by Wil McCarthy
And Bruno felt ashamed then, because tears were soaking Muddy’s sleeve, rolling down his gaunt face, and his voice, never strong to begin with, had broken through with high, squeaky sobs. And, more shameful still, Bruno himself could think of no response, no comfort, no apology save another cup of hot soup. This was what he’d become: a hermit unable to comport civilly, even with himself.
Perhaps Marlon was right to despise him.
chapter sixteen
in which a restless spirit is appeased
Bruno sat up in his bed, suddenly wide awake, his body as rigid as a gravestone. Such a dream. Such a dream he’d had!
He’d never been much of a dreamer, had never put much stock or faith in a state of mind so confused and cluttered with false associations. A duck asks if your latest calculations are thorough enough, and the wall becomes a floor beneath you, and suddenly it’s raining macaroni. Rubbish! But tonight he’d dreamed with strange clarity: his skin shivering as if electrified, his mouth dry, his eyes hot with the energies of the zero-point field, laid out visibly before him. Or perhaps “visibly” was the wrong word, since he was simultaneously aware of the intensities at every wavelength, the half-infinite energies filling each photon state … The view should have been nonsense, infinitely bright or infinitely dark or else infinitely transparent, as the vacuum between islands of matter was usually thought to be. But in the dream he’d walked through his house, through the gardens and meadows of his empty little world, and he’d seen not only the things, but the rippling vibrations of charge that gave rise to them, and the zero-point vacuum that inspired the vibrations, and the true vacuum beneath that.
And in the dream, he’d pulled a special glove down over his hand, and the glove was made of billion-ton black holes the size of protons, and its color was neither the phosphor green of gravitational binding nor the Cerenkov blue of mature collapsium, but the optically superconducting nothing of True Vacuum, for the black holes were not arranged in three-dimensional lattices, but in ripples of semi-random, four-dimensional, open-celled foam. Vibration-damping foam, just exactly like what you’d find muffling the walls of a broadcast studio, although fantastically smaller. The four-dimensional structure was easy, simply a matter of timing the placement of certain elements. A child, he’d thought, could do the math.
And in the dream, the storming vacuum energies had shrunk away from his glove like wax before a torch, and the space before him had filled with nothingness, and he’d glided through it without effort, skating through the hills and meadows without moving his feet, without any sensation of moving at all. In the dream, the universe had moved, or seemed to, while he stood motionless at its center.
And he’d realized, all at once, that this was no talking duck or pasta rain, that this was something he could actually do. And so, in the dream, he’d sat bolt upright in his bed, and the dream had blended so seamlessly with reality that he’d wondered, in a deep and literal sense, if the two were really such separate things after all.
For a moment he felt paralyzed, glued in place by the bogus “inertia” of the vacuum pressing in on him from all sides. It seemed impossible that he should be able to breathe, that his blood should pump and his nerves fire, that he should be able to exist at all. But he did exist, and his blood pumped, and his nerves fired, and as the moment passed he was kicking his covers off, leaping to the floor in his bare feet, screaming “Door! Door!” at the wall and running right on through, trusting it to open for him in time.
“Muddy!” he shouted, racing toward the bony figure curled up on the couch beneath a heap of blankets. “Muddy, wake up! I’ve had an idea!”
Muddy, it seemed, was no stranger to sudden, screaming awakenings in the dead of the night. He sat up immediately, latching onto Bruno with quick, terrified eyes.
“I’ve had an idea!” Bruno repeated. “A big one, a wonderful one!”
“Yes?” Muddy said warily, making a visible effort not to scream or retreat or clutch at his chest. “A helpful idea?”
“You be the judge,” Bruno said quickly, and launched into an account of his dream.
“Oh,” Muddy said when he was done. His finger probed at the air, as if trying to feel the vacuum energies there. “Oh. Oh, yes, that s-s-sounds like it should work. That’s very good, Your Declarancy; the simplicity of the math is a very good sign. I think you must be onto something.”
