accepted you and let you be, despise them for being blinkered, too narrow-minded to see the special and the marvelous in this world. Any reaction, all reactions, or no reaction at all were grounds for contempt.

It was a formula for attracting the ostracized, ensuring that recruits would feel left out, rejected by the world. And it gave Purps a way to feel superior to the hidebound, workaday world, making sure they could be accepted only by fellow Purps.

It was the sort of anger at everything that might appeal to the irrational heir to a mad kingdom. Like Jasper.

As with all converts to the Naked Purple movement, Redeye Jasper was required to sign over all his worldly goods to the movement. Such goods and property included the Kingdom of Tycho. So the Naked Purple movement came into possession of its own country.

By the time the Purples moved in, Tycho hadn’t, strictly speaking, been a prison for decades, but the Lunar Republic’s government still held to the same Tycho policy it had retained for generations: Anyone could go into Tycho Penal, but no one could come out. Even after a hundred years, there were mighty few loopholes in that rule. In effect, it was still a prison. The Republic was not in the least bit willing to change that policy for the sake of a bunch of habitat crazies.

The Naked Purples declared themselves liberators anyway. They moved in, took over, and officially renamed the place Tycho Purple Penal Station. They made much of all the contradictions and tensions bubbling in that name—and in the city itself.

The Naked Purples and a mob of former convicts living cheek by jowl inside a former maximum security prison was a sure formula for confrontation. The murder rate spiked high, even for Tycho, that first year. But, surprisingly, mostly convicts were dying. The Purples swiftly demonstrated their talent for survival and control, and the situation settled down a bit.

Marcia’s parents met at Tycho Purple Penal, her father a second-generation convict, her mother one of the more combative leaders of the Purple’s nonviolent-aggression arm. Unless Marcia really concentrated, all she could remember of her childhood was one long screaming argument between the two of them, endless suspicion, and wild accusations. That sort of thing was considered a Naked Purple art form. And yet, like any child, she accepted her own situation as normal.

Adolescence was at least more varied, hewing to the Naked Purple philosophy of education by extreme. Cloying doses of love and then random anger; overwhelming attention and then abandonment. Forced to live with the Naked Purple shock-value philosophy, the teenaged Marcia got a dose of it all.

One summer (or what would have been summer if the environmental engineers hadn’t decided seasons were bourgeois and locked the thermal controls at twenty degrees centigrade) she spent under the gray stone dome of the abandoned main penal camp, sewing seeds she knew were dead into soil she knew was sterile.

She could no longer remember the precise nuance of the particular nihilist-dialectic theory the experience was supposed to teach her, other than the futility of all effort, a central precept of the Naked Purple worldview. Everything had something to do with studying futility. The Purples worked very hard to convince themselves that work was useless. The details of why didn’t matter anyway. The whole point was that work was meaningless.

All she remembered of that summer was grayness. Grayness, and her flat, defeated acceptance of the situation. The joyless unpainted gray dome of the stone sky. The cold, gray, shadowless light from the glowblimps, hovering overhead like lifeless jellyfish, floating dead in the currents of the air. The gray pallor of the unfertilized Lunar soil that billowed in endless cloaking clouds at the slightest breath of air. The gray, choking, dust-sucking thirst that followed the students as they worked down the razor-straight rows, carefully planting the lifeless seeds.

And the gray, throbbing ache between her shoulders that never seemed to leave, the one product of her endless days of stoop labor.

She grew up surrounded by all the alleged benefits of Purple living, starting with the search after truth through lies, of moderation through extremes and the creative tension of the permanent nonviolent riot. The endless confrontations with the unreconstructed convicts seemed nothing more than another aspect of the Purple ideal of sullen absurdity. Near-starvation would follow a season of compulsory hedonistic debauchery. Any artist who was celebrated today could count on being vilified tomorrow. The police were required to break the law on occasion, and the standard punishment for most crimes was doing a stretch in the police department. Fix a broken machine without authorization, steal a neighbor’s property without leaving your own behind, dress conventionally, and you did time on the force.

Marcia grew into puberty always fearing that Orgy Day was going to be declared again, praying that Celibacy Month would be randomly extended.

And yet, in spite of all she had been through, for reasons that she could certainly not explain, Marcia MacDougal still not only wanted, but expected the world to make sense.

No doubt that was a large part of why she had married Gerald, why she had loved him in the first place. Even though she could not share his religious beliefs, the fact that he had beliefs was a comfort.

But Gerald was missing, along with the rest of Earth. Marcia felt something go cold in her chest at that fact, the reality she could not escape. With an effort of will, she once again tried to force her mind away from that chain of thought. She tried to focus on the problem at hand.

They had missed something, she told herself again. All of the people struggling to find an answer. She had missed something. Her subconscious was stubbornly convinced that there was some key factor that they had all overlooked, something that might actually make some sense of it all. That was the message her inner self was sending.

Wait a second. Message. That was it. The twenty-one-centimeter-band source. McGillicutty had completely missed that it was artificial; not just a source but a signal, a message. She uncurled from her fetal ball and sat up.

Even if McGillicutty had missed the fact that it was a deliberate signal, few other people would.

But had anyone even thought to try to decode the message? Would they be able to do so? Would they know how? She thought back to her days as a grad student at the Lunar Institute of Technology, back to the days when she had met Gerald. They had met in a xeno-bio course— one that started out teaching Message Theory, proposed techniques for communicating with aliens for the express purpose of getting such nonsense out of the way. That way the class could get down to analyzing slime molds without further interruption.

Message Theory. The idea that there were certain irreducible concepts common to any technological civilization. A form of communication based on reference to those ideas ought to be readable to any other civilization. She got up, went to her desk console, and started calling up reference files. Maybe it was time to give those old nonsense theories a test.

Marcia knew she was facing an absurdly complex task. If indeed the radio source was a signal, it was presumably a message in an utterly foreign language.

Unless, of course, it wasn’t aliens who had done this at all, but instead some bunch of perfectly standard-issue humans, crazies who had gotten hold of some very strange technology. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the Octal Millennialists had double-checked the portents, counted up by eight again and discovered they had made a mistake in their base-eight calculations of the date for Judgment Day. Suppose it had come due and they had decided to help it along. Or suppose some other tech-gang had dreamed up a way to hold the Earth hostage. That seemed impossible—but so did everything else about this disaster. If it was a human plot, then presumably that twenty-one-centimeter signal was heavily encrypted. If it was a nonhuman code, then presumably it could only be tougher.

Simply to sit down at a computer console and plunge into the task without preparation was absurd. It was as if she had decided to crack the Rosetta stone in one afternoon.

But she had a few distinct advantages over Champollion and the other Rosetta detectives: computers. In VISOR’s main computer system, she had highly sophisticated pattern-recognition programs at her command. The twenty-one-centimeter signal seemed to be binary in nature, a series of zeroes and ones, ideal for computer manipulation. The number-crunching side of the problem would be straightforward enough.

But even with all that said, the task should have taken months, perhaps years to crack. If Marcia had been in a truly rational state of mind, rather than merely struggling to maintain a veneer of rationality over her panic and despair, she might have realized that, and never even made the attempt.

It was perfectly ridiculous even to try.

And downright absurd that she cracked the first stage of the message in fifteen minutes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Summoning the Demons

Coyote Westlake woke up with a pounding headache, slumped in a corner of her habitat shed. What the hell had she been drinking last night? Lying there without moving a muscle, she carefully reviewed the night before. Wait a second, she thought. I didn’t have anything to drink. I haven’t had a drink in weeks. There was a very good reason for that: there wasn’t a drop of booze left in the hab shed or the ship.

Clearly something was wrong. She had to think this out. But the reflexes of an experienced drinker had taught her to keep her eyes shut when she found herself in this sort of position, being careful not to move a muscle while she took stock of her situation. Getting up and moving was a quick invitation to particularly messy forms of vertigo—especially in zero gee. She lay still, eyes shut, and tried to remember.

If she hadn’t been drinking the night before, then this was not a hangover. She had gone to bed early and stone cold sober, in a good mood even. Then what the hell had happened? She needed more data.

She cautiously opened one eye, and then the other, and found herself staring at what seemed to be the forward bulkhead of the hab shed, at the far end of the cabin from her bunk. She was pasted, facedown, to the wall of the shed. She realized her nose was somehow both numb and sore at the same time, and the pain in her head was across her forehead. She must have slammed herself facefirst into the wall somehow. That, as least, would explain the headache—but how the hell had she thrown herself across the cabin? Even in zero gee, it was a hell of a stunt. Had she leapt out of bed during a nightmare?

Moving cautiously to avoid the stomach-whirling nausea she still half-expected, she reached out with both her hands and pushed herself away from the bulkhead. She drifted back away from the wall—and then was astonished to find herself drifting back down toward it. No, not drifting—falling.

She scrambled in midair and managed to swing herself around fast enough to land, rather awkwardly, on her rump rather than her face again. Falling? In zero gee? Not zero anymore. She would estimate it as about a twentieth gee or so.

She sat there, staring at the cabin above her—above her—in utter bewilderment. Her bunk was bolted to the aft wall of the cabin—which had now become the ceiling. The sheet was caught by one of the restraint clips, or otherwise it would have fallen too. Now it hung absurdly down. She glanced around the forward bulkhead she was sitting on and found it littered with bits and pieces of equipment that had slammed down with her. She reached up and felt a bump on the top of her head. Something must have clipped her as it fell.

She stood up, as carefully as she could, and tried to think. When she had gone to sleep, her hab shed had been bolted to the side of asteroid AC125DN1RA45, a tiny hunk of rock less than half a kilometer across, far too small to generate any gravity field worth mentioning. Maybe a ten-thousandth of a gee, tops. Now, suddenly, she was in a gee field hundreds of times stronger than that. What the hell was going on? Had someone moved her hab shelter for some reason?

Her shelter was a cylinder about fifteen meters long. Or, now, fifteen meters tall, with Coyote standing on the bottom looking up. At its midsection was an airlock system. There were two viewports at the midsection as well, one set into the airlock and the other set into the bulkhead opposite. One port afforded a view of the asteroid’s surface, the other a view spaceward. What she couldn’t see through the ports she ought to be able to see using the remote-control exterior camera. The camera’s controls were set into the wall by the airlock.

It took her two or three tries, and two or three crashes, before she managed to jump precisely enough to grab a handhold by the airlock and clip herself into place with the restraint belts intended for holding small pieces of cargo. She looked through the rockside port first and breathed a sigh of relief. RA45’s dark bulk was still there. She recognized not only the rumpled landscape, but her own mining gear. And there was the drill pit down into the rock’s interior.

Then she looked out the spaceward viewport and discovered something was missing after all. Not on the rock. In the sky.

In a horrifying flash she realized what she wasn’t seeing. Her ship. The Vegas Girl was gone.

No, wait a second. There it was, a tiny blinking dot of light far to sternward, the Girl’s tracking strobe.

How the hell could this have happened? She had left the Vegas Girl in a perfectly matched orbit relative to RA45. There was no way she could have drifted that far while Coyote was asleep.

Unless she had been sleeping for one hell of a long time. She checked her watch and compared it to the time display on the hab shed’s chronometer. She even checked the date, just to be sure she hadn’t slept around the clock. But no, she had been out only a few hours. How far had her ship drifted?

Coyote grabbed the radar range-and-rate gun out of its rack and aimed it through the spaceward viewport, lining up the sights on the Girl. It was a low-power portable unit, not really meant to work at long range. Normally she used it to establish distance from and velocity toward an asteroid, but it could track her ship just as handily. She got the blinking strobe in the sights and pulled the trigger.

The gun pinged cheerfully twice to indicate it had gotten a good range and rate on its target. Coyote checked the gun’s tracking data display.

And her heart nearly stopped. The Vegas Girl was over one hundred kilometers astern, and the ship was moving away at over three hundred meters a second.

But wait a moment. The tracker just showed relative velocity, not which object was doing the moving. She peered out the port again, and spotted the triple-blink beacon she had left on RA46, the last rock she had worked. She swore silently. RA46 was in the wrong part of the sky. She fired a ranging pulse at it and got back virtually the same velocity value. The Girl was stationary relative to RA46. So it wasn’t the ship moving. It was this rock. It was moving at nearly twelve hundred kilometers an hour relative to the ship! But how the hell—

Good Golly God. She wasn’t in a gravity field—that was a one-twentieth-gee acceleration she was feeling. But for how long? Coyote knew that velocity could accumulate at a hellacious rate under even modest acceleration.

Even so, she was startled by the results when she ran the problem. Assuming one-twentieth gee, that meant the rock had been accelerating for only ten or eleven minutes. Somehow, the numbers were the most frightening thing.

But how the devil could a dumb rock accelerate that fast? Or even at all? Coyote sure as hell would have noticed if someone had landed on RA45 and rigged it for acceleration. The fusion engines required would have been twice the size of her hab shelter. Even if it had happened under her local horizon, it would have been a massive engineering job and she would have felt the vibration of the work rattling RA45. But even the high-end miners who routinely maneuvered their rocks into more convenient orbits never got their boost up over one or two percent of a gee. Asteroids were just too massive to make any better headway than that. Even then, the vibration was nearly enough to shake the rock apart.

Except this baby was cooking along at about three times that velocity without so much as a quiver. She hung in the restraint straps, staring at the range gun’s tiny control panel, utterly baffled.

And starting to get very scared. This was a budget hab shelter. It had no radio powerful enough to call for help. No escape pod, either. And without a ship, she had no way off this rock.

Where in gambler’s hell was this rock going?

And who was taking it there?

Larry sat alone in Control Room Four, staring at nothing.

The message from the Moon was perfectly straightforward: Earth had returned, in the form of a black hole.

A black hole. The shocks were coming too fast, too hard.

Larry felt like a fool, a Pollyanna who could not face bad news. How could the Earth vanish without leaving debris, he had demanded. Well, he had his answer now. Simple. All you do is crush the planet down into a black hole. And in some incredible way, his damnable gravity wave had done just that.

Larry clenched his hands hard into the armrests of his chair. He should have seen this answer, should have predicted it. Instead, he and Webling had shouted it down when Sondra suggested a black hole. Because they could not face the truth.

Earth was not now merely missing, but destroyed. So much for his clutching at straws, saying that the planet had merely been moved in some mysterious way.

But his arguments had seemed so logical, his chain of reasoning so strong. Had he truly been rationalizing that hard?

It didn’t matter now. However good or bad his theories had been, they didn’t match the facts—they were wrong. The gravity beam had induced Earth to collapse into a black hole, period. The home planet was destroyed. Details not yet resolved, main fact undeniable.

No one at the station seemed able to respond to the news. Larry felt it himself—a numbness, a shock that seemed to freeze him to his seat. Well, how could they react? What possible way was there for any of them to respond? No one knew what to say or do.

Larry winced, and faced a deeper truth. His situation was a bit different from Sondra’s or Dr. Webling’s. It had been his finger on the button. It was he who had designed the experiment and set it in motion. Alone, among all humanity, he bore that responsibility. Intentional, accidental, that didn’t matter. It was his action that doomed Earth, smashed it into a bottomless gravitational pit, crushed it down into a single point in space, surrounded by an event horizon no larger than a pebble on the beach.

Damn it, how ! Larry felt some part of himself rebel at the thought. How could his gravity beam have done that? It was flat-out impossible. He shut his eyes and visualized the gravity-beam system, traced it through the Ring of Charon’s circuitry, examined every step of the procedure. No, it was impossible. There was no room in its observed behavior, no mysterious unaccounted-for data, that would allow for the beam to touch off a gravity collapse into a black hole.

And how had the other planets escaped the same fate when the beam had touched them? How could his beam crush Earth and yet leave Venus unharmed?

And where had Earth’s gravity field gone for those eight hours between the vanishment and Lucifer’s crash? Naturally occurring gravity was a function of mass, pure and simple. It did not matter what form the mass was in. Earth, or a black hole of Earth’s mass—or Earth’s mass in Swiss cheese—would all produce the same gravity field. It wouldn’t switch on and off as the matter switched from one state to another, or vanish for eight hours.

And why were there still gravity waves and that damned twenty-one-centimeter radio source coming from the Moon?

And how the hell had Earth gained five percent in additional mass during those missing eight hours? Larry was willing to bet that an Earth-mass black hole couldn’t absorb matter that fast. The mass wouldn’t just dive straight in. It would form into an accretion disk, and then spiral inward from the disk. Lucifer’s rubble had already been forming into a disk before the end came. Larry checked the data. Sure enough, as long as Lucifer’s rubble lasted, the black hole had absorbed Lucifer’s mass at a fairly steady rate—and at a rate a hundred times slower than it would need to gobble up five percent in bonus mass in eight hours.

And what the hell were those blue flashes, and the large masses ejecting from them? The masses seemed to be coming from inside the black hole, but that was impossible. Nothing could escape from a black hole, light included, except the hole’s own decay products. So what were the flashes?

Larry stood up and left the room.

What the hell could the blue flashes be, if not a worm-hole aperture opening and shutting?

The Ring was not merely an accelerator. In theory, it could be configured as a gravity-imaging system, a gravity telescope of enormous sensitivity. Such a scope could do more than collect gravity waves. It could form images out of them. No one had ever tried it. Larry decided it was time to test the theory.

He needed an imaging sequence of the Moon and vicinity. The facilities on Venus, Ganymede and Titan were all picking up strong gravity waves from the Moon, but their gear was not powerful or sensitive enough to resolve that data into a clear picture. The Lunar gravity sensors were, of course, completely swamped by the mystery gee waves. In short, none of the other gravity-sensor-equipped stations were able to form a useful image.

Nor did they have the benefit of Larry writing their imaging programs. Larry wasn’t vain—not especially so—but he knew what he was good at.

Something had to be producing those massive gravity waves emanating from the Moon. Larry needed to see whatever was forming those waves—and he needed to see the gravity fields around that damnable black hole. Better still, he needed some sort of readings of all the hole’s properties. Armed with those, he ought to be able to demonstrate that the hole could not possibly be Earth.

They already knew the black hole’s mass was wrong. That was enough to convince Larry, but not the outside world. If Larry could demonstrate that the hole’s other properties—direction of spin, electric charge, angular momentum, axis of rotation, or magnetic fields—did not match what a black hole made out of Earth would have, then that would be convincing proof that Earth had not been destroyed.

Or at least that the black hole the Moon now orbited was not the corpse of Earth.

