The Collapsium (11 page)

“We could just love Venus on her own merits,” Rodenbeck said, in weary, futile rebuttal. “Attacking her isn’t compulsory. You’re the worst sort of real-estate developer, you know; a sanctimonious one.”

Krogh laughed. “Son, when
you
buy a planet, I promise to let you care for it as you choose. No one will dream of stopping you. But the shareholders of Venus have voted, almost unanimously, to alter it. Most of us live here after all, or plan to, and while we don’t desire a second Earth, we do at least hope for homesteads that won’t rust and implode the moment we erect them. You know very little of our hardships here.”

“Yeah, yeah, poor baby. You knew the conditions when you moved here.”

“Hush, you two,” Rhea Krogh said, with a sort of long-suffering amusement.

Other conversations drifted upward, along with some coughs and wheezes.

“If you’re having trouble breathing,” Rhea called down, “do please go back inside. Her Majesty can’t take responsibility for the way I’d feel if anything happened.”

No one took her up on the offer.

“At the very least, go fax yourself an oxygen tank and some filters.”

A few responded to that, turning around the way they had
come, their steps a little lighter in descent. Bruno let a few more minutes go by, giving them every chance, before rising to his feet once more and resuming the climb at a much-reduced pace and with many backward glances.

Leadership, iconhood, bah. Was it so wrong, simply wanting to do his work? Was that so grave a trespass on the rights of humanity? Humanity certainly seemed to think so. Could everyone be wrong but himself? Was that a reasonable thought to entertain? They trusted his opinion with regard to collapsium, why not with regard to himself? Perhaps, after all, they knew something he didn’t. Or perhaps, as with the collapsiter grid, their need simply outweighed any cautions or caveats, outweighed Bruno’s own desires. The good of the many demands the sacrifice of the able, yes?

The worst of it was that he had no role models, no historical personages from whom to draw example. Wealthy, strong, well connected to the seats of power; there’d been many like that, some of them even philosophers and inventors, the Declarant-equivalents in their respective eras. But none of them immortal, none forced to live eternally with the consequences of their actions. How paralyzing would they have found it, the eyes of history always on them, not for the sake of posterity but for on-going and literally ceaseless dissection? Knowing that their adolescent bumblings would look ridiculous even to their future selves, and worse, that such adolescence would never end?

Perhaps some could have managed it. Perhaps some would manage it in the far future, with Bruno’s failed example to look back on. But that didn’t help him now, didn’t show him how to
be
this flawless philosopher-saint of society’s expectation.

Bah. Bah! Better to worry about the collapsium, about the physics underlying it, and the universe underlying that, and the
arc de fin
that might somehow make sense of it all.
That
should be his historical role! That!

But his opinion mattered little; tonight he was a mountain guide, leading idle stargazers to their latest amusement. Well,
not amusement; not that. Their lives did hinge on the fate of the Ring Collapsiter, after all. And they didn’t know how to fix it, and they thought perhaps he did; they were therefore understandably eager for his answer. So perhaps there was nothing strange about any of this, no reason for his ire or discomfort. Had he been harsh, foolish? Probably, yes.

So his thoughts had come full circle, and every time someone coughed or stumbled or demanded a rest on that long, slow climb, the circle began anew, starting and ending in the same places like a stuck recording, belying the myth that Bruno’s mind was extraordinary, somehow elevated above the norm. Bruno’s mind was, in point of fact, messier than his living room, crowded with lusts and irrationalities and stuck recordings beyond number. It was a wonder he accomplished anything at all.

But he engaged Marlon Sykes in sporadic conversation, when certain non-useless thoughts occurred to him. He looked up and down, as the mountain slowly grew beneath them and shrank above. He tugged his beard, pinched his chin, even fretted periodically about the Ring Collapsiter’s fall, and how it might be averted. F=ma, obviously, and by corollary, F=ea/c
²
. Did that help? If so, it wasn’t apparent.

Finally, the summit approached, the sky widening above and below them. It was unsettling, the way the sky never changed. The hazes drifted slowly in the jet stream, yes, but the post-sunset colors that lit them refused to deepen, to lose the last hints of red, to fade to blue and then darkness. The stars refused to really come out. There was no moon, and beneath the gloomy cloud deck below them, it was easy to imagine nothingness: Venus a planet of pure sky with no solid surface at all except this mountain, rising up like a pillar from the depths.

