The Collapsium (26 page)

He could, of course, hop into the fax machine and duplicate himself, but he knew himself too well; the duplicate wouldn’t want to deal with logistical headaches any more than he did. Within hours it would be commandeering his precious resources for some new harebrained experiment, and his attempts to argue the point would prove worse than fruitless, for the duplicate would believe itself to be
him
. And
it would be right. He’d played this drama out enough times to know the pointlessness of it.

And yet …

Was it any better to live in darkness? To cast aside the final pretense of comfort and live as a perfect troglodyte scientist, with no human needs left to neglect? How Tamra Lutui—the Virgin Queen of All Things—would recoil at that! As he himself should recoil, hearing it reduced to those terms.

He sighed, musing darkly: if only inertia could be overcome; if only he could really
proceed
, unhindered and happy. If he could crowd the zero-point field aside, or deaden it with complementary waves, then the tiniest flick would send his billion-ton billiards wherever he chose, at whatever velocity, and another infinitesimal tap would suffice to stop them. Was such an idea feasible? Ridiculous? He should give it some more thought, he thought, but of course
that
would mean suspending his current work, too. The idea made him tired, or perhaps he was already tired and the idea simply helped him to realize it.

He lay back again, to resume his study of the collapsium. It
was
beautiful, really, but also coldly menacing, distorting not only the spacetime around it but the life of one Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji as well. He’d never asked to be marooned out here, never asked to live in darkness and isolation, never asked for any of this. Or perhaps he had, in seeking the
arc de fin
, but why did it have to be so
hard
? Why did he have to sacrifice so
much
?

He supposed the thing to do was to resign himself to an idle period—a vacation, in effect—during which he could solicit production bids. Or perhaps one could simply
buy
neutronium these days—heaven knew the Ring Collapsiter’s demand for it had to be a good thirteen or fourteen orders of magnitude larger than Bruno’s had ever been.

He could probably use the time off, anyway. Didn’t Tamra have the hundredth anniversary of her coronation coming up sometime soon? Surely she’d be upset if he let
that
go by without comment. Perhaps he could visit. There were other
friends he’d been wondering about as well. Vivian Rajmon, Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary? Goodness, she must be over sixteen by now! And Marlon Sykes, his fellow Declarant-Philander? Marlon might not be happy to see him—probably not, actually—but they could talk about physics, maybe hash through some of these inertia problems. Surely he’d be happy to do
that
, at least.

With some unpleasant sense of surprise, Bruno realized that except for a handful of emergencies in which the whole of humanity was threatened, it had been almost three
decades
since he’d had any contact with the Queendom at all. Was that what it took to interest him in the affairs of everyday life? Total calamity? Even his broken network gate had gone unrepaired, except for Her Majesty’s unauthorized access portal. And she hadn’t used it to visit him since the last calamity. Who could blame her, when he’d never sent so much as a letter?

It was like waking up underwater, yes. How did
that
happen?

He felt his blood stir, and wondered, finally, if this was what he’d been needing:
human
interaction to keep his physics problems in balance. No man was an island, the saying went. Never mind a whole planet. Indeed, he could fix his network gate immediately and send a message down into the Queendom, asking which of his friends would consider forgiving his long silence. Perhaps it would cause a stir in the media—they’d always had a strange interest in his affairs—but for God’s sake, why should he let that bother him?

He shot to his feet and, leaving the chaise lounge behind, marched homeward with more determination and enthusiasm than he’d had for much of anything lately.

“Door,” he said as he approached the house. Obligingly, the nearest wall formed a stained-glass door and opened it for him. He stepped through, and the interior lights came on dimly and began easing him from darkness to full interior light.

Robots danced out of his way, offering nothing in the way of food or drink because lately he’d been yelling at them for
that, but one battered thing, far less graceful than its peers, moved directly into his path and spread its arms.

“Hugo,” he said, with a warmth that surprised even him. “Hugo, old fellow, have I neglected you as well? Have a hug, then, yes. Are you well this morning?”

