by Wil McCarthy
Her Majesty smiled tightly and brushed a lock of hair from her face in precisely the way that had inspired the love of billions. “That was no trivial matter, Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji. You make yourself difficult to visit, and then complain that no one takes the quite enormous trouble to visit you anyway? We do have other concerns, you know. A whole society’s worth. If a thought is spared for you every now and then, it’s certainly not because you’ve encouraged it.”
Bruno felt his irritation meter rising. Human genetics, though, had always included a mechanism for awe in the face of celebrity. This was the very reason for the Queendom’s founding, the reason for all the peoples of all the worlds to demand that the tiny Pacific nation of Tonga yield up its young princess to be the Queen of them all. And against so deep an instinct, what chance did mere irritation have? He knew her as much more than a figurehead or celebrity, of course, but he’d long ago discovered just how little this mattered.
Bruno bowed his head. “You know me too well, Highness. Thus, you’ll know that my apology is sincere. Have I wronged you? Questioned your right to demand audience? I have no explanation, save the lateness of the hour and my surprise on seeing you here.”
“Accepted,” the Queen said evenly, with a slight nod of the head.
Able to resist his hunger no longer, Bruno picked up one of the little dishes his servants had left and began popping peeled grapes into his mouth, one by one.
“Excuse me,” he said around a mouthful of them. “I’m quite famished. Will you join me in a meal?”
She shook her head, but touched one of the glasses on the tray. “A drink, perhaps. This is lemonade?”
“Indeed,” he said proudly, “fresh squeezed. Faxed juices may be identical to the taste, but who says taste matters more than principle? I grow the sugar, as well.”
She smiled. “Your father would be proud. Your robots grow it, though, I hope.”
“Well,” he admitted, “I sometimes help. At any rate, it’s clear you haven’t come here to discuss agriculture. I’ll waste no more of your time. What is it you require of me?”
Her Majesty sighed, looking suddenly tired and unhappy. Looking, actually, like she’d been concealing these things for far too long, and was relieved, finally, to let them out. “It’s your expertise with the Ring Collapsiter, I’m afraid.”
“Ah.” Bruno nodded, only a little surprised. “ ‘Also grow tévé,’ is that it?”
She flared visibly at the proverb, taking his meaning immediately. How many times had that hardy, bitter weed sustained Tonga’s people in times of famine? The wise farmer set aside a little plot for it—the damned stuff needed no tending, just a bit of clear ground to stretch its leaves across. Bruno’s barb was double pronged: On the one hand, Tamra was treating him as a kind of Royal Tévé, which seemed a fine way to repay his decades of adoration. On the other hand, he was the one who’d insisted on maintaining a palace vegetable garden, tévé and all, and he had little doubt it had vanished under shrubbery and elephant grass within a month of his departure.
Tamra eyed him silently for a few seconds before replying. “ ‘Plant a coconut and leave it alone.’ ”
“Hmmph,” he said, and suddenly he was fighting off a smirk. A coconut was tough and hairy, difficult to reach without a good climb, and took years and years to produce anything useful when planted in even the best of soils. Bother it, Tamra was good at this sort of repartee—she’d have him tied up in neat little bows if he tried to outproverb her again.
His spasm of good humor quickly faded into worry. He’d left the Queendom with a solution, a means to stabilize the Ring Collapsiter and prevent any recurrence of the accident that had knocked it free. And once completed, once its final intricate shape obliterated all gravitational trace of its existence, the structure would be no more capable of falling into the sun than the Earth was of falling out of its orbit. But so long as it remained unfinished, the Ring Collapsiter was inherently perilous, inherently difficult to protect from the vagaries of time and space and chance. Every collapson weighed eight billion tons, after all, and even at a range of forty million kilometers, the sun’s gravity was considerable. Precautions or no, nature wanted the two to come together.
“The details are complex,” Tamra said, taking a sip of lemonade and glancing approvingly down at the glass. “I’m not entirely sure I understand them.”
“Is Declarant Sykes still in charge of the project?”
