Remember the Wheel
Jun. 17th, 2011 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolHekatora fires the attitude jets one more time, and our roll corrects itself. Hekatora comes from Tantafel, home of Merxis the Prophet, so everybody else in the space program has their doubts about her. The queer Merxian religion that has so overtaken that quadrant of the Wheel basically says that only the knowledge set in stone by Merxis himself is given unto us by the Divine Spirit, and all else is heresy. Naturally, a member of the astronaut corps hailing from Tantafel is seen as having an anti-science bent. However, Hekatora and I have been training together for five years, and I know her to be a conscientious and dedicated engineer and scientist. I would, and do, trust her with my life.
Hekatora's voice crackles over the audio link. "I have the Oculus coming up fast," she says. "Intercept in two minutes. You better get ready with the Leash."
"It's too early to fire," I object. "I'll shoot it in a minute."
"Okay, but if you miss, we're up here another seven hours," says Hekatora. "Don't do that to a girl. You know I have big plans." Hekatora's getting married. Their ceremony will be held in the barren quadrant of Barratura. When Mateo the Murderer painted that quadrant's spire with a crude uranium matrix, he had no way of knowing that it's the spires that keep the Veils from blanketing the entire land. It was only two hundred years ago that Scuronauts penetrated the blackness that covered that quadrant and cleaned off the spire well enough for the disruptor effects to subside. Life has been steady returning, transplanted from other quadrants; there are a few communities but it's mostly wide open spaces – just the thing for a girl like Hekatora.
"All right, don’t rush a fellow," I say. I'm standing outside the capsule in my voidsuit, my boots hooked into cleats, holding the net-launcher. We're two hundred miles above the surface of Tulu – my home village is almost directly below us – in a slow counter-sun orbit. The Oculus, meanwhile, is a high-speed satellite whizzing by much faster than we're going. Our goal is to tether it, match velocities, and then reenter into Lake Llapala. Then we can reacquire the precious cargo of the Oculus – images taken of the Apocalypse – and figure out how to stop it.
I fire the net-gun. The weights spin as the wad of netting shoots out, slowly drawing the web open as the drag line pays out. Soon the net is at full diameter, fifty yards, and I trim the drag line to keep the net spinning in a location to intercept the Oculus's orbit. Then I hustle back inside the capsule and secure the door.
We don’t have to wait long. The Oculus plants itself neatly in the meat of the net, which collapses around the probe. With a jerk our capsule goes dragging along behind the ancient satellite. Hekatora applies the retros slowly, and we carefully decelerate ourselves to zero over the space of two hours. As we come up on Lake Llapala, the capsule and the tethered Oculus come to a halt, hanging motionless in space.
Ballistics is a very strange science. At two hundred miles up, we are almost eighty miles above the gravopause. The downward force of gravity is even and uniform up to that point. Above the gravopause, one enters the Circulation Zone, where there is no gravity, and objects with rotational vectors remain in those vectors until perturbed. The sun is one such object – a huge mass of radioactive minerals, seasonally waxing and waning in luminosity, in a continuous high orbit, just below the Veil that roofs the universe. There is one sun for each quadrant, all synchronized together.
I go back outside and reel in the tether. The Oculus bumps into the capsule. It is exactly as the ancient schematics showed it would be, a satellite built by the previous age's best engineers, made completely without electronics or organic matter. It is covered with a thin layer of space-dust, perturbed only by the webbing, and has smeared panes of volcanic glass on multiple sides. Its cleats match the securing hooks of the capsule perfectly – we designed the capsule with precisely this in mind – and soon two ages of space exploration are merged together into one bundle.
It is time for reentry. I strap myself into the crash couch, and Hekatora fires the attitude jets to point us towards home. Then she hits the thrusters, and we roar towards the gravopause. She turns the vehicle at the last moment, thrusters pointing down towards the lake far below.
