To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

Ah. A man so comfortable with risk that he'd very nearly destroyed the sun, very nearly murdered the king and queen. He had murdered thousands of others, if incidentally, and he was a torturer, too—a closet sadist exposed only at the very end of his days. The Queendom had never imposed a death penalty, but in Sykes' case it had made something close to an exception, firing him off into the void at the speed of light, in a cage of collapsium that sealed him off forever from the universe of decent people.

  A difficult man to admire, yes, but Conrad had studied architecture, and that was a subject one simply could not discuss without frequent invocation of that accursed name. Sykes had invented superreflectors and a hundred other common things, and was responsible for some of the most striking and innovative structures in human history. Including, arguably, the Nescog, which had been built amid the ruins of King Bruno's original collapsiter network. Bruno had designed the Nescog as well, but he'd had Sykes' own Ring Collapsiter, ill-fated but undeniably ingenious, to draw upon for inspiration.

  “Hasn't anyone complained?” Conrad asked. “Aren't people afraid to come here? Why not just build a new platform?”

  “Excellent questions,” the hollie window congratulated him. “I don't have the information here, and the speed of light is such that I may not locate it for several hours. But I will research these issues and forward the results to you.”

  “Um, okay. Do you need my name?”

  “I have your name, sir,” the window informed him proudly. “It's an indelible part of your fax trace, and also encoded in your genome.”

  Ah. Of course. Conrad had grown up with all this, and it was slowly coming back to him. There was something vaguely unsavory about it—he'd never been crazy about machines that watched his every move, talked secretly among themselves, and also enforced such laws as they were able to. In what way did that advance the causes of freedom and human dignity? But at the same time, he felt a part of him melting with relief. On Sorrow there was no backup, no supervision, no help. If you got into trouble, you got yourself out or you died. Conrad and his friends got out; Bascal and his friends had apparently died. But no more. Here, that kind of death simply wasn't possible.

  But Conrad's parents were Irish, and in spite of his best efforts they had managed to imprint him with a certain degree of superstition. He had seen a ghost once, no shit, and he looked around now, suddenly realizing all the other tourists had filed away without his noticing. He was here alone with the machines, on a platform designed by the very cleverest of history's monsters.

  “I think I'll go to Denver,” he said to the fax machine, and hurried to fling himself through the plate.

  But Denver, where arguably his own involvement in the Children's Revolt had begun, was all wrong. Most of it hadn't changed at all; the old skyline was still there, instantly recognizable. The streets were still bursting with children—for this was a Children's City—and with buskers and athletes and pedestrians, for this was also an Urban Preservation District where short-range faxing was severely discouraged.

  But though the old Denver was still visible beneath, today the city had a lot of extra grown-ups pushing their way through the streets of downtown, and a lot of robots scurrying daintily through morning errands. And the downtown district itself lay in the deep morning shadow of six enormous towers—not orbital towers, but simple pressurized stratscrapers capable of holding a million people each. Taller than the mountains to the west, taller even than the Green Mountain Spire which had once been the city's signature landmark, they . . . they ruined it. They made the city look small and artificial and old.

  “How long have those been there?” he asked a passerby, pointing up at the monstrosities.

  “Huh?” said the man, looking for something out of the ordinary and not finding it. His breath steamed in the October air.

  “The towers,” Conrad said, huddling into the warmth of his wellcloth jacket again, for he had not been cold in many decades. “The big ones. How long?”

  “Oh, a long time. Hunnerds of years,” the man said. Then, looking Conrad over, he brightened. “Hey! You're that feller from Barnard, aren't you? Returned from the stars to back here whence you were born.”

  “I am,” Conrad admitted, “though I haven't been to ‘whence' yet. I'm from Ireland.”

  “Eh? Well, welcome back to society, just the same. Does it feel good? Does it feel right?”

  “I don't know,” Conrad answered. “I only lived here for twenty-five years. I've been gone for a thousand.”

