by Wil McCarthy
Shiao made a visible effort to smile at that. “I’m quite glad she is immortal, sir.”
“Naturally, yes. As we all are. But it does crush any hope of ambition, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so, sir. I suppose I’m fortunate not to have any.”
“As am I.” Bruno laughed. “And look where it’s got me. Still, I imagine your childhood on a bitter plateau somewhere, all rocks and weeds and poisonous snakes.”
Shiao smirked at that. “Sir, I grew up in a posh Xingtai suburb, with lemon-tea summers and snow-dragon winters, and everywhere the smell of roasted meat. Superstition thick enough to dance on—we had thousands of little gods running around, but no one particularly believed in them, not with fear and awe like a proper god should inspire. It was just one more lazy game to play; the whole place was a game. I like my life now because it’s serious, because what I do matters.
“It has nothing to do with place, really. You look at me and you see a stiff policeman, which is entirely correct. But it’s not an affliction, right? It’s an aspiration. There are personable, easygoing police as well, and we need them, because it takes a certain variety to balance out a force. From an early age, I guess you could say I cultivated myself to be the person I am, and really I’m very pleased it’s turned out so well.”
“Choosing to isolate and deprive yourself,” Bruno mused. “Why does that sound familiar?”
Shiao politely waved a hand. “Quite the opposite, sir; I enjoy being this way. It’s very rewarding.”
“It also suits his face,” Vivian added. “He has such stern features. You know that cartoon show, ‘Barnes and Manetti’? He looks just like Manetti sometimes. Talks like him, too.”
Shiao looked surprised. “Is that show still on? It’s true: Manetti was an idol of mine. Barnes always had it easy; he would just bend the rules more and more until a solution finally fell into his lap. Intimidation, tampering, unauthorized surveillance … He’s supposed to be the hero, right? Manetti is just an obstacle, this infuriating person standing between the perpetrators and their hard-won justice. But Manetti actually obeys the law, which is much harder. Doing the right thing is always harder. Barnes wouldn’t last two weeks in the Constabulary.”
“No,” Vivian agreed, “he certainly wouldn’t.”
A seagull screeched nearby, drawing everyone’s attention. For a while, they just watched the sunlight on the waves.
Finally, Tamra turned to Marlon. “Do you have any parting words for our guest of honor? If not, we might as well get on with this.”
“Thank him for his services,” Marlon said, with a good solid attempt at sincerity, “and wish him well in his research. I’ve little doubt there’ll be many more breakthroughs with his name attached.”
“Is that all?” Tamra prodded.
“I think so, yes.”
“No good-byes?”
“No. Life is long. The Queendom is small. He and I will be seeing each other again.”
She looked ready to respond to that, but finally shrugged. “All right, then. Bruno, I’ve kept the media away this time—cordon set at twenty kilometers—but I’m sure you understand, we can’t let you out of here without another Medal of Salvation.”
“No,” Bruno agreed ruefully, “I don’t suppose you can. Is this a ceremony, then?”
She shook her head. “You’ve earned the right to have this your way. But I will say thank you; you didn’t have to come help us again.”
“Oh, pish,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “Of course I did. I’m not half the misanthrope you seem to believe, dear. I do wish for people to be happy, free of harm, all that sort of thing. It’s just that usually I can best accomplish this by being far away; Rodenbeck is correct about one thing: collapsium research is fraught with perils. Marlon is braver than I, to risk his reputation so close to home.”
“That may be,” she conceded, silencing Marlon’s protest with a look. “And we wouldn’t dream of depriving you of your passions, nor of depriving ourselves of the benefits thereof. But we do miss you; surely you understand that.”
“I’ve never doubted it.”
“Well, then,” she said, and stuck out her hand, a little gold medallion dangling from it by a length of green ribbon. “Here’s your medal.”
He took it from her. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from having been in her pocket. Somewhat embarrassed, he nonetheless slipped the thing around his neck and let it hang.
