The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  He welcomed the sizzling sound when it began; this wellstone chemistry would get him through to Her Majesty as quickly and safely as possible.

  Muddy continued wailing. Hugo mewled. Deliah, rising from her own couch, asked, “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”

  Bruno, in his singularly single-minded state, ignored them all. “Ship,” he said, as another inspiration struck, “are your grapples still locked on Venus?”

  “Negative,” the ship replied. “The rotation of the platform makes that impossible.”

  “What’s the largest object handy? The sun? Obviously, yes. Can you lock onto that?”

  “Intermittently,” the ship agreed.

  “Good. Do it, and engage the grapples as soon as possible. This platform is damned heavy, but with the ertial shield we may be able to drag it out of place. At least a little. Perhaps a little is all we need. Now then, please paint a line on the interior to mark the thickness and position of the dome.”

  “Instruction unclear,” the ship replied apologetically.

  Blast it, his old house had been well accustomed to halfnonsense commands like that. “Paint a line, you! Show me where the dome is, the edge of the dome against your hull!”

  “Like this?”

  A pinkish red area the size of Bruno’s torso appeared on the inner surface of the hatch. Was this what he wanted? He waited for a moment and verified that yes, indeed, the circle was growing. Soon it became a hollowed-out oval, roughly as deep as Bruno’s hand and encircling an area as large as his body. It swelled outward slowly as the side of the ship sank its way in through the diamond structure of the dome.

  “When this completely encircles the hatch,” he said, pointing to the pink line, “stop burrowing and await further instructions. I’m going to open this door and exit the ship. Er, exit you. When I come back in and close the door, break contact immediately and take us out of here. Let the dome decompress, and just grapple to anything you like. If there’s no target handy, use the backup thrusters.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  The outside of the painted line advanced past the corners of the hatchway. The inside of the line soon followed, leaving the hatchway completely clear. The sizzling sound switched off; the door was fully inside the dome, and so, with hardly a thought in his head, Bruno threw the latches back and heaved the door open, then leaped out.

  Sunlight struck him like a physical blow. There is heat, he had time to think, and there is heat. Solar energy at fourteen thousand watts per square meter—ten times Earth normal—was something the body had no immediate response for. It was exactly like being thrown into a fire; his eyes pinched closed of their own accord, his hair singed and crisped and smoked on his scalp, and he collapsed immediately to the di-clad neutronium deck, thrashing and gasping. Fortunately, the deck was relatively cool, and his shirt and tights—which were cream colored and fairly reflective—had some minimal climate-control capabilities that saturated right around the time his sweat glands finally opened up and began pouring out rivers of lukewarm saline. These factors helped keep him from more serious injury for the six seconds it took the sun to “set” behind the platform’s edge.

  He heard voices nearby. “It is a ship; look!” “What’s that door doing there? Who is that? That’s not a robot; that’s a man!” “My God, I think he stepped out in the daylight.”

  Bruno sat up and, to his surprise, let out a very undignified scream. “Ow! Ow! Goddamn it, that hurts!” His face and hands felt sunburned already, and his eyes, when he opened them, were blinded by sweat and huge, glowing blobs of color.

  “Sir?” a voice said, now just a meter or two away. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Bruno said, though this was far from certain. Once again, his thoughts settled on Tamra. He picked himself up. “Bruno de Towaji, at Her Majesty’s service.”

  His vision began to clear slightly, and the burning of his skin eased somewhat as the air began to cool. His sweat-soaked clothes began to feel heavy and cold, which was wonderful. He looked around. In the glow of wellstone lights set around the dome’s perimeter, he saw four shiny tents surrounded by solar collectors and neat rows of scorched, plastic discs the size of dart boards. Various charred debris—shoes and hats and crumbly brown scrolls of paper—littered the deck around him. Nearby was the skeleton he’d seen, and a little ways off, in the lee of a tent, was another skeleton he hadn’t. And immediately surrounding him, crowding right up against him, were four figures dressed head to toe in suits of thick, silver-white cloth that left only their faces exposed. He took each of them in with a hurried glance.

