Authors: Wil McCarthy
“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
in which darkness proves an ally
On the other side of Tillspar, the highway is less
icy but in generally poorer condition. As the road snakes down the eastern slope of the Sawtooth Mountains there are shelves and valleys with highways of their own—opportunities to turn north or south—but the riders follow the Junction Highway east and down. The air gets warmer, thicker, easier to breathe, and Bruno's ears pop again and again as the pressure upon them slowly increases.
But every kilometer of road seems to be in greater disrepair than the one before it. As the treaders pass through East Black Forest, potholes give way to craters. And as the solar trees thin out to a simple pine forest, the craters become larger and more frequent. Ironically, just as the road is beginning to straighten and level out, it becomes impossible to follow anything like a straight-line course along it. A treader must needs zigzag between the holes at half speed.
“I'm surprised there's any pavement here at all,” Radmer says when Bruno remarks on it.
“Nobody looks after this road,” Natan agrees. “It don't go anywhere.”
At that Radmer muses, “It used to go straight to Crossroads, near the triple point where Imbria and Nubia and Viense come together. It was bigger than Timoch, which back then was a sheep-and-cow town. Manassa was the largest city in the hemisphere, a center of commerce easily rivaling Tosen and Bolo on the south coast. Keep in mind, there were a lot more people then.”
“I remember the Iridium Days well,” Bruno tells him, “if not happily. Lune was the rotting corpse of our Queendom; I couldn't love it. Couldn't
bear
it. I fled because my soul had died and my body refused to follow. But I do remember Manassa. The towers of wellglass all strung together with bridges, and every morning a silence field enforcing ten minutes of meditation . . . When I left they were in a blue period, with every surface glowing in the sun like crystalline bits of sky.”
“Well,” says Radmer, “after the Shattering, Manassa was gone and the Junction Highway led straight into permanent storm, and you had to take the long way around to get to Crossroads. The little towns along the way continued for quite some time afterwards, but one by one they sort of dried up and blew away. This road is two thousand years old, and it's been, I'll guess, almost three hundred years since it saw any attention. So like I say, the surprising thing is that there's any road left.”
Bruno snorts at that. “When I was a boy we were still using Roman roads, older than this one and in far better condition.”
“The Catalan weather was kinder,” Radmer says. “For what it's worth, there are diamond highways here on Lune that will last until the end of time. This pavement was a high-end temporary, never meant to last so long.”
Ahead of them, finally, the sky above another mountain range has begun to show signs of impending dawn. Even on Lune, the night cannot last forever. And the extra light is welcome, because the riders have finally abandoned the idea of avoiding the rough spots, and are now riding straight through them in a clattering mass. At first the clever six-wheeled suspension of the treaders is adequate to the task, but as the ruts deepen and their shapes become more complex, the wheels begin to exceed their vertical travel limits.
Soon, the heaving bodies of the treaders are pummeling their riders' legs, and headlight beams are waving up and down so madly that the road might as well be illuminated by strobe lights. Progress slows yet again. They're still going faster than they would on foot, but that margin is shrinking. Still, Bruno finds he can minimize the beating by crouching in his stirrups—essentially using his legs and back as an extension of the vehicle's suspension system. And once that principle is established, there's no reason not to straighten out his back, to stand tall for a better view, to gun the throttle and dance with the bumps.
To his surprise, he's having a good time, and not feeling guilty about it. Not
all
the problems of this world are his fault, after all, and this ride is in the service of a noble cause, from which he may very well not return. And that, in truth, may be part of why he's feeling good; the possibility of death hangs all around him. He nearly died back there in the pass; for Parma and that unlucky rider there was no “nearly” about it.
Bruno has been without useful work for so long that he hasn't even bothered to count out the span. Thousands of years, certainly. But here he is again, doing something. And his time on this world, on any world, may at last be nearly over—his sins all called to account—so what's the point in holding back? There's nothing to keep him from riding to the limits of his ability, and even slightly beyond.
Eventually, he finds himself leading the pack, the wind whipping his hair out behind his helmet as the countryside slowly brightens ahead of him. He doesn't notice that he's left his escort behind, or else he notices but manages not to formulate any sort of conscious plan to correct it. But Captain Bordi's voice calls ahead angrily, “Ako'i, back! Fall back! We're supposed to be protecting you, damn it! Slow down!”
