The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  His voice sped up, becoming almost giddy. “I watched your world through telescopes, you know, and when you finally made a ring of the collapsium—around a star, no less!—I thought surely you must have figured it out. I waited for your network gate to open; I even sent you a present. But you hadn’t worked it out, had you? You still haven’t. I really am way ahead of you on this one. How extraordinarily affirming that is, of all my years of effort!”

  Bruno felt he couldn’t possibly be more bewildered. “Marlon, what in the damn worlds are you talking about?”

  Another long pause. Then: “The arc de fin, Bruno. Your window to the end of time. There’s a shortcut, an easy solution, to produce it this year. This very month. It requires a lot of mass, and an energetic collapse, but those have finally been arranged.”

  “Oh. Dear God,” Bruno said. “The sun!”

  “Exactly. I need it. Oh, I suppose any equivalent star would do, but there’d have to be a thriving industrial civilization there to help me collapse it in the proper way. So we’d be back to waiting thousands of years again, until these Queendom slackards expand beyond this one meager system. It’s too long. History should know its own end, to be able to make sense of its present. And history will record that it was I, not you, who opened that window.”

  Bruno couldn’t help laughing a little—a sour, bitter, furious chuckle. Grief hovered beside him, waiting its turn, but for the moment he was simply angry. “History will die with the Queendom, Marlon. There’ll be no one left to remember how damned smart you were.”

  “Oh, please.” Marlon’s voice was impatient. “I disrupted the Iscog to keep small minds from interfering; I didn’t realize yours was one of them. There’ll be more deaths, of course; that can’t be avoided. Probably most of the people on Earth, certainly all the ones on Venus. The flares of the dying sun will be impressive, it’s true. But come on; you know as well as I how trivial it is to create miniature stars. We could be circling the planets with them, using them for power, heat, light, industry … Why should we settle for nature, when a handful of neubles, some wellstone, and some hydrogen will match what nature requires a billion billion billion tons to accomplish? A sun! I say it’s inevitable, that we should dismantle the stars for our own purposes and replace them with something of our own device. History will credit me with that, as well.”

  “History will label you a monster,” Bruno said darkly.

  After a pause, Marlon grumbled. “Bruno, I realize nobody owes me greatness, but if I can seize greatness, why shouldn’t I? The Queendom provides the framework and the labor, and I provide the ideas and the careful flow of information to control it all. At the top! People suffer as a result, but what’s so unnatural about that? This idea that people should be safe and happy, that’s a very distorting idea. Look to history: Most societies have agreed that people should be useful, to men of vision like myself. Who remembers the happy nobodies? My future is grander than yours, Bruno; I swear it. Your so-called ‘monsters’ are simply the flesh of humanity’s ambition to create a history worth recording.”

  “You’re brainsick, Marlon. Something’s come loose in your base pattern. When was the last time you were medically validated by anything but a fax filter?”

  “Damn yourself! God, why is there always this confusion between ambition and madness? The two aren’t even related. I’ve created various mad versions of myself, just to see if that would be useful. Better than complacency, at any rate; sometimes I think the very purpose of the Queendom is to crush away all dreams of greatness, to stuff them into a single individual and then rob her of any real power, just to show it can’t be had.”

  “The Ring Collapsiter was ambitious, Marlon.”

  “More than you know.”

  “As described! What a fine idea it was, and is. What a shame to so pervert it! I’d thought you were a builder, Marlon, a creator. I’m ashamed to be so wrong.”

  “Oh, listen to yourself. Listen to that pompous, stupid voice! I know you, sir. Don’t forget it. I know you when you’re proud and fresh, and I know you afterward, when you’ve broken. I’m well aware of your limits. Don’t presume to think, for even a moment, that you have the same knowledge of me.”

  Sykes paused, then continued in a milder voice. “All right, I suppose I am a monster. I suppose that goes without question at this point. But a visionary monster, and that’s what really matters. You and I have clashed enough, Bruno. I’m done hating you; I’m prepared to write your name in next to my own. Consider: if not for you, I’d have no peers at all, and how’s a man with no peers supposed to fit in? Ah? Ah?” He invited a friendly laugh, and seemed to expect that he’d get one.

