To Crush the Moon (23 page)

“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.

Says Natan, “The idea here is to bypass the
conscious parts of your brain. There's enough intelligence in the limbic to conduct a fight, and it's fast, so that's where we're going this morning. Deep inside. And in the brain stem there's more than just reflexes. It's your bird brain, and it's capable of behavior as complex as any bird, and as fast. That's where your vision is going: to the birds. Take five berries—five, mind you!—and chew them thoroughly. When you got a good paste in your mouth, swallow it down.”

The berries are smaller than Bruno's pinkie nail, and the same bright yellow as the Dolceti's traveling cloaks, but other than that they look like blackberries, or little bunches of grapes. Their taste is overpoweringly sweet, so much so that like the drug, it's probably a defense mechanism to keep animals from wanting to eat them. Their texture is surprisingly dry and leathery. The paste they form in Bruno's mouth is like syrup cut with vinegar: dense and sticky, sweetly acrid and vaguely corrosive.

“How often have you done this?” Bruno asks Zuq when he's choked them down per instruction.

“This'll be my tenth time. It takes five before the Order will even admit you, and two more harder ones before they'll give you rank and let you out on assignment. Dolceti are usually older than I am, because most of them can't handle the berry more than a couple of times a year. Me, I've been trying to go every month.”

“So you're tougher even than the average Dolceti?”

“Aw, it's not my place to say that. But I'm definitely tougher than when I started.”

“Cut the chatter,” Natan instructs. “Take the yellow pill, and wash it down with a bit of water.”

The yellow pill is tasteless and perfectly spherical. Also very small, but its texture is gritty enough that it doesn't go down easily.

“Now the white.”

Another sphere, larger and smoother.

“You'll begin to lose your eyesight in about two minutes. After that, the fear will set in, and Ako'i, I want you to promise not to run off on me when it does. If you can't handle it—and there's no shame in it; most people can't—then just curl up on the ground and we'll look after you. Believe it or not, you'll still get something out of the experience.

“The idea is to turn on your amygdala, your fear. We'll create a behavior loop that bypasses the frontal lobe. Fear's a tool; the more threatened your limbic feels, the more your behavior follows a preset routine, like a dance step. We're just giving it a better routine than to run around screaming, see? A higher class of irrationality. There's a time for being rational, but it's not when a bullet's flying at your head.”

“You people can dodge bullets?” Bruno asks, already feeling short of breath.

“That's what blindsight training
is
,” Zuq answers, sounding surprised. “Didn't you know? Sticks, rocks, arrows . . . The training bullets are a special round, oversized and not that fast, but yeah, they'll be flying right at you. You'll swat them aside or suffer the consequences.”

This idea fills Bruno with a gnawing dread, or perhaps the drugs are doing that, but either way he finds himself wishing, suddenly and fervently, that he had never pressed Bordi to allow this. What was he thinking? Even if these bullets can't kill him—and it's likely that they can't, at least by ones and twos—he could be
maimed
. It might be
weeks
before he grows back all his missing parts!

“What does the blindness do?” he asks, for in spite of everything his curiosity is unimpaired.

“It isn't blindness,” says Natan, “it's blindsight. The berries are shutting down your visual cortex, but your optic nerve continues on down to the brain stem. Your inner bird can see just fine, and it's
his
reflexes we want. He's the one we're training; the conscious ‘you' is just a passenger.”

“A blind passenger. A terrified passenger.”

“Right. Mentally tied up, to keep you out of the bird's way.”

Bruno's vision is turning gray and fuzzy around the edges, which terrifies him. What if something goes wrong? What if it never comes back? To be immorbid
and blind
. . .

“People experience the training differently,” says Natan. “Some feel divided, like there are several distinct . . . things, entities, living inside their skulls. Some people just remember it as a panic. A blind panic, literally, where they can't control theirselves. Some remember the whole thing as a set of conscious choices, even when they know it isn't so. Some remember nothing at all, like their frontal lobe just goes to sleep.”

“Which am I?” Bruno asks, inanely, for how could Natan possibly know that?

Then, with alarming swiftness, his vision shrinks to a tunnel, then a drinking straw. He sees a burst of swirling patterns: lace, spirals, Cartesian grids mapped onto heaving topological surfaces. His life is far too long to flash before his eyes in a moment, but he gets pieces of it: a month of mathematical insights in a Girona tower, a decade as philander in Tamra's court, an hour in battle armor under the red-hot surface of Mercury. Then nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Bruno de Towaji, the one-time King of Sol, is blind.

