“Muddy, I—”
“You’ll be killed,” Muddy insisted. “Needlessly, pointlessly killed! You can’t save him in time!”
“You’re saying I’m going to die?” Rodenbeck asked, his breath now coming in gasps.
“Blast it,” Bruno said, quietly, hollowly, because he almost certainly would be killed if he intervened. But perhaps Rodenbeck—an artist, an innocent in this madness—could be saved. With numb fingers, he undid his safety harness. Already he was feeling the beginnings of weight, as the stern of the ship swung close to a collapson node. And for so small a black hole, the gradients would be exceedingly steep. Wenders Rodenbeck was probably already feeling more than a gee, the equivalent of Earth-surface gravity. And in the next thirty seconds…
There was no way to avoid this; the ship couldn’t go forward, couldn’t drag itself backward with grapples, couldn’t go anywhere without turning around. But Bruno should have foreseen this difficulty, should have seen where the danger would occur and then ordered everyone away from it. Steeling himself, he leaned over the side of his couch…
And was whisked, with an instantaneous, all-but-inertia-less flicker of movement, to the bow of the ship.
“I f-f-forbid it,” Muddy said, his hard, solid-wax torso bouncing and skating over Bruno’s own. He held on tightly to something, pinning Bruno to the window there, preventing him from escaping. Muddy had leaped the length of the ship, apparently, to ensure this.
“Let go,” Bruno said urgently. “Let go! I must help him. This is my fault!”
“It isn’t. We’ve never done this before. What man has walked inside collapsium like a tunnel beneath a river? What man can foresee every problem? You saved him once, but this time, Marlon has him for certain.”
“Oh! God!” Rodenbeck cried out, weakly.
“Release me,” Bruno insisted. “We’ve seen deaths before, but I can do something this time. Listen, you coward! You sniveler! Am I really so weak, so selfish? Am I really so capable of being you? Release me!”
“I will not.”
Below, Bruno was just able to see Rodenbeck’s struggling form, pinned to the deck now by several gees. There was no expression on his amoeba face, but the expression in his gasping voice was plain enough: “I told you… this stuff was… dangerous, de To…”
And then he died, his lungs’ strength insufficient to lift their own tremendous weight. He suffocated there at the bottom of the ship, while Bruno and the others, hanging only a few meters away, feeling only the merest stirrings of gravity, did nothing. Terrible sounds rose up from the body as its bones snapped, then shattered, then powdered, until finally Rodenbeck was nothing but a leathery, vaguely man-shaped pancake on the floor. Five hundred gee? A thousand? The gradient itself must have been terrible, a difference of hundreds of gees just between the deck and the space a single centimeter above it. Bruno could see the collapson node there behind Rodenbeck’s body. He watched it pull the remaining remains into a circular mass and drag them along the floor as it rotated by.
And still the jets hummed; still the faint bells tinkled in the air.
“My God,” Deliah said, and began to weep.
Bruno finally stopped struggling.
The rotation continued another fifteen seconds, until finally Sabadell-Andorra proclaimed the maneuver complete. “Eight seconds to fuel depletion,” it added.
“Right,” Muddy said. “Grapples on full. T-take us out of here.”
“Acknowledged, sir. Destination?”
“The planet Mercury.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
in which history’s great wizards clash
There was a lot of talk, once they’d entered normal space again.
“All the things people are doing when they die,” Vivian said quietly. “The things they’re just about to do at the moment the strings are cut. Sometimes nasty, sometimes wonderful, sometimes perfectly ordinary. My grandmother used to say these were things God wanted for himself. She was a kind of Muslim, I suppose—her God was always needy and bitter like that. Not remote, though—he was right there looming over her all the time, like a drunk uncle. But when she died she wasn’t doing anything special, just sitting by the window in her rocking chair, wrapped up in an old blanket.”
“Maybe God needed that,” Shiao suggested matter-of-factly.
Vivian gave an absent nod. “Yes, that’s what Mother said. But couldn’t he just, you know, create his own moment of peace? Why should he need to take Grammy’s? When I was older, I think I would wake up sometimes, wondering if that God of hers were looming over me, ready to steal my dreams or my morning breath or something. What a puny motive! He doesn’t get to do much of that anymore, and I’m glad about it. History’s greatest thug; phooey, I disown him! The day I stand at his throne I’ll place him under arrest; I swear I will.” She cast a gloomy look at the bloodstained deck. ”Rest in peace, Wenders Rodenbeck. Rest, all the victims of this atrocity.”
And there was other talk as welclass="underline" Was Declarant Sykes still looking for them? Should they attempt to render the ship invisible? That wouldn’t work, of course—it’d simply let the sunlight through, to poach all the remaining people inside.
Bruno’s grief had now become unbearable; finally it commanded his attention. He ignored the whole discussion, simply throwing an arm over his face and weeping, weeping, his tears seeming to come from an endless reservoir somewhere. He’d been powerless, all those years ago, to save Enzo and Bernice de Towaji when the Old Girona Bistro fell down on them. He knew they were dying in there, knew there was time to save them if only, if only… And so, today, had he been helpless to save Wenders. And Tamra, yes—how very grievously he’d failed herl Perhaps he was, quite simply, powerless after all. Perhaps all his deeds and accomplishments were so much illusion, just chance and foolish self-deception. It seemed a plausible enough notion, at that moment.
“What do we do with the… body?” someone asked.
“It seems to have gelled. Look, it’s a solid mass. Weird. Into the fax with it, I’d say.”
“I’ll do it. Here.”
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Save us! Hasn’t there been enough? Deposit us in some safe location before you dash off on this mission!” That sounded like Tamra’s friend Tusite. Bruno forgave her the outburst; Tamra surrounded herself with all manner of silly people, but very few of them were weak. It didn’t imply weakness, to bend and break under the strain of these events. Indeed, quite the reverse—it was only human, part of the basic mammalian wiring, to feel terrified when helpless. And to grieve for one’s Queen, yes, as for no other thing except, perhaps, one’s own children.
He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to be comforted. He wanted comfort, period. But he sensed, he knew, that no one would have anything to offer but their own grief, and perhaps some platitudes. Such a tragedy. We all loved her so well and so personally, each in our own way. How trite! How monstrous! Platitudes existed for this very purpose; to underscore the dreary, hopeless banality of human suffering. Should he carve a pyramid with his bare hands? Circumnavigate a world? Would that help? Even for himself, he had no words or thoughts of wisdom, only platitudes.
And then Muddy’s voice spoke up. “There are no’s-s-safe places, madam, and no chance to look for them if there were. Time is of the essence if we’re to foil this… madman’s plot.”