The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page A

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 sixmeters 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 superreflectors 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.
    The clearing of Marlon’s throat held an indication ofsurprise—the question was unexpected. Bruno turned in time to see the smaller man blush. “
My
idea. The, uh, grapples are my idea. Build them faster, you know. Find ways to crank them to higher frequencies, for greater pull. We have to pull the ring
up
, away from the sun. That’s really the sole nature of the problem, dress it up however you may. We’ve got to
apply force
to the collapsium, and