Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Now they’re simply eating your staff,” Shiao complained, though he did sound relieved.

Bruno couldn’t shrug inside his spacesuit, but he did say “Piffle.” The disassemblers were disassembling his staff, dropping out a fine silicon dust beneath them, but a few more whispered commands caused the affected areas to sizzle with pulsed electrical currents at frequencies designed specifically to kill disassemblers. In moments, the bubbling and smoldering had ceased. Then he simply commanded the wellstone’s outermost layer to slough off, leaving him with a good-as-new staff only slightly thinner than the one he’d started with.

“What would the Queendom do without you?” Shiao wanted to know.

Bruno declined to comment, saying simply, “We still have the fog in the room to contend with. Come.”

“Will your library trick work this time?” Shiao pressed, again blocking Bruno’s passage through the doorway.

“Let’s find out,” Bruno said, and nudged him through.

Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any more fog in the room than there had been when they stepped out. A quick look at the fax revealed that it was off, not functioning any longer.

“Perhaps Vivian has had some success,” Shiao said hopefully.

“Indeed. Or else the fog has simply attacked the fax that produced it. An inelegant design, if so. If you’ll excuse me, please?”

“Mmm.” Reluctantly, Shiao stepped aside to let Bruno have access to the edge of the blue-green fog bank. The staff was returned to blitter mode and dipped lightly into the fog.

The result was instantaneous: the fog—really just a suspension of electromagnetic fields generated by the individual disassemblers—vanished at once, and in its place a much sparser cloud of gray-white dust settled harmlessly to the floor.

“Very good,” Shiao said approvingly. “Very good indeed. We’ve only one or two more rooms to get through, eh?”

“Mmm. Time will tell, my friend. It doesn’t pay to underestimate Marlon Sykes.”

Again, Shiao cut a hole through the far wall. Again, he preceded Bruno through it. Again, he screamed.

“What now?” Bruno asked, hurrying through behind him. “Oh. Oh. My goodness.”

He’d been struggling, actually, to remain afraid rather than angry, to maintain the edge of caution and improvisation that fear encouraged so readily. Now, there’d be no need to force it. The third chamber was much like the first and second had been: large, dark, empty of furnishings… It even had a fax in the same exact location, although it, too, appeared to be powered down or broken, its status lights off, its wellstone housing inactivated.

What was different this time was that the room—virtually the entire room—was occupied by an enormous, soft-skinned, pinkish brown spider.

Well, perhaps “spider” was the wrong term, since it had six legs instead of eight, and since each leg terminated in a perfect little human hand, and since its meat-colored body carried a swollen, bulbous caricature of Wenders Rodenbeck’s face in place of a ten-eyed spider head. Its two eyes glowed a malevolent red in the darkness.

Bruno quickly decided he’d never seen anything so horrific in all his years, and he couldn’t help echoing Shiao’s heartfelt scream.

He could be more horrified, though; he discovered this when the spider turned its red eyes upon him, opened its fanged mouth wide, and spoke in a rasping parody of Wenders Rodenbeck’s actual voice.

“Ah, de Towaji. Welcome.”

“My God!” was all Bruno could think to say in return. He hefted his staff like the weapon it was, pointing one end up at that hideous face. “My God, man! My God .”

“He told me you might be coming,” the spider said, around a quite incredible mouthful of dripping fangs. “I’m pleased that you have. I never disliked you, you know, even when He commanded that I should.”

“Wenders,” Bruno said, “what has he done to you?”

“Made a hideous monster of me, obviously,” the spider quipped. Then the eyes narrowed, and the legs and body lurched, and suddenly that swollen face was two meters closer to Bruno’s own. A leg raised; a finger shook, tsk tsk. “Do I finally frighten you, Declarant? Actually, this form was my own idea. Well, His idea, but I agreed to it. Rather than the alternatives, of which I was offered several. Unpleasant. But I’m the man himself inside—playwright, lawyer, defender of planets, same as ever. Same as he made me, anyway. You do realize I’m to murder you?”

“I’ve little doubt of it,” Bruno agreed, afraid to move, afraid to do anything. The sheer size of this creature implied there was nothing Bruno or Shiao could do to stop it. Mortally wounded, it could nonetheless murder them both a dozen times over, simply with its death throes.

“You’ve been grievously mistreated, sir,” Shiao offered up to the thing.

The spider, swiveling its head toward Shiao, looked surprised. “Have I? How, exactly? Do I know you, sir?”

“Actually,” Shiao said, craning his neck to look the thing in the eye, “you and I just spent three weeks together on a derelict platform, about ten million kilometers sunward of here.”

“Really!” The spider was instantly intrigued, its monstrous eyebrows shooting up, its many knees—or perhaps elbows— bending until its leathery bulk plopped heavily onto the floor. “A guy can’t help but be intrigued by that . Where am I now? Not with you any longer?”

“No, sir,” Shiao agreed. “You were killed about twenty minutes ago. By Declarant Sykes.”

“Ah. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m always tying Him up in court and such, without realizing just how badly that upsets Him. I’d probably kill myself , if I met me. Bastard. But how did I die? Was I dramatic? Was I brave?”

“Yes, sir. Very brave. You were on a spaceship blasting for Mercury, on a mission to save the Queendom, and you ran afoul of some stray collapsium.”

“Extraordinary!” the spider said. “I always told people I’d die that way, sooner or later. Not saving the Queendom, I mean—running afoul of collapsium. Nasty stuff, that. Meaning no offense to you, Declarant.”

“Er, none taken,” Bruno said quickly.

“I’m to kill you,” the spider said again. “Have I mentioned? I’m conditioned for it, though obviously I’ve never had the actual opportunity. Any idea what that’s like?”

“Why haven’t you killed Declarant Sykes?” Shiao suggested.

The spider responded with a deep, awful rumbling noise that Bruno eventually identified as laughter. “Kill him? Kill him , what a thought! Oh, I could never do that. My ordeal here has brought the two of us very close together. I’m written into his script, and vice versa. You probably wouldn’t understand that, but take my word: It’s a tangible connection.”

“I do understand it,” Shiao insisted. “You and / became very close, during our time on the platform. I was very sorry to see you die. And I’m very happy , if a bit dumfounded, to discover that a copy of you still exists in… some form.”

“Really.” Again, the spider seemed almost dreamily intrigued.

“You mustn’t do it,” Bruno said, suddenly finding his voice, and with it his anger. “You mustn’t do Marlon’s bidding. He has a way of breaking people, of conscripting their minds as well as their bodies. Perhaps you can’t see what a joke he’s made of you, what a shadow of your former self, but I tell you, the very same thing has happened to me . And do you know where / am? I’m guarding the spaceship that brought us all here. I’m determined to overcome the damage Marlon has done, to me and to everyone else. You must let us pass, sir. We’ll carve a hole in that wall, there, and pass through it into Marlon’s study, and if we survive our business there, we will return to help you!”