Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 38

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 h.e.l.l 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 isFrank," 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 Ura.n.u.s, 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 gra.s.s, the oceans, the forests. Why wouldn't they be all right?

"True, they don't have s.p.a.ceflight anymore, thanks to those CORE devices ready to shoot down anything that flies. But the Naked Purple Habitat's...o...b..ting the Moon-point singularity, and the Terra Nova is somewhere out in the Multisystem. That's two s.p.a.ceside a.s.sets. There should be a lot to learnabout the Multisystem, the domain of the Sphere from deep s.p.a.ce. 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 G.o.d, 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 crackedopen. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.

THE ENDA note on Charonian terminology The Charonians do not use language in the human sense, but instead rely almost entirely on visualized imagery for communication and instruction. (As they do not use language, there is some legitimate question as to whether their visualizations can be considered thought at all.) The portions of the book described as seen by Charonians are therefore not in any sense translations, but human-style verbal labels of convenience on the visual images processed or transmitted by the Charonians.

A Note on Naked Purple terms, names, and usages Each Person in the Naked Purple community earns a name, which is in large part determined by his or her work status and personal attributes.

Names s.h.i.+ft and change over time.

Productive work of any type is seen as a necessary evil to be discouraged, and ultimately stamped out altogether. How society will function when that is achieved has never been made clear.

Language is seen as the direct tool of ideology, and thus there is a constant search for better or more socially correct ways to say things. Puns and combined meanings, particularly those that take the wind out of a self-important person or activity are highly thought of. That such constructions, and the emphasis upon them, frequently become self-important themselves merely adds to the tension of the concept. Purity of expression isvalued over clarity, with the result that much Naked Purple prose and speech is almost undecipherable.

Incomprehensibility itself is highly regarded.

Furthermore, many names and terms are a.s.signed ironically.

Glossary Amalgam Creature. A merged group of several Landers. See Lander.

Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of the largest asteroid, and the only effective instrumentality of law or justice in the Belt Community. The Autocrat's reputation for draconian justice serves to prevent most from daring his wrath.

Barycenter. The center of gravity for any orbiting system; the point around which two bodies in an orbital relations.h.i.+p revolve. In most systems, for example the Sun-Mars system, or the old Earth-Moon system, the larger body contains such a large fraction of the system's ma.s.s that the barycenter is actually inside the large body. In the case of more nearly equal ma.s.ses, for example Pluto-Charon, the barycenter can be a point in open s.p.a.ce between the two ma.s.ses.

Belt Community. A loose political a.s.sociation of the larger and more sensible governments in the remarkably disorganized Asteroid Belt.

Biosphere. That hollow sphere of s.p.a.ce around a star in which a life-bearing planet can survive.

Although other variables are involved, the basic constraint is simple: inside a biosphere, solar radiation is neither too strong or too weak, and Earthlike temperatures are possible.

Caller, Caller Ring. Charonian term for the object (or possibly life-form) exemplified by the LunarWheel. This form is extremely similar to a Keeper Ring such as the Moonpoint Ring.

Carrier bug. One of the lowest-level Charonian type, capable of only the simplest fetch-and-carry duties. Alternatively, any of the low-level Charonian types.

Central City. The princ.i.p.al city and capital of the Lunar Republic. Formerly called Central Colony.

Charonians. Named for the Ring of Charon, the hypothetical aliens controlling the ma.s.sive machines discovered after the Earth's vanishment.

Conner. A citizen of the Lunar Republic. Derived from colonist and/or con artist, in the days when Conners were dismissed as both. Previously a pejorative term, now generally accepted.

COREs, Close-Orbiting Radio Emitters. Any of a large number of identical objects in various...o...b..ts around all the worlds of the Multisystem. Their powerful radio signals-emitted over a wide spectrum of frequencies-serve as an effective jamming mechanism.

Dyson Sphere. A huge sphere built entirely around a star, so as to provide huge surface area (hundreds of billions times the surface area of Earth) and/or to capture all of the star's power.

Named for twentieth-century scientist Freeman Dyson.

Earthpoint. That point in s.p.a.ce, relative to the Moon and the rest of the Solar System, where the Earth once was. The Earthpoint black hole, also known as the Earthpoint singularity or wormhole, now occupies this s.p.a.ce. See Moonpoint.

Event Horizon. The minimum distance from a black hole required before time and/or light can escape-or, to put it another way, the minimum distance required before events are possible. The stronger a gravity field, the slower time moves and the more light is reds.h.i.+fted. If the field is strong enough, time and light are slowed to a completestop. Also defined as the point where the local escape velocity equals the speed of light.

Event Radius. The distance, usually measured in light-minutes or light-hours, between two points.

The event radius is so called because no event can have any effect at a given distance until light (or radio waves or other electromagnetic energy) has had time to cross that distance. Referred to as a "radius" because light expands out spherically. Not related to Event Horizon.

Gee-point object. Any fairly small object emitting modulated gravity power. The term is applied generally not only to Landers, but also to the large objects of similar behavior appearing through the Earthpoint wormhole. See Lander and Worldeater.

Graser. Gravity laser, a focused beam of gravity power.

Heritage Memory. Charonian term for the memories of previous generations of Charonians, together with the experiences of other members of the current generation, downloaded and stored in a Charonian's memory for reference. Each form of Charonian receives an edited subset of the ma.s.s memory appropriate to its needs.

