Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

He worried about the number of workable geometries, this close to the lower mass limit. He supposed the number of solutions could well be infinite, or at least very large, but in a severely restricted domain—the same little mushroom cap, with an infinite number of trivial modifications. Were there any solutions with holes through the middle? He began with the hypothesis that there were , and began formulating a proof.

An hour later, his efforts had borne fruit, yielding an ertial shield solution with a hole of nearly the right size, in nearly the right place. To create it he’d have to use all the neutronium from the planet’s core, and from the core of the little dark sun as well, but that couldn’t be helped. He rose from his chair and bolted through the house.

“Muddy! Muddy, warm up the grapples; we leave at once!”

Outside, the little spaceship had turned to impervium: a smooth, barrel-shaped, superreflecting mirror. Impossibly light and impossibly strong, it would no doubt break his toes if he kicked it. Muddy stood beside it, looking toward Bruno. As before, tears filled his eyes. Were they fresh? Had they been there for the entire hour?

“It’s only just occurred to me,” Muddy said sadly. “You mean to destroy the planet.”

Hurriedly, Bruno nodded. “And the sun, yes. It can’t be helped. Do we have everything we need to rescue a stray grapple station?”

“D’you hear that, house? We’s-s-seek to destroy you for our own gain.”

“Ah. Do be careful, sirs,” the house replied in its calm, mother’s voice.

“Does it bother you?” Muddy pressed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Would you rather live?”

“As you wish,” the house said, equably enough.

Muddy appeared distressed by this. “Shall we at least say good-bye? You’ve been home to me, a reassurance, a place to dream of returning to. It isn’t lightly that one abandons such a place to… the torch.”

The house, unmoving and unchanging, seemed to consider this for a few moments before replying, “I’ve uploaded my gain states to your ship’s memory, sir. Should you ever desire to rebuild me, that image awaits your command. I’m sorry that my destruction troubles you; shall I clean up first? Can I offer you some soup?”

“No.” Muddy said, weeping afresh. “No, thank you.”

“Are we ready to lift off?” Bruno asked, trying to be gentle but needing to hurry things along.

“Not quite,” Muddy said, a little angrily. “A solar IR laser is charging the batteries, and if we’re headed for the grapple station instead of the Queendom , our own grapples will need a few minutes to change target lock.”

Bruno waved a hand. “Muddy, you can handle these things while I’m installing the ertial shield. We’ve got logo, man.”

Muddy’s sobs strengthened, and his arm looked ready to leap up and cover his face again. “Oh, sir, can’t we walk around the world? Can’t we see it one last time? I’ve dreamed of this place for too long, to have it’s-s-snatched out from under me so soon!”

“All right,” Bruno snapped, then softened his tone. “All right, yes. If we haven’t got at least a few minutes to spare, it’s my fault for taking too long in the study. And this place has been a fine home, hasn’t it?”

For a few seconds it seemed Muddy might reply, but he didn’t, and finally Bruno turned to lead the way down the meadow path away from the house. Darkness hadn’t been kind here—the grass lay dead and crisp in some places, dead and limply moldering in others. His gardens lay in neat, lifeless rows. At the meadow’s far end, his dogwoods and honeysuckles had gone dormant, shedding their leaves in a carpet that squelched and crumbled beneath their boots.

The little bridge was intact, and the stream beneath it babbled as happily as ever, but the barley fields beyond it held only harvest stubble and a pair of stoop-backed robots dutifully uprooting the tiny white mushrooms that were springing up all around. The rocky desert looked all right, and the beach, and the sea. These things he hadn’t killed yet. Not yet.

“What would Enzo have made of this place, I wonder?” Muddy asked, pausing where the stream widened out into foul, rotting bog at the ocean’s edge.

Bruno snorted. “It’s no world for kites, I’m afraid, though he’d have liked the fields and vineyards.”

“And hated the silence. He wouldn’t have understood this, would he, Bruno? Crawling off on our own like this, messing around with theories and things; he’d never have stood for it if he’d been alive.”

No, indeed. Enzo de Towaji had been the ultimate people person, a man who seemed to exist only in the thoughts and reactions of others. Strange that he’d been so happy with Bernice, who did like the quiet. How often would she be staring into the fireplace, or setting off to hike in the hills, or playing a game of chess against herself, when Enzo would kidnap her along on some foolish errand? But perhaps she needed that—needed someone to drag her mind from its pure, Machiavellian pursuits.

“Mother might have understood,” Muddy said.

Bruno nodded. “Indeed. Indeed, yes, although she’d find the place awfully confining. We really should be going, Muddy. There are live people who need us. Deliah van Skeltering, for starters.”

Muddy pursed his lips. “She’s the woman on the station?”

“Yes, and she’s probably single-copy. Her death could well be as final as Enzo’s and Bernice’s, if we’re late in preventing it.”

“Do we have the time ?”

Bruno puffed out his chest. “I daresay we must . If nothing else, she knows where to find Tamra, who, incidentally, may also have been singled in this calamity. But I hope we’d have saved her in any case.”

“To spite Marlon?” Muddy asked, in a particularly whining tone.

“To spite God,” Bruno answered sincerely. It was the ultimate superstition, the last and most powerful he could tap. If spirits and demigods were a shorthand for all the pseudorandomness of nature, then God was a shorthand for all the spirits taken together. If silly “boat gods” could derive some statistically measurable reality from dwelling even fleet-ingly in Bruno’s subconscious, then God himself—who dwelt in nearly everyone—must derive enormously more. So to blame God, to beseech God, to invoke God was an act not only of desperation, but of ultimate rationality.

He expanded. “This business of evil , of murder , has no place in civilized society. Deliah does not wish to fly off into outer darkness, and so she shall not. And she’ll have you to thank for it, Muddy, and God to curse for letting it come down to your actions, and mine. Has Marlon broken your heart, along with your pride? Come! Saddle up our steed and let’s away!”

To his relief, Muddy did seem infected by that enthusiasm; together they trotted along the beach, along the pebbled pathway that led back into meadow again. The house appeared over the horizon, and suddenly they were upon it.

A hundred robots lined the way ahead of them.

There were fifty robots on either side of the path, gleaming gold and silver and glossy black in the starlight, their left arms raised in formal salute, forming an arch. Bruno skidded to a halt, Muddy coming up short beside him. Together they stared for a few silent moments, before starting forward.

Two by two, the robots turned blank faces toward their masters and seemed to convey a sense of exultation, untainted by sorrow. Two by two they bowed, bodies clicking and whirring with impossible grace, arms extending downward to brush the withered grass. Two by two, they collapsed the archway, a good-bye as eloquent as any poet had ever penned.