Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Now Muddy shrugged with weary sadness, and wiped a teardrop off his cheek. “Who can say, Declarant? I’m permitted to hate Him, and to wish innumerable harms upon Him, but I never have r-r-resisted Him. I suppose I’ve never had the opportunity.”

“Well, here you have it: together we can work this out, this challenge of Marlon and inertia both. Will you build a ship for me, Muddy?”

Sigh. “You’re right to question me, sir, and quite wrong to place any faith in my abilities. Or yours! The one gift he gave me, the one true thing I’ve learned from his attentions, is a confidence in our fallibility. What argues in your favor is that you’re asking for mere engineering, which is banal. Pluck any two people at random, deposit them on a planet somewhere, and inside of an hour they’re a design team, finding new ways to put up a roof. They don’t have to be friends; they don’t have to communicate well, or even at all, because the whole process is coded in their genes. It may be that I can fumble through it, as humans have always fumbled, and produce some half-assed but workable product, as I did with Redshift .”

“That’s the spirit,” Bruno said, trying to sound encouraging. He clapped Muddy on the shoulder, this time with some genuine affection. “Nothing fancy, nothing hard—just a hull of iron and the weakest, mealiest of engines to push her.”

Muddy bowed his head. “Very well, sir. I’ll do as you ask, though perhaps not for the reasons you would wish.”

“Eh?”

“Sir, have you examined the converse of engineering? We fall into it so naturally, but in the end every project expires, and one way or another every team is dismantled, and that’s something we’re not wired to deal with. It saddens, even traumatizes us. That’s where geniuses are needed, to engineer the conclusions of things. We let things wither, collapse, decompose, when we should be murdering them gently and artfully.”

Bruno frowned. “What is it you wish to murder?”

“An age of mankind,” Muddy said cryptically. “The innocence of an entire society. People believe themselves to be the masters of creation, when in fact they’re barely participants. Better that they learn this now.” He looked up at Bruno as if hoping to be questioned for that remark, or doubted, or accused.

Bruno looked askance at him. “You wish the people harm?”

“No. I wish for them to internalize His Declarancy’s lessons, and to do that they must live. Horrid, to think they might die without first understanding their lives.”

There was much to disagree with in a statement like that, but Bruno, still awash with excitement, declined to take the bait. “Just get started, all right? I’ll be in my laboratory. House: see that I’m not disturbed.”

“As you wish, sir,” the house replied, in its usual, coolly solicitous voice, deep yet subtly feminine. With a start, Bruno realized it was his mother’s voice, or something not terribly different from it. Strange that he’d never noticed this before, but from the look on Muddy’s face, Bruno gathered he’d noticed it as well, and seemed to find it significant in some way. Disturbing.

Well, hopefully there’d be plenty of time to consider the matter later, assuming it had any importance at all. Now was hardly the time to worry about it, not with the laws of physics coming down around the Queendom’s ears. He strode resolutely toward his study door, thinking that he could always change the house’s voice when he got back from the Queendom.

If you get back , Muddy’s whining voice corrected in his mind. Well, all right then. If. He went to work. [6] See Appendix A. Defeating Inertia, page 375

“Sir,” the house said to him sometime later, its mother voice sounding anxious at the need to wake him, “I’m receiving a signal from the runaway grapple station.”

“Hmm, what? A signal, really?” He sat up, rubbing his eyes, putting a hand to the crick in his back. A signal, goodness; he hadn’t expected any such thing. His contact effort had been… a formality, really, because what were the odds that the station’s castaway would think of radio , out here in the wilderness of the Kuiper? Even assuming the necessary devices could be instantiated and configured, what would be the point? Bruno was the only one out here, his tiny planet the only inhabited object in… What? Half a million cubic light-hours of space? Long odds indeed!

“Play it,” he instructed, coming fully awake.

Obediently, the house formed wall speakers and piped the signal through them, distorted but clearly intelligible. “Hello, Mayday, Mayday. This is Deliah van Skeltering of the Ministry of Grapples, responding to your ping. Hello. Can anyone hear me? This is Deliah van Skeltering calling Mayday. Repeat, Mayday. Radio source, please respond. I require immediate assistance…”

He jerked a hand across his throat, and the house cut the signal. Deliah! Laureale-Director and Lead Componeer of ihe Minislry of Grapples! What was she doing aboard a runaway station? And given her presence there, what were the odds of a passage within even a few AU—hundreds of millions of kilometers—of Bruno’s position? Unless perhaps she’d been on all the stations for some reason, and they’d all been flung off into the outer darkness, and this was simply the one that passed nearest to him on its way lo infinity.

Did she know that he was here, that the radio beacon signaling her was, in fact, his? Through the heavy distortion— no doubt caused through some combination of long-range, enormous velocity differential, and poor transmitting equipment—her voice sounded perfunctory, not eager or hopeful but bored . And then he understood: the poor woman was a victim of slow drowning. She grasped dutifully at corks and straws, not because it was likely to help but because it was all she could do, other than simply admitting defeat.

“House, what’s the light-lag between here and the station?”

“Seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

“Sixteen minutes round-trip? Hmm. I hadn’t counted on this; I really hadn’t. Well, send a reply: ‘Laureate-Director, this is Bruno de Towaji. Repeal, this is de Towaji. Perhaps you’ll recall meeting me a number of years ago, shortly before your murder? Now, as then, I offer my heartfelt condolences on your situation. Still, I am very curious as to how it came about! Can you report your status? Over.’”

“Reply sent,” the house said.

Bruno nodded, and settled back into his calculations where he’d left off. Nol that he’d forgotten about Ms. van Skeltering— far from it!—but she’d hardly benefit from his sitting around waiting for something as frightfully slow as light .

He was worried about this new “hypercollapsite”—although the material itself was proven feasible, there was the matter of gross structure to contend with. What shapes must he mold the stuff into, to achieve the desired, inertia-foiling result? The question turned out to be nontrivial in the extreme. He could well envision himself scrabbling at it for hours or days, looking for a conceptual “edge” to start from. It was one thing to speak of EM vibration-damping foams, quite another to design them.

“Return message received,” the house said, after what couldn’t possibly have been sixteen minutes.

“Yes, already? Let’s hear it.”

“De Towaji!” Deliah’s clipped, tinny, strangely muffled voice said. “I’d hoped that was you; I’m glad it is. My situation is that I’m in very serious trouble. I think you know that. The station’s grapple lock on the Ring Collapsiter was disrupted— I’m not sure how—but the complement beam was left intact, pulling us straight out toward Aldeberan. It took me three days to get it shut off. I have casualties here, Declarant—three technicians dead! We saw the other stations going off-line, and we tried to wrap ourselves in impemum before the same thing happened to us. It… wasn’t a good solution.”