He set to work reconfiguring the Ring. It took him two or three hours of simulation time even to confirm the idea was possible. It was hard work, complex calculation involving dozens of variables. Larry was shocked to find that he was having fun working out the problem.

But he had always loved cracking a problem. Maybe the human race would have been better off if he had stuck to jigsaw puzzles.

The sims confirmed that the job was doable—but then it occurred to Larry he had better get some authorization on this one. True, the director had offered complete access, but even so… He punched up the director’s office on the intercom.

Raphael’s voice boomed out of the speaker. “Raphael here.”

“Sir, Larry Chao down in Control Room Four. I’d like to set up the Ring as a gravity detector and see what we can find out. It seems as if everyone else has canceled out their experiments anyway—”

“Do what you want, Chao. Do whatever in God’s name you want. I can’t see that it will make the slightest bit of difference.”

The line went dead as Raphael cut the connection. Larry shivered to hear the defeat in the old man’s voice. Raphael had given up, accepted the fact that Earth was destroyed, and surrendered himself to sorrow. Perhaps he was only being realistic. What possible point could there be to activity, to effort on this day?

But no. Larry wasn’t made that way. Even if it was crazy to do so, he had to keep on trying. Better to be insane and fighting than sane and defeated.

He began laying in his configuration.

The Autocrat of Ceres sat in his very plain chair in the very plain compartment, and regarded the two very nervous people before him with regret. He was going to have to kill them.

“I’m very much afraid,” he said, “that I don’t have much choice in the matter. You were each expected to show cause why I should not put you to death. I have seen no such cause shown. Instead I have seen two people who have allowed a petty squabble over mining rights to degenerate into another useless rock war. It is your egos, and not the mining rights, that prevent justice in this case. And the Autocrat’s Law requires me to remove all obstacles to justice. Case closed.” The Autocrat nodded toward his marshals, and they stepped forward.

The plaintiff screamed, the defendant fainted. The marshals were good at what they did. Within seconds, both of the claimants were restrained, sedated, and being taken away, toward the Autocrat’s very plain, very famous, very deadly airlock. The one where pressure suits were not allowed. The place to which human obstacles to justice were quite literally removed.

Justice, as with many other things in the Belt, was in short supply, and when available, was not of the best quality—too rough, too harsh and too rushed. To the Inner System dandies who visited now and again, the Autocrat’s Law seemed barbaric, violent and vengeful. But to the Belters, who had no other source of justice, the Autocrat’s Law represented civilization itself. In all the wide, wild, ungovernable vastness of the Asteroid Belt, they knew there was one place, one name, one law that all could trust. Only the Autocrat’s Law could protect them against themselves. Harsh and final it might be, but so too was it impartial.

For the Belters knew the Belt was huge—ungovernably huge. There could be no law when law enforcement was impossible, and no conventional enforcement was possible when the population density was something less than one crotchety misanthropic old coot per million cubic kilometers. It was easy for other things besides law to get lost in the midst of all that vast expanse.

Things like sanity, order, trust, proportion. Megalomania was an easy disease to catch when a man or a woman could have a world—albeit a very small one—for the effort of landing on it. And if your own world, why not your own law, your own empire? Why not declare the divine right of kings and expand outward, conquering your neighbors as you go?

The Belt had seen a thousand rock wars between independent states, many of which consisted of two rock-happy miners taking potshots at each other. If lunatics wanted to exterminate each other, that was their own affair, but there was a more serious and basic problem. Other people could get drawn in, or get caught in the cross fire. In all likelihood, the Autocrat had saved dozens of lives this day by blotting out the leaders in this pointless fight.

But, obvious as the case had been, the Autocrat had taken pause before rendering his decision. The present Autocrat of Ceres was a most careful person. But so was the previous holder of the post, and the one before that. No other sort of person would ever be appointed.

Not only Ceres, but the entire Belt Community as well depended on the Autocrat’s authority to supply order, discipline, regimentation, at least to Ceres and its surrounding satellites and stations. Anarchy surrounded Ceres on all sides, but even the Belt’s wildest anarchists knew they needed Ceres to be stable, orderly, predictable, to be a place where a trader could buy and sell in safety.

The rules might change elsewhere with every passing day, but at Ceres the Law was always the same. Claims filed in the office of the Autocrat were honored everywhere—for they were backed not only by the Autocrat’s Law and Justice, but his Vengeance.

Nothing but fair dealing was ever done in a Ceres warehouse. None but fair prices were ever paid. No one brought suit frivolously. For the Autocrat himself stood in judgment of all cases.

By the Law, the Autocrat was required, in every case from unlicensed gambling straight up to claim jumping and murder, to find cause why the death penalty should not be exacted against one—or both parties—to the case. If the Autocrat could not—or would not—find such cause, plaintiff and claimant, accuser and defendant died.

The Autocrat’s Law had a long reach. Many defendants were tried in absentia, having chosen to flee rather than face a day in court. But as the saying went, If the Autocrat finds you guilty, he will find you in the flesh. His bounty hunters—and his rewards—found the guilty everywhere. Very few places refused to honor his warrant—and none were places a sane man would flee towards.

Indeed, fear of the Autocrat’s Justice prevented all but the most worthy claimants from coming forth to ask it, and prevented all but the most venal from risking its power. Calls for justice were few and far between when the sword was as sharp as it was double-edged.

Today, however, the Autocrat found himself besieged. Radio calls were coming in from all over the Belt reporting claim frauds. Claims beacons were being shifted, were even vanishing. Legally beaconed asteroids, even a few with active mines, were being moved without the claimant’s authority. Having disposed of the last court case for the day, the Autocrat stood up from his courtroom and hurried toward his private operations room.

One or two of his predecessors, the more self-important ones, would have been coldly furious at this assault on claims filed under the Autocrat’s authority. Perhaps they would already be calling the marshals, preparing to broadcast attack orders, offering massive bounties.

The Autocrat was tempted to do just that himself, but he hesitated. It was the duty of the Autocrat to think before acting. Who would dare wage such a wholesale assault on claims in the Belt? Who had the sheer raw physical power to move whole fleets of asteroids? Who had that many of the massive fusion engines required for the job? How had they made the complex preparations for the job without anyone noticing?

He reached his private ops room and felt himself relax a bit. The Autocrat was a solitary man. At times of crises he preferred to work by himself, alone with his own thoughts and reflections. He sat down at his desk.

An alert notice was blinking in the center of his desktop controls. Something big had happened. The Autocrat pressed the playback control. A screen came to life and he read with mounting astonishment the words that scrolled past. The incoming reports were obviously garbled, confused, bizarre, contradictory. Most of it he flatly did not believe. But something remarkable had clearly taken place in the Earth-Moon system.

In the meantime, the Autocrat had his own worries. He powered up his holographic display system and set the controls to provide a schematic of the entire Belt, highlighting the various claim-jumping complaints. He leaned back in his chair and examined the glowing midair image carefully.

There were dozens of complaints, perhaps two or three hundred. More complaint lights were appearing in the tank even as he watched. The pattern reminded him of something, some other representation of the Belt. Almost on a whim, he called a display of the Belt’s population density. The pattern matched the claim-jump display almost precisely. The more people in a given volume of space, the more reports of claim jumping and rock shifting. How could there be so many? Where would anyone be taking all of these rocks? No way to know that yet, not enough time had passed to establish any sort of vectors. But the Autocrat had a practiced eye for such things, and could tell the rocks weren’t all headed toward the same place.

Wait a moment. The claim jumping matched the population-density display. Why would someone go to the trouble of moving only claimed rocks, when there were millions more left unclaimed? He was not seeing a display of all the rocks that were moving, but only of the rocks people saw and cared about.

What about the other rocks?

He activated the voice command system. “Give me a radar track of the entire Ceres Sector,” he said. “Track and display all claimed and unclaimed asteroids that are maneuvering without authorization. Add the results to the display in front of me now.”

He leaned over the tank and watched the area around the dot of light representing Ceres. A whole forest of lights began to blaze around it. “Correlate this data with reports of unauthorized moves, assume similar numbers of maneuvering asteroids throughout the Belt, adjusting for population density in reporting moves, distribution of asteroids throughout the Belt and other standard interpretive factors, and display results.”

Suddenly the whole Belt was gleaming with light.

“My God,” the Autocrat said. “How many? What is your estimate?”

The answer appeared in bold numbers, floating in the center of the tank:

The Autocrat slumped back in his chair. Ten thousand. Over ten thousand asteroids were on the move.

No one, no one could do that.

And no one who could do it would have any reason to fear the Autocrat’s Justice.

How long without sleep? Larry asked himself, trying to think back far enough to get an answer. It must be going on twenty hours by now, he realized. Or was it thirty? It was hard enough to keep track of time, in this place of artificial day and night, even when you had a normal routine to rely on.

He rubbed his weary eyes. It had taken forever to lay in the detector-mode settings by hand. At least, if it worked, he could bring them up automatically next time. But it would still take the Ring a while to set itself into the new mode.

He watched the monitors track the progress of the Ring toward scope mode, and let his mind step back a little, away from the narrow technical problem to the bigger picture.

Time to face the facts square on. Hundreds of years of searching, hundreds of years of silence had convinced everyone that there was no source of life except Earth. It was a given, an assumed fact. But no matter how firm the belief against extraterrestrial intelligence was, there was only one possible explanation for what had happened to Earth. An alien invasion.

The words seemed crazy even as he thought them. How mad would they seem when he worked up the nerve to say them?

And if he was right, then how the hell had his damn-fool experiment called the invaders up?

The monitor screen signaled that the reconfiguration was complete, and Larry powered up the display tank, his thoughts much more on aliens than on what he was doing.

It was as if Galileo’s mind had been on something else when he first looked through a telescope at the Moon. It never dawned on Larry that he had quite casually invented a whole new way of looking at the Universe. All he had been after was a practical way to examine the situation around Earth.

A strange place materialized in the three-dee tank. A ghostly dance of shadows gleamed up at him, black tendrils and ribbons floating in a sky field of cloud white, as if streamers of black ink were swirling through a milky sky, radiating out from a central blotch of darkness.

What the hell was he looking at? Larry glanced at the pointing instruments to check that the device was aimed and focused on the vicinity of the Moon. It was—but what was it seeing?

He was like the first person to look at an X ray, not understanding the strange, hidden, ghostly shapes and patterns revealed when the skin was transparent. Larry reminded himself that he was seeing not a solid, physical substance, but the invisible patterns of gravity waves as represented by a computer’s graphics system.

He reached for a control and adjusted the intensity of the image. The streamers faded away, and the central blotch of darkness resolved itself into two shapes: a single, pulsing point of darkness, and a spinning-wheel rim, jet black, tiny and perfect. Both shapes hovered in the tank. The point was easy to identify—it was the black hole, throbbing with gravitic potential. Even as he watched, a flash of black swept out from the hole, and a tiny dot of black moved away from it, Sunward. Jesus Christ. The only thing that would show in the tank was a gravity-wave generator. A gravity field by itself, un-manipulated, wouldn’t show at all. Which meant that that tiny dot was a gravity machine of some sort.

But what about the spinning wheel that hung in space, next to the black hole? What the hell was that?

Larry felt the hair on his neck rise. The Moon, good God, the Moon. Or no, something inside the Moon, hidden from view. Suddenly the strange shape was familiar. He checked the scale of the image, and the precise coordinates.

Shock washed over him. The Ring of Charon had a twin, a great wheel buried far below the Lunar surface, underneath the craters and the mountains of the Moon, wrapped around the Moon’s core.

He adjusted the tank controls to enlarge the ghostly shadow as far out as he possibly could, to the limits of resolution. He stared at the image for a long time. Jet black, a bit grainy, the image distorting for a moment or two as the Ring of Charon adjusted itself, correcting for its own orbital motion. The thing inside the Moon spun huge and dark in the milk white depths of the three-dee tank.

The huge thing lurking inside the Moon was not a smooth or perfect wheel, but ridged and edged, an open structure that resembled uncovered box girders. It reminded Larry of a Ferris wheel with the central supports removed, or the skeleton of an old spinning-wheel-style space station. Wheel was the right name for the thing. If nothing else, it distinguished the Lunar object from the Ring of Charon. The Lunar Wheel, then. It helped, somehow, to put a name to it.

But this Wheel was not solid, not real, not any image of a material structure. Larry was seeing the gravitic energies themselves, whirling impossibly through the Moon’s interior.

But there had to be a physical, nonrotating wheel-shaped structure hidden inside the Moon, a structure that somehow produced these energies.

Larry pulled back the image and shook his head. Now the black hole hung in space next to the Wheel. There was a moment of powerful activity Larry could not follow, and another tiny dot leapt away from the hole. Damn it, what were those things? No one had really focused on them yet.

All by themselves, they represented an incredible mystery: mountain-sized objects leaping out from the interior of a black hole. How? Why? From where? How many of them had jumped out of the black hole already? With the Earth itself vanished, even the greatest of puzzles could get lost in the shuffle.

What was that mass of streaming tendrils blooming out from the Moon? He thought for a moment, then pulled the focus back further. He adjusted the detection gain upwards a bit, and the inky tendrils radiating out from the Earth-Moon system materialized again.

He kept the detection level just high enough for the streaming beams of gravity power to be visible. With the power down low enough, he could see more clearly. The power beams were radiating out from the Moon’s centerpoint, the natural focus of the Lunar Wheel. One of the tendrils reached out and attached itself to the black dot that had just come through the Earthpoint black hole. Larry pulled back the view a bit, and saw other tendrils of gravity power reaching out to touch others of the black dots that were still close to the Moon. As he watched, the image of the Earthpoint black-hole gravity source suddenly swelled larger, another black dot appeared through the black hole—and a massive, jet black pulse of gravity power slammed from the hole into the Lunar Wheel.

The gravity power gets sent through the hole once every 128 seconds, Larry realized. The Wheel absorbs it, stores it, and beams it out to the things moving out from the black hole.

So those things in turn became point-source gravity-wave sources. Which according to theory, ought to be impossible, but never mind that now. Call them gee points. What about them? How many of them were there? He reset the gravity scope to its widest possible angle, and told it to present only point-source gravity generators.

He sat and thought for a moment as the program ran. How many could there be? One every two minutes or so, for the last fourteen hours. That was about right. Something over four hundred gee points by now. Where the hell were they all going?

The tank cleared itself and reset. Larry gasped. He saw a pattern similar to what the Autocrat had seen—but the ten thousand asteroids moving in the Belt were only the beginning.

The Ring of Charon was looking inward, toward the Inner System and the Sun. But it also looked out beyond the distant Sun, out past the far side of Pluto’s own orbit and beyond. At the far side of the Solar System, at the ragged edge of resolution, it could see a section of the Oort Cloud’s inner surface. The Oort Cloud, the hollow sphere of unborn comets that surrounds the Solar System and extends halfway to the nearest star.

The Oort Cloud was alive with purposeful black dots, all of them diving in uncountable numbers straight toward the Inner System.

Dr. Simon Raphael sat alone in his office.

Privacy.

Quiet.

He needed those things now. Leaning over his journal book, he set down his words in a slow and careful script. Perhaps his hand was slow, but his mind was moving fast. Too fast. He had found long ago that the journal did him the most good when he was in this state—tired, and yet upset, concerned about something. He had learned to relax his rigid self-control at these times, and let the pen find the words for him.

“Dearest Jessie,” he wrote.

“All has been lost. The Earth has vanished, and I am to blame.” The words came out of his soul and onto the page. He stopped, set down his pen, and stared at the words in astonishment. “I am to blame”? Why in the world had he written that? How could he be blamed?

He stared at the small three-dee image of Jessie, decades old, that sat on his desk. As if he could find the answers there.

But he already knew. The self-accusation had come from the warmest part of his heart, the part that had come nearest to dying with Jessie’s death. The part he had shielded with anger and bitterness.

He was to blame for squashing Larry’s first experiments, that was why. Simon knew, intellectually at least, that he was not responsible for the Earth’s loss, any more than Larry Chao was responsible. The burden Simon Raphael carried was that he had encouraged Larry’s sense of guilt, made it worse with his bullying and anger.

Larry was no more to blame for Earth’s loss than the first caveman to use fire was responsible for the first village of grass huts destroyed by fire. Discovering a new power meant uncorking a genie’s bottle. Larry happened to be the one to pull the cork out of gravity’s bottle. But it would have been pulled sooner or later. Once the Ring of Charon was built, that much was certain.

Raphael had kicked the boy when he was down. If he had been a proper leader, a proper guide for this scientific operation, he would have accepted Larry’s initial discovery, cultivated it and made it grow. The whole team should have focused on it. Even if it had come to nothing, what would there have been to lose?

If the whole staff been thrown into the effort, had examined the techniques for a million-gee accelerator, perhaps they would have learned about it in a more orderly fashion. Perhaps they would have learned enough to know the consequences and stop the experiment.

More than likely, of course, they would have fired a graser beam anyway, and Earth would have vanished just the same—but at least it would be shared guilt, and the entire staff would have understood Larry’s work well enough to expand on it after the disaster, rush into needed research to understand this incredible situation. A black hole replacing Earth! Fantastic.

For half a moment, the idea nearly excited him, instead of terrifying him. In the old days, that sense of wonder would have been stronger. He would have needed to know what had happened—instead of shutting himself in his office, wishing for catatonia. Simon Raphael bent over the page and continued his writing.

“This place has done things to me, Jessie. You never would have married the sour old man I have turned into. You were always truly my better half, no matter how trite a cliché that phrase might be. You encouraged the young, the weak, the small, and let them grow. You taught me to do so as well. I have forgotten that, and I must re-learn.”

A change came over him as he wrote, and not an unnoticed one. He could feel himself becoming less harsh, less angry, less bitter, feel a gentler part of his heart and soul reopen even as he wrote. He remembered the feelings he had lost, even as he set down the words describing how they were gone.

Larry angered him because Larry represented a successful version of a Simon Raphael that might have been, a lost Simon that he himself had never quite been able to become. He had never been quite bright enough, quite brave enough, quite innocent enough to make the dream-Simon work.

But did not all good fathers wish for their sons to be more than they themselves had been?

Father? Another strange thought. Yes, father. If all of his own children were suddenly lost to him, so too was Larry Chao’s family lost to Larry. The young man needed guidance, kindness. A father.

And humanity needed Larry Chao. The genius locked inside that head had gotten them into this mess. It might very well provide their only way out of it. Perhaps, Simon told himself, if you stop trying so hard to hate the boy, you might find a way to help him save us all. And what was there to hate about him anyway?

