Chapter Eleven — Outside Influences

Princess Liesta hovered above Meshu Town, staring down at the unnatural activity and not certain what to think.

Her divinations were, after so long on earth, somewhat tilted toward finding trouble among people, so it was hardly a surprise that she would register issues in the cities.  The exact nature of the issue was novel, however.  She’d had to come see it for herself, because she didn’t actually understand the result of her divination, it was that odd.

People arguing in circles, everywhere.  A chatter of voices chewing over ancient, ancient history, trying to reconcile the royalist and reestablishment runic languages, and failing.  Of course they were failing; the two were incompatible, with a common origin but inevitably diverging.  It had only gotten worse over time, as the very awareness of those differences crystallized the gap between, and nobody had bothered with any real debate for years.

Here, it was being tried again, but only succeeding in creating frustration.  She barely needed her divinations to chart the waves of discontent washing through the streets and buildings, growing to just short of violence before hitting a barrier and washing back.  It seemed part of that final redoubt against a complete riot was her own runes, which had been implemented to prevent this kind of thing several steps before the boiling point.  The rest, she didn’t know, but could guess.

That said, there was no way the conflict would stay confined to words.  She could tell that the pressure was building as people got more and more frustrated, the conversations if anything more firmly establishing the vast gulf between the two traditions, the languages and ways of thinking.  Something was going to break, but she didn’t know what it was going to be.  However Hartson had managed to alter things – behaviors and probability, habits and habituation – it wasn’t going to be enough to stop a blow-up.  At which point she was going to have to step in.

With a sour look at the city below her, she energized her flight runes and zipped across the landscape, heading for the next settlement to see if it was similar.  Her normal divinations were, as before, not entirely useful just because she didn’t know how to interpret what they were telling her.  They weren’t designed as a remote viewing window, like some people thought, but rather an analysis of movement, energy, attitude.  Normally far more useful than trying to parse a city street at a distance, but less useful if she wasn’t familiar with the usual patterns.

Coming upon the walls of the next city, she found that there was a great and winding exodus along the roads, hundreds of lunarians trooping out and away.  Even from the air she could see that it wasn’t some happy thing, but rather a sullen one.  Which was better than a violent version of the same, being driven away with weapons and spells, but she had no idea where the column of royalists was going to go.

She eyed the city walls, more than a little tempted to go in and shake down whoever had decided to eject her people, and tell everyone on the road to go back home, but after some mulling it over she decided differently.  What mostly stopped her was the fact that this shouldn’t have happened to begin with.  It was that broad-scale influence in effect, which she still couldn’t divine directly, and there was no telling what would happen if she pressed it.  While her own power and prowess, a mastery and understanding of runes well beyond that of even Grandmeister, rendered her immune to such weak effects, others didn’t have such protections.

After a moment she swooped down to the head of the column, landing in front to accost the person leading them.  Nobody she recognized, but that wasn’t a surprise.  In fact, it would have been a suspicious coincidence if it was one of her few lunarian contacts.

“What happened?”  The question was blunt, but the lead lunarian had no trouble recognizing her as a fellow royalist, the sublime quality of her runework marking her of someone of high standing, though she was pretty sure he didn’t know she was Princess Liesta.

“The tension between us and the others was just too much, Grandmeister,” the man said, brimming over with resentment as he guessed at her rank.  “We knew something was coming, it was obvious!  So we decided to leave before something happened.”

“Understandable,” Liesta said, though the fact that the entire royalist population had decided to evacuate themselves en masse was not.  Once again, her runes were supposed to stop that kind of thing, though she had to admit it was preferable to a violent purge of the royalist presence.  She considered a moment, eyeing the train of sort-of-refugees, and then called on a different set of runes entirely.

While she still couldn’t easily teleport to earth, teleports and portals within the moon’s sphere of influence were considerably easier.  Still something only a runemaster of her caliber could manage, given the requirements to understand and empower such effects, but she had a few targets memorized, and one of them was a stronghold of royalist sentiment.  Also, large enough to absorb what looked to be two to three hundred refugees.  They could always go back once the crisis was over.

