The Collapsium (32 page)

While these thoughts raced through Bruno’s head, his
body slid off the acceleration couch and onto the floor. He felt there was something strange in the way he fell, and stranger still in the way he landed, as if the fine hairs on his skin were solid rods growing out of a light, solid, cleverly articulated doll. He attempted to rise. The floor had a comforting traction, at least, but it seemed his mass—his
weight
—rose too quickly for the press of gravity. Something a little off, a little light, with the inertia?

His dizziness continued, along with an odd, pressing sensation in his chest. The heart? He imagined inertialess blood pumping through inertialess veins. Pressure and viscosity and muscular contraction weren’t functions of inertia; the heart
would
pump. The blood
would
flow. But strangely, yes.

Beside him, Hugo lay where they’d strapped it to the floor. It held a worn metal hand in front of its face and made small movements with it every few moments, seeming somehow fascinated with the results. Had Hugo discovered inertia, by virtue of its sudden reduction?

With great concentration, Bruno managed to regain his balance and rise slowly to his feet, standing unsteadily between Muddy’s couch and his own.

“My bones,” Muddy whined tearfully, “my organs. My
eyes
.”

He was rolling back and forth as much as his restraints would allow, as if in a kind of slow seizure, but Bruno immediately had the sense that the movement was voluntary, that Muddy wasn’t seriously hurt, that the tears were of misery rather than outright agony.

Bruno reached out with uncertain fingers to probe at Muddy’s chest. “Does this hurt? Here? Here?”

Muddy cried out each time, but the bones themselves felt perfectly intact. “Ow! Ow, sir, you grieve me!”

“I don’t think there’s a fracture.”

His groaning intensified. “No fracture? God, you’d think after years of torture a person would become inured to pain. The truth is otherwise! Opposite! Bruno, if you knew the
indignities these bones had been s-s-subjected to. Split with wedges? I only wish. It’s that legacy that haunts me now.”

Bruno frowned down at himself. “The fax should have healed any injuries. You should be every bit as fit as I am.”

“Should I?” Muddy’s face was miserable, ashamed. He tried to turn away. “I’ve been cunningly redesigned, sir, in ways the fax has little ability to detect and still less to repair. Primarily in the synaptic wiring, but he took some liberties with my s-s-skeleton as well. To move is to suffer; to hold still is to suffer more.”

Bruno, who was getting tired of feeling aghast, merely sighed. “We’ll undesign you, then.”

“Easy to say. Someday, yes, no doubt we’ll overcome his cleverness. Meanwhile, I suppose I deserve these miseries.”

Here was a clumsy move, an attempt to make Bruno deny it. He declined again to take the bait, saying instead, “There are pressing concerns and limited resources, and anyway that little fax”—he pointed—“won’t pass a human body. So perhaps it
is
necessary for you to be patient until the situation has stabilized. I’m sorry for that, particularly since your suffering doesn’t appear to build character.”

Muddy managed—with visible strain—to scrape out a chuckle. “Ah, a touch of bitterness, of condescension. Go with it, Bruno; be human. Your respect is forced; honor me instead with your heartfelt disgust. There’s a good lad.”

Bruno sighed again. “Can I offer you a drug?”

“A drug! How novel. Indeed, yes, I’d be powerless to refuse some of Enzo’s Christmas brandy. Reduce this pain in me, sir. Your inertially corrupt s-s-spacetime disagrees with me!”

“Brandy is not a painkiller.”

“Ah, but it is, Declarancy. It is.”

“Not the proper sort, and you know it. I’ll get you something … strong.”

Bruno glanced up, half expecting to see the stars themselves moving outside the wellstone “window” of the bow. But
the star field was inert, unimpressed with their meddlings. The turning of his head left him dizzy; he nearly fell again, but caught himself with a hand on each of the two couches. Moving carefully and with many pauses, he extricated himself from between the couches, turned toward the fax, and pulled up a hypercomputer interface beside it so he could search the onboard libraries for a suitable painkiller. There were, it turned out, many thousands to choose from.

“We’re … really … moving along, aren’t we?” Muddy mused.

Turning slowly, Bruno looked up, and followed Muddy’s gaze to the instruments. Specifically, to the “Distance to Target” gauge, an old-style digital readout made from rows of illuminable red bars. It read in tenths of a meter, and at present its lower five digits were all flickery eights, changing too rapidly to register on the eye. The higher seven digits counted down smoothly, their speed increasing even as he watched.

