Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Rhea Krogh beamed for a moment, then looked thoughtful for another moment, then shook a finger at him admonishingly. “You are. You’re Bruno de Towaji, aren’t you? Shame on you, not telling me; I suppose I’ve gone on like a fool.”

“You’ve barely spoken, madam.”

“Oh, you.”

Her Majesty cleared her throat and smiled. “Bruno is here at my behest. Doing some work for us, some consultation.”

Her words echoed a little; their end of the table had gone silent, all eyes on Bruno, all faces surprised or expectant or hopeful. Even Marlon Sykes was looking at him with some grudging cousin of admiration.

“Sir!” someone exclaimed. “Declarant, you’ve come to save the Ring Collapsiter?”

“To save us from the Ring Collapsiter?” another demanded. And their words echoed; the ring of silence was spreading.

Suddenly, the air around Bruno and Tamra filled with buzzing, swooping cameras.

“Your Majesty!” one of them called out in a tinny but amplified voice. “How long has de Towaji been with us?”

“Is he collecting a fee?” another asked.

And then, “Philander, have you resumed sexual relations with the Queen?”

Bruno had been drinking, hiding behind his cup really, but at this he gasped and spluttered, remembering too late the crassness of civilization, ever the counterpoint to its huge, brittle lexicon of manners. Sexual relations? With the Queen? As if the old title of Philander made this, somehow, a matter for public discussion?

“You dare,” Tamra said warningly to the nearest camera, to all the cameras. Instantly, hairlines of sharp blue light connected the buzzing faux insect to the pointing fingers of Tamra’s robots, who suddenly were no longer unobtrusive, no longer standing politely among the shadows.

“Reportant Clive W. Swenger,” they said together in quick robot voices. “ Luna Daily Tabloid . Teleoperating from this building, although the camera pings, fraudulently, as an autonomous agent billing to Universal Press.”

“Eighty thousand dollar fine,” Tamra said, eyeing the camera coldly. Her gaze swept the other buzzing insects. “Cordon is set at two hundred meters, effective immediately.”

The blue beams vanished, and as if pushed by invisible turbulence, the cameras fled wildly toward the exit; the dining chamber was barely seventy meters across, much too small for them to obey the cordon and remain inside. Her Majesty’s word wasn’t law, exactly, but as the strong recommendation of law it carried considerable weight and consequence. No doubt Clive W. Swenger would pay his steep noncompulsory fine, rather than explore the quite dismal consequences of challenging or—God help him—ignoring it. And the other reporters and their robotic agents would obey the cordon almost as if their lives depended on it. Almost.

“Now, the rest of you,” Ernest Krogh said dryly to the many human faces still staring, “back to what you were doing, right? No bothering the other guests; that’s our agreement.”

Bruno, wishing he could slip through the floor, shot him a grateful look. Then, because he had to say something about something other than himself, he said, perhaps too quickly, “Tell me, Declarant: how did you come to invent immortality?”

“Eh?” Krogh turned fully toward Bruno, blinking. “Immortality? Immorbidity, you mean.”

Bruno waited.

“How did I?” Krogh repeated, as if the question were a strange one. “Yes, well, there were lots of people working on it, of course. Evolutionary, not revolutionary; once you had the fax able to reproduce whole people, it was rather an obvious notion to fix them up in the process. I say obvious, but of course I wasn’t in on the early stages of it. Standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say, one gets a better view than the giants themselves have got. No, it wasn’t until little Ania was born that I really became concerned. She’s my daughter, you see. I was in pharmaceuticals until then; waste of time, but I suppose I had it to waste, didn’t I?

“Anyway yes, when Ania was born and I held her, brown and perfect in my two hands, I burst out crying because I realized something right then and there: death was going to take her someday. Really crying, I mean. Needed sedation to quiet me up. Because she’d grow old and wrinkly, you see, and fill up with pain until it extinguished her, and it just… seemed intolerable. Shouldn’t it? I mean, even a diamond is forever, and a diamond can’t grip your finger.

“So I switched professions, right there, and I daresay it was the proper course. Very nearly lost the race, too, not so much with my colleagues as with the Reaper himself. Got rather wrinkly before I was through.”

“But you didn’t lose,” Tamra said.

“No. No, I didn’t. Our backers were… very generous.”

“So, what are you raising funds for this time?” Bruno asked.

Krogh’s eyebrows went up. “Why, for Venus, of course. Can’t change a whole planet so easily; not on what I make, at any rate.”

“So much the better,” a sharp, reedy voice said from farther up the table.

“Oh, do hush, Rodenbeck,” Rhea admonished, not entirely unkindly.

“It’s your planet I speak for, Krogh,” the man called Rodenbeck complained in roughly the same tone. “I see— we see—the way you mistreat her.”

“By bringing her to life?” Rhea waved a hand, dismissively, then said in a childlike falsetto, “ Goodness, Mang, that’s a goober lot of weight you say won’t loosen. Will it collapsy on us?”

There was scattered laughter at that. Even Rodenbeck himself cracked a smile.

“Really, playwright,” she said, “you are better off whining about the Ring Collapsiter. People listen then. But seeing that de Towaji is with Her Majesty this evening…”

Krogh laughed at that, and explained to Bruno. “Wenders Rodenbeck—the playwright, you know—is one of your greatest detractors. A rising star among them, one might say.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, remembering the Flatspace movement, which began almost immediately after the invention of collapsium. Dangerous stuff, they’d insisted. Too dangerous to be used around inhabited planets or, preferably, anywhere else. Even excluding the fate of the Ring Collapsiter, it was a difficult argument to refute. But then, electricity was dangerous, too. He examined Rodenbeck: red haired, freckled, with the sort of face that would age slowly under even the worst of conditions. He wore the uniform of his people: a black sweater over black trousers over heavy black boots, with a brown, brass-buckled belt running round his middle. Hardly a rogue—not with that face and voice together!—but not quite a poseur, either. There was something formidable about him, something easy and smug and self-assured. He was probably a savage card player.

“A detractor of mine as well,” Krogh said, laughing again. “Generally, people find purity in the cold places. A tundra, a permafrost, an ice cap: hands off, thank you. Rodenbeck is unusual in finding scorched rock as pristine and beautiful as a new blanket of snow.” He glanced at Tamra. “As Her Majesty is well aware, we’ve promised to leave the clouds alone, no changes, nothing you’d pickup from a distance. Venus remains the evening star, bright, featureless, all our work hidden safely beneath, but it’s no use. We’re to leave her altogether alone, according to this one. He’s not widely agreed with.”

“More do every day,” Rodenbeck said, “since Maxwell Monies started protruding above the cloudtops, in spite of your promises.”

“Oh, hush,” Rhea repeated. “Not everyone hates progress.”

“Tut,” Tamra cautioned her. “This man is your guest, Mrs. Krogh.”