Elizabeth Moon - Those who Walk in Darkness.pdf - Elizabeth Moon - margozap

Moon, Elizabeth - Lunar Activity SS 10- Those Who Walk in Darkness

Those Who Walk in

Darkness

by Elizabeth Moon

published as story #10 in

LUNAR ACTIVITY

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Moon, Elizabeth - Lunar Activity SS 10- Those Who Walk in Darkness

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance

to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

260 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10001

ISBN: 0-671-69870-2

First printing, April 1990

Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10020

Printed in the United States of America

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Moon, Elizabeth - Lunar Activity SS 10- Those Who Walk in Darkness

Introduction

Real Weather, Small Towns, and

Science Fiction

Lunar Activity suggests lunar exploration, colonization, mining or

industrial or scientific endeavors. Space-suited figures adjusting

telescopes on the far side of the Moon, sweating construction

workers fitting together another section of habitat or workspace.

The Moon is clearly Space, and Space, someone said, has no

weather —an arguable thesis, but meant (in that case) to extoll the

virtues of living in a planned, controllable environment. No sudden

tornadoes, no wild floods, no killing frosts just when the peaches

bloom or the oranges ripen.

Far from such a planned environment, this terrestrial Moon lives in

a small town brimful of real weather. Hail this spring pitted the

young fruit; a tornado ripped the guts out of a neighboring town;

drought parches the grass and floods undermine the fence corners.

More than that, the mind has its own weather, as hard to predict and

control as the planet’s whirl of wind and water. Even in weatherless

space, in the shuttle or space station, on the cloudless, rainless

Moon, the human mind would have storms, whirlwinds, long cold

frozen winters and sudden thaws, rising floods and barren droughts.

Human societies form contentious factions that clash like warm

Gulf air and a Canadian cold front, producing political upheavals,

deadly fireworks… the exterior human weather that buffets all of us.

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Moon, Elizabeth - Lunar Activity SS 10- Those Who Walk in Darkness

And on our world, the visible weather of atmospheric movement is

partnered by the invisible contention of plate tectonics. As the

meeting of atmospheric forces throws up great walls of cumulus, the

meeting of plates sends mountain ranges surging up—and these in

turn affect continental weather for centuries.

Living in a small town, in a true (if imperfect) community, all the

layers of weather lie open to the eye. There are fewer grandly

engineered edifices to hide the cloud patterns and individual

motives, as skyscrapers and corporations do. Under our feet, the

rock witnesses to ancient weathers, then erodes under present

storms to form tomorrow’s sediments… just as ancient grievances

and alliances appear as fossilized relationships that send small

replicas out into the world to replay the same games. Interfaces

matter: where people touch, where atmosphere shapes geology,

where science and technology meet human emotion and biology.

Science fiction is the logical result of letting a Moon loose in small

town weather.

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Moon, Elizabeth - Lunar Activity SS 10- Those Who Walk in Darkness

Those Who Walk In Darkness

Fantasy, unlike science fiction, is expected to have weather. It

arises from the depths of the mind, those tectonic impacts when

buried axioms clash and thrust new mountain ranges up to poke

holes in the mind’s atmosphere, to change climate into stormy

chaos, star-crowned. Don’t be surprised when the mountain ranges,

explored, show ancient fossils around every corner. The mountains

are new; the rock itself is not.

Those who have read The Deed of Paksenarrion will recognize

instantly which night a frightened boy wanders the streets of

Vérella. For the rest of you — be careful. Some of these fossils have

undergone extensive metamorphosis .

—«—»—

H e was feverish and shaky; they had made him stay to the end.

Now he slipped away from his father in the crowd, swerving

quickly into a side passage, and forced himself to hurry on the

stairs. His back hurt still, four days after the beating.

It was already dark outside, and cold. Torches flickered in the light

wind, sending crazy shadows along the street. He took a long breath

of fresh air, grateful for it. The streets were strange again. Every

time they stayed below too long, he had trouble adjusting to the

movement and noise. He had tried to say that, but his father had

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Elizabeth Moon - Those who Walk in Darkness.pdf

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