by Wil McCarthy
He settled down in his invisible chair, feeling it subtly reshape itself beneath him. Not soft but smart, a solid thing that yielded only for him. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his shoulders, jiggled his wrists like an old-fashioned strongman preparing to lift something heavy. He did these things slowly; an observer might almost have said grimly. It didn’t matter that the actual lifting was done by electromagnetic grapples; he would submerge himself in that same mental space where athletes go, where the body obeys the mind, where stiffness and pain and time are reluctant to penetrate. On your marks …
Bruno had tried to be one of the plodders, he really had. He’d spent years making his telecom collapsiters faster and better and cheaper, building the Iscog, building his fortune. But all that was boring compared to what he really wanted, which was to build an arc de fin capable of snatching photons from the end of time itself. Time had an end—the state equations made that clear enough—but what sort of end was the subject of endless noise and conjecture. And why grumble and theorize when you could just open up a window and see the whole business with your own two eyes?
Hence these fifty collapsons, with their prancing orbits and their ghostly Hawking/Cerenkov glow. Not to build the arc—what a laugh!—but to build a tool that might build a tool that might build a piece of the arc, or at least point to a method by which it might be built. Bruno expected the project to last many thousands of years.
He was all but immortal, by the way, and like everyone else he was still struggling to come to terms with it. It wasn’t so unequivocally wonderful a thing, really, a society in which death was always by suicide or freak accident or carefully concocted murder, in which the rare childhood death deprived its victim not of years or decades of life, but millennia. Such disparity, the very opposite of fairness. But again, the potential …
Was it strange to be excited, even after all these years? The eternal question, worn smooth with age: Was obsession a gift? He breathed deeply, preparing to submerge.
Bruno’s fifty collapsons weren’t stable in their orbits and couldn’t remain there forever without some sort of collision or ejection event messing the trajectories up and making a ruin of all his hard work. So he compared them against the blueprint in his mind, pressed his fingers against the invisible desk to bring up an interface, and triggered the gravity induction mechanisms.
With them he grabbed a collapson, watched it jerk and flutter on his display. The forces he could apply here were weak, nothing compared to the gravity of the collapsons themselves, but of course the collapsons were in free fall. Weak forces, adding up over time, were just as effective as strong ones applied suddenly. And Bruno had learned to be a very patient man indeed. Slowly, he took hold of a second collapson, nudged it toward the first, then nudged it again a few seconds later to reduce the closing velocity. With ponderous momentum they drifted together, and finally touched. Their binding produced a flash of green; they continued on as a single joined piece. He grabbed a third collapson and carefully added it to the structure, grabbed a fourth and fifth.
The other collapsons seemed almost alarmed, their orbital square dance taking place now as if on a gigantic quilt being ponderously dragged and folded around them. Bruno’s movements were careful, practiced; he’d done this hundreds of times, made enough mistakes to feel out the limits and breakpoints and failure modes, to know what he could and couldn’t get away with. Before his network gate had gone down and stopped the endless questions and exhortations of his fellow man, he’d often been asked why he did this part by hand, why he didn’t devise some software to handle these exacting manipulations. If the question came from a scientist or technician he’d generally ignored it, but for the craftsmen and artisans and landscape designers he’d had a ready reply: Why don’t you? The truth was, if he could automate this creative process he’d do it, and become the Queendom’s richest human all over again.
He found himself singing, quietly, under his breath. Muttering, really; he had no real gift for song, nor any strong passion, but it bubbled up sometimes, unbidden, while he worked.
Malgrant ens feia anar a església era un món petit … i meravellós un món de … guixos de colors que pintàveu vós …
An old lullaby, he supposed. Catalan words, extinct in the absence of Catalan notes to carry them along. It didn’t bother him that he was probably mangling it, though he briefly imagined his parents wincing and rolling in their graves. Such thoughts were fleeting, quickly crushed beneath the juggernaut of the business at hand.
