The Shattered Sphere

Ten Do It Yourself

“All right, then,” Sianna said. “You’re in charge, Wally. Start from where we left off and assume the Charonians won. Take apart the whole damn Solar System and build me a Dyson Sphere, a Multisystem. I want to see how it’s done.”

“But, um, ah… I don’t know if I have the simulation routines.

“Then we’ll write new routines,” Sianna said, cutting him off. “I’m near the answers, Wally. Damned near. If things break the way I think they will, then”—she paused to choose her words—“then all sorts of things might be possible.”

Wally blinked at her, a bit owlishly, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want the sim results to be?”

There! That was the question that had crippled them for so long. Not what are the results, but what do you want the results to be? That mindset, and a distinct reluctance to consider the possibility of ultimate, final disaster in the Solar System, were the two reasons no one had seen the answer.

“I want the sim to do whatever it wants to do,” she said. “Reset to the moment the Lunar Wheel woke up. Factor out all human interference, and let’s see what the Charonians would do with the cards they were dealt.”

In that sense, at least, the Charonians were like everyone else. They had to work with what they had; not deal with what was logical, but with the available Universe.

That was the point that everyone missed. Sakalov viewed them as supremely logical beings, and maybe they were. But the Charonians did not live in a logical or rational Universe—and they did not spring from nowhere. Like every other life-form—if you considered them a life-form—they had evolved. There seemed little doubt that they had directed their own evolution, but all the same, the current form had to keep itself alive while it was on its way to creating the new one. Whales still had toe bones. Birds still had lizard feet. You used the structures you had and modified them.

And if one thing was certain about the Charonians, it was that they had not always been what they were now. Sometime, somehow in the past, creatures had built starships, filled them with the lifecode, the DNA equivalent, of the life from the home world and sent the starships out into space. But the starships had the ability to modify their cargo of living beings, and they had taken over. Life served machinery instead of machinery serving life, until the two merged into one. The end result of that was the strange complex webs of interdependent beings that humans called Charonians.

Coming into the Universe tends to leave some scars. Humans had belly buttons. Sianna was very close to certain she knew what Charonians had.

“Think like a Charonian,” Sianna said, going over to where Wally was working. “You’ve got the whole Solar System for raw materials, and you want to build a Dyson Sphere. How would you go about doing it?”

Wally looked thoughtful. “What sort of assumptions do I make?”

“No assumptions. Just aim for the end result of a Sphere like the one here. Just do your best guess,” Sianna said.

“But what about—”

“Just make it up as you go along,” Sianna said. She didn’t want to say as much to Wally, but she was relying more on his hunches and guesses and instincts than the results of deliberate thought. Sometimes, when he tried too hard, Wally thought like a regular person. Sianna was half-hoping that the way he looked at the world when he worked at his own level would be closer to the Charonian viewpoint. Not that she could say any of that, of course. “You’ve been doing these sims right along. Do it by feel. Take the tools that make the most sense to you.”

“Okay, then,” Wally said, leaning back in his chair. “I have a lot of stuff in the data library, and a bunch of ideas I never had a chance to try out. You understand I’ll have to do a lot of guessing. We don’t know how the Charonians do a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Ah, well, for starters, they must have some way to do easy, efficient, straightforward matter transmutation. That’s the big thing,” he said. “Hydrogen and helium make up something like ninety percent of the Solar System. They’d have to be able to turn hydrogen and helium into other elements. We’ll just have to do a black box on that. Let’s see. We’ll need some Charonian forms we haven’t seen yet. Sphere constructors, transporters, energy collectors. Probably some sort of interim structures along the way…” Wally kept talking, but his voice got lower and less distinct until he was just muttering to himself, and Sianna could not follow it. But he was caught up in the spirit of the thing, and that was all that mattered. Once Wally got his teeth into a problem, he did not let it go.

