Earth

• CORE

“Whatever we do,” Teresa Tikhana had said earlier, be-fore the meeting broke up. “We can’t let any of the space powers in on this. I’m sure now they were all in cahoots with Spivey’s illegal research on Erehwon. Heaven only knows what they’d do if they got their hands on gravity lasers and cosmic knots. ”

So they decided not to publicly a

Perhaps he and the others were leaping to wrong conclusions. All in all, Alex did find the scenario garish and a bit too weird. But it fit the facts as they knew them. Besides, they simply couldn’t afford to take chances.

“We’ll deal with the taniwha ourselves, then,” George Hutton had summarized at the end of the meeting.

“It’ll be hard to set up the resonators without anyone noticing,” Alex reminded everybody. But Pedro Manella had agreed with George. “Leave that part to Hutton and me. We’ll provide everything you need.”

The portly Aztlan reporter had seemed so relaxed, so confident. No sign remained of the emotion he’d shown on first hearing of the monster at the planet’s heart. Even a slim hope, it seemed, was enough to fill him with energy.

Alex felt uncomfortable putting such trust in a man who — by his own recent reckoning — had ruined his life. Of course it was actually thanks to those riots in Iquitos, triggered by Manella, that his own crude Alpha singularity had fallen and he’d been forced to go looking for it. If not for the fellow’s meddling in Peru, Alex would probably have paid no more attention to the center of the Earth than…

He leaned back in his swivel chair and realized he had no adequate simile for comparison. The center of the Earth was essentially the last place one thought of. And yet, without it where would any of us be?

In front of Alex, the planet’s many layers glowed fulgent in the final schematic presented at the now-adjourned meeting. This ghostly, near-spherical Earth circumscribed a geometric figure — a tetrahedral pyramid whose tips pierced the surface at four evenly spaced locations.

EASTER ISLAND (RAPA NUI): 27° 6' 20'' S, 109° 24' 30'' W

SOUTH AFRICA (NEAR REIVILO): 27° 30' 36° S, 24° 6' E

IRIAN JAYA (NEW GUINEA): 2° 6' 36'' S, 137° 23' 24'' E

WEST GREENLAND (NEAR GODHAVN): 70° 38' 24'' N, 55° 41' 12'' W

Four sites. I’d rather have had twelve. Or twenty.

He’d said as much to Stan and George and the other geophysicists. There’s no telling what will happen when we start pushing at Beta in earnest. It’s certain to drift and tumble. That array of resonators should be a dodecahedron or icosahedron for full coverage, not a pyramid.

But a pyramid was all they could manage.

It wasn’t a matter of money. That George had in plenty, and he was willing to spend every farthing. His political contacts in the Polynesian Federation meant two sites would be readily available, no questions asked. But to set up beyond the Pacific basin, their tiny cabal would need help. Especially if word wasn’t to leak out.

Back in the last century, undercover, secret maneuverings were more the rule than the exception. Nations, corporations, drug cartels, and even private individuals habitually concealed monumental schemes. But arms inspections were followed by tourism, as jetliners and then zeps began nosing through swathes of sky once reserved for warcraft. Data-links laced metropoleis to donkey-cart villages. Of the three great centers of TwenCen secrecy, state socialism had collapsed before Alex was even born, and finance capitalism met its ruin soon after that, amidst the melted Alps.

In hindsight, the Helvetian tragedy probably hadn’t even been necessary, for not even the fabled gnomes could have kept their records private much longer in a world filled with amateur snoops — data hackers with as much free time and computing power as ingenuity.

That left the third relict, and the strongest. The great nation states still maintained “confidential” services — permitted the victors by the same treaty that had ended such things for everyone else. Those agencies could have helped the Tangoparu team set up their gravity-wave array in total secrecy. But then, those same agencies were almost certainly the enemy, as well.

George thinks they made Beta and are hiding their mistake to save their own hides, even if it means eventually dooming everyone.

Alex couldn’t imagine that kind of thinking. It made him ashamed to be a member of the same species. To hear Teresa Tikhana describe her Colonel Spivey, though, she might as well be talking about a creature from another planet.

Were Spivey and his collaborators even now struggling to find a solution as well? Perhaps that’s what Teresa’s husband had been working on, out in space. If so, the government boys never seemed to have stumbled on the gravity laser effect. And at this point, Alex would be damned if he’d give it to them.

Of course if we succeed the secret will come out near the end anyway. It’ll be hard to ignore a sunlike fireball rising out of the Earth, accelerating toward deep space at relativistic speeds.

By then, he and the others had better have prepared to go into hiding. In addition, Alex himself would feel compelled to take memory destroyers as soon as Beta was safely on its way, to prevent spilling what he had learned by coincidence and accident and mental fluke. In principle, it was only what he deserved, of course, for the sin of hubris. Still, he’d regret losing his mental image of the knot singularity, its intricate ten-space foldings, its awful, ignescent beauty. That loss would haunt him, he knew. Almost, he would rather die.

As if I’ll get a choice. It’s a long shot this will work at all.

They were taking a terrible chance. Using gravity-wave recoil to move Beta sounded fine in theory. But some of their initial test gazer beams for unknown reasons had interacted with matter at the planet’s surface — coupling with an earthquake fault in one case, with man-made objects in another. It was still a mystery why this happened or what the consequences might be once they really got started.

But what choice do we have?

Alex looked at the glowing points where the tetrahedron met Earth’s surface. Four sites where they must build mammoth superconducting ante

The resonators had to be evenly spaced and on dry land — not easy to arrange on a world two thirds covered in water. It had taken his computer two whole seconds to search and finally find the best arrangement.

“We only have a few months,” Teresa Tikhana said, interrupting Alex in his brooding. The American astronaut sat across the table from him in the darkened room, watching the same display. They had both fallen silent after the others left, each thinking alone.

In response, he nodded. “After that, Beta will be too massive to budge, even with the gazer. We’d only excite resonant states Stan thinks could make it even worse.”

Teresa shivered. When she sat up, she looked around in a way Alex had noticed before — as if she were checking her surroundings in some ma

“Yes. That’s the anchor point, so—”

“It’s a special place, you know.” Her voice was hushed. “That’s where Atlantis is.”