by Wil McCarthy
“There, there,” Bruno said awkwardly, stepping forward to embrace his tortured self. “It’s all right, Brother. It’s all right. Let me try some more calculations, and see what I can come up with. You finish outfitting the ship, all right? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“All right,” Muddy said, sniffing, and burst into fresh sobs. “God, I’m so broken it surprises even me. Go, sir. Please. Observe me no further.”
It seemed that Bruno should have said something heartening at this point, but instead he turned away from Muddy and, taking him at his word, slunk away into the house. This was just too difficult, too awkward, too shaming. Muddy would understand his reaction, right? Better than anyone else possibly could.
He continued on into his study. Fortunately, it hadn’t cleaned itself up since he’d gone outside; everything was exactly as he’d left it. This made it easy to drop right back into his chair and pick up the “ertial shield” calculations right where he’d left off. Clearly now, time was running out.
He worried about the number of workable geometries, this close to the lower mass limit. He supposed the number of solutions could well be infinite, or at least very large, but in a severely restricted domain—the same little mushroom cap, with an infinite number of trivial modifications. Were there any solutions with holes through the middle? He began with the hypothesis that there were, and began formulating a proof.
An hour later, his efforts had borne fruit, yielding an ertial shield solution with a hole of nearly the right size, in nearly the right place. To create it he’d have to use all the neutronium from the planet’s core, and from the core of the little dark sun as well, but that couldn’t be helped. He rose from his chair and bolted through the house.
“Muddy! Muddy, warm up the grapples; we leave at once!”
Outside, the little spaceship had turned to impervium: a smooth, barrel-shaped, superreflecting mirror. Impossibly light and impossibly strong, it would no doubt break his toes if he kicked it. Muddy stood beside it, looking toward Bruno. As before, tears filled his eyes. Were they fresh? Had they been there for the entire hour?
“It’s only just occurred to me,” Muddy said sadly. “You mean to destroy the planet.”
Hurriedly, Bruno nodded. “And the sun, yes. It can’t be helped. Do we have everything we need to rescue a stray grapple station?”
“D’you hear that, house? We s-s-seek to destroy you for our own gain.”
“Ah. Do be careful, sirs,” the house replied in its calm, mother’s voice.
“Does it bother you?” Muddy pressed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Would you rather live?”
“As you wish,” the house said, equably enough.
Muddy appeared distressed by this. “Shall we at least say good-bye? You’ve been home to me, a reassurance, a place to dream of returning to. It isn’t lightly that one abandons such a place to … the torch.”
The house, unmoving and unchanging, seemed to consider this for a few moments before replying, “I’ve uploaded my gain states to your ship’s memory, sir. Should you ever desire to rebuild me, that image awaits your command. I’m sorry that my destruction troubles you; shall I clean up first? Can I offer you some soup?”
“No.” Muddy said, weeping afresh. “No, thank you.”
“Are we ready to lift off?” Bruno asked, trying to be gentle but needing to hurry things along.
“Not quite,” Muddy said, a little angrily. “A solar IR laser is charging the batteries, and if we’re headed for the grapple station instead of the Queendom, our own grapples will need a few minutes to change target lock.”
Bruno waved a hand. “Muddy, you can handle these things while I’m installing the ertial shield. We’ve got to go, man.”
Muddy’s sobs strengthened, and his arm looked ready to leap up and cover his face again. “Oh, sir, can’t we walk around the world? Can’t we see it one last time? I’ve dreamed of this place for too long, to have it s-s-snatched out from under me so soon!”
“All right,” Bruno snapped, then softened his tone. “All right, yes. If we haven’t got at least a few minutes to spare, it’s my fault for taking too long in the study. And this place has been a fine home, hasn’t it?”
For a few seconds it seemed Muddy might reply, but he didn’t, and finally Bruno turned to lead the way down the meadow path away from the house. Darkness hadn’t been kind here—the grass lay dead and crisp in some places, dead and limply moldering in others. His gardens lay in neat, lifeless rows. At the meadow’s far end, his dogwoods and honeysuckles had gone dormant, shedding their leaves in a carpet that squelched and crumbled beneath their boots.
