Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [57]
Before the lines between the Engford and the Darwin were secured, sunrise erupted through the same well the sun had dug and fallen into more than a hundred million kilometers downstream. The star rose swiftly, returning in triumph to flood with light the vast realm it had so recently abandoned. In only two minutes, it was clear of the well, lofting like a brilliant balloon, its dawn banishing the cometary veils. Twenty minutes later, it might have been mid-morning. Two hours after that, it might have been noon.
Captain Dalen was nagged by an impression, for no reason that she was logically or rationally aware, that the changes occurring outside were even more dramatic. She felt—she knew—that the humans would be shut off from her till the end of time; and she found herself thinking that all the universe was shifting … swelling … all of it except right here!
Nightfall had come again to the Dooglasse, whose ship was now joined to the Balboa, inside the Enterprise’s protective cocoon.
“It’s still shrinking,” Riker called excitedly.
As indeed it was, Picard saw as the Enterprise stood off and watched. For the first time, the Dyson Sphere really did look like a planet. It was as small as Earth now, and growing smaller with each passing second. The instruments suggested that it did not exist at all, except visually and as faint distortions in the geometry of spacetime.
Riker shook his head. “Captain, it should have more gravitational compaction than a neutron star by now.”
“I know,” Picard said, “and by the time it’s down to the Enterprise’s size, whole Earth masses will be compressed into spaces smaller than golf balls. It should be a black hole, by then.”
“But I’ll wager it won’t be,” Riker said with a faint smile.
Picard nodded. “I begin to think we’ve been oversimplifying things here, don’t you?”
Riker shrugged. “What else can we say? Everything we know tells us there’s a whole sun down there, whole star systems full of suns if we count all the mass from which they built it—and yet at Dyson’s surface I’m registering less than one-sixth Earth gravity. The only rational explanation is that Dyson doesn’t quite exist in our universe any more. And that isn’t quite rational.”
“Yet it is extraordinary,” Picard muttered under his breath, as a fuller realization of what had happened came into his mind.
But Data was ahead of him. “Captain,” the android said, “did we wake the Sphere’s artifical intelligence to all this action?”
For once, Picard knew that he was ahead of Data. “We might have been entirely superfluous. In fact, we might even have been a slight impediment.”
“Do you think so, Captain?” asked Data.
“It’s entirely likely,” Picard said.
“Entirely likely means yes, does it not, since the word ‘entirely’ takes all doubt away from the word ‘likely.’”
“Quite right,” Picard said, gazing at the telescopic view of Dyson’s shrinking disk.
“Then are you suggesting that we should have stayed away, since we were not needed?”
Picard rebelled at the thought and said, “Data, I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”
“Thanks for the good advice, Jean-Luc.” He thought again of Captain Dalen’s last message, and wondered if this universe would ever see her and her crew again.
The Sphere was a distant gray bead now, contracting faster and faster through that ghostly hole it had dug in the cosmos—and preparing, no doubt, to pull the hole in after itself. No doubt, it would also pull a part of Picard down with it, as it folded into microverses and tapped energies .that could only be guessed at.
“Be careful what you wish for …” his mother had warned.
Well, he had gotten more than he wished for, as he hoped and yet he also dreaded that he would ever again find something as mysterious and horrifying, as wonderful and as belittling as the Dyson Sphere. This seemed to him so entirely unlikely that he returned the hope and the dread, for now, to that place of dearest wishes that waited in his archaeologist’s heart. He would visit those wishes again, as surely as his blood visited the ventricles of his engineered