The Collapsium (31 page)

Bruno smacked himself on the head. “Damn me! Damn us both, we should have coordinated this better. Muddy, that hole is there because I ran out of materials. I was planning to fill it with mass from the planet’s core. It’s strictly temporary.”

Muddy’s composure collapsed immediately. His arm went up to cover his face, and he commenced a hoarse sobbing. “Oh, sir! Oh, sir! You know how badly I wanted to please you. I can’t manage even that, can I? Did I ever doubt that history would judge me h-h-harshly? If so, that doubt is removed. Please don’t yell at me anymore, sir; please don’t. The weight of my own disapproval is all I can bear!”

For the umptieth time, Bruno felt ashamed, both for upsetting Muddy and for
being
him, this miserable creature who was so easily upset, and so overly dramatic when it happened. Was he really so weak? So sniveling? Marlon Sykes had his number, all right, had his every shame and insecurity mapped out. That was, of course, the whole idea, but that didn’t make it easier to face. Well damn Marlon, anyway. Did it matter what he thought? So what if Bruno and Muddy were a pair of folding cravens? At least they weren’t hurting anyone, weren’t, for example, destroying the Queendom for spite’s sake.

“There, there,” Bruno said awkwardly, stepping forward to embrace his tortured self. “It’s all right, Brother. It’s all right. Let me try some more calculations, and see what I can come up with. You finish outfitting the ship, all right? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“All right,” Muddy said, sniffing, and burst into fresh sobs. “God, I’m
so
broken it surprises even me. Go, sir. Please. Observe me no further.”

It seemed that Bruno should have said something heartening at this point, but instead he turned away from Muddy and, taking him at his word, slunk away into the house. This was just too difficult, too awkward, too shaming. Muddy would understand his reaction, right? Better than anyone else possibly could.

He continued on into his study. Fortunately, it hadn’t cleaned itself up since he’d gone outside; everything was exactly as he’d left it. This made it easy to drop right back into his chair and pick up the “ertial shield” calculations right where he’d left off. Clearly now, time was running out.

He worried about the number of workable geometries, this close to the lower mass limit. He supposed the number of solutions could well be infinite, or at least very large, but in a severely restricted domain—the same little mushroom cap, with an infinite number of trivial modifications. Were there any solutions with holes through the middle? He began with the hypothesis that there
were
, and began formulating a proof.

An hour later, his efforts had borne fruit, yielding an ertial shield solution with a hole of nearly the right size, in nearly the right place. To create it he’d have to use
all
the neutronium from the planet’s core, and from the core of the little dark sun as well, but that couldn’t be helped. He rose from his chair and bolted through the house.

“Muddy! Muddy, warm up the grapples; we leave at once!”

Outside, the little spaceship had turned to impervium: a smooth, barrel-shaped, superreflecting mirror. Impossibly light and impossibly strong, it would no doubt break his toes if he kicked it. Muddy stood beside it, looking toward Bruno. As before, tears filled his eyes. Were they fresh? Had they been there for the entire hour?

“It’s only just occurred to me,” Muddy said sadly. “You mean to destroy the planet.”

Hurriedly, Bruno nodded. “And the sun, yes. It can’t be helped. Do we have everything we need to rescue a stray grapple station?”

“D’you hear that, house? We s-s-seek to destroy you for our own gain.”

“Ah. Do be careful, sirs,” the house replied in its calm, mother’s voice.

“Does it bother you?” Muddy pressed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Would you rather live?”

“As you wish,” the house said, equably enough.

Muddy appeared distressed by this. “Shall we at least say good-bye? You’ve been
home
to me, a reassurance, a place to dream of returning to. It isn’t lightly that one abandons such a place to … the torch.”

The house, unmoving and unchanging, seemed to consider
this for a few moments before replying, “I’ve uploaded my gain states to your ship’s memory, sir. Should you ever desire to rebuild me, that image awaits your command. I’m sorry that my destruction troubles you; shall I clean up first? Can I offer you some soup?”

“No.” Muddy said, weeping afresh. “No, thank you.”

“Are we ready to lift off?” Bruno asked, trying to be gentle but needing to hurry things along.

“Not quite,” Muddy said, a little angrily. “A solar IR laser is charging the batteries, and if we’re headed for the
grapple station
instead of the
Queendom
, our own grapples will need a few minutes to change target lock.”

