To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

  To Conrad and Xmary he said, “Will you come with me, please?” He led the two Barnardeans toward a conference room, with the Palace Guards trailing warily behind. He said, “I should apologize for placing you two—and your friends—in harm's way, but the simple fact is that harm would find you whether you were helping the Queendom or not. As in Barnard, you symbolize much that our enemies despise. I shall not release you from the service you've promised, Mr. Mursk. And as for you, Ms. Li Weng, my wife has declared you the provisional mayor of Grace, the next floating city, until its population stabilizes and a proper election can be held.”

  The Barnardeans grumbled at that, though not loudly. They hadn't heard the worst of it, though. “Both of you will be attended by robotic guards until further notice. Not Palace Guards”—he saw Mursk relax visibly at this—“but Law Enforcers, which are nearly as capable.”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Mursk pointed out, with only a trace of sullenness. “We have, for a thousand years. We didn't have robots when we escaped from Barnard.”

  “No,” Bruno agreed, “but you needed them to survive your midcourse accident. And at any rate you work for me now, which is more dangerous than you seem to imagine.”

  book two

  the

  eridaniad

  The initial excavation was much briefer than Conrad would have imagined. Two years, to dig out the burrows and caverns that would serve as entry points for the later, more profound tunneling. His crew swelled from dozens to hundreds and more, topping out around six thousand, and whenever possible he chose them from among the twenty thousand successfully revived Barnardeans. After all, even the least of them had participated in a grand terraforming experiment, albeit also a grand failure. But he was careful to balance them with the children of Sol, who needed the work at least as desperately, and were capable of great loyalty and even greater imagination. Their pent-up need for accomplishment more than made up for their lack of grit.

  Meanwhile there were factories abuilding, for the production of certain specialized machineries. There had been neutronium barges scouring the heavens around Sol for fifteen hundred years, and Conrad's people simply tweaked and reinforced the design, so that it could roll across a tunnel floor on house-sized treads and eat through solid rock rather than flying through diffuse clouds of ice and dust.

  But it was fundamentally the same machine: a blunt cylinder a thousand meters long and seven hundred wide, with a yawning open mouth that could swallow literally anything. And on the day these machines were first fired up, the moon trembled and groaned beneath its wellglass domes, and the remaining population—angry holdouts defiant to the end—were evicted by their own police or, in a handful of cases where the police themselves were holdouts, by the SWAT robots of the Royal Constabulary.

  Conrad's own escort of Law Enforcers got a bit of a workout as well, when Fatalist or naturalist saboteurs succeeded in bringing a tunnel down on top of him. His body was crushed beyond repair, and he would just as soon have died and reprinted, but the Enforcers managed to save his head and toss it, fainting and throbbing with agony—into the nearest fax.

  “Don't,” he tried to tell them, but without breath or vocal cords he didn't make much of an impression, and the Enforcers either couldn't read lips, didn't care to, or had been programmed to ignore his dying wishes. Still, they needn't have bothered; this “rescue” saved a grand total of five hours' stored experience, of which the pain itself was the only thing he would really remember.

  Conrad was later to mark this event as the end of an era—one of many he'd encountered in his long strange life. His beheading coincided with the start of a time crunch that no amount of plurality could really abate. Being in five places at once was all well and good, but the real trick was coordination, and for that he had to know everything, instantly. He did the best he could, which really wasn't bad, and he made an effort to keep up his home life as well. And with love, money, recognition, and meaningful work, it wasn't a bad way to live. Just a very, very busy one.

  Soon, the months and years and decades were passing in a kind of daydream; his world never changed, or rather it changed slowly and at his own command. In the outer universe, art and fashion and politics morphed swiftly by comparison, when he bothered to notice. Which was rarely, and this is truly saying something, for his own wife had become a politician herself! He breathed her air, listened attentively to her stories, and yet remained somehow detached or aloof.

  Was this what it felt like to be Bruno de Towaji? Consumed by the practical difficulties separating plan and theory from hard reality? Anchored only by the love of a good woman? For her part, Xmary seemed to understand; Conrad had never been happier, and a part of each of them suspected he never would be again. “These,” she told him once, “are the good old days. Savor each one, for they'll never come again.”

