by Wil McCarthy
“Hmm?” Bruno looked up, met Marlon’s gaze. “Disagree? No, of course not. You’ve got the right of it, clearly.”
Her Majesty cleared her throat at that, her eyes flashing angrily. “Nobody’s giving up, Declarants. It’s time to broaden your thinking, and keep broadening it until a solution emerges. That, or all your brilliance is for naught. There is a solution; I’m sure of that.”
Marlon smoldered visibly at the rebuke, and it was several seconds before Bruno, deep in thought, realized the obligatory reply was his to make. “Um, yes,” he said, looking up and nodding, because he didn’t disagree with that statement, either.
He and Marlon were orbiting Tamra, he saw, striding slowly around her on the platform as if she had some dangerous gravity of her own. Which of course, she did, and his reticence clearly did not put him on the right side of it. A not-so-subtle no-no in the grammar of decorum: ignoring the Queen of All Things.
“I do need time to think,” he pointed out.
She nodded once, and her gravity seemed to drop a bit. Permission granted; his orbit could slow and widen. God, how many times had scenes like this played out? Tamra impatient for answers—scientific or otherwise—and Bruno begging silence to contemplate them? He hadn’t missed the feeling, exactly, but now it had a kind of déjà vu effect, reminding him of a lot of things he had missed. He was back in her world, yes. Nodding to himself, he pinched his chin again, and looked down to examine the reflection of the collapsium in the di-clad whiteness of the platform.
Time passed.
“Can I answer anything else for you, Bruno?” Marlon asked, with perfect politeness, when ten minutes had gone by.
“Bruno?” he prompted diplomatically, after another sixty seconds. Finally he snapped his fingers. “Hey you, fathead! Are we through here?”
Bruno looked up, blinking. “Hmm? Oh, yes, please, go on about your business. I think I have all the information I need for the time being. The problem, as you say, is an exceedingly simple one, even if its solution is not.”
“You don’t need anything more from me, then?” Marlon prompted.
“Er, not that I can think of,” Bruno said, realizing that some more time had passed. “I can reach you, yes? If further questions occur?” Then it dawned on him that he was being rude again, perfunctory, exactly the sort of boor Marlon had probably thought him in the first place. Peerless indeed, usurping this other man’s place, his project, his problems. To compensate, if belatedly, he allowed his gaze to narrow, his face to grow shrewd. “If you must go, Declarant, I implore you not to go far. This matter’s been on my mind a fraction of the time it’s been on yours, but once we’re on a more equal footing, I’ll be more ready to assist you.”
Marlon Sykes was, it seemed, not impressed by such transparent flattery. Without a word he doffed his cap, bowed deeply, replaced it again, and walked to the fax gate; and if it’s possible to disappear in a testy, irritable way, then be assured Marlon Sykes did just that.
“Nicely handled,” Tamra chided, emphasizing the remark with a not-so-playful punch in the arm.
“Hmm?” he said, looking up. “What?”
She sighed, then removed the diamond crown and scratched the indented band it left across her forehead. “Bruno, Bruno. I thought you’d changed. You seemed to have grown at first, matured, but maybe that was just the gray hair. Maybe we’re just ourselves, irredeemably, until the end of time. A dreary thought. So are you going to stand there all night? If I send for a chair, will you sit?”
He looked at her, his attention divided, struggling to understand what she wanted here. Finally he just shrugged. “I’m comfortable enough, Tam. If I need to sit, I’ll sit. There’s a fax machine, right? So really, I’ve got everything I need.”
He saw right away that it wasn’t an optimal response. In fact, she seemed to find it funny.
“Have you? Are you dismissing me now, Philander? Don’t be foolish: left to your own devices you’ll happily starve out here.”
He frowned, not liking the condescension in her tone. Was that what she thought of him? “You’re the first human being I’ve seen in nearly a decade, Majesty. I think I’ve gotten on rather well without your assistance.”
“I suppose you have,” she said, clearly amused at his expense. “But I must attend a dinner party tonight, and I think you shall accompany me. You’ll eat; you’ll socialize; you’ll astonish me with your ability to get on.”
