Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

Against the wind, Bruno laughs. “Perhaps. There were paper dollars then, inscribed with their value in gold. But the trolls I remember were all fine gentlemen.”

“Amazing. And did the animals really speak in human voices?”

“Ah. That’s probably not true, or at least I’ve no such recollection. But anything’s possible, eh?”

“Used to be,” says Zuq, agreeably. “Would you go back there if you could?”

“To the Iridium? Or the Queendom?”

“I dunno. You tell me.”

Bruno, his hair whipping in the breeze, grins over at the young Dolceti without humor. “My boy, I fear I’d go back to the Queendom if it cost the lives of millions. That’s precisely what we’re up against here: that yearning.”

As the morning slowly inches its way toward sunrise, Bruno can see that there’s something going on with the air behind the Blood Mountains’ forbidding peaks. Some sort of haze, some sort of cloud bank, darker than a mere rainstorm. In the flash of a lightning bolt he even fancies he can see dust and debris spinning around in there, in great, slow arcs and whorls.

“The Stormlands?” Bruno asks.

But Natan and Zuq can only shrug. “Maybe. We never seen it before, sir.”

Finally, the Dolceti out in front have lost track of the road altogether, and are bouncing through one dry wash after another. The wind, too, has taken on a foreboding character, slamming down from above without warning, the downdrafts bursting like town-sized water balloons. And the land has begun to slope upward again. Soon they’re riding up between hills, and then cliffs. Their progress slows yet again, and finally it’s Radmer, not Bordi, who calls a halt.

“Believe it or not, we’re early. I can see the gaps in these hills, but I can’t tell which one is our pass. I don’t think we’ll make any progress here until sunrise.”

“Four-hour halt,” Bordi calls out then, for sunrise is still five hours away. “Everybody eat and sleep.”

But Bruno is too keyed up to do either, and finds himself in a sort of mutual interrogation against Natan and Bordi, who are suddenly curious about his history, there beside a crackling firepit, with Radmer and a dozen Dolceti slumbering nearby.

“You’re a soldier,” they accuse.

Bruno laughs. “I? Taking orders? Marching in straight lines? I was a sort of knight at one point, but that’s a very different thing. Even at the worst of it, there wasn’t much fighting, and still less discipline.”

“A knight for whom?” Bordi presses. “Tara and Toji? Did you stand guard over this world while Radmer and his men crushed it?”

“Er, well, in a manner of speaking.”

“It’s hard to credit,” Natan says, “him being strong enough to carve a whole world. I’ve seen a lot of it; it’s a big place. So why does he need us if he’s such a power? Why can’t he just carve Astaroth right off the globe, and the Glimmer King with it?”

“Hmm. That’s a hard question to answer, lad. I suppose, when you get right down to it, we were only as powerful as our tools. These were exceedingly complex, and when too many of them broke down all at once, we were hard-pressed to repair them. Until that time we’d always seen civilization as an upward climb; it didn’t occur to us there was a down as well. Just as difficult and treacherous, but every step carried us farther from the stars, not closer.”

“Like the air foil,” Bordi suggests, drawing one and examining it. “They’re not making these anymore.”

“Indeed, yes. It’s a more wondrous thing than you probably suspect. But to build another one would take centuries. Whole nations would need to be conscripted, their entire economic surplus diverted, just to build the components of the tools which make this thing possible.”

“Maybe that’s what the Glimmer King is all about,” Natan says. “There’s all this work going on in the world, right? But it’s purposeless. Just shoes and plowshares, lightbulbs and treaders. Some little luxuries on the side. So a fellow comes along who thinks like you, right? But he’s not so agreeable. He sees all this capacity and he wants it, not for shoes and hats but for himself. There’s specific things he plans on building, but first he’s got to own those nations.”

“He means well,” Bruno says without thinking. “In his mind, he’s doing what’s necessary to achieve a kind of… paradise.”

Bordi turns and looks at him hard. “You said you didn’t know him.”

“I’ve seen his type,” Bruno answers.

“So you told the Furies. And would we like this paradise of his? Would we be happy there?”

“I, uh… I doubt it. Someone would be happy, but certainly not everyone. And even if you bought into the vision somehow, I suspect you’d balk at the cost of getting there. Notably, he isn’t offering you the choice.”

“No. He isn’t. So what’s he got in mind?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bruno answers honestly. “We had a guy once who wanted to collapse the sun, as a means of opening a window into the future. Even ignoring the enormous loss of life, there was no particular evidence that seeing the future—the end of the future, specifically—would be in any way helpful. Might be a bad thing, who knows? But he didn’t offer a choice, either. These madmen never do.”

“Dulcet berries!” Zuq shouts, from a dozen meters away. “I’ve found dulcet berries. Two whole bushes of them!”

“Get some sleep,” Bordi tells him wearily.

“Never could sleep in the dawn hours,” Zuq answers. “Even when I’m tired, which right now I’m not. Can we do some blindsight, Captain?”

Bordi sighs. “It takes more than berries, boy. It takes courage. Takes equipment. Takes a cocktail of other drugs to get the training burned in properly.”

“But we have all that, sir.”

“Not all of it, no. Sit down and have a meal, why don’t you?”

But Zuq is not so easily deflected. “Never could eat in the dawning, either. Not till sunup, when my stomach comes alive. And sir, we don’t want to be lax on our training. Not at a time like this.”

Natan turns to Bordi. “You’ve got to admire his spunk. Most guys his age do the bare minimum, sweating it beforehand and moaning afterwards. If you could join the Dolceti without actually taking the berry, I swear, there’s a lot of people would do it.”

“So,” Bordi says, “in admiration of his fortitude, you’re volunteering to conduct?”

Natan thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I don’t sleep in the dawning much, either.”

And Bruno, as curious as ever, chimes in with, “May I participate, Captain? I’ve heard a great deal about this ‘blindsight training,’ and it would be nice to know what’s involved. Firsthand, I mean.”

“I’ll save you the trouble,” Bordi says, unamused. “It’s pain and it’s terror. After their first experience, only one in a hundred ever go back for a second. It’s that bad. You can’t see, and you feel like you can’t breathe.”

“But you can,” Bruno says. “It’s physically safe.”

“Well. Yes, but—”

“The berries aren’t toxic? It won’t injure me to take them?”

“No, but—”

“Captain, I’ve been in some very tight corners in my time. I’m old enough to know my limits, and although you’ve seen me driving recklessly, I promise you I’ll not endanger myself again, so close to the target of our mission. I’ll do my duty, yes? But I would like to take this training. Indeed, it may help save my life when the moment of truth arrives.”

And to that Bordi has no response. But Bruno fancies he can see the man rethinking his opinions about this ancient beggar, Ako’i.