The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  He’d like to move the hull so his chair is facing backward, to serve as a crash couch. Because yes, even the best landing is going to be rough. But with the starboard charges expended, that would still leave him with one uncorrectable axis. Instead, he points the chair in the “caps” direction, ninety degrees from where he wants it, fires two charges in perpendicular directions, then points the chair forward again and quickly straps in, so he can take another sextant reading on the planette.

  Perfect? Close enough? No, he’s off again, drifting somehow from an ideal ballistic trajectory. He starts dialing for another correction, realizes he’s out of time, and hurriedly stows the sextant instead, to keep it from becoming a projectile in its own right.

  He’s about to unstrap again, to face the chair aft for impact, but he’s really out of time, the hull already singing with atmospheric contact. So he grabs an armrest with one hand and the parachute’s ripcord with the other, and prepares to be thrown hard against the straps.

  There are prayers he could utter right now, battle hymns he could sing, but perhaps thinking of them is enough. Quicker, anyway; he runs through several in the blink of an eye. And then the sphere slaps into denser air—more gently than he’s expecting. Which could be bad, which could mean he’s cut too high, his angle too shallow. Will he skip off the planette’s atmosphere to tumble back Luneward in disgrace?

  Air is squealing all around him, and for a moment, he sees Varna through three separate portholes, and hazy blue-black sky through a fourth. He sees individual blades of grass, no fooling, and then the ground is retreating again and it’s time, slightly past time, to pop the chute. The sudden weight of his arm seems to help as he yanks the lanyard; he’s looking “down” across the sphere, decelerating hard. He hears the chute deploy with a clanging of brass doors, and suddenly he is facing the right way as air drag pulls it around behind the vehicle and jerks its lines taut.

  And then disaster strikes, in the form of a treetop’s spreading arms. He doesn’t hit them hard, but for an instant there are actual acacia leaves snapping across the porthole glass, and the contact is enough to set the sphere rolling around its inner cage. Which is bad, because the chute, which hasn’t fully opened, is fouling—he can see it behind him, an orange-and-white streamer, its hemp lines twirling together in an inextricable mess.

  And then the blue of atmosphere is fading to black again, and after three long seconds of deceleration he’s back, suddenly, in zero gee. Having missed the planette. Having actually missed the damn planette. Through the portholes, the slowly tumbling view is clear enough: Varna shrinking away behind him.

  Varna moving laterally?

  Varna approaching again? More slowly, yes, but definitely approaching. Because he’s cut through a swath of thick atmosphere, because he’s hit a tree, because he’s deployed a streamer chute that, while it couldn’t quite stop him, could at least slow him down below the planette’s escape velocity.

  The air doesn’t whistle this time, barely puffs, barely makes a sound at all as he falls back through it. What does create sound and sensation is the water beneath the air, which he slaps into hard, and the solid surface a couple of meters beneath that. He crashes against it and rolls; through the portholes he sees foam, blue water, blue sky, brown sand or silt kicking off the bottom in his wake.

  The sphere tumbles around the screeching gyro platform for a few moments, but the platform is overwhelmed and starts to tumble along as well, its bearings frozen against the spinning hull. His chair goes with it, tumbling, and he loses his sense of direction almost immediately. Then, with a jerk, all movement stops. He’s looking upward: sky only.

  He has landed on the planette. His mad scheme has become, retroactively, a perfectly reasonable idea.

  To his sides he sees fish and waving grasses, sunlight filtering down in rays through the shallow water. One side of the sphere is higher, its porthole only half-submerged. The shores are hidden behind the knife-edge of water against the glass, but he does see treetops in the distance, perhaps the very ones he struck. The porthole between his legs shows a sandy bottom, a few crushed reeds.

  He takes a few moments to gather himself—it was a rough landing, and he remains quite reasonably terrified—but time is short, and his business urgent. He finds the buckles of his seat harness: damp brass, warmed by his body. He’s unbuckled it a hundred times today; the action is as automatic as coughing.

