The inside of a warehouse would be as inspiring.
Or perhaps that was merely the contempt of familiarity speaking, or Bruno’s own long frustration; perhaps the scene was more wonderful and wondrous than anything Isaac Newton—in his plague-ridden, wattle-thatched world—could possibly have imagined. Bruno feared, suddenly, that this was so. He sat up, looking around him at the steamy, starlit darkness, wondering if, through years of neglect and overwork, he’d burned out his capacity for wonder. What a thought! What if he made the arc de fin, glimpsed the fading lights of the end of time, and could muster no more than a weary “eh”? How awful!
He made an effort to see the scene with fresh eyes: the planet like a little benighted Eden, the stooping robot field-workers like peasants of a land so wealthy its very citizens were made of gold. And over there, his little cottage with its wellstone walls all turned to white glass, a pretty trick indeed. And above it all, the collapsium, glowing blue as the ghosts of drowned sailors. Soon enough, that scalloped ring would be gone, replaced by some new assembly, some new experiment. It was a fleeting thing, a blossom.
There was the problem, though—the very reason for Bruno’s frustration. He’d long ago run out of fresh neutronium and had for years now resigned himself to recycling his collapsium over and over again. Every experiment had to be dismantled to make way for the next—carefully, to prevent its structure from collapsing into a single, ordinary hypermass. Such dismantling required phenomenal precision, and thanks to inertia it also required such vast amounts of energy that he’d been forced to harness virtually the entire output of his miniature star.
The star—his own invention—was simple enough; a neutronium core wrapped securely in superreflectors, holding down an outer sheath of hydrogen in self-sustaining nuclear fusion. But it was for light, damn it; it was meant not only to warm but to brighten this little world at the fringes of interstellar space. So thanks to inertia, he lived in the dark, and while he could certainly build a new sun, and even a new moon to go with it, the difficulties of contacting the Queendom to arrange for neutronium production and delivery would consume his attention as surely his experiments consumed light, possibly for years. Bah.
He could, of course, hop into the fax machine and duplicate himself, but he knew himself too well; the duplicate wouldn’t want to deal with logistical headaches any more than he did. Within hours it would be commandeering his precious resources for some new harebrained experiment, and his attempts to argue the point would prove worse than fruitless, for the duplicate would believe itself to be him. And it would be right. He’d played this drama out enough times to know the pointlessness of it.
And yet…
Was it any better to live in darkness? To cast aside the final pretense of comfort and live as a perfect troglodyte scientist, with no human needs left to neglect? How Tamra Lutui—the Virgin Queen of All Things—would recoil at that! As he himself should recoil, hearing it reduced to those terms.
He sighed, musing darkly: if only inertia could be overcome; if only he could really proceed, unhindered and happy. If he could crowd the zero-point field aside, or deaden it with complementary waves, then the tiniest flick would send his billion-ton billiards wherever he chose, at whatever velocity, and another infinitesimal tap would suffice to stop them. Was such an idea feasible? Ridiculous? He should give it some more thought, he thought, but of course that would mean suspending his current work, too. The idea made him tired, or perhaps he was already tired and the idea simply helped him to realize it.
He lay back again, to resume his study of the collapsium. It was beautiful, really, but also coldly menacing, distorting not only the spacetime around it but the life of one Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji as well. He’d never asked to be marooned out here, never asked to live in darkness and isolation, never asked for any of this. Or perhaps he had, in seeking the arc defin, but why did it have to be so hard? Why did he have to sacrifice so much?
He supposed the thing to do was to resign himself to an idle period—a vacation, in effect—during which he could solicit production bids. Or perhaps one could simply buy neutronium these days—heaven knew the Ring Collapsiter’s demand for it had to be a good thirteen or fourteen orders of magnitude larger than Bruno’s had ever been.
He could probably use the time off, anyway. Didn’t Tamra have the hundredth anniversary of her coronation coming up sometime soon? Surely she’d be upset if he let that go by without comment. Perhaps he could visit. There were other friends he’d been wondering about as well. Vivian Rajmon, Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary? Goodness, she must be over sixteen by now! And Marlon Sykes, his fellow Declarant-Philander? Marlon might not be happy to see him—probably not, actually—but they could talk about physics, maybe hash through some of these inertia problems. Surely he’d be happy to do that, at least.
With some unpleasant sense of surprise, Bruno realized that except for a handful of emergencies in which the whole of humanity was threatened, it had been almost three decades since he’d had any contact with the Queendom at all. Was that what it took to interest him in the affairs of everyday life? Total calamity? Even his broken network gate had gone unrepaired, except for Her Majesty’s unauthorized access portal. And she hadn’t used it to visit him since the last calamity. Who could blame her, when he’d never sent so much as a letter?
It was like waking up underwater, yes. How did that happen?
He felt his blood stir, and wondered, finally, if this was what he’d been needing: human interaction to keep his physics problems in balance. No man was an island, the saying went. Never mind a whole planet. Indeed, he could fix his network gate immediately and send a message down into the Queendom, asking which of his friends would consider forgiving his long silence. Perhaps it would cause a stir in the media— they’d always had a strange interest in his affairs—but for God’s sake, why should he let that bother him?
He shot to his feet and, leaving the chaise lounge behind, marched homeward with more determination and enthusiasm than he’d had for much of anything lately.
“Door,” he said as he approached the house. Obligingly, the nearest wall formed a stained-glass door and opened it for him. He stepped through, and the interior lights came on dimly and began easing him from darkness to full interior light.
Robots danced out of his way, offering nothing in the way of food or drink because lately he’d been yelling at them for that, but one battered thing, far less graceful than its peers, moved directly into his path and spread its arms.
“Hugo,” he said, with a warmth that surprised even him. “Hugo, old fellow, have I neglected you as well? Have a hug, then, yes. Are you well this morning?”
The robot’s neck squeaked audibly as its head nodded, twice, and then the thing was stepping clumsily out of his way and looking around the house as if bewildered. Hugo was an experiment of sorts: an ordinary household robot not controlled by the household, not controlled by anything except its own desires and intentions. In general these were minimal and quite peculiar, unlike the desires of a person or a pet or an invading insect, but on occasion—perhaps by sheer coincidence—its behavior could be touchingly childlike.