  And yet, those twenty-five loomed very large in his memory. At the time, they'd been one hundred percent of his life's experience, whereas Barnard, even at the end, had never been more than ninety percent. And hell, thinking back now it didn't feel like much more than half. A lot of important things had happened to him out there—shaping his character, informing his judgment—but the trajectory of his life had been determined here. Literally: right here on this very street, on a warm July night, with the Prince of Sol at one elbow and Ho Ng—a man Conrad would one day murder—at the other. Denver was the crucible to a lifetime of rebellion; the cannon from which he'd been fired.

  “It looks smaller,” he said. “It feels crowded and weedy and gone-to-seed. But that's a funny thing, because nothing has really changed. Aye, and maybe that's the problem.”

  “Well, good luck to yer,” the man offered, grabbing and pumping Conrad's hand, then dropping it and moving on.

  Ireland should be the next stop: a ritual visit to his parents, whom he loved and missed. They had raised him well enough; his vagabond life could hardly be blamed on anyone but himself. But this was a funny thing, too, because where Denver still felt recent to him, his life with Donald and Maybel Mursk seemed impossibly remote. And those had been the same time.

  So he didn't feel quite ready. He needed to steep in the thin dry air of Denver awhile, before he could face the damp chill of Cork. Instead he found a seat in a nearly full restaurant, where the wellstone was working overtime to cancel out the crowd noise and leave each table in its own bubble of quiet. Eventually a human waiter appeared, and offered him a choice between ten different meals. Conrad selected the least Barnardean of these—a spicy egg sandwich with blue corn chips on the side—and settled back with a mug of bitter red tea.

  The waiter just laughed when he tried to pay. “The walls know, sir. Who you are, what you can afford. Food is free, right? The door wouldn't open unless you could pay for service.”

  Ah. And service didn't come cheap. Not here, not anywhere. He asked the wall, “Excuse me, um, hello. How much money have I got?”

  And the wall answered immediately, in that fast, clipped accent of Sol's machines: “Twenty-seven trillion dollars, sir.”

  Wow. There must have been some mean price inflation here in the Queendom, because the last time he'd been here a trillion dollars was enough to pay ten thousand workers for ten thousand years.

  “That's to three significant digits, sir. Do you require greater precision?”

  “Uh, no. Thanks. But how much is my lunch? A few billion?”

  “No, sir. Two hundred and six dollars, sir.”

  “Two hundred? Dollars? But that would mean . . .” He was rich? He: an exile, a vagabond who'd rebelled against two governments? He'd had money for a while in Barnard, but he'd squandered it all on secret schemes and silly interstellar messages. And even if there was a bit left over, what value would a few Barnardean dollars have here, when Barnard itself was just a dream? He'd had a Queendom bank account as well, holding trivial sums when he'd departed, but even compound interest couldn't account for such an explosion. In an immorbid society, interest rates were very low indeed!

  “I'm afraid you've made some sort of mistake,” he told the wall. “My name is Conrad Ethel Mursk. I'm a refugee.”

  “Possibly, sir,” the wall agreed. “But your bank records are quantum entangled with the physical universe, and thus incapable of error.”

  He laughed. “Are they, now? I've never se
en a system incapable of error. Where would I get so much money?”

  “It isn't my place to know, sir, but I can find out for you.”

  “Um. Yeah, okay. Do that.”

  Why not? He was intrigued. And half a minute later, the wall answered, “Sir, the greater bulk of payments into your account have been from Mass Industries Corporation, with a minority share from World University. I also detect one deposit from the Office of Basic Assistance, in the amount of one thousand dollars.”

  Conrad mulled that over. Mass Industries was King Bruno's neutronium company, whose dredges gathered up the stray dust and gravel of the solar system and squeezed it into billion-ton neubles. Conrad had once helped to hijack one of their ships, but that was the closest he'd ever come to a business relationship with them. And his connections with World University were even more tenuous than that.

  “That doesn't make sense,” he said.

  “I wouldn't know, sir. I'm just a wall. Two messages have just arrived for you, sir. Shall I play them?”

  “I don't know. What are they?”