“I’m sending you to Rhaeticus City,” she said, a shimmering arch appearing in the middle of the road.  “Just for now.  We’ll get your homes back soon,” she reassured them, though she wasn’t sure how without breaking her own rules on keeping the war under control.  It was easier on Earth, outside of the lunar sphere of influence, to plan and consider, but staying here for too long meant she’d lose her objectivity.

“Rhaeticus City?”  The man said with surprise.  “That’s all the way over—”

“Quickly now,” she interrupted him.  “Portals are not free!”

“Yes, of course,” he said, turning around and waving at the line of people.  “Through the portal!” His own runes amplified his voice, though Liesta saw with approval that he was following royalist school doctrine and not making his words louder, but rather preventing attenuation and directing the sounds where he wanted.  The net result being that everyone heard him as if he were right next to them.  “Everyone, through the portal!”

He stood to one side, hustling people through in a way that was very reminiscent of the search-and-rescue people back on Earth.  Of course, the gestures were different, using the proper rune-resonant language and making sure people hastened through without stopping for questions.  The sight of her runes glowing at the Grandmeister level – really, above it, but most people didn’t think of anything higher – certainly helped.

It took longer than she would have liked, even with people picking up the pace and hauling their rune-wagons through the portal.  She did send a message through to Rhaeticus City to let them know what was going on, but nobody there had the proper broadcast runes to reply.  That was fine; they’d do what she told them.  When the last of the lunarians went through the portal, she released the conjuration and let it dissipate before lifting off again.

Liesta didn’t need to see any more cities.  Auditing the entire moon would be a waste of her limited time, since it was obvious that whoever it was – Hartson, if Administrator Ichabod was to be believed – was affecting everyone and everything.  It was, maybe, a sovereign level of power.  It was hard to tell, especially since there didn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to what was happening.  Causing chaos was easy, and that didn’t require sovereign-level power. 

She had already consulted Ike, but without access to Star Central there was little he could offer.  His administrative abilities, connections, and long history were without doubt, but his personal power was extremely limited.  On the other hand, there was another human around who had a professed interest in preventing anything major from happening. 

Mechaniacal was not lunarian, and the change from being a prisoner of the state to owning an estate was unprecedented.  Liesta didn’t envy her cousin the task of trying to work that one out, but the fact was that the supervillain had an actual legal residence on the lunar surface — and thus, a stake in it. 

The hillside manor that the human had purchased was not particularly nearby, nor did she have a teleport or portal anchor close to it, but at top speed it wasn’t much of a trip, either.  The waxing quarter of the Earth swept along the horizon as she followed the line of mountains, keeping her divinations up in case something resolved into an actual crisis.  The bubbling discontent, a pot that refused to boil, pinged steadily against her consciousness, but never congealed into anything actionable.

By the time she made it to Mechaniacal’s manor she was feeling quite put out, to the point where she decided to reduce the amount she was putting into the divinations.  Whatever was going on was in a holding pattern she had nothing to do with, and no way to affect just yet.  Probably, she thought, for the best that she was getting a consultation.

The supervillain’s house didn’t look much different than any well-to-do lunarian dwelling except for a few details.  The metal was the most glaring addition; a sort of decoration completely alien to lunarian sensibilities.  The moon just had no tradition of metalworking; runes didn’t need it or use it.  There was little ore in the regolith, and while they could have imported some from Earth, there had never really been a demand.  Especially with how expensive and restricted travel was between the two.

For a moment she considered just swooping in, but she remembered the impossible station out in deep space, with an actual office building docked to it.  The glimpse of that ruined machine, even with an incongruous armchair in the center, had felt like looking at an exposed organ, something that shouldn’t be revealed to the world.  Liesta was powerful, but power wasn’t some fungible thing that contested evenly in every avenue.  She could employ runes for effects that no tinker could manage, and the reverse.

She dropped down to the gate and inspected it, then rang the buzzer in the little gatehouse.  Something that Earth had been good for was readjusting her perceptions away from being a princess.  Having to wait on people, be the petitioner. She’d spent many years with the perspective of a princess and unparallelled master of runes, but then she had seen what unchecked hubris brought the supervillains of earth, the problems of idiocy and poor judgement that such an outlook brought.  She was glad that she’d shed that particular flaw. 