The robot’s neck squeaked audibly as its head nodded, twice, and then the thing was stepping clumsily out of his way and looking around the house as if bewildered. Hugo was an experiment of sorts: an ordinary household robot not controlled by the household, not controlled by anything except its own desires and intentions. In general these were minimal and quite peculiar, unlike the desires of a person or a pet or an invading insect, but on occasion—perhaps by sheer coincidence—its behavior could be touchingly childlike.

“There, there,” he told it, and patted its head a few times. He’d felt a stab of guilt, thinking of young Vivian. She could be childlike, too, but even five years ago she’d been uncomfortably adult about some other things, and by now she was a young woman, her quite charming girlishness probably a thing of the past, or else taking on the overtones of adult affectation. How dreadful for him, that he could let such a thing slip by and feel guilty only now, when it was too late to do anything about it. Had he really tried to teach poor Hugo to play shuffleboard? That was a poor idea from the start, and if playing against the
house’s
robots was no fun either, well, had he never considered that Vivian might like to play? Or Tamra, or
somebody
?

“House,” he said sternly, turning to face the central fax orifice, “I require network access as soon as possible.”

“Planetary maintenance?” the house asked, perhaps thinking he needed to access the little world’s store of raw materials—water, air, pure element stock for the fax’s matter buffers … Perhaps that seemed likelier than the alternative: that he needed people. His house knew him too well.

“No, no,” he told it, “the Iscog.”

“Acknowledged,” the house said, and he could have sworn
it sounded surprised. Iscog: the Inner System Collapsiter Grid. The Queendom’s telecom network.

Bruno, feeling somewhat indignant at that perhaps-imagined reaction, said, “I did build the thing, you know. The Iscog. I’ve a right to take an interest in the people using it.”

“Of course, sir,” the house agreed, and
now
it sounded imperturbably mechanical. “Gate repair is in progress. Estimated completion time, nine seconds. Gate repair is complete.”

Bruno frowned. That was too easy—a further indictment of his neglect. Had it waited all these years, for him to say those few simple words? Well, bah. There was no help for it now; the thing to do was to move forward.

“Record a letter,” he said.

But before the house could answer, the fax gate sizzled and glowed, and a human figure tumbled out of it and fell, sprawling, to the floor.

“Oh!” it said, in a voice—a male voice—like a sob. The figure reached out a hand, and stroked the floor as if caressing it. “Oh, can it? Can it be? Have I s-s-spilled at last to the feet of de Towaji?”

Nonplussed, Bruno took a step backward and sputtered, “Sir, my goodness! Have you been authorized to access this portal? What are you doing here?” And then, belatedly, “Are you all right?”

“All right?” the man sobbed giddily, looking up from his face-down sprawl. “All right? The concept eludes. No pain is being applied. Is that an answer?”

“Are you injured?”

“Injured? Mortally! Or not at all; the distinction is less important than you probably imagine.”

The question was far from frivolous; fax gate filters were supposed to strip the injuries and illnesses and general wear-and-tear of life from the bodies that passed through them. Conversely, they were supposed to leave affectations like baldness and pierce-holes alone, especially if the subject’s genome appendices commanded it. In the case of this man,
though, the fax seemed to have had a very hard time making up its mind; his clothing hung off him in tatters, even its software apparently defunct; and beneath it, where the skin should be exposed, there was instead a varicolored and decidedly lumpy surface, like tattooed scar tissue. The hands appeared crooked and malformed, as did the feet projecting from the remains of a pair of suede knee boots, and the face … Something odd had been done to the face, it had been flattened somehow, the nose pushed upward and the cheeks drawn down, creating a piggish sort of look. And yet, for all that, the face looked worryingly familiar.

“Do I know you, sir?” Bruno asked. His voice trembled; he had the distinct feeling that the answer would upset him.

The sprawled man looked up at him and smiled in a most horrific way. “Do you not recognize me, de Towaji? I’d hoped not, actually, for I’m no fit thing for your remembrance. The only claim I have to usefulness—the only claim!—is that I was once your-s-s-self. Look upon me, de Towaji, and despair: I am precisely as low as you can sink.”

Bruno’s household managed to get the stranger washed
and into fresh clothing, over repeated and strenuous protests.

