Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  Day after day, year after year went by. Aarti counted time from the moment Yaj was murdered by the mob. Nineteen years, all alone. And then the invasion came. Not the Swarm—the invasion of her Moon, by humans.

  They were Russians—that much she was able to tell, though she didn’t speak the language. Aarti eavesdropped on their conversations, memorized the sound of the words. Then she translated them when she woke in Bombay, arduously bending over a Russian dictionary she’d had Suresh buy for her. Aarti had hoped, at first, that this mission would be like the others, that the Russians would stomp around, collect rocks, set up instruments, and then leave again. Back to the Earth that suited them, that had no place for people like herself.

  But these Russians were different. Two of them were clearly wild cards; jokers, she thought, though perhaps possessed of powers. One was so small that at first she mistook him for a child, but no, he was just a joker.

  Aarti had never actually met another joker. A small part of her had longed to meet these Russian jokers, to assuage her loneliness with the company of others of her kind. She could paint herself a suit, so as not to frighten them too much, pretend that she was here with an Indian expedition. Perhaps fool them long enough to …

  But that was where Aarti’s fantasy broke down. What did she really want from them? She wanted them to leave her and her Moon to grieve in peace.

  Instead, they had built a habitat. It was small and crude, hardly more than a hovel compared to the palace Aarti had built, but still—they clearly meant to stay. Others might come after them and expand their little base or build more besides it. Five men could become fifty, then five hundred, then …

  Aarti could not allow it. The only question was, how could she stop them?

  “Yaj, what should I do?”

  It had become a habit of hers. A bad habit, no doubt—any psychiatrist would tell her that she had to let him go. But instead, Aarti held him closer. On the Moon, she had built the figure of her lover, had lovingly painted each feature on Yajnadar’s face. Aarti let him age a little, year after year, as if he were still alive on Earth and had simply found a way to finally travel with her. In her moon-palace she’d painted a bed, and there among the silken covers, Yaj made love to her, talked to her, listened to her woes.

  She wasn’t mad. Aarti knew full well that she was speaking both sides of the conversation. But his voice was more convincing, more consoling. And she knew what he would say, after all. “You should let them be, love. They’re far away; they won’t bother us. Right now, it’s just you and me, alone together.” He reached out a gentle hand, traced it down her bare neck.

  Aarti pushed herself up on her elbows, shaking her hair loose. “Right now. But what about later? When they spread their way across the Moon, a cancer, a polluting poison…”

  “Shhh … don’t we have better things to do?” His hand slipped to the covers now, pulling them down, baring her body. “No need to worry about this now.” His mouth followed, tracing a heated path from neck to breast, then farther down.

  If only Aarti had listened.

  She’d started off just trying to frighten them away. It was her paintings that had given her the idea, her moonscapes full of fabulous figures. If Aarti could create fantastic moon creatures for her own delight, she could as easily paint frightening beasts to terrify the Russians. Moon ghosts—armed with horns and claws and shining teeth, lurking around every corner. She set to work, and within a few nights, she’d painted an array of creatures. Aarti sent them off to haunt the cosmonauts, thinned herself to barest translucency, and followed to watch.

  One of her ghost creatures startled a joker so much that he dropped the tray of components he was carrying, scattering them across the lunar surface. Others, tall and gray and twisted, made themselves seen outside the Russian camp, and picked at their pipes and instruments with hard black fingers. But still the cosmonauts did not see, would not believe, would not leave. Stubborn, arrogant, infuriating men.

  Frustrated, Aarti had visited their camp once too often, gone too close. She’d been seen, turned, and run away. It was instinct that made Aarti run, and sheer chance that led them to the deep pool of dust—a hazard she never needed to consider, after all, she who walked the Moon on weightless feet.

  That was what Aarti told herself at first—but it was a lie. The Moon was her second skin, and she knew its features, had passed that pool a hundred times. No conscious decision to run through it, but hadn’t Aarti swerved in her running as she neared it? Headed straight for the center, picked up the pace so that they would run faster, heedlessly, to their doom?

  After the first two cosmonauts died, she’d considered it all, in a moment that seemed to stretch endlessly, as long as it needed to. Despair flooded through her, a black river running from head to toe, filling Aarti’s arteries and veins with poison—what had she done? What had she become? Yajnadar would not recognize her, would not have believed her capable of this.

  Aarti made a decision. There was blood on her hands? She was irrevocably committed, irretrievably lost? Fine. Then something useful would come of it, at least. Aarti let herself sink down into the dust of the pool, found a corpse, took his form. It hadn’t been easy, taking on a man’s body again, after all this time. But she was determined to do what she needed to destroy them all. One tactic after another, taking care of them, one by one. No turning back now.

  When the pain of the electrical net shuddered through her, Aarti woke up, though it was not yet sunrise. Her body arched in agony, and she barely managed to bite back the scream. Somehow, the humans had managed to affect her—Aarti was not wholly invulnerable on her Moon. The shock of that was enough to make her want to vomit.

  Still, she’d made sure the last human would die there, cold and alone. Aarti had triumphed. But where was the exhilaration she should rightfully feel? In its place, a cold pit yawned open within her chest, fury and fear mixed together.

