He plucked the blue-jeweled wellgold ring from his finger then, and plinked it down on the wellwood desktop. Little tendrils of blue light fanned out around it for an instant, symbolic of the enormous volume of data he’d just dumped into the system. He thrust his fingers once more into the grapple controls, but this time the collapsium shrank and vanished at his touch, all thousand kilometers of it contracting—within minutes!—into an all-but-invisible, all-but-intangible hyper-collapsite cap, not unlike the one crowning Sabadell-Andorra’s bow. Last time, it had taken him a day, but all his careful steps were encoded here, sure as any music reel on Enzo’s faux-antique player piano. And they could be played at high speed.
The rest was easy: he charged the thing up with a stream of protons and repelled it electrically. Inertia meant little to its hypercollapsite structure; in an instant it was moving, to the solar north, up out of the plane of the ecliptic where the planets all orbited and the people all lived. In another instant, it was moving fast, and in the instant beyond that it had exceeded solar escape velocity and was no longer Bruno’s problem. Perhaps, in hundreds or thousands of years, civilization would expand enough to find such litter annoying—even hazardous—but at this point that was a risk Bruno was quite willing to take.
Settling in, he converted another collapsium fragment, and another, and another, and soon he was automating the process, overseeing it rather than controlling it directly with his fingers. He moved the system’s attention here, and there, and especially there, where the collapsiter’s children were already playing in the plasma loops of the upper chromopause.
He became aware of other people, standing around him while he worked. He listened to their breathing, to the rustle and ripple of their clothes as they shifted slowly from foot to foot, but really they were very quiet: they didn’t cough or clear their throats, didn’t ask questions, didn’t disturb him in the slightest. Only when he realized theirs was an awed silence did he begin to get annoyed.
“Haven’t you seen anyone clean up a mess before?” he asked gruffly.
But nobody answered him. Nobody dared. He continued with his work: twenty, fifty, eighty fragments cleared. It was slow going after that, the fragments more distant, the light-lag stretching his response times out to two minutes and more. But still, he persisted. Only when he’d cleared eighty-five fragments did he begin to fret. Only when he’d cleared ninety did he begin, truly, to doubt. Only when he’d cleared ninety-five did he know for certain, and only when he’d cleared ninety-eight did he admit defeat.
But admit it he did, pushing the chair back, standing up, turning around awkwardly with the spacesuit bunched up around his ankles. All his friends were there, waiting for him, keeping him company while he worked. Sad-faced Muddy with his jester’s hair; little Vivian looking almost like the girl she used to be; Hugo, with his arm reattached and a band of shiny new metal around its socket; Deliah van Skettering staring rapt at Bruno’s activities, interested as much in the mechanics as in the actual result. And Tusite, yes, the closest thing here to an innocent, uninvolved civilian. They had waited here like this for hours. Their faces—even Hugo’s— were expectant, almost exultant; he hated to disappoint them. But disappoint them he must.
“There are, ah, two fragments,” he began slowly, “that lie on the far side of the sun, inaccessible to grapples operating from the surface of Mercury. Now, I’ve dealt with several of these already—their orbits are relatively fast, and even here the sun is only a few degrees wide, not really so huge. So it’s largely a matter of waiting a few hours for the fragments to come ‘round where we can see them. The trouble is, these two aren’t going to emerge—their trajectories intersect the photosphere long before they’ll be visible or accessible to us.”
Faces fell at the news, but otherwise no one replied to it, or reacted in any way. They were tired as well, Bruno saw: tired of hoping, tired of being afraid. Too tired, in the end, to react at all.
“I’m sorry,” he told them sincerely. “The fault is entirely mine; if I’d juggled the priorities differently, if I’d handled these two fragments a few hours ago, this problem would not have occurred. And so, I have failed Tamra’s Queendom a final time.”
“So close,” Deliah said. There was no reproach in her voice, though, no regret. In fact, she sounded almost proud. “So close, Bruno. You’ve done… The situation was hopeless two weeks ago—maybe it was hopeless way before that, and we just didn’t know it. So if it’s hopeless now, you’re hardly to blame.”
Then Muddy stepped forward, his arms outstretched, and for a moment Bruno thought he was going to be hugged. But instead, Muddy reached past him, plucked the little wellgold ring off the desktop, and pranced away.
“Hopeless?” he sang, his body twisting, twirling on one foot, so that Bruno believed, all at once, that he really had been a jester at some foul court of Marlon’s. “Hopeless? There’s never zero hope, as long as some dope has a life to throw away. Okay?” And with those words he was off, running for the door.
“Muddy?” Bruno said. “Muddy!”
He tried to give chase, but the spacesuit tripped him up, and he was obliged—with Tusite’s help—to peel his feet out of it one by one. By this time, Muddy had a substantial lead. Bruno chased him on the blood-sticky floor of the spider room; the gritty, dusty floor of the fog room; the oily, carcass-strewn floor of the robot room; and up the spiral stairs themselves. The lights were on, at least—the place looked not so much menacing now as sadly defeated. But Muddy reached the hatch of Sabadell-Andorra fully ten seconds ahead of him, and by the time Bruno got there, there was only a smooth, seamless impervium surface to pound on.
A speaker emerged.
“Bruno, stand back, please. I’m going to melt the access cylinder’s hull back into place.”
Indeed, the ship’s hull gleamed through a rough opening, metal and wellstone melted and folded and wrinkled away from what had, until moments ago, been the hatch. Now the edges of that hole began to sizzle and pop, and slowly the pulled-back ridges of material began to smooth inward again, covering up the impervium hull, pushing it back and away into the vacuum of Mercury’s surface.
“Muddy!” Bruno shouted. “You open this hatch immediately! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Making amends,” Muddy answered cryptically.
“Open the hatch, Muddy! You can’t make off with this ship; it isn’t right.”
“Make off?” Muddy sounded hurt. “I’m taking her into the photosphere, Bruno. I’m going after those fragments.”
Bruno’s skin went cold. “You’re what? Muddy, they’ll be inside the sun by the time you get to them.”
The loudspeaker was not a face; Bruno could read no emotion there. “Grapples can reach inside the sun, yes?” Muddy said. “At close range? I’ll convert the fragments to hy-percollapsites and simply pull them out.”
“By pulling yourself in,” Bruno said, finally understanding. His voice was soft, disbelieving, probably not easy to hear over the sizzling of wellstone reactions. “You’ll be killed. I don’t see how you could possibly survive.”
“Nor I,” Muddy agreed, and Bruno thought his voice sounded, if not exactly happy, then at least vindicated. “I was created for one purpose, Bruno: to prove that you could be broken, that you could be cowardly and contemptible and weak. I carried the proof of myself right to you, like the craven that I was. But now, Bruno, I’m spent, and therefore free to define a new purpose. Let me show you that you can also be brave.”