“On a neutron star,” Larry said. “It evolved on the surface of it. Of course, on a neutron star, the gravity flattened it out of its spherical shape to a pancake shape.”
“Oh, come off it!” Selby protested. “This is ridiculous. A giant one-celled pancake living on a neutron star? How the hell could such a thing come to be?”
“By evolving—or developing, or whatever—inside a massive gravitational field, and knowing how to feed off it,” Larry said. “The Adversary uses gravitational fields the way we use electrochemical energy in our bodies. It gets its energy by manipulating gravity fields. Somehow—I don’t know how—I think it uses gravity to convert normal matter into strange matter. It builds new pieces of Adversary out of some of it, and the rest it uses as an energy source, somehow.”
Marcia was thinking. “It all sounds a bit outlandish, but something killed that Shattered Sphere,” she said.
“Even so, things would be a great deal easier for a species that was adapted to high gee. To us, a gravity field powerful enough to warp time and space is deadly, and nuclear physics takes place at a scale so small we can’t even see it. But to the Adversary, high gee is normal, and the atoms it deals with are so big they might even be visible to the naked human eye. It would be as if we could create a wormhole with, say, a five- or ten-gee field, or do genetic engineering with genes the size of children’s blocks. The threshold would be much lower.”
“But the Charonians,” Selby insisted. “What do they have to do with the Charonians?”
“The Charonians have a network of wormholes linking their various Spheres and systems,” Larry said. “The Adversary developed a similar network. It put together a wormhole link and locked onto another neutron star, and colonized it. And then another, and another. Both nets grew out from the center.”
“My God,” Marcia said. “I get it. Now I get it. One side accidentally tapped into the other’s wormhole net.”
“Right. Exactly,” Larry said. “But the thing to bear in mind is that the Charonians use high-gee fields and wormholes, but the Adversary lives in them, feeds off them. The Charonians use gravity very differently, but they make a living off gravity fields as well.
“High-gee situations and wormholes are still dangerous to Charonians. They still have to be careful around them. In that respect, we have a lot more in common with the Charonians than the Adversary. At least Charonians and humans inhabit the same experiential universe. The normal place for a part of the Adversary to be is on the surface of a neutron star. To the Adversary, a wormhole is just like home.”
“If you look at it that way, then the size difference doesn’t matter, either,” Marcia said, “any more than it does in a fight between a swarm of crop-eating locusts and a group of humans trying to chase them off.”
“What’s a locust?” Vespasian asked. Apparently, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time on Earth.
“A voracious insect,” Marcia said. “Be glad they never got to the Moon. Millions of them would descend on a field and eat it bare in a day. They were adapted to a certain sort of environment, and if they found that environment, they took it and used it. It didn’t matter to them that humans created the crop field, or would want to use it for themselves. Crop fields were the ideal environment for locusts. They were better designed to exploit them than the humans who planted the fields. The locusts would gobble up the whole field, and the farmers couldn’t stop them.”
“But that only works if you have millions of locusts that can overwhelm by sheer force of numbers,” Selby protested. “We only saw one bit of Adversary in that video sequence.”
“One is all it takes. You saw the one that got through. The Adversary would force open a wormhole and enter a Sphere system as a single large entity. As soon as it was in, it would split up into hundreds of smaller units. Some would run interference and be destroyed by the Charonians. But only one Adversary bit had to make it all the way. It didn’t matter if the rest get killed, because they’re all the same.”
“And one of them—just one—is able to kill a Sphere?”
“Just one,” Larry said. “The best way to stop them is to kill the parent just as it enters the Sphere’s system through the wormhole, before it can split-breed. The way to kill the parent is to throw a planet at it. Adversary units are tough, and the big parent ones are tougher. Only the kinetic energy of a whole planet moving at relativistic speed can kill a large Adversary. Smash into it at a good fraction of light speed and you’ll destroy the Adversary—and the planet. The Adversary will penetrate most of the way to the planet’s core before it’s destroyed. The Charonians kill one planet to save all the others. Acceptable losses. Half a loaf. Sound familiar?” Larry smiled at his own unfunny gallows humor.
“Larry, there’s something more,” Marcia said. “Something else you’re not telling us. Lucian wouldn’t have worked so hard to get you all this information unless it did more than clear up a mystery or two. It’s nice to know who the Charonians are afraid of, but we don’t need to know it.”
“No, no, we don’t need to know all that. But… but…” Larry turned his head away and looked at the wall. How to say it matter-of-factly? How to get them to believe? “What we do need to know is the geometry of the Sphere system the Earth is in.
“When the Adversary comes for you, it comes through a wormhole link. And there is an Adversary coming for the system the Earth is in. That’s what terrified the Charonians, set them into a panic. Somehow, it was the movement of Earth into that system that attracted the Adversary’s attention. It’s heading for the wormhole link with Earth. It might try for some other entry to the system, but the link it’s most likely to come through is the one nearest Earth.
“And when a Charonian Sphere needs to throw a planet at an Adversary, it generally uses the closest one to hand.”
Twenty-two
Recalled to Life
“Source Matter: Dreyfuss Contact record
“Procedure: Thematically Keyed Recursive Adversary/Charonian Translation Routine, Pass #45,234 of 45,234. Certainty Level circa 75 percent.
“Note: All Adversary units of measure and number recast to rough scalar equivalents in standard units. However, the accuracy of these approximations remains variable and highly uncertain. Furthermore, relativistic effects, induced by both massive acceleration and gravitational effects, make measurement comparisons and conversions even more problematic.
“We/I are the One. All touches each, and each, All. Time is our/my domain, space our/my prison.
“We/I travel up and down the milliseconds(?) and seconds(?) and the far-spanning hours(?) at will, and all times are as one to us/me. At need, we/I can send some of ourselves/myself into the transitways to times more distant still, to both past and future.
“But shall we/I boast of our/my current power, when once we/I sent ourself across duration-distances far longer? In truth, now are our/my transits short.
“Once were our/my sojourns in the paths of duration great, yet in this epoch we/I may venture but feebly to the domains of othertime(?) and other-place(?). The distortions of masslessness in the other, lesser, dimensions hem us/me in, and keep us/me held close to our/my home at Allcenter, and our/my past ways of venturing are lost.
“The dark masslessness warps duration itself. In that cold and dark [domain?], time rushes by at such terrifying velocities that to venture but briefly into it is to risk loss of synchrony with the All, beyond all hope of recovery. [Darktime?] flares past a thousand, a million, times faster than does time in its natural state, shattering all links between the sojourner and the All, diminishing each of us that are linked into one.