The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  It was sheer bad luck that they broke into a shaft from below, and that the shaft was filled with armed foremen; and worse luck that Jakob was working the robot, so that he was the first to leap out firing his hand drill like a weapon, and the only one to get struck by return fire before Naomi threw a knotchopper past him and blew the foremen to shreds. They got him on a car and rolled the robot back and pulled up the track and cut off in a new direction, leaving another Boesman behind to destroy evidence of their passing.

  So they were all racing around with the blood and stuff still covering them and the cows mooing in distress and Jakob breathing through clenched teeth in double time, and only Hester and Oliver could sit in the car with him and try to tend him, ripping away the pants from a leg that was all cut up. Hester took a hand drill to cauterize the wounds that were bleeding hard, but Jakob shook his head at her, neck muscles bulging out. “Got the big artery inside of the thigh,” he said through his teeth.

  Hester hissed. “Come here,” she croaked at Solly and the rest. “Stop that and come here!”

  They were in a mass of broken quartz, the fractured clear crystals all pink with oxidation. The robot continued drilling away, the air cylinder hissed, the cows mooed. Jakob’s breathing was harsh and somehow all of them were also breathing in the same way, irregularly, too fast; so that as his breathing slowed and calmed, theirs did too. He was lying back in the sleeping car, on a bed of hay, staring up at the fractured sparkling quartz ceiling of their tunnel, as if he could see far into it. “All these different kinds of rock,” he said, his voice filled with wonder and pain. “You see, the moon itself was the world, once upon a time, and the Earth its moon; but there was an impact, and everything changed.”

  They cut a small side passage in the quartz and left Jakob there, so that when they filled in their tunnel as they moved on he was left behind, in his own deep crypt. And from then on the moon for them was only his big tomb, rolling through space till the sun itself died, as he had said it someday would.

  Oliver got them back on a course, feeling radically uncertain of his navigational calculations now that Jakob was not there to nod over his shoulder to approve them. Dully he gave Naomi and Freeman the coordinates for Selene. “But what will we do when we get there?” Jakob had never actually made that clear. Find the leaders of the city, demand justice for the miners? Kill them? Get to the rockets of the great magnetic rail accelerators, and hijack one to Earth? Try to slip unnoticed into the populace?

  “You leave that to us,” Naomi said. “Just get us there.” And he saw a light in Naomi’s and Freeman’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. It reminded him of the thing that had chased him in the dark, the thing that even Jakob hadn’t been able to explain; it frightened him.

  So he set the course and they tunneled on as fast as they ever had. They never sang and they rarely talked; they threw themselves at the rock, hurt themselves in the effort, returned to attack it more fiercely than before. When he could not stave off sleep Oliver lay down on Jakob’s dried blood, and bitterness filled him like a block of the anorthosite they wrestled with.

  They were running out of hay. They killed a cow, ate its roasted flesh. The water recycler’s filters were clogging, and their water smelled of urine. Hester listened to the seismometer as often as she could now, and she thought they were being pursued. But she also thought they were approaching Selene’s underside.

  Naomi laughed, but it wasn’t like her old laugh. “You got us there, Oliver. Good work.”

  Oliver bit back a cry.

  “Is it big?” Solly asked.

  Hester shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like it. Maybe twice the diameter of the Great Bole, not more.”

  “Good,” Freeman said, looking at Naomi.

  “But what will we do?” Oliver said.

  Hester and Naomi and Freeman and Solly all turned to look at him, eyes blazing like twelve chunks of pure promethium. “We’ve got eight Boesmans left,” Freeman said in a low voice. “All the rest of the explosives add up to a couple more. I’m going to set them just right. It’ll be my best work ever, my masterpiece. And we’ll blow Selene right off into space.”

  It took them ten shifts to get all the Boesmans placed to Freeman’s and Naomi’s satisfaction, and then another three to get far enough down and to one side to be protected from the shock of the blast, which luckily for them was directly upward against something that would give, and therefore would have less recoil.

  Finally they were set, and they sat in the sleeping car in a circle of six, around the pile of components that sat under the master detonator. For a long time they just sat there cross-legged, breathing slowly and staring at it. Staring at each other, in the dark, in perfect redblack clarity. Then Naomi put both arms out, placed her hands carefully on the detonator’s button. Mute Elijah put his hands on hers—then Freeman, Hester, Solly, finally Oliver—just in the order that Jakob had taken them. Oliver hesitated, feeling the flesh and bone under his hands, the warmth of his companions. He felt they should say something but he didn’t know what it was.

