Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

But Vivian Rajmon’s high, teenaged voice called out before he could quite get the words formed. “Cheng? R.C. Captain Cheng Shiao, are you all right?”

“I’m here, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, suddenly attentive. “I… would have you know that my heart was lost the moment I met you, Commandant-Inspector. It would have been yours, if you’d have had it—yours for a million years. But my life belongs to de Towaji, and to the Queendom. Forgive me.”

And with those words, Bruno’s hoped-for miracle occurred: Shiao’s body, crippled and broken and bloodied though it was, somehow found the strength to leap four meters across the room at Marlon Sykes. Marlon had been suspicious, waiting for trouble of some sort, but Cheng Shiao was a hard man to stop. The gun went off with a little popping sound, but a moment later Shiao swept it from Marlon’s hand, knocking it across the room so that it spun along the floor and came to rest beneath the rumpled cot. He knocked Marlon down as well, in the same clean motion.

“Good night!” Bruno couldn’t help exclaiming.

Then Vivian’s voice came again. “Cheng! Cheng!”

And Muddy’s voice. “What’s happening, sir? Can we help?”

Shiao wrestled Marlon facedown onto the floor, and then from somewhere, some pocket or recess in the tattered space-suit, produced a ball of handcuff putty and slapped it down on the small of Marlon’s back. Rattlesnake-quick, it lashed out to encircle wrists and ankles, leaving Marlon neatly trussed and screaming. “Dealbreakers! Dealbreakers! Rotten, stinking, dishonest…”

But there was no look of triumph or even relief on Shiao’s face. Only pain. He rolled away, falling onto his back, and Bruno could see the wound Marlon’s gun had made in Shiao’s abdominal cavity. Not a bullet hole, or a laser burn, but a void —a six-centimeter absence where armor and flesh should be. Transported? Vanished? The dream of matter, somehow undreamt? It hardly mattered; Shiao would not survive the injury. Already it was filling with blood. Cheng Shiao would be dead in sixty seconds, if that.

“Cheng!” Vivian called out again.

“He’s injured,” Bruno said back to her. “You must turn the faxes back on. Quickly!”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it; you have to. We replaced part of the domestic software with your own household AI.”

“You what?”

“It was in the ship’s library. Never mind! Help Cheng!”

Bruno frowned, and for some reason he looked up at the ceiling. “House? Hello, are you here?”

“Good day, sir,” that old, familiar voice said. “I’m detecting numerous diagnostic errors, and I seem to be under some sort of direct software assault from a native AI, but I await your instructions nonetheless. It’s good to be working with you again, sir.”

“Turn the faxes on!” Bruno cried, leveling a finger at Shiao’s struggling, bleeding, dying body. “Help me get him into the fax! Quickly! Quickly!”

“Working,” the house replied easily. “Fax machine activated.”

Sure enough, the orifice hummed to life, flashed briefly, and extruded a humanoid robot of gold and tin, faceless and graceful, precisely like the servants Bruno had employed for so very many years. The space between fax and victim was several meters, but the robot danced across it in an instant, swept Shiao’s body off the floor in a bloody arc, and hurled it directly into the orifice. The body vanished at once, and an instant later the robot had leaped through as well, vanished as well. The whole affair had taken three seconds.

Marlon still struggled on the floor, rolling and flopping, trying to face Bruno and only partially succeeding. “Nobody wins,” he said urgently. “I know what you’re thinking, Bruno, but you can’t possibly grapple all that collapsium up away from the sun. Not in time, not at all . You can have your arc de fin; you can see the very lights and darknesses of uncreation. This year! This month! I give it to you, sir, my gift. All the credit, all the glory, if you’ll only let me at the controls. Let me at them!”

“No,” Bruno said flatly.

“No? Think hard, Bruno. I tell you, you cannot save the sun . Will you at least see that its death has meaning?”

“No. Indeed, I stand here wondering…” The hairs prickled up on the back of Bruno’s neck. He felt awake, really awake , for perhaps the first time in his life. “I stand here wondering what I was thinking all that time. An arc defin ? What use is that? If we’re to live forever, won’t we see the end of time with our own two eyes? All too soon, I fear! We’ll look back and say ‘Already? Already the world is ending, the stars winking out? Why, we’d only just begun!’ And if that end is spoiled by de Towaji, a trillion years before the fact, why… one wonders why we’ve bothered to live at all.”

“You’re mad,” Marlon said, his voice edging on panic. Straining against the putty, he managed to lift his head enough to look Bruno in the eye. “It’s my own fault; I’ve driven you mad. I’ve killed your Queen!”

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed, nodding slowly. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s all it is. The work of decades falls away like ashes, leaving nothing, no sense of purpose or desire. There is no Tamra for me to hide from, no Tamra for me to return to when at long last I’m finished. To live forever without her? Even to contemplate it? I suppose I am mad.”

Marlon’s eyes were sharp, his tone urgent. “Listen to me, Bruno. Ask a question with me. Where do people go when they die? Nowhere? Where exactly is nowhere?”

Ah, but Bruno was awake—he saw the trick in that question. He was encouraged to conclude that “nowhere,” since it didn’t exist, was of zero size, and by corollary that everything that no longer existed—being also of zero size and therefore located “nowhere”—could be found there, instantly, without effort. With zero movement, zero searching, zero time. Ah, but by that logic, everything that never existed could be found there as well. So could everything that existed now, but someday wouldn’t. At the end of time, everything would be nowhere, including time itself, and so Bruno declined to fall for the trick. The size of nowhere was surely infinite, in time as well as space, else he and Marlon and everyone else would be there already.

He raised a finger in Marlon’s direction, and waggled it. “House, remove this body as well.”

“No, Bruno! No! Believe me, you can’t stop this. It’s pointless to try!”

The robot appeared, danced across the floor to where Marlon lay, and scooped him up.

“It’s never pointless to try” Bruno mused.

And then the fax machine hummed, and there was no one else in the room there with him.

“Bruno?” Vivian’s voice quietly, sadly, said from the speaker, treading with utmost tenderness. “Bruno, is Cheng all right?”

“He’s stored, dear,” Bruno replied wearily. “He’s safe for the moment. But the sun, alas, is not.”

It seemed to take a long time to hobble over to Marlon’s little wellstone desk. “House,” he said along the way, “activate that. Thank you.”

He sat down at the wellwood chair, taking the load off his feet, off his back, off his pain. The old grapple controls were there, the old holographic displays, as if Marlon had cribbed them from Bruno’s own designs. Tortured them, probably, from Muddy’s own pained and screaming lips. How tired Muddy must have been, after years of torment! How extraordinary, that he’d managed to accomplish so much in spite of it.

Bruno pulled up an interface and quietly immersed himself.