The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  “Indeed,” Bruno agreed. “We’ll reach the halfway mark in a couple of hours.”

  This was no small feat; though the runaway grapple station had passed just over eight light-minutes of Bruno’s little planet—greater than the distance between the Earth and Sun—at its closest approach, it had since hurtled another fifty light-minutes toward infinity. Poor Deliah had probably traveled farther than any human being before her.

  The fax made a little coughing sound and spat a pill into Bruno’s hand. He extended the other hand and extracted a glass of water, whose contents sloshed from side to side with even the slightest jostling as he rose to approach Muddy.

  “Chair upright,” Muddy said, then screamed as the chair complied.

  When all was ready, Bruno handed his counterpart the pill and the glass, watched him carefully ingest the one and sip from the other, then wince as if the act of swallowing caused some new pain of its own. He drank from the glass several times more, grimacing each time, and also complaining that it was “merely water.” Then finally the chair was reclined again, and the glass was carefully returned to the fax, and Bruno climbed awkwardly back into his own couch, managing to step on Hugo’s head twice during the process. Hugo mewled at this, but otherwise didn’t seem to mind.

  “Sorry, old thing. I’d break the floor if it weren’t impervium.”

  “Will this take effect quickly?” Muddy asked.

  “It should, yes.” Bruno carefully strapped himself back in and cinched the straps tight. “Ah. Ah, yes. It’s much better to lie still.”

  Muddy snorted beside him. “She is a fine ship, isn’t she?”

  “For a cobbled-together prototype on her first shakedown cruise, I’d say she’s a bloody miracle.”

  “Shall we name her?”

  Bruno grunted; he hadn’t thought about that. Anthropomorphic instincts aside, he wasn’t much for naming inanimate things, or even semianimate ones like houses and small planets. But a ship was a different matter—it was animate, by definition. And it would need a name for legal registration if for no other reason. There was some optimistic thinking.

  “All right, yes.” He ran through a few possibilities in his mind: the Redshift II, the Tamra Lutui, The Grappleship Old Girona. Then, belatedly catching a hint in Muddy’s tone, he asked, “You, ah, have something in mind?”

  “I do. I thought perhaps the Sabadell-Andorra.”

  That gave Bruno pause. Absurd on the face of it: by nature, spaceships were gracile and swift, where tectonic plates were among the slowest and heaviest objects ever manipulated by humans. And anyway, did anyone outside Catalonia even remember the pocket catastrophe of that earthquake? Then again, in component form this little spaceship massed considerably more than all the fallen hillsides of Girona, possibly as much as the Iberian plate itself, and the technology certainly was—well, earthshaking in its implications.

  “All right,” he said finally, nodding, “Sabadell-Andorra it is. And we’ll know what it means, at least.”

  “I feel the medication working.”

  Bruno turned to look at his … brother—his battered, mistreated counterpart. “Good. Excellent. Is it helping?”

  “It is, yes. Ah. To be without pain, for even a moment …”

  Muddy’s eyelids began to droop. Through thousands of years of civilization, mankind had yet to invent a reliable pain-suppression chemical that didn’t also proportionally suppress consciousness. Pain was simply too fundamental, too necessary, to be banished so easily; it bound itself up in every system of the body. There were various “nondrowsy formulas” Bruno might have tried, milder analgesics tempered with stimulants and euphoriants, but the ship’s library gave these much lower effectiveness ratings. Of course there was always the brute-force approach: simply deadening the spinal nerves. Muddy didn’t need to move for a while anyway, right? But sleep seemed a much kinder side effect than total paralysis.

  “Thanks,” Muddy said blurrily; Then his eyes closed, his breathing slowed, and he just sort of faded away. It was a peaceful thing to watch, a hundred little tensions sliding out of that tortured body to leave it—finally!—at peace. Bruno almost feared he’d died until his chest rose and fell again slowly—and again, and again—his breathing shallow but steady. Muddy would awaken in four or five hours, just in time for the rendezvous with Deliah’s grapple station.

