The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  “Wow,” Vivian said as she clambered up beside Bruno. “Look at this place. What a terrible shame.”

  “You should have seen it before,” Marlon, who was right behind her, said. The words came slowly, and the bitterness fell away from his voice in midsentence, leaving only surprise and regret and, it seemed, finally some giddy realization that he was lucky to be alive.

  Time doubled back on Bruno for a moment; he recalled the Sabadell-Andorra event, ninety-two seconds of explosive shaking that had toppled trees and structures throughout the Ter valley. There’d been so much fear, so much damage, so much injury and death, a whole population battered out of its smug, suburban complacency. He remembered his neighbors standing on broken alley pavement, bitterly arguing and complaining about this and that crack in their house’s foundation until a man from across the street—whose name they had never known—walked over and handed them a peach.

  “Bruised,” he said. “Won’t last an hour. Better eat it quick.” And then he’d walked back to his own house, a pile of shattered brick, to continue shoveling for anything salvageable. Then his neighbors had noticed Bruno looking at them, and had turned away with a funny kind of shame or guilt in their faces. Guilt at having survived. Bruno, overcome with quiet, unfocused affection, forgave them for it immediately.

  That was how it had gone: the ones who lost everything, whose lives were separated completely from the material possessions that had seemed to define them, were the ones who somehow managed to take it in stride. Himself included, in a way, although it took some time to realize that Enzo and Bernice were not disgraced or somehow forgotten by his pursuit of happiness. That had been a terrible year—being a fifteen-year-old University student without parents, without a home—but by the following spring it had begun to seem like they’d simply stepped back, giving him the room he needed to grow.

  He doubted there would ever be another disaster of comparable scale, on Earth or anywhere else—the Queendom was simply too safe a place for that. But perhaps, one way or another, there’d always be this scene: a man surveying the ruins of his home with sudden, passionate equanimity.

  “You should have seen it,” Marlon said again, now with pride. He raised an arm to point. “I had olive trees over there. All down through here was running water and marble walls. Actual marble; I had it shipped up from Earth.”

  “We’ll rebuild it,” Tamra promised, laying a purple-gloved hand on Marlon’s shoulder. “I’ll send my finest architect.”

  Marlon managed a laugh that was only partly hollow. “There are no backups, Majesty—no complete record of the structure anywhere. Some photographs were published in my last biography, but that’s all. I didn’t want it duplicated, you see. Imitated, perhaps, but never duplicated. Even I don’t remember every detail. Ah, damn it, I’ll miss this place.”

  And then his eyes misted with tears, and Bruno suddenly remembered that from the earthquake as well. Equanimity could be a fragile thing.

  “We’ll build something different, then,” Tamra said gently.

  “Yes. I suppose we will.”

  Tamra’s hand still rested on Marlon’s thick shoulder padding; he probably couldn’t feel it, but certainly he could see it in his rearview mirrors. He knew it was there, and indeed something seemed to pass between the two of them, using that arm as a conduit. Bruno was uncomfortably reminded that Marlon Sykes had been Philander before him, and had, cumulatively, spent decades longer in Tamra’s presence than Bruno ever had.

  “Come,” Bruno said softly, bending close to little Vivian as if to whisper in her ear. “Let’s, ah, examine the area, the two of us.”

  One can’t whisper over an open frequency, though, not to one person. Marlon and Tamra both looked sharply at him, annoyed about something. Well, humph, what was he supposed to do? It seemed like a private moment, one they were certainly both entitled to, but was he to pretend he didn’t exist? To ignore their business here and stand around quietly until they were finished?

  “Switch to Police Five,” Vivian said, in a tone that echoed Bruno’s murmur but was simultaneously commanding and self-conscious, as if she were covering or apologizing for a mistake he’d made.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The channel. We’re on Police One right now. The knob is here.” She jabbed a gauntleted finger at his forearm.

  “Ah, I see.” Once they’d completed the switch and walked a few paces away he added, “That wasn’t very grown-up of you.”

