“Right, Wally.”
That was the end of what they knew happened in the Solar System, because that was the last moment when Earth was in the Solar System. Earth was gone from the simulation now, just as she had vanished from the Solar System in reality. The Solar System. Think about what happened there, not about what happened to Earth.
Don’t think about the way the restaurant building collapsed in the pulsequakes, or how no one found them for days. Don’t think that the sight of that blue-white wall of something falling down out of the sky again and again, or about the mad things that happened to the sky afterward—the sky turning to blood, then night turning to day and back again, or the chaotic reports flooding in from all over of spacecraft and habitats gone missing and crashing, of panic and death, fear and disaster everywhere—
No. Stop. Do not think about it. Do not think at all. Observe. Absorb. She shut her eyes and settled herself down before she faced the next step. Focus on the Solar System. We’ve always thought about our situation—but what about their situation? “Go to a ten-seconds-a-day time scale and give me the best-guess display of what happened next,” she said, keeping her voice steady as she could. The rubble of that restaurant—No. Don’t think about it.
“Okay,” Wally said. “From here on in we’re guessing.” Time flashed back into high gear. The Moon, bereft of the Earth’s gravitational anchoring, wobbled for a time, and then restabilized as the Multisystem sent the Earthpoint Singularity, to anchor the Moon in its old orbit a black hole of almost precisely the Earth’s mass, and to provide a transit point for the invaders that were on the way. In Wally’s sim, the Earthpoint Singularity, invisible in real life, showed as a ruby-red pinpoint of light.
Meanwhile, even before their allies came through Earthpoint, the Charonians in the Solar System gave up more of their secrets. Landers that had slept for thousands or millions of years, camouflaged as asteroids, started moving out from the Asteroid Belt and the distant Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, shown in the display as dimmer points of red.
The Charonian Landers swarmed out across the Solar System, heading toward all the major worlds and attacking them. Landers from the Multisystem starting coming through Earthpoint, streaming to the attack everywhere—everywhere except the Moon.
She needed to see better. “Okay, Wally. Magnify planet and satellite images by a factor of five hundred.” Mars, Jupiter, Venus, all the worlds were suddenly huge, with vivid detail plain to see. Chaos boiled everywhere. A dust cloud started to form around Mars. Jupiter’s Red Spot started to churn. Saturn’s rings disintegrated. Then, out at the edge of the Solar System, something strange started to happen. Charon shrank away to nothing, and then Pluto started to collapse in on itself. The Ring of Charon crushed one world, then the other, swallowing them up to form a human-controlled black hole with the power to strike back—at least once—at the invaders. Planet and satellite vanished, their place taken by a ruby-red spot of light at the centerpoint of the Ring.
“How sure are we on this?” Sianna asked, gesturing toward the image of the new Plutopoint black hole. Even just looking at it made her feel a little bit queasy, a little bit soiled. There was something fundamentally wrong, indecent, about destroying a world, no matter how great the necessity.
“The computers put the probability at over ninety-five percent, but I’d say that’s on the low side. Something back in the Solar System developed enough power to kick a massive jolt of gravity power through the Lunar Wheel and on through it to the Moonpoint Ring here in the Multisystem.”
Wally worked the controls and expanded the image of the Ring until it was five meters top to bottom, spinning smoothly around the angry red eye at its center. His voice was deep and thoughtful, as if this were one of the few realities he had faced—perhaps because the way he could face was it in a simulator. “Over the years I’ve run, a—a million sims of what must have happened back there,” he said.
“And it had to be this way?” Sianna asked. “No other choice?”
Wally shut his eyes and nodded—his way of emphasizing a point.
He opened them again and pointed at the blood-red image of the black hole. “Unless they learned how to spin a massless black hole somehow—and I don’t think they could have—then, well, the only way to punch that much power through would be by drawing on at least a Pluto’s worth of mass in a black hole. Dr. Sakalov says that might be conservative. He thinks they might have been forced to pull in some of the Neptunian moons as well. But I don’t think they would have had time to do that. Things were moving fast—and the— the System was in pretty bad shape by then. Hard to do anything.”
“But God Almighty,” Sianna protested, “what a thing to do! They smashed a world, a four-billion-year old world, just to save a bunch of over-brainy apes from being eaten.”
“No,” Wally said, a bit sharply. Clearly he had thought about this for a while. The hesitation was gone from his voice. “Saving themselves—saving the only species with our kind of intelligence that we know of—that was reason enough to do it. But they had better reasons than that.” He walked over to the simulator controls and brought the imagery back to its previous state, with enlarged images of the worlds hanging in their correct relative positions. “They did it to save all of this. If the people in the Solar System hadn’t stopped them, the Charonians would have taken Pluto apart anyway. They had to sacrifice one planet, and one satellite, to save all the rest.”
“If they did manage to save them,” Sianna said.
Wally nodded sadly. “We’re just guessing at that. For all we know, the Solar System Charonians didn’t die, and there’s nothing left back there at all. We think they fought them off, but there’s—there’s no way to be sure,” Wally replied. He seemed about to say something more, but then he stopped himself. Sianna nodded sadly. What more was there to say?
“I know,” she said. Strange to hear Wally saying such things. But he was, after all, a human being. How could any living person not brood about such things now and again? Even Wally had to look outside himself once in a while. “No one ever likes to think about that—but it’s exactly that possibility that I want to look at. That’s why we’re here right now. To look at… at that. At the Solar System dying.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because I think there are some answers there, in the way it would have died. The way it might have died,” Sianna said. “I know there are.”
Ten
Do It Yourself
“In the most cold-blooded analysis, and speaking on a purely logical level, without reference to theology or philosophy, life is not reasonable. Life does not make any sense. It has no purpose other than its own perpetuation.
“The only purpose of life is more life, a fact which does not seem to bother us—though one would think it might. We mock organizations whose only purpose seems to be their own survival. We are offended by makework projects which seem to accomplish nothing beyond keeping workers working. We are scandalized when some opportunistic person shoves a fellow creature aside in order the reach for the main chance.
“How is it then, in the grander scheme of things, that we are not bothered that the only reason for making babies is to make more babies as a way of making more babies after that? Why are we not upset to see a mother determined to protect her family at any and all costs to others, as well as to herself? How many otherwise immoral acts are excused because they are for the sake of a child?