Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Pressure sensors inside the legs, the arms, the body of the teleoperator itself transmitted their sensations back to servos inside the control rig, providing appropriate physical sensations based on what the T.O. was doing. The mildest of electric shocks susbstituted for a pain response, warning Larry if what he was doing threatened to damage the T.O.

Larry’s head was hidden inside an enormous helmet. Inside it, two video screens displayed the view out of the T.O.‘s cameras. Larry’s earphones merged the faint noises transmitted to the T.O.’s external mikes with the voices on the comm channel.

Wires and gears, levers and sensors: that was what the control rig looked like from the outside.

From in it, things were different. Larry was not in the comm center. He was riding down that huge pit in an open elevator cage, alongside Lucian, the darkness a shroud just outside the feeble lights, the fetid air whistling past his ears. He was there, all his physical sensations keyed to the place he wasn’t.

But he knew that all he felt was unreal. This darkness, this wind, did not surround him. This frightened man in a pressure suit, whom he could reach out and touch, was not there. It was like the strange self-awareness he sometimes felt in a nightmare, knowing the dream was not real, but still experiencing it, accepting the world’s unreality even as he struggled against the demons.

But that sort of detachment had no place in a tele-operator rig. He had to believe, wholeheartedly, that he was down in that shaft. For it was real, it was life and death. He looked at Lucian, sitting there next to him in his crash couch, the fear plain in his eyes. Getting this right was life and death: Lucian’s. And maybe all of humanity’s.

Somehow, that thought made it all seem a great deal less like a dream—but more like a nightmare.

Lucian’s hands clenched the arms of his crash couch. “Five hundred meters,” Larry’s voice called out calmly. “Four hundred. Slowing a bit more. Hang on, Lucian— the winch operator wants to come to a complete halt early, just to make sure we’re stable before we land. Three hundred meters.”

The cage slowed further, and Lucian felt the weight bear down on him. What the hell was down there waiting for them? All they knew, all they really knew, was that it produced a band of gravity energy that girdled the Moon.

“Full stop,” Larry’s voice announced. “Ranging pulse shows us a shade over one hundred eighty meters up. Everything’s stable. Negligible pendular motion and rebound, all the cables holding up. It looks good. Down we go.”

The cage started downward again, more slowly. They could see the shaft walls clearly now, could see that they were inside a gleaming, jet black cylinder a hundred meters across. “Lucian, as soon as we’re down, I’ll grab all the gear, you get out as fast as you can,” Larry’s voice said. “They’re going to pull the cage back up to the hundred-meter mark and leave it there until we’re ready to go back up.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we’re the only ones on it. We don’t know what’s down here, remember?”

“Oh yeah, I remember. That little detail I definitely remember.”

Larry didn’t reply to that. “Fifty meters,” his voice said. “Forty. Thirty. Slowing again. Twenty. Ten. Slowing again. Three. One meter off the ground, full stop. Everybody out.”

Lucian got up from his crash couch, moving carefully. He looked over the edge of the cage. “That’s more than one meter,” he objected. “More like two.”

The TO. turned and looked at Lucian. “So jump,” Larry’s voice said. “Would you rather they guessed wrong the other way and came to a stop two meters under the surface?”

Lucian grunted, shuffled carefully to the edge of the platform, and jumped down. Under the Moon’s leisurely gravity, there shouldn’t have been much of an impact when he landed, but still it knocked the wind out of him for a second, and he lost his balance. He held his arms out to break his fall, and ended up with his face a hands-breadth from the ground. “I’ve just made my first discovery about the surface down here,” he announced. “It’s very dark in color. And it’s crunchy.”

The T.O. lowered a pack full of gear to the ground on a rope and jumped down itself, even more clumsily than Lucian, landing on its hands and knees. “I don’t have the best fine-tactile sensations through this thing,” it said. “What do you mean, crunchy?”

Lucian stood up. “I mean crunchy. Like walking through leaves when the park is in autumn mode. The whole surface is sort of a dark rust color, all dried and shriveled up in discrete layers. Step on it and you crunch through all the upper layers to whatever is underneath.”

“It looks like dead snakeskin, somehow. And there’s junk everywhere,” Larry’s voice said, speaking more for the recorders on the surface than for Lucian’s benefit. “Broken things, or dead, or something. Bits and pieces I can’t quite identify. Some the rust color of the surface, some bits that look more metallic.”

The T.O. stood up and looked around. “So far it looks quiet enough.”

The Caller felt the mildest twinge of oddity. For a long moment it did not understand. It felt something, two somethings, moving about in its skin — but these were not units under its control. It should have also felt, seen, tasted whatever the remote units felt and did. But there was nothing .

In times past, the Caller would have immediately blocked the unexplained data out, refused to accept it as factual. But the Caller was growing, changing. The awakening of its own remote units from their long slumbers, the bustle of maintenance servants providing it with outside input, the sensations arriving from the other planets had all required it to see more, to remember once again how to learn. These new things required investigation.

No sophisticated remote units were in the area, just a few small parts-scavengers working through the detritus of the Caller’s own dead outer skin for usable parts and materials. They would be of no help at all in this situation.

Two larger laborers were not far away. It would send them to get a look. And to defend the Caller, if it came to that.

For the Universe was a hostile place.

Lucian stood up, framed by the lights on the elevator cage, and tried to see out past his own looming shadow. Suddenly the light shifted and his shadow fell away as the elevator cage rose again. The light from the cage, which had been extremely oblique, now was coming straight down on them. Wide-angle lamps on the cage illuminated the sides of the chamber.

The two of them were standing in a huge tunnel. It suddenly struck Lucian that this was the Wheel’s tunnel. He could set off down that tunnel, straight ahead, and walk clear around the Moon, from North Pole to South and back. Weirder still, he was standing on the Wheel, standing on a world-girdling thing far below the Lunar surface.

“Company, Lucian,” Larry’s voice announced in quiet tones.

Lucian’s stomach froze and he turned around slowly to look the way the T.O. was pointing.

Something about the size of a large rabbit was bustling through the debris on the surface. It was gleaming silver in color, and moved on lots of small, stubby legs. Lucian could see that some of the broken junk on the surface matched the shape of this thing. Parts that could be its carapace, parts that could fit inside it.

The bustling little thing continued to examine each broken bit it found with a pair of long, graceful tentacles. It picked bits and pieces off some of the objects it found, and dropped them into a slot on its back. Lucian could not tell if the slot was a mouth or a storage bin. “Is that alive or is it a machine?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.