  “Well, I never said I was grown up, did I?”

  “Tamra seems to believe it.”

  Wood and marble chips crunched beneath their feet, trapped between boot soles and deck plates drawn together by the spacesuits’ safety grapples. They were strolling along a darkened … avenue, he supposed, their head- and hand-lights illuminating jagged stubs of building on one side and, on the other, the shattered remains of a canal, ice crystals glittering along what remained of its sides and bottom. Above, a pair of evidence technicians drifted by, their own lamps setting aglow the fragments of column and slab that spun slowly through the hanging dust.

  “Tamra is benevolent,” Vivian said, “and inclined to see strengths. She’s very dear to me—I remember that much—but I’m not sure I’m quite the person she used to know.”

  “Er, I’m sure they’ll find your full pattern eventually.”

  “Perhaps,” she agreed, “but I’ve lived that life already—her life, the older me. I remember a lot about her. If they did find and reinstantiate that pattern, I’d feel very close—very, um, empathetic—but whether I’d want to be her, to be reconverged with her, I’m not so sure. Nobody has really asked me that.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Vivian’s tone became sharp. “Do you? I don’t see how. People act like this is some kind of unfortunate setback for me. They act like they understand how hard it is for me right now, which they couldn’t possibly.”

  “Hmm, well.” Bruno wished he could pinch his chin. “We all have our problems, I fear. I don’t suppose anyone understands the ones that other people have, but it shouldn’t stop them from trying. They know what a problem feels like, anyway. Your police do seem to understand a bit, to be making allowances for you. Even I, an outsider, can see how highly they think of you.”

  “Or of her,” she said, making a face. When they’d crunched along a few paces more, she turned and asked him, “So what’s your problem? You’re rich; you own your own planet far, far away; and you once saved the entire Queendom from calamity. What makes you think you know the first thing about people’s troubles?”

  “Brat,” he said to her, not unkindly. “If you were an adult, you wouldn’t ask a question like that. I get lonely sometimes. Often. It’s my wealth and my fame, far more than distance, that isolate me. People always seem to expect something of me, some wisdom or eloquence or leadership I’ve never known how to provide. I used to study history, looking for an archetypal figure to emulate when these occasions arose. A tycoon? A philosopher? A military conqueror? I even tried to dress the part, to look historical. But one day, I finally realized how absurd that was. There wasn’t anyone to emulate; civilization had changed too much, and human beings along with it. Changed because of me, I mean, because of things that I’d done. There were no other Declarant-Philander shatterers of worlds, certainly no immortal ones. No other men like me, ever. So really, I’m the archetype for future histories to deconstruct, and I fear that’s a lot of responsibility for one man to bear. Really, a lot.”

  They’d stopped walking, and behind the dome of her helmet Vivian pursed her lips and considered his words for several long seconds. “You’re a megalomaniac,” she said finally.

  He burst out laughing. “Ho! From the mouths of babes. Indeed, I do think highly of myself. But others do, as well, and not in quite the right way. They admire—too well!—a person who isn’t really me.”

  Vivian looked thoughtful. “So you don’t know how to be yourself, without letting other people down. That’s y
our problem. You feel like everyone’s looking, like they know more than you do about how you should act or what you should do. That’s our problem, both of us.”

  He nodded. “All right, that seems a fair comparison.”

  The smile she offered him then was self-conscious and self-deprecating, though not actually apologetic. “I suppose a lot of people feel that way. There’s probably nothing so special or unique about it. We all share the same neural architecture, right? Approximately? How embarrassing, to think my traumas and tragedies could be so banal.”

  “Shocking indeed,” Bruno agreed, deciding that this girl was every bit as formidable as Tamra and the police seemed to think. “You’re beginning to understand. That’s what growing up means: a good understanding of one’s own banality. But of course, we’re all different and special, too.”

  “Oh, joy.” She laughed.

