The Collapsium

Chapter One in which an important experiment is disrupted

In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th morning walk around the world.

The word “morning” is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked through the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a very small planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even tinier “sun” and “moon” of Bruno’s own design.

Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy meadow, feel the itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into the midday forest, with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through the canopy. The trees are low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and dogwood, not so much a shady, mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise with physical law—taller trees would reach right out of the troposphere. As it is, the highest limbs brush and break apart the puffy summer clouds that happen by.

Pass the Northern Hills; watch the stream trickle out between them; see the forest give way to willows at its bank. The bridge is a quaint little arch of native wood; on the far side lie the grasslands of afternoon, the vegetable gardens tended by stoop-backed robots, the fields of wild barley and maize tended by no one, lit by slantwise rays. Behind you, the sun dips low, then slips behind the planet’s sharply curved horizon. Despite the refraction of atmospheric hazes, darkness is sudden, and with it the terrain grows rocky—not jagged but hard and flat and boulder-strewn, dotted with hardy Mediterranean weeds. But here the stream winds back again, and as evening fades to night the channel of it widens out into cattail marshland and feeds, finally, into a little freshwater sea. Sometimes the moon is out, drawing long white reflections across the silent water, but tonight it’s only the stars and the Milky Way haze and the distant, pinpoint gleam of Sol. All of history is down there; if you like, you can cover the human race with your hand.

It grows colder; realize the planet shields you from the little sun—the only local heat source—with the deadly chill of outer space so close you could literally throw a rock into it. But the beach leads around to twilight meadows, and the horizon ruddies up with scattered light, and then suddenly it’s morning again, the sun breaking warmly above the planet’s round edge. And there is Bruno’s house: low, flat, gleaming marble-white and morning-yellow. You’ve walked a little over two kilometers.

Such was Bruno’s morning constitutional, very much like all his others. Sometimes he’d fetch a coat and take the other route, over the hills, over the poles, through cold and dark and cold and hot, but that was mainly a masochism thing; the polar route was actually shorter, and a good deal less scenic.

He’d already eaten breakfast; the walk was to aid his digestion, to invigorate his mind for the needs of the day: his experiments. The front door opened for him. Inside, robot servants stepped gracefully out of his way, providing a clear path to the study, bowing as he passed, though he’d told them a thousand times not to. He grumbled at them wordlessly as he passed. They didn’t reply, of course, though their bronze and tin-gray manikin bodies hummed and clicked with faint life. Mechanical, unburdened by imagination or want, they were utterly dedicated to his comfort, his satisfaction.

Another door opened for him, closed behind him, vanished. He waved a hand, and the windows became walls. Waved another, and the ceiling lights vanished, the floor lights vanished, the desk and chairs and other furnishings became optical superconductors: invisible. Projective holography created the illusion of his day’s apparatus: fifty collapsons, tiny perfect cubes visible as pinpoints of Cerenkov light, powder-blue and pulsing faintly, circling the holographic planet in a complex dance of swapping orbits.

He’d spent the past week assembling these, after his last batch had gone sour.

Assembling them? Certainly.

Imagine a sphere of di-clad neutronium, shiny with Compton-scattered light. It’s a sort of very large atomic nucleus; a billion tons of normal matter crushed down to a diameter of three centimeters so that the protons and electrons that comprise it are bonded together into a thick neutron paste. Left to itself it would, within nanoseconds, explode back into a billion tons of protons and electrons, this time with considerable outward momentum. Hence the cladding: crystalline diamond and fibrediamond and then crystalline again, with a bound layer of wellstone on top. Tough stuff indeed; breaking the neutrons free of their little jail was difficult enough that Bruno had never heard of its happening by accident.

These “neubles” were the seeds of seeds—it took eight of them, crushed unimaginably farther, to build a collapson— and the little “moon” was actually just Bruno’s storage bin: ten thousand neubles held together by their own considerable gravity. Another fifteen hundred formed the core of the tiny planet, a sphere about half a meter across, with a skeleton of wellstone built on top of it, fleshed out with a few hundred meters of dirt and rock and an upper layer neatly sculpted by robots and artisans.

Bruno was very wealthy, you see.

But instead of moons and planets, one could also make black holes of these things, black holes held rigidly into stable lattices, a phase of matter known as “collapsium.”[1]

Bruno had been the first to do this, and was still doing it these seventy years later. He’d traded his soul for it, in some sense. Traded a whole phase of his life, anyway: his love, his adopted home on Tongatapu. But what a thing to swap them for: the bending and twisting of spacetime to his personal whims. The potential of it…

That was the exciting part, and in truth, he’d be happy enough to direct the enterprise, leaving the gruntwork to a horde of employees or devoted grad students or something. The biggest problem was that almost no one was patient enough to work the equations, even to deduce which structures were stable and which were not, much less to derive the properties of the stable ones from first principles. The work was hard, and there were very few graduates to be had for it. That was the biggest problem. The second biggest was the sort of accidents you got when collapsium experiments went awry, and the third biggest problem was the twenty billion people who got understandably upset when this occurred.

So of the handful of people competent to perform the research, most stuck contentedly to the safer paths, the trodden paths, the paths on which accidents were far rarer than fame and fortune. Plodders, he sometimes called them.

He settled down in his invisible chair, feeling it subtly reshape itself beneath him. Not soft but smart, a solid thing that yielded only for him. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his shoulders, jiggled his wrists like an old-fashioned strongman preparing to lift something heavy. He did these things slowly; an observer might almost have said grimly. It didn’t matter that the actual lifting was done by electromagnetic grapples; he would submerge himself in that same mental space where athletes go, where the body obeys the mind, where stiffness and pain and time are reluctant to penetrate. On your marks…

Bruno had tried to be one of the plodders, he really had. He’d spent years making his telecom collapsiters faster and better and cheaper, building the Iscog, building his fortune. But all that was boring compared to what he really wanted, which was to build an arc defin capable of snatching photons from the end of time itself. Time had an end—the state equations made that clear enough—but what sort of end was the subject of endless noise and conjecture. And why grumble and theorize when you could just open up a window and see the whole business with your own two eyes?

Hence these fifty collapsons, with their prancing orbits and their ghostly Hawking/Cerenkov glow. Not to build the arc—what a laugh!—but to build a tool that might build a tool that might build a piece of the arc, or at least point to a method by which it might be built. Bruno expected the project to last many thousands of years.

He was all but immortal, by the way, and like everyone else he was still struggling to come to terms with it. It wasn’t so unequivocally wonderful a thing, really, a society in which death was always by suicide or freak accident or carefully concocted murder, in which the rare childhood death deprived its victim not of years or decades of life, but millennia. Such disparity, the very opposite of fairness. But again, the potential…

Was it strange to be excited, even after all these years? The eternal question, worn smooth with age: Was obsession a gift? He breathed deeply, preparing to submerge.

Bruno’s fifty collapsons weren’t stable in their orbits and couldn’t remain there forever without some sort of collision or ejection event messing the trajectories up and making a ruin of all his hard work. So he compared them against the blueprint in his mind, pressed his fingers against the invisible desk to bring up an interface, and triggered the gravity induction mechanisms.

With them he grabbed a collapson, watched it jerk and flutter on his display. The forces he could apply here were weak, nothing compared to the gravity of the collapsons themselves, but of course the collapsons were in free fall. Weak forces, adding up over time, were just as effective as strong ones applied suddenly. And Bruno had learned to be a very patient man indeed. Slowly, he took hold of a second collapson, nudged it toward the first, then nudged it again a few seconds later to reduce the closing velocity. With ponderous momentum they drifted together, and finally touched. Their binding produced a flash of green; they continued on as a single joined piece. He grabbed a third collapson and carefully added it to the structure, grabbed a fourth and fifth.

The other collapsons seemed almost alarmed, their orbital square dance taking place now as if on a gigantic quilt being ponderously dragged and folded around them. Bruno’s movements were careful, practiced; he’d done this hundreds of times, made enough mistakes to feel out the limits and breakpoints and failure modes, to know what he could and couldn’t get away with. Before his network gate had gone down and stopped the endless questions and exhortations of his fellow man, he’d often been asked why he did this part by hand, why he didn’t devise some software to handle these exacting manipulations. If the question came from a scientist or technician he’d generally ignored it, but for the craftsmen and artisans and landscape designers he’d had a ready reply: Why don’t you“? The truth was, if he could automate this creative process he’d do it, and become the Queendom’s richest human all over again.

He found himself singing, quietly, under his breath. Muttering, really; he had no real gift for song, nor any strong passion, but it bubbled up sometimes, unbidden, while he worked.

An old lullaby, he supposed. Catalan words, extinct in the absence of Catalan notes to carry them along. It didn’t bother him that he was probably mangling it, though he briefly imagined his parents wincing and rolling in their graves. Such thoughts were fleeting, quickly crushed beneath the juggernaut of the business at hand.

Slowly, his design took shape: something like a bucket, a fan, a lens. The shape wasn’t useful in and of itself; most collapsium structures weren’t. But to get to the shape you wanted, you had to pass through stable intermediate designs, adding bricks one by one without upsetting the system’s precarious equilibrium. Often, this meant building complex shapes that “fell” into simpler ones when completed, as a key and a lock might fuse to extrude a single, solid doorknob. Or in this case, a kind of spacetime crowbar able to “pry” bits of vacuum apart to see what lay beneath. Or so he hoped!

Before the assembly was half complete, though, an alarm bell chimed. This was a sound he’d chosen carefully, one that penetrated, demanding attention. The gravity wave alarm. Grunting, he thumbed a lighted yellow circle, increasing magnification, leaning forward to scrutinize the display, to isolate the source of the anomaly.

He didn’t find it. Everything was right where it should be, his little Cerenkov pinpoints all well within spatial and vibrational tolerances. The warning chimed again, though, louder, the perturbation stronger, and Bruno cursed, because the crowbar-to-be was in a very delicate stage right now, its collapsium lattice supported by little more than good intentions. He grabbed the ends of the structure, hoping to steady it, but through the desk’s sensory pads he felt a mild shudder, then another, stronger one. The warning chimed a third time, and this perturbation had to be external, because soon his project was waving like a seaweed, the collapsons growing uncertain as their holes’ gravitic interactions wandered in and out of phase.

“Excuse me, sir,” the house announced through a softly lit speaker that appeared in the wall. “A ship is approaching.”

The collapsium slipped from his fingers and fell in on itself, an origami structure folding and wrinkling into a spitwad of glowing dots.

“Blast,” Bruno said. Then the dots winked out one by one, and a few seconds later it was finished and gone.

“ETA, seven minutes,” the house said, providing a flat schematic wallplate that showed the spaceship’s approach vector in relation to planet, sun, and moon.

Bruno sighed. The newer, much larger black hole he’d just created was difficult to detect, lacking the clear emissions of a collapson, but he found it by feel, charged it with a stream of protons and then, with a grunt of disgust, hurled it off toward his other storage bin, the “wastebasket” hypermass orbiting his world a thousand kilometers out. The trajectory was fine, nowhere near that of the approaching ship. Maybe he should have arranged to graze them with it; a warning shot, a demand for apology. But no, such horseplay could too easily go wrong, else he wouldn’t be stuck out here in the first place.

He sighed again, already trying to convince himself that seven days’ lost labor meant nothing, that he had plenty more time—infinitely more—where that came from. The dollar expenditure was actually harder to accept: two hundred neubles down the drain, literally, along with the twenty he’d wasted last week, and the eight last month, and the twenty more he’d thrown—at one time or another—into the wastebasket for this or that reason. The moon grew smaller, ever smaller, in his sky, and while he certainly had the money to buy more substance for it, the logistical difficulty of getting it delivered was daunting. His last shipment had required the efforts of tens of thousands of people, whole corporations commandeered for the purpose, and altogether the enterprise had cost even more than the planet itself. Insanely selfish extravagances—the leading vice of the wealthy. But he couldn’t postpone the next purchase forever.

Cursing once more, Bruno waved the floor and ceiling lights back up. Glass windows appeared in the walls, admitting the morning sun once again. His furniture reverted to wood— wellwood, anyway—its colored controls and displays vanishing, leaving smooth surfaces behind. A couple of murals appeared beneath the stenciled images of telescopes and rocket-ships on the walls. This was a plain room—small, uncluttered and maybe a little old-fashioned—-exactly as Bruno felt a study should be.

“I apologize for not detecting the vessel sooner,” the house said with quiet, reflexive contrition.

“It’s all right,” Bruno grumbled, and surprised himself by meaning it. Nothing genuinely new had happened around here for a very long time. There’d been no reason to expect… anything, really.

“The vessel is approaching much faster than a neutronium barge would do,” the house went on, as if feeling the need to explain itself. “Anticipating nothing of the kind, I’d set the detection radü much too close. The failure of your experiment was likely a direct result.”

Bruno waved himself a door and exited into the living room, a mess of models and food containers and discarded clothing, which was exactly as that should be, but seeing it now he nodded, pursed his lips and said, “Stop apologizing and clean this up. If we’re to have company, we must be presentable, yes? What’s the ID on the ship?”

“None available, sir. Our network gate is nonfunctional. For four years now.”

“Oh. Right.”