The little bridge was intact, and the stream beneath it babbled as happily as ever, but the barley fields beyond it held only harvest stubble and a pair of stoop-backed robots dutifully uprooting the tiny white mushrooms that were springing up all around. The rocky desert looked all right, and the beach, and the sea. These things he hadn’t killed yet. Not yet.
“What would Enzo have made of this place, I wonder?” Muddy asked, pausing where the stream widened out into foul, rotting bog at the ocean’s edge.
Bruno snorted. “It’s no world for kites, I’m afraid, though he’d have liked the fields and vineyards.”
“And hated the silence. He wouldn’t have understood this, would he, Bruno? Crawling off on our own like this, messing around with theories and things; he’d never have stood for it if he’d been alive.”
No, indeed. Enzo de Towaji had been the ultimate people person, a man who seemed to exist only in the thoughts and reactions of others. Strange that he’d been so happy with Bernice, who did like the quiet. How often would she be staring into the fireplace, or setting off to hike in the hills, or playing a game of chess against herself, when Enzo would kidnap her along on some foolish errand? But perhaps she needed that—needed someone to drag her mind from its pure, Machiavellian pursuits.
“Mother might have understood,” Muddy said.
Bruno nodded. “Indeed. Indeed, yes, although she’d find the place awfully confining. We really should be going, Muddy. There are live people who need us. Deliah van Skettering, for starters.”
Muddy pursed his lips. “She’s the woman on the station?”
“Yes, and she’s probably single-copy. Her death could well be as final as Enzo’s and Bernice’s, if we’re late in preventing it.”
“Do we have the time?”
Bruno puffed out his chest. “I daresay we must. If nothing else, she knows where to find Tamra, who, incidentally, may also have been singled in this calamity. But I hope we’d have saved her in any case.”
“To spite Marlon?” Muddy asked, in a particularly whining tone.
“To spite God,” Bruno answered sincerely. It was the ultimate superstition, the last and most powerful he could tap. If spirits and demigods were a shorthand for all the pseudorandomness of nature, then God was a shorthand for all the spirits taken together. If silly “boat gods” could derive some statistically measurable reality from dwelling even fleetingly in Bruno’s subconscious, then God himself—who dwelt in nearly everyone—must derive enormously more. So to blame God, to beseech God, to invoke God was an act not only of desperation, but of ultimate rationality.
He expanded. “This business of evil, of murder, has no place in civilized society. Deliah does not wish to fly off into outer darkness, and so she shall not. And she’ll have you to thank for it, Muddy, and God to curse for letting it come down to your actions, and mine. Has Marlon broken your heart, along with your pride? Come! Saddle up our steed and let’s away!”
To his relief, Muddy did seem infected by that enthusiasm; together they trotted along the beach, along the pebbled pathway that led back into meadow again. The house appeared over the horizon, and suddenly they were upon it.
A hundred robots lined the way ahead of them.
There were fifty robots on either side of the path, gleaming gold and silver and glossy black in the starlight, th
eir left arms raised in formal salute, forming an arch. Bruno skidded to a halt, Muddy coming up short beside him. Together they stared for a few silent moments, before starting forward.
Two by two, the robots turned blank faces toward their masters and seemed to convey a sense of exultation, untainted by sorrow. Two by two they bowed, bodies clicking and whirring with impossible grace, arms extending downward to brush the withered grass. Two by two, they collapsed the archway, a good-bye as eloquent as any poet had ever penned.
“Farewell, old friends,” Bruno murmured as they came to the end of it, as the last two robots swept into their bows. Muddy burst out crying again.
“It’s been a privilege, sir,” the house said.
“I thank you,” Muddy sobbed, “from the very bottom of my wounded heart.”
Then Bruno touched him on the shoulder and steered him toward the ship, and together they climbed through the little hatch. Inside was a miniature palace of diamonds and green velvet, of blue-and-white veined lapis and green-and-white veined jade. The two little chairs had become slick, stylish acceleration couches in black leather; the toilet had turned to gold.