  He laughed with her. “Does that sound trite, Vivian? I don’t mean it that way. Whatever unique gifts we possess—things that can’t be had from any other source—those are things we should cultivate. Even if they’re absurd, even if they’re downright counterproductive, they’re the only true signs that we, our own unique selves, were ever here at all. I suppose that’s why crimes are committed; sometimes, that’s the only calling card a person knows how to leave.”

  Vivian flung her arms out and tipped her head back inside its clear bubble. “Ah! Right! We should simply let people blow up their enemies and throw Ring Collapsiters into the sun. Thank you, Declarant. To think I’ve been wasting all this effort enforcing laws. Why, it’s all so clear to me now!”

  “Ah, you’re a rotten child. I suppose we’re all rotten children, though. In a thousand years, you’ll look back on this conversation and laugh. A young de Towaji, presuming to lecture. On manners, no less!”

  Her giggle was pleasant. “You’re funny. Did you know that?”

  “Funny? Hrumph,” he replied, feeling a gate slam down suddenly on his good cheer. Tamra used to think he was funny, too, used to laugh along with his observations and suggestions and spontaneous displays of good cheer. What had happened to those days? Why had he found them unsustainable? So many of his archetypes were curmudgeons, or at least he imagined them that way; but was there anything as ridiculous as a curmudgeonly child? What a thing to look back on, a thousand years hence. A young de Towaji, presuming to curmudge.

  Vivian eyed him and frowned, looking ready to scold. He deserved a scolding for letting his mood collapse like that, for being so damnably self-conscious that a simple compliment should shut him up. But what she said was, “I wonder if she did this, if she had a conversation like this one at this exact point in her life. I don’t see how she could have. It’s all very illuminating, very opinion shaping, and unfortunately that means I really am diverging, becoming a noticeably different person than her. Bruno, what if they do find her? What am I going to do then?”

  For all its suppleness, the spacesuit didn’t seem to permit much of a shrug. Not one that she’d see, anyway. “I think you can decide that when it happens. Why worry now? There’s no need to be hasty, not when we’re going to live forever. Perhaps you could be her daughter, or her younger sister, and you could live together in Boston or Calcutta or Cairo, one of the Children’s Cities.”

  “I already have a mother. Where do you think I live?”

  “Ah. Well, perhaps you’ll find this woman is you, or the part of you that you feel is missing. You could even combine, the two of you, into a third distinct person, and all three go on with separate lives. The physical barriers to that sort of thing were all broken years ago; imagination really is the only limit.”

  “Hmm.” She mulled that over, nodding slowly. “You are wise, in a way. Nobody else has suggested any of this. I’ll consider it; I really will. And meanwhile, I do have my work to keep me busy.”

  “Ah, yes. Your work.”

  She thrust her chin out. “I do enjoy it, you know. Nobody will play games with me anymore, but an inspector’s role is a game. Even if everyone does insist on treating me like a grown-up, I find the mental challenges stimulating. Take that brick over there.” She pointed at one as it drifted through their beams a few meters ahead. “It tells a whole story, if you know how to read it. Marble, right? But it’s darkened; it looks foamy and waxy and brittle. Something’s happened to it.”

  “To all the stone,” Bruno agreed, looking around. “It’s probably secondary radiation. The energy beam struck a channel through solid matter from one side of the house to the other, presumably vaporizing it, and the vaporized matter re-released some of that energy in a different form.”

  “Different how?” she asked, her face growing more animated, more interested.

  “I don’t know,” he said, attempting another shrug. “Something charged, I’d expect. That wreaks chemical havoc with most materials. There’s no measurable radiation now, so it’d have to be something with a very short half-life, like maybe pions. Actually, that makes sense: neutrons decaying into protons and pions would transmute some of the calcium to scandium, the oxygen to fluorine, and the carbon to nitrogen. Some of the protons, stripped away by the impact of high-energy pions, simply become hydrogen atoms, and finally the whole mess recombines at high temperature, creating … what? Fluoroapatite, scandium formates, and tar? Is that consistent with what we’re seeing?”

