Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“I suppose so,” he allowed. As if he’d ever stoop to designing something so inane. But life was long , as he’d said. With eternity stretching before him, perhaps he’d do all manner of silly things. Perhaps he’d be known, in future times, as an immensely silly man who once invented a few big things, in his overly serious youth. What a thought! Then again, perhaps he’d be killed in the next few hours. Perhaps the Queendom would fall, and save history the trouble of remembering him at all.

“I need food,” he observed. He walked to the fax and demanded a walnut-and-celery sandwich, which it surrendered readily enough. A glass of milk soon followed, and an apple, and a Venusian plibble, and a basket of sliced potatoes fried in pork grease. Gods, he was hungry.

“With any luck,” he said when he was done eating, “Tamra has already been rescued, and we can turn our attention immediately to the Ring Collapsiter.”

“Unlikely,” Deliah answered seriously. “The last communications I overheard were a good five days ago, but there was a lot of complaining among the spaceship captains and crews. They kept dying, or being ejected from the solar system like me. There were just too many mass anomalies slinging around, on chaotic trajectories. No way to navigate, no safe place to rest. Maybe it’s improved since then…”

“But probably not,” Bruno concluded. Probably, a lot of collapsium had been ejected, and he supposed some of it might have overcome the odds and collided with a planet or other body, perhaps the sun itself. Indeed, they might already be too late! But the bulk of it would still be down there in interplanetary space, interacting chaotically but nonetheless trapped in gravitational contours.

He glanced up, expecting to see the pinpoint of Sol through the window. No such luck: the view was dim, dappled with stars he couldn’t immediately identify.

“We’ve turned around already? We’ve crossed Neptune’s orbit?” he asked, surprised.

“Uh-huh,” Deliah said, surprised by his surprise. “I’m pretty sure we cross Uranus‘ orbit in a few minutes. You really have been in a trance, haven’t you?”

“So it would seem.”

“Grappling the sun is a felony, by the way. If you didn’t know. What’s our deceleration anchor? I’ve been wondering. I suppose we’re simply attached to my station?”

“Correct,” Bruno said, nodding distractedly. “Yes, we’re pulling on it pretty hard. In spite of its mass, it may well have been dragged below solar escape velocity by now. Perhaps it’ll fall back into the inner system as a comet someday.”

“Oh, what a charming thought! It wouldn’t have a tail, though, would it?”

“No. Not unless it picks up some volatiles between now and then. And I can’t imagine where it would find any. I was referring more to the shape of its orbit. Highly elliptical, like a comet.”

Bruno looked over at Muddy’s trajectory display, still an engraved plaque of wellstone bronze. Indeed, the orbit of Neptune was hours behind them, with the orbit of Bruno’s own former world several hours beyond that. And the ship really was about to cross the orbit of Uranus. In fact, on the scale of the display it looked like they’d cross the actual planet itself.

“Er, ship,“ he said mildly, ”how close are we going to come to the planet Uranus?”

“Eight hundred twenty thousand kilometers,” the ship replied immediately.

“I see. That’s within the gravitational sphere of influence, isn’t it?”

“Affirmative,” the ship agreed.

“Hmm. Probability of striking paniculate matter in the vicinity of the planet?”

“Eleven percent, for objects one microgram or larger.” The ship’s voice was cheerful, gender neutral, unimpressed.

“I see. And when, exactly, will we be crossing the planet’s ring plane?”

“Five minutes, nineteen seconds.” It paused. “Danger is minimal, sir,” it then offered. “Probability of damage to the impervium is two point six times ten to the minus eleventh percent. Is that acceptable?”

Relieved, Bruno snorted. “It sounds like the least of our problems. Indeed, yes, it’s acceptable. Will we be passing close to any other planets?”

“Negative,” the ship replied.

“Good. Excellent. Keep it that way. Oh, and ship?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Your name is Sabadell-Andorra .”

“Excuse me, sir, library search. Sabadell and Andorra are geographic localities in northeastern Iberia, European continent, planet Earth.” It paused for a moment, then cited a reference: date, Greenwich Mean Time, latitude and longitude of epicenter, and then a series of geological measurements intended to convey a sense of the magnitude and manner of the associated shock and vibration. “My library contains no other reference to a Sabadell-Andorra . Am I named for this event? An earthquake?”

“Uh, yes. Indeed.”

“Acknowledged. Thank you, sir.”

Deliah cleared her throat. “There’s a library on board, Bruno?”

“Evidently. I mean, Muddy put the thing together; you’d have to ask him all the details, but it isn’t the sort of thing I’d leave out. One needs these things sometimes.”

“So I can watch movies? Read books? Peruse technical articles?”

“Er, well, old ones, yes. Was that not clear to you?”

Her annoyance, fortunately, was cheerful. “No, Declarant, it wasn’t.” Then, catching his own grumpy look, she said, “Serves me right, does it? Well, if I’m too much trouble, you can always put me back where you found me.”

“Later,” he said, in mock warning. “There isn’t time for it right now.” He grew more serious. “There really isn’t. Marlon sent Muddy to me almost three weeks ago, and it was a taunt he expected me to answer. Or hoped I would, at any rate. If my network gate had been functional when Muddy’s image was transmitted, I’d ve had time to build some more conventional means of transport. Three weeks isn’t a long time to travel fifty AU, not in a fusion-powered ship that has to lug its own fuel along, but it certainly could be done. So he must have had some schedule in mind that would prevent my interference. Whatever grand finale he has in store, it can’t be very far off.”

Deliah sobered as well. “You lost more than half a day to come get me, going away from the sun rather than toward it.”

Bruno shrugged. “It couldn’t be helped. You knew where to find the Queen.”

“No, I could have told you that over the radio. You could have let me die; it’s what any reasonable person would have done.” She waved a finger in his face. “Your heart is soft.”

“Soft enough to endanger the Queendom,” he grumbled. “All right, then. If we are too late, there’s no one to blame but myself.”

Deliah, seeming surprisingly immune to the effects of the ship’s lopsided inertia, came forward and kissed him on the forehead. “There’s Marlon to blame, as you keep reminding me. Bruno, I’m not sure people actually expect you to come swooping in to save the day. We’re in the middle of history’s greatest calamity, and / certainly never expected to survive it. If you’re not finally able to salvage anything, well, at least you’ve tried.”

“I should have seen this coming,” Bruno brooded.

“So should I,” Deliah said. “So should Tamra. So should everyone else who’s ever been friends with the man. And the police, too; tracing his involvement in all the grapple accidents is their job, not yours. But I guess Marlon’s outfoxed us all.”

“Humpf,” Bruno said, which pretty well summed up his opinion on that matter.

Deliah’s eyes widened, drawn upward to something above and behind Bruno. “Look!” she said.