“The parachute needs sewing and packing,” Radmer says flatly. “After that, we depart. Do you have any personal effects you’d like to bring?”
In spite of everything, Bruno spreads his arms and laughs. “Do I look like a man with personal effects?”
“No. Indeed.”
A pang of hunger sounds in Radmer’s gut. This is not surprising; working the chemries all week has kept him in a state of constant famishment. In response he has denuded the planette so savagely that he genuinely worries the wild potato and yam and carrot species—and possibly some of the fish—may have been driven to extinction. The fruit trees he’s less worried about, since picking them clean doesn’t kill them.
But in point of fact, Radmer can digest leaves and grass—all the Olders can, though they don’t relish it— and if this long chore were to drag on any longer, the astronomer Rigby would soon notice the color green vanishing from Varna’s miniature landscape.
Again, from an energy standpoint, it would have made more sense and been more efficient to feed soil and vegetable matter directly into the chemry, rather than using his own body as the power plant. But that would have required a vastly more complex device, versatile enough to detect and assimilate and reformulate a wide assortment of chemicals. And things simply don’t work that way on Lune anymore.
“Can you lead me to some bananas?” he asks Bruno.
Again, there is laughter. “That will be a long walk, my dear architect laureate. But there may still be a bunch or two on the planette’s other face.”
“Sold,” Radmer says. “I can use the break.” Then, as they set off, he tells the old king in a more thoughtful tone, “You know, the brevity of a natural life does have its upside. Fifteen years of peace and prosperity may not seem like much to you, but on Lune it’s long enough to raise a family. And fifty years is a lifetime, literally. I can say, without exaggeration, that my personal actions have brightened the lives of hundreds of millions. This is, of course, dwarfed by your own record, but these are the children of my children, forty generations along.”
“This war of theirs,” Bruno says, waving off the compliment. “It’s a bad one.”
“Very bad,” Radmer agrees, marveling at how poorly those two words convey the true situation on Lune.
“And you believe I can help.”
It’s Conrad’s turn to laugh, albeit humorlessly. “I’ve been a fool before, Sire. Many times. But I fear at this point that only you can help. Or rather, that if you cannot, then there is no hope at all.”
The king’s rusty, castaway voice is heavy with irony. “What will you do then? Maroon yourself on a planette? We’ll see about this, you and I. There is always hope. Giving it up is a sign of weakness.”
“Ah,” Radmer says, ignoring all of the easy and obvious retorts.
Ahead, the sun breaks over the round horizon, putting an end to their darkness, and Radmer—who was once Conrad Mursk—chooses to see it as an omen.
When they’ve winched the sphere over into its launch orientation, when they’ve donned their leathers and sealed their hatches, when they’ve bolted the passenger chair into place and peered one final time through the windows at the soil and greenery and cloudy skies of Varna ... only then does it begin to feel real. Only then does Radmer feel the relief, the flush, the excitement, of success. Hitting Lune will be easy enough, compared to the journey here.
“Will you do the honors, Sire?” he asks, handing the blast chains to Bruno. “One firm tug, on my mark.”
“I will, yes,” the king says, taking the chains with a weird solemnity.
“It already stinks in here,” Radmer notes. “I warn you, it will get much worse.”
“Yes, yes. Just give the countdown.”
“A countdown!” Radmer exclaims. “How quaint. Yes, that’s just what the occasion demands. Five! Four! Three!”
And then he pauses, feeling a tickle of déjà vu at the edges of his mind, like the melody of an old, forgotten song. Or perhaps its lyrics: She doesn’t have an engine and she doesn’t have a fax gate ...
“Two? One?” Bruno inquires.
And Radmer answers him. “Sorry, yes. Fire.”
So the chains are jerked and the charges detonate, and there’s nothing gentle or forgiving about it. Varna departs from the windows, and the sky grows black, and the two men, pressed back savagely into their seats, are hurled toward an uncertain future.
All things considered, it’s a hell of a ride.
Appendix A.
Glossary
This book borrows numerous terms from its prequel, The Collapsium. Critical carryovers, plus additional terms first appearing in this volume, are defined below.
Adamantium—(n) The pseudomaterial with the highest known toughness index, and the third-highest hardness. Because it is a poor conductor of electricity, adamantium has a high energy cost to maintain in comparison with other comparable pseudomaterials.
Aft—(adj or adv) One of the ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative roll axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and boots/caps directions, and parallel and opposite to fore.
Asteroid belt—(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any star where the tidal influence of major bodies has prevented the accretion of planetessimals into larger planets. Sol’s Asteroid Belt includes the minor planet Ceres, and otherwise consists of irregular rocky bodies (asteroids) smaller than 260 kilometers across. It extends from approximately 2.2 AU at its lower boundary to 3.6 AU at its upper, with a total mass (including Ceres) less than one-tenth that of Luna.
AU—(n) Astronomical unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 499.028 light-seconds. The AU is the primary distance unit for interplanetary navigation.
Boots—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the positive yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to caps.
Caps—(adj or adv) One of the six ordinal directions on board a ship: along the negative yaw axis, perpendicular to the port/starboard and fore/aft directions, and parallel and opposite to boots.
Cardinal direction—(n) Any of the six main compass points for solar navigation: upsystem, downsystem, north, south, clock, and counter.
Chemry—(n) Any device that employs mechanical energy to drive the chemical synthesis of a product, most typically a food or fuel. Usually applied to human-portable devices; larger versions are more commonly referred to as “factories.”
Chondrite—(n) Any stony meteoroid characterized by the presence of chondrules, or round particles of primordial silicate formed during the early heating of a stellar nebula. Chondrites are similar in composition to the photospheres of their parent stars, except in iron content.
Clathrate—(adj) Of or pertaining to a compound formed by the inclusion of molecules of one substance in the crystal lattice of another. In Kuiper and Oort space, methane and noble-gas hydrates (i.e., water ices) are the most typical examples. Literally: “possessing a lattice.”
Clock (also Retrograde)—(adj or adv) One of the six cardinal directions: clockwise when facing down from solar north. In Sol system, a minority of moons and comets orbit clock.
Collapsiter—(n) A high-bandwidth packet-switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. A key component of the Nescog.
Collapsium—(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Because the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a supervacuum permitting the supraluminal travel of energy, information, and particulate matter. Collapsium is most commonly employed in telecommunications collapsiters; the materials employed in ertial shielding are sometimes referred to as collapsium, although the term “hypercollapsite” is more correct.