by Wil McCarthy
“Not at all,” Radmer says grimly, pointing to a heap on the road which Bruno had taken for a pile of oil-stained rags. But on closer inspection he can see the “oil” spreading in a pool, and a pair of pointy boots sticking out of the heap. It's Parma, the mission mother. Minus the top of her head.
“Sloppy,” someone notes, in tones of mild embarrassment. “You can see she was half a step too close.”
chapter nineteen
in which a great gulf is spanned
The long night just keeps on getting cooler, and as the road climbs higher and higher into the thin mountain air, the last traces of Imbria's temperate winter fall away. Not all of the Dolceti had started off the journey in riding leathers, but before setting off from the scene of the battle they'd all zipped up, and before long they were stopping again to throw vests and parkas over the leathers, and mitten-tops over the fingers of their gloves. Progress slows, and slows again as the slipstream turns to icy daggers.
“Cold enough?” Zuq asks Bruno at one point, and in his addled state, with his face half-frozen beneath a muffle of soft cloth, Bruno can only manage a grunt in reply.
Finally, as the solar trees peter out into scraggly tundra and then bare rock, it actually becomes possible to see the semaphore towers, which roll by every few kilometers. It must be cold duty manning these stations, Bruno thinks, though not nearly as cold or wearying as the long ride between them.
Finally, Bordi calls another halt. “It would be nice to sleep in Highrock,” he says to Radmer. “But we're cold and tired already. Let's get some rest and then regroup for the final push across the summit.”
Radmer carries a pocket watch—a sort of mechanical contraption for ticking off the hours and minutes of the day. Or the night; its hands and numerals glow with the phosphorescent green of radium. He makes a show of checking it now, and as he pops the cover open it casts his face in a sickly light. “Five hours, Captain. No more than that.”
And Bordi answers, “The general is most kind.”
So they make camp, and Natan shows Bruno how to unroll his bivvy, which is a thing that owes its ancestry to sleeping bags and canopy beds and one-man tents but is different from all of these. On the bottom, stiff tendrils of closed-cell foam provide both padding and insulation against the rocky ground. On the top, stiff arches of cloth keep a vented air space above his head, keeping out the wind—or the rain and snow, if there were any. And in the middle are layers of padding which, for a substance not composed of quantum dots, are surprisingly warm and light.
Bruno is asleep before he can draw twenty breaths, and mercifully, the Quantum Horse declines to visit him this time. Still, when Zuq rouses him he resists at first, unable to believe that five hours have really elapsed. “Find your amusement elsewhere, lad!”
But Zuq is both understanding and persistent. “It's time to go, Ako'i. Come on, I'm responsible for you. Come out of there and pack up.”
There is a hasty meal of nuts and raisins and little flavored bits of dried chicken, washed down with water that has begun to freeze in its bottles.
“How much farther is the summit?” Bruno asks Radmer as the two of them stow their gear aboard the treaders.
“A couple of hours, if we hurry. The people of Highrock need to be warned; if the enemy is here in Black Forest already, Tillspar will be a major target for them, both strategically and materially.”
“A lot of metal, is it?”
“Wellstone, actually. And a lot of it, yes. More importantly, as the only bridge across the Divide, it's a critical link between East Imbria and the coastal cities. Without it, Manilus and Duran and Crossroad will be cut off. That's a third of the republic, geographically speaking, and nearly a fifth of its people.”
The night has grown colder still, and there's a stiff breeze blowing, but at least here there are no solar trees drinking in what little heat remains. The men—and the sole woman left among them—saddle up and go, beneath the river of the Milky Way and the watchful eyes of Orion. The stars, barely twinkling, are as clear here as they would be on the surface of an ordinary planette. You'd need a space suit to get a better view. Murdered Earth is hidden by the mountains; only the glow of headlights interferes.
Still, it's slow going up here in the cold and thin, and they crest several false summits which prove, to Bruno's sinking spirits, to have even higher, steeper mountains behind them. Indeed, when they've truly reached the top of the pass, Bruno doesn't realize it until he sees the lights of a small town, kilometers in the distance and slightly below their current position.
