And then X00l’s flight path snapped neatly around in a perfect ninety-degree turn—and set itself on an arrow-straight course straight for the Moonpoint Black Hole.
“What the devil is that?” Bernhardt demanded. “Why is it doing this thing? Beadle—time to impact on black hole, if you please.”
“Ah, ah, yes sir. Stand by. Just a moment.” What the hell was that thing doing aiming direct for the black hole? It was the one possibility they hadn’t considered. Well, why should they have? Why consider the possibility of the SCOREs traveling tens of millions of kilometers just to commit a highly energetic form of suicide? Unless… unless… Yes, it made sense. Beadle ran the numbers on time to impact—they would be the same no matter what happened. But if she was right—
“Sir, assuming the SCORE does not change course, it will hit the event horizon of the black hole in about forty-five seconds—but, ah, sir, I don’t think it’s going to hit it. I think it’s going to go through.”
“But the Ring is dead!” Bernhardt protested. “There is no worm-hole!”
As if on cue, the visual-band image system flared and flashed with the strange not-blue-white of a wormhole opening. Joanne gasped in surprise along with everyone else in the ops center.
“My God, Beadle, you are a good guesser,” Bernhardt said in a half-whisper.
“Thank you, sir,” she replied, most disconcerted, “but I’m usually not this good.”
“The hole,” Bernhardt whispered. “Why the devil are they going into the hole?”
Twenty-four
Tremors
“Too many people fail to make the distinction between the concept of dichotomy and that of opposites. We assume that, if there are two possibilities, the two are therefore opposite. This is in some cases true: Black is the opposite of white.
“However, male is by no means the opposite of female. There is nothing to prevent some other planet developing three sexes, and certainly plenty of Earth life gets by with no sexes at all. In a Universe that includes unliving matter—like rocks—death is not the opposite of life. Much that we declare dead is truly alive—a rotting corpse is literally alive with the micro-organisms that are consuming it. Much that we regard as alive in some way—the weather, music, laughter, literature—are in literal fact lifeless.
“And the human perspective of the Universe is not the opposite of the Charonian perspective. They are not even two points along a one-dimensional spectrum. The two are merely two points. Other points— that is to say, quite literally, other points of view—could be charted anywhere in relation to these first two points.”
Larry Chao had no business being down in the Wheelway, but he was there. He walked along for quite a while, lost in thought, with no real aim, but the going was easy enough that it did not matter, even once he had walked past the last of the overhead lights. His thoughts were quite unclear, even to himself. The talk he had given, the dangers he had discovered—and the unquiet ghost of Lucian Dreyfuss—all whispered in his mind.
His pressure suit’s headlamps lit the tunnel tolerably well, and Larry was not much in the mood for a lot of light anyway. Besides, the lighted signs indicating the side caverns served well enough as beacons in the darkness.
At length he found himself near the sign for Chamber 281, the most famous of the side caverns. Larry had always wanted to get a look at it, and now seemed a perfectly good time to do so. He turned off the main Wheelway into a small antechamber that opened out onto a much larger inner chamber. A transparent wall was rigged up inside the antechamber, so this smaller room could serve as an observation platform for the big room. The air inside the big room was clear, the ambient atmosphere of the Wheelway pumped out and replaced with nitrogen gas. An airlock arrangement permitted access to the interior. Even though the site was deserted, the worklights were on.
Chamber 281 was where they had found the most spectacular collection of dinosaur remains. Even after four years of work, they were just beginning to learn what the room could tell them. Two skeletons and a rather ratty-looking dinosaur mummy had been propped up on huge display boards near the observation chamber for the edification of passersby. Larry was fairly certain the mummy was a tyrannosaur, but he had no idea at all what the others were.
He knew, intellectually, that the creatures had been down here for tens of millions of years, but still, somehow, it was hard to believe it at a gut level. The behavior of this being or that eighty million years ago hadn’t seemed as if it had that much meaning for life in the present day, any more than the dynastic wars of 15th century England, or the imperial collapses all through the 20th century had any meaningful consequence to the life of Larry O’Shawnessy Chao in the 25th century.
Except they did, of course. It was easy to trace the strands back, show that if this king had not defeated that usurper, if this government had held together, then all of subsequent history would be changed.
But that was dry, academic theory. The past, the human past, was dead. It did not come alive from out of nowhere, full of dangers all had thought put to rest long ago.
Not so the Charonian past—or the Adversarial past. How could a race of beings from the time of the tyrannosaurs come back, come to life, today, now?
In one moment Larry was staring down at the monsters of Earth’s past.
—And in the next the cavern was bucking and twisting, writhing like a live thing. The transparent wall bulged, flexed, and smashed open. Larry went tumbling through the air and was slammed into the side wall of the cavern as the whole room shook, spasmed.
Loose bits of rock and debris tumbled free all around him. Half-stunned, Larry wrapped his arms around his head, trying to shield the helmet of his suit. The display boards holding the mummified tyrannosaur bucked and swayed and then toppled forward, sending the head of the monster smashing down into the observation room. Larry pulled his legs back just before the razor-sharp teeth could come down on them.
He pulled back from the leering head as far as he could and hunkered down in the corner, as tools and gadgets and bits of dead Charonian and dead dinosaur tumbled down on to him. A scorp claw caromed into the side of his helmet and put a deep scratch in his visor.
Moonquake, Larry told himself, but even as he thought it, he knew it could not be right. He had ridden out a quake or two since he had been on the Moon, and this was different. The ground was not shuddering from deep below. The whole cavern was spasming, somehow. At last the bucking and heaving began to subside.
Larry got to his feet, moving carefully, cautiously. He made his way out of the cavern, out into the main corridor. The lighted sign over the chamber entrance was out. He switched his suit lights back on and a beam of light speared out into the darkness, the air filled with billowing brown dust. The walls, the floors, the ceiling of the Wheelway were still quivering. That was when it struck Larry. The corridor was not being shaken; it was shaking itself.
This was no Moonquake. Larry knew that, knew it down in his soul. This phenomenon was every bit as alien to the Moon as Larry himself.
The Lunar Wheel itself was coming back to life, somehow, a spasm of activity five years after Larry himself had killed the massive being by sending it the command to die.