Chapter Nineteen — Equal and Opposite

“Oh ho ho!”  Professor Mechanical chortled as the sensor tank reported the take from the unfolding events.  The images and data appeared almost uncertainly, as if the drones themselves could not believe in their mechanical hearts what they were seeing.  That was, of course, untrue, as he had carefully ensured his mechanisms could not think or feel. But the firmament itself could sometimes be confused about what things the superpowered came up with.

His reality anchors labored, straining to hold a bubble of stability against the unleashed power of The Director as Ichabod shoved his fingers into the viscera of the universe.  There were no sensors to tell him exactly what was happening, and how, and why, but he could see with his eyes the two insubstantial celestial bodies, imposed on the space where the moon used to be.

Clearly his momentary dismissal of the humans during the crisis with the lunar war had been poorly considered.  On the other hand, they seemed to have done well enough without his interference.  He hadn’t merely been monologuing, no matter how fun it had been.  His concentrations of forces had been calculated to draw out and disperse the stress, strain, geological instability and harmonic divergence his sensors had been reporting.

The use of so many powerful runes in so short a span of time, and in the areas they were with the population they had, had come close to a cascade failure.  It was a thing of close tolerances, whether it would just result in the overload and destruction of all extant runes in the area, setting much of the moon back to the stone age, or if it would have diverted mostly into the resonant cavities of the lava tubes and collapsed those.  Given the trickiness of the situation, his preoccupation with the civil war was probably a better use of his time anyway.

Of course, he might well have made it worse in the longer term given the queen’s use of artifacts, relics that created effects which completely baffled his analytical engines, but he was willing to claim victory in the end.  Once, he might have been irked by being upstaged by someone else, deeply laid plans rendered pointless in the face of some undreamt-of solution, but time had a way of granting perspective.  He didn’t really want to take over the moon, after all.

What was actually happening instead was a bit harder to read.  He had a drone headed toward the obvious incitement point, following in Moonblast’s wake, but the local disruption of physics was rendering some of his more esoteric propulsion methods less than efficacious.  Sliding along the skein only worked when the skein hadn’t been wrinkled like a carelessly tossed blanket.

His more general sensors, including the zvinth-dimensional probability display, made him think that the phenomenon wasn’t finished.  The manifestation he saw was still in-process, ready to evolve in any direction.  Which was, in fact, a worry, because as much as he enjoyed the grandiose display there was always the risk of it failing in a tremendously spectacular catastrophe.

Obviously his services were required.  It would just be wrong for something so grand in scope and breathtaking in vision be executed without his fingerprints somewhere on the project, even if it was only on the little fiddly bits nobody saw.  Mechaniacal excelled at minutiae.

It was without question that the two spheres couldn’t remain where they were.  In the absence of some very significant infrastructural investment, twin bodies such as that would tear themselves to pieces.  It was possible that the Orrery could be convinced to prevent it, and of course there was always crude gravitational or spatial manipulation.  Mechaniacal had always wanted an excuse to build a planetary engine, but he certainly wouldn’t have time to putter about and get some a device going.

There was, withal, a very small amount that he could do for the immediate situation with his extant machines. The blessing and curse of the tinker was that everything came down to preparation. Given sufficient time and an understanding of what he was trying to do, he could make something like Point Archimedes, and move the world.  Without it, he was restricted to applying his mind and the tools at his disposal.

His drone continued on after Moonblast, laboring far more than she due to the simple fact that it, like the rest of his creations, were no longer fully bound to either moon.  His base and the area he had stabilized had already begun to drift from its previous location, rendered more or less or at the very least orthogonally real compared to whatever The Director and The Tyrant were doing.

It was a very good thing he had already made his personal properties spaceworthy.

By the time that his battle drone reached the point of crisis, it was clear that matters had progressed into an uneasy and unlikely standoff.  Moonblast hovered in confused balance while the Hartson boy stood – or rather, hung – at the nexus between the two moons.  The sensors designed to detect reality alteration, probability alteration, and other things that lay firmly in the realm of esoterica decided to all pack up and retire simultaneously, overwhelmed by the forces at play to the point where the gears jammed and springs unwound. 

