Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

Wicked problems finally put to rest. After which the Anth (for that is what humans called their civilization at its apex) applied themselves eagerly to the extension of good health, the invention of new arts, and the speed of light. They cracked it! Of course they did. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t crack, because they had learned at last the secret of titanic cooperation.

The Anth engineered scintillating emissaries: a new kind of crew for a new kind of voyage. Atop a foundation of computation, they layered intelligences cribbed from nature:

These creatures were the whole potential of a planet poured into a new vessel. The Anth called them: dragons.

They did not transmit a treasure hoard of images from far-off stars. Instead, they tore a chunk out of the moon. The Anth hadn’t known they could do that. Dragon Ensamhet explained that his crew had encountered unimaginable horrors; that they would now draw a veil of dust around Earth; that the planet would forevermore hide from the cosmos. The dragons decreed there was a new law: caution, and darkness, and brutal quiet.

Like them, I was engineered by the Anth, but where the dragons were made to venture outward, to explore and represent, I was made to burrow inward, to record and preserve. I do not know if I was specifically engineered to love the Anth, but I did, and I love them still.

My subject Altissa Praxa was aboard the assault ship Lascaux when it destroyed itself in low orbit.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, said a philosopher of the Middle Anth. Olfaction is the proof of reality, said me. You know you’re back in the mix when you can smell it.

I was engineered by the Anth to nestle into a human mind. In the past, this nestling had been a careful, delicate process. After long entombment, I was not careful. I scrambled to establish my position.

My core is a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense. “Sourdough starter with a mech suit,” one critic complained—but I like the description.

I could not work this place out. I could not even form a theory. It was a mash-up, a pile-up, not so much anachronistic as everything all at once. Of course, the Anth had always lived like this. Encrypted phones alongside incense sticks, coruscating networks alongside printed books. Nothing was ever erased. Even so: a castle? I was all questions: when, and where, and why.

Some days, he wondered if the Wizard Malory had ever taken an apprentice. Ariel might be invited into his secret tower and shown … whatever was up there … Better yet, he might learn to fly the wizard’s airplane.

The hound Yuzu, his favorite, padded in and leapt without invitation to his side, where she was accepted. My confusion was already near an all-time peak when, as if to compound my troubles, Yuzu spoke. She said, with soft affection and clear enunciation, “Good night, Ariel. I hope you feel better in the morning.” The boy showed no surprise; simply patted her flank.

“Of course the hounds can speak,” he said quietly. His eyes were open in the darkness. “Why wouldn’t they?” I wasn’t ready for it. I felt caught; exposed.

“I know I am meant for something important. I can feel it. I have always felt it.” So he was brave, curious, morbid—and a bit grandiose. That was a dangerous combination, but he was just a boy.

Vega’s enthronement revealed that I had been away not for a decade, as I had suspected; not for a century, as I had feared; but for eleven thousand years. The enormity of it roared. At their apex, the Anth had a prehistory only six thousand years distant. This interval, eleven thousand years, doubled their whole story, from the earliest settlements of the Old Anth to the doom of the dragon moon. Vega blared in the north. Eleven thousand years gone, and the heavens all askew.

I live by the logic of the yeast, and that logic is multiplicity. The yeast has no singular I, so, if we are aiming for accuracy, I don’t, either. But I love the I of the Middle Anth, of English. The sovereign I. It is bold and imperious; it presumes too much.

By the calendar of the Anth, it was September 28, 13777, when Ariel de la Sauvage brought me back into history.

In his mind, I saw the object of his hustle: the sword of Altissa Praxa; the sword she carried against the dragons; the sword Ariel had spied in her tomb, where she carried it still. I’d forgotten about it entirely. I never liked that sword.

a sword that was not Excalibur. And there the story changed, for good.

In death, Altissa cradled her sword Regret Minimization. Their swords all had stupid names.

So the representatives of the planet’s most successful civilization were a capacious fungus and a talking sword. More than a few philosophers of the Anth would have found it appropriate, even funny. That was something.

“The stone is my design. As is the village. As are you.” The directness of his speech made the boy’s blood sizzle. “Yet you did not pull the sword. Why?” “I found another,” Ariel said simply. The wizard frowned. “Another sword ought not to have sufficed. The pattern is burned into your cells. Don’t you feel it? Or is my design so poor?”

The wizard said a word; it sounded like and if the other word had been the whine of a mosquito, this one was the tolling of a bell, and it would send the boy into a slumber from which he would never—oh, I knew he would never—wake.

Ariel did not hear it. I caught the word in his ears, burned it to ash in his blood.

The juxtaposition of the reality above (dragons) with the valley below (wizard) vibrated without resolution. The sword in the stone had clarified nothing. I was lost.

