The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  “Neighborhood Watch is a respectable job,” Shiao answered finally. “And they’ll take almost anyone.”

  “Almost,” Bruno mused. “Mmm. And the rest?”

  Shiao sighed. “There’s always crime itself, sir. It’s not generally a career choice for geniuses.”

  “Ah. I suppose not. Seems a bit unfair, though.”

  Shiao, to Bruno’s surprise, seemed to find that funny. “They certainly think so, sir. But good and evil are choices, not fates handed out at birth. We’re talking, probably, about fewer than a hundred of those seven thousand applicants, and if you actually met them, you might find your sympathies reduced.”

  “Ah. Maybe so. You’ve little hope of promotion, then? It sounds like an awfully rigid structure.”

  “They all are, sir. To get promoted I’d have to displace someone more experienced, which is a huge effort even to attempt. And my own job goes open for recompetition every decade, so I could well be demoted if I start to get sloppy. In theory, we’re encouraged to see demotion as a positive career move—point of maximum competence, as they say. But that’s a fairly new idea. ‘Rigid structure’ is an accurate description. But of course, we’re planning for the long term these days.”

  “Mmm. Indeed.”

  Shiao had nothing further to say. Neither did Bruno. The conversation was at an end.

  The actual docking and boarding were so uneventful Bruno nearly missed them; the cruiser simply pulled up alongside the suspect vessel, selected a standard docking adapter, and mated airlocks with nary a thump. Only when Shiao’s harnesses retracted and vanished and the SWAT robots started running in puppetlike synchrony toward the hatch, flicking on their optically superconducting outer jackets so that they vanished from sight—only then did Bruno realize what was happening. Hastily, he unstrapped himself, prepared to follow once the area was “secured.” This had been explained to him at length—whether he left a copy behind or not, he was neither to risk himself nor interfere with tactical or evidentiary procedures unless some very clear and pertinent reason presented itself.

  It took a whopping forty-five seconds to secure the suspect spaceship.

  “One occupant,” the human SWAT commander stated flatly as he materialized to usher the royal committee from their berths. “A modified human, male, deceased.”

  “Modified?” Bruno asked, curious and a little afraid. “Deceased?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Hmm.”

  The inside of the ship was remarkably cramped and colorless, like a half dozen prison cells strung end to end. The ship was much smaller on the inside than the outside, since after all it was mostly engine, fuel tank, and superconducting battery. But it was so dim, so ugly. There were no windows of any kind, and no effort had been made to smooth or pad the many corners, nor to hide the various plumbing and wiring that connected the ship’s systems. It looked like a utility closet, and would have been an inhospitable place even without the twenty black-shelled SWAT robots crowding it.

  The “one occupant” lay on a kind of acceleration couch near the ship’s bow, from which all manner of hoses and cables radiated. The couch appeared to be the ship’s only actual furnishing. The “deceased” status of said occupant was obvious; Bruno’s external air pressure gauge read a flat 0.00, and the figure was naked, somewhat shriveled looking, and was both covered and surrounded by odd pools and knobs and jagged crystals of red-colored ice. “Male” was there for anyone to see, and as for “modified human,” well, that was unequivocal as well; there were wires and tubes feeding into every part of the dead man’s body. The ones running into his head looked blackened and scorched and melted, as if they’d carried a brief but enormous electrical surge.

  The fact that he had six arms—each gripping its own joystick on the wide, gray shoulders of the couch—was actually one of the least disturbing things about him. People hadn’t done this much in Bruno’s day, wholesale modifications of their body forms, but even then, the absence had been recognized as a matter of fashion. The idea itself was hardly a shocking one, given that the capability was there in any fax machine.

  What did shock Bruno was that the face, shriveled and bloody and burned as it was, looked painfully familiar. “I know this man,” he said, and his voice sounded unnerved even to him. “I’ve seen him. On my last visit to the Queendom, I think. On Maxwell Montes, on Venus.”

  “It’s Wenders Rodenbeck,” Tamra agreed, and her voice sounded unnerved as well. “The playwright.”