The robot servants were neither wholly autonomous nor wholly appendages of the house software, neither self-aware nor rigidly programmed. Creatures of silent intuition, they danced through their chores like dreams, like puppets in some tightly choreographed ballet. They knew just what paths to take, what joints to swivel or extend, their economy of motion perfect. They knew just where to put everything, too; most of the clutter was faxware and went back into the fax for recycling, but some objects were original or natural or otherwise sentimental, and each found a place on a shelf or table, or in his bedroom closet around the corner. Speaking of which…

“Seal that,” he said, gesturing at the bedroom door. It slid closed at once, merged with the wall, sprouted bright mural paints—nonrepresentational.

He grunted his approval, then asked, “ETA?”

“Five minutes, twenty seconds.”

He grunted again, less approving this time. The house had standing orders never to mark time in seconds—there were just too many of them, a whole eternity’s worth. But under the circumstances, he supposed it had little choice.

Visitors.

Visitors! Suddenly alarmed, he sniffed himself. “Damn, I probably stink. These clothes are probably ugly. Bathe and dress me, please. Quickly!”

The robots were there so fast they might well have anticipated the request. Cap and vest and tunic and breeches were torn from Bruno’s body and hurled into the fax orifice for recycling. He forced himself to relax, to let his arms be lifted, his torso turned. The robots, with their faceless expressions of infinite gentleness, would rather die than cause him the slightest injury or discomfort, and any resistance on his part would only slow them down, make them gentler still. He let them work, and in another moment their metal hands were buffing him with sponges and damp, scented cloths. A well-stone grease magnet was stroked seven times through his hair, becoming a heated styling comb on the eighth stroke. The fax produced fresh clothing—suitable for company— that smoothed and buttoned itself around him as the robots fussed.

He refused an application of blush.

“Is it landing here? Nearby?” he asked.

“Its course indicates a touchdown in the meadow, forty meters to the east. It is recommended that you remain indoors until this procedure is complete.”

“Hmm? Yes, well. Full transparency on the roof and east wall, please.”

Obligingly, a third of the house turned to glass. To actual glass, yes—wellstone was an early form of programmable matter[2]—and if danger threatened it could just as easily turn to impervium or Bunkerlite, or some other durable super-reflector.

“There’s a good house,” he murmured approvingly, his eyes scanning the now-visible sky.

Despite the interruption, despite the loss of his collapsium and the rudeness of this too-swift approach, Bruno found himself almost anticipating the landing, the arrival of visitors. Almost. It was a long time since he’d last had company, and that had just been the men from the neutronium barge, eager for a breath of fresh air before turning their ship around and faxing themselves back home.

One of them, newly rich and bursting with gratitude, had given Bruno a gift: a neuble-sized diamond ball filled with water instead of neutronium. There’d been algae and bacteria and near-microscopic brine shrimp inside, a whole ecology that needed only light to function, perhaps eternally. “In case you get lonely, sir,” the man had said. Indoors, though, Bruno’s light-dark cycles were irregular, and the thing had died on his shelf in a matter of weeks. His last human interaction. A lesson?

The morning sky shone brightly through the glass. Bruno asked for a reticle to indicate the ship’s position, and the house obligingly cast up a circle of green light the size of a dinner plate, which barely moved and inside which he could see nothing. Soon there were glints of yellow-white at the center, though, sunlight reflecting from bright metal, and in another minute he could see an actual dot beyond the shallow blue-white haze of his atmosphere. The dot resolved into a little toy ship, then a big toy ship drifting high above the sky—a wingless metal teardrop spilling outside the boundaries of the green reticle—and finally, with alarming swiftness, it swelled to something the size of his house and burst though the feathery cirrus layer and the haze beneath it. Clouds rolled off its bright burnished skin, seeming to wrinkle and snap in the blur of a gravity deflection field. Jets fired, little blasts of yellow-hot plasma that scorched his meadow grass white, then black, in tight bull’s-eye circles. A shadow raced from the horizon to throw itself beneath the vehicle as the space between it and terra firma shrank to meters, centimeters, nothing.

There was no thump of impact, no solid confirmation of landing until the maneuvering jets darkened and the shimmer of the deflection field snapped away into clear focus. The sounds of reentry and landing had been no louder than a breeze through the treetops. Skillfully done.

What fixed Bruno’s attention, though, was the seal imprinted on the side of that gleaming hull: a blue, white, and green Earth shaded by twin palms, with three more planets hovering in the background. And hanging above them all, a crown of monocrystalline diamond.

“Door,” he said, standing in front of a row of shelves, looking past them at the landing site. The house seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if wondering whether to open the wall right there—carefully, of course, so as not to drop or break anything—or to make him go a few steps around. Which choice would minimize his inconvenience and displeasure? But the decision itself, teetering precariously at a balance point, took long enough that Bruno became annoyed anyway.

“Door!” he snapped, when almost two seconds had expired. The wall before him opened instantly, robots rushing quietly forward to steady the shelved vases and picture frames, to whisk the little drink table out of his way. He stepped through the opening, out into dewy, meadow-fragrant air.

The side of the ship was marred by a rectangular seam, ringed all around with rivets. No wellstone, that, but honest metal, a passive device for containing air, for holding out vacuum. A hatch. Presently, light fanned from its upper edge, and the hatch swung downward, revealing a carpeted staircase affixed to its inner surface. This made contact with the ground, forming a perfect little exitway.

On the other side stood a pair of dainty robots, delicate-looking things with frilled tutus ringing their waists and feathered caps slanted just so on their heads, their metal hands bearing ceremonial halberds that looked as if they might be twisted out of true by a strong breeze or a harsh word. In perfect synchrony, the pair descended the staircase and came straight forward, straight toward Bruno. The ship had been set down with even greater care than he’d first realized, set down by entities obsessed as much with decorum and pomp as with aero- and astrodynamics.

Ten meters away, they stopped, clicked their metal heels, and bowed.

“Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji,” one of them said— or maybe both, in too-perfect synchrony to distinguish. “We bring you the greetings of Her Majesty, and a request for your immediate audience. You are to come with us.”

It was always strange to see robots speak, because they did it so rarely and because they had no mouths. By royal decree, it was Uncouth to build machines with faces, or hair, or genitalia, except for the express purpose of sexual perversion, which was itself Uncouth and needed no further encouragement.

“Excuse me?” Bruno said.

“You are to come with us,” the robots repeated, their joined voices fluid, elegant, courtly in a mechanical, clockwork-ballerina sort of way.

“Really. Am I to know why?”

“It is a matter of utmost importance, Declarant. The explanation of it is beyond our tasking.”

“Beyond your tasking. I see.” Bruno nodded sagely, thinking to wonder whether his image was being recorded or transmitted, and if so, whether he looked dignified and wise or simply hermitty, possessed of too much hair and beard. “Her Majesty isn’t with you, then, all the way out here. And why should she be?”

Why indeed, when she could simply order him around by proxy? Feeling a sudden, petty anger, he whisked off his cap and threw it at their golden feet. “Pick that up. Deliver it. It’s my reply. If Her Majesty wishes an audience, she is cordially invited to enjoy it here. My work, alas, does not permit me to travel at this time.”

The robots considered that.

“Her Majesty requests your immediate presence,” they finally said. “Groundless refusal is both Uncouth and inconvenient. There is no reason to be rude.”

“Rude? Not at all. Not a bit of it. Tell Her Majesty that it pleases me, as always, to answer her every request. The requests of robot messengers, however, will hardly obligate me. You’ve interrupted important work, expensive work, without explanation or apology. Her Majesty is ill served by such tools as you, and is invited to petition me by the much more reliable method of face-to-face communication. Unfortunately, my network gate is down. I’m afraid you’ll have to go back and fetch her in the flesh.”

He drew a breath, ready to say more, but stopped himself. Baiting robots was a fool’s hobby—they had no feelings to hurt, only needs and obligations to fulfill. They could be frustrated, in the same way that a deaf man could be shouted at: They saw you doing it, knew what it was, but would never be affected in the desired way. But by the same token, this made them ideal absorbers of displaced anger. Killing the messenger was fine and dandy, when the messenger was never alive in the first place, when any fax machine could recycle its smashed components back into the original robot. Not “good as new,” but actually, literally new. So he supposed a little baiting was harmless enough.

Wordlessly, the robots turned and went back up their staircase, which lifted and closed behind them with a faint clunk and hiss.

Bruno would regret this, or course. He would add it to his collection of regrets. But it did feel good.

He retreated a bit, waiting for some indication of impending liftoff before hiding himself back in the house again. But the ship sat, and sat, and sat some more, and finally he understood: There was a fax gate in there, a fax machine coupled to a high-bandwidth network gate linked to the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid, the Iscog. The robots were faxing themselves back to Her Majesty’s throneroom to deliver his “invitation,” and clearly, since the ship remained, they expected her to take him up on it.

His heart quickened a little. So much for his clever manners.

Bruno had his own, fully functional fax machine, of course. For years he’d been getting his clothing and equipment that way, built up atom by atom from stored patterns and extruded whole through orifices inside and outside the house. It produced much of his food as well, supplementing the fruits of his stubbornly anachronistic garden.

The gate could even reproduce a person; he’d done the old parlor trick a time or two, spending the afternoon with a perfect copy of himself. Well, two copies spending time together, actually, with the original Bruno having been destroyed in the reading process. But this amounted to much the same thing in the end.

With copies, you were supposed to hit it off at first and then quickly get on your nerves, but Bruno had found his own company alarmingly dull; what did he have to teach himself that he didn’t already know? He could send a copy off to learn new things, he supposed, but he wouldn’t want to ‘t>e that copy, sent away from the work that really mattered to him, and of course one of him would have to do just that. Invariably, he reconverged the copies within the hour, faxing them back into himself, concluding that maintaining one.

Bruno de Towaji was quite trouble enough. Hence the disinterest in repairing his failed network gate.

The silence of network abstinence had been nice, too. He’d better enjoy the last of it while he still could, before the robots came back with company, or else hauled him through their gate by main force.

He was just turning to reenter the house when, to his utter surprise, the hatch opened once more on the side of the metal teardrop, swinging its staircase out and down, framing in its doorway the figure of none other than Her Majesty herself. The robots followed at a respectful distance as she descended the steps.

Staring stupidly, Bruno computed: Earth, regardless of season, was always at least seven light-hours away. For the robots to return there and come back with Her Majesty in tow should have taken fourteen hours. Even if she’d been on Jupiter for some reason, it would have taken more than twelve, possibly a lot more, depending on where the planet was in its orbit. Ergo, she must have sent her pattern ahead, timing it to arrive when the ship landed. Had she anticipated his refusal? She might simply have broadcast her image into the void, instructing the robots to capture and instantiate it if the need arose. There was something cold-bloodedly logical about that sort of reasoning, and that was how he knew it was true. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The spaceship’s stairs were carpeted in red, and their metal base extruded still more carpet, its end snaking out ahead of the Queen across scorched grass and flowers until finally it stopped, seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then extruded a low platform, a little marble pedestal rising up as if exposed by receding tidewaters. Her Majesty mounted this platform, and the robots assumed stations on either side of her, ceremonial halberds at the ready. Ceremonial, hell; she was here, and they carried no other obvious weaponry. Those blades could probably cleave the planet in two.

The robots spoke more haughtily than before. “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, you may present yourself before Her Majesty Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. You are encouraged to kneel.”

Clad in the shade of purple forbidden to all others, with the diamond crown atop her head and the Scepter of Earth in her left hand and the Rings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on the fingers of her right, she was black haired and walnut skinned and scowling deeply. She was beautiful and terrible and in a bad mood, and could destroy him with a word.

“Hi, Tarn,” he said lamely, then sighed and threw himself to his knees.

Chapter Two in which an urgent plea is heard

She was a figurehead, by the way. She couldn’t literally destroy him, have him killed, have his pattern erased and his name stricken from every stone and pillar, but she could make his personal and professional life difficult enough that he might wish she had.

“Don’t ‘Hi’ me,” she snapped as he knelt there before her. “Rise. Approach.”

Ground moisture had soaked through the knees of Bruno’s trousers. Rising, he wiped them absently with his hand, then caught himself and wiped the hand on his vest, in case she demanded to shake it or something. Approaching gingerly, he spread his arms.

“My world, Your Majesty. Welcome.”

She nodded regally. “Yes. Your world.” Then she cocked her head, looked at him strangely. “Are you all right? Why are you leaning like that?”

He blinked. “Leaning? Ah, it’s the curvature. The planet being so small, local vertical swings a full degree every six meters. Your ‘up’ is not the same as mine. The trees—” He pointed. “—seem to tilt away from you as well, more so the farther away they are. You see how they’re angled?”

The Queen of Sol surveyed the horizon, nodding absently. “I wondered about that. The way the ground slopes away, I feel as if I’m standing on a mountaintop. Is that your house down there?”

“Er, yes,” Bruno replied, following her gaze. “It isn’t ‘down,’ though; the ground’s quite level here. Shall we go inside?”

She nodded. “Somewhere we can sit, yes. There’s much to discuss.”

“I’d gathered.”

He led her back across the meadow, dainty robots trailing behind. Her velvet skirts smoothed a trail in the grass as she walked, the sunlight full in her round face. Even her long shadow was more regal than lanky, a Queen among its kind. Bruno couldn’t keep his eyes forward. Didn’t try.

“It’s closer than I thought,” the queen remarked as they approached the house. “Smaller. You’ve dwelt in a shack all these years? A hovel?”

Bruno shrugged. “The planet size again. If the house were any broader, the curvature of the floor would become apparent. You couldn’t roll a ball bearing on my floor—it’s gravita-tionally flat—but indoors I find the eye prefers straight lines and right angles.”

“Add another level, perhaps?”

