Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

“In your ears, I found words of power—wizard’s tricks. These were waiting to hear Malory’s voice,” she said. “One word to make you sleep, and another, I’m sorry to say, that would kill you. I disconnected them, of course. They are outlawed by my guild.”

Volant Lee, the great journalist of the Fifty-Second Street Network, who said that’s how you ought to look into a camera. If you focused on the lens, you’d appear dull, glazed; but if you focused beyond the lens, onto some deeper plane, your eyes would take on a different density: they would grip the viewer.

Tyger, Tyger had cracked the animal cell, made flesh flow like water. They could write in muscle and mitochondria the way you’d jot a note with a pen—or so they claimed. You had to take their word for it, because Tyger, Tyger was so very cautious.

The invasion of the moon had failed, and the doom of the dragons was upon the Anth. At that final hour, in Tyger, Tyger’s most secret laboratory, its central committee convened. The hope of a gradual, responsible release was swept aside.

Tyger, Tyger’s technology was released all at once.

For animals, the effects were variable and capricious.

Between destruction and resilience was a vast field of chaos: and the niches were all up for grabs. In the history written by the wizards, it was called the Wild Hunt.

Tyger, Tyger’s technology took every human it found—which was, within the span of seven days, all of them—and hid them in the nearest attic.

A whole species encrypted for safekeeping.

The dragons arrived on Earth to find it empty of humans.

In a period when Earth was quiet, a salamander sat beneath a ginkgo tree and discovered, in itself, the curious pattern of a human mind. The salamander thought, and thought, and thought, and drew out of itself a person, who had been hiding inside. “This was the first wizard,” said Hughes. “Sake, who rescued us all.” The Wizard Sake sought other creatures who shone with sublimated humanity, and those humans, he decanted.

How could there be any history at all; how could humans, in any form, go on; without any birds in the sky?

Unfortunately, Altissa was long dead, now very likely rotting. “Does her memory not remain in the place where I found you? The little town that feels like a dream?”

A beautiful morning in the Eigengrau. Pink light on the facades.

Ariel reached for a slender classic of the Middle Anth, and when his finger brushed the spine, he saw a family of mice who lived in a cinder block, and the rats who engineered their salvation. “Brilliant rats,” he breathed.

The boy was morose. The opportunity dangled literally over his head: a platoon of warriors as powerful as any who had ever existed on Earth, who would fight for him, fight with him. But, if he called them, he would be clobbered.

Each of my forms is different. Each of my forms is the same. Each has a battery, for walking. A speaker, for chatting. A radio, for being me.” Ariel thought of Rath Poldhu. “Are you not afraid … of falling stones?” The robot halted. A mechanism inside made a slow ticking. “Long ago, I performed a favor for the dragons. I am remembering this. I am hiking across the Limbic Plain. For this favor, I was granted a dispensation. I am transmitting. I am receiving.”

A distributed intelligence in constant conversation with itself, sturdy in form, a network of eyes and ears, arms and legs and treads everywhere? Yes, Storegga’s assessment seemed accurate to me.

Matter Circus depended for its existence on the guild of trash-pickers who went into the wild to scour the junk piles and treasure hoards of fallen civilizations. (The fact that these civilizations all rose and fell long after the Anth remained, to me, a dizzying vexation.)

Scrounger was, by general acclamation, the greatest of the trash-pickers, so Ariel went to find him in his lair.

“Oh,” the robot said. “I have lost myself.” “What do you mean?” Ariel asked. “Is everything all right?” The robot’s head swiveled to face the direction they had come: back toward the Rath-road, three days distant. “I am walking … I am … I must be … I do not know. I am only here, with you. How strange.”

“The city is tiny!” Ariel exclaimed. “Only to us,” said Scrounger. “If you imagine yourself a rat— and you should, from time to time—you will understand that Instaur was a substantial settlement.

“They were rats?” said Ariel. “Brilliant rats,” said Scrounger. “The Mottainai understood things that are beyond us still.

“What happened to them?” he called out. “The rats? They left!” Scrounger called back. “All together, and all at once. They built ships and sailed west. It’s recorded in books—very small books. Very difficult to read. But the Mottainai left behind all sorts of wonderful gadgets.

a Lagrange point, where Earth’s gravity balances perfectly with the moon’s, creating a pocket of stability: a convenient niche in space where, once placed, an object will remain.

“It could happen just as before, Clovis,” he said. “As it happens always. Comptroller Cob said so. Yet you decided to help.” “I am walking,” Clovis said, “and I am listening. Everywhere, I am listening, and I am learning that, for a long time, the dragons have been quiet. I am curious. I am … wagering.”

So he had announced himself. Only one law in the whole world, and Ariel had broken it.