  “Activist against collapsium,” Deliah added. “Yes, we hear from him frequently at the ministry. I’ve never known him to wear six-armed body forms, though, nor to travel in space. He’s the typical hypocrite: faxing himself daily through the collapsiter grid he claims to despise. He’s pleasant about it, though—a natural charmer. I actually like him. Can this be the same person?”

  “Where are his injunctions and restraining orders now?” Marlon murmured, as if to the body itself. “Is this his final settlement, a head full of burnt wires? I’ll wager I know Wenders better than any of you. A happy prankster, yes. Now a killer? Now lying here with six arms, and blood all over his face? Is this a trick? God, excuse me, I think I’m going to vomit.”

  And so he did, inside the bowl of his helmet. Familiar with the hazard, the SWAT robots slapped his purge valve, then whisked him away to the fax machine before he could move wrong or breathe wrong and suck down a choking glob. Crystals of purged, rapidly freezing vomit spun after him, as if terrified of being abandoned here without him.

  “Cause of death,” Cheng Shiao said gently, looking down at a wellstone pad, “probable suicide. He left a note. An entire log, actually, detailing his activities for the past seven years. Assuming it’s accurate, this would appear to be our man.”

  Vivian regained her maturity and summoned Wenders Rodenbeck right there to De Towaji’s Bane for questioning. Did he know anything about this ship or its business? Did he wish any harm to the Queendom, or bear a grudge against any of its officials or luminaries?

  Rodenbeck, bleary eyed, hanging there in zero atmosphere in a spacesuit he’d never been trained to use, could only stammer his replies: No, no, not at all. Never!

  The Queendom recognized no right to remain silent under questioning; every response was compulsory, and subject to analysis by the finest lie detectors, stress analyzers, and personality emulators of the Royal Constabulary. If he was innocent of the crime being investigated, all records of this conversation would be purged from the interrogators’ minds, leaving them to speculate about any other infelicities or malfeasances he might have revealed under questioning. And any distress he suffered would be measured with exacting precision, and a proper compensation calculated and dispensed. But in the meantime, the twin priorities of public safety and swift justice held sway, and his brain was theirs to pick.

  Bruno had never imagined himself in such a position before; it troubled and embarrassed him, dirtied him in some ill-defined way. Perhaps the experience would be erased, though; Rodenbeck did appear both innocent and distressed. “I’m an artist,” he protested repeatedly. “I love the Queendom—I’ve gone to considerable pains to protect it against its own excesses. And always within the framework of the law! Well, nearly always …”

  “Ah,” Vivian said then, with a knowing look. “Yes. Indeed.”

  Bruno figured that would have been an unnerving thing under any circumstances, to be addressed that way by a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary. Hearing it from an eleven-year-old girl, though, seemed to tip Rodenbeck into hysteria. “Hey, I watch the news!” he shouted. “I’m not stupid. I know why I’m here! You think this Ring Collapsiter thing has anything to do with me? Do you really?”

  “You have spoken out against it on lots of occasions,” Vivian pointed out. “And against its creators.”

  “Of course! Its creators are guilty of the grossest irresponsibility and negligence, as demonstrated by their current difficulties. I protest the use of collap
sium because it’s dangerous, because it poses a huge safety risk. I’m on the side of the angels, here, little girl. Why would I, why would I possibly do anything to enlarge that risk?”

  Vivian, examining readings of some sort on her little wellstone pad, frowned at that. “Have you done anything to enhance the threat?”

  “No.”

  “Have you harmed anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Do you plan to?”

  “No!”

  She sighed then, and clunked her hand against the dome of her helmet in a manner all too familiar to Bruno—she’d been trying to touch her face. “Come look at a body with me, sir. You may find the experience disturbing.”

  “Why? Whose body is it?”

  “Yours.”

  They strode the length of the ship, slipping past SWAT robots and royal bodyguards until they’d reached the strange acceleration couch. It had been fitted with a crinkly black plastic cover, but at Vivian’s nod the attendant Shiao unhooked its fasteners and peeled it away, revealing the body beneath.

