To Crush the Moon (8 page)

“I'm . . . sorry,” she said.

And before she could say anything else he nodded once, trying hard to squelch his anger. “Thank you. Your apology is accepted. Now take me to my wife,
please
.”

chapter six

in which a community is overrun

Faxing from one place to another had been a
perfectly ordinary feature of Conrad's youth. He'd done it several times a day, with no more thought than he'd give to stepping through an ordinary doorway. Sure, the body was destroyed and then reassembled as an atomically perfect copy, but what of it? The atoms in your body were temporary anyway—constantly churning, moving, departing and being replaced. This thing called “life” was just a standing wave in a flowing river; it endured across the smaller patterns that came and went. Only a deathist would obsess about the higher meaning of it all.

But that was a long time ago. Conrad had last seen a medical-grade print plate in the autumn days of Sorrow, and the last person to step through it—Princess Wendy de Towaji Lutui Rishe—had paid a high price, dying elaborately from an undiagnosed glitch in the system. Even that memory felt remote, far removed from this time and place, but its lessons lingered in the bones. Sandra led Conrad to the nearest fax machine with no further difficulty, only to find him balking at the threshold of the gray-black, vaguely foggy-looking rectangle of its print plate.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

And what could Conrad say, who'd just gone on about his impatience, his courage in the face of hardship? “I'm . . . fine, thank you. It's just been a long time since I traveled this way.”

“It doesn't feel like much,” she said, shrugging. “Just a little tingle as you go through.”

“I know, dear, but there's more to it than that. I've been to the stars and back, and I've lost little bits of myself here and there along the way. One grows . . .” Cautious? That was hardly the word for a man who'd defied martial law, who'd stolen Barnard's single most tangible asset, who'd plowed a course through rubble fields and smacked head-on into trouble, bringing his closest friends along for the ride. “One
thinks
about these things more and more. Right and wrong, life and death, freedom and servitude. Every decision kicks up these
consequences
that follow along for the rest of your life. Which is forever, right? It sometimes pays to take a moment and think.”

Sandra had apparently seen her share of wackos on the job, and took this comment with equanimity. “I can arrange for other transport, sir. If your beliefs require it, I may even be able to waive the associated fees.”

“No,” Conrad said, for his eagerness outweighed his caution by several orders of magnitude. “I'm done thinking. Let's go.”

But still, he let Sandra walk through the plate first. It was like watching someone step through paint; the surface parted around her with a faint crackle, and a glow not unlike the southern lights in the cold Antarctic sky. She shrank into it and was gone. Well, here was the heaven he'd bought for Sorrow's dead; taking a breath, he stepped in after her.

And truly, there was no real feeling to it. It was a bit like falling and a bit like drowning and a bit like a static shock all over his body, but mostly it was nothing much. Stepping through paint would at least have been cold and sticky. And there was this to be said for the process: on the other side there was sky.

He came through, right behind Sandra, in an open-sided, glass-domed atrium the size of a soccer field. There were no trees, but there were people sprawled out on blankets, as in a park. And like a park, the dome's floor was covered in short grass of a green so bright it hurt Conrad's optic nerve. There was nothing like this in Barnard; Sorrow's vegetation favored dark browns and ambers, with the occasional splatter of deep olive, under a sun much redder than Sol. The skies of Sorrow ranged from aquamarine to yellow-gray, and its clouds were hazy or feathery or even
striped
as the warm, slow jet stream skipped on and off of the cooler, denser layers underneath.

But the sky here was as blue as the grass was green, with the yellow-white sun shining brightly through an arch of puffy cumulus clouds. Did the soul ever forget this stuff? Did the body, independent of the intellect, feel the allure of its natural home?

“Oh my,” said Conrad, his eyes agog, his heart aflutter.

And almost as quickly, with his first few steps, he felt a sort of brightness in his own body as well. His flesh had been optimized by the best morbidity filters the Barnard colony could devise, and Barnard was (or rather, had been) the clear leader in that field. He was
very
difficult to injure—on
Newhope
it had taken a propylene glycol explosion, the boiling liquid jetting out so hard it had smashed him right through a wellmetal railing. And he'd survived even that, long enough to get down to the cryo tubes.

