The Collapsium (46 page)

Perhaps all was
not
lost.

He stood, quickly, knocking over the chair behind him. The ring was on his finger, but his
finger
was inside this blasted spacesuit! “Off,” he said to it. “Off, you!” And he struggled with it as the hasps unfastened, as the seams parted, as the blood-smeared helmet dome fell away and rang against the floor like a bell. Finally an arm was free, and he used that to free the other one, and he was about to peel his legs out of it as well when he decided that
bah
, it didn’t matter. He pulled the chair up under him and stuffed the suit underneath it, trailing from the tops of his armored boots.

He plucked the blue-jeweled wellgold ring from his finger then, and plinked it down on the wellwood desktop. Little tendrils of blue light fanned out around it for an instant, symbolic of the enormous volume of data he’d just dumped into
the system. He thrust his fingers once more into the grapple controls, but
this
time the collapsium shrank and vanished at his touch, all thousand kilometers of it contracting—within minutes!—into an all-but-invisible, all-but-intangible hypercollapsite cap, not unlike the one crowning
Sabadell-Andorra’s
bow. Last time, it had taken him a day, but all his careful steps were encoded here, sure as any music reel on Enzo’s faux-antique player piano. And they could be played at high speed.

The rest was easy: he charged the thing up with a stream of protons and repelled it electrically. Inertia meant little to its hypercollapsite structure; in an instant it was moving, to the solar north, up out of the plane of the ecliptic where the planets all orbited and the people all lived. In another instant, it was moving
fast
, and in the instant beyond
that
it had exceeded solar escape velocity and was no longer Bruno’s problem. Perhaps, in hundreds or thousands of years, civilization would expand enough to find such litter annoying—even hazardous—but at this point that was a risk Bruno was quite willing to take.

Settling in, he converted another collapsium fragment, and another, and another, and soon he was automating the process, overseeing it rather than controlling it directly with his fingers. He moved the system’s attention here, and there, and especially
there
, where the collapsiter’s children were already playing in the plasma loops of the upper chromopause.

He became aware of other people, standing around him while he worked. He listened to their breathing, to the rustle and ripple of their clothes as they shifted slowly from foot to foot, but really they were very quiet: they didn’t cough or clear their throats, didn’t ask questions, didn’t disturb him in the slightest. Only when he realized theirs was an
awed
silence did he begin to get annoyed.

“Haven’t you seen anyone clean up a mess before?” he asked gruffly.

But nobody answered him. Nobody dared. He continued with his work: twenty, fifty,
eighty
fragments cleared. It was
slow going after that, the fragments more distant, the light-lag stretching his response times out to two minutes and more. But still, he persisted. Only when he’d cleared eighty-five fragments did he begin to fret. Only when he’d cleared ninety did he begin, truly, to doubt. Only when he’d cleared ninety-five did he know for certain, and only when he’d cleared ninety-eight did he admit defeat.

But admit it he did, pushing the chair back, standing up, turning around awkwardly with the spacesuit bunched up around his ankles. All his friends were there, waiting for him, keeping him company while he worked. Sad-faced Muddy with his jester’s hair; little Vivian looking
almost
like the girl she used to be; Hugo, with his arm reattached and a band of shiny new metal around its socket; Deliah van Skettering staring rapt at Bruno’s activities, interested as much in the mechanics as in the actual result. And Tusité, yes, the closest thing here to an innocent, uninvolved civilian. They had waited here like this for
hours
. Their faces—even Hugo’s—were expectant, almost exultant; he hated to disappoint them. But disappoint them he must.

“There are, ah, two fragments,” he began slowly, “that lie on the far side of the sun, inaccessible to grapples operating from the surface of Mercury. Now, I’ve dealt with several of these already—their orbits are relatively fast, and even here the sun is only a few degrees wide, not really
so
huge. So it’s largely a matter of waiting a few hours for the fragments to come ’round where we can see them. The trouble is, these two aren’t
going
to emerge—their trajectories intersect the photosphere long before they’ll be visible or accessible to us.”

Faces fell at the news, but otherwise no one replied to it, or reacted in any way.
They
were tired as well, Bruno saw: tired of hoping, tired of being afraid. Too tired, in the end, to react at all.