There's a visible line marking that boundary; a hazy shell of dust and moisture lingers above the gravopause, its particles of grit and water droplets in rotational orbit, while the space below it is perfectly clear skies. As we cross the threshold, our stomachs jump up into our mouths and we drop like a rock. Hekatora punches the thrusters, and we brake against the force of gravity. She uses attitude jets to correct our trajectory, and I release the chute in the final few miles of fall. The capsule with its precious cargo makes a perfect splash landing in the lake's center. The retrieval craft fishes us out; Doctor Ktangit is on the deck to see us aboard.
The Doctor is our Age's foremost genius. He is a Mhau, a race of great thinkers since ancient times, but even among Mhau the Doctor is exemplary. As a child he destroyed every aptitude test ever devised. At the age of eight he was placed in the Labyrinth, the automated arcology our ancestors were locked in during the Apocalypse, and which could only be escaped from once the occupants had successfully learned all the scientific information carved into its walls; at the age of twelve he walked out. It was The Doctor who, using the previous age's lore for building satellites that could cross Veil fields, developed the Universe Mapping Project to transit the quadrants circumferentially and thereby verify that we live upon a wheel.
The Doctor supervises the removal of the Oculus from the dripping capsule. Me and Hekatora are forgotten; he cares only for that ancient satellite that must have witnessed the death, and rebirth, of our world. Workmen load the Oculus onto a dolly and wheel it into a hold for inspection. Here on the surface the Oculus suddenly looks very small.
The Apocalypse event is really just a small dose of the regular Veil field. Its disruption of organic matter is not so pronounced, the equivalent of a severe sunburn; it has little effect on metal. But electronics are utterly scrambled, and the memories and higher thinking processes of exposed individuals are irretrievably disrupted. We know this from recording devices that the previous age's technicians left behind – cameras set to capture the effects on humans at the precise moment that the Apocalypse arrives. The images are chilling to watch; sane, civilized human beings are transformed into animals in the blink of an eye. For the first few generations, the humans live in utter savagery. Then they start to learn, nudged and pushed by the programs and the devices left behind. The box that dispenses sugar pills for increasingly complex manipulations of patterns, for instance, or the map that shows where a stash of euphorics can be found if only its symbols can be deciphered – these are the tools that have been developed over the ages to accelerate human learning as fast as possible to extend the period where a generation can usefully contribute to plotting its escape from the cycle of ignorance.
We follow the Doctor into his study. He has the top case of the Oculus off already and is peering into its cavernous depths with a flashlight, muttering to himself.
"Yes, moisture, of course," he mumbles. "The most reliable of processes. Very sensible over the long term."
"What's sensible?" I ask. The Doctor looks up, irritated.
"Water vapor condensation," he mutters. "Best method of automating the image gathering when batteries and wiring and microelectronics won't work. See, the Oculus orbited below the sun, right, and at a faster rate. Twelve times per day the sun passed over the glass on the top of the satellite. When that happened, the sun's radiation evaporated the moisture clouding that window and admitted enough light to expose the photographic plates. So, the Oculus took twelve pictures per day-cycle until it ran out of film."
I nod. "But not twelve pictures of the top of the wheel, right?" asks Hekatora.
"No, of course not," snaps the Doctor. "It's in radial circumferential orbit, paralleling the sun, so it's taking shots evenly spaced around the cross-section of the donut. Which is exactly what we want to see if we're interested in the propagation of the Apocalypse Effect. Ah, here we are." He pulls out a module containing what looks like a stack of thin sheets of frosted glass. He carefully pulls out one and holds it up to the light.
"Beautiful," he says. "The glass sandwich and the vacuum has preserved the photo-emulsion perfectly, even though it's been centuries since these images were taken." He places the stack into a kind of slide projector and begins to cycle through the images.
"Here we are, high above the surface of Tulu," he says. "A perfectly nice day, it looks like – thank goodness for clear weather. Ah, now it's swept out over the sea. Then we reach the cataracts, where the water falls off the edge on its way towards the center of the torus. Ah, now we reach the underside of the rim of the Wheel; this froth here is the point of gravipause, where the falling water crosses into the Circulation Zone and sweeps back up and around to rain down from overhead. Now, as you can see, we're completely underwater; and now we're crossing out and up the other side."