“So fast! I wasn't . . . ready . . .”

“I'm here with you,” Zuq says, from very nearby.

“Ah!” Bruno replies, fighting not to run. “Ah, God! Can you see anything?”

“No.”

“Try and relax,” says Natan, in a voice much calmer than Zuq's. “Fear is a tool. Just a state of your brain, which we happen to find convenient. It's nothing to do with
you
, the person. Just ride it.”

“In a moment . . . of weakness,” Bruno tries. “I've never . . . Rarely has such a moment of weakness been . . . I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I can't . . . compose—”

“Enough talk, old man. Defend yourself!”

Bruno swats Natan's hand aside. “Leave me. Alone.” He swats again, and again. Natan is trying to slap him! “Stop it. Stop! Leave me alone!”

And suddenly Bruno realizes what he's doing: blocking slaps he cannot see. His arms aren't moving of their own volition—he's doing it himself, or feels that he is—but the sense, the feeling, the
certainty
that drives them . . . How does he know? How does he sense the blow coming?

Block. Block. Block block.

“Good,” Natan says. “Take hold of this.”

Bruno reaches out and accepts a wooden staff from Natan. There's no fumbling in the motion, no guesswork. He even knows the shape before he has it in his hands. He's aware, dimly, of movement all around him, the jiggling fire, the men rolling over in their sleep, the wind gusting straight down. But he cannot
see
them. This “blindsight” it isn't like seeing at all. It isn't like feeling or hearing. He simply
knows
.

How terrifying.

“Defend!” Natan commands, and Bruno is raising his staff.
Crack! Crack!
He blocks a pair of telegraphed blows, and then a shorter, swifter one delivered like a punch.
CRACK!

“Attack!” says Natan, and Bruno is too afraid to disobey. Pulling left to avoid Zuq's fragile human skull, he whirls the staff around and Strikes! Strikes! Strikes!

“Good,” says Natan, falling back to deliver fresh blows of his own.

“What about me?” Zuq asks, from a position Bruno doesn't have to guess at. “This was supposed to be
my
—”

“Silence, maggot!” commands Natan. Bruno senses him whirling past in a blur of flesh and wood.
Crack! Cracrack!
The two of them come together and then separate, come together again.

“Ako'i! Attack! Both of you maggots, come, hit me. As hard as you can!”

Bruno does as he's bid, and amazingly enough manages not to injure himself or Zuq in the process.

Still curious even in the face of this terrifying blindness, he asks, “Is this right? Is this the training?”

To which Natan just laughs. “Old man, this is the stretching exercise. The
training
doesn't start for another fifteen minutes, when your drugs is more than a whisper in the blood. Now shut your hole and fight like a Dolcet Barney.”

“Ah,” Bruno gasps, and blocks a string of five blows.

chapter twenty-one

in which the appetite of
dragons is tested

The wind no longer whistles, but shrieks. It's no
longer cold, but deathly frigid. The rain no longer spatters, but fires down frozen from the heavens like a hail of meteorites. The ice melts swiftly, but so powerful is the wind that when a squall has passed, the sodden clay of the ground is dried in minutes, and peels away in crumbling sheets. As a result, the Blood Mountain Pass is a mess of sucking mud and stinging grit, with no sign of the pavement that once adorned it.

“I see the way now,” Radmer had said to the waking men. “If we hurry, we may yet miss this morning's rain of stones.”

But had they? Would they? Overhead, the sky is a deep shade of gray-green that Bruno has never seen before. Still, despite the obscurants in his way—the dust and hail, the unruly clouds themselves—he can see structure in this unending storm. It's a squashed toroid, a stretched donut, an elongated treader wheel nearly a hundred kilometers wide—nearly
two
hundred kilometers north to south—hovering flat against the landscape. And at half the footprint of the Imbrian Ocean, that's a sizeable blemish for a world barely forty-four hundred kilometers around! On Earth, the equivalent storm would cover the whole of Greenland, or Europe from Gibraltar to Sardinia to the ports and vineyards of Bordeaux.

“When the pillar buckled and the neutronium plate slipped,” Radmer calls to him from two treaders over, “the gravity in this hex dropped by nine percent. It doesn't sound like much, but it created . . . this. The low-pressure system might be circular if not for the Blood Mountains on the west and the Johnny Wang Uplift on the east, squeezing it, pushing it north and south in a big oval.”

