Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The Sphere is actually a series of concentric Spheres, nested one inside the other, and the master race, the true Charonians, are ordinary beings, not so different from human beings. They live inside the Sphere and run the Multisystem for their own, unknown purposes . It was a reassuring idea, in that it made the Charonians a bit less god-like. But no evidence of such “ordinary” Charonians had ever been spotted anywhere in Multisystem. Besides, what point in creating and operating thing as huge and complex as the Multisystem if you never ventured out into it? And what need of the planets and the Captive Suns if you lived inside a Sphere that provided limitless living space, millions of times more surface area than Earth?

The image resolved itself still further. The latitude and longitude lines were visible on the inner surface of the Sphere, and Sianna saw filaments of some sort reaching down toward the power source at the center, drawing energy in, directing it along the longitudinal lines. The lines began to glow, shining brighter and brighter, the power coursing upward toward the north and south poles of the Sphere. Sianna recognized the pulse pattern as a standardized visual notation for gravity generation.

Suddenly the pattern made sense. Each line of longitude made a complete ring around the planet, going pole to pole. Sakalov was suggesting that each ring was a gravitic wave generator, like the Moonpoint Ring or the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon writ large, with dozens of generators banded together, the better to focus and direct the power stream.

Now the Sphere tipped over, displaying the north polar region to Sianna. The image flickered and pulsed with power. Wally zoomed in closer and closer, until Sianna took an involuntary step backwards. Now she could see a tiny, detailed cluster of pyramidical structures at the pole, and recognized them as scaled-up versions of the so-called Amalgam Creatures, the devices—or animals—the Charonians had built on the terrestrial planets and the larger satellites of the Solar System. In the Solar System, the Amalgams had focused and directed the gravity beams used to tear up the planetary surfaces and launch them into free space.

Here, presumably, they were to transmit the gravity beams outward. That part did not ring true somehow. After the buildup Wally had given Sakalov’s new idea, it came down to some pyramids around the north pole? “Wally,” she asked, stepping back toward where Wally stood at the control panel, “have you guys gotten some new imagery that shows those structures at the poles?”

Wally cleared his throat in obvious embarrassment. “Ah, no, not exactly,” he admitted. “They are, ah, conjectural. Dr. Sakalov says the control structures are really big, but way below the limits of resolution we can get on images of the Sphere. But they make sense ,” he said, with just a little too much emphasis to be convincing.

“Hold it, Wally. Never mind the pretty pictures. Give it to me in words.”

Belittling his simulations was not the best way to get on Wally’s good side. However, he did manage to hold his temper and stick to the subject. “Well, we did a lot of analysis of how much energy would be required to do the work the Sphere does, and a lot of horizon-position relationship analysis.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry. We worked through where the stars and planets and so forth were when their orbits and courses were adjusted, and what points on the Sphere they were visible from at that moment. Almost all of the course adjustments came when the star or planet was in direct line-of-sight with one of the poles.”

Sianna worked that through in her head for a moment. “Wally, that would be equally true for any two points on opposite sides of the Sphere!”

“Yes, but we detected a slight skew toward—”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s the first theory that explains what the longitude lines are,” Wally said, beating a bit of a retreat.

“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Sianna conceded. “But what about the latitude lines, the ones parallel to the Sphere’s equator. What are they ?”

“Well, I—”

“Okay, never mind that. Just walk me through the whole idea. You’ve got a white hole in the center. Why is that?”

“The Charonians use black holes all the time. Stands to reason they’d use the same technology to create power.”

“But you have no evidence? No new particle detection or anything that might support the idea?”

“Well, no,” Wally admitted. “But the simulated energy profiles match up pretty well. Anyway, the white hole dumps power into the Sphere. The power shunt beams you see there transfer that energy to the Longitudinal Generators. The LGs focus that energy at the north and south poles of the Sphere, and the gravity-control systems direct it outward to control the Multisystem. You said yourself that it makes sense for the lines of longitude to be gravity generators. If they are, the poles are natural focus points. It only makes sense that Charon Central would be there on the scene to control the gravity power transmission.”

“But you have no imagery, no evidence, to support that theory, do you?” said Sianna. It was a statement, not a question.

“We have logic,” Wally responded, now openly defensive. “We have the behavioral evidence. The Sphere puts out gravitic energy— it has to be produced somewhere, and be transmitted from somewhere. Dr. Sakalov is extrapolating from known Charonian structures. We know they tend to stay close to the same designs a lot. COREs are a lot like the Landers they saw in the Solar System. He’s taken the Amalgams and scaled them up to match what we know of the Sphere.”

“First off,” Sianna said, “the Solar System Amalgams received gravity power transmitted by the Lunar Wheel. You have super-Amalgams transmitting power. Second, the Solar System Amalgams were a few tens of kilometers high at most. You’ve got these things at least, what, a thousand klicks high? But even past that, I don’t like your logic. Amalgam Creatures exist elsewhere, therefore giant Amalgams exist here? We feel they must exist, therefore they do? Come on, Wally. Do you really think that any of this makes sense? It’s right up there with epicycles.”

“What are epicycles?”

“A good lesson in why facts can’t follow from theory. The philosophers and astronomers before Copernicus had this whole crazy system worked out with the planets and the Sun and the stars orbiting Earth in perfectly circular orbits, because the circle is the perfect form.”

“But the planets don’t—”

“Of course they don’t. They move in ellipses. But when the theory first got trotted out, no one really knew that. As the instruments got better, people started to notice the orbits weren’t perfect circles. So they decided that the planets orbited in small circles that were centered on the big circle of their main orbit, like the Moon going around and around the Earth without the Earth being there.”

Sianna stopped herself for a moment. Something about the Moon going around an Earth that wasn’t there, something she could not quite put her finger on. It resonated with something. She blinked, came back to the moment, and went on with what she had been saying.

“Even that didn’t match the observed movement perfectly,” she continued, “so they decided the planets moved around the circle that was moving around their orbital path in another set of perfect circles, like a satellite going around the Moon while the Moon goes around the Earth—except with Earth and Moon not being there. I think they got up to four or five sets of epicycles.”

“So what’s your point?” Wally asked.

“My point is Sakalov’s doing the same thing. The facts and his theories don’t fit, so he changes the facts to fit the theories, adjusting reality to match his preconceived notions of how reality should be. Then when that doesn’t fit, he changes the facts a little bit more, and a bit more. Everything here is one conjecture built on other.”