Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

If Bruno expected to fax through to a work platform suspended picturesquely beneath the Ring Collapsiter, he was disappointed. Where they ended up instead was a vast, gloomy chamber of hulking gray machinery that hummed.

Tamra slipped her fingers from his, completing the separation. Bruno’s hand felt curiously empty.

He sniffed. The atmosphere was thick and dry and warm, and reeked sharply of wintergreen and burning feathers, a sign that PCBs or other heavy, chlorinated oils were overheating in strained electrical transformers. A trouble sign, to be sure, but not half as troubling as that hum . Most of the basic tones were subsonic, sensed in the bones rather than the eardrums, but there were overtones and harmonics aplenty, a cacophony that somehow managed to seem both too bass and too shrill for comfort. The noise didn’t seem loud until he tried to speak and found he almost had to shout.

“Where are we?”

Behind Tamra, a hemicylinder of gray metal hulked seamlessly atop a seamless metal deck, rising up into the slightly hazy air like a bald mountain.

“Grapple station,” she replied in much the same tone.

“Ah.”

The hum and reek now made sense: this place was an enormous gravity generator, a kind of God-sized cable winch holding up the Ring Collapsiter. [5] See Appendix A. Electromagnetic Grapple, page 371 It had best keep holding, too; black holes inside the sun, even miniature “semisafe” ones, would collapse it to a cinder, assuming they didn’t first tear it to shreds. But despite everyone’s best intentions, despite precautions and failsafes and contingency plans, the ring of crystalline collapsium had slipped sunward again. And this grapple station, whatever its capability, was clearly straining past any reasonable endurance to slow the descent.

“Big,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Quite,” Her Majesty agreed.

The fax gate behind them quietly disgorged a pair of dainty robots, all silver and platinum and chrome. White caps adorned their heads, and white frilled collars adorned their necks. Their sexless torsos and faceless faces were smooth, unadorned expanses of bright metal. Their silver hands gripped ornate pistols of delicate—but nonetheless menacing—design. The robots bowed to Her Majesty and placed themselves at respectful distances on either side of her.

“You’ve changed guards,” Bruno observed. “They used to be gold.”

Tamra smiled, a bit wistfully. “That’s right. They used to be taller, too, and thicker around the middle. But times change, you know. Fashions and preferences change. Even if yours do not.”

“Oh, humph,” he replied, walking past her leftmost guard, around toward the huge gray hemicylinder. He placed a hand on it, felt its desperate hum. “Who says I haven’t changed? How would you know?”

She shrugged. “It’s not an insult, just an observation. Your clothing, your words and mannerisms—all are decades out of touch. Your hair is different than last time, I suppose. Less wild, less gray. It suits you better. When I’m with you, though, I feel almost as if no time has passed at all. You bring my distant decades back to life.”

Bruno humphed again. “What you call ‘time,’ Majesty, is more a social than a physical phenomenon. You don’t perceive this, because you’re inside the social structure that creates it. But watching clocks and calendars, indexing your memories by popular music—these are learned, unnatural behaviors. Mark my words: living alone is the ultimate exploration of inner truth. It’s one thing to see yourself as a web of changing relationships: to others, to society, to material things and places. It’s quite another to see simply yourself , to be your own companion, to talk to yourself and answer back honestly. Your times change because others change them for you. My changes come purely from within.”

“Wait. Be quiet.”

“Why,” he chided, “because your illusions can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny?”

She waved a hand in annoyance. “Bruno, be quiet . Someone’s coming.”

He followed her gaze. There in the distance, walking the kilometers-long avenue between hulking machines, was a pale young woman with tightly braided hair the color of metallic platinum. Bruno’s vision was quite good—whose wasn’t?—and for a moment he inspected her distant features, trying to identify the face. Was this someone he’d known, in the days before his exile? If so, it wasn’t evident, but then again appearance was a malleable thing, programmable through any fax machine. She looked young but mature, which of course meant nothing at all.

“Oh,” he said. “Do you know her?”

Tamra shook her head. The robots beside her faded back into the shadows of machinery, their blank faces turned toward the approaching woman.

“Hello!” Bruno called out.

“Hi,” the woman said back, closer now, well within hailing distance. “Welcome. I was told to expect you.”

“Told? By Declarant Sykes?”

“Correct,” she said, then made a skittish, nervous little laugh. The toss of her shining braids was, he thought, calculated for nonchalance. “I’m Deliah van Skeltering, Lead Componeer for the Ministry of Grapples. Good day, Your Majesty. And you, sir; you’re Bruno de Towaji? It’s an honor, truly. I’ve studied collapsium engineering my whole adult life. In fact as a student I used to keep a statue of you on my desk for inspiration.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, well.”

He never had discovered a comfortable response for statements like that one. Not that he heard them all that often, but those little copper statues had been pretty popular for a while until, mercifully, fashion had turned its attention elsewhere. Talented students and componeers seemed to prefer living role models to dead ones, for which he could hardly blame them. Less comprehensible were the ordinary citizens, with no interest in collapsium or telecommunications or telegravitic engineering, who nonetheless made him a subject of their public admiration. For his wealth, he supposed, although many of the Queendom’s plutocrats reaped as much scorn and envy as actual respect.

So why Bruno? Who could say. Of such mysteries was society constructed. Tamra, at least, had always treated him like an ordinary person. She’d liked the idea that he was smart and famous and rich—with all of humanity to choose from, it surely helped to have some screening criteria—but having grown up a princess, she wasn’t terribly impressed by these things. Impressing her was a whole separate enterprise. He truly wished he could return the favor, disregarding her station and influence to deal with the woman herself, but that was a trick he’d never quite managed in all their years together.

Not that he’d been deferential, exactly. She didn’t go for that, and in fact he’d been a real bum sometimes, pushing her away, trampling her feelings half deliberately so she’d send him off to “exile” in his laboratory. But even then he’d been acutely conscious of her station. Perhaps that’s why he did it, or part of the why: to rebel against the obvious power imbalance between them. And to have something to make up for, yes. They were always a great pair for making up.

‘’He’s pleased to meet you,“ Tamra said to this Deliah van Skeltering, meanwhile offering Bruno a lightly reproachful elbow in the ribs.

“Er, yes.”

Finally, Deliah presented herself before them. “Your Majesty,” she said, curtseying deeply, spreading an imaginary skirt even though she was actually wearing trousers and work boots and a heavy brown shirt made from some dense, wet-looking material. “Declarant-Philander,” she said to Bruno, and curtseyed again.