The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  “Excuse me, Madam, I need you to move a little to the left. Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

  Outside the weirdly translucent hull, Bruno could just barely make out stippled rows and columns of pinpoint brightness in the fog: the collapsium lattice that surrounded them. Curiously, it moved only slightly, vibrating a few centimeters back and forth in irregular bursts. Was the ship stuck against it somehow? It was not easy to see, to perceive any details at all, but there did seem to be some sort of kink in the tunnel ahead of them.

  “What do we do now?” someone wanted to know.

  An excellent question! This was no comfortable place—it was weightlessness and ertial travel, fever and sensory deprivation, hallucination and drowning all rolled into one. Bruno had felt more at ease on rickety sailboats, riding the stormy seas of Tonga! But how to escape? And where to go?

  “Sykes may believe we’re dead,” Cheng Shiao’s voice said tightly, through tinkling bells and underwatery echoes. “That’s something.”

  Vivian Rajmon’s voice replied. “I half believe it myself, Cheng. Is that your hand? It feels like wood!”

  Bruno peered and squinted, trying to perceive the two, to tell them apart from the others. Were there visual cues when a person spoke? Did translucent angel-amoebas have a discernible body language? He picked out two figures huddled together by the fireplace and decided that was probably who they were.

  Annoyingly, one figure still bounced around the hull’s interior. The body was difficult to focus on, almost too quick to see at all.

  “Declarant,” another male voice said, “I don’t feel too well right now.”

  “I’m sure none of us do,” Bruno agreed. “Who is that? Wenders Rodenbeck?”

  “The man himself,” Rodenbeck’s voice agreed.

  “Is that you bouncing around?”

  “That’s right. My hands’ve gone numb; I can’t seem to make the fingers work. I feel sort of poisoned, if that makes sense to you.”

  Bruno’s face threw itself into an inertialess frown. “Seriously ill, hmm?”

  “Seriously,” Rodenbeck agreed, in steady but frightened tones. “Whatever’s … happening to us in here, I think it must be very unhealthy. Getting out of this seems like a pretty necessary thing, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  Bruno, fearing Rodenbeck had suffered some sort of inertialess whiplash injury to his neck, suppressed the urge to nod. “I quite agree. Try not to move, sir. Your symptoms are troubling, and without knowing their cause, there’s no telling whether you could exacerbate them, or indeed, whether the rest of us could be similarly affected. But haste will likely make things worse. Can you remain calm for a few minutes?”

  “De Towaji is right,” Shiao said. “We don’t even know what sort of weapon was used against us back there. Explosive projectiles of some sort?”

  “There were no projectiles,” Bruno said. “Just bursts of energy.”

  “Energy doesn’t just appear,” Deliah objected.

  “Indeed. It’s puzzling. Perhaps Marlon was locally inverting the photon states of the zero-point field? That would create energetic bursts, but they’d be short-lived, and since this would also carve equivalent holes in the vacuum, which the energy would immediately rush back in to fill, the net release would still be zero. I suppose that is consistent with what we’ve observed.”

  Then came Muddy’s voice, only slightly whiny. “Pulsed gravity lasers, if they were crossed, should create brief p-peaks of intense gravitation. Potentially, eight crossed beams could create the equivalent of a collapsium lattice, for picosecond intervals.”

  “Ah. Clever thought.”

  Shiao made an optimistic grunt. “It’s not dangerous, then? It’s a trick, an illusion?”

  “Oh,” Bruno said, “I don’t know about that. The net energy of a knife is also zero. Better a knife than a bomb, I’ll wager, but finding ourselves in the middle of such an inversion would almost certainly be harmful.”

  “Fatal?”

  Bruno’s inertialess shrug nearly dislocated both shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Captain. I’m speculating enough as it is. It would get inside our superreflectors, I’m sure. It would appear inside, without having to penetrate. But he would have to score the hit on us, first, and that appears difficult. For whatever reason, the timing and position of the flashes don’t appear to be precisely controllable.”

  Shiao persisted. “Why would he use such an ineffective weapon? Because this ship is too nimble? Too difficult to target with a nasen beam?”