  Not that it was a peaceful time. Far from it! More and more tunnels collapsed, some by accident and some by malevolence, but most because that was how they were supposed to work: the neutronium bores would hollow out the ground and then bring it crashing down behind them. Deaths and manglings by misadventure were a part of the monthly routine; by its very nature, this workplace could not be made safe, any more than a shifting volcano of boulders and razor-sharp knives could be safe. Rest assured, through their labors the project's burgeoning crew learned a thing or two about pain and loss and recovery.

  But in the best of worlds, learning does modify behavior. Few of Luna's workers died more than twice. It became, in a way, a rite of passage, except for Conrad himself, who well remembered his faxless days on Sorrow and could not be bothered to die even once. “I hope to lead by example,” he told his crew on several occasions, when Bell Daniel teased him about it.

  And so, year by year the moon changed and shrunk as the mass beneath its surface was squozen into neubles and packed down into diamond plates near the solid core. And as the lithosphere's diameter approached its final value, the bores' work became slower and more precise. A traditional sculptor cuts first with a jackhammer, then with a chisel, then an awl, and finally with a rasp and a file and a block of heated wellstone to smooth and polish. Such was the role of the destruction crew in those last eighty years: finessing the rubble of Luna into something new and wonderful.

  Of course, an odd thing was happening by this point: the moon had begun to retain air. It wasn't much at first—just a bit of outgassed oxygen, combining with a bit of hydrogen from the solar wind. The pressure could be measured in microbars—millionths of a breathable atmosphere—but overnight it seemed to change the texture of the soil and rocks at the surface, which had never before felt the touch of anything but vacuum.

  And then the first of the gigantic atmosphere-processing faxes had been lowered into place along the Nearside equator. Tied to a network gate, it called down nitrogen from Titan, carbon dioxide from Venus, methane and heavy nobles from a spherical station adrift in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The Elementals grew wealthier still, for who but they could arrange such enormous transfers of purified mass? And then, before the atmosphere had achieved even a tenth of its final density, a second fax was placed on the Farside to crack additional oxygen from the soil itself, and to combine some fraction of it with the carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen to produce a gray, reeking smog of water and hydrocarbons, fats and other complex organics which would be useful in conditioning the soil for the arrival of life.

  And indeed, life was not far behind; soon the surface was crawling with dainty labor robots, spreading and raking and watering and fertilizing a powder of microscopic spores. This had few visible effects, but on the visceral level it struck a deep chord: for the first time in its 4.5-billion-year history, this world was waking up. Suddenly it had a smell, a feel, a sky under which you could walk without protection. Whether the Fatalists and naturalists liked it or not, the history of Luna would be forevermore shaped by living things.

  Which was good, because the flow of refugees from the coloni
es now exceeded the Queendom's own population growth by an order of magnitude, and was expected to continue increasing. If crushing the moon had once been a forward-thinking solution to long-term problems, it was now a grim and immediate necessity. But that was a political matter, and Conrad felt justified in letting other people worry about it. After all, he was just an architect.

  “Don't lose too much contact with reality,” advised King Bruno on one of his status-check visits, when Conrad made some comment along these lines. “Believe me, even on Maplesphere things are easier when I keep the end users in mind. I've wasted years of my life solving the wrong problems, and now I should like to have them back. I've lost arms inside a wormhole, lad, but never my entire self.”

  But in spite of the king's warnings, Conrad found himself spending less time on Grace—his nominal home—and more here on this squozen moon, whose lifelessness had begun, suddenly, to seem precious even to him, in the way that all things become precious when their time is nearly over. Another era of his personal history—and Luna's—was drawing to a close. And not only theirs; all the Queendom seemed to be drawing its collective breath, preparing for some new spasm of change. And as Conrad became aware of this, as his gaze turned finally outward, he found all the eyes of the Queendom looking in at him with worried impatience.

  What have you built for us, Architect, in this hour of need? And the answer that came to Conrad was a strange one indeed, for he found he didn't know. His job was to deliver the skeleton of a world; its final flesh and purpose had never been his to decide.

  Said Rodenbeck, “History is a blind toboggan. A single man can sometimes steer it, much to the trees' dismay, but a billion dragging feet will have their say as well.”

  chapter twelve

  in which a frontier is

  finally opened

  Was it a sad moment? A happy one? A moment of triumph or the passing of a triumphant age? Was it all of the above?

  The kilometer-wide neutronium bore was a cylinder of mirror-bright impervium, and as it chewed its way through Lunar bedrock—consuming oxides of iron and silicon at one end and excreting neubles at the other—it made a sound like the end of a world. A never-ending detonation of antimatter, yes, a crushing of atomic bonds and atomic nuclei, a crushing of matter itself into dense neutron paste.

