Authors: Wil McCarthy
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 seventeen
in which light fails
Bruno finds himself brushing a quantum horse—
white with black spots, like a negative image of the wide, unforgiving cosmos. This creature, he knows, has the power to carry him anywhere he wants to go. The catch being, he first has to go
everywhere
, and then collapse his waveform to a single location. And that seems an odd bargain to strike; there's a faint whiff of brimstone on the air. But there's a destination he must reach, an error of judgment he must correct before . . . before . . .
But the flau jostles beneath him, and the wicker deck creaks, and he opens his eyes to darkness. The dream flees to wherever it is that dreams go, and is forgotten. Although he doesn't know it, Bruno has had this dream five times before, and the warnings buried within it have been a great, if vague, source of trouble to his waking mind.
“Where are we?” he asks, sitting up abruptly. The coarse rope around his waist draws taut.
“Landing,” says Zuq, who sits beside him as a man might sit by a campfire. For warmth, for a kind of company. Along the railing that circles the flau's broad back, every third post is triple-high, with a paper lantern lashed to a hook. The lamps have been lit with electric bulbs, and from this vantage Bruno can see there are similar lamps as well on the ground below. Landing lights.
And the stars are still up there in the sky, though the Murdered Earth clings low above the clouds which hide the western horizon, and the sea. But there is something ineffably
dark
about this place. The light doesn't quite seem to reach the ground, or else reaches it but is not reflected back. Indeed, outside of the tiny islands of illumination underneath the airfield lights, he can't
see
the ground at all. He has no idea whether they're landing in a valley or on a mountaintop, although something in the angle of the breeze implies neither. On a shelf, halfway up a steep mountainside? To the east there's nothing but blackness, and the voices of men, calling out landing instructions, echo as if from a canted, irregular wall.
“Where are we
physically
?” he presses, frowning down at the knot that holds him. “The Sawtooth Mountains, obviously. But is this the pass?”
“Aye,” says Zuq. “The Black Forest herself. We're about three and a half kilometers above sea level, on the Andrea Bench overlooking Aden. Due east of Timoch, give or take. The land rises eastward like a staircase.”
“I can't see a thing,” says Bruno. His vision is still quite good—probably better than any of these “humans” can boast, but their trait of rapidly shifting skin pigment has made even Zuq into a shadow. It's rather warm for a winter's night in the high mountains, but dark skin will more readily absorb any ambient, radiant heat. In the cool and dark, these people, these humans, grow darker still.
“You're not the only one,” answers Zuq. But he points to a faint glow, perhaps a hundred meters off the flau's port side. “That's Gillem Forta, the army base. Eight hundred men on station, and another fifty in semaphore shacks running all up and down the pass. Behind the main barracks there, you can just make out the highway.”
All Bruno can make out is the edge of a single building, and only because an electric lightbulb burns there in the gloom. There's no road, no army base, no people at all except the airfield technicians, who are throwing ropes up to the waiting Dolceti under the disapproving glare of the steersman.
“You can't see it from here,” Zuq continues, “but just the other side of the road is the Rayton Inn, where travelers catch their breath before the steepest part of the climb. Is it true blackberries come from the stars?”
“No, although they fared well in the soil of Planet Two, in the stormy skies of Barnard's Star. They're from Old Earth. Why do you ask?”
“Because the inn makes a fine blackberry pie, and an even finer blackberry beer, which they still call ‘the best in four worlds.' I suppose they can call it whatever they like.”
“We're not staying for pie,” says Radmer, walking up to them with a grim look. “Unless you want to reach the Stormlands at the height of morning thermals, when the gravel rains down, we must cross the pass summit by midnight, and the rim of Shanru Basin by the first light of dawn.”
“Black Forest at midnight,” Zuq marvels. “These
are
desperate times. I hope the road's in good repair.”
“Parts of it,” Radmer says coolly. “But it can be done without roads at all. I once took a thousand men through this pass on a cloudy, Earthless night, without so much as a footpath to follow. In the other direction, the harder direction. And those were happy days, comparatively speaking.”
“The Davner War?” Zuq asks, marveling. He breaks into song for a moment: “
When the Endistal Faction broke the Gower Monop'ly? / And the rivers of freedom ran red!
Are you
that
Radmer?”
