The Shattered Sphere

Fourteen Garbage In

The Sunstar was high in the east as Sianna stepped into Bernhardt’s office. Normally, Sianna was not that aware of the sun’s position when she was in an office, but then most offices had opaque walls.

Wolf Bernhardt’s New York office was not anywhere near as far aboveground as the MRI main level was below, but it seemed that way. It was in a twenty-third-century monstrosity of a NeoGoth tower on Columbus Avenue, about twenty-five blocks south of Columbia. The office itself was huge, a big, sparsely furnished space. The floor was gleaming hardwood, and the walls plain white. Bernhardt’s desk, easily the size of Sianna’s whole office, was an immaculate slab of polished white wood.

There were no pictures on the wall, no shelves, no decoration. It was a room perfect for a man given over to neatness. But insofar as Sianna was interested, the key fact was that the door into the room was on the north side of the room, and the south wall, behind Bernhardt’s desk, was a single huge pane of non-reflective glass, affording a completely unobstructed view that took in the whole Manhattan skyline from a hundred meters up. The spires and towers of the city gleamed in the morning light, framed by a perfect blue sky beyond.

Every fear Sianna had ever had of enclosed spaces vanished, at least for the moment, to be replaced instantly by acute agoraphobia, before she settled down. It was all right. It was all right. Just a spectacular view. Nothing to be afraid of. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped through the door into the room. At first her eyes were fixed on the emptiness, and the glorious city beyond, where a wall was supposed to be. But then she tore her eyes away and looked around the room.

Wally and Sakalov were already there, sitting in two of the visitor’s chairs. Wally had a pocket computer out, and seemed ready to read something off the screen. But of course, it would have been more remarkable if he didn’t have some sort of hardware with him. Sakalov had a notepack as well, the sort that was mostly used to show flat images.

A tray full of coffee things, pastries and fruit and breads, sat on Bernhardt’s desk, and all three men had been helping themselves. That in and of itself was incredible.

For a man like that to be in this celebratory a mood was amazing. For Wolf Bernhardt to put out coffee and danish, exposing his immaculate office to the risk of crumbs and coffee spills, was right up there with the Pope leading a conga line. But be that as it may, all three men were quite plainly happy and relaxed, leaning back in their chairs.

She realized that she had her arms folded up tight in front of her chest. She forced her arms to her sides.

“Ah, Miss Colette,” Bernhardt said, his voice buoyant and expansive. He did not take his feet down off the desk, let alone stand up to greet her. Instead, he kept his comfortable position and waved her toward the chair closest to the window. “You’re just in time. Mr. Sturgis and Dr. Sakalov were just expounding a bit on your idea about the Earth being held in a sort of stasis orbit for those missing thirty-seven minutes. Sit, sit. Have some coffee.”

Sianna forced herself to move toward the desk and the coffee things, certain that everyone in the room was watching her every move and could tell just how self-conscious she was. Moving with what she hoped was studied casualness, she took a cup and poured for herself. She took her cup and saucer, crossed to her chair, and sat down, swiveling around in the chair to partially hide her face from Bernhardt without being rude. She hoped.

She looked toward Wally and tried to look as if she were paying attention to what he was saying, instead of being scared to death of Bernhardt and a trifle over-aware of the invisible glass wall and the sheer drop-off behind it, a mere two meters behind her back.

“—of course, most wormhole links are instantaneous,” Wally was saying. “That only makes sense if you were trying for fast transportation. But you don’t have to make wormholes that way. Suppose you, ah, were after something else, like a holding tank, say. Some way to hold something—say, a planet.

“Everyone’s always assumed the Sphere was ready and waiting for Earth. They figured that since the Sphere managed to get Earth into an orbit and get the Moonpoint Ring set up for Earth in just a few seconds—the few seconds it took for Earth to come through the hole. The trouble with that theory is that Earth’s new orbit isn’t very stable. It’s a major anomaly.”

“What do you mean?” Bernhardt asked.

