The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy Page A

not playing a trick on me, are you?”
    “You’ll be with Her Majesty, Declarant,” Tusité replied coolly. He supposed that meant no, it wasn’t possible to embarrass Bruno without also embarrassing Tamra. But theremight be another barb here he was missing. This was typical; Tamra’s courtiers were mostly kind people, but their sparring was constant, driven by hypertrophied senses of wit and honor and propriety. They were like athletes who had honed a particular set of skills to the point of bodily distortion: runners with cricket legs, or weightlifters who could no longer throw a ball. He could believe Tusité had altogether
lost
the ability to speak plainly, without layers of veiled meaning.
    Bah.
    Tonight, he’d balked at sequins, but had otherwise yielded judgment to the palace and its ladies, who’d promptly swathed him in green-and-black suede. Spurious zippers and snaps and buckles on the jacket were complemented by fat laces down the trousers’ outer seams. The matching hat was wide brimmed and glossy, the sort of thing one expected a big ostrich feather to protrude from, although none did.
    Each piece had looked absurd in isolation, and Bruno had been hard-pressed to stifle his protests. The total ensemble had a different effect, though. It did look ridiculous, in the way that unfamiliar clothes always did, but it also seemed, in a strange way, to suit him. If this was a joke, it was of the contextual variety: well dressed but out of place. A time traveler. But probably it was no joke, and people actually dressed this way these days.
    The handmaids had wanted to stroke the gray out of his hair and beard as well, and now, eyeing himself in the dressing hall’s triple mirror, he wondered what that might’ve looked like. No color was “natural” in this age of artifice, after all, and his own tastes were clearly outdated and otherwise suspect.
    “Whom are you trying to emulate?” the would-be teenage Tusité had asked him earlier, her voice brusque with amusement. The question gave him pause. His post-court appearance had evolved gradually, over twenty years, without much in the way of conscious planning or assessment. And yet, as Tamra also had teased him, he seemed to have become a sort of theatrical construct, less himself than an iconification ofhimself. Symbolizing what, he couldn’t guess, but there it was: his eyes brooding between gray-black thickets, fat eyebrows merging with overlong hair, bushy sideburns slopping down into curls of untamed beard. The handmaids had done what they could in the time allotted, but still he looked uncomfortably like a mad prophet, combed over but hardly couth. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it in his own mirror this morning.
    That was court life for you: self-consciousness without end. Silly clothes. Comments so veiled and obtuse that they might as well have been encrypted.
    “You look … better,” Tamra told him, gliding in, dismissing her courtiers with a look.
    “Yes,” he agreed grudgingly, straightening a blousy sleeve beneath the cuff of the jacket. “I’m quite the dandy. Compliments to your software and staff; you do seem to surround yourself with the tasteful.”
    “Usually,” she said, and took his arm. “Did Tusité give you a hard time?”
    “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She seems to have her doubts about me.”
    “She does have a good memory.”
    Tamra herself had adopted a blue-gray, long-sleeved evening gown that—like Bruno’s jacket—suggested Venus was no longer the hot-house of ages past. Circling her brow was a simple platinum band, adequate for semiformal occasions where she was, nonetheless, on public display.
    Robot guards came to life for them as they approached the fax gate, transiting ahead of them to prepare the way. Watching them disappear was interesting; the gate itself didn’t look like anything, just a vertical slab of blackish material swathed in a thin layer of fog. But the robots melted into it with tiny