K-Crash, Knowledge Crash. While a ma.s.sive downturn in Earth's economy has certainly taken place, no one is certain that it has been caused by a surfeit of information, as suggested in the K-Crash theory. According to the K-Crash idea, Earth's economy reached the point where the simplest decisions could not be made without ma.s.sive reference to the various databases. Many jobs became so complex that the training for them could take an entire lifetime.

Keeper, Keeper Ring. Charonian term for the Moonpoint Ring, and for the similar objects that orbit most of the Multisystem's worlds.

Lander. Huge creatures, long hidden in dormant stages inside asteroids, which move through s.p.a.ceunder broadcasted gravity power radiated by the Lunar Wheel. Once at their destination in orbit or on the surface of a target world, they merge themselves into larger amalgam creatures of incredible power. See Worldeater and Gee-Point Object.

Lifecode. DNA, or any extraterrestrial equivalent of DNA; thus, any means of pa.s.sing and storing an instruction set for a making a life-form.

Lunar Wheel. A ma.s.sive Charonian structure, a huge toroid deep inside the Moon. It circles the Moon's core and is aligned precisely with the border between the lunar Nearside and Farside. Known to Charonians as a Caller Ring.

Moonpoint. That point in s.p.a.ce, relative to Earth, that occupies the s.p.a.ce where the Moon once was. The Moonpoint Ring, a ma.s.sive gravity generator, holds the s.p.a.ce now, with the Moonpoint end of the Earth-Solar System wormhole at its center. See Earthpoint and Keeper.

Multisystem. The huge artificial stellar system in which the Earth was placed. At its center is the Dyson Sphere. It includes at least eight G-cla.s.s stars, around each of which large numbers of life-bearing planets...o...b..t.

Naked Purple Movement. One of a number of odd social and political movements. Also known as the Pointless Cause. Its belief structure is kept deliberately obscure and conflicted. The movement owns the NaPurHab habitat and Tycho Purple Penal on the Moon.

NaPurHab, Naked Purple Habitat. A large and rather shabby orbiting habitat owned and populated by the Naked Purple Movement. As the book opens, it is in a figure-eight orbit between Earth and the Moon. Population: 10,000.

Observer. Charonian term for a semidormant stage of the Caller Ring type. See Lunar Wheel.

Port Viking. Capital and princ.i.p.al city of Mars.Rabbit Hole. The vertical shaft leading from the Lunar North Pole to the Lunar Wheel, many kilometers below the surface.

Ring of Charon. A huge human-made gravity research tool, orbiting Charon, Pluto's Moon. In essence, an enormous particle accelerator.

Saint Anthony. The automated relay probe dropped through the Earthpoint-Moonpoint wormhole. Named for the patron saint of lost objects.

Scorpion, scorp. A fairly sophisticated Charonian type, capable of dealing (though not necessarily well) with unexpected situations. The term is applied not only to the scorpion-shaped Charonians, but to all creatures of its approximate ability.

Seeds.h.i.+p. A robot stars.h.i.+p that carries fertilized ova, or the equivalent, to a new planet around a new star. The seeds.h.i.+p lands, grows the ova to adulthood, and thus colonizes a new star system without having to transport a complex life-support system.

Settlement Worlds. Essentially, all the real estate outside the Earth-Moon system. Likewise refers to the now-moribund political alliance of those worlds in opposition to Earth's rather arrogant policies of the previous century.

Shepherd. The Charonian term for CORE.

Sphere. See Dyson Sphere.

Spin-storms. Artificial storms, created by gas-giant-breed Worldeaters, resembling hurricanes or tornadoes. They are used to pump atmosphere off the larger planets.

SubBubble. Subsurface bubble: a standard type of Lunar construction that consists of a large excavation under the Lunar surface. A subbubble is usually formed by melting an area of subsurface rock and then placing the interior under pressure.Much of Central City is composed of interconnected subbubbles.

Sunstar. The star in the Multisystem around which the Earth orbits.

Teleoperator, T.O. A remote-control device, generally resembling a humanoid robot but without a robot's capacity for independent action. A T.O. is controlled by a human operator working in a control harness at a remote location. The control harness completely surrounds the operator and provides her or him with the sensory reactions-sight, hearing, and touch- experienced by the T.O. Servos in the controller operate the T.O.

so that if, for example, the operator moves her finger, the T.O. moves its finger. As is the case with most Virtual Reality devices, the sensations reported by the T.O. to the operator can seem extremely real. Virtual Reality stigmata-such as cuts and bruises on the operator corresponding to damage on the T.O.-are not unknown. See Virtual Reality.

Terra Nova. A huge multigenerational stars.h.i.+p mothballed in Earth orbit, a victim of the K-Crash.

UNLAC, United Nations Lunar Administration Commission. The old colonial power on the Moon, overthrown a century ago.

VBH, Virtual Black Hole. Currently a theoretical possibility only. In concept, a VBH is formed by an artificial ma.s.sless gravity source so tightly focused that a microscopic black hole forms. If a VBH of a sufficient gravity gradient survives long enough in the presence of sufficient ma.s.s, it should be able to absorb that ma.s.s and thus become self-sustaining.

Virtual Reality. The general term applied to any technology that makes a nonlocal environment (real or imaginary) seem utterly real to an observer-partic.i.p.ant. In most VR systems, at least vision and hearing are supported with sufficient quality to seem real. Often tactile sensations aresupported as well. Typically, the partic.i.p.ant will be able to manipulate the simulated environment in some way, through a remote control or sensor glove.

See Teleoperator.