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed. “We’ll reach the halfway mark in a couple of hours.”

This was no small feat; though the runaway grapple station had passed just over eight light-minutes of Bruno’s little planet—greater than the distance between the Earth and Sun—at its closest approach, it had since hurtled another fifty light-minutes toward infinity. Poor Deliah had probably traveled farther than any human being before her.

The fax made a little coughing sound and spat a pill into Bruno’s hand. He extended the other hand and extracted a glass of water, whose contents sloshed from side to side with even the slightest jostling as he rose to approach Muddy.

“Chair upright,” Muddy said, then screamed as the chair complied.

When all was ready, Bruno handed his counterpart the pill and the glass, watched him carefully ingest the one and sip from the other, then wince as if the act of swallowing caused some new pain of its own. He drank from the glass several times more, grimacing each time, and also complaining that it was “merely water.” Then finally the chair was reclined again,
and the glass was carefully returned to the fax, and Bruno climbed awkwardly back into his own couch, managing to step on Hugo’s head twice during the process. Hugo mewled at this, but otherwise didn’t seem to mind.

“Sorry, old thing. I’d break the floor if it weren’t impervium.”

“Will this take effect quickly?” Muddy asked.

“It should, yes.” Bruno carefully strapped himself back in and cinched the straps tight. “Ah. Ah, yes. It’s much better to lie still.”

Muddy snorted beside him. “She
is
a fine ship, isn’t she?”

“For a cobbled-together prototype on her first shakedown cruise, I’d say she’s a bloody miracle.”

“Shall we name her?”

Bruno grunted; he hadn’t thought about that. Anthropomorphic instincts aside, he wasn’t much for naming inanimate things, or even semianimate ones like houses and small planets. But a ship was a different matter—it
was
animate, by definition. And it would need a name for legal registration if for no other reason.
There
was some optimistic thinking.

“All right, yes.” He ran through a few possibilities in his mind: the
Redshift II
, the
Tamra Lutui, The Grappleship Old Girona
. Then, belatedly catching a hint in Muddy’s tone, he asked, “You, ah, have something in mind?”

“I do. I thought perhaps the
Sabadell-Andorra
.”

That
gave Bruno pause. Absurd on the face of it: by nature, spaceships were gracile and swift, where tectonic plates were among the slowest and heaviest objects ever manipulated by humans. And anyway, did anyone outside Catalonia even remember the pocket catastrophe of that earthquake? Then again, in component form this little spaceship massed considerably more than all the fallen hillsides of Girona, possibly as much as the Iberian plate itself, and the technology certainly was—well, earthshaking in its implications.

“All right,” he said finally, nodding, “
Sabadell-Andorra
it is. And
we’ll
know what it means, at least.”

“I feel the medication working.”

Bruno turned to look at his … brother—his battered, mistreated counterpart. “Good. Excellent. Is it helping?”

“It is, yes. Ah. To be without pain, for even a moment …”

Muddy’s eyelids began to droop. Through thousands of years of civilization, mankind had yet to invent a reliable pain-suppression chemical that didn’t also proportionally suppress consciousness. Pain was simply too fundamental, too
necessary
, to be banished so easily; it bound itself up in every system of the body. There were various “nondrowsy formulas” Bruno might have tried, milder analgesics tempered with stimulants and euphoriants, but the ship’s library gave these much lower effectiveness ratings. Of course there was always the brute-force approach: simply deadening the spinal nerves. Muddy didn’t need to move for a while anyway, right? But sleep seemed a much kinder side effect than total paralysis.

“Thanks,” Muddy said blurrily; Then his eyes closed, his breathing slowed, and he just sort of faded away. It was a peaceful thing to watch, a hundred little tensions sliding out of that tortured body to leave it—finally!—at peace. Bruno almost feared he’d
died
until his chest rose and fell again slowly—and again, and again—his breathing shallow but steady. Muddy would awaken in four or five hours, just in time for the rendezvous with Deliah’s grapple station.

Bruno, seeing these hours stretching dully before him, wished
he
had some means to slip away so easily. All the hard hours in the study had taken their toll; he didn’t relish any further isolation. He spent fully twenty-eight seconds considering this before he, too, fell asleep.