  Rodenbeck recoiled. “Eew. Is that real? Is that supposed to be me?’ ”

  “It is you, sir,” Vivian said. “Bioassay confirms it’s an accurate copy whose pattern began divergence from yours approximately seven years ago. It shows several fax markers in that first year, each with body modifications associated, and nothing at all after that. Reconstruction shows it’s been physically grafted to that chair for sixty-two months, nine days. Unfortunately, the brain suffered extensive damage in the surge that killed it, so its memories are not available to us. Do you have any idea what this … individual … might have been up to?”

  Rodenbeck started to say something, but fainted instead.

  Vivian sighed, and said to Shiao, “Get him out of here; take him home. He doesn’t know anything.”

  Shiao straightened. “Right away, Commandant-Inspector. I agree with your analysis.”

  “Relax, Lieutenant. Please.”

  “Yes’m. Absolutely.”

  When Shiao had gone, Tamra whirled around and pointed an angry finger at the body. “This creature did well to kill itself—I’d see it jailed for a million years! Yet Rodenbeck, who is the creature, is innocent? Explain this to me, Vivian. Why did you let him go?”

  “Because he’s innocent,” Vivian said simply, attempting a shrug inside her suit. “We see this sometimes: compartmentalization of intent. We all have copies running around, true? Sometimes, one of them will diverge, and decide it’s not part of the canonical individual anymore. Could be a traumatic experience, could be almost anything, really. All of a sudden, you have this person with Wenders Rodenbeck’s history and knowledge, but not his actual sense of identity. Maybe he’s smug, he figures he knows something that’s fundamentally changed him. So he changes his body, changes his name, stays out of fax machines—which would not only log his existence, but might eventually report his movements back to the real Rodenbeck and charge him transit fees for every step!

  “So this copy lives in the shadows for a while, without the social pressures or accountability he’s accustomed to, and whatever funny ideas he has in his head start to seem reasonable. Rodenbeck isn’t a criminal, but this—all right, this creature—isn’t Rodenbeck anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.”

  “And this happens often?” Tamra demanded, her tone indicating just how well she liked this sort of thing going on under her nose behind her back.

  “Not often,” Vivian said. “But sometimes. I remember maybe, like, three cases of this since human-capable faxes first became available. I’m not really sure; you’d have to ask Shiao for the details.”

  Bruno, finally moved to speak, said, “I don’t think I like the implications, here. Living alone causes genocidal mania? Do you think I’m at risk, mademoiselle? I’d resent that notion very much!”

  Vivian eyed him clinically for several seconds. “Well, I would say you’re at a higher risk for it than someone with equivalent intellect, but who’s better socialized. Don’t take that as an insult; genocidal mania is remarkably rare, even among hardened sociopaths, and you haven’t shown any of the marker behaviors.”

  “Well. Humph. If I do lose my mind, perhaps you’ll be the first to know about it. This whole experience has been unsavory, and we’ve nothing to show for it, no villain to punish.”

  “And the collapsiter is still falling,” Tamra pointed out angrily. “You do need to address that at some point, you know.”

  Bruno gasped. “Goodness, I’d almost forgotten! It came to me, while the ships were docking; what if the ring were spun?” He turned to Marlon, who was drifting in dour silence at the other end of the ship, by the airlock. In an atmosphere he’d have been too distant for anything but a shouted conversation, but over suit radios it hardly mattered. “Marlon, the grapple stations all point straight down at the ring, yes? As much as possible given the damage, I mean. But imagine skewing them, pointing them a few degrees off to one side. That would create a torque which would spin the ring in place.”

  “And reduce the upward pull on it,” Marlon said, straightening. “It would just fall in that much faster, until the attachment points had swung around to be underneath the grapples again.”

  “Ah!” Bruno said, waving a finger at his colleague. “But we’d keep moving them, attaching to new points that were off to the side again. Like pushing a merry-go-round. If that torque were applied for long enough, the collapsiter would simply go into orbit around the sun.”

