by Wil McCarthy
Any rock is 99.999% computationally inert, yes, but particularly in iron-rich basalts and granites, most particularly in those that have been shaped with metal tools—which of course tend to become magnetized with frequent use—chance doping of conveniently sized pockets or vacuoles yields electrical properties ideal for the capture and storage of patterned radiation, such as the image of a body flushed with fear or rage. That the inventors of magnetic tape and bubble memory failed to recognize this is often cited as one of history’s stranger anomalies.
Granted, it often takes quite sophisticated archaeological instruments to extract the information again, to reconstitute some recognizable echo of the image itself. It’s difficult to imagine that human sensory processors can distinguish so finely, and filter so well. Unaided ghost “sightings” remain rare and difficult to confirm, leading perhaps to the conclusion that they don’t really occur. But it pays to remember that ancient folklorists—the well-nourished ones, at least—were as intelligent and reliable as any modern witness, and also that they knew, one way or another, not only about hauntings but about the vanished “dragons” and “oni” and “troglodytes” of ages past.
At any rate, modern archaeologists make a livelihood of studying ghosts virtually indistinguishable from those described by medieval scholars. It’s from just such a source that we know the following:
1. That while faxing himself home that day, Bruno de Towaji was simultaneously diverted to a place of cut stone, deep inside the Uranian moon of Miranda.
2. That he looked around in puzzlement for several seconds upon arriving there.
3. That his eyes settled on a particular location, about six meters away from where he was standing.
4. That his skin temperature rose by nearly a full degree and then dropped precipitously, and that he said “God, oh God, you’ve got to be joking.”
The ghost reveals nothing else about that particular incident, although archaeologists dutifully report a sense of dread and foreboding in the heel marks where de Towaji stood.
book two
twice upon a star imperiled
chapter seven
in which an anomalous result is pondered
In the ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting at the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our latest attention, sat brooding in his study, staring at the measurement his desk had reported for the umptieth time. Feigenbaum’s number, yes, hmm.4
Bruno had built an apparatus, a structure for testing the nature of true vacuum. The structure was called “the Onion,” and was composed of miniature black holes held in place by carefully balanced electrogravitic forces, a state of matter known as “collapsium.” Naturally, such a thing could not be kept on the miniature planet itself; it orbited several miles away, a faint puckering of the star field, powder-blue with escaped Hawking-Cerenkov radiation.
Distance notwithstanding, the Onion’s tides disturbed the planet’s tiny ocean and atmosphere, playing hell with the weather, playing hell with the orbit of the miniature moon. When there’d been one, anyway; the “moon” was really a storage heap for inch-wide spheres of extremely dense matter: neubles. Diamond-clad balls of liquid neutronium, a billion tons apiece. Black hole food. All gone now, used up.
Presently, the floor seemed to tilt under Bruno’s chair and then jerk upright, then tilt again and slowly right itself, as the Onion passed overhead. The atmosphere crackled, alive with static electricity; the ground, pulled several inches out of true and then released, rumbled in protest.
Sounds and images flitted through Bruno’s mind. Bricks, dust, cries of alarm; the ground was shaking. Well, not anymore, but his heart still hammered like a wet fist at the base of his throat, and would do so for the next ten minutes at least, before it finally faded from notice. And in another two and a half hours, whether Bruno was ready or not, it would all happen again!
He felt he should have gotten used to this at some point. Sabadell-Andorra, after all, was eight decades in his past. He couldn’t help but remember the bells of Girona clanging as the weary brick towers crumbled around them. He couldn’t help but remember the Old Girona Bistro—his own house!—falling in on itself like a magician’s box, taking his parents down with it while he bounced and surfed, more or less unscathed, on the street outside. To a fifteen-year-old, the calamity had been absolute.
But Girona’s demise had been a freak, a chance synergy of tectonics and soil composition feeding precisely the resonant frequencies of the local architecture. He’d learned some new terms that week: feedback, fluidization, condemned, aftershock, pyre. There hadn’t been another case like it in all the years since, and probably—given the extreme conservatism of Queendom building codes—there never would be again. So why was he still afraid of earthquakes? Even minor ones, even ones whose timing and severity were under his direct control?
His failure to acclimate made him wonder, sometimes, just what he was doing out here. Alchemy? Aversion therapy? The inane bumblings of a man who should, by now, have grown senile and sessile with age? He wasn’t doing controlled science, that much was obvious.
He’d never intended—never imagined—orbiting such a massive structure so close to his little planet. He’d never imagined using the entire moon in the Onion’s construction, but what began as a transient curiosity had become first a tinkering, then a project, and finally a heedless, sleepless obsession. A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become—seemingly overnight—a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! A structure too massive to relocate, too delicate to risk disassembling, too dangerous and disruptive to leave where it was. What had he been thinking?
