Wally pulled up a large image of the Moon, guiding the picture through the air until it hung a few feet in front of his head. “Here’s a cutaway,” Wally said, and a quarter-section slice of the Moon vanished, revealing the interior. Instead of just the Lunar Wheel wrapping once around the Moon’s core, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ring-shaped objects wrapped around the world. “This is all guesswork, of course,” Wally said. “I don’t know how they would add capacity, or what it would look like, but I do know the Wheel would have to add capacity as the building project went along. The sim was programmed to add it as needed. And this doesn’t even show the processing systems, the artificial intelligence centers that are managing construction and keeping the system stable.
“So yeah, it would be logical to cut the Moon out of the loop at this point. The Sphere is big enough to handle all the power control, but there are so many power and logic and comm interconnects through there that removing them all would be like the Sphere performing brain surgery on itself. The connections and control links to all the operations in the system are so complex, so keyed to synchronizations with the Moon’s orbit, that I wouldn’t even want to adjust the Moon’s orbit, because of all the other things you’d have to adjust as a result.
“See, at this point, the Moon is not just the only survivor of the Solar System’s worlds, it’s pretty much the de facto command center for the whole—” Wally stopped his work and looked up sharply as the light came on in his head. “Command center,” he whispered to himself.
He blanked the simulation, saved it back to the central data library, and brought up the simulation of the Multisystem that he had showed to Sianna in the long-ago morning of this endless day.
That had just been today? A wave of exhaustion swept over Sianna. How long ago had that morning been? Was it still the same day? What time was it now? Sianna knew she could find out the current, correct time, down to the nanosecond if she liked, by checking with any of a dozen instruments, starting with the clock on Wally’s control panel. But she did not want to look. She felt as if she were outside of time itself, and that being out of time was part of how she was getting the answer. Somehow the moment, the magic, the way things were falling into place would end if she knew what time it was in the outside world. And now the answers were so close.
Wally had the sim of the real-life Multisystem up and running now. He brought up a close-in image of the Sphere, of the huge, brooding globe—and the tiny, barely visible dot that orbited so close to it.
Sianna stared at it, knowing that Wally was seeing what she did, was understanding what the simulated destruction of the Solar System had told them. There it was. The only planet-sized body to orbit the Sphere directly. The lone, lifeless, uninhabitable world in a Multisystem built to store and preserve living worlds.
Charon Central, the control station for the whole system, a system built by a species that had remade itself again and again over the eons. But the Charonians had remade themselves not through logic, but through history, through growth and death and evolution and residual effects, by improvising and working with what they had, by using one problem to solve another.
“The Lone World,” Sianna said.
“Yeah,” Wally said, staring at it in amazement. “Charon Central.” Sianna grinned, nodded, and grabbed him by the shoulder. However that sideways mind of his worked, Wally had followed the same logic she had, and then gotten the same answer. She was right. Oh, there would be all sorts of battles and struggles ahead to convince the others, but that was trivial, a mere detail. She knew she was right. She had spent this day and this night underground, cut out from the sky and the stars, here in this place where time seemed so plastic that she felt cut out of time herself. But it had been worth it. Worth it to find this truth that would—
Out of time. Wait a second. Wait just a second. Out of time.
She turned and grabbed Wally by the arm. “Wally! Those Ring-and-Hole sets you made co-orbital with the Moon in the simulation. That was the best way to stabilize the orbit?”
Wally shrugged. “Best I could see.”
“And those were standard R-H sets, right? They could do anything that other R-H sets could do?”
“Sure. They’re big, heavy-duty units, but yeah, they could do the normal stuff. Why not?”
Sianna did not answer, but instead nodded to herself, thinking it through. The last link was there, just coming into reach. Yes. Yes.
“Wally. What’s the orbital circumference for the Lone World? For the real one, not the Moon in the simulation.”
“The circumference? Well, um, let’s see. Circumference of an ellipse is um, ah…” Wally picked up a pencil and starting working it out on a scratch pad. Sianna was treated to the rare sight of a master of computer math struggling over a simple problem on paper. “Ah… that’s ah… no, wait. Carry the… right. Right. Okay. Rough number would be about 665,000,000 kilometers. But why—”
“Good. Fine. What does that come to in light-minutes? How long would it take for a beam of light to travel that far?”
“Huh? What? Easy enough. Just divide out by the speed of light— um, just under thirty-seven minutes. But why—”
Thirty-seven minutes. God knows how, but it all fit! The same number that had been nudging at her subconscious all morning. Thirty-seven minutes. The time period that it would take a beam of light to travel the circumference of the Lone World’s orbit. Thirty-seven minutes. The time discrepancy between the Saint Anthony‘s clocks and all the clocks of Earth. Somehow, Earth had been accelerated to light speed, sent once around the orbit, and then decanted back into normal space. Sianna looked out toward the tiny dot of the Lone World, imagining the R-H sets that must be strung out along its orbit. Why, she did not know, but it had to be. She didn’t know how they did it, either, but that number, thirty-seven minutes, told her they had done it. For some reason Earth had been pulled out of time, suspended, dropped into stasis, and moved once around the Lone World’s orbit at the speed of light.
Sianna felt her heart pounding, her weary soul alive with excitement and enthusiasm. She had it. She knew she had it.
But even in her moment of victory, Sianna’s subconscious found something to throw up in her face. A cloud popped up to cover the sunlight, and Sianna felt the all-too-familiar knot in her stomach, her guilty conscience reminding her of the consequences of wasted time.
Damnation. There was always something to ruin the fun.
Her finals started tomorrow and she hadn’t even thought of studying.
Eleven
What Cats Won’t See
“…There can be no doubt that his role in the Abduction caused Larry Chao to become somewhat unbalanced. All witnesses agree that he suffered tremendous guilt and shame, along with and on top of the shock and survivor guilt that everyone suffered. There has been much discussion of how this might have shaped his later actions. However, another, less well known incident has not received anywhere near as much study, though it no doubt had as much to do with his disordered state of mind when he destroyed Pluto and Charon not long after.
“Soon after the discovery of the Rabbit Hole and the entryway to the Lunar Wheel, Lucian Dreyfuss was sent down to attach a new form of gravity-wave detector on the then-still-functioning Lunar Wheel. Dreyfuss was accompanied by a TeleOperator, and the TeleOperator was controlled by Chao. The TeleOperator was capable of providing extremely detailed sensory feedback to the controller—too detailed, as it turned out.