The Ring of Charon

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Thought Chain

Tyrone Vespasian caressed the Nenya’s controls. It had been too long since Vespasian had done anything but watch others go into space. He was more than pleased that he had convinced Daltry his piloting skills were sharp, and that the Gravities Research Station would have use for his knowledge of the Earthpoint wormhole’s behavior.

His face darkened. There was another, truer reason for his flying off to Pluto. With Lucian gone, he had to get off the Moon, run away from his pointless guilt, his sense of loss.

He couldn’t have done anything to prevent Lucian’s dying. But there should have been something. And by piloting this craft, by tending to the still-weakened Larry Chao, perhaps he was performing penance.

Larry. He was back there, in his cabin. There was a boy who had seen more than his share.

And done more. One 25-year-old kid pushes one button, and the history of humanity is changed for all time.

He checked his gauges carefully, and made sure the Nenya was holding together. If these gravity geniuses didn’t get back to Pluto, history might end altogether.

“So what’s happened while I’ve been out?” Larry asked, his voice weak and thin.

“Quite a bit,” Simon Raphael said, trying to hide his worry. The lad had been under sedation almost constantly for three days—but coming out of it this time, he seemed far more calm and rational than he had before. But even if he was recovered enough to sit up for a time, he was clearly not yet well. Though there was nothing physically wrong with Larry, his mind had suffered a cruel enough shock to weaken his body as well. His subconscious was responding, trying to recover from injuries he had never actually suffered.

Raphael spoke, pretending for Larry’s sake that he did not notice anything wrong. “We’re not really getting anything new. Just updates. One word we’re getting from everywhere: the structures are going up. Eyewitness and video reports from Mars, the radar teams at Venus, Sun-side overflight missions on Mercury. Observations of all Jupiter and Saturn’s major satellites. They’re all reporting the same thing—huge structures are rising on the equators of all the worlds.

“And more and more of both types—the gee-point asteroids and the faster gee points coming through the wormhole—are just placing themselves in parking orbits and waiting once they arrive at their target planet. What they’re waiting for, I don’t know. There also seems to be some sort of disturbances in the equatorial weather bands of Jupiter and Saturn, and there have been several sightings of asteroids entering Jupiter’s atmosphere. God only knows how the Charonians are managing that, or what it means. Except that they can survive inside a gas giant. No one can figure out how the Charonians are staying alive on Mercury and Venus and Ganymede, either. The biologists say it’s patently impossible—except the Charonians are doing it.

“The first gee-point asteroids have only just arrived at Uranus, and Neptune can expect visitors in a few days. Pluto’s turn is coming if the trajectory projections hold up. The Moon still hasn’t been touched, presumably because the Wheel lives there.

“The big structures are different shapes on each world, though I doubt that means anything. It matches the patterns at smaller scales. Every Lander has variants on the auxiliary creatures and machines that attend it, but they all do the same work. On Mars, the Charonian structures are pyramids. On others, massive cylinders, or enormous hemispherical domes.”

“Things are moving toward a climax,” Larry said. “The last of the Martian pyramids will be complete in a day or so. What happens then? What happens when enough of the big structures are complete on the other worlds?”

Raphael smiled. “Maybe all the orbiting gee-point objects crash, and use the big structures for target practice.”

“Charming thought,” Larry said. A few of the Landers had malfunctioned, crashing instead of landing gently. There was one confirmed crash on Venus, two at Ganymede and one impact on Mars, on the other side of the globe from Port Viking, just a few hours after the Anthony went through the wormhole. Thankfully, the Martian impacter was a small gee point, moving fairly slowly when it hit. It had punched a hell of a big hole in the surface, but had not caused any casualties or damage to inhabited areas. “The crashed Landers are the closest thing to good news we’ve had since the first commlink with Earth,” Larry said. “They at least show the enemy is fallible. But times are bad when an asteroid crashing into a world is good news.

“The thing is, I get the feeling that the asteroid strikes should be telling me something,” Larry went on. “Something important. But the gee points’ parking themselves in orbit worries me most of all. That’s a signal that the Charonians are ready for the next phase—whatever that next phase is.”

Damn it, who or what were the Charonians? Who controlled that Sphere? And from where? “Sorry,” Larry said. “My mind’s wandering. There are too damn many questions.” Larry thought of the recording of the shattered sphere Marcia MacDougal had picked up from the first tap on the Lunar Wheel. At least that was clear now—and yet still a mystery. “Can you call up the sphere image Marcia showed us?”

Raphael worked the controls on his notepack. The wallscreen cleared and showed a sullen red globe glowing in the darkness. And there was the burn-through, the twin sparks of fire leaping away from inside it and racing away.

Raphael set the holographic image to repeat, and brought up a series of images of the Dyson Sphere as relayed from Earth via the Saint Anthony.

“They’re the same,” Raphael said. “They have to be the same. They both display the same surface markings. As if someone had etched in lines of longitude and latitude. The patterns are identical.”

“But the images of the Sphere relayed by the Anthony show nothing that suggests any such thing ever happened to it,” Larry objected, staring at the two images.

“Perhaps the burn-through is on the other side of the Sphere, on the hemisphere not visible from Earth.” Raphael suggested.

“No, this Sphere, Earth’s Sphere, isn’t wobbling or tumbling. It’s very clearly under control,” Larry said.

Raphael nodded. “You’re right. But then what does the message-image of the shattered Sphere mean? Is it a premonition? A warning? What sort of enemy would be powerful enough to endanger a Dyson Sphere? An entity that can grab stars and planets, that can call upon the entire power output of a star. What could be powerful enough to dare attack that?”

Larry shrugged helplessly. “Why were there two stars inside the Dyson Sphere?” He shook his head. “A side issue. The physicists can worry about it later.”

“They’re all side issues,” Raphael said, a bit heatedly. “Compared to figuring out the Charonians’ next move, everything else is a side issue. Let’s try to tackle the situation from another tack. Maybe there’s some clue in when things happen, their order.” He pulled out his notepack and called a chronology of events up onto the screen.

“Okay, but if the Charonians ignore human activity, so should we,” Larry said. He took the notepack from Raphael and worked the controls for a moment. “Besides, we have no idea what they would chart as a major or minor event. Let’s blank out the human events and just chart all the Charonian actions, no matter how trivial, against time.” Larry set the system for graphic display on the wallscreen, a red dot against a white background for every single thing that happened.

Raphael looked up at the display and drew in his breath. From the moment Earth vanished until the time the Lunar Wheel received the first image of the shattered Sphere, the pace of events was leisurely at best. It was immediately after that image that things were thrown into a panicky rush and started to happen in frantic haste, all over the Solar System. The image of the shattered Sphere had stimulated the Wheel to action.

“To me, that pattern says the shattered Sphere image scared the merry hell out of the Wheel,” Larry said. “So why should a picture of a Sphere scare it? What do we know about the Sphere, anyway?” He lay back in the bed.

Raphael took back the notepack, looked over the summaries. “Let me see. According to what we have from Earth, there are at least eight G-class stars around the Dyson Sphere, held in place by gravity control. Uncounted terrestrial-sized worlds around each star, perhaps ten or twenty around each.”

“So what are those worlds to the Charonians?” Larry asked, staring at the ceiling. “Prisoners? Science experiments?”

A weird and chilling idea popped into Raphael’s mind. “Or perhaps toys? Or pets? They’re certainly being well cared for, if Earth is any example. None of us dared dream that Earth would have survived in such good shape.”

Suddenly, Larry sat up again. “That’s it. What they’re doing is keeping Earth safe. That’s the point. You’ve just reminded me of a dumb idea I tossed out a long time ago. Maybe they got the Earth out of the way before the rough stuff began here in the Solar System. Earth was being taken out of harm’s way. Maybe the rough stuff is about to begin, here.”

Raphael looked at Larry and felt fear sweat suddenly popping out of his forehead. “Suppose it’s not the Earth they want—but the Solar System?” Raphael asked.

The Nenya roared through the darkness, accelerating toward Pluto, many dark days ahead.

Gerald MacDougal bustled into the crowded wardroom of the Terra Nova and looked around. A dozen conversations were starting up between people who had never met before. Like lunchtime on the first day of school, he thought. A roomful of new people, a sense of things beginning, a chance for new adventure.

As he made his way through the line for his morning tea, he heard bits and snatches of conversation. There was only one topic this day: the Saint Anthony, bearing news from the Solar System.

And of Marcia. His wife’s name on so many of the reports filled him with a special pride, and relief. He might well never see her again, though he was by no means resigned to that. At least he knew she was alive and kicking.

And she—they, all of them—had seen the enemy. Here Earth was, in the heart of the enemy’s empire, and none of them had gotten within a hundred thousand kilometers of a Charonian of any sort.

He took his tea to an empty table, sat down and thought.

The Charonians, the aliens, had not offered up a single clue to their own nature, even as they flaunted their power with arrogant confidence, both here in the Multisystem, and back home. Time after time, in endless ways, they had demonstrated that they had no fear of humanity, and perhaps humans were quite literally beneath their notice. Perhaps beings that hunted planets paid life no mind, any more than a man who captured lions would even think to consider the lion’s fleas.

Except that Earth, and Earth’s life, was so well cared for. It occurred to Gerald that humanity, no, human technology, was the only thing harmed by the move to the Multisystem. Scarcely any nonsentient species would even notice the change. Solar constant, axial tilt, the tides, even—to a very close approximation—the length of the year, all had been duplicated. Satellites, spacecraft, communication and trade were all that suffered.

Life, then, was important to the Charonians, and they made great effort to protect it.

It was intelligent life they held in such contempt that they could ignore it.

A chill ran through his soul, and he whispered a silent prayer.

But that thought, of intelligent life, had set something tickling at his memory. Something he sensed was of great importance. Marcia. Yes, she was part of it. Somewhere, back in the past. Something in graduate school, back on the Moon that no longer hung in Earth’s sky.

Gerald leaned back in his chair and looked at the crowd, wondering what possible reason there could be for thinking of such things at a time like this.

But he ignored that voice of doubt, and let his mind journey where it might. His subconscious was trying to tell him something, remind him of some bit of knowledge that was not recorded on a datablock. A clue hidden in his own memory. The train of thought was delicate and elusive. If he struggled too hard to understand it, he might destroy it altogether. He let it drift and carry him where it might. School. The wardroom had reminded him of school days. A lecture, and Marcia had been sitting next to him, because he remembered talking with her about it. An idea that had excited him.

Which of his classes had it been? No, wait a second. He had been sitting in on her class. An engineering class, some wild theory the professor was spinning one day when she had covered all the planned material early.

But what was it?

Some wild idea in space construction. Von something.

Gerald sat bolt upright, and nearly sent himself sprawling in zero gee. Von Neumann. That was it.

Gerald’s blood ran cold. Von Neumann machines. A dozen pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and it was suddenly all clear to him. Horrifyingly clear.

They would need the answer back in the Solar System, and back on Earth. And now, fast, before that CORE could get any nearer to the Saint Anthony.

He scrambled out of his seat and headed for the comm center. It all made sense. He knew that he had got it right. But even so, he was more than half-hoping he had gotten it wrong.

Sondra Berghoff mumbled something in her sleep and turned over, so that her arm flopped over the edge of the cot. Marcia MacDougal, standing at the door, looked in and smiled.

Marcia herself had been working more hours than she should have, out at the Landing Zone One observation camp, trying to pull in just a few more facts. She was more than a bit tempted to take up residence on the couch in the opposite corner for a few hours. But not yet. Not quite yet. There was so much to know about the Charonians. Marcia was still tempted by the hope—or perhaps the illusion—that one more hour of study, of thought, would be rewarded with the big answer. No one had yet been able to pull it all together, put all the pieces in one jigsaw puzzle. Marcia MacDougal wanted to be the one who did.

Marcia and Sondra had taken over a research room at the library of Port Viking, determined to sift through the mountains of data dug up in the Solar System and on Earth. Unfortunately for Marcia’s sense of order, Sondra had gotten there first.

Datablocks littered the floor. Printouts were stacked up everywhere. A playback unit was blaring out some bombastic piece of classical music Marcia did not recognize. Video images taken by Earthside astronomers and relayed by the Saint Anthony were up on half the screens. The other half showed images from various datataps placed on the invaders, from the lowliest of carrier bugs and scorpions up to the Lunar Wheel itself.

The datataps, damn them, were providing torrents of information. Unfortunately, none of it seemed to mean very much. Marcia guessed Sondra had staggered toward the cot after yet another marathon session, hoping that rest would bring the answer. If there could be an answer.

Marcia was not at all unhappy that Sondra was working alongside her. But, just now, she was glad to be alone with her own thoughts for the moment.

Sondra seemed to need light and noise to work—and to sleep. Not Marcia. She punched buttons on her console, shut down the music and most of the video screens. The room turned dark, quiet, full of shadows and silence. Marcia MacDougal liked things that way when she was working on a research problem.

Databanks, supercomputers, communications, reference service, comfortable chairs. No doubt about it: the facilities here were the best. Get assigned to the asteroid-invader problem, and you could have anything you wanted from the frightened Martian government.

Everything except enough sleep.

Marcia got up from her desk, stretched, and stumbled toward the door. Maybe a splash of water on her face would wake her up.

She pushed the door of the study open and squinted as the bright light of the corridor struck her eyes. She made her way down the silent halls to the washroom and wasted precious Martian water in the effort to wake herself up. She toweled off her face and stepped back out into the hall.

She stepped over to a large, ceiling-to-floor window just past the entrance to the library. The city was quiet, and dark, and the dome was opacified, locking in as much of the day’s warmth as possible to carry the city through the night. Marcia was disappointed. She had wanted to see the stars.

The stars. Good God, that was where her husband was now. Gerald. Gerald, where are you ? They had thought themselves tragically sundered with a paltry few hundred million kilometers between them. Now the distance between them was literally unmeasurable.

What had that first signal said? She turned and walked back to the library. Marcia returned to her desk, shuffled through her papers, and found the first preliminary message from Earth. She studied it again, read the sad words. “Distance from Earth unknown… range estimated to be at a minimum of several hundred light years, with no upper limit.” The Earth could be on the other side of the Milky Way—or in another galaxy altogether. She read on. “Perpetrators of Earth-theft unknown. Purpose of Earth-theft unknown…”

She dropped the paper and sighed. This Wolf Bernhardt was not an optimistic reporter, to put it mildly. Well, at least he got the facts down in a clear fashion, and that was what counted.

Earth had survived. The people of Earth were alive— or at least most of them were. That was the real message, and the happiest possible report that could have been sent. They should all be grateful that Earth survived intact.

But had Gerald survived? Marcia closed her eyes and crumpled up the message slip. It seemed likely, but she had no way of knowing. Nor was there anything she could do about it. It was all but certain that she would never see him again, never hear his voice or touch his hand. Perhaps, one day, there would be a message—but even if the Saint Anthony survived long enough to do such service, all the billions of people on Earth and in the Solar System would be struggling to send word through the probe. It would be a long line to wait in. Besides, the probe might be destroyed at any moment by God only knew what. It might be a long time—or forever—before she could get or receive word.

Suddenly, a great feeling of peace settled over her. Gerald was all right. She found herself quite abruptly believing that, knowing it. Strange as it seemed, Earth was in very good hands, well cared for. Whoever had taken the planet had placed it in a carefully perfect orbit, reproduced its original tides and solar radiation to within three decimal places.

Marcia rubbed her tired eyes. Marcia had yet to rest since the first news from Earth had flashed across the Solar System. The first wave of hopeful excitement had faded long ago, to be replaced by utter bafflement. The new data from Earth merely confused the situation even more.

There was a noise from the other side of the room. Marcia looked up to see Sondra, rolling over in her sleep, caught inside a dream.

The screen dimmed, flared, cleared. Somehow Sondra was watching the display and in it at the same time, watching a readout of her own mind, watching the results of watching the readout, which were caused by the readout.

Feedback. Her mind echoed, shifted places, split into two. Now half of her was Charonian, a scorpion robot. But no, a real scorpion, grown huge, its stinging tail swiveling toward her as the monster stepped through the fun-house mirror that was all that remained of the video screen—

Sondra groaned, raised her hands, rolled over—and fell off of the cot. Hitting the floor woke her, but just barely. She lay there, all but inert, for a long moment, before summoning the energy to move.

She looked up to see Marcia trying to hide a smile.

“Good morning, or evening, or whatever the hell it is,” Sondra said in a growly voice.

“Dead of night, I think,” Marcia said.

Sondra got up carefully, trying to unwrap the sheet that had tangled itself around her legs, feeling decidedly foolish. “Just like the bad old days in grad school,” she said, mostly for the sake of something to say. “Pump the brain full of facts, stumble someplace to sleep, and then semi-reawaken to write the term paper. Should I go somewhere else to work?”

