Foolish thoughts. Why would beings capable of stealing all the worlds and suns of the Multisystem and gathering them in one place care in the slightest if Sianna Colette, nineteen-year-old Columbia University undergraduate and noted troublemaker, snubbed their sky?
Unless this, now, was the dream, truly was the nightmare. Perhaps this very night the survivors back in the Solar System had mastered gravities, found the Earth, and pulled it home.
Sianna felt a stirring of hope. But then she snorted to herself, rolled over on her side and hugged at her pillow. In a pig’s eye. Nonsense. Piffle.
But it could have happened. The sky that had vanished when she was a gawky fourteen-year-old could have returned. After all, it had vanished while she slept, five years ago.
What a horrible morning that had been, when she awoke. But no, don’t think about it.
But it could have come back. The people in the Solar System could have rescued Earth, somehow.
Oh, hell and bother. She tossed the pillow across the tiny room. It struck the wall with a soft whump and slid to the floor. Might as well go take a look. Otherwise Sianna knew she would lie there half the night, torturing herself with the convincing delusions of her dreams.
She sat upright in bed, swung her feet around, slipped them precisely into her slippers, and stood up. Moving in the darkness, she went to the closet and pulled on her robe, moving carefully so as not to set the floor creaking. She did not wish to waken Rachel, her apartment mate, sleeping in the next room. She made sure she had her key and slipped out into the hallway. She moved confidently through the darkened hall to the stairwell door, her hand smoothly finding the handle in the darkness. She padded up the stairs, her slippers flip-flopping up the elderly treads.
She climbed the four flights to the roof and pushed open the door. She stepped out into a chilly spring evening and onto the little patch of roofgrass. Nearly every roof in New York sported some sort of greenery. Sometimes she wished that the super would go to the additional expense of planting trees instead of just grass, but then she would not be able to see the sky, and that would never do.
Sianna Colette needed to see the sky, needed to keep an eye on it, as she would watch a once-trusted friend who had turned on her once and might do so again. Now she looked upward, and felt the same numb, angry disappointment she always felt upon awaking from her dream of the skies of home. Anger at the Universe generally, and the Charonians especially, that the Earth was still in this place. Anger at herself for letting her muzzy-headed dreams trick her into believing, into hoping.
Sianna Colette looked upward into a firmament nothing like anything Nature had ever intended for the Earth.
The Moonpoint Ring hung low in the sky to the southwest, where the full Moon belonged. It was a hollow ring hanging edge-on in the grey-black sky, a circle in the sky, the same size as the Moon but much harder to see. At its center was the Moonpoint Singularity, a black hole. It was a most incongruous and alien object to be floating over the spires and skyscrapers and towers of Manhattan. The Naked Purple Habitat, the last surviving human habitation in space besides the Terra Nova, orbited the Moonpoint Singularity as well, actually inside the Moonpoint Ring, but it was too faint to be a naked-eye object in as murky a sky as this one.
Three Captive Suns were visible at the moment, each casting something like the same light as a full moon, each washing out a large swatch of the night sky. The brightest of the three was actually surrounded by a tiny ring of blue sky, fading out to dark grey at about twice the diameter of a full Moon. Bright as they were, the Captive Suns would have been brighter still, if not for the dust shrouds that begloomed the Multisystem.
A good round dozen meteors flashed across the firmament in the first minute that Sianna looked at the sky, but she paid them no mind. In the Solar System, so many meteors would have been remarkable, but here they were a routine and distracting nuisance. In the Multisystem, space was chock-full of small debris.
Not counting the Captive Suns, there were no stars to be seen. Blame the dust for that, as well. Whether by design or by accident, thick clouds of dust and gas—thick by astronomical standards— filled and surrounded the Multisystem, blotting out the stars beyond and rendering the Multisystem invisible from the outside Universe. The astrophysicists down at the Multisystem Research Institute calculated that, from the outside, the Multisystem would be nothing more than a dull blob of infrared, undetectable from further off than a few tens of light-years.
Sianna also could see a dozen planets, two of them close enough to show disks. So close and yet so far, she thought. That so many other worlds were visible was perhaps the cruelest joke of the Earth’s captivity. For no human could reach any of them. The COREs saw to that. COREs did not care if they pulverized a rogue asteroid or a spacecraft. They killed anything on an intercept course with a planet. Not that many of those planets would be pleasant places to be. They were life-bearing worlds, yes—but ruined ones. You could tell that from the telescope images and the spectroscopic data. The best estimate was that a mass landing of Charonians on a planet’s surface would cause enough stress and damage to induce a mass extinction, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. A few revisionists believed it was the Charonians who wiped out the dinosaurs, though that seemed a bit farfetched to Sianna.
Sianna glanced at her watch and noted the time. Past midnight. She had to get back to bed. Class tomorrow, and she had to study for her exams.
It all seemed so normal. That was the most infuriating thing. Earth kidnapped, all links with the rest of humanity severed, and yet life went relentlessly on. Earth had been snatched through a black hole, and yet Sianna still had to worry about studying and getting her laundry done. It didn’t seem reasonable. Somehow, everyday life should have been hit harder by the disaster.
But here she was, worrying about exams. It had to be that way, if she was not to go mad.
The whole city, the whole world was like that, each person struggling to pull a thick blanket of normalcy down over the terror, the bewilderment, of everyday life. Whenever Sianna walked the streets of the city, she saw too many expressionless eyes, too many faces with that same blank stare. Indeed, numb denial had become the normal state of affairs.
Sianna felt a thin film of moisture in her eyes and blinked rapidly. Not now. Not tonight. She could cry some other time. Now she had to get back to bed.
She kept watching the sky. A dim dot of light, crawling slowly across the sky. And there was another one. COREs. Back in the old days, those dots of light would have been brighter, sharper—and they would have been spacecraft, space stations, orbital habitats.
Once Earth had a mighty empire of satellites, habitats and spacecraft back in the Solar System. Now nearly all of them were gone. Not much had survived the transit to the Multisystem, and most that did make it through had been smashed by the COREs.
Humanity had exactly two major space assets left, to wit, a habitat and a spacecraft. The Terra Nova, designed as a generational starship and pressed into service exploring the Multisystem as best it could. The habitat was the Naked Purple Habitat, or NaPurHab, and it almost didn’t count. The Naked Purple, the movement that ran NaPurHab, was so far out on the edge that even the other lunatic fringe groups called them extreme. NaPurHab was valuable and important only because it was the only hab left. It was an asset that might someday prove useful, though the Purps hadn’t been the most useful of partners in the struggle so far.