Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Not by choice, surely,” he says, and they surprise him by denying it. “Now, now. Any ward of the Regents is a ward of the Order of Dolcet, and deserving the best protection. We volunteered and were accepted.”

“Well,” Bruno says, feeling a bit of human warmth stirring in the ancient hollows of his heart. “You have my gratitude, then.”

“Up you go,” says Zuq, grabbing a rope ladder and climbing upward, showing the way.

“After you,” says Natan, with a valetlike gesture. Radmer and Bordi have gotten separated somehow—Bruno can see them heading up toward the flau’s pinched little face—and he appears to be in the care of these two men once again. So he climbs the ropes himself, clambering past a network of rings and fishnet and flat leather straps.

The deck of the flau—if indeed that’s the proper term—is a woven mat remarkably like the deck of a traditional Tongan catamaran, except that the bark it’s fashioned from feels thicker and tougher, the strips much wider. All around it is a waist-high railing of something like bamboo—some light, stiff, hollow plant that looks gray under the night sky.

Immediately he’s set upon by a bare-chested little Luner man wearing a vest and pants and cylindrical cap of supple brown leather. “Who’s you?” the man demands in a thick New Tongue accent, and if the Dolceti have dispelled any notion of these “humans” being childlike or comical, this stocky, strutting, hypercephalic figure provides the counterpoint. “Older? Been y’ on a flau before? Don’ put tha down thar, foo!”

“Our steersman, Fander Kytu,” Zuq explains, leaning easily against the railing, which for him is nearly chest-high. “Don’t make him angry, or we’ll have a long night of it. Be assured, he’s the best in the world at what he does.”

“Bag,” says Fander, pointing to a netted-over heap near the deck’s stern.

“I’ll take it,” says Natan, relieving Bruno of his few meager possessions. Except the sword and pistol the Furies gave him, which he keeps in leather scabbards at his side. The sword is not an air foil. In fact, it’s not a real sword by any reasonable standard. It’s made of opaque forged steel, for one thing, without so much as a diamond coating to stiffen it and hold its edge. And it doesn’t vibrate or glow white-hot or anything, so if he’s to cut anything with it he’ll need to swing very hard indeed.

A blitterstaff would be much more the thing, but the Imbrians have made a mess of their remaining wellstone. Bruno was only able to salvage five staves from the entire façade, and they were of such unspeakable value here that to ask for one was to ask too much.

For that matter, the pistol they’ve given him would be little more than a toy in the Queendom. It fires thumbnail-sized metal bullets at only slightly more than the speed of sound! One well-placed shot is enough to fell a grown man, and a better-placed one will burst the junction box affixed to a robot’s head, with generally terminal results. But he will have to aim it himself, by eye and by hand.

Still, he’s seen too much of this world to want to travel it unarmed, and at the end of the day a blade is still a blade, and a projectile a projectile. He knows what to do with them.

“All board!” calls the steersman to the Dolceti, who are swarming up the rigging like they’ve been crewing such flights all their lives. Bruno catches sight of Radmer up by the bow. “Wind arising! Hook off! Cast by!”

And these commands—both to the Dolceti and to the minimal ground crew on the pavement below—suffice. Over the next half minute the mooring ropes are untied and the flau—swelling beneath them—becomes a thing independent of the ground on which it rests. Not airborne yet, but neither wholly in the thrall of gravity.

“She weighs only as much as a cow, if you can believe it,” Zuq says conversationally. “Even with her bladders flat, old Natan and I here could practically carry her where we’re going. But it is a fine thing, to ride the upslope on a winter’s night, with the light of Murdered Earth shining down all around.”

And as if in answer, the flau beneath them gives a final sigh of inflation, and lifts gently away from the planette.

It’s funny, Bruno thinks, that a black hole should be surrounded by so much light. But the halo of Murdered Earth—shaped like the stem and cap of a toppled mushroom—captures the full glory of Sol and tears it apart into nested rainbows. The whole thing is larger and brighter than the full moon had been in the skies of Old Earth.

And while it moves across the heavens on a twenty-eight-day cycle, first approaching the sun and then opposing it, it does not go through “phases” per se. It’s always bright, and washes out the sky so badly that he supposes most Lunites have never seen the Milky Way on anything but Earthless nights. There must be a lot of things they never see, and still more they’ve never heard or dreamed of.

Still, Lune’s jagged landscape is eerily beautiful by this varicolored glow. And the stars—what he can see of them—are peaceful, and since the flau is drifting eastward on the wind itself, at the speed of the wind, the air around it gives an impression of stillness, even as the Earthlit roads and farms roll by underneath. Ahead is the Sawtooth, the first range of the very tall Apenine mountains. Beneath them lies Aden Plateau, where Bruno and Radmer first landed in their sphere of brass. Lord, that was only forty hours ago—less than a day by the Luner clock. But it seems a longer time. Weeks.

“Look,” Zuq tells him at one point, “there goes another flau.”

And indeed, there it is, spread out above them and slightly south, pulling ahead in a stronger wind. Bruno can see its downward-pointing sail, so very much like the frills of Pup’s ever-slumbering leviathan. From this vantage he can get a sense of the creature’s entire shape, its natural form, which looks neither tortured nor artificial. In fact, from a distance it’s quite beautiful, an elegant blending of form and function.

He sees another one far below, its decks swarming with men and women in white jackets, singing some bittersweet melody. To celebrate their escape from the doomed city? To mourn it? But then, with a shock, he recognizes the faint tune itself: it’s Bascal Edward’s Song of Physics, which once sought to capture the essence of Queendom science in twenty memorable stanzas.

It’s beautiful. Bruno can barely make out the words, but it seems to him that the song has been passed down intact, in something close to the Old Tongue. And suddenly the tears are flowing freely from his eyes, for whatever sins might weigh against his son’s name, Bascal had risen to that particular challenge with all the grace and skill his genetics and training could muster. He’d been, if nothing else, a truly brilliant poet.

And of course any thought of Bascal is really a thought of Tamra, and this makes him leak saline just that much faster.

“Are you all right?” Natan asks him, coming over to lean his elbows on the railing. If Bruno tried that on this lightly rolling deck, he’d be pitched right over the edge the first time his attention wandered. But Natan is shorter, and surer of foot, and to Bruno’s surprise he sounds more than professionally concerned.

Angry at himself, Bruno wipes his eyes on a sleeve. “This is what old men do, I’m afraid. The grief comes upon us in unguarded moments.”

And Natan surprises him again by asking, “Was it real beautiful, your world? Your many, many worlds?”

“Indeed,” Bruno confirms, as a fresh wave of tears rolls down his cheeks. “It sounds fatuous to say it, I realize, but there was more beauty and wonder than you can imagine. Did we even notice at the time? But your own world is beautiful, too. Promise me this, guardsman: take nothing for granted in your flicker-short lifetime. Appreciate.”