“I'm older than I look,” Radmer says, deadpan. And Bruno laughs, because to a trained eye the remains of this architect laureate appear very old indeed. But he's struck again by the span of time this Irish lad has crossed, the events he's been caught up in. Never one to leave well enough alone. Surely not to abandon a world to its fate. Not again, not another one.
“The Endistas' role in that story is underappreciated,” Radmer adds thoughtfully. “Kung's army had nothing to eat but sugar, and I kept saying they had to crash sometime. But they led us a long, frantic chase, and if not for the harrying of those recon units we might not have caught them before they hit the flatland. I had an unusually good team with me.”
To which Captain Bordi answers, from somewhere nearby, “Way I hear it, Radmer, every team with you on it is an unusually good team. By coincidence, you'll say, but I assume my grandfather had reason for idolizing you the way he did.”
With a smirk in his tone, Zuq says, “Maybe something else. That ballad isn't all about fighting, you know.” He breaks into song again:
“Radmer stayed with Queen Monday for eight years and twenty / and she bore him five sons and a girl!”
“That's enough, lad,” Bruno tells him gently. “No one likes to hear his old joys and sorrows reduced to a banjo ditty.”
“Ah. Okay.” Young Zuq sounds disappointed.
There's more fun to be had with this,
his tone implies. He doesn't seem to realize it could hurt as well.
Soon, though, the ladders are unrolled and the Dolceti are swinging down onto solid ground. Bruno is nearly the last to go, with only Zuq behind him. The sandy ground is coarse with sharp, angular pebbles that crunch and grind underfoot. The night is very black, and suddenly, inexplicably colder here at ground level.
“Why is it so dark?” Bruno can't help asking. “I can see the western sky. We're not in a valley, right? Where do all the photons go?”
“Solar trees,” one of the Dolceti answers over her shoulder. “This is the Black Forest.” The speaker is Parma, one of the “mission mothers.” Bruno isn't clear on whether this is a formal rank or title, or a job assignment, or just some sort of nickname, but the lowest ranks among the Dolceti are “squad leaders” like Zuq, with “deceants” like Natan just above them. And both ranks act deferentially toward the two mothers, who are the only women in the group. The womens' age is equally ambiguous; neither one has acquired the lines and sags of full-blown geriatry yet, but the bloom of youth isn't prominent either. Bruno knows almost nothing about “human” physiology, but if he had to guess, he would put Parma's age at around forty years.
Anyway. Solar trees, hmm. Is that supposed to be self-explanatory? The first hint of understanding comes as he watches the Dolceti appearing and disappearing around him. Not in the manner of Lyman's Olders, with their stealth-mode inviz cloaks drawing kilowatts of power from hidden reserves, but in the manner of people walking behind pillars of superabsorber black. Once clear of the gravel airfield, they've moved in among a stand of trees. Very, very dark trees. The Dolceti are
groping
their way through, he realizes, with uncertain steps and their arms out ahead of them. Above Bruno, the starlight has been replaced by a roof of absolute blackness.
He touches one of the trees. Nearly runs into it, in fact, and is saved only by the envelope of cold air around it—characteristic of surfaces which absorb infrared but do not release it. He stops short and—gingerly—reaches out to brush the surface with his fingers. It feels slick, nearly featureless, interrupted only occasionally by small ridges or bumps. If it's tree bark, it's far smoother than birch or aspen or anything else he's familiar with. And it's cold, drinking in the heat of his fingertips. Reaching up, he can feel limbs as thick as his wrist, branching up and away at forty-five-degree angles.
“Are these natural?” he asks.
“They're biological,” says Radmer's disembodied voice, from some distance away. “They grow and die. They drop seeds and sprout forests. The soil conditions have to be just right, but where they are, the solar trees will choke out any other vegetation.”
Indeed, the ground remains a wasteland of sand and gravel, unbroken by grass or moss or even leaf litter. The spacing of the trees, too, is remarkably regular—a sort of honeycomb pattern. Because no tree can grow in the shadow of another, Bruno realizes, and because any open space will surely be colonized. The sprouts must fight it out for dominance, for survival itself, but the contest is rigged from the start: a tree at the edge of a clearing must eventually grow into the shadows of its neighbors, its energy budget forever restricted. A tree at the
center
of a clearing would have no such constraint, and could reach its full growth and potential without hindrance.