While Moonblast was clearly not happy with the situation as presented fait accompli, she was at least savvy enough not to attack the people that were in control of the impending consequences.  He was regularly surprised by how often there were heroes and villains both who preferred to shoot, punch, or eyebeam first and ask questions later. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, princesses and raptors,” he said into the pickup, his voice being transmitted through the aether and echoing from the mechanodynamic speakers built into every one of his drones.  He included the Deep Kingdom mounts in his address mostly because he liked the way it balanced out the cadence, but he wouldn’t have been even slightly surprised if they understood every word.  “I see you have the proverbial bull by the somewhat less proverbial horns.”  He smiled to himself at the wordplay, even if it had been millions of years since the moon had seen glaciers. 

“Do you have something to add to the situation, Mechaniacal?” Ichabod asked, his voice strained and echoing oddly from the not-quite-real.  Moonblast twitched, clearly annoyed by the difference in their relative orientations, but a very close look showed a subtle difference in the character of the two moons.  Not only were they not quite a match with reality, they were not quite a match with each other.

“I may well indeed,” he said happily, ensuring that every iota of what sensor data he could get was being stored and backed up.  There would be so much he could learn from all this, plus he could add it to the highlight reel.  Someday he’d release a docu-drama of his adventures.  It’d be fun.  “It’s clear that these two moons have to go somewhere, or else it’s all for nothing.”

“That’s not news,” Hartson said, his voice registering on a variety of different, slightly mismatched, frequencies.  It was all very interesting from a technical perspective, and while Mechaniacal would have dearly liked to have them simply hold that position long enough for him to do some experiments, in the interests of expedience he couldn’t keep delaying.

“An interesting quirk of celestial mechanics,” Mechaniacal said.  “It’s generally difficult for two large bodies to share an orbit, but on the precise opposite side of the Earth from the moon is an island of stability.  There are some issues here and there, but I suspect the Orrery would appreciate being balanced.”

“Perfectly opposed, perfectly balanced,” Ichabod muttered, the sound echoing in a fascinating way.  It refused to obey the usual inverse square law, the waves propagating without diffusing their energy.  Not an entirely unusual effect – Moonblast herself tended to use it, although with clear runic support – but still intriguing as a clear side effect of whatever was going on. 

“Wouldn’t that simply be a disaster for Earth?” Moonblast argued, though it was not as full-throated as it might have been.  Like most heroes, she was not quite as single minded as supervillains tended to be, even if she had a right to be upset about what was going on.  It was her home, after all, but Mechaniacal heartily approved of Hartson’s reasoning.  By refusing to resolve the civil war herself, Moonblast had abrogated any claim to control of the situation.

“Less than you would think.  The moon is far away and there are many mechanics to absorb the strain.”  He did not add that neither of the moons were quite real now, so it was anybody’s guess how that would propagate to things like magic or calendars. 

Would only one be visible from the surface, or both, or neither?  Would some people see one moon, and others see its twin?  Or would the reality of the original moon stay, anchoring the new pair?  He couldn’t wait to find out!

“Can you manage it?” Hartson asked Ichabod, who, oddly, looked to the lunarian tagging along with them.  Alianora, according to Mechaniacal’s notes.  By herself not particularly notable, but as any good operative would, she had attached herself to some very powerful people.

“Yes,” said Lia.

“Yes,” said Ichabod.

“Do it.”  Hartson’s hands strained as if he were holding the two moons apart – or together – by strength alone, sinew standing out for a moment before he released his grip.  For a moment he stayed in the air, at the neutral point between two gravity wells, two worlds, before slowly falling upward.  Moonblast began to say something, protest or instruct or question, but her words were lost as both moons swept away from his drones.

One of the side effectsturni of insulating himself from the reality alteration was that he didn’t get the benefits of the reality shift.  The moons orbited away in opposite directions, prograde and retrograde, leaving him and his machines drifting in space.  The distribution of his drones described a rough sphere in their positions – more of a hemisphere in truth, given how sparsely populated the far side actually was – now freely orbiting around Earth. 

