The Shattered Sphere

Six Grail of the Sphere

The Multisystem Research Institute at Columbia University in the city of New York was a goddamned big hole in the ground, but that was not much of a novelty in mid-twenty-fifth-century New York. Belowground construction had been popular even before the Abduction. Automated Lunar excavating technology had proved to be quite practical on Earth, environmental control was easy underground, and there weren’t many prime abovegrounds available.

After the Abduction, of course, the fad had really taken hold. Post-Abduction New York was even moodier and more paranoid than the city had been in times past. People wanted to hide.

Some people had—or pretended to have—reasons for going underground that had nothing to do with the Charonians. Many people felt safer underground. Well, maybe they were safer from street crime and bad weather and that sort of thing. But no one was really thinking about those dangers, even when they talked about them. They simply served as a nice series of plausible reasons for going underground.

Even if there was no real safety underground, people who lived and worked below street level did not have to see the sky. That was the major attraction. Underground living was downright fashionable.

However, there was such a thing as overdoing it—and that’s what MRI had done. Such was Sianna’s first thought every morning as she stepped into the high-speed elevator. She was early this morning, and all alone in the elevator car. Somehow that made it worse. She stood with her back to the rear wall of the car and reached out to either side. She wrapped both her hands tightly around the waist-high guardrail, and let her breath out slowly.

“Main Level,” she said to the elevator, and braced herself as best she could against the stomach-knotting drop. MRI main level was three hundred meters below ground level, and the speed with which the elevators could make the run was an inexplicable point of pride among the staff. Sianna would just as soon have gone twice as slowly and gotten half as queasy.

The motors whirred, the car started its descent, and Sianna was suddenly strongly aware of just what size—and flavor—breakfast she had had. She shut her eyes, determined not to listen to the air whistling past the car, the humming of the motors, the deeper vibration of the car’s drop down into the depths, a deep thrumming noise that seemed to be making the unconvincing promise that it would be over soon, over soon, over soon. The imaginary voices were never much comfort. After all, Sianna was afraid the ride would end too soon— and too suddenly.

Then came that blissful moment when her knees half-buckled and her weight suddenly spiked high and then slowly reduced itself to normal. The elevator car decelerated to a smooth and perfect stop, once again not dropping like a stone and smashing into the bottom of the shaft, once again not reducing Sianna to a shapeless, hideous blob the consistency of strawberry jam.

That was the rule. Sianna smiled weakly to herself as the doors opened and her ears popped with the change in pressure. Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.

Well, maybe not—but she never would trust that damned elevator.

With a distinct sense of relief, Sianna stepped out of the car and onto the observation platform. The elevator banks opened up onto a raised stonework observation platform ten meters above the main level. Two long, wide stairways in front and two long swooping ramps at the sides led down to “ground” level. The MRI designers had been deeply concerned no one be reminded of the endless megatons of rock overhead, of the fact that this grand, well-lit place was in reality an artificial cave deep in the Earth.

But for Sianna, who had no illusions about MRI’s location, something was still tickling the back of her head, telling her that this was it, today was the day. Today things were going to happen. She felt obliged to approach the day with a certain sense of occasion. Sianna forced herself to savor the moment, the view. Somehow, she knew that she would want to remember this day hereafter. She would want to remember what this place looked like now, today.

The MRI Main Level was not in and of itself a building. It was only a shell, a container to hold the actual labs and offices, a dome 150 meters wide and 300 meters long.

The ceiling of the chamber was done up in an absurd and deeply comforting imitation of a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. A combination of active-matrix paint and hidden projectors allowed the clouds to move across the sky. A brilliant yellow-white dazzle of light, too bright to look upon, tracked across the ceiling in place of the Sun. Now it hung in the eastern end of the ceiling, a bit redder than it would be when closer to the middle.

At night, the dome was lit up with the night sky of the Solar System, with the Moon and stars and planets all precisely as they would be as seen from New York City—if New York were back in the Solar System, and if New York City produced no light pollution. Illusions within illusions. No one had seen that many stars in New York’s night sky since the invention of the light bulb.

Endless effort and design had gone into making the stone sky seem to lift away toward infinity. None of it fooled Sianna, however.

She did not, did not, did not like enclosed places. Maybe that was why she hated the Charonians so much—they had put the Earth in a box, closed it off from the Universe, sealed the whole world off from the outside.

