Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 13

"The signals and the gravity waves are artificial, Sondra. Which means Earth didn't just disappear,"

he said. "Somebody took it."

"We know that it's still sending pulses of gravity waves, and that radio signal." Tyrone Vespasian sat in his office, behind his desk, willing himself to calmness. He knew there was something overcontrolled about his movements, as if he were trying to hold too much in. Was he trying too hard to be rational, logical, to be sensible when sense was useless? "The signal proves it. That's a deliberate message signal, not some natural radio noise. Even if we can't read it."

"And where is that signal coming from?" Lucian asked gently.

Vespasian s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably in his seat.

"From here. From somewhere on the Moon. It's almost as if it's coming from everywhere at once,out of a whole series of dispersed transmitters. We can't find it."

"Don't you think that might give us a few problems?" Lucian asked. "Earth vanished two-point-six seconds after the beam touched it-the exact time for a speed-of-light signal to go back and forth between the Earth and Moon. If they decide to blame us, Mars and the Belt Community might decide to do something drastic."

Vespasian nodded, leaned in toward Lucian and lowered his voice. "I've thought of that, too.

Remember the proposal about ten years ago to blow up Mercury to get at its core metals? They wanted to create a second asteroid belt close enough in to the Sun so they could really get some use out of Solar power. Officially, the Community never got around to building the Core Cracker bomb-but suppose they did, unofficially? The Moon's about the same size as Mercury, with a lower ma.s.s. The Belt Community might figure it's them or us."

"But we didn't do it!" Lucian protested.

"I checked, and as of five minutes ago, no less than six groups have claimed credit for the quakes, Earth's vanishment, or both. Three on the Moon, two on board the surviving habitats, and one on Mars. Rad groups, nut groups, and most of them barely know which end of a screwdriver to hold.

None of them could possibly have pulled this off. All they're doing is blowing off steam, trying to upset the applecart and fit the disaster into their ideology. The Final Clan Habitat survived, and I read some guff from those nuts. Claiming they had swept away Earth, the source of all genetic decadence and lower races. Now they're free to breed their superhumans without interference. No one has taken any of these groups seriously in decades. They always claim responsibility for disasters. But suppose someone is rattled enough to believe them now- and we get caught in the line of fire?" Vespasian said."Thanks to that d.a.m.n fool McGillicutty sending a public message from Venus, everyone-including the nut groups-knows all about the twenty-one-centimeter radio signal, the speed-of-light delay, and the gravity waves. They can talk those things up, sound impressive, like they really did it. But none of them can know about the black hole yet-unless they did do it."

"So if we keep our mouths shut about it, that might be a way to spot the real culprits," Vespasian said.

"Or at least prove none of our local crazies did it,"

Lucian said.

"Then who did do it?" Vespasian demanded.

Lucian frowned. "Jesus, Vespy. You're talking about the most horrible crime in history. I can't imagine anyone being able to do it. Not emotionally, or mentally. I can't imagine a reason good enough for doing it." Lucian paused a moment. "Those scientists on Pluto fired the gravity beam. But if they meant to wreck Earth, then why announce the experiment beforehand? Most of them are from Earth, and Earth funded their work.

Besides, the beam touched Venus and those outer planet satellites-and the Moon for that matter-and we're still here. Which suggests the beam was a coincidence, or set off someone else's hidden system, or that the real baddies timed the thing to look like Pluto did it. Pluto had no motive.

"If anyone had a good enough motive-and I don't think anyone does-it could be Mars and the Belt Community. They've got a lot of weird hardware floating around out there in deep s.p.a.ce.

Stuff n.o.body knows about. With Earth out of the way, Mars and the B.C. are suddenly dominant in the Solar System. And they get to blame the disaster on us-or on a bunch of mad scientists on Pluto."

"But Earth is their biggest market!" Vespasianprotested. "Everyone on Mars and in the Belt has some kind of family Earthside! And dammit, they're human beings. No human being could commit this crime."

"Which leaves open one other possibility," Lucian said.

"Oh no. No you don't." Vespasian stood up suddenly and began pacing back and forth behind his desk. "Come on, Lucian. Don't throw aliens from outer s.p.a.ce at me. There's nothing out there. By now we'd have found something." There was something in Vespasian's soul that felt chilled by the very thought.

