The Collapsium Read online

  Praise for the novels of WIL McCARTHY

  THE COLLAPSIUM

  “The future as McCarthy sees it is a wondrous place. While there are amusing attributes and quirks to McCarthy’s characters, the greater pleasures of this novel lie in its hard science extrapolations. McCarthy plays up his technical strengths by providing a useful appendix and glossary for the mathematically inclined reader.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ingenious and witty … as if Terry Pratchett at his zaniest and Larry Niven at his best had collaborated.”

  —Booklist

  “The author of Bloom once again demonstrates his talent for mind-expanding SF. Vibrant with humor, drama, and quirky ideas. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “A fairy tale [with] … the most delicious superscience since Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Stylistic diversity and hard scientific rigor blended with panache and striking imagination. McCarthy works hard to draw out pathos and character development. Genuinely exciting—a wonderful hoot.”

  —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Fresh and imaginative. From a plausible yet startling invention, McCarthy follows the logical lines of sight, building in parallel the technological and societal innovations. ‘Our Pick.’ I wanted to visit this Queendom and meet these people.”

  —Science Fiction Weekly

  “[A] comedy of manners about High Physics, immortality, mad scientists, and murder. Great fun [with a] Wodehouse-meets-Doc-Smith aesthetic. As ingenious as the physics and special effects are, it is their juxtaposition to the wit and comedy that gives the novel its particular flavor. [A] playful, thoughtful book.”

  —Locus

  “Top notch. Terribly good fun. This very funny book has something for everyone.”

  —Entertainment Tomorrow

  “McCarthy knows his physics, and makes it extremely easy to suspend in disbelief. He creates a world that is both foreign and amazing … but in McCarthy’s hands it appears all but inevitable.”

  —Mindjack Magazine

  “Wil McCarthy is a certified science fiction treasure, a real-life rocket scientist with a gorgeous writing style and rapier wit to boot. [While his] high-concept physics ideas … are deft and fascinating, it’s his characters and story that make The Collapsium a book to savor, a complex and layered story in the grand tradition of science fiction’s masters.”

  —Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

  “Quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters.” —SF Site

  “I don’t recall the last time a book made me laugh out loud. I did so here on this page, and at the book’s end I did so again … though my eyes were moist as well. McCarthy has created a story here that is distinctly Asimovian in flavor, though his voice is very much his own.”

  —SF Revu

  “Prepare to use your grey matter. [McCarthy] fills his pages with lovingly rendered descriptions … but it is the strength of his scientific imagination that really shines through.”

  —SFX Magazine (UK)

  “A most dazzling future. What follows is a mind-spinning struggle that recalls a Henry Fielding novel of manners, Michael Moorcock’s epic sagas and the cosmic free-for-alls of Doc Smith. There’s fascinating science aplenty, mad scientists, robots running amok.… What more could you want?”

  —The Weekly Australian

  “A decidedly odd but enjoyable mix of mannered, decadent comedy and far-out physics. I liked and was even prepared to believe in [it].”

  —Ansible (UK)

  BLOOM

  “Bloom is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control.”

  —David Brin

  “What clever and compelling science fiction! The Bloom future is all too believable.”

  —James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science

  “Wil McCarthy makes ideas jump. Bloom grabs you from the very first scene and doesn’t let go till the last page. It’s irresistible.”

  —Walter Jon Williams

  “Ultimately [humanity] must learn to ask new questions. The book’s message is [that] in a universe stranger than we know, ignorance may be inevitable, but it’s definitely not bliss.”

  —The New York Times

  “Swiftly paced, consistently inventive and tightly written. This is a novel that knows its business.”

  —The Washington Post

  “McCarthy has worked out a bleakly dramatic future. This is the kind of broad view of mankind’s future and the universe reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke.”

  —The Denver Post

  “The science is consistent and integral to the story, and the characters are much more plausibly drawn than are so many folks in [other speculative] fiction. In nearly every passage, we get another slice of the science of McCarthy’s construction, and a deeper sense of danger and foreboding.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “The writing is vivid. Readers who can plug into the prose and navigate its dense circuitry will find themselves rewarded with a wallop of a finale that satisfies high expectations for high-concept SF.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An ingenious yarn with challenging ideas, well-handled technical details and plenty of twists and turns.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “McCarthy is an entertaining, intelligent, amusing writer, with Clarke’s thoughtfulness [and] Heinlein’s knack for breakneck plotting.”

  —Booklist

  “Succeeds on many different levels, combining a unique literary style with complex scientific speculation and political intrigue. Wil McCarthy’s most entertaining and thought-provoking novel yet.”

