The Collapsium (16 page)

The first reply to that was simply a glower, but finally Marlon put his smile back on and reached out a hand to be shaken. “Your manners exceed my own. I’ve been immersed here; I’m not really in a mood for interruptions. You know how that can be, I’m sure.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, and chuckled a little. He took Marlon’s hand in his and clasped it warmly. It came away, of course, slick with machine grease, but that was of little consequence.

“You’re well?”

“Well enough, thank you. And you?”

Marlon grumbled, nodding toward the malfunctioning instrument walls. “Could be better, alas. Have you made progress in your research? Are we any closer to an
arc de fin
?”

“Ah, well, that’s difficult to say. Like you, I’ve been tinkering, although in my case the goal is True Vacuum. Results have been … mixed, I guess you’d say. Odd. I probably need some peer review at this point, isolation being an ideal breeding ground for foolish error. Perhaps we can discuss it while I’m here downsystem.”

“Perhaps,” Marlon said, not quite able to hide a sense of avarice and excitement. He wanted to share insights with Bruno, yes, but for whatever reason, he didn’t seem to want Bruno to know that.

Tamra began tapping her foot again. “Will you explain our problem to de Towaji please, Declarant?”

Marlon sighed and crossed his arms. “Must I, Highness? I
really am quite busy here, and don’t want to lose the thread of it. Perhaps you could visit me at home.”

“When?” Tamra demanded coolly.

“Right now,” Marlon said, making a kind of facial shrug. “I’m there. It’s where I expected you, actually. Whatever possessed you to come here?”

“I don’t know; it seemed like an appropriate starting point.”

Marlon pursed his lips and shook his head. “Loud and smelly? For our dear friend de Towaji? His mind is a palace, Tam, a cathedral, unsullied by life’s grimy banalities. Send him home to me, I beg you. I’ll take proper care of him there.”

“I’m fine here,” Bruno protested mildly. “Banality and grime are novelties, remember. Though of course I’m happy to let you get back to work if that’s what you need. Could I leave a copy here to help?”

“No, thanks,” Marlon said too quickly, and though he clapped Bruno on the shoulder—leaving a noticeable smudge—there was little mirth in his eyes.

Sykes Manor was an exercise in water and white marble
. Spin-gee habitats were common enough in the Queendom, spheres and cylinders that pressed their occupants to the inner walls by centrifugal force, in the age-old manner of carnival rides. Bruno had never seen a spin sphere crafted as a single residence, though, and he’d never seen one in the Athenian style before, nor imagined that such a thing might exist. Where the classical Greeks had favored straight lines and rectangles and squat isosceles triangles, Marlon’s architects had substituted sphere-mapped chords and pie wedges and truncated cones to good—though decidedly strange—effect. And where the inner surface of a typical kilometer-wide suburb cylinder might be dotted with homesteads and ringed with a greenbelt or two, draining into faux-natural streams and ponds, Marlon’s house, only forty meters across, contained a system of rigidly geometric gardens and fountains, zigzagging between looming walled structures that reached, in some cases, almost to the spin axis. There were no external windows looking out into planetary space, either; instead,
bright, yellow-orange light slanted down from a tiny, illuminated dome at one of the hubs.

The overall effect was completely startling: an immaculate palace or temple complex as glimpsed at the moment of sunrise, but folded in on itself until inner and outer walls met, creating the dreamlike sensation that one was neither inside nor outside, neither above and looking down, nor below and looking up. No matter where one stood or where one looked, one was, it seemed, perpetually
about to enter
some grand, vaulted inner space that in fact couldn’t possibly exist.

All this said something important, Bruno felt, about the psychological workings of a certain Declarant-Philander, though exactly
what
it said he wasn’t sure. There was a kind of ostentation here: modest wealth conspicuously displayed. Well, modest by Bruno’s standards, at any rate; probably very few people could afford to live this way, and fewer still would do it if they could.

“Many people,” Bruno had observed shortly after entering this place, “are too timid or oblivious to shape an environment to their own true hearts. You, Marlon Sykes, are not one of them.”