The Royal Committee applauded politely for a full minute, at which point Tamra said, “All right, everyone, thanks for coming. Now I’ll ask you to excuse us.”
They all rose with a chorus of good-byes, to which Bruno responded with, surprisingly, a little lump in his throat. And then, without further ado, they were all walking away, blankets in hand, their rising conversation now with one another, rather than with Bruno. In another minute, he and Tamra were alone. They rose, leaving their own blankets behind for beach attendants to clean up, and made their way toward the fax gate that stood by the washrooms, just beyond the tree-line.
“You’re more regal than you used to be,” Bruno remarked. “More comfortable with your regality.”
She shrugged. “The people expect no less: elective monarchy is basically a scapegoating tactic.”
Bruno smirked at this; in Girona, the word “scapegoat” had meant, literally, a goat on whom the city’s problems were blamed. Every year, in a grand festival, the people would stack themselves into human pyramids—a prize for the highest! the widest! the jiggliest!—and then they’d throw this poor goat off a tower. No one particularly disputed the cruelty of the practice, but centuries of tradition weighed heavy then, as they probably did today.
Tamra, who knew all about the goat but apparently hadn’t made the connection, continued. “Once upon a time, democrats overthrew monarchs for the promise of freedom. What a laugh! As if responsibility and accountability were something people wanted for themselves! Freedom means finding someone else to worry about all the little details for you, and all the big details you’re too immersed in your life to see. People don’t want a dictator, obviously. Quite the contrary; they want a dictatee, a conscripted functionary who can be endlessly blamed and imposed upon. It is democracy, for all but the monarch herself.”
“Ah, but we love you in return,” Bruno pointed out. “And there’s a lot of money and privilege involved.”
“Yes. Yes, there is. And it’s my duty to enjoy and appreciate that, up to a point. But if I begin to feel entitled, I undermine the very principles of my office, and wherever I go I find myself sharply and impatiently reminded of the fact. They aren’t shy about it, these subjects of mine. Isn’t it the least bit ironic, Bruno, that a Queendom which seeks to match jobs to people for optimum happiness and efficiency also insists on, at best, grudging leadership at its highest levels? Isn’t that an odd thing?”
Bruno mused, then slowly nodded. “It is ironic, yes. But it’s hardly the only such irony. And I doubt it’s quite the conspiracy you suggest. People probably just want their money’s worth, and haven’t really reflected on how it affects you personally. Or perhaps they have, but they still feel—rightly, I think—that someone has to bear the responsibility. It’s not always for us to choose our fates.”
“Not for me, at any rate. I do like to imagine I’ve bought some freedom of choice for other people. But anyway, it’s not like I have anything else to compare my life to. I’m content enough, yes, through long practice and long experience. And like everyone else, I reserve the right to complain sometimes. You will attend me in this, Philander.”
“As you wish, Highness.” Bruno couldn’t quite hide his smirk. “You know, I wasn’t always so suave. You’re just about the only person who accepted me, in those days, exactly as I was.”
“Suave!” she laughed. “Well, that’s one word for it, I suppose, though not one that leaps most readily to mind. But seriously, Bruno, I don’t accept you. I never have; you’re not a very a
cceptable person. I love you, and that’s a very different thing.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Very different. I wouldn’t know what love was if not for you. It’s difficult to leave you here and go about my business; surely that’s understood.”
She looked sad then, which made him feel guilty. He almost decided right then to stay in the Queendom forever. Almost.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “even twenty kilometers away, news cameras have an alarming ability to resolve fine details. If we were, say, to duck into one of these washrooms for even a moment, the headlines would last the rest of the year. So I’m afraid you must kiss me chastely on the lips, just once, and take your leave of me.”
“Yes, Highness,” he said, ever the obedient one, and complied exactly with her instructions.