Sianna had been to Cambridge in England and wandered the ancient quadrangles of King’s College, Queens’ College, Jesus College and all the rest, and been fascinated by how they all conformed to the same basic design, the same layout of student rooms, dining hull, library, office and chapel laid out around a quadrangle. She had loved the feel of age and centuries hanging off the colleges, the sense that they had stayed the same here while all else had changed. She had loved the worn stones of the walkway, the way the present had been set down in whatever odd corners the past was not taking up. MRI had been laid out to the same pattern, a new and strange change rung on the same pattern twelve hundred years later. But was it conscious praise of the past, or self-deceptive denial of present reality? No centuries had molded this place. It was artificial.

Sianna had heard someone describe MRI as a campus-under-glass, and that was pretty close. The buildings themselves ranged from the ivy-covered brick of the Simulation Center to the mushroom-shaped biocrete of the Main Operations Building. Sianna could almost imagine Alice’s Caterpillar sitting on top of the Ops Building, gravely smoking his hookah. She smiled to herself. She had Carroll on the brain this morning, she did.

One side of the campus was given over to a fair-sized lawn, and most incongruous of all, a duck pond. A mama duck and her ducklings were moving across the water. The two swans were still snoozing in the shade of one of the pondside trees.

Sianna turned and made her way down the stairs and onto the pathway that led past the pond to the Main Ops building.

The unreality of the place suddenly seemed the most palpable thing about it. Piped-in air treated to smell like fresh air, the errant breeze created by computer-controlled ductwork, the springiness of the thick-growing, robot-tended lawn beneath her feet all suddenly seemed too real, like the over-vivid hallucinations of a fever-dream.

Somehow the real things suddenly felt false. The quacking and fussing of the ducks as they splashed about in the water, the slight residual queasiness in her stomach, even the distant echo of a human voice from some unseen conversation elsewhere in the dome—all seemed part of some grand illusion.

Everything is fine, the dome of the main level told all who came there. Everything is under control. You are safe here, and all is as it should be.

Except the only reason the place existed was that the Earth had been stolen by aliens and nothing was as it should be.

Sianna frowned as she made her way toward the Main Ops building. She entered the place through one of the glass doors in the base of the mushroom stem, and got into one of the elevators that led up to the main body of the building. If the main center for the study of the enemy was so deeply immersed in denial of the situation, if the people researching the problem insisted on seeing the night sky as it ought to be, not as it was—then what hope could there truly be?

Ten minutes later, a mug of good, strong, steaming-hot tea in her hand, her face directed toward the largest and blankest of the windowless walls that made up her cubicle, Sianna felt better. She was alone, her mind was clear, the problem was in front of her.

Quiet and alone, she allowed her mind the pleasure of wrapping itself up in the mystery of those missing thirty-seven minutes. Let’s see, she told herself. Assume there was nothing at all wrong with the Saint Anthony‘s clock. If so, then those thirty-seven minutes were real. So what could cause the probe to jump around in time when—

“Hello, Sianna. Good morning,” a quiet voice said from behind her.

Sianna jumped, splashing tea on the desk. It was Wally, of course.

Damnation, couldn’t he ever make some noise? Or knock? She cursed under her breath and set the mug down. No, he never would change. If she wanted to quit jumping out of her skin, she would have to rearrange the furniture in here so her back wasn’t to the door, or, worse, shut the door. Sianna did not relish being in an enclosed space that small. Besides, she was damned if she would change her space and the way she did things in it to suit someone else.

“Hello, Wally,” she said, her back still to the doorway as she calmed herself, trying to compose her face as she blotted up the spilled tea with a piece of tissue from the dispenser. She felt a strong impulse to bite his head off, but there was no point in scaring the poor guy to death. Wally did not deal well with anger.

Throwing the tissue into the recycle bin, she swiveled her chair around to face the doorway, her expression blandly polite.

Wally Sturgis was standing nervously just outside her door. God only knew how he managed to look shy and nervous without moving a muscle, but he managed it. “Hello Sianna. What brings you, ah— in—so early this morning?” he asked, still not quite daring to make eye contact with her.

Wally was a forty-two-year-old doctoral candidate on loan to the Multisystem Research Institute from the Simulations and Modeling Lab in Columbia’s math department. He was the absolute archetype of the eternal student—locked into one niche in life that he could never escape, and completely unaware that he was locked into anything.

