The Collapsium Read Online Free PDF

played. Or hadn’t been, anyway, when Bruno’s network gate last functioned. He supposed fashion had probably overtaken such musical preferences by now, along with all the clothing and furnishing styles he knew best. Fashion was always doing things like that, making the most ordinary things seem ridiculous and the most ridiculous seem ordinary. Immortality had yet to bestow any higher aesthetic upon the Queendom, although he supposed that, too, could have changed in his absence.
    It was nineteen years since he’d quit Tamra’s court, eleven since he’d quit civilization altogether, trading it for this silence, this peace and solitude. Out here, he
wasn’t
peerless or depended on. Just alone.
    He realized he should speak, behave as a host. “Uh, refreshment? Food, drink? I have vegetables fresh from the soil.”
    She wrinkled her nose. “Still doing that, are you? Thank you, no. A glass of water, perhaps. Shall we sit?”
    “Oh. Yes. Forgive me.” He indicated a chair beside a low table, waited until she’d seated herself, waited until she’d nodded permission for him to join her, and finally sat in the chair across. A gently clicking robot appeared, whisked a pair of glasses of ice water onto the table between them, and was gone. “You look well, Tamra. I mean that.”
    “You look good yourself,” she said, her voice betraying a hint of pique. “You always look good.”
    Shrug. “Everyone does. But I’ve dressed up!”
    She studied him for a few moments before replying, “Yes.Actually, you look like you’re playing yourself in a melodrama. The gray hair is new. It suits you, I suppose.”
    Her tone, while sharp, was not unkind. Like her expression and her too-correct posture, it bespoke a mingling of amusement and ire and haste, as well as a kind of bruised dignity. He’d left her court without permission, after all. Without even a proper good-bye, for he’d feared his resolve would crumble. It had been a cowardly, disrespectful, unkind thing to do, and whatever business drew her here now … Well, he’d made her jump through hoops for it, hadn’t he? What urgency would permit a queen to beggar herself before such a determined expatriate?
    “Something’s happened,” he prompted. “Something awful.”
    She shook her head, but her eyes looked nervous, uncertain. “Not awful, no. Inconvenient. A … project of ours has gone somewhat awry. No one’s been hurt, but there’s a … cleanup effort that isn’t progressing well. I thought perhaps you’d have some advice for us.”
    Bruno wasn’t sure he understood, and said so. “My so-called expertise is in collapsium engineering, Highness. Industrial accidents are hardly …” He caught her expression. “Oh, I see. It
is
a collapsium accident.”
    She nodded, pursing her lips, and for a moment Bruno felt paralyzed by her beauty, unable to think, unworthy to speak. The human brain was said to be
wired
for monarchy, for hierarchy, for the elevation and admiration of single individuals, and now the truth of this hit Bruno like a heavy gilded pillow. There wasn’t any one thing about Tamra Lutui—not her long black hair or the tilt of her head or the gentle swell of her hips and thighs and bosom—that should affect him so. He knew her very well indeed, well enough that her pout shouldn’t fill him with this boyish, trembling awe. But she was Queen, and that made all the difference in the worlds.
    Her Majesty, being well familiar with this reaction, this social allergy, waited politely for it to subside.
    “Yes,” she said finally. “A collapsium accident. You shouldbe proud of us, Bruno; we’ve finally attempted something big. Too big, evidently.”
    Bruno clucked and shook his head. “Ambition has to imply some willingness to fail, Tam. It isn’t a stretch, otherwise. You mustn’t regret your mistakes.”
    “This one I regret, Declarant,” she said coolly. “That we can hope for a favorable outcome is immaterial. Some errors are