Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Blackbody temperature of the flashes?” Bruno asked.

“Ten million kelvins, sir.”

“Ah.” That told him nothing useful.

“We’re being herded,” Cheng Shiao said, pointing at the display. “The sun on one side, the weapon pulses on the other. No way to move up or down out of the ecliptic plane. No place to go but here .”

“Toward the collapsium,” Bruno agreed angrily. “Deliah, can we grapple to it?”

“Not without shredding it. The whole thing will still be muon-contaminated, Bruno. Very fragile.”

“ How contaminated? How long will it stand up to our tugging?”

“I don’t know. Seconds, minutes… I don’t know how to measure or calculate it. Do you?”

“Not offhand,” Bruno admitted. Then he said, “Bah. Enough. We grapple to it, at once. Ship? You hear me? Grab the end of that fragment, if you can—that’ll direct the tension along its strongest axis.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

Gravity flickered and lurched, then restored itself. The view outside the bow wheeled and locked, centering itself on the distant, powder-blue tendril of collapsium.

“It’s too hot in here,” Tamra’s courtier, Tusite, complained.

“We’re all hot,” Muddy answered her faintly, from his place on the floor. Evidently he’d decided to remain there. “We’re diving into the sun, for God’s sake.”

“Environmental controls at maximum,” the ship said in its own defense.

“Vent some oxygen from the emergency tank,“ Bruno suggested. “It’s supercompressed—its expansion upon release should provide some cooling.”

The temperature nudged down a bit. A sigh went through them all. In the window above, the collapsium grew larger, closer.

Sabadell-Andorra spoke again. “Receiving a transmission, sir. Playing it.”

Then Marlon’s voice, crackling heavily with solar-wind static. “Bruno, what are you doing? You leave that fragment alone! Its placement is very precise! What are you dragging it with?”

“No reply,” Bruno instructed.

“Bruno,” Marlon warned, “stop this at once. Blast it, I’ve given you every possible chance, and see where it gets me. Good-bye, sir.”

“Centroid of the flashes has shifted to our position,” the ship said. “It is now tracking us directly.”

Under his breath, Bruno muttered something history does not record. “All right, what’s our probability of being flashed?”

“Of being inside one of the flashes when it appears?” the ship asked.

“Exactly.”

“Approximately one-half percent, sir, every second.”

“I see. And how long before we collide with that collapsium fragment?”

“Forty seconds, sir.”

“Ah.” He looked around, at the assembled friends and acquaintances, at the robot and the copy of himself. “Well, I’m very sorry, everyone, but Marlon appears to have killed us all. My humblest apologies to every one of you.”

Then a thought struck him. “Ship, what part of the fragment are we approaching? The middle?”

“The end, sir. It’s where we grappled to, per your orders.”

“Indeed.” He turned to Deliah and spoke quickly. “The Ring Collapsiter is hollow , yes? A tube of collapsium, with an open conduit down the center. That’s the whole point of it: a tunnel of supervacuum through which light can travel unimpeded.”

“Yes,” Deliah said uncertainly, her eyes widening.

“How large a conduit, again? Six meters? Wide enough to admit this vessel?”

“Bruno, you can’t—well, perhaps you can.”

“Ship, can you dive straight down the center of the fragment?”

“I can try, sir. Contact in five seconds. Four, three, two, one…”

Is this death , Bruno wondered? There was certainly a lot of screaming, or rather, a lot of unearthly, uncanny whispering sounds that reminded him of screaming. He also heard clear, high ringing sounds, like hundreds of little bells. And these flitting, translucent entities… Were they souls? Angels? Devils? Were they the ones screaming? The sounds were impossible to localize—they seemed to come from within his own head!

Simultaneous arrival in both eardrums , the voice of reason whispered, and that voice actually was in his head, purely imaginary, giving him something to compare these actual sounds against. The difference was, so to speak, pronounced. So perhaps he was in a real place after all. In his ship, alive inside the Ring Collapsiter? That seemed as unlikely as Heaven itself.

His senses told him nothing familiar, filled him with confusion and terror and nothing more. Start with vision: he saw, or seemed to see, a dim, sourceless, colorless light all around, like a fog. Within the light he perceived movement, rapid and repetitive. He perceived shapes, or rather, shapeless regions with a different sort of translucence. Some of these moved; others did not. Some were close; others were not.

Aha! So stereo vision still worked in this place. Bruno still had two eyes, which were capable of angling inward or outward to judge distance. That was something, a major clue! But what were those two eyes seeing ? Not ordinary light, certainly. Start with the assumption, then, that he was inside the collapsium. What would that imply? A greatly reduced zero-point field, for one thing. Like the ertial shield’s wake, but symmetric all around him? With no acceleration to restore some grudging sense of inertia? The speed of light would be much higher, meaning the frequency of light would be much higher for a given energy. Visible light photons would phase off into the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum, without gaining the energy wallop of true gamma rays. And low-energy photons? Might they become visible?

Try sound next: He couldn’t localize it, the way he could localize light. But while stereo vision was related to angles, independent of anything else, stereo hearing relied on differences in a sound’s arrival time from one ear to the other. This related directly to the speed of sound—the higher the speed, the vaguer the perceived direction. Yet he did hear human voices, or something like them. So perhaps the speed of sound—and thus its frequency—wasn’t that different, maybe increased by a factor of a few hundred. Perhaps friction and viscosity played a larger role in sound waves than inertia did. If he spoke in low tones, could he make himself understood?

“HELLO!” he rumbled in his deepest, loudest bass, and indeed, he felt and heard a scratchy whisper that was faint but— at least to him—reasonably intelligible. He was rewarded with a renewed cacophony of sounds, urgent sounding but otherwise devoid of meaning.

He was still furious and afraid, still awaiting his chance to grieve, but now he was fascinated as well. Rarely did physics problems present themselves in such dramatic and tangible ways!

All right, then; try the sense of touch: He felt light impacts all around him, like puffs of air. There was no feeling of weight or motion, but the touches on his skin did seem to correspond in some way to the dancing translucences all around him. He reached out a hand, and it flicked out like a whip and then stopped as quickly. To his astonishment he felt the shapes of a human nose and cheek touch it lightly, for an instant, then bounce away. The face had felt rigid, as if carved out of wax, but it had been a face, warm and sticky-slick with natural oils. For an instant it had even looked like a face in a vague, watercolor sort of way, before it flickered off into the fog again.

Finally, his senses began to integrate. To give them a few moments’ peace, he took a breath and closed his eyes. Those actions felt normal enough, at least. When he looked again, things were clearer.