by Wil McCarthy
He made an effort to see the scene with fresh eyes: the planet like a little benighted Eden, the stooping robot fieldworkers like peasants of a land so wealthy its very citizens were made of gold. And over there, his little cottage with its wellstone walls all turned to white glass, a pretty trick indeed. And above it all, the collapsium, glowing blue as the ghosts of drowned sailors. Soon enough, that scalloped ring would be gone, replaced by some new assembly, some new experiment. It was a fleeting thing, a blossom.
There was the problem, though—the very reason for Bruno’s frustration. He’d long ago run out of fresh neutronium and had for years now resigned himself to recycling his collapsium over and over again. Every experiment had to be dismantled to make way for the next—carefully, to prevent its structure from collapsing into a single, ordinary hypermass. Such dismantling required phenomenal precision, and thanks to inertia it also required such vast amounts of energy that he’d been forced to harness virtually the entire output of his miniature star.
The star—his own invention—was simple enough; a neutronium core wrapped securely in superreflectors, holding down an outer sheath of hydrogen in self-sustaining nuclear fusion. But it was for light, damn it; it was meant not only to warm but to brighten this little world at the fringes of interstellar space. So thanks to inertia, he lived in the dark, and while he could certainly build a new sun, and even a new moon to go with it, the difficulties of contacting the Queendom to arrange for neutronium production and delivery would consume his attention as surely his experiments consumed light, possibly for years. Bah.
He could, of course, hop into the fax machine and duplicate himself, but he knew himself too well; the duplicate wouldn’t want to deal with logistical headaches any more than he did. Within hours it would be commandeering his precious resources for some new harebrained experiment, and his attempts to argue the point would prove worse than fruitless, for the duplicate would believe itself to be him. And it would be right. He’d played this drama out enough times to know the pointlessness of it.
And yet …
Was it any better to live in darkness? To cast aside the final pretense of comfort and live as a perfect troglodyte scientist, with no human needs left to neglect? How Tamra Lutui—the Virgin Queen of All Things—would recoil at that! As he himself should recoil, hearing it reduced to those terms.
He sighed, musing darkly: if only inertia could be overcome; if only he could really proceed, unhindered and happy. If he could crowd the zero-point field aside, or deaden it with complementary waves, then the tiniest flick would send his billion-ton billiards wherever he chose, at whatever velocity, and another infinitesimal tap would suffice to stop them. Was such an idea feasible? Ridiculous? He should give it some more thought, he thought, but of course that would mean suspending his current work, too. The idea made him tired, or perhaps he was already tired and the idea simply helped him to realize it.
He lay back again, to resume his study of the collapsium. It was beautiful, really, but also coldly menacing, distorting not only the spacetime around it but the life of one Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji as well. He’d never asked to be marooned out here, never asked to live in darkness and isolation, never asked for any of this. Or perhaps he had, in seeking the arc de fin, but why did it have to be so hard? Why did he have to sacrifice so much?
He supposed the thing to do was to resign himself to an idle period—a vacation, in effect—during which he could solicit production bids. Or perhaps one could simply buy neutronium these days—heaven knew the Ring Collapsiter’s demand for it had to be a good thirteen or fourteen orders of magnitude larger than Bruno’s had ever been.
He could probably use the time off, anyway. Didn’t Tamra have the hundredth anniversary of her coronation coming up sometime soon? Surely she’d be upset if he let that go by without comment. Perhaps he could visit. There were other friends he’d been wondering about as well. Vivian Rajmon, Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary? Goodness, she must be over sixteen by now! And Marlon Sykes, his fellow Declarant-Philander? Marlon might not be happy to see him—probably not, actually—but they could talk about physics, maybe hash through some of these inertia problems. Surely he’d be happy to do that, at least.
With some unpleasant sense of surprise, Bruno realized that except for a handful of emergencies in which the whole of humanity was threatened, it had been almost three decades since he’d had any contact with the Queendom at all. Was that what it took to interest him in the affairs of everyday life? Total calamity? Even his broken network gate had gone unrepaired, except for Her Majesty’s unauthorized access portal. And she hadn’t used it to visit him since the last calamity. Who could blame her, when he’d never sent so much as a letter?
