No word. No word at all from NaPurHab or Terra Nova, and now this. There had to be a connection, somehow. Wolf Bernhardt stepped out of the elevator onto the main level of MRI’s under-ground headquarters. He rushed across the quadrangle to the auditorium. The word had come just a few minutes before. Wolf could have watched the video of the telescope images just as well from his office, but he felt the need to be with people, to join together with others.
Practically the whole staff of MRI was there, watching it on the big screen. The images from the terrestrial telescopes were grainy, and more than a little hard to make out, but they were the most beautiful thing Wolf had seen in a long time.
They were leaving. The SCOREs and COREs that had kept humanity bottled up on Earth for all these years were pulling out, departing their orbits, heading off across the sky.
Wolf looked around and spotted Ursula Gruber standing in the rear of the room. He hurried over to her, and she took him by the hand, her eyes shining and bright. “It’s wonderful, Wolf. Just wonderful. But what do you think it means?”
Wolf shook his head and looked up, past the auditorium ceiling, past the caverns of MRI, past the towers of Manhattan and the skies of the Multisystem, out to the unknown place, somewhere out in the Universe, where NaPurHab and the Terra Nova had gone. And past there as well, to Earth’s own Solar System. Surely the rest of the human family was waiting as eagerly for news as Earth itself was. And surely news would come soon. The departure of the COREs was a message to that effect, all by itself.
“I think,” he said, “I think it means that our friends out there have done rather well.”
Notes on the Charonian-Adversary War
It is important to realize that nearly every term in the discussion that follows must be regarded as an approximation or as poetic license. Paleontologists often speak of, say, a giraffe evolving a long neck, as if that were some sort of deliberate policy decision on the part of the giraffe. Clearly, this is merely convenient shorthand used instead of a more precise—and necessarily laborious— description of the process.
Just so, here we must discuss a “war” that moved at glacial speeds, over astronomical distances and tremendously long periods of time, between two belligerent parties that quite likely never regarded each other as the “enemy,” so much as mere forces of nature. Both sides quite likely viewed it as a “war” only in the sense of a war against the weather, or an untamed territory, or a plague of locusts. It is likely that, for long periods of time, the two sides were not consciously aware of each other.
It was a conflict between army ants on the one hand and a flock of vultures on the other. Conscious decision-making played little if any part in shaping the conflict.
Like ants and vultures, the two sides had ways of life so radically different, and experienced their portions of the Universe in ways so wholly different from each other that they might as well have lived in separate universes.
Their worlds scarcely ever intersected—until, of course, their interests came into conflict.
Many details of our ant-vulture analogy are quite obviously at odds with reality, but the most skewed is perhaps that of physical scale. The Charonians—a differentiated species, with many non-reproductive individuals who labor to support those of higher castes— bear several resemblances to termites, ants, and bees. They modify their own environments extensively, develop and harvest their own “food” supply (in the form of various energy and gravitic resources), and invest significant resources in establishing new colonies.
The Adversary does not develop resources, but merely exploits such resources as become available. As an opportunistic feeder, the Adversary must range far and wide in search of energy sources, while the Charonians must remain in close proximity to their manufactured resources.
In short, the Charonians’ behavior resembles that of social insects, while the Adversary’s behavior closely parallels that of a free-range scavenger, such as a vulture. On Earth, the smallest scavenger birds are far larger than the largest insect. Even though the Charonians and Adversary reverse that pattern out in space, being of such disparate scales has exactly the same effect, no matter who is the larger: it is difficult for the two life-forms even to be aware of each other’s existence, let alone perceive the other as an opponent, rather than a food source or an obstacle.*
*Indeed, the question of scale accounts for much of the Charonian difficulty in being able to perceive humans.
Somewhere in the distant past, the Adversary broke into the Charonian wormhole network and cut a massive swath of destruction, smashing into Spheres and feeding on their energy sources, leaving wrecked Multisystems in its wake. After the first horrific onslaught wiped out most of the Spheres, the Charonians learned to fight back—and to hide. But the war did not end so much as peter out. The Adversary still feeds on Charonian Spheres whenever it can.
One hundred forty-seven years before the book opens, the Adversary found the Shattered Sphere and ate it. The Shattered Sphere, parent to the Multisystem that holds Earth, gave a warning, then killed itself before the Adversary could make a link to other systems. When the Shattered Sphere died, its system was wrecked. Dead planets, rogue stars, and dead Charonians wheeled through space.
After killing the Shattered Sphere, the Adversary unit responsible for the attack withdrew to a truncated wormhole and remained there. The Adversary unit lived in slow-time conditions where perhaps one year Adversary time is equivalent to a century of our time. It was “asleep” for most of that 147 years, inert, as seen from the outside Universe.
However, the Earth’s arrival in the Multisystem created a disturbance in the wormhole net that stimulated the Adversary to wakefulness. Then, the human-caused interference was loud and indiscriminate. It served to illuminate the Shattered Sphere system links to the Multisystem, making the revivable wormholes clearly visible.
This gave the Adversary a wonderful guide to a new system to invade, a trail which it is following as The Shattered Sphere opens. The Adversary is preparing to make a transit of normal space heading straight for the main, default wormhole link, the one that produced the most clear and powerful signal—that is, the link between Lone World of Solitude to the Multisystem. The Adversary has taken five years to awaken and now is preparing to attack. The Multisystem Charonians laid low until there was no question that an attack was coming. Once there was no doubt, they prepared to meet it.
Glossary of Terms, Ship Names, and Locations
Abduction The event and time period during which the Charonians stole the Earth and placed it in a new orbit around the Sunstar in the Multisystem. There is a natural tendency to divide things into pre- and post-Abduction.
Amalgam Creatures See Lander.
Artlnt (Artificial Intelligence) Typically refers to a machine or subsystem smart enough to do what should be done without being told.
Autarch The personal ship of the Autocrat of Ceres.
Autocrat of Ceres The absolute ruler of the largest asteroid, and the only effective instrumentality of law or justice in the Belt Community. A reputation for draconian justice has served to prevent most from daring his wrath.