acknowledgments

With special thanks to Anne Groell for buying into my madness, to Deanna Hoak for taming it, to Hayden Green Mountain for the view that inspired this multivolume story, to Rich Powers and Gary Snyder for serving as vital sounding boards and bullshit detectors, to Bruce Hall for editing as though he were autistic (I mean this in a good way), and to Cathy for, well, everything.

The third part of this volume is drawn in part from twenty-year-old doodlings in the margins of the Computational Fluid Dynamics notebook I used at CU Boulder in 1985. Ah, Boulder. The title and a bit of the Lune imagery come from a dream I had during the same period, in which I held and examined a paperback book by that name, apparently written by myself. I'd like to thank Chun-Yen Chow and Scotty Cassut for inspiring these, and Richmond T. Meyer for the offhand remarks and critiques that have been cooking in my back brain ever since. More recently I had the pleasure of discussing the physics and biology of the squozen moon with Jack Williamson, and with Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) shortly before his death. I'm grateful to both for their enthusiasm and support.

That these silly ideas have actually wormed their way between the covers of a book is literally a dream come true, so in addition I'd like to thank you, the reader, for indulging me in this way. You rock.

The ideas behind parts one and two have also been a long time building, and owe their cohesion in large part to Gary Snyder, Shawna McCarthy, Mike McCarthy, Vernor Vinge, Scott Edelman, Shelly Shapiro, Chris Schluep, Anne Groell, Stanley Schmidt, Bernard Haisch, Richard Turton, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke. I am their imperfect messenger; hold them blameless (well, mostly blameless) for any errors you encounter in these pages.

chapter zero

in which a city's gates
are breached

The skirmish at Timoch's gate is little recorded by conventional history--a minor engagement of Silver and Yellow and Stealth Gray, lost in the shuffle of much larger events. But a great deal of subsequent chaos turns on it, as an avalanche is said to turn on a single pebble. Regard it, then, as a moment of critical change which makes all the rest of it possible. It begins like this:

In the two hundred and first decade of the death of the Queendom of Sol, an ancient man finds himself trudging across the plains of a strange world. His escort--half a dozen armed men nearly as ancient as he--have already led him from the base of a bluff called Aden very nearly to the walls of a city called Timoch. And although the man has been to this world before--has lived here, wept here, bled and sweated here--he's never seen either of these places. Indeed, he's not even sure they existed when last his bootheels trod this gray, powdery soil, for he has spent a great many years . . . away. Asleep. Ensorcelled.

The world's name is Lune, although it was once called Luna. The man's name is Bruno de Towaji; he was once called "King." See him now in your mind's eye: a body incapable of frailty, wrapped round an ancient soul. His frayed, yellow-white hair extends to his shoulders in a kind of fan shape--very thin on top. His teeth are chalky nubs in a jaw as sturdy as ever. His skin--liver-spotted and yet still flushed with youth--is not so much wrinkled as creased. As if he's been folded up in a drawer somewhere.

Which is not far from the truth. Not nearly as far as Bruno would like.

"In decades past, the oldest towers were still enlivened. Programmable--faced with wellstone," says Bruno's primary companion, Conrad Mursk, pointing at the city with young-old fingers as the group crests a hill and looks down upon it. "They had diamond cores and deep foundations. Survivors of the Shattering, yes, very old and very grand. But twenty years ago there were some strange malfunctions, and Imbrians can be painfully superstitious about things like that. So, in the Year of the Lamb the buildings were torn down at great cost. The high towers which remain are of poured concrete over an iron lattice--a technique dating back to the Old Moderns of pre-Queendom Earth."

And that seems a strange thing to say, for Mursk is no architect. Hasn't been for a long, long time. Instead, he has passed himself down through the ages as a kind of soldier. Indeed, the guards accompanying the two--five men-at-arms as frizzed and ancient as Mursk and Bruno themselves--call him "General Radmer" when they call him anything at all.

"Let's not tarry here, shall we?" says one of them.

The men are angry, for this old leader of theirs--whom they clearly adore--has dragged them through one battle already, and is urging them now to Timoch, where they were once--and perhaps still are--considered criminals.

"Too much metal down there," says Sidney Lyman, the nominal leader of this ancient band. His tone is disapproving as he glowers down at the city. "How can the glints resist? There aren't soldiers enough--nor walls, nor glue--to hold them at bay forever."

Ah, and that's the other problem: this war of theirs. Not of these men--these Olders--in particular, but a war belonging to the entire world of Lune. And it's going badly, and as near as Bruno can determine, this places the entire human race at risk.

He glances up at the Murdered Earth, visible as a puckered distortion in the evening sky. The sun has set behind the mountains here, but the sky is still bright, alive with clouds of fierce orange and yellow. And behind them, the tortured rainbow of sunlight refracting around the centimeter-wide fleck of hypercondensed matter that was once the world--the one and only world--of human beings. It is, in truth, a tragically beautiful sight.

There is a Murdered Venus as well, and a Murdered Mars--crushed into black holes virtually indistinguishable from Earth's--and Bruno has no reason to suspect the other planets, especially the gas giants, have been spared in the years of his exile. That leaves only the moons and asteroids and planettes, many of which had still been thriving in the Iridium Days--the last days Bruno can still remember. But given the tendency of economic depressions to isolate vacuum habitats, slowly choking off the energies and machineries of their air supply, it's doubtful any could have survived this long. That leaves only the planettes, which of course have problems of their own, and cannot retain atmosphere indefinitely without maintenance. Surely a great many of them have failed already.

And that leaves only Lune, that greatest of planettes, that living world squozen from the lifeless mass of Earth's primordial moon. Squozen by Conrad Mursk, in fact, at the command of Bruno de Towaji.

"Well, it's really no problem of ours," adds Sidney Lyman. He points an elbow in Bruno's direction, forcefully enough that Bruno half expects a Palace Guard to materialize from the ether to restrain him. But the Guards are dust now, like the Queendom of Sol itself, and Lyman goes on. "We'll get this Ako'i fellow back inside yonder walls, then scurry like hell to reach the veils of Echo Valley in time for sunset."

Which isn't saying much, Bruno muses, considering that sunset--judging from the angle of the sun and the shadows of the trees--is still a good thirty-five hours away. The days are long here.

"He's not going ‘back' to Timoch," says Conrad Mursk. General Radmer, Bruno reminds himself. Not Mursk. They call him General Emeritus Radmer. And I am Ako'i. "He's going to it."

"Ah! A first-timer. A virgin in the hallowed ancient halls of that mausoleum of a city. Come now, Ako'i, one cannot dwell this long on Lune--" A thought seemed to strike him, then. "Oh, but you've been on Varna! Marooned, cast away. For that long? Since before there was a Timoch? Since the Shattering itself?"

"Possibly," Bruno grumbles, hoping to leave it at that. Tellingly, Lyman and his men have not recognized the husk of their old king. They don't know his name, his crimes, his many failures, and he prefers it that way. "Ako'i" isn't a name at all, but a Tongan epithet, something like calling a man "perfesser" or "genius" or . . . or "de Towaji," yes. Perhaps they would forgive him if they knew, but what matter? Perhaps Bruno might have forgiven himself, had he been himself these many, many centuries. But that doesn't matter, either. He is here as a figure out of history, to correct a historical mistake. Or to try, anyway.

They pass through a field of grazing, bleating sheep with gold-colored wool and curiously oversized heads. Then there are rock walls topped by wooden fences, leading down into a broad expanse of fresh-mown corn stubble. Soon, they find themselves on an actual road, paved with a smooth, continuous sheet of what looks like diamond or zirconium or some allotrope of silicon carbide. The surface is flawless, but to Bruno's eye something about it conveys a sense of tremendous age. On one particularly sharp curve, a mound of dirt has spread from the roadside to cover part of the road itself.

Bruno first mistakes the pile for a construction project, and then a termite mound of the sort that had once been common on the savannahs of Africa. But on closer inspection there is something almost crystalline about it: straight lines and flat surfaces. And the "termites" themselves are large and of curious design, with angular body parts of clear and superabsorber black and translucent, glassine blue.

"What are these?" he asks, pointing.

"Termites," Lyman answers, with no detectable irony.

"They're a bit . . . modified, yes?"

"No more than anything else around here. It ain't a natural world."

As the city draws near, Bruno can see that the walls surrounding it are at least as recent as the termite mounds out on the plains. They're flawless--not in the manner of wellstone or diamond but in the manner of freshly poured concrete which hasn't had a chance to weather. For all he can tell, they might have been poured yesterday.

"Those damned walls," Radmer is saying. "My goodness. They may indeed protect the city for a time, though not in the intended manner. The iron over which the cement was poured will be . . . tempting. The enemy may find it easier to dismantle the wall than to breach it and sally through. Every gram of it makes them stronger, while the people inside grow hungry. Not exactly the delay the City Mothers might wish for, but they're hardly in a position to choose."

Radmer's manner of speech does not much resemble Conrad Mursk's. Nor, really, does his face. A lot of time has passed here.

"Bloody valets," one of the soldiers says, making a heartfelt curse of it. "Bloody glints."

And Bruno doesn't know whether to laugh or weep at this, for the armies of doom are quite ridiculous, and the swelling of their ranks can probably, if indirectly, be blamed on himself. Who set this stage, if not the king of all that preceded it?

Damn and blast. If dying were easy he'd've done it long ago. He had tried. But there had been nothing on the planette Varna capable of extinguishing this robust carriage of his, and to die of hunger or thirst required more concentration than he'd been able to muster. Every time his attention wandered, he would find his belly full of turnips and spring water. And in the aching solitude there, his attention did nothing but wander.

Finally, they arrive at the gates of the city, and Bruno sees the gate and wall are much smaller than they'd looked from a distance. Not more than four meters high, possibly as little as three. The men upon the walls, with their burnished iron helmets, their rifles and bayonets, are quite a bit shorter than the grizzled old men who've escorted him here.

"Ho there," Radmer calls up to them. "We require an audience with the Furies."

"Oh wonder! It's a band 'f Olders," one of the guards calls down contemptuously. "We'n't seen y'r like here since th' troubles begun."

"There ha'e al'ys been troubles," Radmer calls back, with a rising contempt of his own. "My name is Radmer, and you will open this gate."

"Y'all c'n have audience with my arse, Mr. Radmer."

"E'en if your arse were a magistrate, m'boy, I would have to decline. I will see no guard, no City Mother, not even a senator. I'm here to speak with the Furies."

Bruno finds it difficult to follow this exchange, for accent and inflection so clot the guard's voice that his might almost be another language entirely. This "Radmer" has spoken Queendom-standard, Tongan-inflected English up to this point, but with the city guard he speaks in the city dialect. Flawlessly, as near as Bruno can detect.

"He doesn't know you," Lyman says to Radmer, in Queendom-standard tones of quiet indignation. Then, to the man on the wall, "Groveling in the dust is where you should be, maggot. This is General Emeritus Radmer, who turned back the armies of Red Antonio and saved this pathetic city of yours, when your grandparents' grandparents could not. More than that, you glob of phlegm, he carved the very world upon which you now stand, whose air you now stink up with your putrid excuses."

The man is not impressed. "Y'all Olders 're all Gross High Mucky-Muck of someorother, close as I can figure. And 'f this man built the world, then he be a god, and should need no 'sistance o' mine."

"Good point," Lyman says, sounding approving for the first time this day. "You have wit enough to call us Olders. Have wit enough, then, to realize we request your help for the sake of decorum. And we'll open the gate, if you will not."

Radmer holds up a hand at waist level--a gesture which commands silence. And Lyman--reluctantly--obeys.

"We dare not tarry out here," Radmer says to the guards. "I bring with me an item of great strategic value, and the Glimmer King's scouts have found us once already. You do know they're here, yes? Soon the hills will be lousy with them. If you turn us away, O morbid child, I daresay you won't last the week."

Glimmer King. Is that what they're calling Bruno's son these days? His only child, his greatest error? If indeed Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui is (a) alive, and (b) responsible for all this mad suffering--Bruno has heard only Radmer's suspicions on the subject. But those were enough to draw him here, to this unreal place. A father's disappointment--and atonement--run as deep as his love.

"If he turns us away he won't last the minute," Lyman says, drawing his sword. And a sense washes over Bruno yet again, that he is living in some hell of his own creation, for the sword in Lyman's hand could well be a figment of fevered dreams. Ancient, yes. Sharpened and sealed with a film of epitaxial diamond. The weapon has a wicked point, and a basket hilt to protect the wielder's hand, and in between there is . . . nothing at all. Nothing to parry, to grasp, to see flashing in a deadly arc. In showing it off to him, Lyman had called it an "air foil," and had declined to estimate the number of deaths it had inflicted at his hand, and the hands of other soldiers before him.

Ploughshares into swords, alas. That wasn't what mass-stabilized wormholes were for.

But Bruno's musings are cut short when someone up on the wall cries "Bandits!" and hurls down a wooden spear tipped with barbs of iron. Of course it bounces harmlessly off the marble-gray cloak of one of the Olders--Brian, his name is--who picks it up quietly, examines it for a moment, and then breaks it calmly over his knee.

And suddenly everyone is fighting.

"Inviz" was mainly a fashion statement in Bruno's day, one of many geostat patterns that seemed to hold stationary while your clothes and body swirled around them. In set theory terms, inviz was the special case of geostat in which the display pattern matched the background pattern. But in the hands of an artful dresser it became something more, something beautiful. A complement to the other nonspectral colors--superblack and superreflector, wellwood and glowhoo, animorphic and animimetic and the ever-popular c0unt rs ns . How he misses those! How he misses the fops and dandies who strutted around in them, with hardly a care!

But on the wellcloth cloaks of Sydney Lyman's band, stealth inviz is just another instrument of murder. The Olders lift their hoods and vanish, or nearly vanish, leaving only smudges in the air and dancing shadows on the ground. They must be wearing speed boots and wall-hugging gecko gloves as well, for in what seems no time at all, the air is shimmering on top of the wall itself, and the guards there are dropping their weapons, dropping their helmets, staggering and falling in disarray. Struggling vainly with unseen assailants.

"Harm no one!" Radmer commands, and it occurs to Bruno to wonder whether he's speaking to his own men, or to the city guards, or to the world of Lune itself, with a frustration that borders on despair. Here is a man, thinks Bruno, who knows combat all too well, and loves it not at all. He feels a moment of pity, for the earnest young man who had long ago dreamed himself a builder, just as Bruno had dreamed himself a physicist. But the moment passes, for this whole world is like a nightmare, and there's a great deal Bruno doesn't know. He'll take nothing for granted, and he feels--perhaps foolishly--that nothing can truly surprise him, or move him. He's beyond all that.

Old-fashioned cast iron bells are ringing up on the wall now--alarms from the guards close enough to observe the fray but not close enough to be caught in it. Still, the gate--a simple affair of welded steel bars and plates--swings slowly open on squealing hinges, and Radmer strides casually into the city. Not waiting to be summoned like a dog, Bruno trails close behind.

The city within could have been clipped straight from Bruno's Old Girona childhood: an environment of stone and brick and heat-trapping colored glass. A cluster of hundred-story towers stands anomalously at the center, ringed by artful moats and bridges, but few of the other buildings are more than six floors high, and (per Radmer's warning) none seem enlivened. Between them, streets of diamond and cobblestone and muddy gravel slope gradually down toward the seashore.

And on the streets are crowds of dwarfish, big-headed men and women dressed in drab spectral colors. Fluttering gray shadows cling beneath their chins and eyelids, the undersides of their arms. Reactive skin pigment--an adaptation generally used for shedding heat. These people are Eridanians, he thinks at first, but on the heels of that he notices other engineered features as well: the six-fingered, dual-thumbed hands of Sirius, a hint of the thick, trollish skins of Barnardean extremists. Also the occasional head of translucent blue-green hair--a photosynthetic adaptation that had started right here in Sol System, under the very nose of a disapproving Queen Tamra.

At the moment, these strange, patchwork people are scurrying back or fleeing outright, their eyes wide on the opened gate. "Olders!" some of them cry.

"What are they?" Bruno asks quietly.

"They call themselves ‘human beings,'" Radmer answers without irony. "They're the people of Lune."

"Ah. Well. What do they call us, then? Olders?"

"Or bandits," Radmer agrees, "or indeceased, which is an unkind word indeed. But our numbers have faded over the centuries--especially here in Imbria, which is a hard nation to inhabit in secret. They sometimes hunt us, so we try to keep out of sight."

"Some of us do," says Sidney Lyman, materializing suddenly at Bruno's side. He glares pointedly at Radmer. "Others don't ever learn, no matter how much misfortune they bring down upon the rest of us. These ‘humans' go through spurts of curiosity and outreach, seeking us out as historical reference works, which is fine except that it lays the groundwork for the next round of bloodletting. Know thy enemy, eh?

"And of course it's worst for our own children. Immorbidity doesn't breed through; if they stay with us, we watch them grow old and die. We're like statues to them, unbending, wearing down on a timescale they can scarce perceive. But if they join the mainstream of human society, they do so as tall, five-fingered freaks. There aren't even ghettos for them, not anymore, so the freak show never ends. Many of them do become bandits, in the times when relations are poor. And our dear Radmer here is always stirring things up."

"Was always," Radmer says. "It's a habit I'd long abandoned."

"Until these lucky days," Lyman answers, with more than a hint of bitterness. "Now you've gone all the way to Varna, braving radiation and vacuum to bring this . . . gift to the Imbrians. How very noble of you."

"I like to think so, Sid. Really. If this civilization falls, what do you think will succeed it? Another Queendom? Another dark age? Do you really want to find out? Most of the time, the people of this city give little thought to our existence, except as characters in ancient songs."

"But now they need us, in your opinion," Lyman mutters. "Even if their own opinions disagree."

"Yes," Radmer says simply. Then, "I asked you to bring me this far, Sid, and you've done it. I won't ask any more. In fact, I'll invite you to leave before things get any worse."

"And abandon you here for lynching?"

Radmer laughs humorlessly. "I've been here a hundred times, Sid, and they haven't managed it yet. I'll be fine."

"Meaning no offense, sir, but I think we'll wait here a minute and see what happens."

"Hmm. Well. Suit yourself."

And presently, as if called forth by this exchange, a new set of guards appear--first a dozen, then two dozen, then a hundred strong. They're dressed all in yellow, and in addition to rifles and swords they carry, here and there, the elongated wormhole pole-arms which Lyman has called "air pikes." A few of them, Bruno notes with surprise, are quite obviously female.

"Ah, the Dolceti," Lyman says, in almost welcoming tones.

"This is more serious," Conrad murmurs to Bruno. "The nation's elite guard, trained in blindsight through the channels of fear. Don't underestimate them."

"I hadn't," Bruno says, meaning it. He has no idea what any of these terms mean, or what anyone here might be capable of. Blindsight? Channels of fear? The name "Dolceti" itself is suggestive; it's about as unTongan a word as human mouths can utter, and assuming it descends from some species of Latin or Greek, it might mean "sweet" or "pleasing." It might also mean "pain" or "chop" or "deceit," or even "whale."

"You lot are under arrest," says one of the Dolceti--not obviously marked as a leader but certainly carrying himself that way. His dialect is not quite as impenetrable as the wall guards' had been, though it does sound forced, as though he's dredging up some ancient tongue he'd learned and half forgotten.

"Y'all near c'rect," Conrad Mursk says back to him, in what sounds to Bruno, again, like flawless Lunish. "We're t'be escorted to the Furies."

"On whose authority?" the Dolceti wants to know.

"Mine," Radmer answers calmly. "As Third Protector of Imbria."

That sends a ripple of surprise through the guards. "You're Radmer?"

"I am. Are you the captain here? Is Petro dead already?"

"Petro retired twenty years ago, when the haunted towers came down. I'm the captain, yes."

"Well, Captain," says Radmer, "I'm afraid we don't have much time, for the enemy's scouts are in yonder hills already, and will soon pin you against the sea. Come now: close the gate and do as I ask."

At that, the Dolceti captain moves with amazing swiftness, drawing a short sword--an ordinary one, though an air foil hangs at his side as well. In an eyeblink, he leaps forward to lay the iron blade across Radmer's neck. "I take no orders from--"

But Radmer has stepped aside, not quickly but at just the right moment, with the ease of long practice. Centuries of practice--millennia. He's out of reach, untouchable. Then, with no greater urgency, he tosses a nearly full canteen at another Dolceti, whose rifle is aimed exactly between Radmer's eyes. The guard doesn't flinch, but he does swat the projectile aside with a viper-quick motion, letting his rifle waver for a second. Which gives Radmer enough time to draw his blitterstick without seeming to hurry.

Intended mainly for use against robots, a blitterstick--or blitterstaff, or blitter-anything--is an ungainly and rather cruel weapon to turn against human flesh. Rarely lethal, its shifting wellstone patterns--caustic and thermally abusive, alive with pseudoatom disassembly brigades--leave puckers and burns and worse disfigurements which, in a medically impoverished environment like this one, must surely be permanent. But Radmer's only other weapon is a pistol, far more lethal.

What happens next strikes Bruno as something like a chess opening: no one attacks, but everyone glares and sidesteps, aims and tenses, lining up for a kill. The drop of a feather will set them off, but neither side is crass or undisciplined enough to engage. Not first, not in cold blood. The Dolceti outnumber the Olders ten to one, though, and from the looks on their faces they seem to think it will be enough. To penetrate the diamond weave beneath a soft Queendom skin? To shatter the brickmail and impervium of faxborn Queendom-era bones? Probably not, but they can still drag a man down and pinch his nose shut until he smothers. And they seemed prepared to.

"Always a pleasure, coming here," Radmer says. "The Imbrians of Timoch are such a fine, appreciative people."

For a moment, Bruno toys with the idea of unveiling his true identity. Perhaps the shock value will defuse this situation, and get the Olders inside without bloodshed. Then again, he would be a figure as remote in the Imbrians' past as Aristotle and Alexander were in his own. Would they believe him? Would they recognize his name, or understand its burden of significance? Would they even care?

He is spared any further thought on the matter when a voice from atop the wall calls out "Glints!" in a tone that registers panic across all possible dialects. Bruno turns, looking back across the sloping plains he and Radmer have just crossed at considerable peril. And indeed, yes, the enemy is still at work out there: he sees the unmistakable glints and flashes of sunlight on superreflective impervium. Less than five kilometers away. Less than two.

Behind him, a ripple of concern passes through the Dolceti.

"You must attack," Radmer says, simply and without fear. "They're only scouts, but they're right here, barely a rifle's reach from your capital gates. And if they report back, the Glimmer King will know I've been to Varna and back in a sphere of brass. He'll know I came here afterward. Assuming he doesn't know it already."

"Varna is in outer space," the Dolceti captain replies, as if to a child's bad joke.

"Aye," says Radmer. "I had to launch from Tillspar, over Highrock Divide. All I can say is, thank God for pulleys. You might be interested in my catapult, by the way; properly cocked it can bombard any point on this planette's surface."

"You lie," says a voice in the crowd somewhere.

"Do I? For what purpose?" Radmer's tone is patient. "The enemy is that way, friend, and if you swear this man's safety"--he points at Bruno--"upon all that is holy and dear, then I will fight at your side to defend these ill-forged walls."

The captain is angry but not stupid; he considers the offer, considers the evidence before him. "What's special about this man?"

"Wisdom," Radmer answers. "And if you will not pledge his safe conduct to the Furies, then you'll have two enemies, and no friends, and soon no country to defend."

"Very diplomatic," the captain grumbles, then steps forward to offer his hand. "I'm Bordi, grandson of Petro."

The two men shake on it, prompting Sidney Lyman to mutter, "You'll be the death of me, General. But I'll not let you enter this fight by yourself."

"Nor I," says the Older named Brian, and the others grunt in assent.

"Natan," says Bordi, gesturing sharply to one of the taller Dolceti. "Stay here, you and Zuq. Guard this Older, this font of wisdom, until I return."

And with that, the Dolceti are off and running in a hooting, jabbering mob that quickly settles into three perfect V formations, like flights of geese. Not to be outdone, Lyman's Olders follow on their springy well-leather boots, quickly overtaking the Dolceti, leaping right over the "human beings'" oversized heads and dashing out in front, to form a smaller, faster V of their own.

"Be safe," Radmer says to Bruno, not in a kindly way but as a command. Then he, too, is sprinting toward the enemy.

Bruno still carries Radmer's binoculars, and they're of ancient design, wellstone lenses and all. He lifts them to his eyes now, and can clearly resolve the enemy squad: another group of twenty, moving rapidly toward the city on feet so dainty and small that a baby girl's ballet slippers could easily fit them. They carry no energy weapons or projectile throwers, and except for the swords, and the black iron boxes affixed to the left sides of their gleaming faceless heads, they could easily pass for Queendom-era household robots. Valets, yes. Scullery maids. But already Bruno knows, from bitter experience, how fast and strong and remorseless these impervium soldiers really are. Delicate killers, bent on some demented form of world domination for this unseen Glimmer King.

"If 'ts metal they want," says the Dolceti named Natan, "I say let 'em have it. Right through the ocular sensors and out through the box. Bap! I want to be out there, old man, not wiping your withered old nose."

"Your captain must have great faith in you," Bruno says, trying for some reason to be kind to this man, who seems little more than a figment of his senile imagination. Thus far he's been driven forward by curiosity alone--a desire to see this thing through to the end, like a play. None of it feels real.

"Fester these robots," Natan spits. He might use the word "devils" or "child molesters" in milder tones.

"They were once our servants," Bruno says to him, because he's not sure Natan even knows this.

"Really?" says the younger Dolceti guard, Zuq. He's shorter, with light green hair underneath his yellow cap. "Well thank you very much. We've nothing but your Older mess to live in, and this really contributes. Thanks for the Shattering, too, and the Stormlands. And for Murdered Earth while we're at it."

"You're welcome," Bruno says dryly. His grief burned out a long, long time ago, and if he starts bogging himself down now in pointless guilt, then where will it lead? Whom will it benefit? "If you had seen the Queendom in its heyday you'd understand. It seemed worth any price. Truthfully, it still does."

Yes, and there is a damning indictment, for he and Tamra had built, in the words of Rodenbeck, "a house of collapsium and straw." And they knew it at the time. How could they not? It took a lifetime of determined self-deception to ignore the generation problem, the population problem, the limits of mass and energy and physical law. What had they been thinking?

But then, in all fairness to himself, what could he, Bruno de Towaji, have done differently? He didn't create the Queendom; he was conscripted by it. And he hadn't known--couldn't have imagined--how thoroughly his early discoveries would rewrite the human story. Once collapsium was out of Pandora's hands, into the ham fists of Prometheus, Bruno had been as hard-pressed as anyone just to keep up. Perhaps if he'd guessed the future better, or raised a gentler child, or succeeded in his later research . . .

"Well," he says, suddenly glummer, "if my apology helps, then be assured you have it. We've left some terrible messes behind."

"I can't understand your prattle, old man," says Zuq.

"Maybe you should shut up," Natan suggests.

And in spite of everything, Bruno finds his neck growing warm, for no one has spoken to him like that since his earliest days at Tamra's court, and rarely then. Even the megalomaniac Marlon Sykes had been polite--often deferential--toward his fellow declarant-philander. Well, usually.

He waves a hand at the yellow uniforms, and in his best professorial tone he advises, "Overconfidence is the chief failing of elites, boy. The robots will have no trouble finding you in these canary suits."

"We don't hide from our enemies," says Zuq. "Our enemies hide from us. That's not overconfidence, it's psychology. And my rank is ‘squad leader,' not ‘boy.' This is Deceant Natan."

"Well," says Bruno, "‘old man' isn't my rank, either. I won't invoke ancient titles that mean nothing here, but I was fighting robots when the Queendom itself was young."

And so he was. They'd made him king for it! But the Dolceti's point is taken nonetheless: he isn't a king here, nor a soldier, nor even a guest. If anything, he's a sort of commandeered munition, hauled from the mothballs of history and pressed back into service. He can't really imagine what knowledge Radmer thinks he possesses, to turn the tide of this war. His Royal Override has already failed to halt the enemy's advances, though in fairness to Radmer it did give them pause. They do carry within them some vague memory of the old allegiances.

Bruno raises the binoculars again, and sees to his mild surprise that Lyman's Olders have already engaged the enemy, with Radmer and the canary-colored Dolceti not far behind. The robots fight well--they fight perfectly, with the fluidity of dancers and the cool precision of clockwork. Their swords flash in elaborate sweeping arcs, as if spelling out glyphs in the afternoon air. But oddly enough, the Dolceti are faster. And the Olders are certainly more cunning, and anyway the robots are--for once!--badly outnumbered.

One of them manages to raise an antenna--the robotic equivalent of a scream for help--but it's quickly cut down by the swords of human beings. The mast is a telescoping wand of impervium, theoretically unbreakable, but it isn't all one piece, and everyone seems to know where to hack, where the vulnerable joints are. Meanwhile, the box on the robot's head explodes in a hail of metal bullets. The other robots are down just as quickly, and the only casualty Bruno can see is a single Dolceti guard, holding her throat while a spray of blood jets between her fingers, turning her yellow tunic bright red. She looks calm, but she'll be dead within the minute.

And Bruno takes this as a bad omen indeed, for if twenty robots can strike a blow against the elite guard of this world's strongest nation--with Queendom technology assisting, no less!--then what will happen when the robots return in their hundreds of thousands? In their millions? Radmer has been right all along: without a miracle, the city of Timoch doesn't stand a chance.

Damn Conrad Mursk anyway, he can't help thinking. This isn't the first time the boy has swept into Bruno's life, turning everything on its head. Even in the days of the Queendom, Mursk had always had an uncanny talent for trouble.

book one

the
barnardyssey

chapter one

in which the arrest of a drifter
proves troublesome

The ship had seen hard use over long years; her sides were streaked with burns and gouges, with dead spots where the hull's wellstone plating had given out, leaving man-sized squares of inert silicon. She was one of the old starships, no doubt about that: a round needle thirty meters across and seven hundred and thirty long, capped at either end by a faintly glowing meshwork of blue-green dots: the ertial shields--essentially a foam of tiny black holes, emitting weakly in the Cerenkov bands. The ship was otherwise dark, her running lights extinguished. There was no sign of her photosail; the compartments that should hold it were open to vacuum, their doors torn away. The streaking patterns suggested this had happened long ago.

But the worst of the damage looked slightly less ancient: a round, meterwide hole punched through the portside hull of the ship, just in front of the engines, and out again through the capside in a shotgun-patterned oval large enough to admit an elephant. Interestingly, there were some intact pipes and ducts visible through the hole, running right through the path of destruction. These were shiny in the middle, and looked duller toward the hole's edges, as if they'd been grafted in place after the accident. Structural damage to the hull itself was minimal; the hole edges looked almost cauterized, suggesting the projectile had been very small and moving very fast--a sand grain flying through at 1% of lightspeed. The actual damage had been done by heat, and by plasmified hull material entrained in the particle's wake.

The fact that the ship was tumbling end-over-end at 2.06 revolutions per second also supported this theory. Getting that much mass moving that quickly required a substantial momentum transfer.

"Visual contact," said Bruno de Towaji into the microphones of his space suit helmet. "Running lights and station-keeping thrusters are inactive, but there are signs of . . . well, perhaps not life, but activity at any rate. Something on that ship survived the accident, at least briefly. The severed plumbing between the reactors and deutrelium tanks has been repaired."

Here in the hundred and thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol, Bruno himself was aboard the grappleship Boat Gods, which had its own ertial shield and its own deutrelium reactor, plus gravitic grapples whose use would be illegal for 99.9999% of humanity. With these, Bruno could grab on to anything--moons, planets, the sun itself--to pull Boat Gods around the solar system. The grappleship was tiny as such things went, but its interior was nicely appointed, and filled of course with breathable atmosphere. Bruno's space suit--actually a set of full battle armor, with high-domed helmet and thick wellcloth shielding all around--was strictly a precaution.

The starship whirled in his view like a fan blade, like a dizzying wheel of enigma and peril and his own damned confusion. Irritated by the blurring motion, he switched to a snapshot view that updated every five seconds. And in one of these frozen views, in bold red letters affixed to the ship's port side in some ancient chemical paint he read: QSS NEWHOPE. Which made sense on the one hand, for this ship had come out of the constellation of Ophiuchus, just off the Snake Holder's right shoulder. And Newhope was the name of the ship that the Queendom of Sol had launched, long ago, to Barnard's Star, which lurked invisible to the naked eye in precisely that location. The first of the great colony ships, yes. But on the other hand it made no sense at all, because the Barnard colony had been silent for hundreds of years--presumed extinct--and the QSS Newhope had been reported destroyed hundreds of years before that, in some sort of freak collision during an ill-advised sun-grazing maneuver.

"Target identity confirmed," he said. "She's QSS Newhope, apparently out of Barnard. Carrying what? Carrying whom? This makes no sense."

And while Bruno had always loved a good mystery, this one was a bit too personal, for his own son had been a passenger onboard this ship. Had been the King of Barnard, just as Bruno was, now and always, the King of Sol. And though it be foolish--there was no reason to suspect his exiled progeny had escaped the colony's fall--the sight of those words on the hull of the ship were enough to bestir in Bruno a pathetic sense of hope. For he loved his pirate, poet son as dearly as any father must.

What must it be like in there? Could anyone have survived? Those repairs had probably been carried out robotically, and in an ordinary spaceship that centrifugal tumbling would produce, what, almost six thousand gee at the fore and aft ends? Enough to crush a human into broth, to rend any possible hull or superstructural material. Even impervium--that strongest of wellstone substances, that perfect arrangement of quantum dots and confined electrons--should have given way long ago.

But this wasn't an ordinary spaceship; it was an ertially shielded starship. Even sweeping sideways through the ether, those ertial shields would have a deadening effect on the space around them. Absorbing and destroying the vacuum's delicate resonances, yes, clearing a bubble of supervacuum and greatly reduced inertia. And the so-called centrifugal force was inertia, nothing more.

Were there habitable, ertial spaces within the ship? Were there safe (or quasi-safe) regions where he could dock, for search and rescue purposes? Mathematically speaking the situation was appallingly complex, but here before him was a cheat, a peek at the answer, for QSS Newhope had not flown apart in a haze of carbon and silicon and black-hole hypercollapsite. Having been a professor and a laureate and a declarant long before he'd been a king, Bruno knew something of these matters, and though he declined to slog through the formal calculations, it seemed to him that attaching at the center and poking around would be safe enough.

And if not--if he destroyed himself--Boat Gods would simply withdraw, and print a fresh copy of him from its onboard fax machine. Or perhaps it would be flung away in ruin, and a fresh Bruno would have to be printed on Earth. Either way, it promised to be an interesting ride.

"Attempting a docking maneuver," he informed Traffic Control. For all the good it would do them; by the time they received the signal, he'd already be dead, or several hours into his rescue. Boat Gods and Newhope had encountered one another in the vast, cold wastes of the Kuiper Belt, where the sun was little more than a bright star, and the waste-ice dredging of a few dozen unpiloted neutronium barges was the only activity in some sixty thousand cubic light-hours of space. Civilization was a long way off.

