To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

  “No. He isn't. So what's he got in mind?”

  “I wouldn't know,” Bruno answers honestly. “We had a guy once who wanted to collapse the sun, as a means of opening a window into the future. Even ignoring the enormous loss of life, there was no particular evidence that seeing the future—the end of the future, specifically—would be in any way helpful. Might be a bad thing, who knows? But he didn't offer a choice, either. These madmen never do.”

  “Dulcet berries!” Zuq shouts, from a dozen meters away. “I've found dulcet berries. Two whole bushes of them!”

  “Get some sleep,” Bordi tells him wearily.

  “Never could sleep in the dawn hours,” Zuq answers. “Even when I'm tired, which right now I'm not. Can we do some blindsight, Captain?”

  Bordi sighs. “It takes more than berries, boy. It takes courage. Takes equipment. Takes a cocktail of other drugs to get the training burned in properly.”

  “But we have all that, sir.”

  “Not all of it, no. Sit down and have a meal, why don't you?”

  But Zuq is not so easily deflected. “Never could eat in the dawning, either. Not till sunup, when my stomach comes alive. And sir, we don't want to be lax on our training. Not at a time like this.”

  Natan turns to Bordi. “You've got to admire his spunk. Most guys his age do the bare minimum, sweating it beforehand and moaning afterwards. If you could join the Dolceti without actually taking the berry, I swear, there's a lot of people would do it.”

  “So,” Bordi says, “in admiration of his fortitude, you're volunteering to conduct?”

  Natan thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I don't sleep in the dawning much, either.”

  And Bruno, as curious as ever, chimes in with, “May I participate, Captain? I've heard a great deal about this ‘blindsight training,' and it would be nice to know what's involved. Firsthand, I mean.”

  “I'll save you the trouble,” Bordi says, unamused. “It's pain and it's terror. After their first experience, only one in a hundred ever go back for a second. It's that bad. You can't see, and you feel like you can't breathe.”

  “But you can,” Bruno says. “It's physically safe.”

  “Well. Yes, but—”

  “The berries aren't toxic? It won't injure me to take them?”

  “No, but—”

  “Captain, I've been in some very tight corners in my time. I'm old enough to know my limits, and although you've seen me driving recklessly, I promise you I'll not endanger myself again, so close to the target of our mission. I'll do my duty, yes? But I would like to take this training. Indeed, it may help save my life when the moment of truth arrives.”

  And to that Bordi has no response. But Bruno fancies he can see the man rethinking his opinions about this ancient beggar, Ako'i.

  Says Natan, “The idea here is to bypass the conscious parts of your brain. There's enough intelligence in the limbic to conduct a fight, and it's fast, so that's where we're going this morning. Deep inside. And in the brain stem there's more than just reflexes. It's your bird brain, and it's capable of behavior as complex as any bird, and as fast. That's where your vision is going: to the birds. Take five berries—five, mind you!—and chew them thoroughly. When you got a good paste in your mouth, swallow it down.”

  The berries are smaller than Bruno's pinkie nail, and the same bright yellow as the Dolceti's traveling cloaks, but other than that they look like blackberries, or little bunches of grapes. Their taste is overpoweringly sweet, so much so that like the drug, it's probably a defense mechanism to keep animals from wanting to eat them. Their texture is surprisingly dry and leathery. The paste they form in Bruno's mouth is like syrup cut with vinegar: dense and sticky, sweetly acrid and vaguely corrosive.

  “How often have you done this?” Bruno asks Zuq when he's choked them down per instruction.

  “This'll be my tenth time. It takes five before the Order will even admit you, and two more harder ones before they'll give you rank and let you out on assignment. Dolceti are usually older than I am, because most of them can't handle the berry more than a couple of times a year. Me, I've been trying to go every month.”

  “So you're tougher even than the average Dolceti?”

  “Aw, it's not my place to say that. But I'm definitely tougher than when I started.”

  “Cut the chatter,” Natan instructs. “Take the yellow pill, and wash it down with a bit of water.”

  The yellow pill is tasteless and perfectly spherical. Also very small, but its texture is gritty enough that it doesn't go down easily.

  “Now the white.”

