The Collapsium

Chapter Fourteen in which an ancient question is revisited

Though Isaac Newton is best known for his pomiary investigations into the nature of gravity, he was in fact quite troubled by his findings. Action at a distance, an effect with no explicable cause? The idea would be preposterous if its truth weren’t so readily demonstrated. And while gravity was bothersome, inertia was by far the deepest thorn in his aristocratic hide, a thing he itched and scrabbled at right up to the final hours of his life.

A ship, he reasoned, must part the waters ahead of it, must push the waters aside to make a place for itself to move forward into. This requires energy; hence the need for sails, or oar-wielding galley slaves, or some other means to push against the water’s resistance. So perhaps the air and Earth and even the space between planets were permeated with a kind of fluid? One which resisted the acceleration of the bodies within it, creating this phantom “inertia” that seemed to constrain the motions of every object in God’s strange universe?

But if that were true, why would those selfsame objects, having been accelerated into motion, then remain in motion indefinitely? Why was the amount of force needed to decelerate an apple the same as that used to accelerate it in the first place? No ship had ever sailed thus; no fluid had ever allowed it. What properties would such an intangible fluid possess? Newton realized the question was fundamental, but after decades of pondering and wondering and quietly beseeching the powers of Heaven he was still no closer to understanding, and so he died.

What he didn’t know, of course, was that the “fluid” was none other than light, the half-filled photon states of the zero-point vacuum churning in a perpetual storm of electric and magnetic potentials, which in turn resisted—and continue even now to resist—the acceleration of quarks and other charged particles. Since this field is isotropic, or uniform in all directions, and Lorentz-invariant, or uniform at all velocities, a force is required to alter the path or speed of any charged particle, on any trajectory at any time, anywhere in the universe. And since the interaction of charge with the zero-point field is precisely what gives rise to the illusion of “matter,” the force required to accelerate an object winds up being directly proportional to its mass.

For nearly three centuries after Newton, philosophers were content to regard this “inertia” as some inherent property of matter, axiomatic and therefore inexplicable, where in fact Newton’s strained speculations had been much nearer to the truth.

In the tenth 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 final attention, was brooding over an aspect of this very problem, and wishing to God he could be half as smart as Newton about it. He was in the habit of maneuvering very large masses with very great precision, and the energies involved—a direct consequence of Newton’s inertia—were straining the limits of his infrastructure.

He was a sort of chemist or materials scientist, but the particles he worked with weighed a billion tons each, and swallowed light, and bent and twisted the spacetime around them. They were known classically as “black holes,” industrially as “collapson nodes,” but in Bruno’s private lexicon they frequently adopted the names of anatomical features or bodily fluids or social functions best left unmentioned here.

It was daytime on Bruno’s little planet, but the planet’s little sun was dark, a shadow against the starscape, its nuclear fires encapsulated by a photoelectric conversion shell so that only its invisible heat escaped. Bruno lay on his back, on a chaise longue, in a meadow beneath a sprawling, hot, dew-dripping canopy of stars. The atmosphere was only a few meters thick because, yes, the planet really was that small, and so the stars didn’t twinkle at him, but rather glared down with a hard, steady light that gave little doubt as to their nature. Had cavemen seen such a light they’d have guessed immediately that the stars were little suns, or large ones seen from a very great distance. The constellations would have been perfectly familiar, too, save for the bright yellow star off the tail of Sagittarius. That was Sol, the Queendom, the whole of humanity huddled around that pinprick of warmth. An ordinary star, and at this distance not really any brighter than Sirius.

But the stars didn’t interest Bruno just now; he was inspecting, for perhaps the hundredth time that month, the ring of collapsium—of quantum-repulsion black-hole matter—with which he’d encircled his dark little sun. Once upon a time, that matter had comprised an ultradense “moon” of di-clad neutronium. Later, it had been an Onion of vacuum-rending collapsium shells, and afterward a disc and a cube and a series of interlocking equilateral triangles. From each configuration he’d learned a thing or two—mainly about how ignorant he really was, and how mysterious the inner workings of God’s universe could be at their most fundamental levels.

Perhaps someday those collapsons would form an arc de fin—an archway through which the end of time could be observed, for purposes that Bruno had never really been able to articulate. Because it was there, he supposed. Because he felt like knowing. He’d managed, over the years, to confirm the theoretical possibility of such a device, and to derive some vague, half-baked notions as to how it might be constructed. But it was a long way from there to actually building the thing. It would be the work of centuries, he feared, perhaps even millennia.

Pinching his bearded chin thoughtfully, he studied the “ring,” which was actually a quite complicated arrangement of scallopy, sinusoidal ripples, one upon the other, like a lace apron or tutu strung across the sky. It glowed the bright, pale color first glimpsed by Pavel Cerenkov in the twentieth century; the blue of supraluminal particles shedding energy as they dropped below the speed of light.

Had he surrounded the planet with it, the ring might have appeared as a peaked arch linking one side of the horizon with the other. Well, perhaps not—Bruno’s planet was so small that it sloped away like a hilltop beneath his lounge. As a result, his horizons were not only close, they were visibly down. At any rate, there wasn’t nearly enough collapsium to encircle the entire planet. He’d need three or four kilometers of it to accomplish that. But the “sun” was much smaller, and the collapsium looked like exactly what it was: a frilled ring a few centimeters thick and fifty meters around, encircling a dark, spherical body orbiting some seven hundred meters above the planet’s surface.

The inside of a warehouse would be as inspiring.

Or perhaps that was merely the contempt of familiarity speaking, or Bruno’s own long frustration; perhaps the scene was more wonderful and wondrous than anything Isaac Newton—in his plague-ridden, wattle-thatched world—could possibly have imagined. Bruno feared, suddenly, that this was so. He sat up, looking around him at the steamy, starlit darkness, wondering if, through years of neglect and overwork, he’d burned out his capacity for wonder. What a thought! What if he made the arc de fin, glimpsed the fading lights of the end of time, and could muster no more than a weary “eh”? How awful!

He made an effort to see the scene with fresh eyes: the planet like a little benighted Eden, the stooping robot field-workers like peasants of a land so wealthy its very citizens were made of gold. And over there, his little cottage with its wellstone walls all turned to white glass, a pretty trick indeed. And above it all, the collapsium, glowing blue as the ghosts of drowned sailors. Soon enough, that scalloped ring would be gone, replaced by some new assembly, some new experiment. It was a fleeting thing, a blossom.

There was the problem, though—the very reason for Bruno’s frustration. He’d long ago run out of fresh neutronium and had for years now resigned himself to recycling his collapsium over and over again. Every experiment had to be dismantled to make way for the next—carefully, to prevent its structure from collapsing into a single, ordinary hypermass. Such dismantling required phenomenal precision, and thanks to inertia it also required such vast amounts of energy that he’d been forced to harness virtually the entire output of his miniature star.

The star—his own invention—was simple enough; a neutronium core wrapped securely in superreflectors, holding down an outer sheath of hydrogen in self-sustaining nuclear fusion. But it was for light, damn it; it was meant not only to warm but to brighten this little world at the fringes of interstellar space. So thanks to inertia, he lived in the dark, and while he could certainly build a new sun, and even a new moon to go with it, the difficulties of contacting the Queendom to arrange for neutronium production and delivery would consume his attention as surely his experiments consumed light, possibly for years. Bah.

He could, of course, hop into the fax machine and duplicate himself, but he knew himself too well; the duplicate wouldn’t want to deal with logistical headaches any more than he did. Within hours it would be commandeering his precious resources for some new harebrained experiment, and his attempts to argue the point would prove worse than fruitless, for the duplicate would believe itself to be him. And it would be right. He’d played this drama out enough times to know the pointlessness of it.

And yet…

Was it any better to live in darkness? To cast aside the final pretense of comfort and live as a perfect troglodyte scientist, with no human needs left to neglect? How Tamra Lutui—the Virgin Queen of All Things—would recoil at that! As he himself should recoil, hearing it reduced to those terms.

He sighed, musing darkly: if only inertia could be overcome; if only he could really proceed, unhindered and happy. If he could crowd the zero-point field aside, or deaden it with complementary waves, then the tiniest flick would send his billion-ton billiards wherever he chose, at whatever velocity, and another infinitesimal tap would suffice to stop them. Was such an idea feasible? Ridiculous? He should give it some more thought, he thought, but of course that would mean suspending his current work, too. The idea made him tired, or perhaps he was already tired and the idea simply helped him to realize it.

He lay back again, to resume his study of the collapsium. It was beautiful, really, but also coldly menacing, distorting not only the spacetime around it but the life of one Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji as well. He’d never asked to be marooned out here, never asked to live in darkness and isolation, never asked for any of this. Or perhaps he had, in seeking the arc defin, but why did it have to be so hard? Why did he have to sacrifice so much?

He supposed the thing to do was to resign himself to an idle period—a vacation, in effect—during which he could solicit production bids. Or perhaps one could simply buy neutronium these days—heaven knew the Ring Collapsiter’s demand for it had to be a good thirteen or fourteen orders of magnitude larger than Bruno’s had ever been.

He could probably use the time off, anyway. Didn’t Tamra have the hundredth anniversary of her coronation coming up sometime soon? Surely she’d be upset if he let that go by without comment. Perhaps he could visit. There were other friends he’d been wondering about as well. Vivian Rajmon, Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary? Goodness, she must be over sixteen by now! And Marlon Sykes, his fellow Declarant-Philander? Marlon might not be happy to see him—probably not, actually—but they could talk about physics, maybe hash through some of these inertia problems. Surely he’d be happy to do that, at least.

With some unpleasant sense of surprise, Bruno realized that except for a handful of emergencies in which the whole of humanity was threatened, it had been almost three decades since he’d had any contact with the Queendom at all. Was that what it took to interest him in the affairs of everyday life? Total calamity? Even his broken network gate had gone unrepaired, except for Her Majesty’s unauthorized access portal. And she hadn’t used it to visit him since the last calamity. Who could blame her, when he’d never sent so much as a letter?

It was like waking up underwater, yes. How did that happen?

He felt his blood stir, and wondered, finally, if this was what he’d been needing: human interaction to keep his physics problems in balance. No man was an island, the saying went. Never mind a whole planet. Indeed, he could fix his network gate immediately and send a message down into the Queendom, asking which of his friends would consider forgiving his long silence. Perhaps it would cause a stir in the media— they’d always had a strange interest in his affairs—but for God’s sake, why should he let that bother him?

He shot to his feet and, leaving the chaise lounge behind, marched homeward with more determination and enthusiasm than he’d had for much of anything lately.

“Door,” he said as he approached the house. Obligingly, the nearest wall formed a stained-glass door and opened it for him. He stepped through, and the interior lights came on dimly and began easing him from darkness to full interior light.

Robots danced out of his way, offering nothing in the way of food or drink because lately he’d been yelling at them for that, but one battered thing, far less graceful than its peers, moved directly into his path and spread its arms.

“Hugo,” he said, with a warmth that surprised even him. “Hugo, old fellow, have I neglected you as well? Have a hug, then, yes. Are you well this morning?”

The robot’s neck squeaked audibly as its head nodded, twice, and then the thing was stepping clumsily out of his way and looking around the house as if bewildered. Hugo was an experiment of sorts: an ordinary household robot not controlled by the household, not controlled by anything except its own desires and intentions. In general these were minimal and quite peculiar, unlike the desires of a person or a pet or an invading insect, but on occasion—perhaps by sheer coincidence—its behavior could be touchingly childlike.

“There, there,” he told it, and patted its head a few times. He’d felt a stab of guilt, thinking of young Vivian. She could be childlike, too, but even five years ago she’d been uncomfortably adult about some other things, and by now she was a young woman, her quite charming girlishness probably a thing of the past, or else taking on the overtones of adult affectation. How dreadful for him, that he could let such a thing slip by and feel guilty only now, when it was too late to do anything about it. Had he really tried to teach poor Hugo to play shuffleboard? That was a poor idea from the start, and if playing against the house’s robots was no fun either, well, had he never considered that Vivian might like to play? Or Tamra, or somebody“?

“House,” he said sternly, turning to face the central fax orifice, “I require network access as soon as possible.”

“Planetary maintenance?” the house asked, perhaps thinking he needed to access the little world’s store of raw materials—water, air, pure element stock for the fax’s matter buffers… Perhaps that seemed likelier than the alternative: that he needed people. His house knew him too well.

“No, no,” he told it, “the Iscog.”

“Acknowledged,” the house said, and he could have sworn it sounded surprised. Iscog: the Inner System Collapsiter Grid. The Queendom’s telecom network.

Bruno, feeling somewhat indignant at that perhaps-imagined reaction, said, “I did build the thing, you know. The Iscog. I’ve a right to take an interest in the people using it.”

“Of course, sir,” the house agreed, and now it sounded imperturbably mechanical. “Gate repair is in progress. Estimated completion time, nine seconds. Gate repair is complete.”

Bruno frowned. That was too easy—a further indictment of his neglect. Had it waited all these years, for him to say those few simple words? Well, bah. There was no help for it now; the thing to do was to move forward.

“Record a letter,” he said.

But before the house could answer, the fax gate sizzled and glowed, and a human figure tumbled out of it and fell, sprawling, to the floor.

“Oh!” it said, in a voice—a male voice—like a sob. The figure reached out a hand, and stroked the floor as if caressing it. “Oh, can it? Can it be? Have I’s-s-spilled at last to the feet of de Towaji?”

Nonplussed, Bruno took a step backward and sputtered, “Sir, my goodness! Have you been authorized to access this portal? What are you doing here?” And then, belatedly, “Are you all right?”

“All right?” the man sobbed giddily, looking up from his face-down sprawl. “All right? The concept eludes. No pain is being applied. Is that an answer?”

“Are you injured?”

“Injured? Mortally! Or not at all; the distinction is less important than you probably imagine.”

The question was far from frivolous; fax gate filters were supposed to strip the injuries and illnesses and general wear-and-tear of life from the bodies that passed through them. Conversely, they were supposed to leave affectations like baldness and pierce-holes alone, especially if the subject’s genome appendices commanded it. In the case of this man, though, the fax seemed to have had a very hard time making up its mind; his clothing hung off him in tatters, even its software apparently defunct; and beneath it, where the skin should be exposed, there was instead a varicolored and decidedly lumpy surface, like tattooed scar tissue. The hands appeared crooked and malformed, as did the feet projecting from the remains of a pair of suede knee boots, and the face… Something odd had been done to the face, it had been flattened somehow, the nose pushed upward and the cheeks drawn down, creating a piggish sort of look. And yet, for all that, the face looked worryingly familiar.

“Do I know you, sir?” Bruno asked. His voice trembled; he had the distinct feeling that the answer would upset him.

The sprawled man looked up at him and smiled in a most horrific way. “Do you not recognize me, de Towaji? I’d hoped not, actually, for I’m no fit thing for your remembrance. The only claim I have to usefulness—the only claim!—is that I was once your-s-s-self. Look upon me, de Towaji, and despair: I am precisely as low as you can sink.”

Chapter Fifteen in which the clarity of hindsight is reaffirmed

Bruno’s household managed to get the stranger washed and into fresh clothing, over repeated and strenuous protests.

“This thing? I’m no fit inhabitant for a garment like this. No! Away! Don’t touch me. Please!”

The robots, dashing about in their usual poetic blur, nonetheless betrayed a curious deference or solicitousness toward the stranger, and by using their bodies in conjunction with strategically held towels and clothes, they managed to keep the surface of his body almost completely hidden. Bruno caught glimpses of ridged or puckered flesh, colored over with strange designs, and he very briefly observed a complete word calligraphed along the stranger’s leg. “PENITENT,” it looked like, though he was far from certain about that.

Finally, the protests died down, and the stranger said, “Ah, who’s myself to argue? It’s your generosity that’s given me these doublet and tights, not my own deserving, of which there is—take my word of it—none whatsoever.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Bruno said carefully, unsure what to make of a remark like that. Unsure what to make of this person at all, wondering what had happened to him and why he’d chosen to come here in what seemed to be an hour of quite desperate need.

But the stranger only laughed. “You haven’t grasped the tenth of it, Declarant-Philander, you who’ve never yet made acquaintance with the lash. Ah, what a lordly figure you cut! Your knees unbent, your eyes unaverted. Do you crawl? Do you plead? Do you think yours-s-self incapable of it?”

The stranger wasn’t mocking him, but seemed actually to be sort of pitying or even pleading, like someone who’d stumbled on a suicide attempt in progress and had no idea what to say. But there was a kind of se//-mockery going on there, the voice reedy and whining, its tone deliberately obnoxious, as though its owner feared to speak with any decisive clarity or strength.

“What in the worlds has happened to you?” Bruno asked, and was relieved to hear more concern than disgust in his own voice. As the robots finished their work and danced away one by one, he stepped forward to offer the man a hand up. “Why have you come here?”

“What’s the date?” the stranger asked him in return. He declined the helping hand and stood up on his own, though he wobbled slightly. Were his knees weak? Injured, perhaps? As for dates, Bruno didn’t generally keep track of such things, but the house answered for him. “Sunday, February 28th, Year Ninety-Five of the Queendom.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, nodding. The look on his face was full of excitement, though of a stilted, unpleasant, untrustworthy variety. “Then I’ve been trapped in the grid for over two weeks, waiting for your port to open. I was afraid it mightn’t open—I know you too well!—but faxing to nowhere was much preferable to the alternative. And betrayer that I am, I did dare hope to reach you.”

Bruno’s frown deepened. “I don’t grasp your meaning, sir. Where have you come from?”

“From damnation itself!” the stranger said, cringing, and squeaked out a manic sound that was neither giggle nor sob.

“You think I’m jesting? Speaking in metaphors? He has a lot of anger toward you, and by extension toward myself, for having been you. Whips, chains, direct stimulation of the centers of’s-s-suffering? These are merely appetizers. The most disagreeable treatments you can possibly imagine are inadequate, mere infantile shadows of the truth, because you haven’t spent a lifetime reflecting on it, as He has.”

But Bruno was still shaking his head. “What do you mean, ‘having been me?’ Are you saying you’re Bruno de Towaji? A copy of myself?”

“Was,” the stranger spat. “Was. It’s a name I’ll sully no further. But yes; He pirates fax patterns out of the Iscog, and instantiates them in secret, in dungeons hidden away from civilized eyes and sensors. He’s particularly fond of your pattern—thereVe been dozens of us in His clutches at one time or another—but He keeps others as well: Rodenbecks, van Sketterings, Kroghs… He even kept a Tamra for a while, though it didn’t seem to please Him. He’s kept a few others on occasion. Not that they last long, of course, the way He uses them up, but they can always be freshly printed, the’s-s-same pain recipes tried over and over until they’re perfected. I represent an unbroken chain, decades long. In the midst of our sufferings we pass down the histories and lore, from one generation to the next. He encourages the practice, as it deepens our despair.”

Bruno could only stare. Was the stranger mad? Was he speaking from delusion, or some demented sense of jest? The two men stared at each other, the one unbelieving and the other unbelievable, for a long string of moments.

“May I sit?” the stranger finally asked, in the same whiny, ingratiating tones. He sounded tired, though. More than tired. Exhausted, in the literal sense: a container that had been squeezed of its contents. His knees quivered beneath his scrawny weight. He looked ready to faint. “I shudder to contaminate your furnishings, Bruno, or even your fine little floor, but my’s-s-strength is limited.”

“Are you really myself?” Bruno asked, horrified to his very core, unable to reconcile a single trait or feature of this exhausted container with his own self-image. But the question needed no answer—the house would have corrected the lie already, would never have admitted the stranger in the first place if he were, indeed, anything other than what he claimed. “My God, my God, yes, sit down over here! Lie back! House, bring us hot soup and blankets. Immediately!”

Steering the stranger—steering himself—toward the couch, he realized that it was warm enough in here, that there was no literal need for soup or blankets. But the house and the stranger seemed to understand; the gesture was symbolic. Robots brought woolen bedclothes, with which the stranger permitted Bruno to cover him, and a mug of steaming broth, from which he dutifully sipped.

“Ah,” the stranger sighed, “you’re too kind. Literally too kind, for I’ve betrayed your secrets and bartered off your dignity more thoroughly than you could ever know. He knows what moves you, what hurts you; He knows everything about you. He knows how you wipe your ass! I told Him all of this, over and over. I deserve none of your’s-s-sympathy. And yet here I am, seeking it. Further proof of my unworth!”

“No, no! My God, Bruno, who’s done this to you?”

The stranger sat up angrily. “Do not call me that! I am not a Bruno! Call me Shit, or Remnant, or Betrayer.”

Bruno, leaning forward against one arm of the couch, shook his head. “I’ll do no such thing.”

“Sir,” the stranger pleaded, “do not call me Bruno. Unless you seek to upset me, sir. I deserve that, but I don’t desire it.”

Hugo let out a sudden mewl. In a corner of the room, trapped between a table and the wall, it stood perplexed, contemplating its golden legs and the prison that held them, perhaps considering an act of self-mutilation—Hugo had removed a leg more than once, sometimes for less reason than this. Once it had even managed to remove both of its arms, and had stood over them forlornly for a solid day, ignored by the house software, until Bruno had finally taken pity, broken off his experiments, and taken a screwdriver to the poor thing.

But even Hugo possessed a measure of self-respect. Barely sentient, barely knowing it was alive at all, the “emancipated” robot nonetheless managed to find and fulfill the occasional desire. It managed to play a little, learn a little, live a little; this fact was clear in its bearing. The stranger, who had no such air about him, eyed the thing, suddenly, with an envy that looked like hunger.

“Come,” Bruno reassured, and wished there were someone else here to reassure him, or better yet that he’d wake up and find this whole incident to be a particularly loathsome dream, the result of a too-early bedtime after much too heavy and spicy a meal. “Come on, uh, friend. We’ll get you calmed down, and then the two of us can climb in the fax together and reconverge.”

Even as he said it, the idea struck him as a poor one.

The stranger’s reaction was violent. “Are you mad? Are you mad, Bruno? I am every imaginable poison and pathogen! Look at this wreck, this wreckage of yourself, and ask ‘tvhat these memories will do to that proud bearing of yours. I know your weaknesses, sir; I know them far better than you, and I say keep your distance. I am your worst imaginable betrayer, and even / recoil at the idea! I’ll never join with you. Never!”

Bruno pulled back a little, seeing the huddled figure in still another light: a man who had been himself, but was himself no longer. A man whose harrowing experiences set him apart, entitled him to a sense of identity quite distinct from Bruno’s own. Suddenly, he felt ashamed for having suggested otherwise.

“I will call you Brazowy,” he said gently. “Or perhaps Kafiese. Those are translations; they mean ‘brown’ or ‘brown haired,’ as Bruno does.”

“I know what they mean,” the stranger snapped. “But I warn you, sir: you overestimate the dignity I’m able to’s-s-sustain. Those names are fair and pretty; I couldn’t bear them. Call me Fuscus if you must.”

“ ‘Muddy?’”

“Muddy! Yes, call me Muddy! That’s exactly what I am: the flooded, silted ruins of a once-grand mansion. I am clotted with muck from a distant source, and I’ll reek of it to the end of my days.”

Bruno nodded grimly. “Very well, then; Muddy it is. But you must tell me, who is this villain? Who dares to kidnap and torture the images of innocent people? He has the Queen, you say? Unthinkable!”

“You know who it is,” Muddy said.

“I don’t.”

“You can guess who it is, Declarant.”

“No, I couldn’t possibly.”

Muddy pushed a wild, gray-white lock of hair back over the rutted battlefield of his scalp, and cringed. “I can say the name, sir, but you’ll feel no surprise on hearing it. My tormentor is none other than His Declarancy, Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson S-S-S-Sykes.”

And it was true; Bruno felt his hair stand on end, his skin go clammy, his feet begin to tingle and sweat. He felt disgust, and anger, and betrayal, and above all, a deep sense of embarrassment for poor Marlon, that he should take his petty envies and covetousnesses so deeply and seriously and personally after all. But he felt no real surprise. In some sense, he supposed he’d known all along that Marlon was no good, that there was something really wrong with him.

“The really odd part,” Muddy said, and the whiny tone in his voice, while stronger than ever, seemed more forgivable, “is that he does it to himself as well. You’ll see him dragging his own copy down into the caverns, and the copy will be’s-s-screaming, ‘Oh God, it’s me this time! It’s a mistake; I’m on the wrong side! I’m supposed to be you!’ and His Declarancy will lock it down and torment it in the most savage ways, all the while yelling ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why do you have to be so stupidl’ He’s harder on himself than he is on others, if such a thing is possible. There’s a kind of nobility in that.”

“No, there is not,” Bruno stated flatly. “The man is clearly ill, and these ghastly infractions of his must be stopped at once. It’s fortunate you escaped when you did.”

Muddy, pulling the blanket up a little higher under his chin, looked blank. “Escape? I didn’t escape, Bruno. There is no escape from a place like that, from a man like that. One dreams of death, not freedom. Truly, I tell you, he’s thought of everything.”

“Then… how are you here?”

Muddy laughed sourly. “I was released, in the manner that a projectile is released from a cannon. I was’s-s-sent here to you, sir, and like an obedient wretch I’ve complied. I bring a message, and the message is myself.”

Bruno shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? I thought you were so smart! The message of myself is that you can be broken, that your spirit and your flesh are far weaker than you’ve ever guessed. You can be made so abjectly miserable that in the end you’ll betray your principles, your dignity, your Queendom, and your Queen with frightening complicity and ease. There’s nothing in yourself to stop it from happening, no inner strength or reserve that can possibly suffice. Even you, Declarant. Even you can be turned into me. His Declarancy wanted to be sure you understood this.”

Bruno got the message. He looked at Muddy, and finally he did see himself inside there somewhere, and the sight filled him with disgust and terror. Was there so little to him after all? He tried, not very convincingly, to give this wretch a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “ ‘His Declarancy,’ as you call him, is no doubt going straight to jail. We’ll contact Vivian Rajmon of the Royal Constabulary; she’ll know exactly how to proceed.”

And here, Bruno felt his disgust deepen; Vivian a young woman already, and himself calling her only because he’d been the victim of a crime. He’d claimed more than once to be her friend, but would a friend require this before finding, finally, the time to place a call? Surely not. So in fact he was no friend at all, and never had been, and all his claims to the contrary were the worst sort of self-congratulatory hypocrisy.

But what Muddy said was, “I’m afraid that’ll be impossible, Your Lordship. He’s seen to that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Contacting this friend of yours. It’ll be impossible. He was planning to smash the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid; I was’s-s-supposed to be one of the last messages it was permitted to carry.”

“Smash the Iscog? Why?”

Muddy’s sour laugh echoed through the house again. “To isolate you, sir. To trap you at the very summit of the solar system while he carries out his plans below. And, as an amusing aside, to trap me here with you, as a permanent reminder of your talent for failure. I’m truly sorry it had to be this way, Bruno. I’m sorry I had to help.”

“The Ring Collapsiter!” Bruno said, slapping himself on the head, feeling like a perfect fool. “All those problems, accidents, all the sabotage. It was Marlon all along! He’s trying to destroy the Queendom.”

“Of course he is, sir. Always has been.”

Thinking of a corpse he’d seen once on an unlicensed space freighter, Bruno asked, “Does he ever alter the body forms of his victims? Does he add or remove limbs?”

“Constantly, sir.”

“God, I’ve been a fool!”

“You certainly have, sir. Believe me, I know that far better than you.”

“But why would he do such a thing?” Bruno was pacing now, waving his arms. “Even a sick, vengeful man needs somewhere to be sick and vengeful, doesn’t he? He’s no fool; he’s not stupid. What could he possibly stand to gain by destroying the Queendom?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. You’d have to ask him that yourself.”

Finally, Bruno felt himself get truly angry, angrier than he’d been in years, or maybe ever. “Is that the way of it? Is that his message to me? I will ask him myself, then. We’ll find a way down there, and we’ll show you right back to him as a message that we’re not so easily beaten, you and I!”

At this, Muddy laughed again, his voice sadder and nastier and whinier than ever.

“What? What’s funny?” Bruno snapped.

“Nothing, sir. It’s just that I’t-t-told him you’d say that.”

And in that moment, Bruno hated Muddy for all that had happened, and he knew this meant that he was actually hating himself—all the weakness and stupidity and vulnerability in himself. And then he felt like an even bigger fool, because it meant that Marlon’s bullet had hit its target dead-on, and he, Bruno, had been powerless to dodge it.

“Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-seven seconds,” Bruno said. “Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, three seconds.”

“Nothing,” Muddy answered.

“Right ascension ninety-one degrees, eleven minutes, forty-seven seconds. Declination nine degrees, zero minutes, six seconds.”

“Nothing,” Muddy said again. He was bent almost double, peering into a brass eyepiece. Strange markings, perhaps Chinese, were visible on the back of his neck. Above them both, the ceiling had arched itself into a dome of glass, through which the faxed telescope could observe the heavens. It looked archaic, this telescope, almost a thing Galileo himself might have employed, but its lenses were of wellstone rather than glass. The filtered, enhanced, broad-spectrum images they produced could easily rival the finest products of twenty-first century astronomy.

In fact, there was little need for a human operator at all; a few murmured instructions to the house and every celestial object of note would be mapped within the hour. But they had let the house find Iscog fragments for them, boulder-sized bits of collapsium ejected starward by the grid’s obviously quite messy demise. Whatever sabotage Marlon performed had been swift and decisive. One shuddered to contemplate the dynamics: so much mass interacting with so much violence and chaos! And so Bruno had determined that they should inspect the fragments—at least a few of them—with their own eyes. Or with reasonable proxies thereof. Perhaps it would help them to understand what had happened, and how.

“Nothing,” Muddy said again. “No wait,” he then amended. “It’s there at the edge of the frame.”

“Center, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The one good thing about this wretch, Bruno decided, was that he had no pretensions of any kind. Unlike a real de Towaji, Muddy made no attempt to conscript or control or second-guess. He didn’t seem to feel any sense of ownership here, or any urgency about their task or their precarious position. In fact, he seemed content to follow orders without the slightest reflection. Perhaps it gave him a sense of peace.

“Oh. Goodness,” Muddy said. “You should have a look at this, Your Lordship.”

They traded places, and Bruno leaned over to peer into the eyepiece. He saw nothing there but a scattering of stars. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s moving,” that whiny voice complained. “I don’t know how to make the telescope track it.”

“Moving against the starscape? An arc-second and a half in thirty seconds? It’s five AUs away!”

“It’s fast,” Muddy agreed. “Whatever ejected it must have been—” He cringed slightly.“—a violent event.”

“Mmm.”

Indeed. Bruno’s sensors had been triggering all afternoon, reporting magnetic and gravitational anomalies passing through the area. If even a few of these had originated in the Queendom a mere week ago, then they must be moving very fast indeed, fully 10% of the speed of light. That meant crushing accelerations: hundreds or thousands of gees. He imagined a handful of collapsium structures falling together over planetary distances as the Iscog was fractured, then spinning apart in a hundred little gravitational eddies, flinging bits of themselves in all directions while their cores were crushed into a single useless hypermass. Such an event would be violent— exceedingly so.