Lucian ignored his friend's discomfiture. He rubbed his face with tired hands. He felt drained, all capacity for emotion sucked out of him. "Either humans or aliens, Vespy. Take your choice. Either people who couldn't possibly do it, or beings from another world who don't exist. Bug-eyed aliens, insane human terrorists, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny gone bad. Somebody did it. And we're not going to find out who's guilty sitting here. Just don't send a public message about the Earthpoint black hole," Lucian said. "It could only make matters worse, scare people more. Send coded messages to the scientific groups. Let them work on it."

Vespasian grunted. "Okay, I guess." He shook his head and looked at the wall clock. "Jesus, those poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds on Pluto."

"What do you mean?" Lucian asked.

"I mean the frigging speed of light. Think about it. Earth went poof ten hours ago. They sent the gravity wave five hours before it reached its target, went to bed, got up, and didn't find out what they had done until then, five and a half hours after we saw it happen. We're sending the word about the black hole now. They won't find out about that until late tonight. It's like it's all happening to them in adream on the other side of the Universe."

Vespasian stared into s.p.a.ce. "Terrible things happen, things you cause accidentally. You don't learn the consequences of what you've done for eleven hours after it happens, and you can't stop the terror once you've set it in motion. If you were the poor son of a b.i.t.c.h who had pushed the b.u.t.ton in the first place, how many shocks like that could you take?"

The day the Tycho Purple Penal Fire Department burned down her parent's house Marcia felt the purest joy of her life. The memory popped into her mind unbidden, and at first she wondered why.

Then she understood. Her subconscious was reminding her how much she had already survived.

Remember, Marcia told herself. Remember the turmoil, the chaos you have survived to get here.

You can survive this, too. Remember the strange and terrible way you escaped, and the joy you felt that day.

The moment came back to her. The black pall of smoke hazing over the dome's interior, the gray ashes sifting downward, the firemen laughing and chuckling, putting away their blowtorches. And Marcia watching it all, tears of happiness in her eyes.

It was mere days before her eighteenth birthday, and the fire made her a homeless minor refugee in the eyes of the Lunar Republic, made homeless by an official act that was unquestionably not of her doing. She had a receipt from the fire department to prove that.

The fire was her ticket out of Tycho Purple Penal,because legal refugees were one of the very few categories of souls ent.i.tled to pa.s.s through the Lunar Republic's security checkpoints, out of the asylum into the saner world outside.

Life didn't get easier after leaving home. There were only two nations on the Moon: Tycho Purple Penal and the Lunar Republic. Getting by in the feisty Republic, confronted on all sides with the legendary touch of cheerful surliness burned into the Lunar character-now that had been a challenge. She was astonished to discover that she missed the parents she could never see face-to-face again. She spent far too much on videocalls to Tycho. But if life among the Naked Purples had any virtue, it was that the experience prepared you to cope with anything.

Gerald. Gerald. Earth had been taken, and Gerald, her loving, perfect husband had gone with the planet. Could she learn to cope with that?

There had to be an explanation. They must have missed something, something that would make sense of it all. Marcia knew that. They must have.

Even wrapped up in a fetal ball on her bed, struggling to block out the world, her mind demanded that she find the missing answer, make sense of the madness.

The desire to find sense in order to survive madness was a deep-seated reflex for Marcia, after being raised in the Naked Purple scene, struggling to be the ordinary child of extraordinary-even mad-parents. Whenever, as a child and a teenager, she had been surrounded by madness, she had clung to the hope, the urgently needed faith that the Purple weirdness was itself surrounded by a larger world of sanity. The sort of sanity and decency that Gerald had always represented. But no, don't think of him now, she thought. Calm yourself. Sanity existed. She believed that, had to believe it now, just as she always had.

She had been born into the Naked Purplemovement not long after it expanded from its...o...b..tal habitat into the former home of the Tycho Penal Colony on the Moon. After eighteen years of hearing only the Purple version of events, the straight version of history sounded strange to her.

Tycho Purple Penal Station had started out centuries before as the Soviet Lunar base, and had pa.s.sed to the United Nations' control with the final Soviet breakup. In the bad old days when UNLAC-the United Nations Lunar Administration Council-ran the Moon, Tycho had been made into a U.N. penal colony, and had rapidly devolved into the final dumping ground for the human refuse of the Earth, the Moon, and the Settlement Worlds.

