Moonstar

by David Gerrold

  I give it willingly.

  It’s a vampire, Jobe. It feeds upon your time. It’s killing you.

  The screen was flickering. Enticing. Safe retreat, the screen. And betrayal. Flicker. Flicker.

  “—one moment please.” Flicker. Beep. “—no way to predict how severe the effects will be. Strong shelter is advised immediately for the islands bordering the shield. Evacuation is recommended for the islands of—”

  “What the—?”

  “Shhh!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Erdik ship. Went through a plasma—”

  “Not the plasma,” someone corrected. “The focusing shield.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t—”

  “—at this time, the situation is still uncertain. Until we know how seriously the field has been torn, we cannot predict—”

  “Oh, Great Reethe, no!”

  “Shut up!”

  Someone was choking, or sobbing. Two Dakkarik were holding hands and sitting very close to each other. Jobe felt as if she were embedded in ice. Sweat was dripping down her cold sides.

  “—have slightly more than thirteen hours before the Lagin eclipse. By that time, of course, we will have a better idea of what damage has been done and what the secondary effects will be; but the thirteen-hour margin also allows a chance to—”

  Flicker, flicker. Babble, babble. The Lagin! Kossarlin was in the Lagin!

  “—some of the effects can be minimized; Authority maintains its plasma-control stations for precisely this kind of emergency, although there has not been a torn shield since the Nonal Comet passed, a hundred and thirty-one years ago. We do know that as much as forty percent of the screen has been destroyed, perhaps more, in which case the Maintenance Authority will be unable to prevent the—”

  Jobe sat alone. Unable to watch. Unable to leave. What had happened to her innocent shadow-murals? This was pain! Her retreat had been ripped away from her, and she was nailed to her bench in fear. Her stomach had dropped away, a sickening gulp in her belly, and her ears were roaring with her heartbeat. This was real! She knew too much about the plasmas; everybody did, it was taught at elementary levels. They were fragile. They had to be maintained. They had to be protected. If they were destroyed, it could mean the end of the Satlik biosphere. The end of life. The screen flickered, and flickered again.

  “Look! Already there are weather effects,” someone cried in horror.

  “Nonsense. This is direct feed from Tarralon.” A representation of the planet, a shadow-cone projected on it.

  “—transverse across the Lagin Shield. The red line there. As you can see, the ship passed between the focusing satellites and the plasma proper. It’s theorized that the localized singularity of the Erdik drive generators created a specificity of fringing within the field, overloading the field and destroying it.

  Why the satellite shut down and did not immediately begin constructing a new focusing field is still being investigated. The second Lagin satellite is still trying to maintain its functions, but an elliptical shield requires two generators. The plasma has now stretched into an egg-shaped with most of the material moving southward into the disrupted area; the southern part of the field has begun to bulge dangerously. It is possible that if the field continues to weaken and extend, then the plasma could expand beyond its threshold density and dissipate beyond repair—if the field does not collapse upon itself first. There is at least the singular blessing that the Erdik captain did not realize the damage she was doing. The word from the Erdik embassy is that she believed erroneously that her engines had been shut down, when in fact they were only idling, and creating the singularity disturbance. We will have more on that later. Had she realized what was happening and tried to move out of the way, she might have done worse damage, disrupting the fields of both satellites—”

  Lagin Shield. Lagin Shield. Named after the first Satlik to mother a child on the new world.

  All of the plasmas were approximately equal in size. Each one served as an ecliptor to split the midday of the area it was synchronous to, as well as a nightside reflector for its darkday. Without a shield, neither would occur.

  The Lagin was Jobe’s home.

  “—worst effects are expected in the southern half, where the plasma is continuing to bulge—are working on the fields now—?

  How high would the temperatures climb? Kossarlin was in the Southern Reach of Lagin.

  The screen went blank, then there was an image of the Erdik ambassador and her aides going into an emergency session of the High Synod. A voice was making noises about aid—whatever either of the two Erdik shuttles now at Porta might implement.

