The Collapsium (52 page)

Radmer himself looks somewhat like this, but with his shorter hair and longer teeth, and the fact that he’s clothed, it isn’t quite so apparent. And though the armies to which he has formally belonged are all dust and gone, he still carries himself like a soldier, while the man in the dirt—digging up yams with his bare hands, Radmer sees now—has the absent, casual quality of a sleepwalker.

And something more: the eyes flicking slowly from here to there, taking in the house, the forest, the soft ground beneath them, the sea. Lingering overlong on the distant brass sphere, and on Radmer himself—disturbances in this long-familiar environment. But he’s not really seeing them. Not seeing at all. Or rather: seeing but not processing. Not affected by what is seen.

The old man rises, clutching two small yams in each hand, and begins walking—not limping or shuffling—toward the little house. Radmer follows.

“De Towaji, sir. Sire. I need to speak with you.”

The old man pauses, casts a cloudy, troubled glance over his shoulder, then continues on.

This is a condition Radmer has heard of: neurosensory dystrophia—pathways worn smooth in the brain through constant, repetitive stimulation. When the nervous system is old and the daily routine goes on unbroken for years or decades, its victims can be trapped by it. He’s heard of couples and even whole villages succumbing, but typically it’s the people who live alone—especially in isolated areas—who are most at risk.

He imagines Bruno de Towaji performing these same actions
day after day, varying little or not at all. Like an animate fossil. Like a ghost, haunting this place, oblivious to the fact of his own demise.

The good news is that the symptoms are temporary, subsiding soon after the routine itself is interrupted. The arrival of a visitor is normally sufficient. But barring strange miracles, de Towaji must have been here on the planette for a long time indeed—much longer than Radmer cares to think about. Whole histories come and gone, an unthinkable span of time.

Radmer follows along into the shade of the overhanging forest, and then the old man enters the cottage through an open doorway that looks like it may never have had a door of any kind, or even a curtain. The windows are the same. Probably there’s no winter here, perhaps no serious weather of any kind. Rigby could confirm that. Still, there’s something unsavorily primeval about a house fully open on the sides.

The inside is a single room, shockingly clean, dominated by a water fountain made, like the house and floor, of white wellstone marble. Here de Towaji kneels again, and patiently washes the four yams he’s retrieved.

Radmer tries again. “I suspect you can hear me, Sire. Perhaps you’ll remember an architect by the name of Mursk? Conrad Mursk? We worked together once, long ago. Before that, I was a companion to your son.”

When the yams are clean, de Towaji sets them down on the floor, rises again, and moves to a corner of the house, where a pile of small stones rests atop a little shelf. Flint? For starting a cooking fire? Surely raw yams would have busted the poor man’s guts out long ago. He then turns toward the house’s only exit and commences that slow, deliberate walk again. When Radmer blocks the way, de Towaji literally runs into him.

Then blinks and looks him over.

“Sire,” Radmer says.

Slowly, the old man nods. “Ah. Ah. I … know you.”

“Yes, Sire.”

“Mursk.”

“Yes, Sire. Very good.”

“The architect. You … crushed the moon. Squoze it.”

Radmer glances behind him at the half-disc of Lune in the sky. The clouds, the continents, the splatters of ocean … . But this isn’t a map. This is the world itself, seen from a height of fifty thousand kilometers. “We crushed it together, Sire. Long ago.”

Gruffly: “You’re … in my way.”

Radmer can’t bring himself to bar the doorway any longer. Bowing, he steps back and to the side, allowing de Towaji to pass. At once, the old man’s expression eases.

“Forgive me, Sire. I don’t know if I’m rescuing you, or desecrating … Excuse me! Sire!”

Impatience is a rare emotion among the Olders, but seeing de Towaji prepare to ignore him again, Radmer feels it now, and dares to grab his long-ago master by the arm.

