Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 19

This new home for Earth was not the afterlife, but it was certainly a celestial realm, a kingdom of stars, an Empire of the Suns.

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

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

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

He had to get to those worlds. Somehow. Getting here was a good first step. He had guessed right.

JPL had been officially designated the lead lab for finding out what the h.e.l.l had happened. Gerald barely had time to finish mentioning his credentials as an exobiologist before they had signed him up.

JPL's people could read a spectrograph as well as Gerald could. They knew they were going to needexobiology expertise, sooner or later. And until such time as he could work directly in his field, there was endless staff work that needed doing. Earth's survival could well hinge on figuring out what had happened. The scientific community generally and JPL specifically were confronted with the largest and most urgent research program in history, and they needed to gear up for the job. Gerald was a good organizer, and was glad to help out.

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

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

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

Already she was used to the ghostly pseudo-sensations her new left hand provided.

Maybe the astronaut's union was a waning political power, but it still bought d.a.m.n good medical care.

She sat in Wolf Bernhardt's outer office, waiting.

From time to time, someone would rush past, carrying a stack of datablocks, looking worried.

There was a frantic air about the place. Fumbling a bit, working awkwardly with just her right hand, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it.

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

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

She blew out a cloud of smoke, sighed, and tried to tell herself how lucky she had been. Of course, if you were a s.p.a.cer, you had a few more problems.

Not that Dianne felt she had any right to complain.

She was home, and alive. There were a lot of astros-a lot of her friends-who weren't.

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

She opened her eyes again, and found herself staring at an open hand, the fingers splayed out, starfished away from each other. With a new and separate act of will, she again forced her new hand into a fist, watched it close with open eyes this time.

And felt nothing at all from it but a numb warmth.

Her nervous system, confused by conflicting signals, simply gave up.

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

The doctors were soothing and rea.s.suring. In the old days, when amputations were permanent, amputees reported phantom feelings-an itch in the leg that wasn't there anymore, that sort of thing.

Intellectually, she knew, the disconcerting sensations she was experiencing were merely an echo of the same phenomenon. Her new left hand was sending legitimate signals to her nervous system, but a replacement body part, even a sprint-grown bud-clone produced from the patient's own cells, never precisely matched the original. In time the new hand would develop muscle tone and coordination, but for now it didn't respond or report sensation the same way her old hand had.

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

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

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

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

Whether or not dealing with them was a denial mechanism, Earth was facing some extremely serious problems that did require attention. The loss of s.p.a.ce facilities hurt badly, caused energy shortages, communications lapses, transportation problems, supply problems. People were suffering.

The papers and the tapes and the newsblocks were still reporting new disasters, new updates on the number killed or injured, on the loss of this s.p.a.ce facility or that. No one could truly comprehend the theft of a world, but people could understand the death of ten thousand in the crash of a habitat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even a Dyson Sphere hanging in the sky. People were acting as if giving it a name explained it.

Dianne felt a grim amus.e.m.e.nt at that. She was one of a very few persons to see it unveiled by atmosphere, blazing with power at the height of its energy pulse. She knew to fear it. Not so the average person in the street. They had learned that it was many billions of kilometers away, and many seemed to a.s.sume that anything that far off could do them no harm. Never mind that it was presumably related to the power that had s.n.a.t.c.hed the planet away. And besides, the Sphere wasn't visible in the sky anymore. Its cherry red glow had faded down through brick red, to a dim glow, to darkness. Now it was merely a spot of blackness in the night sky,eclipsing the background stars. In infrared, of course, it was another story. In IR, the d.a.m.ned thing was bright as h.e.l.l.

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

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

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

So where were they?

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

"Dianne Steiger?"

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

"Ah, no. I'm Gerald MacDougal, head exobiologist and chief of staff for the Directorate of Spatial Investigations."

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

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

"Background to what?" Dianne asked. "Why am I here?"

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

"Who's Dr. Bernhardt?"

"To oversimplify a bit, Dr. Wolf Bernhardt was the duty scientist here at JPL who detected the gravity waves that caused the Earth's removal. The U.N. Security Council needed someone to run their investigation of what happened, and they decided that gravitic technology was going to be central to figuring that out. Besides, they had to pick someone, and fast. So they dumped it in Wolf's lap.