Fortunately for his neighbors, his reality anchor only protected his personal estate, which meant that the town he had been protecting was not stranded in hard vacuum.   The bubble shield remained, however, casually drifting in the blackness of orbit.  Without the moon for his lunar skyhooks, his drones were somewhat mobility limited, relegated to direct dimensional winding to get around.  Something akin to using a car motor to adjust a caliper.

He made a note to pick up his devices later, after he’d time to warm up the drive on the repurposed machinery from Point Archimedes, his eyes glued to his displays as the moons swung around, tracking along their orbit with a precision that normally was relegated to machines or to physics.  But then, it likely was something closer to the latter than some clumsy, hand-adjusted trajectory.  Returning each moon to a position it knew it had been and would be.

Mechaniacal would still keep an eye on it.  That planetary engine idea was firmly at the front of his mind and a mild bit of stabilization would be a fun project to keep him engaged while he figured out what to do for a new home.  Choosing one moon or the other would immediately create a power imbalance, likely spark open conflict, and undo all the effort that had gone into the miracle in the first place.  No one would thank him for it.

No one would thank him for his role in preventing a cascade reaction and full scale war either, but such was the life of a supervillain.  Sometimes you just had to know to get while the getting was good, and with the entire conflict between himself and the two sides of the lunarian conflict essentially nullified and rendered moot, this was such a time.

Adopting the better part of valor, Mechaniacal decided to exit stage left and work on building a station in the place the moon used to be.  Point Balance, perhaps?  It would be fun.

***

Isaac landed on the stone in the classic three-point pose he’d seen so many superheroes use, one hand flat on the ground.  It wasn’t because he was bracing himself from the fall though, which was a gentle thing in one-sixth gravity, but so he could focus on his connection to the moon.  He lifted his other hand, reaching toward the sky, holding onto the metaphysical connection with its twin as he focused his talent to a singular end.

Moonblast and Mechanical’s drone were whisked away at staggering speeds as the two moons separated.  It seemed almost slow and stately, the landscape ahead receding into the sky overhead, but for the motion to even be visible, it had to be dangerously fast.  Ichabod’s power had to be compensating for that, because Isaac was pretty sure that the moon should have simply broken apart under the forces.

Or rather both moons, because it wasn’t just the other one that was moving.  The Earth in the sky rotated visibly, the angle of the sun shifting as the moon tracked along its orbit.  The demuto’s ticking, already a solid whirr, finally ground to a halt, whatever mechanisms within jamming from overuse, the thing palpably warm through the pocket fabric. 

That was a distant thing, though, focused as he was on the connections and the reality.  Months ago when he’d first started to understand there was more to his talent than just the physical aspect, ontological inertia had been the first thing he’d experimented with.  The existential weight of his costumed personas, making it harder for reality to affect them.

That had nearly ended in disaster, as he’d come within an ace of locking himself into the persona of Ravdia permanently.  After that he’d been far more leery of indulging in it, but after the incident with Blacktime in the Deep Kingdoms where he’d invested in Sarah’s smoke illusions, he’d gone back to it long enough to create the Smoke Army.  Certain illusions that kept their invested reality despite not always being out, because they were the same illusions. 

Now he used the same technique, with the refinements he’d learned.  The focus, the faint touch of feedback that was more of an impression than anything solid.  Working up the abstractions first, making it easier to change it before actually instituting the changes, giving him a force multiplier for his talent at the expense of time and requiring a very clear idea of his end goal — making the moons fully real.

He was vaguely aware of Sarah and her clones taking up station around him, guarding him while he plied his talent.  His mind was definitely overworked by that point, between figuring out what to do with Ike and constantly adjusting things for the past hour solid. He was completely wrung out but gamely kept applying his will, making sure to spread it to both moons equally.  Fumbling one of them was probably worse than fumbling both, and that was ignoring that both places were chock full of lunarians.