  Bruno, seeing these hours stretching dully before him, wished he had some means to slip away so easily. All the hard hours in the study had taken their toll; he didn’t relish any further isolation. He spent fully twenty-eight seconds considering this before he, too, fell asleep.

  He awoke to gravity fluctuations—a sense of rotation and weightlessness—followed by the slamming jerk of acceleration again. The first sound he heard was Muddy’s weeping—not a shriek or howl or moan this time but a quiet, private, sniffly sort of weeping that engendered immediate sympathy. He opened his eyes, saw Muddy lying there on the acceleration couch, his skin and tufted hair pale against the black leather. His shirt had loosened in the night; the word “savage” was clearly visible on his shoulder in fluorescent green.

  “Are you all right?” Bruno asked him gently.

  Muddy jumped a little, startled. “What? Ah, Bruno. I was savoring a dream.”

  Above, the bow afforded a view of Sol, at this range barely distinguishable from the stars around it.

  “Mmm. A sad dream?”

  “A dream about His Declarancy. Not sad, no; I dreamed he held a whip in his hand.”

  “How terrifying!”

  Muddy snorted. “Not at all. No, the whip is a personal, almost intimate expression between two people. It means he wants to talk, to exchange. But in my dream, he was whipping the sun, and flares were spinning out of it with every stroke, and he was saying your name over and over again, and when I asked him what he was doing, he turned to look at me. His face was blank, like a robot’s. I woke up.”

  “That sounds horrible, Muddy.”

  “No.” He was shaking his head. “To me it was touching. Sweet. I suppose I’m crying because it should have been horrible, because I’ve come so far from where I started. Ah, Bruno, if only you could know him. He admires you so very much. He’s not such a bad man, in some ways. Just very, very driven.”

  “How sad for him,” Bruno said, then loosened his straps a little and raised his seat back. “Muddy, you don’t have to play his games anymore.”

  The tears ran freely down Muddy’s face. “Perhaps I do, sir. These things aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine. Perhaps they can’t be undone at all, except in death, but he’s made such an obedient little coward of me I doubt even that is an option. There’s little doubt I’m doing his work right now, one way or another. You should lock me in this chair and drug me for the duration, sir. I would, in your place.”

  “Yes? Well, that’s precisely where you and I differ. I’m very sorry for all that’s happened to you, but enough already. Right? You’ve made a fine ship to fly against him, and you’re using it. Revel in that. Have we turned around yet?”

  “Indeed,” Muddy said, in sour imitation of Bruno’s own voice. Or perhaps the “imitation” was literal, and his voice really was that growling and brusque. “We’ve been decelerating for hours. We’ll reach the station in eleven minutes.”

  He pointed to a diagram on the instrument console, a little brass plaque engraved with black letters and symbols, which showed the arrow-straight trajectory of the station and the slightly curvier path of the Sabadell-Andorra intersecting it. Curvy because the ship’s only means of propulsion was the runaway station itself, the electromagnetic anchor they’d tied to it. There was nothing else to anchor to out here in the so-called Kuiper Belt, a space so huge and empty around them that the nearest other object was probably the planetary debris field they’d left behind, or perhaps a flake or two of very lonely methane ice.

  At any rate, since they couldn’t aim for where the station would be, but only where it was, their path
was a classic “stern chase.” Actually, it was worse than that, because they’d had to place themselves directly between the station and the sun, so the latter could be used as a deceleration anchor. Their final rendezvous—indicated in miniature on the little brass plaque—involved a lot of flip-flopping toward the station and back, for course correction, while Sol, on the other side, did all the heavy lifting. Bruno had been awakened by just such a flip-flop. It was hardly an optimal arrangement, but it did seem to be getting the job done. As Bruno watched, the little black indentations labeled SHIP and STATION inched forward in their tracks, dotted lines turning solid in their wake. And indeed, if the display was accurate then rendezvous was very nearly at hand.

  “Have you made radio contact?” he asked Muddy.

  “With the s-s-station?”

  “With Deliah, yes.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it. Shall I?”

  “Allow me. Ship? Hello?”

  A hypercomputer earpiece appeared on the hull beside him.

