Swanwick, Michael - Griffins Egg

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Press. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology in the United

States of America only.

GRIFFIN'S EGG

Michael Swanwick

The moon? It is a griffin's egg,

Hatching to-morrow night.

And how the little boys will watch

With shouting and delight

To see him break the shell and stretch

And creep across the sky.

The boys will laugh. The little girls,

I fear, may hide and cry . . .

VACHEL LINDSAY

This book is dedicated to the Loud Philadelphians:

Tess Kissinger, Bob Walters, Susan Casper, Gardner Dozois, Marianne

Porter, Mike Ford emeritus, Greg Frost, Joanne Burke, David Axler, Ray

Ridenour (hon.), Tim Sullivan emeritus, and occasionally Janet and Karl

Kofoed.

The sun cleared the mountains. Gunther Weil raised a

hand in salute, then winced as the glare hit his eyes

in the instant it took his helmet to polarize.

He was hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater

industrial park. The Chatterjee B reactor had gone

critical forty hours before dawn, taking fifteen

remotes and a microwave relay with it, and putting out

a power surge that caused collateral damage to every

factory in the park. Fortunately, the occasional

meltdown was designed into the system. By the time the

sun rose over the Rhaeticus highlands, a new reactor

had been built and was ready to go online.

Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance

from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare

Vaporum road. Close by the city, discarded

construction machinery and damaged assemblers sat in

open-vacuum storage, awaiting possible salvage. Ten

kilometers out, a pressurized van had exploded,

scattering machine parts and giant worms of insulating

foam across the landscape. At twenty-five kilometers,

a poorly graded stretch of road had claimed any number

of cargo skids and shattered running lights from

passing traffic.

Forty kilometers out, though, the road was clear, a

straight, clean gash in the dirt. Ignoring the voices

at the back of his skull, the traffic chatter and

automated safety messages that the truck routinely fed

into his transceiver chip, he scrolled up the

topographicals on the dash.

Right about here.

Gunther turned off the Mare Vaporum road and began

laying tracks over virgin soil. "You've left your

prescheduled route," the truck said. "Deviations from

schedule may only be made with the recorded permission

of your dispatcher."

"Yeah, well." Gunther's voice seemed loud in his

helmet, the only physical sound in a babel of ghosts.

He'd left the cabin unpressurized, and the insulated

layers of his suit stilled even the conduction rumbling

from the treads. "You and I both know that so long as

I don't fall too far behind schedule, Beth Hamilton

isn't going to care if I stray a little in between."

"You have exceeded this unit's linguistic

capabilities."

"That's okay, don't let it bother you." Deftly he

tied down the send switch on the truck radio with a

twist of wire. The voices in his head abruptly died.

He was completely isolated now.

"You said you wouldn't do that again." The words,

broadcast directly to his trance chip, sounded as deep

and resonant as the voice of God. "Generation Five

policy expressly requires that all drivers maintain

constant radio--"

"Don't whine. It's unattractive."

"You have exceeded this unit's linguistic--"

"Oh, shut up." Gunther ran a finger over the

topographical maps, tracing the course he'd plotted the

night before: Thirty kilometers over cherry soil,

terrain no human or machine had ever crossed before,

and then north on Murchison road. With luck he might

even manage to be at Chatterjee early.

He drove into the lunar plain. Rocks sailed by to

either side. Ahead, the mountains grew imperceptibly.

Save for the treadmarks dwindling behind him, there was

nothing from horizon to horizon to show that humanity

had ever existed. The silence was perfect.

Gunther lived for moments like this. Entering that

clean, desolate emptiness, he experienced a vast

expansion of being, as if everything he saw, stars,

plain, craters and all, were encompassed within

himself. Bootstrap City was only a fading dream, a

distant island on the gently rolling surface of a stone

sea. Nobody will ever be first here again, he

thought. Only me.

A memory floated up from his childhood. It was

Christmas eve and he was in his parents' car, on the

way to midnight Mass. Snow was falling, thickly and

windlessly, rendering all the familiar roads of

Dusseldorf clean and pure under sheets of white. His

father drove, and he himself leaned over the front seat

to stare ahead in fascination into this peaceful,

transformed world. The silence was perfect.