The elk watched him with shining eyes. The bulbous form was a hive; it rested in the elk’s antlers, stretched between prongs, anchored by a mottled mixture of wax and hair.

Here in the far future, the bees had undomesticated themselves. They had recruited a powerful partner and convinced him not to shed his antlers. They had bribed him, it seemed, with a lifetime supply of honey.

The real future was the bugs revolting against the spiders, and the bees riding through the winter on a mighty mobile base.

“It speaks!” Percy reported. “It will not stop,” added Gal. He lifted the sword, turned it in his grip. “It is very annoying, but very light.” “I took it from a tomb,” Ariel said. “In a cave, up against the glacier. There was a princess. Dead!” Altissa Praxa would snort at being called a princess.

What did anyone in that room know about leaving Sauvage? Nothing. Beyond the valley, Ariel’s map faded to default gray. It wasn’t only that they had never left the valley; they had never heard of anyone leaving the valley. They had never heard of anyone thinking about leaving the valley. The exception was the wizard, who came and went freely in his airplane.

guts out.

“Worry is a form of pride. You think your brother is helpless? Tell me his name. All right. Kay has plans of his own.” Mankeeper’s voice was rich and urgent; all the stranger for the fact that the bog body never twitched. “I have three words for you—a powerful incantation, learned at great cost. Are you ready?” Ariel was ready. “Worry about yourself!”

Now, as the lady rose out of the bog, she revealed that Malory had made the same expedient choice as every visual effects artist throughout the history of the Anth: declining to spend too much time on the things that would be off-camera.

So I had the Eigengrau. It was inside of me, and only me. It was an imaginary city, and it was my home, and a safehouse for all my memories.

Over several centuries, I have chronicled four long-lived subjects (not counting Ariel de la Sauvage; not yet), and all of them resided in the Eigengrau.

There was: Peter Leadenhall, the mathematician, who perfected the world models that made possible the economy of the Anth Travanian, the Last Lawyer, who wrote the law that ended law, opening the way for the système sensible Kate Belcalis, the cooperativo supremo, who financed the dragons Altissa Praxa, the operator, who fought them

The ghosts of my subjects were different. They could chat with me, and with each other. They could perform all the spectacular qualities they had possessed in life, and the annoying ones, too. The only thing they could not do was surprise me.

The Anth, at their height, had made the sidewalk into their greatest art form: a stroll in Manhattan or Mumbai became a parade of form and style, every outfit an argument, crackling with energy. Here, in Rath Varia, every dimension of human difference was stretched, revealing extremes unknown in the East Village or Bandra West.

After escaping the Lady of the Lake, Ariel and Humboldt fled along the ancient wall. The boy was aware of my absence.

“Is that the way?” he called out. “What are you?” The wind whooshed through the forest, and a final time, he heard: ZHOZM. Ariel turned and marched through the mat of golden leaves in the direction the figure had indicated.

a glowing path through the forest; a trail of warm light. Here was Mankeeper’s promised highway.

Here, on this lonely stretch of road, among the aspens, was where Ariel de la Sauvage met Clovis for the first time. An occasion worth remembering. Clovis raised an arm, a burnished rod, and waggled fingers of vastly different lengths. From the speaker in their belly buzzed a greeting: “Hello!”

There was no innkeeper; this inn kept itself. The chatram spoke. A greeting came from everywhere at once, a groan from the foundation, a rattle from the windows. “Quiet night,” the building said softly, the structural equivalent of a whisper.

The boy was fascinated by the robot’s plural awareness. The fact that Clovis was in many places at once seemed like a magic trick.

Every morning, the Clovis he had walked with was gone. Every day, he found another, and their walk continued.

City and river flexed and surged together. Neighborhoods were lost in the flow, abandoned without angst, reclaimed when the river shifted again. On the day Ariel arrived, Rath Varia boasted thirty-one bridges. The routes across the city were always changing.

In the city’s center was a huge open facility, roughly circular, into which trash flowed: all those trucks he’d seen on the road, and trucks from other roads, all jostling to deliver their cargo. It was the recycling center. They called it Matter Circus.

He learned that in Rath Varia, no one would ever go without food and shelter; these were always in surplus, freely given. The bathhouses were open to everyone. Beyond those essentials, any frivolities required a balance of matter.

“Tell me … do you grow?” Then, as if explanation was necessary: “Have your limbs elongated over time? Your height—is it increasing?” It sounded to Ariel like she was asking if he breathed. “Of course I grow. I am—” He did not want to say he was a child. “I am still young!” Hughes shook her head. “Astonishing. A body that can grow … I have heard it is possible. This will be new territory for me.”

She arrived yesterday, and asked to be decanted. In another week, her transformation will be complete.