  —Locus

  “An intense narrative of survival. Bloom works on several levels even while beckoning the reader into deeper mysteries. McCarthy proves once again that he has the wit and narrative power to take us to the outer reaches of space and down into the vast unknown of human, and inhuman, consciousness.”

  —Barnes and Noble Explorations

  “Complex and inventive. Hundreds of pages of smart, suspenseful science fiction. ‘Our Pick.’ ”

  —Science Fiction Weekly

  “An astonishingly original concept, one of the most chilling versions of nanotechnology yet envisioned. McCarthy is able to make the idea … seem quite believable. The pacing of the book is also excellent. McCarthy has a real talent for hard-SF concepts and thriller plotting.”

  —SF Age

  “A feast of exposition [that is] tasty as well as nutritious. His sworn agenda to balance hard science, adventure and characterization is vindicated by the completed product. Bloom is a fine synthesis between hard and literary SF, a trick many have tried, but few have managed.”

  —SF Revu

  “The science is plausible, the narrative sinewy and taut. [McCarthy’s] assurance and skill are evident throughout. Starlog verdict: ***** [5 out of 5 stars].”

  —Starlog UK

  “Bloom might be the wide-screen novel nanotech SF needs to kick-start itself. As soon as I read the cover blurb I couldn’t wait to start reading, and then once I’d started reading I couldn’t stop. Wil McCarthy’s take on nanotech SF may be just about as far as we can go with the idea in fiction.”

  —Infinity Plus (UK)

  “Destined to become the classic nanotechnology novel.”

  —Bookman News

  “Impressive. Believable. The storytelling and plot devices are tight, tight, tight. I regretted ever having to put the book down. I found it to be often insightful, in psychology, relationships, even philosophy. But the bottom line is that Bloom is fun. Complaints? Nope, can’t think of one.”

  —Fantastica Dailyr />
  THE COLLAPSIUM

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ballantine/DelRey hardcover edition / August 2000

  Bantam paperback edition / December 2002

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Wil McCarthy

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41542-4

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Book One - once upon a matter crushed

  Chapter One: in which an important experiment is disrupted

  Chapter Two: in which an urgent plea is heard

  Chapter Three: in which an impressive structure is examined

  Chapter Four: in which a legendary mead hall is christened

  Chapter Five: in which a great mountain is climbed

  Chapter Six: in which an historic ceremony is conducted

  Book Two - twice upon a star imperiled

  Chapter Seven: in which an anomalous result is pondered

  Chapter Eight: in which the nature of time is explained

  Chapter Nine: in which unexpected hospitality is offered

  Chapter Ten: in which a crime is reconstructed

  Chapter Eleven: in which the rubble is sifted

  Chapter Twelve: in which a strange creature is discovered

  Chapter Thirteen: in which a brilliant first step is taken

  Book Three - thrice upon a schemer’s plotting

  Chapter Fourteen: in which an ancient question is revisited

  Chapter Fifteen: in which the clarity of hindsight is reaffirmed

  Chapter Sixteen: in which a restless spirit is appeased

  Chapter Seventeen: in which the bravery of houses is demonstrated

  Chapter Eighteen: in which numerous laws are broken

  Chapter Nineteen: in which the lawbreaking accelerates

  Chapter Twenty: in which old demons are faced

  Chapter Twenty-one: in which the predictions of a doomsayer are fulfilled

  Chapter Twenty-two: in which history’s great wizards clash

  Chapter Twenty-three: in which lives are pledged and traded

  Chapter Twenty-four: in which an historic tally is counted

  Appendix A: in which an appendix is provided

  Appendix B: glossary

  Appendix C: technical notes

  Appendix D: marlon

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Wellstone

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  book one

  once upon a matter crushed

  chapter one

  in which an important experiment is disrupted

  In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th morning walk around the world.

  The word “morning” is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked through the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a very small planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even tinier “sun” and “moon” of Bruno’s own design.

  Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy meadow, feel the itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into the midday forest, with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through the canopy. The trees are low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and dogwood, not so much a shady, mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise with physical law—taller trees would reach right out of the troposphere. As it is, the highest limbs brush and break apart the puffy summer clouds that happen by.

