by Wil McCarthy
“I surrender,” Bruno said quickly. “Please, harm none of them.”
Marlon relaxed. “You’re no fool, de Towaji. You understand: Your lives can end along with several billion others, or they can continue while those billions die anyway. Those are the only choices available. The equation is simple.”
“Indeed,” Bruno said, his heart quailing. He still hoped for some miracle, some way to bring this horrific matter to a less-than-horrific conclusion. But to achieve that miracle, even to hope for it, he must live at least a little while longer … “Can you access some sort of intercom or public address system? I’ll need to speak with my friends.”
“That can be arranged,” Marlon said, stepping toward the live wellstone wall in which the doorway had appeared. He looked somewhat less than trusting as he tapped out a series of commands on the wellstone’s surface.
A pickup and wall speaker appeared beside Bruno, at the same level as the speaker beneath his chin.
“Er, hello?” he tried. “Vivian, are you there?”
“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice called back immediately. “We were worried; you’ve been gone so long!”
“You may remain worried,” Bruno said. Then, finally, he knew what he must do: He must order Deliah and Vivian and Tusité and Muddy away from this place. Could he not save the Queendom? Was it arrogance to think he ever could? Well, then at least he would save something, and not in the foul clutches of Marlon Sykes. He would order them away, and Marlon, with his systems down, would have no choice but to let them escape. Meanwhile, he would vent his anger on the available targets: Shiao first, naturally, but Shiao had just got done placing his fate in Bruno’s hands. And Shiao’s death, his inevitable death, might conceivably give Bruno enough time to throw himself hands-first at Marlon’s throat—
But Vivian Rajmon’s high, teenaged voice called out before he could quite get the words formed. “Cheng? R.C. Captain Cheng Shiao, are you all right?”
“I’m here, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, suddenly attentive. “I … would have you know that my heart was lost the moment I met you, Commandant-Inspector. It would have been yours, if you’d have had it—yours for a million years. But my life belongs to de Towaji, and to the Queendom. Forgive me.”
And with those words, Bruno’s hoped-for miracle occurred: Shiao’s body, crippled and broken and bloodied though it was, somehow found the strength to leap four meters across the room at Marlon Sykes. Marlon had been suspicious, waiting for trouble of some sort, but Cheng Shiao was a hard man to stop. The gun went off with a little popping sound, but a moment later Shiao swept it from Marlon’s hand, knocking it across the room so that it spun along the floor and came to rest beneath the rumpled cot. He knocked Marlon down as well, in the same clean motion.
“Good night!” Bruno couldn’t help exclaiming.
Then Vivian’s voice came again. “Cheng! Cheng!”
And Muddy’s voice. “What’s happening, sir? Can we help?”
Shiao wrestled Marlon facedown onto the floor, and then from somewhere, some pocket or recess in the tattered spacesuit, produced a ball of handcuff putty and slapped it down on the small of Marlon’s back. Rattlesnake-quick, it lashed out to encircle wrists and ankles, leaving Marlon neatly trussed and screaming. “Dealbreakers! Dealbreakers! Rotten, stinking, dishonest …”
But there was no look of triumph or even relief on Shiao’s face. Only pain. He rolled away, falling onto his back, and Bruno could see the wound Marlon’s gun had made in Shiao’s abdominal cavity. Not a bullet hole, or a laser burn, but a void—a six-centimeter absence where armor and flesh should be. Transported? Vanished? The dream of matter, somehow undreamt? It hardly mattered; Shiao would not survive the injury. Already it was filling with blood. Cheng Shiao would be dead in sixty seconds, if that.
“Cheng!” Vivian called out again.
“He’s injured,” Bruno said back to her. “You must turn the faxes back on. Quickly!”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it; you have to. We replaced part of the domestic software with your own household AI.”
“You what?”
“It was in the ship’s library. Never mind! Help Cheng!”
Bruno frowned, and for some reason he looked up at the ceiling. “House? Hello, are you here?”
“Good day, sir,” that old, familiar voice said. “I’m detecting numerous diagnostic errors, and I seem to be under some sort of direct software assault from a native AI, but I await your instructions nonetheless. It’s good to be working with you again, sir.”