Anyway, survivors or no, if he could stop this ship or change its course there was profit to be made, for the hypercollapsites used in ertial shielding were among the most valuable commodities in existence. And God knew the cash would be useful! Bruno would fax himself back home and return with the Queendom's finest salvage teams. And then the derelict, stripped of any special spacetime properties, could be vaporized by any superweapon his navy (or rather, his wife's navy) preferred.

Nor was this some trifling bureaucratic matter, for QSS Newhope was, alas, on a direct collision course with the sun. Her navigators, setting out from Barnard over six light-years distant, had done their job too well; aiming at Sol and driving their error sources to zero. So, in thirty-two days' time the derelict Newhope--moving at 2,500 kps, nearly 1% of the speed of light--would come screaming into the Inner System, passing the orbits of Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury and then plunging (if grazingly) into the photosphere of their mother star.

The results would not be pleasant; the sun would escape destruction--probably--and the 90% of Queendom citizens nestled beneath bedrock or planetary atmospheres should be safe enough. But the flares would be colossal, and the Vacuum Cities' billion-odd residents would have to be evacuated as a precaution. And there was no bloody place to put them. Ergo, the naval response.

But first an investigation, hmm?

How the lords and ladies of Tamra's court had struggled against that suggestion! Or rather, against his doing it himself, without assistance.

"Dear," Queen Tamra had said to him, intruding upon his study in the way she almost never did, except in times of real trouble. "There's a tumbling starship on a collision course with the sun."

"Hmm?" he'd said, looking up from the equations and sketches on his desk. His mind was bursting with wormhole physics; he barely heard her. He barely noticed the storm outside, lashing rain and tattered palm fronds against his windows while the waves hammered the beach below. He was close--he was close--to understanding the dynamics of the throat collapse that had destroyed every one of his test holes. And this was as important politically as it was scientifically, for a functioning wormhole would solve nearly all of the Queendom's problems. Nearly all!

But Tamra knew this, and would not have broken his concentration without good reason. She could have printed an alternate copy of him from the palace archive, and given it the news, and let the two of him reconverge later on in the day. For an ordinary emergency, she'd've done exactly that.

Ergo this was no ordinary emergency, so with some effort he processed her words. "A starship, you say? One of ours?"

"Presumably," she'd answered testily, for no bug-eyed aliens had ever been detected out there in the void, whereas Sol had sent ships out to a dozen and one colonies. Still, the king could be forgiven his surprise; none of those ships had ever come back. "It's traveling out of Ophiuchus."

"Ah, the Barnard Express! Any sign of our boy?"

Unhappily: "No. The ship appears to be derelict; perhaps her crew is in storage. But Bruno, she's ertial, and on a collision course with the sun. Thirty-nine days from now."

"Ah. I see." Bruno nodded at that. As a young man not yet to the century mark, he'd made his greatest fame by rescuing the sun from the fall of the first Ring Collapsiter, which would surely have destroyed it. He rose from his chair. "Well, I suppose I have work to do."

At this, Tamra simply rolled her eyes. "Your swashbuckling days are over, darling. We have a meeting with the navy in fifteen minutes."

And this was true; he'd been king for eleven hundred years, whereas he'd been a swashbuckling hero for barely more than a decade, and only then by accident. Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji! It seemed an improbable history now, even to him. Before that he'd been a teacher, a drunken lover, a layabout courtier, and a wilderness hermit. Ah, but like everyone in the Queendom, he had the immorbid body of a twenty-five-year-old; his soul might grow old, but his physical self could not. Was he less capable of heroism now? Surely not! So he had dutifully attended his meetings, dispensing judgments and calculations and recommendations while his wife faxed herself to the navy's flagship, the QSS Malu'i--Tongan for "Protector"--and ordered her seat of government temporarily transferred there.

And yes, it might be the job of a woman to manage a fleet in time of disaster, and to rule over a Queendom in times of peace, but surely it was the job of a man to rush forward willy-nilly to survey the scene ahead of her.

"Let the navy handle this," his courtiers had urged as he finalized his plans. "Your Majesty, we need you here." Which was blatant flattery and foolish besides, for he was first and foremost an inventor, and impatient--after all this time!--with the fussy details of governance and the inane formalities of court. The courtiers and ministers needed him more as a symbol than as a living, breathing human, and what could be more symbolic than this?

"The navy hasn't the proper expertise," he'd answered. For that was true; almost no one in the Queendom truly understood the mathematics of ertial shielding.

"Then let the navy transport you," they'd urged, as he fitted himself into his space armor, flexing and testing the joints one by one.

"They haven't the speed," he answered, for indeed the fastest interplanetary vessels were the ertial grappleships, and none were faster than Boat Gods.

"It's bad for the Queendom if you're hurt or killed," they'd tried, as he'd powered up the ship's systems and rolled aside the hangar roof to reveal, in a shower of loose palm fronds, the bright blue sky left behind by the storm.

"I've made my backups," he told them sternly. "If anything happens, restore me and await instructions. That's a command, good sirs and madams, from your king. Even from Earth, from these very islands, I can reach this mystery vessel three days ahead of the navy's best picket boats out of Neptune, and five days ahead of Her Majesty."

"May I come?" asked Hugo, his own pet robot, who'd been emancipated for more than a millennium but still chose to remain at home, learning how to be alive.

"Not this time," Bruno told him. "I can't spare the mass."

"But Sire," his manservant Adelade said cannily, "who's to develop the wormhole in your absence?"

And that had almost stopped him. Almost. But if there was one thing he'd learned about the hard problems of physics, it was that they often yielded when the body and mind were otherwise engaged. And he missed this derring-do, and feared that his people--even his own servants!--thought him no longer capable of it. And anyway, blast it, saving the sun was his job. Not Tamra's.

Almost as an afterthought he'd said to Adelade, "Will you take stewardship of the Earth, please, until Tamra's or my return?"

"Er, well . . ."

"There's a good fellow. Mind the impending holidays."

He'd closed his hatch then, stoked his reactor, fired up his sensors and hypercomputers. Engaged his gravitic grapples, yes, latching them on to the crescent moon and yanking himself right off the Earth.

And in a rare moment of perspicacity, as the stars came alive around him and he wheeled the ship for a new, more distant grapple target, he had muttered under his breath, "Oh, yes, my friends, this vagabond heart lives on, smothered in census figures. None among you can refuse me now! Surprised though I am to say this, sometimes it's good to be the king."

chapter three

in which the consequences of
immorbidity are lamented

A trip through the fax was the treatment of first resort for any ailment or injury, but the Nescog morbidity filters were meant to repair the living. Clever algorithms examined the genome, along with its appendices and parity blocks, in a large enough sample of cells to screen out any accumulated mutations. Then, based on this corrected blueprint the system extrapolated what the body ought to look like--allowing of course for undocumented cosmetics--and then compared that ideal with the scanned body image itself, rearranging the cell structure as appropriate. All damage and signs of aging were wiped away in the process, rendering the subject "immorbid."

This much was traditional, and nearly as old as the Queendom itself. Under their own strange forms of duress, though, the ailing colonies had piled whole suites of additional "healing" onto the process, weaving protective meshes and brickmails throughout the body, filling the cells with wellstone-fiber networks and organelles adapted from alien microbes. Even inserting active programs into the genome, to fight back disease and aging among individuals too poor to have regular fax access.

Via Instelnet radio downloads, the Queendom had imported some of these techniques as either quality-of-life enhancements or cost-cutting measures, so Bruno was no stranger to exotic biomods. But even so these four star voyagers' bodies were something else altogether; something foreign, alien.

Two of the four were former Queendom citizens whom Bruno had known personally before their Barnard exile: Conrad Mursk and Xiomara Li Weng, the latter being Newhope's captain. The two were lovers if Bruno recalled correctly, although Xiomara--"Xmary" to her friends--had nearly been Prince Bascal's instead. Or so it seemed to the prince's father, several paces removed from the actual intrigue. At the molecular level, though, neither of them much resembled their original childhood patterns.

The other man also checked out as a Queendomite: one Yinebeb Bragston Fecre, who had played a major role in the Children's Revolt, prior to the founding of the colonies. The fourth body was female, and matched no Queendom records.

"Eustace Faxborn," Newhope said of her. "Custom printed in the Barnard colony, one hundred standard days prior to this mission's departure."

"Custom printed?" Bruno asked. "Not born, but created for some particular purpose?"

"She is the bride of Yinebeb Fecre."

"Ah."

A barbaric custom, that: the crafting of "adults" specialized for . . . well, various purposes. Honorable marriage was one possibility, but by no means the only one.

At any rate, the legal status of the citizens was clear enough: they were entitled to revival. For the twenty-five thousand actual corpses the opposite was true; they were legally dead noncitizen strangers. Any revival would be an act of charity--of foreign policy, essentially. And this Faxborn woman fell somewhere in the ambiguous middle.

Alas, it seemed a moot point, for all four of the bodies were, according to Boat Gods' fax machine, either not human or else irreparably damaged and in need of archival replacement. And since there were no archives available--no buffer copies or formal backups--the four would need that rarest of Queendom services: live medical attention.

So the four bodies were shipped to Antarctica, whose landscape was dotted with small hospitals experienced in the treatment of accidental whole-body frostbite. But the doctors there objected to the extensive radiation damage in these "corpses," and in the end a team of specialists had to be faxed down from the moons of Jupiter, where radiation accidents were commonplace, and up from Venus, where genomic engineering was both high art and science.

All of this was charged to King Bruno's accounts. No private charity or government agency seemed prepared to take charge of these people, for fear of an implied obligation to care for their thousands of shipmates. Even if those revivals were free--which they surely would not be--the housing costs alone would be considerable. There weren't that many vacant apartments in the whole of Earth!

As for Newhope herself, the navy guided her--bodies and all--into a parking orbit in the lower Kuiper Belt. There to remain, like the Instelnet message-ghosts, until some brighter future should happen along.

"Appalling," Bruno said to his wife as they lounged that night in their bed on Tongatapu. "Have we not wealth enough?"

"It's more a matter of space," she reminded him. "If we're to have any wilderness at all, we must contain urban growth on the habitable worlds, and our own children--natural-born humans with no sins on their shoulders--must have the first pick of what growth we allow. Or do you propose a Queendom without children? I confess, I can't see the point of that."

"Mmm," Bruno grumbled. "No one volunteers to die anymore. To make a bit of space."

"Would you?" the queen asked with a bitter-tinged laugh.

"No," he admitted. Not while the wormhole project remained incomplete. Indeed, he had dozens of incomplete projects which held the promise of a better life for all. "But we must do something, you and I."

"Yes," she agreed, taking his hand. "We must. This trickle of refugees has begun to add up. We could almost fill a city."

"A floating city?" he suggested.

She made an unhappy face. "Not another one, dear. Please. The oceans need to breathe."

"The oceans are vast. One more won't hurt."

"But a hundred more," she said. "A thousand more. Where does it stop? Why don't you revive your Lunar program instead?"

It was Bruno's turn to laugh, stroking Tamra's hand against the wellcloth sheets. "It was you, my dear, who ordered a halt to it. Too many displacements, you said. Too much economic disruption, including the loss of one of history's greatest landmarks. And you were right: sparsely domed though it may be, the moon is proud home to four million people. Where shall I put them?"

"On a floating city," she said, and sighed. "It's like a puzzle. Slide one piece and the others have to move. To make an opening, you've got to close one. And yet, the alternative is death."

"So say the Fatalists," Bruno chided. "Do they lack imagination? Do we? ‘Everything has an end,' they insist. ‘Let's engineer it, peacefully and with love.' By which they mean the vaporization of innocents, the sabotage of shielded archives. Bah! I say everything has a solution, and we've only to find it."

Tamra kissed him firmly. "And I, my darling, say that everyone must sleep. Come, let's have a bit of darkness."

And suddenly, for no discernible reason, Bruno knew just what to do about his wormhole problem. "Egad!" he said, grabbing for the sketchplate he theoretically kept on his nightstand for moments like this. But theory and practice were only lightly acquainted; the sketchplate wasn't there. Bruno searched the area for a second or two, but the idea was hot on the tip of his brain, and though his fatigue had vanished he was nevertheless terrified he would fall asleep or suffer some distraction, or that the idea would simply trickle away before he could record it.

In desperation, he slid to the floor and began scribbling there with his finger. The wellstone, long accustomed to such behavior, responded with trails of black obsidian in its surface of faux bleached wood. These rough figures arranged themselves into elegant numbers and symbols as the king's finger raced ahead. "There's a long axis," he muttered. "Indeed, indeed. Where the mass distribution falls away as a function of Z, it drives an instability in X and Y. But it needn't! We shall present the spherical opening with a cylindrical plug!"

Her Majesty Queen Tamra was also accustomed to these intellectual fits and spasms--her husband's renowned mind was anything but linear--and she knew better than to disturb him in the midst of one. Indeed, she watched with sleepy interest for a few minutes as the obsidian equations spread upward along one wall, and were joined by holographic diagrams: spheres and cylinders surrounded by a forest of right triangles.

"Two spheres," Bruno said to himself. "They're one and the same--the real and imaginary component of a single object--but to an observer that's not evident. How could it be? And the observer's viewpoint is valid, yes? Or relativity be damned. Two positions in real space, connected by a line. By a cylinder."

The queen was no mathematician, but she'd seen enough of her husband's work to know he was trying--vainly trying--to sketch out some four-dimensional object or relationship in a 3-D image.

Fortunately their bedroom was a suite whose outer chamber could be sealed off from both the outside world and the bedchamber itself. And so, sighing, the Queen of Sol stooped to kiss her king upon the shoulder, then dragged her blankets from the bed and stumbled off to sleep on the couch. For the one message she could read clearly in the walls, albeit implicit, was, This will be a long night, dear. Don't wait up.

When Conrad Ethel Mursk opened his eyes, he was astonished to see something other than the afterlife. There were no angels, no clouds, no twinkling stars, and certainly no God or devil waiting to judge him. Instead, there were green walls and white examination tables, and a young-looking woman with copper hair and eyes the color of jade, dressed in powder-blue medical pyjamas.

"I'm not dead," he said, and was surprised by the clarity of his voice. He sat up, and was surprised by the pull of gravity. Not grav lasers or spin-gee but planetary gravity. Then he charmingly added, "Where the hell am I?"

The woman was fiddling with controls of some sort behind Conrad's headrest, and in sitting up he had placed his viewpoint only centimeters from her torso, so that she appeared mainly as a pair of breasts. Still, he caught her smile.

"Welcome back, Mr. Mursk. How do you feel?"

"I don't know," he said, pausing for a moment to take stock of himself, to feel his body up and down for numbness or injury. "I suppose I feel all right, all things considered. Is this Sorrow?"

She chuckled. "This is Earth. More specifically, Frostbite Trauma Center in the city of Glacia in Victoria Land, Antarctica."

"Oh," he said, digesting that. "What year?"

She told him, and he heard a low, pathetic groan escape from his lips. He'd been gone a long time--so long that the numbers barely made sense. A thousand years? Forty childhoods? Fifty thousand episodes of Barnes and Manetti? The Queendom he knew was ancient history. And so was he.

"Shit," he said. "Wow. How's my crew?"

"All fine," the woman assured him, now stepping back to give him a view of something other than her chest. "We've woken you last, since your reconstruction was the most difficult."

"I was burned," he remembered suddenly. "The coolant lines blew out. There was this swarm of damage-control robots, just pouring out of the fax machine, draining the mass buffers, hustling us down into storage and trying to stop the air leak. But the ship was coming apart, and somebody had to be last in line. I remember thinking, We tried. We did our best, but this is where it ends."

"You were fortunate," the woman said. "It could have been a lot worse."

"Hmm," he answered, mulling over the sheer obviousness of that. "It seems I'm in your debt. Or someone's. What about the passengers? We had twenty-five thousand in cold sleep."

Her expression shifted, and he had the sense she was choosing her next words carefully. "Well, yes. It should be possible to recover most of them at some point. But sleep is a generous term here, don't you think? Some of those people were already partially decomposed when you froze them."

"It was a rescue mission," Conrad said vaguely. And right away he could see how stupid his plans had been, how pointlessly optimistic. The Queendom of Sol could help his countrymen, yes; it had the wealth, the technology, the notable absence of psychotic leadership and sociopolitical collapse. The Queendom of his dreams would have done exactly that. But the Queendom of the real, physical universe had problems of its own--didn't every place? A pile of dead colonists would be a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intrusion at worst.

"I'm an idiot," he said. And it was true; he'd come all this way on the theory that a faint hope was better than none. But if the faint hope didn't pan out, then it was as good as none. Or worse.

"I doubt that," the woman answered, offering him a handshake. "Angela Proud Rumson, Doctor of Medicine and Extrapolative Cosmetics."

He examined her hand for a moment--it looked absurdly soft, like she'd never used it--and then shook it. It was soft.

"Conrad Mursk," he said, and was about to add a title or two of his own. But what was the point in that? What status did he hold here? What he said instead was, "Refugee."

"Very pleased to meet you."

"Can I see my friends now?"

Angela Proud Rumson's smile was reserved. "Tomorrow, if you please. They've gone to their temporary quarters already, and I'm expected to hold you for observation. Test drive the old nervous system, make sure we've done all the wiring correctly. Shall we say twelve hours?"

chapter four

in which fatalism is
confronted by action

Perhaps the event at Newhope's lonely drydock was inevitable. Certainly, its cargo of dead human flesh invited public commentary: Are we responsible for these lives? For their premature ending, for their mere existence? If so, then aren't these corpses likewise culpable in the demise of the Barnard colony? Do they then deserve a second chance, at our expense?

Or: Why'd they send us their bodies at all? Why not just their heads, their brains, their memories? If the medium is the message, this message stinks. Where exactly did we sign up? To salvage putrid alien flesh simply because it's dumped in our laps is to play the chump.

Or: A species of promise was made in the Queendom's banishment of morbidity--a statement of ultimate equality before God and Nature. Thou shalt not die. This was affirmed in the Fall, and has thereafter formed the defining aspect of our societal character. Such pains as result are ours by choice, and by example we endure them gladly, ever mindful of the alternative. That these folk are the get of our own miscreants is beside the point; by definition, any justice must exist for all comers, or it be no justice at all. Dare we, my brothers and sisters, choose death for those who have come in search of life?

And it was this, more than anything, which inflamed Fatalist sentiment, for if the so-called "right to life" could not be waived for the long-dead corpses of nonhuman noncitizens, then it could not be waived at all, and the Fatalist cause was utterly lost. But by its very nature, Fatalism could not take an armchair view of these matters.

Shall we imagine a deathist philosopher and Fatalist general? Call her "Starquake" or "Dark Cloud" or "Shiva." Shall we imagine her followers, in their dozens or hundreds, or perhaps even thousands? Shall we describe the terrifying Death persona they crafted and physically instantiated, to loom cadaverously in their midst and remind them of their supposed duty?

This much is certain: a group of individuals held a meeting. Enormous care was taken to conceal their identities, as well as the meeting's location. In theory this was both possible and legal, for the Queendom was not a tyranny. But it was astronimically difficult, for by its own nature the Nescog must store buffer images of the people passing through it; must log their movements and enforce their copy-hour limits. Too, nearly everything under Sol's light was made from wellstone, or from other forms of programmable matter, and its nature was to record the commands--even subtly implied commands--that washed over it every moment of every day. Indeed, the universe itself was a witness to all of the events within it, and like any witness it could, with the proper inducements, be compelled to testify. And then, of course, there were the participants themselves, human and therefore corruptible.

To gather a "cluster house" or secret assembly from all corners of the solar system, whether virtually or in the flesh, and to leave no trace of having done so, was a work of great cleverness of which only a few thousand citizens were capable. And for no one to blab or squeal or accidentally invite a government informant would require not only an improbable degree of dedication, but also a meticulous attention to matters of psychology and logistics. Indeed, from this and other circumstantial evidence we may suspect that at least a few of the participants came from the highest echelons of bureaucracy and law enforcement, for such meetings had been going on for centuries, and none had ever been discovered.

The list probably also includes the most prominent and vocal right-to-death pundits and commentators of the day, as well as convicted murderers who had outlived their hundred-year "life" sentences. Surely they felt that life could be taken without consent, for some higher (or lower) purpose. Too, there may have been workers from the assorted and largely bygone deathist industries--the morticians and hospice orderlies, the coffin designers, the groomers and protectors of Earth's historical graveyards. These were the people most displaced by the death of death, and also those most inclined, by general disposition, to see some value in its return.

But it must be said that the Queendom government, following this same line of reasoning, applied particular scrutiny to these individuals without ever turning up a single conclusive lead. "Vast conspiracy" is an oxymoron in any era, but despite this movement's scope and influence and funding, it held successfully to the shadows of a nearly shadowless society. From this we may conclude that the conspirators were in fact the cloistered copies of our suspect individuals, secretly created without their progenitors' knowledge. Imagine our Shiva--officially deceased, perhaps a victim of the Fall--selecting the most trustworthy of her living friends, hijacking their fax traces and printing unauthorized copies. Briefing and drilling them, yes, scanning their loyalties in a hidden cavern somewhere and killing off the ones who presented even the slightest security risk. If five captains--call them the Reapers--each found five lieutenants, who found five sergeants, who found five corporals and privates and orderlies, then an army of thousands could be assembled in as little as six months. Across the centuries of known Fatalist activity, we can only guess at the true scope of their operations.

Still, in the absence of evidence we may safely imagine our Shiva banging her gavel or drumhead, calling the attendees to order. We may then suggest that words were spoken in praise of death, for death was an integral component of the "natural cycle" which dominated their philosophy. If they (or their progenitors) did not choose death for themselves, it was because their lives were necessary for the advancement of the cause of death--a higher-order effect. The reasonable deathists were long in their graves; these were diehard visionaries, and this much at least can be said in their favor: they were more likely stout game theoreticians than cowards or hypocrites. They knew what they were doing, and they did it well.

Little is known of their religion, although the public writings of the pro-death movement argue for a variant of the dominant animism: a megapantheon of small gods or kami ruling over the mundane articles and processes of life, both natural and technological. And a single God, yes, who either rules over these kami or is, in some information-theoretic sense, generated by them. An afterlife--involving both reincarnation and divine judgment--is strongly implied. Drum music apparently played a symbolic or therapeutic role, along with more obscure rituals. "Grounding and awareness techniques" and "energy circles" and "silent cheering" were enlisted to generate "an atmosphere of support and appreciation and joy." That these phrases are difficult to reconcile with the movement's coercive violence is, one assumes, a failure of our own empathy; the Fatalists clearly viewed themselves as heroes rather than villains.

In any case, we shall suppose that under the guidance of Shiva and the Stygian glower of Death, certain motions were proposed, debated, amended, and voted affirmative.

"We have a direct action opportunity," Shiva may have said, "which combines the salubrious traits of an open target, a high symbolic value, and a higher-than-usual alignment between public sympathies and our own cause. We have carried too much for too long, we few, but this is energy work for the soul of Humanity itself. Power originates in freedom of movement, and the love that flows in this circle must be channeled outward in a strong and coherent way. Can you feel the presence of the Whirlwind? He is storm and revolution and fire, lord of wild transformations and sudden, chaotic change. Great forces are gathering here; great deeds will flow through this space and into the physical Queendom. Nature herself feels enraged at the continual violation. Our natural ally, Entropy, held long at bay, grows stronger and more insistent, and Rage rises over her sister Compassion. They will dance, comrades, with ourselves as their avatars."

Or perhaps it went nothing like that. Perhaps there was no Shiva. But certainly there was a Death, for he was physically present among the Newhope strike force.

This much is a matter of historical record: fifty days after the delivery of QSS Newhope into her parking orbit, a nameless inertial fusion boat, stealthed, without running lights or identity beacons, appeared some three thousand kilometers off the boot of Newhope's docking cradle, and matched velocities with a hundred-second blast from its motors. The boat then fired a cable lanyard which wrapped itself mechanically around Newhope, and shortly thereafter, nine space-suited figures emerged bearing rectangular wellstone bricks of unknown programming and purpose.

They were accompanied by Death, who apparently needed no space suit, and whose black cowl had been programmed to swirl about him in a picturesque and unvacuumlike manner. The precise nature of this Death figure is not known, but he (or it) appeared skeletal within the robe--in some images, starlight clearly showed through the chin and neck vertebrae--and his movements showed a humanlike purpose and articulation.

If the strike team had intended the mere destruction of Newhope, they needn't have visited in person. Any bomb or missile or long-range energy weapon would have served, although to be fair, Newhope was reported to have survived at least one space battle. She was a tough old ship. At any rate, whatever plans the boarding party might have had fell apart moments after their debarkation, when the fax machine on Newhope's docking cradle flickered to life and expelled both a platoon of vacuum-capable SWAT robots and a trio of human commanders.

This much should be said in favor of the Queendom authorities: they had little success in tracking or isolating or even comprehending the Fatalist organization, but they were masters of pattern recognition, and knew a tempting target when they saw one. The platform was a light-hour and more from the nearest naval or Constabulary outpost, and so would have had to wait two hours for a response to any distress signals it might have raised. But the docking cradle itself was intelligent and primed for trouble, as was the starship within it, and the troopers, along with other weapons, had been pre-positioned in its fax buffers and instantiated at the first sign of disruption.

In his deposition, Constabulary Captain Cheng Shiao said of the encounter, "Upon exiting the fax I established my bearings and took measure of the alleged intruders, of whom there were ten, clad not in stealth or inviz but simple optical black. On the citizens' frequencies I pronounced them under arrest on suspicion of trespassing and read them their rights, which proved to be a formality when they opened fire with mass projectors. This was not unexpected, and although our armor was struck by multiple projectiles--five-gram impervium wirebombs accelerated to several hundred meters per second--the attackers' aim was such that no serious damage was inflicted at that point. Our suits were not breached, and the SWAT robots were not disturbed from their duties."

In the recorded testimony, Shiao sits very straight in his chair. His expression is placid, as though he finds his own story interesting but not upsetting. The other voice belongs to Hack Friesland, the Kuiper Belt district attorney, not visible in the frame.

"Did you fire back?"

"No, sir. I issued an order that the attackers were to be taken alive at all costs, on account of their distinctive nature. Observing two of them at close range, I noted that beneath the helmet domes their heads were hairless and earless and very pale, with two apelike nostrils taking the place of a normal human nose. Their eyes were gray and somewhat oversized. There is no direct evidence linking this attack with any known group, but these features are typical of suspected Fatalist operatives, who are believed to be disposable copies of the actual organization members, downloaded into physically and genetically identical bodies to baffle our investigators. The popular term for these avatars is ‘ghoul.'"

"We're aware of the terminology," says Friesland. "But how did you expect to capture one?"

Shiao's testimony continues, "The attackers' weapons were recoilless, sir, but as the projectiles obviously were not, we were forced to rocket ourselves upstream through a hail of them. We did succeed in overpowering nine of the attackers, although under the effects of sustained fire, four troopers and both of my sergeants were disabled. I later learned that they were killed. However, the nine attackers were in fact restrained."

"But not arrested."

"No, sir. At this point, a voice on the citizens' frequency cut in, shouting, ‘All hands abort! Abort!' And the faces of the attackers I could see fell immediately slack. There is a particular look on a human face, sir, when the animating consciousness behind it is erased. The lights go out, so to speak; there's nothing ambiguous about it. Later scans showed that these individuals' brains, skulls, and even their spinal columns and stomach nerves had been subjected to a complete quantum wipe. Similarly, all information in the bricks they carried was summarily destroyed.

"Our sensors can be quite astute, and some small fraction of these data were eventually reconstructed in spite of the attackers' best efforts. We know, for example, that one of the attackers ate tea cakes on at least one occasion. Unfortunately, very little was uncovered that proved useful to our investigation."

"I'm sure the physical damage to the evidence didn't help?"

"An excellent point, sir. With the engagement apparently over, we would have called fresh robots from the fax, shipped the bodies to a Constabulary lab for immediate analysis, and moved in to search the suspect vessel on probable cause. That would be standard procedure. However, the vessel's fusion reactor initiated a cascade overload, resulting in a kiloton-class explosion which scattered the physical evidence, obliterating some of it beyond hope of reconstruction. Newhope itself had grown the proper shielding, and was minimally damaged. I did not know any of this at the time, but I suspected it, as my helmet dome went superreflective and I was aware of a sharp physical impulse, very much like striking the ground after a fall. I felt my body tumbling, and when it was recovered six hours later, the autopsy revealed I had died shortly thereafter, from a combination of blunt trauma and gamma ionization. I recommended myself for disciplinary action, sir, but was refused."

"That's in the record, yes. Do you have any regrets about the encounter?"

"Many. Most notably, the skeletal figure was not apprehended during the scuffle, and no trace of it could be found afterward. This, too, is typical of our encounters with presumed Fatalists. We have yet to develop an effective tactic for arresting them."

When asked what he did with the Medal of Conduct he'd won for his heroism, Captain Shiao replied, "It's against regulations, sir, to wear such adornments on duty, or to wear them at any time on a garment other than a Constabulary uniform. There is one that I sometimes bring with me to state functions; this particular medal I placed in a locker with the others for safekeeping. It's a great honor to serve the Queendom in this way, for the Fatalists are breaking the law. The awards themselves are of secondary importance."

And when asked if he expected to die himself someday, Shiao frowned in thought before answering, "Permanently? Irretrievably? That would be a gross dereliction of my duties, sir. Unless a qualified replacement were found ahead of time, I should do my best to remain alive. However, if it happened that my services were no longer required, I suppose I'd consider terminating my life voluntarily, as an act of community."

In response to this remark, Shiao's wife Vivian, the beloved Director of the Constabulary, is reported to have offered a colorful rebuttal which history, alas, does not record.

chapter five

in which innocents are imperiled

The doctor, Angela Proud Rumson, turned out to be only the first of a tag team of nonthreatening female civil servants paraded through Conrad's room. There was P.J. the environmental technician--who thoughtfully interrogated him about the conditions of his "native" Planet Two. Was the light too bright for him here? Would he prefer a chlorine atmosphere?

"It was called ‘Sorrow,'" Conrad told her, "and I wasn't born there. I'm from Ireland, originally."

"Oh, how nice," she said, sounding surprised.

"It wasn't that much dimmer than Earth, just . . . yellower. And the chlorine was never more than a trace gas."

Again, surprise. "Fatal concentrations, I thought."

He shrugged. "To a regular human lung, sure, but it's a minor biomod. I barely noticed it after the first couple years. The biggest difference between P2 and Earth is the length of the day; P2's is a lot longer. And that's not something a sane person would miss."

And when P.J. was gone there was Lilly the nurse, and then Anne Inclose Ytterba, who was apparently some sort of famous historian.

"You want to know about life in the colonies?" he asked.

"Very much so," she said, "but I've been asked to hold that conversation for another time. Right now I'm here to brief you on the past thousand years."

Which turned out to be a really short conversation; the population of Sol had quadrupled, and nine of the thirteen colonies had gone offline and were presumed extinct. Nothing else of any real import had happened.

"We lost contact with Barnard in Q987--three hundred and three years ago. The circumstances were curious; there had been talk of a budget crisis, and then a cemetery crisis. No details were offered, and in your King Bascal's final announcement no mention was made of them. The next message--the colony's last--was from something called the ‘Swivel Committee for Home Justice' announcing that King Bascal had abdicated his throne, and that the Instelnet transceivers were being temporarily shut down to conserve energy. This occurred on schedule, and no further transmissions have been received from Barnard since that time."

"So they might still be alive?" Conrad asked, reeling under the news. He'd been born into a world without death, and the grim toll of life on Sorrow had never seemed normal to him. It was, fundamentally, the reason he'd braved the rubble-strewn starlanes once again: to bring thousands of children to a place where "dead" was a medical condition rather than the end of a universe.

"They might," she agreed, "although the so-called budget crisis was really more of a food crisis. The population had just passed the one million mark, but the fax economy was declining asymptotically to zero, and agricultural production had not fully taken up the slack. Think of it as an energy shortage, if you prefer; insufficient conversion of sunlight into food."

"The soil there was worthless," Conrad said, with a tinge of bitterness. "Never enough metals. No matter how much organic mulch you throw down, plants just won't grow without trace metals. But you can synthesize food in a factory, right?"

"And they did," Anne agreed, "from air and ocean water and metals mined from the asteroid belt. But all that takes energy, too. Sunlight and deutrelium, and the technology to exploit them. To function smoothly, Barnard's economy needed more people than it had the resources to support."

"So they died."

"The ones you knew, yes, very probably. I'm sorry. At the time of last contact, the average lifespan of a Kingdom citizen was just a hundred and ten years."

"Jesus," Conrad said. He had socks older than that.

"Still," she offered, "Sorrow's air is breathable. There's water to drink, and some vegetation. It just grows slowly. By most estimates, using nothing but human labor the planet should support roughly one person for every twenty fertile acres. And it's a big planet, right? There's no telling what's happened up there, but I'd be astonished if there weren't someone still alive. Possibly hundreds of thousands of someones--the great-grandchildren of the people you knew and loved. They may even be happy."

"Hooray," Conrad said, managing in his distress to make an insult of it. The world you've left behind is gone. Everyone you know is dead.

Anne didn't appear offended, but the interview was over; she began the process of gathering her things. "I don't blame you for being upset, Mr. Mursk. I'm sure I would be. But most colonies aren't as lucky. At Ross and Sirius and Luyten, they didn't have the cushion of a habitable planet to fall back on. When their economies failed, the air trade failed with them, and most of the communities died out within a year. Maybe someday we'll travel there, to find vacuum-preserved corpses by the hundreds of millions. A field day for people like me, I'm sure, but nothing alive. Nothing contemporary."

"Nothing decomposed," Conrad said. "You could just wake them all up."

"Except for the radiation damage," she answered. "The way I hear it, you were barely recoverable yourself. If we left right now to rescue them, those people might have a chance."

"But the Queendom of Sol has its own problems," he finished for her, "and isn't going anywhere."

"Unfortunately, yes. But consider this: you got out, along with thousands of your countrymen. And in light of recent events, there's little doubt they'll be revived. If the Fatalists hate you that much, most people will find some reason to love you."

"What recent events?" Conrad asked, not liking the sound of that. "What Fatalists?"

Anne Inclose Ytterba, already stepping through the doorway, turned to offer him a look of sudden sympathy. Now she felt sorry for him. "Didn't you hear? You're all the targets of a secret society's deathmark. It seems you're emblematic of everything they've ever struggled against, and they want you expunged."

"Really?" Conrad wasn't exactly a stranger to conflict; he'd shot his way out of Barnard, and before that he'd been in the Revolt. If people would just be nice, just look out for each other and share the wealth along with the problems, he'd've lived long and peacefully without complaint. Hell, if life were short he'd've been happy enough to take over his father's paving business in Cork, living and dying in the county of his birth. But rare indeed was a century without conflict, and this far-wandering Conrad Mursk had already slogged his way through the darkest hours of more than one. Shamefully, he held himself responsible for dozens of deaths--many of them permanent.

