The Collapsium (38 page)

Bruno knew he wasn’t dead when he heard Muddy wailing
. Oddly, though, what Muddy was saying was not “Poor me,” or “I am afraid,” but “Tamra! Tamra!! Oh, God, how I’ve failed you!” This was how he knew he and Muddy weren’t really so different after all.

“He’s waking up,” a too-husky version of Vivian Rajmon’s voice said. “Cheng, come here; he’s waking up.”

“No,” Bruno said without opening his eyes. “No, there’s no point in that.”

“Are you all right, Bruno? We’ve put some salve on your burns, but your hair will need to be shaved …”

Resignedly, he opened his eyes, which already ran with tears, and promised to run with many more before they were through. “Hello, Vivian. God, how beautiful you’ve become! What a young lady! It’s good of you to care for me, really; thank you. It’s quite unnecessary, though; my life is over. I’m about to kill myself.”

Muddy shrieked again, and leaped from his own couch to throw himself atop Bruno’s body. “No! Declarant, Lordship, you mustn’t consider it! To lose Tamra
and
you, how unthinkable. No! I won’t allow it!”

“Ah, damn it,” Bruno said, struggling under Muddy’s weight. “Get off me. Get
off
. I’ll do as I please, damn you!”

“You will
not
,” Muddy snarled. His breath was hot on Bruno’s cheek; the bristles of his beard dug into Bruno’s flesh like needles. “The Queendom still rots with collapsium, its sun is in imminent danger of swallowing a hypermass, and I have suffered a blow far worse than any torment of Marlon’s. We all have. God, I’m able to
empathize
. I’m able to feel the pain of all the worlds’ billions, because my own pain is finally too huge to contain.

“Will you not avenge her, Bruno? Will you not fight for her Queendom’s safety, as she’d command you to if she were here? Have we traded places, you and I? Because
I
would save her worlds if I could.
If I could
.”

“Let me up.”

“Listen carefully, damn you: I’m weak and damaged and years behind your knowledge of collapsium. I
will
save the Queendom, but I’ve only yourself to use as my instrument. There is no other r-recourse. Let you up? By God, you’ll
get
up. Now!”

His weight lifted off Bruno, but suddenly his hands were there, grabbing the ruff of Bruno’s shirt, hauling him up by it.

“Say it,” Muddy instructed, thrusting his face once more into Bruno’s own. “Say you will live.”

“Let go.”

Bruno tried to shake off Muddy’s grasp and saw the wince of agony there on his brother’s face, his own face. Muddy’s weakened body struggled against pain and fatigue and despair, but his grip was surprisingly strong, the conviction behind it being much greater than Bruno’s own. It was that more than anything—that wobbly but determined strength in the face of total calamity—that altered the trajectory of Bruno’s heart.

“All right, damn it. I’ll live,” he agreed, his voice heavy with despair. To be bested by this most pathetic of creatures, to find that he himself was the lesser man after all …

But with nothing left to live for, he could at least, indeed, spend his life in the act of vengeance. He could, at least, do his level best to crush Marlon’s face between angry fists, to put an end to these evil plans, to sweep up every last bit of stray collapsium before irreversible havoc could be wreaked on the Queendom and its people.

“Or die trying,” Muddy added with a sudden, strangled laugh. He released Bruno’s shirt ruff and stepped away, and suddenly tears were rolling down his face. His strength—limited, as he’d so often said—was finally expended, and he staggered and slumped against his acceleration couch.

Not limply, though—the ertial space around them seemed to discourage that. Instead, he bounced away and collapsed in a heap beside the supine Hugo, who mewled in delight.
Hello, friend!

“Attention,” the voice of
Sabadell-Andorra
said. “I am receiving a radio transmission, analog voice.”

Dear God, Bruno thought, was there no rest? Would there be no rest for him, ever? “Play it,” he said, raising the back of his couch to a working position. The whole ship smelled of sweat and scorched cloth, and his own sun-fried hair. He looked around, thinking: so crowded in here. What are we doing?

“De Towaji?” a crackling voice asked from the ether. It was Marlon Sykes’ voice, unmistakable after all these years. “Bruno de Towaji, is that you?”

Bruno sighed, too tired for the moment to feel a proper sense of hatred. “Reply: Yes, Marlon, you pathetic bastard. I’m here.”

