The Collapsium (45 page)

“My winter quarters,” Marlon apologized, catching Bruno’s look. “It isn’t much, but then it doesn’t really need to be, does it?”

“Your systems are down,” Bruno said.

Marlon’s smile was sheepish. “Well, yes, there is that. Not entirely down, mind you—not yet, anyway. But the most
critical
systems—the ones on which the Queendom’s fate depends—are inaccessible. I was hoping perhaps you could help me with that.”

“I?” Bruno asked innocently.

Marlon’s smile vanished. “I don’t know what you’ve done, Bruno, but you’ll kindly undo it. Immediately! The project has reached a critical juncture, and if I’m not at the controls in the next few hours there will
be
no
arc de fin
. The sun will still collapse, mind you, but there’ll be no purpose to it, no benefit to anyone.
Senseless
death and destruction is something we all wish to avoid, I’d think.”

“Hence your magnanimity,” Bruno said.

“Oh, tch tch, Bruno. After all these years, you still doubt the special bond between us? Come, help me out of this jam. If you reflect a moment, you’ll realize you have no actual choice about it.”

Wobbling against Shiao’s weight, Bruno sighed. “Marlon, can’t you just stop this? I
believe
you. You’ve discovered the
arc de fin
, where I have not. Isn’t that enough? History will mark your triumph either way. But if you end this villainy now, if you’re willing to leave bad enough alone, you’ll at least be remembered with some measure of approval. A would-be monster who, in the end, didn’t have the heart for it. The
sun
, Marlon. Was there ever a more fundamental symbol of nurture, of comfort, of
life itself
?”

“I expect not,” Marlon agreed, amicably enough. “I’ve come too far, though, Bruno. I wouldn’t stop this if I could, and at this point I don’t see that it’s even possible. Now, that’s an
honest
response. I could just as easily have agreed to your demand, let you reactivate my systems, and then killed you. That’s what a
monster
would do. But I have more respect than that.”

“And if
I
agree to
your
demand,” Bruno countered, “and your systems are reactivated, you could still kill us both.”

“I could,” Marlon conceded. “But I give you my word that you and all your friends will be stored safely.”

“Safely?” Shiao snorted. “Surely this place … will be among the first destroyed, and there
is
no Iscog to carry our patterns away from here.”

Marlon shrugged. “Whether this camp will survive I’m not sure—it’ll be on the nightside during the worst conflagrations, vulnerable only to neutrinos passing all the way through the planet. But the question is moot—I have a spaceship to escape in.”

“Ah,” Shiao said. “Of course you do.”

“No insolence, please,” Marlon said wearily. “I’ve already given you your lives, what more do you expect?”

There was no right answer to that question. No answer was attempted.

Finally, Marlon rolled his eyes, sighed heavily, and pointed the gun again at Shiao’s head. It was a strange little thing, four tubes emerging from the rim of a parabolic dish, not parallel
but
converged
on the geometric center of Shiao’s skull. The whole thing was translucent and blue and quite fragile looking, like a funny toy designed to mock the concept of “gun.” But Bruno had never seen anything like it, and that was reason enough to be afraid.

“Fifteen seconds, gentlemen. You’ve presumed on my patience long enough.”

“Give him nothing,” Shiao said calmly.

But Bruno held up a placating hand. “Marlon, please. This isn’t easy for us.”

“The others with you,” Marlon said. “They’ll die as well. Slowly, badly, if I have any say in the matter. Five seconds.”

“I surrender,” Bruno said quickly. “Please, harm none of them.”

Marlon relaxed. “You’re no fool, de Towaji. You understand: Your lives can end
along
with several billion others, or they can continue while those billions die anyway. Those are the only choices available. The equation is simple.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, his heart quailing. He still hoped for some miracle, some way to bring this horrific matter to a less-than-horrific conclusion. But to achieve that miracle, even to
hope
for it, he must live at least a little while longer … “Can you access some sort of intercom or public address system? I’ll need to speak with my friends.”

“That can be arranged,” Marlon said, stepping toward the live wellstone wall in which the doorway had appeared. He looked somewhat less than trusting as he tapped out a series of commands on the wellstone’s surface.

A pickup and wall speaker appeared beside Bruno, at the same level as the speaker beneath his chin.

“Er, hello?” he tried. “Vivian, are you there?”

