“Ah,” Bruno said, beginning at last to understand. “That’s why you want higher frequencies on the grapples: so you can grab hold right where you need to. The collapsium is in a precarious state, and gravitic disturbances are to be avoided at all costs. But frequencies higher than those of gravitation won’t set up the same sort of destructive resonance.”
Marlon’s smile was only a little tight. “Your edge remains keen, Declarant. In minutes, you reiterate the analysis of weeks. Yes, it’s exactly as you say.”
“The work progresses poorly, though,” Her Majesty interjected, in cool tones. “The collapsiter builds momentum with each passing moment. Even if Declarant Sykes’ plan works perfectly, there may not be time to stop its fall. And if we’re lucky enough to stop it just above the sun’s surface, rather than below, I still think the result is unlikely to please us. Your services, Bruno, are very much in need.”
Bruno sighed, as uncomfortable as ever with this notion that the unsolvable problems were somehow his to solve. “My ‘services’ seem to have come up with precisely the same solution that Marlon’s did. It’s the right solution, Tarn.”
Her Majesty said nothing, but put on a faux vapid smile that meant she found his comment foolish.
Grumbling, Marlon threw his tea mug into the little cascade, where it clanked and splashed and skidded to a halt, resting half submerged on the marble bottom. “We’ve enough force to lift this thing, Majesty. It’s simply a matter of applying that force where it’s needed. As I’ve told you, the math is really quite straightforward.”
“Undoubtedly,” she agreed, nodding once.
“You can be infuriating sometimes, Tarn,” Bruno said to her, not unkindly. In decades past, he’d sometimes spent whole days, even weeks being infuriated by her. Truthfully, there were worse ways to spend one’s time. But Marlon did not seem so amused.
“Just think about the problem for me,” she said, nestling back into her couch and closing her eyes, as if basking in warm sunlight, though in truth the glow of the illuminated dome was rather cool. “Both of you.”
They were all silent for a few seconds.
“I do mean now,” she noted.
Both men grumbled and, taking advantage of her closed eyes, made sarcastic faces. Then, seeing each other, they laughed, the tension going out of them. Bruno hurled his own mug into the fountain, causing a brief ripple of alarm in Tamra’s robots, and then he leaned back with his arms behind his head. Might as well assume a comfortable thinking position, yes? Leather and wood creaked pleasantly beneath him.
“Hmm, yes. A pickle indeed. So how long until we’re rid of these particles?”
Marlon sat up on an elbow. “Rid of them how? By decay?”
“Right.”
A detailed discussion ensued.?
“Eleven months,” Bruno mused, when they’d kicked it around for a while. “That’s odd. May I examine your raw data?”
Marlon’s good cheer faded a bit. “Of course, yes. What data we have is yours.”
With their two wellstone drawing slates slaved together, Marlon walked him through several layers of menus until he’d pulled up the database of measurements his paid observers had collected in recent weeks. Mere samplings, of course, indirect measurements scattered here and there along the Ring Collapsiter’s considerable length. Bruno pondered them for a while—apparently a long while, since both Marlon and Tamra got up to use the bathroom a few times while he was doing it—and finally he called up a little hypercomputer in a corner of the slate and fed it some quite horrific equations to solve. The answers were, of course, available almost immediately.
“Eleven months,” he confirmed, with an approving nod in Marlon’s direction. “And how long, again, until the collapsiter penetrates Sol’s chromopause?” That was the accepted benchmark for irretrievability; soon afterward, the collapsons would have swollen with gobbled star matter to the point where their crystalline structure became unsupportable. The whole thing would, no doubt slowly and elaborately, crush down into a single large hole, and eventually pull the sun in after it.
“Ten months,” Marlon replied, looking and sounding unnerved.
“Well, well,” Bruno said. “That’s what I call inconvenient timing. Had you been assuming this was a natural phenomenon?”
Marlon’s voice was hollow, frightened. “I had, yes. Indeed I had. But the odds against such a coincidence…”
Her Majesty opened her eyes and sat up, as if only now realizing the implication. “What are you saying, Declarants? That there’s a saboteur afoot? That someone has done this deliberately^”
Bruno shrugged. “ ‘Saboteur’ is the right word, I suppose. A muon is a highly unstable particle about a tenth the size of a proton, and it results from the decay of an even more unstable particle called a pion. My guess is that electrons from the solar wind were struck with a high-powered and precisely targeted stream of coherent neutrinos—a nasen beam, we call it—and this converted them to pions. It’s a graduate-level transmutation exercise, performed on an enormous scale.”
Marlon Sykes had turned almost completely white. “Good Lord, Bruno, I think you must certainly be right. What else could it be? What else could scatter such short-lived particles over such a wide area? I am, as always, dwarfed in your shadow. In an hour you’ve deduced this.”
“Well,” Bruno grumbled, trying to think of something self-deprecating to say.
“Well nothing,” Marlon insisted, somewhat angrily.
“A saboteur?” Tamra said again, rising to her feet so she could stamp one of them. “You suggest that a subject of this Queendom is capable of such villainy? A subject of rntwe?”
“I suggest nothing,” Bruno said innocently.
A loud noise, like a gong, echoed through the sphero-Athenian spaces of Sykes Manor. Marlon looked up sharply.
“Yes?”
“A message,” the house said to him, in tones much louder and slower and flatter of affect than Bruno’s own house would dare employ.
“I’m holding a slate,” Marlon said, testily.
In his hands, an image appeared: a square-faced man of deeply serious expression, clad in the stiff uniform of the Royal Constabulary. That uniform had not changed one bit since Bruno had last seen one, thirty years before: a wellcloth coverall, programmed to act like beige smartcotton festooned with strips of white numerals. And of course, the obligatory monocle over the left eye.
“Yes?” Marlon demanded of the face.
“Declarant-Philander Sykes, is everything all right?”
“It is as far as / know. How can I help you?”
The policeman’s expression managed, somehow, to grow more serious. “Sir, there’s been an incident on Grapple Station 117. Two dead, apparently very recently, apparently by homicide. Are you sitting down, sir?”
“Why are you calling me?” Marlon asked, trying now to disguise the annoyance in his voice. “Who was homicide, er, was murdered?”
“You were, sir. And a woman, one Deliah van Skeltering.”
“Oh,” Marlon said, going paler then before. “Oh, shit.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly. I’m sorry to ask it. but I wonder if you could come to the site and answer a few questions.”
Chapter Ten
in which a crime is reconstructed
In some sense, the first ten thousand years of human history could be described as a steady climb toward freedom. Not the doomed, hapless freedom of short-lived beach and savanna apes, but the enlightened democracy of a fit and educated humanity that recognized—and indeed, meticulously cataloged—the value of individual action. Society, it was thought, should work to maximize the power—and with it the accountability—of each of its members, so that success and failure and happiness and misery might be had in direct proportion to the effort invested.