The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  But even Hugo possessed a measure of self-respect. Barely sentient, barely knowing it was alive at all, the “emancipated” robot nonetheless managed to find and fulfill the occasional desire. It managed to play a little, learn a little, live a little; this fact was clear in its bearing. The stranger, who had no such air about him, eyed the thing, suddenly, with an envy that looked like hunger.

  “Come,” Bruno reassured, and wished there were someone else here to reassure him, or better yet that he’d wake up and find this whole incident to be a particularly loathsome dream, the result of a too-early bedtime after much too heavy and spicy a meal. “Come on, uh, friend. We’ll get you calmed down, and then the two of us can climb in the fax together and reconverge.”

  Even as he said it, the idea struck him as a poor one.

  The stranger’s reaction was violent. “Are you mad? Are you mad, Bruno? I am every imaginable poison and pathogen! Look at this wreck, this wreckage of yourself, and ask what these memories will do to that proud bearing of yours. I know your weaknesses, sir; I know them far better than you, and I say keep your distance. I am your worst imaginable betrayer, and even I recoil at the idea! I’ll never join with you. Never!”

  Bruno pulled back a little, seeing the huddled figure in still another light: a man who had been himself, but was himself no longer. A man whose harrowing experiences set him apart, entitled him to a sense of identity quite distinct from Bruno’s own. Suddenly, he felt ashamed for having suggested otherwise.

  “I will call you Brazowy,” he said gently. “Or perhaps Kafiese. Those are translations; they mean ‘brown’ or ‘brown haired,’ as Bruno does.”

  “I know what they mean,” the stranger snapped. “But I warn you, sir: you overestimate the dignity I’m able to s-s-sustain. Those names are fair and pretty; I couldn’t bear them. Call me Fuscus if you must.”

  “ ‘Muddy?’ ”

  “Muddy! Yes, call me Muddy! That’s exactly what I am: the flooded, silted ruins of a once-grand mansion. I am clotted with muck from a distant source, and I’ll reek of it to the end of my days.”

  Bruno nodded grimly. “Very well, then; Muddy it is. But you must tell me, who is this villain? Who dares to kidnap and torture the images of innocent people? He has the Queen, you say? Unthinkable!”

  “You know who it is,” Muddy said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You can guess who it is, Declarant.”

  “ No, I couldn’t possibly.”

  Muddy pushed a wild, gray-white lock of hair back over the rutted battlefield of his scalp, and cringed. “I can say the name, sir, but you’ll feel no surprise on hearing it. My tormentor is none other than His Declarancy, Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson S-S-S-Sykes.”

  And it was true; Bruno felt his hair stand on end, his skin go clammy, his feet begin to tingle and sweat. He felt disgust, and anger, and betrayal, and above all, a deep sense of embarrassment for poor Marlon, that he should take his petty envies and covetousnesses so deeply and seriously and personally after all. But he felt no real surprise. In some sense, he supposed he’d known all along that Marlon was no good, that there was something really wrong with him.

  “The really odd part,” Muddy said, and the whiny tone in his voice, while stronger than ever, seemed more forgivable, “is that he does it to himself as well. You’ll see him dragging his own copy down into the caverns, and the copy will be s-s-screaming, ‘Oh God, it’s me this time! It’s a mistake; I’m on the wrong side! I’m supposed to be you!’ and His Declarancy will lock it down and torment it in the most savage ways, all the while yelling ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why do you have to be so stupid!’ He’s harder on himself than he is on others, if such a thing is possible. There’s a kind of nobility in that.”

  “No, there is not,” Bruno stated flatly. “The man is clearly ill, and these ghastly infractions of his must be stopped at once. It’s fortunate you escaped when you did.”

  Muddy, pulling the blanket up a little higher under his chin, looked blank. “Escape? I didn’t escape, Bruno. There is no escape from a place like that, from a man like that. One dreams of death, not freedom. Truly, I tell you, he’s thought of everything.”

  “Then … how are you here?”

  Muddy laughed sourly. “I was released, in the manner that a projectile is released from a cannon. I was s-s-sent here to you, sir, and like an obedient wretch I’ve complied. I bring a message, and the message is myself.”