Marcia smiled. “No need. I’m stuck myself at the moment. You can’t disturb thoughts that aren’t happening. What have you got so far?”

Sondra smiled. Nice of Marcia to ask. But then Marcia was nice. Much nicer than Sondra would ever be—or would ever want to be. She went over to her own desk on the far side of the room, sat down at her terminal and picked up her notes. “Some extremely weird stuff,” she said. “The exobiology labs came up with something big while you were out. Inside every one of the creatures they’ve examined, they’ve found not only Earth-type DNA, but at least three other incompatible, nonterres-trial genetic-coding systems. Which means the Charoni-ans’ ancestors—or at least the ancestors of whoever engineered them—visited Earth and stole samples of DNA, and did the same on at least three other life-bearing worlds.” Sondra looked up at Marcia. “That scary enough for you?”

“Oh, yes,” Marcia said, clearly too stunned by the words to say anything more.

Sondra couldn’t blame her for being unsettled. It was no happy thought to realize the Charonians had used Earth life as a genetic spare-parts bin. Knowing they were in some way related to Earth life somehow only made them more… alien. “It confirms something else, too,” Sondra said. “The living Charonian creatures are clearly every bit as artificial as their robots. As if the designers of the living creatures and mechanical devices didn’t make any distinction between life-form and machine, and combined some elements of both types into everything they made. Which might explain why the scorpion robots look like scorpions. They’re patterned after some form of terrestrial arthropod.” She tossed her notes down. “That’s the big news here. What’s new from the field?” she asked.

“We’re getting a lot better at reading the Charonians’ minds,” Marcia said, leaning back in her chair and propping her feet up. “I’ve spent the day pulling together a lot of data on the thought processes of the Charonians. The datataps are collecting more information than we’ll ever use. And we’re getting terrific stuff from the Lunar Wheel taps.

“Unfortunately, Charonian minds make for pretty dull reading,” Marcia said dryly. “It’s almost all concrete imagery, direct visualization with almost no capacity for abstract thought, or reasoning by deduction or induction. Their thoughts are highly repetitive. A lot of what passes for thought seems to be ‘playback’ of another creature’s experiences.”

Sondra frowned. “How does that work?”

“Say a scorpion robot comes across a rock in its path,” Marcia said. “It first calls up the memory of a previous encounter with a rock, to see how it handled the problem before. It then adapts the old thought-image to the existing circumstance, and works out the best route around the rock it currently faces. Then it broadcasts the results, and whoever runs into the rock next already knows how to deal with it. They can run through the whole process very quickly. The whole cycle of obstacle encounter, image call-up, image modification, and then reaction only takes milliseconds. The key is that all the Charonians are constantly broadcasting their own experiences and picking up transmissions from all the other Charonians in the vicinity. One creature can send out a query, and then receive a solution to its problem. If they’re working it right, they ought to be able to store and transfer memories from one generation to the next.

“The only other thing I’ve managed to confirm is so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning,” Marcia said. “The bigger they are, the smarter they are, without any relation to machine versus animal or any other variable. Not really a hot news flash, is it? The carrier bugs are just drones,” Marcia went on. “They can only be programmed to fetch and carry. The scorpion-level animals and robots are a bit more flexible. They’re capable of receiving and handling more information, and of dealing with more varied situations—though not always successfully.

“The Lander creatures are smarter than the scorpion-level types—but not by so much as might be expected. I’d score them as being about as bright as cocker spaniels. I assume the Lunar Wheel is far above the Landers in intellect. Sort of a thought chain instead of a food chain.

“But I’ve got a theory I haven’t really proved yet. Down on the lower levels, each creature or robot seems to receive its initial ‘education’ by means of a massive data download from the next level up on the thought chain. I’ve got a great tape of a Lander ‘teaching’ a batch of new scorpions by downloading subsets of its own information to the scorps.”

“Wait a second.” Sondra stood up. There was an answer in there somewhere, a big one. “You’ve been out in the field looking at the Charonians on Mars, and I’ve been here looking at what the Wheel and the Sphere have been doing. We haven’t put the two halves together.” Even as she spoke, Sondra suddenly saw it. The answer was staring them all in their faces! She forced herself to move forward in an orderly fashion, making sure all the links of the logic chain were there. “Before I dozed off, I was watching a transmission from the Wheel to a Lander. It could be interpreted as the Wheel ‘teaching’ the Lander a subset of its information. So how far up does it go?”

Marcia nodded, her face betraying slowly mounting excitement. “So scorps teach bugs. Landers teach scorps. The Wheel teaches the Landers. But who teaches the Wheel?” she asked.

Sondra grinned in triumph. “Bingo.” She was on the right track. That was the real question, the one all the others led towards. “It’s got to be the Sphere, or whoever it is that runs the Sphere. They must be the ones who teach entities on the level of the Wheel.”

“Wait a second,” Marcia said. “The reports from Earth show that the Moonpoint Ring thing orbiting Earth in the Multisystem is just like the Lunar Wheel inside the Moon in our system, except that the Earth’s Moon-point Ring isn’t buried inside a satellite. It had no need for camouflage. But if the Moonpoint Ring is new, it will need teaching. The Sphere could be doing a memory download to the Moonpoint Ring right now.”

Sondra nodded eagerly. “I get it! If Earth could listen in, they might get some real answers. They’d hear from the real masters, the real Charonians who created all. these nightmares.”

“Yes! My God, yes. We could tap right into their instructions to their machines.” Marcia stood up, tried to think. They would have to transmit this idea to the Moon at once, have the Saint Anthony’s controllers radio instructions to the probe through the wormhole.

Marcia glanced at the wall clock, trying to figure how much time was left before they lost the Anthony. Just under thirty-six hours. There was time to send the message, if they started now. She was about to say that to Sondra. But then the quakes started.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Ages of Life and Death

The Sphere had sent its orders, and Sphere orders were something the Caller could not even conceive of resisting.

And the orders said that now was the time. The Caller ran a last check of all its far-scattered underlings. Not all, or even a majority, were ready for action. But many units were prepared, and the Sphere had placed the highest urgency on the Caller’s task. Strange that a job that might take decades, or centuries, should have to be so rushed—but a century from now, the crisis would surely come, and survival might well depend on the hours, the minutes, the seconds saved now.

The Caller focused gravity beams of massive power and fired them at the worlds. The beams of gravity were infinitely more powerful than the ones fired by the Ring of Charon—and no effort had been made to render these beams harmless. Far from it.

The Caller sent the command coursing over the gravity beams to all the completed installations, all across this star system. Along with the commands, embedded in the very gravity beams that sent the orders, it sent power as well. The Worldeaters sucked it all in, eager for more.

On Mars, on Venus and Mercury, on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, the Worldeaters began to earn their names. The Worldeaters took the beams, formed them into gravity fields that did what nature never intended. Around each amalgam of Worldeaters, in whatever shape they formed, the planetary crust began to tear itself open, to heave itself up into the air. The Worldeaters themselves, deeply anchored into the planetary subsurfaces, clung tight, held on.

All but a few. Even Worldeaters could fail, and die. On Mars one failed, and another on Mercury, the huge beings torn up from their moorings, flung up into the sky by their own gravity beams, tumbling insanely across the sky until they crashed and died.

But their fellows strove on, ripping down into the subsurface rock. The debris was pulled in toward the artificial gravity sources that hovered, like so many children’s balloons, over every cluster of Worldeaters. Now fully energized, the gee sources grabbed violently at anything below them that was not strongly secured. But matter pulled in by the gee sources did not accumulate around them. Second-stage gravity beams, wrenchingly manipulated by the Worldeaters, threw the debris up, out, directly away from the planet, accelerating it at incredible rates.

Within minutes, from every rocky or icy world inside Saturn’s orbit, streams of pulverized planetary crust were fountaining up into space. The red stone of Mars, the ice of Ganymede, the acid-leached rock of Venus, and the Sun-scorched skin of Mercury were blasted up into free space, arcing out into clouds of dust that rapidly enveloped the planets.

Huge vortices, hurricanes and tornadoes of fantastic size, roared up from the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The huge spin-storms stretched out from the gas giants, extending their reach far beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere, stretching themselves into bizarre tendrils of gas that arced and spiraled across the sky, releasing megatons of atmosphere into free orbit.

At Saturn, the gas jets slammed into the ring plane, disrupting orbits of the ring particles, knotting the gorgeous patterns of Saturn’s diadem into chaos. The jets of atmospheric hydrogen and methane and complex hydrocarbons boiled up from inside the huge world to splash across space.

All across the Solar System, the stuff of worlds was thrown into orbit. The spaceside Worldeaters set to work, grabbing at the gas and dust and rubble, spreading gravity nets to gather it all up.

And it did not end. The jets, the rubble streams, the storms gathered force, tearing at the fabric of all the worlds. From Mercury to Saturn, the Worldeaters tore away, clawing the flesh from the planets.

The Solar System began to die.

The images streamed unendingly across the video screen. Towering pillars of flying stone and dust and ice and gas surging up into the skies of Mars, Mercury, Venus, Ganymede, Titan, Tethys. Monstrous spin-storms arcing up into orbital velocity from Jupiter and Saturn. The Landers were attacking.

Endless as the terror seemed, yet the end was coming. One by one, the commlinks to the other worlds were dying as clouds of ionized dust jammed radio and laser signals.

Larry sat before the Nenya’s comm station and shook his head, watching the signals come through. How could humans stand against all this? How could the Charonians be stopped, when no one even understood what they were doing? Larry found himself breathing hard, fear and exhaustion overtaking him. He forced himself to lean back, eyes closed, and relax. He felt the tension ease out of him, at least for a moment. Better. Better.

“We’ve lost contact with Mars again,” Raphael was saying, his voice quiet and somber. “The ionized dust is jamming out radio and laser. The Lunar comm stations are sending to all the planets and listening on every alternate frequency they can think of, but there’s no way of knowing if Mars can hear us, or if they’re sending on some frequency we haven’t tried. And the Saint Anthony has got problems. Earth warned us there was some sort of Charonian spacecraft or robot or something homing in on it.”

“We won’t have the probe too much longer,” Vespasian said, with a hint of sadness.

Dr. Raphael remembered how much pride Vespasian had taken in naming the probe, how attached to it he felt. “Good Saint Anthony has already done the most important job,” Raphael said in as comforting a voice as he could manage. “He found Earth for us again. That should be some comfort if all else is lost.”

The skies were full of fire.

Marcia looked up into the Martian night, to where the stars had been replaced by terror. To the southeast, the closest jet of matter was being blasted into space. It was a glowing pillar of flame, air friction, ionization effects, electrical discharges, and whatever strange side effects the Charonian gravity beam caused, all combining to set the matter jet flickering and shimmering with power. Out on the surface, there was a constant splashing of dust jets as random bits of debris fell back from the central matter jet and slammed into the ground. Pieces of debris, some of them boulder-size or larger, were also falling in the city.

The sky itself was glowing, sheets and plumes of dust and rubble streaming off the matter jets, spreading across space, far out enough to be free of the planet’s shadow, free to catch the glow of the hidden Sun. Another dust storm suddenly snapped into being, ruddy sands swept up into the lower atmosphere by the chaos to the south, shrouding the world in blood.

“Do you honestly think they mean us no harm?” Marcia whispered to herself, remembering Larry’s question, the memory of his recorded voice echoing in her mind. He had asked that of Raphael, somewhere in the hours and hours of records that she had played back. But the horrifying answer to the question was that they had no intentions at all toward humans. Nothing so small and insignificant ever entered into the Charonians’ calculations. Marcia had a sudden strange image of herself as a microbe looking up from its glass slide, suddenly realizing the cleaning solution is about to splash down, cascading down onto her world, wiping her away, clearing her away to make room for something new.

She glanced back toward the research library, where Sondra worked the communications console, desperately searching the radio spectrum for any word from anywhere.

But there was nothing to hear. All contact with the outside universe had been lost. Never, in all her life, had all the lines been so utterly cut. The lines to Earth, to her husband, to her work at VISOR, to her whole life. All of it was gone.

So what happened now? she wondered.

There was a new series of flashing explosions in the southern sky. Marcia looked out the windows, past the terrible sights plain to the eye. She tried to see the future, the days still coming. Even Port Viking could not hold together if these storms continued. The dome had taken a year’s worth of punctures in the last day. The air would leak out. Power would fail as the dust blew in, as the Charonian onslaught smashed equipment and threw it into the sky. The Charonians would work their will. Humanity would be wiped clean off Mars.

And then the same on all the other worlds of the Solar System. That would be the end of the human future in the Solar System. And then… her throat choked up, and she began to cry, watching the flaming sky through tear-fogged eyes.

And then, the rest was silence.

Sondra awoke slumped over the comm console. She must have dozed off mere. There was a beeping noise coming from somewhere. She blinked, still half-asleep, and looked around. There was Marcia, collapsed on one of the couches. But what the hell was that beeping? Suddenly she realized it was coming from the comm system. The status board was flashing a message, “COMM CHANNEL CLEAR, TEXT MESSAGE INCOMING FROM LUNAR TRANSMITTER,” it read.

Sondra snapped awake. The jamming had cleared, at least for the moment. The signal’s status-coding sideband showed that the incoming message had been repeating for over an hour.

Wait a second. If one signal could get in, then another could get out. They had written up a long text message the night before, asking for a tap on the Moonpoint Ring, and had prepared it for transmission. Now Sondra reached for the controls and sent it off toward the Moon, setting it to repeat over and over again. With luck, their idea on tapping the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem would still get through in time.

But what about the incoming message? She punched a few keys and it began scrolling across the screen, too fast for her to catch more than a word or two of it. But that was enough.

“Oh my God,” she said. She jumped up and rushed to the couch. “Marcia! Marcia! My God, Marcia. Wake up.” She grabbed Marcia by the shoulder and shook her hard. “Your husband, Marcia.”

Marcia opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. “My husband? Gerald? What about him?”

“We’re getting a message from him,” Sondra said. “Some kind of technical report he wrote and relayed through the Saint Anthony. It’s coming in now.”

But Marcia was already seating herself at the comm unit, printing out a hard copy. She grabbed the first page as it scrolled from the printer. “Oh sweet Jesus, he is alive!” she said. “He’s okay.”

Sondra stepped back a bit, unwilling to intrude on such a private moment. She watched Marcia as she eagerly read through the pages. What was it like to love someone that much? Sondra wondered.

“It’s a tech report,” Marcia said. “Very official. But he managed to work in that he had read our reports on the Landers.” She looked up at Sondra and her eyes were shining. “That’s for me. He’s telling me that he knows I’m alive.” She kept reading, her eyes running eagerly down the page.

But then Marcia’s expression changed, turned to something other than delight. To shock, and surprise. She let her hands drop, still holding the papers. “He’s figured it out,” she said at last, her voice small and still. “Or at least a big part of it. At least he’s got a theory.”

“Figured out what?” Sondra asked. “A theory about what?”

“About what the Charonians are,” she said. “They’re von Neumanns. That’s it. That’s got to be it.”

“That’s what?”

“The answer, the explanation. The key to it all. Not all by itself, but it’s a start.” Marcia stood up, still holding the pages of the message, and stared off into space, carefully thinking it all out. “It makes sense,” she said. “They’ve got to be von Neumanns.”

“Will you please quit saying ‘von Neumanns’ and explain what they are?” Sondra demanded.

“It’s very simple,” Marcia said. “How did we miss it? A von Neumann machine is any device that can exactly duplicate itself out of locally available raw materials. A toaster that could not only toast bread but build more toasters out of things found in the kitchen would be a von Neumann toaster. It’s a very old concept, named for the scientist who dreamed it up.

“But von Neumann’s real idea was to build a von Neumann starship,” Marcia said. “A robot explorer that could fly from one star system to another, explore the system—and then duplicate itself a few dozen times, maybe mining asteroids for materials. It would send out new von Neumanns, duplicates of itself, from there. Then each new exploration robot would travel on to a nearby star, duplicate itself, and start the cycle again. Each machine would report back to the home planet on what it found. Even given a fairly slow transit speed between stars, you could explore a huge volume of space in just a few hundred years. Traveling, exploring, reproducing, over and over again.”

“Wait a second,” Sondra protested. “The Charonians haven’t done any of those things. They’re not travelers, and they’re not explorers, and they aren’t reproducing—”

“Oh yes, they are,” Marcia said. “Remember, the labs found three different alien genetic codes in their genes? Maybe these Charonians haven’t gone anywhere, but that means they and their ancestors have been to at least three other star systems that had life. Finding them all would take a lot of traveling and exploring. And look how many of them there are—they’ve certainly done some reproducing!”

Sondra sat down at the comm console and thought about it. “Okay, okay. I can see that. But that’s not the whole story. There has to be something more. It doesn’t quite fit. Why is the Wheel hidden in the Moon? What were the Landers doing riding around in asteroids all this time? And how does stealing Earth and attacking the planets fit in? Wait a second. Old starship ideas. That reminds me of something else. Another old idea.”

