Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

This was a bummer so colossal that it was definitely, inarguably, easily the worst thing that had ever happened, in the whole history of Earth.

I first saw the boy as one beholds the sun behind eyelids: red heat.

The narrow stream rushed alongside it, swollen with the storm, and between the stream and the castle there was a lawn, trimmed short, where a big-bellied black airplane peeked out of a thatched hangar.

The castle, the airstrip, the XL moth, the boy himself, a human, conspicuously alive: I was violently confused.

When Ariel passed, he heard them telling each other tales of terror, fainting with delight.

The place where a snake had erected a snake-fortress, a clever dome of stones, the largest he had ever seen, its interior crowded with cast-off skins. (Snakes had learned to build fortresses.)

The wizard’s role in the village was ambient, more like weather than government.

That was the great theme of the operators: intention. Get it done, Altissa.

If Regret Minimization’s personality was unhinged, the sword itself was perfectly balanced.

Here in the far future, the bees had undomesticated themselves. They had recruited a powerful partner and convinced him not to shed his antlers.

“Then we should join the fun,” said Jesse. “I call to order the first and only meeting of the Committee to Confound the Wizard.”

With agonizing slowness, she drew a card: the eight of cauldrons. “Oh, good,” said Betelgauze brightly. “Yes, you can simply walk out of Sauvage.”

Rocky spheroid develops taste for life (soup, lighting). Pale purple dot. A billion boring years. Oxygen revolution. A really great party, crashed by an asteroid. Disaster.

I once met a Wizard Keaton. Nice fellow. Well, not actually nice. But he was a fellow.”

“My victories were stupid!” exclaimed Mankeeper. “Who wants to kill a thing with bears for hands? You think I mean he had hands like a bear’s. No. Each hand was a bear. Bears for hands.

“I am Ariel de la Sauvage,”

What a great name

SHIVELIGHT & SHADOWTACKLE

Lovely words

He would disappear ahead, then surprise them from the rear, bellowing advisories that, though cheerful, were mostly annoying. “It’s flatter up ahead! Steeper before that. But flatter, eventually. Don’t trample that sedge! Look at those clouds!”

Clovis was passing the oyster beds of the Desenrasque Coast. They were vast constructions; the city of oysters dwarfed Rath Varia.

There was no respite from vastness.

Can it be called skulking when everyone is doing it?

The beaver surveyed, standing on tiptoe, which was not that helpful.

Agassiz, who did not wear clothes anyway, was mystified by the entire process.

Durga thrashed into view, attempting another dive; she was a confident but very inefficient swimmer.

Sinking lower, Ariel felt as if he were peeling the layers of an onion in the kitchen at the Castle Sauvage—an onion with no center. Infinite onion.

A beautiful morning in the Eigengrau. Warm rain on the sidewalk. Ariel de la Sauvage came barreling into the café, and to everyone assembled, with panic in his voice, he cried: “Does anyone here know math?”

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.”

How luxurious, to have a small god narrate your audiobook.

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.

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.

Six dragons on six thrones, all looking, it must be said, like shit. The all-nighter to end all-nighters.

Betelgauze got an immersion blender.

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.