He shook his head. “The upper story would feel less gravity, and a lot less air pressure. Thirty percent less. The gradients are steep on a planet this small.” He pointed to the snow-capped Northern Hills. “The air’s thin up there. And cold.”

She smiled. “Those little things?”

“My Himalayas. I’m quite comfortable, Tamra, really, and I don’t think you’ve come here to remodel the planet.”

Bruno waved for a door as they approached. It opened,and they stepped through. The house had remodeled itself in his absence, throwing down trails of red carpet joining furniture more elegant than he’d normally employ. Chandeliers of gold and diamond hung from a ceiling striped with stained-glass murals of green and tan and blue, stylized scenes from Her Majesty’s native Tonga. They moved and changed, almost too slowly to see.

Presently, a ring of speakers formed along the walls at chest level, and began playing “Thank God for the Revival of Monarchy,” which was the Queendom of Sol’s quite popular unofficial anthem; the official one was the dreary “Praise upon Her,” which was almost never played. Or hadn’t been, anyway, when Bruno’s network gate last functioned. He supposed fashion had probably overtaken such musical preferences by now, along with all the clothing and furnishing styles he knew best. Fashion was always doing things like that, making the most ordinary things seem ridiculous and the most ridiculous seem ordinary. Immortality had yet to bestow any higher aesthetic upon the Queendom, although he supposed that, too, could have changed in his absence.

It was nineteen years since he’d quit Tamra’s court, eleven since he’d quit civilization altogether, trading it for this silence, this peace and solitude. Out here, he wasn’t peerless or depended on. Just alone.

He realized he should speak, behave as a host. “Uh, refreshment? Food, drink? I have vegetables fresh from the soil.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Still doing that, are you? Thank you, no. A glass of water, perhaps. Shall we sit?”

“Oh. Yes. Forgive me.” He indicated a chair beside a low table, waited until she’d seated herself, waited until she’d nodded permission for him to join her, and finally sat in the chair across. A gently clicking robot appeared, whisked a pair of glasses of ice water onto the table between them, and was gone. “You look well, Tamra. I mean that.”

“You look good yourself,” she said, her voice betraying a hint of pique. “You always look good.”

Shrug. “Everyone does. But I’ve dressed up!”

She studied him for a few moments before replying, “Yes. Actually, you look like you’re playing yourself in a melodrama. The gray hair is new. It suits you, I suppose.”

Her tone, while sharp, was not unkind. Like her expression and her too-correct posture, it bespoke a mingling of amusement and ire and haste, as well as a kind of bruised dignity. He’d left her court without permission, after all. Without even a proper good-bye, for he’d feared his resolve would crumble. It had been a cowardly, disrespectful, unkind thing to do, and whatever business drew her here now… Well, he’d made her jump through hoops for it, hadn’t he? What urgency would permit a queen to beggar herself before such a determined expatriate?

“Something’s happened,” he prompted. “Something awful.”

She shook her head, but her eyes looked nervous, uncertain. “Not awful, no. Inconvenient. A… project of ours has gone somewhat awry. No one’s been hurt, but there’s a… cleanup effort that isn’t progressing well. I thought perhaps you’d have some advice for us.”

Bruno wasn’t sure he understood, and said so. “My so-called expertise is in collapsium engineering, Highness. Industrial accidents are hardly…” He caught her expression. “Oh, I see. It is a collapsium accident.”

She nodded, pursing her lips, and for a moment Bruno felt paralyzed by her beauty, unable to think, unworthy to speak. The human brain was said to be wired for monarchy, for hierarchy, for the elevation and admiration of single individuals, and now the truth of this hit Bruno like a heavy gilded pillow. There wasn’t any one thing about Tamra Lutui—not her long black hair or the tilt of her head or the gentle swell of her hips and thighs and bosom—that should affect him so. He knew her very well indeed, well enough that her pout shouldn’t fill him with this boyish, trembling awe. But she was Queen, and that made all the difference in the worlds.

Her Majesty, being well familiar with this reaction, this social allergy, waited politely for it to subside.

“Yes,” she said finally. “A collapsium accident. You should be proud of us, Bruno; we’ve finally attempted something big. Too big, evidently.”

Bruno clucked and shook his head. “Ambition has to im ply some willingness to fail, Tarn. It isn’t a stretch, otherwise. You mustn’t regret your mistakes.”

“This one I regret, Declarant,” she said coolly. “That we can hope for a favorable outcome is immaterial. Some errors are inexcusable.” With these words she fixed a mild glare on him: Had he no regrets?

“Fair enough,” he said, raising his palms in immediate surrender lest he be forced, in some way, to explain or apologize for himself. He had good reasons for all of it. Didn’t he? “Er, perhaps you should tell me what you’ve been doing. With the collapsium, I mean.”

Her Majesty rapped the tabletop. “Sketch pad, please.” Obligingly, the table darkened, and where her finger traced, colored lines and dots and circles appeared. “This is the sun, all right? I can’t draw well, but these here are the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars.”

In fact, for hasty finger paintings her renditions were fairly accurate.

“Sol is big in the inner system, and if two planets are aligned with the sun between them—opposition, they call it?—then network signals have to be sent around via satellite. There’s a time delay associated with the extra distance, and this implies a cost.”

“Yes,” Bruno agreed in a knowing tone. He’d laid the foundations for the collapsiter grid himself—besting previous network bandwidths by six orders of magnitude—and he understood a thing or two about how the system worked.

Tamra looked up at him but declined to glare. “Some of our people have worked out a fix, Declarant, by putting an annulus of collapsium around the sun. The ‘Ring Collapsiter,’ as Declarant Sykes has named it.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The speed of light was much higher in the Casimir supervacuum of a collapsium lattice than in the half-filled energy states of normal space. A ring of collapsium encircling the sun could admit signals at one side, expel them at the other, and reduce the time not only of the trip around, but of the trip through as well. Like a highway bypass where the speed limit was a trillion times higher than in the crowded streets of downtown. Why crawl through when you could blaze the long way around in half an instant, cutting light-minutes off your journey? “Very elegant, very impressive. Very enormously expensive, I’d imagine.”

Tamra shrugged. “The cost ladies say it’ll pay for itself in a century, through increased efficiency. It’s actually just the first piece of a whole new kind of network our componeers envision: a spiderweb of collapsium threads stretching to every corner of the Queendom.”

That metaphor had been stretched a few times too many, Bruno judged. A “spiderweb” would twist apart in hours, each rung of it orbiting the sun at different levels, different velocities. Unless…

“Good Lord. This ring of yours. It’s static?”

Tamra quirked her head, not understanding.

“It’s stationary?” he tried. “Does it orbit the sun, or is it suspended above by some other means?”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Static, yes. I’m told it needs to be, to function properly. You’d have to ask Declarant Sykes’ people for the details.”

Bruno marveled. A static ring completely encircling the sun? The mother of all collapsiters, not orbiting but hanging above its parent star like a gossamer suspension bridge? Unthinkable! Life in the Queendom certainly had changed in his absence. He found his mouth overflowing with questions.

“What holds it up? Good Lord, what holds it together? You’d have standing waves at multiples of the gravitic frequency. Around the ring, that’s fine, but across it I don’t see how the phases would match. You’d get shearing forces that would tend to pull the collapsium out of—”

He caught himself; Her Majesty’s expression showed nothing more than polite incomprehension. Sol was fortunate to have a queen so sharp, so quick, but it had trained her in more superficial pursuits, made a kind of glorified video star of her. No scientist, she.

“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, exposing his hair’s grayed roots to her inspection. “I’ll stop interrupting. What problem brings you here? To me, of all people?”

She frowned, the troubled creases deepening across her face. “Bruno, I need you to come back with me. Really, I’m not kidding. Fax yourself downsystem; have a look at this thing; tell us what we can do. I wouldn’t have come all the way out here if it weren’t important.”

“The ring needs stiffening?” he guessed.

She shook her head. “Every analysis tells us the design is sound. Even the environmentalists agree it’s more than strong enough, even now, when it’s only a third complete, still held up by electromagnetic grapple stations.”

“Hmm. So what’s the problem?”

Her Majesty sighed, looking almost as if she might begin to fidget, embarrassed by some personal inadequacy. Finally, she said, “We had a solar flare last month. A big one, that hit the collapsiter dead center and burned out half the grapples that were holding it up. We’re moving new ones into place, but…”

“But meanwhile the structure is slipping,” he said.

She nodded, then picked up her glass and drank deeply from it, as if the ice water were something stronger to soothe her nerves. It was a gesture Bruno hadn’t seen—or made—in a long time. Afterward she held onto the glass, kept it close to her lips, until Bruno realized she was using it as an excuse to keep from speaking further. When he’d waited long enough for her next words, she took another sip, then another, until finally the silence had dragged on long enough and Bruno was obliged to fill it himself.

It was uncharacteristically clumsy of her; another indication of her alarmingly unQueenly distress.

“It’s accelerating,” he suggested. “You can’t get enough grappling force in place fast enough.”

Again, she nodded.

“When a boulder first starts rolling downhill,” he said, reaching for the sort of analogy she preferred, “you can stop it with a well-placed pebble, but if you’re late on the scene it takes more, a stone, an iron chock. And if the boulder rolls over those…”

She set down her glass. “You have the essence of it, yes. As the ring falls closer, the sun’s gravity increases, and we simply can’t build new grapples fast enough to stop it. I’m told we’ve got six months.”

It was Bruno’s turn to frown. “Six months before what? Before this ‘Ring Collapsiter’ falls into the sun?”

Tamra nodded yet again.

Bruno felt the blood draining from his face. “Good Lord. Good Lord. An accident indeed!”

“You’ll help us,” Tamra said. It wasn’t a command; her tone hovered right at the edge of asking. As if he had some right to refuse her. As if he had even the ability to refuse her, else why would he ever have left her side in the first place?

His glance took in her copper eyes, her almond skin, the elegance of her purple dress, cinched at the waist with a chain of diamond-studded gold. With a start, he realized it was precisely the outfit he’d last seen her in. Precisely the haircut, precisely the cosmetic palette. Had she worn it deliberately, in some coarse attempt to influence him? The idea was unsettling.

“Glass ceiling,” he said to the house. Light flooded in. Looking left and squinting, he pointed. “My sun warms exactly one subject, Tamra. Yours warms billions. Even assuming a solar collapse were somehow survivable to those nearby, which I doubt very much, the idea of there being no Sol to have a Queendom of… Tamra, do you think I’d refuse you? We’ve squabbled, all right, but do you think so little of me? Why are you here? Your robots should have dragged me to you.”

“They nearly did,” she said, her voice hinting at sadness. “And no, I didn’t think you’d refuse me. But you do insist on being difficult. One has to approach Bruno de Towaji in very particular ways, I’m afraid. Even if one is Queen of all humanity.”

He hoped his scowl was impressive. “I’m your servant, Tam. As always. Lead me to your fax machine, and think no more of it. We leave at once!”

Chapter Three in which an impressive structure is examined

They stepped through the ship’s fax gate to a worker’s platform: a flat, domed-over plate of di-clad neutronium large enough to host a volleyball match.

Bruno’s breath caught in his throat. “Good Lord,” he said.

“Yes,” Her Majesty agreed coolly.

Diamond—the crystalline form of carbon—is beautiful because its high index of refraction causes the light passing through it to be trapped and split. The stone itself is clear to the eye, but the light that enters is forced—very much against its will—to slow down, to bend, to bounce from shallow edges as though they were mirrors. Upon striking a diamond, a ray of white light may find its red and yellow and green components shunted onto wildly different paths, a phenomenon commonly known as “sparkle.”

When diamond surrounds a core of degenerate matter, the effect is heightened further by the Compton scattering of photons off the neutron surface. The usual trite description— that neutronium looks like white fog inside a gem—misses the point entirely: it looks like nothing else in existence, more like a dream of fog made solid. Very solid. But that was merely the view beneath Bruno’s and Tamra’s feet. Above their heads, well…

Even di-clad neutronium is dull as cut glass next to the haunting light of collapsium, inside which a sundered light beam can circle for days or weeks, or until the end of time. Just as the speed of light is higher in air than in diamond, and higher still in the “vacuum” of empty space, so too is the speed of light higher—a trillion times higher—in the Casimir supervacuum of the collapsium lattice. “Cerenkov blue” is the radiation given off by swift particles that find themselves slamming into a denser material and briefly exceeding its speed of light, and it is this unearthly glow for which collapsium is best known.

So imagine an arch of it filling the sky. Imagine a universe of stars reaching up to infinity above you, pinpoint splashes of light filtering through and around the collapsium. Imagine Sol beneath your feet, swollen and huge but eclipsed by a disc of di-clad, invisible but for the effect of its light echoing through the arch rising high above you.

Like choir music through the rafters of heaven, Bruno de Towaji would later write, to be quoted out of context for tens of thousands of years. In truth the passage continues, It was grand, enormous, an absurdity of unprecedented scale and scope. A glimpse of heaven, yes, but as we dream it, beach monkeys fond of glitter. If it’s God we hope to impress, I daresay a tower of socks would serve as well.

This by itself is significant: that even Bruno de Towaji, upon seeing the Ring Collapsiter for the first time, reacted to it not as a work of engineering, but of art.

“Astonishing,” he conceded.

“Yes,” Her Majesty could only agree. Her two robots stepped through, assuming positions on either side of the fax gate.

