The Collapsium (14 page)

It
was
sort of a grim thing to inflict on a robot, he supposed.

Hugo, once again looking up at the sound of his name, mewled and fell face first into the hole in the floor.

“Ahem,” Her Majesty said.

“Oh, bother it.” Bruno sighed and took a seat across from her. “Where are
your
robots, Tamra? Your guards. You’re never without them. And how did you get in here, anyway? I’d have detected the approach of a ship.”

One of Hugo’s graceful cousins slipped briefly into view then slipped out again, leaving a tray of food and drink on the table between them.

“Your fax,” Tamra said, pointing at the dark orifice around which the little house was built. “It
is
the usual mode of travel, Bruno.”

He pursed his lips. “Eh? My network gate is down, Highness. Nonfunctional, for years.”

It was Tamra’s turn to shrug. “I had it repaired last time I was up here.”

“Really. Ah. Nice of you to inform me.”

“You needn’t be so offended,” she said, with an air of both guilty humor and bruised camaraderie. “I’ve kept the secret, kept the override to myself. It’s as I found it, with the exception that I can get word to you when circumstances demand it.”

He nodded resignedly. “When circumstances demand it, ah. This isn’t a social visit, then.”

The shaking of her head was gentle, apologetic. “No. Did you expect otherwise?”

“No,” he admitted. “Why should I? You’ve visited exactly once in sixteen years, and only then to tell me the Ring Collapsiter was falling into the sun.”

The Ring Collapsiter: an annulus of collapsium encircling the Queendom’s parent star, its interior a supervacuum shortcut through which telecom packets—such as the signals comprising a faxed monarch—might pass much faster than the vacuum speed of light. Only a third complete when last Bruno had seen it, the Collapsiter had already been the most breathtakingly beautiful of all the works of man. An impressive project to be sure, almost impressive enough to make him stay. A Queendom capable of such grandeur might have use for his peculiar drives and talents after all!

But in the end, he’d been lured back up here by the promise of an
arc de fin
, an arch through which the end of time itself might be observed. His bones quaked at the very idea. Here was an even grander project, so grand in fact that he expected to spend thousands of years working out the details. And yes, conducting those dangerous experiments—such as the Onion—that might eventually lead him there. Experiments even a bold Queendom could never tolerate in its midst, and rightly so.

Her Majesty smiled tightly and brushed a lock of hair from her face in precisely the way that had inspired the love of billions. “That was no trivial matter, Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji. You make yourself difficult to visit, and then complain that no one takes the quite enormous trouble to visit you anyway? We do have other concerns, you know. A whole society’s worth. If a thought is spared for you every now and then, it’s certainly not because you’ve encouraged it.”

Bruno felt his irritation meter rising. Human genetics, though, had always included a mechanism for awe in the face of celebrity. This was the very reason for the Queendom’s founding, the reason for all the peoples of all the worlds to
demand
that the tiny Pacific nation of Tonga yield up its young princess to be the Queen of them all. And against so deep an instinct, what chance did mere irritation have? He knew her as much more than a figurehead or celebrity, of course, but he’d long ago discovered just how little this mattered.

Bruno bowed his head. “You know me too well, Highness. Thus, you’ll know that my apology is sincere. Have I wronged you? Questioned your right to demand audience? I have no explanation, save the lateness of the hour and my surprise on seeing you here.”

“Accepted,” the Queen said evenly, with a slight nod of the head.

Able to resist his hunger no longer, Bruno picked up one of the little dishes his servants had left and began popping peeled grapes into his mouth, one by one.

“Excuse me,” he said around a mouthful of them. “I’m quite famished. Will you join me in a meal?”

She shook her head, but touched one of the glasses on the tray. “A drink, perhaps. This is lemonade?”

“Indeed,” he said proudly, “fresh squeezed. Faxed juices may be identical to the taste, but who says taste matters more than principle? I grow the sugar, as well.”

She smiled. “Your father would be proud. Your
robots
grow it, though, I hope.”

“Well,” he admitted, “I sometimes help. At any rate, it’s clear you haven’t come here to discuss agriculture. I’ll waste no more of your time. What is it you require of me?”

