“But he’s not walking on anything!”
“Neither have you been,” she said. “You’ve been in illusion the whole time. You think that’s the real lunar surface under your feet? Just walk like you’re climbing stairs, the way he is. He’s controlling the illusion. If he thinks you’re moving upward, you’ll move upward. Follow him!”
“Um, ah, okay.” The image lurched from side to side as Larry moved in exaggerated upward steps. “I’m, ah, climbing,” he said. “My God, it’s working. I’m following him up. My God!”
The view tilted upward as Larry looked toward Lucian, several meters above him. “Can you see?” he asked. “He’s stopped moving his legs. He’s just flying along. I’m going to try it, see if it makes him think I should fall.”
Marcia watched anxiously and the picture stopped bucking and swaying. Larry had stopped moving his feet. No, he wasn’t falling. How could Larry fall when he was still in the T.O. rig in the chamber just down the passage? Illusion was befuddling stuff.
Never mind. For whatever reason, Lucian no longer needed Larry to pretend to move in order for Lucian to take him along. Perhaps Lucian was getting better at controlling his environment—if you could call a self-induced delusion an environment.
But then she noticed what Larry was seeing, and forgot about such trivia.
The stars were changing.
They were shifting position, rearranging themselves, coalescing, some growing brighter, and others fading away. Something was coming closer, growing bigger.
A Sphere. A Dyson Sphere. The twin of the one they had seen in the images from the Multisystem.
“Oh my God,” she said. “We’re in. Lucian’s showing images from the Heritage Memory.”
“Images of bloody what?” Selby asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Marcia said.
The Dyson Sphere was suddenly huge, and close, surrounded by a cloud of Captive Suns and Captive Worlds. An ordered, stately dominion, all its stars and planets dancing attendance on the Sphere.
Then, from out of the darkness, something came, flashing out of a hole in space. There was a flurry of action, too fast to see. The screen filled with a jumble of images and symbols that came too fast to see or understand. “Let’s hope the recorders got that,” Vespasian said. “Could you make sense of it?”
“Not me,” Marcia said. Selby shook her head no, but did not speak. Instead she watched the screen.
Something was moving in from the outer Multisystem, a bright orange spark of throbbing light.
“What the devil is that?” Vespasian demanded.
“No idea,” Selby said. “But either it’s bloody huge or this is some sort of schematic symbolized display, things scaled up.” Now there was movement on the screen as a swarm of objects converged on the orange dot of light. “If those are Charonians, this must be scaled up. They don’t have anything that can move like that much above asteroid-size. At least so far as we know.”
One after another, and then in great swarms, the Charonians moved toward the intruder, smashed into it—and were destroyed, smashed down to nothing. The intruder moved inward, toward the Sphere, unstoppable. More and more defenders moved in, each wave more frantic than the last, as the intruder came closer to the Sphere. Then the screen blanked for a moment, and there was another flurry of incomprehensible symbols and schematics before the image of the intruder and the Sphere reappeared.
“What in blazes the devil are we looking at?” Vespasian asked.
Marcia shook her head without taking her eyes from the display screen. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, “but it looks familiar. I’ve seen something like this before.”
“What are you talking about? How could you have—”
“Ssssh. Quiet. Let me watch.”
Now the intruder was dodging and weaving, ducking the cloud of Charonian defenders. It broke through the last of them and moved toward the Sphere, closer and closer.
With one last lunging thrust, it smashed into the Sphere, punching a hole in it, diving inward. For a brief moment, nothing seemed to happen—and then the intruder, the dot of light, erupted from another place on the Sphere and moved outward, dragging along a second bright point of light with it.
“That’s the Shattered Sphere sequence!” Marcia said. “Frame by frame, exactly the same images that the Sphere in Earth’s Multisystem sent to the Lunar Wheel. The transmission we intercepted.”
But this image did not stop the way the Shattered Sphere imagery had. The two bright sparks of light did not pass out of the field of view. This time the view stayed with them. They moved out, away from the Sphere, toward a Ring-and-Hole pair in the farthest reaches of the system. They dove toward the hole—and disappeared.
But even then the imagery did not end. Instead it swung back toward the Sphere, showed it pitching and wobbling, its stately, ordered spin decaying into a chaotic tumble. Clearly, the Sphere was dead. Without the Sphere to regulate and control the orbits of the suns and worlds, the whole system of stars and planets careened out of control. The image pulled back to show the Captive Suns beginning to drift away, toward the depths of interstellar space.
Stars made close passes to each other, and their gravity fields stripped planets away, ejecting worlds into the darkness, or pulling planets down into collisions with Captive Suns or into direct impacts with other worlds.
The system was a ruin.
The image faded to black, and then Lucian’s voice spoke to the darkness, to Larry, to the team in the control room. “There is it,” he said. “Sleep now tired. Very tired.” And that was all. Darkness and silence.
Marcia punched up the intercom key. “Larry,” she said. “Did you get that? Larry?”
But there was no answer. She tried it again. “Larry? Larry, come in.” Suddenly worried, Marcia got up from her console and rushed down the cable-snaked corridor, Selby at her heels. They rushed past the glaring worklights, to the chamber where the techs had assembled the TeleOperator’s exoskeleton.
By the time they got there, the techs already had the exoskeleton open. They were taking him down. His skin was pasty-white, his body limp as a rag in the arms of the techs. For a half-second, Marcia thought he was dead, but then his face twitched, his arm raised up. The techs moved him over to a cot on the other side of the room and lay him down there.
“I don’t know,” the head tech said before Marcia could ask anything. “Looks like it might be some sort of sensory overload reaction. Too much comes in at once and your brain just shuts down. You pass out cold. If that’s all it is, then he’ll be okay after he comes to.”
But then Larry made a low grunting noise, rolled over on his side—and started to snore.
“He’s not unconscious,” Marcia said. “He’s asleep. Dead asleep.”
“Well, wake him up!” Selby said. “Ask him what all of that meant!”
“No,” Marcia said. “Let him sleep. The poor man certainly deserves it.” She looked down at him, and shook her head. Dear God, what he had been through. Today, and in his life. If ever a man deserved a little peace, it was Larry Chao. “Let him sleep,” she said again. She turned and looked at Selby. “If he has any answers, they’ll just have to wait until he wakes up. God knows we have enough to work on until then.”
Eighteen
In the Can
“In all our attempts to understand the behavior of the Charonians, our most common failing is in neglecting to remember they are partly living. There is an animal side to these creatures, living beings that are part and parcel of the cybernetic synergisms called Charonians. We think of Charonians as machines, as computers, as robots, as self-propelled spaceships and automated terraforming construction systems. The Charonians are all of these things—but only half their heritage is mechanistic.