“You adjust the tracking with this,” Bruno grumbled, pointing to a brass-shod button on the side of the telescope. “Center your target, and then press. To turn tracking off, center on empty space and press again. If you have questions, you know, you can ask them. Which direction is the object moving?”

“Down. Er, south.”

“Hmm.”

He bent to the eyepiece again, and adjusted the declination until something appeared at the edge of the frame: a dark, metallic object that looked vaguely like a castle, its turrets pointed back down toward the sun, glittering dimly in its distant light. It was moving south by southeast, actually; he centered it and locked the tracking function. Immediately, the stars behind the object began crawling across his view. It •was moving fast.

“Good Lord,” he said, “that’s not a collapsium fragment; it’s one of the EM grapple stations!”

“Yes, sir.”

“It should be deep inside the Queendom, holding up the Ring Collapsiter!”

“Yes, sir. It certainly should. The event that ejected it must have been extremely violent.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said abstractly. Fussing with the dainty brass controls, he managed to magnify the image and adjust its wavelength compression until the object became translucent, a flying palace of smoky glass. The gravitic machineries were visible inside, glass within glass, some components glowing warm shades of orange, while others, shown in blue, either absorbed heat or channeled it away. Even a cursory inspection showed that the station couldn’t be entirely functional; power and heat and buffer mass flowed through it, but fitfully, via components that sat askew, bent and twisted and shaken out of true by what surely must have been titanic forces. Actually, it was amazing the thing had survived at all.

He zoomed in on one of the smaller warm spots, and gasped.

“My God. My God! There’s a person onboard!”

“Not possible,” Muddy whined. “The gee f-f-forces would have been too great.”

“One would think so!” Bruno agreed, straightening and stepping away. “One most certainly would expect so. But see for yourself!”

Muddy shuffled forward again and, sighing as if in pain, bent once more to the telescope. He drew in a breath immediately, then put a tentative hand to the controls. “He’s moving. He’s alive. I don’t understand. No wait, it’s a woman. She. Is this the wavelength control? These two? Ah. She’s holding a wrench. She’s disassembling something.”

“House!” Bruno called out. “Contact that station!”

“Network resources unavailable, sir,” the house replied apologetically.

“Then build an antenna, damn you. Use radio waves.”

“May I compromise roof transparency?”

“Do whatever you must. That woman is in terrible danger, exiting the solar system at relativistic speed! When her power reserves fail, she’ll suffocate or freeze to death, assuming she hasn’t already starved by then.”

In the next moment, the glass roof was spiderwebbed with silvery conformal antenna elements, a network for focusing and gathering electromagnetic radiation in the longer wavelengths, centimeters and meters and even tens of meters.

“She’s doomed,” Muddy said matter-of-factly. “No one can reach her. No one will even try. Radio contact is pointless, p-p-perhaps even cruel.”

“Blast!” Bruno cursed, and nearly knocked the telescope over. “The chaos below, in Queendom space, must be of immense proportion. There must be tragedies like this one playing out all across the solar system. Damn your Marlon Sykes; he knows what he’s doing!”

“My Marlon Sykes?”

Bruno sighed, ran a hand through the long ripples of his hair, and finally threw himself down on the sofa. “Are we so helpless, Muddy? We, the Queendom’s favored consultants? There’s more than enough material here—” He spread his arms to indicate the planet beneath their feet. “—to fax a fleet of the swiftest and noblest spaceships.”

“As His Declarancy no doubt anticipated,” Muddy said, sniffing.

“Indeed,” Bruno snapped. “Indeed. Whatever is transpiring below, he doesn’t expect us to be able to intervene. At a full gee acceleration, assuming our propulsion system could sustain that, it’d still be two weeks before we could reach the Ring Collapsiter. Twice as long, if we wanted to stop when we got there!”

Muddy nodded, groaned a little, then plopped down cross-legged on the floor beside the telescope. “He knows you’ll try, sir. The fact amuses him.”

Bruno felt a bomb-burst of rage. “Does it? What in God’s name is driving this man? Why can’t he just accept things as they are? I could kill him! He pretends to be merely jealous, a little bit bruised and snooty, a little bit nasty when crossed. And it’s fine! People like him for it, or at least in spite of it. His wit and charm serve him well enough, and his genius. Why can’t he just be that person? What’s so savagely difficult, so brutally unfair about that?”

Muddy’s laugh sounded like the rattling of pebbles in ajar. “Lordship, do you understand so little? The sociopath, as known by’s-s-society, is only a mask. Usually, one which has been perfected over a period of decades and which serves as an interface to the wider world which cannot accept—or in many cases even understand—the true face underneath. Think of the puppet theater in the old marketplace. Could you tell, simply by watching the puppet, if the puppeteer was kindly or vicious? Did you ever consider the puppeteer at all? Who crafts a mask if not to please, if not to present a likeness every man and woman and child can be captivated by? We may ask the basement torturer to become the model citizen he emulates so skillfully, but it’s like asking the shell to be an egg; it’s a meaningless question. It’s all the pieces together, the villainy and greatness and everyday human foibles, that we must use to take his measure.”

“You look up to him,” Bruno said, eyeing his counterpart with disgust.

“I know more about him than you do,” Muddy said darkly. “I know a lot more than you, about a great many things. In some ways, I’m finding it easier to think of you as a child than as a full-grown veteran of worldly politics and strife. I can reconcile your behavior that way, your attitudes.”

Bruno sighed. “So I’m a fool, am I? Because my mind has never been shaped by humiliation or pain? What a pitiable creature you are, Muddy. I’ll remain a fool, thank you.”

“No, sir, no!” Muddy cried, throwing an arm melodramatically across his eyes. “Not a fool, a child. A’s-s-sweet, bright-eyed little boy that Enzo and Bernice would be proud to show off! It isn’t a bad thing, sir. I never said it was.”

And Bruno felt ashamed then, because tears were soaking Muddy’s sleeve, rolling down his gaunt face, and his voice, never strong to begin with, had broken through with high, squeaky sobs. And, more shameful still, Bruno himself could think of no response, no comfort, no apology save another cup of hot soup. This was what he’d become: a hermit unable to comport civilly, even with himself.

Perhaps Marlon was right to despise him.

Chapter Sixteen in which a restless spirit is appeased

Bruno sat up in his bed, suddenly wide awake, his body as rigid as a gravestone. Such a dream. Such a dream he’d had!

He’d never been much of a dreamer, had never put much stock or faith in a state of mind so confused and cluttered with false associations. A duck asks if your latest calculations are thorough enough, and the wall becomes a floor beneath you, and suddenly it’s raining macaroni. Rubbish! But tonight he’d dreamed with strange clarity: his skin shivering as if electrified, his mouth dry, his eyes hot with the energies of the zero-point field, laid out visibly before him. Or perhaps “visibly” was the wrong word, since he was simultaneously aware of the intensities at every wavelength, the half-infinite energies filling each photon state… The view should have been nonsense, infinitely bright or infinitely dark or else infinitely transparent, as the vacuum between islands of matter was usually thought to be. But in the dream he’d walked through his house, through the gardens and meadows of his empty little world, and he’d seen not only the things, but the rippling vibrations of charge that gave rise to them, and the zero-point vacuum that inspired the vibrations, and the true vacuum beneath that.

And in the dream, he’d pulled a special glove down over his hand, and the glove was made of billion-ton black holes the size of protons, and its color was neither the phosphor green of gravitational binding nor the Cerenkov blue of mature collapsium, but the optically superconducting nothing of True Vacuum, for the black holes were not arranged in three-dimensional lattices, but in ripples of semi-random, four-dimensional, open-celled foam. Vibration-damping foam, just exactly like what you’d find muffling the walls of a broadcast studio, although fantastically smaller. The four-dimensional structure was easy, simply a matter of timing the placement of certain elements. A child, he’d thought, could do the math.

And in the dream, the storming vacuum energies had shrunk away from his glove like wax before a torch, and the space before him had filled with nothingness, and he’d glided through it without effort, skating through the hills and meadows without moving his feet, without any sensation of moving at all. In the dream, the universe had moved, or seemed to, while he stood motionless at its center.

And he’d realized, all at once, that this was no talking duck or pasta rain, that this was something he could actually do. And so, in the dream, he’d sat bolt upright in his bed, and the dream had blended so seamlessly with reality that he’d wondered, in a deep and literal sense, if the two were really such separate things after all.

For a moment he felt paralyzed, glued in place by the bogus “inertia” of the vacuum pressing in on him from all sides. It seemed impossible that he should be able to breathe, that his blood should pump and his nerves fire, that he should be able to exist at all. But he did exist, and his blood pumped, and his nerves fired, and as the moment passed he was kicking his covers off, leaping to the floor in his bare feet, screaming “Door! Door!” at the wall and running right on through, trusting it to open for him in time.

“Muddy!” he shouted, racing toward the bony figure curled up on the couch beneath a heap of blankets. “Muddy, wake up! I’ve had an idea!”

Muddy, it seemed, was no stranger to sudden, screaming awakenings in the dead of the night. He sat up immediately, latching onto Bruno with quick, terrified eyes.

“I’ve had an idea!” Bruno repeated. “A big one, a wonderful one!”

“Yes?” Muddy said warily, making a visible effort not to scream or retreat or clutch at his chest. “A helpful idea?”

“You be the judge,” Bruno said quickly, and launched into an account of his dream.

“Oh,” Muddy said when he was done. His finger probed at the air, as if trying to feel the vacuum energies there. “Oh. Oh, yes, that’s-s-sounds like it should work. That’s very good, Your Declarancy; the simplicity of the math is a very good sign. I think you must be onto something.”

“I have work to do,” Bruno said excitedly. “Lots of work! It’s another damned invention, I suppose. We’ll see all of society turned on its ear again, bent and twisted around these momentary insights. What a strange thing that is, to cause such trouble and be adored for it. The Queendom should hang us both for our crimes, and save itself any further turmoil! But I’ll say, even the worst outcome is bound to improve on what Marlon has in store.”

“Likely so,” Muddy agreed, “if it has come in time to stop him. I don’t suppose this is the sort of thing even He can anticipate. A bolt of inspiration,‘s-s-striking from nowhere? Our muse usually comes when it jolly well pleases her, without regard for when she’s actually needed.”

Muddy seemed far more saddened than intrigued, and at this, Bruno felt genuine pity for him, for perhaps the first time. Was his counterpart so broken that even the lure of discovery couldn’t enliven him? He must have suffered grievously indeed.

“Come,” Bruno said, extending him a hand. “You remember the boat I built—that you built—on the yard at Talafo’uo?”

“HMS Redshift,” Muddy said wanly. “By gods, it seems so long ago.”

Indeed, it did. Bruno had been fresh to the islands of Tonga, and the task had seemed simple enough: design and fax the parts, assemble them, and motor away on a full-planing hull that would leap from one wave crest to the next, barely touching the water at all. But Bruno had—as a matter of principle— refused both robotic and human assistance. That old Girona stubbornness again, so that even with the best tools and guidebooks money could buy, even with his modular, snap-together design and hundreds of real-world examples to compare his work against, the little boat had wound up taking a full week to come together, and another three to really start performing well. There were a lot of variables to control; the experience had been both humbling and uplifting, after his larger and more troublesome successes with the early telecom collapsiters.

“I would ask you to repeat that experience,” Bruno said.

“That? It took weeks.”

“You’ll let robots do the work, of course. It must be done quickly. But be a hero, Muddy: build me a spaceship. I haven’t time to do it myself; this idea demands attention. But when we’re both done, perhaps we’ll ride to the Queendom’s rescue.” When there was no reply, he went on, “Are you able to face your puerile, damnable little nemesis? Has he left you with any ability to oppose him?”

Now Muddy shrugged with weary sadness, and wiped a teardrop off his cheek. “Who can say, Declarant? I’m permitted to hate Him, and to wish innumerable harms upon Him, but I never have r-r-resisted Him. I suppose I’ve never had the opportunity.”

“Well, here you have it: together we can work this out, this challenge of Marlon and inertia both. Will you build a ship for me, Muddy?”

Sigh. “You’re right to question me, sir, and quite wrong to place any faith in my abilities. Or yours! The one gift he gave me, the one true thing I’ve learned from his attentions, is a confidence in our fallibility. What argues in your favor is that you’re asking for mere engineering, which is banal. Pluck any two people at random, deposit them on a planet somewhere, and inside of an hour they’re a design team, finding new ways to put up a roof. They don’t have to be friends; they don’t have to communicate well, or even at all, because the whole process is coded in their genes. It may be that I can fumble through it, as humans have always fumbled, and produce some half-assed but workable product, as I did with Redshift.”

“That’s the spirit,” Bruno said, trying to sound encouraging. He clapped Muddy on the shoulder, this time with some genuine affection. “Nothing fancy, nothing hard—just a hull of iron and the weakest, mealiest of engines to push her.”

Muddy bowed his head. “Very well, sir. I’ll do as you ask, though perhaps not for the reasons you would wish.”

“Eh?”

“Sir, have you examined the converse of engineering? We fall into it so naturally, but in the end every project expires, and one way or another every team is dismantled, and that’s something we’re not wired to deal with. It saddens, even traumatizes us. That’s where geniuses are needed, to engineer the conclusions of things. We let things wither, collapse, decompose, when we should be murdering them gently and artfully.”

Bruno frowned. “What is it you wish to murder?”

“An age of mankind,” Muddy said cryptically. “The innocence of an entire society. People believe themselves to be the masters of creation, when in fact they’re barely participants. Better that they learn this now.” He looked up at Bruno as if hoping to be questioned for that remark, or doubted, or accused.

Bruno looked askance at him. “You wish the people harm?”

“No. I wish for them to internalize His Declarancy’s lessons, and to do that they must live. Horrid, to think they might die without first understanding their lives.”

There was much to disagree with in a statement like that, but Bruno, still awash with excitement, declined to take the bait. “Just get started, all right? I’ll be in my laboratory. House: see that I’m not disturbed.”

“As you wish, sir,” the house replied, in its usual, coolly solicitous voice, deep yet subtly feminine. With a start, Bruno realized it was his mother’s voice, or something not terribly different from it. Strange that he’d never noticed this before, but from the look on Muddy’s face, Bruno gathered he’d noticed it as well, and seemed to find it significant in some way. Disturbing.

Well, hopefully there’d be plenty of time to consider the matter later, assuming it had any importance at all. Now was hardly the time to worry about it, not with the laws of physics coming down around the Queendom’s ears. He strode resolutely toward his study door, thinking that he could always change the house’s voice when he got back from the Queendom.

If you get back, Muddy’s whining voice corrected in his mind. Well, all right then. If. He went to work.[6]

“Sir,” the house said to him sometime later, its mother voice sounding anxious at the need to wake him, “I’m receiving a signal from the runaway grapple station.”

“Hmm, what? A signal, really?” He sat up, rubbing his eyes, putting a hand to the crick in his back. A signal, goodness; he hadn’t expected any such thing. His contact effort had been… a formality, really, because what were the odds that the station’s castaway would think of radio, out here in the wilderness of the Kuiper? Even assuming the necessary devices could be instantiated and configured, what would be the point? Bruno was the only one out here, his tiny planet the only inhabited object in… What? Half a million cubic light-hours of space? Long odds indeed!

“Play it,” he instructed, coming fully awake.

Obediently, the house formed wall speakers and piped the signal through them, distorted but clearly intelligible. “Hello, Mayday, Mayday. This is Deliah van Skeltering of the Ministry of Grapples, responding to your ping. Hello. Can anyone hear me? This is Deliah van Skeltering calling Mayday. Repeat, Mayday. Radio source, please respond. I require immediate assistance…”

He jerked a hand across his throat, and the house cut the signal. Deliah! Laureale-Director and Lead Componeer of ihe Minislry of Grapples! What was she doing aboard a runaway station? And given her presence there, what were the odds of a passage within even a few AU—hundreds of millions of kilometers—of Bruno’s position? Unless perhaps she’d been on all the stations for some reason, and they’d all been flung off into the outer darkness, and this was simply the one that passed nearest to him on its way lo infinity.

Did she know that he was here, that the radio beacon signaling her was, in fact, his? Through the heavy distortion— no doubt caused through some combination of long-range, enormous velocity differential, and poor transmitting equipment—her voice sounded perfunctory, not eager or hopeful but bored. And then he understood: the poor woman was a victim of slow drowning. She grasped dutifully at corks and straws, not because it was likely to help but because it was all she could do, other than simply admitting defeat.

“House, what’s the light-lag between here and the station?”

“Seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

“Sixteen minutes round-trip? Hmm. I hadn’t counted on this; I really hadn’t. Well, send a reply: ‘Laureate-Director, this is Bruno de Towaji. Repeal, this is de Towaji. Perhaps you’ll recall meeting me a number of years ago, shortly before your murder? Now, as then, I offer my heartfelt condolences on your situation. Still, I am very curious as to how it came about! Can you report your status? Over.’”

“Reply sent,” the house said.

Bruno nodded, and settled back into his calculations where he’d left off. Nol that he’d forgotten about Ms. van Skeltering— far from it!—but she’d hardly benefit from his sitting around waiting for something as frightfully slow as light.

He was worried about this new “hypercollapsite”—although the material itself was proven feasible, there was the matter of gross structure to contend with. What shapes must he mold the stuff into, to achieve the desired, inertia-foiling result? The question turned out to be nontrivial in the extreme. He could well envision himself scrabbling at it for hours or days, looking for a conceptual “edge” to start from. It was one thing to speak of EM vibration-damping foams, quite another to design them.

“Return message received,” the house said, after what couldn’t possibly have been sixteen minutes.

“Yes, already? Let’s hear it.”

“De Towaji!” Deliah’s clipped, tinny, strangely muffled voice said. “I’d hoped that was you; I’m glad it is. My situation is that I’m in very serious trouble. I think you know that. The station’s grapple lock on the Ring Collapsiter was disrupted— I’m not sure how—but the complement beam was left intact, pulling us straight out toward Aldeberan. It took me three days to get it shut off. I have casualties here, Declarant—three technicians dead! We saw the other stations going off-line, and we tried to wrap ourselves in impemum before the same thing happened to us. It… wasn’t a good solution.”

Bruno’s fingers dug at the wellwood edges of his desk. Had he been unwise to establish this contact? Was there anything, really, that he could do?

His voice was tentative but, he hoped, compassionate. “Deliah, ah, not to put too fine a point on it, but are you hoping for rescue? You see, I’m rather engaged at the moment, and a lot of lives may hang in the balance.”

Her reply, a thousand seconds later. “It’s very kind of you to ask, Declarant, but I am realistic about my situation. Even assuming anything could be done—which I doubt—the Queendom’s peril is obviously much more important than my own. The Ring Collapsiter is falling in again, much faster this time, and mostly in pieces. Something has also happened to the Iscog, although I’m not sure what. There’s loose collapsium and neutronium everywhere—the planets may actually be in as much danger as the sun!”

She paused, then continued. “Are you able to travel, de Towaji? When I last saw Her Majesty, she was adrift on a workman’s platform spinning perilously close to the sun. It sounds like you have some sort of… plan or something. Is that the case? We are lucky to have you, we really are. Meanwhile, I’m absolutely kicking myself that I let this happen. I just wish I knew what went wrong.”

“Deliah,” he reassured her, “this calamity was engineered by Marlon Sykes. I can’t imagine what his reasons might be, but his methods are more thorough than you probably imagine. I doubt you’ve erred in the slightest, although it’s commendable that you’re willing to consider it. Even more commendable is your bravery. I’ll be sure to tell you about it when next we meet.”

“Marlon?” her voice came back, incredulous. “Why would Marlon sabotage the collapsiter? I mean, I know the man—in several senses of the word—and he does have a temper sometimes, but it’s his collapsiter. It always has been.”

“The man is apparently acting from pure malice, Deliah. Evil, one might say. God, what a petty, small-minded thing that is! Of all the things to do, of all the infinite possibilities, to choose thatl Why not paint, or dig holes, or sing off-key when nobody’s listening; theres nobility for you. Hurting people is just dumb. It’s vandalism in its lowest form.”

“I’m glad I knew you, de Towaji.”

“Call me Bruno, please, and know that the honor is mine. I’ll be sure to tell you this when we meet again someday.”

Her voice was weary and resigned. “Bruno, we’re not going to meet again. The Iscog is smashed, and all my copies were on these grapple stations. I may be the last of me already; if not, it’s just a matter of time.”

Bruno was aghast. “There’s the Royal Registry for Indispensable Persons, isn’t there?”

“What? Oh, no, the Registry closed its doors years ago. Corrupted storage media; toward the end, they couldn’t keep a gnat.”

“Personal backups?”

“You’ve been gone a long time, Bruno. We’ve had virus storms, datavore infestations, Flying Dutchman faxes circling endlessly through the network… A clean backup is only possible if the system generating it is clean, and we haven’t had that luxury in recent years. I’m not sure we ever did.”

Bruno was even more aghast. “Do you mean to say your only copy is flying off into interstellar space?”

“Worse than that,” she replied, her voice going stern. “I think Tamra’s only copy is down there on that ceremony platform; Tongatapu was one of the islands that got drowned by tidal waves. Literally drowned, no survivors.”

Bruno tried to parse that statement. Like most of Tonga’s islands, Tongatapu was a coral atoll, very flat. Geology had tipped it slightly, raising its southern edge out of the waves and submerging parts of the north completely, but even the heights of Fua’amotu rose no more than about fifty meters above sea level. And if something truly massive, a ball of neubles or a stray telecom collapsiter, grazed close enough to the Earth, it could raise local sea levels by several times that much. No survivors? Tongatapu had over eighty thousand residents!

“There are others down there on the platform with her,” Deliah continued. “Wenders Rodenbeck, for one, and Vivian Rajmon and her pet police captain. We were rehearsing for the completion ceremony next year, when the last segment of Ring Collapsiter was to be towed into place.”

Pet captain? Would that be Cheng Shiao? Bruno tried to remember if that too-competent constable had been a captain or not. By all the little gods, he really had been away too long.

“Damn it,” he said. “Damn that Marlon; he’s timed this entirely too well. It’s what malice does, I suppose—sit around calculating minimum effort for maximum harm. Well, he shan’t get away with it. You sit tight, Deliah; you’ll be rescued in the next couple of days. I shall personally guarantee it.” The words surprised even him as he said them. To keep from blurting anything else, he quickly added, “Over and out.”

He’d been continuing his work throughout the five hours or so of that slow conversation, and now he set into it more fiercely, with the energy of total outrage. Gross structure! He must find a gross structure for his hypercollapsite!

But the work progressed slowly, and it was in this area that he encountered his first major disappointments: truly effective damping of the zero-point field would require enormous assemblies, towering cities of foam many thousands of miles wide, and massing enormously more than Sol herself. Perhaps mankind could one day conceive of projects so grand, but for the moment Bruno had some very sharp time and material limits to contend with, and little patience for daydreams.

With sensors fine and coarse, he studied the ring encircling his tiny star. Such was the pool of his actual resources: ten trillion tons of collapsium. He assumed an equal mass of hypercollapsite—implying a completely error-free rearrangement scheme—and fed it into a permutation algorithm to plumb what forms, if any, could be crafted that might do any good at all.

Here, finally, he got lucky again—almost. The key was that the zero-point field’s energy was known to rise as a function of frequency; its highest energies occurred at the shortest wavelengths. With limited mass, Bruno’s damper could only block out absorption “windows” of the field’s full spectrum, but by concentrating on windows at the higher frequencies, it could maximize its otherwise limited effect. And the higher frequencies, he found, were by far the easiest to damp; it was the low ones, the cosmological subwoofers, that penetrated every simulated barrier he could think to erect.

So he put his head down for a little more sleep, trusting the machines to do their work. He was exhausted; this was exhausting work, wringing his brain like a sponge. As he drifted off, bright flashes popped behind his eyelids, as his ocular muscles flinched to the beat of Muddy’s spaceship work outside. Even through the wellstone walls, there was no mistaking the muffled clang! clang! and occasional bursts of stacatto speech, like the cursing of a man who’s just hammered his thumb. Bruno’s last vague thought was that the boat gods must be in need of appeasement out there, and perhaps—worryingly—in here as well.

His sleep was troubled—one might say haunted. He woke a few unsatisfying hours later, produced more flashes by rubbing his eyes, then opened them and learned from his hypercomputers that there was a rilled dome shape, like a meter-wide mushroom cap turned inside out, that when cast in hypercollapsite foam would block out some very high energies indeed. Such higher-frequency energies were also the greatest contributors to Newton’s inertia, so in fact the computer-designed device would behave as if it contained less than a gram of matter, or IE-19 times its actual mass. Objects in its immediate wake would experience an enormously weaker damping effect, but nonetheless would feel the effects of acceleration reduced by a factor of 1081.3901.

In other words, a ship outfitted with such a cap would feel less than one-thousandth of the actual gee forces it was subjected to. More significantly, it would require less than one-thousandth of the fuel and travel time of a conventional ship. This was hardly the magic glove of his dream, but this hypothetical spaceship could—with barely a whiff of fuel in its tanks—accelerate at a thousand gees or more without damage or even discomfort to its occupants.

The problem—found only after an initial, ill-advised burst of smug excitement—was that immeasurably tiny rounding errors had gradually accumulated in the hypercomputers’ innumerable calculations. He’d never have believed it possible, but when he painstakingly worked out a closed-form solution to confirm the final design, his direct calculations yielded a mass fully 15.028% larger than the iterative solution had yielded. Perhaps no one had ever pushed a computer so hard, forced so many calculations based on calculations based on calculations, to achieve a result so weirdly inaccurate. He’d never heard of such a thing happening before.

Here, though, the error was critical: Bruno’s collapsium reserves were right at the ragged edge of useful size. Actually, on the wrong side of the ragged edge—he was nearly 1.5 trillion tons shy of the mass required to achieve any measurable effect at all.

The boat gods were angry indeed. Absently, he murmured a little prayer to appease them.

Then he permitted himself a discouraged sigh. Sinking down into superstition was not a good sign right now. That the boat gods weren’t “real” made little difference; the human brain was wired for animism and anthropomorphism as much as for monarchy. Hammered by billions of years of evolution, it had learned to devote most of its enormous pattern-matching power to guessing the moods and likely actions of prey animals, and predators, and fellow human brains, which of course were the most complex and dangerous of all. And like any hypertrophied athlete, it had lost generality in the process, so that it tended to turn the same sort of attention toward natural phenomena—especially pseudo-random or chaotic events—treating them as entities to be studied and modeled and, if at all possible, appeased.

So even in mono- or atheistic cultures, you inevitably found Mother Nature and Grim Reaper analogs, along with whole pantheons of other demigods and spirits and patron saints inspired by the myriad processes of the world around them. In the early ages of rationalism, these beings were often dismissed as either idle fantasies or as a kind of shorthand for pseudo-mystical concepts like Murphy’s Law and Karma and Fate, which were themselves a shorthand for rigorous, statistical observations about the fate of individuals in society. And if science had long recognized that the mind did model them as entities, that made them real enough to cause real problems, even if these problems were quite separate from the phenomena that implied them.

Blast it, Bruno had hardly spared a thought for the boat gods in sixty years. At Talafo’ou they’d made their presence known, grudgingly rewarding his Redshift labors but also decisively punishing all hubris and presumption. And demanding, yes, a steady sacrifice in disappeared tools and fasteners. Tonga’s old gods were officially dead—not even Tamra had been eager to share their names or histories with him—and it had taken time to arrive at a nonverbal understanding with them, once they’d shown him for sure who was boss. But this time he hadn’t considered their needs at all. Nonexistent or no, they were bound to take that personally. And they had access to his brain.

He rose from his chair, prepared to curse or pray or go looking for something tangible to sacrifice—but gasped at the sensation of gravity pulling down at him. A full gee’s worth of gravity, created by fifteen hundred neubles at the planet’s core! Why, if he could simply extract those, then perhaps the situation could be salvaged after all!

Encouraged, he plopped into the chair again and rattled some more calculations into the hypercomputers, deeply informed now by all that he had learned. He confirmed that this was—just barely!—enough.

All right, then, little gods be praised. All of this was finally, actually possible.

Bruno let out a long sigh.

It seemed Marlon’s taunts had done their work too well, goading Bruno to the point that he actually could interfere. He suspected that anger alone could never have carried him this far. Folk wisdom had always held that love was more powerful than anger, and folk wisdom had proved so right about so many things. But what happened when love and anger were wedded together, when they served the same end?

Leaving aside all the other enormous issues at work here, the simple fact was that Tamra-Tamatra Lutui’s life was in danger, and as her friend and lover Bruno would be damned— literally damned to an eternity of suffering—if he let her freeze to death in the sunless dark, or vaporize in a nova flare, or burn away on a workman’s platform, or any such disagreeable thing. So perhaps the old adage was true: love really did conquer all. It conquered inertia, anyway.

Wary of displaying any actionable hubris, he gave the boat gods a solemn nod and then sat quietly for a minute, though his insides were doing a little jig.

Then impatience finally caught up with him; the house, when queried, informed him that he’d been cooped up in here for almost seventy-three hours. How long did the Queendom have left, before the collapsium started falling into the sun? Miraculously, it hadn’t happened yet; the house had been keeping a close eye on Sol ever since Muddy first told his mad tale, and the unmistakable signs of collapsium intrusion had yet to manifest on that dear old star. All the whirling fragments had missed, had been flung off in other directions. But how long could such fortune hold?

The final stage of this endeavor, the actual construction of the vacuogel hypercollapsite cap, was a matter of excruciating precision, properly the subject of several weeks’ simulation and preparation in its own right, but Bruno—in perhaps the most shocking lapse of his career—thrust his hands into a set of EM grapple controllers to attack the problem manually. One shudders to think how close to the brink he might have come, how many times he nearly slipped or erred or performed key steps out of sequence. Were the odds—and the gods—in his favor? All we can say for certain is that de Towaji completed the entire process in less than twenty hours, his fingers hopping from island to island, one stable form to the next, and that disaster did not, in fact, strike.

Rome may not have been built in a day, but for better or worse, the first crude hypercollapsite was. Sometimes it works like that; simply knowing that a thing is possible sometimes leads you straight to it. If you’re a genius, at least. If you’re desperate and angry and don’t have time to fail. If the higher powers, such as they are, seem inclined to take your side.

As the day progressed, the collapsium shrank, withered, brightened briefly as its nodes fell into denser and denser arrangements, and finally lost its color altogether and became invisible, an optical superconductor. Then came the final step: a jerk here, a flourish there, a picosecond’s delay, and… the structure ceased to be a part of the Newtonian universe, its mass folding in on itself, its charge vibrations damping out in self-eradicating sympathetic waves.

Still useless, of course; without that penultimate, trillion-ton cap’s cap, the eye at the top of the pyramid, the device could no more block inertia than a boat with a hole in it could float. But that was a simple matter, easily corrected when the time came—or so Bruno hoped, at any rate. If it weren’t, if problems occurred at this point to crush the hypercollapsite or otherwise prevent it from functioning, there was little to be done about it. The time had come, to do or die.