It was like waking up underwater, yes. How did that happen?
He felt his blood stir, and wondered, finally, if this was what he’d been needing: human interaction to keep his physics problems in balance. No man was an island, the saying went. Never mind a whole planet. Indeed, he could fix his network gate immediately and send a message down into the Queendom, asking which of his friends would consider forgiving his long silence. Perhaps it would cause a stir in the media—they’d always had a strange interest in his affairs—but for God’s sake, why should he let that bother him?
He shot to his feet and, leaving the chaise lounge behind, marched homeward with more determination and enthusiasm than he’d had for much of anything lately.
“Door,” he said as he approached the house. Obligingly, the nearest wall formed a stained-glass door and opened it for him. He stepped through, and the interior lights came on dimly and began easing him from darkness to full interior light.
Robots danced out of his way, offering nothing in the way of food or drink because lately he’d been yelling at them for that, but one battered thing, far less graceful than its peers, moved directly into his path and spread its arms.
“Hugo,” he said, with a warmth that surprised even him. “Hugo, old fellow, have I neglected you as well? Have a hug, then, yes. Are you well this morning?”
The robot’s neck squeaked audibly as its head nodded, twice, and then the thing was stepping clumsily out of his way and looking around the house as if bewildered. Hugo was an experiment of sorts: an ordinary household robot not controlled by the household, not controlled by anything except its own desires and intentions. In general these were minimal and quite peculiar, unlike the desires of a person or a pet or an invading insect, but on occasion—perhaps by sheer coincidence—its behavior could be touchingly childlike.
“There, there,” he told it, and patted its head a few times. He’d felt a stab of guilt, thinking of young Vivian. She could be childlike, too, but even five years ago she’d been uncomfortably adult about some other things, and by now she was a young woman, her quite charming girlishness probably a thing of the past, or else taking on the overtones of adult affectation. How dreadful for him, that he could let such a thing slip by and feel guilty only now, when it was too late to do anything about it. Had he really tried to teach poor Hugo to play shuffleboard? That was a poor idea from the start, and if playing against the house’s robots was no fun either, well, had he never considered that Vivian might like to play? Or Tamra, or somebody?
“House,” he said sternly, turning to face the central fax orifice, “I require network access as soon as possible.”
“Planetary maintenance?” the house asked, perhaps thinking he needed to access the little world’s store of raw materials—water, air, pure element stock for the fax’s matter buffers … Perhaps that seemed likelier than the alternative: that he needed people. His house knew him too well.
“No, no,” he told it, “the Iscog.”
“Acknowledged,” the house said, and he could have sworn it sounded surprised. Iscog: the Inner System Collapsiter Grid. The Queendom’s telecom network.
Bruno, feeling somewhat indignant at that perhaps-imagined reaction, said, “I did build the thing, you kn
ow. The Iscog. I’ve a right to take an interest in the people using it.”
“Of course, sir,” the house agreed, and now it sounded imperturbably mechanical. “Gate repair is in progress. Estimated completion time, nine seconds. Gate repair is complete.”
Bruno frowned. That was too easy—a further indictment of his neglect. Had it waited all these years, for him to say those few simple words? Well, bah. There was no help for it now; the thing to do was to move forward.
“Record a letter,” he said.
But before the house could answer, the fax gate sizzled and glowed, and a human figure tumbled out of it and fell, sprawling, to the floor.
“Oh!” it said, in a voice—a male voice—like a sob. The figure reached out a hand, and stroked the floor as if caressing it. “Oh, can it? Can it be? Have I s-s-spilled at last to the feet of de Towaji?”
Nonplussed, Bruno took a step backward and sputtered, “Sir, my goodness! Have you been authorized to access this portal? What are you doing here?” And then, belatedly, “Are you all right?”