“Turn the faxes on!” Bruno cried, leveling a finger at Shiao’s struggling, bleeding, dying body. “Help me get him into the fax! Quickly! Quickly!”
“Working,” the house replied easily. “Fax machine activated.”
Sure enough, the orifice hummed to life, flashed briefly, and extruded a humanoid robot of gold and tin, faceless and graceful, precisely like the servants Bruno had employed for so very many years. The space between fax and victim was several meters, but the robot danced across it in an instant, swept Shiao’s body off the floor in a bloody arc, and hurled it directly into the orifice. The body vanished at once, and an instant later the robot had leaped through as well, vanished as well. The whole affair had taken three seconds.
Marlon still struggled on the floor, rolling and flopping, trying to face Bruno and only partially succeeding. “Nobody wins,” he said urgently. “I know what you’re thinking, Bruno, but you can’t possibly grapple all that collapsium up away from the sun. Not in time, not at all. You can have your arc de fin; you can see the very lights and darknesses of uncreation. This year! This month! I give it to you, sir, my gift. All the credit, all the glory, if you’ll only let me at the controls. Let me at them!”
“No,” Bruno said flatly.
“No? Think hard, Bruno. I tell you, you cannot save the sun. Will you at least see that its death has meaning?”
“No. Indeed, I stand here wondering …” The hairs prickled up on the back of Bruno’s neck. He felt awake, really awake, for perhaps the first time in his life. “I stand here wondering what I was thinking all that time. An arc de fin? What use is that? If we’re to live forever, won’t we see the end of time with our own two eyes? All too soon, I fear! We’ll look back and say ‘Already? Already the world is ending, the stars winking out? Why, we’d only just begun!’ And if that end is spoiled by de Towaji, a trillion years before the fact, why … one wonders why we’ve bothered to live at all.”
“You’re mad,” Marlon said, his voice edging on panic. Straining against the putty, he managed to lift his head enough to look Bruno in the eye. “It’s my own fault; I’ve driven you mad. I’ve killed your Queen!”
“Indeed,” Bruno agreed, nodding slowly. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s all it is. The work of decades falls away like ashes, leaving nothing, no sense of purpose or desire. There is no Tamra for me to hide from, no Tamra for me to return to when at long last I’m finished. To live forever without her? Even to contemplate it? I suppose I am mad.”
Marlon’s eyes were sharp, his tone urgent. “Listen to me, Bruno. Ask a question with me. Where do people go when they die? Nowhere? Where exactly is nowhere?”
Ah, but Bruno was awake—he saw the trick in that question. He was encouraged to conclude that “nowhere,” since it didn’t exist, was of zero size, and by corollary that everything that no longer existed—being also of zero size and therefore located “nowhere”—could be found there, instantly, without effort. With zero movement, zero searching, zero time. Ah, but by that logic, everything that never existed could be found there as well. So could everything that existed now, but someday wouldn’t. At the end of time, everything would be nowhere, including time itself, and so Bruno declined to fall for the trick. The size of nowhere was surely infinite, in time as well as space, else he and Marlon and everyone else would be there already.
He raised a finger in Marlon’s direction, and waggled it. �
�House, remove this body as well.”
“No, Bruno! No! Believe me, you can’t stop this. It’s pointless to try!”
The robot appeared, danced across the floor to where Marlon lay, and scooped him up.
“It’s never pointless to try,” Bruno mused.
And then the fax machine hummed, and there was no one else in the room there with him.
“Bruno?” Vivian’s voice quietly, sadly, said from the speaker, treading with utmost tenderness. “Bruno, is Cheng all right?”
“He’s stored, dear,” Bruno replied wearily. “He’s safe for the moment. But the sun, alas, is not.”
It seemed to take a long time to hobble over to Marlon’s little wellstone desk. “House,” he said along the way, “activate that. Thank you.”
He sat down at the wellwood chair, taking the load off his feet, off his back, off his pain. The old grapple controls were there, the old holographic displays, as if Marlon had cribbed them from Bruno’s own designs. Tortured them, probably, from Muddy’s own pained and screaming lips. How tired Muddy must have been, after years of torment! How extraordinary, that he’d managed to accomplish so much in spite of it.
Bruno pulled up an interface and quietly immersed himself.