Bruno waved a hand. “Muddy, you can handle these things while I’m installing the ertial shield. We’ve got to
go
, man.”

Muddy’s sobs strengthened, and his arm looked ready to leap up and cover his face again. “Oh, sir, can’t we walk around the world? Can’t we see it one last time? I’ve dreamed of this place for too long, to have it s-s-snatched out from under me so soon!”

“All right,” Bruno snapped, then softened his tone. “All right, yes. If we haven’t got at least a
few
minutes to spare, it’s my fault for taking too long in the study. And this place
has
been a fine home, hasn’t it?”

For a few seconds it seemed Muddy might reply, but he didn’t, and finally Bruno turned to lead the way down the meadow path away from the house. Darkness hadn’t been kind here—the grass lay dead and crisp in some places, dead and limply moldering in others. His gardens lay in neat, lifeless rows. At the meadow’s far end, his dogwoods and honeysuckles had gone dormant, shedding their leaves in a carpet that squelched and crumbled beneath their boots.

The little bridge was intact, and the stream beneath it babbled as happily as ever, but the barley fields beyond it held only harvest stubble and a pair of stoop-backed robots dutifully uprooting the tiny white mushrooms that were springing up all around. The rocky desert looked all right, and the beach, and the sea. These things he hadn’t killed yet. Not yet.

“What would Enzo have made of this place, I wonder?” Muddy asked, pausing where the stream widened out into foul, rotting bog at the ocean’s edge.

Bruno snorted. “It’s no world for kites, I’m afraid, though he’d have liked the fields and vineyards.”

“And hated the silence. He wouldn’t have understood this, would he, Bruno? Crawling off on our own like this, messing around with
theories
and
things
; he’d never have stood for it if he’d been alive.”

No, indeed. Enzo de Towaji had been the ultimate people person, a man who seemed to exist
only
in the thoughts and reactions of others. Strange that he’d been so happy with Bernice, who
did
like the quiet. How often would she be staring into the fireplace, or setting off to hike in the hills, or playing a game of chess against herself, when Enzo would kidnap her along on some foolish errand? But perhaps she needed that—needed someone to drag her mind from its pure, Machiavellian pursuits.

“Mother might have understood,” Muddy said.

Bruno nodded. “Indeed. Indeed, yes, although she’d find the place awfully confining. We really should be going, Muddy. There are live people who need us. Deliah van Skettering, for starters.”

Muddy pursed his lips. “She’s the woman on the station?”

“Yes, and she’s probably single-copy. Her death could well be as final as Enzo’s and Bernice’s, if we’re late in preventing it.”

“Do we have the
time
?”

Bruno puffed out his chest. “I daresay we
must
. If nothing else, she knows where to find Tamra, who, incidentally, may also have been singled in this calamity. But I
hope
we’d have saved her in any case.”

“To spite Marlon?” Muddy asked, in a particularly whining tone.

“To spite God,” Bruno answered sincerely. It was the ultimate superstition, the last and most powerful he could tap. If spirits and demigods were a shorthand for all the
pseudorandomness of nature, then God was a shorthand for all the spirits taken together. If silly “boat gods” could derive some statistically measurable reality from dwelling even fleetingly in Bruno’s subconscious, then God himself—who dwelt in nearly everyone—must derive enormously more. So to blame God, to beseech God, to
invoke
God was an act not only of desperation, but of ultimate rationality.

He expanded. “This business of
evil
, of
murder
, has no place in civilized society. Deliah does not wish to fly off into outer darkness, and so she shall not. And she’ll have you to thank for it, Muddy, and God to curse for letting it come down to your actions, and mine. Has Marlon broken your heart, along with your pride? Come! Saddle up our steed and let’s away!”

To his relief, Muddy did seem infected by that enthusiasm; together they trotted along the beach, along the pebbled pathway that led back into meadow again. The house appeared over the horizon, and suddenly they were upon it.

A hundred robots lined the way ahead of them.

There were fifty robots on either side of the path, gleaming gold and silver and glossy black in the starlight, their left arms raised in formal salute, forming an arch. Bruno skidded to a halt, Muddy coming up short beside him. Together they stared for a few silent moments, before starting forward.

