Wil McCarthy: The Collapsium

Ten meters away, they stopped, clicked their metal heels, and bowed.

“Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji,” one of them said— or maybe both, in too-perfect synchrony to distinguish. “We bring you the greetings of Her Majesty, and a request for your immediate audience. You are to come with us.”

It was always strange to see robots speak, because they did it so rarely and because they had no mouths. By royal decree, it was Uncouth to build machines with faces, or hair, or genitalia, except for the express purpose of sexual perversion, which was itself Uncouth and needed no further encouragement.

“Excuse me?” Bruno said.

“You are to come with us,” the robots repeated, their joined voices fluid, elegant, courtly in a mechanical, clockwork-ballerina sort of way.

“Really. Am I to know why?”

“It is a matter of utmost importance, Declarant. The explanation of it is beyond our tasking.”

“Beyond your tasking. I see.” Bruno nodded sagely, thinking to wonder whether his image was being recorded or transmitted, and if so, whether he looked dignified and wise or simply hermitty, possessed of too much hair and beard. “Her Majesty isn’t with you, then, all the way out here. And why should she be?”

Why indeed, when she could simply order him around by proxy? Feeling a sudden, petty anger, he whisked off his cap and threw it at their golden feet. “Pick that up. Deliver it. It’s my reply. If Her Majesty wishes an audience, she is cordially invited to enjoy it here. My work, alas, does not permit me to travel at this time.”

The robots considered that.

“Her Majesty requests your immediate presence,” they finally said. “Groundless refusal is both Uncouth and inconvenient. There is no reason to be rude.”

“Rude? Not at all. Not a bit of it. Tell Her Majesty that it pleases me, as always, to answer her every request. The requests of robot messengers, however, will hardly obligate me. You’ve interrupted important work, expensive work, without explanation or apology. Her Majesty is ill served by such tools as you, and is invited to petition me by the much more reliable method of face-to-face communication. Unfortunately, my network gate is down. I’m afraid you’ll have to go back and fetch her in the flesh.”

He drew a breath, ready to say more, but stopped himself. Baiting robots was a fool’s hobby—they had no feelings to hurt, only needs and obligations to fulfill. They could be frustrated, in the same way that a deaf man could be shouted at: They saw you doing it, knew what it was, but would never be affected in the desired way. But by the same token, this made them ideal absorbers of displaced anger. Killing the messenger was fine and dandy, when the messenger was never alive in the first place, when any fax machine could recycle its smashed components back into the original robot. Not “good as new,” but actually, literally new. So he supposed a little baiting was harmless enough.

Wordlessly, the robots turned and went back up their staircase, which lifted and closed behind them with a faint clunk and hiss.

Bruno would regret this, or course. He would add it to his collection of regrets. But it did feel good.

He retreated a bit, waiting for some indication of impending liftoff before hiding himself back in the house again. But the ship sat, and sat, and sat some more, and finally he understood: There was a fax gate in there, a fax machine coupled to a high-bandwidth network gate linked to the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid, the Iscog. The robots were faxing themselves back to Her Majesty’s throneroom to deliver his “invitation,” and clearly, since the ship remained, they expected her to take him up on it.

His heart quickened a little. So much for his clever manners.

Bruno had his own, fully functional fax machine, of course. For years he’d been getting his clothing and equipment that way, built up atom by atom from stored patterns and extruded whole through orifices inside and outside the house. It produced much of his food as well, supplementing the fruits of his stubbornly anachronistic garden.

The gate could even reproduce a person; he’d done the old parlor trick a time or two, spending the afternoon with a perfect copy of himself. Well, two copies spending time together, actually, with the original Bruno having been destroyed in the reading process. But this amounted to much the same thing in the end.

With copies, you were supposed to hit it off at first and then quickly get on your nerves, but Bruno had found his own company alarmingly dull; what did he have to teach himself that he didn’t already know? He could send a copy off to learn new things, he supposed, but he wouldn’t want to ‘ t>e that copy, sent away from the work that really mattered to him, and of course one of him would have to do just that. Invariably, he reconverged the copies within the hour, faxing them back into himself, concluding that maintaining one.

Bruno de Towaji was quite trouble enough. Hence the disinterest in repairing his failed network gate.

The silence of network abstinence had been nice, too. He’d better enjoy the last of it while he still could, before the robots came back with company, or else hauled him through their gate by main force.

He was just turning to reenter the house when, to his utter surprise, the hatch opened once more on the side of the metal teardrop, swinging its staircase out and down, framing in its doorway the figure of none other than Her Majesty herself. The robots followed at a respectful distance as she descended the steps.

Staring stupidly, Bruno computed: Earth, regardless of season, was always at least seven light-hours away. For the robots to return there and come back with Her Majesty in tow should have taken fourteen hours. Even if she’d been on Jupiter for some reason, it would have taken more than twelve, possibly a lot more, depending on where the planet was in its orbit. Ergo, she must have sent her pattern ahead, timing it to arrive when the ship landed. Had she anticipated his refusal? She might simply have broadcast her image into the void, instructing the robots to capture and instantiate it if the need arose. There was something cold-bloodedly logical about that sort of reasoning, and that was how he knew it was true. Quod erat demonstrandum .

The spaceship’s stairs were carpeted in red, and their metal base extruded still more carpet, its end snaking out ahead of the Queen across scorched grass and flowers until finally it stopped, seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then extruded a low platform, a little marble pedestal rising up as if exposed by receding tidewaters. Her Majesty mounted this platform, and the robots assumed stations on either side of her, ceremonial halberds at the ready. Ceremonial, hell; she was here, and they carried no other obvious weaponry. Those blades could probably cleave the planet in two.

The robots spoke more haughtily than before. “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, you may present yourself before Her Majesty Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. You are encouraged to kneel.”

Clad in the shade of purple forbidden to all others, with the diamond crown atop her head and the Scepter of Earth in her left hand and the Rings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on the fingers of her right, she was black haired and walnut skinned and scowling deeply. She was beautiful and terrible and in a bad mood, and could destroy him with a word.

“Hi, Tarn,” he said lamely, then sighed and threw himself to his knees.

She was a figurehead, by the way. She couldn’t literally destroy him, have him killed, have his pattern erased and his name stricken from every stone and pillar, but she could make his personal and professional life difficult enough that he might wish she had.