Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

The first three hundred meters or so held no surprises. The shaft exactly resembled the perfectly standard vertical shaft that Conners cut into the Moon by the thousand. The first part of the shaft was almost comforting, a taste of the familiar through the pallid green air.

But the familiar was not going to last long. Lucian leaned over the edge of his crash couch and looked down. He saw a dark hole at the bottom of the human-cut shaft, too far and too deep for the elevator cage lights to illuminate. There. That was the transition into the unknown.

There was sudden movement at his side—fluid, glittering highlights in motion. Lucian nearly jumped out of his crash couch in fright.

“Oh, sorry,” Larry’s voice said in his helmet phones. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just switched this thing on.”

“Damn it, don’t—” Lucian fought down another wave of irrational anger. “Jesus. Yeah. Right. You just startled me. How’s that thing feel?”

“Not too bad. I’ve used them before on Pluto. Actually, this rig is a lot easier. No speed-of-light delay.”

Larry’s voice seemed strangely disembodied to Lucian, perhaps because the T.O. had no mouthlike part he could pretend the voice was coming from. He was getting the voice, relayed from Larry on the surface, through a direct radio link from the T.O., over a standard suit comm unit. He was used to suit radios, and talking to disembodied voices belonging to people he had never seen. But this . He was talking to a machine with Larry Chao’s soul, an alien being with Larry’s mind. He shivered and forced the thoughts from his mind.

The T.O. leaned over the edge of the cage and peered downward. “Coming up on the bottom of our drill hole,” the T.O. announced.

“Right,” Lucian said weakly.

The cage lowered away, down into the depths. The hole at the bottom of the human-bored shaft grew larger as they sank toward it. Wisps of the greenish gas eddied up out of the hole, licking at the bottom of the shaft. They seemed to be moving faster as they dropped. Lucian knew that that had to be an illusion, caused by their moving closer to the hole. The descent meter showed a steady drop speed. But he was not comforted. He looked up, at the darkness that closed over them as the elevator’s lights petered out, fading into a greenish glow.

He looked down again, just in time to see them drop through the hole.

And into infinite, green-fogged darkness. The sickly air was not merely green tinged, but a thick, dead green that cut visibility down to less than ten meters. Even Larry’s T.O., close enough that Lucian could reach out and touch it, faded out a trifle.

The walls of this monstrous shaft could not be seen at all. The goggle-eyed head of the T.O. swung back and forth as Larry took the view in, the T.O.‘s aux cameras panning in all directions. Neither Larry nor Lucian could think of anything to say.

Lucian looked upward and caught a last fog-shrouded glimpse of the shaft ceiling. “Larry! Did your cams pick up the ceiling? Virgin rock, never been worked.”

“Yeah,” the T.O. answered. “The mining engineers topside are all swearing the surface had never been cut or disturbed. Maybe they were right. It would explain why we haven’t found excavated rock on the surface.”

“If the Charonians didn’t dig the hole from the surface, then how did the Wheel get down there?” Lucian asked. “And why did they just dig it nearly all the way? And where did the dug-out rock go?”

The T.O. shrugged in an eerie imitation of Larry’s mannerisms. “Maybe it bored down there as a much smaller creature, from some other point on the surface, and then ate out the rock as raw material. Maybe the Wheel dug up into this shaft to collect construction material. It could have compressed the surplus rock to make up the walls of the shaft and strengthen them. Or maybe there’s a very small tame black hole shielded down there, with the missing rock compressed down into it.

“As to why it dug the shaft nearly all the way, I do have one other idea. Maybe it’s going to break out of the Moon’s interior one day, the way those Lander creatures came out of the asteroids, and it needs an escape hatch. Who knows?”

Lucian felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Larry Chao was not exactly a source of comforting ideas.

The two of them rode in silence for a long time, the time blurring away as they dropped past the featureless walls. Lucian thought of the original Rabbit Hole, and how long Alice had fallen down it. Long enough to get bored with the fall, and start asking herself nonsense questions. “Do bats eat cats?” he muttered to himself.

The T.O. turned and looked at him. “Did you say something?” it asked.

“No, nothing,” he answered in pointless embarrassment.

They rode again in silence for a short time. “That’s strange,” Larry’s voice said. “The temperature should be rising steadily as we go deeper in toward the planetary core. But it’s holding steady, maybe dropping.”

“Maybe this damn Wheel thing is absorbing some of the core’s heat as an energy source,” Lucian said. “Not enough to detect from the surface, but enough to draw down the temperatures in the shaft. Maybe that’s what the shaft is for, to draw heat down toward the Wheel.”

“That’s possible.” The teleoperator looked around for a moment. “I think the fog is lifting. I’m starting to see the shaft walls. Hold on a second, let me send a ranging pulse toward the bottom.” There was a moment’s pause. “We’re getting there,” Larry’s voice announced. “Just two kilometers over the bottom now,” he said. “Hang on, Lucian, the winch controller’s going to start slowing us down.” Lucian felt a surge of pressure as the cage slowed its descent. For a sickening second, the cage began to sway back and forth, and Lucian imagined the elevator cage working up a pendulum motion, swinging slowly, relentlessly, back and forth until it smashed into the shaft wall. But then the momentum dampers caught the swing and damped it out. Lucian breathed a sigh of relief. At least they wouldn’t get killed that way. Though there were no doubt plenty of other possibilities waiting for them at the bottom.

The Caller was but dimly aware of the intruders entering its domain. It was involved in great things, in nothing less than commanding the conquest of the Solar System. The tiny disturbances at the northern portal were unimportant. Its maintenance systems could handle any difficulty. It chose to concentrate its attentions on its work, on the task of coordinating the Worldeaters. They were frustrating assistants at times, capable of great things but utterly lacking inflexibility. In what was nearly a flash of humor, the Caller realized that the Sphere must see its Callers in much the same light. The Caller was developing its capacity for contemplation, for self-awareness and self-understanding. It would have need of those abilities in the next stage of its development. A stage that would find both the Caller and the Solar System vastly transformed.

The sweat ran down Larry’s brow. Even just sitting still in this thing was a strain. No matter what he might say to keep Lucian settled down, wearing a teleoperator control rig was tough work. Larry was so thoroughly enveloped in the control rig’s exoskeleton that the comm techs at the other end of the room could barely see him.

The control rig hung in midair, so that the feet would be unconstrained by the floor. He could run, jump, kick, wave his arms, do anything he wanted, and the control rig would stay right where it was, merely waving its limbs about. The teleoperator down below actually moved.