To Crush the Moon (18 page)

“But as you've surmised, he needs metal. Gold and aluminum are best, but almost any conductor will do—wellstone is anywhere from twelve to twenty percent metal by volume. The rest is all silicon and oxygen, easily obtained from even the most sterile of soils. He has a small quarry nearby, you can bet on that. But not a mine, not a refining operation. Why bother, when he can loot the hard-won fruits of civilization instead?”

“Why?” someone demands. “Why would he do such a thing?”

“To conquer the world,” Bruno answers simply. “To smash it and remake it according to some blueprint of his own. The lives of his victims are incidental; he's chasing some mirage of imagined ‘greatness.'”

“Blueprint?” someone else asks, in thickly accented tones.

“Sorry, a . . . a map. A design. An image of how things will appear when he's finished. The intermediate stages are nothing to him; your suffering is meaningless. He's got his eyes on the future, not the present.”

“You sound as though you know him,” Pine Chadwir says, not quite accusingly.

“I know his type,” Bruno answers. “Given the constraints on your life span and population size, such individuals may be rare on Lune. But they used to crop up with fair regularity. When exactly did these troubles begin?”

“It's difficult to say with any certainty,” Radmer answers, jumping ahead of the Furies and their attendants in a way Bruno would have found rude. He walks to one of the globes, spins it ass-up, and points his finger at a region marked in orange, which includes the south pole and over half the former Farside. “Here, in the high desert hills of Astaroth, there have been robot sightings for fifteen, maybe twenty years. They were dismissed until two years ago, when it became clear that Astaroth had ceased to exist as an organized nation.

“This may sound odd, but the actual date of its collapse is unknown. Astaroth had always been a sparsely populated country, with internal squabbles and few diplomatic ties to the rest of Lune. Most of its people just disappeared, quietly, and by the time refugees started finding their way to Nubia, why, the Nubians' days were already numbered.”

Bruno nodded, processing that. “And where does the name Glimmer King come from? These refugees?”

“According to them, it comes from the robots themselves. I've never encountered the story in anything but fragments. He has . . . other names as well.”

Bruno looks him in the eye and nods very slightly, acknowledging that. There have been rumors, yes.

“Robots have been known to speak,” says Danella Mota. “They addressed the Senatoria Plurum in City Campanas, for example, shortly before sacking it and killing the people inside. Only a few escaped with their lives, so I can't help wondering what the robots said, or why they bothered. It seems capricious, especially for machines.”

“Only because you don't see the plans that drive them,” Bruno tells her. “But these can be deduced through careful study, and usually are. No one has ever conquered the whole human race—not without a majority vote in favor.”

“You have an air of comfortable authority about you,” says the eldest Fury to Bruno. “Mr. . . . Ako'i, is it? So does General Radmer, but he defers to you, not the other way round.”

“I was once a teacher,” Bruno answers. Which is certainly the truth, if not the whole.

“Hmm,” she says, unconvinced. “I suppose this ‘fax machine' is like a mirror? Its reflections are made solid somehow, but the device itself can be smashed?”

“Certainly.”

“And this is your plan? To find it and break it?”

Here Bruno comes up short, because no plan has been explained to him in anything but the vaguest terms. The “Stormlands” are visible on the map as a gray oval smear, perhaps eighty kilometers wide and a hundred and eighty tall, near Imbria's uninhabited southeast corner. The province is marked with the name “Shanru.” But no such place had existed in his day. A land of permanent storm? Why would he go there? What would he accomplish?

His ignorance seems to disappoint the eldest Fury. To Radmer she says, “Will you elaborate on your plans, General? You can risk your neck in the Stormlands without our blessing. You're here because you need something.”

To this Pine Chadwir adds, “If you can fling yourself all the way to Varna, then surely you can fling yourself directly into the Stormlands' eye. Assuming it has one.”

