The Collapsium Read Free Page A

supposed. Catalan words, extinct in the absence of Catalan notes to carry them along. It didn’t bother him that he was probably mangling it, though he briefly imagined his parents wincing and rolling in their graves. Such thoughts were fleeting, quickly crushed beneath the juggernaut of the business at hand.
    Slowly, his design took shape: something like a bucket, a fan, a lens. The shape wasn’t useful in and of itself; most collapsium structures weren’t. But to get to the shape you wanted, you had to pass through stable intermediate designs, adding bricks one by one without upsetting the system’s precarious equilibrium. Often, this meant building complex shapes that “fell” into simpler ones when completed, as a key and a lock might fuse to extrude a single, solid doorknob. Or in this case, a kind of spacetime crowbar able to “pry” bits of vacuum apart to see what lay beneath. Or so he hoped!
    Before the assembly was half complete, though, an alarm bell chimed. This was a sound he’d chosen carefully, one that
penetrated
, demanding attention. The gravity wave alarm. Grunting, he thumbed a lighted yellow circle, increasing magnification, leaning forward to scrutinize the display, to isolate the source of the anomaly.
    He didn’t find it. Everything was right where it should be, his little Cerenkov pinpoints all well within spatial and vibrational tolerances. The warning chimed again, though, louder, the perturbation stronger, and Bruno cursed, because the crowbar-to-be was in a very delicate stage right now, its collapsium lattice supported by little more than good intentions. He grabbed the ends of the structure, hoping to steady it, but through the desk’s sensory pads he felt a mild shudder, then another, stronger one. The warning chimed a third time, and this perturbation
had
to be external, because soon his projectwas waving like a seaweed, the collapsons growing uncertain as their holes’ gravitic interactions wandered in and out of phase.
    “Excuse me, sir,” the house announced through a softly lit speaker that appeared in the wall. “A ship is approaching.”
    The collapsium slipped from his fingers and fell in on itself, an origami structure folding and wrinkling into a spitwad of glowing dots.
    “Blast,” Bruno said. Then the dots winked out one by one, and a few seconds later it was finished and gone.
    “ETA, seven minutes,” the house said, providing a flat schematic wallplate that showed the spaceship’s approach vector in relation to planet, sun, and moon.
    Bruno sighed. The newer, much larger black hole he’d just created was difficult to detect, lacking the clear emissions of a collapson, but he found it by feel, charged it with a stream of protons and then, with a grunt of disgust, hurled it off toward his
other
storage bin, the “wastebasket” hypermass orbiting his world a thousand kilometers out. The trajectory was fine, nowhere near that of the approaching ship. Maybe he should have arranged to graze them with it; a warning shot, a demand for apology. But no, such horseplay could too easily go wrong, else he wouldn’t be stuck out here in the first place.
    He sighed again, already trying to convince himself that seven days’ lost labor meant nothing, that he had plenty more time—infinitely more—where that came from. The dollar expenditure was actually harder to accept: two hundred neubles down the drain, literally, along with the twenty he’d wasted last week, and the eight last month, and the twenty more he’d thrown—at one time or another—into the wastebasket for this or that reason. The moon grew smaller, ever smaller, in his sky, and while he certainly had the money to buy more substance for it, the logistical difficulty of getting it
delivered
was daunting. His last shipment had required the efforts of tens of thousands of people, whole corporations commandeered for the purpose, and altogether the enterprise had cost even more than the planet itself.