The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  Bruno tried to parse that statement. Like most of Tonga’s islands, Tongatapu was a coral atoll, very flat. Geology had tipped it slightly, raising its southern edge out of the waves and submerging parts of the north completely, but even the heights of Fua’amotu rose no more than about fifty meters above sea level. And if something truly massive, a ball of neubles or a stray telecom collapsiter, grazed close enough to the Earth, it could raise local sea levels by several times that much. No survivors? Tongatapu had over eighty thousand residents!

  “There are others down there on the platform with her,” Deliah continued. “Wenders Rodenbeck, for one, and Vivian Rajmon and her pet police captain. We were rehearsing for the completion ceremony next year, when the last segment of Ring Collapsiter was to be towed into place.”

  Pet captain? Would that be Cheng Shiao? Bruno tried to remember if that too-competent constable had been a captain or not. By all the little gods, he really had been away too long.

  “Damn it,” he said. “Damn that Marlon; he’s timed this entirely too well. It’s what malice does, I suppose—sit around calculating minimum effort for maximum harm. Well, he shan’t get away with it. You sit tight, Deliah; you’ll be rescued in the next couple of days. I shall personally guarantee it.” The words surprised even him as he said them. To keep from blurting anything else, he quickly added, “Over and out.”

  He’d been continuing his work throughout the five hours or so of that slow conversation, and now he set into it more fiercely, with the energy of total outrage. Gross structure! He must find a gross structure for his hypercollapsite!

  But the work progressed slowly, and it was in this area that he encountered his first major disappointments: truly effective damping of the zero-point field would require enormous assemblies, towering cities of foam many thousands of miles wide, and massing enormously more than Sol herself. Perhaps mankind could one day conceive of projects so grand, but for the moment Bruno had some very sharp time and material limits to contend with, and little patience for daydreams.

  With sensors fine and coarse, he studied the ring encircling his tiny star. Such was the pool of his actual resources: ten trillion tons of collapsium. He assumed an equal mass of hypercollapsite—implying a completely error-free rearrangement scheme—and fed it into a permutation algorithm to plumb what forms, if any, could be crafted that might do any good at all.

  Here, finally, he got lucky again—almost. The key was that the zero-point field’s energy was known to rise as a function of frequency; its highest energies occurred at the shortest wavelengths. With limited mass, Bruno’s damper could only block out absorption “windows” of the field’s full spectrum, but by concentrating on windows at the higher frequencies, it could maximize its otherwise limited effect. And the higher frequencies, he found, were by far the easiest to damp; it was the low ones, the cosmological subwoofers, that penetrated every simulated barrier he could think to erect.

  So he put his head down for a little more sleep, trusting the machines to do their work. He was exhausted; this was exhausting work, wringing his brain like a sponge. As he drifted off, bright flashes popped behind his eyelids, as his ocular muscles flinched to the beat of Muddy’s spaceship work outside. Even through the wellstone walls, there was no mistaking the muffled clang! clang! and occasional bursts of stacatto speech, like the cursing of a man who’s just hammered his thumb. Bruno’s last vague thought was that the boat gods must be in need of appeasement out there, and perhaps—worryingly—in here as well.

  His sleep was troubled—one might say haunted. He woke a few unsatisfying hours later, produced more flashes by rubbing his eyes, then opened them and learned from his hypercomputers that there was a rilled dome shape, like a meter-wide mushroom cap turned inside out, that when cast in hypercollapsite foam would block out some very high energies indeed. Such higher-frequency energies were also the greatest contributors to Newton’s inertia, so in fact the computer-designed device would behave as if it contained less than a gram of matter, or 1E—19 times its actual mass. Objects in its immediate wake would experience an enormously weaker damping effect, but nonetheless would feel the effects of acceleration reduced by a factor of 1081.3901.

  In other words, a ship outfitted with such a cap would feel less than one-thousandth of the actual gee forces it was subjected to. More significantly, it would require less than one-thousandth of the fuel and travel time of a conventional ship. This was hardly the magic glove of his dream, but this hypothetical spaceship could—with barely a whiff of fuel in its tanks—accelerate at a thousand gees or more without damage or even discomfort to its occupants.