While still piloting his treader, Radmer attempts to gesture his way through the half-shouted explanation. “Now that you're here, you can see it: the air rushes in along the ground, and then suddenly it weighs less. More importantly, all the air
above
it weighs less, so there's less pressure holding it down. It wells up. Then it hits the tropopause and flattens out, rolling back the way it came and then cooling and sinking, condensing out moisture. It's a big, rolling ring, like a stationary smoke ring, except that Coriolis forces—weak as they are—pull it around into a cyclone. Add the turbulence and static of air passing through these mountains, and you've got a real mess!”

Indeed, the Blood Mountains are lower than the Sawtooth, but every bit as jagged. This world simply hasn't had time to wear them down. And thanks to grit and sleet and the occasional uprooted shrub, Bruno can
see
the turbulence they create: crack-the-whip sheets and rolls of whirling air snapping off every peak, slicing through every valley. He hasn't seen lightning yet, but the air is sharp with the tang of ozone.

“Are we going to survive this?” he asks casually, raising his voice above the howling wind.

“Most groups turn back around at this point,” Radmer answers. “Some vanish, or return at half-strength. Some probably find their way in and then die of starvation, rather than brave the tornadoes again. Only Zaleis the Wanderer has been to the eye of the storm and back, and lived to tell the tale. And he started with a group of five.”

Then, in a more personal tone, “How are you holding up?”

“Well enough,” Bruno says, not sure how else to answer.

“Sore?”

A barking half laugh. “No! Victims of explosive decompression are sore. I'm, well, there isn't quite a word for it. The body hurts badly, but the real wounds are in the soul.”

“I could've told you not to try that,” Radmer chides. “Especially not before a big push like this. People end up in Special Care from that shit. Some of them permanently. You wouldn't blow out an airlock and call it training. You wouldn't smash your treader into a wall and call it training. If you survive, yes, you'll have learned a thing or two. But there are better ways.
All
practice—especially repetitive—involves the brain stem. It has to!”

“He did all right,” Natan says, with a bit of warning in his tone. “I've seen better on the first try—I've seen a lot better—but with years of practice he could be one of us.”

Bruno has lived long enough to recognize this as high praise indeed. But he can also see the truth in Radmer's criticism; blindsight is a shortcut, for people whose lives are miserably brief. The effect is real, yes: he can feel a new strength, a new swiftness in his limbs. They have a mind of their own now—quicker and surer than his own, yet subordinate to him. With practice, he could summon or dismiss it at will.

But with longer practice—decades, centuries—he could achieve a comparable grace without the . . . side effects. A little slower, a little smarter, a lot less damaged inside. “Disfigured” is the word that springs to mind, when his mind considers its own sorry state. The drugs have done something to him, something bad. Prolonged abuse of them would create . . . well, Dolceti. Violence addicts. Affable men and women with a zest for life, but a strangely sterile view of death and fear and pain, and no hope for a normal existence. In their own way, the Dolceti are as different from human beings as the Olders themselves. Bruno can appreciate that now. And fear it.

“He'll be all right,” Natan says.

“Better than all right,” Zuq echoes.

But their definition of “all right” clearly differs from Bruno's own. If he were going to live forever he'd probably feel a bit cheated, like he'd lost a finger and could never grow it back. As it is, with this sense of welcome doom hanging over him, he'll simply accept the scar, and the costly insights that come with it.

To Radmer he says, “It's no wonder you wanted Dolceti for my bodyguards. Who else would be brave and stupid enough to follow you into that?” He nods toward the pass ahead, where a trio of dust devils are whipping together into a single large vortex.

“Shit,” answers Radmer.

The vortex whirls straight down the pass, straight toward the riders.

“The dragon!” someone calls out, in mingled worry and glee. “The Shanru Dragon! See the mark she leaves! The dragon's tail upon the ground!”

“Get down!” Radmer calls out. “Get off, get into the ditch!”

But the Dragon of Shanru is swift, and falls upon the treaders before all the riders have dismounted and fled. One Dolceti is pulled right off his mount, and another is whisked from the ground, and both are flung high into the air, twirling and tumbling, and then dashed against the cliff wall high above. Their bodies fall, limp and lifeless, against the cliff's sharp crags.

Bruno, who reached the ditch in time, feels the tornado pass right over him with no worse effect than a sandblasting, a slam against the ground, a breathless moment of popping ears and eyeballs bulging against tightly closed lids. The Dragon's shriek and chuff are deafening, and then they're gone, and for his fallen comrades Bruno momentarily feels only a deep contempt. Because they brought it on themselves. Because they stopped to look at the vortex bearing down on them, when they should have dropped and crawled.

“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.