  Being a sphere, his carriage-sized spaceship was expected to roll a bit on landing, coming to rest in an unknown orientation. For this reason, the sphere has two exit hatches, one presently underwater, the other above it, pointing skyward at a cockeyed angle. He climbs to this one, using the potter’s wheel and gyro assembly for a staircase.

  He moves carefully; it’s a small world, yes, but thanks to the planette’s superdense neutronium core, gravity here is “gee,” or about the same as at the surface of Lune. Or, reaching back a ways into the mists of time, Earth. With one hand he grasps a slick handle on the hull; with the other, the locking wheel on the hatch itself. It spins easily—no screeching or sticking—and he’s abstractly relieved by this.

  Like many wise men, Radmer worries a lot, and this errand has given his imagination more than the usual to work with. But while the sphere was built in a hurry, he has to give a nod to the smiths and armorers and watchmakers of Highrock, who clearly knew their business well enough.

  Having landed in one piece, this craft has every chance of taking him home again. Compared to this planette, Lune is a huge target, virtually impossible to miss; so as long as the motors ignite and the parachute opens cleanly, he should be back in the war by next Friday at the latest.

  Back in the death, the misery, the collapse of nations. The people of Lune are not Radmer’s children per se, although a great many of them are, in one way or another, his descendants. And the world itself is his, or was long ago. How gladly he would die to protect it!

  His hatch flips inward, clanks against the hull, then hangs down, swinging back and forth, while Radmer works out his handholds on the outer hull and, finally, lifts himself through.

  It’s like climbing up into a pleasant dream. It’s warm out here, and the bright sky and brighter sun cast brilliant reflections on the lapping waters of the sea, which, spanning eighty meters at its widest, stretches nearly from horizon to horizon. The shoreline is a few meters of pristine beach, fading back into palm trees and elephant grass. The breeze smells sweetly pungent, like ice cream and salt somehow. Like fresh beer and flowers.

  Farther back, behind the planette’s round edge, rise a pair of low hills, green with pine and acacia, and on one of these hills is exactly what Radmer has come here to find, what the astronomer Rigby has claimed to see from his mountain observatory on the clearest of nights: a little white cottage of wellstone marble.

  Silently, on some great universal scorecard, Radmer’s obsession ticks over from “reasonable” to “downright sensible.” So like any dutiful soldier, he strips off his coat and riding leathers, then hops in the water and swims for it.

  It isn’t far. Soon he is dripping on the white sands of the beach, strolling in his felt johnnysuit beneath the shade of palms, on a course for the not-so-distant hills. The air is hazy, perhaps by design; it enhances the illusion of distance, of space. He loses sight of the cottage as he plunges into the chest-high wall of grass, then is startled at how quickly it reappears again, immediately before him.

  Overgrown, yes, overshadowed by vegetation. But certainly not a ruin, sitting here in this little glade or clearing on the hillside. Nor has it been abandoned. Kneeling in the dirt before it is the figure of a naked man, white hair frizzed and trailing to his waist.

  You know that feeling, when you see something at once ancient and familiar, when your neck prickles and your stomach flutters and all your little hairs stand at attention? This is how Radmer feels as he approaches the cottage, as he eyeballs the naked man kneeling there in front of it.

  He considers
kneeling himself, but rejects the idea.

  “Bruno,” he says instead, from ten meters away. “Bruno de Towaji.” A whole string of titles could be appended to the name, both fore and aft, but applying them to this dismal figure seems inappropriate. Still, there is no question in Radmer’s voice, or in his mind. There is no mistaking that face. True, the ravages of time are apparent; the Olders age in slow but very particular ways. Hair and beard faded yellow-white, yes, and grown out to a length past which it simply frays and abrades. The skin smooth, but deeply freckled and tanned with the weary brown of accumulated melanin, sharply creased in its various corners and crannies. Teeth worn to chalky nubs in that slack, hanging jaw.

