The Collapsium (9 page)

“Oh, do hush, Rodenbeck,” Rhea admonished, not entirely unkindly.

“It’s your planet I speak for, Krogh,” the man called Rodenbeck complained in roughly the same tone. “I see—
we
see—the way you mistreat her.”

“By bringing her to life?” Rhea waved a hand, dismissively, then said in a childlike falsetto, “
Goodness, Mang, that’s a goober lot of weight you say won’t loosen. Will it collapsy on
us?”

There was scattered laughter at that. Even Rodenbeck himself cracked a smile.

“Really, playwright,” she said, “you
are
better off whining about the Ring Collapsiter. People listen then. But seeing that de Towaji is with Her Majesty this evening …”

Krogh laughed at that, and explained to Bruno. “Wenders Rodenbeck—the playwright, you know—is one of your greatest detractors. A rising star among them, one might say.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, remembering the Flatspace movement, which began almost immediately after the invention of collapsium. Dangerous stuff, they’d insisted. Too dangerous to be used around inhabited planets or, preferably, anywhere else. Even excluding the fate of the Ring Collapsiter, it was a difficult argument to refute. But then, electricity was dangerous, too. He examined Rodenbeck: red haired, freckled, with the sort of face that would age slowly under even the worst of conditions. He wore the uniform of his people: a black sweater over black trousers over heavy black boots, with a brown, brass-buckled belt running round his middle. Hardly a rogue—not with that face and voice together!—but not quite a poseur, either. There was something formidable about him, something easy and smug and self-assured. He was probably a savage card player.

“A detractor of mine as well,” Krogh said, laughing again. “Generally, people find purity in the
cold
places. A tundra, a permafrost, an ice cap: hands off, thank you. Rodenbeck is unusual in finding scorched rock as pristine and beautiful as a new blanket of snow.” He glanced at Tamra. “As Her Majesty is well aware, we’ve promised to leave the clouds alone, no changes, nothing you’d pick up from a distance. Venus remains the evening star, bright, featureless, all our work hidden safely beneath, but it’s no use. We’re to leave her altogether alone, according to this one. He’s not widely agreed with.”

“More do every day,” Rodenbeck said, “since Maxwell Montes started protruding above the cloudtops, in spite of your promises.”

“Oh, hush,” Rhea repeated. “Not everyone hates progress.”

“Tut,” Tamra cautioned her. “This man is your guest, Mrs. Krogh.”

“Indeed. As Her Majesty wishes, although no disrespect was intended.”

Rodenbeck grinned at that, saying, “Majesty, our hosts have invited me to provide the
appearance
of balanced debate. I hope they’ll pardon my … overstepping the assignment. For what it’s worth, I don’t hate progress. Why would I hate progress? The fax machine has been a boon for man
and
nature, freeing up billions of acres once enslaved to food production and waste disposal. Any invention that helps us leave more things alone is okay by me, and even things that
don’t
aren’t necessarily all bad.”

“Such balance!” Someone at one of the tables jeered.

Unperturbed, Rodenbeck spoke a little louder, widening his audience. “I’m also a lawyer.”

There was more laughter at that; Bruno gathered that Rodenbeck’s legal maneuvering was well known, at least among this crowd.

He went on. “I didn’t choose these movements. Flatspace, Leave It Alone, the Smith Club—they chose me. Reluctantly, a guy suspects, since I don’t toe their full party lines by any means. I never saw ‘Uncle Lisa’s Neutron’ as a blueprint for action—it still surprises me to see it treated that way. I mean, it’s just a play. But one thing I do believe is that someone has to take the side of nature in these debates. The way I see it, that’s just common sense. The air can’t sue on its own behalf.”

“I quite agree,” Tamra said, in a tone calculated to close the subject. “It’s Queendom policy to seek a devil’s advocate in all endeavors.”

Ouch.
Rodenbeck, you are necessary but overruled
. Bruno found himself liking this man, this greatest of his detractors. But he liked the Kroghs as well, and theirs was clearly the prevailing side here. Following their lead, Bruno returned to his meal, quickly finishing off the salad. His mug, which he thought he’d drained, stood full again at his elbow. He lifted it and took another long draught, savoring the flavors.

“How much do you need, exactly?” he asked when a minute or two had gone by.

“How much
don’t
we?” Krogh laughed.