“Moonblast!”  The human’s cheerful voice came from a little box, technology imported from Earth, but from maybe three hundred years prior.  It was hard to tell, but certainly from a time before Tinkertown and softchips.  “What brings you by?”

“I’m not certain,” she said, choosing her words with care.  Supervillains didn’t work like heroes did; she could have stated the problems and any superhero would have leapt to assist.  With a supervillain, that was simply inviting an attempt at extortion, exploitation, or mockery.  “The entire moon seems to be undergoing an event.”

“Ah, yes.  An event.  That is certainly one way to describe things,” the tinker said with an incredibly annoying chuckle.  “Do come in, and we can discuss this event.”  The iron gates opened of their own accord, and she flew through a few inches off the ground, respecting the implicit boundaries.  A mechanical ratcheting and clicking heralded the courtyard reconfiguring itself.  Strips of brilliant grass and a few blazingly purple bushes were pulled under the ground and replaced with decorative posts and bunting that could have come straight out of the place where she grew up.

She wasn’t sure if it was more disturbing that Mechaniacal knew about it, or that he had the art pieces to hand.  Of course, she was no stranger to the estate, and it wasn’t hard to predict that she would visit again at some point, but it was still a bizarre piece of preparation.  She drifted past, the inner doors – physical doors, not the proper runic gates – opening to reveal Mechaniacal himself, complete with hat and cane.  He looked insufferably pleased with himself.

“Princess,” he greeted her, using her lunar title instead of her hero one.  “Welcome to my humble abode.”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, not really meaning it as he invited her in with a sweep of his cane.  She took in the interior of the manor at a glance, a little surprised at how few changes there were, then turned to him.  “Unfortunately, I’m not here to exchange pleasantries.  I’m here regarding what’s going on.  There has been a widespread change in the usual behavior of people, one that Administrator Ichabod credits to the human known as Isaac Hartson.”

“Yes, that seems about right,” Mechaniacal agreed, strolling along beside her toward a conservatory that looked out over the back garden.  “His particular talent does lend itself toward uncontrolled effects over a broad area.  An unusual approach, to be sure, and one that is ultimately limiting.  Though perhaps it is for the best that those limits exist.”

“You knew this was happening?” Liesta suppressed a flare of anger, instead stopping and staring down at Mechaniacal.  His carefree affectation was beginning to grate on her, but that wasn’t enough to justify being rude.  Or ruder than usual, anyway.  “Why didn’t you stop it?  Or at the very least notify someone?”

“In all, it’s not my business,” Mechaniacal said.  “The moon’s civil war is, in the general, not something that threatens Earth and, in the specific, not something where I even have knowledge enough to choose sides.  Or, put another way, between your side and their side I choose my side.”  He smiled broadly, then tapped his cane against the floor.  A mechanical trolley appeared from a side passage, trundling along with the whirr of clockwork, bearing a bottle of wine and two glasses.  “Please, sit.  I assume you are going to try and convince me to intervene on your behalf.”

“Not my behalf,” Liesta argued, reluctantly taking the lunarian-sized seat as Mechaniacal poured wine from the bottle into two glasses.  “On behalf of the lunarian people, whichever side of the war they are.  We have managed to keep the differences between the two sides from escalating into a genocidal war for years.  What’s going on here threatens that balance.” 

“By design, even,” Mechaniacal agreed, handing her a wineglass.  She took it with some reluctance, though she had to admit the last batch she’d tried from him was pretty good.  “Hartson’s stated goal is to end the war, and by preference not violently.”

“That’s incredibly stupid,” Liesta said, before she even thought about moderating her words.  “And impossible.”

“Yes, and that’s exactly why the war didn’t resolve itself a hundred-some years ago,” Mechaniacal said.  “Because it was decided it couldn’t.  Now, before you protest more, perhaps that was the correct decision at the time.  Is it still?  I don’t know, but Hartson might be uniquely positioned to find out.”

“Find out?”  Liesta scowled at Mechaniacal, but it wasn’t really him that was the target of her ire.  “This is not some science experiment or social paper.  This is the lives and livelihoods of everyone on the moon.”