She thought about it for a moment. At last she remembered. “Seedships. That’s it. It was a starship concept intended more for colonizing planets than for exploration. The logic was that a life-support system would be the biggest, heaviest part of a spacecraft—so you eliminate it. Instead, you freeze down a bunch of genetically perfect embryos, or fertilized eggs—or just sperm and ova. Maybe not just of the intelligent life-form, but the local equivalent of dogs and pigs and cats and chickens, or maybe Tyrannosaurus rex, if that suits your fancy. Any life-forms that might be handy at the other end. You pack them all up and launch them off.

“When the seedship finds a habitable planet, it lands, thaws out the embryos, and decants them. Then the ship—or its robots, or whatever—educates the kids as they grow. It raises the first generation of settlers. And if your designers were good enough, the ship could be programmed to do gene engineering, modify that first generation to survive better on whatever sort of world they end up on. Directed evolution.”

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happened here, either.” Marcia protested.

“No. But suppose you combined the ideas,” Sondra said. “Suppose you decided to build a von Neumann seedship. A seedship that knew how to do genetic tinkering, not only on gene codes from its homeworld, but smart enough to analyze other codes as well and use whatever was useful in them. Like Earth-style DNA. A machine that could duplicate itself, a machine programmed to duplicate itself and to send new seeds out among the stars, spreading out in all directions. A machine that was capable of modifying, improving itself, and modifying the life-forms it carried. Mining not asteroids, but living worlds, like Earth. Not just mining metal and fuel as raw materials, but life itself.”

Marcia nodded. “I can see that. But the present-day Charonians aren’t like that. Seedships like the ones you’ve described wouldn’t have a reason to hide in asteroids.”

“Maybe they do, and we don’t know what it is,” Sondra said. “Maybe they’ve just been in a dormant phase for a while and the gravity-wave beam woke them up.” But then she frowned and shook her head. “Wait a second. Their use of gravity waves and wormholes. We haven’t accounted for that.”

“So let’s go back a bit,” Marcia said. “Let’s talk about earlier stages in their development. Not the way the Charonians are now, but an intermediate stage between the way they were first made and the way they are now. Millions, tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.” She thought for a second. “Suppose, way back when, the Charonians were von Neumann seedships. Suppose a few things went wrong—at least from the viewpoint of the original designers. Suppose the ships just evolved off in an unexpected direction?”

Marcia put the message sheets down on the comm unit and walked back to sit on the couch she had been sleeping on. “The plan when the first ship was sent out was to spread life, and the duplication of the ships and so on was subordinate to spreading life. Then that point got lost, or changed. After all, it’s the machines doing all the work. Suppose the machines decided it was more important that they be duplicated—and then subordinated spreading life to spreading machines?

“Suppose the ships started modifying their passengers, started breeding them so they were genetically driven to build more seedships?” Marcia asked. “They could hardwire building skills into the passengers, so that building new seedships becomes an instinct, a primal need. Maybe they start cutting and pasting DNA, or whatever they use instead of DNA. Take some T. rex genes, some dog and cow genes, combine them with the intelligent life-form’s genome. They land on a new world full of life and find some handy codings there. They cut and paste those in, too.”

“Wait a second,” Sondra protested. “No human would let a machine loose to modify human DNA.”

“We wouldn’t. Humans wouldn’t do it, no. The very idea is repellant to us. But we’re not talking humans here. Suppose there were aliens with no taboos against such things? The idea disgusts me too, but imagine how fast things could change, how dramatically a species could evolve, if such things were permitted.

“They kept evolving,” Marcia went on. “The machines modifying themselves, the organic forms breeding themselves, machines tinkering with their own programming, and modifying the descendants of the organic Charonian passengers and their worker-animals. The seedships developed machines that worked with special-bred animals, and bred animals that needed mechanical implants, that couldn’t survive without them. Until the line between living and machine was completely blurred, until the Charonians didn’t even bother with the distinction anymore, until there was no clear line anymore between the Charonians, their machines, and their worker-animals. They all merged into one hugely complex entity. All the forms rely on each other to survive. Call it a multispecies.”

“Okay, good,” Sondra said. “But the ships were still the key. The seedships become the dominant form of the Charonians,” Sondra said. “They didn’t need organic-style intelligence to tell them what to do anymore. Somewhere along the line, the original Charonians lost out. That must be true, because they’re not there anymore. After all, it had to be living, sentient creatures who built the first ships.”

“It makes sense,” Marcia said. “I doubt we have it precisely right, but if we accept the idea that the Charonians of today started out as von Neumann seedships, built by creatures something like us, then they’ve certainly changed, mutated along the way to get to be what they are now. But that wasn’t the end of their development. We haven’t explained the Lunar Wheel, or the Multisystem. How do they fit in?”

Sondra scratched her head. “Let’s take a pass at it from another direction. Let’s think of their biology, their technology, the ages that went by in a breeding cycle. The ages of their lives and deaths. A ship with a computer full of machine blueprints and a hold full of dormant animals or dormant embryos would launch from a system, and drift between the stars for centuries, maybe for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, until it found a star system with a life-bearing world. Maybe the ship would pass the time during the flight by tinkering with the genes of the animals and blueprints of the machines. Finally the ship would land, and if need be, it would genetically modify its animals once again so they could survive on the new world.

“The animals—some of them descended from the ship’s designers—would go out into the world, breed as fast as they could, while mining that planet for raw materials and building more ships—perhaps thousands of ships, or millions. The shipbuilding would be like everything else—a reflex action, a complex instinct.

“The new ships would take their passengers aboard and launch out into space, out to search for new worlds. Maybe one ship in a thousand, one in a million, would manage to cross the sky, reach a new star and survive to reproduce, but that would be enough for the whole cycle to repeat, over and over again.”

Marcia looked up. “But that’s so inefficient,” she objected. “Breeding-planets would be light-years, dozens or hundreds of light-years apart. And they would chew up any life-bearing worlds they used. Look what they’re doing to Mars, outside that window, right now. If their ancestors were even half that size, the planetside breeding binges needed to stock a new generation of seedships would do tremendous damage to an ecosystem.”

“You’re right. They’d eat everything in sight,” Sondra agreed. “None of the native animals would be able to find food. The Charonians would wreck everything, trying to breed as heavily as possible. And they’d be doing their mining and their shipbuilding at the same time. It’d be a hundred times worse than the way we polluted Earth. And look at the damage we did before we knew better. But it wouldn’t be a problem for the Charonians. They’d be leaving. They wouldn’t care about the mess they left behind.” Her eyes suddenly grew wide. “Jesus,” she said. “We’re talking about stuff that happened millions of years ago, and we know from the DNA they found in the carrier-bug that the Charonians landed on Earth sometime in the distant past. Do you think maybe the Charonians landed on Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs?”

Marcia blinked in surprise. “It could be. It’s been pretty well nailed down that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact where Iceland is now. But if a Lander seedship malfunctioned and crashed, it would be just like a real asteroid crashing. Maybe two Lander seedships were traveling together. One crashed, and the other survived to breed. The impact killed most of the dinosaurs, and the breeding binge afterwards was more than the survivors could take.”

Marcia rubbed her eyes and tried to think. “But getting back to the point at hand,” Marcia said, turning the conversation back, “the breeding binges were basically parasitic, sucking the life out of a world. That would not only deplete the animal and plant populations, it would wreck the ecosystem. But the Charonians would care about that. Life-bearing planets must be very rare. Some future seedship would need that world again for some future breeding binge. And mass extinctions would wipe out the genetic diversity the Charonians needed as raw material for their bioengineering.”

Marcia paused for a moment, staring into space. “And we’re forgetting gravity again. We’re forgetting that somewhere along the line the Charonians learned how to manipulate gravity. How does that fit? Maybe the original Charonians knew how and taught the first seedship. Maybe a seedship landed on a planet and conquered a species that knew how. But somehow they learned how to use wormholes, how to use black holes as a power source.”

Sondra thought for a long moment. “And that was important. Without it, they couldn’t have become what they are. They use gravity control for everything. It had to be a turning point. Maybe they were short of life-bearing planets, but in every other way, they were rich. They had all of space and time to work with, endless rock and metal and volatiles in free space. All that was holding them back was the planet shortage.”

She paused for a long moment. Suddenly she slapped her palm down on the comm console. “So they decided to do something about the planet shortage. That’s it. That’s got to be it, the last piece in the puzzle, Once they had gravity control, they had power, incredible power. So they built the Sphere, the Multisystem, and stocked it with stars and planets. And now I think we know why.” Sondra looked at Marcia, let her come to the same answer she had found, if for no other reason than to convince herself she wasn’t crazy.

Marcia’s face went pale. “It’s a nature preserve,” she said. “The Charonians built the Dyson Sphere, the Multisystem, as a nature preserve for wild planets, as a place for planets to heal between breeding binges, a central storage place where the seedships could always find breeding planets.

“But don’t forget the Charonians would still be deliberately modifying themselves, directing their own evolution,” Marcia said. “How far would that go? How far could it go? Suppose the Sphere became the Charonians, the ruling intellect. Suppose the Sphere took over from the seedships, just as the seedships had taken over control from the original, organic intelligent life-form. If the Dyson Sphere took over, it would design a new life cycle, using the ancient patterns in a new way. It was built to store the life-bearing worlds of the Multisystem, for the convenience of the seedships. But if it started working for itself, for its own purposes, it would change that, take control of the life cycle and breed any independent streak out of the seedships. Which means the first, biological Charonians and the second, seedship Charonians are both extinct. So neither of those types are in charge.”

“It’s the Sphere,” Sondra said, almost whispering. “The Sphere itself is running things. We’ve been wondering who’s been running it, when all the time it’s been running everything.”

“Hold it a second,” Marcia said. She got up and sat next to Sondra at the comm unit. She grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper and started taking notes. “So we’ve got a Dyson Sphere using its stock of breeding worlds to grow new forms. It puts them aboard seedships—though now it’s only one creature to a seedship, because the creatures are so big. The seedships go out, just as they always have. They find a world, use it for breeding stock, and then what?”

“That’s where the change comes,” Sondra said, grabbing a keyboard to make her own notes on the computer. Maybe Marcia could think with a pencil, but she needed a set of keys. “They launch themselves off the planet after they’ve chewed it up, but instead of scattering amid the stars, the mutated seedships—the things we’ve been calling Landers and gee-point asteroids—go into hibernation in deep space, and wait. One of them grows into something hike the Lunar Wheel. Once it’s matured, it sends a message that all is in readiness and waits for a return signal from the home Sphere that sent it out in the first place. A return signal is simply any sort of modulated gravity beam. The signal Larry sent by accident.”

“But what’s the signal supposed to mean?” Marcia asked.

“It’s the Sphere saying ‘I’m ready for a new world,’ ” Sondra said excitedly. “Maybe because it’s caught a new star and has more room for worlds.”

Marcia nodded. “Okay, so that explains why they stole the Earth, and why they’re taking such good care of it. But why are they mining the other worlds here?”

Sondra considered that for a moment. Try to think like the Dyson Sphere, she thought. What would be important to the Sphere? And then it hit her. Sondra’s heart started pounding in her chest, and her palms went damp with sweat. “Think for a second,” she said. “The original Charonians built the seedships to carry their offspring to new worlds, to make new Charonians. Then the seed-ships took power for themselves, and decided the important thing was to make more seedships, spread themselves out among the stars.

“And then the seedships built a Dyson Sphere, and it took over, and it decided…”

The two women were deadly silent as the thought sunk in. “The Dyson Sphere decided the important thing was to make more Dyson Spheres,” Sondra said at last. “So, millions of years ago, it modified the seedships’ programs one more time, played with the gene pool one more time. To make all the other forms into part of a Sphere-reproduction system. And what the hell did we think Dyson Spheres were made out of?”

Marcia shook her head numbly. “My sweet God. And we were rushing to save Earth. It’s every other world in the Solar System that’s in trouble.”

“Planets,” Sondra said, not hearing Marcia. “You make them out of disassembled planets.”

Marcia spoke very quietly. “That’s what the Landers are doing. Now that they’ve got Earth out of harm’s way, they’re taking the Solar System apart to build a new Dyson Sphere. They’ll shred the planets, the moons, the asteroids down to nothing, take them apart and use that material as raw material to build a shell around the Sun. They’ll start up a new Multisystem here.”

Sondra stared blankly at the computer screen for a long moment and then came back to herself. “We have to tell them,” she said. “Before the dust clouds thicken again and all the radio wavelengths are jammed. We have to get the word out.” She started typing furiously.

But Marcia wasn’t paying attention. She stood up and returned to the window, back to the sky full of fire. Out there, the Landers were tearing Mars apart, blasting its stones and sand up into the sky. Now she understood. But would understanding do any good? They were as far as ever from being able to stop it, from being able to do anything about it. Mars was still being torn to shreds.

It wasn’t fair. She did not want to die like this. Not alone. “Oh, Gerald,” she said to the sky. “Gerald my love.” He was alive, and he had reached out across unimaginable distances, sent his words to her. That should have been some comfort, some solace.

But it was not. Instead anger flared inside her.

Gerald lived. How could she die, when she suddenly had a new reason to live?

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Reality Check

The three men aboard the Nenya sat in the ship’s wardroom, reading printouts of the messages from the Terra Nova and Mars.

Larry shook his head. “I knew the Lander crashes on Mars should have told me something. This part here, about the possibility of a Lander crashing on Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs. That was it. That was what was in the back of my mind. I should have seen that.” Larry continued reading.

At last they were all finished examining the new information. Raphael put down his copy and turned to the others. There was a deadly silence in the compartment. Raphael looked at Larry and Vespasian, and spoke. “If Sondra and Marcia’s theories are anywhere near right— and I think they are—then the Solar System is doomed. The Charonian Landers will tear every world apart.”

“There must to be a way to stop them,” Larry said.

“The Core Cracker,” Vespasian said.

“What?” Larry said.

“The big bomb, the really big bomb the Belt Community was supposed to build,” Vespasian said. “We still have contact with Ceres. We could send a message to the Autocrat. Way back when, they were going to blow up Mercury with it, give themselves a bigger and better asteroid belt to mine. If we could get it, get it here, we could smash the Moon with it. That kills the Lunar Wheel. With the Lunar Wheel gone, the rest of the Char-onians would shut themselves down, and the rest of the Solar System would be saved.”

Raphael found himself nodding, considering the possibility, and that made his blood run cold. Only weeks ago, someone’s using a Core Cracker on the Moon would have been the greatest disaster imaginable, something to be prevented at all costs. But Chancellor Daltry had warned that there was always a worse fate possible. Now a man who lived on the Moon was suggesting the destruction of the Moon, and of all the human life on it, as a solution, something better than the alternative. “It’s a terrible price to pay, Tyrone. But you might be right.”

“No,” Larry said. “We can’t. We can’t kill that many people and dream of justifying it. Especially when there’s no promise that it would work. If I were programming the Charonians, I’d set the gee points and Landers to keep working if they lost contact with the Wheel. It’s fairly clear that the Wheel pulls gravity power in from the Earthpoint black hole and transmits it to the gee points, but there must be some sort of backup system. I’d bet the Dyson Sphere could send commands and power directly through the wormhole and run the show that way.

“Besides, even if the plan worked, we’d have lost the last contact with Earth—and sooner or later, unless we learn how to prevent it, Earth is going to be used for a breeding binge. That will cost more lives than we could save by destroying the Moon. And we don’t even know if the Core Cracker exists, or if the Autocrat would agree to release it even if it did.”

“Can we sabotage the Wheel, wreck it without smashing the Moon?” Vespasian asked. “Maybe just a small nuclear warhead dropped down the Rabbit Hole?”

Larry shook his head. “No. Nearly all the same arguments apply. There must be backup procedures, some way for the Dyson Sphere to regain control if the Wheel fails. And even if we succeed, and shut down the gee points and the link to the Dyson Sphere, we lose any hope of ever contacting Earth again, ever helping them.”

“Then is there any way to seize control of the Wheel?” Vespasian asked. “Go down there again, rewire it somehow, make it do what we want it to do. Use it to order the gee points to knock it off.”

Larry shook his head, but there was something less negative about the way he did it, as if he saw a possibility. “We don’t know the codes. Even if we did, I still don’t see how we could use them. We’d have to use the same signaling procedure the Sphere uses, and use stronger signals. That wouldn’t be any problem on the radio bands, but now we know they used modulated gravity waves for signaling as well, beaming both through the wormhole. We could fire up the Ring of Charon again and use it to send another signal. But we couldn’t possibly send a stronger gravity-wave signal than the Sphere. Not unless we had our own—”

Larry stopped for a moment. Not just talking, but stopped, all of him, as if his mind were suddenly so busy with a thought that he couldn’t spare any part of his mind for movement. “My God. We’ve learned enough to do it. I could—”

His voice faded out, and he muttered to himself. “Yes, it could be done.” He turned to Raphael and Vespasian with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eye. “Maybe we could take over the Wheel.” Suddenly, his fece fell. “If we knew the codes.”