  Bruno shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you? I thought you were so smart! The message of myself is that you can be broken, that your spirit and your flesh are far weaker than you’ve ever guessed. You can be made so abjectly miserable that in the end you’ll betray your principles, your dignity, your Queendom, and your Queen with frightening complicity and ease. There’s nothing in yourself to stop it from happening, no inner strength or reserve that can possibly suffice. Even you, Declarant. Even you can be turned into me. His Declarancy wanted to be sure you understood this.”

  Bruno got the message. He looked at Muddy, and finally he did see himself inside there somewhere, and the sight filled him with disgust and terror. Was there so little to him after all? He tried, not very convincingly, to give this wretch a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “ ‘His Declarancy,’ as you call him, is no doubt going straight to jail. We’ll contact Vivian Rajmon of the Royal Constabulary; she’ll know exactly how to proceed.”

  And here, Bruno felt his disgust deepen; Vivian a young woman already, and himself calling her only because he’d been the victim of a crime. He’d claimed more than once to be her friend, but would a friend require this before finding, finally, the time to place a call? Surely not. So in fact he was no friend at all, and never had been, and all his claims to the contrary were the worst sort of self-congratulatory hypocrisy.

  But what Muddy said was, “I’m afraid that’ll be impossible, Your Lordship. He’s seen to that.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Contacting this friend of yours. It’ll be impossible. He was planning to smash the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid; I was s-s-supposed to be one of the last messages it was permitted to carry.”

  “Smash the Iscog? Why?”

  Muddy’s sour laugh echoed through the house again. “To isolate you, sir. To trap you at the very summit of the solar system while he carries out his plans below. And, as an amusing aside, to trap me here with you, as a permanent reminder of your talent for failure. I’m truly sorry it had to be this way, Bruno. I’m sorry I had to help.”

  “The Ring Collapsiter!” Bruno said, slapping himself on the head, feeling like a perfect fool. “All those problems, accidents, all the sabotage. It was Marlon all along! He’s trying to destroy the Queendom.”

  “Of course he is, sir. Always has been.”

  Thinking of a corpse he’d seen once on an unlicensed space freighter, Bruno asked, “Does he ever alter the body forms of his victims? Does he add or remove limbs?”

  “Constantly, sir.”

  “God, I’ve been a fool!”

  “You certainly have, sir. Believe me, I know that far better than you.”

  “But why would he do such a thing?” Bruno was pacing now, waving his arms. “Even a sick, vengeful man needs somewhere to be sick and vengeful, doesn’t he? He’s no fool; he’s not stupid. What could he possibly stand to gain by destroying the Queendom?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. You’d have to ask him that yourself.”

  Finally, Bruno felt himself get truly angry, angrier than he’d been in years, or maybe ever. “Is that the way of it? Is that his message to me? I will ask him myself, then. We’ll find a way down there, and we’ll show you right back to him as a message that we’re not so easily beaten, you and I!”

  At this, Muddy laughed again, his voice sadder and nastier and whinier than ever.

  “What? What’s funny?” Bruno snapped.

  “Nothing, sir. It’s just that I t-t-told him you’d say th
at.”

  And in that moment, Bruno hated Muddy for all that had happened, and he knew this meant that he was actually hating himself—all the weakness and stupidity and vulnerability in himself. And then he felt like an even bigger fool, because it meant that Marlon’s bullet had hit its target dead-on, and he, Bruno, had been powerless to dodge it.

  “Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-seven seconds,” Bruno said. “Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, three seconds.”

  “Nothing,” Muddy answered.

  “Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-seven seconds. Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, six seconds.”

  “Nothing,” Muddy said again. He was bent almost double, peering into a brass eyepiece. Strange markings, perhaps Chinese, were visible on the back of his neck. Above them both, the ceiling had arched itself into a dome of glass, through which the faxed telescope could observe the heavens. It looked archaic, this telescope, almost a thing Galileo himself might have employed, but its lenses were of wellstone rather than glass. The filtered, enhanced, broad-spectrum images they produced could easily rival the finest products of twenty-first century astronomy.