“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice called back immediately. “We were worried; you’ve been gone so long!”

“You may remain worried,” Bruno said. Then, finally, he knew what he must do: He must order Deliah and Vivian and Tusité and Muddy away from this place. Could he not save
the Queendom? Was it arrogance to think he ever could? Well, then at least he would save
something
, and not in the foul clutches of Marlon Sykes. He would order them away, and Marlon, with his systems down, would have no choice but to let them escape. Meanwhile, he would vent his anger on the available targets: Shiao first, naturally, but Shiao had just got done placing his fate in Bruno’s hands. And Shiao’s death, his inevitable death, might conceivably give Bruno enough time to throw himself hands-first at Marlon’s throat—

But Vivian Rajmon’s high, teenaged voice called out before he could quite get the words formed. “Cheng? R.C. Captain Cheng Shiao, are you all right?”

“I’m here, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, suddenly attentive. “I … would have you know that my heart was lost the moment I met you, Commandant-Inspector. It would have been yours, if you’d have had it—yours for a million years. But my
life
belongs to de Towaji, and to the Queendom. Forgive me.”

And with those words, Bruno’s hoped-for miracle occurred: Shiao’s body, crippled and broken and bloodied though it was, somehow found the strength to
leap
four meters across the room at Marlon Sykes. Marlon had been suspicious, waiting for trouble of some sort, but Cheng Shiao was a hard man to stop. The gun went off with a little popping sound, but a moment later Shiao swept it from Marlon’s hand, knocking it across the room so that it spun along the floor and came to rest beneath the rumpled cot. He knocked
Marlon
down as well, in the same clean motion.

“Good night!” Bruno couldn’t help exclaiming.

Then Vivian’s voice came again. “Cheng! Cheng!”

And Muddy’s voice. “What’s happening, sir? Can we help?”

Shiao wrestled Marlon facedown onto the floor, and then from somewhere, some pocket or recess in the tattered spacesuit, produced a ball of handcuff putty and slapped it down on the small of Marlon’s back. Rattlesnake-quick, it lashed out to encircle wrists and ankles, leaving Marlon neatly trussed
and screaming. “Dealbreakers! Dealbreakers! Rotten, stinking, dishonest …”

But there was no look of triumph or even relief on Shiao’s face. Only pain. He rolled away, falling onto his back, and Bruno could see the wound Marlon’s gun had made in Shiao’s abdominal cavity. Not a bullet hole, or a laser burn, but a
void
—a six-centimeter absence where armor and flesh should be. Transported? Vanished? The dream of matter, somehow undreamt? It hardly mattered; Shiao would not survive the injury. Already it was filling with blood. Cheng Shiao would be dead in sixty seconds, if that.

“Cheng!” Vivian called out again.

“He’s injured,” Bruno said back to her. “You must turn the faxes back on. Quickly!”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it;
you
have to. We replaced part of the domestic software with your own household AI.”

“You what?”

“It was in the ship’s library. Never mind! Help Cheng!”

Bruno frowned, and for some reason he looked up at the ceiling. “House? Hello, are you here?”

“Good day, sir,” that old, familiar voice said. “I’m detecting numerous diagnostic errors, and I seem to be under some sort of direct software assault from a native AI, but I await your instructions nonetheless. It’s good to be working with you again, sir.”

“Turn the faxes on!” Bruno cried, leveling a finger at Shiao’s struggling, bleeding,
dying
body. “Help me get him into the fax! Quickly! Quickly!”

“Working,” the house replied easily. “Fax machine activated.”

Sure enough, the orifice hummed to life, flashed briefly, and extruded a humanoid robot of gold and tin, faceless and graceful, precisely like the servants Bruno had employed for so very many years. The space between fax and victim was several meters, but the robot danced across it in an instant, swept Shiao’s body off the floor in a bloody arc, and hurled it directly into the orifice. The body vanished at once, and an
instant later the robot had leaped through as well, vanished as well. The whole affair had taken three seconds.

Marlon still struggled on the floor, rolling and flopping, trying to face Bruno and only partially succeeding. “Nobody wins,” he said urgently. “I know what you’re thinking, Bruno, but you can’t possibly grapple all that collapsium up away from the sun. Not in time, not at
all
. You can have your
arc de fin
; you can see the very lights and darknesses of uncreation. This year! This month! I give it to you, sir, my gift. All the credit, all the glory, if you’ll only let me at the controls. Let me at them!”

