Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

For a long time yet, until she learned to use it, the physical sensations would be… disturbing. She would learn to tolerate it, then get used to it, then accept it, until the new hand seemed normal and natural.

In the meantime, the doctors told her, life went on. Wait it out.

That was the second lesson she had learned. Life went on, no matter what.

Quite abruptly and without warning, the entire planet is grabbed and thrown into a new solar system, without any explanation. No one knew why or how it had happened. Nonetheless, there were plenty of crises people could understand, and those were what people focused on. Perhaps dealing with the smaller crises was a means of avoiding the larger disaster.

Whether or not dealing with them was a denial mechanism, Earth was facing some extremely serious problems that did require attention. The loss of space facilities hurt badly, caused energy shortages, communications lapses, transportation problems, supply problems. People were suffering. The papers and the tapes and the newsblocks were still reporting new disasters, new updates on the number killed or injured, on the loss of this space facility or that. No one could truly comprehend the theft of a world, but people could understand the death of ten thousand in the crash of a habitat.

And yet, on another, broader level, the damage was superficial. Taken as a social whole, planet Earth was still strong enough, resilient enough, to survive this trauma. Society wasn’t showing any signs of collapsing.

Or at least that was the reassuring message everyone was trying to give everyone else. Whether or not it was true, humanity needed to believe it.

Perhaps people glanced to the sky now and again, but they walked down the street, met their friends, ate their meals and went to their jobs. If those, too, were denial mechanisms, they were healthy ones.

Meanwhile the bars were all full, and so were the churches. The various organizations of crazies had more than a few new recruits. Any group that claimed to have an explanation, or an escape from danger, was popular. And there were more than a few incidents of attacks on the crazies, as people looked for someone to blame.

Yet, all told, as represented in Los Angeles at least, the people of Earth were taking the catastrophe in stride. Dianne Steiger looked down at the cloned, alien hand resting in her lap. She was taking that catastrophe in stride, too, and for much the same reasons. What choice did she have? She may have lost a part of herself, but she could not stop going about the business of staying alive. The whole of the world could not drop everything it was doing in order to find an appropriate way to react.

And the people who did react, with protest marches (against whom or what, Dianne could not understand), accomplished nothing. The jaded, world-weary leaders of Earth’s nations and cities, still hurting from the Knowledge Crash riots and the worldwide recession, had learned the hard way that emotional appeals could only produce more riot, more destruction, more fear. Governments and large institutions put all their efforts into spreading calm, urging a return to normalcy, whatever that was.

Life went on, in spite of all. It wasn’t just fact: it was official policy.

Dianne thought there was reason to believe the policy would work. After all, people could get used to anything.

Even a Dyson Sphere hanging in the sky. People were acting as if giving it a name explained it. Dianne felt a grim amusement at that. She was one of a very few persons to see it unveiled by atmosphere, blazing with power at the height of its energy pulse. She knew to fear it. Not so the average person in the street. They had learned that it was many billions of kilometers away, and many seemed to assume that anything that far off could do them no harm. Never mind that it was presumably related to the power that had snatched the planet away. And besides, the Sphere wasn’t visible in the sky anymore. Its cherry red glow had faded down through brick red, to a dim glow, to darkness. Now it was merely a spot of blackness in the night sky, eclipsing the background stars. In infrared, of course, it was another story. In IR, the damned thing was bright as hell.

And was it a Dyson Sphere? Named for Freeman Dyson, the twentieth-century scientist who had dreamed them up, Dyson Spheres were supposed to be hollow shells, hundreds of millions of kilometers in diameter, built around stars. This thing sure looked like one—it was certainly big enough—but it seemed like every engineer on the planet was busily demonstrating that no conceivable material could withstand the forces a Dyson Sphere would be subjected to.

There were two reasons for building Dyson Spheres: one, to provide enormously vast amounts of living area; and two, to collect great amounts of energy. Because it enclosed its star completely, a Dyson Sphere could trap all of the energy the star emitted.

Of course, if this was a Dyson Sphere, it was therefore artificial. It had been built. Which left the question of where the builders were. Presumably they were the same folk who had snatched the Earth.

So where were they?

The door to the inner office slid open, and a tall, good-looking man in casual clothes stepped out. “Dianne Steiger?”

Dianne dropped her cigarette to the concrete floor and ground it out as she stood up. “Yes. Are you Dr. Bernhardt?”

“Ah, no. I’m Gerald MacDougal, head exobiologist and chief of staff for the Directorate of Spatial Investigations.”

“Chief of staff?” Dianne asked, trying to sound cheerful. “That sounds a little out of line for an exobiologist.”

Gerald smiled, a bit sadly. “No one here has time to worry about that sort of thing. We’re all just making it up as we go along. Come on back.” Gerald led her into the inner offices, into a small, bare, windowless room. It looked to be an old storeroom that had been cleaned out and set up as an office on very short notice. Gerald sat down at one side of a trestle table and gestured for Dianne to sit at the other. “Dr. Bernhardt is just finishing up some other work. He’ll see you in just a moment. I thought I might save some time and give you a quick background briefing before you go in,” Gerald said.

“Background to what?” Dianne asked. “Why am I here?”

“We’ll talk a bit, and I bet you figure it out before Dr. Bernhardt sees you,” Gerald said.

“Who’s Dr. Bernhardt?”

“To oversimplify a bit, Dr. Wolf Bernhardt was the duty scientist here at JPL who detected the gravity waves that caused the Earth’s removal. The U.N. Security Council needed someone to run their investigation of what happened, and they decided that gravitic technology was going to be central to figuring that out. Besides, they had to pick someone, and fast. So they dumped it in Wolf’s lap. They set up the United Nations Directorate of Spatial Investigation and made Dr. Bernhardt the first director and lead investigator. They’ve ordered him to, quote, ‘Establish the causes and consequences of the Earth’s removal to its present location,’ close quote. DSI’s got an absolute U.N. priority claim on JPL and on any or all other research establishments or facilities or resources it needs, anywhere on Earth. We want it, we take it.”

Dianne’s eyebrows went up. “Wait a second. You said something about gravity waves associated with the Earth’s removal. You mean someone knows how it happened ? With gravity waves? That’s been kept quiet.”

“Yeah, it has, because that’s all we know. And we want to work on the problem without every kook on the planet phoning in his suggestions. The data from every single gravity-wave detector in the world shows large numbers of highly complex gravity-wave transmissions right at the time of the Big Jump. Immediately afterward, within five seconds of each other, every gee-wave detector on Earth blew out. Based on the five seconds of data we did get, we think there are thousands of gravity-modulation sources in the Multisystem.”