by Wil McCarthy
“It got better later,” Radmer tells them both, as if apologizing. But Bruno is mostly right; the Iridium Days were never as roaring as the legends that adhered to them afterward. But neither, in his opinion, was the Queendom itself. He'd fought against it, been exiled from it, crawled back to it in defeat, and finally, toward the end, joined its upper echelons—a rich man with heady connections. He knew it better than Bruno did; knew it from up and down, from inside and out. And the simple fact was, the Tara and Toji of Luner mythology, with their Sphere Palace and their Great Bronze Navy and their “only as strong as the weakest among us,” were creatures out of fairy tale. He'd long ago stopped trying to reconcile them to any literal history.
But Bruno surprises him by saying, “Nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even the bad.”
And what can Radmer say to that, who has seen his share of bad, and even a goodly slice of forever?
After breakfast, he leads Bruno up into the dune field for a closer look, taking Deceant Natan—the only uninjured Dolceti—along as bodyguard. Radmer doesn't expect trouble, but he's always prepared for it.
At the base of the hills, the dirt looks almost exactly like beach sand: a mix of white and brown and black grains, very small, interspersed with sharp bits of unweathered gravel that can't have been here very long. And like an undisturbed beach or riverbed, the ground is covered with a ripply pattern of footprint-sized dunes. When he steps in the trough of one, he finds it squashing underfoot like a sponge. When he steps on the crest, it supports his weight for a moment and then slowly undergoes a kind of staged collapse. Squish squish crunch. It's like this at every step, and it will take a lot of steps to carry them up to those ruins.
With a terraformer's eye, he takes in the view ahead, admiring the way the sweep of the mountains has conspired with the swirl of the storm to gather so much dust in this quiet corner. The dune field is larger than the city it swallowed. In fact, Radmer can see now that the city must extend beyond the eastern side of the eyewall, into even greater ruin.
Still, surprisingly, the northeast faces of many dunes are lined with grass and other plants, particularly at the base, or the seam between dunes, and it strikes him suddenly that this is not so much a desert as a battleground, between the forces that build and move the dunes, and the forces that seek to smother them with plant life. It's the terraforming drama itself, writ small.
Nor is this place particularly dry. Indeed, emerging from the base of a high dune, a little stream flows in bursts, with minor flash floods of water surging every twenty seconds or so. Gloo-OOP! Gloo-OOP! like a kind of geological clock, ticking away the empty millennia. Bruno pauses here, admiring.
“I should like to study this regularity,” he says, sounding wistful. “How do deep sand and shallow water conspire in this way? Tick, tock!”
But Radmer doesn't have to remind him there's a war on, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Bruno watches four complete cycles, and then he's off toward Manassa again, without prompting. It's not an easy walk; after a while, the crumbly yielding softness of the sand fatigues the calf muscles, the ankles, the tendons along the top of the foot. Maybe a camel would feel at home on a surface like this, but few other creatures are adapted for it; Radmer is keenly aware that he's a primate of seashore and savannah and forest. He can climb a rock or a tree without difficulty, but his evolution doesn't know this place.
Still, they find their way. The crests of the dunes are almost like roads, extending for winding kilometers. On either side the dunes drop away into hollows a hundred meters deep. On the face of a dune, the undisturbed ground is a tiger-stripe pattern of brown and black, or beige and dark gray. The lighter sand seems to accumulate in the hollows, with the darker sand following along the ridgelines.
“Something to do with grain sizes?” he asks Bruno.
But the older man just shrugs. “A natural sorting mechanism, clearly. Weight, temperature, the stickiness of the grains . . . You're the planet builder, I'm afraid. I can only guess.”
Anyway, for whatever reason, the vegetation and the lighter sand seem to occur mainly in the same places—streaks of white and green among the brown. Even though it's technically winter, the long day has heated up the dark sand, which shimmers with mirages. Radmer is already thirsty again, and from the road-crest of a dune those cool colors beckon. And the roads don't lead the right direction anyway; from here, straight on is straight down! But walking down the steep hillside is almost impossible; it invites one to run. Soon the three men are descending in great walloping giant's steps, with the sand squeaking and groaning wherever their feet touch down. It's hilarious and a little bit frightening, because the dune collapses with every step, and it seems to Radmer that the whole thing could easily bury them without a hiccup if they stumble. So they don't.