  “He does seem to have a lot of devices at his disposal,” Muddy agreed. “At least one nasen projector, probably eight or more gravity lasers, and oblivion knows how many s-s-standard EM grapples, to pull the Iscog and the Ring Collapsiter apart as he has. The energy he’s expended in the past five minutes would fill a battery twice as large as this ship. How much has he expended in the past week? The past three weeks?”

  “We should be looking for a very large ship, then?” asked Shiao.

  “Or a base,” Muddy said. “He’s a deeply private man, fond of s-s-secret facilities buried in rock. And if he is using gravity lasers in the way I’ve imagined, there would need to be two banks of four, spaced a considerable distance apart. Look for a good-sized asteroid whose sunward face is c-covered in wellstone energy converters. Dead black.”

  With great effort and concentration, Bruno fought inertialessness to lean as far forward as his straps would allow, and peered at the translucence of the control panel. He knew exactly where the trajectory display should be located, so it wasn’t hard to train his eyes on that spot. It was hard to make anything out there, though. Were those the edges of the plaque? The dashed and dotted lines upon it? He tried to remember where the planets had been, when they’d last seen a glimpse of …

  “Mercury,” he said. “It’s close enough—the radio time-lags match. It’s certainly big enough. And I can’t imagine a larger, emptier source of concealment.”

  “Or a better source of raw materials,” Muddy agreed. “Mercury, yes.”

  “I really don’t feel well,” Rodenbeck complained, in a weaker voice than before. “My limbs have gone entirely numb.”

  “All right,” Bruno said, with an accidental and quite sickening nod. “Ship? Why have we stopped?”

  “I stopped us,” the ship replied. “The tunnel ahead of us bends too sharply to admit my outer hull.”

  “Hmm. You used backup thrusters to do this?”

  “Yes. I’m also currently using them to maintain attitude and position. It’s difficult, sir—required thrust is very low to effect a velocity change, but the counterpulse required to damp it is itself a function of position and velocity. The resulting control space has no closed-form solutions.”

  “So you’re improvising.”

  “Correct, sir. Fuel consumption has stabilized, but remains disconcertingly rapid.”

  Rapid? That wasn’t a good thing. “Estimated time of depletion?”

  “Two minutes, twenty-four seconds, sir.”

  “Oh, dear. Is there enough fuel to back us out of here safely?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  “Blast. Use some imagination, you! Bring matters like this to my attention before they become irrevocable!”

  “I am extremely taxed,” the ship said in its own defense.

  Bruno sighed. “All right, then, turn around and pull us out with the grapples; without a fuel supply we’re in more danger in here than we are outside.”

  “Acknowledged, sir.”

  There was no sense of movement, but the jittering lattice of pinpoints outside the hull began—slowly and jerkily—to rotate.

  With a yelp of surprise, Wenders Rodenbeck settled at once to the deck beside Bruno’s couch and remained there.

  “Ah, good. You’ve managed to grab hold,” Bruno said, looking down approvingly.

  “Actually, friend, I appear to be stuck.” Rodenbeck’s voice was alarmed.

  “Stuck?”

/>   “It feels … like gravity. Pretty much exactly like gravity.”

  Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness! “Ship, cease rotation!”

  But it was too late. The walls hummed with activity, oxygen atoms accelerating near-inertialessly and being expelled at velocities that probably exceeded the vacuum speed of light. But the rotation continued—even began, ponderously, to accelerate.

  “I don’t understand,” Deliah van Skettering protested. “The gravity inside a cylinder should cancel to zero, regardless of position or orientation.”

  “A continuous cylinder of infinite length,” Bruno corrected. “Ours is kinked and twisted, and composed of discrete masses, and filled with a Casimir supervacuum that dulls momentum! I’m a fool. Hold on, Wenders, I’ll fish you up.”

  “No!” Muddy shrieked. “I forbid it, sir! Keep your hands where they are!”

  “Muddy, I—”

  “You’ll be killed,” Muddy insisted. “Needlessly, pointlessly killed! You can’t save him in time!”

  “You’re saying I’m going to die?” Rodenbeck asked, his breath now coming in gasps.

