Sykes paused, then continued in a milder voice. “All right, I suppose I am a monster. I suppose that goes without question at this point. But a visionary monster, and that’s what really matters. You and I have clashed enough, Bruno. I’m done hating you; I’m prepared to write your name in next to my own. Consider: if not for you, I’d have no peers at all, and how’s a man with no peers supposed to fit in? Ah? Ah?” He invited a friendly laugh, and seemed to expect that he’d get one.
Bruno sighed a final time. “You know I can’t let you do this, Marlon. Do as Captain Shiao says: Surrender yourself now. They won’t prosecute you; you clearly have some kind of illness. Once cured, you’ll see the madness in all this. For your own sake, not to mention poor Tamra’s, you should help me clean this mess up and start setting things right.”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. I had to try, Bruno. Don’t say I didn’t try. I’m sorry to tell you, this conversation is over.”
Suddenly, the space around them was filled with pulsing light. Great blossoms of pure energy—each one easily the size of Earth’s moon—flicked into existence, remained just long enough to register, and vanished again.
“Good night!” Bruno exclaimed. “Ship, what’s the distribution of those flashes?”
“Stochastic, sir, a Gaussian white-noise pattern.”
“Centered around us?”
“Centered ten million kilometers to the solar east of us. Eigenvectors are nonorthogonal; the distribution is shaped like—excuse me, library search—a banana, sir.”
“A banana? Gods, what now? What’s the standard deviation?”
“Along which axis, sir?”
“Along the relevant axis, you! The one connecting our position to the centroid of your banana. How close is this phenomenon to hitting us?”
“Ah,” the ship said. “Five million kilometers, sir.”
Bruno frowned, pinched his chin. “We’re at the two-sigma dispersion contour? That’s odd. Is the centroid stationary?”
“Negative, sir. It’s matching our acceleration, and exceeding our velocity by a constant two hundred thousand kilometers per second. It is gaining on us.”
“Ah,” Bruno said, finally beginning to understand. “Add the phenomenon to the trajectory display, please. All known flashes to date.”
The result was quite alarming: here was the grappleship, hurtling directly downward, toward the vast luminous plains of the solar chromosphere. And off to one side was a crescent-shaped pattern of dots, marching and smearing its way toward them. Off to the other side was that stray Ring Collapsiter fragment he’d glimpsed a few minutes ago: a ropy, kilometers-long chain of collapsium.
Despite the ertial nausea, everyone crowded forward, eager to see and understand the new display, eager to know what was happening to them. Their bodies stank of sweat; even Deliah’s, he realized. Even his own. Impervium or no, it was getting hot in here. No material was superreflective at all wavelengths, after all, and the hull was necessarily pierced by certain openings, for the grapple beams and the emergency exhaust ports and of course the hatch itself. So it leaked, slowly letting in the heat. How close to the sun could they get before they were cooked in place? He noticed that the little faux fireplace had extinguished itself, probably figuring its warming-the-place-up job was done.
“Blackbody temperature of the flashes?” Bruno asked.
“Ten million kelvins, sir.”
“Ah.” That told him nothing useful.
“We’re being herded,” Cheng Shiao said, pointing at the display. “The sun on one side, the weapon pulses on the other. No way to move up or down out of the ecliptic plane. No place to go but here.”
“Toward the collapsium,” Bruno agreed angrily. “Deliah, can we grapple to it?”
“Not without shredding it. The whole thing will still be muon-contaminated, Bruno. Very fragile.”
“How contaminated? How long will it stand up to our tugging?”
“I don’t know. Seconds, minutes… I don’t know how to measure or calculate it. Do you?”
“Not offhand,” Bruno admitted. Then he said, “Bah. Enough. We grapple to it, at once. Ship? You hear me? Grab the end of that fragment, if you can—that’ll direct the tension along its strongest axis.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
Gravity flickered and lurched, then restored itself. The view outside the bow wheeled and locked, centering itself on the distant, powder-blue tendril of collapsium.
“It’s too hot in here,” Tamra’s courtier, Tusite, complained.
“We’re all hot,” Muddy answered her faintly, from his place on the floor. Evidently he’d decided to remain there. “We’re diving into the sun, for God’s sake.”
“Environmental controls at maximum,” the ship said in its own defense.
“Vent some oxygen from the emergency tank,“ Bruno suggested. “It’s supercompressed—its expansion upon release should provide some cooling.”
The temperature nudged down a bit. A sigh went through them all. In the window above, the collapsium grew larger, closer.
Sabadell-Andorra spoke again. “Receiving a transmission, sir. Playing it.”
Then Marlon’s voice, crackling heavily with solar-wind static. “Bruno, what are you doing? You leave that fragment alone! Its placement is very precise! What are you dragging it with?”
“No reply,” Bruno instructed.
“Bruno,” Marlon warned, “stop this at once. Blast it, I’ve given you every possible chance, and see where it gets me. Good-bye, sir.”
“Centroid of the flashes has shifted to our position,” the ship said. “It is now tracking us directly.”
Under his breath, Bruno muttered something history does not record. “All right, what’s our probability of being flashed?”
“Of being inside one of the flashes when it appears?” the ship asked.
“Exactly.”
“Approximately one-half percent, sir, every second.”
“I see. And how long before we collide with that collapsium fragment?”
“Forty seconds, sir.”
“Ah.” He looked around, at the assembled friends and acquaintances, at the robot and the copy of himself. “Well, I’m very sorry, everyone, but Marlon appears to have killed us all. My humblest apologies to every one of you.”
Then a thought struck him. “Ship, what part of the fragment are we approaching? The middle?”
“The end, sir. It’s where we grappled to, per your orders.”
“Indeed.” He turned to Deliah and spoke quickly. “The Ring Collapsiter is hollow, yes? A tube of collapsium, with an open conduit down the center. That’s the whole point of it: a tunnel of supervacuum through which light can travel unimpeded.”
“Yes,” Deliah said uncertainly, her eyes widening.
“How large a conduit, again? Six meters? Wide enough to admit this vessel?”
“Bruno, you can’t—well, perhaps you can.”
“Ship, can you dive straight down the center of the fragment?”
“I can try, sir. Contact in five seconds. Four, three, two, one…”
Chapter Twenty-One
in which the predictions of a doomsayer are fulfilled
Is this death, Bruno wondered? There was certainly a lot of screaming, or rather, a lot of unearthly, uncanny whispering sounds that reminded him of screaming. He also heard clear, high ringing sounds, like hundreds of little bells. And these flitting, translucent entities… Were they souls? Angels? Devils? Were they the ones screaming? The sounds were impossible to localize—they seemed to come from within his own head!