  “Ship here,” was the immediate—though somewhat tentative—reply. The poor thing was probably growing a consciousness emulator for the first time, opening its metaphorical eyes and ears, the demands of an impatient de Towaji being its first-ever experience of experience. The ship itself wouldn’t mind, of course; it would be eager for any task, but still Bruno found the idea depressing. This week had been filled to bursting with depressing ideas.

  “Can you make radio contact with that grapple station?”

  “The object ahead of us? Certainly, sir. Can you recommend a frequency?”

  Bruno gave it one—the one he and Deliah had used in their conversation at closest approach. “Analog,” he added, “not digital.”

  “Very well, sir. Receiving reply.”

  “Play it.”

  “Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice said. “Malo e lelei, it’s about time you answered. I’ve had you on radar for over an hour. Hello?”

  “I’m here,” he acknowledged. “Two of me, actually, though one would deny it. How are you holding up?”

  “Splendidly,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. He supposed not; he’d certainly be delighted at the prospect of rescue after a week of lonely terror out here, the sun shrinking steadily behind him. The light-lag and vocal distortions, at least, had dropped almost to zero.

  “Right. Well, we’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m not sure that we have an actual rendezvous plan, but we’ll work something out.”

  “What is the condition of the station?” Muddy interjected, in a voice less sour than before.

  “Condition? Why, it’s a mess. Every non-wellstone component has been smashed out of true, and there are lots of those components. Big, too. I feel I’m in some carnival funhouse. I’m actually amazed the hull’s held up so well: I’ve got leaks, but they’re about eighth on my hierarchy of problems to worry about. The floor here is neutronium filled, for local gravity. My biggest fear is losing cohesion in the diamond cladding—I’d survive about a microsecond.”

  “Is the station functional?” Muddy pressed. “Can you produce a grapple beam with it?”

  Deliah paused. “Bruno? Is that still you? You sound funny.”

  “I’m Muddy. A de Towaji relative on the Quisling s-s-side of the family.”

  Quisling: traitor. Deliah didn’t appear to catch the reference. “Attitude control is out,” she said evenly. “Power distribution is out. I’ve got hypercomputers running in several locations, but there isn’t a lot for them to do. The emitter cavities are wellstone lined, so it’s possible the revpics still have full range of motion. If I can route power to them, I could probably get enough vibration out to muster some measurable gravitation. Not enough to save me or anything. Why? What did you have in mind?”

  Muddy shrugged, then seemed to realize she couldn’t see that. “I, uh, thought we might simply take it with us. The whole thing. I thought it might come in handy.”

  “It might at that,” Bruno said, impressed with the idea. “Goodness.” He turned to the nearest hypercomputer and tapped in some quick calculations. “Hmmph. Not feasible. The ertial shield’s wake is essentially cone shaped, and could only accommodate the station if it were more than a kilometer behind. But at that range, most of the zpf has filled in again. It’s like digging a hole in water—it doesn’t last long at all.”

  Muddy looked ready to cry again. “It was just an idea,” he whined, cringing back in his couch as if expecting violence.

  “A good idea,” Bruno agreed quickly, “just not a workable one. At best, we’d yank a core sample out through the station’s middle.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Deliah complained. “If you can think of towing something this size through space, then you’re either crazy or … Well, we’ve got some talking to do when you get here.”

  A gentle but very solid whump came up through the floor, and suddenly all the sensations of inertialess motion vanished. They weren’t accelerating any longer, so the aft deck was no longer “down.” But they weren’t weightless, either. Instead, the di-clad neutronium deck liners inside the grapple station tugged at them sidewise. The deck seemed to tilt beneath them now, as on an ocean ship that was sinking.

  “Huh. I believe we are here,” Muddy said.

  The view above them was still of Sol: a bright star among the many stars, none of them moving. But at the edges of the view, just barely visible, was a lighted red circle in a curve of well-metals. It flicked off and then on again as Bruno watched. Not part of their own ship; it was the only sign of the massive station hulking below them.

  “Ship,” Muddy said, “display a schematic of the station, including yourself upon it, and clearly indicate the positions of all living persons.”

