The Collapsium (29 page)

Sigh. “You’re right to question me, sir, and quite wrong to place any faith in my abilities. Or yours! The one gift he gave me, the one true thing I’ve learned from his attentions, is a
confidence in our fallibility. What argues in your favor is that you’re asking for mere engineering, which is banal. Pluck any two people at random, deposit them on a planet somewhere, and inside of an hour they’re a design team, finding new ways to put up a roof. They don’t have to be friends; they don’t have to communicate well, or even at all, because the whole process is coded in their genes. It may be that I can fumble through it, as humans have always fumbled, and produce some half-assed but workable product, as I did with
Redshifi
.”

“That’s the spirit,” Bruno said, trying to sound encouraging. He clapped Muddy on the shoulder, this time with some genuine affection. “Nothing fancy, nothing hard—just a hull of iron and the weakest, mealiest of engines to push her.”

Muddy bowed his head. “Very well, sir. I’ll do as you ask, though perhaps not for the reasons you would wish.”

“Eh?”

“Sir, have you examined the converse of engineering? We fall into it so naturally, but in the end every project expires, and one way or another every team is dismantled, and
that’s
something we’re not wired to deal with. It saddens, even traumatizes us.
That’s
where geniuses are needed, to engineer the conclusions of things. We let things wither, collapse, decompose, when we should be murdering them gently and artfully.”

Bruno frowned. “What is it you wish to murder?”

“An age of mankind,” Muddy said cryptically. “The innocence of an entire society. People believe themselves to be the masters of creation, when in fact they’re barely participants. Better that they learn this now.” He looked up at Bruno as if hoping to be questioned for that remark, or doubted, or accused.

Bruno looked askance at him. “You wish the people harm?”

“No. I wish for them to internalize His Declarancy’s lessons, and to do that they must live. Horrid, to think they might die without first understanding their lives.”

There was much to disagree with in a statement like that, but Bruno, still awash with excitement, declined to take the
bait. “Just get started, all right? I’ll be in my laboratory. House: see that I’m not disturbed.”

“As you wish, sir,” the house replied, in its usual, coolly solicitous voice, deep yet subtly feminine. With a start, Bruno realized it was his mother’s voice, or something not terribly different from it. Strange that he’d never noticed this before, but from the look on Muddy’s face, Bruno gathered he’d noticed it as well, and seemed to find it significant in some way. Disturbing.

Well, hopefully there’d be plenty of time to consider the matter later, assuming it had any importance at all. Now was hardly the time to worry about it, not with the laws of physics coming down around the Queendom’s ears. He strode resolutely toward his study door, thinking that he could always change the house’s voice when he got back from the Queendom.

If you get back
, Muddy’s whining voice corrected in his mind. Well, all right then. If. He went to work.
⁸

“Sir,” the house said to him sometime later, its mother
voice sounding anxious at the need to wake him, “I’m receiving a signal from the runaway grapple station.”

“Hmm, what? A signal, really?” He sat up, rubbing his eyes, putting a hand to the crick in his back. A signal, goodness; he hadn’t expected any such thing. His contact effort had been … a formality, really, because what were the odds that the station’s castaway would think of
radio
, out here in the wilderness of the Kuiper? Even assuming the necessary devices could be instantiated and configured, what would be the point? Bruno was the only one out here, his tiny planet the only inhabited object in … What? Half a million cubic light-hours of space? Long odds indeed!

“Play it,” he instructed, coming fully awake.

Obediently, the house formed wall speakers and piped the
signal through them, distorted but clearly intelligible. “Hello, Mayday, Mayday. This is Deliah van Skettering of the Ministry of Grapples, responding to your ping. Hello. Can anyone hear me? This is Deliah van Skettering calling Mayday. Repeat, Mayday. Radio source, please respond. I require immediate assistance …”

He jerked a hand across his throat, and the house cut the signal. Deliah! Laureate-Director and Lead Componeer of the Ministry of Grapples! What was
she
doing aboard a runaway station? And given her presence there, what were the odds of a passage within even a few AU—hundreds of millions of kilometers—of Bruno’s position? Unless perhaps she’d been on
all
the stations for some reason, and they’d
all
been flung off into the outer darkness, and this was simply the one that passed nearest to him on its way to infinity.

