The Shattered Sphere

Four The Autocrat Arrives

The Autocrat of Ceres prided himself on keeping an accurate and complete journal. As with all other aspects of his life, he kept his journal according to a rigid and careful schedule. Each morning as he sat at his breakfast table, he dictated to his private autoscribe, speaking in a clear, careful voice. He found that writing about the day just past allowed him to focus on the tasks for the day ahead.

“June twelfth, 2431,” he began. “Nineteen days out from Titan, the ship now almost completely decelerated. Assuming constant boost, we will arrive at Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon this afternoon. I find that I have had much time for quiet reflection on this long journey—perhaps too much. I must admit that the rather austere circumstances of my travel are in some ways a pleasure. I do not miss the company of my usual retinue, for example, and the ceremonies of state dinners can become most tiresome.

“But it has been a long journey to Pluto—or rather, to where Pluto once was. It is hard to escape one’s own thoughts in such quiet and tranquil surroundings. The crew knows I wish privacy, and grants it to me.

“I find that I am paying less and less attention to my everyday work as it is radioed in to me from Ceres. I handle it all, but not with the relentless attention demanded of me at my court. Somehow the cases recede in importance as the distance between myself and home grows greater. But it is part of the task of the Autocrat to know when to step outside the everyday. Should my people rely too much on my presence to adjudicate and execute the laws, they would fail to rely on themselves. It is part of my duty not to do my duty too well. The Autocracy is meant as a counterweight to the Belt’s anarchy—not as a replacement for it. Neither must become too strong.

“It is not that I neglect my duties, but rather that I view them in a different way. The journals and diaries of my predecessors make it clear that the tradition of the Autocrat’s Progress was established precisely to expand the Autocrat’s horizons, alter the worldview of the Autocrat, and so it is with myself.

“Every artist should, now and again, step back from the day-to-day work on this detail or that, and examine the whole canvas. There is an art to governance, of that I have no doubt. More so under the Autocracy than other forms of government, I think. I govern by what I might do, or what I do not do, as much as by direct action.

“And so I step back and think over, not Xeg Mortoi’s accusation of claim-jumping against his wife, but the circumstances of all humankind, and my place in them.

“I now understand more fully why I chose to take this trip at a time when I would be away from Ceres on the fifth terrestrial anniversary of Abduction Day. It is now time to stop mourning that catastrophe and to stop living with it as a part of the present. Now it must be accepted as part of the past. Now we must move forward, toward the future.”

Pleased with the entry, the Autocrat closed the autoscribe and stepped to his compartment’s single small porthole to look upon the unchanging stars. Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were close now, very close, even if he could not see them from this port.

The Autocrat had a subtle and important agenda at Plutopoint. He had to prevent the Ring from coming under his control. Forces were combining to make it likely to happen, but Belt control of the Ring of Charon might well be the first step in producing far too great a concentration of power—political, technical, and economic—in the Solar System.

A Solar System dominated by Ceres would be unstable, ungovernable. Centralizing sufficient power to control the entire Solar System would require a tremendous investment in the tools of control. The Autocracy would be forced to become more powerful, too powerful, if it were to survive. It would have to deal in massive repression and control. The forces of anarchy would, quite inevitably, grow in power as well, forcing the Autocracy to respond. Terrorism, rebellion, and war could well be the final result. A classic case of the crisis of empire. No, the Autocracy—and the Autocrat—dared not become mightier than they were.

But how to force others to remain independent? How to use one’s power to prevent the absorption of further power?

A pretty question. A very pretty question indeed.

But there were hopeful signs. The Ring was in the process of becoming a more powerful place. The Autocrat needed to find some way of using the enemy’s strength against the Autocrat.

An interesting challenge.

Sondra Berghoff stood—or, more accurately, floated—at the entrance to the airlock, waiting, more than a bit nervously, for no less a personage than the Autocrat of Ceres himself. The Autocrat was a him, wasn’t it? No, wait a second. A woman. She remembered seeing a picture in a news report. No, that had been some history article, about the last Autocrat but two. Well, the office was supposed to be depersonalized, to be held by someone willing to subsume all private concerns to the needs of justice and the good of the Belt. Or something. She had never followed Asteroid Belt politics or history that carefully.

