The Collapsium (4 page)

Bruno would regret this, or course. He would add it to his collection of regrets. But it did feel good.

He retreated a bit, waiting for some indication of impending liftoff before hiding himself back in the house again. But the ship sat, and sat, and sat some more, and finally he understood: There was a fax gate in there, a fax machine coupled to a high-bandwidth network gate linked to the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid, the Iscog. The robots were faxing themselves back to Her Majesty’s throneroom to deliver his “invitation,” and clearly, since the ship remained, they expected her to take him up on it.

His heart quickened a little. So much for his clever manners.

Bruno had his own, fully functional fax machine, of course. For years he’d been getting his clothing and equipment that way, built up atom by atom from stored patterns and extruded whole through orifices inside and outside the house. It produced much of his food as well, supplementing the fruits of his stubbornly anachronistic garden.

The gate could even reproduce a person; he’d done the old parlor trick a time or two, spending the afternoon with a perfect copy of himself. Well,
two
copies spending time together, actually, with the original Bruno having been destroyed in the reading process. But this amounted to much the same thing in the end.

With copies, you were supposed to hit it off at first and then quickly get on your nerves, but Bruno had found his own company alarmingly dull; what did he have to teach himself that he didn’t already know? He could send a copy off to learn new things, he supposed, but he wouldn’t want to
be
that copy, sent away from the work that really mattered to him, and of course one of him would have to do just that. Invariably, he reconverged the copies within the hour, faxing them back into himself, concluding that maintaining one
Bruno de Towaji was quite trouble enough. Hence the disinterest in repairing his failed network gate.

The silence of network abstinence had been nice, too. He’d better enjoy the last of it while he still could, before the robots came back with company, or else hauled him through their gate by main force.

He was just turning to reenter the house when, to his utter surprise, the hatch opened once more on the side of the metal teardrop, swinging its staircase out and down, framing in its doorway the figure of none other than Her Majesty herself. The robots followed at a respectful distance as she descended the steps.

Staring stupidly, Bruno computed: Earth, regardless of season, was always at least seven light-hours away. For the robots to return there and come back with Her Majesty in tow should have taken fourteen hours. Even if she’d been on
Jupiter
for some reason, it would have taken more than twelve, possibly a lot more, depending on where the planet was in its orbit. Ergo, she must have sent her pattern ahead, timing it to arrive when the ship landed. Had she anticipated his refusal? She might simply have broadcast her image into the void, instructing the robots to capture and instantiate it if the need arose. There was something cold-bloodedly logical about that sort of reasoning, and that was how he knew it was true.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

The spaceship’s stairs were carpeted in red, and their metal base extruded still more carpet, its end snaking out ahead of the Queen across scorched grass and flowers until finally it stopped, seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then extruded a low platform, a little marble pedestal rising up as if exposed by receding tidewaters. Her Majesty mounted this platform, and the robots assumed stations on either side of her, ceremonial halberds at the ready. Ceremonial, hell; she was here, and they carried no other obvious weaponry. Those blades could probably cleave the planet in two.

The robots spoke more haughtily than before. “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, you may present yourself before
Her Majesty Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. You are encouraged to kneel.”

Clad in the shade of purple forbidden to all others, with the diamond crown atop her head and the Scepter of Earth in her left hand and the Rings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on the fingers of her right, she was black haired and walnut skinned and scowling deeply. She was beautiful and terrible and in a bad mood, and could destroy him with a word.

“Hi, Tam,” he said lamely, then sighed and threw himself to his knees.

She was a figurehead, by the way. She couldn’t
literally
destroy him, have him killed, have his pattern erased and his name stricken from every stone and pillar, but she could make his personal and professional life difficult enough that he might wish she had.

“Don’t ‘Hi’ me,” she snapped as he knelt there before her. “Rise. Approach.”

Ground moisture had soaked through the knees of Bruno’s trousers. Rising, he wiped them absently with his hand, then caught himself and wiped the hand on his vest, in case she demanded to shake it or something. Approaching gingerly, he spread his arms.

