Lucian looked upward and caught a last fog-shrouded glimpse of the shaft ceiling. “Larry! Did your cams pick up the ceiling? Virgin rock, never been worked.”
“Yeah,” the T.O. answered. “The mining engineers topside are all swearing the surface had never been cut or disturbed. Maybe they were right. It would explain why we haven’t found excavated rock on the surface.”
“If the Charonians didn’t dig the hole from the surface, then how did the Wheel get down there?” Lucian asked. “And why did they just dig it nearly all the way? And where did the dug-out rock go?”
The T.O. shrugged in an eerie imitation of Larry’s mannerisms. “Maybe it bored down there as a much smaller creature, from some other point on the surface, and then ate out the rock as raw material. Maybe the Wheel dug up into this shaft to collect construction material. It could have compressed the surplus rock to make up the walls of the shaft and strengthen them. Or maybe there’s a very small tame black hole shielded down there, with the missing rock compressed down into it.
“As to why it dug the shaft nearly all the way, I do have one other idea. Maybe it’s going to break out of the Moon’s interior one day, the way those Lander creatures came out of the asteroids, and it needs an escape hatch. Who knows?”
Lucian felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Larry Chao was not exactly a source of comforting ideas.
The two of them rode in silence for a long time, the time blurring away as they dropped past the featureless walls. Lucian thought of the original Rabbit Hole, and how long Alice had fallen down it. Long enough to get bored with the fall, and start asking herself nonsense questions. “Do bats eat cats?” he muttered to himself.
The T.O. turned and looked at him. “Did you say something?” it asked.
“No, nothing,” he answered in pointless embarrassment.
They rode again in silence for a short time. “That’s strange,” Larry’s voice said. “The temperature should be rising steadily as we go deeper in toward the planetary core. But it’s holding steady, maybe dropping.”
“Maybe this damn Wheel thing is absorbing some of the core’s heat as an energy source,” Lucian said. “Not enough to detect from the surface, but enough to draw down the temperatures in the shaft. Maybe that’s what the shaft is for, to draw heat down toward the Wheel.”
“That’s possible.” The teleoperator looked around for a moment. “I think the fog is lifting. I’m starting to see the shaft walls. Hold on a second, let me send a ranging pulse toward the bottom.” There was a moment’s pause. “We’re getting there,” Larry’s voice announced. “Just two kilometers over the bottom now,” he said. “Hang on, Lucian, the winch controller’s going to start slowing us down.” Lucian felt a surge of pressure as the cage slowed its descent. For a sickening second, the cage began to sway back and forth, and Lucian imagined the elevator cage working up a pendulum motion, swinging slowly, relentlessly, back and forth until it smashed into the shaft wall. But then the momentum dampers caught the swing and damped it out. Lucian breathed a sigh of relief. At least they wouldn’t get killed that way. Though there were no doubt plenty of other possibilities waiting for them at the bottom.
The Caller was but dimly aware of the intruders entering its domain. It was involved in great things, in nothing less than commanding the conquest of the Solar System. The tiny disturbances at the northern portal were unimportant. Its maintenance systems could handle any difficulty. It chose to concentrate its attentions on its work, on the task of coordinating the Worldeaters. They were frustrating assistants at times, capable of great things but utterly lacking inflexibility. In what was nearly a flash of humor, the Caller realized that the Sphere must see its Callers in much the same light. The Caller was developing its capacity for contemplation, for self-awareness and self-understanding. It would have need of those abilities in the next stage of its development. A stage that would find both the Caller and the Solar System vastly transformed.
The sweat ran down Larry’s brow. Even just sitting still in this thing was a strain. No matter what he might say to keep Lucian settled down, wearing a teleoperator control rig was tough work. Larry was so thoroughly enveloped in the control rig’s exoskeleton that the comm techs at the other end of the room could barely see him.
The control rig hung in midair, so that the feet would be unconstrained by the floor. He could run, jump, kick, wave his arms, do anything he wanted, and the control rig would stay right where it was, merely waving its limbs about. The teleoperator down below actually moved.
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.”