“Oh, phooey,” she said, punching him lightly on the chest. “Is that the best you can do? Do my hints and temptations mean nothing?”
“That wasn’t very grown-up of you,” he said, feigning both pain and indignation.
“Who ever said I was grown up?” she returned, and pushed him bodily through the fax gate.
For once, he experienced a distinct sensation of travel; her laughter cut off instantly, and the cool touch of her hand seemed very distant indeed. Sweet sorrow? Pah, there was nothing sweet about it. On the other side was full daylight and a decidedly chilly breeze. The trees around him swayed, and the clouds scudded overhead like speeding aircraft, and the breeze became a wind that ruffled and flattened the meadow grass as he hurried toward his little white house.
Hurried, because he knew what happened next; even as the house opened a door for him, even as his staff of robots swarmed to pull him inside, the ground tilted beneath them all, then straightened, then tilted again the other way. The Onion! Blast it, he’d nearly forgotten. How was he going to dispose of that thing? Saving the Queendom was trouble enough, but this, this was difficult!
“Welcome, sir,” the house offered as gravity gradually returned to something approaching its normal magnitude and direction.
One of his robots fell over.
The others seemed not to notice it, except as an obstacle to be danced around or avoided altogether as they hurried to bring him food, drink, fresh clothes, or whatever it was they thought he needed right now. But to fall—such clumsiness was unheard-of, even in the face of the Onion’s disturbances. The one that had fallen had a scuffed, somewhat battered look to it, and presently it turned its blank metal face up toward Bruno in what could only be described as a pitiful manner, and emitted a sharp, questioning mewl.
Forgetting all else for the moment, Bruno cried out in surprise and delight and extended an eager hand toward the robot. “Hugo! Good God, man, you’ve learned to walk!”
book three
thrice upon a schemer’s plotting
chapter fourteen
in which an ancient question is revisited
Though Isaac Newton is best known for his pomiary investigations into the nature of gravity, he was in fact quite troubled by his findings. Action at a distance, an effect with no explicable cause? The idea would be preposterous if its truth weren’t so readily demonstrated. And while gravity was bothersome, inertia was by far the deepest thorn in his aristocratic hide, a thing he itched and scrabbled at right up to the final hours of his life.
A ship, he reasoned, must part the waters ahead of it, must push the waters aside to make a place for itself to move forward into. This requires energy; hence the need for sails, or oar-wielding galley slaves, or some other means to push against the water’s resistance. So perhaps the air and Earth and even the space between planets were permeated with a kind of fluid? One which resisted the acceleration of the bodies within it, creating this phantom “inertia” that seemed to constrain the motions of every object in God’s strange universe?
But if that were true, why would those selfsame objects, having been accelerated into motion, then remain in motion indefinitely? Why was the amount of force needed to decelerate an apple the same as that used to accelerate it in the first place? No ship had ever sailed thus; no fluid had ever allowed it. What properties would such an intangible fluid possess? Newton realized the question was fundamental, but after decades of pondering and wondering and quietly beseeching the powers of Heaven he was still no closer to understanding, and so he died.
What he didn’t know, of course, was that the “fluid” was none other than light, the half-filled photon states of the zero-point vacuum churning in a perpetual storm of electric and magnetic potentials, which in turn resisted—and continue even now to resist—the acceleration of quarks and other charged particles. Since this field is isotropic, or uniform in all directions, and Lorentz-invariant, or uniform at all velocities, a force is required to alter the path or speed of any charged particle, on any trajectory at any time, anywhere in the universe. And since the interaction of charge with the zero-point field is precisely what gives rise to the illusion of “matter,” the force required to accelerate an object winds up being directly proportional to its mass.
For nearly three centuries after Newton, philosophers were content to regard this “inertia” as some inherent property of matter, axiomatic and therefore inexplicable, where in fact Newton’s strained speculations had been much nearer to the truth.
