Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

He notices another thing as well; the wind has changed somewhere along the way. No longer frigid and damp, it’s now warm and very dry. He can no longer blink his eyes; they’ve dried open in a crust of mucus. When did that happen? In fact, the air grows warmer with every step. The eyewall itself must be as dry and hot as an oven; he can feel the heat radiating off it. From friction? From the sudden compression of unwilling air against the storm’s unyielding center? Certainly, the sound of it is louder than anything Bruno has ever experienced. Like an ongoing explosion, the eyewall is a vertical slice of hell. How deep can it be? How long can a human survive all this?

“Are we going through there?” he shouts to no one. And of course they are. Where else is there? Even staggering like drunks, what other chance or choice have they got?

Blast.

And somehow they do get through; Bruno will later remember the experience like a nightmare: in fragments. Smashed against a rock, then clinging desperately to it as he’s lifted off his feet! Smashed against the ground, then scrabbling for something, anything, to grab on to as the vast suction takes hold of him. A dizzy airborne moment and then, miraculously, a hard landing on his knees. That’s all. He later suspects that he managed to close his eyes, and in fact had them closed the whole time, for the memories are visceral rather than visual.

In any case he emerges onto a plain of sand, beneath a sky so blue and bright it seems to burn his optic nerves. The sun hangs over the eyewall’s far side, illuminating the storm’s interior like a vast, spinning paper lantern.

He staggers forward, becomes aware of a figure ahead of him, a figure behind. He wants to rest, to drink a sip of water and then collapse into a dreamless coma. He doesn’t care if he ever awakes. But there’s brick-sized debris raining down all around him, so he staggers on a little farther, a little farther. The bedrock beneath his tattered boots gives way to dirt, and then to sand that feels as soft and cool as a wellstone bed.

Finally he comes to a gathering place, a hollow in the sand where raggedy human beings have accumulated. He throws himself down among them and takes that longed-for sip of water. Another person plops down beside him, and then another. And there must be some part of his brain that remembers thought, remembers mathematics, for he takes in the scene with a glance and says to himself, “Our twenty Dolceti are down to just ten. We’ve lost six more along the way.”

It’s his last thought for a long, long time.

Looking over Bruno and the sleeping Dolceti, a newly awakened Radmer feels—if grimly—the same vindication he did upon setting his boots on the beaches of Varna, after a fifty-hour tumble through cold vacuum. Crazy idea, yes, but here they are. Ten bodies poorer than they began, but still operational.

And there, in the distance, nestled among dunes as high as ten semaphore towers, lie the ruins of Manassa. He sees stone and brick walls jutting up, gray and black and ocher against the sand. More important, he sees the mirror-black sheen of inactive wellstone, alive with glints of green and purple and tarnished silver. It’s been a long time since he’s seen so much in one place, and it’s a good sign indeed; this deadly journey has not been in vain.

The dunes themselves are light brown in color, with patches of gray-black and khaki, and long, strange smudges of darker brown. They look like nothing so much as a pair of desert camouflage trousers out of some Old Modern war drama. The top of the dune field makes a clean line against the sky, not sinusoidal but irregular, ripply, dotted with shallow crests and peaks. It divides the world in two: brown underneath and achingly blue above.

By contrast, the first ridgeline of the Blood Mountains is jagged and chaotic with trees, with rocks, with a variety of grays and browns, dark greens and light greens. Behind that sits the eyewall, which reaches away to the north and south, wrapping around the Shanru Basin. A weak tornado, fifteen kilometers wide.

To the west, the ragged line of the Johnny Wang Uplift is lost in blue-white haze, with the eyewall behind it and evil-looking clouds boiling over the top, racing hard to the north. The ground between here and the Uplift is incredibly flat, broken only by the dune field itself.

Ah, my precious Lune, Radmer frets. He hasn’t seen this place since the Shattering, when the ground fell two hundred meters and the city burst like a melon. Almost no one got out alive. It looks now like a cork jammed too deep in its bottle and then left too long on the shelf, so that the resulting hollow has filled with dust. Disrupting the clean lines of his planette, his would-be masterpiece. If he’d had more time to track down and melt out seismic hotspots, that terrible day might never have come. He’d never had it in him to save the Queendom, but the Iridium Days, at least, might still be going strong if he’d managed the last years of Luna with greater finesse. Tamra had forbidden him from completing the crustal stabilization, yes, but that simply told him he should have begun it earlier. Somehow. He should have paid more attention to the news; he should have anticipated the need.

Or, alternatively, he could have mustered the resources of the post-Queendom era. With sufficient digging—and he knew where to dig—the worst of the pressure could still have been relieved, gradually and intentionally. Not all in one shot. The Shattering was his fault if it was anyone’s. Still, his punishment is fitting: to dwell forever in the ruins. Such is the fate of an immorbid people, as Rodenbeck had warned.

But Radmer learned long ago not to mope. It doesn’t help anything. He turns his mind instead to practical concerns: a fire, upon which a decent breakfast might finally be cooked. He begins gathering up bits of desert driftwood, strangely light and hard in his hands.

At the edges of the dune field, there are dead and dying trees. Also a few living ones that look recently half-buried, and some dead-and-mostly-buried ones looking as though the sand moved forward and swallowed them a long time ago. Here and there, thick roots and branches jut out of the sand like bones, with a solid, shiny feel that suggests they’re already partially fossilized. How long would it take to petrify wood in sands like these?

But the stuff burns well enough when he lays it in a pit, so he unfolds the little titanium grate he’s been carrying all these days, and places some hard biscuits and olives and fatbeans in a tray of water to soften them up for grilling.

Soon the smells of food are waking up the others, who rub their eyes, make faces at the scum and grit in their mouths.

“Am I dead?” the young Dolceti, Zuq, asks hopefully. He looks like a man badly hung over and ready to swear off the grape forever. His skin has gone purple-white, but that at least is a reaction to the brightness here; his body is attempting to reflect unwanted heat and UV.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. But with one of my breakfasts, you may be in luck. How’s your condition?”

“Not good,” Zuq answers, showing off a broken wrist.

And he’s not alone; of the ten Dolceti who’ve made it this far, nine are sporting some sort of major sprain or fracture. Splinting these becomes the first task of this day, which is already into late afternoon and will see the sun set in another twelve hours.

“Remember the war,” Radmer tells them solemnly, as Bruno de Towaji stirs, shakes the sand out of his hair, and finally rises. “Injured or not, you’re here to fight. You’re here to protect this man, Ako’i, while he rummages through yonder ruins.”