To Crush the Moon (12 page)

The trick with a pipe was not to puff on it too much, lest its smoke turn sharp and acrid—or too little, lest it fade to the dull flavor of ashes. But Hugo was back again, this time with Bruno's ashtray, which he whisked onto the desk in front of him before dancing back out of the study again with too-quick, too-perfect fluidity.

“Nice robot,” Mursk said, with less than total conviction.

“He saved my life once, in battle. He's quite brave.” Bruno set the pipe down in the ashtray and began tapping at his desktop controls. “Now, the first trick in wormhole dynamics is to develop your standing gravity wave very, very rapidly. It's not at all like collapsing a neuble into a black hole. Second, you've got to dump in twice as much power as theory predicts you ought to. I'm still figuring that one out.”

While he spoke, the writing vanished from every surface, zipping into archive space. Glittering green-black bullseyes took their place on two opposite walls. The lights dimmed, and though it wasn't apparent from here in the windowless study, the sun itself dimmed as well, focusing fully eighty percent of its output in a single strand of violet laser. Bruno's eastern photovoltaic array, hidden away in a forest glade, took the beam head-on and fed its power directly into the gravity lasers. The air in the study began to shudder, then to twirl itself into fist-sized eddies that popped and lashed their way around the room.

“The third trick,” Bruno said, raising his voice above the hiss, “is to ram a cylindrical mass through the wormhole throat, to stabilize the two openings.” Leaning, he dragged a half-meter iron bar out from under his desk and held it up for Conrad Mursk to see.

“Is this experiment safe?” Mursk wanted to know. The air devils were whipping at his hair, driving him back, blinking and puffing, against the door frame.

“Not particularly,” Bruno called back, “but your image is archived in my fax buffer.”

And then the time for talk was past, for a pair of rippling distortions appeared like lenses in the air between the two men. The spherical wormhole mouths: each displaying a funhouse-mirror view of the photons striking the other. Their instability was apparent even to the naked eye; they wandered and quivered, orbiting one another in a slow spiral that would, within seconds, bring them swirling together in a flash of canceling energy.

Bruno's initial tests had taken place in vacuum, ten kilometers from Maplesphere and with the trillion-ton mass of the planette between himself and the relativistic action. It was only by accident—literally—that he'd discovered the radiation of a wormhole's collapse was nonlethal. Or not immediately lethal, anyway; the flux of photons and virtual particles would surely wreak lasting havoc on a body with no access to fax repair.

“Watch!” he instructed, hefting the bar and jabbing it at one of the holes.

There was no preferred direction of travel between the two wormhole mouths; each point on one sphere—or vector through it—corresponded with a point or vector on the other. Bruno's aim wasn't bad, but even a glancing blow would have done the trick. The bar slid silently and effortlessly into the nearer sphere, its far end emerging just as cleanly from the other. The two halves of the bar were pointing in wildly different directions, but within moments the two mouths were sliding and rotating into the minimum-energy configuration, wherein the bar was straight. They missed on the first swooping pass, and again on the second, but the oscillations tightened until suddenly the vectors locked.

The spherical distortions vanished. The whirling air devils quieted. The bullseyes faded from Bruno's walls, and his equations returned, and the lights came back up, and the sun resumed shining, and somewhere in the distance a bird chirped uncertainly.

“Jesus,” Conrad Mursk said.

“Indeed,” Bruno could only agree. He held up the bar for Mursk's inspection. The two ends were perfectly intact, not damaged in any way, but the distance between them was more than twice what it had been. And the center of the bar . . .

The center of the bar wasn't there at all. Or rather, the center existed in two places. The bar existed in two halves, with half a meter of empty space in between. Bruno waved the thing around, demonstrating to a goggle-eyed Mursk that the metal was in fact contiguous; each end moved with the other, just as though it were all one piece. Because it
was
one piece. It just had a gap in the middle, a kind of elongated four-dimensional wrinkle.

