Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

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.”