The Collapsium

Chapter Seven in which an anomalous result is pondered

In the ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting at the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our latest attention, sat brooding in his study, staring at the measurement his desk had reported for the umptieth time. Feigenbaum’s number, yes, hmm.[3]

Bruno had built an apparatus, a structure for testing the nature of true vacuum. The structure was called “the Onion,” and was composed of miniature black holes held in place by carefully balanced electrogravitic forces, a state of matter known as “collapsium.” Naturally, such a thing could not be kept on the miniature planet itself; it orbited several miles away, a faint puckering of the star field, powder-blue with escaped Hawking-Cerenkov radiation.

Distance notwithstanding, the Onion’s tides disturbed the planet’s tiny ocean and atmosphere, playing hell with the weather, playing hell with the orbit of the miniature moon. When there’d been one, anyway; the “moon” was really a storage heap for inch-wide spheres of extremely dense matter: neubles. Diamond-clad balls of liquid neutronium, a billion tons apiece. Black hole food. All gone now, used up.

Presently, the floor seemed to tilt under Bruno’s chair and then jerk upright, then tilt again and slowly right itself, as the Onion passed overhead. The atmosphere crackled, alive with static electricity; the ground, pulled several inches out of true and then released, rumbled in protest.

Sounds and images flitted through Bruno’s mind. Bricks, dust, cries of alarm; the ground was shaking. Well, not anymore, but his heart still hammered like a wet fist at the base of his throat, and would do so for the next ten minutes at least, before it finally faded from notice. And in another two and a half hours, whether Bruno was ready or not, it would all happen again!

He felt he should have gotten used to this at some point. Sabadell-Andorra, after all, was eight decades in his past. He couldn’t help but remember the bells of Girona clanging as the weary brick towers crumbled around them. He couldn’t help but remember the Old Girona Bistro—his own house!—falling in on itself like a magician’s box, taking his parents down with it while he bounced and surfed, more or less unscathed, on the street outside. To a fifteen-year-old, the calamity had been absolute.

But Girona’s demise had been a freak, a chance synergy of tectonics and soil composition feeding precisely the resonant frequencies of the local architecture. He’d learned some new terms that week: feedback, fluidization, condemned, aftershock, pyre. There hadn’t been another case like it in all the years since, and probably—given the extreme conservatism of Queendom building codes—there never would be again. So why was he still afraid of earthquakes? Even minor ones, even ones whose timing and severity were under his direct control?

His failure to acclimate made him wonder, sometimes, just what he was doing out here. Alchemy? Aversion therapy? The inane bumblings of a man who should, by now, have grown senile and sessile with age? He wasn’t doing controlled science, that much was obvious.

He’d never intended—never imagined—orbiting such a massive structure so close to his little planet. He’d never imagined using the entire -moon in the Onion’s construction, but what began as a transient curiosity had become first a tinkering, then a project, and finally a heedless, sleepless obsession. A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become— seemingly overnight—a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! A structure too massive to relocate, too delicate to risk disassembling, too dangerous and disruptive to leave where it was. What had he been thinking?

No, he knew the answer to that: he’d been after the True Vacuum. Hard to blame himself for that.[4]

The project had taken several weeks, he thought. Or months, maybe; he’d long since stopped marking the passage of time. He’d eaten and slept on a schedule not matched with the rising and setting of his miniature “sun.” He remembered that much. But looking now at the wreckage of his study— the mess of socks and cups and wellstone drawing slates filled with notes and diagrams and 3-D animations that had been abandoned half finished or else crossed out with savage strokes—he marveled at how damnably entranced he could sometimes become.

It was like waking up underwater, at the bottom of a bathtub or something: looking up, seeing the surface rippling above you. It isn’t hard to sit up and take a breath, so the initial panic fades to simple confusion and astonishment. How the fudge did that happen?

And the results he’d brought back with him were astonishing, too. Or confusing. Or simply—probably?—wrong. Feigenbaum’s Number? This was the trouble with basic research Expected results told you nothing, told you that you had learned nothing. But unexpected results could mean anything; experimental error or flawed conception or simple insanity on the part of the experimenter. Bruno had known his share of scientific kooks, and this was exactly the sort of thing they were always going on about, in a thousand different mutual contradictions. So in the end, you still learned nothing, maybe for hundreds of years, until the rest of physics caught up and could finally tell if you were full of beans or not.

Humph.

He waved for lights, for windows. The study brightened with warm, incandescent yellows and whites, but where stone wall faded to glass window there were only reflections of those same lights against darkness. It was nighttime outside.

He realized he was famished, and wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten. A full day? He hoped not, else gas and bellyaches would follow soon after any meal.

“Good evening, sir,” the house said through extruded wall speakers, as if he’d just arrived and required a greeting.

“Hmm, yes. Door, please.”

Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall plaster; the space within it darkened, turned to wood, acquired picturesque brass hinges, and swung outward.

“Sir, you have—”

He held up a hand. “Actually, I need something to eat before I hear the day’s problems.”

“Yes, sir,” the house replied, a bit uneasily. “There’s a bowl of peeled grapes ready for you. Chilled. But you have—”

“Grapes?” Bruno passed through the doorway, into the darkened living room. “Grapes? Where? No, don’t turn on the lights, just tell—

His shins collided with something knee high and solid, something that felt cool and smooth through the silk of his pajama breeches, felt in fact like the torso of a robot that was resting on its hands and knees. At least, that’s how it felt for the moment it took Bruno to lose his balance and spill over sideways.

“Hugo! Blast it!” he called out.

Can a house gasp in dismay? Bruno’s seemed to for a moment. Beneath him there was the crackle of programmable matter shifting substance at maximum rate; he landed on a thick, yielding carpet of foam rubber. Not real rubber, of course, but wellstone rubber, a structure of designer electron bundles alternating with superfine silicon threads. Presently, the foam grew patchy beneath him, as if dissolving; two seconds later he lay in a Bruno-shaped depression, his left side resting directly against the granite of the house’s foundation. A cloud of silicon dust rose up all around him.

The foam had yielded too far, lost structural integrity, broken the fine mesh of circuits that gave it the illusion of substance. Had the floor changed to iron instead, he’d have been the one to yield, but as it was he’d probably been saved from a cracked elbow. Of course, in the Queendom of Sol “breaking the floor” was the very metaphor for foolish clumsiness. Or had been, once upon a time; he didn’t get down there much anymore.

“Declarant-Philander!” the house cried out, using the longest and most formal of his titles, though he’d told it a thousand times not to. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

He didn’t speak at first, fearful of inhaling the fine silicon dust. Instead he sat up, brushing himself off, breathing lightly—experimentally—through his nose. At once, small multilegged robots scuttled forth from the shadows, undulating, wrapping sinuously around him and racing over his skin and clothing with tiny vacuum-cleaner probosci. They raced around the edges of him as well, finding the dust where it lay. Two seconds later they were finished and gone, scuttling back into hiding like fast-motion figments of his imagination.

“Sir?” the house prompted again, anxiously. “My humblest, humblest apologies, sir. Are you all right? I tried—

Bruno sighed. “I’m fine. Hugo?”

The robot he’d tripped over, perched there in the darkness on its hands and knees, looked up slowly at the sound of its name. Its neck joints clicked, golden bands sliding one inside the other, as it turned its blank metallic face toward him. A faint mewling sound emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of its nonexistent mouth.

“Your robot is in need of recycling,” another voice, a female voice, said from deeper in the living room’s darkness.

Startled, Bruno rose to his feet, spied a silhouette there on the divan. Long hair, long dress, a sparkle of diamonds at the waist.

“Lights,” he said, though he knew at once who it must be.

“I tried to tell you, sir,” the house complained. “You have a visitor.”

The lights came up softly, illuminating the form of—who else?—Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. Bruno had known no other visitor for years, and even she’d been here only the once. She’d been desperate, then, in need of his help. And in the here and now, her posture gave the impression that she’d been sitting there in the darkness for some time. Fair enough; the house had standing orders never to disturb him in his study unless his safety or his work were in immediate danger. Had it made her wait? Had she agreed to, when Royal Overrides could compel any software to her immediate bidding?

“Malo e lelei,” he said, as prelude to his many questions.

She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the greeting. No crown adorned her tonight; her black hair spilled out over bare, walnut-colored shoulders. Her dress was of crimson suede, with round black shoes sticking out underneath. Casual attire, even for a figurehead ruler of billions. Especially for a figurehead, he supposed. The only concession to her station was a wide bracelet of porcelain bearing the traditional plus sign and six-pointed star of Tongan heraldry, half smothered in laurels and filigree.

“You’re quite welcome here, Highness,” he went on, now a bit testily. “I’m at your disposal, as always, but I’m afraid I wasn’t prepared for a visitor this evening.” He glanced around at the floor and furnishings. “I see the house has cleaned up, at least. By choice, I wouldn’t inflict my usual housekeeping on you.”

“Your robot,” she said, pointing, “is defective. I nearly tripped over it myself.”

Beside him, Hugo had moved, slowly, to the side of the Bruno-shaped dent in the floor, and was probing the edges of it with slow, tin-gray fingers capped in gold. The faint mewling sound had never quite stopped.

“Not defective,” Bruno said wearily. “Free. I wanted one animate object around here that wasn’t simply a house appendage. Do you realize there isn’t a single animal on this planet? Not a bird to sing, not a fish to poke ripples in the water’s smooth surface. Did I really do that, craft an entire world, landscapes and biomes and evaporation cycles, and then forget to populate it? Someone gave me a little toy ocean once, alive with miniature creatures, and even then I didn’t take the hint. I suppose I sought to correct the oversight. I have entirely too many servants as it is, so I decided to free one.”

She frowned. “Free it?”

He nodded. “Yes. I severed its link to the house software.”

Her Majesty looked aghast. “Robots have no volition, Declarant, no desire to do anything but fulfill. Nor do they possess intelligence, unless you’d count raw intuition as such. You severed the link to its processor, its ability to grasp and assess the very needs it must fulfill?”

He nodded again. “Just so.”

“How… unkind. You leave it helpless and confused, in an environment beyond its comprehension.”

Bruno shrugged. “Such is the nature of freedom, Highness. I’ve often said that life is nothing more than the choices thrust upon us when ability and incident collide. Which of us truly knows our course? Generally, we don’t even know the landscape beneath our course. It’s a terrible gift, in some ways, but a great one as well. Hugo is more fortunate than some.”

Bruno was intrigued even as he said the words, because there’d been no one to ask him these questions before, and he hadn’t really reflected on them himself. Freeing Hugo was something he’d simply done one day, and never reconsidered. After all, what software existed to tell him what to do next? None. And if it came about somehow, if some master house intelligence could plot the course of his life, or even his afternoon, would he listen? He’d never expected to wind up out here, in the Queendom’s upper wilderness, with only the collapsium for company, but at least he could look back and know that for whatever inane reasons, he’d done this to himself. Such was the nature of freedom.

It was sort of a grim thing to inflict on a robot, he supposed.

Hugo, once again looking up at the sound of his name, mewled and fell face first into the hole in the floor.

“Ahem,” Her Majesty said.

“Oh, bother it.” Bruno sighed and took a seat across from her. “Where are your robots, Tamra? Your guards. You’re never without them. And how did you get in here, anyway? I’d have detected the approach of a ship.”

One of Hugo’s graceful cousins slipped briefly into view then slipped out again, leaving a tray of food and drink on the table between them.

“Your fax,” Tamra said, pointing at the dark orifice around which the little house was built. “It is the usual mode of travel, Bruno.”

He pursed his lips. “Eh? My network gate is down, Highness. Nonfunctional, for years.”

It was Tamra’s turn to shrug. “I had it repaired last time I was up here.”

“Really. Ah. Nice of you to inform me.”

“You needn’t be so offended,” she said, with an air of both guilty humor and bruised camaraderie. “I’ve kept the secret, kept the override to myself. It’s as I found it, with the exception that I can get word to you when circumstances demand it.”

He nodded resignedly. “When circumstances demand it, ah. This isn’t a social visit, then.”

The shaking of her head was gentle, apologetic. “No. Did you expect otherwise?”

“No,” he admitted. “Why should I? You’ve visited exactly once in sixteen years, and only then to tell me the Ring Collapsiter was falling into the sun.”

The Ring Collapsiter: an annulus of collapsium encircling the Queendom’s parent star, its interior a supervacuum shortcut through which telecom packets—such as the signals comprising a faxed monarch—might pass much faster than the vacuum speed of light. Only a third complete when last Bruno had seen it, the Collapsiter had already been the most breathtakingly beautiful of all the works of man. An impressive project to be sure, almost impressive enough to make him stay. A Queendom capable of such grandeur might have use for his peculiar drives and talents after all!

But in the end, he’d been lured back up here by the promise of an arc defin, an arch through which the end of time itself might be observed. His bones quaked at the very idea. Here was an even grander project, so grand in fact that he expected to spend thousands of years working out the details. And yes, conducting those dangerous experiments—such as the Onion—that might eventually lead him there. Experiments even a bold Queendom could never tolerate in its midst, and rightly so.

Her Majesty smiled tightly and brushed a lock of hair from her face in precisely the way that had inspired the love of billions. “That was no trivial matter, Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji. You make yourself difficult to visit, and then complain that no one takes the quite enormous trouble to visit you anyway? We do have other concerns, you know. A whole society’s worth. If a thought is spared for you every now and then, it’s certainly not because you’ve encouraged it.”

Bruno felt his irritation meter rising. Human genetics, though, had always included a mechanism for awe in the face of celebrity. This was the very reason for the Queendom’s founding, the reason for all the peoples of all the worlds to demand that the tiny Pacific nation of Tonga yield up its young princess to be the Queen of them all. And against so deep an instinct, what chance did mere irritation have? He knew her as much more than a figurehead or celebrity, of course, but he’d long ago discovered just how little this mattered.

Bruno bowed his head. “You know me too well, Highness. Thus, you’ll know that my apology is sincere. Have I wronged you? Questioned your right to demand audience? I have no explanation, save the lateness of the hour and my surprise on seeing you here.”

“Accepted,” the Queen said evenly, with a slight nod of the head.

Able to resist his hunger no longer, Bruno picked up one of the little dishes his servants had left and began popping peeled grapes into his mouth, one by one.

“Excuse me,” he said around a mouthful of them. “I’m quite famished. Will you join me in a meal?”

She shook her head, but touched one of the glasses on the tray. “A drink, perhaps. This is lemonade?”

“Indeed,” he said proudly, “fresh squeezed. Faxed juices may be identical to the taste, but who says taste matters more than principle? I grow the sugar, as well.”

She smiled. “Your father would be proud. Your robots grow it, though, I hope.”

“Well,” he admitted, “I sometimes help. At any rate, it’s clear you haven’t come here to discuss agriculture. I’ll waste no more of your time. What is it you require of me?”

Her Majesty sighed, looking suddenly tired and unhappy. Looking, actually, like she’d been concealing these things for far too long, and was relieved, finally, to let them out. “It’s your expertise with the Ring Collapsiter, I’m afraid.”

“Ah.” Bruno nodded, only a little surprised. “ ‘Also grow teVe,’is that it?”

She flared visibly at the proverb, taking his meaning immediately. How many times had that hardy, bitter weed sustained Tonga’s people in times of famine? The wise farmer set aside a little plot for it—the damned stuff needed no tending, just a bit of clear ground to stretch its leaves across. Bruno’s barb was double pronged: On the one hand, Tamra was treating him as a kind of Royal Teve, which seemed a fine way to repay his decades of adoration. On the other hand, he was the one who’d insisted on maintaining a palace vegetable garden, teve and all, and he had little doubt it had vanished under shrubbery and elephant grass within a month of his departure.

Tamra eyed him silently for a few seconds before replying. “ ‘Plant a coconut and leave it alone.’ ”

“Hmmph,” he said, and suddenly he was fighting off a smirk. A coconut was tough and hairy, difficult to reach without a good climb, and took years and years to produce anything useful when planted in even the best of soils. Bother it, Tamra was good at this sort of repartee—she’d have him tied up in neat little bows if he tried to outproverb her again.

His spasm of good humor quickly faded into worry. He’d left the Queendom with a solution, a means to stabilize the Ring Collapsiter and prevent any recurrence of the accident that had knocked it free. And once completed, once its final intricate shape obliterated all gravitational trace of its existence, the structure would be no more capable of falling into the sun than the Earth was of falling out of its orbit. But so long as it remained unfinished, the Ring Collapsiter was inherently perilous, inherently difficult to protect from the vagaries of time and space and chance. Every collapson weighed eight billion tons, after all, and even at a range of forty million kilometers, the sun’s gravity was considerable. Precautions or no, nature wanted the two to come together.

“The details are complex,” Tamra said, taking a sip of lemonade and glancing approvingly down at the glass. “I’m not entirely sure I understand them.”

“Is Declarant Sykes still in charge of the project?”

“He is, yes.”

“Then I shall get the details from him. But the ring is falling again? And our previous methods are unable to save it?”

She nodded. “I’m told that’s so.”

“Will it take six months, this time? Or is it free-falling under pure gravitation? Have I time for a night’s sleep before faxing myself downsystem?”

Tamra appeared to consider for a moment, then nodded. “We have some time, yes. It’s ten months before the crisis comes to a head, and I’m inclined to think we’re in very deep trouble if you need every moment of that. So the answer is yes, you may remain here until morning. I’ll send a copy of myself down with news of the delay.”

“Where are your robots?” Bruno asked again. It was they who should do such messenger work, as well as their primary function as bodyguards. In truth, Her Majesty looked almost naked without them.

She laughed musically and rose from her seat. “Do I need them here, Philander? From whom are they to protect me? There are… times… when even the most discreet witnesses are unwelcome.”

Bruno frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Oh, Bruno,” she said, stepping around the table to plant her lips on his.

Chapter Eight in which the nature of time is explained

Bruno never could say no to her. Or rarely, anyhow, and last night they’d fallen together like randy teenagers, their decades apart like some kind of annoyingly long weekend. Still in love, damn them; all their fighting and sulking was for naught, a moment’s tantrum in the long, long morning of their lives. But today—despite the way it had begun—was not about the two of them, but about the Queendom itself. Today was business sans pleasure, and what Queen and Philander didn’t know how to separate the two? Formality seeped and hardened between them as they dined, dressed, and finally, traveled.