Vespasian’s brow knitted for a moment, and then suddenly he snatched up one of the earlier reports from Mars. “They saw it, on Mars!” he said. “The Wheel has got to be just like this Moonpoint Ring next to Earth, use the same command code.”

Larry grabbed the hard copy eagerly and skimmed the pages. “My God, you’re right. They call it the thought chain, each lower form trained by the form above it.” He put down the pages and thought. “It would work. If Earth could get a tap in place, we could listen in on the Dyson Sphere downloading data to the Moonpoint Ring. Has the Moon asked for the tap yet?”

Vespasian nodded. “Yes. They reported making the request about an hour after Marcia and Sondra sent the idea. About five hours ago. They sent us a copy of the request.”

“But what if the Sphere has already sent the data we need?” Raphael objected.

“Repetition,” Larry said, “That was the one cast-iron certainty we got out of that image of the shattered sphere. The Charonians use repetition for emphasis. The more important the idea is, the more often they’ll repeat it. If Earth can get a tap in place, we have a real shot at reading the codes.”

Raphael looked up at the wall chronometer, counting down the hours and minutes of life left to the Saint Anthony and figuring in the time since the Moon had relayed Marcia’s request for a tap. “They won’t have time. Even if Earth got the message immediately, that would only give them eighteen hours between receipt of signal and when the Saint Anthony is destroyed, thirteen hours from now. That’s not time for Earth to prepare a launch from scratch, let alone build a probe.”

“Damn it,” Larry said through clenched teeth. He looked at Raphael. “If we don’t get the data we need, it can’t work.”

“Wait a second,” Vespasian said. “The Lunar comm center knew all that when they sent the request. There was something in the reports from Earth that a habitat had ended up orbiting the Moonpoint black hole, inside the Moonpoint Ring, close enough to run a tap if they knew how to build the receiver. So they requested that that habitat to do the tap. I’ve got our copy of the signal here somewhere.” He worked the console controls again, calling up the file in question. The three men leaned close to the screen and read the signal.

Vespasian’s wide face fell, collapsed utterly. “Oh, hell. Oh sweet and sour bloody hell. Why in God’s own twisted name did it have to be them?”

Larry Chao and Simon Raphael didn’t ask what the problem was. They could read that off the screen for themselves.

The only facility in position to try for a datatap, the only place they could get the information that might save the Solar System, just happened to be the Naked Purple Habitat.

Raphael suddenly felt old, infinitely old, old and defeated, as if nothing else could ever matter again. All his refound ability to understand, empathize, was suddenly gone. How could it be that the fate of everything was up to those lunatics? “Start praying, Tyrone,” he said in a defeated old man’s voice. “And pray to Saint Jude this time. This is clearly a job for him and not Anthony.”

The request for a tap made quite a trip before arriving. From Mars to the Moon through the wormhole to the Saint Anthony to JPL to Chelated Noisemaker Extreme’s comm board. But that was only the beginning of its journey. Next it had to survive passage through a meeting of the Purple Deluxe.

Ohio did not enjoy Purple Deluxe meets. For starters, tradition dictated that they be held in a compartment far too small for the number of people present. Also by tradition, the ventilation system was turned off for the duration of the meeting. Usually, that helped keep meetings short, but the end of this one was not yet on the horizon.

Time was desperately short. Just in case the decision came down as a “yes,” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme was already at work rigging up the datatap probe, as per the plans sent from Mars along with the request. Ohio himself found the whole situation a bit daunting. He wasn’t quite up to deciding the fate of Earth and the Solar System.

But he had a more immediate problem. The meeting was not going well. Which was another way of saying Creamcheese Drone Deluxe was speaking.

Creamcheese had certainly earned the highly complimentary title Drone. No one had ever caught her doing a lick of work. But Creamcheese meant sexy or attractive. Perhaps Cheese believed herself to be a highly attractive woman. Few others believed so, or ever would. But Cheese was many other things. For starters, she demonstrated that even the most complimentary Naked Purple name could be applied ironically, and was likewise living proof that such irony could be completely lost on a member of a group as linguistically sophisticated as the Purps claimed to be. But Cheese had an ego and a half, and no one had the nerve to tell her to try a different name for a while.

She was one of the very few Purps who took the call to get naked and purple literally, though she was certainly among the vast majority of Purps who should never get naked, let alone purple. To be fair, Ohio allowed, her appearance did evoke the shocked silence that was the purpose of the original Naked Purple manifesto. And that was fitting, for Creamcheese was one of the most vigorous and doctrinaire defenders of the faith.

Tonight she was in rare form, shouting at the top of her lungs. There she stood in her nude, plum-colored, plum-shaped glory, fulminating away. “Let them all rot!” she cried. “The Earthers, the damned scoombas back in the Solar Area, all of ‘em. They got us down into this scene with their gravity grinding. Why should we help them now? This here is the biggest chance we’re ever gonna have of reely living the Purple ideal. All we have to do is what Purples are supposed to do. Nothing. Not one Grand Coulee Dam thing.”

“But these here Charonians ain’t no shade of Purple,” Cold Breeze objected. The bickering between Breeze and Cheese had been going on for hours. “They doing everything but nothing. The Purple idea we got is to back off and let Nature do her thing, let entropy slide the Universe on down. Cheese, I have scanned a lotta blocks o‘ data, and these Charonians are no-way-José natural. Back home in the Solar System—sorry, I mean the Solar Area, they’s putting the planets through a buzz saw. Ask me is that Mom Nature doing her bit, and I say I think not. I say we get the data for the groundhogs and the Solar dudes, let ’em try and stop the party.”

“Oh, jump down off it, Cold,” Cheese said. “These Charonians are ultra-Purple, glowing in dark down to their bones. You want the big mystery about what they’re doing, I’ll peek in the backathebook for ya. They’re scraping the tech-know-log-ick-all crap offa the Earth. They’re giving entropy a chance to kick back in, let Nature slump back down to blessed disorder. Lookit Earth. Their satellites are gone. The spaceships are nearly all gone. Practically all the habitats ‘cept ours—gone, gone, gone. If we sit back long enough to make grooving behooving, do nothing long enough while the Charonians do a dance on the Earthers, them groundhogs will be back in mud huts and still going down! And once this Saint Android robot probe is creamed, there will be nothing we can do anyway. Back in the Solar, the Charonians are erasing all the tech yech there too. The Purple ideal. Surrender to Nature! My bristers and sibsters, that’s the tune we’ve been singing since the first coat of purple got slapped on somebody’s hide. Now Earth’s dancing to the beat, the Solar’s dancing to it, and Cold Breeze says shut down the playback because he’s about to lose his fudge. No way.”

Ohio Template Windbag sat back in his frowsy old armchair and blinked a time or two. Strange. He found himself having to translate what they were all saying. It suddenly struck him that he was no longer thinking in Naked Purple terms, but once again in standard English. Maybe he has been hanging out in the comm center with Chelated/Frank too much. The pointless artificial complexities seemed strangely foreign to his ear. Where once it had all sounded clever, now all he heard was anger, and voices a bit louder than they needed to be. Was his subconscious trying to tell him something?

“How are you on murder, Cheese?” Cold Breeze asked. “Suppose everyone on the hab—including you— shuffles off the coil because we sat on back, followed your plan?”

Creamcheese Deluxe glared at him. “We all die, Coldness,” she said contemptuously. “That’s the whole point of calling our bristers and sibsters to the Pointless Cause. All striving is useless against entropy. The Heat Death of the Universe is coming reel soon and—”

“Ah, knock back all that philoso-flapping,” a voice in the back said, daring to cut her off. “You an‘ Breeze both. We’ve all heard it buzz before, and I don’t need you to herd it past again. Ohio, what’s your slant?”

“No slant at all, and that’s the trub, bub. I’m right on the level.” The jive talk and double meanings fell trippingly off his tongue, but they rang false in his ear. The Breeze and the Cheese were both right. To stand by and do nothing was exactly correct, according to the Naked Purple philosophy, because the destruction of the bad old Earth civilization was inevitable.

But the whole creaky structure of Purple assumed that its goals were impossible—not only unattainable, but deliberately chosen because they were unattainable.

That had been the original Purple goal. To shock people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be. The Purple was supposed to give people goals they could reach for, but never grasp, thus getting their minds moving again. If society ostracized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to find your own goals. Surely that was laudable, and gave promise for the future. Ohio looked around the crowded room. What goal did these people have, beyond getting to tonight’s party? There was nothing in their Tycho version of Purple. It was sterile, a game of prattling words cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway. It didn’t have to be that way. Yes, there had always been anger in the Purple—but once upon a time there had been hope as well. But that was long ago and far away, all but forgotten, corrupted by the wackos of Tycho Purple Penal. Hope had become mere sullenness.

Tycho. That was the cause of all this. Crossbreed a cult seeking individual enlightenment with a crew of third-generation convicts, and what else could you expect but angry, self-indulgent blather? No, Ohio thought, the Tycho brand of Purple had held sway long enough. It was time for the older ways to return, the old Purple that did have a goal, even if it was half-hidden. A Purple that mixed its anger with hope.

This was too serious, too deadly serious a moment for playing games with words. Ohio nodded, his mind made up. After all, what the hell kind of philosophy endorsed self-extinction?

“Great windbag Ohio turns out to be,” Cheese said mockingly. “He just sits there and nods. No opinions, no thoughts. That’s not the Purple way.”

That got Ohio genuinely mad. Cheese had spent her whole life sticking like glue to the Purple orthodoxy. No room for any thought someone else hadn’t had before. No room for un-Purple thoughts of any kind.

But, outside of this habitat, the real universe was not a very Purple place. Time to make these people run a reality check, he thought. His voice shifted, lowered by an octave. He decided to talk in the old way. Maybe that would have some sort of negative shock value. “Okay, we’ll play it your way.” He turned toward the others. “Cheese here doesn’t want to talk about real people dying, whole civilizations collapsing, maybe humanity becoming extinct, because it doesn’t fit in with the orthodox view. So we won’t. But even if you really believe that we alone of the human race are worth saving, remember that everybody dying includes us. Earth goes, we go. Let me say it in one swell foop.” Damn, a slip into slang, but never mind. “If we let Earth go, we die. We need the Earth. We cannot grow all our own food, or fix our own machines. We can’t take care of ourselves.”

Creamcheese sniffed, a bit uneasily. “Don’t exaggerate. So we buy up a few luxuries, hire a few Earthers like that Noisemaker geek to push the buttons down. It keeps us from polluting ourselves with knowledge we don’t need. As for the imports, mere fripperies for our amusements.”

Ohio couldn’t help noticing that the Purple slang was dropping out of Creamcheese’s words as well. Maybe he had her attention. “That all used to be true,” he said. “But every year, we’ve done less and less of our own work. The Naked Purple ideal called for each of us to do work when needful—but the richer we got, the more that definition of needful started to slide. Until we were buying luxuries like food and airlock repair. We hired outsiders to do our work for us, until we got to where we were buying our air from them because we were sloppy about running the airplant. At least that I put a stop to when I got stuck with this job. I bought us a new airplant and trained a crew to run it. But things like that cost money. Dirty Earth money.

“We’re dependent on Earth. We have to buy from Earth, or starve. With so many ships lost, it’s going to be a lot tougher to resupply us. If they’ll even come. With that CORE thing about to paste the Saint Anthony probe, who’ll want to risk the same treatment just to fly us some food? We might have to evacuate the habitat, move everyone back to Earth—but we don’t have the ships to do that on our own, either. At the very least, we’ll need emergency supplies launched from Earth to tide us over while we buckle down and make ourselves self-sufficient.

“No matter how it breaks, we’ll need help from Earth. Which will be tough to get if the people of Earth accuse us of allowing the Solar Area—damn it, the Solar System—to be destroyed.” Ohio felt a sudden, passionate need to call things by their right names, with no games. “We’re going to need Earth’s goodwill.”

Ohio Template Windbag looked around the shabby room, and the faces of the aggressively, lovably eccentric people in it. There was something oddly sad about them. Not just now, but something that had always been there. “The game’s over,” he said. With a sudden pang of sorrow, he remembered his own pre-Purple past, teaching school, and the desolated faces of the children when the rains came during recess.

Especially the lonely children, the ones that nobody would play with. They seemed to be the ones that gloried most of all in the open space of the school yard, most loved the one place they could at least be themselves and play their secret, solitary games without interruption.

Suddenly the blue skies would be gone, with the fat drops plashing down everywhere, thunder and lightning rumbling threats across the sky, and their secret worlds would be washed away. “Rain’s come, fun’s over,” Ohio whispered to the sad little faces he still saw. “It’s time to come inside,” he said quietly. “Back inside, and back to work.” The room was quiet. Even Creamcheese Drone Deluxe had nothing to say.

Ohio took that as a sign. He punched up the intercom, switched it over to the channel that worked, and called Chelated Noisemaker Extreme. “Frank,” he said at last, “I think we’re all about agreed up here. Why don’t you get that datatap dancing?”

The Sphere had many duties, but its capacities were great, and there was no prize greater than a new life-bearing world. The price—in risk, in treasure—was huge, and certainly this would not have been the time it would have deliberately sent out a call, declaring itself ready to absorb a new world and ready to assist in the construction of a new Sphere. But the Sphere was flexible, adaptable in its thought processes, and determined to make the best of the situation, find the advantages to itself inside the crisis.

Such as the capture of a splendid new world, one that deserved the best of treatment. Preparing a place for it had been a great strain. Gathering up a Keeper Ring and an anchor wormhole was normally a leisurely process, but this time the Sphere had been forced to do it all within a few brief seconds. Matching the new world’s previous environment of heating and tidal effects so closely in such a short space of time had been a remarkable achievement.

But the job had required speed, and the placement of an unprogrammed Keeper Ring. The Ring had been built and grown long, long ago, and placed in storage, left to sleep, untutored, until there was a world that needed care. When the message from the Caller had come, the Sphere had found a black hole that matched the new world’s tidal needs, and then used a dangerous self-transiting technique to move the Ring-hole ensemble into position, manipulating the Keeper Ring so that it served as both ends of the same wormhole.

All the while, the new world was kept cycling through a whole series of transit points as the Sphere juggled to hold on to it. At last the new Keeper was ready, and the Keeper, under the Sphere’s direct control, pulled the new world into a safe and stable orbit.

It had been a dangerous and complex job, and the Sphere had been running the Keeper Ring directly ever since, transporting new-mode Worldeaters to the new planet’s old star system, closely monitoring the somewhat archaic Caller Ring that was running the planet-stripping operation there, vectoring the Shepherd to intercept the large piece of debris that was falling toward the new world.

But the Sphere had many duties. It could not focus this much attention on this single operation indefinitely. The Sphere, when other duties allowed, continued to download all that a Keeper must know: images of the Sphere’s ancestry and history, images that demonstrated this procedure and that, examples of commands and their results, and endless demonstrations of a Keeper’s duties.

The Keeper took it all in eagerly, felt itself awakening as it absorbed enough data to understand its duties more fully. Its somewhat rigid mind was primed for this knowledge set, hungry for it.

It never occurred to the Keeper or to the Sphere that there might be another listening. The very idea was alien, inconceivable to them. Neither of them could even imagine a being such as Frank Barlow, let alone his actions.

But that didn ‘t stop Barlow from listening, and gathering in his data.

The boost out from Earth had gone well, and now the Nova was in free-fall, moving toward its deceleration point, a few hundred thousand kilometers astern of the Target One planet. An easy zero-gee flight, then a braking burn to slide the ship into orbit around T-One. Without the burn, the Terra Nova would sail right on past the new world it sought.

The Universe outside the Terra Nova might be in turmoil, but life aboard the big ship was settling into a comfortable routine.

Dianne Steiger watched the bridge main display screen as the two radar tracks—the Saint Anthony and the CORE—intercepted. She watched on an aux screen as the carrier-wave signal died, watched the smaller target vanish off the main screen as the larger sailed majestically on. The Charonian CORE had done its work, and the Saint Anthony was dead.

Dianne pulled out a cigarette and lit it thoughtfully, manipulating it with her new left hand, just for the practice. She took a deep drag and pointedly ignored Gerald MacDougal’s coughing fit. She held the smoke in her lungs for a moment and smiled with real satisfaction. There were advantages to being the captain of a starship. An air system built to last generations had to be able to handle a cigarette—and as captain, no one aboard could tell her not to smoke.