Which was too bad, as a big dose of both was just about to be dumped in her lap. The Autocrat wanted to get a look at the Ring of Charon—and at Sondra.

Sondra didn’t like that aspect of the situation, either. Five years ago she had gotten a lifetime supply of notoriety. The theft of the Earth was a defining moment in everyone’s life. Fine, so be it—but Sondra had no desire for her role in those events to be all there was to her life, the one thing that summed her up.

She remembered her long-dead Great-uncle Sanchez. He had died at an advanced age when she was a child. A century before, Sanchez had been a teenager, working odd jobs at this station and that on the Moon.

Uncle Sanchez had been one of the last ones to evacuate Farside Station, just before that mispiloted asteroid piled into it and turned lunar history upside down. But Sondra did not remember Uncle Sanchez as a witness to history, but as a boring old man who told the same stories over and over again, who spent his adult and elder years focused on the single day, the single moment of his youth, when he had happened to stumble, quite by accident, into the sweep of great events.

Uncle Sanchez had belonged to any number of clubs and organizations dedicated to researching and remembering the great impact. He had told his eyewitness account of that day so often Sondra could recite it from memory.

He had kept a fifty-kilo lump of rock in his living room, and told anyone who came within a kilometer of the place that it was the largest intact fragment of the asteroid.

A month after he died, his widow, Aunt Sally, lived up to her reputation for being unsentimental. Tired of having her front parlor cluttered up, she had the reputed asteroid fragment dumped out into the back yard, and good riddance. Somehow, Sondra had always thought of the big rock as being Uncle Sanchez, picked up and heaved out.

No thank you. Not for her. Okay, maybe she had been a witness to history. Maybe she had even been a part of history. She had no desire to bore generations of relatives and strangers telling the same story over and over again.

And yet here she was, being trotted out as a curiosity, a historical artifact to be examined by an important visitor.

Besides which, she was not at all sure she wanted to meet the Autocrat of Ceres. If Simon Raphael were still alive, he would have gotten stuck with this duty—and done a better job of it as well. But he had died in his sleep two years before, and thanks to her damned notoriety Sondra had been appointed the new director of the Gravities Research Station.

What sort of person had a title but not a name, anyway? It must be one hell of a job if you had to give up your name in order to take it. And why did they do that, anyway? Sondra knew she could get every boring detail of the boring tradition if she asked the right person, or if she trolled through the right datastore, but there wasn’t any point. The Autocrat giving up his name was a bizarre and inexplicable tradition. Any purported explanation of it would merely serve to paper over the fact that it made no sense.

There was a clunk and a thud and a whir from the other side of the airlock and Sondra moved forward just a trifle. But no, there was always that moment when the lock seemed as if it were about to open, and then the inexplicable delay while everyone waited for something or other. It seemed likely to Sondra that such unexplained pauses had been going on long before there were airlocks, that there was always that gap of a few minutes between things seeming ready and really being ready.

What was he doing here, anyway? The common room had been buzzing with speculation for weeks. He was just here on a tour of inspection, someone would say, a traditional Autocrat’s Progress. But then someone would point out that such progresses were normally confined to those places that recognized the Autocrat’s authority. He was coming here to lay claim to the station in the name of the Asteroid Belt. He wanted to take over the Graviton project. He was just here as a tourist. He had a secret plan to use the Ring as some sort of superweapon—against whom and on whose behalf was not clear.

The airlock swung open, and the Great Man—he was a man, after all—floated through the lock door, moving himself along rather neatly on the guidebars set into the bulkhead. He was short and pale-skinned, his face sharp-featured, his sand-colored hair cut bottle-brush short. He had a somewhat prominent nose and his mouth fell naturally into a rather disapproving frown. And yet his eyes had some glimmer of lightness and humor in their grey gaze. He was dressed in a dark grey, loose-fitting tunic and baggy black pants— comfortable and practical. He wore no insignia or pendant or ring of office that Sondra could see. He had no need to put his power, his authority, on display.

His eyes caught hers as he came out of the lock, and he gave her a rather engaging smile.

