“But there is something else. The Terra Nova has asked for more than supplies. She has asked that we send her… send her some expertise. I have reached that conclusion that to do so would be very risky—but potentially, most valuable.
“But there is little time, and little cargo space available. If I had my way, the Terra Nova would rendezvous with a full complement of our greatest experts on the Charonians. But that cannot be. I have no time to examine all the personnel reports, interview candidates, request volunteers, all of that. So I am left with my own instincts, my hunches, my feelings.
“So I am going to send them you three.”
There was dead silence in the room. Sianna could not believe what she was hearing.
“I will send you three,” Bernhardt said again. “A wise old man who still knows how to learn, a genius who does not know all that she is, and a dreamer of visions that lead to truth. I will not make any pretense that you have any choice in the matter, or that I am looking for volunteers. There is no time. The charter establishing my office gave me the power to draft whomever I wish for whatever task I wish in order to protect the people of Earth.”
Sianna stood up, feeling a bit dizzy, and opened her mouth to protest. But no words came. Bernhardt just kept right on talking.
“So. There is only one question I have for each of you,” he said. “How soon can you leave?”
Fifteen
Puppet on a String
“We forget what our lives were like back then, before it all happened, back when Earth and Moon shared a sky, and the Solar System was whole and complete. We thought we were alone in the Universe. We thought we were safe. No one had ever heard of the Charonians. No one even knew the Wheel was buried under the Lunar surface until Larry woke it up and it dropped Earth through a black hole.
“We will never regain that innocence—but we can only judge Larry Chao by the standards of the Universe that existed up until the moment he pressed that button.
“In that lost world of the innocent past, he must be found not guilty of committing any intentional wrong. But Larry Chao has never stopped trying to atone for what he did—at a cost to himself that few of us would be willing to face.”
Three days after the first attempt to contact Lucian Dreyfuss, they were almost ready to try again.
Larry Chao was doing his best to sit still as the techs hooked him in to the virtual reality system, trying not to think about what came next. They were going to fire this thing up and run him through the moments leading up to his own death. All right, not his death, but as close to it as Larry wished to come. When the Charonians had attacked in the tunnel five years ago, the T.O. had been destroyed while Larry was controlling it, and it had been realistic enough to convince Larry he had died, at least for a while. The nightmares had taken a long time to go away—and they had come back last night. But no, don’t think about it. The one bright side was that Larry had been “killed” a few seconds after the Charonians grabbed Lucian and made off with him. Lucian, therefore, had not witnessed Larry’s death and, therefore, was not reliving it, over and over again. Larry would not have to re-enact his own decapitation.
The down side was that, for whatever reason, the slice of time Lucian was looping through over and over started just a few seconds before the Charonians attacked. The idea was to break the loop before the Charonians hit, force Lucian to perceive a sequence of events fed to his optical and audio centers, not by the Charonians, but by the human virtual reality teams. In effect, they would feed Lucian a hallucination to break him out of psychosis. Of course, Larry had been dropped into psychosis by experiencing the real events through the TeleOperator five years ago, but that was beside the point. Even Larry had to admit the possible reward was worth the risk.
They had used a limited-mobility setup the first time they had tried to break through to Lucian, but this time they were using a full TeleOperator control rig, identical to the one Larry had used five years ago in the Rabbit Hole. This time, the T.O.‘s inputs and outputs were not hooked up to an actual robot body, but to a computer simulation of a robot body.
Larry’s entire body still had to be completely encased in the T.O. control unit, which was, in effect, an exoskeleton with the operator inside. Later, when they had the thing powered up, the machinery would respond to his slightest motion, and he would be able to move his arms and legs and head freely. But until the power-amp circuits were on, the T.O. was so much inert metal and his body was completely immobilized by the weight of the machinery. Even when the thing was powered up, Larry would not actually walk when he moved his legs—the rig had him suspended in mid-air. His body would stay still while his simulated self moved about. He was, and would be, in the center of it all, but absolutely unable to move. That summed up the last five years of Larry’s life pretty well.
“How’s that feel?” the VR tech asked.
“Hmm? Oh, ah, fine, I guess,” Larry said. Actually, the straps were rather tight, but minor things like that didn’t seem to matter just now. They wanted him to die again, and no one seemed to think that was asking a lot.
But even if they had understood his terror, they would have strapped him into the TeleOperator control system all the same. Even a chance of cracking open the Lunar Wheel’s Heritage Memory could easily be worth a life or two—even if the lives in question were his and Lucian’s.
“So was he a friend of yours?” the tech asked.
“Hmm? What?” Larry said.
“Lucian Dreyfuss.”
“Oh, I knew him all right.”
“So you were friends.”
“No,” Larry said, looking straight ahead, determined not to look at the tech. “We weren’t friends. I never much liked him. And he blamed me for… for well, what happened.”
“Oh,” the tech said. “Sorry. I didn’t—”
“It’s okay,” Larry said. Now he turned to look at the man, and forced himself to smile. “It was a while ago. I’ve gotten over it.” Now there was a lie. The Abduction, the disaster in the Rabbit Hole, pushing the button that killed Pluto and saved the rest of the Solar System. He was nowhere near over those things. There were days he had hopes of getting past those memories—but this was no such day.
“Oh. Well, um… ah, hold still now while I attach the electrodes,” the tech said, clearly embarrassed.
But Larry was only vaguely aware that the tech was still there. Memories. This whole thing revolved around memories. His, Lucian’s, and the Wheel’s. The Wheel’s Heritage Memory, with the sum total not only of its own experience, but that of all its ancestors as well. Find that, and they could read the history of the Charonians.
There was no end to the information, the answers, the discoveries that might be found there—if the Heritage memory had not been destroyed when the Lunar Wheel died, if it were still accessible, if Lucian’s dead mind could show them the way in.
“Okay, VR view-helmet coming down,” the tech said. “You’re going to be in the dark for a second until we get this thing hooked up.”