“I have work to do,” Bruno said excitedly. “Lots of work! It’s another damned invention, I suppose. We’ll see all of society turned on its ear again, bent and twisted around these momentary insights. What a strange thing that is, to cause such trouble and be adored for it. The Queendom should hang us both for our crimes, and save itself any further turmoil! But I’ll say, even the worst outcome is bound to improve on what Marlon has in store.”
“Likely so,” Muddy agreed, “if it has come in time to stop him. I don’t suppose this is the sort of thing even He can anticipate. A bolt of inspiration, s-s-striking from nowhere? Our muse usually comes when it jolly well pleases her, without regard for when she’s actually needed.”
Muddy seemed far more saddened than intrigued, and at this, Bruno felt genuine pity for him, for perhaps the first time. Was his counterpart so broken that even the lure of discovery couldn’t enliven him? He must have suffered grievously indeed.
“Come,” Bruno said, extending him a hand. “You remember the boat I built—that you built—on the yard at Talafo’uo?”
“HMS Redshifi,” Muddy said wanly. “By gods, it seems so long ago.”
Indeed, it did. Bruno had been fresh to the islands of Tonga, and the task had seemed simple enough: design and fax the parts, assemble them, and motor away on a full-planing hull that would leap from one wave crest to the next, barely touching the water at all. But Bruno had—as a matter of principle—refused both robotic and human assistance. That old Girona stubbornness again, so that even with the best tools and guidebooks money could buy, even with his modular, snap-together design and hundreds of real-world examples to compare his work against, the little boat had wound up taking a full week to come together, and another three to really start performing well. There were a lot of variables to control; the experience had been both humbling and uplifting, after his larger and more troublesome successes with the early telecom collapsiters.
“I would ask you to repeat that experience,” Bruno said.
“That? It took weeks.”
“You’ll let robots do the work, of course. It must be done quickly. But be a hero, Muddy: build me a spaceship. I haven’t time to do it myself; this idea demands attention. But when we’re both done, perhaps we’ll ride to the Queendom’s rescue.” When there was no reply, he went on, “Are you able to face your puerile, damnable little nemesis? Has he left you with any ability to oppose him?”
Now Muddy shrugged with weary sadness, and wiped a teardrop off his cheek. “Who can say, Declarant? I’m permitted to hate Him, and to wish innumerable harms upon Him, but I never have r-r-resisted Him. I suppose I’ve never had the opportunity.”
“Well, here you have it: together we can work this out, this challenge of Marlon and inertia both. Will you build a ship for me, Muddy?”
Sigh. “You’re right to question me, sir, and quite wrong to place any faith in my abilities. Or yours! The one gift he gave me, the one true thing I’ve learned from his attentions, is a confidence in our fallibility. What argues in your favor is that you’re asking for mere engineering, which is banal. Pluck any two people at random, deposit them on a planet somewhere, and inside of an hour they’re a design team, finding new ways to put up a roof. They don’t have to be friends; they don’t have to communicate well, or even at all, because the whole process is coded in their genes. It may be that I can fumble through it, as humans have always fumbled, and produce some half-assed but workable product, as I did with Redshifi.”
“That’s the spirit,” Bruno said, trying to sound encouraging. He clapped Muddy on the shoulder, this time with s
ome genuine affection. “Nothing fancy, nothing hard—just a hull of iron and the weakest, mealiest of engines to push her.”
Muddy bowed his head. “Very well, sir. I’ll do as you ask, though perhaps not for the reasons you would wish.”
“Eh?”
“Sir, have you examined the converse of engineering? We fall into it so naturally, but in the end every project expires, and one way or another every team is dismantled, and that’s something we’re not wired to deal with. It saddens, even traumatizes us. That’s where geniuses are needed, to engineer the conclusions of things. We let things wither, collapse, decompose, when we should be murdering them gently and artfully.”
Bruno frowned. “What is it you wish to murder?”
“An age of mankind,” Muddy said cryptically. “The innocence of an entire society. People believe themselves to be the masters of creation, when in fact they’re barely participants. Better that they learn this now.” He looked up at Bruno as if hoping to be questioned for that remark, or doubted, or accused.