For a split second, she allowed herself to believe that it was going to be all right. This was someone she could deal with. But then it struck her—she had no idea whatsoever of the proper mode of address for an Autocrat. What should she call him? Excellence? Sir? Your Autocracy? How the hell did you talk to someone who didn’t have a damned name?

She decided to finesse the question of form of address by avoiding it altogether. “Ah, um, welcome to the Ring of Charon,” she blurted out. “I am Dr. Sondra Berghoff, director of the facility.” She stuck out her hand, not sure if that was the thing to do or not. Apparently it was, because the Autocrat accepted her hand. She pumped it, a bit too vigorously, and held onto it a moment or two longer than she should have.

“I am pleased to meet you, Doctor,” the Autocrat replied. His voice was quiet, firm, and deep. “I have been looking forward to this visit for some time.”

“And we have been looking forward to having you here, um, ah, ah…”

“Most people find it most convenient to treat ‘Autocrat’ as if it were my name and address me by it,” her guest said, a hint of amusement at the corners of his mouth. “You may also simply address me as ‘sir’ without causing an interplanetary incident.” Plainly, the man had come across this problem before.

“Ah, yes sir, very good sir,” Sondra said, the words tumbling out. “I understand that you want an immediate tour of the facility?”

“Yes, indeed. I have been looking forward to it for some time.”

“As we’re nearly at peak view conditions, would you like to get a look at the Ring itself first?”

“Yes, by all means,” the Autocrat said.

“Are you ready to go now, or is there anything you need to do about your ship?”

“My crew will see to all that,” the Autocrat said, with a dismissive gesture. “They will remain aboard for some time yet, I am told.”

“Very good, then. Won’t you come this way?”

“Certainly.”

She led him out of the airlock and docking complex and into a small, odd-looking elevator car. “Things are a little jury-rigged around here,” she said as the doors pulled shut and sealed themselves. “We’re going to be moving out of zero gee as the car descends,” Sondra said. “Are you ready for it?”

“I’ve been moving in and out of varying gravity conditions my whole life,” the Autocrat replied.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Sondra said, embarrassed. “I wasn’t thinking. In any event, here we go.” Sondra pushed the button and the car started to move down.

“You were saying things were a bit jury-rigged,” the Autocrat prompted.

“We used to control the Ring from the surface of Pluto,” she said, “and of course we had to evacuate the surface in a hurry when the planet was destroyed and drawn into the black hole. We had to improvise the whole operation, rebuild from scratch. Pluto was destroyed, everyone got crammed onto the Nenya, the supply ship that serviced the research station.

“Once things were settled down, and we were getting supply ships coming in again, we sent as many people back toward the Inner System as we could on the empty ships, so as to cut down on the number of mouths to feed.” Sondra could feel weight returning as the car moved from the rotation axis down toward the living quarters.

“Some of the supply ships we didn’t send back at all,” she went on. “Instead we rebuilt them into additional crew quarters and working space. Finally we built a long rigid connection frame with the Nenya at one end and the rest of the quarters at the other, with the airlock axis you just came from right at the center of gravity, in zero gee. Sort of a dumbbell shape with the airlock in the middle of the long arm. Once we spun it up, we had artificial gravity at the two ends of the dumbbell. It’s a little ironic, actually.”

“What is?” the Autocrat asked.

“This is the foremost gravity research station there is, and we have a gravity generator of incredible power. But we’re still using centrifugal force to make artificial gravity. Someday we’ll know enough to develop a controlled gravity field. We’re learning a lot with the Graviton project. Until we get it right, though, we spin away. In any event, the station is essentially complete. We’re still adding bits and pieces, upgrading, that sort of thing. It’s almost gotten to the point where it’s comfortable. But it’s still hard here,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very hard.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence as the car moved downward into the high-gee sections of the station. The doors opened and Sondra ushered the Autocrat out. “This way,” she said, trying to sound bright, clipped, efficient.

She led him toward the rather cramped confines of the main wardroom. Ring-viewing conditions varied constantly. They were almost at the peak of their six-day cycle, and she didn’t want the Autocrat—or herself—to miss the sight. Everyone loved looking at the ring. It had taken some doing to chase everyone else out of the wardroom for the Autocrat’s tour.

