Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Hi. I hope you burn in hell,” Conrad had told them both brightly when the queen had introduced them, and it felt good to get that off his chest. Really.

“Be reasonable. I would say the same to you, Architect,” the queen answered him now, forking a bit of cheese-draped sausage into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. Seconds later she touched a napkin to her lips and added, “You really must try the cheese. That woman over there—in the green frock, yes—is perhaps the most brilliant flavor designer in human history.”

“High praise indeed,” Conrad allowed, taking a nibble. Damn, it was good. Melting in his mouth, almost vaporizing, it had a taste at once fatty and ethereal, rich and salty and yet somehow subtle as well. His eyes closed for a moment, of their own accord.

“Immorbidity demands novelty,” the queen opined. “Else it’s bread and water forever. Bless our flavor designers, every one.”

And to that Conrad could not help answering, “We did without them on Sorrow, Majesty. But aye, not forever.”

Tamra nodded solemnly. “You see my point, then. Shall we consign ourselves to no better a fate? Will you not surrender yon world to me? Our population crisis continues to grow. Our middle-class homeless now number in the tens of millions, and the political pressure to open a new frontier—any frontier—is overwhelming. Am I to resist the will of the people? The need of the people? They don’t require a perfect world, and your quest for one—though admirable—consumes precious time. And money. Endings are always difficult, but there comes a point when the engineers and craftsmen must disperse, and find new projects.”

“No doubt, Your Highness,” Conrad hedged, “but is that day truly upon us? We’ve only just sealed the last of the neutronium plates. The lithosphere above them is full of voids and faults, which store a tremendous unwanted energy. Over time they will settle, with unpredictable results.”

“That’s been understood for some time,” the queen countered, “but you can relieve these pressure points at leisure, with minimal disruption at ground level. True? I’m informed that the largest tremors will cause only minor damage at the surface.”

“Possibly, Your Highness, but none of us can say that with confidence. We’re speaking of probabilities, in a world of imperfect knowledge. The first Ring Collapsiter was considered safe as well, and we know how that turned out.”

“Cunning sabotage,” the queen said dismissively, “at the deepest levels of design. We trust you, sir, to eschew such scheming.”

“Do you? Then trust me that Lune is incomplete, Majesty. The biosphere is another problem, immature and unstable. On Sorrow and Pup we’ve seen what that can do. How much suffering has our impatience created there?”

“Your point is duly noted, Architect. However, as on Sorrow and Pup, we’re installing town-sized fax plates to churn out fresh gases and creatures, keeping the ecology in crude balance. Yes? And unlike those worlds, we’ve the infrastructure of an entire civilization to draw upon. Mars and Venus are better analogies, for in their early civilized histories they prospered with no biosphere at all. As did Luna herself, for a dozen centuries and more. In any event, these risks are mine to assess, and I have more brains to pick than yours alone. You will prepare the moon for immediate habitation.”

And here the king added his own voice to the fray: “It’s no use, lad, to argue with the facts. Focus on the work itself, yes, but remember who pays your salary. Your job is not to run the new world, but to deliver it.”

“Aye, Your Majesty,” Conrad said, unconvinced and unconvincing.

“Come now,” the king expounded, tossing a grape onto Conrad’s plate. “Do you think you’re the first? Has no engineer before you surrendered his treasures to a witless society? I do know the feeling, lad. How many deaths linger on my conscience, do you suppose, from the discovery of collapsium alone? When I finally get these wormholes working, do you think I expect there to be no accidents? No malice? All systems are subject to failure, but the mere possibility should not shackle our striving.”

He tossed another grape, and another. “Will you choke on these? Are they poison? Will they beguile you and squander your time, as mass-stabilized wormholes have squandered mine? I could let you starve , lad, for fear of what a grape might do. Or we could get on with the party, and see what happens.”

“You’ve become quite the orator,” Conrad said. “When did that happen?”

Such a comment might easily have been taken as rudeness, but the king just laughed. “With fifteen hundred years of life, my boy, one does eventually learn to speak.”

At that, Conrad’s old friend Feck chimed in. “Don’t let the refugee crisis escape your attention, hmm? We’ve got six million in storage, and three billion on the way. At present deceleration, Perdition is only two months out, with fifteen percent of the load. I would say there are risks in every course of action, and especially in responding too slowly.”

And Conrad, being a refugee himself, could hardly argue with that. The remaining colonies were simply collapsing. They were up to their armpits in dead and mortal children, and had turned their spasm-wracked economies to the sorry task of triage: shipping “home” as many as possible, by whatever means possible, and leaving the rest to their fate. Whatever that might be.

Conrad sometimes wondered whether this trend had been inevitable all along. Had the colonists carried out with them the seeds of their own destruction? Or was this simply a fad, a mass surrender, a herd action inspired by the traitorous flight of Newhope ? If so, then Conrad and Xmary and Feck had a lot to answer for: the death of billions. The death of hope itself.

“Have there been any further communications with the Perdition or the Trail of Tears ?” Conrad asked, for no matter what Feck said, he was poignantly interested in the refugee crisis. He was just out of step with the news. But Feck was the queen’s Minister of Colonial Affairs, and would know everything.

“Communications, yes,” Feck said, sounding both chagrined and incensed. “Meaningful dialogue, no. Eridani breeds angry, suspicious men. And women, too, one supposes, but since they’re cloistered, we never hear from them. At any rate, the Eridanians’ journey has been a hard one, and they’re not eager to park their butts in Kuiper Belt storage when they finally arrive.”

“Nor would I be,” Conrad said. He’d visited Eridani twice in virtual form, and remembered it as a place of sharp contrasts: molten metal and frozen gas, wild anger and wilder compassion. Eridani boasted no habitable worlds, and like all the colony stars it was richer than Sol in stormy radiation. And the outer system’s Dust Belt was treacherous—it could grind even the proudest of habitats to rubble in a matter of years. Even the inner system was full of flying crap. Eridani had thousands of times more asteroids and comets and random small meteoroids than Sol; its planets had been battered all to hell, and still endured several large impacts each year.

So the people, in their tens of billions, lived deep underground in Aetna, the moon of Mulciber, and ventured only rarely to its cratered-upon-cratered surface. To compensate for their bleak, cramped quarters, they had opted for a gradual reduction in body size, and while they were at it they’d added new metabolic pathways and—they claimed—new modes of thought which opened their minds to a greater spiritual awareness. And why not? What the hell else did they have to do under there?