by Wil McCarthy
“I’m not saying this very well. It’s a straightforward thing, though: I want to change, not what I am but what I do with what I am. Surely it behooves us, as immortal people, to find the time to start over. Otherwise, we’re just living the same time, over and over again.”
“There is the small matter,” Bruno reminded her, “of rescuing the sun from collapse.” He was suddenly cross, and hadn’t the energy to conceal it.
“Oh,” she said, seeming to come awake. “Yes, there is that.” Then she frowned, not at Bruno but at herself. “Here I’m blithely assuming you’ve figured it all out. You must get so tired of that! To be so relentlessly relied upon, when inside you’re just like everyone else. Smarter, obviously, but there are lots of smart people who don’t get … I don’t know … scapegoated that way. Even myself, who should have known better than to let this all happen.”
Bruno nodded, somewhat mollified. “To be relied upon, yes. It’s burdensome. Maybe that’s why I left.”
“Hmm. I never thought of it that way. I suppose you probably have a lot to say on that subject.”
“Er,” he hedged, not wanting to be drawn in again. “ Perhaps a little later.”
“Oh.” Deliah, who’d had some small experience dealing with physicists, smiled a little and clapped him on the arm. “You’ve started working. I wasn’t disturbing you before, but I am now.”
That only made him feel sheepish. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk, Deliah. I do. It’s very rude, I know.”
“Can I help with what you’re doing?”
Bruno thought about that. “You probably could, if we had more time. A week, perhaps. But I’m too many layers deep, in matters I’d be very poor at explaining. As the designated scapegoat, I need to press on with this alone.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“I suppose you do,” he said sincerely, “and I appreciate it. It’s quite uncommon.”
He turned back to his analyses.
As often happened when he was engaged in such activity, time passed. Quite a lot of it, actually, until Deliah became restless and—against all advice—unstrapped herself to “stretch her legs.” This involved her pacing back and forth in the cabin’s quite narrow confines, which of course Bruno found very distracting, and couldn’t quite keep himself from complaining about.
“Well,” Deliah said, trying to be polite but with frustration and boredom written all over her, “I appreciate the rescue; I really do. But it’s difficult to lie still on a couch for sixteen hours with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Sixteen hours is splendidly fast for such a monumental journey—five hundred light minutes, almost sixty AU. And I thought I was moving fast, covering that same distance in a week! But I’m a person who needs to be busy. With the Iscog down, I can’t access libraries or entertainments or anything, and with you and this ‘Muddy’ down I can’t have a conversation …” She looked around the cabin, her eyes settling on Hugo. “What’s this thing? A servant?”
“Oh, uh, actually a sort of pet,” Bruno answered distractedly.
“Mewl,” Hugo answered, as if aware of the attention.
“May I release it?”
“What? Er, I’d rather you didn’t. It tends to get into trouble, which under present circumstances hardly seems a good idea. It seems content enough where it is, yes?”
Deliah sighed. “The perfect pet for you, Declarant; it requires no attention. Shall I redecorate the cabin, here? It’s really … Well, I guess ‘spartan’ is hardly the word for something done up in gold and lapis lazuli, but it’s not very pleasing. You’re hoping to rescue Her Majesty in this? It ought to be more regal, then.”
Hrumph. Her Majesty could be rescued in a clear plastic bag for all Bruno cared. Still it might be nice to surprise her, particularly if he didn’t have to do anything special himself. She would find this ship ugly. “Do you know her tastes?”
Deliah shrugged. “Probably not as well as you do. I see her palace in the entertainments and such, but the closest I’ve been in person is the beach outside.”
Bruno waved a hand. “Well, then you know more than I. The decorations I recall are all forty years out of date. No doubt they’ve become mortifyingly ugly in that time. Are you at all fashionable?”
Deliah blushed a little. “I come from an African sun farm, Bruno. And I grew up to be a shepherd of physicists. I like my styles, anyway.”
