To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

  “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 wi
lds 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 employm
ent 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.