Authors: Wil McCarthy
“So
you're
their miracle,” Bruno says, almost reproachfully.
“Sometimes,” Radmer admits. “When luck and timing allow it. But not for a very long while. I really was retired. I swore I'd never take another human life, and I've kept that promise. These people have no brickmail inside them, no wellstone, no fibrediamond or regeneration factors. When they lose an eye, it never grows back, and they get only a few years of practice to refine their skills.”
“And dolcet berries!” one of the Dolceti chimes in. “I reckon those helps us a bit!”
There is scattered laughter at that remark, but Radmer presses on. “For me to fight against these children—even in the cause of justice—was terribly unfair. Such battles are their own to win or lose. It's their world.”
“Hmm. Yes. But these new enemies come from without. You've roused yourself from the fireside at last—roused me as well!—to strike down a foreign invader who upsets the balance of power you've so carefully cultivated. To protect your children.”
“Don't romanticize it,” Radmer warns. “I did have children of my own, once.”
And Bruno answers, “As did I. There's nothing pretty about this mess, but having agreed to participate, I do mean to understand it.”
Bruno's second surprise is that there are twenty-two of those six-wheeled vehicles, those “treaders,” waiting for him and his escorts. Fully equipped, yes, and with a pair of army lads standing guard to make sure the travelers and inn guests don't have a chance to swipe anything.
“Someone has called ahead,” Bruno says, impressed.
To which Radmer reacts with irritation. “What kind of place do you think this is? Yes, it's still the Metal Ages here, but we didn't have wellstone and fax machines in the colonies, either. Not after the first couple of centuries. Did that make us uncivilized? Even badly outnumbered, the Eridanians
defeated
the Queendom of Sol.”
“Meaning no offense,” Bruno says mildly, for he's tired of taking the blame for his ignorance. Plenty of blame attaches to him for other reasons, but this at least is not his fault. When he lived here, briefly, it was another age entirely. The Iridium Days, yes. He's never heard the songs of Lune's history, never even glanced at a current political map for more than a few seconds. How could he? And anyway, it was entropy that defeated the Queendom. The Eridanians were simply there at the time.
Soon, Natan is showing Bruno how to mount a treader. There's no great trick to it—there were electric motorcarts of similar design in Old Girona, and alcohol-powered scooters in the islands of Tonga, which Bruno and his family had occasionally ridden. But the treader is more complex, better balanced. Bruno sees at once that its six wheels, cunningly articulated, will keep the chassis approximately level through considerable variance in the terrain. These are off-road vehicles, deigning for the moment to travel a ribbon of pavement.
In another minute they're off and rolling, a loose pack of riders with Bruno and Radmer at the protected center. They're not moving all that fast—forty kilometers per hour, perhaps a little less—but the progress is steady, and the treaders seem little troubled by the steepness of the climb. Neither their motors nor the wind noise is loud enough to be troublesome. Indeed, it's an eerily silent way to travel, like flying a glider low and slow, not touching the ground at all. But Bruno is glad he's not riding out in front, for the treaders' headlight beams travel only as far as the next little curve, where they're swallowed by the superabsorber blackness of the forest.
“This is the most direct route,” Radmer tells him apologetically. “Flau have been known to reach an altitude of six kilometers, but their gas bladders suffer permanent damage, and they're too hypoxic to follow navigation commands. Even in emergencies such as this, their service ceiling is capped at four kilometers. But Gillem is the highest airfield in Imbria, and one of the highest on Lune, and the Black Forest Pass will lead us to Tillspar.”
“The bridge?”
“Right. And once we're across the divide into East Highrock, we can follow the old Junction Highway—what remains of it—east to the base of the Blood Mountains, where the Stormlands begin. The northern route, through a town called Viewpoint, would be a flatter, brighter way to pass the night, but it would take four hours longer. It's a delay we can ill afford.”
“And the southern route,” Bruno says, trying to picture the jagged land around him, “cuts through the north of Nubia, where our enemies are as thick as flies.”
“Right,” Radmer says again. “So Black Forest it is.” He looks around at the shapeless dark. “Was it like this during the Light Wars? This dark, I mean? Every building greedily drinking in the energy around it, heedless of courtesy or the greater good?”
With the wind in his face, Bruno laughs humorlessly. “Believe it or not, lad, the Light Wars were before my time. My parents were born in that period, but even they were sheltered from it, for Catalonia had stern regulations about wellstone. It had to be locally produced, inefficiently and at great cost, or else it was subject to tariffs. It still found its way in, of course, but rarely in anything as bulky or expensive as a
building
. And in Girona, where my parents lived and died, there were social taboos attached to it as well. The people weren't fanatics, but they favored a kind of technological puritanism. A hands-on approach, if you will. As a boy, I sometimes wore clothing woven from the wool of actual sheep!”
“And yet,” Radmer says in tones of mock accusation, “you turned the world of physics on its head. You changed everything.”
“I did,” Bruno agrees. “Almost as soon as my parents were buried. And I fear I'd do it all over again if I had the choice! But it was that Old Modern styling that made the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake so deadly when it hit. I wasn't the only one turning my back on it; the whole world was shaken, looking for a new path, a new monarch to lead the way into a brighter future. And in that sense, my research wasn't a betrayal of Girona's ideals at all; it was very hands-on. It put the deadly fringes of quantum physics right there at your fingertips.”
“Just how old
are
you, Ako'i?” asks Zuq, who is riding along just a few meters away. “You're talking about Old Earth, right? Before Tara and Toji conquered the solar system.”
Bruno laughs again. “Tara and Toji, was it? Yes, lad, I remember their conquests well.” Then, in a more maudlin tone: “Such memories linger far beyond their usefulness. It's a cruel sort of prank, for the past seems palpably close, even when the last of its keepsakes have turned to dust.”
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.