“Four and a half,” Bruno agreed. He stepped out into the daylight and then quickly thought better of it. However perfect his eyes might be, strong light still made them ache when he’d been working too long. He retreated to the study instead, motioning for Mursk to follow. “Clear off a chair and sit, if you like.”
Mursk’s eyes ran along the floorboards, taking in the zero-elevation curve where floor met wall. On a planette this small, a surface could be either “level” like Bruno’s floor—hugging the shape of the ground—or “flat,” pleasing the eye but spilling and rolling every loose object into its center. Mursk opened his mouth as if to comment, but then noticed the scrawled equations and came up short again.
“Wormhole tensors,” Bruno said apologetically. “An arcanum even by mathematical standards. I’ve been tempted, these past three centuries, to recast general relativity in matrix notation, just to make sense of the damned arithmetic.”
Having no response to that, Mursk shrugged blankly and cleared off a seat. “This is a job interview?”
“It is,” Bruno confirmed. And though a part of him squirmed with impatience, with the burning need to get back to his equations, he had other curiosities which burned even brighter. He’d known this lad who’d known his son, and he would wade through any pleasantries necessary to get the full data dump. What had Bascal really done out there in the colonies? And yes, in truth Bruno was hungry for company as well. He could always put a copy of himself back to work if necessary. “But there’s no hurry. I thought we could chitchat, you and I.”
“You want to know about Bascal,” Mursk said, with no particular emphasis.
“I want to know about everything.”
“He was a good king,” Mursk lamented, examining his fingernails as if the dust of Sorrow might still somehow be lodged there. “He really was, for hundreds of years. A builder, a visionary. He foresaw the economic collapse, long before anyone else did. He took steps to avert it, then to mitigate it, then to ride it out. But apparently it was bigger than he was.”
“You were friends,” Bruno prodded.
“The best. No matter where I went or what I did, I always ended up in his dining room. It’s hard for me to think that won’t happen anymore.”
“But you and he had your differences, yes?”
“Philosophical,” Mursk said with a dismissive wave. “We all have differences. Your son was a brother to me, and we squabbled like brothers.”
Bruno shifted in his chair, feeling it adjust beneath his weight. Was this refugee telling the full truth? Was he telling King Bruno what he thought King Bruno wanted to hear? With a sudden stab of impatience, he stood up again. “Come with me, lad. We’ll have a walk around the planette.”
“I’ve seen planettes before,” Mursk said, though he stood and followed Bruno out.
Maplesphere was a large world as such things went, and Bruno used little of its space except as, well, space. On the far side, the obligatory lake was small, crowded by trees. Bruno’s maple forest covered half the remaining land area, blocking the view of the too-close horizon, making the pocket world seem that much bigger. The trees also damped reverberation, so that the daylight squawking of a bluejay would not disturb the nighttime slumber of a squirrel on the world’s other side, which after all was only a kilometer’s walk away. Even the miniature “sun”—a fusion-powered sila’a or pocket star—was only forty kilometers distant.
“A laser-cooled tropopausal barocline,” Bruno said, pointing up at the cloud-strewn sky, “allows this world to retain a nitrox atmosphere, without heavy nobles cluttering up the gas balance. The weather itself serves as a backup system, cooling the upper atmosphere so its molecules have a harder time escaping into space. Moist air rises, radiates its heat to the vacuum, and then falls as rain. Maplesphere is the rainiest planette ever created, and thus the most meteorologically stable.”
“Interesting,” Mursk said, with apparent sincerity.
“Alas, ‘most stable’ does not mean ‘actually stable.’ Day by day, year by year, the planette loses gas to the wilds of space. Without replenishment, I’d have a pure vacuum at ground level within two hundred years. If the power failed, I’d have it much sooner than that. And as the colonies have shown us, sooner or later the power always fails. If civilization is to ride out its gloomier moments, we’ll need a larger class of planette—one that can hold its atmosphere indefinitely.”
“Is this place serviced by tankers, then?” Mursk asked.
“Rarely. I’ve designed a tertiary system which is capable of bleeding mass from the neubles at the planette’s core.”
“Hmm. Clever.” They passed from the cottage’s grassy meadow into the green gloom of the forest itself.
“Lad, I want you to level with me. No sweeteners, no half-truths. You fled the Barnard colony with guns blazing, in the midst of what proved to be a total collapse. What happened?”
“A disagreement.”
“With Bascal?”
“Aye, with Bascal. Who else? He was in charge, Sire. Of everything.” Now Mursk was angry.
“Gently,” Bruno said, fearing he might not get an answer at all if he pressed too hard, or in the wrong way. “It’s all in the past, and I’ll not prosecute misdeeds which took place outside my dear wife’s jurisdiction. You understand? The chips have fallen; the cards are on the table, and I call. I just want to know.”
Behind them, the sun set through the branches and canopy of the forest. On the world’s other side—currently its night side—it was the crickets, not the birds, that chirped. Such was life on a planette: you could walk to any time of day you liked.
“People were dying,” Mursk said. His tone begged no forgiveness, offered no apology. “Your son’s plans were rational, but they weren’t humane.”
“And yours were,” Bruno said.
“Aye. But not rational. And not loyal. Your son put his faith in me, and I betrayed him.”
Bruno could hear the pain in Mursk’s voice, and he supposed it was all true; this man did love Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. As a friend, as a brother. As a traitor—squirming under the bootheel of oppression—loves his country and his people. Bascal had always been, in his father’s sad opinion, more a user than a developer.
“Sometimes opposition is loyalty,” he offered, though it must be cold comfort indeed.
“Maybe. You should know, Sire, that there’s a partial copy of Bascal in Newhope’s comm archives. Not a whole person by any means, but a valid memory nonetheless. I promised him that when we got here, I’d transmit it back to Barnard.”
“Promised him? Even after he tried to erase you from the colonial sky? My goodness. Lad, the worst evil is the kind we feel fondly toward. I understand your reluctance to condemn him, truly. But you must be honest with yourself, and with me. Do you know who my best friend was?”
“Marlon Sykes,” Mursk answered, for every schoolchild knew this.
“Correct,” Bruno said. “And as you say, we fought as only brothers of the spirit can fight. With absolute conviction, with love and honor and hatred. To the death.” And even after all these centuries, the wound still felt fresh, still brought an angry mist to Bruno’s eyes. Rational and inhumane, indeed! Marlon had been a brilliant creator as well as a villain, and if the two traits could have been separated somehow, then perhaps Bruno might not have pulled that switch, and sent his friend packing in a cage de fin, on a one-way journey to the end of time. But the damage that hidden monster had caused—the sheer scale of it—boggled even Bruno’s imagination. Some offenses simply overflowed the dams and levees of any possible compassion.