To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

  They could have met anywhere; it was an act of kindness—of respect—for her to invite him specifically here. She wasn't even playing him, particularly—just being thoughtful. And it came to him suddenly, that she was doing exactly the same thing on a global scale: simply extracting and fulfilling the most deeply held wishes of Lune. Was it her fault she was rich? Had guarded generosity become a sin? Her resources seemed to dwarf even those of the Queendom at its peak, and there was no wickedness in her, nor foolishness.

  Whether Conrad liked it or not, the people of this world were indeed choosing their own destiny. They wanted an end to death and politics, and who could begrudge them that age-old impossible dream? More than that, they wanted the stars, as Conrad had once wanted them. When had he shriveled into this ridiculous old fuddy-duddy, with nothing to do but stand in their way? His time was past. How lucky they were not to have him for their king!

  But even this sentiment brought only kind laughter when he shared it with Tilly.

  “You love these people, Mr. Radmer. It's evident in everything you do.”

  “Call me Conrad.”

  “All right, I will. Thank you.”

  “You're genuinely welcome.” But then a black thought overtook him, and slowly became a certainty. “You beamed signals at this world. You tried to activate our wellstone systems remotely. Nineteen years ago, was it? Maybe twenty?”

  “We tried. It didn't work,” she said, shrugging.

  “It did,” he told her. “My God. The haunted towers of Imbria. A fax machine briefly awakening in its sandy grave. The finger of God, commanding a robot to waken. It was you!”

  “I . . . don't understand.”

  “You stirred up old horrors, Ms. Nichols. You're responsible for the robot army that nearly destroyed this world! Bruno had the sense to kill his monstrous child, millennia ago, but you brought it back!”

  That seemed to rock her. “We what? Conrad, in all our encounters we've done our level best to avoid damage—”

  “And a splendid job you've made of it!” he spat, trying to sound venomous. “Only two of four nations destroyed, a fifth of the world's population killed . . .” He wanted to unload the full sedition act on her, but he found his heart wasn't in it. His voice trailed away.

  Because how could they know? How could they imagine their well-intended fumbling might kick loose such an avalanche? That there'd been a hill of loose scree waiting to collapse was no fault of theirs, and if a beggar should choke on a gift of bread, did that lessen the kindness of the gesture?

  “If what you say is true,” she answered guardedly, “then reparations are in order.”

  “How?” he demanded, briefly flaring once more. “You're already giving this world everything it ever dreamed of. Its heroes, its riches, its dead . . . Your apology—if I dare call it that—is lost in the noise of your . . . overwhelming generosity . . .”

  He stopped there, for he was spouting nonsense: they had been so good that they couldn't do better? And that was a bad thing?

  In spite of everything, the two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. They laughed until the tears streamed down their cheeks, and then Conrad laughed some more, and wept, and felt an unfamiliar ache at the corners of his mouth. A grin that refused to be wiped away by his anger, no matter how hard he tried.

  “It's good to see you smile,” she remarked when things had settled down.

  “It feels strange,” Conrad admitted, with a tinge of resentment. Then, more reflectively: “It was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm an old soldier, Ms. Nichols. An old, unwilling soldier.”

  “Please, call me Tilly.”

  “All right. The thing is, Tilly, it ends here. I'm finally done fighting. You may be the most genuinely happy person I've ever met, and my defenses aren't up to that. I'm officially opening my gates; you may enter and do as you will.”

  “Or you could come out,” she suggested. “And do as you will.”

  And before he knew it they were falling into bed together, rolling and twisting on wellcloth sheets in a field of sharply reduced gravity.

  “God,” he said. “Oh, my God. Is this happiness? Is this what hope feels like?”

  “Explore,” she advised him, offering herself as freely as she offered her planets' riches. “Live a little. Have some fun.”

  And it seemed like very good advice indeed, here at the start of something wonderful.

  appendix A-1

  rights of the dead

  It was an interesting statutory question, still largely unresolved: if these interactive messages were the only remains of a legal individual, did they have the right to be played back indefinitely as holograms? Or to be burned into blank human bodies and treated as people? They couldn't possibly hold all the memories of their original senders, all the nuance and subtlety of a lifetime's experience. They were doppelgängers at best—superficial, hollow inside—and at worst they were shadows or caricatures of the original person, laughably incomplete.

  And there was another question here, not so much legal as moral: these deceased persons had won their reincarnation at the expense of their fellow colonists. Pushing and bribing their way to the lifeboats, as it were. This didn't warrant punishment per se, but neither did it encourage charity.

