The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  “For eight years now, yes.”

  “And you say you’ve had no other problems?”

  “Major ones? There are always problems—”

  He waved a hand. “Of course, of course. I’m not grilling you; I’m just, er, making conversation. Since it appears we’ll be working together.”

  “Ah. Well, for what it’s worth, I came to physics fairly late in life. And management. I’m from Africa.”

  Bruno wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Is where you’re from a significant factor here?”

  She gave an uncomfortable laugh. “It can be, yes. Growing up on a photocollector farm, you don’t think about much beyond the weather, the maintenance, and maybe a strong boy or two who’ll keep the dust off and laugh at your jokes. But University changes you—that is its purpose, I suppose.”

  “Changes you? Leads you toward the sciences, you mean.”

  “Toward the management of sciences, yes. What a shock, to discover I was a shepherd of physicists! By my second year at KSPA I was the department gopher, organizing all the home conferences, and eventually all the conferences all over the solar system. My grades were good, too, and my thesis did win that prize. Suddenly I was ‘Laureate van Skettering,’ right when my kiddie marriage was falling apart and I needed a fresh start anyway. But from the moment I hit the job exchange, it was clear I was headed for administration, not math.

  “Knowing the material is fine—it’s common—but it’s hard for one person to really move the world. Even you needed a cast of thousands in the end, Declarant, if I may say so. Turning prototype to product to end-user installed base is the real test of an idea, and knowing how to pull a team together—and hold them together when the going gets tough—is the key to that.”

  Bruno could hardly argue with that; if everyone were like him, there’d probably be no commerce or progress at all, at least in the conventional sense.

  “And yet,” Bruno said, groping to understand her point, “you’re still surprised to find yourself here. Far from Africa, among monarchs and Declarants, plotting the salvation of a star and all its worlds.”

  “Exactly.” Deliah nodded once, emphatically.

  He cleared his throat. “You, ah, do realize that the rest of us feel that way too? I myself grew up in the apartment above a little Spanish tavern.”

  “I know,” she replied quickly.

  Well of course she did. She’d already admitted to being an admirer, and Bruno’s life was in the public domain, open to all possible scrutiny. All at once, he was uncomfortable again, feeling exposed. Feeling far from his home, wherever that might be.

  “Life is full of surprises,” he added, more sourly than was probably wise.

  Suddenly, they were at the instrument room, a narrow closet Bruno might almost have missed if a pair of silk-trousered legs hadn’t been poking out of it. The walls and ceiling were of wellstone; a panoply of dials and gauges and keyboards and graphical displays raced and oozed and flickered around the flat surfaces, whose composition bubbled cubistically between metal and porcelain and various forms of plastic.

  “What happened?” Deliah demanded of the legs. She was eyeing the wellstone surfaces with tired exasperation. Then, more respectfully, she said, “Can I help, Declarant?”

  “No,” a voice said from beyond the legs. They disappeared, Bruno saw, into a slot at the bottom of the closet’s back wall. Big enough to hold a human torso, though probably not comfortably, not unless the space opened up back there behind the wall.

  “You realize we’re going to have to restart the calibration estimates from scratch,” Deliah complained. “You do realize that?”

  “I do, yes. Thank you.” Presently, the owner of the legs shuffled and scooted and rocked out of the opening. Only when the face emerged was Bruno sure that this was, in fact, Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes. Awkwardly, Sykes straightened himself up to his full height. He wiped his hands on the blue velvet and fine, gold-white embroidery of his vest, leaving black smudges there.

  “Marlon!” Her Majesty snapped. “What on Earth are you doing?”

  The Queen’s robots tensed on either side of her, but Sykes just flashed an easy grin and leaned back—carelessly, Bruno thought—against the madly shifting wall of the instrument room. “On Earth, I don’t believe I’m doing anything at the moment. I do have copies on half a dozen grapple stations, probably all doing the same thing right now.”

  “Which is?” Tamra demanded, arching an eyebrow.

  “Retrofitting the equipment, obviously.”

