The Collapsium (5 page)

That metaphor had been stretched a few times too many, Bruno judged. A “spiderweb” would twist apart in hours, each rung of it orbiting the sun at different levels, different velocities. Unless …

“Good Lord. This ring of yours. It’s static?”

Tamra quirked her head, not understanding.

“It’s stationary?” he tried. “Does it orbit the sun, or is it suspended above by some other means?”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Static, yes. I’m told it needs to be, to function properly. You’d have to ask Declarant Sykes’ people for the details.”

Bruno marveled. A static ring completely encircling the sun? The mother of all collapsiters, not orbiting but
hanging
above its parent star like a gossamer suspension bridge? Unthinkable! Life in the Queendom certainly
had
changed in his absence. He found his mouth overflowing with questions.

“What holds it up? Good Lord, what holds it
together
? You’d have standing waves at multiples of the gravitic frequency. Around the ring, that’s fine, but
across
it I don’t see how the phases would match. You’d get shearing forces that would tend to pull the collapsium out of—”

He caught himself; Her Majesty’s expression showed nothing more than polite incomprehension. Sol was fortunate to
have a queen so sharp, so quick, but it had trained her in more superficial pursuits, made a kind of glorified video star of her. No scientist, she.

“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, exposing his hair’s grayed roots to her inspection. “I’ll stop interrupting. What problem brings you here? To me, of all people?”

She frowned, the troubled creases deepening across her face. “Bruno, I need you to come back with me. Really, I’m not kidding. Fax yourself downsystem; have a look at this thing; tell us what we can do. I wouldn’t have come all the way out here if it weren’t important.”

“The ring needs stiffening?” he guessed.

She shook her head. “Every analysis tells us the design is sound. Even the environmentalists agree it’s more than strong enough, even now, when it’s only a third complete, still held up by electromagnetic grapple stations.”

“Hmm. So what’s the problem?”

Her Majesty sighed, looking almost as if she might begin to fidget, embarrassed by some personal inadequacy. Finally, she said, “We had a solar flare last month. A big one, that hit the collapsiter dead center and burned out half the grapples that were holding it up. We’re moving new ones into place, but …”

“But meanwhile the structure is slipping,” he said.

She nodded, then picked up her glass and drank deeply from it, as if the ice water were something stronger to soothe her nerves. It was a gesture Bruno hadn’t seen—or made—in a long time. Afterward she held onto the glass, kept it close to her lips, until Bruno realized she was using it as an excuse to keep from speaking further. When he’d waited long enough for her next words, she took another sip, then another, until finally the silence had dragged on long enough and Bruno was obliged to fill it himself.

It was uncharacteristically clumsy of her; another indication of her alarmingly unQueenly distress.

“It’s accelerating,” he suggested. “You can’t get enough grappling force in place fast enough.”

Again, she nodded.

“When a boulder first starts rolling downhill,” he said, reaching for the sort of analogy she preferred, “you can stop it with a well-placed pebble, but if you’re late on the scene it takes more, a stone, an iron chock. And if the boulder rolls over those …”

She set down her glass. “You have the essence of it, yes. As the ring falls closer, the sun’s gravity increases, and we simply can’t build new grapples fast enough to stop it. I’m told we’ve got six months.”

It was Bruno’s turn to frown. “Six months before what? Before this ‘Ring Collapsiter’ falls into the sun?”

Tamra nodded yet again.

Bruno felt the blood draining from his face. “Good Lord. Good
Lord
. An accident indeed!”

“You’ll help us,” Tamra said. It wasn’t a command; her tone hovered right at the edge of
asking
. As if he had some right to refuse her. As if he had even the
ability
to refuse her, else why would he ever have left her side in the first place?

His glance took in her copper eyes, her almond skin, the elegance of her purple dress, cinched at the waist with a chain of diamond-studded gold. With a start, he realized it was precisely the outfit he’d last seen her in. Precisely the haircut, precisely the cosmetic palette. Had she worn it deliberately, in some coarse attempt to influence him? The idea was unsettling.