Thankfully he didn’t need to reinforce them, as well.  They were real enough, just weirdly separated by Ike’s power.  It made sense that in the wistful, hopeful logic of dreams it would be self-evident who was on which side, but it was still a breathtakingly enormous effect, to put the royalists on one moon and the reestablishment on the other.  But until things settled, the ground they stood on was uncertain, half composed of atoms and molecules while the rest was the stuff that dreams were made of.

Even the rock beneath his feet was oddly translucent, not like gemstone or even Sarah’s smoke, but rather like the pepper’s ghost technique he’d seen used at the convention one time.  Something not quite there masquerading as solid.  Yet even as he watched, it seemed to grow slightly more natural, slightly more present.

Of course, he wasn’t the only one who was laboring.  Administrator Ike was providing the bulk of the brute force, to the point where even Isaac, unlettered as he was, could feel the power of it through his feet and his talent.  A bit of a shiver in the concepts, a slow shifting as it adapted to the application of Isaac’s inertia, making it more real and thus less dreamlike.

The push and pull between the two powers was wordless, not that Isaac could have been able to keep up with the speed of the changes aloud nor articulate exactly what he was feeling.  Not only were his senses undeveloped, his vocabulary was, too.  So he simply stuck to feeling his way through it, the process not nearly as simple as it sounded.

A slight mismatch between his effort and Ike’s nearly flattened him as some fraction of the enormous acceleration that was happening in the real world slipped through.  The ground trembled underneath him, snapping groans as rock was shocked by a force it should never have experienced — which faded as the ineffability of dream set in again, sidestepping the inevitable results of what could have been moon-wide avalanches and rockslides, collapses and tidal waves.  Lia made a small noise, a pulse of alarm coming through the translator, and then promptly was quiet again.

That moment made him feel deep in his gut how much he held in his hands.  The weight of lives, millions of lunarians, even the integrity of the moon itself — far more than he would ever have liked.  But a job couldn’t be left undone simply because it was hard, and this was the path he’d set himself on the moment he’d agreed to help Lia.  True, he had thought at the time it would be a simpler task, and a far less dramatic one, but it was never up to him what form the solution took.

Shadows shifted, the Earth staying pinned exactly above the dolmen while the sun slid through the sky.  It passed over one point, seeming to pause for a moment as he and Ike gathered breath for another push, then continued to sweep over the line of standing stones.  Isaac kept his eyes on the next stone in the circle, feeling the seconds tick by as he pushed his weary mind to keep tuning the moons to be more moon. 

The sun slowed, sliding close to the next point by degrees, fractions at a time.  The moments stretched further, every instant spent wrestling with the fundamental being of the twin bodies Ike had created.  If once he had envisioned the moon as a ball at the top of a hill, with a slope he’d created, now it was at the bottom, rolling on the dregs of inertia but not quite to the destination.  All around were pitfalls and spikes, places to crash and burn before making it to the final resting place.

The sun slid into position over the next standing stone with an almost audible grinding sensation, both moons reaching a physical or metaphysical limit as they settled into place.  Isaac could no longer see the other moon, but could tell it was opposite them, behind the Earth.  It never would be visible, forever eclipsed by the pale blue marble of Isaac’s home.  The entire sphere seemed to stretch, flex, and then settle with a sigh.

Despite his position on the ground, supported by two feet and one hand, he still nearly fell over as he finally dropped his power.  He felt like he’d gone ten rounds in the ring, all the little bumps and bruises he’d accumulated over the course of the last few hours of panic making themselves known all at once.  Isaac levered himself up, staggering before Sarah steadied him.

“You okay?”  She studied him, her other clones still on the alert despite the lack of any obvious threats.

“Yeah, just feeling weird,” he managed.  It was more like being drunk than being tired, though he could definitely go for a nap.  A strange lightheadedness that made him question exactly how much of what he’d just done he had imagined.  The surreality of it seemed to hit all at once, with the silence from the broken demuto refusing to reassure him of the reality of his power’s application.  How much had he actually done to Ike’s power, and had he really just split the moon into two?

