To Crush the Moon (24 page)

Still, there does come a point where he notices they're going downhill. This by itself is not unusual, for the pass snakes up and down many times as it rises through the mountains. But the
trend
is down now. They've passed the summit, and are on their way down into the Shanru Basin. They have reached the halfway mark. Which only means that the worst is still to come.

Of the terrible hours after that, Bruno later remembers nothing at all. His first clear memory is of the eyewall, which resembles a tornado, except that it's so large—fifteen kilometers large!—that it appears flat, like a genuine wall. It's so tall that it seems to have no structure at all, no top, no twist or curl. It's just a straight, opaque, heaving wall of flying debris, from dust and fines to sharp rocks the size of his head. Blowing
up
, more than laterally. Is this the main source of the region's gravel rains?

He notices another thing as well; the wind has changed somewhere along the way. No longer frigid and damp, it's now warm and very dry. He can no longer blink his eyes; they've dried open in a crust of mucus. When did that happen? In fact, the air grows warmer with every step. The eyewall itself must be as dry and hot as an oven; he can feel the heat radiating off it. From friction? From the sudden compression of unwilling air against the storm's unyielding center? Certainly, the sound of it is louder than anything Bruno has ever experienced. Like an ongoing explosion, the eyewall is a vertical slice of hell. How deep can it be? How long can a human survive all this?

“Are we going through there?” he shouts to no one. And of course they are. Where else is there? Even staggering like drunks, what other chance or choice have they got?

Blast.

And somehow they do get through; Bruno will later remember the experience like a nightmare: in fragments. Smashed against a rock, then clinging desperately to it as he's lifted off his feet! Smashed against the ground, then scrabbling for something, anything, to grab on to as the vast suction takes hold of him. A dizzy airborne moment and then, miraculously, a hard landing on his knees. That's all. He later suspects that he managed to close his eyes, and in fact had them closed the whole time, for the memories are visceral rather than visual.

In any case he emerges onto a plain of sand, beneath a sky so blue and bright it seems to burn his optic nerves. The sun hangs over the eyewall's far side, illuminating the storm's interior like a vast, spinning paper lantern.

He staggers forward, becomes aware of a figure ahead of him, a figure behind. He wants to rest, to drink a sip of water and then collapse into a dreamless coma. He doesn't care if he ever awakes. But there's brick-sized debris raining down all around him, so he staggers on a little farther, a little farther. The bedrock beneath his tattered boots gives way to dirt, and then to sand that feels as soft and cool as a wellstone bed.

Finally he comes to a gathering place, a hollow in the sand where raggedy human beings have accumulated. He throws himself down among them and takes that longed-for sip of water. Another person plops down beside him, and then another. And there must be some part of his brain that remembers thought, remembers mathematics, for he takes in the scene with a glance and says to himself, “Our twenty Dolceti are down to just ten. We've lost six more along the way.”

It's his last thought for a long, long time.

chapter twenty-two

in which a crown of
empire is retrieved

Looking over Bruno and the sleeping Dolceti, a
newly awakened Radmer feels—if grimly—the same vindication he did upon setting his boots on the beaches of Varna, after a fifty-hour tumble through cold vacuum. Crazy idea, yes, but here they are. Ten bodies poorer than they began, but still operational.

And there, in the distance, nestled among dunes as high as ten semaphore towers, lie the ruins of Manassa. He sees stone and brick walls jutting up, gray and black and ocher against the sand. More important, he sees the mirror-black sheen of inactive wellstone, alive with glints of green and purple and tarnished silver. It's been a long time since he's seen so much in one place, and it's a good sign indeed; this deadly journey has not been in vain.

The dunes themselves are light brown in color, with patches of gray-black and khaki, and long, strange smudges of darker brown. They look like nothing so much as a pair of desert camouflage trousers out of some Old Modern war drama. The top of the dune field makes a clean line against the sky, not sinusoidal but irregular, ripply, dotted with shallow crests and peaks. It divides the world in two: brown underneath and achingly blue above.

By contrast, the first ridgeline of the Blood Mountains is jagged and chaotic with trees, with rocks, with a variety of grays and browns, dark greens and light greens. Behind that sits the eyewall, which reaches away to the north and south, wrapping around the Shanru Basin. A weak tornado, fifteen kilometers wide.

To the west, the ragged line of the Johnny Wang Uplift is lost in blue-white haze, with the eyewall behind it and evil-looking clouds boiling over the top, racing hard to the north. The ground between here and the Uplift is incredibly flat, broken only by the dune field itself.

Ah, my precious Lune,
Radmer frets. He hasn't seen this place since the Shattering, when the ground fell two hundred meters and the city burst like a melon. Almost no one got out alive. It looks now like a cork jammed too deep in its bottle and then left too long on the shelf, so that the resulting hollow has filled with dust. Disrupting the clean lines of his planette, his would-be masterpiece. If he'd had more time to track down and melt out seismic hotspots, that terrible day might never have come. He'd never had it in him to save the Queendom, but the Iridium Days, at least, might still be going strong if he'd managed the last years of Luna with greater finesse. Tamra had forbidden him from completing the crustal stabilization, yes, but that simply told him he should have begun it earlier. Somehow. He should have paid more attention to the news; he should have anticipated the need.