  The problem—found only after an initial, ill-advised burst of smug excitement—was that immeasurably tiny rounding errors had gradually accumulated in the hypercomputers’ innumerable calculations. He’d never have believed it possible, but when he painstakingly worked out a closed-form solution to confirm the final design, his direct calculations yielded a mass fully 15.028% larger than the iterative solution had yielded. Perhaps no one had ever pushed a computer so hard, forced so many calculations based on calculations based on calculations, to achieve a result so weirdly inaccurate. He’d never heard of such a thing happening before.

  Here, though, the error was critical: Bruno’s collapsium reserves were right at the ragged edge of useful size. Actually, on the wrong side of the ragged edge—he was nearly 1.5 trillion tons shy of the mass required to achieve any measurable effect at all.

  The boat gods were angry indeed. Absently, he murmured a little prayer to appease them.

  Then he permitted himself a discouraged sigh. Sinking down into superstition was not a good sign right now. That the boat gods weren’t “real” made little difference; the human brain was wired for animism and anthropomorphism as much as for monarchy. Hammered by billions of years of evolution, it had learned to devote most of its enormous pattern-matching power to guessing the moods and likely actions of prey animals, and predators, and fellow human brains, which of course were the most complex and dangerous of all. And like any hypertrophied athlete, it had lost generality in the process, so that it tended to turn the same sort of attention toward natural phenomena—especially pseudo-random or chaotic events—treating them as entities to be studied and modeled and, if at all possible, appeased.

  So even in mono- or atheistic cultures, you inevitably found Mother Nature and Grim Reaper analogs, along with whole pantheons of other demigods and spirits and patron saints inspired by the myriad processes of the world around them. In the early ages of rationalism, these beings were often dismissed as either idle fantasies or as a kind of shorthand for pseudo-mystical concepts like Murphy’s Law and Karma and Fate, which were themselves a shorthand for rigorous, statistical observations about the fate of individuals in society. And if science had long recognized that the mind did model them as entities, that made them real enough to cause real problems, even if these problems were quite separate from the phenomena that implied them.

  Blast it, Bruno had hardly spared a thought for the boat gods in sixty years. At Talafo’ou they’d made their presence known, grudgingly rewarding his Redshift labors but also decisively punishing all hubris and presumption. And demanding, yes, a steady sacrifice in disappeared tools and fasteners. Tonga’s old gods were officially dead—not even Tamra had been eager to share their names or histories with him—and it had taken time to arrive at a nonverbal understanding with them, once they’d shown him for sure who was boss. But this time he hadn’t considered their needs at all. Nonexistent or no, they were bound to take that personally. And they had access to his brain.

  He rose from his chair, prepared to curse or pray or go looking for something tangible to sacrifice—but gasped at the sensation of gravity pulling down at him. A full gee’s worth of gravity, created by fifteen hundred neubles at the planet’s core! Why, if he could simply extract those, then perhaps the situation could be salvaged after all!

  Encouraged, he plopped into the chair aga
in and rattled some more calculations into the hypercomputers, deeply informed now by all that he had learned. He confirmed that this was—just barely!—enough.

  All right, then, little gods be praised. All of this was finally, actually possible.

  Bruno let out a long sigh.

  It seemed Marlon’s taunts had done their work too well, goading Bruno to the point that he actually could interfere. He suspected that anger alone could never have carried him this far. Folk wisdom had always held that love was more powerful than anger, and folk wisdom had proved so right about so many things. But what happened when love and anger were wedded together, when they served the same end?

  Leaving aside all the other enormous issues at work here, the simple fact was that Tamra-Tamatra Lutui’s life was in danger, and as her friend and lover Bruno would be damned—literally damned to an eternity of suffering—if he let her freeze to death in the sunless dark, or vaporize in a nova flare, or burn away on a workman’s platform, or any such disagreeable thing. So perhaps the old adage was true: love really did conquer all. It conquered inertia, anyway.

