Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “How long do we have this place leased?” Theodorus asked.

  Malachi blinked. “Are you asking me a question about money?”

  Theodorus said, “I just don’t want the owners to be inconvenienced if we leave it empty. Houses like this take a lot of upkeep, you know.”

  Malachi said, “Yes, I do know. As it happens, I own this villa myself. But don’t worry, I gave you an excellent price, given the season and the short notice.”

  Mathilde tried to remember whether she’d known her father owned an Italian villa. She tried to remember if she’d ever told him about the time-share condo she and Oliver had together in Amalfi.

  Theodorus just laughed. “Come on, then. Mollie, you’ve been there before so no need to call up a current view, correct? Let’s go, let’s go!”

  Off again.

  The Monastery of the Caves was a sprawling complex of religious buildings designed and constructed over the course of hundreds of years. At the moment Mathilde stepped through Mollie’s gateway from Italy, it was also a battleground.

  They appeared scant yards from a pair of men wearing nondescript suits, but one of them was brandishing what Mathilde thought was a distinctly dangerous-looking machine gun. The other had his hands held slightly apart, a sphere of crackling purple electricity dancing between them.

  Both of them looked over at the arriving party in shock, then the man with the gun said, in New England–accented English, “Holy shit, it’s Witherspoon! Forget the snake!”

  Troll crossed the distance between the two groups with more speed than Mathilde would have given him credit for. He had just wrenched the machine gun from the grasp of the man who had spoken when the other threw his hands apart. The purple ball of lightning flew into Troll’s chest, knocking the enormous joker flat. Aftershocks danced over Troll’s skin, and his long limbs shook as if he were experiencing a seizure.

  “Mollie!” Theodorus shouted.

  A portal opened beneath the two men, and they screamed as they fell through what should have been solid ground.

  “Bye bye,” said Mollie.

  Malachi and Mathilde hurried to Troll’s side, but he was already sitting up, shaking his head. “Who the hell were those guys? What was that all about?”

  Mathilde had a pretty good guess, but it wasn’t her that answered. Just then, a Black man whose form transitioned from a muscular torso to the body of an impossibly gigantic coral snake slithered out of the shadows of a nearby chapel. “They were SCARE agents,” he said. “And they were after us.”

  Who “us” was became apparent when a fine-featured woman stepped out of the church, holding the hand of a child. A joker child, with glowing eyes and four back-turned legs sprouting radially from her hips. Other figures milled behind the woman, beyond the high arched doors.

  “You’re Marcus Morgan,” said Theodorus. “The man who smuggles jokers out of the former Soviet sphere.”

  “A man near the top of everyone’s list of international fugitives,” said Malachi.

  Morgan, unexpectedly, smiled at that. “I used to be number one until your boss went on the run from Duncan Towers.”

  “We should get inside,” the woman said, her accent indicating she was a local. “The monks have been kind, but they won’t want us drawing attention.”

  As the group crowded into the church, Mathilde asked Mollie, “Where did you send them?”

  Mollie looked genuinely mystified. “Who?” she asked.

  There were perhaps thirty jokers in the church’s sanctuary. Most of them appeared malnourished and exhausted. A trio of monks moved among them, offering food and, apparently, blessings. The refugees seemed grateful for both.

  “I admire the work you are doing,” Theodorus told Morgan. “We have a lot in common, I think.”

  Mathilde looked at the two men side by side. A snail-centaur and a snake-centaur. Both on the run from the law. Both doing whatever they could to help jokers around the world. She decided that Theodorus was right.

  Marcus Morgan apparently didn’t agree. He spat on the stone floor. There was a faint sizzling sound where his sputum struck, and the jokers nearest by stepped away.

  “We have nothing in common. You think I don’t know who you are? You think I don’t know about your little vacation this past year? I’ve been underground for years, man. Do you know how many run-ins I’ve had with government aces since Towers became president? Do you know how many times I’ve been shot at, beaten up, electrified? One dude nearly froze me solid! Do you know how many of the people I’ve been trying to help have died in the fallout?”

  The local woman, to all appearances a nat, stepped forward and stroked Morgan’s cheek. “My love,” she said. “I think we should talk to these people.”

  “Yes,” said Theodorus. “We should talk. Because I think I can help you.”

  It took some convincing, of both Morgan and Malachi, but eventually Theodorus and the wary snake man began a long conversation.

  That was how the refugees in the church wound up on the Moon. That was how the Infamous Black Tongue came into Theodorus’s employ.

