“What is?” the Autocrat asked.
“This is the foremost gravity research station there is, and we have a gravity generator of incredible power. But we’re still using centrifugal force to make artificial gravity. Someday we’ll know enough to develop a controlled gravity field. We’re learning a lot with the Graviton project. Until we get it right, though, we spin away. In any event, the station is essentially complete. We’re still adding bits and pieces, upgrading, that sort of thing. It’s almost gotten to the point where it’s comfortable. But it’s still hard here,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very hard.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence as the car moved downward into the high-gee sections of the station. The doors opened and Sondra ushered the Autocrat out. “This way,” she said, trying to sound bright, clipped, efficient.
She led him toward the rather cramped confines of the main wardroom. Ring-viewing conditions varied constantly. They were almost at the peak of their six-day cycle, and she didn’t want the Autocrat—or herself—to miss the sight. Everyone loved looking at the ring. It had taken some doing to chase everyone else out of the wardroom for the Autocrat’s tour.
The lights in the wardroom were lowered to make it easier to see out into the sky. The room was quiet. In the gloom, it was a trifle hard to see the wardroom’s oversized porthole—a mere spot of star-sprinkled greater darkness in the dark. But Sondra knew where it was, of course, from long practice. Even if she had not, her eye would have been caught by the movement of the heavens, slowly wheeling past the porthole.
“Ah,” the Autocrat said. “There.” He crossed the room, threading his way between the tables and chairs, and stood in front of the porthole, staring out. Sondra followed a step or two behind. Perhaps it would have been more respectful, more gracious, if she had allowed him to stand there alone, drink it all in by himself—but she could not resist. She had spent endless hours before that window, gazing on the ring, and would gladly have spent twice as many.
In the days of the dim, forgotten past, the first astronauts orbiting the Earth had stolen every moment they could from their tasks in order to gaze on the blue-white marvel sweeping past below. Ring-watching was like that—except that there had never been a sense of danger, or melancholy, in looking at the Earth.
For the Earth was gone—and it was, after all, the Ring that had sent it away. The Ring of Charon was, by any measure, the most powerful machine ever built by human hands. It had crushed Pluto and Charon down to quite literally nothing at all, down into a black hole. The Ring’s beauty was a fearful thing.
The Ring was just that, a hollow toroid 1,600 kilometers in diameter, the Plutopoint Singularity at its centerpoint. The Ring was the direct descendant of the ever-larger particle accelerators built on Earth, and later in free space. When originally built, the Ring had circled the moon Charon, and had been designed to deal with its gravitational field alone. Now it circled the far more massive Pluto-point, and was stressed by far greater gravitic energies, energies that would have torn the Ring apart long ago if Sondra and the rest of her team had not found a way to mask and refocus some of the singularity’s expressed mass.
The command center revolved around the Ring and the singularity at right angles to the Ring’s plane, in a circular orbit roughly 20,000 kilometers out from the singularity. Twice an orbit the Ring was edge-on as seen from the station, and it was likewise face-on twice an orbit. The best time to see the ring was when it was face-on, with the Sun behind the station, lighting up the ring—albeit faintly.
The Ring hung in the sky, massive, perfect, gleaming, its running lights bright in the darkness. The cold stars floated, uncaring, behind it, in the silence of space. And at the Ring’s center was the source of all its power.
The black hole, the singularity itself, was of course invisible. The event horizon was only a few meters across, and it was, after all, merely blackness in the black. Now and again, some bit of debris would be pulled into the horizon, and a bright spark would flare up as the bit of dust or misplaced screwdriver was torn apart by tidal forces, giving up some part of its mass as energy as it was sucked down into the singularity. But those flashes of light were rare, weak, tiny. The singularity pulled in nearly all the light and energy of the impact events.
Sondra stood next to the Autocrat in the gloom of the wardroom, staring out at the mighty Ring. “There it is,” she said. “Our one weapon against the Charonians. Our one hope for finding the Earth. Though God knows what we could do if we ever found it.”
“How long will it take, finding Earth?” the Autocrat asked.
Sondra shook her head. “We have no way of knowing. It’s not as if we’re actually going to open up a hole, look through it, and see the Earth. What we’re doing is a tuning hunt, searching for the right gravity resonance pattern. If we can get our singularity resonating with a Charonian black hole, the resonance will induce a wormhole between the two. That’s oversimplifying, of course, but that’s the basic idea. The trouble is that there are millions, maybe billions, of combinations. We’ve hit on six that might be something, that make the meters twitch in ways that make us think we almost induced wormhole formation. We’ve worked the hell out of all the near-misses, run every conceivable variation on them—and gotten nowhere. Maybe one of them is this Multisystem place that stole Earth, and we just haven’t got enough data. Maybe all of them were false positives. So how long until we find Earth? We don’t know.”
“Could you induce a wormhole if you got the pattern match?” the Autocrat asked. “Do you have the power, and the know-how?”
“Oh, yes,” Sondra said. “God yes. Don’t forget we’ve had a whole Solar System full of dead Charonians to take apart—and we’ve got this Plutopoint Singularity and the Earthpoint Singularity to play with. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about gravity—and manipulating gravity—in the last five years.”
“That’s one thing I’ve never understood. The Charonians placed a black hole—a singularity—there, and used it as one end of a worm-hole link connecting back to their Multisystem. Why can’t we do the same? Do a pattern match with the Earthpoint Singularity and establish a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint? Or reactivate Earthpoint as a link to where Earth is?”
“Because that singularity was controlled by the Lunar Wheel, and the Lunar Wheel is dead. You need a functional ring accelerator— like the Ring of Charon—to modulate the gravitic energy and establish a resonance pattern in the first place. The Lunar Wheel’s resonance match was lost, randomized, when the Wheel died, and we can’t get it back—just as we lost the link to where Earth is. If we built a Ring about Earthpoint, we could set up a wormhole link between Plutopoint and Earthpoint, I suppose. But without the tuning data, it wouldn’t let us link up with the Multisystem. Besides, building an Earthpoint Ring would bankrupt the Solar System. That one I know. We’ve run the numbers. If you want faster transport, the Graviton is the way to go.”
“Ah, yes,” the Autocrat said, his eyes not moving off the Ring. “The Graviton. You will be surprised to learn that I do not have much interest in her.”
Sondra was surprised—and then suspicious. “No interest in a ship that should be able to make a run from the Moon to Plutopoint in no more than two or three days?”
“In a word, no. Not so long as such ships are based on technology we don’t understand, and are built with parts stripped from dead aliens. How can we rely on Charonian machinery when Charonian machinery has been so full of unpleasant surprises in the past? If we humans could build gravity-beam ships that were entirely our own, then I would be fascinated by them.”