“I wish you could have met Larry,” he wrote to his dead wife. “I think you would have liked him.”

But then he set the pen down.

There was work to do. He reached for a button and punched up the intercom system.

Larry sat, lost and alone, watching the trajectories of the gee points, thinking, struggling to find any possible meanings, all the imaginable consequences he could. But it was too much for him. This was beyond him, beyond human capacity.

Raphael had to call him twice over the intercom before Larry even heard his name being called. He came to himself with a start. “Ah, yes, Dr. Raphael.”

“Mr. Chao. I wanted to apologize for being so short with you when you requested Ring time. We are all… all more than a bit under stress at the moment.”

“That’s all right sir.”

There was an awkward pause, as if Raphael had expected Larry to say more, and was now searching for words, if only to cover the silence. “I, ah, suppose it’s a bit premature to ask—but have you found anything? Anything that might help?”

Larry stared again at the three-dee tank. Thirty thousand asteroid-sized invaders on the move from the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud. He felt a knot in his stomach. “Oh, I’ve found quite a bit, sir, but I don’t know if it will exactly be helpful. Perhaps you should come down here and see it.”

“I’m on my way. Thank you.”

The intercom cut out. Larry stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. It suddenly struck him that he was making an official report to the director of the station. He had never done that before. What should he do? Documents. Records. That would at least be something. He instructed the computer to print a hard-copy summary of his findings. And an audiovisual record. That was standard operating procedure when making a major verbal presentation. He reached over and set the voice recorder on, powering up the mikes and cameras. A bright red panel lit on the console, flashing the words room recorder on. The computer had just finished printing the data summary when the door opened. Raphael stepped in.

The director looked subdued, drawn into himself, as if he had lost something he knew he would never find again. Which was of course precisely true, Larry reminded himself. Humanity was in mourning. But there was more to the expression on Raphael’s face. Larry wasn’t usually very good at understanding people, but he could see something here. With a degree of insight that Larry himself knew he rarely achieved, Larry sensed that a change had come over the old man. There was a hint of hope in him, as if he had also found something long missing.

Raphael went straight for the three-dee tank. He stood and stared at the image for a long time. He glanced at the scale display, and sucked in his breath as he realized how huge a volume of space was being represented. “What is it?” he asked.

“An image of all the gravity-wave sources in the Solar System, sir. As seen by the Ring in gravity-telescope mode.”

“The Ring doesn’t have a—” Raphael’s sharp tone of voice suddenly softened, as if he were forcing himself to be gentle. “Oh, I see. Now it does have such a mode. More of your work. Very good, Mr. Chao.”

Larry reddened with embarrassment. “Ah, thank you, sir. But I don’t understand these sources. All of them are very faint and small, as least relatively speaking. Not more than a few kilometers across. So small I can’t explain how they can generate the gravity waves in the first place. We need something the size of the Ring to do it.”

Larry hesitated, and then moved to the controls, adjusting them. “I’ve got a good image of the black hole as well. And there’s… there’s something inside the Moon.”

“Inside?”

“I printed out a data summary, sir,” Larry said, handing Raphael the stack of papers.

Raphael took the pages and skimmed them quickly, flipping through the pages. Larry switched the view to a close-up of the Lunar Wheel. He called up the output from the observation dome telescope and superimposed a transparent real-time image of the visible Moon over the Wheel hidden deep inside. The three-dee tank dimensionalized the Moon image, so that the Wheel hung perfectly inside it, spinning sedately through the solid mass of the Moon.

Raphael stared at the tank. “Something in the Moon,” he agreed. “So it would appear,” he said, in a faint, abstracted tone. “Something that bears a strong resemblance to our own little toy.”

“Yes sir. That spinning effect is the gravitic energy moving, and not the physical object itself. Obviously, the Wheel itself must be stationary.”

“Obviously,” Raphael said, in that same abstracted tone. He sat down at the control-panel operator’s seat and looked up at Larry. “You have made a whole series of rapid-fire, utterly remarkable discoveries here tonight. I ought to be astounded, or fearful—but I just feel… feel dead inside. I don’t have the capacity to react anymore. As God is my witness, I don’t know what that thing in the Moon is, or what we can do about it. You found it. What do you think?” There was an eerie steadiness in his voice, as if Raphael himself knew perfectly well that he was keeping up a false front of calm.

Larry stood there, looking first at the old man, and then at the strange, frightening images in the three-dee tank. He thought of the asteroids leaving their orbits, unaware and unconcerned of the terrified Belters watching them go. He stared again at the rippling wheel of energy spinning through the solid mass of the Moon.

“I think that all my work is meaningless. It won’t help us one tiny bit, not by itself,” he said at last, a strange intensity in his voice. He stood over the old man, feeling tired, angry, defiant. The feeling washed over him and then faded away. Damn it, how could Raphael suddenly be so reasonable, just when Larry was finally feeling strong enough to fight him?

He took the mound of meaningless paperwork from Raphael and riffled through it. Useless. Utterly useless. He threw the thick sheaf of papers up in the air and ignored them as they fluttered slowly toward the floor in Pluto’s flimsy gravity field. Raphael stared at him quite solemnly, unable or unwilling to respond. “All this data means nothing by itself,” Larry said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve learned more about the mechanics of gravity than any human has ever known—but it’s not enough! It’s all irrelevant.

“Gravity is barely the start of what’s going on. This is something way beyond a freak lab accident, a strange natural phenomenon. Let’s face it: somehow or another, we—no, I—have touched off an alien invasion of our Solar System.”

Larry stopped, backed off from the desk, and looked around the room. “There. I finally said it. God knows it sounds absurd and melodramatic, but you tell me: what else do we call it? We’ve been skirting around that reality long enough. Somehow, I don’t know how, I summoned up that… that thing buried in the Moon, like the sorcerer’s apprentice accidentally summoning up the demons. I awakened it. I don’t know what it is, or how it works, or who put it there. But I do know it must be related to the asteroids and Oort Cloud objects that have suddenly started moving. And I think they are moving toward us, toward all the surviving planets.

“There are at least thirty thousand asteroid-sized objects moving in on the surviving planets of this Solar System. Do you honestly think they mean us no harm? I don’t know. I think maybe they got the Earth out of the way before the rough stuff begins. Maybe it’s not Earth that’s in danger. Maybe it’s Earth that’s being taken out of harm’s way.”

He sat down and turned his palms upward, a gesture of resignation, an admission of failure. “Or maybe that’s just nuts.” He forced himself to be calm. “We’ve been picking up reports from all over the Solar System, from people working in every discipline, and we’ve sent our own messages. But talking at people from light-hours away isn’t going to help. I think that we all have to get together, in one place, and work together.”

“Do you mean bring the other teams out here?” Raphael asked. “Get them to the Ring of Charon to help plan our experiments?”

Larry shook his head. “No, sir, that wouldn’t help. It would leave us focused on gravity. This isn’t about gravity! Gravity is just what these… these things use, the way we use electricity. We’re up against something a thousand times more complex than running little gravity-wave experiments.

“Besides, the center of action isn’t out here. It’s in the Earth-Moon system. We need to get all the specialists from all the various outposts to the Moon, working on the spot, taking a good hard look at the Lunar Wheel. And the black hole.

“Somebody built that Wheel inside the Moon. Who? How? Why? Where are they from? We can’t know from here. We have to get inside the Wheel, if we can. Take a look at it, see if we can find out what makes it tick, what its purpose is.”

Larry stood up, and gazed, more steadily, at the eerie image of a Wheel inside the Moon.

“And find out how to destroy it,” he said in a whisper.

CHAPTER TWELVE After the Fall

The Sphere had to be smarter than the Callers or the Anchors or the Worldeaters, or any of the other forms. The Sphere had far greater responsibilities, and thus had far more need to be cautious, than the others.

Besides, the Sphere had so much data to keep track of. Handling the gravitic control of a multistar system, keeping tabs on the many Observers and Waiters sleeping in their far-flung hiding places, building and breeding and hoping for the next generation of seedships. A thousand, a million other details. It took tremendous processing power, remarkable flexibility, and adaptability, to handle it all.

But the Sphere was not immune to shock, or protected against surprise—and many of its reflexes were as unalterable as a Caller’s. When the Caller’s messages exploded into its mind, requiring preemptive Link, the Sphere had no choice but to comply.

In the normal course of events, it was the Sphere that would signal that it was ready for a new world and then wait for a reply. It was rare that a Caller initiated Link, and there were many fail-safes to prevent it, but it had happened at times, when there was a malfunction, or a spurious signal, or when the life-bearing world in question was in some immediate danger—say, from an asteroid impact.

Once initiated, failure to complete the Link would not only threaten the destruction of the precious life-bearing world in transit, but the energy destabilization of a failed Link could actually wreck the Sphere and its star system.

A planet—or any mass—blocked midway through transit would have to express its entire mass as energy— enough uncontrolled energy to rival a supernova, funneled right into the Sphere. And if the Sphere was wrecked, so was the Sphere’s star system, as planets and stars careered out of control. No matter if there was a place prepared for the world, or sufficient energy stores were available to handle the transfer. The Sphere had to complete the Link and take on the new world—or chance its own destruction.

Now was perhaps the worst of times. Danger pressed the Sphere on all sides, and the energy expenditure of incorporating a new world could scarcely be afforded. Worse, the radiation of that much nonrandomized energy could only draw the danger closer.

But it had no choice. None whatever. At least the Caller had sent a dataset along with the new world. With a supreme effort, the Sphere set the new world into a holding pattern, shuttling it from one temporary stability point to another while the Sphere prepared a place for it.

But the danger. The danger was not merely to the Sphere’s domain, but to the Caller’s own planetary system. But there too was hope. If the Caller could build quickly, then perhaps its domain could provide a new, uncharted haven, a direction of retreat. But only if it could build fast, and with a minimum of traceable linkage.

The Caller would need help from the Sphere. The more help the Sphere sent, the better the odds of the Caller’s success. The risk and the expenditure of resources were worth the possible reward.

The Sphere rushed to prepare a Portal Anchor, capable of Linking under a Caller’s control, and arranged for new-breed Worldeaters to be transported to the new domain.

The Sphere also sent a message. An urgent report, that could be boiled down to one simple concept.

Danger.

Dianne stared out across the sky. Things seemed to have settled down, at least for the moment, though this was no sky of Earth’s. A half-dozen stars, white, yellow-white and red, gleamed brighter than Sirius ever had. A monstrous sullen red disk, the size of the Moon, glowered behind one of the stars. But the star was too far off to show a disk. How large did that disk have to be to seem that big behind a star? Was it a red giant? Dianne remembered reading about such things—huge stars, their outer atmospheres thin, barely more than a red-hot vacuum, with diameters as wide as Saturn’s orbit. But a red giant should appear to grow dimmer at its edges. This star showed a firm, sharp edge.

A new star—Dianne felt certain it was not the Sun—hung fat and bright, bathing the Earth in light that was not quite the color of sunlight. The terminator was in about the right place.

Something caught at Dianne. A strange star where the Sun should be. A wave of irrational anger swept over her. The Sun that had nurtured Earth for four billion years was gone. In its place this substitute shone in Earth’s sky. No counterfeit deserved the true Sun’s name. She decided to call it the Sunstar to distinguish it both from Earth’s proper Sun and the other nearby stars.

Her eyes swept further across the sky, were drawn again to Earth. If the Sunstar’s light was not precisely correct, neither was the darkness over the Earth quite so dark as it should have been—not with a half-dozen stars and that massive disk shedding light upon it.

Opposite the Sunstar in the sky, about where the Moon should have been, a roughly toroidal structure of indeterminate size hung in the darkness at some unknown distance. It was a bit larger than a ring for a fat man’s finger held at arm’s length. It sat in space, gleaming in the light of the Sunstar. Acting on impulse, she fired a radar-ranging beam at it, and got a response 2.5 seconds later. The ranging computer wasn’t really meant to work at that sort of range, but it returned a calculated distance of about 300,000 kilometers. The toroid was roughly at the Moon’s distance from Earth. Sweet God in the sky. That made it roughly as large as the Moon.

Somehow, of all the terrible wonders she saw, it was the least of them, the toroid, that scared her most. New stars, a substitute sun, even that massive, far-off, glowing red thing in the sky she could accept. It was at least possible, albeit highly improbable, that they were natural, understandable objects. But the toroid was obviously—and impossibly—artificial. A made thing, built by someone, a wheel in the sky as big around as Earth’s Moon.

Enough of stargazing. If Dianne wanted to survive, she had work to do. She strapped herself more firmly into her command chair and started running checks.

Wait a second. NaPurHab. Where the hell was—there. There it was. Already nothing more than a tiny shape, moving down toward the Earth before sweeping back out onto the Lunar half of its figure-eight orbit. Much good that it did her. She certainly couldn’t reach NaPurHab, and with the Moon missing, the Purps’ orbit was going to get plenty screwed up. It might well not be a good place to be.

Never mind. Survival issues first. Get this ship dancing, then worry other people’s worries. She started running down her checklists.

But routine system checks could not stop her mind working. Someone had taken them here. Earth had been stolen. This was no accident. They had done it on purpose.

Whoever they were.

Owing to lack of interest, the end of the world has been canceled. Gerald did not know what irreverent part of his hindbrain the thought had come from, but it was true. He was still here, and so was the Universe. He came to himself, and told himself to stay where he was, lying on his back. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his arm and felt the lump on his head. His hand came away sticky with blood. What had happened? Perhaps a rock shaken loose by the quakes had beaned him, knocking him out.

But that did not matter. The world was still here. The ground was still beneath him, the night breezes still blew, the stars still shone down, peeking through a high, hazy band of thin clouds that had blown in from the Pacific. The sky had been clear before. Some time must have passed. He felt cold.

The stars. Gerald thought the stars looked a bit strange, even through the haze, although he had never been much for stargazing. Too many bright stars. And the Moon was either greatly changed or else replaced by something he could not see clearly through the late-night haze.

What had happened? The experiment. Marcia had mentioned something about an experiment, a beam being pointed at Earth just after ten a.m. her time.

Gerald checked his watch by the too-bright starlight and figured the time out in his head, allowing for the time zones and the speed-of-light delay.

That beam had been scheduled to hit at precisely the moment the world had gone mad.

A coincidence. A devil of a big coincidence.

He stood up and hurried back to the house. He went to the printer bin and dug out the document she had sent. He started to read inside—but being inside just after an earthquake didn’t sit right with him. He went to the kitchen, fished a flashlight out of the junk drawer, and took the papers outside to read.

Ring of Charon. Gravity waves. High power. Earth-side target lab: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But how could a gravity beam do this? Gerald asked.

But then he asked an even more fundamental question.

Do what? What, exactly, has happened? Gerald required of himself that he face things squarely, examine the evidence and reach conclusions based on what was so, not on what he wanted to be so. His nonreligious friends were confused that a man of faith would operate that way. But his faith was, paradoxically, a result of facing the evidence. God, in some form, was the only possible explanation for Creation.

But that was beside the point.

New stars in the sky. Several of them incredibly bright. Bright enough that he almost did not need his light to read by. That great sphere he had seen earlier must now be hidden away on the other side of Earth. He looked up again at the thing where the Moon should have been. The skies had cleared, and he could see plainly that it was a ring-shaped form.

Face the evidence and accept the obvious answer to his question. The Earth, the entire planet, had been moved to a new place.

By a gravity beam? It seemed absurd. Maybe the gravity experiment happening when it did was sheer chance. If not—

He looked again the paper. JPL. If the experiment happening when it did was not just a mad coincidence, then JPL would be the place to be. To find out what had gone wrong.

And the place to get involved in fixing it.

What can be moved, can be moved back. Gerald smiled with a rare thrill of gallows humor. If faith can move mountains, then maybe faith plus determination can move planets.

Gerald knew where he was going.

He stood up and looked across the valley below him. All was quiet, and still. A few houses here and there had lights on, and faint voices whispered across the distance. Only a few had been awakened, perhaps only those who had once lived where earthquakes were frequent.

It struck him that there would be those who had slept through the whole thing, who wouldn’t check the news the next day, who might go for days without noticing that the Universe had been transmogrified. He looked up at the stranger’s sky above and shivered.

He could find it in himself to envy such people.

Across the wide expanse of the Earth, by greater and lesser degrees, people realized what had happened—or at least that something had happened. Governments, news services, private comm systems, rumor mills—all were overloaded with speculation, wild rumors, sober and reasoned discussions, panicky tirades.

Two or three of the more unstable governments collapsed. Rabblerousers appeared in village squares, on obscure vid channels and on what was left of the major networks with the satellites gone. The Final Clanners, the Naked Purples and the other culture rads took to the streets.

Generals mobilized their armies, navies put to sea, air forces and what space forces there were surviving in orbit went on alert. All of it was useless. What use was an army against a power that moved worlds?

Within a few hours, riots, demonstrations, debates, and emergency meetings of world bodies were in full swing across the globe. None of it was of any use at all. Nothing could be, unless and until people could understand what had happened.

The post-Knowledge Crash world needed information, and started turning toward the people who could provide it.

But those people were more than a bit busy themselves, at the moment.

Time had passed. That much Wolf knew. How much time he could not tell without a deep act of concentration. Dreamlike, the hours were passing like seconds. Wolf Bernhardt looked up, bleary-eyed, from his console and checked the wall chronometer. Two p.m., local time. Something like twelve hours, then.

The tomblike quiet of JPL at nighttime had given way to a day of chaos, as every scientist with the remotest connection to JPL descended on the place, chasing after answers, charging about in panic. The printer was spitting out another telegram from the International Astronomical Union every few seconds, the JPL computers logging in the new data as it arrived. The IAU’s Telegram Office in Massachusetts was the clearinghouse for all new astronomical discoveries.

The sheer volume of data was daunting. Earth may have suffered a Knowledge Crash, may have lost many of its communications satellites, may have lost much of its power grid when half the power satellites vanished, but even so the information flowed in a torrent from endless sources. Less than twelve hours after the Big Jump, Earthbound observatories and the surviving orbital stations were reporting discoveries faster than JPL could log them in.

Wolf prided himself on being flexible. That flexibility was being put to the test this morning. It fell to him to pull the facts together, for the very basic reason that no one else seemed able to believe the facts. Not even the people who were finding them.

The observatories were forced to confront the impossible situation first and most directly. Every astronomical observation ever made back in the Solar System was worthless—the objects that had once been observed were all missing. Even more seriously, all the astronomical frames of reference were gone. The background stars, likewise gone from their old points in the sky, could no longer be used as positional aids.