After them came a man—short haired, short statured, neatly shaved and groomed and dressed—whom the robots examined only briefly. They seemed to know him, and he in turn carried himself as one accustomed to their dainty-hard robotic scrutiny, and to the dainty-hard company of the Queen herself. He seemed properly respectful without appearing awed or worshipful or afraid, and for this Bruno approved of him instantly, although he also sensed, almost as quickly, something cool and detached back behind the eyes somewhere. Mathematical, one might say.

Bruno’s people skills were a bit out of practice, though, and we may suspect he put little credence in his first impressions, pending further analysis.

“Majesty,” the man said, doffing his cap and bowing low, so that his hands nearly brushed the slick surface of the platform.

“Marlon,” the Queen acknowledged, inclining her head slightly. “Thank you for coming so quickly. I take it you loaded your pattern here ahead of time?”

The man bowed again, less deeply, then offered a courtly smile. “I stow copies of myself where they’re likely to be of use, Majesty. This one is a few days old, though I’ll happily send for a fresh one if you prefer.”

She shook her head. “Not necessary.” To Bruno she said, “Marlon Sykes is the father of the Ring Collapsiter project. Without his prolonged and dogged efforts, this—” She indicated the collapsium towering above them. “—would never have come about.”

Did she mean the structure, or the accident? Was there reproach in her tone? Bruno couldn’t tell, couldn’t detect her mood through the calm mask she projected. But surely the implication was clear enough: Marlon Sykes had convinced her the ring project was safe. And he’d been wrong. Bruno felt immediate kinship with the man—it was easy to be wrong. It was always so easy to make a mistake.

“Dr. Sykes,” he said, offering a greeting bow of his own.

The man smiled warmly. “Declarant Sykes, actually. It’s nice to see you again, sir.”

“Bruno,” Tamra chided, “you know Marlon from your days at court.” Now there was clear warning in her tone; she was embarrassed, and he, Bruno, was the cause of it.

He thought for several seconds, trying to place the name, the face. There had been a Marlon Somebodyorother, but he was First Philander, more an afterimage than an actual presence at court. Ex-lover to the Queen, allegedly a gifted matter programmer of some sort… Marlon Sykes, yes. Gods of memory, had the details of his life faded so quickly?

“Declarant Sykes,” Bruno repeated, now bowing more deeply and assuming what he hoped was a tone of proper contrition. “Declarant-Philander Sykes, yes, of course! I’ve been isolated of late, sir, but the lapse is, er—” with a glance and nod in Tamra’s direction “—inexcusable. I beg your indulgence.”

“Forget it,” Marlon said with a dismissive wave and smile. “It’s been years, and the acquaintance was never a strong one. This admirer is happy to be remembered at all.”

“Hrnm,” Bruno said, unconvinced. “Yes, well.”

He was expected to feel embarrassment at a time like this. In fact, he felt only a twinge; that he’d failed to remember Marlon Sykes was no surprise, and no real fault of his own. There’d been so many people. His childhood had been spent among tolerant adults. And at University he’d begun to encounter people who felt the same way he did about such things, enough people to persuade him that his laissez-faire attitude toward social interaction was simply a minority view, rather than a mental defect per se, a result of his having been orphaned or some repartitioning of his brain to make room for gardening or mathematics. So he’d spent several years of study in a sort of private resistance movement, asserting himself, presenting himself in precisely the forthright manner that everyone claimed to respect and admire.

It was the worst time of his life, bar none; this phantom “decorum” was no trifling matter, but actually some kind of genetically coded pecking order thing. Even he didn’t like tactless boors, though for a while they’d become his only company. So he’d decided to approach these foolishly subtle but socially compulsory responses as a kind of language, and with less effort than he would later spend learning Bad Tongan, had gone about memorizing their basic vocabulary and grammar.

The effort had proved, at best, a partial success, but it did give him some foundation to work from. And through his father’s alcohol recipes, he’d found both courage and a kind of unself-conscious ease that really helped, especially if other people were drinking as well. What happy drunks they’d made! Being good at darts and shuffleboard had also proven useful.

He’d still been prone to fits of distraction, but that was at least partially a consequence of his having to impress the scholarship committee or starve. This was before all the money had started. And the fame, yes. Tamra’s court had sharpened those social skills still further, in a careless, sink-or-swim kind of way. But by then, settling into life at Nuku‘ alofa, he’d found a kind of prison accreting around him: erstwhile colleagues tarring him with labels like “tycoon” and “politician,” while the media adopted him as a sort of Romeo Einstein. Increasingly, people seemed to “know” a de Towaji whom Bruno himself had never met.

Even at court—or perhaps especially there—no one seemed prepared to advise him, to take him under a friendly wing, to understand his life or his problems at all. Was he permitted to have problems? Even Tamra, wrestling incomprehensible demons of her own, had thrown her hands up at his grousing. That was when he’d begun to daydream—and eventually obsess—about the end of time, and the arc de fin that would someday show it to him.

And of course living alone meant not having to think about these things at all, getting lazy about them, forming a bond with the house software that gradually let the language devolve to shorthand codes and even, sorry to say, preverbal grunting and pointing. At least he wasn’t in his underwear.

So with a twinge of guilt and no decorum whatsoever, he simply strode to the edge of the platform and looked down, pressing first his hands and then his forehead against the slick, clear surface of the dome, straining for a view of the sun.

The best he could manage was an edge of the corona, the vast, diffuse, superhot solar atmosphere. As in an eclipse, magnetic field lines stood out clearly; looping threads of bright and dim against the blue-white glow, but much nearer than any eclipse he’d ever seen. Beneath this platform, the corona flared huge, as wide as ten full moons, as structured and detailed as a wreath of burning, phosphorescent ivy.

“Quite a view,” he said. “We’re close in. Six months until this ring falls in? Solar disturbances could begin sooner than that, as it passes through the chromopause.”

He tried to picture such an event. Collapsium was a “semi-safe” material in that it didn’t consume matter the way a large black hole would; the component hypermasses, being precisely the size of protons, couldn’t swallow protons, any more than a standard manhole could swallow its cover. But they could swallow smaller particles, and slowly stretch in the process.

Would coronal plasma densities be sufficient to trigger such a chain reaction? The plasma nuclei would certainly cling to the collapsons as they fell past, sliding into orbit around the lattice points like planets in newly formed, rapidly growing star systems. Enough nuclei to make a difference? Enough to alter the behavior of a star?

“ThereVe been detailed simulations,” Marlon Sykes said, after an apologetic clearing of the throat. “From now, it’s six months to the earliest symptoms. After that, barely a week until the photosphere is penetrated. It was the first thing we checked.”

Well, now Bruno genuinely was embarrassed. Of course they’d check a thing like that, long before they ever thought to send for him. Marlon Sykes clearly was not stupid; the glittering arch above them was proof enough of that. Bruno stepped away from the dome, absently wiping at it where his forehead had rested, though no smear or smudge remained.

“Of course,” he said, now with proper and unfeigned apology. “Of course you did. Forgive me, Declarant.”

Sykes smiled, indulgently if not quite warmly. “Stop it, Declarant. Am I to forgive you every fifteen seconds? It seems a waste of our talents, this officiousity. Call me Marlon, please. Speak to me as a friend, loosely and without calculation, and we shall both be the happier for it.”

Well, that seemed rather a courtly way of asking him not to be courtly. Was there some cunning insult here, buried in subtexts and subtleties? Bruno grunted noncommittally, then caught himself. What if there were? What did it matter? He was here to help Tamra, to help the Queendom in general and Marlon Sykes in particular. It wasn’t difficult to imagine some rancor there, some resentment at imagined usurpations of authority and respect, but did that change the physics one iota? No. Here, at least, it was better simply to state his thoughts as they actually were, with social filters disengaged.

Which of course was exactly what Sykes himself—what Marlon—was proposing.

“Damn me,” Bruno said, with forced cheer. “I’ve been away too long. Marlon it is, and you may call me Bruno, or ‘fathead,’ or anything you please. We’ve a sun to save, yes? And not with our manners.”

Marlon’s grin widened. “Well spoken, fathead.”

Despite Her Majesty’s sharp intake of breath at this, the two men shared a sudden laugh, and Bruno felt the easing of a mutual hostility he hadn’t fully realized was there.

He looked up at the sparkling arch of the Ring Collapsiter again, this time with an eye for the details of its construction. Based on the spacing of its gently pulsing Cerenkov pinpoints, he judged the structure’s zenith to be some two kilometers above the platform, its range increasing to perhaps millions of times that much as it sloped away to the sides. A ring, yes, but one so enormous that it looked flat, ruler-straight, until it had all but vanished in the distance, at which point it seemed to turn down sharply, and finally vanish beneath the platform. But for all its enormous girth, the ring was only about six meters thick. Its cross-section appeared to be circular—an observation that Marlon confirmed when asked.

So what were these other lights, these bright flarepoints of yellow-white, spaced along the lattice every half kilometer or so?

“Curved sheets of superreflector,” Marlon said, with something like rue in his tone. “Placed near the ring’s outer edge, they reflect Hawking radiation back in the direction of the sun. Since the radiation already headed for the sun isn’t reflected, there’s a net downward flow of mass-energy, pushing the collapsiter upward. Like a very weak rocket engine, using collapson evaporation as the energy source.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, impressed. “What holds the superreflec-tors in place?”

Marlon pursed his lips, shook his head. Now he did look rueful. “Nothing, my friend. Nothing at all. They’re perfect sails, and between light pressure, solar wind, and Hawking radiation, they start accelerating right away. Within an hour they’re pushed too far to do any good, and within a few days they’ve exceeded solar escape velocity. Bye-bye, superreflector. We could hold them down with electromagnetic grapples, but of course that simply reverses the problem of holding the collapsium lattice up.”

“So it’s useless, then,” Bruno said cautiously.

Sykes gave an emphatic nod. “Quite useless, yes. I told Her Majesty as much—” Here he raised his voice and looked glumly at Tamra. “—but she’s in a mood to try… almost anything.” And here his gaze was directed at Bruno: another idea born of royal desperation.

“Not your idea, then,” Bruno said, ignoring what must certainly have been a deliberate jibe.

“No. Some functionary’s.”

They were silent for a while, Marlon looking at Tamra, Tamra looking at Bruno, Bruno looking at the collapsium arch, the two golden robots looking studiously at nothing.

“Tell me your idea,” Bruno said to Marlon after a while.

The clearing of Marlon’s throat held an indication of surprise—the question was unexpected. Bruno turned in time to see the smaller man blush. “My idea. The, uh, grapples are my idea. Build them faster, you know. Find ways to crank them to higher frequencies, for greater pull. We have to pull the ring up, away from the sun. That’s really the sole nature of the problem, dress it up however you may. We’ve got to apply force to the collapsium, and the grapples are our only means of doing so without tearing the lattice out of whack and creating ourselves an even bigger problem.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, nodding absently, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger.

A flicker of resentment crossed Marlon’s features. “You disagree?”

“Hmm?” Bruno looked up, met Marlon’s gaze. “Disagree? No, of course not. You’ve got the right of it, clearly.”

Her Majesty cleared her throat at that, her eyes flashing angrily. “Nobody’s giving up, Declarants. It’s time to broaden your thinking, and keep broadening it until a solution emerges. That, or all your brilliance is for naught. There is a solution; I’m sure of that.”

Marlon smoldered visibly at the rebuke, and it was several seconds before Bruno, deep in thought, realized the obligatory reply was his to make. “Um, yes,” he said, looking up and nodding, because he didn’t disagree with that statement, either.

He and Marlon were orbiting Tamra, he saw, striding slowly around her on the platform as if she had some dangerous gravity of her own. Which of course, she did, and his reticence clearly did not put him on the right side of it. A not-so-subtle no-no in the grammar of decorum: ignoring the Queen of All Things.

“I do need time to think,” he pointed out.

She nodded once, and her gravity seemed to drop a bit. Permission granted; his orbit could slow and widen. God, how many times had scenes like this played out? Tamra impatient for answers—scientific or otherwise—and Bruno begging silence to contemplate them? He hadn’t missed the feeling, exactly, but now it had a kind of deja vu effect, reminding him of a lot of things he had missed. He was back in her world, yes. Nodding to himself, he pinched his chin again, and looked down to examine the reflection of the collapsium in the di-clad whiteness of the platform.

Time passed.

“Can I answer anything else for you, Bruno?” Marlon asked, with perfect politeness, when ten minutes had gone by.

“Bruno?” he prompted diplomatically, after another sixty seconds. Finally he snapped his fingers. “Hey you, fathead! Are we through here?”

Bruno looked up, blinking. “Hmm? Oh, yes, please, go on about your business. I think I have all the information I need for the time being. The problem, as you say, is an exceedingly simple one, even if its solution is not.”

“You don’t need anything more from me, then?” Marlon prompted.

“Er, not that I can think of,” Bruno said, realizing that some more time had passed. “I can reach you, yes? If further questions occur?” Then it dawned on him that he was being rude again, perfunctory, exactly the sort of boor Marlon had probably thought him in the first place. Peerless indeed, usurping this other man’s place, his project, his problems. To compensate, if belatedly, he allowed his gaze to narrow, his face to grow shrewd. “If you must go, Declarant, I implore you not to go far. This matter’s been on my mind a fraction of the time it’s been on yours, but once we’re on a more equal footing, I’ll be more ready to assist you.”

Marlon Sykes was, it seemed, not impressed by such transparent flattery. Without a word he doffed his cap, bowed deeply, replaced it again, and walked to the fax gate; and if it’s possible to disappear in a testy, irritable way, then be assured Marlon Sykes did just that.

