Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Marcia wrapped her blanket more tightly around her. Perhaps the engineers would be able to bring the power back on again. But then another fragment of sky-tossed stone would smash into some other vital piece of equipment again, or a quake would trip every circuit breaker in the city again, or the dome supports would finally take one more strike than they could handle and collapse. There would be the struggle to fix whatever it was—and then another disaster would strike.

Sooner or later the engineers would no longer be able to patch it over. Port Viking would die in the dark.

How long had it been? How much time had passed since the Saint Anthony had died, and taken so much of their hope with it? On Earth, wherever she was, they had marked the transit of four days and nights. The Moon had rolled through a sixth of her leisurely, month-long rotation. On those worlds, time moved much as it always had, for the Charonians left the Earth and Moon untouched.

But on Mars, on Venus, on all the other worlds, time had lost its old measure and meaning. On dust-choked Mars there was no night, no day, just a series of catastrophes in the dust-shrouded gloom under the sullen glowing sky. There was no meaningful way to mark the time on Mars, on Ganymede, on Titan. Or was it time itself ending for all those places?

The Nenya rushed at full throttle toward Pluto, the engines roaring at powers far beyond safety margin, Vespasian forcing every possible scrap of thrust, without regard for a return trip. If the flight succeeded, there would be more than enough time to mount a rescue mission. If it failed, there would be no point to one. Never mind that. Larry stared grimly at the display screen, determined to focus on the data there. Updates from the Gravities Research Station, refinements of the models he had done the night before. Good people there. All of them. Maybe he had done the flashy, exciting work, but it had all been based on the research they had done. But he had needed more help than theirs. And gotten it.

God only knew why, but the Purples had cooperated. The data had come through the Saint Anthony before it died. Not just data, but in a very real sense, the voice of the Sphere, the precise equivalent of words handed down from the intelligence that ruled the Charonian empire.

It wasn’t language, not in any human sense. It was an image set, closer to a system of notation for computer programming than anything else. Larry had enough data to get a start on the Charonian command set. The Nenya computers weren’t really built for this sort of analysis, but they were the best he was going to get. Communication was still spotty, but the engineers on all the worlds were improvising desperately, finding the sending and receiving frequencies that still worked. Word was coming in from all over, and the word was not good.

Venus was reporting a huge structure pumping magma from the interior. Ganymede reported that Io was coming apart at the seams, its chaotic surface all but completely liquified. The tiny world was melting away into a cloud of sulfur and complex hydrocarbons. Somehow the Charonians were amplifying the tidal effects that had always torn at the giant moon, focusing the stress at weak points, concentrating the internal pressure until the moon simply tore itself apart. Several of Jupiter and Saturn’s smaller ice moons just weren’t there anymore, already completely digested by whatever monstrosities had landed there.

He checked the wall chronometer. Fourteen days out from the Moon, two more days until arrival at Pluto. Larry didn’t even want to think about the Nenya’s terrifying velocity.

Two days. That would barely be enough time to prepare.

Could it be done? Would it work?

Damn it, would it work ? As far as the gravity side of it went, he had no doubts. He had learned from the Charonians, watched what they did, how they turned gravity on its ear to do their bidding. He could see the way to configure the Ring, knew instinctively what must be done.

But what should be done? Did he have the right answer to that question? Larry stared at the datascreen in front of him, then glanced down at the notes on the desk, turned and looked into the mirror set into the opposite wall of the tiny cabin. But he saw none of those things. Instead, his eye turned inward, toward places in his soul he had never imagined. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands. If it was not an attitude of prayer, it was close enough. How many worlds was he trying to save tonight?

How many had he already helped to destruction?

He lifted his head a bit and found himself staring at his hands, as if he had never seen them before. These were the hands that had done it, that had shaped the commands, set the Ring configuration, pressed that damnable start button. These were the hands that had made the Earth vanish, turned the entire Solar System upside down, awakened monsters that had slept since before humanity existed.

He thought back, and remembered deliberately setting the controls so the actual start command had to be sent manually, and tried to remember why. He knew, intellectually, it was because pushing that button meant rebellion against Raphael. But that emotion no longer made sense to him. Had the whole disaster been caused by nothing more than that? Larry O’Shawnessy Chao’s childish need to show that he was smarter than anyone else? How many worlds were wrecked, how many people were dead already because he had pushed that button? How many ships were lost, how much treasure destroyed?

But he couldn’t have known. No one could have known. The search for gravity control had started before he was born. Sooner or later someone would have found a way to make a graser beam, and would have brushed the Moon with it. Someone would have pushed that button. Dr. Raphael had said quite clearly that the entire Gravities Research Station had to bear its share of the blame…

No . Larry looked up again, caught his own eye in the mirror, and stared back at himself. All of it, in his favor and against him, was true, but now was not the time. Now he had to push it all away, the guilt and the justification. He would have his whole life for that. Wallowing in either right now would interfere with the amends he had to make.

He stared again at his hands. But his act of atonement would itself be a terrible crime. No one else knew that, no one knew what he had planned, and no one would, not until it was too late to stop. This crime, this guilt, this sin he was determined to carry on his own shoulders alone, without ambiguity, fully aware of exactly what he was doing.

For Larry had realized that, in the event he got it wrong, it was that ambiguity, far more than the guilt itself, that he feared.

It had been a long and lonely wait on Pluto. One hundred twenty people at the edge of the Solar System, struggling to clean up after the geniuses. The science staff had been working around the clock, trying to keep up with the torrents of gravities data pouring in. They had learned a great deal—in fact, too much. There had been no time to assimilate any of the information, to ponder it. As soon as one new discovery was made, a dozen new and urgent mysteries would pop up, requiring more urgent overtime and study.

And now it could only get harder. Chao and Raphael were returning.

There! A flare of brightness halfway across the sky from Charon and the Ring. Jane Webling watched as the Nenya performed her final braking burn.

But Webling frowned. There was something strange about that burn. She pulled out her notepack. Strange indeed. The Nenya was not dropping into her normal parking orbit, but instead placing herself into the bary-center of the Pluto-Charon system. The barycenter was the balance point, the center of gravity for the whole Pluto-Charon system, the point in space around which both planet and satellite rotated.