  A map, and then a voice. “—first predictions are in now. The worst affected areas will be here, here and—”

  “Oh, Reethe! No!”

  “For Dakka’s sake, be quiet!”

  “That’s my home!” Jobe’s heart was knotted, it pounded in her chest like a bomb.

  “—will evacuate as many as we can—”

  “I’ve got to get home!”

  “That’s the worst thing you could do.”

  “Shut her up.”

  “She’s distraught, can’t you see?”

  “—this just in now, the field is collapsing! Emergency measures are being taken—”

  “Those bleeding, stinging, sucking Erdik!”

  “Hey—watch it!”

  “Hold her back, hey!”

  “Hold her down.”

  “Get the Healer.”

  “Take it easy, Jobe—everything’s going to be all right!”

  “Let go! I have to get home! My family!”

  “We all have families—”

  “No—!”

  “All right, Jobe. All right. It’s going to be—”

  “No, it isn’t! You don’t understand. We have babies. The babies can’t stand the heat! The temperatures are going to kill them!”

  “—Erdik have reassured the High Synod that they will do whatever possible—”

  “Oww! Watch her nails!”

  “Let go of me, you stinging spawn!”

  Don’t hit her! She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “Where’s the Healer?”

  “—no way of generating new plasma on this scale—”

  There were arms all over her. And hands. She bit and slapped and clawed, but there were too many.

  “Easy, Jobe. Easy.”

  “No, no, no, no. Noooo—”

  “Listen to me, Jobe!”

  “—at least a month before dissolution is complete—”

  “Listen to me, you stupid fish!” Slap.

  Jobe bit at something blurred. And again. Frenzied.

  “—emergency shadow squares. However, light pressure effects would make this solution difficult at best. The problem is not initial mobilization so much as maintenance—”

  “Damn Dakka!”

  “Jobe, listen to us. You’re safest here. Your family will be taken care of, there’s time!”

  “—already under discussion, reparations for damages and—”

  Something buzzed on her arm, then everything went fuzzy . . .

  “Oh, no—please, nooo—”

  . . . and went out.

  The screen had promised safety from reality, and now, maliciously, had thrust her headlong into it instead.

  Poor Jobe.

  “Option was under the Nona Shield; next west was Bundt, beyond that, Lagin. As the day came up, we could see that there was one less moondrop in the western sky. Lagin should have glowed just above the far horizon, its silvery lens shifting through its phases as the day turned past; on darkdays, because of the angle of reflection of its light, it was reduced, a glimmering hint just on the edge of visibility. Now there was nothing there but a pale amorphous aura, dimming in the sunlight even as we watched.

  “The Lagin plasma was seventy percent gone now—and still breaking up. Instead of two sundays of nine and a h
alf hours each, split by a seven-and-three-quarter-hour eclipse, the area beneath the lost Lagin umbrella would now be seared by a twenty-six-hour blast of atomic radiation every time the planet turned. Temperatures in the area would soon be reaching six degrees Celsius, or more. The islands of the Lagin Circle would be unlivable in days. Kossarlin was in the Lagin—I would not accept that it was dying now; I would not believe that anything could hurt it—Kossarlin was home, and home would be forever.

  “But all day long, Authority was on the air, the litany repeated: ‘No hope for saving anything, the islands there are lost, who know how long, perhaps forever.’ How many homes? How many lives? How many family circles shattered? I felt a cold burning fear—where was my family now? I could not imagine Kuvig abandoning Kossarlin for anything. And yet—Authority spoke of exodus and complete evacuation. Lagin was turning into desert now.

  “The words went on forever. They described in vivid detail how the disaster was developing and spreading. Like a glowing molten meteor dropped in a crater lake, it spread its steaming ripples outward, boiling and burning everything it touched. All of us at Option listened horrified as Authority detailed evacuation efforts in the stricken circle and the preparations being made to receive the refugees who were already streaming eastward. Already there were squalls and fogs to make the sailing treacherous; an overloaded barge had been capsized north of Cameron, three hundred souls were lost in stingfish waters. Who knew how many more craft had disappeared unreported? Hurricanes and water-spouts were predicted for a score of triads; the Lagin Circle writhed in its attempts to reestablish its stability in its new, much hotter range. There would be vaster storms to come, maybe even tidal shocks. The Lagin was not dying peacefully.

