Wil McCarthy: To Crush the Moon

“Ah! A first-timer. A virgin in the hallowed ancient halls of that mausoleum of a city. Come now, Ako’i, one cannot dwell this long on Lune—” A thought seemed to strike him, then. “Oh, but you’ve been on Varna! Marooned, cast away. For that long? Since before there was a Timoch? Since the Shattering itself?”

“Possibly,” Bruno grumbles, hoping to leave it at that. Tellingly, Lyman and his men have not recognized the husk of their old king. They don’t know his name, his crimes, his many failures, and he prefers it that way. “Ako’i” isn’t a name at all, but a Tongan epithet, something like calling a man “perfesser” or “genius” or… or “de Towaji,” yes. Perhaps they would forgive him if they knew, but what matter? Perhaps Bruno might have forgiven himself, had he been himself these many, many centuries. But that doesn’t matter, either. He is here as a figure out of history, to correct a historical mistake. Or to try, anyway.

They pass through a field of grazing, bleating sheep with gold-colored wool and curiously oversized heads. Then there are rock walls topped by wooden fences, leading down into a broad expanse of fresh-mown corn stubble. Soon, they find themselves on an actual road, paved with a smooth, continuous sheet of what looks like diamond or zirconium or some allotrope of silicon carbide. The surface is flawless, but to Bruno’s eye something about it conveys a sense of tremendous age. On one particularly sharp curve, a mound of dirt has spread from the roadside to cover part of the road itself.

Bruno first mistakes the pile for a construction project, and then a termite mound of the sort that had once been common on the savannahs of Africa. But on closer inspection there is something almost crystalline about it: straight lines and flat surfaces. And the “termites” themselves are large and of curious design, with angular body parts of clear and superabsorber black and translucent, glassine blue.

“What are these?” he asks, pointing.

“Termites,” Lyman answers, with no detectable irony.

“They’re a bit… modified, yes?”

“No more than anything else around here. It ain’t a natural world.”

As the city draws near, Bruno can see that the walls surrounding it are at least as recent as the termite mounds out on the plains. They’re flawless—not in the manner of wellstone or diamond but in the manner of freshly poured concrete which hasn’t had a chance to weather. For all he can tell, they might have been poured yesterday.

“Those damned walls,” Radmer is saying. “My goodness. They may indeed protect the city for a time, though not in the intended manner. The iron over which the cement was poured will be… tempting. The enemy may find it easier to dismantle the wall than to breach it and sally through. Every gram of it makes them stronger, while the people inside grow hungry. Not exactly the delay the City Mothers might wish for, but they’re hardly in a position to choose.”

Radmer’s manner of speech does not much resemble Conrad Mursk’s. Nor, really, does his face. A lot of time has passed here.

“Bloody valets,” one of the soldiers says, making a heartfelt curse of it. “Bloody glints.”

And Bruno doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep at this, for the armies of doom are quite ridiculous, and the swelling of their ranks can probably, if indirectly, be blamed on himself. Who set this stage, if not the king of all that preceded it?

Damn and blast. If dying were easy he’d’ve done it long ago. He had tried. But there had been nothing on the planette Varna capable of extinguishing this robust carriage of his, and to die of hunger or thirst required more concentration than he’d been able to muster. Every time his attention wandered, he would find his belly full of turnips and spring water. And in the aching solitude there, his attention did nothing but wander.

Finally, they arrive at the gates of the city, and Bruno sees the gate and wall are much smaller than they’d looked from a distance. Not more than four meters high, possibly as little as three. The men upon the walls, with their burnished iron helmets, their rifles and bayonets, are quite a bit shorter than the grizzled old men who’ve escorted him here.

“Ho there,” Radmer calls up to them. “We require an audience with the Furies.”

“Oh wonder! It’s a band ’f Olders,” one of the guards calls down contemptuously. “We’n’t seen y’r like here since th’ troubles begun.”

“There ha’e al’ys been troubles,” Radmer calls back, with a rising contempt of his own. “My name is Radmer, and you will open this gate.”

“Y’all c’n have audience with my arse, Mr. Radmer.”

“E’en if your arse were a magistrate, m’boy, I would have to decline. I will see no guard, no City Mother, not even a senator. I’m here to speak with the Furies.”

Bruno finds it difficult to follow this exchange, for accent and inflection so clot the guard’s voice that his might almost be another language entirely. This “Radmer” has spoken Queendom-standard, Tongan-inflected English up to this point, but with the city guard he speaks in the city dialect. Flawlessly, as near as Bruno can detect.

“He doesn’t know you,” Lyman says to Radmer, in Queendom-standard tones of quiet indignation. Then, to the man on the wall, “Groveling in the dust is where you should be, maggot. This is General Emeritus Radmer , who turned back the armies of Red Antonio and saved this pathetic city of yours, when your grandparents’ grandparents could not. More than that, you glob of phlegm, he carved the very world upon which you now stand, whose air you now stink up with your putrid excuses.”

The man is not impressed. “Y’all Olders ’re all Gross High Mucky-Muck of someorother, close as I can figure. And ’f this man built the world, then he be a god, and should need no ’sistance o’ mine.”

“Good point,” Lyman says, sounding approving for the first time this day. “You have wit enough to call us Olders. Have wit enough, then, to realize we request your help for the sake of decorum. And we’ll open the gate, if you will not.”

Radmer holds up a hand at waist level—a gesture which commands silence. And Lyman—reluctantly—obeys.

“We dare not tarry out here,” Radmer says to the guards. “I bring with me an item of great strategic value, and the Glimmer King’s scouts have found us once already. You do know they’re here, yes? Soon the hills will be lousy with them. If you turn us away, O morbid child, I daresay you won’t last the week.”

Glimmer King. Is that what they’re calling Bruno’s son these days? His only child, his greatest error? If indeed Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui is (a) alive, and (b) responsible for all this mad suffering—Bruno has heard only Radmer’s suspicions on the subject. But those were enough to draw him here, to this unreal place. A father’s disappointment—and atonement—run as deep as his love.

“If he turns us away he won’t last the minute,” Lyman says, drawing his sword. And a sense washes over Bruno yet again, that he is living in some hell of his own creation, for the sword in Lyman’s hand could well be a figment of fevered dreams. Ancient, yes. Sharpened and sealed with a film of epitaxial diamond. The weapon has a wicked point, and a basket hilt to protect the wielder’s hand, and in between there is… nothing at all. Nothing to parry, to grasp, to see flashing in a deadly arc. In showing it off to him, Lyman had called it an “air foil,” and had declined to estimate the number of deaths it had inflicted at his hand, and the hands of other soldiers before him.

Ploughshares into swords, alas. That wasn’t what mass-stabilized wormholes were for .