“The state of the art,” Bruno said, “in mass-stabilized wormholes.”

A string of quite astonishing curse words tumbled from Mursk's gaping mouth, and Bruno had to remind himself that the lad was, among other things, a sailor.

“Forgive me, Sire,” Mursk added finally. “I've just . . . I've never seen anything like that before.”

“Nor I,” Bruno said, “until a few weeks ago.” He tossed the bar behind him, clanking onto the heap with the dozen or so others he'd created thus far. “And it's certainly not what I had in mind. We need
tunnels
, from one point in space to another.”

Mursk thought that one over. “Can you drill through the center of the bar? Make a hollow tube of it?”

“One would think so,” Bruno told him. He tugged at his beard, mulling and fretting over it. “But every attempt thus far has pinched off the wormhole, cutting the bar in half. Nor have I been able to prop the throat open with wellstone, or wood, or any other material. There's something about the crystal structure of a solid metal, or the free electrons roaming through it, that allows the wormhole throat to stabilize. Something
mysterious
, you see? With the unified field equations in hand, it should be possible to derive any result, to describe any physically demonstrated system. But the math can be unimaginably complex, and it's not always clear how to express a physical system in those terms. I've tried to approximate this one by various methods, but so far nothing has come close to describing what we see here.”

“And you think
I
can help?” Mursk asked, sounding surprised and perhaps even vaguely offended.

The question surprised Bruno as well. “With this? I think perhaps you could,” he said carefully, not wanting to drive off this man whose services he hoped to secure, “with your background in gravitic engineering.”

“My what?”

Mursk seemed genuinely puzzled. Had there been some mistake? Bother it, Bruno didn't need yet another digression! But just the same, he pulled up a window on the surface of his desk, while the desk tilted itself toward him to improve the reading angle.

“Have I erred in some way? Your name came up at the very top of my search. Have I perhaps summoned the wrong Conrad Mursk? No, here it is: according to your employment profile, you invented the ‘pinpoint drip' style of matter condenser.”

“The what?” Mursk frowned for a moment, and then seemed to have a dull epiphany of some sort. “Oh, that. Squeezing neutronium with a small black hole, right?”

“And pumping it,” Bruno agreed, “and storing it in a metastable reservoir until there's enough to neubleize. It's quite a clever invention, which has streamlined our mass dredging operations considerably. Do you have any idea how much money you've saved me over the years?”

“Not I,” Mursk said, with a sudden laugh. “That machine was invented by Money Izolo, in the wake of an industrial accident on Element Pit. I had nothing to do with it.”

Nothing, eh? Bruno prodded harder. “I examined the patent document myself, lad. There was an Izolo listed as coinventor, but your name appeared first. You also built a . . . Gravittoir, was it? A system for pulling heavy payloads off a planetary surface?”

If anything, that suggestion made Mursk uneasier than the first one had. He cringed and fidgeted. “I didn't build it myself, Sire. I mean, I headed the team . . .”

And here, seeing what was going on, Bruno summoned his most regal glare and turned it full-force upon Conrad Mursk. “False modesty,” he said, “is a form of lying, and I have very little patience with it. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I require you to answer simply and truthfully. And if I have reason to doubt your answers, lad, I will copy your brain and dissect it alive until I find what I'm looking for. Is that clear?”

In point of fact, Bruno would do no such thing, and indeed he wasn't even sure it was possible. But he saw that Mursk really
had
lived in a tyranny, for he believed it at once, and looked afraid. And Mursk really had rebelled against that tyranny, too, for on the heels of his fright he swelled with such anger that the cottage summoned a Palace Guard to glide up silently behind him. Just in case.

“Very clear, Sire,” Mursk said tightly.

Bother it. Why had the people of Sol made an inventor their king, who could scarcely maintain his end of a civil conversation? Bruno adored the people of Sol, and he understood exactly why they adored his wife, their first and only queen. But he had never understood their love for
him
, and feared at times that it was nothing but spillover. If Tamra loved him then so must they, by extension if not by inclination. But Conrad Mursk had been away for so very long.

