The Collapsium (7 page)

Two of the women were vaguely familiar; he’d already feigned embarrassment over forgetting their names. He had been at court for almost three decades, so there really wasn’t much excuse. The third woman, Tusité something, was one of Tamra’s personal friends, and consequently treated him with chilly regard.
Are you back, Trouble?
Her conversational barbs were subtle, though, and since he had pretty well earned them, he resolved to take them with good grace.

But still, eyeing his triple reflection, he had to ask her. “You’re not playing a trick on me, are you?”

“You’ll be with Her Majesty, Declarant,” Tusité replied coolly. He supposed that meant no, it wasn’t possible to embarrass Bruno without also embarrassing Tamra. But there
might be another barb here he was missing. This was typical; Tamra’s courtiers were mostly kind people, but their sparring was constant, driven by hypertrophied senses of wit and honor and propriety. They were like athletes who had honed a particular set of skills to the point of bodily distortion: runners with cricket legs, or weightlifters who could no longer throw a ball. He could believe Tusité had altogether
lost
the ability to speak plainly, without layers of veiled meaning.

Bah.

Tonight, he’d balked at sequins, but had otherwise yielded judgment to the palace and its ladies, who’d promptly swathed him in green-and-black suede. Spurious zippers and snaps and buckles on the jacket were complemented by fat laces down the trousers’ outer seams. The matching hat was wide brimmed and glossy, the sort of thing one expected a big ostrich feather to protrude from, although none did.

Each piece had looked absurd in isolation, and Bruno had been hard-pressed to stifle his protests. The total ensemble had a different effect, though. It did look ridiculous, in the way that unfamiliar clothes always did, but it also seemed, in a strange way, to suit him. If this was a joke, it was of the contextual variety: well dressed but out of place. A time traveler. But probably it was no joke, and people actually dressed this way these days.

The handmaids had wanted to stroke the gray out of his hair and beard as well, and now, eyeing himself in the dressing hall’s triple mirror, he wondered what that might’ve looked like. No color was “natural” in this age of artifice, after all, and his own tastes were clearly outdated and otherwise suspect.

“Whom are you trying to emulate?” the would-be teenage Tusité had asked him earlier, her voice brusque with amusement. The question gave him pause. His post-court appearance had evolved gradually, over twenty years, without much in the way of conscious planning or assessment. And yet, as Tamra also had teased him, he seemed to have become a sort of theatrical construct, less himself than an iconification of
himself. Symbolizing what, he couldn’t guess, but there it was: his eyes brooding between gray-black thickets, fat eyebrows merging with overlong hair, bushy sideburns slopping down into curls of untamed beard. The handmaids had done what they could in the time allotted, but still he looked uncomfortably like a mad prophet, combed over but hardly couth. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it in his own mirror this morning.

That was court life for you: self-consciousness without end. Silly clothes. Comments so veiled and obtuse that they might as well have been encrypted.

“You look … better,” Tamra told him, gliding in, dismissing her courtiers with a look.

“Yes,” he agreed grudgingly, straightening a blousy sleeve beneath the cuff of the jacket. “I’m quite the dandy. Compliments to your software and staff; you do seem to surround yourself with the tasteful.”

“Usually,” she said, and took his arm. “Did Tusité give you a hard time?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She seems to have her doubts about me.”

“She does have a good memory.”

Tamra herself had adopted a blue-gray, long-sleeved evening gown that—like Bruno’s jacket—suggested Venus was no longer the hot-house of ages past. Circling her brow was a simple platinum band, adequate for semiformal occasions where she was, nonetheless, on public display.

Robot guards came to life for them as they approached the fax gate, transiting ahead of them to prepare the way. Watching them disappear was interesting; the gate itself didn’t look like anything, just a vertical slab of blackish material swathed in a thin layer of fog. But the robots melted into it with tiny pops and flashes, like ice cubes slipping into something carbonated and phosphorescent.

It took some conscious effort to approach the slab as though it weren’t there, but stepping through it was as easy as stepping through a curtain, and provided as little in the way
of sensation. On the other side lay a gallery, a vast mall of stone and glass, its windows looking down on twilit cloud tops.

The robots’ heels and toes clicked against a floor of glossy stone as they danced out of the way, elegantly unobtrusive, their movements interrupted not at all by the journey between planets.

Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all, though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location. Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body, or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the risk.

At any rate, in the early days of faxing there’d been some pain, some discomfort, some small degree of disorientation that let you know the transfer had happened. This new way, it hardly seemed like travel at all. This might as well have been another room of Tamra’s palace, or anyplace, really.

He paused at the transom, turning, eyeing their new surroundings dubiously. Venus? It looked more like Colorado, some glassine lodge clinging to the side of a mountain, looking down on someone else’s rain clouds. Above, stars twinkled faintly, as if through a yellow-brown layer of smog. All around the floor were man-high juniper trees in iron pots, not in rows but scattered, a faux forest lying silent and still. Behind the fax gate lay the rock face itself, Maxwell Montes, sealed and structurally reinforced but otherwise left in its natural state, smooth basalt planes broken at jagged edges like petrified layers of pastry. The floor beneath them was opaque and solid, probably a single sheet of whiskered stone held up by metal stanchions and trusswork without a gram of wellstone anywhere in the mix. Why risk a power failure dumping one’s party guests—
not to mention one’s junipers—screaming into the cloud deck below?

As far as other guests went, Bruno didn’t see any, but then again this was clearly a kind of hallway, a place between places, albeit a large one—forty meters across if it was an inch. In both directions, the stone and glass followed natural contours of the mountain, folding around corners and out of view. They were on a promontory of sorts, a jutting outcrop of rock; above, the mountainside sloped away rapidly from the arcade’s ceiling.

A faint, light snow was falling, he saw, clinging in places to the juncture of rock wall and sloping glass roof and, when enough had accumulated, spilling down the glass to be whisked away by swirling breezes. Beyond this, splashes of lichen were clearly visible on the rock face, and there were even, he thought, some leafy plants waving up there in the gloom.

Below, the clouds somehow managed to look chilly, like Earthly rainstorms after the sun has set.

“Venus,” he said quietly. A parched, poisonous world of crushing pressures and furnace temperatures, tin and lead running liquid on its surface like so much quicksilver? No longer.

Tamra quirked her head at him as if puzzled by his stopping. “Something?” she asked. The view didn’t seem to faze her, to affect her at all. Perhaps too familiar, too ordinary a thing in her life: a whole planet brought to heel, another ring for her hand.

He shook his head. “No, nothing.”

He felt someone crowd in through the fax gate behind him, heard a grunt of surprise. “Excuse me,” a voice said testily.

Tamra sighed, pulling him away from the gate. “You needn’t stand
right there
, Declarant.”

“Of course,” he mumbled, his eyes still flicking around hungrily, taking it all in.

“It’s been a while since you’ve seen anyplace new,” she observed, with some degree of sympathy.

“Indeed,” he said, nodding absently. “One forgets the sensation. The overwhelmingness of it. Without realizing, one forgets how to
be
overwhelmed.”

His gaze finally came to rest on her face, finding the expression there amused. This displeased him. “Is it intentional, Highness, to distract me from the very problem I’m summoned to solve? Changes of scene undermine one’s concentration. If your desire is to frustrate me, I admit you’ve succeeded.”

“Oh, hush.”

“De Towaji?” another voice, a man’s, said. Bruno turned, saw four strangers clustered at the fax gate now. Strangers, yes; he was quite sure he recognized none of them. The man who’d spoken was tall and thin, dressed head to toe in crimson, and—if Bruno dared think it—possessed of the sort of shallow, almost effeminate beauty he generally associated with actors and politicians. Two of his associates were female, swathed respectively in yellow and green velour dresses that seemed little more than long, endlessly winding scarves. The third, a portly man in indigo, was looking wide-eyed at Bruno.

“De Towaji,” he echoed.

Oh, bother.

“Gentlemen,” Bruno said, bowing slightly. Then, with greater conviction, “Ladies.”

The ladies eyed him skeptically, this clownish figure late of the wilderness.

“My God,” the indigo man exclaimed. “Her Majesty went and got you, didn’t she?”

And the woman in green said, “You’re here to fix the Ring Collapsiter.”

And the crimson man, at a loss but apparently feeling the need to say something, added, “Er, that’s quite a handsome jacket!”

“Doctors,” Tamra said, placing a hand on Bruno’s back, “allow me to present Declarant Bruno de Towaji.”

