Moonbound

by Robin Sloan

The boy obeyed happily, and soon he was trotting along Sauvage’s main street, where the whole village swirled around him. Some nights, with the villagers all tucked into their houses or their niches in the castle, Sauvage seemed oppressively small; but with everyone out wandering, laughing and hallooing, all in their best technical outerwear, it felt like a bright parade.

“I do not live in water. I cannot even swim! Mx. Beaver—Humboldt—I am lost. I cannot find my way through this foul swamp.” “Foul!” squeaked Humboldt. “Swamp! It is no swamp. A swamp is a low-lying wetland fed by an external inflow, generally inundated, often dominated by trees. This is a bog! Its water source is primarily rainwater, which results in a highly acidic and mineral-poor environment.” Eleven thousand years, and the beavers had grown didactic.

I was astonished. This meek pilgrim had been granted a total monopoly on the electromagnetic spectrum, and used this power … to putter with themself. In some long-forgotten grave, a media mogul of the Middle Anth was spinning, spinning, spinning

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.) They sought spools of corroded wire as eagerly as golden idols; in fact, the wire earned a richer balance at the recycling center. The wall of ferrous metal that brought Ariel out of the bog had been a great haul for some trash-picker, ages ago. Spool or idol, the trash-pickers hauled it back, deposited it with Comptroller Cob, ate and drank their balance down in the seethe of the city, then did it all over again. In this way, they were tidying the world: compressing the scattered detritus of fallen civilizations into a hot gem of life.

“The best of the best weren’t assigned to the assault,” she said. “They worked on Plan Z. They built simulations—games of propaganda and uprising, that nobody but me and three other girls ever played. For two years, there weren’t any movies, because the writers were all working on the myth.”

“You suggest that the dragons, in their hearts, have a particular preference,” said Kate. “A bias toward … plot.” This was right. I knew it was right. I knew, because that same preference is in my heart. Without it, I couldn’t write this down. I couldn’t pick and choose what to describe, couldn’t strategically withhold information for your benefit. Without that preference, I could only vomit data. I’m glad to have it.

This was the beaver who supported the fire, so Ariel expected to hear a summary of that argument. Instead: the opposite. Red described the danger and uncertainty inherent in the project. “Has this beaver’s opinion been changed so easily?” he whispered to Agassiz. “No, no,” she said. “Red states Black’s opinion; Black will do the same for Red. And they must both agree that the summary is fair. This is the assurance of an argument in good faith. The reeds demand it.”

Ariel and Durga stood in a data center! Or something like a data center: the dark, glittering caves of the Anth; the places where all their thoughts came together, were braided and bent, frozen and unfrozen. The data centers of the Anth had been hot, loud, claustrophobic—a bit scary. And they had been among their highest achievements.

As Ariel sat and waited, a curious feeling was rising; not in the boy’s body, but in mine. My own cells. I sensed a familiar power in this data center, and it had, at last, sensed me, too. Through droplets of mist that landed on Ariel’s lips, in his nose, this power diffused into his blood. There, it sought me, and there, I recognized it. The ledger was built like me, with the same logic at its foundation. Like a mirror, I saw it: chronicler. Remnant of the Anth, hearty fungus upon which much technology had been layered. It was in the reeds, and their roots; in the fish, and their eggs. 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.

But I had seen my subjects enticed by systems like these, and I knew the cost. If I accepted the ledger’s invitation, I—the sovereign I! this I, me!—would be fried. And if by some chance I wasn’t; if I could somehow hold on to myself in the flood: it would still wash away any sense of a story. I would no longer care about the fate of one creature, not even one like Ariel de la Sauvage, brave, curious, morbid, and more.

“When a tree falls in a forest,” Agassiz explained, “it decomposes, and—poof! All that carbon circulates again. When moss sinks in a bog, it doesn’t decompose. It just stays there, down in the dark, as long as it’s not disturbed. Go down home, Jenny Moss! The bogs are the firm’s most precious assets … our vaults. As fast as the storm computer kicks up carbon, we suck it back down, and we keep it here.” She slapped her tail on the moss.

“Malory substituted effort for talent,” Morgan continued, “so, by the time we donned our cloaks, he was a better scholar than me, because he understood how he knew what he knew, and I was coasting on intuition.” She shrugged massively. “Still am.”

Ariel looked at Durga, whose face was set and shining; at Agassiz, whose fur was bristling with eager curiosity; and he felt that he would rather attempt something difficult, even absurd, together with them, than continue alone. He could not continue alone, he realized. He was right. He was learning. I felt it: the slow but powerful tide of self-knowledge, and even wisdom.

Peter nodded. “So you have been paying attention. X 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.” Peter plucked at his shirt, one of the blousy button-downs he favored. “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.”

The ship became the headquarters of the Committee to Confound the Dragons. Durga was joined there by Kay, along with Gal and Percy. 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.