  Wary of displaying any actionable hubris, he gave the boat gods a solemn nod and then sat quietly for a minute, though his insides were doing a little jig.

  Then impatience finally caught up with him; the house, when queried, informed him that he’d been cooped up in here for almost seventy-three hours. How long did the Queendom have left, before the collapsium started falling into the sun? Miraculously, it hadn’t happened yet; the house had been keeping a close eye on Sol ever since Muddy first told his mad tale, and the unmistakable signs of collapsium intrusion had yet to manifest on that dear old star. All the whirling fragments had missed, had been flung off in other directions. But how long could such fortune hold?

  The final stage of this endeavor, the actual construction of the vacuogel hypercollapsite cap, was a matter of excruciating precision, properly the subject of several weeks’ simulation and preparation in its own right, but Bruno—in perhaps the most shocking lapse of his career—thrust his hands into a set of EM grapple controllers to attack the problem manually. One shudders to think how close to the brink he might have come, how many times he nearly slipped or erred or performed key steps out of sequence. Were the odds—and the gods—in his favor? All we can say for certain is that de Towaji completed the entire process in less than twenty hours, his fingers hopping from island to island, one stable form to the next, and that disaster did not, in fact, strike.

  Rome may not have been built in a day, but for better or worse, the first crude hypercollapsite was. Sometimes it works like that; simply knowing that a thing is possible sometimes leads you straight to it. If you’re a genius, at least. If you’re desperate and angry and don’t have time to fail. If the higher powers, such as they are, seem inclined to take your side.

  As the day progressed, the collapsium shrank, withered, brightened briefly as its nodes fell into denser and denser arrangements, and finally lost its color altogether and became invisible, an optical superconductor. Then came the final step: a jerk here, a flourish there, a picosecond’s delay, and … the structure ceased to be a part of the Newtonian universe, its mass folding in on itself, its charge vibrations damping out in self-eradicating sympathetic waves.

  Still useless, of course; without that penultimate, trillionton cap’s cap, the eye at the top of the pyramid, the device could no more block inertia than a boat with a hole in it could float. But that was a simple matter, easily corrected when the time came—or so Bruno hoped, at any rate. If it weren’t, if problems occurred at this point to crush the hypercollapsite or otherwise prevent it from functioning, there was little to be done about it. The time had come, to do or die.

  His final acts in the study that day, partly practical and partly symbolic, were to capture the forces and movements and stages the collapsium had gone through in its transformation to code them into a single wellstone jewel embedded in the hypercomputer wall, to form a little wellgold ring around the jewel, and to pluck that ring from the wall and place it on the middle finger of his right hand, where it looked very smart indeed.

  “Door,” he said then, and stepped out to meet his destiny.

  8. See Appendix A: Defeating Inertia, this page

  chapter seventeen

  in which the bravery of houses is demonstrated

  “That’s our spaceship?” was all Bruno could think to say, upon seeing what Muddy had done with the past four days.

  “An iron hull and an engine to propel her,” Muddy quoted back at him, cringing and whining. “That’s what you told me.”

  And that was very nearly all there was; the pressure vessel itself was windowless and barrel shaped, tapered slightly at the top and bottom, and the sheets of iron that comprised it were exceedingly thin, almost like foil. Bruno figured he could easily puncture them with a screwdriver. The rivets holding them together were tiny and weak looking, too; perhaps he could breach the hull with his bare hands. The “engine” consisted of a pair of man-sized EM grapples at the top—the bow, Bruno supposed—each with a man-sized superconducting battery to power it, and the life-support system was simply a di-clad tube of supercondensed oxygen strapped to the side of the barrel, with a valve and heating coil at one end and a plastic tube running through into the hull.

  The interior was nearly as spartan: a flimsy “hatch” led through to a chamber with two chairs and a little fax machine, plus an iron toilet whose plumbing was apparently just some sort of airlock for dumping wastes overboard. The only civilized concession was the inch of wellstone Muddy had laid—or more likely asked the robots to lay—around the inside and outside surfaces of the hull. For the moment, it was inert, its fine-threaded structure translucent as smoke. This, too, reflected poor judgment: a stiff breeze could damage it in that state.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” Bruno said, goggling at this monstrosity that hulked, in the warm starlit darkness, on his front lawn.