Bruno laughed. “Ah. Well. Having a style makes you more fashionable than I’ve ever been. Have at it, yes, by all means, although I’ll ask you to leave Muddy’s control panel as it is, along with these interfaces.” He indicated his dual hypercomputers. “And try not to jerk the couches out from under us.”
“I’ll work around them,” Deliah agreed, less enthusiastically than before. Suddenly, he understood: redecoration had not been a serious suggestion. She’d been pressing him with its absurdity, hoping he’d suggest something else, or maybe just talk to her. But now, with his approval, she was stuck with actually doing it. He sympathized; it was hard to get excited about busywork. But at the moment, he had no other suggestions for her. At least they weren’t dying yet.
After that, they left each other alone for a good long while. There were some noises, and Deliah talked to herself occasionally, but soon he was engrossed enough not to find it distracting. Actually, it was he who eventually distracted himself, when a rumbling in his belly reminded him how long it had been since his last meal. Reluctantly, he pried himself away from the work, and unfastened his harness.
“Well hello,” Deliah said as he rose—slowly and carefully—from his couch.
“Hi,” he muttered back to her, then realized he should probably be more polite. “Good, ah, afternoon.”
He looked around, and immediately wondered just how long he’d been working. The place looked utterly different; where there’d been lapis walls and decks of jade, now there were cedarwood panels and bricks of red clay, and carpets and cushions in the pattern of animal skins that seemed, oddly enough, to go very well with the existing controls. A folding screen of black wood and white paper hid the little toilet, and opposite that, beside where Hugo lay, was a crackling fireplace, wooden logs blazing merrily behind a pane of sooty glass. There was heat coming out of it in considerable quantity.
“Good night!” he exclaimed. “What have you done? Is that safe?”
“The fire?” she asked, following his gaze. “Oh, sure, perfectly. It’s a broad-spectrum holographic panel. I thought it was a little cold in here anyway; the temperature control loops for life support were fairly primitive.”
“We were in a hurry.”
“I’m sure. But this is nicer, don’t you think?”
Thinking about it for a moment, he found he had to agree. “It is, yes.” He walked over to it, careful not to lose his balance or step on poor Hugo. He held his hands out. “The heat is unevenly distributed. It seems to come from the coals and flames themselves.”
“Oh, sure,” she agreed, “the hologram includes thermal IR in the five to twelve-micron range, where it radiates best through air. It’s distinguishable from a real fire—you can’t open the glass, for one thing—but it’s just as nice for our purpose. You’ve never seen one before? There used to be a folding variety you could carry in your pocket. You’d charge it up with sunlight and set it anywhere you liked.”
“Carry in your pocket? Without being burned?”
She smiled. “The heat-emitting surfaces activate when you open it, silly. Wouldn’t you design it that way?”
“I suppose so,” he allowed. As if he’d ever stoop to designing something so inane. But life was long, as he’d said. With eternity stretching before him, perhaps he’d do all manner of silly things. Perhaps he’d be known, in future times, as an immensely silly man who once invented a few big things, in his overly serious youth. What a thought! Then again, perhaps he’d be killed in the next few hours. Perhaps the Queendom would fall, and save history the trouble of remembering him at all.
“I need food,” he observed. He walked to the fax and demanded a walnut-and-celery sandwich, which it surrendered readily enough. A glass of milk soon followed, and an apple, and a Venusian plibble, and a basket of sliced potatoes fried in pork grease. Gods, he was hungry.
“With any luck,” he said when he was done eating, “Tamra has already been rescued, and we can turn our attention immediately to the Ring Collapsiter.”
“Unlikely,” Deliah answered seriously. “The last communications I overheard were a good five days ago, but there was a lot of complaining among the spaceship captains and crews. They kept dying, or being ejected from the solar system like me. There were just too many mass anomalies slinging around, on chaotic trajectories. No way to navigate, no safe place to rest. Maybe it’s improved since then …”
“But probably not,” Bruno concluded. Probably, a lot of collapsium had been ejected, and he supposed some of it might have overcome the odds and collided with a planet or other body, perhaps the sun itself. Indeed, they might already be too late! But the bulk of it would still be down there in interplanetary space, interacting chaotically but nonetheless trapped in gravitational contours.
