“The Spheres fought back as best they could. One of their tactics was to perform a rather brutal kind of triage—killing a threatened Sphere and thus wrecking its whole system of stars, planets and wormhole links—so as to deny the power source and transit links to the Adversary. Sometimes a Sphere would commit suicide rather than be taken. You will all recall that the Charonians in the Solar System accepted the command to die that we sent to them. We wondered why they were programmed to take such a command in the first place, but now we know.
“It would appear that only a very few Charonian Spheres of that era survived. Those that did learned to hide themselves, conceal themselves from the Adversary.
“In theory, wormholes can be used not only to link two points in space, but as a means of time travel. We humans have never managed it, and there is no evidence that the Charonians ever used wormholes in this way.
“Be that as it may, we found indications that the Adversarys travel backwards and forwards in time.
“Maybe the Adversary was lying, or being poetic, or the Charonians misunderstood, or we misunderstood. However, there is one form of time travel we know the Adversary used. It is called waiting.
“As mentioned earlier, these portions of the Adversary—or constructs, or entities, or whatever you want to call them—live on the surfaces of neutron stars, where gravity is tremendously intense, and they can survive more powerful gravity fields than that. How they survive, we don’t know. Perhaps they can manipulate inertia. Dial your inertia down to zero, and you have reduced your apparent mass down to zero as well. Give a mountain the inertia of a pebble, and you will be able to propel that mountain as if it weighed no more than a pebble.
“But back to the question of time. As we all know, as the strength of a gravity field increases, time slows down. This is not a trick, or an illusion, or a theory. It is a fact, part and parcel of the phenomenon of gravity itself. A massive gravity field will retard time tremendously—and, of course, a black hole stops time altogether.
“The Adversary cannot go into a black hole and survive. But it can get deep, deep into a gravity well without suffering harm—and there it can wait. A year for us might seem a day—or a minute—for an Adversary unit in a wormhole. This explains why the danger is not passed, although the Charonian-Adversary War ended—or seemed to have ended—millions of years ago. The Adversary has a tremendous capacity to wait. The Adversary may have some way of piloting singularities through interstellar space, living in slow time near the event horizon as its singularity moves. It would be a clever solution to the problem of long star journeys.
“One hundred and forty-seven years ago the Adversary, having worked its way through all the dead wormholes, or perhaps traveling through normal space for an extended period, found Earth-Sphere’s parent.
“The Adversary attacked. That Sphere seems to have sent a warning, and either died or killed itself before the Adversary could make any wormhole link to other Sphere systems. The holes were slammed shut, and the tuning controls for the holes destroyed.
“When that Sphere died, its system was wrecked. Its Captive Suns, no longer held in their orbits by the Sphere’s gravitic control, flew out into space. A few of those stars retained at least some of their planets, but many more planets were flung off. The Shattered Sphere rules no suns, no worlds. It is alone in space, with nothing but the corpses of spacegoing Charonians for company. The wormhole links to other systems were slammed shut when the Sphere died.
“In the meantime, the Adversary apparently went back down a wormhole and remained there, living in slow time. It was, in effect, asleep for most of the last 147 years.
“However, five years ago, the Abduction woke it up. Earth’s transition through the wormhole between the Solar System and the Earth-Sphere system created a… disturbance… in the wormhole network. Without going into a great deal of mathematics on the subject of gravity-wave propagation, suffice it to say that the transition of a massive object through a wormhole would set up a resonance pattern—a gravitational vibration, if you will. When the Earth was stolen, its passage caused a disturbance that reverberated up and down the wormhole links, not unlike waves in a pond moving out from the point where a rock hits.
“This uncontrolled, unshieldable vibration was like a blast of light, illuminating not only the position of wormhole links between the dead Sphere’s system and the Earth-Sphere system, but the precise tuning and resonance setting for them. Then, we sent the kill command to the Charonians here. That kill command was loud and indiscriminate, and likewise may have served to illuminate the worm-hole links.
“Thus the Adversary learned exactly where to find a new Sphere system. It will take some time for the Adversary to respond. It is possible it has not responded yet. But it will. It will emerge from its gravity well—unless it has already. It will move toward the center of the gravity-wave disturbance. It will go through that link, and attempt an attack on the Earth-Sphere system. It will do all these things—unless it has done them already.
“The Earth-Sphere must know all this better than we do. Once the Sphere is certain that it is to be attacked, it will set to work preparing to defend itself by every means it can.
“The Earth is in terrible danger. If the Sphere dies, Earth will almost certainly be ejected out into the depths of interstellar space, or smash into some other body in the Earth-Sphere system.
“However, the odds are poor that Earth would survive even that long. The best defense against an Adversary unit that has penetrated into a given Sphere system is to smash a planet into it at the highest-possible velocity, before the Adversary has a chance to split-breed.
As the Adversary will be homing in on the wormhole exit that Earth came through, Earth is the most convenient rock. It is going to be smashed to rubble in the first few milliseconds after that Adversary gets through.”
Larry hesitated and looked around the auditorium.
“That is what will happen. Unless, of course, it already has happened. With every day that passes, the odds are higher that Earth has already been destroyed.”
Twenty-three
Boast of the Duck
“By the time you understand the rules of a complex game, you will no longer be able to explain those rules to anyone who does not already understand the game.”
“What Hoyle sez to a sim gamester izzat inna a chinwag re a ‘game’ all hands need 2b playing with same deck. They need to be kneeding the same words for same things, need to capiche what they wanna do, have a handle on what secret rules say no 2 if you know, and a troo digging of the ground game stands on, air game breathes. Gag is, only after an outside geek can speak all that weird backdoor info and whispertalk, will he-she comprende a peek at the rool book—but by then, won’t half/have to look, and outgeek nomore. Everywhere thisiz troo, from groupmind-warp to nookspooking, from howto cheat at cards polite or ballbashing to who presumes to whom at a HiPurp All-Hands-Haftawanta Handsoff Gangbang.
“Run through the numbercrunch and you’ll nail down that the big prize of runaroundbusy gigs is mosttimes toughest to spot from outside. An outgeek will not spot the hiddenholes the player knows their cans can fall in. Outgeek might no-know lettle sidethangs on the game-plan, or be able to tell dodging from going ahead—and might not even able to scope what the big goal iz.