Two by two, the robots turned blank faces toward their masters and seemed to convey a sense of exultation, untainted by sorrow. Two by two they bowed, bodies clicking and whirring with impossible grace, arms extending downward to brush the withered grass. Two by two, they collapsed the archway, a good-bye as eloquent as any poet had ever penned.

“Farewell, old friends,” Bruno murmured as they came to the end of it, as the last two robots swept into their bows. Muddy burst out crying again.

“It’s been a privilege, sir,” the house said.

“I thank you,” Muddy sobbed, “from the very bottom of my wounded heart.”

Then Bruno touched him on the shoulder and steered him toward the ship, and together they climbed through the little hatch. Inside was a miniature palace of diamonds and green velvet, of blue-and-white veined lapis and green-and-white veined jade. The two little chairs had become slick, stylish acceleration couches in black leather; the toilet had turned to gold.

“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed on seeing it. “Did I accuse you of shoddy design, Brother? I retract every word!”

“It’s just library patterns,” Muddy said, shrugging, his sobs trailing away into sniffles again. Then he straightened. “Oblivion! Aren’t we forgetting your pet?”

“My pet? My pet?” Bruno felt his eyes widen. “Ah, God! Hugo!”

He leaped through the hatch, catching his boot toe on it, and fell sprawling in the rotting grass, narrowly missing smashing his nose. He needn’t have bothered, though; the battered robot stood outside, looking as if it’d been just about to climb in.

“Mewl,” it said distinctly, looking down at Bruno in an oddly human—if faceless—way.

“Yes,” Bruno agreed, rising, brushing himself off, “mewl indeed. Climb aboard, you, and quickly. There’s much to do, and little time!”

Of the world’s destruction there is little to say; grapples
cleft the planet in twain, exposing its core of prismatic-white neubles, and the neubles were collapsed into proton-sized black holes, and the black holes were formed into collapsium, and the collapsium was squashed into a torus of vacuogel hypercollapsite and positioned atop the ertial shield.

The destruction of the sun was somewhat more delicate, somewhat more involved, but only slightly. Muddy, staring upward through the wellstone “window” of the bow, wept and moaned inconsolably throughout the process, until Bruno, who was none too happy about all this himself, finally snapped at him to shut up. Hugo mewled once and fell silent, and as the ertial shield
whump
ed into place atop the spaceship’s impervium bow and the propulsion grapples locked onto their distant target, there was only the sound of the two men breathing: one raggedly, the other not.

The star field—and the debris field of their former home—rippled only slightly; the ertial shield was transparent to visible light, transparent in fact to nearly every phenomenon the universe could throw at it. It existed primarily as an absence,
a damping, a silence in the zero-point field’s infinite screeching.

“Engage the beams,” Bruno said, when all systems were ready.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Muddy acknowledged in sullen, childish tones. In place of a standard hypercomputer interface he’d designed a late renaissance control panel, with all manner of gilded switches and levers and dials, and with his hands he now manipulated these controls.

The transition from weightlessness to weight was immediate; the debris field dropped away against the unmoving stars, and Bruno felt his lungs compress, the air forced out of them by the weight of his own breastbone. The acceleration wasn’t enormous—the system was set for precisely 1.00000 gee—but it came on as a step function. Its time derivative, known to physicists as “jerk,” was nearly infinite, lurching them from zero to full throttle in a millionth of a millionth of a microsecond. Funny how, in their hurry, they hadn’t considered the
effect
of this on tender flesh and blood; it hurt. Not a stinging or a burning or a bruising kind of hurt, but a
pressing
, like having a soft, heavy couch dropped on you.

“Ah, my bones!” Muddy shrieked. “My ribs! I’ve broken my ribs!” And then he vomited over the side of his couch and shrieked again.

“Steady,” Bruno said, unfastening restraints and sitting up. The movement was unwise. The ertial shield swept away the zero-point field immediately ahead of them, leaving behind a medium one thousand times less energetic; in theory, plowing through this sparser field at one thousand times the acceleration should have been completely equivalent to 1.00000 gee, indistinguishable in every way from normal gravity or thrust. But a bow-heavy structure weighing trillions of tons, however cleverly disguised, poses some minor practical difficulties. What was really going on, in this air-filled space behind the hypercollapsite? Was it surprising that inner-ear fluids might misbehave?