Sianna sighed inwardly, and spoke in a fair imitation of a cheerful voice. “Just had an idea or two I wanted to work on before the rest of the crowd came in,” she said. “I wanted a little peace and quiet, that’s all.” There was some hope, however faint, that he might take the hint.

No such luck. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Wally said, nodding vigorously as he sidled through the door and sat down in the visitor’s chair, keeping himself as far from her as possible. He sat down, folded his hands tightly in his lap and stared intently at a spot on the floor just to the left of her feet.

“I know how that is,” he said. “You can get a lot more done when nobody is around. I hate it when people just barge in and— Ah. Oh.” Suddenly the light went on in his head. He looked up, startled, making eye contact for the first time. Sianna repressed a smile as she watched an expression of dismay slowly appear on Wally’s face. Only he could wander in and disrupt someone and then sympathize about the perils of being disrupted.

Sianna knew she ought to say something, ought to smooth over the awkward moment with a word or two that would make Wally feel better. But half out of mischief, and half because it wouldn’t kill Wally to be embarrassed enough not to barge in the next time, she said nothing.

The first time she had met Wally, back when she was an underage freshman four years ago, Sianna had asked him some polite question about whether he liked doing simulations. Wally had started his reply in a low, quiet, shy voice Sianna could barely hear—but as he started warming to his topic, he spoke louder, faster, his face becoming animated and excited as he described the virtues and perils of pseudo-fractal regressions and high n-dimensional projection arrays. He had gone on for twenty minutes before Sianna could find a way to escape.

Not long after that, Sianna had made it her mission in life to reform Wally, to show him the big wide grown-up world. Why, precisely, a gawky fifteen-year-old should want to do such a thing was not entirely clear to her, even at the time.

Whatever drew him to her, made her feel for him, it certainly wasn’t his looks. He was short and spindly-looking. What there was of his shaggy brown hair hung straggling down about his shoulders, uncombed and unkempt.

A large and prominent bald spot on the top of his head spoke to the fact that this was not a man much given to vanity or appearances. After all, a man could slap a dab of cream on his head twice a day and clear up baldness in a month—but that presupposed that the man cared that he was balding, and could remember to apply the medication every day. Wally didn’t qualify on either score.

His clothes told much the same story, from the slept-in look of his rumpled dark-blue shirt and wrinkled, musty dark grey work pants to the battered look of his ped-slippers. Still, even these clothes suggested some sort of progress. For Wally, wearing any other color but black was a real fashion statement.

He had bushy eyebrows, deep-set eyes of indeterminate color, a rather beakish nose, and an unfashionably large and unkempt beard that didn’t somehow seem to match his handlebar mustache. His rumpled face held that pallor peculiar to people who never see the Sun at all, and never expose themselves to the weather. It looked as if he had not slept in a while.

None of that meant anything, of course. He always looked that way. Wally could have been in those clothes for three days, nursing a computer run nonstop—or he could have just rolled out of bed, taken a bracing hot shower, and stepped into clean fresh clothes. Sianna had concluded that Wally’s unchanging appearance was a result of years of effort, the cumulative effect of decades in the student life-style. He had been pulling all-nighters at random intervals all his adult life, each one etching the lines of exhaustion and rumpledness a little deeper.

The consensus around the Institute was that Wally would develop normal social skills—and complete his doctorate—just about the time he was due to retire.

Clearly he didn’t have the skills yet. He still hadn’t apologized for barging in. He sat there, with that damned hangdog look on his face. She could never read that look. Was he embarrassed? Was he trying to think of something to say? Did he think that he had already said enough? Was he waiting for her to speak?

Sianna gave in. She would have to break the ice, as usual.

“Oh, it’s all right, Wally. Life goes on. But how about you?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, in a daydreamy voice. At a guess, he had already forgotten asking her why she was here.

What went on in that head? Sianna spoke in her calmest voice, for all the world like a patient grade-school teacher dealing with a slow student. “Why are you here, Wally?” she asked.

“Huh? What? Well, uh, I was transferred over from Columbia because—”

“No, Wally,” Sianna said, struggling to keep her voice from rising. “Why are you here this morning? You look a little punchy. Have you been here all night?”