  Marlon’s frown was clearly visible. “It’s fragile, Bruno. Until that muon contamination burns off, we hardly dare to touch the ring.”

  “Really? Assuming any significant vibrations could be damped, we’d actually be reducing the strain on the collapsium lattice with every bit of velocity we added. It should take … what? A little over ten to the sixth meters per second to orbit it? It’d be self-supporting then, like the rings of Saturn, needing the grapple stations only to shepherd and stabilize it. At a tenth of a gee acceleration, that speed would take less than three weeks to achieve. Since we have ten months to play with, we could go all the way down to fifty milligee and still have margin to spare. I’ll need the math to be certain, but surely the lattice ought to tolerate that.”

  “Gods of fucking algebra!” Marlon exclaimed. “It certainly should! It certainly should! Does it take a Declarant to see that?”

  And here, the police files recorded a distinct clunking noise over Marlon’s radio as he tried to slap himself in the forehead but hit only the solid helmet dome instead.

  chapter thirteen

  in which a brilliant first step is taken

  To Bruno’s surprise, the investigation didn’t stop there. “We have old fax records to pore through,” Vivian explained in their parting conversation. “It’s possible there are alternate copies of the creature out there that may at least be accessories by foreknowledge. The original divergence may even have happened against Rodenbeck’s will, which would be a kind of kidnapping. And we have so many unexplained fax anomalies surrounding this thing. This could well take years to sort out, assuming it’s possible at all. But our duty is to try.”

  “Well,” Bruno told her seriously, “far be it from me to stand in duty’s way, but do remember to act your age now and then, while you still have it. Enjoy your plight, for my sake if for no other reason. Most of us are only young once!”

  That wasn’t a particularly funny comment, but they chuckled together at it just the same, and Deliah and Tamra and Cheng Shiao chuckled with them. Marlon simply glowered, apparently having decided yet again to be jealous of Bruno, after his recent whirlwind of media appearances had—to everyone’s surprise—actually gone rather well. Marlon himself had been invited to appear only as an afterthought or sidekick, or to answer for his errors, or as a substitute for Bruno when Bruno was unavailable.

  Fortunately, Bruno’s availability was about to drop to zero; he was returning home tonight, delayed only by Her Majesty’s insistence. This
was the last official meeting of the Royal Committee for Investigation of Ring Collapsiter Anomalies—thankfully abbreviated to RoCIRCA—and Tamra had assured all of them that attendance was compulsory. Thankfully, the location she’d reserved for it was Fangatapu, the Forbidden Beach near Tamra’s Tongan palace, where she’d arranged that the warm summertime sun should set through three separate layers of patchy cloud, making—they’d all agreed—for one of the most striking sunsets any of them had ever seen. And the blankets somehow never got sandy, and the drinks were just intoxicating enough that Bruno could quench his thirst pleasantly without fear of overindulgence.

  “It’s been nice getting to know you,” Deliah said, filling an opening in the conversation. “I wish it could have been under different circumstances; it’s fair to say you haven’t seen me at my best. I’m actually a fairly together person.”

  She’d expressed this sentiment before, so Bruno smiled for her and used the reply he’d rehearsed the night before. “Madam, it’s been a pleasure, and if it’s your worst side I’ve seen this past week, I suspect I’m unworthy company for the real you.”

  She actually blushed at that, a fact in which Bruno took some satisfaction. Not bad for a recluse. Actually, he didn’t feel that his style or behavior had changed all that much, but people did seem to respond to him better these days, to find more enjoyment than discomfort in his company. Perhaps he’d simply been born with an old man’s personality and was finally growing into it, or at least learning to walk in the oversized shoes society had chosen for him.

  “You’d make an excellent investigator,” Cheng Shiao told him a little while after that. “I’ve learned some things by watching you.”

  Bruno suspected that was one of the highest compliments the man had at his disposal. His first impulse was therefore to brush it off, to deny it or make a poor joke of it, but with effort he restrained himself, nodded once, and returned with, “Your talent at reconstruction would serve brilliantly in any field of science. If Vivian here weren’t immortal, I’m sure you’d have her job someday.”