Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

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 am built from technological engines bolted onto tamed microorganisms. 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.

“Where are you bound?” Ariel asked weakly. “I am not bound. I am walking. Are you not walking?”

“And where are you bound?”

So the boy walked, while Clovis, one of many, rolled on. In the evenings, they stopped at chatrams. They were all the same, with the same voice; Ariel came to think of it as the voice of the road.

one-of-many,”

The city was lubricated by aqua varia, flooding out of the vast distillery district where they made it from … anything. Everything. Many distillers began with apple cider, naturally, but others built on a base of chili pepper, of peat moss, of petrified wood. Shoes that didn’t go to the cobblers went to the distillers, to make aqua varia rich with the flavors of mycelium leather and long walking.

One of the wizard’s machines played a quiet melody. Ariel looked over. “That’s the song of your own cells,” Hughes said. “Isn’t it nice to know it’s been inside you all along? It’s also a lullaby. Sleep now, young sir.”

“Is she a ghost?” Ariel interjected. They were autonomous memories, not ghosts.

My designers intended several roles for me. Foremost, a reliable chronicler; I was designed to watch, and listen, and keep a faithful record. Next, a counselor; to make the expertise and intuition of my subjects available to each in turn, so that their capabilities might compound. Finally, the most ambitious of my designers imagined that, together, my subjects and I might eventually constitute a new species: a human not individual but multiple; a walking, talking society.

“You see it!” Peter said excitedly. “I remember this well. If you asked the language machines what happened on a dark and stormy night, they always said: murder.”

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

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

“We are descended from the first architects of Earth,” Carson said plainly. That was a fair claim. Beavers had been remaking ecologies for millions of years before humans, or anything like them, appeared. “I know the role the Anth played in history,” the VP continued. “I know we have them to thank for the gift of speech. But our dominion is overdue. We are the rightful stewards of Earth. If you think the Anth will … rise again? And continue where they left off? Well, I do not foresee it.”

“We are beyond winning and losing! The dragons are quiet; how they occupy themselves, up on their moon, I do not know. Down here, we are locked in a mortal struggle.” She paused and looked at Durga sharply. “You do not see it, because you are one of the Anth, who never saw their planet at all.”

high above.

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.

“Spoken language,” he continued, “is a train of words—like my friends coming out of the changing room, one at a time, do you see? Just as I am saying now: Do, you, see? The same would be true if I wrote my words down, letters on a page.” He traced them in the air: DO, YOU, SEE?

“The techniques developed for selling shirts laid the foundations for my world models. I stood on the shoulders of shoppers.”

They were woven from fibers spun from plastiglomerate quarried several kilometers in from the coast. Ariel might have been wearing a water bottle of the Middle Anth.

If the level of the oceans had dropped a hundred meters or more—well within the realm of possibility—the English Channel would have become dry land, just as it had been long ago, when humans strolled freely from England to France, before there was any England or France.

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

“We were decanted in the same season exactly, Malory. If you can choose to look young, I can choose to look old. It is all vanity of one kind or another.”