The Doctor frowns at the next slide. "Ah. Something is happening now," he says. "See the glow on the edge? The Apocalypse event is occurring. It's propagating from the center of the torus, from the Hub Veil at the very center."
"As expected," I say. The cylindrical Veil that shrouds the center of the Wheel hub has been visited by three space missions; none of them returned. There must be something in the center that is unfriendly to visitors. The Doctor cycles the next slide.
"We have moved a twelfth of the way around the orbit," he says, "but in this next image the glow has spread almost across the field of view. From this we can estimate the speed of propagation. It's very fast. That's interesting, don't you think?"
An idea occurs to me. "Doctor," I say, "if the Apocalypse Event is just like the Veil, why can't we shield against it?"
"Lower power, deeper penetration," he says, as if this explains everything. I start to interrupt but Hekatora touches my arm and shakes her head.
The Doctor cycles through a few more images. "Now here we are where we started," he says. "The lights are out on the surface. The Effect happens quickly and effectively." He turns off the projector and begins to pace the room.
"We know the Veils project from the hub as well," he muses. "Uranium impregnated items thrust into a Veil create an upward wake. So, some sort of a field generator lies down there. Mechanical or natural? Could be either, I suppose, but 'machine' is suggested. Then what is the purpose of The Wheel, hmm?" He stops and looks expectantly at me and Hekatora.
I squirm. "Uh, I don't know," I say. "Maybe it's a prison? Keep us here, but keep us alive, and incapable of escaping?"
"A fair answer," replies The Doctor, "although this implies that there is someplace outside The Wheel to escape to."
"Maybe the Apocalypse Effect wasn't intentional," Hekatora suggests. "Maybe it's a malfunction or an unintended consequence."
"Ridiculous," says The Doctor. "Nothing with so precise an effect could occur by accident. But perhaps its triggering is accidental or misapplied. An escape-prevention mechanism? Some sort of a sick experiment?"
"Why does it matter?" I ask.
"It's very important to ask such a question," replies The Doctor, hurt. "If you don't know why something exists, you can't possibly understand the consequences of breaking it."
Hekatora's eyes go wide. I probably look no less shocked. "Uh, what exactly are we talking about?"
The Doctor looks disgusted. "Breaking the Wheel, of course," he says. "Or at least whatever generates the Veils and the Apocalypse down there in the Hub. It might destroy the rest of the Wheel too, but I think it would be worth it. You see, I happen to share your idea that there is something beyond this universe in which we dwell. I very much want us to be able to see what it is. We're born to be clever and inquisitive, I should think, for a very good reason, and that is to cleverly go about the business of inquisition. Are we in a prison? Or perhaps the entire universe is nothing but a giant version of our Labyrinth, a holding cell built to release us when we're smart enough to figure out how to escape? However you paint it, we should try our best to wreck that which keeps us captive."
"Sounds risky," I say. "What if you destroy everything, and then we're dead and gone?"
The Doctor spreads his hands. "In what way, in a cosmic sense, have we lost anything? We're trapped like rats where we are. If we're all dead, at least we'll be free."
"You're mad," says Hekatora.
"Oh, I don't propose to do this now," says the Doctor. "I would design a space capsule – no, make that a fleet of capsules – and fill them with fission bombs. Anything that can generate large quantities of radiation will do. Then I'd time their launching to coincide with the Apocalypse, twenty years from now. I'd point them down at the hub, punch them through the Circulation Zone, and start detonating once we reached the Hub Veil. Clear a path down to the center, and blow up anything we find."
"You could destroy us all," I say. "Remember Mateo the Murderer?"
"Mateo was a hero, not a villain," replies The Doctor. "He had the right idea. Effect massive change to shake things up. We learned a great deal from what he did; arguably we couldn't even contemplate escape now unless he made the decision he made. This decision is no less risky, but carries just as great a potential reward."
Hekatora shakes her head. "What you're proposing is not a decision that one person should make, not without consulting the rest of the world."
"Why?" asks the Doctor innocently. "None of them are as smart as I am. The only possible result of including the rest of the world in this decision is increasing the likelihood of doing the wrong thing."
"Nevertheless," says Hekatora, and begins to stalk out of the room. A gun appears in Doctor Ktangit's hand.