“Well, most of the Captive Worlds around the other Captive Suns in the Multisystem move in orbits that should be good for at least several million years. But Earth was dropped too close to the orbits of a lot of other planets that orbit the Sunstar. Dr. Sakalov showed that the Sunstar system was stable before Earth was dropped into it.”

Dr. Sakalov nodded and spoke, looking at Bernhardt. “Those same simulations show that the Sunstar’s system of planets was rendered highly unstable by Earth’s arrival. The interaction of all the gravitational forces throws things off. Earth’s orbit, and the orbits of the neighboring planets, will start deteriorating within about three hundred years at the outside—maybe a lot less. The Sphere will have to do constant active maintenance on the orbits to keep them under control.

“At first we assumed that was the norm for the Multisystem. We’ve proved it’s the exception. All the other Captive Worlds are in far more stable orbits. But why? Why did the Sphere put us in an unstable, unsuitable orbit, without waiting until such time as it could arrange a more stable pattern?

“Miss Colette’s theory answers that problem,” Sakalov went on, answering his own question. “It allows the Sphere enough time to do some preparation—but not enough to do a perfect job. If she is right, then the Sphere put Earth in this stasis orbit while it rushed to prepare a place for it. Thirty-seven minutes is not much time, of course, but it is more than the forty or fifty seconds of elapsed time recorded on Earth between the moment of Abduction and arrival in our present orbit. I suspect that holding Earth in a stasis orbit put great demands on the Sphere, or else it would have maintained the stasis longer and prepared a more stable orbit.”

“But what the devil is a stasis orbit?” Bernhardt demanded.

“You catch the Earth in a wormhole, and then use the Mtabe modal transformation sequence model,” Wally said, in a tone of voice that made it clear how obvious it was. Sianna almost expected him to add of course. “The modal transformation causes the wormhole itself to move through space as a standing wave front.”

“Huh?” Sianna said, making her first contribution to the discussion.

“It’s simple,” Wally said, without a trace of irony in his voice. “Drop the Earth into the wormhole, pinch the endpoints of the wormhole, seal the ends to form a closed volume, and you’ve got the Earth inside a singularity that can be manipulated. Viewed from the outside, you have a supermassive charged particle that can be guided electromagnetically. If you then create magnetic lines of force between Ring-and-Hole sets co-orbiting with the Lone World, you have what amounts to a huge storage ring, one large and powerful enough to hold an Earth-mass pinched wormhole particle.” Wally shrugged. “Trouble is, the pinched wormhole particle will tend to evaporate spontaneously. It won’t last long. Of course, if you accelerate the hole to near light velocity, then relativistic time dilation kicks in and the hole lasts longer.”

“Of course,” Bernhardt said, with amused sarcasm.

But that sort of thing went right past Wally. He went on with his explanation, completely unaware that even Sakalov’s eyes were showing signs of glazing over. “The main thing is, the pinched hole won’t last long. You have to drop Earth out of the hole before it evaporates, get Earth back into normal space, and then drop the planet down into a new hole, pinch that one off, and send it back along the next leg of the storage ring. Keep repeating the procedure as long as you want.”

“But why didn’t it hold us longer, if this is what happened?” Bernhardt asked. “I can see that the Sphere might need to have the Earth complete an orbit for some mechanical reason we don’t know about, but surely the Sphere could have held us in stasis longer and prepared a more stable orbit somehow.”

Sakalov shrugged. “My guess is that the Sphere simply did not have the energy reserves to hold the planet in stasis more than one orbit. It would require tremendous power to do all the things Wally is describing so casually. And even the Sphere has a limit on its energy output.”

“Just out of curiosity, what would happen if the Sphere was unable to provide enough power?” Bernhardt asked. “Would the Earth have dropped out of the stasis orbit?”

“Well, yes, that would be the problem. You’d get an uncontrolled spontaneous evaporation of the pinched wormhole,” Wally said, as if evaporating wormholes were some sort of annoying household nuisance, like dustballs under the bed.

“And what would that mean?” Bernhardt asked.

Wally shifted awkwardly in his seat and grinned, a bit embarrassed. “E = MC². Earth’s mass would be expressed as energy.”