If Bruno expected to fax through to a work platform suspended picturesquely beneath the Ring Collapsiter, he was disappointed. Where they ended up instead was a vast, gloomy chamber of hulking gray machinery that hummed.

Tamra slipped her fingers from his, completing the separation. Bruno’s hand felt curiously empty.

He sniffed. The atmosphere was thick and dry and warm, and reeked sharply of wintergreen and burning feathers, a sign that PCBs or other heavy, chlorinated oils were overheating in strained electrical transformers. A trouble sign, to be sure, but not half as troubling as that hum. Most of the basic tones were subsonic, sensed in the bones rather than the eardrums, but there were overtones and harmonics aplenty, a cacophony that somehow managed to seem both too bass and too shrill for comfort. The noise didn’t seem loud until he tried to speak and found he almost had to shout.

“Where are we?”

Behind Tamra, a hemicylinder of gray metal hulked seamlessly atop a seamless metal deck, rising up into the slightly hazy air like a bald mountain.

“Grapple station,” she replied in much the same tone.

“Ah.”

The hum and reek now made sense: this place was an enormous gravity generator, a kind of God-sized cable winch holding up the Ring Collapsiter.[5] It had best keep holding, too; black holes inside the sun, even miniature “semisafe” ones, would collapse it to a cinder, assuming they didn’t first tear it to shreds. But despite everyone’s best intentions, despite precautions and failsafes and contingency plans, the ring of crystalline collapsium had slipped sunward again. And this grapple station, whatever its capability, was clearly straining past any reasonable endurance to slow the descent.

“Big,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Quite,” Her Majesty agreed.

The fax gate behind them quietly disgorged a pair of dainty robots, all silver and platinum and chrome. White caps adorned their heads, and white frilled collars adorned their necks. Their sexless torsos and faceless faces were smooth, unadorned expanses of bright metal. Their silver hands gripped ornate pistols of delicate—but nonetheless menacing—design. The robots bowed to Her Majesty and placed themselves at respectful distances on either side of her.

“You’ve changed guards,” Bruno observed. “They used to be gold.”

Tamra smiled, a bit wistfully. “That’s right. They used to be taller, too, and thicker around the middle. But times change, you know. Fashions and preferences change. Even if yours do not.”

“Oh, humph,” he replied, walking past her leftmost guard, around toward the huge gray hemicylinder. He placed a hand on it, felt its desperate hum. “Who says I haven’t changed? How would you know?”

She shrugged. “It’s not an insult, just an observation. Your clothing, your words and mannerisms—all are decades out of touch. Your hair is different than last time, I suppose. Less wild, less gray. It suits you better. When I’m with you, though, I feel almost as if no time has passed at all. You bring my distant decades back to life.”

Bruno humphed again. “What you call ‘time,’ Majesty, is more a social than a physical phenomenon. You don’t perceive this, because you’re inside the social structure that creates it. But watching clocks and calendars, indexing your memories by popular music—these are learned, unnatural behaviors. Mark my words: living alone is the ultimate exploration of inner truth. It’s one thing to see yourself as a web of changing relationships: to others, to society, to material things and places. It’s quite another to see simply yourself, to be your own companion, to talk to yourself and answer back honestly. Your times change because others change them for you. My changes come purely from within.”

“Wait. Be quiet.”

“Why,” he chided, “because your illusions can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny?”

She waved a hand in annoyance. “Bruno, be quiet. Someone’s coming.”

He followed her gaze. There in the distance, walking the kilometers-long avenue between hulking machines, was a pale young woman with tightly braided hair the color of metallic platinum. Bruno’s vision was quite good—whose wasn’t?—and for a moment he inspected her distant features, trying to identify the face. Was this someone he’d known, in the days before his exile? If so, it wasn’t evident, but then again appearance was a malleable thing, programmable through any fax machine. She looked young but mature, which of course meant nothing at all.

“Oh,” he said. “Do you know her?”

Tamra shook her head. The robots beside her faded back into the shadows of machinery, their blank faces turned toward the approaching woman.

“Hello!” Bruno called out.

“Hi,” the woman said back, closer now, well within hailing distance. “Welcome. I was told to expect you.”

“Told? By Declarant Sykes?”

“Correct,” she said, then made a skittish, nervous little laugh. The toss of her shining braids was, he thought, calculated for nonchalance. “I’m Deliah van Skeltering, Lead Componeer for the Ministry of Grapples. Good day, Your Majesty. And you, sir; you’re Bruno de Towaji? It’s an honor, truly. I’ve studied collapsium engineering my whole adult life. In fact as a student I used to keep a statue of you on my desk for inspiration.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, well.”

He never had discovered a comfortable response for statements like that one. Not that he heard them all that often, but those little copper statues had been pretty popular for a while until, mercifully, fashion had turned its attention elsewhere. Talented students and componeers seemed to prefer living role models to dead ones, for which he could hardly blame them. Less comprehensible were the ordinary citizens, with no interest in collapsium or telecommunications or telegravitic engineering, who nonetheless made him a subject of their public admiration. For his wealth, he supposed, although many of the Queendom’s plutocrats reaped as much scorn and envy as actual respect.

So why Bruno? Who could say. Of such mysteries was society constructed. Tamra, at least, had always treated him like an ordinary person. She’d liked the idea that he was smart and famous and rich—with all of humanity to choose from, it surely helped to have some screening criteria—but having grown up a princess, she wasn’t terribly impressed by these things. Impressing her was a whole separate enterprise. He truly wished he could return the favor, disregarding her station and influence to deal with the woman herself, but that was a trick he’d never quite managed in all their years together.

Not that he’d been deferential, exactly. She didn’t go for that, and in fact he’d been a real bum sometimes, pushing her away, trampling her feelings half deliberately so she’d send him off to “exile” in his laboratory. But even then he’d been acutely conscious of her station. Perhaps that’s why he did it, or part of the why: to rebel against the obvious power imbalance between them. And to have something to make up for, yes. They were always a great pair for making up.

‘’He’s pleased to meet you,“ Tamra said to this Deliah van Skeltering, meanwhile offering Bruno a lightly reproachful elbow in the ribs.

“Er, yes.”

Finally, Deliah presented herself before them. “Your Majesty,” she said, curtseying deeply, spreading an imaginary skirt even though she was actually wearing trousers and work boots and a heavy brown shirt made from some dense, wet-looking material. “Declarant-Philander,” she said to Bruno, and curtseyed again.

Bruno couldn’t help sizing her up: tall and sturdy, quick, self-assured. But something told him she was maybe a little bit hollow inside. Unfulfilled? She reminded him of a weaver woman he’d known in Girona: Margaret something. Master of a craft that was widely admired and very much in demand, but difficult and rather dull in the practice. “The prison of my talent,” she’d often called it. Margaret’s frustration had always seemed a terrible shame to Bruno, but if people could choose their abilities he supposed the world would drown itself in athletes and guitar players and raunchy but lovable sex artists. If you had a job you were good at and appreciated for, well, sometimes that had to be enough.

He bowed.

“Doubly honored,” Deliah said nervously. “Brushes with greatness, oh my. I’ve had this department for eight years, but this is the month people choose to notice.”

“Naturally,” Tamra said.

“I’m to take you to Declarant Sykes,” Deliah added, casting a glance in the direction she’d come from. “Unfortunately, the station’s only fax gate is on the opposite end from the instrument room. It’s a bit of a walk.”

“Marlon is mucking with instruments again?” Tamra asked in a disapproving tone.

“Urn, well, we’ve been tuning the revpics, trying to bring the frequencies up. It’s slow work.”

“And rather beneath your rank,” Tamra observed, falling into step behind her.

“Perhaps, yes.”

The hum of machinery followed them as they walked.

“Well,” Bruno said, “it’s a very formidable station you have here. There are hundreds of others just like it?”

“That’s so.”

Bruno couldn’t help but be impressed. Projects like this one, however ill fated, bespoke a Queendom far bolder, far wealthier and more ambitious, than the one he’d left. With death a hunted quality, faxed away with every minor journey, perhaps civilization was finally able to take a longer view. Was it easier to make such pipe dreams come true when the benefits were for the builders themselves, rather than some hypothetical “posterity?”

He traced his hand along an enormous and unpleasantly warm resistor.

“The main beam holds up the collapsiter. I’m guessing its complement is anchored to a star?”

Deliah turned and smiled at him, as if the question pleased her. “Several stars, actually. It’s like sinking tent stakes into sand—the more you distribute the load, the less slippage you get.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Partly my own idea, I’ll confess. After all, we don’t want to spend all our time tightening the, uh, tent cords.”

“Indeed.”

“It’s only for a few decades, anyway, until the ring is self-supporting, like a bridge. That’s the only reason we can do it this way. We couldn’t build a permanent structure of gravity beams—the anchor stars would all crash together eventually.”

“Obviously, yes,” Bruno agreed, then wondered if his tone weren’t a bit overbearing or dismissive. “I, uh, see you’ve worked out all the details.”

That comment clearly didn’t please Deliah van Skeltering. Of course, yes, because she hadn’t worked everything out, had not managed to prevent this newest disaster. Would she feel his words to be an insult? Bother it, people were so damned easy to offend. Especially the friendly ones. As always, Bruno could be offensive without lifting a finger.

“The Declarant’s social skills don’t see much use these days,” Tamra said, touching both Bruno and Deliah on the shoulder. She sounded amused, though not entirely patient about it. “Do please forgive him.”

“No, he’s quite right,” Deliah sighed. “Patience and mathematics. Patience and mathematics. If I’ve learned anything from his example, it’s that. If I’ve learned anything.”

“Here now,” Bruno protested. Many notions could be drawn from his example, surely, but he’d hate to count self-pity among them. “Mistakes happen, young lady. Don’t blame me for blaming you, because I haven’t. If, at some point, I do blame you, you’ll know it unambiguously. As you see, I’m not a subtle man.”

Deliah ducked her head. “Of… course, Declarant. Forgive me.”

“Oh, none of that,” he said, waving a hand. “I won’t hear of it; you’ll have us tied in knots. So you’re the director around here, are you?”

“For eight years now, yes.”

“And you say you’ve had no other problems?”

“Major ones? There are always problems—”

He waved a hand. “Of course, of course. I’m not grilling you; I’m just, er, making conversation. Since it appears we’ll be working together.”

“Ah. Well, for what it’s worth, I came to physics fairly late in life. And management. I’m from Africa.”

Bruno wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Is where you’re from a significant factor here?”

She gave an uncomfortable laugh. “It can be, yes. Growing up on a photocollector farm, you don’t think about much beyond the weather, the maintenance, and maybe a strong boy or two who’ll keep the dust off and laugh at your jokes. But University changes you—that is its purpose, I suppose.”

“Changes you? Leads you toward the sciences, you mean.”

“Toward the management of sciences, yes. What a shock, to discover I was a shepherd of physicists! By my second year at KSPAI was the department gopher, organizing all the home conferences, and eventually all the conferences all over the solar system. My grades were good, too, and my thesis did win that prize. Suddenly I was ‘Laureate van Skeltering,’ right when my kiddie marriage was falling apart and I needed a fresh start anyway. But from the moment I hit the job exchange, it was clear I was headed for administration, not math.

“Knowing the material is fine—it’s common—but it’s hard for one person to really move the world. Even you needed a cast of thousands in the end, Declarant, if I may say so. Turning prototype to product to end-user installed base is the real test of an idea, and knowing how to pull a team together—and hold them together when the going gets tough— is the key to that.”

Bruno could hardly argue with that; if everyone were like him, there’d probably be no commerce or progress at all, at least in the conventional sense.

“And yet,” Bruno said, groping to understand her point, “you’re still surprised to find yourself here. Far from Africa, among monarchs and Declarants, plotting the salvation of a star and all its worlds.”

“Exactly.” Deliah nodded once, emphatically.

He cleared his throat. “You, ah, do realize that the rest of us feel that way too? I myself grew up in the apartment above a little Spanish tavern.”

“I know,” she replied quickly.

Well of course she did. She’d already admitted to being an admirer, and Bruno’s life was in the public domain, open to all possible scrutiny. All at once, he was uncomfortable again, feeling exposed. Feeling far from his home, wherever that might be.

“Life is full of surprises,” he added, more sourly than was probably wise.

Suddenly, they were at the instrument room, a narrow closet Bruno might almost have missed if a pair of silk-trousered legs hadn’t been poking out of it. The walls and ceiling were of wellstone; a panoply of dials and gauges and keyboards and graphical displays raced and oozed and flickered around the flat surfaces, whose composition bubbled cubistically between metal and porcelain and various forms of plastic.

“What happened?” Deliah demanded of the legs. She was eyeing the wellstone surfaces with tired exasperation. Then, more respectfully, she said, “Can I help, Declarant?”

“No,” a voice said from beyond the legs. They disappeared, Bruno saw, into a slot at the bottom of the closet’s back wall. Big enough to hold a human torso, though probably not comfortably, not unless the space opened up back there behind the wall.

“You realize we’re going to have to restart the calibration estimates from scratch,” Deliah complained. “You do realize that?”

“I do, yes. Thank you.” Presently, the owner of the legs shuffled and scooted and rocked out of the opening. Only when the face emerged was Bruno sure that this was, in fact, Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes. Awkwardly, Sykes straightened himself up to his full height. He wiped his hands on the blue velvet and fine, gold-white embroidery of his vest, leaving black smudges there.

“Marlon!” Her Majesty snapped. “What on Earth are you doing?”

The Queen’s robots tensed on either side of her, but Sykes just flashed an easy grin and leaned back—carelessly, Bruno thought—against the madly shifting wall of the instrument room. “On Earth, I don’t believe I’m doing anything at the moment. I do have copies on half a dozen grapple stations, probably all doing the same thing right now.”

“Which is?” Tamra demanded, arching an eyebrow.

“Retrofitting the equipment, obviously.”

Her Majesty’s suede-booted foot tapped thrice on the decking. She seemed to consider for a moment before saying, “Declarant, the Queendom pays handsomely for your services. We expect handsome service in return. This—” She waggled a finger at his stained hands and clothing. “—is the best use of your talents right now? It must be, surely, or you’d be doing something else. Correct?”

“Ah.” Marlon’s smile faltered, then deepened. “Tamra, my pay is by the job, not the copy-hour. Consequently I find it easier to send my own copies to perform certain tasks, rather than having to explain these tasks to others, particularly since our laborers and technicians are operating at full legal capacity already.”

“I’ll issue a writ to waive the copy-hour limits,” Tamra said. “I should have done it already, I see. How long has this been going on?”

He shrugged. “Not long.”

“A week,” Deliah van Skeltering chipped in, her tone supportive and apologetic. “I may have requested… that is, my requests of Declarant Sykes may have been…”

“Be silent, Laureate-Director,” Tamra said to the woman. Then, less haughtily, “All my conversations are official. Speaking out of turn is disruptive.”

Reddening, Deliah bowed her head, saying nothing.

Bruno empathized: Deliah was no practiced courtier, after all, and she was—admirably—trying to take responsibility for her own job. But Tamra’s role was equally clear: bureaucrats and functionaries must not be permitted to undermine her authority even in these tiny, offhand ways. A Queen must exude power and influence from every pore, yes? Else what good was a Queendom at all?

“Er, shall we… proceed?” he asked, when a few pointed moments had passed. It was a calculated risk: even he couldn’t talk back to her in public. Not without paying.

“We shall,” Tamra said lightly. And that was that.

“What is it you’re doing there?” Bruno asked Marlon. “Manual labor? Couldn’t robots help?”

“They are helping,” Marlon snapped, in a rapid-fire voice. “Look, wellstone devices are almost infinitely configurable, but where no pathway exists at all between components A and B, as often happens when you’re configuring large machinery for unintended purposes, we have to physically lay a line of wellstone down. Or copper, or fibe-op glass, but rarely, because we can program the wellstone to emulate those. So robots do the coarse installation, point to point, and the delicate final connections are completed by hand. And as I say, explaining the process to a technician requires refinement in both the theory and detail of what I’m doing, which would consume precious time. Until / know precisely what needs connection to what, I find it easier simply to tinker. Perhaps in another week, I’ll have gained enough experience to pass instructions along.”

“Hmm,” Tamra said, unconvinced.

A touch of sullenness graced Marlon Sykes’ features. His gaze flicked to Bruno for a moment. “His time costs you nothing, I suppose.”

“He donates it, yes.”

“I’ve little need for money,” Bruno almost said, but stopped himself, realizing in time that it would probably antagonize rather than soothe. Marlon, the father of the Ring Collapsiter, was just about as brilliant and wealthy and powerful a man as ever lived, his name writ large as any Edison or Franklin or Fuller. But through the twisting of fate, Bruno’s name had been writ much larger, ridiculously larger. Along with his bank account, yes. It was a sore point between two Declarant-Philanders, and understandably so. What he did say was, “It pleases me to visit with friends again. I do it so rarely. I almost feel / should pay for the privilege. It’s good to see you again, Marlon.”

The first reply to that was simply a glower, but finally Marlon put his smile back on and reached out a hand to be shaken. “Your manners exceed my own. I’ve been immersed here; I’m not really in a mood for interruptions. You know how that can be, I’m sure.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, and chuckled a little. He took Marlon’s hand in his and clasped it warmly. It came away, of course, slick with machine grease, but that was of little consequence.

“You’re well?”

“Well enough, thank you. And you?”

Marlon grumbled, nodding toward the malfunctioning instrument walls. “Could be better, alas. Have you made progress in your research? Are we any closer to an arc defin?”

“Ah, well, that’s difficult to say. Like you, I’ve been tinkering, although in my case the goal is True Vacuum. Results have been… mixed, I guess you’d say. Odd. I probably need some peer review at this point, isolation being an ideal breeding ground for foolish error. Perhaps we can discuss it while I’m here downsystem.”

“Perhaps,” Marlon said, not quite able to hide a sense of avarice and excitement. He wanted to share insights with Bruno, yes, but for whatever reason, he didn’t seem to want Bruno to know that.

Tamra began tapping her foot again. “Will you explain our problem to de Towaji please, Declarant?”