"My dear," he says calmly, "I will kill you. And him. What must be done, must be done without interference."
"You ARE mad," I say. The gun turns on me.
"Am I?" asks the Doctor. "Perhaps I am. Perhaps it's a kind of insanity to be willing to gain everything by one bold, well-timed stroke. If so, my madness is humanity's only hope. You have two choices, my friends. You can embrace my madness, or you can be overwhelmed by it."
Doctor Ktangit raises the gun. "Choose," he says.
**
I am old now. I spend my days looking through the viewers. The Sphere's rear-facing viewer shows the fringe of the Apocalypse glow chasing us. It is losing the race. At first it appeared it would catch us, gaining ground on us even though the Sphere's propulsion systems were the most powerful we could devise. But as the region of space expanded that the effect moved through, its rate of expansion slowed, and we began to outrun its leading edge. Once again, The Doctor was right.
We had a year's head start. We launched from Tulu and began projecting our Veil Shield to allow us to penetrate the barrier surrounding the Rotation Zone. We rocketed away from the surface of the torus for that entire year, not knowing exactly what was happening back in The Wheel, because communication signals cannot penetrate Veil fields. Then a shock wave rippled through the almost-vacuum of space. A month later the Veil around us fell into tatters, revealing the Apocalypse glow behind us.
Did the Wheel itself survive that explosion? I can't say for sure, but I suspect not. If whatever was generating the Veils also accounted for gravity, everybody on The Wheel is dead. The five thousand souls aboard the Sphere would be the last survivors of humanity, running away from a constrained past toward an uncertain future.
And what did we gain? The stars, for one. I look out the forward viewer now. The dark sky is filled with innumerable points of light. Each of them appear to be very distant balls of gas illuminated by a fusion process of sorts. Some of them have small spheres of material orbiting them. Everywhere are spheres, never toruses. Is this natural?
There is a star ahead of us. It will take us about five years to reach it. I have already decided we will head in that direction, although I haven't told the rest of the Steering Committee. Sometimes the best decisions are made without outside input. At least, I think so. Hekatora would disagree, may she rest with the Ancestors forever.
But I'll always remember her, and The Doctor, who didn't live to see the launch. We'll always remember The Wheel and its quadrants, its heroes and villains, its past and present and the future yet to come.
By all that's good, we'll remember it all forever.
Hekatora's voice crackles over the audio link. "I have the Oculus coming up fast," she says. "Intercept in two minutes. You better get ready with the Leash."
"It's too early to fire," I object. "I'll shoot it in a minute."
"Okay, but if you miss, we're up here another seven hours," says Hekatora. "Don't do that to a girl. You know I have big plans." Hekatora's getting married. Their ceremony will be held in the barren quadrant of Barratura. When Mateo the Murderer painted that quadrant's spire with a crude uranium matrix, he had no way of knowing that it's the spires that keep the Veils from blanketing the entire land. It was only two hundred years ago that Scuronauts penetrated the blackness that covered that quadrant and cleaned off the spire well enough for the disruptor effects to subside. Life has been steady returning, transplanted from other quadrants; there are a few communities but it's mostly wide open spaces – just the thing for a girl like Hekatora.
"All right, don’t rush a fellow," I say. I'm standing outside the capsule in my voidsuit, my boots hooked into cleats, holding the net-launcher. We're two hundred miles above the surface of Tulu – my home village is almost directly below us – in a slow counter-sun orbit. The Oculus, meanwhile, is a high-speed satellite whizzing by much faster than we're going. Our goal is to tether it, match velocities, and then reenter into Lake Llapala. Then we can reacquire the precious cargo of the Oculus – images taken of the Apocalypse – and figure out how to stop it.
I fire the net-gun. The weights spin as the wad of netting shoots out, slowly drawing the web open as the drag line pays out. Soon the net is at full diameter, fifty yards, and I trim the drag line to keep the net spinning in a location to intercept the Oculus's orbit. Then I hustle back inside the capsule and secure the door.