Slowly, his design took shape: something like a bucket, a fan, a lens. The shape wasn’t useful in and of itself; most collapsium structures weren’t. But to get to the shape you wanted, you had to pass through stable intermediate designs, adding bricks one by one without upsetting the system’s precarious equilibrium. Often, this meant building complex shapes that “fell” into simpler ones when completed, as a key and a lock might fuse to extrude a single, solid doorknob. Or in this case, a kind of spacetime crowbar able to “pry” bits of vacuum apart to see what lay beneath. Or so he hoped!
Before the assembly was half complete, though, an alarm bell chimed. This was a sound he’d chosen carefully, one that penetrated, demanding attention. The gravity wave alarm. Grunting, he thumbed a lighted yellow circle, increasing magnification, leaning forward to scrutinize the display, to isolate the source of the anomaly.
He didn’t find it. Everything was right where it should be, his little Cerenkov pinpoints all well within spatial and vibrational tolerances. The warning chimed again, though, louder, the perturbation stronger, and Bruno cursed, because the crowbar-to-be was in a very delicate stage right now, its collapsium lattice supported by little more than good intentions. He grabbed the ends of the structure, hoping to steady it, but through the desk’s sensory pads he felt a mild shudder, then another, stronger one. The warning chimed a third time, and this perturbation had to be external, because soon his project was waving like a seaweed, the collapsons growing uncertain as their holes’ gravitic interactions wandered in and out of phase.
“Excuse me, sir,” the house announced through a softly lit speaker that appeared in the wall. “A ship is approaching.”
The collapsium slipped from his fingers and fell in on itself, an origami structure folding and wrinkling into a spitwad of glowing dots.
“Blast,” Bruno said. Then the dots winked out one by one, and a few seconds later it was finished and gone.
“ETA, seven minutes,” the house said, providing a flat schematic wallplate that showed the spaceship’s approach vector in relation to planet, sun, and moon.
Bruno sighed. The newer, much larger black hole he’d just created was difficult to detect, lacking the clear emissions of a collapson, but he found it by feel, charged it with a stream of protons and then, with a grunt of disgust, hurled it off toward his other storage bin, the “wastebasket” hypermass orbiting his world a thousand kilometers out. The trajectory was fine, nowhere near that of the approaching ship. Maybe he should have arranged to graze them with it; a warning shot, a demand for apology. But no, such horseplay could too easily go wrong, else he wouldn’t be stuck out here in the first place.
He sighed again, already trying to convince himself that seven days’ lost labor meant nothing, that he had plenty more time—infinitely more—where that came from. The dollar expenditure was actually harder to accept: two hundred neubles down the drain, literally, along with the twenty he’d wasted last week, and the eight last month, and the twenty more he’d thrown—at one time or another—into the wastebasket for this or that reason. The moon grew smaller, ever smaller, in his sky, and while he certainly had the money to buy more substance for it, the logistical difficulty of getting it delivered was daunting. His last shipment had required the efforts of tens of thousands of people, whole corporations commandeered for the purpose, and altogether the enterprise had cost even more than the planet itself. Insanely selfish extravagances—the leading vice of the wealthy. But he couldn�
�t postpone the next purchase forever.
Cursing once more, Bruno waved the floor and ceiling lights back up. Glass windows appeared in the walls, admitting the morning sun once again. His furniture reverted to wood—wellwood, anyway—its colored controls and displays vanishing, leaving smooth surfaces behind. A couple of murals appeared beneath the stenciled images of telescopes and rocket-ships on the walls. This was a plain room—small, uncluttered and maybe a little old-fashioned—exactly as Bruno felt a study should be.
“I apologize for not detecting the vessel sooner,” the house said with quiet, reflexive contrition.
“It’s all right,” Bruno grumbled, and surprised himself by meaning it. Nothing genuinely new had happened around here for a very long time. There’d been no reason to expect … anything, really.
“The vessel is approaching much faster than a neutronium barge would do,” the house went on, as if feeling the need to explain itself. “Anticipating nothing of the kind, I’d set the detection radii much too close. The failure of your experiment was likely a direct result.”