“Exactly.  Some of whom felt that the endless stalemate, the slow grind of sporadic violence and even more sporadic annihilation, was not worth the cost anymore.”  Mechaniacal’s voice wasn’t accusing, but something inside her still flinched at it.  There was a cost to keeping the peace, and while Liesta was firmly convinced that it was worth it, it was still a cost. 

“I take it you’re not going to aid me in preventing this,” she said instead.

“My dear, there isn’t anything to prevent,” Mechaniacal told her.  “Hartson’s power isn’t some esoteric energy field that will snap back the moment he loses concentration.  His changes to reality are permanent.  If you convince him to stop, and he does, this still continues on.”

Liesta forgot the wineglass in her hand for a moment as she processed that, nearly spilling it on herself before recovering.  She had known that whatever cleanup was required would be substantial, just from the shift in actions and attitudes, but this was a step beyond that.  Only Hartson would be able to undo what had been done, if it could be at all.

“If that is so, then moon-wide violence might not be far behind,” she said grimly.  “He might want to avoid it, but the two sides cannot be reconciled.  We are two people in one body, two moons in one space, foreign to each other and with a long history of blood between us.  If the flame ever catches, it will burn down everything.”

“Dramatic, but I have no reason to believe your appraisal is inaccurate,” Mechaniacal observed, unperturbed.  He sipped at his wineglass, Earth-brown eyes watching her.  “However, what can you expect if you keep piling up dry wood?  From what I have observed the civil war is the sort of bugbear that cannot be easily put to rest, and it will fight no matter when and where you try.”

“That’s a lot of words to say very little,” Liesta said dryly, unimpressed by Mechaniacal’s self-important meandering.  “You realize that you will be caught in the middle of widespread unrest, and there are some people besides myself with very potent runes.  You’re not lunarian, but as an outsider you’ll be even more of a target.”

“I am perfectly capable of defending myself,” Mechaniacal said mildly, glancing out at the rear garden.  Liesta followed his gaze, but didn’t see anything out of place.  Her divinatory runes told a different story, vibrating with warnings about things of ominous import, but nothing seemed to be active at the moment.

“Perhaps you are, but this is the sort of thing that will swamp the whole moon.  You can keep this place intact, I don’t doubt, but what will you do when everything else is burning?  I very much doubt that you want to look out your window here and see nothing but fire and ash.”

“Indeed I do not,” Mechanical confirmed.  “This is, however, your moon, your people, and a problem you have been refusing to solve.  I can understand if you are wroth that your hand is being forced, but it is something you have to address.”

“I had been managing it just fine until earthlings interfered,” Liesta retorted.  “I’m not sure what is happening now can be managed.”

“You will resolve it, or I will,” Mechaniacal said, in what was distinctly a threat despite his genial tone.  “And you do not want me to choose sides.”

***

Isaac didn’t find that he was much happier after some sleep, even if he was far clearer-headed.  Being responsible for a coup was an absolutely bizarre feeling, especially when maybe it was necessary.  He was massively relieved that it had been a bloodless one, more or less, because if Lia’s granddad had been hurt it would have been hard to keep perspective. 

Actually, he still needed perspective.  From what he’d seen out and about, there wasn’t just one way that the change was trending.  There was no clear current, just chaos.  A lot of nothing, working at cross purposes, which made it not much different than before.

That would have to change.

“I think I’m going to have a chat with whatsisname.  Ostra, you said it was?”  He had a hard time keeping track of the multisyllabic lunarian names.  No wonder they adopted nicknames so readily, if that was how everyone was called.

“Yes,” Lia said, the translation rune telling him that she was still unhappy.  Not that he blamed her, but even if he agreed that the coup should be undone, he wasn’t sure he was capable of enforcing that.  Not without acting like some sort of thug about it, anyway, and he could only imagine how badly that would go in the long term.

“Sarah, hold down the fort?”  He knew that she could and would keep an eye on him through smoke, just in case. 

“No problem,” Sarah said, waving at him without looking up from the writing she was doing now that they had a little downtime.  Her microfilm was out on the table next to her as she consulted it and her notebooks both, fleshing out her thoughts. 