The pale sand at the bottom of the ditch is very firm when his foot comes down straight on top of it. A sideways kick loosens it, though, revealing softer sand beneath. It appears, actually, to be a semisolid crust of larger particles sitting on top of a fluid of smaller ones. The trough is full of dried, dead vegetation, with mounds of light brown sand surrounding it.
He's got to retract his thoughts about the lifelessness here, though, for on closer inspection he sees that the dunes are crisscrossed with little tracks. The shapes and even sizes of the footprints have been lost—blurred out by the shifting sand—and there's no other clue to their identity. Ironically, the plants here in the trough look edible and even succulent: desert species of pea and rice and pepper, perfectly adapted to sucking moisture out of this environment.
He hasn't seen a termite mound anywhere, but here in the trough he does see a few individual blue-on-clear specimens, carrying not only seeds and wood fragments but also the body of some larger insect he's not sure he recognizes. Or perhaps it's a little machine, not truly organic at all, and the termites will go hungry tonight. In any case it's balanced along three blue-and-clear backs, and moving steadily toward whatever home the termites have here.
“Industrious and hungry,” says Bruno, looking down at the marching line, and Radmer can see how strange these engineered creatures must seem to him, who grew up on an Earth still mostly natural.
“Food for something else,” he counters, for ultimately that's the only purpose any animal serves in this ecology. Or any ecology.
One set of animal tracks, clearly left by a kangaroo rat, consists of paired footprints, very small, with a linear drag mark between, as from a little tail. The footprints terminate in a fist-sized mound of undisturbed sand, and Conrad supposes the thing has buried itself there to wait out the day's rising heat. In summer this place must be an oven! But Radmer can see, again with his terraformer's eye—how a big, hungry creature like himself could make his living out here. Reaching an arm into the sand to pull out mice and lizards, garnishing them with desert rice and desert peas and cooking them over half-fossilized driftwood, with the woody, nutty taste of termites for dessert . . . The eye of the Stormlands would be hard-pressed to support a large population—as the empty city of Manassa can attest!—but there's enough energy here to sustain a small band of frugal hermits.
Would it make them hard? Vicious?
“Keep your eyes open,” he suggests to Natan, quite unnecessarily since the Dolceti have no other job. “This place isn't exactly lifeless.”
“If there's boogeymen,” Natan agrees cheerfully, “I'll hold 'em off.”
Radmer isn't kidding, but neither is Natan, so he lets it go.
“There's good clean air here,” Natan adds approvingly. “Nice for my allergies. Don't worry yourself, General.”
Surprisingly, an hour later they're only about halfway to the area Radmer has identified as the “top” of the dune field. If there are more and higher peaks behind those, he doesn't want to know about it! But it seems they have arrived at the outskirts of Manassa; a corner of wellstone juts up half a meter from the sand.
“Declarant,” Radmer says to Bruno, pointing
out the anomaly.
“Ah,” says the former king, rubbing his hands together. “Well, well. What have we here?” He kneels next to the object and brushes some of the sand away from it. “It's dead, for starters, but so are a lot of things. Wake up, you!” And when that doesn't work, he taps it forcefully, several times. “Hello? Activate!” This, at least, produces a brief flicker of color.
Bruno looks back at Radmer. “You used to know these things, Architect. Have you any ideas? It's getting plenty of sunlight, so it should—”
“This piece is getting plenty of sunlight,” Radmer says, and for a moment he sounds like Conrad Mursk, even to himself.
“Ah!” Bruno agrees, liking that answer quite a lot. “This piece is getting plenty of sunlight, but we have no way of knowing how far down the structure extends. It's browning out! This little sliver may be attempting to power an entire building, yes? Or else it really is dead, but let's start with what we know. Natan, will you break off a piece for me? This way, if you please, not that way.”