Tycho Penal was specifically intended to be not only escape-proof, but reprieve-proof. No prisoner was ever sent there under any sentence except life without parole.

When the Lunar Republic was declared, eighty years before Marcia was born, the Lunar Colonists-the Conners-were very careful not to lay claim to the Tycho Penal Colony and environs. They were quite happy to let the United Nations administer the nightmare it had created for itself.

Even after the Republic, the United Nations let Tycho Penal stagger along a few years as a prison, until a resolution pa.s.sed the General a.s.sembly banning the placement of any more prisoners at Tycho. UNLAC was stuck with the bills for a prison populated with old men and women too mean to die. The costs of running the place rapidly got out of hand-until it dawned on UNLAC that it would be cheaper to declare the place a separate republic, and announce that all current residents were naturalized citizens.

The Lunar Republic promptly decreed that any bearer of a Tychoean pa.s.sport found in the Republic would be escorted back to the Tycho border-with or without a pressure suit. Every nation on Earth, and all of the Settlement Worlds,refused to honor Tycho pa.s.sports.

So the convicts-and, by this time, their descendants- were technically free, but legally they couldn't travel.

Tycho was still tough to get out of illegally, for that matter. But the convicts could write their own laws, and own their own property. The Lunar Republic did allow some amount of legitimate trade, which provided ample cover for smuggling operations. It gave the convicts a window on the outside world.

All in all, it wasn't much of an opening. But it was enough for the smart cons to get rich, while the dumb ones starved. After a while, the inevitable happened, and one of the smartest, meanest convicts managed to muscle everyone else out of power and set himself up as the King of Tycho: Redeye Sid the First.

That much was history-confirmable facts. The rest was half legend, half outright lie. Marcia had never quite decided which was which. The story went that Redeye Sid won the last open tract of Tycho in a poker game. A crooked game, some whispered. But no one could be sure, as Redeye was the only player to survive the game. Unless that tale was circulated by Sid to keep enemies in line.

And then, in the tenth year of his reign, Redeye Sid dropped dead (or was poisoned) and left it all to his idiot (or perhaps mad genius or political malcontent) son Jasper, who listened to off-planet broadcasts a bit too often. More particularly, Redeye Jasper listened to the Purple Voice beaming down from NaPurHab. He got religion. Or philosophy. Or paranoid delusions. No one could ever decide which.

Whatever the Purple was, it had earned itself a prominent place in any history of the irrational.

What the Purps were for, what they were against, what their goals were-all those issues weremeaningless to the Purps. Alienating themselves from society, offending the world and then protesting the world for taking offense, that was the Purple way. The Purples drenched themselves in anger, anger for its own sake, absurdity as an art and a political policy, the overturning of any and all existing forms. That was the closest the Purps came to a goal, a Naked Purple ideal.

Marcia thought back to the allegory that named the movement: Get naked, paint yourself purple, and walk down the street. If people were surprised, shocked, offended, or merely amused, rail at them for their small-minded, bourgeois ways. If they accepted you and let you be, despise them for being blinkered, too narrow-minded to see the special and the marvelous in this world. Any reaction, all reactions, or no reaction at all were grounds for contempt.

It was a formula for attracting the ostracized, ensuring that recruits would feel left out, rejected by the world. And it gave Purps a way to feel superior to the hidebound, workaday world, making sure they could be accepted only by fellow Purps.

It was the sort of anger at everything that might appeal to the irrational heir to a mad kingdom. Like Jasper.

As with all converts to the Naked Purple movement, Redeye Jasper was required to sign over all his worldly goods to the movement. Such goods and property included the Kingdom of Tycho. So the Naked Purple movement came into possession of its own country.

By the time the Purples moved in, Tycho hadn't, strictly speaking, been a prison for decades, but the Lunar Republic's government still held to the same Tycho policy it had retained for generations: Anyone could go into Tycho Penal, but no one could come out. Even after a hundred years, there were mighty few loopholes in that rule. In effect, it was still a prison. The Republic was not in the least bitwilling to change that policy for the sake of a bunch of habitat crazies.