“Ah.” Dinner parties: loud, complicated. Bruno sighed, feeling his delicate chain of thought breaking apart already. “Bother.”
“Oh, bother yourself. For all your complaining, you do think best when you’re distracted. Leaving you here alone is really a disservice to all.” Frowning, she pinched the shoulder seam of his vest. “Bruno, where did you get this pattern? We’ll need to stop by the palace, have it dress you in something suitable. And me, for that matter; we look like a couple of time travelers.”
“From twenty years ago?”
She nodded. “At least.”
Well humph, he’d been trying to continue his apparent funny streak. He was pretty sure there’d been a time when Tamra had laughed at his jokes, finding them witty and apropos. So long ago? Perhaps he should go partying with her, freshen up the skills a bit. With six whole months until disaster struck, he could hardly begrudge himself a single evening’s fellowship, could he? Particularly when the Queen herself commanded it.
He grunted suddenly, recalling that “disaster” meant, literally, “bad star.” Perhaps that could be made into a joke later. Or perhaps not, since nothing leaped immediately to mind. Jokes you had to think about were not usually the funniest. Especially if they were in bad taste to begin with. He did smile a little at that.
“What?” Her Majesty asked, marking his shift of mood.
“Er, nothing. I’ll … tell you later.”
Accepting that answer, she smiled, took his hand, threaded her fingers through his, and began leading him toward the blank vertical slab of the fax gate. “Well. It’s time, then.”
“Wait,” he protested, “it’s not evening now, is it?”
“It is on Maxwell Montes.”
“Maxwell Montes? Venus? That’s where we’re going?”
“Yep. And it occurs to me we’ve less than an hour to get ready.”
“But …” he said, realizing the futility of the words even as they left his lips. “An hour? Bother it, I’ve only just eaten breakfast.”
3. See Appendix A: Semisafe Black Holes, this page
chapter four
in which a legendary mead hall is christened
Maxwell Montes is the highest point on Venus, reaching through fully a third of the planet’s thick, toxic atmosphere, and as such, was the first place to become marginally habitable once terraforming began. Or so Tamra informed Bruno as her Tongan courtiers—a trio of gorgeous but nearly flat-chested ladies affecting a quite implausible adolescence—fussed with the final details of his hair and clothing.
Two of the women were vaguely familiar; he’d already feigned embarrassment over forgetting their names. He had been at court for almost three decades, so there really wasn’t much excuse. The third woman, Tusité something, was one of Tamra’s personal friends, and consequently treated him with chilly regard. Are you back, Trouble? Her conversational barbs were subtle, though, and since he had pretty well earned them, he resolved to take them with good grace.
But still, eyeing his triple reflection, he had to ask her. “You’re not playing a trick on me, are you?”
“You’ll be with Her Majesty, Declarant,” Tusité replied coolly. He supposed that meant no, it wasn’t possible to embarrass Bruno without also embarrassing Tamra. But there might be another barb here he was missing. This was typical; Tamra’s courtiers were mostly kind people, but their sparring was constant, driven by hypertrophied senses of wit and honor and propriety. They were like athletes who had honed a particular set of skills to the point of bodily distortion: runners with cricke
t legs, or weightlifters who could no longer throw a ball. He could believe Tusité had altogether lost the ability to speak plainly, without layers of veiled meaning.
Bah.
Tonight, he’d balked at sequins, but had otherwise yielded judgment to the palace and its ladies, who’d promptly swathed him in green-and-black suede. Spurious zippers and snaps and buckles on the jacket were complemented by fat laces down the trousers’ outer seams. The matching hat was wide brimmed and glossy, the sort of thing one expected a big ostrich feather to protrude from, although none did.
Each piece had looked absurd in isolation, and Bruno had been hard-pressed to stifle his protests. The total ensemble had a different effect, though. It did look ridiculous, in the way that unfamiliar clothes always did, but it also seemed, in a strange way, to suit him. If this was a joke, it was of the contextual variety: well dressed but out of place. A time traveler. But probably it was no joke, and people actually dressed this way these days.
