The Collapsium (2 page)

In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature
planet in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th morning walk around the world.

The word “morning” is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked through the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a
very
small planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even tinier “sun” and “moon” of Bruno’s own design.

Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy meadow, feel the itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into the midday forest, with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through the canopy. The trees are low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and dogwood, not so much a shady, mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise with physical law—taller trees would reach right out of the troposphere. As it is, the highest limbs brush and break apart the puffy summer clouds that happen by.

Pass the Northern Hills; watch the stream trickle out between them; see the forest give way to willows at its bank. The bridge is a quaint little arch of native wood; on the far side lie the grasslands of afternoon, the vegetable gardens tended by stoop-backed robots, the fields of wild barley and maize tended by no one, lit by slantwise rays. Behind you, the sun dips low, then slips behind the planet’s sharply curved horizon. Despite the refraction of atmospheric hazes, darkness is sudden, and with it the terrain grows rocky—not jagged but hard and flat and boulder-strewn, dotted with hardy Mediterranean weeds. But here the stream winds back again, and as evening fades to night the channel of it widens out into cattail marshland and feeds, finally, into a little freshwater sea. Sometimes the moon is out, drawing long white reflections across the silent water, but tonight it’s only the stars and the Milky Way haze and the distant, pinpoint gleam of Sol. All of history is down there; if you like, you can cover the human race with your hand.

It grows colder; realize the planet shields you from the little sun—the only local heat source—with the deadly chill of outer space so close you could literally throw a rock into it. But the beach leads around to twilight meadows, and the horizon ruddies up with scattered light, and then suddenly it’s morning again, the sun breaking warmly above the planet’s round edge. And there is Bruno’s house: low, flat, gleaming marble-white and morning-yellow. You’ve walked a little over two kilometers.

Such was Bruno’s morning constitutional, very much like all his others. Sometimes he’d fetch a coat and take the other route, over the hills, over the poles, through cold and dark and cold and hot, but that was mainly a masochism thing; the polar route was actually shorter, and a good deal less scenic.

He’d already eaten breakfast; the walk was to aid his digestion, to invigorate his mind for the needs of the day: his experiments. The front door opened for him. Inside, robot servants stepped gracefully out of his way, providing a clear
path to the study, bowing as he passed, though he’d told them a thousand times not to. He grumbled at them wordlessly as he passed. They didn’t reply, of course, though their bronze and tin-gray manikin bodies hummed and clicked with faint life. Mechanical, unburdened by imagination or want, they were utterly dedicated to his comfort, his satisfaction.

Another door opened for him, closed behind him, vanished. He waved a hand, and the windows became walls. Waved another, and the ceiling lights vanished, the floor lights vanished, the desk and chairs and other furnishings became optical superconductors: invisible. Projective holography created the illusion of his day’s apparatus: fifty collapsons, tiny perfect cubes visible as pinpoints of Cerenkov light, powder-blue and pulsing faintly, circling the holographic planet in a complex dance of swapping orbits.

He’d spent the past week assembling these, after his last batch had gone sour.

Assembling them? Certainly.

Imagine a sphere of di-clad neutronium, shiny with Compton-scattered light. It’s a sort of very large atomic nucleus; a billion tons of normal matter crushed down to a diameter of three centimeters so that the protons and electrons that comprise it are bonded together into a thick neutron paste. Left to itself it would, within nanoseconds, explode back into a billion tons of protons and electrons, this time with considerable outward momentum. Hence the cladding: crystalline diamond and fibrediamond and then crystalline again, with a bound layer of wellstone on top. Tough stuff indeed; breaking the neutrons free of their little jail was difficult enough that Bruno had never heard of its happening by accident.

These “neubles” were the seeds of seeds—it took eight of them, crushed unimaginably farther, to build a collapson—and the little “moon” was actually just Bruno’s storage bin: ten thousand neubles held together by their own considerable gravity. Another fifteen hundred formed the core of the
tiny planet, a sphere about half a meter across, with a skeleton of wellstone built on top of it, fleshed out with a few hundred meters of dirt and rock and an upper layer neatly sculpted by robots and artisans.

Bruno was very wealthy, you see.

But instead of moons and planets, one could also make black holes of these things, black holes held rigidly into stable lattices, a phase of matter known as “collapsium.”
¹

Bruno had been the first to do this, and was still doing it these seventy years later. He’d traded his soul for it, in some sense. Traded a whole phase of his life, anyway: his love, his adopted home on Tongatapu. But what a thing to swap them for: the bending and twisting of spacetime to his personal whims. The
potential
of it …

That was the exciting part, and in truth, he’d be happy enough to direct the enterprise, leaving the gruntwork to a horde of employees or devoted grad students or something. The biggest problem was that almost no one was patient enough to work the equations, even to deduce which structures were stable and which were not, much less to derive the properties of the stable ones from first principles. The work was
hard
, and there were very few graduates to be had for it. That was the biggest problem. The second biggest was the sort of accidents you got when collapsium experiments went awry, and the third biggest problem was the twenty billion people who got understandably upset when this occurred.