In a new star system, with no frame of reference set, it was difficult to get one’s bearings. The word came down from the IAU: they were arbitrarily assigning Earth’s orbital plane as the zero-reference plane for the system. They decreed that Earth’s orbital motion was from west to east, approximating the conditions of Earth’s old orbit.

It was of some help in getting organized, but the astronomers had a more basic problem: quite understandably, they could not believe their eyes. But Wolf quickly discovered that their electronic assistants were able to handle the changed circumstances without skipping a beat. Most of the IAU grams came from robotic observation stations. Robots didn’t have to worry about believing in what they saw: discoveries, major ones, were literally being made on automatic.

With the loss of nearly all the spaceside instruments, modern astronomy had been decapitated. Suddenly astronomy was back in the mid twentieth century, dependent on crotchety instruments and crotchety observers perched on lonely mountaintops all over the world.

Some modern hardware was earning its keep. The most fruitful data was coming from the ground-based wide-scan telescopes. These instruments tracked the sky, watching for objects that moved against the fixed background of Earth’s sky. They were designed to spot uncharted and potentially profitable asteroids or incoming comets, and to watch for spacecraft on collision courses with each other. The skyscanners had spotted a number of comets and asteroids, over the years, doing their part in the history of astronomy, but suddenly they were spotting dozens of full-blown planets, both around Earth’s new sun and around the other stars.

It was too soon to establish much about the properties of the new planets, except that they existed. There weren’t even resolvable images for most of them yet. They were merely dots of light that moved against the stars. JPL’s computers quickly nailed positions and provisional orbits for many of them.

Wolf knew at first glance that those orbits were damnably odd. No two planets in any system seemed to be moving in the same orbital plane. Many of the planets were in highly inclined orbits. Some were traveling in opposite directions from each other. The differing orbital planes Wolf could deal with. Natural mechanisms could cause that. If two worlds came close to each other, the interaction of their gravity fields might deflect them into new orbital planes, each flinging the other off into a new orbital inclination. Something like that had happened to Pluto, billions of years ago. But the close distancing and the retrograde orbits shook Wolf. There was no conceivable way planets could form in those positions, moving in opposite directions.

A quick-look calculation at Earth’s own orbit showed the planet was moving about its new star once every 370 days. The calendars were going to be off by four days from now on.

That seemed manageable enough, but Earth was in a mighty strange neighborhood. Its closest new planetary neighbor rode an orbit a mere three million kilometers inward, though its orbit was inclined forty-five degrees from Earth’s and it was moving east to west. It was in retrograde orbit, moving in the opposite direction, and near its closest approach at the moment. Through Earth’s telescopes, it showed itself a lovely blue-green world.

Two hours after their scopes got those images, the observatories came up with another stunner. Earth was looking down into the new sun’s polar region. Wolf took a long moment to accept that. Well, if the orbits were in all inclinations, somebody had to be in a polar orbit.

One other damn strange thing: as well as he could judge from the first-look data, all the worlds were terrestrial. No gas giants, no ice balls. And all of them rode orbits that seemed to be inside their primary star’s biosphere, the narrow band of distances from a star where a planet could sustain roughly Earthlike temperatures.

Certainly Earth was inside this new star’s biosphere, with a vengeance. One of the very few things that had not changed was the mean solar constant—the average amount of solar energy reaching a given square area of the Earth’s surface. That seemed to have remained the same to within several decimal places.

And that strongly suggested something else he didn’t want to know. Maybe Wolf wasn’t quite as flexible as he hoped.

Dianne Steiger felt a moment of triumph. Forget the robots and the on-board automatics and the Pack Rat’s artificial intelligence programs. This was one moment the Pack Rat needed an honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood human on board. The poor old ship wasn’t ready to cope with this situation on her own. She needed a human pilot—and a repair worker.

Repairs first, though. Dianne peered carefully at the video display. As far as she could tell, part of the Rat’s nose had been lopped off in the first moment of… of whatever had happened. Dianne blinked, realizing that she had not developed any more meaningful way of describing what she had seen.

Well, what the hell had it been? What, exactly, had happened? Dianne felt something cold in her gut when she even considered the question.

But she had enough on her plate focusing on smaller problems. Whatever that thing was, it had done a number on her ship. It looked as if the first manifestation of that damn blue-unwhiteness had come into existence right across the Rat’s bow, leaving five centimeters of the ship’s nose on the other side. The blue-unwhite plane must have sliced across the nose like a knife through a salami. Perhaps a tiny sliver of debris was still floating out in space somewhere, back in the Solar System.

Concentrate on what she could deal with. She looked again at the nose damage. The first five centimeters of the Pack Rat’s nose weren’t there anymore, and the nose jets’ recessed nozzles were truncated, obviously screwing up their thrust patterns. It was lucky they had fired at all, instead of simply blowing up. She could see scorch marks on the hulls, mute evidence that some reaction-rocket exhaust gases had gone where they shouldn’t have. It had been close.

So, kiss the nose jets good-bye. She dared not press her luck by using them again. It was possible to fly the ship without nose jets. Difficult, but possible.

Still, the damaged nose was going to need some sort of repair. It could never survive reentry with bare metal exposed and the nose the wrong shape. Even if she didn’t fly the ship home, but merely to a spaceside repair station, she did not want to go cruising around with the nose gone. The delicate components in there were never meant to be exposed to the temperature extremes of open space. She had to patch it.

Spray foam. The number two arm had a foam nozzle on it, intended for dealing with just this sort of problem. She switched it on, and brought the arm in as close as she could to the nose.

Working with a fine spray and a delicate touch, she slowly built up layer after layer of ablative, heat-absorbing foam. The foam turned rock hard within seconds of hitting vacuum. The idea was that the stuff would survive long enough for one reentry. It would slough off as it melted, taking the excess heat of reentry with it as it ablated away.

It was a delicate job. The foam needed to be strong and well bonded, and needed to match the old contours of the nose as closely as possible. Dianne wanted to hurry, to get through and get the hell out of a chunk of space where fields of unseeable blue-unwhiteness appeared and cut chunks out of your spacecraft. But hurry could kill her. She knew that. She worked slowly and carefully, forcing herself to hold the hurried, overanxious side of her personality in check.

Finally the job was done. She pulled the manipulators away and examined her handiwork as seen from the remote camera mounted on the number three arm. It looked good. A clean job.

The number one and two arms backed away as she drew in the waldo controls. The ablative foam ought to hold together long enough for reentry. Reentry. Was she really willing to take that risk? She sat back and thought about it. Reentry was certainly riskier than going for an emergency docking with one of the orbital stations. NaPurHab was out of reach to her—and still didn’t seem likely to be a healthy place to be. The other stations? She didn’t have a line of sight on any of the major stations from this orbit, and the comm channels were hopelessly screwed up. Probably most of the communications satellites were gone. She had no idea if the orbital stations were still there—or if they would remain where they were, or were capable of docking spacecraft and taking in refugees.

On the other hand, Earth was there. She could see it. Whatever the hell had been done, had been done to Earth. Orbital facilities had survived, or not, at random—she had been witness to that. She had a good strong hunch that the Rat wouldn’t be here right now if she had been another hundred meters Moonward from NaPurHab.

And where the hell would the Rat have been? Where was the Moon? Back in the Solar System?

Good God. Where was the Sun?

She looked out across the Universe. More to the point, where was she? What was this place? She pushed the thought away and retracted the last of the manipulator arms. Worrying about that sort of thing wasn’t going to get her home alive. She settled back into her console and fired up the navigation system. Working on manual only, doing her own naked-eye navigation, she set to work plotting out her reentry.

The unknown faced her on every side. This was going to be the most dangerous flyback of her life.

But she knew, already, that this was merely a tactical retreat. She would be back, back up here in space, to find out what had happened and why.

Plastered with sweat, half-numb from exhaustion and shock, she prepared her crippled spacecraft for the dangerous ride home, already planning her revenge, the coming day when she faced whatever power it was that moved worlds.

She was happier than she had ever been in her life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Wormhole

The Caller was delighted. It had expected—or at least hoped for—assistance, in the form of an Anchor. It had never dared to dream the Sphere would send a sophisticated Portal Anchor, let alone new-breed World-eaters. Nor had it ever dared hope that such help might come so fast.

Anchors often arrived swiftly, but Portal Anchors were rarely sent, and periods equivalent to terrestrial years— even decades and centuries—had been known to pass before any material aid was sent through a Portal Anchor.

But even a non-Portal Standard Anchor would have served a vital purpose, of course. A Standard Anchor could provide a hole in space, albeit a smaller one than a full Portal allowed. Anything that could be sent across normal space could be sent through such a hole. Such as radio signals. The Caller had sent its own dataset, over and over, to ensure accurate reception. It received signals back, with the data needed to reestablish sophisticated contact after so many silent eons. In effect, the Sphere and Caller were relearning each other’s archaic dialect.

But now the Caller was receiving a substantive signal, not a mere language lesson. As was standard procedure, the Caller echoed the signal back to demonstrate that it had been received.

That required no thought. But considering the signal did. The Caller examined the message.

And was bathed in fear.

It was a long ride from Pluto to the Moon, no matter how fast the ship. At least it was almost over. They should be landing within an hour or so. Sondra glanced up from her screenful of Moonside news and propaganda and looked across the tiny wardroom at Larry and Raphael. Lot of fun it had been, being cooped up in here with the two of them and Collier, Nenya’s taciturn pilot.

Sondra thought about herself in connection with Raphael and Larry. The rushed flight of the Nenya demonstrated how important the three of them suddenly were, and not just on Pluto. That the Ring was suddenly important off Pluto was demonstrated by the fact that the repairs and upgrades on the Nenya were to be given top priority once they reached the Moon. With half the satellite’s own infrastructure wrecked, that meant something. Sondra had caught a mood in all the messages flitting back and forth: if Larry Chao and the Ring had got them into this mess, then only Larry Chao and the Ring could get them back out.

“Are you sure the charge values are for real?” Larry asked, his slightly muffled voice echoing out from his sleep cabin. He did most of his work in there, in a feeble attempt to give the others some privacy—but his voice still carried. No doubt he was speaking into the radio mike that seemed surgically attached to him these days. He had spent most of the trip arguing with some guy named Lucian Dreyfuss about data on the Earthpoint black hole. At least now they were within reasonable radio range of the Moon. The speed-of-light delays were no longer quite so maddening.

Sondra desperately wanted some real privacy, to get away from the others and be by herself. Too bad the rest of the enormous ship was sealed off, filled with flexible fuel bladders. Only seven compartments were open—the control room, the wardroom, four coffin-sized sleep cabins, and a refresher chamber that provided an utterly unsatisfactory zero-gee shower.

Sixteen days. Sixteen days en route from Pluto to the Moon. At least Larry had his work, sifting through the math and the physics, seeking after answers, solutions.

That was how he dealt with his guilt. So how the hell was she dealing with her own? Without her encouragement and help, Larry wouldn’t have worked up the nerve to do what he had done. Or was that even true? How responsible was she supposed to feel for the cataclysmic and utterly unforeseeable actions of another person?

She sighed and returned to her reading. She had gotten to the Naked Purple’s pronouncement. Blatant nonsense, but at least it was a change of pace from listening to Larry arguing gravity physics.

We proudly proclaim our victory in ridding the Solar Area of the scourge called “Earth.” Sondra frowned. More babble. “What’s the Solar Area?” she asked Dr. Raphael. “I mean, in Purple talk.”

Raphael set down his own book and thought for a moment. He seemed calm and at ease, as if he had found some part of himself on this flight, some part that had long been missing. “I used to know these things. Oh, yes. The Purples disapprove of the term Solar System, because it implies that there is organization and purpose in nature. Chaos is of course the primordial state and attempts to impose order were human attacks on nature. I may not have the logic precisely, but it’s something like that. It’s hard to read more than a sentence from the Purps or the Octals or any of the other outfringers without running into some strange word or verbal construction. I believe you’ll find the reasoning behind most of the odd language is no less tortured than the writing itself. Read some of that out loud, will you? I haven’t heard any of it in years.”

Sondra cleared her throat. “I’ll try, but half of this stuff is in puns and alternate spellings. Probably sounds even more incoherent out loud. Let’s see: ‘For billions of years, an unnatural state of existence has warped the Solar Area, as the entropy-reversing perversion of life and evil-ution has upended the right and natural progression to universal decay. Now, thanks to the Naked Purple Movement, the Solar Area is cleansed of the source of this contagion, and the proper state of nature has been reestablished.

“ ‘Once again, this Purple tech-knowledge-ick-all breakthrough demonstrates the superiority of the Naked Purple way of Wisdom Through Ignorance/ants. When all have learned to ignore the ant-like humyn drive for order and stability, all cultures will be capable of / have such / big feats/feet.

“ ‘But for now, humyns of all genders on all worlds everywhere can begin life anew, out from under the oppressive yoke of Earth’s Cultural Imperialism. The Naked Purple Movement has rendered this great service free of charge, but contributions and recruits to the Pointless Cause are always well-come… ’

“Drivel,” Sondra said. “Utterly unintelligible drivel.”

“But oddly poetic in its own way,” Raphael said mildly. “The remarkable thing is that there are people, a very few of them, who will believe, who will be impressed by that. They will entertain the possibility that a collection of eccentrics squatting in an abandoned prison crater could destroy planets. A few will join, or contribute. All it takes is one believer in a million to keep the Pointless Cause alive.

“Or at least that was true when the Purples had Earth’s eight billion for an audience. Far fewer than a billion people live in the Solar System now, and they are extremely spread out. How will a mass nut group function in a Solar System of small, dispersed populations?”

“Well, it sure doesn’t make sense. But at least the Purples wrote their piece in something that resembled prose.”

“You have another sample?” Raphael asked with a chuckle.

Sondra had never seen the man so relaxed and open. There had been a fascinating person buried deep under all that anger. Getting away from Pluto seemed an utterly liberating experience for him. “The Octal Millennialists. They put out a competing declaration—in base-eight notation. I suppose I could get the computer to translate it.”

“I doubt it would be worth the bother. Even translated it wouldn’t make much sense. The Octals select their wording for the interesting number patterns it produces in eight-mode.”

“How do you know so much about all these groups?”

Raphael smiled. “My wife, Jessie. She was a great one for exploring, finding the odd and the strange and going to take a look. And there were a lot of strange things to see on the campuses, way back when. She had a special fondness for the outfringers, even flirted with the Glibsters when we were both doing our postdoctoral work. They aren’t around anymore, but the Glibs and the Higginists were both in reaction to all the politically correct verbiage of the other groups. The Glib-Higs didn’t care what they did, or meant, as long as it was said in an entertaining or amusing manner.

“But the Purple—they’re special. Or at least they used to be. They’ve forgotten what they were, and that’s a kind of tragedy. The whole structure of the Naked Purple Movement was built on finding goals—such as inciting the nonviolent collapse of human civilization—that were outrageous, and utterly impossible. The goals they chose were not only unattainable, but deliberately unattainable. In fact, in the beginning, I believe they called themselves La Manchans, or Don Qs, after Don Quixote and his windmills. The whole idea of an unreachable goal was to leave the seeker ever striving, forever searching, never resting. Chasing an absolute, an ideal, meant never getting where you were going, which left you forced to realize none of us complete the journey of life alive. It was supposed to make you treasure the small accomplishments you did make.

“There were purposes behind the original Purple. Not merely shock, but shock for a reason. To jolt people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be—and, by urging people on to a higher goal, at least get their minds moving again. If society ostracized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to learn of your own inner goals, thus strengthening the individual.

“Jessie showed me that it was that contradiction, and that need to strive further on, that was the true, hidden point of the Pointless Cause.” Raphael got a distant look in his eye. “Nowadays the Purple philosophy is merely blather that makes sure everyone expresses their individuality in the same way, sees to it that all are equally nonconformist. But getting mixed up with the Tycho convicts poisoned them. Jessie predicted that would happen, before she died.” Raphael shook his head. “She’d be sorry to see she was right. Nothing is left but anger in the Tycho Purple. Anger, and a sense that the Universe owes them a living. Their philosophy is a game of prattling words for arrogant people, cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway.

“There has always been anger in the Purple—but once upon a time there was hope, as well. Nowadays the Purple hope has become mere sullenness.”

Sondra was stunned, not by Raphael’s words, but by the fact that they had come from the lips of what had been such a bitter old man. “Jessie sounds like a remarkable woman,” Sondra said at last.

“Oh, she was,” Simon Raphael said wistfully. “That indeed she was. I’ve been remembering just how remarkable.”

A tone sounded, and Collier, the pilot, spoke over the intercom, his voice calm and confident. “Now thirty minutes from touchdown on the Moon. If you set your monitors to the external view cameras, you should see quite a nice show.”

Sondra breathed a sigh of relief. The endless flight was nearly ended. She turned on the monitor, not to see the passing landscape, but to watch for any signs of engine problems on these final maneuvers. She looked up for a moment as Larry emerged from his cabin, moved to his crash couch, and strapped himself in. He looked as nervous as she did. Both of them had felt certain that the trip would wreck the Nenya’s engines. The Nenya had run here from Pluto on constant boost the whole way; no way to treat engines that weren’t really designed for such work. The technique had gotten them here in sixteen days, but other than that, Sondra didn’t see much to recommend it. The ride was uncomfortable—and frightening.

Constant boost meant accelerating the first half of the trip at one and a quarter gee, and then braking at one and a quarter gee on the second half of the run. Sondra didn’t even want to think about the hellacious maximum speeds they had achieved at turnover. On the plus side, Sondra told herself, the Moon’s one-sixth gravity would seem an absolute luxury once the Nenya landed.

Larry watched the Moon’s scarred and cratered surface leaping toward them, and suddenly concerns over the nature of black holes seemed far less important. He clenched his hands into a death grip on the crash couch’s armrests, shut his eyes, and saw images of the Nenya slamming into the Moon. No good. He opened his eyes again. The engines were humming along, seeming to run far too leisurely to counteract a fall toward a planet. Then they cut out altogether, and that was far more disturbing. He fixed his eyes on the monitor as the harshly cratered surface swept past, moving faster, getting closer with every moment.

The engines flared to life again, slowing into a sensible hover. The Nenya eased herself down onto the landing field. The engines shut down, and the ship landed with a gentle and anticlimactic bump.

Larry barely had time to breathe before there was a banging and clanging belowdecks. A young man stuck his head up through the deck hatch and looked around until he spotted Larry. “Larry O’Shawnessy Chao?” he asked.