He felt touched by solitude and made holy.

The truck plowed through a rainbow of soft greys,

submerged hues more hints than colors, as if something

bright and festive held itself hidden just beneath a

coating of dust. The sun was at his shoulder, and when

he spun the front axle to avoid a boulder, the truck's

shadow wheeled and reached for infinity. He drove

reflexively, mesmerized by the austere beauty of the

passing land.

At a thought, his peecee put music on his chip.

Stormy Weather filled the universe.

He was coming down a long, almost imperceptible slope

when the controls went dead in his hands. The truck

powered down and coasted to a stop. "Goddamn you, you

asshole machine!" he snarled. "What is it this time?"

"The land ahead is impassible."

Gunther slammed a fist on the dash, making the maps

dance. The land ahead was smooth and sloping, any

unruly tendencies tamed eons ago by the Mare Imbrium

explosion. Sissy stuff. He kicked the door open and

clambered down.

The truck had been stopped by a baby rille: a

snakelike depression meandering across his intended

route, looking for all the world like a dry streambed.

He bounded to its edge. It was fifteen meters across,

and three meters down at its deepest. Just shallow

enough that it wouldn't show up on the topos. Gunther

returned to the cab, slamming the door noiselessly

behind him.

"Look. The sides aren't very steep. I've been down

worse a hundred times. We'll just take it slow and

easy, okay?"

"The land ahead is impassible," the truck said.

"Please return to the originally scheduled course."

Wagner was on now. Tannhauser. Impatiently, he

thought it off.

"If you're so damned heuristic, then why won't you

ever listen to reason?" He chewed his lip angrily,

gave a quick shake of his head. "No, going back would

put us way off schedule. The rille is bound to peter

out in a few hundred meters. Let's just follow it

until it does, then angle back to Murchison. We'll be

at the park in no time."

Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road.

By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders

ached with tension. "Where are we?" he asked sourly.

Then, before the truck could answer, "Cancel that."

The soil had turned suddenly black. That would be the

ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine. Their

railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid

the client factories, and so their tailings hit the

road first. That meant he was getting close.

Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck

treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by

blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders. In quick

order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks:

Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing

fantail, Krupp funfzig fantail. He knew them all. G5

did the robotics for the lot.

A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped

past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast

as pebbles. The remote driving it waved a spindly arm

in greeting. He waved back automatically, and wondered

if it was anybody he knew.

The land hereabouts was hacked and gouged, dirt and

boulders shoved into careless heaps and hills, the

occasional tool station or Oxytank Emergency Storage

Platform chopped into a nearby bluff. A sign floated

by: TOILET FLUSHING FACILITIES 1/2 KILOMETER. He made

a face. Then he remembered that his radio was still

off and slipped the loop of wire from it. Time to

rejoin the real world. Immediately his dispatcher's

voice, harsh and staticky, was relayed to his trance

chip.

"--ofabitch! Weil! Where the fuck are you?"

"I'm right here, Beth. A little late, but right

where I'm supposed to be."

"Sonofa--" The recording shut off, and Hamilton's

voice came on, live and mean. "You'd better have a

real good explanation for this one, honey."

"Oh, you know how it is." Gunther looked away from

the road, off into the dusty jade highlands. He'd like

to climb up into them and never come back. Perhaps he

would find caves. Perhaps there were monsters: vacuum

trolls and moondragons with metabolisms slow and

patient, taking centuries to move one body's-length,

hyperdense beings that could swim through stone as if

it were water. He pictured them diving, following

lines of magnetic force deep, deep into veins of

diamond and plutonium, heads back and singing. "I

picked up a hitchhiker, and we kind of got involved."

"Try telling that to E. Izmailova. She's mad as

hornets at you."

"Who?"

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Copyright©1990byMichaelSwanwick,Allrightsreserved.PublishedbyarrangementwithSt.Martin'sPress.ForthepersonaluseofthosewhohavepurchasedtheESF1993AwardanthologyintheUnitedStatesofAmericaonly.GRIFFIN'SEGGMichaelSwanwickThemoon?Itisagriffin'segg,Hatchingto-morrownight.AndhowthelittleboyswillwatchWithshou...

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Swanwick, Michael - Griffins Egg

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