by Wil McCarthy
“Ah,” Bruno says, for he has seen that sight himself, long ago. To the Furies he says, “But that's a matter of clockwork, yes? Not an omen, but a happenstance of whirling bodies.”
“So our ministers inform us,” says the oldest of the Furies, as though it's a matter of little consequence. “But we face extinction. Nubia has been stripped of metal, and is it coincidence that the metal armies which razed it have since doubled in size? The reports we have from that lost republic are as terrifying as they are sparse. Mass starvation, mass enslavement. In the face of that, everything is an omen.”
“We're here to help,” Radmer assures her. “This man is possibly the oldest living person, and his knowledge of Queendom technology is unsurpassed, easily dwarfing my own.”
“That's wonderful,” says Danella Mota, “except that we have no Queendom technology. The city's last wellstone is buried in the dumps, for we were unable to make it work.”
“If that's so,” Bruno says to her, “you should exhume it and allow me to make blitterstaves of the material. It isn't difficult, and it would improve your defensive position enormously. With care, every square meter of rubble can be fashioned into twenty weapons.”
This comment gains him the Furies' full attention.
“Ah, yes,” says Radmer, though surely the idea is obvious to anyone who has been both an architect and a general. And a matter programmer.
“Don't patronize me,” Bruno tells him. Then, to the Furies: “How much intact material can you salvage? The deconstruction needs to have been performed in particular ways, to avoid damage to the nanofiber weave that produces the pseudoatoms.”
That goes a bit over their heads, but they are persuaded nevertheless, and in short order a courier is sent out to order an immediate excavation of the city dumps.
“So,” says Pine Chadwir to Radmer, with half an eye on Bruno, “this ancient vessel still holds a bit of wine. You have our thanks, General. Does he do anything else?”
Radmer forms an embarrassed half smile. “Actually, I had something quite different in mind, and with your permission I'll soon remove this man from Timoch altogether.”
“Yes?” says the eldest Fury skeptically. “Our would-be savior? And where exactly would you bring him?”
“The Stormlands,” Radmer says. And everyone in the room seems to gasp in surprise, then slowly nod in agreement.
Soon they're in a different room whose decorations consist mainly of dead robots crucified on the walls. The human beings—and the Olders—are all standing around a table whose surface is a map of the country. It's rather misleading, Bruno thinks, because Imbria covers almost half of the northern hemisphere, and stretching it out flat produces eerie distortions in the squozen moon's once-familiar features. Fortunately, a large globe hangs above the table for reference, and another one sits on the floor behind it in a two-axis mechanical spin platform that would have been perfectly at home in the Old Girona of Bruno's youth.
The table is dotted with chessmen—mirror-shiny for the Glimmer King's armies, blue for Imbria's, and red for the tattered, fleeing remnants of the armies of Nubia. The planette's Olders are apparently too few and scattered to merit chessmen of their own, but if they ever find their way to this table, Bruno has no doubt they will be some weary shade of gray.
Anyway, at a glance he can see just how badly the war is going; two southern cities—labeled Renold and Bolo—are staring already into the faceless faces of the approaching enemy, and if the robots march by night as well as by day (and why wouldn't they?), the sites will be under siege by midnight, and likely demolished before sunrise, just over sixty hours from now. These sunset rays slanting through the slatted windows might be the last daylight the two cities will ever see.
Meanwhile, a third branch of the robot army is streaming northward between the two, aiming for the city of Tosen and, one hundred fifty kilometers beyond it, the capital city of Timoch itself. The Imbrian Sea—a bit larger than in Bruno's day—fills a basin just west of Timoch, stretching northward to the Mairan Shelf and west to the Stark Hills in a rough triangle three hundred kilometers on a side, covering the middle third between the planette's equator and the north pole.