“This thing? I’m no fit inhabitant for a garment like this. No! Away! Don’t touch me. Please!”

The robots, dashing about in their usual poetic blur, nonetheless betrayed a curious deference or solicitousness toward the stranger, and by using their bodies in conjunction with strategically held towels and clothes, they managed to keep the surface of his body almost completely hidden. Bruno caught glimpses of ridged or puckered flesh, colored over with strange designs, and he very briefly observed a complete word calligraphed along the stranger’s leg. “PENITENT,” it looked like, though he was far from certain about that.

Finally, the protests died down, and the stranger said, “Ah, who’s myself to argue? It’s your generosity that’s given me these doublet and tights, not my own deserving, of which there is—take my word of it—none whatsoever.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Bruno said carefully, unsure what to make of a remark like that. Unsure what to make of this person at
all, wondering what had happened to him and why he’d chosen to come
here
in what seemed to be an hour of quite desperate need.

But the stranger only laughed. “You haven’t grasped the tenth of it, Declarant-Philander, you who’ve never yet made acquaintance with the lash. Ah, what a lordly figure you cut! Your knees unbent, your eyes unaverted. Do you crawl? Do you plead? Do you think yours-s-self incapable of it?”

The stranger wasn’t mocking him, but seemed actually to be sort of pitying or even pleading, like someone who’d stumbled on a suicide attempt in progress and had no idea what to say. But there was a kind of
self
-mockery going on there, the voice reedy and whining, its tone deliberately obnoxious, as though its owner feared to speak with any decisive clarity or strength.

“What in the worlds has happened to you?” Bruno asked, and was relieved to hear more concern than disgust in his own voice. As the robots finished their work and danced away one by one, he stepped forward to offer the man a hand up. “Why have you come here?”

“What’s the date?” the stranger asked him in return. He declined the helping hand and stood up on his own, though he wobbled slightly. Were his knees weak? Injured, perhaps? As for dates, Bruno didn’t generally keep track of such things, but the house answered for him. “Sunday, February 28th, Year Ninety-Five of the Queendom.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, nodding. The look on his face was full of excitement, though of a stilted, unpleasant, untrustworthy variety. “Then I’ve been trapped in the grid for over two weeks, waiting for your port to open. I was afraid it
mightn’t
open—I know you too well!—but faxing to nowhere was much preferable to the alternative. And betrayer that I am, I did dare hope to reach you.”

Bruno’s frown deepened. “I don’t grasp your meaning, sir. Where have you come from?”

“From damnation itself!” the stranger said, cringing, and squeaked out a manic sound that was neither giggle nor sob.

“You think I’m jesting? Speaking in metaphors? He has a lot of anger toward you, and by extension toward myself, for having
been
you. Whips, chains, direct stimulation of the centers of s-s-suffering? These are merely appetizers. The most disagreeable treatments you can possibly imagine are inadequate, mere infantile shadows of the truth, because you haven’t spent a lifetime reflecting on it, as He has.”

But Bruno was still shaking his head. “What do you mean, ‘having been me?’ Are you saying you’re Bruno de Towaji? A copy of myself?”

“Was,” the stranger spat. “Was. It’s a name I’ll sully no further. But yes; He pirates fax patterns out of the Iscog, and instantiates them in secret, in dungeons hidden away from civilized eyes and sensors. He’s particularly fond of
your
pattern—there’ve been dozens of us in His clutches at one time or another—but He keeps others as well: Rodenbecks, van Sketterings, Kroghs … He even kept a Tamra for a while, though it didn’t seem to please Him. He’s kept a few others on occasion. Not that they last long, of course, the way He uses them up, but they can always be freshly printed, the s-s-same pain recipes tried over and over until they’re perfected. I represent an unbroken chain, decades long. In the midst of our sufferings we pass down the histories and lore, from one generation to the next. He encourages the practice, as it deepens our despair.”

Bruno could only stare. Was the stranger mad? Was he speaking from delusion, or some demented sense of jest? The two men stared at each other, the one unbelieving and the other unbelievable, for a long string of moments.