His final acts in the study that day, partly practical and partly symbolic, were to capture the forces and movements and stages the collapsium had gone through in its transformation to code them into a single wellstone jewel embedded in the hypercomputer wall, to form a little wellgold ring around the jewel, and to pluck that ring from the wall and place it on the middle finger of his right hand, where it looked very smart indeed.

“Door,” he said then, and stepped out to meet his destiny.

Chapter Seventeen in which the bravery of houses is demonstrated

“That’s our spaceship?” was all Bruno could think to say, upon seeing what Muddy had done with the past four days.

“An iron hull and an engine to propel her,” Muddy quoted back at him, cringing and whining. “That’s what you told me.”

And that was very nearly all there was; the pressure vessel itself was windowless and barrel shaped, tapered slightly at the top and bottom, and the sheets of iron that comprised it were exceedingly thin, almost like foil. Bruno figured he could easily puncture them with a screwdriver. The rivets holding them together were tiny and weak looking, too; perhaps he could breach the hull with his bare hands. The “engine” consisted of a pair of man-sized EM grapples at the top—the bow, Bruno supposed—each with a man-sized superconducting battery to power it, and the life-support system was simply a di-clad tube of supercondensed oxygen strapped to the side of the barrel, with a valve and heating coil at one end and a plastic tube running through into the hull.

The interior was nearly as spartan: a flimsy “hatch” led through to a chamber with two chairs and a little fax machine, plus an iron toilet whose plumbing was apparently just some sort of airlock for dumping wastes overboard. The only civilized concession was the inch of wellstone Muddy had laid—or more likely asked the robots to lay—around the inside and outside surfaces of the hull. For the moment, it was inert, its fine-threaded structure translucent as smoke. This, too, reflected poor judgment: a stiff breeze could damage it in that state.

“I hardly know where to begin,” Bruno said, goggling at this monstrosity that hulked, in the warm starlit darkness, on his front lawn.

“It’s precisely what you ordered, sir, and the gods have been most forgiving in its creation. How was I to’s-s-surmise you wanted elegance?”

Bruno’s sigh was almost a laugh. Almost. “Muddy, this thing is flimsy as a kite. If the wellstone loses power or integrity for some reason, what’s to hold the ship together?”

“It’s light. I wanted it to be light, so it could travel even if your… project didn’t work out. And if the wellstone fails, won’t your hypercollapsite destroy the hull anyway? Regardless of its composition?”

“Hmm. Yes, well, what about the life support?”

“That oxygen bottle is the backup system. In operation we’ll use wellstone scrubbers to crack exhaled CC>2.”

Bruno shook a finger, unwilling to be appeased. “The interior space? We’re to rescue a Queendom in a ship sized for just the two of us?”

Muddy squirmed under his gaze. “I made four folding chairs for extra passengers; I was going to put those in before we left. They attach to special brackets in the walls. But surely we can’t rescue everyone, no matter how big a spaceship we bring. One does have to draw the line’s-s-somewhere.”

“Why is the wellstone inactivated? You’ve left this ship frighteningly vulnerable.”

“To permit your inspection, sir. I’ll switch it back on once you’re done.”

“If I tripped, I could fall right through the hull!”

“The robots have been instructed to prevent that, Declarancy.”

Bruno had saved his worst for last: he pointed up at the bow. “All right, you, look here; look at these grapples. This is supposed to be our propulsion system?”

Muddy cast him a bruised look. “That’s the b-b-best part, sir. Efficient: a hundred percent conversion of stored energy to kinetic, with thrust limited only by the available power. Much better than rockets, if you’re in a hurry. Never widely employed, because the targets you grapple to are dragged and disturbed in the process, ditto anything that passes through the beam incidentally. Actually, it’s probably illegal to travel that way in the Queendom, but under the circumstances I’s-s-suppose they’ll forgive us.”

“Muddy, rockets push, from the rear. That’s what we need here! Good God, man, grapples pull from the front. We have a zpf-damping cap on the front of the ship; the grapple beams will vanish into it without a trace. What do you think a grapple beam is?”

Finally, for the first time Bruno could recollect, Muddy gathered himself up, straightened his spine, and returned something approximating a steady gaze. “I know exactly what a grapple beam is, Declarant. You forget yourself. You forget that I was yourself. In the first place, we can expel oxygen for emergency propulsion, accelerated electromagnetically through wellstone channels in the hull. From the back, yes. In the second place, I watched you put the ertial shield together.”

“Ertial?” Bruno asked.

“The opposite of mertial. I coined the term while you were working. Anyway, I watched you assemble the thing, and I know it’s got a hole in it. As it happens, these grapples are positioned to emit right through that hole.”

Bruno smacked himself on the head. “Damn me! Damn us both, we should have coordinated this better. Muddy, that hole is there because I ran out of materials. I was planning to fill it with mass from the planet’s core. It’s strictly temporary.”

Muddy’s composure collapsed immediately. His arm went up to cover his face, and he commenced a hoarse sobbing. “Oh, sir! Oh, sir! You know how badly I wanted to please you. I can’t manage even that, can I? Did I ever doubt that history would judge me h-h-harshly? If so, that doubt is removed. Please don’t yell at me anymore, sir; please don’t. The weight of my own disapproval is all I can bear!”

For the umptieth time, Bruno felt ashamed, both for upsetting Muddy and for being him, this miserable creature who was so easily upset, and so overly dramatic when it happened. Was he really so weak? So sniveling? Marlon Sykes had his number, all right, had his every shame and insecurity mapped out. That was, of course, the whole idea, but that didn’t make it easier to face. Well damn Marlon, anyway. Did it matter what he thought? So what if Bruno and Muddy were a pair of folding cravens? At least they weren’t hurting anyone, weren’t, for example, destroying the Queendom for spite’s sake.

“There, there,” Bruno said awkwardly, stepping forward to embrace his tortured self. “It’s all right, Brother. It’s all right. Let me try some more calculations, and see what I can come up with. You finish outfitting the ship, all right? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“All right,” Muddy said, sniffing, and burst into fresh sobs. “God, I’m so broken it surprises even me. Go, sir. Please. Observe me no further.”

It seemed that Bruno should have said something heartening at this point, but instead he turned away from Muddy and, taking him at his word, slunk away into the house. This was just too difficult, too awkward, too shaming, Muddy would understand his reaction, right? Better than anyone else possibly could.

He continued on into his study. Fortunately, it hadn’t cleaned itself up since he’d gone outside; everything was exactly as he’d left it. This made it easy to drop right back into his chair and pick up the “ertial shield” calculations right where he’d left off. Clearly now, time was running out.

He worried about the number of workable geometries, this close to the lower mass limit. He supposed the number of solutions could well be infinite, or at least very large, but in a severely restricted domain—the same little mushroom cap, with an infinite number of trivial modifications. Were there any solutions with holes through the middle? He began with the hypothesis that there were, and began formulating a proof.

An hour later, his efforts had borne fruit, yielding an ertial shield solution with a hole of nearly the right size, in nearly the right place. To create it he’d have to use all the neutronium from the planet’s core, and from the core of the little dark sun as well, but that couldn’t be helped. He rose from his chair and bolted through the house.

“Muddy! Muddy, warm up the grapples; we leave at once!”

Outside, the little spaceship had turned to impervium: a smooth, barrel-shaped, superreflecting mirror. Impossibly light and impossibly strong, it would no doubt break his toes if he kicked it. Muddy stood beside it, looking toward Bruno. As before, tears filled his eyes. Were they fresh? Had they been there for the entire hour?

“It’s only just occurred to me,” Muddy said sadly. “You mean to destroy the planet.”

Hurriedly, Bruno nodded. “And the sun, yes. It can’t be helped. Do we have everything we need to rescue a stray grapple station?”

“D’you hear that, house? We’s-s-seek to destroy you for our own gain.”

“Ah. Do be careful, sirs,” the house replied in its calm, mother’s voice.

“Does it bother you?” Muddy pressed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Would you rather live?”

“As you wish,” the house said, equably enough.

Muddy appeared distressed by this. “Shall we at least say good-bye? You’ve been home to me, a reassurance, a place to dream of returning to. It isn’t lightly that one abandons such a place to… the torch.”

The house, unmoving and unchanging, seemed to consider this for a few moments before replying, “I’ve uploaded my gain states to your ship’s memory, sir. Should you ever desire to rebuild me, that image awaits your command. I’m sorry that my destruction troubles you; shall I clean up first? Can I offer you some soup?”

“No.” Muddy said, weeping afresh. “No, thank you.”

“Are we ready to lift off?” Bruno asked, trying to be gentle but needing to hurry things along.

“Not quite,” Muddy said, a little angrily. “A solar IR laser is charging the batteries, and if we’re headed for the grapple station instead of the Queendom, our own grapples will need a few minutes to change target lock.”

Bruno waved a hand. “Muddy, you can handle these things while I’m installing the ertial shield. We’ve got logo, man.”

Muddy’s sobs strengthened, and his arm looked ready to leap up and cover his face again. “Oh, sir, can’t we walk around the world? Can’t we see it one last time? I’ve dreamed of this place for too long, to have it’s-s-snatched out from under me so soon!”

“All right,” Bruno snapped, then softened his tone. “All right, yes. If we haven’t got at least a few minutes to spare, it’s my fault for taking too long in the study. And this place has been a fine home, hasn’t it?”

For a few seconds it seemed Muddy might reply, but he didn’t, and finally Bruno turned to lead the way down the meadow path away from the house. Darkness hadn’t been kind here—the grass lay dead and crisp in some places, dead and limply moldering in others. His gardens lay in neat, lifeless rows. At the meadow’s far end, his dogwoods and honeysuckles had gone dormant, shedding their leaves in a carpet that squelched and crumbled beneath their boots.

The little bridge was intact, and the stream beneath it babbled as happily as ever, but the barley fields beyond it held only harvest stubble and a pair of stoop-backed robots dutifully uprooting the tiny white mushrooms that were springing up all around. The rocky desert looked all right, and the beach, and the sea. These things he hadn’t killed yet. Not yet.

“What would Enzo have made of this place, I wonder?” Muddy asked, pausing where the stream widened out into foul, rotting bog at the ocean’s edge.

Bruno snorted. “It’s no world for kites, I’m afraid, though he’d have liked the fields and vineyards.”

“And hated the silence. He wouldn’t have understood this, would he, Bruno? Crawling off on our own like this, messing around with theories and things; he’d never have stood for it if he’d been alive.”

No, indeed. Enzo de Towaji had been the ultimate people person, a man who seemed to exist only in the thoughts and reactions of others. Strange that he’d been so happy with Bernice, who did like the quiet. How often would she be staring into the fireplace, or setting off to hike in the hills, or playing a game of chess against herself, when Enzo would kidnap her along on some foolish errand? But perhaps she needed that—needed someone to drag her mind from its pure, Machiavellian pursuits.

“Mother might have understood,” Muddy said.

Bruno nodded. “Indeed. Indeed, yes, although she’d find the place awfully confining. We really should be going, Muddy. There are live people who need us. Deliah van Skeltering, for starters.”

Muddy pursed his lips. “She’s the woman on the station?”

“Yes, and she’s probably single-copy. Her death could well be as final as Enzo’s and Bernice’s, if we’re late in preventing it.”

“Do we have the time?”

Bruno puffed out his chest. “I daresay we must. If nothing else, she knows where to find Tamra, who, incidentally, may also have been singled in this calamity. But I hope we’d have saved her in any case.”

“To spite Marlon?” Muddy asked, in a particularly whining tone.

“To spite God,” Bruno answered sincerely. It was the ultimate superstition, the last and most powerful he could tap. If spirits and demigods were a shorthand for all the pseudorandomness of nature, then God was a shorthand for all the spirits taken together. If silly “boat gods” could derive some statistically measurable reality from dwelling even fleet-ingly in Bruno’s subconscious, then God himself—who dwelt in nearly everyone—must derive enormously more. So to blame God, to beseech God, to invoke God was an act not only of desperation, but of ultimate rationality.

He expanded. “This business of evil, of murder, has no place in civilized society. Deliah does not wish to fly off into outer darkness, and so she shall not. And she’ll have you to thank for it, Muddy, and God to curse for letting it come down to your actions, and mine. Has Marlon broken your heart, along with your pride? Come! Saddle up our steed and let’s away!”

To his relief, Muddy did seem infected by that enthusiasm; together they trotted along the beach, along the pebbled pathway that led back into meadow again. The house appeared over the horizon, and suddenly they were upon it.

A hundred robots lined the way ahead of them.

There were fifty robots on either side of the path, gleaming gold and silver and glossy black in the starlight, their left arms raised in formal salute, forming an arch. Bruno skidded to a halt, Muddy coming up short beside him. Together they stared for a few silent moments, before starting forward.

Two by two, the robots turned blank faces toward their masters and seemed to convey a sense of exultation, untainted by sorrow. Two by two they bowed, bodies clicking and whirring with impossible grace, arms extending downward to brush the withered grass. Two by two, they collapsed the archway, a good-bye as eloquent as any poet had ever penned.

“Farewell, old friends,” Bruno murmured as they came to the end of it, as the last two robots swept into their bows. Muddy burst out crying again.

“It’s been a privilege, sir,” the house said.

“I thank you,” Muddy sobbed, “from the very bottom of my wounded heart.”

Then Bruno touched him on the shoulder and steered him toward the ship, and together they climbed through the little hatch. Inside was a miniature palace of diamonds and green velvet, of blue-and-white veined lapis and green-and-white veined jade. The two little chairs had become slick, stylish acceleration couches in black leather; the toilet had turned to gold.

“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed on seeing it. “Did I accuse you of shoddy design, Brother? I retract every word!”

“It’s just library patterns,” Muddy said, shrugging, his sobs trailing away into sniffles again. Then he straightened. “Oblivion! Aren’t we forgetting your pet?”

“My pet? My pet?” Bruno felt his eyes widen. “Ah, God! Hugo!”

He leaped through the hatch, catching his boot toe on it, and fell sprawling in the rotting grass, narrowly missing smashing his nose. He needn’t have bothered, though; the battered robot stood outside, looking as if it’d been just about to climb in.

“Mewl,” it said distinctly, looking down at Bruno in an oddly human—if faceless—way.

“Yes,” Bruno agreed, rising, brushing himself off, “mewl indeed. Climb aboard, you, and quickly. There’s much to do, and little time!”

Chapter Eighteen in which numerous laws are broken

Of the world’s destruction there Is little to say; grapples cleft the planet in twain, exposing its core of prismatic-white neubles, and the neubles were collapsed into proton-sized black holes, and the black holes were formed into collapsium, and the collapsium was squashed into a torus of vacuo-gel hypercollapsite and positioned atop the ertial shield.

The destruction of the sun was somewhat more delicate, somewhat more involved, but only slightly. Muddy, staring upward through the wellstone “window” of the bow, wept and moaned inconsolably throughout the process, until Bruno, who was none too happy about all this himself, finally snapped at him to shut up. Hugo mewled once and fell silent, and as the ertial shield whumped into place atop the spaceship’s impervium bow and the propulsion grapples locked onto their distant target, there was only the sound of the two men breathing: one raggedly, the other not.

The star field—and the debris field of their former home—-rippled only slightly; the ertial shield was transparent to visible light, transparent in fact to nearly every phenomenon the universe could throw at it. It existed primarily as an absence, a damping, a silence in the zero-point field’s infinite screeching.

“Engage the beams,” Bruno said, when all systems were ready.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Muddy acknowledged in sullen, childish tones. In place of a standard hypercomputer interface he’d designed a late renaissance control panel, with all manner of gilded switches and levers and dials, and with his hands he now manipulated these controls.

The transition from weightlessness to weight was immediate; the debris field dropped away against the unmoving stars, and Bruno felt his lungs compress, the air forced out of them by the weight of his own breastbone. The acceleration wasn’t enormous—the system was set for precisely 1.00000 gee— but it came on as a step function. Its time derivative, known to physicists as “jerk,” was nearly infinite, lurching them from zero to full throttle in a millionth of a millionth of a microsecond. Funny how, in their hurry, they hadn’t considered the effect of this on tender flesh and blood; it hurt. Not a stinging or a burning or a bruising kind of hurt, but a pressing, like having a soft, heavy couch dropped on you.

“Ah, my bones!” Muddy shrieked. “My ribs! I’ve broken my ribs!” And then he vomited over the side of his couch and shrieked again.

“Steady,” Bruno said, unfastening restraints and sitting up. The movement was unwise. The ertial shield swept away the zero-point field immediately ahead of them, leaving behind a medium one thousand times less energetic; in theory, plowing through this sparser field at one thousand times the acceleration should have been completely equivalent to 1.00000 gee, indistinguishable in every way from normal gravity or thrust. But a bow-heavy structure weighing trillions of tons, however cleverly disguised, poses some minor practical difficulties. What was really going on, in this air-filled space behind the hypercollapsite? Was it surprising that inner-ear fluids might misbehave?

While these thoughts raced through Bruno’s head, his body slid off the acceleration couch and onto the floor. He felt there was something strange in the way he fell, and stranger still in the way he landed, as if the fine hairs on his skin were solid rods growing out of a light, solid, cleverly articulated doll. He attempted to rise. The floor had a comforting traction, at least, but it seemed his mass—his weight—rose too quickly for the press of gravity. Something a little off, a little light, with the inertia?

His dizziness continued, along with an odd, pressing sensation in his chest. The heart? He imagined inertialess blood pumping through inertialess veins. Pressure and viscosity and muscular contraction weren’t functions of inertia; the heart would pump. The blood would flow. But strangely, yes.

Beside him, Hugo lay where they’d strapped it to the floor. It held a worn metal hand in front of its face and made small movements with it every few moments, seeming somehow fascinated with the results. Had Hugo discovered inertia, by virtue of its sudden reduction?

With great concentration, Bruno managed to regain his balance and rise slowly to his feet, standing unsteadily between Muddy’s couch and his own.

“My bones,” Muddy whined tearfully, “my organs. My eyes.”

He was rolling back and forth as much as his restraints would allow, as if in a kind of slow seizure, but Bruno immediately had the sense that the movement was voluntary, that Muddy wasn’t seriously hurt, that the tears were of misery rather than outright agony.

Bruno reached out with uncertain fingers to probe at Muddy’s chest. “Does this hurt? Here? Here?”

Muddy cried out each time, but the bones themselves felt perfectly intact. “Ow! Ow, sir, you grieve me!”

“I don’t think there’s a fracture.”

His groaning intensified. “No fracture? God, you’d think after years of torture a person would become inured to pain. The truth is otherwise! Opposite! Bruno, if you knew the indignities these bones had been’s-s-subjected to. Split with wedges? I only wish. It’s that legacy that haunts me now.”

Bruno frowned down at himself. “The fax should have healed any injuries. You should be every bit as fit as I am.”

“Should I?” Muddy’s face was miserable, ashamed. He tried to turn away. “I’ve been cunningly redesigned, sir, in ways the fax has little ability to detect and still less to repair. Primarily in the synaptic wiring, but he took some liberties with my’s-s-skeleton as well. To move is to suffer; to hold still is to suffer more.”

Bruno, who was getting tired of feeling aghast, merely sighed. “We’ll undesign you, then.”

“Easy to say. Someday, yes, no doubt we’ll overcome his cleverness. Meanwhile, I suppose I deserve these miseries.”

Here was a clumsy move, an attempt to make Bruno deny it. He declined again to take the bait, saying instead, “There are pressing concerns and limited resources, and anyway that little fax”—he pointed—“won’t pass a human body. So perhaps it is necessary for you to be patient until the situation has stabilized. I’m sorry for that, particularly since your suffering doesn’t appear to build character.”

Muddy managed—with visible strain—to scrape out a chuckle. “Ah, a touch of bitterness, of condescension. Go with it, Bruno; be human. Your respect is forced; honor me instead with your heartfelt disgust. There’s a good lad.”

Bruno sighed again. “Can I offer you a drug?”

“A drug! How novel. Indeed, yes, I’d be powerless to refuse some of Enzo’s Christmas brandy. Reduce this pain in me, sir. Your inertially corrupt’s-s-spacetime disagrees with me!”

“Brandy is not a painkiller.”

“Ah, but it is, Declarancy. It is.”

“Not the proper sort, and you know it. I’ll get you something… strong.”

Bruno glanced up, half expecting to see the stars themselves moving outside the wellstone “window” of the bow. But the star field was inert, unimpressed with their meddlings. The turning of his head left him dizzy; he nearly fell again, but caught himself with a hand on each of the two couches. Moving carefully and with many pauses, he extricated himself from between the couches, turned toward the fax, and pulled up a hypercomputer interface beside it so he could search the onboard libraries for a suitable painkiller. There were, it turned out, many thousands to choose from.

“We’re… really… moving along, aren’t we?” Muddy mused.

Turning slowly, Bruno looked up, and followed Muddy’s gaze to the instruments. Specifically, to the “Distance to Target” gauge, an old-style digital readout made from rows of illuminable red bars. It read in tenths of a meter, and at present its lower five digits were all flickery eights, changing too rapidly to register on the eye. The higher seven digits counted down smoothly, their speed increasing even as he watched.

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed. “We’ll reach the halfway mark in a couple of hours.”

This was no small feat; though the runaway grapple station had passed just over eight light-minutes of Bruno’s little planet—greater than the distance between the Earth and Sun—at its closest approach, it had since hurtled another fifty light-minutes toward infinity. Poor Deliah had probably traveled farther than any human being before her.

The fax made a little coughing sound and spat a pill into Bruno’s hand. He extended the other hand and extracted a glass of water, whose contents sloshed from side to side with even the slightest jostling as he rose to approach Muddy.

“Chair upright,” Muddy said, then screamed as the chair complied.

When all was ready, Bruno handed his counterpart the pill and the glass, watched him carefully ingest the one and sip from the other, then wince as if the act of swallowing caused some new pain of its own. He drank from the glass several times more, grimacing each time, and also complaining that it was “merely water.” Then finally the chair was reclined again, and the glass was carefully returned to the fax, and Bruno climbed awkwardly back into his own couch, managing to step on Hugo’s head twice during the process. Hugo mewled at this, but otherwise didn’t seem to mind.

“Sorry, old thing. I’d break the floor if it weren’t impervium.”

“Will this take effect quickly?” Muddy asked.

“It should, yes.” Bruno carefully strapped himself back in and cinched the straps tight. “Ah. Ah, yes. It’s much better to lie still.”

Muddy snorted beside him. “She is a fine ship, isn’t she?”

“For a cobbled-together prototype on her first shakedown cruise, I’d say she’s a bloody miracle.”

“Shall we name her?”

Bruno grunted; he hadn’t thought about that. Anthropomorphic instincts aside, he wasn’t much for naming inanimate things, or even semianimate ones like houses and small planets. But a ship was a different matter—it was animate, by definition. And it would need a name for legal registration if for no other reason. There was some optimistic thinking.

“All right, yes.” He ran through a few possibilities in his mind: the Redshift II, the Tamra Lutui, The Grappleship Old Girona. Then, belatedly catching a hint in Muddy’s tone, he asked, “You, ah, have something in mind?”

“I do. I thought perhaps the Sabadell-Andorra.”

That gave Bruno pause. Absurd on the face of it: by nature, spaceships were gracile and swift, where tectonic plates were among the slowest and heaviest objects ever manipulated by humans. And anyway, did anyone outside Catalonia even remember the pocket catastrophe of that earthquake? Then again, in component form this little spaceship massed considerably more than all the fallen hillsides of Girona, possibly as much as the Iberian plate itself, and the technology certainly was—well, earthshaking in its implications.

“All right,” he said finally, nodding, “Sabadell-Andorra it is. And we’ll know what it means, at least.”

“I feel the medication working.”

Bruno turned to look at his… brother—his battered, mistreated counterpart. “Good. Excellent. Is it helping?”

“It is, yes. Ah. To be without pain, for even a moment…”

Muddy’s eyelids began to droop. Through thousands of years of civilization, mankind had yet to invent a reliable pain-suppression chemical that didn’t also proportionally suppress consciousness. Pain was simply too fundamental, too necessary, to be banished so easily; it bound itself up in every system of the body. There were various “nondrowsy formulas” Bruno might have tried, milder analgesics tempered with stimulants and euphoriants, but the ship’s library gave these much lower effectiveness ratings. Of course there was always the brute-force approach: simply deadening the spinal nerves. Muddy didn’t need to move for a while anyway, right? But sleep seemed a much kinder side effect than total paralysis.

“Thanks,” Muddy said blurrily; Then his eyes closed, his breathing slowed, and he just sort of faded away. It was a peaceful thing to watch, a hundred little tensions sliding out of that tortured body to leave it—finally!—at peace. Bruno almost feared he’d died until his chest rose and fell again slowly—and again, and again—his breathing shallow but steady. Muddy would awaken in four or five hours, just in time for the rendezvous with Deliah’s grapple station.

Bruno, seeing these hours stretching dully before him, wished he had some means to slip away so easily. All the hard hours in the study had taken their toll; he didn’t relish any further isolation. He spent fully twenty-eight seconds considering this before he, too, fell asleep.

He awoke to gravity fluctuations—a sense of rotation and weightlessness—followed by the slamming jerk of acceleration again. The first sound he heard was Muddy’s weeping—not a shriek or howl or moan this time but a quiet, private, sniffly sort of weeping that engendered immediate sympathy. He opened his eyes, saw Muddy lying there on the acceleration couch, his skin and tufted hair pale against the black leather.

His shirt had loosened in the night; the word “savage” was clearly visible on his shoulder in fluorescent green.

“Are you all right?” Bruno asked him gently.

Muddy jumped a little, startled. “What? Ah, Bruno. I was savoring a dream.”

Above, the bow afforded a view of Sol, at this range barely distinguishable from the stars around it.

“Mmm. A sad dream?”

“A dream about His Declarancy. Not sad, no; I dreamed he held a whip in his hand.”

“How terrifying!”

Muddy snorted. “Not at all. No, the whip is a personal, almost intimate expression between two people. It means he wants to talk, to exchange. But in my dream, he was whipping the sun, and flares were spinning out of it with every stroke, and he was saying your name over and over again, and when I asked him what he was doing, he turned to look at me. His face was blank, like a robot’s. I woke up.”

“That sounds horrible, Muddy.”

“No.” He was shaking his head. “To me it was touching. Sweet. I suppose I’m crying because it should have been horrible, because I’ve come so far from where I started. Ah, Bruno, if only you could know him. He admires you so very much. He’s not such a bad man, in some ways.-Just very, very driven.”

“How sad for him,” Bruno said, then loosened his straps a little and raised his seat back. “Muddy, you don’t have to play his games anymore.”

The tears ran freely down Muddy’s face. “Perhaps I do, sir. These things aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine. Perhaps they can’t be undone at all, except in death, but he’s made such an obedient little coward of me I doubt even that is an option. There’s little doubt I’m doing his work right now, one way or another. You should lock me in this chair and drug me for the duration, sir. I would, in your place.”

“Yes? Well, that’s precisely where you and I differ. I’m very sorry for all that’s happened to you, but enough already. Right? You’ve made a fine ship to fly against him, and you’re using it. Revel in that. Have we turned around yet?”

“Indeed,” Muddy said, in sour imitation of Bruno’s own voice. Or perhaps the “imitation” was literal, and his voice really was that growling and brusque. “We’ve been decelerating for hours. We’ll reach the station in eleven minutes.”

He pointed to a diagram on the instrument console, a little brass plaque engraved with black letters and symbols, which showed the arrow-straight trajectory of the station and the slightly curvier path of the Sabadell-Andorra intersecting it. Curvy because the ship’s only means of propulsion was the runaway station itself, the electromagnetic anchor they’d tied to it. There was nothing else to anchor to out here in the so-called Kuiper Belt, a space so huge and empty around them that the nearest other object was probably the planetary debris field they’d left behind, or perhaps a flake or two of very lonely methane ice.

At any rate, since they couldn’t aim for where the station ivould be, but only where it was, their path was a classic “stern chase.” Actually, it was worse than that, because they’d had to place themselves directly between the station and the sun, so the latter could be used as a deceleration anchor. Their final rendezvous—indicated in miniature on the little brass plaque—involved a lot of flip-flopping toward the station and back, for course correction, while Sol, on the other side, did all the heavy lifting. Bruno had been awakened by just such a flip-flop. It was hardly an optimal arrangement, but it did seem to be getting the job done. As Bruno watched, the little black indentations labeled SHIP and STATION inched forward in their tracks, dotted lines turning solid in their wake. And indeed, if the display was accurate then rendezvous was very nearly at hand.

“Have you made radio contact?” he asked Muddy.

“With the’s-s-station?”

“With Deliah, yes.”

“I hadn’t thought of it. Shall I?”

“Allow me. Ship? Hello?”

A hypercomputer earpiece appeared on the hull beside him.

“Ship here,” was the immediate—though somewhat tentative—reply. The poor thing was probably growing a consciousness emulator for the first time, opening its metaphorical eyes and ears, the demands of an impatient de Towaji being its first-ever experience of experience. The ship itself wouldn’t mind, of course; it would be eager for any task, but still Bruno found the idea depressing. This week had been filled to bursting with depressing ideas.

“Can you make radio contact with that grapple station?”

“The object ahead of us? Certainly, sir. Can you recommend a frequency?”

Bruno gave it one—the one he and Deliah had used in their conversation at closest approach. “Analog,” he added, “not digital.”

“Very well, sir. Receiving reply.”

“Play it.”

“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice said. “Malo e lelei, it’s about time you answered. I’ve had you on radar for over an hour. Hello?”

“I’m here,” he acknowledged. “Two of me, actually, though one would deny it. How are you holding up?”

“Splendidly,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. He supposed not; he’d certainly be delighted at the prospect of rescue after a week of lonely terror out here, the sun shrinking steadily behind him. The light-lag and vocal distortions, at least, had dropped almost to zero.

“Right. Well, we’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m not sure that we have an actual rendezvous plan, but we’ll work something out.”

“What is the condition of the station?” Muddy interjected, in a voice less sour than before.

“Condition? Why, it’s a mess. Every non-wellstone component has been smashed out of true, and there are lots of those components. Big, too. I feel I’m in some carnival funhouse. I’m actually amazed the hull’s held up so well: I’ve got leaks, but they’re about eighth on my hierarchy of problems to worry about. The floor here is neutronium filled, for local gravity. My biggest fear is losing cohesion in the diamond cladding— I’d survive about a microsecond.”

“Is the station functional?” Muddy pressed. “Can you produce a grapple beam with it?”

Deliah paused. “Bruno? Is that still you? You sound funny.”

“I’m Muddy. A de Towaji relative on the Quisling’s-s-side of the family.”

Quisling: traitor. Deliah didn’t appear to catch the reference. “Attitude control is out,” she said evenly. “Power distribution is out. I’ve got hypercomputers running in several locations, but there isn’t a lot for them to do. The emitter cavities are wellstone lined, so it’s possible the revpics still have full range of motion. If I can route power to them, I could probably get enough vibration out to muster some measurable gravitation. Not enough to save me or anything. Why? What did you have in mind?”