The handmaids had wanted to stroke the gray out of his hair and beard as well, and now, eyeing himself in the dressing hall’s triple mirror, he wondered what that might’ve looked like. No color was “natural” in this age of artifice, after all, and his own tastes were clearly outdated and otherwise suspect.
“Whom are you trying to emulate?” the would-be teenage Tusité had asked him earlier, her voice brusque with amusement. The question gave him pause. His post-court appearance had evolved gradually, over twenty years, without much in the way of conscious planning or assessment. And yet, as Tamra also had teased him, he seemed to have become a sort of theatrical construct, less himself than an iconification of himself. Symbolizing what, he couldn’t guess, but there it was: his eyes brooding between gray-black thickets, fat eyebrows merging with overlong hair, bushy sideburns slopping down into curls of untamed beard. The handmaids had done what they could in the time allotted, but still he looked uncomfortably like a mad prophet, combed over but hardly couth. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it in his own mirror this morning.
That was court life for you: self-consciousness without end. Silly clothes. Comments so veiled and obtuse that they might as well have been encrypted.
“You look … better,” Tamra told him, gliding in, dismissing her courtiers with a look.
“Yes,” he agreed grudgingly, straightening a blousy sleeve beneath the cuff of the jacket. “I’m quite the dandy. Compliments to your software and staff; you do seem to surround yourself with the tasteful.”
“Usually,” she said, and took his arm. “Did Tusité give you a hard time?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She seems to have her doubts about me.”
“She does have a good memory.”
Tamra herself had adopted a blue-gray, long-sleeved evening gown that—like Bruno’s jacket—suggested Venus was no longer the hot-house of ages past. Circling her brow was a simple platinum band, adequate for semiformal occasions where she was, nonetheless, on public display.
Robot guards came to life for them as they approached the fax gate, transiting ahead of them to prepare the way. Watching them disappear was interesting; the gate itself didn’t look like anything, just a vertical slab of blackish material swathed in a thin layer of fog. But the robots melted into it with tiny pops and flashes, like ice cubes slipping into something carbonated and phosphorescent.
It took some conscious effort to approach the slab as though it weren’t there, but stepping through it was as easy as stepping through a curtain, and provided as little in the way of sensation. On the other side lay a gallery, a vast mall of stone and glass, its windows looking down on twilit cloud tops.
The robots’ heels and toes clicked against a floor of glossy stone as they danced out of the way, elegantly unobtrusive, their movements interrupted not at all by the journey between planets.
Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all, though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location. Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body, or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the risk.
At any rate, in the early days of faxing there’d been some pain, some discomfort, some small degree of disorientation that let you know the transfer had happened. This new way, it hardly seemed like travel at all. This might as well have been another room of Tamra’s palace, or anyplace, really.
He paused at the transom, turning, eyeing their new surroundings dubiously. Venus? It looked more like Colorado, some glassine lodge clinging to the side of a mountain, looking down on someone else’s rain clouds. Above, stars twinkled faintly, as if through a yellow-brown layer of smog. All around the floor were man-high juniper trees in iron pots, not in rows but scattered, a faux forest lying silent and still. Behind the fax gate lay the rock face itself, Maxwell Montes, sealed and structurally reinforced but otherwise left in its natural state, smooth basalt planes broken at jagged edges like petrified layers of pastry. The floor beneath them was opaque and solid, probably a single sheet of whiskered stone held up by metal stanchions and trusswork without a gram of wellstone anywhere in the mix. Why risk a power failure dumping one’s party guests—not to mention one’s junipers—screaming into the cloud deck below?
As far as other guests went, Bruno didn’t see any, but then again this was clearly a kind of hallway, a place between places, albeit a large one—forty meters across if it was an inch. In both directions, the stone and glass followed natural contours of the mountain, folding around corners and out of view. They were on a promontory of sorts, a jutting outcrop of rock; above, the mountainside sloped away rapidly from the arcade’s ceiling.