Marlon sighed and crossed his arms. “Must I, Highness? I really am quite busy here, and don’t want to lose the thread of it. Perhaps you could visit me at home.”

“When?” Tamra demanded coolly.

“Right now,” Marlon said, making a kind of facial shrug. “I’m there. It’s where I expected you, actually. Whatever possessed you to come here?”

“I don’t know; it seemed like an appropriate starting point.”

Marlon pursed his lips and shook his head. “Loud and smelly? For our dear friend de Towaji? His mind is a palace, Tam, a cathedral, unsullied by life’s grimy banalities. Send him home to me, I beg you. I’ll take proper care of him there.”

“I’m fine here,” Bruno protested mildly. “Banality and grime are novelties, remember. Though of course I’m happy to let you get back to work if that’s what you need. Could I leave a copy here to help?”

“No, thanks,” Marlon said too quickly, and though he clapped Bruno on the shoulder—leaving a noticeable smudge—there was little mirth in his eyes.

Chapter Nine in which unexpected hospitality is offered

Sykes Manor was an exercise in water and white marble. Spin-gee habitats were common enough in the Queendom, spheres and cylinders that pressed their occupants to the inner walls by centrifugal force, in the age-old manner of carnival rides. Bruno had never seen a spin sphere crafted as a single residence, though, and he’d never seen one in the Athenian style before, nor imagined that such a thing might exist. Where the classical Greeks had favored straight lines and rectangles and squat isosceles triangles, Marlon’s architects had substituted sphere-mapped chords and pie wedges and truncated cones to good—though decidedly strange—effect. And where the inner surface of a typical kilometer-wide suburb cylinder might be dotted with homesteads and ringed with a greenbelt or two, draining into faux-natural streams and ponds, Marlon’s house, only forty meters across, contained a system of rigidly geometric gardens and fountains, zigzagging between looming walled structures that reached, in some cases, almost to the spin axis. There were no external windows looking out into planetary space, either; instead, bright, yellow-orange light slanted down from a tiny, illuminated dome at one of the hubs.

The overall effect was completely startling: an immaculate palace or temple complex as glimpsed at the moment of sunrise, but folded in on itself until inner and outer walls met, creating the dreamlike sensation that one was neither inside nor outside, neither above and looking down, nor below and looking up. No matter where one stood or where one looked, one was, it seemed, perpetually about to enter some grand, vaulted inner space that in fact couldn’t possibly exist.

All this said something important, Bruno felt, about the psychological workings of a certain Declarant-Philander, though exactly what it said he wasn’t sure. There was a kind of ostentation here: modest wealth conspicuously displayed. Well, modest by Bruno’s standards, at any rate; probably very few people could afford to live this way, and fewer still would do it if they could.

“Many people,” Bruno had observed shortly after entering this place, “are too timid or oblivious to shape an environment to their own true hearts. You, Marlon Sykes, are not one of them.”

Marlon, reclined on a couch and plucking at the strings of a mandolin, had laughed pleasantly, clearly taking the comment as Bruno had intended it.

“You flatter me,” he’d said, and his robots had handed Bruno a mug of chilled green tea. This other Marlon, relaxing at home, seemed far more at ease than his counterpart at the grapple station, far happier to greet the man he regarded as a rival, on the arm of the woman he’d once loved.

We all have multiple faces and aspects, Bruno mused, but rarely is the contrast so obvious. That was life in the Queendom for you; the Iscog joined every fax machine to every other, reducing all of space, topologically speaking, to a single geometric point. This permitted—in fact demanded—the encountering of innumerable rareties and ironies and stark, polar opposites, all superimposed atop one another. Impossible, of course, without the transfinite self-recursions of collapsium-based computing devices.

He supposed he could permit himself, at such a moment, to admire his handiwork.

Now the three of them lounged on soft couches in the slanting light beside a softly chattering cascade, clear water spilling down stairs of white marble in the shade of a line of olive trees. Tamra’s slender silver robots stood guard on either side, like statues.

“How they got there isn’t clear,” Marlon was saying. He’d put away his mandolin and was tracing with his index finger on a wellstone slate. “But this whole segment of the ring is contaminated with muons, in tight little orbits around the collapson nodes.”

On Bruno’s own slate, Marlon’s tracings were echoed, and quickly became solid, detailed, three-dimensional-looking images. The sun blazed, and the Ring Collapsiter—its thickness exaggerated by several orders of magnitude—glittered around it like a two-thirds completed crown. Fully half the structure, though, showed not the soothing blue of Hawking-Cerenkov radiation, but a kind of dingy brown glow. Presumably, this was as fictitious as the ring’s thickness; Bruno couldn’t think of any collapsium process that would create a visible signature like that one.

Bruno sipped from his mug, nodding. The tea was a little sweet for his taste, but he wasn’t sure it would be polite to ask the mug to change it for him. Not right in front of Marlon; not when he was being so friendly.

“I see. And the ring is slipping because the EM grapples would damage the contaminated region? By pulling its lattices out of phase?”

“Just so. We dare not disturb it further.”

“You’re distributing the load across the remainder of the ring, yes? What there is of it, I mean. Your stations remain operational, just aimed differently, at the undamaged arc segments?” He studied the drawing. “Yes, that would produce a side force, wouldn’t it? But you can’t turn the grapples off, either, cutting the puppet’s strings, as it were. The whole thing would fall into the sun in a matter of days!—And you can’t attach a wellstone sail to the contaminated area, because the orbiting particles would smash through it precisely where the stress is greatest.”

“We tried it,” Marlon said, shaking his head ruefully. “The sails collapsed immediately and fell into the black holes. Theoretically the holes are semisafe, too small to swallow even a proton, but if you jam one in there hard enough, it’ll go. And that’s the beginning of the end, because it increases the size of the hole, making it ever so slightly easier for the next particle to penetrate. And of course, any mass change disrupts the equilibrium of the crystal lattice, so already, the collapsium is inherently unstable.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, beginning at last to understand. “That’s why you want higher frequencies on the grapples: so you can grab hold right where you need to. The collapsium is in a precarious state, and gravitic disturbances are to be avoided at all costs. But frequencies higher than those of gravitation won’t set up the same sort of destructive resonance.”

Marlon’s smile was only a little tight. “Your edge remains keen, Declarant. In minutes, you reiterate the analysis of weeks. Yes, it’s exactly as you say.”

“The work progresses poorly, though,” Her Majesty interjected, in cool tones. “The collapsiter builds momentum with each passing moment. Even if Declarant Sykes’ plan works perfectly, there may not be time to stop its fall. And if we’re lucky enough to stop it just above the sun’s surface, rather than below, I still think the result is unlikely to please us. Your services, Bruno, are very much in need.”

Bruno sighed, as uncomfortable as ever with this notion that the unsolvable problems were somehow his to solve. “My ‘services’ seem to have come up with precisely the same solution that Marlon’s did. It’s the right solution, Tarn.”

Her Majesty said nothing, but put on a faux vapid smile that meant she found his comment foolish.

Grumbling, Marlon threw his tea mug into the little cascade, where it clanked and splashed and skidded to a halt, resting half submerged on the marble bottom. “We’ve enough force to lift this thing, Majesty. It’s simply a matter of applying that force where it’s needed. As I’ve told you, the math is really quite straightforward.”

“Undoubtedly,” she agreed, nodding once.

“You can be infuriating sometimes, Tarn,” Bruno said to her, not unkindly. In decades past, he’d sometimes spent whole days, even weeks being infuriated by her. Truthfully, there were worse ways to spend one’s time. But Marlon did not seem so amused.

“Just think about the problem for me,” she said, nestling back into her couch and closing her eyes, as if basking in warm sunlight, though in truth the glow of the illuminated dome was rather cool. “Both of you.”

They were all silent for a few seconds.

“I do mean now,” she noted.

Both men grumbled and, taking advantage of her closed eyes, made sarcastic faces. Then, seeing each other, they laughed, the tension going out of them. Bruno hurled his own mug into the fountain, causing a brief ripple of alarm in Tamra’s robots, and then he leaned back with his arms behind his head. Might as well assume a comfortable thinking position, yes? Leather and wood creaked pleasantly beneath him.

“Hmm, yes. A pickle indeed. So how long until we’re rid of these particles?”

Marlon sat up on an elbow. “Rid of them how? By decay?”

“Right.”

A detailed discussion ensued.?

“Eleven months,” Bruno mused, when they’d kicked it around for a while. “That’s odd. May I examine your raw data?”

Marlon’s good cheer faded a bit. “Of course, yes. What data we have is yours.”

With their two wellstone drawing slates slaved together, Marlon walked him through several layers of menus until he’d pulled up the database of measurements his paid observers had collected in recent weeks. Mere samplings, of course, indirect measurements scattered here and there along the Ring Collapsiter’s considerable length. Bruno pondered them for a while—apparently a long while, since both Marlon and Tamra got up to use the bathroom a few times while he was doing it—and finally he called up a little hypercomputer in a corner of the slate and fed it some quite horrific equations to solve. The answers were, of course, available almost immediately.

“Eleven months,” he confirmed, with an approving nod in Marlon’s direction. “And how long, again, until the collapsiter penetrates Sol’s chromopause?” That was the accepted benchmark for irretrievability; soon afterward, the collapsons would have swollen with gobbled star matter to the point where their crystalline structure became unsupportable. The whole thing would, no doubt slowly and elaborately, crush down into a single large hole, and eventually pull the sun in after it.

“Ten months,” Marlon replied, looking and sounding unnerved.

“Well, well,” Bruno said. “That’s what I call inconvenient timing. Had you been assuming this was a natural phenomenon?”

Marlon’s voice was hollow, frightened. “I had, yes. Indeed I had. But the odds against such a coincidence…”

Her Majesty opened her eyes and sat up, as if only now realizing the implication. “What are you saying, Declarants? That there’s a saboteur afoot? That someone has done this deliberately^”

Bruno shrugged. “ ‘Saboteur’ is the right word, I suppose. A muon is a highly unstable particle about a tenth the size of a proton, and it results from the decay of an even more unstable particle called a pion. My guess is that electrons from the solar wind were struck with a high-powered and precisely targeted stream of coherent neutrinos—a nasen beam, we call it—and this converted them to pions. It’s a graduate-level transmutation exercise, performed on an enormous scale.”

Marlon Sykes had turned almost completely white. “Good Lord, Bruno, I think you must certainly be right. What else could it be? What else could scatter such short-lived particles over such a wide area? I am, as always, dwarfed in your shadow. In an hour you’ve deduced this.”

“Well,” Bruno grumbled, trying to think of something self-deprecating to say.

“Well nothing,” Marlon insisted, somewhat angrily.

“A saboteur?” Tamra said again, rising to her feet so she could stamp one of them. “You suggest that a subject of this Queendom is capable of such villainy? A subject of rntwe?”

“I suggest nothing,” Bruno said innocently.

A loud noise, like a gong, echoed through the sphero-Athenian spaces of Sykes Manor. Marlon looked up sharply.

“Yes?”

“A message,” the house said to him, in tones much louder and slower and flatter of affect than Bruno’s own house would dare employ.

“I’m holding a slate,” Marlon said, testily.

In his hands, an image appeared: a square-faced man of deeply serious expression, clad in the stiff uniform of the Royal Constabulary. That uniform had not changed one bit since Bruno had last seen one, thirty years before: a wellcloth coverall, programmed to act like beige smartcotton festooned with strips of white numerals. And of course, the obligatory monocle over the left eye.

“Yes?” Marlon demanded of the face.

“Declarant-Philander Sykes, is everything all right?”

“It is as far as / know. How can I help you?”

The policeman’s expression managed, somehow, to grow more serious. “Sir, there’s been an incident on Grapple Station 117. Two dead, apparently very recently, apparently by homicide. Are you sitting down, sir?”

“Why are you calling me?” Marlon asked, trying now to disguise the annoyance in his voice. “Who was homicide, er, was murdered?”

“You were, sir. And a woman, one Deliah van Skeltering.”

“Oh,” Marlon said, going paler then before. “Oh, shit.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly. I’m sorry to ask it. but I wonder if you could come to the site and answer a few questions.”

Chapter Ten in which a crime is reconstructed

In some sense, the first ten thousand years of human history could be described as a steady climb toward freedom. Not the doomed, hapless freedom of short-lived beach and savanna apes, but the enlightened democracy of a fit and educated humanity that recognized—and indeed, meticulously cataloged—the value of individual action. Society, it was thought, should work to maximize the power—and with it the accountability—of each of its members, so that success and failure and happiness and misery might be had in direct proportion to the effort invested.

Turns out this was a load of hooey all along; people hated that sort of self-responsibility. Always had. Only when it was inescapably universal, when there were no more corrupt or uncivilized “third worlds” to flee to, did it become clear that what people really wanted, in their secret hearts of hearts, was a charismatic monarch to admire and gossip about and blame all their problems on.

Unfortunately, over the millennia Earth’s monarchies had been deposed one by one, and since deposed monarchies had a habit of creeping back into power it had been necessary to murder them all—not simply the monarchs and their heirs and assigns and spouses and bastard cousins, but also their friends, supporters, beloved pets, and the occasional bystander, leaving as little chance of a miraculous restoration as possible.

There were de novo monarchs here and there, micronational leaders who’d declared their kingship or queenship on a lark, or in dire earnest and questionable mental health, but by the twenty-fifth century the only real, legitimate, globally recognized monarch left, the only one whose lineage extended back into sufficient historical murk, was King Longo Lutui, of the tiny Polynesian nation of Tonga. And as luck would have it, shortly before the scheduled Interplanetary Referendum on Constitutional Reform, King Longo, sailing the shark-filled straits between the islands of Tongatapu and Eua, chased a wine bottle over the side of his boat and was neither seen nor heard from again. He had left behind a single heir: one Princess Tamra.

You know what happened from there: Her coronation became the talk of the solar system, the duly modified referendum was held, and Tamra was elected the Queen of Sol by a stunning 93% supermajority. And since everyone knew that power corrupted, they were careful not to give her any, and to install a special prosecutor to chase after what little she managed to accumulate. Much was made of her sexual purity as well, and it was thought good and proper that she be humanity’s Virgin Queen for all time thenceforward.

The only trouble was, nobody had particularly consulted Tamra about any of this. Really, they were just taking their own burdens of personal accountability and heaping them onto her, which hardly seemed fair, and this whole virginity business had more to do with her being fifteen than with any inherent chastity of spirit. She just hadn’t worked up the nerve yet, was all. And while the immortality thing hadn’t quite happened by that time, the writing on the wall was clearly legible, and the thought of retaining her supposed purity for literally “all time thenceforward” did not amuse Tamra in the least.

So, once installed as Queen, once crowned and throned and petitioned for the royal edicts everyone so craved, her first act had been to Censure everyone responsible for putting her there. Her second act was to compel her physicians to see that her physical purity could regenerate itself in the manner of a lizard’s tail or a starfish’s arm. And her third had been a deliciously shocking call for suitors—low achievers need not apply.

The rest, as they say, is history.

So understand that the officer in charge of the grapple station crime scene, one Lieutenant Cheng Shiao of the Royal Constabulary, did a commendable job of not acting flabbergasted or starstruck when the expected First Philander stepped through the fax gate with the quite unexpected Queen of Sol in tow, plus a pair of dainty metal bodyguards, plus an extra Philander who was quite famous in his own right. Shiao bowed to each of them in turn and explained with perfect professionalism that in light of the victims’ rank and occupation, a more senior investigator had been called and was expected on the scene shortly. In the meantime, if he could just ask a few questions…

Marlon Sykes, for his part, did a commendable job of answering without visible emotion. Had he had any reason to expect violence? No. Had any threats been made against him? No. Did he have any enemies? Certainly, yes. A man in his position could hardly avoid it. But mortal enemies? He’d have to think about that one. He had just uncovered evidence of—

Presently, the fax gate spat out a disheveled young woman Bruno took a moment to recognize as Deliah van Skeltering. Dressed not in work shirt and trousers but in a rumpled saffron evening gown, she sported an arch of flowers above her off-kilter platinum braids and looked as if she’d been crying.

Her first words were, “This is a fine hello, isn’t it? Talk about going from bad to worse!”

“There there, miss,” Cheng Shiao consoled. His voice could be, all at once, soothing and professional and yet loud enough to drown out the whine of machinery.

“Hi,” Marlon added, disspiritedly.

“When you’re ready, miss, a few questions?”

“Oh. Of course, yes. Hello, Your Highness. It’s very nice of you to be here.”

Tamra inclined her head in acknowledgment.

The fax gate, its entrance already crowded, hummed for a moment before expelling another figure, this time a young girl in what looked like a school uniform: beige blouse, dark gray necktie, beige pleated skirt, dark gray socks, black shoes. Her eyes—the left one half-hidden by a VR monocle—fixed immediately on Shiao, then swept the rest of the assembled persons coolly. She looked, to Bruno’s inexperienced eye, about ten or eleven years old, on the threshold of puberty but still girlishly proportioned. Her carriage and posture and gait were all wrong, though. Or partly wrong, anyway, as if she’d spent too much time around grown-ups and had forgotten how to move like a child.

“Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said at once, throwing his shoulders back, his chin up, his chest forward. “Thank you for relieving me. It will please me to assist you on this case in any way I can.”

Astonished, Bruno looked at the little girl again, more closely this time, noting that Shiao had made no such display of obsequity to a pair of Declarant-Philanders, nor even to the Queen of Sol herself. Commandant-Inspector? He’d always assumed that was a rank for octogenarians, senior police officers with decades of crime-fighting experience.

He noted, too, Tamra’s and Marlon’s and Deliah’s lack of surprise at the policeman’s reaction. They knew this girl, or knew of her, if indeed the word “girl” applied in any but the most outward sense. Perhaps it was a disguise, an invitation to underestimate the person beneath?

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the girl said. Then, curtseying to Tamra, “Good evening, Your Majesty. Sorry to meet you under these circumstances; I hadn’t heard you were at the scene. Declarant Sykes, Laureate van Skeltering, allow me to express my condolences.”

And this perplexed Bruno still further, because the voice was very much that of a young girl trying hard to act mature, and while she was speaking, her right foot twisted and dug at the floor’s metal decking, and her right hand grabbed a corner of her skirt and twisted it, then dropped it, smoothed it, and finally grabbed it again.