  Another sphere, larger and smoother.

  “You'll begin to lose your eyesight in about two minutes. After that, the fear will set in, and Ako'i, I want you to promise not to run off on me when it does. If you can't handle it—and there's no shame in it; most people can't—then just curl up on the ground and we'll look after you. Believe it or not, you'll still get something out of the experience.

  “The idea is to turn on your amygdala, your fear. We'll create a behavior loop that bypasses the frontal lobe. Fear's a tool; the more threatened your limbic feels, the more your behavior follows a preset routine, like a dance step. We're just giving it a better routine than to run around screaming, see? A higher class of irrationality. There's a time for being rational, but it's not when a bullet's flying at your head.”

  “You people can dodge bullets?” Bruno asks, already feeling short of breath.

  “That's what blindsight training is,” Zuq answers, sounding surprised. “Didn't you know? Sticks, rocks, arrows . . . The training bullets are a special round, oversized and not that fast, but yeah, they'll be flying right at you. You'll swat them aside or suffer the consequences.”

  This idea fills Bruno with a gnawing dread, or perhaps the drugs are doing that, but either way he finds himself wishing, suddenly and fervently, that he had never pressed Bordi to allow this. What was he thinking? Even if these bullets can't kill him—and it's likely that they can't, at least by ones and twos—he could be maimed. It might be weeks before he grows back all his missing parts!

  “What does the blindness do?” he asks, for in spite of everything his curiosity is unimpaired.

  “It isn't blindness,” says Natan, “it's blindsight. The berries are shutting down your visual cortex, but your optic nerve continues on down to the brain stem. Your inner bird can see just fine, and it's his reflexes we want. He's the one we're training; the conscious ‘you' is just a passenger.”

  “A blind passenger. A terrified passenger.”

  “Right. Mentally tied up, to keep you out of the bird's way.”

  Bruno's vision is turning gray and fuzzy around the edges, which terrifies him. What if something goes wrong? What if it never comes back? To be immorbid and blind . . .

  “People experience the training differently,” says Natan. “Some feel divided, like there are several distinct . . . things, entities, living inside their skulls. Some people just remember it as a panic. A blind panic, literally, where they can't control theirselves. Some remember the whole thing as a set of conscious choices, even when they know it isn't so. Some remember nothing at all, like their frontal lobe just goes to sleep.”

  “Which am I?” Bruno asks, inanely, for how could Natan possibly know that?

  Then, with alarming swiftness, his vision shrinks to a tunnel, then a drinking straw. He sees a burst of swirling patterns: lace, spirals, Cartesian grids mapped onto heaving topological surfaces. His life is far too long to flash before his eyes in a moment, but he gets pieces of it: a month of mathematical insights in a Girona tower, a decade as philander in Tamra's court, an hour in battle armor under the red-hot surface of Mercury. Then nothing at all.

  Nothing at all.

  Bruno de Towaji, the one-time King of Sol, is blind.

  “So fast! I wasn't . . . ready . . .”

  “I'm here with you,” Zuq says, from very nearby.

  “Ah!” Bruno replies, fighting
not to run. “Ah, God! Can you see anything?”

  “No.”

  “Try and relax,” says Natan, in a voice much calmer than Zuq's. “Fear is a tool. Just a state of your brain, which we happen to find convenient. It's nothing to do with you, the person. Just ride it.”

  “In a moment . . . of weakness,” Bruno tries. “I've never . . . Rarely has such a moment of weakness been . . . I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I can't . . . compose—”

  “Enough talk, old man. Defend yourself!”

  Bruno swats Natan's hand aside. “Leave me. Alone.” He swats again, and again. Natan is trying to slap him! “Stop it. Stop! Leave me alone!”

  And suddenly Bruno realizes what he's doing: blocking slaps he cannot see. His arms aren't moving of their own volition—he's doing it himself, or feels that he is—but the sense, the feeling, the certainty that drives them . . . How does he know? How does he sense the blow coming?

  Block. Block. Block block.

  “Good,” Natan says. “Take hold of this.”

