Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“Except you’re not talking about a language here,” Larry said. “At least not so far as I can see. Has there been any arbitrary code in these signals that you couldn’t unbutton, something that might be commentary or orders or abstract thought symbols?”

Marcia looked as if she was about to protest, but then she stopped. “No, there wasn’t. Nothing unaccounted for. Just the data stream. I’ve been able to decode it all down into pictorial images of one degree or another of sophistication. So if you want to nitpick, then no, it’s not a true natural language.”

“Hold it there,” McGillicutty said. “The sons of bitches are sending messages here. How the hell can it not be a language?”

“Because, if you really want to nitpick, they aren’t actually messages, either,” Larry said. “They’re pictures. The sender and receiver have agreed on a set of transmission standards, a procedure for sending data.”

“So what?”

“They can only send data—not advice, abstracts, or ideas.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference between a picture of your Aunt Minnie and a letter telling what you think of the old girl,” Larry said. “According to Dr. MacDougal, there’s no residual signal left over that might be used as a symbol set for interpretative discussion. It’s as if I had come in here with pictures, and data, but without any words to tell you what it all meant.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Sondra said, “then maybe they don’t need language. Because they don’t need interpretation.”

Larry looked at her for a second. “Go on. What’s your point?”

“They don’t need a language capable of interpretation or opinion or theories because there is no possibility of disagreement. Their responses are all Pavlovian. If every member of their species always respond to the same stimuli in the same way, language would be redundant.”

“In effect, a mass mind. It doesn’t need communications,” Daltry said. “Separated by great expanses of time and space, but so like each other they always reach the same conclusions.”

“It sort of makes sense,” Sondra said, “but then why the grammar lessons?”

“Language drift,” Lucian suggested. “Enough time has passed since their last contact that the two parties expected to be mutually unintelligible. Maybe they think very nearly alike, but there was some drift, either in attitude or simply in styles of notation.”

“How long are you talking about before that could happen?” Larry asked.

“I’m no expert,” Lucian said, “but we can read and understand Shakespeare, and he was eight hundred years ago—but there’s certainly been drift since then. Any decent record keeping and memory storage system would slow the process down. If you’re dealing with computers that can remember for you, you’re talking at least thousands of years since they talked with each other. Maybe millions.”

“Millions of years?” Daltry said with a faint gasp.

Larry cleared his throat. “That’s not quite as incredible as it sounds. We’ve got some evidence that suggests the Charonians have been around a long, long time. There’s a whole new situation that our group on Pluto decided to keep under wraps until we got here, something we couldn’t trust to radio or message laser. In fact the team from Pluto is agreed that we will not divulge this data to this committee until we get some assurances that it will be kept quiet . We don’t want to spread panic.”

“How could anything panic us more than losing Earth?” Daltry asked.

“Having people thinking you did it,” Sondra said.

“You’ve already got the Naked Purples in Tycho claiming they did it.”

“But they couldn’t have! No one could possibly believe them,” Marcia protested. Heads turned to see who was talking. “No one could imagine the Purples had the ability to do this. I ought to know,” she added.

“But supposing people had reason to imagine just that?” Sondra asked gently. “Suppose there was some good, hard, unnerving evidence that this thing was being run from the Moon? Worse than the mystery radio beams. Don’t you think someone might panic? Perhaps attack the Moon to prevent further disasters?”

“No one would do that,” Marcia protested.

Sondra swept her hand around the table, indicating everyone. “We’re here from all the settled planets and major habitats. Can you all honestly say that you’re positive that your governments might not drop one of your nastier noisemakers on the Purps—or on the Moon generally— if they thought there was even a microscopic chance it would do some good? No matter who got hurt? And you from the Moon—what would your people do if they thought one of the other worlds was about to make a sudden preemptive attack? What would your government do?”

Again there was silence.

At last Chancellor Daltry cleared his throat. “Speaking for the Lunar contingent, I can pledge my group to silence. As you may have gathered from the lack of press or other attention, we have done what we could to keep this meeting quiet for the time being, and I have no desire to step into the spotlight just yet. What of the other delegations? Will you keep silent on this new evidence outside this group?”

There was a rumble of reluctant assents, and Larry nodded, satisfied. “Thank you for that,” he said. “I think in a moment you will all understand why that was necessary. But let me emphasize that none of us think any human agent had anything to do with this. We just don’t want anyone else to think so either.” He rose and went to the video display controls on the far side of the room. “Let me tell you about the Lunar Wheel…”

The ghostly gray-on-black image of the Wheel, hanging inside a transparent Moon, hovered over the conference table alongside the frozen, blood red image of the shattered sphere. Larry noticed more than one delegate glancing down at the floor, imagining the monstrous device there under their feet. It was a damned unsettling thought, that a world-girdling monster was lurking in the depths.

“To sum up,” he said. “The Wheel is a toroidal object buried many kilometers below the Moon’s surface. It exactly follows the border between Nearside and Farside, so that it was always precisely facing the Earth—when the Earth was there. It in many ways closely resembles the Ring of Charon, and was detected because it is also a gravity-wave generator. It is massively more powerful than the Ring of Charon. It is the source of the radio signal we have been monitoring since the moment Earth vanished. It seems obvious that it is central to whatever has happened to the Earth—and whatever is happening to the Solar System. It’s been there a long time. That is more or less the sum total of our knowledge of the Wheel. The biggest problem we have right now is that the only device we have capable of seeing the Wheel is back at Pluto. Maybe someday we’ll rig a more compact gravity telescope, but not soon. If we could get closer to the Wheel, I have no doubt we could get far better imagery—but this is all we’re going to get for a while. We have played a few games with computer enhancement, and those runs have produced one rather intriguing additional detail. Computer, display enhancement routine.”

Two faint, ghost needles of gray floated at the edge of visibility, one growing up from the north pole of the Wheel, the other from the south. Both seemed to reach the Lunar surface proper. “Computer, give us a brightened outline on the enhancement-revealed details.” Bright red lines snapped into being around the needles.

“So, what are they?” McGillicutty asked.