But his enemies, numerous though they were, didn't usually take the trouble to swear out a formal deathmark. That was something one expected of Old Modern robber barons, or cartoon characters. The illegality of it paled in comparison to its sheer absurdity. They want to do what?

"We just got here," he said to her, a bit defensively. "What could we possibly have done?"

And here Anne the historian cocked her head and laughed a strange little laugh. "You're breathing the air, Mr. Mursk. Tsk tsk."

After that charming encounter, Conrad enjoyed a few hours of darkness and sleep, and then another visit from still another civil servant: Sandra Wong the social worker.

"Look," he told her, before she'd had a chance to say very much, "I just want to get out of here. I want to see my wife." He was standing at the window, peering out through the frost and into the polar darkness. Except for the faint, shining curtains of aurora australis hanging over the wellstone lights of Victoria Land, it looked just like the view from Newhope's observation lounge. The same damned stars, a bit less vivid. He hadn't seen a sky in hundreds of years, but it was winter here; dry and cloudless. The sun wouldn't be up for months.

"I understand--" Sandra began.

"I'm not sure you do," he said, turning to glare at her. "We were in a terrible accident. We had to freeze ourselves, without any guarantee we'd ever be revived, and I haven't seen her since. You people have been kind, and you offer every assurance that she's fine, just fine. But since when is that a substitute for . . . for . . ."

"Warm flesh and a smile?" Sandra asked, looking down at her sketchplate and nodding. "I'm your last visitor, Mr. Mursk, and my job is to process you back into Queendom society. Technically speaking, you're still a prisoner."

"Eh?"

"For your role in the Children's Revolt. You were banished, yes?"

"Oh, that. Yes." It seemed such a long time ago. But these people were immorbid, and forgot nothing. Time passed for them like a kind of dream, a river without end.

"As your caseworker, I've filed a temporary motion to reinstate your citizenship with full privileges. This means, among other things, that you're entitled to draw Basic Assistance. It's not much, but it should get you on your feet until you're able to find employment. What's your area of specialty?"

"Uh," Conrad answered brilliantly. Specialty? He'd kicked around from one profession to the next, mastering few tangible skills. Life in the colonies was like that; there was always more work to do than there were people to do it, and no one was really qualified. You just grabbed urgent-looking tasks and did them, and then you grabbed some more, and just kept on like that. Until you died. But how could he explain that to someone like Sandra, who'd probably had fifty years of schooling before her first lowly apprenticeship?

"Architect," he finally said, for lack of anything better to attach his name to. He'd been First Architect of the Kingdom of Barnard, for whatever that was worth. A laugh, here, probably.

Indeed, Sandra's expression was primly amused. "Architecture is a field, sir. I need a specialty."

"You need one?"

"Every citizen needs one. If nothing else, it may win you Appreciator status, which would boost your assistance level."

Conrad frowned. "You mean I'd be paid to walk around admiring buildings?"

"In a sense, yes."

"Would I have to write anything?"

Again, that flicker of amusement. Sandra was trying not to smirk, not to condescend; she seemed like a nice person, and certainly her profession was one of understanding and tolerance. But Conrad was just too damned ridiculous: not just a refugee but a bumpkin, from a place so backward it had collapsed and died in its own filth, without building so much as a teleportation grid. Architect, indeed.

"Sir, that would make you a Reviewer. I'm not sure you've got the background for that."

Ouch. "Hmm. No, I don't suppose I do. I became a revolutionary because there was nothing else for me here. All the good jobs were filled with people too competent to ever leave them. And that was a long time ago. Today, I'm a thousand years more foolish!"

A faint smile acknowledged the joke, but then she said, "There's nothing wrong with being an Appreciator, sir. It's honest work. Most people don't have the eye for it."

"Hmm. Well. I suppose I'm flattered, then."

"I do need to put something down for your specialty. Shall we say, residential architecture?"

"Oh, I've done residential," Conrad said. "Single- and multifamily. Also industrial, civic, monumental, and certain infrastructure projects, including roads and tuberails. But lots of people were doing that. The only specialty I can claim is in transatmospherics. I once built an orbital tower a thousand kilometers tall."

Sandra the social worker blinked at that. "Personally? With your own two hands?"

It was Conrad's turn to laugh. "Yeah, I'm magic. I had a crew, miss. Twenty-five men and eleven hundred robots."

She blinked again, then glanced down at her sketchplate and said, "Specialty: transatmospheric architecture with supervisory experience." When she looked up, the condescension was gone. "You may qualify for more than Basic Assistance. It could take a few weeks to sort out, though."

"I'm a patient man," he said, "except where my wife is concerned. For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing my parents, whom I haven't laid eyes on in a thousand years. And the sky, the wind. I tried to go outside, here, but the door wouldn't open. It said I'd freeze to death in ten minutes. I said I'd be back in two. I've lived on polar caps before. But as you say, I'm still a prisoner."

"We'll be on our way in a few minutes," Sandra assured him. "But first, shall we talk about your wardrobe options? The right appearance could make a big difference in your prospects."

Conrad laughed again, pinching the hospital gown he'd been wearing since before they revived him. "Are you saying this is the wrong appearance? I'm shocked. Miss, we wore clothes in the Barnard colony, too. Give me a fax machine and I'm sure I can work something out."

"You'll have access to one," Sandra said cautiously. "You won't own it."

"Good enough," Conrad said. And then, with a burst of wonder: "I'll be able to travel anywhere in the Queendom, won't I? I can eat whatever I want, and I'll never get sick or geriatric again. I'll be immorbid. I'll be rich."

Sandra shook her head at that, and dutifully burst his bubble. "Don't get your hopes up, sir. You'll be living on Basic Assistance, in a Red Sun emergency shelter in one of the hottest, wettest climates on Earth. You'll be in the bottom percentile for personal income, with sharp travel and plurality restrictions."

"Plurality!" Conrad chortled. "I can make copies of myself. I can be twins, triplets!"

"You can be twins," Sandra said, "but it just means your energy budgets will go half as far. There's no way of knowing how long you'll be on assistance, sir, and you need to prepare yourself for the reality of it."

Conrad was a patient man, and a kind one, but this went too far. He'd had enough of these self-important children telling him what to do, what to think. "Miss," he said coolly, "have you ever walked out of a blizzard with a broken collarbone? Have you spent a hundred years aboard a starship, or fought off a team of angry asteroid miners? I once watched my best friend's daughter cut in half, while her image archive was permanently erased. I've stood knee-deep in the rot of a failed ecology, and handled a city's worth of corpses. I've betrayed the trust of a king, and lived. So don't tell me about hardship, all right?"

"I'm . . . sorry," she said.

And before she could say anything else he nodded once, trying hard to squelch his anger. "Thank you. Your apology is accepted. Now take me to my wife, please."

chapter seven

in which certain difficulties
are unmasked

"Your Majesty," said Reportant Bernhart Bechs to the Queen of Sol, "this seems an awkward time for the king to be absent. Did you ask him to leave a copy behind?"

"No," she said, not only to Bechs but to the other reportants here, clustered around her and her Palace Guards in a buzzing hemispherical swarm. Ordinarily her personal press cordon was set at eighty meters, with strict acoustic volume limits to discourage uninvited chitchat, but this was a press conference. Typically these would be handled by her press secretary or by some crisis-specific bureaucrat, but there was a lot going on this week, and she had dozens of copies working all across the solar system. Printing out one more was hardly a bother, and people were burning with curiosity anyway, so she had generously permitted the paparazzi to approach within ten meters of her physical person, and to ask--within the bounds of decorum!--anything they wished.

"The king," she went on, "does not divide his attention when matters of science loom large. He is cloistered at his workshop on Maplesphere, and will remain there until his experiments are complete."

"Does that mean weeks?" Bechs followed up. "Years?"

Bechs was, at the moment, a four-winged news camera only slightly larger than the queen's pinkie nail. Strictly speaking this wasn't necessary; they were in Chryse Downs Amphitheater on the northern lowlands of Mars, and Bechs' physical self--one of him, anyway--was in a rental office just a few kilometers away. He could remote this bug; there was no need to be it, to run a shadow of his brain within it. Too, he was among the most respected reportants in the Queendom, and would be welcome at her side in his own human body. But old habits die hard, and Bechs was an old, old man. He was accustomed to interviewing Her Majesty in this way, and she, for her part, always recognized his signature wine-red cameras.

"Weeks, most likely," the queen said. "If his problem is tractable he'll solve it, and if it isn't he'll move on to something more immediate. It's possible he'll uncover new principles requiring much more detailed investigation, but if so he will delegate the problem--at least temporarily--to his technical staff. He's aware that I have pressing tasks for him here, and he won't lightly refuse."

"Is it the wormhole physics again?" asked another of the cameras.

"I don't discuss my husband's work," she reminded. But her tone was indulgent, for when Bruno retreated to Maplesphere, which happened three or four times each decade, he generally returned with treasures: the backtime processor, the quantum screw, the popular word-cypher game known as "Nickels." Nothing could match the twin bombshells of his early career--collapsium and ertial shielding--but he remained the most inventive soul in a population of one hundred and sixty billion. Tamra would never blame her subjects for being curious about his current interests.

"What's happening with the Barnard refugees?" asked someone else.

"The four living crewmates remain in Red Sun custody," she said. "No decisions have been made about the others."

"Has the attack on Newhope accelerated the timetable for their revival?"

"I repeat," she said, less patiently than before, "no decisions have been made. Whatever we finally do here will set a precedent for all time hereafter. There is no reason to enter into it hastily."

"What about radiation damage?" another reportant demanded, somewhat angrily. "You can't leave them out there forever."

"Steps are being taken," the queen assured. "Whatever status these people are finally accorded, we will treat their remains with utmost dignity."

Meanwhile, another Bernhart Bechs camera had found its way to Sealillia, to interview one Conrad Ethel Mursk. It would be the climax of a series; Bechs had already profiled the other three, whom he thought of as the Captain, the Comedian, and the Cactus. He'd even interviewed the ship itself.

In a lurid, voyeuristic sense, the Cactus was by far the most interesting of these; Xiomara Li Weng and her jokester second mate, Yinebeb Fecre, had been born in the Queendom and exiled in the Revolt. They'd had real lives, if sad ones, whereas Eustace Faxborn was created specifically for the interstellar return mission, stepping live and whole and nearly adult from a Barnardean fax machine. This custom had been commonplace out in the colonies, where--strange notion!--there was a chronic shortage of human beings. But in the Queendom this was considered one of the the basest possible perversions.

Especially since people named "Faxborn" were, for the most part, sexually active from the word go. Indeed, if the refugees' accounts were accurate--and Bechs had no reason to believe otherwise--Eustace Faxborn had married the Comedian shortly before the bloody surprise attack that was the mission's unauthorized departure. She'd begun less as a member of Newhope's crew than as part of its life-support system: a living sex robot for the otherwise lonely second mate. In this sense, she'd done quite well for herself, and Bechs was careful to say so in his profile.

"You could run that ship by yourself," he'd said to her in the interview, echoing the words of the Comedian. "You could fix any subsystem. You've a quick mind, and quick hands to go with it, for you've been using them all your life."

He'd meant it in the best possible way--most of his viewers had no such practical skills, and admired them greatly--but her reply was characteristically prickly: "Newhope ran for five hundred seventy-eight years without any crew. After the accident it repaired itself with no help from me. It's smarter than a human being when it needs to be."

Which was partly true and partly her own sort of modesty, but mostly it was an uncomfortable and vaguely hostile evasion. The Cactus seemed at ease only when reciting facts, or describing the emotions of others. Her own self, her own feelings, were a troubling subject she didn't care to examine. And why should she? She'd lived her life in a microcosm, with only two other people besides her husband. Plus the ship itself, yes, which could spin out robots and specialized personality constructs to suit any whim or need. But it wasn't human.

"I regret the accident," the ship had said to Bechs in its own interview, conducted at distance over the Nescog voice channels, with hours of signal lag between question and answer. "I was aware of the divergence in the navigation solution, but I was unable to formulate a response. I failed to realize the debris shoal was within our position envelope, and failed to imagine the resulting collision. I was caught off guard."

"What did you imagine?" he'd asked in response.

And the ship had replied: "Very little, sir. Imagination is an inductive trait, and difficult to mechanize."

Of course.

At any rate, Bechs had buzzed and flitted his way back here on the news that the ship's first mate--the captain's husband--had finally been released from hospital. Bechs would round out his story and then rerelease the whole thing, with commentary, to a curious public.

Unfortunately, several dozen other reportants had beat him to it; he found Mursk seated at his apartment's tiny dinner table, swatting angrily at a cloud of them.

"Shove off, parasites. I'm done. I'm eating!"

And so he was: fax-fresh plibbles and bran flakes, steaming blood sausage and curried potatoes, with miso soup and the nutrient paste known as "mulm," which Bechs had never seen eaten by anyone but navy crews and merchant spacers. It was far more food than a human stomach could hold, and there were three nearly full beverage mugs in front of him as well. Here was a man who hadn't tasted for decades. Not enough, anyway, or not the right things.

But still the cameras pestered him, spitting out questions, stepping all over each other in a haze of white noise. Most people had no idea how to run a press conference, even if they'd called it themselves.

"Welcome back to civilization," Bechs said to him, raising his voice above the din. He could do that; he had a special volume license, along with other privileges. "You do realize, I hope, that you can order these cameras outside? They can't invade your home, nor peer through your windows, without permission."

"Ah!" Mursk said. "Then my permission is revoked. Off with you pests. Off!" To Bechs he said, "Thank you."

"Quite welcome," Bechs assured him, while the others buzzed sullenly away. "I wonder if I could speak with you when you're finished, though. I've already interviewed your friends, and I'm hoping to round out my set."

"You're Bernhart Bechs," Mursk said.

"Yes."

"I remember you from when I was a kid."

"Do you?" Bechs was surprised, and pleased. "That was a long time ago."

Mursk laughed. "You're telling me? But you did that thing on the history of Europe, and the one about the plight of juvenile commuters."

"God, I barely remember it myself. When can I return, Mr. Mursk? I don't mean to trouble you."

Conrad looked down at his food, then up again at the maroon bug that was Bechs. He seemed disappointed. "You know, truthfully, I'm already full. What would you like to know?"

Conrad Mursk turned out to be very nearly an ideal interviewee, whose life story could, Bechs sensed, fill volumes of its own. Nearly everything Bechs asked was met with a long, detailed answer which neither rambled nor lacked a point. A longtime spacer, Mursk had as much vacuum lore as any of his crewmates--and quite a bit more than Eustace Faxborn. But unlike the other three, Mursk had done a lot of additional things with his life, spending more than a century of it on the ground, and decades more on the sea and on the ice of Planet Two's small polar cap.

He was never a politician--he made that abundantly clear--but he had nevertheless been a member, if unofficially, of King Bascal's inner circle. He'd been remotely consulted on several occasions by the King and Queen of Sol, and seemed to have been present at almost every major turn in Barnard's history.

"I'm a trouble magnet," Mursk said at one point. The admission seemed to sadden him, which only heightened his aura of thoroughness and thoughtfulness. If he had a single great fault, it was a kind of self-doubt that bordered on self-loathing. To hear him tell it, he'd done little good in his life. Still, Bechs sensed through these deep layers of modesty and guilt that nearly every calamity had involved his attempting to, often against terrible odds.

"Our departure helped collapse the Barnardean economy," he would say. Or, "I shortened the Children's Revolt through an act of blatant treachery." Or, "I never convinced the government to soften its punitive measures, and in terrorizing the miners into ending their rebellion I gave my de facto approval to their indenture."

But from these statements Bechs extracted the unspoken corollaries: I've risked my life to preserve innocents. I know when to cut my losses. I know how to broker a deal. I am unspeakably interesting. Bechs could have questioned this man for days, for months; but as fate would have it, the two had only been talking for twenty or thirty minutes when a commotion rose up outside. Not the buzz of reportant cameras but the actual shouting of live human beings, transmitted through the paper-thin, almost tentlike wellstone of the dormitory shelter.

"Excuse me," Mursk said, a look of worry blooming on his face. He rose from his chair and moved to the wall, murmuring "Window" to it just as though he'd been in civilization all his life. And when the window appeared, he said, "Oh, brother."

Conrad had been expecting trouble since before he'd even arrived here, and he'd spent much of his time huddled at a library in the apartment's wall, learning what he could about Fatalist tactics. But what he saw outside was a surprise nonetheless. There was an attack of sorts under way, but the invaders coming down the staircase were not gray-skinned Fatalist ghouls or skeletal Death avatars, but ordinary men in blood-colored jumpsuits trimmed with white.

Conrad had spent time in four different Barnardean services, and had a fine eye for uniforms. These were neither military nor medical; they looked more like a mechanic's coverall than anything else. They had names stenciled in black across the left breast, but no indications of rank or functional specialty. Indeed, the only insignia was a white rectangle on each man's left sleeve, bearing a blood-red circle surrounded by five outward-facing triangles. A sunburst, highly stylized.

Conrad counted twenty men, two of them with bullhorns and all of them carrying objects he recognized immediately: contact tazzers, capable of dropping any human being in his or her tracks with the merest brush of their business end. The tazzer was a humane weapon as such things went, but the people who'd actually been struck by one--Conrad included--tended to give them a wide berth. In the words of the poet Rodenbeck, "Being tazzed is like being stepped on by an electric elephant."

The other surprise was that the half-dressed kids at the bottom of the stairs--nearly a hundred of them--were holding their ground rather than falling back or scattering.

"What's happening?" Bechs asked, buzzing up beside Conrad for a look.

"It's the Red Sun eviction team," Conrad answered. Then, in a much louder voice: "Feck! Xmary!"

He stepped out onto the balcony, prepared to vault over its railing as Xmary had done, or at least call down advice to the children and warnings to the Red Sun security. But the surprises just kept on coming.

"We are not taking names," said one of the bullhorn carriers in an amplified but outwardly reasonable tone. "No one here will be punished. We simply request that you vacate these premises so they can be put to humanitarian use."

But the kids--boys and girls alike--were forming up into battle lines as though they'd been training for it all their lives. Their wellgold necklaces and earrings flashed and flickered in the sunlight, not merely reflecting but in some way modulating the glare. Passing notes in class, oh my, in their own secret language. Did they feel it as taps upon their skin? As nerve inductions? As sights or sounds?

They couldn't change their bodies, but clearly they could use their brains. And whatever they were passing, whatever they were saying to each other, the Red Sun workers seemed oblivious to it until it was too late, and their fate was sealed. When the mob had self-assembled into five clean ranks, they rushed their attackers. Silently at first, as rows one and two launched into motion, but then rows three and four let out an ululating yell, while row five raised its fists in defiance.

Nor were these kids afraid to absorb some hurt; the first two rows were sacrificial, simply throwing themselves against the Red Sun line--in some cases right up against the tazzers. This put the Red Sun workers off balance--literally--so that the third and fourth lines could sweep them off their feet, wrenching the tazzers from their hands. This was also sacrificial, as most of the kids involved went down twitching and grunting. But the fifth line swept over them without opposition, taking up the tazzers and hurling them away, without even bothering to use them against their owners.

Instead, the Red Sun people were hauled up by their armpits and threaded into cunning arm- and neck- and headlocks that made optimum use of the strengths and weaknesses of human anatomy. The guards, like everyone else, must be terribly hard to injure, but against overpowering leverage they had little recourse.

"Here now!" one of them said.

"This activity's unlawful," tried another.

But more kids were streaming into the area, and the ones already here were finding their voices. "We're not hurting anything! Why are you on us like this? Leave us the hell alone!" And then, in a rising chorus: "Into the drink with you! Swim for it! Swim for it! Swim for it!!"

"Excuse me," said the camera of Bernhart Bechs, buzzing down for a closer view.

Conrad didn't know what to feel. Barely fifteen seconds after the first commotion, the kids were dragging their captives toward the platform's edge, at the juncture between two of its flower petals, and they really were going to throw them in the water.

"Stop!" he shouted after them. "There are . . . there . . . shit. There are smarter ways!"

But nobody was paying attention to an old man's babbling, and if he jumped down there to intervene, in all likelihood he'd just be going for a swim himself. Damn! Whatever faults these kids might have, helplessness was clearly not among them. And Conrad had seen this all before, had lived it all more than once--the anger, the spontaneous order and chaos, the pent-up need for action. Alas, Utopia, Rodenbeck had written in the wake of the Children's Revolt, thou retreatest from immorbid grasp as a cricket from fractious children.

And yea, verily, Conrad could feel it in his bones: the dream of a better life never ended, even when all sense said it should. And so the Queendom of Sol--forged with the loftiest of intentions by the best minds in history--was poised, once again, at the brink of revolution.

"Eternal life," Conrad observed though no one was there to hear him, "is a tuberail car that won't stop crashing."

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."

The trick with a pipe was not to puff on it too much, lest its smoke turn sharp and acrid--or too little, lest it fade to the dull flavor of ashes. But Hugo was back again, this time with Bruno's ashtray, which he whisked onto the desk in front of him before dancing back out of the study again with too-quick, too-perfect fluidity.

"Nice robot," Mursk said, with less than total conviction.

"He saved my life once, in battle. He's quite brave." Bruno set the pipe down in the ashtray and began tapping at his desktop controls. "Now, the first trick in wormhole dynamics is to develop your standing gravity wave very, very rapidly. It's not at all like collapsing a neuble into a black hole. Second, you've got to dump in twice as much power as theory predicts you ought to. I'm still figuring that one out."

While he spoke, the writing vanished from every surface, zipping into archive space. Glittering green-black bullseyes took their place on two opposite walls. The lights dimmed, and though it wasn't apparent from here in the windowless study, the sun itself dimmed as well, focusing fully eighty percent of its output in a single strand of violet laser. Bruno's eastern photovoltaic array, hidden away in a forest glade, took the beam head-on and fed its power directly into the gravity lasers. The air in the study began to shudder, then to twirl itself into fist-sized eddies that popped and lashed their way around the room.

"The third trick," Bruno said, raising his voice above the hiss, "is to ram a cylindrical mass through the wormhole throat, to stabilize the two openings." Leaning, he dragged a half-meter iron bar out from under his desk and held it up for Conrad Mursk to see.

"Is this experiment safe?" Mursk wanted to know. The air devils were whipping at his hair, driving him back, blinking and puffing, against the door frame.

"Not particularly," Bruno called back, "but your image is archived in my fax buffer."

And then the time for talk was past, for a pair of rippling distortions appeared like lenses in the air between the two men. The spherical wormhole mouths: each displaying a funhouse-mirror view of the photons striking the other. Their instability was apparent even to the naked eye; they wandered and quivered, orbiting one another in a slow spiral that would, within seconds, bring them swirling together in a flash of canceling energy.

Bruno's initial tests had taken place in vacuum, ten kilometers from Maplesphere and with the trillion-ton mass of the planette between himself and the relativistic action. It was only by accident--literally--that he'd discovered the radiation of a wormhole's collapse was nonlethal. Or not immediately lethal, anyway; the flux of photons and virtual particles would surely wreak lasting havoc on a body with no access to fax repair.

"Watch!" he instructed, hefting the bar and jabbing it at one of the holes.

There was no preferred direction of travel between the two wormhole mouths; each point on one sphere--or vector through it--corresponded with a point or vector on the other. Bruno's aim wasn't bad, but even a glancing blow would have done the trick. The bar slid silently and effortlessly into the nearer sphere, its far end emerging just as cleanly from the other. The two halves of the bar were pointing in wildly different directions, but within moments the two mouths were sliding and rotating into the minimum-energy configuration, wherein the bar was straight. They missed on the first swooping pass, and again on the second, but the oscillations tightened until suddenly the vectors locked.

The spherical distortions vanished. The whirling air devils quieted. The bullseyes faded from Bruno's walls, and his equations returned, and the lights came back up, and the sun resumed shining, and somewhere in the distance a bird chirped uncertainly.

"Jesus," Conrad Mursk said.

"Indeed," Bruno could only agree. He held up the bar for Mursk's inspection. The two ends were perfectly intact, not damaged in any way, but the distance between them was more than twice what it had been. And the center of the bar . . .

The center of the bar wasn't there at all. Or rather, the center existed in two places. The bar existed in two halves, with half a meter of empty space in between. Bruno waved the thing around, demonstrating to a goggle-eyed Mursk that the metal was in fact contiguous; each end moved with the other, just as though it were all one piece. Because it was one piece. It just had a gap in the middle, a kind of elongated four-dimensional wrinkle.

"The state of the art," Bruno said, "in mass-stabilized wormholes."

A string of quite astonishing curse words tumbled from Mursk's gaping mouth, and Bruno had to remind himself that the lad was, among other things, a sailor.

"Forgive me, Sire," Mursk added finally. "I've just . . . I've never seen anything like that before."

"Nor I," Bruno said, "until a few weeks ago." He tossed the bar behind him, clanking onto the heap with the dozen or so others he'd created thus far. "And it's certainly not what I had in mind. We need tunnels, from one point in space to another."

Mursk thought that one over. "Can you drill through the center of the bar? Make a hollow tube of it?"

"One would think so," Bruno told him. He tugged at his beard, mulling and fretting over it. "But every attempt thus far has pinched off the wormhole, cutting the bar in half. Nor have I been able to prop the throat open with wellstone, or wood, or any other material. There's something about the crystal structure of a solid metal, or the free electrons roaming through it, that allows the wormhole throat to stabilize. Something mysterious, you see? With the unified field equations in hand, it should be possible to derive any result, to describe any physically demonstrated system. But the math can be unimaginably complex, and it's not always clear how to express a physical system in those terms. I've tried to approximate this one by various methods, but so far nothing has come close to describing what we see here."

"And you think I can help?" Mursk asked, sounding surprised and perhaps even vaguely offended.

The question surprised Bruno as well. "With this? I think perhaps you could," he said carefully, not wanting to drive off this man whose services he hoped to secure, "with your background in gravitic engineering."

"My what?"

Mursk seemed genuinely puzzled. Had there been some mistake? Bother it, Bruno didn't need yet another digression! But just the same, he pulled up a window on the surface of his desk, while the desk tilted itself toward him to improve the reading angle.

"Have I erred in some way? Your name came up at the very top of my search. Have I perhaps summoned the wrong Conrad Mursk? No, here it is: according to your employment profile, you invented the ‘pinpoint drip' style of matter condenser."

"The what?" Mursk frowned for a moment, and then seemed to have a dull epiphany of some sort. "Oh, that. Squeezing neutronium with a small black hole, right?"

"And pumping it," Bruno agreed, "and storing it in a metastable reservoir until there's enough to neubleize. It's quite a clever invention, which has streamlined our mass dredging operations considerably. Do you have any idea how much money you've saved me over the years?"

"Not I," Mursk said, with a sudden laugh. "That machine was invented by Money Izolo, in the wake of an industrial accident on Element Pit. I had nothing to do with it."

Nothing, eh? Bruno prodded harder. "I examined the patent document myself, lad. There was an Izolo listed as coinventor, but your name appeared first. You also built a . . . Gravittoir, was it? A system for pulling heavy payloads off a planetary surface?"

If anything, that suggestion made Mursk uneasier than the first one had. He cringed and fidgeted. "I didn't build it myself, Sire. I mean, I headed the team . . ."

And here, seeing what was going on, Bruno summoned his most regal glare and turned it full-force upon Conrad Mursk. "False modesty," he said, "is a form of lying, and I have very little patience with it. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I require you to answer simply and truthfully. And if I have reason to doubt your answers, lad, I will copy your brain and dissect it alive until I find what I'm looking for. Is that clear?"

In point of fact, Bruno would do no such thing, and indeed he wasn't even sure it was possible. But he saw that Mursk really had lived in a tyranny, for he believed it at once, and looked afraid. And Mursk really had rebelled against that tyranny, too, for on the heels of his fright he swelled with such anger that the cottage summoned a Palace Guard to glide up silently behind him. Just in case.

"Very clear, Sire," Mursk said tightly.

Bother it. Why had the people of Sol made an inventor their king, who could scarcely maintain his end of a civil conversation? Bruno adored the people of Sol, and he understood exactly why they adored his wife, their first and only queen. But he had never understood their love for him, and feared at times that it was nothing but spillover. If Tamra loved him then so must they, by extension if not by inclination. But Conrad Mursk had been away for so very long.

Bruno had learned, through long bitter practice, never to retract or apologize for anything he said. A king simply wasn't permitted this courtesy. But he did soften his stance, adding, "The labors of coercion are never as useful as the labors of willing gift. There are still assaults in the Queendom, every now and again, and I often suspect their perpetrators have simply never felt the touch of kindness. For if they had, then the fumbling of a cornered victim could hardly measure up. Here's what criminals fail to understand: in a civilized world there is nothing left to steal. There are no goods or commodities they can carry away with them, nor services of value they can commandeer. Even a beggar has better odds than a thief."

"Meaning what?" Mursk demanded, relaxing only slightly.

Bruno spread his hands. "I want your help. Not with wormhole dynamics, if that's what you're thinking, but with a project whose distractions threaten my delicate concentration. I need to be free to retreat here to Maplesphere at any time, so I dare not manage this project myself. And in this queendom of third-order specialists, I dare not turn it over to an unqualified leader, for my terraformers know nothing of gravity. My graviteers know nothing of DNA. My architects and planette builders are craftsmen, unacquainted with the needs of a large project, and my megaproject managers know nothing about anything. I need generalists, of a sort which Sol has simply stopped producing. On Sorrow you built the Orbital Tower, yes?"

Bruno could see Mursk contemplating some hedge around the correct answer, but in the end all he said was, "Yes. It's one of the few things in my life I'm unequivocally proud of."

"Aha. And you discovered the wellstone substance known as Mursk Metal?"

"Um. Yeah."

"Well, then, you may be interested to know it's a key component of today's gravity lasers. You've also personally operated a variety of construction equipment, from bulldozers and cranes to neutronium barges and asteroid bores. True?"

Reluctantly: "True."

"And you've worked as both an ecological engineer and a climatologist?"

"Well, a wildlife surveyor and a weather station monitor."

"All right, fair enough. But on a world in the midst of terraforming operations. Indeed, you've lived most of your life in extreme environments. Spaceships, polar wells, desolate alien landscapes. Would you agree?"

"I . . . suppose."

"And you've been the captain of a ship."

Mursk balked at that one. "What? Oh, an ocean ship. Yes. But only for sixteen years."

Bruno tapped a thumb on his desk, feeling himself grow restless again, impatient with this young man's aggressive modesty. He needed yeses, not maybes, if they were to finish this quickly. But he pressed onward, reading his way down the profile. Fortunately the thing had been assembled by hypercomputers delving back into Queendom records and archived Barnardean transmissions, for if Mursk himself had written it, it would be all of ten words long. "Good. Now, you were present at the Sealillia riot a few days ago. Ordinarily I wouldn't hold that against you, but given your history . . ."

"We were bystanders," Mursk said, with convincing irritation. "If those kids had listened to us, it would have gone very differently. Peaceful protest, maybe. I don't know."

"So you tried to organize them? Pacify them for their own good?"

Defiantly: "Sure."

"That's good," Bruno said, looking up briefly to meet the boy's gaze. "Most people wouldn't. Now, if I understand your records correctly, you were briefly in charge of the entire planet of Sorrow?"

"Um. Well, very briefly, yes. Before the terraforming had started, before we'd done much of anything. There were only a few hundred people orbiting it at the time, and no one on the surface."

"There will be a few thousand on this project," Bruno said to him. "Perhaps ten times as many as you've previously managed. Would this present a problem for you?" Then he thought better of that phrasing, and amended, "Do you have some intellectual or emotional defect which would prevent you from attempting it?"

"Uh, well, I don't think so. I mean, I could certainly try."

"Then you're hired," Bruno said.

And suddenly Mursk was backpedaling, taking back some control over the interview. "Hold on, now, I haven't agreed to anything. You haven't told me anything. Location, duration . . . I suppose pay rates would be good to know. I'm trying to imagine a job for which my name comes up first, and I'm sorry, but I'm blanking. What exactly is this project?"

And here Bruno smiled, because he knew he had his man. "It's a terraforming, lad. We're going to crush the moon."

chapter ten

in which worlds are critiqued

In a crazy-ambitious kind of way, Conrad could see it made sense: the moon was too small and light to retain an atmosphere of its own. But the moon's gravitational attraction--like that of any object--dropped off with the square of the distance from its center, so that compressing the surface down to forty percent of its current elevation would sextuple gravity's pull there. Yielding an Earth-normal gravity of 1.00 gee, and ensuring that the atmosphere was truly stable, even over geological spans of time. Talk about terraforming!

Fortunately Luna did not lack for oxygen, and as for the light metals which life required, why, Luna's crust was richer than any of the colony worlds--richer even than Earth itself. For organic molecules to exist, there would of course need to be a huge importation of hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon. But once this was done it would be possible to construct a soil so deep and so fertile that the new world--with a surface area equal to that of China or Australia--could easily support a billion people even at a colonial-or-worse level of technology.

Moreover, thanks to conservation of angular momentum, reducing the moon's diameter would also speed up its rotation, so that its "day" would shorten from 29.5 Earth days to a more hospitable 4.92 days. Indeed, Conrad immediately suggested crushing just a wee bit less, so that the day would work out to exactly 5.00 Earth days, or 120 hours. He'd had his fill of goofy clocks and calendars on Sorrow, and the decrease in surface gravity that would result--a mere 0.02 gee, according to Bruno's office wall--would inconvenience no one.

"An excellent suggestion," the king said, with approval and relief in his voice. "I see we're in good hands. In any case, the way is paved for such an endeavor by the engineering of large planettes, by the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and of Sorrow and Gammon and Pup. And in truth a squozen moon is more suitable than those colony worlds in a variety of ways. Locked tight against their red-dwarf stars, those three are metal-poor and radiation-rich, and their days are very long. We can do better by design than by astronomical accident. But I forget myself. I don't have to tell you this, who have seen it all firsthand."

He was leading Conrad toward the fax gate, and at first Conrad assumed he was being dismissed. Bruno had what he wanted--a leader for this bizarre project--and now he was getting back to his own work. But apparently, the sales pitch wasn't over quite yet, for the king murmured something to the fax gate and stepped right through it alongside him.

They came out on a warm, windswept mountaintop under a sprawling canopy of stars. This was some kind of scenic overlook at a mountain's summit: a flat, circular depression lined with a wellstone emulation of the surrounding rock. A winding stone staircase led downward, to a cluster of wellglass buildings ringing the mountain farther down. There were no other peaks in view, and a few hundred meters below the buildings was a layer of cloud that hid the ground, making it impossible to tell how high this mountain was.