Bruno had learned, through long bitter practice, never to retract or apologize for anything he said. A king simply wasn't permitted this courtesy. But he did soften his stance, adding, “The labors of coercion are never as useful as the labors of willing gift. There are still assaults in the Queendom, every now and again, and I often suspect their perpetrators have simply never felt the touch of kindness. For if they had, then the fumbling of a cornered victim could hardly measure up. Here's what criminals fail to understand: in a civilized world there is nothing left to steal. There are no goods or commodities they can carry away with them, nor services of value they can commandeer. Even a
beggar
has better odds than a thief.”

“Meaning what?” Mursk demanded, relaxing only slightly.

Bruno spread his hands. “I want your help. Not with wormhole dynamics, if that's what you're thinking, but with a project whose distractions threaten my delicate concentration. I need to be free to retreat here to Maplesphere at any time, so I dare not manage this project myself. And in this queendom of third-order specialists, I dare not turn it over to an unqualified leader, for my terraformers know nothing of gravity. My graviteers know nothing of DNA. My architects and planette builders are craftsmen, unacquainted with the needs of a large project, and my megaproject managers know nothing about anything. I need generalists, of a sort which Sol has simply stopped producing. On Sorrow you built the Orbital Tower, yes?”

Bruno could see Mursk contemplating some hedge around the correct answer, but in the end all he said was, “Yes. It's one of the few things in my life I'm unequivocally proud of.”

“Aha. And you discovered the wellstone substance known as Mursk Metal?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Well, then, you may be interested to know it's a key component of today's gravity lasers. You've also personally operated a variety of construction equipment, from bulldozers and cranes to neutronium barges and asteroid bores. True?”

Reluctantly: “True.”

“And you've worked as both an ecological engineer and a climatologist?”

“Well, a wildlife surveyor and a weather station monitor.”

“All right, fair enough. But on a world in the midst of terraforming operations. Indeed, you've lived most of your life in extreme environments. Spaceships, polar wells, desolate alien landscapes. Would you agree?”

“I . . . suppose.”

“And you've been the captain of a ship.”

Mursk balked at that one. “What? Oh, an
ocean
ship. Yes. But only for sixteen years.”

Bruno tapped a thumb on his desk, feeling himself grow restless again, impatient with this young man's aggressive modesty. He needed yeses, not maybes, if they were to finish this quickly. But he pressed onward, reading his way down the profile. Fortunately the thing had been assembled by hypercomputers delving back into Queendom records and archived Barnardean transmissions, for if Mursk himself had written it, it would be all of ten words long. “Good. Now, you were present at the
Sealillia
riot a few days ago. Ordinarily I wouldn't hold that against you, but given your history . . .”

“We were bystanders,” Mursk said, with convincing irritation. “If those kids had listened to us, it would have gone very differently. Peaceful protest, maybe. I don't know.”

“So you tried to organize them? Pacify them for their own good?”

Defiantly: “Sure.”

“That's good,” Bruno said, looking up briefly to meet the boy's gaze. “Most people wouldn't. Now, if I understand your records correctly, you were briefly in charge of the entire planet of Sorrow?”

“Um. Well,
very
briefly, yes. Before the terraforming had started, before we'd done much of anything. There were only a few hundred people orbiting it at the time, and no one on the surface.”

“There will be a few thousand on this project,” Bruno said to him. “Perhaps ten times as many as you've previously managed. Would this present a problem for you?” Then he thought better of that phrasing, and amended, “Do you have some intellectual or emotional defect which would prevent you from attempting it?”

“Uh, well, I don't think so. I mean, I could certainly try.”

“Then you're hired,” Bruno said.

And suddenly Mursk was backpedaling, taking back some control over the interview. “Hold on, now, I haven't agreed to anything. You haven't
told
me anything. Location, duration . . . I suppose pay rates would be good to know. I'm trying to imagine a job for which my name comes up first, and I'm sorry, but I'm blanking. What exactly is this project?”

