Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  He did, draining the bottle in three long draughts. Then he took a deep breath and said, “To answer your questions from earlier, I am now fine, that was a sort of seizure, and Mr. Bell knows about it because he knows what I want done when it occurs and will do it. If it were up to you there would be an ambulance on the way here now and soon there’d be outsiders tromping through the House Secure.”

  The House Secure was what Theodorus had rechristened the Witherspoon estate a few years earlier, after Malachi had found a poem for him that Theodorus particularly liked. Mathilde wasn’t overly fond of the name or the poem.

  “How long has this been happening?” Theodorus asked.

  Malachi looked between the two of them. Then he said, “For fifty-five years.”

  Fifty-five years?

  Theodorus said, “Ah, well, then you clearly know what you’re doing.”

  Mathilde couldn’t believe it. She watched Theodorus turn back to his tablet, watched Malachi straighten his jacket and dismiss Bell and his guards. They’re both so good at keeping secrets that revelations don’t phase them, she thought. But that, she realized, heart stricken, was hardly a revelation itself.

  Diggers

  by David D. Levine

  PART ONE

  BRICK BY BRICK, GIRDER by girder, Tiago Gonçalves was putting himself back together. It wasn’t working.

  He kept at it anyway. He didn’t know what else to do.

  “More concrete!” he called to Salpicado, holding up a three-story-tall steel pillar that wanted nothing more than to fall over. They were all amateurs here, but he hoped that with enough steel and enough concrete they would be able to make something that lasted.

  Tiago was about five meters tall at the moment, a man-shaped sculpture of batten, board, and broken concrete at the heart of which was a trembling, sweating twenty-six-year-old curinga whose skin was a jigsaw patchwork of shades from ebony to alabaster. When the wild card virus had dealt him a joker—had it been nearly ten years, now?—it had made him a collage, a messy assemblage of all humanity’s skin tones and textures. Even his eyes were two different colors.

  But the virus, always capricious, had also dealt him an ace: the ability to draw to himself any bits of junk or trash in the vicinity. These objects, upon touching his skin directly or indirectly, became part of his body, and through them he could feel, see, touch, and even taste; the more junk he piled onto himself the larger and stronger he became. It worked, the UN scientists had told him, on any “organic” substance—which meant, in their strange lingo, not healthy and pesticide-free but something about the elements of which they were composed. Wood, plastic, meat, and bone yes; metal, stone, and glass no. This ability had earned him a spot on Heróis Brazil, the name the Recycler, membership in the Committee … and a trip to Hell.

  It was only by blind chance and good fortune that he had escaped Kazakhstan with his life, and even so—even with the help of some of the UN’s finest therapists—he sometimes wondered if the thousands who had died had gotten off more easily. Memories of his time as a horrific golem of rotting, pustulent flesh, slaughtering friends and strangers with unthinking cruelty, haunted him day and night.

  It was Horrorshow who had performed those atrocities, he knew, not truly him—he had been only a tool, an extension of Horrorshow’s twisted soul with no more volition than the bits of wood and string that made up his gigantic extended body at the moment. No normal mind, and very few extraordinary ones, could possibly have resisted that malefic influence, and he needed to forgive himself, to stop flogging himself for failing to achieve the impossible.

  But it was his hands that had torn out those throats, his eyes that had looked on the slaughter with gleeful malice, his mouth that had laughed and sneered and cursed the blameless victims even as they bled out on the shuddering flesh-ground at his feet. He could never forget how satisfied he had been at the carnage, and though time and therapy and hypnosis had blunted the pain of those memories, they would always be a part of him.

  The pillar shifted, and he put his wooden shoulder against it to steady it. “Hurry!” he called to Salpicado, a curinga whose spongy body exuded water in seemingly endless quantities. Even now he was wringing his hands together, squishing out liters of water into the trough where two young men from the favela—part of the community that would be served by the hospital they were building, if they ever finished it—mixed it together with cement and rocks to form concrete. “That’s enough!” Tiago shouted as the pillar shifted again, this time trying to fall in the opposite direction, and even as he struggled to right it he reached out with his power, pulling bits of rubber hose and scrap wood from the trash heap nearby onto his body, trying to make himself big and strong enough to hold this three-story steel stick vertical until the tardy concrete could be poured.