He gave her a nod and exited the suite, stepping out into the main room of the building where the tactical display stood.  There were several moonies around it, a couple of them arguing over something technical, another several just focusing on it with glowing runes.  Isaac couldn’t read exactly what it was supposed to be showing other than the surface of the moon, but there was enough color-coding to demonstrate it was supposed to be conveying something. 

“Is Ostra around?” Isaac asked the room at large, carrying the special lantern on his belt so his translator rune would stay active.  He had actually given the device some ontological reinforcement, because without it they wouldn’t be able to communicate at all.

“Meister Aucliostratus is on the terrace,” one of the moonies said with stiff formality, waving to the second floor of the building.  Isaac glanced up, then sighed to himself and bounced up the steps.  He’d managed to get the hang of walking on level ground, but he still felt he was on some kind of carnival ride when he ascended stairs and took them four or six at a time. 

Ostra was indeed on a balcony, which he supposed was large enough to be called a terrace, made possible by the low gravity.  The lunarian paced back and forth, feet sliding along on the stone as various different runes pulsed and flickered on exposed skin, something which the translator struggled to convey.  If he had to guess, Isaac would say it was the equivalent of muttering to himself, not really full sentences but just random thoughts bubbling up far enough to be expressed.

“Earthling.”  Ostra interrupted himself and turned to face Isaac without any prompting, clearly less than thrilled to see him.

“Isaac.”  He made the correction firm, then breezed on past it, taking it as a given.  He’d seen that too much whining about proper modes of respect seriously undercut someone’s authority, and Isaac’s authority was shaky enough already.  At least, socially.  The ultimate authority of force worked everywhere, and he had plenty of that so long as people didn’t push back too hard.  “I need your perspective on the civil war, and what all is going on.”

“You ask now?” Ostra said, clearly sour.  “Not before you came in to change everything?”

“It’s only because of those changes that you are where you are,” Isaac said.  He hesitated to say in charge, but the young lunarian was definitely more important than he had once been.  “I can tell you firsthand that the stasis you were in was not easy to shift.  And I had to start shifting it first, because otherwise the only answers I’d get would be the status quo.”

“Perhaps,” Ostra said, his arms clasped behind his back and clearly unwilling to concede much ground, but he did unbend enough to actually think about Isaac’s request.  “I have never known a moon without the suppression.  For my whole life I’ve had people, the elders, pretending that were weren’t side by side with the enemy.  People who are not like us, could never understand us, and who had done terrible things to us.  Everyone has lost someone, either killed by the other side or worse, joining the other side, seduced by some aspect of the other type of runes.

“My own family was killed by royalists, and yet nothing has been done,” Ostra continued, and Isaac winced.  He completely understood Ostra’s attitude, especially since he’d been driven to extremely lengths by much the same story.  The obvious follow-up question seemed pointless, but he had to try anyway.

“So you don’t think that the two sides can coexist?”  Isaac prodded.  “I did see one city trying to talk through their differences.”

“It’s been tried,” Ostra said dismissively. “You think it hasn’t?  The problem is, you can’t talk things out when the very words, the meaning and the way they negotiate and describe reality, are different.  Besides, we are so far beyond that.  We may have been one people, but now we’re two, divided by the blood spilled and the runes we use.  It’s like there are two moons on top of each other, equal and opposite.”

“I suppose a feud has never been resolved by diplomacy,” Isaac said, though he was thinking more about the last comment that Ostra had made.  At the moment the moonies were indeed all living side by side, despite the vast area of the moon.  But that could change.  Much of what was uninhabited was just not particularly amenable to settlements and civilizations, but that could change. 

It was a bit longer term than he had originally anticipated, but if Ostra was right, then there could be no real negotiation.  Nothing lasting, anyway, and even something like shifting people to different cities wouldn’t work.  There’d have to be a much larger endeavor, a splitting of the moon. 

Fortunately, anything to do with the landscape wouldn’t be nearly as bad as a shifting social situation.  Targeting something that was a barren desert and making it extremely easy to change that fact would stay until it was no longer a barren desert.  Or for unworked land to be changed into something else. 

The more he thought about it, the more it appealed.  Changing one complex thing to another was hard to guide or put on rails, since there were so many different ways it could go.  But if something was already useless, changing to useful, in any direction, was a net good.  He didn’t have to worry so much about putting up the guiderails, about how things could go wrong.