  “Seven,” Hester croaked suddenly.

  “Six,” Freeman said.

  Elijah blew air through his teeth, hard.

  “Four,” said Naomi.

  “Three!” Solly cried.

  “Two,” Oliver said.

  And they all waited a beat, swallowing hard, waiting for the moon and the man in the moon to speak to them. Then they pressed down on the button. They smashed at it with their fists, hit it so violently they scarcely felt the shock of the explosion.

  They had put on vacuum suits and were breathing pure oxygen as they came up the last tunnel, clearing it of rubble. A great number of other shafts were revealed as they moved into the huge conical cavity left by the Boesmans; tunnels snaked away from the cavity in all directions, so that they had sudden long vistas of blasted tubes extending off into the depths of the moon they had come out of. And at the top of the cavity, struggling over its broken edge, over the rounded wall of a new crater . . .

  It was black. It was not like rock. Spread across it was a spill of white points, some bright, some so faint that they disappeared into the black if you looked straight at them. There were thousands of these white points, scattered over a black dome that was not a dome . . . And there in the middle, almost directly overhead: a blue and white ball. Big, bright, blue, distant, rounded; half of it bright as a foreman’s flash, the other half just a shadow . . . It was clearly round, a big ball in the . . . sky. In the sky.

  Wordlessly they stood on the great pile of rubble ringing the edge of their hole. Half buried in the broken anorthosite were shards of clear plastic, steel struts, patches of green grass, fragments of metal, an arm, broken branches, a bit of orange ceramic. Heads back to stare at the ball in the sky, at the astonishing fact of the void, they scarcely noticed these things.

  A long time passed, and none of them moved except to look around. Past the jumble of dark trash that had mostly been thrown off in a single direction, the surface of the moon was an immense expanse of white hills, as strange and glorious as the stars above. The size of it all! Oliver had never dreamed that everything could be so big.

  “The blue must be promethium,” Solly said, pointing up at the Earth. “They’ve covered the whole Earth with the blue we mined.”

  Their mouths hung open as they stared at it. “How far away is it?” Freeman asked. No one answered.

  “There they all are,” Solly said. He laughed harshly. “I wish I could blow up the Earth too!”

  He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater’s rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and glass. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver’s ears, it strained the intercom: “Too bad we can’t fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!”

  And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the
sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. “Almost got it, didn’t you!” Freeman and Solly tried themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through space, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again . . . It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.

  After a while they sat down on the new crater’s rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of “Bucket” and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight—earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.

  “What do you think they’ll do with us when they get here?” Solly asked.

  “Kill us,” Hester croaked.

  “Or put us back to work,” Naomi added.

  Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.

  1991

  Michael Swanwick has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards, and has the pleasant distinction of having been nominated for and lost more of these same awards than any other writer. He has written ten novels, over a hundred and fifty short stories, and countless works of flash fiction. His latest novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, will be published by Tor Books in 2019.

  He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

  GRIFFIN’S EGG

  Michael Swanwick

  The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,

  Hatching to-morrow night.

  And how the little boys will watch

  With shouting and delight

  To see him break the shell and stretch

  And creep across the sky.

  The boys will laugh. The little girls,

  I fear, may hide and cry . . .

  —Vachel Lindsay

  The sun cleared the mountains. Gunther Weil raised a hand in salute, then winced as the glare hit his eyes in the instant it took his helmet to polarize. He was hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park. The Chatterjee B reactor had gone critical forty hours before dawn, taking fifteen remotes and a microwave relay with it, and putting out a power surge that caused collateral damage to every factory in the park. Fortunately, the occasional meltdown was designed into the system. By the time the sun rose over the Rhaeticus highlands, a new reactor had been built and was ready to go online.

  Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road. Close by the city, discarded construction machinery and damaged assemblers sat in open-vacuum storage, awaiting possible salvage. Ten kilometers out, a pressurized van had exploded, scattering machine parts and giant worms of insulating foam across the landscape. At twenty-five kilometers, a poorly graded stretch of road had claimed any number of cargo skids and shattered running lights from passing traffic.

  Forty kilometers out, though, the road was clear, a straight, clean gash in the dirt. Ignoring the voices at the back of his skull, the traffic chatter and automated safety messages that the truck routinely fed into his transceiver chip, he scrolled up the topographicals on the dash.

  Right about here.

