by Wil McCarthy
“Would you hasten your own story's end?” Bruno probes. Among men as old as they, it isn't a rude question at all. “Is that why you became a soldier?”
But Radmer dismisses that notion just as contemptuously. “I've always been a soldier, a fighter, intolerant of oppression. I fought you, once.”
“So you did,” Bruno muses, remembering back to those days, when Conrad Mursk and Bascal Edward had been inseparable, and the problems of the world could be dismissed as mere childishness. It doesn't seem so long ago, really, and there's a sentiment the deathists would have an opinion about. Did the long years of his life count for so little? “Still, here we are. Side by side for a new war.”
Radmer grunts. “I gave that up, too—soldiering. Really! With a fax-filtered body and three thousand years of dirty tricks, it was like shooting babies. Not a risk to myself at all. It was nothing a moral person could condone.”
“But you'll fight robots,” Bruno said.
“Aye, one last time. In my next life I'll be a farmer, bringing sustenance into the world.”
Now there's an interesting thought. What will the resurrected Bruno do, if it turns out there's a future for him to do it in? Teach? Open a bistro, as his father had done long ago, in a land not so terribly different from this one? The idea seems bizarre, alien, tragically comic. But not impossible.
Any further rumination on the subject, though, is extinguished by the arrival of Bordi, the Dolceti Primus and Captain of the Timoch Guard.
“Where are your men?” he asks crisply, in the Old Tongue.
“Departed,” says Radmer. “Returned to protect their own homes and families.”
Well, yes, thinks Bruno, but not as easily as that. At the last, Sidney Lyman had resisted. “So, what, you're going to help the humans, be a hero, and we're dismissed?”
“You didn't even want to be here,” Radmer told him. “I dragged you.”
“Come with us,” Lyman said urgently. “Or let us come with you. There's too few of us in the world, sir, to be scattering to the winds like this. We've got to hang together.”
“I agree. Which is why you're needed back at Echo Valley.”
There'd been more to it than that, but eventually Lyman and his followers had given up, realizing that their old commander simply wouldn't be responsible for them any longer, would not allow them into harm's way on his account. On the one hand it was a sorry way to repay their loyalty—with the barbed kindness of condescension. On the other hand, it was exactly what Bruno would have done in his place. If the world be doomed, well, let them salvage what they could. That's an order, soldier.
There are so many people he misses, people he loves but will never see again. If he could reach back and save even one of them—not just Tamra, but anyone—he'd do it in a heartbeat, whatever the cost. But here there are no such decisions for him to make. Here he's a relic, nothing more, and that's all right. He'll do his bit—or try, anyway—and fade back into the mists.
“It's just the two of you?” Bordi asks.
“Right,” says Radmer. “And if it's all the same to you, I'll delegate all the logistics. Just get us to the Stormlands and back, before this city falls.”
“Already working on it, General. Your timing is good; with the sun setting, the upslope winds will begin blowing in a few hours. Eastward, against the mountains. That will buy us a hundred kilometers right there. I'd advise you both to get some sleep beforehand.”
“Why?” asks Radmer. “How are we traveling?”
“On the back of a flau,” Bordi answers, in hard and mirthful tones.
This turns out to be a living creature, mostly hollow and filled with hydrogen. With the proportions of a Tongan royal pleasure yacht, the thing has a broad, flat back some fifteen meters wide and forty-five long, with a bulbous, vaguely ship-shaped body underneath. At the front, its mouth is surprisingly tiny, and surrounded by eyes and nostrils of alien design.
“It looks like a leviathan,” Bruno says, referring to the largest of the multicellular creatures in the ocean of Pup, the marginally habitable world circling Wolf 359. The thought brings a pang to his heart, for the King of Wolf had been Edward Bascal Faxborn, an alternate version of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. King Eddie to his admirers, he'd been by all accounts a fair-minded ruler who had taken more closely after Bruno and especially Tamra.
