The Collapsium Read Free

reluctant to penetrate. On your marks …
    Bruno had tried to be one of the plodders, he really had. He’d spent years making his telecom collapsiters faster and better and cheaper, building the Iscog, building his fortune. But all that was
boring
compared to what he really wanted, which was to build an
arc de fin
capable of snatching photons from the end of time itself. Time
had
an end—the state equations made that clear enough—but what
sort
of end was the subject of endless noise and conjecture. And why grumble and theorize when you could just open up a window and see the whole business with your own two eyes?
    Hence these fifty collapsons, with their prancing orbits and their ghostly Hawking/Cerenkov glow. Not to
build
the arc—what a laugh!—but to build a tool that might build a tool that might build a
piece
of the arc, or at least point to a method by which it might be built. Bruno expected the project to last many thousands of years.
    He was all but immortal, by the way, and like everyone else he was still struggling to come to terms with it. It wasn’t so unequivocally wonderful a thing, really, a society in which death was always by suicide or freak accident or carefully concocted murder, in which the rare childhood death deprived its victim not of years or decades of life, but millennia. Such disparity, the very opposite of fairness. But again, the
potential
 …
    Was it strange to be excited, even after all these years? The eternal question, worn smooth with age: Was obsession a gift? He breathed deeply, preparing to submerge.
    Bruno’s fifty collapsons weren’t stable in their orbits and couldn’t remain there forever without some sort of collisionor ejection event messing the trajectories up and making a ruin of all his hard work. So he compared them against the blueprint in his mind, pressed his fingers against the invisible desk to bring up an interface, and triggered the gravity induction mechanisms.
    With them he grabbed a collapson, watched it jerk and flutter on his display. The forces he could apply here were weak, nothing compared to the gravity of the collapsons themselves, but of course the collapsons were in free fall. Weak forces, adding up over time, were just as effective as strong ones applied suddenly. And Bruno had learned to be a very patient man indeed. Slowly, he took hold of a second collapson, nudged it toward the first, then nudged it again a few seconds later to reduce the closing velocity. With ponderous momentum they drifted together, and finally touched. Their binding produced a flash of green; they continued on as a single joined piece. He grabbed a third collapson and carefully added it to the structure, grabbed a fourth and fifth.
    The other collapsons seemed almost alarmed, their orbital square dance taking place now as if on a gigantic quilt being ponderously dragged and folded around them. Bruno’s movements were careful, practiced; he’d done this hundreds of times, made enough mistakes to feel out the limits and breakpoints and failure modes, to know what he could and couldn’t get away with. Before his network gate had gone down and stopped the endless questions and exhortations of his fellow man, he’d often been asked why he did this part by hand, why he didn’t devise some software to handle these exacting manipulations. If the question came from a scientist or technician he’d generally ignored it, but for the craftsmen and artisans and landscape designers he’d had a ready reply: Why don’t
you
? The truth was, if he could automate this creative process he’d do it, and become the Queendom’s richest human all over again.
    He found himself singing, quietly, under his breath. Muttering, really; he had no real gift for song, nor any strong passion, but it bubbled up sometimes, unbidden, while he worked.
    Malgrant ens feia anar a església era un món petit … i meravellós un món de … guixos de colors que pintàveu vós …
    An old lullaby, he