  “It’s a gambit,” said Malachi. “The first move in some game that will see us all imprisoned or killed.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” said Theodorus. “But a presidential pardon isn’t something to be turned down lightly. And besides, aren’t you tired of all this constant travel?”

  Mathilde was sure Malachi was absolutely exhausted by the constant travel. The rest of them certainly were. But she wasn’t so sure that Theodorus’s eagerness to accept Duncan Towers’s unexpected peace offering and return to the House Secure was particularly wise.

  It was true that the Satterly Commission, still working, had released a preliminary report clearing Theodorus and his allies of any wrongdoing. Of course, this was the same body that had earlier released a report clearing Duncan Towers—if not his allies—of any wrongdoing.

  “It doesn’t cover Marcus and Olena,” said Mathilde. She wasn’t reading the pardon, but the summary of it and of the Commission’s report that Clifford Bell had sent to them in Fiji. Oliver, who had joined them via a mundane commercial airline flight, was reading over her shoulder.

  “So far as we are aware,” said Theodorus, “the authorities don’t know that they’ve joined us. Mollie can keep them moving until we’ve reestablished ourselves at home. Once that’s done, they can join us there and no one will be the wiser.”

  “Balderdash,” said Malachi. “Pardons only work backward, you know. Sheltering felons will put us right back in the fire.”

  “Malachi,” said Theodorus, “the terms of the pardon require us to stop all work on the Joker Moon project, which is absolutely not going to happen. We’ll be back in the fire eventually no matter what we do. As you said, it’s a gambit. But I know a thing or two about games. I know how to play for time.”

  “And time is growing short,” said Mathilde. “The ice bodies will impact the Moon on schedule, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them at this point. And I’ll need to be there—” She paused and took Oliver’s hand. “—We’ll need to be there once the volatiles have been released to begin the following phase.” There would be so much work.

  Oliver, curiously, did not squeeze her hand in return. He was still reading.

  “Exactly,” said Theodorus. “We need to return to the House Secure. We need to begin transporting people to the Moon in large numbers, and soon. We need to catch up with all the work we’ve gotten behind on.”

  Malachi still wasn’t convinced, but he wasn’t the one who needed convincing. He took his phone out of his pocket and began making calls. Mathilde took that as acquiescence, a sign that they would all be back in South Carolina soon.

  She started to rise from the couch and noticed that Oliver had put the tablet down on the coffee table, still staring at it, but clearly not reading it. “What is it?” she asked him.

  “The pardon,” he said. “It doesn’t cover me, either. It doesn�
�t cover hardly any of us.”

  That “us,” Mathilde realized, must be the vast number of Witherspoon employees on both the Moon and the Earth who were engaged in the project. But she was named in the pardon papers, she knew. So it was, heartbreakingly, an “us” that included Oliver, but didn’t include her.

  Diggers

  PART TWO

  THERE WERE NO WEEKENDS on the Moon. Every day for Tiago was just the same: smashing and clearing, shoring up, hauling equipment and materials. Church services were offered on Sunday mornings, but Tiago had never been very religious. “We’re under a hard deadline here,” Mike explained when Tiago asked whether they’d ever get a whole day off. “We need to have the habitat space ready for the scientists and engineers who will supervise the new ecology when the ice asteroids start landing, and they are already on their way.” How much longer would this pace have to keep up? “Until the job is done.”

  The job, Tiago reflected, would not really be done until the Moon was completely habitable and every joker who wanted to had moved there … and that might be centuries. But Tiago’s quarters lacked a window; apart from the gravity, he might as well have been working in a gold mine back in Brazil. So on Sunday mornings, despite his continued exhaustion, Tiago suited up for a recreational walk on the surface, just to remind himself where he was and how lucky he was to be there.

  Signs in the air lock advised all personnel that EVAs should only be conducted with proper approval and accompanied by a buddy. But those signs were old and scarred, and the policies they described had not been enforced for years. The experienced vacuum hands—everyone knew who they were, and Tiago was definitely one of them—knew how to stay out of trouble.

  He closed the outer air lock door behind himself—the creak of the hinges transmitted as a tingle through the door’s regolene to his hands—and turned, fists on hips, to survey the lunar landscape. The sky above was clean and black, the nearby hills rugged and picturesque, a range of grays and browns limned by sharp-edged pitch-black shadows. All was silent and unmoving. He set out at a comfortable loping bound, skipping across the heavily tracked ground near the air lock and heading for a less-frequented area.

  Being on the far side of the Moon was a weird and paradoxical situation. They were farther away from other people than anyone on Earth had ever been, even in the middle of a desert or at the South Pole. Yet, despite its isolation and its cavernous spaces, the Moon base was crowded—always noisy and often odorous—and getting more so every week as more and more jokers poured in. So Tiago often found himself desperately in need of fresh air … and, ironically enough, found it on the surface, where there was no air at all.