And though he'd thought his grief long exhausted, Bruno finds that the thought of Tamra Lutui can still wrench his insides. Not just the coolly smiling Queen of Sol—though he misses her, too—but the twenty-year-old girl who'd gigglingly granted him the title of declarant in a room full of well-dressed strangers. And then philander, yes, a few months later—in her royal bedchamber, attended only by those dainty robots that looked more like ballerinas than like the later Palace Guards.
“It was a leviathan once,” Radmer says, yanking Bruno back to the present. “But now it swims a sea of air.”
And that's absurd, because the Wolfans had never managed a starship to return even their own miserable selves to Sol, much less a mindless, overgrown alien invertebrate. He says, “Was the genome transmitted over the Instelnet? Part of the intellectual property traffic?”
“It was, yes, during the late Queendom era. Eridani bought it from Wolf, and carried it here in their armadas' libraries. And since the four known life-bearing worlds were all seeded by the same primordial source, deep in the galaxy somewhere, it wasn't hard to insert that genome into a Terran yeast cell and convince it to grow. If you recall, the early Lunites were quite talented bioengineers.”
“I don't recall it, no,” says Bruno. “I was quite busy at that time, trying to save a bit of Earth. All in vain, as it turned out, but it was important to try.”
Radmer muses for a moment before adding, “Those engineers had all the best equipment from the old Queendom, and all the best techniques from half a dozen colonies. And there was no law to stop them, not really. From the original genomes, of course, they began their customizations; the flau was only one project of hundreds.”
The creature is ugly in the extreme, its lumpy, rubbery skin gleaming in the rainbow light of Murdered Earth. It doesn't seem to have much shape, either, though that might be more a function of its lying on the hard, flat pavement of the Timoch International Airport. In the water, with its fans and frills extended, the leviathan had always moved with the same slow, eerie beauty of sea creatures everywhere.
Heck, it probably still drifts in the seas of Pup, dreamily unaware of the solid little beings that came and went in the caverns of its world's rocky highlands. Unlike the Eridanians, the Wolfans could at least go outside, if not exactly live there. They could explore their ocean, could sting its residents with probes and biopsy needles. A few humans had even been eaten by leviathans, and at least one man had been rescued alive, days later, after cutting through to an air sac and subsisting on the moisture of its walls. It was huge interstellar news at the time. But even that had scarcely seemed to register with the affected creature, which swam peacefully away in unhurried search of more cooperative meals.
Here, the “flau” has had metal rings driven through its body, with hemp and leather ropes strung through them, making it a kind of artifact, a ship, an old-fashioned beast of burden. A thing both owned and controlled, no longer free.
“This is how people travel?” he asks disapprovingly.
“When necessary,” Radmer allows. “Though smaller groups would generally use a cloth balloon, and single individuals can still travel by glider. If they begin at sufficient altitude and ride the thermals skillfully, glider pilots have been known to circumnavigate the world.”
This surprises Bruno only slightly, because the world is small, and the mountains of Lune tower much higher over its seas than the hills of Earth ever did, giving rise sometimes to very strong updrafts. Still, this place evokes a sort of continuous amazement in him, for what appears rustic—even primitive—at first glance, always turns out to be something more. Something clever, s
omething optimized for the environment and the available resources. The absence of wellstone—indeed, of semiconductors in general—has pushed the Lunites to almost uncanny extremes of artistry and invention. And that makes it not so terribly different from the Queendom, which after all had hired an inventor as its king.
“Why not simply use a blimp?” he asks.
And Radmer counters, “Why not stay home? The flau can be a bit tricky—people have been known to fall off when they get the hiccups—but they know their own way. They're self-healing and self-balancing, and they almost never get hit by lightning. They just . . . go around the storms.”
“General,” says Bordi, striding toward them in the darkness. “The wind is shifting, so we'd best get aloft while we can. You two can lash your bags at the stern. Mind the steersman, though; put them exactly where he specifies, and no other place.”
“Aye,” Radmer acknowledges. “Thank you, Captain.”
Two other people follow in Bordi's wake, and after a moment Bruno recognizes them as Natan and Zuq, the Dolceti who stood with him at the city gate, while the others ran off to battle.