“Is that Highrock?” he calls out to Radmer, now several treaders away in the pack.
“Aye,” Radmer confirms. “If you look, you can even make out the bridge.”
And it's true; past a sharp turn and a fork in the road, Bruno can see the town nestling on either side of some dark expanse, and between them the inverted, caternary arches of a suspension bridge, its cables strung up with electric lights. It's a scene straight out of his childhood, and it brings another pang of nostalgia. Oh, for those simpler days! But it's a false longing and he knows it, for the simple life is never simple, nor safe. The Queendom, for all its faults and programmed failures, was a place more worthy of his pining.
“That's a river, then?” he asks Radmer.
And Radmer laughs. “There is a river, yes, carrying meltwater westward to the Imbrian Sea. On the other side it flows east to Tranquility, where the site of Luna's first human visit lies submerged under eighty meters of briny ocean. But there's more to the Divide than that.”
“How so?”
“You missed the Shattering, Ako'i. It'll be easier to explain when we're actually on Tillspar, looking down.”
They ride onward, and at the outskirts of the village they encounter a lighted guard shack, with a sort of vestigial gate blocking the road, consisting of little more than a horizontal boom which can be pivoted up out of the way.
“Bestnight. What bin'z, then?” asks one of the two guards in the shack. But the other one, recognizing Radmer in the pack, steps forward in surprise, then finally moves to the doorway and walks out. “Radmer! My God! I never thought we'd lay eyes on you again!”
Radmer chuckles at that. “Oh, ye of little faith. You think a vanishing dot in the sky is the last you'll see of me? I'm harder to get rid of than that.”
“But we saw it hit the ground! That capsule of yours, a gleam of light in the setting sun!”
“You saw it cross the horizon,” Radmer corrects, “at an altitude of ten thousand kilometers and climbing. Really, Elmer, if the course was plotted by the astronomer Rigby, and the capsule and catapult were overseen by no less than Mika's Armory and the watchmaker Orange Mayhew, then it's Highrock's reputation at stake more than my own sorry skin. Is this or is this not the Artisans' Pinnacle?”
“Aye,” the guard agrees, “yours was a finely crafted delusion. Wheels and chains, bombs and hatches! A fitting tomb for such as you, big brass balls and all. No offense to the men what built it, sir, but I'm surprised to see you just the same.”
“Well,” Radmer says, pulling out a set of travel orders to show off as a formality, “perhaps you could send word to the mayor, let her know I'm here.”
“I've rung the bell already,” the guard assures him.
Soon, the other riders are shouldered aside and Radmer is surrounded by a milling throng of villagers, talking over one another in a rapidly rising din. “How did that air filter work? Radmer? Radmer! Did the wheel springs seize at all? Did the dinite charges hurt when they went off? Where did these Dolceti come from?”
It's the mayor herself who rescues him, striding along the cobblestone avenue in a green robe, with some sort of golden ceremonial pendant dangling from her neck.
“So. How many lives does a scoundrel have?”
Radmer looks up, suddenly pleased and sheepish, vaguely off balance. “More than he can count, Your Honor. I'm pleased to see you again.”
“I should say the sam
e to you.” She clucks, looking him up and down. “In one piece, no less. That's good. Did you find what you were looking for up there?”
“I did,” Radmer answers, presenting Bruno with a flourish.
“Hmm.” The mayor then turns her appraising eyes upon this even older Older, who is immediately reminded of his wife. Tamra used to look at Bruno exactly like that—interested, curious, vaguely exasperated—whenever things were just starting to go askew. A couple of years ago, it seemed. A couple of hundred at the very most. “And is he worth your worldly fortune, General? We're living quite well on the wages you paid us.”
To which Radmer answers, “If he's not, Your Honor, then you should spend the money while you can. The Glimmer King has scouting patrols in this pass already. I fear it won't be long before they're coming for Tillspar in force.”