  Was this what she had wanted?

  Aarti rose from her bed and paced the house, resisting the urge to slam doors behind her. When the house felt too confining, she took to the garden. The Moon shone graciously overhead, but it offered her no comfort.

  Her family had thought her a monster, a demon, had left her to waste away in this house, like Raksha in his tower. Yaj had tried to convince her that she could have a better life than her parents had left to her. Society is changing, Aartibai. Jokers aren’t as stigmatized as they were when you were young—few wear the cloaks and masks these days. You could go out in the world, live—you could still marry, have children. Aarti had scorned Yaj’s fantasies, and then she’d lost him. Too late for children now, and grandchildren. She hadn’t needed them, or at least that was the thought she consoled herself with. Not when she had the Moon, with her palace, her garden, her phantasmagoria of magical creatures. The Moon was hers, and she belonged to the Moon; in the absence of Yaj, it had to be enough.

  But now Aarti had turned into the monster her parents had thought her, all their prophecies fulfilled. A murderess. It was no use to plead accident, to say, I didn’t mean to do it! Aarti felt her soul blackening, shriveling within. Where the wild card had not broken her, not all the years of living with its legacy, the loneliness, not even Yajnadar’s murder—this, this was too much to bear.

  Aarti sank to her knees in the garden, amid the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine. Bougainvillea arched overhead, hibiscus and passionflower and a dozen other blooms surrounded her—so much beauty that she did not deserve. Aarti sobbed, letting loose four decades’ worth of tears at once, a wild grief for everything that had been taken from her. For everything she had done or not done. She dug her nails into the soil, the rich dirt of Earth, wishing that she could sink into it and disappear.

  That night, she returned to the Moon. Aarti summoned Yaj’s face and form one last, desperate time—but he turned away from her, disgusted by what she had become. She let him go. He was right.

  Aarti smashed her little palace then, raini
ng rocks onto it until it was shattered into tiny fragments, which dissolved, slowly, into dust. She would not build it again, nor bring back her lover. She didn’t deserve love. The demon form rose within her, grew huge, crimson and black.

  She stalked the Moon’s surface, twenty feet tall, three-headed, blood dripping from her giant fangs. Her clawed feet dragged paths along the dust, and a half-dozen muscled arms waved gory scimitars at the abyss above. If Aarti were a Rakshasa, a demon from the ancient tales, then the human men had made her thus.

  Let the humans dare to come to her again. She’d be waiting.

  Within That House Secure

  IV

  THE COUNTDOWN CLOCK, MADDENINGLY, still read four seconds, as it had for over half an hour now, as if time itself had stopped. Mathilde, maddeningly, had herself been the one to halt the countdown.

  Her number two—an on-the-edge-of-elderly Japanese nat man named Ito, who most of the VIPs in attendance believed to be the person actually in charge—typed something on his console. Lines of text appeared at the bottom of one of Mathilde’s screens. There is no cause for alarm. You did the right thing to halt and check the coolant system. Also, smoke is rising from your chair.

  Mathilde jumped to her feet and kicked her chair back, trying to force calm on herself at the same time. If the chair burst into flames it wouldn’t harm her, but her clothing would probably catch on fire, and that would definitely lead to the launch being scrubbed.

  Calm down, she thought to herself. This is all going to work out.

  A familiar voice came over her headset. “Are we going to go today, Mathilde?”

  Theodorus was at home, of course, probably in one of the greenhouses, which all featured nearly as much telecommunications equipment as they did exotic flora or, these days, even more exotic fauna. He kept an engineer on staff specifically to develop means of keeping the equipment running in high-humidity environments. The half-dozen patents that had been generated probably paid for the man’s salary and then some.

  She keyed the transmit button on the unit at her belt. “Just running some tests on the coolant systems. There was a temperature fluctuation registering in the number three engine, but Captain Harding thinks it’s just a glitched sensor, not a real heat spike.”

  “Captain Harding wants to make sure he’s the pilot of record for the first manned Stormwing flight. Don’t cut any corners.”

  That was mildly annoying. “Of course not,” she said.

  “Of course not,” he repeated. “I’ll let you work.”

  Mathilde walked over to the huddle of technicians running temperature and sensor tests, listened in for a moment, and decided that interrupting them wouldn’t be productive. They knew their jobs. Everyone in the control tower knew their jobs.

  She looked out the window toward the end of the runway, a mile and a half distant, where the Stormwing sat, ready to race its way into the air. There were pairs of Swiss-manufactured binoculars available, so she could have availed herself of a clearer view. She didn’t. She knew what a Stormwing looked like. She’d been responsible for much of their design.

  The wide-bodied craft could pass for an oversized jetliner to an unschooled viewer, but the humpbacked section that housed the second set of engines—“the business engines,” Theodorus called them—and the compact nuclear power plant that drove them, would be obvious to anyone with more than a casual familiarity with aircraft. Not that the Stormwings were technically aircraft. Quite a bit of money, mostly given over to lobbyist fees but also some for settling a lawsuit and even a bit for a public-relations campaign, had ensured that. No, Stormwings weren’t aircraft. They were spaceships.