We don’t have to wait long. The Oculus plants itself neatly in the meat of the net, which collapses around the probe. With a jerk our capsule goes dragging along behind the ancient satellite. Hekatora applies the retros slowly, and we carefully decelerate ourselves to zero over the space of two hours. As we come up on Lake Llapala, the capsule and the tethered Oculus come to a halt, hanging motionless in space.
Ballistics is a very strange science. At two hundred miles up, we are almost eighty miles above the gravopause. The downward force of gravity is even and uniform up to that point. Above the gravopause, one enters the Circulation Zone, where there is no gravity, and objects with rotational vectors remain in those vectors until perturbed. The sun is one such object – a huge mass of radioactive minerals, seasonally waxing and waning in luminosity, in a continuous high orbit, just below the Veil that roofs the universe. There is one sun for each quadrant, all synchronized together.
I go back outside and reel in the tether. The Oculus bumps into the capsule. It is exactly as the ancient schematics showed it would be, a satellite built by the previous age's best engineers, made completely without electronics or organic matter. It is covered with a thin layer of space-dust, perturbed only by the webbing, and has smeared panes of volcanic glass on multiple sides. Its cleats match the securing hooks of the capsule perfectly – we designed the capsule with precisely this in mind – and soon two ages of space exploration are merged together into one bundle.
It is time for reentry. I strap myself into the crash couch, and Hekatora fires the attitude jets to point us towards home. Then she hits the thrusters, and we roar towards the gravopause. She turns the vehicle at the last moment, thrusters pointing down towards the lake far below.
There's a visible line marking that boundary; a hazy shell of dust and moisture lingers above the gravopause, its particles of grit and water droplets in rotational orbit, while the space below it is perfectly clear skies. As we cross the threshold, our stomachs jump up into our mouths and we drop like a rock. Hekatora punches the thrusters, and we brake against the force of gravity. She uses attitude jets to correct our trajectory, and I release the chute in the final few miles of fall. The capsule with its precious cargo makes a perfect splash landing in the lake's center. The retrieval craft fishes us out; Doctor Ktangit is on the deck to see us aboard.
The Doctor is our Age's foremost genius. He is a Mhau, a race of great thinkers since ancient times, but even among Mhau the Doctor is exemplary. As a child he destroyed every aptitude test ever devised. At the age of eight he was placed in the Labyrinth, the automated arcology our ancestors were locked in during the Apocalypse, and which could only be escaped from once the occupants had successfully learned all the scientific information carved into its walls; at the age of twelve he walked out. It was The Doctor who, using the previous age's lore for building satellites that could cross Veil fields, developed the Universe Mapping Project to transit the quadrants circumferentially and thereby verify that we live upon a wheel.
The Doctor supervises the removal of the Oculus from the dripping capsule. Me and Hekatora are forgotten; he cares only for that ancient satellite that must have witnessed the death, and rebirth, of our world. Workmen load the Oculus onto a dolly and wheel it into a hold for inspection. Here on the surface the Oculus suddenly looks very small.
The Apocalypse event is really just a small dose of the regular Veil field. Its disruption of organic matter is not so pronounced, the equivalent of a severe sunburn; it has little effect on metal. But electronics are utterly scrambled, and the memories and higher thinking processes of exposed individuals are irretrievably disrupted. We know this from recording devices that the previous age's technicians left behind – cameras set to capture the effects on humans at the precise moment that the Apocalypse arrives. The images are chilling to watch; sane, civilized human beings are transformed into animals in the blink of an eye. For the first few generations, the humans live in utter savagery. Then they start to learn, nudged and pushed by the programs and the devices left behind. The box that dispenses sugar pills for increasingly complex manipulations of patterns, for instance, or the map that shows where a stash of euphorics can be found if only its symbols can be deciphered – these are the tools that have been developed over the ages to accelerate human learning as fast as possible to extend the period where a generation can usefully contribute to plotting its escape from the cycle of ignorance.
We follow the Doctor into his study. He has the top case of the Oculus off already and is peering into its cavernous depths with a flashlight, muttering to himself.
"Yes, moisture, of course," he mumbles. "The most reliable of processes. Very sensible over the long term."