  Architect Laureate Conrad Ethel Mursk stood behind it at a safe distance, along with his wife, Governor Adjudicate Xiomara Li Weng, and the very closest members of his construction crew's inner circle. Watching and thinking, celebrating and mourning. Not talking, because the sound had already tattered their eardrums, pulverized their fibrediamond-reinforced hearing bones. If they stood here long enough, the sound—still skeletally conducted through the ground—would deafen them at the cerebrum level as well, and finally bruise the soft meat of their brains into unthinking goo. In Conrad's outfit, sound levels were measured not in decibels but in Minutes To Kill, and this one pegged the meter at MTK 15.

  There were no standards or limits per se, although it was generally recognized that at levels higher than this, useful work became a lot more difficult. Even 15 was pushing it, hard. But the people of Sol were tough, and the survivors of Barnard tougher still, and with a fax machine handy the assembled group had little thought for its safety.

  Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world. Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the others carried “rock burner” lamps—multispectral lasers which cast white spots whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six degrees of arc—no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts—which at short range was enough to vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone. Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment it really was.

  And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the bore's mechanical anus and settle—under the influence of straining gravity lasers—to the tunnel floor.

  WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the grasers' carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.

  And that was that. The last neuble. The thundering machine—the last of its kind still operating—rumbled to a halt.

  The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this tunnel was collapsed.

  HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel's space suit.

  “Well done, all,” Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.

  Xmary offered her CONGRATULATIONS!!!!, and the four others exchanged the visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence and timeliness of their work.

  COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, BOSS, Bell offered, and Conrad wondered why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on, Luna—or rather Lune—would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette's surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty years.

  THANKS, AND LIKEWISE, Conrad assured him. THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE. SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE?

  ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant, dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible soda-silica-lime material—old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine would dispense without authorization. And Conrad's crew dutifully smashed these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them—with more enthusiasm than hope—toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.

  Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other's suits before it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days—harried and hopeful and deeply fulfilling—would be replaced by something new, and nothing would ever be the same.

  And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death—a lame and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer. But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.

  Ah, well.

  CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily. I WANT THAT LAST PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS.

  SURE, BOSS, Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could convey.

  That was the really private ceremony. The semiprivate one occurred four hours later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including a few hundred retirees who'd wandered away from the project before its completion.

  They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry, barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.

  “You've done excellent work here,” he told them all. “And God willing, we'll see each other again someday, on a grander project still.”

  “Crush Venus! Crush Venus!” the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a woman off toward the rear called out “Crush Mars!” Then everyone was shouting: Melt Europa! Ignite Jupiter! Reconstitute the asteroid belt! And finally the noise dissolved into argumentative laughter.

 
; None of these things were possible, of course; King Bruno wasn't exactly out of money, but he wouldn't be playing sugar daddy to the Queendom again for another few centuries. The workers were just letting off steam, kidding themselves that it could all keep going.

  “We'll do something,” he assured them, “and when we do, I'll know exactly who to call. The best damned crew in the universe!”

  They cheered at that, of course.

  Was there anything else to say? He shook the hands that needed shaking, then wandered off into the barren hills to let his people—his former people—sort it out on their own. He wasn't their boss anymore.

  “You should be happy,” Xmary said, walking alongside him.

  “I am,” he assured her. “Very.” And it was true. “I'm just . . . I don't know, more tired than anything. My willpower's browning out. Which is bad, because there's a lot of work still to be done. And a lot of refugees streaming homeward, expecting a place to live.”

  At that, she patted him on the rump and smiled wickedly. “I know what you need, Architect. Around that withered soul you're still young and virile. A body like that requires attention.” And that was true, too.

  Although the planet had shrunk beneath it, Luna's actual crust hadn't gotten any smaller. But it had only one-fourth the area to cover, so over the years of its settling it had folded and wrinkled and cracked, raising jagged mountain chains, broad steppes, and vast, broken plains. Even here in the relative flat of the former Mare Nubium, it wasn't hard to find a little valley so secluded that it would be visible only from directly above.

  “We start pouring the oceans tomorrow,” he told his wife. “Faxed ice from Callisto, mostly. And for the first year or two the water will simply sink into all these voids in the crust. The surface will be as dry as ever, but with the water to lubricate them, and explosives to jar them loose, the rock plates should settle together, smoothing out all these jags and spines.”