Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

Ariel, Durga, and Agassiz formed a new class of three. Laurentide took them careening through a remedial course in high-dimensional mathematics. Durga’s propagandist training had gone heavy on game theory, epidemiology, and 3D graphics. Agassiz already knew the pernicious physics of fluid dynamics. They were well matched to the material.

Upon the foundation of time, there were added width, height, and depth; these were followed by momentum, charge, and spin; next came density, symmetry, and “bagelness.” Ariel had never encountered a bagel.

Nostalgia was a dimension. Sorrow was a dimension. So was contentment.

In a special lesson, Garibald introduced a bundle of dimensions, numbered in the high seventies, that were especially salient to the Wyrm. These dimensions corresponded to ancient stories that had been lost to history—but not to the Wyrm.

One of these salient dimensions was called Ursula K. Le Guin.

and Y and Z, along with time, are sufficient for billiard balls and booster rockets—simple things. But real life, the complexity of it, demands more. This was our discovery: the world, like a sponge, will soak up as many dimensions as you provide.”

“Size, color, material … these are all dimensions, and they establish a space that can be navigated and explored. Just as we can move up or down, side to side, we can also move along the axis of … softer, or scratchier. More stylish, or less. This insight was the foundation of the great shopping algorithms of the Middle Anth.” Their highest achievement, sadly.

“Don’t be too judgmental,” Peter chided me. “The techniques developed for selling shirts laid the foundations for my world models. I stood on the shoulders of shoppers.”

The cup had been floating half in the water, but Ariel’s collision sent it dipping under, and now it sank. Curious, he gulped a lungful of air and dove. The cup, a broad chalice, was sinking quickly, so he reached for it; and reached not only through the dimensions of width and height and depth, but through sorrow and contentment and, I believe, bagelness. The feeling shocked him, and his distress grew as the cup became enormous, and instead of grasping it, he stepped inside.

You had to be cautious with analogies in the wilds of high-dimensional mathematics, where intuition could not guide you. Peter Leadenhall knew that—he insisted upon it—yet caution was not prohibition. In his work, analogies had bridged vexing chasms. He never told anyone (but I knew) that he’d cracked the world models, at last, with a line of poetry. The mighty industry of the cooperativos, balanced on the tip of Auden’s pencil.

Ingrid told Ariel the dragons possessed a library of spaceships from far-off civilizations, all caught in various nets and traps, inspected, filed away. Each ship adhered to a totally different theory of faster-than-light travel. Comparing them, the dragons had learned there are myriad ways to make them work: but you always sacrifice something terrible.

There is nothing more human than the experience of lying in the dark, wondering: What if I don’t wake up? In that way, sleep becomes existential cross-training: dread faced nightly, and nightly overcome.

For all their power and genius, the dragons failed this test.

“Ten thousand years, and I never slept. It’s monstrous. The others remain sleepless, growing ever more insane, and I think sometimes that I have forsaken them.” She exhaled, a long rattling breath. Wiped her eyes. “Ariel, this is how I stopped being a dragon. It was terrifying—you cannot imagine how terrifying, to loosen my grip on consciousness … But I slept at last, with the scholars watching over me, and when I woke, I was the Wyrm.”

It wasn’t dark; it was nothing. In the inscrutable distance, he could not see it, but he felt its gravity: the bulk of the forty-three-million-dimensional mind of the Wyrm, which was the mind of a dragon.

“It is a thought, packaged in matter, like the vessel I made to escape the moon, long ago. Like the knife I made for Morgan Samphire.” “Thank you,” Ariel said. “I know it is difficult for you to make things.” “That’s true, but it is no burden, when I’m making a gift for a friend.”

“Of course we are friends,” Ingrid said. “We have sat and talked for no reason, about nothing in particular. That’s what friends do.”

She embraced him, and seemed to surround him, all the Morgans across all the dimensions she now understood, all in agreement. “I wish you would finally learn, Malory, that you have talent. It does not all need to be cruel effort.”