Bruno couldn’t help himself. “You’re the senior investigator?” he blurted.

The girl looked at him, again with that same sort of rapid, confident assessment that said she knew a thing or two about human beings. She didn’t appear overawed with what she saw. “Have we met, sir?”

“Er, I think not. I’m de Towaji.”

“De Towaji who?” Her voice was unimpressed.

Tamra came to the rescue then, stepping sideways to touch a hand to Bruno’s shoulder. “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, dear. He’s the inventor, among other things, of collapsium.” Then her voice dropped an octave, filled out with genial warning. “Bruno, this is Commandant Vivian Rajmon, a senior inspector of the Royal Constabulary and a personal friend of mine.”

“Senior?” he couldn’t keep from saying.

Commandant-Inspector Vivian Rajmon’s sigh was loud and short, an exclamation of impatience. “The worst part is always having to explain it. Can I pleeease take a leave of absence, Tamra?”

“Not a chance,” Her Majesty said, with stern amusement. “It would encourage the criminal element too much.”

“Explain what?” Bruno asked, still stuck on the girl’s appearance.

Inspector Rajmon sighed again, eyeing Bruno gloomily. “I’ve heard of you. You’re rich. You own your own private planet.”

“Er, a small one, yes.”

“What are you doing here? Wait! Let me guess: you were called in to consult on the fall of the Ring Collapsiter. You visited Marlon Sykes, and were with him when news of his murder arrived.”

Bruno thought to bow. “Your deductions are accurate, uh, mademoiselle.”

She pursed her lips, and looked him over as if weighing the intent of his words. Finally, she said, “I don’t care to explain myself to you. I don’t have to.” Then, to Shiao, she said, “Has the scene been fully documented?”

“Nearly complete, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, stiffly. “We should have a reconstruction in a few minutes.”

Vivian nodded. “Good. Thank you.” Then her voice became amused. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

“Yes’m.” Shiao’s posture slumped just enough to show he was complying with the order.

“Declarant, Laureate,” Vivian said then to Marlon and Deliah, “do you feel up to viewing the bodies?”

Marlon Sykes nodded.

Deliah, for her part, straightened her back, pushed her hair into closer array, and said, “Why not? Nothing could make this evening much worse than it is already.”

“Let’s go, then,” Vivian said, then nodded to Shiao. “Will you keep the news cameras away, please?”

Shiao went rigid again. “Absolutely, Commandant-Inspector. I won’t budge from this spot.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied with that, and set off down the length of the grapple station with the rest of them trailing behind.

The place was crawling with figures in white spacesuits, dozens of them, some on rolling ladders, some on hands and knees, some dangling from roof beams on harnesses of optically superconducting cable so that they seemed to float unsupported in the air. All of them were sweeping every available surface with instruments of various design and purpose.

When Vivian’s entourage had gone far enough and spread out enough that the station’s hum would hide a discreet voice.

Bruno touched Tamra’s elbow and leaned in close to murmur, “She’s got that fellow well cowed, hasn’t she? It seems odd.”

“They adore her,” Her Majesty murmured back. “These constables, all of them, they have such a hard time letting go. Vivian’s situation is very sad, very unfortunate. She hasn’t always been so young.”

“A disguise, then?”

“Hardly. She died in an accident last year, and we’ve had a terrible time tracking down her fax patterns. She wasn’t afraid to fax herself, but she did prefer to travel in that little spaceship of hers. How she loved that ship! But it blew up one day and took her with it.”

“How perfectly horrid,” Bruno said, meaning it. “And this… young version was the most recent you could find? That’s peculiar; even if she rarely faxed, there should be buffer archives stored somewhere.”

“In theory,” Tamra whispered back. It was difficult to whisper here and still be heard, but Vivian had cast a suspicious glance backward. She knew, obviously, that they’d be talking about her, that Bruno required some explanation before taking her at rank value, but she just as clearly didn’t like the idea.

“The theory fails to model reality?”

“Uh, right. Even the Royal Registry for Indispensable Persons didn’t seem to have a copy, not that they’ve admitted to it yet. ‘Still searching, Your Majesty. We’re quite sure it’s around here somewhere.’ Even if that’s true, it only means their search algorithms are defective. This is what I get for awarding contracts to the lowest bidder.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, digesting that. There’d been no “Royal Registry” during his time in civilization—at least none that he’d ever heard about—and he was certainly an infrequent traveler himself. Other than his home fax machine, did anyplace have recent copies of him“? Did this station, or Marlon’s home? What might happen if he died suddenly? He tended not to pay attention to such concerns, but perhaps that was foolish of him. Things mightn’t always work out in his favor.

Finally, he asked, “How is she able to perform her duties at all? You thought my robot Hugo to be a cruel experiment, but it seems far crueler to ask a young girl to act with a lifetime of experience she never had.”

“Oh, Bruno, it’s just not that simple. Vivian was always good about keeping mental notes, and after the accident she insisted on downloading all of them, all at once. The result is a very well trained, very confused little girl. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a wise idea, but there you have it. She complains about her work now, yes, but she was miserable—I mean genuinely despondent—until I ordered her back to it. And since the Constabulary was clamoring for her anyway, it seemed the kindest course of action.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, unconvinced. Mental notes—essentially neuroelectrical snapshots of a particular moment of understanding—were something he’d always found to cause at least as many problems as they cured. What use to recapture the exact steps of a derivation or insight, when what you really wanted was to take the results of it and move forward, upward, to the next level of understanding? Notes could too easily set you in circles, working the same problems over and over to no clear purpose.

Now he was willing to concede that his example might not be a typical one. Quite possibly, a profession like criminal investigation relied on memory and habit in a way that note-taking could complement. But it was quite a step from there to the idea that an eleven-year-old could be programmed to perform the job as well as a seasoned adult. And even if that were granted, the question of whether such a thing should be done…

On the other hand, it had ‘t>een done. Bruno’s approval wasn’t required, and his opinion was not an informed one. If Her Majesty and the Royal Constabulary wanted Vivian Rajmon back at work, well, perhaps they knew best after all.

Vivian slowed; the knot of walking people drew closer together. Over her shoulder she asked, “So, do I meet with your approval, de Towaji?”

He answered quickly, and with a fortunate evenness of tone. “You meet with Her Majesty’s approval, mademoiselle. My own opinion hardly matters. As you surmise, I’m here only to assess the sabotage of the Ring Collapsiter.”

Vivian stopped so suddenly that Deliah van Skeltering collided with her. But her voice was dignified enough in speaking this single word. “Sabotage?”

“Indeed.”

“We’ve worked it out,” Marlon Sykes cut in, his voice weary but hard edged. “The pattern simply isn’t consistent with a natural event. Someone deliberately destabilized the gravitational links, apparently for the express purpose of knocking the ring into the sun again.”

“How long have you known this?” Vivian asked impatiently.

Marlon shrugged. “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

“Nearly coincident with the murder.”

“Well, yes. I’d guess the two subjects are related.”

Vivian sighed, and started twisting at the hem of her skirt again. “Were you going to tell me about this? Were you waiting for me to figure it out on my own?”

“Er, you’ve only been here a minute.”

“Indeed,” Tamra said, in mildly commanding tones. “Let’s not expect too much of the victims, dear. They’re distraught.”

Vivian bowed her head momentarily. “Of course, yes. Excuse my error.” When she raised it again, her eyes were clear. “Are there other copies of you two around the Queendom?”

“Yes,” Marlon and Deliah answered together. “Several.”

“At all the grapple stations in the Capricorn arc,” Marlon added. “We’re attempting to tune them for operation at higher frequencies. I believe I’m on Mars right now as well, though I wouldn’t swear to it.”

Nodding distractedly, Vivian took a little wellstone slate out of a pocket in her skirt, touched a lighted circle, and said into it, “Lieutenant Shiao, would you please have your people check all the grapple stations in the Capricorn arc? Let me know if you find anything unusual.”

“Yes’m,” the slate said without delay. “Right away.”

She touched the little circle again and put the slate away. “Where on Mars?”

“I couldn’t say, exactly.”

“Can you call yourself there?”

Marlon shrugged. “Not easily. I can send a message, and reply when I get it.”

Vivian nodded. “Good. Do that. Now I’m afraid we’re going to have to view the bodies. This may be unpleasant for you. If either one of you want to change your minds, now would be the time.”

“I’m all right,” Marlon said, shaking his head grimly.

“I’m saturated and therefore imperturbable,” Deliah answered, less confidently.

“Well then, let’s proceed.”

The instrument room was only a little farther on, surrounded by a knot of white-suited technicians. Cheng Shiao was here as well, presiding over the evidence collection, gazing into a slate of his own and nodding at something someone was saying. At the sight of Vivian, he jerked to attention.

“Commandant-Inspector! A pleasure. You’re looking well.”

“I’ve aged a month,” she replied, a little snottily.

Marlon and Deliah crowded slowly forward, their curiosity battling a sense of reluctance and, to all appearances, defeating it. Police technicians parted solemnly for them.

“Oh,” Marlon said, in flat tones.

Deliah was less sanguine. “How completely rude! Look at this! Do I deserve this? Gods, the inconsideration. This must have hurt!”

By craning his neck, Bruno was able to see around her, to see what she was looking at: herself and Marlon lying in heaps on the floor of the instrument room, with their toes pointing down and their faces pointing up. Someone had twisted their heads completely around, leaving wide, ugly, red-black bruises all around their necks, almost like burns. In the doorway, a lacquer-black robot sprawled, powerless and inert. It was small, probably not more than a meter and a half in height, though its arms and hands and especially its fingers were of disproportionate length. Its glossy exterior betrayed no dents or scratches or other signs of violence; it seemed to have just dropped there, perhaps while exiting the room.

“That doesn’t belong here,” Tamra said unnecessarily. “That’s not government issue.”

Vivian examined the scene for several seconds, pursing her lips and nodding. “Homicide, two counts, officers on the scene. Murder weapon is possibly a robot. Lieutenant, do we have a reconstruction yet?”

Bruno was surprised to see a heaviness around the edges of her eyes, as if she were suddenly holding back tears. Her lip quivered a little, although her voice had been firm and clear. Perhaps dealing with this sort of carnage wasn’t as easy for her as Tamra might like to believe.

“Yes’m,” Cheng Shiao said at once. He held up a wellstone slate. Vivian clicked her own, smaller one against it, and the two units chimed. An image appeared of the murder scene, exactly as it lay before them all but without the crowd, without the police and technicians and royal entourage complete with silver bodyguards. There was only Marlon, and Deliah, and the enigmatic little robot.

“The time is twenty-eight minutes ago,” Shiao said. “Both victims are clinically dead, in the presence of an inactivated autronic device of roughly anthropoid design, as seen here.” On the displays, in three-dimensional miniature, the faces and bodies of the two prone figures began to twitch. The movements were slight, but the time scale was clearly compressed, so that the corpses seemed to take on a kind of manic quiver reminiscent of an AC electrical shock.

“Death throes, approximately four minutes for the woman and three for the man, may be considered mercifully brief. Neural and circulatory connections between brain and body have been completely severed, and both brains have suffered additional, acceleration-related traumas, owing to the great violence of the event. Organized memories not related to smell or emotion should be considered irretrievable in both cases. Whether this damage was deliberate or incidental is a matter for speculation.

“Continuing backward in time, we find the autronic device, colloquially a ‘robot,’ showing its final signs of activity. Central processing shuts down last, following the termination of emergency and backup power. Here the memory is wiped and erased, and shortly before that, primary power shuts off, most likely under CPU command.”

On screen, the robot twitched, then rose to its feet like a marionette. It stood still for a moment, then turned around suddenly and brought its hands out parallel in front of it, raised slightly above the level of its head. The body of Marlon Sykes, twitching more violently now, rose from the floor and placed its head between the robot’s hands. Its neck was still twisted, though there was now no sign of the burnlike discoloration. If it could be said that there was any facial expression at all, it was one of simple discomfort, of skin and muscle hanging crooked and rudely pressed, like the face of a sleeper propped awkwardly in a chair not meant for sleeping.

That was only for a moment, though. In the next instant, the body’s head was rotated sharply, with such speed that Bruno didn’t see it happen, and afterward Marlon stood there, looking over his shoulder with what was now very clearly an expression of fear and startlement.

Then, in quick succession, the body of Deliah van Skeltering first hurled itself upward into the robot’s waiting hands, then twisted its head around similarly, then turned, intact, to face the information-rich wall of the instrument room. Bruno noted that the walls were not randomizing, as they had been when he himself had last seen them.

“The second and first murders occur, to all appearances, a premeditated and in fact calculated attack. Here the robot enters and approaches.”

The black machine leaped backward out of the room, landing lightly on its feet, and then commenced a stately—if accelerated—backward stroll along the grapple station’s main avenue. The viewpoint followed it all the way back to the fax gate, where it vanished.

“Curiously,” Shiao said, “the fax has no record of this transaction. We deduce it purely from the age and placement of molecular traces left by the robot’s feet. From this point, the scene remains largely unchanged for sixteen minutes, forty seconds, at which point there is a record of passage for two persons—Her Majesty Queen Tamra Lutui and Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji—and their accompanying guards.”

On the two slates, a little Bruno and Tamra walked backward out of the fax, led by one stocky little silver robot and followed by another. They continued backward at a brisk walk until arriving at the instrument room, at which point a conversation ensued between them and the figures of Marlon and Deliah, both alive. And this time, the walls were randomizing as Bruno had remembered.

How did the police know to include that in their simulation? What storage devices or subtle electrical traces told them that? These reconstructions, corroborated now by his own observations, seemed all but perfect. He resolved to learn more about police procedures, and particularly the physics underlying them.

The conversation was brief, and finally Marlon’s hand sucked a grease stain off Bruno’s jacket, and Marlon himself settled down onto his back on the floor and scooted headfirst into the recess where Bruno had first found him. Then Bruno and Tamra and the guards walked backward to the fax gate again, this time with Deliah van Skeltering trailing behind. When they had gone, Deliah backed alone to the instrument room again.

“A brief visit,” Shiao said, “preceded by another period of relative inactivity. We jump behind. Two hours, five minutes and thirty-six seconds earlier, the van Skeltering woman arrives, and eleven minutes before that, Sykes does. Again, for some reason the fax does not maintain any record or receipl of this singular transaction, but shed skin cells and residual ghosting tell us almost precisely when it must have occurred. Prior to this arrival, the station appears to have sat unattended for a period of twenty-nine days, and shows no prior visits by either Sykes or van Skettering at any time. This completes the first draft of our reconstruction. A final, admissible draft will be completed within twenty-four hours.”

Shiao clicked his heels together and waited.

“Excellent work,” Vivian said, nodding. “I’ll note this in my report. Regarding a motive, we—

Along the avenue, another Shiao came sprinting toward them, shouting, “Commandant-Inspector! Commandant-Inspector! I’m reporting trouble at six other grapple stations!” He pulled up and stopped, puffing. “Murders, Commandant-Inspector, all almost exactly like this one. Two bodies, one robot, some of them fresher than those found here. And Commandant? One of me has failed to report back. It isn’t like me, if I may say so. If I may say so, I fear the worst.”

Frowning, Vivian nodded. “Rightly so. Send a full armed detail and report back immediately. Try to capture the robot alive, if at all possible.”

“Yes’m!” The new Shiao turned and sprinted back toward the fax again. He was passed on the way by still another Shiao, who, while less agitated, was if anything in an even grimmer mood.

“Commandant-Inspector!”

“Yes, Shiao?”

“Commandant-Inspector, there’s been an accident of some sort. Cislunar traffic control just came through with a debris anomaly; the home of Declarant-Philander Marlon Sykes has apparently been damaged. My attempts to raise him there have been unsuccessful. House software does not appear to be responding. I fear the worst.”

“Darn it!” Vivian squawked, suddenly eleven years old again. “That’s no accident. Darn, darn, darnit! This just isn’t how we do things in the Queendom. Somebody’s being systematically mean, and that just isn’t how we do things.”

“No’m.”

She relaxed a little, perhaps by force, then nodded to Her Majesty. “This situation is obviously volatile, Tarn. With your permission, I’d like to remove you all to a safer location.”

Tamra bowed her head. “I defer to your judgment, Commandant-Inspector.”

“Good. Shiao, escort all these people to headquarters under maximum protection. Are you still guarding the fax gate?”

“Yes’m. I’m there now.”

“Good. On your way out, tell yourself to seal it behind us. Official access only. And while you’re at it, find out more about these unlogged fax transactions. There’s something very uncanny about that.”

Chapter Eleven in which the rubble is sifted

“So this unidentified ‘saboteur’ of yours—” Vivian sighed, looking out the headquarters window at a distant line of palm trees. “—either a person or an organization, is not only trying to push the Ring Collapsiter into the sun, but also to eradicate any persons able to stop it. I don’t get it. I don’t get a motive for this. I mean, we haven’t received any kind of threats or demands.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said. “It’s difficult to imagine an outcome useful to anyone. And yet, the tricks being played here are extraordinarily clever. This is not the work of a madman.”

“Madmen aren’t necessarily stupid,” Marlon pointed out sullenly. He had good cause to be sullen: as the investigation spread, it had quickly become apparent that no fax machine anywhere in the Queendom had record of him. He’d been erased, in the ninety minutes leading up to the destruction of his house. There was only one copy of him currently in existence, and if not for the discovery of the bodies on Station 117 and the timing of his visit there, no copy would exist. Even the Royal Registry, when asked to produce him, begged “a slight delay, owing to technical difficulties.”

It seemed to horrify Tamra and Deliah at least as much as it horrified Marlon himself. Bruno, who’d been single-copy for most of his life, couldn’t easily grasp their mood. Marlon was still alive, right? But for those accustomed to multiplicity, that seemed little comfort. This much was apparent to all: that the greatest of rarities, a murder in the first degree, had been attempted, and had very nearly succeeded.

No one seemed to notice that Bruno himself had nearly been obliterated in the same stroke. Had hunter-killer apps gone looking for his fax image in the collapsiter grid? Were the police investigating that? Perhaps they assumed he’d left a live copy at home, as many people did while traveling.

