Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Sondra scratched her head. “Let’s take a pass at it from another direction. Let’s think of their biology, their technology, the ages that went by in a breeding cycle. The ages of their lives and deaths. A ship with a computer full of machine blueprints and a hold full of dormant animals or dormant embryos would launch from a system, and drift between the stars for centuries, maybe for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, until it found a star system with a life-bearing world. Maybe the ship would pass the time during the flight by tinkering with the genes of the animals and blueprints of the machines. Finally the ship would land, and if need be, it would genetically modify its animals once again so they could survive on the new world.

“The animals—some of them descended from the ship’s designers—would go out into the world, breed as fast as they could, while mining that planet for raw materials and building more ships—perhaps thousands of ships, or millions. The shipbuilding would be like everything else—a reflex action, a complex instinct.

“The new ships would take their passengers aboard and launch out into space, out to search for new worlds. Maybe one ship in a thousand, one in a million, would manage to cross the sky, reach a new star and survive to reproduce, but that would be enough for the whole cycle to repeat, over and over again.”

Marcia looked up. “But that’s so inefficient,” she objected. “Breeding-planets would be light-years, dozens or hundreds of light-years apart. And they would chew up any life-bearing worlds they used. Look what they’re doing to Mars, outside that window, right now. If their ancestors were even half that size, the planetside breeding binges needed to stock a new generation of seedships would do tremendous damage to an ecosystem.”

“You’re right. They’d eat everything in sight,” Sondra agreed. “None of the native animals would be able to find food. The Charonians would wreck everything, trying to breed as heavily as possible. And they’d be doing their mining and their shipbuilding at the same time. It’d be a hundred times worse than the way we polluted Earth. And look at the damage we did before we knew better. But it wouldn’t be a problem for the Charonians. They’d be leaving. They wouldn’t care about the mess they left behind.” Her eyes suddenly grew wide. “Jesus,” she said. “We’re talking about stuff that happened millions of years ago, and we know from the DNA they found in the carrier-bug that the Charonians landed on Earth sometime in the distant past. Do you think maybe the Charonians landed on Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs?”

Marcia blinked in surprise. “It could be. It’s been pretty well nailed down that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact where Iceland is now. But if a Lander seedship malfunctioned and crashed, it would be just like a real asteroid crashing. Maybe two Lander seedships were traveling together. One crashed, and the other survived to breed. The impact killed most of the dinosaurs, and the breeding binge afterwards was more than the survivors could take.”

Marcia rubbed her eyes and tried to think. “But getting back to the point at hand,” Marcia said, turning the conversation back, “the breeding binges were basically parasitic, sucking the life out of a world. That would not only deplete the animal and plant populations, it would wreck the ecosystem. But the Charonians would care about that. Life-bearing planets must be very rare. Some future seedship would need that world again for some future breeding binge. And mass extinctions would wipe out the genetic diversity the Charonians needed as raw material for their bioengineering.”

Marcia paused for a moment, staring into space. “And we’re forgetting gravity again. We’re forgetting that somewhere along the line the Charonians learned how to manipulate gravity. How does that fit? Maybe the original Charonians knew how and taught the first seedship. Maybe a seedship landed on a planet and conquered a species that knew how. But somehow they learned how to use wormholes, how to use black holes as a power source.”

Sondra thought for a long moment. “And that was important . Without it, they couldn’t have become what they are. They use gravity control for everything. It had to be a turning point. Maybe they were short of life-bearing planets, but in every other way, they were rich. They had all of space and time to work with, endless rock and metal and volatiles in free space. All that was holding them back was the planet shortage.”

She paused for a long moment. Suddenly she slapped her palm down on the comm console. “So they decided to do something about the planet shortage. That’s it. That’s got to be it, the last piece in the puzzle, Once they had gravity control, they had power, incredible power. So they built the Sphere, the Multisystem, and stocked it with stars and planets. And now I think we know why.” Sondra looked at Marcia, let her come to the same answer she had found, if for no other reason than to convince herself she wasn’t crazy.

Marcia’s face went pale. “It’s a nature preserve,” she said. “The Charonians built the Dyson Sphere, the Multisystem, as a nature preserve for wild planets, as a place for planets to heal between breeding binges, a central storage place where the seedships could always find breeding planets.

“But don’t forget the Charonians would still be deliberately modifying themselves, directing their own evolution,” Marcia said. “How far would that go? How far could it go? Suppose the Sphere became the Charonians, the ruling intellect. Suppose the Sphere took over from the seedships, just as the seedships had taken over control from the original, organic intelligent life-form. If the Dyson Sphere took over, it would design a new life cycle, using the ancient patterns in a new way. It was built to store the life-bearing worlds of the Multisystem, for the convenience of the seedships. But if it started working for itself, for its own purposes, it would change that, take control of the life cycle and breed any independent streak out of the seedships. Which means the first, biological Charonians and the second, seedship Charonians are both extinct. So neither of those types are in charge.”

“It’s the Sphere,” Sondra said, almost whispering. “The Sphere itself is running things. We’ve been wondering who’s been running it , when all the time it’s been running everything .”

“Hold it a second,” Marcia said. She got up and sat next to Sondra at the comm unit. She grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper and started taking notes. “So we’ve got a Dyson Sphere using its stock of breeding worlds to grow new forms. It puts them aboard seedships—though now it’s only one creature to a seedship, because the creatures are so big. The seedships go out, just as they always have. They find a world, use it for breeding stock, and then what?”

“That’s where the change comes,” Sondra said, grabbing a keyboard to make her own notes on the computer. Maybe Marcia could think with a pencil, but she needed a set of keys. “They launch themselves off the planet after they’ve chewed it up, but instead of scattering amid the stars, the mutated seedships—the things we’ve been calling Landers and gee-point asteroids—go into hibernation in deep space, and wait. One of them grows into something hike the Lunar Wheel. Once it’s matured, it sends a message that all is in readiness and waits for a return signal from the home Sphere that sent it out in the first place. A return signal is simply any sort of modulated gravity beam. The signal Larry sent by accident.”

“But what’s the signal supposed to mean?” Marcia asked.