“Nicely handled,” Tamra chided, emphasizing the remark with a not-so-playful punch in the arm.

“Hmm?” he said, looking up. “What?”

She sighed, then removed the diamond crown and scratched the indented band it left across her forehead. “Bruno, Bruno. I thought you’d changed. You seemed to have grown at first, matured, but maybe that was just the gray hair. Maybe we’re just ourselves, irredeemably, until the end of time. A dreary thought. So are you going to stand there all night? If I send for a chair, will you sit?”

He looked at her, his attention divided, struggling to understand what she wanted here. Finally he just shrugged. “I’m comfortable enough, Tam. If I need to sit, I’ll sit. There’s a fax machine, right? So really, I’ve got everything I need.”

He saw right away that it wasn’t an optimal response. In fact, she seemed to find it funny.

“Have you? Are you dismissing me now, Philander? Don’t be foolish: left to your own devices you’ll happily starve out here.”

He frowned, not liking the condescension in her tone. Was that what she thought of him? “You’re the first human being I’ve seen in nearly a decade, Majesty. I think I’ve gotten on rather well without your assistance.”

“I suppose you have,” she said, clearly amused at his expense. “But I must attend a dinner party tonight, and I think you shall accompany me. You’ll eat; you’ll socialize; you’ll astonish me with your ability to get on.”

“Ah.” Dinner parties: loud, complicated. Bruno sighed, feeling his delicate chain of thought breaking apart already. “Bother.”

“Oh, bother yourself. For all your complaining, you do think best when you’re distracted. Leaving you here alone is really a disservice to all.” Frowning, she pinched the shoulder seam of his vest. “Bruno, where did you get this pattern? We’ll need to stop by the palace, have it dress you in something suitable. And me, for that matter; we look like a couple of time travelers.”

“From twenty years ago?”

She nodded. “At least.”

Well humph, he’d been trying to continue his apparent funny streak. He was pretty sure there’d been a time when Tamra had laughed at his jokes, finding them witty and apropos. So long ago? Perhaps he should go partying with her, freshen up the skills a bit. With six whole months until disaster struck, he could hardly begrudge himself a single evening’s fellowship, could he? Particularly when the Queen herself commanded it.

He grunted suddenly, recalling that “disaster” meant, literally, “bad star.” Perhaps that could be made into a joke later. Or perhaps not, since nothing leaped immediately to mind. Jokes you had to think about were not usually the funniest. Especially if they were in bad taste to begin with. He did smile a little at that.

“What?” Her Majesty asked, marking his shift of mood.

“Er, nothing. I’ll… tell you later.”

Accepting that answer, she smiled, took his hand, threaded her fingers through his, and began leading him toward the blank vertical slab of the fax gate. “Well. It’s time, then.”

“Wait,” he protested, “it’s not evening wow, is it?”

“It is on Maxwell Monies.”

“Maxwell Monies? Venus? That’s where we’re going?”

“Yep. And it occurs to me we’ve less than an hour to get ready.”

“But…” he said, realizing the futility of the words even as they left his lips. “An hour? Bother it, I’ve only just eaten breakfast.”

Chapter Four in which a legendary mead hall is christened

Maxwell Montes Is the highest point on Venus, reaching through fully a third of the planet’s thick, toxic atmosphere, and as such, was the first place to become marginally habitable once terraforming began. Or so Tamra informed Bruno as her Tongan courtiers—a trio of gorgeous but nearly flat-chested ladies affecting a quite implausible adolescence—fussed with the final details of his hair and clothing.

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

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

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

Bah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She does have a good memory.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head. “No, nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, hush.”

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

“De Towaji,” he echoed.

Oh, bother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pleased,” the crimson man piped.

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

The indigo man simply nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Er,” the crimson man said.

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

“Ah, civilization,” Bruno said.

Her Majesty grunted. “Wiseass.”

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

Perhaps this was Tusite’s joke?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruno and Tamra seemed to be right on time, at any rate. That was another thing about faxing: it left no sense of the minutes elapsed during transmission through the collapsiter grid. One could, in theory, specify longer-than-optimal packet routes, bouncing a signal to the outer planets and back as many times as desired, effectively transmitting oneself into the future. Why wait for the party, when you could—in effect— bring the party to you? But the cost was such that Bruno doubted many people had tried it; there were easier ways to skip over dull time. Sleeping, for example.

Presently, a little bald man detached himself from the crowd and strode briskly forward, arms outstretched, his attention fully on Tamra. In the corners of Bruno’s vision, the robots tensed.

“Your Majesty,” the man said, sounding delighted. “Mcdo e lelei. Na’ake ‘i heni kimu’a?” His hands closed on hers, enfolding; he was bigger than he looked, taller in fact than the ’Virgin Queen“ herself. There was deception in the stoop of his shoulders and the draping, nondescript grays and browns of his clothing. Deliberate deception? It seemed unlikely in such a grandfatherly figure.

“Declarant Krogh,” Tamra acknowledged pleasantly, lifting and inclining her hand for a ceremonial kiss.

Suddenly, the face clicked: Ernest Krogh, inventor of the fax morbidity filter that had all but banished death from the Queendom. The first Declarant Tamra had ever named.

“I’ve seated you next to myself,” Krogh said, “if that’s all right. Rhea is eager to speak with you about… something-orother. It escapes.” He waved a hand absently.

“I’ve brought a guest,” Tamra cautioned.

Krogh nodded. “Thought you might. Saved a place. Backups in case, yes, but I thought…” He interrupted himself and turned to Bruno. “Son, you look familiar.”

Son? Son? No one had called him that in decades. But then, few people affected such advanced decrepitude, as if the mechanics of biology weren’t so rigorously mapped and filtered in fax transmissions after all. Krogh had, of course, come by his decrepitude honestly, the old-fashioned way, but so had many others who’d long since abandoned it for the comfort and vitality of youth.

He supposed Krogh was probably healthy in the ways that mattered: free of diseases and mechanical degenerations, his weathered exterior a kind of uniform or honor badge. Like height or muscle or decisive skin pigmentation, it did draw a kind of knee-jerk attention to itself. A kind of respect, he grudgingly supposed, though he’d rather respect the man’s record and title, his taste in buildings, his obviously quite large number of friends.

“De Towaji,” he said finally, thrusting out a hand to be shaken. “Bruno.”

“Declarant,” Her Majesty chimed in.

“Oh! Right!” Krogh exclaimed, grabbing the hand and pumping it enthusiastically. “Collapsium, yes! Still alive, then? Outstanding.” To Tamra he said, “Brought him to us, have you? Haven’t heard much from this one lately. Bit of a recluse, yes?”

Bruno shrugged. “My work demands isolation.”

“I daresay it does,” Krogh laughed. “Crushing matter into nothingness. None for me, thanks! God’s own spacetime is agreeable enough. Not that there’s anything wrong, of course, with a tweak here and there. Mustn’t grow complacent. Kiss of death for an immorbid society, I’d say.”

“Uh,” Bruno said, then realized he had no response. Bit of a recluse, yes, no longer able to hold up his end of a conversation. Blast.

“Well, do come in, Your Majesty. Declarant.” Krogh urged them both, not seeming to notice Bruno’s discomfiture. “Follow me, follow me. The table is right over here. Rhea, darling, I’ve brought visitors! Now Bruno, this thing about the Ring Collapsiter. Falling into the sun, they tell me. Not very desirable, that.”

“Certainly not.”

“You’re on it, I hazard? Fixing it up for us?”

Bruno, feeling bothered, could only shrug again. Then he identified the source of his irritation: he felt like a child, like a bright little boy in the company of an adult. Not that he was being patronized, particularly, but Young Prodigy was clearly the role he’d be called upon to play here. What a thought! He, the gray, brooding prophet! That was the problem with putting on airs: other people were free to cut right through them.

Well, blast. So be it. Served him right, probably.

“I’ve looked,” he said to Krogh, nodding. “I’m thinking the problem over, but really I’ve only just arrived. And since Her Majesty insisted I join her for dinner…”

Krogh smiled knowingly, reached out an arm, and for a moment Bruno feared his mad prophet’s hair might be given a good-natured tousling. But no, the arm was merely gesturing, pointing out the seats marked LUTUI TAMRA and LUTUI GUEST. So many utensils, Bruno noted with an inward groan.

A few seats down was a place marked SYKES MARLON, which, presently, was occupied by the frowning Declarant-Philander himself, now swathed head to toe in white, a cap and smock and jacket and breeches which, if anything, suited him better than the previous ensemble had done. Pulling out his chair, he cast a smoldering glare in Bruno’s direction, then softened it a little and nodded in simple acknowledgment, one peer to another.

In another moment Tamra seated herself, and with that the crowd seemed to shift, change phase, its members drawn down into their chairs over a period of seconds like kites dropping out of a suddenly windless sky. Not unusual, Bruno recalled; people tended to keep half an eye on the Queen at times like these, and to draw their cues from her. But still it was strange, a thing half forgotten in his years away.

Soon Krogh alone remained standing, whereupon he lifted a metal cup from the table, raised it to eye level, and brought a hush down over all.

Bruno found his eyes drifting toward the back of the chamber again, surveying the rough staircase there. Where did it lead? Outside? To the surface of Venus itself?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Krogh said quietly, his voice echoing from the pastry walls, “Welcome to our planet—a work in progress, I’m afraid—and thank you all for coming. There will be time to continue mingling after dinner; I’ll have to ask you not to do it during. Rhea’s gone to quite a bit of trouble about the seating, you understand, and she won’t see her efforts undone. Now, we have some very special guests tonight, whom I’ll ask you not to pester. This is a fund-raiser after all, and any pestering is to be done by Rhea exclusively.” There was polite laughter all around, which seemed to surprise Krogh a little. He looked around sheepishly. “Er. If you are a special guest, do come and talk to her before you leave. Or an ordinary guest, for that matter; I’m sure she’s dying to speak with you all.”

“Pish, there are no ordinary guests here!” the woman at Krogh’s side called out. Like him, she’d chosen an appearance of physical maturity, and though it was nowhere near as advanced as his, her red dress and rouge and lipstick and eyeliner did clearly emphasize the pallor of her skin. That is, if “pallor” could describe the graying and weathering of a face so darkly brown.

Again, polite laughter filled the chamber. Again, Krogh seemed good-naturedly put off by it. He looked as though he had more to say, but after pausing a moment, he finally shrugged and sat down again. A few diners clapped uncertainly.

“Oh, well done, Cyrano,” the woman—Rhea—teased him, amusement winking in her eyes. “Such an orator, such an in-spirer of men. How our coffers will swell tonight.”

“As you say, darling.”

Both faces turned politely toward Tamra then, and waited.

Smiling, Her Majesty delicately lifted a fork, at which signal plates of brightly colored salad rose up from the solid wellwood of the tables, one to a diner.

“Kataki ha’u o kai,” she said in one rote breath, granting permission for the meal to begin.

Bruno, still unsure of his etiquette, waited for others to dig in before doing so himself. When he did, though, he found the salad excellent, every bit as crisp and succulent as anything he’d grown himself, and clothed in a quite zingy dressing he couldn’t identify.

“Very good,” he remarked around a mouthful of it, which technically was a social error but which seemed to please Rhea Krogh well enough. The beverage, too, was striking; when Bruno had last dined among the civilized, fashion had favored mood enhancers of excruciating subtlety, perfumed drugs that elicited a temporary bliss or ardor or thoughtful-ness and then erased their own tracks, suppressing the users’ desire for more drug until some seemly interval had passed. But this time his metal cup, when he touched it, filled with a foamy amber fluid that smelled like—and was—ordinary beer. Beer! He nearly choked on it in his surprise.

“It’s only the default, son.” Rhea explained, seeing his reaction. “Whisper the name of any drink you’d prefer, and the cup will change it. Water to wine, the full menu.”

“No, no,” Bruno said, mastering himself. “It’s quite good. A quaint, clever touch. I haven’t had beer in… well, decades, I suppose. It’s good to taste it again!”

“A little hoppier, perhaps? A touch of the bitter?”

“No,” he insisted. “This is fine. Really.”

Rhea Krogh beamed for a moment, then looked thoughtful for another moment, then shook a finger at him admonishingly. “You are. You’re Bruno de Towaji, aren’t you? Shame on you, not telling me; I suppose I’ve gone on like a fool.”

“You’ve barely spoken, madam.”

“Oh, you.”

Her Majesty cleared her throat and smiled. “Bruno is here at my behest. Doing some work for us, some consultation.”

Her words echoed a little; their end of the table had gone silent, all eyes on Bruno, all faces surprised or expectant or hopeful. Even Marlon Sykes was looking at him with some grudging cousin of admiration.

“Sir!” someone exclaimed. “Declarant, you’ve come to save the Ring Collapsiter?”

“To save us from the Ring Collapsiter?” another demanded. And their words echoed; the ring of silence was spreading.

Suddenly, the air around Bruno and Tamra filled with buzzing, swooping cameras.

“Your Majesty!” one of them called out in a tinny but amplified voice. “How long has de Towaji been with us?”

“Is he collecting a fee?” another asked.

And then, “Philander, have you resumed sexual relations with the Queen?”

Bruno had been drinking, hiding behind his cup really, but at this he gasped and spluttered, remembering too late the crassness of civilization, ever the counterpoint to its huge, brittle lexicon of manners. Sexual relations? With the Queen? As if the old title of Philander made this, somehow, a matter for public discussion?