  Her Majesty’s suede-booted foot tapped thrice on the decking. She seemed to consider for a moment before saying, “Declarant, the Queendom pays handsomely for your services. We expect handsome service in return. This—” She waggled a finger at his stained hands and clothing. “—is the best use of your talents right now? It must be, surely, or you’d be doing something else. Correct?”

  “Ah.” Marlon’s smile faltered, then deepened. “Tamra, my pay is by the job, not the copy-hour. Consequently I find it easier to send my own copies to perform certain tasks, rather than having to explain these tasks to others, particularly since our laborers and technicians are operating at full legal capacity already.”

  “I’ll issue a writ to waive the copy-hour limits,” Tamra said. “I should have done it already, I see. How long has this been going on?”

  He shrugged. “Not long.”

  “A week,” Deliah van Skettering chipped in, her tone supportive and apologetic. “I may have requested … that is, my requests of Declarant Sykes may have been …”

  “Be silent, Laureate-Director,” Tamra said to the woman. Then, less haughtily, “All my conversations are official. Speaking out of turn is disruptive.”

  Reddening, Deliah bowed her head, saying nothing.

  Bruno empathized: Deliah was no practiced courtier, after all, and she was—admirably—trying to take responsibility for her own job. But Tamra’s role was equally clear: bureaucrats and functionaries must not be permitted to undermine her authority even in these tiny, offhand ways. A Queen must exude power and influence from every pore, yes? Else what good was a Queendom at all?

  “Er, shall we … proceed?” he asked, when a few pointed moments had passed. It was a calculated risk: even he couldn’t talk back to her in public. Not without paying.

  “We shall,” Tamra said lightly. And that was that.

  “What is it you’re doing there?” Bruno asked Marlon. “Manual labor? Couldn’t robots help?”

  “They are helping,” Marlon snapped, in a rapid-fire voice. “Look, wellstone devices are almost infinitely configurable, but where no pathway exists at all between components A and B, as often happens when you’re configuring large machinery for unintended purposes, we have to physically lay a line of wellstone down. Or copper, or fibe-op glass, but rarely, because we can program the wellstone to emulate those. So robots do the coarse installation, point to point, and the delicate final connections are completed by hand. And as I say, explaining the process to a technician requires refinement in both the theory and detail of what I’m doing, which would consume precious time. Until I know precisely what needs connection to what, I find it easier simply to tinker. Perhaps in another week, I’ll have gained enough experience to pass instructions along.”

  “Hmm,” Tamra said, unconvinced.

  A touch of sullenness graced Marlon Sykes’ features. His gaze flicked to Bruno for a moment. “His time costs you nothing, I suppose.”

  “He donates it, yes.”

  “I’ve little need for money,” Bruno almost said, but stopped himself, realizing in time that it would probably antagonize rather than soothe. Marlon, the father of the Ring Collapsiter, was just about as brilliant and wealthy and powerful a man as ever lived, his name writ large as any Edison or Franklin or Fuller. But through the twisting of fate, Bruno’s name had been writ much larger, ridiculously larger. Along with his bank account, yes. It was a sore point between two Declarant-Philander
s, and understandably so. What he did say was, “It pleases me to visit with friends again. I do it so rarely. I almost feel I should pay for the privilege. It’s good to see you again, Marlon.”

  The first reply to that was simply a glower, but finally Marlon put his smile back on and reached out a hand to be shaken. “Your manners exceed my own. I’ve been immersed here; I’m not really in a mood for interruptions. You know how that can be, I’m sure.”

  “Indeed,” Bruno said, and chuckled a little. He took Marlon’s hand in his and clasped it warmly. It came away, of course, slick with machine grease, but that was of little consequence.

  “You’re well?”

  “Well enough, thank you. And you?”

  Marlon grumbled, nodding toward the malfunctioning instrument walls. “Could be better, alas. Have you made progress in your research? Are we any closer to an arc de fin?”

  “Ah, well, that’s difficult to say. Like you, I’ve been tinkering, although in my case the goal is True Vacuum. Results have been … mixed, I guess you’d say. Odd. I probably need some peer review at this point, isolation being an ideal breeding ground for foolish error. Perhaps we can discuss it while I’m here downsystem.”