“He is, yes.”
“Then I shall get the details from him. But the ring is falling again? And our previous methods are unable to save it?”
She nodded. “I’m told that’s so.”
“Will it take six months, this time? Or is it free-falling under pure gravitation? Have I time for a night’s sleep before faxing myself downsystem?”
Tamra appeared to consider for a moment, then nodded. “We have some time, yes. It’s ten months before the crisis comes to a head, and I’m inclined to think we’re in very deep trouble if you need every moment of that. So the answer is yes, you may remain here until morning. I’ll send a copy of myself down with news of the delay.”
“Where are your robots?” Bruno asked again. It was they who should do such messenger work, as well as their primary function as bodyguards. In truth, Her Majesty looked almost naked without them.
She laughed musically and rose from her seat. “Do I need them here, Philander? From whom are they to protect me? There are … times … when even the most discreet witnesses are unwelcome.”
Bruno frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Oh, Bruno,” she said, stepping around the table to plant her lips on his.
4. See Appendix A. Feigenbaum’s Number, this page
5. See Appendix A. True Vacuum, this page
chapter eight
in which the nature of time is explained
Bruno never could say no to her. Or rarely, anyhow, and last night they’d fallen together like randy teenagers, their decades apart like some kind of annoyingly long weekend. Still in love, damn them; all their fighting and sulking was for naught, a moment’s tantrum in the long, long morning of their lives. But today—despite the way it had begun—was not about the two of them, but about the Queendom itself. Today was business sans pleasure, and what Queen and Philander didn’t know how to separate the two? Formality seeped and hardened between them as they dined, dressed, and finally, traveled.
If Bruno expected to fax through to a work platform suspended picturesquely beneath the Ring Collapsiter, he was disappointed. Where they ended up instead was a vast, gloomy chamber of hulking gray machinery that hummed.
Tamra slipped her fingers from his, completing the separation. Bruno’s hand felt curiously empty.
He sniffed. The atmosphere was thick and dry and warm, and reeked sharply of wintergreen and burning feathers, a sign that PCBs or other heavy, chlorinated oils were overheating in strained electrical transformers. A trouble sign, to be sure, but not half as troubling as that hum. Most of the basic tones were subsonic, sensed in the bones rather than the eardrums, but there were overtones and harmonics aplenty, a cacophony that somehow managed to seem both too bass and too shrill for comfort. The noise didn’t seem loud until he tried to speak and found he almost had to shout.
“Where are we?”
Behind Tamra, a hemicylinder of gray metal hulked seamlessly atop a seamless metal deck, rising up into the slightly hazy air like a bald mountain.
“Grapple station,” she replied in much the same tone.
“Ah.”
The hum and reek now made sense: this place was an enormous gravity generator, a kind of God-sized cable winch holding up the Ring Collapsiter.6 It had best keep holding, too; black holes inside the sun, even miniature “semisafe” ones, would collapse it to a cinder, assuming they didn’t first tear it to shreds. But despite everyone’s best intentions, despite precautions and failsafes and contingency plans, the ring of crystalline collapsium had slippe
d sunward again. And this grapple station, whatever its capability, was clearly straining past any reasonable endurance to slow the descent.
“Big,” he said, unnecessarily.
“Quite,” Her Majesty agreed.
The fax gate behind them quietly disgorged a pair of dainty robots, all silver and platinum and chrome. White caps adorned their heads, and white frilled collars adorned their necks. Their sexless torsos and faceless faces were smooth, unadorned expanses of bright metal. Their silver hands gripped ornate pistols of delicate—but nonetheless menacing—design. The robots bowed to Her Majesty and placed themselves at respectful distances on either side of her.
“You’ve changed guards,” Bruno observed. “They used to be gold.”
Tamra smiled, a bit wistfully. “That’s right. They used to be taller, too, and thicker around the middle. But times change, you know. Fashions and preferences change. Even if yours do not.”