  Trying … and failing. Despite his best efforts, the pillar kept tipping, painfully tearing bits of plywood and drywall from Tiago’s straining fingers. “Look out!” he cried, his powerful voice grating oddly from a throat built of rope and cardboard. Nats and curingas alike scattered from the falling pillar as it toppled, smashing the foundation form in which it stood and turning a tidy pile of cinder blocks into shattered rubble. When the dust cleared, the pillar—which, together with three others, was intended to form the hospital’s sturdy spine—was bent and twisted to uselessness.

  “Droga!” he swore, relaxing his power. The giant man, the Recycler, gradually collapsed, leaving in its place Tiago Gonçalves: a trembling, sweating skinny kid with ugly patchwork skin, standing in soaking jeans and a T-shirt in a heap of shattered junk. He stood bent over, hands on knees, panting and gasping from effort and frustration. “Damn it,” he swore again, in English this time—it was a habit he’d picked up in the Committee.

  “Está bem,” Salpicado reassured him, placing a damp and squidgy hand on his shoulder. “We can try again tomorrow.”

  “But look at the pillar!” Tiago cried, flinging a hand at the twisted, useless thing. He was near tears, he realized, and tried to calm himself, closing his eyes and focusing on his breathing as his therapist had taught him. We can buy another pillar, he told himself. No one was hurt. He had done his best. But what he said aloud was, “Everything I touch winds up broken.”

  Now the tears did come, and he turned away from Salpicado and the other workers—nats and curingas working together to build a hospital for the favela, people he himself had brought together … and failed. Wiping his eyes and his running nose, he stumbled blindly away downhill.

  Poor people, nats and curingas alike, lived up in the morro, or hills, while rich people lived down on the flats, the asfalto. Tiago slept in a hotel by the beach, with a soft enormous bed, air-conditioning, and room service, all paid for by Committee money. The UN had been generous to him in the wake of the Kazakhstan disaster. But nothing—not his money, not his determination, not his wild card power—could remedy Rio’s poverty or assuage his guilt for Kazakhstan.

  He was doing everything he could, and it wasn’t enough.

  “Senhor Gonçalves!” called the front desk clerk as Tiago dragged himself despondently through the revolving door into the hotel’s cool, scented lobby. Being addressed by that name still surprised him every time. “There’s a message for you, sir! It’s urgent!”

  Politeness and curiosity overcame Tiago’s weariness and despair, and he accepted the proffered envelope with a nod and a small tip.

  Within the hotel’s envelope was a second, smaller envelope, heavy cream-colored paper with a gold embossed logo: Witherspoon Holdings do Brasil Ltda. Within was a note, handwritten in looping, elegant curves. He stared at the rich paper and deep black ink for some time.

  Shame suffused Tiago’s chest as he handed the note back to the desk clerk. “Could you read this to me, please?” he said. “I … I forgot my reading glasses.” In truth, he could not read cursive. Indeed, it was only by dint of intensive hypnotic training that he could read at all, or speak English. Neither of these ski
lls had been necessary for a child of the favelas, and his life since escaping the slums had been far too chaotic for a normal education.

  The clerk’s skepticism about Tiago’s reading glasses was clear, but he took the note back and read aloud: “‘Senhor Fernando Suzuki, personal representative in Brazil of Theodorus Witherspoon, sends greetings to Senhor Tiago Gonçalves, also known as O Reciclador. He desires a personal meeting with you at your earliest convenience on a matter of utmost urgency and confidentiality.’ There’s a phone number.” He looked up. “Would you like me to dial it for you?”

  Anger joined the shame. “I can dial my own phone, thank you. Just write the number out clearly for me.” Then, belatedly remembering his excuse, “And large.” He handed over another tip, much bigger than the first.