“I hoped you’d come,” Marlon said, after only a few seconds’ delay. He must be somewhere close by. Bruno scanned the trajectory display but saw no trace of a base or spaceship or other structure there, just another loose end of Ring Collapsiter swimming into view.

“End reply,” he said. “Ship, can you localize the source of that transmission?”

“Negative, sir. Range is indeterminate, and the signal appears to be coming from a broad region, fully half the sky.”

Bruno frowned. “Which half?”

“Opposite the sun.”

“Hmm. And it all arrives at the same time? It’s a clean signal?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“How unique. It’s as if it were coming from an enormous shell antenna, symmetric about our position. But
that’s
unlikely, isn’t it? He’s got some trick he’s employing.”

Marlon’s voice came again. “Bruno, are you still there?”

“Reply: I’m here. You say you hoped I’d come?”

Again, the delay. Then Sykes said, “I did, really. You’re my hero, sir. Didn’t your tattooed friend tell you?” The odd thing was, Marlon didn’t sound snotty or sarcastic or evil with that remark. He sounded like plain old Marlon Sykes, meaning every word he was saying.

“Declarant Sykes,” Cheng Shiao said urgently, leaning over the radio console in an ill-considered lurch. “I must insist that you surrender yourself immediately. You’ve broken the
law
, sir.”

Sykes laughed at that, and suddenly he
did
sound evil. “Who’ve you got down there with you, Bruno? Some policeman? No one fit to judge
us
, certainly. We make our own laws, we Declarant-Philanders. Even
physical
laws can be ruled in our favor, if we prepare the proper defense.”

Bruno sighed, weary of all this. “What is it you want, Marlon?”

“To business, eh? No time to catch up on the personal side? All right, then; be that way. I’ve contacted you to ask you to join me. Not quite as a
full
partner—I’m really not prepared to share the conceptual credit—but I could certainly use your help in the detail work. Frankly, I could use your company, too, if you’re willing to lend it.”

Bruno was aghast. “Marlon, are you insane? Well, clearly you are, but are you stupid as well? Tamra is
dead
. You
killed
her, you … you … fiend!” There didn’t seem any better word for it. Words had simply failed him.

“Fiend?” Marlon sounded genuinely hurt. “I’m as much a victim as you, sir. Remember, I loved her first. I didn’t kill her—why would I do that? She killed herself. Ask your little friends there.”

Killed herself? Killed
herself
?

“It’s true,” Vivian said hollowly. She’d stripped out of her quilted bodysuit and now wore only a kind of slip or under-dress that served to emphasize her all-but-grown-up figure. But her face—her grown-up face—was heartbreakingly sad. “We’d gotten the fax working again, intermittently, but it kept malfunctioning and going offline—none of us knew enough about it to say why. We had only two reflective blankets at that time, and there just wasn’t enough room for everyone underneath them. We tried taking turns that first day, but it was clear that that was just going to slowly kill us all.

“So we tried drawing straws, but Her Majesty somehow rigged the draw. She lost five times in a row. We didn’t let it stand, of course, though she kept insisting it was her duty, that ‘not one more citizen’ would die in her stead. But what was
our
duty, if not to protect her? Then Cheng Peterson died—we found him with his skin burned black and his tongue all puffed out—and she just … walked out into the sunlight and cut her throat. I don’t know where she got the knife; I never saw it before. We tried to save her. We
tried
, but you can’t fix a carotid artery under those conditions; you just can’t. So she … died. And the next day—”

Vivian, clutching tightly at the wellwood mantelpiece, choked momentarily, her beautiful face streaked with speedy, inertialess tears. The strain of the long ordeal showed clearly in her features. Finally, she found enough composure to continue. “The next day, we got the fax working again for nearly an hour. We got the tents up, and the moisture condensers … She would have lived, Bruno. She would have. The Queen of All Things sacrificed herself for
nothing
.”

“Not for nothing,” Muddy said, struggling to rise from his heap on the floor. He looked dizzy. He looked, truthfully, like he should just stay put. “It was a gesture of, of … d-d-defiance. Perhaps she knew she was bait in a trap.”

“No,” Shiao said, shaking his crew cut head sadly, “the cruiser didn’t try to rescue us until five days after that. She couldn’t have known.”

“An affirmation of life for the rest of you, then,” Muddy said harshly. “Ill considered, perhaps, but she l-l-loved all of you enough to do it, and that’s the thing that counts. She died—f-fittingly—of an excess of love.”