“It does, Madam Regent,” Radmer says. “I've seen it myself, from high above the world. A fifteen-kilometer hole in the clouds. Its western edge, against the Blood Mountains, is piled high with sand dunes, but near the center I saw a crisscross of straight, dark lines.”

“Manassa?” asks the eldest Fury, her eyes glittering in the sunset.

“The fabled city itself,” Radmer agrees, “exactly as Zaleis the Wanderer claimed. He really did make it in and out.”

“And so you believe his other claims,” says Danella Mota, “his ‘Dragon of Shanru' and his ‘engines and objects of great antiquity and wholly mysterious purpose.'”

“There were no dragons in this world when it was new, madam. Whether any have been created since then I couldn't say. But aye, the rest of it I believe. And this man, who calls himself Ako'i, is better qualified than any living person to bring these engines and objects back to life. The Glimmer King's robots are not invincible, just strong and numerous. With proper equipment on the human side, it should be possible to defeat them.”

“Possible,” says the eldest Fury with a slow nod. “Well, that's something. But what do you need from us?”

“Transportation,” says Radmer. “Armed escort. A safe-conduct passport which your turnpike guards will accept. The enemy will have taken my capsule by now, and even if I had a spare, landing inside the eye of a storm would be risky indeed. Hiking in on foot, as Zaleis did, is more likely to succeed. I've studied his path, which appears to be the best compromise between weather and terrain. I believe we can duplicate it.”

“We cannot spare troops, Radmer,” says Danella Mota warily.

“I need only a few. A dozen Dolceti, perhaps.”

The room explodes at that remark. “Dolceti! A dozen! This Older is as mad as all the rest.”

“Your request is denied,” says a harried-sounding Pine Chadwir. “You ask the one thing we cannot possibly grant, in this hour of greatest need.”

“Then I'll take my leave,” says Radmer, “and return to the veils of Echo Valley to await this world's destruction. I would stand and die with you, madam, if I thought it would do any good. But if civilization must die again, I prefer to be among friends.”

Now the room falls silent, and fearful, and all eyes are on the Furies, wondering what they'll say next. It's the eldest who speaks first, and her tone is wistful and quiet. “They say you built the world, Radmer, as a carpenter might build a house.”

“The world was here long before me, madam. All I did was remodel it.”

“So. Not quite a god, then. But something powerful nonetheless. And still afraid! You've traveled far on our behalf—to Varna and back.”

And here Bruno catches a glimpse of the young Conrad Mursk in the weathered features of Radmer. “I've traveled much farther than that, Madam Regent. To the stars themselves, where this sunlight won't arrive for years.”

“You're very old,” she says, considering that. “And wise, and strange. And very kind—or foolish—to offer this peculiar assistance to us, who barely know you. Whether it help or not, it surely cannot make things any worse. I give you twenty Dolceti, General, and the blessing of the Board of Regents.”

chapter sixteen

in which a fateful journey
is undertaken

“One of the diamond pillars buckled,” Radmer is
telling Bruno, “and the neutronium plate above it slipped almost to the center of Lune. The plates are flat hexagons, right? But at the surface, the region of depressed gravity is more nearly circular. And with mountain ranges on either side, you can't even really see that. It ends up being more of an oval.”

“A permanent low-pressure system,” Bruno muses. “A permanent thunderstorm.”

“More nearly a hurricane. It brings no joy to the region, no refreshment. Only a hard cleansing. And when it happened, when the pillar buckled and the plate fell and the ground above it cracked and sank, the shock waves struck every fault and fissure in the whole damned planette, releasing gigatons of stored energy.”

“This was the ‘Shattering,' that looms so large in these people's history?” Bruno asks.

Radmer confirms it. “Half the population died in the first few hours, and within a week no two bricks were left standing, anywhere in the world. Lune was the jewel of post-Queendom civilization, and without it things just . . . fell apart. Again. No more rockets, no heavy industry of any kind. It's only in the past two centuries that there's been any real consolidation. And frankly I'd still call this a borderline dark age, even without the war.”

