Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  Vice President Duncan Towers had been sworn in as president within hours of the assassination, but in the ensuing chaos most of his staff had not yet moved into the White House offices appropriate to their new higher standing. All of that particular mess was still being sorted out, so most were still ensconced in their old digs in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which was adjacent to the West Wing on the White House premises.

  Bugsy’s wasps, hardly encumbered at all by the microtech they wore, made their way, singly, unseen and silent, into the august halls of the Eisenhower Building, straight to the office of Reginald Fleming, the former vice president’s chief of staff, where Fleming was entertaining a visitor. Antonio Echeverria of SCARE. Justice himself.

  Fleming was not in the best mood. He leaned back in his overstuffed office chair to glare directly at Justice. “The Russians are out, then?”

  Justice looked acutely uncomfortable. “They’ve gone to the mattresses. I don’t know who is going to emerge on top. Grekov was killed in some horrible way, maybe by one of his own. No one knows. It looks like the work of an ace. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the Colonel, but he’s well alibied. Brighton Beach is blowing up. It’s a war down there.”

  “Did Grekov talk before he died?”

  “We don’t know that, either. But he never knew enough to matter.”

  “What about the retard and his brother?”

  “They’re both retards,” said Justice. “They’re out of the way. Having fun down in Buenos Aires.”

  “They’re liabilities,” said Fleming. “I would sleep better at night if they were both out of the way permanently.”

  “I can take care of that,” Justice promised, “but let’s hold off a bit. We may have further need of their … special talents.”

  “Hold off, then,” said Fleming, “but not too long. This needs to be cleaned up. Do what needs to be done. And keep me out of it. We need plausible deniability.”

  “You and the man,” said Justice, “so if this falls apart, you don’t know me. Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “You were the shooter,” Fleming said pointedly, “but don’t get your panties in a twist. We’re close. Our polling suggests that almost eighty percent of the public thinks the Big Snail took Pauline out. Once things settle down, we’ll find some pretext to get rid of Lady Black, and you’ll be the director of SCARE. And rich.”

  Justice seemed appeased. “Your boss knows I’m loyal.”

  “He knows you’re loyal as money can buy,” Fleming said.

  “Hey, I’m Towers all the way—”

  In the food truck, Sibyl and her companions looked at one another. She wished that she could smile. “Money shot,” Sibyl announced. “Go live. It’s time to share this with the world.” She nodded at Bugsy. Bugsy nodded back, and Ratboy punched the buttons.

  “Hello fans in cyberland,” Jonathan Hive said into his microphone. “This is Jonathan Tipton-Clark reporting from the field—virtually live. We’re working only with a slight tape delay to bring you undercover audio from the offices of the vice president in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The voices belong to SCARE agent Antonio Echeverria and Reginald Fleming, chief of staff to Vice President Duncan Towers. I’ll just let them speak for themselves—”

  Ratboy made the connection. “Transmitting to the Aces! website,” he confirmed. The tape started from the beginning of the conversation, which continued into interesting details.

  Fifteen minutes later the Aces! website crashed. Twenty minutes later a squad of grim-faced Capitol policemen were breaking down the door to Fleming’s office.

  Bugsy, no longer caring if the wasps were spotted or not, brought them down to get some great close-ups of Fleming’s stunned face. They got it all. For good measure, he had one of them sting Justice on the nose.

  Sibyl watched impassively as the cops marched the men out of the office. By then the FBI and SCARE had arrived to join the party. She didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry, but she was capable of neither.

  We got them, she thought to herself. We got them all, Father.

  For Victor Milán. Ve con dios, hermano.

  Within That House Secure

  X

  Cahier No. 619

  5 December 2017

  The House Secure

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Pauline van Renssaeler was assassinated over six months ago, and despite what Jonathan Tipton-Clark and the JADL revealed about the conspiracy that killed her, despite the arrests that have been made and the admittedly glacially slow work of the Satterly Commission, half the world still thinks Theodorus was behind it.

  Now, with the inbound ice bodies having been spotted and publicized by the global astronomy community, more than half the world thinks we plan to bombard the planet into a second ice age.

  I wonder if they will kill us all.

  Theodorus had been very worried about the billiards table. He was widely assumed to have been instrumental in a conspiracy that killed the leader of the free world, and had been accused by her successor of initiating an effort to end all life on Earth, and he was very worried about the billiards table.

  The games room had been judged the best location in the House Secure for the press conference, but it had required the removal of the table—not to mention the curio cabinets and shelves that displayed his large collection of antique board games—and Theodorus had insisted on bringing in a team of experts from Chicago to ensure that the table not be damaged when it was taken out of the room. How one became an expert in billiards table removal, Mathilde didn’t know. What she did know was that she had been visiting the Witherspoon estate regularly for nearly her entire life, and had never once seen Theodorus playing billiards.

  Four rows of chairs were lined up in front of a specially built dais. The dais featured its own row of chairs and a podium, all in front of a backdrop decorated with a repeated motif of the Witherspoon Aerospace logo. Mathilde squinted, taking a closer look at the logo, then pulled out her worn old employee badge. The logo on the backdrop was slightly different—the Os there looked like cratered moons.

