Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“And what is that?” Chancellor Daltry asked gently.

Vespasian’s face turned sad, and he was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “I thought a lot about that,” he said. “I think they’re spaceships. Really big spaceships. The ones coming from the Outer System have been waiting, hidden, camouflaged as asteroids and comets. Hiding from what, I don’t know. Once these things start accelerating, moving, it’s obvious they aren’t what they seem. Disguise is pointless. So, since the ones coming through Earthpoint are accelerating from the start, there’s no sense in disguising them. The Earthpoint ones are accelerated on the other side of the wormhole somehow—given a high initial speed. Plus they have a slightly higher boost rate. That makes them seem different from the Outer System jobs, but I think they’re really all the same thing. Big ships.”

He hesitated one last time, and then said it. “Invasion ships. I’ve tried to come up with some other explanation, but nothing else fits. They’re ships. What sort of crews they have aboard, I don’t know.

“But we’re going to find out when the first one lands on Mars.”

Maybe the world hadn’t ended, but Gerald MacDougal found himself in paradise, after all. Or at least in California.

But then, California, Vancouver, and in fact all of Earth were suddenly an exobiologist’s paradise. This new home for Earth was not the afterlife, but it was certainly a celestial realm, a kingdom of stars, an Empire of the Suns.

And it was a realm crowded with life. Of that Gerald was convinced—and surely that was the next best thing to Heaven for an exobiologist. Most of the other planets were too far off for good imagery from a ground-based telescope, but they could get good spectroscopic data. Gerald looked again at the document in his hand, barely able to resist jumping for joy. It was a summary from the first run-through of planetary spectrographs, as collected from observatories all over the world.

And the summary practically shouted evidence of life-bearing worlds. Free oxygen, water vapor, nitrogen glowed up from every spectrograph.

Likewise, every world was at the proper distance from its respective star for life. For every star of a given size and temperature, there was a particular range of distances, called the biosphere, wherein a planet would be at the right temperature for Earthlike life, neither too hot nor too cold. Only certain types of stars were capable of supporting life. But every star around the sphere was of the right size, temperature and color to support life—and every planet in the Multisystem rode a secure and perfect orbit inside its star’s biosphere.

He had to get to those worlds. Somehow. Getting here was a good first step. He had guessed right. JPL had been officially designated the lead lab for finding out what the hell had happened. Gerald barely had time to finish mentioning his credentials as an exobiologist before they had signed him up. JPL’s people could read a spectrograph as well as Gerald could. They knew they were going to need exobiology expertise, sooner or later. And until such time as he could work directly in his field, there was endless staff work that needed doing. Earth’s survival could well hinge on figuring out what had happened. The scientific community generally and JPL specifically were confronted with the largest and most urgent research program in history, and they needed to gear up for the job. Gerald was a good organizer, and was glad to help out.

But there was a core of pain underneath all the excitement. Marcia was lost to him, somewhere out across the sea of stars.

And, as wondrous as this place was, it was not Earth’s home. No doubt a sojourn here would teach many things, but Earth belonged in the Solar System. Gerald was determined to see her returned there.

Dianne Steiger had learned something in the ten days since they had fished her out of the Pack Rat’s wreckage at the Los Angeles Spaceport: People can get used to anything.

Already she was used to the ghostly pseudo-sensations her new left hand provided. Maybe the astronaut’s union was a waning political power, but it still bought damn good medical care. She sat in Wolf Bernhardt’s outer office, waiting. From time to time, someone would rush past, carrying a stack of datablocks, looking worried. There was a frantic air about the place. Fumbling a bit, working awkwardly with just her right hand, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it.

Frantic yes, but at the same time eerily normal and calm.

That was the way the world was now. Massive and unseen forces had stolen Earth—and yet life went on. If it was time to go to work, it didn’t much matter which star system Earth was in. You still had to get up, eat breakfast, drink your coffee—and step out into a world where the light of day wasn’t quite the right color, where the sun in the sky was not the Sun. You still had to go to the office and get those invoices out, or go to the store and get the shopping done, or go to the dentist for your cleaning. You still had to go home at night, though under a too-bright sky that held not the Moon and the familiar constellations, but a half-dozen too-bright stars that washed out much of the sky, leaving it tinged with blue in places. There were too few fixed-background stars, and far too many planets that were too large, too close. And a lot more meteors than there used to be. Everything in the sky had changed, and yet everything on Earth was exactly the same.

Even if you wanted to react, there was nothing you could do about it. What did you do about the sky transmogrifying? And on a practical level, if you weren’t a spacer, what difference did it make?

She blew out a cloud of smoke, sighed, and tried to tell herself how lucky she had been. Of course, if you were a spacer, you had a few more problems. Not that Dianne felt she had any right to complain. She was home, and alive. There were a lot of astros—a lot of her friends—who weren’t.

She lifted her left arm and examined her new hand. Too pink, the nails not properly grown in, no muscle tone to speak of, unweathered and characterless. A baby hand grown into the size and form of a woman’s, but without the slightest sign of maturity. She closed her eyes, and willed the hand to close, to clench itself into a fist. Eyes shut, she concentrated on her sensations in the hand. She could feel the arching of her fingers, the pressure of her fingertips on the base of her palm, her thumb wrapped around the side of her forefinger. The feelings were clear enough so that she could see her hand, her fist, through closed eyes.

She opened her eyes again, and found herself staring at an open hand, the fingers splayed out, starfished away from each other. With a new and separate act of will, she again forced her new hand into a fist, watched it close with open eyes this time. And felt nothing at all from it but a numb warmth. Her nervous system, confused by conflicting signals, simply gave up.

She carefully laid the hand in her lap and cursed silently. Again, and still, it happened. It was as if she had one left hand that she could only see, and another that she could only feel.

The doctors were soothing and reassuring. In the old days, when amputations were permanent, amputees reported phantom feelings—an itch in the leg that wasn’t there anymore, that sort of thing. Intellectually, she knew, the disconcerting sensations she was experiencing were merely an echo of the same phenomenon. Her new left hand was sending legitimate signals to her nervous system, but a replacement body part, even a sprint-grown bud-clone produced from the patient’s own cells, never precisely matched the original. In time the new hand would develop muscle tone and coordination, but for now it didn’t respond or report sensation the same way her old hand had.