  “It’s precisely what you ordered, sir, and the gods have been most forgiving in its creation. How was I to s-s-surmise you wanted elegance?”

  Bruno’s sigh was almost a laugh. Almost. “Muddy, this thing is flimsy as a kite. If the wellstone loses power or integrity for some reason, what’s to hold the ship together?”

  “It’s light. I wanted it to be light, so it could travel even if your … project didn’t work out. And if the wellstone fails, won’t your hypercollapsite destroy the hull anyway? Regardless of its composition?”

  “Hmm. Yes, well, what about the life support?”

  “That oxygen bottle is the backup system. In operation we’ll use wellstone scrubbers to crack exhaled CO2.”

  Bruno shook a finger, unwilling to be appeased. “The interior space? We’re to rescue a Queendom in a ship sized for just the two of us?”

  Muddy squirmed under his gaze. “I made four folding chairs for extra passengers; I was going to put those in before we left. They attach to special brackets in the walls. But surely we can’t rescue everyone, no matter how big a spaceship we bring. One does have to draw the line s-s-somewhere.”

  “Why is the wellstone inactivated? You’ve left this ship frighteningly vulnerable.”

  “To permit your inspection, sir. I’ll switch it back on once you’re done.”

  “If I tripped, I could fall right through the hull!”

  “The robots have been instructed to prevent that, Declarancy.”

  Bruno had saved his worst for last: he pointed up at the bow. “All right, you, look here; look at these grapples. This is supposed to be our propulsion system?”

  Muddy cast him a bruised look. “That’s the b-b-best part, sir. Efficient: a hundred percent conversion of stored energy to kinetic, with thrust limited only by the available power. Much better than rockets, if you’re in a hurry. Never widely employed, because the targets you grapple to are dragged and disturbed in the process, ditto anything that passes through the beam incidentally. Actually, it’s probably ill
egal to travel that way in the Queendom, but under the circumstances I s-s-suppose they’ll forgive us.”

  “Muddy, rockets push, from the rear. That’s what we need here! Good God, man, grapples pull from the front. We have a zpf-damping cap on the front of the ship; the grapple beams will vanish into it without a trace. What do you think a grapple beam is?”

  Finally, for the first time Bruno could recollect, Muddy gathered himself up, straightened his spine, and returned something approximating a steady gaze. “I know exactly what a grapple beam is, Declarant. You forget yourself. You forget that I was yourself. In the first place, we can expel oxygen for emergency propulsion, accelerated electromagnetically through wellstone channels in the hull. From the back, yes. In the second place, I watched you put the ertial shield together.”

  “Ertial?” Bruno asked.

  “The opposite of inertial. I coined the term while you were working. Anyway, I watched you assemble the thing, and I know it’s got a hole in it. As it happens, these grapples are positioned to emit right through that hole.”

  Bruno smacked himself on the head. “Damn me! Damn us both, we should have coordinated this better. Muddy, that hole is there because I ran out of materials. I was planning to fill it with mass from the planet’s core. It’s strictly temporary.”

  Muddy’s composure collapsed immediately. His arm went up to cover his face, and he commenced a hoarse sobbing. “Oh, sir! Oh, sir! You know how badly I wanted to please you. I can’t manage even that, can I? Did I ever doubt that history would judge me h-h-harshly? If so, that doubt is removed. Please don’t yell at me anymore, sir; please don’t. The weight of my own disapproval is all I can bear!”

  For the umptieth time, Bruno felt ashamed, both for upsetting Muddy and for being him, this miserable creature who was so easily upset, and so overly dramatic when it happened. Was he really so weak? So sniveling? Marlon Sykes had his number, all right, had his every shame and insecurity mapped out. That was, of course, the whole idea, but that didn’t make it easier to face. Well damn Marlon, anyway. Did it matter what he thought? So what if Bruno and Muddy were a pair of folding cravens? At least they weren’t hurting anyone, weren’t, for example, destroying the Queendom for spite’s sake.