Vivian, clutching tightly at the wellwood mantelpiece, choked momentarily, her beautiful face streaked with speedy, inertialess tears. The strain of the long ordeal showed clearly in her features. Finally, she found enough composure to continue. “The next day, we got the fax working again for nearly an hour. We got the tents up, and the moisture condensers… She would have lived, Bruno. She would have. The Queen of All Things sacrificed herself for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” Muddy said, struggling to rise from his heap on the floor. He looked dizzy. He looked, truthfully, like he should just stay put. “It was a gesture of, of… d-d-defiance. Perhaps she knew she was bait in a trap.”
“No,” Shiao said, shaking his crew cut head sadly, “the cruiser didn’t try to rescue us until five days after that. She couldn’t have known.”
“An affirmation of life for the rest of you, then,” Muddy said harshly. “Ill considered, perhaps, but she 1-I-loved all of you enough to do it, and that’s the thing that counts. She died—f-fittingly—of an excess of love.”
“You see?” Marlon piped up from the radio speaker. “I was as shocked and shattered as any of you. I’d roll back time to that moment if I could.” Then, more ominously: “Perhaps some day I shall.”
Bruno’s weariness had been subsiding, replaced bit by bit with a deep, sustaining anger. Now it blossomed. “You created the situation, Marlon. You put her there in harm’s way, and you could have removed her from it when you saw the way things were going. You’re twice the bastard I thought, for laying the blame on chance when you know perfectly well it’s your own damned fault. Why would I possibly want to join you? What hope or endeavor could we possibly share?”
There was a long pause, until finally Marlon answered. “I was never sure if you knew, Bruno. When I had the idea, I figured surely it was one you’d considered and discarded. But the math checked out, so I guessed you’d just been squeamish about it. Perfectly in keeping with your character, right? You actually care about people on some level, which is great. Really, I mean that in a nonsarcastic way. But you were all alone up there on that little planet, your research going off in these weird directions, and I saw it’d be thousands of years before you actually got anywhere with it.
“That first time you came back to the Queendom, I thought you’d call me out for what I was doing. When you didn’t… Well, I was full of resentment then. I was happy to see you go, and happy to capture your image for… well, malicious purposes. And the image confirmed your ignorance! The second time, though, I figured you must have worked it out. You were very methodical, so when you said nothing, I dared to hope you were secretly on my side. It made me feel better about you, about how great everyone thinks you are. If you were working on my idea, well, that would make it all worthwhile. And if not, then maybe you weren’t so smart after all. And that would be an important discovery, too.”
His voice sped up, becoming almost giddy. “I watched your world through telescopes, you know, and when you finally made a ring of the collapsium—around a star, no less!— I thought surely you must have figured it out. I waited for your network gate to open; I even sent you a present. But you hadn’t worked it out, had you? You still haven’t. I really am way ahead of you on this one. How extraordinarily affirming that is, of all my years of effort!”
Bruno felt he couldn’t possibly be more bewildered. “Marlon, what in the damn worlds are you talking about?”
Another long pause. Then: “The arc de fin, Bruno. Your window to the end of time. There’s a shortcut, an easy solution, to produce it this year. This very month. It requires a lot of mass, and an energetic collapse, but those have finally been arranged.”
“Oh. Dear God,” Bruno said. “The sun!”
“Exactly. I need it. Oh, I suppose any equivalent star would do, but there’d have to be a thriving industrial civilization there to help me collapse it in the proper way. So we’d be back to waiting thousands of years again, until these Queendom slackards expand beyond this one meager system. It’s too long. History should know its own end, to be able to make sense of its present. And history will record that it was I, not you, who opened that window.”
Bruno couldn’t help laughing a little—a sour, bitter, furious chuckle. Grief hovered beside him, waiting its turn, but for the moment he was simply angry. “History will die with the Queendom, Marlon. There’ll be no one left to remember how damned smart you were.”
“Oh, please.” Marlon’s voice was impatient. “I disrupted the Iscog to keep small minds from interfering; I didn’t realize yours was one of them. There’ll be more deaths, of course; that can’t be avoided. Probably most of the people on Earth, certainly all the ones on Venus. The flares of the dying sun will be impressive, it’s true. But come on; you know as well as I how trivial it is to create miniature stars. We could be circling the planets with them, using them for power, heat, light, industry… Why should we settle for nature, when a handful of neubles, some wellstone, and some hydrogen will match what nature requires a billion billion billion tons to accomplish? A sun! I say it’s inevitable, that we should dismantle the stars for our own purposes and replace them with something of our own device. History will credit me with that, as well.”
“History will label you a monster,” Bruno said darkly.
After a pause, Marlon grumbled. “Bruno, I realize nobody owes me greatness, but if I can seize greatness, why shouldn’t I? The Queendom provides the framework and the labor, and I provide the ideas and the careful flow of information to control it all. At the top! People suffer as a result, but what’s so unnatural about that? This idea that people should be safe and happy, that’s a very distorting idea. Look to history: Most societies have agreed that people should be useful, to men of vision like myself. Who remembers the happy nobodies? My future is grander than yours, Bruno; I swear it. Your so-called ‘monsters’ are simply the flesh of humanity’s ambition to create a history worth recording.”
“You’re brainsick, Marlon. Something’s come loose in your base pattern. When was the last time you were medically validated by anything but a fax filter?”
“Damn yourself! God, why is there always this confusion between ambition and madness? The two aren’t even related. I’ve created various mad versions of myself, just to see if that would be useful. Better than complacency, at any rate; sometimes I think the very purpose of the Queendom is to crush away all dreams of greatness, to stuff them into a single individual and then rob her of any real power, just to show it can’t be had.”
“The Ring Collapsiter was ambitious, Marlon.”
“More than you know.”
“As described! What a fine idea it was, and is. What a shame to so pervert it! I’d thought you were a builder, Marlon, a creator. I’m ashamed to be so wrong.”
“Oh, listen to yourself. Listen to that pompous, stupid voice! I know you, sir. Don’t forget it. I know you when you’re proud and fresh, and I know you afterward, when you’ve broken. I’m well aware of your limits. Don’t presume to think, for even a moment, that you have the same knowledge of me.”