  “Blast it,” Bruno said, quietly, hollowly, because he almost certainly would be killed if he intervened. But perhaps Rodenbeck—an artist, an innocent in this madness—could be saved. With numb fingers, he undid his safety harness. Already he was feeling the beginnings of weight, as the stern of the ship swung close to a collapson node. And for so small a black hole, the gradients would be exceedingly steep. Wenders Rodenbeck was probably already feeling more than a gee, the equivalent of Earth-surface gravity. And in the next thirty seconds …

  There was no way to avoid this; the ship couldn’t go forward, couldn’t drag itself backward with grapples, couldn’t go anywhere without turning around. But Bruno should have foreseen this difficulty, should have seen where the danger would occur and then ordered everyone away from it. Steeling himself, he leaned over the side of his couch …

  And was whisked, with an instantaneous, all-but-inertialess flicker of movement, to the bow of the ship.

  “I f-f-forbid it,” Muddy said, his hard, solid-wax torso bouncing and skating over Bruno’s own. He held on tightly to something, pinning Bruno to the window there, preventing him from escaping. Muddy had leaped the length of the ship, apparently, to ensure this.

  “Let go,” Bruno said urgently. “Let go! I must help him. This is my fault!”

  “It isn’t. We’ve never done this before. What man has walked inside collapsium like a tunnel beneath a river? What man can foresee every problem? You saved him once, but this time, Marlon has him for certain.”

  “Oh! God!” Rodenbeck cried out, weakly.

  “Release me,” Bruno insisted. “We’ve seen deaths before, but I can do something this time. Listen, you coward! You sniveler! Am I really so weak, so selfish? Am I really so capable of being you? Release me!”

  “I will not.”

  Below, Bruno was just able to see Rodenbeck’s struggling form, pinned to the deck now by several gees. There was no expression on his amoeba face, but the expression in his gasping voice was plain enough: “I told you … this stuff was … dangerous, de To …”

  And then he died, his lungs’ strength insufficient to lift their own tremendous weight. He suffocated there at the bottom of the ship, while Bruno and the others, hanging only a few meters away, feeling only the merest stirrings of gravity, did nothing. Terrible sounds rose up from the body as its bones snapped, then shattered, then powdered, until finally Rodenbeck was nothing but a leathery, vaguely man-shaped pancake on the floor. Five hundred gee? A thousand? The gradient itself must have been terrible, a difference of hundreds of gees just between the deck and the space a single centimeter above it. Bruno could see the collapson node there behind Rodenbeck’s body. He watched it pull the remaining remains into a circular mass and drag them along the floor as it rotated by.

  And still the jets hummed; still the faint bells tinkled in the air.

  “My God,” Deliah said, and began to weep.

  Bruno finally stopped struggling.

  The rotation continued another fifteen seconds, until finally Sabadell-Andorra proclaimed the maneuver complete. “Eight seconds to fuel depletion,” it added.

  “Right,” Muddy said. “Grapples on full. T-take us out of here.”

  “Acknowledged, sir. Destination?”

  “The planet Mercury.”

  chapter twenty-two

  in which history’s great wizards clash

  There was a lot of talk, once they’d entered normal space again.

  “All the things people are doing when they die,” Vivian said quietly. “The things they’re just about to do at the moment the strings are cut. Sometimes nasty, sometimes wonderful, sometimes perfectly ordinary. My grandmother used to say these were things God wanted for himself. She was a kind of Muslim, I suppose—her God was always needy and bitter like that. Not remote, though—he was right there looming over her all the time, like a drunk uncle. But when she died she wasn’t doing anything special, just sitting by the window in her rocking chair, wrapped up in an old blanket.”

  “Maybe God needed that,” Shiao suggested matter-of-factly.

  Vivian gave an absent nod. “Yes, that’s what Mother said. But couldn’t he just, you know, create his own moment of peace? Why should he need to take Grammy’s? When I was older, I think I would wake up sometimes, wondering if that God of hers were looming over me, ready to steal my dreams or my morning breath or something. What a puny motive! He doesn’t get to do much of that anymore, and I’m glad about it. History’s greatest thug; phooey, I disown him! The day I stand at his throne I’ll place him under arrest; I swear I will.” She cast a gloomy look at the bloodstained deck. “Rest in peace, Wenders Rodenbeck. Rest, all the victims of this atrocity.”