“Nor are stupid men invariably hapless,” Deliah added, with a sort of low anger. “The gravity projector was invented by a moron. Half the senate are fools, but see how they come alive when crossed!” She was standing at the window, looking out at coconut palms and bamboo and beach sand, and the distant breaking of ocean waves. She’d been quietly outraged, Bruno thought, to find that her murder was an afterthought, that she wasn’t the target, that she was merely standing next to Marlon Sykes at the wrong time. She, the Lead Componeer for the Ministry of Grapples, had not been seen as a threat to the Ring Collapsiter’s fall. The idyllic island of Tongatapu had done little to assuage her indignation; she stood guywire taut, hands clasped firmly behind her buttocks.

“Boyle Schmenton was hardly a moron,” Bruno felt compelled to point out.

“Oh, dry up.”

“That’s enough, Laureate-Director,” Tamra said coolly.

A collective sigh or yawn went through them all—all except the robot guards, who stood like anchored chrome statues, gleaming in the sunlight. Royal Constabulary Headquarters, on the northeast edge of the city of Nuku’alofa, was a pyramid of yellow-white glass, nearly as large as Bruno’s whole planet and really far too bright inside for an office building. But the temperature and humidity were just right, and the air smelled brilliantly of ocean and wood smoke and vanilla. Wild vanilla, probably—nobody really farmed anymore, or fished, or roasted pigs and turtles in pits on the beach.

In some ways, Bruno had always felt he was more Tongan than the Tongans themselves. His father, Enzo de Towaji, had won a lot of money flying kites, and sunk it all—against every bit of advice—into a restaurant that served only “natural” foods and beverages. A stupid idea, yes, but it had not only caught on, but spawned a whole range of subindustries to support and complement it. Bruno had grown up in the retro-Girona of gentlemen farmers and butchers and vintners, and eventually even weaver women and chandlers to complete the ambience. Back-to-basics was always an easy sell in Catalonia—Enzo was no fool. Of course, the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had ended that era rather decisively, but Bruno had never really shaken off its influence.

Still, he’d forgotten how much he missed Tonga, how very many memories he had tied up here. The noisy palace, the quiet beaches, the secret harbors of Eua accessible only by catamaran… He’d come to Tamra’s court at the age of thirty, and remained for thirty years more, fighting always for the time to seclude himself, to lock these sultry islands away behind white laboratory walls and work. The arc de fin, the arc definl But now he’d been away and alone for nearly as long, his life neatly trisected by this residence and birthplace and ancestral capital of Queen Tamra Lutui.

He moved his chair closer to hers, and would have reached for her hand if they’d been anything like alone together. As it was, there were seven people in the room here, and dozens more visible in the rooms nearby, and hundreds or thousands of news cameras swarming like thirsty mosquitoes at the cordon line, three hundred meters out. But Tamra seemed to sense his thoughts, and nodded sidelong at him: Yes, Philander, I remember it too.

Vivian set down her wellstone slate and rubbed her eyes with her thumbs in a very unchildlike gesture. “I need more information. This isn’t falling into place for me. You, Sergeant.” she said, singling out one of the uniformed officers standing guard. “Find me Cheng Shiao, with a reconstruction of the attack on Sykes’ house. No excuses—I want whatever he’s got. And bring me a soda, also.”

“Yes’m. Right away.”

To Bruno, for some reason, she said, “It’s like something I’ve learned in school but mostly forgotten.”

“Mademoiselle?” Bruno said, in a tone meant to convey incomprehension.

“My life. My job. I feel as if I know them until it’s time to do something, and then I’m never sure what. I keep expecting people to laugh, to say I’m doing it all wrong.”

Bruno felt a little smile plant itself on him. “I’ve often felt that way myself, mademoiselle. It’s more normal than you might suppose. I do think you’re being too bossy, though. You might tone that down a notch.”

“My name is Vivian, sir.”

“Ah. Well. I shall call you that in the future, and if you like, you may call me Bruno. Understand, I’ve never met a person in your… circumstances before. We’re making up the protocol as we go along, both of us.”

“Hmm.” She considered that answer, or perhaps the smile behind it, and finally seemed to find it good.

“You’re doing a splendid job,” Tamra added sincerely. “Believe me, I’d remove you if you weren’t. The Queendom deserves no less.”

“Hmm.” After a moment’s reflection, Vivian seemed to like that answer even better.

They all fell silent. The hum of ventilators and lighting seemed, somehow, to match the rolling and crashing of the ocean, too distant to be audible behind the wellstone glass of the windows.

Half a minute later, Cheng Shiao strode into the office, a glass of dark, fizzing soda in his hand. He set it down in front of Vivian, then stood at attention. “Cola Five-Two, no ice. Regrettably, I’m unavailable with the full reconstruction at this time, as my cruiser is presently docking with the remains of Sykes Manor. Only the gross reconstruction, based on our last radar assay, is available yet. I’ve taken the liberty of uploading it to your pads.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. Will you walk us through it?”

“A pleasure, Commandant-Inspector, though I’m afraid there isn’t much to it.” Images appeared on all the little pads, and on a backlit holographic rectangle that appeared in the center of the table’s smooth surface, like a glass window looking down on outer space, on the golden-white sphere of Marlon’s house spinning silently against the starscape, lit mainly by floodlights but with a sliver of bright sunlight illuminating one side. “A directed energy stream approximately six meters wide strikes the house in a single pulse at fourteen hours fifty-two minutes, penetrating here and exiting here. Although the structure remains largely intact, atmospheric containment fails immediately—note the venting gases—and power distribution fails within seconds.”

The little house shot gouts of debris and glittering crystals of frozen air from a pair of circular openings that appeared in it. The mangled Athenian structures within showed clearly.

“Power distribution failed?” Marlon asked angrily. “There’s wellstone all through that house—more than enough redundancy to keep it alive.”

“Yes sir. Apparently it was the embedded computing structures themselves that failed.”

“Secondary radiation?” Bruno speculated. “A shower of charged particles released by the sudden energy flux?”

“Possibly, sir.”

“What sort of beam was it?”

“Unknown, sir.”

“Hmm.” Bruno pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger, as was his habit when attempting to concentrate. “I don’t suppose you have the precise time of impact? Coupled with the rotation rate of the house, that could be used to trace the beam back to its source.”

“We have timeline only to the half minute, sir, based on long-range radar tracks of the larger debris. I expect to refine that figure through proximity scan and direct assay of the impact site.”

“This is police business,” Vivian noted impatiently. “Shiao does know what he’s doing.”

“Please,” Tamra said, holding up a hand in what was either a scolding or a beseeching gesture, or perhaps both. “The Royal Committee for Investigation of Ring Collapsiter Anomalies does share jurisdiction here. Their investigation precedes yours, in fact precedes the murder itself, and I daresay their business is the more urgent. You’re to provide de Towaji with anything he asks.”

“Oh,” Vivian said, with surprising equanimity. “Okay.”

Bruno, who hadn’t realized he was a member of any sort of official committee, said, with some embarrassment, “Er, what’s the soonest you could get us a full reconstruction?”

Shiao shrugged. “Unknown, sir. Since the investigating cruiser is some seven light-minutes distant, I haven’t communicated with myself directly. For a precise figure, you’d have to ask me there yourself, in person.”

“Ah. An excellent suggestion. Your cruiser is fully equipped? Can I fax myself there?”

Shiao looked alarmed. “Well, um, technically yes, sir, but in actuality I was attempting a joke. You’d need to be certified for shipboard operations. Have you even had any spacesuit training?”

Bruno laughed. “Breathe in, breathe out, and keep your boot grapples engaged? I’ve seen it in the movies.”

“Sir, emergency procedures alone require eight weeks of intensive immersion. I’m afraid I can’t authorize—”

“You can authorize it,” Her Majesty said firmly. “Was I unclear about this? De Towaji is operating under full royal dispensation, and shall have whatever resources he requires. His safety is my responsibility, not yours.”

Nervously, Shiao pressed. “Sir, have you ever even worn a spacesuit?”

“No,” Bruno admitted, “but I grew up in a back-to-basics community where primitive skills like that were highly prized. I’m adaptable. Don’t worry, son; I intend no unwarranted risks, and you’ll be held blameless for any foolishness on my part. I do think this merits my attention, though. And yours, Marlon, if you feel up to accompanying me.”

“It’s my house,” Marlon said unhappily. “Of course I’ll go.”

“And I,” Tamra said, stifling Shiao’s protest with a stern look. “It’s my Queendom at risk. And I have had spacesuit and spaceship training—in fact, I’m a level-one instructor.” Shiao looked surprised at this, which only made Her Majesty grow sterner. “You think I’m a twit, like my dear departed Queen Mother? All my life I’ve had the finest doctors, the finest fax programmers, the finest tutors and trainers. I’m as fit and as fast and as wise as modern science can make me, and I’ve been certified with more tools and vehicles and weapons than you’ve probably ever heard of. It’s not Tamra Lutui who’ll step aboard that cruiser, but the Queendom of Sol itself, and your approval, Lieutenant, has not been solicited.”

Bruno noted that Marlon, who’d been Tamra’s childhood mathematics tutor long before he’d been anything else, swelled with pride at these remarks. Shiao, though, gasped, bowed his head, and dropped to his knees.

“Meaning no disrespect, Your Majesty! My concern is only for your safety!”

“And appreciated as such,” Tamra conceded. “But overruled. Vivian, have you retained any spacesuit training?”

“Um, I think so.”

“Excellent. Will you accompany us?”

“Sure.”

Bruno watched Shiao’s down-turned face, thinking he’d never seen someone actually bite back a protest before. He dered if it was anywhere near as uncomfortable as it looked.

It took less than fifteen minutes for the Constabulary wardrobe to dress them all in custom-fit, top-of-the-line vacuum-safety equipment, by which time Shiao admitted that his docking maneuvers were complete and that he was dutifully awaiting the Royal Committee in what remained of Sykes Manor.

Bruno flexed his fingers and elbows and knees experimentally. The silvery-blue garments weren’t nearly as heavy or stiff as they looked, and the helmet dome, when he commanded it to swing shut over his head, was optically superconducting, invisible except for faint silver marking dots applied to it— he supposed they were there so he’d know where the dome was, so he wouldn’t accidentally try to put his gloved fingers through it.

They each had their name emblazoned on their rebreather backpacks—literally emblazoned, in dully glowing red letters. Bruno’s said TOWAJI, an error or abbreviation he hadn’t seen fit to correct. And here around him, as they crowded into the fax atrium, were SYKES and SKETTERING, a miniature RAJMON and a couple of hulking SHIAOs.

Tamra’s suit alone was nameless, bearing only the royal seal, but it was unmistakable from any angle, being purple in color, with bright gold trim that seemed to—possibly did— glow with its own inner light. It also managed, despite its bulk, to look sexy on her, the cut somehow exaggerating the hourglass of her waist, the curve of her calves, the gentle swell of rump and bosom. Crisscrossing reinforcement straps, their placement engineered to look coincidental, contrived to emphasize each perfect breast in a way that made Bruno feel almost as though he were imagining it, as though he were a lecher and a boor unworthy of the Virgin Queen’s chaste presence. Doubtless, she’d downloaded the pattern from her palace wardrobe, which had designed it for exactly these qualities. Of such silly but powerful subtleties was court life constructed. Perhaps it was a kind of joke.

The royal bodyguards alone remained undressed, looking almost vulnerable alongside their armored Queen. Nonetheless, pistols at the ready, they stepped through the gate to prepare the way for her. She followed closely; Bruno, right in tow, felt compelled to study the heart shape of her purple armored behind.

Seven minutes’ travel time vanished in a faxed instant; stepping through a curtain would have provided a greater sense of travel.

The inside of the police cruiser was surprisingly large, a gravity-free cylinder twice as wide as Bruno was tall, with token “floor” and “ceiling” of waffled rubber and all the rest an expanse of wellstone, smooth gray panels set with deep, breadbox-sized niches every couple of meters, and larger, coffin-sized ones interspersed less frequently. The thing appeared to be about a hundred meters long, somewhat larger than the shattered sphere of Marlon’s house visible outside the round, di-clad portholes. The ship’s setup was enviable and no doubt expensive—a complete laboratory that could, on a moment’s notice, be reconfigured for nearly any purpose, and that could simultaneously protect or confine dozens of human beings, be they SWAT troopers or prisoners or refugees plucked from some civil disaster.

A Cheng Shiao stood, waving uncertainly, in the aisle a dozen meters ahead, next to what was probably an air-lock hatch. Tamra, with her robots on either side, advanced toward him, her improbably swiveling dernere beckoning Bruno to follow, which he did. The others appeared behind him one by one, clearly visible in the small rearview mirrors projecting forward from each of his shoulders.

“Any warning lights in your suit collar?” Shiao asked anxiously. “Any unfamiliar noises or sensations?”

“No,” Tamra answered him with apparent good cheer. Their voices rang in Bruno’s helmet as intimately as if they were right in there with him.

“Er, no,” he said, though in fact the weightlessness—despite the fax filters that had conditioned his body against space sickness—was already making him a bit queasy. The food and drink Marlon had served him earlier now seemed to be rocking back and forth as a single, fluid mass in his stomach.

“Nope,” Vivian said behind him.

“No,” Marlon said more sullenly, echoed by an even more sullen Deliah van Skeltering. Why she’d insisted on accompanying them Bruno was not at all sure—she’d seemed to regard the prospect with a mix of resentment and dread. But she’d died already; little worse could happen now. Perhaps she just wanted to feel included, to be present in case anything important happened. Or perhaps she had something material to contribute—she was, after all, a Laureate in the sciences and a Director in the bureaucracy. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed the idea. Like Bruno, she had no space-suit training of any kind, so her obvious fear of space’s vacuum was well founded, more sensible really than Bruno’s own nonchalance.

He flexed his hand, trying somehow to feel the absence of air around him. He realized, with a twinge of worry, that he’d once again neglected to leave a copy of himself behind. He wouldn’t want to ‘t>e left behind, so the idea hadn’t occurred until now, to make a copy and mistreat it that way. Was this unwise, given the risks he was taking? Ah well, done was done, and the fax machines at both ends should retain his pattern in their buffers, at least until something else overwrote it.

He followed Her Majesty around the corner and into the airlock, both of whose doors stood open. Beyond it was some crude hardware—a kind of metal tunnel that seemed to have been jammed straight through the hull of Marlon’s home. Bruno’s sense of up and down did a little cartwheel, making him queasier still. Where the floor of the police cruiser had been “beneath” him and the airlock “in front,” now the airlock and its hatchway seemed to point “up” through the floor of Sykes Manor. And Bruno was clinging to the wall by the grapples on his boot soles! If the police hadn’t stopped the house’s spin “gravity,” he’d be falling backward right now, pivoting on broken ankles—his boot soles still clinging—until he finally bashed the back of his helmet against the wall below. But if not for the weightlessness, he wouldn’t be so disoriented in the first place. He’d be climbing a ladder or something.

The police had stopped Marlon’s house from spinning, he realized, for safety reasons. With centrifugal “gravity” pressing everything to the hull—or out through the holes the energy beam had punched in it—there would be a risk of flung debris or even outright disintegration of the house, like a merry-go-round whose bolts had all come undone.

“You’ve despun it,” Bruno said to one of the Shiaos, and though the Shiao was “below” or “behind” him and had no direct cue that he was the one being spoken to, the reply was immediate. “Yes, sir. To facilitate docking. Watch your step, please.”

This exchange of words had a soothing effect on Bruno, who hadn’t realized he was in need of soothing, hadn’t realized quite how difficult and uncomfortable and not-a-game this business was going to be. He wondered if it mightn’t be easier to disengage the boot grapples and simply launch himself up the tube, to rise like a soda bubble through the hole in Marlon’s floor. But probably, if that were easiest, they’d have told him to do it. There was of course the problem of stopping.

Her Majesty’s first robot walked up the side of the tube and around its upper lip as if this were the most natural thing in the worlds, and then Tamra herself did likewise, and then the other robot. Bruno, when his turn came, found the maneuver less difficult than it looked. Really, it was a matter of ankles and calf muscles, of letting the boots pull flat against whatever surface was handy, and of keeping ones leg—and with it the rest of the body—aligned. He marveled again at how supple these suits were. Thick enough to feel sturdy and safe as two winter coats with a suit of armor in between, they nonetheless flexed and twisted quite readily, as if shrinking away from the areas under compression—such as the insides of joints—and in turn rushing to the areas under tension, somehow adding length there, so that the fabric needn’t stretch or tighten.

Marlon’s house, alas, was a mess inside. Power had failed, leaving the interior dark save for starlight streaming in through one gaping hole, and sunlight tinting the edges of the other, and between them the wandering flashlight and headlight beams of white-space-suited evidence technicians, a dozen of whom swarmed the wreckage like bizarre creatures of the deepest ocean. Where a few hours ago there’d been marvels here, or at least architectural curiosities, now there were simply floating debris and the stubs of pillars and the empty foundations of buildings.

It looks more like Athens than ever, he thought suddenly. He nearly said it out loud, to God knew what effect on Marlon, but keeping the observation inside made it seem all the more insistently true. The real Athens, the contemporary one, preserved its temples and Acropolis forever in their twenty-first century state of ruin, lighting them up at night with floodlights and search beams…

Well, in an earlier age, at least. Bruno hadn’t been to Athens in more than eighty years, almost before the Queendom’s founding, and hadn’t heard even the slightest news of it since moving up to his little planet in the Kuiper Belt. By now, he supposed the city could look like anything: a dome or a beehive or a forest of sky-scraping towers, perhaps even a restoration of its dusty classical grandeur. There was no limit to what people could do these days, or at any rate there shouldn’t be.

“Wow,” Vivian said as she clambered up beside Bruno. “Look at this place. What a terrible shame.”

“You should have seen it before,” Marlon, who was right behind her, said. The words came slowly, and the bitterness fell away from his voice in midsentence, leaving only surprise and regret and, it seemed, finally some giddy realization that he was lucky to be alive.

Time doubled back on Bruno for a moment; he recalled the Sabadell-Andorra event, ninety-two seconds of explosive shaking that had toppled trees and structures throughout the Ter valley. There’d been so much fear, so much damage, so much injury and death, a whole population battered out of its smug, suburban complacency. He remembered his neighbors standing on broken alley pavement, bitterly arguing and complaining about this and that crack in their house’s foundation until a man from across the street—whose name they had never known—walked over and handed them a peach.