“Which would of course be a great inconvenience to us all,” Sakalov observed, rather dryly. “The explosion would almost certainly be enough to destroy the Sphere, and probably vaporize most of the planets of the closer-in Captive Suns as well.”

Bernhard raised his eyebrows. “Just as well the Sphere knows what it is doing, then.” He bent his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Leaving the destruction of the Earth to one side, if I’m following you, what you’re describing would jibe with what people saw at the time Earth was abducted: the sky quite abruptly turning from dark to light and back again, with repeated drops through the blue-white zones that seem to be what the throat of a wormhole looks like. Many witnesses in the Northern Hemisphere saw what must have been the Sphere, but so close up that it resembled a flat plane stretching across the sky.”

“So the idea fits?” Sianna asked, feeling rather tentative about speaking up, even if it was her idea they were discussing. They were going into an awful lot of detail, considering that the discussion of stasis orbits and co-orbiting R-H sets was wholly hypothetical.

“So it would seem,” Bernhardt said in a voice that was quite alarmingly cheerful. “And it is not the only thing that fits. That is the splendid thing about your theory, you know. It explains everything we know to date. But it’s a good theory for two other equally important reasons. Do you know what they are?”

“Because it makes testable predictions and is subject to disproof,” Sianna blurted out, her competitive classroom instincts kicking in. It was the right answer, of course, but she instantly regretted giving it.

Bernhardt had obviously wanted her to ask for the answer, not give it. Wally gave her a funny look, as if to say even he could tell that was a rhetorical question.

“Ah, yes, exactly,” Bernhardt said, thrown off his stride just a trifle. “You have given us a theory we can test. We can study this Lone World and see if it behaves as your theory requires. We must see if we can detect commands coming from it, for example. The study should be made far easier because we can focus our attention on this one small body, rather than searching the whole vast expanse of the Sphere for Charon Central.”

Sianna nodded, not quite knowing what to say—and having no desire to speak out of turn again.

“Our friend Dr. Gruber has started already, in fact,” Sakalov said. He lifted the notepack he had been holding and gave it to Sianna. She set her cup down on the desk and took the pack. “Images and data pulled down yesterday, last night, and this morning,” Sakalov said. “Gruber wangled time on instruments all over the world, and on the Terra Nova. Have a look for yourself.”

Sometimes Sianna worried that people assumed she was much smarter than she really was. How in the world did Sakalov come to assume she was smart enough to interpret raw images and data without guidance or explanation?

But then she switched on the notepack, and all doubts faded away. It was all so obvious.

“Gruber searched the entire circumference of the Lone World’s orbit—or at least the fraction of it currently visible from Earth,” Sakalov said. “Since we are nearly over the Sphere’s northern pole, and the Lone World orbits along the Sphere’s equator, we can see about nine-tenths of its orbit from here. Those are all visible-light images you have there, but we are hoping for infrared and ultraviolet from the Terra Nova.”

Sianna nodded, not really hearing what he was saying. There they were. Five, six, seven of them, all of them showing the signs of heavy magnification and intense image-enhancement. There were fuzzy, faint, murky images of ring shapes, some seen nearly from the edge, others somewhat foreshortened, and one perfectly face-on. The black holes at their center would be completely invisible, of course, but Sianna found herself straining to see them all the same.

“The only thing I got wrong is the number of them,” Wally said proudly. “We only have images on seven R-H sets so far, but the spacing of those tells us there must be eighteen of them altogether, and including at least one R-H set orbiting the Lone World.”

“A prediction tested and proved correct right there,” Bernhardt said.

Sianna nodded absently and worked the display controls. As Bernhardt himself had pointed out, pretty pictures were all very well, but there was more to analysis than that.

Ursula Gruber had directed whatever detectors she could find, of whatever kind they might be, at the Lone World.