And for the same reasons, his body aged slowly. In the colony's waning days, when Conrad and Xmary had stolen
Newhope
and spirited away the frozen dead, Barnard's elite classes had spoken half-seriously about
outliving
the coming dark age. Hoarding the last of the medical-grade faxes, they planned across the millennia while the proletariat lived and died around them. According to some of the models, a single optimization might carry a careful person through a thousand years of life. Or more. Ah, but Conrad and his fellow traitors had been
so long
on that ship, that damned, cramped tower of a ship. With limited exercise, limited stimulation, an industrial-grade diet of recycled organics and minerals. Ordinary human beings would surely have cracked under the strain. They were
a hundred and forty-six years
into the voyage when disaster finally struck, and Conrad, without realizing it, had felt every day of that in his bones!

But the Frostbite Trauma Center had lifted those years away, and now that he was out in the world, in the fresh air and sunshine, he felt light as a pillow and springy as a sapling. Indeed, he'd last felt the tug of Earth at the age of twenty-five—absurdly long ago—and being back here now made him feel almost that young again.

“We're near the ocean,” he said, for the air smelled of salt. Not the grotty acid smell of Sorrow's lightly briny oceans, but something cleaner and heavier. Almost edible, a kind of stew. And then, feeling a slight rolling motion in the ground beneath his feet, “We're
on
the ocean. A floating platform?”

Sandra nodded. “This is
Sealillia
, an emergency shelter owned by Red Sun Charities and deployed in times of crisis. I think the last time it was used was during the Amphitrite habitat failure on . . . one of Neptune's moons. I forget which one. Twenty thousand people came streaming through these fax portals”—there were three of them here, side-by-side along one edge of the grassy field—” and stayed here five weeks.”

Ah. Interesting. “This place can hold
Newhope
's passengers, then.”

She grimaced slightly. “Well, in principle. Right now there's a bit of a squatter problem.”

Indeed, there were two dozen people sprawled out on the grass, wrapped in blankets and apparently sleeping. This was no real surprise; open real estate with any sort of facilities access—such as the fax machines here—had attracted the indigent even on Sorrow, where indigence tended to be fatal and therefore self-limitingly rare. But as he stepped over one of the sleeping bodies, he saw a woman with painted nails and wellgold earrings, her immaculately coiffed hair only slightly smooshed by its contact with her pillow. A hobo-ish backpack lay at her feet, but she was outwardly young and certainly well dressed, in a peach-colored wellcloth pyjama adorned with moving circles of metallic gold. Her blanket was the reverse: circles of peach roaming a cloth-of-gold surface.

The others around her, men and women alike, looked comparably respectable, though they seemed inordinately fond of wellgold jewelry. And that was interesting, because the indigent people of Conrad's time had been hairy and smelly, antisocial and unadorned, and that wasn't the sort of fashion that ever went out of style. The ones in the old days were mostly men, too, whereas these people were about a fifty-fifty mix.

“They're overgrown children,” he said, recognizing their type at once. Here were fully ripened citizens of, he would guess, anywhere from twenty to a hundred years of age, who could not for the life of them find the employment, the wealth, the
respect
accorded a true adult. And how could they, when the self-appointed adults of the Queendom refused to grow old and die? The positions of power and influence were all filled long ago, before the colonies were founded. That was
why
there were colonies. That was why there'd been a Children's Revolt to inspire their hasty founding.

“Yup,” Sandra agreed. “They just show up. Tired of living with their parents and too poor to afford places of their own, they just sort of drift around the Earth like a vapor, condensing on any flat surface.”

Conrad laughed; he hadn't realized his caseworker had a sense of humor under that bureaucratic exterior. He realized suddenly that the mere fact of her being an obstacle in his path, and a tool of the government he'd once rebelled against, did not in any way prevent her from being a likable person.

She laughed as well, but then added, “It's only funny until the eviction crews show up. The Amphitrite evac was fifteen years ago, but Red Sun is required to maintain a state of readiness. It
needs
this place for the next refugee crisis, whenever that may be. Probably you guys; probably soon.”