  The clerk nodded and returned the original letter with the number written in huge, childish numerals at the bottom. “Will there be anything else, Senhor?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Fernando Suzuki, whose cultured Brazilian Portuguese on the phone had been completely without accent, had the Japanese facial features his last name suggested. He was also a curinga, having a second pair of arms in place of his legs. He walked on all fours, his hands protected by fashionable black leather gloves, and wore a suit whose exquisite tailoring managed to make him look like the lawyer he was rather than a dressed-up dog. “So pleased you could see me on such short notice,” he said, stripping off his right fore-hand glove and reaching up to take Tiago’s hand. His grip was firm, his palm surprisingly soft. A nat assistant, also wearing a suit though not quite so finely made, carried his briefcase.

  They had met in the hotel bar, and Suzuki clambered up into a booth without a trace of awkwardness. Tiago took the seat across from him; with Suzuki’s lower limbs hidden by the tabletop, he seemed merely somewhat short. The lawyer folded his delicately manicured fingers before himself as the assistant—silent and not introduced—sat down beside him. “You are familiar with Theodorus Witherspoon, I trust?”

  “I’ve heard the name. Joker? Rich guy?” Tiago recalled pictures of a giant snail-centaur on the covers of the magazines behind the counter at the convenience store, usually seen in the company of beautiful blonde women.

  “Fourth richest person in the world. Also the developer of the Stormwing.” Seeing Tiago’s blank look, Suzuki clarified, “It’s a spaceplane that can take off and land at any major airport. Single stage to orbit.”

  Tiago shrugged. “That’s nice. What does this have to do with me?”

  Suzuki leaned forward over his folded hands. “As I said on the phone, this is a highly confidential matter. Before we proceed I must ask you to sign this nondisclosure agreement.” Without prompting, the assistant drew from his briefcase a fat sheaf of papers, dense with text.

  Tiago made a show of looking over the papers, but he could barely understand one word in three. “So, bottom line,” he said—it was a phrase he’d heard often from the producers of Heróis Brazil—“this means that if I tell anyone what you’re about to tell me, very bad things will happen. To me.”

  “Precisely.” Suzuki took a pen from his own pocket. It was warm and very heavy in Tiago’s fingers.

  Tiago signed.

  Suzuki bowed his head as he took the signed agreement back from Tiago, then handed it to his assistant. The assistant tucked it into the briefcase, then brought out a slim metallic device, placed it on the table, and pressed a button. A thin whine, almost too high to hear, came from it, and at once the voices of the other patrons of the restaurant dimmed to a low incomprehensible mumble. “We can speak privately now,” Suzuki said, his voice slightly muffled and echoey, “but I must remind you that we can still be seen. Do not make any sudden or dramatic gestures.”

  “All right.” Tiago folded his hands on the table before him, mirroring Suzuki, but his ugly patchwork skin and ragged fingernails made the gesture more a parody than a reflection.

  “You may be aware that Mr. Witherspoon is a strong proponent of jokers’ rights,” Suzuki said. Tiago shrugged. “However, in addition to his public persona, Mr. Witherspoon has for many years been pursuing a personal project of dramatic scope, one which will immensely improve the lives of jokers around the world. That project has now reached a critical new stage, and we have an immediate need for a great many talented jokers—jokers such as yourself.”

  “Go on.”

  “The Stormwing is not merely an orbital craft,” Suzuki explained then, for no apparent reason. “It is capable of reaching the Moon, and has been for over ten years. And Mr. Witherspoon has been using his fleet of Stormwings—which includes, by the way, many more craft than are publicly known—to construct a homeland for jokers on the lunar far side.”

