Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

What have you built for us, Architect, in this hour of need? And the answer that came to Conrad was a strange one indeed, for he found he didn’t know. His job was to deliver the skeleton of a world; its final flesh and purpose had never been his to decide.

Said Rodenbeck, “History is a blind toboggan. A single man can sometimes steer it, much to the trees’ dismay, but a billion dragging feet will have their say as well.”

Was it a sad moment? A happy one? A moment of triumph or the passing of a triumphant age? Was it all of the above?

The kilometer-wide neutronium bore was a cylinder of mirror-bright impervium, and as it chewed its way through Lunar bedrock—consuming oxides of iron and silicon at one end and excreting neubles at the other—it made a sound like the end of a world. A never-ending detonation of antimatter, yes, a crushing of atomic bonds and atomic nuclei, a crushing of matter itself into dense neutron paste.

Architect Laureate Conrad Ethel Mursk stood behind it at a safe distance, along with his wife, Governor Adjudicate Xiomara Li Weng, and the very closest members of his construction crew’s inner circle. Watching and thinking, celebrating and mourning. Not talking, because the sound had already tattered their eardrums, pulverized their fibrediamond-reinforced hearing bones. If they stood here long enough, the sound—still skeletally conducted through the ground—would deafen them at the cerebrum level as well, and finally bruise the soft meat of their brains into unthinking goo. In Conrad’s outfit, sound levels were measured not in decibels but in Minutes To Kill, and this one pegged the meter at MTK 15.

There were no standards or limits per se, although it was generally recognized that at levels higher than this, useful work became a lot more difficult. Even 15 was pushing it, hard. But the people of Sol were tough, and the survivors of Barnard tougher still, and with a fax machine handy the assembled group had little thought for its safety.

Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world. Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the others carried “rock burner” lamps—multispectral lasers which cast white spots whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six degrees of arc—no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts—which at short range was enough to vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone. Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment it really was.

And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the bore’s mechanical anus and settle—under the influence of straining gravity lasers—to the tunnel floor.

WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the grasers’ carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.

And that was that. The last neuble. The thundering machine—the last of its kind still operating—rumbled to a halt.

The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this tunnel was collapsed.

HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel’s space suit.

“Well done, all,” Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.

Xmary offered her CONGRATULATIONS!!!!, and the four others exchanged the visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence and timeliness of their work.

COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, BOSS, Bell offered, and Conrad wondered why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on, Luna—or rather Lune —would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette’s surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty years.

THANKS, AND LIKEWISE, Conrad assured him. THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE. SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE?

ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant, dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible soda-silica-lime material—old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine would dispense without authorization. And Conrad’s crew dutifully smashed these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them—with more enthusiasm than hope—toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.

Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other’s suits before it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days—harried and hopeful and deeply fulfilling—would be replaced by something new, and nothing would ever be the same.

And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death—a lame and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer. But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.

Ah, well.

CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily. I WANT THAT LAST PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS.

SURE, BOSS, Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could convey.

That was the really private ceremony. The semiprivate one occurred four hours later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including a few hundred retirees who’d wandered away from the project before its completion.

They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry, barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.

“You’ve done excellent work here,” he told them all. “And God willing, we’ll see each other again someday, on a grander project still.”

“Crush Venus! Crush Venus!” the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a woman off toward the rear called out “Crush Mars!” Then everyone was shouting: Melt Europa! Ignite Jupiter! Reconstitute the asteroid belt! And finally the noise dissolved into argumentative laughter.

None of these things were possible, of course; King Bruno wasn’t exactly out of money, but he wouldn’t be playing sugar daddy to the Queendom again for another few centuries. The workers were just letting off steam, kidding themselves that it could all keep going.

“We’ll do something ,” he assured them, “and when we do, I’ll know exactly who to call. The best damned crew in the universe!”

They cheered at that, of course.

Was there anything else to say? He shook the hands that needed shaking, then wandered off into the barren hills to let his people—his former people—sort it out on their own. He wasn’t their boss anymore.

“You should be happy,” Xmary said, walking alongside him.