  And there was other talk as well: Was Declarant Sykes still looking for them? Should they attempt to render the ship invisible? That wouldn’t work, of course—it’d simply let the sunlight through, to poach all the remaining people inside.

  Bruno’s grief had now become unbearable; finally it commanded his attention. He ignored the whole discussion, simply throwing an arm over his face and weeping, weeping, his tears seeming to come from an endless reservoir somewhere. He’d been powerless, all those years ago, to save Enzo and Bernice de Towaji when the Old Girona Bistro fell down on them. He knew they were dying in there, knew there was time to save them if only, if only … And so, today, had he been helpless to save Wenders. And Tamra, yes—how very grievously he’d failed her! Perhaps he was, quite simply, powerless after all. Perhaps all his deeds and accomplishments were so much illusion, just chance and foolish self-deception. It seemed a plausible enough notion, at that moment.

  “What do we do with the … body?” someone asked.

  “It seems to have gelled. Look, it’s a solid mass. Weird. Into the fax with it, I’d say.”

  “I’ll do it. Here.”

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! Save us! Hasn’t there been enough? Deposit us in some safe location before you dash off on this mission!” That sounded like Tamra’s friend Tusité. Bruno forgave her the outburst; Tamra surrounded herself with all manner of silly people, but very few of them were weak. It didn’t imply weakness, to bend and break under the strain of these events. Indeed, quite the reverse—it was only human, part of the basic mammalian wiring, to feel terrified when helpless. And to grieve for one’s Queen, yes, as for no other thing except, perhaps, one’s own children.

  He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to be comforted. He wanted comfort, period. But he sensed, he knew, that no one would have anything to offer but their own grief, and perhaps some platitudes. Such a tragedy. We all loved her so well and so personally, each in our own way. How trite! How monstrous! Platitudes existed for this very purpose; to underscore the dreary, hopeless banality of human suffering. Should he carve a pyramid with his bare hands? Circumnavigate a world? Would that help? Even for himself, he had no words or thoughts of wisdom,
only platitudes.

  And then Muddy’s voice spoke up. “There are no s-s-safe places, madam, and no chance to look for them if there were. Time is of the essence if we’re to foil this … madman’s plot.”

  That got on Bruno’s nerves: Muddy’s tone was, as ever, grating and whiny and filled with terrified self-pity. And yet, there he was, acting to save the Queendom while Bruno himself sniveled and sobbed on the couch. How humiliating! How base! The thought only made him cry harder.

  “Mercury isn’t a small place,” Vivian Rajmon observed.

  “Indeed,” Muddy said, “and we’ve only a few minutes to decide where to begin.”

  “We look for deep-black solar collectors, you said. Superabsorbers?”

  “C-c-correct. But even those will be small, compared to the size of a world. Even with the best sensors and algorithms, we are hindered by simple geometry. Searching the entire surface could take hours.”

  “Hours,” Cheng Shiao brooded. “With Sykes ready to open fire upon us at any time. I’m surprised he hasn’t already!”

  “Perhaps he isn’t looking,” Vivian said. “Perhaps he’s busy hatching some new villainy.” Then she paused, and came over to Bruno’s bedside. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed. “It must be hard, Declarant: all of us drawing upon you so desperately, in your hour of need. Even your own duplicate is doing it! But we’ll be there very soon. Will you join us for a moment?”

  Finally, at these words, Bruno felt the flow of tears begin to ebb. Not so much because Vivian had requested it—although he’d had a little soft spot in his heart for her since she was eleven years old—but because he didn’t want to arrive at their destination and have Marlon see him weep. Absurd, of course, since Marlon had probably seen Muddy weep for twenty continuous years, had in fact coaxed tears from a Bruno until he became a Muddy, over and over and over again. But he supposed the mind didn’t need to work rationally, so long as it worked.

  “Oh, forgive me.” He sniffed, wiping his eyes and nose with a sleeve.

  “Of course,” she said gently. “Of course we do.”