Not very, Conrad thought at first, from the dry thickness of the air and the dim, twinkly look of the stars. Must be close to sea level, or even . . . But no, the air was too thick, and didn't smell right, and it occurred to him suddenly that this was Venus, not Earth.

Nor was that his only surprise. The fax had produced two Palace Guards along with the bodies of Bruno and Conrad--one in front of them and the other appearing behind as they stepped away from the print plate--and when Conrad turned his head and saw them he nearly yelped out loud. He shouldn't be surprised to find the king traveling in the company of his royal bodyguards, but there'd been Palace Guards in the Barnard colony as well, and in the events leading up to the Children's Revolt, and they had certain . . . unsavory associations for Conrad. That hulking silhouette was a symbol of danger, of impending unavoidable pain.

A curse rose unbidden to his lips, and though he managed to keep it silent, his heart rate jumped. Damn!

"Venus," Bruno said, spreading his arms as if he owned the place. Which he did, Conrad seemed to recall, as majority shareholder or some such. "The day is long here as well--fully twenty-eight hundred hours from dawn to dawn--and this world is also a geological nightmare which periodically liquefies broad swaths of its own crust. There is no way to curb its immense volcanic activity, its immense and continual outpouring of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Thus, terraforming has become an unending process, which will never make anything but the highest mountaintops habitable to humans unless we engineer a special Venusian strain."

That'll be the day, Conrad thought, for the Queendom, unlike the colonies, expressly forbade biomods until they'd been thoroughly studied and vetted, their full consequence plumbed. "Tinkering produces monsters," the Queen had said on more than one occasion, "who cannot grasp the humanity they've lost. Can the fall of the colonies be completely unrelated to this truth? If we're to be free and happy, it's necessary that we avoid such self-destruction." Rather an extreme position, Conrad thought, but there you had it.

"Anyway," Bruno said, "the sun is damnably hot here during the long days. As a result, people venture outdoors mainly at night, if then. And does this not undermine the very purpose of terraforming? Immorbidity does not imply omnipotence, alas. We were ambitious in ever thinking this place could be tamed by such as we."

"Maybe Venus could be crushed," Conrad suggested. "That would speed up its rotation. You'd have to remove a lot of mass to keep the gravity tolerable, but you could make a moon with it. Hell, you could get two viable planets out of it, and if you set up the eclipses properly they'd shelter each other from the noonday sun."

"Ho!" Bruno chortled dryly. "What have I pulled from this hat of mine? An architect of worlds, indeed! Your ambition does you credit, lad, but there isn't money enough in all the universe for a scheme as mad as that. If you can imagine such a thing, I'm actually running short of funds. I, yes! I've built thirteen starships out of my own pocket, and each of them cost as much as the entire Nescog and provided not one penny in returns. Some corners of society may be richer for the investment, but I myself am not.

"My coffers have slowly recovered from the shock, but your squozen moon will set me back a thousand years. Think of the energies we must deploy, the masses we'll shift! And here you speak to me of lifting half the weight of a planet, against the planet's own gravity, and then crushing it all! That's twenty times the project you have before you, lad, and the project before you is the largest since Marlon's Ring Collapsiter."

He paused a moment, though, tugging his beard and pinching his chin, and finally said, "Still, the suggestion has merit. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile I have more to show you, for Venus has not been our only disappointment."

The fax took them next to a low hilltop overlooking a village in the middle of a rusty plain, with steep red cliffs rising up on either side, just beyond the horizon.

"Savage Mars," Bruno said, "turns out to have none of Venus' rages and sorrows, and in truth human beings have discovered no gentler world anywhere, except the Earth. He needed a bit of air, a bit of warmth to get him going again, but Mars never forgot how to live. Thriving, though, has always eluded him, for he's a scarred old soldier whose energies are long spent. The warmth of Sol touches this place with a quarter of its Earthly intensity, and the core of the planet is dead and cold and solid. Nor is there enough heavy hydrogen in the poles for economical fusion. So deutrelium is imported, and solar power stations throughout the Queendom beam their energies here. Without this input, this net inward flux of foreign energy, the cities of Mars would grind to a chilly halt. It's a fine world for poets and dilettantes, gardeners and gamers, but industry must look elsewhere for its shelter and comfort."

The king eyed Conrad curiously. "Unless you've, er, got some suggestions for this place as well?"

Conrad shrugged. He wasn't exactly a font of spontaneous genius. He said to the king, "There's always tidal heating, right? On Sorrow it was the only thing keeping the core molten. If Mars had a large, close moon . . . Well, wait a minute. Imagine a water moon, larger than the planet itself, with no solid surface or center. It doesn't weigh as much as rock, but it could still exert a strong tidal force. And it would act as an enormous lens, gathering light from the sun and heating up. It would radiate in the infrared, and Mars' gravity would pull it into a teardrop shape that should direct more than half the emissions toward the planet. Right?"

"Hmm," Bruno said, thinking about that. "Possibly. But would it be stable over geologic time? I suppose it might!"

"Or we could move the planet," Conrad added lamely. "Closer to the sun."

The king laughed at that. "I see thinking small is not among your faults. Long ago, I'd thought to give the squozen moon project to Bascal, but in truth he was never suited. He was a political creature, and started a revolution instead."

So did I, Conrad answered silently. For he was just as guilty as Bascal, or nearly as guilty, in getting the Children's Revolt moving.

"And he clawed his way to the stars," Bruno mused, staring down at the village and the red desert plains beyond it, "through my pocketbook. And there he met his end."

At that poignant sentiment, Conrad asked, "Sire, what will you do with the image of Bascal? The one in Newhope's memory?"

"I don't know," the king answered. "If my son is dead then this thing, this recorded entity, must be more a caricature than a copy. We could overlay it on his childhood fax archives and see what happened, but . . ."

"But tinkering produces monsters?"

"Indeed. And so does hardship, of which you had plenty out there in the dying colonies. I'm sick with guilt about that, lad, and I'm not eager to compound my past errors. Some people are more inclined to monsterdom than others. But I do mourn for the little boy, the Poet Prince who used to putter around Tongatapu on that noisy little scooter of his. What a happy lad, what a joy to behold! Already containing within him the sprouts of wickedness, or poor judgment. Even before the time of Newhope's departure, he'd become a stranger to us. A dangerous one."

"You're going to let him die? Your own son?" Conrad couldn't help feeling a little bit horrified, after he'd gone to the trouble of preserving that damned message. If it was the only record of Bascal's adult life . . . God, it must be a wrenching decision. If it were up to Conrad, what would he do?

"We don't know his fate," the king said sadly. "We only suspect it. And this so-called cousin of his, this Edward Bascal Faxborn, is an alternate expression of the boy I raised. ‘King Eddie of Wolf' they call him, in tones of true friendship. I've never met the man outside a self-aware transmission, but is he not also my son? A better version? A different set of choices?"

The king moped for a few seconds, the Martian breeze twisting in his long hair. "Someday, perhaps, when we've universe enough to contain him, we can dare to unleash that spirit again. But for now I suspect we're better off leaving him where he is. If it's a kind of murder to postpone his resurrection, I'll invite you to join in the conspiracy. Will you do me the favor, Architect, of forgetting this conversation? I don't want his mother finding out."

Conrad's next stop was Luna itself--specifically the small domed city of Copernicus, nearly dead-center on Nearside, which was to be the site of his temporary headquarters, until by his command the ground started shaking and cracking and falling in on itself and the surface became uninhabitable.

"How exactly do we accomplish this?" he'd asked the king, for there were already detailed cross-sectional blueprints of the squozen moon, showing exactly where the surface must lie, and how the dense subsurface must be layered in order to maximize the world's utility to its future inhabitants. Toxic metals were to be buried deep--the moon had an excess of nickel and arsenic--and useful ones were to wrap the planette like foil, in layers easily accessible from surface mines. Deeper, a third of the way down to the core, there'd be a layer of di-clad neutronium supported by pillars of monocrystalline diamond.

"How?" the king asked, as though the question had never occurred to him. "I should think you would tell me."

Fortunately, there didn't seem to be any huge hurry; Conrad was given two hundred years to complete the task, and a budget of trillions to get it started. Still, Bruno's tour around the solar system, ending back in the remoteness of Maplesphere far out in the Kuiper Belt, had been a long one. Subjectively they were gone for just a few minutes, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and most of the Nescog was incapable of exceeding it. Invisibly, the journey had chewed up nearly a day in transit times, during which the evacuation orders had been broadcast to Lunar citizens, along with Conrad's name and face.

As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the people of Luna.

The moon's gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn't compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with anyplace for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn't exactly a garden spot.

And yet, in Conrad's day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how happy they would be at the news of their eviction!

"Developer," one woman called out to Conrad as he exited the fax. On her lips, the word was definitely a curse. "Trillionaire! Dirty robber baron," said someone else.

Looking around, Conrad decided that the Lunar domes, too, held a lot more people than they used to. The only uncrowded place he'd yet seen was Maplesphere itself--hardly representative of society as a whole.

"What's wrong with the moon we have now?" demanded a red-haired man in reedy tones. And with a shock, Conrad realized he was looking at humanity's greatest playwright, Wenders Rodenbeck, who had penned such classics as Uncle Lisa's Neutron and Past Pie Season. Under other circumstances, Conrad would have been pleased to shake the man's hand, to sit down with him over a mug of hot tea and chitchat about the ways of the world. But Rodenbeck--a noted opponent of terraforming--had brought an angry mob with him, and Conrad figured this might not be the best time. In a glance around the square, half a kilometer beneath the town's domed roof, he could even swear he saw the hooded, translucent figure of Death out there at the back of the crowd. When he looked again, though, the apparition was gone.

"I didn't start this project," Conrad called out to the mob, for all the good it would do. "Your king has simply hired me to take a look at it, to alleviate the crowding problems and provide a home for billions."

That went over well. The crowd groaned and shouted and cursed.

"Listen," Conrad said. "You'll be compensated for the fair value of your property here, and as far as I'm concerned you can continue to occupy it for as long as it's safe--probably several years, while we're getting the project logistics in order."

"Go back to Barnard!" someone shouted, and Conrad answered angrily, "I wish I could, sir. How very rude. How many of your friends have died forever?"

Presently, a group of men in heavy but helmetless space suits pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and Conrad, fearing violence, briefly wished the Palace Guards were here. Or at least the local police, who on Luna were renowned for their courage and skill. But the leader of the men said to him, "Mr. Mursk, I'm Bell Daniel, the president of Lunacorp Construction."

"You're hired," Conrad said at once. "Your first assignment is to find me an office, away from this mob." Then, thinking about it, he added, "It might also be a good idea to start digging a hole."

"Um, okay. What sort of hole, sir? How deep?"

"All the way through," Conrad told him.

Only much later would it occur to him that he had missed his chance to see the moon--the old, the original moon--in the skies of Earth, before King Bruno's proclamations had begun the long, slow process of crushing it.

"Call Xmary," he told the wall of his new office, just as soon as he stepped inside. The network took a few fractions of a second to figure out whom he meant, and the light of his signal itself took a second and a half to reach the surface of Earth. But presently her face appeared, framed against clouds and sky, green grass and oceans.

"Conrad," she said, "where have you been? Three days you've been gone, and no message?"

"Sorry," he told her. "A lot has happened. It turns out I'm a trillionaire. Also I met the king, and I have a job. Oh, and my parents say hi."

Xmary nodded impatiently. "That's nice, dear. We're under attack."

book two

the
eridaniad

The initial excavation was much briefer than Conrad would have imagined. Two years, to dig out the burrows and caverns that would serve as entry points for the later, more profound tunneling. His crew swelled from dozens to hundreds and more, topping out around six thousand, and whenever possible he chose them from among the twenty thousand successfully revived Barnardeans. After all, even the least of them had participated in a grand terraforming experiment, albeit also a grand failure. But he was careful to balance them with the children of Sol, who needed the work at least as desperately, and were capable of great loyalty and even greater imagination. Their pent-up need for accomplishment more than made up for their lack of grit.

Meanwhile there were factories abuilding, for the production of certain specialized machineries. There had been neutronium barges scouring the heavens around Sol for fifteen hundred years, and Conrad's people simply tweaked and reinforced the design, so that it could roll across a tunnel floor on house-sized treads and eat through solid rock rather than flying through diffuse clouds of ice and dust.

But it was fundamentally the same machine: a blunt cylinder a thousand meters long and seven hundred wide, with a yawning open mouth that could swallow literally anything. And on the day these machines were first fired up, the moon trembled and groaned beneath its wellglass domes, and the remaining population--angry holdouts defiant to the end--were evicted by their own police or, in a handful of cases where the police themselves were holdouts, by the SWAT robots of the Royal Constabulary.

Conrad's own escort of Law Enforcers got a bit of a workout as well, when Fatalist or naturalist saboteurs succeeded in bringing a tunnel down on top of him. His body was crushed beyond repair, and he would just as soon have died and reprinted, but the Enforcers managed to save his head and toss it, fainting and throbbing with agony--into the nearest fax.

"Don't," he tried to tell them, but without breath or vocal cords he didn't make much of an impression, and the Enforcers either couldn't read lips, didn't care to, or had been programmed to ignore his dying wishes. Still, they needn't have bothered; this "rescue" saved a grand total of five hours' stored experience, of which the pain itself was the only thing he would really remember.

Conrad was later to mark this event as the end of an era--one of many he'd encountered in his long strange life. His beheading coincided with the start of a time crunch that no amount of plurality could really abate. Being in five places at once was all well and good, but the real trick was coordination, and for that he had to know everything, instantly. He did the best he could, which really wasn't bad, and he made an effort to keep up his home life as well. And with love, money, recognition, and meaningful work, it wasn't a bad way to live. Just a very, very busy one.

Soon, the months and years and decades were passing in a kind of daydream; his world never changed, or rather it changed slowly and at his own command. In the outer universe, art and fashion and politics morphed swiftly by comparison, when he bothered to notice. Which was rarely, and this is truly saying something, for his own wife had become a politician herself! He breathed her air, listened attentively to her stories, and yet remained somehow detached or aloof.

Was this what it felt like to be Bruno de Towaji? Consumed by the practical difficulties separating plan and theory from hard reality? Anchored only by the love of a good woman? For her part, Xmary seemed to understand; Conrad had never been happier, and a part of each of them suspected he never would be again. "These," she told him once, "are the good old days. Savor each one, for they'll never come again."

Not that it was a peaceful time. Far from it! More and more tunnels collapsed, some by accident and some by malevolence, but most because that was how they were supposed to work: the neutronium bores would hollow out the ground and then bring it crashing down behind them. Deaths and manglings by misadventure were a part of the monthly routine; by its very nature, this workplace could not be made safe, any more than a shifting volcano of boulders and razor-sharp knives could be safe. Rest assured, through their labors the project's burgeoning crew learned a thing or two about pain and loss and recovery.

But in the best of worlds, learning does modify behavior. Few of Luna's workers died more than twice. It became, in a way, a rite of passage, except for Conrad himself, who well remembered his faxless days on Sorrow and could not be bothered to die even once. "I hope to lead by example," he told his crew on several occasions, when Bell Daniel teased him about it.

And so, year by year the moon changed and shrunk as the mass beneath its surface was squozen into neubles and packed down into diamond plates near the solid core. And as the lithosphere's diameter approached its final value, the bores' work became slower and more precise. A traditional sculptor cuts first with a jackhammer, then with a chisel, then an awl, and finally with a rasp and a file and a block of heated wellstone to smooth and polish. Such was the role of the destruction crew in those last eighty years: finessing the rubble of Luna into something new and wonderful.

Of course, an odd thing was happening by this point: the moon had begun to retain air. It wasn't much at first--just a bit of outgassed oxygen, combining with a bit of hydrogen from the solar wind. The pressure could be measured in microbars--millionths of a breathable atmosphere--but overnight it seemed to change the texture of the soil and rocks at the surface, which had never before felt the touch of anything but vacuum.

And then the first of the gigantic atmosphere-processing faxes had been lowered into place along the Nearside equator. Tied to a network gate, it called down nitrogen from Titan, carbon dioxide from Venus, methane and heavy nobles from a spherical station adrift in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The Elementals grew wealthier still, for who but they could arrange such enormous transfers of purified mass? And then, before the atmosphere had achieved even a tenth of its final density, a second fax was placed on the Farside to crack additional oxygen from the soil itself, and to combine some fraction of it with the carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen to produce a gray, reeking smog of water and hydrocarbons, fats and other complex organics which would be useful in conditioning the soil for the arrival of life.

And indeed, life was not far behind; soon the surface was crawling with dainty labor robots, spreading and raking and watering and fertilizing a powder of microscopic spores. This had few visible effects, but on the visceral level it struck a deep chord: for the first time in its 4.5-billion-year history, this world was waking up. Suddenly it had a smell, a feel, a sky under which you could walk without protection. Whether the Fatalists and naturalists liked it or not, the history of Luna would be forevermore shaped by living things.

Which was good, because the flow of refugees from the colonies now exceeded the Queendom's own population growth by an order of magnitude, and was expected to continue increasing. If crushing the moon had once been a forward-thinking solution to long-term problems, it was now a grim and immediate necessity. But that was a political matter, and Conrad felt justified in letting other people worry about it. After all, he was just an architect.

"Don't lose too much contact with reality," advised King Bruno on one of his status-check visits, when Conrad made some comment along these lines. "Believe me, even on Maplesphere things are easier when I keep the end users in mind. I've wasted years of my life solving the wrong problems, and now I should like to have them back. I've lost arms inside a wormhole, lad, but never my entire self."

But in spite of the king's warnings, Conrad found himself spending less time on Grace--his nominal home--and more here on this squozen moon, whose lifelessness had begun, suddenly, to seem precious even to him, in the way that all things become precious when their time is nearly over. Another era of his personal history--and Luna's--was drawing to a close. And not only theirs; all the Queendom seemed to be drawing its collective breath, preparing for some new spasm of change. And as Conrad became aware of this, as his gaze turned finally outward, he found all the eyes of the Queendom looking in at him with worried impatience.

What have you built for us, Architect, in this hour of need? And the answer that came to Conrad was a strange one indeed, for he found he didn't know. His job was to deliver the skeleton of a world; its final flesh and purpose had never been his to decide.

Said Rodenbeck, "History is a blind toboggan. A single man can sometimes steer it, much to the trees' dismay, but a billion dragging feet will have their say as well."

chapter twelve

in which a frontier is
finally opened

Was it a sad moment? A happy one? A moment of triumph or the passing of a triumphant age? Was it all of the above?

The kilometer-wide neutronium bore was a cylinder of mirror-bright impervium, and as it chewed its way through Lunar bedrock--consuming oxides of iron and silicon at one end and excreting neubles at the other--it made a sound like the end of a world. A never-ending detonation of antimatter, yes, a crushing of atomic bonds and atomic nuclei, a crushing of matter itself into dense neutron paste.

Architect Laureate Conrad Ethel Mursk stood behind it at a safe distance, along with his wife, Governor Adjudicate Xiomara Li Weng, and the very closest members of his construction crew's inner circle. Watching and thinking, celebrating and mourning. Not talking, because the sound had already tattered their eardrums, pulverized their fibrediamond-reinforced hearing bones. If they stood here long enough, the sound--still skeletally conducted through the ground--would deafen them at the cerebrum level as well, and finally bruise the soft meat of their brains into unthinking goo. In Conrad's outfit, sound levels were measured not in decibels but in Minutes To Kill, and this one pegged the meter at MTK 15.

There were no standards or limits per se, although it was generally recognized that at levels higher than this, useful work became a lot more difficult. Even 15 was pushing it, hard. But the people of Sol were tough, and the survivors of Barnard tougher still, and with a fax machine handy the assembled group had little thought for its safety.

Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world. Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the others carried "rock burner" lamps--multispectral lasers which cast white spots whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six degrees of arc--no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts--which at short range was enough to vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone. Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment it really was.

And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the bore's mechanical anus and settle--under the influence of straining gravity lasers--to the tunnel floor.

WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the grasers' carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.

And that was that. The last neuble. The thundering machine--the last of its kind still operating--rumbled to a halt.

The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this tunnel was collapsed.

HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel's space suit.

"Well done, all," Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.

Xmary offered her CONGRATULATIONS!!!!, and the four others exchanged the visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence and timeliness of their work.

COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, BOSS, Bell offered, and Conrad wondered why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on, Luna--or rather Lune--would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette's surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty years.

THANKS, AND LIKEWISE, Conrad assured him. THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE. SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE?

ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant, dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible soda-silica-lime material--old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine would dispense without authorization. And Conrad's crew dutifully smashed these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them--with more enthusiasm than hope--toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.

Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other's suits before it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days--harried and hopeful and deeply fulfilling--would be replaced by something new, and nothing would ever be the same.

And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death--a lame and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer. But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.

Ah, well.

CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily. I WANT THAT LAST PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS.

SURE, BOSS, Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could convey.

That was the really private ceremony. The semiprivate one occurred four hours later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including a few hundred retirees who'd wandered away from the project before its completion.

They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry, barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.

"You've done excellent work here," he told them all. "And God willing, we'll see each other again someday, on a grander project still."

"Crush Venus! Crush Venus!" the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a woman off toward the rear called out "Crush Mars!" Then everyone was shouting: Melt Europa! Ignite Jupiter! Reconstitute the asteroid belt! And finally the noise dissolved into argumentative laughter.

None of these things were possible, of course; King Bruno wasn't exactly out of money, but he wouldn't be playing sugar daddy to the Queendom again for another few centuries. The workers were just letting off steam, kidding themselves that it could all keep going.

"We'll do something," he assured them, "and when we do, I'll know exactly who to call. The best damned crew in the universe!"

They cheered at that, of course.

Was there anything else to say? He shook the hands that needed shaking, then wandered off into the barren hills to let his people--his former people--sort it out on their own. He wasn't their boss anymore.

"You should be happy," Xmary said, walking alongside him.

"I am," he assured her. "Very." And it was true. "I'm just . . . I don't know, more tired than anything. My willpower's browning out. Which is bad, because there's a lot of work still to be done. And a lot of refugees streaming homeward, expecting a place to live."

At that, she patted him on the rump and smiled wickedly. "I know what you need, Architect. Around that withered soul you're still young and virile. A body like that requires attention." And that was true, too.

Although the planet had shrunk beneath it, Luna's actual crust hadn't gotten any smaller. But it had only one-fourth the area to cover, so over the years of its settling it had folded and wrinkled and cracked, raising jagged mountain chains, broad steppes, and vast, broken plains. Even here in the relative flat of the former Mare Nubium, it wasn't hard to find a little valley so secluded that it would be visible only from directly above.

"We start pouring the oceans tomorrow," he told his wife. "Faxed ice from Callisto, mostly. And for the first year or two the water will simply sink into all these voids in the crust. The surface will be as dry as ever, but with the water to lubricate them, and explosives to jar them loose, the rock plates should settle together, smoothing out all these jags and spines."

"All?"

"Well, a lot of them. We still want some contour, obviously, and with the highest mountains reaching twelve whole kilometers above the plains, we'll definitely still have some. But the geo boys are having the time of their lives, figuring out where to plant all the bombs. We'll go after the biggest voids with subnukes and aye-ma'am, and over time the water will be squeezed back out to the surface. Truthfully, with a fixed mass budget we're not sure how deep the oceans will be when it's all said and done. But there'll be enough to stabilize the climate and the ecosystem. And there'll be beaches."

"Sounds lovely," Xmary said, in a we're-done-talking-now kind of way. Her clothes, sensing the moment, peeled away and fell to the dusty ground. Conrad's did likewise. Soon the two of them were on their clothes, rolling and wrestling, feeling the dry air soak up their sweat. The love they made together was excellent, as always.

There were more failed couples in the universe than successful ones, and conventional wisdom thus insisted that two people simply couldn't get along forever. But Conrad had never understood this. He was barely old enough to deprogram facial hair when he'd met Xmary, and they'd become lovers within the year.

Later, they'd tried it apart for what seemed like a long time, but their flexibility hadn't been up to the task. Like two trees that had grown together, they simply couldn't disentangle. Not without damage, without broken hearts and limbs and skyward-pointing roots. And eternal youth or no, who had time to recover from a thing like that? Who would want to?

True love is immorbid, Conrad wrote once in his diary. You can kill it, but it never gets old. It's stronger than petty anger or lust. Stronger even than boredom, and that's a strong force indeed. Or maybe he, personally, was just weak. His love for Xmary belied any notion of free will; he could leave her, yes, but he couldn't want to.

"I can't imagine my life without you," he told her now, murmuring into a sweaty ear.

"Enough," she said. "Talk later. Let's enjoy this planet of yours."

The ground shook a little then, as if in agreement or--as Conrad would later see it--in warning.

And Xmary, perhaps sensing this, added, "While it's still ours. Before the homeless arrive and things get interesting. It's not enough to crush the moon; you've got to decide how you're going to love it."

Lune. The name--chosen democratically and ratified by royal decree--seemed strange, musical, and somehow appropriate. Luna took twice as long to say, for a world twice as wide. "Ash," by contrast, was a drab moniker for the outermost of this new world's planettes, poised at the L1 Lagrange point and stabilized there by a network of orbiting collapsiters.

Ash itself, though, was anything but drab. The planette Varna, orbiting thirty thousand kilometers closer to Lune, was blue and green and steamy, like a little tropical Earth. Beneath that was the grassy Kishu and--visible just now off the limb of Lune--the desert Harst, glowing like a little beige pinpoint.

But Ash's biosphere was dominated by reds and yellows: snapdragon and bougainvillea, cardinals and canaries, foxes and howler monkeys and fluorescent yellow mice. The trees were engineered specifically for the site, and were like nothing ever seen on Earth or in the colonies. Tall and sparse as autumn poplars, prickly as cacti, stronger and more flexible than bamboo, they rose from the dome-shaped ground like pillars of flame, waving brightly in the breeze.

And in Ash's pearl-gray sky, the spectacular blue-green orbs of Earth and Lune were almost exactly equal in size. Their impending eclipse, two days hence, would see the glare of Sol line up perfectly behind the Earth, which would cast its shadow across Lune and turn it red as well. The red of sunset, of sunrise, of beginnings and endings.

And per the queen's proclamation, the sixty-two minutes of the eclipse's totality were to mark the formal opening of Lune to human settlement. But the queen had declined to run these dates by her architect laureate, and in Conrad's professional opinion they were utter hooey. He'd been building that world for long years, and he needed another eighteen to complete the job properly. At least eighteen!

"Be realistic, Your Highness," he said to Tamra, by the light of the sun and the Earth and of Lune itself. "Be reasonable. This party is several years premature."

This was the official celebration, to which none of Conrad's crew were invited, despite his strenuous objections. They were of course welcome to attend the public celebration during the actual eclipse, except that at full capacity the planette could comfortably hold only eighty thousand people, and for a construction worker the tickets would cost a year's salary at least. So in fact they'd be watching the ceremony on TV, or via neural sensorium, or maybe just skipping it and going straight to their own drunken revelries. It seemed a shame.

"The official commencement will be a simple dinner party," the queen's invitation had told him primly, "for a few close friends and relations. Since your wife is also invited, you needn't bring a guest. Her Majesty understands your concern, but is she to share her table with every rigger and wrench-boy in the Queendom? She loves them all equally, but she hasn't the time to love them individually. She could dedicate a score of copies to that purpose alone, and never make a dent in the problem. And what would she do with the memories? Summarize them, or be hopelessly clogged, or forget them entirely. And wouldn't that defeat the purpose?"

"Not for the workers," he told it. "They'd treasure the experience forever."

"Presumption is rude, Architect," the invitation had chided. Then, "Come now, you owe the luminaries of Sol a chance to congratulate you."

So here they were, seated at a pair of long, arch-shaped tables that followed the curve of Ash's surface. Forty people, only half of whom Conrad knew at all well. But Feck was here, and Eustace, and a handful of other revived Barnardeans who'd made good in the stodgy old Queendom. The king was here too, of course, and so were Donald and Maybel Mursk and, rather surprisingly, Xmary's parents as well.

Since Mimi and David Li Weng had disowned their daughter after the Revolt, Conrad had never actually met them. Nor wanted to, though it wasn't a position he'd considered overmuch. They were historical figures more than anything, and though Xmary was largely ignoring them, their presence did lend an odd authority to the proceedings. Their daughter, the Governor Adjudicate of Central Pacifica and wife of a celebrated architect, was no longer an embarrassment to them.

"Hi. I hope you burn in hell," Conrad had told them both brightly when the queen had introduced them, and it felt good to get that off his chest. Really.

"Be reasonable. I would say the same to you, Architect," the queen answered him now, forking a bit of cheese-draped sausage into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. Seconds later she touched a napkin to her lips and added, "You really must try the cheese. That woman over there--in the green frock, yes--is perhaps the most brilliant flavor designer in human history."

"High praise indeed," Conrad allowed, taking a nibble. Damn, it was good. Melting in his mouth, almost vaporizing, it had a taste at once fatty and ethereal, rich and salty and yet somehow subtle as well. His eyes closed for a moment, of their own accord.

"Immorbidity demands novelty," the queen opined. "Else it's bread and water forever. Bless our flavor designers, every one."

And to that Conrad could not help answering, "We did without them on Sorrow, Majesty. But aye, not forever."

Tamra nodded solemnly. "You see my point, then. Shall we consign ourselves to no better a fate? Will you not surrender yon world to me? Our population crisis continues to grow. Our middle-class homeless now number in the tens of millions, and the political pressure to open a new frontier--any frontier--is overwhelming. Am I to resist the will of the people? The need of the people? They don't require a perfect world, and your quest for one--though admirable--consumes precious time. And money. Endings are always difficult, but there comes a point when the engineers and craftsmen must disperse, and find new projects."

"No doubt, Your Highness," Conrad hedged, "but is that day truly upon us? We've only just sealed the last of the neutronium plates. The lithosphere above them is full of voids and faults, which store a tremendous unwanted energy. Over time they will settle, with unpredictable results."

"That's been understood for some time," the queen countered, "but you can relieve these pressure points at leisure, with minimal disruption at ground level. True? I'm informed that the largest tremors will cause only minor damage at the surface."

"Possibly, Your Highness, but none of us can say that with confidence. We're speaking of probabilities, in a world of imperfect knowledge. The first Ring Collapsiter was considered safe as well, and we know how that turned out."

"Cunning sabotage," the queen said dismissively, "at the deepest levels of design. We trust you, sir, to eschew such scheming."

"Do you? Then trust me that Lune is incomplete, Majesty. The biosphere is another problem, immature and unstable. On Sorrow and Pup we've seen what that can do. How much suffering has our impatience created there?"

"Your point is duly noted, Architect. However, as on Sorrow and Pup, we're installing town-sized fax plates to churn out fresh gases and creatures, keeping the ecology in crude balance. Yes? And unlike those worlds, we've the infrastructure of an entire civilization to draw upon. Mars and Venus are better analogies, for in their early civilized histories they prospered with no biosphere at all. As did Luna herself, for a dozen centuries and more. In any event, these risks are mine to assess, and I have more brains to pick than yours alone. You will prepare the moon for immediate habitation."

And here the king added his own voice to the fray: "It's no use, lad, to argue with the facts. Focus on the work itself, yes, but remember who pays your salary. Your job is not to run the new world, but to deliver it."

"Aye, Your Majesty," Conrad said, unconvinced and unconvincing.

"Come now," the king expounded, tossing a grape onto Conrad's plate. "Do you think you're the first? Has no engineer before you surrendered his treasures to a witless society? I do know the feeling, lad. How many deaths linger on my conscience, do you suppose, from the discovery of collapsium alone? When I finally get these wormholes working, do you think I expect there to be no accidents? No malice? All systems are subject to failure, but the mere possibility should not shackle our striving."

He tossed another grape, and another. "Will you choke on these? Are they poison? Will they beguile you and squander your time, as mass-stabilized wormholes have squandered mine? I could let you starve, lad, for fear of what a grape might do. Or we could get on with the party, and see what happens."

"You've become quite the orator," Conrad said. "When did that happen?"

Such a comment might easily have been taken as rudeness, but the king just laughed. "With fifteen hundred years of life, my boy, one does eventually learn to speak."

At that, Conrad's old friend Feck chimed in. "Don't let the refugee crisis escape your attention, hmm? We've got six million in storage, and three billion on the way. At present deceleration, Perdition is only two months out, with fifteen percent of the load. I would say there are risks in every course of action, and especially in responding too slowly."

And Conrad, being a refugee himself, could hardly argue with that. The remaining colonies were simply collapsing. They were up to their armpits in dead and mortal children, and had turned their spasm-wracked economies to the sorry task of triage: shipping "home" as many as possible, by whatever means possible, and leaving the rest to their fate. Whatever that might be.

Conrad sometimes wondered whether this trend had been inevitable all along. Had the colonists carried out with them the seeds of their own destruction? Or was this simply a fad, a mass surrender, a herd action inspired by the traitorous flight of Newhope? If so, then Conrad and Xmary and Feck had a lot to answer for: the death of billions. The death of hope itself.

"Have there been any further communications with the Perdition or the Trail of Tears?" Conrad asked, for no matter what Feck said, he was poignantly interested in the refugee crisis. He was just out of step with the news. But Feck was the queen's Minister of Colonial Affairs, and would know everything.

"Communications, yes," Feck said, sounding both chagrined and incensed. "Meaningful dialogue, no. Eridani breeds angry, suspicious men. And women, too, one supposes, but since they're cloistered, we never hear from them. At any rate, the Eridanians' journey has been a hard one, and they're not eager to park their butts in Kuiper Belt storage when they finally arrive."

"Nor would I be," Conrad said. He'd visited Eridani twice in virtual form, and remembered it as a place of sharp contrasts: molten metal and frozen gas, wild anger and wilder compassion. Eridani boasted no habitable worlds, and like all the colony stars it was richer than Sol in stormy radiation. And the outer system's Dust Belt was treacherous--it could grind even the proudest of habitats to rubble in a matter of years. Even the inner system was full of flying crap. Eridani had thousands of times more asteroids and comets and random small meteoroids than Sol; its planets had been battered all to hell, and still endured several large impacts each year.

So the people, in their tens of billions, lived deep underground in Aetna, the moon of Mulciber, and ventured only rarely to its cratered-upon-cratered surface. To compensate for their bleak, cramped quarters, they had opted for a gradual reduction in body size, and while they were at it they'd added new metabolic pathways and--they claimed--new modes of thought which opened their minds to a greater spiritual awareness. And why not? What the hell else did they have to do under there?

But they were also energy-rich and element-rich and lived like kings in their stifling burrows. Or they had, anyway, before the fax machines started giving out. Theirs was a sad history, as fraught with broken promise as Barnard's own.

"What are we supposed to do?" Feck demanded suddenly, taking the comment as a barb. "There are a dozen asylum-seeking vessels parked in the Kuiper Belt already, and if we wake their sleepers only as new living space becomes available, we're accused of breaking up families and friendships, of scattering the refugees out over time and space. Of destroying their culture.