One minor mystery was cleared up—the COREs obviously used some form of radar—crude, arrogantly powerful radar—to do their tracking. That was why they emitted such energetic radio waves. There had been a fair amount of speculation aboard the Terra Nova as to how the CORE would make the kill. Lasers and ship-to-ship missiles had been the most popular guesses, but the CORE had simply crashed into the probe. A direct kinetic-impact kill.

That hadn’t surprised Dianne. There was nothing subtle about the Charonian way of doing things. They were masters of direct, brute-force action. They took what they wanted, did what they pleased, plainly never thinking that anything might oppose them.

She turned her head toward Gerald, sitting beside her on the bridge. “All right, Gerald. You tell me. Why the hell did they wait so long to stop the Anthony! Why did they allow the probe to operate so long, and why didn’t they jam its transmissions, or attempt to capture it instead of destroying it?”

Gerald shrugged. “Because the COREs aren’t programmed to think in those terms. And whatever it is that programs them, which I suppose is ultimately the Dyson Sphere, doesn’t think that way either.” The Dyson Sphere doing the thinking, Gerald thought. Yes, of course. By some miracle, Marcia and this Sondra Berghoff had read his message about von Neumanns, and understood, and, miracle on top of miracle, had taken his ideas to places he had never imagined. Praise be to God for His blessings, Gerald told himself, deeply thankful for all of it. But especially for the knowledge that Marcia was alive.

“But the Anthony was obviously sent to gather and transfer information,” Dianne was saying. “How could any intelligent species not realize that the Anthony was a threat?”

“Because they aren’t intelligent in any sense of the term we understand,” Gerald said. “They are machines programmed by machines. What’s confused us about them is that some of the machines are living creatures, of a sort. But they are as programmed, as artificial, as the mechanical devices.”

“But what’s the point of it all? What do they all do it for! What’s the point of a huge machine that does nothing but keep itself running?”

Gerald smiled sadly. “You’ve just asked: ‘What’s the point of being alive?’ That question is just as important, and just as meaningless, if you’re a mechanical life-form or a biotic one. They survive in order to survive, just as we do. And, I might add, they do a very impressive job of it. But we’re thinking of the Multisystem as a network of machines. Maybe it would be more accurate to think of them all as part of one big entity.”

Captain Dianne Steiger thought for a long moment. “You’re saying that the whole Multisystem—the Sphere, the Rings, the COREs, the artificial animals and the robots, the captured planets and stars—all amount to one organism!”

“It’s possible. Either that, or a highly coordinated alliance of linked creatures. Or some third thing, between those two. But whatever it is, we’re going to have a tough time understanding what makes them tick.”

“Okay, but if it’s all one creature, then the COREs are just a subsystem. They’re like white blood cells, attacking an invader…” Dianne leaned back in her chair, puffing on her cigarette, staring into space. Suddenly her eyes popped wide. She sat straight up and pulled the cigarette from her mouth. “Attacking an invader as soon as it threatened to crash into something valuable.”

Gerald frowned, and then he got it. “Like a planet.”

“They never regarded the Anthony as a spy probe, or a radio relay. They don’t need things like that.” She stubbed out the cigarette into an ashtray. “They saw it as a rock that was going to fall on Earth, and diverted the closest interceptor to make the kill. That’s what the COREs are—meteor interceptors, orbiting the worlds of the Multisystem to protect them from spaceside debris.”

Gerald’s face went pale. “If we change our present course, make our braking burn to intercept the Target One planet, they’re going to see the Terra Nova as a rock about to fall on Target One. The COREs around Target One will pound us into a pulp.”

Dianne Steiger nodded and tried to remain calm as she felt a cold hand wrap itself around her heart. “I think you’re right, but we’ve got to test the theory. Let’s hope it’s way off base. Because if it’s right, we can never come near any of these worlds.”

The Flying Dutchman, Dianne thought again. The name appeared in her mind, and nothing she could do seemed capable of forcing it out. Dianne remembered the name of the old legend, but almost nothing else. What was it that had happened to him? Had he been doomed never to land, or just never to return home?

She blinked hard and tried to concentrate. “Deploy decoys and fire their engines remotely as per plan and schedule,” she ordered. Was her voice steady? Never to land, a life that echoed a ghost story. A life that would become a ghost story. Hadn’t there been a historical character who inspired the Dutchman legend? What tales would her endless journey inspire? The prospect chilled her very bones.

She watched as the first of the decoys leapt away. The things were utterly simple. It had taken the machine shop only an hour or two to build them. Big square-corner radar reflectors attached to small rocket engines. The reflectors would provide a brilliant echo to any radar beam directed at them. The radar-sensing COREs should be able to see them easily enough.

There were eight of the decoys, and it was the work of a few minutes to deploy them all. Their rocket engines fired, and the decoys shifted course toward the Target One world. Two were aimed directly at the planet, the others pointed to miss T-One at distances varying from a few hundred kilometers to nearly half a million.

The decoys fell away from the Terra Nova. Their engines flared on, performing high-gee burns that shifted their orbits violently, with far more stress than a human crew would ever survive. But the faster the decoys got in there, the sooner Dianne would have some data—and the sooner she could reach a decision about what to do.

Spacecraft move fast, but the scale of space is huge. The decoys, moving at tremendous speeds, seemed to crawl across the display screens at the most leisurely of rates. Dianne Steiger settled into her captain’s chair, ready for a long wait.

She didn’t get it. Mere minutes after the decoys had completed their burns, six COREs, accelerating at a terrifying rate, suddenly lifted out of orbit toward the decoys. The navigation computers hurriedly projected their courses, assuming constant boost, and showed intercepts with all but the two most distant decoys. Dianne stared at the screen, and read the message there. The Terra Nova could not come within three hundred thousand kilometers of a planet without being destroyed.

She smiled coldly, humorlessly. Her original orders had been to explore the Dyson Sphere, and she had rejected that because it was too dangerous. She had insisted on a safer flight first. And now she wasn’t even able to get near the closest planet.

“Ma’am,” the navigator said quietly. “We’re coming up on our decision point. As per your orders, I have trajectory solutions laid in for a continued free orbit of the Sunstar, a distant orbit of T-One, or a return path to Earth. Propulsion needs your orders.”

Dianne glanced involuntarily behind her, thinking of the Earth they had left behind. Every world of this Multisystem had to have been stolen the same way Earth was, and then enveloped with a shield of COREs. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Earth would receive the same protection. Perhaps outgoing spacecraft would be unmolested, though Dianne would be unwilling to bet much on that chance. But no returning spacecraft could land. Sweet Jesus, it was worse than that, she realized. The COREs would attack anything that even came near Earth. Like satellites and habitats. All of them would have to be evacuated now, before the people on board were stranded, or killed outright by impacting COREs. Any replacement for the Saint Anthony would be smashed to scrap almost as soon as it arrived.

And after the COREs arrived at Earth, the Terra Nova could not return home. Ever. Perhaps no other ship could lift from Earth without being destroyed. Ever. Space-flight would end. Even communication between Earth and a spacecraft would be tough, with the COREs’ radars jamming virtually every usable comm frequency. But what was the point in worrying about contact with Earth if no ship could ever leave Earth again?

Except if the only ship away from Earth stayed away. The Terra Nova had been built to travel between star systems, to outlast journeys that might last hundreds of years. So long as she never approached a planet, the big ship could continue in operation long after the last crewman aboard had died of natural causes.

Or else, if Dianne turned the ship back now, her crew could see their families again before they died.

No, she thought. Suppose, some day, a way was found to beat the COREs and the rest of the Charonians, and the plan needed a ship in space for it to work? Or suppose there was some vital discovery waiting, one that could be made only from a spacecraft, far away from Earth? What other, unimagined doors would slam shut if the Nova retreated? And what fate would humanity deserve, what future would it be worthy of, if danger was met so meekly?

Dianne straightened her back, stared at the display screen, and spoke quietly. “Advise propulsion to stand down. Continued free orbit, no use of main engines required. Here we stay. We can do no other.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Becoming Shiva

The clouds of dust and debris piled up in ugly choking rings about the planet Venus. The storms of Venus roiled and bridled in new and terrifying ways, tortured by the Charonian machine-monsters on the surface. A dark spot appeared in the glaring clouds, large enough to be visible from orbit. For the first time in human history, a portion of the Venusian surface was visible from space.

It was a mountain, impossibly huge, climbing up out of the clouds, swelling upward and outward moment by moment, until its upper slopes were outside the planet’s atmosphere. It was an elongated cone, almost a caricature of a volcano—a classic, perfect cartoon volcano.

Suddenly, it belched smoke and flame, and a column of fire blasted out into space, glowing hot molten rock flying clear of the planet.

Core material. The Charonians had bored down through the crust of the planet, used their gravity systems to pull the molten magma out of the planet and heave it into space. The Charonians were taking not just the crustal rock, but they were sucking out the core matter as well. It wasn’t a volcano. It was a vampire.

Marcia MacDougal and Sondra Berghoff sat in the Martian darkness, feeling the cold creep in. The power had died again. Marcia was getting restless. She desperately wanted to get outside, but that was impossible. There had been too many holes punched in the dome, and the engineers had bled the pressure off to conserve air. The entire population of Port Viking had been forced to retreat to the airtight buildings.

Marcia wrapped her blanket more tightly around her. Perhaps the engineers would be able to bring the power back on again. But then another fragment of sky-tossed stone would smash into some other vital piece of equipment again, or a quake would trip every circuit breaker in the city again, or the dome supports would finally take one more strike than they could handle and collapse. There would be the struggle to fix whatever it was—and then another disaster would strike.

Sooner or later the engineers would no longer be able to patch it over. Port Viking would die in the dark.

How long had it been? How much time had passed since the Saint Anthony had died, and taken so much of their hope with it? On Earth, wherever she was, they had marked the transit of four days and nights. The Moon had rolled through a sixth of her leisurely, month-long rotation. On those worlds, time moved much as it always had, for the Charonians left the Earth and Moon untouched.

But on Mars, on Venus, on all the other worlds, time had lost its old measure and meaning. On dust-choked Mars there was no night, no day, just a series of catastrophes in the dust-shrouded gloom under the sullen glowing sky. There was no meaningful way to mark the time on Mars, on Ganymede, on Titan. Or was it time itself ending for all those places?

The Nenya rushed at full throttle toward Pluto, the engines roaring at powers far beyond safety margin, Vespasian forcing every possible scrap of thrust, without regard for a return trip. If the flight succeeded, there would be more than enough time to mount a rescue mission. If it failed, there would be no point to one. Never mind that. Larry stared grimly at the display screen, determined to focus on the data there. Updates from the Gravities Research Station, refinements of the models he had done the night before. Good people there. All of them. Maybe he had done the flashy, exciting work, but it had all been based on the research they had done. But he had needed more help than theirs. And gotten it.

God only knew why, but the Purples had cooperated. The data had come through the Saint Anthony before it died. Not just data, but in a very real sense, the voice of the Sphere, the precise equivalent of words handed down from the intelligence that ruled the Charonian empire.

It wasn’t language, not in any human sense. It was an image set, closer to a system of notation for computer programming than anything else. Larry had enough data to get a start on the Charonian command set. The Nenya computers weren’t really built for this sort of analysis, but they were the best he was going to get. Communication was still spotty, but the engineers on all the worlds were improvising desperately, finding the sending and receiving frequencies that still worked. Word was coming in from all over, and the word was not good.

Venus was reporting a huge structure pumping magma from the interior. Ganymede reported that Io was coming apart at the seams, its chaotic surface all but completely liquified. The tiny world was melting away into a cloud of sulfur and complex hydrocarbons. Somehow the Charonians were amplifying the tidal effects that had always torn at the giant moon, focusing the stress at weak points, concentrating the internal pressure until the moon simply tore itself apart. Several of Jupiter and Saturn’s smaller ice moons just weren’t there anymore, already completely digested by whatever monstrosities had landed there.

He checked the wall chronometer. Fourteen days out from the Moon, two more days until arrival at Pluto. Larry didn’t even want to think about the Nenya’s terrifying velocity.

Two days. That would barely be enough time to prepare.

Could it be done? Would it work?

Damn it, would it work? As far as the gravity side of it went, he had no doubts. He had learned from the Charonians, watched what they did, how they turned gravity on its ear to do their bidding. He could see the way to configure the Ring, knew instinctively what must be done.

But what should be done? Did he have the right answer to that question? Larry stared at the datascreen in front of him, then glanced down at the notes on the desk, turned and looked into the mirror set into the opposite wall of the tiny cabin. But he saw none of those things. Instead, his eye turned inward, toward places in his soul he had never imagined. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands. If it was not an attitude of prayer, it was close enough. How many worlds was he trying to save tonight?

How many had he already helped to destruction?

He lifted his head a bit and found himself staring at his hands, as if he had never seen them before. These were the hands that had done it, that had shaped the commands, set the Ring configuration, pressed that damnable start button. These were the hands that had made the Earth vanish, turned the entire Solar System upside down, awakened monsters that had slept since before humanity existed.

He thought back, and remembered deliberately setting the controls so the actual start command had to be sent manually, and tried to remember why. He knew, intellectually, it was because pushing that button meant rebellion against Raphael. But that emotion no longer made sense to him. Had the whole disaster been caused by nothing more than that? Larry O’Shawnessy Chao’s childish need to show that he was smarter than anyone else? How many worlds were wrecked, how many people were dead already because he had pushed that button? How many ships were lost, how much treasure destroyed?

But he couldn’t have known. No one could have known. The search for gravity control had started before he was born. Sooner or later someone would have found a way to make a graser beam, and would have brushed the Moon with it. Someone would have pushed that button. Dr. Raphael had said quite clearly that the entire Gravities Research Station had to bear its share of the blame…

No. Larry looked up again, caught his own eye in the mirror, and stared back at himself. All of it, in his favor and against him, was true, but now was not the time. Now he had to push it all away, the guilt and the justification. He would have his whole life for that. Wallowing in either right now would interfere with the amends he had to make.

He stared again at his hands. But his act of atonement would itself be a terrible crime. No one else knew that, no one knew what he had planned, and no one would, not until it was too late to stop. This crime, this guilt, this sin he was determined to carry on his own shoulders alone, without ambiguity, fully aware of exactly what he was doing.

For Larry had realized that, in the event he got it wrong, it was that ambiguity, far more than the guilt itself, that he feared.

It had been a long and lonely wait on Pluto. One hundred twenty people at the edge of the Solar System, struggling to clean up after the geniuses. The science staff had been working around the clock, trying to keep up with the torrents of gravities data pouring in. They had learned a great deal—in fact, too much. There had been no time to assimilate any of the information, to ponder it. As soon as one new discovery was made, a dozen new and urgent mysteries would pop up, requiring more urgent overtime and study.

And now it could only get harder. Chao and Raphael were returning.

There! A flare of brightness halfway across the sky from Charon and the Ring. Jane Webling watched as the Nenya performed her final braking burn.

But Webling frowned. There was something strange about that burn. She pulled out her notepack. Strange indeed. The Nenya was not dropping into her normal parking orbit, but instead placing herself into the bary-center of the Pluto-Charon system. The barycenter was the balance point, the center of gravity for the whole Pluto-Charon system, the point in space around which both planet and satellite rotated.

But the Nenya was never placed in the barycenter, for the very good reason that it could interfere with communication between the Ring and the Gravities Station. It only made sense if the Ring was to be controlled from the ship, instead of the Station.

But why the hell would they need to run the Ring from there? And why hadn’t the situation been explained? Jane Webling found a seat in the deserted observation dome and sat down. What the hell was Larry Chao hoping to accomplish here? She knew the official explanation, that Larry hoped to use the Ring to control the Lunar Wheel, and thus shut down the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

Ironically, the Charonian Landers had beat the Nenya home. The first of them had arrived a few days ago. Now there were dozens of the huge things, dotting the surface of Pluto and Charon, home to their namesake.

The Nenya had been gone a long time, stranding the entire staff in the cold and the dark. It was a quite distinct relief to have her back home again. They had a way out again—even if home, if Earth, was no longer there.

With Larry, Dr. Raphael, and Sondra Berghoff away, she was the only scientist at the Gravities Research Station who fully understood Larry’s work. In order to take over the Wheel, the Ring would have to send it a more powerful signal than the Dyson Sphere was sending. The Ring of Charon did not have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed to overcome the Sphere.

Therefore if Larry was not lying to everyone, he was at least misleading them. Which suggested he was up to something.

But what, and why? It was a question of some importance. After all, here was a young man who had acted on his own, in secret, once before—and torn the Solar System apart. She could produce proofs, demonstrate to the other scientists that Larry’s stated plan of action was impossible. Until Raphael returned a few hours from now, she was the acting director of the station. And if she could demonstrate that Raphael was part of the plot, then she would have every right and duty to prevent him from taking over the job again. And perhaps she ought to clap the two of them in irons.