Bruno looked askance at him. “You wish the people harm?”
“No. I wish for them to internalize His Declarancy’s lessons, and to do that they must live. Horrid, to think they might die without first understanding their lives.”
There was much to disagree with in a statement like that, but Bruno, still awash with excitement, declined to take the bait. “Just get started, all right? I’ll be in my laboratory. House: see that I’m not disturbed.”
“As you wish, sir,” the house replied, in its usual, coolly solicitous voice, deep yet subtly feminine. With a start, Bruno realized it was his mother’s voice, or something not terribly different from it. Strange that he’d never noticed this before, but from the look on Muddy’s face, Bruno gathered he’d noticed it as well, and seemed to find it significant in some way. Disturbing.
Well, hopefully there’d be plenty of time to consider the matter later, assuming it had any importance at all. Now was hardly the time to worry about it, not with the laws of physics coming down around the Queendom’s ears. He strode resolutely toward his study door, thinking that he could always change the house’s voice when he got back from the Queendom.
If you get back, Muddy’s whining voice corrected in his mind. Well, all right then. If. He went to work.8
“Sir,” the house said to him sometime later, its mother voice sounding anxious at the need to wake him, “I’m receiving a signal from the runaway grapple station.”
“Hmm, what? A signal, really?” He sat up, rubbing his eyes, putting a hand to the crick in his back. A signal, goodness; he hadn’t expected any such thing. His contact effort had been … a formality, really, because what were the odds that the station’s castaway would think of radio, out here in the wilderness of the Kuiper? Even assuming the necessary devices could be instantiated and configured, what would be the point? Bruno was the only one out here, his tiny planet the only inhabited object in … What? Half a million cubic light-hours of space? Long odds indeed!
“Play it,” he instructed, coming fully awake.
Obediently, the house formed wall speakers and piped the signal through them, distorted but clearly intelligible. “Hello, Mayday, Mayday. This is Deliah van Skettering of the Ministry of Grapples, responding to your ping. Hello. Can anyone hear me? This is Deliah van Skettering calling Mayday. Repeat, Mayday. Radio source, please respond. I require immediate assistance …”
He jerked a hand across his throat, and the house cut the signal. Deliah! Laureate-Director and Lead Componeer of the Ministry of Grapples! What was she doing aboard a runaway station? And given her presence there, what were the odds of a passage within even a few AU—hundreds of millions of kilometers—of Bruno’s position? Unless perhaps she’d been on all the stations for some reason, and they’d all been flung off into the outer darkness, and this was simply the one that passed nearest to him on its way to infinity.
Did she know that he was here, that the radio beacon signaling her was, in fact, his? Through the heavy distortion—no doubt caused through some combination of long-range, enormous velocity differential, and poor transmitting equipment—her voice sounded perfunctory, not eager or hopeful but bored. And then he understood: the poor woman was a victim of slow drowning. She grasped dutifully at corks and straws, not because it was likely to help but because it was all she could do, other than simply admitting defeat.
“House, what’s the light-lag between here and the station?”
“Seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.”
“Sixteen minutes round-trip? Hmm. I hadn’t counted on this; I really hadn’t. Well, send a reply: ‘Laureate-Director, this is Bruno de Towaji. Repeat, this is de Towaji. Perhaps you’ll recall meeting me a number of years ago, shortly before your murder? Now, as then, I offer my heartfelt condolences on your situation. Still, I am very curious as to how it came about! Can you report your status? Over.’ ”
“Reply sent,” the house said.
Bruno nodded, and settled back into his calculations where he’d left off. Not that he’d forgotten about Ms. van Skettering—far from it!—but she’d hardly benefit from his sitting around waiting for something as frightfully slow as light.
He was worried about this new “hypercollapsite”—although the material itself was proven feasible, there was the matter of gross structure to contend with. What shapes must he mold the stuff into, to achieve the desired, inertia-foiling result? The question turned out to be nontrivial in the extreme. He could well envision himself scrabbling at it for hours or days, looking for a conceptual “edge” to start from. It was one thing to speak of EM vibration-damping foams, quite another to design them.