Suddenly the interior of the Sim Center chamber began to shift and change, slowly at first, but then with greater and greater violence. The darkened room flared into glaring light. The images of the planets turned ghostly pale, then transformed into ghostly white wire balls, mere schematics rather than true images. Wally was conserving processing power, doing bare-bones imaging while he set up. Then the wire balls began to shift position, zipping and flashing across the darkened sky as Wally brought the setup to where he wanted it. Sianna found herself ducking, a bit too late, as the wireframe image of Jupiter skimmed across the room—and right through her.

“Okay,” Wally said, clearly talking to himself, “we’ll need places to store and process raw materials, and, ah, transmuters, and transporters, and oh, let’s see…” His voice started to take on a strange enthusiasm, and an odd little gleam came into his eye. Sianna had asked him to play God, and it was obvious he liked the idea.

Strange shapes, changing and evolving, appeared in the air around Sianna, and then vanished before they completed themselves. Wally was trying out ideas, scenarios, procedures half in his head and half in the sim chamber. It was all most disconcerting.

But then quite suddenly, it all stopped, and the room dropped into total darkness. “Okay,” Wally’s voice announced from the midst of the utter blackness. “I think I have it. At least a first-draft idea, anyway. Here we go.”

The room remained in darkness for a moment. Then the planets reappeared, moving fast enough that even Saturn’s motion was visible. Sianna checked the time display—Wally had gone back to the moment the Lunar Wheel had awakened, and was running the system at a year every thirty seconds. At that speed, the individual Charonians were barely visible, little more than a hazy cloud about each of the planets. But Sianna could see the results of their handiwork quite plainly.

The planets were coming apart at the seams, dissolving before her eyes as the Charonians tore up the worlds and hurled their component matter out into free space. The Lunar Wheel, hidden deep inside the Moon, commanded the operation, sending out stabbing bolts of gravity power for the other Charonian forms to absorb. The time display rolled forward at a frantic pace, quickly sweeping past the time when the Solar System had managed to stop the Charonians—or at least the moment where everyone hoped they had been stopped.

The pace of destruction accelerated as more and more Charonians poured through the wormhole links. The smaller and then the larger satellites of the gas giants evaporated. Mars was the first planet to go, shredded away until its component mass was nothing but a cloud of dust and rubble. One by one, the rest of the worlds of the Solar System followed suit, ground down to nothing. At last, even Jupiter wasn’t there anymore, the king of the planets reduced to a cloud of gas and dust. All the worlds were gone. All but the Moon. All but the Moon—the Moon, where the Lunar Wheel lived.

“Okay,” Wally said. “From here on in it’s all totally hypothetical. We know that once the Landers were on the ground, they came together, kinda merged into larger Amalgam Creatures. I figure the Charonians would just keep going with that idea. Once the worlds are torn up, the Amalgams would merge together and form black box monsters.”

“Black box monsters?”

“Huh? Oh, you haven’t hung out in the theory bull sessions, I guess. Well, the things would be huge—maybe a hundred, two, three hundred kilometers across. That’s what I call a monster. And a black box—you know, a machine where you know what it does but not how it does it. If the Charonians want to use the debris fields that used to be the planets, they have to be able to collect that matter, transmute it into whatever elements and materials they will need, and then form those up into, ah, well, call ’em Sphere modules. Sections of the Sphere’s skin, structural support, that sort of thing. Anyway, I’ve just sorta guessed at what the BBMs for a given job would look like. Here, I’ll do an enlargement on a cluster of them. Lemme slow down the time rate and zoom in a bit so you can see what’s going on.”

A cluster of tiny dots near Mars’ old orbit suddenly started to grow, swelling up until they filled half the sim chamber. The BBMs were huge, complex, malevolent-looking things. They looked like clusters of pyramidical Amalgam Creatures stuck together into various shapes.

One of them was sucking in matter from the surrounding debris field—debris that had once been Mars—and extruding it in the form of long, flattened sheets. No doubt, at least in this simulation, those sheets would one day be the outer skin of the Solar System Dyson Sphere.

Sianna felt that knot in her stomach again. Suppose they had all talked themselves into the notion that their kith and kin back home were still alive? Suppose what she was seeing here was what was really happening back there?