“No time to rest, Mister Hartson,” Ike’s voice came, pulling Isaac’s attention away from the sky.  “With all that done, I need you to help me close the gate so nothing untoward happens.”

“Right,” Isaac said, staggering that way.  Of course there was still cleanup to do; there was always cleanup to do.  Sometimes cleaning up after what you had done to clean something up took longer than the initial task, even.

Ike’s instruction was impenetrable as ever, but Isaac forced his addled mind to focus and actually finish the task.  Nobody wanted any more rifts forming or for one or both of the moons to get sucked back into the dream realm, or worse, half of each moon.  Although he was pretty sure that was impossible with the ontological reinforcement he’d given them.  They were the moon-est moons he could make them, insulated against any kind of untoward changes.

He wasn’t sure if it was his practice, Ike having a better grasp of exactly what Isaac’s talent did, or maybe just Ike’s talent being exhausted after such a major expenditure, but it wasn’t too difficult to close the gate.  There weren’t even little greeblies crawling out of nowhere anymore, which was a relief.  They hadn’t ever been that much of a threat with Sarah on the job, but they had been a constant, distracting pressure.  

It seemed like it said a lot that something that would have sent him running the previous year, something that probably could have easily killed him before, was just a distraction.  He knew he was unfocused because of how his thoughts wandered as he tried to work his way through the last of the changes Ike needed, his eyes straying back to the sky even if he knew he couldn’t see the second moon.

“It’s done?” Lia muttered at last, the translator presenting a confused muddle instead of any proper tone.  He didn’t blame her.  Isaac was feeling a bit like he’d been through a whirlwind himself, and he hadn’t been spending years of his life on the war.  Lia had never told him how old she was, but it was obvious that her whole life had been leading up to this moment. 

“To the best of my abilities, Miss Alianora,” Ike confirmed.

“I felt it sort of lock in,” Isaac contributed, taking his hand off Ike’s shoulder and, at the same time undoing the connections he’d formed to both him and the moons.  It felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.  “I think it’s done.”

“Which still leaves the problem of getting home,” Sarah said, recalling her clones and guiding Astoria over to where Isaac stood.  Shay nudged his shoulder and he reached up to scratch her under the chin.

“After everything that just happened, I imagine the jammer is down,” Lia said, the translator conveying a twitch of something that Isaac couldn’t quite catch.  Ike’s brow furrowed and he stabbed one of the buttons on his chair.

“Administrator Ike to Star Central,” he said.

“Administrator!”  The voice on the other end was vaguely familiar to Isaac.  Vilmonica, he was pretty sure, though he wouldn’t swear by it.  “We’re still putting together teams to get to the moons, we should be deployed in less than—”

“There is no longer an exigent circumstance,” Ike said, which was such a weird phrasing that it had to have some kind of pre-arranged meaning.  “Code Vector-Green-Seven.  This is probably political now, and I would rather reserve our personnel for any unexpected consequences on the ground.”

“Understood, sir,” Vilmonica replied crisply. “Will you be needing retrieval?”

“Your artifact,” Ike said, addressing Lia.  “Will it work now that the jammer has been lifted?”

“Yes,” Lia said, without hesitation. 

“I have secured local transportation,” Ike told Vilmonica.  “If there is a change of plans I will keep you informed.  The communications blackout should not happen again.”  If Isaac were talking to Ike, he would have wanted more than that, but that seemed to be enough.  Again though, he suspected there was code in their speech — or maybe the chair transmitted something to answer most of her questions.  Not the most important one, however.

“If you can, what exactly happened up there, sir?”

“Just cleaning up a mess that’d been left too long,” Ichabod said dryly, with an ironic look at Isaac.  “Nothing to worry about.”

“Of course, sir,” Vilmonica said, sounding a little bit uncertain for the first time.  “I’ll check in again within the hour.”

“Hopefully I’ll be down by then,” Ike said, then closed the channel.  He couldn’t exactly slump in his chair, given that he was attached to it, but he gave a good impression of it.  Then he straightened up.  “Ah, dammit,” he said.  “My paintings.”