"But if we hold them in storage, awaiting a world of their own, then we're pushing them off into some indefinite future. Which is a kind of murder, for many suspect we'll never wake them at all. And that's a valid question, Conrad, because even Lune cannot absorb the colonies' entire human flux. How long will those worlds take to die, and how many of their children will they dump on us beforehand?"

The queen cleared her throat. "These decisions are also mine, Minister Feck. You've done very well for your charges, and argue their case most effectively. But their fate is not yours to choose. This is the point of monarchy, you see: to concentrate blame. You may sleep soundly, your conscience untroubled."

Feck looked ready to argue that point, but finally thought better of it and dropped his eyes to his dinner. "Of course, Your Highness. My apologies."

"Accepted," she said, favoring him with the smile that had earned her the love of billions.

"The day grows late," warned the red-haired Wenders Rodenbeck, in a tone that managed to convey at once a personal sadness, an official gravitas, and a semiamused kind of told-you-so. "A stiff wind rises at last, and we find our house of straw less sturdy than we'd hoped."

"Don't gloat, Poet Laureate," the queen said, clearly annoyed. "It shows off the food in your teeth. If we'd listened to you all these years, I suppose the Queendom would still be a paradise, and never a tear would be shed?"

"No indeed, Majesty." The playwright's voice was, to Conrad's ear, rather shrill, but in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from his air of authority. "I would suggest a more careful reading of my oeuvre, when time permits. In fact, my own paradise would likely have collapsed by now as well, for reasons we couldn't imagine at the outset. Such is the fate of human endeavor; our vision is not extended merely by the stretching of our lifetimes."

"Go on," the queen said skeptically. "You have my attention. What remedies do you propose?"

"Why, none," said Rodenbeck, spreading his hands as if this should have been obvious. "Who has taught me to plan for the long, long term? Where shall we draw our lessons, when this civilization of ours has outlasted all that came before it? The Queendom rose from the ashes of Old Modernity, which sprang from the embers of Rome, which drew upon the lessons of Greece, and Egypt before her. Indeed, Highness, Egypt had the Minoan example to emulate, and fair Atlantis was a focused echo of the civilizations of Indus and Jomon, drowned in the Deluge at the closing of the Ice Age.

"History is not linear, I'm afraid, but cyclic, for sustainability has never guided human affairs. And in banishing death, we simply condemn ourselves to observe the cycle from within. To live, as it were, in the filth we've excreted, with the sound of falling towers all around."

"Ah," said Tamra, "so we needn't listen to you, then."

"Not at all, Majesty. I am but a mote in the vastness, amazed by all that I perceive. Let's do take a moment, though, to congratulate ourselves for all that we've accomplished. Even this ghastly destruction of Luna, yes, for it speaks to grand intentions. And here at the end of the day, we shall need a warm thought like that to remember ourselves by."

"Quite," the queen agreed, in a tone that closed the subject. And then, to Conrad: "We do have evidence, Architect, that Perdition is in regular contact with someone in the Queendom. Does that make you feel better?"

"Um, well," Conrad said, "that depends on who they're talking to."

The queen's smile deepened. "Someone charming, I'm sure. Shall we have dessert?"

chapter thirteen

in which the demands of
beggars are voiced

It was, of course, the Fatalists with whom Perdition communicated, and while the details of their exchange were quantum-encrypted and thus impossible to decipher, archaeologists and historians agree on this much:

First, that the exchange was hundreds of petabytes long in both directions--more than adequate for a self-aware data construct to be passed back and forth several times. Or, alternatively, for several constructs to make the crossing once.

Second, that the Queendom recipients of these messages were, without a doubt, located well away from Earth and Mars and Venus. Mercury and the moons of Jupiter are considered unlikely but cannot be ruled out altogether. Almost anywhere else in the system is possible; no physical traces have ever been found.

Third, that the virus released into the Nescog on Lune Day was of Eridanian origin, or evolved from an Eridanian template which in turn traced its heritage back to the early Queendom. Sol had endured crippling network attacks during the Fall, and the "Eridge" plague showed a cunning grasp of both the strengths of that ancient assault, and the weaknesses of the contemporary network.

These weaknesses were few and slight, so the virus spread at only a tiny fraction of the classical speed of light, and was not truly lethal in its effects. Still, it was stealthy, and raised no conclusive alarms until it had wormed its way to the heart of every switch and router, collapsiter and precognitor in the system.

Conrad Mursk first learned of the attack indirectly, faxing home from a meeting with the Europan Ice Authority. As he stepped out of the print plate into his penthouse apartment in the city of Grace, he found himself staggering for a drunken moment. This was not entirely unheard of, for Grace was a floating city, and the Carpal Tower at its center was very slightly flexible. On windy days, you could feel the roll and sway of the city here as nowhere else.

But never this much. Though his balance reasserted itself, Conrad felt at once that something was wrong. For one thing he was covered with a fine white dust, like talcum powder. For another thing, the evening lights of the city below were not all lit. Some were flickering; others were simply out.

Worse, he had the distinct sense that there was something different about him. Inside, in his mind or his memories or his immortal soul. Nothing monumental--he was still Conrad Mursk of Ireland and Sorrow, Lune and Pacifica--but it seemed to him that he was suddenly peppered with small absences. With tiny half-remembered things, now wholly forgotten. Or was he imagining it?

"Call Xmary," he said to the ceiling, but he needn't have bothered, for moments later she spilled out of the fax in person. This was, after all, dinnertime, and she'd've called him already if her gubernatorial duties required her to be late, or to spawn an extra copy or two.

She was also covered in powder, and looked startled and subtly off-kilter.

"What just happened?" she said, fixing her eyes on Conrad, her hands on the black hair hanging down past her neck.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Are you all right?"

"I . . ." I think so, she'd been about to say. But something stopped her. She didn't think so.

"Maintenance," Conrad instructed the apartment. "Fax diagnostic, now."

"All functions nominal, sir," the fax said, sounding ever-so-slightly offended.

"Seconded," said the ceiling. "No sign of anomalies."

"Not here," offered the floor. "But look at sir and madam. They're quite disturbed. Perhaps they encountered a transit glitch."

"Impossible," the fax replied.

"Improbable," the floor countered, "and yet--"

"Everyone shut up!" Xmary commanded firmly. "Conrad, do you feel . . ."

"Funny? Full of holes? Dusty? Yes. Something's happening."

Xmary looked up at the ceiling. "News."

"Today's top story: Travelers report fax anomalies. No details available. Please propagate this message on supraluminal channels where possible."

Well, that was helpful.

"That could mean anything," Xmary grumbled. "What travelers? Where? Us? Update the top story every time it changes, please."

"Yes, madam. Today's top story: This is a travel advisory. Travelers in the vicinity of Earth and Mars report minor cellular injury after Nescog transport. Citizens are advised to avoid Nescog travel wherever possible. No further details available. Please assign this story top priority on all civilian supraluminal channels."

And then, on the heels of that: "Today's top story: Her Majesty has declared a state of emergency. Please remain where you are, or limit necessary travel to licensed air, ground, and space vehicles. The Nescog is hereby reserved for authorized emergency personnel."

"Damn," Xmary said. "I'd better get back to the office."

"How?" Conrad wanted to know. The Central Pacifica governor's office was on Cooper Ridge Construct, eight hundred kilometers away.

"I'm emergency personnel," she pointed out. "I must be."

"But do you want to risk the damage? It could be permanent. For all we know it could be fatal."

"Hmm. I could take a glider, I suppose. Or maybe a boat. There are boats here, right? It's an island."

She was spared any further thought on the matter by a crackling from the fax machine behind her. It coughed out a cloud of dust, then a sizzle of blue sparks, and finally the staggering body of a heavy, bearded man.

Bruno de Towaji, the King of Sol. Presently, he put an arm out and fell flat on his face.

"Blast," he said woozily, "that is a nasty smack, isn't it? Am I still me?"

"Your Highness!" Conrad and Xmary said together. "What are you doing here?" Conrad added, while Xmary asked, "Are you all right?"

"Scrambled," the king said, picking himself up, brushing the dust from his eyebrows and beard. "If that's the worst they can do I'll be happy, but still. How dare they do their worst!"

"What's happening?" Xmary asked him. "Why are you here?"

"I set up a point-to-point filter between this apartment and the Beach Palace, but someone had to go through it first. As a calibration article."

"Why?"

He didn't answer, but turned groggily back toward the fax again. "I'm close to a breakthrough on the wormhole front. I can feel it! But Maplesphere and Earth are suddenly very far apart. It'll take us months to filter this irritant from all possible routes. Indeed, it may be quicker to purge the virus entirely than to design emergency workarounds."

"What virus?"

"Eh?" Bruno looked over his shoulder. "The one they've attacked us with."

"Who?"

"The Fatalists. The Eridanians. The dark angel of unintended consequences. My errors return to me, young lady, a thousand times magnified." To the fax he said, "Royal Override. Apply calibration results and clear your buffer. Begin point-to-point transfer."

The Queen of Sol stepped out of the plate, with no more fuss than if she'd stepped through an ordinary doorway.

"Thank you, darling," she said to her husband. "I appear to be intact. And you?"

"I will be," he said, "when I can get my hands on a previrus backup. They've taken down the first-tier error correction. The damage is minor but . . . disconcerting."

"All right," she said brusquely. "Give me safe passage to Malu'i. For two."

Malu'i. Protector. The navy's flagship.

"Are we under attack?" Conrad asked stupidly. He'd fought a dozen battles in his life, and they were all different, all surprising. But they shared this characteristic: he never really believed they were happening until he was in the thick of it, fighting for his life or his freedom or for some empty principle he'd barely remember afterwards.

"Play message Doxar twenty-one," the queen said to the apartment walls, instead of answering Conrad directly. "Full exchange, half duplex."

A hollie window appeared near the fax, and in it the face of an Eridanian man. There was no mistaking the Eridanians, for their heads were overlarge and overround, their dark eyes glaring out from beneath bushy white eyebrows and thick manes of curly silver hair. Their skins were as pale as chalk, except in the shadows and creases, where they were as black as coal. This was a trick that helped them radiate excess body heat, but it made them look . . . exaggerated. False. Like comic drawings designed to highlight particular emotions: here is HAPPY! Here is ANGRY! Here is FILLED WITH THE ENNUI OF TOO MANY CENTURIES IN A CAVE! Their small size--about two-thirds the height of a natural human--only exaggerated the effect.

This particular Eridanian was ANGRY.

"I am Doxar Bagelwipe," he said self-importantly, "of Humanitarium Perdition. Y'all poseth unacceptably, y'hear? We will not end our travail in forgettable parking orbits, for yet more centuries of unlife. To prove the sincerity of our conviction, we assail your teleport network. Consider it declared: no less than full sanctuary is acceptable, for all persons stored cold or warm aboard this vessel."

Next, Queen Tamra's own image replaced Doxar's. "Captain," she said calmly, "the people of Eridani will be resettled in the Queendom of Sol as space and resources permit. Your impatience is understandable, and in sympathy with your plight we're doing all we can to prepare new worlds for habitation. But this sabotage is counterproductive, and can only hurt your standing with the people of Sol. Please reverse it immediately, and proceed to your designated orbit."

Doxar reappeared then, for his message was interactive, and carried with it the full force of his personality. Why wait for the speed of light, when you can send your image to negotiate in your stead? Particularly when your position is inflexible, and no persuasion can hope to alter it. "Unacceptable. We declare the right to escalate," Doxar's image said, and then winked out.

Damn.

The king said to Conrad, "If they actually enter the Queendom, right now and all at once, they'll destabilize the economy. We must delay them. Meanwhile, my boy, you and I are traveling to Lune, and thence to Callisto and Europa. Just in case things go astray, we've got to get as much water onto that dustball of yours as we can in the next seven weeks."

When Perdition was due to arrive. With guns blazing?

Said Queen Tamra to Governor Xmary, "You captained a starship for hundreds of years. You know how starship crews think, how they react. And you have actual combat experience, correct? You fought a space battle."

"Once," Xmary protested.

"Not a police impoundment," the queen pressed. "Not a simulation or staged maneuver, but a to-the-death battle against a determined and capable opponent. From the forces of my son, King Bascal."

"Once!"

"That's once more than anyone else, Governor. You won the fight, correct? You survived, and your opponent didn't."

"That's accurate, yes."

"Then come with me," the queen said. And to Bruno: "Is the fax machine ready?"

"It is."

"Then kiss your husband good-bye," the queen instructed Xmary. "Your respective duties may keep you apart for some time. I wish I could say how long."

Conrad reeled. Was this truly happening? Was Xmary being drafted right in front of his eyes? Sent off to fight for her life in the wilds of space?

"I--," he said, but nothing else came out.

"Don't," Xmary told him, turning into his arms, putting a finger to his lips. She looked scared and somewhat dazed, but fully in control of herself. "You know how these things go. All we need is a show of force, then a show of compassion, and then a get-to-know-you coffee in the observation lounge. I'll see you soon." She kissed him then as he had rarely been kissed, in a thousand years of life.

"Be careful," he said, clutching her in his arms, unwilling to let go. But she extricated herself anyway, and answered, "Always."

She nodded to the queen then, who was kissing her own husband good-bye. Then the two of them--the strongest women Conrad had ever known--stepped into the fax plate and vanished.

What happened next is history, in all the great and small senses of the word, for it is written in the Ballad of Conrad Mursk, "They faxed from the house / the queen and his spouse / and he never saw neither no more."

book three

twilight over astaroth

chapter fifteen

in which the plight of a
world is examined

"In light of your past service to the nation of Imbria," says the woman named Danella Mota, "we are prepared to forgive the excesses of your men on the ramparts today."

They are deep within the city of Timoch, on the hard-pressed world of Lune, where three women--with shadowy Eridanian faces and six-fingered Sirian hands--apparently rule over humanity's strongest remaining nation-state.

"The Furies are most generous," Radmer answers, with a bow of the head that is surely calculated for maximum ambiguity. Is he being surly or ironic? Is he partly or wholly sincere? Bruno can't tell.

A partial answer comes when the second woman, Pine Chadwir, admonishes him, "That term is no longer considered polite, General. We are, as always, the Board of Regents of the Imbrian Nation."

"Ah, yes. My failing memory is abetted by your grandmother's sense of humor in these matters, Madam Regent."

But "Furies" is a good nickname for these three old women, who command a quarter of Lune's surface from this very room, the Silver Chamber. They are seated on a dais ringed by aides and pages, scribes and whispering advisors, but the room's three primary lights--halide-filament vacuum bulbs, Bruno thinks--point straight down at them, with a smaller, dimmer bulb casting a cone of yellow around himself and Radmer.

Behind them, the Olders Sidney Lyman and Brian Romset--who were permitted to accompany Radmer as bodyguards--exude an air of angry but fearless distrust. And in counterpoint, a dozen Dolceti guards in canary-yellow uniforms loom quietly in the shadows behind the dais, looking grudgingly respectful but ready for anything. Dead before you hit the ground, villain, their looks seem to say, though if it came to that Bruno could probably take down one or two of them himself before succumbing to any serious injury.

But all things considered, the chamber is exceedingly quiet, and the lighting makes it seem dreamlike as well, and the seated ladies mythic in proportion and demeanor. All they need is a spindle, loom, and scissors to complete the effect. But out of courtesy they speak the Old Tongue--essentially Queendom-standard English--and Radmer, with a different kind of courtesy, does the same. That makes them seem more human, and anyway Bruno is well familiar with the psychological tricks a leadership can employ to enhance its mystique, its air of natural authority. The Queendom was founded on these principles, long before he'd been drafted as its king.

"Do enlighten us, Radmer, with your reason for this accostment," says the third Fury, whose name Bruno can no longer remember from the introductions. Sprain? Spirulina? Something like that. "It may surprise you to learn we've an invasion to repel."

"The very reason I'm here," Radmer tells her, "for I watched Nubia fall to the Glimmer King's armies. I know very well what Imbria faces in the coming weeks."

"Our guards report you've distinguished yourself in clashes against the enemy."

"Aye, madam, on Aden Bluff and outside your gates, and in Nubia before that."

"We also had a string of reports out of Highrock. That you supervised the construction of a very large catapult? Using the Tillspar bridge as its lath?"

"That's so, madam."

"And this catapult is capable of flinging a hollow canister completely off the planette?"

"Not to escape velocity, madam. The capsule falls back again unless its rockets are fired. But yes. The VLC can also bombard any point on Lune, though its accuracy is measured in kilometers, and its firing time in days. If we knew the location of the Glimmer King's palace--assuming such a place exists at all--then with a hundred shots we might have a hope of hitting it. But I doubt we'll be granted the time such an experiment would require."

"Indeed," says Pine Chadwir. Then she pauses, looking apologetic, as though her next words will sound insane. "But one of our agents observed you climbing into such a canister, being fired at the heavens and not returning during the three days of his observation. Is there any truth to this?"

"Aye, madam. The Imbrian astronomer Rigby believed there was someone living on Varna."

"The slowest moon. And also the most distant?"

"Correct, although there was a farther moon in days gone by. And since traffic to Varna ended with the Shattering, any population there was likely to include Olders from the Iridium Days or before. Specifically, Rigby was of the opinion that the group was small--possibly a single individual."

Understanding blooms in the eyes of the Furies. "This man?" They point at Bruno, studying him closely for the first time.

"I'm called Ako'i," Bruno tells them. Not a name but a title: Professor.

This prompts some surprise on their parts. "He can speak!" And this is no idle exclamation, for Bruno passed the time on Varna as a kind of sleepwalker, repeating the same few tasks over and over again, day in and day out. Unaware of the passing centuries--unaware of anything, including himself. Beyond his first few weeks on that neutronium island, he can't remember a single thing until Radmer's arrival.

Indeed, until a few hours after that, for the sleepwalking did not immediately subside. He had spoken--even held fragmentary conversations--but either his brain's neocortex had not fully engaged, or else its hippocampus had been sluggish about laying down new memories. "Neurosensory dystropia," they called it. Or "maroon sickness," or "zombitis," which wasn't even a proper word. In extreme cases it was irreversible.

In declining that final trip from Varna to the chaos of an overpopulated Lune, Bruno had been trying, in a way, to draw an end to his long life. But he hadn't really understood what awaited him. Now the image makes him shudder: the "indeceased," wandering like animate ghosts, wearing grooves in the countryside with their feet. According to Radmer, whole villages had been known to succumb, going blankly through the motions of life until their crops eventually failed and they starved.

"I can reason," he assures the Furies. "Though perhaps not well."

They study him some more, furrowing and clucking. "Radmer, dear, this is a season of ill omens. The sun has been kicked twice, fair Nubia has fallen, and rather than fleeing, or pledging your sword to our defense, you've brought us an old man. Your ways have always been strange--since the world's very creation, we're told--but this is truly baffling. What do you seek from us?"

"The sun has been kicked?" Bruno repeats, wondering what such a thing could mean.

"A metaphor for eclipse," says Radmer. "Murdered Earth transits the sun, which appears to explode and then re-form. Lesser kickings occur when one of the other murdered planets passes in front of something."

"Ah," Bruno says, for he has seen that sight himself, long ago. To the Furies he says, "But that's a matter of clockwork, yes? Not an omen, but a happenstance of whirling bodies."

"So our ministers inform us," says the oldest of the Furies, as though it's a matter of little consequence. "But we face extinction. Nubia has been stripped of metal, and is it coincidence that the metal armies which razed it have since doubled in size? The reports we have from that lost republic are as terrifying as they are sparse. Mass starvation, mass enslavement. In the face of that, everything is an omen."

"We're here to help," Radmer assures her. "This man is possibly the oldest living person, and his knowledge of Queendom technology is unsurpassed, easily dwarfing my own."

"That's wonderful," says Danella Mota, "except that we have no Queendom technology. The city's last wellstone is buried in the dumps, for we were unable to make it work."

"If that's so," Bruno says to her, "you should exhume it and allow me to make blitterstaves of the material. It isn't difficult, and it would improve your defensive position enormously. With care, every square meter of rubble can be fashioned into twenty weapons."

This comment gains him the Furies' full attention.

"Ah, yes," says Radmer, though surely the idea is obvious to anyone who has been both an architect and a general. And a matter programmer.

"Don't patronize me," Bruno tells him. Then, to the Furies: "How much intact material can you salvage? The deconstruction needs to have been performed in particular ways, to avoid damage to the nanofiber weave that produces the pseudoatoms."

That goes a bit over their heads, but they are persuaded nevertheless, and in short order a courier is sent out to order an immediate excavation of the city dumps.

"So," says Pine Chadwir to Radmer, with half an eye on Bruno, "this ancient vessel still holds a bit of wine. You have our thanks, General. Does he do anything else?"

Radmer forms an embarrassed half smile. "Actually, I had something quite different in mind, and with your permission I'll soon remove this man from Timoch altogether."

"Yes?" says the eldest Fury skeptically. "Our would-be savior? And where exactly would you bring him?"

"The Stormlands," Radmer says. And everyone in the room seems to gasp in surprise, then slowly nod in agreement.

Soon they're in a different room whose decorations consist mainly of dead robots crucified on the walls. The human beings--and the Olders--are all standing around a table whose surface is a map of the country. It's rather misleading, Bruno thinks, because Imbria covers almost half of the northern hemisphere, and stretching it out flat produces eerie distortions in the squozen moon's once-familiar features. Fortunately, a large globe hangs above the table for reference, and another one sits on the floor behind it in a two-axis mechanical spin platform that would have been perfectly at home in the Old Girona of Bruno's youth.

The table is dotted with chessmen--mirror-shiny for the Glimmer King's armies, blue for Imbria's, and red for the tattered, fleeing remnants of the armies of Nubia. The planette's Olders are apparently too few and scattered to merit chessmen of their own, but if they ever find their way to this table, Bruno has no doubt they will be some weary shade of gray.

Anyway, at a glance he can see just how badly the war is going; two southern cities--labeled Renold and Bolo--are staring already into the faceless faces of the approaching enemy, and if the robots march by night as well as by day (and why wouldn't they?), the sites will be under siege by midnight, and likely demolished before sunrise, just over sixty hours from now. These sunset rays slanting through the slatted windows might be the last daylight the two cities will ever see.

Meanwhile, a third branch of the robot army is streaming northward between the two, aiming for the city of Tosen and, one hundred fifty kilometers beyond it, the capital city of Timoch itself. The Imbrian Sea--a bit larger than in Bruno's day--fills a basin just west of Timoch, stretching northward to the Mairan Shelf and west to the Stark Hills in a rough triangle three hundred kilometers on a side, covering the middle third between the planette's equator and the north pole.

And chillingly, there are at least a dozen smaller silver chessmen--the Glimmer King's scouting patrols--scattered all the way from Imbria's border to the southern shore of its sea. The only saving grace--the only thing that keeps it from looking like certain doom--is the fact that the bulk of the robot army is still in Nubia, in Lune's southern hemisphere, and does not appear on this map at all. But even Bruno can sense the mass of them down there, implicit in the northward-streaming formations.

"How accurate are these unit positions?" he murmurs to Radmer.

"Very. Cover the nation in hundred-kilometer circles and you'll find a watch tower on the highest points of each, with dozens more running through the passes and lowlands in-between. During daylight hours, everything that moves is tracked with great precision."

"How do the towers communicate?"

"Semaphore," Radmer says, as though this should be obvious. "It's a quaternary code loosely based on DNA sequences. With properly trained crews, their data rates approach two digits per second, including parity and checksum bits on every tenth flag. It can even send pictures."

"Hmm." Not a stupid way to handle things, though a lot of skill and muscle would be required. Something similar had been tried in Bruno's native Catalonia, before the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had ended that nation-state's flirtation with things medieval. But he seems to recall that effort being abandoned in favor of an Old Modern maser network.

And it's interesting, he thinks, that Imbria has electricity but no sign of lasers or computers. No telegraphs, no wireless. Its leaders, advised at least occasionally by real astronomers, have a rough understanding of the heavens they cannot touch. And they know what wellstone is, though they lack the equipment to produce it or the technical skill to program it.

Clearly they're not a stupid people. Bruno surprises himself with a sudden ache of sympathy for them, caught as they are in some bizarre remnant of Queendom-era intrigue which they surely can't understand. Not because they're incapable, but because no one has bothered to explain it to them.

"Someone has revived an old fax machine," he announces to the room, when a lull in the conversation permits. The Imbrians fall quiet at that, and suddenly all eyes are on him. Obligingly, he steps over to a crucified robot--one of a dozen mounted around the room's circumference. He points to the shattered iron box on the side of its head. "As you might guess, this annex, this junction box for external wiring, is not a part of the original design. It's been soldered on--here and here--using aluminum, which adheres well to both silicon and impervium. And while the skin may look flawless it isn't really. It's been scratched and filled, you see? Even impervium, eleven times harder than diamond, will flake and abrade with sufficient mistreatment. There's a thin layer of resin in every small groove; this hull has been expertly polished."

He moves to another robot. God, they look so familiar. So harmless! "But see here? The same welds. The same scratches. These robots are of Queendom design, crudely modified but otherwise well cared for. And they're all identical. The fax machine has a buffer, you see--a kind of memory of its last few operations. Someone found the fax with its libraries scrambled, but the image of a robot stored intact in its buffers. A household robot, ordinarily harmless. And this Glimmer King--surely an Older of great technical skill--cut it open and jumpered its wiring. This is no small feat, for the Asimov protocols are buried deep in the wellstone itself, and are designed to reconfigure around any casual tampering. But he accomplished the task, and put the robot back together, and fed it into the fax again, to be duplicated and reduplicated.

"But as you've surmised, he needs metal. Gold and aluminum are best, but almost any conductor will do--wellstone is anywhere from twelve to twenty percent metal by volume. The rest is all silicon and oxygen, easily obtained from even the most sterile of soils. He has a small quarry nearby, you can bet on that. But not a mine, not a refining operation. Why bother, when he can loot the hard-won fruits of civilization instead?"

"Why?" someone demands. "Why would he do such a thing?"

"To conquer the world," Bruno answers simply. "To smash it and remake it according to some blueprint of his own. The lives of his victims are incidental; he's chasing some mirage of imagined ‘greatness.'"

"Blueprint?" someone else asks, in thickly accented tones.

"Sorry, a . . . a map. A design. An image of how things will appear when he's finished. The intermediate stages are nothing to him; your suffering is meaningless. He's got his eyes on the future, not the present."

"You sound as though you know him," Pine Chadwir says, not quite accusingly.

"I know his type," Bruno answers. "Given the constraints on your life span and population size, such individuals may be rare on Lune. But they used to crop up with fair regularity. When exactly did these troubles begin?"

"It's difficult to say with any certainty," Radmer answers, jumping ahead of the Furies and their attendants in a way Bruno would have found rude. He walks to one of the globes, spins it ass-up, and points his finger at a region marked in orange, which includes the south pole and over half the former Farside. "Here, in the high desert hills of Astaroth, there have been robot sightings for fifteen, maybe twenty years. They were dismissed until two years ago, when it became clear that Astaroth had ceased to exist as an organized nation.

"This may sound odd, but the actual date of its collapse is unknown. Astaroth had always been a sparsely populated country, with internal squabbles and few diplomatic ties to the rest of Lune. Most of its people just disappeared, quietly, and by the time refugees started finding their way to Nubia, why, the Nubians' days were already numbered."

Bruno nodded, processing that. "And where does the name Glimmer King come from? These refugees?"

"According to them, it comes from the robots themselves. I've never encountered the story in anything but fragments. He has . . . other names as well."

Bruno looks him in the eye and nods very slightly, acknowledging that. There have been rumors, yes.

"Robots have been known to speak," says Danella Mota. "They addressed the Senatoria Plurum in City Campanas, for example, shortly before sacking it and killing the people inside. Only a few escaped with their lives, so I can't help wondering what the robots said, or why they bothered. It seems capricious, especially for machines."

"Only because you don't see the plans that drive them," Bruno tells her. "But these can be deduced through careful study, and usually are. No one has ever conquered the whole human race--not without a majority vote in favor."

"You have an air of comfortable authority about you," says the eldest Fury to Bruno. "Mr. . . . Ako'i, is it? So does General Radmer, but he defers to you, not the other way round."

"I was once a teacher," Bruno answers. Which is certainly the truth, if not the whole.

"Hmm," she says, unconvinced. "I suppose this ‘fax machine' is like a mirror? Its reflections are made solid somehow, but the device itself can be smashed?"

"Certainly."

"And this is your plan? To find it and break it?"

Here Bruno comes up short, because no plan has been explained to him in anything but the vaguest terms. The "Stormlands" are visible on the map as a gray oval smear, perhaps eighty kilometers wide and a hundred and eighty tall, near Imbria's uninhabited southeast corner. The province is marked with the name "Shanru." But no such place had existed in his day. A land of permanent storm? Why would he go there? What would he accomplish?

His ignorance seems to disappoint the eldest Fury. To Radmer she says, "Will you elaborate on your plans, General? You can risk your neck in the Stormlands without our blessing. You're here because you need something."

To this Pine Chadwir adds, "If you can fling yourself all the way to Varna, then surely you can fling yourself directly into the Stormlands' eye. Assuming it has one."

"It does, Madam Regent," Radmer says. "I've seen it myself, from high above the world. A fifteen-kilometer hole in the clouds. Its western edge, against the Blood Mountains, is piled high with sand dunes, but near the center I saw a crisscross of straight, dark lines."

"Manassa?" asks the eldest Fury, her eyes glittering in the sunset.

"The fabled city itself," Radmer agrees, "exactly as Zaleis the Wanderer claimed. He really did make it in and out."

"And so you believe his other claims," says Danella Mota, "his ‘Dragon of Shanru' and his ‘engines and objects of great antiquity and wholly mysterious purpose.'"

"There were no dragons in this world when it was new, madam. Whether any have been created since then I couldn't say. But aye, the rest of it I believe. And this man, who calls himself Ako'i, is better qualified than any living person to bring these engines and objects back to life. The Glimmer King's robots are not invincible, just strong and numerous. With proper equipment on the human side, it should be possible to defeat them."

"Possible," says the eldest Fury with a slow nod. "Well, that's something. But what do you need from us?"

"Transportation," says Radmer. "Armed escort. A safe-conduct passport which your turnpike guards will accept. The enemy will have taken my capsule by now, and even if I had a spare, landing inside the eye of a storm would be risky indeed. Hiking in on foot, as Zaleis did, is more likely to succeed. I've studied his path, which appears to be the best compromise between weather and terrain. I believe we can duplicate it."

"We cannot spare troops, Radmer," says Danella Mota warily.

"I need only a few. A dozen Dolceti, perhaps."

The room explodes at that remark. "Dolceti! A dozen! This Older is as mad as all the rest."

"Your request is denied," says a harried-sounding Pine Chadwir. "You ask the one thing we cannot possibly grant, in this hour of greatest need."

"Then I'll take my leave," says Radmer, "and return to the veils of Echo Valley to await this world's destruction. I would stand and die with you, madam, if I thought it would do any good. But if civilization must die again, I prefer to be among friends."

Now the room falls silent, and fearful, and all eyes are on the Furies, wondering what they'll say next. It's the eldest who speaks first, and her tone is wistful and quiet. "They say you built the world, Radmer, as a carpenter might build a house."

"The world was here long before me, madam. All I did was remodel it."

"So. Not quite a god, then. But something powerful nonetheless. And still afraid! You've traveled far on our behalf--to Varna and back."

And here Bruno catches a glimpse of the young Conrad Mursk in the weathered features of Radmer. "I've traveled much farther than that, Madam Regent. To the stars themselves, where this sunlight won't arrive for years."

"You're very old," she says, considering that. "And wise, and strange. And very kind--or foolish--to offer this peculiar assistance to us, who barely know you. Whether it help or not, it surely cannot make things any worse. I give you twenty Dolceti, General, and the blessing of the Board of Regents."

chapter sixteen

in which a fateful journey
is undertaken

"One of the diamond pillars buckled," Radmer is telling Bruno, "and the neutronium plate above it slipped almost to the center of Lune. The plates are flat hexagons, right? But at the surface, the region of depressed gravity is more nearly circular. And with mountain ranges on either side, you can't even really see that. It ends up being more of an oval."

"A permanent low-pressure system," Bruno muses. "A permanent thunderstorm."

"More nearly a hurricane. It brings no joy to the region, no refreshment. Only a hard cleansing. And when it happened, when the pillar buckled and the plate fell and the ground above it cracked and sank, the shock waves struck every fault and fissure in the whole damned planette, releasing gigatons of stored energy."

"This was the ‘Shattering,' that looms so large in these people's history?" Bruno asks.

Radmer confirms it. "Half the population died in the first few hours, and within a week no two bricks were left standing, anywhere in the world. Lune was the jewel of post-Queendom civilization, and without it things just . . . fell apart. Again. No more rockets, no heavy industry of any kind. It's only in the past two centuries that there's been any real consolidation. And frankly I'd still call this a borderline dark age, even without the war."

Bruno weighs this against his conscience, probing for the guilt he ought to feel. Surely this Shattering is another calamity he could have prevented. But as the two of them step through an archway and into a large courtyard of grass and concrete and grimly drilling soldiers, he glances up at the sky. The sun has finally gone down, but the clouds are aflame, dwarfing the works of Man beneath them. And he finds he can no longer be angry with himself for honest mistakes, or for living through to this moment.

Still, more from a sense of duty than anything else he says, "You and I have a lot of bodies at our feet."

"Aye, well. At least there is a Lune. We can take credit for that."

"There'd still be an Earth, if not for the Nescog. If not for me, personally."

But Radmer just shrugs. "Something would have killed it, sooner or later. It's the way of things. The important question is whether it was good while it lasted."

Bruno, though horrified, can't help but chuckle at that. "You've become a deathist, lad. Who'd've thought?"

"Aye," says Radmer, cracking a feeble grin of his own. "A vegetarian, too, for in this life the meat comes from creatures. They have faint little hopes and dreams of their own, and I've made war on them long enough. Why should some chicken lose everything, to add another day to this?" He waves contemptuously at his own flesh.

"Would you hasten your own story's end?" Bruno probes. Among men as old as they, it isn't a rude question at all. "Is that why you became a soldier?"

But Radmer dismisses that notion just as contemptuously. "I've always been a soldier, a fighter, intolerant of oppression. I fought you, once."

"So you did," Bruno muses, remembering back to those days, when Conrad Mursk and Bascal Edward had been inseparable, and the problems of the world could be dismissed as mere childishness. It doesn't seem so long ago, really, and there's a sentiment the deathists would have an opinion about. Did the long years of his life count for so little? "Still, here we are. Side by side for a new war."

Radmer grunts. "I gave that up, too--soldiering. Really! With a fax-filtered body and three thousand years of dirty tricks, it was like shooting babies. Not a risk to myself at all. It was nothing a moral person could condone."

"But you'll fight robots," Bruno said.

"Aye, one last time. In my next life I'll be a farmer, bringing sustenance into the world."

