“The answer, of course, is that we know life must perpetuate itself, at all cost, for if it fails to do so, all is lost. This is our most basic instinct. No living thing could survive without this knowledge embedded in its every gene…
“…Life must live off life, which is to say it must live off death. Even the most gentle of vegetarian species lives by killing and eating plants. Life’s perpetuation, its renewal, and acts of creation, are of necessity exactly balanced by acts of destruction.”
“All right, then,” Sianna said. “You’re in charge, Wally. Start from where we left off and assume the Charonians won. Take apart the whole damn Solar System and build me a Dyson Sphere, a Multisystem. I want to see how it’s done.”
“But, um, ah… I don’t know if I have the simulation routines.
“Then we’ll write new routines,” Sianna said, cutting him off. “I’m near the answers, Wally. Damned near. If things break the way I think they will, then”—she paused to choose her words—“then all sorts of things might be possible.”
Wally blinked at her, a bit owlishly, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want the sim results to be?”
There! That was the question that had crippled them for so long. Not what are the results, but what do you want the results to be? That mindset, and a distinct reluctance to consider the possibility of ultimate, final disaster in the Solar System, were the two reasons no one had seen the answer.
“I want the sim to do whatever it wants to do,” she said. “Reset to the moment the Lunar Wheel woke up. Factor out all human interference, and let’s see what the Charonians would do with the cards they were dealt.”
In that sense, at least, the Charonians were like everyone else. They had to work with what they had; not deal with what was logical, but with the available Universe.
That was the point that everyone missed. Sakalov viewed them as supremely logical beings, and maybe they were. But the Charonians did not live in a logical or rational Universe—and they did not spring from nowhere. Like every other life-form—if you considered them a life-form—they had evolved. There seemed little doubt that they had directed their own evolution, but all the same, the current form had to keep itself alive while it was on its way to creating the new one. Whales still had toe bones. Birds still had lizard feet. You used the structures you had and modified them.
And if one thing was certain about the Charonians, it was that they had not always been what they were now. Sometime, somehow in the past, creatures had built starships, filled them with the lifecode, the DNA equivalent, of the life from the home world and sent the starships out into space. But the starships had the ability to modify their cargo of living beings, and they had taken over. Life served machinery instead of machinery serving life, until the two merged into one. The end result of that was the strange complex webs of interdependent beings that humans called Charonians.
Coming into the Universe tends to leave some scars. Humans had belly buttons. Sianna was very close to certain she knew what Charonians had.
“Think like a Charonian,” Sianna said, going over to where Wally was working. “You’ve got the whole Solar System for raw materials, and you want to build a Dyson Sphere. How would you go about doing it?”
Wally looked thoughtful. “What sort of assumptions do I make?”
“No assumptions. Just aim for the end result of a Sphere like the one here. Just do your best guess,” Sianna said.
“But what about—”
“Just make it up as you go along,” Sianna said. She didn’t want to say as much to Wally, but she was relying more on his hunches and guesses and instincts than the results of deliberate thought. Sometimes, when he tried too hard, Wally thought like a regular person. Sianna was half-hoping that the way he looked at the world when he worked at his own level would be closer to the Charonian viewpoint. Not that she could say any of that, of course. “You’ve been doing these sims right along. Do it by feel. Take the tools that make the most sense to you.”
“Okay, then,” Wally said, leaning back in his chair. “I have a lot of stuff in the data library, and a bunch of ideas I never had a chance to try out. You understand I’ll have to do a lot of guessing. We don’t know how the Charonians do a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, well, for starters, they must have some way to do easy, efficient, straightforward matter transmutation. That’s the big thing,” he said. “Hydrogen and helium make up something like ninety percent of the Solar System. They’d have to be able to turn hydrogen and helium into other elements. We’ll just have to do a black box on that. Let’s see. We’ll need some Charonian forms we haven’t seen yet. Sphere constructors, transporters, energy collectors. Probably some sort of interim structures along the way…” Wally kept talking, but his voice got lower and less distinct until he was just muttering to himself, and Sianna could not follow it. But he was caught up in the spirit of the thing, and that was all that mattered. Once Wally got his teeth into a problem, he did not let it go.
Suddenly the interior of the Sim Center chamber began to shift and change, slowly at first, but then with greater and greater violence. The darkened room flared into glaring light. The images of the planets turned ghostly pale, then transformed into ghostly white wire balls, mere schematics rather than true images. Wally was conserving processing power, doing bare-bones imaging while he set up. Then the wire balls began to shift position, zipping and flashing across the darkened sky as Wally brought the setup to where he wanted it. Sianna found herself ducking, a bit too late, as the wireframe image of Jupiter skimmed across the room—and right through her.
“Okay,” Wally said, clearly talking to himself, “we’ll need places to store and process raw materials, and, ah, transmuters, and transporters, and oh, let’s see…” His voice started to take on a strange enthusiasm, and an odd little gleam came into his eye. Sianna had asked him to play God, and it was obvious he liked the idea.
Strange shapes, changing and evolving, appeared in the air around Sianna, and then vanished before they completed themselves. Wally was trying out ideas, scenarios, procedures half in his head and half in the sim chamber. It was all most disconcerting.
But then quite suddenly, it all stopped, and the room dropped into total darkness. “Okay,” Wally’s voice announced from the midst of the utter blackness. “I think I have it. At least a first-draft idea, anyway. Here we go.”
The room remained in darkness for a moment. Then the planets reappeared, moving fast enough that even Saturn’s motion was visible. Sianna checked the time display—Wally had gone back to the moment the Lunar Wheel had awakened, and was running the system at a year every thirty seconds. At that speed, the individual Charonians were barely visible, little more than a hazy cloud about each of the planets. But Sianna could see the results of their handiwork quite plainly.
The planets were coming apart at the seams, dissolving before her eyes as the Charonians tore up the worlds and hurled their component matter out into free space. The Lunar Wheel, hidden deep inside the Moon, commanded the operation, sending out stabbing bolts of gravity power for the other Charonian forms to absorb. The time display rolled forward at a frantic pace, quickly sweeping past the time when the Solar System had managed to stop the Charonians—or at least the moment where everyone hoped they had been stopped.