Bruno waved himself a door and exited into the living room, a mess of models and food containers and discarded clothing, which was exactly as that should be, but seeing it now he nodded, pursed his lips and said, “Stop apologizing and clean this up. If we’re to have company, we must be presentable, yes? What’s the ID on the ship?”
“None available, sir. Our network gate is nonfunctional. For four years now.”
“Oh. Right.”
The robot servants were neither wholly autonomous nor wholly appendages of the house software, neither self-aware nor rigidly programmed. Creatures of silent intuition, they danced through their chores like dreams, like puppets in some tightly choreographed ballet. They knew just what paths to take, what joints to swivel or extend, their economy of motion perfect. They knew just where to put everything, too; most of the clutter was faxware and went back into the fax for recycling, but some objects were original or natural or otherwise sentimental, and each found a place on a shelf or table, or in his bedroom closet around the corner. Speaking of which …
“Seal that,” he said, gesturing at the bedroom door. It slid closed at once, merged with the wall, sprouted bright mural paints—nonrepresentational.
He grunted his approval, then asked, “ETA?”
“Five minutes, twenty seconds.”
He grunted again, less approving this time. The house had standing orders never to mark time in seconds—there were just too many of them, a whole eternity’s worth. But under the circumstances, he supposed it had little choice.
Visitors.
Visitors! Suddenly alarmed, he sniffed himself. “Damn, I probably stink. These clothes are probably ugly. Bathe and dress me, please. Quickly!”
The robots were there so fast they might well have anticipated the request. Cap and vest and tunic and breeches were torn from Bruno’s body and hurled into the fax orifice for recycling. He forced himself to relax, to let his arms be lifted, his torso turned. The robots, with their faceless expressions of infinite gentleness, would rather die than cause him the slightest injury or discomfort, and any resistance on his part would only slow them down, make them gentler still. He let them work, and in another moment their metal hands were buffing him with sponges and damp, scented cloths. A wellstone grease magnet was stroked seven times through his hair, becoming a heated styling comb on the eighth stroke. The fax produced fresh clothing—suitable for company—that smoothed and buttoned itself around him as the robots fussed.
He refused an application of blush.
“Is it landing here? Nearby?” he asked.
“Its course indicates a touchdown in the meadow, forty meters to the east. It is recommended that you remain indoors until this procedure is complete.”
“Hmm? Yes, well. Full transparency on the roof and east wall, please.”
Obligingly, a third of the house turned to glass. To actual glass, yes—wellstone was an early form of programmable matter2—and if danger threatened it could just as easily turn to impervium or Bunkerlite, or some other durable superreflector.
“There’s a good house,” he murmured approvingly, his eyes scanning the now-visible sky.
Despite the interruption, despite the loss of his collapsium and the rudeness of this too-swift approach, Bruno found himself almost anticipating the landing, the arrival of visitors. Almost. It was a long time since he’d last had company, and that had just been the men from the neutronium barge, eager for a breath of fresh air before turning their ship around and faxing themselves back home.
One of them, newly rich and bursting with gratitude, had given Bruno a gift: a neuble-sized diamond ball filled with water instead of neutronium. There’d been algae and bacteria and near-microscopic brine shrimp inside, a whole ecology that needed only light to function, perhaps eternally. “In case you get lonely, sir,” the man had said. Indoors, though, Bruno’s light-dark cycles were irregular, and the thing had died on his shelf in a matter of weeks. His last human interaction. A lesson?