"What's sensible?" I ask. The Doctor looks up, irritated.
"Water vapor condensation," he mutters. "Best method of automating the image gathering when batteries and wiring and microelectronics won't work. See, the Oculus orbited below the sun, right, and at a faster rate. Twelve times per day the sun passed over the glass on the top of the satellite. When that happened, the sun's radiation evaporated the moisture clouding that window and admitted enough light to expose the photographic plates. So, the Oculus took twelve pictures per day-cycle until it ran out of film."
I nod. "But not twelve pictures of the top of the wheel, right?" asks Hekatora.
"No, of course not," snaps the Doctor. "It's in radial circumferential orbit, paralleling the sun, so it's taking shots evenly spaced around the cross-section of the donut. Which is exactly what we want to see if we're interested in the propagation of the Apocalypse Effect. Ah, here we are." He pulls out a module containing what looks like a stack of thin sheets of frosted glass. He carefully pulls out one and holds it up to the light.
"Beautiful," he says. "The glass sandwich and the vacuum has preserved the photo-emulsion perfectly, even though it's been centuries since these images were taken." He places the stack into a kind of slide projector and begins to cycle through the images.
"Here we are, high above the surface of Tulu," he says. "A perfectly nice day, it looks like – thank goodness for clear weather. Ah, now it's swept out over the sea. Then we reach the cataracts, where the water falls off the edge on its way towards the center of the torus. Ah, now we reach the underside of the rim of the Wheel; this froth here is the point of gravipause, where the falling water crosses into the Circulation Zone and sweeps back up and around to rain down from overhead. Now, as you can see, we're completely underwater; and now we're crossing out and up the other side."
The Doctor frowns at the next slide. "Ah. Something is happening now," he says. "See the glow on the edge? The Apocalypse event is occurring. It's propagating from the center of the torus, from the Hub Veil at the very center."
"As expected," I say. The cylindrical Veil that shrouds the center of the Wheel hub has been visited by three space missions; none of them returned. There must be something in the center that is unfriendly to visitors. The Doctor cycles the next slide.
"We have moved a twelfth of the way around the orbit," he says, "but in this next image the glow has spread almost across the field of view. From this we can estimate the speed of propagation. It's very fast. That's interesting, don't you think?"
An idea occurs to me. "Doctor," I say, "if the Apocalypse Event is just like the Veil, why can't we shield against it?"
"Lower power, deeper penetration," he says, as if this explains everything. I start to interrupt but Hekatora touches my arm and shakes her head.
The Doctor cycles through a few more images. "Now here we are where we started," he says. "The lights are out on the surface. The Effect happens quickly and effectively." He turns off the projector and begins to pace the room.
"We know the Veils project from the hub as well," he muses. "Uranium impregnated items thrust into a Veil create an upward wake. So, some sort of a field generator lies down there. Mechanical or natural? Could be either, I suppose, but 'machine' is suggested. Then what is the purpose of The Wheel, hmm?" He stops and looks expectantly at me and Hekatora.
I squirm. "Uh, I don't know," I say. "Maybe it's a prison? Keep us here, but keep us alive, and incapable of escaping?"
"A fair answer," replies The Doctor, "although this implies that there is someplace outside The Wheel to escape to."
"Maybe the Apocalypse Effect wasn't intentional," Hekatora suggests. "Maybe it's a malfunction or an unintended consequence."
"Ridiculous," says The Doctor. "Nothing with so precise an effect could occur by accident. But perhaps its triggering is accidental or misapplied. An escape-prevention mechanism? Some sort of a sick experiment?"
"Why does it matter?" I ask.
"It's very important to ask such a question," replies The Doctor, hurt. "If you don't know why something exists, you can't possibly understand the consequences of breaking it."
Hekatora's eyes go wide. I probably look no less shocked. "Uh, what exactly are we talking about?"