“My world, Your Majesty. Welcome.”

She nodded regally. “Yes. Your world.” Then she cocked her head, looked at him strangely. “Are you all right? Why are you leaning like that?”

He blinked. “Leaning? Ah, it’s the curvature. The planet being so small, local vertical swings a full degree every six meters. Your ‘up’ is not the same as mine. The trees—” He
pointed. “—seem to tilt away from you as well, more so the farther away they are. You see how they’re angled?”

The Queen of Sol surveyed the horizon, nodding absently. “I wondered about that. The way the ground slopes away, I feel as if I’m standing on a mountaintop. Is that your house down there?”

“Er, yes,” Bruno replied, following her gaze. “It isn’t ‘down,’ though; the ground’s quite level here. Shall we go inside?”

She nodded. “Somewhere we can sit, yes. There’s much to discuss.”

“I’d gathered.”

He led her back across the meadow, dainty robots trailing behind. Her velvet skirts smoothed a trail in the grass as she walked, the sunlight full in her round face. Even her long shadow was more regal than lanky, a Queen among its kind. Bruno couldn’t keep his eyes forward. Didn’t try.

“It’s closer than I thought,” the queen remarked as they approached the house. “Smaller. You’ve dwelt in a shack all these years? A hovel?”

Bruno shrugged. “The planet size again. If the house were any broader, the curvature of the floor would become apparent. You couldn’t roll a ball bearing on my floor—it’s gravitationally flat—but indoors I find the eye prefers straight lines and right angles.”

“Add another level, perhaps?”

He shook his head. “The upper story would feel less gravity, and a lot less air pressure. Thirty percent less. The gradients are steep on a planet this small.” He pointed to the snow-capped Northern Hills. “The air’s thin up there. And cold.”

She smiled. “Those little things?”

“My Himalayas. I’m quite comfortable, Tamra, really, and I don’t think you’ve come here to remodel the planet.”

Bruno waved for a door as they approached. It opened, and they stepped through. The house had remodeled itself in his absence, throwing down trails of red carpet joining furniture more elegant than he’d normally employ. Chandeliers of gold
and diamond hung from a ceiling striped with stained-glass murals of green and tan and blue, stylized scenes from Her Majesty’s native Tonga. They moved and changed, almost too slowly to see.

Presently, a ring of speakers formed along the walls at chest level, and began playing “Thank God for the Revival of Monarchy,” which was the Queendom of Sol’s quite popular unofficial anthem; the official one was the dreary “Praise upon Her,” which was almost never played. Or hadn’t been, anyway, when Bruno’s network gate last functioned. He supposed fashion had probably overtaken such musical preferences by now, along with all the clothing and furnishing styles he knew best. Fashion was always doing things like that, making the most ordinary things seem ridiculous and the most ridiculous seem ordinary. Immortality had yet to bestow any higher aesthetic upon the Queendom, although he supposed that, too, could have changed in his absence.

It was nineteen years since he’d quit Tamra’s court, eleven since he’d quit civilization altogether, trading it for this silence, this peace and solitude. Out here, he
wasn’t
peerless or depended on. Just alone.

He realized he should speak, behave as a host. “Uh, refreshment? Food, drink? I have vegetables fresh from the soil.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Still doing that, are you? Thank you, no. A glass of water, perhaps. Shall we sit?”

“Oh. Yes. Forgive me.” He indicated a chair beside a low table, waited until she’d seated herself, waited until she’d nodded permission for him to join her, and finally sat in the chair across. A gently clicking robot appeared, whisked a pair of glasses of ice water onto the table between them, and was gone. “You look well, Tamra. I mean that.”

“You look good yourself,” she said, her voice betraying a hint of pique. “You always look good.”

Shrug. “Everyone does. But I’ve dressed up!”

She studied him for a few moments before replying, “Yes.
Actually, you look like you’re playing yourself in a melodrama. The gray hair is new. It suits you, I suppose.”

