Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Well, then, why doesn’t everyone flee?”

“You’re asking me? I suppose the glib answer is that treaders—those vehicles, there—are expensive. But the real answer goes deeper than that. People are rarely eager to march into certain doom, but there are those who’ll stand their ground at any cost. And truthfully, it takes both kinds to clean up afterward. War after war, people like that have their spirits broken, while people like this survive with their illusions intact. And that’s what soldiers are for, Your Hi— er, Ako’i. If we cannot protect idealism, then there’s little point in protecting anything.”

“So you’re their miracle,” Bruno says, almost reproachfully.

“Sometimes,” Radmer admits. “When luck and timing allow it. But not for a very long while. I really was retired. I swore I’d never take another human life, and I’ve kept that promise. These people have no brickmail inside them, no wellstone, no fibrediamond or regeneration factors. When they lose an eye, it never grows back, and they get only a few years of practice to refine their skills.”

“And dolcet berries!” one of the Dolceti chimes in. “I reckon those helps us a bit!”

There is scattered laughter at that remark, but Radmer presses on. “For me to fight against these children—even in the cause of justice—was terribly unfair. Such battles are their own to win or lose. It’s their world.”

“Hmm. Yes. But these new enemies come from without. You’ve roused yourself from the fireside at last—roused me as well!—to strike down a foreign invader who upsets the balance of power you’ve so carefully cultivated. To protect your children.”

“Don’t romanticize it,” Radmer warns. “I did have children of my own, once.”

And Bruno answers, “As did I. There’s nothing pretty about this mess, but having agreed to participate, I do mean to understand it.”

Bruno’s second surprise is that there are twenty-two of those six-wheeled vehicles, those “treaders,” waiting for him and his escorts. Fully equipped, yes, and with a pair of army lads standing guard to make sure the travelers and inn guests don’t have a chance to swipe anything.

“Someone has called ahead,” Bruno says, impressed.

To which Radmer reacts with irritation. “What kind of place do you think this is? Yes, it’s still the Metal Ages here, but we didn’t have wellstone and fax machines in the colonies, either. Not after the first couple of centuries. Did that make us uncivilized? Even badly outnumbered, the Eridanians defeated the Queendom of Sol.”

“Meaning no offense,” Bruno says mildly, for he’s tired of taking the blame for his ignorance. Plenty of blame attaches to him for other reasons, but this at least is not his fault. When he lived here, briefly, it was another age entirely. The Iridium Days, yes. He’s never heard the songs of Lune’s history, never even glanced at a current political map for more than a few seconds. How could he? And anyway, it was entropy that defeated the Queendom. The Eridanians were simply there at the time.

Soon, Natan is showing Bruno how to mount a treader. There’s no great trick to it—there were electric motorcarts of similar design in Old Girona, and alcohol-powered scooters in the islands of Tonga, which Bruno and his family had occasionally ridden. But the treader is more complex, better balanced. Bruno sees at once that its six wheels, cunningly articulated, will keep the chassis approximately level through considerable variance in the terrain. These are off-road vehicles, deigning for the moment to travel a ribbon of pavement.

In another minute they’re off and rolling, a loose pack of riders with Bruno and Radmer at the protected center. They’re not moving all that fast—forty kilometers per hour, perhaps a little less—but the progress is steady, and the treaders seem little troubled by the steepness of the climb. Neither their motors nor the wind noise is loud enough to be troublesome. Indeed, it’s an eerily silent way to travel, like flying a glider low and slow, not touching the ground at all. But Bruno is glad he’s not riding out in front, for the treaders’ headlight beams travel only as far as the next little curve, where they’re swallowed by the superabsorber blackness of the forest.

“This is the most direct route,” Radmer tells him apologetically. “Flau have been known to reach an altitude of six kilometers, but their gas bladders suffer permanent damage, and they’re too hypoxic to follow navigation commands. Even in emergencies such as this, their service ceiling is capped at four kilometers. But Gillem is the highest airfield in Imbria, and one of the highest on Lune, and the Black Forest Pass will lead us to Tillspar.”

“The bridge?”

“Right. And once we’re across the divide into East Highrock, we can follow the old Junction Highway—what remains of it—east to the base of the Blood Mountains, where the Stormlands begin. The northern route, through a town called Viewpoint, would be a flatter, brighter way to pass the night, but it would take four hours longer. It’s a delay we can ill afford.”

“And the southern route,” Bruno says, trying to picture the jagged land around him, “cuts through the north of Nubia, where our enemies are as thick as flies.”

“Right,” Radmer says again. “So Black Forest it is.” He looks around at the shapeless dark. “Was it like this during the Light Wars? This dark, I mean? Every building greedily drinking in the energy around it, heedless of courtesy or the greater good?”

With the wind in his face, Bruno laughs humorlessly. “Believe it or not, lad, the Light Wars were before my time. My parents were born in that period, but even they were sheltered from it, for Catalonia had stern regulations about wellstone. It had to be locally produced, inefficiently and at great cost, or else it was subject to tariffs. It still found its way in, of course, but rarely in anything as bulky or expensive as a building . And in Girona, where my parents lived and died, there were social taboos attached to it as well. The people weren’t fanatics, but they favored a kind of technological puritanism. A hands-on approach, if you will. As a boy, I sometimes wore clothing woven from the wool of actual sheep!”

“And yet,” Radmer says in tones of mock accusation, “you turned the world of physics on its head. You changed everything.”

“I did,” Bruno agrees. “Almost as soon as my parents were buried. And I fear I’d do it all over again if I had the choice! But it was that Old Modern styling that made the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake so deadly when it hit. I wasn’t the only one turning my back on it; the whole world was shaken, looking for a new path, a new monarch to lead the way into a brighter future. And in that sense, my research wasn’t a betrayal of Girona’s ideals at all; it was very hands-on. It put the deadly fringes of quantum physics right there at your fingertips.”

“Just how old are you, Ako’i?” asks Zuq, who is riding along just a few meters away. “You’re talking about Old Earth, right? Before Tara and Toji conquered the solar system.”

Bruno laughs again. “Tara and Toji, was it? Yes, lad, I remember their conquests well.” Then, in a more maudlin tone: “Such memories linger far beyond their usefulness. It’s a cruel sort of prank, for the past seems palpably close, even when the last of its keepsakes have turned to dust.”

On a road made of gravel and tar, the occurrence of frost heaves and potholes can hardly be surprising. Particularly as the altitude rises up above the permanent snow line, which in this country hovers around seven kilometers. Nor can the effects of hypoxia be overlooked, for on Lune the atmosphere halves in pressure with every five kilometers of height. In this, at least, the post-Queendom humans are resilient, for they can subsist on partial pressures of oxygen as low as thirty millibars, or one-fifth the sea-level norms of Old Earth. But their metabolism slows accordingly, dulling their reactions.