Muddy shrugged, then seemed to realize she couldn’t see that. “I, uh, thought we might simply take it with us. The whole thing. I thought it might come in handy.”

“It might at that,” Bruno said, impressed with the idea. “Goodness.” He turned to the nearest hypercomputer and tapped in some quick calculations. “Hmmph. Not feasible. The ertial shield’s wake is essentially cone shaped, and could only accommodate the station if it were more than a kilometer behind. But at that range, most of the zpf has filled in again. It’s like digging a hole in water—it doesn’t last long at all.”

Muddy looked ready to cry again. “It was just an idea,” he whined, cringing back in his couch as if expecting violence.

“A good idea,” Bruno agreed quickly, “just not a workable one. At best, we’d yank a core sample out through the station’s middle.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Deliah complained. “If you can think of towing something this size through space, then you’re either crazy or… Well, we’ve got some talking to do when you get here.”

A gentle but very solid whump came up through the floor, and suddenly all the sensations of inertialess motion vanished. They weren’t accelerating any longer, so the aft deck was no longer “down.” But they weren’t weightless, either. Instead, the di-clad neutronium deck liners inside the grapple station tugged at them sidewise. The deck seemed to tilt beneath them now, as on an ocean ship that was sinking.

“Huh. I believe we are here,” Muddy said.

The view above them was still of Sol: a bright star among the many stars, none of them moving. But at the edges of the view, just barely visible, was a lighted red circle in a curve of well-metals. It flicked off and then on again as Bruno watched. Not part of their own ship; it was the only sign of the massive station hulking below them.

“Ship,” Muddy said, “display a schematic of the station, including yourself upon it, and clearly indicate the positions of all living persons.”

Obligingly, the brass plaque erased itself and became instead a plate of holographic glass, behind which a little grapple station appeared, as if modeled in translucent brown plastic. Two dots of brightly contrasting pink appeared in one lobe of the structure—Bruno and Muddy in the Sabadell-Andorra. A third dot hovered nearby, perhaps fifty meters away.

“Okay, I have you on scope,” Deliah said. “The nearest air lock suffered minimal damage in the accident—air leakage shouldn’t be a major problem if you mate there.”

“Mate?” Bruno asked stupidly.

Muddy slapped himself on the forehead, not playfully or symbolically but hard, as if he meant to raise a welt. “Little gods, I’m so stupid! So stupid!”

“We have no airlock,” Bruno said, echoing the obvious. “Steady, Brother—I didn’t think of it either. We’re not the most brilliant of sailors, you and I. Deliah, there’s a problem. Have you any sort of spacesuit to climb into?”

“No,” she said, “nothing like that. All the faxes are down. Do I hear you correctly? If you’re airlock-free, I don’t see how a spacesuit would help. The vacuum would kill you both the moment I opened your hatch.”

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed ruefully. “We have a door, and an ample supply of oxygen, but that will do us little good if we must suffocate to admit you. An idiotic quandary. Let’s think on this a moment. My humblest apologies, madam.”

“Can you fax yourself into storage for a few minutes, while the hatch is opened and closed?” Deliah asked.

“Alas, no, our fax is much too small to admit a person. Let me think about this.”

Muddy had, of course, started crying again, but presently his eyes brightened, his snuffling quieted, and his hands lashed out for the control panel above him.

“An idea?” Bruno asked, feeling startled.

“Indeed, yes. Deliah, move as far away from us as you can. Can you seal yourself off with an independent air supply?”

Her snort of amusement was unmistakable. “You overestimate the conditions here, de Towaji.”

“I’m Muddy.”

“Oh. Well, I can put some distance between us, but it’s all one crumpled volume. Is the danger really any greater if I’m close?”

Muddy considered. “I suppose not, actually.”

“I’ll only go a little ways, then.”

“Stay clear of the walls, at least.”

The floor had begun to make a new noise—a kind of low, sizzling hiss.

“What are you doing?” Bruno asked. Well, demanded, actually, and then immediately felt bad for it. He’d been telling Muddy all along to act like a man, to use the brains and initiative he’d been born with, to be helpful rather than helpless, and yet here he was getting unnerved and suspicious the first time it actually happened. He supposed it was another response from humanity’s deep wiring: Muddy had acted subservient for long enough to place himself “beneath” Bruno in some imaginary hierarchy. And now he was… What? Exceeding that role? Getting uppity? Was Bruno entitled, in this age of self-repair and self-reconstruction, to blame him for that, and then excuse his own behavior as a quirk of evolution? Surely not.

These things, Muddy’s voice reminded him, aren’t so easily undone as you seem to imagine. Perhaps it was like the wiring for pain: subtle, pervasive, intimately tied to vital functions. But was that an excuse? Goodness, if Bruno couldn’t treat himself with dignity…

“I’m sorry,” he said to Muddy’s cringing form, with as much sincerity as he could muster. “Please proceed.”

Slowly, Muddy uncringed himself and moved his hands back toward the controls. “It’s a chemical reaction. A’s-s-series of them, actually.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The hull’s outer layer was wellstone; it could be programmed into all manner of absurdly reactive forms that would decompose— atom by atom—the absurdly nonreactive substance of the grapple station’s wellstone hull. Such reactions could be timed in waves, so that each atom of silicon substrate, once liberated, could be carried away in the chemical equivalent of a bucket brigade. And at the edges and interfaces, the two hulls could be pseudochemically merged, to keep the air from leaking out around the sides. The Sabadell-Andorra was melting its way through the defenses of the runaway station, melting through into its cozy, air-filled interior. Already, the sizzling sound had climbed half a meter up the sides of the Andorra’s barrel hull.

“My God!” Bruno exclaimed, and if he weren’t secured and awkwardly tilted in his leather couch, he’d have leaped to his feet to grasp Muddy’s hand and pump it. “How brilliant! What a tidy solution that is. And quick! Why, it took you hardly any time at all.”

“Careful, sir,” Muddy warned. “You endanger your modesty. To claim me as part of yourself, then praise my brilliance? It’s mightily suspicious.” His voice was partly sour, partly sarcastic, partly amused and wry. But he seemed to appreciate the compliment just the same. He relaxed visibly, his frame filling out a little as his muscles slumped and his chest expanded.

“Oh, piffle,” Bruno answered, in much the same tone. But he took the hint, and declined to praise himself further. “How long until we can open the door?”

“Another minute.”

Deliah’s voice broke through again. “Holy Philadelphia! My station! My beautiful station, what are you doing to the hull of my beautiful station?”

She, too, sounded amused. What a jolly band of jokers they were up here, ten thousand million kilometers above the sun. Bruno supposed it was a reasonable defense mechanism, given the chaos below and the impossibility of their intervention there, at this particular moment. He thought of Tonga, the cliffs of Fua’amotu washed away, and felt guilty for his humor.

“I see the door,” Deliah said in a bleaker, more serious tone. “It’s about halfway in. No signs of air leakage yet. For an impromptu solution, this seems to be working rather well.”

“You know,” Muddy said, “technically we could do the same thing to our own hull: pull the iron aside bit by bit as a temporary measure, and make a wellstone door anywhere we like. Not even a door, a semipermeable membrane. I suppose fighting your way against the air-pressure gradient might be difficult, but we could compensate by… Well, hmm.”

“It hardly matters,” Deliah said. “Your real hatch is almost through. Just stay clear of that cladding! You do realize I’d never approve this as a safe operating procedure. You could so easily kill us all right now…

“All right, another two centimeters and it looks like the hatch will open. And… it’s… there. Can you go a little further inward, just to be safe? Good. Can you see this? It looks perfectly clear from where I’m standing. Can you open the door?”

“Indeed,” Bruno said.

But it was Muddy who was closest, and so he was the one who unstrapped himself, slid down the now-diagonal floor, and threw the latches. There was a huffing noise as the equalization valves kicked in. Bruno’s ears popped; the pressure was lower on Deliah’s side.

The door swung open, and a platinum-haired woman in a grease-smeared yellow pantsuit burst through. With hardly a glance, she threw her arms around Muddy and kissed him soundly on the cheek. “My hero!”

Muddy squawked and tried to pull away. “I’m Muddy, madam. Your hero is over there. Please, please, you’re hurting me.”

“You’re both my heroes,” she insisted breathlessly, and launched herself uphill at Bruno who, to tell the truth, reacted much as Muddy had. They were neither one of them too comfortable with displays of gratitude. Some heroes.

Chapter Nineteen in which the lawbreaking accelerates

Deliah’s face betrayed more curiosity than concern. “I don’t understand, Bruno. Why did you change your name? What exactly did Marlon do?”

Muddy tensed at the question but, to his credit, did his best to answer politely. “That’s a more personal inquiry than you suspect, madam. Pray you never discover the answer.”

Bruno, who’d been ignoring the two so he could feed calculations into a pair of hypercomputers, looked up now and saw the need to intervene. “Ah. Deliah, you’ve hit upon a… delicate subject. Muddy has, until quite recently, been accumulating what we’ll politely call ‘deep psychological injuries.’ All things considered I’d say he’s coping rather well, but it’s unwise—not to mention unkind—to press him. Once he’s seen proper medical attention, he may feel more inclined to share his story, but for the moment even / don’t know it. And perhaps we should take him at his word, that there are things we really don’t want to know.”

Muddy, not surprisingly, burst out crying at this.

Deliah blushed. Her folding chair—now a slim couch of padded white leather secured beside the fax machine— creaked a little as she moved within her restraints. “I’m… sorry, uh, Muddy. I had no idea your troubles were so… That is to say… Urgh. When I first saw you, I thought you looked, um, festive, and so I…”

“Festive. Festive!” Muddy fingered the several gray tufts of hair sprouting from his wrinkled, mottled scalp, then touched his upturned nose, which was somewhat redder and wider than Bruno’s own. His cheeks were ruddier, too. Muddy wasn’t restrained at all; he sat upon his couch, and through his tears an awkward chuckle escaped, and an unhappy smile, and he even managed a little bow in this sickening environment of Sabadell-Andorra under full sunward acceleration.

“I didn’t mean—

“No, no, the lady is most perceptive. Indeed, among… other activities… I was employed exactly as you surmise. You may say the word—I grant you my leave.”

“Here now,” Bruno tried. What he wanted to say was that Muddy might prove useful in the hours ahead, and his delicate-but-functional emotional state should not be tweaked or tampered with. But that sounded so cold, so calculating. If Muddy were Bruno himself, then fine; he could do whatever he pleased. People made copies for purposes both monumental and banal, and reconverged them with equal aplomb. Some even destroyed the copies after certain rough uses, with no reconvergence, no exchange of mental notes, or else they designed sacrificial copies that willingly destroyed themselves. That was a bitter pill for any enlightened society to swallow, but indeed, under Queendom law Bruno would be well within his rights to command Muddy’s erasure as “spoilage.”

For that matter, the Queendom itself could make such a ruling, and poor Muddy would have no recourse. This could hardly be called justice—indeed, such scenarios had inspired some of the century’s most wrenching songs and dramas. And yet, the government must hold these powers, or all its planets would be stuffed pole to pole with cranky, unwanted faxes. If that wasn’t a form of criminal trespass, then what was? A hundred million of the same compulsive, neurotic narcissist? No thank you!

But still, he found reason to doubt. From the look on her face, it seemed clear that Deliah knew exactly what Muddy was talking about, while Bruno himself had no idea. This was hardly the rapport one expected between duplicates, or even brothers.

“Say the word,” Muddy repeated.

Deliah struggled with it for a few seconds before finally giving in. “Jester.”

Still weeping, Muddy bowed again, then carefully slid off his couch until his feet were on the deck. “Jester. Indeed. I am festive, a plaything, a joke between friends. Shall I defy my nature, and gallivant about the solar system with this foul hero?” He jerked an elbow in Bruno’s direction. “Or shall I drug myself insensible, and spare you both my company? The latter, I think. This place is filled with pain.”

As he spoke, he tiptoed gingerly over the supine form of Hugo, still strapped to the floor and apparently content there. He advanced on Deliah, or rather on the fax orifice beside her, and she pulled away as much as her restraints allowed, her face betraying a familiar mix of guilt and mortification.

Ignoring her, Muddy extended a hand to the fax, which anticipated his request and spat a pill into his waiting palm, along with a glass of something that definitely wasn’t water. He popped the drug into his mouth and gulped it immediately, then winced in pain and downed, in two big gulps, the amber fluid in the glass. His sobbing renewed as he put the glass back in the fax again. Then, head down, he trudged back to his couch, settled down on it, and strapped himself in.

“Apologies, Laureate-Director,” he said to Deliah, through his tears. “It isn’t you. I’d no doubt embarrass myself no matter what you did or said. I’m intended to embarrass a certain de Towaji, but I’ve disowned him. Let him find his own humiliations.”

Then he closed his eyes and feigned sleep, and soon enough the heavy rise and fall of his chest was no act.

“I’m so very sorry,” Deliah said, to no one specific.

Bruno was gruff. “Blame your friend Marlon. If you doubt the malice of his intentions, there’s your proof right there. That any human being should be so mistreated…”

“Marlon’s not like that, Bruno. He really isn’t.”

“He is,” Bruno insisted. “Unless someone a thousand times -more evil has constructed Muddy to frame him. False memories, false Iscog trace… I know of exactly two people bright enough and patient enough to pull off that trick, and one of them is Marlon.”

“Who is the other?”

Bruno’s face grew warm. “Oh, all right then; possibly several others could do it. If we’re to live forever, no doubt any number of surprises and infamies will assail us. People can accomplish anything, given sufficient time. This isn’t the last sick fantasy we’ll see played out in our lifetimes.”

“No,” she mused, “I suppose it isn’t. But Marlon?”

“Occam’s Razor would convict him; his guilt is the simplest explanation. And Deliah, I’m sorry to inform you that he keeps copies of you in his dungeons as well. I have Muddy’s word on it, at any rate.”

That clearly knocked her back. Perhaps he could have broached the matter more delicately. Ah, that worlds-renowned de Towaji charm.

The two of them were silent a long time.

Finally, Deliah said, “I had a personal relationship with Marlon at one time. He was upset about the way it broke off, and I suppose in some sense I don’t blame him. But I couldn’t help it; I really couldn’t. Love is the bane of the immortal, I’ve always said. Are we cheating God by living forever? If so, he gets us back with nagging doubts, and silly dreams of silly perfection. It must have been easier in the days when marriage meant a decade or two of hard work and squalor, then a simple, horrible death. All choices would be permanent in that time, and thus simple. You want to grow old and die alone? No? Then grab a hand and hold it tight! Today, the question is a lot harder to answer, because we know someplace there’s a perfect mate, or at least an optimal one, whom we have only to find and meet. Perfect love! So the thought of spending eternity with anything less becomes appalling. But are we supposed to meet everyone? Shake every hand, kiss every mouth, listen to every bit of passionate nonsense until we’re completely, viscerally swre? What a stupid, lonely quest that is.”

“Finding such love can be as bad, I fear,” Bruno said morosely. His chin was resting on his hand. “Perfect love, yes: it bends and compels you, it crowds out every other passion. Love is sublime, truly, a precious gift. But also, alas, one of God’s little pranks. It’s naive of you to confuse love and happiness, as if they were somehow the same thing. In fact love, once found, is more akin to gravity: too strong, too close, and it will crush you. Unless you’re careful, always.”

She twirled, absently, one of her platinum-colored braids. “There are so many theories about why you and Tamra split up.”

“Theories, humph.” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “It couldn’t be simpler: we fought too much. We did come from opposite sides of the Earth, after all. The antipodes, as she used to say. Love does nothing about the friction of misunderstanding; if anything, it exacerbates the problem. And thirty years really is a long time to spend with one person. Back then it seemed like a lifetime, but of course that was a foolish perception. We were young, and the lives ahead of us so long.”

“I didn’t know you fought,” Deliah said, surprised. “You always looked so happy together.”

“Didn’t we?” Bruno agreed. “But there was just so much baggage there. My family wasn’t wealthy—a restaurateur and a small-time politician—but at University, after the earthquake, I started to have some money. Far more than any teenage orphan should have, really, and by the time I was thirty, even before Tamra’s lawyers got behind me, it had mushroomed beyond all sense. My reaction was predictable: an excess of excess. Drugs, women, miniature planets… It was just a phase, but I was still in it when she summoned me to court. She was so vulnerable—I mean, her parents had just died, one right after the other, and like me she’d been thrust into a very public role which small-town life had never groomed her for. I was older, and I’d been through all that, and she turned to me in, just, absolute desperation. I suppose I took advantage.”

Seeing Deliah’s querying look, he sighed and expanded, “It was two or three years before she had the courage to demand my fidelity. I found it difficult to refuse a beautiful woman, and they were all so beautiful, so drawn to that complex of youth and wealth and power… I had no charm, no guile, no ‘sizzle,’ as we used to say back then. But I had brains and money, as well as Tamra herself: I was that forbidden morsel from the Queen’s private garden. But none of those ladies were ever worth the pain they caused. It makes me physically ill to think of it now.”

“But you’re the one who left,” Deliah said, looking as if she was struggling to comprehend. Bruno, who’d been summarily classified and pigeonholed and speculated about for as long as he cared to remember, was flattered that anyone would actually struggle to comprehend him.

“You’re a good friend,” he said, nodding. “I’ve never talked about this. It feels good to get it off my chest. Yes, I was the one who left. By then I’d been faithful and accommodating for two decades, but my work had been suffering for it. And I drank too much. I always drank too much.”

“Alcohol?”

“Indeed. Crude, I know, and I always expected the media to expose me for it. But like the womanizing, it was something they just didn’t want to find out about. I never understood that. I never understood much of anything back then, and the arc defm was beckoning, and I had this whole planet to retreat to. So I left, yes. Some would call it an escape; some would say I ran from my problems instead of solving them, but that too is naive. In solitude, I found the clarity I needed. My work flourished, my vices fell away like childhood. I’m a better person today; I truly am. Or a bigger fool, perhaps, but that’s nearly as good.”

“But we miss you, Bruno. Everyone misses you. There’s never been another Philander, not really.”

“Oh, pish. I was always an embarrassment. Like that time on Maxwell Monies, when I threw up at the banquet table. Drinking again, after all those years. Throwing money around, insulting the hostess… What a wretched night!”

“That was embarrassing,” Deliah admitted, cracking a doleful half smile. “You had toilet paper on your shoe, also. And that silly hat of yours was in fashion for all of about three months. But we followed you up that mountain, Bruno. All of us did.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You were there?”

“Yeah, that was right after my laureacy. I took over the Ministry of Grapples only a few years afterward, from this really pleasant man who wound up doing cryoastronomy in Russia. Talk about your happy demotions! But, I mean, yes, I was there. And you were brilliant, you really were. You probably are a terrible manager, but you’re also the sort who makes footsteps other people want to follow in, constantly—it’s your default state.”

Bruno had nothing to say to that.

She pressed. “Bruno, is hiding away on your private planet really the best thing you could be doing? I don’t personally need an arc defm—I’m not sure anyone does. And, seriously, we do miss you.”

“The planet’s gone,” he told her. “Destroyed. Used up.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps it served its purpose.”

“Tamra misses you,” she added thoughtfully.

“We have forever,” he said, and shrugged again. But that felt shallow, unjust. “I miss her, too. I wish I’d been better for her.”

Deliah stared at him for several seconds, her eyes growing sad.

“We all make mistakes. Marlon was one of mine, I guess. But I think you’re wrong about him, Bruno. I… God, I’d like to think I’m not that stupid.”

Bruno should have offered some words of comfort for that, some reassurance. He wanted to reassure her, this good friend he hadn’t really known he had. But what could he say? That it was all right? That she’d failed to recognize the monster because she had no monster in herself? He couldn’t bring himself to say that; the lapse was inexcusable. Not only on her part, but on his, on everyone’s.

Seeing that he wasn’t going to answer, Deliah turned away.

“I’m sorry,” he offered. It was the best he could do.

In times of distress, Bruno retreated into his work. This day was no exception. And he could use the work, too, because in retrospect there were all kinds of things wrong with the ertial shield and the design of the Sabadell-Andorra, and for clarity’s sake he wanted to know exactly where he and Muddy had gone wrong. It wasn’t a vain undertaking—a detailed understanding of the ship’s flaws might well save their lives in the coming hours.

“I’m very happy to be rescued,” Deliah said after a while. Her tone was more serious now, and Bruno turned to face her. “From the… depths of my heart I thank you for that. But I was this close.” She held up two fingers, pinching the air between them. “Death and I were on speaking terms. He’d taken three good people right in front of me, and afterward I had a lot of time to contemplate, and not much else to do. People don’t have that experience anymore, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as recreation or any such thing. But still it’s a very purifying thing, to finally look at your life from the outside. And to be reborn afterwards!

“Maybe it’s like your decades of solitude, only more compressed, and more urgent. I don’t think I can go back to being the same person I was. Or I could, maybe, but what a waste it would be! Of hard-won insight. This whole Laureate-Director thing has been very interesting—I’ve learned a lot about so many different things—but am I supposed to do it forever”? Or until someone better comes along and replaces me, I guess, but even that… I’m more person than that. Every person is so much more than the paths they’ve taken, those tew particular paths we choose on the spur of the moment, with no information. So much of it is mistakes.

“I’m not saying this very well. It’s a straightforward thing, though: I want to change, not what I am but what I do with what I am. Surely it behooves us, as immortal people, to find the time to start over. Otherwise, we’re just living the same time, over and over again.”

“There is the small matter,” Bruno reminded her, “of rescuing the sun from collapse.” He was suddenly cross, and hadn’t the energy to conceal it.

“Oh,” she said, seeming to come awake. “Yes, there is that.” Then she frowned, not at Bruno but at herself. “Here I’m blithely assuming you’ve figured it all out. You must get so tired of that! To be so relentlessly relied upon, when inside you’re just like everyone else. Smarter, obviously, but there are lots of smart people who don’t get… I don’t know… scapegoated that way. Even myself, who should have known better than to let this all happen.”

Bruno nodded, somewhat mollified. “To be relied upon, yes. It’s burdensome. Maybe that’s why I left.”

“Hmm. I never thought of it that way. I suppose you probably have a lot to say on that subject.”

“Er,” he hedged, not wanting to be drawn in again. “Perhaps a little later.”

“Oh.” Deliah, who’d had some small experience dealing with physicists, smiled a little and clapped him on the arm. “You’ve started working. I wasn’t disturbing you before, but I am now.”

That only made him feel sheepish. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk, Deliah. I do. It’s very rude, I know.”

“Can I help with what you’re doing?”

Bruno thought about that. “You probably could, if we had more time. A week, perhaps. But I’m too many layers deep, in matters I’d be very poor at explaining. As the designated scapegoat, I need to press on with this alone.”

She nodded. “I understand.”

“I suppose you do,” he said sincerely, “and I appreciate it. It’s quite uncommon.”

He turned back to his analyses.

As often happened when he was engaged in such activity, time passed. Quite a lot of it, actually, until Deliah became restless and—against all advice—unstrapped herself to “stretch her legs.” This involved her pacing back and forth in the cabin’s quite narrow confines, which of course Bruno found very distracting, and couldn’t quite keep himself from complaining about.

“Well,” Deliah said, trying to be polite but with frustration and boredom written all over her, “I appreciate the rescue; I really do. But it’s difficult to lie still on a couch for sixteen hours with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Sixteen hours is splendidly fast for such a monumental journey—five hundred light minutes, almost sixty AU. And I thought / was moving fast, covering that same distance in a week! But I’m a person who needs to be busy. With the Iscog down, I can’t access libraries or entertainments or anything, and with you and this ‘Muddy’ down I can’t have a conversation…” She looked around the cabin, her eyes settling on Hugo. “What’s this thing? A servant?”

“Oh, uh, actually a sort of pet,” Bruno answered distractedly.

“Mewl,” Hugo answered, as if aware of the attention.

“May I release it?”

“What? Er, I’d rather you didn’t. It tends to get into trouble, which under present circumstances hardly seems a good idea. It seems content enough where it is, yes?”

Deliah sighed. “The perfect pet for you, Declarant; it requires no attention. Shall I redecorate the cabin, here? It’s really… Well, I guess ‘spartan’ is hardly the word for something done up in gold and lapis lazuli, but it’s not very pleasing. You’re hoping to rescue Her Majesty in this? It ought to be more regal, then.”

Hrumph. Her Majesty could be rescued in a clear plastic bag for all Bruno cared. Still it might be nice to surprise her, particularly if he didn’t have to do anything special himself. She would find this ship ugly. “Do you know her tastes?”

Deliah shrugged. “Probably not as well as you do. I see her palace in the entertainments and such, but the closest I’ve been in person is the beach outside.”

Bruno waved a hand. “Well, then you know more than I. The decorations I recall are all forty years out of date. No doubt they’ve become mortifyingly ugly in that time. Are you at all fashionable?”

Deliah blushed a little. “I come from an African sun farm, Bruno. And I grew up to be a shepherd of physicists. / like my styles, anyway.”

Bruno laughed. “Ah. Well. Having a style makes you more fashionable than I’ve ever been. Have at it, yes, by all means, although I’ll ask you to leave Muddy’s control panel as it is, along with these interfaces.” He indicated his dual hyper-computers. “And try not to jerk the couches out from under us.”

“I’ll work around them,” Deliah agreed, less enthusiastically than before. Suddenly, he understood: redecoration had not been a serious suggestion. She’d been pressing him with its absurdity, hoping he’d suggest something else, or maybe just talk to her. But now, with his approval, she was stuck with actually doing it. He sympathized; it was hard to get excited about busywork. But at the moment, he had no other suggestions for her. At least they weren’t dying yet.

After that, they left each other alone for a good long while. There were some noises, and Deliah talked to herself occasionally, but soon he was engrossed enough not to find it distracting. Actually, it was he who eventually distracted himself, when a rumbling in his belly reminded him how long it had been since his last meal. Reluctantly, he pried himself away from the work, and unfastened his harness.

“Well hello,” Deliah said as he rose—slowly and carefully— from his couch.

“Hi,” he muttered back to her, then realized he should probably be more polite. “Good, ah, afternoon.”

He looked around, and immediately wondered just how long he’d been working. The place looked utterly different; where there’d been lapis walls and decks of jade, now there were cedarwood panels and bricks of red clay, and carpets and cushions in the pattern of animal skins that seemed, oddly enough, to go very well with the existing controls. A folding screen of black wood and white paper hid the little toilet, and opposite that, beside where Hugo lay, was a crackling fireplace, wooden logs blazing merrily behind a pane of sooty glass. There was heat coming out of it in considerable quantity.

“Good night!” he exclaimed. “What have you done? Is that safe?”

“The fire?” she asked, following his gaze. “Oh, sure, perfectly. It’s a broad-spectrum holographic panel. I thought it was a little cold in here anyway; the temperature control loops for life support were fairly primitive.”

“We were in a hurry.”

“I’m sure. But this is nicer, don’t you think?”

Thinking about it for a moment, he found he had to agree. “It is, yes.” He walked over to it, careful not to lose his balance or step on poor Hugo. He held his hands out. “The heat is unevenly distributed. It seems to come from the coals and flames themselves.”

“Oh, sure,” she agreed, “the hologram includes thermal IR in the five to twelve-micron range, where it radiates best through air. It’s distinguishable from a real fire—you can’t open the glass, for one thing—but it’s just as nice for our purpose. You’ve never seen one before? There used to be a folding variety you could carry in your pocket. You’d charge it up with sunlight and set it anywhere you liked.”

“Carry in your pocket? Without being burned?”

She smiled. “The heat-emitting surfaces activate when you open it, silly. Wouldn’t you design it that way?”

“I suppose so,” he allowed. As if he’d ever stoop to designing something so inane. But life was long, as he’d said. With eternity stretching before him, perhaps he’d do all manner of silly things. Perhaps he’d be known, in future times, as an immensely silly man who once invented a few big things, in his overly serious youth. What a thought! Then again, perhaps he’d be killed in the next few hours. Perhaps the Queendom would fall, and save history the trouble of remembering him at all.

“I need food,” he observed. He walked to the fax and demanded a walnut-and-celery sandwich, which it surrendered readily enough. A glass of milk soon followed, and an apple, and a Venusian plibble, and a basket of sliced potatoes fried in pork grease. Gods, he was hungry.

“With any luck,” he said when he was done eating, “Tamra has already been rescued, and we can turn our attention immediately to the Ring Collapsiter.”

“Unlikely,” Deliah answered seriously. “The last communications I overheard were a good five days ago, but there was a lot of complaining among the spaceship captains and crews. They kept dying, or being ejected from the solar system like me. There were just too many mass anomalies slinging around, on chaotic trajectories. No way to navigate, no safe place to rest. Maybe it’s improved since then…”

“But probably not,” Bruno concluded. Probably, a lot of collapsium had been ejected, and he supposed some of it might have overcome the odds and collided with a planet or other body, perhaps the sun itself. Indeed, they might already be too late! But the bulk of it would still be down there in interplanetary space, interacting chaotically but nonetheless trapped in gravitational contours.

He glanced up, expecting to see the pinpoint of Sol through the window. No such luck: the view was dim, dappled with stars he couldn’t immediately identify.

“We’ve turned around already? We’ve crossed Neptune’s orbit?” he asked, surprised.

“Uh-huh,” Deliah said, surprised by his surprise. “I’m pretty sure we cross Uranus‘ orbit in a few minutes. You really have been in a trance, haven’t you?”

“So it would seem.”

“Grappling the sun is a felony, by the way. If you didn’t know. What’s our deceleration anchor? I’ve been wondering. I suppose we’re simply attached to my station?”

“Correct,” Bruno said, nodding distractedly. “Yes, we’re pulling on it pretty hard. In spite of its mass, it may well have been dragged below solar escape velocity by now. Perhaps it’ll fall back into the inner system as a comet someday.”

“Oh, what a charming thought! It wouldn’t have a tail, though, would it?”

“No. Not unless it picks up some volatiles between now and then. And I can’t imagine where it would find any. I was referring more to the shape of its orbit. Highly elliptical, like a comet.”

Bruno looked over at Muddy’s trajectory display, still an engraved plaque of wellstone bronze. Indeed, the orbit of Neptune was hours behind them, with the orbit of Bruno’s own former world several hours beyond that. And the ship really was about to cross the orbit of Uranus. In fact, on the scale of the display it looked like they’d cross the actual planet itself.

“Er, ship,“ he said mildly, ”how close are we going to come to the planet Uranus?”

“Eight hundred twenty thousand kilometers,” the ship replied immediately.

“I see. That’s within the gravitational sphere of influence, isn’t it?”

“Affirmative,” the ship agreed.

“Hmm. Probability of striking paniculate matter in the vicinity of the planet?”

“Eleven percent, for objects one microgram or larger.” The ship’s voice was cheerful, gender neutral, unimpressed.

“I see. And when, exactly, will we be crossing the planet’s ring plane?”

“Five minutes, nineteen seconds.” It paused. “Danger is minimal, sir,” it then offered. “Probability of damage to the impervium is two point six times ten to the minus eleventh percent. Is that acceptable?”