And chillingly, there are at least a dozen smaller silver chessmen—the Glimmer King's scouting patrols—scattered all the way from Imbria's border to the southern shore of its sea. The only saving grace—the only thing that keeps it from looking like certain doom—is the fact that the bulk of the robot army is still in Nubia, in Lune's southern hemisphere, and does not appear on this map at all. But even Bruno can sense the mass of them down there, implicit in the northward-streaming formations.
“How accurate are these unit positions?” he murmurs to Radmer.
“Very. Cover the nation in hundred-kilometer circles and you'll find a watch tower on the highest points of each, with dozens more running through the passes and lowlands in-between. During daylight hours, everything that moves is tracked with great precision.”
“How do the towers communicate?”
“Semaphore,” Radmer says, as though this should be obvious. “It's a quaternary code loosely based on DNA sequences. With properly trained crews, their data rates approach two digits per second, including parity and checksum bits on every tenth flag. It can even send pictures.”
“Hmm.” Not a stupid way to handle things, though a lot of skill and muscle would be required. Something similar had been tried in Bruno's native Catalonia, before the Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had ended that nation-state's flirtation with things medieval. But he seems to recall that effort being abandoned in favor of an Old Modern maser network.
And it's interesting, he thinks, that Imbria has electricity but no sign of lasers or computers. No telegraphs, no wireless. Its leaders, advised at least occasionally by real astronomers, have a rough understanding of the heavens they cannot touch. And they know what wellstone is, though they lack the equipment to produce it or the technical skill to program it.
Clearly they're not a stupid people. Bruno surprises himself with a sudden ache of sympathy for them, caught as they are in some bizarre remnant of Queendom-era intrigue which they surely can't understand. Not because they're incapable, but because no one has bothered to explain it to them.
“Someone has revived an old fax machine,” he announces to the room, when a lull in the conversation permits. The Imbrians fall quiet at that, and suddenly all eyes are on him. Obligingly, he steps over to a crucified robot—one of a dozen mounted around the room's circumference. He points to the shattered iron box on the side of its head. “As you might guess, this annex, this junction box for external wiring, is not a part of the original design. It's been soldered on—here and here—using aluminum, which adheres well to both silicon and impervium. And while the skin may look flawless it isn't really. It's been scratched and filled, you see? Even impervium, eleven times harder than diamond, will flake and abrade with sufficient mistreatment. There's a thin layer of resin in every small groove; this hull has been expertly polished.”
He moves to another robot. God, they look so familiar. So harmless! “But see here? The same welds. The same scratches. These robots are of Queendom design, crudely modified but otherwise well cared for. And they're all identical. The fax machine has a buffer, you see—a kind of memory of its last few operations. Someone found the fax with its libraries scrambled, but the image of a robot stored intact in its buffers. A household robot, ordinarily harmless. And this Glimmer King—surely an Older of great technical skill—cut it open and jumpered its wiring. This is no small feat, for the Asimov protocols are buried deep in the wellstone itself, and are designed to reconfigure around any casual tampering. But he accomplished the task, and put the robot back together, and fed it into the fax again, to be duplicated and reduplicated.
“But as you've surmised, he needs metal. Gold and aluminum are best, but almost any conductor will do—wellstone is anywhere from twelve to twenty percent metal by volume. The rest is all silicon an
d oxygen, easily obtained from even the most sterile of soils. He has a small quarry nearby, you can bet on that. But not a mine, not a refining operation. Why bother, when he can loot the hard-won fruits of civilization instead?”
“Why?” someone demands. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“To conquer the world,” Bruno answers simply. “To smash it and remake it according to some blueprint of his own. The lives of his victims are incidental; he's chasing some mirage of imagined ‘greatness.'”
“Blueprint?” someone else asks, in thickly accented tones.
“Sorry, a . . . a map. A design. An image of how things will appear when he's finished. The intermediate stages are nothing to him; your suffering is meaningless. He's got his eyes on the future, not the present.”
“You sound as though you know him,” Pine Chadwir says, not quite accusingly.
“I know his type,” Bruno answers. “Given the constraints on your life span and population size, such individuals may be rare on Lune. But they used to crop up with fair regularity. When exactly did these troubles begin?”