  Radmer himself looks somewhat like this, but with his shorter hair and longer teeth, and the fact that he’s clothed, it isn’t quite so apparent. And though the armies to which he has formally belonged are all dust and gone, he still carries himself like a soldier, while the man in the dirt—digging up yams with his bare hands, Radmer sees now—has the absent, casual quality of a sleepwalker.

  And something more: the eyes flicking slowly from here to there, taking in the house, the forest, the soft ground beneath them, the sea. Lingering overlong on the distant brass sphere, and on Radmer himself—disturbances in this long-familiar environment. But he’s not really seeing them. Not seeing at all. Or rather: seeing but not processing. Not affected by what is seen.

  The old man rises, clutching two small yams in each hand, and begins walking—not limping or shuffling—toward the little house. Radmer follows.

  “De Towaji, sir. Sire. I need to speak with you.”

  The old man pauses, casts a cloudy, troubled glance over his shoulder, then continues on.

  This is a condition Radmer has heard of: neurosensory dystrophia—pathways worn smooth in the brain through constant, repetitive stimulation. When the nervous system is old and the daily routine goes on unbroken for years or decades, its victims can be trapped by it. He’s heard of couples and even whole villages succumbing, but typically it’s the people who live alone—especially in isolated areas—who are most at risk.

  He imagines Bruno de Towaji performing these same actions day after day, varying little or not at all. Like an animate fossil. Like a ghost, haunting this place, oblivious to the fact of his own demise.

  The good news is that the symptoms are temporary, subsiding soon after the routine itself is interrupted. The arrival of a visitor is normally sufficient. But barring strange miracles, de Towaji must have been here on the planette for a long time indeed—much longer than Radmer cares to think about. Whole histories come and gone, an unthinkable span of time.

  Radmer follows along into the shade of the overhanging forest, and then the old man enters the cottage through an open doorway that looks like it may never have had a door of any kind, or even a curtain. The windows are the same. Probably there’s no winter here, perhaps no serious weather of any kind. Rigby could confirm that. Still, there’s something unsavorily primeval about a house fully open on the sides.

  The inside is a single room, shockingly clean, dominated by a water fountain made, like the house and floor, of white wellstone marble. Here de Towaji kneels again, and patiently washes the four yams he’s retrieved.

  Radmer tries again. “I suspect you can hear me, Sire. Perhaps you’ll remember an architect by the name of Mursk? Conrad Mursk? We worked together once, long ago. Before that, I was a companion to your son.”

  When the yams are clean, de Towaji sets them down on the floor, rises again, and moves to a corner of the house, where a pile of small stones rests atop a little shelf. Flint? For starting a cooking fire? Surely raw yams would have busted the poor man’s guts out long ago. He then turns toward the house’s only exit and commences that slow, deliberate walk again. When Radmer blocks the way, de Towaji literally runs into him.

  Then blinks and looks him over.

  “Sire,” Radmer says.

  Slowly, the old man nods. “Ah. Ah. I … know you.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Mursk.”

  “Yes, Sire. Very good.”

  “The architect. You … crushed the moon. Squoze it.”

  Radmer glances behind him at the half-disc of Lune in the sky. The clouds, the continents, the splatters of ocean … . But this isn’t a map. This is the world itself, seen from a height of fifty thousand kilometers. “We crushed it together, Sire. Long ago.”

  Gruffly: “You’re … in my way.”

  Radmer can’t bring himself to bar the doorway any longer. Bowing, he steps back and to the side, allowing de Towaji to pass. At once, the old man’s expression eases.

  “Forgive me, Sire. I don’t know if I’m rescuing you, or desecrating … Excuse me! Sire!”

  Impatience is a rare emotion among the Olders, but seeing de Towaji prepare to ignore him again, Radmer feels it now, and dares to grab his long-ago master by the arm.

  “Bruno! I have little time for this. Rouse yourself and listen to me: a great evil has been loosed upon that squozen moon of ours. Its future is now very much in peril.”

