Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

And then Donald Mursk started crying as well.

When the Mursk boy finally showed up, Bruno was elbow-deep in wormholes. Not literally, of course—he’d lost more than one arm that way already—but in the figurative sense; he’d scratched self-solving calculations on nearly every flat surface in his study, and was no closer to a meaningful answer than he had been twelve hours ago. Bah. He hated ceding his concentration to outside disruptions. If he didn’t, he’d be at home right now, basking in the company of his dear wife! But he was old and wise enough to recognize an empty rut, and when Mursk announced himself with a toppled chair and a clatter of spilled sketchplates, Bruno’s irritation was leavened with relief. It was time for a break, yes.

“Hello?” Mursk called out, from the cottage’s small atrium.

“Hello,” answered the voice of Hugo the Robot.

“Excuse me,” said Mursk. “Is this Maplesphere?”

“I don’t know,” Hugo answered flatly. And why should he? He wasn’t part of the systems here, nor a guest, nor precisely a resident. If he was anything at all, he was a dim-witted friend or a particularly intelligent and loyal pet.

But the answer did seem to throw Mursk for a moment.

“This is Maplesphere,” Bruno called back, then allowed his chair to raise and flatten and dump him on his feet. “Door,” he said to the scribbles on his study wall. A rectangular seam appeared and, almost too quick to see, filled in with knotted oak shod and hinged in black iron. The door creaked open, revealing a vaguely disheveled young man, framed in a ray of sunlight.

Today’s fax filters could clean and straighten and press the clothing of a body in transit, could scrub the toxins from every corner and give the DNA a thorough proofread. A glow for the cheeks, a twinkle for the eye… They could even compensate, to some extent, for lack of sleep, and restore the mental and physical equilibrium that a night on the town had depleted. But Bruno was the son of a restaurateur, and had been a shameless drunk for three decades of his early childhood. He’d given that up even before the people of Sol had made him their king, but one never really lost the eye for it.

To the very slight extent that Queendom technology permitted, Conrad Mursk was hung over.

“Welcome,” Bruno said with mild amusement. “I see you’ve met Hugo.”

“Good God,” Mursk replied blearily, looking Bruno up and down. He was amazed, yes, to find himself face-to-face with the King of Sol. This was a common reaction among the commoners, and elicited no surprise in Bruno himself. He barely noticed such things anymore, although truthfully, when one was summoned to Maplesphere one ought to expect an encounter with its sole inhabitant.

“I thought this…” Mursk stammered. “I was asked…” He glanced out the window, at the round, shady curve of the planette: a miniature world domed over with the blue haze of a miniature sky. Something in the view seemed to stabilize him. “What is this, about a fifteen-thousand-neuble core? Three-hundred-meter lithosphere? Those sugar maples run their roots deep. You must have the lining layer about four meters down from the surface.”

“Four and a half,” Bruno agreed. He stepped out into the daylight and then quickly thought better of it. However perfect his eyes might be, strong light still made them ache when he’d been working too long. He retreated to the study instead, motioning for Mursk to follow. “Clear off a chair and sit, if you like.”

Mursk’s eyes ran along the floorboards, taking in the zero-elevation curve where floor met wall. On a planette this small, a surface could be either “level” like Bruno’s floor—hugging the shape of the ground—or “flat,” pleasing the eye but spilling and rolling every loose object into its center. Mursk opened his mouth as if to comment, but then noticed the scrawled equations and came up short again.

“Wormhole tensors,” Bruno said apologetically. “An arcanum even by mathematical standards. I’ve been tempted, these past three centuries, to recast general relativity in matrix notation, just to make sense of the damned arithmetic.”

Having no response to that, Mursk shrugged blankly and cleared off a seat. “This is a job interview?”

“It is,” Bruno confirmed. And though a part of him squirmed with impatience, with the burning need to get back to his equations, he had other curiosities which burned even brighter. He’d known this lad who’d known his son, and he would wade through any pleasantries necessary to get the full data dump. What had Bascal really done out there in the colonies? And yes, in truth Bruno was hungry for company as well. He could always put a copy of himself back to work if necessary. “But there’s no hurry. I thought we could chitchat, you and I.”

“You want to know about Bascal,” Mursk said, with no particular emphasis.

“I want to know about everything.”

“He was a good king,” Mursk lamented, examining his fingernails as if the dust of Sorrow might still somehow be lodged there. “He really was, for hundreds of years. A builder, a visionary. He foresaw the economic collapse, long before anyone else did. He took steps to avert it, then to mitigate it, then to ride it out. But apparently it was bigger than he was.”

“You were friends,” Bruno prodded.

“The best. No matter where I went or what I did, I always ended up in his dining room. It’s hard for me to think that won’t happen anymore.”

“But you and he had your differences, yes?”

“Philosophical,” Mursk said with a dismissive wave. “We all have differences. Your son was a brother to me, and we squabbled like brothers.”

Bruno shifted in his chair, feeling it adjust beneath his weight. Was this refugee telling the full truth? Was he telling King Bruno what he thought King Bruno wanted to hear? With a sudden stab of impatience, he stood up again. “Come with me, lad. We’ll have a walk around the planette.”

“I’ve seen planettes before,” Mursk said, though he stood and followed Bruno out.

Maplesphere was a large world as such things went, and Bruno used little of its space except as, well, space. On the far side, the obligatory lake was small, crowded by trees. Bruno’s maple forest covered half the remaining land area, blocking the view of the too-close horizon, making the pocket world seem that much bigger. The trees also damped reverberation, so that the daylight squawking of a bluejay would not disturb the nighttime slumber of a squirrel on the world’s other side, which after all was only a kilometer’s walk away. Even the miniature “sun”—a fusion-powered sila’a or pocket star—was only forty kilometers distant.

“A laser-cooled tropopausal barocline,” Bruno said, pointing up at the cloud-strewn sky, “allows this world to retain a nitrox atmosphere, without heavy nobles cluttering up the gas balance. The weather itself serves as a backup system, cooling the upper atmosphere so its molecules have a harder time escaping into space. Moist air rises, radiates its heat to the vacuum, and then falls as rain. Maplesphere is the rainiest planette ever created, and thus the most meteorologically stable.”

“Interesting,” Mursk said, with apparent sincerity.

“Alas, ‘most stable’ does not mean ‘actually stable.’ Day by day, year by year, the planette loses gas to the wilds of space. Without replenishment, I’d have a pure vacuum at ground level within two hundred years. If the power failed, I’d have it much sooner than that. And as the colonies have shown us, sooner or later the power always fails. If civilization is to ride out its gloomier moments, we’ll need a larger class of planette—one that can hold its atmosphere indefinitely.”