Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

And would hope that Marcia would understand, and forgive him.

Sianna made her way back to the Main Ops building and her cubicle, sat down in her chair, leaned back and sighed. What a bloody disaster of a morning! The news from Bernhardt was bad by itself, but that was only part of it. She had wasted the morning and made a fool of herself in front of the big boss. The fate of the planet, the idea of universal doom, was a bit too much to deal with. The excellent odds that she would get fired seemed a little closer to home, a bit more tangible, plenty all by itself to bring on the storm clouds.

She might as well give up on the day before depression, guilt, and frustration had their chance to feed on each other.

With a supreme effort of will, she stood up, shoved her chair in behind her desk, and left.

Sianna made her way aboveground without even being aware of the elevator’s terrors. She stepped out into the bright June sunshine, blinking miserably at the perfect robin’s-egg blue sky. She trudged home, unaware of the fresh, clean smell in the air and the playful little breezes that chased each other around the city streets. She dragged herself home to her apartment building, aware of little more than being miserable.

How much worse a morning could it possibly have been ? she asked herself as she waited for the elevator. The elevator arrived. She got in and rode to her floor. She stepped out of it to clomp down the hallway to her apartment.

Incredible that she had started the day with her subconscious hinting that she was on the verge of a discovery, a breakthrough! She had actually thought that Wally— Wally —was going to inspire her. So much for the subconscious. Wally telling her something that would unlock the doors to the knowledge hidden inside her? The only real piece of new, solid, information he offered up was that a silly little worldlet orbited the Sphere all by itself. She might as well wait for her toaster to reveal the secrets of the Universe.

To hell with it. She reached the door to her apartment, and waited the infuriating ten seconds it took for the door to recognize her, unbolt, and open up. Damned-fool old-fashioned door. When was the landlord going to install something that didn’t take all day to let her in?

At last the door came open, and she flounced her way into the apartment. She marched straight to her room, hurled her handbag down onto the floor, and flung herself at the bed, landing with a satisfyingly loud if muffled thud.

If only she could learn to grow up. Or maybe the trouble was that she already had grown up, and was forever doomed to retain all the foolishness of childhood. Sometimes it seemed to her that the foolishness was all that remained of her—as if she were the Cheshire Cat, and her foolish smile was lasting quite a while after the rest of her—career hopes, academic standing, maturity—had faded away.

She frowned, shook her head, and hugged her arms around her pillow, burying her face in it.

Suddenly, two other images popped into her head, quite unbidden. Epicycles, as she herself has described them— like a satellite going around the Moon while the Moon goes around the Earth — except the Earth and Moon aren’t there . And the Sphere, the Sphere as she had first seen it in Wally’s simulation, glowing red, a huge thing with stars and worlds in orbit about it; the Sphere’s circumference bigger around than Earth’s old orbit—

Sianna spun around until she was lying on her back, staring at the pulsequake cracks in the ceiling. Her lips moved silently. Her heart started to pound. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed.

She had it. She had it. She knew . In half a minute she was out the door, headed back toward the lab. She had to find Wally and get to work on this.

Sianna paced eagerly up and down the sim room, rubbing her hands together. She had it. She knew she had it. If there were ever a moment in her life where she knew the right answer, this was it.

Wally fed the last of Sianna’s instructions into the simulator system and stared at his setup screens. “Well, it’s all in there,” he said. “Now what?”

Sianna stopped in her pacing at the far side of the room from Wally, then turned and faced him. “Throw it up on the main display system,” she said. “Show it to me. Give me a minute-a-year time rate, starting ten years ago.”

The room darkened, and the Solar System appeared. Not the Multisystem, but Earth’s own home system, the way it had been before the Charonians. Sianna stepped out into the midst of the worlds, marveling at their tiny perfection. Wally had set the system to run in enhanced imagery mode, the planets and other bodies scaled up, made larger and brighter so they were easy to see. Even so, the worlds were little things, delicate jewels set in a vast, velvet darkness.

All was as it should be, all was as it had been and was no longer. The nine worlds orbited the gleaming Sun, the dust motes of the asteroids moved in their myriad paths in the emptiness between Mars and Jupiter. Comets hovered in the outer depths of the Oort Cloud. Pluto hung in the outer reaches of the system, with his moon Charon still in attendance.

The Ring of Charon, the only human-made object large enough to be visible in this scale, was there, a wheel in space wrapped around the circumference of Charon. It looked like an oversized wedding band with a black ball floating at its center. There was Jupiter with all his moons, and his Red Spot, and his modest rings. There was Saturn, with that grand and gaudy ring system, and Mars with both moons.

All the planets still had the satellites and ring systems they were supposed to have. All was well.

Except that it wasn’t, of course. The Lunar Wheel slumbered in the depths of the Moon, and soon it was to awaken. Sianna had not realized how hard it was going to be to watch it all happen again. Even in a simulator, even in pursuit of a breakthrough, there was nothing pleasurable in watching the disaster all over again.

One year a minute , starting ten years back . Sianna turned and found the Earth, close in by the Sun, the Moon wheeling steadily about the blue-white marble that floated in the darkness. There, on that world, ten years ago, she had been growing up, perhaps just a little too fast. She imagined a submicroscopic nine-year-old version of her self back in a miniature France on the simulated world in front of her. She remembered being teased by the other children over her funny name and its funnier spelling, desperately hoping her mother’s job in America would come through and Sianna could move away from the cruel taunts.

A year a minute , and the tiny Earth swung once around the Sun. A ten-year-old with frizzy hair, skinned knees, and easily hurt feelings learned that children in New York, children everywhere, could be cruel—but also learned that she was brave enough to endure it, and that in enduring the taunts came acceptance.

Another minute, and a second year went past, and a third , and Sianna remembered kissing a boy for the first time. A tall, gawky boy with a forgotten name and a half-remembered, sharp-featured face. It shocked her that she could not bring his name to mind. Her whole world had revolved about him! Now all she could remember about him was the kiss itself, out on the hill behind the school, and the clumsy, tingly, exciting feel of it all. For some reason, she associated a distinct smell of butterscotch with the event, though she couldn’t imagine why.

She smiled to recall that gentle moment in her confused adolescence, the mad crush she had had on the boy, the silly romance they had shared for an eyeblink-short span of spring days. It was all over in real life nearly as fast as she imagined the time rushing past on the simulated miniature Earth.