The staircase widened at the last, doubling and tripling its breadth before opening, finally, to a flattened, roughly circular depression at Skadi’s summit, some thirty meters across. The rock into which it was sunk formed a waist-high wall all
around, broken by sheets into rough-smooth pastry layers. To the southwest, the twilight was brighter; Bruno hurried in that direction, crowding up against the wall, looking out toward the sun, hidden by miles of cloud and miles more of rock.

And there, standing nearly vertical in the sunset glow, was the Ring Collapsiter, barely visible as a filament of blue-green Cerenkov light, not quite a line but the peak of an arch; two very fine lines rising together to join at the top. Like the stars themselves, too small and distant to see as objects; this was a sort of stretched pinpoint, a brightness without dimension, but not without structure. Marlon’s promised crenellations were quite apparent, though subtle: little scallopy waves in the smoothness of the ring, and smaller waves scalloping those, placing each of the structure’s millions of collapsons into one of gravity’s infinitely many vibrational nodes, making it a stable, eternal structure. In theory.

Again, he was struck by the beauty of the thing, by the sheer elegance of function cast into form. Would future generations perceive its marvel, its grace? Would it slide into mundanity, one more work of engineering fading into civilization’s background, like cabling and sewer pipes? The very thought made him angry.

And then it struck him: he was doing it too, presuming a future for this thing, for the people whose lives it threatened. He, too, presumed unconsciously that this problem would be solved. And that was interesting, because he’d never presumed, for example, that the Earth could be towed to a warmer orbit to thaw its frozen regions, or that wellstone iron could magically change to atomic iron, or that one fine day, people would all cease being rotten to each other. Bruno prided himself on a good sense of which problems were and weren’t tractable, and this one—the fall of the Ring Collapsiter—apparently passed the test.

So what did his subconscious know that he himself did not? What had it been doing, while he was off barfing into cups and whatnot?

“There it is,” Marlon Sykes said, pointing vaguely. “In all its glory. You can even see Her Majesty’s superreflectors, little white dots all around.”

Bruno peered, squinted, and decided Marlon was right. The pinpoints were faint, much fainter than the collapsium itself. They were yellow-white, like sunlight, and they hovered outside the ring at various distances, sunlight pushing them away as fast as they could be lowered into place. In fact, a few of the more distant dots were moving with just-barely-perceptible speed.

“Hmm,” Bruno agreed. “Yes. Interesting. How big are the sheets?”

“Not large. A hundred meters.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said again, nodding slowly and pinching his chin. “Enough to wrap around the torus, like tape around the rim of a steering wheel. Goodness, if the ring were solid, we’d have no problem, would we?”

And then the world stopped. He drew a slow, reeking breath, filling his lungs, and then released it slowly, loudly, in an extended sigh. Because that was it. Because by God, that was bloody well
it
.

“They’re wellstone sheets?” he asked excitedly. “Thin and flexible, but able to be rigidized quickly?”

“Uh, affirmative,” Marlon said, noting Bruno’s change of mood with less-than-complete certainty. The resentment, Bruno saw, hadn’t really vanished. It was just better hidden.

“So we wrap them around!” he said, excited anyway, anxious to share the insight. “Send it home in a
cast
, letting sunlight and solar wind do the lifting for us! If the inertia is still too great, which I’m sure it is, we erect solar sails, hundreds of kilometers wide, to collect the necessary force. With perfect reflection, momentum should build fairly rapidly, at least as compared to the alternative. It should provide enough time for your additional grapples to be built and placed, to stabilize the structure. It should; I believe it will!”

“Uh, Declarant,” Sykes said, hesitantly and with visible
reluctance, “the collapsiter is made of black holes. Universal superabsorbers. They’ll devour the wellstone sheets; we have no way to prevent this.”

“Indeed!” Bruno agreed, doffing his cap. “Indeed. But devour them how quickly? The holes are far narrower than a silicon nucleus. Semisafe, yes? Statistically, some erosion is bound to occur
—bound
to—but any resulting damage could be repaired locally, without interrupting the overall process.”

He thrust his fist against the top of his hat, thinking to burst it out, to create a model with which to demonstrate. The hat proved tougher than it looked, though. He punched it harder, with no better result.

Sykes glanced down at the hat and back up again, as if doubting Bruno’s sobriety. “Sir,” he said tightly, “the space between the silicon atoms is enormous compared to the size of a neuble-mass black hole. At best, the collapsium will pass right through.”