Marlon, reclined on a couch and plucking at the strings of a mandolin, had laughed pleasantly, clearly taking the comment as Bruno had intended it.

“You flatter me,” he’d said, and his robots had handed Bruno a mug of chilled green tea. This other Marlon, relaxing at home, seemed far more at ease than his counterpart at the grapple station, far happier to greet the man he regarded as a rival, on the arm of the woman he’d once loved.

We all have multiple faces and aspects
, Bruno mused,
but rarely is the contrast so obvious
. That was life in the Queendom for you; the Iscog joined every fax machine to every other, reducing all of space, topologically speaking, to a single geometric point. This permitted—in fact demanded—the encountering of innumerable rareties and ironies and stark, polar opposites, all superimposed atop one another. Impossible, of course, without the transfinite self-recursions of collapsium-based computing devices.

He supposed he could permit himself, at such a moment, to admire his handiwork.

Now the three of them lounged on soft couches in the slanting light beside a softly chattering cascade, clear water spilling down stairs of white marble in the shade of a line of olive trees. Tamra’s slender silver robots stood guard on either side, like statues.

“How they got there isn’t clear,” Marlon was saying. He’d put away his mandolin and was tracing with his index finger on a wellstone slate. “But this whole segment of the ring is contaminated with muons, in tight little orbits around the collapson nodes.”

On Bruno’s own slate, Marlon’s tracings were echoed, and quickly became solid, detailed, three-dimensional-looking images. The sun blazed, and the Ring Collapsiter—its thickness exaggerated by several orders of magnitude—glittered around it like a two-thirds completed crown. Fully half the structure, though, showed not the soothing blue of Hawking-Cerenkov radiation, but a kind of dingy brown glow. Presumably, this was as fictitious as the ring’s thickness; Bruno couldn’t think of any collapsium process that would create a visible signature like that one.

Bruno sipped from his mug, nodding. The tea was a little sweet for his taste, but he wasn’t sure it would be polite to ask the mug to change it for him. Not right in front of Marlon; not when he was being so friendly.

“I see. And the ring is slipping because the EM grapples would damage the contaminated region? By pulling its lattices out of phase?”

“Just so. We dare not disturb it further.”

“You’re distributing the load across the remainder of the ring, yes? What there is of it, I mean. Your stations remain operational, just aimed differently, at the undamaged arc segments?” He studied the drawing. “Yes, that
would
produce a side force, wouldn’t it? But you can’t turn the grapples off, either, cutting the puppet’s strings, as it were. The whole thing would fall into the sun in a matter of days!—And you can’t
attach a wellstone sail to the contaminated area, because the orbiting particles would smash through it precisely where the stress is greatest.”

“We tried it,” Marlon said, shaking his head ruefully. “The sails collapsed immediately and fell into the black holes. Theoretically the holes are semisafe, too small to swallow even a proton, but if you jam one in there hard enough, it’ll go. And that’s the beginning of the end, because it increases the size of the hole, making it ever so slightly easier for the next particle to penetrate. And of course, any mass change disrupts the equilibrium of the crystal lattice, so already, the collapsium is inherently unstable.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, beginning at last to understand. “That’s why you want higher frequencies on the grapples: so you can grab hold right where you need to. The collapsium is in a precarious state, and gravitic disturbances are to be avoided at all costs. But frequencies
higher
than those of gravitation won’t set up the same sort of destructive resonance.”

Marlon’s smile was only a little tight. “Your edge remains keen, Declarant. In minutes, you reiterate the analysis of weeks. Yes, it’s exactly as you say.”

“The work progresses poorly, though,” Her Majesty interjected, in cool tones. “The collapsiter builds momentum with each passing moment. Even if Declarant Sykes’ plan works perfectly, there may not be time to stop its fall. And if we’re lucky enough to stop it just
above
the sun’s surface, rather than below, I still think the result is unlikely to please us. Your services, Bruno, are very much in need.”

Bruno sighed, as uncomfortable as ever with this notion that the unsolvable problems were somehow his to solve. “My ‘services’ seem to have come up with precisely the same solution that Marlon’s did. It’s the right solution, Tam.”

Her Majesty said nothing, but put on a faux vapid smile that meant she found his comment foolish.