“I’m sorry,” he told them sincerely. “The fault is entirely mine; if I’d juggled the priorities differently, if I’d handled these two fragments a few hours ago, this problem would not
have occurred. And so, I have failed Tamra’s Queendom a final time.”

“So close,” Deliah said. There was no reproach in her voice, though, no regret. In fact, she sounded almost proud. “So
close
, Bruno. You’ve done … The situation was
hopeless
two weeks ago—maybe it was hopeless way before that, and we just didn’t know it. So if it’s hopeless now, you’re hardly to blame.”

Then Muddy stepped forward, his arms outstretched, and for a moment Bruno thought he was going to be hugged. But instead, Muddy reached past him, plucked the little wellgold ring off the desktop, and pranced away.

“Hopeless?” he sang, his body twisting, twirling on one foot, so that Bruno believed, all at once, that he really
had
been a jester at some foul court of Marlon’s. “Hopeless? There’s never zero hope, as long as some dope has a life to throw away. Okay?” And with those words he was off, running for the door.

“Muddy?” Bruno said. “Muddy!”

He tried to give chase, but the spacesuit tripped him up, and he was obliged—with Tusité’s help—to peel his feet out of it one by one. By this time, Muddy had a substantial lead. Bruno chased him on the blood-sticky floor of the spider room; the gritty, dusty floor of the fog room; the oily, carcass-strewn floor of the robot room; and up the spiral stairs themselves. The lights were on, at least—the place looked not so much
menacing
now as sadly defeated. But Muddy reached the hatch of
Sabadell-Andorra
fully ten seconds ahead of him, and by the time Bruno got there, there was only a smooth, seamless impervium surface to pound on.

A speaker emerged.

“Bruno, stand back, please. I’m going to melt the access cylinder’s hull back into place.”

Indeed, the ship’s hull gleamed through a rough opening, metal and wellstone melted and folded and wrinkled away from what had, until moments ago, been the hatch. Now the edges of that hole began to sizzle and pop, and slowly the
pulled-back ridges of material began to smooth inward again, covering up the impervium hull, pushing it back and away into the vacuum of Mercury’s surface.

“Muddy!” Bruno shouted. “You open this hatch immediately! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Making amends,” Muddy answered cryptically.

“Open the hatch, Muddy! You can’t make off with this ship; it isn’t
right
.”

“Make off?” Muddy sounded hurt. “I’m taking her into the photosphere, Bruno. I’m going after those fragments.”

Bruno’s skin went cold. “You’re what? Muddy, they’ll be
inside the sun
by the time you get to them.”

The loudspeaker was not a face; Bruno could read no emotion there. “Grapples can reach inside the sun, yes?” Muddy said. “At close range? I’ll convert the fragments to hypercollapsites and simply pull them out.”

“By pulling yourself in,” Bruno said, finally understanding. His voice was soft, disbelieving, probably not easy to hear over the sizzling of wellstone reactions. “You’ll be killed. I don’t see how you could possibly survive.”

“Nor I,” Muddy agreed, and Bruno thought his voice sounded, if not exactly
happy
, then at least vindicated. “I was created for one purpose, Bruno: to prove that you could be broken, that you could be cowardly and contemptible and weak. I carried the proof of myself right to you, like the craven that I was. But now, Bruno, I’m spent, and therefore free to define a new purpose. Let me show you that you can also be
brave
.”

“Muddy, my God. At least leave a
copy
behind.”

There was a pause, and then Muddy’s voice said, “I have, sir. It’s you.”

Before Bruno could reply, before he could
conceive
of a reply, the crackling edges of the wellstone reaction closed in over the loudspeaker, first a ring around it and then a circular wave splashing in across it and finally a smooth, blank cylinder wall. The sizzling stopped.

A rocket would have made some sound, even in vacuum,
as its hot exhaust gases expanded and flowed across the landscape, impinging on the surface of the access port. But a grappleship made no sound at all. Through the little window in the airlock, Bruno could see a shadow pass briefly over the landscape, and that was all.

He stood there a long time, with his nose pressed up against the hot glass.