The morning sky shone brightly through the glass. Bruno asked for a reticle to indicate the ship’s position, and the house obligingly cast up a circle of green light the size of a dinner plate, which barely moved and inside which he could see nothing. Soon there were glints of yellow-white at the center, though, sunlight reflecting from bright metal, and in another minute he could see an actual dot beyond the shallow blue-white haze of his atmosphere. The dot resolved into a little toy ship, then a big toy ship drifting high above the sky—a wingless metal teardrop spilling outside the boundaries of the green reticle—and finally, with alarming swiftness, it swelled to something the size of his house and burst though the feathery cirrus layer and the haze beneath it. Clouds rolled off its bright burnished skin, seeming to wrinkle and snap in the blur of a gravity deflection field. Jets fired, little blasts of yellow-hot plasma that scorched his meadow grass white, then black, in tight bull’s-eye circles. A shadow raced from the horizon to throw itself beneath the vehicle as the space between it and terra firma shrank to meters, centimeters, nothing.
There was no thump of impact, no solid confirmation of landing until the maneuvering jets darkened and the shimmer of the deflection field snapped away into clear focus. The sounds of reentry and landing had been no louder than a breeze through the treetops. Skillfully done.
What fixed Bruno’s attention, though, was the seal imprinted on the side of that gleaming hull: a blue, white, and green Earth shaded by twin palms, with three more planets hovering in the background. And hanging above them all, a crown of monocrystalline diamond.
“Door,” he said, standing in front of a row of shelves, looking past them at the landing site. The house seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if wondering whether to open the wall right there—carefully, of course, so as not to drop or break anything—or to make him go a few steps around. Which choice would minimize his inconvenience and displeasure? But the decision itself, teetering precariously at a balance point, took long enough that Bruno became annoyed anyway.
“Door!” he snapped, when almost two seconds had expired. The wall before him opened instantly, robots rushing quietly forward to steady the shelved vases and picture frames, to whisk the little drink table out of his way. He stepped through the opening, out into dewy, meadow-fragrant air.
The side of the ship was marred by a rectangular seam, ringed all around with rivets. No wellstone, that, but honest metal, a passive device for containing air, for holding out vacuum. A hatch. Presently, light fanned from its upper edge, and the hatch swung downward, revealing a carpeted staircase affixed to its inner surface. This made contact with the ground, forming a perfect little exitway.
On the other side stood a pair of dainty robots, delicate-looking things with frilled tutus ringing their waists and feathered caps slanted just so on their heads, their metal hands bearing ceremonial halberds that looked as if they might be twisted out of true by a strong breeze or a harsh wo
rd. In perfect synchrony, the pair descended the staircase and came straight forward, straight toward Bruno. The ship had been set down with even greater care than he’d first realized, set down by entities obsessed as much with decorum and pomp as with aero- and astrodynamics.
Ten meters away, they stopped, clicked their metal heels, and bowed.
“Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji,” one of them said—or maybe both, in too-perfect synchrony to distinguish. “We bring you the greetings of Her Majesty, and a request for your immediate audience. You are to come with us.”
It was always strange to see robots speak, because they did it so rarely and because they had no mouths. By royal decree, it was Uncouth to build machines with faces, or hair, or genitalia, except for the express purpose of sexual perversion, which was itself Uncouth and needed no further encouragement.
“Excuse me?” Bruno said.
“You are to come with us,” the robots repeated, their joined voices fluid, elegant, courtly in a mechanical, clockwork-ballerina sort of way.
“Really. Am I to know why?”
“It is a matter of utmost importance, Declarant. The explanation of it is beyond our tasking.”
“Beyond your tasking. I see.” Bruno nodded sagely, thinking to wonder whether his image was being recorded or transmitted, and if so, whether he looked dignified and wise or simply hermitty, possessed of too much hair and beard. “Her Majesty isn’t with you, then, all the way out here. And why should she be?”
Why indeed, when she could simply order him around by proxy? Feeling a sudden, petty anger, he whisked off his cap and threw it at their golden feet. “Pick that up. Deliver it. It’s my reply. If Her Majesty wishes an audience, she is cordially invited to enjoy it here. My work, alas, does not permit me to travel at this time.”
The robots considered that.
“Her Majesty requests your immediate presence,” they finally said. “Groundless refusal is both Uncouth and inconvenient. There is no reason to be rude.”