  In fact, there was little need for a human operator at all; a few murmured instructions to the house and every celestial object of note would be mapped within the hour. But they had let the house find Iscog fragments for them, boulder-sized bits of collapsium ejected starward by the grid’s obviously quite messy demise. Whatever sabotage Marlon performed had been swift and decisive. One shuddered to contemplate the dynamics: so much mass interacting with so much violence and chaos! And so Bruno had determined that they should inspect the fragments—at least a few of them—with their own eyes. Or with reasonable proxies thereof. Perhaps it would help them to understand what had happened, and how.

  “Nothing,” Muddy said again. “No wait,” he then amended. “It’s there at the edge of the frame.”

  “Center, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The one good thing about this wretch, Bruno decided, was that he had no pretensions of any kind. Unlike a real de Towaji, Muddy made no attempt to conscript or control or second-guess. He didn’t seem to feel any sense of ownership here, or any urgency about their task or their precarious position. In fact, he seemed content to follow orders without the slightest reflection. Perhaps it gave him a sense of peace.

  “Oh. Goodness,” Muddy said. “You should have a look at this, Your Lordship.”

  They traded places, and Bruno leaned over to peer into the eyepiece. He saw nothing there but a scattering of stars. “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s moving,” that whiny voice complained. “I don’t know how to make the telescope track it.”

  “Moving against the starscape? An arc-second and a half in thirty seconds? It’s five AUs away!”

  “It’s fast,” Muddy agreed. “Whatever ejected it must have been—” He cringed slightly. “—a violent event.”

  “Mmm.”

  Indeed, Bruno’s sensors had been triggering all afternoon, reporting magnetic and gravitational anomalies passing through the area. If even a few of these had originated in the Queendom a mere week ago, then they must be moving very fast indeed, fully 10% of the speed of light. That meant crushing accelerations: hundreds or thousands of gees. He imagined a handful of collapsium structures falling together over planetary distances as the Iscog was fractured, then spinning apart in a hundred little gravitational eddies, flinging bits of themselves in all directions while their cores were crushed into a single useless hypermass. Such an event would be violent—exceedingly so.

  “You adjust the tracking with this,” Bruno grumbled, pointing to a brass-shod button on the side of the telescope. “Center your target, and then press. To turn tracking off, center on empty space and press again. If you have questions, you know, you can ask them. Which direction is the object moving?”

  “Down. Er, south.”

  “Hmm.”

  He bent to the eyepiece again, and adjusted the declination until something appeared at the edge of the frame: a dark, metallic object that looked vaguely like a castle, its turrets pointed back down toward the sun, glittering dimly in its distant light. It was moving south by southeast, actually; he centered it and locked the tracking function. Immediately, the stars behind the object began crawling across his view. It was moving fast.

  “Good Lord,” he said, “that’s not a collapsium fragment; it’s one of the EM grapple stations!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It should be deep inside the Queendom, holding up the Ring Collapsiter!”

  “Yes, sir. It certainly should. The event that ejected it must have been extremely violent.”

  “Indeed,” Bruno said abstractly. Fussing with the dainty brass controls, he managed to magnify the image and adjust its wavelength compression until the object became translucent, a flying palace of smoky glass. The gravitic machineries were visible inside, glass within glass, some components glowing warm shades of orange, while others, shown in blue, either absorbed heat or channeled it away. Even a cursory inspection showed that the station couldn’t be entirely functional; power and heat and buffer mass flowed through it, but fitfully, via components that sat askew, bent and twisted and shaken out of true by what surely must have been titanic forces. Actually, it was amazing the thing had survived at all.

  He zoomed in on one of the smaller warm spots, and gasped.

  “My God. My God! There’s a person onboard!”

  “Not possible,” Muddy whined. “The gee f-f-forces would have been too great.”

  “One would think so!” Bruno agreed, straightening and stepping away. “One most certainly would expect so. But see for yourself!”