“All right?” the man sobbed giddily, looking up from his face-down sprawl. “All right? The concept eludes. No pain is being applied. Is that an answer?”
“Are you injured?”
“Injured? Mortally! Or not at all; the distinction is less important than you probably imagine.”
The question was far from frivolous; fax gate filters were supposed to strip the injuries and illnesses and general wear-and-tear of life from the bodies that passed through them. Conversely, they were supposed to leave affectations like baldness and pierce-holes alone, especially if the subject’s genome appendices commanded it. In the case of this man, though, the fax seemed to have had a very hard time making up its mind; his clothing hung off him in tatters, even its software apparently defunct; and beneath it, where the skin should be exposed, there was instead a varicolored and decidedly lumpy surface, like tattooed scar tissue. The hands appeared crooked and malformed, as did the feet projecting from the remains of a pair of suede knee boots, and the face … Something odd had been done to the face, it had been flattened somehow, the nose pushed upward and the cheeks drawn down, creating a piggish sort of look. And yet, for all that, the face looked worryingly familiar.
“Do I know you, sir?” Bruno asked. His voice trembled; he had the distinct feeling that the answer would upset him.
The sprawled man looked up at him and smiled in a most horrific way. “Do you not recognize me, de Towaji? I’d hoped not, actually, for I’m no fit thing for your remembrance. The only claim I have to usefulness—the only claim!—is that I was once your-s-s-self. Look upon me, de Towaji, and despair: I am precisely as low as you can sink.”
chapter fifteen
in which the clarity of hindsight is reaffirmed
Bruno’s household managed to get the stranger washed and into fresh clothing, over repeated and strenuous protests.
“This thing? I’m no fit inhabitant for a garment like this. No! Away! Don’t touch me. Please!”
The robots, dashing about in their usual poetic blur, nonetheless betrayed a curious deference or solicitousness toward the stranger, and by using their bodies in conjunction with strategically held towels and clothes, they managed to keep the surface of his body almost completely hidden. Bruno caught glimpses of ridged or puckered flesh, colored over with strange designs, and he very briefly observed a complete word calligraphed along the stranger’s leg. “PENITENT,” it looked like, though he was far from certain about that.
Finally, the protests died down, and the stranger said, “Ah, who’s myself to argue? It’s your generosity that’s given me these doublet and tights, not my own deserving, of which there is—take my word of it—none whatsoever.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Bruno said carefully, unsure what to make of a remark like that. Unsure what to make of this person at all, wondering what had happened to him and why he’d chosen to come here in what seemed to be an hour of quite desperate need.
But the stranger only laughed. “You haven’t grasped the tenth of it, Declarant-Philander, you who’ve never yet made acquaintance with the lash. Ah, what a lordly figure you cut! Your knees unbent, your eyes unaverted. Do you crawl? Do you plead? Do you think yours-s-self incapable of it?”
The stranger wasn’t mocking him, but seemed actually to be sort of pitying or even pleading, like someone who’d stumbled on a suicide attempt in progress and had no idea what to say. But there was a kind of self-mockery going on there, the voice reedy and whining, its tone deliberately obnoxious, as though its owner feared to speak with any decisive clarity or strength.
“What in the worlds has happened to you?” Bruno asked, and was relieved to hear more concern than disgust in his own voice. As the robots finished their work and danced away one by one, he stepped forward to offer the man a hand up. “Why have you come here?”
“What’s the date?” the stranger asked him in return. He declined the helping hand and stood up on his own, though he wobbled slightly. Were his knees weak? Injured, perhaps? As for dates, Bruno didn’t generally keep track of such things, but the house answered for him. “Sunday, February 28th, Year Ninety-Five of the Queendom.”
“Ah,” the stranger said, nodding. The look on his face was full of excitement, though of a stilted, unpleasant, untrustworthy variety. “Then I’ve been trapped in the grid for over two weeks, waiting for your port to open. I was afraid it mightn’t open—I know you too well!—but faxing to nowhere was much preferable to the alternative. And betrayer that I am, I did dare hope to reach you.”
