Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

With their two wellstone drawing slates slaved together, Marlon walked him through several layers of menus until he’d pulled up the database of measurements his paid observers had collected in recent weeks. Mere samplings, of course, indirect measurements scattered here and there along the Ring Collapsiter’s considerable length. Bruno pondered them for a while—apparently a long while, since both Marlon and Tamra got up to use the bathroom a few times while he was doing it—and finally he called up a little hypercomputer in a corner of the slate and fed it some quite horrific equations to solve. The answers were, of course, available almost immediately.

“Eleven months,” he confirmed, with an approving nod in Marlon’s direction. “And how long, again, until the collapsiter penetrates Sol’s chromopause?” That was the accepted benchmark for irretrievability; soon afterward, the collapsons would have swollen with gobbled star matter to the point where their crystalline structure became unsupportable. The whole thing would, no doubt slowly and elaborately, crush down into a single large hole, and eventually pull the sun in after it.

“ Ten months,” Marlon replied, looking and sounding unnerved.

“Well, well,” Bruno said. “That’s what I call inconvenient timing. Had you been assuming this was a natural phenomenon?”

Marlon’s voice was hollow, frightened. “I had, yes. Indeed I had. But the odds against such a coincidence…”

Her Majesty opened her eyes and sat up, as if only now realizing the implication. “What are you saying, Declarants? That there’s a saboteur afoot? That someone has done this deliberately^”

Bruno shrugged. “ ‘Saboteur’ is the right word, I suppose. A muon is a highly unstable particle about a tenth the size of a proton, and it results from the decay of an even more unstable particle called a pion. My guess is that electrons from the solar wind were struck with a high-powered and precisely targeted stream of coherent neutrinos—a nasen beam, we call it—and this converted them to pions. It’s a graduate-level transmutation exercise, performed on an enormous scale.”

Marlon Sykes had turned almost completely white. “Good Lord, Bruno, I think you must certainly be right. What else could it be? What else could scatter such short-lived particles over such a wide area? I am, as always, dwarfed in your shadow. In an hour you’ve deduced this.”

“Well,” Bruno grumbled, trying to think of something self-deprecating to say.

“Well nothing,” Marlon insisted, somewhat angrily.

“A saboteur ?” Tamra said again, rising to her feet so she could stamp one of them. “You suggest that a subject of this Queendom is capable of such villainy? A subject of rntwe?”

“I suggest nothing,” Bruno said innocently.

A loud noise, like a gong, echoed through the sphero-Athenian spaces of Sykes Manor. Marlon looked up sharply.

“Yes?”

“A message,” the house said to him, in tones much louder and slower and flatter of affect than Bruno’s own house would dare employ.

“I’m holding a slate,” Marlon said, testily.

In his hands, an image appeared: a square-faced man of deeply serious expression, clad in the stiff uniform of the Royal Constabulary. That uniform had not changed one bit since Bruno had last seen one, thirty years before: a wellcloth coverall, programmed to act like beige smartcotton festooned with strips of white numerals. And of course, the obligatory monocle over the left eye.

“Yes?” Marlon demanded of the face.

“Declarant-Philander Sykes, is everything all right?”

“It is as far as / know. How can I help you?”

The policeman’s expression managed, somehow, to grow more serious. “Sir, there’s been an incident on Grapple Station 117. Two dead, apparently very recently, apparently by homicide. Are you sitting down, sir?”

“Why are you calling me?” Marlon asked, trying now to disguise the annoyance in his voice. “Who was homicide, er, was murdered?”

“You were, sir. And a woman, one Deliah van Skeltering.”

“Oh,” Marlon said, going paler then before. “Oh, shit.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly. I’m sorry to ask it. but I wonder if you could come to the site and answer a few questions.”

In some sense, the first ten thousand years of human history could be described as a steady climb toward freedom. Not the doomed, hapless freedom of short-lived beach and savanna apes, but the enlightened democracy of a fit and educated humanity that recognized—and indeed, meticulously cataloged—the value of individual action. Society, it was thought, should work to maximize the power—and with it the accountability—of each of its members, so that success and failure and happiness and misery might be had in direct proportion to the effort invested.

Turns out this was a load of hooey all along; people hated that sort of self-responsibility. Always had. Only when it was inescapably universal, when there were no more corrupt or uncivilized “third worlds” to flee to, did it become clear that what people really wanted, in their secret hearts of hearts, was a charismatic monarch to admire and gossip about and blame all their problems on.

Unfortunately, over the millennia Earth’s monarchies had been deposed one by one, and since deposed monarchies had a habit of creeping back into power it had been necessary to murder them all—not simply the monarchs and their heirs and assigns and spouses and bastard cousins, but also their friends, supporters, beloved pets, and the occasional bystander, leaving as little chance of a miraculous restoration as possible.

There were de novo monarchs here and there, micronational leaders who’d declared their kingship or queenship on a lark, or in dire earnest and questionable mental health, but by the twenty-fifth century the only real, legitimate, globally recognized monarch left, the only one whose lineage extended back into sufficient historical murk, was King Longo Lutui, of the tiny Polynesian nation of Tonga. And as luck would have it, shortly before the scheduled Interplanetary Referendum on Constitutional Reform, King Longo, sailing the shark-filled straits between the islands of Tongatapu and Eua, chased a wine bottle over the side of his boat and was neither seen nor heard from again. He had left behind a single heir: one Princess Tamra.

You know what happened from there: Her coronation became the talk of the solar system, the duly modified referendum was held, and Tamra was elected the Queen of Sol by a stunning 93% supermajority. And since everyone knew that power corrupted, they were careful not to give her any, and to install a special prosecutor to chase after what little she managed to accumulate. Much was made of her sexual purity as well, and it was thought good and proper that she be humanity’s Virgin Queen for all time thenceforward.

The only trouble was, nobody had particularly consulted Tamra about any of this. Really, they were just taking their own burdens of personal accountability and heaping them onto her , which hardly seemed fair, and this whole virginity business had more to do with her being fifteen than with any inherent chastity of spirit. She just hadn’t worked up the nerve yet, was all. And while the immortality thing hadn’t quite happened by that time, the writing on the wall was clearly legible, and the thought of retaining her supposed purity for literally “all time thenceforward” did not amuse Tamra in the least.

So, once installed as Queen, once crowned and throned and petitioned for the royal edicts everyone so craved, her first act had been to Censure everyone responsible for putting her there. Her second act was to compel her physicians to see that her physical purity could regenerate itself in the manner of a lizard’s tail or a starfish’s arm. And her third had been a deliciously shocking call for suitors—low achievers need not apply.