She popped the crusts of her toast into her mouth and hurried on her way, the crunching in her mouth almost drowning out the thoughts in her head.
“Round and round she goes, and where she stops, no-bo-dy knows,” Eyeball whispered to herself.
Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on, big cheeze of the astronomy section, stared out the observation port of the Naked Purple Habitat, out onto the cold black of space, and whispered the old patter to herself.
“Nobody knows,” she whispered again. More and more often, she found herself wishing for the old daze, for her old job, for the times back when that statement had made sense, even if it had not been strictly true.
Rare was the roulette wheel in Nevada Free State where someone didn’t capiche where she stopped. But the marks had dug that—the license fees for an honest house were way higher than those for a shady one. In the long run, the marks knew, you got a better deal in one of the clip joints. Folks were more pleasant, too. The only geeks who gambled in the honest houses were the flamers so raging they had been bounced out of all the dives.
But that was the past, and Nevada Free State was not likely to figure large in Eyeball’s plans for the future. NevFree was back in the old daze, back when they was all in the Solar Area. “Solar System” was the straight name, but “system” implied a logic and order, and MomNature was not big on too much order. Still, it was hard to devote your life to the battle against order and reason in a Universe that seemed intent on killing you for nogood reason. Didn’t used to be that way. Used to be e-z-r to be anti-reason back when the Universe seemed more reasonable.
Eyeball sighed as she thought of backhome Nevada. She glanced toward the number four monitor, showing a pic of Earth. So near and yet so far. Nothing was going to get from NaPurHab to Nevada no how, or to any other part of Earth, not when there was a fleet of big damn paranoid skymountains whirling around the planet, keeping anything from getting too close. Damned COREs.
No way no how no one would ever get back to the simple pleasures of running a dishonest gambling house. Still, the present circs had compensation for a gambler. At present, Eyeball was concerned with a roulette wheel of somewhat larger proportions, and a game with more serious stakes. She was more worried by orbital mechanics than gambling laws.
Five years ago, during the Big Drop, what the straights back on Earth called the Abduction, the Naked Purple Habitat had been dragged along with Earth when Earth was stolen. NaPurHab was sent wheeling across the sky in an unstable, decaying orbit.
In a desperation throwdice move, the Maximum Windbag had dropped the habitat into the only stable orbit the hab could reach. From then till now, the hab had ridden an orbit around the Moonpoint Singularity, an orbit so tight it was actually inside Moonpoint Ring.
NaPurHab had spent the last five years in a fast, tight orbit of the black hole, the singularity, that sat at the center of the Moonpoint Ring.
That was how the hab had gotten into the game. Eyeball had just wrapped the calcs that old time and manner of its getting thrown out. “Round and round she goes,” Eyeball whispered to herself again. But she did not complete the little couplet this time. She knew exactly where this one would stop.
She glanced at the ticktock. Assuming the situation did not change, and the hab did not correct its orbit, NaPurHab would impact on the Moonpoint Singularity in 123 days, 47 minutes, and 19 seconds. That assumption, however, was a helluva big one. The situation had been doing nothing but change.
Moonpoint Ring’s swing around the hole was flopping up down all ways always, and that was bad. To put it another way, the orbit of the Moonpoint Ring around the wormhole was becoming more and more unstable, and that in turn was destabilizing NaPurHab’s orbital track.
As to howcum Moonpoint Ring’s swing around was failing, Eyeball couldn’t say. It was almost as if the big Windbag Charonians didn’t give no more of a damn. Moonpoint Ring’s orbit had never been more than metastable since the Big Drop, but used to be it had always gotten a noodge back toward equilibrium when things were looking bad. Not now, not no way. Charonians weren’t lifting a finger, or a tentacle, or whatever was they had.
And doing all the correct it burns was getting tough. The tanks were getting low. Ever time, it took a bigger and bigger swig of propellant to hold the hab swingaround together. Meantime, it was getting more and more difficult for Earth to top the tank, send refills. God or whoever or whatever bless the straights back on Earth for doing what they could, but weren’t much they could do.
Eyeball could see lines on a chart move good as anyone. Sooner or later, they would not be able to hold it together and the hab would pile it in. And the way things were falling apart, Eyeball had a deep hunch NaPurHab was going to go down soonerthanlater.
Sucked up by a black hole. Not a good way to check out.
Notcool notcool notcool.
“Where she stops, no one wanna know,” Eyeball whispered to herself.
Six
Grail of the Sphere
“Denial is a remarkable thing. With it, all things impossible are made possible, and vice versa. In the years following the Abduction, denial—the refusal to accept the facts of reality—came to be a major survival mechanism not only for individuals, but for society as a whole. Coupled with the refusal to see the Universe as it existed was the determination to see it as it was not, a will to build castles in the air out of what ought to have been.
“After a time, of course, the question became whether the cure was worse than the disease, whether it would indeed be possible for individuals—or society—to survive the survival mechanism.”
The Multisystem Research Institute at Columbia University in the city of New York was a goddamned big hole in the ground, but that was not much of a novelty in mid-twenty-fifth-century New York. Belowground construction had been popular even before the Abduction. Automated Lunar excavating technology had proved to be quite practical on Earth, environmental control was easy underground, and there weren’t many prime abovegrounds available.
After the Abduction, of course, the fad had really taken hold. Post-Abduction New York was even moodier and more paranoid than the city had been in times past. People wanted to hide.
Some people had—or pretended to have—reasons for going underground that had nothing to do with the Charonians. Many people felt safer underground. Well, maybe they were safer from street crime and bad weather and that sort of thing. But no one was really thinking about those dangers, even when they talked about them. They simply served as a nice series of plausible reasons for going underground.
Even if there was no real safety underground, people who lived and worked below street level did not have to see the sky. That was the major attraction. Underground living was downright fashionable.
However, there was such a thing as overdoing it—and that’s what MRI had done. Such was Sianna’s first thought every morning as she stepped into the high-speed elevator. She was early this morning, and all alone in the elevator car. Somehow that made it worse. She stood with her back to the rear wall of the car and reached out to either side. She wrapped both her hands tightly around the waist-high guardrail, and let her breath out slowly.