  Bruno sighed a final time. “You know I can’t let you do this, Marlon. Do as Captain Shiao says: Surrender yourself now. They won’t prosecute you; you clearly have some kind of illness. Once cured, you’ll see the madness in all this. For your own sake, not to mention poor Tamra’s, you should help me clean this mess up and start setting things right.”

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. I had to try, Bruno. Don’t say I didn’t try. I’m sorry to tell you, this conversation is over.”

  Suddenly, the space around them was filled with pulsing light. Great blossoms of pure energy—each one easily the size of Earth’s moon—flicked into existence, remained just long enough to register, and vanished again.

  “Good night!” Bruno exclaimed. “Ship, what’s the distribution of those flashes?”

  “Stochastic, sir, a Gaussian white-noise pattern.”

  “Centered around us?”

  “Centered ten million kilometers to the solar east of us. Eigenvectors are nonorthogonal; the distribution is shaped like—excuse me, library search—a banana, sir.”

  “A banana? Gods, what now? What’s the standard deviation?”

  “Along which axis, sir?”

  “Along the relevant axis, you! The one connecting our position to the centroid of your banana. How close is this phenomenon to hitting us?”

  “Ah,” the ship said. “Five million kilometers, sir.”

  Bruno frowned, pinched his chin. “We’re at the two-sigma dispersion contour? That’s odd. Is the centroid stationary?”

  “Negative, sir. It’s matching our acceleration, and exceeding our velocity by a constant two hundred thousand kilometers per second. It is gaining on us.”

  “Ah,” Bruno said, finally beginning to understand. “Add the phenomenon to the trajectory display, please. All known flashes to date.”

  The result was quite alarming: here was the grappleship, hurtling directly downward, toward the vast luminous plains of the solar chromosphere. And off to one side was a crescent-shaped pattern of dots, marching and smearing its way toward them. Off to the other side was that stray Ring Collapsiter fragment he’d glimpsed a few minutes ago: a ropy, kilometers-long chain of collapsium.

  Despite the ertial nausea, everyone crowded forward, eager to see and understand the new display, eager to know what was happening to them. Their bodies stank of sweat; even Deliah’s, he realized. Even his own. Impervium or no, it was getting hot in here. No material was superreflective at all wavelengths, after all, and the hull was necessarily pierced by certain openings, for the grapple beams and the emergency exhaust ports and of course the hatch itself. So it leaked, slowly letting in the heat. How close to the sun could they get before they were cooked in place? He noticed that the little faux fireplace had extinguished itself, probably figuring its warming-the-place-up job was done.

  “Blackbody temperature of the flashes?” Bruno asked.

  “Ten million kelvins, sir.”

  “Ah.” That told him nothing useful.

  “We’re being herded,” Cheng Shiao said, pointing at the display. “The sun on one side, the weapon pulses on the other. No way to move up or down out of the ecliptic plane. No place to go but here.”

  “Toward the collapsium,” Bruno agreed angrily. “Deliah, can we grapple to it?”

  “Not without shreddi
ng it. The whole thing will still be muon-contaminated, Bruno. Very fragile.”

  “How contaminated? How long will it stand up to our tugging?”

  “I don’t know. Seconds, minutes … I don’t know how to measure or calculate it. Do you?”

  “Not offhand,” Bruno admitted. Then he said, “Bah. Enough. We grapple to it, at once. Ship? You hear me? Grab the end of that fragment, if you can—that’ll direct the tension along its strongest axis.”

  “Acknowledged, sir.”

  Gravity flickered and lurched, then restored itself. The view outside the bow wheeled and locked, centering itself on the distant, powder-blue tendril of collapsium.

  “It’s too hot in here,” Tamra’s courtier, Tusité, complained.

  “We’re all hot,” Muddy answered her faintly, from his place on the floor. Evidently he’d decided to remain there. “We’re diving into the sun, for God’s sake.”