“It's difficult to say with any certainty,” Radmer answers, jumping ahead of the Furies and their attendants in a way Bruno would have found rude. He walks to one of the globes, spins it ass-up, and points his finger at a region marked in orange, which includes the south pole and over half the former Farside. “Here, in the high desert hills of Astaroth, there have been robot sightings for fifteen, maybe twenty years. They were dismissed until two years ago, when it became clear that Astaroth had ceased to exist as an organized nation.
“This may sound odd, but the actual date of its collapse is unknown. Astaroth had always been a sparsely populated country, with internal squabbles and few diplomatic ties to the rest of Lune. Most of its people just disappeared, quietly, and by the time refugees started finding their way to Nubia, why, the Nubians' days were already numbered.”
Bruno nodded, processing that. “And where does the name Glimmer King come from? These refugees?”
“According to them, it comes from the robots themselves. I've never encountered the story in anything but fragments. He has . . . other names as well.”
Bruno looks him in the eye and nods very slightly, acknowledging that. There have been rumors, yes.
“Robots have been known to speak,” says Danella Mota. “They addressed the Senatoria Plurum in City Campanas, for example, shortly before sacking it and killing the people inside. Only a few escaped with their lives, so I can't help wondering what the robots said, or why they bothered. It seems capricious, especially for machines.”
“Only because you don't see the plans that drive them,” Bruno tells her. “But these can be deduced through careful study, and usually are. No one has ever conquered the whole human race—not without a majority vote in favor.”
“You have an air of comfortable authority about you,” says the eldest Fury to Bruno. “Mr. . . . Ako'i, is it? So does General Radmer, but he defers to you, not the other way round.”
“I was once a teacher,” Bruno answers. Which is certainly the truth, if not the whole.
“Hmm,” she says, unconvinced. “I suppose this ‘fax machine' is like a mirror? Its reflections are made solid somehow, but the device itself can be smashed?”
“Certainly.”
“And this is your plan? To find it and break it?”
Here Bruno comes up short, because no plan has been explained to him in anything but the vaguest terms. The “Stormlands” are visible on the map as a gray oval smear, perhaps eighty kilometers wide and a hundred and eighty tall, near Imbria's uninhabited southeast corner. The province is marked with the name “Shanru.” But no such place had existed in his day. A land of permanent storm? Why would he go there? What would he accomplish?
His ignorance seems to disappoint the eldest Fury. To Radmer she says, “Will you elaborate on your plans, General? You can risk your neck in the Stormlands without our blessing. You're here because you need something.”
To this Pine Chadwir adds, “If you can fling yourself all the way to Varna, then surely you can fling yourself directly into the Stormlands' eye. Assuming it has one.”
“It does, Madam Regent,” Radmer says. “I've seen it myself, from high above the world. A fifteen-kilometer hole in the clouds. Its western edge, against the Blood Mountains, is piled high with sand dunes, but near the center I saw a crisscross of straight, dark lines.”
“Manassa?” asks the eldest Fury, her eyes glittering in the sunset.
“The fabled city itself,” Radmer agrees, “exactly as Zaleis the Wanderer claimed. He really did make it in and out.”
“And so you believe his other claims,” says Danella Mota, “his ‘Dragon of Shanru' and his ‘engines and objects of great antiquity and wholly mysterious purpose.'”
“There were no dragons in this world when it was new, madam. Whether any have been created since then I couldn't say. But aye, the rest of it I believe. And this man, who calls himself Ako'i, is better qualified than any living person to bring these engines and objects back to life. The Glimmer King's robots are not invincible, just strong and numerous. With proper equipment on the human side, it should be possible to defeat them.”
“Possible,” says the eldest Fury with a slow nod. “Well, that's something. But what do you need from us?”
