The Collapsium (40 page)

“SHIFT YOUR AUDIO FREQUENCIES. TRANSMIT LOWER. LISTEN HIGHER. THE SPEED OF SOUND HAS CHANGED.”

“C … nsating. This is a test signal. Can you hear me, sir?” The voice was tinny but clear.

“YES! CAN YOU REBROADCAST OUR VOICES IN A FREQUENCY-SHIFTED DOMAIN?”

Now in a stronger voice: “Th . . t should be possible in a moment, sir. I’m experiencing an enormous number of intermittent computational malfunctions, but I have established sufficient redundancy to compensate. Shift and rebroadcast is enabled.”

Bruno cleared his throat, then tried to speak normally. “Hello?” His voice, despite an echoey, underwater quality, sounded much better. And with much less effort, too.

“Hello!” four or five other voices called back.

Then a new burst of chatter broke out.

“I can
hear
!”

“…  got my voice back.”

“I feel really sick.”

“Help! I don’t like this!”

“Excuse me, Madam, I need you to move a little to the left. Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

Outside the weirdly translucent hull, Bruno could just barely make out stippled rows and columns of pinpoint brightness in the fog: the collapsium lattice that surrounded them. Curiously, it moved only slightly, vibrating a few centimeters back and forth in irregular bursts. Was the ship
stuck
against it somehow? It was not easy to see, to perceive any details at all, but there did seem to be some sort of kink in the tunnel ahead of them.

“What do we do now?” someone wanted to know.

An excellent question! This was no comfortable place—it was weightlessness and ertial travel, fever and sensory deprivation, hallucination and drowning all rolled into one. Bruno had felt more at ease on rickety sailboats, riding the stormy seas of Tonga! But how to escape? And where to go?

“Sykes may believe we’re dead,” Cheng Shiao’s voice said tightly, through tinkling bells and underwatery echoes. “That’s something.”

Vivian Rajmon’s voice replied. “I half believe it myself, Cheng. Is that your hand? It feels like wood!”

Bruno peered and squinted, trying to perceive the two, to tell them apart from the others. Were there visual cues when a person spoke? Did translucent angel-amoebas have a discernible body language? He picked out two figures huddled together by the fireplace and decided that was probably who they were.

Annoyingly, one figure still bounced around the hull’s interior. The body was difficult to focus on, almost too quick to see at all.

“Declarant,” another male voice said, “I don’t feel too well right now.”

“I’m sure none of us do,” Bruno agreed. “Who is that? Wenders Rodenbeck?”

“The man himself,” Rodenbeck’s voice agreed.

“Is that you bouncing around?”

“That’s right. My hands’ve gone numb; I can’t seem to make the fingers work. I feel sort of
poisoned
, if that makes sense to you.”

Bruno’s face threw itself into an inertialess frown. “Seriously ill, hmm?”

“Seriously,” Rodenbeck agreed, in steady but frightened tones. “Whatever’s … happening to us in here, I think it must be very unhealthy. Getting out of this seems like a pretty necessary thing, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Bruno, fearing Rodenbeck had suffered some sort of inertialess whiplash injury to his neck, suppressed the urge to nod. “I quite agree. Try not to move, sir. Your symptoms are troubling, and without knowing their cause, there’s no telling whether you could exacerbate them, or indeed, whether the rest of us could be similarly affected. But haste will likely make things worse. Can you remain calm for a few minutes?”

“De Towaji is right,” Shiao said. “We don’t even know what sort of weapon was used against us back there. Explosive projectiles of some sort?”

“There were no projectiles,” Bruno said. “Just bursts of energy.”

“Energy doesn’t just
appear
,” Deliah objected.

“Indeed. It’s puzzling. Perhaps Marlon was locally inverting the photon states of the zero-point field? That
would
create energetic bursts, but they’d be short-lived, and since this would also carve equivalent holes in the vacuum, which the energy would immediately rush back in to fill, the
net
release would still be zero. I suppose that is consistent with what we’ve observed.”

Then came Muddy’s voice, only slightly whiny. “Pulsed gravity lasers, if they were
crossed
, should create brief p-peaks of intense gravitation. Potentially, eight crossed beams could create the equivalent of a collapsium lattice, for picosecond intervals.”

“Ah. Clever thought.”

