Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Bah.

Tonight, he’d balked at sequins, but had otherwise yielded judgment to the palace and its ladies, who’d promptly swathed him in green-and-black suede. Spurious zippers and snaps and buckles on the jacket were complemented by fat laces down the trousers’ outer seams. The matching hat was wide brimmed and glossy, the sort of thing one expected a big ostrich feather to protrude from, although none did.

Each piece had looked absurd in isolation, and Bruno had been hard-pressed to stifle his protests. The total ensemble had a different effect, though. It did look ridiculous, in the way that unfamiliar clothes always did, but it also seemed, in a strange way, to suit him. If this was a joke, it was of the contextual variety: well dressed but out of place. A time traveler. But probably it was no joke, and people actually dressed this way these days.

The handmaids had wanted to stroke the gray out of his hair and beard as well, and now, eyeing himself in the dressing hall’s triple mirror, he wondered what that might Ve looked like. No color was “natural” in this age of artifice, after all, and his own tastes were clearly outdated and otherwise suspect.

“Whom are you trying to emulate?” the would-be teenage Tusite had asked him earlier, her voice brusque with amusement. The question gave him pause. His post-court appearance had evolved gradually, over twenty years, without much in the way of conscious planning or assessment. And yet, as Tamra also had teased him, he seemed to have become a sort of theatrical construct, less himself than an iconification of himself. Symbolizing what, he couldn’t guess, but there it was: his eyes brooding between gray-black thickets, fat eyebrows merging with overlong hair, bushy sideburns slopping down into curls of untamed beard. The handmaids had done what they could in the time allotted, but still he looked uncomfortably like a mad prophet, combed over but hardly couth. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it in his own mirror this morning.

That was court life for you: self-consciousness without end. Silly clothes. Comments so veiled and obtuse that they might as well have been encrypted.

“You look… better,” Tamra told him, gliding in, dismissing her courtiers with a look.

“Yes,” he agreed grudgingly, straightening a blousy sleeve beneath the cuff of the jacket. “I’m quite the dandy. Compliments to your software and staff; you do seem to surround yourself with the tasteful.”

“Usually,” she said, and took his arm. “Did Tusite give you a hard time?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She seems to have her doubts about me.”

“She does have a good memory.”

Tamra herself had adopted a blue-gray, long-sleeved evening gown that—like Bruno’s jacket—suggested Venus was no longer the hot-house of ages past. Circling her brow was a simple platinum band, adequate for semiformal occasions where she was, nonetheless, on public display.

Robot guards came to life for them as they approached the fax gate, transiting ahead of them to prepare the way. Watching them disappear was interesting; the gate itself didn’t look like anything, just a vertical slab of blackish material swathed in a thin layer of fog. But the robots melted into it with tiny pops and flashes, like ice cubes slipping into something carbonated and phosphorescent.

It took some conscious effort to approach the slab as though it weren’t there, but stepping through it was as easy as stepping through a curtain, and provided as little in the way of sensation. On the other side lay a gallery, a vast mall of stone and glass, its windows looking down on twilit cloud tops.

The robots’ heels and toes clicked against a floor of glossy stone as they danced out of the way, elegantly unobtrusive, their movements interrupted not at all by the journey between planets.

Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all, though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location. Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body, or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the risk.

At any rate, in the early days of faxing there’d been some pain, some discomfort, some small degree of disorientation that let you know the transfer had happened. This new way, it hardly seemed like travel at all. This might as well have been another room of Tamra’s palace, or anyplace, really.

He paused at the transom, turning, eyeing their new surroundings dubiously. Venus? It looked more like Colorado, some glassine lodge clinging to the side of a mountain, looking down on someone else’s rain clouds. Above, stars twinkled faintly, as if through a yellow-brown layer of smog. All around the floor were man-high juniper trees in iron pots, not in rows but scattered, a faux forest lying silent and still. Behind the fax gate lay the rock face itself, Maxwell Monies, sealed and structurally reinforced but otherwise left in its natural state, smooth basalt planes broken at jagged edges like petrified layers of pastry. The floor beneath them was opaque and solid, probably a single sheet of whiskered stone held up by metal stanchions and trusswork without a gram of wellstone anywhere in the mix. Why risk a power failure dumping one’s party guests— not to mention one’s junipers—screaming into the cloud deck below?

As far as other guests went, Bruno didn’t see any, but then again this was clearly a kind of hallway, a place between places, albeit a large one—forty meters across if it was an inch. In both directions, the stone and glass followed natural contours of the mountain, folding around corners and out of view. They were on a promontory of sorts, a jutting outcrop of rock; above, the mountainside sloped away rapidly from the arcade’s ceiling.

A faint, light snow was falling, he saw, clinging in places to the juncture of rock wall and sloping glass roof and, when enough had accumulated, spilling down the glass to be whisked away by swirling breezes. Beyond this, splashes of lichen were clearly visible on the rock face, and there were even, he thought, some leafy plants waving up there in the gloom.

Below, the clouds somehow managed to look chilly, like Earthly rainstorms after the sun has set.

‘Venus,“ he said quietly. A parched, poisonous world of crushing pressures and furnace temperatures, tin and lead running liquid on its surface like so much quicksilver? No longer.

Tamra quirked her head at him as if puzzled by his stopping. “Something?” she asked. The view didn’t seem to faze her, to affect her at all. Perhaps too familiar, too ordinary a thing in her life: a whole planet brought to heel, another ring for her hand.

He shook his head. “No, nothing.”

He felt someone crowd in through the fax gate behind him, heard a grunt of surprise. “Excuse me,” a voice said testily.

Tamra sighed, pulling him away from the gate. “You needn’t stand right there , Declarant.”

“Of course,” he mumbled, his eyes still flicking around hungrily, taking it all in.

“It’s been a while since you’ve seen anyplace new,” she observed, with some degree of sympathy.

“Indeed,” he said, nodding absently. “One forgets the sensation. The overwhelmingness of it. Without realizing, one forgets how to be overwhelmed.”

His gaze finally came to rest on her face, finding the expression there amused. This displeased him. “Is it intentional, Highness, to distract me from the very problem I’m summoned to solve? Changes of scene undermine one’s concentration. If your desire is to frustrate me, I admit you’ve succeeded.”