by Wil McCarthy
“All?”
“Well, a lot of them. We still want some contour, obviously, and with the highest mountains reaching twelve whole kilometers above the plains, we'll definitely still have some. But the geo boys are having the time of their lives, figuring out where to plant all the bombs. We'll go after the biggest voids with subnukes and aye-ma'am, and over time the water will be squeezed back out to the surface. Truthfully, with a fixed mass budget we're not sure how deep the oceans will be when it's all said and done. But there'll be enough to stabilize the climate and the ecosystem. And there'll be beaches.”
“Sounds lovely,” Xmary said, in a we're-done-talking-now kind of way. Her clothes, sensing the moment, peeled away and fell to the dusty ground. Conrad's did likewise. Soon the two of them were on their clothes, rolling and wrestling, feeling the dry air soak up their sweat. The love they made together was excellent, as always.
There were more failed couples in the universe than successful ones, and conventional wisdom thus insisted that two people simply couldn't get along forever. But Conrad had never understood this. He was barely old enough to deprogram facial hair when he'd met Xmary, and they'd become lovers within the year.
Later, they'd tried it apart for what seemed like a long time, but their flexibility hadn't been up to the task. Like two trees that had grown together, they simply couldn't disentangle. Not without damage, without broken hearts and limbs and skyward-pointing roots. And eternal youth or no, who had time to recover from a thing like that? Who would want to?
True love is immorbid, Conrad wrote once in his diary. You can kill it, but it never gets old. It's stronger than petty anger or lust. Stronger even than boredom, and that's a strong force indeed. Or maybe he, personally, was just weak. His love for Xmary belied any notion of free will; he could leave her, yes, but he couldn't want to.
“I can't imagine my life without you,” he told her now, murmuring into a sweaty ear.
“Enough,” she said. “Talk later. Let's enjoy this planet of yours.”
The ground shook a little then, as if in agreement or—as Conrad would later see it—in warning.
And Xmary, perhaps sensing this, added, “While it's still ours. Before the homeless arrive and things get interesting. It's not enough to crush the moon; you've got to decide how you're going to love it.”
Lune. The name—chosen democratically and ratified by royal decree—seemed strange, musical, and somehow appropriate. Luna took twice as long to say, for a world twice as wide. “Ash,” by contrast, was a drab moniker for the outermost of this new world's planettes, poised at the L1 Lagrange point and stabilized there by a network of orbiting collapsiters.
Ash itself, though, was anything but drab. The planette Varna, orbiting thirty thousand kilometers closer to Lune, was blue and green and steamy, like a little tropical Earth. Beneath that was the grassy Kishu and—visible just now off the limb of Lune—the desert Harst, glowing like a little beige pinpoint.
But Ash's biosphere was dominated by reds and yellows: snapdragon and bougainvillea, cardinals and canaries, foxes and howler monkeys and fluorescent yellow mice. The trees were engineered specifically for the site, and were like nothing ever seen on Earth or in the colonies. Tall and sparse as autumn poplars, prickly as cacti, stronger and more flexible than bamboo, they rose from the dome-shaped ground like pillars of flame, waving brightly in the breeze.
And in Ash's pearl-gray sky, the spectacular blue-green orbs of Earth and Lune were almost exactly equal in size. Their impending eclipse, two days hence, would see the glare of Sol line up perfectly behind the Earth, which would cast its shadow across Lune and turn it red as well. The red of sunset, of sunrise, of beginnings and endings.
And per the queen's proclamation, the sixty-two minutes of the eclipse's totality were to mark the formal opening of Lune to human settlement. But the queen had declined to run these dates by her architect laureate, and in Conrad's professional opinion they were utter hooey. He'd been building that world for long years, and he needed another eighteen to complete the job properly. At least eighteen!
“Be realistic, Your Highness,” he said to Tamra, by the light of the sun and the Earth and of Lune itself. “Be reasonable. This party is several years premature.”