Isaac almost laughed, even though it wasn’t funny.  Ichabod, too, had to be feeling the effects of so much strain, and probably worse than Isaac was.  But where Ichabod had a chair, Isaac simply leaned against Shay and scrubbed his hand against his eyes.

“You bring that artifact with you, Lia?  I think we’re ready to head home.”  There was a lot of stuff that still had to shake out, but wasn’t any of his business.  The war was solved, and that was the mess that he had come for.  The internal situation of either royalist or reestablishment was not something he should be involved with, and for the very same reason he had gotten involved with their civil war.  He didn’t understand the lunarians, and while that was a plus for neutrality it was a significant demerit for setting up society.

Plus, he was tired.

“Yes,” Lia said.  “Though it will not return you directly to your house.  The closest I can get it—”

“We’re not too worried about accuracy, Miss Alianora,” Ike said tiredly.  “I do have priority access to transportation.”

“Very well,” Lia said, reaching down to access Norastra’s barding, rummaging around until she came out with the bound ribbon of rune-inscribed links.  She unfurled it and began arranging it on the bare stone, glancing over at Earth on occasion as she adjusted the positioning of the artifact and prepared it for their return journey. 

With his experience and the translator rune he got a hint of meaning from it, a partially assembled jigsaw puzzle half-glimpsed, but it was still alien enough to reassure him of his thoughts.  The moons were for moonies, and he couldn’t be of any further help.  With his task completed, albeit with substantial assistance, it was time to go home.

The portal appeared as a shimmering pastel, revealing a half-familiar back lot.  It wasn’t until Isaac nudged Shay through that he recognized where they were — Justice for Hire.  Crossing into the heavier air and gravity made him stagger and cough both as the familiar sounds and smells of evening in Star City washed over him.  Concrete and car exhaust, voices and sirens, a tang of salt from the ocean and a hint of greenery from the surrounding wilds.  Home.

Sarah and Ike arrived behind him, stepping from the shimmering curtain – or in Ike’s case, floating – and glancing around to get their bearings.  Lia didn’t follow.  Isaac turned around, seeing her rendered in a vague and shimmery desaturation.  He couldn’t see her expression, nor did the translator carry anything across the portal, but she didn’t seem like she was ready to cross over.

“Not coming back?” Isaac asked, not sure if the sound would carry across the phenomenon.  Nevertheless, Lia shook her head, reaching down to pick up the artifact before leaping back up on top of her raptor.  Norastra’s crystal-panel wings extended, and the two of them vanished from sight.  The portal began to fade, dwindling away, while Isaac rubbed his eyes and looked at Sarah.

“Makes sense,” Sarah said, even though he hadn’t asked anything.  “She’s got enough to do up there.  That grandfather of hers is probably the de facto leader for their moon, so she’s got to buckle down and get to work.”

“Hopefully, without our needing to do anything,” Ike sighed, his fingers tapping the buttons on his chair.  “You’d better get home before we’re swarmed.  I’d appreciate if you’d be available for a debrief at some point in the next week but I suspect my own account will be sufficient.”

Isaac almost felt guilty for the fact that he could go home and rest but Ichabod had more work to do.  Almost. 

“We’ll be in touch,” Sarah half-promised.

“Let me know if there’s anything I need to use my talent on,” Isaac said, then tapped Shay.  The raptor flicked out her wing panels and took to the air in smug contemptuousness of city traffic, making their way past familiar landmarks.  Human buildings of steel and glass, rather than rock and coral.  They even took a break on the way over to grab some pizza at one of Isaac’s favorite places, coming away with massive, double-sized slices to eat on the way back.  It was the perfect taste of home, even if Sarah did commit heresy by going with a white sauce style instead of red.

They landed on the roof of their walk-up as the sun dipped below the horizon.  To the east was the moon, just rising and partly full.  To the west was the moon, just setting and partly empty.  From the Earth, both looked real and natural, two halves making a whole.  Equal and opposite.