And he’s not alone; of the ten Dolceti who’ve made it this far, nine are sporting some sort of major sprain or fracture. Splinting these becomes the first task of this day, which is already into late afternoon and will see the sun set in another twelve hours.
“Remember the war,” Radmer tells them solemnly, as Bruno de Towaji stirs, shakes the sand out of his hair, and finally rises. “Injured or not, you’re here to fight. You’re here to protect this man, Ako’i, while he rummages through yonder ruins.”
“We know our jobs,” Bordi answers solemnly. “We don’t need you to tell us.”
“Fair enough. But you do need breakfast.”
He dishes it hot into their waiting bowls, and for those who’ve lost their bowls along the way he plops it, steaming, into their bare hands. If it burns them, they don’t acknowledge it, but rather wolf it down, barely pausing to chew.
“I’ve been here before,” Bruno says while the others eat. His eyes are on the distant wellstone jutting up from the sand.
“In the Iridium Days?” Zuq asks, sounding, as always, like he just barely believes it.
Bruno snorts. “They weren’t called that until they were nearly over, lad. We had no name for that bitter time, when the Earth lay dying, chewed outward from its core by fragments of the murdered Nescog. Still, ‘iridium’ is a clever pun; someone back then had an acid sense of humor.”
“Because it sounds like Eridani?” Radmer asks.
Bruno coughs out a bitter laugh. “Not at all, lad. Think back to your chemistry lessons; think of a periodic table. Iridium is a member of the precious metals group, one step down from platinum and two down from gold. But it’s less shiny than either, and was never a favorite in coins or jewelry. In a value-of-metal sense, the phrase ‘Iridium Days’ falls somewhere between ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Iron Age.’ It’s a dark subtle irony for an era of decline.”
“Well,” says Zuq, “at least they kept a sense of humor.”
Bruno smiles down at the boy, who still looks to his eyes like an overgrown toddler. Not only is he short, but like all the “humans” he’s got that oversized coconut, those big questioning eyes. “You mightn’t say that if you were there.”
“You did a lot of fighting?”
“Indeed, though not against an enemy you’d recognize. Oh, there were shooting wars here and there, but for the most part we had shamed ourselves into a kind of sorry truce. Even Doxar Bagelwipe was appalled at the scale of destruction. ‘So fragile after all,’ he said on his deathbed. The nerve!”
“So what did you fight?”
Bruno waves a hand. “Oh, you know. Gravity. Entropy. I spent a decade as a common laborer in the Bag Corps, trying to rescue as much mass as possible for the neutronium presses. Trying to turn the Earth into a constellation of planettes, so her people might have somewhere to flee to, even if they lacked the means. But they did lack the means, and so did we. Only two planettes were built down there in the gravity well, before the Earth collapsed into rainbows. I have no idea what’s become of them since. Uninhabited, presumably, or your people would know of them. Have you heard of a world called Ramadan? Or another called Open Hand?”
“I haven’t,” admits Zuq. Other voices mutter their agreement.
Bruno sighs. “No, I thought not. Alas. Before that I was involved in a project to revive select portions of the Nescog. Right here in Manassa, for almost a year. Someone had found an old fax machine, complete with network gates, and we snatched it from the hospital system and were trying to contact the last few nodes, before they went down. With that, you see, we could yank people right off the dying planets! But the tide was against us, all efforts in vain. Were there people who considered the situation normal? Even glorious? I never met them. For those who remembered the Queendom, its aftermath was a time of great sadness.”
“It got better later,” Radmer tells them both, as if apologizing. But Bruno is mostly right; the Iridium Days were never as roaring as the legends that adhered to them afterward. But neither, in his opinion, was the Queendom itself. He’d fought against it, been exiled from it, crawled back to it in defeat, and finally, toward the end, joined its upper echelons—a rich man with heady connections. He knew it better than Bruno did; knew it from up and down, from inside and out. And the simple fact was, the Tara and Toji of Luner mythology, with their Sphere Palace and their Great Bronze Navy and their “only as strong as the weakest among us,” were creatures out of fairy tale. He’d long ago stopped trying to reconcile them to any literal history.
But Bruno surprises him by saying, “Nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even the bad.”
And what can Radmer say to that, who has seen his share of bad, and even a goodly slice of forever?
After breakfast, he leads Bruno up into the dune field for a closer look, taking Deceant Natan—the only uninjured Dolceti—along as bodyguard. Radmer doesn’t expect trouble, but he’s always prepared for it.
At the base of the hills, the dirt looks almost exactly like beach sand: a mix of white and brown and black grains, very small, interspersed with sharp bits of unweathered gravel that can’t have been here very long. And like an undisturbed beach or riverbed, the ground is covered with a ripply pattern of footprint-sized dunes. When he steps in the trough of one, he finds it squashing underfoot like a sponge. When he steps on the crest, it supports his weight for a moment and then slowly undergoes a kind of staged collapse. Squish squish crunch. It’s like this at every step, and it will take a lot of steps to carry them up to those ruins.
With a terraformer’s eye, he takes in the view ahead, admiring the way the sweep of the mountains has conspired with the swirl of the storm to gather so much dust in this quiet corner. The dune field is larger than the city it swallowed. In fact, Radmer can see now that the city must extend beyond the eastern side of the eyewall, into even greater ruin.
Still, surprisingly, the northeast faces of many dunes are lined with grass and other plants, particularly at the base, or the seam between dunes, and it strikes him suddenly that this is not so much a desert as a battleground, between the forces that build and move the dunes, and the forces that seek to smother them with plant life. It’s the terraforming drama itself, writ small.
Nor is this place particularly dry. Indeed, emerging from the base of a high dune, a little stream flows in bursts, with minor flash floods of water surging every twenty seconds or so. Gloo-OOP! Gloo-OOP! like a kind of geological clock, ticking away the empty millennia. Bruno pauses here, admiring.
“I should like to study this regularity,” he says, sounding wistful. “How do deep sand and shallow water conspire in this way? Tick, tock!”
But Radmer doesn’t have to remind him there’s a war on, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Bruno watches four complete cycles, and then he’s off toward Manassa again, without prompting. It’s not an easy walk; after a while, the crumbly yielding softness of the sand fatigues the calf muscles, the ankles, the tendons along the top of the foot. Maybe a camel would feel at home on a surface like this, but few other creatures are adapted for it; Radmer is keenly aware that he’s a primate of seashore and savannah and forest. He can climb a rock or a tree without difficulty, but his evolution doesn’t know this place.
Still, they find their way. The crests of the dunes are almost like roads, extending for winding kilometers. On either side the dunes drop away into hollows a hundred meters deep. On the face of a dune, the undisturbed ground is a tiger-stripe pattern of brown and black, or beige and dark gray. The lighter sand seems to accumulate in the hollows, with the darker sand following along the ridgelines.