But the image itself fit. Fit into what, Sianna did not yet know, but it fit. The more Sianna stared at the endlessly repeating destruction of the Shattered Sphere, the more sure she was that the imagery held a clue to whatever it was she felt herself on the verge of finding.
But what the hell was she looking for? She was beginning to think that her subconscious already knew the answer, whereas she barely knew the question.
Sianna did not feel herself to be on the best of terms with her subconscious: it seemed to her that it often made her work to get what it already had. It was going to make her stumble her own way toward the inspiration that would set it all free. The clues, the knowledge, were inside her head, but her subconscious was going to make her find the stimuli, the images, the words, that would bring it all to the fore. So, how best to give her subconscious a poke?
Wait a second.
Wally. Sianna blinked at the screen and the images in it. She had been staring at the loop of imagery, the Sphere smashing, the two objects flying out of it, over and over again for ten minutes without seeing it. She shut her eyes and afterimages of the dying Sphere danced behind her eyelids. Sianna leaned back in her chair, opened her eyes, and looked up at a blank spot in the ceiling. Wally.
Something Wally had been talking about, something that whispered at the bottom of her skull. A hint, a guide toward an idea. Something that prodded her toward whatever it was she was looking for. His Charon Central and her thirty-seven minutes. Could the two be linked, somehow? Or was she just grasping at straws?
She turned toward where he had been, half-expecting him to be in the chair, staring into space. Then she remembered him leaving. She was getting as bad as he was.
She got up out of her chair, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Something Wally said. All right, go find him, and get him to say it again. Wally’s cubicle was just six doors down. She stepped out into the hallway and walked over. He had the door to his cubicle shut. Wally, it seemed, didn’t have much problem with enclosed spaces. Sianna knocked, but got no response. She tried again, but still nothing. Either he wasn’t in there or else…
She opened the door and sighed to herself. He was there all right— more or less. Wally sat slumped over in a blown-out old recliner he had unearthed somewhere, his body settled down in the chair so that his knees were higher than his head. Wally was completely unaware of where he was—and that was just as well, considering the shape the room was in. It was as messy as Sianna’s cubicle was clean. Empty food containers overflowed the recycle bin. Papers were stacked everywhere, in no apparent order. The light seemed dimmer in here, somehow. It smelled a bit moldy.
Wally was oblivious to all, clearly off in his own world, thinking about who knew what. He stared off into space, eyes locked on some unseen image. Hell and damnation. Now if she said anything, she would be interrupting him, breaking his train of thought—and his thoughts were valuable things.
But she had to break in. She was close to something. She could feel it. Wally did not have the knowledge, but she knew there was something he could say, something he could tell her, that would make it all clear to her. Maybe it didn’t even matter what he said. Her subconscious was telling her his words would hold the answer, and therefore they would.
“Wally,” she said. “Wally. Come on.” She reached out a careful, gentle hand and gave him a nudge.
Wally jumped a bit, startled, and looked about in bewilderment for a moment. “What? What?”
“Okay, Wally, you win. Show me what you have. Let’s see what Sakalov’s dreamed up this time.”
Eight
Wheels Within Wheels
The Adversary ventured, somewhat reluctantly, fully out into fast-time space. There were certainly benefits to be had, gains to be made, here in the cold, flat Universe outside the wormhole web. But it was, nonetheless, a most unpleasant place to be.
But no matter. It would not have to stay here long. There was no need to lose precious time and energy searching for its prey.
It had a good, solid lock on the wormhole link that had betrayed itself with those bursts of sympathetic vibration. Something, somewhere, had gone through a wormhole in such a way as to set off remarkably powerful vibrations.
An easy transit back toward the dead system it had left behind, the dead system where last it had fed. The trivial challenge of forcing the wormhole open, the brushing back of whatever pathetic defenses its prey could muster—and then the Adversary would kill and feed on the energy so obligingly stored up by its prey. Stored up by the Sphere.
The Sphere hung perfect in the night, glowing brick red in the darkness, strong and solid. The fine cross-hatching etched in its surface like tidy lines of latitude and longitude added to the sense of serenity and order. All was as it should be, all was under control.
Sianna walked a bit closer, brushing past the lightfleck of a Captive Sun, walking straight through holographic projections of several planets, all but microscopic at this scale, until the Sphere was right in front of her, a meter from her face. She had to admit it was impressive. Wally did indeed do good work.
“We have the whole Multisystem mapped into the simulation now,” Wally said with obvious pride. “All the Captive Suns and the known planets, of course. But also every known Charonian installation and object, all the way down to the COREs.”
Sianna had seen other sims of the Multisystem, of course, but she had never seen a full run of a full three-dee animated sim—and this was one of the best.
“What sort of detail can you get?” she asked.
“Well, it varies, of course,” Wally replied. “Some things we know to twelve decimal places, and others we’re just guessing at. The Terra Nova has done good long-range mapping surveys of the closer planets and good spectroscopic and mass studies of pretty much all the Captive Suns. The most distant Captive Worlds and a few of the Captive Suns that are behind dust clouds we don’t know so well. And of course we don’t have completely reliable masses for a lot of the objects in the Multisystem—just apparent masses. Our only way to measure the mass of a body is by measuring the movement of bodies near it. From that we get a measure of gravity, and from there to mass. Back in the Solar System, it was a straight conversion, cut and dried. Here, we have to guess what is a straight, ordinary gravity field and what is an artificial field imposed by the Charonians.”
Sianna nodded. “But what about the Sphere and its behavior? How good is your detail on that?”
“Not so good,” Wally admitted. “We, ah, have to fudge a lot on that.”
No surprise there, either. The Sphere was a completely artificial object. How the hell could you determine which motions were the result of natural forces and which were deliberate action? You could not derive information about either mass or density from, say, the orbits of the Captive Suns, for the Suns’ orbits made no sense whatever. The Sunstar, about which the Earth revolved, orbited the Sphere at the same radial rate, and thus with the same orbital period, as Captive Sun Fifteen—even though CS-15 was a billion kilometers closer to the Sphere, and exactly 180 degrees ahead of the Sunstar.
Sianna found the Sunstar, and then CS-15, in the simulation. CS-15 was always invisible from Earth, of course, hidden behind the bulk of the Sphere. The Terra Nova had spotted it and reported back.