The trouble was that the Lone World was a dim, tiny target at a great distance. It was smaller than the Moon, eight times farther from Earth than Pluto had been from the Sun, and separated by only a few million kilometers from a larger object, an object known to throw off a bit of radiation itself—the Sphere. In fact, to make things even trickier, the Lone World was transiting the Sphere at the moment. “Transiting” was nothing more than a fancy way of saying the Lone World was in front of the Sphere as seen from Earth; the positioning made it that much harder to observe the smaller body.

“Obviously, you’re looking for something that could be a communications signal, a command system, right?” Sianna asked.

“That’s right,” Dr. Bernhardt said. “Gruber’s already pulled in more data than one analysis team could handle in a week. Once we find the correct command channel, there will be less to analyze, but for now we must examine every wavelength we can detect.”

“Why do you assume the Charonians will only use one data channel?” Sianna asked. “We use more than one frequency, and we know they do, too.”

Bernhardt looked confused for a moment. He took his feet down off the desk and turned to face Sianna directly. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“The first signal they intercepted back in the Solar System. The Shattered Sphere signal and reply,” Sianna said, paying more attention to the data discrimination reports in the notepack than to her own words. Gruber had picked up a lot of data already, in IR, UV, and lots of radio bands, and rejected them all as “natural” or “static.” How could she be so sure?

“Ah, Miss Colette, you were discussing the first Charonian signal received?” Sakalov said, rather gently.

“Huh? Oh. Right. The first signal was at a frequency of twenty-one centimeters, with the reply at forty-two centimeters. So we know they use more than one bandwidth for signaling. That only makes sense—some frequencies are better for a given purpose than others. One might allow you to transmit more data more quickly, but another might punch through a dust cloud more easily.”

“And, ah, don’t forget the Solar System reported the Charonians were using modulated gravity waves to send signals,” Wally said. “We assume the Multisystem Charonians use MG waves as well, but all our active-process gravity-wave detectors blew up as soon as Earth got here.”

“Yes, I well remember that,” Bernhardt said, with a slight smile. “I was in the next building over from one of the detectors that blew. Every active detector built since then has blown as soon as it was powered up. Too much gravity energy for an active-process detector to handle, and we never had much luck with the alternate-mode detectors based on Charonian technology. But we can still use the old-fashioned passive detectors, and they tell us enough to know Charon Central does not send commands over gravity waves.”

“How so?” Wally asked, in slightly suspicious tones.

“The passive detectors aren’t sensitive to high-frequency gravity modulation,” Bernhardt replied, “but they do detect harmonics, reverberations in the lower frequencies induced by the higher frequencies, and we can usually correlate the harmonics with some sort of activity. If the Lone World were putting out high-end MG waves, we would have spotted that long ago.”

“Right,” Sianna agreed, a bit vague about what, exactly, she was agreeing with. Her mind was working on something else. “Besides, I don’t think MG waves could be all that efficient as a pure signal system. Yes, anything that can be modulated can be used to send a signal—but there are lots of much easier, more efficient things to modulate than gravity waves. Like radio bands.”

“That’s the problem,” Sakalov said. “Gruber’s people did checks all through the EM bands—especially radio. They compared the data we’ve gotten from the Lone World against all the data types we’ve received over the last five years. The Lone World puts out a lot of radio energy, but most of it is natural. Gruber suggests that there’s a lot of interaction between the Lone World’s magnetic fields and the Sphere’s surface. In fact, that sort of interaction accounts for one family of very annoying transient bursts of static we’ve seen for years. Anyway, once Gruber’s team eliminated natural radio sources and the GIGO data, there wasn’t much left.”

Sianna looked up at Sakalov without really seeing him. GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. One of the oldest and most arcane bits of computer slang. It used to mean that if the data that went in was no go, your results wouldn’t be of much use. But meanings change over time. These days, GIGO referred to data that had already been classified as garbage—static, transient spikes or dips caused by power fluctuation, image degradation cause by flaws in the equipment.

Already classified as garbage. Hold it a moment. Who looks for anything in the places they’ve already looked? Sianna worked the notepack controls.

“Miss Colette?” Dr. Sakalov was still waiting for her to say something.

