Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

He heard voices nearby. “It is a ship; look!”

“What’s that door doing there? Who is that? That’s not a robot; that’s a man!”

“My God, I think he stepped out in the daylight.”

Bruno sat up and, to his surprise, let out a very undignified scream. “Ow! Ow! Goddamn it, that hurts!” His face and hands felt sunburned already, and his eyes, when he opened them, were blinded by sweat and huge, glowing blobs of color.

“Sir?” a voice said, now just a meter or two away. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bruno said, though this was far from certain. Once again, his thoughts settled on Tamra. He picked himself up. “Bruno de Towaji, at Her Majesty’s service.”

His vision began to clear slightly, and the burning of his skin eased somewhat as the air began to cool. His sweat-soaked clothes began to feel heavy and cold, which was wonderful. He looked around. In the glow of wellstone lights set around the dome’s perimeter, he saw four shiny tents surrounded by solar collectors and neat rows of scorched, plastic discs the size of dart boards. Various charred debris—shoes and hats and crumbly brown scrolls of paper—littered the deck around him. Nearby was the skeleton he’d seen, and a little ways off, in the lee of a tent, was another skeleton he hadn’t. And immediately surrounding him, crowding right up against him, were four figures dressed head to toe in suits of thick, silver-white cloth that left only their faces exposed. He took each of them in with a hurried glance.

It’d been a long time. The first face he identified as belonging to Wenders Rodenbeck, the playwright-cum-lawyer. The second—identified more by his hulking body than his Asian features—was the policeman Cheng Shiao. The third was one of Tamra’s courtiers, the woman named Tusite. Hardest of all was the fourth, a quite familiar-looking young lady. She had the same copper eyes and sandalwood skin as young Vivian Rajmon, and with a start he realized it was Vivian, grown up nearly all the way.

But where was Tamra? Putting all else out of his mind, he pointed to the open hatchway of his ship, which hung ridiculously outside the dome, like some shiny, barrel-shaped lamprey. “This way,” he said. “Climb aboard, and quickly. I’ll assist Her Majesty. Where is she?”

Cheng Shiao stepped forward and grabbed Bruno firmly by the elbow. “Philander,” he said in quick, precise tones, “it is my sad duty to inform you that Her Majesty gave her life in the effort to save others. Let’s away from this place, quickly. You’re in terrible danger.”

Bruno felt as though he’d been slammed in the chest with a croquet mallet. “What? What? Instruction unclear. What did you say?”

Shiao’s face was grimly serious. “Her Majesty Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in the person of her last known copy, is dead. I’m more sorry than you know, Philander.”

He said some other stuff after that, various irrelevancies about ships and danger and impending death, none of which registered on Bruno. If not for Shiao’s firm grip on his elbow, he’d have sunk to the deck and stayed there, waited for the sun to come and burn him away. But Shiao’s grip didn’t compromise, didn’t allow him to fall. He was dragged back toward the waiting ship and pulled through the hatch.

Only when the hatch was closed, and Sabadell-Andorra broke contact with the platform’s dome and lurched toward the sun at a thousand-gee acceleration, and the sickening inertial imbalances caused Shiao to lose equilibrium…

Only then was Bruno de Towaji permitted to faint.

Of historical note is the fact that within milliseconds of Bruno’s head striking the edge of the fireplace, a nasen beam passed through the diamond cladding of the platform, breaching it. The resulting neutronium spill eradicated all traces of the structure itself, including the bones of one Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, and had the Sabadell-Andorra been propelled by any of the technologies that were standard at the time, there is little doubt that it would have been eradicated as well.

Bruno knew he wasn’t dead when he heard Muddy walling. Oddly, though, what Muddy was saying was not “Poor me,” or “I am afraid,” but “Tamra! Tamra!! Oh, God, how I’ve failed you!” This was how he knew he and Muddy weren’t really so different after all.

“He’s waking up,” a too-husky version of Vivian Rajmon’s voice said. “Cheng, come here; he’s waking up.”

“No,” Bruno said without opening his eyes. “No, there’s no point in that.”

“Are you all right, Bruno? We’ve put some salve on your burns, but your hair will need to be shaved…”

Resignedly, he opened his eyes, which already ran with tears, and promised to run with many more before they were through. “Hello, Vivian. God, how beautiful you’ve become! What a young lady! It’s good of you to care for me, really; thank you. It’s quite unnecessary, though; my life is over. I’m about to kill myself.”

Muddy shrieked again, and leaped from his own couch to throw himself atop Bruno’s body. “No! Declarant, Lordship, you mustn’t consider it! To lose Tamra and you, how unthinkable. No! I won’t allow it!”

“Ah, damn it,” Bruno said, struggling under Muddy’s weight. “Get off me. Get off . I’ll do as I please, damn you!”

“You will not ,” Muddy snarled. His breath was hot on Bruno’s cheek; the bristles of his beard dug into Bruno’s flesh like needles. “The Queendom still rots with collapsium, its sun is in imminent danger of swallowing a hypermass, and I have suffered a blow far worse than any torment of Marlon’s. We all have. God, I’m able to empathize . I’m able to feel the pain of all the worlds’ billions, because my own pain is finally too huge to contain.

“Will you not avenge her, Bruno? Will you not fight for her Queendom’s safety, as she’d command you to if she were here? Have we traded places, you and I? Because / would save her worlds if I could. If I could .”

“Let me up.”

“Listen carefully, damn you: I’m weak and damaged and years behind your knowledge of collapsium. I will save the Queendom, but I’ve only yourself to use as my instrument. There is no other r-recourse. Let you up? By God, you’ll get up. Now!”

His weight lifted off Bruno, but suddenly his hands were there, grabbing the ruff of Bruno’s shirt, hauling him up by it.

“Say it,” Muddy instructed, thrusting his face once more into Bruno’s own. “Say you will live.”

“Let go.”

Bruno tried to shake off Muddy’s grasp and saw the wince of agony there on his brother’s face, his own face. Muddy’s weakened body struggled against pain and fatigue and despair, but his grip was surprisingly strong, the conviction behind it being much greater than Bruno’s own. It was that more than anything—that wobbly but determined strength in the face of total calamity—that altered the trajectory of Bruno’s heart.

“All right, damn it. I’ll live,” he agreed, his voice heavy with despair. To be bested by this most pathetic of creatures, to find that he himself was the lesser man after all.

But with nothing left to live for, he could at least, indeed, spend his life in the act of vengeance. He could, at least, do his level best to crush Marlon’s face between angry fists, to put an end to these evil plans, to sweep up every last bit of stray collapsium before irreversible havoc could be wreaked on the Queendom and its people.

‘’Or die trying,“ Muddy added with a sudden, strangled laugh. He released Bruno’s shirt ruff and stepped away, and suddenly tears were rolling down his face. His strength— limited, as he’d so often said—was finally expended, and he staggered and slumped against his acceleration couch.