Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Indeed. As Her Majesty wishes, although no disrespect was intended.”

Rodenbeck grinned at that, saying, “Majesty, our hosts have invited me to provide the appearance of balanced debate. I hope they’ll pardon my… overstepping the assignment. For what it’s worth, I don’t hate progress. Why would I hate progress? The fax machine has been a boon for man and nature, freeing up billions of acres once enslaved to food production and waste disposal. Any invention that helps us leave more things alone is okay by me, and even things that don’t aren’t necessarily all bad.”

“Such balance!” Someone at one of the tables jeered.

Unperturbed, Rodenbeck spoke a little louder, widening his audience. “I’m also a lawyer.”

There was more laughter at that; Bruno gathered that Rodenbeck’s legal maneuvering was well known, at least among this crowd.

He went on. “I didn’t choose these movements. Flatspace, Leave It Alone, the Smith Club—they chose me. Reluctantly, a guy suspects, since I don’t toe their full party lines by any means. I never saw ‘Uncle Lisa’s Neutron’ as a blueprint for action—it still surprises me to see it treated that way. I mean, it’s just a play. But one thing I do believe is that someone has to take the side of nature in these debates. The way I see it, that’s just common sense. The air can’t sue on its own behalf.”

“I quite agree,” Tamra said, in a tone calculated to close the subject. “It’s Queendom policy to seek a devil’s advocate in all endeavors.”

Ouch. Rodenbeck, you are necessary but overruled . Bruno found himself liking this man, this greatest of his detractors. But he liked the Kroghs as well, and theirs was clearly the prevailing side here. Following their lead, Bruno returned to his meal, quickly finishing off the salad. His mug, which he thought he’d drained, stood full again at his elbow. He lifted it and took another long draught, savoring the flavors.

“How much do you need, exactly?” he asked when a minute or two had gone by.

“How much don’t we?” Krogh laughed.

The next course arrived: meatballs with tough, bready centers. Again, Bruno drank deeply from his mug, this time watching it refill when he set it down. Pulling matter through the tabletop from a reservoir somewhere? The same place the food and dishes came from, and then went back to when the diners were through with them? Bottomless, a veritable miracle of loaves and fishes. One felt no urge to hoard, to pace or measure one’s consumption.

With a start, he realized that Rhea Krogh was engaged in the old-fashioned and quite roguish practice of getting her dinner guests drunk. To soften them up for solicitation? Was he to have known this? To prepare, to steel himself? Alcohol was a crude drug, but in Enzo de Towaji’s Old Girona Bistro it had flowed freely, practically a dietary staple. That was before the earthquake had killed Girona’s faux retro medieval phase, of course, along with Enzo and Bernice de Towaji, and 850 other unfortunates. Afterward, as an orphaned student in a grieving community, Bruno had had little besides the beer and wine recipes to remember them by. He’d drunk deeply in those days.

“You’re drunking me,” he snapped at Rhea Krogh suddenly. “Er, well. That is, I fear I’m drinking too much. Too quickly, that is. I’m unaccustomed…” his voice trailed away uncertainly, a strange feeling tickling in his chest. And then a massive belch escaped him, silencing all conversation once again.

“I warned you,” Rhea said to him, with perfect innocence. “Whisper the name of any beverage. Ask for the intoxicants to be removed, the carbonation, whatever your preference.” Then her face took on a look of weathered, knowing sympathy. “Oh, but this is new to you. Sequestered on your little planet, so far away. When was your last dinner party? Of course, of course, the fault is entirely mine.”

Beside him, Tamra sighed. “The fault is no such thing, Mrs. Krogh. I apologize for bringing him here, with so little warning to himself or to you. He is unaccustomed, although for that he has only himself to blame. But these disruptions are my fault.”

“Stop,” Bruno growled at her. The room swam a little; he felt its heat in steamy waves. The alcohol was finding its way into his bloodstream, his brain. Bother, how many decades since he’d been drunk? He’d had a fantastic tolerance for it, once, but clearly that wasn’t a health trait Krogh’s morbidity filters had maintained for him. “Stop it, Tamra, please. I’m not a child, or a fool. I response… that is, I take responsibility for myself. This woman—” He shook a finger at Rhea. —wants money. She plies for it, cleverly, in the manner of a restaurateur. She deserves, she earns —

Tamra reddened. “Bruno!”

“It’s all right,” Rhea insisted, her good humor fading now into genuine concern. “He’s perceptive, and I fear I’ve treated him poorly. A mug of Prudence should help, or a trip through the fax.”

“Nonsense,” Bruno said, more loudly than he’d intended. “No. I’ve drunk it; I’ll keep it down. Serve me right. I’ll be sober soon enough. And I do have money. For your project. Just…” He glanced over at Wenders Rodenbeck. “Just leave the clouds alone, all right?”

He paused, scratched his ear, did some muzzy calculations in his head. “Would, ah, would a hundred trillion dollars be enough?”

A universal gasp went up, from the Kroghs, from Rodenbeck, from Marlon Sykes and Tamra Lutui and a hundred painted lords and ladies. All eyes were on him again, and he knew at once that he’d erred, that all his careful efforts to treat these people as friends or equals had just been dashed to flinders.

Peerless. That was his curse, yes, the curse of isolation, of knowing that no other human commanded even a tiny fraction of the resources at his disposal. Even Krogh, who had changed the worlds forever, reaped only a tiny royalty when someone faxed him- or herself across space and time, the morbidity filter one of many background processes running behind every collapsiter grid transaction. Whereas Bruno, who had built the grid, earned a large royalty, too large, more than he’d ever asked for or wanted. Tamra’s lawyers had set the whole thing up, and in the end even they were stunned at what they’d wrought: a fortune dwarfing Tamra’s own, growing faster than anything the worlds had ever seen or contemplated. So large that even giving the stuff away was an exercise fraught with peril.

Because he, albeit unwittingly, had really changed the worlds. Because he, albeit unwittingly, had won the power to break spirits with an ill-chosen word, to show people just how small and futile their life’s works had been.

“Too much,” he said, looking around him morosely. “I’m… sorry, I didn’t intend any… offense.”

And then he bent forward and vomited into the enormous metal cup, where his bile changed at once to fresh, foaming beer.

The worst part about the evening was that that wasn’t the worst part. With taut aristocratic deference and diplomacy, no one present gave any sign of noticing his lapse, not the tiniest quivering of disgust or sympathy. It was a nonevent, shunned, disacknowledged for its impropriety. This simply wasn’t a barf-in-your-mug sort of gathering, and when he’d asked to be excused on grounds of fatigue, Her Majesty had smiled thinly and suggested a hot tonic. Having no other cup to drink it from, he’d naturally demurred, and wound up sitting out the hour in queasy mortification and almost total silence, while his head grew muzzier and then began, slowly, to clear.