  Muddy shuffled forward again and, sighing as if in pain, bent once more to the telescope. He drew in a breath immediately, then put a tentative hand to the controls. “He’s moving. He’s alive. I don’t understand. No wait, it’s a woman. She. Is this the wavelength control? These two? Ah. She’s holding a wrench. She’s disassembling something.”

  “House!” Bruno called out. “Contact that station!”

  “Network resources unavailable, sir,” the house replied apologetically.

  “Then build an antenna, damn you. Use radio waves.”

  “May I compromise roof transparency?”

  “Do whatever you must. That woman is in terrible danger, exiting the solar system at relativistic speed! When her power reserves fail, she’ll suffocate or freeze to death, assuming she hasn’t already starved by then.”

  In the next moment, the glass roof was spiderwebbed with silvery conformal antenna elements, a network for focusing and gathering electromagnetic radiation in the longer wavelengths, centimeters and meters and even tens of meters.

  “She’s doomed,” Muddy said matter-of-factly. “No one can reach her. No one will even try. Radio contact is pointless, p-p-perhaps even cruel.”

  “Blast!” Bruno cursed, and nearly knocked the telescope over. “The chaos below, in Queendom space, must be of immense proportion. There must be tragedies like this one playing out all across the solar system. Damn your Marlon Sykes; he knows what he’s doing!”

  “My Marlon Sykes?”

  Bruno sighed, ran a hand through the long ripples of his hair, and finally threw himself down on the sofa. “Are we so helpless, Muddy? We, the Queendom’s favored consultants? There’s more than enough material here—” He spread his arms to indicate the planet beneath their feet. “—to fax a fleet of the swiftest and noblest spaceships.”

  “As His Declarancy no doubt anticipated,” Muddy said, sniffing.

  “Indeed,” Bruno snapped. “Indeed. Whatever is transpiring below, he doesn’t expect us to be able to intervene. At a full gee acceleration, assuming our propulsion system could sustain that, it’d still be two weeks before we could reach the Ring Collapsiter. Twice as long, if we wanted to stop when we got there!”

  Muddy nodded, groaned
a little, then plopped down cross-legged on the floor beside the telescope. “He knows you’ll try, sir. The fact amuses him.”

  Bruno felt a bomb-burst of rage. “Does it? What in God’s name is driving this man? Why can’t he just accept things as they are? I could kill him! He pretends to be merely jealous, a little bit bruised and snooty, a little bit nasty when crossed. And it’s fine! People like him for it, or at least in spite of it. His wit and charm serve him well enough, and his genius. Why can’t he just be that person? What’s so savagely difficult, so brutally unfair about that?”

  Muddy’s laugh sounded like the rattling of pebbles in a jar. “Lordship, do you understand so little? The sociopath, as known by s-s-society, is only a mask. Usually, one which has been perfected over a period of decades and which serves as an interface to the wider world which cannot accept—or in many cases even understand—the true face underneath. Think of the puppet theater in the old marketplace. Could you tell, simply by watching the puppet, if the puppeteer was kindly or vicious? Did you ever consider the puppeteer at all? Who crafts a mask if not to please, if not to present a likeness every man and woman and child can be captivated by? We may ask the basement torturer to become the model citizen he emulates so skillfully, but it’s like asking the shell to be an egg; it’s a meaningless question. It’s all the pieces together, the villainy and greatness and everyday human foibles, that we must use to take his measure.”

  “You look up to him,” Bruno said, eyeing his counterpart with disgust.

  “I know more about him than you do,” Muddy said darkly. “I know a lot more than you, about a great many things. In some ways, I’m finding it easier to think of you as a child than as a full-grown veteran of worldly politics and strife. I can reconcile your behavior that way, your attitudes.”

  Bruno sighed. “So I’m a fool, am I? Because my mind has never been shaped by humiliation or pain? What a pitiable creature you are, Muddy. I’ll remain a fool, thank you.”

  “No, sir, no!” Muddy cried, throwing an arm melodramatically across his eyes. “Not a fool, a child. A s-s-sweet, bright-eyed little boy that Enzo and Bernice would be proud to show off! It isn’t a bad thing, sir. I never said it was.”