  Spaceships that can take off and land at commercial airports, Mathilde reminded herself. At least at commercial airports that have eight-thousand-foot runways.

  Theodorus was going to make a fortune.

  Another one.

  She checked her watch, a beautiful and complicated piece of engineering that Malachi had given her when she finished her master’s degree, and decided to bust up the huddle running the tests. They saw her coming and rearranged themselves so that a red-eyed young man with a pelt like an otter’s was standing in front. He looked back at the other technicians, a mixture of nats and jokers, the betrayal he felt clear on his odd features.

  His name was Oliver Taylor, and he was one of the best engineers in her employ, even if he would never believe that himself. She noticed that he wore a lapel pin depicting the silhouette of a squirrel beneath some Cyrillic characters. Mathilde didn’t know that alphabet, or indeed, know much Russian, but she knew that the word was Remember.

  Oliver wasn’t the only member of the flight control team who wore such an insignia, a subtle tribute to the Russian cosmonaut Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Kozlov, “Belka,” who had died three years earlier when his flight control team had intentionally provided incorrect reentry telemetry, leading to the diminutive joker’s fiery death in the upper atmosphere. There were perhaps two dozen people in the world outside the Soviet space apparatus who knew that fact, most of whom were in this room. Theodorus had told them the story. Hell, for all Mathilde knew, Theodorus had provided the lapel pins.

  Mathilde snapped her attention back to the engineer, who was looking at her nervously. “Oliver,” she said, “I need a determination.”

  “Yes, well … yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, the captain’s feeling that the problem with the sensor is probably correct.”

  “Probably?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “Oliver, does that ‘almost’ cover eight hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of hardware and six human lives?”

  The young man looked confused. “The crew complement is five.”

  She let him think about it for a second, staring at him levelly.

  “Oh! You mean me!”

  She stared still.

  “Would you … would you like to look over my data yourself?”

  Mathilde considered it. She thought about it like an engineer, and she thought about it like a manager. She turned to Ito, who had been watching the entire exchange, she was sure. She raised her hand, held her thumb upright. Her other thumb pressed the transmit button at her waist. “We’re go. We’re go. We’re go.”

  There were cheers in the control tower. Over the radio, that familiar voice. “At last.”

  The automated Stormwings had been in service for just over a year. With the exception of one spectacular failure that Malachi, who was either in the best position to know or the worst, insisted was the result of sabotage, the program had been running smoothly. Malachi’s opinion on that failure, Mathilde reminded herself, was shaky judged from an engineering point of view, but pretty sound from a corporate espionage point of view.

  Unmanned Stormwings had circled the Earth. Over two spectacular days that Theodorus had spent obscene amounts of money to keep quiet, an unmanned Stormwing had achieved lunar orbit. And returned. To land at a pristine new corporate airfield near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, something else that had cost obscene amounts of money.

  But if there was one thing that Mathilde and Theodorus agreed upon when it came to spaceflight—of course there were dozens of things they agreed upon in that area—it was this. Robots are boring.

  “Don’t you want to hear a human’s voice talking across the void, Mathilde?” Theodorus had asked in the early days of development. “Don’t you want to know that there are people out there. People from Earth? People you know?”

  Of course she did.

  And now five people she knew were hurtling down the runway, fast, but not really that much faster than a commercial liner would have made the same trip. The Stormwing’s nose lifted, the fuselage angled up, and then the craft was airborne.

  “Showing you a clean set of wheels, Control,” said Captain Harding over the radio, still in the affected West Virginia drawl that no one had been able to encourage, coax, or outright order him to abandon. The man was from
San Diego.

  Ito said, “Nominal across the board.”

  Mathilde nodded. This was the easy part.

  She saw Oliver standing by the window, a pair of those heavy binoculars held an inch or two away from his eyes, tracking the Stormwing south and east and up through the twilight. She looked at her board. About seven minutes until the next crucial point, so she walked back over.

  “Not monitoring the sensor suite on engine three?” she asked.

  Oliver lowered the glasses quickly and cast a guilty glance back toward his station. “Randy’s watching it,” he said. “A failure sourced there would have … would have manifested already.”

  By which he meant that if there was going to be a spectacular explosion that was his fault at least, then it would have happened by now.

  She nodded. “You knew I wasn’t going to check your data,” she said.

  He shook his head, the gesture obscure. “I believed my data were correct. I believed, I mean, that my interpretation of the data was correct.”

  “Four minutes,” said Ito. Four minutes until business time.

  “But you didn’t insist on that. You said ‘probably.’ You said ‘almost.’ Just now you said ‘believed’ instead of ‘knew.’”

  He ran his hand back through that thick pelt. “When you look like me, nobody ever wants you to be too sure of anything.”

  Mathilde let that hang there. Then she said, “Oliver, I do look like you.”

  Cahier No. 200

  22 September 1990

  Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

  A spacecraft I helped design is in orbit around the Earth tonight. On television, all of the networks are showing the wreckage of the Brooklyn Bridge.