The Naked Purples declared themselves liberators anyway. They moved in, took over, and officially renamed the place Tycho Purple Penal Station. They made much of all the contradictions and tensions bubbling in that name-and in the city itself.

The Naked Purples and a mob of former convicts living cheek by jowl inside a former maximum security prison was a sure formula for confrontation. The murder rate spiked high, even for Tycho, that first year. But, surprisingly, mostly convicts were dying. The Purples swiftly demonstrated their talent for survival and control, and the situation settled down a bit.

Marcia's parents met at Tycho Purple Penal, her father a second-generation convict, her mother one of the more combative leaders of the Purple's nonviolent-aggression arm. Unless Marcia really concentrated, all she could remember of her childhood was one long screaming argument between the two of them, endless suspicion, and wild accusations. That sort of thing was considered a Naked Purple art form. And yet, like any child, she accepted her own situation as normal.

Adolescence was at least more varied, hewing to the Naked Purple philosophy of education by extreme. Cloying doses of love and then random anger; overwhelming attention and then abandonment. Forced to live with the Naked Purple shock-value philosophy, the teenaged Marcia got a dose of it all.

One summer (or what would have been summer if the environmental engineers hadn't decided seasons were bourgeois and locked the thermal controls at twenty degrees centigrade) she spent under the gray stone dome of the abandoned main penal camp, sewing seeds she knew were dead into soil she knew was sterile.She could no longer remember the precise nuance of the particular nihilist-dialectic theory the experience was supposed to teach her, other than the futility of all effort, a central precept of the Naked Purple worldview. Everything had something to do with studying futility. The Purples worked very hard to convince themselves that work was useless. The details of why didn't matter anyway.

The whole point was that work was meaningless.

All she remembered of that summer was grayness. Grayness, and her flat, defeated acceptance of the situation. The joyless unpainted gray dome of the stone sky. The cold, gray, shadowless light from the glowblimps, hovering overhead like lifeless jellyfish, floating dead in the currents of the air. The gray pallor of the unfertilized Lunar soil that billowed in endless cloaking clouds at the slightest breath of air. The gray, choking, dust-sucking thirst that followed the students as they worked down the razor-straight rows, carefully planting the lifeless seeds.

And the gray, throbbing ache between her shoulders that never seemed to leave, the one product of her endless days of stoop labor.

She grew up surrounded by all the alleged benefits of Purple living, starting with the search after truth through lies, of moderation through extremes and the creative tension of the permanent nonviolent riot. The endless confrontations with the unreconstructed convicts seemed nothing more than another aspect of the Purple ideal of sullen absurdity. Near-starvation would follow a season of compulsory hedonistic debauchery. Any artist who was celebrated today could count on being vilified tomorrow. The police were required to break the law on occasion, and the standard punishment for most crimes was doing a stretch in the police department. Fix a broken machine without authorization, steal a neighbor's property without leaving your own behind, dress conventionally, andyou did time on the force.

Marcia grew into p.u.b.erty always fearing that Orgy Day was going to be declared again, praying that Celibacy Month would be randomly extended.

And yet, in spite of all she had been through, for reasons that she could certainly not explain, Marcia MacDougal still not only wanted, but expected the world to make sense.

No doubt that was a large part of why she had married Gerald, why she had loved him in the first place. Even though she could not share his religious beliefs, the fact that he had beliefs was a comfort.

But Gerald was missing, along with the rest of Earth. Marcia felt something go cold in her chest at that fact, the reality she could not escape. With an effort of will, she once again tried to force her mind away from that chain of thought. She tried to focus on the problem at hand.

They had missed something, she told herself again. All of the people struggling to find an answer. She had missed something. Her subconscious was stubbornly convinced that there was some key factor that they had all overlooked, something that might actually make some sense of it all. That was the message her inner self was sending.

Wait a second. Message. That was it. The twenty-one-centimeter-band source. McGillicutty had completely missed that it was artificial; not just a source but a signal, a message. She uncurled from her fetal ball and sat up.

Even if McGillicutty had missed the fact that it was a deliberate signal, few other people would.

But had anyone even thought to try to decode the message? Would they be able to do so? Would they know how? She thought back to her days as a grad student at the Lunar Inst.i.tute of Technology, back to the days when she had met Gerald. They had met in a xeno-bio course- one that started out teachingMessage Theory, proposed techniques for communicating with aliens for the express purpose of getting such nonsense out of the way. That way the cla.s.s could get down to a.n.a.lyzing slime molds without further interruption.