This was the official celebration, to which none of Conrad's crew were invited, despite his strenuous objections. They were of course welcome to attend the public celebration during the actual eclipse, except that at full capacity the planette could comfortably hold only eighty thousand people, and for a construction worker the tickets would cost a year's salary at least. So in fact they'd be watching the ceremony on TV, or via neural sensorium, or maybe just skipping it and going straight to their own drunken revelries. It seemed a shame.
“The official commencement will be a simple dinner party,” the queen's invitation had told him primly, “for a few close friends and relations. Since your wife is also invited, you needn't bring a guest. Her Majesty understands your concern, but is she to share her table with every rigger and wrench-boy in the Queendom? She loves them all equally, but she hasn't the time to love them individually. She could dedicate a score of copies to that purpose alone, and never make a dent in the problem. And what would she do with the memories? Summarize them, or be hopelessly clogged, or forget them entirely. And wouldn't that defeat the purpose?”
“Not for the workers,” he told it. “They'd treasure the experience forever.”
“Presumption is rude, Architect,” the invitation had chided. Then, “Come now, you owe the luminaries of Sol a chance to congratulate you.”
So here they were, seated at a pair of long, arch-shaped tables that followed the curve of Ash's surface. Forty people, only half of whom Conrad knew at all well. But Feck was here, and Eustace, and a handful of other revived Barnardeans who'd made good in the stodgy old Queendom. The king was here too, of course, and so were Donald and Maybel Mursk and, rather surprisingly, Xmary's parents as well.
Since Mimi and David Li Weng had disowned their daughter after the Revolt, Conrad had never actually met them. Nor wanted to, though it wasn't a position he'd considered overmuch. They were historical figures more than anything, and though Xmary was largely ignoring them, their presence did lend an odd authority to the proceedings. Their daughter, the Governor Adjudicate of Central Pacifica and wife of a celebrated architect, was no longer an embarrassment to them.
“Hi. I hope you burn in hell,” Conrad had told them both brightly when the queen had introduced them, and it felt good to get that off his chest. Really.
“Be reasonable. I would say the same to you, Architect,” the queen answered him now, forking a bit of cheese-draped sausage into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. Seconds later she touched a napkin to her lips and added, “You really must try the cheese. That woman over there—in the green frock, yes—is perhaps the most brilliant flavor designer in human history.”
“High praise indeed,” Conrad allowed, taking a nibble. Damn, it was good. Melting in his mouth, almost vaporizing, it had a taste at once fatty and ethereal, rich and salty and yet somehow subtle as well. His eyes closed for a moment, of their own accord.
“Immorbidity demands novelty,” the queen opined. “Else it's bread and water forever. Bless our flavor designers, every one.”
And to that Conrad could not help answering, “We did without them on Sorrow, Majesty. But aye, not forever.”
Tamra nodded solemnly. “You see my point, then. Shall we consign ourselves to no better a fate? Will you not surrender yon world to me? Our population crisis continues to grow. Our middle-class homeless now number in the tens of millions, and the political pressure to open a new frontier—any frontier—is overwhelming. Am I to resist the will of the people? The need of the people? They don't require a perfect world, and your quest for one—though admirable—consumes precious time. And money. Endings are always difficult, but there comes a point when the engineers and craftsmen must disperse, and find new projects.”
“That's been understood for some time,” the queen countered, “but you can relieve these pressure points at leisure, with minimal disruption at ground level. True? I'm informed that the largest tremors will cause only minor damage at the surface.”
“Possibly, Your Highness, but none of us can say that with confidence. We're speaking of probabilities, in a world of imperfect knowledge. The first Ring Collapsiter was considered safe as well, and we know how that turned out.”
“Cunning sabotage,” the queen said dismissively, “at the deepest levels of design. We trust you, sir, to eschew such scheming.”
“Do you? Then trust me that Lune is incomplete, Majesty. The biosphere is another problem, immature and unstable. On Sorrow and Pup we've seen what that can do. How much suffering has our impatience created there?”