“Good evening,” he says to them, without any particular emphasis. And their reply, though less than enthusiastic, contains a good bit more deference than their earlier speech had. “It's Encyclopedia Man. Hello, sir. Apparently we're at your service.”
“Not by choice, surely,” he says, and they surprise him by denying it. “Now, now. Any ward of the Regents is a ward of the Order of Dolcet, and deserving the best protection. We volunteered and were accepted.”
“Well,” Bruno says, feeling a bit of human warmth stirring in the ancient hollows of his heart. “You have my gratitude, then.”
“Up you go,” says Zuq, grabbing a rope ladder and climbing upward, showing the way.
“After you,” says Natan, with a valetlike gesture. Radmer and Bordi have gotten separated somehow—Bruno can see them heading up toward the flau's pinched little face—and he appears to be in the care of these two men once again. So he climbs the ropes himself, clambering past a network of rings and fishnet and flat leather straps.
The deck of the flau—if indeed that's the proper term—is a woven mat remarkably like the deck of a traditional Tongan catamaran, except that the bark it's fashioned from feels thicker and tougher, the strips much wider. All around it is a waist-high railing of something like bamboo—some light, stiff, hollow plant that looks gray under the night sky.
Immediately he's set upon by a bare-chested little Luner man wearing a vest and pants and cylindrical cap of supple brown leather. “Who's you?” the man demands in a thick New Tongue accent, and if the Dolceti have dispelled any notion of these “humans” being childlike or comical, this stocky, strutting, hypercephalic figure provides the counterpoint. “Older? Been y' on a flau before? Don' put tha down thar, foo!”
“Our steersman, Fander Kytu,” Zuq explains, leaning easily against the railing, which for him is nearly chest-high. “Don't make him angry, or we'll have a long night of it. Be assured, he's the best in the world at what he does.”
“Bag,” says Fander, pointing to a netted-over heap near the deck's stern.
“I'll take it,” says Natan, relieving Bruno of his few meager possessions. Except the sword and pistol the Furies gave him, which he keeps in leather scabbards at his side. The sword is not an air foil. In fact, it's not a real sword by any reasonable standard. It's made of opaque forged steel, for one thing, without so much as a diamond coating to stiffen it and hold its edge. And it doesn't vibrate or glow white-hot or anything, so if he's to cut anything with it he'll need to swing very hard indeed.
A blitterstaff would be much more the thing, but the Imbrians have made a mess of their remaining wellstone. Bruno was only able to salvage five staves from the entire façade, and they were of such unspeakable value here that to ask for one was to ask too much.
For that matter, the pistol they've given him would be little more than a toy in the Queendom. It fires thumbnail-sized metal bullets at only slightly more than the speed of sound! One well-placed shot is enough to fell a grown man, and a better-placed one will burst the junction box affixed to a robot's head, with generally terminal results. But he will have to aim it himself, by eye and by hand.
Still, he's seen too much of this world to want to travel it unarmed, and at the end of the day a blade is still a blade, and a projectile a projectile. He knows what to do with them.
“All board!” calls the steersman to the Dolceti, who are swarming up the rigging like they've been crewing such flights all their lives. Bruno catches sight of Radmer up by the bow. “Wind arising! Hook off! Cast by!”
And these commands—both to the Dolceti and to the minimal ground crew on the pavement below—suffice. Over the next half minute the mooring ropes are untied and the flau—swelling beneath them—becomes a thing independent of the ground on which it rests. Not airborne yet, but neither wholly in the thrall of gravity.
“She weighs only as much as a cow, if you can believe it,” Zuq says conversationally. “Even with her bladders flat, old Natan and I here could practically carry her where we're going. But it is a fine thing, to ride the upslope on a winter's night, with the light of Murdered Earth shining down all around.”
And as if in answer, the flau beneath them gives a final sigh of inflation, and lifts gently away from the planette.
It's funny, Bruno thinks, that a black hole should be surrounded by so much light. But the halo of Murdered Earth—shaped like the stem and cap of a toppled mushroom—captures the full glory of Sol and tears it apart into nested rainbows. The whole thing is larger and brighter than the full moon had been in the skies of Old Earth.
