Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Vespasian’s brow knitted for a moment, and then suddenly he snatched up one of the earlier reports from Mars. “They saw it, on Mars!” he said. “The Wheel has got to be just like this Moonpoint Ring next to Earth, use the same command code.”

Larry grabbed the hard copy eagerly and skimmed the pages. “My God, you’re right. They call it the thought chain, each lower form trained by the form above it.” He put down the pages and thought. “It would work. If Earth could get a tap in place, we could listen in on the Dyson Sphere downloading data to the Moonpoint Ring. Has the Moon asked for the tap yet?”

Vespasian nodded. “Yes. They reported making the request about an hour after Marcia and Sondra sent the idea. About five hours ago. They sent us a copy of the request.”

“But what if the Sphere has already sent the data we need?” Raphael objected.

“Repetition,” Larry said, “That was the one cast-iron certainty we got out of that image of the shattered sphere. The Charonians use repetition for emphasis. The more important the idea is, the more often they’ll repeat it. If Earth can get a tap in place, we have a real shot at reading the codes.”

Raphael looked up at the wall chronometer, counting down the hours and minutes of life left to the Saint Anthony and figuring in the time since the Moon had relayed Marcia’s request for a tap. “They won’t have time. Even if Earth got the message immediately, that would only give them eighteen hours between receipt of signal and when the Saint Anthony is destroyed, thirteen hours from now. That’s not time for Earth to prepare a launch from scratch, let alone build a probe.”

“Damn it,” Larry said through clenched teeth. He looked at Raphael. “If we don’t get the data we need, it can’t work.”

“Wait a second,” Vespasian said. “The Lunar comm center knew all that when they sent the request. There was something in the reports from Earth that a habitat had ended up orbiting the Moonpoint black hole, inside the Moonpoint Ring, close enough to run a tap if they knew how to build the receiver. So they requested that that habitat to do the tap. I’ve got our copy of the signal here somewhere.” He worked the console controls again, calling up the file in question. The three men leaned close to the screen and read the signal.

Vespasian’s wide face fell, collapsed utterly. “Oh, hell. Oh sweet and sour bloody hell. Why in God’s own twisted name did it have to be them ?”

Larry Chao and Simon Raphael didn’t ask what the problem was. They could read that off the screen for themselves.

The only facility in position to try for a datatap, the only place they could get the information that might save the Solar System, just happened to be the Naked Purple Habitat.

Raphael suddenly felt old, infinitely old, old and defeated, as if nothing else could ever matter again. All his refound ability to understand, empathize, was suddenly gone. How could it be that the fate of everything was up to those lunatics? “Start praying, Tyrone,” he said in a defeated old man’s voice. “And pray to Saint Jude this time. This is clearly a job for him and not Anthony.”

The request for a tap made quite a trip before arriving. From Mars to the Moon through the wormhole to the Saint Anthony to JPL to Chelated Noisemaker Extreme’s comm board. But that was only the beginning of its journey. Next it had to survive passage through a meeting of the Purple Deluxe.

Ohio did not enjoy Purple Deluxe meets. For starters, tradition dictated that they be held in a compartment far too small for the number of people present. Also by tradition, the ventilation system was turned off for the duration of the meeting. Usually, that helped keep meetings short, but the end of this one was not yet on the horizon.

Time was desperately short. Just in case the decision came down as a “yes,” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme was already at work rigging up the datatap probe, as per the plans sent from Mars along with the request. Ohio himself found the whole situation a bit daunting. He wasn’t quite up to deciding the fate of Earth and the Solar System.

But he had a more immediate problem. The meeting was not going well. Which was another way of saying Creamcheese Drone Deluxe was speaking.

Creamcheese had certainly earned the highly complimentary title Drone . No one had ever caught her doing a lick of work. But Creamcheese meant sexy or attractive. Perhaps Cheese believed herself to be a highly attractive woman. Few others believed so, or ever would. But Cheese was many other things. For starters, she demonstrated that even the most complimentary Naked Purple name could be applied ironically, and was likewise living proof that such irony could be completely lost on a member of a group as linguistically sophisticated as the Purps claimed to be. But Cheese had an ego and a half, and no one had the nerve to tell her to try a different name for a while.

She was one of the very few Purps who took the call to get naked and purple literally, though she was certainly among the vast majority of Purps who should never get naked, let alone purple. To be fair, Ohio allowed, her appearance did evoke the shocked silence that was the purpose of the original Naked Purple manifesto. And that was fitting, for Creamcheese was one of the most vigorous and doctrinaire defenders of the faith.

Tonight she was in rare form, shouting at the top of her lungs. There she stood in her nude, plum-colored, plum-shaped glory, fulminating away. “Let them all rot!” she cried. “The Earthers, the damned scoombas back in the Solar Area, all of ‘em. They got us down into this scene with their gravity grinding. Why should we help them now? This here is the biggest chance we’re ever gonna have of reely living the Purple ideal. All we have to do is what Purples are supposed to do. Nothing . Not one Grand Coulee Dam thing.”

“But these here Charonians ain’t no shade of Purple,” Cold Breeze objected. The bickering between Breeze and Cheese had been going on for hours. “They doing everything but nothing. The Purple idea we got is to back off and let Nature do her thing, let entropy slide the Universe on down. Cheese, I have scanned a lotta blocks o‘ data, and these Charonians are no-way-José natural . Back home in the Solar System—sorry, I mean the Solar Area , they’s putting the planets through a buzz saw. Ask me is that Mom Nature doing her bit, and I say I think not. I say we get the data for the groundhogs and the Solar dudes, let ’em try and stop the party.”

“Oh, jump down off it, Cold,” Cheese said. “These Charonians are ultra-Purple, glowing in dark down to their bones. You want the big mystery about what they’re doing, I’ll peek in the backathebook for ya. They’re scraping the tech-know-log-ick-all crap offa the Earth. They’re giving entropy a chance to kick back in, let Nature slump back down to blessed disorder. Lookit Earth. Their satellites are gone. The spaceships are nearly all gone. Practically all the habitats ‘cept ours—gone, gone, gone. If we sit back long enough to make grooving behooving, do nothing long enough while the Charonians do a dance on the Earthers, them groundhogs will be back in mud huts and still going down! And once this Saint Android robot probe is creamed, there will be nothing we can do anyway. Back in the Solar, the Charonians are erasing all the tech yech there too. The Purple ideal. Surrender to Nature! My bristers and sibsters, that’s the tune we’ve been singing since the first coat of purple got slapped on somebody’s hide. Now Earth’s dancing to the beat, the Solar’s dancing to it, and Cold Breeze says shut down the playback because he’s about to lose his fudge. No way.”