  The old man frowns, and it is no regal frown meant to convey official displeasure, but a private and unconscious one. A gesture of simple unhappiness.

  “Future,” the old man muses, or perhaps recites. He continues looking down the path ahead, deeper into the forest. “I remember that word. Where is the future? When will it get here?”

  “I fear it will not, Sire.”

  De Towaji’s gaze clears a bit, and a look of pained amusement passes briefly over his features. He speaks very slowly. “Lad, I guarantee it will not. All these … futures we thought we were building. Where are they? In the past. This is the past, by the time I finish saying so.” He pauses for a long moment to make the point, then adds, “There is no future, only past.”

  Now Radmer is angry. “I’m not here to debate the semantics of it, Sire. People are dying as we speak, and still others are being enslaved. Millions more are at risk, and there’s an ill thing to allow into our past, if it’s within our power to prevent it.”

  Bruno tries to pull away. “I’m in the past as well, lad. Leave me.” Then, more regally: “Leave me.”

  “I won’t,” Radmer tells him. “Not yet—not until you’ve heard me out.”

  Resistance ceases; a kind of bitter calm settles over de Towaji. He is waking up, yes, and he doesn’t like it. The look is clear in his eyes: a fear of being needed again, of bearing up under that burden after being free of it for so very long. Radmer understands, suddenly, that the old man’s isolation and senility did not come upon him by accident.

  His grip tightens, and his voice is almost cruel as he says, “Even if you were dead I would make you listen, Sire. Because I fancy you can help us, and I don’t much care if it pleases you. Where else have we got to turn? Nowhere. And when I speak the name of our peril, I think you might even want to help.”

  “Unlikely. You have no idea how wearily I washed up on this shore, lad. Not the least beginning of an idea.”

  Tightly: “I fancy I do, Sire. I’ve been depended on a time or two myself. And we live on, don’t we? Never too old to be bothered, to be mined for blood and sweat, to be dusted off and put to use again in one way or another. Not even a grave to rest in, not for the likes of us. But the alternative—to live on with no purpose at all—is appalling and obscene.”

  Finally, Bruno de Towaji matches Radmer’s anger, and meets his gaze. “You think so, do you? Smug bastard. Speak the name of your peril, then, and begone from my sight.”

  Radmer does as he’s told, and has the grim pleasure of watching the old man’s face light up with a terrible mix of wonder and righteous anger and, yes, even fear.

  Now de Towaji is fully awake, blinking, looking Radmer up and down. “Lune, you say? The collapsiter grid is gone. Did I dream that? Between the stars we travel no more. How did you get here, lad? And … how will you return?”

  Radmer feels the corners of his mouth begin to
stir. Seeing Bruno again has brought back a lot of memories, a lot of old grief. With the clarity of hindsight, he does feel some understanding of his bonds to this man, but they were formed and broken long ago, in events so huge that from the inside they hadn’t looked like anything at all. Joyrides and camp riots, the green virile fires of youth.

  But this is too practical a question for a man who wants to be left alone. Radmer senses that a hurdle has been crossed, a new cascade of events set in motion. He will be taking this man, this intellect, this trove of living history back to Lune with him. And in that moment he dares, for the first time in months, to hope.

  By Wil McCarthy

  Aggressor Six

  Flies from the Amber

  The Fall of Sirius

  Murder in the Solid State

  Bloom

  The Collapsium

  about the author

  Wil McCarthy, after ten years of rocket science with Lockheed Martin, traded the hectic limelight of the space program for the peace and quiet (ha!) of commercial robotics at Omnitech, where he works as a research and development hack.

  He writes a monthly column for the SciFi Channel’s news magazine (www.scifi.com/sfw), and his less truthful writings have appeared in Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and various anthologies. His most recent novel, Bloom, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Further biographical and bibliographic information is available at:

  www.sff.net/people/wmccarth