Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

She turned toward where he had been, half-expecting him to be in the chair, staring into space. Then she remembered him leaving. She was getting as bad as he was.

She got up out of her chair, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Something Wally said. All right, go find him, and get him to say it again. Wally’s cubicle was just six doors down. She stepped out into the hallway and walked over. He had the door to his cubicle shut. Wally, it seemed, didn’t have much problem with enclosed spaces. Sianna knocked, but got no response. She tried again, but still nothing. Either he wasn’t in there or else…

She opened the door and sighed to herself. He was there all right— more or less. Wally sat slumped over in a blown-out old recliner he had unearthed somewhere, his body settled down in the chair so that his knees were higher than his head. Wally was completely unaware of where he was—and that was just as well, considering the shape the room was in. It was as messy as Sianna’s cubicle was clean. Empty food containers overflowed the recycle bin. Papers were stacked everywhere, in no apparent order. The light seemed dimmer in here, somehow. It smelled a bit moldy.

Wally was oblivious to all, clearly off in his own world, thinking about who knew what. He stared off into space, eyes locked on some unseen image. Hell and damnation. Now if she said anything, she would be interrupting him , breaking his train of thought—and his thoughts were valuable things.

But she had to break in. She was close to something. She could feel it. Wally did not have the knowledge, but she knew there was something he could say, something he could tell her, that would make it all clear to her. Maybe it didn’t even matter what he said. Her subconscious was telling her his words would hold the answer, and therefore they would.

“Wally,” she said. “Wally. Come on.” She reached out a careful, gentle hand and gave him a nudge.

Wally jumped a bit, startled, and looked about in bewilderment for a moment. “What? What?”

“Okay, Wally, you win. Show me what you have. Let’s see what Sakalov’s dreamed up this time.”

The Adversary ventured, somewhat reluctantly, fully out into fast-time space. There were certainly benefits to be had, gains to be made, here in the cold, flat Universe outside the wormhole web. But it was, nonetheless, a most unpleasant place to be .

But no matter . It would not have to stay here long. There was no need to lose precious time and energy searching for its prey.

It had a good, solid lock on the wormhole link that had betrayed itself with those bursts of sympathetic vibration. Something, somewhere, had gone through a wormhole in such a way as to set off remarkably powerful vibrations .

An easy transit back toward the dead system it had left behind, the dead system where last it had fed. The trivial challenge of forcing the wormhole open, the brushing back of whatever pathetic defenses its prey could muster—and then the Adversary would kill and feed on the energy so obligingly stored up by its prey. Stored up by the Sphere .

The Sphere hung perfect in the night, glowing brick red in the darkness, strong and solid. The fine cross-hatching etched in its surface like tidy lines of latitude and longitude added to the sense of serenity and order. All was as it should be, all was under control.

Sianna walked a bit closer, brushing past the lightfleck of a Captive Sun, walking straight through holographic projections of several planets, all but microscopic at this scale, until the Sphere was right in front of her, a meter from her face. She had to admit it was impressive. Wally did indeed do good work.

“We have the whole Multisystem mapped into the simulation now,” Wally said with obvious pride. “All the Captive Suns and the known planets, of course. But also every known Charonian installation and object, all the way down to the COREs.”

Sianna had seen other sims of the Multisystem, of course, but she had never seen a full run of a full three-dee animated sim—and this was one of the best.

“What sort of detail can you get?” she asked.

“Well, it varies, of course,” Wally replied. “Some things we know to twelve decimal places, and others we’re just guessing at. The Terra Nova has done good long-range mapping surveys of the closer planets and good spectroscopic and mass studies of pretty much all the Captive Suns. The most distant Captive Worlds and a few of the Captive Suns that are behind dust clouds we don’t know so well. And of course we don’t have completely reliable masses for a lot of the objects in the Multisystem—just apparent masses. Our only way to measure the mass of a body is by measuring the movement of bodies near it. From that we get a measure of gravity, and from there to mass. Back in the Solar System, it was a straight conversion, cut and dried. Here, we have to guess what is a straight, ordinary gravity field and what is an artificial field imposed by the Charonians.”

Sianna nodded. “But what about the Sphere and its behavior? How good is your detail on that?”

“Not so good,” Wally admitted. “We, ah, have to fudge a lot on that.”

No surprise there, either. The Sphere was a completely artificial object. How the hell could you determine which motions were the result of natural forces and which were deliberate action? You could not derive information about either mass or density from, say, the orbits of the Captive Suns, for the Suns’ orbits made no sense whatever. The Sunstar, about which the Earth revolved, orbited the Sphere at the same radial rate, and thus with the same orbital period, as Captive Sun Fifteen—even though CS-15 was a billion kilometers closer to the Sphere, and exactly 180 degrees ahead of the Sunstar.

Sianna found the Sunstar, and then CS-15, in the simulation. CS-15 was always invisible from Earth, of course, hidden behind the bulk of the Sphere. The Terra Nova had spotted it and reported back.

She found her way around other parts of the simulation. Captive Suns Seven to Eleven were at varying distances from the Sphere, but they were spaced exactly ninety degrees apart from each other, and shared an orbital plane forty-five degrees away from the Sunstar’s.

And there, CS-4, -5, and -6. The three stars shared their orbit, spaced a perfect 120 degrees apart from each other. Other sets of suns were likewise lined up like beads on a string, orbiting in impossibly perfect alignment.

Some of the arrangements of stars seemed sensible enough, in that they kept the Captive Suns out of each other’s way. Others were completely inexplicable. Maybe the stellar orbital arrangements simply appealed to the Charonian sense of aesthetics.

The worlds that orbited the Captive Suns were arranged by equally mysterious criteria, but they were not Sianna’s concern right now. She had asked Wally to show her the Sphere. And he wanted to show off his latest handiwork.

Wally knew everything—more than everything—there was to know about simulation modeling, and absolutely nothing about anything else. He almost never left the campus, and didn’t even go aboveground that much. He supposedly had an apartment topside somewhere, in Morningside Heights, but his cubicle was his real home; that and a series of cots scattered around the labs.

All he cared about, or paid any attention to, was his work, the problem he was called upon to solve, the simulation someone asked him to create. To Wally, nothing but his simulations were real.

Wally had showed off some of his previous triumphs to her now and again. She had stood where she was right now, and watched real-time, highly detailed recreations of dinosaur mating dances, seen the Moon born in the impact of a Mars-sized object on the proto-Earth, seen imaginary “fast-life” creatures in invented environments evolve at the rate of a generation a minute. Sianna could almost understand why the real world wasn’t of much interest to Wally. If his simulations were that intense, if life in this tank had the hallucinatory, fever-dream, hard-edged sense of being more real than reality, how could anyone expect him to deal with—or be much interested in—the ordinary world?