  Gunther turned off the Mare Vaporum road and began laying tracks over virgin soil. “You’ve left your prescheduled route,” the truck said. “Deviations from schedule may only be made with the recorded permission of your dispatcher.”

  “Yeah, well.” Gunther’s voice seemed loud in his helmet, the only physical sound in a babel of ghosts. He’d left the cabin unpressurized, and the insulated layers of his suit stilled even the conduction rumbling from the treads. “You and I both know that so long as I don’t fall too far behind schedule, Beth Hamilton isn’t going to care if I stray a little in between.”

  “You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic capabilities.”

  “That’s okay, don’t let it bother you.” Deftly he tied down the send switch on the truck radio with a twist of wire. The voices in his head abruptly died. He was completely isolated now.

  “You said you wouldn’t do that again.” The words, broadcast directly to his trance chip, sounded as deep and resonant as the voice of God. “Generation Five policy expressly requires that all drivers maintain constant radio—”

  “Don’t whine. It’s unattractive.”

  “You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Gunther ran a finger over the topographical maps, tracing the course he’d plotted the night before: Thirty kilometers over cherry soil, terrain no human or machine had ever crossed before, and then north on Murchison road. With luck he might even manage to be at Chatterjee early.

  He drove into the lunar plain. Rocks sailed by to either side. Ahead, the mountains grew imperceptibly. Save for the treadmarks dwindling behind him, there was nothing from horizon to horizon to show that humanity had ever existed. The silence was perfect.

  Gunther lived for moments like this. Entering that clean, desolate emptiness, he experienced a vast expansion of being, as if everything he saw, stars, plain, craters and all, were encompassed within himself. Bootstrap City was only a fading dream, a distant island on the gently rolling surface of a stone sea. Nobody will ever be first here again, he thought. Only me.

  A memory floated up from his childhood. It was Christmas Eve and he was in his parents’ car, on the way to midnight Mass. Snow was falling, thickly and windlessly, rendering all the familiar roads of Düsseldorf clean and pure under sheets of white. His father drove, and he himself leaned over the front seat to stare ahead in fascination into this peaceful, transformed world. The silence was perfect.

  He felt touched by solitude and made holy.

  The truck plowed through a rainbow of soft greys, submerged hues more hints than colors, as if something bright and festive held itself hidden just beneath a coating of dust. The sun was at his shoulder, and when he spun the front axle to avoid a boulder, the truck’s shadow wheeled and reached for infinity. He drove reflexively, mesmerized by the austere beauty of the passing land.

  At a thought, his peecee put music on his chip. “Stormy Weather” filled the universe.

  He was coming down a long, almost imperceptible slope when the controls went dead in his hands. The truck powered down and coasted to a stop. “Goddamn you, you asshole machine!” he snarled. “What is it this time?”

  “The land ahead is impassible.”

  Gunther slammed a fist on the dash, making the maps dance. The land ahead was smooth and sloping, any unruly tendencies tamed eons ago by the Mare Imbrium explosion. Sissy stuff. He kicked the door open and clambered down.

  The truck had been stopped by a baby rille: a snakelike depression meandering across his intended route, looking for all the world like a dry streambed. He bounded to its edge. It was fifteen meters across, and three meters down at its deepest. Just shallow enough that it wouldn’t show up on the topos. Gunther returned to the c
ab, slamming the door noiselessly behind him.

  “Look. The sides aren’t very steep. I’ve been down worse a hundred times. We’ll just take it slow and easy, okay?”

  “The land ahead is impassible,” the truck said. “Please return to the originally scheduled course.”

  Wagner was on now. Tannhäuser. Impatiently, he thought it off.

  “If you’re so damned heuristic, then why won’t you ever listen to reason?” He chewed his lip angrily, gave a quick shake of his head. “No, going back would put us way off schedule. The rille is bound to peter out in a few hundred meters. Let’s just follow it until it does, then angle back to Murchison. We’ll be at the park in no time.”

  Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road. By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders ached with tension. “Where are we?” he asked sourly. Then, before the truck could answer, “Cancel that.” The soil had turned suddenly black. That would be the ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine. Their railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid the client factories, and so their tailings hit the road first. That meant he was getting close.

  Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders. In quick order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks: Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing fantail, Krupp fünfzig fantail. He knew them all. G5 did the robotics for the lot.

  A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast as pebbles. The remote driving it waved a spindly arm in greeting. He waved back automatically, and wondered if it was anybody he knew.