Now there's an interesting thought. What will the resurrected Bruno do, if it turns out there's a future for him to do it in? Teach? Open a bistro, as his father had done long ago, in a land not so terribly different from this one? The idea seems bizarre, alien, tragically comic. But not impossible.

Any further rumination on the subject, though, is extinguished by the arrival of Bordi, the Dolceti Primus and Captain of the Timoch Guard.

"Where are your men?" he asks crisply, in the Old Tongue.

"Departed," says Radmer. "Returned to protect their own homes and families."

Well, yes, thinks Bruno, but not as easily as that. At the last, Sidney Lyman had resisted. "So, what, you're going to help the humans, be a hero, and we're dismissed?"

"You didn't even want to be here," Radmer told him. "I dragged you."

"Come with us," Lyman said urgently. "Or let us come with you. There's too few of us in the world, sir, to be scattering to the winds like this. We've got to hang together."

"I agree. Which is why you're needed back at Echo Valley."

There'd been more to it than that, but eventually Lyman and his followers had given up, realizing that their old commander simply wouldn't be responsible for them any longer, would not allow them into harm's way on his account. On the one hand it was a sorry way to repay their loyalty--with the barbed kindness of condescension. On the other hand, it was exactly what Bruno would have done in his place. If the world be doomed, well, let them salvage what they could. That's an order, soldier.

There are so many people he misses, people he loves but will never see again. If he could reach back and save even one of them--not just Tamra, but anyone--he'd do it in a heartbeat, whatever the cost. But here there are no such decisions for him to make. Here he's a relic, nothing more, and that's all right. He'll do his bit--or try, anyway--and fade back into the mists.

"It's just the two of you?" Bordi asks.

"Right," says Radmer. "And if it's all the same to you, I'll delegate all the logistics. Just get us to the Stormlands and back, before this city falls."

"Already working on it, General. Your timing is good; with the sun setting, the upslope winds will begin blowing in a few hours. Eastward, against the mountains. That will buy us a hundred kilometers right there. I'd advise you both to get some sleep beforehand."

"Why?" asks Radmer. "How are we traveling?"

"On the back of a flau," Bordi answers, in hard and mirthful tones.

This turns out to be a living creature, mostly hollow and filled with hydrogen. With the proportions of a Tongan royal pleasure yacht, the thing has a broad, flat back some fifteen meters wide and forty-five long, with a bulbous, vaguely ship-shaped body underneath. At the front, its mouth is surprisingly tiny, and surrounded by eyes and nostrils of alien design.

"It looks like a leviathan," Bruno says, referring to the largest of the multicellular creatures in the ocean of Pup, the marginally habitable world circling Wolf 359. The thought brings a pang to his heart, for the King of Wolf had been Edward Bascal Faxborn, an alternate version of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. King Eddie to his admirers, he'd been by all accounts a fair-minded ruler who had taken more closely after Bruno and especially Tamra.

And though he'd thought his grief long exhausted, Bruno finds that the thought of Tamra Lutui can still wrench his insides. Not just the coolly smiling Queen of Sol--though he misses her, too--but the twenty-year-old girl who'd gigglingly granted him the title of declarant in a room full of well-dressed strangers. And then philander, yes, a few months later--in her royal bedchamber, attended only by those dainty robots that looked more like ballerinas than like the later Palace Guards.

"It was a leviathan once," Radmer says, yanking Bruno back to the present. "But now it swims a sea of air."

And that's absurd, because the Wolfans had never managed a starship to return even their own miserable selves to Sol, much less a mindless, overgrown alien invertebrate. He says, "Was the genome transmitted over the Instelnet? Part of the intellectual property traffic?"

"It was, yes, during the late Queendom era. Eridani bought it from Wolf, and carried it here in their armadas' libraries. And since the four known life-bearing worlds were all seeded by the same primordial source, deep in the galaxy somewhere, it wasn't hard to insert that genome into a Terran yeast cell and convince it to grow. If you recall, the early Lunites were quite talented bioengineers."

"I don't recall it, no," says Bruno. "I was quite busy at that time, trying to save a bit of Earth. All in vain, as it turned out, but it was important to try."

Radmer muses for a moment before adding, "Those engineers had all the best equipment from the old Queendom, and all the best techniques from half a dozen colonies. And there was no law to stop them, not really. From the original genomes, of course, they began their customizations; the flau was only one project of hundreds."

The creature is ugly in the extreme, its lumpy, rubbery skin gleaming in the rainbow light of Murdered Earth. It doesn't seem to have much shape, either, though that might be more a function of its lying on the hard, flat pavement of the Timoch International Airport. In the water, with its fans and frills extended, the leviathan had always moved with the same slow, eerie beauty of sea creatures everywhere.

Heck, it probably still drifts in the seas of Pup, dreamily unaware of the solid little beings that came and went in the caverns of its world's rocky highlands. Unlike the Eridanians, the Wolfans could at least go outside, if not exactly live there. They could explore their ocean, could sting its residents with probes and biopsy needles. A few humans had even been eaten by leviathans, and at least one man had been rescued alive, days later, after cutting through to an air sac and subsisting on the moisture of its walls. It was huge interstellar news at the time. But even that had scarcely seemed to register with the affected creature, which swam peacefully away in unhurried search of more cooperative meals.

Here, the "flau" has had metal rings driven through its body, with hemp and leather ropes strung through them, making it a kind of artifact, a ship, an old-fashioned beast of burden. A thing both owned and controlled, no longer free.

"This is how people travel?" he asks disapprovingly.

"When necessary," Radmer allows. "Though smaller groups would generally use a cloth balloon, and single individuals can still travel by glider. If they begin at sufficient altitude and ride the thermals skillfully, glider pilots have been known to circumnavigate the world."

This surprises Bruno only slightly, because the world is small, and the mountains of Lune tower much higher over its seas than the hills of Earth ever did, giving rise sometimes to very strong updrafts. Still, this place evokes a sort of continuous amazement in him, for what appears rustic--even primitive--at first glance, always turns out to be something more. Something clever, something optimized for the environment and the available resources. The absence of wellstone--indeed, of semiconductors in general--has pushed the Lunites to almost uncanny extremes of artistry and invention. And that makes it not so terribly different from the Queendom, which after all had hired an inventor as its king.

"Why not simply use a blimp?" he asks.

And Radmer counters, "Why not stay home? The flau can be a bit tricky--people have been known to fall off when they get the hiccups--but they know their own way. They're self-healing and self-balancing, and they almost never get hit by lightning. They just . . . go around the storms."

"General," says Bordi, striding toward them in the darkness. "The wind is shifting, so we'd best get aloft while we can. You two can lash your bags at the stern. Mind the steersman, though; put them exactly where he specifies, and no other place."

"Aye," Radmer acknowledges. "Thank you, Captain."

Two other people follow in Bordi's wake, and after a moment Bruno recognizes them as Natan and Zuq, the Dolceti who stood with him at the city gate, while the others ran off to battle.

"Good evening," he says to them, without any particular emphasis. And their reply, though less than enthusiastic, contains a good bit more deference than their earlier speech had. "It's Encyclopedia Man. Hello, sir. Apparently we're at your service."

"Not by choice, surely," he says, and they surprise him by denying it. "Now, now. Any ward of the Regents is a ward of the Order of Dolcet, and deserving the best protection. We volunteered and were accepted."

"Well," Bruno says, feeling a bit of human warmth stirring in the ancient hollows of his heart. "You have my gratitude, then."

"Up you go," says Zuq, grabbing a rope ladder and climbing upward, showing the way.

"After you," says Natan, with a valetlike gesture. Radmer and Bordi have gotten separated somehow--Bruno can see them heading up toward the flau's pinched little face--and he appears to be in the care of these two men once again. So he climbs the ropes himself, clambering past a network of rings and fishnet and flat leather straps.

The deck of the flau--if indeed that's the proper term--is a woven mat remarkably like the deck of a traditional Tongan catamaran, except that the bark it's fashioned from feels thicker and tougher, the strips much wider. All around it is a waist-high railing of something like bamboo--some light, stiff, hollow plant that looks gray under the night sky.

Immediately he's set upon by a bare-chested little Luner man wearing a vest and pants and cylindrical cap of supple brown leather. "Who's you?" the man demands in a thick New Tongue accent, and if the Dolceti have dispelled any notion of these "humans" being childlike or comical, this stocky, strutting, hypercephalic figure provides the counterpoint. "Older? Been y' on a flau before? Don' put tha down thar, foo!"

"Our steersman, Fander Kytu," Zuq explains, leaning easily against the railing, which for him is nearly chest-high. "Don't make him angry, or we'll have a long night of it. Be assured, he's the best in the world at what he does."

"Bag," says Fander, pointing to a netted-over heap near the deck's stern.

"I'll take it," says Natan, relieving Bruno of his few meager possessions. Except the sword and pistol the Furies gave him, which he keeps in leather scabbards at his side. The sword is not an air foil. In fact, it's not a real sword by any reasonable standard. It's made of opaque forged steel, for one thing, without so much as a diamond coating to stiffen it and hold its edge. And it doesn't vibrate or glow white-hot or anything, so if he's to cut anything with it he'll need to swing very hard indeed.

A blitterstaff would be much more the thing, but the Imbrians have made a mess of their remaining wellstone. Bruno was only able to salvage five staves from the entire façade, and they were of such unspeakable value here that to ask for one was to ask too much.

For that matter, the pistol they've given him would be little more than a toy in the Queendom. It fires thumbnail-sized metal bullets at only slightly more than the speed of sound! One well-placed shot is enough to fell a grown man, and a better-placed one will burst the junction box affixed to a robot's head, with generally terminal results. But he will have to aim it himself, by eye and by hand.

Still, he's seen too much of this world to want to travel it unarmed, and at the end of the day a blade is still a blade, and a projectile a projectile. He knows what to do with them.

"All board!" calls the steersman to the Dolceti, who are swarming up the rigging like they've been crewing such flights all their lives. Bruno catches sight of Radmer up by the bow. "Wind arising! Hook off! Cast by!"

And these commands--both to the Dolceti and to the minimal ground crew on the pavement below--suffice. Over the next half minute the mooring ropes are untied and the flau--swelling beneath them--becomes a thing independent of the ground on which it rests. Not airborne yet, but neither wholly in the thrall of gravity.

"She weighs only as much as a cow, if you can believe it," Zuq says conversationally. "Even with her bladders flat, old Natan and I here could practically carry her where we're going. But it is a fine thing, to ride the upslope on a winter's night, with the light of Murdered Earth shining down all around."

And as if in answer, the flau beneath them gives a final sigh of inflation, and lifts gently away from the planette.

It's funny, Bruno thinks, that a black hole should be surrounded by so much light. But the halo of Murdered Earth--shaped like the stem and cap of a toppled mushroom--captures the full glory of Sol and tears it apart into nested rainbows. The whole thing is larger and brighter than the full moon had been in the skies of Old Earth.

And while it moves across the heavens on a twenty-eight-day cycle, first approaching the sun and then opposing it, it does not go through "phases" per se. It's always bright, and washes out the sky so badly that he supposes most Lunites have never seen the Milky Way on anything but Earthless nights. There must be a lot of things they never see, and still more they've never heard or dreamed of.

Still, Lune's jagged landscape is eerily beautiful by this varicolored glow. And the stars--what he can see of them--are peaceful, and since the flau is drifting eastward on the wind itself, at the speed of the wind, the air around it gives an impression of stillness, even as the Earthlit roads and farms roll by underneath. Ahead is the Sawtooth, the first range of the very tall Apenine mountains. Beneath them lies Aden Plateau, where Bruno and Radmer first landed in their sphere of brass. Lord, that was only forty hours ago--less than a day by the Luner clock. But it seems a longer time. Weeks.

"Look," Zuq tells him at one point, "there goes another flau."

And indeed, there it is, spread out above them and slightly south, pulling ahead in a stronger wind. Bruno can see its downward-pointing sail, so very much like the frills of Pup's ever-slumbering leviathan. From this vantage he can get a sense of the creature's entire shape, its natural form, which looks neither tortured nor artificial. In fact, from a distance it's quite beautiful, an elegant blending of form and function.

He sees another one far below, its decks swarming with men and women in white jackets, singing some bittersweet melody. To celebrate their escape from the doomed city? To mourn it? But then, with a shock, he recognizes the faint tune itself: it's Bascal Edward's Song of Physics, which once sought to capture the essence of Queendom science in twenty memorable stanzas.

It's beautiful. Bruno can barely make out the words, but it seems to him that the song has been passed down intact, in something close to the Old Tongue. And suddenly the tears are flowing freely from his eyes, for whatever sins might weigh against his son's name, Bascal had risen to that particular challenge with all the grace and skill his genetics and training could muster. He'd been, if nothing else, a truly brilliant poet.

And of course any thought of Bascal is really a thought of Tamra, and this makes him leak saline just that much faster.

"Are you all right?" Natan asks him, coming over to lean his elbows on the railing. If Bruno tried that on this lightly rolling deck, he'd be pitched right over the edge the first time his attention wandered. But Natan is shorter, and surer of foot, and to Bruno's surprise he sounds more than professionally concerned.

Angry at himself, Bruno wipes his eyes on a sleeve. "This is what old men do, I'm afraid. The grief comes upon us in unguarded moments."

And Natan surprises him again by asking, "Was it real beautiful, your world? Your many, many worlds?"

"Indeed," Bruno confirms, as a fresh wave of tears rolls down his cheeks. "It sounds fatuous to say it, I realize, but there was more beauty and wonder than you can imagine. Did we even notice at the time? But your own world is beautiful, too. Promise me this, guardsman: take nothing for granted in your flicker-short lifetime. Appreciate."

"I will," says Natan. "I do. Life is a precious gift."

Still wiping his tears, Bruno chuckles at that. "An odd sentiment--don't you think?--for an elite soldier in a sorely endangered country. Shouldn't you be a Stoic?"

"Uh? I don't know that word."

"Er, silent. Economical in word and motion. Quietly suffering, to the point of simplemindedness."

"Ah." It's Natan's turn to chuckle. "We have no need of that, sir. That warrior mysticism, that claptrap. We don't have to be that sterile. We have the blindsight training."

Suddenly the wicker deck is creaking under bootsteps, and Radmer is there. "Ako'i?"

"I'm fine," Bruno assures him, to forestall any involved discussion. The concern in Radmer's voice is far less friendly, for Radmer's duty is not to a person or an ideal, but to the human race generally. It's a heavy burden, and admits little room for empathy or play. "Just reminiscing a bit."

"That can be dangerous. Have you slept enough? Some of the men are tying down, over there on center-deck."

"I'm not blind, Architect. I can see what's happening five meters from my elbow."

"Yes, well, you'll need your rest for the climb. After we land, we'll be ascending eight vertical kilometers in less than a hundred horizontally."

"What's our entry point?" asks Zuq, somewhere behind them all at the stern.

"Black Forest Pass," Radmer answers, with such portentous foreboding that even Bruno, who's never heard of the place, feels a shiver run through him at the prospect.

chapter eighteen

in which a harbinger of battle
is vindicated

On a road made of gravel and tar, the occurrence of frost heaves and potholes can hardly be surprising. Particularly as the altitude rises up above the permanent snow line, which in this country hovers around seven kilometers. Nor can the effects of hypoxia be overlooked, for on Lune the atmosphere halves in pressure with every five kilometers of height. In this, at least, the post-Queendom humans are resilient, for they can subsist on partial pressures of oxygen as low as thirty millibars, or one-fifth the sea-level norms of Old Earth. But their metabolism slows accordingly, dulling their reactions.

Thus, when the Dolceti's lead treader, piloted by a young man named Vick of Greening, hits a patch of invisible ice on a hairpin turn and continues straight on into a lethal rock face, no one is surprised. Indeed, the surprising thing is that the two treaders in his wake manage to brake to a halt without leaving the road or triggering a massive pileup. But just the same, Bordi orders a refueling halt and a chance for the Dolceti to stretch their legs, to catch their breath, to revive their senses on something more than the blackness of the forest pass.

"Shall we bury the body?" Bruno asks Natan, who is the most senior Dolceti he feels he actually knows.

"If you like," Natan replies, "but the Gillem patrols will do a better job of it when they find him. If the wolves don't find him first."

"Hmm. That seems a bit callous. Did you know him? Was he a friend?"

"We're all friends," Natan says with no particular emphasis. "I'll miss him. But I'm embarrassed for him, too. That stupid son of a pig has eaten the berry and taken the training."

"Had the reflexes and didn't use them," Zuq agrees, and there are murmurs of assent all around as the Dolceti walk their treaders off the road.

"Would you rather he'd died in battle?" Bruno asks, partly out of politeness and partly because he's genuinely curious. This isn't the reaction he would have expected.

And Natan compounds Bruno's confusion by laughing. "In battle? Against whom? Dying is sloppy."

"Er, perhaps if the odds were overwhelming?"

"All the more reason to duck out of the way, I'd say."

And with that, Bruno feels his first tingling of unease about these Dolceti. Is this bravado a part of their esprit de corps, or do they simply lack a background in failure? "Anyone can die," he cautions. "Everyone will, including yourself. If you fail to believe that, you'll never take the proper steps to protect yourself."

"You're telling me?" Natan says, unimpressed. "I took a vow, sir. I'm dead already. But I'm still effective, see? Still enjoying the pleasures of life. When I finally screw up, I don't want nobody being proud of me for it."

"I'll spit on your grave, sir," Zug offers, to general laughter.

But Natan answers, "You'll lose it before I do, boy. Even blind, you're too slow on the left. Got a lazy limbic, you." Then to Bruno he says, "Come on, I'll show you how to recharge your treader."

And this too is perplexing, because Natan is rolling his own vehicle into the trees. Is there some sort of fuel depot back there? In this nowhere spot on this nowhere road? But the man drops a kickstand, pulls out a pair of sharp metal spikes, and unreels a few meters of two-stranded, rubber-insulated cable. And finally Bruno understands.

"The trees store an electric charge."

"Course they do," Natan says, pulling out a mallet and driving the longer of the two spikes into the black-on-black trunk of the nearest specimen. "What do you think they're for?" He pounds in the shorter spike a hand's breadth below the longer one, and suddenly a yellow electric lamp is glowing where the handlebars of the treader meet in the center.

And now Bruno can picture it: a dielectric in the "bark" and "wood" which drives electrons inside the trunk and won't let them back out again. Or ions, perhaps, if the storage medium is chemical rather than capacitive, but either way they'd be separated by a barrier layer, which the longer spike is designed to penetrate. Half of it had been insulated with some sort of tar compound, yes? To keep it from shorting against the outer layer, which makes contact only with the shorter spike. Current flows, yes, but only through the storage battery of the treader.

The electrical systems of Timoch suddenly make more sense to Bruno. Is electricity a harvestable commodity here, like grain or walnuts? Is it shipped to the city in barrels and consumed directly, without transmission over long wires?

"How long does it take to charge?" he asks Natan, whose shrug is barely perceptible in the darkness.

"Depends on the tree, but most will charge a lot more batteries than a treader can carry away. And the more charge they have, the faster they deliver it. Call it half an hour, more or less."

Right away this tells Bruno that the trees and treader batteries are chemical in nature, because capacitors or superconductors could be slam-charged or discharged in mere fractions of a second. But they must be big, clever batteries to store so much energy, and the charging circuitry must be fairly sophisticated or the batteries would deteriorate in mere months. Yet again Bruno finds himself reassessing his opinions of Luner culture and technology.

So he hammers in his own spikes and goes off to look for Radmer, to obtain a complete explanation.

Unfortunately, Radmer isn't in a talking mood. He's found a laminated wooden helmet of the sort worn by civilian treader pilots.

"The force of the blow," he's saying to Bordi, and pointing to a gore-spattered gash across the laminate, "is considerable. The blood is still tacky. Bandits would hide such evidence, not leave it beside the road. There'll be bodies nearby, and not a scrap of metal anywhere near them."

"Alert for danger!" Bordi calls out to his men. "Search the area by fours!"

"The refugees?" Bruno asks.

Radmer looks up from the helmet and says nothing.

"Why would they target civilians?" Bruno presses. "What's to be gained? They can't be acting out of malice."

"Greed," Radmer corrects. "Civilians carry metal, and the robot scouts are careful not to leave witnesses behind. And if they were traveling on the road we'd've heard the alert drums; there'd be semaphore towers dropping off the network left and right. The patrol must have been traveling north, just cutting across the pass, and these people were simply unlucky. Wrong place at the wrong time. With a rich haul the robots would have turned back to the south, to deliver it to some Nubian foundry, or maybe take it all the way back to Astaroth. We don't really know what they do with it, except that their numbers swell in proportion with the tonnage they cart away."

"They're feeding a fax machine," Bruno says, eyeing a little termite mound beside the road. "Nothing else makes sense, and anyway it's a fine, cheap way to conquer the world. To raze it, to impose a viewpoint upon it and build it afresh. If you had the machine, I daresay you'd be tempted to try a stunt like this yourself. All they need is metal."

While he speaks, Bruno keeps his eyes on the termite mound. What do these creatures live on, he wonders, here in this solar-tree desert? He crouches to watch them streaming in and out of their nest, but in the darkness he can't see what, if anything, they're carrying. To feed themselves, to swell their ranks. To fill the planette to the very brink of its termite-carrying capacity. He's impressed that they continue working in this total darkness, but given the trees, he supposes it might not be much brighter during the day.

"And it's a bad sign," he continues, "to find scouts this high, this far north. How many patrols are in these mountains right now? How long before they identify us as a strategic threat, as opposed to a merely tactical one?"

"These robots got eyes," volunteers one of the Dolceti. "Not in their faces, maybe, but they see things."

And Bruno says, grimly, "Perhaps more than you think. Even if these termites were natural, it would be a trivial exercise to reprogram their colonies to serve as sensor networks."

"Well," says Radmer, "aren't you a barrel of laughs?"

From the forest comes a strange cry: Thawt! Thawt!

"The owls seem to think so," Bruno says dryly. But Radmer and the searching Dolceti tense up at the sound, looking around nervously.

"What is it?" Bruno asks.

"A thrat," says Bordi, his eyes on the forest.

"A threat?"

"A thrat," Radmer corrects. "A sort of bird you find sometimes in the solar-tree forests, or the pine barrens. There it is. Do you see?"

Bruno looks where Radmer is pointing, and where the black of forest meets the deep, dark blue of sky he can just barely make out an avian form atop the cone point of one of the trees. Its beak is raised up toward the stars, its wings outstretched.

Thwat? Thwat?

"Is it dangerous?"

"No," says Radmer, "but its wings are laced with nerves so sensitive . . . well, people say it can read minds."

"Ah. I see. And can it really?"

"I'm not sure. They do seem to know when they're being hunted. Try pointing a weapon at one; you'll find it gone before you've even finished thinking. For the princes of the Second Dynasty, to bring home a live thrat was considered the ultimate quest. The logic being, it would only come to you if there was genuine kindness in your heart--a thing that couldn't be faked."

"And did they?"

"Eh?"

"Come to these princes. Did a prince ever capture a thrat, and become a king?"

"Once," Radmer says distractedly. "King Minor of Daum. He was a really good guy. Funny, and very strong. Tried to make a sort of lie detector out of it, but it looked so sad in its cage, he finally released it. It's still on the family crest, though."

"All right, so," Bruno says, beginning now to lose patience, "if this bird is harmless, then why are we so tense all of a sudden?"

ThooRAT! ThooRAT!

"Because it drinks the blood of corpses," Radmer says evenly, his eyes on the blank wall of forest. "With a taste for adrenaline and the stink of fear, it's the harbinger of battle. In the opinion of that bird, Sire, someone is about to die."

"Oh. Well." Bruno's weapons are of the usual sort: a sword and pistol, some glue bombs, and a stout metal rod for, in theory, holding an enemy outside of sword-thrust range. He takes quick stock of them, and finally draws the pistol.

Just in time, as it turns out; the robots burst through the trees, swarming across the road like a troupe of whirring, clicking ballerinas. Before he knows it, Bruno is firing wildly, then firing more carefully as a robot engages a Dolceti just a few meters away from him. His bullet misses its target--the iron box on the side of the robot's head--and clanks off its superreflective neck without leaving a mark.

Then the glue bombs are flying, splattering in sticky masses that trip and snare the robots but slide right off human flesh. And the guns are popping, and the swords and clubs are swinging, and the air foils are flickering in the darkness. Men call out to each other, and Bruno finds himself face-to-face with a robot attacker. He's fought robots before, and feels no particular fear as he whirls the iron bar into play and strikes for the side of the thing's head. The box! Hit the box! But his aim is as worn-out as the rest of his ancient body; he misses by inches, and he senses the blow wasn't hard enough anyway, to do more than dent the metal.

He isn't afraid, no, but he's disappointed. The robot's sword is coming around now, and he has no way to block it except by throwing an arm up over his head. Will it be enough? Will he live to see the Stormlands, or the ancient city hidden within? Will he not confront the mistakes and misdeeds of his past?

The razor-sharp sword strikes his arm with the force of a pile driver, shearing right through the skin and the outer layer of fibrediamond and cutting into the muscle beneath. He feels the bone chip, and his strength is insufficient to keep the sword from continuing downward, to ring painfully against his Imbrian army helmet. The shock leaves him dazed, but a part of him is swinging the bar around anyway, with all the strength his good arm can muster. It isn't much, but it pushes the robot back for a moment, delaying the final, killing blow.

And then Zuq is there with a hard body slam to the robot's impervium hull, and Bordi is ducking beneath the whirling sword blade and stabbing directly into the box with the diamond tip of an air foil. The robot tries to dodge, to parry, but the void in the middle of the weapon simply baffles it. The point digs in, punching through the thin sheet of iron, and the robot is falling away in a kind of seizure.

And that's it. The battle is over. The ground is littered with twitching robots and severed robot limbs.

"Ako'i!" says Bordi, looking at Bruno with considerable alarm. To someone else he says, "Throw a tourniquet around that shoulder! Lose the arm, not the man!"

"Excuse me," Bruno tells him, collapsing down onto his rump. A tourniquet won't help, he wants to say. The arm isn't severed, just mauled, and what it really needs is to have the edges of the wound sewn back together. His body will do the rest, knitting skin and bone and muscle with better-than-human efficiency. The fibrediamond will not grow back, alas, and the bone is unlikely to heal perfectly around its dented brickmail sheathing. He'll have a permanent scar, a permanent ache. But with proper first aid, amazingly enough, he and his arm will both survive.

He can't get the words out, though, because his pain receptors are functioning perfectly, and no matter how wonderfully reinforced his skull might be, the brain inside it remains a fragile pudding of delicate bioelectric tendrils. It's also reinforced, and not given to internal bleeding, but just the same he's dazed, torpid. His bell has been rung.

Fortunately, Radmer is there in another few seconds, and takes charge of the medical response. Bruno watches with dizzy detachment as a needle and thread are worked through the injury, lacing it together. His eyes are inspected with lights, his reflexes tested.

"You'll live," Radmer pronounces finally. "But it's going to hurt for a day or two."

"Noted," Bruno says muzzily.

"You're going to have to ride, I'm afraid. If we carry two on a treader, it'll slow us down."

"I understand. I'll muddle through. These . . . these Dolceti are very fast, aren't they? The best fighters in the world."

"You didn't fare so badly yourself," Bordi says, with some grudging cousin of admiration. "I thought they'd killed you. The moment that robot stepped in front of you I said to myself, ‘That's it. He's dead.' But you actually hit the thing, twice."

"It was in my way," Bruno said, trying to make a joke of it. Then, more seriously, "Has anyone got some water? Fighting really takes it out of you. I've lived a long, long time, but I'm not sure I've ever been quite this thirsty before."

Someone hands him a bottle, and he drinks from it greedily, trying to slow the rasp of his breathing so he won't choke. Finally he says to Radmer, "So there. Your thrat-bird was wrong."

"Not at all," Radmer says grimly, pointing to a heap on the road which Bruno had taken for a pile of oil-stained rags. But on closer inspection he can see the "oil" spreading in a pool, and a pair of pointy boots sticking out of the heap. It's Parma, the mission mother. Minus the top of her head.

"Sloppy," someone notes, in tones of mild embarrassment. "You can see she was half a step too close."

chapter nineteen

in which a great gulf is spanned

The long night just keeps on getting cooler, and as the road climbs higher and higher into the thin mountain air, the last traces of Imbria's temperate winter fall away. Not all of the Dolceti had started off the journey in riding leathers, but before setting off from the scene of the battle they'd all zipped up, and before long they were stopping again to throw vests and parkas over the leathers, and mitten-tops over the fingers of their gloves. Progress slows, and slows again as the slipstream turns to icy daggers.

"Cold enough?" Zuq asks Bruno at one point, and in his addled state, with his face half-frozen beneath a muffle of soft cloth, Bruno can only manage a grunt in reply.

Finally, as the solar trees peter out into scraggly tundra and then bare rock, it actually becomes possible to see the semaphore towers, which roll by every few kilometers. It must be cold duty manning these stations, Bruno thinks, though not nearly as cold or wearying as the long ride between them.

Finally, Bordi calls another halt. "It would be nice to sleep in Highrock," he says to Radmer. "But we're cold and tired already. Let's get some rest and then regroup for the final push across the summit."

Radmer carries a pocket watch--a sort of mechanical contraption for ticking off the hours and minutes of the day. Or the night; its hands and numerals glow with the phosphorescent green of radium. He makes a show of checking it now, and as he pops the cover open it casts his face in a sickly light. "Five hours, Captain. No more than that."

And Bordi answers, "The general is most kind."

So they make camp, and Natan shows Bruno how to unroll his bivvy, which is a thing that owes its ancestry to sleeping bags and canopy beds and one-man tents but is different from all of these. On the bottom, stiff tendrils of closed-cell foam provide both padding and insulation against the rocky ground. On the top, stiff arches of cloth keep a vented air space above his head, keeping out the wind--or the rain and snow, if there were any. And in the middle are layers of padding which, for a substance not composed of quantum dots, are surprisingly warm and light.

Bruno is asleep before he can draw twenty breaths, and mercifully, the Quantum Horse declines to visit him this time. Still, when Zuq rouses him he resists at first, unable to believe that five hours have really elapsed. "Find your amusement elsewhere, lad!"

But Zuq is both understanding and persistent. "It's time to go, Ako'i. Come on, I'm responsible for you. Come out of there and pack up."

There is a hasty meal of nuts and raisins and little flavored bits of dried chicken, washed down with water that has begun to freeze in its bottles.

"How much farther is the summit?" Bruno asks Radmer as the two of them stow their gear aboard the treaders.

"A couple of hours, if we hurry. The people of Highrock need to be warned; if the enemy is here in Black Forest already, Tillspar will be a major target for them, both strategically and materially."

"A lot of metal, is it?"

"Wellstone, actually. And a lot of it, yes. More importantly, as the only bridge across the Divide, it's a critical link between East Imbria and the coastal cities. Without it, Manilus and Duran and Crossroad will be cut off. That's a third of the republic, geographically speaking, and nearly a fifth of its people."

The night has grown colder still, and there's a stiff breeze blowing, but at least here there are no solar trees drinking in what little heat remains. The men--and the sole woman left among them--saddle up and go, beneath the river of the Milky Way and the watchful eyes of Orion. The stars, barely twinkling, are as clear here as they would be on the surface of an ordinary planette. You'd need a space suit to get a better view. Murdered Earth is hidden by the mountains; only the glow of headlights interferes.

Still, it's slow going up here in the cold and thin, and they crest several false summits which prove, to Bruno's sinking spirits, to have even higher, steeper mountains behind them. Indeed, when they've truly reached the top of the pass, Bruno doesn't realize it until he sees the lights of a small town, kilometers in the distance and slightly below their current position.

"Is that Highrock?" he calls out to Radmer, now several treaders away in the pack.

"Aye," Radmer confirms. "If you look, you can even make out the bridge."

And it's true; past a sharp turn and a fork in the road, Bruno can see the town nestling on either side of some dark expanse, and between them the inverted, caternary arches of a suspension bridge, its cables strung up with electric lights. It's a scene straight out of his childhood, and it brings another pang of nostalgia. Oh, for those simpler days! But it's a false longing and he knows it, for the simple life is never simple, nor safe. The Queendom, for all its faults and programmed failures, was a place more worthy of his pining.

"That's a river, then?" he asks Radmer.

And Radmer laughs. "There is a river, yes, carrying meltwater westward to the Imbrian Sea. On the other side it flows east to Tranquility, where the site of Luna's first human visit lies submerged under eighty meters of briny ocean. But there's more to the Divide than that."

"How so?"

"You missed the Shattering, Ako'i. It'll be easier to explain when we're actually on Tillspar, looking down."

They ride onward, and at the outskirts of the village they encounter a lighted guard shack, with a sort of vestigial gate blocking the road, consisting of little more than a horizontal boom which can be pivoted up out of the way.

"Bestnight. What bin'z, then?" asks one of the two guards in the shack. But the other one, recognizing Radmer in the pack, steps forward in surprise, then finally moves to the doorway and walks out. "Radmer! My God! I never thought we'd lay eyes on you again!"

Radmer chuckles at that. "Oh, ye of little faith. You think a vanishing dot in the sky is the last you'll see of me? I'm harder to get rid of than that."

"But we saw it hit the ground! That capsule of yours, a gleam of light in the setting sun!"

"You saw it cross the horizon," Radmer corrects, "at an altitude of ten thousand kilometers and climbing. Really, Elmer, if the course was plotted by the astronomer Rigby, and the capsule and catapult were overseen by no less than Mika's Armory and the watchmaker Orange Mayhew, then it's Highrock's reputation at stake more than my own sorry skin. Is this or is this not the Artisans' Pinnacle?"

"Aye," the guard agrees, "yours was a finely crafted delusion. Wheels and chains, bombs and hatches! A fitting tomb for such as you, big brass balls and all. No offense to the men what built it, sir, but I'm surprised to see you just the same."

"Well," Radmer says, pulling out a set of travel orders to show off as a formality, "perhaps you could send word to the mayor, let her know I'm here."

"I've rung the bell already," the guard assures him.

Soon, the other riders are shouldered aside and Radmer is surrounded by a milling throng of villagers, talking over one another in a rapidly rising din. "How did that air filter work? Radmer? Radmer! Did the wheel springs seize at all? Did the dinite charges hurt when they went off? Where did these Dolceti come from?"

It's the mayor herself who rescues him, striding along the cobblestone avenue in a green robe, with some sort of golden ceremonial pendant dangling from her neck.

"So. How many lives does a scoundrel have?"

Radmer looks up, suddenly pleased and sheepish, vaguely off balance. "More than he can count, Your Honor. I'm pleased to see you again."

"I should say the same to you." She clucks, looking him up and down. "In one piece, no less. That's good. Did you find what you were looking for up there?"

"I did," Radmer answers, presenting Bruno with a flourish.

