Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Four minutes, four years gone by, and the Sianna-that-was on the miniature Earth was discovering a larger world than boys and giggling, was looking up at the busy night sky and wondering if perhaps there was a place in it for her.

She was starting to plan, to think, to map out what she imagined was a sensible route through life. Left too much on her own by her always-working parents, never quite sure where she stood with them, thirteen-year-old Sianna had set out to put everything in its proper place. Her room was always neat, her homework always perfect, her world always in order. She had worked out her future as well, in relentless detail. She would go to this school, get that degree, work at this job, meet and marry that sort of man, have this number of children by that age.

Sianna shook her head, remembering, marveling at the sensible, orderly, rigid future she had worked out for herself. Looking back from here, from just a few years on, it all seemed so silly. Even if the Charonians had not come, if everything hadn’t changed, no life could be mapped out that tidily. You couldn’t always do what was sensible. More often you just worked with what you had, dealt with the situation in front of you. Even if you were a Charonian.

The mini-Earth swung round the imaginary Sun in its comfortable orbit, making something like its four billion, seven hundred and fifty millionth revolution about the Sun. Its last revolution. Sianna stood there in the dark, watching, remembering, knowing what was about to happen, crying in the darkness for the loss she was about to watch.

Four and a half, five minutes, four and a half years gone by, and her parents were happy and well, though perhaps not as attentive as other kids’ parents. Both of them had always been more intent on their work than their child. Always friendly, always there with a smile, and maybe even a brief hug or a pat on the arm, but somehow never very approachable. They never had time now , but they would make it up to her later. Except the Charonians came, and they could never, ever, make it up to her.

Five minutes. Five years. She glanced at the time-date display, and knew it was about to start. “Slow up here, Wally,” she said. “A minute a day here.”

The planets slowed abruptly, and time seemed to freeze for a moment before Sianna could detect the motion in the slowed-down rhythms. Now , she told herself. Just about now .

Wally had programmed the gravity beams to appear as bright red lines, even though they were as invisible as gravity in real life. A slush of red light stretched out across the darkness, reaching from Pluto, from the Ring of Charon. The first test beams, sent to all of the major test facilities on the inner planets and moons.

At the time and distance scales Wally was using, a light beam took long minutes to cross the long reaches of space from Pluto and Charon to the inner worlds. The Ring of Charon had fired ten-minute pulses at each of the inner worlds.

“Slow down again,” Sianna whispered. She had to see this, understand it perfectly. “Give me a minute per hour.”

Again the display slowed, and again time seemed to stop before moving on more slowly. Now blood-red spears of light, each ten light-minutes long, were moving down into the Solar System from the Ring of Charon. One to Saturn’s moon Titan, then to Jupiter’s Ganymede, then Mars and Venus. The spears of light touched each world in turn, harmlessly, undetectable save by the most sophisticated of gravity-wave detectors. Now all the beams, all but the last, had struck. “Normal rate time now, Wally,” Sianna whispered.

Sianna looked down on the shining blue-white globe of Earth, clouds and sea and sky shining, glitter-bright. Somewhere down on that perfect miniature she could imagine that it was just past noon on a perfect June day. She knew where she had been when it happened. Everyone did. Down there, Sianna and her friends were just going outside to have lunch in the school quadrangle, chattering away about how many days of school were left until vacation, what to wear to school next day, how to get the calculus homework done. They were just reaching the crest of the hill when it happened. It was not until much later that she learned where her parents had been, but now she could visualize it all so perfectly that it was almost as if she had been with them, as well. There, down on that tiny jewel of a world, her parents were just about to meet for lunch at one of their favorite spots. A restaurant in a four-hundred-year-old brownstone, probably constructed long before anyone had even thought about building codes.

Time seemed to slow again, but this time it had nothing to do with Wally adjusting the controls. This was the moment that changed it all, the instant that made Sianna what she was, that changed the life of every human being.

The last spear of light reached for Earth, touched it, brushed past it and hit the Moon. And inside the Moon the Lunar Wheel awoke. A disk of blue-white something/nothing appeared between Earth and Moon, swept toward the planet—and Earth was gone. The blue-white disk vanished. That was that. Earth was gone.

“That’s all we have from direct observation for what happened back in the Solar System, Sianna,” Wally said, his voice quiet and reserved. “From here on in, it’s all conjectures and best guesses, and a little bit of hard information from the Saint Anthony data.”

“Right, Wally.”

That was the end of what they knew happened in the Solar System, because that was the last moment when Earth was in the Solar System. Earth was gone from the simulation now, just as she had vanished from the Solar System in reality. The Solar System . Think about what happened there, not about what happened to Earth.

Don’t think about the way the restaurant building collapsed in the pulsequakes, or how no one found them for days. Don’t think that the sight of that blue-white wall of something falling down out of the sky again and again, or about the mad things that happened to the sky afterward—the sky turning to blood, then night turning to day and back again, or the chaotic reports flooding in from all over of spacecraft and habitats gone missing and crashing, of panic and death, fear and disaster everywhere—

No. Stop. Do not think about it. Do not think at all. Observe. Absorb. She shut her eyes and settled herself down before she faced the next step. Focus on the Solar System. We’ve always thought about our situation — but what about their situation ? “Go to a ten-seconds-a-day time scale and give me the best-guess display of what happened next,” she said, keeping her voice steady as she could. The rubble of that restaurant—No. Don’t think about it.

“Okay,” Wally said. “From here on in we’re guessing.” Time flashed back into high gear. The Moon, bereft of the Earth’s gravitational anchoring, wobbled for a time, and then restabilized as the Multisystem sent the Earthpoint Singularity, to anchor the Moon in its old orbit a black hole of almost precisely the Earth’s mass, and to provide a transit point for the invaders that were on the way. In Wally’s sim, the Earthpoint Singularity, invisible in real life, showed as a ruby-red pinpoint of light.

Meanwhile, even before their allies came through Earthpoint, the Charonians in the Solar System gave up more of their secrets. Landers that had slept for thousands or millions of years, camouflaged as asteroids, started moving out from the Asteroid Belt and the distant Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, shown in the display as dimmer points of red.

The Charonian Landers swarmed out across the Solar System, heading toward all the major worlds and attacking them. Landers from the Multisystem starting coming through Earthpoint, streaming to the attack everywhere—everywhere except the Moon.