  Pass the Northern Hills; watch the stream trickle out between them; see the forest give way to willows at its bank. The bridge is a quaint little arch of native wood; on the far side lie the grasslands of afternoon, the vegetable gardens tended by stoop-backed robots, the fields of wild barley and maize tended by no one, lit by slantwise rays. Behind you, the sun dips low, then slips behind the planet’s sharply curved horizon. Despite the refraction of atmospheric hazes, darkness is sudden, and with it the terrain grows rocky—not jagged but hard and flat and boulder-strewn, dotted with hardy Mediterranean weeds. But here the stream winds back again, and as evening fades to night the channel of it widens out into cattail marshland and feeds, finally, into a little freshwater sea. Sometimes the moon is out, drawing long white reflections across the silent water, but tonight it’s only the stars and the Milky Way haze and the distant, pinpoint gleam of Sol. All of history is down there; if you like, you can cover the human race with your hand.

  It grows colder; realize the planet shields you from the little sun—the only local heat source—with the deadly chill of outer space so close you could literally throw a rock into it. But the beach leads around to twilight meadows, and the horizon ruddies up with scattered light, and then suddenly it’s morning again, the sun breaking warmly above the planet’s round edge. And there is Bruno’s house: low, flat, gleaming marble-white and morning-yellow. You’ve walked a little over two kilometers.

  Such was Bruno’s morning constitutional, very much like all his others. Sometimes he’d fetch a coat and take the other route, over the hills, over the poles, through cold and dark and cold and hot, but that was mainly a masochism thing; the polar route was actually shorter, and a good deal less scenic.

  He’d already eaten breakfast; the walk was to aid his digestion, to invigorate his mind for the needs of the day: his experiments. The front door opened for him. Inside, robot servants stepped gracefully out of his way, providing a clear path to the study, bowing as he passed, though he’d told them a thousand times not to. He grumbled at them wordlessly as he passed. They didn’t reply, of course, though their bronze and tin-gray manikin bodies hummed and clicked with faint life. Mechanical, unburdened by imagination or want, they were utterly dedicated to his comfort, his satisfaction.

  Another door opened for him, closed behind him, vanished. He waved a hand, and the windows became walls. Waved another, and the ceiling lights vanished, the floor lights vanished, the desk and chairs and other furnishings became optical superconductors: invisible. Projective holography created the illusion of his day’s apparatus: fifty collapsons, tiny perfect cubes visible as pinpoints of Cerenkov light, powder-blue and pulsing faintly, circling the holographic planet in a complex dance of swapping orbits.

  He’d spent the past week assembling these, after his last batch had gone sour.

  Assembling them? Certainly.

  Imagine a sphere of di-clad neutronium, shiny with Compton-scattered light. It’s a sort of very large atomic nucleus; a billion tons of normal matter crushed down to a diameter of three centimeters so that the protons and electrons that comprise it are bonded together into a thick neutron paste. Left to itself it would, within nanoseconds, explode back into a billion tons of protons and electrons, this time with considerable outward momentum. Hence the cladding: crystalline diamond and fibrediamond and then crystalline again, with a bound layer of wellstone on top. Tough stuff indeed; breaking the neutrons free of their little jail was difficult enough that Bruno had never heard of its happening by accident.

  These “neubles” were the seeds of seeds—it took eight of them, crushed unimaginably farther, to build a collapson—and the
little “moon” was actually just Bruno’s storage bin: ten thousand neubles held together by their own considerable gravity. Another fifteen hundred formed the core of the tiny planet, a sphere about half a meter across, with a skeleton of wellstone built on top of it, fleshed out with a few hundred meters of dirt and rock and an upper layer neatly sculpted by robots and artisans.

  Bruno was very wealthy, you see.

  But instead of moons and planets, one could also make black holes of these things, black holes held rigidly into stable lattices, a phase of matter known as “collapsium.”1

  Bruno had been the first to do this, and was still doing it these seventy years later. He’d traded his soul for it, in some sense. Traded a whole phase of his life, anyway: his love, his adopted home on Tongatapu. But what a thing to swap them for: the bending and twisting of spacetime to his personal whims. The potential of it …

  That was the exciting part, and in truth, he’d be happy enough to direct the enterprise, leaving the gruntwork to a horde of employees or devoted grad students or something. The biggest problem was that almost no one was patient enough to work the equations, even to deduce which structures were stable and which were not, much less to derive the properties of the stable ones from first principles. The work was hard, and there were very few graduates to be had for it. That was the biggest problem. The second biggest was the sort of accidents you got when collapsium experiments went awry, and the third biggest problem was the twenty billion people who got understandably upset when this occurred.

  So of the handful of people competent to perform the research, most stuck contentedly to the safer paths, the trodden paths, the paths on which accidents were far rarer than fame and fortune. Plodders, he sometimes called them.