Relieved, Bruno snorted. “It sounds like the least of our problems. Indeed, yes, it’s acceptable. Will we be passing close to any other planets?”

“Negative,” the ship replied.

“Good. Excellent. Keep it that way. Oh, and ship?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Your name is Sabadell-Andorra.”

“Excuse me, sir, library search. Sabadell and Andorra are geographic localities in northeastern Iberia, European continent, planet Earth.” It paused for a moment, then cited a reference: date, Greenwich Mean Time, latitude and longitude of epicenter, and then a series of geological measurements intended to convey a sense of the magnitude and manner of the associated shock and vibration. “My library contains no other reference to a Sabadell-Andorra. Am I named for this event? An earthquake?”

“Uh, yes. Indeed.”

“Acknowledged. Thank you, sir.”

Deliah cleared her throat. “There’s a library on board, Bruno?”

“Evidently. I mean, Muddy put the thing together; you’d have to ask him all the details, but it isn’t the sort of thing I’d leave out. One needs these things sometimes.”

“So I can watch movies? Read books? Peruse technical articles?”

“Er, well, old ones, yes. Was that not clear to you?”

Her annoyance, fortunately, was cheerful. “No, Declarant, it wasn’t.” Then, catching his own grumpy look, she said, “Serves me right, does it? Well, if I’m too much trouble, you can always put me back where you found me.”

“Later,” he said, in mock warning. “There isn’t time for it right now.” He grew more serious. “There really isn’t. Marlon sent Muddy to me almost three weeks ago, and it was a taunt he expected me to answer. Or hoped I would, at any rate. If my network gate had been functional when Muddy’s image was transmitted, I’d ve had time to build some more conventional means of transport. Three weeks isn’t a long time to travel fifty AU, not in a fusion-powered ship that has to lug its own fuel along, but it certainly could be done. So he must have had some schedule in mind that would prevent my interference. Whatever grand finale he has in store, it can’t be very far off.”

Deliah sobered as well. “You lost more than half a day to come get me, going away from the sun rather than toward it.”

Bruno shrugged. “It couldn’t be helped. You knew where to find the Queen.”

“No, I could have told you that over the radio. You could have let me die; it’s what any reasonable person would have done.” She waved a finger in his face. “Your heart is soft.”

“Soft enough to endanger the Queendom,” he grumbled. “All right, then. If we are too late, there’s no one to blame but myself.”

Deliah, seeming surprisingly immune to the effects of the ship’s lopsided inertia, came forward and kissed him on the forehead. “There’s Marlon to blame, as you keep reminding me. Bruno, I’m not sure people actually expect you to come swooping in to save the day. We’re in the middle of history’s greatest calamity, and / certainly never expected to survive it. If you’re not finally able to salvage anything, well, at least you’ve tried.”

“I should have seen this coming,” Bruno brooded.

“So should I,” Deliah said. “So should Tamra. So should everyone else who’s ever been friends with the man. And the police, too; tracing his involvement in all the grapple accidents is their job, not yours. But I guess Marlon’s outfoxed us all.”

“Humpf,” Bruno said, which pretty well summed up his opinion on that matter.

Deliah’s eyes widened, drawn upward to something above and behind Bruno. “Look!” she said.

He turned, and immediately regretted the wave of nausea this sudden movement brought. But he saw what she was pointing at: a little dome of blue at the bottom edge of the window, with three brightish pinpoints hovering above it. Uranus and its moons? The dome climbed and grew in the view; in half a minute, the whole planet would be visible.

He reached out to give Muddy’s leg a shake. “Wake up. Wake up! You’ll want to see this. At least, I think you will…”

Muddy, who was fully reclined in his couch, groggily opened his eyes. “What? What’s that? Oh. Mmm. You’re very kind to wake me, Lordship, but actually, I’ve seen planets before.” And with that he turned away and fell back into stuporous sleep.

Impressive views have a way of saturating the mind; the planet was visible for a good twenty minutes, but never so large or close as that first stunning glimpse. And really, the planet didn’t have any features to speak of, just a uniform, powder-green haze sinking down for thousands upon thousands of kilometers. The world was huge, able to contain a dozen Earths, but it shrank quickly, becoming a little ball and finally a bright green speck before disappearing down the other side of the window.

An hour and a half later, they crossed the orbit of Saturn, which of course was completely uneventful since the planet was nowhere nearby. An hour after that, they passed Jupiter’s similarly empty orbit. Against the starscape soon afterward, they spotted a few bright, fast-moving specks that proved, under the enhancement of wellstone telescopes, to be asteroids. That was good for a few minutes’ distraction, in the hour and a half it took them to reach the orbit of Mars.

Then the pace of things started to pick up. The ship was slowing down dramatically, now cruising at barely an eighth of its thirty-thousand-kilometer-per-second peak velocity, but the inner planets were a lot closer together than their outer cousins. Earth was barely twenty minutes beyond the Red Planet, and Sabadell-Andorra had started picking up random bits of radio noise. Nothing useful—just data bursts and occasional, panicky voices—but it made clear that they’d reentered civilization, and that civilization, though deprived of both its communication networks and the more primitive means of physical travel, nonetheless still had some fight in it.

They encountered their share of gravitational anomalies, too: Iscog fragments and free-floating neubles ejected from some industrial site somewhere. Their course jinked around in a way that worried Bruno. Finding the sun was not too difficult, but finding Tamra’s little di-clad neutronium work platform in the sun’s glare might very well be. Especially if their own course was misplotted. It wasn’t like they could ping the Iscog for their precise location. These thoughts made him impatient.

Still, the view above them was naught but stars, the sun invisible below their feet, the planets hidden by distance and geometry. Even civilization was large, consisting mostly of empty space. Even an inertialess grappleship needed some time to cross through. To reach the orbit of Venus took them another twelve minutes, by which time they’d shed 95% of their velocity and were rapidly shedding the rest. Mercury was deep in the sun’s gravitational sink, farther from Venus than Earth was. They’d need thirty-six minutes more to reach it. From there, though, it should only be a few more minutes to reach the platform where Tamra and her entourage supposedly awaited rescue. Assuming their course was proper…

Once again, Bruno shook Muddy awake.

Once again, Muddy responded groggily and tried to go back to sleep.

“Oh, no, no,” Bruno said this time. “I don’t know what you took, or how much, but I’ll wager it wasn’t what I’d picked for you. So okay, you’ve had a little break from yourself, but you get up and fly this ship now, Declarant-Philander; you’ve yet to teach me how to do it myself. Go on, take something to wake up if you like, but we need you at the controls.”

“Hmmpf,” Muddy replied, opening bloodshot eyes to peer at him. “Where are we?”

“Just sunward of Venus. We’ve just about half an hour to go, and you’ll need to start scanning for Tamra’s platform.”

“Hmmpf,” Muddy said again, though in a livelier, more interested way. “That far, are we? Yes, I’s-s-suppose I should be getting up, despite all the misery that entails. I can take a pill, you say?”

“Muddy, so long as you’re awake and alert you can take any damned thing you please. We’ll sort your problems out later, right?”

“All right, yes.”

He struggled out of his couch, fell squarely atop a mewling Hugo, and made his way to the fax machine, which insisted on giving him a chilled electrolyte solution before dispensing any medication. From the look on Muddy’s face, it tasted none too wonderful.

“All right?” Bruno asked, when Muddy finally settled back down into his couch.

“Please, if you would, wait for the drugs to take effect.” Muddy’s voice was thick and slow.

“I’ll do no such thing. Begin scanning, please.”

“Well, aye, Your Lordship.”

“You’ve learned sarcasm in your years away.”

“And you’ve learned to be a prick. Beginning scan, sir. The ship is perfectly capable of doing this by itself, you know. Navigation and helm control, too. The instrument panel is just for fun, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. Well, it does make a few things easier—whoa. Scan complete; I’ve found a platform. Would you like a telescopic image?”

“Please.”

A holographic window appeared in the brick wall beside Bruno’s head. On it, he could clearly see a thin disc of opaque but gloriously shiny white. Di-clad neutronium, yes, spinning slowly in the sunlight. And, pinned to the bottom of the disc as if glued there, the somewhat larger shape of a police cruiser, whose battered hull had apparently reverted to native iron, its wellstone sheathing dead or inactivated.

“Is the dome intact?” Bruno asked rhetorically. The clear dome that held in the platform’s air was pointed away from them at the moment, pointed straight down at the full fires of the sun.

“Looks like someone did get to them,” Deliah observed. “It must have been a hell of a trip.”

“And an unfortunate one,” Bruno said. “It doesn’t look as though that cruiser set down there peacefully. Look at that hull: the bending, the stress ripples. Do you see any lights on it?”

“I’m compensating for sunlight,” Muddy volunteered. “We’re looking almost straight down. There may be lights that are simply drowned out. But I’m doubtful—that iron looks partly melted to me.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said. “Any signs of air leakage?”

Muddy checked. “No, sir. No signs of air at all, not even traces in the immediate vicinity.”

“They might have spacesuits on,” Deliah said.

“There’d still be traces,” Muddy sniffed. “That hull’s been devoid of life for at least a day. Probably longer. The air blew out and crystallized, and the’s-s-solar wind has carried away the evidence.”

“Well, then,” Bruno said. “Rest in peace, brave men and women of the Royal Constabulary. Here’s yet another tragedy to lay at the feet of Marlon Sykes.”

Deliah pointed. “Here comes the dome. It looks intact!”

The platform’s slow rotation was turning the shipwreck back down to face the punishing sunlight, and turning the dome—the only place that might yet harbor survivors—toward the cold blackness of space. Bruno’s heart sank. Intact or no, the dome’s contents would undergo brutal thermal cycles, heating up probably to several hundred degrees at peak, and then bleeding it all away again, bottoming out probably well below freezing. Living tissue did, of course, have its compensating mechanisms, its exothermic metabolism and its evaporative cooling, its circulatory system to refresh chilled or overheated tissues with milder fluids from the body’s interior. Ironically, human beings stood up to such punishment better than many inanimate objects, better even than the clothing and shoes that should nominally be protecting them. Indeed, the Queen and her people had allegedly survived at least six revolutions of the platform before Deliah had lost contact with them. But two weeks“? It seemed impossible that even the hardiest of humans could survive that.

Could the neutronium’s enormous mass serve as a heat sink? No, of course not—it had been basking out here in full sunlight for years! Its temperature would have equalized long ago, probably to something uncomfortably warm. Well, at least diamond was a good thermal conductor—it would pull heat from the sunward face, and radiate it away on the opposite side, in the cold shadows. That might help, though just how much…

As the platform continued to turn, its habitable side swung slowly into view, and Bruno could see—to his incalculable relief—that beneath the diamond dome were a handful of loose, soft-looking silver cones, like little tents made of reflective fabric.

“What’s inside those?” he demanded, pointing at them on the display. “Is anyone alive?”

“I’m not able to tell,” Muddy answered gruffly, with no real sign of relief or concern in his voice. This was one of his symptoms—apathy regarding anyone but himself and Bruno, who still was himself in some very meaningful ways. But apathy even about Her Majesty?

Bruno waved impatient hands. “They’re what, sheets of impervium cloth?”

“Bunkerlite, I think, or some near equivalent. Super-reflectors, anyway.”

“They must have gotten their fax machine working,” Deliah said, and at least the relief was evident in her voice.

“So they could be alive,” Bruno dared to say. “Sabadell-Andorra, please attempt to establish radio contact. Muddy, are we on course to arrive there?”

“Nearly,” Muddy said. “We’ll need a minor adjustment. I’m moving the grapple anchor to Venus…”

“Not the inhabited areas, surely?”

“Uh, checking. No. Not the inhabited areas.”

“Still illegal,” Deliah noted.

The ship bucked around them; if they hadn’t been strapped to their couches, the companions would all have tumbled like tenpins.

“Now we are on course,” Muddy said. “Arrival in twenty minutes. There’s a problem, though—our course intercepts a loose fragment of Ring Collapsiter. What happens if that contacts the ertial shield?”

“Oh, I’m not certain,” Bruno admitted. “And I doubt very much that we want to find out. But we do have to pass this way. For my comfort, let’s miss this thing by at least a kilometer.”

“Aye, Lordship.” Muddy said. Then, “Unfortunately, we appear to be headed directly for it. We’ll miss by meters, if at all.”

“Heavens! Is there anything to hook to for a plane change? North or south, it doesn’t matter; we just need to get some small distance between ourselves and the plane of the Ring Collapsiter.”

“Oh, sir. No. We’ve spent the last sixteen hours pulling ourselves ever more precisely into that plane, and no, there isn’t anything near at hand we can grapple to, to pull us out of it again.”

“The poles of Venus, perhaps?”

Muddy burst into tears. “Alas, no! We have to strike our targets with a nearly perpendicular beam. Venus itself is out of our plane, but not enough out of it. We could attach to its equator, and given enough time… Pointless. We haven’t enough time.”

“Blast. Can we stop?”

“Not quickly enough, sir.” Muddy wiped at his tears—a futile gesture, since the flow of fresh ones hadn’t abated. “Remember, we’re at full deceleration already. Oblivion, what a miserable ass I am. What a perfect servant of Declarant Sykes. I’ve killed you at last, sir, within reach of your goal.”

“Oh, nonsense. Everyone makes mistakes. You’ve my distracted brain to do your thinking with, and that’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on Sykes himself. Time to impact?”

“Urn, seventeen minutes.”

“Enough time to think of something. How about your emergency propulsion system? The compressed oxygen apparatus?”

Muddy brightened. “I’d all but forgotten about that. Yes! What a thought, that something of my design should prove useful.” He hammered a series of calculations into the interfaces before him. “There is enough time, yes. It’s very low thrust, in comparison with our present velocity, but if we activate it immediately, we’ll miss the collapsium by half a kilometer. Is that enough?”

Bruno tried to think of some way to confirm it, and finally—to his deep chagrin—was forced to shrug. “I don’t know, Muddy. I guess it’ll have to be.”

Chapter Twenty in which old demons are faced

Bruno sweated some as the wayward fragment approached. He pulled up images of it on a gravitational anomaly scanner; a thin loop of collapsium a thousand kilometers long. It should have appeared arrow-straight, just the tiniest slice of a huge circle stretching clear around the sun, but the piece had begun to pull in on itself, to twist, to curl. It seemed to be part of a ring much smaller than the collapsiter itself, one that might fit around the equator of Earth’s moon, or even a medium-sized asteroid. It was kinked in places, too, its structural rigidity slowly failing. In another few weeks it would probably curl enough to double back on itself, with probably calamitous results. Did it have a few weeks? He checked its trajectory and found it was indeed in a rather sedate solar orbit, with perihelion nearly a million kilometers above the chromopause. An orbit that might continue indefinitely, in the absence of disturbing influences.

There were influences, though; the nearby construction platform, for one. And his sensors picked up all sorts of other, indistinct mass concentrations at the edges of his detection range. No doubt there were a thousand other fragments just like this one, caroming about in the limited space inside Mercury’s orbit. Eventually, this fragment would run afoul of one of those others, and its orbit would ratchet upward or downward. Eventually, one of them would surely fall straight in. There could be no doubt of that.

The backup thrusters hummed; hundreds of tiny, temporary channels through the wellstone outer hull, accelerating heavy oxygen ions, one by one, to relativistic speeds. This, too, was probably illegal: an exhaust much deadlier than the typical fusion helium, and deadlier at a much greater range, too. They could probably cook a human from a light-second away.

“Thirty’s-s-seconds to closest approach,” Muddy warned.

“Hmm. Here we go, then.”

“It’s been an honor working with you, sir.”

“Likewise,” Deliah chipped in.

“Oh, nonsense. I couldn’t have done any of this alone. We all have the greatest respect for each other, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Twenty seconds.”

He became acutely aware of his breathing. He wondered if it was loud, if it maybe should be a little slower and quieter.

“Ten seconds. Five. Four, three, two…”

And then, suddenly, there it was in the window above them—a long, slender piece glowing brightly with the familiar Cerenkov blue. The ertial shield hadn’t twitched in the slightest, hadn’t reacted at all. The collapsium itself seemed similarly unaffected, not falling in on itself in their wake or anything. They continued past, seeing more and more of it, the fragment growing longer and dimmer and loopier in the window view. Then the last of it trailed by, and they were in clear space again.

“Backup thrusters off,” Muddy said. The humming stopped.

Deliah let a long breath out. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“No,” Bruno agreed. Not bad at all. Some day, he’d have to work out the theory of it all, the precise interactions between collapsium and hypercollapsite. The weak link was surely the collapsium, it being so much less dense, so much more subject to gravity and inertia and the various other interactions of the zero-point field. His fear had been the crushing of its lattice, and its resulting reversion to a chain of heavy, disconnected, uncontrollable hypermasses capable of all sorts of harm. But perhaps the two could live together in harmony after all. At half a kilometer’s distance, anyway!

“Platform contact in two minutes,” Muddy said. He seemed to enjoy counting down event times—a task at once useful and easy and safe.

“Good,” Bruno acknowledged. “Can we have the telescope image back?”

Wordlessly, Muddy reached for his interface. The window reappeared, now showing a much larger, more detailed version of what they’d seen before. The dome was there, and the mirrored tents beneath it. Now there were other things visible as well: light-energy conversion panels with cables running across the diamond deck until they slipped under the edges of superreflective cloth. Discs of various color arranged in neat rows outside the tents, as if occupied in some sort of experiment. And one image that was both horrifying and uplifting: the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Horrifying because, well, it was the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Uplifting because there was only one. Had the survivors dragged a fallen comrade outside, to burn rather than rot? It lent credence to the idea that there were survivors down there.

“My God,” Deliah said.

That initial view had been oblique, almost edge-on, so it was difficult to make out any telling details as the platform turned away, turned its other, blank side to face them.

Now the shipwreck as well betrayed new details; he could clearly make out the lines of an airlock in its iron skin, and a seam where two plates had warped apart. There was a neat, circular hole through the side, too, down low where it was nearly hidden by shadow. As the platform revolved—and grew, for they were approaching it rapidly—he could see a matching hole down low on the ship’s other side.

He experienced an instant chilling of the blood. He’d seen holes like that before, in the ruins of Sykes Manor. Holes created by a weapon, a nasen beam. That ship hadn’t crashed onto the platform, hadn’t limped its way here and quietly expired; it had been murdered in the very act of rescue!

“This is a trap,” he said, as coolly and evenly as possible. “Someone is watching the platform, waiting to pick off any ship that approaches.”

“My God!” Deliah squawked, with much greater conviction.

“I knew it!” Muddy wailed, suddenly tearful again. “I knew I’d get us killed! Declarant-Philander, there’s nothing we can do! No place else to grapple to, not in the time allotted!”

“To the collapsium fragment above us?” Bruno suggested quickly.

“No!” Deliah said. “It’s muon-contaminated—it’ll come apart in seconds.”

“We will rendezvous with the platform,” Muddy insisted. “Nothing can prevent that now, no matter what we grapple to. Inertia can only be bent so far.”

Bruno pounded a fist into his palm. “Blast it, a nasen beam isn’t easy to aim! How’s our oxygen supply?”

“Fine, sir,” Muddy wearily replied.

“Good. Set your thrusters on a program of random firing. Stay on trajectory, but let our arrival time float, plus or minus a few seconds. That may confuse the targeting mechanisms. They don’t have to miss us by much, so long as they miss us!”

Soon, an annoyingly staccato hum commenced in the outer hull. As before, no sense of motion resulted from it.

“Where is this nasen beam?” Deliah wanted to know.

Bruno shrugged. “I couldn’t say. On a ship, probably, and not too near, or we’d‘ve detected it already. It could be quite distant, in which case it likely wouldn’t fire until we’d matched courses with the platform. A known position—you see?— regardless of light-lag delays. If we complete our rescue quickly, the beam’s… controller may not realize we’re gone until after it’s fired.”

“Thirty seconds to contact,” Muddy whined. “I’m scared, Bruno. I don’t want to do this!”

“Turn us!” Bruno shot back, with sudden inspiration. “Make sure our hatch is facing the dome! And try to hit as close to the dome’s base as possible, without endangering the neutronium cladding. It’s all right to hit a little harder, just be sure we stick when we hit, so we can start melting through immediately. This is for your safely, Muddy; as you say, we will hit.”

“Ten seconds. Oh, God, can’t we just let them die?”

The impact was sudden and severe; Bruno was thrown against his restraints and slammed back into his couch again. Muddy shrieked, and even Deliah cried out in distress.

Bruno’s own fear was a brusque, impatient business. He was frustrated, more than a little bit angry at being forced to such extremity, and there was a substantial part of his mind that dreamily refused to believe any of this was happening at all. His thoughts, such as they were, were focused on Tamra. In those hurried moments as he threw off his harness and leaped for the door, his own safety concerned him mainly to the extent that it was linked with hers—he couldn’t very well save her if he got himself killed. So he moved very quickly until he was poised to open the door, then froze in place.

He welcomed the sizzling sound when it began; this well-stone chemistry would get him through to Her Majesty as quickly and safely as possible.

Muddy continued wailing. Hugo mewled. Deliah, rising from her own couch, asked, “Is there anything I should be doing right now?”

Bruno, in his singularly single-minded state, ignored them all. “Ship,” he said, as another inspiration struck, “are your grapples still locked on Venus?”

“Negative,” the ship replied. “The rotation of the platform makes that impossible.”

“What’s the largest object handy? The sun? Obviously, yes. Can you lock onto that?”

“Intermittently,” the ship agreed.

“Good. Do it, and engage the grapples as soon as possible. This platform is damned heavy, but with the ertial shield we may be able to drag it out of place. At least a little. Perhaps a little is all we need. Now then, please paint a line on the interior to mark the thickness and position of the dome.”

“Instruction unclear,” the ship replied apologetically.

Blast it, his old house had been well accustomed to half-nonsense commands like that. “Paint a line, you! Show me where the dome is, the edge of the dome against your hull!”

“Like this?”

A pinkish red area the size of Bruno’s torso appeared on the inner surface of the hatch. Was this what he wanted? He waited for a moment and verified that yes, indeed, the circle was growing. Soon it became a hollowed-out oval, roughly as deep as Bruno’s hand and encircling an area as large as his body. It swelled outward slowly as the side of the ship sank its way in through the diamond structure of the dome.

“When this completely encircles the hatch,” he said, pointing to the pink line, “stop burrowing and await further instructions. I’m going to open this door and exit the ship. Er, exit you. When I come back in and close the door, break contact immediately and take us out of here. Let the dome decompress, and just grapple to anything you like. If there’s no target handy, use the backup thrusters.”

“Understood, sir.”

The outside of the painted line advanced past the corners of the hatchway. The inside of the line soon followed, leaving the hatchway completely clear. The sizzling sound switched off; the door was fully inside the dome, and so, with hardly a thought in his head, Bruno threw the latches back and heaved the door open, then leaped out.

Sunlight struck him like a physical blow. There is heat, he had time to think, and there is heat. Solar energy at fourteen thousand watts per square meter—ten times Earth normal— was something the body had no immediate response for. It was exactly like being thrown into a fire; his eyes pinched closed of their own accord, his hair singed and crisped and smoked on his scalp, and he collapsed immediately to the di-clad neutronium deck, thrashing and gasping. Fortunately, the deck was relatively cool, and his shirt and tights—which were cream colored and fairly reflective—had some minimal climate-control capabilities that saturated right around the time his sweat glands finally opened up and began pouring out rivers of lukewarm saline. These factors helped keep him from more serious injury for the six seconds it took the sun to “set” behind the platform’s edge.

He heard voices nearby. “It is a ship; look!”

“What’s that door doing there? Who is that? That’s not a robot; that’s a man!”

“My God, I think he stepped out in the daylight.”

Bruno sat up and, to his surprise, let out a very undignified scream. “Ow! Ow! Goddamn it, that hurts!” His face and hands felt sunburned already, and his eyes, when he opened them, were blinded by sweat and huge, glowing blobs of color.

“Sir?” a voice said, now just a meter or two away. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bruno said, though this was far from certain. Once again, his thoughts settled on Tamra. He picked himself up. “Bruno de Towaji, at Her Majesty’s service.”

His vision began to clear slightly, and the burning of his skin eased somewhat as the air began to cool. His sweat-soaked clothes began to feel heavy and cold, which was wonderful. He looked around. In the glow of wellstone lights set around the dome’s perimeter, he saw four shiny tents surrounded by solar collectors and neat rows of scorched, plastic discs the size of dart boards. Various charred debris—shoes and hats and crumbly brown scrolls of paper—littered the deck around him. Nearby was the skeleton he’d seen, and a little ways off, in the lee of a tent, was another skeleton he hadn’t. And immediately surrounding him, crowding right up against him, were four figures dressed head to toe in suits of thick, silver-white cloth that left only their faces exposed. He took each of them in with a hurried glance.

It’d been a long time. The first face he identified as belonging to Wenders Rodenbeck, the playwright-cum-lawyer. The second—identified more by his hulking body than his Asian features—was the policeman Cheng Shiao. The third was one of Tamra’s courtiers, the woman named Tusite. Hardest of all was the fourth, a quite familiar-looking young lady. She had the same copper eyes and sandalwood skin as young Vivian Rajmon, and with a start he realized it was Vivian, grown up nearly all the way.

But where was Tamra? Putting all else out of his mind, he pointed to the open hatchway of his ship, which hung ridiculously outside the dome, like some shiny, barrel-shaped lamprey. “This way,” he said. “Climb aboard, and quickly. I’ll assist Her Majesty. Where is she?”

Cheng Shiao stepped forward and grabbed Bruno firmly by the elbow. “Philander,” he said in quick, precise tones, “it is my sad duty to inform you that Her Majesty gave her life in the effort to save others. Let’s away from this place, quickly. You’re in terrible danger.”

Bruno felt as though he’d been slammed in the chest with a croquet mallet. “What? What? Instruction unclear. What did you say?”

Shiao’s face was grimly serious. “Her Majesty Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, in the person of her last known copy, is dead. I’m more sorry than you know, Philander.”

He said some other stuff after that, various irrelevancies about ships and danger and impending death, none of which registered on Bruno. If not for Shiao’s firm grip on his elbow, he’d have sunk to the deck and stayed there, waited for the sun to come and burn him away. But Shiao’s grip didn’t compromise, didn’t allow him to fall. He was dragged back toward the waiting ship and pulled through the hatch.

Only when the hatch was closed, and Sabadell-Andorra broke contact with the platform’s dome and lurched toward the sun at a thousand-gee acceleration, and the sickening inertial imbalances caused Shiao to lose equilibrium…

Only then was Bruno de Towaji permitted to faint.

Of historical note is the fact that within milliseconds of Bruno’s head striking the edge of the fireplace, a nasen beam passed through the diamond cladding of the platform, breaching it. The resulting neutronium spill eradicated all traces of the structure itself, including the bones of one Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, and had the Sabadell-Andorra been propelled by any of the technologies that were standard at the time, there is little doubt that it would have been eradicated as well.

Bruno knew he wasn’t dead when he heard Muddy walling. Oddly, though, what Muddy was saying was not “Poor me,” or “I am afraid,” but “Tamra! Tamra!! Oh, God, how I’ve failed you!” This was how he knew he and Muddy weren’t really so different after all.

“He’s waking up,” a too-husky version of Vivian Rajmon’s voice said. “Cheng, come here; he’s waking up.”

“No,” Bruno said without opening his eyes. “No, there’s no point in that.”

“Are you all right, Bruno? We’ve put some salve on your burns, but your hair will need to be shaved…”

Resignedly, he opened his eyes, which already ran with tears, and promised to run with many more before they were through. “Hello, Vivian. God, how beautiful you’ve become! What a young lady! It’s good of you to care for me, really; thank you. It’s quite unnecessary, though; my life is over. I’m about to kill myself.”

Muddy shrieked again, and leaped from his own couch to throw himself atop Bruno’s body. “No! Declarant, Lordship, you mustn’t consider it! To lose Tamra and you, how unthinkable. No! I won’t allow it!”

“Ah, damn it,” Bruno said, struggling under Muddy’s weight. “Get off me. Get off. I’ll do as I please, damn you!”

“You will not,” Muddy snarled. His breath was hot on Bruno’s cheek; the bristles of his beard dug into Bruno’s flesh like needles. “The Queendom still rots with collapsium, its sun is in imminent danger of swallowing a hypermass, and I have suffered a blow far worse than any torment of Marlon’s. We all have. God, I’m able to empathize. I’m able to feel the pain of all the worlds’ billions, because my own pain is finally too huge to contain.

“Will you not avenge her, Bruno? Will you not fight for her Queendom’s safety, as she’d command you to if she were here? Have we traded places, you and I? Because / would save her worlds if I could. If I could.”

“Let me up.”

“Listen carefully, damn you: I’m weak and damaged and years behind your knowledge of collapsium. I will save the Queendom, but I’ve only yourself to use as my instrument. There is no other r-recourse. Let you up? By God, you’ll get up. Now!”

His weight lifted off Bruno, but suddenly his hands were there, grabbing the ruff of Bruno’s shirt, hauling him up by it.

“Say it,” Muddy instructed, thrusting his face once more into Bruno’s own. “Say you will live.”

“Let go.”

Bruno tried to shake off Muddy’s grasp and saw the wince of agony there on his brother’s face, his own face. Muddy’s weakened body struggled against pain and fatigue and despair, but his grip was surprisingly strong, the conviction behind it being much greater than Bruno’s own. It was that more than anything—that wobbly but determined strength in the face of total calamity—that altered the trajectory of Bruno’s heart.

“All right, damn it. I’ll live,” he agreed, his voice heavy with despair. To be bested by this most pathetic of creatures, to find that he himself was the lesser man after all.

But with nothing left to live for, he could at least, indeed, spend his life in the act of vengeance. He could, at least, do his level best to crush Marlon’s face between angry fists, to put an end to these evil plans, to sweep up every last bit of stray collapsium before irreversible havoc could be wreaked on the Queendom and its people.

‘’Or die trying,“ Muddy added with a sudden, strangled laugh. He released Bruno’s shirt ruff and stepped away, and suddenly tears were rolling down his face. His strength— limited, as he’d so often said—was finally expended, and he staggered and slumped against his acceleration couch.

Not limply, though—the ertial space around them seemed to discourage that. Instead, he bounced away and collapsed in a heap beside the supine Hugo, who mewled in delight. Hello, friend!

“Attention,” the voice of Sabadell-Andorra said. “I am receiving a radio transmission, analog voice.”

Dear God, Bruno thought, was there no rest? Would there be no rest for him, ever? “Play it,” he said, raising the back of his couch to a working position. The whole ship smelled of sweat and scorched cloth, and his own sun-fried hair. He looked around, thinking: so crowded in here. What are we doing?

“De Towaji?” a crackling voice asked from the ether. It was Marlon Sykes’ voice, unmistakable after all these years. “Bruno de Towaji, is that you?”

Bruno sighed, too tired for the moment to feel a proper sense of hatred. “Reply: Yes, Marlon, you pathetic bastard. I’m here.”