“Return message received,” the house said, after what couldn’t possibly have been sixteen minutes.
“Yes, already? Let’s hear it.”
“De Towaji!” Deliah’s clipped, tinny, strangely muffled voice said. “I’d hoped that was you; I’m glad it is. My situation is that I’m in very serious trouble. I think you know that. The station’s grapple lock on the Ring Collapsiter was disrupted—I’m not sure how—but the complement beam was left intact, pulling us straight out toward Aldeberan. It took me three days to get it shut off. I have casualties here, Declarant—three technicians dead! We saw the other stations going off-line, and we tried to wrap ourselves in impervium before the same thing happened to us. It … wasn’t a good solution.”
Bruno’s fingers dug at the wellwood edges of his desk. Had he been unwise to establish this contact? Was there anything, really, that he could do?
His voice was tentative but, he hoped, compassionate. “Deliah, ah, not to put too fine a point on it, but are you hoping for rescue? You see, I’m rather engaged at the moment, and a lot of lives may hang in the balance.”
Her reply, a thousand seconds later. “It’s very kind of you to ask, Declarant, but I am realistic about my situation. Even assuming anything could be done—which I doubt—the Queendom’s peril is obviously much more important than my own. The Ring Collapsiter is falling in again, much faster this time, and mostly in pieces. Something has also happened to the Iscog, although I’m not sure what. There’s loose collapsium and neutronium everywhere—the planets may actually be in as much danger as the sun!”
She paused, then continued. “Are you able to travel, de Towaji? When I last saw Her Majesty, she was adrift on a workman’s platform spinning perilously close to the sun. It sounds like you have some sort of … plan or something. Is that the case? We are lucky to have you, we really are. Meanwhile, I’m absolutely kicking myself that I let this happen. I just wish I knew what went wrong.”
“Deliah,” he reassured her, “this calamity was engineered by Marlon Sykes. I can’t imagine what his reasons might be, but his methods are more thorough than you probably imagine. I doubt you’ve erred in the slightest, although it’s commendable that you’re willing to consider it. Even more commendable is your bravery. I’ll be sure to tell you about it when next we meet.”
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“Marlon?” her voice came back, incredulous. “Why would Marlon sabotage the collapsiter? I mean, I know the man—in several senses of the word—and he does have a temper sometimes, but it’s his collapsiter. It always has been.”
“The man is apparently acting from pure malice, Deliah. Evil, one might say. God, what a petty, small-minded thing that is! Of all the things to do, of all the infinite possibilities, to choose that! Why not paint, or dig holes, or sing off-key when nobody’s listening; there’s nobility for you. Hurting people is just dumb. It’s vandalism in its lowest form.”
“I’m glad I knew you, de Towaji.”
“Call me Bruno, please, and know that the honor is mine. I’ll be sure to tell you this when we meet again someday.”
Her voice was weary and resigned. “Bruno, we’re not going to meet again. The Iscog is smashed, and all my copies were on these grapple stations. I may be the last of me already; if not, it’s just a matter of time.”
Bruno was aghast. “There’s the Royal Registry for Indispensable Persons, isn’t there?”
“What? Oh, no, the Registry closed its doors years ago. Corrupted storage media; toward the end, they couldn’t keep a gnat.”
“Personal backups?”
“You’ve been gone a long time, Bruno. We’ve had virus storms, datavore infestations, Flying Dutchman faxes circling endlessly through the network … A clean backup is only possible if the system generating it is clean, and we haven’t had that luxury in recent years. I’m not sure we ever did.”
Bruno was even more aghast. “Do you mean to say your only copy is flying off into interstellar space?”
“Worse than that,” she replied, her voice going stern. “I think Tamra’s only copy is down there on that ceremony platform; Tongatapu was one of the islands that got drowned by tidal waves. Literally drowned, no survivors.”