Or, alternatively, he could have mustered the resources of the post-Queendom era. With sufficient digging—and he knew where to dig—the worst of the pressure could still have been relieved, gradually and intentionally.
Not
all in one shot. The Shattering was
his fault
if it was anyone's. Still, his punishment is fitting: to dwell forever in the ruins. Such is the fate of an immorbid people, as Rodenbeck had warned.

But Radmer learned long ago not to mope. It doesn't help anything. He turns his mind instead to practical concerns: a fire, upon which a decent breakfast might finally be cooked. He begins gathering up bits of desert driftwood, strangely light and hard in his hands.

At the edges of the dune field, there are dead and dying trees. Also a few living ones that look recently half-buried, and some dead-and-mostly-buried ones looking as though the sand moved forward and swallowed them a long time ago. Here and there, thick roots and branches jut out of the sand like bones, with a solid, shiny feel that suggests they're already partially fossilized. How long would it take to petrify wood in sands like these?

But the stuff burns well enough when he lays it in a pit, so he unfolds the little titanium grate he's been carrying all these days, and places some hard biscuits and olives and fatbeans in a tray of water to soften them up for grilling.

Soon the smells of food are waking up the others, who rub their eyes, make faces at the scum and grit in their mouths.

“Am I dead?” the young Dolceti, Zuq, asks hopefully. He looks like a man badly hung over and ready to swear off the grape forever. His skin has gone purple-white, but that at least is a reaction to the brightness here; his body is attempting to reflect unwanted heat and UV.

“Not yet, I'm afraid. But with one of my breakfasts, you may be in luck. How's your condition?”

“Not good,” Zuq answers, showing off a broken wrist.

And he's not alone; of the ten Dolceti who've made it this far, nine are sporting some sort of major sprain or fracture. Splinting these becomes the first task of this day, which is already into late afternoon and will see the sun set in another twelve hours.

“Remember the war,” Radmer tells them solemnly, as Bruno de Towaji stirs, shakes the sand out of his hair, and finally rises. “Injured or not, you're here to fight. You're here to protect this man, Ako'i, while he rummages through yonder ruins.”

“We know our jobs,” Bordi answers solemnly. “We don't need you to tell us.”

“Fair enough. But you do need breakfast.”

He dishes it hot into their waiting bowls, and for those who've lost their bowls along the way he plops it, steaming, into their bare hands. If it burns them, they don't acknowledge it, but rather wolf it down, barely pausing to chew.

“I've been here before,” Bruno says while the others
eat. His eyes are on the distant wellstone jutting up from the sand.

“In the Iridium Days?” Zuq asks, sounding, as always, like he just barely believes it.

Bruno snorts. “They weren't called that until they were nearly over, lad. We had no name for that bitter time, when the Earth lay dying, chewed outward from its core by fragments of the murdered Nescog. Still, ‘iridium' is a clever pun; someone back then had an acid sense of humor.”

“Because it sounds like Eridani?” Radmer asks.

Bruno coughs out a bitter laugh. “Not at all, lad. Think back to your chemistry lessons; think of a periodic table. Iridium is a member of the precious metals group, one step down from platinum and two down from gold. But it's less shiny than either, and was never a favorite in coins or jewelry. In a value-of-metal sense, the phrase ‘Iridium Days' falls somewhere between ‘Golden Age' and ‘Iron Age.' It's a dark subtle irony for an era of decline.”

“Well,” says Zuq, “at least they kept a sense of humor.”

Bruno smiles down at the boy, who still looks to his eyes like an overgrown toddler. Not only is he short, but like all the “humans” he's got that oversized coconut, those big questioning eyes. “You mightn't say that if you were there.”

“You did a lot of fighting?”

“Indeed, though not against an enemy you'd recognize. Oh, there were shooting wars here and there, but for the most part we had shamed ourselves into a kind of sorry truce. Even Doxar Bagelwipe was appalled at the scale of destruction. ‘So fragile after all,' he said on his deathbed. The nerve!”

“So what
did
you fight?”

Bruno waves a hand. “Oh, you know. Gravity. Entropy. I spent a decade as a common laborer in the Bag Corps, trying to rescue as much mass as possible for the neutronium presses. Trying to turn the Earth into a constellation of planettes, so her people might have somewhere to flee to, even if they lacked the means. But they
did
lack the means, and so did we. Only two planettes were built down there in the gravity well, before the Earth collapsed into rainbows. I have no idea what's become of them since. Uninhabited, presumably, or your people would know of them. Have you heard of a world called Ramadan? Or another called Open Hand?”

“I haven't,” admits Zuq. Other voices mutter their agreement.

Bruno sighs. “No, I thought not. Alas. Before that I was involved in a project to revive select portions of the Nescog. Right here in Manassa, for almost a year. Someone had found an old fax machine, complete with network gates, and we snatched it from the hospital system and were trying to contact the last few nodes, before they went down. With that, you see, we could yank people right off the dying planets! But the tide was against us, all efforts in vain. Were there people who considered the situation normal? Even glorious? I never met them. For those who remembered the Queendom, its aftermath was a time of great sadness.”

