Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

What was that mass of streaming tendrils blooming out from the Moon? He thought for a moment, then pulled the focus back further. He adjusted the detection gain upwards a bit, and the inky tendrils radiating out from the Earth-Moon system materialized again.

He kept the detection level just high enough for the streaming beams of gravity power to be visible. With the power down low enough, he could see more clearly. The power beams were radiating out from the Moon’s centerpoint, the natural focus of the Lunar Wheel. One of the tendrils reached out and attached itself to the black dot that had just come through the Earthpoint black hole. Larry pulled back the view a bit, and saw other tendrils of gravity power reaching out to touch others of the black dots that were still close to the Moon. As he watched, the image of the Earthpoint black-hole gravity source suddenly swelled larger, another black dot appeared through the black hole—and a massive, jet black pulse of gravity power slammed from the hole into the Lunar Wheel.

The gravity power gets sent through the hole once every 128 seconds , Larry realized. The Wheel absorbs it, stores it, and beams it out to the things moving out from the black hole.

So those things in turn became point-source gravity-wave sources. Which according to theory, ought to be impossible, but never mind that now. Call them gee points. What about them? How many of them were there? He reset the gravity scope to its widest possible angle, and told it to present only point-source gravity generators.

He sat and thought for a moment as the program ran. How many could there be? One every two minutes or so, for the last fourteen hours. That was about right. Something over four hundred gee points by now. Where the hell were they all going?

The tank cleared itself and reset. Larry gasped. He saw a pattern similar to what the Autocrat had seen—but the ten thousand asteroids moving in the Belt were only the beginning.

The Ring of Charon was looking inward, toward the Inner System and the Sun. But it also looked out beyond the distant Sun, out past the far side of Pluto’s own orbit and beyond. At the far side of the Solar System, at the ragged edge of resolution, it could see a section of the Oort Cloud’s inner surface. The Oort Cloud, the hollow sphere of unborn comets that surrounds the Solar System and extends halfway to the nearest star.

The Oort Cloud was alive with purposeful black dots, all of them diving in uncountable numbers straight toward the Inner System.

Dr. Simon Raphael sat alone in his office.

Privacy.

Quiet.

He needed those things now. Leaning over his journal book, he set down his words in a slow and careful script. Perhaps his hand was slow, but his mind was moving fast. Too fast. He had found long ago that the journal did him the most good when he was in this state—tired, and yet upset, concerned about something. He had learned to relax his rigid self-control at these times, and let the pen find the words for him.

“ Dearest Jessie ,” he wrote.

“ All has been lost. The Earth has vanished, and I am to blame.” The words came out of his soul and onto the page. He stopped, set down his pen, and stared at the words in astonishment. “ I am to blame” ? Why in the world had he written that ? How could he be blamed?

He stared at the small three-dee image of Jessie, decades old, that sat on his desk. As if he could find the answers there.

But he already knew. The self-accusation had come from the warmest part of his heart, the part that had come nearest to dying with Jessie’s death. The part he had shielded with anger and bitterness.

He was to blame for squashing Larry’s first experiments, that was why. Simon knew, intellectually at least, that he was not responsible for the Earth’s loss, any more than Larry Chao was responsible. The burden Simon Raphael carried was that he had encouraged Larry’s sense of guilt, made it worse with his bullying and anger.

Larry was no more to blame for Earth’s loss than the first caveman to use fire was responsible for the first village of grass huts destroyed by fire. Discovering a new power meant uncorking a genie’s bottle. Larry happened to be the one to pull the cork out of gravity’s bottle. But it would have been pulled sooner or later. Once the Ring of Charon was built, that much was certain.

Raphael had kicked the boy when he was down. If he had been a proper leader, a proper guide for this scientific operation, he would have accepted Larry’s initial discovery, cultivated it and made it grow. The whole team should have focused on it. Even if it had come to nothing, what would there have been to lose?

If the whole staff been thrown into the effort, had examined the techniques for a million-gee accelerator, perhaps they would have learned about it in a more orderly fashion. Perhaps they would have learned enough to know the consequences and stop the experiment.

More than likely, of course, they would have fired a graser beam anyway, and Earth would have vanished just the same—but at least it would be shared guilt, and the entire staff would have understood Larry’s work well enough to expand on it after the disaster, rush into needed research to understand this incredible situation. A black hole replacing Earth! Fantastic.

For half a moment, the idea nearly excited him, instead of terrifying him. In the old days, that sense of wonder would have been stronger. He would have needed to know what had happened—instead of shutting himself in his office, wishing for catatonia. Simon Raphael bent over the page and continued his writing.

“This place has done things to me, Jessie. You never would have married the sour old man I have turned into. You were always truly my better half, no matter how trite a cliché that phrase might be. You encouraged the young, the weak, the small, and let them grow. You taught me to do so as well. I have forgotten that, and I must re-learn.”

A change came over him as he wrote, and not an unnoticed one. He could feel himself becoming less harsh, less angry, less bitter, feel a gentler part of his heart and soul reopen even as he wrote. He remembered the feelings he had lost, even as he set down the words describing how they were gone.

Larry angered him because Larry represented a successful version of a Simon Raphael that might have been, a lost Simon that he himself had never quite been able to become. He had never been quite bright enough, quite brave enough, quite innocent enough to make the dream-Simon work.

But did not all good fathers wish for their sons to be more than they themselves had been?

Father ? Another strange thought. Yes, father . If all of his own children were suddenly lost to him, so too was Larry Chao’s family lost to Larry. The young man needed guidance, kindness. A father.

And humanity needed Larry Chao. The genius locked inside that head had gotten them into this mess. It might very well provide their only way out of it. Perhaps , Simon told himself, if you stop trying so hard to hate the boy, you might find a way to help him save us all . And what was there to hate about him anyway?

“ I wish you could have met Larry ,” he wrote to his dead wife. “ I think you would have liked him.”

But then he set the pen down.

There was work to do. He reached for a button and punched up the intercom system.

Larry sat, lost and alone, watching the trajectories of the gee points, thinking, struggling to find any possible meanings, all the imaginable consequences he could. But it was too much for him. This was beyond him, beyond human capacity.