All the planets still had the satellites and ring systems they were supposed to have. All was well.
Except that it wasn’t, of course. The Lunar Wheel slumbered in the depths of the Moon, and soon it was to awaken. Sianna had not realized how hard it was going to be to watch it all happen again. Even in a simulator, even in pursuit of a breakthrough, there was nothing pleasurable in watching the disaster all over again.
One year a minute, starting ten years back. Sianna turned and found the Earth, close in by the Sun, the Moon wheeling steadily about the blue-white marble that floated in the darkness. There, on that world, ten years ago, she had been growing up, perhaps just a little too fast. She imagined a submicroscopic nine-year-old version of her self back in a miniature France on the simulated world in front of her. She remembered being teased by the other children over her funny name and its funnier spelling, desperately hoping her mother’s job in America would come through and Sianna could move away from the cruel taunts.
A year a minute, and the tiny Earth swung once around the Sun. A ten-year-old with frizzy hair, skinned knees, and easily hurt feelings learned that children in New York, children everywhere, could be cruel—but also learned that she was brave enough to endure it, and that in enduring the taunts came acceptance.
Another minute, and a second year went past, and a third, and Sianna remembered kissing a boy for the first time. A tall, gawky boy with a forgotten name and a half-remembered, sharp-featured face. It shocked her that she could not bring his name to mind. Her whole world had revolved about him! Now all she could remember about him was the kiss itself, out on the hill behind the school, and the clumsy, tingly, exciting feel of it all. For some reason, she associated a distinct smell of butterscotch with the event, though she couldn’t imagine why.
She smiled to recall that gentle moment in her confused adolescence, the mad crush she had had on the boy, the silly romance they had shared for an eyeblink-short span of spring days. It was all over in real life nearly as fast as she imagined the time rushing past on the simulated miniature Earth.
Four minutes, four years gone by, and the Sianna-that-was on the miniature Earth was discovering a larger world than boys and giggling, was looking up at the busy night sky and wondering if perhaps there was a place in it for her.
She was starting to plan, to think, to map out what she imagined was a sensible route through life. Left too much on her own by her always-working parents, never quite sure where she stood with them, thirteen-year-old Sianna had set out to put everything in its proper place. Her room was always neat, her homework always perfect, her world always in order. She had worked out her future as well, in relentless detail. She would go to this school, get that degree, work at this job, meet and marry that sort of man, have this number of children by that age.
Sianna shook her head, remembering, marveling at the sensible, orderly, rigid future she had worked out for herself. Looking back from here, from just a few years on, it all seemed so silly. Even if the Charonians had not come, if everything hadn’t changed, no life could be mapped out that tidily. You couldn’t always do what was sensible. More often you just worked with what you had, dealt with the situation in front of you. Even if you were a Charonian.
The mini-Earth swung round the imaginary Sun in its comfortable orbit, making something like its four billion, seven hundred and fifty millionth revolution about the Sun. Its last revolution. Sianna stood there in the dark, watching, remembering, knowing what was about to happen, crying in the darkness for the loss she was about to watch.
Four and a half, five minutes, four and a half years gone by, and her parents were happy and well, though perhaps not as attentive as other kids’ parents. Both of them had always been more intent on their work than their child. Always friendly, always there with a smile, and maybe even a brief hug or a pat on the arm, but somehow never very approachable. They never had time now, but they would make it up to her later. Except the Charonians came, and they could never, ever, make it up to her.
Five minutes. Five years. She glanced at the time-date display, and knew it was about to start. “Slow up here, Wally,” she said. “A minute a day here.”
The planets slowed abruptly, and time seemed to freeze for a moment before Sianna could detect the motion in the slowed-down rhythms. Now, she told herself. Just about now.
Wally had programmed the gravity beams to appear as bright red lines, even though they were as invisible as gravity in real life. A slush of red light stretched out across the darkness, reaching from Pluto, from the Ring of Charon. The first test beams, sent to all of the major test facilities on the inner planets and moons.
At the time and distance scales Wally was using, a light beam took long minutes to cross the long reaches of space from Pluto and Charon to the inner worlds. The Ring of Charon had fired ten-minute pulses at each of the inner worlds.
“Slow down again,” Sianna whispered. She had to see this, understand it perfectly. “Give me a minute per hour.”
Again the display slowed, and again time seemed to stop before moving on more slowly. Now blood-red spears of light, each ten light-minutes long, were moving down into the Solar System from the Ring of Charon. One to Saturn’s moon Titan, then to Jupiter’s Ganymede, then Mars and Venus. The spears of light touched each world in turn, harmlessly, undetectable save by the most sophisticated of gravity-wave detectors. Now all the beams, all but the last, had struck. “Normal rate time now, Wally,” Sianna whispered.
Sianna looked down on the shining blue-white globe of Earth, clouds and sea and sky shining, glitter-bright. Somewhere down on that perfect miniature she could imagine that it was just past noon on a perfect June day. She knew where she had been when it happened. Everyone did. Down there, Sianna and her friends were just going outside to have lunch in the school quadrangle, chattering away about how many days of school were left until vacation, what to wear to school next day, how to get the calculus homework done. They were just reaching the crest of the hill when it happened. It was not until much later that she learned where her parents had been, but now she could visualize it all so perfectly that it was almost as if she had been with them, as well. There, down on that tiny jewel of a world, her parents were just about to meet for lunch at one of their favorite spots. A restaurant in a four-hundred-year-old brownstone, probably constructed long before anyone had even thought about building codes.
Time seemed to slow again, but this time it had nothing to do with Wally adjusting the controls. This was the moment that changed it all, the instant that made Sianna what she was, that changed the life of every human being.
The last spear of light reached for Earth, touched it, brushed past it and hit the Moon. And inside the Moon the Lunar Wheel awoke. A disk of blue-white something/nothing appeared between Earth and Moon, swept toward the planet—and Earth was gone. The blue-white disk vanished. That was that. Earth was gone.
“That’s all we have from direct observation for what happened back in the Solar System, Sianna,” Wally said, his voice quiet and reserved. “From here on in, it’s all conjectures and best guesses, and a little bit of hard information from the Saint Anthony data.”