The pace of destruction accelerated as more and more Charonians poured through the wormhole links. The smaller and then the larger satellites of the gas giants evaporated. Mars was the first planet to go, shredded away until its component mass was nothing but a cloud of dust and rubble. One by one, the rest of the worlds of the Solar System followed suit, ground down to nothing. At last, even Jupiter wasn’t there anymore, the king of the planets reduced to a cloud of gas and dust. All the worlds were gone. All but the Moon. All but the Moon—the Moon, where the Lunar Wheel lived.
“Okay,” Wally said. “From here on in it’s all totally hypothetical. We know that once the Landers were on the ground, they came together, kinda merged into larger Amalgam Creatures. I figure the Charonians would just keep going with that idea. Once the worlds are torn up, the Amalgams would merge together and form black box monsters.”
“Black box monsters?”
“Huh? Oh, you haven’t hung out in the theory bull sessions, I guess. Well, the things would be huge—maybe a hundred, two, three hundred kilometers across. That’s what I call a monster. And a black box—you know, a machine where you know what it does but not how it does it. If the Charonians want to use the debris fields that used to be the planets, they have to be able to collect that matter, transmute it into whatever elements and materials they will need, and then form those up into, ah, well, call ’em Sphere modules. Sections of the Sphere’s skin, structural support, that sort of thing. Anyway, I’ve just sorta guessed at what the BBMs for a given job would look like. Here, I’ll do an enlargement on a cluster of them. Lemme slow down the time rate and zoom in a bit so you can see what’s going on.”
A cluster of tiny dots near Mars’ old orbit suddenly started to grow, swelling up until they filled half the sim chamber. The BBMs were huge, complex, malevolent-looking things. They looked like clusters of pyramidical Amalgam Creatures stuck together into various shapes.
One of them was sucking in matter from the surrounding debris field—debris that had once been Mars—and extruding it in the form of long, flattened sheets. No doubt, at least in this simulation, those sheets would one day be the outer skin of the Solar System Dyson Sphere.
Sianna felt that knot in her stomach again. Suppose they had all talked themselves into the notion that their kith and kin back home were still alive? Suppose what she was seeing here was what was really happening back there?
Don’t think about it. Don’t think. As the sheets of Sphere skin came out of the thing that was making them, another breed of Charonian was grappling the sheets and hauling them away.
“It’s all guesswork,” Wally said. “We’ve never seen these forms. But they’d have to have some sort of creatures to do these things. Maybe they have more than one type. One to transmute, and one to take the transmuted matter and form it up as needed. Or maybe— God knows how—they’ve found some way to sidestep transmutation and do it all on the, ah, chemical level rather than the atomic one. So they could build superstrong molecules out of hydrogen and helium and trace amounts of the other elements. But somehow or another, they have to take the raw material of the planets and rework it into the components of the Sphere.”
“Fine, Wally, fine. Now, keep it going, Wally,” Sianna said. “What happens next?”
“Well, once you have the transmuters—or whatever—up and running, it’s a question of getting the material to where the Sphere is going to be. And you’d need a hole spinner.”
“A what?”
“Well, the Lunar Wheel provided all the gravity power to the other Charonians in the system—but it didn’t generate any of that power, as best we can tell. It was a conduit for gee power being transmitted by its parent sphere, here in the Multisystem. And we know the Charonians use a lot of black holes—for wormhole transport, to keep tidal stresses balanced, to generate power, all that kind of stuff. Sooner or later, the Lunar Wheel is going to need to make its own power, and build its own holes.”
“But there isn’t enough mass in the Solar System to create a new Sphere and make black holes of any size.”
“Right. But do you really need mass? In theory, with enough energy to throw around, you can create a massless black hole—a virtual black hole—basically by shoving enough power down into a singularity. We have no idea how to do it—but we aren’t the Charonians. Either they are stealing mass from other star systems, or else they are spinning massless holes by tapping into huge amounts of energy from the Sun.” Wally worked the controls again.
The image zoomed out again, making most of the inner Solar System visible. The planets were all gone—and something new was coming into being. A huge object, shaped like a wide flat bowl, was under construction well inside the old orbit of Mercury. Even as Sianna watched, tiny, midge-like transports were hauling sections of material into position and attaching them to the huge object. “That’s your hole spinner?” Sianna asked.
“Yeah, but, ah, hold on a second. Why make ’em do the work twice?” The image froze and jumbled for a second. When it cleared, the huge bowl was now a long, wide arc, shaped like a slice of melon skin. “There. That’s more like it,” Wally said. “With that shape they can pull it out away from the Sun later and use it as a section of the final Sphere.” The simulation started up again, this time with an arc-shaped power collector driving the hole spinner.
The two of them stood watching the simulation running for a few minutes of speeded-up time. The hole spinner did its work, generating massless black holes that appeared as tiny dots of fiery red in the simulator. The holes mated themselves to ring-shaped accelerators that could draw on and control the gravity power the holes produced. Wally adjusted the controls and sent several Ring-and-Hole units out toward the huge machines that were building sections of shell material. “Now we have wormhole pairs to move things through,” Wally said. “That’ll speed things up.”
As soon as the Ring-and-Hole units were on station, the transports stopped carrying the shell sections across space and started short-cutting through the wormhole links.
“Hmmmm, wait a second. Another thing,” Wally said. “Rovers. Gotta make me some Rovers.” He stopped the simulator for a moment and started keying in some adjustments.
“Rovers?” Sianna asked.
“Yeah, Rovers. I dunno what they’d look like, but some kind of really big things that could go out and snatch stars. Like really big Ring-and-Hole units, I guess. Ones that could use gravitic acceleration to send themselves toward the nearest stars at some sort of reasonable speed. Don’t forget, the whole point of the Multisystem is to be a planet farm. You need stars to anchor the planets and give them light and heat. And you need planets, of course.”
“Good God. I forgot about that,” Sianna said. It was a sobering thought. She had thought she had the whole thing figured out, but how could that be if she had forgotten something that basic? It could throw off her whole idea. “But do you need to start building them so soon?” she asked. “Why not wait until after the Sphere is built?”
“Because it takes so damn long to travel from one star system to the next,” Wally explained. “The Rovers have to travel in normal space. Once they are on station, they can just shift the star through. But it’s going to take fifty or a hundred years to get to the closest G-class stars. Longer for some of the ones further off. If we’re going to make the Solar System into something like the Multisystem, we’re talking a good dozen stars. Course, I can multiplex the system. Send Rover One to Alpha Centauri, say, and then have it set up a worm-hole, and send Rover Two through it. Rover Two could then press on to the next closest star in that direction. The other reason to build Rovers early is so I can snatch extra raw materials for the Dyson Sphere and other constructs from other star systems.”