And here Bruno smiled, because he knew he had his man. “It's a terraforming, lad. We're going to crush the moon.”

chapter ten

in which worlds are critiqued

In a crazy-ambitious kind of way, Conrad could
see it made sense: the moon was too small and light to retain an atmosphere of its own. But the moon's gravitational attraction—like that of any object—dropped off with the square of the distance from its center, so that compressing the surface down to forty percent of its current elevation would sextuple gravity's pull there. Yielding an Earth-normal gravity of 1.00 gee, and ensuring that the atmosphere was truly stable, even over geological spans of time. Talk about terraforming!

Fortunately Luna did not lack for oxygen, and as for the light metals which life required, why, Luna's crust was richer than any of the colony worlds—richer even than Earth itself. For organic molecules to exist, there would of course need to be a huge importation of hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon. But once this was done it would be possible to construct a soil so deep and so fertile that the new world—with a surface area equal to that of China or Australia—could easily support a billion people even at a colonial-or-worse level of technology.

Moreover, thanks to conservation of angular momentum, reducing the moon's diameter would also speed up its rotation, so that its “day” would shorten from 29.5 Earth days to a more hospitable 4.92 days. Indeed, Conrad immediately suggested crushing just a wee bit less, so that the day would work out to exactly 5.00 Earth days, or 120 hours. He'd had his fill of goofy clocks and calendars on Sorrow, and the decrease in surface gravity that would result—a mere 0.02 gee, according to Bruno's office wall—would inconvenience no one.

“An excellent suggestion,” the king said, with approval and relief in his voice. “I see we're in good hands. In any case, the way is paved for such an endeavor by the engineering of large planettes, by the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and of Sorrow and Gammon and Pup. And in truth a squozen moon is more suitable than those colony worlds in a variety of ways. Locked tight against their red-dwarf stars, those three are metal-poor and radiation-rich, and their days are very long. We can do better by design than by astronomical accident. But I forget myself. I don't have to tell
you
this, who have seen it all firsthand.”

He was leading Conrad toward the fax gate, and at first Conrad assumed he was being dismissed. Bruno had what he wanted—a leader for this bizarre project—and now he was getting back to his own work. But apparently, the sales pitch wasn't over quite yet, for the king murmured something to the fax gate and stepped right through it alongside him.

They came out on a warm, windswept mountaintop under a sprawling canopy of stars. This was some kind of scenic overlook at a mountain's summit: a flat, circular depression lined with a wellstone emulation of the surrounding rock. A winding stone staircase led downward, to a cluster of wellglass buildings ringing the mountain farther down. There were no other peaks in view, and a few hundred meters below the buildings was a layer of cloud that hid the ground, making it impossible to tell how high this mountain was.

Not very, Conrad thought at first, from the dry thickness of the air and the dim, twinkly look of the stars. Must be close to sea level, or even . . . But no, the air was
too
thick, and didn't smell right, and it occurred to him suddenly that this was
Venus
, not Earth.

Nor was that his only surprise. The fax had produced two Palace Guards along with the bodies of Bruno and Conrad—one in front of them and the other appearing behind as they stepped away from the print plate—and when Conrad turned his head and saw them he nearly yelped out loud. He shouldn't be surprised to find the king traveling in the company of his royal bodyguards, but there'd been Palace Guards in the Barnard colony as well, and in the events leading up to the Children's Revolt, and they had certain . . . unsavory associations for Conrad. That hulking silhouette was a symbol of danger, of impending unavoidable pain.

A curse rose unbidden to his lips, and though he managed to keep it silent, his heart rate jumped. Damn!