The next course arrived: meatballs with tough, bready centers. Again, Bruno drank deeply from his mug, this time watching it refill when he set it down. Pulling matter through the tabletop from a reservoir somewhere? The same place the food and dishes came from, and then went back to when the diners were through with them? Bottomless, a veritable miracle of loaves and fishes. One felt no urge to hoard, to pace or measure one’s consumption.

With a start, he realized that Rhea Krogh was engaged in the old-fashioned and quite roguish practice of getting her dinner guests drunk. To soften them up for solicitation? Was he to have known this? To prepare, to steel himself? Alcohol was a crude drug, but in Enzo de Towaji’s Old Girona Bistro it had flowed freely, practically a dietary staple. That was before the earthquake had killed Girona’s faux retro medieval phase, of course, along with Enzo and Bernice de Towaji, and 850 other unfortunates. Afterward, as an orphaned student in a grieving community, Bruno had had little
besides
the beer and wine recipes to remember them by. He’d drunk deeply in those days.

“You’re drunking me,” he snapped at Rhea Krogh suddenly. “Er, well. That is, I fear I’m drinking too much. Too quickly, that is. I’m unaccustomed …” his voice trailed away uncertainly, a strange feeling tickling in his chest. And then a massive belch escaped him, silencing all conversation once again.

“I warned you,” Rhea said to him, with perfect innocence. “Whisper the name of any beverage. Ask for the intoxicants to be removed, the carbonation, whatever your preference.” Then her face took on a look of weathered, knowing sympathy. “Oh, but this is new to you. Sequestered on your little planet, so far away. When was your last dinner party? Of course, of course, the fault is entirely mine.”

Beside him, Tamra sighed. “The fault is no such thing, Mrs. Krogh. I apologize for bringing him here, with so little warning to himself or to you. He
is
unaccustomed, although for that he has only himself to blame. But these disruptions are my fault.”

“Stop,” Bruno growled at her. The room swam a little; he felt its heat in steamy waves. The alcohol was finding its way into his bloodstream, his brain. Bother, how many decades since he’d been drunk? He’d had a fantastic tolerance for it, once, but clearly that wasn’t a health trait Krogh’s morbidity filters had maintained for him. “Stop it, Tamra, please. I’m not a child, or a fool. I response … that is, I take responsibility for myself. This woman—” He shook a finger at Rhea. “—wants money. She plies for it, cleverly, in the manner of a restaurateur. She deserves, she
earns—
”

Tamra reddened. “Bruno!”

“It’s all right,” Rhea insisted, her good humor fading now into genuine concern. “He’s perceptive, and I fear I’ve treated him poorly. A mug of Prudence should help, or a trip through the fax.”

“Nonsense,” Bruno said, more loudly than he’d intended. “No. I’ve drunk it; I’ll keep it down. Serve me right. I’ll be sober soon enough. And I
do
have money. For your project. Just …” He glanced over at Wenders Rodenbeck. “Just leave the clouds alone, all right?”

He paused, scratched his ear, did some muzzy calculations in his head. “Would, ah, would a hundred trillion dollars be enough?”

A universal gasp went up, from the Kroghs, from Rodenbeck, from Marlon Sykes and Tamra Lutui and a hundred painted lords and ladies. All eyes were on him again, and he knew at once that he’d erred, that all his careful efforts to treat these people as friends or equals had just been dashed to flinders.

Peerless. That was his curse, yes, the curse of isolation, of knowing that no other human commanded even a tiny fraction of the resources at his disposal. Even Krogh, who had
changed the worlds forever, reaped only a tiny royalty when someone faxed him- or herself across space and time, the morbidity filter one of many background processes running behind every collapsiter grid transaction. Whereas Bruno, who had built the grid, earned a
large
royalty, too large, more than he’d ever asked for or wanted. Tamra’s lawyers had set the whole thing up, and in the end even they were stunned at what they’d wrought: a fortune dwarfing Tamra’s own, growing faster than anything the worlds had ever seen or contemplated. So large that even giving the stuff away was an exercise fraught with peril.

Because he, albeit unwittingly, had
really
changed the worlds. Because he, albeit unwittingly, had won the power to break spirits with an ill-chosen word, to show people just how small and futile their life’s works had been.

“Too much,” he said, looking around him morosely. “I’m … sorry, I didn’t intend any … offense.”