“Ah, um, just a second, sir.” Okay then. They were saying that all of these emissions were GIGO data, pure noise. Someone had decided data like them were noise long before anyone even knew the Lone World existed. Knowing full well they were all waiting for her, Sianna rushed through a series of sorts and checks and groupings on the data, not quite knowing what she was looking for.

She looked up suddenly, staring with unseeing eyes past Bernhardt’s shoulder at the magnificent vista beyond. Wait a minute. That was it. She knew exactly what she was looking for. Vagueness. Yes. Yes.

“I have an idea,” she said at last. “We have a signal source with no meaningful signals. What if we’ve spent the last five years detecting signals without a source and discarding them as meaningless static? After all, the Sphere puts out a lot of noise.”

“We all know that,” Bernhardt said, with just a trace of impatience.

“Yes, but we know it too well,” Sianna said. “I’ve been working on data for the CORE project, and every time there’s anything in the radio bands that we don’t understand, it gets charted as an ‘EM anomaly’ or a ‘transient event’ like the ones Dr. Sakalov mentioned. Once we name something, we assume we understand it, and we ignore it.”

“So you’re saying Gruber’s people have eliminated a lot of real signals, called them noise or static instead?” Bernhardt asked.

Sianna shook her head. “No, not her people—her computers. All the initial data processing is automated. If the computer is told that datapoints with thus-and-such characteristics are garbage, it discards every subsequent datapoint with the same profile. The humans running the data-processing system never even get to see that stuff unless they wade through all the raw data manually.”

“And we just got through saying that going through even the non-rejected data we have after twelve hours could take a week,” Bernhardt said.

“Yes sir. But if you’ll pardon the expression, it’s possible that searching that non-rejected data makes about as much sense as what the drunk did when he dropped his keys on a dark street.”

“I beg your pardon?” Bernhardt said.

Sakalov let out a dry chuckle. “The young lady has indeed attended my lectures, Wolf. It is an example I often use. The drunk drops his keys in the dark, but searches for them under a street lamp, where the light is better.”

“So you are suggesting that the Lone World is transmitting its orders at frequencies we don’t even know we aren’t looking at?” Bernhardt said.

Sianna nodded. “It’s possible,” she said. “After all, we don’t know for sure what a command signal from Charon Central looks like.”

“Quite so,” Sakalov said. “We assume it will in large part resemble the signals intercepted in the Solar System and the signals we have intercepted as they are sent between lower-function Charonians— except it’s obvious the command signals don’t resemble those signals completely, or else we would have spotted them by now.”

“So what could they be?” Bernhardt asked.

Sakalov nodded toward the notepack that Sianna was holding. “Anything in there, or maybe a dozen other things that aren’t there. Or maybe the command signals are expressed as some complex phase relationship between two seemingly unrelated signals.” Sakalov shrugged. “Maybe they’re meant to be read backwards. Or maybe they are modulated or digitalized at such a high—or low—rate of speed we didn’t recognize them as signals.”

“Too fast I can understand,” Bernhardt said. “But too slow?”

“It would be damned tough to recognize a Morse code message if the dots were two weeks long and the dashes were a month.”

“Hmmph.” Bernhardt turned toward Sianna. “So, now that you have said we must comb through all the parts of the haystack that we thought we could ignore, where do you suggest we start?”

“With the vague stuff,” Sianna said. “There’s lots of well-explained natural sources, but the rejected-data log is full of things labeled ‘General Static’ and ‘Unspecified Transient EM event.’ If we have a look at all that—”

“And then compare that against any old rejected data,” Wally said, cutting in eagerly. “We could look at stuff from what we now know to be the Lone World’s orbital track,” he went on, leaning forward eagerly. “I bet we’ve got a big old stack of old data labeled ‘static’ that came from the Lone World—even though we didn’t know the Lone World was there until just a little while ago.”

“Yes! Right!” Sianna said.