In the tenth 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 final attention, was brooding over an aspect of this very problem, and wishing to God he could be half as smart as Newton about it. He was in the habit of maneuvering very large masses with very great precision, and the energies involved—a direct consequence of Newton’s inertia—were straining the limits of his infrastructure.
He was a sort of chemist or materials scientist, but the particles he worked with weighed a billion tons each, and swallowed light, and bent and twisted the spacetime around them. They were known classically as “black holes,” industrially as “collapson nodes,” but in Bruno’s private lexicon they frequently adopted the names of anatomical features or bodily fluids or social functions best left unmentioned here.
It was daytime on Bruno’s little planet, but the planet’s little sun was dark, a shadow against the starscape, its nuclear fires encapsulated by a photoelectric conversion shell so that only its invisible heat escaped. Bruno lay on his back, on a chaise longue, in a meadow beneath a sprawling, hot, dew-dripping canopy of stars. The atmosphere was only a few meters thick because, yes, the planet really was that small, and so the stars didn’t twinkle at him, but rather glared down with a hard, steady light that gave little doubt as to their nature. Had cavemen seen such a light they’d have guessed immediately that the stars were little suns, or large ones seen from a very great distance. The constellations would have been perfectly familiar, too, save for the bright yellow star off the tail of Sagittarius. That was Sol, the Queendom, the whole of humanity huddled around that pinprick of warmth. An ordinary star, and at this distance not really any brighter than Sirius.
But the stars didn’t interest Bruno just now; he was inspecting, for perhaps the hundredth time that month, the ring of collapsium—of quantum-repulsion black-hole matter—with which he’d encircled his dark little sun. Once upon a time, that matter had comprised an ultradense “moon” of di-clad neutronium. Later, it had been an Onion of vacuum-rending collapsium shells, and afterward a disc and a cube and a series of interlocking equilateral triangles. From each configuration he’d learned a thing or two—mainly about how ignorant he really was, and how mysterious the inner workings of God’s universe could be at their most fundamental levels.
Perhaps someday those collapsons would form an arc de fin—an archway through which the end of time could be observed, for purposes that Bruno had never really been able to articulate. Because it was there, he supposed. Because he felt like knowing. He’d managed, over the years, to confirm the theoretical possibility of such a device, and to
derive some vague, half-baked notions as to how it might be constructed. But it was a long way from there to actually building the thing. It would be the work of centuries, he feared, perhaps even millennia.
Pinching his bearded chin thoughtfully, he studied the “ring,” which was actually a quite complicated arrangement of scallopy, sinusoidal ripples, one upon the other, like a lace apron or tutu strung across the sky. It glowed the bright, pale color first glimpsed by Pavel Cerenkov in the twentieth century; the blue of supraluminal particles shedding energy as they dropped below the speed of light.
Had he surrounded the planet with it, the ring might have appeared as a peaked arch linking one side of the horizon with the other. Well, perhaps not—Bruno’s planet was so small that it sloped away like a hilltop beneath his lounge. As a result, his horizons were not only close, they were visibly down. At any rate, there wasn’t nearly enough collapsium to encircle the entire planet. He’d need three or four kilometers of it to accomplish that. But the “sun” was much smaller, and the collapsium looked like exactly what it was: a frilled ring a few centimeters thick and fifty meters around, encircling a dark, spherical body orbiting some seven hundred meters above the planet’s surface.
The inside of a warehouse would be as inspiring.
Or perhaps that was merely the contempt of familiarity speaking, or Bruno’s own long frustration; perhaps the scene was more wonderful and wondrous than anything Isaac Newton—in his plague-ridden, wattle-thatched world—could possibly have imagined. Bruno feared, suddenly, that this was so. He sat up, looking around him at the steamy, starlit darkness, wondering if, through years of neglect and overwork, he’d burned out his capacity for wonder. What a thought! What if he made the arc de fin, glimpsed the fading lights of the end of time, and could muster no more than a weary “eh”? How awful!