Bruno weighs this against his conscience, probing for the guilt he ought to feel. Surely this Shattering is another calamity he could have prevented. But as the two of them step through an archway and into a large courtyard of grass and concrete and grimly drilling soldiers, he glances up at the sky. The sun has finally gone down, but the clouds are aflame, dwarfing the works of Man beneath them. And he finds he can no longer be angry with himself for honest mistakes, or for living through to this moment.

Still, more from a sense of duty than anything else he says, “You and I have a lot of bodies at our feet.”

“Aye, well. At least there
is
a Lune. We can take credit for that.”

“There'd still be an Earth, if not for the Nescog. If not for me, personally.”

But Radmer just shrugs. “Something would have killed it, sooner or later. It's the way of things. The important question is whether it was good while it lasted.”

Bruno, though horrified, can't help but chuckle at that. “You've become a deathist, lad. Who'd've thought?”

“Aye,” says Radmer, cracking a feeble grin of his own. “A vegetarian, too, for in this life the meat comes from creatures. They have faint little hopes and dreams of their own, and I've made war on them long enough. Why should some chicken lose everything, to add another day to
this
?” He waves contemptuously at his own flesh.

“Would you hasten your own story's end?” Bruno probes. Among men as old as they, it isn't a rude question at all. “Is that why you became a soldier?”

But Radmer dismisses that notion just as contemptuously. “I've always been a soldier, a fighter, intolerant of oppression. I fought
you
, once.”

“So you did,” Bruno muses, remembering back to those days, when Conrad Mursk and Bascal Edward had been inseparable, and the problems of the world could be dismissed as mere childishness. It doesn't seem so long ago, really, and
there's
a sentiment the deathists would have an opinion about. Did the long years of his life count for so little? “Still, here we are. Side by side for a new war.”

Radmer grunts. “I gave that up, too—soldiering. Really! With a fax-filtered body and three thousand years of dirty tricks, it was like shooting babies. Not a risk to myself at all. It was nothing a moral person could condone.”

“But you'll fight robots,” Bruno said.

“Aye, one last time. In my next life I'll be a farmer, bringing sustenance into the world.”

Now there's an interesting thought. What will the resurrected Bruno do, if it turns out there's a future for him to do it in? Teach? Open a bistro, as his father had done long ago, in a land not so terribly different from this one? The idea seems bizarre, alien, tragically comic. But not impossible.

Any further rumination on the subject, though, is extinguished by the arrival of Bordi, the Dolceti Primus and Captain of the Timoch Guard.

“Where are your men?” he asks crisply, in the Old Tongue.

“Departed,” says Radmer. “Returned to protect their own homes and families.”

Well, yes, thinks Bruno, but not as easily as that. At the last, Sidney Lyman had resisted. “So, what, you're going to help the humans, be a hero, and we're dismissed?”

“You didn't even want to be here,” Radmer told him. “I dragged you.”

“Come with us,” Lyman said urgently. “Or let us come with you. There's too few of us in the world, sir, to be scattering to the winds like this. We've got to hang together.”

“I agree. Which is why you're needed back at Echo Valley.”

There'd been more to it than that, but eventually Lyman and his followers had given up, realizing that their old commander simply wouldn't be responsible for them any longer, would not allow them into harm's way on his account. On the one hand it was a sorry way to repay their loyalty—with the barbed kindness of condescension. On the other hand, it was exactly what Bruno would have done in his place. If the world be doomed, well, let them salvage what they could.
That's an order, soldier.

There are so many people he misses, people he loves but will never see again. If he could reach back and save even one of them—not just Tamra, but anyone—he'd do it in a heartbeat, whatever the cost. But here there are no such decisions for him to make. Here he's a relic, nothing more, and that's all right. He'll do his bit—or try, anyway—and fade back into the mists.

