Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

She had spent too many long nights staring a hole in the overhead bulkhead, brooding over what the Charonians were, and where they came from—and who or what it was they feared.

Fear. Charonian fear. That was the key that turned the lock, the question that would lead to the answers. Dianne had watched the SCOREs appear, watched the Ghoul Modules come in and commandeer the corpse of the Moonpoint Ring, watched the way things had turned hard-edged recently. Up until a few months ago, the system had reminded Dianne of a huge, lumbering beast that could go where it wanted and do what it would. Now it was moving in panicky fear. Something, somewhere had told the Sphere that some threat was suddenly near. Things were nearing their climax.

And she was damned if the Terra Nova was going to miss the party.

Sianna Colette opened the door to her quarters and stuck her head out into the corridor. After the incident with the cleanup robot the night before, she was not going to venture into the hab’s public ways without careful consideration. NaPurHab was a madhouse. But that, Sianna thought, was the normal part. What was remarkable was the degree to which it was managing to organize itself and prepare for what everyone was calling the Big Dive, a term that seemed to come out of nowhere.

But then everything around here seemed to come from nowhere. Nothing made sense. The Boredway Gang started a petition that protested not the Dive, but the existence of the wormhole itself. She had learned the fine old Purple tradition of signing someone else’s name—preferably an outsider’s name—to a petition when someone shoved a page full of scrawls, scribbles and x’s, all purporting to be Sianna’s own signature, under her nose. She had signed Wolf Bernhardt’s name.

But the hab did, after all, work. It kept its citizens alive, and managed to hold itself together. The Purp had to be doing something right. Certainly the manic enthusiasm with which the entire populace was preparing for the Dive was impressive. Even if the cleaning robots did chase people around now and again.

The coast seemed to be clear, more or less, except for the man editing the graffiti on the opposite wall. Sianna stepped out into the corridor, determined that, this time, she would find her way to the Eyeball Central—the navigation room—without getting lost. She made her way through the tangle of passageways turned into living spaces, and living spaces turned into found art, and lost art turned back into passageways.

At last she came upon the hatchway marked I-BALLS OWNLEE. She had made it this time, without needing to ask directions of a local who might improvise a fictional route, or send her in exactly the wrong direction, just to demonstrate the foolishness of linear thinking, or something. Or else tell her she was going to be given false directions, and then give exact, precise, and accurate instructions on how to get there.

She stepped inside and closed the hatch behind her with a distinct sense of relief. In here, things were relatively sane. More or less. After all, Wally was there.

Sianna had been working herself to exhaustion every night, dragging herself back to her cabin only when her eyes just would not open any longer. But Wally had always been there when she left, and there when she arrived the next day. Sianna didn’t think Wally had left Eyeball Central in the last two days. He was right where she had left him last night, hunched over a video display, staring intently at something or other, not even aware she had come in. Sianna didn’t even try to offer him a greeting. Just like old times.

Eyeball came in a minute or two after Sianna, and offered Sianna a smile, of sorts. A tricky woman, Eyeball was, and not too much interested in the Purple way of doing a thing if that way did not suit her. Her lab space was immaculate. No rubbish heaved in corners, no drawings scribbled on the walls. Wolf Bernhardt himself kept no tidier an office.

“Good morning,” Sianna said.

“Morn,” Eyeball said. “Least morn or less. Losing track.”

“I know the feeling,” Sianna said. “But we’re getting there.”

“ ’Less there’s getting us ,” Eyeball said, rather cryptically. She sat down at a workstation and got back to work.

Sianna nodded, to herself as much as anything. Talkative group. Of course, to be fair, Eyeball had to plan the precise trajectory through the wormhole, working off the numbers Sianna and Wally were developing on exactly where and when and what size the worm-hole would be.

Analyzing the wormhole events that had let the SCOREs pass through was Sianna’s job.

She had spent a good part of yesterday running playbacks of all the recorded passages of SCOREs through the hole, getting precise timings, positions and trajectories for all the events.

Well, back at it . Sianna told herself. She sat down at the console next to Wally’s and punched up the recorded images of the worm-hole events. She could have cued it up at the point she had left off the night before, but instead she ran it from the beginning, fast-forwarding through repeated blue-white flashes of the wormhole bursting open, the SCOREs heading through, the wormhole slamming shut behind them.

Sianna stared at the screen, watching the wormhole opening and shutting, at the stream of SCOREs heading into it. Opening, shutting, on, off, in, out, on, off.

Wait a second. Sianna had been a bit slouched down in her seat. Now she sat straight up. Wait a second. On-off, pos-neg, yes-no, zero-one, dot-dash. The most basic signaling system. Signaling… Yes!

“Wally,” she said, “Wally!”

Wally looked up from his datapack, and turned to look at Sianna. He was clearly surprised to see her, but that was no surprise.

“Huh? What? What… what is it?” he asked.

Eyeball looked up from her own work. Sianna hurried on with her question before Eyeball could shush her.

“What would happen to an inert wormhole aperture with the same default settings as this one when this one opens up and something goes through? Like, say, the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. What would happen?”

Wally frowned and looked off into space for a second. “Well, if current theory is anywhere near right, in some dimensional domains, Earthpoint and Moonpoint are contiguous. Well, more than contiguous. They aren’t just two adjacent planes in space, but two sides of the same plane, coplanar. Anything that affected one would have to affect the other. And of course the other side of the Moonpoint Wormhole is coplanar with whatever it’s linking up with.”

“Huh?” Eyeball asked. Straight or Purple, that seemed to be the standard response to one of Wally’s explanations.

Wally looked around and found two sheets of scratch paper. “C’m‘ere,” he said. “I’ll show you.” The two women got up and stood over him at the console. He put one sheet of paper down on the counter top, then put a second sheet on top of it. “The sheets of paper are the wormholes, and the space between them is the plane of normal space that divides them.” He lifted a corner of the top piece of paper and pointed to the one below. “Here’s the bottom sheet, the first wormhole. The bottom side of it exits out to wherever the SCOREs are going. Top side opens up here in the Multisystem, in the middle of the Moonpoint Ring.” He dropped the corner of the upper sheet back down on top of the first. “Top sheet. The bottom side of it also opens here in the Multisystem, but the top comes out from the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Sianna said. This much she knew.

“Almost,” Eyeball said. “Go on.”