The Wellstone

Chapter twenty-one. Walking home

By the light of a gas lamp, Radmer takes a final flask of dinite from the chemry and closes its little brass door for the last time. It’s a clever device, worthy of its Highrock creators: without electricity, using only catalyst beds and the mechanical energy of a foot pump, it combines the gases in the air with water from the sea, to produce a paste that any spark will explode, even in the vacuum of space. He’s been warned not to get this paste on his skin; even the sweet, waxy smell of it sometimes gives him headaches and heart palpitations.

The stuff has a longer name that he can’t remember, but the word “dinite” is familiar to any soldier who’s ever had shells of it bursting overhead. This formula is a bit tamer than the military equivalent, but only a bit. He sprinkles fine sand into the flask as well—an operation which, in the words of his armorer, Mika, “will reduce the energy and enhance the impulse of each detonation.”

The predawn morning has yet to warm up, and finally finishing this chore is a numbing concept; he’s been pumping sixteen hours a day for over a week, and his legs feel ready to drop off with exhaustion. From an energy standpoint, it’s as if he had to personally hike up out of Varna’s gravity well with the space capsule on his back, and then kill enough orbital velocity—with his feet!—for the capsule’s path to dip down into Lune’s atmosphere for reentry. Actually it’s much worse than that, because the pump and the chemry and the mechanics of combustion offer layers and layers of inefficiency. And he’s also had to make oxygen candles with a different chemry of similar design, which eats salt water and bits of iron, so really he’s had to complete that hike twenty times over. By now he’s so sick of it that he’s almost relieved at the prospect of returning to space, and thence to the war itself. Almost.

Luckily, the atmosphere here on Varna contains a lot more nitrogen than the plant and microbial life strictly require. As an air thickener, nitrogen leaves a lot to be desired—you need a large planette to contain it over geologic time—but such things had always been a matter of fashion, back when planettes were still being built. Which is fortunate, because the refueling of the brass sphere would have taken a lot longer on a noble-gas world. One cannot spin explosives from xenon and neon.

“Handmade,” Bruno de Towaji remarks, running his fingers along the lines of the chemry’s brass case. “A single device for a single purpose. I see armies of craftsmen, digging ore from the mountainsides, smelting and refining and beating it into shape for this one use. Extraordinary.”

He’s been around the chemry for days, but now, in the lamplight and the gloom of early morning—their last morning—he seems to really notice it for the first time. His tone suggests surprise and admiration, as well as condescension. He might be describing a piece of primitive art. He is wearing the felt johnnysuit Radmer has brought for him, to go beneath the topcoat and leathers that will protect him from the cold of space. It’s hardly a garment to be snobby in.

“I’ve used worse,” Radmer tells him as he fishes the packing trowel from a compartment on the sphere’s exterior.

“Yes, I suppose you have. Life in the colonies was—”

“Fine,” Radmer tells him, a bit testily. “It was fine. No worse than we have on Lune today. A handmade world requires humans in a way that the Queendom never did. Over time, one learns to appreciate this.”

Bruno makes a sour face, all shadows and beard. “Requires them as fuel, perhaps. Uses them up. Works them over. Kills them.”

Radmer glances at the blue-green half-disc of Lune, hanging peacefully in the starry sky, then favors his one-time king with a hard, unfriendly glare. “Would you rather live forever, Sire? Truly?”

Bruno does not reply, so Radmer—who after all has pressing business on that squozen, half-sized moon up there—gets back to work. He mixes up the grit and paste in the flask, digs a wad of it out with the tip of the trowel, and starts slathering and packing it into the last of his course-correction charges. It’s a delicate operation—a slip of his hand could blow a substantial chunk out of the planette—but the danger doesn’t faze him. Radmer and danger have been on close, personal terms for longer than he cares to remember.

“We didn’t realize what sentence we’d imposed,” Bruno muses. His tone is wistful and full of regret.

“No one sees the future, Sire.”

“No, I suppose not. But mistakes are supposed to educate us, yes? Instead we have thirteen colonies, thirteen failures, and none of us any wiser for the experience.”

“Millions of pages were written on the subject,” Radmer points out impatiently.

But Bruno dismisses this with a shake of his head. “Analysis. Rhetoric. Imperfect analogy. None of us understood what was happening. Are there messages which cannot be copied? Organisms which cannot reproduce? Our Queendom, so simple and inevitable in its logic, rested on a foundation of prior society. There were hidden variables that refused to transcribe to the colony environment. There must have been.”

Radmer hasn’t had time to consider this subject in recent years, but now with the clarity of hindsight it seems simple enough. “I think it was just a matter of money. A network of collapsiters, spaced every hundred AU from here to Barnard, would have made the Queendom continuous. Or directly connected, at any rate. If the carrying capacity of Planet Two had been higher there’d’ve been no need for a second colony.”

Bruno grimaces. “That’s four thousand collapsiters, lad. At least ten-to-the-fourteenth tons. We’d’ve had to dismantle a moon just to make the neubles to make the black holes—a whole second Nescog, and never mind the energy cost of shipping them.”

“Impractical,” Radmer agrees. “Perhaps a fleet of cargo ships could have served the same purpose. Sending one vessel—even a fine one—is quite a leap of faith, if you think about it.”

“I have,” Bruno says. “And the shame will never leave me. You’re quite right to despise me for it.”

Radmer looks up in surprise. “Sire, have I blamed you for what happened? I don’t think anyone ever did. No one knows everything, sees everything.”

“A king should,” Bruno complains. “A civilization should. We had the wherewithal to reason it out.”

“Aye,” Radmer says. “That we did.”

The correction charge is now fully packed—and wildly explosive—so Radmer drops the trowel into the dinite flask with a clink of metal on glass, and then sets the flask down in the shadows beside the chemry.

“We’ll leave this equipment behind,” he tells Bruno matter-of-factly. “And more. It’s necessary, to compensate for your weight on board the capsule. If you like, we can store it in your cottage rather than littering the ground.”

Bruno shrugs. “It hardly matters.”

“To the immorbid, Sire, little things always matter. Perhaps you’ll return here someday. Or someone will.”

He finds the charge housing’s end cap nozzle and screws it back on. Several of these have blown out—burst their threads when the dinite charges went off during the outbound leg of the trip. But the charge cases themselves unscrew, so the damaged ones have been removed and the intact ones shuffled around so that the capsule has a reasonable balance of corrections available in each of the six ordinal axes.

“Perhaps I will,” Bruno says unconvincingly.

Now Radmer is impatient again. “I’m not taking you to certain death, you know. I’ve lived down there a long time. The people are as kind and wonderful as people ever are, and they deserve our help.”

“Aye, and that’s the problem,” Bruno agrees, with his own little measure of anger. “They need help and care and kindness, and then they die. And then another generation needs help, and they die as well. On and on it goes. Before the Queendom, keeping dogs was like that: eventually they would exhaust all patience, all love, all grief, until the thought of caring for one more dog became an obscenity.”

Radmer slams and latches the storage compartment on the skin of the brass sphere and moves to open another, which spills out yards of silk and twine. He says nothing.

Bruno wipes his mouth, and examines the new Timoch boots Radmer has given him. “And yet. And yet, there was always another mutt, wasn’t there. Wagging its tail.”

“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.