“Oh, humph,” he replied, walking past her leftmost guard, around toward the huge gray hemicylinder. He placed a hand on it, felt its desperate hum. “Who says I haven’t changed? How would you know?”
She shrugged. “It’s not an insult, just an observation. Your clothing, your words and mannerisms—all are decades out of touch. Your hair is different than last time, I suppose. Less wild, less gray. It suits you better. When I’m with you, though, I feel almost as if no time has passed at all. You bring my distant decades back to life.”
Bruno humphed again. “What you call ‘time,’ Majesty, is more a social than a physical phenomenon. You don’t perceive this, because you’re inside the social structure that creates it. But watching clocks and calendars, indexing your memories by popular music—these are learned, unnatural behaviors. Mark my words: living alone is the ultimate exploration of inner truth. It’s one thing to see yourself as a web of changing relationships: to others, to society, to material things and places. It’s quite another to see simply yourself, to be your own companion, to talk to yourself and answer back honestly. Your times change because others change them for you. My changes come purely from within.”
“Wait. Be quiet.”
“Why,” he chided, “because your illusions can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny?”
She waved a hand in annoyance. “Bruno, be quiet. Someone’s coming.”
He followed her gaze. There in the distance, walking the kilometers-long avenue between hulking machines, was a pale young woman with tightly braided hair the color of metallic platinum. Bruno’s vision was quite good—whose wasn’t?—and for a moment he inspected her distant features, trying to identify the face. Was this someone he’d known, in the days before his exile? If so, it wasn’t evident, but then again appearance was a malleable thing, programmable through any fax machine. She looked young but mature, which of course meant nothing at all.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you know her?”
Tamra shook her head. The robots beside her faded back into the shadows of machinery, their blank faces turned toward the approaching woman.
“Hello!” Bruno called out.
“Hi,” the woman said back, closer now, well within hailing distance. “Welcome. I was told to expect you.”
“Told? By Declarant Sykes?”
“Correct,” she said, then made a skittish, nervous little laugh. The toss of her shining braids was, he thought, calculated for nonchalance. “I’m Deliah van Skettering, Lead Componeer for the Ministry of Grapples. Good day, Your Majesty. And you, sir; you’re Bruno de Towaji? It’s an honor, truly. I’ve studied collapsium engineering my whole adult life. In fact as a student I used to keep a statue of you on my desk for inspiration.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, well.”
He never had discovered a comfortable response for statements like that one. Not that he heard them all that often, but those little copper statues had been pretty popular for a while until, mercifully, fashion had turned its attention elsewhere. Talented students and componeers seemed to prefer living role models to dead ones, for which he could hardly blame them. Less comprehensible were the ordinary citizens, with no interest in collapsium or telecommunications or telegravitic engineering, who nonetheless made him a subject of their public admiration. For his wealth, he supposed, although many of the Queendom’s plutocrats reaped as much scorn and envy as actual respect.
So why Bruno? Who could say. Of such mysteries was society constructed. Tamra, at least, had always treated him like an ordinary person. She’d liked the idea that he was smart and famous and rich—with all of humanity to choose from, it surely helped to have some screening criteria—but having grown up a princess, she wasn’t terribly impressed by these things. Impressing her was a whole separate enterprise. He truly wished he could return the favor, disregarding her station and influence to deal with the woman herself, but that was a trick he’d never quite managed in all their years together.
Not that he’d been deferential, exactly. She didn’t go for that, and in fact he’d been a real bum sometimes, pushing her away, trampling her feelings half deliberately so she’d send him off to “exile” in his laboratory. But even then he’d been acutely conscious of her station. Perhaps that’s why he did it, or part of the why: to rebel against the obvious power imbalance between them. And to have something to make up for, yes. They were always a great pair for making up.
“He’s pleased to meet you,” Tamra said to this Deliah van Skettering, meanwhile offering Bruno a lightly reproachful elbow in the ribs.
“Er, yes.”