  It’d been a long time. The first face he identified as belonging to Wenders Rodenbeck, the playwright-cum-lawyer. The second—identified more by his hulking body than his Asian features—was the policeman Cheng Shiao. The third was one of Tamra’s courtiers, the woman named Tusité. Hardest of all was the fourth, a quite familiar-looking young lady. She had the same copper eyes and sandalwood skin as young Vivian Rajmon, and with a start he realized it was Vivian, grown up nearly all the way.

  But where was Tamra? Putting all else out of his mind, he pointed to the open hatchway of his ship, which hung ridiculously outside the dome, like some shiny, barrel-shaped lamprey. “This way,” he said. “Climb aboard, and quickly. I’ll assist Her Majesty. Where is she?”

  Cheng Shiao stepped forward and grabbed Bruno firmly by the elbow. “Philander,” he said in quick, precise tones, “it is my sad duty to inform you that Her Majesty gave her life in the effort to save others. Let’s away from this place, quickly. You’re in terrible danger.”

  Bruno felt as though he’d been slammed in the chest with a croquet mallet. “What? What? Instruction unclear. What did you say?”

  Shiao’s face was grimly serious. “Her Majesty Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in the person of her last known copy, is dead. I’m more sorry than you know, Philander.”

  He said some other stuff after that, various irrelevancies about ships and danger and impending death, none of which registered on Bruno. If not for Shiao’s firm grip on his elbow, he’d have sunk to the deck and stayed there, waited for the sun to come and burn him away. But Shiao’s grip didn’t compromise, didn’t allow him to fall. He was dragged back toward the waiting ship and pulled through the hatch.

  Only when the hatch was closed, and Sabadell-Andorra broke contact with the platform’s dome and lurched toward the sun at a thousand-gee acceleration, and the sickening inertial imbalances caused Shiao to lose equilibrium …

  Only then was Bruno de Towaji permitted to faint.

  Of historical note is the fact that within milliseconds of Bruno’s head striking the edge of the fireplace, a nasen beam passed through the diamond cladding of the platform, breaching it. The resulting neutronium spill eradicated all traces of the structure itself, including the bones of one Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, and had the Sabadell-Andorra been propelled by any of the technologies that were standard at the time, there is little doubt that it would have been eradicated as well.

  Bruno knew he wasn’t dead when he heard Muddy wailing. Oddly, though, what Muddy was saying was not “Poor me,” or “I am afraid,” but “Tamra! Tamra!! Oh, God, how I’ve failed you!” This was how he knew he and Muddy weren’t really so different after all.

  “He’s waking up,” a too-husky version of Vivian Rajmon’s voice said. “Cheng, come here; he’s waking up.”

  “No,” Bruno said without opening his eyes. “No, there’s no point in that.”

  “Are you all right, Bruno? We’ve put some salve on your burns, but your hair will need to be shaved …”

  Resignedly, he opened his eyes, which already ran with tears, and promised to run with many more before they were through. “Hello, Vivian. God, how beautiful you’ve become! What a young lady! It’s good of you to care for me, really; thank you. It’s quite unnecessary, though; my life is over. I’m about to kill myself.”

  Muddy shrieked again, and leaped from his
own couch to throw himself atop Bruno’s body. “No! Declarant, Lordship, you mustn’t consider it! To lose Tamra and you, how unthinkable. No! I won’t allow it!”

  “Ah, damn it,” Bruno said, struggling under Muddy’s weight. “Get off me. Get off. I’ll do as I please, damn you!”

  “You will not,” Muddy snarled. His breath was hot on Bruno’s cheek; the bristles of his beard dug into Bruno’s flesh like needles. “The Queendom still rots with collapsium, its sun is in imminent danger of swallowing a hypermass, and I have suffered a blow far worse than any torment of Marlon’s. We all have. God, I’m able to empathize. I’m able to feel the pain of all the worlds’ billions, because my own pain is finally too huge to contain.

  “Will you not avenge her, Bruno? Will you not fight for her Queendom’s safety, as she’d command you to if she were here? Have we traded places, you and I? Because I would save her worlds if I could. If I could.”

  “Let me up.”

  “Listen carefully, damn you: I’m weak and damaged and years behind your knowledge of collapsium. I will save the Queendom, but I’ve only yourself to use as my instrument. There is no other r-recourse. Let you up? By God, you’ll get up. Now!”

