Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Still, he found the place a bit disturbing. But then, he would have been worried about himself if he ever got used to these people.

He felt the need to talk to someone and keyed the radio link open again. “Hey Dianne, you still on the feed?”

“Still here, Frank,” her voice said from the overhead speaker. “What’s up?” Chelated was about to reply, but the view through the monitor caught his eye again.

Some sort of flash of light overwhelmed the camera for a moment before it recovered. A chance reflection of the Sun off some polished surface, no doubt. The image came back at once. But there was something wrong. Chelated frowned and looked harder.

No, it was okay. Dianne’s ship was still there, against the broad background of stars. Stars ? That was nuts. The Moon should be behind the Pack Rat . An alarm began to bleat, and he checked the system. The Earthside links were okay, but all the Moonside commlinks were out. Every last one of them.

Frank looked to the external view again. A numbing horror began to take hold of his gut.

The sky was all wrong. The Moon wasn’t there anymore.

And those weren’t the right stars, either.

Lucian Dreyfuss was one of the few permanent Lunar residents who actually witnessed Earth’s disappearance.

Mostly, it was the tourists who saw it happen. At any given moment, there were thousands of tourists up on the surface, in suits or in the view-domes, seeing the Lunar sights, such as they were. The locals never went topside.

Lucian worked as a space traffic controller in his regular job, and shepherded tourists on the side when money was tight—as it usually was with Lucian. At least it was a view-dome tour today. Dealing with a gaggle of tourist in shirtsleeves, oohing and ahhing at the gray landscape from inside a bubble dome, was infinitely preferable to riding herd on a bunch of neophytes bounding about the surface, all of them merrily trying to kill themselves by finding the flaws in supposedly idiot-proofed pressure suits.

Not even the Sun could hurt them here. Outside the dome, a large occulting disk on a specially built tracking arm followed the Sun around the sky, putting itself between the dome and the Sun at all times, thus keeping the Sun’s disk safely hidden from the dome’s interior. Outside the dome, the Moonscape was brilliantly lit: the dome itself was in permanent shadow. Lights glowed around the edge of the dome floor, providing just enough illumination to keep the turistas from tripping over each other.

But dome or surface, morning tours were always a bit much for Lucian. He was a night owl, used to the night shift at Orbital Traffic Control—and the night life at the casinos. He glanced at his watch. Just before 1000, Universal Time. Of course, this crowd was fresh off the ship. Most of these grounders were probably still on their local times. God only knew what time of day it was for them.

Lucian was on the short side with a wiry, athletic build. He put in a lot of time in the gym, determined to fight off the typical Conner’s tendency toward pudginess. His face was narrow and pale, with a reddish brown crew cut. His eyes were slate gray, penetrating, serious, passionate.

He looked out over the landscape. At the moment, his eyes showed nothing more impassioned than boredom. Maybe the landscape was awesome, but the natives—the Conners, as they called themselves—had seen it all before. None of them bothered to go up to the surface without a good reason. After all, the Lunar surface didn’t change much. Or at all. The tourists never seemed to understand that attitude.

Lucian spotted a somewhat overfed matron looking around the dome, giving every person a once-over, no doubt cataloguing each by accent and clothing. She frowned, spotted Lucian, and came over to him. A Mrs. Chester, he remembered. He knew what she was going to ask even before she opened her mouth.

“Tell me, Mr. Dreyfuss,” she asked. “Why do so few natives came up to look at any of the sights? I’ve been on tour here for a week now, and the only locals I’ve seen aboveground have been the tour guides. The vistas are so lovely . Why don’t you all come to look at them?”

“ ‘You only have to see the rocks once,’ ” Lucian replied in a tired voice. He didn’t bother telling her that that bit of folk wisdom had the power of a proverb among the Conners. People said it to explain that something once new was getting stale, old, was something you didn’t need anymore.

Lucian currently felt all of those things. He certainly didn’t need to see the rocks again. His mind was on other things. On how long until he could bring the tour group back, on how much of the spiel he still had to give, on how many more herds of groundlings he would have to drag around to clear his casino debt.

He glanced at his watch. That was time enough to let them wander the dome, ogling on their own. Lucian clapped his hands together and stepped up onto a low dais built into the dome’s floor. “All right, folks, all right. Gather around, if you please. I’ll be pointing out several of the landmarks visible from here. First and foremost of these is of course the Earth, directly over my head.”

As if they were all attached to the same swivel control, the sea of heads surrounding Lucian all pivoted upward at once. A forest of arms sprouted up as the groundlings pointed out home to each other. Lucian had given up wondering why they did that. Did any of them seriously think their friends were incapable of finding Earth in the sky?

Lucian looked up himself to see what sort of real estate and weather were visible at the moment. Earth was in waning half-phase, the terminator just about to reach the coast of North America, with clear weather over most of the daylight quadrant. Good. That put Africa front and center. A nice, well-known, easy-to-recognize piece of geography plainly visible with no damn cloud cover hiding it. Much preferable to when the Pacific was socked in and he was reduced to showing where Hawaii would be if it were big enough to see and the clouds weren’t there. He tried to pump a little enthusiasm into his voice, just for the form’s sake.

“As you can see, the Sun is just rising over the coast of North and South America, and there’s clear weather over most of the Atlantic. Can anyone spot the coast of Africa?”

The murmur of voices swept toward a crescendo as the groundlings eagerly pointed out the perfectly obvious to each other. Next step. He could explain how the South American coast matched up with Africa. He looked up at the Earth and began.

“Very good. Now, if you look toward the dark side of the planet, you can just see—”

He saw it. He saw it happen. One moment the Earth was there, and then, suddenly, in a weird, twisted flash of blue light, it wasn’t. He blinked, unbelieving.

The Earth wasn’t there anymore.

Around him, the tourist voices rose again, a bit uncertainly. “Is it an eclipse?” one of them asked.

“Hey, sonny, is this some kind of joke?”

“Did the polarizers switch on in the wrong place?”

“No, dummy, this dome isn’t polarized. It’s got that Sun-blocking gizmo on the control arm outside.”

“It must be a power failure. All the lights on Earth went out.”

“Yeah, right, including the Sun ?”

“Hey, mister, you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Young man, what in heaven’s name is going on?” Mrs. Chester demanded in an imperious voice, as if Lucian were responsible for preventing disasters.

Lucian ignored the welter of voices and stared at the impossible sky, his mind racing for an explanation. What in the name of God could create the illusion of a planet vanishing? He dreamed up a half dozen theories. A black dust cloud wandering through the Solar System, a bad prank by some grad students on one of the space habitats, flinging a king-size occulting disk in front of Earth, a sudden weird flaw in the dome’s glass that filtered out Earth-colored light. But none of his ideas made sense, or were even physically possible.