“No,” Bruno said flatly.

“No? Think hard, Bruno. I tell you,
you cannot save the sun
. Will you at least see that its death has meaning?”

“No. Indeed, I stand here wondering …” The hairs prickled up on the back of Bruno’s neck. He felt awake, really
awake
, for perhaps the first time in his life. “I stand here wondering what I was thinking all that time. An
arc de fin
? What use is that? If we’re to live forever, won’t we see the end of time with our own two eyes? All too soon, I fear! We’ll look back and say ‘Already? Already the world is ending, the stars winking out? Why, we’d only just begun!’ And if that end is
spoiled
by de Towaji, a trillion years before the fact, why … one wonders why we’ve bothered to live at all.”

“You’re mad,” Marlon said, his voice edging on panic. Straining against the putty, he managed to lift his head enough to look Bruno in the eye. “It’s my own fault; I’ve
driven
you mad. I’ve killed your Queen!”

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed, nodding slowly. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s all it is. The work of decades falls away like ashes, leaving nothing, no sense of purpose or desire. There is no Tamra for me to hide from, no Tamra for me to return to when at long last I’m finished. To live forever without her? Even to contemplate it? I suppose I
am
mad.”

Marlon’s eyes were sharp, his tone urgent. “Listen to me, Bruno. Ask a question with me. Where do people go when they die? Nowhere? Where exactly
is
nowhere?”

Ah, but Bruno was awake—he saw the trick in that question. He was encouraged to conclude that “nowhere,” since it didn’t exist, was of zero size, and by corollary that everything that no longer existed—being also of zero size and therefore located “nowhere”—could be found there, instantly, without effort. With zero movement, zero searching, zero time. Ah, but by that logic, everything that
never
existed could be found there as well. So could everything that existed now, but someday wouldn’t. At the end of time,
everything
would be nowhere, including time itself, and so Bruno declined to fall for the trick. The size of nowhere was surely infinite, in time as well as space, else he and Marlon and everyone else would be there already.

He raised a finger in Marlon’s direction, and waggled it. “House, remove this body as well.”

“No, Bruno! No! Believe me, you can’t stop this. It’s pointless to try!”

The robot appeared, danced across the floor to where Marlon lay, and scooped him up.

“It’s never pointless to
try
,” Bruno mused.

And then the fax machine hummed, and there was no one else in the room there with him.

“Bruno?” Vivian’s voice quietly, sadly, said from the speaker, treading with utmost tenderness. “Bruno, is Cheng all right?”

“He’s stored, dear,” Bruno replied wearily. “He’s safe for the moment. But the sun, alas, is not.”

It seemed to take a long time to hobble over to Marlon’s little wellstone desk. “House,” he said along the way, “activate that. Thank you.”

He sat down at the wellwood chair, taking the load off his feet, off his back, off his pain. The old grapple controls were there, the old holographic displays, as if Marlon had cribbed them from Bruno’s own designs. Tortured them, probably, from Muddy’s own pained and screaming lips. How
tired
Muddy must have been, after years of torment! How extraordinary, that he’d managed to accomplish so much in spite of it.

Bruno pulled up an interface and quietly immersed himself.

Here was the sun, here the dotted line where the Ring Collapsiter had once stood. And beneath it, in a hundred spinning fragments, were the Ring Collapsiter’s children, and he saw at once that there were simply too many of them, that they were simply too large, that most were simply too close to the sun to retrieve. They were mere
hours
from penetration, from the beginning of Sol’s slow and painful death. Still, he grabbed the nearest one with Marlon’s EM grapples, which were of a fine and strong design. He tugged, he twisted, he prodded and nudged. None of it, of course, worked. The best he could accomplish, really, would be to tear it apart, to break it, to let it collapse into a
real
black hole that he’d have even less hope of manipulating.

“Ah, well,” he whispered, “she was a good star while she lasted.”

And then he remembered the ring. The ring! The wellstone ring he’d plucked from his own hypercomputer, minutes before he’d destroyed it and the planet it stood on! That ring contained the program, the dance card, the recipe by which collapsium was converted to hypercollapsite vacuogel.