“Bruno! I have little time for this. Rouse yourself and listen to me: a great evil has been loosed upon that squozen moon of ours. Its future is now very much in peril.”

The old man frowns, and it is no regal frown meant to convey official displeasure, but a private and unconscious one. A gesture of simple unhappiness.

“Future,” the old man muses, or perhaps recites. He continues looking down the path ahead, deeper into the forest. “I remember that word. Where is the future? When will it get here?”

“I fear it will not, Sire.”

De Towaji’s gaze clears a bit, and a look of pained amusement passes briefly over his features. He speaks very slowly. “Lad, I guarantee it will not. All these … futures we thought we were building. Where are they? In the past.
This
is the past, by the time I finish saying so.” He pauses for a long moment to make the point, then adds, “There is no future, only past.”

Now Radmer is angry. “I’m not here to debate the semantics of it, Sire. People are dying as we speak, and still others
are being enslaved. Millions more are at risk, and
there’s
an ill thing to allow into our past, if it’s within our power to prevent it.”

Bruno tries to pull away. “I’m in the past as well, lad. Leave me.” Then, more regally:
“Leave me.”

“I won’t,” Radmer tells him. “Not yet—not until you’ve heard me out.”

Resistance ceases; a kind of bitter calm settles over de Towaji. He is waking up, yes, and he doesn’t like it. The look is clear in his eyes: a fear of being needed again, of bearing up under that burden after being free of it for so very long. Radmer understands, suddenly, that the old man’s isolation and senility did not come upon him by accident.

His grip tightens, and his voice is almost cruel as he says, “Even if you were
dead
I would make you listen, Sire. Because I fancy you can help us, and I don’t much care if it pleases you. Where else have we got to turn? Nowhere. And when I speak the name of our peril, I think you might even
want
to help.”

“Unlikely. You have no idea how wearily I washed up on this shore, lad. Not the least beginning of an idea.”

Tightly: “I fancy I do, Sire. I’ve been depended on a time or two myself. And we live on, don’t we? Never too old to be bothered, to be mined for blood and sweat, to be dusted off and put to use again in one way or another. Not even a grave to rest in, not for the likes of us. But the alternative—to live on with no purpose at all—is appalling and obscene.”

Finally, Bruno de Towaji matches Radmer’s anger, and meets his gaze. “You think so, do you? Smug bastard. Speak the name of your peril, then, and begone from my sight.”

Radmer does as he’s told, and has the grim pleasure of watching the old man’s face light up with a terrible mix of wonder and righteous anger and, yes, even fear.

Now de Towaji is fully awake, blinking, looking Radmer up and down. “Lune, you say? The collapsiter grid is gone. Did I dream that? Between the stars we travel no more. How did you get here, lad? And … how will you return?”

Radmer feels the corners of his mouth begin to stir. Seeing Bruno again has brought back a lot of memories, a lot of old grief. With the clarity of hindsight, he does feel some understanding of his bonds to this man, but they were formed and broken long ago, in events so huge that from the inside they hadn’t looked like anything at all. Joyrides and camp riots, the green virile fires of youth.

But this is too practical a question for a man who wants to be left alone. Radmer senses that a hurdle has been crossed, a new cascade of events set in motion. He will be taking this man, this intellect, this trove of living history back to Lune with him. And in that moment he dares, for the first time in months, to hope.

Aggressor Six

Flies from the Amber

The Fall of Sirius

Murder in the Solid State

Bloom

The Collapsium

Wil McCarthy
, after ten years of rocket science with Lockheed Martin, traded the hectic limelight of the space program for the peace and quiet (ha!) of commercial robotics at Omnitech, where he works as a research and development hack.

He writes a monthly column for the SciFi Channel’s news magazine (
www.scifi.com/sfw
), and his less truthful writings have appeared in
Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age
, and various anthologies. His most recent novel,
Bloom
, was selected as a
New York Times
Notable Book. Further biographical and bibliographic information is available at:

www.sff.net/people/wmccarth