He glanced up, expecting to see the pinpoint of Sol through the window. No such luck: the view was dim, dappled with stars he couldn’t immediately identify.
“We’ve turned around already? We’ve crossed Neptune’s orbit?” he asked, surprised.
“Uh-huh,” Deliah said, surprised by his surprise. “I’m pretty sure we cross Uranus’ orbit in a few minutes. You really have been in a trance, haven’t you?”
“So it would seem.”
“Grappling the sun is a felony, by the way. If you didn’t know. What’s our deceleration anchor? I’ve been wondering. I suppose we’re simply attached to my station?”
“Correct,” Bruno said, nodding distractedly. “Yes, we’re pulling on it pretty hard. In spite of its mass, it may well have been dragged below solar escape velocity by now. Perhaps it’ll fall back into the inner system as a comet someday.”
“Oh, what a charming thought! It wouldn’t have a tail, though, would it?”
“No. Not unless it picks up some volatiles between now and then. And I can’t imagine where it would find any. I was referring more to the shape of its orbit. Highly elliptical, like a comet.”
Bruno looked over at Muddy’s trajectory display, still an engraved plaque of wellstone bronze. Indeed, the orbit of Neptune was hours behind them, with the orbit of Bruno’s own former world several hours beyond that. And the ship really was about to cross the orbit of Uranus. In fact, on the scale of the display it looked like they’d cross the actual planet itself.
“Er, ship,” he said mildly, “how close are we going to come to the planet Uranus?”
“Eight hundred twenty thousand kilometers,” the ship replied immediately.
“I see. That’s within the gravitational sphere of influence, isn’t it?”
“Affirmative,” the ship agreed.
“Hmm. Probability of striking particulate matter in the vicinity of the planet?”
“Eleven percent, for objects one microgram or larger.” The ship’s voice was cheerful, gender neutral, unimpressed.
“I see. And when, exactly, will we be crossing the planet’s ring plane?”
“Five minutes, nineteen seconds.” It paused. “Danger is minimal, sir,” it then offered. “Probability of damage to the impervium is two point six times ten to the minus eleventh percent. Is that acceptable?”
Relieved, Bruno snorted. “It sounds like the least of our problems. Indeed, yes, it’s acceptable. Will we be passing close to any other planets?”
“Negative,” the ship replied.
“Good. Excellent. Keep it that way. Oh, and ship?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Your name is Sabadell-Andorra.”
“Excuse me, sir, library search. Sabadell and Andorra are geographic localities in northeastern Iberia, European continent, planet Earth.” It paused for a moment, then cited a reference: date, Greenwich Mean Time, latitude and longitude of epicenter, and then a series of geological measurements intended to convey a sense of the magnitude and manner of the associated shock and vibration. “My library contains no other reference to a Sabadell-Andorra. Am I named for this event? An earthquake?”
“Uh, yes. Indeed.”
“Acknowledged. Thank you, sir.”
Deliah cleared her throat. “There’s a library on board, Bruno?”
“Evidently. I mean, Muddy put the thing together; you’d have to ask him all the details, but it isn’t the sort of thing I’d leave out. One needs these things sometimes.”
“So I can watch movies? Read books? Peruse technical articles?”
“Er, well, old ones, yes. Was that not clear to you?”
Her annoyance, fortunately, was cheerful. “No, Declarant, it wasn’t.” Then, catching his own grumpy look, she said, “Serves me right, does it? Well, if I’m too much trouble, you can always put me back where you found me.”
“Later,” he said, in mock warning. “There isn’t time for it right now.” He grew more serious. “There really isn’t. Marlon sent Muddy to me almost three weeks ago, and it was a taunt he expected me to answer. Or hoped I would, at any rate. If my network gate had been functional when Muddy’s image was transmitted, I’d’ve had time to build some more conventional means of transport. Three weeks isn’t a long time to travel fifty AU, not in a fusion-powered ship that has to lug its own fuel along, but it certainly could be done. So he must have had some schedule in mind that would prevent my interference. Whatever grand finale he has in store, it can’t be very far off.”