“It's just the two of you?” Bordi asks.

“Right,” says Radmer. “And if it's all the same to you, I'll delegate all the logistics. Just get us to the Stormlands and back, before this city falls.”

“Already working on it, General. Your timing is good; with the sun setting, the upslope winds will begin blowing in a few hours. Eastward, against the mountains. That will buy us a hundred kilometers right there. I'd advise you both to get some sleep beforehand.”

“Why?” asks Radmer. “How are we traveling?”

“On the back of a flau,” Bordi answers, in hard and mirthful tones.

This turns out to be a living creature, mostly hollow
and filled with hydrogen. With the proportions of a Tongan royal pleasure yacht, the thing has a broad, flat back some fifteen meters wide and forty-five long, with a bulbous, vaguely ship-shaped body underneath. At the front, its mouth is surprisingly tiny, and surrounded by eyes and nostrils of alien design.

“It looks like a leviathan,” Bruno says, referring to the largest of the multicellular creatures in the ocean of Pup, the marginally habitable world circling Wolf 359. The thought brings a pang to his heart, for the King of Wolf had been Edward Bascal Faxborn, an alternate version of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. King Eddie to his admirers, he'd been by all accounts a fair-minded ruler who had taken more closely after Bruno and especially Tamra.

And though he'd thought his grief long exhausted, Bruno finds that the thought of Tamra Lutui can still wrench his insides. Not just the coolly smiling Queen of Sol—though he misses her, too—but the twenty-year-old girl who'd gigglingly granted him the title of declarant in a room full of well-dressed strangers. And then philander, yes, a few months later—in her royal bedchamber, attended only by those dainty robots that looked more like ballerinas than like the later Palace Guards.

“It was a leviathan once,” Radmer says, yanking Bruno back to the present. “But now it swims a sea of air.”

And that's absurd, because the Wolfans had never managed a starship to return even their own miserable selves to Sol, much less a mindless, overgrown alien invertebrate. He says, “Was the genome transmitted over the Instelnet? Part of the intellectual property traffic?”

“It was, yes, during the late Queendom era. Eridani bought it from Wolf, and carried it here in their armadas' libraries. And since the four known life-bearing worlds were all seeded by the same primordial source, deep in the galaxy somewhere, it wasn't hard to insert that genome into a Terran yeast cell and convince it to grow. If you recall, the early Lunites were quite talented bioengineers.”

“I don't recall it, no,” says Bruno. “I was quite busy at that time, trying to save a bit of Earth. All in vain, as it turned out, but it was important to try.”

Radmer muses for a moment before adding, “Those engineers had all the best equipment from the old Queendom, and all the best techniques from half a dozen colonies. And there was no law to stop them, not really. From the original genomes, of course, they began their customizations; the flau was only one project of hundreds.”

The creature is ugly in the extreme, its lumpy, rubbery skin gleaming in the rainbow light of Murdered Earth. It doesn't seem to have much shape, either, though that might be more a function of its lying on the hard, flat pavement of the Timoch International Airport. In the water, with its fans and frills extended, the leviathan had always moved with the same slow, eerie beauty of sea creatures everywhere.

Heck, it probably still drifts in the seas of Pup, dreamily unaware of the solid little beings that came and went in the caverns of its world's rocky highlands. Unlike the Eridanians, the Wolfans could at least
go
outside, if not exactly live there. They could explore their ocean, could sting its residents with probes and biopsy needles. A few humans had even been
eaten
by leviathans, and at least one man had been rescued alive, days later, after cutting through to an air sac and subsisting on the moisture of its walls. It was huge interstellar news at the time. But even that had scarcely seemed to register with the affected creature, which swam peacefully away in unhurried search of more cooperative meals.

Here, the “flau” has had metal rings driven through its body, with hemp and leather ropes strung through them, making it a kind of artifact, a ship, an old-fashioned beast of burden. A thing both owned and controlled, no longer free.

