To Crush the Moon (11 page)

“How long have those been there?” he asked a passerby, pointing up at the monstrosities.

“Huh?” said the man, looking for something out of the ordinary and not finding it. His breath steamed in the October air.

“The towers,” Conrad said, huddling into the warmth of his wellcloth jacket again, for he had not been cold in many decades. “The big ones. How long?”

“Oh, a long time. Hunnerds of years,” the man said. Then, looking Conrad over, he brightened. “Hey! You're that feller from Barnard, aren't you? Returned from the stars to back here whence you were born.”

“I am,” Conrad admitted, “though I haven't been to ‘whence' yet. I'm from Ireland.”

“Eh? Well, welcome back to society, just the same. Does it feel good? Does it feel right?”

“I don't know,” Conrad answered. “I only lived here for twenty-five years. I've been gone for a thousand.”

And yet, those twenty-five loomed very large in his memory. At the time, they'd been one hundred percent of his life's experience, whereas Barnard, even at the end, had never been more than ninety percent. And hell, thinking back now it didn't
feel
like much more than half. A lot of important things had happened to him out there—shaping his character, informing his judgment—but the
trajectory
of his life had been determined here. Literally: right here on this very street, on a warm July night, with the Prince of Sol at one elbow and Ho Ng—a man Conrad would one day murder—at the other. Denver was the crucible to a lifetime of rebellion; the cannon from which he'd been fired.

“It looks smaller,” he said. “It feels crowded and weedy and gone-to-seed. But that's a funny thing, because nothing has really changed. Aye, and maybe that's the problem.”

“Well, good luck to yer,” the man offered, grabbing and pumping Conrad's hand, then dropping it and moving on.

Ireland
should
be the next stop: a ritual visit to his parents, whom he loved and missed. They had raised him well enough; his vagabond life could hardly be blamed on anyone but himself. But this was a funny thing, too, because where Denver still felt recent to him, his life with Donald and Maybel Mursk seemed impossibly remote. And those had been the
same time
.

So he didn't feel quite ready. He needed to steep in the thin dry air of Denver awhile, before he could face the damp chill of Cork. Instead he found a seat in a nearly full restaurant, where the wellstone was working overtime to cancel out the crowd noise and leave each table in its own bubble of quiet. Eventually a human waiter appeared, and offered him a choice between ten different meals. Conrad selected the least Barnardean of these—a spicy egg sandwich with blue corn chips on the side—and settled back with a mug of bitter red tea.

The waiter just laughed when he tried to pay. “The walls know, sir. Who you are, what you can afford. Food is free, right? The door wouldn't open unless you could pay for
service
.”

Ah. And service didn't come cheap. Not here, not anywhere. He asked the wall, “Excuse me, um, hello. How much money have I got?”

And the wall answered immediately, in that fast, clipped accent of Sol's machines: “Twenty-seven trillion dollars, sir.”

Wow. There must have been some mean price inflation here in the Queendom, because the last time he'd been here a trillion dollars was enough to pay ten thousand workers for ten thousand years.

“That's to three significant digits, sir. Do you require greater precision?”

“Uh, no. Thanks. But how much is my lunch? A few billion?”

“No, sir. Two hundred and six dollars, sir.”

“Two hundred? Dollars? But that would mean . . .” He was rich? He: an exile, a vagabond who'd rebelled against two governments? He'd had money for a while in Barnard, but he'd squandered it all on secret schemes and silly interstellar messages. And even if there was a bit left over, what value would a few Barnardean dollars have here, when Barnard itself was just a dream? He'd had a Queendom bank account as well, holding trivial sums when he'd departed, but even compound interest couldn't account for such an explosion. In an immorbid society, interest rates were very low indeed!

“I'm afraid you've made some sort of mistake,” he told the wall. “My name is Conrad Ethel Mursk. I'm a refugee.”

“Possibly, sir,” the wall agreed. “But your bank records are quantum entangled with the physical universe, and thus incapable of error.”

He laughed. “Are they, now? I've never seen a system incapable of error. Where would I get so much money?”

“It isn't my place to know, sir, but I can find out for you.”

“Um. Yeah, okay. Do that.”

Why not? He was intrigued. And half a minute later, the wall answered, “Sir, the greater bulk of payments into your account have been from Mass Industries Corporation, with a minority share from World University. I also detect one deposit from the Office of Basic Assistance, in the amount of one thousand dollars.”