“It got better later,” Radmer tells them both, as if
apologizing. But Bruno is mostly right; the Iridium Days were never as roaring as the legends that adhered to them afterward. But neither, in his opinion, was the Queendom itself. He'd fought against it, been exiled from it, crawled back to it in defeat, and finally, toward the end, joined its upper echelons—a rich man with heady connections. He knew it better than Bruno did; knew it from up and down, from inside and out. And the simple fact was, the Tara and Toji of Luner mythology, with their Sphere Palace and their Great Bronze Navy and their “only as strong as the weakest among us,” were creatures out of fairy tale. He'd long ago stopped trying to reconcile them to any literal history.

But Bruno surprises him by saying, “Nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even the bad.”

And what can Radmer say to that, who has seen his share of bad, and even a goodly slice of forever?

After breakfast, he leads Bruno up into the dune field for a closer look, taking Deceant Natan—the only uninjured Dolceti—along as bodyguard. Radmer doesn't expect trouble, but he's always prepared for it.

At the base of the hills, the dirt looks almost exactly like beach sand: a mix of white and brown and black grains, very small, interspersed with sharp bits of unweathered gravel that can't have been here very long. And like an undisturbed beach or riverbed, the ground is covered with a ripply pattern of footprint-sized dunes. When he steps in the trough of one, he finds it squashing underfoot like a sponge. When he steps on the crest, it supports his weight for a moment and then slowly undergoes a kind of staged collapse.
Squish squish crunch.
It's like this at every step, and it will take a lot of steps to carry them up to those ruins.

With a terraformer's eye, he takes in the view ahead, admiring the way the sweep of the mountains has conspired with the swirl of the storm to gather so much dust in this quiet corner. The dune field is larger than the city it swallowed. In fact, Radmer can see now that the city must extend beyond the eastern side of the eyewall, into even greater ruin.

Still, surprisingly, the northeast faces of many dunes are lined with grass and other plants, particularly at the base, or the seam between dunes, and it strikes him suddenly that this is not so much a desert as a battleground, between the forces that build and move the dunes, and the forces that seek to smother them with plant life. It's the terraforming drama itself, writ small.

Nor is this place particularly dry. Indeed, emerging from the base of a high dune, a little stream flows in bursts, with minor flash floods of water surging every twenty seconds or so.
Gloo-OOP! Gloo-OOP!
like a kind of geological clock, ticking away the empty millennia. Bruno pauses here, admiring.

“I should like to study this regularity,” he says, sounding wistful. “How do deep sand and shallow water conspire in this way? Tick, tock!”

But Radmer doesn't have to remind him there's a war on, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Bruno watches four complete cycles, and then he's off toward Manassa again, without prompting. It's not an easy walk; after a while, the crumbly yielding softness of the sand fatigues the calf muscles, the ankles, the tendons along the top of the foot. Maybe a camel would feel at home on a surface like this, but few other creatures are adapted for it; Radmer is keenly aware that he's a primate of seashore and savannah and forest. He can climb a rock or a tree without difficulty, but his evolution doesn't know this place.

Still, they find their way. The crests of the dunes are almost like roads, extending for winding kilometers. On either side the dunes drop away into hollows a hundred meters deep. On the face of a dune, the undisturbed ground is a tiger-stripe pattern of brown and black, or beige and dark gray. The lighter sand seems to accumulate in the hollows, with the darker sand following along the ridgelines.

“Something to do with grain sizes?” he asks Bruno.

But the older man just shrugs. “A natural sorting mechanism, clearly. Weight, temperature, the stickiness of the grains . . . You're the planet builder, I'm afraid. I can only guess.”

Anyway, for whatever reason, the vegetation and the lighter sand seem to occur mainly in the same places—streaks of white and green among the brown. Even though it's technically winter, the long day has heated up the dark sand, which shimmers with mirages. Radmer is already thirsty again, and from the road-crest of a dune those cool colors beckon. And the roads don't lead the right direction anyway; from here, straight on is straight down! But walking down the steep hillside is almost impossible; it invites one to run. Soon the three men are descending in great walloping giant's steps, with the sand squeaking and groaning wherever their feet touch down. It's hilarious and a little bit frightening, because the dune collapses with every step, and it seems to Radmer that the whole thing could easily bury them without a hiccup if they stumble. So they don't.

The pale sand at the bottom of the ditch is very firm when his foot comes down straight on top of it. A sideways kick loosens it, though, revealing softer sand beneath. It appears, actually, to be a semisolid crust of larger particles sitting on top of a fluid of smaller ones. The trough is full of dried, dead vegetation, with mounds of light brown sand surrounding it.

He's got to retract his thoughts about the lifelessness here, though, for on closer inspection he sees that the dunes are crisscrossed with little tracks. The shapes and even sizes of the footprints have been lost—blurred out by the shifting sand—and there's no other clue to their identity. Ironically, the plants here in the trough look edible and even succulent: desert species of pea and rice and pepper, perfectly adapted to sucking moisture out of this environment.