“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed on seeing it. “Did I accuse you of shoddy design, Brother? I retract every word!”
“It’s just library patterns,” Muddy said, shrugging, his sobs trailing away into sniffles again. Then he straightened. “Oblivion! Aren’t we forgetting your pet?”
“My pet? My pet?” Bruno felt his eyes widen. “Ah, God! Hugo!”
He leaped through the hatch, catching his boot toe on it, and fell sprawling in the rotting grass, narrowly missing smashing his nose. He needn’t have bothered, though; the battered robot stood outside, looking as if it’d been just about to climb in.
“Mewl,” it said distinctly, looking down at Bruno in an oddly human—if faceless—way.
“Yes,” Bruno agreed, rising, brushing himself off, “mewl indeed. Climb aboard, you, and quickly. There’s much to do, and little time!”
chapter eighteen
in which numerous laws are broken
Of the world’s destruction there is little to say; grapples cleft the planet in twain, exposing its core of prismatic-white neubles, and the neubles were collapsed into proton-sized black holes, and the black holes were formed into collapsium, and the collapsium was squashed into a torus of vacuogel hypercollapsite and positioned atop the ertial shield.
The destruction of the sun was somewhat more delicate, somewhat more involved, but only slightly. Muddy, staring upward through the wellstone “window” of the bow, wept and moaned inconsolably throughout the process, until Bruno, who was none too happy about all this himself, finally snapped at him to shut up. Hugo mewled once and fell silent, and as the ertial shield whumped into place atop the spaceship’s impervium bow and the propulsion grapples locked onto their distant target, there was only the sound of the two men breathing: one raggedly, the other not.
The star field—and the debris field of their former home—rippled only slightly; the ertial shield was transparent to visible light, transparent in fact to nearly every phenomenon the universe could throw at it. It existed primarily as an absence, a damping, a silence in the zero-point field’s infinite screeching.
“Engage the beams,” Bruno said, when all systems were ready.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Muddy acknowledged in sullen, childish tones. In place of a standard hypercomputer interface he’d designed a late renaissance control panel, with all manner of gilded switches and levers and dials, and with his hands he now manipulated these controls.
The transition from weightlessness to weight was immediate; the debris field dropped away against the unmoving stars, and Bruno felt his lungs compress, the air forced out of them by the weight of his own breastbone. The acceleration wasn’t enormous—the system was set for precisely 1.00000 gee—but it came on as a step function. Its time derivative, known to physicists as “jerk,” was nearly infinite, lurching them from zero to full throttle in a millionth of a millionth of a microsecond. Funny how, in their hurry, they hadn’t considered the effect of this on tender flesh and blood; it hurt. Not a stinging or a burning or a bruising kind of hurt, but a pressing, like having a soft, heavy couch dropped on you.
“Ah, my bones!” Muddy shrieked. “My ribs! I’ve broken my ribs!” And then he vomited over the side of his couch and shrieked again.
“Steady,” Bruno said, unfastening restraints and sitting up. The movement was unwise. The ertial shield swept away the zero-point field immediately ahead of them, leaving behind a medium one thousand times less energetic; in theory, plowing through this sparser field at one thousand times the acceleration should have been completely equivalent to 1.00000 gee, indistinguishable in every way from normal gravity or thrust. But a bow-heavy structure weighing trillions of tons, however cleverly disguised, poses some minor practical difficulties. What was really going on, in this air-filled space behind the hypercollapsite? Was it surprising that inner-ear fluids might misbehave?
While these thoughts raced through Bruno’s head, his body slid off the acceleration couch and onto the floor. He felt there was something strange in the way he fell, and stranger still in the way he landed, as if the fine hairs on his skin were solid rods growing out of a light, solid, cleverly articulated doll. He attempted to rise. The floor had a comforting traction, at least, but it seemed his mass—his weight—rose too quickly for the press of gravity. Something a little off, a little light, with the inertia?