“I hoped you’d come,” Marlon said, after only a few seconds’ delay. He must be somewhere close by. Bruno scanned the trajectory display but saw no trace of a base or spaceship or other structure there, just another loose end of Ring Collapsiter swimming into view.

“End reply,” he said. “Ship, can you localize the source of that transmission?”

“Negative, sir. Range is indeterminate, and the signal appears to be coming from a broad region, fully half the sky.”

Bruno frowned. “Which half?”

“Opposite the sun.”

“Hmm. And it all arrives at the same time? It’s a clean signal?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“How unique. It’s as if it were coming from an enormous shell antenna, symmetric about our position. But that’s unlikely, isn’t it? He’s got some trick he’s employing.”

Marlon’s voice came again. “Bruno, are you still there?”

“Reply: I’m here. You say you hoped I’d come?”

Again, the delay. Then Sykes said, “I did, really. You’re my hero, sir. Didn’t your tattooed friend tell you?” The odd thing was, Marlon didn’t sound snotty or sarcastic or evil with that remark. He sounded like plain old Marlon Sykes, meaning every word he was saying.

“Declarant Sykes,” Cheng Shiao said urgently, leaning over the radio console in an ill-considered lurch. “I must insist that you surrender yourself immediately. You’ve broken the law, sir.”

Sykes laughed at that, and suddenly he did sound evil. “Who’ve you got down there with you, Bruno? Some policeman? No one fit to judge MS, certainly. We make our own laws, we Declarant-Philanders. Even physical laws can be ruled in our favor, if we prepare the proper defense.”

Bruno sighed, weary of all this. “What is it you want, Marlon?”

“To business, eh? No time to catch up on the personal side? All right, then; be that way. I’ve contacted you to ask you to join me. Not quite as a full partner—I’m really not prepared to share the conceptual credit—but I could certainly use your help in the detail work. Frankly, I could use your company, too, if you’re willing to lend it.”

Bruno was aghast. “Marlon, are you insane? Well, clearly you are, but are you stupid as well? Tamra is dead. You killed her, you… you… fiend!” There didn’t seem any better word for it. Words had simply failed him.

“Fiend?” Marlon sounded genuinely hurt. “I’m as much a victim as you, sir. Remember, I loved her first. I didn’t kill her—why would I do that? She killed herself. Ask your little friends there.”

Killed herself? Killed herself?

“It’s true,” Vivian said hollowly. She’d stripped out of her quilted bodysuit and now wore only a kind of slip or under-dress that served to emphasize her all-but-grown-up figure. But her face—her grown-up face—was heartbreakingly sad. “We’d gotten the fax working again, intermittently, but it kept malfunctioning and going offline—none of us knew enough about it to say why. We had only two reflective blankets at that time, and there just wasn’t enough room for everyone underneath them. We tried taking turns that first day, but it was clear that that was just going to slowly kill us all.

“So we tried drawing straws, but Her Majesty somehow rigged the draw. She lost five times in a row. We didn’t let it stand, of course, though she kept insisting it was her duty, that ‘not one more citizen’ would die in her stead. But what was our duty, if not to protect her? Then Cheng Peterson died—we found him with his skin burned black and his tongue all puffed out—and she just… walked out into the sunlight and cut her throat. I don’t know where she got the knife; I never saw it before. We tried to save her. We tried, but you can’t fix a carotid artery under those conditions; you just can’t. So she… died. And the next day—

Vivian, clutching tightly at the wellwood mantelpiece, choked momentarily, her beautiful face streaked with speedy, inertialess tears. The strain of the long ordeal showed clearly in her features. Finally, she found enough composure to continue. “The next day, we got the fax working again for nearly an hour. We got the tents up, and the moisture condensers… She would have lived, Bruno. She would have. The Queen of All Things sacrificed herself for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” Muddy said, struggling to rise from his heap on the floor. He looked dizzy. He looked, truthfully, like he should just stay put. “It was a gesture of, of… d-d-defiance. Perhaps she knew she was bait in a trap.”

“No,” Shiao said, shaking his crew cut head sadly, “the cruiser didn’t try to rescue us until five days after that. She couldn’t have known.”

“An affirmation of life for the rest of you, then,” Muddy said harshly. “Ill considered, perhaps, but she 1-I-loved all of you enough to do it, and that’s the thing that counts. She died—f-fittingly—of an excess of love.”

“You see?” Marlon piped up from the radio speaker. “I was as shocked and shattered as any of you. I’d roll back time to that moment if I could.” Then, more ominously: “Perhaps some day I shall.”

Bruno’s weariness had been subsiding, replaced bit by bit with a deep, sustaining anger. Now it blossomed. “You created the situation, Marlon. You put her there in harm’s way, and you could have removed her from it when you saw the way things were going. You’re twice the bastard I thought, for laying the blame on chance when you know perfectly well it’s your own damned fault. Why would I possibly want to join you? What hope or endeavor could we possibly share?”

There was a long pause, until finally Marlon answered. “I was never sure if you knew, Bruno. When I had the idea, I figured surely it was one you’d considered and discarded. But the math checked out, so I guessed you’d just been squeamish about it. Perfectly in keeping with your character, right? You actually care about people on some level, which is great. Really, I mean that in a nonsarcastic way. But you were all alone up there on that little planet, your research going off in these weird directions, and I saw it’d be thousands of years before you actually got anywhere with it.

“That first time you came back to the Queendom, I thought you’d call me out for what I was doing. When you didn’t… Well, I was full of resentment then. I was happy to see you go, and happy to capture your image for… well, malicious purposes. And the image confirmed your ignorance! The second time, though, I figured you must have worked it out. You were very methodical, so when you said nothing, I dared to hope you were secretly on my side. It made me feel better about you, about how great everyone thinks you are. If you were working on my idea, well, that would make it all worthwhile. And if not, then maybe you weren’t so smart after all. And that would be an important discovery, too.”

His voice sped up, becoming almost giddy. “I watched your world through telescopes, you know, and when you finally made a ring of the collapsium—around a star, no less!— I thought surely you must have figured it out. I waited for your network gate to open; I even sent you a present. But you hadn’t worked it out, had you? You still haven’t. I really am way ahead of you on this one. How extraordinarily affirming that is, of all my years of effort!”

Bruno felt he couldn’t possibly be more bewildered. “Marlon, what in the damn worlds are you talking about?”

Another long pause. Then: “The arc de fin, Bruno. Your window to the end of time. There’s a shortcut, an easy solution, to produce it this year. This very month. It requires a lot of mass, and an energetic collapse, but those have finally been arranged.”

“Oh. Dear God,” Bruno said. “The sun!”

“Exactly. I need it. Oh, I suppose any equivalent star would do, but there’d have to be a thriving industrial civilization there to help me collapse it in the proper way. So we’d be back to waiting thousands of years again, until these Queendom slackards expand beyond this one meager system. It’s too long. History should know its own end, to be able to make sense of its present. And history will record that it was I, not you, who opened that window.”

Bruno couldn’t help laughing a little—a sour, bitter, furious chuckle. Grief hovered beside him, waiting its turn, but for the moment he was simply angry. “History will die with the Queendom, Marlon. There’ll be no one left to remember how damned smart you were.”

“Oh, please.” Marlon’s voice was impatient. “I disrupted the Iscog to keep small minds from interfering; I didn’t realize yours was one of them. There’ll be more deaths, of course; that can’t be avoided. Probably most of the people on Earth, certainly all the ones on Venus. The flares of the dying sun will be impressive, it’s true. But come on; you know as well as I how trivial it is to create miniature stars. We could be circling the planets with them, using them for power, heat, light, industry… Why should we settle for nature, when a handful of neubles, some wellstone, and some hydrogen will match what nature requires a billion billion billion tons to accomplish? A sun! I say it’s inevitable, that we should dismantle the stars for our own purposes and replace them with something of our own device. History will credit me with that, as well.”

“History will label you a monster,” Bruno said darkly.

After a pause, Marlon grumbled. “Bruno, I realize nobody owes me greatness, but if I can seize greatness, why shouldn’t I? The Queendom provides the framework and the labor, and I provide the ideas and the careful flow of information to control it all. At the top! People suffer as a result, but what’s so unnatural about that? This idea that people should be safe and happy, that’s a very distorting idea. Look to history: Most societies have agreed that people should be useful, to men of vision like myself. Who remembers the happy nobodies? My future is grander than yours, Bruno; I swear it. Your so-called ‘monsters’ are simply the flesh of humanity’s ambition to create a history worth recording.”

“You’re brainsick, Marlon. Something’s come loose in your base pattern. When was the last time you were medically validated by anything but a fax filter?”

“Damn yourself! God, why is there always this confusion between ambition and madness? The two aren’t even related. I’ve created various mad versions of myself, just to see if that would be useful. Better than complacency, at any rate; sometimes I think the very purpose of the Queendom is to crush away all dreams of greatness, to stuff them into a single individual and then rob her of any real power, just to show it can’t be had.”

“The Ring Collapsiter was ambitious, Marlon.”

“More than you know.”

“As described! What a fine idea it was, and is. What a shame to so pervert it! I’d thought you were a builder, Marlon, a creator. I’m ashamed to be so wrong.”

“Oh, listen to yourself. Listen to that pompous, stupid voice! I know you, sir. Don’t forget it. I know you when you’re proud and fresh, and I know you afterward, when you’ve broken. I’m well aware of your limits. Don’t presume to think, for even a moment, that you have the same knowledge of me.”

Sykes paused, then continued in a milder voice. “All right, I suppose I am a monster. I suppose that goes without question at this point. But a visionary monster, and that’s what really matters. You and I have clashed enough, Bruno. I’m done hating you; I’m prepared to write your name in next to my own. Consider: if not for you, I’d have no peers at all, and how’s a man with no peers supposed to fit in? Ah? Ah?” He invited a friendly laugh, and seemed to expect that he’d get one.

Bruno sighed a final time. “You know I can’t let you do this, Marlon. Do as Captain Shiao says: Surrender yourself now. They won’t prosecute you; you clearly have some kind of illness. Once cured, you’ll see the madness in all this. For your own sake, not to mention poor Tamra’s, you should help me clean this mess up and start setting things right.”

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. I had to try, Bruno. Don’t say I didn’t try. I’m sorry to tell you, this conversation is over.”

Suddenly, the space around them was filled with pulsing light. Great blossoms of pure energy—each one easily the size of Earth’s moon—flicked into existence, remained just long enough to register, and vanished again.

“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed. “Ship, what’s the distribution of those flashes?”

“Stochastic, sir, a Gaussian white-noise pattern.”

“Centered around us?”

“Centered ten million kilometers to the solar east of us. Eigenvectors are nonorthogonal; the distribution is shaped like—excuse me, library search—a banana, sir.”

“A banana? Gods, what now? What’s the standard deviation?”

“Along which axis, sir?”

“Along the relevant axis, you! The one connecting our position to the centroid of your banana. How close is this phenomenon to hitting us?”

“Ah,” the ship said. “Five million kilometers, sir.”

Bruno frowned, pinched his chin. “We’re at the two-sigma dispersion contour? That’s odd. Is the centroid stationary?”

“Negative, sir. It’s matching our acceleration, and exceeding our velocity by a constant two hundred thousand kilometers per second. It is gaining on us.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, finally beginning to understand. “Add the phenomenon to the trajectory display, please. All known flashes to date.”

The result was quite alarming: here was the grappleship, hurtling directly downward, toward the vast luminous plains of the solar chromosphere. And off to one side was a crescent-shaped pattern of dots, marching and smearing its way toward them. Off to the other side was that stray Ring Collapsiter fragment he’d glimpsed a few minutes ago: a ropy, kilometers-long chain of collapsium.

Despite the ertial nausea, everyone crowded forward, eager to see and understand the new display, eager to know what was happening to them. Their bodies stank of sweat; even Deliah’s, he realized. Even his own. Impervium or no, it was getting hot in here. No material was superreflective at all wavelengths, after all, and the hull was necessarily pierced by certain openings, for the grapple beams and the emergency exhaust ports and of course the hatch itself. So it leaked, slowly letting in the heat. How close to the sun could they get before they were cooked in place? He noticed that the little faux fireplace had extinguished itself, probably figuring its warming-the-place-up job was done.

“Blackbody temperature of the flashes?” Bruno asked.

“Ten million kelvins, sir.”

“Ah.” That told him nothing useful.

“We’re being herded,” Cheng Shiao said, pointing at the display. “The sun on one side, the weapon pulses on the other. No way to move up or down out of the ecliptic plane. No place to go but here.”

“Toward the collapsium,” Bruno agreed angrily. “Deliah, can we grapple to it?”

“Not without shredding it. The whole thing will still be muon-contaminated, Bruno. Very fragile.”

“How contaminated? How long will it stand up to our tugging?”

“I don’t know. Seconds, minutes… I don’t know how to measure or calculate it. Do you?”

“Not offhand,” Bruno admitted. Then he said, “Bah. Enough. We grapple to it, at once. Ship? You hear me? Grab the end of that fragment, if you can—that’ll direct the tension along its strongest axis.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

Gravity flickered and lurched, then restored itself. The view outside the bow wheeled and locked, centering itself on the distant, powder-blue tendril of collapsium.

“It’s too hot in here,” Tamra’s courtier, Tusite, complained.

“We’re all hot,” Muddy answered her faintly, from his place on the floor. Evidently he’d decided to remain there. “We’re diving into the sun, for God’s sake.”

“Environmental controls at maximum,” the ship said in its own defense.

“Vent some oxygen from the emergency tank,“ Bruno suggested. “It’s supercompressed—its expansion upon release should provide some cooling.”

The temperature nudged down a bit. A sigh went through them all. In the window above, the collapsium grew larger, closer.

Sabadell-Andorra spoke again. “Receiving a transmission, sir. Playing it.”

Then Marlon’s voice, crackling heavily with solar-wind static. “Bruno, what are you doing? You leave that fragment alone! Its placement is very precise! What are you dragging it with?”

“No reply,” Bruno instructed.

“Bruno,” Marlon warned, “stop this at once. Blast it, I’ve given you every possible chance, and see where it gets me. Good-bye, sir.”

“Centroid of the flashes has shifted to our position,” the ship said. “It is now tracking us directly.”

Under his breath, Bruno muttered something history does not record. “All right, what’s our probability of being flashed?”

“Of being inside one of the flashes when it appears?” the ship asked.

“Exactly.”

“Approximately one-half percent, sir, every second.”

“I see. And how long before we collide with that collapsium fragment?”

“Forty seconds, sir.”

“Ah.” He looked around, at the assembled friends and acquaintances, at the robot and the copy of himself. “Well, I’m very sorry, everyone, but Marlon appears to have killed us all. My humblest apologies to every one of you.”

Then a thought struck him. “Ship, what part of the fragment are we approaching? The middle?”

“The end, sir. It’s where we grappled to, per your orders.”

“Indeed.” He turned to Deliah and spoke quickly. “The Ring Collapsiter is hollow, yes? A tube of collapsium, with an open conduit down the center. That’s the whole point of it: a tunnel of supervacuum through which light can travel unimpeded.”

“Yes,” Deliah said uncertainly, her eyes widening.

“How large a conduit, again? Six meters? Wide enough to admit this vessel?”

“Bruno, you can’t—well, perhaps you can.”

“Ship, can you dive straight down the center of the fragment?”

“I can try, sir. Contact in five seconds. Four, three, two, one…”

Chapter Twenty-One in which the predictions of a doomsayer are fulfilled

Is this death, Bruno wondered? There was certainly a lot of screaming, or rather, a lot of unearthly, uncanny whispering sounds that reminded him of screaming. He also heard clear, high ringing sounds, like hundreds of little bells. And these flitting, translucent entities… Were they souls? Angels? Devils? Were they the ones screaming? The sounds were impossible to localize—they seemed to come from within his own head!

Simultaneous arrival in both eardrums, the voice of reason whispered, and that voice actually was in his head, purely imaginary, giving him something to compare these actual sounds against. The difference was, so to speak, pronounced. So perhaps he was in a real place after all. In his ship, alive inside the Ring Collapsiter? That seemed as unlikely as Heaven itself.

His senses told him nothing familiar, filled him with confusion and terror and nothing more. Start with vision: he saw, or seemed to see, a dim, sourceless, colorless light all around, like a fog. Within the light he perceived movement, rapid and repetitive. He perceived shapes, or rather, shapeless regions with a different sort of translucence. Some of these moved; others did not. Some were close; others were not.

Aha! So stereo vision still worked in this place. Bruno still had two eyes, which were capable of angling inward or outward to judge distance. That was something, a major clue! But what were those two eyes seeing? Not ordinary light, certainly. Start with the assumption, then, that he was inside the collapsium. What would that imply? A greatly reduced zero-point field, for one thing. Like the ertial shield’s wake, but symmetric all around him? With no acceleration to restore some grudging sense of inertia? The speed of light would be much higher, meaning the frequency of light would be much higher for a given energy. Visible light photons would phase off into the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum, without gaining the energy wallop of true gamma rays. And low-energy photons? Might they become visible?

Try sound next: He couldn’t localize it, the way he could localize light. But while stereo vision was related to angles, independent of anything else, stereo hearing relied on differences in a sound’s arrival time from one ear to the other. This related directly to the speed of sound—the higher the speed, the vaguer the perceived direction. Yet he did hear human voices, or something like them. So perhaps the speed of sound—and thus its frequency—wasn’t that different, maybe increased by a factor of a few hundred. Perhaps friction and viscosity played a larger role in sound waves than inertia did. If he spoke in low tones, could he make himself understood?

“HELLO!” he rumbled in his deepest, loudest bass, and indeed, he felt and heard a scratchy whisper that was faint but— at least to him—reasonably intelligible. He was rewarded with a renewed cacophony of sounds, urgent sounding but otherwise devoid of meaning.

He was still furious and afraid, still awaiting his chance to grieve, but now he was fascinated as well. Rarely did physics problems present themselves in such dramatic and tangible ways!

All right, then; try the sense of touch: He felt light impacts all around him, like puffs of air. There was no feeling of weight or motion, but the touches on his skin did seem to correspond in some way to the dancing translucences all around him. He reached out a hand, and it flicked out like a whip and then stopped as quickly. To his astonishment he felt the shapes of a human nose and cheek touch it lightly, for an instant, then bounce away. The face had felt rigid, as if carved out of wax, but it had been a face, warm and sticky-slick with natural oils. For an instant it had even looked like a face in a vague, watercolor sort of way, before it flickered off into the fog again.

Finally, his senses began to integrate. To give them a few moments’ peace, he took a breath and closed his eyes. Those actions felt normal enough, at least. When he looked again, things were clearer.

He could make out the insides of the Sabadell-Andorra, yes, her hull all but transparent in this foggy light. Inside that space were the many human bodies he and Muddy had collected, but they were bouncing around off every surface, like ping-pong balls. Sometimes they spun, sometimes not. Sometimes they’d stop suddenly, and then be knocked into motion again by the collision of someone else. All their transitions were instantaneous, rigid. Bruno himself was not bouncing, since he was strapped into his ghostly-clear couch. Another form—Deliah, in her folding chair?—was also motionless, though the body twitched in a quick, unpleasant, insectile way.

The screams continued.

“ER, TRY TO REMAIN CALM,” he rumbled at them. “SEE IF YOU CAN GRAB ONTO SOMETHING.”

Almost immediately, one of the bodies stopped bouncing. Bruno peered at it, trying to make out details. A person, desperately gripping Muddy’s control panel with arms and knees?

“it works,” a faint, whispery voice, barely audible sounded, “you can stop yourself you can catch yourself”

Another body froze in place against the hatchway. Soon someone else was clinging to that. Then a pair of bodies were bouncing together, clinging to each other but not to anything else.

Suddenly there were voices rather than screams, “where are we hey that’s my hair i’ve got you don’t let go we are inside the ring collapsiter i thought we were dead for sure…”

“SHIP?” Bruno tried.

“… because i can’t reach it that’s my eye you will have to climb over…”

“SHIP!”

“Y-r-mnk-str-hhhhhhk”

“SABADELL-ANDORRA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

“C… d not pro… d”

“SHIFT YOUR AUDIO FREQUENCIES. TRANSMIT LOWER. LISTEN HIGHER. THE SPEED OF SOUND HAS CHANGED.”

“C… nsating. This is a test signal. Can you hear me, sir?” The voice was tinny but clear.

“YES! CAN YOU REBROADCAST OUR VOICES IN A FREQUENCY-SHIFTED DOMAIN?”

Now in a stronger voice: “Th . .‘t should be possible in a moment, sir. I’m experiencing an enormous number of intermittent computational malfunctions, but I have established sufficient redundancy to compensate. Shift and rebroadcast is enabled.”

Bruno cleared his throat, then tried to speak normally. “Hello?” His voice, despite an echoey, underwater quality, sounded much better. And with much less effort, too.

“Hello!” four or five other voices called back.

Then a new burst of chatter broke out.

“I can hearl”

“… got my voice back.”

“I feel really sick.”

“Help! I don’t like this!”

“Excuse me, Madam, I need you to move a little to the left. Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

Outside the weirdly translucent hull, Bruno could just barely make out stippled rows and columns of pinpoint brightness in the fog: the collapsium lattice that surrounded them. Curiously, it moved only slightly, vibrating a few centimeters back and forth in irregular bursts. Was the ship stuck against it somehow? It was not easy to see, to perceive any details at all, but there did seem to be some sort of kink in the tunnel ahead of them.

“What do we do now?” someone wanted to know.

An excellent question! This was no comfortable place—it was weightlessness and ertial travel, fever and sensory deprivation, hallucination and drowning all rolled into one. Bruno had felt more at ease on rickety sailboats, riding the stormy seas of Tonga! But how to escape? And where to go?

“Sykes may believe we’re dead,” Cheng Shiao’s voice said tightly, through tinkling bells and underwatery echoes. “That’s something.”

Vivian Rajmon’s voice replied. “I half believe it myself, Cheng. Is that your hand? It feels like wood!”

Bruno peered and squinted, trying to perceive the two, to tell them apart from the others. Were there visual cues when a person spoke? Did translucent angel-amoebas have a discernible body language? He picked out two figures huddled together by the fireplace and decided that was probably who they were.

Annoyingly, one figure still bounced around the hull’s interior. The body was difficult to focus on, almost too quick to see at all.

“Declarant,” another male voice said, “I don’t feel too well right now.”

“I’m sure none of us do,” Bruno agreed. “Who is that? Wenders Rodenbeck?”

“The man himself,” Rodenbeck’s voice agreed.

“Is that you bouncing around?”

“That’s right. My hands’ve gone numb; I can’t seem to make the fingers work. I feel sort of poisoned, if that makes sense to you.”

Bruno’s face threw itself into an inertialess frown. “Seriously ill, hmm?”

“Seriously,” Rodenbeck agreed, in steady but frightened tones. “Whatever’s… happening to us in here, I think it must be very unhealthy. Getting out of this seems like a pretty necessary thing, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Bruno, fearing Rodenbeck had suffered some sort of inertialess whiplash injury to his neck, suppressed the urge to nod. “I quite agree. Try not to move, sir. Your symptoms are troubling, and without knowing their cause, there’s no telling whether you could exacerbate them, or indeed, whether the rest of us could be similarly affected. But haste will likely make things worse. Can you remain calm for a few minutes?”

“De Towaji is right,” Shiao said. “We don’t even know what sort of weapon was used against us back there. Explosive projectiles of some sort?”

“There were no projectiles,” Bruno said. “Just bursts of energy.”

“Energy doesn’t just appear,” Deliah objected.

“Indeed. It’s puzzling. Perhaps Marlon was locally inverting the photon states of the zero-point field? That would create energetic bursts, but they’d be short-lived, and since this would also carve equivalent holes in the vacuum, which the energy would immediately rush back in to fill, the net release would still be zero. I suppose that is consistent with what we’ve observed.”

Then came Muddy’s voice, only slightly whiny. “Pulsed gravity lasers, if they were crossed, should create brief p-peaks of intense gravitation. Potentially, eight crossed beams could create the equivalent of a collapsium lattice, for picosecond intervals.”

“Ah. Clever thought.”

Shiao made an optimistic grunt. “It’s not dangerous, then? It’s a trick, an illusion?”

“Oh,” Bruno said, “I don’t know about that. The net energy of a knife is also zero. Better a knife than a bomb, I’ll wager, but finding ourselves in the middle of such an inversion would almost certainly be harmful.”

“Fatal?”

Bruno’s inertialess shrug nearly dislocated both shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Captain. I’m speculating enough as it is. It would get inside our superreflectors, I’m sure. It would appear inside, without having to penetrate. But he would have to score the hit on us, first, and that appears difficult. For whatever reason, the timing and position of the flashes don’t appear to be precisely controllable.”

Shiao persisted. “Why would he use such an ineffective weapon? Because this ship is too nimble? Too difficult to target with a nasen beam?”

“He does seem to have a lot of devices at his disposal,” Muddy agreed. “At least one nasen projector, probably eight or more gravity lasers, and oblivion knows how many’s-s-standard EM grapples, to pull the Iscog and the Ring Collapsiter apart as he has. The energy he’s expended in the past five minutes would fill a battery twice as large as this ship. How much has he expended in the past week”? The past three weeks?”

“We should be looking for a very large ship, then?” asked Shiao.

“Or a base,” Muddy said. “He’s a deeply private man, fond of’s-s-secret facilities buried in rock. And if he is using gravity lasers in the way I’ve imagined, there would need to be two banks of four, spaced a considerable distance apart. Look for a good-sized asteroid whose sunward face is c-covered in wellstone energy converters. Dead black.”

With great effort and concentration, Bruno fought inertia-lessness to lean as far forward as his straps would allow, and peered at the translucence of the control panel. He knew exactly where the trajectory display should be located, so it wasn’t hard to train his eyes on that spot. It was hard to make anything out there, though. Were those the edges of the plaque? The dashed and dotted lines upon it? He tried to remember where the planets had been, when they’d last seen a glimpse of…

“Mercury,” he said. “It’s close enough—the radio time-lags match. It’s certainly big enough. And I can’t imagine a larger, emptier source of concealment.”

“Or a better source of raw materials,” Muddy agreed. “Mercury, yes.”

“I really don’t feel well,” Rodenbeck complained, in a weaker voice than before. “My limbs have gone entirely numb.”

“All right,” Bruno said, with an accidental and quite sickening nod. “Ship? Why have we stopped?”

“I stopped us,” the ship replied. “The tunnel ahead of us bends too sharply to admit my outer hull.”

“Hmm. You used backup thrusters to do this?”

“Yes. I’m also currently using them to maintain attitude and position. It’s difficult, sir—required thrust is very low to effect a velocity change, but the counterpulse required to damp it is itself a function of position and velocity. The resulting control space has no closed-form solutions.”

“So you’re improvising.”

“Correct, sir. Fuel consumption has stabilized, but remains disconcertingly rapid.”

Rapid? That wasn’t a good thing. “Estimated time of depletion?”

“Two minutes, twenty-four seconds, sir.”

“Oh, dear. Is there enough fuel to back us out of here safely?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Blast. Use some imagination, you! Bring matters like this to my attention before they become irrevocable!”

“I am extremely taxed,” the ship said in its own defense.

Bruno sighed. “All right, then, turn around and pull us out with the grapples; without a fuel supply we’re in more danger in here than we are outside.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

There was no sense of movement, but the jittering lattice of pinpoints outside the hull began—slowly and jerkily—to rotate.

With a yelp of surprise, Wenders Rodenbeck settled at once to the deck beside Bruno’s couch and remained there.

“Ah, good. You’ve managed to grab hold,” Bruno said, looking down approvingly.

“Actually, friend, I appear to be stuck.” Rodenbeck’s voice was alarmed.

“Stuck?”

“It feels… like gravity. Pretty much exactly like gravity.”

Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness! “Ship, cease rotation!”

But it was too late. The walls hummed with activity, oxygen atoms accelerating near-inertialessly and being expelled at velocities that probably exceeded the vacuum speed of light. But the rotation continued—even began, ponderously, to accelerate.

“I don’t understand,” Deliah van Skeltering protested. “The gravity inside a cylinder should cancel to zero, regardless of position or orientation.”

“A continuous cylinder of infinite length,” Bruno corrected. “Ours is kinked and twisted, and composed of discrete masses, and filled with a Casimir supervacuum that dulls momentum! I’m a fool. Hold on, Wenders, I’ll fish you up.”

“No!” Muddy shrieked. “I forbid it, sir! Keep your hands where they are!”

“Muddy, I—”

“You’ll be killed,” Muddy insisted. “Needlessly, pointlessly killed! You can’t save him in time!”

“You’re saying I’m going to die?” Rodenbeck asked, his breath now coming in gasps.

“Blast it,” Bruno said, quietly, hollowly, because he almost certainly would be killed if he intervened. But perhaps Rodenbeck—an artist, an innocent in this madness—could be saved. With numb fingers, he undid his safety harness. Already he was feeling the beginnings of weight, as the stern of the ship swung close to a collapson node. And for so small a black hole, the gradients would be exceedingly steep. Wenders Rodenbeck was probably already feeling more than a gee, the equivalent of Earth-surface gravity. And in the next thirty seconds…

There was no way to avoid this; the ship couldn’t go forward, couldn’t drag itself backward with grapples, couldn’t go anywhere without turning around. But Bruno should have foreseen this difficulty, should have seen where the danger would occur and then ordered everyone away from it. Steeling himself, he leaned over the side of his couch…

And was whisked, with an instantaneous, all-but-inertia-less flicker of movement, to the bow of the ship.

“I f-f-forbid it,” Muddy said, his hard, solid-wax torso bouncing and skating over Bruno’s own. He held on tightly to something, pinning Bruno to the window there, preventing him from escaping. Muddy had leaped the length of the ship, apparently, to ensure this.

“Let go,” Bruno said urgently. “Let go! I must help him. This is my fault!”

“It isn’t. We’ve never done this before. What man has walked inside collapsium like a tunnel beneath a river? What man can foresee every problem? You saved him once, but this time, Marlon has him for certain.”

“Oh! God!” Rodenbeck cried out, weakly.

“Release me,” Bruno insisted. “We’ve seen deaths before, but I can do something this time. Listen, you coward! You sniveler! Am I really so weak, so selfish? Am I really so capable of being you? Release me!”

“I will not.”

Below, Bruno was just able to see Rodenbeck’s struggling form, pinned to the deck now by several gees. There was no expression on his amoeba face, but the expression in his gasping voice was plain enough: “I told you… this stuff was… dangerous, de To…”

And then he died, his lungs’ strength insufficient to lift their own tremendous weight. He suffocated there at the bottom of the ship, while Bruno and the others, hanging only a few meters away, feeling only the merest stirrings of gravity, did nothing. Terrible sounds rose up from the body as its bones snapped, then shattered, then powdered, until finally Rodenbeck was nothing but a leathery, vaguely man-shaped pancake on the floor. Five hundred gee? A thousand? The gradient itself must have been terrible, a difference of hundreds of gees just between the deck and the space a single centimeter above it. Bruno could see the collapson node there behind Rodenbeck’s body. He watched it pull the remaining remains into a circular mass and drag them along the floor as it rotated by.