Larry stood up, more than a little wobbly in the one-sixth gee. “Yeah,” he said, recognizing the voice from his arguments over the radio. “You’re Lucian Dreyfuss.”

Lucian popped up through the hatch with a disconcerting bounce and grinned. He stuck out a hand, and Larry shook it with as much vigor as he could. Larry looked Lucian over. He was a short, wiry, high-strung-looking sort, very much the opposite of the roly-poly, easy-going Lunar stereotype. His face was narrow and pale, and his smile seemed to have a lot of teeth in it. His reddish brown hair was cut in a rather longish crew cut that stood bottle-brush straight on his head. His handshake was a bit too firm. His short-sleeved shirt revealed well-muscled arms. He was a year or two older than Larry, and there was something in his grin that said he thought he was ahead on points, as if there were already a competition between them.

Lucian looked around the room. “Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael, welcome to you as well. Follow me down through the access port. I have a runcart waiting on the city side of the lock. The conference will convene as soon as you arrive. The port crew will see to your luggage. They’re all in a bit of rush down at the conference center, to put it mildly. There’s been some wild rumors shooting around the stuff coming in from VISOR—” He abruptly stopped talking, as if discussing the rumors would only delay his finding out the truth. “Once you arrive, the meeting will start immediately.” He gestured the three of them down the hatch with what struck Larry as an oddly professional assuredness, as if he were used to playing guide.

“Immediately?” Dr. Raphael asked.

“Ah, yes sir.”

“I see,” Dr. Raphael said, with a rather concerned glance at Sondra and Larry.

They were all still in their traveling clothes, chosen for comfort on a cramped ship, and not for appearance. Larry was wearing one of his loudest shirts, and it was a safe bet that his purple shorts did not match it, as the shorts did not match anything. Great outfit for a historic meeting, Larry thought. Sondra was at least somewhat better off in a frowsy black coverall, but it definitely looked like it had been slept in, with a few crumbs from breakfast on the lapel. Raphael, in his sensible slacks and pullover shirt, seemed the height of formality.

“Ah, well, it’s our words and not our fashion sense they’re interested in, I suppose,” Raphael said.

“Yes, sir,” Lucian said with a glance at his watch, clearly not paying much attention to anything but the march of time. “Shall we go?”

The three visitors followed him, a bit uncertainly. He led them through the deck hatch, then the ship’s airlock, down a flexible accessway that was long and steep enough to lead them underground into an elaborate airlock complex. A squad of workers in pressure suits were checking each other’s equipment. “Repair crew,” Lucian announced. “Going to soup up your ship—we figure this isn’t going to be the last time she needs to make a fast run.” Larry glanced at the worried expression on Dr. Raphael’s face, and couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. He was the director of the station, and the Nenya had always been the lifeline, the ticket home if it all went wrong, a talisman that made it all seem safer.

Things were moving too fast. Lucian led them from the airlock complex and out into a city tunnel, to a small open-body electric car. Lucian took the driver’s seat and the others got aboard.

Larry’s rear end had barely met the seat when Lucian hit the accelerator. The tires squealed, and the runcart took off at speed down the narrow, dimly lit tunnel. Ten minutes ago Larry had been scared to ride a landing spacecraft. It did not take him long to decide that a ballistic landing on the Nenya was downright safe compared to being Lucian’s passenger in this go-cart.

“You three are the last to arrive,” Lucian shouted above the roar of the air whipping past them down the tunnel. “Things are happening fast, even since my last comm signal to you. Marcia MacDougal from VISOR is supposed to have some sort of really hot numbers.”

“Do our numbers still hold up?” Larry shouted back, trying to forget that he was clinging to the seat frame just as hard as he had held onto his crash couch on the ship.

“The numbers are fine, very solid. It’s your conclusions I don’t like.”

“There’s no question at all about the conclusions.”

“There is in my mind,” Lucian shouted, trying to be heard over the air rushing past them. “But back to the numbers. I pulled together a last update just before you landed. The Earthpoint black hole mass is definitely 1.054 terrestrial, no appreciable accretion since appearance, though we’re starting to see a nice little debris field. We’ve used the optical scalar technique to nail down the spin rate. The north magnetic and spin poles are definitely pointed south. But are you that solid on what the figures mean? I’m still a little hesitant about going public with them.”

“If the numbers are right, then we go,” Larry shouted back, a bit heatedly. “If they’ve called a crash meeting, we can’t waste time quadruple-checking just because you have a gut reaction against the answers. Give me an alternative explanation and I’ll hold back.”

“Okay, okay. I guess I’m convinced, but just barely. The other researchers will have to make up their own minds.”

In the backseat, Sondra couldn’t hear half the words, but she didn’t much care. The two of them had been going back and forth over this ground for weeks. The runcart burst out of the tunnel into what a sign said was the Amundsen SubBubble, and there was suddenly a lot more to look at than rock wall. She recorded a brief impression of a city that had been rattled about a bit, and people here and there working on the cleanup. There wasn’t time to note much before Lucian stood on the brakes nearly hard enough to throw them all over the front of the cart. Presumably, they had arrived at Armstrong University, though Sondra hadn’t seen a sign. “Here we are,” Lucian announced, and hopped out of the cart. He led them into a long, low, academic-looking building. They hurried down a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was open, and Lucian ushered them right inside.

Larry was the last one into the room, and at first it seemed to him that the place was full of nothing but eyes sitting around an oblong table. Everyone in the room was staring straight at him, getting a good look at the man who destroyed Earth. Larry felt like he had been moving at breakneck speed and had just slammed into a brick wall. A brick wall made out of eyes.

He heard the door swing shut and latch behind him, and did not feel reassured.

Larry felt a gentle hand on his arm and turned to see a gnomish-looking little man in a rather severely cut lime green frock coat that lived up to the Lunar reputation for garish dress. “Welcome to you all,” he said. “I am Pierre Daltry, chancellor of the university and, it would appear, the de facto head of our group, at least for the time being. If you would take your seats, we can begin. Mr. Chao, Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael?” They sat down in the chairs reserved for them at the head of the long table, Larry for one wishing for a less prominent place to sit.

Chancellor Daltry took his place at the middle of the table, but remained standing. “I will not waste too much time on introductions,” he said, “but let me note a few of the other principal speakers for the day. These are the people who have done the most to study our present situation. Lucian Dreyfuss you have all met. Tyrone Vespasian, also of the Orbital Traffic Control Center. Marcia MacDougal and Hiram McGillicutty from VISOR.” He pointed each of them out, and then gestured to include the entire table.

“Every major government in the Solar System is represented here—including Earth, I might add. Nancy Stanton, the U.N. ambassador to the Lunar Republic, is here. And we are here to make decisions. Simon Raphael and Larry Chao suggested this meeting some days ago, and things have happened quickly since then, enlarging the importance—and the responsibility—of this conference. As the time for deliberation is short, and the need for action urgent, the various governments have agreed to authorize this joint committee to speak and to act. What we decide around this table will not be mere recommendations, but the orders of the day. So let us consider well what we do.”

Daltry paused and looked around the table.

“A moment from the Moon’s history comes to my mind. About a century ago, the political situation between the Earth and Moon on one side, and the rest of the Solar System on the other, came dangerously close to interplanetary war. In the midst of that crisis, an asteroid that was to be placed in Earth orbit came horribly close to striking the Earth, a disaster that would have made a nuclear war seem trivial by comparison. The Moon bore the brunt of that crisis, and we have Morrow Crater in the center of Farside—and our independence from Earth—to remind us of those days.

“Up until a few days ago, we all imagined such an asteroid impact to be the worst possible catastrophe that could befall humanity, or the Earth. Now we know better.

“We as a race have often imagined that we knew the worst that could befall us—and time after time we have found something worse that could happen. Famine, flood, ecologic disaster, nuclear winter, asteroidal impact. Every time, a new worst has supplanted the old, imagined worst. Can we now be sure the worst is behind us?”

There was silence around the table.

“I call upon Mr. Chao to open the substantive discussion.”

Larry Chao wondered whether to stand up or not, and decided not to; he felt exposed enough just sitting there. He had never even been to the Moon before. What the hell was he doing here now, addressing all these big shots? Had it really been worth all the money and effort to get him here so fast just so he could talk?

The hell with it. Larry squared his shoulders and launched into his talk, hoping to get it over with as soon as possible. “Ah, thank you once again, Chancellor, and, ah, members of the joint committee.” He wasn’t even quite sure if that was what this group should be called.

He pulled some notes from his pocket and shuffled through them without comprehension, trying to stall long enough to order his thoughts. “Let me start by settling the first and foremost issue before the group: Is the black hole now where Earth once was actually the Earth? Did our—did my—experiment somehow cause Earth to be crushed down into nothingness?” There, I’ve said it, he thought. His heart was pounding in his chest. There was a slight rustle around the table as Larry confessed his own part in the disaster.

Yes, I was the one who did it, he thought. I admit it. He knew he had no choice in the matter but to accept the facts. He could never hide from what had happened, from what he had done. He was going to travel under a cloud for the rest of his days. Pretending it wasn’t there would not improve the situation.

Sondra sat next to him, watching her friend. Even through his nervousness, she could see that he had grown, changed, matured in these past days. As he spoke, he sat up a little straighter, returned the gaze of his audience with a bit more confidence. The shy half-child was not yet gone, but there was much more of the adult about him, too.

Larry went on. “During our journey in from Pluto, I was in constant contact with the Orbital Traffic Control Center here on the Moon. As you all no doubt know, that facility came up with excellent data on the situation here in the Earth-Moon system—or perhaps calling it Lunar space might make more sense now.” Again, a small stir in the audience. “Lucian Dreyfuss of OTC has collated the OTC information on the black hole. Both he and I have analyzed that data and come to the same conclusions.”

Larry saw Lucian at the far end of the table, returning Larry’s gaze evenly, doing nothing to signal agreement or disagreement. Larry found himself forced to admire Lucian’s cool.

“We modeled what Earth would look like as a black hole, and compared it to what we can measure of the black hole that is now sitting where Earth used to be.”

Warming to his subject, Larry forgot his shyness. “The trouble is, very few properties of a black hole can be measured. In many senses, a black hole isn’t there at all. It has no size, no color, no spectrum. Its density is infinite. But there are certain things we can get readings on. First and most obvious is the hole’s mass. The first thing we knew about the hole was how much it weighed.

“You will also recall that it weighed five percent more than Earth. That may not sound like much, but bear in mind, the Moon only has one-point-two percent of the Earth’s mass. And remember, the black hole’s mass was measured only eight hours after Earth vanished. It could not have accumulated that much more mass that quickly. For the Earthpoint black hole to be Earth, it would have to be removed, compressed down into a singularity, fed the equivalent of four Moon masses, and then returned to its starting point, all in eight hours. To my mind that makes it all but impossible that the black hole truly is the Earth.”

Larry found himself remembering his days as a teaching assistant. He had always enjoyed lecturing. “Now I’ve got to jump into some slightly complicated areas. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to be something less than a purist about my nomenclature. Forgive me if I oversimplify a bit, but I won’t hand out any wrong data, just make it a bit easier to follow.

“There are a few things we can measure in a black hole: spin attributes; electric charge and magnetic field, if any; event horizon; mass; and of course the strength of the gravity field itself. These are not independent variables, of course. For example, the magnetic field, or lack of it, depends on both the electrical charge of the hole, and on its spin.

“We can measure spin, charge, and the magnetic field effects—and they can tell us useful things. Let me start with spin. We can get a reading on the hole’s rotation from the movement of its magnetic fields, and from what is called the optical scalar technique. The black hole’s axis of spin is precisely ninety degrees from the plane of its orbit. As you know, Earth’s axis is canted 23.5 degrees from its orbital plane. It would require tremendous energy to move Earth’s axis into the vertical and then hold it there. The planet would resist the motion, the way a gyroscope resists any effort to change its axis of spin. I doubt that you could force Earth toward the vertical without cracking the planetary crust and flinging large amounts of debris into space. We did not see that debris.

“But that is only the first point concerning spin. In order to conserve momentum, an object must spin faster if it gets smaller, the way a skater in a pirouette spins faster and faster as he draws his arms in toward his body.

“If you crush Earth into a black hole, the resultant hole would have to spin at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed. This hole is rotating far too slowly for it to be Earth. It is only rotating at about one percent of the velocity that an Earth-derived hole would turn. I might add that it is also spinning in the wrong direction.

“This black hole also exhibits a massive negative electric charge. Earth was—is—electrically neutral. Another point: the north and south magnetic poles of the hole are reversed.

“In mass, spin data, electric charge and magnetic properties—in every way that we can measure—this black hole is drastically different from what the Earth would be like if the Earth were made into a black hole.

“For all these reasons, I feel confident that this black hole is not the Earth.”

A murmur of relief whispered about the room. Larry let it die down before he went on. “What then has happened to Earth? Earth is either somewhere else, or has been destroyed. If it has been destroyed, where was the rubble it should have left behind, the debris? Where was the energy pulse? If the Earth had been smashed to rubble, or blown up, or disintegrated into elementary particles or pure energy, we would know about it—if we survived the event. There would be nothing subtle about the effects. The Moon would have been pelted with a massive amount of debris or roasted in the energy release, or both.

“I believe that the Earth has been transported to another place, and was not destroyed.”

“Now hold on a minute!” A strident voice broke in from halfway down the table. “There is not the slightest bit of information in the data to support that claim. I know! I gathered most of the data myself.” It was McGillicutty, sputtering mad. “I didn’t watch your precious black hole close up. But you’ve just made the high-and-mighty argument that no technology could wreck a planet without a trace—but then you go and say, casual as you please, that it’s possible to steal a planet without any fuss? What technology makes that possible?”

Sondra leaned in. “The wormhole, dammit! That’s what the black hole is. A wormhole gateway to where Earth is.”

“Wormhole, that’s damned ridiculous!” McGillicutty snorted. “They don’t exist. They can’t exist. And for my money, neither can black holes. Certainly not black holes this small.”

Sondra felt her temper beginning to fray. “For God’s sake—you’ve seen asteroid-sized bodies popping out of those blue flashes—and you provided the images of that blue flash sweeping up from behind Earth, engulfing it.”

“I recorded that image,” McGillicutty snapped, “but I do not support that interpretation of it. There is clearly a compact mass in Earth’s old position, but you are merely assuming this compact mass is a black hole. I haven’t seen any evidence that supports that idea. Suppose it is merely very dense, with no event horizon, and a surface gravity low enough for physical matter to escape? I haven’t run the figures yet, but it seems to me that an Earth mass could be a thousandth the density of a black hole and still only be a few meters across, far too small to see from this distance. It could be that the beam shifted Earth from normal matter into strange-quark matter. A strange-quark body of Earth mass might only be a few kilometers across, and extremely dark in color. I suggest that is the situation, and the asteroid-sized bodies are being blown off the strange-matter compact body’s surface somehow. By violent transitions back into normal matter.”

“And the blue flashes?” Sondra asked.

“Energy discharges related to whatever is blasting the gee points off the strange-matter surface.”

“But how are they being blown off?” Larry asked. “What’s the mechanism?”

“I don’t know yet, sonny,” McGillicutty snapped. “But that’s the only unexplained feature of my theory. Your black hole idea is nothing but unexplained features. My idea makes sense. Yours doesn’t.”

With that, a dozen voices joined in, offering their own opinions.

Larry listened to the shouting with a sinking heart. They had been willing—even eager—to believe in evidence that the Earth had not been destroyed. But suddenly, he sensed something different around the table. McGillicutty’s theory had a dozen major flaws in it, was contradicted by the available evidence. But perhaps it was more palatable than something with the terrifying power to drop the Earth into a wormhole.

Larry watched the argument storm around him. They had been with him up until McGillicutty interrupted. But he had lost them when they’d been given something more like what they wanted to hear.

Larry shrank back in his chair, feeling very much like a little child lost in a sea of doubting grown-ups. He thought back to the last full science staff meeting of the Gravities Research Station. How long ago had it been? Just seventeen days ago? Eighteen? He had made a very long, strange trip indeed just to come and feel lost again. He sat there, feeling young and alone.

But then a new voice, strong and determined, cut through the welter of voices. “All this is a side issue,” Simon Raphael said in a stern voice. “Black hole, worm-hole, compact mass—just before we left Pluto, Mr. Chao reminded me that none of that truly matters. What matters is that our homeworld has been stolen, and our Solar System invaded by an alien force.” Raphael stood up, leaned his hands on the table, and looked about the room. There was silence.

“How that has happened does not matter. In a strange way, it is almost comforting to get lost in technical arguments over how it happened—because then we could get so lost in the details of the situation that we never have to look at these larger, and more terrifying issues. Our Solar System has been invaded. In some unknown way, our gravity-wave experiment appears to have been the signal for that invasion.

“I know as well as all of you how absurd that sounds—attack from beyond the stars—but what other explanation fits the facts? Do you have an idea, Dr. McGillicutty? Some other interpretation that does not contradict any of the very few facts we do have?” Raphael looked around the table. “The quiet in this room tells me there is no other explanation. But we cannot reject the only answer we have simply because it is difficult to accept. I know of what I speak when I say that. Refusing to accept a challenge is an old man’s failing, and one of which I have been much guilty in recent days.

“We have been attacked, that is obvious. And yet no one asks, ‘By whom?’ We are so reluctant to accept this incredible disaster that we cannot go even one step further and ask who did this, or why they did it. It seems to me that those questions are far more important than how they did it, or whether their technology seems to violate this or that pet theory. I don’t know what their motives are, but I cannot imagine that a fleet of thirty thousand asteroid-sized spacecraft are headed toward all our worlds with the intention of doing good deeds.

“And yet how they do what they do is important, because we must fight them, whoever they are. Before we can do that, we must learn more about them. If Earth has been removed, where was it taken? What do the aliens intend here in the Solar System? How, precisely, are the other planets threatened? And why?

“The latest reports estimate thirty-two thousand large objects, which we’ve been calling gee points, all of them on constant-boost courses headed straight for every one of the major planets—but not for the Moon. So let’s talk about why, if we can.”

“Ah, maybe this is the place for me to jump in,” said a bald, heavyset man sitting next to Lucian. “I’m Tyrone Vespasian, and I’ve been concentrating on the gee points.”

Raphael nodded and sat down. “By all means.”