The Doctor looks disgusted. "Breaking the Wheel, of course," he says. "Or at least whatever generates the Veils and the Apocalypse down there in the Hub. It might destroy the rest of the Wheel too, but I think it would be worth it. You see, I happen to share your idea that there is something beyond this universe in which we dwell. I very much want us to be able to see what it is. We're born to be clever and inquisitive, I should think, for a very good reason, and that is to cleverly go about the business of inquisition. Are we in a prison? Or perhaps the entire universe is nothing but a giant version of our Labyrinth, a holding cell built to release us when we're smart enough to figure out how to escape? However you paint it, we should try our best to wreck that which keeps us captive."
"Sounds risky," I say. "What if you destroy everything, and then we're dead and gone?"
The Doctor spreads his hands. "In what way, in a cosmic sense, have we lost anything? We're trapped like rats where we are. If we're all dead, at least we'll be free."
"You're mad," says Hekatora.
"Oh, I don't propose to do this now," says the Doctor. "I would design a space capsule – no, make that a fleet of capsules – and fill them with fission bombs. Anything that can generate large quantities of radiation will do. Then I'd time their launching to coincide with the Apocalypse, twenty years from now. I'd point them down at the hub, punch them through the Circulation Zone, and start detonating once we reached the Hub Veil. Clear a path down to the center, and blow up anything we find."
"You could destroy us all," I say. "Remember Mateo the Murderer?"
"Mateo was a hero, not a villain," replies The Doctor. "He had the right idea. Effect massive change to shake things up. We learned a great deal from what he did; arguably we couldn't even contemplate escape now unless he made the decision he made. This decision is no less risky, but carries just as great a potential reward."
Hekatora shakes her head. "What you're proposing is not a decision that one person should make, not without consulting the rest of the world."
"Why?" asks the Doctor innocently. "None of them are as smart as I am. The only possible result of including the rest of the world in this decision is increasing the likelihood of doing the wrong thing."
"Nevertheless," says Hekatora, and begins to stalk out of the room. A gun appears in Doctor Ktangit's hand.
"My dear," he says calmly, "I will kill you. And him. What must be done, must be done without interference."
"You ARE mad," I say. The gun turns on me.
"Am I?" asks the Doctor. "Perhaps I am. Perhaps it's a kind of insanity to be willing to gain everything by one bold, well-timed stroke. If so, my madness is humanity's only hope. You have two choices, my friends. You can embrace my madness, or you can be overwhelmed by it."
Doctor Ktangit raises the gun. "Choose," he says.
**
I am old now. I spend my days looking through the viewers. The Sphere's rear-facing viewer shows the fringe of the Apocalypse glow chasing us. It is losing the race. At first it appeared it would catch us, gaining ground on us even though the Sphere's propulsion systems were the most powerful we could devise. But as the region of space expanded that the effect moved through, its rate of expansion slowed, and we began to outrun its leading edge. Once again, The Doctor was right.
We had a year's head start. We launched from Tulu and began projecting our Veil Shield to allow us to penetrate the barrier surrounding the Rotation Zone. We rocketed away from the surface of the torus for that entire year, not knowing exactly what was happening back in The Wheel, because communication signals cannot penetrate Veil fields. Then a shock wave rippled through the almost-vacuum of space. A month later the Veil around us fell into tatters, revealing the Apocalypse glow behind us.
Did the Wheel itself survive that explosion? I can't say for sure, but I suspect not. If whatever was generating the Veils also accounted for gravity, everybody on The Wheel is dead. The five thousand souls aboard the Sphere would be the last survivors of humanity, running away from a constrained past toward an uncertain future.
And what did we gain? The stars, for one. I look out the forward viewer now. The dark sky is filled with innumerable points of light. Each of them appear to be very distant balls of gas illuminated by a fusion process of sorts. Some of them have small spheres of material orbiting them. Everywhere are spheres, never toruses. Is this natural?
There is a star ahead of us. It will take us about five years to reach it. I have already decided we will head in that direction, although I haven't told the rest of the Steering Committee. Sometimes the best decisions are made without outside input. At least, I think so. Hekatora would disagree, may she rest with the Ancestors forever.
But I'll always remember her, and The Doctor, who didn't live to see the launch. We'll always remember The Wheel and its quadrants, its heroes and villains, its past and present and the future yet to come.
By all that's good, we'll remember it all forever.