Wally looked surprised and glanced down at himself, clearly wondering what about his appearance would make someone think he was short of sleep. “Me? Nope. Got to bed about nine last night. I’m just coming in for the day. Dr. Sakalov wants me to set up his Sphere-interior simulation. He thinks he’s finally figured out where Charon Central is.”

“Not Charon Central again. Don’t they ever quit?”

Wally smiled, and his eyes crinkled up with pleasure. “I guess not. Dr. Sakalov really thinks he has it this time. But—ah—ah—I almost hope he’s wrong again. Every time he is, he gets me higher-priority access to sim time so I can prove his next theory.” Wally grinned broadly, very much amused.

Sianna frowned. “Maybe it’s a joke to you, but not to me, Wally. It’s all guesses and theory and philosophy and logic-chopping. Sakalov’s trying to prove the Multisystem is controlled from the Sphere core because he wants to believe it, not because there’s any proof. Because it fits his theories—hell, his theology—about how the Charonians work.” Maybe that was a bit overstated, but Sianna wasn’t the only one who thought Sakalov got a bit mystical at times. “It’s about as scientific as the quest for the Holy Grail, or creating the Philosopher’s Stone, or squaring the circle. You look for something so hard you end up trying to invent it when it turns out not to exist.”

“But… well… I don’t know,” Wally said. Wally didn’t like arguing, or any sort of confrontation, and he wasn’t very good at it.

“Look,” Sianna said, “someday, yes, maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll find Charon Central—if it even exists—and maybe that will be vital information. But for the time being, the Charonians have us penned up pretty damned tight. What use is proving Charon Central is in the Sphere when we can’t get to the Sphere? No one can even get off-planet!”

“Sure they can,” Wally objected, clearly unconscious that he was using “they” to refer to the human race. “They send supplies to NaPurHab and the Terra Nova.”

“Come on, Wally, where have you been? Yes, we can send supplies, but we can’t send people. The COREs in Earth orbit smash one outbound cargo ship out of two during boost phase. And nothing can come inbound to Earth from NaPurHab or the Terra Nova. The COREs smash up anything that even gets close to an intercept course with Earth.”

“Well, okay, it isn’t easy,” Wally said. “Maybe we can’t get to Charon Central yet, but what’s wrong with trying to figure out where it is?”

“Nothing, except that all the time and effort they put into chasing the Center is lost to doing research that might get us out of this mess. Like getting past the COREs so we can land ships, maybe.”

“I like doing the Charon Central sims!” Wally said, a bit petulantly. “I’ve done COREs a million times. They’re boring.”

Only Wally would see relative degrees of fun as a reason to do one simulation over another.

“It isn’t a question of what you like, Wally,” Sianna said. “It’s a question of which is going to help the most. The COREs are—”

“COREs, COREs, COREs,” Wally said, losing his temper. “That’s all you ever talk about. It seems to me that you’re as obsessed with them as Sakalov is with Charon Central. You don’t ever seem to get anywhere, either.”

Sianna opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. There was too much justice in what he said for her to say anything. Maybe the COREs represented a more immediate problem, but if so, the problem didn’t show any more sign of being solved than the Charon Central mystery. He had a point. Dammit, now she was the one who had to apologize.

But Wally was already out of the visitor’s chair, stomping off down the hall to his own cubicle. Hell. Sianna wanted to get up and go after him, but she knew Wally wouldn’t listen to an apology—or anything else—until he calmed down. On the plus side, at least he had left her cubicle.

The trouble was, Wally had a point, one that she had not quite faced for herself—and when Wally Sturgis could see something you could not, then you were pretty damned self-absorbed.

Here she was, completely distracted from her own area of research, off on an ill-defined wild goose chase, listening to whispered hints from her subconscious, looking for messages in dreams, working on hunches and instinct. What the devil kind of science would that sort of nonsense produce?

Maybe it all was hopeless. Maybe nothing was left to any of them but the need to keep busy, keep the mind and body occupied. Maybe all of MRI was nothing but a huge distraction from a cruel and unchangeable reality. Maybe humankind was utterly, totally helpless in the face of the Charonians, and humanity would be wiped out in the exact moment that best suited the Charonian whim.

But Sianna was not quite ready to descend into gloom. Maybe they were all doomed. Well, even if that was the case, it could do no harm to solve the puzzle. The hell with it. She turned back to the question at hand.