“You dare,” Tamra said warningly to the nearest camera, to all the cameras. Instantly, hairlines of sharp blue light connected the buzzing faux insect to the pointing fingers of Tamra’s robots, who suddenly were no longer unobtrusive, no longer standing politely among the shadows.

“Reportant Clive W. Swenger,” they said together in quick robot voices. “Luna Daily Tabloid. Teleoperating from this building, although the camera pings, fraudulently, as an autonomous agent billing to Universal Press.”

“Eighty thousand dollar fine,” Tamra said, eyeing the camera coldly. Her gaze swept the other buzzing insects. “Cordon is set at two hundred meters, effective immediately.”

The blue beams vanished, and as if pushed by invisible turbulence, the cameras fled wildly toward the exit; the dining chamber was barely seventy meters across, much too small for them to obey the cordon and remain inside. Her Majesty’s word wasn’t law, exactly, but as the strong recommendation of law it carried considerable weight and consequence. No doubt Clive W. Swenger would pay his steep noncompulsory fine, rather than explore the quite dismal consequences of challenging or—God help him—ignoring it. And the other reporters and their robotic agents would obey the cordon almost as if their lives depended on it. Almost.

“Now, the rest of you,” Ernest Krogh said dryly to the many human faces still staring, “back to what you were doing, right? No bothering the other guests; that’s our agreement.”

Bruno, wishing he could slip through the floor, shot him a grateful look. Then, because he had to say something about something other than himself, he said, perhaps too quickly, “Tell me, Declarant: how did you come to invent immortality?”

“Eh?” Krogh turned fully toward Bruno, blinking. “Immortality? Immorbidity, you mean.”

Bruno waited.

“How did I?” Krogh repeated, as if the question were a strange one. “Yes, well, there were lots of people working on it, of course. Evolutionary, not revolutionary; once you had the fax able to reproduce whole people, it was rather an obvious notion to fix them up in the process. I say obvious, but of course I wasn’t in on the early stages of it. Standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say, one gets a better view than the giants themselves have got. No, it wasn’t until little Ania was born that I really became concerned. She’s my daughter, you see. I was in pharmaceuticals until then; waste of time, but I suppose I had it to waste, didn’t I?

“Anyway yes, when Ania was born and I held her, brown and perfect in my two hands, I burst out crying because I realized something right then and there: death was going to take her someday. Really crying, I mean. Needed sedation to quiet me up. Because she’d grow old and wrinkly, you see, and fill up with pain until it extinguished her, and it just… seemed intolerable. Shouldn’t it? I mean, even a diamond is forever, and a diamond can’t grip your finger.

“So I switched professions, right there, and I daresay it was the proper course. Very nearly lost the race, too, not so much with my colleagues as with the Reaper himself. Got rather wrinkly before I was through.”

“But you didn’t lose,” Tamra said.

“No. No, I didn’t. Our backers were… very generous.”

“So, what are you raising funds for this time?” Bruno asked.

Krogh’s eyebrows went up. “Why, for Venus, of course. Can’t change a whole planet so easily; not on what I make, at any rate.”

“So much the better,” a sharp, reedy voice said from farther up the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much don’t we?” Krogh laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tamra reddened. “Bruno!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Five in which a great mountain is climbed

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you reachable by network again, Declarant?”

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

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

He looked up. “Eh?”

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

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

A nod. “Enough.”

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

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

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

“I’m only guessing.”

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

Bruno grunted, unwilling to acknowledge the point. “I don’t recall seeing these… crenellations from your work platform.”

“No, you probably wouldn’t, not when you’re that close. And on the inside! Better, I suppose, to see the ring from afar, preferably a little out of the ecliptic plane.”

‘Venus is two degrees out of the ecliptic, isn’t it? Can we see the ring from here?”

Sykes shrugged at that, so Bruno turned to Ernest Krogh, who said, “Expect you could, this time of year. Sun’s just set and all. Parts of the ring still above the horizon, yes, another couple of weeks at least. Yes. But you’re out of luck, I’m afraid; we’ve no fax gates on the other side of Skadi, which is where you’d see it.”

“Skadi?”

“The mountain.”

“I thought the mountain was Maxwell.”

Krogh squinched his lips up and shook his head. “On the continent of Ishtar, Maxwell is a prominence the size of Britain. Buckled plates, you see, very nearly a continent’s continent. Skadi, the Norse goddess of winter, is the highest of the peaks which crown her. It’s where the house is, you understand, on the north face. A poor decision in retrospect: gets cold at night, these days especially.”

Bruno, with a tingling of excitement, waved a hand at the staircase at the back of the room. “What about that? Where does it go? To the surface?”

“The rock face, you mean,” Krogh corrected uncertainly. “Stairs go all the way to the summit, lad, but it’s a steep climb. Over a kilometer.”

“Pish,” Bruno said, feeling his blood rising, feeling the strength in his limbs like a reservoir waiting to be tapped. “We’re young, aren’t we? Children. If we’re to live forever, shall we have nothing to look back on but the hills we declined to conquer? I, at least, shall climb.”

“The air is… unsuitable,” Krogh objected. “Smoggy, smelly, impure. Carbon dioxide of course, still more than we’d prefer, and residual traces of sulfuric acid. Not to mention all the intermediate hydrocarbons…”

“It’s breathable?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Then I, at least, shall climb. Marlon? May I have the privilege of your company?”

Marlon nodded once. “An honor, Declarant. Try and stop me.”

Krogh squirmed in his seat. “I am responsible—”

“Nonsense,” Bruno said. “I am responsible. I absolve you of any liability for myself.”

“But you can’t—” Krogh stammered.

Her Majesty stood, eyeing Bruno and Sykes and Krogh himself in turn. “No, legally he can’t absolve you. I, however, can. Pray, let de Towaji do as he pleases; the responsibility is mine. Bruno, for our hosts’ sake I’ll need to keep a close eye on you.”

Bruno felt a wry grin creep onto his face. “In that dress, Majesty? I doubt—

“Pants,” Her Majesty whispered, apparently into her right shoulder strap. The dress pulled in around her, sliding, tucking, forming a crease between her legs that unzipped into two separate sleeves of material, one enclosing each leg. In moments, the dress had become a kind of coverall or jumpsuit. The odd thing was that the general cut and style of it had barely changed.

“Oh,” Bruno said. Neat trick. He wondered what his own clothing might turn into, if he accidentally whispered the wrong word. A cloak? A dress? A settling cloud of feathers?

Ernest Krogh cleared his throat. “Yes, well. If you insist. The way is clear enough, I should hazard. No need to be shown. Do let me accompany you, though. As host.”

“Let us,” Rhea corrected.

At the table across from them, the four bright Martians broke a huddle and rose to their feet. “Declarant,” the indigo man said, “may we accompany you as well?”

“And I?” another voice said, elsewhere in the banquet hall.

“And we?” A bishop and her husband.

“Myself? Yes?”

Soon the voices were everywhere, and Bruno realized he was yet again the center of attention, something he had never sought to be—had in fact fought not to be. Rather than answer the many voices, Bruno stood and waved his hands dismissively: Yes, yes, do as you wish; my permission is hardly required. Sliding his chair back, he turned and made for the staircase with long, purposeful strides. Marlon Sykes fell in half a step behind him, Her Majesty and her robots half a step behind that, and behind her came the Kroghs and Wenders Rodenbeck, and behind them were sounds of a rising crowd as Rruno mounted the stairs and began to climb.

Around the passage’s first lazy curve there came another, sharper one in the opposite direction, and beyond that lay a thick sheet of curved glass that was part wall, part ceiling. Behind it the mountain shot up in a fist of blunt rock, the little staircase winding up it like a varicose vein, lit with periodic circles of soft wellstone light. Not jagged on the outside, this mountain, this Skadi Peak on the crown of Maxwell Monies. No, soft metals had once frosted here right out of the atmosphere’s furnace, and eons of hot, thick, corrosive wind had swept over it like ocean currents, inexorable, smoothing every contour, actually polishing in places, so that the tinned, leaded rock shone almost wetly in the twilight. What Skadi looked like, more than anything, was a cheap computer graphic, a platonic ideal of mountainness. Or perhaps a tall scoop of chocolate ice cream, just beginning to slump in summer’s heat. Here and there, patches of blue and green and butterscotch lichen interrupted the smooth silver-browns of windswept basalt.

“Door,” Bruno said to the glass, and obligingly, it opened for him, a rectangle of wellwood appearing in the glass and swinging upward on creaky, faux iron hinges. The wind swirled in at once, whistling, much thinner and less cold than he’d been expecting. He stepped through.

Beside him, Marlon Sykes noted, “You know, I’m not sure that actually seeing the fractal structure of the collapsiter will help you, particularly. You seem to have worked out the crucial insight already.”

“Yes? Well, we shall see.” He drew a deep breath, sampling, releasing it with the hint of a cough. Ernest Krogh had not exaggerated the air’s impurity—it tickled the lungs, filled them without wholly satisfying them. It reeked faintly but distinctly of sulfur. It was dry and cool and seemed to suck the moisture right out of him. It was, he thought, good enough for a mere kilometer’s hike.

“Can you breathe?” he asked Marlon.

Inhaling deeply, the Declarant nodded. “Adequately, yes.”

“Majesty?”

Tamra sniffed, wrinkled her nose, then finally nodded. “It will do, yes.”

There were others behind her, dozens of others, but he felt no need to interrogate each of them. Whatever Tamra might say, people were responsible primarily to and for themselves, and if the air displeased them they could, obviously, go back downstairs and finish their dessert.

Bruno pointed with his shoulder. “Upward, then!”

The climb commenced.

The stairs were less smooth than the rock face around them. Rough; perhaps deliberately so, though traction didn’t pose much of a problem. With the latest clothing technology a sheet of smooth glass might have served nearly as well, boot soles finding and clinging to the tiniest bumps and ridges, or holding fast with suckered tentacles where no such imperfections presented. The climb was steep, though, and there was no banister, just the edges of the stairwell groove itself, wobbling up and down from ankle to shoulder height and back again as it passed through the tallowy features of the rock face. Above, the stars winked and glittered through postsun-set haze and burnt-orange smog—glittered in precisely the way they never had on Bruno’s tiny planet, with its too-low, too-thin atmosphere.

“Invigorating,‘’ he said, relishing the feeling of being truly outdoors, on a real planet, for the first time in years. The cool wind alone was a new, freshly real sensation as it puffed through his beard, pulled his hair aside in streamers, fluttered at the brim of his hat.

“Yeah, whatever,” Marlon muttered beside him. Tamra grunted something unintelligible in a similar tone as her guards clanked along beside her.

The first hundred meters seemed trivial enough, and the second hundred, but halfway through the third he detected Tamra’s voice well behind him, and turned to see her dropping wearily, setting one buttock down on the edge of a tall stair. She looked at him half plaintively, half commandingly.

“Keep climbing like that, and you’re going to send someone home in a cast,” she said.

He grunted, with mingled amusement and annoyance. Rolling injured limbs in foamed plastic was pure hyperbole; nobody treated fractures that way anymore. Why bother, when the injured party could simply be hurled into the nearest fax, murdered, disassembled, and replaced with a perfect—and perfectly healed—duplicate who’d thank you for the service? But as a figure of speech, Bruno grasped it implicitly: he was somehow in charge of this expedition, somehow responsible for all who followed behind him, and he was failing to take proper care. Everyone was healthy these days, well muscled and aerobically fit. Faxware saw to that. But that wasn’t quite the same, he reflected, as actual exercise, which after all got one used to a certain amount of hardship and strain. He supposed all those walks around the world had done some good after all.

Beside him, Marlon appeared hale enough, if a bit flushed and pink against the white of his jacket. But he saw that Rodenbeck and the Kroghs had overtaken Tamra, and behind her along the snaking stairway were strewn what must surely be the party’s entire guest list, in varying stages of fatigue. Some looked fit, eager, though reluctant to crowd past the Queen on her resting stair, or the halberd-bearing robots looming on the steps immediately above and below. Others, farther back, climbed more slowly and deliberately, and behind them lay a great many who slogged with great heaviness, as if their feet were shod with iron, as if the Earthlike gravity of Venus were far more than they were accustomed to, but also as if this climb were a matter of strange importance to them, an historic event in which they were determined to take part. The news cameras, he saw, had also returned, zipping and buzzing around the invisible, two-hundred meter cordon.

He could almost hear the voices echoing back from some distant future: “I was there on Skadi Peak, when de Towaji climbed it to examine the Ring Collapsiter. You’ve seen recorded images, maybe saw it live on the network, but I was actually there.” The notion bothered Bruno for several reasons, first because it underscored this fame, this unseemly significance that dogged him always, whatever he did, and second because it presumed, axiomatically, that there was a future to look back from. That he would, in other words, fix the Ring Collapsiter, single-handedly saving the Queendom from its otherwise certain doom. What basis did they have for such an assumption? What right did they have to demand it of him, if not of themselves?

He wondered how eager and solicitous their faces would be if the blasted thing fell in. Plenty of time to worry, no doubt; the collapsium’s lattice holes would widen slowly at first, gobbling solar protons only occasionally, later perhaps a few neutrons. They’d play hell with the sun in the meantime, of course, ejecting flares, wreaking massive disturbances, creating localized zones of greatly increased density as solar matter crowded in around the holes but was not immediately swallowed. Would there be pockets of neutronium kicking around inside the convection zones? Settling in toward the core and then pulling the core in after them? Eventually, no doubt. Eventually.

“Marlon,” he said, “how long between chromopause penetration and total solar collapse?”