“Venus,” Bruno said, spreading his arms as if he owned the place. Which he did, Conrad seemed to recall, as majority shareholder or some such. “The day is long here as well—fully twenty-eight hundred hours from dawn to dawn—and this world is also a geological nightmare which periodically liquefies broad swaths of its own crust. There is no way to curb its immense volcanic activity, its immense and continual outpouring of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Thus, terraforming has become an unending process, which will never make anything but the highest mountaintops habitable to humans unless we engineer a special Venusian strain.”

That'll be the day,
Conrad thought, for the Queendom, unlike the colonies, expressly forbade biomods until they'd been thoroughly studied and vetted, their full consequence plumbed. “Tinkering produces monsters,” the Queen had said on more than one occasion, “who cannot grasp the humanity they've lost. Can the fall of the colonies be completely unrelated to this truth? If we're to be free and happy, it's necessary that we avoid such self-destruction.” Rather an extreme position, Conrad thought, but there you had it.

“Anyway,” Bruno said, “the sun is damnably hot here during the long days. As a result, people venture outdoors mainly at night, if then. And does this not undermine the very purpose of terraforming? Immorbidity does not imply omnipotence, alas. We were ambitious in ever thinking this place could be tamed by such as we.”

“Maybe Venus could be crushed,” Conrad suggested. “That would speed up its rotation. You'd have to remove a lot of mass to keep the gravity tolerable, but you could make a moon with it. Hell, you could get two viable planets out of it, and if you set up the eclipses properly they'd shelter each other from the noonday sun.”

“Ho!” Bruno chortled dryly. “What have I pulled from this hat of mine? An architect of worlds, indeed! Your ambition does you credit, lad, but there isn't money enough in all the universe for a scheme as mad as that. If you can imagine such a thing, I'm actually running short of funds. I, yes! I've built thirteen starships out of my own pocket, and each of them cost as much as the entire Nescog and provided not one penny in returns. Some corners of society may be richer for the investment, but I myself am not.

“My coffers have slowly recovered from the shock, but your squozen moon will set me back a thousand years. Think of the energies we must deploy, the masses we'll shift! And here you speak to me of lifting half the weight of a planet, against the planet's own gravity, and then crushing it all! That's twenty times the project you have before you, lad, and the project before you is the largest since Marlon's Ring Collapsiter.”

He paused a moment, though, tugging his beard and pinching his chin, and finally said, “Still, the suggestion has merit. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile I have more to show you, for Venus has not been our only disappointment.”

The fax took them next to a low hilltop overlooking a village in the middle of a rusty plain, with steep red cliffs rising up on either side, just beyond the horizon.

“Savage Mars,” Bruno said, “turns out to have none of Venus' rages and sorrows, and in truth human beings have discovered no gentler world anywhere, except the Earth. He needed a bit of air, a bit of warmth to get him going again, but Mars never forgot how to live. Thriving, though, has always eluded him, for he's a scarred old soldier whose energies are long spent. The warmth of Sol touches this place with a quarter of its Earthly intensity, and the core of the planet is dead and cold and solid. Nor is there enough heavy hydrogen in the poles for economical fusion. So deutrelium is imported, and solar power stations throughout the Queendom beam their energies here. Without this input, this net inward flux of foreign energy, the cities of Mars would grind to a chilly halt. It's a fine world for poets and dilettantes, gardeners and gamers, but
industry
must look elsewhere for its shelter and comfort.”

The king eyed Conrad curiously. “Unless you've, er, got some suggestions for this place as well?”

Conrad shrugged. He wasn't exactly a font of spontaneous genius. He said to the king, “There's always tidal heating, right? On Sorrow it was the only thing keeping the core molten. If Mars had a large, close moon . . . Well, wait a minute. Imagine a
water
moon, larger than the planet itself, with no solid surface or center. It doesn't weigh as much as rock, but it could still exert a strong tidal force. And it would act as an enormous lens, gathering light from the sun and heating up. It would radiate in the infrared, and Mars' gravity would pull it into a teardrop shape that should direct more than half the emissions toward the planet. Right?”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, thinking about that. “Possibly. But would it be stable over geologic time? I suppose it might!”