They watched on the sensors of Marlon’s desk as
Sabadell-
Andorra
raced to the scene of the collapsium’s photopause penetration. As promised, the fragments shrank and vanished from view, and even Bruno had a hard time identifying their gravitational signatures as the tug of
Sabadell-Andorra’s
grapples flung them away from solar space. And then there was the gravitational signature of the ship itself, of the ertial shield crowning her bow; they watched this plunge headlong into the photosphere’s dense plasma, where even impervium could expect a lifetime measured in fractions of a second.

Once the ship was burned away, of course, there
was
no mass for the ertial shield to drag around behind it. Weightless, massless, all but inertialess, it caught a whiff of the solar convections, the outward currents in the plasma that, higher up in the photosphere, gave rise to the solar wind. It caught this breeze, yes, right at the very source, and was flicked at once toward eternity.

Bruno lost interest after that. There were a lot of tearful thanks, a lot of hugs and shoulder thumps, a lot of shaken
hands. Cheng Shiao came back from the dead to congratulate Bruno on his excellent work and to offer up his deepest thanks for saving all of their lives, in so many ways. But Bruno could barely pay attention to the words, and in time his friends withdrew, realizing how deep his grief must be. The loss of his home, his ship, his brother, were as nothing to the loss of his Queen.
They
felt that loss—that yawning, hollow emptiness—and they had far less to lose of her than Bruno did.

They left him alone there in the study, alone not only with his grief but with his
guilt
, because he knew—as Muddy must surely have known—that the Queendom itself barely existed for him, except as an interest and possession of Tamra’s. He’d have let it fall, let the sun explode and the Earth run with fire, let the Iscog scatter to the far corners of the galaxy, if only he could have saved her.

Brave? He was the worst sort of coward, the worst sort of villain, because he was willing to hide behind a mask of heroism. Were all heroes that way, inside their secret selves? What an empty thought.

Time passed; he slept on the cot, awoke, ate from the fax and then slept again. In time, Deliah came to him and announced that they’d gotten Marlon’s spaceship working and were ready to go. Back to Earth, she said, and only looked puzzled when he told her he didn’t deserve to set foot there.

An argument ensued; they tried, both one by one and as a gang, to persuade him to board the ship with them. But he refused to be persuaded, and refused to be persuaded, and finally they concluded his grief had consumed all else within him—which was certainly true. They wondered aloud whether he could be trusted to remain here alone without harming himself. They extracted a promise from him regarding this, and in the end they simply had to trust him with it. He
did
have some experience in living alone, after all.

And so they departed, and Bruno remained behind. History does not record what he did there, as Mercury’s long day collapsed slowly into afternoon, as the sun set and darkness
fell and the ground gave up its heat. Mercury’s night is among the coldest in the solar system; perhaps it matched his mood. Perhaps he donned a spacesuit and spent long hours walking under the stars’ cold light. Perhaps he remained indoors, and meditated, or slept.

Did his heart begin to turn, when the sun reached its nadir at midnight? Did it turn before dawn, when the night had reached its coldest and the sun’s stealthy advance upon the horizon had begun, finally, to heat the ground again?

This much is known: that ten weeks after the Solar Rescue, when The Honorable Helen Beckart, Regent of the Crown and Judge Adjudicator of the House of Parliament, arrived at Mercury with her entourage and bodyguards, they found a de Towaji more at peace than the one Vivian Rajmon had tearfully described to them.

“Declarant-Philander,” Beckart said to him upon their meeting, inclining her head deeply. She wore a black cassock and frock, a black tricorned hat, black stockings and shoes. Fortunately, her skin was pale, or she’d have disappeared entirely.

“Judge Adjudicator,” Bruno returned, rising from his cot to bow. “I trust your landing was pleasant.”

“It was,” she said. “Your house’s instructions were most helpful.”

Bruno
had
come to somewhat better terms with the universe, in his time alone here. His shame and guilt were a burden not so easily dispelled, but he was slowly forgiving himself for them, and for the events that had caused them. He forgave Tamra, too, for editing herself out of the equation like that. She’d had no way of knowing help was on the way; even Bruno hadn’t known that for sure. To err was human, yes?