The ship’s response rattled in the robot’s breast, those seven notes repeated, all dread and braggadocio. The beat came in, and the star of the summer of ’23 growled her best impersonation of a long-ago singer, with lyrics updated for the moment: We’re gonna fight ’em off A seven-dragon army cannot hold us back

The freezer bed performed an old animal trick: by chilling the body, it slowed its clock, which meant it slowed the damage, too. Pain and death are processes in time; a grisly filmstrip. But, in any filmstrip, no matter how dire, the space between frames is empty. The bed found that space.

“You suggest that the dragons, in their hearts, have a particular preference,” said Kate. “A bias toward … plot.”

Without that preference, I could only vomit data.

the wizard’s design gives it away. He produced an archetype—or attempted to do so. Why? Because the dragons hunger for plot and resonance—for the reassurance of myth. If that’s true, then Ariel de la Sauvage might, in some sense, be irresistible to them.”

“You would wage a war against the dragons,” he said, “in the name of a better view.” “Yes,” Durga said, “because the view is everything.”

“What I mean is—we have minds! We dream, and we plan, and then we take action. For that reason, our present is a function of the future we imagine. It is forged in response to vision. If we lack vision—well, then the ghosts will play, and that is our own fault. You can believe it or not. I know it is true, because I was born in San Francisco, the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed.”

whole story of the sword in the stone, and what came after. The actors were formidable and stagey, in the style of the time. Ariel recognized the pattern of his life. In the character of the fated child (a girl, in this rendering) he saw himself, and when she pulled the sword from the stone, he saw the way it could have gone. Part of him screamed with regret, but another part acknowledged the wider context: that he was watching this movie while lying on his belly alongside a girl he had called down from space. He felt that, lying here, he was in the correct story, even if he did not know where it was going.

“Our health is matched to the duration of our interests,” said Agassiz. “Isn’t that how it should be?”

Decarbonization was the maturation of the Middle Anth: the beginning of real history.

The firm was the beavers, and the beavers were the firm, and that firm was Shivelight & Shadowtackle: global in scope, expert in ecological engineering, strategic hydrology, and, most of all, carbon accounting. The Wild Hunt had forged the firm, brought the beavers’ architecture out of instinct and into the realm of planning, negotiation, ambition.

If you wish to ask for the services of this office, I will let you.” “What … are those services?” Ariel ventured. The VP looked at him flatly. “Flooding; alternatively, desertification. Burning; alternatively, glacial creep. Erosion, fast or slow. The resettlement of herds and swarms. And burial, of course—by rock, by ice, by vegetation. When the firm decides to do one of these things, it is done.” Her eyes glittered. “Do you require a flood or a fire?”

On the other side of the planet, said Black, the wardens of the ocean were burning, burning, burning. They were pumping carbon dioxide into the air at a rate that would have made even the Middle Anth blush. The storm computer liked it hot. Shivelight & Shadowtackle had the tools to counterbalance this malignity, and keep the atmosphere in balance—but there could be no deviation from the firm’s long-term plan.

The storehouse was crowded with woven forms, like the ones they’d seen in the central hall. These were the outcomes of the debates, stored for posterity and reference. “It is our gallery of precedents,” Agassiz explained.

“The reeds carry genetic material that is transferred to the fish. Each fish is—how can I say it? A data point. They live and grow and reproduce and die, but the information remains, and it can be queried. They are essential to our work. Shivelight & Shadowtackle is the reeds, the fish, and the beavers, all working together.

Somewhere, somehow, long ago, a chronicler had leapt from its subject, just as I had—and joined not a boy, but this vastly more capable partner. In a flash, I understood how it all worked: the vast rhizome of the reeds ferrying scraps of RNA that were integrated into the fish; each fish in turn becoming a living data point, its brain patterned by the RNA to determine its response to the woven queries from the beavers. It was sublime.

The ocean, on their shoulder, was a glittering glory. The sun was hot, but the air was cold: one of the planet’s great combinations.

In the center of town, between the road and the cliff, stood a formidable structure with a barrel roof, from which additions launched in every direction, linked by skywalks erected across the alleys. This was the great hall of the College of Wyrd.

The scholars fuzzed and fogged, and their cards whirred like the wings of dragonflies, and their voices beat against each other like weather. In the whisper of the cards, in the hum of conversation, Ariel heard the word: ZHOZM.

Morgan hooted. “The riddles are all I care about!” She turned to Ariel. “We are a diverse college. Laurentide came to dive; to learn what diving could be. I came because I heard the secrets of the universe were waiting, like tangled knots, to be picked apart. I love to pick, pick, pick.”

For me, the world has always felt vast. Too vast! That is why I huddle in the library. For Malory, the world felt small. He wanted—what? I don’t know. A broader scope.”

“The Wyrm’s Well is very dangerous,” said Garibald. “Scholars are sometimes lost. But the Limpid Pool shouldn’t pose any problem.”

“The only way to the Wyrm is through this pool. If you wish to speak with her, you will dive.” The Wyrm knew why the wizard had created Ariel. She might even know how to defeat him. The boy wanted that information desperately. And yet …