He awoke to gravity fluctuations—a sense of rotation and
weightlessness—followed by the slamming jerk of acceleration again. The first sound he heard was Muddy’s weeping—not a shriek or howl or moan this time but a quiet, private, sniffly sort of weeping that engendered immediate sympathy. He opened his eyes, saw Muddy lying there on the acceleration couch, his skin and tufted hair pale against the black leather.
His shirt had loosened in the night; the word “savage” was clearly visible on his shoulder in fluorescent green.

“Are you all right?” Bruno asked him gently.

Muddy jumped a little, startled. “What? Ah, Bruno. I was savoring a dream.”

Above, the bow afforded a view of Sol, at this range barely distinguishable from the stars around it.

“Mmm. A sad dream?”

“A dream about His Declarancy. Not sad, no; I dreamed he held a whip in his hand.”

“How terrifying!”

Muddy snorted. “Not at all. No, the whip is a personal, almost intimate expression between two people. It means he wants to talk, to exchange. But in my dream, he was whipping the sun, and flares were spinning out of it with every stroke, and he was saying your name over and over again, and when I asked him what he was doing, he turned to look at me. His face was blank, like a robot’s. I woke up.”

“That sounds horrible, Muddy.”

“No.” He was shaking his head. “To me it was touching. Sweet. I suppose I’m crying because it
should
have been horrible, because I’ve come so far from where I started. Ah, Bruno, if only you could
know
him. He admires you so very much. He’s not such a bad man, in some ways. Just very, very driven.”

“How sad for him,” Bruno said, then loosened his straps a little and raised his seat back. “Muddy, you don’t have to play his games anymore.”

The tears ran freely down Muddy’s face. “Perhaps I do, sir. These things aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine. Perhaps they can’t be undone at all, except in death, but he’s made such an obedient little coward of me I doubt even
that
is an option. There’s little doubt I’m doing his work right now, one way or another. You should lock me in this chair and drug me for the duration, sir. I would, in your place.”

“Yes? Well, that’s precisely where you and I differ. I’m very sorry for all that’s happened to you, but
enough
already. Right?
You’ve made a fine ship to fly against him, and you’re using it. Revel in that. Have we turned around yet?”

“Indeed,” Muddy said, in sour imitation of Bruno’s own voice. Or perhaps the “imitation” was literal, and his voice really was that growling and brusque. “We’ve been decelerating for hours. We’ll reach the station in eleven minutes.”

He pointed to a diagram on the instrument console, a little brass plaque engraved with black letters and symbols, which showed the arrow-straight trajectory of the station and the slightly curvier path of the
Sabadell-Andorra
intersecting it. Curvy because the ship’s only means of propulsion was the runaway station itself, the electromagnetic anchor they’d tied to it. There was nothing else to anchor to out here in the so-called Kuiper Belt, a space so huge and empty around them that the nearest other object was probably the planetary debris field they’d left behind, or perhaps a flake or two of very lonely methane ice.

At any rate, since they couldn’t aim for where the station
would
be, but only where it
was
, their path was a classic “stern chase.” Actually, it was worse than that, because they’d had to place themselves directly between the station and the sun, so the latter could be used as a deceleration anchor. Their final rendezvous—indicated in miniature on the little brass plaque—involved a lot of flip-flopping toward the station and back, for course correction, while Sol, on the other side, did all the heavy lifting. Bruno had been awakened by just such a flip-flop. It was hardly an optimal arrangement, but it did seem to be getting the job done. As Bruno watched, the little black indentations labeled SHIP and STATION inched forward in their tracks, dotted lines turning solid in their wake. And indeed, if the display was accurate then rendezvous was very nearly at hand.

“Have you made radio contact?” he asked Muddy.

“With the s-s-station?”

“With Deliah, yes.”

“I hadn’t thought of it. Shall I?”

“Allow me. Ship? Hello?”

A hypercomputer earpiece appeared on the hull beside him.

“Ship here,” was the immediate—though somewhat tentative—reply. The poor thing was probably growing a consciousness emulator for the first time, opening its metaphorical eyes and ears, the demands of an impatient de Towaji being its first-ever experience of
experience
. The ship itself wouldn’t mind, of course; it would be eager for any task, but still Bruno found the idea depressing. This week had been filled to bursting with depressing ideas.