  Vivian’s eyes glittered. “What would cause that? What would make those particles act that way?”

  “A nasen beam,” Bruno answered, feeling the hairs prickle up on the back of his neck. “It’d have to be a powerful one; the overwhelming majority of neutrinos wouldn’t interact at all.”

  “I see. And weren’t you looking for a nasen beam projector already?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “Indeed. It needn’t be large, just an oblate, monocrystalline diamond with wellstone emitters at either end, and a very good heat sink attached. You could easily fit one in your police cruiser, although the energy to fire it would have to be stored somewhere. A superconducting battery holding … what? A petajoule? That would be substantial. Larger than this house, I think. A little larger. So you’d need a big ship, or a ground base somewhere. Tracing from Shiao’s reconstruction we might …”

  He realized he was talking to a dead channel; Vivian had just jabbed the frequency controls on her forearm, and while she was nodding and looking right at him, she was suddenly speaking to someone else, in a voice Bruno couldn’t hear. After a moment, she took out a wellstone pad and studied it.

  Bruno tried Police One. “Something interesting?”

  She looked up and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve relayed your deduction to Shiao. He’s backtracking to the time of impact. Is there any way to know how far the beam traveled before arriving here?”

  Bruno again tried to pinch his chin, and was frustrated by the invisible barrier of his helmet dome. “How far? Let’s see. Nasen beams focus tightly, but disperse over large distances. Six meters wide at the impact site? Is there a difference in diameter from one hole to the other? I suppose we don’t know which is the entrance wound and which the exit, but if one is wider than the other—by a very small amount, you understand—the resulting cone should point straight to the source. Well, coupled with the exact impact time and rotation rate.”

  “Shiao?” Vivian prompted.

  “Processing,” Shiao replied. A Shiao. His voice was deep, and if not completely humorless, then at least solidly professional. His tone made a promise of the word, a reassurance to the many victims of this crime. Light beams swept and flashed the ruins as evidence techs—apparently communicating on some channel of their own—swarmed to take the appropriate measurements.

  “Patience is the hard part,” Vivian remarked, with a sidelong glance at Bruno.

  But it was Shiao who replied. “Of course, Commandant-Inspector. I apologize for the delay. I’m refining the reconstruction, and should be finished right … now. I have the position: three AUs distant, in the asteroid belt. Referencing ephemeris d
ata. Confirmed: no charted celestial object would have been in that location at that time.”

  “A ship, then?” Vivian asked.

  “Most likely, Commandant-Inspector. I’ll send out an all-points. Do either of you have suggestions regarding a description?”

  “A solid battery somewhat larger than this house,” Bruno answered. “Either moving very slowly, or carrying an even bigger tank for tritium fuel. It should be fairly unmistakable, actually.”

  And then Marlon’s voice came through. “Hello? Did we miss something? I believe we’re looking for a spaceship carrying large batteries, and a nasen projector.”

  chapter twelve

  in which a strange creature is discovered

  After that there was a great deal of radio traffic with Earth and Mars and a number of space traffic control stations, as the police sought a ship of the appropriate dimensions speeding—or drifting—away from the appropriate coordinates. But it was slow traffic, light-lagged, some of it routed the long way around the sun, to receivers way off on the other side. Bruno began to appreciate how the Bureaucracy, painfully efficient in so many other regards, could finally chafe against this barrier—the speed of light—that no persuasion or fiat or veto could soften for them.

  It was as if Mars and Earth existed in a different time, in some parallel universe whose clocks ran perpetually behind. How distracting, when one’s work demanded prompt coordination! Hence the Ring Collapsiter, first link in a network of supraluminal conduits that might finally join the disparate worlds together in a single moment. Or an entirely smaller span of moments, at least.

  “While they’re settling this,” Tamra said to Bruno, with an offhand wave at Vivian and Cheng Shiao and the evidence technicians, “would you please go have a word with the press? They’re massed outside by the thousands, understandably curious. I think a word from you at this point would be reassuring.”