The Collapsium (27 page)

“May I sit?” the stranger finally asked, in the same whiny, ingratiating tones. He sounded tired, though. More than tired. Exhausted, in the literal sense: a container that had been squeezed of its contents. His knees quivered beneath his scrawny weight. He looked ready to faint. “I shudder to contaminate your furnishings, Bruno, or even your fine little floor, but my s-s-strength is limited.”

“Are you really myself?” Bruno asked, horrified to his very
core, unable to reconcile a single trait or feature of this exhausted container with his own self-image. But the question needed no answer—the house would have corrected the lie already, would never have admitted the stranger in the first place if he were, indeed, anything other than what he claimed. “My God, my
God
, yes, sit down over here! Lie back! House, bring us hot soup and blankets. Immediately!”

Steering the stranger—steering
himself
—toward the couch, he realized that it was warm enough in here, that there was no
literal
need for soup or blankets. But the house and the stranger seemed to understand; the gesture was symbolic. Robots brought woolen bedclothes, with which the stranger permitted Bruno to cover him, and a mug of steaming broth, from which he dutifully sipped.

“Ah,” the stranger sighed, “you’re too kind.
Literally
too kind, for I’ve betrayed your secrets and bartered off your dignity more thoroughly than you could ever know. He knows what moves you, what hurts you; He knows everything about you. He knows how you wipe your ass! I told Him all of this, over and over. I deserve none of your s-s-sympathy. And yet here I am, seeking it. Further proof of my unworth!”

“No, no! My God, Bruno, who’s done this to you?”

The stranger sat up angrily. “Do not call me that! I am not a Bruno! Call me Shit, or Remnant, or Betrayer.”

Bruno, leaning forward against one arm of the couch, shook his head. “I’ll do no such thing.”

“Sir,” the stranger pleaded, “do not call me Bruno. Unless you seek to upset me, sir. I deserve that, but I don’t desire it.”

Hugo let out a sudden mewl. In a corner of the room, trapped between a table and the wall, it stood perplexed, contemplating its golden legs and the prison that held them, perhaps considering an act of self-mutilation—Hugo had removed a leg more than once, sometimes for less reason than this. Once it had even managed to remove both of its arms, and had stood over them forlornly for a solid day, ignored by the house software, until Bruno had finally taken pity, broken off his experiments, and taken a screwdriver to the poor thing.

But even Hugo possessed a measure of self-respect. Barely sentient, barely knowing it was alive at all, the “emancipated” robot nonetheless managed to find and fulfill the occasional desire. It managed to play a little, learn a little, live a little; this fact was clear in its bearing. The stranger, who had no such air about him, eyed the thing, suddenly, with an envy that looked like hunger.

“Come,” Bruno reassured, and wished there were someone else here to reassure
him
, or better yet that he’d wake up and find this whole incident to be a particularly loathsome dream, the result of a too-early bedtime after much too heavy and spicy a meal. “Come on, uh, friend. We’ll get you calmed down, and then the two of us can climb in the fax together and reconverge.”

Even as he said it, the idea struck him as a poor one.

The stranger’s reaction was violent. “Are you mad? Are you
mad
, Bruno? I am every imaginable poison and pathogen! Look at this wreck, this wreckage of yourself, and ask what these memories will do to that proud bearing of yours. I know your weaknesses, sir; I know them far better than you, and I say keep your distance. I am your worst imaginable betrayer, and even
I
recoil at the idea! I’ll never join with you. Never!”

Bruno pulled back a little, seeing the huddled figure in still another light: a man who
had
been himself, but was himself no longer. A man whose harrowing experiences set him apart, entitled him to a sense of identity quite distinct from Bruno’s own. Suddenly, he felt ashamed for having suggested otherwise.

“I will call you Brazowy,” he said gently. “Or perhaps Kafiese. Those are translations; they mean ‘brown’ or ‘brown haired,’ as Bruno does.”

“I know what they mean,” the stranger snapped. “But I warn you, sir: you overestimate the dignity I’m able to s-s-sustain. Those names are fair and pretty; I couldn’t bear them. Call me Fuscus if you must.”

