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Enforcers, which are nearly as capable.
We can take care of ourselves, Mursk pointed out, with only a trace of
sullenness. Wehave, for a thousand years. We didn t have robots when we
escaped from Barnard.
No, Bruno agreed, but you needed them to survive your midcourse accident.
And at any rate you work for me now, which is more dangerous than you seem to
imagine.
chapter twelve
in which a frontier is
finally opened
Was it a sad moment? A happy one? A momentof triumph or the passing of a
triumphant age? Was it all of the above?
The kilometer-wide neutronium bore was a cylinder of mirror-bright impervium,
and as it chewed its way through Lunar bedrock consuming oxides of iron and
silicon at one end and excreting neubles at the other it made a sound like the
end of a world. A never-ending detonation of antimatter, yes, a crushing of
atomic bonds and atomic nuclei, a crushing of matter itself into dense neutron
paste.
Architect Laureate Conrad Ethel Mursk stood behind it at a safe distance,
along with his wife, Governor Adjudicate Xiomara Li Weng, and the very closest
members of his construction crew s inner circle. Watching and thinking,
celebrating and mourning. Not talking, because the sound had already tattered
their eardrums, pulverized their fibrediamond-reinforced hearing bones. If
they stood here long enough, the sound still skeletally conducted through the
ground would deafen them at the cerebrum level as well, and finally bruise the
soft meat of their brains into unthinking goo. In Conrad s outfit, sound
levels were measured not in decibels but in Minutes To Kill, and this one
pegged the meter at MTK 15.
There were no standards or limits per se, although it was generally
recognized that at levels higher than this, useful work became alot more
difficult. Even 15 was pushing it, hard. But the people of Sol were tough, and
the survivors of Barnard tougher still, and with a fax machine handy the
assembled group had little thought for its safety.
Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world.
Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands
of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any
conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother
installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the
others carried rock burner lamps multispectral lasers which cast white spots
whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six
degrees of arc no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could
ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts which at short range was enough to
vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone.
Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly
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rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous
piece of equipment it really was.
And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the
stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the
bore s mechanical anus and settle under the influence of straining gravity
lasers to the tunnel floor.
WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the
grasers carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.
And that was that. Thelast neuble. The thundering machine the last of its
kind still operating rumbled to a halt.
The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one
hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on
the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this
tunnel was collapsed.
HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel s space suit.
Well done, all, Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could
hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.
Xmary offered herCONGRATULATIONS!!!! , and the four others exchanged the
visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence
and timeliness of their work.
COULDN T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU,BOSS , Bell offered, and Conrad wondered
why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on,
Luna or ratherLune would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology
teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette s
surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty
years.
THANKS,AND LIKEWISE , Conrad assured him.THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE
GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE .SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE ?
ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant,
dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible
soda-silica-lime material old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine
would dispense without authorization. And Conrad s crew dutifully smashed
these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them with more enthusiasm than
hope toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.
Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and
popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other s suits before
it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure
he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for
change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days harried and hopeful
and deeply fulfilling would be replaced by something new, and nothing would
ever be the same.
And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative
was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death a lame
and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer.
But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in
the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.
Ah, well.
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CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily.I WANT THAT LAST
PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS .
SURE,BOSS , Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could
convey.
That was thereallyprivate ceremony. The semiprivateone occurred four hours
later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including
a few hundred retirees who d wandered away from the project before its
completion.
They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry,
barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.
You ve done excellent work here, he told them all. And God willing, we ll
see each other again someday, on a grander project still.
Crush Venus! Crush Venus! the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a
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