Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

The Sphere had many duties, but its capacities were great, and there was no prize greater than a new life-bearing world. The price — in risk, in treasure — was huge, and certainly this would not have been the time it would have deliberately sent out a call, declaring itself ready to absorb a new world and ready to assist in the construction of a new Sphere. But the Sphere was flexible, adaptable in its thought processes, and determined to make the best of the situation, find the advantages to itself inside the crisis .

Such as the capture of a splendid new world, one that deserved the best of treatment. Preparing a place for it had been a great strain. Gathering up a Keeper Ring and an anchor wormhole was normally a leisurely process, but this time the Sphere had been forced to do it all within a few brief seconds. Matching the new world’s previous environment of heating and tidal effects so closely in such a short space of time had been a remarkable achievement.

But the job had required speed, and the placement of an unprogrammed Keeper Ring. The Ring had been built and grown long, long ago, and placed in storage, left to sleep, untutored, until there was a world that needed care. When the message from the Caller had come, the Sphere had found a black hole that matched the new world’s tidal needs, and then used a dangerous self-transiting technique to move the Ring-hole ensemble into position, manipulating the Keeper Ring so that it served as both ends of the same wormhole.

All the while, the new world was kept cycling through a whole series of transit points as the Sphere juggled to hold on to it. At last the new Keeper was ready, and the Keeper, under the Sphere’s direct control, pulled the new world into a safe and stable orbit.

It had been a dangerous and complex job, and the Sphere had been running the Keeper Ring directly ever since, transporting new-mode Worldeaters to the new planet’s old star system, closely monitoring the somewhat archaic Caller Ring that was running the planet-stripping operation there, vectoring the Shepherd to intercept the large piece of debris that was falling toward the new world.

But the Sphere had many duties. It could not focus this much attention on this single operation indefinitely. The Sphere, when other duties allowed, continued to download all that a Keeper must know: images of the Sphere’s ancestry and history, images that demonstrated this procedure and that, examples of commands and their results, and endless demonstrations of a Keeper’s duties.

The Keeper took it all in eagerly, felt itself awakening as it absorbed enough data to understand its duties more fully. Its somewhat rigid mind was primed for this knowledge set, hungry for it.

It never occurred to the Keeper or to the Sphere that there might be another listening. The very idea was alien, inconceivable to them. Neither of them could even imagine a being such as Frank Barlow, let alone his actions.

But that didn ‘t stop Barlow from listening, and gathering in his data.

The boost out from Earth had gone well, and now the Nova was in free-fall, moving toward its deceleration point, a few hundred thousand kilometers astern of the Target One planet. An easy zero-gee flight, then a braking burn to slide the ship into orbit around T-One. Without the burn, the Terra Nova would sail right on past the new world it sought.

The Universe outside the Terra Nova might be in turmoil, but life aboard the big ship was settling into a comfortable routine.

Dianne Steiger watched the bridge main display screen as the two radar tracks—the Saint Anthony and the CORE—intercepted. She watched on an aux screen as the carrier-wave signal died, watched the smaller target vanish off the main screen as the larger sailed majestically on. The Charonian CORE had done its work, and the Saint Anthony was dead.

Dianne pulled out a cigarette and lit it thoughtfully, manipulating it with her new left hand, just for the practice. She took a deep drag and pointedly ignored Gerald MacDougal’s coughing fit. She held the smoke in her lungs for a moment and smiled with real satisfaction. There were advantages to being the captain of a starship. An air system built to last generations had to be able to handle a cigarette—and as captain, no one aboard could tell her not to smoke.

One minor mystery was cleared up—the COREs obviously used some form of radar—crude, arrogantly powerful radar—to do their tracking. That was why they emitted such energetic radio waves. There had been a fair amount of speculation aboard the Terra Nova as to how the CORE would make the kill. Lasers and ship-to-ship missiles had been the most popular guesses, but the CORE had simply crashed into the probe. A direct kinetic-impact kill.

That hadn’t surprised Dianne. There was nothing subtle about the Charonian way of doing things. They were masters of direct, brute-force action. They took what they wanted, did what they pleased, plainly never thinking that anything might oppose them.

She turned her head toward Gerald, sitting beside her on the bridge. “All right, Gerald. You tell me. Why the hell did they wait so long to stop the Anthony ! Why did they allow the probe to operate so long, and why didn’t they jam its transmissions, or attempt to capture it instead of destroying it?”

Gerald shrugged. “Because the COREs aren’t programmed to think in those terms. And whatever it is that programs them, which I suppose is ultimately the Dyson Sphere, doesn’t think that way either.” The Dyson Sphere doing the thinking , Gerald thought. Yes, of course. By some miracle, Marcia and this Sondra Berghoff had read his message about von Neumanns, and understood, and, miracle on top of miracle, had taken his ideas to places he had never imagined. Praise be to God for His blessings , Gerald told himself, deeply thankful for all of it. But especially for the knowledge that Marcia was alive.

“But the Anthony was obviously sent to gather and transfer information,” Dianne was saying. “How could any intelligent species not realize that the Anthony was a threat?”

“Because they aren’t intelligent in any sense of the term we understand,” Gerald said. “They are machines programmed by machines. What’s confused us about them is that some of the machines are living creatures, of a sort. But they are as programmed, as artificial, as the mechanical devices.”

“But what’s the point of it all? What do they all do it for ! What’s the point of a huge machine that does nothing but keep itself running?”

Gerald smiled sadly. “You’ve just asked: ‘What’s the point of being alive?’ That question is just as important, and just as meaningless, if you’re a mechanical life-form or a biotic one. They survive in order to survive, just as we do. And, I might add, they do a very impressive job of it. But we’re thinking of the Multisystem as a network of machines. Maybe it would be more accurate to think of them all as part of one big entity.”

Captain Dianne Steiger thought for a long moment. “You’re saying that the whole Multisystem—the Sphere, the Rings, the COREs, the artificial animals and the robots, the captured planets and stars—all amount to one organism !”

“It’s possible. Either that, or a highly coordinated alliance of linked creatures. Or some third thing, between those two. But whatever it is, we’re going to have a tough time understanding what makes them tick.”

“Okay, but if it’s all one creature, then the COREs are just a subsystem. They’re like white blood cells, attacking an invader…” Dianne leaned back in her chair, puffing on her cigarette, staring into space. Suddenly her eyes popped wide. She sat straight up and pulled the cigarette from her mouth. “Attacking an invader as soon as it threatened to crash into something valuable.”