And suddenly everyone is fighting.
“Inviz” was mainly a fashion statement in Bruno’s day, one of many geostat patterns that seemed to hold stationary while your clothes and body swirled around them. In set theory terms, inviz was the special case of geostat in which the display pattern matched the background pattern. But in the hands of an artful dresser it became something more, something beautiful. A complement to the other nonspectral colors—superblack and superreflector, wellwood and glowhoo, animorphic and animimetic and the ever-popular c0unt rs ns. How he misses those! How he misses the fops and dandies who strutted around in them, with hardly a care!
But on the wellcloth cloaks of Sydney Lyman’s band, stealth inviz is just another instrument of murder. The Olders lift their hoods and vanish, or nearly vanish, leaving only smudges in the air and dancing shadows on the ground. They must be wearing speed boots and wall-hugging gecko gloves as well, for in what seems no time at all, the air is shimmering on top of the wall itself, and the guards there are dropping their weapons, dropping their helmets, staggering and falling in disarray. Struggling vainly with unseen assailants.
“Harm no one!” Radmer commands, and it occurs to Bruno to wonder whether he’s speaking to his own men, or to the city guards, or to the world of Lune itself, with a frustration that borders on despair. Here is a man, thinks Bruno, who knows combat all too well, and loves it not at all. He feels a moment of pity, for the earnest young man who had long ago dreamed himself a builder, just as Bruno had dreamed himself a physicist. But the moment passes, for this whole world is like a nightmare, and there’s a great deal Bruno doesn’t know. He’ll take nothing for granted, and he feels—perhaps foolishly—that nothing can truly surprise him, or move him. He’s beyond all that.
Old-fashioned cast iron bells are ringing up on the wall now—alarms from the guards close enough to observe the fray but not close enough to be caught in it. Still, the gate—a simple affair of welded steel bars and plates—swings slowly open on squealing hinges, and Radmer strides casually into the city. Not waiting to be summoned like a dog, Bruno trails close behind.
The city within could have been clipped straight from Bruno’s Old Girona childhood: an environment of stone and brick and heat-trapping colored glass. A cluster of hundred-story towers stands anomalously at the center, ringed by artful moats and bridges, but few of the other buildings are more than six floors high, and (per Radmer’s warning) none seem enlivened. Between them, streets of diamond and cobblestone and muddy gravel slope gradually down toward the seashore.
And on the streets are crowds of dwarfish, big-headed men and women dressed in drab spectral colors. Fluttering gray shadows cling beneath their chins and eyelids, the undersides of their arms. Reactive skin pigment—an adaptation generally used for shedding heat. These people are Eridanians, he thinks at first, but on the heels of that he notices other engineered features as welclass="underline" the six-fingered, dual-thumbed hands of Sirius, a hint of the thick, trollish skins of Barnardean extremists. Also the occasional head of translucent blue-green hair—a photosynthetic adaptation that had started right here in Sol System, under the very nose of a disapproving Queen Tamra.
At the moment, these strange, patchwork people are scurrying back or fleeing outright, their eyes wide on the opened gate. “Olders!” some of them cry.
“What are they?” Bruno asks quietly.
“They call themselves ‘human beings,’” Radmer answers without irony. “They’re the people of Lune.”
“Ah. Well. What do they call us, then? Olders?”
“Or bandits,” Radmer agrees, “or indeceased, which is an unkind word indeed. But our numbers have faded over the centuries—especially here in Imbria, which is a hard nation to inhabit in secret. They sometimes hunt us, so we try to keep out of sight.”
“Some of us do,” says Sidney Lyman, materializing suddenly at Bruno’s side. He glares pointedly at Radmer. “Others don’t ever learn, no matter how much misfortune they bring down upon the rest of us. These ‘humans’ go through spurts of curiosity and outreach, seeking us out as historical reference works, which is fine except that it lays the groundwork for the next round of bloodletting. Know thy enemy, eh?
“And of course it’s worst for our own children. Immorbidity doesn’t breed through; if they stay with us, we watch them grow old and die. We’re like statues to them, unbending, wearing down on a timescale they can scarce perceive. But if they join the mainstream of human society, they do so as tall, five-fingered freaks. There aren’t even ghettos for them, not anymore, so the freak show never ends. Many of them do become bandits, in the times when relations are poor. And our dear Radmer here is always stirring things up.”
“Was always,” Radmer says. “It’s a habit I’d long abandoned.”
“Until these lucky days,” Lyman answers, with more than a hint of bitterness. “Now you’ve gone all the way to Varna, braving radiation and vacuum to bring this… gift to the Imbrians. How very noble of you.”
“I like to think so, Sid. Really. If this civilization falls, what do you think will succeed it? Another Queendom? Another dark age? Do you really want to find out? Most of the time, the people of this city give little thought to our existence, except as characters in ancient songs.”
“But now they need us, in your opinion,” Lyman mutters. “Even if their own opinions disagree.”
“Yes,” Radmer says simply. Then, “I asked you to bring me this far, Sid, and you’ve done it. I won’t ask any more. In fact, I’ll invite you to leave before things get any worse.”
“And abandon you here for lynching?”
Radmer laughs humorlessly. “I’ve been here a hundred times, Sid, and they haven’t managed it yet. I’ll be fine.”
“Meaning no offense, sir, but I think we’ll wait here a minute and see what happens.”
“Hmm. Well. Suit yourself.”
And presently, as if called forth by this exchange, a new set of guards appear—first a dozen, then two dozen, then a hundred strong. They’re dressed all in yellow, and in addition to rifles and swords they carry, here and there, the elongated wormhole pole-arms which Lyman has called “air pikes.” A few of them, Bruno notes with surprise, are quite obviously female.
“Ah, the Dolceti,” Lyman says, in almost welcoming tones.
“This is more serious,” Conrad murmurs to Bruno. “The nation’s elite guard, trained in blindsight through the channels of fear. Don’t underestimate them.”
“I hadn’t,” Bruno says, meaning it. He has no idea what any of these terms mean, or what anyone here might be capable of. Blindsight? Channels of fear? The name “Dolceti” itself is suggestive; it’s about as unTongan a word as human mouths can utter, and assuming it descends from some species of Latin or Greek, it might mean “sweet” or “pleasing.” It might also mean “pain” or “chop” or “deceit,” or even “whale.”
“You lot are under arrest,” says one of the Dolceti—not obviously marked as a leader but certainly carrying himself that way. His dialect is not quite as impenetrable as the wall guards’ had been, though it does sound forced, as though he’s dredging up some ancient tongue he’d learned and half forgotten.
“Y’all near c’rect,” Conrad Mursk says back to him, in what sounds to Bruno, again, like flawless Lunish. “We’re t’be escorted to the Furies.”
“On whose authority?” the Dolceti wants to know.