“ ‘Muddy?’ ”

“Muddy! Yes, call me Muddy! That’s exactly what I am: the flooded, silted ruins of a once-grand mansion. I am clotted with muck from a distant source, and I’ll reek of it to the end of my days.”

Bruno nodded grimly. “Very well, then; Muddy it is. But you must tell me, who is this villain? Who dares to kidnap and torture the images of innocent people? He has the
Queen
, you say? Unthinkable!”

“You know who it is,” Muddy said.

“I don’t.”

“You can guess who it is, Declarant.”

“ No, I couldn’t possibly.”

Muddy pushed a wild, gray-white lock of hair back over the rutted battlefield of his scalp, and cringed. “I can say the name, sir, but you’ll feel no surprise on hearing it. My tormentor is none other than His Declarancy, Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson S-S-S-Sykes.”

And it was true; Bruno felt his hair stand on end, his skin go clammy, his feet begin to tingle and sweat. He felt disgust, and anger, and betrayal, and above all, a deep sense of embarrassment for poor Marlon, that he should take his petty envies and covetousnesses so deeply and seriously and personally after all. But he felt no real surprise. In some sense, he supposed he’d known all along that Marlon was no good, that there was something really wrong with him.

“The really odd part,” Muddy said, and the whiny tone in his voice, while stronger than ever, seemed more forgivable, “is that he does it to himself as well. You’ll see him dragging his own copy down into the caverns, and the copy will be s-s-screaming, ‘Oh God, it’s
me
this time! It’s a mistake; I’m on the wrong side! I’m supposed to be you!’ and His Declarancy will lock it down and torment it in the most savage ways, all the while yelling ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why do you have to be so
stupid
!’ He’s harder on himself than he is on others, if such a thing is possible. There’s a kind of nobility in that.”

“No, there is not,” Bruno stated flatly. “The man is clearly
ill, and these ghastly infractions of his must be stopped at once. It’s fortunate you escaped when you did.”

Muddy, pulling the blanket up a little higher under his chin, looked blank. “Escape? I didn’t
escape
, Bruno. There is no escape from a place like that, from a man like that. One dreams of death, not freedom. Truly, I tell you, he’s thought of everything.”

“Then … how are you here?”

Muddy laughed sourly. “I was released, in the manner that a projectile is released from a cannon. I was s-s-sent here to you, sir, and like an obedient wretch I’ve complied. I bring a message, and the message is myself.”

Bruno shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? I thought you were so smart! The message of myself is that
you can be broken
, that your spirit and your flesh are far weaker than you’ve ever guessed. You can be made so abjectly miserable that in the end you’ll betray your principles, your dignity, your Queendom, and your Queen with frightening complicity and ease. There’s nothing in yourself to stop it from happening, no inner strength or reserve that can possibly suffice. Even you, Declarant. Even you can be turned into me. His Declarancy wanted to be sure you understood this.”

Bruno got the message. He looked at Muddy, and finally he
did
see himself inside there somewhere, and the sight filled him with disgust and terror. Was there so little to him after all? He tried, not very convincingly, to give this wretch a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “ ‘His Declarancy,’ as you call him, is no doubt going straight to jail. We’ll contact Vivian Rajmon of the Royal Constabulary; she’ll know exactly how to proceed.”

And here, Bruno felt his disgust deepen; Vivian a young woman already, and himself calling her only because he’d been the victim of a crime. He’d claimed more than once to be her friend, but would a friend require
this
before finding, finally, the time to place a call? Surely not. So in fact he was
no friend at all, and never had been, and all his claims to the contrary were the worst sort of self-congratulatory hypocrisy.

But what Muddy said was, “I’m afraid that’ll be impossible, Your Lordship. He’s seen to that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Contacting this friend of yours. It’ll be impossible. He was planning to smash the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid; I was s-s-supposed to be one of the last messages it was permitted to carry.”

“Smash the Iscog? Why?”

Muddy’s sour laugh echoed through the house again. “To isolate you, sir. To trap you at the very summit of the solar system while he carries out his plans below. And, as an amusing aside, to trap me here with you, as a permanent reminder of your talent for failure. I’m truly sorry it had to be this way, Bruno. I’m sorry I had to help.”

“The Ring Collapsiter!” Bruno said, slapping himself on the head, feeling like a perfect fool. “All those problems, accidents, all the sabotage. It was Marlon all along! He’s
trying
to destroy the Queendom.”