Conrad mulled that over. Mass Industries was King Bruno's neutronium company, whose dredges gathered up the stray dust and gravel of the solar system and squeezed it into billion-ton neubles. Conrad had once helped to hijack one of their ships, but that was the closest he'd ever come to a business relationship with them. And his connections with World University were even more tenuous than that.

“That doesn't make sense,” he said.

“I wouldn't know, sir. I'm just a wall. Two messages have just arrived for you, sir. Shall I play them?”

“I don't know. What are they?”

“The first comes from Ring Observation Platform Two. Seven hundred eighty people have complained, sir, and the number who are afraid to go there is not known. The platform—the only one of its kind—remains in service as a historical landmark. The other message is a request for a job interview on Maplesphere at your earliest convenience.”

Job interview? Already? Hmm. Maybe that Appreciator thing had come through. “That's odd. What's the address?”

“Maplesphere
is
the address, sir. Just speak it to any fax machine. Would you like to hear the complete message?”

“It sounds like I just did. All right, look, I'm going to eat my breakfast, and then I'm going to visit my mom and dad. Hold my calls, if you would, until further notice.”

“I will inform the network,” the wall said dutifully. “And I must say, sir, it's been an honor working with you.”

“Likewise,” Conrad said, unsure whether to grumble or chuckle at that.

The meeting with his parents, when it finally came,
was sadder and louder than he'd expected. He didn't fax straight to the house, but to the northern edge of downtown Cork, which lay in the late-afternoon shadow of another million-body stratscraper, and had pedestrian and robot crowding issues of its own. Nothing else had changed, although the landscape seemed tired somehow—the leaves a bit droopier, the grass and hedges just as orderly as ever, but in some way less emerald. Here was a place that had simply been walked on too much.

And yet, and yet, his hairs stood at attention, craning their follicles for a view. He knew this place as he'd known few others: in his bones. And Donald Mursk's roads were in excellent repair, and in his soft Queendom shoes Conrad followed them home without difficulty.

Or rather, to the place where his home should be. But the trees and hedgerows were gone, replaced with a smooth low carpet of grass, and the
house
was gone, and the tall, skinny mansion that took its place sat twenty meters farther back from the road. Egad. It had never occurred to him that his parents might have
moved
in the millennium he'd been away. But he walked up just the same, and the house said to him, “Master Conrad! You are
most
welcome, sir. Do come in, do. Your mother is leaping from her chair as we speak, and while your father is away, I'm printing a fresh copy of him to meet with you.”

Indeed, Conrad was still an arm's reach from the gray front wall when a wooden door appeared in it with a crackle of wellstone, and immediately swung open to reveal Maybel Mursk, who flew out weeping and laughing. “My son! My son is here!”

Conrad's father was not far behind, and when the hugging and backslapping and handshaking were done, and they were dragging Conrad back inside, he couldn't help a wash of guilt. “Come on, now. Mom, Dad, I barely wrote to you.”

“Sure,” his mother said, “and we missed you all the more for that. Sit down! Sit! Can I get you a drink or something? We've found a fine beer that we're quite fond of these past two centuries. Oh, look at you.
Look
at you! Not a boy any longer but a fine, proud soldier.”

Conrad should have taken that in the spirit it was meant, as a pure compliment. But surely he
looked
the same as ever, a fit twenty-five, just as Donald and Maybel Mursk surely looked, to their own eyes, too young to be the parents of a grown adult. Much less a thousand-year-old. They'd been born into a morbid world, expecting to live a childless life and die before the century mark, poor and ignorant. Conrad, like immorbitity itself, had seemed a constant source of amazement for them. “Look,” they would say, “we have a boy who rides a bike! Look, he's a space pirate now! Look, he's a thousand years old and returning from the stars!” Conrad's only “soldier” time had been as a security thug in the Royal Barnardean Navy, pushing around the miners and 'finers and wranglers of interplanetary space. It was a period in his life he'd just as soon forget, and even the thought of it had the power to bring out what venom he possessed.

To his shame he blurted, “That's a bit presumptuous, Mom. You knew me for two decades out of what, a hundred and twenty?”