“Transportation,” says Radmer. “Armed escort. A safe-conduct passport which your turnpike guards will accept. The enemy will have taken my capsule by now, and even if I had a spare, landing inside the eye of a storm would be risky indeed. Hiking in on foot, as Zaleis did, is more likely to succeed. I've studied his path, which appears to be the best compromise between weather and terrain. I believe we can duplicate it.”
“We cannot spare troops, Radmer,” says Danella Mota warily.
“I need only a few. A dozen Dolceti, perhaps.”
The room explodes at that remark. “Dolceti! A dozen! This Older is as mad as all the rest.”
“Your request is denied,” says a harried-sounding Pine Chadwir. “You ask the one thing we cannot possibly grant, in this hour of greatest need.”
“Then I'll take my leave,” says Radmer, “and return to the veils of Echo Valley to await this world's destruction. I would stand and die with you, madam, if I thought it would do any good. But if civilization must die again, I prefer to be among friends.”
Now the room falls silent, and fearful, and all eyes are on the Furies, wondering what they'll say next. It's the eldest who speaks first, and her tone is wistful and quiet. “They say you built the world, Radmer, as a carpenter might build a house.”
“The world was here long before me, madam. All I did was remodel it.”
“So. Not quite a god, then. But something powerful nonetheless. And still afraid! You've traveled far on our behalf—to Varna and back.”
And here Bruno catches a glimpse of the young Conrad Mursk in the weathered features of Radmer. “I've traveled much farther than that, Madam Regent. To the stars themselves, where this sunlight won't arrive for years.”
“You're very old,” she says, considering that. “And wise, and strange. And very kind—or foolish—to offer this peculiar assistance to us, who barely know you. Whether it help or not, it surely cannot make things any worse. I give you twenty Dolceti, General, and the blessing of the Board of Regents.”
chapter sixteen
in which a fateful journey
is undertaken
“One of the diamond pillars buckled,” Radmer is telling Bruno, “and the neutronium plate above it slipped almost to the center of Lune. The plates are flat hexagons, right? But at the surface, the region of depressed gravity is more nearly circular. And with mountain ranges on either side, you can't even really see that. It ends up being more of an oval.”
“A permanent low-pressure system,” Bruno muses. “A permanent thunderstorm.”
“More nearly a hurricane. It brings no joy to the region, no refreshment. Only a hard cleans
ing. And when it happened, when the pillar buckled and the plate fell and the ground above it cracked and sank, the shock waves struck every fault and fissure in the whole damned planette, releasing gigatons of stored energy.”
“This was the ‘Shattering,' that looms so large in these people's history?” Bruno asks.
Radmer confirms it. “Half the population died in the first few hours, and within a week no two bricks were left standing, anywhere in the world. Lune was the jewel of post-Queendom civilization, and without it things just . . . fell apart. Again. No more rockets, no heavy industry of any kind. It's only in the past two centuries that there's been any real consolidation. And frankly I'd still call this a borderline dark age, even without the war.”
Bruno weighs this against his conscience, probing for the guilt he ought to feel. Surely this Shattering is another calamity he could have prevented. But as the two of them step through an archway and into a large courtyard of grass and concrete and grimly drilling soldiers, he glances up at the sky. The sun has finally gone down, but the clouds are aflame, dwarfing the works of Man beneath them. And he finds he can no longer be angry with himself for honest mistakes, or for living through to this moment.
Still, more from a sense of duty than anything else he says, “You and I have a lot of bodies at our feet.”
“Aye, well. At least there is a Lune. We can take credit for that.”
“There'd still be an Earth, if not for the Nescog. If not for me, personally.”
But Radmer just shrugs. “Something would have killed it, sooner or later. It's the way of things. The important question is whether it was good while it lasted.”
Bruno, though horrified, can't help but chuckle at that. “You've become a deathist, lad. Who'd've thought?”
“Aye,” says Radmer, cracking a feeble grin of his own. “A vegetarian, too, for in this life the meat comes from creatures. They have faint little hopes and dreams of their own, and I've made war on them long enough. Why should some chicken lose everything, to add another day to this?” He waves contemptuously at his own flesh.