“Okay, I guess the big questions about the gee points are one, what are they, and two, why is the Moon exempt? Let me talk about the first. Some of the fastest-moving gee points have reached Venus and Mercury. Unfortunately we don’t know what happened to them on arrival. Quicksilver Station on Mercury just saw large radar blips go below the horizon, and VISOR also lost the gee points as they went in. There weren’t any big seismic events on either world, which suggests that the gee points managed to make soft landings somehow.

“I don’t know if it’s good news or bad, but we ought to have landings on Mars in a few days. We should be able to get better information from there when that happens. The Venus and Mercury arrivals are from gee points moving out from the Earthpoint black hole.” Vespasian looked up and glared at McGillicutty. “Or compact mass, if you need to call it that. Anyway, there are a few gee points moving from Earth-space toward the outer planets, but they have farther to go. The gee points moving from the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud are moving slower and have the longest distances to travel.

“Some of the gee points are moving toward the gas giants. What they plan to do when they get there, we don’t know. We don’t know if they’re interested in the planets, the satellites, or both.

“If you take a look at the Asteroid Belt gee points through a long-range camera, they look just like ordinary asteroids. In fact, a few of them were mined as asteroids for some time. Except asteroids aren’t supposed to contain point-source gravity-wave systems.

“The objects coming out of the Earthpoint black hole look totally different, as far as we can tell. It’s hard to get good imagery on them. They’re a little smaller, and look more like artificial objects. Their surfaces are more reflective, and they seem to be very regular in shape. The Earthpoint gee points are moving too fast for any of our ships to match velocity with them real easy, though there are four or five missions already on the way. On the other hand, they seem to behave just like the asteroidal gee points. I think they’re all really the same thing.”

“And what is that?” Chancellor Daltry asked gently.

Vespasian’s face turned sad, and he was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “I thought a lot about that,” he said. “I think they’re spaceships. Really big spaceships. The ones coming from the Outer System have been waiting, hidden, camouflaged as asteroids and comets. Hiding from what, I don’t know. Once these things start accelerating, moving, it’s obvious they aren’t what they seem. Disguise is pointless. So, since the ones coming through Earthpoint are accelerating from the start, there’s no sense in disguising them. The Earthpoint ones are accelerated on the other side of the wormhole somehow—given a high initial speed. Plus they have a slightly higher boost rate. That makes them seem different from the Outer System jobs, but I think they’re really all the same thing. Big ships.”

He hesitated one last time, and then said it. “Invasion ships. I’ve tried to come up with some other explanation, but nothing else fits. They’re ships. What sort of crews they have aboard, I don’t know.

“But we’re going to find out when the first one lands on Mars.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Empire of the Suns

Maybe the world hadn’t ended, but Gerald MacDougal found himself in paradise, after all. Or at least in California.

But then, California, Vancouver, and in fact all of Earth were suddenly an exobiologist’s paradise. This new home for Earth was not the afterlife, but it was certainly a celestial realm, a kingdom of stars, an Empire of the Suns.

And it was a realm crowded with life. Of that Gerald was convinced—and surely that was the next best thing to Heaven for an exobiologist. Most of the other planets were too far off for good imagery from a ground-based telescope, but they could get good spectroscopic data. Gerald looked again at the document in his hand, barely able to resist jumping for joy. It was a summary from the first run-through of planetary spectrographs, as collected from observatories all over the world.

And the summary practically shouted evidence of life-bearing worlds. Free oxygen, water vapor, nitrogen glowed up from every spectrograph.

Likewise, every world was at the proper distance from its respective star for life. For every star of a given size and temperature, there was a particular range of distances, called the biosphere, wherein a planet would be at the right temperature for Earthlike life, neither too hot nor too cold. Only certain types of stars were capable of supporting life. But every star around the sphere was of the right size, temperature and color to support life—and every planet in the Multisystem rode a secure and perfect orbit inside its star’s biosphere.

He had to get to those worlds. Somehow. Getting here was a good first step. He had guessed right. JPL had been officially designated the lead lab for finding out what the hell had happened. Gerald barely had time to finish mentioning his credentials as an exobiologist before they had signed him up. JPL’s people could read a spectrograph as well as Gerald could. They knew they were going to need exobiology expertise, sooner or later. And until such time as he could work directly in his field, there was endless staff work that needed doing. Earth’s survival could well hinge on figuring out what had happened. The scientific community generally and JPL specifically were confronted with the largest and most urgent research program in history, and they needed to gear up for the job. Gerald was a good organizer, and was glad to help out.

But there was a core of pain underneath all the excitement. Marcia was lost to him, somewhere out across the sea of stars.

And, as wondrous as this place was, it was not Earth’s home. No doubt a sojourn here would teach many things, but Earth belonged in the Solar System. Gerald was determined to see her returned there.

Dianne Steiger had learned something in the ten days since they had fished her out of the Pack Rat’s wreckage at the Los Angeles Spaceport: People can get used to anything.

Already she was used to the ghostly pseudo-sensations her new left hand provided. Maybe the astronaut’s union was a waning political power, but it still bought damn good medical care. She sat in Wolf Bernhardt’s outer office, waiting. From time to time, someone would rush past, carrying a stack of datablocks, looking worried. There was a frantic air about the place. Fumbling a bit, working awkwardly with just her right hand, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it.

Frantic yes, but at the same time eerily normal and calm.

That was the way the world was now. Massive and unseen forces had stolen Earth—and yet life went on. If it was time to go to work, it didn’t much matter which star system Earth was in. You still had to get up, eat breakfast, drink your coffee—and step out into a world where the light of day wasn’t quite the right color, where the sun in the sky was not the Sun. You still had to go to the office and get those invoices out, or go to the store and get the shopping done, or go to the dentist for your cleaning. You still had to go home at night, though under a too-bright sky that held not the Moon and the familiar constellations, but a half-dozen too-bright stars that washed out much of the sky, leaving it tinged with blue in places. There were too few fixed-background stars, and far too many planets that were too large, too close. And a lot more meteors than there used to be. Everything in the sky had changed, and yet everything on Earth was exactly the same.

Even if you wanted to react, there was nothing you could do about it. What did you do about the sky transmogrifying? And on a practical level, if you weren’t a spacer, what difference did it make?

She blew out a cloud of smoke, sighed, and tried to tell herself how lucky she had been. Of course, if you were a spacer, you had a few more problems. Not that Dianne felt she had any right to complain. She was home, and alive. There were a lot of astros—a lot of her friends—who weren’t.

She lifted her left arm and examined her new hand. Too pink, the nails not properly grown in, no muscle tone to speak of, unweathered and characterless. A baby hand grown into the size and form of a woman’s, but without the slightest sign of maturity. She closed her eyes, and willed the hand to close, to clench itself into a fist. Eyes shut, she concentrated on her sensations in the hand. She could feel the arching of her fingers, the pressure of her fingertips on the base of her palm, her thumb wrapped around the side of her forefinger. The feelings were clear enough so that she could see her hand, her fist, through closed eyes.

She opened her eyes again, and found herself staring at an open hand, the fingers splayed out, starfished away from each other. With a new and separate act of will, she again forced her new hand into a fist, watched it close with open eyes this time. And felt nothing at all from it but a numb warmth. Her nervous system, confused by conflicting signals, simply gave up.

She carefully laid the hand in her lap and cursed silently. Again, and still, it happened. It was as if she had one left hand that she could only see, and another that she could only feel.

The doctors were soothing and reassuring. In the old days, when amputations were permanent, amputees reported phantom feelings—an itch in the leg that wasn’t there anymore, that sort of thing. Intellectually, she knew, the disconcerting sensations she was experiencing were merely an echo of the same phenomenon. Her new left hand was sending legitimate signals to her nervous system, but a replacement body part, even a sprint-grown bud-clone produced from the patient’s own cells, never precisely matched the original. In time the new hand would develop muscle tone and coordination, but for now it didn’t respond or report sensation the same way her old hand had.

For a long time yet, until she learned to use it, the physical sensations would be… disturbing. She would learn to tolerate it, then get used to it, then accept it, until the new hand seemed normal and natural.

In the meantime, the doctors told her, life went on. Wait it out.

That was the second lesson she had learned. Life went on, no matter what.

Quite abruptly and without warning, the entire planet is grabbed and thrown into a new solar system, without any explanation. No one knew why or how it had happened. Nonetheless, there were plenty of crises people could understand, and those were what people focused on. Perhaps dealing with the smaller crises was a means of avoiding the larger disaster.

Whether or not dealing with them was a denial mechanism, Earth was facing some extremely serious problems that did require attention. The loss of space facilities hurt badly, caused energy shortages, communications lapses, transportation problems, supply problems. People were suffering. The papers and the tapes and the newsblocks were still reporting new disasters, new updates on the number killed or injured, on the loss of this space facility or that. No one could truly comprehend the theft of a world, but people could understand the death of ten thousand in the crash of a habitat.

And yet, on another, broader level, the damage was superficial. Taken as a social whole, planet Earth was still strong enough, resilient enough, to survive this trauma. Society wasn’t showing any signs of collapsing.

Or at least that was the reassuring message everyone was trying to give everyone else. Whether or not it was true, humanity needed to believe it.

Perhaps people glanced to the sky now and again, but they walked down the street, met their friends, ate their meals and went to their jobs. If those, too, were denial mechanisms, they were healthy ones.

Meanwhile the bars were all full, and so were the churches. The various organizations of crazies had more than a few new recruits. Any group that claimed to have an explanation, or an escape from danger, was popular. And there were more than a few incidents of attacks on the crazies, as people looked for someone to blame.

Yet, all told, as represented in Los Angeles at least, the people of Earth were taking the catastrophe in stride. Dianne Steiger looked down at the cloned, alien hand resting in her lap. She was taking that catastrophe in stride, too, and for much the same reasons. What choice did she have? She may have lost a part of herself, but she could not stop going about the business of staying alive. The whole of the world could not drop everything it was doing in order to find an appropriate way to react.

And the people who did react, with protest marches (against whom or what, Dianne could not understand), accomplished nothing. The jaded, world-weary leaders of Earth’s nations and cities, still hurting from the Knowledge Crash riots and the worldwide recession, had learned the hard way that emotional appeals could only produce more riot, more destruction, more fear. Governments and large institutions put all their efforts into spreading calm, urging a return to normalcy, whatever that was.

Life went on, in spite of all. It wasn’t just fact: it was official policy.

Dianne thought there was reason to believe the policy would work. After all, people could get used to anything.

Even a Dyson Sphere hanging in the sky. People were acting as if giving it a name explained it. Dianne felt a grim amusement at that. She was one of a very few persons to see it unveiled by atmosphere, blazing with power at the height of its energy pulse. She knew to fear it. Not so the average person in the street. They had learned that it was many billions of kilometers away, and many seemed to assume that anything that far off could do them no harm. Never mind that it was presumably related to the power that had snatched the planet away. And besides, the Sphere wasn’t visible in the sky anymore. Its cherry red glow had faded down through brick red, to a dim glow, to darkness. Now it was merely a spot of blackness in the night sky, eclipsing the background stars. In infrared, of course, it was another story. In IR, the damned thing was bright as hell.

And was it a Dyson Sphere? Named for Freeman Dyson, the twentieth-century scientist who had dreamed them up, Dyson Spheres were supposed to be hollow shells, hundreds of millions of kilometers in diameter, built around stars. This thing sure looked like one—it was certainly big enough—but it seemed like every engineer on the planet was busily demonstrating that no conceivable material could withstand the forces a Dyson Sphere would be subjected to.

There were two reasons for building Dyson Spheres: one, to provide enormously vast amounts of living area; and two, to collect great amounts of energy. Because it enclosed its star completely, a Dyson Sphere could trap all of the energy the star emitted.

Of course, if this was a Dyson Sphere, it was therefore artificial. It had been built. Which left the question of where the builders were. Presumably they were the same folk who had snatched the Earth.

So where were they?

The door to the inner office slid open, and a tall, good-looking man in casual clothes stepped out. “Dianne Steiger?”

Dianne dropped her cigarette to the concrete floor and ground it out as she stood up. “Yes. Are you Dr. Bernhardt?”

“Ah, no. I’m Gerald MacDougal, head exobiologist and chief of staff for the Directorate of Spatial Investigations.”

“Chief of staff?” Dianne asked, trying to sound cheerful. “That sounds a little out of line for an exobiologist.”

Gerald smiled, a bit sadly. “No one here has time to worry about that sort of thing. We’re all just making it up as we go along. Come on back.” Gerald led her into the inner offices, into a small, bare, windowless room. It looked to be an old storeroom that had been cleaned out and set up as an office on very short notice. Gerald sat down at one side of a trestle table and gestured for Dianne to sit at the other. “Dr. Bernhardt is just finishing up some other work. He’ll see you in just a moment. I thought I might save some time and give you a quick background briefing before you go in,” Gerald said.

“Background to what?” Dianne asked. “Why am I here?”

“We’ll talk a bit, and I bet you figure it out before Dr. Bernhardt sees you,” Gerald said.

“Who’s Dr. Bernhardt?”

“To oversimplify a bit, Dr. Wolf Bernhardt was the duty scientist here at JPL who detected the gravity waves that caused the Earth’s removal. The U.N. Security Council needed someone to run their investigation of what happened, and they decided that gravitic technology was going to be central to figuring that out. Besides, they had to pick someone, and fast. So they dumped it in Wolf’s lap. They set up the United Nations Directorate of Spatial Investigation and made Dr. Bernhardt the first director and lead investigator. They’ve ordered him to, quote, ‘Establish the causes and consequences of the Earth’s removal to its present location,’ close quote. DSI’s got an absolute U.N. priority claim on JPL and on any or all other research establishments or facilities or resources it needs, anywhere on Earth. We want it, we take it.”

Dianne’s eyebrows went up. “Wait a second. You said something about gravity waves associated with the Earth’s removal. You mean someone knows how it happened? With gravity waves? That’s been kept quiet.”

“Yeah, it has, because that’s all we know. And we want to work on the problem without every kook on the planet phoning in his suggestions. The data from every single gravity-wave detector in the world shows large numbers of highly complex gravity-wave transmissions right at the time of the Big Jump. Immediately afterward, within five seconds of each other, every gee-wave detector on Earth blew out. Based on the five seconds of data we did get, we think there are thousands of gravity-modulation sources in the Multisystem.”

“Multisystem?”

“The multiple-star system Earth is in now. Had to call it something.”

“And those gravity-wave sources were so powerful they blew out all the detectors.”

Gerald nodded. “Looks that way, but we don’t know for sure. We don’t know if they did it on purpose or not.”

“ ‘They did it,’ ” Dianne repeated. “So you definitely think we didn’t end up here by chance. No weird natural fluke.”

Gerald’s gentle face hardened. “No. Someone did this. We know that. The entire Multisystem is held together artificially. Has to be. The orbits of all the stars, planets, moons and so on are so complex that they could not have occurred naturally. They aren’t stable for even the shortest period of time. Our first orbital projections predicted all kinds of collisions and near misses and close-pass momentum exchanges. There should have been planets crashing into each other and worlds being flung clear of the Multisystem. Except none of that happens. Somehow the orbits of the stars and planets are constantly being tweaked up, shifted from their projected paths into safer directions. The Multisystem is as complex and delicate as a mechanical Swiss watch. The slightest mistake in orbit control could have devastating effects.

“We think that’s what they do with gravity waves—correct and control the stellar and planetary orbits. And also they use them for grabbing planets. We’re pretty sure that all of the objects in the Multisystem were brought here the same way Earth was. Not just the planets, but the stars, too. They built themselves an Empire of the Suns.”

Dianne found herself impressed by that turn of phrase, and unnerved by the idea. “So they—whoever they are—are manipulating orbits, keeping all the planets from hitting each other?”

Gerald frowned. “At least most of the time. It looks like once in a while they’ve gotten it wrong. There are several highly ordered and clearly artificial asteroid belts of minor planets—but also a lot of asteroid-sized bodies in random orbits. We’ve already seen two impact events between asteroids.” He leaned forward and gestured to emphasize a point. “That’s another reason for us to keep things quiet until we know more. The people of Earth don’t need to hear that an asteroid might crash into them. We’ve had enough panic.”

Dianne felt her blood run cold. How could this man MacDougal talk about such things so matter-of-factly? “I understand,” she said.

“But the most disturbing thing about those impacts is that no effort was made to prevent them. Plus there’s been a major upward jump in the number of meteors and meteorites, worldwide. Some of them pretty big rocks. All of which means that control of the bodies in this system is not absolute. That’s why the man on the street doesn’t need to hear about these things just yet. Let things settle down a bit first:”

Dianne nodded vacantly. “Anything else I need to know before you tell me why I’m here?”

“One or two other points,” Gerald said with studied casualness. “The motions of the stars and planets are also being affected by unseen companion objects. Practically all of the stars and planets have periodic wobbles in their orbital motions, very distinct from the gee-wave-induced orbital shifts. We’re sure the wobbles are caused by the gravitic effects of unseen co-orbiting companion objects. And they’re big wobbles, so the companions have to be very massive.”

“Except?” Dianne asked carefully. She didn’t know how many more disturbing revelations she wanted to get.

“Except we should be able to see the companions. There are a lot of wobbling planets close enough, but we can’t see their companions. So the companions are not only very massive, they must be extremely small. Plus we’ve spotted disk-shaped debris fields centered on where the companions should be, and seen some rather odd energy releases, consistent with the impact of debris onto gravity singularities.”

Dianne found herself wishing desperately for a cigarette. “In other words, the Multisystem is full of black holes.”

Gerald nodded. “One of them very close. It looks like there’s one at the centerpoint of the large ring-shaped object hanging in the sky where the Moon should be. A Moon-mass black hole would serve to maintain the pattern of tides and gravitational stresses Earth is used to. Without something stabilizing us, we’d still be getting quakes like the one just after the Big Jump.

“There’s one last thing to tell you,” Gerald said. “It’s not exactly a secret, because anyone could reach the same conclusion we did just by thinking for a minute. It seems at the very least a strong working hypothesis that the Dyson Sphere at the center of the Multisystem is not only the power source, but the control center for the entire system. So we very much want to take a look at the Sphere. The trouble is that the Dyson Sphere has an exterior surface area approximately four hundred million times greater than Earth’s. That’s going to make locating the control center difficult. More so if the interior surface and volume of the Sphere are considered.”

Dianne thought about that for a moment, and found herself adopting Gerald’s air of studied calm. In the act of doing so, she suddenly understood his behavior. He was as scared by all this as she was. His air of calm was like a test pilot’s artificial nonchalance, nothing more than a defense, a way to keep the fear from overwhelming him.