But it proves more difficult than he'd expected; against even dead wellstone, mere human strength is rather slight. But with swords and feet and a great deal of grunting and heaving, the three men manage to break off a shard that fits neatly into Bruno's hand, with edges dull enough that Radmer doesn't fear he'll cut himself.
But still, the fragment refuses to respond with anything more than flickers of green and a faint, faint crackling noise. Finally, in exasperation Bruno says, “Listen, you, this is a Royal Override. Shut down all resident programs and boot up in command line mode.”
Strangely enough, that works. Yellow letters and numerals appear on the flat surface, and in another moment Bruno is tapping the shard with three fingers in rapid sequence, keying in a set of basic configuration commands. The thing, already shiny rainbow-black in his hands, turns the color of a solar tree: superabsorber black. Then it begins to change in more sophisticated ways; colors shoot along its length as it reconfigures itself, layer by nanoscopic layer.
“God's eyes!” Natan curses, watching the fragment flicker and change. “I never quite believed in sorcerers!”
Bruno looks up in annoyance. “Eh? Is it sorcery to spill ink on a page? To rot an apple? To stand in the sun and turn your ‘human' skin as white as milk? No? Then I'm no sorcerer, Deceant. This object is a tool, like a special sort of window glass. Nothing more.”
“So you say,” Natan mutters, looking as though he'd prefer to take a step or two backward. But this Older is his responsibility, through death or worse. He stands his ground. “But in the stories, it's only Tara and Toji who can command the stones. ‘Roylovride,' yeah, that's the magic word.”
Bruno turns away in weary disappointment. “Believe what you like. I don't suppose it matters.” To the fragment in his hand he says, “Run standard sensor package. Run any sensor package. Run sensor diagnostic.” Then, when these fail to work, he casts an annoyed look at Radmer and says, “Do you know anything about sensor design?”
And although Conrad Mursk did time in two different navies, in deep-space and deep-solar atmospheres—places where wellstone sensors were the difference between life and death—it never really rubbed off on him. He was remarkably bad at a remarkable number of things, which in the end is why he's ended up here, why the world is the way it is.
“No,” says Radmer. “I wish I did.”
“Hmm. Well.” Bruno plops his ass down in the sand and peers at the fragment for several long minutes. “There's information buried inside you,” he mutters to it at one point. “Libraries of it. You know things; you just don't know you know them.”
He sits there, fumbling and muttering, for what seems like a long time. Then, finally, perhaps an hour after sitting down, he rises again and brushes the dust off himself.
“Have you got it working?” Radmer asks, trying not to sound weary or ungrateful.
“Not properly, no,” Bruno answers with obvious irritation. “I'm trying to map the city by composition, and it's just not working. But I've located something that might make the job easier.”
“Yes? What's that?”
“A working fax machine,” Bruno says, as though it isn't good news at all.
As it turns out, the fax is located a kilometer and a half deeper into the dune field, where the free flow of sand is restricted by the presence of wellstone walls, running deep. And even to Radmer himself, it really does begin to seem that Bruno is a kind of sorcerer, for though he's complained about the crude sketchplate in his hands—it isn't working properly, it isn't suitable, its library has been corrupted—he's able to use it, somehow, to communicate with the dead wellstone all around him. Conrad Mursk had been an expert programmer in his day, and his particular specialty was in speaking to buildings, or pieces of buildings. But Conrad had merely been determined and lucky, which was not at all the same thing as being brilliant.
Now, Bruno walks out ahead of Radmer and Natan, and the dead wellstone in his wake turns to silver and gold, to impervium and marble and mother-of-pearl. There's no real rhyme or reason to it, no master plan, no memory of how the city once looked. The King of Sol is just fooling around, putting the stuff through its paces, like a musician picking up a long-forgotten instrument. In truth the effect is kind of gaudy, kind of ugly. But it makes a world of difference in the appearance of the desert: no longer a ruin, no longer a dead city filled with sand, but a sleeping one, carefully preserved for later use.
