Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

His final acts in the study that day, partly practical and partly symbolic, were to capture the forces and movements and stages the collapsium had gone through in its transformation to code them into a single wellstone jewel embedded in the hypercomputer wall, to form a little wellgold ring around the jewel, and to pluck that ring from the wall and place it on the middle finger of his right hand, where it looked very smart indeed.

“Door,” he said then, and stepped out to meet his destiny.

“ That’s our spaceship?” was all Bruno could think to say, upon seeing what Muddy had done with the past four days.

“An iron hull and an engine to propel her,” Muddy quoted back at him, cringing and whining. “That’s what you told me.”

And that was very nearly all there was; the pressure vessel itself was windowless and barrel shaped, tapered slightly at the top and bottom, and the sheets of iron that comprised it were exceedingly thin, almost like foil. Bruno figured he could easily puncture them with a screwdriver. The rivets holding them together were tiny and weak looking, too; perhaps he could breach the hull with his bare hands . The “engine” consisted of a pair of man-sized EM grapples at the top—the bow, Bruno supposed—each with a man-sized superconducting battery to power it, and the life-support system was simply a di-clad tube of supercondensed oxygen strapped to the side of the barrel, with a valve and heating coil at one end and a plastic tube running through into the hull.

The interior was nearly as spartan: a flimsy “hatch” led through to a chamber with two chairs and a little fax machine, plus an iron toilet whose plumbing was apparently just some sort of airlock for dumping wastes overboard. The only civilized concession was the inch of wellstone Muddy had laid—or more likely asked the robots to lay—around the inside and outside surfaces of the hull. For the moment, it was inert, its fine-threaded structure translucent as smoke. This, too, reflected poor judgment: a stiff breeze could damage it in that state.

“I hardly know where to begin,” Bruno said, goggling at this monstrosity that hulked, in the warm starlit darkness, on his front lawn.

“It’s precisely what you ordered, sir, and the gods have been most forgiving in its creation. How was I to’s-s-surmise you wanted elegance?”

Bruno’s sigh was almost a laugh. Almost. “Muddy, this thing is flimsy as a kite. If the wellstone loses power or integrity for some reason, what’s to hold the ship together?”

“It’s light . I wanted it to be light , so it could travel even if your… project didn’t work out. And if the wellstone fails, won’t your hypercollapsite destroy the hull anyway? Regardless of its composition?”

“Hmm. Yes, well, what about the life support?”

“That oxygen bottle is the backup system. In operation we’ll use wellstone scrubbers to crack exhaled CC>2.”

Bruno shook a finger, unwilling to be appeased. “The interior space? We’re to rescue a Queendom in a ship sized for just the two of us?”

Muddy squirmed under his gaze. “I made four folding chairs for extra passengers; I was going to put those in before we left. They attach to special brackets in the walls. But surely we can’t rescue everyone , no matter how big a spaceship we bring. One does have to draw the line’s-s-somewhere.”

“Why is the wellstone inactivated? You’ve left this ship frighteningly vulnerable.”

“To permit your inspection, sir. I’ll switch it back on once you’re done.”

“If I tripped, I could fall right through the hull!”

“The robots have been instructed to prevent that, Declarancy.”

Bruno had saved his worst for last: he pointed up at the bow. “All right, you, look here; look at these grapples. This is supposed to be our propulsion system?”

Muddy cast him a bruised look. “That’s the b-b-best part, sir. Efficient: a hundred percent conversion of stored energy to kinetic, with thrust limited only by the available power. Much better than rockets, if you’re in a hurry. Never widely employed, because the targets you grapple to are dragged and disturbed in the process, ditto anything that passes through the beam incidentally. Actually, it’s probably illegal to travel that way in the Queendom, but under the circumstances I’s-s-suppose they’ll forgive us.”

“Muddy, rockets push, from the rear. That’s what we need here! Good God, man, grapples pull from the front . We have a zpf-damping cap on the front of the ship; the grapple beams will vanish into it without a trace. What do you think a grapple beam is?”

Finally, for the first time Bruno could recollect, Muddy gathered himself up, straightened his spine, and returned something approximating a steady gaze. “I know exactly what a grapple beam is, Declarant. You forget yourself. You forget that I was yourself. In the first place, we can expel oxygen for emergency propulsion, accelerated electromagnetically through wellstone channels in the hull. From the back , yes. In the second place, I watched you put the ertial shield together.”

“Ertial?” Bruno asked.

“The opposite of mertial. I coined the term while you were working. Anyway, I watched you assemble the thing, and I know it’s got a hole in it. As it happens, these grapples are positioned to emit right through that hole.”

Bruno smacked himself on the head. “Damn me! Damn us both, we should have coordinated this better. Muddy, that hole is there because I ran out of materials. I was planning to fill it with mass from the planet’s core. It’s strictly temporary.”

Muddy’s composure collapsed immediately. His arm went up to cover his face, and he commenced a hoarse sobbing. “Oh, sir! Oh, sir! You know how badly I wanted to please you. I can’t manage even that, can I? Did I ever doubt that history would judge me h-h-harshly? If so, that doubt is removed. Please don’t yell at me anymore, sir; please don’t. The weight of my own disapproval is all I can bear!”

For the umptieth time, Bruno felt ashamed, both for upsetting Muddy and for being him, this miserable creature who was so easily upset, and so overly dramatic when it happened. Was he really so weak? So sniveling? Marlon Sykes had his number, all right, had his every shame and insecurity mapped out. That was, of course, the whole idea, but that didn’t make it easier to face. Well damn Marlon, anyway. Did it matter what he thought? So what if Bruno and Muddy were a pair of folding cravens? At least they weren’t hurting anyone, weren’t, for example, destroying the Queendom for spite’s sake.

“There, there,” Bruno said awkwardly, stepping forward to embrace his tortured self. “It’s all right, Brother. It’s all right. Let me try some more calculations, and see what I can come up with. You finish outfitting the ship, all right? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“All right,” Muddy said, sniffing, and burst into fresh sobs. “God, I’m so broken it surprises even me. Go, sir. Please. Observe me no further.”

It seemed that Bruno should have said something heartening at this point, but instead he turned away from Muddy and, taking him at his word, slunk away into the house. This was just too difficult, too awkward, too shaming, Muddy would understand his reaction, right? Better than anyone else possibly could.

He continued on into his study. Fortunately, it hadn’t cleaned itself up since he’d gone outside; everything was exactly as he’d left it. This made it easy to drop right back into his chair and pick up the “ertial shield” calculations right where he’d left off. Clearly now, time was running out.