  Bruno reaches out and accepts a wooden staff from Natan. There's no fumbling in the motion, no guesswork. He even knows the shape before he has it in his hands. He's aware, dimly, of movement all around him, the jiggling fire, the men rolling over in their sleep, the wind gusting straight down. But he cannot see them. This “blindsight” it isn't like seeing at all. It isn't like feeling or hearing. He simply knows.

  How terrifying.

  “Defend!” Natan commands, and Bruno is raising his staff. Crack! Crack! He blocks a pair of telegraphed blows, and then a shorter, swifter one delivered like a punch. CRACK!

  “Attack!” says Natan, and Bruno is too afraid to disobey. Pulling left to avoid Zuq's fragile human skull, he whirls the staff around and Strikes! Strikes! Strikes!

  “Good,” says Natan, falling back to deliver fresh blows of his own.

  “What about me?” Zuq asks, from a position Bruno doesn't have to guess at. “This was supposed to be my—”

  “Silence, maggot!” commands Natan. Bruno senses him whirling past in a blur of flesh and wood. Crack! Cracrack! The two of them come together and then separate, come together again.

  “Ako'i! Attack! Both of you maggots, come, hit me. As hard as you can!”

  Bruno does as he's bid, and amazingly enough manages not to injure himself or Zuq in the process.

  Still curious even in the face of this terrifying blindness, he asks, “Is this right? Is this the training?”

  To which Natan just laughs. “Old man, this is the stretching exercise. The training doesn't start for another fifteen minutes, when your drugs is more than a whisper in the blood. Now shut your hole and fight like a Dolcet Barney.”

  “Ah,” Bruno gasps, and blocks a string of five blows.

  chapter twenty-one

  in which the appetite of

  dragons is tested

  The wind no longer whistles, but shrieks. It's no longer cold, but deathly frigid. The rain no longer spatters, but fires down frozen from the heavens like a hail of meteorites. The ice melts swiftly, but so powerful is the wind that when a squall has passed, the sodden clay of the ground is dried in minutes, and peels away in crumbling sheets. As a result, the Blood Mountain Pass is a mess of sucking mud and stinging grit, with no sign of the pavement that once adorned it.

  “I see the way now,” Radmer had said to the waking men. “If we hurry, we may yet miss this morning's rain of stones.”

  But had they? Would they? Overhead, the sky is a deep shade of gray-green that Bruno has never seen before. Still, despite the obscurants in his way—the dust and hail, the unruly clouds themselves—he can see structure in this unending storm. It's a squashed toroid, a stretched donut, an elongated treader wheel nearly a hundred kilometers wide—nearly two hundred kilometers north to south—hovering flat against the landscape. And at half the footprint of the Imbrian Ocean, that's a sizeable blemish for a world barely forty-four hundred kilometers around! On Earth, the equivalent storm would cover the whole of Greenland, or Europe from Gibraltar to Sardinia to the ports and vineyards of Bordeaux.

  “When the pillar buckled and the neutronium plate slipped,” Radmer calls to him from two treaders over, “the gravity in this hex dropped by nine percent. It doesn't sound like much, but it created . . . this. The low-pressure system might be circular if not for the Blood Mountains on the west and the Johnny Wang Uplift on the east, squeezing it, pushing it north and south in a big oval.”

  While still piloting his treader, Radmer attempts to gesture his way through the half-shouted explanation. “Now that you're here, you can see it: the air rushes in along the ground, and then suddenly it weighs less. More importantly, all the air above it weighs less, so there's less pressure holding it down. It wells up. Then it hits the tropopause and flattens out, rolling back the way it came and then cooling and sinking, condensing out moisture. It's a big, rolling ring, like a stationary smoke ring, except that Coriolis forces—weak as they are—pull it around into a cyclone. Add the turbulence and static of air passing through these mountains, and you've got a real mess!”

  Indeed, the Blood Mountains are lower than the Sawtooth, but every bit as jagged. This world simply hasn't had time to wear them down. And thanks to grit and sleet and the occasional uprooted shrub, Bruno can see the turbulence they create: crack-the-whip sheets and rolls of whirling air snapping off every peak, slicing through every valley. He hasn't seen lightning yet, but the air is sharp with the tang of ozone.

  “Are we going to survive this?” he asks casually, raising his voice above the howling wind.