“This is one of the great failed experiments of early Lune,” Radmer expounds. “They were supposed to enrich the world, to bring infrastructure to its remotest corners. And they have, in a way. But the price is steep.”
“So now you're older than the trees themselves?” Zuq asks, as though he only half believes it.
And Bruno tells him, “When our Radmer here first stood upon this sphere, son, there wasn't even air. There wasn't even gravity, not as you feel it now. It took him two hundred years to make a world of it. But he had built other worlds before this one.” He waves a hand at the sky. “Out there, among the stars. Where the blackberries grow.”
“Such sorcerers we have in our midst!” Zuq laughs, and again he's only half joking. For the second time, Bruno feels a surge of sympathy for these unlucky people. To Zuq, this grotty little war is epic in scope! The history behind him seems unimaginably vast, with an uncertain future ahead and himself at the cusp, a young hero on a desperate quest. His humor is of the funereal variety; he expects his life to be violent and short. He expects his noble death to be written up in a song, if indeed his people survive at all.
Bruno feels a sudden urge to hug this young man, to rub his head, to offer some reassurance. But there's nothing to say, for the situation really is desperate. And anyway Zuq is off in the trees somewhere, separated from Bruno by four meters of blackness. So fortunately the urge is not difficult to resist, and the lad escapes with his dignity intact.
Then, suddenly, Bruno and Radmer and the Dolceti are in a clearing, with buildings all around. It isn't a natural clearing—black little sprouts and silver-gray stumps attest to the violence of its maintenance—but here the light can travel for more than a few meters. Here in this little bubble it can reflect, and re-reflect, and mingle with the starlight raining down from above.
“Bestnight,” says a soldier leaning in a doorway. It's a Luner greeting Bruno has heard once or twice already. “Luck unto yer.”
“Danks,” replies Captain Bordi. “Luck en yer hold'n dis pass. We will'n no enemy et ours back, right?”
“Right,” the soldier agrees. There are other signs and sounds of activity here, but the place has a sleepy, dolorous feel to it. An air of fatalism, of doom. These ordinary soldiers are an afterthought in the epic; their job is simply to die, to hold the borders for a while and then be overrun. And yet there's discipline here; there's a man in every doorway, grimly standing his watch. At the side of the “highway”—really just a thin ribbon of tar and crushed rock—sits a shack atop a three-meter tower, with lamps burning brightly and three men waving semaphore flags up and down, left and right. Dutifully transmitting the nation's network traffic by the effort of their own eyes and arms.
Bruno's first surprise is the stream of refugees trickling uphill, against the pull of gravity. A family of four rolls by on a pair of six-wheeled scooters, whirring with the unmistakable tones of the old-fashioned electric motor. Up ahead, almost lost in the gloom, he can make out the lights of a slightly larger group. These are not traumatized people, hollow with the shock of murder and destruction. Indeed, he hears the sound of laughter drifting along the road, and the cases and trunks strapped to the vehicles show every sign of having been packed with care and forethought. These families have simply done the math, and concluded that the coastal lowlands of central Imbria are no longer the fashionable place to be.
And though Bruno is hardly in a position to criticize them, he asks, “Where are they going?”
“Manilus, probably,” Radmer answers. “It's a large enough city to absorb a few extras. If their treaders hold out, if nothing breaks down, they'll be behind city walls again by morning.”
“Will they be safe there?”
“For an extra few Luner days, I imagine. It hardly seems worth the effort, but people always do this. In a way it's admirable: squeezing out the last few drops of the good life, refusing to buy into the gruesome promises of war. And more often than you'd think, some miracle really does intervene, and spare them the nightmares they've never quite believed in.”
“Well, then, why doesn't
everyone
flee?”
“You're asking me? I suppose the glib answer is that treaders—those vehicles, there—are expensive. But the real answer goes deeper than that. People are rarely eager to march into certain doom, but there are those who'll stand their ground at any cost. And truthfully, it takes both kinds to clean up afterward. War after war, people like that have their spirits broken, while people like this survive with their illusions intact. And that's what soldiers are for, Your Hi— er, Ako'i. If we cannot protect idealism, then there's little point in protecting anything.”