His dizziness continued, along with an odd, pressing sensation in his chest. The heart? He imagined inertialess blood pumping through inertialess veins. Pressure and viscosity and muscular contraction weren’t functions of inertia; the heart would pump. The blood would flow. But strangely, yes.
Beside him, Hugo lay where they’d strapped it to the floor. It held a worn metal hand in front of its face and made small movements with it every few moments, seeming somehow fascinated with the results. Had Hugo discovered inertia, by virtue of its sudden reduction?
With great concentration, Bruno managed to regain his balance and rise slowly to his feet, standing unsteadily between Muddy’s couch and his own.
“My bones,” Muddy whined tearfully, “my organs. My eyes.”
He was rolling back and forth as much as his restraints would allow, as if in a kind of slow seizure, but Bruno immediately had the sense that the movement was voluntary, that Muddy wasn’t seriously hurt, that the tears were of misery rather than outright agony.
Bruno reached out with uncertain fingers to probe at Muddy’s chest. “Does this hurt? Here? Here?”
Muddy cried out each time, but the bones themselves felt perfectly intact. “Ow! Ow, sir, you grieve me!”
“I don’t think there’s a fracture.”
His groaning intensified. “No fracture? God, you’d think after years of torture a person would become inured to pain. The truth is otherwise! Opposite! Bruno, if you knew the indignities these bones had been s-s-subjected to. Split with wedges? I only wish. It’s that legacy that haunts me now.”
Bruno frowned down at himself. “The fax should have healed any injuries. You should be every bit as fit as I am.”
“Should I?” Muddy’s face was miserable, ashamed. He tried to turn away. “I’ve been cunningly redesigned, sir, in ways the fax has little ability to detect and still less to repair. Primarily in the synaptic wiring, but he took some liberties with my s-s-skeleton as well. To move is to suffer; to hold still is to suffer more.”
Bruno, who was getting tired of feeling aghast, merely sighed. “We’ll undesign you, then.”
“Easy to say. Someday, yes, no doubt we’ll overcome his cleverness. Meanwhile, I suppose I deserve these miseries.”
Here was a clumsy move, an attempt to make Bruno deny it. He declined again to take the bait, saying instead, “There are pressing concerns and limited resources, and anyway that little fax”—he pointed—“won’t pass a human body. So perhaps it is necessa
ry for you to be patient until the situation has stabilized. I’m sorry for that, particularly since your suffering doesn’t appear to build character.”
Muddy managed—with visible strain—to scrape out a chuckle. “Ah, a touch of bitterness, of condescension. Go with it, Bruno; be human. Your respect is forced; honor me instead with your heartfelt disgust. There’s a good lad.”
Bruno sighed again. “Can I offer you a drug?”
“A drug! How novel. Indeed, yes, I’d be powerless to refuse some of Enzo’s Christmas brandy. Reduce this pain in me, sir. Your inertially corrupt s-s-spacetime disagrees with me!”
“Brandy is not a painkiller.”
“Ah, but it is, Declarancy. It is.”
“Not the proper sort, and you know it. I’ll get you something … strong.”
Bruno glanced up, half expecting to see the stars themselves moving outside the wellstone “window” of the bow. But the star field was inert, unimpressed with their meddlings. The turning of his head left him dizzy; he nearly fell again, but caught himself with a hand on each of the two couches. Moving carefully and with many pauses, he extricated himself from between the couches, turned toward the fax, and pulled up a hypercomputer interface beside it so he could search the onboard libraries for a suitable painkiller. There were, it turned out, many thousands to choose from.
“We’re … really … moving along, aren’t we?” Muddy mused.
Turning slowly, Bruno looked up, and followed Muddy’s gaze to the instruments. Specifically, to the “Distance to Target” gauge, an old-style digital readout made from rows of illuminable red bars. It read in tenths of a meter, and at present its lower five digits were all flickery eights, changing too rapidly to register on the eye. The higher seven digits counted down smoothly, their speed increasing even as he watched.