  “Most groups turn back around at this point,” Radmer answers. “Some vanish, or return at half-strength. Some probably find their way in and then die of starvation, rather than brave the tornadoes again. Only Zaleis the Wanderer has been to the eye of the storm and back, and lived to tell the tale. And he started with a group of five.”

  Then, in a more personal tone, “How are you holding up?”

  “Well enough,” Bruno says, not sure how else to answer.

  “Sore?”

  A barking half laugh. “No! Victims of explosive decompression are sore. I'm, well, there isn't quite a word for it. The body hurts badly, but the real wounds are in the soul.”

  “I could've told you not to try that,” Radmer chides. “Especially not before a big push like this. People end up in Special Care from that shit. Some of them permanently. You wouldn't blow out an airlock and call it training. You wouldn't smash your treader into a wall and call it training. If you survive, yes, you'll have learned a thing or two. But there are better ways. All practice—especially repetitive—involves the brain stem. It has to!”

  “He did all right,” Natan says, with a bit of warning in his tone. “I've seen better on the first try—I've seen a lot better—but with years of practice he could be one of us.”

  Bruno has lived long enough to recognize this as high praise indeed. But he can also see the truth in Radmer's criticism; blindsight is a shortcut, for people whose lives are miserably brief. The effect is real, yes: he can feel a new strength, a new swiftness in his limbs. They have a mind of their own now—quicker and surer than his own, yet subordinate to him. With practice, he could summon or dismiss it at will.

  But with longer practice—decades, centuries—he could achieve a comparable grace without the . . . side effects. A little slower, a little smarter, a lot less damaged inside. “Disfigured” is the word that springs to mind, when his mind considers its own sorry state. The drugs have done something to him, something bad. Prolonged abuse of them would create . . . well, Dolceti. Violence addicts. Affable men and women with a zest for life, but a strangely sterile view of death and fear and pain, and no hope for a normal existence. In their own way, the Dolceti are as different from human beings as the Olders themselves. Bruno can appreciate that now. And fear it.

  “He'll be all right,” Natan says.

  “Better than all right,” Zuq echoes.

  But thei
r definition of “all right” clearly differs from Bruno's own. If he were going to live forever he'd probably feel a bit cheated, like he'd lost a finger and could never grow it back. As it is, with this sense of welcome doom hanging over him, he'll simply accept the scar, and the costly insights that come with it.

  To Radmer he says, “It's no wonder you wanted Dolceti for my bodyguards. Who else would be brave and stupid enough to follow you into that?” He nods toward the pass ahead, where a trio of dust devils are whipping together into a single large vortex.

  “Shit,” answers Radmer.

  The vortex whirls straight down the pass, straight toward the riders.

  “The dragon!” someone calls out, in mingled worry and glee. “The Shanru Dragon! See the mark she leaves! The dragon's tail upon the ground!”

  “Get down!” Radmer calls out. “Get off, get into the ditch!”

  But the Dragon of Shanru is swift, and falls upon the treaders before all the riders have dismounted and fled. One Dolceti is pulled right off his mount, and another is whisked from the ground, and both are flung high into the air, twirling and tumbling, and then dashed against the cliff wall high above. Their bodies fall, limp and lifeless, against the cliff's sharp crags.

  Bruno, who reached the ditch in time, feels the tornado pass right over him with no worse effect than a sandblasting, a slam against the ground, a breathless moment of popping ears and eyeballs bulging against tightly closed lids. The Dragon's shriek and chuff are deafening, and then they're gone, and for his fallen comrades Bruno momentarily feels only a deep contempt. Because they brought it on themselves. Because they stopped to look at the vortex bearing down on them, when they should have dropped and crawled.

  “Fools,” he mutters under his breath. And only then thinks to feel ashamed.

  Soon there is lightning crashing all around, and except for the occasional errant gust, the shrieking wind is firmly at the riders' backs. The Dolceti are more careful on the Dragon's second visit, suffering no additional casualties, but after the roadway's third scouring Radmer proclaims, in a voice barely audible above the storm, “These twisters are dropping down into the pass from above! Bigger every time! Our luck won't hold; we've got to seek higher ground!”