Deliah sobered as well. “You lost more than half a day to come get me, going away from the sun rather than toward it.”
Bruno shrugged. “It couldn’t be helped. You knew where to find the Queen.”
“No, I could have told you that over the radio. You could have let me die; it’s what any reasonable person would have done.” She waved a finger in his face. “Your heart is soft.”
“Soft enough to endanger the Queendom,” he grumbled. “All right, then. If we are too late, there’s no one to blame but myself.”
Deliah, seeming surprisingly immune to the effects of the ship’s lopsided inertia, came forward and kissed him on the forehead. “There’s Marlon to blame, as you keep reminding me. Bruno, I’m not sure people actually expect you to come swooping in to save the day. We’re in the middle of history’s greatest calamity, and I certainly never expected to survive it. If you’re not finally able to salvage anything, well, at least you’ve tried.”
“I should have seen this coming,” Bruno brooded.
“So should I,” Deliah said. “So should Tamra. So should everyone else who’s ever been friends with the man. And the police, too; tracing his involvement in all the grapple accidents is their job, not yours. But I guess Marlon’s outfoxed us all.”
“Humpf,” Bruno said, which pretty well summed up his opinion on that matter.
Deliah’s eyes widened, drawn upward to something above and behind Bruno. “Look!” she said.
He turned, and immediately regretted the wave of nausea this sudden movement brought. But he saw what she was pointing at: a little dome of blue at the bottom edge of the window, with three brightish pinpoints hovering above it. Uranus and its moons? The dome climbed and grew in the view; in half a minute, the whole planet would be visible.
He reached out to give Muddy’s leg a shake. “Wake up. Wake up! You’ll want to see this. At least, I think you will …”
Muddy, who was fully reclined in his couch, groggily opened his eyes. “What? What’s that? Oh. Mmm. You’re very kind to wake me, Lordship, but actually, I’ve seen planets before.” And with that he turned away and fell back into stuporous sleep.
Impressive views have a way of saturating the mind; the planet was visible for a good twenty minutes, but never so large or close as that first stunning glimpse. A
nd really, the planet didn’t have any features to speak of, just a uniform, powder-green haze sinking down for thousands upon thousands of kilometers. The world was huge, able to contain a dozen Earths, but it shrank quickly, becoming a little ball and finally a bright green speck before disappearing down the other side of the window.
An hour and a half later, they crossed the orbit of Saturn, which of course was completely uneventful since the planet was nowhere nearby. An hour after that, they passed Jupiter’s similarly empty orbit. Against the starscape soon afterward, they spotted a few bright, fast-moving specks that proved, under the enhancement of wellstone telescopes, to be asteroids. That was good for a few minutes’ distraction, in the hour and a half it took them to reach the orbit of Mars.
Then the pace of things started to pick up. The ship was slowing down dramatically, now cruising at barely an eighth of its thirty-thousand-kilometer-per-second peak velocity, but the inner planets were a lot closer together than their outer cousins. Earth was barely twenty minutes beyond the Red Planet, and Sabadell-Andorra had started picking up random bits of radio noise. Nothing useful—just data bursts and occasional, panicky voices—but it made clear that they’d reentered civilization, and that civilization, though deprived of both its communication networks and the more primitive means of physical travel, nonetheless still had some fight in it.
They encountered their share of gravitational anomalies, too: Iscog fragments and free-floating neubles ejected from some industrial site somewhere. Their course jinked around in a way that worried Bruno. Finding the sun was not too difficult, but finding Tamra’s little di-clad neutronium work platform in the sun’s glare might very well be. Especially if their own course was misplotted. It wasn’t like they could ping the Iscog for their precise location. These thoughts made him impatient.