The lights in the wardroom were lowered to make it easier to see out into the sky. The room was quiet. In the gloom, it was a trifle hard to see the wardroom’s oversized porthole—a mere spot of star-sprinkled greater darkness in the dark. But Sondra knew where it was, of course, from long practice. Even if she had not, her eye would have been caught by the movement of the heavens, slowly wheeling past the porthole.

“Ah,” the Autocrat said. “There.” He crossed the room, threading his way between the tables and chairs, and stood in front of the porthole, staring out. Sondra followed a step or two behind. Perhaps it would have been more respectful, more gracious, if she had allowed him to stand there alone, drink it all in by himself—but she could not resist. She had spent endless hours before that window, gazing on the ring, and would gladly have spent twice as many.

In the days of the dim, forgotten past, the first astronauts orbiting the Earth had stolen every moment they could from their tasks in order to gaze on the blue-white marvel sweeping past below. Ring-watching was like that—except that there had never been a sense of danger, or melancholy, in looking at the Earth.

For the Earth was gone—and it was, after all, the Ring that had sent it away. The Ring of Charon was, by any measure, the most powerful machine ever built by human hands. It had crushed Pluto and Charon down to quite literally nothing at all, down into a black hole. The Ring’s beauty was a fearful thing.

The Ring was just that, a hollow toroid 1,600 kilometers in diameter, the Plutopoint Singularity at its centerpoint. The Ring was the direct descendant of the ever-larger particle accelerators built on Earth, and later in free space. When originally built, the Ring had circled the moon Charon, and had been designed to deal with its gravitational field alone. Now it circled the far more massive Pluto-point, and was stressed by far greater gravitic energies, energies that would have torn the Ring apart long ago if Sondra and the rest of her team had not found a way to mask and refocus some of the singularity’s expressed mass.

The command center revolved around the Ring and the singularity at right angles to the Ring’s plane, in a circular orbit roughly 20,000 kilometers out from the singularity. Twice an orbit the Ring was edge-on as seen from the station, and it was likewise face-on twice an orbit. The best time to see the ring was when it was face-on, with the Sun behind the station, lighting up the ring—albeit faintly.

The Ring hung in the sky, massive, perfect, gleaming, its running lights bright in the darkness. The cold stars floated, uncaring, behind it, in the silence of space. And at the Ring’s center was the source of all its power.

The black hole, the singularity itself, was of course invisible. The event horizon was only a few meters across, and it was, after all, merely blackness in the black. Now and again, some bit of debris would be pulled into the horizon, and a bright spark would flare up as the bit of dust or misplaced screwdriver was torn apart by tidal forces, giving up some part of its mass as energy as it was sucked down into the singularity. But those flashes of light were rare, weak, tiny. The singularity pulled in nearly all the light and energy of the impact events.

Sondra stood next to the Autocrat in the gloom of the wardroom, staring out at the mighty Ring. “There it is,” she said. “Our one weapon against the Charonians. Our one hope for finding the Earth. Though God knows what we could do if we ever found it.”

“How long will it take, finding Earth?” the Autocrat asked.

Sondra shook her head. “We have no way of knowing. It’s not as if we’re actually going to open up a hole, look through it, and see the Earth. What we’re doing is a tuning hunt, searching for the right gravity resonance pattern. If we can get our singularity resonating with a Charonian black hole, the resonance will induce a wormhole between the two. That’s oversimplifying, of course, but that’s the basic idea. The trouble is that there are millions, maybe billions, of combinations. We’ve hit on six that might be something, that make the meters twitch in ways that make us think we almost induced wormhole formation. We’ve worked the hell out of all the near-misses, run every conceivable variation on them—and gotten nowhere. Maybe one of them is this Multisystem place that stole Earth, and we just haven’t got enough data. Maybe all of them were false positives. So how long until we find Earth? We don’t know.”

“Could you induce a wormhole if you got the pattern match?” the Autocrat asked. “Do you have the power, and the know-how?”