Sianna stood up and started pacing excitedly. “For five years we’ve been observing the Sphere, and for all that time there’s been this tiny, hard-to-see dot going around it, sometimes at the edge of the Sphere as seen from Earth, sometimes in front of it, sometimes behind. We’re bound to have picked up all sorts of stuff from the Lone World without knowing what it was.” She paused for a second and thought. “Hey, data coming from the now-known coordinates of the co-orbital R-H sets too! They’d make a perfectly good signal-relay network.” She paused in her pacing and turned toward Dr. Sakalov. “The data archives will still have all that, won’t they?”

“They never erase anything down there,” Dr. Sakalov said, quite cheerfully. “Tell me, Wally: do you think that you could set up a search that would find what we’re looking for?”

“Sure I could,” Wally said. “All it would take is a good ArtInt searching for vague source coding in the old data, correlating the backtracked orbital coordinates in question. Next we run that against Gruber’s new data, and then…” His voice trailed off as he caught the boss’s eye.

Bernhardt glared at Wally and then at Sianna with something of the irritation and impatience he was famous for. “None of this has very much to do with why I wanted to see you all.”

“It doesn’t?” Sianna asked, suddenly feeling quite deflated. She sat back down in her chair.

“No, it doesn’t,” Bernhardt said. “Oh, I suppose there is a tangential connection, but it is merely—” Bernhardt stopped dead and shook his head. “Dear God, now you have me doing it. No. We will stay on the subject this time. In my job, sometimes I have to act like a scientist with a theory, and sometimes like a general fighting a war. A scientist would wait until there was proof that the Lone World was Charon Central. A general has to take more chances than that, gamble that the proof will be forthcoming. I have to take a chance like that now.

“As you know, the SCOREs are on their way—and we all know the probable aftermath of their arrival. We must assume that, once they get here, it will be impossible to launch anything off Earth. As you know, we have a massive effort under way to resupply our off-Earth assets before that time. We are launching everything we can toward NaPurHab. Food, equipment, fuel, what have you. I have already ordered Terra Nova to break off her attempt to land a prize crew on a CORE. She has confirmed that she intends to return to Earth space and dock with NaPurHab.

“From there, she intends to proceed, however her captain sees fit, toward precisely one goal. If Captain Steiger decides to pursue the immediate goal at once, so be it. However, I would expect that she will instead invest in months, perhaps years, of research, study, rehearsal and simulation. However, sooner or later, she is to proceed toward the Lone World, land on that planet, and attempt to seize control of the Multisystem.”

“Good God,” Sakalov said. “But how has there been time to plan this, work out procedures?”

“There hasn’t,” Bernhardt said. He stood up and turned to face the window wall, a mere thickness of glass between him and the deep canyons of Manhattan. “We have been setting up the resupply mission for weeks, based on standing contingency plans, ever since we spotted the incoming SCOREs.

“But that is almost incidental. If the Lone World is Charon Central, and if we can somehow get to it and make it ours, even if we merely find a way to kill it, cripple it—then we will have won. The risks are great, and there are any number of guesses piled on guesses. But if I wait until I am sure of my facts, then we will have lost the moment. The SCOREs will have reached Earth, and God only knows what happens then.

“But there is something else. The Terra Nova has asked for more than supplies. She has asked that we send her… send her some expertise. I have reached that conclusion that to do so would be very risky—but potentially, most valuable.

“But there is little time, and little cargo space available. If I had my way, the Terra Nova would rendezvous with a full complement of our greatest experts on the Charonians. But that cannot be. I have no time to examine all the personnel reports, interview candidates, request volunteers, all of that. So I am left with my own instincts, my hunches, my feelings.

“So I am going to send them you three.”

There was dead silence in the room. Sianna could not believe what she was hearing.

“I will send you three,” Bernhardt said again. “A wise old man who still knows how to learn, a genius who does not know all that she is, and a dreamer of visions that lead to truth. I will not make any pretense that you have any choice in the matter, or that I am looking for volunteers. There is no time. The charter establishing my office gave me the power to draft whomever I wish for whatever task I wish in order to protect the people of Earth.”

Sianna stood up, feeling a bit dizzy, and opened her mouth to protest. But no words came. Bernhardt just kept right on talking.

“So. There is only one question I have for each of you,” he said. “How soon can you leave?”