Don’t think about it. Don’t think. As the sheets of Sphere skin came out of the thing that was making them, another breed of Charonian was grappling the sheets and hauling them away.

“It’s all guesswork,” Wally said. “We’ve never seen these forms. But they’d have to have some sort of creatures to do these things. Maybe they have more than one type. One to transmute, and one to take the transmuted matter and form it up as needed. Or maybe— God knows how—they’ve found some way to sidestep transmutation and do it all on the, ah, chemical level rather than the atomic one. So they could build superstrong molecules out of hydrogen and helium and trace amounts of the other elements. But somehow or another, they have to take the raw material of the planets and rework it into the components of the Sphere.”

“Fine, Wally, fine. Now, keep it going, Wally,” Sianna said. “What happens next?”

“Well, once you have the transmuters—or whatever—up and running, it’s a question of getting the material to where the Sphere is going to be. And you’d need a hole spinner.”

“A what?”

“Well, the Lunar Wheel provided all the gravity power to the other Charonians in the system—but it didn’t generate any of that power, as best we can tell. It was a conduit for gee power being transmitted by its parent sphere, here in the Multisystem. And we know the Charonians use a lot of black holes—for wormhole transport, to keep tidal stresses balanced, to generate power, all that kind of stuff. Sooner or later, the Lunar Wheel is going to need to make its own power, and build its own holes.”

“But there isn’t enough mass in the Solar System to create a new Sphere and make black holes of any size.”

“Right. But do you really need mass? In theory, with enough energy to throw around, you can create a massless black hole—a virtual black hole—basically by shoving enough power down into a singularity. We have no idea how to do it—but we aren’t the Charonians. Either they are stealing mass from other star systems, or else they are spinning massless holes by tapping into huge amounts of energy from the Sun.” Wally worked the controls again.

The image zoomed out again, making most of the inner Solar System visible. The planets were all gone—and something new was coming into being. A huge object, shaped like a wide flat bowl, was under construction well inside the old orbit of Mercury. Even as Sianna watched, tiny, midge-like transports were hauling sections of material into position and attaching them to the huge object. “That’s your hole spinner?” Sianna asked.

“Yeah, but, ah, hold on a second. Why make ’em do the work twice?” The image froze and jumbled for a second. When it cleared, the huge bowl was now a long, wide arc, shaped like a slice of melon skin. “There. That’s more like it,” Wally said. “With that shape they can pull it out away from the Sun later and use it as a section of the final Sphere.” The simulation started up again, this time with an arc-shaped power collector driving the hole spinner.

The two of them stood watching the simulation running for a few minutes of speeded-up time. The hole spinner did its work, generating massless black holes that appeared as tiny dots of fiery red in the simulator. The holes mated themselves to ring-shaped accelerators that could draw on and control the gravity power the holes produced. Wally adjusted the controls and sent several Ring-and-Hole units out toward the huge machines that were building sections of shell material. “Now we have wormhole pairs to move things through,” Wally said. “That’ll speed things up.”

As soon as the Ring-and-Hole units were on station, the transports stopped carrying the shell sections across space and started short-cutting through the wormhole links.

“Hmmmm, wait a second. Another thing,” Wally said. “Rovers. Gotta make me some Rovers.” He stopped the simulator for a moment and started keying in some adjustments.

“Rovers?” Sianna asked.

“Yeah, Rovers. I dunno what they’d look like, but some kind of really big things that could go out and snatch stars. Like really big Ring-and-Hole units, I guess. Ones that could use gravitic acceleration to send themselves toward the nearest stars at some sort of reasonable speed. Don’t forget, the whole point of the Multisystem is to be a planet farm. You need stars to anchor the planets and give them light and heat. And you need planets, of course.”

“Good God. I forgot about that,” Sianna said. It was a sobering thought. She had thought she had the whole thing figured out, but how could that be if she had forgotten something that basic? It could throw off her whole idea. “But do you need to start building them so soon?” she asked. “Why not wait until after the Sphere is built?”

