Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Come with us,” Lyman said urgently. “Or let us come with you. There’s too few of us in the world, sir, to be scattering to the winds like this. We’ve got to hang together.”

“I agree. Which is why you’re needed back at Echo Valley.”

There’d been more to it than that, but eventually Lyman and his followers had given up, realizing that their old commander simply wouldn’t be responsible for them any longer, would not allow them into harm’s way on his account. On the one hand it was a sorry way to repay their loyalty—with the barbed kindness of condescension. On the other hand, it was exactly what Bruno would have done in his place. If the world be doomed, well, let them salvage what they could. That’s an order, soldier.

There are so many people he misses, people he loves but will never see again. If he could reach back and save even one of them—not just Tamra, but anyone—he’d do it in a heartbeat, whatever the cost. But here there are no such decisions for him to make. Here he’s a relic, nothing more, and that’s all right. He’ll do his bit—or try, anyway—and fade back into the mists.

“It’s just the two of you?” Bordi asks.

“Right,” says Radmer. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’ll delegate all the logistics. Just get us to the Stormlands and back, before this city falls.”

“Already working on it, General. Your timing is good; with the sun setting, the upslope winds will begin blowing in a few hours. Eastward, against the mountains. That will buy us a hundred kilometers right there. I’d advise you both to get some sleep beforehand.”

“Why?” asks Radmer. “How are we traveling?”

“On the back of a flau,” Bordi answers, in hard and mirthful tones.

This turns out to be a living creature, mostly hollow and filled with hydrogen. With the proportions of a Tongan royal pleasure yacht, the thing has a broad, flat back some fifteen meters wide and forty-five long, with a bulbous, vaguely ship-shaped body underneath. At the front, its mouth is surprisingly tiny, and surrounded by eyes and nostrils of alien design.

“It looks like a leviathan,” Bruno says, referring to the largest of the multicellular creatures in the ocean of Pup, the marginally habitable world circling Wolf 359. The thought brings a pang to his heart, for the King of Wolf had been Edward Bascal Faxborn, an alternate version of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. King Eddie to his admirers, he’d been by all accounts a fair-minded ruler who had taken more closely after Bruno and especially Tamra.

And though he’d thought his grief long exhausted, Bruno finds that the thought of Tamra Lutui can still wrench his insides. Not just the coolly smiling Queen of Sol—though he misses her, too—but the twenty-year-old girl who’d gigglingly granted him the title of declarant in a room full of well-dressed strangers. And then philander, yes, a few months later—in her royal bedchamber, attended only by those dainty robots that looked more like ballerinas than like the later Palace Guards.

“It was a leviathan once,” Radmer says, yanking Bruno back to the present. “But now it swims a sea of air.”

And that’s absurd, because the Wolfans had never managed a starship to return even their own miserable selves to Sol, much less a mindless, overgrown alien invertebrate. He says, “Was the genome transmitted over the Instelnet? Part of the intellectual property traffic?”

“It was, yes, during the late Queendom era. Eridani bought it from Wolf, and carried it here in their armadas’ libraries. And since the four known life-bearing worlds were all seeded by the same primordial source, deep in the galaxy somewhere, it wasn’t hard to insert that genome into a Terran yeast cell and convince it to grow. If you recall, the early Lunites were quite talented bioengineers.”

“I don’t recall it, no,” says Bruno. “I was quite busy at that time, trying to save a bit of Earth. All in vain, as it turned out, but it was important to try.”

Radmer muses for a moment before adding, “Those engineers had all the best equipment from the old Queendom, and all the best techniques from half a dozen colonies. And there was no law to stop them, not really. From the original genomes, of course, they began their customizations; the flau was only one project of hundreds.”

The creature is ugly in the extreme, its lumpy, rubbery skin gleaming in the rainbow light of Murdered Earth. It doesn’t seem to have much shape, either, though that might be more a function of its lying on the hard, flat pavement of the Timoch International Airport. In the water, with its fans and frills extended, the leviathan had always moved with the same slow, eerie beauty of sea creatures everywhere.

Heck, it probably still drifts in the seas of Pup, dreamily unaware of the solid little beings that came and went in the caverns of its world’s rocky highlands. Unlike the Eridanians, the Wolfans could at least go outside, if not exactly live there. They could explore their ocean, could sting its residents with probes and biopsy needles. A few humans had even been eaten by leviathans, and at least one man had been rescued alive, days later, after cutting through to an air sac and subsisting on the moisture of its walls. It was huge interstellar news at the time. But even that had scarcely seemed to register with the affected creature, which swam peacefully away in unhurried search of more cooperative meals.

Here, the “flau” has had metal rings driven through its body, with hemp and leather ropes strung through them, making it a kind of artifact, a ship, an old-fashioned beast of burden. A thing both owned and controlled, no longer free.

“This is how people travel?” he asks disapprovingly.

“When necessary,” Radmer allows. “Though smaller groups would generally use a cloth balloon, and single individuals can still travel by glider. If they begin at sufficient altitude and ride the thermals skillfully, glider pilots have been known to circumnavigate the world.”

This surprises Bruno only slightly, because the world is small, and the mountains of Lune tower much higher over its seas than the hills of Earth ever did, giving rise sometimes to very strong updrafts. Still, this place evokes a sort of continuous amazement in him, for what appears rustic—even primitive—at first glance, always turns out to be something more. Something clever, something optimized for the environment and the available resources. The absence of wellstone—indeed, of semiconductors in general—has pushed the Lunites to almost uncanny extremes of artistry and invention. And that makes it not so terribly different from the Queendom, which after all had hired an inventor as its king.

“Why not simply use a blimp?” he asks.

And Radmer counters, “Why not stay home? The flau can be a bit tricky—people have been known to fall off when they get the hiccups—but they know their own way. They’re self-healing and self-balancing, and they almost never get hit by lightning. They just… go around the storms.”

“General,” says Bordi, striding toward them in the darkness. “The wind is shifting, so we’d best get aloft while we can. You two can lash your bags at the stern. Mind the steersman, though; put them exactly where he specifies, and no other place.”

“Aye,” Radmer acknowledges. “Thank you, Captain.”

Two other people follow in Bordi’s wake, and after a moment Bruno recognizes them as Natan and Zuq, the Dolceti who stood with him at the city gate, while the others ran off to battle.

“Good evening,” he says to them, without any particular emphasis. And their reply, though less than enthusiastic, contains a good bit more deference than their earlier speech had. “It’s Encyclopedia Man. Hello, sir. Apparently we’re at your service.”