“Cheng!” Vivian called out again.
“He’s injured,” Bruno said back to her. “You must turn the faxes back on. Quickly!”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it; you have to. We replaced part of the domestic software with your own household AI.”
“You what?”
“It was in the ship’s library. Never mind! Help Cheng!”
Bruno frowned, and for some reason he looked up at the ceiling. “House? Hello, are you here?”
“Good day, sir,” that old, familiar voice said. “I’m detecting numerous diagnostic errors, and I seem to be under some sort of direct software assault from a native AI, but I await your instructions nonetheless. It’s good to be working with you again, sir.”
“Turn the faxes on!” Bruno cried, leveling a finger at Shiao’s struggling, bleeding, dying body. “Help me get him into the fax! Quickly! Quickly!”
“Working,” the house replied easily. “Fax machine activated.”
Sure enough, the orifice hummed to life, flashed briefly, and extruded a humanoid robot of gold and tin, faceless and graceful, precisely like the servants Bruno had employed for so very many years. The space between fax and victim was several meters, but the robot danced across it in an instant, swept Shiao’s body off the floor in a bloody arc, and hurled it directly into the orifice. The body vanished at once, and an instant later the robot had leaped through as well, vanished as well. The whole affair had taken three seconds.
Marlon still struggled on the floor, rolling and flopping, trying to face Bruno and only partially succeeding. “Nobody wins,” he said urgently. “I know what you’re thinking, Bruno, but you can’t possibly grapple all that collapsium up away from the sun. Not in time, not at all. You can have your arc de fin; you can see the very lights and darknesses of uncreation. This year! This month! I give it to you, sir, my gift. All the credit, all the glory, if you’ll only let me at the controls. Let me at them!”
“No,” Bruno said flatly.
“No? Think hard, Bruno. I tell you, you cannot save the sun. Will you at least see that its death has meaning?”
“No. Indeed, I stand here wondering…” The hairs prickled up on the back of Bruno’s neck. He felt awake, really awake, for perhaps the first time in his life. “I stand here wondering what I was thinking all that time. An arc defin? What use is that? If we’re to live forever, won’t we see the end of time with our own two eyes? All too soon, I fear! We’ll look back and say ‘Already? Already the world is ending, the stars winking out? Why, we’d only just begun!’ And if that end is spoiled by de Towaji, a trillion years before the fact, why… one wonders why we’ve bothered to live at all.”
“You’re mad,” Marlon said, his voice edging on panic. Straining against the putty, he managed to lift his head enough to look Bruno in the eye. “It’s my own fault; I’ve driven you mad. I’ve killed your Queen!”
“Indeed,” Bruno agreed, nodding slowly. “Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s all it is. The work of decades falls away like ashes, leaving nothing, no sense of purpose or desire. There is no Tamra for me to hide from, no Tamra for me to return to when at long last I’m finished. To live forever without her? Even to contemplate it? I suppose I am mad.”
Marlon’s eyes were sharp, his tone urgent. “Listen to me, Bruno. Ask a question with me. Where do people go when they die? Nowhere? Where exactly is nowhere?”
Ah, but Bruno was awake—he saw the trick in that question. He was encouraged to conclude that “nowhere,” since it didn’t exist, was of zero size, and by corollary that everything that no longer existed—being also of zero size and therefore located “nowhere”—could be found there, instantly, without effort. With zero movement, zero searching, zero time. Ah, but by that logic, everything that never existed could be found there as well. So could everything that existed now, but someday wouldn’t. At the end of time, everything would be nowhere, including time itself, and so Bruno declined to fall for the trick. The size of nowhere was surely infinite, in time as well as space, else he and Marlon and everyone else would be there already.
He raised a finger in Marlon’s direction, and waggled it. “House, remove this body as well.”
“No, Bruno! No! Believe me, you can’t stop this. It’s pointless to try!”
The robot appeared, danced across the floor to where Marlon lay, and scooped him up.
“It’s never pointless to try” Bruno mused.
And then the fax machine hummed, and there was no one else in the room there with him.
“Bruno?” Vivian’s voice quietly, sadly, said from the speaker, treading with utmost tenderness. “Bruno, is Cheng all right?”
“He’s stored, dear,” Bruno replied wearily. “He’s safe for the moment. But the sun, alas, is not.”
It seemed to take a long time to hobble over to Marlon’s little wellstone desk. “House,” he said along the way, “activate that. Thank you.”
He sat down at the wellwood chair, taking the load off his feet, off his back, off his pain. The old grapple controls were there, the old holographic displays, as if Marlon had cribbed them from Bruno’s own designs. Tortured them, probably, from Muddy’s own pained and screaming lips. How tired Muddy must have been, after years of torment! How extraordinary, that he’d managed to accomplish so much in spite of it.
Bruno pulled up an interface and quietly immersed himself.
Here was the sun, here the dotted line where the Ring Collapsiter had once stood. And beneath it, in a hundred spinning fragments, were the Ring Collapsiter’s children, and he saw at once that there were simply too many of them, that they were simply too large, that most were simply too close to the sun to retrieve. They were mere hours from penetration, from the beginning of Sol’s slow and painful death. Still, he grabbed the nearest one with Marlon’s EM grapples, which were of a fine and strong design. He tugged, he twisted, he prodded and nudged. None of it, of course, worked. The best he could accomplish, really, would be to tear it apart, to break it, to let it collapse into a real black hole that he’d have even less hope of manipulating.
“Ah, well,” he whispered, “she was a good star while she lasted.”
And then he remembered the ring. The ring! The well-stone ring he’d plucked from his own hypercomputer, minutes before he’d destroyed it and the planet it stood on! That ring contained the program, the dance card, the recipe by which collapsium was converted to hypercollapsite vacuogel.
Perhaps all was not lost.
He stood, quickly, knocking over the chair behind him. The ring was on his finger, but his finger was inside this blasted spacesuit! “Off,” he said to it. “Off, you!” And he struggled with it as the hasps unfastened, as the seams parted, as the blood-smeared helmet dome fell away and rang against the floor like a bell. Finally an arm was free, and he used that to free the other one, and he was about to peel his legs out of it as well when he decided that bah, it didn’t matter. He pulled the chair up under him and stuffed the suit underneath it, trailing from the tops of his armored boots.