“Because it takes so damn long to travel from one star system to the next,” Wally explained. “The Rovers have to travel in normal space. Once they are on station, they can just shift the star through. But it’s going to take fifty or a hundred years to get to the closest G-class stars. Longer for some of the ones further off. If we’re going to make the Solar System into something like the Multisystem, we’re talking a good dozen stars. Course, I can multiplex the system. Send Rover One to Alpha Centauri, say, and then have it set up a worm-hole, and send Rover Two through it. Rover Two could then press on to the next closest star in that direction. The other reason to build Rovers early is so I can snatch extra raw materials for the Dyson Sphere and other constructs from other star systems.”

Sianna nodded agreement, though she understood that explanation a lot more poorly than she let on. She stood there and watched as Wally worked his controls, diverting resources toward a new construction site in the farther reaches of what had once been the Solar System. He started time moving at a minute-a-year and then sat back to watch the show. Constructor teams fabricated huge new Ring-and-Hole systems and sent them on their ways, out beyond the limits of the Solar System. Once the Rovers were on their way, the new construction site set to work manufacturing Sphere shell material.

“Okay,” Wally said. “I think we’re on course here now.” He lifted his hands from the controls, folded his arms, and watched the Sphere sections grow, huge bowl-shaped forms taking shape just inside Earth’s old orbit. Then the linkups began. First the equatorial regions were joined into one. The arc-shaped form of the hole spinner was pulled back from its interior orbit to form a large fraction of the circumference.

From there, huge arcs of Sphere shell began to reach for the poles. But the polar arcs didn’t hold. They began to buck and sway.

“Hell!” Wally said, reaching out to freeze the program. “Dynamic loads are too high.”

“How so?”

“Simple. The equatorial areas are orbiting the Sun with just about Earth’s old orbital speed, but as you get away from the equator, the surface moves more and more slowly. Basic rule of a rotating sphere. If the entire surface rotates as a rigid unit, speed of rotation goes from zero at the pole to maximum at the equator.”

“Then why not cut the rotation and get rid of the stress?” Sianna asked.

“Hmmm. The real Sphere here in the Multisystem rotates at about a normal orbital velocity, but I suppose the Charonians could have spun the Sphere back up after it was complete. Once the whole Sphere is built, it’s more rigid and a lot stronger. We’ll do it that way, and be more conservative in our assembly strategy.” Wally ran the simulation backwards, with bits of Sphere shell vanishing, melting away.

He stopped at the moment just before the final equatorial section was dropped into position. He ran it forward from there, making the final linkup and then pausing further construction for a full year while he attached gravitic thrusters to the equatorial ring and used them to slow to a halt. “Of course, now every part of the equatorial ring is going to want to fall in toward the Sun, but all the inward stresses will cancel each other out—unless some outside perturbation throws it out of whack. If you view it as a static system, it’s stable, but without a spin, it’s an unstable dynamic system. Doesn’t matter, though, because we can use the gravitic thrusters to keep it in trim.”

The sections of Sphere shell material started to go again, but this time in a different pattern. This time, instead of building great arcs up toward the poles, the shell sections were added evenly all around the edge of the equatorial ring, adding equally to its northern and southern edges, working to make sure the whole system stayed in trim and balance. Sianna blinked and rubbed her eyes. There was something quite dizzying about the way Wally was running things.

The simulation seemed so intensely real when it was running at a steady clip and seen from one viewpoint. The degree of detail, the sharpness, the clarity of the images all gave the simulation a tremendous degree of verisimilitude. It was easy to imagine a real Dyson Sphere abuilding out there, and that she, Sianna, was watching it from the observation port of a nearby spacecraft. It took an act of will to remember that the images she saw were wholly imaginary. It was all brighter, more solid, more logical, more authentic than reality ever was.

But then Wally would slow time, speed it up, freeze it, run it backwards, pan and shift and zoom and flip the viewing angles, project this diagnostic screen or that status display over part of the sim, and the whole thing would be shown up for the dream, the hallucination it was.

God help them all if it was real, if this was what was happening to the Solar System in real life, instead of in a simulator nightmare.

Sianna took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand. She had already missed some key details. Did that mean her central idea was wrong as well? One way to find out. Watch the sim and see what happens.