“Your point is duly noted, Architect. However, as on Sorrow and Pup, we're installing town-sized fax plates to churn out fresh gases and creatures, keeping the ecology in crude balance. Yes? And unlike those worlds, we've the infrastructure of an entire civilization to draw upon. Mars and Venus are better analogies, for in their early civilized histories they prospered with no biosphere at all. As did Luna herself, for a dozen centuries and more. In any event, these risks are mine to assess, and I have more brains to pick than yours alone. You will prepare the moon for immediate habitation.”
And here the king added his own voice to the fray: “It's no use, lad, to argue with the facts. Focus on the work itself, yes, but remember who pays your salary. Your job is not to run the new world, but to deliver it.”
“Aye, Your Majesty,” Conrad said, unconvinced and unconvincing.
“Come now,” the king expounded, tossing a grape onto Conrad's plate. “Do you think you're the first? Has no engineer before you surrendered his treasures to a witless society? I do know the feeling, lad. How many deaths linger on my conscience, do you suppose, from the discovery of collapsium alone? When I finally get these wormholes working, do you think I expect there to be no accidents? No malice? All systems are subject to failure, but the mere possibility should not shackle our striving.”
He tossed another grape, and another. “Will you choke on these? Are they poison? Will they beguile you and squander your time, as mass-stabilized wormholes have squandered mine? I could let you starve, lad, for fear of what a grape might do. Or we could get on with the party, and see what happens.”
“You've become quite the orator,” Conrad said. “When did that happen?”
Such a comment might easily have been taken as rudeness, but the king just laughed. “With fifteen hundred years of life, my boy, one does eventually learn to speak.”
At that, Conrad's old friend Feck chimed in. “Don't let the refugee crisis escape your attention, hmm? We've got six million in storage, and three billion on the way. At present deceleration, Perdition is only two months out, with fifteen percent of the load. I would say there are risks in every course of action, and especially in responding too slowly.”
And Conrad, being a refugee himself, could hardly argue with that. The remaining colonies were simply collapsing. They were up to their armpits in dead and mortal children, and had turned their spasm-wracked economies to the sorry task of triage: shipping “home” as many as possible, by whatever means possible, and leaving the rest to their fate. Whatever that might be.
Conrad sometimes wondered whether this trend had been inevitable all along. Had the colonists carried out with them the seeds of their own destruction? Or was this simply a fad, a mass surrender, a herd action inspired by the traitorous flight of Newhope? If so, then Conrad and Xmary and Feck had a lot to answer for: the death of billions. The death of hope itself.
“Have there been any further communications with the Perdition or the Trail of Tears?” Conrad asked, for no matter what Feck said, he was poignantly interested in the refugee crisis. He was just out of step with the news. But Feck was the queen's Minister of Colonial Affairs, and would know everything.
“Communications, yes,” Feck said, sounding both chagrined and incensed. “Meaningful dialogue, no. Eridani breeds angry, suspicious men. And women, too, one supposes, but since they're cloistered, we never hear from them. At any rate, the Eridanians' journey has been a hard one, and they're not eager to park their butts in Kuiper Belt storage when they finally arrive.”
“Nor would I be,” Conrad said. He'd visited Eridani twice in virtual form, and remembered it as a place of sharp contrasts: molten metal and frozen gas, wild anger and wilder compassion. Eridani boasted no habitable worlds, and like all the colony stars it was richer than Sol in stormy radiation. And the outer system's Dust Belt was treacherous—it could grind even the proudest of habitats to rubble in a matter of years. Even the inner system was full of flying crap. Eridani had thousands of times more asteroids and comets and random small meteoroids than Sol; its planets had been battered all to hell, and still endured several large impacts each year.
