Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Not limply, though—the ertial space around them seemed to discourage that. Instead, he bounced away and collapsed in a heap beside the supine Hugo, who mewled in delight. Hello, friend !

“Attention,” the voice of Sabadell-Andorra said. “I am receiving a radio transmission, analog voice.”

Dear God, Bruno thought, was there no rest? Would there be no rest for him, ever? “Play it,” he said, raising the back of his couch to a working position. The whole ship smelled of sweat and scorched cloth, and his own sun-fried hair. He looked around, thinking: so crowded in here. What are we doing?

“De Towaji?” a crackling voice asked from the ether. It was Marlon Sykes’ voice, unmistakable after all these years. “Bruno de Towaji, is that you?”

Bruno sighed, too tired for the moment to feel a proper sense of hatred. “Reply: Yes, Marlon, you pathetic bastard. I’m here.”

“I hoped you’d come,” Marlon said, after only a few seconds’ delay. He must be somewhere close by. Bruno scanned the trajectory display but saw no trace of a base or spaceship or other structure there, just another loose end of Ring Collapsiter swimming into view.

“End reply,” he said. “Ship, can you localize the source of that transmission?”

“Negative, sir. Range is indeterminate, and the signal appears to be coming from a broad region, fully half the sky.”

Bruno frowned. “Which half?”

“Opposite the sun.”

“Hmm. And it all arrives at the same time? It’s a clean signal?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“How unique. It’s as if it were coming from an enormous shell antenna, symmetric about our position. But that’s unlikely, isn’t it? He’s got some trick he’s employing.”

Marlon’s voice came again. “Bruno, are you still there?”

“Reply: I’m here. You say you hoped I’d come?”

Again, the delay. Then Sykes said, “I did, really. You’re my hero, sir. Didn’t your tattooed friend tell you?” The odd thing was, Marlon didn’t sound snotty or sarcastic or evil with that remark. He sounded like plain old Marlon Sykes, meaning every word he was saying.

“Declarant Sykes,” Cheng Shiao said urgently, leaning over the radio console in an ill-considered lurch. “I must insist that you surrender yourself immediately. You’ve broken the law , sir.”

Sykes laughed at that, and suddenly he did sound evil. “Who’ve you got down there with you, Bruno? Some policeman? No one fit to judge MS, certainly. We make our own laws, we Declarant-Philanders. Even physical laws can be ruled in our favor, if we prepare the proper defense.”

Bruno sighed, weary of all this. “What is it you want, Marlon?”

“To business, eh? No time to catch up on the personal side? All right, then; be that way. I’ve contacted you to ask you to join me. Not quite as a full partner—I’m really not prepared to share the conceptual credit—but I could certainly use your help in the detail work. Frankly, I could use your company, too, if you’re willing to lend it.”

Bruno was aghast. “Marlon, are you insane? Well, clearly you are, but are you stupid as well? Tamra is dead . You killed her, you… you… fiend!” There didn’t seem any better word for it. Words had simply failed him.

“Fiend?” Marlon sounded genuinely hurt. “I’m as much a victim as you, sir. Remember, I loved her first. I didn’t kill her—why would I do that? She killed herself. Ask your little friends there.”

Killed herself? Killed herself ?

“It’s true,” Vivian said hollowly. She’d stripped out of her quilted bodysuit and now wore only a kind of slip or under-dress that served to emphasize her all-but-grown-up figure. But her face—her grown-up face—was heartbreakingly sad. “We’d gotten the fax working again, intermittently, but it kept malfunctioning and going offline—none of us knew enough about it to say why. We had only two reflective blankets at that time, and there just wasn’t enough room for everyone underneath them. We tried taking turns that first day, but it was clear that that was just going to slowly kill us all.

“So we tried drawing straws, but Her Majesty somehow rigged the draw. She lost five times in a row. We didn’t let it stand, of course, though she kept insisting it was her duty, that ‘not one more citizen’ would die in her stead. But what was our duty, if not to protect her? Then Cheng Peterson died—we found him with his skin burned black and his tongue all puffed out—and she just… walked out into the sunlight and cut her throat. I don’t know where she got the knife; I never saw it before. We tried to save her. We tried , but you can’t fix a carotid artery under those conditions; you just can’t. So she… died. And the next day—

Vivian, clutching tightly at the wellwood mantelpiece, choked momentarily, her beautiful face streaked with speedy, inertialess tears. The strain of the long ordeal showed clearly in her features. Finally, she found enough composure to continue. “The next day, we got the fax working again for nearly an hour. We got the tents up, and the moisture condensers… She would have lived, Bruno. She would have. The Queen of All Things sacrificed herself for nothing .”

“Not for nothing,” Muddy said, struggling to rise from his heap on the floor. He looked dizzy. He looked, truthfully, like he should just stay put. “It was a gesture of, of… d-d-defiance. Perhaps she knew she was bait in a trap.”

“No,” Shiao said, shaking his crew cut head sadly, “the cruiser didn’t try to rescue us until five days after that. She couldn’t have known.”

“An affirmation of life for the rest of you, then,” Muddy said harshly. “Ill considered, perhaps, but she 1-I-loved all of you enough to do it, and that’s the thing that counts. She died—f-fittingly—of an excess of love.”

“You see?” Marlon piped up from the radio speaker. “I was as shocked and shattered as any of you. I’d roll back time to that moment if I could.” Then, more ominously: “Perhaps some day I shall.”

Bruno’s weariness had been subsiding, replaced bit by bit with a deep, sustaining anger. Now it blossomed. “You created the situation, Marlon . You put her there in harm’s way, and you could have removed her from it when you saw the way things were going. You’re twice the bastard I thought, for laying the blame on chance when you know perfectly well it’s your own damned fault. Why would I possibly want to join you? What hope or endeavor could we possibly share?”

There was a long pause, until finally Marlon answered. “I was never sure if you knew, Bruno. When I had the idea, I figured surely it was one you’d considered and discarded. But the math checked out, so I guessed you’d just been squeamish about it. Perfectly in keeping with your character, right? You actually care about people on some level, which is great. Really, I mean that in a nonsarcastic way. But you were all alone up there on that little planet, your research going off in these weird directions, and I saw it’d be thousands of years before you actually got anywhere with it.

“That first time you came back to the Queendom, I thought you’d call me out for what I was doing. When you didn’t… Well, I was full of resentment then. I was happy to see you go, and happy to capture your image for… well, malicious purposes. And the image confirmed your ignorance! The second time, though, I figured you must have worked it out. You were very methodical, so when you said nothing, I dared to hope you were secretly on my side. It made me feel better about you, about how great everyone thinks you are. If you were working on my idea, well, that would make it all worthwhile. And if not, then maybe you weren’t so smart after all. And that would be an important discovery, too.”