The Collapsium (33 page)

“Can you make radio contact with that grapple station?”

“The object ahead of us? Certainly, sir. Can you recommend a frequency?”

Bruno gave it one—the one he and Deliah had used in their conversation at closest approach. “Analog,” he added, “not digital.”

“Very well, sir. Receiving reply.”

“Play it.”

“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice said. “
Malo e lelei
, it’s about time you answered. I’ve had you on radar for over an hour. Hello?”

“I’m here,” he acknowledged. “Two of me, actually, though one would deny it. How are you holding up?”

“Splendidly,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. He supposed not;
he’d
certainly be delighted at the prospect of rescue after a week of lonely terror out here, the sun shrinking steadily behind him. The light-lag and vocal distortions, at least, had dropped almost to zero.

“Right. Well, we’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m not sure that we have an actual rendezvous plan, but we’ll work something out.”

“What is the condition of the station?” Muddy interjected, in a voice less sour than before.

“Condition? Why, it’s a mess. Every non-wellstone component has been smashed out of true, and there are
lots
of those components. Big, too. I feel I’m in some carnival funhouse. I’m actually amazed the hull’s held up so well: I’ve got leaks,
but they’re about eighth on my hierarchy of problems to worry about. The floor here is neutronium filled, for local gravity. My biggest fear is losing cohesion in the diamond cladding—I’d survive about a microsecond.”

“Is the station functional?” Muddy pressed. “Can you produce a grapple beam with it?”

Deliah paused. “Bruno? Is that still you? You sound funny.”

“I’m Muddy. A de Towaji relative on the Quisling s-s-side of the family.”

Quisling: traitor. Deliah didn’t appear to catch the reference. “Attitude control is out,” she said evenly. “Power distribution is out. I’ve got hypercomputers running in several locations, but there isn’t a lot for them to
do
. The emitter cavities are wellstone lined, so it’s possible the revpics still have full range of motion. If I can route power to them, I could probably get enough vibration out to muster some measurable gravitation. Not enough to save me or anything. Why? What did you have in mind?”

Muddy shrugged, then seemed to realize she couldn’t see that. “I, uh, thought we might simply take it with us. The whole thing. I thought it might come in handy.”

“It might at that,” Bruno said, impressed with the idea. “Goodness.” He turned to the nearest hypercomputer and tapped in some quick calculations. “Hmmph. Not feasible. The ertial shield’s wake is essentially cone shaped, and could only accommodate the station if it were more than a kilometer behind. But at that range, most of the zpf has filled in again. It’s like digging a hole in water—it doesn’t last long at all.”

Muddy looked ready to cry again. “It was just an idea,” he whined, cringing back in his couch as if expecting violence.

“A
good
idea,” Bruno agreed quickly, “just not a workable one. At best, we’d yank a core sample out through the station’s middle.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Deliah complained. “If you can
think
of towing something this size
through space, then you’re either crazy or … Well, we’ve got some talking to do when you get here.”

A gentle but very solid
whump
came up through the floor, and suddenly all the sensations of inertialess motion vanished. They weren’t accelerating any longer, so the aft deck was no longer “down.” But they weren’t weightless, either. Instead, the di-clad neutronium deck liners inside the grapple station tugged at them sidewise. The deck seemed to tilt beneath them now, as on an ocean ship that was sinking.

“Huh. I believe we
are
here,” Muddy said.

The view above them was still of Sol: a bright star among the many stars, none of them moving. But at the edges of the view, just barely visible, was a lighted red circle in a curve of well-metals. It flicked off and then on again as Bruno watched. Not part of their own ship; it was the only sign of the massive station hulking below them.

“Ship,” Muddy said, “display a schematic of the station, including yourself upon it, and clearly indicate the positions of all living persons.”

Obligingly, the brass plaque erased itself and became instead a plate of holographic glass, behind which a little grapple station appeared, as if modeled in translucent brown plastic. Two dots of brightly contrasting pink appeared in one lobe of the structure—Bruno and Muddy in the
Sabadell-Andorra
. A third dot hovered nearby, perhaps fifty meters away.