“Pleased,” the crimson man piped.

“To meet you,” the woman in green finished, half apologetically, touching the crimson man lightly on the hand. He was, Bruno saw at once, her husband, whose sentences she was well accustomed to finishing. The love and shyness and exasperation between them radiated out in invisible rays, like infrared. Warming.

The indigo man simply nodded.

Well, they made Bruno feel less clownish, at any rate. Or in better company with his clownishness, perhaps. Nice to know he wasn’t the only awkward chap in the worlds.

Tamra looked at him sidelong and said, “Doctors Shum and Doctors Theotakos, of Elysium province.” She paused, then added, “Mars.”

And here were court nuances aplenty: Her Majesty had given these people’s titles and last names, but not their firsts, meaning she knew them, but not well. And she’d made a point of emphasizing Bruno’s rank over theirs; the Queendom’s educational system being by far the best humanity had ever known, “Doctor” was very nearly no title at all. There were more subtle levels in the exchange as well, as invisible and inevitable as the basalt pastry layers beneath Maxwell Montes’ outermost surface. That Bruno couldn’t parse them—and wouldn’t even if he knew how—didn’t mean their presence had escaped him. This much he knew: that these Martians had been smartly, artfully dressed down, acknowledged for their value but instructed in no uncertain terms to keep their distance.

It was perhaps a necessary gesture, reflexive, else Her Majesty would be mobbed at all times with admirers. Such was her job, after all: to be admired. But it was still a snotty thing to do, this enforced distance, and Bruno felt an instant sympathy for its victims.

“I am very pleased to meet you all,” he said sincerely, realizing that these were, in fact, the first people he’d met in five or six years. He bowed again, and felt a friendly smile creeping onto his face. “We’ll talk later, if you like.”

The relief on the men’s faces was palpable. Bruno wondered
what sort of doctors they were, that they so craved his attention.

“Er,” the crimson man said.

“Thank you, very much,” his wife said, smiling, touching his hand again to lead him away. The indigo man and yellow woman fell in behind them, strolling down a path between the junipers, past Tamra’s guards. In a few moments, they were lost from sight.

“Ah, civilization,” Bruno said.

Her Majesty grunted. “Wiseass.”

Another figure materialized in the fax gate: a man. A smallish man in black and green, a shiny black hat cocked jauntily atop his head. It took Bruno a moment to recognize him as Marlon Sykes, prettied up for the ball, and still another moment to recognize the clothing ensemble as very nearly identical to his own. Perhaps suggested by the same piece of software?

Perhaps
this
was Tusités joke?

Sykes, it seemed, made the connection more quickly, eyeing Bruno up and down and then glaring pointedly. Tamra, for her part, looked at the two of them and burst out laughing.

“Am I to be second in
all
things?” Sykes muttered.

Bruno, somewhat taken aback himself, could only stammer, “It … why, it looks much better on you, Declarant.” Which was true, but it mollified Sykes not at all.

“Damn you, de Towaji,” Sykes said, then stepped backward and vanished.

Another batch of people filed through the fax gate, and in another moment Bruno felt his arm clasped again, Tamra’s strong fingers pulling him away from still another encounter, down the juniper path toward the party.

The robots, earlier so conspicuous in their duties, now seemed almost to sneak alongside them, quiet, holding to the walls and shadows. They remained ever vigilant, of course, their blank metal heads facing Her Majesty no matter how they moved, but now they followed a program of discretion,
balancing etiquette against the need to protect—or perhaps protecting Tamra’s image along with her skin.

A few turns and twists later, the glass arcade opened back into a sort of dining hall, a chamber cut back into the mountain. Or possibly a natural cavern of some sort; beneath a ceiling of white-glowing wellstone, the walls retained that same rough pastry look. At the back, a staircase rose up into rock and darkness. Five long tables filled the hall, eight seats to a side and one on each end, enough for a hundred people in all. Half these seats were filled already, and from the arcade’s other side a steady stream of guests filed in. Had he and Tamra come in through some sort of VIP entrance? The crowd was certainly thicker over there, and while neither wealth nor status could be gauged from clothing, from their movements and muddled-together speech they seemed a slightly more raucous bunch. The brightly clad Martians were ahead, strolling along the nearest table, looking at place cards to find or confirm their seats.