The Collapsium Read Online Free PDF Page B

inexcusable.” With these words she fixed a mild glare on him: Had
he
no regrets?
    “Fair enough,” he said, raising his palms in immediate surrender lest he be forced, in some way, to explain or apologize for himself. He had good reasons for all of it. Didn’t he? “Er, perhaps you should tell me what you’ve been doing. With the collapsium, I mean.”
    Her Majesty rapped the tabletop. “Sketch pad, please.” Obligingly, the table darkened, and where her finger traced, colored lines and dots and circles appeared. “This is the sun, all right? I can’t draw well, but these here are the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
    In fact, for hasty finger paintings her renditions were fairly accurate.
    “Sol is
big
in the inner system, and if two planets are aligned with the sun between them—opposition, they call it?—then network signals have to be sent around via satellite. There’s a time delay associated with the extra distance, and this implies a cost.”
    “Yes,” Bruno agreed in a knowing tone. He’d laid the foundations for the collapsiter grid himself—besting previous network bandwidths by six orders of magnitude—and he understood a thing or two about how the system worked.
    Tamra looked up at him but declined to glare. “Some of our people have worked out a fix, Declarant, by putting an annulus of collapsium around the sun. The ‘Ring Collapsiter,’ as Declarant Sykes has named it.”
    “Ah!” Bruno said, grasping the idea at once. The speed of light was much higher in the Casimir supervacuum of a collapsium lattice than in the half-filled energy states of normalspace. A
ring
of collapsium encircling the sun could admit signals at one side, expel them at the other, and reduce the time not only of the trip around, but of the trip
through
as well. Like a highway bypass where the speed limit was a trillion times higher than in the crowded streets of downtown. Why crawl through when you could blaze the long way around in half an instant, cutting light-minutes off your journey? “Very elegant, very impressive. Very enormously
expensive
, I’d imagine.”
    Tamra shrugged. “The cost ladies say it’ll pay for itself in a century, through increased efficiency. It’s actually just the first piece of a whole new kind of network our componeers envision: a spiderweb of collapsium threads stretching to every corner of the Queendom.”
    That metaphor had been stretched a few times too many, Bruno judged. A “spiderweb” would twist apart in hours, each rung of it orbiting the sun at different levels, different velocities. Unless …
    “Good Lord. This ring of yours. It’s static?”
    Tamra quirked her head, not understanding.
    “It’s stationary?” he tried. “Does it orbit the sun, or is it suspended above by some other means?”
    “Oh,” she said, nodding. “Static, yes. I’m told it needs to be, to function properly. You’d have to ask Declarant Sykes’ people for the details.”
    Bruno marveled. A static ring completely encircling the sun? The mother of all collapsiters, not orbiting but
hanging
above its parent star like a gossamer suspension bridge? Unthinkable! Life in the Queendom certainly
had
changed in his absence. He found his mouth overflowing with questions.
    “What holds it up? Good Lord, what holds it
together
? You’d have standing waves at multiples of the gravitic frequency. Around the ring, that’s fine, but
across
it I don’t see how the phases would match. You’d get shearing forces that would tend to pull the collapsium out of—”
    He caught himself; Her Majesty’s expression showed nothing more than polite incomprehension. Sol was fortunate tohave a queen so sharp, so quick, but it had trained her in more superficial pursuits, made a kind of glorified video star of her. No scientist, she.
    “Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, exposing his hair’s grayed roots to her inspection. “I’ll stop interrupting. What problem brings you here? To me, of all