Her smile is vaguely condescending. “The bridge has stood since the Shattering itself, General. It was built, I understand, by the very architect who crushed this world from the husk of a lifeless moon. Chairmain Kung of the Gower Monopoly once struck it with a blitterstaff, if I recall the story correctly, and the bridge rang like a gong and stood firm. And there've been lesser attempts by lesser villains, which accomplished nothing at all.”
“Kung struck only one blow,” Radmer says, “before I pitched him over the railing. Two minutes later you could still hear him screaming, all the way down. We never did find the staff. If we hadn't been there to stop him, he'd've fared a lot better.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Your point being?”
“I won't be here to help, Your Honor. Not this time.”
“We've got a full garrison,” she reminded him, sounding annoyed.
“So did every outpost in Nubia. Against this enemy, a few hundred men are no defense at all.”
She leans close, dropping her voice to a murmur. “What do you want me to say, Rad? We'll hold it for as long as we can, and if we fail we'll go down fighting. Is that what you want to hear? This is Highrock. It's our bridge, and anyway we've got a few surprises up our skirt.”
“I expect you do,” he concedes.
The two of them look at each other for a long moment, until Radmer finally asks, “Where are Orange and Mika?”
“On the bridge, if you can believe it. Cocking the VLC for a shot down the pass.”
“Well, bless their little hearts.”
“Yes.”
Another long moment passes.
“You're not staying,” she says. “Not even for a few hours.”
“No. I'm sorry, but we've had enough delays already. We need to be through the Stormlands before the midmorning thermals kick in.”
“Stormlands.” She clucks, shaking her head slightly. “You sure know how to pick your battles, General.”
“Aye,” he agrees sadly. “It's always been my greatest talent.”
Soon the riders are rolling on, right through this gingerbread town, leaving the gate and the guards and the mayor behind.
“So, Radmer,” Zuq wants to know, “what color are her nipples?”
The buildings of Highrock have straight, high, rectangular walls of gray mortar and smooth yellow river rock, ranging from fist sized to head sized. The roofs are of wooden shingle, sprouting key-shaped chimneys of tin tied down with steel cables. The whole place smells of burning wood, and Bruno can see wagonloads of cut-up logs in alleys and behind the houses, awaiting their own turn in the furnace.
Apparently the weather is highly thought of here, for every roof seems to sport a vane to indicate the wind's direction, and a cup anemometer to gauge its speed. There are black-painted water tanks on the roofs as well, nestled close to the chimneys to keep from freezing. At first glance, the bridge doesn't seem like anything special. The far side of the Divide, perhaps a kilometer distant, gives no real clue as to just how far down the bottom is. But as they draw nearer, the walls of the chasm go down, and down, and down some more.
On the bridge itself, Bruno quickly realizes that this “Divide” is no mere riverbed. Its sides—separated by a thousand meters of blackness—drop away almost vertically, and although the edges are jagged as lightning, the overall course of the thing is almost perfectly east-west. In total darkness it might've baffled Bruno's senses completely, but during the long night, Murdered Earth has overshot the sun and can be seen on the eastern horizon, right through the crack of the Divide itself. And in the other direction, through haze and darkness, Bruno fancies he can see all the way down to the Imbrian Sea, now hundreds of kilometers west of him, and ten kilometers down. Indeed, what else could that be? That muzzy juncture between ground and sky?
Where the mountains fall away to the east, below the rising Earth, the crack runs together as a pair of converging lines before seeming, at some impossibly remote point, to take a sudden and decisive turn to the northwest. Below, there is only darkness and the howl of wind. And this is telling indeed, if Bruno can see the horizon through the gap in the rock!
“This is a crevasse,” he diagnoses for Radmer's assessment. “A single seismic crack down the spine of the entire mountain range. Very deep.”
“Very,” Radmer agrees. “Beneath Tillspar, the river Arkis sits only two hundred meters above sea level. Its source, a wellspring eighteen kilometers upstream, is only two hundred meters higher than that.”
