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 collision or 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.
An old lullaby, he 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 project was 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. Insanely selfish extravagances—the leading vice of the wealthy. But he couldn’t postpone the next purchase forever.