  “Perhaps,” Marlon said, not quite able to hide a sense of avarice and excitement. He wanted to share insights with Bruno, yes, but for whatever reason, he didn’t seem to want Bruno to know that.

  Tamra began tapping her foot again. “Will you explain our problem to de Towaji please, Declarant?”

  Marlon sighed and crossed his arms. “Must I, Highness? I really am quite busy here, and don’t want to lose the thread of it. Perhaps you could visit me at home.”

  “When?” Tamra demanded coolly.

  “Right now,” Marlon said, making a kind of facial shrug. “I’m there. It’s where I expected you, actually. Whatever possessed you to come here?”

  “I don’t know; it seemed like an appropriate starting point.”

  Marlon pursed his lips and shook his head. “Loud and smelly? For our dear friend de Towaji? His mind is a palace, Tam, a cathedral, unsullied by life’s grimy banalities. Send him home to me, I beg you. I’ll take proper care of him there.”

  “I’m fine here,” Bruno protested mildly. “Banality and grime are novelties, remember. Though of course I’m happy to let you get back to work if that’s what you need. Could I leave a copy here to help?”

  “No, thanks,” Marlon said too quickly, and though he clapped Bruno on the shoulder—leaving a noticeable smudge—there was little mirth in his eyes.

  6. See Appendix A. Electomagnetic Grapple, this page

  chapter nine

  in which unexpected hospitality is offered

  Sykes Manor was an exercise in water and white marble. Spin-gee habitats were common enough in the Queendom, spheres and cylinders that pressed their occupants to the inner walls by centrifugal force, in the age-old manner of carnival rides. Bruno had never seen a spin sphere crafted as a single residence, though, and he’d never seen one in the Athenian style before, nor imagined that such a thing might exist. Where the classical Greeks had favored straight lines and rectangles and squat isosceles triangles, Marlon’s architects had substituted sphere-mapped chords and pie wedges and truncated cones to good—though decidedly strange—effect. And where the inner surface of a typical kilometer-wide suburb cylinder might be dotted with homesteads and ringed with a greenbelt or two, draining into faux-natural streams and ponds, Marlon’s house, only forty meters across, contained a system of rigidly geometric gardens and fountains, zigzagging between looming walled structures that reached, in some cases, almost to the spin axis. There were no external windows looking out into planetary space, either; instead, bright, yellow-orange light slanted down from a tiny, illuminated dome at one of the hubs.

  The overall effect was completely startling: an immaculate palace or temple complex as glimpsed at the moment of sunrise, but folded in on itself until inner and outer walls met, creating the dreamlike sensation that one was neither inside nor outside, neither above and looking down, nor below and looking up. No matter where one stood or where one looked, one was, it seemed, perpetually about to enter some grand, vaulted inner space that in fact couldn’t possibly exist.

  All this said something important, Bruno felt, about the psychological workings of a certain Declarant-Philander, though exactly what it said he wasn’t sure. There was a kind of ostentation here: modest wealth conspicuously displayed. Well, modest by Bruno’s standards, at any rate; probably very few people could afford to live this way, and fewer still would do it if they could.

  “Many people,” Bruno had observed shortly after entering this place, “are too timid or oblivious to shape an environment to their own true hearts. You, Marlon Sykes, are not one of them.”

  Marlon, reclined on a couch and plucking at the strings of a mandolin, had laughed pleasantly, clearly taking the comment as Bruno had intended it.

  “You flatter me,” he’d said, and his robots had handed Bruno a mug of chilled green tea. This other Marlon, relaxing at home, seemed far more at ease than his counterpart at the grapple station, far happier to greet the man he regarded as a rival, on the arm of the woman he’d once loved.

  We all have multiple faces and aspects, Bruno mused, but rarely is the contrast so obvious. That was life in the Queendom for you; the Iscog joined every fax machine to every other, reducing all of space, topologically speaking, to a single geometric point. This permitted—in fact demanded—the encountering of innumerable rareties and ironies and stark, polar opposites, all superimposed atop one another. Impossible, of course, without the transfinite self-recursions of collapsium-based computing devices.