“Four months,” Sykes puffed without hesitation.

“Hmm.” Bruno placed his chin in his hand, thoughtfully, wishing again for a less distracting environment. He didn’t want to lead his fellow humans or absorb their admiration; he just wanted another look at the Ring Collapsiter, and some quiet time to think. “We’re only a quarter of the way up, you know,” he said to Tamra, “I’ll make it,” she replied. “But I think a lot of us need to catch our breath.”

Looking down at the crowd behind her, he nearly said, “I didn’t ask them to come.” But he didn’t like the way that might sound on later repetition, so instead he raised his voice and called out, “We’ll rest for a few minutes, and then proceed more slowly.”

He watched the faces react to that, all the faces and bodies spilling out below him like the followers of some wise, all-knowing Moses. A mad prophet, yes, late of the wilderness; he should have let the ladies trim and color his hair after all. Grumpily, he sat.

A snowflake lit beside him on the stone, failed to melt, and was whisked away again by the sighing wind. Strange, the rock didn’t feel that cold beneath his hands; the snow should have melted. In a sheltered corner, he spied a little pile of it, gathered there like dust. He stretched a hand out to touch it, found it dry and somewhat sharp. Not quite like coarse sand or tiny glass shards, but similar in some way to each.

“This isn’t snow,” he said, surprised, pinching a bit between his fingers and dropping it into his palm for examination.

“Snow?” Ernest Krogh asked, eight steps below him.

“It’s wellstone flake,” Rodenbeck called up from two steps farther down. “Also known as terraform ash. It sprouts reactive ions to strip ‘unwanted’ chemicals from the air, then settles out, changes composition, and sloughs the impurities off as solids to join the lithosphere. Then the wind carries it up again, and it starts all over. There are equivalent devices freeing oxygen and nitrogen from the rocks; it’s precisely the antagonist of nature: the geochemical cycle running in reverse.”

“Only much quicker,” Krogh added with a trace of smugness.

Bruno peered at the little crystals, so much like snow-flakes. The design made immediate sense: maximum surface area for a given mass, to increase reaction space, to maximize the chemistry a single flake could perform. How many were needed to change a whole planet? What fraction were really lifted into the sky again, after settling to earth? He imagined dunes of the stuff piling up here and there, strange geological strata for future generations to ponder. An immortal society could afford to be patient, but still it was no wonder this enterprise was short of cash. A small enterprise, yes, compared with shipping neutronium all the way up to the Kuiper Belt. But that didn’t make it easy, or cheap.

“We could just love Venus on her own merits,” Rodenbeck said, in weary, futile rebuttal. “Attacking her isn’t compulsory. You’re the worst sort of real-estate developer, you know; a sanctimonious one.”

Krogh laughed. “Son, when you buy a planet, I promise to let you care for it as you choose. No one will dream of stopping you. But the shareholders of Venus have voted, almost unanimously, to alter it. Most of us live here after all, or plan to, and while we don’t desire a second Earth, we do at least hope for homesteads that won’t rust and implode the moment we erect them. You know very little of our hardships here.”

“Yeah, yeah, poor baby. You knew the conditions when you moved here.”

“Hush, you two,” Rhea Krogh said, with a sort of long-suffering amusement.

Other conversations drifted upward, along with some coughs and wheezes.

“If you’re having trouble breathing,” Rhea called down, “do please go back inside. Her Majesty can’t take responsibility for the way I’d feel if anything happened.”

No one took her up on the offer.

“At the very least, go fax yourself an oxygen tank and some filters.”

A few responded to that, turning around the way they had come, their steps a little lighter in descent. Bruno let a few more minutes go by, giving them every chance, before rising to his feet once more and resuming the climb at a much-reduced pace and with many backward glances.

Leadership, iconhood, bah. Was it so wrong, simply wanting to do his work? Was that so grave a trespass on the rights of humanity? Humanity certainly seemed to think so. Could everyone be wrong but himself? Was that a reasonable thought to entertain? They trusted his opinion with regard to collapsium, why not with regard to himself? Perhaps, after all, they knew something he didn’t. Or perhaps, as with the collapsiter grid, their need simply outweighed any cautions or caveats, outweighed Bruno’s own desires. The good of the many demands the sacrifice of the able, yes?

The worst of it was that he had no role models, no historical personages from whom to draw example. Wealthy, strong, well connected to the seats of power; there’d been many like that, some of them even philosophers and inventors, the Declarant-equivalents in their respective eras. But none of them immortal, none forced to live eternally with the consequences of their actions. How paralyzing would they have found it, the eyes of history always on them, not for the sake of posterity but for on-going and literally ceaseless dissection? Knowing that their adolescent bumblings would look ridiculous even to their future selves, and worse, that such adolescence would never end?

Perhaps some could have managed it. Perhaps some would manage it in the far future, with Bruno’s failed example to look back on. But that didn’t help him now, didn’t show him how to be this flawless philosopher-saint of society’s expectation.

Bah. Bah! Better to worry about the collapsium, about the physics underlying it, and the universe underlying that, and the arc defin that might somehow make sense of it all. That should be his historical role! That!

But his opinion mattered little; tonight he was a mountain guide, leading idle stargazers to their latest amusement. Well, not amusement; not that. Their lives did hinge on the fate of the Ring Collapsiter, after all. And they didn’t know how to fix it, and they thought perhaps he did; they were therefore understandably eager for his answer. So perhaps there was nothing strange about any of this, no reason for his ire or discomfort. Had he been harsh, foolish? Probably, yes.

So his thoughts had come full circle, and every time someone coughed or stumbled or demanded a rest on that long, slow climb, the circle began anew, starting and ending in the same places like a stuck recording, belying the myth that Bruno’s mind was extraordinary, somehow elevated above the norm. Bruno’s mind was, in point of fact, messier than his living room, crowded with lusts and irrationalities and stuck recordings beyond number. It was a wonder he accomplished anything at all.

But he engaged Marlon Sykes in sporadic conversation, when certain non-useless thoughts occurred to him. He looked up and down, as the mountain slowly grew beneath them and shrank above. He tugged his beard, pinched his chin, even fretted periodically about the Ring Collapsiter’s fall, and how it might be averted. F=ma, obviously, and by corollary, F=ea/c². Did that help? If so, it wasn’t apparent.

Finally, the summit approached, the sky widening above and below them. It was unsettling, the way the sky never changed. The hazes drifted slowly in the jet stream, yes, but the post-sunset colors that lit them refused to deepen, to lose the last hints of red, to fade to blue and then darkness. The stars refused to really come out. There was no moon, and beneath the gloomy cloud deck below them, it was easy to imagine nothingness: Venus a planet of pure sky with no solid surface at all except this mountain, rising up like a pillar from the depths.

The staircase widened at the last, doubling and tripling its breadth before opening, finally, to a flattened, roughly circular depression at Skadi’s summit, some thirty meters across. The rock into which it was sunk formed a waist-high wall all around, broken by sheets into rough-smooth pastry layers. To the southwest, the twilight was brighter; Bruno hurried in that direction, crowding up against the wall, looking out toward the sun, hidden by miles of cloud and miles more of rock.

And there, standing nearly vertical in the sunset glow, was the Ring Collapsiter, barely visible as a filament of blue-green Cerenkov light, not quite a line but the peak of an arch; two very fine lines rising together to join at the top. Like the stars themselves, too small and distant to see as objects; this was a sort of stretched pinpoint, a brightness without dimension, but not without structure. Marlon’s promised crenellations were quite apparent, though subtle: little scallopy waves in the smoothness of the ring, and smaller waves scalloping those, placing each of the structure’s millions of collapsons into one of gravity’s infinitely many vibrational nodes, making it a stable, eternal structure. In theory.

Again, he was struck by the beauty of the thing, by the sheer elegance of function cast into form. Would future generations perceive its marvel, its grace? Would it slide into mundanity, one more work of engineering fading into civilization’s background, like cabling and sewer pipes? The very thought made him angry.

And then it struck him: he was doing it too, presuming a future for this thing, for the people whose lives it threatened. He, too, presumed unconsciously that this problem would be solved. And that was interesting, because he’d never presumed, for example, that the Earth could be towed to a warmer orbit to thaw its frozen regions, or that wellstone iron could magically change to atomic iron, or that one fine day, people would all cease being rotten to each other. Bruno prided himself on a good sense of which problems were and weren’t tractable, and this one—the fall of the Ring Collapsiter—apparently passed the test.

So what did his subconscious know that he himself did not? What had it been doing, while he was off barfing into cups and whatnot?

“There it is,” Marlon Sykes said, pointing vaguely. “In all its glory. You can even see Her Majesty’s superreflectors, little white dots all around.”

Bruno peered, squinted, and decided Marlon was right. The pinpoints were faint, much fainter than the collapsium itself. They were yellow-white, like sunlight, and they hovered outside the ring at various distances, sunlight pushing them away as fast as they could be lowered into place. In fact, a few of the more distant dots were moving with just-barely-perceptible speed.

“Hmm,” Bruno agreed. “Yes. Interesting. How big are the sheets?”

“Not large. A hundred meters.”

“Hmm,” Bruno said again, nodding slowly and pinching his chin. “Enough to wrap around the torus, like tape around the rim of a steering wheel. Goodness, if the ring were solid, we’d have no problem, would we?”

And then the world stopped. He drew a slow, reeking breath, filling his lungs, and then released it slowly, loudly, in an extended sigh. Because that was it. Because by God, that was bloody well it.

“They’re wellstone sheets?” he asked excitedly. “Thin and flexible, but able to be rigidized quickly?”

“Uh, affirmative,” Marlon said, noting Bruno’s change of mood with less-than-complete certainty. The resentment, Bruno saw, hadn’t really vanished. It was just better hidden.

“So we wrap them around!” he said, excited anyway, anxious to share the insight. “Send it home in a cast, letting sunlight and solar wind do the lifting for us! If the inertia is still too great, which I’m sure it is, we erect solar sails, hundreds of kilometers wide, to collect the necessary force. With perfect reflection, momentum should build fairly rapidly, at least as compared to the alternative. It should provide enough time for your additional grapples to be built and placed, to stabilize the structure. It should; I believe it will!”

“Uh, Declarant,” Sykes said, hesitantly and with visible reluctance, “the collapsiter is made of black holes. Universal superabsorbers. They’ll devour the wellstone sheets; we have no way to prevent this.”

“Indeed!” Bruno agreed, doffing his cap. “Indeed. But devour them how quickly? The holes are far narrower than a silicon nucleus. Semisafe, yes? Statistically, some erosion is bound to occur—bound to—but any resulting damage could be repaired locally, without interrupting the overall process.”

He thrust his fist against the top of his hat, thinking to burst it out, to create a model with which to demonstrate. The hat proved tougher than it looked, though. He punched it harder, with no better result.

Sykes glanced down at the hat and back up again, as if doubting Bruno’s sobriety. “Sir,” he said tightly, “the space between the silicon atoms is enormous compared to the size of a neuble-mass black hole. At best, the collapsium will pass right through.”

Bruno punched his hat again, aware that a crowd was building steadily all around, conscious of the weight of their collective gaze. “Will it, Declarant? After sucking electrons off the wellstone’s surface? The nuclei, being positively charged, will be attracted directly to the collapson nodes, blocking them partially, all but plugging them.” He looked at the hat, still good as new in his hands. “Blast. Look, you: I’m trying to remove your top.”

At that, to his astonishment, the hat’s crown separated all around, and fluttered end over end to the ground, leaving a flat ring of leather in his hands, a broad disc with a head-sized hole through its center.

Blinking, he said to it, “Er, assume a toroidal cross-section, please.”

Obligingly, the hat shrank one way and fattened the other, inflating to a kind of oversized, black leather donut in his hands. Still a bit surprised, he held this up for Marlon’s inspection.

“Imagine this as your Ring Collapsiter.” He held up a hand beside it, palm flat, fingers together. “This is your sheet of superreflector. When you wrap the one around the other—” He demonstrated by slowly grabbing the donut.“—and then rigidize it—” He tensed his fist.“—what you’re doing, effectively, is balancing a sheet of joined marbles on a bed of… I don’t know… small drains with tremendous suction behind them. Yes, each of your big marbles is really fourteen drain-sized marbles, and yes, the substance of the drains is somewhat pliable. Wait long enough, and despite the energy barriers their mouths will pull protons right off the nuclei, widen, pull some more, widen some more… But they won’t get big enough to suck whole marbles down, not in the time frame that concerns us. So the erosion will be slow, and the collapsium’s mass gain negligible. If there’s damage, we’ll just snip those collapsons out and replace them. It ought to work.”

Did Marlon’s face grow pale? In the twilight it was difficult to be sure.

“Good Lord, Bruno. I believe you’re right.”

“I haven’t tried the math, of course. I’m guessing.”

“As you guessed before? Phooey. I’ll begin the computations in the morning, and then we’ll know for certain. But at this point, I’d say you’re well within the bounds of decorum to leap and prance and shout ‘Eureka!’ You’ve banished my doubts, and that’s no mean accomplishment.”

Eureka. Hmm, well. With his Greek-philosopher haircut fluttering in the breeze, Bruno had no doubts how ridiculous that would look. Should he run naked down the stairs as well, carrying the Archimedes impersonation to its logical conclusion? Conscious of the news cameras at his back, framing his silhouette against the changeless sunset, he instead cocked his hand back and snapped it forward, sailing the leather donut of his hat out into the empty air, in the general direction of the Ring Collapsiter.

