Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Bruno’s fingers dug at the wellwood edges of his desk. Had he been unwise to establish this contact? Was there anything, really, that he could do?

His voice was tentative but, he hoped, compassionate. “Deliah, ah, not to put too fine a point on it, but are you hoping for rescue? You see, I’m rather engaged at the moment, and a lot of lives may hang in the balance.”

Her reply, a thousand seconds later. “It’s very kind of you to ask, Declarant, but I am realistic about my situation. Even assuming anything could be done—which I doubt—the Queendom’s peril is obviously much more important than my own. The Ring Collapsiter is falling in again , much faster this time, and mostly in pieces. Something has also happened to the Iscog, although I’m not sure what. There’s loose collapsium and neutronium everywhere —the planets may actually be in as much danger as the sun!”

She paused, then continued. “Are you able to travel, de Towaji? When I last saw Her Majesty, she was adrift on a workman’s platform spinning perilously close to the sun. It sounds like you have some sort of… plan or something. Is that the case? We are lucky to have you, we really are. Meanwhile, I’m absolutely kicking myself that I let this happen. I just wish I knew what went wrong.”

“Deliah,” he reassured her, “this calamity was engineered by Marlon Sykes. I can’t imagine what his reasons might be, but his methods are more thorough than you probably imagine. I doubt you’ve erred in the slightest, although it’s commendable that you’re willing to consider it. Even more commendable is your bravery. I’ll be sure to tell you about it when next we meet.”

“Marlon?” her voice came back, incredulous. “Why would Marlon sabotage the collapsiter? I mean, I know the man—in several senses of the word—and he does have a temper sometimes, but it’s his collapsiter. It always has been.”

“The man is apparently acting from pure malice, Deliah. Evil, one might say. God, what a petty, small-minded thing that is! Of all the things to do, of all the infinite possibilities, to choose thatl Why not paint, or dig holes, or sing off-key when nobody’s listening; theres nobility for you. Hurting people is just dumb. It’s vandalism in its lowest form.”

“I’m glad I knew you, de Towaji.”

“Call me Bruno, please, and know that the honor is mine. I’ll be sure to tell you this when we meet again someday.”

Her voice was weary and resigned. “Bruno, we’re not going to meet again. The Iscog is smashed, and all my copies were on these grapple stations. I may be the last of me already; if not, it’s just a matter of time.”

Bruno was aghast. “There’s the Royal Registry for Indispensable Persons, isn’t there?”

“What? Oh, no, the Registry closed its doors years ago. Corrupted storage media; toward the end, they couldn’t keep a gnat.”

“Personal backups?”

“You’ve been gone a long time, Bruno. We’ve had virus storms, datavore infestations, Flying Dutchman faxes circling endlessly through the network… A clean backup is only possible if the system generating it is clean, and we haven’t had that luxury in recent years. I’m not sure we ever did.”

Bruno was even more aghast. “Do you mean to say your only copy is flying off into interstellar space?”

“Worse than that,” she replied, her voice going stern. “I think Tamra’s only copy is down there on that ceremony platform; Tongatapu was one of the islands that got drowned by tidal waves. Literally drowned , no survivors.”

Bruno tried to parse that statement. Like most of Tonga’s islands, Tongatapu was a coral atoll, very flat. Geology had tipped it slightly, raising its southern edge out of the waves and submerging parts of the north completely, but even the heights of Fua’amotu rose no more than about fifty meters above sea level. And if something truly massive, a ball of neubles or a stray telecom collapsiter, grazed close enough to the Earth, it could raise local sea levels by several times that much. No survivors? Tongatapu had over eighty thousand residents!

“There are others down there on the platform with her,” Deliah continued. “Wenders Rodenbeck, for one, and Vivian Rajmon and her pet police captain. We were rehearsing for the completion ceremony next year, when the last segment of Ring Collapsiter was to be towed into place.”

Pet captain? Would that be Cheng Shiao? Bruno tried to remember if that too-competent constable had been a captain or not. By all the little gods, he really had been away too long.

“Damn it,” he said. “Damn that Marlon; he’s timed this entirely too well. It’s what malice does, I suppose—sit around calculating minimum effort for maximum harm. Well, he shan’t get away with it. You sit tight, Deliah; you’ll be rescued in the next couple of days. I shall personally guarantee it.” The words surprised even him as he said them. To keep from blurting anything else, he quickly added, “Over and out.”

He’d been continuing his work throughout the five hours or so of that slow conversation, and now he set into it more fiercely, with the energy of total outrage. Gross structure! He must find a gross structure for his hypercollapsite!

But the work progressed slowly, and it was in this area that he encountered his first major disappointments: truly effective damping of the zero-point field would require enormous assemblies, towering cities of foam many thousands of miles wide, and massing enormously more than Sol herself. Perhaps mankind could one day conceive of projects so grand, but for the moment Bruno had some very sharp time and material limits to contend with, and little patience for daydreams.

With sensors fine and coarse, he studied the ring encircling his tiny star. Such was the pool of his actual resources: ten trillion tons of collapsium. He assumed an equal mass of hypercollapsite—implying a completely error-free rearrangement scheme—and fed it into a permutation algorithm to plumb what forms, if any, could be crafted that might do any good at all.

Here, finally, he got lucky again—almost. The key was that the zero-point field’s energy was known to rise as a function of frequency; its highest energies occurred at the shortest wavelengths. With limited mass, Bruno’s damper could only block out absorption “windows” of the field’s full spectrum, but by concentrating on windows at the higher frequencies, it could maximize its otherwise limited effect. And the higher frequencies, he found, were by far the easiest to damp; it was the low ones, the cosmological subwoofers, that penetrated every simulated barrier he could think to erect.

So he put his head down for a little more sleep, trusting the machines to do their work. He was exhausted; this was exhausting work, wringing his brain like a sponge. As he drifted off, bright flashes popped behind his eyelids, as his ocular muscles flinched to the beat of Muddy’s spaceship work outside. Even through the wellstone walls, there was no mistaking the muffled clang! clang ! and occasional bursts of stacatto speech, like the cursing of a man who’s just hammered his thumb. Bruno’s last vague thought was that the boat gods must be in need of appeasement out there, and perhaps—worryingly—in here as well.

His sleep was troubled—one might say haunted. He woke a few unsatisfying hours later, produced more flashes by rubbing his eyes, then opened them and learned from his hypercomputers that there was a rilled dome shape, like a meter-wide mushroom cap turned inside out, that when cast in hypercollapsite foam would block out some very high energies indeed. Such higher-frequency energies were also the greatest contributors to Newton’s inertia, so in fact the computer-designed device would behave as if it contained less than a gram of matter, or IE-19 times its actual mass. Objects in its immediate wake would experience an enormously weaker damping effect, but nonetheless would feel the effects of acceleration reduced by a factor of 1081.3901.