Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“Well, you could think of it in generations. Call the point we’re heading for Point X. Point X is the grandfather singularity, and it produced the Moonpoint Singularity. Moonpoint is the father to the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. Earthpoint would have to have similar resonance characteristics to its father and grand father, Moonpoint and Point X. Sort of like genetics. Characteristics would be passed down, with some variance—though not much. There’s probably no more than a fourth-power variance between them at best, enough to differentiate the Moonpoint from Earth-point and Point X.”

“Great, good to know,” Sianna said. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t?” Wally asked. Clearly he felt that the next stage in the reasoning was utterly self-evident.

Sianna looked to Eyeball and shrugged. “Does it?”

“Not so I suss, nohow. Come on, Walls—what would be popping at Earthpoint ifwhen Charos drop SCOREs down Moonpoint tube?”

Wally had not ever shown the slightest trouble understanding Purpspeak. “Earthpoint ought to ring like a bell, resonate in all sorts of gravitic frequencies. Sympathetic vibration. We’ve always assumed that a lot of the hardware on a Ring-and-Hole pair was to damp out that sort of vibration.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sianna said. “Okay. Would the people back in the Solar System be able to detect that? If they were running any sort of gravitic detection gear hooked to the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon?”

“They’d be lucky if it didn’t blow every circuit breaker on the detector grid. Absolutely. In fact, I doubt they’d need detectors. The Lunar Wheel itself would react. No way they could miss it.”

“Charon Ring?” Eyeball asked.

Wally thought for a second. “ Maybe . If they were running in the right sort of detection mode, they might pick it up. If the folks on the Moon warned them, they could certainly recalibrate and listen for the next one. Of course, we don’t know for sure anyone is still running the Ring, or if anyone is observing the Lunar Wheel.”

“Okay,” Sianna said. “Good. Great. There have been lots of openings and closings, lots of SCOREs headed through. Something like a hundred so far, and maybe another dozen to go.”

“And they’d have been watching them,” Wally said, getting I he idea. “And they know reverb theory as well as we do. They’ll know it means something is up with us.”

“Holdit holdit holdit,” Eyeball said. “ We’re going through, right? We’re gonna send a command set to pop the hatch on that thing and dive in. That command set. Has to go through to your Point X so’s the other end of the hole knows to open. Right?”

“Sure, right. We’ll send the signal the same way the Charonians do. Earth will send a radio beam to the Ghoul Modules. The Ghouls will respond by sending out command modulations on a gravitic carrier beam,” Wally said.

Eyeball leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and thought for a moment. “Now how ’bout folks back home in Solar, at Charon? They be able to detect commands, maybe read ’em and reap?”

Wally shrugged. “Read them, sure, but I don’t know what they’ll get out of them. All the signals are virtually identical. Without some sort of code key, like we got off the Lone World, it’ll just be the same burst of noise over and over.”

“No,” Sianna said. “They have a code key, sort of. They knew enough Charonian visual symbol language to close the wormhole five years ago. They’ll know it’s a wormhole transit signal, and they’ll have enough of the syntax to be able to get something out of it. Besides, the signals aren’t precisely identical. There are timing variables and mass variables.”

“Okay, they’ll be able to parse the signal, work out the grammar. Maybe even mimic the signal. But there won’t be anything in the signal they’ll be able to read and understand.”

Sianna stood up straight rather suddenly and put her hand over her mouth. “Wait a second. Wally, stick around. I get my best ideas around you. There will be nothing they can read in the signal—unless we put it there.”

“Say what?”

“There’s a null sequence in the command set,” Sianna said. “Like a comment line. It’s preceded by a symbol telling the Ghoul Modules’ processors to disregard the following sequences. Probably it’s a place to put in the Charonian equivalent of a manifest name, or an explanatory note. We could use it.”

“Could we put something in there?” Wally asked, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he was not concerned with the technical challenge, but whether they would be allowed to do so, as if the grown-ups wouldn’t let them fool around with the equipment that way.

Sianna nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t see why not. Wally, pull up that diagram of the signal syntax. I want to see how much room we have.”

Wally got out his notepack and worked the controls. He shook his head. “Not much. About thirty characters, tops. Can’t say much in that.”

“But enough to tell them it’s us ,” Sianna said. “Enough to say it’s Earth, it’s people going through.”

“What good would that do?” Wally asked.

“At least it would tell them we’re still alive,” Sianna said. “We’ve been out of contact for five years. They have no idea whether or not we’re still here.”

“Could do more than that,” Eyeball said. “Would let them know they could use same command set on Earthpoint Singu—no, no, that fish ain’t tunable no more. The Ring of Charon, though. Maybe they could tweak it up enough to scoot a ship, send it thru true to Point X.”

“Wherever that is. Is that going to be doing them any favors?” Sianna asked. “Suppose we all get killed the second we go through, just after we’ve sent them an invitation to join us?”

“Risk worth it,” Eyeball said. “Think ’bout it. We can’t make passage to Solar Space nohow now. Suppose we find a real, perm way to get forth and back, use Point X place for long shortcut. Worth plenty, that.” Eyeball thought for a second. “Risk they might miss it, though. Mebbe we could send own shout, longer message? Just talk, without sending something through?”

“Not now,” Sianna said. “Maybe not ever. The only command set we know is the one the Lone World’s been sending. We don’t know any other way to do it, any other code set. And I don’t want to mess with a wormhole if I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t forget this whole mess started when that Chao guy accidentally switched on the Earthpoint-Moonpoint wormhole. We might send a text message that also told the wormhole to convert its mass into energy, or something.”

“Could we do like that with this nullset thing, the comment line?” Eyeball asked.

Sianna frowned. “My God, I hadn’t thought of that. Wally? Could we do any damage using the nullset area?”

Wally shook his head, serenely—and disconcertingly—confident. “No way. Impossible. That null sequence area is safe. That’s the whole point of it.” But then he cocked his head to one side, and thought about it a little more. “At least I don’t think it could do any damage. Don’t see how it could. But, ah, I’m not quite sure I can make any promises.”

“Beautiful, Walls,” Eyeball said. “Glad you cleared that one up.”

“So? Well?” Sianna asked, looking toward Eyeball. “It’s your hab, your home,” she said. “You’re the pilot. Your call.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Wish weren’t.” Eyeball turned her back on the other two, and stepped over to the porthole. She looked out onto the depths of space, at the Moonpoint Ring, at the Multisystem beyond. “I got family Earthward,” she said. “Sis and pop live, mom longdead. Never gonna seem ’em again, likeward. But let ’em know I’m alive, that we made it? Gotta do that. Be sweet to let ’em know we all reet. Risk so high on diving the Hole anyhoo, it ain’t no nevermind to bet one more leetle chip.”