Bruno’s frown deepened. “I don’t grasp your meaning, sir. Where have you come from?”
“From damnation itself!” the stranger said, cringing, and squeaked out a manic sound that was neither giggle nor sob.
“You think I’m jesting? Speaking in metaphors? He has a lot of anger toward you, and by extension toward myself, for having been you. Whips, chains, direct stimulation of the centers of s-s-suffering? These are merely appetizers. The most disagreeable treatments you can possibly imagine are inadequate, mere infantile shadows of the truth, because you haven’t spent a lifetime reflecting on it, as He has.”
But Bruno was still shaking his head. “What do you mean, ‘having been me?’ Are you saying you’re Bruno de Towaji? A copy of myself?”
“Was,” the stranger spat. “Was. It’s a name I’ll sully no further. But yes; He pirates fax patterns out of the Iscog, and instantiates them in secret, in dungeons hidden away from civilized eyes and sensors. He’s particularly fond of your pattern—there’ve been dozens of us in His clutches at one time or another—but He keeps others as well: Rodenbecks, van Sketterings, Kroghs … He even kept a Tamra for a while, though it didn’t seem to please Him. He’s kept a few others on occasion. Not that they last long, of course, the way He uses them up, but they can always be freshly printed, the s-s-same pain recipes tried over and over until they’re perfected. I represent an unbroken chain, decades long. In the midst of our sufferings we pass down the histories and lore, from one generation to the next. He encourages the practice, as it deepens our despair.”
Bruno could only stare. Was the stranger mad? Was he speaking from delusion, or some demented sense of jest? The two men stared at each other, the one unbelieving and the other unbelievable, for a long string of moments.
“May I sit?” the stranger finally asked, in the same whiny, ingratiating tones. He sounded tired, though. More than tired. Exhausted, in the literal sense: a container that had been squeezed of its contents. His knees quivered beneath his scrawny weight. He looked ready to faint. “I shudder to contaminate your furnishings, Bruno, or even your fine little floor, but my s-s-strength is limited.”
“Are you really myself?” Bruno asked, horrified to his very core, unable to reconcile a single trait or feature of this exhausted container with his own self-image. But the question needed no answer—the house would have corrected the lie already, would never have admitted the strang
er in the first place if he were, indeed, anything other than what he claimed. “My God, my God, yes, sit down over here! Lie back! House, bring us hot soup and blankets. Immediately!”
Steering the stranger—steering himself—toward the couch, he realized that it was warm enough in here, that there was no literal need for soup or blankets. But the house and the stranger seemed to understand; the gesture was symbolic. Robots brought woolen bedclothes, with which the stranger permitted Bruno to cover him, and a mug of steaming broth, from which he dutifully sipped.
“Ah,” the stranger sighed, “you’re too kind. Literally too kind, for I’ve betrayed your secrets and bartered off your dignity more thoroughly than you could ever know. He knows what moves you, what hurts you; He knows everything about you. He knows how you wipe your ass! I told Him all of this, over and over. I deserve none of your s-s-sympathy. And yet here I am, seeking it. Further proof of my unworth!”
“No, no! My God, Bruno, who’s done this to you?”
The stranger sat up angrily. “Do not call me that! I am not a Bruno! Call me Shit, or Remnant, or Betrayer.”
Bruno, leaning forward against one arm of the couch, shook his head. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“Sir,” the stranger pleaded, “do not call me Bruno. Unless you seek to upset me, sir. I deserve that, but I don’t desire it.”
Hugo let out a sudden mewl. In a corner of the room, trapped between a table and the wall, it stood perplexed, contemplating its golden legs and the prison that held them, perhaps considering an act of self-mutilation—Hugo had removed a leg more than once, sometimes for less reason than this. Once it had even managed to remove both of its arms, and had stood over them forlornly for a solid day, ignored by the house software, until Bruno had finally taken pity, broken off his experiments, and taken a screwdriver to the poor thing.