“Bruised,” he said. “Won’t last an hour. Better eat it quick.” And then he’d walked back to his own house, a pile of shattered brick, to continue shoveling for anything salvageable. Then his neighbors had noticed Bruno looking at them, and had turned away with a funny kind of shame or guilt in their faces. Guilt at having survived. Bruno, overcome with quiet, unfocused affection, forgave them for it immediately.

That was how it had gone: the ones who lost everything, whose lives were separated completely from the material possessions that had seemed to define them, were the ones who somehow managed to take it in stride. Himself included, in a way, although it took some time to realize that Enzo and Bernice were not disgraced or somehow forgotten by his pursuit of happiness. That had been a terrible year—being a fifteen-year-old University student without parents, without a home—but by the following spring it had begun to seem like they’d simply stepped back, giving him the room he needed to grow.

He doubted there would ever be another disaster of comparable scale, on Earth or anywhere else—the Queendom was simply too safe a place for that. But perhaps, one way or another, there’d always be this scene: a man surveying the ruins of his home with sudden, passionate equanimity.

“You should have seen it,” Marlon said again, now with pride. He raised an arm to point. “I had olive trees over there. All down through here was running water and marble walls. Actual marble; I had it shipped up from Earth.”

“We’ll rebuild it,” Tamra promised, laying a purple-gloved hand on Marlon’s shoulder. “I’ll send my finest architect.”

Marlon managed a laugh that was only partly hollow. “There are no backups, Majesty—no complete record of the structure anywhere. Some photographs were published in my last biography, but that’s all. I didn’t want it duplicated, you see. Imitated, perhaps, but never duplicated. Even I don’t remember every detail. Ah, damn it, I’ll miss this place.”

And then his eyes misted with tears, and Bruno suddenly remembered that from the earthquake as well. Equanimity could be a fragile thing.

“We’ll build something different, then,” Tamra said gently.

“Yes. I suppose we will.”

Tamra’s hand still rested on Marlon’s thick shoulder padding; he probably couldn’t feel it, but certainly he could see it in his rearview mirrors. He knew it was there, and indeed something seemed to pass between the two of them, using that arm as a conduit. Bruno was uncomfortably reminded that Marlon Sykes had been Philander before him, and had, cumulatively, spent decades longer in Tamra’s presence than Bruno ever had.

“Come,” Bruno said softly, bending close to little Vivian as if to whisper in her ear. “Let’s, ah, examine the area, the two of us.”

One can’t whisper over an open frequency, though, not to one person. Marlon and Tamra both looked sharply at him, annoyed about something. Well, humph, what was he supposed to do? It seemed like a private moment, one they were certainly both entitled to, but was he to pretend he didn’t exist? To ignore their business here and stand around quietly until they were finished?

“Switch to Police Five,” Vivian said, in a tone that echoed Bruno’s murmur but was simultaneously commanding and self-conscious, as if she were covering or apologizing for a mistake he’d made.

“Excuse me?”

“The channel. We’re on Police One right now. The knob is here.” She jabbed a gauntleted finger at his forearm.

“Ah, I see.” Once they’d completed the switch and walked a few paces away he added, “That wasn’t very grown-up of you.”

“Well, I never said I was grown up, did I?”

“Tamra seems to believe it.”

Wood and marble chips crunched beneath their feet, trapped between boot soles and deck plates drawn together by the spacesuits’ safety grapples. They were strolling along a darkened… avenue, he supposed, their head- and hand-lights illuminating jagged stubs of building on one side and, on the other, the shattered remains of a canal, ice crystals glittering along what remained of its sides and bottom. Above, a pair of evidence technicians drifted by, their own lamps setting aglow the fragments of column and slab that spun slowly through the hanging dust.

“Tamra is benevolent,” Vivian said, “and inclined to see strengths. She’s very dear to me—I remember that much— but I’m not sure I’m quite the person she used to know.”

“Er, I’m sure they’ll find your full pattern eventually.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, “but I’ve lived that life already—her life, the older me. I remember a lot about her. If they did find and reinstantiate that pattern, I’d feel very close—very, um, empathetic—but whether I’d want to be her, to be recon-verged with her, I’m not so sure. Nobody has really asked me that.”

“Oh. I see.”

Vivian’s tone became sharp. “Do you? I don’t see how. People act like this is some kind of unfortunate setback for me. They act like they understand how hard it is for me right now, which they couldn’t possibly.”

“Hmm, well.” Bruno wished he could pinch his chin. “We all have our problems, I fear. I don’t suppose anyone understands the ones that other people have, but it shouldn’t stop them from trying. They know what a problem feels like, anyway. Your police do seem to understand a bit, to be making allowances for you. Even I, an outsider, can see how highly they think of you.”

“Or of her,” she said, making a face. When they’d crunched along a few paces more, she turned and asked him, “So what’s your problem? You’re rich; you own your own planet far, far away; and you once saved the entire Queendom from calamity. What makes you think you know the first thing about people’s troubles?”

“Brat,” he said to her, not unkindly. “If you were an adult, you wouldn’t ask a question like that. I get lonely sometimes. Often. It’s my wealth and my fame, far more than distance, that isolate me. People always seem to expect something of me, some wisdom or eloquence or leadership I’ve never known how to provide. I used to study history, looking for an archetypal figure to emulate when these occasions arose. A tycoon? A philosopher? A military conqueror? I even tried to dress the part, to look historical. But one day, I finally realized how absurd that was. There wasn’t anyone to emulate; civilization had changed too much, and human beings along with it. Changed because of me, I mean, because of things that I’d done. There were no other Declarant-Philander shatterers of worlds, certainly no immortal ones. No other men like me, ever. So really, I’m the archetype for future histories to deconstruct, and I fear that’s a lot of responsibility for one man to bear. Really, a lot.”

They’d stopped walking, and behind the dome of her helmet Vivian pursed her lips and considered his words for several long seconds. “You’re a megalomaniac,” she said finally.

He burst out laughing. “Ho! From the mouths of babes. Indeed, I do think highly of myself. But others do, as well, and not in quite the right way. They admire—too well!—a person who isn’t really me.”

Vivian looked thoughtful. “So you don’t know how to be yourself, without letting other people down. That’s your problem. You feel like everyone’s looking, like they know more than you do about how you should act or what you should do. That’s our problem, both of us.”

He nodded. “All right, that seems a fair comparison.”

The smile she offered him then was self-conscious and self-deprecating, though not actually apologetic. “I suppose a lot of people feel that way. There’s probably nothing so special or unique about it. We all share the same neural architecture, right? Approximately? How embarrassing, to think my traumas and tragedies could be so banal.”

“Shocking indeed,” Bruno agreed, deciding that this girl was every bit as formidable as Tamra and the police seemed to think. “You’re beginning to understand. That’s what growing up means: a good understanding of one’s own banality. But of course, we’re all different and special, too.”

“Oh, joy.” She laughed.

He laughed with her. “Does that sound trite, Vivian? I don’t mean it that way. Whatever unique gifts we possess— things that can’t be had from any other source—those are things we should cultivate. Even if they’re absurd, even if they’re downright counterproductive, they’re the only true signs that we, our own unique selves, were ever here at all. I suppose that’s why crimes are committed; sometimes, that’s the only calling card a person knows how to leave.”

Vivian flung her arms out and tipped her head back inside its clear bubble. “Ah! Right! We should simply let people blow up their enemies and throw Ring Collapsiters into the sun. Thank you, Declarant. To think I’ve been wasting all this effort enforcing laws. Why, it’s all so clear to me now!”

“Ah, you’re a rotten child. I suppose we’re all rotten children, though. In a thousand years, you’ll look back on this conversation and laugh. A young de Towaji, presuming to lecture. On manners, no less!”

Her giggle was pleasant. “You’re funny. Did you know that?”

“Funny? Hrumph,” he replied, feeling a gate slam down suddenly on his good cheer. Tamra used to think he was funny, too, used to laugh along with his observations and suggestions and spontaneous displays of good cheer. What had happened to those days? Why had he found them unsustainable? So many of his archetypes were curmudgeons, or at least he imagined them that way; but was there anything as ridiculous as a curmudgeonly child‘? What a thing to look back on, a thousand years hence. A young de Towaji, presuming to curmudge.

Vivian eyed him and frowned, looking ready to scold. He deserved a scolding for letting his mood collapse like that, for being so damnably self-conscious that a simple compliment should shut him up. But what she said was, “I wonder if she did this, if she had a conversation like this one at this exact point in her life. I don’t see how she could have. It’s all very illuminating, very opinion shaping, and unfortunately that means I really am diverging, becoming a noticeably different person than her. Bruno, what if they do find her? What am I going to do then?”

For all its suppleness, the spacesuit didn’t seem to permit much of a shrug. Not one that she’d see, anyway. “I think you can decide that when it happens. Why worry now? There’s no need to be hasty, not when we’re going to live forever. Perhaps you could be her daughter, or her younger sister, and you could live together in Boston or Calcutta or Cairo, one of the Children’s Cities.”

“I already have a mother. Where do you think I live?”

“Ah. Well, perhaps you’ll find this woman is you, or the part of you that you feel is missing. You could even combine, the two of you, into a third distinct person, and all three go on with separate lives. The physical barriers to that sort of thing were all broken years ago; imagination really is the only limit.

“Hmm.” She mulled that over, nodding slowly. “You are wise, in a way. Nobody else has suggested any of this. I’ll consider it; I really will. And meanwhile, I do have my work to keep me busy.”

“Ah, yes. Your work.”

She thrust her chin out. “I do enjoy it, you know. Nobody will play games with me anymore, but an inspector’s role is a game. Even if everyone does insist on treating me like a grown-up, I find the mental challenges stimulating. Take that brick over there.” She pointed at one as it drifted through their beams a few meters ahead. “It tells a whole story, if you know how to read it. Marble, right? But it’s darkened; it looks foamy and waxy and brittle. Something’s happened to it.”

“To all the stone,” Bruno agreed, looking around. “It’s probably secondary radiation. The energy beam struck a channel through solid matter from one side of the house to the other, presumably vaporizing it, and the vaporized matter re-released some of that energy in a different form.”

“Different how?” she asked, her face growing more animated, more interested.

“I don’t know,” he said, attempting another shrug. “Something charged, I’d expect. That wreaks chemical havoc with most materials. There’s no measurable radiation now, so it’d have to be something with a very short half-life, like maybe pions. Actually, that makes sense: neutrons decaying into protons and pions would transmute some of the calcium to scandium, the oxygen to fluorine, and the carbon to nitrogen. Some of the protons, stripped away by the impact of high-energy pions, simply become hydrogen atoms, and finally the whole mess recombines at high temperature, creating… what? Fluoroapatite, scandium formates, and tar? Is that consistent with what we’re seeing?”

Vivian’s eyes glittered. “What would cause that? What would make those particles act that way?”

“A nasen beam,” Bruno answered, feeling the hairs prickle up on the back of his neck. “It’d have to be a powerful one; the overwhelming majority of neutrinos wouldn’t interact at all.”

“I see. And weren’t you looking for a nasen beam projector already?”

“Indeed,” he said. “Indeed. It needn’t be large, just an oblate, monocrystalline diamond with wellstone emitters at either end, and a very good heat sink attached. You could easily fit one in your police cruiser, although the energy to fire it would have to be stored somewhere. A superconducting battery holding… what? A petajoule? That would be substantial. Larger than this house, I think. A little larger. So you’d need a big ship, or a ground base somewhere. Tracing from Shiao’s reconstruction we might…”

He realized he was talking to a dead channel; Vivian had just jabbed the frequency controls on her forearm, and while she was nodding and looking right at him, she was suddenly speaking to someone else, in a voice Bruno couldn’t hear. After a moment, she took out a wellstone pad and studied it.

Bruno tried Police One. “Something interesting?”

She looked up and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve relayed your deduction to Shiao. He’s backtracking to the time of impact. Is there any way to know how far the beam traveled before arriving here?”

Bruno again tried to pinch his chin, and was frustrated by the invisible barrier of his helmet dome. “How far? Let’s see. Nasen beams focus tightly, but disperse over large distances. Six meters wide at the impact site? Is there a difference in diameter from one hole to the other? I suppose we don’t know which is the entrance wound and which the exit, but if one is wider than the other—by a very small amount, you understand—the resulting cone should point straight to the source. Well, coupled with the exact impact time and rotation rate.”

“Shiao?” Vivian prompted.

“Processing,” Shiao replied. A Shiao. His voice was deep, and if not completely humorless, then at least solidly professional. His tone made a promise of the word, a reassurance to the many victims of this crime. Light beams swept and flashed the ruins as evidence techs—apparently communicating on some channel of their own—swarmed to take the appropriate measurements.

“Patience is the hard part,” Vivian remarked, with a sidelong glance at Bruno.

But it was Shiao who replied. “Of course, Commandant-Inspector. I apologize for the delay. I’m refining the reconstruction, and should be finished right… now. I have the position: three AUs distant, in the asteroid belt. Referencing ephemeris data. Confirmed: no charted celestial object would have been in that location at that time.”

“A ship, then?” Vivian asked.

“Most likely, Commandant-Inspector. I’ll send out an all-points. Do either of you have suggestions regarding a description?”

“A solid battery somewhat larger than this house,” Bruno answered. “Either moving very slowly, or carrying an even bigger tank for tritium fuel. It should be fairly unmistakable, actually.”

And then Marlon’s voice came through. “Hello? Did we miss something? I believe we’re looking for a spaceship carrying large batteries, and a nasen projector.”

Chapter Twelve in which a strange creature is discovered

After that there was a great deal of radio traffic with Earth and Mars and a number of space traffic control stations, as the police sought a ship of the appropriate dimensions speeding— or drifting—away from the appropriate coordinates. But it was slow traffic, light-lagged, some of it routed the long way around the sun, to receivers way off on the other side. Bruno began to appreciate how the Bureaucracy, painfully efficient in so many other regards, could finally chafe against this barrier— the speed of light—that no persuasion or fiat or veto could soften for them.

It was as if Mars and Earth existed in a different time, in some parallel universe whose clocks ran perpetually behind. How distracting, when one’s work demanded prompt coordination! Hence the Ring Collapsiter, first link in a network of supraluminal conduits that might finally join the disparate worlds together in a single moment. Or an entirely smaller span of moments, at least.

“While they’re settling this,” Tamra said to Bruno, with an offhand wave at Vivian and Cheng Shiao and the evidence technicians, “would you please go have a word with the press? They’re massed outside by the thousands, understandably curious. I think a word from you at this point would be reassuring.”

Bruno opened his mouth to protest, to point out how generally poor he was at that sort of thing, but the words didn’t form. He couldn’t convey the idea, because in fact he didn’t believe the idea. How surprising! Yes, he was the expert here, the person who could best explain what had probably happened. Any claims to the contrary would go beyond modesty, into simple cowardice and obstruction. And anyway, the police were busy and Tamra herself was still consoling Marlon, while Bruno had no obvious duties just now.

Finally, he nodded. “Of course, Highness. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He dithered for a moment, wondering where exactly he should go, until he spied starlight through the one of the gaping holes the nasen beam had left. He strode toward it, crunching over dust and rubble and swaths of bare metal hull, swinging wide around the now barely visible foundations of a couple of structures. The dissolution of Sykes Manor was still ongoing, the remaining bits and pieces slowly losing cohesion and joining the nebula of floating debris. As he approached the hole, he saw there was a good deal of garbage floating outside as well, slowly leaking from the hull’s double wound, forming expanding clouds that would, eventually, become rings encircling the sun itself, like a kind of miniature, invisibly diffuse asteroid belt.

The last few steps were more difficult; he couldn’t suppress the idea that the opening pointed dawn, that another few steps would cast him, screaming and helpless, into the infinity of space. Rubbish, of course; his boot grapples would simply swing him around, pulling in whatever direction they happened to be facing, until finally he stood on the outside of the hull looking “down” into the inside. But still, the bottoms of his feet tingled, and he wished he could wipe away the mist of sweat that sprang nervously from his forehead.

As promised, the eyes of the news cameras glittered at him like a wall, hundreds or possibly thousands of them hovering right at the limit of their invisible, three hundred-meter cordon around Her Majesty’s person.

He switched the control on his forearm to the PRESS/ PUBLIC ACCESS setting. “Hello?” he uttered tentatively.

Questions besieged him instantly, a hundred voices all yammering at once, with a sound like amplified static. He thought he heard the words “queen” and “house” and “collapsiter” in there a few times, but perhaps those were just his expectations, overlaid against the noise.

He held up a hand and shouted. “Please!” The noise quieted somewhat. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Be silent! Silent!” Within a few seconds, the hubbub stilled. He lowered his hand. “Thank you. Good afternoon. I am de Towaji, summoned here as part of the Royal Committee for Investigation of, uh. Ring Collapsiter Anomalies. There is reason to believe this structure was damaged by a coherent energy burst called a ‘nasen beam,’ fired by a spaceship the police are still trying to locate. This ship may also have been involved in the most recent disruption of the Ring Collapsiter’s suspension mechanisms, although we have no direct proof at this time. Investigation is of course ongoing. I have no predictions as to when, uh, any resolution may come about. And now, if you require more specific information, I’m willing to answer a few questions.”

To avoid a tsunami of replies, he thought to point toward a specific region of the flattened swarm, a cluster of four or five cameras, and to say, “You, yes.”

The response was immediate. “Sir, have you resumed sexual relations with Her Majesty?”

Bruno sighed. “Is that all you people ever think about? The Queendom is in peril, you know. Are there any serious or technical questions?”

There almost certainly were, but something in his tone put them off, made the cameras worried or confused. Sykes Manor sat halfway between the orbits of Earth and Venus and was not, at this time of year, actually close to either of them. So the cameras were almost certainly autonomous, loaded with their owners’ instruction sets and stripped-down personality images and fired off on absurdly hasty trajectories to gather up what news they could. Given a few seconds to collect their miniature wits, or a few tens of seconds to confer with their distant owners, the cameras’ processors might well have come up with an intelligent question or two; surely some of them were from research or educational outfits, or other nontabloid press.