  “And the Lagin Circle was only the focus of the disaster—the effects would spread far wider still, thousands of kilometers beyond the Lagin borders. There was no circle west of Lagin, just high desert, but the circle eastward, Bundt, depended on the Lagin Shield for a calm west border, and on its darkday moonstar for almost half their light. They would feel it worst—they were a border circle now; they would feel the wrath of angry winds scouring them with desert sands and burning water. The sudden wrench to their ecology as heat poured in from the maddened west would destroy much of their crops. There would be famines soon in Bundt.

  “Authority feared that not only Bundt but Nona, too, would be badly damaged. Heat and storms are born in borderlands, but they’re raised in circles. The highland deserts west of Lagin were the Fathers of All Storms, and the edges of the shield umbrella were the cauldrons of the huuru, where the warm air meets the cold and neither can or will retreat. The now unshielded Lagin Circle would probably breed great new scours, hurling them at Bundt, seasons of them, battering across the seas, raising walls of water like mountains, rushing across the atolls and the islands, a hundred and a half kilometers an hour—all the fury of the legendary storms of ice and fire. We would have seasons of uncertainty for many years to come.

  “Authority was going to dust the sky to absorb some of the heat and light, hoping at least to slow the heating of the circle and reduce actinic searing—at least until the Lagin was evacuated. They were urging those who lived in Bundt and Nona—that included Option, of course—to prepare strong shelters insulated for the cold of the reduced darkdays, strengthened against the heat and winds and storms to come—just how strong they’d be, we did not know. They might be mild at first, but as the ripples of the heat-scour spread, the effects would gather cumulatively—until the Lagin Circle reached its new permanent temperature cycle; then the storms would start to level off—but slowly.

  “And when—if ever—might the shield be restored? It had taken more than thirty years to build; it might take as long to do again. And when could they begin? The new Bogin umbrella had just begun to fill—it would be many years before they could do something about the Lagin. No, that circle was a memory now; it was lost forever. The sound of those words scraped at my bones; I didn’t want to hear them. The frontier was set back fifty years—but this was my home they spoke of! I watched and raged and watched some more—they filled me with drugs to make me calm, and still I raged until they would not let me listen to the words or see the pictures on the screens.

  “As in the child-chants we used to sing while skipping rope, there was ‘Chaos above, chaos below’—only this time, no one knew ‘which way Reethe would blow.’ This chaos was beyond the power of the gods. This was one more way the Erdik had devalued them. The ‘Tears of Reethe’ had begun almost immediately—the warm salty storms that came out of the west; they reach us even as far east as Option, splattering hotly on the mossy hills, not in gentle drizzles as we knew them, but in fitful sobs and torrents that went on for hours till the hillsides ran with mud.

  “As the skies turned darker still, the community of Option fragmented into spastic attempts at action; none of us knew exactly what the local effects might be, and the situation was further confused by the fears and emotions of a hundred and fifty-seven skittish adolescents, all at the most unstable period of our young lives. Perhaps in the days to follow a consent of purpose might occur, but there were only thirty elders on the island, some only a few years post-blush themselves, and they were as bound by their own concerns as they were by their responsibilities to us. With all those crosscurrents of fear, a maelstrom of paralysis and doubt was inevitable.

  “And it seemed that I was at its center; my family, Kossarlin, we were the targets of the Erdik vengeance. And yet—I saw our island in my mind as somehow still intact within the center of a cauldron, despite the storms that raged around it. I had no experience with which to imagine otherwise. And we’d survived the great scours of 286, had we not?

