Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Rodenbeck started to say something, but fainted instead.

Vivian sighed, and said to Shiao, “Get him out of here; take him home. He doesn’t know anything.”

Shiao straightened. “Right away, Commandant-Inspector. I agree with your analysis.”

“Relax, Lieutenant. Please.”

“Yes’m. Absolutely.”

When Shiao had gone, Tamra whirled around and pointed an angry finger at the body. “This creature did well to kill itself—I’d see it jailed for a million years! Yet Rodenbeck, who is the creature, is innocent? Explain this to me, Vivian. Why did you let him go?”

“Because he’s innocent,” Vivian said simply, attempting a shrug inside her suit. “We see this sometimes: compartmen-talization of intent. We all have copies running around, true? Sometimes, one of them will diverge, and decide it’s not part of the canonical individual anymore. Could be a traumatic experience, could be almost anything, really. All of a sudden, you have this person with Wenders Rodenbeck’s history and knowledge, but not his actual sense of identity. Maybe he’s smug, he figures he knows something that’s fundamentally changed him. So he changes his body, changes his name, stays out of fax machines—which would not only log his existence, but might eventually report his movements back to the real Rodenbeck and charge him transit fees for every step!

“So this copy lives in the shadows for a while, without the social pressures or accountability he’s accustomed to, and whatever funny ideas he has in his head start to seem reasonable. Rodenbeck isn’t a criminal, but this—all right, this creature —isn’t Rodenbeck anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.”

“And this happens often ?” Tamra demanded, her tone indicating just how well she liked this sort of thing going on under her nose behind her back.

“Not often,” Vivian said. “But sometimes. I remember maybe, like, three cases of this since human-capable faxes first became available. I’m not really sure; you’d have to ask Shiao for the details.”

Bruno, finally moved to speak, said, “I don’t think I like the implications, here. Living alone causes genocidal mania? Do you think I’m at risk, mademoiselle? I’d resent that notion very much!”

Vivian eyed him clinically for several seconds. “Well, I would say you’re at a higher risk for it than someone with equivalent intellect, but who’s better socialized. Don’t take that as an insult; genocidal mania is remarkably rare, even among hardened sociopaths, and you haven’t shown any of the marker behaviors.”

“Well. Humph. If I do lose my mind, perhaps you’ll be the first to know about it. This whole experience has been unsavory, and we’ve nothing to show for it, no villain to punish.”

“And the collapsiter is still falling,” Tamra pointed out angrily. “You do need to address that at some point, you know.”

Bruno gasped. “Goodness, I’d almost forgotten! It came to me, while the ships were docking; what if the ring were spun?” He turned to Marlon, who was drifting in dour silence at the other end of the ship, by the airlock. In an atmosphere he’d have been too distant for anything but a shouted conversation, but over suit radios it hardly mattered. “Marlon, the grapple stations all point straight down at the ring, yes? As much as possible given the damage, I mean. But imagine skewing them, pointing them a few degrees off to one side. That would create a torque which would spin the ring in place.”

“And reduce the upward pull on it,” Marlon said, straightening. “It would just fall in that much faster, until the attachment points had swung around to be underneath the grapples again.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, waving a finger at his colleague. “But we’d keep moving them, attaching to new points that were off to the side again. Like pushing a merry-go-round. If that torque were applied for long enough, the collapsiter would simply go into orbit around the sun.”

Marlon’s frown was clearly visible. “It’s fragile, Bruno. Until that muon contamination burns off, we hardly dare to touch the ring.”

“Really? Assuming any significant vibrations could be damped, we’d actually be reducing the strain on the collapsium lattice with every bit of velocity we added. It should take… what? A little over ten to the sixth meters per second to orbit it? It’d be self-supporting then, like the rings of Saturn, needing the grapple stations only to shepherd and stabilize it. At a tenth of a gee acceleration, that speed would take less than three weeks to achieve. Since we have ten months to play with, we could go all the way down to fifty milligee and still have margin to spare. I’ll need the math to be certain, but surely the lattice ought to tolerate that .”

“Gods of fucking algebra!” Marlon exclaimed. “It certainly should! It certainly should! Does it take a Declarant to see thatf”

And here, the police files recorded a distinct clunking noise over Marlon’s radio as he tried to slap himself in the forehead but hit only the solid helmet dome instead.

To Bruno’s surprise, the investigation didn’t stop there.

“We have old fax records to pore through,” Vivian explained in their parting conversation. “It’s possible there are alternate copies of the creature out there that may at least be accessories by foreknowledge. The original divergence may even have happened against Rodenbeck’s will, which would be a kind of kidnapping. And we have so many unexplained fax anomalies surrounding this thing. This could well take years to sort out, assuming it’s possible at all. But our duty is to try.”

“Well,” Bruno told her seriously, “far be it from me to stand in duty’s way, but do remember to act your age now and then, while you still have it. Enjoy your plight, for my sake if for no other reason. Most of us are only young once!”

That wasn’t a particularly funny comment, but they chuckled together at it just the same, and Deliah and Tamra and Cheng Shiao chuckled with them. Marlon simply glowered, apparently having decided yet again to be jealous of Bruno, after his recent whirlwind of media appearances had—to everyone’s surprise—actually gone rather well. Marlon himself had been invited to appear only as an afterthought or sidekick, or to answer for his errors, or as a substitute for Bruno when Bruno was unavailable.

Fortunately, Bruno’s availability was about to drop to zero; he was returning home tonight, delayed only by Her Majesty’s insistence. This was the last official meeting of the Royal Committee for Investigation of Ring Collapsiter Anomalies—thankfully abbreviated to RoCIRCA—and Tamra had assured all of them that attendance was compulsory. Thankfully, the location she’d reserved for it was Fangatapu, the Forbidden Beach near Tamra’s Tongan palace, where she’d arranged that the warm summertime sun should set through three separate layers of patchy cloud, making—they’d all agreed—for one of the most striking sunsets any of them had ever seen. And the blankets somehow never got sandy, and the drinks were just intoxicating enough that Bruno could quench his thirst pleasantly without fear of overindulgence.

“It’s been nice getting to know you,” Deliah said, filling an opening in the conversation. “I wish it could have been under different circumstances; it’s fair to say you haven’t seen me at my best. I’m actually a fairly together person.”

She’d expressed this sentiment before, so Bruno smiled for her and used the reply he’d rehearsed the night before. “Madam, it’s been a pleasure, and if it’s your worst side I’ve seen this past week, I suspect I’m unworthy company for the real you.”