Ariel spoke. “I am leaving—” Durga cursed again, and this one was worse. “—and I do not know if I will return. But I will always be your ally.” The last part he said very quietly: “Rokeya Durga Darwin, I will always be your friend.” Each of her true names the tolling of a bell.

“Do you know what they have up there? For thousands of years, they’ve stretched their nets, and they’ve caught ships. Spaceships! From other worlds! They have promised me my pick, and permission to go.”

Ariel had just placed a marker for Rath Fortuna (his best guess) when a message appeared on the screen of the Stromatolite. With surprise and dismay, he read: OUT OF MEMORY. He nibbled at the edges of the map, but there wasn’t much he could omit: every mound and divot represented knowledge hard-won. An addition in one place required a deletion in another. New terrain devoured the old.

After spending so much time with his treasured device, he had discovered that the real world would not fit inside. He set the Stromatolite aside.

Ariel stared. “From what … was I distilled?” The wizard turned back to the sink. “From myself, of course.”

His grim focus narrowed my access to his thoughts and senses. As a chronicler, I have wondered, sometimes, what it would be like to track one of the cold dictators of the Middle Anth. Here, I had a premonition of the experience, and I realized it would be hell.

The boy had never seen any bird at all, never in his life, but his mind was a human mind, and now it crackled with bird-feeling. He watched the creature’s sharp movements, the saccade of its approach; it switched poses without seeming to occupy the space between them. Here was a creature running at a different frame rate.

Finally, the bird was still, and it gazed at him—blink, blink—and it spoke. “Do not despair,” the bird chirped.

Ariel was growing up; he had learned to conceal himself, even from himself.

“I have had a companion, one I found before you chased me from Sauvage,” the boy said. “A chronicler of the Anth, who became my friend and counselor.” “A chronicler?” Malory said. His breath did not steam in the cold air.

The mythic archetype does not have … what are you? Do I detect a fungus? No, the archetype does not have a fungus. Absolutely not.” The boy was a new archetype, then. “How literary. Unfortunately, that is not what the dragons ordered. So.” He turned to Peter Leadenhall. “Better finish that coffee.”

Three knocks it would take to destroy me, because I have the dragons’ flaw in my heart, and everything must follow a stupid pattern, even my own doom.

Three knocks it would take—but the third never came.

The dragon moon blared in the sky above the glacier. Inside Malory’s strange circle, the portal activated, as tall as the wizard’s barrow, an uncanny aperture into which air now rushed, a powerful wind: because the portal opened onto the surface of the moon. The view was stark and glittering.

If Ariel had done as the wizard intended, accepted the role for which he had been manufactured, the result would have been his death. I am sure of it. Even if not literal death—even if the boy’s biological processes continued, perhaps forever, in the care of the dragons—then true death: the absence of event. Here was the opposite: an event as large as any that had occurred since the fall of the Anth. Ariel stepped through the portal.

The stars: ablaze. The view through Durga’s rip had not prepared him. Earth and the moon, pebbles in space. Space, a hall of endless light. The great question of the Anth: What happens next? Every step a bound. No air, but he felt fine. It was a dive. The gates of the perfect castle, open, ignored. Bounds becoming huge wheeling leaps. Delight. Ariel. Get it done.

Ariel saying, Yes. The sword’s name is … Sleep!

The ballistic shock of education, which, at its best, provides the realization: life can be different. It does not all need to be cruel effort.

The squires began intensive instruction in dance (they were naturals) and singing (they were not), for Durga now planned the construction of one of the most terrible weapons of the Middle Anth: a boy band.

In short: Rokeya Durga Darwin began the slow, thrilling task of inventing media.

happened on the moon. He explained he’d left her gift behind: the sword planted in the lunar surface, the idea planted in the minds of her old companions. He told her that some of the dragons had sighed; that Dragon Twilight had gone to sleep smiling. Ingrid nodded, and began to speak, but her lips crumpled, and she surrendered to a sob: of regret, and shame. “I should have sent it to them sooner.” She exhaled raggedly, and managed a smile. “But then, I did not know anyone bound for the moon!”

The fearful did not act; the fearful hoped nothing happened at all.