And while it moves across the heavens on a twenty-eight-day cycle, first approaching the sun and then opposing it, it does not go through “phases” per se. It's always bright, and washes out the sky so badly that he supposes most Lunites have never seen the Milky Way on anything but Earthless nights. There must be a lot of things they never see, and still more they've never heard or dreamed of.
Still, Lune's jagged landscape is eerily beautiful by this varicolored glow. And the stars—what he can see of them—are peaceful, and since the flau is drifting eastward on the wind itself, at the speed of the wind, the air around it gives an impression of stillness, even as the Earthlit roads and farms roll by underneath. Ahead is the Sawtooth, the first range of the very tall Apenine mountains. Beneath them lies Aden Plateau, where Bruno and Radmer first landed in their sphere of brass. Lord, that was only forty hours ago—less than a day by the Luner clock. But it seems a longer time. Weeks.
“Look,” Zuq tells him at one point, “there goes another flau.”
And indeed, there it is, spread out above them and slightly south, pulling ahead in a stronger wind. Bruno can see its downward-pointing sail, so very much like the frills of Pup's ever-slumbering leviathan. From this vantage he can get a sense of the creature's entire shape, its natural form, which looks neither tortured nor artificial. In fact, from a distance it's quite beautiful, an elegant blending of form and function.
He sees another one far below, its decks swarming with men and women in white jackets, singing some bittersweet melody. To celebrate their escape from the doomed city? To mourn it? But then, with a shock, he recognizes the faint tune itself: it's Bascal Edward's Song of Physics, which once sought to capture the essence of Queendom science in twenty memorable stanzas.
It's beautiful. Bruno can barely make out the words, but it seems to him that the song has been passed down intact, in something close to the Old Tongue. And suddenly the tears are flowing freely from his eyes, for whatever sins might weigh against his son's name, Bascal had risen to that particular challenge with all the grace and skill his genetics and training could muster. He'd been, if nothing else, a truly brilliant poet.
And of course any thought of Bascal is really a thought of Tamra, and this makes him leak saline just that much faster.
“A
re you all right?” Natan asks him, coming over to lean his elbows on the railing. If Bruno tried that on this lightly rolling deck, he'd be pitched right over the edge the first time his attention wandered. But Natan is shorter, and surer of foot, and to Bruno's surprise he sounds more than professionally concerned.
Angry at himself, Bruno wipes his eyes on a sleeve. “This is what old men do, I'm afraid. The grief comes upon us in unguarded moments.”
And Natan surprises him again by asking, “Was it real beautiful, your world? Your many, many worlds?”
“Indeed,” Bruno confirms, as a fresh wave of tears rolls down his cheeks. “It sounds fatuous to say it, I realize, but there was more beauty and wonder than you can imagine. Did we even notice at the time? But your own world is beautiful, too. Promise me this, guardsman: take nothing for granted in your flicker-short lifetime. Appreciate.”
“I will,” says Natan. “I do. Life is a precious gift.”
Still wiping his tears, Bruno chuckles at that. “An odd sentiment—don't you think?—for an elite soldier in a sorely endangered country. Shouldn't you be a Stoic?”
“Uh? I don't know that word.”
“Er, silent. Economical in word and motion. Quietly suffering, to the point of simplemindedness.”
“Ah.” It's Natan's turn to chuckle. “We have no need of that, sir. That warrior mysticism, that claptrap. We don't have to be that sterile. We have the blindsight training.”
Suddenly the wicker deck is creaking under bootsteps, and Radmer is there. “Ako'i?”
“I'm fine,” Bruno assures him, to forestall any involved discussion. The concern in Radmer's voice is far less friendly, for Radmer's duty is not to a person or an ideal, but to the human race generally. It's a heavy burden, and admits little room for empathy or play. “Just reminiscing a bit.”
“That can be dangerous. Have you slept enough? Some of the men are tying down, over there on center-deck.”