Giving the built-up tension and the accumulated desire and impetus for change a goal would provide more structure for what was going on, and might avoid unintended consequences.  He didn’t want some equivalent to depowering Glorybeam.  The natural consequences were bad enough, since there would be enormous upheaval all across lunar society.

“I think I might be able to help things resolve,” Isaac said, chewing over the idea.  “Though I’m not sure how I can present it to both sides.”  Let alone how to make it sound like he wasn’t issuing terms to them, even if he was the major driver behind it.

“Try,” Ostra said, giving Isaac a skeptical look.

“You want two moons; so split it in two.”  Isaac waved out at the desaturated landscape, the mountains and the trees and the bird-like things winging through the sky.  “I know there’s a lot of things that’d have to change for that to be reasonable, but that’s the trick.  I can make change easier.  Much easier.  I can’t make it happen, that requires an outside force.  But I think you’re plenty motivated.”

“Motivated to win,” Ostra said coldly.  “But I’m stupid enough to think it can be done without bloodshed,” he added begrudgingly. “It might be worth a try, but in the end I don’t think this idea of yours will work.  A moon split in half is just a war waiting to happen, only without any shared cities or neighbors to create even the smallest of limits that it has now.”

“Or the fact that you’re all crammed up next to each other, unable to escape the fact that you’ve got different people right next door, is the problem?”  Isaac suggested. “But I can’t claim I know better than lunarians.  It’s just, the two languages don’t threaten each other just by existing, right?  If you could pursue separate lives, would out of sight, be out of mind enough?”

“If it had been that way from the beginning, maybe,” Ostra said, pacing along the edge of the terrace.  To the eye his motions were calm and elegant, but the translator rune read in the restlessness and discontent.  “But now?  It would take a great gulf, not just a few miles where we can see the enemy living where we used to live.” 

“I can see why,” Isaac said diplomatically, though inwardly he was a little bit frustrated.  He couldn’t actually blame the lunarians; after a hundred-something years of feuding and bad blood, there was no solution that wouldn’t fall afoul of the justified hate and frustration.  “Just consider the alternatives are probably worse and bloodier.”

“If it were just me, I could choke down my objections and try it,” Ostra said.  “But it isn’t just me.  It’s millions of lunarians, many of whom are far less understanding than I.”

“The general public,” Isaac sighed.  He usually was the general public, but ever since he’d started properly exercising his power, he’d gotten a bit of a different perspective on things.  Less because he thought he was in any way better, but because other people noticed him and that started excluding him from the general background condition he was used to.

“I understand that you believe you are trying to help,” Ostra said.  “But the divide between royalist and reestablishment is too deep for an earthling to resolve, no matter what magic you have at your disposal.”

“This whole thing has never been about me resolving it,” Isaac said, though he wasn’t really arguing with Ostra.  “It’s about giving you the chance and the tools to.  Which I will continue doing, because better you have the options than not.”

“It seems to me that we do not have any options,” Ostra said, looking at Isaac and then turning to regard the landscape once again.  It was the sort of brooding normally associated with supervillains, to Isaac’s mind, but he doubted he could call the lunarian something so grandiose.

Isaac took a breath, then let it out, trying to think through a better argument.  It wasn’t his job to actually solve all the bad feelings, but he did need to prod people into action to get moving.  Perhaps he could even make it easier for people to change their minds, but that was the kind of thing that he was very leery of.  He was not the Tyrant, and would never be.

He was still standing there, looking out at the moon with Ostra, the crescent of the Earth hanging in the sky, when a small silver dot abruptly appeared out over the forest.  It approached rapidly, clearly mechanical, and for a moment Isaac thought it was one of Doctor Mechaniacal’s drones, come with news or the like.  But then he saw it was saucer-shaped, and bore a different style than the supervillain’s tinker work.  Closer still, and he saw there was someone inside.

Isaac stared, agog, as Administrator Ichabod floated up next to the balcony.  Ostra took a step back, runes lighting up, but neither Ike nor Isaac paid him much mind.  The man was simply not a threat.

“Mister Hartson,” Ichabod said, his voice coming through the speakers on the saucer.  “We need to talk.”