Bruno punched his hat again, aware that a crowd was building steadily all around, conscious of the weight of their collective gaze. “Will it, Declarant? After sucking electrons off the wellstone’s surface? The nuclei, being positively charged, will be attracted directly to the collapson nodes, blocking them partially, all but plugging them.” He looked at the hat, still good as new in his hands. “Blast. Look, you: I’m trying to remove your top.”

At that, to his astonishment, the hat’s crown separated all around, and fluttered end over end to the ground, leaving a flat ring of leather in his hands, a broad disc with a head-sized hole through its center.

Blinking, he said to it, “Er, assume a toroidal cross-section, please.”

Obligingly, the hat shrank one way and fattened the other, inflating to a kind of oversized, black leather donut in his hands. Still a bit surprised, he held this up for Marlon’s inspection.

“Imagine this as your Ring Collapsiter.” He held up a hand
beside it, palm flat, fingers together. “This is your sheet of superreflector. When you wrap the one around the other—” He demonstrated by slowly grabbing the donut. “—and then rigidize it—” He tensed his fist. “—what you’re doing, effectively, is balancing a sheet of joined marbles on a bed of … I don’t know … small drains with tremendous suction behind them. Yes, each of your big marbles is really fourteen drain-sized marbles, and yes, the substance of the drains is somewhat pliable. Wait long enough, and despite the energy barriers their mouths will pull protons right off the nuclei, widen, pull some more, widen some more … But they won’t get big enough to suck whole marbles down, not in the time frame that concerns us. So the erosion will be slow, and the collapsium’s mass gain negligible. If there’s damage, we’ll just snip those collapsons out and replace them. It ought to work.”

Did Marlon’s face grow pale? In the twilight it was difficult to be sure.

“Good Lord, Bruno. I believe you’re right.”

“I haven’t tried the math, of course. I’m guessing.”

“As you guessed before? Phooey. I’ll begin the computations in the morning, and then we’ll know for certain. But at this point, I’d say you’re well within the bounds of decorum to leap and prance and shout ‘Eureka!’ You’ve banished my doubts, and that’s no mean accomplishment.”

Eureka. Hmm, well. With his Greek-philosopher haircut fluttering in the breeze, Bruno had no doubts how ridiculous that would look. Should he run naked down the stairs as well, carrying the Archimedes impersonation to its logical conclusion? Conscious of the news cameras at his back, framing his silhouette against the changeless sunset, he instead cocked his hand back and snapped it forward, sailing the leather donut of his hat out into the empty air, in the general direction of the Ring Collapsiter.

“Majesty,” he said quietly, “I believe we’ve found it.”

But his words echoed from the rocks, booming, repeated and amplified by some reportant mechanism aimed at him, or
perhaps by wellstone devices buried in the mountain itself and activated surreptitiously. In any case, a great cheer went up from the crowd, and suddenly everyone was thronging around him, wanting to shake his hand, and neither Tamra nor Krogh interceded this time, for they were the first two in line.

A week later, Bruno sat, chairless and alone, on the smooth
, di-clad surface of Marlon’s work platform, gazing up at what he’d wrought. That haunting Cerenkov glow was gone, super-reflected back into the body of the Ring Collapsiter, which now arched overhead as a pinkie-thin ribbon of yellow-white light, a huge smeared reflection of the sun below. Not too bright to look at, not quite; the reflecting surface was large enough to diffuse the tremendous radiance of Sol here inside the orbit of Mercury. Spaced around the ring were great circular patches, the “sails” he’d described to Marlon, but from this vantage, none reflected anything but starlight, too dim to make out in the brightness as anything but a lighter shade of black.

Fortunately, this new structure was only temporary. The collapsiter’s fall had already slowed significantly, buying time and promising to buy still more, and once the new electromagnetic grapples were finally in place … Well. He supposed the superreflector “cast” had a raw, functional beauty of its own, like the skeleton of a building turned inside-out, but of course it was nothing compared to the hidden glory of
the collapsium itself. He wondered if there were more aesthetic solutions, if he’d hit by chance on one of the grimmer, uglier routes to salvation. He hoped not; the eyes of the future—his own included—would have enough to criticize him for as it was. To look back and find that he was, after all, a
bad collapsium engineer
 …