  “The first comes from Ring Observation Platform Two. Seven hundred eighty people have complained, sir, and the number who are afraid to go there is not known. The platform—the only one of its kind—remains in service as a historical landmark. The other message is a request for a job interview on Maplesphere at your earliest convenience.”

  Job interview? Already? Hmm. Maybe that Appreciator thing had come through. “That's odd. What's the address?”

  “Maplesphere is the address, sir. Just speak it to any fax machine. Would you like to hear the complete message?”

  “It sounds like I just did. All right, look, I'm going to eat my breakfast, and then I'm going to visit my mom and dad. Hold my calls, if you would, until further notice.”

  “I will inform the network,” the wall said dutifully. “And I must say, sir, it's been an honor working with you.”

  “Likewise,” Conrad said, unsure whether to grumble or chuckle at that.

  The meeting with his parents, when it finally came, was sadder and louder than he'd expected. He didn't fax straight to the house, but to the northern edge of downtown Cork, which lay in the late-afternoon shadow of another million-body stratscraper, and had pedestrian and robot crowding issues of its own. Nothing else had changed, although the landscape seemed tired somehow—the leaves a bit droopier, the grass and hedges just as orderly as ever, but in some way less emerald. Here was a place that had simply been walked on too much.

  And yet, and yet, his hairs stood at attention, craning their follicles for a view. He knew this place as he'd known few others: in his bones. And Donald Mursk's roads were in excellent repair, and in his soft Queendom shoes Conrad followed them home without difficulty.

  Or rather, to the place where his home should be. But the trees and hedgerows were gone, replaced with a smooth low carpet of grass, and the house was gone, and the tall, skinny mansion that took its place sat twenty meters farther back from the road. Egad. It had never occurred to him that his parents might have moved in the millennium he'd been away. But he walked up just the same, and the house said to him, “Master Conrad! You are most welcome, sir. Do come in, do. Your mother is leaping from her chair as we speak, and while your father is away, I'm printing a fresh copy of him to meet with you.”

  Indeed, Conrad was still an arm's reach from the gray front wall when a wooden door appeared in it with a crackle of wellstone, and immediately swung open to reveal Maybel Mursk, who flew out weeping and laughing. “My son! My son is here!”

  Conrad's father was not far behind, and when the hugging and backslapping and handshaking were done, and they were dragging Conrad back inside, he couldn't help a wash of guilt. “Come on, now. Mom, Dad, I barely wrote to you.”

  “Sure,” his mother said, “and we missed you all the more for that. Sit down! Sit! Can I get you a drink or something? We've found a fine beer that we're quite fond of these past two centuries. Oh, look at you. Look at you! Not a boy any longer but a fine, proud soldier.”

  Conrad should have taken that in the spirit it was meant, as a pure compliment. But surely he looked the same as ever, a fit twenty-five, just as Donald and Maybel Mursk surely looked, to their own eyes, too young to be the parents of a grown adult. Much less a thousand-year-old. They'd been born into a morbid world, expecting to live a childless life and die before the century mark, poor and ignorant. Conrad, like immorbitity itself, had seemed a constant source of amazement for them. “Look,” they would say, “we have a boy who rides a bike! Look, he's a space pirate now! Look, he's a thousand years old and returning from the stars!” Conrad's only “soldier” time had been as a security thug in the Royal Barnardean Navy, pushing around the miners and 'finers and wranglers of interplanetary space. It was a period in his life he'd just as soon forget, and even the thought of it had the power to bring out what venom he possessed.

  To his shame he blurted, “That's a bit presumptuous, Mom. You knew me for two decades out of what, a hundred and twenty?”

  And of course his mother started crying at that, and his father said, “Oh, now, what do you go and say a thing like that for? Breaking your poor mother's heart. Have you had any children yourself? Well, then, I don't expect you know too much about it. You pour your soul into a child, lad. How could you not? And it doesn't pour back. It wanders off. It gets surly and insults its mother. Now come on, you, tip a glass with us and we'll speak no more about it. You owe us the tale of your many adventures, and don't think you'll escape from here without it. I don't care how old you are; in this house you'll listen to the pair that gave you life.”

  And then Donald Mursk started crying as well.

  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.”