Although Bruno has seen some large artifacts in his day, he cannot help being impressed. A crack in the earth ten kilometers deep! The Shattering must have been a violent event indeed, and a sudden one. No wonder the world had fallen again into ruin!
The bridge itself is an interesting bit of retrofit; the road runs right to its edge and then turns to a bed of wooden planks that look as though they've been freshly laid. And these planks are secured at the center and edges by simple iron bolts, whose patina of recent oxidation is evident even by the weak electric lights strung up along the bridge. They've been in place for weeks, not millennia, and from the look of it they won't last out the century.
As for what the planks are bolted into, why, that's another story altogether. The superreflector gleaming of impervium and Bunkerlite is unmistakable, and yet these substances are encased in something translucent and ordinary: a glass, a clear resin. The suspension cables are thicker than Bruno himself, and they fire into the rock face at a twenty-degree angle, where they're held fast by a larger-than-life system of plates and bolts and old-fashioned threaded nuts.
“Nice design,” he notes.
“Thank you,” Radmer acknowledges, “but I was only peripherally involved. The bulk of the engineering was handled by Bell Daniel.”
“Of Lunacorp Construction? My goodness, I remember him.”
“He lived a couple hundred years past the Shattering. Died of electrocution, if you can believe it, trying to wire up some old apartment building. Anyway, yes, there were a lot of Olders still around back then, looking forward to a long future, and they financed Tillspar, which was consequently built to last. These cable stays are longer than the bridge itself, anchored a full kilometer into the toughest bedrock in the whole region. The structural members are layered composites of programmable and traditional materials, and the programmable ones have every security feature and safety lockout we could scrape together at the time. I don't want to use the word ‘tamper-proof,' because nothing ever is. But it's certainly tamper-resistant. I'd have a hard time changing the thing myself; Bell scrambled all the passwords at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.”
“And it was from here that you launched yourself to Varna? That's your Very Large Catapult, there?”
Bruno points at a system of large reels and pulleys mounted behind one of the railings, near the center of the bridge.
“Yep, that's it. Thirty turns on a block-and-tackle, plus a counterweight thirty times the mass of the capsule. If you allow ten kilometers of throw, the pull of gravity really adds up! It's not a ride I'd recommend—not so gentle as the explosion that kicked us off Varna—but it's tolerable.”
“Gentle?
I don't recall anything gentle about that.”
“Well it's all relative, isn't it? It depends how badly you want to go. The only really difficult part was hacking the bridge to harvest a sufficient length of impervium wire. It made such a mess that we finally had to replace the whole road surface, as you can see. It's a rush job; someday I'll come back and fix the thing properly.”
“If you survive.”
“Aye. If any of us do.”
Even after watching half a dozen Dolceti roll out ahead of him, driving his treader onto the planks and out over empty space is, for Bruno, an act of faith. He has never trusted the flammable, frangible substance known as wood, and indeed it creaks and bends alarmingly under the weight of his treader, and the many other treaders around him. The planks are knotty, bumpy, warped, not with age but from having been harvested too young. Bruno remembers the sawmill near his father's bistro, and the sorry planks it cut from local wood. There was a shortage of old-growth forest in Catalonia then, and clearly there was one on Lune now, at least in this mountainous region. And why not, when wood was at once an ornament, a structural material, a fuel, and a source of durable fiber? And electricity!
But Radmer, seeing his look, is quick to offer assurances. “Even in its current state, sir, Tillspar could easily carry ten times this load. There are greater problems to worry about.”
“Er, yes. Perhaps. But not deeper ones.”
The planks are separated by significant gaps—three or four centimeters in places!—through which Bruno can see rock walls converging down into a yawning blackness. From here, for all he can tell, the Divide might reach all the way to the center of the planette. And through these gaps the wind whistles, producing a light, tickly sensation on the soles of his feet, as though he's not wearing boots at all. He can also feel the bridge swaying beneath him, a few centimeters back and forth, back and forth like the seat of a gigantic swing. Has this thing really stood for two millennia and more?