Her Majesty sighed, looking suddenly tired and unhappy. Looking, actually, like she’d been concealing these things for far too long, and was relieved, finally, to let them out. “It’s your expertise with the Ring Collapsiter, I’m afraid.”

“Ah.” Bruno nodded, only a little surprised. “ ‘Also grow tévé,’ is that it?”

She flared visibly at the proverb, taking his meaning immediately. How many times had that hardy, bitter weed sustained Tonga’s people in times of famine? The wise farmer set aside a little plot for it—the damned stuff needed no tending,
just a bit of clear ground to stretch its leaves across. Bruno’s barb was double pronged: On the one hand, Tamra was treating him as a kind of Royal Tévé, which seemed a fine way to repay his decades of adoration. On the other hand,
he
was the one who’d insisted on maintaining a palace vegetable garden, tévé and all, and he had little doubt it had vanished under shrubbery and elephant grass within a month of his departure.

Tamra eyed him silently for a few seconds before replying. “ ‘Plant a coconut and leave it alone.’ ”

“Hmmph,” he said, and suddenly he was fighting off a smirk. A coconut was tough and hairy, difficult to reach without a good climb, and took years and years to produce anything useful when planted in even the best of soils. Bother it, Tamra was
good
at this sort of repartee—she’d have him tied up in neat little bows if he tried to outproverb her again.

His spasm of good humor quickly faded into worry. He’d left the Queendom with a solution, a means to stabilize the Ring Collapsiter and prevent any recurrence of the accident that had knocked it free. And once completed, once its final intricate shape obliterated all gravitational trace of its existence, the structure would be no more capable of falling into the sun than the Earth was of falling out of its orbit. But so long as it remained unfinished, the Ring Collapsiter was inherently perilous, inherently difficult to protect from the vagaries of time and space and chance. Every collapson weighed eight billion tons, after all, and even at a range of forty million kilometers, the sun’s gravity was considerable. Precautions or no, nature
wanted
the two to come together.

“The details are complex,” Tamra said, taking a sip of lemonade and glancing approvingly down at the glass. “I’m not entirely sure I understand them.”

“Is Declarant Sykes still in charge of the project?”

“He is, yes.”

“Then I shall get the details from him. But the ring is falling again? And our previous methods are unable to save it?”

She nodded. “I’m told that’s so.”

“Will it take six months, this time? Or is it free-falling under pure gravitation? Have I time for a night’s sleep before faxing myself downsystem?”

Tamra appeared to consider for a moment, then nodded. “We have some time, yes. It’s ten months before the crisis comes to a head, and I’m inclined to think we’re in
very
deep trouble if you need every moment of that. So the answer is yes, you may remain here until morning. I’ll send a copy of myself down with news of the delay.”

“Where
are
your robots?” Bruno asked again. It was they who should do such messenger work, as well as their primary function as bodyguards. In truth, Her Majesty looked almost naked without them.

She laughed musically and rose from her seat. “Do I need them here, Philander? From whom are they to protect me? There are … times … when even the most discreet witnesses are unwelcome.”

Bruno frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Oh, Bruno,” she said, stepping around the table to plant her lips on his.

Bruno never could say no to her. Or rarely, anyhow, and last
night they’d fallen together like randy teenagers, their decades apart like some kind of annoyingly long weekend. Still in love, damn them; all their fighting and sulking was for naught, a moment’s tantrum in the long, long morning of their lives. But today—despite the way it had begun—was not about the two of them, but about the Queendom itself. Today was business
sans
pleasure, and what Queen and Philander didn’t know how to separate the two? Formality seeped and hardened between them as they dined, dressed, and finally, traveled.

If Bruno expected to fax through to a work platform suspended picturesquely beneath the Ring Collapsiter, he was disappointed. Where they ended up instead was a vast, gloomy chamber of hulking gray machinery that hummed.

Tamra slipped her fingers from his, completing the separation. Bruno’s hand felt curiously empty.