And when he does so, dropping back among the Dolceti, Bordi glares sternly at Natan and Zuq, telling them, “Stay within arm's reach of him. Let nothing happen. You boys have taken the berry, taken the vow. You're expendable; he isn't.”
“Yes, sir!” the two of them call out ruefully, then cast baleful glares at Bruno.
But when Zuq finally speaks, all he says is, “Where in the hell did you learn to ride like that? You've never been on a treader, you said.”
And Bruno's only answer is a muttered “Beginner's luck.” Because there's no point explaining to this boy that he's ridden a scooter, ridden a car, ridden a skimmer and a broomstick and a
horse
. Not to mention a grappleship. He's tried his hand at more different vehicles than Zuq will ever see or imagine; one more doesn't tax him in the least. And he was never exactly a motor fanatic; he's simply lived a long time.
Too, there's the matter of being comfortable in one's own skin. Bruno knows exactly what his body is and isn't capable of. If he falls, he knows roughly what injuries he can survive. And he's far more afraid of embarrassing himself than he is of getting killed, so he will drive this instrument, his body, exactly as he pleases. Indeed, for all their courage and reflexes the Dolceti are indifferent riders, and their pace begins to seem unnaturally slow.
Still, he grits his teeth and perseveres, and hour upon hour the Sawtooth Mountains shrink behind them, while the equally jagged Blood Mountains draw nearer up ahead. They pass a lake, which Natan calls The Lake of the Maidens. They pass a grove of peach pie trees, and another of peach cobblers. They pass five flocks of sheep, and once a shepherd looking down on them from a hilltop, the traditional crook-ended glowstaff in his hands.
Says Zuq, “The shepherds here have magic bottles, in which the milk never sours. Or so the story goes.”
And Bruno answers, “I believe it. Those bottles were common, once.”
“Really? And were there trolls in the hills back then, and mermaids in the sea?”
“There were. And stranger things.”
“‘For the insult, the trolls carried off Gyrelda, and made hard sport of her until Gyraldo stormed their bunker and won her freedom, and gave her a hundred paper dollars for her dowry.' Is
that
true?”
Against the wind, Bruno laughs. “Perhaps. There
were
paper dollars then, inscribed with their value in gold. But the trolls I remember were all fine gentlemen.”
“Amazing. And did the animals really speak in human voices?”
“Ah. That's probably
not
true, or at least I've no such recollection. But anything's possible, eh?”
“Used to be,” says Zuq, agreeably. “Would you go back there if you could?”
“To the Iridium? Or the Queendom?”
“I dunno. You tell me.”
Bruno, his hair whipping in the breeze, grins over at the young Dolceti without humor. “My boy, I fear I'd go back to the Queendom if it cost the lives of millions. That's precisely what we're up against here: that yearning.”
As the morning slowly inches its way toward sunrise, Bruno can see that there's something going on with the air behind the Blood Mountains' forbidding peaks. Some sort of haze, some sort of cloud bank, darker than a mere rainstorm. In the flash of a lightning bolt he even fancies he can see dust and debris spinning around in there, in great, slow arcs and whorls.
“The Stormlands?” Bruno asks.
But Natan and Zuq can only shrug. “Maybe. We never seen it before, sir.”
Finally, the Dolceti out in front have lost track of the road altogether, and are bouncing through one dry wash after another. The wind, too, has taken on a foreboding character, slamming down from above without warning, the downdrafts bursting like town-sized water balloons. And the land has begun to slope upward again. Soon they're riding up between hills, and then cliffs. Their progress slows yet again, and finally it's Radmer, not Bordi, who calls a halt.
“Believe it or not, we're early. I can see the gaps in these hills, but I can't tell which one is our pass. I don't think we'll make any progress here until sunrise.”
“Four-hour halt,” Bordi calls out then, for sunrise is still five hours away. “Everybody eat and sleep.”
But Bruno is too keyed up to do either, and finds himself in a sort of mutual interrogation against Natan and Bordi, who are suddenly curious about his history, there beside a crackling firepit, with Radmer and a dozen Dolceti slumbering nearby.