“Okay then,” she said in a voice that was suddenly far steadier. “How about the big question. Who? Have any theories on that? Who has done this and what do they want with us?”

“No idea. Not a blessed idea. There’s been no sign whatsoever of the perpetrators themselves. Wolf thinks it’s possible they are as wholly unaware of our existence as we were of theirs a few days ago. As to motive, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they have no interest in humanity, and are interested only in Earth, possibly for colonization purposes. Either they think Earth is empty, or they think we will be utterly unable to oppose them when they come to take possession.” Gerald glanced casually at his watch, as if he had been discussing nothing more unnerving than a visit to the library. “Come on, he should be ready for you now.”

He stood up and she rose with him. “The authority they’ve given DSI,” Dianne said. “If Wolf Bernhardt is in charge, that’s his authority. And you said DSI has absolute U.N. priority over any and all resources and facilities. They’re trusting this guy Bernhardt with a hell of a lot of power. He could take over every lab on Earth, just for starters.”

“Yes, I suppose so—if he were a fool. If he wanted to be locked up, or to wake up dying from a bullet in the back of his head. Things are a bit panicky, and I wouldn’t be amazed if people starting playing very rough. Wolf knows that what the U.N. can give, the U.N. can take away. They hope that he can find more positive expression for his ambition. They want him—us—to come up with answers. That’s where you come in.”

Gerald led her out into the hall, down to a proper office, designed for the purpose. Gerald opened the door and walked in without knocking.

Herr Doktor Wolf Bernhardt was seated at his desk, engrossed in his work. Gerald leaned up against the doorframe and Dianne sat down in the visitor’s chair. By the looks of it, Bernhardt had been working at a frantic pace for many long hours.

The room was in chaos—but a neat man’s chaos, a valiant rearguard action against disorder. There were stacks of paper everywhere, and piles of datablocks—but each heap of paper had its edges squared off, and each datablock was neatly labeled in a precise hand. The center of the desk was surrounded by the mountains of information, but was itself an empty plain, nothing on it but a late-model notepack and a single sheet of paper that looked to be a list of things to do with half the items checked off. To one side of the sheet were a pen and a china cup half full of what seemed to be slightly stale, cold coffee.

Wolf was staring at the notepack’s screen, his fingers busy on the touchpad. Dianne Steiger studied him for a moment. His appearance matched that of his office: a precise, orderly man trying to keep up with too much coming in from all sides at once. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly combed, his shirt fresh, his eyes clear and alert—but exhaustion was peeking through the facade. He was not working through the notepack steadily, but in spurts of energy that spent themselves almost before they began. Then he would blink, shake his head, and force himself to concentrate anew. He took a careful sip of the coffee and made a face. At last he glanced up and realized with a start that Dianne and Gerald were there. “My God. I did not even hear you come in. Forgive me, I have been working too hard. You are astronaut Dianne Steiger, yes?”

Astronaut. That was his interest. A light went on in Dianne’s head. Suddenly she knew why she was here. She had thought that perhaps Bernhardt had wanted an eyewitness account of the Big Jump as seen from space, but no. This was something far bigger. She looked at Gerald, her heart suddenly trip-hammer fast with excitement. Something in his face seemed to confirm her guess. She looked back to Wolf Bernhardt.

“Yes I am.” She hesitated a moment, and then blurted it out. “You want the Terra Nova.” Her heart was pounding, and a dull, silent roar echoed dimly inside her head. Terra Nova. The prize lost so long ago. Dianne rarely allowed herself even to think of the canceled star-ship project. She had been only a few steps away from becoming a reserve pilot before the program had been canceled.

But now the prize would be even more rich. There were dozens of worlds, eight whole star systems in one to explore out there—

“I have the Terra Nova,” Bernhardt said abruptly, cutting into her reverie. “There are rush crews prepping her for a sprint mission to the Dyson Sphere right now. What I want—what I need—is you.”

Dianne lifted her left hand as carefully as she could, and tried to move it with something close to grace. But even wiggling her fingers was clumsy. “Ah, sir, of course I want to go—but I don’t think I can pilot. Not for a while. Not with this hand.”

“Pilots I have,” Wolf said dismissively. “What I want you for is captain. No one else on Earth can know that ship as well as you do.”

The roaring in her ears suddenly got louder, and Dianne blinked hard. Dreams aren’t supposed to come true, especially in the middle of a nightmare. Earth had been kidnapped, and so she got to fly a starship. Right into a Dyson Sphere. Suddenly her heart sank. That was a plan for disaster. But Wolf Bernhardt was still talking. Dianne forced herself back to reality.

“—the Terra Nova is tremendously complex. The training to handle it goes far beyond flying even a large interplanetary craft. We need someone who understands the broad picture. My office has found enough spacers who can fill the specialty jobs aboard—lander pilots, science specialists, medical, astronomers, orbital observation scientists and so on. Gerald here will be going along as chief scientific officer. But there are damn few from the original group of Terra Nova officers and crew candidates, people who really know that ship and what she can and can’t do. Most of the original candidates out-emigrated to find work. They’re back in the Solar System where we can’t get at them. The others—ah, well, there were very high casualties among spacers when the Big Jump happened.”

Bernhardt hesitated over that point, as if he could say more. It occurred to Dianne that she had never seen a breakdown of just how many casualties there had been. This DSI operation was keeping a lot of disturbing data to itself. “What it comes down to,” Bernhardt went on, “is that you are far and away the most qualified person for this job who’s still with Earth and alive.”

Dianne thought fast, considering as many sides of the situation as she could. It was tempting to just agree, to make the grand gesture and charge off to adventure. But no. False courage or bravado might help her ego, but the price for Earth would be too high. If she had to throw her dreams away, so be it. She leaned forward abruptly. “Yes, I’m here and alive. And I want to stay that way for a while.” She had to take charge of this little chat now if she was going to do it.

Wolf looked at her in surprise. “You aren’t accepting the mission voluntarily? I assure you that I have the power to draft labor—”

“For a suicide mission?” she asked. “For a mission that will throw away one of the few cards planet Earth has in this game? I’ll fly the Terra Nova—but not straight down the throat of a monster four hundred million times bigger than Earth! Not until I know something more about that monster.”

Wolf looked at Dianne. For the first time, he seemed to be considering her as something more than a chess piece. “What, exactly, are you saying?” he asked carefully.

“That the Terra Nova took years to build, and so would her replacement. If we even could build her replacement, with most of our off-planet resources and infrastructure gone. For at least the time being, she is irreplaceable. This new Multisystem of yours is likely to be dangerous enough without sending the ship to commit suicide deliberately. Wouldn’t it be nice at least to try to collect some data with the ship before she is vaporized by the enemy? Perhaps, to find out who and what the enemy is?”

“Same thing I’ve been saying, Wolf,” Gerald MacDougal put in. “We ought to search as much of the rest of this system as we can, and then consider a cautious approach to the Sphere. Think about how big the Sphere is. Even if you make the unwarranted assumption that the control system exists, and the further unwarranted assumption that it is on the exterior surface of the Sphere, and not the inside, you’ve got an incredibly large search area. Search the entire surface area of all nine planets in our old Solar System, plus the Sun as well while you’re at it, and you wouldn’t have done one percent of this search.”

“I agree completely,” Dianne said. “Your imaginary control center could cover as much area as Earth’s surface and still get lost on something that big. And what would it look like? What would we be searching for? And while we’re searching that Sphere, what are the people who run the Sphere going to be doing?”

There was the faintest flicker of a smile on Wolf’s face. “I see that you are already behaving as a captain should. Protecting your command. Very well. How would you use the Terra Nova!”

Dianne thought for a long moment and then spoke, choosing her words carefully. “I would explore a sampling of the worlds and stars in the Multisystem, perhaps gradually working in toward the Dyson Sphere itself—if we learned enough to give the Sphere mission some hope of success that would justify the risk. I would do everything I could to avoid risks to the ship or her personnel. I’d be extremely conservative about landings—and I’d run like hell if I was challenged.”

“And what would you do if I ordered you to do it my way?” Wolf asked. “What if I drafted you into the service of the DSI they’ve cooked up, and ordered you to head straight for the Sphere?”

Dianne shrugged. If the man wanted to ask hypothetical questions… “A captain in space is the absolute master of her ship, particularly as regards the safety of the ship and crew. I’d do it my way. Legally, I don’t know who’d be right. But as a practical matter, the Terra Nova was designed to take longer trips than this without help from Earth. You couldn’t do anything to stop me.”

Bernhardt grinned and looked up at Gerald, then back to Dianne. “I like this. I always appreciate a little ambiguity in circumstances. I find it brings out the best in people. As I’m sure it will in Gerald here. I’ve just decided to make him second-in-command as well as chief scientist.”

Gerald blinked and stood up straight. “What?”

“It only makes sense,” Wolf said smoothly. “After all, the main concern of this mission will be the research of extraterrestrial life, specifically the creatures that have done this to Earth. And you are an exobiologist. You have thought on all these matters. Besides, as we’ve just seen, the two of you clearly think alike.”

“But I know nothing of ship handling, or navigation, or anything related to running a spacecraft. If anything happened to Dianne—”

“Then I suggest you see to it that nothing does happen to Dianne until you have learned all those things. We have no time for all the precautions we should take. We need data now. And what Dianne Steiger will need from you is advice.”

Wolf turned his attention back to Dianne. “Very well, Captain Steiger. I hereby draft you into the service of the Directorate of Spatial Investigation and appoint you master of the starship Terra Nova, with orders to proceed directly for the Dyson Sphere. Have a pleasant trip. Our lawyers will have a nice fight when you get back.”

He leaned back over his desk, checked off one more item on his list of things to do, and got on with his work, leaving Dianne and Gerald to find their own way out.

NaPurHab, the Naked Purple Habitat, was the scene of bedlam, but that was nothing new. It was routine bedlam, the usual chaos. Ohio Template Windbag had an idea that many among the brothersandsisters (“blisters,” in the latest approved parlance, though many were holding out for “sisthers,” or perhaps “sibsters,” instead) didn’t even know something farout had happened.

Ohio sat in the graffiti-splattered comm and control room, behind Chelated Noisemaker Extreme. Ohio’s eyes were fixed on the main monitor. He stared at the image of the Big Ring, hands wrapped around the wide girth of his belly.

Even before the Earth had done its little dance, taking NaPurHab with it, NaPurHab had ridden a rather eccentric orbit, figure-eighting between Earth and Moon, swinging close over each world before flying out to the other. It wasn’t all that stable an orbit for a habitat, and NaPurHab had always needed a lot of course corrections. It had been about the only orbit slot in the Earth-Moon system open to a habitat when the old owners of the hab had built the thing, long before the Purples took it over.

NaPurHab had been close to Earth, just about to swing around the planet and head back toward the Moon, when the Big Jump had gone down. The first pass over the Big Ring hadn’t been that bad. Scary and low, and that was one weird thing to fly over, but the run was double-you slash oh incident. Still, it had been nice to get away from the alien Big Ring, and swing back toward the familiar— if sinfully life-corrupted—face of Earth.

But all good things come to an end, and the pass over Earth was done with now. NaPurHab was headed back out to where the Moon oughta be, out toward the Big Ring. And therein was the flaw. NaPurHab’s orbit had gotten a bit more jostled than anyone had thought. On this second pass, NaPurHab was going to go inside the Big Ring.

Worse, NaPurHab would strike the Earth on the return trip, just north of Johannesburg. Not good. And Earth wasn’t in much position to help there. The Mom planet had her own probs at the moment, to put it mildly—and NaPurHab had never done much to make itself popular to groundhogs. After all, the whole Earthside crazies movement had sprouted from NaPurHab, and the whole farging point of the crazies was to cheese off the normals.

No, never mind help what couldn’t come in time no-how: privately, at least, Ohio couldn’t blame the Earthsquares for nuking NaPurHab if it came to that. NaPurHab would be a goner anyway. Why flatten a chunk of southern Africa too? Given a choice between Jo-Berg and NaPurHab, the answer came back as about twenty kilotons rocketed into the collective Purple keister. Of course, in his public capacity of Maximum Windbag, Ohio would have to come down hard on Earth for the dastardly deed. Better do it beforehand, tho, cause there weren’t gonna be a chance on the flipside. Best to hope that Chelated could pull this one out.

“So, Chelated, talk to me,” Ohio said. “We got the gas in tank for the gig?” They could have had their talk in straight English, but the former Frank Barlow needed the practice in Purpspeak. It was a key precept of the Purple philosophy that Humpty Dumpty was right: the speaker, and not the words spoken, should be the master. But even for a temporary contract employee, the man’s grasp of the lingo was pretty bad. Too logical a mind, or something.

Ohio could see the man moving his lips, parsing out his response to himself before answering. “Not even close, Bossmeister. Nothing like the fuel to be cool and raise the Earthside half of the ride.” Not bad, Ohio thought. For Purpspeak, that was fair, if a little too readily understandable.

“Then we dead, Ned?” Ohio asked.

Chelated had to think again. “Be steady, Teddy. We got one other set of dice to roll. We got the gas, barely, to lay down an orbit inside the Big Ring.”

“Inside? We dunno even what the hell izzat the center of the Ring.”

“Hell, bossman, something at the center has mass, fershure. Even if we can’t see it. Uhh… we got those unwhiteblue flashes coming from it every hundred twenty-eight seconds. And they’s some kinda big herd o‘ unheard of thangs, big dude thangs, nearly the size of the habitat, in damnclose close orbit of the blueflasher at the center. They moving plentydamnscary quick. And after every blueflash, they’s one less big dude around the blueflasher.”

“Say what? Oh, the hell with it, Frank, switch to English. You’re giving me a headache.”

Chelated/Frank breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Walter. I’ve got one already. What I was trying to say was that there is definitely something at the center.”

“Just how big a mass?”

“Well, I derived that from our own motion. The blueflasher weighs just about as much as the Moon. Pretty wild for something so small we can’t even see it through the big telescopes.”

“And the ‘big dude thangs’? What does that translate to?”

Frank shrugged. “Actually, that’s as good a name as any. Large objects, roughly the size of this habitat, several hundred of them, moving very fast in very close orbit around the blueflasher at the center. Beats the hell out of me what they are. But after every flash, the tracking computer says there’s one less of them. Like the large objects are going into the blueflasher. Or through it.”

Ohio/Walter sighed and wished for the old days, back when he was teaching high school in Columbus, and not trying to keep ten thousand yahoos alive inside a tin can in space. Things were bad when setting up a close orbit around a wormhole was the solution to a problem. Better to pretend it wasn’t true. Lying to himself beat going crazy. “Frank, I’m a reasonable man, so I know you’re not trying to tell me what you seem to be trying to tell me. I refuse to believe in wormholes. But circularize us around the centerpoint anyway. If you think that’s our best shot.”

“With the fuel we’ve got, it’s our only shot,” Frank said, a bit worriedly. “I don’t see any other way of getting into a safe orbit.”

“ ‘Safe.’ You suggest putting us in orbit around the wormhole or black hole or whatever it is that I refuse to believe in—that thing that’s where the Moon should be. You suggest putting us in orbit inside the circumference of the Big Ring. And you call it ‘safe.’ ” Ohio Template Windbag shook his head sadly. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about your command of Purpspeak. Obviously you can make a word do whatever you want it to do.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Shattered Sphere

Coyote Westlake had remembered a lesson of her childhood back in Nevada: live with what you could not change. Her bizarre predicament was now routine. She was trapped without a ship or a radio aboard an asteroid that was accelerating smoothly to absurdly high velocities by means she could not understand. She had even gotten used to it all, even used to the impossibility of it all.

Up until a few days ago, space had made sense. She had known the rules. She was a rock miner. She tracked down smaller asteroids, rocks too small to interest the big-time boys. She bored through the rocks, refined whatever metals and volatiles she could find on the spot, and hauled her refined goods back to make a sale. She had some fun on Ceres or one of the big habs, and then back out again. It was a stable, understandable life.

The world surrounding her was equally understandable. The asteroids moved in predictable patterns, and she knew how to keep her ship ticking, knew she would die if she got it wrong, knew how to play a dicker with the traders. It was simple.

Back on Earth, that had never been true of her world. Hell, she had never been sure who or even what she was. Never sure if she was completely human, natural born, a woman who just got born ugly; or if she was a bioengineered “upgrade” that didn’t quite work out. Big boned, too tall, her too-white face too hard edged.

Maybe her parents were a pair of drifters who dumped her on the creche steps—or maybe instead of parents mere was a lab somewhere that did the same after the technicians realized they had blended the genes wrong. She had held all the Nevada jobs—prostitute, card dealer, con grifter, divorce lawyer—and had never been happy. The freaks of Earth generally, and of Las Vegas specifically, disturbed her. L. V. Freestate drew them all: Cyborgs, Purples, head-clears, twominders. They all started to get to her, because she was never quite sure if she was one of them.

Out here, she still didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She was herself. Taking care of herself. Even if that was a mite tricky in the present circumstances.

She had worked as well as she could with the limited hardware aboard the tank—as she now thought of the hab shelter. She spent her days at the bottom of a cylinder five meters across and fifteen meters high, and was determined at least to make her situation as tolerable as she could. She had gotten her bunk off the ceiling and put it on the floor. She’d rigged lines and ropes so she could climb up to the control panel, and had reset all the restraints and handholds to allow her to move more easily.

The trickiest job was reprogramming the hab’s tiny position-reporter computer to provide her with tracking data. She felt a real need to keep at least a rough track of where the hell she was going. If she was doing her crude astrogation right, and assuming a constant acceleration and turnaround halfway there, RA45 was headed straight for Mars.

She still had not the faintest idea as to why this was happening. Who was doing this? Toward what goal? And how? She had rigged her exterior-view camera on the longest cable she could manage and spooled the cable out far enough for the camera to give her a view of the asteroid’s aft end, trying to get a look at the engines that were doing this.

But there were no engines, there was nothing at all back there. Just more rock. Damn it, something was accelerating this rock. If the something wasn’t outside the rock, it had to be inside the asteroid, somehow. But then how was the acceleration even happening? A rocket inside the rock couldn’t work. That meant a reactionless drive.

Enough of the anything-for-a-buck Las Vegas Free-state tradition had stuck with her that it occurred to her, even in her current predicament, that a reactionless drive ought to be worth something.