  His weight lifted off Bruno, but suddenly his hands were there, grabbing the ruff of Bruno’s shirt, hauling him up by it.

  “Say it,” Muddy instructed, thrusting his face once more into Bruno’s own. “Say you will live.”

  “Let go.”

  Bruno tried to shake off Muddy’s grasp and saw the wince of agony there on his brother’s face, his own face. Muddy’s weakened body struggled against pain and fatigue and despair, but his grip was surprisingly strong, the conviction behind it being much greater than Bruno’s own. It was that more than anything—that wobbly but determined strength in the face of total calamity—that altered the trajectory of Bruno’s heart.

  “All right, damn it. I’ll live,” he agreed, his voice heavy with despair. To be bested by this most pathetic of creatures, to find that he himself was the lesser man after all …

  But with nothing left to live for, he could at least, indeed, spend his life in the act of vengeance. He could, at least, do his level best to crush Marlon’s face between angry fists, to put an end to these evil plans, to sweep up every last bit of stray collapsium before irreversible havoc could be wreaked on the Queendom and its people.

  “Or die trying,” Muddy added with a sudden, strangled laugh. He released Bruno’s shirt ruff and stepped away, and suddenly tears were rolling down his face. His strength—limited, as he’d so often said—was finally expended, and he staggered and slumped against his acceleration couch.

  Not limply, though—the ertial space around them seemed to discourage that. Instead, he bounced away and collapsed in a heap beside the supine Hugo, who mewled in delight. Hello, friend!

  “Attention,” the voice of Sabadell-Andorra said. “I am receiving a radio transmission, analog voice.”

  Dear God, Bruno thought, was there no rest? Would there be no rest for him, ever? “Play it,” he said, raising the back of his couch to a working position. The whole ship smelled of sweat and scorched cloth, and his own sun-fried hair. He looked around, thinking: so crowded in here. What are we doing?

  “De Towaji?” a crackling voice asked from the ether. It was Marlon Sykes’ voice, unmistakable after all these years. “Bruno de Towaji, is that you?”

  Bruno sighed, too tired for the moment to feel a proper sense of hatred. “Reply: Yes, Marlon, you pathetic bastard. I’m here.”

  “I hoped you’d come,” Marlon said, after only a few seconds’ delay. He must be somewhere close by. Bruno scanned the trajectory display but saw no trace of a base or spaceship or other structure there, just another loose end of Ring Collapsiter swimming into view.

  “End reply,” he said. “Ship, can you localize the source of that transmission?”

  “Negative, sir. Range is indeterminate, and the signal appears to be coming from a broad region, fully half the sky.”

  Bruno frowned. “Which half?”

  “Opposite the sun.”

  “Hmm. And it all arrives at the same time? It’s a clean signal?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “How unique. It’s as if it were coming from an enormous shell antenna, symmetric about our position. But that’s unlikely, isn’t it? He’s got some trick he’s employing.”

  Marlon’s voice came again. “Bruno, are you still there?”

  “Reply: I’m here. You say you hoped I’d come?”

  Again, the delay. Then Sykes said, “I did, really. You’re my hero, sir. Didn’t your tattooed friend tell you?” The odd thing was, Marlon didn’t sound snotty or sarcastic or evil with that remark. He sounded like plain old Marlon Sykes, meaning every word he was saying.

  “Declarant Sykes,” Cheng Shiao said urgently, leaning over the radio console in an ill-considered lurch. “I must insist that you surrender yourself immediately. You’ve broken the law, sir.”

  Sykes laughed at that, and suddenly he did sound evil. “Who’ve you got down there with you, Bruno? Some policeman? No one fit to judge us, certainly. We make our own laws, we Declarant-Philanders. Even physical laws can be ruled in our favor, if we prepare the proper defense.”

  Bruno sighed, weary of all this. “What is it you want, Marlon?”

  “To business, eh? No time to catch up on the personal side? All right, then; be that way. I’ve contacted you to ask you to join me. Not quite as a full partner—I’m really not prepared to share the conceptual credit—but I could certainly use your help in the detail work. Frankly, I could use your company, too, if you’re willing to lend it.”