  Obligingly, the brass plaque erased itself and became instead a plate of holographic glass, behind which a little grapple station appeared, as if modeled in translucent brown plastic. Two dots of brightly contrasting pink appeared in one lobe of the structure—Bruno and Muddy in the Sabadell-Andorra. A third dot hovered nearby, perhaps fifty meters away.

  “Okay, I have you on scope,” Deliah said. “The nearest air lock suffered minimal damage in the accident—air leakage shouldn’t be a major problem if you mate there.”

  “Mate?” Bruno asked stupidly.

  Muddy slapped himself on the forehead, not playfully or symbolically but hard, as if he meant to raise a welt. “Little gods, I’m so stupid! So stupid!”

  “We have no airlock,” Bruno said, echoing the obvious. “Steady, Brother—I didn’t think of it either. We’re not the most brilliant of sailors, you and I. Deliah, there’s a problem. Have you any sort of spacesuit to climb into?”

  “No,” she said, “nothing like that. All the faxes are down. Do I hear you correctly? If you’re airlock-free, I don’t see how a spacesuit would help. The vacuum would kill you both the moment I opened your hatch.”

  “Indeed,” Bruno agreed ruefully. “We have a door, and an ample supply of oxygen, but that will do us little good if we must suffocate to admit you. An idiotic quandary. Let’s think on this a moment. My humblest apologies, madam.”

  “Can you fax yourself into storage for a few minutes, while the hatch is opened and closed?” Deliah asked.

  “Alas, no, our fax is much too small to admit a person. Let me think about this.”

  Muddy had, of course, started crying again, but presently his eyes brightened, his snuffling quieted, and his hands lashed out for the control panel above him.

  “An idea?” Bruno asked, feeling startled.

  “Indeed, yes. Deliah, move as far away from us as you can. Can you seal yourself off with an independent air supply?”

  Her snort of amusement was unmistakable. “You overestimate the conditions here, de Towaji.”

  “I’m Muddy.”

  “Oh. Well, I can put some distance between us, but it’s all one crumpled volume. Is the danger really any greater if I�
��m close?”

  Muddy considered. “I suppose not, actually.”

  “I’ll only go a little ways, then.”

  “Stay clear of the walls, at least.”

  The floor had begun to make a new noise—a kind of low, sizzling hiss.

  “What are you doing?” Bruno asked. Well, demanded, actually, and then immediately felt bad for it. He’d been telling Muddy all along to act like a man, to use the brains and initiative he’d been born with, to be helpful rather than helpless, and yet here he was getting unnerved and suspicious the first time it actually happened. He supposed it was another response from humanity’s deep wiring: Muddy had acted subservient for long enough to place himself “beneath” Bruno in some imaginary hierarchy. And now he was … What? Exceeding that role? Getting uppity? Was Bruno entitled, in this age of self-repair and self-reconstruction, to blame him for that, and then excuse his own behavior as a quirk of evolution? Surely not.

  These things, Muddy’s voice reminded him, aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine. Perhaps it was like the wiring for pain: subtle, pervasive, intimately tied to vital functions. But was that an excuse? Goodness, if Bruno couldn’t treat himself with dignity …

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Muddy’s cringing form, with as much sincerity as he could muster. “Please proceed.”

  Slowly, Muddy uncringed himself and moved his hands back toward the controls. “It’s a chemical reaction. A s-s-series of them, actually.”

  “Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The hull’s outer layer was wellstone; it could be programmed into all manner of absurdly reactive forms that would decompose—atom by atom—the absurdly nonreactive substance of the grapple station’s wellstone hull. Such reactions could be timed in waves, so that each atom of silicon substrate, once liberated, could be carried away in the chemical equivalent of a bucket brigade. And at the edges and interfaces, the two hulls could be pseudochemically merged, to keep the air from leaking out around the sides. The Sabadell-Andorra was melting its way through the defenses of the runaway station, melting through into its cozy, air-filled interior. Already, the sizzling sound had climbed half a meter up the sides of the Andorra’s barrel hull.