The Collapsium (47 page)

Bruno had suffered from impure thoughts, from callousness, from introversion, and though his behavior might appear irreproachable, still he knew the difference.
Tamra’s
sin was to think and feel too purely, and to act in haste. Did the
two sins balance out? Who could say? They were all just children, after all, the whole of humanity, exploring only the very earliest beginnings of their long, long lives.

Still, at the sight of Helen Beckart he felt a distinct knot of unease start tying itself up in his belly. Bruno was wearing black as well, in a band around his right biceps, but Beckart’s was the black of her official uniform, not of grieving. She stood there in the doorway of Marlon’s study like a legal document, waiting for Bruno to break her seal.

He cleared his throat and spoke more gruffly than he’d intended. “It isn’t another medal, I hope.”

Her smile was polite, devoid of any true joy. And who could blame her? “No, Declarant, I’m afraid it’s more serious than that.”

“Hmm? Yes? Well, do come in. Can I offer you refreshment?”

“No, thank you.” She strode into the room, followed by two gray-robed pages, a pair of faceless silver robots, and a sedately hovering squadron of courtroom cameras. He saw that she carried something in her hands, a black velvet bag or wrapping of some sort.

“Is that for me?”

She nodded once. “It is. Forgive me, Declarant; I’m only doing my job.”

In spite of everything, his heart quailed a bit at those words. Had he done something? Said something? But when Beckart opened the bag, what she withdrew was simply Tamra’s crown of monocrystalline diamond. A souvenir? An object willed to Bruno by the instruments of Tamra’s estate?

“I … don’t understand,” he said, shrugging.

Beckart reddened. “An election has been held, Declarant. Its results were as near unanimity as any election has ever been. I’m afraid … Sir, I’m afraid you’re the new monarch of Sol.”

Bruno blinked, unable to process that statement. “I beg your pardon?”

“As I say, sir. You are the new monarch.”

“Is this a joke? ”

“It is not,” Beckart told him seriously. “I’ve spared you the formal ceremony, at least, but these cameras
are
recording for posterity. Kneel, please, that I might place this crown atop your head.”

Bruno gaped, then snorted. “Why, I refuse. I refuse! I, the monarch of Sol? A king?
Me?
It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It isn’t,” Beckart said to him, her eyes apologetic but certain. “I voted for you myself. It’s a cruel fate to practice upon you but … we
are
human, sir, we citizens of the Queendom. Our needs are valid.”

“I refuse,” Bruno said again, in a sterner voice.

But Beckart shook her head. “You’re a figurehead, sir. You haven’t the authority to refuse. Now I ask you, please, to kneel, else these bailiffs will be forced to
make
you do it.”

“You can’t be serious!” he protested.

But she was: the bailiff robots stepped forward, gripped him firmly and without pity, and pressed him to the ground, knees first. Some Latin and Tongan words were recited from a document, and twenty seconds later the crown was encircling his brow. The Queendom had its King at last.

Every child knows of the Winter Palace that de Towaji
commanded to be built in high orbit around Earth. Every child knows of the year he spent there, shunning attention, appearing only for the wedding of Vivian and Cheng Shiao, and the funerals of the thousands upon thousands of True Dead the destruction of the Iscog and Ring Collapsiter had left behind.

Not that de Towaji was idle during the time of his seclusion; far from it. Following the trial and confession of Marlon Sykes—who had steadfastly refused treatment for megalomania and homocidia—Bruno’s first decree was that a
cage de fin
should be constructed, inside which time would not pass.
Sykes—hunted by every search engine in the Queendom and meticulously reconverged to a single copy—would be placed within it.

“There you will see the lights and darknesses of uncreation,” de Towaji is known to have said, “for the span of the universe will pass for you in a single instant.”