Her tone, while sharp, was not unkind. Like her expression and her too-correct posture, it bespoke a mingling of amusement and ire and haste, as well as a kind of bruised dignity. He’d left her court without permission, after all. Without even a proper good-bye, for he’d feared his resolve would crumble. It had been a cowardly, disrespectful, unkind thing to do, and whatever business drew her here now … Well, he’d made her jump through hoops for it, hadn’t he? What urgency would permit a queen to beggar herself before such a determined expatriate?

“Something’s happened,” he prompted. “Something awful.”

She shook her head, but her eyes looked nervous, uncertain. “Not awful, no. Inconvenient. A … project of ours has gone somewhat awry. No one’s been hurt, but there’s a … cleanup effort that isn’t progressing well. I thought perhaps you’d have some advice for us.”

Bruno wasn’t sure he understood, and said so. “My so-called expertise is in collapsium engineering, Highness. Industrial accidents are hardly …” He caught her expression. “Oh, I see. It
is
a collapsium accident.”

She nodded, pursing her lips, and for a moment Bruno felt paralyzed by her beauty, unable to think, unworthy to speak. The human brain was said to be
wired
for monarchy, for hierarchy, for the elevation and admiration of single individuals, and now the truth of this hit Bruno like a heavy gilded pillow. There wasn’t any one thing about Tamra Lutui—not her long black hair or the tilt of her head or the gentle swell of her hips and thighs and bosom—that should affect him so. He knew her very well indeed, well enough that her pout shouldn’t fill him with this boyish, trembling awe. But she was Queen, and that made all the difference in the worlds.

Her Majesty, being well familiar with this reaction, this social allergy, waited politely for it to subside.

“Yes,” she said finally. “A collapsium accident. You should
be proud of us, Bruno; we’ve finally attempted something big. Too big, evidently.”

Bruno clucked and shook his head. “Ambition has to imply some willingness to fail, Tam. It isn’t a stretch, otherwise. You mustn’t regret your mistakes.”

“This one I regret, Declarant,” she said coolly. “That we can hope for a favorable outcome is immaterial. Some errors are inexcusable.” With these words she fixed a mild glare on him: Had
he
no regrets?

“Fair enough,” he said, raising his palms in immediate surrender lest he be forced, in some way, to explain or apologize for himself. He had good reasons for all of it. Didn’t he? “Er, perhaps you should tell me what you’ve been doing. With the collapsium, I mean.”

Her Majesty rapped the tabletop. “Sketch pad, please.” Obligingly, the table darkened, and where her finger traced, colored lines and dots and circles appeared. “This is the sun, all right? I can’t draw well, but these here are the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars.”

In fact, for hasty finger paintings her renditions were fairly accurate.

“Sol is
big
in the inner system, and if two planets are aligned with the sun between them—opposition, they call it?—then network signals have to be sent around via satellite. There’s a time delay associated with the extra distance, and this implies a cost.”

“Yes,” Bruno agreed in a knowing tone. He’d laid the foundations for the collapsiter grid himself—besting previous network bandwidths by six orders of magnitude—and he understood a thing or two about how the system worked.

Tamra looked up at him but declined to glare. “Some of our people have worked out a fix, Declarant, by putting an annulus of collapsium around the sun. The ‘Ring Collapsiter,’ as Declarant Sykes has named it.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The speed of light was much higher in the Casimir supervacuum of a collapsium lattice than in the half-filled energy states of normal
space. A
ring
of collapsium encircling the sun could admit signals at one side, expel them at the other, and reduce the time not only of the trip around, but of the trip
through
as well. Like a highway bypass where the speed limit was a trillion times higher than in the crowded streets of downtown. Why crawl through when you could blaze the long way around in half an instant, cutting light-minutes off your journey? “Very elegant, very impressive. Very enormously
expensive
, I’d imagine.”

Tamra shrugged. “The cost ladies say it’ll pay for itself in a century, through increased efficiency. It’s actually just the first piece of a whole new kind of network our componeers envision: a spiderweb of collapsium threads stretching to every corner of the Queendom.”