Yes, beyond question, there were many things she could do. But should she do them? What did Larry intend?

Jane Webling did not know Larry well, but she had gotten a good look at his character in those chaotic first days after Earth vanished. He had seemed a very open and decent young man under incredible pressure. She had sensed nothing venal in him, nothing underhanded.

No, the most dangerous possibility was that he meant well, but had some plan, some scheme in mind he knew would not be permitted, some idea he thought would be the answer to everything and solve all their problems. Under cover of the experiment he professed to be running, he would instead do whatever it was he did not wish anyone to know about.

In other words, Webling concluded, he would do exactly what had gotten them all into this mess in the first place, when he had suborned her graser experiment and fired that damned beam at Earth.

And he had meant well then, too.

Damn it! What the hell was she supposed to do?

Think. Think. That was what she had to do. All right then. Larry was up to something, because his stated plan could not possibly work, and he knew it. However, he meant to do something that would do what the stated plan was meant to do: stop the Charonian attack on the Solar System.

And no doubt he was hiding his real plan because no one would let him near the Ring if they knew what he was really scheming.

And then she figured it out. She pulled out her notepack, ran through a series of calculations, and got the answers she knew she would get. She stared at them, utterly shocked that Larry would do such a thing.

She knew. She knew the answer. There was no other possible explanation.

But that left her with her original problem. What was she going to do about it?

She sat there, alone, with only Charon and the Ring bulking in the sky for company, and thought for a cold and lonely time. Larry Chao, for whatever reason—choice, necessity, guilt, panic, mischievousness or a cold, hard, adult feeling of responsibility, was playing God with the survival of the Solar System. Again. And by second-guessing him, deciding what to do about it, she found herself playing a little God all by herself. Suppose, strange and impossible as it seemed, Larry had it right, and she moved to stop him? Or suppose he were wildly, disastrously wrong, and she stood by and did nothing?

The Nenya was meant to double as a bare-bones, extremely barren backup to the station in an emergency— and this situation certainly qualified. The ship could house the entire staff, albeit under rather Spartan and crowded conditions. With the external tanks installed on the Moon, she could begin taking on passengers immediately, without reconverting the ship first. But was that the right choice?

Jane Webling knew she had to choose, and time was running out. At last she stood up, returned to the Director’s office, and used the intercom station there to give her orders. She could have done it anywhere on the station, but even the modest trapping of an office made her feel as if she had more authority.

Pushing the intercom button, she drew in her breath, and spoke as slowly and clearly as she could, resisting the temptation to blurt her words out all at once.

“This is Acting Director Webling,” she said. “All personnel are to prepare for the immediate and permanent evacuation of this station. Pack your personal items and prepare copies of all data for transfer to the Nenya. Work as quickly as you can, take only what you need— and work on the assumption that we are never coming back.”

She shut down the intercom.

“Because we never can come back,” she whispered. The station wasn’t going to be there very long, a very high price to pay—but if she understood the situation, that station’s destruction would be the cheapest of prices.

Or should she instead call it a down payment?

For if the race survived, humanity would be paying the balance on this bill for a long, long time.

Another feature to the Nenya’s design that reflected its purpose as a backup: the ship had a Ring control room, a duplicate of the four control rooms on the station. Larry, unaware of the station evacuation, sat there, working a simulation of his plan. It ought to work. All of it ought to work. And maybe that was what troubled him. Each step in the sequence seemed logical, sensible. But when he stepped back and looked at the entirety, it seemed ridiculous. Insane.

A knock at the control room door, and Simon Raphael came in. “Something interesting has come up,” he said quietly. “I was just about to order the immediate evacuation of the station’s staff up onto to the Nenya, when a message came in from Dr. Webling, saying that she had just ordered the very same thing.” Raphael lowered himself into a seat by the wall, and pulled the belt across his lap, as if he planned to stay there a long time.

Larry felt his blood running cold, felt confusion sweep over him. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Sometimes if you give two people the same problem with the same set of clues, they come up with the same answer.” There was a pause. “And sometimes, even three people can come up with it.”

“You and Dr. Webling both saw right through me,” Larry said. “No point in even trying to hide it.”

“Yes,” Dr. Raphael said, staring very intently at a point just over Larry’s left shoulder.

The silence dragged for a long time, until it became apparent that the older man wasn’t going to say anything else.

“Can I take it from the fact that you haven’t stopped me, that you both approve of my actions?” Larry asked, in a voice that was struggling to be calm and steady.

“No one,” Dr. Raphael said, with an effort, “no one is ever going to approve of your plans, especially given recent events. They seem too much like a disaster we have already witnessed. But neither Dr. Webling nor myself see any choice in the matter.

“You obviously planned not to tell anyone until it was too late. Just out of curiosity, how were you going to string us along? What were you going to say or do to allay our suspicions?”

Larry shook his head, his expression blank. “I don’t know. That was the thing I hadn’t figured out.”

“Then I suggest,” Raphael said coldly, “that you get on with the parts you did figure out.”

Power, Larry told himself.

Power. That was what it was all about. Power, gravity power, was what the Charonians had. Power allowed them to take over solar systems, steal planets, tear worlds apart—without any thought of objections from the inhabitants.

Larry checked the next step on his list. Shift the override control to manual. It was the absence of power that left the people of the Solar System helpless.

So, the question came back, how to get some of that power into humanity’s hands? Rotate colliding beam focus transfer to 270 degrees. Ultimately, of course, the Dyson Sphere was the source of that power, and there was not a hope, not a dream of matching that.

But even the Sphere needed conduits to send its power outward. Fusion boosters to third-stage warming. Larry was deep into his work now, barely aware that the outside world, that anything outside the Ring, its control room, and his intellect existed.

As far as power was concerned, the Lunar Wheel barely entered into the issue. It used the power, yes. Directed it and controlled it. But all its power came from elsewhere.

The power could not come from the Earthpoint black hole, either. By definition, nothing could come out of a black hole, except through the process of its own evaporation. The stream of elementary particles caused by that process was nowhere near enough to drive the vast operations going on in the Solar System.

The only other possible source for the power was the Dyson Sphere itself, using the Earthpoint black hole in wormhole mode as power conduit, relaying power to the Wheel. For three seconds out of every 128, Earthpoint flicked open into a wormhole, a link between the worlds. And it was then, when the huge asteroid-sized physical objects were sent, that the power had to be sent as well. Gravity power, modulated gravitational energy. How the Dyson Sphere produced it, Larry did not know, or care. He would worry about that tomorrow.

If there was a tomorrow.

Larry forced that thought from his mind, determined to focus on the problem at hand. He did not notice as Webling slipped into the room and sat down next to Raphael. High-power channel rotators in operational position. The power got to the Wheel. That was the important thing. When the Ring was in gravity-scope mode, you could see the Wheel laden with that power, watch it absorb, store, transmit it out across the Solar System to all the monsters tearing the worlds apart. You could see it sending out the command-images ordering the Venusian Landers to build that hideous thing pumping core matter out of the world, ordering the Ganymede Landers to dig in deeper.

That was the power and command cycle that gave the Charonians their strength.

Suppose that mere humans were able to tap into that power cycle? Were able to draw down gravitic power, and so deny it to the Wheel? Cut in on the communications circuits and order the invaders to stop what they were doing?

Suppose humanity had its own black hole?

But black holes were made out of mass. Lots of it.

Board ready. Ring ready in new configuration. Ready for manual activation. Larry stared for a long moment at the sequence indicator. He realized that he could have configured for an automatic start this time, too. But no, once again, he had set it up to take a manual start, a human finger pushing a button to start the whole desperate gamble rolling.

“Go ahead, Mr. Chao,” a gruff old man’s voice said. “Do what you must do to Charon.”

Larry flinched in startlement. He turned around to see Dr. Raphael and Dr. Webling there. He had no idea how long they had been there. “It is Charon first, is it not?” Raphael asked.

“Yes… yes sir. But ah, well, I really don’t have any good models on how much time we’ll have. Once we have a momentum of accretion, we really shouldn’t stop—”

“The station has been evacuated, Mr. Chao,” Dr. Webling said, her voice strained and under tight control. What emotions was she struggling to mask? Fear? Awe? Anger?

And toward what or whom were those emotions directed? No, ask the plain question, Larry told himself. Just how afraid of me is she? Will they all fear me, forevermore?

“Everyone is aboard the Nenya?” he asked in surprise. How wrapped up in his work had he been, that he had missed the comings and goings of the shuttle craft? Good God, isn ‘t there anything in my life besides work? Isn’t there even anything else I can see?

“It’s time to begin this,” Dr. Raphael said.

“And end it,” Webling agreed, in a tense whisper.

Larry lifted his finger, held it over the button, and pressed it down.

A signal, a simple radio signal of only a few watts in power, leapt across the depths of space toward the Ring.

Simplicity, and smallness ended there.

The immensely powerful Ring that girdled Charon sprang to life, shifting and channeling gravitic energy in ways that its designers had never imagined. Perhaps in some nomenclatures it would be more accurate to say the Ring bent space, realigned the areas of potential, but this assault on a world was too violent to be described by a mere bending and folding. The Ring crushed the space around Charon, beating it into a new form like red-hot iron on an anvil. It grabbed at Charon’s gravity field and focused it, creating a gravitic lensing effect, concentrating the entire worldlet’s gravitic potential at one point.

But not a point in the interior. A point on the surface, directly in the center of the hemisphere facing Pluto. It was Larry’s old experiment in focusing and amplifying gravity. But this time the point of million-gee force was stable, and solid. Now Larry knew how to maintain such a point source for as long as he wanted, draining the gravitic potential out of the entire world and focusing it in one tiny point.

For a time, a brief time, the satellite held firm, retained its near-spherical shape. But then the new and violent tidal stresses on it began to take hold.

The core, for billions of years at the focus of Charon’s gravity field, was suddenly at the gravity field’s periphery. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, Charon was suddenly a world cut adrift from the ancient gravity well that had molded it, formed it over all the lonely aeons of its existence. With the loss of gravity’s anchoring effects, the worldlet began to crumble. First the surface matter, and then more and more core material began to fall upward, toward the new gravitic locus.

Ancient crater fields trembled, shuddered, smashed themselves to pieces as impossible landslides slumped sideways over the surface, pounding and tumbling toward the locus. Deep in the interior, layers of frozen gas and rock that had not moved in a billion years began to shift, bulge upward toward the locus on the surface. Heat, caused by compression and friction, warmed ice and rock that had slumbered near absolute zero since long before the first living thing had emerged from Earth’s primordial sea. The heated ice and rock expanded, hissed, boiled, exploded. Vast sheets of the tortured surface suddenly blasted forth, streamers of glowing gas and pulverized rock arcing out into space, then falling down onto the hungry locus of gravity.

The Charonian Landers that had landed on their namesake world began to die, beaten and pummeled by the ever-growing violence that ripped at the frozen landscape.

With each infall of matter, the locus grew stronger, grasping greedily for more and more mass. The Ring monitored the locus, refocusing and amplifying it down to an ever-tighter, smaller, more powerful point source.

Now the Ring began the second phase of the operation, slowly dragging the new locus back down into the center of the dying satellite, twisting the knife in the wound, tearing a deeper hole in the surface, forcing a second wave of compression and heating to start moving back down into the interior, so that the old and new compression waves slammed directly into each other.

The satellite’s surface shuddered and cracked wide open, the heated ices of the interior blasting forth as gases and liquids.

The Ring took hundreds, thousands of minor impacts from the shower of artificial volcanic activity. But it had been built to withstand massive stresses, and Larry’s control program managed to focus most of the convulsions well away from the Ring plane.

The locus of gravity bore down into the center of the little world. By now, a solid pinpoint of matter, already close to the density of a neutron star, had gathered around the locus, and was eagerly sucking more and more matter down into itself. Under Charon’s tortured surface, the volume of infalling matter began to make itself felt. The locus mass swallowed up material and compressed it down into a tiny fraction of its previous volume. With more and more matter compressing into a smaller and smaller space, Charon began to fall in on itself.

The heat of collapse began to increase, even as the mass and volume of matter available for heating started to shrink.

Temperatures began to rise. Chemical bonds that had been stable for billions of years split apart. Hotspots began to glow on the surface, horrid splotches of red and white spreading like some ghastly plague on the land. More and more surface volatiles sublimated away. Gas geysers blasted free, plumes of steam roiled up through vents and from the bubbling cauldrons of the hotspots. Clouds of pink and green, chemical compounds new-formed in the turmoil below, twisted and knotted through the tempestuous air. For the first time in all its long history, Charon’s skies bore an atmosphere.

But not for long.

The chronometers said it took 47.5 hours, but none of those who witnessed it were ever able to believe that. It was far too long, or too short, a time, for a world to vanish utterly.

Larry never slept in all that time, but long passages of that time had the qualities of a nightmare, when the surging, seething storms, the weird sight of a world glowing white-hot with the heat of compression and collapse, the matter of the world relentlessly crushing itself, the world-serpent swallowing its own tail, consuming itself, driven on by the relentless urging of the Ring of Charon, named for a satellite that no longer was.

On and on it went, transfixing him, the moments taking forever, and then no time at all. Charon seemingly locked for all time into one state of its collapse, and then abruptly, seemingly without any transition, Larry would blink to find the satellite shrunk by half, glowing with a fiery light that had not been there before.

Larry watched, utterly unable to act or react, as the drama unfolded. It was something beyond him, outside him. It was utterly inconceivable that this titanic event could have anything to do with him, that anything he could do or say or think could have any effect on such a spectacle.

And yet he had caused it. He had imagined it, planned it, set the program, and pressed the button that caused it.

Explosions, massive electric storms, powerful magnetic eddy currents, auroral displays. Charon in its death throes found every way imaginable to shed the massive energy of position held by all the matter that fell in toward the rapacious center. The shrinking world glowed brighter and brighter, grew hotter and hotter as the spectacle continued.

At last there was nothing left but a sun-bright fleck of light in the sky, the glowing, ionized cloud of debris surrounding the dot of neutronium that late had been a world. The ion glow set the inner rim of the Ring gleaming jewel-bright by reflected light. But soon, all too soon, even that cloud of matter, even now forming into a miniature accretion disk, would vanish as well. Particle by particle, atom by atom, it would smash into the surface of collapsed matter and be absorbed by it. And the neutronium sphere, now spinning at incredible speed as it conserved the satellite’s momentum, kept growing, a particle at a time, letting off a flash of light and hard radiation with every impact.

Charon was no more. In its place, a point of star-hot brilliance, surrounded by a wispy nimbus of gas, thickening into a lumpen disk of dust, debris, and gas at the plane of Charon’s old equator. And the Ring, the Ring of Charon surrounding it all, at right angles to the accretion disk, face-on to the tiny ship hovering at the still-unmoving barycenter. The system’s center of gravity had not shifted appreciably. Charon’s gravity was still there, now captured in a tiny dot of neutronium, a pinpoint of degenerate matter that held all of what had made a world.

Matter so compressed that even the atoms themselves had collapsed in on themselves, the electron shells flattened down to nothing, forcing protons and electrons to bond, forming neutrons, gravity overcoming the weak nuclear force, in effect compressing the satellite down into one giant neutron.

“So now we’ve become what they are,” Webling said, looking through the monitors at the impossible sight. “Become Shiva, destroyer of worlds. We’ve taken a whole world, a satellite four billion years old, crushed it down to nothing, to serve our transient needs.”

“Self-defense, Jane,” Raphael said. It was not explanation enough, but it was all he had. He turned and looked at Larry. “There isn’t any chance that Charon by itself will be enough, is there? No hope that we can leave Pluto alone?”

Larry stared straight ahead, numbingly exhausted, refusing to see anything but the screens full of abstract numbers ahead of him. He could not afford to consider the reality of what they were—no, what he—was doing. “None. I’ve amplified and focused Charon’s gravity enough to form a neutronium sphere, but that’s it. I’ve pulled all the artificial focusing pressure off it. It’s stable, certainly for the present time, and maybe permanently. It shouldn’t be able to reexpand on its own. But I can’t achieve any further compression with so little matter, no matter what tricks I play.

“Even with Pluto added in, it’s marginal. Even with the planet added in, I might not have the mass to cause a tripover into a black—I mean, um, a singularity.” He had dreamed of creating a black hole for a long, long time. But now that it was within his grasp, he could not even bear to say the words, was forced into euphemisms.

Webling gasped. “Not enough? Well, what happens then? What if Pluto goes and we still don’t have tripover?”