And then he bent forward and vomited into the enormous metal cup, where his bile changed at once to fresh, foaming beer.

The worst part about the evening was that that wasn’t the
worst part. With taut aristocratic deference and diplomacy, no one present gave any sign of noticing his lapse, not the tiniest quivering of disgust or sympathy. It was a nonevent, shunned, disacknowledged for its impropriety. This simply wasn’t a barf-in-your-mug sort of gathering, and when he’d asked to be excused on grounds of fatigue, Her Majesty had smiled thinly and suggested a hot tonic. Having no other cup to drink it from, he’d naturally demurred, and wound up sitting out the hour in queasy mortification and almost total silence, while his head grew muzzier and then began, slowly, to clear.

The astronomer Tycho Brahe, he recalled, had died of a burst bladder at a dinner like this one, that being entirely more polite than barbarically excusing himself to go pee. Perhaps Bruno should do that in his cup as well, just to see if a head would turn or an eyebrow quirk somewhere in the room, but he’d noticed the lavatory door at the back of the chamber and went there instead, not bothering to ask permission like a
child but simply standing, saying he’d be right back, and lurching off.

All these people’s lives hung in the balance, he realized suddenly. It was hard to believe he could help them, hard to believe they
expected
it of him. He’d been so rude, and they so patient.

On his way back he passed the gloomy staircase he’d seen earlier. He glanced up its length, curiously. The passage was steep, and curved away to the right. Reflecting from the pastry walls was the same twilight glow as the sky outside the gallery windows. A conservative sky, he thought, all but unchanging; Venus took thousands of hours to complete a rotation, its sidereal day actually slightly longer than its year. The sun followed it around like a child running alongside a merry-go-round, falling slowly behind but remaining stubbornly in view while the stars whirled beyond. This gloomy evening would probably last another four or five standard days, possibly longer, before fading to night.

“Will you be staying long?” someone asked him, a while after he’d returned to his seat. In reply, he simply shrugged and looked to Tamra, and paid little attention to her answer.

In his absence, dessert had arrived: a light berry sorbet that looked as if it might ease his stomach a bit. He tried it; it did.

“Are you reachable by network again, Declarant?”

Again, he shrugged. So long as he remained in civilization, even with no fixed address, a message directed to him would eventually find its way. But why encourage the practice? Why rub these rotted social graces against the fabric of society any more than necessary? Surely society deserved better. He mumbled some reply, then leaned in and finished his dessert.

“Declarant,” Wenders Rodenbeck finally said to him, as part of some larger conversation, “how are we going to fix the Ring Collapsiter?”

He looked up. “Eh?”

Ernest Krogh clucked in distress. “No, no, Wenders. Mustn’t harass. Haven’t I mentioned? Leave the guests alone, all that?”

“It’s all right,” Bruno said, perking up. “Really.” It was, in fact, the most interesting subject he could think of. A matter—regardless of whether Tamra chose to admit it—of life and death. To Rodenbeck he said, “You know something about collapsium?”

A nod. “Enough.”

Bruno snorted. “Enough? Enough for what? I don’t know enough, and I’m allegedly the Queen’s expert. I’ve been trying to work out the equilibrium of the thing, never mind the dynamics. What keeps it even statically stable? The lattice points are all rigidly in phase, of course; that’s what we mean when we speak of collapsium. And imagining the structure as linear, as a long rectangular prism, it’s all very straightforward. But in twisting it around to a ring, a toroid, we have to worry about crosswise forces, every part of the structure exerting strange diagonal influences on every other part. It should throw the whole thing out of phase; a collapson swarm, chaotic and perilous and in no way useful as a telecom shunt.

“So what do we do? Adjust the ring size so that every node is an even wavelength away from every other? No, that wouldn’t work, would it? There’s no such size; the set is empty. You’d have to fiddle with the lattice rows, too, not so much circular rings as huge, frilly doilies of collapsium. Dimensionality … what? At least one-point-two. Would that work?”

“One-point-two-nine,” Marlon Sykes said, a stunned look on his face, “and yes, it does. Declarant, did you just work that out? In your head? Just now?”

“I’m only guessing.”

“Very intelligently,” Sykes insisted, all trace of rancor gone from his voice. “Do you know how long it took me to work out the same scheme? With Her Majesty’s finest computers at my disposal?”