  A few well-to-do families had claimed such messages as prodigal children returned to the fold, and had tried to give them their old lives back. But they'd had to hire teams of cognitive and cellular surgeons for weeks at a time, and the results were not encouraging: people who could hold a brilliant conversation on flowers but didn't recognize one when they saw it. People who could barely feed or dress themselves, who behaved badly in public, who mistreated the unfamiliar flesh that housed them. And even in the famous “Smith and Jones” trial where two partials had been declared “legal and functional children with the hope of future maturity,” the families' petitions for public assistance had been roundly and loudly denounced.

  appendix A-2

  resupply

  One could not produce deutrelium in a fax machine. The machine could only assemble the atoms which existed in its own buffers—a stable subset of the periodic table. But in the strange ways of the sprawling collapsiter network that was the Nescog, one could transmit any isotope, stable or non-, from an Elemental stockpile to any point with a functioning network gate.

  Not antimatter, of course (or “aye-ma'am” as the sailors called it). Not collapsium or neutronium, nor any material or object which incorporated durable spacetime defects into its structure. But anything else, yes. So with a few hours' light lag, deuterium and trelium (respectively, heavy hydrogen and light helium—also known as “fusion lotion” or “doot toot” or “treat”) could be ordered direct from the gas mines of Jupiter and Saturn, and charged to Bruno's account. Hoses and pipelines could not, alas, be sealed against the fax's print plate, but a good old-fashioned barrel could roll right through.

  appendix A-3

  planet envy

  But hell, all of Sol's gas giants were prettier than Barnard's, except perhaps for Uranus. And Sorrow was no Earth, and Planet One was no Mercury, and Barnard's two asteroid belts were paltry middens against the grandeur of Sol's one. That was the problem with red dwarf star systems: they occupied only the top three rows of the periodic table. Chlorine was the heaviest of their common elements, leaving little room for exotic aero- and geochemistry. They were, in a word, boring.

  appendix B

  glossary

  Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti —Traditional Latin benediction: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Employed by several Old Modern religions as a prayer for the dying.

  Aft —(adj, adv) One of the ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.

  AKA —(abbrev.) Also Known As.

  Ako'i —(n) Tongan word meaning “teacher.”

  Antiautomata —(adj.) Describ
es any weapon intended for use against robots.

  Apenine —(prop n) Province of the Luner nation of Imbria which includes the capital city of Timoch.

  Arc de commencer —(n) A hypothetical device for diverting photons to a chronologically “earlier” point in spacetime, for the purpose of altering a historical outcome. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

  Ash —(prop n) A planette constructed in the late Queendom period at the L1 Lagrange point between Earth and Luna. Symbolically, the middle ground between two worlds. Later ejected by n-body perturbations.

  Astaroth —(n) Luner nation including the south pole and southern portions of the former Nearside and Farside, with a population of approximately five million.

  Astrogation —(n) Astral navigation. In common use, the art or process of navigating a starship.

  AU —(n) Astronomical Unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 49.9028 light-seconds.

  Autronic —(adj) Capable of self-directed activity. Commonly used to differentiate “robots” from teleoperated or “waldo” devices.

  Aye-ma'am —(n) Colloquial abbreviation for antimatter.

  Barnardean —(adj) Of or pertaining to Barnard, the first of the Queendom's thirteen colonies.

  Barocline —(n) Any layer boundary marked by an abrupt change in pressure.

  Biomod —(n) Biological modification. Any genetic, synthetic, Lamarckian, or bionic enhancement, whether heritable or non-.

  Blindsight —(n) A condition in which the conscious portions of the neocortex (primarily the frontal lobes) are prevented from receiving input through the visual cortex, while the brain stem receives its own visual inputs normally. Although blindsight sufferers are able to avoid obstacles and grasp specific objects on demand, they experience none of the sensation associated with “seeing.”

  Blitterstaff —Also Blitterstick. (n) An antiautomata weapon employing a library of rapidly shifting wellstone compositions. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

  Bootward —(adj, adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.

  Brickmail —(n) An allotrope of carbon consisting of benzene rings interlocked in a three-dimensional matrix. Brickmail is the toughest known nonprogrammable substance.

  Bunkerlite —(n) Copyrighted, superreflective wellstone substance employed as protective cloth or armor. Attributed to Marlon Sykes.

  Campanas —(prop n) Capital city of the Luner nation of Nubia.

  Capward —(adj, adv) One of the six ordinal directions onboard a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.

  Cerenkov radiation —(n) Electromagnetic radiation emitted by particles temporarily exceeding the local speed of light, e.g., upon exit from a collapsium lattice.

  Chromosphere —(n) A transparent layer, usually several thousand kilometers deep, between the photosphere and corona of a star, i.e., the star's “middle atmosphere.” Temperature is typically several thousand kelvins, with roughly the pressure of Earth's atmosphere in Low Earth Orbit.