No, he knew the answer to that: he’d been after the True Vacuum. Hard to blame himself for that.5
The project had taken several weeks, he thought. Or months, maybe; he’d long since stopped marking the passage of time. He’d eaten and slept on a schedule not matched with the rising and setting of his miniature “sun.” He remembered that much. But looking now at the wreckage of his study—the mess of socks and cups and wellstone drawing slates filled with notes and diagrams and 3-D animations that had been abandoned half finished or else crossed out with savage strokes—he marveled at how damnably entranced he could sometimes become.
It was like waking up underwater, at the bottom of a bathtub or something: looking up, seeing the surface rippling above you. It isn’t hard to sit up and take a breath, so the initial panic fades to simple confusion and astonishment. How the fudge did that happen?
And the results he’d brought back with him were astonishing, too. Or confusing. Or simply—probably?—wrong. Feigenbaum’s Number? This was the trouble with basic research Expected results told you nothing, told you that you had learned nothing. But unexpected results could mean anything; experimental error or flawed conception or simple insanity on the part of the experimenter. Bruno had known his share of scientific kooks, and this was exactly the sort of thing they were always going on about, in a thousand different mutual contradictions. So in the end, you still learned nothing, maybe for hundreds of years, until the rest of physics caught up and could finally tell if you were full of beans or not.
Humph.
He waved for lights, for windows. The study brightened with warm, incandescent yellows and whites, but where stone wall faded to glass window there were only reflections of those same lights against darkness. It was nighttime outside.
He realized he was famished, and wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten. A full day? He hoped not, else gas and bellyaches would follow soon after any meal.
“Good evening, sir,” the house said through extruded wall speakers, as if he’d just arrived and required a greeting.
“Hmm, yes. Door, please.”
Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall plaster;
the space within it darkened, turned to wood, acquired picturesque brass hinges, and swung outward.
“Sir, you have—”
He held up a hand. “Actually, I need something to eat before I hear the day’s problems.”
“Yes, sir,” the house replied, a bit uneasily. “There’s a bowl of peeled grapes ready for you. Chilled. But you have—”
“Grapes?” Bruno passed through the doorway, into the darkened living room. “Grapes? Where? No, don’t turn on the lights, just tell—”
His shins collided with something knee high and solid, something that felt cool and smooth through the silk of his pajama breeches, felt in fact like the torso of a robot that was resting on its hands and knees. At least, that’s how it felt for the moment it took Bruno to lose his balance and spill over sideways.
“Hugo! Blast it!” he called out.
Can a house gasp in dismay? Bruno’s seemed to for a moment. Beneath him there was the crackle of programmable matter shifting substance at maximum rate; he landed on a thick, yielding carpet of foam rubber. Not real rubber, of course, but wellstone rubber, a structure of designer electron bundles alternating with superfine silicon threads. Presently, the foam grew patchy beneath him, as if dissolving; two seconds later he lay in a Bruno-shaped depression, his left side resting directly against the granite of the house’s foundation. A cloud of silicon dust rose up all around him.
The foam had yielded too far, lost structural integrity, broken the fine mesh of circuits that gave it the illusion of substance. Had the floor changed to iron instead, he’d have been the one to yield, but as it was he’d probably been saved from a cracked elbow. Of course, in the Queendom of Sol “breaking the floor” was the very metaphor for foolish clumsiness. Or had been, once upon a time; he didn’t get down there much anymore.
“Declarant-Philander!” the house cried out, using the longest and most formal of his titles, though he’d told it a thousand times not to. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
He didn’t speak at first, fearful of inhaling the fine silicon dust. Instead he sat up, brushing himself off, breathing lightly—experimentally—through his nose. At once, small multilegged robots scuttled forth from the shadows, undulating, wrapping sinuously around him and racing over his skin and clothing with tiny vacuum-cleaner probosci. They raced around the edges of him as well, finding the dust where it lay. Two seconds later they were finished and gone, scuttling back into hiding like fast-motion figments of his imagination.
“Sir?” the house prompted again, anxiously. “My humblest, humblest apologies, sir. Are you all right? I tried—”
Bruno sighed. “I’m fine. Hugo?”
The robot he’d tripped over, perched there in the darkness on its hands and knees, looked up slowly at the sound of its name. Its neck joints clicked, golden bands sliding one inside the other, as it turned its blank metallic face toward him. A faint mewling sound emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of its nonexistent mouth.
“Your robot is in need of recycling,” another voice, a female voice, said from deeper in the living room’s darkness.
Startled, Bruno rose to his feet, spied a silhouette there on the divan. Long hair, long dress, a sparkle of diamonds at the waist.
“Lights,” he said, though he knew at once who it must be.
“I tried to tell you, sir,” the house complained. “You have a visitor.”
The lights came up softly, illuminating the form of—who else?—Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. Bruno had known no other visitor for years, and even she’d been here only the once. She’d been desperate, then, in need of his help. And in the here and now, her posture gave the impression that she’d been sitting there in the darkness for some time. Fair enough; the house had standing orders never to disturb him in his study unless his safety or his work were in immediate danger. Had it made her wait? Had she agreed to, when Royal Overrides could compel any software to her immediate bidding?
“Malo e lelei,” he said, as prelude to his many questions.