  “Environmental controls at maximum,” the ship said in its own defense.

  “Vent some oxygen from the emergency tank,” Bruno suggested. “It’s supercompressed—its expansion upon release should provide some cooling.”

  The temperature nudged down a bit. A sigh went through them all. In the window above, the collapsium grew larger, closer.

  Sabadell-Andorra spoke again. “Receiving a transmission, sir. Playing it.”

  Then Marlon’s voice, crackling heavily with solar-wind static. “Bruno, what are you doing? You leave that fragment alone! Its placement is very precise! What are you dragging it with?”

  “No reply,” Bruno instructed.

  “Bruno,” Marlon warned, “stop this at once. Blast it, I’ve given you every possible chance, and see where it gets me. Good-bye, sir.”

  “Centroid of the flashes has shifted to our position,” the ship said. “It is now tracking us directly.”

  Under his breath, Bruno muttered something history does not record. “All right, what’s our probability of being flashed?”

  “Of being inside one of the flashes when it appears?” the ship asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Approximately one-half percent, sir, every second.”

  “I see. And how long before we collide with that collapsium fragment?”

  “Forty seconds, sir.”

  “Ah.” He looked around, at the assembled friends and acquaintances, at the robot and the copy of himself. “Well, I’m very sorry, everyone, but Marlon appears to have killed us all. My humblest apologies to every one of you.”

  Then a thought struck him. “Ship, what part of the fragment are we approaching? The middle?”

  “The end, sir. It’s where we grappled to, per your orders.”

  “Indeed.” He turned to Deliah and spoke quickly. “The Ring Collapsiter is hollow, yes? A tube of collapsium, with an open conduit down the center. That’s the whole point of it: a tunnel of supervacuum through which light can travel unimpeded.”

  “Yes,” Deliah said uncertainly, her eyes widening.

  “How large a conduit, again? Six meters? Wide enough to admit this vessel?”

  “Bruno, you can’t—well, perhaps you can.”

  “Ship, can you dive straight down the center of the fragment?”

  “I can try, sir. Contact in five seconds. Four, three, two, one …”

  chapter twenty-one

  in which the predictions of a doomsayer are fulfilled

  Is this death, Bruno wondered? There was certainly a lot of screaming, or rather, a lot of unearthly, uncanny whispering sounds that reminded him of screaming. He also heard clear, high ringing sounds, like hundreds of little bells. And these flitting, translucent entities … Were they souls? Angels? Devils? Were they the ones screaming? The sounds were impossible to localize—they seemed to come from within his own head!

  Simultaneous arrival in both eardrums, the voice of reason whispered, and that voice actually was in his head, purely imaginary, giving him something to compare these actual sounds against. The difference was, so to speak, pronounced. So perhaps he was in a real place after all. In his ship, alive inside the Ring Collapsiter? That seemed as unlikely as Heaven itself.

  His senses told him nothing familiar, filled him with confusion and terror and nothing more. Start with vision: he saw, or seemed to see, a dim, sourceless, colorless light all around, like a fog. Within the light he perceived movement, rapid and repetitive. He perceived shapes, or rather, shapeless regions with a different sort of translucence. Some of these moved; others did not. Some were close; others were not.

  Aha! So stereo vision still worked in this place. Bruno still had two eyes, which were capable of angling inward or outward to judge distance. That was something, a major clue! But what were those two eyes seeing? Not ordinary light, certainly. Start with the assumption, then, that he was inside the collapsium. What would that imply? A greatly reduced zero-point field, for one thing. Like the ertial shield’s wake, but symmetric all around him? With no acceleration to restore some grudging sense of inertia? The speed of light would be much higher, meaning the frequency of light would be much higher for a given energy. Visible light photons would phase off into the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum, without gaining the energy wallop of true gamma rays. And low-energy photons? Might they become visible?