Message Theory. The idea that there were certain irreducible concepts common to any technological civilization. A form of communication based on reference to those ideas ought to be readable to any other civilization. She got up, went to her desk console, and started calling up reference files.

Maybe it was time to give those old nonsense theories a test.

Marcia knew she was facing an absurdly complex task. If indeed the radio source was a signal, it was presumably a message in an utterly foreign language.

Unless, of course, it wasn't aliens who had done this at all, but instead some bunch of perfectly standard-issue humans, crazies who had gotten hold of some very strange technology. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the Octal Millennialists had double-checked the portents, counted up by eight again and discovered they had made a mistake in their base-eight calculations of the date for Judgment Day. Suppose it had come due and they had decided to help it along. Or suppose some other tech-gang had dreamed up a way to hold the Earth hostage. That seemed impossible-but so did everything else about this disaster. If it was a human plot, then presumably that twenty-one-centimeter signal was heavily encrypted. If it was a nonhuman code, then presumably it could only be tougher.

Simply to sit down at a computer console and plunge into the task without preparation was absurd. It was as if she had decided to crack the Rosetta stone in one afternoon.

But she had a few distinct advantages over Champollion and the other Rosetta detectives:computers. In VISOR's main computer system, she had highly sophisticated pattern-recognition programs at her command. The twenty-one-centimeter signal seemed to be binary in nature, a series of zeroes and ones, ideal for computer manipulation. The number-crunching side of the problem would be straightforward enough.

But even with all that said, the task should have taken months, perhaps years to crack. If Marcia had been in a truly rational state of mind, rather than merely struggling to maintain a veneer of rationality over her panic and despair, she might have realized that, and never even made the attempt.

It was perfectly ridiculous even to try.

And downright absurd that she cracked the first stage of the message in fifteen minutes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Summoning the Demons Coyote Westlake woke up with a pounding headache, slumped in a corner of her habitat shed.

What the h.e.l.l had she been drinking last night?

Lying there without moving a muscle, she carefully reviewed the night before. Wait a second, she thought. I didn't have anything to drink. I haven't had a drink in weeks. There was a very good reason for that: there wasn't a drop of booze left in the hab shed or the s.h.i.+p.

Clearly something was wrong. She had to think this out. But the reflexes of an experienced drinker had taught her to keep her eyes shut when she found herself in this sort of position, being careful not to move a muscle while she took stock of hersituation. Getting up and moving was a quick invitation to particularly messy forms of vertigo-especially in zero gee. She lay still, eyes shut, and tried to remember.

If she hadn't been drinking the night before, then this was not a hangover. She had gone to bed early and stone cold sober, in a good mood even. Then what the h.e.l.l had happened? She needed more data.

She cautiously opened one eye, and then the other, and found herself staring at what seemed to be the forward bulkhead of the hab shed, at the far end of the cabin from her bunk. She was pasted, facedown, to the wall of the shed. She realized her nose was somehow both numb and sore at the same time, and the pain in her head was across her forehead. She must have slammed herself facefirst into the wall somehow. That, as least, would explain the headache-but how the h.e.l.l had she thrown herself across the cabin? Even in zero gee, it was a h.e.l.l of a stunt. Had she leapt out of bed during a nightmare?

Moving cautiously to avoid the stomach-whirling nausea she still half-expected, she reached out with both her hands and pushed herself away from the bulkhead. She drifted back away from the wall-and then was astonished to find herself drifting back down toward it. No, not drifting-falling.

She scrambled in midair and managed to swing herself around fast enough to land, rather awkwardly, on her rump rather than her face again.

Falling? In zero gee? Not zero anymore. She would estimate it as about a twentieth gee or so.

She sat there, staring at the cabin above her- above her-in utter bewilderment. Her bunk was bolted to the aft wall of the cabin-which had now become the ceiling. The sheet was caught by one of the restraint clips, or otherwise it would have fallen too. Now it hung absurdly down. She glanced around the forward bulkhead she was sitting on and found it littered with bits and pieces of equipmentthat had slammed down with her. She reached up and felt a b.u.mp on the top of her head. Something must have clipped her as it fell.