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.