He’d still been prone to fits of distraction, but that was at least partially a consequence of his having to impress the scholarship committee or starve. This was before all the money had started. And the fame, yes. Tamra’s court had sharpened those social skills still further, in a careless, sink-or-swim kind of way. But by then, settling into life at Nuku‘ alofa, he’d found a kind of prison accreting around him: erstwhile colleagues tarring him with labels like “tycoon” and “politician,” while the media adopted him as a sort of Romeo Einstein. Increasingly, people seemed to “know” a de Towaji whom Bruno himself had never met.
Even at court—or perhaps especially there—no one seemed prepared to advise him, to take him under a friendly wing, to understand his life or his problems at all. Was he permitted to have problems? Even Tamra, wrestling incomprehensible demons of her own, had thrown her hands up at his grousing. That was when he’d begun to daydream—and eventually obsess—about the end of time, and the arc de fin that would someday show it to him.
And of course living alone meant not having to think about these things at all, getting lazy about them, forming a bond with the house software that gradually let the language devolve to shorthand codes and even, sorry to say, preverbal grunting and pointing. At least he wasn’t in his underwear.
So with a twinge of guilt and no decorum whatsoever, he simply strode to the edge of the platform and looked down, pressing first his hands and then his forehead against the slick, clear surface of the dome, straining for a view of the sun.
The best he could manage was an edge of the corona, the vast, diffuse, superhot solar atmosphere. As in an eclipse, magnetic field lines stood out clearly; looping threads of bright and dim against the blue-white glow, but much nearer than any eclipse he’d ever seen. Beneath this platform, the corona flared huge, as wide as ten full moons, as structured and detailed as a wreath of burning, phosphorescent ivy.
“Quite a view,” he said. “We’re close in. Six months until this ring falls in? Solar disturbances could begin sooner than that, as it passes through the chromopause.”
He tried to picture such an event. Collapsium was a “semi-safe” material in that it didn’t consume matter the way a large black hole would; the component hypermasses, being precisely the size of protons, couldn’t swallow protons, any more than a standard manhole could swallow its cover. But they could swallow smaller particles, and slowly stretch in the process.
Would coronal plasma densities be sufficient to trigger such a chain reaction? The plasma nuclei would certainly cling to the collapsons as they fell past, sliding into orbit around the lattice points like planets in newly formed, rapidly growing star systems. Enough nuclei to make a difference? Enough to alter the behavior of a star?
“ThereVe been detailed simulations,” Marlon Sykes said, after an apologetic clearing of the throat. “From now, it’s six months to the earliest symptoms. After that, barely a week until the photosphere is penetrated. It was the first thing we checked.”
Well, now Bruno genuinely was embarrassed. Of course they’d check a thing like that, long before they ever thought to send for him. Marlon Sykes clearly was not stupid; the glittering arch above them was proof enough of that. Bruno stepped away from the dome, absently wiping at it where his forehead had rested, though no smear or smudge remained.
“Of course,” he said, now with proper and unfeigned apology. “Of course you did. Forgive me, Declarant.”
Sykes smiled, indulgently if not quite warmly. “Stop it, Declarant. Am I to forgive you every fifteen seconds? It seems a waste of our talents, this officiousity. Call me Marlon, please. Speak to me as a friend, loosely and without calculation, and we shall both be the happier for it.”
Well, that seemed rather a courtly way of asking him not to be courtly. Was there some cunning insult here, buried in subtexts and subtleties? Bruno grunted noncommittally, then caught himself. What if there were? What did it matter? He was here to help Tamra, to help the Queendom in general and Marlon Sykes in particular. It wasn’t difficult to imagine some rancor there, some resentment at imagined usurpations of authority and respect, but did that change the physics one iota? No. Here, at least, it was better simply to state his thoughts as they actually were, with social filters disengaged.
Which of course was exactly what Sykes himself—what Marlon—was proposing.
“Damn me,” Bruno said, with forced cheer. “I’ve been away too long. Marlon it is, and you may call me Bruno, or ‘fathead,’ or anything you please. We’ve a sun to save, yes? And not with our manners.”
Marlon’s grin widened. “Well spoken, fathead.”
Despite Her Majesty’s sharp intake of breath at this, the two men shared a sudden laugh, and Bruno felt the easing of a mutual hostility he hadn’t fully realized was there.
He looked up at the sparkling arch of the Ring Collapsiter again, this time with an eye for the details of its construction. Based on the spacing of its gently pulsing Cerenkov pinpoints, he judged the structure’s zenith to be some two kilometers above the platform, its range increasing to perhaps millions of times that much as it sloped away to the sides. A ring, yes, but one so enormous that it looked flat, ruler-straight, until it had all but vanished in the distance, at which point it seemed to turn down sharply, and finally vanish beneath the platform. But for all its enormous girth, the ring was only about six meters thick. Its cross-section appeared to be circular—an observation that Marlon confirmed when asked.
So what were these other lights, these bright flarepoints of yellow-white, spaced along the lattice every half kilometer or so?
“Curved sheets of superreflector,” Marlon said, with something like rue in his tone. “Placed near the ring’s outer edge, they reflect Hawking radiation back in the direction of the sun. Since the radiation already headed for the sun isn’t reflected, there’s a net downward flow of mass-energy, pushing the collapsiter upward. Like a very weak rocket engine, using collapson evaporation as the energy source.”
“Ah!” Bruno said, impressed. “What holds the superreflec-tors in place?”
Marlon pursed his lips, shook his head. Now he did look rueful. “Nothing, my friend. Nothing at all. They’re perfect sails, and between light pressure, solar wind, and Hawking radiation, they start accelerating right away. Within an hour they’re pushed too far to do any good, and within a few days they’ve exceeded solar escape velocity. Bye-bye, superreflector. We could hold them down with electromagnetic grapples, but of course that simply reverses the problem of holding the collapsium lattice up.”
“So it’s useless, then,” Bruno said cautiously.
Sykes gave an emphatic nod. “Quite useless, yes. I told Her Majesty as much—” Here he raised his voice and looked glumly at Tamra. “—but she’s in a mood to try… almost anything.” And here his gaze was directed at Bruno: another idea born of royal desperation.
“Not your idea, then,” Bruno said, ignoring what must certainly have been a deliberate jibe.
“No. Some functionary’s.”
They were silent for a while, Marlon looking at Tamra, Tamra looking at Bruno, Bruno looking at the collapsium arch, the two golden robots looking studiously at nothing.
“Tell me your idea,” Bruno said to Marlon after a while.