“Thank you, Sire,” Sykes is known to have replied. And together the two of them designed the thing, and built it, and it is rumored that they spent a final evening together, drinking alcohol and smoking from weed pipes, singing and dancing and weeping together, their enmity in brief abeyance. Despite all Marlon’s villainy and Bruno’s long reticence, the two did after all have more in common with one another than with any other person, living or dead. Perhaps this is the origin of the nursery rhyme:

In any case, the recordings clearly show both men dry eyed and somber at the execution, as Bruno closed his old friend and nemesis inside the
cage de fin
and fired him on an inertialess trajectory out of the solar system, at very nearly the speed of light.

When this was done, and a sigh of relieved closure was heaved by all and sundry, de Towaji commenced to brood and agonize over the decision to restore the Iscog. The last words of Wenders Rodenbeck—in his nonspider form, at least—weren’t lost on Bruno at all. Collapsium
was
dangerous stuff to have around. In the end, though, he was swayed by the ruling opinion of the Queendom’s citizens themselves. The collapsium’s dangers meant little to them, it seemed, in comparison to its benefits.

“
Fire
is dangerous, Your Highness,” they insisted, in billions upon billions of respectfully snitty letters. “Shall we ban that as well?”

It seemed to be a kind of slogan. Still, it
was
Bruno’s money
they were talking about spending, and of course, in retrospect the old Iscog could be seen to suffer from all manner of unfortunate design errors and oversights. The Ring Collapsiter, for all its grievous faults, did indeed point the way to a new and better paradigm in material telecommunications. So Bruno began the slow, hard work of designing a new Iscog—a
Nescog
—from the neubles up.

But every child knows that he had barely begun this effort, barely scratched the surface of the new design, on the morning when his most famous visitor arrived.

There was a polite but rather urgent-sounding knock on his study wall, and he rose from his desk and walked over there and said, “Door.” And a door opened up, and he
gasped
, and some say he nearly fainted when he saw who it was.

“You,” he managed to say as he staggered back.

“Me,” the visitor agreed. She stepped inside, pursing her lips, surveying the room with a critical eye. She took in the desk, the chair, the chandelier and clutter-strewn floor. The hugeness of the place, the emptiness, the decoration all in crystal and alabaster and silver. Finally, she nodded. “About what one would expect, yes. This really is a hideous building, Bruno.”

Still reeling, he said, “My Taj Mahal. The tomb of my undying love.”

She laughed. “You’re not supposed to
live
in the tomb of your undying love.”

He came forward and touched her shoulder gently, lightly, afraid to confirm her solidity. “Am I dreaming? Are you real?”

She laughed again, but there were tears in her eyes. “I
feel
real. They tell me I am. I’m out of date, though
—years
out of date.”

He gasped, backing away a step. “You’re not
Marlon’s
copy, surely?”

But she just shook her head. “It seems the Royal Registry finally earned its keep. They’ve been closed for years, I guess, but the way I hear it, there was this disc at the bottom of a closet …” Her eyes clouded. “Bruno, is it true, all these
things I hear? Did I really cut my throat? Are you really the King?”

“No more,” he said at once, snatching the diamond crown off his head and placing it on hers.

She laughed, and the tears spilled down her face. “You can’t abdicate, Bruno; I’ve tried it. Lord, how I’ve tried it. They won’t even let you
die
 …”

Suddenly, it occurred to him that this was really happening. He grabbed her by the shoulders, crushed her to him. “Tamra! My Queen!” And he was crying, too, and laughing, and trying to tell her so many things at once that no words came out at all. They stood like that for a long time.

“Strange,” he mused later, as they rocked back and forth with her brown hair tickling his nose. “I’m the King, and you’re the Queen, and here we’ve never even been married.”

“I accept,” she murmured, then giggled a little and kissed him lightly on the neck.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Perhaps it was novel, to imagine black holes not as highly compressed stars but as very heavy elementary particles—mega-particles, like protons massing a billion tons, their surfaces able to devour light, to bend time and space, to tear energies loose from the zero-point field of the “empty” vacuum itself …

An enterprise worth pursuing!