“Okay, I have you on scope,” Deliah said. “The nearest air lock suffered minimal damage in the accident—air leakage shouldn’t be a major problem if you mate there.”

“Mate?” Bruno asked stupidly.

Muddy slapped himself on the forehead, not playfully or symbolically but
hard
, as if he meant to raise a welt. “Little gods, I’m so stupid!
So
stupid!”

“We have no airlock,” Bruno said, echoing the obvious. “Steady, Brother—I didn’t think of it either. We’re not the most brilliant of sailors, you and I. Deliah, there’s a problem. Have you any sort of spacesuit to climb into?”

“No,” she said, “nothing like that. All the faxes are down. Do I hear you correctly? If you’re airlock-free, I don’t see how a spacesuit would help. The vacuum would kill you both the moment I opened your hatch.”

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed ruefully. “We have a
door
, and an ample supply of oxygen, but that will do us little good if we must suffocate to admit you. An idiotic quandary. Let’s think on this a moment. My humblest apologies, madam.”

“Can you fax yourself into storage for a few minutes, while the hatch is opened and closed?” Deliah asked.

“Alas, no, our fax is much too small to admit a person. Let me think about this.”

Muddy had, of course, started crying again, but presently his eyes brightened, his snuffling quieted, and his hands lashed out for the control panel above him.

“An idea?” Bruno asked, feeling startled.

“Indeed, yes. Deliah, move as far away from us as you can. Can you seal yourself off with an independent air supply?”

Her snort of amusement was unmistakable. “You overestimate the conditions here, de Towaji.”

“I’m Muddy.”

“Oh. Well, I can put some distance between us, but it’s all one crumpled volume. Is the danger really any greater if I’m close?”

Muddy considered. “I suppose not, actually.”

“I’ll only go a little ways, then.”

“Stay clear of the walls, at least.”

The floor had begun to make a new noise—a kind of low, sizzling hiss.

“What are you doing?” Bruno asked. Well, demanded, actually, and then immediately felt bad for it. He’d been telling Muddy all along to act like a man, to use the brains and initiative he’d been born with, to be helpful rather than help
less
, and yet here he was getting unnerved and suspicious the first time it actually happened. He supposed it was another response from humanity’s deep wiring: Muddy had acted subservient for long enough to place himself “beneath” Bruno
in some imaginary hierarchy. And now he was … What? Exceeding that role? Getting uppity? Was Bruno entitled, in this age of self-repair and self-reconstruction, to blame him for that, and then excuse his own behavior as a quirk of evolution? Surely not.

These things
, Muddy’s voice reminded him,
aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine
. Perhaps it was like the wiring for pain: subtle, pervasive, intimately tied to vital functions. But was
that
an excuse? Goodness, if Bruno couldn’t treat
himself
with dignity …

“I’m sorry,” he said to Muddy’s cringing form, with as much sincerity as he could muster. “Please proceed.”

Slowly, Muddy uncringed himself and moved his hands back toward the controls. “It’s a chemical reaction. A s-s-series of them, actually.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The hull’s outer layer was wellstone; it could be programmed into all manner of absurdly reactive forms that would decompose—atom by atom—the absurdly nonreactive substance of the grapple station’s wellstone hull. Such reactions could be timed in waves, so that each atom of silicon substrate, once liberated, could be carried away in the chemical equivalent of a bucket brigade. And at the edges and interfaces, the two hulls could be pseudochemically
merged
, to keep the air from leaking out around the sides. The
Sabadell-Andorra
was melting its way through the defenses of the runaway station, melting through into its cozy, air-filled interior. Already, the sizzling sound had climbed half a meter up the sides of the
Andorra’s
barrel hull.

“My God!” Bruno exclaimed, and if he weren’t secured and awkwardly tilted in his leather couch, he’d have leaped to his feet to grasp Muddy’s hand and pump it. “How brilliant! What a
tidy solution
that is. And quick! Why, it took you hardly any time at all.”

“Careful, sir,” Muddy warned. “You endanger your modesty. To claim me as part of yourself, then praise my brilliance? It’s mightily suspicious.” His voice was partly sour, partly sarcastic, partly amused and wry. But he seemed to
appreciate the compliment just the same. He relaxed visibly, his frame filling out a little as his muscles slumped and his chest expanded.