Finally, Deliah presented herself before them. “Your Majesty,” she said, curtseying deeply, spreading an imaginary skirt even though she was actually wearing trousers and work boots and a heavy brown shirt made from some dense, wet-looking material. “Declarant-Philander,” she said to Bruno, and curtseyed again.
Bruno couldn’t help sizing her up: tall and sturdy, quick, self-assured. But something told him she was maybe a little bit hollow inside. Unfulfilled? She reminded him of a weaver woman he’d known in Girona: Margaret something. Master of a craft that was widely admired and very much in demand, but difficult and rather dull in the practice. “The prison of my talent,” she’d often called it. Margaret’s frustration had always seemed a terrible shame to Bruno, but if people could choose their abilities he supposed the world would drown itself in athletes and guitar players and raunchy but lovable sex artists. If you had a job you were good at and appreciated for, well, sometimes that had to be enough.
He bowed.
“Doubly honored,” Deliah said nervously. “Brushes with greatness, oh my. I’ve had this department for eight years, but this is the month people choose to notice.”
“Naturally,” Tamra said.
“I’m to take you to Declarant Sykes,” Deliah added, casting a glance in the direction she’d come from. “Unfortunately, the station’s only fax gate is on the opposite end from the instrument room. It’s a bit of a walk.”
“Marlon is mucking with instruments again?” Tamra asked in a disapproving tone.
“Um, well, we’ve been tuning the revpics, trying to bring the frequencies up. It’s slow work.”
“And rather beneath your rank,” Tamra observed, falling into step behind her.
“Perhaps, yes.”
The hum of machinery followed them as they walked.
“Well,” Bruno said, “it’s a very formidable station you have here. There are hundreds of others just like it?”
“That’s so.”
Bruno couldn’t help but be impressed. Projects like this one, however ill fated, bespoke a Queendom far bolder, far wealthier and more ambitious, than the one he’d left. With death a hunted quality, faxed away with every minor journey, perhaps civilization was finally able to take a longer view. Was it easier to make such pipe dreams come true when the benefits were for the builders themselves, rather than some hypothetical “posterity?”
He traced his hand along an enormous and unpleasantly warm resistor.
�
��The main beam holds up the collapsiter. I’m guessing its complement is anchored to a star?”
Deliah turned and smiled at him, as if the question pleased her. “Several stars, actually. It’s like sinking tent stakes into sand—the more you distribute the load, the less slippage you get.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“Partly my own idea, I’ll confess. After all, we don’t want to spend all our time tightening the, uh, tent cords.”
“Indeed.”
“It’s only for a few decades, anyway, until the ring is self-supporting, like a bridge. That’s the only reason we can do it this way. We couldn’t build a permanent structure of gravity beams—the anchor stars would all crash together eventually.”
“Obviously, yes,” Bruno agreed, then wondered if his tone weren’t a bit overbearing or dismissive. “I, uh, see you’ve worked out all the details.”
That comment clearly didn’t please Deliah van Skettering. Of course, yes, because she hadn’t worked everything out, had not managed to prevent this newest disaster. Would she feel his words to be an insult? Bother it, people were so damned easy to offend. Especially the friendly ones. As always, Bruno could be offensive without lifting a finger.
“The Declarant’s social skills don’t see much use these days,” Tamra said, touching both Bruno and Deliah on the shoulder. She sounded amused, though not entirely patient about it. “Do please forgive him.”
“No, he’s quite right,” Deliah sighed. “Patience and mathematics. Patience and mathematics. If I’ve learned anything from his example, it’s that. If I’ve learned anything.”
“Here now,” Bruno protested. Many notions could be drawn from his example, surely, but he’d hate to count self-pity among them. “Mistakes happen, young lady. Don’t blame me for blaming you, because I haven’t. If, at some point, I do blame you, you’ll know it unambiguously. As you see, I’m not a subtle man.”
Deliah ducked her head. “Of … course, Declarant. Forgive me.”
“Oh, none of that,” he said, waving a hand. “I won’t hear of it; you’ll have us tied in knots. So you’re the director around here, are you?”