Here was the sun, here the dotted line where the Ring Collapsiter had once stood. And beneath it, in a hundred spinning fragments, were the Ring Collapsiter’s children, and he saw at once that there were simply too many of them, that they were simply too large, that most were simply too close to the sun to retrieve. They were mere hours from penetration, from the beginning of Sol’s slow and painful death. Still, he grabbed the nearest one with Marlon’s EM grapples, which were of a fine and strong design. He tugged, he twisted, he prodded and nudged. None of it, of course, worked. The best he could accomplish, really, would be to tear it apart, to break it, to let it collapse into a real black hole that he’d have even less hope of manipulating.
“Ah, well,” he whispered, “she was a good star while she lasted.”
And then he remembered the ring. The ring! The wellstone ring he’d plucked from his own hypercomputer, minutes before he’d destroyed it and the planet it stood on! That ring contained the program, the dance card, the recipe by which collapsium was converted to hypercollapsite vacuogel.
Perhaps all was not lost.
He stood, quickly, knocking over the chair behind him. The ring was on his finger, but his finger was inside this blasted spacesuit! “Off,” he said to it. “Off, you!” And he struggled with it as the hasps unfastened, as the seams parted, as the blood-smeared helmet dome fell away and rang against the floor like a bell. Finally an arm was free, and he used that to free the other one, and he was about to peel his legs out of it as well when he decided that bah, it didn’t matter. He pulled the chair up under him and stuffed the suit underneath it, trailing from the tops of his armored boots.
He plucked the blue-jeweled wellgold ring from his finger then, and plinked it down on the wellwood desktop. Little tendrils of blue light fanned out around it for an instant, symbolic of the enormous volume of data he’d just dumped into the system. He thrust his fingers once more into the grapple controls, but this time the collapsium shrank and vanished at his touch, all thousand kilometers of it contracting—within minutes!—into an all-but-invisible, all-but-intangible hypercollapsite cap, not unlike the one crowning Sabadell-Andorra’s bow. Last time, it had taken him a day, but all his careful steps were encoded here, sure as any music reel on Enzo’s faux-antique player piano. And they could be played at high speed.
The rest was easy: he charged the thing up with a stream of protons and repelled it electrically. Inertia meant little to its hypercollapsite structure; in an instant it was moving, to the solar north, up out of the plane of the ecliptic where the planets all orbited and the people all lived. In another instant, it was moving fast, and in the instant beyond that it had exceeded solar escape velocity and was no longer Bruno’s problem. Perhaps, in hundreds or thousands of years, civilization would expand enough to find such litter annoying—even hazardous—but at this point that was a risk Bruno was quite willing to take.
Settling in, he converted another collapsium fragment, and another, and another, and soon he was automating the process, overseeing it rather than controlling it directly with his fingers. He moved the system’s attention here, and there, and especially there, where the collapsiter’s children were already playing in the plasma loops of the upper chromopause.
He became aware of other people, standing around him while he worked. He listened to their breathing, to the rustle and ripple of their clothes as they shifted slowly from foot to foot, but really they were very quiet: they didn’t cough or clear their throats, didn’t ask questions, didn’t disturb him in the slightest. Only when he realized theirs was an awed silence did he begin to get annoyed.
“Haven’t you seen anyone clean up a mess before?” he asked gruffly.
But nobody answered him. Nobody dared. He continued with his work: twenty, fifty, eighty fragments cleared. It was slow going after that, the fragments more distant, the light-lag stretching his response times out to two minutes and more. But still, he persisted. Only when he’d cleared eighty-five fragments did he begin to fret. Only when he’d cleared ninety did he begin, truly, to doubt. Only when he’d cleared ninety-five did he know for certain, and only when he’d cleared ninety-eight did he admit defeat.
But admit it he did, pushing the chair back, standing up, turning around awkwardly with the spacesuit bunched up around his ankles. All his friends were there, waiting for him, keeping him company while he worked. Sad-faced Muddy with his jester’s hair; little Vivian looking almost like the girl she used to be; Hugo, with his arm reattached and a band of shiny new metal around its socket; Deliah van Skettering staring rapt at Bruno’s activities, interested as much in the mechanics as in the actual result. And Tusité, yes, the closest thing here to an innocent, uninvolved civilian. They had waited here like this for hours. Their faces—even Hugo’s—were expectant, almost exultant; he hated to disappoint them. But disappoint them he must.
