Roger Allen: The Shattered Sphere

Tunnels and chambers cut into the lunar rock, with a few surface domes. That was Dreyfuss Station. Yet there had been a time—and perhaps there would be a time once again—when those tunnels and domes were and would be something more than that. Once it had been a place with a purpose, a mission , the place where the people of the Moon would wrest the secrets of the Charonians from the ruined Lunar Wheel.

But no one had made any real progress toward that goal in a long, long time. The researchers had accumulated data, yes—huge masses of it. The people of the Moon now understood the biology and behavior of the Charonians far better than they ever had before. But none of that knowledge got them any closer to finding the Earth.

And, ultimately, what else mattered besides that?

Well, one thing did. At least it mattered to Marcia MacDougal. It was why she had signed on to the Lunar Wheel survey in the first place. Her husband, Gerald MacDougal, serving aboard the Terra Nova . She had lost him when the Earth had been Abducted, and if there was one goal in her life, it was it getting him back. Mastering the Charonian symbol language was nothing to her but a way of moving toward that goal. Humanity might be able to undo what the Charonians had done—if humanity learned Charonian.

None of which did her any good at the moment. Where was Selby? She glanced around the arrival room, half-hoping that Selby wasn’t going to be there. Yes, she had said she would meet her flight, and Marcia had agreed, but she couldn’t help wishing she could slip off to her own quarters and have a little peace and quiet—

But no. There was Selby, on the far side of the room, waving her hand a bit frantically. Marcia sighed, gave her a token wave, and made her way over to her.

The theory had been offered more than once that England kept an even keel through the simple expedient of shipping a fair number of the dottier cases off to foreign parts. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton lent credence to the theory. Marcia MacDougal had never met anyone quite like Selby. Normally, she rather enjoyed the other woman’s company—in small doses. Selby never quite seemed to be on the same wavelength as everyone else. There she was, on a day of general public mourning, grinning from ear to ear and literally bouncing up and down with excitement.

Selby was about forty-five or fifty, something under average height. Her dark brown hair had a bit of grey in it, and was cut in a too-short sort of pageboy. She had pale skin, startling blue eyes, even white teeth, and a strange sort of nonchalant enthusiasm for practically everything. She was a just a trifle on the stocky side, though really still quite trim.

“Coo-ee! Marcia! Marcia MacDougal! Over here!” As if Marcia couldn’t see her eight meters in front of her face. What was that coo-ee noise supposed to mean , anyway? Marcia stepped forward to greet her. “Hello, Selby,” she said, reaching out to shake her hand.

“Hello, Dr. MacDougal,” she said with exaggerated emphasis, a chirpy lilt in her voice. Instead of shaking hands, she sidestepped and gave Marcia a rather maternal peck on the cheek. “Always such a pleasure to see you. But you’ve been away so long this time I almost forgot you were gone.”

“Well, I, ah… what? What did you say?”

She smiled and pulled Marcia along by the arm, eager to get moving. “Welcome back,” she said, ignoring her question. “It’s been nothing but dull going since you left—until the excitement started, of course. Non-stop, all-out, all-go ever since we got started,” she went on, the sentences tumbling out of her, one after the other. “We’ve been down there doing the—well, you’ll see. No matter. Working round the clock and then some. But I swear we’ve been at it so hard I didn’t know the date until I realized what today was.”

MacDougal never quite knew how to react to Selby’s scrambled syntax. For her part, Selby never seemed to understand why people were constantly confused around her. It was as if she were speaking a private language of her own, one that made perfect sense to her, and that only resembled English by sheer chance. Marcia knew Tycho Purple Penal folk who were more understandable. “Sounds as if you’ve been busy,” she said, for want of anything better to say.

“Oh, I suppose so. Maybe not all that much,” she said, quite casually contradicting everything she had just said with an obviously spurious nonchalance. “Are you glad to be here?” she asked, quite out of the blue.

It was an absurd question, and Marcia was in no mood for nonsense, but at least it had the benefit of allowing a clear answer. “Not really,” she said. “Today’s not exactly a happy day. But you said you had something for me. Is it—”

Selby’s voice turned serious, at least for the moment. She stopped and looked her straight in the eye. “Yes. I said it might be a breakthrough. Our Rosetta Stone, the key that might let us learn… learn everything. If we have the stomach for it. Don’t bother getting back to your quarters. Just toss your gear in a locker and let’s go right now,” Selby said. “This will make better sense if you see for yourself. If it even makes sense then .”

It was not until that moment that Marcia realized Selby was still wearing her own pressure suit. She hated wearing that thing. She always stripped out of it the first chance she got. And she usually bent Marcia’s ear for at least a good fifteen minutes no matter what the topic under discussion. If Selby stayed in her suit, and didn’t stop to chat, then something was definitely up.

Selby seemed too excited. Marcia started to feel a nervous, queasy sensation in her stomach as she crossed to the single bank of luggage lockers and tossed her bag into one of the lockers that still worked. She came back, with more certainty in her stride than her heart. The sooner she found out what the hell they had found, the better. “All right, Selby,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The entrance complex to the Rabbit Hole took up most of the rest of Dome One. They made their way through the redundant airlock sealing off the Vertical Transit Center from the rest of the dome. There was normal pressure on either side of the lock, and perhaps it would have been more convenient to leave both doors open and allow easier access—but this was a station on a shoestring, and lots of things could change air pressure on either side of that lock. Safety regs required full standard lock cycling and sealed airlocks at all times. They went through the lock. “All set to see what we shall see?” Selby asked, her tone more serious than her words.

“All set,” Marcia said, trying hard to read Selby’s expression through her helmet. She was always a bit strained and tense, but something about her cheeriness seemed even more forced than usual.

MacDougal followed Selby into the transit elevator and took a seat on the opposite side of the car from her, trying to get far enough away that it would be awkward for Selby to start a conversation. She buckled her seatbelt and waited.

The Rabbit Hole. At some time in the deep past, the Charonians had dug the Lunar Wheel cavity, wrapping clear around the Moon forty kilometers beneath the surface. As part of that process, they had dug twin boreholes at the lunar North and South poles. They had dug these upward from the forty-kilometer level, almost but not quite to the surface, leaving the surface layers of rock undisturbed. As with most things regarding the Charonians, there were many theories as to why this might be so, but no real answer.

Five years before, search teams had used alternate-mode gravity detectors to locate the top of the North Pole borehole, which was promptly dubbed the Rabbit Hole. Back then, Lucian Dreyfuss and Chao’s TeleOperator had ridden a jury-rigged sort of cable car down the forty-kilometer shaft.