He sniffed. The atmosphere was thick and dry and warm, and reeked sharply of wintergreen and burning feathers, a sign that PCBs or other heavy, chlorinated oils were overheating in strained electrical transformers. A trouble sign, to be sure,
but not half as troubling as that
hum
. Most of the basic tones were subsonic, sensed in the bones rather than the eardrums, but there were overtones and harmonics aplenty, a cacophony that somehow managed to seem both too bass and too shrill for comfort. The noise didn’t seem loud until he tried to speak and found he almost had to shout.

“Where are we?”

Behind Tamra, a hemicylinder of gray metal hulked seamlessly atop a seamless metal deck, rising up into the slightly hazy air like a bald mountain.

“Grapple station,” she replied in much the same tone.

“Ah.”

The hum and reek now made sense: this place was an enormous gravity generator, a kind of God-sized cable winch holding up the Ring Collapsiter.
⁶
It had best
keep
holding, too; black holes inside the sun, even miniature “semisafe” ones, would collapse it to a cinder, assuming they didn’t first tear it to shreds. But despite everyone’s best intentions, despite precautions and failsafes and contingency plans, the ring of crystalline collapsium had slipped sunward again. And this grapple station, whatever its capability, was clearly straining past any reasonable endurance to slow the descent.

“Big,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Quite,” Her Majesty agreed.

The fax gate behind them quietly disgorged a pair of dainty robots, all silver and platinum and chrome. White caps adorned their heads, and white frilled collars adorned their necks. Their sexless torsos and faceless faces were smooth, unadorned expanses of bright metal. Their silver hands gripped ornate pistols of delicate—but nonetheless menacing—design. The robots bowed to Her Majesty and placed themselves at respectful distances on either side of her.

“You’ve changed guards,” Bruno observed. “They used to be gold.”

Tamra smiled, a bit wistfully. “That’s right. They used to be
taller, too, and thicker around the middle. But times change, you know. Fashions and preferences change. Even if yours do not.”

“Oh, humph,” he replied, walking past her leftmost guard, around toward the huge gray hemicylinder. He placed a hand on it, felt its desperate hum. “Who says I haven’t changed? How would you know?”

She shrugged. “It’s not an insult, just an observation. Your clothing, your words and mannerisms—all are decades out of touch. Your hair is different than last time, I suppose. Less wild, less gray. It suits you better. When I’m with you, though, I feel almost as if no time has passed at all. You bring my distant decades back to life.”

Bruno humphed again. “What you call ‘time,’ Majesty, is more a social than a physical phenomenon. You don’t perceive this, because you’re inside the social structure that creates it. But watching clocks and calendars, indexing your memories by popular music—these are learned, unnatural behaviors. Mark my words: living alone is the ultimate exploration of inner truth. It’s one thing to see yourself as a web of changing relationships: to others, to society, to material things and places. It’s quite another to see simply
yourself
, to be your own companion, to talk to yourself and answer back honestly.
Your
times change because others change them for you. My changes come purely from within.”

“Wait. Be quiet.”

“Why,” he chided, “because your illusions can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny?”

She waved a hand in annoyance. “Bruno, be
quiet
. Someone’s coming.”

He followed her gaze. There in the distance, walking the kilometers-long avenue between hulking machines, was a pale young woman with tightly braided hair the color of metallic platinum. Bruno’s vision was quite good—whose wasn’t?—and for a moment he inspected her distant features, trying to identify the face. Was this someone he’d known, in the days before his exile? If so, it wasn’t evident, but then again appearance
was a malleable thing, programmable through any fax machine. She looked young but mature, which of course meant nothing at all.

“Oh,” he said. “Do you know her?”

Tamra shook her head. The robots beside her faded back into the shadows of machinery, their blank faces turned toward the approaching woman.

“Hello!” Bruno called out.

“Hi,” the woman said back, closer now, well within hailing distance. “Welcome. I was told to expect you.”

“Told? By Declarant Sykes?”

“Correct,” she said, then made a skittish, nervous little laugh. The toss of her shining braids was, he thought, calculated for nonchalance. “I’m Deliah van Skettering, Lead Componeer for the Ministry of Grapples. Good day, Your Majesty. And you, sir; you’re Bruno de Towaji? It’s an honor, truly. I’ve studied collapsium engineering my whole adult life. In fact as a student I used to keep a statue of you on my desk for inspiration.”