“We go shopping for planets and moons,” Raphael said coldly. “I believe Uranus will provide us with more possibilities than Neptune. With the focused mass of Charon and Pluto to draw on, I expect we could develop a gravity beam that could draw one of its moons toward us. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Larry said woodenly, as if he were giving a test answer. “A tighter, more directed, more powerful beam than we ever would have dreamed possible a few weeks ago. The gravity beam would produce mutual attraction, of course. We’d be moving ourselves toward them at the same time, in effect falling toward them once the beam stripped the satellites from their orbits. It would require a transit time of several weeks at least. We’d meet at the halfway point between Pluto and Uranus, more or less. I expect we’d need Oberon and Titania, and possibly Umbriel. They’re all far smaller than Pluto, but their combined mass would be more than enough if Pluto by itself doesn’t do the job.”

Would it even work? No matter how many worlds they destroyed, no matter how much mass they swallowed up, it meant nothing if they could not break into the Char-onian power and control loop. Larry sighed, and his voice cracked just a little. “Then we proceed?”

Raphael nodded. “There’s no turning back now.” He pressed an intercom key. “Mr. Vespasian, this is Raphael. You may move us out of the barycenter now.”

For purpose of observation and measurement, the barycenter had some distinct advantages as a control station site, but because it was on a direct line between the locus mass and Pluto, it had some far more distinct disadvantages when firing a gravity beam from one point to the other. Vespasian wasted no time gunning the Nenya’s engines, moving his ship a prudent five thousand kilometers straight out from the barycenter.

Larry checked his sequencer, confirmed that the Ring was ready for the next phase, and pressed that damnable start button again.

The Ring of Charon focused down on the locus mass, this time bending the shape of space around it to direct most of its gravitic potential down on a tiny point on the surface of Pluto, suddenly subjecting that point to a field a million times as powerful as the planet’s surface gravity. A gravity field pulling that one point up, away from the planet. Just like what the Charonians do, Larry thought.

Almost instantly, a brilliant beam of ruby red light linked the locus mass with Pluto’s surface as a pencil-thin stream of matter ripped itself out of the planet and accelerated toward the locus. Heated by friction and particle collisions, the matter stream lit the frozen world in a terrifying crimson light. But the heating progressed further, and the in-falling end of the matter stream, accelerating toward the neutronium sphere, glowed hotter and hotter, a blue-white sword of light, a firelance of light stabbing into space toward the Ring of Charon’s center-point, knifing into the bull’s-eye with dreadful precision.

And then, from the viewpoint of the Nenya, the locus end of the firelance began guttering down back toward the red. Not because it was slowing, but because it was speeding up, reaching relativistic speeds, moving fast enough that its light was redshifted, its color dimmed down toward red by the velocity at which it was moving away from the Nenya.

The Ring began to shift its target point on Pluto, moving the contact point across the surface, expanding the focus point slightly, deliberately unfocusing the edges of the beam to reduce the gravitic potential toward the perimeter of the beam. Torn by the hideous violence of the gravity beam’s assault, its underpinnings pulled away as interior core material was pulled skyward, the Plutonian landscape was shredded apart. Pulverized by the massive tidal effects of the variable beam, the solid surface was reduced to shattered rock and superheated volatiles that blasted into space.

Larry watched, the tears running down his face, as Pluto collapsed in on itself. It hadn’t been a large planet, or an important one. The astrophysicists had never even quite decided whether it was a true planet in its own right, or merely an escaped Neptunian moon or a bit of oversized skyjunk. But it had been a world, a place, a unique part of God’s Universe, a border marker for the inner frontier of the Solar System.

And now it was going, going, gone.

And he had killed it.

“The station’s still holding together,” Raphael announced, a strange note of pride in his voice. “We’re getting some impressive readings on all the telemetry channels. The world crumbling beneath her feet, and the station still stands. We built that place well, didn’t we?” Simon Raphael asked, turning toward his colleague. His face was pained, sorrowful, and his expression was mirrored in Jane Webling’s face. He reached out, and took her hand. It had been a lonely place, cold in a way no heating system could warm, a place of drawn-out defeats. But the station had been a home to both of them as well.

Larry got up from the control console, leaving the Ring to run itself. It was all on automatic now, the sequence moving too fast for a human eye to follow.

He went to the side of the two older scientists, and joined them in watching the relays from the Gravities Research Station’s external cameras. He recognized the camera angle. It was the same view, the old, unchanging view from the observation dome. Before his eyes saw it as it now was, his mind remembered how it had been for so long, immutable—the craters, the empty plain, and, close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first stations, ruins exposed to the stars. And the graveyard, a few frozen corpses from the first missions here, hastily covered over a generation ago, carefully hidden from the dome’s line of sight.

And the now-missing happy blue marble of Earth sometimes gleaming in the night.

Now, nothing was as it had been.

He opened his eyes to the present time. The ground was shuddering, boulders leaping up into the sky, pressure vents blasting open as they watched, sending geysers of superheated liquid streaking upward. The shattered remains of the first and second stations tumbled over, collapsed into the bubbling cauldron of the melted land. And for a brief, terrible moment, the graves gave up their dead. A steam vent blasted open the ground below the graves, and Jane Webling cried in horror as the bodies of old friends were thrown upward, hurtling over the horizon.

Now the ground under the station lurched downward, and the camera slumped over, fell on its side. A boulder slammed into the dome, smashing it open. The interior of the dome frosted over in the blink of an eye, and the contents of the room were a sudden blizzard of whirling debris. The viewscreen went blank as the camera was yanked free from its cable.

Like so many candles snuffed out with the rippling speed of a gusting wind, all the other indicators and readouts from the station flickered out and went dead.

Larry turned back toward his control console and checked the sequencer display. The locus mass had grown appreciably, and the Ring was able to refocus the gravity beam to even greater power. He switched one of the monitors to an external view camera and looked for a long last time at Pluto.

The planet was collapsing, shrinking, fast enough that he could see it happening. A haze of dust and debris and gas was a funeral shroud for the doomed planet. A huge, roiling cone-cloud of debris was climbing up the gravity beam, matter spiraling down into the maelstrom from all over the planet, pulled in toward the beam.

The Ring adjusted the focus again, centering the beam on the point directly under the locus mass, widening the beam to draw in a wider and wider swath of matter. The faster the locus absorbed matter, the faster the strength of the beam grew, and the faster it tore matter from Pluto.

The planet’s matter howled up the gravity cyclone, the superheated glow of ionized matter blazing across the sky. The locus absorbed more and more matter, giving the Ring more gravity potential to work with. The Ring tightened down the vise, compressing the locus down upon itself ever more tightly.

Larry watched the gee meters, the amplification meters. They were rising even more rapidly than he had planned. Closer and closer to the point where nothing, not even light, could escape from the microscopic pinpoint that now held all the matter that had once been a moon, the pinpoint that was swallowing a world. “Coming up on it,” he announced, and no one had to ask what he meant. He closed his eyes, and exhaustion swept over him, tried to claim him one more time. But no, not yet.

The end of the firelance resting on the mass locus reddened more and more, grew dark and sullen as the gravity well deepened, redshifting the light more and more. The last shreds and fragments of Pluto slammed into the accretion cone, ripped themselves down to powder and gas, then to ions, falling, whirling, spinning, glowing, collapsing toward the voracious maw.

Larry watched the meters and licked his fear-dry lips. Soon. Soon. When the escape velocity reached the speed of light…

Suddenly there was a strange flickering across the screen as the last of Pluto fell into the beam. Just then, the light of the firelance guttered down to nothing, and not even the light of impact on the mass locus could escape. And the rest was darkness.

Larry looked up from his numbers and his meters, ignored the view from the monitor screens, and stumbled toward one of the Nenya’s few viewpoints. His own eyes. He had to see this with his own eyes.

In the wardroom. A port there. He stepped in, and saw a crowd there, people staring out the port. But suddenly their faces turned toward him, and they backed away. Whether out of fear or respect Larry neither knew nor cared. See. He had to see, with his own eyes.

He shoved his face up against the port, leaned in close enough that his breath froze on the quartz, turning the port into a foggy mirror, putting eyes in the quartz reflection that looked back at him.

His breath had frosted the station’s observation dome that first night of it all. That action, that tiny dusting of frozen moisture on a window, reminded him of the far-off victory when he had succeeded in focusing a pinprick of gravitic potential, a nothing, and held it steady for the briefest of moments—and had thought that to be a triumph. Now he knew better.

And, oh how happily he would give up that moment in order to give up this one, trade away his dreams to lose the knowledge he had purchased at such terrible price. The knowledge of destruction.

He reached out a weary hand and wiped his reflection away to look out at his handiwork.

Charon was gone.

Pluto was gone.

Lost, vanished, as if they had never been.

Only the Ring, the mighty and terrible Ring, survived. At its centerpoint, at the axis of the Ring, at the place around which all their desperate hopes revolved, was an impossibly tiny dot, utterly and forever invisible. A dot that contained all that been Charon, all that had been Pluto, all that had been the station and the bodies of their dead comrades.

A black hole.

A piece of darkness, and he had made it so.

Larry closed his eyes, and trembled, and wept. Then the exhaustion of collapse swept over him, and he knew no more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Half a Loaf

Larry awoke after far too short a time, longing for a better rest, for proper sleep, for a chance to dream away some of the nightmares. But things were getting worse back in the Inner System. People, families, whole cities could die while he caught a few winks. There was no time.

And so he was back in his control chair, trying to make it all work.

At last the main monitor screen lit up.

Good. He cleared the board, ran one last check, and let the automatics take over. A display light flickered once, there was a faint beep, and the search program ran. The Ring’s computers knew to within close tolerances Earthpoint’s modulation, intensity, focus, pulse rate. Now it had to hunt within that range, searching for the precise combination of values that would cause a lock.

It was up to the machines now. Larry moved back from the board. This was it, the end of the quest.

And yet only the beginning. There were endless battles left to fight.

The Ring sequencer worked relentlessly through all the myriad ways, testing, sensing as it made each adjustment. Larry watched it work, astonished by his own arrogance. His black hole was a scant few hours old, and here they were, using it in the most elaborate and complicated way imaginable. They should have performed tests, years’ worth of tests, accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of data, before they tried something this far out on the edge.

But there was no time. People were dying.

Webling, utterly exhausted, had gone off to try to sleep. Larry sat in the control room, alone with Dr. Raphael, watching the display click through all the permutations.

But being alone was an illusion. Larry knew that outside that door the entire staff of the research station, the people he had just made refugees, were watching every monitor, every display. Watching to see if the Solar System would live. Oh, yes, he was far from alone.

Larry turned and looked at Dr. Raphael. No, at Simon. He had never called the man that. But maybe now was the time to speak the man’s name. Maybe that, too, would be a beginning, a start of saying many other things to his staunchest companion. “Simon,” he said, quietly.

The older man looked up, startled. It was clear that he understood the significance of the moment. “Yes, Larry?”

“Simon, where are we? I mean, even if this works, what does it gain us? If we stop them, where do we go next?”

Simon thought for a moment, and then offered up a sad smile. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe nowhere. Maybe we win this battle and lose the war. We’ve just barely begun to have an idea of who and what we’re fighting. But at least we’ll have bought time. We’ll be in a position to survive, to regroup. We’ll have hope. And Earth will be safe, at least for the moment.”

Larry was about to reply when the alert buzzer went off. He checked his board and suddenly felt the adrenaline surging through his body. “We have a lock,” he announced. He powered up the external monitor and zoomed the camera in on the centerpoint of the Ring, where the invisible Plutopoint singularity hung lurking in the darkness. Suddenly, impossibly, there was a flash of unwhite, unblue, a flicker of color in the black. And then it was gone. Larry watched, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting.

One hundred twenty-eight seconds later it flared again, and Larry let out a shout of triumph that nearly scared Simon Raphael to death. They were in.

“Now,” he said, “we start tapping into the Lunar Wheel’s power feed.”

The education of the new planet’s Keeper Ring was barely completed. The Keeper had been handling the Link on a solo basis for only the briefest period of time, but it had the procedure down to a comfortable routine. Maintain the Link, allow the aperture’s innate recycle time to complete, stimulate the wormhole aperture to open, direct a Worldeater through the aperture, pull down gravitic quanta from the Dyson Sphere and direct them through the aperture at the same time. Complete all the transactions before the aperture destabilized and collapsed. And then, maintain the Link while the aperture recycled.

It was simple, straightforward, and the thing the Keeper had been bred to do. The Keeper took the mechanical equivalent of pride and satisfaction in the work, and in the fact that the Sphere had removed its last direct monitors, trusting the Keeper with the responsibility.

But no matter how great the Keeper’s competence, no matter how vast its heritage memory, time was still the great teacher, and very little of that had passed.

The Keeper Ring—and the Sphere—paid the price for the Keeper’s inexperience when the anomaly occurred. It took the Keeper only microseconds to realize something was wrong. The Keeper sensed a strange sensation on its Link to the new star system. A dip in power, a double echo on the last few pulses, as if the Caller Ring on the other end were answering twice. The Keeper increased the draw-down from the Sphere’s power feed to match the increased demand while it ran diagnostics on the situation. No need to call the Sphere for help. The Keeper felt confident it could handle the problem on its own.

It had to be his imagination, but to Larry it seemed as if the Ring of Charon were visibly surging, pulsing with power. It had never been designed to store this kind of gravitic potential, but the Gravities Station staff had learned a great deal in his absence. They had devised a way to use part of the Plutopoint singularity’s potential to form a toroidal gravity bottle, a gravity-field containment that knotted a toroid of space between the Ring and the black hole, curving space back on itself into a doughnut shape centered on the singularity. The containment could store the gravitic potential until it was needed.

And it was going to be needed soon.

Larry drummed his fingers nervously on the console. “Simon, there are things that I’m not sure of. I think that I’ve got the Charonian command-image system down. The Gravities Station’s engineers agree, and the Simulations work, and the data we’re pulling in now from the Keeper tap seem to confirm it. But there’s no time for more research. We won’t know if we’ve got it right until we start sending commands—and by then it will be too late to find out if things are going wrong.”

“All right,” Simon said. “Walk through it with me one more time. Assuming everything works, what are you going to do?”

“Well, the best we can hope for is to send false commands to the Lunar Wheel at a higher signal power than the real commands. Because we’re putting all our gravitic potential into signaling, and none into power relay, we ought to be able to shout at the Lunar Wheel louder than the Dyson Sphere—or louder than whatever auxiliary the Sphere is using to control the Wheel. Probably the Moonpoint Ring, but we don’t know.

“Then we can order the Lunar Wheel to relay our commands to its underlings. Marcia MacDougal recorded a large number of start-work commands sent by the Lunar Wheel to the Landers, and a few that seem to be stop commands. We send shutdown command sequences that ought to work. They should cause all the Landers to stop what they are doing and stand down. That should buy us enough time to learn the command language, and do more refined control—while holding the link to Earth open. If we get good enough with the command system, maybe we could bring Earth back.”

“It all sounds very promising. Suppose your commands don’t work?”

Larry folded his hands in his lap and looked down. “I have a contingency plan. But not one I want to use. It has to be decided ahead of time.”

“What has to be decided?” Simon asked, as gently as he could.

Larry seemed unwilling to answer that directly. “Well, if nothing else works, Marcia found what seems to be an abort order. The Charonians were smart enough to put an off switch in every machine. It seems to be an order that can be used on any malfunctioning Charonian device or creature, in the event that it goes out of control, threatening others. She spotted it being sent to the Landers that went out of control and crashed. I can use that command—as a last-ditch effort—to tell the Lunar Wheel and the Moonpoint Ring and all the Landers to die. It’s a very simple command. There’s no question that we have it right. If we sent it in a general broadcast through the wormhole link, and direct from here it would give us permanent, complete, final shutdown. I have no doubt about that. But of course, there would be other consequences as well,” he said.

“Consequences?” Simon Raphael asked. “It would be a full-blown disaster! Without the Wheel, we’ll have lost our link to Earth! You yourself pointed out what a disaster that would be when Vespasian suggested killing the Wheel. Earth will still be in danger, exposed to a future breeding binge.”

“We’ve sent Earth our warnings,” Larry said. “Unless a miracle happens and we can bring the planet back here, I don’t really think there’s much more beyond that we can do, or will be able to do. Whether or not we are in contact, Earth will have to stop the breeding binge on its own.”

“But you yourself said the Dyson Sphere had to have a backup linkage system,” Simon said.

“If it does I bet the other end is maintained by the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem,” Larry said. “And the Moonpoint Ring will get the order to die at the same time the Lunar Wheel does. With both ends of the link destroyed, the wormhole will collapse. I don’t know if even the Dyson Sphere could find us again.”

“How can you even imagine doing such—” Simon Raphael was about to protest, when his eyes fell upon the clock. With every change of the numbers, the Solar System was suffering more and deeper wounds. Three more of the core-matter volcanoes on Venus, and six on Mercury. Port Viking’s dome coming apart at the seams, its air rushing out into the Martian night. Daltry’s law, he thought. There is always a worse catastrophe. “Forgive me. If it does come to that, perhaps we will find out how we can do such a thing. We’ve done all we can afford to do in order to prepare for this. There is no time. Begin it. And good luck.”