The first problem comes when the fax machine turns out to be buried deep in the sand. When the men arrive at the designated spot, there isn't even a building. There are wall fragments and even a bit of intact rooftop nearby, but the magic spot itself is just a basin of sand, featureless and apparently empty.
“Blast,” Bruno says, surveying the scene unhappily. But he isn't daunted for long; within another minute he's calling out instructions to the surrounding wellstone, forging connections between the intact pieces of building and the intact pieces of street far below. Soon the fragments are coming alive with circuit traces, white and gold and silver on black, and he's murmuring to them, gesturing, and finally raising his beseeching arms into the air, more like a prophet or a druid than any conventional sort of scientist.
And the sand responds.
At first there's just a hissing sound, and then a slight rumble underfoot, barely noticeable. Then Conrad's hairs suddenly stand on end, his pistol and blitterstick rattle in their holsters, and there is a tangible jerk in the ground beneath his feet. Against the sides of the wellstone ruins, the sand begins flowing like water. Out, away, unburying this place. And in another few seconds these trickles are entraining more sand around them, becoming rivulets, streams, rapids. Radmer exchanges a glance with Natan, and the two of them step back, and back, and back some more. If Bruno needs protection in this place, it's not a sort that they can provide. Soon, the dust is flying in geysers and there's an excavation happening in real time, right before their eyes. The hole is rectangular, at least to the extent that the collapsing sand permits, and it's three meters deep, then five, then ten. Radmer and Natan retreat farther. Then the hole widens, and they have to retreat some more. Within minutes, the top of a building is exposed. Then the whole top story, with the sand flowing away in rivers, crawling to higher ground and spilling down out of sight, into hollows somewhere, burying mice and lizards and desert peas.
Then, all at once, the sound and the movement stop. The sand neither rises nor falls. It doesn't trickle back into the hole, and Radmer's hair does not lie flat against his scalp. There is some sorcery at work here, still.
“It's down there,” Bruno says, pointing quite unnecessarily into the pit. As if they could miss what happened there. As if they could be looking at anything else. The building fades from mirror-black to bronze, and Bruno says to it, in a somewhat louder voice, “Glass ceiling. Glass windows. Door.”
A double line of round portholes appears in the bronze, one of them surrounded by a rectangular seam, which parts fro
m the material around it and swings inward on imaginary hinges. Bruno climbs down into the hole on sure, steady feet, as though he does this all the time. He follows the carpet of rigid sand right into the doorway itself, pausing at the threshold to look over his shoulder at Natan and Radmer. “Are you coming?” It's very nearly a command.
Natan is looking frankly scared by all this, and Radmer can hardly blame him. He hasn't seen a sight like this in thousands of years, or maybe ever. But he murmurs, “It's all right. We're in good hands.”
And Natan replies, “I'd fling myself into the great beyond for this man, too, in a sphere of brass or not. Suddenly I feel sorry for the Glimmer King. Isn't that a funny thing?”
“Aye,” Radmer can only agree. And with that, they follow the ancient scarecrow of a man inside the ancient building.
The interior is surprisingly well lit. It's an office of some sort, and the surfaces are immaculate—walls and floors and countertops, tables, the arms and seats and backs of wellstone chairs, supported by spindly structures that look, even to Conrad's eye, as though they should have collapsed at the first puff of wind. The fax machine—a sight Radmer hasn't seen since the Shattering, or nearly, stands against a far wall. Bruno walks right up to it as though he owns the place.
“Buffer status.”
And then, when that doesn't work, “Royal Override. Reset all functions to factory nominal. Report the status of mass buffers. Report the status of memory buffers. Perform a full diagnostic, and stand by.”
The foggy, fractal surface of the print plate flickers for a moment, and then the walls around it come alive with diagrams, with scrolling lists of words and numbers, with a holographic table of the elements, annotated with a bar graph showing how much of each element is present in the machine at this particular time. It isn't much.
“Fax,” Bruno says to it, “how are you feeling?”
“Very well, Your Majesty. It's good to be functional again, for the first time in nineteen years.”