“Or we could move the planet,” Conrad added lamely. “Closer to the sun.”

The king laughed at that. “I see thinking small is not among your faults. Long ago, I'd thought to give the squozen moon project to Bascal, but in truth he was never suited. He was a political creature, and started a revolution instead.”

So did I,
Conrad answered silently. For he was just as guilty as Bascal, or nearly as guilty, in getting the Children's Revolt moving.

“And he clawed his way to the stars,” Bruno mused, staring down at the village and the red desert plains beyond it, “through
my
pocketbook. And there he met his end.”

At that poignant sentiment, Conrad asked, “Sire, what will you do with the image of Bascal? The one in
Newhope
's memory?”

“I don't know,” the king answered. “If my son is dead then this thing, this recorded entity, must be more a caricature than a copy. We could overlay it on his childhood fax archives and see what happened, but . . .”

“But tinkering produces monsters?”

“Indeed. And so does hardship, of which you had plenty out there in the dying colonies. I'm sick with guilt about that, lad, and I'm not eager to compound my past errors. Some people are more inclined to monsterdom than others. But I do mourn for the little boy, the Poet Prince who used to putter around Tongatapu on that noisy little scooter of his. What a happy lad, what a joy to behold! Already containing within him the sprouts of wickedness, or poor judgment. Even before the time of
Newhope
's departure, he'd become a stranger to us. A dangerous one.”

“You're going to let him die? Your own son?” Conrad couldn't help feeling a little bit horrified, after he'd gone to the trouble of preserving that damned message. If it was the
only
record of Bascal's adult life . . . God, it must be a wrenching decision. If it were up to Conrad, what would he do?

“We don't know his fate,” the king said sadly. “We only suspect it. And this so-called cousin of his, this Edward Bascal Faxborn, is an alternate expression of the boy I raised. ‘King Eddie of Wolf' they call him, in tones of true friendship. I've never met the man outside a self-aware transmission, but is he not also my son? A better version? A different set of choices?”

The king moped for a few seconds, the Martian breeze twisting in his long hair. “Someday, perhaps, when we've universe enough to contain him, we can dare to unleash that spirit again. But for now I suspect we're better off leaving him where he is. If it's a kind of murder to postpone his resurrection, I'll invite you to join in the conspiracy. Will you do me the favor, Architect, of forgetting this conversation? I don't want his mother finding out.”

Conrad's next stop was Luna itself—specifically
the
small domed city of Copernicus, nearly dead-center on Nearside, which was to be the site of his temporary headquarters, until by his command the ground started shaking and cracking and falling in on itself and the surface became uninhabitable.

“How exactly do we accomplish this?” he'd asked the king, for there were already detailed cross-sectional blueprints of the squozen moon, showing exactly where the surface must lie, and how the dense subsurface must be layered in order to maximize the world's utility to its future inhabitants. Toxic metals were to be buried deep—the moon had an excess of nickel and arsenic—and useful ones were to wrap the planette like foil, in layers easily accessible from surface mines. Deeper, a third of the way down to the core, there'd be a layer of di-clad neutronium supported by pillars of monocrystalline diamond.

“How?” the king asked, as though the question had never occurred to him. “I should think
you
would tell
me
.”

Fortunately, there didn't seem to be any huge hurry; Conrad was given two hundred years to complete the task, and a budget of trillions to get it started. Still, Bruno's tour around the solar system, ending back in the remoteness of Maplesphere far out in the Kuiper Belt, had been a long one. Subjectively they were gone for just a few minutes, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and most of the Nescog was incapable of exceeding it. Invisibly, the journey had chewed up nearly a day in transit times, during which the evacuation orders had been broadcast to Lunar citizens, along with Conrad's name and face.

As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the
people
of Luna.

The moon's gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn't compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with
anyplace
for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn't exactly a garden spot.

And yet, in Conrad's day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how
happy
they would be at the news of their eviction!