And still the jets hummed; still the faint bells tinkled in the air.

“My God,” Deliah said, and began to weep.

Bruno finally stopped struggling.

The rotation continued another fifteen seconds, until finally Sabadell-Andorra proclaimed the maneuver complete. “Eight seconds to fuel depletion,” it added.

“Right,” Muddy said. “Grapples on full. T-take us out of here.”

“Acknowledged, sir. Destination?”

“The planet Mercury.”

Chapter Twenty-Two in which history’s great wizards clash

There was a lot of talk, once they’d entered normal space again.

“All the things people are doing when they die,” Vivian said quietly. “The things they’re just about to do at the moment the strings are cut. Sometimes nasty, sometimes wonderful, sometimes perfectly ordinary. My grandmother used to say these were things God wanted for himself. She was a kind of Muslim, I suppose—her God was always needy and bitter like that. Not remote, though—he was right there looming over her all the time, like a drunk uncle. But when she died she wasn’t doing anything special, just sitting by the window in her rocking chair, wrapped up in an old blanket.”

“Maybe God needed that,” Shiao suggested matter-of-factly.

Vivian gave an absent nod. “Yes, that’s what Mother said. But couldn’t he just, you know, create his own moment of peace? Why should he need to take Grammy’s? When I was older, I think I would wake up sometimes, wondering if that God of hers were looming over me, ready to steal my dreams or my morning breath or something. What a puny motive! He doesn’t get to do much of that anymore, and I’m glad about it. History’s greatest thug; phooey, I disown him! The day I stand at his throne I’ll place him under arrest; I swear I will.” She cast a gloomy look at the bloodstained deck. ”Rest in peace, Wenders Rodenbeck. Rest, all the victims of this atrocity.”

And there was other talk as well: Was Declarant Sykes still looking for them? Should they attempt to render the ship invisible? That wouldn’t work, of course—it’d simply let the sunlight through, to poach all the remaining people inside.

Bruno’s grief had now become unbearable; finally it commanded his attention. He ignored the whole discussion, simply throwing an arm over his face and weeping, weeping, his tears seeming to come from an endless reservoir somewhere. He’d been powerless, all those years ago, to save Enzo and Bernice de Towaji when the Old Girona Bistro fell down on them. He knew they were dying in there, knew there was time to save them if only, if only… And so, today, had he been helpless to save Wenders. And Tamra, yes—how very grievously he’d failed herl Perhaps he was, quite simply, powerless after all. Perhaps all his deeds and accomplishments were so much illusion, just chance and foolish self-deception. It seemed a plausible enough notion, at that moment.

“What do we do with the… body?” someone asked.

“It seems to have gelled. Look, it’s a solid mass. Weird. Into the fax with it, I’d say.”

“I’ll do it. Here.”

“Oh, God! Oh, God! Save us! Hasn’t there been enough? Deposit us in some safe location before you dash off on this mission!” That sounded like Tamra’s friend Tusite. Bruno forgave her the outburst; Tamra surrounded herself with all manner of silly people, but very few of them were weak. It didn’t imply weakness, to bend and break under the strain of these events. Indeed, quite the reverse—it was only human, part of the basic mammalian wiring, to feel terrified when helpless. And to grieve for one’s Queen, yes, as for no other thing except, perhaps, one’s own children.

He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to be comforted. He wanted comfort, period. But he sensed, he knew, that no one would have anything to offer but their own grief, and perhaps some platitudes. Such a tragedy. We all loved her so well and so personally, each in our own way. How trite! How monstrous! Platitudes existed for this very purpose; to underscore the dreary, hopeless banality of human suffering. Should he carve a pyramid with his bare hands? Circumnavigate a world? Would that help? Even for himself, he had no words or thoughts of wisdom, only platitudes.

And then Muddy’s voice spoke up. “There are no’s-s-safe places, madam, and no chance to look for them if there were. Time is of the essence if we’re to foil this… madman’s plot.”

That got on Bruno’s nerves: Muddy’s tone was, as ever, grating and whiny and filled with terrified self-pity. And yet, there he was, acting to save the Queendom while Bruno himself sniveled and sobbed on the couch. How humiliating! How base! The thought only made him cry harder.

“Mercury isn’t a small place,‘’ Vivian Rajmon observed.

“Indeed,” Muddy said, “and we’ve only a few minutes to decide where to begin.”

“We look for deep-black solar collectors, you said. Super-absorbers?”

“C-c-correct. But even those will be small, compared to the size of a world. Even with the best sensors and algorithms, we are hindered by simple geometry. Searching the entire surface could take hours.”

“Hours,” Cheng Shiao brooded. “With Sykes ready to open fire upon us at any time. I’m surprised he hasn’t already!”

“Perhaps he isn’t looking,” Vivian said. “Perhaps he’s busy hatching some new villainy. ”Then she paused, and came over to Bruno’s bedside. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed. “It must be hard, Declarant: all of us drawing upon you so desperately, in your hour of need. Even your own duplicate is doing it! But we’ll be there very soon. Will you join us for a moment?”

Finally, at these words, Bruno felt the flow of tears begin to ebb. Not so much because Vivian had requested it— although he’d had a little soft spot in his heart for her since she was eleven years old—but because he didn’t want to arrive at their destination and have Marlon see him weep. Absurd, of course, since Marlon had probably seen Muddy weep for twenty continuous years, had in fact coaxed tears from a Bruno until he became a Muddy, over and over and over again. But he supposed the mind didn’t need to work rationally, so long as it worked.

“Oh, forgive me.” He sniffed, wiping his eyes and nose with a sleeve.

“Of course,” she said gently. “Of course we do.”

He consoled himself with one thought: that the Sabadell-Andorra Earthquake had been an accident, an act of God. Inevitable, really, and buried back in an age when death— especially by accident—was still the norm. These more recent deaths were something else entirely: caused. He glanced up: Mercury was fully visible, already as large as a mottled gray apple in the view, and growing visibly.

He sat up and tried wanly to bring some of the iron back into his voice. “Do… forgive me, please. The loss of so many, including Her Majesty, has… well. Yes. You know as well as I. But of course we’ll be to the planet in a few minutes, unbalanced or no. An unfortunate property of time is that it can’t be made to wait.”

Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “Our enemy, of course, has the same problem. Things are moving quickly. If we’re as quick, we may very well land safely. Visually, Marlon will be looking straight into the sun for us, which ought to confuse even quite sophisticated sensors. And gravitationally… well, let’s just say this ship has an unusual—and decidedly minimal—signature. And if he really isn’t looking, if he does presume us dead, we may be able to slip right in.”

“He’ll see us in orbit,” Shiao protested, “if we’re forced to scour the surface for signs of him.”

Bruno, still sniffling a bit, pinched himself on the chin. “Hmm. Well. We needn’t search the entire planet, surely. He must have his energy converters on the daylight side right now, after all. And his beam weapons as well, since they can’t fire through the planet.” He sat up straighten “In fact, he must have had collectors on the daylight side continuously for the past several weeks. Either that, or very, very large batteries, and since the former is much easier…”

“What’s to say the power source is near the base?” Shiao asked skeptically.

“Efficiency,” Deliah said, ticking the answers off on her fingers. “Safety. Cost. Time. Light-lag. Marlon may be a good faker, but in private he is—demonstrably!—not a very patient person. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this, but I doubt he’s gone to any extra trouble, or put up with any suboptimal equipment, or otherwise made things harder on himself than they absolutely need to be.”

Fighting dizzy nausea, Bruno nodded. “Indeed. I quite agree.”

Muddy was huddled at one of the hypercomputer interfaces, tapping figures in madly. “Mercury completes a revolution every fifty-eight days, an orbit every eighty-eight. Daylight lasts eight and a half weeks at the equator, so we’re looking pole to pole in an arc from the eastern terminator to thirty degrees west of the noon line. But to be consistent with observations, the g-gravity lasers couldn’t be within, er, thirty degrees of the north pole, whereas from the south…”

Bruno looked up again, saw the planet there in the bow window, fully illuminated from edge to edge like a full but strangely altered moon because they were flying toward it almost straight up out of the sun, their grapples locked on the planet’s equator. Indeed, the planet was as wide as a dinner platter, and widening rapidly.

“The base should be’s-s-somewhere in here,” Muddy said, and on the window a green, crosshatched area the shape of a kidney bean appeared, covering less than a fifth of the planet’s sunward face. “Initiating telescopic survey.”

Shiao glared up anxiously through the window. “How long will this take? Should we think about plotting an orbit solution?”

“I am still experiencing widespread malfunction,” Sabadell-Andorra answered. “Gravitational stresses have fractured millions of my wellstone fibers.”

“Oh, God,” Deliah said. “Is hull containment in danger?”

“Not imminently. Unless there are further stresses. But my computing power and reliability are markedly degraded.”

“Oh, well, no problem about that.” Deliah’s voice dripped irony.

Then Muddy spoke up. “Survey complete. There are a number of reflective prominences right here, surrounded by a bank of’s-s-superabsorbers.”

On the window, superimposed over the planet’s surface and the bean-shaped highlight, a red X appeared.

“Yes? Goodness, lock the grapples to it,” Bruno said, his blood rising. Part of him hadn’t really expected to find anything—their chain of suppositions was rather long—and another part had expected, long before now, to be burned out of the sky by some silly weapon or other. But logic existed for a reason, because it carried you inexorably toward truth. When properly applied, of course, but by now that was a matter of long habit.

“Grapples may harm the base,” Deliah said excitedly. “Disrupting local gravity, interfering with his grav-projection mechanisms… It could be just the edge we need.”

“A double edge,” Shiao cautioned. “It’ll alert him to our presence, and in fact pinpoint our exact location.”

“Irrelevant,” Muddy said. “Unless we mean to d-destroy the base using ourselves as a projectile, we must begin deceleration at once.”

Indeed, moments later the gravity switched off, and everyone went flying into the air as the Sabadell-Andorra wheeled around them, orienting its grapples toward the sun. Above, the window dimmed again to prevent the sunlight from searing them all. Then gravity returned, and they all came crashing back down in an assortment of uncomfortable ways.

“Blast,” Bruno said, pointing vaguely. “Everyone into your couches, please. Unfold those, yes. We now have—alas!— enough seats to accommodate everyone.”

“Are we still heading for this ‘base?” Tusite asked.

“We are,” Muddy confirmed. Then, in a rare display of manners for a de Towaji of any sort, he stuck out his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, by the way. I’m Muddy.”

“Tusite,” she returned quickly, accepting his hand into her own dark fingers with a reflexively dainty, ladylike grip. “No last name.”

“Me either,” Muddy said.

She looked puzzled by that—clearly she thought he was another Bruno, or at least another de Towaji. But what she said, albeit somewhat brusquely, was, “Charmed. I… apologize for screaming, a minute ago. It’s frightening, all this running and fighting and dying. But I do owe you my life.”

“Oh, none of that,” Muddy clucked. “We’ve all had our share of b-bad moments on this trip. Anyway, you owe him,” He nodded sideways at Bruno.

Tusite looked in Bruno’s direction and inclined her head. She looked as if her fright were only barely contained, but she nonetheless turned back to Muddy. “Mercury is hostile wilderness, true?” she asked. “So hot it’s full of molten metal? If we come down in the wrong spot, it could mean our deaths.”

“Indeed,” Muddy agreed. “But we’re aimed right for the center of the Declarant’s base. As we approach, I’ll be scanning for dangers. I’ll look for hollows beneath the rock, too— natural or otherwise—because that’s where we’ll find him. I’ll do my b-best to set us atop one of them.”

“Steering how?” she pressed anxiously.

“The guidance algorithm adjusts its course by sliding the grapple target to different parts of the sun.”

“I’ll bet we’re disrupting that, as well,” Deliah noted. “It’s illegal to grapple the sun because it can whip up flares and proton storms which affect the entire Queendom. I doubt anyone has ever given our poor photopause the sort of thrashing we’re giving it now.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, “we have much to answer for.”

Everyone burst out laughing at that. Tight, anxious laughter, it was true, but still it surprised Bruno—he’d been serious. All week, he’d been tearing up the solar system as if he owned the place, grappling to anything handy regardless of consequence, helping mainly his own friends… But even Hugo, strapped as ever to the cabin’s floor, made mewling noises that were quite a good imitation of amusement.

“I’m sure we could all use a rest,” he grumbled, and everyone laughed at that, too.

“You’re planning to melt through solid rock?” Shiao asked. “He could be buried quite deep, couldn’t he?”

“Unlikely,” Deliah said. “For the same reasons already cited. His equipment needs to be on the surface—or to stick up through the surface, at any rate—and he’ll want to be close to it. It’s the same reason your eyes and ears are up next to your brain—so the signals don’t have far to travel.”

“So how deep should we expect to burrow?”

She shrugged. “Less than fifty meters, at a guess. Of course, at the rate this ship tunnels that could still take a pretty long time.”

“Three minutes to touchdown,” the ship noted.

“There’ll be a-a-access ports at the surface,” Muddy said, finally climbing onto his acceleration couch. His hands and voice were shaking, Bruno saw. He was going in to face his personal Satan. Was there ever a better reason to be terrified? “He never uses his ports, but they’re always there. I’ve seen his secret f-facilities elsewhere in the solar system, and I doubt he’d deviate much from pattern. We should be armed, by the way; we can expect a stiff resistance from robot guards. Captain Shiao?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you recommend some hand weapons to our fax machine, please?”

“Certainly.” From his folding couch, Shiao rattled off a series of model numbers, technical specifications, magazine sizes and battery capacities, piezoelectric coefficients and physical dimensions. Beside him, the fax hummed and glowed.

“Acknowledged, sir,” Sabadell-Andorra replied a few moments later. “Weapons are ready.”

With shaking hands, Muddy snapped his couch harness in place. “Right. Well, everyone should pick one up on the way out. I don’t suppose we have sufficient mass in the reservoir to make’s-spacesuits?”

“Only two complete ones,” the ship replied apologetically. “We are low on certain key elements, notably oxygen.”

“We could send two of us ahead in full armor,” Cheng Shiao suggested. “I will, naturally, volunteer.”

It took Bruno a moment to realize the suggestion was aimed solely at him. He was the commander of this expedition, in every conceivable sense. Such a decision was clearly his. He considered it. Would dividing their forces leave them vulnerable? Would the ship be safer with people aboard to guard her? Did it matter, two people, or four, or six? He wanted no more deaths on his conscience, but wasn’t at all sure how to accomplish this under the circumstances.

He did know, in a low, cold-blooded way, that Shiao was the one person here—other than himself—that he’d be most willing to sacrifice, if such sacrifice could not be helped. Shiao was the person most willing to sacrifice himself, and also the one most qualified—far more qualified than Bruno— to break into the fortress of a mad genius.

The sun moved out of the bow window, which turned clear again, showing stars and a few wispy tendrils of solar corona. Their little ship could be anywhere, really; looking up there gave no impression that they were about to land on a planet.

“All right,” Bruno said finally, “Shiao and I will don space suits and attempt to seize control of Marlon’s study, wherever it may be. I’m not sure whether we can reverse the damage he’s done, but if so that will be the likeliest place from which to accomplish it. The rest of you stay with the ship.”

“I object,” Vivian said immediately, from her little couch beside Shiao’s own. “I am a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary.”

“Also a sixteen-year-old girl,” Bruno and Shiao said together.

“I didn’t have any heroics in mind, thank you,” she said, with a cool stiffness that belied her age. “I’m thinking of Declarant Sykes’ household control systems. There must be an interface somewhere, and if I can find it I may be able to issue law-enforcement overrides to the resident intelligence. If not, I may at least be able to sabotage it in some way.”

Bruno thought about this. In no way did he wish to further endanger Vivian’s life. There was danger enough, without sending her off to the mercies of armed robots and other household security systems.

“None of us have backup patterns we can rely on,” he reminded her. “Our actions here carry the sting of permanence. If you die, you’ll die.”

“I’m aware of that, Declarant.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well, I leave it up to Shiao. He seems quite protective of you.”

“I—” Shiao began, but was immediately interrupted.

“I order you to agree,” Vivian said.

Shiao reddened; his protective instincts were suddenly frustrated, bottled in. He didn’t like that one bit.

“Cheng,” she warned, her copper eyes flashing angrily, “this won’t look good on my report. Physically, I’m sure you could prevent me, but you do not want to refuse a direct order. Nor would you want, in any way, to endanger this mission. Would you like to be the cause of our failure?”

“I… would not,” he said, with visible effort.

“I’ll take every precaution,” she said, softening. “I have no desire to upset you.”

He slumped back into his couch. “I’ll agree, Commandant-Inspector, on the sole condition that you not go alone.”

“I’ll go with her,” Deliah said. “I’ve dealt with some balky intelligences in my time.”

Hugo, strapped right where it had been for the past several days, started up an urgent mewling. “Me! Me! Me!” it seemed almost to be saying.

“Steady, old thing,” Bruno said in his best tone of reassurance.

“Thirty seconds to touchdown,” the ship informed them.

Muddy, eyes on his sensors, worried at the hypercomputer interfaces with badly shaking hands. “We appear to be d-di-rectly over the central complex, with several access ports nearby. The habitable area consists of four main chambers plus assorted closets and conduits, eighteen meters below ground. Optimal landing site… identified.”

Suddenly, the space above them was alive with brief, intense, moon-sized flashes of light. They were taking fire again.

“He’s detected us,” Shiao said unnecessarily.

“Centroid of detonations is eighty kilometers above us,” said Muddy. “We’re close to the source—he may not be physically able to aim any lower than that. Ship, probability of a hit?”

“Twenty percent, each second.”

“Time to touchdown?”

“Three seconds. Two. One. Zero.”

The deck thumped beneath them, gently. Paradoxically, the sense of gravity lessened immediately, as if they’d been parked and stationary all along, and now the ground had dropped out from under them. Above, the view still gave no impression of a planetary environment; on Mercury, outer space started a millimeter above the soil. And the blasts of the zero-point field inversion weapon started eighty kilometers above that!

“He won’t hit us on the ground,” Deliah said hopefully. “He might hurt his own equipment.”

“It looks like taking off again will be a bit of trouble, though,” Tusite observed quietly. Her eyes had begun to take on a kind of refugee stare, an unwillingness to be further surprised or intimidated.

Bruno was out of his harness and up within four seconds of touchdown; Shiao was even faster. At the hatchway, the familiar sizzling sounds had begun as Sabadell-Andorra melted its way into one of Muddy’s promised ‘access ports.’

“Time to penetration?” Muddy called out anxiously.

“Ninety-two seconds,” the ship replied.

“Spacesuits,” Shiao said. “Quickly.” He picked up a bundle from beside the fax machine, tossed it to Bruno, then picked up another bundle for himself. Bruno struggled into the garment as best he could, and the suit itself did its best to help him. Still, he’d only worn one of these things once before in his life, and at that time he’d had palace servants to help him into it. It took him well over a minute to get dressed. Shiao— finished in a quarter the time—passed out weapons and then, for nearly a full thirty seconds, tapped a ringing, armor-clad toe on the deck.

“All right,” Bruno said when he was finally ready.

Hugo, to his astonishment, stood up alongside him. Had the battered old robot somehow struggled free of its restraining straps? They lay on the floor, neatly piled a meter away from the iron rings they’d been strung through. Good Lord, had Hugo actually unfastened all the hasps, with his clumsy golden fingers? It seemed inconceivable.

“Mewl,” the blank metal face said, with what sounded for all the worlds like satisfaction.

Bother it, there was no time for this. “You stay here, Hugo. Guard the ship, with Muddy.”

“Pick a weapon, sir,” Cheng Shiao suggested urgently, pointing at a pile of clutter beside the fax. “His defenses may still be coming on-line. For everyone’s safety, we should be moving along as quickly as possible.”

“Hmm. Indeed,” Bruno said, peering down at the weapons pile through the clear dome of his space helmet. Should he select one of the pistols? The rifle? The vibrating impervium sword? At the very bottom of the pile was a simple wellstone rod, a meter and a half in length and as big around as a stairway banister. Bruno reached for it, pulled it up from the clutter, felt the heft of it in his hand. It was very light, like a toy made of foam. But it was wellstone; currently it emulated a black polymer surface, but it could become almost anything in his hands. Less a weapon than a humble tool, like an oversized hammer, but he took it nonetheless.

Shiao saw this, and nodded. He himself had taken up a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, and waited now by the door with grim impatience.

The sizzling noises stopped.

“Safe to open hatch,” Sabadell-Andorra said.

“I’m scared,” Tusite said, as if unable to help herself.

“We’ll b-be scared together,” Muddy reassured her, in a voice at least as shaky. He threw a trembling arm around her.

Meanwhile, Shiao threw the latches and pulled the door open. On the other side was a simple pressure vessel, a metal cylinder with a door of its own facing off to one side. In that door was a little circular window of some heavily tinted, glass-ine material, through which a gray-white moonscape was visible. There were two more cylinders nearby outside, their hulls reflecting mirror-bright in the harsh sunlight, and beyond them were some other, smaller glittery things less easily identified.

And farther away still, where the ground started rising up into low, rounded hills, Bruno saw the inky blackness of su-perabsorbers. Solar energy conversion, nearly 100% efficient. He thought of his own little sun, imprisoned in converters and finally murdered outright, and he winced inwardly. Marlon had thought things through much better than Bruno ever had; he would not want for energy in this place.

The floor of the cylinder opened into a spiral staircase leading down into darkness.

“Come,” Shiao said without delay, leaping for the staircase and beckoning Bruno to follow. The gravity was light here— probably no more than half a gee. Shiao seemed to glide down the stairs like a man-shaped balloon, his feet only occasionally touching down. In moments, the shadows had swallowed him whole. Gulping, Bruno started after him, probably with a good deal less grace.

Had Bruno been a claustrophobic or acrophobic sort, these stairs would be a nightmare—each one just barely wide enough for his foot, the spiral itself just barely wide enough for his suited body, and without any sort of banister. As the first turn completed, the stairs above him closed over in a tight, low ceiling that was barely high enough to accommodate his helmet dome. His suit headlamps switched on; they were the only source of illumination, although far below it seemed he could see the dull reflections of Shiao’s lights. He clanked downward, metal toes on metal stairs, for what seemed like a long time: four turns, five, six…

Finally, at the eighth turn of the spiral, the stairs opened out into a chamber that Shiao’s headlamps—and now Bruno’s own—showed to be roughly the size of a di-clad worker’s platform. Ahead, the chamber was lined wall to wall with glossy black robots. They were short, long armed, long fingered. Some of them carried glossy black pistols of strange design; others were empty handed, but reached out those empty hands and made popping, blue-white electrical arcs across the spaces between them. There were twenty of the robots lined up across the room, and in fact, Bruno saw that in places they were two rows deep, and behind them all was a fax machine that, every few seconds, glowed and hummed and spat out a new comrade to join them. Rarely had Bruno— or anyone, really—seen a sight so menacing.

“Freeze! Royal Constabulary!” Shiao said in quick but officious tones. “This facility is a suspected crime scene. All autronic and telerobotic mechanical entities are ordered to shut down forthwith.”

Ignoring him, the robots, moving as a single entity, took a giant, clanking step forward.

That was all the encouragement Shiao needed—he raised his sword and pistol, uttered an uncharacteristically wild exclamation, and leaped directly at them. Pistols coughed—not only Shiao’s own but those of the robots as well. Shiao staggered. Bruno himself was knocked back by a series of impacts across his chest and arms. Bullets exploded in yellow-white pops, snapping miniature shrapnel into walls and floor and ceiling.

Shiao cried out again, not in pain but in a sort of battle mania. In one motion he straightened his body, aimed, and fired his pistol point-blank into the skull of the nearest robot. The robot, alas, neither staggered nor fell.

Breathing hard, too hard, Bruno realized he himself was essentially unhurt—these space suits were tough, bulletproof. His helmet dome was slightly chipped in two places, and the white outer fabric of the suit itself was discolored here and there. Unfortunately, the gleaming hulls of the robot guards appeared to be tougher still.

Undaunted, Shiao hefted his sword against the same attacker. That worked much better—the impervium blade, vibrating so rapidly its edges were a fog, sliced through the robot’s neck, decapitating it cleanly. But still the robot did not fall; still it reached for Shiao with long, bright-sparking hands. A dozen robots pressed around Shiao, clawing silently, mere moments from zapping him or crushing him or lifting him off the floor and doing Heaven knows what. Another six of the things were advancing on Bruno—clank, clank, clank. And he realized he had never—not once in his life—struck a blow in anger. He had never learned how.

The situation was, in a word, desperate.

But there was a rod of wellstone in Bruno’s hands, gripped tightly, held out before him at chest level, and with a few whispered commands he caused its surface—in the middle and on the ends, well away from his hands—to seethe with all manner of exotic fields and substances, all manner of EM radiation and software pathogens and electrochemical reactions. He had no idea what these enemies were made of, which of the thousands of improbably durable materials had been woven together to form these gleaming hulls, but he figured surely something would hurt them. Ditto their sensory and computational systems—no matter how rugged the design, in the end they had to be made of something, controlled by something, vulnerable to something in the wellstone’s vast library.

The robots advanced, and advanced some more. In another moment they’d be upon him…

“Back, you!” Bruno shouted at them. With more conviction than skill, he lashed out with the rod before the robots quite had a chance to lash out at him.

The results are, of course, known to all, as the blitterstaff has been a standard antiautomata weapon for hundreds of years. But recall that de Towaji had no history to fall back on; he invented the thing right there and then, with little time for a careful consideration of its properties. Try to imagine, then, his sense of stunned relief and triumph, when the advancing robots screamed and bled and melted at his touch! Six of them toppled immediately: masses of twitching, disorganized, heterogeneous matter that ruined the floor wherever they fell, warping and buckling it with blitter scars.

Six more robots advanced over the smoldering carcasses of their brethren. Six more fell. Some few of the victims retained, at least approximately, the shapes their creator had given them, but as for function, not one of them remained conscious or coherent for longer than a few milliseconds.

Cheng Shiao had meanwhile given a good account of himself, having completely dismembered three of the robots through a series of carefully aimed strikes. Their severed arms and legs, littering the deck around him, naturally fought on, but mindlessly, their distant heads and torsos unable to advise them.

But Shiao was sorely pressed, his spacesuit a mess of burns and gouges, his helmet dome spiderwebbed with cracks. Angry robots surrounded him three rings deep, and their bludgeoning claws struck at him again and again, with telling blows. He staggered, lurched, fought as madly and yet also as carefully as his skills and training permitted. But it wasn’t enough. His doom was certain.

Bruno, realizing the power of this thing he carried in his hands, had become a bit giddy with it all. He advanced on the robots, screaming and laughing in a voice that none would recognize, and dashed them one by one to oil-smeared flinders.

“Awayf Away!” he shouted, and while robots are incapable of fear, their controlling software does have some inkling of caution. Walking directly into a weapon, or holding still while one is wielded against them, is inefficient compared to a duck-and-roll attack or even a simple outflanking maneuver. So Shiao’s attackers, becoming aware of the blitterstaff in their midst, began to shrink back from it as though afraid. They would have dived for Bruno’s knees, surely, or ducked aside to get behind him, if he weren’t whirling the thing around him with such crazy abandon.

One by one, they slipped into its range and were destroyed, and with each fallen comrade, the panic of the others seemed to increase. Soon they were ignoring Shiao entirely, stumbling over each other in their press to escape. Bruno shouted his laughter over and over, all the bottled rage finding its outlet at last. Even Shiao cringed before him.

But the fight wasn’t over yet. The fax machine had begun to spit out new designs: tentacled robots capable of leaving a damaged limb behind, and soon afterward, toylike robots too small and fast and numerous to hold at bay. The surviving longarms had got their act together as well, falling back to a position along the far wall, from which they hurled a staggering stream of explosive bullets while slowly fanning out along the walls. Bruno’s rage began to cool; he sensed the danger all around him. These were not tenpins, after all, but vicious, remorseless killing machines that would take the first opening he provided them.

He had to get to that fax, had to shut it down. It was the source of all these enemies, and who knew what it might spew out next?

“To the fax!” he said to Shiao.

Wobbling slightly on his bullet-scarred feet, Shiao finally came up alongside Bruno. The two began to advance, but resistance ahead was stiff, the new robots less and less willing to give ground, and harder and harder to score with a clean kill. Multijointed impervium tentacles, blitter-struck and writhing madly, piled up in drifts on the floor ahead of them, while the robots who’d lost them fought on with grim, fearless determination.

It could have gone on like that for a long time, inch by bloody, oily inch, had a new factor not entered the fray. “Mewl!” a battered-looking robot of tin and gold cried, wading into the carnage to stomp and stomp and stomp the little toy soldiers. “My! My! Mewl!”

“Hugo!” Bruno cried, alarmed for his friend. “Go back. Go back to the ship!”

“Mewl!” Hugo replied sternly, looking Bruno full in the face while stomping flat yet another little robot.

The enemy robots seemed perplexed for a moment, unsure what to make of this development. It didn’t take them long to figure it out, though—within seconds Hugo was swarmed, covered head to toe in angry little robots, and a tentacled monstrosity was advancing, flailing about with all manner of evil weapons.

But Shiao saw that moment of confusion, the distraction of the toy soldiers, and struck hard, slicing half the tentacles off another monstrosity and driving a sharp thrust directly into the heart of a third. They fought on, of course, but soon Bruno was there beside him, laying about with the blitter-staff, and finally the tentacled robots—there were five of them now—began to fall.

And then, all at once, the two men were right there at the fax orifice, a simple frame of wellstone surrounding a fog-shrouded vertical plate. Shiao looked at Bruno, who tapped the rim of the thing with his varicolored staff. That was all it took—the fax machine groaned, expelled a cubic meter of white plastic beads, and promptly expired in a mess of oil and smoke.

After that, it was simply a cleanup operation. Bruno ran to a beleaguered Hugo, kicking toy soldiers off him one by one. Hugo had fallen to his knees, and one of his arms had come off and was dangling by a single wire. But there weren’t that many toy soldiers, now that their supply was finite. The tide had clearly turned against them. A few tried to leap onto Bruno’s left arm, apparently aiming for the environmental controls there, and a few others tried—somewhat pathetically—to retreat toward the protection of the remaining longarms. Bruno finished them all off, though, while Shiao hacked the long-arms apart with his sword. The last enemy they killed together, Shiao lopping the head off and Bruno going after the body, reducing it with one blow to a pile of steaming shards, like a dropped soup bowl.

Then the two men fell against each other, weeping and laughing with relief.

“I thought I was doomed!” Shiao expanded, spreading his arms wide. “Well fought, sir! Well fought! What on Earth did you do to those poor bastards?”

“Dropped a library on them,” Bruno panted, and laughed at his own joke. He turned to Hugo. “You came at just the right time, old thing. And fought well! You’re smarter than I credit, aren’t you?”

Hugo, more battered than ever, said nothing, but stared at the arm dangling from its scarred, scorched shoulder.

“We’ll fix you,” Bruno promised. “You’ve done your part. More than your part. Are you able to make it back to the ship?”