“Glass ceiling,” he said to the house. Light flooded in. Looking left and squinting, he pointed. “My sun warms exactly one subject, Tamra. Yours warms billions. Even assuming a solar collapse were somehow survivable to those nearby, which I doubt very much, the idea of there being no Sol to have a Queendom of … Tamra, do you think I’d refuse you? We’ve squabbled, all right, but do you think so little of me? Why are you here? Your robots should have
dragged
me to you.”

“They nearly did,” she said, her voice hinting at sadness. “And no, I didn’t think you’d refuse me. But you do insist on
being difficult. One has to approach Bruno de Towaji in very particular ways, I’m afraid. Even if one is Queen of all humanity.”

He hoped his scowl was impressive. “I’m your servant, Tam. As always. Lead me to your fax machine, and think no more of it. We leave at once!”

They stepped through the ship’s fax gate to a worker’s
platform: a flat, domed-over plate of di-clad neutronium large enough to host a volleyball match.

Bruno’s breath caught in his throat. “Good Lord,” he said.

“Yes,” Her Majesty agreed coolly.

Diamond—the crystalline form of carbon—is beautiful because its high index of refraction causes the light passing through it to be trapped and split. The stone itself is clear to the eye, but the light that enters is forced—very much against its will—to slow down, to bend, to bounce from shallow edges as though they were mirrors. Upon striking a diamond, a ray of white light may find its red and yellow and green components shunted onto wildly different paths, a phenomenon commonly known as “sparkle.”

When diamond surrounds a core of degenerate matter, the effect is heightened further by the Compton scattering of photons off the neutron surface. The usual trite description—that neutronium looks like white fog inside a gem—misses the point entirely: it looks like nothing else in existence, more like a
dream
of fog made solid. Very solid. But that was merely
the view beneath Bruno’s and Tamra’s feet. Above their heads, well …

Even di-clad neutronium is dull as cut glass next to the haunting light of collapsium, inside which a sundered light beam can circle for days or weeks, or until the end of time. Just as the speed of light is higher in air than in diamond, and higher still in the “vacuum” of empty space, so too is the speed of light higher—a trillion times higher—in the Casimir supervacuum of the collapsium lattice. “Cerenkov blue” is the radiation given off by swift particles that find themselves slamming into a denser material and briefly exceeding its speed of light, and it is
this
unearthly glow for which collapsium is best known.

So imagine an arch of it filling the sky. Imagine a universe of stars reaching up to infinity above you, pinpoint splashes of light filtering through and around the collapsium. Imagine Sol beneath your feet, swollen and huge but eclipsed by a disc of di-clad, invisible but for the effect of its light echoing through the arch rising high above you.

Like choir music through the rafters of heaven
, Bruno de Towaji would later write, to be quoted out of context for tens of thousands of years. In truth the passage continues,
It was grand, enormous, an absurdity of unprecedented scale and scope. A glimpse of heaven, yes, but as
we
dream it, beach monkeys fond of glitter. If it’s God we hope to impress, I daresay a tower of socks would serve as well
.

This by itself is significant: that even Bruno de Towaji, upon seeing the Ring Collapsiter for the first time, reacted to it not as a work of engineering, but of art.

“Astonishing,” he conceded.

“Yes,” Her Majesty could only agree. Her two robots stepped through, assuming positions on either side of the fax gate.

After them came a man—short haired, short statured, neatly shaved and groomed and dressed—whom the robots examined only briefly. They seemed to know him, and he in turn carried
himself as one accustomed to their dainty-hard robotic scrutiny, and to the dainty-hard company of the Queen herself. He seemed properly respectful without appearing awed or worshipful or afraid, and for this Bruno approved of him instantly, although he also sensed, almost as quickly, something cool and detached back behind the eyes somewhere. Mathematical, one might say.

Bruno’s people skills were a bit out of practice, though, and we may suspect he put little credence in his first impressions, pending further analysis.

“Majesty,” the man said, doffing his cap and bowing low, so that his hands nearly brushed the slick surface of the platform.

“Marlon,” the Queen acknowledged, inclining her head slightly. “Thank you for coming so quickly. I take it you loaded your pattern here ahead of time?”