Did she know that he was here, that the radio beacon signaling her was, in fact, his? Through the heavy distortion—no doubt caused through some combination of long-range, enormous velocity differential, and poor transmitting equipment—her voice sounded perfunctory, not eager or hopeful but
bored
. And then he understood: the poor woman was a victim of slow drowning. She grasped dutifully at corks and straws, not because it was likely to help but because it was all she could do, other than simply admitting defeat.

“House, what’s the light-lag between here and the station?”

“Seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

“Sixteen minutes round-trip? Hmm. I hadn’t counted on this; I really hadn’t. Well, send a reply: ‘Laureate-Director, this is Bruno de Towaji. Repeat, this is de Towaji. Perhaps you’ll recall meeting me a number of years ago, shortly before your murder? Now, as then, I offer my heartfelt condolences on your situation. Still, I am very curious as to how it came about! Can you report your status? Over.’ ”

“Reply sent,” the house said.

Bruno nodded, and settled back into his calculations where he’d left off. Not that he’d forgotten about Ms. van Skettering—
far from it!—but she’d hardly benefit from his sitting around waiting for something as frightfully slow as
light
.

He was worried about this new “hypercollapsite”—although the material itself was proven feasible, there was the matter of gross structure to contend with. What shapes must he mold the stuff into, to achieve the desired, inertia-foiling result? The question turned out to be nontrivial in the extreme. He could well envision himself scrabbling at it for hours or days, looking for a conceptual “edge” to start from. It was one thing to
speak
of EM vibration-damping foams, quite another to design them.

“Return message received,” the house said, after what couldn’t possibly have been sixteen minutes.

“Yes, already? Let’s hear it.”

“De Towaji!” Deliah’s clipped, tinny, strangely muffled voice said. “I’d hoped that was you; I’m glad it is. My situation is that I’m in very serious trouble. I think you know that. The station’s grapple lock on the Ring Collapsiter was disrupted—I’m not sure how—but the complement beam was left intact, pulling us straight out toward Aldeberan. It took me three days to get it shut off. I have
casualties
here, Declarant—three technicians dead! We saw the other stations going off-line, and we tried to wrap ourselves in impervium before the same thing happened to us. It … wasn’t a good solution.”

Bruno’s fingers dug at the wellwood edges of his desk. Had he been unwise to establish this contact? Was there anything, really, that he could do?

His voice was tentative but, he hoped, compassionate. “Deliah, ah, not to put too fine a point on it, but are you hoping for rescue? You see, I’m rather engaged at the moment, and a lot of lives may hang in the balance.”

Her reply, a thousand seconds later. “It’s very kind of you to ask, Declarant, but I am realistic about my situation. Even assuming anything could be done—which I doubt—the Queendom’s peril is obviously much more important than my own. The Ring Collapsiter is falling in
again
, much faster this time, and mostly in pieces. Something has also happened to
the Iscog, although I’m not sure what. There’s loose collapsium and neutronium
everywhere
—the planets may actually be in as much danger as the sun!”

She paused, then continued. “Are you able to travel, de Towaji? When I last saw Her Majesty, she was adrift on a workman’s platform spinning perilously close to the sun. It sounds like you have some sort of … plan or something. Is that the case? We are lucky to have you, we really are. Meanwhile, I’m absolutely kicking myself that I let this happen. I just wish I knew what went wrong.”

“Deliah,” he reassured her, “this calamity was engineered by Marlon Sykes. I can’t imagine what his reasons might be, but his
methods
are more thorough than you probably imagine. I doubt you’ve erred in the slightest, although it’s commendable that you’re willing to consider it. Even more commendable is your bravery. I’ll be sure to tell you about it when next we meet.”

“Marlon?” her voice came back, incredulous. “Why would
Marlon
sabotage the collapsiter? I mean, I know the man—in several senses of the word—and he does have a temper sometimes, but it’s
his
collapsiter. It always has been.”

“The man is apparently acting from pure malice, Deliah. Evil, one might say. God, what a petty, small-minded thing that is! Of all the things to do, of all the infinite possibilities, to choose
that
! Why not paint, or dig holes, or sing off-key when nobody’s listening;
there’s
nobility for you. Hurting people is just dumb. It’s vandalism in its lowest form.”

“I’m glad I knew you, de Towaji.”