"Hmm." The mayor then turns her appraising eyes upon this even older Older, who is immediately reminded of his wife. Tamra used to look at Bruno exactly like that--interested, curious, vaguely exasperated--whenever things were just starting to go askew. A couple of years ago, it seemed. A couple of hundred at the very most. "And is he worth your worldly fortune, General? We're living quite well on the wages you paid us."

To which Radmer answers, "If he's not, Your Honor, then you should spend the money while you can. The Glimmer King has scouting patrols in this pass already. I fear it won't be long before they're coming for Tillspar in force."

Her smile is vaguely condescending. "The bridge has stood since the Shattering itself, General. It was built, I understand, by the very architect who crushed this world from the husk of a lifeless moon. Chairmain Kung of the Gower Monopoly once struck it with a blitterstaff, if I recall the story correctly, and the bridge rang like a gong and stood firm. And there've been lesser attempts by lesser villains, which accomplished nothing at all."

"Kung struck only one blow," Radmer says, "before I pitched him over the railing. Two minutes later you could still hear him screaming, all the way down. We never did find the staff. If we hadn't been there to stop him, he'd've fared a lot better."

She arches an eyebrow. "Your point being?"

"I won't be here to help, Your Honor. Not this time."

"We've got a full garrison," she reminded him, sounding annoyed.

"So did every outpost in Nubia. Against this enemy, a few hundred men are no defense at all."

She leans close, dropping her voice to a murmur. "What do you want me to say, Rad? We'll hold it for as long as we can, and if we fail we'll go down fighting. Is that what you want to hear? This is Highrock. It's our bridge, and anyway we've got a few surprises up our skirt."

"I expect you do," he concedes.

The two of them look at each other for a long moment, until Radmer finally asks, "Where are Orange and Mika?"

"On the bridge, if you can believe it. Cocking the VLC for a shot down the pass."

"Well, bless their little hearts."

"Yes."

Another long moment passes.

"You're not staying," she says. "Not even for a few hours."

"No. I'm sorry, but we've had enough delays already. We need to be through the Stormlands before the midmorning thermals kick in."

"Stormlands." She clucks, shaking her head slightly. "You sure know how to pick your battles, General."

"Aye," he agrees sadly. "It's always been my greatest talent."

Soon the riders are rolling on, right through this gingerbread town, leaving the gate and the guards and the mayor behind.

"So, Radmer," Zuq wants to know, "what color are her nipples?"

The buildings of Highrock have straight, high, rectangular walls of gray mortar and smooth yellow river rock, ranging from fist sized to head sized. The roofs are of wooden shingle, sprouting key-shaped chimneys of tin tied down with steel cables. The whole place smells of burning wood, and Bruno can see wagonloads of cut-up logs in alleys and behind the houses, awaiting their own turn in the furnace.

Apparently the weather is highly thought of here, for every roof seems to sport a vane to indicate the wind's direction, and a cup anemometer to gauge its speed. There are black-painted water tanks on the roofs as well, nestled close to the chimneys to keep from freezing. At first glance, the bridge doesn't seem like anything special. The far side of the Divide, perhaps a kilometer distant, gives no real clue as to just how far down the bottom is. But as they draw nearer, the walls of the chasm go down, and down, and down some more.

On the bridge itself, Bruno quickly realizes that this "Divide" is no mere riverbed. Its sides--separated by a thousand meters of blackness--drop away almost vertically, and although the edges are jagged as lightning, the overall course of the thing is almost perfectly east-west. In total darkness it might've baffled Bruno's senses completely, but during the long night, Murdered Earth has overshot the sun and can be seen on the eastern horizon, right through the crack of the Divide itself. And in the other direction, through haze and darkness, Bruno fancies he can see all the way down to the Imbrian Sea, now hundreds of kilometers west of him, and ten kilometers down. Indeed, what else could that be? That muzzy juncture between ground and sky?

Where the mountains fall away to the east, below the rising Earth, the crack runs together as a pair of converging lines before seeming, at some impossibly remote point, to take a sudden and decisive turn to the northwest. Below, there is only darkness and the howl of wind. And this is telling indeed, if Bruno can see the horizon through the gap in the rock!

"This is a crevasse," he diagnoses for Radmer's assessment. "A single seismic crack down the spine of the entire mountain range. Very deep."

"Very," Radmer agrees. "Beneath Tillspar, the river Arkis sits only two hundred meters above sea level. Its source, a wellspring eighteen kilometers upstream, is only two hundred meters higher than that."

Although Bruno has seen some large artifacts in his day, he cannot help being impressed. A crack in the earth ten kilometers deep! The Shattering must have been a violent event indeed, and a sudden one. No wonder the world had fallen again into ruin!

The bridge itself is an interesting bit of retrofit; the road runs right to its edge and then turns to a bed of wooden planks that look as though they've been freshly laid. And these planks are secured at the center and edges by simple iron bolts, whose patina of recent oxidation is evident even by the weak electric lights strung up along the bridge. They've been in place for weeks, not millennia, and from the look of it they won't last out the century.

As for what the planks are bolted into, why, that's another story altogether. The superreflector gleaming of impervium and Bunkerlite is unmistakable, and yet these substances are encased in something translucent and ordinary: a glass, a clear resin. The suspension cables are thicker than Bruno himself, and they fire into the rock face at a twenty-degree angle, where they're held fast by a larger-than-life system of plates and bolts and old-fashioned threaded nuts.

"Nice design," he notes.

"Thank you," Radmer acknowledges, "but I was only peripherally involved. The bulk of the engineering was handled by Bell Daniel."

"Of Lunacorp Construction? My goodness, I remember him."

"He lived a couple hundred years past the Shattering. Died of electrocution, if you can believe it, trying to wire up some old apartment building. Anyway, yes, there were a lot of Olders still around back then, looking forward to a long future, and they financed Tillspar, which was consequently built to last. These cable stays are longer than the bridge itself, anchored a full kilometer into the toughest bedrock in the whole region. The structural members are layered composites of programmable and traditional materials, and the programmable ones have every security feature and safety lockout we could scrape together at the time. I don't want to use the word ‘tamper-proof,' because nothing ever is. But it's certainly tamper-resistant. I'd have a hard time changing the thing myself; Bell scrambled all the passwords at the ribbon-cutting ceremony."

"And it was from here that you launched yourself to Varna? That's your Very Large Catapult, there?"

Bruno points at a system of large reels and pulleys mounted behind one of the railings, near the center of the bridge.

"Yep, that's it. Thirty turns on a block-and-tackle, plus a counterweight thirty times the mass of the capsule. If you allow ten kilometers of throw, the pull of gravity really adds up! It's not a ride I'd recommend--not so gentle as the explosion that kicked us off Varna--but it's tolerable."

"Gentle? I don't recall anything gentle about that."

"Well it's all relative, isn't it? It depends how badly you want to go. The only really difficult part was hacking the bridge to harvest a sufficient length of impervium wire. It made such a mess that we finally had to replace the whole road surface, as you can see. It's a rush job; someday I'll come back and fix the thing properly."

"If you survive."

"Aye. If any of us do."

Even after watching half a dozen Dolceti roll out ahead of him, driving his treader onto the planks and out over empty space is, for Bruno, an act of faith. He has never trusted the flammable, frangible substance known as wood, and indeed it creaks and bends alarmingly under the weight of his treader, and the many other treaders around him. The planks are knotty, bumpy, warped, not with age but from having been harvested too young. Bruno remembers the sawmill near his father's bistro, and the sorry planks it cut from local wood. There was a shortage of old-growth forest in Catalonia then, and clearly there was one on Lune now, at least in this mountainous region. And why not, when wood was at once an ornament, a structural material, a fuel, and a source of durable fiber? And electricity!

But Radmer, seeing his look, is quick to offer assurances. "Even in its current state, sir, Tillspar could easily carry ten times this load. There are greater problems to worry about."

"Er, yes. Perhaps. But not deeper ones."

The planks are separated by significant gaps--three or four centimeters in places!--through which Bruno can see rock walls converging down into a yawning blackness. From here, for all he can tell, the Divide might reach all the way to the center of the planette. And through these gaps the wind whistles, producing a light, tickly sensation on the soles of his feet, as though he's not wearing boots at all. He can also feel the bridge swaying beneath him, a few centimeters back and forth, back and forth like the seat of a gigantic swing. Has this thing really stood for two millennia and more?

At first, the mountain slopes gently beneath the planks, but about thirty meters out the ground drops away sharply, and the wind picks up. It's less bitingly cold than the air of the mountains, though; this is a warm draft welling up from the high-pressure spaces below. The bridge is suspended from a pair of towers, driven into opposite faces of the Divide at a sixty-degree angle. At the first tower is a plaque, bronze in color but utterly untouched by weather or corrosion or time. It might have been cast this morning. In the spotlights shining on it, it reads:

Tillspar
Highest known suspension bridge
Constructed Jun 4–Dec 7, Year 38 of the Fjolmes Dynasty
Chief Engineer Belliam K. Daniel
Consulting Engineer C. E. "Rad" Mursk
This property has been placed on the Global Register of
Historic Places by the order of Her Excellency
Babsie Fjolmes, Second Dynast of Imbria and North Astaroth

Beyond the plaque, the bridge begins to feel even less secure. It rises and falls by several centimeters at a time, and when Bruno looks along the handrail he sees little transverse waves rolling back and forth across it, faster than a man could run. Near the center of the bridge, it's like walking on a ship, or the deck of a soaring flau. He can feel it rolling and swaying under him; when he looks at his feet or his wheels instead of the dim silhouette of the mountains, he feels mildly but immediately seasick.

To Bruno's surprise, though, as they approach Radmer's catapult mechanism at the center of the bridge, the Divide offers a wider view which includes several rows and banks of electric light on the near side, far below and behind them, like the view from an air car or a landing spaceship. He can even--to his much greater surprise--see boats down there, alive with tiny lights, slowly bobbing and swirling through what must be very large rapids.

"What industry is this?" he asks Radmer wonderingly. "Those lights, those boats! To pilot a ferry through such landscape as this must be a thrilling career."

"And a short one," Radmer says, "for the rapids are deadly and the loads very heavy." Heedless of the half dozen Dolecti rolling out ahead of him, he stops and points beneath the railing on the side of the bridge. "Down there is the tin mine, from which Highrock got its start as a metalworking capital. There's a gold mine further down, which you can just make out from here. Rare earths are mined upstream a ways. As you can see, there's quite a lot of lithosphere laid bare in these walls. Easy pickings, prelayered by weight."

Bruno can see no such thing in this darkness, and he says so.

Radmer grunts. "Well, I suppose you develop an eye for it after a while. If we had all night to linger here, you'd see all sorts of things in these walls, which have grown dusty with edible lichen, pale green and rusty orange. In the cities it's considered a delicacy. Can you see it there in the spotlights? Those baskets are for lowering the harvest girls down along the face, looking for morsels choice enough for human consumption and scraping the rest into hog-slop buckets. They only do that in the daytime, though."

"I wish I could see more," Bruno offers politely.

"Yeah, well, in some ways the daytime view is actually worse, because the sunlight never penetrates more than two-thirds of the way down. But it washes out the artificial lighting, with the result that you can't see anything down there at all."

"Hmm." This conversation is not without interest for Bruno, and in the past he has found reason to pause in places much scarier--much more tangibly deadly--than this. He was once trapped inside a Ring Collapsiter fragment, with only ion thrusters to turn his ship and keep it off the walls! But in the interests of moving along, he says nothing more, instead releasing the brake on his treader and rolling forward.

So when Radmer stops again at the center of the bridge, to speak to the two men fussing with the cranks and reels there, Bruno doesn't know whether to see it as another interesting landmark or an unwelcome pause. Nor is he alone in this worry; the Dolceti--brave souls, to be sure--are aglow with anxiety, no doubt picturing themselves in a battle against gravity itself, a long fall during which their uncanny reflexes would avail them not at all.

"Let's go, old man," Zug mutters in a voice barely audible above the wind, whistling through the bridge cables.

"I hope you're throwing something heavy," Radmer says to the two men. "At someone truly deserving."

They look up, and one of them says, "Oh. Hello, General."

Radmer seems disappointed with that. "Is that all you have for me, Orange? No warm greetings? Aren't you surprised to see me alive?"

"Should we be?" asks the other man, who must be Mika, the armorer. "All right, then, it's good to see you. Alive. Can you give us a hand with this cocking latch?"

"Sure." Radmer puts his kickstand down and dismounts. "What's the payload? I'd dearly love to drop a greeting card right on the south pole. Just a note to say hello, right? But I'm afraid a show of defiance will tip our hand prematurely. Better to show our weakest face, until the last possible moment."

"He'll find us a bit sticky, if you'll excuse my saying. This here's eight tons of glue bombs, packed to scatter. That ought to hold the pass for a minute or two."

Catching hold of a spring-loaded lever, Radmer laughs. "We can hope, yes. Are there oil traps as well, to tilt and slide your enemies into the Divide?"

"Course there are," says Orange Mayhew.

"And other gifts," says Mika, "fit for a Glimmer King. Where're you heading?"

"Stormlands."

"Ah. Bad luck, that."

"Eh. No worse than usual. I saw Manassa from orbit--a hidden ruin, perfectly preserved right there in the center--so we're hoping to collect a few surprises of our own."

"Hmm," says Orange Mayhew. "Well. Do me one favor, General: don't get killed."

"I'll take that under advisement. You too, hey?"

But Orange just shrugs. "We're human beings, sir, Mika here and myself. Living forever, well, it ain't on our list of options."

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.

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?

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.

chapter twenty-three

in which the old meets the new
meeting the old

Bruno has faced worse odds than these, with poorer equipment to back him up, so his leap to action comes virtually without thought. He tears across the sandy plains, confident of passing Lyman and his fellows before their dainty attackers can reach them. And the look on their faces when he does pass is, he thinks, worth the thousands of years of solitude that carried him to this point. At long last he has become a sort of Buddhist, or a factory-issue mammal, fully present in the moment, able to appreciate the humor of it all and yet caring little about the outcome. He will simply do his best to smash these robots, and see what happens.

And that best is quite good indeed, for as he arrives among them they stab and hack with whirling blades that might easily have severed his head from the brickmail-reinforced neck that supports it. The blades are that sharp, yes, the blows that fast and hard. This time, the robots mean business; they're saving nothing for the trip back home. But what Bruno lacks in speed he more than makes up for in sheer capacity; the attacks push him this way and that, but his unscathed armor scarcely sheds a molecule.

And meanwhile he's grabbing swords, grabbing arms, firing energy beams at point-blank range. He doesn't even bother to aim for the iron boxes on the sides of their heads; those are for merely human weapons to pierce. Bruno was never a great warrior; he merely happened to be present at a few of history's most crucial battles. And while the abomination of blindsight training still crackles inside him, informing his actions, he is no Dolceti. Just a man, just some guy in a suit of armor. So if these robots were combat models he might have cause to worry.

But they aren't, and he doesn't; their impervium hulls are thin, never meant to withstand the burn of a gamma-ray laser or the punch of a hypersonic wirebomb. He's got a blitterstaff slung across his back which he doesn't even bother to use, because it's cleansing to fight this one out hand-to-hand.

And the robots seem to get the message; they've never encountered anything like him before, either, and as five of them collapse into sparking fragments during the first few seconds of combat, the rest retreat to a safer distance, ten and twenty meters back so that Bruno must aim more carefully to hit them. And aiming carefully is not one of his better skills, and the robots are circling and regrouping with inhuman grace and fluidity, and he's just deciding to unsling that blitterstaff after all when they suddenly leap upon him en masse.

Oh. Oh, dear.

He goes down under their weight, sprawling onto his back with a robot on each arm, a robot on each leg, two on his chest, and a dozen standing round him like the outlines of an angel. They raise their swords, preparing to peel him out of his wellstone skin no matter how long it takes.

Fortunately, there's a response for this in the annals of the Queendom's martial arts, with which Bruno was once, of necessity, familiar. "Discharge all!" he screams at the suit, and it responds by turning to glass underneath him and then opening up its capacitors, dumping all their stored charge. For a few nanoseconds he's crawling with surface electrons, which quickly find their way to the ground through every object within easy arcing distance. The voltage is high, but it's the wattage that really counts, burning paths through the robots' own wellstone, through the very circuitry that controls them, through libraries of collective memory and programmed response. From a distance it looks like an explosion, and indeed it sends eleven robots flipping through the air, dazed and befuddled, parts of them damaged beyond repair.

And in the wake of that, Bruno shouts: "Royal override! All autronic devices, stand down and await instructions!"

The robots will not obey this command, but he knows from experience that they'll recognize it in some way, that it will confuse them for a moment. And he takes advantage, struggling to his feet in a garment that has gone stiff and lifeless, gone black in a last-ditch attempt to drink in energy from the sky.

There are eight attackers left on their feet, staring at him with their blank metal faces, and he steps backward through a gap between them, unslinging the blitterstaff. This is a weapon that requires no finesse; it's coded to ignore his suit, but any other wellstone it touches--for example, the impervium of a robot hull--will be subjected to an intense barrage of electrical and software and pseudochemical insults, in random patterns shifting too rapidly for the robots' defenses.

He touches one, and it falls apart into screaming, steaming shards. Touches another, and it bursts like a chestnut in a fire. But the other six have their wits about them now, and are dancing toward him with deadly intent. There's nothing for it but to whirl the staff around him, not with any great skill but in a simple space-filling function that leaves no room for a robot to pass. He clobbers another two before a third one manages to slip in at ground level--literally crawling on its back!--and take a firm hold on his legs. He kills that one, too, but not before he loses his balance again and tumbles over the back of another one crouching behind him.

Blast, he thinks as the ground rushes up again, these robots are cleverer than they ought to be. He shouldn't have taken them on alone--not that he'd had much choice. Now he's facedown in the sand, and when the first blow slices down at his neck he tries to struggle away sideways, but something is holding him. He tries to raise the blitterstaff, but something is weighing it down. He tries to fire his wrist-mounted wireguns again, but of course there's no power. Not yet, not for another few seconds at least. The blindsight part of his mind is painfully, terrifyingly aware of that blade rushing down. And there isn't a thing it can do.

The blow lands solidly, and Bruno's suit is no longer absurdly durable. In fact, it's just a fine-mesh silicon cloth, not much different from old-fashioned fiberglass. The blade doesn't penetrate, but it does concentrate a great deal of force on a rather narrow stripe of neck. The impact is like a flash, a shock, a crashing together of cymbals. Heedless of his dignity, the King of Sol screams in rage.

But this recalls another bit of Queendom battle lore: when all else fails, there is power in a scream. In a brief burst of strength he manages to lift himself, to roll a bit, to make the next blow come down in a different place and at a less-favorable angle. He manages to jerk the blitterstaff free of whatever was holding it, and to sweep it around him in a ground-level arc. It hits something along the way, although he has no idea what, or whether it'll help him.

And now, finally, he fears for his safety. As a result, the next few seconds of the fight are pure blindsight; Bruno sees nothing, and is only vaguely aware of himself in the conscious sense. He is motion and shadow. Then his vision flickers on: once, twice, like a heartbeat and then a constant hum, and he's on his feet, and the sand around him is littered with robot bodies. Some of these are dead and shattered, and some are dragging themselves pathetically toward him, as if they might still somehow injure him with the last of their strength. Their bodies have gone black, too, groping for solar energy, although there's a fine grit of storm-blown dust settling onto them from above. They'll be buried long before any self-repair can kick in.

Still, there's something so purposeful about it all that he pauses for a moment, wondering whether finishing these bastards off might be some kind of sin. But he's spared the trouble when the crack of a rifle sounds, and the nearest robot head explodes. Then another, then another, until there are no robots left.

And then Sidney Lyman is rising from the crest of a dune, dusting himself off, and the other two Olders are there at his side.

"Bloody glints," one of them mutters.

Bruno squats for a moment, panting, just looking at the three men while he regains his breath. Finally he says, "Gentlemen. Welcome to Shanru Basin. To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"You weren't fooling anyone, Sire," Sidney says to that.

"Hmm?"

"Admittedly, it took us a while to figure it out. I mean, we hadn't seen your face in what, two thousand years? But it clicked. Right after you left, me and the boys here were just kind of looking at each other, saying, ‘Whoops, that was kind of stupid.' I sent most of the unit back to Echo Valley, but for my own self I just . . . needed to be here. You and Radmer, you're off to fight the Glimmer King. Without me! Without my boys, here! Look at you: you're young. You're armored. You just took on twenty-some robots all by yourself, saving our sorry asses. Fucking King of Sol."

"Sorry to trouble you," Bruno says to him, meaning it. "You don't owe me a thing. Quite the reverse: I'm responsible for all the misery you see around you."

"Oh, piffle," Sidney says, almost spitting the words. He looks utterly exhausted, but this flare of anger is enough to keep him going for a little while longer. "You haven't even been here. You think we can't fuck a world up all by ourselves? Listen, you, we're here for . . . for . . ."

"Closure," says Brian.

"Right. Closure. And you're going to give it to us."

Bruno blinks. "Are you here to assassinate me?" It's a strange concept; on some level it's exactly what he deserves, and yet he cannot allow it to happen. Not now, not yet.

But Sidney just rolls his eyes. "Oh, please. We're here because it puts some . . ."

"Meaning," says Brian.

"Right. On all the fuffing time we've killed on this planette. Hiding out is not the same thing as actually turning the place over to a new . . ."

"Generation?" suggests Nick Valdi.

"No. A new paradigm. A new society. Free from all this debris. From all our broken dreams." He points vaguely in the direction of Manassa.

Bruno eyes these three raggedy men carefully, seeing no deception in them, no weakness. They will fight, even if they cannot say exactly why.

"I understand," he says, for he truly does. "Up there in the ruins is a fax machine which will get you back in fighting condition. But it's no substitute for rest, after a journey through the Stormlands. A little farther into the dunes, you'll find our camp. The sand is very soft there."

But Sidney Lyman just laughs at that. "Your Majesty, do you think we just happened to run into a scouting patrol here? The enemy may not have figured out what you're up to, but they know you're up to something. There's about fifteen thousand robots on the march, and they'll be here, oh, any minute now."

"Ah," Bruno says, processing that. On the face of it, it's very bad news indeed. But how much does it really change? "Well, I suppose we can all rest when we're safely dead and buried. In the meantime, come with me. Quickly, if you please."

By the time Bruno returns to the bronze tower, with Lyman and his men in tow, Radmer has already fed most of the Dolceti through the fax. They're standing around now, admiring each other in their battle armor, which Radmer has done up in bright, dolcet-berry yellow with a subtle metallic finish. Their blitterstaves are a shade of dully glowing crimson that complements the uniforms nicely.

At the sight of it Bruno feels yet another pang for the Queendom, whose sense of style--and ability to follow through on it!--was unmatched by any society before or after. On those terms, King Bruno had been an embarrassment to his people, who were forever beseeching him not to wear anything in public which had not first been approved by his wife, or one of her courtiers, or his own valet, or even Slappy Luzarre, who for one thousand years sold bananas from a wagon on the street outside the palace gates. But like any mathematician, Bruno could recognize beauty when he saw it, and he'd seen it everywhere in the Queendom. Here on Lune, even the Iridium Days had been drab by comparison.

Radmer himself is wearing reflective inviz, which is like regular inviz except that it's purely passive, illuminated only by ambient light and reflection. Consuming far less energy than a full stealthing cloak, it doesn't attempt to match the radiant brightness of sun or sky, and it leaves a clear, sunset-elongated shadow upon the dunes. His head and hands are also visible.

"What do you mean I'm a copy of my old self?" Mission Mother Mathy is demanding of his floating, disembodied head. "Did I die? Did that thing in there kill me and take my soul?"

"Will you calm down?" Radmer replies wearily. But not all that wearily, for he too is young again, and looks exactly like the Conrad Mursk who agreed, so long ago, to crush this moon for fun and profit.

"No one knows the fate of a human soul," Bruno says, striding up, "when the body is destroyed and recopied. But such adventures were commonplace in the Queendom, and though we were vigilant--especially in the beginning!--for signs of spiritual decay, none were ever observed. The process is, to all tests and appearances, safe. And better than safe, for you've been rendered immorbid."

"Oh, my, God," Mathy says, horrified.

Hmm. Apparently these people are deathists. And why not, with only decayed, bitter Olders around to show what immorbidity was like? Well, no help for it. He says, not just to Mathy but to all of them, "Fear not, for though your bodies cannot grow old, they most certainly can be killed. And as we speak, there's a robot army marching through the eyewall that will gladly make it happen."

Indeed, on the hills just this side of the eyewall, glints of light have begun to appear, reflecting the blurry red of the sunset behind the eyewall's other face. If they're undamaged by the storm, and move at the speed of household robots, they'll be here in twenty minutes. Perhaps less.

To Sidney and Brian and Nick he says, "Refresh yourselves quickly, in there."

"Hello, sir," they say to Radmer in passing.

"Hi," he says back. "You shouldn't have come here."

Then, looking out unhappily at the approaching glints, Radmer asks Bruno, "What of Highrock? Is Tillspar in enemy hands already?"

"I haven't heard. But this army apparently followed the southern route, bypassing the Divide. So there may yet be reason to hope."

"For now. How many are coming? Are we enough to hold this site against them?"

"Perhaps," Bruno says, though even with Queendom equipment he doubts it very much. The odds are just tilted too steeply in the enemy's favor. "But we may find greater advantage in moving onward."

"A fighting retreat? I'll begin the weapons training immediately."

"Do that, yes," Bruno says, "But first there's something you should know. This machine here"--he waves a hand at the bronze tower-top sticking out of the sand--"is in contact with at least three collapsiters, somewhere in the lower Kuiper Belt, just above Neptune's orbit. A bit of Nescog survives!"

"How is that possible?" asks an incredulous Radmer. "We would have known, long ago."

Before the Shattering, yes. Even before the Murdered Earth cracked and fell in itself and breathed a last puff of air from the lungs of its dying billions. Curses, mostly, with Bruno's name figuring prominently among them.

"Indeed we would," Bruno agrees. "And something as complex and fragile as a collapsiter doesn't simply reconstitute itself. Perhaps the hand of God has intervened on our behalf, or perhaps the hand of Man, if Lune is not the last bastion of us after all. It hardly matters at this late hour, General. My point is simply that I can take us out of here. Swiftly and without a trace."

"To where?" asks Radmer.

And here Bruno cannot help grinning, for there's nothing more just in this world than turning a villain's own dirty tricks against him. "The survival of a fax machine for this long without maintenance is surprising, but hardly incredible. It's use that wears them down. And the gates are just as durable, so it's reasonable to suppose they're intact. I'd be more surprised if they weren't."

"So, what? We fax out and back? Use the speed-of-light delays as a kind of time bomb, and step out of the plate ten or twelve hours after we left?"

Impatiently, Bruno tries to run a hand through his hair, but bangs up against the dome of his helmet instead. "Listen, all right? Ours is not the only fax machine. We've assumed another all along. In Astaroth, yes? In the Glimmer King's own presumed fortress, somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. It will take hours, yes, for our signal to travel to the outer system and back. But when it does, we can step right to the heart of this world's problems. And solve them."

"Oh," says Radmer. He seems stunned to blankness by that remark, but slowly he recovers himself, and finally matches Bruno's grin. "That sounds a bit dangerous, old man. Are you sure you're up to the task?"

"As sure as the sun shines, my boy. I've penetrated a fearsome lair or two in my day. And I hadn't the Dolceti with me then, nor you, nor the element of surprise. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a three-thousand-year-old telecom network to fix."

Alas, this proves more difficult than he'd assumed at first. The collapsiters are clearly pinging and responding to pings, but sorting through the fax machine's comm logs, he's baffled at first by the nonsense he finds there. He built the Nescog, and while the passage of time has bleached out the specific details of its comm protocol, he does at least recognize his own work when he sees it. And this is something . . . else.

This isn't Nescog at all, but some derivative coding system built upon it. When? By whom? Could it be the fabled Shadow Network of the Fatalist ghouls? A hundred gigatons of collapsium could not be hidden in the Old Solar System--every collapsiter was known and tracked--but a parasitic protocol running secretly in the margins . . . Well, it isn't impossible, but it still doesn't explain how dead collapsiters have turned back into live ones. And anyway something in him doubts that explanation. It fails Occam's Razor; it's too complex. Something else is going on.

Alas, the mystery will have to wait for another time; with a few minutes of study he's able to decipher the important features of the log file, and construct an access request that will race out ahead of their own corporeal images, logging them on to the mystery network just in time to be routed through it, and also scanning for additional gates and logging them on, involuntarily. A hostile takeover of the Glimmer King's fax. Or so he hopes; if the process fails, they'll bounce right back here again, to face the robot army.

"They're coming!" someone shouts down to him from outside.

Well, yes. That goes without saying. Of the fax he asks, "Does this transaction look valid to you?"

"I have never seen one like it, Sire," the fax replies, from a speaker grown adjacent to its print plate. "But it appears to be a valid construction."

"Then implement it, under full Royal Override."

"Doing so."

"Architect!" he shouts then through the open doorway. "We're ready! Start sending people through!"

But something's wrong; there's a rising din and clatter out there. The battle has begun, or rather resumed. Blast. He races outside, prepared for the worst, and sees pretty much what he expects: the site is overrun. Already there are dozens of robots down and dozens more swarming among the Dolceti, and there are hundreds pouring over the nearby dunes. Presumably thousands racing upward through the dune field, out of sight for the moment but not planning on staying that way for long.

"Radmer!" he shouts, blasting his voice over the loudspeakers. "Bordi! Get the Dolceti through the fax!"

"I'm not going in there," someone protests, over the grunt and clatter of combat and the death screams of household robots.

"You're not staying here," someone else remarks. And a third voice--Mathy's--adds, "I'm not going first, I'll tell you that much."

Bruno pauses to smash down a pair of attackers, and then says, "General Radmer will go first. Then Sidney Lyman and his men, for they'll know better what to expect on the other side." He pauses again to rescue a fallen comrade, then continues, "Next will go Natan and Zuq and Mathy, and all the rest of you, and"--he fires an energy blast at a nearby hilltop, scattering the robots there in a burst of sand and sundered wellstone, and sorely depleting his energy reserves once again--"and finally Bordi."

"You're not going last," Bordi says, while laying about him with the blitterstaff in decisive blindsight strokes. "Not if I have anything to say about it!"

"You do not," Bruno answers, "for only I can seal the gates behind us, and prevent this army from pouring through in pursuit."

"Good luck," says Radmer, on his way down into the pit and through the doorway. Lyman and the other Olders follow behind, murmuring similar sentiments, and then the Dolceti are making their retreat, stepping backward into the pit while hundreds of robots swarm in after them. It's dicey for a few moments when the sheer weight of attackers thrusts Mathy and two other Dolceti away from the doorway. It fills with robots, which pour inside like a fluid. And then it's worse, when the three of them are lifted off their feet and hoisted into the air, faceup, struggling upon the upraised hands of dozens upon dozens of robots. Bruno does what he can, firing wirebombs into the fray at the rate of fifty per second, but his aim is hasty and there are just too many targets moving too quickly, and his charge and munitions are low. Mathy and the others don't know the power of their suits, their weapons. Of the several moves they could make right now, few are obvious to an untrained person.

Bitterly, Bruno makes an executive decision, and allows the robots to carry the three Dolceti away. He must concentrate on clearing that doorway, and holding it, or all these people will be lost, and their world along with them.

"Mathy!" someone shouts in tones of pained helplessness. And then, on the heels of that, "Stupid sow. Keep your feet!"

But the flood has taken them; they're out of sight now, out of mind, and Bruno is using every milligram of martial skill he can summon, to drive Bordi and the four remaining Dolceti forward through the impervium swarm, which gleams and flickers in the light of sunset.

Another Dolceti goes down and is swept away. Then another, and then two, and finally it's just Bruno and Bordi in the doorway, with shattered robots piling higher and higher around them, threatening to block the way. Bruno shouts, "Go! Quickly!"

The diamond crown is knocked off his head and spins away into the heaving robot stream. As Bordi falls back into the tower room, fighting his way through the robots still inside, Bruno is forced to acknowledge that he has never, in fact, faced a battle as dire as this. The attackers are not well armed or armored, but in such numbers there's little he can do to stop them. Soon enough his suit charge will be zero again, and like so many voracious termites they'll be carrying him away.

He's out of time, and he can't spare a glance to see whether Bordi has gotten through safely or not. To the walls he shouts, "Fax! Royal Lockout! Pass no objects save myself! Walls! Release all fields and power down permanently!"

"Acknowledged," the fax replies calmly, unaware of His Majesty's peril and possibly incapable of understanding it. "Immediately, Sire," say the walls, which go dark, reverting to blank wellstone. And then the sides of the sand pit slide inward, carrying live robots down with them and burying several. Bruno retreats inside.

And that's that: no one but he will ever use this place again, for travel or medicine or resupply. The Royal Lockouts and Overrides were built into the Queendom's wellstone at the deepest levels. Subverting them had always been possible, but insanely difficult. The sands will reclaim this place in minutes or hours, and since Bruno does not expect to pass this way again, the sands and the lockouts will remain. One more treasure of Lune consumed for the sake of this stupid war.

Along with the two human patterns still stored within it. He thinks of them suddenly: the final victims of the Queendom's demise. Should he wake them amid all this clamor? To die afresh, without the least understanding of why? No. Better to let them sleep. Better to worry about his own skin for a little while longer!

The trick, now, is to battle the rushing tide of sand and robots, to protect his front and his back without actually whacking the fax machine with his blitterstaff. Because that would kill it even for him.

There's a bad moment when the robots team up to high-low him again, tumbling him off his feet. He feels strong hands on his ankles, preparing to lift him, to carry him away! But with the wellcloth of his suit still active, he manages to call up a slippery exterior and wriggle free, leaping and sliding for the fax plate ahead of him. His momentum is sufficient--just barely!--to carry him through.

The plate crackles blue for a moment and then falls forever silent.

chapter twenty-five

in which power fails to corrupt

Radmer wept for hours. For Bruno, yes, and for Bascal. For the Olders and Dolceti, for Xmary and Tamra and the Queendom of Sol. And for himself, with the misfortune to be the last of them all. If ending comes to all things, he wondered, and gives them meaning, why do we despise it so?

When he was finished weeping he slept, for his body was tired and his injuries serious. He never knew how long he slept, for when he awoke, the twilight over Astaroth was unchanged. But he felt a little better--his body was healing itself--so he found a kitchen all decorated with cobwebs, and made a fire from the dusty wood he found there, and grilled up the last of his olives and fatbeans. Oh, what he wouldn't give for a flavor designer now! He'd been eating this slop for a thousand years too long. He was ready for something new, or an end to all of it.

When his meal was done he found his way outside, and located a shovel, and dug seven graves in the rocky polar soil. Incredibly, there were some small trees here, and birds warbling from their branches, and soil-grubbing bugs and worms for the birds to eat, and tufts of grass to house the bugs. It was a whole twilight ecology, which apparently had grown here all by itself, for Conrad Mursk had never scheduled or budgeted such a thing. And it was quite beautiful, really--a fitting place to leave his friends.