  Try sound next: He couldn’t localize it, the way he could localize light. But while stereo vision was related to angles, independent of anything else, stereo hearing relied on differences in a sound’s arrival time from one ear to the other. This related directly to the speed of sound—the higher the speed, the vaguer the perceived direction. Yet he did hear human voices, or something like them. So perhaps the speed of sound—and thus its frequency—wasn’t that different, maybe increased by a factor of a few hundred. Perhaps friction and viscosity played a larger role in sound waves than inertia did. If he spoke in low tones, could he make himself understood?

  “HELLO!” he rumbled in his deepest, loudest bass, and indeed, he felt and heard a scratchy whisper that was faint but—at least to him—reasonably intelligible. He was rewarded with a renewed cacophony of sounds, urgent sounding but otherwise devoid of meaning.

  He was still furious and afraid, still awaiting his chance to grieve, but now he was fascinated as well. Rarely did physics problems present themselves in such dramatic and tangible ways!

  All right, then; try the sense of touch: He felt light impacts all around him, like puffs of air. There was no feeling of weight or motion, but the touches on his skin did seem to correspond in some way to the dancing translucences all around him. He reached out a hand, and it flicked out like a whip and then stopped as quickly. To his astonishment he felt the shapes of a human nose and cheek touch it lightly, for an instant, then bounce away. The face had felt rigid, as if carved out of wax, but it had been a face, warm and sticky-slick with natural oils. For an instant it had even looked like a face in a vague, watercolor sort of way, before it flickered off into the fog again.

  Finally, his senses began to integrate. To give them a few moments’ peace, he took a breath and closed his eyes. Those actions felt normal enough, at least. When he looked again, things were clearer.

  He could make out the insides of the Sabadell-Andorra, yes, her hull all but transparent in this foggy light. Inside that space were the many human bodies he and Muddy had collected, but they were bouncing around off every surface, like ping-pong balls. Sometimes they spun, sometimes not. Sometimes they’d stop suddenly, and then be knocked into motion again by the collision of someone else. All their transitions were instantaneous, rigid. Bruno himself was not bouncing, since he was strapped into his ghostly-clear couch. Another form—Deliah, in her folding chair?—was also motionless, though the body twitched in a quick, unpleasant, insectile way.

  The screams continued.

  “ER, TRY TO REMAIN CALM,” he rumbled at them. “SEE IF YOU CAN GRAB ONTO SOMETHING.”

  Almost immediately, one of the bodies stopped bouncing. Bruno peered at it, trying to m
ake out details. A person, desperately gripping Muddy’s control panel with arms and knees?

  “it works,” a faint, whispery voice, barely audible sounded. “you can stop yourself you can catch yourself”

  Another body froze in place against the hatchway. Soon someone else was clinging to that. Then a pair of bodies were bouncing together, clinging to each other but not to anything else.

  Suddenly there were voices rather than screams. “where are we hey that’s my hair i’ve got you don’t let go we are inside the ring collapsiter i thought we were dead for sure …”

  “SHIP?” Bruno tried.

  “… because i can’t reach it that’s my eye you will have to climb over …”

  “SHIP!”

  “Y-r-mnk-str-hhhhhhk”

  “SABADELL-ANDORRA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

  “C … d not pro … d”

  “SHIFT YOUR AUDIO FREQUENCIES. TRANSMIT LOWER. LISTEN HIGHER. THE SPEED OF SOUND HAS CHANGED.”

  “C … nsating. This is a test signal. Can you hear me, sir?” The voice was tinny but clear.

  “YES! CAN YOU REBROADCAST OUR VOICES IN A FREQUENCY-SHIFTED DOMAIN?”

  Now in a stronger voice: “Th . . t should be possible in a moment, sir. I’m experiencing an enormous number of intermittent computational malfunctions, but I have established sufficient redundancy to compensate. Shift and rebroadcast is enabled.”

  Bruno cleared his throat, then tried to speak normally. “Hello?” His voice, despite an echoey, underwater quality, sounded much better. And with much less effort, too.

  “Hello!” four or five other voices called back.

  Then a new burst of chatter broke out.

  “I can hear!”

  “… got my voice back.”

  “I feel really sick.”

  “Help! I don’t like this!”