  Tiago clutched his hands together, reminding himself not to make any sudden or dramatic gestures. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am not shitting you, Senhor Gonçalves. And this homeland, which currently consists of just a few hundred hardy jokers, is about to expand dramatically. Beginning in 2020, and continuing for many years more, a barrage of water-ice asteroids will impact the lunar surface. This influx of volatiles—forgive me, water and gases—will, over the course of the next few decades, transform the Moon from a barren rock into a livable planet. But in order for this project to succeed, the population of the joker homeland will need to increase by a factor of one hundred or more—tens of thousands of jokers with the specialized scientific, engineering, and technological skills needed to manage the transformation.”

  Tiago blinked, then slowly spread his hands. “I … I appreciate your confidence in me, Senhor. But I have no such skills.”

  Suzuki inclined his head in acknowledgment. “But these highly skilled individuals will need a place to live. And you, with your particular abilities, experience, and motivations, are perfectly suited for the job.” He held out a hand and the assistant placed in it a tablet computer, which Suzuki switched on and turned to face Tiago. The screen, Tiago noted, was built for privacy—it appeared black unless it was pointed directly toward the viewer.

  The image on the screen was a drawing of a giant robot—a humanoid form, clean and white and shiny, with clever jointed fingers and a smooth head, noseless and mouthless, that suggested rather than depicted a human face. A human figure drawn next to it showed that it was about three and a half meters tall. “What is this?” he asked Suzuki.

  “You.” Suzuki touched the screen and a third human form, this one skinny and colored in a patchwork of browns, faded into view in the middle of the giant robot’s torso. In case there were any doubt, it had Tiago’s face and hair.

  “I couldn’t possibly assemble something like that. I don’t have that kind of control.”

  Suzuki shook his head. “We will build it for you. It will be custom fitted, very comfortable, and airtight. But as it is built entirely of plastic and will be in contact with your skin, because of your unique abilities it will also be an extension of your body. With this suit you will be stronger than any space-suited astronaut, and also able to manipulate and feel objects in vacuum as well as an ungloved human hand. A perfect lunar construction machine.”

  Tiago stared hard at the illustration, trying to imagine himself within it. With this suit he could walk upon the Moon—the Moon!—and feel the lunar rock beneath his feet, as no one else had ever done. Those fingers, carefully crafted and machined, would surely be stronger and more precise than any he’d ever formed of junk. And he would be helping to build a homeland for jokers. “What’s the catch?” he said.

  “You will need to depart immediately—as in, right this minute. You can’t tell anyone where you are going, and you won’t be able to communicate with anyone on Earth while you are on the Moon. We will take care of your affairs and make sure your friends and relatives don’t worry about you, but no one can know about this project until it is much further along.”

  “I don’t have any relatives.” Even his friends, he realized, were not close … most of
his best friends, those he had made on the Committee and, before that, in the landfills of Rio, were dead or missing. “But I couldn’t possibly. I’m building a hospital.”

  “We are aware of this, and I have been authorized to make a substantial donation—a very substantial donation—to the project. Anonymous, of course, but it should be sufficient to complete the project in your absence.”

  Tiago drummed his fingers on the table. “Enough to pay for a real architect and proper construction equipment?”

  Suzuki gazed at him levelly. “Enough to make it the finest hospital in Rio. If you join our project.”

  The two curingas studied each other for a time. “I don’t understand,” Tiago said. “There must be a hundred jokers in the world better suited to this project. Why is Witherspoon that desperate to hire me?”

  Suzuki tilted his head, his expression softening. “It’s not Mr. Witherspoon,” he said, “but Mr. Schwartz, the project manager, who specifically requested that I approach you. And, frankly, I don’t know why.” He folded his hands on the table and leaned forward over them. “As I’m sure you can understand, most of the people involved in this project are what you might call ‘true believers.’ Usually new recruits spend a considerable time—years—volunteering, or working in more peripheral roles, before being offered an on-site position like this. This is an extremely unusual opportunity, Senhor Gonçalves, and I strongly encourage you to accept it.”

  Something about the deal smelled, Tiago thought. But still … it was an extremely unusual opportunity, indeed the opportunity of a lifetime. And what would he be giving up to do it? The hospital? The hospital whose spine he had just broken, through inexperience and inadequacy?