The center of the bar wasn’t there at all. Or rather, the center existed in two places. The bar existed in two halves, with half a meter of empty space in between. Bruno waved the thing around, demonstrating to a goggle-eyed Mursk that the metal was in fact contiguous; each end moved with the other, just as though it were all one piece. Because it was one piece. It just had a gap in the middle, a kind of elongated four-dimensional wrinkle.
“The state of the art,” Bruno said, “in mass-stabilized wormholes.”
A string of quite astonishing curse words tumbled from Mursk’s gaping mouth, and Bruno had to remind himself that the lad was, among other things, a sailor.
“Forgive me, Sire,” Mursk added finally. “I’ve just… I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Nor I,” Bruno said, “until a few weeks ago.” He tossed the bar behind him, clanking onto the heap with the dozen or so others he’d created thus far. “And it’s certainly not what I had in mind. We need tunnels, from one point in space to another.”
Mursk thought that one over. “Can you drill through the center of the bar? Make a hollow tube of it?”
“One would think so,” Bruno told him. He tugged at his beard, mulling and fretting over it. “But every attempt thus far has pinched off the wormhole, cutting the bar in half. Nor have I been able to prop the throat open with wellstone, or wood, or any other material. There’s something about the crystal structure of a solid metal, or the free electrons roaming through it, that allows the wormhole throat to stabilize. Something mysterious, you see? With the unified field equations in hand, it should be possible to derive any result, to describe any physically demonstrated system. But the math can be unimaginably complex, and it’s not always clear how to express a physical system in those terms. I’ve tried to approximate this one by various methods, but so far nothing has come close to describing what we see here.”
“And you think I can help?” Mursk asked, sounding surprised and perhaps even vaguely offended.
The question surprised Bruno as well. “With this? I think perhaps you could,” he said carefully, not wanting to drive off this man whose services he hoped to secure, “with your background in gravitic engineering.”
“My what?”
Mursk seemed genuinely puzzled. Had there been some mistake? Bother it, Bruno didn’t need yet another digression! But just the same, he pulled up a window on the surface of his desk, while the desk tilted itself toward him to improve the reading angle.
“Have I erred in some way? Your name came up at the very top of my search. Have I perhaps summoned the wrong Conrad Mursk? No, here it is: according to your employment profile, you invented the ‘pinpoint drip’ style of matter condenser.”
“The what?” Mursk frowned for a moment, and then seemed to have a dull epiphany of some sort. “Oh, that. Squeezing neutronium with a small black hole, right?”
“And pumping it,” Bruno agreed, “and storing it in a metastable reservoir until there’s enough to neubleize. It’s quite a clever invention, which has streamlined our mass dredging operations considerably. Do you have any idea how much money you’ve saved me over the years?”
“Not I,” Mursk said, with a sudden laugh. “That machine was invented by Money Izolo, in the wake of an industrial accident on Element Pit. I had nothing to do with it.”
Nothing, eh? Bruno prodded harder. “I examined the patent document myself, lad. There was an Izolo listed as coinventor, but your name appeared first. You also built a… Gravittoir, was it? A system for pulling heavy payloads off a planetary surface?”
If anything, that suggestion made Mursk uneasier than the first one had. He cringed and fidgeted. “I didn’t build it myself, Sire. I mean, I headed the team…”
And here, seeing what was going on, Bruno summoned his most regal glare and turned it full-force upon Conrad Mursk. “False modesty,” he said, “is a form of lying, and I have very little patience with it. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I require you to answer simply and truthfully. And if I have reason to doubt your answers, lad, I will copy your brain and dissect it alive until I find what I’m looking for. Is that clear?”
In point of fact, Bruno would do no such thing, and indeed he wasn’t even sure it was possible. But he saw that Mursk really had lived in a tyranny, for he believed it at once, and looked afraid. And Mursk really had rebelled against that tyranny, too, for on the heels of his fright he swelled with such anger that the cottage summoned a Palace Guard to glide up silently behind him. Just in case.
“Very clear, Sire,” Mursk said tightly.
Bother it. Why had the people of Sol made an inventor their king, who could scarcely maintain his end of a civil conversation? Bruno adored the people of Sol, and he understood exactly why they adored his wife, their first and only queen. But he had never understood their love for him, and feared at times that it was nothing but spillover. If Tamra loved him then so must they, by extension if not by inclination. But Conrad Mursk had been away for so very long.
Bruno had learned, through long bitter practice, never to retract or apologize for anything he said. A king simply wasn’t permitted this courtesy. But he did soften his stance, adding, “The labors of coercion are never as useful as the labors of willing gift. There are still assaults in the Queendom, every now and again, and I often suspect their perpetrators have simply never felt the touch of kindness. For if they had, then the fumbling of a cornered victim could hardly measure up. Here’s what criminals fail to understand: in a civilized world there is nothing left to steal. There are no goods or commodities they can carry away with them, nor services of value they can commandeer. Even a beggar has better odds than a thief.”
“Meaning what?” Mursk demanded, relaxing only slightly.
Bruno spread his hands. “I want your help. Not with wormhole dynamics, if that’s what you’re thinking, but with a project whose distractions threaten my delicate concentration. I need to be free to retreat here to Maplesphere at any time, so I dare not manage this project myself. And in this queendom of third-order specialists, I dare not turn it over to an unqualified leader, for my terraformers know nothing of gravity. My graviteers know nothing of DNA. My architects and planette builders are craftsmen, unacquainted with the needs of a large project, and my megaproject managers know nothing about anything. I need generalists, of a sort which Sol has simply stopped producing. On Sorrow you built the Orbital Tower, yes?”
Bruno could see Mursk contemplating some hedge around the correct answer, but in the end all he said was, “Yes. It’s one of the few things in my life I’m unequivocally proud of.”
“Aha. And you discovered the wellstone substance known as Mursk Metal?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Well, then, you may be interested to know it’s a key component of today’s gravity lasers. You’ve also personally operated a variety of construction equipment, from bulldozers and cranes to neutronium barges and asteroid bores. True?”
Reluctantly: “True.”
“And you’ve worked as both an ecological engineer and a climatologist?”
“Well, a wildlife surveyor and a weather station monitor.”
“All right, fair enough. But on a world in the midst of terraforming operations. Indeed, you’ve lived most of your life in extreme environments. Spaceships, polar wells, desolate alien landscapes. Would you agree?”
“I… suppose.”
“And you’ve been the captain of a ship.”