The Shattered Sphere
by Roger MacBride Allen
To Eleanore Maury Fox—
Home is where she is.
Author’s Note
“Have you finished The Shattered Sphere yet?”
That is the question I have been asked more than any other since The Ring of Charon came out. Readers, friends, editors, agents, and all sorts of other people have wanted to know. I am more pleased than you can know that the answer is now “yes.” Here it is.
To everyone who has been patient—and impatient— for this book, let me say thank you. I hope that the results have been worth the wait.
Special thanks are due to my editor, Debbie Notkin, and to Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tom Doherty, and the entire staff at Tor Books. Now, at long last, I can stop hiding from them. Thanks also, once again, to Linda Silk, whose artwork graced the advance reading copies. Thanks to my parents, Tarn and Scottie, for their comments on the manuscript.
And finally, thanks also to Eleanore Maury Fox, to whom this book is dedicated. She read the original manuscript and provided a great deal of firm and much-needed advice. There are, needless to say, a lot of other reasons for me to say thanks to Eleanore, but that’s another story—one that isn’t anywhere near done yet.
—Roger MacBride Allen, London, August 1993
Dramatis Personae
The Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of Ceres, and de facto hegemonic leader of the entire Asteroid Belt. By tradition, the holder of the office renounces his or her name and all links to his or her previous life upon entry into office.
Joanne Beadle. Operations technician at Kourou Spaceport, South America. She acts, rather reluctantly, as Wolf Bernhardt’s personal assistant during his stay there.
Dr. Wolf Bernhardt. Head of the U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI) and Director of the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI).
Dr. Sondra Berghoff. Director of the Ring of Charon Gravities Research Station at Plutopoint.
Canpopper Notworthit. A rather inefficient cargo handler on NaPurHab.
Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton. A “Leftover,” that is, a citizen of Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. The only trained archaeologist on the Moon, she heads the exploration of the Lunar Wheel and the Wheelway Tunnel system.
Sianna Colette. A young woman, orphaned as a teenager by the pulsequakes of the Abduction. As the book opens, she is a graduate student working at the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI) in New York.
Dr. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao. Formerly a youthful and very junior researcher at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto. Chao accidentally activated the huge Charonian being, the Lunar Wheel, and thus inadvertently set in motion the events leading to the Abduction. As the book opens, he is working on the Graviton project.
Lucian Dreyfuss. Once a technician at the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center, he was captured by the Charonians in the Rabbit Hole. He is presumed dead.
Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on. A rather moody and forceful woman, she is head of navigation and guidance on NaPurHab.
Dr. Ursula Gruber. Director of Observational Studies at MRI and a key adviser to Wolf Bernhardt.
Dr. Gerald MacDougal. Second-in-command of the Terra Nova. He is married to Marcia MacDougal. A born-again Christian, he is a trained exobiologist.
Dr. Marcia MacDougal. Once a planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational Research (VISOR), now a researcher in Charonian symbology. She escaped from the Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teenager. She returned to the Moon when VISOR was moth-balled. As the book opens, she is based at the Lunar North Pole and involved in research into Charonian language and behavior there.
Wally Sturgis. An expert in computer modeling. As the book opens, he is employed at the Multisystem Research Institute.
Ohio Template Windbag. The Maximum Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab).
Tyrone Vespasian. Director of the Lucian Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station (a.k.a. “The Rabbit Hole”) at the Moon’s North Pole.
One
Boarding Party
Others called it the Adversary, but it had no name for itself, or even a sufficient awareness of self for a name to be meaningful. The distinction between individual and group was as meaningless to it as it would be to a volume of water that happens to be divided and then recombined. The Adversary could divide itself, and merge itself, to whatever degree it chose. But the Adversary was, ultimately, one.
It lived in the warm, slow, soft recesses of heavy gravity, of gravity fields powerful enough to slow time down to a reasonable rate of speed. As seen from out in the cold and dark distortions of fast-time space, the Adversary was deep inside a truncated wormhole aperture, seemingly unheeding of the outside universe.
But it was not so, even if the slowed passage of time inside the ruined wormhole might make it so appear. It was aware of its surroundings, even if it was slow to react to them.
And it had detected a vibration in the fabric of the gravitic links. Some time past, as measured in the cold and dark of fast time, there had been a series of disturbances. As a series of lightning flashes might briefly illuminate all of a darkened landscape, and so serve to guide one across it, the gravitic vibrations made much that was hidden suddenly visible. The Adversary could see the path to new sources of power, of energy, illuminated across the expanses of wormhole links and fast-time space.
Slowly, oh so slowly as seen from fast-time space, it began to move.
“The Terra Nova was, of course, built to be the first starship. In the parlance of the time, she was a sleep-ship. Her passengers were meant to be frozen before departure, and to sleep away the long years and decades between the stars, then thawed and decanted on arrival at the target star system. However, budget restraints forced the mothballing of the great ship a few months short of completion. She was never launched toward Alpha Centauri, as intended. Instead, she sat in a parking orbit of Earth.
“As chance would have it, the Terra Nova was swept up along with Earth when the planet was abducted into its new surroundings in the Multisystem. The Terra Nova was immediately set to work studying Earth’s startling new environs.
“The ship’s designers named her for a famous British exploration ship of the early twentieth century. No doubt they would have chosen a name of better omen had they examined the history, rather than the myth and romance, surrounding that namesake vessel. That Terra Nova, Commander Scott’s ill-fated command vessel on his fatal trip to the South Pole, was a rather ordinary ship, a whaling vessel pressed into Antarctic service, quite ill-suited to exploration or Antarctic conditions. As a result, she found herself in the greatest of difficulties on many occasions, putting her crew in great and needless peril. Her unsuitability was a contributing factor in the expedition’s disastrous failure.