Larry took a deep breath, turned back to the controls and adjusted the release on the gravitic quanta containment. The Ring took on new power. Up until now the Plutopoint end of the wormhole had been at the lowest possible energy, a mere pinprick in the side of the main sky tunnel.

Now Larry amplified the power going into the Pluto aperture, in effect grabbing at space, grabbing at the pinprick and pulling it wider, until the pinprick was a gaping hole in space.

Simon Raphael watched the main display screen, with half an eye on the countdown clock. The Earthpoint-Moonpoint aperture was to reopen in another five seconds. Four, three, two, one—where there had been a tiny flicker of blue, suddenly there was a blazing flash of color—and a massive object was hurtling through space. Simon caught a glimpse of a gleaming, cigar-shaped object before it flashed out of camera angle.

“Good God. We caught a Lander!” Simon said. Suddenly, for the first time, the mad idea of building a worm-hole was real, was concrete to him. A Lander, an asteroid-sized half-living spaceship, had popped out of nowhere right in front of them.

“That poor dumb Lander had to have been targeted and programmed for one of the inner planets. Now what the hell is it going to do?” Larry asked gleefully. “Good start, and if we didn’t know before, we know now,” Larry said. “Our aperture is stronger than the Earthpoint aperture. The theory worked—the wormhole is drawn toward the most powerful gravity signal. Now we’re in the driver’s seat,” Larry said eagerly.

“But what will the Sphere do?” Raphael asked.

“Not the Sphere,” Larry said. “That’s our main hope. The Sphere would be smart enough to handle our attack. But from what I could get out of the reports from Earth, the Sphere delegates everything. My bet is the Moonpoint Ring is running autonomously by now.”

“So how will it react?”

“God only knows.” Larry was intent on his control panel. “There! There it is.” He threw an oscilloscope tracing on the main screen. “That’s the main command signal coming from the Moonpoint Ring through the wormhole. I’m going to shunt it toward us, try and pull as much of that signal in through our aperture as possible, so we can weaken the signal arriving at Earth-point.”

Malfunction! Terrible malfunction. Massive amounts of power were being drained away from the Link. The young and inexperienced Keeper Ring forced itself to think clearly. There had to be an answer, a solution stored in its heritage memory. But this circumstance was new, unique, utterly unknown in all the annals of the Sphere and its ancestors. It rushed to abort the next launch of a Worldeater through the aperture, knowing the terrible dangers of sending mass through an unstable wormhole.

But power. That was the real problem. Without sufficient power, the Caller Ring would be unable to complete its work. The Keeper Ring redoubled its efforts.

On the other end of the wormhole Link, the Caller Ring was equally mystified, equally frightened, and utterly helpless. Without power it was nothing.

“Here we go,” Larry said. “We’re sending a modulated pulsed gravity beam, at high power, in command mode, right down the wormhole. I’m ordering shutdown of all activity on Mars.” He pressed the button and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Hell! The Moonpoint Ring is increasing its command power feed to the Lunar Wheel through Earthpoint. I’ll have to shunt more power away and store it here to make sure ours is the stronger signal at the Lunar Wheel.”

“But we don’t have that much storage capacity,” Raphael said, leaning over the control console. “We’ll have to dump the power, or use it to amplify our own command signal.”

“Can’t,” Larry said tersely. “Everything’s at capacity already and there’s no way to dump it except through the Ring of Charon. Put any more power through the Ring and we’ll melt it. And we don’t have any storage capacity left in the gravity containment.”

There was something wrong with the incoming commands, and nothing could be more terrifying to a Caller Ring. It was getting two command signals at once, and neither made any sense. The weaker one advised that increased power was on the way—but if anything, the power transmission was dropping again. The second command signal was loud, blaringly loud and powerful. It took a supreme effort of will to resist blind obedience to it. But its command syntax was garbled slightly, and there was something odd, disturbingly unfamiliar about it—and the orders did not make sense. A stranger’s voice, commanding wrongful acts. The Caller Ring was badly frightened now. What could it be? What was happening? It sent a reply signal to both senders.

The Keeper Ring was stunned. The Caller was clearly receiving an alien signal. Why was the Caller being ordered to cease disassembly of one world? Who or what was ordering it? How was it that the increased power the Keeper sent was not received?

The Keeper Ring upped its output to the Caller Ring again.

“Damn all that’s holy. Son, we’re spiking high,” Raphael said. “The gravity containment is completely saturated. We can’t shunt any more power to it. We have to let the power through to the Lunar Wheel or melt out the Ring.”

“Not yet,” Larry said. “Just a little bit—hold it, signal coming back. Computers working to interpret. Stand by.” Larry stared at the display screen, and his face turned ashen gray. “Oh my God. We’ve failed. The Wheel is saying our command was garbled, and indicates receipt of two command signals. We didn’t jam the Moonpoint signal hard enough.”

“Well, send the Martian shutdown order again,” Raphael said.

Larry shook his head, and punched in a display code.

A highly complex visual image flashed on the main screen, the schematic of the Martian shutdown command. “Not if it contains an error. We can’t just send it again, the Wheel would just refuse it again.” He stared at the schematic, and muttered to himself, trying to read the symbols and codes.

“Can you fix it? Correct the error and send it again?” Simon asked.

Larry shook his head, the sweat popping out on his forehead. “Not in time, not this fast. The damn message is too complicated, and we don’t know the language well enough. And we can’t shunt any more power to our containment, unless you want to recreate the Big Bang right here and now. The Wheel is going to get everything Moonpoint sends—all the power, all the commands—and you can bet the Moonpoint Ring is going to increase its power relay.

“And now they know we’re in the power loop, that there’s an intruder in the system. When the Wheel gets a full power signal from Moonpoint, they’ll find a way to lock us out. Just change the damn frequency, probably. And it’ll all be for nothing.”

He hesitated for a long moment, and turned toward Simon, a desperate look in his eye. “Unless the Lunar Wheel isn’t there anymore.”

There was a pause, a deep beat of time while Simon Raphael looked at Larry, and understood what he was saying.

Simon Raphael felt a hard knot in the pit of his stomach. Fifteen minutes ago he had been rejecting the idea as a disaster, but now it was the only choice left. “Do it,” he said, Now he wished Larry had kept the whole plan to himself. Dr. Simon Raphael did not want this decision thrust upon him. “Do it. Send the order to die.”

Larry decided not to tempt fate by asking for confirmation. He shifted all the power he could draw, called up the signal he had so carefully constructed, and ordered the computer to send it down the wormhole with everything behind it. Not just to the Lunar Wheel—but through the Wheel to the Moonpoint Ring, and through open space, to every Charonian in the Solar System.

The Caller Ring had never known such terror. What was happening? What monstrous enemy was doing these things? Suddenly its whole being twitched to attention, a hugely powerful signal grabbing at it, demanding its entire attention. The feel of the message, the voice, was still that of a stranger, an alien. But this time the command was unmistakable, sent in perfect syntax and modulation.

And it was the one signal that could not be denied, for it worked not through the Caller’s conscious mind, but through the very circuits that formed that mind. The command echoed through the Caller Ring, out on its every command link, to every Worldeater in the system. And rebounded through the Caller Ring itself.

Death.

Stop.

Halt.

Cut power.

Shut down.

Death.

With a strange, cold, fascination, it felt the signal, absorbed it, sensed it coursing through all the myriad links that made up the Caller. It could see the order crashing through all the components of itself.

There was only one hope. It had to set up a stasis storage, set part of itself into hibernation mode before the signal could destroy everything. Any portion of itself that was shut down would not hear the command, and would survive, inert. There was very little time left. Only microseconds at best. Almost at random, the Caller selected a portion of itself near the North Pole region and used every command channel it had to send the stasis order.

But then the signal reached the seat of consciousness itself.

Death.

Death.

Dea—

The Keeper Ring shuddered, convulsed with pain. Death. Death. Death. It fought off the impulse to die, struggled to clamp down its outgoing comm system. If this hideous command echoed out further, out into the Multisystem, the catastrophe would be complete. The Sphere itself might be imperiled. With a last effort of will, it held the command to itself.

And died.

The Sphere realized something was wrong. It switched its full attention back to the new Keeper Ring, milliseconds too late. It caught the last shreds of the death command on an outgoing signal, deftly countermanded it before it could travel outward. None of the Sphere’s other charges would be endangered.

But the Ring was dead, utterly inert. Something had attacked it, and killed it savagely.

Without a Keeper, the Sphere would have to monitor the new world directly, control its orbit personally. A further drain on its resources and attention. No world it had ever taken had caused it so much trouble.

And its new star system! Its hope for a new Multisystem, a refuge against the coming onslaught. Gone. Lost. And with the Link to the new star system shattered, there was no way to know how this thing had happened.

The Sphere realized that new star system was not merely lost—it had been deliberately taken away.

For the first time, the Dyson Sphere realized that it had not one enemy, but two.

And the second enemy knew how to deny it a star system.

But who and what had done this thing? The Sphere set to feverish work, sifting through the wreckage of the dead Keeper Ring’s memory. There had to be clues. There had to be a way to get the Link back.

If there was not, the Sphere was doomed. For its first enemy would not stop at killing a single Keeper Ring.

Frank Barlow, lately known as Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, looked down at his instruments, and out the porthole at the Moonpoint singularity. Suddenly there was no activity. The whole farging thing had shut down. As best he could tell with low-power, low-sensitivity, jury-rigged sensors, there was no gravity modulation going on at all. The Ring had stopped controlling the Moonpoint black hole, and the wormhole wasn’t there anymore.

Somehow, the folks back in the Solar System had killed the Moonpoint Ring.

He sat there, staring at nothing, for a long time. Better call Ohio, even if he was busy as hell trying to save the hab, now that the COREs had probably made resupply from Earth impossible. Now NaPurHab would have to be self sufficient, or die.

He pressed down the intercom key. “Ohio, this is Frank,” he said. “Something’s happened down here.”

“What’s that?” Ohio’s voice asked.

Frank Barlow licked his lips, looked again at the dead and silent instruments, and told Ohio Template Windbag what all of Earth was about to find out.

“Well, Walter,” he said. “All of a sudden, it looks like we’re on our own.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Before the Hunt

The command to die spread out from the Moon, coursing across the Solar System in all directions. On Venus, on Mars, on Mercury and in the Asteroid Belt, on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, the Landers heard—and stopped.

The spin storms of Jupiter faded away, the core-matter volcanoes on Venus and Mercury thundered to a halt, the surface strippers that had mauled Mars so badly stopped their deadly upblasts of rock and stone. The orbiting Landers, busily preparing to process the wreckage of worlds into usable form, shut down before they had properly begun. All the half-living, half-machine Landers stuttered to a halt.

The dust clouds faded from the skies of Port Viking. The domed cities of the gas-giant satellites peeked out from the rubble that surrounded them, and discovered they were still alive. VISOR coursed over a planet no longer in torment.

But the price was high. For no one had made the slightest progress in physically locating the Multisystem.

Without the Keeper Ring and Caller Ring, Earth was lost, utterly lost amid all the myriad suns.

Sleep had come at last. Fitful, fearful, unsettled, but sleep, a long enough rest to do some good—and a chance for the nightmares to work themselves out. Sleep and then awakening. Simon and Larry sat in the wardroom, lingering over coffee, happy at least to be alive. The viewscreen was on, and the stars shone in at the breakfast table.

“Half a loaf,” Simon said. “We are alive, and Earth is alive—but we are lost to each other. I was wrong to call that a disaster, Larry. Even if we never do find each other, at least we survived, Earth and the Solar System. We’ll be all right. They’ll be all right.”

“Do you really think so?” Larry asked.

Raphael shrugged. For some reason, even after the long nightmare just past, he felt good this morning. Tomorrow or the next day would be time enough for survivor guilt. Right now, against huge odds, he, the Solar System, and the Earth had made it through the night alive. That was reason enough to celebrate. “I don’t see why not. The planet itself is intact, its climate is stable. Only human technology was damaged in the jump—and our friends were recovering from that even before we lost contact. They have blue skies, green grass, the oceans, the forests. Why wouldn’t they be all right?

“True, they don’t have spaceflight anymore, thanks to those CORE devices ready to shoot down anything that flies. But the Naked Purple Habitat’s orbiting the Moon-point singularity, and the Terra Nova is somewhere out in the Multisystem. That’s two spaceside assets. There should be a lot to learn about the Multisystem, the domain of the Sphere from deep space. They have a few cards to play.”

“I suppose. But what really scares me is that I’ve gotten the Dyson Sphere’s attention,” Larry said. “We’ve had a real blessing in disguise all this time: the Sphere, all the Charonians, were utterly unaware of human beings. But they’ll have to take notice of someone stealing a whole solar system out from under them, and killing all their operatives here. I may very well have made the Charonians into a desperate enemy.”

Simon Raphael looked startled. “I can see them as an enemy. But why do you call them desperate?”

Larry hesitated for a moment. “There’s that one image I can’t get out of my mind, that picture of the shattered sphere. I don’t think the Sphere just wanted the Solar System. I think it needed it. And still does. As a refuge, as a hiding place, or maybe as a diversion, a decoy. I don’t know. We don’t know what that picture of the shattered sphere means, but we do know that the moment the Lunar Wheel received it, every Charonian in the Solar System went into panic overdrive.

“And there’s the way all the Charonians hid themselves in the Solar System. Think about that. Somehow we all took it for granted, never really considered that they had to be hiding from somebody. The Landers, disguised as asteroids, as comets in the Oort Cloud. Think about the way the Lunar Wheel was dug into the Moon. My God, what is there out there powerful enough to smash open a Dyson Sphere, frightening enough to scare something the size of the Lunar Wheel into hiding?”

Larry shrugged. “We can give it a name, I suppose. I’ve been thinking of it as the Sphere Cracker. But what is it? What does it want? Maybe it hunts for Dyson Spheres the way the Charonians hunt for life-bearing planets. And maybe the Earth’s Dyson Sphere is just about ready to be cracked open. What happens to Earth then? Imagine what would happen to the Multisystem if the Sphere weren’t there to keep the orbits stable.”

Larry stopped, and stared out the viewscreen. The Ring of Charon wheeled sedately through the darkness, as if nothing in the Universe had ever gone wrong, or ever could. At last he spoke again. “I don’t think Earth is going to be safe for very long at all. Not with a Dyson Sphere saving it for use as a breeding cage. Not with a Sphere Cracker out tracking down the Sphere.”

“Safe,” Simon said. “When have any of us ever been truly safe? Sometimes we’ve had the illusion of safety, but there’s always been something out there that could kill us. Name one person who’s ever lived through being alive.”

Larry smiled at the old joke, but then the sadness overtook him again, a wave of homesickness swept through him. Could it truly be that he would never see Earth, see home, again? “Will we ever find them again, Simon? We lost Earth once, and had to hunt for it through the worm-hole. Now we have to hunt for it again, but working blind. Can we find it this time, with the Lunar Wheel dead?”

Simon smiled gently, and nodded. “I think so. We know about wormholes, and Dyson Spheres, and we’ve got a Solar System full of alien technology to pick through. There must be some clue somewhere, buried in all those memory stores. And Earth will be looking for us, as well. We’ll find each other. In a week, or a lifetime, or a millennium.”

Larry smiled at last, and looked out the viewport, out past the Ring of Charon that had destroyed—and then rescued—so much. Past the invisible Plutopoint black hole imprisoned in the Ring’s centerpoint, past the wreckage of alien invaders strewn across the Solar System, past the battered planets shrouded in dust and his far-scattered friends picking their ways out of the rubble, past the ghosts of the dead lost in this fight, past the far-off gleam of the loving Sun that the Charonians had sought to entomb in a new Dyson Sphere—past all fear to the clean, clean stars.

Gravity power and wormhole links. Those were the keys to the stars—and Earth was out there somewhere, waiting for the good people of the Solar System to put that key to the lock and find them.

Gravity power, wormholes, the simple knowledge that intelligent life had once existed elsewhere, even if it were now mutated into something strange and incomprehensible. The sure knowledge that the stars were reachable. They had learned a great deal from their tormentors, back here in the wounded wreck of the Solar System. And there was a great deal more to learn, locked in the broken machines and dead servants of the enemy.

And what of the Earth, surrounded by the wonders of the Multisystem, with who knows how many habitable worlds just out of reach? The knowledge Earth and Terra Nova might find was limitless.

For there must be other wormholes in the Multisystem, other links to other multisystems, links to ancestors and relatives of this Sphere, reaching in all directions of space, back to every place the Charonians had journeyed in uncounted millions of years.

Look at it that way, look at it the right way, and humanity was not merely clinging to life, battling for survival, but quite accidentally poised for new and great adventures, both here and on the lost Earth.

Today was for rest.

Tomorrow the Hunt for Earth could begin.