But Bruno, already bored with his role as spokesman, didn’t give them a few seconds. Instead, he waved a dismissive hand and said, “Bah, you have the gist of it already. The details, when we know them, will be released in some sort of interactive document. Meanwhile, Marlon Sykes and Deliah van Skeltering are coping with their misfortune, while their murderer is sought.”

“Declarant,” one brave camera finally asked, “will this report include your solution to the Ring Collapsiter’s fall?”

“I have no solution to that,” Bruno said grumpily. “At the moment, I’m not certain there is one.”

The cameras met that remark with stunned silence. Oh. So much for his being reassuring.

“Er, that is, I’ve only been here a few hours. And as such things go, they’ve been rather busy hours. When I’ve had time to study the problem more completely, I’ll… Well, it’s just premature right now.”

Bother it, he was bad at this. Annoyed, he cut the channel and walked away. Tamra should have had better judgment than to send him out here like this, unsupervised.

On his way, he nearly walked into one of the many Cheng Shiaos that filled Sykes Manor; the Shiao was standing there in the gloom, his back turned, his lights pointing up at distant rubble, and Bruno half mistook him for a pillar until the lights turned suddenly toward him.

“Goodness, Shiao, you startled me.”

Shiao gave a ritual nod. “Excuse me, Declarant. The fault is mine. To update you on what’s happening: the suspect vessel has been pinpointed, and has refused radio contact or else been unable to establish it. Its registration number, which we’ve been able to read optically from the exterior hull, shows ownership by something called the Titania Mineralogical Concern. This registry may be forged or stolen, though; the application was filed eighty years ago, for an eight-berth personnel ferry much smaller than this vessel, by the name of Lupin II.”

“Ah,” Bruno said. “I see, yes. And this other ship, the one you’ve actually spotted, does it have a name?”

Shiao looked troubled. “It does, sir. HMS De Towaji’s Bane. You’ll, ah, be pleased to know that the nearest Constabulary cruiser is already en route toward it, with a SWAT boarding party and a full suite of armaments. ETA five hours, twenty-two minutes.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, taken aback. “My own bane, is it? I should be flattered, I suppose. And a boarding party, you say? You’ll certainly want to identify the nasen beam projector—it should be outside the hull, possibly in a pod of some sort, with its heat sink located opposite the projection aperture. The device also needs to be completely free of mechanical vibrations for several minutes before it’s fired, so if anyone aims it at your cruiser there should be ample warning to move out of the way. You needn’t move far—even a few meters would suffice. Just enough that the beam will miss if it isn’t realigned.”

“Thank you, Declarant,” Shiao said, sounding impressed and concerned and genuinely grateful. “That advice could well save lives today.”

“Think nothing of it,” Bruno returned, waving a hand. “My own life may well be among them, as this bears directly on the Ring Collapsiter investigation. You’re prepared to fax the Royal Committee aboard for the encounter?”

Shiao’s jaw tightened visibly, but all he said was, “Absolutely, sir. Arrangements are already underway.”

A Constabulary boarding action turned out to be a remarkably dull affair. This one did, anyway, since the “suspect vessel,” Bruno’s very own personal bane, his hashashin, his self-styled mortal enemy, never once engaged its engines or aimed its nasen projector or reoriented its hull in any way. It might almost have been a derelict, a ghost ship drifting empty through space, if not for the winking of running lights, clearly visible through the new cruiser’s telescopes. Too, the cruiser’s captain reported that the suspect vessel did occasionally fire a puff of gas from its maneuvering thrusters. “Momentum wheel desaturation,” he explained cryptically. “For control of their altitude, which appears to be fixed in inertial space.”

Ordinarily, Bruno would have pressed for a more detailed explanation, but he’d been drawn into a royal game of doubles poker and dared not let his attention wander too far for too long lest young Vivian kick his armored shin with the remarkably armor-rattling toe of her space boot. They’d all taken a quiet dinner and fresh-air break back on Tongatapu before coming here, but they’d been back in suits and helmet domes for over two hours now, and it had been getting somewhat tiresome. Finally Vivian had faxed up a set of magnetic playing cards and convinced Tamra to make their use an Official Business of the Royal Committee.

Ordinarily, Bruno would have objected to such gross misuse of his person at a time like this. He’d done so often enough in his days at Tamra’s palace, when matters were—to put it mildly—a good deal less urgent. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to refuse Vivian Rajmon; if the Queendom could put its children to work in such hazardous circumstances, chasing after their elders’ banes and suchlike, then said Queendom should at least indulge, when possible, said children’s need for play. He’d even surprised himself by enjoying the game a little. He and Vivian had narrowly won the match with three games out of five, although Deliah and Marlon had won the other two, and the odd pairing of Tamra with Cheng Shiao had presented substantial resistance throughout. Vivian seemed more childish than ever, or perhaps the term would be childlike, since she manifested it mainly in pleasant ways. Even Tamra seemed to notice the difference, and to look on her little Commandant-Inspector a bit more thoughtfully.

But another hour later even that was finished, and the SWAT robots were strapping them all into recessed acceleration couches as the final rendezvous and boarding action approached. The ship’s bulkheads swam with wellstone designs, hypercomputers forming and reforming and vanishing and forming again, their innards no doubt buzzing with strategic and tactical analyses. Ironically, this superficial turmoil required nothing of Bruno and was in fact his first real chance to sit still and think. He took full advantage of it by refining, in his mind, the exact scenario by which a single ship, with a single nasen beam projector, might weaken and contaminate nearly a third of the Ring Collapsiter’s arc. He came up with a number of plausible mechanisms and finally settled on one that best fit the observed facts: the ship had sat up here in the asteroid belt and fired almost tangentially, the most glancing of blows, cutting a chord about half a kilometer sunward of the collapsiter’s rim.

At that range, the beam would be about twice as wide as the collapsiter itself, but the sun’s gravity—and indeed the collapsiter’s own gravity—would pull the beam out of true, curve it around like a stream of water firing out of a hose. If the top of the beam’s arc touched the Ring Collapsiter just so, then instead of punching two neat holes through the ring, as it had through Marlon’s house, it would instead follow the ring’s curvature around, plowing a swath right through it, perhaps for millions of kilometers. Hmm. He’d have to work the actual math on that one; curiosity aside, the results might be needed as evidence in court.

Cheng Shiao settled into the berth across from his and was instantly immobilized by straps and webbing.

“So,” Bruno asked him, “if you don’t mind my asking, how does one rise to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Constabulary?”

Shiao, still attempting to settle into a more comfortable position, looked puzzled. “Rise, sir? I was appointed to this rank directly.”

“Truly? With no prior experience?”

“Correct.”

“How strange. On what… basis was this appointment made?”

“Exam scores, sir. And general inclination. I won’t bore you with the story.”

“No, indeed, I’m asking you to. I begin to realize how little I know about the modern Queendom.”

Shiao met his gaze. “Are you certain you want the full details? Because there’s some violence involved. I was in Qingdao, walking along the Yanan Lu on my way to the job interview, which was well outside the business district, in a warehouse area I didn’t know well. It was two-ten in the afternoon; there wasn’t much traffic. As I was walking, I passed what appeared to be an abandoned building, with two males standing on the front steps. They were dressed in reflective jackets and sunglasses, and appeared unusually alert.”

“Nervous, eh?”

“No, sir, just the opposite. My strong impression at the time was that they were guards. Not professional security, you understand—they were kempt and well dressed, but there was no impression of legitimacy about them. It seemed to me that they were posted there explicitly to intimidate passersby. I suspected that some business was going on inside the building, and there was a desire to prevent interruptions.”

“Or witnesses.”

“Exactly, yes.”

“So what did you do? You weren’t a police officer at all at that point, were you?”

“I belonged to a neighborhood watch organization in Xingtai. But you’re correct: I had no official standing in the city of Qingdao. I wasn’t licensed to carry weapons or interfere with lawful enterprise. But the situation looked bad, like someone could easily get hurt.”

“Including yourself,” Bruno noted.

“Yes, sir. I was acutely aware of the fact—any suspicious action on my part could tip them off. Even simply walking past might do it; the smart thing would have been to just turn around the moment I saw them. But I believe in the law. I believe that no one has the right to violate it, especially in flagrant ways that breed disrespect. Calling the police would have been an option, but I worried the suspects would be long gone by the time an officer materialized.”

“A curious worry. What did you do?”

Shiao shrugged. “I called myself at home, and then while the line was open I rapidly approached the two suspects. ‘I need your help,’ I said to them. ‘Someone is chasing me.’ It’s doubtful they would have believed this story for long, and possibly they saw at once what I was doing, which was capturing their coordinates and their images to a remote location. But what certainly gave me away was my own voice on the telephone, screaming that I should get out of there immediately. I was younger then, more impulsive, but it turned out to be good advice: the nearer suspect drew a laser pointer and burned the left side of my face straight through to the bone.”

“Good gods!”

“He was aiming for the phone,” Shiao explained, “and he hit it. At that moment I myself was still an incidental target. Since I was already running, I took advantage of the distraction to engage the suspect physically.”

Bruno didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “Surely you must have been in agony!”

Again, Shiao shrugged. “I assume so. By the time the city police arrived, I was dead, so I never did learn how it all turned out. We didn’t have the kind of scene reconstructions that we do nowadays; it became something of a town mystery. AH I can say is that one suspect was picked up at the scene, having been detained there by an injury, and the other was identified and arrested later based on the video I’d captured. No other associates were ever explicitly identified.”

Shiao’s voice had never once wavered from the precise, restrained, overpolite monotone that had marked good police officersJor centuries, perhaps forever. There was no room for boast or modesty in that tone: the account was purely factual and devoid of emotional overtone, laid out plainly for Bruno’s evaluation. Shiao’s eyes had not looked clouded or sentimental as he told the tale of this major turning point in his life.

“I daresay these gentlemen benefited from the lesson,” Bruno ventured.

Shiao nodded. “I like to think so, sir. A policeman’s job is to chill and frustrate crime—merely punishing it is a symptom of failure.”

“I suppose so, yes. Very insightful. I’m surprised they didn’t promote you directly to captain.”

Again, a factual monotone. “I failed the aptitude, sir. I hope to grow and season with age, but today the Constabulary has dozens of better cops than myself.”

“Dozens? Really?” Bruno blanched inwardly at the thought. With forty billion citizens to choose from, the Queendom certainly had no shortage of compulsive savants to fill its payroll. Better than filling it with incompetents, obviously, but there was something frightening about a really gung-ho interplanetary police force. “I shall be very careful to obey the laws, I think.”

“That’s the idea, sir.” Then, catching something in Bruno’s look, Shiao said, “It makes some people nervous, this kind of concentrated authority. I understand the feeling. But I can assure you of the Constabulary’s complete intolerance for bad cops. Any crook or bigot in our midst, or even a well-meaning authoritarian, would be disowned and prosecuted immediately. Of the seven thousand, six hundred, and eight applicants for the position of lieutenant, more than eighty percent failed the moral aptitude screening.”

“Seven thousand!” Bruno said, surprised. “Goodness, that’s a lot of applicants. What happened to all of them?”

“A few are taken on each year as sergeants,” Shiao replied, “and since local and regional forces have less stringent entrance criteria, they absorb a lot of our near misses.”

“Mmm. How many is a lot?”

Shrug. “Probably a few hundred, that year.”

“And the rest?”

Shiao considered for a few seconds before answering, “I would guess many of them found work in support roles: admin, theory, equipment testing. And there’s always a need for critics and advocates in the policy arena. And actors for the training demos, and I suppose for commercial movies as well. Actors who really understand the police are rare.”

“And the rest?” Bruno persisted.

Now Shiao began to look uncomfortable, and Bruno sensed he was edging into taboo territory. In a meritocracy, what happened to people who lacked merit? People who were lazy or impulsive or foolish could change, up to a point, but could they want to change?

“Neighborhood Watch is a respectable job,” Shiao answered finally. “And they’ll take almost anyone.”

“Almost,” Bruno mused. “Mmm. And the rest?”

Shiao sighed. “There’s always crime itself, sir. It’s not generally a career choice for geniuses.”

“Ah. I suppose not. Seems a bit unfair, though.”

Shiao, to Bruno’s surprise, seemed to find that funny. “They certainly think so, sir. But good and evil are choices, not fates handed out at birth. We’re talking, probably, about fewer than a hundred of those seven thousand applicants, and if you actually met them, you might find your sympathies reduced.”

“Ah. Maybe so. You’ve little hope of promotion, then? It sounds like an awfully rigid structure.”

“They all are, sir. To get promoted I’d have to displace someone more experienced, which is a huge effort even to attempt. And my own job goes open for recompetition every decade, so I could well be demoted if I start to get sloppy. In theory, we’re encouraged to see demotion as a positive career move—point of maximum competence, as they say. But that’s a fairly new idea. ‘Rigid structure’ is an accurate description. But of course, we’re planning for the long term these days.”

“Mmm. Indeed.”

Shiao had nothing further to say. Neither did Bruno. The conversation was at an end.

The actual docking and boarding were so uneventful Bruno nearly missed them; the cruiser simply pulled up alongside the suspect vessel, selected a standard docking adapter, and mated airlocks with nary a thump. Only when Shiao’s harnesses retracted and vanished and the SWAT robots started running in puppetlike synchrony toward the hatch, flicking on their optically superconducting outer jackets so that they vanished from sight—only then did Bruno realize what was happening. Hastily, he unstrapped himself, prepared to follow once the area was “secured.” This had been explained to him at length—whether he left a copy behind or not, he was neither to risk himself nor interfere with tactical or evidentiary procedures unless some very clear and pertinent reason presented itself.

It took a whopping forty-five seconds to secure the suspect spaceship.

“One occupant,” the human SWAT commander stated flatly as he materialized to usher the royal committee from their berths. “A modified human, male, deceased.”

“Modified?” Bruno asked, curious and a little afraid. “Deceased?”

“You’ll see.”

“Hmm.”

The inside of the ship was remarkably cramped and colorless, like a half dozen prison cells strung end to end. The ship was much smaller on the inside than the outside, since after all it was mostly engine, fuel tank, and superconducting battery. But it was so dim, so ugly. There were no windows of any kind, and no effort had been made to smooth or pad the many corners, nor to hide the various plumbing and wiring that connected the ship’s systems. It looked like a utility closet, and would have been an inhospitable place even without the twenty black-shelled SWAT robots crowding it.

The “one occupant” lay on a kind of acceleration couch near the ship’s bow, from which all manner of hoses and cables radiated. The couch appeared to be the ship’s only actual furnishing. The “deceased” status of said occupant was obvious; Bruno’s external air pressure gauge read a flat 0.00, and the figure was naked, somewhat shriveled looking, and was both covered and surrounded by odd pools and knobs and jagged crystals of red-colored ice. “Male” was there for anyone to see, and as for “modified human,” well, that was unequivocal as well; there were wires and tubes feeding into every part of the dead man’s body. The ones running into his head looked blackened and scorched and melted, as if they’d carried a brief but enormous electrical surge.

The fact that he had six arms—each gripping its own joystick on the wide, gray shoulders of the couch—was actually one of the least disturbing things about him. People hadn’t done this much in Bruno’s day, wholesale modifications of their body forms, but even then, the absence had been recognized as a matter of fashion. The idea itself was hardly a shocking one, given that the capability was there in any fax machine.

What did shock Bruno was that the face, shriveled and bloody and burned as it was, looked painfully familiar. “I know this man,” he said, and his voice sounded unnerved even to him. “I’ve seen him. On my last visit to the Queendom, I think. On Maxwell Monies, on Venus.”

“It’s Wenders Rodenbeck,” Tamra agreed, and her voice sounded unnerved as well. “The playwright.”

“Activist against collapsium,” Deliah added. “Yes, we hear from him frequently at the ministry. I’ve never known him to wear six-armed body forms, though, nor to travel in space. He’s the typical hypocrite: faxing himself daily through the collapsiter grid he claims to despise. He’s pleasant about it, though—a natural charmer. I actually like him. Can this be the same person?”

“Where are his injunctions and restraining orders now?” Marlon murmured, as if to the body itself. “Is this his final settlement, a head full of burnt wires? I’ll wager I know Wenders better than any of you. A happy prankster, yes. Now a killer? Now lying here with six arms, and blood all over his face? Is this a trick? God, excuse me, I think I’m going to vomit.”

And so he did, inside the bowl of his helmet. Familiar with the hazard, the SWAT robots slapped his purge valve, then whisked him away to the fax machine before he could move wrong or breathe wrong and suck down a choking glob. Crystals of purged, rapidly freezing vomit spun after him, as if terrified of being abandoned here without him.

“Cause of death,” Cheng Shiao said gently, looking down at a wellstone pad, “probable suicide. He left a note. An entire log, actually, detailing his activities for the past seven years. Assuming it’s accurate, this would appear to be our man.”

Vivian regained her maturity and summoned Wenders Rodenbeck right there to De Towaji’s Bane for questioning. Did he know anything about this ship or its business? Did he wish any harm to the Queendom, or bear a grudge against any of its officials or luminaries?

Rodenbeck, bleary eyed, hanging there in zero atmosphere in a spacesuit he’d never been trained to use, could only stammer his replies: No, no, not at all. Never!

The Queendom recognized no right to remain silent under questioning; every response was compulsory, and subject to analysis by the finest lie detectors, stress analyzers, and personality emulators of the Royal Constabulary. If he was innocent of the crime being investigated, all records of this conversation would be purged from the interrogators’ minds, leaving them to speculate about any other infelicities or malfeasances he might have revealed under questioning. And any distress he suffered would be measured with exacting precision, and a proper compensation calculated and dispensed. But in the meantime, the twin priorities of public safety and swift justice held sway, and his brain was theirs to pick.

Bruno had never imagined himself in such a position before; it troubled and embarrassed him, dirtied him in some ill-defined way. Perhaps the experience would be erased, though; Rodenbeck did appear both innocent and distressed. “I’m an artist,” he protested repeatedly. “I love the Queendom—I’ve gone to considerable pains to protect it against its own excesses. And always within the framework of the law! Well, nearly always…”

“Ah,” Vivian said then, with a knowing look. “Yes. Indeed.”