  “When did they change the logo?” she asked Clifford Bell.

  “Logo?” he replied.

  “Look, see the moons there?” She showed him her badge.

  He pulled out his own badge, glanced at it, and then showed it to her. It matched the backdrop.

  “They’re issuing new IDs?” she asked.

  Cliff shrugged. “Not that I know of. This is the same one I’ve always had.”

  “Since when?”

  He gave her a questioning look. “Since 2003, I guess. Maybe you just never noticed it until now?”

  That was … well, that was entirely possible, actually. But it still made her uneasy for some reason. Cliff was looking at her oddly. Probably wondering why she was worried about logos when so much had happened, when so much was riding on the reaction to this press conference.

  Vickie, the public relations professional who had been an employee at one or another of Theodorus’s companies for even longer than Mathilde had been, walked over. She gave them both appraising looks, then said, “The makeup artists did a good job on you, Mathilde. Mr. Bell, we need to do something about your eyes.”

  Forestalling an argument, Mathilde asked, “Is everything set up? Are we ready to go live?”

  Vickie shook her head. “Most of the networks are already live. Half of them are convinced that the authorities are going to descend and arrest Mr. Witherspoon at any minute and the other half think that, too, but that he won’t go without a fight. They’re expecting fireworks.”

  “Impacts,” murmured Mathilde. “Not fireworks. They’re expecting asteroid impacts. The end of the world.”

  “Thank you all for coming,” Theodorus said. “I know that it has been some time since I made a public appearance or answered any questions from the press.” The assembled reporters, producers, camera operators, and sound technicians all looked
at one another. One of them, Mathilde couldn’t see, actually laughed aloud. It had literally been years since Theodorus had appeared in public.

  “To address the two questions that most of you no doubt wish to ask first,” Theodorus said, “no, I had nothing to do with President van Renssaeler’s death, and no, I am not planning to rain asteroids down upon the Earth.”

  The room erupted in a tumultuous scrum of shouted questions, imprecations, pleas, even threats. Mathilde looked over at Vickie. The woman looked shocked.

  “If you didn’t order President van Renssaeler’s assassination, then who did?”

  “Are you claiming that the astronomers are all wrong, that there aren’t over fifty asteroids bound for Earth?”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  Theodorus nodded, but not at any of the reporters. In the back of the room, a technician activated the screen hanging from the ceiling in front of the backdrop. The image it showed was of a shapeless hunk of something gray and white floating in a void.

  “This is, or rather, was, Asteroid 2013 GH22. It is an example of one of the newly discovered group of objects within the Koronis family consisting largely of water ice.”

  A woman’s hand shot up, and she didn’t wait for Theodorus to acknowledge her before asking, “Why did you say ‘was’? Has something happened to it?”

  Theodorus smiled broadly, and Mathilde winced. His smile didn’t play well on camera. “Our friends at the International Astronomical Union are very particular about designations,” he said. “2013 GH22 is no longer in the asteroid belt, so it is technically no longer an asteroid.”

  The object on the screen rotated to show what had been its aft side. A curved shape was appended to its surface, and fiery gases, immediately recognizable as the outflow from a rocket engine, jetted away from the unnatural feature.

  “Technically, well, I suppose technically you could say that it’s now a spaceship. It has an engine, as you can see. And in this case”—the picture zoomed in—“the engine is also the pilot.”

  More than one of the people gathered in the room, including Vickie up on the stage next to him, gasped. The closer view showed that the curved shape was a mottled nautilus snail shell nearly identical to Theodorus’s own.

  Theodorus spoke over a number of shouts. “Let me say a little more and save you all some questions. The ice bodies are bound in our direction, but toward the Moon, not toward the Earth. The first will impact the lunar surface in a little less than three years, on September 15, 2020.”

  “What’s their purpose?”

  “Is there any chance they could miss the Moon and hit the Earth?”

  “Did President van Renssaeler approve of this?”

  “Does President Towers approve of this?”

  There were even more questions than those, but Theodorus just let them wash over him. Mathilde watched the faces of the reporters. She saw anger there, but more than that, fear.

  “I’ve said all I plan to say about the president. As for your other questions, we’ll be distributing a fact sheet and drives with more information and video for you in just a moment,” said Theodorus. “But in brief, there are fifty-one ice bodies bound for the Moon, they are part of a terraforming project, and at least some elements in the United States government, as well as in the governments of most of the G20, have known about it for at least two years. Why they haven’t shared their knowledge with the public, I do not know.”

  He didn’t answer the question about whether one could hit us here, Mathilde thought. She wondered if that was on purpose. One of the few print reporters in the room, an aging nat man wearing an unfashionable khaki jacket, had been holding up his hand for the last few minutes. He hadn’t stood. He hadn’t shouted. “Simon,” said Theodorus. “You have a question.”

  “Yes, Mr. Witherspoon,” said the man. “Why?”

  And Theodorus smiled again.