“Oh, yes,” Sondra said. “God yes. Don’t forget we’ve had a whole Solar System full of dead Charonians to take apart—and we’ve got this Plutopoint Singularity and the Earthpoint Singularity to play with. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about gravity—and manipulating gravity—in the last five years.”

“That’s one thing I’ve never understood. The Charonians placed a black hole—a singularity—there, and used it as one end of a worm-hole link connecting back to their Multisystem. Why can’t we do the same? Do a pattern match with the Earthpoint Singularity and establish a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint? Or reactivate Earthpoint as a link to where Earth is?”

“Because that singularity was controlled by the Lunar Wheel, and the Lunar Wheel is dead. You need a functional ring accelerator— like the Ring of Charon—to modulate the gravitic energy and establish a resonance pattern in the first place. The Lunar Wheel’s resonance match was lost, randomized, when the Wheel died, and we can’t get it back—just as we lost the link to where Earth is. If we built a Ring about Earthpoint, we could set up a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint, I suppose. But without the tuning data, it wouldn’t let us link up with the Multisystem. Besides, building an Earthpoint Ring would bankrupt the Solar System. That one I know. We’ve run the numbers. If you want faster transport, the Graviton is the way to go.”

“Ah, yes,” the Autocrat said, his eyes not moving off the Ring. “The Graviton. You will be surprised to learn that I do not have much interest in her.”

Sondra was surprised—and then suspicious. “No interest in a ship that should be able to make a run from the Moon to Plutopoint in no more than two or three days?”

“In a word, no. Not so long as such ships are based on technology we don’t understand, and are built with parts stripped from dead aliens. How can we rely on Charonian machinery when Charonian machinery has been so full of unpleasant surprises in the past? If we humans could build gravity-beam ships that were entirely our own, then I would be fascinated by them.”

“But it will require a great deal of research before that is possible.”

“The Autocracy has always been eager to fund worthy research projects.”

“Our current sponsors on Mars and the Moon might not welcome that,” Sondra said. “They hope to develop such ships, and use our gravity beams to power them.

“Your gravity beams. They are yours, quite true. But we Belters are traders, and we fear monopoly. Your Ring is the only possible source of gravity beams, correct? No one else in the Solar System could produce them at present? Save the Earthpoint Ring we cannot now build?”

“You are right,” Sondra said, choosing her words carefully. “It is a point which disturbs me as well,” Sondra said. “A monopoly source of a vital commodity can very easily become a target, either for destruction or empire building—or both.”

“All quite true. It would be in everyone’s interests to forestall these problems before the first ships are built. We have a great deal to talk about, you and I.” The Autocrat paused, and then spoke again in a more thoughtful tone. “It is possible that I will be forced to extend my stay.”

Which will definitely drive the Moon and Mars crazy, Sondra thought. But you know that. So why do you want to upset them? This is going to be more interesting than I thought. “Feel free to stay as long as you wish,” she said evenly. As if I could stop you, with the Autarch and her crew armed to the teeth.

“I thank you for your hospitality,” he said.

“You are most welcome,” Sondra said. “Is there more you wish to say regarding the Graviton?”

“Perhaps at another time. Just now, I wish to focus on the central issue. Earth,” the Autocrat said. “Is there any hope at all of finding her?”

“There is more than hope,” Sondra said, surprising herself with the vehemence of her tone. “We will get a tuning lock and find the Earth. Every other use of the Ring is secondary to our hunt for Earth, and nothing else will be allowed to interfere with it. If we get a tuning lock in the next five minutes, or if it takes a thousand years, until the Hunt for Earth is a religion, an act of faith, we will keep on until we find her. We have to believe that. We have to know that. We are the only hope the Solar System has for finding the Earth and undoing at least some of the damage.”

“Then you see the Hunt for Earth as your mission, as your duty?” asked the Autocrat.

“Oh, no,” Sondra said. “Not duty. Not mission. That’s not it at all.” She stared out the porthole at the massive ring and the tiny, invisible singularity that had once been Charon and Pluto. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the lost Earth, the sundered families, the dead of all the disasters caused by the Charonians that the Ring had awakened. “Finding Earth is not our mission,” she said. “Finding the Earth is our penance.”