  He supposed he could permit himself, at such a moment, to admire his handiwork.

  Now the three of them lounged on soft couches in the slanting light beside a softly chattering cascade, clear water spilling down stairs of white marble in the shade of a line of olive trees. Tamra’s slender silver robots stood guard on either side, like statues.

  “How they got there isn’t clear,” Marlon was saying. He’d put away his mandolin and was tracing with his index finger on a wellstone slate. “But this whole segment of the ring is contaminated with muons, in tight little orbits around the collapson nodes.”

  On Bruno’s own slate, Marlon’s tracings were echoed, and quickly became solid, detailed, three-dimensional-looking images. The sun blazed, and the Ring Collapsiter—its thickness exaggerated by several orders of magnitude—glittered around it like a two-thirds completed crown. Fully half the structure, though, showed not the soothing blue of Hawking-Cerenkov radiation, but a kind of dingy brown glow. Presumably, this was as fictitious as the ring’s thickness; Bruno couldn’t think of any collapsium process that would create a visible signature like that one.

  Bruno sipped from his mug, nodding. The tea was a little sweet for his taste, but he wasn’t sure it would be polite to ask the mug to change it for him. Not right in front of Marlon; not when he was being so friendly.

  “I see. And the ring is slipping because the EM grapples would damage the contaminated region? By pulling its lattices out of phase?”

  “Just so. We dare not disturb it further.”

  “You’re distributing the load across the remainder of the ring, yes? What there is of it, I mean. Your stations remain operational, just aimed differently, at the undamaged arc segments?” He studied the drawing. “Yes, that would produce a side force, wouldn’t it? But you can’t turn the grapples off, either, cutting the puppet’s strings, as it were. The whole thing would fall into the sun in a matter of days!—And you can’t attach a wellstone sail to the contaminated area, because the orbiting particles would smash through it precisely where the stress is greatest.”

  “We tried it,” Marlon said, shaking his head ruefully. “The sails collapsed immediately and fell into the black holes. Theoretically the holes are semisafe, too small to swallow even a proton, but if you jam one in there hard enough, it�
�ll go. And that’s the beginning of the end, because it increases the size of the hole, making it ever so slightly easier for the next particle to penetrate. And of course, any mass change disrupts the equilibrium of the crystal lattice, so already, the collapsium is inherently unstable.”

  “Ah,” Bruno said, beginning at last to understand. “That’s why you want higher frequencies on the grapples: so you can grab hold right where you need to. The collapsium is in a precarious state, and gravitic disturbances are to be avoided at all costs. But frequencies higher than those of gravitation won’t set up the same sort of destructive resonance.”

  Marlon’s smile was only a little tight. “Your edge remains keen, Declarant. In minutes, you reiterate the analysis of weeks. Yes, it’s exactly as you say.”

  “The work progresses poorly, though,” Her Majesty interjected, in cool tones. “The collapsiter builds momentum with each passing moment. Even if Declarant Sykes’ plan works perfectly, there may not be time to stop its fall. And if we’re lucky enough to stop it just above the sun’s surface, rather than below, I still think the result is unlikely to please us. Your services, Bruno, are very much in need.”

  Bruno sighed, as uncomfortable as ever with this notion that the unsolvable problems were somehow his to solve. “My ‘services’ seem to have come up with precisely the same solution that Marlon’s did. It’s the right solution, Tam.”

  Her Majesty said nothing, but put on a faux vapid smile that meant she found his comment foolish.

  Grumbling, Marlon threw his tea mug into the little cascade, where it clanked and splashed and skidded to a halt, resting half submerged on the marble bottom. “We’ve enough force to lift this thing, Majesty. It’s simply a matter of applying that force where it’s needed. As I’ve told you, the math is really quite straightforward.”

  “Undoubtedly,” she agreed, nodding once.

  “You can be infuriating sometimes, Tam,” Bruno said to her, not unkindly. In decades past, he’d sometimes spent whole days, even weeks being infuriated by her. Truthfully, there were worse ways to spend one’s time. But Marlon did not seem so amused.