  “But contact with home was impossible. Authority had preempted all the channels. As the disaster spread, they told only of its broadcast outlines; it was too big to dwell on details. My ignorance of where my family was only increased my determination to be with them. I could not see Kuvig or Suko willingly giving up the island—they’d stay and fight to save it, despite the heat, the storms, the winds, the searing baleful sun. I belonged beside them—

  “Were circumstances otherwise, I would never have been able to leave Option with such ease. Had I been more popular, had I had a friend close enough to care, or had the elders or the other younglings not been equally concerned about their won home-circles, I would never have escaped. But no matter; had I been more in tune with all the others, I would not have been so panicked anyway, I could have hidden in the soft cotton of their reassurances while fear gnawed at my heart. But without that reassurance, the fear gnawed its way to the surface and I ran. Option didn’t matter to me anymore—I didn’t know whether I was Rethrik or Dakkarik, I didn’t care. Both ways had seemed only to bring me pain surpassing their advantages.

  “I had to leave, I didn’t care, I had no ties to Option. Let the island die, or let it live, it wasn’t part of me. Kossarlin was, and I went, away from this awful place and back toward the warm safe afternoons of childhood. The shield had gone down on Three; by Fiveday I was gone. I took a boat across to Peakskill, the tower at the focus of the crescent; from there I caught the local out past Fallen Wall to Wardy, then to Koah, and at last to Tarralon.

  “I arrived at Tarralon on Nine, the second damaged darkday. Nona was the eastern moonstar, a pale gibbous glowing. The Bundt was crescent, poised at zenith, soon to be a shining ringstar; it blinked with navigation lights—but in the west, where Lagin should have glowed symmetrical to Nona, there was just a feeble nimbus, all that remained of its proud light. We looked upward and we shivered, more from fear than cold.

  “The docks at Tarralon were bleak and gray, mists crept along the streets—there wasn’t heat enough to burn them off. All the night lamps had been lit and would remain so until sunday; all the houses glowed as if this were a festive night. And the people on the avenues laughed shrilly, as if this were a Carnival of Fear, the wild final night of it, the Night of Huuru Thrills. They
milled about in clusters and in varieties of dress, not quite succeeding at covering their tension—was this twilight mist a day or night? What manners were appropriate? Strangers stopped and spoke to strangers, seeking reassurance, or, if nothing else, a mutual exchange of horrors, each hoping that the other’s was not as bad as hers, each hoping that her own personal disaster was truly at the focus of the larger one so she could claim priority of aid. Everywhere were nervous crowds, each person seeking affirmation in the reality of others, as if the insistence of enough of us would return the shattered world to normal.

  “I was buffeted by the tide of their emotions, and frightened that someone from Option would be coming after me—if they did, I never saw them; I doubt they bothered. Tarralon had no Clemency Mountains to shelter it like Option, and it was closer to the exposed border. Should a howling wrath-filled storm come raging from the west, Tarralon would take the brunt of it. This was a city singing hopeful while teetering on the edge of panic—and enjoying the sweet delicious thrill of it—and in that, at least, this was a populace united. They had a better idea now of what horrors to expect, not just the heat, but famines afterward, and storms and deaths—the Lagin area had been on its way to becoming the richest of agricultural circles. With that gone, and Bundt’s crops endangered, the people here feared that the reality to come would be worse than any expectations Authority might make. They were already building massive depots for storing and distributing a rationed commonstore.

  “I spent that first day on the docks, going frantically from ship to ship, seeking passage south and west. Everywhere people were rushing, refugees arriving, others fleeing farther east. I carried my few things in a woven grip and I was bumped and buffeted by dockhands and uncaring sailors as I moved along the narrow walks. As darkday brooded on, turning even colder and bleaker, my fear turned to frustration and a gnawing, pressing sense of doom. I was unsettled by the missing moonstar, I kept looking for the Lagin—and finding only that vague patch of glow instead. Yes, it was really happening—just like the tele said. Frequently, others too would stop and look up toward the sky, it was a common fear—it felt like night, this dark day, and throughout the milling crowds kept watch and prayed, as if somehow the shield might appear again. ‘Please, Reethe—make it like it didn’t happen.’