A faint, light snow was falling, he saw, clinging in places to the juncture of rock wall and sloping glass roof and, when enough had accumulated, spilling down the glass to be whisked away by swirling breezes. Beyond this, splashes of lichen were clearly visible on the rock face, and there were even, he thought, some leafy plants waving up there in the gloom.
Below, the clouds somehow managed to look chilly, like Earthly rainstorms after the sun has set.
“Venus,” he said quietly. A parched, poisonous world of crushing pressures and furnace temperatures, tin and lead running liquid on its surface like so much quicksilver? No longer.
Tamra quirked her head at him as if puzzled by his stopping. “Something?” she asked. The view didn’t seem to faze her, to affect her at all. Perhaps too familiar, too ordinary a thing in her life: a whole planet brought to heel, another ring for her hand.
He shook his head. “No, nothing.”
He felt someone crowd in through the fax gate behind him, heard a grunt of surprise. “Excuse me,” a voice said testily.
Tamra sighed, pulling him away from the gate. “You needn’t stand right there, Declarant.”
“Of course,” he mumbled, his eyes still flicking around hungrily, taking it all in.
“It’s been a while since you’ve seen anyplace new,” she observed, with some degree of sympathy.
“Indeed,” he said, nodding absently. “One forgets the sensation. The overwhelmingness of it. Without realizing, one forgets how to be overwhelmed.”
His gaze finally came to rest on her face, finding the expression there amused. This displeased him. “Is it intentional, Highness, to distract me from the very problem I’m summoned to solve? Changes of scene undermine one’s concentration. If your desire is to frustrate me, I admit you’ve succeeded.”
“Oh, hush.”
“De Towaji?” another voice, a man’s, said. Bruno turned, saw four strangers clustered at the fax gate now. Strangers, yes; he was quite sure he recognized none of them. The man who’d spoken was tall and thin, dressed h
ead to toe in crimson, and—if Bruno dared think it—possessed of the sort of shallow, almost effeminate beauty he generally associated with actors and politicians. Two of his associates were female, swathed respectively in yellow and green velour dresses that seemed little more than long, endlessly winding scarves. The third, a portly man in indigo, was looking wide-eyed at Bruno.
“De Towaji,” he echoed.
Oh, bother.
“Gentlemen,” Bruno said, bowing slightly. Then, with greater conviction, “Ladies.”
The ladies eyed him skeptically, this clownish figure late of the wilderness.
“My God,” the indigo man exclaimed. “Her Majesty went and got you, didn’t she?”
And the woman in green said, “You’re here to fix the Ring Collapsiter.”
And the crimson man, at a loss but apparently feeling the need to say something, added, “Er, that’s quite a handsome jacket!”
“Doctors,” Tamra said, placing a hand on Bruno’s back, “allow me to present Declarant Bruno de Towaji.”
“Pleased,” the crimson man piped.
“To meet you,” the woman in green finished, half apologetically, touching the crimson man lightly on the hand. He was, Bruno saw at once, her husband, whose sentences she was well accustomed to finishing. The love and shyness and exasperation between them radiated out in invisible rays, like infrared. Warming.
The indigo man simply nodded.
Well, they made Bruno feel less clownish, at any rate. Or in better company with his clownishness, perhaps. Nice to know he wasn’t the only awkward chap in the worlds.
Tamra looked at him sidelong and said, “Doctors Shum and Doctors Theotakos, of Elysium province.” She paused, then added, “Mars.”
And here were court nuances aplenty: Her Majesty had given these people’s titles and last names, but not their firsts, meaning she knew them, but not well. And she’d made a point of emphasizing Bruno’s rank over theirs; the Queendom’s educational system being by far the best humanity had ever known, “Doctor” was very nearly no title at all. There were more subtle levels in the exchange as well, as invisible and inevitable as the basalt pastry layers beneath Maxwell Montes’ outermost surface. That Bruno couldn’t parse them—and wouldn’t even if he knew how—didn’t mean their presence had escaped him. This much he knew: that these Martians had been smartly, artfully dressed down, acknowledged for their value but instructed in no uncertain terms to keep their distance.