Grumbling, Marlon threw his tea mug into the little cascade, where it clanked and splashed and skidded to a halt, resting half submerged on the marble bottom. “We’ve enough
force to lift this thing, Majesty. It’s simply a matter of applying that force where it’s needed. As I’ve told you, the math is really quite straightforward.”

“Undoubtedly,” she agreed, nodding once.

“You
can
be infuriating sometimes, Tam,” Bruno said to her, not unkindly. In decades past, he’d sometimes spent whole days, even weeks being infuriated by her. Truthfully, there were worse ways to spend one’s time. But Marlon did not seem so amused.

“Just think about the problem for me,” she said, nestling back into her couch and closing her eyes, as if basking in warm sunlight, though in truth the glow of the illuminated dome was rather cool. “Both of you.”

They were all silent for a few seconds.

“I do mean now,” she noted.

Both men grumbled and, taking advantage of her closed eyes, made sarcastic faces. Then, seeing each other, they laughed, the tension going out of them. Bruno hurled his own mug into the fountain, causing a brief ripple of alarm in Tamra’s robots, and then he leaned back with his arms behind his head. Might as well assume a comfortable thinking position, yes? Leather and wood creaked pleasantly beneath him.

“Hmm, yes. A pickle indeed. So how long until we’re rid of these particles?”

Marlon sat up on an elbow. “Rid of them how? By decay?”

“Right.”

A detailed discussion ensued.
⁷

“Eleven months,” Bruno mused, when they’d kicked it around for a while. “That’s odd. May I examine your raw data?”

Marlon’s good cheer faded a bit. “Of course, yes. What data we have is yours.”

With their two wellstone drawing slates slaved together,
Marlon walked him through several layers of menus until he’d pulled up the database of measurements his paid observers had collected in recent weeks. Mere samplings, of course, indirect measurements scattered here and there along the Ring Collapsiter’s considerable length. Bruno pondered them for a while—apparently a
long
while, since both Marlon and Tamra got up to use the bathroom a few times while he was doing it—and finally he called up a little hypercomputer in a corner of the slate and fed it some quite horrific equations to solve. The answers were, of course, available almost immediately.

“Eleven months,” he confirmed, with an approving nod in Marlon’s direction. “And how long, again, until the collapsiter penetrates Sol’s chromopause?” That was the accepted benchmark for irretrievability; soon afterward, the collapsons would have swollen with gobbled star matter to the point where their crystalline structure became unsupportable. The whole thing would, no doubt slowly and elaborately, crush down into a single large hole, and eventually pull the sun in after it.

“
Ten
months,” Marlon replied, looking and sounding unnerved.

“Well, well,” Bruno said. “That’s what I call inconvenient timing. Had you been assuming this was a natural phenomenon?”

Marlon’s voice was hollow, frightened. “I had, yes. Indeed I had. But the odds against such a coincidence …”

Her Majesty opened her eyes and sat up, as if only now realizing the implication. “What are you saying, Declarants? That there’s a
saboteur
afoot? That someone has done this
deliberately
?”

Bruno shrugged. “ ‘Saboteur’ is the right word, I suppose. A muon is a highly unstable particle about a tenth the size of a proton, and it results from the decay of an even more unstable particle called a pion. My guess is that electrons from the solar wind were struck with a high-powered and precisely targeted stream of coherent neutrinos—a nasen beam, we call
it—and this converted them to pions. It’s a graduate-level transmutation exercise, performed on an enormous scale.”

Marlon Sykes had turned almost completely white. “Good Lord, Bruno, I think you must certainly be right. What else
could
it be? What else could scatter such short-lived particles over such a wide area? I am, as always, dwarfed in your shadow. In an
hour
you’ve deduced this.”

“Well,” Bruno grumbled, trying to think of something self-deprecating to say.

“Well nothing,” Marlon insisted, somewhat angrily.

“A
saboteur
?” Tamra said again, rising to her feet so she could stamp one of them. “You suggest that a subject of this Queendom is capable of such villainy? A subject of
mine
?”

“I suggest nothing,” Bruno said innocently.