And of course his mother started crying at that, and his father said, “Oh, now, what do you go and say a thing like that for? Breaking your poor mother's heart. Have you had any children yourself? Well, then, I don't expect you know too much about it. You pour your
soul
into a child, lad. How could you not? And it doesn't pour back. It wanders off. It gets surly and insults its mother. Now come on, you, tip a glass with us and we'll speak no more about it. You owe us the tale of your many adventures, and don't think you'll escape from here without it. I don't care
how
old you are; in this house you'll listen to the pair that gave you life.”

And then Donald Mursk started crying as well.

chapter nine

in which a self-deceit is exposed

When the Mursk boy finally showed up, Bruno
was elbow-deep in wormholes. Not literally, of course—he'd lost more than one arm that way already—but in the figurative sense; he'd scratched self-solving calculations on nearly every flat surface in his study, and was no closer to a meaningful answer than he had been twelve hours ago. Bah. He
hated
ceding his concentration to outside disruptions. If he didn't, he'd be at home right now, basking in the company of his dear wife! But he was old and wise enough to recognize an empty rut, and when Mursk announced himself with a toppled chair and a clatter of spilled sketchplates, Bruno's irritation was leavened with relief. It was time for a break, yes.

“Hello?” Mursk called out, from the cottage's small atrium.

“Hello,” answered the voice of Hugo the Robot.

“Excuse me,” said Mursk. “Is this Maplesphere?”

“I don't know,” Hugo answered flatly. And why should he? He wasn't part of the systems here, nor a guest, nor precisely a resident. If he was anything at all, he was a dim-witted friend or a particularly intelligent and loyal pet.

But the answer did seem to throw Mursk for a moment.

“This is Maplesphere,” Bruno called back, then allowed his chair to raise and flatten and dump him on his feet. “Door,” he said to the scribbles on his study wall. A rectangular seam appeared and, almost too quick to see, filled in with knotted oak shod and hinged in black iron. The door creaked open, revealing a vaguely disheveled young man, framed in a ray of sunlight.

Today's fax filters could clean and straighten and press the clothing of a body in transit, could scrub the toxins from every corner and give the DNA a thorough proofread. A glow for the cheeks, a twinkle for the eye . . . They could even compensate, to some extent, for lack of sleep, and restore the mental and physical equilibrium that a night on the town had depleted. But Bruno was the son of a restaurateur, and had been a shameless drunk for three decades of his early childhood. He'd given that up even before the people of Sol had made him their king, but one never really lost the eye for it.

To the very slight extent that Queendom technology permitted, Conrad Mursk was hung over.

“Welcome,” Bruno said with mild amusement. “I see you've met Hugo.”

“Good God,” Mursk replied blearily, looking Bruno up and down. He was amazed, yes, to find himself face-to-face with the King of Sol. This was a common reaction among the commoners, and elicited no surprise in Bruno himself. He barely noticed such things anymore, although truthfully, when one was summoned to Maplesphere one ought to expect an encounter with its sole inhabitant.

“I thought this . . .” Mursk stammered. “I was asked . . .” He glanced out the window, at the round, shady curve of the planette: a miniature world domed over with the blue haze of a miniature sky. Something in the view seemed to stabilize him. “What is this, about a fifteen-thousand-neuble core? Three-hundred-meter lithosphere? Those sugar maples run their roots deep. You must have the lining layer about four meters down from the surface.”

“Four and a half,” Bruno agreed. He stepped out into the daylight and then quickly thought better of it. However perfect his eyes might be, strong light still made them ache when he'd been working too long. He retreated to the study instead, motioning for Mursk to follow. “Clear off a chair and sit, if you like.”

Mursk's eyes ran along the floorboards, taking in the zero-elevation curve where floor met wall. On a planette this small, a surface could be either “level” like Bruno's floor—hugging the shape of the ground—or “flat,” pleasing the eye but spilling and rolling every loose object into its center. Mursk opened his mouth as if to comment, but then noticed the scrawled equations and came up short again.

“Wormhole tensors,” Bruno said apologetically. “An arcanum even by mathematical standards. I've been tempted, these past three centuries, to recast general relativity in matrix notation, just to make sense of the damned arithmetic.”

Having no response to that, Mursk shrugged blankly and cleared off a seat. “This is a job interview?”

“It is,” Bruno confirmed. And though a part of him squirmed with impatience, with the burning need to get back to his equations, he had other curiosities which burned even brighter. He'd known this lad who'd known his son, and he would wade through any pleasantries necessary to get the full data dump.
What had Bascal really done out there in the colonies?
And yes, in truth Bruno was hungry for company as well. He could always put a copy of himself back to work if necessary. “But there's no hurry. I thought we could chitchat, you and I.”