“You see?” Marlon piped up from the radio speaker. “I was as shocked and shattered as any of you. I’d roll back time to that moment if I could.” Then, more ominously: “Perhaps some day I shall.”

Bruno’s weariness had been subsiding, replaced bit by bit with a deep, sustaining anger. Now it blossomed. “You created the situation,
Marlon
. You put her there in harm’s way, and you could have
removed
her from it when you saw the way things were going. You’re twice the bastard I thought, for laying the blame on chance when you know perfectly well it’s your own damned fault. Why would I possibly want to join you? What hope or endeavor could we possibly share?”

There was a long pause, until finally Marlon answered. “I was never sure if you knew, Bruno. When I had the idea, I figured
surely
it was one you’d considered and discarded. But the math checked out, so I guessed you’d just been squeamish about it. Perfectly in keeping with your character, right? You actually
care
about people on some level, which is great. Really, I mean that in a nonsarcastic way. But you were all alone up there on that little planet, your research going off in these weird directions, and I saw it’d be thousands of years before you actually got anywhere with it.

“That first time you came back to the Queendom, I thought you’d call me out for what I was doing. When you didn’t … Well, I was full of resentment then. I was happy to
see you go, and happy to capture your image for … well, malicious purposes. And the image confirmed your ignorance! The second time, though, I figured you
must
have worked it out. You were very methodical, so when you said nothing, I dared to hope you were secretly on my side. It made me feel better about you, about how great everyone thinks you are. If
you
were working on
my
idea, well, that would make it all worthwhile. And if not, then maybe you weren’t so smart after all. And that would be an important discovery, too.”

His voice sped up, becoming almost giddy. “I watched your world through telescopes, you know, and when you finally made a
ring
of the collapsium—around a star, no less!—I thought surely you
must
have figured it out. I waited for your network gate to open; I even sent you a present. But you hadn’t worked it out, had you? You still haven’t. I really am way ahead of you on this one. How extraordinarily affirming that is, of all my years of effort!”

Bruno felt he couldn’t possibly be more bewildered. “Marlon, what in the damn worlds are you talking about?”

Another long pause. Then: “The
arc de fin
, Bruno. Your window to the end of time. There’s a shortcut, an easy solution, to produce it
this year
. This very month. It requires a lot of mass, and an energetic collapse, but those have finally been arranged.”

“Oh. Dear God,” Bruno said. “The sun!”

“Exactly. I need it. Oh, I suppose any equivalent star would do, but there’d have to be a thriving industrial civilization there to help me collapse it in the proper way. So we’d be back to waiting thousands of years again, until these Queendom slackards expand beyond this one meager system. It’s too long. History should know its own end, to be able to make sense of its present. And history
will
record that it was I, not you, who opened that window.”

Bruno couldn’t help laughing a little—a sour, bitter, furious chuckle. Grief hovered beside him, waiting its turn, but for the moment he was simply angry. “History will die with
the Queendom, Marlon. There’ll be no one left to remember how damned smart you were.”

“Oh, please.” Marlon’s voice was impatient. “I disrupted the Iscog to keep small minds from interfering; I didn’t realize
yours
was one of them. There’ll be more deaths, of course; that can’t be avoided. Probably most of the people on Earth, certainly all the ones on Venus. The flares of the dying sun
will
be impressive, it’s true. But come on; you know as well as I how trivial it is to create miniature stars. We could be circling the planets with them, using them for power, heat, light, industry … Why should we settle for nature, when a handful of neubles, some wellstone, and some hydrogen will match what nature requires a billion billion billion tons to accomplish? A sun! I say it’s inevitable, that we should dismantle the stars for our own purposes and replace them with something of our own device. History will credit me with
that
, as well.”

“History will label you a monster,” Bruno said darkly.

After a pause, Marlon grumbled. “Bruno, I realize nobody
owes
me greatness, but if I can
seize
greatness, why shouldn’t I? The Queendom provides the framework and the labor, and I provide the ideas and the careful flow of information to control it all. At the top! People suffer as a result, but what’s so unnatural about that? This idea that people should be safe and happy, that’s a very distorting idea. Look to history: Most societies have agreed that people should be
useful
, to men of vision like myself. Who remembers the happy nobodies? My future is grander than yours, Bruno; I swear it. Your so-called ‘monsters’ are simply the flesh of humanity’s ambition to create a history worth recording.”