“Of course he is, sir. Always has been.”

Thinking of a corpse he’d seen once on an unlicensed space freighter, Bruno asked, “Does he ever alter the body forms of his victims? Does he add or remove limbs?”

“Constantly, sir.”

“God, I’ve been a fool!”

“You certainly have, sir. Believe me, I know that far better than you.”

“But why would he do such a thing?” Bruno was pacing now, waving his arms. “Even a sick, vengeful man needs
somewhere
to be sick and vengeful, doesn’t he? He’s no fool; he’s not
stupid
. What could he possibly stand to gain by destroying the Queendom?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. You’d have to ask him that yourself.”

Finally, Bruno felt himself get truly angry, angrier than he’d been in years, or maybe ever. “Is that the way of it? Is that his message to me? I
will
ask him myself, then. We’ll find
a way down there, and we’ll show you right back to him as a message that we’re not so easily beaten, you and I!”

At this, Muddy laughed again, his voice sadder and nastier and whinier than ever.

“What? What’s funny?” Bruno snapped.

“Nothing, sir. It’s just that I t-t-told him you’d say that.”

And in that moment, Bruno
hated
Muddy for all that had happened, and he knew this meant that he was actually hating himself—all the weakness and stupidity and vulnerability in himself. And then he felt like an even
bigger
fool, because it meant that Marlon’s bullet had hit its target dead-on, and he, Bruno, had been powerless to dodge it.

“Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-
seven seconds,” Bruno said. “Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, three seconds.”

“Nothing,” Muddy answered.

“Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-seven seconds. Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, six seconds.”

“Nothing,” Muddy said again. He was bent almost double, peering into a brass eyepiece. Strange markings, perhaps Chinese, were visible on the back of his neck. Above them both, the ceiling had arched itself into a dome of glass, through which the faxed telescope could observe the heavens. It looked archaic, this telescope, almost a thing Galileo himself might have employed, but its lenses were of wellstone rather than glass. The filtered, enhanced, broad-spectrum images they produced could easily rival the finest products of twenty-first century astronomy.

In fact, there was little need for a human operator at all; a few murmured instructions to the house and every celestial object of note would be mapped within the hour. But they
had
let the house find Iscog fragments for them, boulder-sized bits of collapsium ejected starward by the grid’s obviously quite messy demise. Whatever sabotage Marlon performed had
been swift and decisive. One shuddered to contemplate the dynamics: so much mass interacting with so much violence and chaos! And so Bruno had determined that they should inspect the fragments—at least a few of them—with their own eyes. Or with reasonable proxies thereof. Perhaps it would help them to understand what had happened, and how.

“Nothing,” Muddy said again. “No wait,” he then amended. “It’s there at the edge of the frame.”

“Center, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The one good thing about this wretch, Bruno decided, was that he had no pretensions of any kind. Unlike a
real
de Towaji, Muddy made no attempt to conscript or control or second-guess. He didn’t seem to feel any sense of ownership here, or any urgency about their task or their precarious position. In fact, he seemed content to follow orders without the slightest reflection. Perhaps it gave him a sense of peace.

“Oh. Goodness,” Muddy said. “You should have a look at this, Your Lordship.”

They traded places, and Bruno leaned over to peer into the eyepiece. He saw nothing there but a scattering of stars. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s moving,” that whiny voice complained. “I don’t know how to make the telescope track it.”

“Moving against the starscape? An arc-second and a half in thirty seconds? It’s five AUs away!”

“It’s fast,” Muddy agreed. “Whatever ejected it must have been—” He cringed slightly. “—a violent event.”

“Mmm.”

Indeed, Bruno’s sensors had been triggering all afternoon, reporting magnetic and gravitational anomalies passing through the area. If even a few of these had originated in the Queendom a mere week ago, then they must be moving very fast indeed, fully 10% of the speed of light. That meant crushing accelerations: hundreds or thousands of gees. He imagined a handful of collapsium structures falling together over planetary
distances as the Iscog was fractured, then spinning apart in a hundred little gravitational eddies, flinging bits of themselves in all directions while their cores were crushed into a single useless hypermass. Such an event
would
be violent—exceedingly so.