Shiao made an optimistic grunt. “It’s not dangerous, then? It’s a trick, an illusion?”

“Oh,” Bruno said, “I don’t know about that. The net energy of a knife is also zero. Better a knife than a bomb, I’ll wager,
but finding ourselves in the middle of such an inversion would almost certainly be harmful.”

“Fatal?”

Bruno’s inertialess shrug nearly dislocated both shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Captain. I’m speculating enough as it is. It would get inside our superreflectors, I’m sure. It would
appear
inside, without having to penetrate. But he would have to score the hit on us, first, and that appears difficult. For whatever reason, the timing and position of the flashes don’t appear to be precisely controllable.”

Shiao persisted. “Why would he use such an ineffective weapon? Because this ship is too nimble? Too difficult to target with a nasen beam?”

“He does seem to have a lot of devices at his disposal,” Muddy agreed. “At least one nasen projector, probably eight or more gravity lasers, and oblivion knows how many s-s-standard EM grapples, to pull the Iscog and the Ring Collapsiter apart as he has. The energy he’s expended in the past five minutes would fill a battery twice as large as this ship. How much has he expended in the past
week
? The past
three
weeks?”

“We should be looking for a very large ship, then?” asked Shiao.

“Or a base,” Muddy said. “He’s a deeply private man, fond of s-s-secret facilities buried in rock. And if he
is
using gravity lasers in the way I’ve imagined, there would need to be two banks of four, spaced a considerable distance apart. Look for a good-sized asteroid whose sunward face is c-covered in wellstone energy converters. Dead black.”

With great effort and concentration, Bruno fought inertialessness to lean as far forward as his straps would allow, and peered at the translucence of the control panel. He knew exactly where the trajectory display should be located, so it wasn’t hard to train his eyes on that spot. It
was
hard to make anything out there, though. Were those the edges of the plaque? The dashed and dotted lines upon it? He tried to remember where the planets had been, when they’d last seen a glimpse of …

“Mercury,” he said. “It’s close enough—the radio time-lags match. It’s certainly
big
enough. And I can’t imagine a larger, emptier source of concealment.”

“Or a better source of raw materials,” Muddy agreed. “Mercury, yes.”

“I really don’t feel well,” Rodenbeck complained, in a weaker voice than before. “My limbs have gone entirely numb.”

“All right,” Bruno said, with an accidental and quite sickening nod. “Ship? Why have we stopped?”

“I stopped us,” the ship replied. “The tunnel ahead of us bends too sharply to admit my outer hull.”

“Hmm. You used backup thrusters to do this?”

“Yes. I’m also currently using them to maintain attitude and position. It’s difficult, sir—required thrust is very low to effect a velocity change, but the counterpulse required to damp it is itself a function of position and velocity. The resulting control space has no closed-form solutions.”

“So you’re improvising.”

“Correct, sir. Fuel consumption has stabilized, but remains disconcertingly rapid.”

Rapid?
That
wasn’t a good thing. “Estimated time of depletion?”

“Two minutes, twenty-four seconds, sir.”

“Oh, dear. Is there enough fuel to back us out of here safely?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Blast. Use some imagination, you! Bring matters like this to my attention before they become irrevocable!”

“I am extremely taxed,” the ship said in its own defense.

Bruno sighed. “All right, then, turn around and pull us out with the grapples; without a fuel supply we’re in more danger in here than we are outside.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

There was no sense of movement, but the jittering lattice of pinpoints outside the hull began—slowly and jerkily—to rotate.

With a yelp of surprise, Wenders Rodenbeck settled at once to the deck beside Bruno’s couch and remained there.

“Ah, good. You’ve managed to grab hold,” Bruno said, looking down approvingly.

“Actually, friend, I appear to be stuck.” Rodenbeck’s voice was alarmed.

“Stuck?”

“It feels … like gravity. Pretty much exactly like gravity.”

Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness! “Ship, cease rotation!”

But it was too late. The walls hummed with activity, oxygen atoms accelerating near-inertialessly and being expelled at velocities that probably exceeded the vacuum speed of light. But the rotation continued—even began, ponderously, to accelerate.

“I don’t understand,” Deliah van Skettering protested. “The gravity inside a cylinder should cancel to zero, regardless of position or orientation.”

