by Wil McCarthy
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!”
chapter three
in which an impressive structure is examined
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.
And of course living alone meant not having to think about these things at all, getting lazy about them, forming a bond with the house software that gradually let the language devolve to shorthand codes and even, sorry to say, preverbal grunting and pointing. At least he wasn’t in his underwear.
So with a twinge of guilt and no decorum whatsoever, he simply strode to the edge of the platform and looked down, pressing first his hands and then his forehead against the slick, clear surface of the dome, straining for a view of the sun.
The best he could manage was an edge of the corona, the vast, diffuse, superhot solar atmosphere. As in an eclipse, magnetic field lines stood out clearly; looping threads of bright and dim against the blue-white glow, but much nearer than any eclipse he’d ever seen. Beneath this platform, the corona flared huge, as wide as ten full moons, as structured and detailed as a wreath of burning, phosphorescent ivy.
“Quite a view,” he said. “We’re close in. Six months until this ring falls in? Solar disturbances could begin sooner than that, as it passes through the chromopause.”
He tried to picture such an event. Collapsium was a “semisafe” material in that it didn’t consume matter the way a large black hole would; the component hypermasses, being precisely the size of protons, couldn’t swallow protons, any more than a standard manhole could swallow its cover. But they could swallow smaller particles, and slowly stretch in the process.3
Would coronal plasma densities be sufficient to trigger such a chain reaction? The plasma nuclei would certainly cling to the collapsons as they fell past, sliding into orbit around the lattice points like planets in newly formed, rapidly growing star systems. Enough nuclei to make a difference? Enough to alter the behavior of a star?
“There’ve been detailed simulations,” Marlon Sykes said, after an apologetic clearing of the throat. “From now, it’s six months to the earliest symptoms. After that, barely a week until the photosphere is penetrated. It was the first thing we checked.”
Well, now Bruno genuinely was embarrassed. Of course they’d check a thing like that, long before they ever thought to send for him. Marlon Sykes clearly was not stupid; the glittering arch above them was proof enough of that. Bruno stepped away from the dome, absently wiping at it where his forehead had rested, though no smear or smudge remained.
“Of course,” he said, now with proper and unfeigned apology. “Of course you did. Forgive me, Declarant.”
Sykes smiled, indulgently if not quite warmly. “Stop it, Declarant. Am I to forgive you every fifteen seconds? It seems a waste of our talents, this officiousity. Call me Marlon, please. Speak to me as a friend, loosely and without calculation, and we shall both be the happier for it.”
Well, that seemed rather a courtly way of asking him not to be courtly. Was there some cunning insult here, buried in subtexts and subtleties? Bruno grunted noncommittally, then caught himself. What if there were? What did it matter? He was here to help Tamra, to help the Queendom in general and Marlon Sykes in particular. It wasn’t difficult to imagine some rancor there, some resentment at imagined usurpations of authority and respect, but did that change the physics one iota? No. Here, at least, it was better simply to state his thoughts as they actually were, with social filters disengaged.
Which of course was exactly what Sykes himself—what Marlon—was proposing.
“Damn me,” Bruno said, with forced cheer. “I’ve been away too long. Marlon it is, and you may call me Bruno, or ‘fathead,’ or anything you please. We’ve a sun to save, yes? And not with our manners.”
Marlon’s grin widened. “Well spoken, fathead.”
Despite Her Majesty’s sharp intake of breath at this, the two men shared a sudden laugh, and Bruno felt the easing of a mutual hostility he hadn’t fully realized was there.
He looked up at the sparkling arch of the Ring Collapsiter again, this time with an eye for the details of its construction. Based on the spacing of its gently pulsing Cerenkov pinpoints, he judged the structure’s zenith to be some two kilometers above the platform, its range increasing to perhaps millions of times that much as it sloped away to the sides. A ring, yes, but one so enormous that it looked flat, ruler-straight, until it had all but vanished in the distance, at which point it seemed to turn down sharply, and finally vanish beneath the platform. But for all its enormous girth, the ring was only about six meters thick. Its cross-section appeared to be circular—an observation that Marlon confirmed when asked.
So what were these other lights, these bright flarepoints of yellow-white, spaced along the lattice every half kilometer or so?
“Curved sheets of superreflector,” Marlon said, with something like rue in his tone. “Placed near the ring’s outer edge, they reflect Hawking radiation back in the direction of the sun. Since the radiation already headed for the sun isn’t reflected, there’s a net downward flow of mass-energy, pushing the collapsiter upward. Like a very weak rocket engine, using collapson evaporation as the energy source.”
“Ah!” Bruno said, impressed. “What holds the superreflectors in place?”
Marlon pursed his lips, shook hi
s head. Now he did look rueful. “Nothing, my friend. Nothing at all. They’re perfect sails, and between light pressure, solar wind, and Hawking radiation, they start accelerating right away. Within an hour they’re pushed too far to do any good, and within a few days they’ve exceeded solar escape velocity. Bye-bye, superreflector. We could hold them down with electromagnetic grapples, but of course that simply reverses the problem of holding the collapsium lattice up.”
“So it’s useless, then,” Bruno said cautiously.
Sykes gave an emphatic nod. “Quite useless, yes. I told Her Majesty as much—” Here he raised his voice and looked glumly at Tamra. “—but she’s in a mood to try … almost anything.” And here his gaze was directed at Bruno: another idea born of royal desperation.
“Not your idea, then,” Bruno said, ignoring what must certainly have been a deliberate jibe.
“No. Some functionary’s.”
They were silent for a while, Marlon looking at Tamra, Tamra looking at Bruno, Bruno looking at the collapsium arch, the two golden robots looking studiously at nothing.
“Tell me your idea,” Bruno said to Marlon after a while.
The clearing of Marlon’s throat held an indication of surprise—the question was unexpected. Bruno turned in time to see the smaller man blush. “My idea. The, uh, grapples are my idea. Build them faster, you know. Find ways to crank them to higher frequencies, for greater pull. We have to pull the ring up, away from the sun. That’s really the sole nature of the problem, dress it up however you may. We’ve got to apply force to the collapsium, and the grapples are our only means of doing so without tearing the lattice out of whack and creating ourselves an even bigger problem.”
“Hmm,” Bruno said, nodding absently, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger.
A flicker of resentment crossed Marlon’s features. “You disagree?”