So the people, in their tens of billions, lived deep underground in Aetna, the moon of Mulciber, and ventured only rarely to its cratered-upon-cratered surface. To compensate for their bleak, cramped quarters, they had opted for a gradual reduction in body size, and while they were at it they'd added new metabolic pathways and—they claimed—new modes of thought which opened their minds to a greater spiritual awareness. And why not? What the hell else did they have to do under there?
But they were also energy-rich and element-rich and lived like kings in their stifling burrows. Or they had, anyway, before the fax machines started giving out. Theirs was a sad history, as fraught with broken promise as Barnard's own.
“What are we supposed to do?” Feck demanded suddenly, taking the comment as a barb. “There are a dozen asylum-seeking vessels parked in the Kuiper Belt already, and if we wake their sleepers only as new living space becomes available, we're accused of breaking up families and friendships, of scattering the refugees out over time and space. Of destroying their culture.
“But if we hold them in storage, awaiting a world of their own, then we're pushing them off into some indefinite future. Which is a kind of murder, for many suspect we'll never wake them at all. And that's a valid question, Conrad, because even Lune cannot absorb the colonies' entire human flux. How long will those worlds take to die, and how many of their children will they dump on us beforehand?”
The queen cleared her throat. “These decisions are also mine, Minister Feck. You've done very well for your charges, and argue their case most effectively. But their fate is not yours to choose. This is the point of monarchy, you see: to concentrate blame. You may sleep soundly, your conscience untroubled.”
Feck looked ready to argue that point, but finally thought better of it and dropped his eyes to his dinner. “Of course, Your Highness. My apologies.”
“Accepted,” she said, favoring him with the smile that had earned her the love of billions.
“The day grows late,” warned the red-haired Wenders Rodenbeck, in a tone that managed to convey at once a personal sadness, an official gravitas, and a semiamused kind of told-you-so. “A stiff wind rises at last, and we find our house of straw less sturdy than we'd hoped.”
“Don't gloat, Poet Laureate,” the queen said, clearly annoyed. “It shows off the food in your teeth. If we'd listened to you all these years, I suppose the Queendom would still be a paradise, and never a tear would be shed?”
“No indeed, Majesty.” The playwright's voice was, to Conrad's ear, rather shrill, but in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from his air of authority. “I would suggest a more careful reading of my oeuvre, when time permits. In fact, my own paradise would likely have collapsed by now as well, for reasons we couldn't imagine
at the outset. Such is the fate of human endeavor; our vision is not extended merely by the stretching of our lifetimes.”
“Go on,” the queen said skeptically. “You have my attention. What remedies do you propose?”
“Why, none,” said Rodenbeck, spreading his hands as if this should have been obvious. “Who has taught me to plan for the long, long term? Where shall we draw our lessons, when this civilization of ours has outlasted all that came before it? The Queendom rose from the ashes of Old Modernity, which sprang from the embers of Rome, which drew upon the lessons of Greece, and Egypt before her. Indeed, Highness, Egypt had the Minoan example to emulate, and fair Atlantis was a focused echo of the civilizations of Indus and Jomon, drowned in the Deluge at the closing of the Ice Age.
“History is not linear, I'm afraid, but cyclic, for sustainability has never guided human affairs. And in banishing death, we simply condemn ourselves to observe the cycle from within. To live, as it were, in the filth we've excreted, with the sound of falling towers all around.”
“Ah,” said Tamra, “so we needn't listen to you, then.”
“Not at all, Majesty. I am but a mote in the vastness, amazed by all that I perceive. Let's do take a moment, though, to congratulate ourselves for all that we've accomplished. Even this ghastly destruction of Luna, yes, for it speaks to grand intentions. And here at the end of the day, we shall need a warm thought like that to remember ourselves by.”
“Quite,” the queen agreed, in a tone that closed the subject. And then, to Conrad: “We do have evidence, Architect, that Perdition is in regular contact with someone in the Queendom. Does that make you feel better?”
“Um, well,” Conrad said, “that depends on who they're talking to.”
The queen's smile deepened. “Someone charming, I'm sure. Shall we have dessert?”