The Collapsium Read Online Free Page B

to his collection of regrets. But it did feel good.
    He retreated a bit, waiting for some indication of impending liftoff before hiding himself back in the house again. But the ship sat, and sat, and sat some more, and finally he understood: There was a fax gate in there, a fax machine coupled to a high-bandwidth network gate linked to the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid, the Iscog. The robots were faxing themselves back to Her Majesty’s throneroom to deliver his “invitation,” and clearly, since the ship remained, they expected her to take him up on it.
    His heart quickened a little. So much for his clever manners.
    Bruno had his own, fully functional fax machine, of course. For years he’d been getting his clothing and equipment that way, built up atom by atom from stored patterns and extruded whole through orifices inside and outside the house. It produced much of his food as well, supplementing the fruits of his stubbornly anachronistic garden.
    The gate could even reproduce a person; he’d done the old parlor trick a time or two, spending the afternoon with a perfect copy of himself. Well,
two
copies spending time together, actually, with the original Bruno having been destroyed in the reading process. But this amounted to much the same thing in the end.
    With copies, you were supposed to hit it off at first and then quickly get on your nerves, but Bruno had found his own company alarmingly dull; what did he have to teach himself that he didn’t already know? He could send a copy off to learn new things, he supposed, but he wouldn’t want to
be
that copy, sent away from the work that really mattered to him, and of course one of him would have to do just that. Invariably, he reconverged the copies within the hour, faxing them back into himself, concluding that maintaining oneBruno de Towaji was quite trouble enough. Hence the disinterest in repairing his failed network gate.
    The silence of network abstinence had been nice, too. He’d better enjoy the last of it while he still could, before the robots came back with company, or else hauled him through their gate by main force.
    He was just turning to reenter the house when, to his utter surprise, the hatch opened once more on the side of the metal teardrop, swinging its staircase out and down, framing in its doorway the figure of none other than Her Majesty herself. The robots followed at a respectful distance as she descended the steps.
    Staring stupidly, Bruno computed: Earth, regardless of season, was always at least seven light-hours away. For the robots to return there and come back with Her Majesty in tow should have taken fourteen hours. Even if she’d been on
Jupiter
for some reason, it would have taken more than twelve, possibly a lot more, depending on where the planet was in its orbit. Ergo, she must have sent her pattern ahead, timing it to arrive when the ship landed. Had she anticipated his refusal? She might simply have broadcast her image into the void, instructing the robots to capture and instantiate it if the need arose. There was something cold-bloodedly logical about that sort of reasoning, and that was how he knew it was true.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.
    The spaceship’s stairs were carpeted in red, and their metal base extruded still more carpet, its end snaking out ahead of the Queen across scorched grass and flowers until finally it stopped, seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then extruded a low platform, a little marble pedestal rising up as if exposed by receding tidewaters. Her Majesty mounted this platform, and the robots assumed stations on either side of her, ceremonial halberds at the ready. Ceremonial, hell; she was here, and they carried no other obvious weaponry. Those blades could probably cleave the planet in two.
    The robots spoke more haughtily than before. “Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji, you may present yourself beforeHer Majesty Tamra-Tamatra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. You are encouraged to