The man bowed again, less deeply, then offered a courtly smile. “I stow copies of myself where they’re likely to be of use, Majesty. This one is a few days old, though I’ll happily send for a fresh one if you prefer.”

She shook her head. “Not necessary.” To Bruno she said, “Marlon Sykes is the father of the Ring Collapsiter project. Without his prolonged and dogged efforts, this—” She indicated the collapsium towering above them. “—would never have come about.”

Did she mean the structure, or the accident? Was there reproach in her tone? Bruno couldn’t tell, couldn’t detect her mood through the calm mask she projected. But surely the implication was clear enough: Marlon Sykes had convinced her the ring project was safe. And he’d been wrong. Bruno felt immediate kinship with the man—it was easy to be wrong. It was always so easy to make a mistake.

“Dr. Sykes,” he said, offering a greeting bow of his own.

The man smiled warmly. “
Declarant
Sykes, actually. It’s nice to see you again, sir.”

“Bruno,” Tamra chided, “you know Marlon from your days
at court.” Now there was clear warning in her tone; she was embarrassed, and he, Bruno, was the cause of it.

He thought for several seconds, trying to place the name, the face. There
had
been a Marlon Somebodyorother, but he was First Philander, more an afterimage than an actual presence at court. Ex-lover to the Queen, allegedly a gifted matter programmer of some sort … Marlon Sykes, yes. Gods of memory, had the details of his life faded so quickly?

“Declarant Sykes,” Bruno repeated, now bowing more deeply and assuming what he hoped was a tone of proper contrition. “Declarant-
Philander
Sykes, yes, of course! I’ve been isolated of late, sir, but the lapse is, er—” with a glance and nod in Tamra’s direction “—inexcusable. I beg your indulgence.”

“Forget it,” Marlon said with a dismissive wave and smile. “It’s been years, and the acquaintance was never a strong one. This admirer is happy to be remembered at all.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, unconvinced. “Yes, well.”

He was expected to feel embarrassment at a time like this. In fact, he felt only a twinge; that he’d failed to remember Marlon Sykes was no surprise, and no real fault of his own. There’d been so many people. His childhood had been spent among tolerant adults. And at University he’d begun to encounter people who felt the same way he did about such things, enough people to persuade him that his laissez-faire attitude toward social interaction was simply a minority view, rather than a mental defect per se, a result of his having been orphaned or some repartitioning of his brain to make room for gardening or mathematics. So he’d spent several years of study in a sort of private resistance movement, asserting himself, presenting himself in precisely the forthright manner that everyone claimed to respect and admire.

It was the worst time of his life, bar none; this phantom “decorum” was no trifling matter, but actually some kind of genetically coded pecking order thing. Even
he
didn’t like tactless boors, though for a while they’d become his only company. So he’d decided to approach these foolishly subtle but socially
compulsory responses as a kind of language, and with less effort than he would later spend learning Bad Tongan, had gone about memorizing their basic vocabulary and grammar.

The effort had proved, at best, a partial success, but it did give him some foundation to work from. And through his father’s alcohol recipes, he’d found both courage and a kind of unself-conscious ease that really helped, especially if other people were drinking as well. What happy drunks they’d made! Being good at darts and shuffleboard had also proven useful.

He’d still been prone to fits of distraction, but that was at least partially a consequence of his having to impress the scholarship committee or starve. This was before all the money had started. And the fame, yes. Tamra’s court had sharpened those social skills still further, in a careless, sink-or-swim kind of way. But by then, settling into life at Nuku’ alofa, he’d found a kind of prison accreting around him: erstwhile colleagues tarring him with labels like “tycoon” and “politician,” while the media adopted him as a sort of Romeo Einstein. Increasingly, people seemed to “know” a de Towaji whom Bruno himself had never met.

Even at court—or perhaps especially there—no one seemed prepared to advise him, to take him under a friendly wing, to understand his life or his problems at all. Was he permitted to
have
problems? Even Tamra, wrestling incomprehensible demons of her own, had thrown her hands up at his grousing. That was when he’d begun to daydream—and eventually obsess—about the end of time, and the
arc de fin
that would someday show it to him.