It’s like climbing up into a pleasant dream. It’s warm out here, and the bright sky and brighter sun cast brilliant reflections on the lapping waters of the sea, which, spanning eighty meters at its widest, stretches nearly from horizon to horizon. The shoreline is a few meters of pristine beach, fading back into palm trees and elephant grass. The breeze smells sweetly pungent, like ice cream and salt somehow. Like fresh beer and flowers.
Farther back, behind the planette’s round edge, rise a pair of low hills, green with pine and acacia, and on one of these hills is exactly what Radmer has come here to find, what the astronomer Rigby has claimed to see from his mountain observatory on the clearest of nights: a little white cottage of wellstone marble.
Silently, on some great universal scorecard, Radmer’s obsession ticks over from “reasonable” to “downright sensible.” So like any dutiful soldier, he strips off his coat and riding leathers, then hops in the water and swims for it.
It isn’t far. Soon he is dripping on the white sands of the beach, strolling in his felt johnnysuit beneath the shade of palms, on a course for the not-so-distant hills. The air is hazy, perhaps by design; it enhances the illusion of distance, of space. He loses sight of the cottage as he plunges into the chest-high wall of grass, then is startled at how quickly it reappears again, immediately before him.
Overgrown, yes, overshadowed by vegetation. But certainly not a ruin, sitting here in this little glade or clearing on the hillside. Nor has it been abandoned. Kneeling in the dirt before it is the figure of a naked man, white hair frizzed and trailing to his waist.
You know that feeling, when you see something at once ancient and familiar, when your neck prickles and your stomach flutters and all your little hairs stand at attention? This is how Radmer feels as he approaches the cottage, as he eyeballs the naked man kneeling there in front of it.
He considers kneeling himself, but rejects the idea.
“Bruno,” he says instead, from ten meters away. “Bruno de Towaji.” A whole string of titles could be appended to the name, both fore and aft, but applying them to this dismal figure seems inappropriate. Still, there is no question in Radmer’s voice, or in his mind. There is no mistaking that face. True, the ravages of time are apparent; the Olders age in slow but very particular ways. Hair and beard faded yellow-white, yes, and grown out to a length past which it simply frays and abrades. The skin smooth, but deeply freckled and tanned with the weary brown of accumulated melanin, sharply creased in its various corners and crannies. Teeth worn to chalky nubs in that slack, hanging jaw.
Radmer himself looks somewhat like this, but with his shorter hair and longer teeth, and the fact that he’s clothed, it isn’t quite so apparent. And though the armies to which he has formally belonged are all dust and gone, he still carries himself like a soldier, while the man in the dirt—digging up yams with his bare hands, Radmer sees now—has the absent, casual quality of a sleepwalker.
And something more: the eyes flicking slowly from here to there, taking in the house, the forest, the soft ground beneath them, the sea. Lingering overlong on the distant brass sphere, and on Radmer himself—disturbances in this long-familiar environment. But he’s not really seeing them. Not seeing at all. Or rather: seeing but not processing. Not affected by what is seen.
The old man rises, clutching two small yams in each hand, and begins walking—not limping or shuffling— toward the little house. Radmer follows.
“De Towaji, sir. Sire. I need to speak with you.”
The old man pauses, casts a cloudy, troubled glance over his shoulder, then continues on.
This is a condition Radmer has heard of: neurosensory dystrophia—pathways worn smooth in the brain through constant, repetitive stimulation. When the nervous system is old and the daily routine goes on unbroken for years or decades, its victims can be trapped by it. He’s heard of couples and even whole villages succumbing, but typically it’s the people who live alone—especially in isolated areas—who are most at risk.
He imagines Bruno de Towaji performing these same actions day after day, varying little or not at all. Like an animate fossil. Like a ghost, haunting this place, oblivious to the fact of his own demise.
The good news is that the symptoms are temporary, subsiding soon after the routine itself is interrupted. The arrival of a visitor is normally sufficient. But barring strange miracles, de Towaji must have been here on the planette for a long time indeed—much longer than Radmer cares to think about. Whole histories come and gone, an unthinkable span of time.
Radmer follows along into the shade of the overhanging forest, and then the old man enters the cottage through an open doorway that looks like it may never have had a door of any kind, or even a curtain. The windows are the same. Probably there’s no winter here, perhaps no serious weather of any kind. Rigby could confirm that. Still, there’s something unsavorily primeval about a house fully open on the sides.
The inside is a single room, shockingly clean, dominated by a water fountain made, like the house and floor, of white wellstone marble. Here de Towaji kneels again, and patiently washes the four yams he’s retrieved.
Radmer tries again. “I suspect you can hear me, Sire. Perhaps you’ll remember an architect by the name of Mursk? Conrad Mursk? We worked together once, long ago. Before that, I was a companion to your son.”
When the yams are clean, de Towaji sets them down on the floor, rises again, and moves to a corner of the house, where a pile of small stones rest atop a little shelf. Flint? For starting a cooking fire? Surely raw yams would have busted the poor man’s guts out long ago. He then turns toward the house’s only exit and commences that slow, deliberate walk again. When Radmer blocks the way, de Towaji literally runs into him.
Then blinks and looks him over.
“Sire,” Radmer says.
Slowly, the old man nods. “Ah. Ah. I ... know you.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Mursk.”
“Yes, Sire. Very good.”
“The architect. You ... crushed the moon. Squoze it.”
Radmer glances behind him at the half-disc of Lune in the sky. The clouds, the continents, the splatters of ocean.... But this isn’t a map. This is the world itself, seen from a height of fifty thousand kilometers. “We crushed it together, Sire. Long ago.”
Gruffly: “You’re ... in my way.”
Radmer can’t bring himself to bar the doorway any longer. Bowing, he steps back and to the side, allowing de Towaji to pass. At once, the old man’s expression eases.
“Forgive me, Sire. I don’t know if I’m rescuing you, or desecrating ... Excuse me! Sire!”
Impatience is a rare emotion among the Olders, but seeing de Towaji prepare to ignore him again, Radmer feels it now, and dares to grab his long-ago master by the arm.
“Bruno! I have little time for this. Rouse yourself and listen to me: a great evil has been loosed upon that squozen moon of ours. Its future is now very much in peril.”
The old man frowns, and it is no regal frown meant to convey official displeasure, but a private and unconscious one. A gesture of simple unhappiness.
“Future,” the old man muses, or perhaps recites. He continues looking down the path ahead, deeper into the forest. “I remember that word. Where is the future? When will it get here?”
“I fear it will not, Sire.”
De Towaji’s gaze clears a bit, and a look of pained amusement passes briefly over his features. He speaks very slowly. “Lad, I guarantee it will not. All these ... futures we thought we were building. Where are they? In the past. This is the past, by the time I finish saying so.” He pauses for a long moment to make the point, then adds, “There is no future, only past.”