“Call me Bruno, please, and know that the honor is mine. I’ll be sure to tell you this when we meet again someday.”

Her voice was weary and resigned. “Bruno, we’re not going to meet again. The Iscog is smashed, and all my copies were on these grapple stations. I may be the last of me already; if not, it’s just a matter of time.”

Bruno was aghast. “There’s the Royal Registry for Indispensable Persons, isn’t there?”

“What? Oh, no, the Registry closed its doors years ago.
Corrupted storage media; toward the end, they couldn’t keep a gnat.”

“Personal backups?”

“You’ve been gone a long time, Bruno. We’ve had virus storms, datavore infestations, Flying Dutchman faxes circling endlessly through the network … A clean backup is only possible if the
system generating it
is clean, and we haven’t had that luxury in recent years. I’m not sure we ever did.”

Bruno was even more aghast. “Do you mean to say your
only copy
is flying off into interstellar space?”

“Worse than that,” she replied, her voice going stern. “I think
Tamra’s
only copy is down there on that ceremony platform; Tongatapu was one of the islands that got drowned by tidal waves. Literally
drowned
, no survivors.”

Bruno tried to parse that statement. Like most of Tonga’s islands, Tongatapu was a coral atoll, very flat. Geology had tipped it slightly, raising its southern edge out of the waves and submerging parts of the north completely, but even the heights of Fua’amotu rose no more than about fifty meters above sea level. And if something truly massive, a ball of neubles or a stray telecom collapsiter, grazed close enough to the Earth, it could raise local sea levels by several times that much. No survivors? Tongatapu had over eighty thousand residents!

“There are others down there on the platform with her,” Deliah continued. “Wenders Rodenbeck, for one, and Vivian Rajmon and her pet police captain. We were rehearsing for the completion ceremony next year, when the last segment of Ring Collapsiter was to be towed into place.”

Pet captain? Would that be Cheng Shiao? Bruno tried to remember if that too-competent constable had been a captain or not. By all the little gods, he really
had
been away too long.

“Damn it,” he said. “Damn that Marlon; he’s timed this entirely too well. It’s what malice does, I suppose—sit around calculating minimum effort for maximum harm. Well, he shan’t get away with it. You sit tight, Deliah; you’ll be rescued
in the next couple of days. I shall personally guarantee it.” The words surprised even him as he said them. To keep from blurting anything else, he quickly added, “Over and out.”

He’d been continuing his work throughout the five hours or so of that slow conversation, and now he set into it more fiercely, with the energy of total outrage. Gross structure! He must find a gross structure for his hypercollapsite!

But the work progressed slowly, and it was in this area that he encountered his first major disappointments: truly effective damping of the zero-point field would require enormous assemblies, towering cities of foam many thousands of miles wide, and massing enormously more than Sol herself. Perhaps mankind could one day conceive of projects so grand, but for the moment Bruno had some very sharp time and material limits to contend with, and little patience for daydreams.

With sensors fine and coarse, he studied the ring encircling his tiny star. Such was the pool of his actual resources: ten trillion tons of collapsium. He assumed an equal mass of hypercollapsite—implying a completely error-free rearrangement scheme—and fed it into a permutation algorithm to plumb what forms, if any, could be crafted that might do any good at all.

Here, finally, he got lucky again—almost. The key was that the zero-point field’s energy was known to rise as a function of frequency; its highest energies occurred at the shortest wavelengths. With limited mass, Bruno’s damper could only block out absorption “windows” of the field’s full spectrum, but by concentrating on windows at the higher frequencies, it could maximize its otherwise limited effect. And the higher frequencies, he found, were by far the easiest to damp; it was the low ones, the cosmological subwoofers, that penetrated every simulated barrier he could think to erect.

So he put his head down for a little more sleep, trusting the machines to do their work. He was exhausted; this was exhausting work, wringing his brain like a sponge. As he drifted off, bright flashes popped behind his eyelids, as his ocular muscles flinched to the beat of Muddy’s spaceship
work outside. Even through the wellstone walls, there was no mistaking the muffled
clang! clang!
and occasional bursts of stacatto speech, like the cursing of a man who’s just hammered his thumb. Bruno’s last vague thought was that the boat gods must be in need of appeasement out there, and perhaps—worryingly—in here as well.