So that's what he did.

Six weeks later he found himself addressing the Furies, in a darkened chamber deep within the battered city of Timoch.

". . . and that is the tale, I'm afraid. The long and short of it, for better or worse."

Said Danella Mota, "You've concealed information from us, General. Important information, which might have colored our judgments and informed our actions."

"I withheld only suspicions, Madam Regent. As you said yourself, I hardly know you."

"Ah." Pine Chadwir clucked. "But we had history's greatest hero right here in our midst--King Toji himself!--and you told us nothing."

"King Toji never existed, Madam."

"Towaji, then."

"Still. The creatures of fable bear little resemblance to the human beings of actual memory. His name was Bruno, and he once taught university. The rest is mere happenstance."

Which was neither completely true nor completely fair, and would have been a perfect opening for Spiraldi Truich, the oldest of the Furies, to further demolish Radmer's pretenses. But Spiraldi was among the casualties of the siege; she'd died on the walls with a rifle in her hands, protecting her people as a good ruler ought.

So instead, Radmer took the opportunity to change the subject. "When will new elections be held, Madams Regents? And in their wake, will it still be you who address me here in this chamber?"

"Likely not," answered Danella Mota. She lifted a Luner globe from its rack and turned it idly in her hands. "With the southern hemisphere in such disarray, Imbria and Viense are the only real nations remaining. And we're wounded, both. We can't leave the south to its fate, and neither can we help them--or each other--through separate efforts. We must work together--truly together--to clean the mess and build this world anew."

"A global government?" Radmer asks, impressed with the audacity of such a scheme, at such a time as this.

"A global monarchy," says Pine Chadwir. "And then a Solar one, to rival the glories of old. And now we come to the deeper purpose of your summons here, General, for no living person remembers the glories of old more fully or more truthfully than you."

Oh. Crap. Radmer doesn't like the sound of that.

"No one has fought longer or harder than you, for the peace and justice of Lune."

Worse!

"No one knows this world better than you, who built it."

"Stop right there," Radmer says. "I am out of the leader business, and I mean forever. Once we're done with our little chat here, I'm going to hightail it under the veils of Echo Valley and never come out. I'll rot my brain. I'll walk a groove in the soil with the endless reptition of my steps."

"A selfish gesture," says Danella Mota.

"Not at all," says Radmer. "This isn't my world. We speak different languages, Lune and I. If I'm as wise as you suggest, then listen to me now: choose your leaders from among yourselves. The past is dead because it killed itself. Through better management than mine."

"There is renewed interest in the Old Tongue," says Pine Chadwir. "In the old ways. In yourself."

"I said no."

More words would certainly have been exchanged on the subject, had a page not chosen that moment to run in screaming, "A ship! Madams Regents, a ship has landed!"

"Inform the port master," said Danella. "All cargoes are welcome, but we're in session here, boy."

"Madams, please, it's a spaceship!"

And so it was that C. "Rad" Mursk came face-to-face with Ambassador Tilly Nichols of the Biarchy of Wolf and Lalande.

"You look just like your pictures," she said, shaking his hand out there on the cement of the Timoch International Airport. Her gleaming starship hulked in the background like the end of a world, appearing less like something out of history than something out of its most fanciful stories--a Platonic dream of starshipitude.

"And you look . . . familiar," he said, trying to place the woman's face.

"You knew my birth mother. Bethany."

"Ah! And how is the Queen of Lalande?"

"Retired," said the ambassador, "and thrice reincarnated. When I left Gammon she was a little girl on a solar farm, way out on the western coast. But she remembered you a little. And my father, King Eddie; she said she was going to find him someday and marry him all over again. But she asked me to give you her best. Poor dear; it never occurred to her that you might be dead."

"I certainly might. Everyone else seems to be."

"Well," said Tilly, "I'm sorry for your people's suffering, and I want you to know, we're here to help. We tried remote activation of your inert systems, and when that didn't work we tried synching to the remains of your collapsiter grid. And when that didn't work, we decided to show up in person. We're installing a wormhole gate now, so you should be up and running in a few days. Then we can start in on educational travel and the real-time transfer of materiel. This place looks like a long, long shortage of just about everything."

Conrad gawked. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him like that! "What and what? You're . . . Young lady, I don't even know what you're talking about. Did it ever occur to you to ask permission? To await an invitation for your help?"

"Fallen colonies are often too proud," she said. "We understand, having been there several times ourselves. Only with great determination and patience have we elevated ourselves to what you see." She nodded back at her ship, from which strangely attired workmen were already unloading crates and tubes of . . . something. "And it must be particularly galling, for the very seat of humanity to fall. . . ."

"Fall where?" he demanded. "Enlightened lives are played out here all the time, as always."

"Short lives."

"Oh, so. Does quantity suddenly matter more than quality?" That sounded lame to him. What he really meant was something grander, but he lacked the words. He had always lacked the words.

"If there isn't time to achieve personal fulfillment," said Tilly, "then yes, I would say quantity matters. In the Biarchy, we strive for milestones and then reinvent ourselves upon their achievement. Before we grow stale. We join the Exploration Corps, which will soon be visiting a hundred new stars. Or the Diplomatic Corps, which visits the old ones and invites them into the wormhole network, which we call the Muswog. Five systems and counting! The point is, we have these choices, and we make them freely."

"Hmm. Well. I believe I understand your offer; you've clawed your way up from the ashes of your parents' great blunders, and it has made you strong and clever and smug. And now, in your boundless generosity, you seek to deny the same privilege to the people of Lune. The only thing wrong with this place, kiddo, is people like me who never cleaned up our toys. But that's all finished now. Help? What do you expect to help us with? What is it you think we need?"

"That's what I'm here to find out," she said reasonably. "I asked to speak with someone in charge, and you're the one they sent. Has there been . . . some error?"

"Definitely," he answered, turning his back on her and everything she stood for. "Like your mother, I'm just some farmer who used to be somebody."

chapter twenty-six

in which an act of kindness
takes flower

Conrad would have cause to regret those words, for as a king he'd've been entitled to throw these smug missionaries out on their collective ear. As it was, they dealt with the Furies instead, and with the Grand Kabinet of Viense, and in short order they had conspired together to launch the largest restoration project in history.

Murdered Earth was, apparently, an affront to all humanity, for the Biarchists promised, at their own expense and under their own supervision, to place a shell around it which closely mimicked the original surface to a depth of fifty kilometers. Following this, they contemplated the resurrection of Mars, and possibly Venus as well. And resurrection was the proper word, for they planned to populate these worlds with simulacra of their departed residents--most especially the famous ones.

"It's nothing personal," Tilly Nichols insisted, in response to Radmer's outrage. Was Earth to be an amusement park, then? A monument to its former self, incapable of growing beyond the fairy tales that had accreted around it like orbiting debris?

"Not at all," Tilly said, looking and sounding politely amused. "We expect it to be as different from the original as you are from the dapper fellow my mother once courted. In your experience, eternal life and eternal death are the only options. You admit no shades of gray."

"But some people will remain dead," he accused. "Most, in fact. The vast majority."

To which she simply shrugged. "Our powers are limited. And the ones who do live will be reincarnations, yes. Not literal resurrections, not faxed copies. But also not witless and alone, like the natural-born, with no past lives to draw upon, no wisdom to inform their childhoods . . . I don't know what you're so offended about, truly; in Barnard your children were born as functional adults!"

"That also offended me."

"Oh. Well. We'll try to be conscious of societal norms here, to avoid such offenses wherever possible."

"How kind of you."

Unperturbed, she said, "To answer your question, Mr. Radmer, we start with celebrities because the reincarnation process is more accurate the more we know about a person. And through the gratings and lenses of their memory we can sift the quantum traces of those we know less well. Slowly but surely, Earth will give up her secrets."

And it was with precisely these sentiments that they exhumed the grave of Bruno de Towaji, and scanned his rotting carcass and the many electromagnetic ghosts it had left behind. De Towaji had gotten around in his long life; there were imprints of him all over the ruins of Sol system.

And of Tamra, who'd left nearly as many writings behind, and a great many more recorded images. "The lift of an arm," said Tilly, "speaks volumes about the mind that controls it."

Alas, through Tilly's eyes he could see that it was true. Poor Tamra. To be a literal puppet for these oversweet invaders, lifting her arms for their amusement!

"I'd love to scan you as well," she told Conrad on another occasion. "You knew the king and queen personally; you knew the age. Living brains make questionable witnesses when it comes to detail, but for recalling the scope and flavor of a bygone era, nothing else really quite compares."

But Conrad had no desire to meet--much less help create!--the Biarchy's caricatures of his dead king and queen. And as for the Xmary they would surely pluck from his dreams . . . God, the notion was seductive. Fragments of a woman half-remembered, whom he'd loved fiercely but never wholly known, for who could know the mind of another? Still less a woman! For all he knew, she would be as monstrous as the ghost of Bascal in a robot body. And know it! And resent it!

"Thank you, no," he said to Tilly. "My wife would kill me."

Finally, though, during his fiftieth or two hundredth argument with this alien woman, relations began to shift. They were in her quarters near the top of the starship, seated on opposite sides of a dining table that had risen up from the deck, overflowing with faxed meats and cheeses, steaming flavor-designer breads and lightly chilled fruits. The outer bulkhead had gone transparent, and the views of Timoch and the ocean behind it were pleasing.

They could have met anywhere; it was an act of kindness--of respect--for her to invite him specifically here. She wasn't even playing him, particularly--just being thoughtful. And it came to him suddenly, that she was doing exactly the same thing on a global scale: simply extracting and fulfilling the most deeply held wishes of Lune. Was it her fault she was rich? Had guarded generosity become a sin? Her resources seemed to dwarf even those of the Queendom at its peak, and there was no wickedness in her, nor foolishness.

Whether Conrad liked it or not, the people of this world were indeed choosing their own destiny. They wanted an end to death and politics, and who could begrudge them that age-old impossible dream? More than that, they wanted the stars, as Conrad had once wanted them. When had he shriveled into this ridiculous old fuddy-duddy, with nothing to do but stand in their way? His time was past. How lucky they were not to have him for their king!

But even this sentiment brought only kind laughter when he shared it with Tilly.

"You love these people, Mr. Radmer. It's evident in everything you do."

"Call me Conrad."

"All right, I will. Thank you."

"You're genuinely welcome." But then a black thought overtook him, and slowly became a certainty. "You beamed signals at this world. You tried to activate our wellstone systems remotely. Nineteen years ago, was it? Maybe twenty?"

"We tried. It didn't work," she said, shrugging.

"It did," he told her. "My God. The haunted towers of Imbria. A fax machine briefly awakening in its sandy grave. The finger of God, commanding a robot to waken. It was you!"

"I . . . don't understand."

"You stirred up old horrors, Ms. Nichols. You're responsible for the robot army that nearly destroyed this world! Bruno had the sense to kill his monstrous child, millennia ago, but you brought it back!"

That seemed to rock her. "We what? Conrad, in all our encounters we've done our level best to avoid damage--"

"And a splendid job you've made of it!" he spat, trying to sound venomous. "Only two of four nations destroyed, a fifth of the world's population killed . . ." He wanted to unload the full sedition act on her, but he found his heart wasn't in it. His voice trailed away.

Because how could they know? How could they imagine their well-intended fumbling might kick loose such an avalanche? That there'd been a hill of loose scree waiting to collapse was no fault of theirs, and if a beggar should choke on a gift of bread, did that lessen the kindness of the gesture?

"If what you say is true," she answered guardedly, "then reparations are in order."

"How?" he demanded, briefly flaring once more. "You're already giving this world everything it ever dreamed of. Its heroes, its riches, its dead . . . Your apology--if I dare call it that--is lost in the noise of your . . . overwhelming generosity . . ."

He stopped there, for he was spouting nonsense: they had been so good that they couldn't do better? And that was a bad thing?

In spite of everything, the two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. They laughed until the tears streamed down their cheeks, and then Conrad laughed some more, and wept, and felt an unfamiliar ache at the corners of his mouth. A grin that refused to be wiped away by his anger, no matter how hard he tried.

"It's good to see you smile," she remarked when things had settled down.

"It feels strange," Conrad admitted, with a tinge of resentment. Then, more reflectively: "It was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm an old soldier, Ms. Nichols. An old, unwilling soldier."

"Please, call me Tilly."

"All right. The thing is, Tilly, it ends here. I'm finally done fighting. You may be the most genuinely happy person I've ever met, and my defenses aren't up to that. I'm officially opening my gates; you may enter and do as you will."

"Or you could come out," she suggested. "And do as you will."

And before he knew it they were falling into bed together, rolling and twisting on wellcloth sheets in a field of sharply reduced gravity.

"God," he said. "Oh, my God. Is this happiness? Is this what hope feels like?"

"Explore," she advised him, offering herself as freely as she offered her planets' riches. "Live a little. Have some fun."

And it seemed like very good advice indeed, here at the start of something wonderful.

appendix A-3

planet envy

But hell, all of Sol's gas giants were prettier than Barnard's, except perhaps for Uranus. And Sorrow was no Earth, and Planet One was no Mercury, and Barnard's two asteroid belts were paltry middens against the grandeur of Sol's one. That was the problem with red dwarf star systems: they occupied only the top three rows of the periodic table. Chlorine was the heaviest of their common elements, leaving little room for exotic aero- and geochemistry. They were, in a word, boring.

appendix B

glossary

Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti --Traditional Latin benediction: "Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit." Employed by several Old Modern religions as a prayer for the dying.

Aft --(adj, adv) One of the ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.

AKA --(abbrev.) Also Known As.

Ako'i --(n) Tongan word meaning "teacher."

Antiautomata --(adj.) Describes any weapon intended for use against robots.

Apenine --(prop n) Province of the Luner nation of Imbria which includes the capital city of Timoch.

Arc de commencer --(n) A hypothetical device for diverting photons to a chronologically "earlier" point in spacetime, for the purpose of altering a historical outcome. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Ash --(prop n) A planette constructed in the late Queendom period at the L1 Lagrange point between Earth and Luna. Symbolically, the middle ground between two worlds. Later ejected by n-body perturbations.

Astaroth --(n) Luner nation including the south pole and southern portions of the former Nearside and Farside, with a population of approximately five million.

Astrogation --(n) Astral navigation. In common use, the art or process of navigating a starship.

AU --(n) Astronomical Unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 49.9028 light-seconds.

Autronic --(adj) Capable of self-directed activity. Commonly used to differentiate "robots" from teleoperated or "waldo" devices.

Aye-ma'am --(n) Colloquial abbreviation for antimatter.

Barnardean --(adj) Of or pertaining to Barnard, the first of the Queendom's thirteen colonies.

Barocline --(n) Any layer boundary marked by an abrupt change in pressure.

Biomod --(n) Biological modification. Any genetic, synthetic, Lamarckian, or bionic enhancement, whether heritable or non-.

Blindsight --(n) A condition in which the conscious portions of the neocortex (primarily the frontal lobes) are prevented from receiving input through the visual cortex, while the brain stem receives its own visual inputs normally. Although blindsight sufferers are able to avoid obstacles and grasp specific objects on demand, they experience none of the sensation associated with "seeing."

Blitterstaff --Also Blitterstick. (n) An antiautomata weapon employing a library of rapidly shifting wellstone compositions. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Bootward --(adj, adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.

Brickmail --(n) An allotrope of carbon consisting of benzene rings interlocked in a three-dimensional matrix. Brickmail is the toughest known nonprogrammable substance.

Bunkerlite --(n) Copyrighted, superreflective wellstone substance employed as protective cloth or armor. Attributed to Marlon Sykes.

Campanas --(prop n) Capital city of the Luner nation of Nubia.

Capward --(adj, adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.

Cerenkov radiation --(n) Electromagnetic radiation emitted by particles temporarily exceeding the local speed of light, e.g., upon exit from a collapsium lattice.

Chromosphere --(n) A transparent layer, usually several thousand kilometers deep, between the photosphere and corona of a star, i.e., the star's "middle atmosphere." Temperature is typically several thousand kelvins, with roughly the pressure of Earth's atmosphere in Low Earth Orbit.

Collapsar --(n) see Hypermass

Collapsiter --(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.

Collapsium --(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term "hypercollapsite" is more correct.

Converge (also Reconverge)--(v) To combine two separate entities, or two copies of the same entity, using a fax machine. In practice, rarely applied except to humans.

Coriolis force --(n) An apparent force on the surface of a rotating body, which causes apparent deflection of trajectories from the "expected" course in the rotating coordinate frame of the body. In meteorology, the force responsible for large-scale cyclonic weather systems.

Day, Barnardean --(n) A measure of time, equal to the stellar (not sidereal) day of Sorrow, aka Planet Two. There are 23 pids, or 460 Barnardean hours, or 1,653,125 standard seconds in the Barnardean day.

Deathist --(n) Adherent to the belief that the death of individuals is healthy for the population as a whole. Rarely applied except to humans; animal deathists are generally referred to as naturalists.

Deceant --(n) Title accorded to Luner military officers in charge of ten individual soldiers.

Declarant --(n) The highest title accorded by the Queendom of Sol; descended from the Tongan award of Nopélé, or knighthood. Only twenty-nine declarancies were ever issued.

Decohere --(v) To collapse a quantum uncertainty into a classical or Newtonian certainty, as with the position or trajectory of a particle or the state of a quantum bit.

Deutrelium --(n) A mixture (generally frozen or slushy) of equal numbers of deuterium (²H) and trelium (³He) atoms, used preferentially in magnetic-confinement fusion reactors.

Di-clad --(adj) Sheathed in an outer layer of monocrystalline diamond or other allotropes of carbon.

Dinite --(n) Any detonating or deflagrating explosive consisting primarily of ethylene glycol dinitrate.

Dolceti --(n) One or more members of the Order of Dolcet, whose "blindsight" training relies on the mildly toxic dolcet berry, native to Lune.

Downsystem --(adj) One of the six cardinal directions: toward the sun in any orientation.

Elementals, The --(n) Queendom-era cartel responsible for some 70% of the traffic in purified elements throughout the Queendom of Sol, with even higher percentages for certain key metals and rare earths.

Epitaxial --(adj) Describes a crystal of one material grown on the crystal face of another material, such that both crystals have the same structural orientation.

Eridanian --(n, adj) Resident of the Epsilon Eridani colony, typically characterized by short stature, neoteny, and photochromic skin pigments. Alternatively, anything pertaining to the Eridani colony.

Ertial --(adj) Antonym of inertial, applied to inertially shielded devices. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Extrasolar --(adj) Existing outside of Sol system.

Fatalist --(n, adj) Adherent to the belief that all events are predetermined and inevitable. As a proper noun, refers to any member of a Queendom-era organization dedicated to the forcible restoration of death as a natural renewal process.

Fax --(n) Abbreviated form of "facsimile." A device for reproducing physical objects from stored or transmitted data patterns. By the time of the Restoration, faxing of human beings had become possible, and with the advent of collapsiter-based telecommunications soon afterward, the reliable transmission of human patterns quickly became routine.

Faxborn --(adj) Created artificially in a fax machine, with no natural counterpart. In practice, applied only to human and human-derived beings, where it is often used in lieu of a family name.

Faxel --(n) Facsimile element. One element of a fax machine print plate which is capable of producing and placing a stored atom with 100-picometer precision.

Fibrediamond --(n) Composite material of whiskered crystalline carbon in a resin matrix. Unless sheathed in a superreflective coating, fibrediamond is notably flammable.

Flau --(n) Member of a species of living airship developed on Lune, based originally on the genome of the leviathan, the largest native marine creature of Pup.

Fuff --(v) A polite term for sexual intercourse, popular in the Queendom of Sol and its colonies.

Geostat --(adj) Fixed in reference to the Earth. In fashion, a clothing or paint pattern which appears to hold stationary while the subject moves through it.

Geriatry --(n) The condition of physical decrepitude which occurs in natural organisms over the course of their presumed lifespans. Geriatry is characterized by high rates of apoptosis triggered by lipofuscin buildup, and cellular senscence triggered by telomere shortening.

Ghost --(n) Any electromagnetic trace preserved in rock or metal. Colloquially, a visual image of past events, especially involving deceased persons. The term may also refer to interactive messages, especially from distant or deceased persons.

Gigaton --(n) One billion metric tons, or 10¹² kilograms. Equal to the mass of a standard industrial neuble or collapson node ("black hole").

Girona --(prop n) A minor city in the E1 Gironès comarque of Catalonia, Old Earth, situated at the confluence of the Ter, Güell, Galligants, and Onyar Rivers, some 80 kilometers from the nation's former capital at Barcelona.

Grand kabinet --(prop n) Primary ruling body of the Luner nation of Viense.

Grappleship --(n) A vehicle propelled by means of electromagnetic grapples. Use of grappleships was considered impractical in the Queendom until the advent of ertial shielding, though high-powered inertial devices were capable of attaining enormous accelerations.

Graser --(n) A gravity projector whose emissions are coherent, i.e., monochromatic and phase-locked. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Gravitic --(adj) Of or pertaining to gravity, either natural or artificial.

Hollie --(n) Abbreviated form of "hologram." Any three-dimensional image. Colloquially, a projected, dynamic three-dimensional image, or device for producing same.

Hypercollapsite --(n) A quasicrystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Usually organized as a vacuogel.

Hypercomputer --(n) Any computing device capable of altering its internal layout. Colloquially, a computing device made of wellstone.

Hypercondensed --(adj) Condensed to the point of gravitational collapse, i.e., until a black hole or "hypermass" is formed. Colloquially, condensed to any level the speaker finds impressive. Also "hypercompressed."

Hypermass --(adj) A mass which has been hypercompressed; a black hole.

Imbria --(prop n) Temperate Luner nation of the northern hemisphere, on the former Nearside, with a population of approximately ten million.

Immorbid --(adj) Not subject to life-threatening disease or deterioration.

Impervium --(n) Public domain wellstone substance; the hardest superreflector known.

Indeceased --(n, adj) Luner colloquialism for senile Olders who are incapable of useful learning or work.

Instantiate (also Print)--(v) To produce a single instance of a person or object; to fax from a stored or received pattern.

Instelnet --(prop n) The low-bandwidth lightspeed data network connecting the Queendom of Sol and its thirteen colony systems.

Judder --(v, n) To vibrate energetically. As a noun, a motion artifact produced when stored images are played back incorrectly. Judder can be employed deliberately as part of an error-correction scheme in defective fax machine print plates.

Juke --(v) To move unexpectedly out of position. Colloquially, to cheat or deceive.

kps --(abbrev.) Kilometers per second, a measure of velocity for celestial bodies and interplanetary/interstellar vehicles. The speed of light is 300,000 kps. (Also kips, kiss).

Kuiper Belt --(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any solar system, in which gravitational perturbations have amplified the concentration of large, icy bodies or "comets." Sol's Kuiper Belt extends from 40 AU at its lower boundary to 1000 AU at its upper, and has approximately one-fourth the overall density of the much smaller Asteroid Belt. The total mass of the Kuiper Belt exceeds that of Earth.

Light-minute --(n) The distance traveled by light through a standard vacuum in one minute: 17,987,547.6 kilometers or 0.12 AU.

Light-year --(n) The distance traveled by light through a standard vacuum in one year: 9.4607 trillion kilometers or 63,238 AU.

Luna --(prop n) Original name of Earth's moon.

Lune (also The Squozen Moon, The Half Moon)--(prop n) Name attaching to Earth's moon following the terraforming operations which reduced its diameter from 3500 to 1400 kilometers.

Malo e lelei --Traditional Tongan greeting widely used within the Queendom. Literally: "Thank you for coming."

Matter programming --(n) The discipline of arranging, sequencing, and utilizing pseudomaterials in a wellstone or other programmable-matter matrix, often including the in situ management of energy and computing resources.

Mechsprach --(n) Any spoken accent or dialect reserved for use by machines, to distinguish them from human or human-derived speakers.

Metastable --(adj) Existing in an unstable state which is transient but relatively long-lived.

Microbar --(n) A measure of atmospheric pressure, equivalent to one-millionth of an Earth atmosphere at sea level. Partial pressures of oxygen must reach approximately 70,000 microbars to be considered breathable.

Millibar --(n) A measure of atmospheric pressure, equivalent to one-thousandth of an Earth atmosphere at sea level. Partial pressures of oxygen in the 70 millibar range are generally considered breathable.

Nasen --(n) An acronym: Neutrino Amplification through Stimulated EmissioN. A monochromatic beam of high-energy neutrinos, sometimes employed for interplanetary communication thanks to its extremely small divergence angle. However, the difficulty of generating such a beam, plus its ready interactions with matter, limit its usefulness except as a weapon.

Naturalist --(n, adj) Adherent to the belief that natural events and processes are preferable to artificial ones. Naturalists may or may not also be deathists.

Neoteny --(n) The retention of juvenile characteristics (usually physical) into adulthood.

Nescog, The --(prop. n) NEw Systemwide COllapsiter Grid. Sol system's successor to the Inner System Collapsiter Grid or Iscog; an ultrahigh-bandwidth telecommunications network employing numerous supraluminal signal shunts.

Neuble --(n) A diamond-clad neutronium sphere, explosively formed, usually incorporating one or more layers of wellstone for added strength and versatility. A standard industrial neuble masses one billion metric tons, with a radius of 2.67 centimeters.

Neutronium --(n) Matter which has been supercondensed, crushing nuclear protons and orbital electron shells together into a continuous mass of neutrons. Unstable except at very high pressures. Any quantity of neutronium may be considered a single atomic nucleus; however, under most conditions the substance will behave as a superfluid.

Neutronium barge (also Neutronium Dredge) --(n) A space vessel, typically one billion cubic meters (1000 x 1000 x 1000 m) or larger, whose primary function is to gather mass, supercompress it into neutronium, and transport it to a depot or work site. Although less numerous, smaller neutronium barges also existed for transport only.

Nubia --(prop n) Subtropical Luner nation of the southern hemisphere, on the former Nearside, with a population of approximately 100 million.

Older --(prop n) Informal title or ethnic slur applied to immorbid Queendom residents by the morbid, mortal peoples of Lune.

Ophiuchus --(prop n) A large, dim, nonzodiacal constellation, "The Snake Holder," beginning between Scorpius and Sagittarius near the Sol Ecliptic Plane and extending some 50 degrees northward.

Petabyte --(n) A measure of data storage equal to 10¹⁵ bytes or eight quadrillion digital bits.

Philander --(n) A title granted to formal consorts of the Queen of Sol. Only four philanders were ever named.

Photochromic --(adj) Changing color under the influence of light.

Photosail --(n) Any nearly two-dimensional device whose primary function is to derive mechanical energy from the pressure of reflected light, including sunlight, starlight, and radiation from artificial sources. The term "solar sail" is sometimes applied colloquially, but in fact solar sails are a subset of photosails.

Photosphere --(n) The hot, opaque, convectively stable plasma layer of a star beginning at the photopause, responsible for most thermal and visible emissions. Usually less than 1000 kilometers deep, with temperatures of several thousand kelvins and the approximate pressure of Earth's stratosphere. The photosphere floats atop the deep hydrogen convection zones of the stellar interior.

Photovoltaic --(adj) Capable of generating an electrical voltage with the input of light energy, through the liberation of bound electrons in a preferred direction. In many isolated devices, wellstone pseudomaterials must be photovoltaic in order to maintain their other properties using ambient radiation.

Picometer --(n) A measure of distance, equal to 10^-12 meters or one-billionth of a millimeter.

Planette --(n) Any artificial celestial body consisting of a stony or earthy lithosphere surrounding a core or shell of supercondensed (neutronic) matter. The vast majority of planettes are designed for human habitation, and include Earthlike surface gravity and breathable atmospheres.

Plibbles --(n) Fruits of the plibble tree.

Plurality --(n) The condition of existing in more than one physical instantiation under the same identity, e.g., with intent to reconverge the copies at a later time.

Positronium --(n) A material consisting of "atoms" made from one electron and one positron orbiting their mutual center of attraction. Unstable in free space, positronium is generally stored in magnetic nanobottles between the fibers of bulk wellstone.

Print plate --(n) The largest single component of a fax machine, responsible for assembling and disassembling finished goods at the atomic level. Print plates are generally flat and most typically rectangular, although with effort they can be fashioned as cylinders or other three-dimensional forms.

Pseudoatom --(n) The organization of electrons into Schrödinger orbitals and pseudoorbitals, made possible with great precision in a designer quantum dot. The properties of pseudoatoms do not necessarily mimic those of natural atoms.

Pup --(prop n) Innermost world of the Wolf 359 star system, first colonized in Q427. Considered marginally habitable.

Quantum dot --(n) A device for constraining the position of one or more charge carriers (e.g., electrons) in all three spatial dimensions, such that quantum ("wavelike") effects dominate over classical ("particlelike") effects. Charge carriers trapped in a quantum dot will arrange themselves into standing waveforms analogous to the electron orbitals of an atom. Thus, the waveforms inside a quantum dot may be referred to collectively as a pseudoatom.

Reportant --(n) Any person or mechanism gathering information for public distribution.

Rodenbeck, Wenders --(prop n) Poet laureate of the Queendom era.

Senatoria Plurum --(prop n) The main governing body of the Luner nation of Nubia.

Sensorium, Neural --(n) Any system for channeling synthetic neural inputs into the brain. Sometimes employed as a form of torture, but generally considered a medium for education and entertainment, especially in remote environments.

Shattering, The --(prop n) Global seismic event with a death toll in the hundreds of millions, generally credited with destroying the post-Queendom Iridium Age civilization of Lune. According to Conrad Mursk, an ostensibly preventable disaster.

Sila'a --(n) A pinpoint fusion generator or "pocket star" consisting of a wellstone-sheathed neutronium core surrounded by gaseous deuterium. From the Tongan si'i (small) and la'aa (sun).

Sketchplate --(n) A thin, typically rectangular block or sheet of wellstone sized and preprogrammed for the portable display and input of text, drawings, and physical simulations.

Squozen Moon, The (See Lune)

Stealth --(n) Concealment, especially during movement or action. Colloquially, a synonym for technologically derived invisibility.

Stormlands, The --(prop n) 180-kilometer-wide region of Lune's northern hemisphere, characterized by reduced gravity, peripheral convection cells, and permanent cyclonic weather formations.

Superabsorber (also superblack) --(n) Any material capable of absorbing 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. The only known universal superabsorber (i.e., functioning at all wavelengths) is the event horizon of a hypermass. (Approximations of 100% absorption are generally referred to as "black.")

Superfluid --(n, adj) Any fluidized material capable of propagating with zero friction and zero viscosity. The vast majority of superfluids are either cryogenic, as with liquid helium, or supercondensed, as with neutronium.

Superreflector --(n) Any material capable of reflecting 100% of incident light in a given wavelength band. No universal superreflectors are known. (Approximations of 100% reflectance are generally referred to as "mirrors.")

Supervacuum --(n) A state of vacuum in which some wavelengths of the Zero Point Field have been suppressed or excluded. Since the speed of light is a function of vacuum energy, supervacuum is useful for the transmission of matter and information at supraluminal velocities.

Supraluminal --(adj) Exceeding the classical speed of light.

Tazzer --(n) A short-range beam weapon consisting of pulsed, coaxial streams of electrons and metal ions in a guide beam of blue or violet laser light. Tazzers are primarily used to induce temporary incapacity (pain, paralysis, unconsciousness), although lethal versions also exist.

Terraform --(v) To make Earthlike. In general, to match the gravity, climate, and atmosphere of a planet or planette to that of Earth, possibly including the imposition of a stable biosphere. Enclosed spaces are "climate controlled" rather than terraformed. Attributed to Jack Williamson.

Thermocline --(n) Any layer boundary marked by an abrupt change in temperature.

Tillspar --(prop n) Highest nonvacuum suspension bridge in the known universe, spanning the 10-kilometer-deep Highrock Divide in the Imbrian province of Apenine, Lune.

Timoch --(prop n) Capital city of the Luner nation of Imbria, with a population of approximately two million.

Tonga --(n) Former Earth kingdom consisting of the Tongatapu, Ha'apai, and Vava'u archipelagoes of Polynesia, and scattered islands occasionally including parts of Samoa and Fiji. Tonga was the only Polynesian nation never to be conquered or colonized by a foreign power, and was the last human monarchy prior to the Q1 establishment of the Queendom of Sol.

Tropopause --(n) In a planetary atmosphere, a sharply defined thermocline or barocline separating the troposphere or lower atmosphere from the stratosphere or upper atmosphere.

Upsystem --(adj, adv) One of the six cardinal directions: away from the sun in any orientation.

Varna --(prop n) A 640-meter-radius planette constructed in orbit around Luna by private investors during the latter years of the Queendom of Sol. Site of the Q1290 Treaty of Varna, granting Right of Return to Barnard refugees.

Viense --(prop n) Temperate Luner nation of the original Farside, including the north pole, with a population of approximately fifty million.

Wellcloth --(n) A fabric woven wholly or partially from wellstone fibers. While sheet wellstone could technically be considered a form of cloth, the term "wellcloth" is generally reserved for fabrics with weavelengths larger than 1 micrometer.

Wellglass --(n) Any wellstone substance which is both optically transparent and electrically insulative, often employed as the default state of wellstone devices. Most typically refers to a wellstone substance closely emulating the properties of transparent silica-soda-lime (SiO₂, NaO, CaO) "window glass" preparations except in terms of mass and toughness. In general, natural substances containing a preponderance of silicon are the easiest to emulate in a wellstone matrix.

Wellstone --(n) A substance consisting of fine, semiconductive fibers studded with quantum dots, capable of emulating a broad range of natural, artificial, and hypothetical materials. Typical wellstone is composed primarily of pure silicon, silicon dioxide, and gold.

Wellwood --(n) An emulation of lignous cellulose ("wood"), often employed as the default state of wellstone devices.

Zetta-ton --(n) A measure of mass, equal to 10²¹ tons or one million billion billion kilograms.

appendix D

further voyaging

Pumpkin orange, Conrad noted with surprise and mild disappointment. There were hints of rainbow at the edges, hints of laquered sheen at the center, but the dully glowing "white dwarf" was fundamentally orange, not much different in appearance than the neutron star had been. More than anything it looked like a wellstone nightlight in the wall of a child's bedroom. But unlike the neutron star--really just a tourist stop along the way--this planet-sized sphere contained riches: stable transuranics by the gigaton, held tightly in the core by a hundred thousand gravities.

"If only we could pry them loose," Tilly said to him as they stood together on their yacht's observation deck. "We'd be richer than the Biarchy itself."

"I think I've got an idea," Conrad replied. And so he did, though its implementation was more difficult than he could possibly have imagined. But that's another tale entirely.

By Wil McCarthy

Aggressor Six

Flies from the Amber

The Fall of Sirius

Murder in the Solid State

Bloom

The Collapsium

The Wellstone

Lost in Transmission

To Crush the Moon