Hugo seemed to consider for a moment, before slowly shaking its head. The neck joints squeaked alarmingly. Indeed, Hugo did look much the worse for wear, unlikely to rise at all, much less climb eight turns of stairs. Presently, it fell from its knees to its metal buttocks, landing with a dull clank.

“Er,” Bruno said, “damn, will you survive at all?”

Hugo considered that as well, and finally—squeakily— nodded. With its remaining hand, it gestured for Bruno and Shiao to go on without it.

“Very well, friend,“ Bruno said, still fighting his surprise. “God willing, we’ll return for you shortly.”

Then he marched toward the far wall—which was featureless—and said, “Door.”

Not surprisingly, nothing happened—Marlon’s stronghold was programmed to kill invaders, not to obey them. But Shiao, in a move no doubt routine among the Royal Constabulary, took up the impervium sword again, knocked twice on the wall as politely as you please, then carved a perfect rectangular door of his own.

“I shall lead this time,” Bruno said, stepping forward.

But Shiao, whose body blocked the new doorway, turned and gave him a hard look. “No, sir, you shall not. You, at least, must reach Sykes’ study alive.” Then he was stepping through, into another darkened chamber.

He screamed almost at once. Bruno hurried through to see what was the matter.

On the other side was a chamber much like the one they’d just left, with another fax machine in precisely the same place. There were no robots this time, for which Bruno was grateful, but instead a viscid, blue-green substance, seemingly halfway between a slimy fluid and a vapor, floated from the rectangular orifice. Indeed, the room was full of it already, tendrils lapping around at knee level, like ground fog.

“What is it?” Bruno demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“This substance is corrosive!” Shiao warned at once, backing away, forcing Bruno back through the doorway again. “It’s eating through the armor of my boots!”

“Is it?” Bruno asked, alarmed. He bent to look. Indeed, Shiao’s boots—in none too good a shape to begin with—were bubbling and smoking at their surface, as the blue-green substance ate its way in. Curiously, though, where any reasonable chemical corrosion would have slowed down as it progressed, as its reagents were slowly consumed in the reaction, this one seemed to be holding steady, chewing its way through the armor with an almost mechanical efficiency.

Almost mechanical, indeed.

“That’s a disassembler fog,” Bruno said. “Nonreplicating, by the look of it. Hold still, please! It’s a spatially discontinuous cellular automaton, each microscopic unit technically independent, but owing to power and mass distribution issues it’s effective only in clusters of a milliliter or more. Actually, I think I’ve seen this exact strain before! I think this is the stuff the Tongans used to use in the garbage dumps at Ha’atafu!”

“Can you neutralize it?” Shiao asked, with quite remarkable calm.

“I expect so,” Bruno agreed. “It really is more of a tool than a weapon. Quite tractable, generally.” Whispering to the well-stone rod, he caused its surface, on one end, to form a layer of Bondril, a substance far stickier than natural atoms could ever produce. Then he touched this end to Shiao’s left boot, and rolled it up and down. The tiny disassembler automata were plucked up by the trillions of trillions, until finally there were none left on the boot at all. Or at least, not enough to get any organized activity together. With the rod’s other end, Bruno repeated the procedure on Shiao’s right boot, until it was clear as well.

“Now they’re simply eating your staff,” Shiao complained, though he did sound relieved.

Bruno couldn’t shrug inside his spacesuit, but he did say “Piffle.” The disassemblers were disassembling his staff, dropping out a fine silicon dust beneath them, but a few more whispered commands caused the affected areas to sizzle with pulsed electrical currents at frequencies designed specifically to kill disassemblers. In moments, the bubbling and smoldering had ceased. Then he simply commanded the wellstone’s outermost layer to slough off, leaving him with a good-as-new staff only slightly thinner than the one he’d started with.

“What would the Queendom do without you?” Shiao wanted to know.

Bruno declined to comment, saying simply, “We still have the fog in the room to contend with. Come.”

“Will your library trick work this time?” Shiao pressed, again blocking Bruno’s passage through the doorway.

“Let’s find out,” Bruno said, and nudged him through.

Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any more fog in the room than there had been when they stepped out. A quick look at the fax revealed that it was off, not functioning any longer.

“Perhaps Vivian has had some success,” Shiao said hopefully.

“Indeed. Or else the fog has simply attacked the fax that produced it. An inelegant design, if so. If you’ll excuse me, please?”

“Mmm.” Reluctantly, Shiao stepped aside to let Bruno have access to the edge of the blue-green fog bank. The staff was returned to blitter mode and dipped lightly into the fog.

The result was instantaneous: the fog—really just a suspension of electromagnetic fields generated by the individual disassemblers—vanished at once, and in its place a much sparser cloud of gray-white dust settled harmlessly to the floor.

“Very good,” Shiao said approvingly. “Very good indeed. We’ve only one or two more rooms to get through, eh?”

“Mmm. Time will tell, my friend. It doesn’t pay to underestimate Marlon Sykes.”

Again, Shiao cut a hole through the far wall. Again, he preceded Bruno through it. Again, he screamed.

“What now?” Bruno asked, hurrying through behind him. “Oh. Oh. My goodness.”

He’d been struggling, actually, to remain afraid rather than angry, to maintain the edge of caution and improvisation that fear encouraged so readily. Now, there’d be no need to force it. The third chamber was much like the first and second had been: large, dark, empty of furnishings… It even had a fax in the same exact location, although it, too, appeared to be powered down or broken, its status lights off, its wellstone housing inactivated.

What was different this time was that the room—virtually the entire room—was occupied by an enormous, soft-skinned, pinkish brown spider.

Well, perhaps “spider” was the wrong term, since it had six legs instead of eight, and since each leg terminated in a perfect little human hand, and since its meat-colored body carried a swollen, bulbous caricature of Wenders Rodenbeck’s face in place of a ten-eyed spider head. Its two eyes glowed a malevolent red in the darkness.

Bruno quickly decided he’d never seen anything so horrific in all his years, and he couldn’t help echoing Shiao’s heartfelt scream.

He could be more horrified, though; he discovered this when the spider turned its red eyes upon him, opened its fanged mouth wide, and spoke in a rasping parody of Wenders Rodenbeck’s actual voice.

“Ah, de Towaji. Welcome.”

“My God!” was all Bruno could think to say in return. He hefted his staff like the weapon it was, pointing one end up at that hideous face. “My God, man! My God.”

“He told me you might be coming,” the spider said, around a quite incredible mouthful of dripping fangs. “I’m pleased that you have. I never disliked you, you know, even when He commanded that I should.”

“Wenders,” Bruno said, “what has he done to you?”

“Made a hideous monster of me, obviously,” the spider quipped. Then the eyes narrowed, and the legs and body lurched, and suddenly that swollen face was two meters closer to Bruno’s own. A leg raised; a finger shook, tsk tsk. “Do I finally frighten you, Declarant? Actually, this form was my own idea. Well, His idea, but I agreed to it. Rather than the alternatives, of which I was offered several. Unpleasant. But I’m the man himself inside—playwright, lawyer, defender of planets, same as ever. Same as he made me, anyway. You do realize I’m to murder you?”

“I’ve little doubt of it,” Bruno agreed, afraid to move, afraid to do anything. The sheer size of this creature implied there was nothing Bruno or Shiao could do to stop it. Mortally wounded, it could nonetheless murder them both a dozen times over, simply with its death throes.

“You’ve been grievously mistreated, sir,” Shiao offered up to the thing.

The spider, swiveling its head toward Shiao, looked surprised. “Have I? How, exactly? Do I know you, sir?”

“Actually,” Shiao said, craning his neck to look the thing in the eye, “you and I just spent three weeks together on a derelict platform, about ten million kilometers sunward of here.”

“Really!” The spider was instantly intrigued, its monstrous eyebrows shooting up, its many knees—or perhaps elbows— bending until its leathery bulk plopped heavily onto the floor. “A guy can’t help but be intrigued by that. Where am I now? Not with you any longer?”

“No, sir,” Shiao agreed. “You were killed about twenty minutes ago. By Declarant Sykes.”

“Ah. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m always tying Him up in court and such, without realizing just how badly that upsets Him. I’d probably kill myself, if I met me. Bastard. But how did I die? Was I dramatic? Was I brave?”

“Yes, sir. Very brave. You were on a spaceship blasting for Mercury, on a mission to save the Queendom, and you ran afoul of some stray collapsium.”

“Extraordinary!” the spider said. “I always told people I’d die that way, sooner or later. Not saving the Queendom, I mean—running afoul of collapsium. Nasty stuff, that. Meaning no offense to you, Declarant.”

“Er, none taken,” Bruno said quickly.

“I’m to kill you,” the spider said again. “Have I mentioned? I’m conditioned for it, though obviously I’ve never had the actual opportunity. Any idea what that’s like?”

“Why haven’t you killed Declarant Sykes?” Shiao suggested.

The spider responded with a deep, awful rumbling noise that Bruno eventually identified as laughter. “Kill him? Kill him, what a thought! Oh, I could never do that. My ordeal here has brought the two of us very close together. I’m written into his script, and vice versa. You probably wouldn’t understand that, but take my word: It’s a tangible connection.”

“I do understand it,” Shiao insisted. “You and / became very close, during our time on the platform. I was very sorry to see you die. And I’m very happy, if a bit dumfounded, to discover that a copy of you still exists in… some form.”

“Really.” Again, the spider seemed almost dreamily intrigued.

“You mustn’t do it,” Bruno said, suddenly finding his voice, and with it his anger. “You mustn’t do Marlon’s bidding. He has a way of breaking people, of conscripting their minds as well as their bodies. Perhaps you can’t see what a joke he’s made of you, what a shadow of your former self, but I tell you, the very same thing has happened to me. And do you know where / am? I’m guarding the spaceship that brought us all here. I’m determined to overcome the damage Marlon has done, to me and to everyone else. You must let us pass, sir. We’ll carve a hole in that wall, there, and pass through it into Marlon’s study, and if we survive our business there, we will return to help you!”

Again, the spider laughed. “You need to understand, sir, I’m conditioned to resist those sort of appeals. You’re not dealing with amateur security here; we’ve been optimizing for years and years.”

Bruno’s anger flared. “All right then, you, why haven’t you killed us already? Why talk to us at all?”

Shiao sighed angrily, looking as if he’d just realized something important. “Declarant, perhaps his purpose is simply to delay us. A familiar face, an encouragement to stand around persuading him… We haven’t the time, sir.”

Perhaps the spider had been conditioned to react to that phrase with violence, to delay the fight as long as possible and then commit to it wholeheartedly, with intent to win. Perhaps it was angered for some reason, or had simply heard enough. In any case, it leaped for Shiao with surprising nimbleness, snatching him up in its oversized jaws and driving its dripping, mirror-bright fangs hard against the fabric of his space suit. Over the suit radios, Bruno heard Shiao gasp, heard the breath squeezed out of his body as it had so recently been squeezed out of Rodenbeck’s, inside the Ring Collapsiter fragment.

All thought fled from Bruno’s mind. He had let Rodenbeck die, had carelessly let him slip too close to the collapsium and be crushed to death. He simply would not repeat that mistake.

Throwing down his staff, he dodged between two pink-brown spider legs to retrieve the impervium sword where Shiao had dropped it. At his touch, the thing came alive, its blade vibrating all in a blur, its handle acoustically isolated and quite firm and steady in his grip. Then, with a patience and precision that would have astonished him a minute earlier, he stepped forward and lopped off the spider’s swollen Rodenbeck head.

He fully expected the thing to die badly, messily, and in this he was not disappointed; the spider thrashed violently as its head was parting company with the rest of it, and as a result the head flew across the room—with Shiao still inside it—and crashed hard against the wall. The body’s spasms did not end there. Quite the reverse: its legs, with surprising coordination, carried the body forward to crash hard against another wall, and another, and another one still. The hands flailed madly, grabbing at anything. The body rolled. Bruno was lifted, dashed, trampled, and for one dizzy moment, crushed up hard against the ceiling. The wind was knocked out of him immediately, and his limbs were twisted all the wrong ways, and his skull suffered a number of sharp blows against the dome of his helmet, which should have been too far from his head to make contact, if his neck had been holding onto it properly. Those were the hard parts of the ordeal; he waited patiently through the rest of it, willing himself limp, knowing he had nothing to gain by struggling against this agonizing tumbling and buffeting.

Finally, what seemed like hours later, the spider gave a final shudder and lay still.

Bruno tried to breathe, waited a few seconds, tried again. Now, finally, he could hold off panic no longer. He managed a little, gasping inhalation, but it only seemed to make things worse. He tried again, and again. Finally, when he didn’t black out, he realized he must actually be getting enough oxygen to survive, regardless of how it felt. He willed himself to be patient one final time, and partially succeeded.

A minute later, or maybe just a few seconds, he managed a fairly deep, fairly refreshing breath. A few more followed, more easily, and after another minute he gritted his teeth and forced himself to sit up.

Shiao was nearby, still trapped inside the spider’s head. His helmet dome had shattered, and his suit’s tough outer layer hung around him in scorched tatters, revealing the tubes and hoses of the midlayer underneath. His headlamps had shattered and gone out, and of course, like everything else in the room, he was covered in sticky red blood. It was only the faint, purposeful movement of Shiao’s arm casting moving shadows on the wall behind him that let Bruno know he was alive at all.

“Shiao?” He called out.

No reply.

Gathering his breath and wits, Bruno managed to flip over onto his hands and knees, and crawl—slowly and painfully— to the enormous fallen head.

“Shiao?”

This time, he was answered with a groan. Bruno completed the journey, then threw himself back over into a sitting position. It took another several seconds to get his breath again. “Shiao?” He touched the man’s arm, felt it move beneath his fingers. Shiao’s head stirred. His eyes opened.

“Tight,” he whispered.

Tight? Belatedly, Bruno realized the spider’s jaw, in death, continued to clamp down on Shiao’s body. Not as hard as before, probably, but hard enough to keep him from breathing properly. Mustering his strength, Bruno got to his knees, then his feet. He grabbed an edge of jaw and tugged on it. He’d half feared that the thing wouldn’t budge, that he’d have to search under the spider’s bus-sized carcass somehow, to find the sword again, to cut Shiao free. But no, the jaw wasn’t clamped, it was just heavy. With effort, he lifted it a few centimeters. With greater effort, he lifted it farther, and with the last of his strength lifted it a bit farther still, then gently kicked Shiao’s body out from between the fangs.

Shiao gasped, exhaled, gasped again. He was breathing. Not normally, perhaps. Not easily. But breathing nonetheless. Now fully exhausted, Bruno sat down beside his fallen comrade with no thought at all for what should happen next.

Perhaps fortunately, this decision was made for him: in the far wall of the chamber, a door opened up. And there in the doorway, framed with light, stood Declarant-Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson Sykes.

“Good Lord, Bruno,” he said wonderingly, in the clear, strong voice so familiar from days gone by. “You really are my peer.”

Chapter twenty-Three in which lives are pledged and traded

Incredibly, Cheng Shiao lifted his blood-streaked head up into the light and spoke. “Declarant-Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson Sykes, it is my… duty as a Captain of the Royal Constabulary to place you under immediate arrest, for suspicion… of the crimes of murder, high treason, and regicide in the first degree.”

The voice was weak, bubbling wetly, but the words themselves were clear enough. Shadows danced in Bruno’s headlight beams as Shiao continued. “You have the right to an attorney. You have the right… to be interrogated by disposable copies. You have the right to commit suicide without entering a plea. Do you… understand these rights?”

For a moment, no one moved or spoke. Then, finally, Marlon’s silhouette said, “Cheng Shiao, right? I remember you. We once investigated a murder case together.”

“A murder for which you… are now prime suspect,” Shiao agreed.

“Hmm,” Marlon shifted slightly in the doorway, and Bruno’s sound pickups clearly transmitted the rubbing and creaking of fabrics. Marlon actually seemed to consider the offer for a moment, but finally he shook his head. “It seems a shame to kill you both; it really does. I admire nothing so much as tenacity. There will be a new society after I’m finished here, and perhaps there’s a place for both of you in it somewhere. Oh, I’m sure you can’t conceive of that right now, but I do pride myself on being a fair man. Come. I’ll show you around, and then place you both in fax storage. That’s humane, isn’t it?”

Neither Bruno nor Shiao answered.

Sighing, Marlon reached into a little pocket in his gray-blue waistcoat and withdrew a complex little pistol of some sort, which he proceeded to aim at Cheng Shiao’s head.

“Really, Bruno, you know I’m capable of violence. Now, shall I shoot your friend, or save him? The choice is up to you.”

“Stop!” Bruno said at once, raising both hands to the level of his shoulders. “Lower the weapon. Show us what you wish to show us, but you will not harm this man. I won’t allow it.”

“Won’t you?” Marlon said, amused. “All right then. Come.”

With effort, Bruno got his armored feet down under his armored body and slowly hauled himself erect. Every part of him throbbed with hurt; he could only imagine what Shiao must be going through.

“Forgive me, friend,” he said then, extending a hand downward for Shiao to grasp. Shiao’s fingers, all but exposed in the tatters of glove, gripped weakly, and with a tentative quality that suggested great pain. But grip they did, and soon Bruno was helping him up.

“I owe you everything, sir,” Shiao said quietly as he wobbled to a standing position. “I’d follow you anywhere. I mean this in the literal sense.”

“You’re a fool, then,” Bruno said back, in the same low tones, carried externally through the speaker beneath his chin. “I don’t see how I can possibly get us out of this.”

“Nevertheless,” Shiao said, straightening.

Together, using one another for support, the two of them hobbled toward that backlit doorway, toward the gun Marlon was pointing at them.

“That’s it,” Marlon said gently. “That’s fine, both of you. The fighting’s all done now—no one could possibly say you haven’t tried. I’ll see that history does mark your deeds, if only as a footnote to my own.”

Then he was sidling back, making room for the two of them to step, side by side, through the doorway. The apartment on the other side of it was surprisingly small, surprisingly modest—a rumpled cot on one side, a fax, a toilet, and on the other side a wellstone desk much like the one Bruno had always used.

Bruno noted that the fax was dark, apparently lifeless. Ditto the desk, which was bare wellstone at the moment—a translucent gray matrix that emulated nothing.

“My winter quarters,” Marlon apologized, catching Bruno’s look. “It isn’t much, but then it doesn’t really need to be, does it?”

“Your systems are down,” Bruno said.

Marlon’s smile was sheepish. “Well, yes, there is that. Not entirely down, mind you—not yet, anyway. But the most critical systems—the ones on which the Queendom’s fate depends-—are inaccessible. I was hoping perhaps you could help me with that.”

“I?” Bruno asked innocently.

Marlon’s smile vanished. “I don’t know what you’ve done, Bruno, but you’ll kindly undo it. Immediately! The project has reached a critical juncture, and if I’m not at the controls in the next few hours there will ‘t>e no arc defin. The sun will still collapse, mind you, but there’ll be no purpose to it, no benefit to anyone. Senseless death and destruction is something we all wish to avoid, I’d think.”

“Hence your magnanimity,” Bruno said.

“Oh, tch tch, Bruno. After all these years, you still doubt the special bond between us? Come, help me out of this jam. If you reflect a moment, you’ll realize you have no actual choice about it.”

Wobbling against Shiao’s weight, Bruno sighed. “Marlon, can’t you just stop this? I believe you. You’ve discovered the arc de fin, where I have not. Isn’t that enough? History will mark your triumph either way. But if you end this villainy now, if you’re willing to leave bad enough alone, you’ll at least be remembered with some measure of approval. A would-be monster who, in the end, didn’t have the heart for it. The sun, Marlon. Was there ever a more fundamental symbol of nurture, of comfort, of life itself?”

“I expect not,” Marlon agreed, amicably enough. ‘’I’ve come too far, though, Bruno. I wouldn’t stop this if I could, and at this point I don’t see that it’s even possible. Now, that’s an honest response. I could just as easily have agreed to your demand, let you reactivate my systems, and then killed you. That’s what a monster would do. But I have more respect than that.”

“And if / agree to your demand,” Bruno countered, “and your systems are reactivated, you could still kill us both.”

“I could,” Marlon conceded. “But I give you my word that you and all your friends will be stored safely.”

“Safely?” Shiao snorted. “Surely this place… will be among the first destroyed, and there is no Iscog to carry our patterns away from here.”

Marlon shrugged. “Whether this camp will survive I’m not sure—it’ll be on the nightside during the worst conflagrations, vulnerable only to neutrinos passing all the way through the planet. But the question is moot—I have a spaceship to escape in.”

“Ah,” Shiao said. “Of course you do.”

“No insolence, please,” Marlon said wearily. “I’ve already given you your lives, what more do you expect?”

There was no right answer to that question. No answer was attempted.

Finally, Marlon rolled his eyes, sighed heavily, and pointed the gun again at Shiao’s head. It was a strange little thing, four tubes emerging from the rim of a parabolic dish, not parallel but converged on the geometric center of Shiao’s skull. The whole thing was translucent and blue and quite fragile looking, like a funny toy designed to mock the concept of “gun.” But Bruno had never seen anything like it, and that was reason enough to be afraid.

“Fifteen seconds, gentlemen. You’ve presumed on my patience long enough.”

“Give him nothing,” Shiao said calmly.

But Bruno held up a placating hand. “Marlon, please. This isn’t easy for us.”

“The others with you,” Marlon said. “They’ll die as well. Slowly, badly, if I have any say in the matter. Five seconds.”

“I surrender,” Bruno said quickly. “Please, harm none of them.”

Marlon relaxed. “You’re no fool, de Towaji. You understand: Your lives can end along with several billion others, or they can continue while those billions die anyway. Those are the only choices available. The equation is simple.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, his heart quailing. He still hoped for some miracle, some way to bring this horrific matter to a less-than-horrific conclusion. But to achieve that miracle, even to hope for it, he must live at least a little while longer… “Can you access some sort of intercom or public address system? I’ll need to speak with my friends.”

“That can be arranged,” Marlon said, stepping toward the live wellstone wall in which the doorway had appeared. He looked somewhat less than trusting as he tapped out a series of commands on the wellstone’s surface.

A pickup and wall speaker appeared beside Bruno, at the same level as the speaker beneath his chin.

“Er, hello?” he tried. “Vivian, are you there?”

“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice called back immediately. “We were worried; you’ve been gone so long!”

“You may remain worried,” Bruno said. Then, finally, he knew what he must do: He must order Deliah and Vivian and Tusite and Muddy away from this place. Could he not save the Queendom? Was it arrogance to think he ever could? Well, then at least he would save something, and not in the foul clutches of Marlon Sykes. He would order them away, and Marlon, with his systems down, would have no choice but to let them escape. Meanwhile, he would vent his anger on the available targets: Shiao first, naturally, but Shiao had just got done placing his fate in Bruno’s hands. And Shiao’s death, his inevitable death, might conceivably give Bruno enough time to throw himself hands-first at Marlon’s throat—

But Vivian Rajmon’s high, teenaged voice called out before he could quite get the words formed. “Cheng? R.C. Captain Cheng Shiao, are you all right?”

“I’m here, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, suddenly attentive. “I… would have you know that my heart was lost the moment I met you, Commandant-Inspector. It would have been yours, if you’d have had it—yours for a million years. But my life belongs to de Towaji, and to the Queendom. Forgive me.”

And with those words, Bruno’s hoped-for miracle occurred: Shiao’s body, crippled and broken and bloodied though it was, somehow found the strength to leap four meters across the room at Marlon Sykes. Marlon had been suspicious, waiting for trouble of some sort, but Cheng Shiao was a hard man to stop. The gun went off with a little popping sound, but a moment later Shiao swept it from Marlon’s hand, knocking it across the room so that it spun along the floor and came to rest beneath the rumpled cot. He knocked Marlon down as well, in the same clean motion.

“Good night!” Bruno couldn’t help exclaiming.

Then Vivian’s voice came again. “Cheng! Cheng!”

And Muddy’s voice. “What’s happening, sir? Can we help?”

Shiao wrestled Marlon facedown onto the floor, and then from somewhere, some pocket or recess in the tattered space-suit, produced a ball of handcuff putty and slapped it down on the small of Marlon’s back. Rattlesnake-quick, it lashed out to encircle wrists and ankles, leaving Marlon neatly trussed and screaming. “Dealbreakers! Dealbreakers! Rotten, stinking, dishonest…”

But there was no look of triumph or even relief on Shiao’s face. Only pain. He rolled away, falling onto his back, and Bruno could see the wound Marlon’s gun had made in Shiao’s abdominal cavity. Not a bullet hole, or a laser burn, but a void—a six-centimeter absence where armor and flesh should be. Transported? Vanished? The dream of matter, somehow undreamt? It hardly mattered; Shiao would not survive the injury. Already it was filling with blood. Cheng Shiao would be dead in sixty seconds, if that.

“Cheng!” Vivian called out again.

“He’s injured,” Bruno said back to her. “You must turn the faxes back on. Quickly!”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it; you have to. We replaced part of the domestic software with your own household AI.”

“You what?”

“It was in the ship’s library. Never mind! Help Cheng!”

Bruno frowned, and for some reason he looked up at the ceiling. “House? Hello, are you here?”

“Good day, sir,” that old, familiar voice said. “I’m detecting numerous diagnostic errors, and I seem to be under some sort of direct software assault from a native AI, but I await your instructions nonetheless. It’s good to be working with you again, sir.”

“Turn the faxes on!” Bruno cried, leveling a finger at Shiao’s struggling, bleeding, dying body. “Help me get him into the fax! Quickly! Quickly!”

“Working,” the house replied easily. “Fax machine activated.”

Sure enough, the orifice hummed to life, flashed briefly, and extruded a humanoid robot of gold and tin, faceless and graceful, precisely like the servants Bruno had employed for so very many years. The space between fax and victim was several meters, but the robot danced across it in an instant, swept Shiao’s body off the floor in a bloody arc, and hurled it directly into the orifice. The body vanished at once, and an instant later the robot had leaped through as well, vanished as well. The whole affair had taken three seconds.

Marlon still struggled on the floor, rolling and flopping, trying to face Bruno and only partially succeeding. “Nobody wins,” he said urgently. “I know what you’re thinking, Bruno, but you can’t possibly grapple all that collapsium up away from the sun. Not in time, not at all. You can have your arc de fin; you can see the very lights and darknesses of uncreation. This year! This month! I give it to you, sir, my gift. All the credit, all the glory, if you’ll only let me at the controls. Let me at them!”

“No,” Bruno said flatly.

“No? Think hard, Bruno. I tell you, you cannot save the sun. Will you at least see that its death has meaning?”

“No. Indeed, I stand here wondering…” The hairs prickled up on the back of Bruno’s neck. He felt awake, really awake, for perhaps the first time in his life. “I stand here wondering what I was thinking all that time. An arc defin? What use is that? If we’re to live forever, won’t we see the end of time with our own two eyes? All too soon, I fear! We’ll look back and say ‘Already? Already the world is ending, the stars winking out? Why, we’d only just begun!’ And if that end is spoiled by de Towaji, a trillion years before the fact, why… one wonders why we’ve bothered to live at all.”

“You’re mad,” Marlon said, his voice edging on panic. Straining against the putty, he managed to lift his head enough to look Bruno in the eye. “It’s my own fault; I’ve driven you mad. I’ve killed your Queen!”

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed, nodding slowly. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s all it is. The work of decades falls away like ashes, leaving nothing, no sense of purpose or desire. There is no Tamra for me to hide from, no Tamra for me to return to when at long last I’m finished. To live forever without her? Even to contemplate it? I suppose I am mad.”

Marlon’s eyes were sharp, his tone urgent. “Listen to me, Bruno. Ask a question with me. Where do people go when they die? Nowhere? Where exactly is nowhere?”

Ah, but Bruno was awake—he saw the trick in that question. He was encouraged to conclude that “nowhere,” since it didn’t exist, was of zero size, and by corollary that everything that no longer existed—being also of zero size and therefore located “nowhere”—could be found there, instantly, without effort. With zero movement, zero searching, zero time. Ah, but by that logic, everything that never existed could be found there as well. So could everything that existed now, but someday wouldn’t. At the end of time, everything would be nowhere, including time itself, and so Bruno declined to fall for the trick. The size of nowhere was surely infinite, in time as well as space, else he and Marlon and everyone else would be there already.

He raised a finger in Marlon’s direction, and waggled it. “House, remove this body as well.”

“No, Bruno! No! Believe me, you can’t stop this. It’s pointless to try!”

The robot appeared, danced across the floor to where Marlon lay, and scooped him up.

“It’s never pointless to try” Bruno mused.

And then the fax machine hummed, and there was no one else in the room there with him.

“Bruno?” Vivian’s voice quietly, sadly, said from the speaker, treading with utmost tenderness. “Bruno, is Cheng all right?”

“He’s stored, dear,” Bruno replied wearily. “He’s safe for the moment. But the sun, alas, is not.”

It seemed to take a long time to hobble over to Marlon’s little wellstone desk. “House,” he said along the way, “activate that. Thank you.”

He sat down at the wellwood chair, taking the load off his feet, off his back, off his pain. The old grapple controls were there, the old holographic displays, as if Marlon had cribbed them from Bruno’s own designs. Tortured them, probably, from Muddy’s own pained and screaming lips. How tired Muddy must have been, after years of torment! How extraordinary, that he’d managed to accomplish so much in spite of it.

Bruno pulled up an interface and quietly immersed himself.

Here was the sun, here the dotted line where the Ring Collapsiter had once stood. And beneath it, in a hundred spinning fragments, were the Ring Collapsiter’s children, and he saw at once that there were simply too many of them, that they were simply too large, that most were simply too close to the sun to retrieve. They were mere hours from penetration, from the beginning of Sol’s slow and painful death. Still, he grabbed the nearest one with Marlon’s EM grapples, which were of a fine and strong design. He tugged, he twisted, he prodded and nudged. None of it, of course, worked. The best he could accomplish, really, would be to tear it apart, to break it, to let it collapse into a real black hole that he’d have even less hope of manipulating.

“Ah, well,” he whispered, “she was a good star while she lasted.”

And then he remembered the ring. The ring! The well-stone ring he’d plucked from his own hypercomputer, minutes before he’d destroyed it and the planet it stood on! That ring contained the program, the dance card, the recipe by which collapsium was converted to hypercollapsite vacuogel.

Perhaps all was not lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Muddy?” Bruno said. “Muddy!”

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

A speaker emerged.

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

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

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

“Making amends,” Muddy answered cryptically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twenty-Four in which an historic tally is counted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that for me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this a joke?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You can’t be serious!” he protested.

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

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

Not that de Towaji was idle during the time of his seclusion; far from it. Following the trial and confession of Marlon Sykes—who had steadfastly refused treatment for megalomania and homocidia—Bruno’s first decree was that a cage de fin should be constructed, inside which time would not pass.

Sykes—hunted by every search engine in the Queendom and meticulously reconverged to a single copy—would be placed within it.

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

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

A cigarette, a mandolin, a glass of wine, A trip to see the devil at the end of time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the rest, as they say, is history.