Bruno figured that would have been an unnerving thing under any circumstances, to be addressed that way by a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary. Hearing it from an eleven-year-old girl, though, seemed to tip Rodenbeck into hysteria. “Hey, I watch the news!” he shouted. “I’m not stupid. I know why I’m here! You think this Ring Collapsiter thing has anything to do with me? Do you really?”

“You have spoken out against it on lots of occasions,” Vivian pointed out. “And against its creators.”

“Of course! Its creators are guilty of the grossest irresponsibility and negligence, as demonstrated by their current difficulties. I protest the use of collapsium because it’s dangerous, because it poses a huge safety risk. I’m on the side of the angels, here, little girl. Why would I, why would I possibly do anything to enlarge that risk?”

Vivian, examining readings of some sort on her little well-stone pad, frowned at that. “Have you done anything to enhance the threat?”

“No.”

“Have you harmed anyone?”

“No.”

“Do you plan to?”

“No!”

She sighed then, and clunked her hand against the dome of her helmet in a manner all too familiar to Bruno—she’d been trying to touch her face. “Come look at a body with me, sir. You may find the experience disturbing.”

“Why? Whose body is it?”

“Yours.”

They strode the length of the ship, slipping past SWAT robots and royal bodyguards until they’d reached the strange acceleration couch. It had been fitted with a crinkly black plastic cover, but at Vivian’s nod the attendant Shiao unhooked its fasteners and peeled it away, revealing the body beneath.

Rodenbeck recoiled. “Eew. Is that real? Is that supposed to be we?‘”

“It is you, sir,” Vivian said. “Bioassay confirms it’s an accurate copy whose pattern began divergence from yours approximately seven years ago. It shows several fax markers in that first year, each with body modifications associated, and nothing at all after that. Reconstruction shows it’s been physically grafted to that chair for sixty-two months, nine days. Unfortunately, the brain suffered extensive damage in the surge that killed it, so its memories are not available to us. Do you have any idea what this… individual… might have been up to?”

Rodenbeck started to say something, but fainted instead.

Vivian sighed, and said to Shiao, “Get him out of here; take him home. He doesn’t know anything.”

Shiao straightened. “Right away, Commandant-Inspector. I agree with your analysis.”

“Relax, Lieutenant. Please.”

“Yes’m. Absolutely.”

When Shiao had gone, Tamra whirled around and pointed an angry finger at the body. “This creature did well to kill itself—I’d see it jailed for a million years! Yet Rodenbeck, who is the creature, is innocent? Explain this to me, Vivian. Why did you let him go?”

“Because he’s innocent,” Vivian said simply, attempting a shrug inside her suit. “We see this sometimes: compartmen-talization of intent. We all have copies running around, true? Sometimes, one of them will diverge, and decide it’s not part of the canonical individual anymore. Could be a traumatic experience, could be almost anything, really. All of a sudden, you have this person with Wenders Rodenbeck’s history and knowledge, but not his actual sense of identity. Maybe he’s smug, he figures he knows something that’s fundamentally changed him. So he changes his body, changes his name, stays out of fax machines—which would not only log his existence, but might eventually report his movements back to the real Rodenbeck and charge him transit fees for every step!

“So this copy lives in the shadows for a while, without the social pressures or accountability he’s accustomed to, and whatever funny ideas he has in his head start to seem reasonable. Rodenbeck isn’t a criminal, but this—all right, this creature—isn’t Rodenbeck anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.”

“And this happens often?” Tamra demanded, her tone indicating just how well she liked this sort of thing going on under her nose behind her back.

“Not often,” Vivian said. “But sometimes. I remember maybe, like, three cases of this since human-capable faxes first became available. I’m not really sure; you’d have to ask Shiao for the details.”

Bruno, finally moved to speak, said, “I don’t think I like the implications, here. Living alone causes genocidal mania? Do you think I’m at risk, mademoiselle? I’d resent that notion very much!”

Vivian eyed him clinically for several seconds. “Well, I would say you’re at a higher risk for it than someone with equivalent intellect, but who’s better socialized. Don’t take that as an insult; genocidal mania is remarkably rare, even among hardened sociopaths, and you haven’t shown any of the marker behaviors.”

“Well. Humph. If I do lose my mind, perhaps you’ll be the first to know about it. This whole experience has been unsavory, and we’ve nothing to show for it, no villain to punish.”

“And the collapsiter is still falling,” Tamra pointed out angrily. “You do need to address that at some point, you know.”

Bruno gasped. “Goodness, I’d almost forgotten! It came to me, while the ships were docking; what if the ring were spun?” He turned to Marlon, who was drifting in dour silence at the other end of the ship, by the airlock. In an atmosphere he’d have been too distant for anything but a shouted conversation, but over suit radios it hardly mattered. “Marlon, the grapple stations all point straight down at the ring, yes? As much as possible given the damage, I mean. But imagine skewing them, pointing them a few degrees off to one side. That would create a torque which would spin the ring in place.”

“And reduce the upward pull on it,” Marlon said, straightening. “It would just fall in that much faster, until the attachment points had swung around to be underneath the grapples again.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, waving a finger at his colleague. “But we’d keep moving them, attaching to new points that were off to the side again. Like pushing a merry-go-round. If that torque were applied for long enough, the collapsiter would simply go into orbit around the sun.”

Marlon’s frown was clearly visible. “It’s fragile, Bruno. Until that muon contamination burns off, we hardly dare to touch the ring.”

“Really? Assuming any significant vibrations could be damped, we’d actually be reducing the strain on the collapsium lattice with every bit of velocity we added. It should take… what? A little over ten to the sixth meters per second to orbit it? It’d be self-supporting then, like the rings of Saturn, needing the grapple stations only to shepherd and stabilize it. At a tenth of a gee acceleration, that speed would take less than three weeks to achieve. Since we have ten months to play with, we could go all the way down to fifty milligee and still have margin to spare. I’ll need the math to be certain, but surely the lattice ought to tolerate that.”

“Gods of fucking algebra!” Marlon exclaimed. “It certainly should! It certainly should! Does it take a Declarant to see thatf”

And here, the police files recorded a distinct clunking noise over Marlon’s radio as he tried to slap himself in the forehead but hit only the solid helmet dome instead.

Chapter Thirteen in which a brilliant first step is taken

To Bruno’s surprise, the investigation didn’t stop there.

“We have old fax records to pore through,” Vivian explained in their parting conversation. “It’s possible there are alternate copies of the creature out there that may at least be accessories by foreknowledge. The original divergence may even have happened against Rodenbeck’s will, which would be a kind of kidnapping. And we have so many unexplained fax anomalies surrounding this thing. This could well take years to sort out, assuming it’s possible at all. But our duty is to try.”

“Well,” Bruno told her seriously, “far be it from me to stand in duty’s way, but do remember to act your age now and then, while you still have it. Enjoy your plight, for my sake if for no other reason. Most of us are only young once!”

That wasn’t a particularly funny comment, but they chuckled together at it just the same, and Deliah and Tamra and Cheng Shiao chuckled with them. Marlon simply glowered, apparently having decided yet again to be jealous of Bruno, after his recent whirlwind of media appearances had—to everyone’s surprise—actually gone rather well. Marlon himself had been invited to appear only as an afterthought or sidekick, or to answer for his errors, or as a substitute for Bruno when Bruno was unavailable.

Fortunately, Bruno’s availability was about to drop to zero; he was returning home tonight, delayed only by Her Majesty’s insistence. This was the last official meeting of the Royal Committee for Investigation of Ring Collapsiter Anomalies—thankfully abbreviated to RoCIRCA—and Tamra had assured all of them that attendance was compulsory. Thankfully, the location she’d reserved for it was Fangatapu, the Forbidden Beach near Tamra’s Tongan palace, where she’d arranged that the warm summertime sun should set through three separate layers of patchy cloud, making—they’d all agreed—for one of the most striking sunsets any of them had ever seen. And the blankets somehow never got sandy, and the drinks were just intoxicating enough that Bruno could quench his thirst pleasantly without fear of overindulgence.

“It’s been nice getting to know you,” Deliah said, filling an opening in the conversation. “I wish it could have been under different circumstances; it’s fair to say you haven’t seen me at my best. I’m actually a fairly together person.”

She’d expressed this sentiment before, so Bruno smiled for her and used the reply he’d rehearsed the night before. “Madam, it’s been a pleasure, and if it’s your worst side I’ve seen this past week, I suspect I’m unworthy company for the real you.”

She actually blushed at that, a fact in which Bruno took some satisfaction. Not bad for a recluse. Actually, he didn’t feel that his style or behavior had changed all that much, but people did seem to respond to him better these days, to find more enjoyment than discomfort in his company. Perhaps he’d simply been born with an old man’s personality and was finally growing into it, or at least learning to walk in the oversized shoes society had chosen for him.

“You’d make an excellent investigator,” Cheng Shiao told him a little while after that. “I’ve learned some things by watching you.”

Bruno suspected that was one of the highest compliments the man had at his disposal. His first impulse was therefore to brush it off, to deny it or make a poor joke of it, but with effort he restrained himself, nodded once, and returned with, “Your talent at reconstruction would serve brilliantly in any field of science. If Vivian here weren’t immortal, I’m sure you’d have her job someday.”

Shiao made a visible effort to smile at that. “I’m quite glad she is immortal, sir.”

“Naturally, yes. As we all are. But it does crush any hope of ambition, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so, sir. I suppose I’m fortunate not to have any.”

“As am I.” Bruno laughed. “And look where it’s got me. Still, I imagine your childhood on a bitter plateau somewhere, all rocks and weeds and poisonous snakes.”

Shiao smirked at that. “Sir, I grew up in a posh Xingtai suburb, with lemon-tea summers and snow-dragon winters, and everywhere the smell of roasted meat. Superstition thick enough to dance on—we had thousands of little gods running around, but no one particularly believed in them, not with fear and awe like a proper god should inspire. It was just one more lazy game to play; the whole place was a game. I like my life now because it’s serious, because what I do matters.

“It has nothing to do with place, really. You look at me and you see a stiff policeman, which is entirely correct. But it’s not an affliction, right? It’s an aspiration. There are personable, easygoing police as well, and we need them, because it takes a certain variety to balance out a force. From an early age, I guess you could say I cultivated myself to be the person I am, and really I’m very pleased it’s turned out so well.”

“Choosing to isolate and deprive yourself,” Bruno mused. “Why does that sound familiar?”

Shiao politely waved a hand. “Quite the opposite, sir; I enjoy being this way. It’s very rewarding.”

“It also suits his face,” Vivian added. “He has such stern features. You know that cartoon show, ‘Barnes and Manetti’? He looks just like Manetti sometimes. Talks like him, too.”

Shiao looked surprised. “Is that show still on? It’s true: Manetti was an idol of mine. Barnes always had it easy; he would just bend the rules more and more until a solution finally fell into his lap. Intimidation, tampering, unauthorized surveillance… He’s supposed to be the hero, right? Manetti is just an obstacle, this infuriating person standing between the perpetrators and their hard-won justice. But Manetti actually obeys the law, which is much harder. Doing the right thing is always harder. Barnes wouldn’t last two weeks in the Constabulary.”

“No,” Vivian agreed, “he certainly wouldn’t.”

A seagull screeched nearby, drawing everyone’s attention. For a while, they just watched the sunlight on the waves.

Finally, Tamra turned to Marlon. “Do you have any parting words for our guest of honor? If not, we might as well get on with this.”

“Thank him for his services,” Marlon said, with a good solid attempt at sincerity, “and wish him well in his research. I’ve little doubt there’ll be many more breakthroughs with his name attached.”

“Is that all?” Tamra prodded.

“I think so, yes.”

“No good-byes?”

“No. Life is long. The Queendom is small. He and I will be seeing each other again.”

She looked ready to respond to that, but finally shrugged. “All right, then. Bruno, I’ve kept the media away this time— cordon set at twenty kilometers—but I’m sure you understand, we can’t let you out of here without another Medal of Salvation.”

“No,” Bruno agreed ruefully, “I don’t suppose you can. Is this a ceremony, then?”

She shook her head. “You’ve earned the right to have this your way. But I will say thank you; you didn’t have to come help us again.”

“Oh, pish,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “Of course I did. I’m not half the misanthrope you seem to believe, dear. I do wish for people to be happy, free of harm, all that sort of thing. It’s just that usually I can best accomplish this by being far away; Rodenbeck is correct about one thing: collapsium research is fraught with perils. Marlon is braver than I, to risk his reputation so close to home.”

“That may be,” she conceded, silencing Marlon’s protest with a look. “And we wouldn’t dream of depriving you of your passions, nor of depriving ourselves of the benefits thereof. But we do miss you; surely you understand that.”

“I’ve never doubted it.”

“Well, then,” she said, and stuck out her hand, a little gold medallion dangling from it by a length of green ribbon. “Here’s your medal.”

He took it from her. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from having been in her pocket. Somewhat embarrassed, he nonetheless slipped the thing around his neck and let it hang.

The Royal Committee applauded politely for a full minute, at which point Tamra said, “All right, everyone, thanks for coming. Now I’ll ask you to excuse us.”

They all rose with a chorus of good-byes, to which Bruno responded with, surprisingly, a little lump in his throat. And then, without further ado, they were all walking away, blankets in hand, their rising conversation now with one another, rather than with Bruno. In another minute, he and Tamra were alone. They rose, leaving their own blankets behind for beach attendants to clean up, and made their way toward the fax gate that stood by the washrooms, just beyond the tree-line.

“You’re more regal than you used to be,” Bruno remarked. “More comfortable with your regality.”

She shrugged. “The people expect no less: elective monarchy is basically a scapegoating tactic.”

Bruno smirked at this; in Girona, the word “scapegoat” had meant, literally, a goat on whom the city’s problems were blamed. Every year, in a grand festival, the people would stack themselves into human pyramids—a prize for the highest! the widest! the jiggliest!—and then they’d throw this poor goat off a tower. No one particularly disputed the cruelty of the practice, but centuries of tradition weighed heavy then, as they probably did today.

Tamra, who knew all about the goat but apparently hadn’t made the connection, continued. “Once upon a time, democrats overthrew monarchs for the promise of freedom. What a laugh! As if responsibility and accountability were something people wanted for themselves! Freedom means finding someone else to worry about all the little details for you, and all the big details you’re too immersed in your life to see. People don’t want a dictator, obviously. Quite the contrary; they want a dictatee, a conscripted functionary who can be endlessly blamed and imposed upon. It is democracy, for all but the monarch herself.”

“Ah, but we love you in return,” Bruno pointed out. “And there’s a lot of money and privilege involved.”

“Yes. Yes, there is. And it-s my duty to enjoy and appreciate that, up to a point. But if I begin to feel entitled, I undermine the very principles of my office, and wherever I go I find myself sharply and impatiently reminded of the fact. They aren’t shy about it, these subjects of mine. Isn’t it the least bit ironic, Bruno, that a Queendom which seeks to match jobs to people for optimum happiness and efficiency also insists on, at best, grudging leadership at its highest levels? Isn’t that an odd thing?”

Bruno mused, then slowly nodded. “It is ironic, yes. But it’s hardly the only such irony. And I doubt it’s quite the conspiracy you suggest. People probably just want their money’s worth, and haven’t really reflected on how it affects you personally. Or perhaps they have, but they still feel—rightly, I think—that someone has to bear the responsibility. It’s not always for us to choose our fates.”

“Not for me, at any rate. I do like to imagine I’ve bought some freedom of choice for other people. But anyway, it’s not like I have anything else to compare my life to. I’m content enough, yes, through long practice and long experience. And like everyone else, I reserve the right to complain sometimes. You will attend me in this, Philander.”

“As you wish, Highness.” Bruno couldn’t quite hide his smirk. “You know, I wasn’t always so suave. You’re just about the only person who accepted me, in those days, exactly as I was.”

“Suave!” she laughed. “Well, that’s one word for it, I suppose, though not one that leaps most readily to mind. But seriously, Bruno, I don’t accept you. I never have; you’re not a very acceptable person. I love you, and that’s a very different thing.”

“Indeed,” he agreed. ‘Very different. I wouldn’t know what love was if not for you. It’s difficult to leave you here and go about my business; surely that’s understood.”

She looked sad then, which made him feel guilty. He almost decided right then to stay in the Queendom forever. Almost.

“Unfortunately,” she said, ”even twenty kilometers away, news cameras have an alarming ability to resolve fine details. If we were, say, to duck into one of these washrooms for even a moment, the headlines would last the rest of the year. So I’m afraid you must kiss me chastely on the lips, just once, and take your leave of me.”

“Yes, Highness,” he said, ever the obedient one, and complied exactly with her instructions.

“Oh, phooey,” she said, punching him lightly on the chest. “Is that the best you can do? Do my hints and temptations mean nothing?”

“That wasn’t very grown-up of you,” he said, feigning both pain and indignation.

“Who ever said I was grown up?” she returned, and pushed him bodily through the fax gate.

For once, he experienced a distinct sensation of travel; her laughter cut off instantly, and the cool touch of her hand seemed very distant indeed. Sweet sorrow? Pah, there was nothing sweet about it. On the other side was full daylight and a decidedly chilly breeze. The trees around him swayed, and the clouds scudded overhead like speeding aircraft, and the breeze became a wind that ruffled and flattened the meadow grass as he hurried toward his little white house.

Hurried, because he knew what happened next; even as the house opened a door for him, even as his staff of robots swarmed to pull him inside, the ground tilted beneath them all, then straightened, then tilted again the other way. The Onion! Blast it, he’d nearly forgotten. How was he going to dispose of that thing? Saving the Queendom was trouble enough, but this, this was difficult!

“Welcome, sir,” the house offered as gravity gradually returned to something approaching its normal magnitude and direction.

One of his robots fell over.

The others seemed not to notice it, except as an obstacle to be danced around or avoided altogether as they hurried to bring him food, drink, fresh clothes, or whatever it was they thought he needed right now. But to fall—such clumsiness was unheard-of, even in the face of the Onion’s disturbances. The one that had fallen had a scuffed, somewhat battered look to it, and presently it turned its blank metal face up toward Bruno in what could only be described as a pitiful manner, and emitted a sharp, questioning mewl.

Forgetting all else for the moment, Bruno cried out in surprise and delight and extended an eager hand toward the robot. “Hugo! Good God, man, you’ve learned to walk!”