She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the greeting. No crown adorned her tonight; her black hair spilled out over bare, walnut-colored shoulders. Her dress was of crimson suede, with round black shoes sticking out underneath. Casual attire, even for a figurehead ruler of billions. Especially for a figurehead, he supposed. The only concession to her station was a wide bracelet of porcelain bearing the traditional plus sign and six-pointed star of Tongan heraldry, half smothered in laurels and filigree.
“You’re quite welcome here, Highness,” he went on, now a bit testily. “I’m at your disposal, as always, but I’m afraid I wasn’t prepared for a visitor this evening.” He glanced around at the floor and furnishings. “I see the house has cleaned up, at least. By choice, I wouldn’t inflict my usual housekeeping on you.”
“Your robot,” she said, pointing, “is defective. I nearly tripped over it myself.”
Beside him, Hugo had moved, slowly, to the side of the Bruno-shaped dent in the floor, and was probing the edges of it with slow, tin-gray fingers capped in gold. The faint mewling sound had never quite stopped.
“Not defective,” Bruno said wearily. “Free. I wanted one animate object around here that wasn’t simply a house appendage. Do you realize there isn’t a single animal on this planet? Not a bird to sing, not a fish to poke ripples in the water’s smooth surface. Did I really do that, craft an entire world, landscapes and biomes and evaporation cycles, and then forget to populate it? Someone gave me a little toy ocean once, alive with miniature creatures, and even then I didn’t take the hint. I suppose I sought to correct the oversight. I have entirely too many servants as it is, so I decided to free one.”
She frowned. “Free it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I severed its link to the house software.”
Her Majesty looked aghast. “Robots have no volition, Declarant, no desire to do anything but fulfill. Nor do they possess intelligence, unless you’d count raw intuition as such. You severed the link to its processor, its ability to grasp and assess the very needs it must fulfill?”
He nodded again. “Just so.”
“How … unkind. You leave it helpless and confused, in an environment beyond its comprehension.”
Bruno shrugged. “Such is the nature of freedom, Highness. I’ve often said that life is nothing more than the choices thrust upon us when ability and incident collide. Which of us truly knows our course? Generally, we don’t even know the landscape beneath our course. It’s a terrible gift, in some ways, but a great one as well. Hugo is more fortunate than some.”
Bruno was intrigued even as he said the words, because there’d been no one to ask him these questions before, and he hadn’t really reflected on them himself. Freeing Hugo was something he’d simply done one day, and never reconsidered. After all, what software existed to tell him what to do next? None. And if it came about somehow, if some master house intelligence could plot the course of his life, or even his afternoon, would he listen? He’d never expected to wind up out here, in the Queendom’s upper wilderness, with only the collapsium for company, but at least he could look back and know that for whatever inane reasons, he’d done this to himself. Such was the nature of freedom.
It was sort of a grim thing to inflict on a robot, he supposed.
Hugo, once again looking up at the sound of his name, mewled and fell face first into the hole in the floor.
“Ahem,” Her Majesty said.
“Oh, bother it.” Bruno sighed and took a seat across from her. “Where are your robots, Tamra? Your guards. You’re never without them. And how did you get in here, anyway? I’d have detected the approach of a ship.”
One of Hugo’s graceful cousins slipped briefly into view then slipped out again, leaving a tray of food and drink on the table between them.
“Your fax,” Tamra said, pointing at the dark orifice around which the little house was built. “It is the usual mode of travel, Bruno.”
H
e pursed his lips. “Eh? My network gate is down, Highness. Nonfunctional, for years.”
It was Tamra’s turn to shrug. “I had it repaired last time I was up here.”
“Really. Ah. Nice of you to inform me.”
“You needn’t be so offended,” she said, with an air of both guilty humor and bruised camaraderie. “I’ve kept the secret, kept the override to myself. It’s as I found it, with the exception that I can get word to you when circumstances demand it.”
He nodded resignedly. “When circumstances demand it, ah. This isn’t a social visit, then.”
The shaking of her head was gentle, apologetic. “No. Did you expect otherwise?”
“No,” he admitted. “Why should I? You’ve visited exactly once in sixteen years, and only then to tell me the Ring Collapsiter was falling into the sun.”
The Ring Collapsiter: an annulus of collapsium encircling the Queendom’s parent star, its interior a supervacuum shortcut through which telecom packets—such as the signals comprising a faxed monarch—might pass much faster than the vacuum speed of light. Only a third complete when last Bruno had seen it, the Collapsiter had already been the most breathtakingly beautiful of all the works of man. An impressive project to be sure, almost impressive enough to make him stay. A Queendom capable of such grandeur might have use for his peculiar drives and talents after all!
But in the end, he’d been lured back up here by the promise of an arc de fin, an arch through which the end of time itself might be observed. His bones quaked at the very idea. Here was an even grander project, so grand in fact that he expected to spend thousands of years working out the details. And yes, conducting those dangerous experiments—such as the Onion—that might eventually lead him there. Experiments even a bold Queendom could never tolerate in its midst, and rightly so.