  Cahier No. 620

  6 December 2017

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Theodorus has been called to Washington to appear before the Satterly Commission, though he’s adamant about not going. Neither, he says, will he answer any of the many other summons. He insists that he will not spend his valuable time testifying before four separate congressional subcommittees and two full Senate committees, and neither will he “trot off” to the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, U.S. Space Command, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, nor, especially, not ever, the White House.

  Malachi asked him if he’s ever heard of such a thing as a subpoena.

  Theodorus told him that it was his job to handle the paperwork.

  “We need goodwill yet,” said Malachi.

  Malachi, who reads all those newspapers every day, must not have read any this morning. Goodwill is the last thing we’re getting.

  European papers are calling for the U.S. government to nationalize all of Theodorus’s holdings immediately. Official news outlets in the Middle East and Central Asia have called for his arrest, and the subtext suggesting he simply be executed is not hard to pick up on. At least the string of nations around the equator where we’ve done so much for employment and infrastructure over the years are apparently reserving judgment, though even there, an opposition paper in Colombia this morning led with the headline “¿AYUDAMOS A CONSTRUIR UNA LUNA JOKER? DID WE HELP BUILD A JOKER MOON?”

  Yes. Yes, you did, though of course we never told you.

  It’s only the fact that so many world governments knew about the inbound asteroids and concealed that fact for so long that’s kept us from being the target of all the ire in the world, it seems. People are also very upset—marching in the streets upset, turning over police cars upset—with their leaders.

  Clifford Bell raised the idea this morning that Theodorus “consider relocation,” as he put it. By which he meant Theodorus should have Mollie Steunenberg open one of her portals and travel through it to one of our lunar bases immediately.

  Theodorus said no.

  When Cliff said he didn’t know whether he could protect Theodorus here any longer, Theodorus said, “I did not name this place the House Secure lightly.”

  Governments, business leaders, religious leaders, the media—they’re all calling for investigations at the least and outright seizure of everything we’ve done at most. Publicly. Cliff insists that the back-channel chatter he’s hearing from his sources indicates that privately, the reactions are even more vehement.

  Jokers interviewed around the world express everything from disbelief to enthusiasm to caution to rejection. A video clip being shown over and over again features a woman with a row of beautiful green eyes completely encircling her head saying, “It’s insane, what did you expect me to say? You believe we all think the same?”

  Dr. Bradley Finn, still technically a person of interest in the president’s assassination but released on bail after the conspiracy was revealed, has gone on record calling the project insane.

  Oliver is at the Marshall Islands base. I haven’t been able to reach him.

  The Sands of Mourning

  PART 2

  2017

  “THEY’RE MASSIVE,” ADESINA SAID, as they looked up at the monuments to the Living Gods. Her cobalt wings spread out, an iridescent sheen reflecting off them. “I mean, it’s one thing to read about them, but in person they’re, like, totes big.”

  The statues were carved of sandstone, rivaling those of Ancient Egypt. They lined the broad pathway leading to the temple. Figures of Sobek, Anubis, Bast, Tawaret, and Thoth mirrored one another. Past them were larger statues of Isis and Osiris. Dwarfing them all were Ra’s twin effigies, bracketing the entrance to the temple. Ra was depicted wearing a falcon mask and traditional shenti. A golden ball of fire was suspended over his head. It was a neat feat of engineering.

  A cool breeze whispered across the First Court inside the temple where they stood waiting to meet up with Bastet. “B
ubbles!”

  Michelle turned and saw Bastet walking briskly across the courtyard. She wore a kalasiris, but it was made from a stretchy, brightly colored, geometric print material, not the traditional linen. Her black muzzle had a few white hairs sprinkled in it now, Michelle noted. Bastet resembled Bast, but she was shorter and there was a roundness to her once-lithe body. Michelle found herself in an enthusiastic embrace. Bastet smelled of sandalwood and vanilla. Just the way Michelle remembered.

  “How have you been?” Bastet asked, releasing Michelle, then turning to look at Adesina. “And you must be Adesina. You are your mother’s daughter. Powerful and beautiful. I imagine you’ve had more than your own share of adventures.”

  “Oh, not so much,” Adesina replied, smoothly avoiding her mother’s gaze. It was a lie. Her daughter had been having far too many adventures as far as Michelle was concerned. Adesina had gone into a cocoon and had changed from a child to a teenager overnight.

  According to Michelle, she was still just a child, but she didn’t act like a child. And though Adesina still looked like a teenager, she wanted to be treated like an adult. Michelle didn’t like that, either.

  “I think your mother would disagree with you,” Bastet said with a laugh. “How long has it been, Michelle?”

  “Since the Caliphate War.”

  “It seems like longer,” Bastet said. She patted Michelle’s cheek. “And you’re not playing fat today.”

  “You asked us to come for a visit,” Michelle answered with a soft laugh. “I’m as incognito as I can be. And you know how it is—me being fat gets people nervous.”

  Bastet took Adesina by her right arm and Michelle by her left, then began escorting them across the courtyard. Before they got halfway, a man strode through the far entrance. He was dressed exactly like the statue of Ra: falcon mask, ceremonial robes, even a ball of fire floating above his head.