“You want to know about Bascal,” Mursk said, with no particular emphasis.

“I want to know about everything.”

“He was a good king,” Mursk lamented, examining his fingernails as if the dust of Sorrow might still somehow be lodged there. “He really was, for hundreds of years. A builder, a visionary. He foresaw the economic collapse, long before anyone else did. He took steps to avert it, then to mitigate it, then to ride it out. But apparently it was bigger than he was.”

“You were friends,” Bruno prodded.

“The best. No matter where I went or what I did, I always ended up in his dining room. It's hard for me to think that won't happen anymore.”

“But you and he had your differences, yes?”

“Philosophical,” Mursk said with a dismissive wave. “We all have differences. Your son was a brother to me, and we squabbled like brothers.”

Bruno shifted in his chair, feeling it adjust beneath his weight. Was this refugee telling the full truth? Was he telling King Bruno what he thought King Bruno wanted to hear? With a sudden stab of impatience, he stood up again. “Come with me, lad. We'll have a walk around the planette.”

“I've seen planettes before,” Mursk said, though he stood and followed Bruno out.

Maplesphere was a large world as such things went, and Bruno used little of its space except as, well, space. On the far side, the obligatory lake was small, crowded by trees. Bruno's maple forest covered half the remaining land area, blocking the view of the too-close horizon, making the pocket world seem that much bigger. The trees also damped reverberation, so that the daylight squawking of a bluejay would not disturb the nighttime slumber of a squirrel on the world's other side, which after all was only a kilometer's walk away. Even the miniature “sun”—a fusion-powered sila'a or pocket star—was only forty kilometers distant.

“A laser-cooled tropopausal barocline,” Bruno said, pointing up at the cloud-strewn sky, “allows this world to retain a nitrox atmosphere, without heavy nobles cluttering up the gas balance. The weather itself serves as a backup system, cooling the upper atmosphere so its molecules have a harder time escaping into space. Moist air rises, radiates its heat to the vacuum, and then falls as rain. Maplesphere is the rainiest planette ever created, and thus the most meteorologically stable.”

“Interesting,” Mursk said, with apparent sincerity.

“Alas, ‘most stable' does not mean ‘actually stable.' Day by day, year by year, the planette loses gas to the wilds of space. Without replenishment, I'd have a pure vacuum at ground level within two hundred years. If the power failed, I'd have it much sooner than that. And as the colonies have shown us, sooner or later the power always fails. If civilization is to ride out its gloomier moments, we'll need a larger class of planette—one that can hold its atmosphere indefinitely.”

“Is this place serviced by tankers, then?” Mursk asked.

“Rarely. I've designed a tertiary system which is capable of bleeding mass from the neubles at the planette's core.”

“Hmm. Clever.” They passed from the cottage's grassy meadow into the green gloom of the forest itself.

“Lad, I want you to level with me. No sweeteners, no half-truths. You fled the Barnard colony with guns blazing, in the midst of what proved to be a total collapse. What happened?”

“A disagreement.”

“With Bascal?”

“Aye, with Bascal. Who else? He was in charge, Sire. Of everything.” Now Mursk was angry.

“Gently,” Bruno said, fearing he might not get an answer at all if he pressed too hard, or in the wrong way. “It's all in the past, and I'll not prosecute misdeeds which took place outside my dear wife's jurisdiction. You understand? The chips have fallen; the cards are on the table, and I call. I just want to know.”

Behind them, the sun set through the branches and canopy of the forest. On the world's other side—currently its night side—it was the crickets, not the birds, that chirped. Such was life on a planette: you could walk to any time of day you liked.

“People were dying,” Mursk said. His tone begged no forgiveness, offered no apology. “Your son's plans were rational, but they weren't humane.”

“And yours were,” Bruno said.

“Aye. But not rational. And not loyal. Your son put his faith in me, and I betrayed him.”

Bruno could hear the pain in Mursk's voice, and he supposed it was all true; this man did love Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. As a friend, as a brother. As a traitor—squirming under the bootheel of oppression—loves his country and his people. Bascal had always been, in his father's sad opinion, more a user than a developer.