“This is how people travel?” he asks disapprovingly.

“When necessary,” Radmer allows. “Though smaller groups would generally use a cloth balloon, and single individuals can still travel by glider. If they begin at sufficient altitude and ride the thermals skillfully, glider pilots have been known to circumnavigate the world.”

This surprises Bruno only slightly, because the world is small, and the mountains of Lune tower much higher over its seas than the hills of Earth ever did, giving rise sometimes to
very
strong updrafts. Still, this place evokes a sort of continuous amazement in him, for what appears rustic—even primitive—at first glance, always turns out to be something more. Something clever, something optimized for the environment and the available resources. The absence of wellstone—indeed, of semiconductors in general—has pushed the Lunites to almost uncanny extremes of artistry and invention. And that makes it not so terribly different from the Queendom, which after all had hired an inventor as its king.

“Why not simply use a blimp?” he asks.

And Radmer counters, “Why not stay home? The flau can be a bit tricky—people have been known to fall off when they get the hiccups—but they know their own way. They're self-healing and self-balancing, and they almost never get hit by lightning. They just . . . go around the storms.”

“General,” says Bordi, striding toward them in the darkness. “The wind is shifting, so we'd best get aloft while we can. You two can lash your bags at the stern. Mind the steersman, though; put them exactly where he specifies, and no other place.”

“Aye,” Radmer acknowledges. “Thank you, Captain.”

Two other people follow in Bordi's wake, and after a moment Bruno recognizes them as Natan and Zuq, the Dolceti who stood with him at the city gate, while the others ran off to battle.

“Good evening,” he says to them, without any particular emphasis. And their reply, though less than enthusiastic, contains a good bit more deference than their earlier speech had. “It's Encyclopedia Man. Hello, sir. Apparently we're at your service.”

“Not by choice, surely,” he says, and they surprise him by denying it. “Now, now. Any ward of the Regents is a ward of the Order of Dolcet, and deserving the best protection. We volunteered and were accepted.”

“Well,” Bruno says, feeling a bit of human warmth stirring in the ancient hollows of his heart. “You have my gratitude, then.”

“Up you go,” says Zuq, grabbing a rope ladder and climbing upward, showing the way.

“After you,” says Natan, with a valetlike gesture. Radmer and Bordi have gotten separated somehow—Bruno can see them heading up toward the flau's pinched little face—and he appears to be in the care of these two men once again. So he climbs the ropes himself, clambering past a network of rings and fishnet and flat leather straps.

The deck of the flau—if indeed that's the proper term—is a woven mat remarkably like the deck of a traditional Tongan catamaran, except that the bark it's fashioned from feels thicker and tougher, the strips much wider. All around it is a waist-high railing of something like bamboo—some light, stiff, hollow plant that looks gray under the night sky.

Immediately he's set upon by a bare-chested little Luner man wearing a vest and pants and cylindrical cap of supple brown leather. “Who's you?” the man demands in a thick New Tongue accent, and if the Dolceti have dispelled any notion of these “humans” being childlike or comical, this stocky, strutting, hypercephalic figure provides the counterpoint. “Older? Been y' on a flau before? Don' put tha down thar, foo!”

“Our steersman, Fander Kytu,” Zuq explains, leaning easily against the railing, which for him is nearly chest-high. “Don't make him angry, or we'll have a long night of it. Be assured, he's the best in the world at what he does.”

“Bag,” says Fander, pointing to a netted-over heap near the deck's stern.

“I'll take it,” says Natan, relieving Bruno of his few meager possessions. Except the sword and pistol the Furies gave him, which he keeps in leather scabbards at his side. The sword is not an air foil. In fact, it's not a real sword by any reasonable standard. It's made of opaque forged steel, for one thing, without so much as a diamond coating to stiffen it and hold its edge. And it doesn't vibrate or glow white-hot or anything, so if he's to cut anything with it he'll need to swing very hard indeed.