They set up the United Nations Directorate of Spatial Investigation and made Dr. Bernhardt the first director and lead investigator. They've ordered him to, quote, 'Establish the causes and consequences of the Earth's removal to its present location,' close quote. DSI's got an absolute U.N.

priority claim on JPL and on any or all other research establishments or facilities or resources it needs, anywhere on Earth. We want it, we take it."

Dianne's eyebrows went up. "Wait a second. You said something about gravity waves a.s.sociated with the Earth's removal. You mean someone knows how it happened? With gravity waves? That's been kept quiet.""Yeah, it has, because that's all we know. And we want to work on the problem without every kook on the planet phoning in his suggestions. The data from every single gravity-wave detector in the world shows large numbers of highly complex gravity-wave transmissions right at the time of the Big Jump. Immediately afterward, within five seconds of each other, every gee-wave detector on Earth blew out. Based on the five seconds of data we did get, we think there are thousands of gravity-modulation sources in the Multisystem."

"Multisystem?"

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

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

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

" 'They did it,' " Dianne repeated. "So you definitely think we didn't end up here by chance. No weird natural fluke."

Gerald's gentle face hardened. "No. Someone did this. We know that. The entire Multisystem is held together artificially. Has to be. The orbits of all the stars, planets, moons and so on are so complex that they could not have occurred naturally. They aren't stable for even the shortest period of time. Our first orbital projections predicted all kinds of collisions and near misses and close-pa.s.s momentum exchanges. There should have been planets cras.h.i.+ng into each other and worlds being flung clear of the Multisystem. Except none of that happens.

Somehow the orbits of the stars and planets are constantly being tweaked up, s.h.i.+fted from their projected paths into safer directions. The Multisystem is as complex and delicate as a mechanical Swiss watch. The slightest mistake in orbit control could have devastating effects."We think that's what they do with gravity waves-correct and control the stellar and planetary orbits. And also they use them for grabbing planets.

We're pretty sure that all of the objects in the Multisystem were brought here the same way Earth was. Not just the planets, but the stars, too. They built themselves an Empire of the Suns."

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

Gerald frowned. "At least most of the time. It looks like once in a while they've gotten it wrong.

There are several highly ordered and clearly artificial asteroid belts of minor planets-but also a lot of asteroid-sized bodies in random orbits. We've already seen two impact events between asteroids."

He leaned forward and gestured to emphasize a point. "That's another reason for us to keep things quiet until we know more. The people of Earth don't need to hear that an asteroid might crash into them. We've had enough panic."

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

"But the most disturbing thing about those impacts is that no effort was made to prevent them.

Plus there's been a major upward jump in the number of meteors and meteorites, worldwide.

Some of them pretty big rocks. All of which means that control of the bodies in this system is not absolute. That's why the man on the street doesn't need to hear about these things just yet. Let things settle down a bit first:"

Dianne nodded vacantly. "Anything else I need to know before you tell me why I'm here?"

"One or two other points," Gerald said with studied casualness. "The motions of the stars and planets are also being affected by unseencompanion objects. Practically all of the stars and planets have periodic wobbles in their orbital motions, very distinct from the gee-wave-induced orbital s.h.i.+fts. We're sure the wobbles are caused by the gravitic effects of unseen co-orbiting companion objects. And they're big wobbles, so the companions have to be very ma.s.sive."

"Except?" Dianne asked carefully. She didn't know how many more disturbing revelations she wanted to get.

"Except we should be able to see the companions.

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

Dianne found herself wis.h.i.+ng desperately for a cigarette. "In other words, the Multisystem is full of black holes."

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

"There's one last thing to tell you," Gerald said.

"It's not exactly a secret, because anyone could reach the same conclusion we did just by thinking for a minute. It seems at the very least a strong working hypothesis that the Dyson Sphere at the center of the Multisystem is not only the power source, but the control center for the entire system.

So we very much want to take a look at the Sphere.

The trouble is that the Dyson Sphere has an exterior surface area approximately four hundredmillion times greater than Earth's. That's going to make locating the control center difficult. More so if the interior surface and volume of the Sphere are considered."

Dianne thought about that for a moment, and found herself adopting Gerald's air of studied calm.

In the act of doing so, she suddenly understood his behavior. He was as scared by all this as she was.

His air of calm was like a test pilot's artificial nonchalance, nothing more than a defense, a way to keep the fear from overwhelming him.

"Okay then," she said in a voice that was suddenly far steadier. "How about the big question.

Who? Have any theories on that? Who has done this and what do they want with us?"

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

"Come on, he should be ready for you now."

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

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

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

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

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