Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Don’t think about it. Don’t think. As the sheets of Sphere skin came out of the thing that was making them, another breed of Charonian was grappling the sheets and hauling them away.

“It’s all guesswork,” Wally said. “We’ve never seen these forms. But they’d have to have some sort of creatures to do these things. Maybe they have more than one type. One to transmute, and one to take the transmuted matter and form it up as needed. Or maybe— God knows how—they’ve found some way to sidestep transmutation and do it all on the, ah, chemical level rather than the atomic one. So they could build superstrong molecules out of hydrogen and helium and trace amounts of the other elements. But somehow or another, they have to take the raw material of the planets and rework it into the components of the Sphere.”

“Fine, Wally, fine. Now, keep it going, Wally,” Sianna said. “What happens next?”

“Well, once you have the transmuters—or whatever—up and running, it’s a question of getting the material to where the Sphere is going to be. And you’d need a hole spinner.”

“A what?”

“Well, the Lunar Wheel provided all the gravity power to the other Charonians in the system—but it didn’t generate any of that power, as best we can tell. It was a conduit for gee power being transmitted by its parent sphere, here in the Multisystem. And we know the Charonians use a lot of black holes—for wormhole transport, to keep tidal stresses balanced, to generate power, all that kind of stuff. Sooner or later, the Lunar Wheel is going to need to make its own power, and build its own holes.”

“But there isn’t enough mass in the Solar System to create a new Sphere and make black holes of any size.”

“Right. But do you really need mass? In theory, with enough energy to throw around, you can create a massless black hole—a virtual black hole—basically by shoving enough power down into a singularity. We have no idea how to do it—but we aren’t the Charonians. Either they are stealing mass from other star systems, or else they are spinning massless holes by tapping into huge amounts of energy from the Sun.” Wally worked the controls again.

The image zoomed out again, making most of the inner Solar System visible. The planets were all gone—and something new was coming into being. A huge object, shaped like a wide flat bowl, was under construction well inside the old orbit of Mercury. Even as Sianna watched, tiny, midge-like transports were hauling sections of material into position and attaching them to the huge object. “That’s your hole spinner?” Sianna asked.

“Yeah, but, ah, hold on a second. Why make ’em do the work twice?” The image froze and jumbled for a second. When it cleared, the huge bowl was now a long, wide arc, shaped like a slice of melon skin. “There. That’s more like it,” Wally said. “With that shape they can pull it out away from the Sun later and use it as a section of the final Sphere.” The simulation started up again, this time with an arc-shaped power collector driving the hole spinner.

The two of them stood watching the simulation running for a few minutes of speeded-up time. The hole spinner did its work, generating massless black holes that appeared as tiny dots of fiery red in the simulator. The holes mated themselves to ring-shaped accelerators that could draw on and control the gravity power the holes produced. Wally adjusted the controls and sent several Ring-and-Hole units out toward the huge machines that were building sections of shell material. “Now we have wormhole pairs to move things through,” Wally said. “That’ll speed things up.”

As soon as the Ring-and-Hole units were on station, the transports stopped carrying the shell sections across space and started short-cutting through the wormhole links.

“Hmmmm, wait a second. Another thing,” Wally said. “Rovers. Gotta make me some Rovers.” He stopped the simulator for a moment and started keying in some adjustments.

“Rovers?” Sianna asked.

“Yeah, Rovers. I dunno what they’d look like, but some kind of really big things that could go out and snatch stars. Like really big Ring-and-Hole units, I guess. Ones that could use gravitic acceleration to send themselves toward the nearest stars at some sort of reasonable speed. Don’t forget, the whole point of the Multisystem is to be a planet farm. You need stars to anchor the planets and give them light and heat. And you need planets, of course.”

“Good God. I forgot about that,” Sianna said. It was a sobering thought. She had thought she had the whole thing figured out, but how could that be if she had forgotten something that basic? It could throw off her whole idea. “But do you need to start building them so soon?” she asked. “Why not wait until after the Sphere is built?”

“Because it takes so damn long to travel from one star system to the next,” Wally explained. “The Rovers have to travel in normal space. Once they are on station, they can just shift the star through. But it’s going to take fifty or a hundred years to get to the closest G-class stars. Longer for some of the ones further off. If we’re going to make the Solar System into something like the Multisystem, we’re talking a good dozen stars. Course, I can multiplex the system. Send Rover One to Alpha Centauri, say, and then have it set up a worm-hole, and send Rover Two through it. Rover Two could then press on to the next closest star in that direction. The other reason to build Rovers early is so I can snatch extra raw materials for the Dyson Sphere and other constructs from other star systems.”

Sianna nodded agreement, though she understood that explanation a lot more poorly than she let on. She stood there and watched as Wally worked his controls, diverting resources toward a new construction site in the farther reaches of what had once been the Solar System. He started time moving at a minute-a-year and then sat back to watch the show. Constructor teams fabricated huge new Ring-and-Hole systems and sent them on their ways, out beyond the limits of the Solar System. Once the Rovers were on their way, the new construction site set to work manufacturing Sphere shell material.

“Okay,” Wally said. “I think we’re on course here now.” He lifted his hands from the controls, folded his arms, and watched the Sphere sections grow, huge bowl-shaped forms taking shape just inside Earth’s old orbit. Then the linkups began. First the equatorial regions were joined into one. The arc-shaped form of the hole spinner was pulled back from its interior orbit to form a large fraction of the circumference.

From there, huge arcs of Sphere shell began to reach for the poles. But the polar arcs didn’t hold. They began to buck and sway.

“Hell!” Wally said, reaching out to freeze the program. “Dynamic loads are too high.”

“How so?”

“Simple. The equatorial areas are orbiting the Sun with just about Earth’s old orbital speed, but as you get away from the equator, the surface moves more and more slowly. Basic rule of a rotating sphere. If the entire surface rotates as a rigid unit, speed of rotation goes from zero at the pole to maximum at the equator.”

“Then why not cut the rotation and get rid of the stress?” Sianna asked.

“Hmmm. The real Sphere here in the Multisystem rotates at about a normal orbital velocity, but I suppose the Charonians could have spun the Sphere back up after it was complete. Once the whole Sphere is built, it’s more rigid and a lot stronger. We’ll do it that way, and be more conservative in our assembly strategy.” Wally ran the simulation backwards, with bits of Sphere shell vanishing, melting away.

He stopped at the moment just before the final equatorial section was dropped into position. He ran it forward from there, making the final linkup and then pausing further construction for a full year while he attached gravitic thrusters to the equatorial ring and used them to slow to a halt. “Of course, now every part of the equatorial ring is going to want to fall in toward the Sun, but all the inward stresses will cancel each other out—unless some outside perturbation throws it out of whack. If you view it as a static system, it’s stable, but without a spin, it’s an unstable dynamic system. Doesn’t matter, though, because we can use the gravitic thrusters to keep it in trim.”