“Sometimes opposition
is
loyalty,” he offered, though it must be cold comfort indeed.

“Maybe. You should know, Sire, that there's a partial copy of Bascal in
Newhope
's comm archives. Not a whole person by any means, but a valid memory nonetheless. I promised him that when we got here, I'd transmit it back to Barnard.”

“Promised him? Even after he tried to erase you from the colonial sky? My goodness. Lad, the worst evil is the kind we feel fondly toward. I understand your reluctance to condemn him, truly. But you must be honest with yourself, and with me. Do you know who
my
best friend was?”

“Marlon Sykes,” Mursk answered, for every schoolchild knew this.

“Correct,” Bruno said. “And as you say, we fought as only brothers of the spirit can fight. With absolute conviction, with love and honor and hatred. To the death.” And even after all these centuries, the wound still felt fresh, still brought an angry mist to Bruno's eyes. Rational and inhumane, indeed! Marlon had been a brilliant creator as well as a villain, and if the two traits could have been separated somehow, then perhaps Bruno might not have pulled that switch, and sent his friend packing in a
cage de fin
, on a one-way journey to the end of time. But the
damage
that hidden monster had caused—the sheer scale of it—boggled even Bruno's imagination. Some offenses simply overflowed the dams and levees of any possible compassion.

“That must be quite a load for you to carry, Sire,” Mursk said to him, as starlight broke through the trees.

“Quite,” Bruno agreed. And they finished the walk in silence.

“I don't know anything about wormholes,” Mursk
admitted. “You're making them? Here?”

Seated once more in his comfortable study, Bruno spread his hands. “Trying to, yes.”

Sensing an appropriate moment, Hugo appeared with a pipe and lighter, which Bruno accepted gratefully.

“Thanks, old thing.”

“You're entirely welcome,” Hugo answered, sounding truly pleased with himself, albeit that stale, arithmetic sort of pleasure to which emancipated robots were given. “May I walk around the yard a bit?”

“You're supposed to do as you please, my friend.”

“It pleases me to serve,” Hugo said, and wandered off.

With the ease of much practice, Bruno ignited the home-grown, home-cured weeds in the pipe's ceramic bowl, and drew a puff of their smoke into his mouth. The natural drugs involved, passing through the tissues of his cheeks and into his bloodstream, were mild and crude and beside the point. It was the anachronism of the act itself that Bruno savored; the loops and whorls of rising smoke connected him to Einstein, to Edison, to all the great thinkers of the Mortal Age, of whom he was the last. Connecting him, indeed, to the fireside musings of primal humanity itself.

“What are they for?” Mursk asked. “You intend these wormholes as a substitute for fax gates?”

“Ideally, yes. There may yet be time to prop up these failing colonies, if I can just—”

“Make it work?”

Bruno laughed around the stem of his pipe. “Yes, make it work. Clever lad. Alas, I fear I'm not up to the task. These old chalkboards are getting white.”

“Eh?”

“Chalkboards. Blackboards. Ah, what do you children know?” The cloud around him thickened with his huffing, and he waved it away. “In the tradition-heavy wilds of Catalonia, where I cut my first set of teeth, the last vestiges of the stone age lingered very nearly until the rise of the Queendom. A chalkboard was a slab of hard, dark slate onto which you would scribble with little cylinders of soft, white chalk. Really! We had one in every classroom, every kitchen. You'd erase the board with a rag, you see, and write in a new batch of lessons or chores or ingredients. But sometimes you'd misplace the rag, and you'd have to scribble around the margins of what you'd already written. If you let this go on long enough, eventually the board would get so white with scribbles that you couldn't read it anymore. And so we learned: too much knowledge is as bad as none at all. We forget how to forget. But this lesson itself seems to have fallen from our collective memory. Our civilization grows too brilliant to brush its own teeth.

“At any rate, yes, I'm battering my head against this problem, and what progress I've made has been more tantalizing than helpful.” Bruno didn't generally present his works-in-progress—too embarrassing—but in a sudden fit of hospitality he added, “I can show you, if you like.”

“Sure,” Mursk said, shrugging. “It sounds kind of fundamental to our future.”

This irritated Bruno. The lad meant well enough, surely, but a king could grow very tired of his people's unreasonable expectations. “Only if luck is on our side, lad. The universe is under no obligation to please our petty whims, and I have failed many times to throw a harness round its neck.”