Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Fools,” he mutters under his breath. And only then thinks to feel ashamed.

Soon there is lightning crashing all around, and except for the occasional errant gust, the shrieking wind is firmly at the riders’ backs. The Dolceti are more careful on the Dragon’s second visit, suffering no additional casualties, but after the roadway’s third scouring Radmer proclaims, in a voice barely audible above the storm, “These twisters are dropping down into the pass from above! Bigger every time! Our luck won’t hold; we’ve got to seek higher ground!”

“The treaders won’t climb these walls!” Bordi says. “Too steep, too pointy!”

“I know; we’ll have to leave them behind!”

“Are you insane?” someone asks. But Radmer just looks around at the Dolceti, his expression answering the question for him: No, just desperate.

“This moment had to come! Sooner or later, we’ll have to press forward on foot. The question is, how many people do you want to lose before we try it? Load up your packs, everyone! Food, water, bivvies, nothing else. Oh, and weapons!”

Well, obviously, Bruno mutters, in a voice even he cannot hear.

In another three minutes they’re all scaling the canyon wall, following Radmer single-file along the uphill slope of jagged basalt layers, like arrowheads sprouting from spearheads sprouting from swords and fallen, leaf-shaped monoliths. The points and edges have been sandblasted dull—no one seems in danger of cutting off a hand or foot—but with even a minor fall the jags are sufficient to snap a human spine, to stave in a skull, to shatter a leg and leave its owner stranded. There could be little doubt that the group would press forward, leaving any such unfortunates to their fate. Except for Bruno and Radmer, of course; they would be rescued at almost any cost. But that was hardly fair, for they were as close to unbreakable as a human body could be made.

There had, of course, been even ruggeder body forms out in the colonies—trolls and whatnot, shot through with diamond—but they had sacrificed their softness, their sensitivity, their very humanity. And although many such creatures had returned from the stars in the gray days after the Queendom, none had survived even into the Iridium recovery that preceded the Shattering. One by one they’d succumbed to disease, to old age, to the gloom of loneliness, and their genomes had rarely bred true. Even the Olders bore mortal children, yes? When they bore children at all. In the colonies, and indeed in the Queendom itself, the art of reproduction had decoupled itself from any natural biology. And it suffered grievously, when those technical crutches were kicked away.

Still, nature is clever where the propagation of species is concerned, and a love of breeding can welcome many a wayward subspecies back into the gene pool. Whether by chance or by design, these “humans” of Lune are a clever synthesis of the many human-derived forms Bruno recalls from those days. And they are human, far more than they’re centaur or angel or mole. As such they’re frail, and he fears this terrible country may be too much for them.

For that matter, it may be too much for Olders, else Manassa would be more than a half-believed legend. Had only one person truly made it there and back in one piece?

A message crawls back along the line, shouted from man to man over the howling of restless atmosphere: “We don’t dare climb to the top of the ridge. The winds are fiercer up there, and we’d be a prime target for lightning. We’ll proceed about two-thirds of the way up the canyon. Move cautiously. Step on the big rocks, not the small ones; they’re more stable.”

Bruno sends his own question up the line: “How much farther do we have to go?”

A minute later, the reply comes back: “Two full kilometers to climb, across ten horizontal. After that it’s downhill into Shanru Basin. But the winds will keep getting worse until we cross the eyewall, twenty kilometers from here!”

Ah. Well, here’s another great surprise, another place Bruno never imagined ending up. The benefit of a long life, yes: a large number of very large surprises. Moving glove-over-glove and boot-over-boot like this, across jagged, icy rocks, they’ll be lucky to manage a kilometer an hour. And what sort of shape will they be in when they finally burst through into clear air? What if they have to fight? What if they have to think ?

He supposes at first that the final hours will be the hardest, but then he begins to suspect that nothing could be worse than the battering they’re receiving right now. The wind here carries not only dust and grit, but occasional bursts of sharp gravel as well. Dragon or no, Bruno is nearly ripped from the rock face many times by errant gusts. Dragon pups? At other times he’s slammed against it, until his skin is raw and his bones are aching inside their carbon-brickmail sheaths. His arm screams where the robot’s sword cut it; it has healed, yes, but it will never be the same.

But the trudge goes on and on and on some more. The sun must be well up into the sky by now, but here beneath the roiling thunderheads it’s dark as dawn and gray as a Fatalist ghoul. No more messages are passed. Even thoughts are drowned out by this unending noise.

When they reach a flat, minimally sheltered area and the line around him begins to break up, Bruno at first worries that they’re going to lose somebody. Single file, people! he thinks at them furiously. But then, as the Dolceti get their bivvy rolls out, he understands: they’re stopping to rest. Not to eat, certainly not to cook, but to huddle together in a miserable mass. One guard manages to lose his bivvy into the wind, and ends up curled in with Mathy, the surviving Mission Mother.

Bruno manages to hang on to his own, although its tent top rips as he’s climbing in, and finally tears away altogether. It scarcely matters; the freezing rain finds its way in horizontally under the rock shelf, under the tents, and soaks all the bags anyway. Fortunately, the material they’re made from seems to retain its heat even when wet. Resting here seems a laughable concept, like falling asleep in a barrel rolling down a jagged slope, but incredibly, Bruno remembers nothing after that frazzled thought.

Nothing, that is, until the firm hand of Radmer shakes him awake. His eyelashes are partially frozen together, but he forces them apart and sits up. Radmer—looking miserable as a scarecrow, with icicles hanging from the chin strap of his helmet—says something to him which he can’t make out. He answers back with something even less coherent. But all around him the Dolceti are packing away their bivvies, and he must do likewise. To stay here would mean certain death.

Soon they’re on the move again, and Bruno can’t guess what time of day it is, or how far they’ve come, or how much longer they have to go. Indeed, his mind can scarcely grasp these concepts at all; the world is reduced to wind and pain, to slow, careful movement between the rocks. When he closes his eyes—and he closes them often now, against the frigid sting of wind and sleet—he still sees rocks. These are his thoughts: rocks, and more rocks, and the occasional step or grasp to carry him from one to the next. Time has no meaning at all.

Still, there does come a point where he notices they’re going downhill. This by itself is not unusual, for the pass snakes up and down many times as it rises through the mountains. But the trend is down now. They’ve passed the summit, and are on their way down into the Shanru Basin. They have reached the halfway mark. Which only means that the worst is still to come.

Of the terrible hours after that, Bruno later remembers nothing at all. His first clear memory is of the eyewall, which resembles a tornado, except that it’s so large—fifteen kilometers large!—that it appears flat, like a genuine wall. It’s so tall that it seems to have no structure at all, no top, no twist or curl. It’s just a straight, opaque, heaving wall of flying debris, from dust and fines to sharp rocks the size of his head. Blowing up , more than laterally. Is this the main source of the region’s gravel rains?