Once Wally had the assembly-pattern problem worked out, things proceeded smoothly for a while, the Sphere growing steadily from the equator toward the two poles.

Quite abruptly, two fiery-bright points of light appeared in the outer edge of the system, spaced well away from each other. “Alpha Centauri A and B,” Wally said. “The first Captive Suns for the new system. Going to be tough to stabilize them this early on. Take some doing.” Sianna glanced at the display that showed elapsed time for the simulation. She was startled to see that more than a hundred years had already gone by since the initial Charonian attack, five years in her own past. She was seeing a century into a future that might have been.

But then something started to go wrong. The Moon, the last natural object of any size in the simulated Solar System, started to wobble in its orbit. “Hold it a second,” Wally said. “The Moon’s orbit is going unstable. Gravity from the Captive Suns is throwing it off.”

Another knot tied itself in Sianna’s stomach. She hadn’t foreseen this, either. It might be enough to blow off her whole theory, but if it did ruin things, then her theory was too flimsy for the real world anyway. She was tempted to nudge Wally toward her idea, but no. She was trying to get him to think like a Charonian. If anything, she should encourage him away from her idea. “So who cares about the Moon’s orbit, or the Moon, for that matter?” she asked in a level voice. “Why not just get rid of it altogether?”

“No, no I can’t,” Wally said. “Hold it a second.” His hands flew over the controls. “Stabilize it,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe a six-sided rosette pattern. That give us a dynamic load balance? Yeah, that ought to do it.” Five Ring-and-Hole sets moved out from the various construction sites and positioned themselves at equidistant points along the Moon’s orbit, so that the five anchor rings and the Moon were sixty degrees apart from each other in orbit.

“That seems like a lot of trouble just to hold the Moon in place,” Sianna said again, quite perversely pushing in the direction opposite to the one she wanted Wally to go. “Why not just get rid of it?” Sianna asked.

“Can’t,” Wally said. “It is a lot of trouble, I agree, but I’m stuck with the Moon. Remember the Lunar Wheel, inside the Moon, started this whole thing off by grabbing the Earth. The Wheel was the central conduit for power for the first twenty years or so, receiving gravity energy transmitted through the wormhole link by our Sphere. Once the Solar System started being a net gravitic energy producer, most of that power still had to move through the Lunar Wheel. In fact, the Lunar Wheel’s power transmission capacity had to go way up—and the Wheel had to handle a lot of new processing power.”

Wally pulled up a large image of the Moon, guiding the picture through the air until it hung a few feet in front of his head. “Here’s a cutaway,” Wally said, and a quarter-section slice of the Moon vanished, revealing the interior. Instead of just the Lunar Wheel wrapping once around the Moon’s core, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ring-shaped objects wrapped around the world. “This is all guesswork, of course,” Wally said. “I don’t know how they would add capacity, or what it would look like, but I do know the Wheel would have to add capacity as the building project went along. The sim was programmed to add it as needed. And this doesn’t even show the processing systems, the artificial intelligence centers that are managing construction and keeping the system stable.

“So yeah, it would be logical to cut the Moon out of the loop at this point. The Sphere is big enough to handle all the power control, but there are so many power and logic and comm interconnects through there that removing them all would be like the Sphere performing brain surgery on itself. The connections and control links to all the operations in the system are so complex, so keyed to synchronizations with the Moon’s orbit, that I wouldn’t even want to adjust the Moon’s orbit, because of all the other things you’d have to adjust as a result.

“See, at this point, the Moon is not just the only survivor of the Solar System’s worlds, it’s pretty much the de facto command center for the whole—” Wally stopped his work and looked up sharply as the light came on in his head. “Command center,” he whispered to himself.

He blanked the simulation, saved it back to the central data library, and brought up the simulation of the Multisystem that he had showed to Sianna in the long-ago morning of this endless day.

