Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Manassa?” asks the eldest Fury, her eyes glittering in the sunset.

“The fabled city itself,” Radmer agrees, “exactly as Zaleis the Wanderer claimed. He really did make it in and out.”

“And so you believe his other claims,” says Danella Mota, “his ‘Dragon of Shanru’ and his ‘engines and objects of great antiquity and wholly mysterious purpose.’”

“There were no dragons in this world when it was new, madam. Whether any have been created since then I couldn’t say. But aye, the rest of it I believe. And this man, who calls himself Ako’i, is better qualified than any living person to bring these engines and objects back to life. The Glimmer King’s robots are not invincible, just strong and numerous. With proper equipment on the human side, it should be possible to defeat them.”

“Possible,” says the eldest Fury with a slow nod. “Well, that’s something. But what do you need from us?”

“Transportation,” says Radmer. “Armed escort. A safe-conduct passport which your turnpike guards will accept. The enemy will have taken my capsule by now, and even if I had a spare, landing inside the eye of a storm would be risky indeed. Hiking in on foot, as Zaleis did, is more likely to succeed. I’ve studied his path, which appears to be the best compromise between weather and terrain. I believe we can duplicate it.”

“We cannot spare troops, Radmer,” says Danella Mota warily.

“I need only a few. A dozen Dolceti, perhaps.”

The room explodes at that remark. “Dolceti! A dozen! This Older is as mad as all the rest.”

“Your request is denied,” says a harried-sounding Pine Chadwir. “You ask the one thing we cannot possibly grant, in this hour of greatest need.”

“Then I’ll take my leave,” says Radmer, “and return to the veils of Echo Valley to await this world’s destruction. I would stand and die with you, madam, if I thought it would do any good. But if civilization must die again, I prefer to be among friends.”

Now the room falls silent, and fearful, and all eyes are on the Furies, wondering what they’ll say next. It’s the eldest who speaks first, and her tone is wistful and quiet. “They say you built the world, Radmer, as a carpenter might build a house.”

“The world was here long before me, madam. All I did was remodel it.”

“So. Not quite a god, then. But something powerful nonetheless. And still afraid! You’ve traveled far on our behalf—to Varna and back.”

And here Bruno catches a glimpse of the young Conrad Mursk in the weathered features of Radmer. “I’ve traveled much farther than that, Madam Regent. To the stars themselves, where this sunlight won’t arrive for years.”

“You’re very old,” she says, considering that. “And wise, and strange. And very kind—or foolish—to offer this peculiar assistance to us, who barely know you. Whether it help or not, it surely cannot make things any worse. I give you twenty Dolceti, General, and the blessing of the Board of Regents.”

“One of the diamond pillars buckled,” Radmer is telling Bruno, “and the neutronium plate above it slipped almost to the center of Lune. The plates are flat hexagons, right? But at the surface, the region of depressed gravity is more nearly circular. And with mountain ranges on either side, you can’t even really see that. It ends up being more of an oval.”

“A permanent low-pressure system,” Bruno muses. “A permanent thunderstorm.”

“More nearly a hurricane. It brings no joy to the region, no refreshment. Only a hard cleansing. And when it happened, when the pillar buckled and the plate fell and the ground above it cracked and sank, the shock waves struck every fault and fissure in the whole damned planette, releasing gigatons of stored energy.”

“This was the ‘Shattering,’ that looms so large in these people’s history?” Bruno asks.

Radmer confirms it. “Half the population died in the first few hours, and within a week no two bricks were left standing, anywhere in the world. Lune was the jewel of post-Queendom civilization, and without it things just… fell apart. Again. No more rockets, no heavy industry of any kind. It’s only in the past two centuries that there’s been any real consolidation. And frankly I’d still call this a borderline dark age, even without the war.”

Bruno weighs this against his conscience, probing for the guilt he ought to feel. Surely this Shattering is another calamity he could have prevented. But as the two of them step through an archway and into a large courtyard of grass and concrete and grimly drilling soldiers, he glances up at the sky. The sun has finally gone down, but the clouds are aflame, dwarfing the works of Man beneath them. And he finds he can no longer be angry with himself for honest mistakes, or for living through to this moment.

Still, more from a sense of duty than anything else he says, “You and I have a lot of bodies at our feet.”

“Aye, well. At least there is a Lune. We can take credit for that.”

“There’d still be an Earth, if not for the Nescog. If not for me, personally.”

But Radmer just shrugs. “Something would have killed it, sooner or later. It’s the way of things. The important question is whether it was good while it lasted.”

Bruno, though horrified, can’t help but chuckle at that. “You’ve become a deathist, lad. Who’d’ve thought?”

“Aye,” says Radmer, cracking a feeble grin of his own. “A vegetarian, too, for in this life the meat comes from creatures. They have faint little hopes and dreams of their own, and I’ve made war on them long enough. Why should some chicken lose everything, to add another day to this ?” He waves contemptuously at his own flesh.

“Would you hasten your own story’s end?” Bruno probes. Among men as old as they, it isn’t a rude question at all. “Is that why you became a soldier?”

But Radmer dismisses that notion just as contemptuously. “I’ve always been a soldier, a fighter, intolerant of oppression. I fought you , once.”

“So you did,” Bruno muses, remembering back to those days, when Conrad Mursk and Bascal Edward had been inseparable, and the problems of the world could be dismissed as mere childishness. It doesn’t seem so long ago, really, and there’s a sentiment the deathists would have an opinion about. Did the long years of his life count for so little? “Still, here we are. Side by side for a new war.”

Radmer grunts. “I gave that up, too—soldiering. Really! With a fax-filtered body and three thousand years of dirty tricks, it was like shooting babies. Not a risk to myself at all. It was nothing a moral person could condone.”

“But you’ll fight robots,” Bruno said.

“Aye, one last time. In my next life I’ll be a farmer, bringing sustenance into the world.”

Now there’s an interesting thought. What will the resurrected Bruno do, if it turns out there’s a future for him to do it in? Teach? Open a bistro, as his father had done long ago, in a land not so terribly different from this one? The idea seems bizarre, alien, tragically comic. But not impossible.

Any further rumination on the subject, though, is extinguished by the arrival of Bordi, the Dolceti Primus and Captain of the Timoch Guard.

“Where are your men?” he asks crisply, in the Old Tongue.

“Departed,” says Radmer. “Returned to protect their own homes and families.”

Well, yes, thinks Bruno, but not as easily as that. At the last, Sidney Lyman had resisted. “So, what, you’re going to help the humans, be a hero, and we’re dismissed?”

“You didn’t even want to be here,” Radmer told him. “I dragged you.”