“And the kids can't use it in the meantime?”

“The kids have a way of messing things up, Mr. Mursk. The platform spends most of its time folded up somewhere—probably in the waters off Tonga—to prevent exactly this from happening.”

“Hmm. Well. How big
is
this thing?”

Instead of answering, she led him off the grassy field and out through one of several arch-shaped openings in the dome. As they approached a railing, he saw that the dome was built atop the die of a circular plinth or podium two hundred meters across, which sat in the center of a six-petaled raft of some gray, cementlike material. Covered end-to-end in black-roofed, three-story wellwood dormitories,
Sealillia
was a kilometer-wide flower on the surface of a featureless ocean. Around it was a low ring, projecting half a meter out of the water; the sea outside was blue and nearly waveless, but within the ring the water was distinctly greenish in hue, and teeming with laughing, splashing humans in various states of undress.

“It's a model city,” Sandra answered finally. “Larger versions dot the equator from Galapagos to Kiribati, where hurricanes fear to tread. Probably twenty million people altogether. At the moment, I believe we're a thousand klicks north of the Marquesas, or forty-five hundred northeast of Tonga.”

“Fascinating,” Conrad said, meaning it. Nothing of the sort had been necessary in his own time. In fact, he suspected it would've been illegal, as there was a push at the time to shrink the Earth's population and expand its wilderness areas, by pushing people off into space. Apparently, this hadn't gone well. Still, he wasn't here to admire the scenery, or even the architecture. “Where are my friends?”

“This way,” she said, pointing, motioning for him to follow as she approached the staircase that ringed the central plinth. “They've got a pair of apartments in Building One.”

If that was Building One there at the foot of the stairs, then Conrad could see right away that something was going on; there were kids everywhere, but here they were
clustered
. Here they were all facing the same direction: toward a second-floor balcony on which three people stood. Xmary, Feck, and Eustace.

Conrad's heart leaped at the sight—they looked fine! In fact they looked
beautiful
, much better than they ever had onboard the starship. Over the years of that bitter journey Eustace in particular had grown into a fine, clever, resilient woman, with no way to express or define herself except in terms of the mission. But there she was, standing out over a crowd of strangers like she'd been doing it all her life. Xmary, by contrast, had started as a socialite and become a spacer mainly by accident.
She
looked even better, even more at home, even more smugly pleased with herself. Mission accomplished!

The three of them were dressed in wellcloth togas of superabsorber black—“sun cloth” it was sometime called, for it could absorb and store many kilowatt-hours of solar energy, and then release it at night to warm the wearer and light her way. Their hair had been cropped close, in a way that gracefully emphasized their age somehow. Conrad felt immediately self-conscious about his own unruly mop, but at least he had combed it. At least he'd let Sandra pick out a pair of pants and a shirt for him—plain, but tasteful.

“If you insist on putting yourselves in harm's reach,” Xmary was calling down to a crowd of hundreds, “you should at least prepare yourselves for what's to come. That's just my advice, but you'd do well to listen. You need to study this group's tactics. Does anyone here have combat experience?”

No hands went up, although many a nervous foot was shuffling on the cement.

“What's she doing?” Sandra asked quietly, turning a funny look on Conrad.

“Preparing a defense,” Conrad said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Which of course it was; if they truly had been marked for death, then he and his friends had best gird their loins for battle. And with these young'uns hanging around, there were only three options: evict, recruit, or watch them die in the crossfire. Drowned, most likely; the easiest thing to do with a platform like this was to sink it with all hands aboard, then pick off the survivors as they swam. Would Fatalists discriminate between targets and bystanders? It seemed unlikely.

“But that's the Constabulary's job,” Sandra protested. “Or the local police for this jurisdiction.”

“Then where are they?” Conrad asked. “If they want to help, that's fine, but we're not going to sit around waiting.” And then it dawned on him that that was
exactly
what Sandra—what the Queendom authorities and probably the Fatalists themselves—expected the refugees to do. He laughed and said, “In the colonies, miss, one learns to take care of problems as early and as thoroughly as possible.”