Marcia stepped forward into the chamber, toward the cluster of human machines. Something lay on floor in the center of the chamber, hard to see with the machines in the way. A low hummock in the floor of the chamber, a discolored brownish lump that looked as if it had been melted and poured into place. It was translucent, and gleamed dimly. Someone had dusted it off, polished it up. Any number of wires led from the medical machines to various points on the lumpen shape.
“Oh, my God,” Marcia whispered. She got closer, shoved past the surrounding monitoring gear, and looked down at the shape from above.
The shape of the thing was more complicated than she had thought. It was no simple blob in the floor. Instead it repeated exactly the same pose and orientation as the sliced-open pressure suits. It reminded Marcia irresistibly of the chalk outline policemen drew around a corpse in murder stories. There was the torso, and the head, and the arms and legs spread wide.
Every body part was in the same relative position as on the pressure suit, but everything was rounded, spread out, made large enough to surround that which was inside. It looked like some strange, misshapen, hideous caricature of a gingerbread man.
Marcia stepped forward, pulled her handlight out of the holster on her suit, and shone it down on the—the whatever it was.
Her throat went dry. There. Yes. She could see the body, ever so dimly, through the exterior shell, clearly enough to recognize the man she had known, slightly and briefly, five years before. Perfect, uncorrupted, intact, suspended in the brown substance a few inches off the floor. His eyes were shut, his expression calm. Only his hair was disordered, floating up around his head just a trifle.
Except—except—there were cables—no, not cables, not wires. Somehow, they had more of the look of living tissue than mechanical hardware. Marcia knelt down and looked closer. Elongated growths—call them tendrils—coming up from the floor of the cavern, and attached to Lucian’s head and neck. Others were attached to his chest and his genitalia.
Sweet God. Sweet God. Of course. The dinosaurs. The damned dinosaurs Selby had been babbling about. Half of them died fifteen million years after the others because the Charonians had kept them alive, like this, for fifteen million years.
Alive. Sweet Jesus in Hell, Lucian Dreyfuss was in death alive, entombed inside that thing, with no way to get out. Marcia collapsed to her knees, and the tears fell from her eyes.
The Charonians had snatched him and put him, still living, in a specimen bottle. Good God, fifteen million years! Might he wait as long as the poor tyrannosaurs to be released from this nightmare storage into real, honest death?
And Selby was kneeling beside her, putting her arm around her, drawing her up to stand, leading her back the way they had come. “Come on, love. We found a small empty side cavern a few hundred meters down the way. We’ve set up a pressure bubble and a field office there. You and I need to talk.”
Three
Penance and Remembrance
“There have been any number of attempts to portray Larry Chao as a maniac or a lunatic, as a destructive monster who went out of control. The truth is much simpler, and much less satisfying to those who need villains to blame for the ills of the world: the Larry Chao behind the myth was simply unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real Larry Chao is not a monster, but a man.
“A good man. That is the first thing that must be said about Larry Chao. He is a good man who accidentally committed the greatest crime in history, a good man who is guilty of nothing and responsible for everything. No one could possibly have dreamt that a gravity beam of the type he fired could do any more harm than shining a flashlight. Who could have imagined it would serve as an activation signal for a hidden alien black hole generator?
“The second thing to say is that he was a victim of forces he could not control. Fate, or history, or chance—whatever name you want to give it—saw to it he was the one who activated the experiment. I was in the room, I saw him do it, I approved of his action, and yet history has left no black mark on me. No matter how you divide up the guilt, or no matter what you do to demonstrate that it was wild, bizarre chance, the fact remains that it was Larry O’Shawnessy Chao who pushed that button.
“Sooner or later someone was going to discover how to shape the force of gravity as Larry did. But that inevitability is meaningless. There is no escaping the reality that it was Larry who actually did it. No escape for us—and certainly none for him.”
—Dr. Sondra Berghoff, statement for Qravitics Research Station Oral History Project, Charon DataPress, 2443
Larry O’Shawnessy Chao marked the dismal anniversary of Earth’s disappearance by struggling to ignore it. Rather than commemorate the day, he had tried to do some tests on the Graviton, but he hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything significant. So he had wasted his time doing a studious and careful job on an absurd and trivial task. No real purpose could be served by rerunning the standard electro-response testing regime yet again on yet another servo-claw from yet another long-dead Charonian scorpion robot. But the work had kept him focused, kept him absorbed.
Playing around with bits and pieces of the half-living, half-machine corpses of dead Charonians wasn’t much, but it was all he was capable of at the moment.
He tried to concentrate on the claw, tracking out its bioelectronic circuits with painstaking care, for all the world as if he expected to find something meaningful there. For all the world. Now there was a poor choice of words.
Most days, recently, it had not been too bad. But today. Today, everything seemed to remind him of what had been. Today was different, no matter how hard he told himself it was not. Today, he could not keep the thoughts at bay.
Five years.
Five years since the Charonians awoke and swallowed Earth up, pulled the home world down a wormhole.
Damn it all, admit it to yourself, at least, he thought, savagely jabbing at the claw with a logic probe, pulsing far too much current through its contacts. The claw whirred and clacked in response, its razor-sharp teeth nearly snapping the probe in two.
Larry pulled the probe back and forced himself to calm down, to clear his mind. All right then. Allow the thoughts inside your own mind. Even if you can’t say the words, at least dare to think them. How long since you have even allowed yourself that much! They all said it wasn’t his fault, of course, but they could not know. They could not possibly understand.
Larry dropped his tools and kneaded his hands nervously. But just as it always did, the sight of his hands moving in that nervous gesture made him think of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands before the multitude. He pulled his hands apart, lay them down on the workbench, stared straight ahead at the blank wall. After a while, he found that, quite involuntarily, his hands were gripping the edge of the bench, holding on tightly, as if he feared that he would be ripped away from this time and place.
Dare to think it. The thought echoed insistently in his mind with a force that would not be denied, an intruder that would not depart until it was acknowledged.