Einstein may have changed the world with his famous equation linking mass and energy, but when you ask the more fundamental question—just what
is
mass?—you soon find yourself scribbling:

Mass is like energy because energy is like itself, just an electromagnetic vibration of the zero-point vacuum. Soon the quantum-age profusion of particles and forces falls away like a bad dream, leaving only charge, electromagnetism, and the vacuum. There is nothing else, no other force or substance
required to construct the universe. And you wonder why you ever thought there was.

It all comes down to
zitterbewegung
vibrations—the “trembling motion” of charged particles buffeted by the very real energies of the zero-point field. Even the neutron is composed of quarks, charged +⅔, –⅓, and –⅓ proton equivalents, and the secondary fields emitted by these trembling particles give rise to a net force that is always attractive, always infinite in range, always difficult to block or channel or deflect. Call it gravity—Newton did. The experiment had been performed dozens of times before Bruno de Towaji came along: isolate a proton, subject it to oscillating electric fields at frequencies comparable to those of gravitation, and measure the increase in its mass. The Haisch effect. Bruno’s “genius” was simply to dump in a neuble’s worth of mass-energy, upping the frequency and amplitude of the oscillation, upping the illusory mass until the neuble was gone and the proton weighed a billion tons—enough to collapse it into a miniature black hole.

The rest had seemed obvious enough:
two
black holes, not only vibrating but vibrating
each other
, their interactions exactly 180 degrees out of phase with their
zitterbewegung
motions, gravities therefore canceling out. That turned out to be statically rather than dynamically stable, but
eight
holes arranged in a cube
just so
, at excruciatingly precise distances, would hold their positions indefinitely, for billions of years, for as long as the Hawking-bled holes themselves would last. A stiff cage, a “collapson,” the elementary building block of a wholly new material: crystalline collapsium.

Obvious.

And once you did this, once you began bricking the collapsons together into three-dimensional structures, you were well on your way to the control of physical reality at its most fundamental levels.

Consider the humble semiconductor, which is an insulating substance that can nonetheless conduct electrons within a certain range or “band” of energies. The most common of these is silicon, whose native oxide is the main crustal component of every terrestrial moon and planet. Silicon’s electrical properties are fixed by immutable physics, but through “doping,” the carefully controlled introduction of impurities, its crystals can be tuned so that, for example, room-temperature electrons have a good chance of jumping up into the conduction band when a voltage is applied.

Now, by layering these doped silica in particular ways, we can trap conduction electrons in a membrane so thin that from one face to the other, their behavior as tiny quantum wave packets takes precedence over their behavior as particles. This is called a “quantum well.” From there, confining the electrons along a second dimension produces a “quantum wire,” and finally, with three dimensions, a “quantum dot.”

The important thing about a quantum dot is that if it’s the right size, the electrons trapped in it will arrange themselves as though they were part of an atom, even though there’s no atomic nucleus for them to surround. Which atom they emulate depends on the number of electrons and the exact geometry of the wells confining them, and in fact where a
normal atom is spherical, such “designer atoms” can be fashioned into cubes or tetrahedrons or any other shape, and filled not only with electrons but with positrons, muons, tau leptons, and other exotica to produce “atoms” with properties that simply don’t occur in nature.

Lastly, the quantum dots needn’t reside within the physical structure of our semiconductor; they can be maintained just above it through a careful balancing of electrical charges. In fact, this is the preferred method, since it permits the dots’ characteristics to be adjusted without any physical modification of the substrate.

So picture this: a diffuse lattice of crystalline silicon, superfine threads much thinner than a human hair crisscrossing to form a translucent structure with roughly the density of balsa wood, a structure which, like balsa wood, is mostly empty space. Except that with the application of electrical currents, that space can be filled with “atoms” of any desired species, producing a virtual substance with the
mass
of diffuse silicon, but the chemical, physical, and electrical properties of some new, hybrid material.