“Oh, piffle,” Bruno answered, in much the same tone. But he took the hint, and declined to praise himself further. “How long until we can open the door?”

“Another minute.”

Deliah’s voice broke through again. “Holy Philadelphia! My station! My beautiful station, what are you doing to the hull of my beautiful station?”

She, too, sounded amused. What a jolly band of jokers they were up here, ten thousand million kilometers above the sun. Bruno supposed it was a reasonable defense mechanism, given the chaos below and the impossibility of their intervention there, at this particular moment. He thought of Tonga, the cliffs of Fua’amotu washed away, and felt guilty for his humor.

“I see the door,” Deliah said in a bleaker, more serious tone. “It’s about halfway in. No signs of air leakage yet. For an impromptu solution, this seems to be working rather well.”

“You know,” Muddy said, “technically we could do the same thing to our
own
hull: pull the iron aside bit by bit as a temporary measure, and make a wellstone door anywhere we like. Not even a door, a semipermeable membrane. I suppose fighting your way against the air-pressure gradient might be difficult, but we could compensate by … Well, hmm.”

“It hardly matters,” Deliah said. “Your real hatch is almost through. Just stay clear of that cladding! You do realize I’d never approve this as a safe operating procedure. You could
so easily
kill us all right now …

“All right, another two centimeters and it looks like the hatch will open. And … it’s … there. Can you go a little further inward, just to be safe? Good. Can you see this? It looks perfectly clear from where I’m standing. Can you open the door?”

“Indeed,” Bruno said.

But it was Muddy who was closest, and so he was the one
who unstrapped himself, slid down the now-diagonal floor, and threw the latches. There was a huffing noise as the equalization valves kicked in. Bruno’s ears popped; the pressure was lower on Deliah’s side.

The door swung open, and a platinum-haired woman in a grease-smeared yellow pantsuit burst through. With hardly a glance, she threw her arms around Muddy and kissed him soundly on the cheek. “My hero!”

Muddy squawked and tried to pull away. “I’m Muddy, madam. Your hero is over there. Please,
please
, you’re hurting me.”

“You’re
both
my heroes,” she insisted breathlessly, and launched herself uphill at Bruno who, to tell the truth, reacted much as Muddy had. They were neither one of them too comfortable with displays of gratitude. Some heroes.

Deliah’s face betrayed more curiosity than concern. “I
don’t understand, Bruno. Why did you change your name? What exactly did Marlon do?”

Muddy tensed at the question but, to his credit, did his best to answer politely. “That’s a more personal inquiry than you suspect, madam. Pray you never discover the answer.”

Bruno, who’d been ignoring the two so he could feed calculations into a pair of hypercomputers, looked up now and saw the need to intervene. “Ah. Deliah, you’ve hit upon a … delicate subject. Muddy has, until quite recently, been accumulating what we’ll politely call ‘deep psychological injuries.’ All things considered I’d say he’s coping rather well, but it’s unwise—not to mention unkind—to press him. Once he’s seen proper medical attention, he may feel more inclined to share his story, but for the moment even
I
don’t know it. And perhaps we should take him at his word, that there are things we really don’t want to know.”

Muddy, not surprisingly, burst out crying at this.

Deliah blushed. Her folding chair—now a slim couch of padded white leather secured beside the fax machine—
creaked a little as she moved within her restraints. “I’m … sorry, uh, Muddy. I had no idea your troubles were so … That is to say … Urgh. When I first saw you, I thought you looked, um, festive, and so I …”

“Festive. Festive!” Muddy fingered the several gray tufts of hair sprouting from his wrinkled, mottled scalp, then touched his upturned nose, which was somewhat redder and wider than Bruno’s own. His cheeks were ruddier, too. Muddy wasn’t restrained at all; he sat upon his couch, and through his tears an awkward chuckle escaped, and an unhappy smile, and he even managed a little bow in this sickening environment of
Sabadell-Andorra
under full sunward acceleration.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, no, the lady is most perceptive. Indeed, among … other activities … I was employed exactly as you surmise. You may say the word—I grant you my leave.”