“Fair enough,” he said, raising his palms in immediate surrender lest he be forced, in some way, to explain or apologize for himself. He had good reasons for all of it. Didn’t he? “Er, perhaps you should tell me what you’ve been doing. With the collapsium, I mean.”
Her Majesty rapped the tabletop. “Sketch pad, please.” Obligingly, the table darkened, and where her finger traced, colored lines and dots and circles appeared. “This is the sun, all right? I can’t draw well, but these here are the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
In fact, for hasty finger paintings her renditions were fairly accurate.
“Sol is big in the inner system, and if two planets are aligned with the sun between them—opposition, they call it?—then network signals have to be sent around via satellite. There’s a time delay associated with the extra distance, and this implies a cost.”
“Yes,” Bruno agreed in a knowing tone. He’d laid the foundations for the collapsiter grid himself—besting previous network bandwidths by six orders of magnitude—and he understood a thing or two about how the system worked.
Tamra looked up at him but declined to glare. “Some of our people have worked out a fix, Declarant, by putting an annulus of collapsium around the sun. The ‘Ring Collapsiter,’ as Declarant Sykes has named it.”
“Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The speed of light was much higher in the Casimir supervacuum of a collapsium lattice than in the half-filled energy states of normal space. A ring of collapsium encircling the sun could admit signals at one side, expel them at the other, and reduce the time not only of the trip around, but of the trip through as well. Like a highway bypass where the speed limit was a trillion times higher than in the crowded streets of downtown. Why crawl through when you could blaze the long way around in half an instant, cutting light-minutes off your journey? “Very elegant, very impressive. Very enormously expensive, I’d imagine.”
Tamra shrugged. “The cost ladies say it’ll pay for itself in a century, through increased efficiency. It’s actually just the first piece of a whole new kind of network our componeers envision: a spiderweb of collapsium threads stretching to every corner of the Queendom.”
That metaphor had been stretched a few times too many, Bruno judged. A “spiderweb” would twist apart in hours, each rung of it orbiting the sun at different levels, different velocities. Unless…
“Good Lord. This ring of yours. It’s static?”
Tamra quirked her head, not understanding.
“It’s stationary?” he tried. “Does it orbit the sun, or is it suspended above by some other means?”
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Static, yes. I’m told it needs to be, to function properly. You’d have to ask Declarant Sykes’ people for the details.”
Bruno marveled. A static ring completely encircling the sun? The mother of all collapsiters, not orbiting but hanging above its parent star like a gossamer suspension bridge? Unthinkable! Life in the Queendom certainly had changed in his absence. He found his mouth overflowing with questions.
“What holds it up? Good Lord, what holds it together? You’d have standing waves at multiples of the gravitic frequency. Around the ring, that’s fine, but across it I don’t see how the phases would match. You’d get shearing forces that would tend to pull the collapsium out of—”
He caught himself; Her Majesty’s expression showed nothing more than polite incomprehension. Sol was fortunate to have a queen so sharp, so quick, but it had trained her in more superficial pursuits, made a kind of glorified video star of her. No scientist, she.
“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, exposing his hair’s grayed roots to her inspection. “I’ll stop interrupting. What problem brings you here? To me, of all people?”
She frowned, the troubled creases deepening across her face. “Bruno, I need you to come back with me. Really, I’m not kidding. Fax yourself downsystem; have a look at this thing; tell us what we can do. I wouldn’t have come all the way out here if it weren’t important.”
“The ring needs stiffening?” he guessed.
She shook her head. “Every analysis tells us the design is sound. Even the environmentalists agree it’s more than strong enough, even now, when it’s only a third complete, still held up by electromagnetic grapple stations.”
“Hmm. So what’s the problem?”
Her Majesty sighed, looking almost as if she might begin to fidget, embarrassed by some personal inadequacy. Finally, she said, “We had a solar flare last month. A big one, that hit the collapsiter dead center and burned out half the grapples that were holding it up. We’re moving new ones into place, but…”
“But meanwhile the structure is slipping,” he said.
She nodded, then picked up her glass and drank deeply from it, as if the ice water were something stronger to soothe her nerves. It was a gesture Bruno hadn’t seen—or made—in a long time. Afterward she held onto the glass, kept it close to her lips, until Bruno realized she was using it as an excuse to keep from speaking further. When he’d waited long enough for her next words, she took another sip, then another, until finally the silence had dragged on long enough and Bruno was obliged to fill it himself.
It was uncharacteristically clumsy of her; another indication of her alarmingly unQueenly distress.
“It’s accelerating,” he suggested. “You can’t get enough grappling force in place fast enough.”
Again, she nodded.
“When a boulder first starts rolling downhill,” he said, reaching for the sort of analogy she preferred, “you can stop it with a well-placed pebble, but if you’re late on the scene it takes more, a stone, an iron chock. And if the boulder rolls over those…”
She set down her glass. “You have the essence of it, yes. As the ring falls closer, the sun’s gravity increases, and we simply can’t build new grapples fast enough to stop it. I’m told we’ve got six months.”
It was Bruno’s turn to frown. “Six months before what? Before this ‘Ring Collapsiter’ falls into the sun?”
Tamra nodded yet again.
Bruno felt the blood draining from his face. “Good Lord. Good Lord. An accident indeed!”
“You’ll help us,” Tamra said. It wasn’t a command; her tone hovered right at the edge of asking. As if he had some right to refuse her. As if he had even the ability to refuse her, else why would he ever have left her side in the first place?
His glance took in her copper eyes, her almond skin, the elegance of her purple dress, cinched at the waist with a chain of diamond-studded gold. With a start, he realized it was precisely the outfit he’d last seen her in. Precisely the haircut, precisely the cosmetic palette. Had she worn it deliberately, in some coarse attempt to influence him? The idea was unsettling.
“Glass ceiling,” he said to the house. Light flooded in. Looking left and squinting, he pointed. “My sun warms exactly one subject, Tamra. Yours warms billions. Even assuming a solar collapse were somehow survivable to those nearby, which I doubt very much, the idea of there being no Sol to have a Queendom of… Tamra, do you think I’d refuse you? We’ve squabbled, all right, but do you think so little of me? Why are you here? Your robots should have dragged me to you.”
“They nearly did,” she said, her voice hinting at sadness. “And no, I didn’t think you’d refuse me. But you do insist on being difficult. One has to approach Bruno de Towaji in very particular ways, I’m afraid. Even if one is Queen of all humanity.”