“You're a soldier,” they accuse.
Bruno laughs. “I? Taking orders? Marching in straight lines? I was a sort of knight at one point, but that's a very different thing. Even at the worst of it, there wasn't much fighting, and still less discipline.”
“A knight for whom?” Bordi presses. “Tara and Toji? Did you stand guard over this world while Radmer and his men crushed it?”
“Er, well, in a manner of speaking.”
“It's hard to credit,” Natan says, “him being strong enough to carve a whole world. I've seen a lot of it; it's a big place. So why does he need us if he's such a power? Why can't he just carve Astaroth right off the globe, and the Glimmer King with it?”
“Hmm. That's a hard question to answer, lad. I suppose, when you get right down to it, we were only as powerful as our tools. These were exceedingly complex, and when too many of them broke down all at once, we were hard-pressed to repair them. Until that time we'd always seen civilization as an upward climb; it didn't occur to us there was a down as well. Just as difficult and treacherous, but every step carried us farther from the stars, not closer.”
“Like the air foil,” Bordi suggests, drawing one and examining it. “They're not making
these
anymore.”
“Indeed, yes. It's a more wondrous thing than you probably suspect. But to build another one would take centuries. Whole nations would need to be conscripted, their entire economic surplus diverted, just to build the components of the tools which make this thing possible.”
“Maybe that's what the Glimmer King is all about,” Natan says. “There's all this work going on in the world, right? But it's purposeless. Just shoes and plowshares, lightbulbs and treaders. Some little luxuries on the side. So a fellow comes along who thinks like you, right? But he's not so agreeable. He sees all this capacity and he
wants
it, not for shoes and hats but for himself. There's specific things he plans on building, but first he's got to
own
those nations.”
“He means well,” Bruno says without thinking. “In his mind, he's doing what's necessary to achieve a kind of . . . paradise.”
Bordi turns and looks at him hard. “You said you didn't know him.”
“I've seen his type,” Bruno answers.
“So you told the Furies. And would we like this paradise of his? Would we be happy there?”
“I, uh . . . I doubt it. Someone would be happy, but certainly not everyone. And even if you bought into the vision somehow, I suspect you'd balk at the cost of getting there. Notably, he isn't offering you the choice.”
“No. He isn't. So what's he got in mind?”
“I wouldn't know,” Bruno answers honestly. “We had a guy once who wanted to collapse the sun, as a means of opening a window into the future. Even ignoring the enormous loss of life, there was no particular evidence that seeing the future—the end of the future, specifically—would be in any way helpful. Might be a bad thing, who knows? But he didn't offer a choice, either. These madmen never do.”
“Dulcet berries!” Zuq shouts, from a dozen meters away. “I've found dulcet berries. Two whole bushes of them!”
“Get some sleep,” Bordi tells him wearily.
“Never could sleep in the dawn hours,” Zuq answers. “Even when I'm tired, which right now I'm not. Can we do some blindsight, Captain?”
Bordi sighs. “It takes more than berries, boy. It takes courage. Takes equipment. Takes a cocktail of other drugs to get the training burned in properly.”
“But we have all that, sir.”
“Not all of it, no. Sit down and have a meal, why don't you?”
But Zuq is not so easily deflected. “Never could eat in the dawning, either. Not till sunup, when my stomach comes alive. And sir, we don't want to be lax on our training. Not at a time like this.”
Natan turns to Bordi. “You've got to admire his spunk. Most guys his age do the bare minimum, sweating it beforehand and moaning afterwards. If you could join the Dolceti without actually taking the berry, I swear, there's a lot of people would do it.”
“So,” Bordi says, “in admiration of his fortitude, you're volunteering to conduct?”
Natan thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I don't sleep in the dawning much, either.”
And Bruno, as curious as ever, chimes in with, “May I participate, Captain? I've heard a great deal about this ‘blindsight training,' and it would be nice to know what's involved. Firsthand, I mean.”
“I'll save you the trouble,” Bordi says, unamused. “It's pain and it's terror. After their first experience, only one in a hundred ever go back for a second. It's that bad. You can't see, and you feel like you can't breathe.”