“Majesty,” he said quietly, “I believe we’ve found it.” But his words echoed from the rocks, booming, repeated and amplified by some reportant mechanism aimed at him, or perhaps by wellstone devices buried in the mountain itself and activated surreptitiously. In any case, a great cheer went up from the crowd, and suddenly everyone was thronging around him, wanting to shake his hand, and neither Tamra nor Krogh interceded this time, for they were the first two in line.

Chapter Six in which an historic ceremony is conducted

A week later, Bruno sat, chalrless and alone, on the smooth, di-clad surface of Marlon’s work platform, gazing up at what he’d wrought. That haunting Cerenkov glow was gone, super-reflected back into the body of the Ring Collapsiter, which now arched overhead as a pinkie-thin ribbon of yellow-white light, a huge smeared reflection of the sun below. Not too bright to look at, not quite; the reflecting surface was large enough to diffuse the tremendous radiance of Sol here inside the orbit of Mercury. Spaced around the ring were great circular patches, the “sails” he’d described to Marlon, but from this vantage, none reflected anything but starlight, too dim to make out in the brightness as anything but a lighter shade of black.

Fortunately, this new structure was only temporary. The collapsiter’s fall had already slowed significantly, buying time and promising to buy still more, and once the new electromagnetic grapples were finally in place… Well. He supposed the superreflector “cast” had a raw, functional beauty of its own, like the skeleton of a building turned inside-out, but of course it was nothing compared to the hidden glory of the collapsium itself. He wondered if there were more aesthetic solutions, if he’d hit by chance on one of the grimmer, uglier routes to salvation. He hoped not; the eyes of the future—his own included—would have enough to criticize him for as it was. To look back and find that he was, after all, a bad collapsium engineer…

The notion troubled him for a few minutes, but finally faded until he was able to enjoy the peace here, the stillness, the absence of pressing gratitude and curiosity with which he knew no graceful way to cope. In the last seven days he’d been wined, dined, interviewed, and applauded without end. Without purpose, it seemed, for every demanded speech reinforced what the fax had taught him long ago: that his company was dull, that he had almost nothing witty or fascinating of his own to say, that in fact he had a penchant for offending and embarrassing the very people who offered him kindness. And yet they pressed on, offering more and greater kindness, until for their own sakes he felt compelled to withdraw. He didn’t mind being distressed half as much as he minded causing it in others, and he knew no other way to prevent it.

But eventually, this thought faded as well, and it might be said that Bruno meditated there on the platform, his mind drifting among the planets, untroubled. How long he sat there is not known, but after some interval had elapsed, he became aware of another presence on the platform with him, of Marlon Sykes settling down cross-legged next to him, following his gaze upward.

“I hear you’re leaving,” he said.

“Indeed,” Bruno agreed. “My work demands it.”

“Today?”

“Probably, yes. Does that please you?”

“A bit,” Marlon said, an admission for which Bruno respected him all the more. “It’s difficult, being confronted with the likes of you. I didn’t ask to be resentful; I don’t seek it. Things would be much easier if I could count you as a friend.”

“But you can’t.”

“No. Never. Least of all now. Go back to your brilliant arc de fin project, please. I’ve followed your work, you know, sometimes convinced myself I could have done likewise if you hadn’t been there first. I hate that it isn’t true. And of course there’s Tamra, who no longer pines for me, her First Philander, if indeed she ever did. I suppose I should keep these thoughts to myself, but I can’t quite manage such courtesy. For that, I apologize.”

“Unnecessary,” Bruno said. “I respect you, and would have you speak your heart.”

“Thank you, Declarant. That means… something to me, at least.”

They were silent for a while, looking up at their collapsium arch, each man alone in thought, until finally another voice called out behind them: Tamra’s. “Marlon, blast it, I told you to get him dressed. The ceremony is dress. Formal. He can’t wear that. Is it your goal to embarrass me?”

“Not you, Highness,” Marlon said innocently. “Why should I desire such a thing?”

“Ceremony?” Bruno asked, with rising alarm. The air, he realized, had been filling slowly with the buzz of news cameras.

“It’s a surprise,” Tamra said, “and we haven’t much time. Quickly, step over to the fax! We’ll… erect a privacy screen or something.” She was wearing the Diamond Crown, he noted, along with the Rings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and a formal gown of deepest purple. Even her perfect golden robots seemed, somehow, to have been gussied up for the occasion.

Sighing, Bruno examined himself; the clothing he’d selected this morning was casual, comfortable, no doubt long out of fashion. Would the eyes of history care about such a thing, or even notice? Did it make, really, the slightest bit of difference? He’d trimmed his foliage back a bit and combed most of the gray out of it, casting aside the ridiculous cartoon sage’s facade, leaving only that measure of maturity that—in his estimation—he’d fairly earned. Surely that was enough.

Smirking uneasily, he spread his arms wide. “If you must take me, Majesty, I think it proper that you take me as I am. For this surprise of yours, which I do not seek.”

“I’m not ‘taking’you anywhere. We’re doing this right here, in view of the collapsiter, and you do need to be properly dressed. Come on.”

He shook his head. “No, Tamra. I won’t.”

Her eyes narrowed, her expression sharpening, weapon-like. She was not accustomed to refusal; the last time it had happened, Bruno had knelt in the mud to placate her. But he was, after all, the man of the hour. He was, after all, leaving once more for his true home in the wilderness, and not in any stiff contrivance of cummerbunds and ribbon silk. She seemed, finally, to sense that he felt no compulsion to obey her. And by corollary, that she had no means to force him.

The standoff ended; she sighed. “My feral sorcerer. All right, have it your way. Do at least stand up straight. We’ll begin.”

On that cue, the sides of the dome came alive with holie screens, three-dimensional windows looking out as if from balconies, looking down on crowds of people thronging below skies of blue, of pink, of saffron yellow, beneath mirrored domes and huge, vaulted ceilings of rock, of plaster, of ice and wellstone and steel. The bottom of the work platform’s dome was soon covered; a new row started, like an igloo being constructed of video screens, until it seemed there must be at least one window open on every planet, moon, and drifting rock of the Queendom. Tens of millions of people, a goodly sampling of the Queendom’s billions, all planning ahead for this, knowing where and when to show up.

“Typical,” he muttered, looking from one screen to the next. “Everyone’s in on the joke but me.”

The responding laughter all but toppled him from his feet. Thousands of people laughing all at once, from something he’d said! Even Marlon Sykes was chuckling. Bruno could not have been more astonished. Or embarrassed—he felt his cheeks warming. And the laughter went on! The speed of light placed a moat of seconds or minutes between himself and each of these screens. But every few seconds, his remark reached another crowd, and provoked another explosion of cheer, even as the previous ones were dying out.

“I’ll make this as quick as light speed permits,” Tamra said tartly to the assembled millions, when the chain reaction had finally subsided. “De Towaji has business elsewhere, and doubtless we’ve taken enough of his time already. Declarant Sykes, do you have the medal?”

“I do,” Marlon said, stepping forward, a bronze-colored disc in his outstretched hand, trailing a loop of ribbon.

Tamra lifted it, took the ribbon in both hands, and said, “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, it is my privilege as monarch of this Queendom to present you with an honor devised specifically for this occasion: the Medal of Salvation. It has no special properties, save the love and gratitude which inspire it.”

Grudgingly, Bruno lowered his head and permitted her to loop the ribbon around his neck. She let the medal fall, so that when he stood up straight again it rested just over his heart.

“As the voice of all humanity, it is my privilege to say to you, ‘Thanks, Bruno. We owe you one.’ ”

It was Bruno’s turn to laugh, the Queendom’s millions falling in behind him, less deafening than before. To the crowds Tamra said, “Actually, that’s it. Thank you all for coming.”

And then, to Bruno’s relief, the holie sceens began winking out, the igloo unbuilding itself around the three of them. Half an hour later, the last of the crowds had vanished, leaving only the Ring Collapsiter itself to observe them.

“Leave us, please,” Her Majesty said to Marlon Sykes.

“Gladly,” he replied, walking to the fax, casting Bruno a pointed look before vanishing into it.

“So,” she said.

“So,” Bruno agreed.

“We’ve quarreled.”

“Indeed.”

“But we’re okay now. Friends again?”

He shrugged. “We always were.”

“Really,” she said, seeming to find that funny. She took his arm, and led him in the direction Marlon had gone. “Will it be another decade before I see you next? Longer, perhaps?”

Bruno shrugged. “I have no way of knowing, Majesty. My work is intricate.”

“Stow the formality, jerk. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too. Did you think otherwise?”

“But you don’t miss… this.” She gestured, somehow indicating the whole of the Queendom.

Startled, he replied. “Who said I didn’t miss it? Of course I do! Not all of it, but enough. I miss the smell of bread on a rainy street. I miss the laughter of children. Not court, of course. Not fortune or fame. Civilization demands things of me which I really don’t know how to provide. Perhaps I’ll learn someday, or people will stop asking, but for the moment I find it much simpler to be alone with my work.”

“Simpler, perhaps. But are you happier?”

He stopped walking for a moment to think about that, and finally decided he didn’t have an answer.

“You may kiss me good-bye,” she said, stopping beside him, turning her face up toward his.

On either side of them, her robots tensed slightly.

Ignoring them, he bent and kissed her, reflecting that this, at least, he treasured from his old life. This, at least, he could always treasure. How many knew the softness of her lips? How many Philanders could a Virgin Queen declare? Precious few.

“Good-bye, Tarn,” he said, with unintended gruffness. And then, more softly, “I shouldn’t think it’s forever.”

And then he stepped through the fax gate, into the little spaceship she’d parked on his lawn.

Home again.

He took a moment to admire the ship’s red velvet interior, its burnished silver fittings and leather seats, superfluous since Tamra had no need to actually ride in this thing. But he supposed the ship would look strange without them. He drew a breath, then stepped out toward the little debarkation staircase and descended to his meadow below.

His sky was a much deeper blue than Earth’s, and much clearer than Venus‘. The little clouds drifting through it seemed like toys; the horizon was so very close. Behind him, the little teardrop-shaped spaceship closed its hatch and began to hum as if warning him of impending liftoff. Very well. He strode purposefully toward his tiny house. His cottage, really.

“Door,” he said when he was close enough. Obligingly, the house opened up, and he entered. All was still neat and tidy and gaudily chandeliered from Tamra’s too-brief visit. Robots lined up in front of him, forming a corridor, bowing in twin waves as he passed.

“Stop it,” he ordered, refusing at least to put up with that sort of thing in his own home. “Unseal the bedroom,” he said after another moment.

Again, the house obliged immediately, but still Bruno looked around him, frowning, dissatisfied.

Outside, Tamra’s spaceship lifted silently from the ground, hurling a shadow at the horizon and then vanishing into the sky. Still, Bruno frowned.

“Is anything wrong, sir?” the house finally asked.

Bruno grunted, then threw himself down on the sofa and grudgingly shook his head. “No, it’s fine; everything’s fine. It just looks smaller, that’s all.”

Every known tradition of human folklore includes references to “ghosts,” lingering traces of people and events long past, and particularly to hauntings, the infusion of certain places with ghostly happenings. Such places are usually man-made, usually built of stone, and the images captured therein are typically unpleasant in character and almost always described in frightening terms regardless of content. A ghost is, to a first approximation, a multimedia record of human terror or anguish, impressed in cut stone and released gradually over time.

In the early ages of rationalism, even through the beginnings of space flight, disbelief in such phenomena was considered a fashionable—even obligatory— rejection of primitive and outmoded superstition. This despite the almost universal dread inspired by graveyards and mausoleums and ruined castles, most particularly at night, when their thermal infrared emissions stood out most prominently. This despite the discovery of semiconductors, the invention of cameras whose silicon-oxide lenses channeled images onto arrays of silicon detectors and thence to silicon memories, from which they could be viewed through silicon-based video displays.

Any rock is 99.999% computationally inert, yes, but particularly in iron-rich basalts and granites, most particularly in those that have been shaped with metal tools—which of course tend to become magnetized with frequent use—chance doping of conveniently sized pockets or vacuoles yields electrical properties ideal for the capture and storage of patterned radiation, such as the image of a body flushed with fear or rage. That the inventors of magnetic tape and bubble memory failed to recognize this is often cited, as one of history’s stranger anomalies.

Granted, it often takes quite sophisticated archaeological instruments to extract the information again, to reconstitute some recognizable echo of the image itself. It’s difficult to imagine that human sensory processors can distinguish so finely, and filter so well. Unaided ghost “sightings” remain rare and difficult to confirm, leading perhaps to the conclusion that they don’t really occur. But it pays to remember that ancient folklorists—the well-nourished ones, at least—were as intelligent and reliable as any modern witness, and also that they knew, one way or another, not only about hauntings but about the vanished “dragons” and “oni” and “troglodytes” of ages past.

At any rate, modern archaeologists make a livelihood of studying ghosts virtually indistinguishable from those described by medieval scholars. It’s from just such a source that we know the following:

1. That while faxing himself home that day, Bruno de Towaji was simultaneously diverted to a place of cut stone, deep inside the Uranian moon of Miranda.

2. That he looked around in puzzlement for several seconds upon arriving there.

3. That his eyes settled on a particular location, about six meters away from where he was standing.

4. That his skin temperature rose by nearly a full degree and then dropped precipitously, and that he said “God, oh God, you’ve got to be joking.”

The ghost reveals nothing else about that particular incident, although archaeologists dutifully report a sense of dread and foreboding in the heel marks where de Towaji stood.