  Bruno was aghast. “Marlon, are you insane? Well, clearly you are, but are you stupid as well? Tamra is dead. You killed her, you … you … fiend!” There didn’t seem any better word for it. Words had simply failed him.

  “Fiend?” Marlon sounded genuinely hurt. “I’m as much a victim as you, sir. Remember, I loved her first. I didn’t kill her—why would I do that? She killed herself. Ask your little friends there.”

  Killed herself? Killed herself?

  “It’s true,” Vivian said hollowly. She’d stripped out of her quilted bodysuit and now wore only a kind of slip or under-dress that served to emphasize her all-but-grown-up figure. But her face—her grown-up face—was heartbreakingly sad. “We’d gotten the fax working again, intermittently, but it kept malfunctioning and going offline—none of us knew enough about it to say why. We had only two reflective blankets at that time, and there just wasn’t enough room for everyone underneath them. We tried taking turns that first day, but it was clear that that was just going to slowly kill us all.

  “So we tried drawing straws, but Her Majesty somehow rigged the draw. She lost five times in a row. We didn’t let it stand, of course, though she kept insisting it was her duty, that ‘not one more citizen’ would die in her stead. But what was our duty, if not to protect her? Then Cheng Peterson died—we found him with his skin burned black and his tongue all puffed out—and she just … walked out into the sunlight and cut her throat. I don’t know where she got the knife; I never saw it before. We tried to save her. We tried, but you can’t fix a carotid artery under those conditions; you just can’t. So she … died. And the next day—”

  Vivian, clutching tightly at the wellwood mantelpiece, choked momentarily, her beautiful face streaked with speedy, inertialess tears. The strain of the long ordeal showed clearly in her features. Finally, she found enough composure to continue. “The next day, we got the fax working again for nearly an hour. We got the tents up, and the moisture condensers … She would have lived, Bruno. She would have. The Queen of All Things sacrificed herself for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing,” Muddy said, struggling to rise from his heap on the floor. He looked dizzy. He looked, truthfully, like he should just stay put. “It was a gesture of, of … d-d-defiance. Perhaps she knew she was bait in a trap.”

  “No,” Sh
iao said, shaking his crew cut head sadly, “the cruiser didn’t try to rescue us until five days after that. She couldn’t have known.”

  “An affirmation of life for the rest of you, then,” Muddy said harshly. “Ill considered, perhaps, but she l-l-loved all of you enough to do it, and that’s the thing that counts. She died—f-fittingly—of an excess of love.”

  “You see?” Marlon piped up from the radio speaker. “I was as shocked and shattered as any of you. I’d roll back time to that moment if I could.” Then, more ominously: “Perhaps some day I shall.”

  Bruno’s weariness had been subsiding, replaced bit by bit with a deep, sustaining anger. Now it blossomed. “You created the situation, Marlon. You put her there in harm’s way, and you could have removed her from it when you saw the way things were going. You’re twice the bastard I thought, for laying the blame on chance when you know perfectly well it’s your own damned fault. Why would I possibly want to join you? What hope or endeavor could we possibly share?”

  There was a long pause, until finally Marlon answered. “I was never sure if you knew, Bruno. When I had the idea, I figured surely it was one you’d considered and discarded. But the math checked out, so I guessed you’d just been squeamish about it. Perfectly in keeping with your character, right? You actually care about people on some level, which is great. Really, I mean that in a nonsarcastic way. But you were all alone up there on that little planet, your research going off in these weird directions, and I saw it’d be thousands of years before you actually got anywhere with it.

  “That first time you came back to the Queendom, I thought you’d call me out for what I was doing. When you didn’t … Well, I was full of resentment then. I was happy to see you go, and happy to capture your image for … well, malicious purposes. And the image confirmed your ignorance! The second time, though, I figured you must have worked it out. You were very methodical, so when you said nothing, I dared to hope you were secretly on my side. It made me feel better about you, about how great everyone thinks you are. If you were working on my idea, well, that would make it all worthwhile. And if not, then maybe you weren’t so smart after all. And that would be an important discovery, too.”