That, and the risk of madness by boredom, were enough to set her to work trying to solve the puzzle. She took her first crack at it by sitting and thinking. This drive seemed to have some attributes of a rocket, and some attributes of a gravity field. Like a rocket, it obviously could be started and presumably stopped at will. Like gravity, it worked without throwing mass in one direction to move in another.

But gravity couldn’t be pointed in one direction—it radiated out spherically from the center of a mass.

But if the whole rock were simply falling forward under the influence of some sort of external gravity field, her body would have been pulled along by the gee field precisely as much as the asteroid itself. The relative acceleration between herself and the asteroid would be exactly zero—in other words, she should have been in free-fall, effectively in zero gee.

But she was in a very definite five-percent field. Or was it five? That was still just a guess. There had to be a way to measure it.

What was accelerating her? A magic rocket that didn’t need propellant or fuel or nozzles, or magic gravity you could point in any direction?

She sat there on the bottom of her tank and worried at the puzzle, perfectly aware of what she was really doing: struggling to keep her mind off another little problem. No matter how the propulsion system worked, she was going to be in a hell of a mess when this rock piled into Mars.

Chancellor Daltry was demonstrating a fair talent for running tight meetings, Larry decided. Things were moving right along.

And Larry was also getting the very clear impression that Daltry was going to be the one making the final decisions here.

“I now call on Dr. Marcia MacDougal,” the chancellor said. “We have heard some stunning facts today, but I believe Dr. MacDougal can match them. I had the opportunity to talk with her before the meeting, and I must say that she has come up with some remarkable results. Dr. MacDougal.”

Larry watched the wiry, ebony-skinned woman stand and cross to the audiovisual controls at the far end of the room. She was plainly nervous. “Thank you, Chancellor. I’ve made what I think might be a real breakthrough—but I don’t know what it all means. I know this will sound backwards, but I think it might be best if I start at the end, and then jump back to the beginning and work my way forward.”

She plugged a datablock into place and punched a few buttons. The lights dimmed and an image appeared in the air over the table. A massive sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the air, spinning slowly. Larry frowned and stared at it. A red dwarf star? But why so dim? And why were its edges so well defined?

Then he noticed faint lines etched into the surface of the object, barely visible against the dark background. “Could you enhance those surface lines a bit?” he asked. Marcia worked the controls and the lines brightened.

“Longitude and latitude,” someone in the darkness said.

“That’s what I thought, at first,” Marcia said. “It’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.”

“What the hell are we looking at?” Lucian’s voice asked.

“A movie,” MacDougal replied. “A three-dee, alien movie. What it’s a film of, I don’t know. Watch for a moment.”

Suddenly the sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the sphere’s interior and vanished out of the frame. The sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface.

The image blanked, and then the sphere reappeared, unbroken and whole. “The sequence loops at that point,” Marcia said. “It was repeated at least a hundred times, far more often than any other message unit. That suggests to me that whatever that showed us was damned important to the Charonians.”

“To the who?” Larry asked.

Marcia shrugged. “The aliens. I had to name them something. The Ring of Charon was what woke them up, so Charonians seemed as good as anything.”

“Where did these images come from?” Raphael asked.

“From the wormhole,” Marcia replied. “It was sent, as a binary-code signal, by whatever is on the other side of the wormhole. And I’m sorry, Hiram, but I’m convinced that’s what the Earthpoint mass is. I don’t know who or what on this end is supposed to see it.”

“How was it sent?” Lucian asked.

“Forty-two-centimeter radio signals, sent in burst patterns. Answering the twenty-one-centimeter signal coming from the Moon.”

“How could radio pass through a wormhole?” Lucian asked.

“Mostly because there’s nothing to stop it, as I understand it,” Marcia said. “A wormhole isn’t as much a hole as a door, a way of putting two planes of normal space next to each other. Once that door’s open, anything that can pass through normal space—matter, energy, radiation, whatever—can cross the wormhole.”

“Hell’s bells, if you can drop planets through the hole, what’s a few lousy radio waves?” someone asked.

Radio waves. An idea suddenly started tickling at the base of Larry’s mind, but the conversation steamrollered on, and he lost his train of thought.

McGillicutty stood up and leaned in toward the hologram to get a better look. The grim red of the sphere made his face into something forbidding and sepulchral. “I knew you were working on cracking their signals, Marcia, but I had no idea you had gotten so far. You should have come to me for help. With imagery this complex, you had to make some choices and interpretations you’re not trained to make. How solid is this? I mean, how reliable could this be?”

“It’s close, very, very close to what was sent,” Marcia replied in a steely voice. “I’d say the colors, for example, are within angstroms of the intended value. Aside from bringing the latitude and longitude lines up when you asked, I haven’t enhanced or manipulated it at all. Time scale and physical scale, I have no idea on. This could be a record of a beach-ball-sized object popping— or a planet or a star being wrecked. All I know is it seems to be important to the Charonians.”

“What in God’s name is it?” Raphael asked in the darkness.

The room was silent for a long time. “This is a damn sophisticated four-dee image,” McGillicutty said at last, in a voice that seemed to be louder than it had to be. “How the hell did you manage to crack it?”

Marcia laughed, a low, throaty chuckle that came from the darkness, and a gleaming flicker of teeth flashed. “I told you I thought it would make sense to start at the end,” Marcia said. “I wanted to show you that I really had something before I explained how I got it. I know it seems amazing that I could come up with images and data so fast—even more so when I have no idea what the data mean. I wish I could take credit for cracking the enemy’s codes—but I can’t. These messages were designed to be decoded.

“In fact that’s the thing that worries me the most. Your invaders, Dr. Raphael, have done worse than deliberately ignore us. I get the distinct impression that it has never even occurred to them that we might be a threat, or even an issue. I think it would be a major effort of will for them even to realize we exist. They send messages back and forth right in front of us, the way we might talk about taking the dog to the vet while he’s in the room. We assume dogs can’t possibly understand people, and maybe they assume people can’t possibly understand Charonians. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know what they’re saying.”

Again, awkward silence blanketed the room. This time McGillicutty’s grating voice was almost a relief. “Dammit, MacDougal, how the hell did you unbutton this message?” He wasn’t going to let that question go.

“Arecibo technique,” Marcia replied. “A big old radio telescope they used in the twentieth century. On Bermuda or Cuba or someplace. It’s an old, old idea. The idea was to send out a binary message based on simple enough concepts and images that a totally alien culture could understand it. Something you could plot to graph paper—fill in a square for a binary on, leave it blank for a binary off to form pictures.

“A lot of your first message would consist of basic concepts of number, size, atomic structure in schematic form, that sort of thing. Count from one to, say, ten, then run the beginning of the prime-number series, maybe demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem by drawing a right triangle. Once you’ve sent enough for them to get the idea, maybe you send an outline sketch of what your species looks like, or a map of your planet or solar system. Your radio wavelength could provide a linear scale to give the size of any image you drew.

“The idea went that once you had a basic information set of number, geometry, scale, and atomic notation, you could move from there to real conversation, except that they were talking about signals sent to alien races light-years away.

“If you got good enough, and could establish a gray scale and a color scale, you could send detailed pictures. I don’t think anyone back then ever considered sending fully three-dimensional moving images, but the principle is the same. The first series of messages back and forth between the Moon and whatever the hell is on the other end of the wormhole closely resembled the number sequences I’ve just described.”

“Wait a second,” Larry objected. “This whole technique you’re describing is a means for sending messages to someone who doesn’t understand your language.”

“Right. In essence the first thing you do is send a grammar book to make sure they understand what follows.”

“But they’re sending messages to their own people,” Larry protested. “That’s nuts.”

“All I know is what I saw when I unbuttoned the message traffic. The computer was able to break it in real time into a two-dimensional grid. I had to walk the program through interpretation of the first outgoing message-grid—what the math examples were, what symbols they were using for numbers and atomic structures. Once the computer got the idea, it was off and running, learning the new language on its own. I just sat there and watched it. It was a classic example of the sort of grid messages we all dreamed up a million times in my xeno-bio classes—just more elaborate and sophisticated.

“You know about that twenty-one-centimeter signal coming from somewhere on the Moon. No one can find its source transmitter. That signal seems to go through to the Charonians on the other side. They send back a copy of the message at a doubled wavelength to signal receipt, and then send their own messages. Then the Lunar Charonian transmitter echoes the message from the other side. Once or twice the Lunar transmitter sends a perfect echo and then a slightly altered one. I didn’t get it until I compared the two copies. It was correcting the wormhole Charonian’s language errors.

“There’s no doubt in my mind on two points: That the Lunar Charonian had to teach whatever-it-was-sending-to the Lunar Charonian language. And that the receiving whatever-it-was was expecting a language lesson. It was too fast off the mark, replied too quickly. Which suggests the receiver had to be prepared to receive this message— even though they did not understand the language. It demonstrated that by making mistakes as it learned.”

“Except you’re not talking about a language here,” Larry said. “At least not so far as I can see. Has there been any arbitrary code in these signals that you couldn’t unbutton, something that might be commentary or orders or abstract thought symbols?”

Marcia looked as if she was about to protest, but then she stopped. “No, there wasn’t. Nothing unaccounted for. Just the data stream. I’ve been able to decode it all down into pictorial images of one degree or another of sophistication. So if you want to nitpick, then no, it’s not a true natural language.”

“Hold it there,” McGillicutty said. “The sons of bitches are sending messages here. How the hell can it not be a language?”

“Because, if you really want to nitpick, they aren’t actually messages, either,” Larry said. “They’re pictures. The sender and receiver have agreed on a set of transmission standards, a procedure for sending data.”

“So what?”

“They can only send data—not advice, abstracts, or ideas.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference between a picture of your Aunt Minnie and a letter telling what you think of the old girl,” Larry said. “According to Dr. MacDougal, there’s no residual signal left over that might be used as a symbol set for interpretative discussion. It’s as if I had come in here with pictures, and data, but without any words to tell you what it all meant.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Sondra said, “then maybe they don’t need language. Because they don’t need interpretation.”

Larry looked at her for a second. “Go on. What’s your point?”

“They don’t need a language capable of interpretation or opinion or theories because there is no possibility of disagreement. Their responses are all Pavlovian. If every member of their species always respond to the same stimuli in the same way, language would be redundant.”

“In effect, a mass mind. It doesn’t need communications,” Daltry said. “Separated by great expanses of time and space, but so like each other they always reach the same conclusions.”

“It sort of makes sense,” Sondra said, “but then why the grammar lessons?”

“Language drift,” Lucian suggested. “Enough time has passed since their last contact that the two parties expected to be mutually unintelligible. Maybe they think very nearly alike, but there was some drift, either in attitude or simply in styles of notation.”

“How long are you talking about before that could happen?” Larry asked.

“I’m no expert,” Lucian said, “but we can read and understand Shakespeare, and he was eight hundred years ago—but there’s certainly been drift since then. Any decent record keeping and memory storage system would slow the process down. If you’re dealing with computers that can remember for you, you’re talking at least thousands of years since they talked with each other. Maybe millions.”

“Millions of years?” Daltry said with a faint gasp.

Larry cleared his throat. “That’s not quite as incredible as it sounds. We’ve got some evidence that suggests the Charonians have been around a long, long time. There’s a whole new situation that our group on Pluto decided to keep under wraps until we got here, something we couldn’t trust to radio or message laser. In fact the team from Pluto is agreed that we will not divulge this data to this committee until we get some assurances that it will be kept quiet. We don’t want to spread panic.”

“How could anything panic us more than losing Earth?” Daltry asked.

“Having people thinking you did it,” Sondra said.

“You’ve already got the Naked Purples in Tycho claiming they did it.”

“But they couldn’t have! No one could possibly believe them,” Marcia protested. Heads turned to see who was talking. “No one could imagine the Purples had the ability to do this. I ought to know,” she added.

“But supposing people had reason to imagine just that?” Sondra asked gently. “Suppose there was some good, hard, unnerving evidence that this thing was being run from the Moon? Worse than the mystery radio beams. Don’t you think someone might panic? Perhaps attack the Moon to prevent further disasters?”

“No one would do that,” Marcia protested.

Sondra swept her hand around the table, indicating everyone. “We’re here from all the settled planets and major habitats. Can you all honestly say that you’re positive that your governments might not drop one of your nastier noisemakers on the Purps—or on the Moon generally— if they thought there was even a microscopic chance it would do some good? No matter who got hurt? And you from the Moon—what would your people do if they thought one of the other worlds was about to make a sudden preemptive attack? What would your government do?”

Again there was silence.

At last Chancellor Daltry cleared his throat. “Speaking for the Lunar contingent, I can pledge my group to silence. As you may have gathered from the lack of press or other attention, we have done what we could to keep this meeting quiet for the time being, and I have no desire to step into the spotlight just yet. What of the other delegations? Will you keep silent on this new evidence outside this group?”

There was a rumble of reluctant assents, and Larry nodded, satisfied. “Thank you for that,” he said. “I think in a moment you will all understand why that was necessary. But let me emphasize that none of us think any human agent had anything to do with this. We just don’t want anyone else to think so either.” He rose and went to the video display controls on the far side of the room. “Let me tell you about the Lunar Wheel…”

The ghostly gray-on-black image of the Wheel, hanging inside a transparent Moon, hovered over the conference table alongside the frozen, blood red image of the shattered sphere. Larry noticed more than one delegate glancing down at the floor, imagining the monstrous device there under their feet. It was a damned unsettling thought, that a world-girdling monster was lurking in the depths.

“To sum up,” he said. “The Wheel is a toroidal object buried many kilometers below the Moon’s surface. It exactly follows the border between Nearside and Farside, so that it was always precisely facing the Earth—when the Earth was there. It in many ways closely resembles the Ring of Charon, and was detected because it is also a gravity-wave generator. It is massively more powerful than the Ring of Charon. It is the source of the radio signal we have been monitoring since the moment Earth vanished. It seems obvious that it is central to whatever has happened to the Earth—and whatever is happening to the Solar System. It’s been there a long time. That is more or less the sum total of our knowledge of the Wheel. The biggest problem we have right now is that the only device we have capable of seeing the Wheel is back at Pluto. Maybe someday we’ll rig a more compact gravity telescope, but not soon. If we could get closer to the Wheel, I have no doubt we could get far better imagery—but this is all we’re going to get for a while. We have played a few games with computer enhancement, and those runs have produced one rather intriguing additional detail. Computer, display enhancement routine.”

Two faint, ghost needles of gray floated at the edge of visibility, one growing up from the north pole of the Wheel, the other from the south. Both seemed to reach the Lunar surface proper. “Computer, give us a brightened outline on the enhancement-revealed details.” Bright red lines snapped into being around the needles.

“So, what are they?” McGillicutty asked.

“Access tunnels,” Daltry suggested. “They needed a way in and out when they built that thing.”

“That was my thought too,” Larry agreed.

“Then we have to go in there and get a look at that thing,” Lucian said.

That brought out dead silence around the table. At last Raphael spoke unhappily. “That was our conclusion,” he said. “We must find out the nature of the Lunar Wheel. Examine the Wheel, and we should learn a great deal more about the aliens—the Charonians—who run it. Who are they? Where are they? Are some of them actually inside the Moon? We must get to that Wheel, somehow.”

“And yet there are other needs,” Daltry said. “We need to get a close look at the gee-point objects, and see what happens when they reach a planet. Mars will be our best chance for that.”

“Can we get an observer team to Mars before the first gee-point asteroid shows up?” Sondra asked.

Vespasian checked with his notepack. “With a constant-boost ship at one gee, sure thing. Get you there in under four days.”

“And while we should have a gravities specialist going to Mars to observe there, I also want at least some of you gravities people back in place on Pluto as soon as possible,” Daltry said. “In the meantime: Dr. Berghoff, Dr. McGillicutty, Dr. MacDougal. A gravities expert, a physicist, and the person who has made the most progress toward communication with the, ah, Charonians. There is a constant-boost ship ready to depart for Mars. I want the three of you on it tomorrow morning.”

Sondra, fresh off a grueling constant-boost flight, swore under her breath, but Daltry did not seem to hear it.

Daltry turned toward Larry and Dr. Raphael. “I’m told that your ship, the Nenya, will be upgraded and ready for the return flight in seven days’ time. Mr. Chao, Dr. Raphael. You will return to Pluto at that time.” Daltry smiled grimly, showing a bit more steel than he had before now. He was clearly not interested in discussion. Obviously, he was assuming he could give orders—and everyone around the table seemed willing to take them. For his own part, Larry dreaded the idea of a return flight to Pluto. Another sixteen days in the Nenya… But there didn’t seem likely to be any pleasant duties ahead.

“But we have one week to put you to use here, Mr. Chao,” Daltry said. “Obviously, a good part of that time should be spent consulting with the scientific people here. But there is the question of the Wheel, and getting to it. That would seem a high priority as well.”

Chancellor Daltry leaned in from the middle of the table and looked both ways down it. Larry at one end, Lucian at the other. “Mr. Chao, Mr. Dreyfuss. One of you knows gravity-wave generators, the other how things are done on the Moon. The two of you ought to be able to find a way to reach the Wheel. You have one week to do it.”

Lucian seemed about to protest, but said nothing. Plainly, he did not want to work with Larry. That stung, more than a bit, but it did not surprise Larry. Even if it was unexplained, unexpressed, he knew there was already something gone wrong between Lucian and himself.

“Very well. I suggest that we give our new arrivals a chance to freshen up, and then reconvene here in one hour’s time.” The meeting broke up into a general hubbub of voices as people stood and stretched. Obviously a number of people wanted to talk to Larry, but he was in no mood for that right now. He found himself drifting toward Daltry at the center of the room, where the holographic displays of the Lunar Wheel and the shattered Sphere still hung in the middle of the air. The Lunar Wheel. Bad blood between Lucian and himself was not a good sign. Not if they were supposed to tackle something the size of the Wheel together.

“How long has that Wheel been down there?” Dr. Daltry asked, looking up at them. “How long has it been waiting for the signal we accidentally sent?” He nodded up at the strange repeating image of the Sphere. “And what in all the names of hell is that?”

“We can’t answer that, Dr. Daltry,” Lucian said, coming over to stand on the chancellor’s other side. “Why don’t we send a little radio message and ask them?”

Larry looked at Lucian in surprise. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get my finger on.”

“What?” Lucian grinned sardonically at Larry. “Trying to talk to them? Let me tell you, friend, they won’t listen.”

“No! Trying to talk with Earth! It’s on the other side of that hole. After all, if they can send radio signals through the wormhole, why can’t we?”