Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Nothing,” Muddy said again. “No wait,” he then amended. “It’s there at the edge of the frame.”

“Center, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The one good thing about this wretch, Bruno decided, was that he had no pretensions of any kind. Unlike a real de Towaji, Muddy made no attempt to conscript or control or second-guess. He didn’t seem to feel any sense of ownership here, or any urgency about their task or their precarious position. In fact, he seemed content to follow orders without the slightest reflection. Perhaps it gave him a sense of peace.

“Oh. Goodness,” Muddy said. “You should have a look at this, Your Lordship.”

They traded places, and Bruno leaned over to peer into the eyepiece. He saw nothing there but a scattering of stars. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s moving,” that whiny voice complained. “I don’t know how to make the telescope track it.”

“Moving against the starscape? An arc-second and a half in thirty seconds? It’s five AUs away!”

“It’s fast,” Muddy agreed. “Whatever ejected it must have been—” He cringed slightly.“—a violent event.”

“Mmm.”

Indeed. Bruno’s sensors had been triggering all afternoon, reporting magnetic and gravitational anomalies passing through the area. If even a few of these had originated in the Queendom a mere week ago, then they must be moving very fast indeed, fully 10% of the speed of light. That meant crushing accelerations: hundreds or thousands of gees. He imagined a handful of collapsium structures falling together over planetary distances as the Iscog was fractured, then spinning apart in a hundred little gravitational eddies, flinging bits of themselves in all directions while their cores were crushed into a single useless hypermass. Such an event would be violent— exceedingly so.

“You adjust the tracking with this,” Bruno grumbled, pointing to a brass-shod button on the side of the telescope. “Center your target, and then press. To turn tracking off, center on empty space and press again. If you have questions, you know, you can ask them. Which direction is the object moving?”

“Down. Er, south.”

“Hmm.”

He bent to the eyepiece again, and adjusted the declination until something appeared at the edge of the frame: a dark, metallic object that looked vaguely like a castle, its turrets pointed back down toward the sun, glittering dimly in its distant light. It was moving south by southeast, actually; he centered it and locked the tracking function. Immediately, the stars behind the object began crawling across his view. It •was moving fast.

“Good Lord,” he said, “that’s not a collapsium fragment; it’s one of the EM grapple stations!”

“Yes, sir.”

“It should be deep inside the Queendom, holding up the Ring Collapsiter!”

“Yes, sir. It certainly should. The event that ejected it must have been extremely violent.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said abstractly. Fussing with the dainty brass controls, he managed to magnify the image and adjust its wavelength compression until the object became translucent, a flying palace of smoky glass. The gravitic machineries were visible inside, glass within glass, some components glowing warm shades of orange, while others, shown in blue, either absorbed heat or channeled it away. Even a cursory inspection showed that the station couldn’t be entirely functional; power and heat and buffer mass flowed through it, but fitfully, via components that sat askew, bent and twisted and shaken out of true by what surely must have been titanic forces. Actually, it was amazing the thing had survived at all.

He zoomed in on one of the smaller warm spots, and gasped.

“My God. My God! There’s a person onboard!”

“Not possible,” Muddy whined. “The gee f-f-forces would have been too great.”

“One would think so!” Bruno agreed, straightening and stepping away. “One most certainly would expect so. But see for yourself!”

Muddy shuffled forward again and, sighing as if in pain, bent once more to the telescope. He drew in a breath immediately, then put a tentative hand to the controls. “He’s moving. He’s alive. I don’t understand. No wait, it’s a woman. She . Is this the wavelength control? These two? Ah. She’s holding a wrench. She’s disassembling something.”

“House!” Bruno called out. “Contact that station!”

“Network resources unavailable, sir,” the house replied apologetically.

“Then build an antenna, damn you. Use radio waves.”

“May I compromise roof transparency?”

“Do whatever you must. That woman is in terrible danger, exiting the solar system at relativistic speed! When her power reserves fail, she’ll suffocate or freeze to death, assuming she hasn’t already starved by then.”

In the next moment, the glass roof was spiderwebbed with silvery conformal antenna elements, a network for focusing and gathering electromagnetic radiation in the longer wavelengths, centimeters and meters and even tens of meters.

“She’s doomed,” Muddy said matter-of-factly. “No one can reach her. No one will even try. Radio contact is pointless, p-p-perhaps even cruel.”

“Blast!” Bruno cursed, and nearly knocked the telescope over. “The chaos below, in Queendom space, must be of immense proportion. There must be tragedies like this one playing out all across the solar system. Damn your Marlon Sykes; he knows what he’s doing!”

“ My Marlon Sykes?”

Bruno sighed, ran a hand through the long ripples of his hair, and finally threw himself down on the sofa. “Are we so helpless, Muddy? We, the Queendom’s favored consultants? There’s more than enough material here—” He spread his arms to indicate the planet beneath their feet. “—to fax a fleet of the swiftest and noblest spaceships.”

“As His Declarancy no doubt anticipated,” Muddy said, sniffing.

“Indeed,” Bruno snapped. “Indeed. Whatever is transpiring below, he doesn’t expect us to be able to intervene. At a full gee acceleration, assuming our propulsion system could sustain that, it’d still be two weeks before we could reach the Ring Collapsiter. Twice as long, if we wanted to stop when we got there!”

Muddy nodded, groaned a little, then plopped down cross-legged on the floor beside the telescope. “He knows you’ll try, sir. The fact amuses him.”

Bruno felt a bomb-burst of rage. “Does it? What in God’s name is driving this man? Why can’t he just accept things as they are? I could kill him! He pretends to be merely jealous, a little bit bruised and snooty, a little bit nasty when crossed. And it’s fine! People like him for it, or at least in spite of it. His wit and charm serve him well enough, and his genius. Why can’t he just be that person? What’s so savagely difficult, so brutally unfair about that?”

Muddy’s laugh sounded like the rattling of pebbles in ajar. “Lordship, do you understand so little? The sociopath, as known by’s-s-society, is only a mask. Usually, one which has been perfected over a period of decades and which serves as an interface to the wider world which cannot accept—or in many cases even understand—the true face underneath. Think of the puppet theater in the old marketplace. Could you tell, simply by watching the puppet, if the puppeteer was kindly or vicious? Did you ever consider the puppeteer at all? Who crafts a mask if not to please, if not to present a likeness every man and woman and child can be captivated by? We may ask the basement torturer to become the model citizen he emulates so skillfully, but it’s like asking the shell to be an egg; it’s a meaningless question. It’s all the pieces together, the villainy and greatness and everyday human foibles, that we must use to take his measure.”