“There are, ah, two fragments,” he began slowly, “that lie on the far side of the sun, inaccessible to grapples operating from the surface of Mercury. Now, I’ve dealt with several of these already—their orbits are relatively fast, and even here the sun is only a few degrees wide, not really so huge. So it’s largely a matter of waiting a few hours for the fragments to come ’round where we can see them. The trouble is, these two aren’t going to emerge—their trajectories intersect the photosphere long before they’ll be visible or accessible to us.”
Faces fell at the news, but otherwise no one replied to it, or reacted in any way. They were tired as well, Bruno saw: tired of hoping, tired of being afraid. Too tired, in the end, to react at all.
“I’m sorry,” he told them sincerely. “The fault is entirely mine; if I’d juggled the priorities differently, if I’d handled these two fragments a few hours ago, this problem would not have occurred. And so, I have failed Tamra’s Queendom a final time.”
“So close,” Deliah said. There was no reproach in her voice, though, no regret. In fact, she sounded almost proud. “So close, Bruno. You’ve done … The situation was hopeless two weeks ago—maybe it was hopeless way before that, and we just didn’t know it. So if it’s hopeless now, you’re hardly to blame.”
Then Muddy stepped forward, his arms outstretched, and for a moment Bruno thought he was going to be hugged. But instead, Muddy reached past him, plucked the little wellgold ring off the desktop, and pranced away.
“Hopeless?” he sang, his body twisting, twirling on one foot, so that Bruno believed, all at once, that he really had been a jester at some foul court of Marlon’s. “Hopeless? There’s never zero hope, as long as some dope has a life to throw away. Okay?” And with those words he was off, running for the door.
“Muddy?” Bruno said. “Muddy!”
He tried to give chase, but the spacesuit t
ripped him up, and he was obliged—with Tusité’s help—to peel his feet out of it one by one. By this time, Muddy had a substantial lead. Bruno chased him on the blood-sticky floor of the spider room; the gritty, dusty floor of the fog room; the oily, carcass-strewn floor of the robot room; and up the spiral stairs themselves. The lights were on, at least—the place looked not so much menacing now as sadly defeated. But Muddy reached the hatch of Sabadell-Andorra fully ten seconds ahead of him, and by the time Bruno got there, there was only a smooth, seamless impervium surface to pound on.
A speaker emerged.
“Bruno, stand back, please. I’m going to melt the access cylinder’s hull back into place.”
Indeed, the ship’s hull gleamed through a rough opening, metal and wellstone melted and folded and wrinkled away from what had, until moments ago, been the hatch. Now the edges of that hole began to sizzle and pop, and slowly the pulled-back ridges of material began to smooth inward again, covering up the impervium hull, pushing it back and away into the vacuum of Mercury’s surface.
“Muddy!” Bruno shouted. “You open this hatch immediately! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Making amends,” Muddy answered cryptically.
“Open the hatch, Muddy! You can’t make off with this ship; it isn’t right.”
“Make off?” Muddy sounded hurt. “I’m taking her into the photosphere, Bruno. I’m going after those fragments.”
Bruno’s skin went cold. “You’re what? Muddy, they’ll be inside the sun by the time you get to them.”
The loudspeaker was not a face; Bruno could read no emotion there. “Grapples can reach inside the sun, yes?” Muddy said. “At close range? I’ll convert the fragments to hypercollapsites and simply pull them out.”
“By pulling yourself in,” Bruno said, finally understanding. His voice was soft, disbelieving, probably not easy to hear over the sizzling of wellstone reactions. “You’ll be killed. I don’t see how you could possibly survive.”
“Nor I,” Muddy agreed, and Bruno thought his voice sounded, if not exactly happy, then at least vindicated. “I was created for one purpose, Bruno: to prove that you could be broken, that you could be cowardly and contemptible and weak. I carried the proof of myself right to you, like the craven that I was. But now, Bruno, I’m spent, and therefore free to define a new purpose. Let me show you that you can also be brave.”