“A
continuous
cylinder of infinite length,” Bruno corrected. “Ours is kinked and twisted, and composed of discrete masses, and filled with a Casimir supervacuum that dulls momentum! I’m a fool. Hold on, Wenders, I’ll fish you up.”

“No!” Muddy shrieked. “I forbid it, sir! Keep your hands where they are!”

“Muddy, I—”

“You’ll be killed,” Muddy insisted. “Needlessly, pointlessly killed! You can’t save him in time!”

“You’re saying I’m going to die?” Rodenbeck asked, his breath now coming in gasps.

“Blast it,” Bruno said, quietly, hollowly, because he almost certainly
would
be killed if he intervened. But perhaps Rodenbeck—an artist, an innocent in this madness—could be saved. With numb fingers, he undid his safety harness. Already he was feeling the beginnings of weight, as the stern of the ship swung close to a collapson node. And for so small a black hole, the gradients would be exceedingly steep. Wenders Rodenbeck was probably already feeling more than a gee, the equivalent of Earth-surface gravity. And in the next thirty seconds …

There was no way to avoid this; the ship couldn’t go forward, couldn’t drag itself backward with grapples, couldn’t go
anywhere
without turning around. But Bruno should have foreseen this difficulty, should have seen where the danger would occur and then ordered everyone away from it. Steeling himself, he leaned over the side of his couch …

And was whisked, with an instantaneous, all-but-inertialess flicker of movement, to the bow of the ship.

“I f-f-forbid it,” Muddy said, his hard, solid-wax torso bouncing and skating over Bruno’s own. He held on tightly to something, pinning Bruno to the window there, preventing him from escaping. Muddy had leaped the length of the ship, apparently, to ensure this.

“Let go,” Bruno said urgently. “Let go! I must help him. This is my fault!”

“It isn’t. We’ve never done this before. What man has walked inside collapsium like a tunnel beneath a river? What man can foresee every problem? You saved him once, but this time, Marlon has him for certain.”

“Oh! God!” Rodenbeck cried out, weakly.

“Release me,” Bruno insisted. “We’ve seen deaths before, but I can
do
something this time. Listen, you coward! You sniveler! Am I really so weak, so selfish? Am I really so capable of being
you? Release me!
”

“I will not.”

Below, Bruno was just able to see Rodenbeck’s struggling form, pinned to the deck now by several gees. There was no expression on his amoeba face, but the expression in his gasping voice was plain enough: “I told you … this stuff was … dangerous, de To …”

And then he died, his lungs’ strength insufficient to lift their own tremendous weight. He suffocated there at the bottom of the ship, while Bruno and the others, hanging only a few meters away, feeling only the merest stirrings of gravity, did nothing. Terrible sounds rose up from the body as its bones snapped, then shattered, then powdered, until finally Rodenbeck was nothing but a leathery, vaguely man-shaped
pancake on the floor. Five hundred gee? A thousand? The gradient itself must have been terrible, a difference of hundreds of gees just between the deck and the space a single centimeter above it. Bruno could
see
the collapson node there behind Rodenbeck’s body. He watched it pull the remaining remains into a circular mass and drag them along the floor as it rotated by.

And still the jets hummed; still the faint bells tinkled in the air.

“My God,” Deliah said, and began to weep.

Bruno finally stopped struggling.

The rotation continued another fifteen seconds, until finally
Sabadell-Andorra
proclaimed the maneuver complete. “Eight seconds to fuel depletion,” it added.

“Right,” Muddy said. “Grapples on full. T-take us out of here.”

“Acknowledged, sir. Destination?”

“The planet Mercury.”

There was a lot of talk, once they’d entered normal space
again.

“All the things people are doing when they die,” Vivian said quietly. “The things they’re
just about to do
at the moment the strings are cut. Sometimes nasty, sometimes wonderful, sometimes perfectly ordinary. My grandmother used to say these were things God wanted for himself. She was a kind of Muslim, I suppose—her God was always needy and bitter like that. Not remote, though—he was right there looming over her all the time, like a drunk uncle. But when she died she wasn’t doing anything special, just sitting by the window in her rocking chair, wrapped up in an old blanket.”

“Maybe God needed that,” Shiao suggested matter-of-factly.