So of the handful of people competent to perform the research, most stuck contentedly to the safer paths, the trodden paths, the paths on which accidents were far rarer than fame and fortune. Plodders, he sometimes called them.

He settled down in his invisible chair, feeling it subtly reshape itself beneath him. Not soft but
smart
, a solid thing that yielded only for him. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his shoulders, jiggled his wrists like an old-fashioned strongman
preparing to lift something heavy. He did these things slowly; an observer might almost have said
grimly
. It didn’t matter that the actual lifting was done by electromagnetic grapples; he would submerge himself in that same mental space where athletes go, where the body obeys the mind, where stiffness and pain and time are reluctant to penetrate. On your marks …

Bruno had tried to be one of the plodders, he really had. He’d spent years making his telecom collapsiters faster and better and cheaper, building the Iscog, building his fortune. But all that was
boring
compared to what he really wanted, which was to build an
arc de fin
capable of snatching photons from the end of time itself. Time
had
an end—the state equations made that clear enough—but what
sort
of end was the subject of endless noise and conjecture. And why grumble and theorize when you could just open up a window and see the whole business with your own two eyes?

Hence these fifty collapsons, with their prancing orbits and their ghostly Hawking/Cerenkov glow. Not to
build
the arc—what a laugh!—but to build a tool that might build a tool that might build a
piece
of the arc, or at least point to a method by which it might be built. Bruno expected the project to last many thousands of years.

He was all but immortal, by the way, and like everyone else he was still struggling to come to terms with it. It wasn’t so unequivocally wonderful a thing, really, a society in which death was always by suicide or freak accident or carefully concocted murder, in which the rare childhood death deprived its victim not of years or decades of life, but millennia. Such disparity, the very opposite of fairness. But again, the
potential
 …

Was it strange to be excited, even after all these years? The eternal question, worn smooth with age: Was obsession a gift? He breathed deeply, preparing to submerge.

Bruno’s fifty collapsons weren’t stable in their orbits and couldn’t remain there forever without some sort of collision
or ejection event messing the trajectories up and making a ruin of all his hard work. So he compared them against the blueprint in his mind, pressed his fingers against the invisible desk to bring up an interface, and triggered the gravity induction mechanisms.

With them he grabbed a collapson, watched it jerk and flutter on his display. The forces he could apply here were weak, nothing compared to the gravity of the collapsons themselves, but of course the collapsons were in free fall. Weak forces, adding up over time, were just as effective as strong ones applied suddenly. And Bruno had learned to be a very patient man indeed. Slowly, he took hold of a second collapson, nudged it toward the first, then nudged it again a few seconds later to reduce the closing velocity. With ponderous momentum they drifted together, and finally touched. Their binding produced a flash of green; they continued on as a single joined piece. He grabbed a third collapson and carefully added it to the structure, grabbed a fourth and fifth.

The other collapsons seemed almost alarmed, their orbital square dance taking place now as if on a gigantic quilt being ponderously dragged and folded around them. Bruno’s movements were careful, practiced; he’d done this hundreds of times, made enough mistakes to feel out the limits and breakpoints and failure modes, to know what he could and couldn’t get away with. Before his network gate had gone down and stopped the endless questions and exhortations of his fellow man, he’d often been asked why he did this part by hand, why he didn’t devise some software to handle these exacting manipulations. If the question came from a scientist or technician he’d generally ignored it, but for the craftsmen and artisans and landscape designers he’d had a ready reply: Why don’t
you
? The truth was, if he could automate this creative process he’d do it, and become the Queendom’s richest human all over again.

He found himself singing, quietly, under his breath. Muttering, really; he had no real gift for song, nor any strong passion, but it bubbled up sometimes, unbidden, while he worked.

An old lullaby, he supposed. Catalan words, extinct in the absence of Catalan notes to carry them along. It didn’t bother him that he was probably mangling it, though he briefly imagined his parents wincing and rolling in their graves. Such thoughts were fleeting, quickly crushed beneath the juggernaut of the business at hand.

Slowly, his design took shape: something like a bucket, a fan, a lens. The shape wasn’t useful in and of itself; most collapsium structures weren’t. But to get to the shape you wanted, you had to pass through stable intermediate designs, adding bricks one by one without upsetting the system’s precarious equilibrium. Often, this meant building complex shapes that “fell” into simpler ones when completed, as a key and a lock might fuse to extrude a single, solid doorknob. Or in this case, a kind of spacetime crowbar able to “pry” bits of vacuum apart to see what lay beneath. Or so he hoped!

Before the assembly was half complete, though, an alarm bell chimed. This was a sound he’d chosen carefully, one that
penetrated
, demanding attention. The gravity wave alarm. Grunting, he thumbed a lighted yellow circle, increasing magnification, leaning forward to scrutinize the display, to isolate the source of the anomaly.