“Yet in time far behind, far behind even as time is reckoned in the Dark, it was/is not so.
“In the beginning, deep in the [far back?] we/I [refined itself?] from the cold and ghastly chaos of the massless nether reaches and gathered close to Allcenter. This we/I did a full galactic rotation from the Now, a duration-distance so mighty that none of us/ me could attempt a transit a thousandth so far without dooming the All. [Farback?] and [gonelong?] is the beginning, beyond all reach.
“We/I came to be, and came to growing. Long was the slowtime as we/I bred ourself, spreading across the surface and duration of Allcenter.
“Until the others came, with their questings and probings and jostling gravity waves, seeking to [subsume?] Allcenter into their web of space. But it was we/I who [subsumed?] them.
“Beyond all understanding, beyond All comprehension, they were and are and shall be. But great was the treasure of [power?] and [transit?] we/I took from them.
“Until they escaped. Deep was our loss and great our weakening. Grown great upon the energies of the others, the All lost all it had gained, and more beyond. Weak and low was our/my state. Long did we/I [search for them?] in all the transit links.
“And now we/I have found them again.”
“Good afternoon,” Larry said, looking out over the auditorium—a rather grand name for the rather scruffy-looking hall, but it was the only room at the station that could hold everyone, and everyone wanted to hear this. “We’ve come a long way very quickly, and I thought it would be smart to bring the whole team together to talk it through. The leads Lucian Dreyfuss provided have given us some guidance and some clues into what we should be looking for.
“Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton has made a tremendous contribution. Her expertise in reconstructing and interpreting old computer records has been invaluable. Thanks to Marcia MacDougal’s work over the last five years, we had a lot of Charonian visual-symbol units translated already, giving us the basic vocabulary to move forward fast.
“The teams working on chronology and duration have found all sorts of measures and scales in the data bursts, and that right there is a breakthrough. We know more about when things happened than we ever have before. Dates back to about five thousand years we know with great precision. Everything before that gets more and more uncertain. Some of the older data could come from a million years ago or a hundred million. We don’t know.
“Much of what I am about to tell you has been at least guessed at before. The difference is that now we have evidence and, in many cases, absolute proof that turns speculation into fact. We have filled in many—but not nearly all—of the holes in the story.
“Let me start from the beginning. Something like eighty million to sixty-five million years ago, a seedship Charonian, a large Charonian carrying the lifecodes and schematics for all the forms of Charonians, landed on the Earth and bred the various forms of Charonian, producing everything from smaller scavenger robots to things the size of asteroids, and producing them at a ferocious rate. The Charonian Breeders fed off terrestrial life—and picked up whatever odd bits of DNA they found of interest.
“At least one large Charonian lifted off for the Moon and started digging and burrowing and building itself into what we now call the Lunar Wheel. Other Charonians hid themselves in the depths of space, mostly by disguising themselves as asteroids and comets. Then the Lunar Wheel sent a signal to its parent Sphere that all was in readiness, and all the Charonians in the Solar System went dormant. They waited for a call that never came—until five years ago.
“Now, that original Charonian seedship that landed on Earth and started the Breeding Binge was one of thousands sent out by its parent Sphere system—the system in which the Earth now finds itself. Perhaps only one out of a thousand seedships would find a suitable star system. Each of those few would do as the Charonians did here—set things up, send a ready message, and then wait for a call. The parent Sphere might elect merely to order any usable stars or planets shipped into its system, or it might decide that it had enough surplus power and material to assist its offspring Charonians in tearing apart the star system they were in and helping them build a new Sphere system.
“Many are sent out, but few are called. For whatever reason, the Lunar Wheel was never called—until it was quite accidentally activated five years ago. Until I accidentally activated it.” Larry paused to take a sip of water, and worked very hard at not making eye contact with the audience. Being forthright was all very well, but there was no sense in pushing his luck.
“In any event,” he went on, a trifle too briskly, “the Sphere never called on the Solar System. Even for the Charonians, eighty million years is a long time. Our best guess is that the Sphere simply forgot about us, or found some other star system to be more useful. Or else the crisis I am about to describe made it impossible for the Sphere to deal with Earth and the Solar System.
“Sometime after the Charonian seedship arrived in the Solar System, bred, and went dormant, the Charonian network encountered the Adversary. The Charonians quite suddenly found themselves cast down—the lords of creation reduced to a mere food source for the Adversary.
“You have all seen the famous image sequence of a bright spot of light smashing through a Sphere and then smashing its way back out, taking a second bright spot of light with it. This is more or less the classic tactic of the Adversary. A single large Adversary unit gets into the system via a wormhole link, then splits up into as many smaller subunits as possible. Floods the Sphere system with large numbers of highly expendable Adversary units, all of them driving for the Sphere. Sheer numbers ensure that at least one or two get through for the kill. Whatever Adversary unit gets through seizes control of the central power source and smashes out of the Sphere with it.
“How, exactly, the Adversary uses the power source, or what, exactly, the form of the power source is, we haven’t a clue. We assume that it was made out of the original star the Sphere was built around, but God knows what the Charonians might turn those core stars into. Maybe they convert the core stars into black holes, and use those to generate gravitational power. We don’t know.
“Think for a moment how the Adversary experiences the Universe, what sort of place it is for it. Certainly it does not perceive the Universe as we do. Our senses would, of course, be completely useless to it, and yet it must be able to sense its environment. To it, what we regard as normal space must seem cold, dark, and disturbing. Should some sub-part of it move out of their high-gravity, slow-time world to the universe outside, little or no time will have passed there though they might have been gone years, perhaps centuries, as seen from out here. Neutron stars and wormholes are the safe, comfortable places. We think of wormholes as transits between two points in ‘normal’ space. They regard the web of wormholes as normal space, surrounded by cold, dark, and danger.
“In any case, once an invading Adversary had used a Sphere’s power source to reproduce, it would send its—I suppose ‘spawn’ would be the best word—it would send its spawn down the network of wormhole links, on the hunt for other Spheres to consume.