That had just been today? A wave of exhaustion swept over Sianna. How long ago had that morning been? Was it still the same day? What time was it now? Sianna knew she could find out the current, correct time, down to the nanosecond if she liked, by checking with any of a dozen instruments, starting with the clock on Wally’s control panel. But she did not want to look. She felt as if she were outside of time itself, and that being out of time was part of how she was getting the answer. Somehow the moment, the magic, the way things were falling into place would end if she knew what time it was in the outside world. And now the answers were so close.

Wally had the sim of the real-life Multisystem up and running now. He brought up a close-in image of the Sphere, of the huge, brooding globe—and the tiny, barely visible dot that orbited so close to it.

Sianna stared at it, knowing that Wally was seeing what she did, was understanding what the simulated destruction of the Solar System had told them. There it was. The only planet-sized body to orbit the Sphere directly. The lone, lifeless, uninhabitable world in a Multisystem built to store and preserve living worlds.

Charon Central, the control station for the whole system, a system built by a species that had remade itself again and again over the eons. But the Charonians had remade themselves not through logic, but through history, through growth and death and evolution and residual effects, by improvising and working with what they had, by using one problem to solve another.

“The Lone World,” Sianna said.

“Yeah,” Wally said, staring at it in amazement. “Charon Central.” Sianna grinned, nodded, and grabbed him by the shoulder. However that sideways mind of his worked, Wally had followed the same logic she had, and then gotten the same answer. She was right. Oh, there would be all sorts of battles and struggles ahead to convince the others, but that was trivial, a mere detail. She knew she was right. She had spent this day and this night underground, cut out from the sky and the stars, here in this place where time seemed so plastic that she felt cut out of time herself. But it had been worth it. Worth it to find this truth that would—

Out of time. Wait a second. Wait just a second. Out of time.

She turned and grabbed Wally by the arm. “Wally! Those Ring-and-Hole sets you made co-orbital with the Moon in the simulation. That was the best way to stabilize the orbit?”

Wally shrugged. “Best I could see.”

“And those were standard R-H sets, right? They could do anything that other R-H sets could do?”

“Sure. They’re big, heavy-duty units, but yeah, they could do the normal stuff. Why not?”

Sianna did not answer, but instead nodded to herself, thinking it through. The last link was there, just coming into reach. Yes. Yes.

“Wally. What’s the orbital circumference for the Lone World? For the real one, not the Moon in the simulation.”

“The circumference? Well, um, let’s see. Circumference of an ellipse is um, ah…” Wally picked up a pencil and starting working it out on a scratch pad. Sianna was treated to the rare sight of a master of computer math struggling over a simple problem on paper. “Ah… that’s ah… no, wait. Carry the… right. Right. Okay. Rough number would be about 665,000,000 kilometers. But why—”

“Good. Fine. What does that come to in light-minutes? How long would it take for a beam of light to travel that far?”

“Huh? What? Easy enough. Just divide out by the speed of light— um, just under thirty-seven minutes. But why—”

Thirty-seven minutes. God knows how, but it all fit! The same number that had been nudging at her subconscious all morning. Thirty-seven minutes. The time period that it would take a beam of light to travel the circumference of the Lone World’s orbit. Thirty-seven minutes. The time discrepancy between the Saint Anthony‘s clocks and all the clocks of Earth. Somehow, Earth had been accelerated to light speed, sent once around the orbit, and then decanted back into normal space. Sianna looked out toward the tiny dot of the Lone World, imagining the R-H sets that must be strung out along its orbit. Why, she did not know, but it had to be. She didn’t know how they did it, either, but that number, thirty-seven minutes, told her they had done it. For some reason Earth had been pulled out of time, suspended, dropped into stasis, and moved once around the Lone World’s orbit at the speed of light.

Sianna felt her heart pounding, her weary soul alive with excitement and enthusiasm. She had it. She knew she had it.

But even in her moment of victory, Sianna’s subconscious found something to throw up in her face. A cloud popped up to cover the sunlight, and Sianna felt the all-too-familiar knot in her stomach, her guilty conscience reminding her of the consequences of wasted time.

Damnation. There was always something to ruin the fun.

Her finals started tomorrow and she hadn’t even thought of studying.