  Collapsar —(n) see Hypermass

  Collapsiter —(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.

  Collapsium —(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term “hypercollapsite” is more correct.

  Converge (also Reconverge)—(v) To combine two separate entities, or two copies of the same entity, using a fax machine. In practice, rarely applied except to humans.

  Coriolis force —(n) An apparent force on the surface of a rotating body, which causes apparent deflection of trajectories from the “expected” course in the rotating coordinate frame of the body. In meteorology, the force responsible for large-scale cyclonic weather systems.

  Day, Barnardean —(n) A measure of time, equal to the stellar (not sidereal) day of Sorrow, aka Planet Two. There are 23 pids, or 460 Barnardean hours, or 1,653,125 standard seconds in the Barnardean day.

  Deathist —(n) Adherent to the belief that the death of individuals is healthy for the population as a whole. Rarely applied except to humans; animal deathists are generally referred to as naturalists.

  Deceant —(n) Title accorded to Luner military officers in charge of ten individual soldiers.

  Declarant —(n) The highest title accorded by the Queendom of Sol; descended from the Tongan award of Nopélé, or knighthood. Only twenty-nine declarancies were ever issued.

  Decohere —(v) To collapse a quantum uncertainty into a classical or Newtonian certainty, as with the position or trajectory of a particle or the state of a quantum bit.

  Deutrelium —(n) A mixture (generally frozen or slushy) of equal numbers of deuterium (2H) and trelium (3He) atoms, used preferentially in magnetic-confinement fusion reactors.

  Di-clad —(adj) Sheathed in an outer layer of monocrystalline diamond or other allotropes of carbon.

  Dinite —(n) Any detonating or deflagrating explosive consisting primarily of ethylene glycol dinitrate.

  Dolceti —(n) One or more members of the Order of Dolcet, whose “blindsight” training relies on the mildly toxic dolcet berry, native to Lune.

  Downsystem —(adj) One of the six cardinal directions: toward the sun in any orientation.

  Elementals, The —(n) Queendom-era cartel responsible for some 70% of the traffic in purified elements throughout the Queendom of Sol, with even higher percentages for certain key metals and rare earths.

  Epitaxial —(adj) Describes a crystal of one material grown on the crystal face of another material, such that both crystals have the same structural orientation.

  Eridanian —(n, adj) Resident of the Epsilon Eridani colony, typically characterized by short stature, neoteny, and photochromic skin pigments. Alternatively, anything pertaining to the Eridani colony.

  Ertial —(adj) Antonym of inertial, applied to inertially shielded devices. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

  Extrasolar —(adj) Existing outside of Sol system.

  Fatalist —(n, adj) Adherent to the belief that all events are predetermined and inevitable. As a proper noun, refers to any member of a Queendom-era organization dedicated to the forcible restoration of death as a natural renewal process.

  Fax —(n) Abbreviated form of “facsimile.” A device for reproducing physical objects from stored or transmitted data patterns. By the time of the Restoration, faxing of human beings had become possible, and with the advent of collapsiter-based telecommunications soon afterward, the reliable transmission of human patterns quickly became routine.

  Faxborn —(adj) Created artificially in a fax machine, with no natural counterpart. In practice, applied only to human and human-derived beings, where it is often used in lieu of a family name.

  Faxel —(n) Facsimile element. One element of a fax machine print plate which is capable of producing and placing a stored atom with 100-picometer precision.

  Fibrediamond —(n) Composite material of whiskered crystalline carbon in a resin matrix. Unless sheathed in a superreflective coating, fibrediamond is notably flammable.

  Flau —(n) Member of a species of living airship developed on Lune, based originally on the genome of the leviathan, the largest native marine creature of Pup.

  Fuff —(v) A polite term for sexual intercourse, popular in the Queendom of Sol and its colonies.

  Geostat —(adj) Fixed in reference to the Earth. In fashion, a clothing or paint pattern which appears to hold stationary while the subject
moves through it.

  Geriatry —(n) The condition of physical decrepitude which occurs in natural organisms over the course of their presumed lifespans. Geriatry is characterized by high rates of apoptosis triggered by lipofuscin buildup, and cellular senscence triggered by telomere shortening.

  Ghost —(n) Any electromagnetic trace preserved in rock or metal. Colloquially, a visual image of past events, especially involving deceased persons. The term may also refer to interactive messages, especially from distant or deceased persons.

  Gigaton —(n) One billion metric tons, or 1012 kilograms. Equal to the mass of a standard industrial neuble or collapson node (“black hole”).

  Girona —(prop n) A minor city in the E1 Gironès comarque of Catalonia, Old Earth, situated at the confluence of the Ter, Güell, Galligants, and Onyar Rivers, some 80 kilometers from the nation's former capital at Barcelona.