Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

His voice sped up, becoming almost giddy. “I watched your world through telescopes, you know, and when you finally made a ring of the collapsium—around a star, no less!— I thought surely you must have figured it out. I waited for your network gate to open; I even sent you a present. But you hadn’t worked it out, had you? You still haven’t. I really am way ahead of you on this one. How extraordinarily affirming that is, of all my years of effort!”

Bruno felt he couldn’t possibly be more bewildered. “Marlon, what in the damn worlds are you talking about?”

Another long pause. Then: “The arc de fin , Bruno. Your window to the end of time. There’s a shortcut, an easy solution, to produce it this year . This very month. It requires a lot of mass, and an energetic collapse, but those have finally been arranged.”

“Oh. Dear God,” Bruno said. “The sun!”

“Exactly. I need it. Oh, I suppose any equivalent star would do, but there’d have to be a thriving industrial civilization there to help me collapse it in the proper way. So we’d be back to waiting thousands of years again, until these Queendom slackards expand beyond this one meager system. It’s too long. History should know its own end, to be able to make sense of its present. And history will record that it was I, not you, who opened that window.”

Bruno couldn’t help laughing a little—a sour, bitter, furious chuckle. Grief hovered beside him, waiting its turn, but for the moment he was simply angry. “History will die with the Queendom, Marlon. There’ll be no one left to remember how damned smart you were.”

“Oh, please.” Marlon’s voice was impatient. “I disrupted the Iscog to keep small minds from interfering; I didn’t realize yours was one of them. There’ll be more deaths, of course; that can’t be avoided. Probably most of the people on Earth, certainly all the ones on Venus. The flares of the dying sun will be impressive, it’s true. But come on; you know as well as I how trivial it is to create miniature stars. We could be circling the planets with them, using them for power, heat, light, industry… Why should we settle for nature, when a handful of neubles, some wellstone, and some hydrogen will match what nature requires a billion billion billion tons to accomplish? A sun! I say it’s inevitable, that we should dismantle the stars for our own purposes and replace them with something of our own device. History will credit me with that , as well.”

“History will label you a monster,” Bruno said darkly.

After a pause, Marlon grumbled. “Bruno, I realize nobody owes me greatness, but if I can seize greatness, why shouldn’t I? The Queendom provides the framework and the labor, and I provide the ideas and the careful flow of information to control it all. At the top! People suffer as a result, but what’s so unnatural about that? This idea that people should be safe and happy, that’s a very distorting idea. Look to history: Most societies have agreed that people should be useful , to men of vision like myself. Who remembers the happy nobodies? My future is grander than yours, Bruno; I swear it. Your so-called ‘monsters’ are simply the flesh of humanity’s ambition to create a history worth recording.”

“You’re brainsick, Marlon. Something’s come loose in your base pattern. When was the last time you were medically validated by anything but a fax filter?”

“Damn yourself! God, why is there always this confusion between ambition and madness? The two aren’t even related. I’ve created various mad versions of myself, just to see if that would be useful. Better than complacency, at any rate; sometimes I think the very purpose of the Queendom is to crush away all dreams of greatness, to stuff them into a single individual and then rob her of any real power, just to show it can’t be had.”

“The Ring Collapsiter was ambitious, Marlon.”

“More than you know.”

“As described! What a fine idea it was, and is . What a shame to so pervert it! I’d thought you were a builder, Marlon, a creator. I’m ashamed to be so wrong.”

“Oh, listen to yourself. Listen to that pompous, stupid voice! I know you, sir. Don’t forget it. I know you when you’re proud and fresh, and I know you afterward, when you’ve broken. I’m well aware of your limits. Don’t presume to think, for even a moment, that you have the same knowledge of me.”

Sykes paused, then continued in a milder voice. “All right, I suppose I am a monster. I suppose that goes without question at this point. But a visionary monster, and that’s what really matters. You and I have clashed enough, Bruno. I’m done hating you; I’m prepared to write your name in next to my own. Consider: if not for you, I’d have no peers at all, and how’s a man with no peers supposed to fit in? Ah? Ah?” He invited a friendly laugh, and seemed to expect that he’d get one.

Bruno sighed a final time. “You know I can’t let you do this, Marlon. Do as Captain Shiao says: Surrender yourself now. They won’t prosecute you; you clearly have some kind of illness. Once cured, you’ll see the madness in all this. For your own sake, not to mention poor Tamra’s, you should help me clean this mess up and start setting things right.”

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. I had to try, Bruno. Don’t say I didn’t try. I’m sorry to tell you, this conversation is over.”

Suddenly, the space around them was filled with pulsing light. Great blossoms of pure energy—each one easily the size of Earth’s moon—flicked into existence, remained just long enough to register, and vanished again.

“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed. “Ship, what’s the distribution of those flashes?”

“Stochastic, sir, a Gaussian white-noise pattern.”

“Centered around us?”

“Centered ten million kilometers to the solar east of us. Eigenvectors are nonorthogonal; the distribution is shaped like—excuse me, library search—a banana, sir.”

“A banana? Gods, what now? What’s the standard deviation?”

“Along which axis, sir?”

“Along the relevant axis, you! The one connecting our position to the centroid of your banana. How close is this phenomenon to hitting us?”

“Ah,” the ship said. “Five million kilometers, sir.”

Bruno frowned, pinched his chin. “We’re at the two-sigma dispersion contour? That’s odd. Is the centroid stationary?”

“Negative, sir. It’s matching our acceleration, and exceeding our velocity by a constant two hundred thousand kilometers per second. It is gaining on us.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, finally beginning to understand. “Add the phenomenon to the trajectory display, please. All known flashes to date.”

The result was quite alarming: here was the grappleship, hurtling directly downward, toward the vast luminous plains of the solar chromosphere. And off to one side was a crescent-shaped pattern of dots, marching and smearing its way toward them. Off to the other side was that stray Ring Collapsiter fragment he’d glimpsed a few minutes ago: a ropy, kilometers-long chain of collapsium.

Despite the ertial nausea, everyone crowded forward, eager to see and understand the new display, eager to know what was happening to them. Their bodies stank of sweat; even Deliah’s, he realized. Even his own. Impervium or no, it was getting hot in here. No material was superreflective at all wavelengths, after all, and the hull was necessarily pierced by certain openings, for the grapple beams and the emergency exhaust ports and of course the hatch itself. So it leaked, slowly letting in the heat. How close to the sun could they get before they were cooked in place? He noticed that the little faux fireplace had extinguished itself, probably figuring its warming-the-place-up job was done.