Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

If a shuttlecraft from NaPurHab tried to land on Earth, a CORE would smash the ship to smithereens. If the COREs decided that a craft launching from Earth to NaPurHab was a threat to Earth, then it too would be destroyed. About a third to a half of the resupply flights to NaPurHab made it through. The COREs had humanity quite thoroughly bottled up.

At least, Sianna thought, she was part of the organization, the Multisystem Research Institute, that was looking for a way out. She was just an undergraduate and part-time researcher, but she was contributing, in some tiny way. Any day now, MRI might find the COREs’ weaknesses, actually solve the problem and let the people of Earth travel freely in space once again.

And if pigs were horses, then beggars would fly . Or however it goes . No, she had that all muddled. Sianna yawned and hugged her arms around her shoulders. She must be more tired than she thought. Time to go in and get back to bed.

But there was one more thing in the night sky of New York City, something she had to force herself to look at. Where would it be? High in the east by this time of night.

She peered fiercely up at the gloomy half-dark sky. The Sphere. Sometimes it would glow a dull and sullen red. The prevailing school of thought was that the red glow meant the Sphere was expending some massive amount of power. Of course, the alternative theory was that the glow meant the Sphere was absorbing power, which just went to show how little anyone knew.

Ah. There it was. Hard to see it tonight. Just now, the Sphere was charcoal grey, a disk the size of a medium-large coin held at arm’s length. It hung in the deep purple-blue of a patch of sky near one of the Captive Suns. When not indulging in its power surges—unless they were power absorptions—the Sphere was visible only by light reflected off the Sunstar and the other Captive Suns. Sometimes it was slightly backlit by light reflecting off the dust beyond it. In general, the sky inside the Multisystem was a dark charcoal-grey, illuminated by light reflecting off the dust clouds. In a fully dark sky, the Sphere would normally be more or less invisible—but then, there was no longer any such thing as a fully dark sky.

The Sphere. Calling it by such a simple name made it seem so normal, so harmless. It didn’t look much bigger than the Moonpoint Ring, or some of the nearer planets on their unnervingly close approaches.

But the Sphere’s circumference was just about the same as that of Earth’s old orbit around the Sun. The Sunstar around which Earth now orbited, and all the other Captive Suns, and all the planets and meteors and dust clouds of the Multisystem, were chained to the Sphere by its artificially generated gravitic power.

The Sphere was many times farther from Earth than Pluto had been in the old days. At a distance where the Sun itself would be nothing but a bright point of light, the Sphere still showed a disk noticeably larger than a full Moon.

That harmless-looking Sphere had kidnapped the Earth. No one was exactly certain why the Sphere did it, though there were any number of entertaining theories. Earth had been collected as part of some long-term scientific experiment. Or the Sphere, with its godlike powers, wished to be treated as such, and had gathered Earth in to provide it with a fresh batch of worshipers. Sianna knew of at least three Sphere-worship sects in Manhattan alone. Or the Multisystem, with its many Captive Suns, each with large numbers of life-bearing worlds in attendance, was a wildlife refuge, a safe place to keep Earth while some of the Sphere’s myriad underlings tore the Solar System apart and built a new Sphere around the Sun of the Solar System, thus producing an offspring to the present Sphere.

The consensus in scientific circles was that the last could well be reasonably close to the truth. The last word from the Solar System before all communication was lost was that the Sphere’s minions had made a shambles of the place.

But there was no law requiring the consensus to be right. Sianna worked as an intern at Columbia’s Multisystem Research Institute, and she heard things there. Saw papers she wasn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to see.

Things that were not supposed to get out, ever, period. For if they got out, the sheer horror of the news would most emphatically change everyday life. Numb denial was preferable to mass panic.

The trouble was, of course, that sooner or later it would get out. The evidence was there to be seen, on the other worlds of the Multisystem.

Sianna turned her back on the Sphere. She went back inside and down the stairs. She slipped back into the apartment and back into bed, struggling mightily not to think about it all—and failing miserably.

She tried desperately to think about her upcoming exams, her laundry, the way her roommate slept till noon, about anything that did not matter. But none of that would come to mind, of course. Not with Fermi’s Paradox scuttling about in her brain.

Hundreds of years before, a scientist named Enrico Fermi had posited a famous question: Where are they ? Where were the other intelligences in the Universe? Assume any sort of reasonable distribution of Earth-like planets, and assign any probability meaningfully higher than zero for intelligent life arising and surviving on such worlds. There were so many stars in the sky that even if only a microscopic fraction of them produced intelligent life, the skies should have been full of interstellar radio traffic at the very least, and perhaps starships as well. They should have been easy to detect. So why couldn’t humanity find anything?

Earth’s astronomers were now able to get a good close look at all the other Earth-like worlds in attendance on the Sphere. Explanatory evidence was plainly visible on those worlds. Now, at last, there was a simple, straightforward answer to Fermi’s question. Now they knew.

Sianna stared again at the crack in her ceiling and swore silently. Now she had done it. She was going to lie awake half the night, worrying about it. But who could blame her, once she had seen the confidential reports?

Humankind could not detect any other intelligent races in the galaxy for a very simple reason:

The Charonians had, in effect, eaten them.

And soon, it would be humanity’s turn.

What was left of the night passed in strange and uncomfortable dreams that skipped back and forth over Sianna’s life, back to the comfortable certainties of her childhood, ignoring the fragile present, looking toward to her doubtful future. She saw visions of herself as a youth, as a hale and hearty old woman, as a shriveled young corpse being gobbled up by a Charonian worldeater. She saw the face of the first boy to kiss her, years before, and the faces of her children to be in years not yet come. Those futures and pasts, and many others besides, flickered through her mind, all seeming strangely cut off from her present, as if there were some barrier, some gap, between them. She found herself trying to reach the future, trying to walk toward it—but instead falling, falling into the gap that held her back from it.

Falling, falling, into deepness and darkness—

It seemed to Sianna that her eyes snapped open with an almost audible click , that her mind spontaneously uplinked into fully-awake turbo mode without her having any say in the matter. She shook her head bemusedly. She must be doing too much computer work if she was thinking of her own mind in programming terms.

The Sunstar gleamed in her window, the almost-right-colored light relentlessly cheerful. She popped up out of bed, her feet hitting the floor just as the invigorating odor of fresh, hot coffee wafted into her nose from the automatics in the kitchen. She blinked, stretched, and looked about herself eagerly, as if it were Easter morning and there were presents and painted eggs to be found.