  In recent weeks he’d been exploring a nameless plain on the far side of Dutton Ridge from the base. The ridge was steep and rocky, generally considered impassible, but with the sureness of his boots—as sensitive as bare feet—and the strength and dexterity of his plastic fingers, Tiago could scale slopes that were beyond the capabilities of machines and too dangerous for space-suited jokers. He found the plain peaceful and would often sit on a rock at its edge, looking out over its crater-pocked gray surface as though over a placid lake or idyllic meadow.

  Occasionally in his wanderings he would find intriguing crystals or organic-looking twists of iron, just sitting on the surface waiting to be picked up. They could have lain there unchanging for days or millennia … but in a few decades they would all be washed away by the new lunar ecology. He kept the best of them in a box under his bed.

  But on this particular Sunday morning he encountered something completely unexpected.

  At first he was certain that what he was seeing was just something stuck in his eye. But then he reminded himself that his robot body lacked eyes as such; his power allowed him to see using the suit’s entire face, giving him much better vision than any nat and even some very good cameras. He peered more intently and realized that the motion and color he had at first dismissed were real.

  A human figure. An unsuited human. Dark face, black hair, a filmy garment of purple and gold. It stood still, as though stunned to have been noticed.

  Tiago began walking toward the impossibility for a closer look.

  Immediately the impossibility reacted, turning and running away. It whirled like a dancer, a swirl of purple and gold silk drifting on the air as it turned.

  There was no air. This could only be an illusion, or a hallucination, or a projection of some sort. Yet gray dust puffed from beneath the running figure’s feet, darkening the lower hems of its clothing. If it were an illusion it was, at least, a very comprehensive and detailed one.

  “Hey!” Tiago called. But the figure didn’t seem to have heard. Not surprising, given the lack of air. He put on more speed, changing his gait to a kilometer-eating low-gravity lope.

  As Tiago closed the distance between them the running figure looked over its shoulder—no, her shoulder, he could see now—and ran harder. But each of Tiago’s legs was as long as her entire body; he caught up with her in just a few long bounds, and soon cornered her in a V-shaped valley between steep basalt walls. Both of them slid to a halt in the powdery soil, the dust from Tiago’s feet falling as fast as dropped gravel while the dust from the stranger’s feet hung in the nonexistent air for a moment. Was she, in fact, somehow surrounded by an envelope of air like Bo’s? Tiago doubted it; every stitch and sequin on her ornate sari was as crystal clear to his vision as the rocks behind her. But despite that clarity and detail, which argued that she was not just an illusion or projection, something about her felt … off. Not really there somehow.

  Whatever she was, he had no desire to harm her, or even to frighten her. He held up his hands, fingers spread, and stood still, eight or ten meters away from her. She stared back at him from a defensive crouch, as though expecting a blow, panting heavily … but no sound came to his ears, and her face showed anger and determination rather than fear. It was a beautiful face, a face like a Bollywood star’s, with fine dark features, intense brown eyes, and strong black brows.

  “I mean you no harm,” he said. She gave no indication of having heard—not really surprising—and as his suit had no face, she could not have seen his lips move. Tentatively he took a step closer, extending his open hands in what he hoped was a nonthreatening manner.

  Immediately she ducked and ran, trying to escape around him to his left. But she underestimated his reach and speed; his hand darted out and caught her, gently but firmly, by the arm. It was the strangest sensation. The slim arm held in his plastic fingers felt exactly like a human arm, with smooth warm skin, muscle tensing beneath that, and the firmness of bone beneath that. But it lacked … presence.

  Human flesh, like all organic materials, was subject to Tiago’s power. No matter how he tried, he would never forget how he had reveled in the feeling of meat and guts and gore being incorporated into his bulk as he slaughtered and dismembered his way across the flesh-plains of Kazakhstan. But living flesh … he could sense it, in the same way he constantly sensed all organic materials around him, but when he tried to draw it toward himself, or add it to his body like a bit of wood or cardboard, it simply refused.

  The beautiful stranger’s arm was not like that. It had physicality—he could feel it as well as see it—but to his unique organic senses it was completely invisible. It might as well be a handful of moondust.

  And, even as Tiago thought the word moondust, she gave him a withering look and faded away, skin and hair and sari dissolving into gray powder and blowing away in a nonexistent breeze.

  He was left gazing in astonishment at his empty plastic hand. No, not quite empty … a few grains of dust remained in the joints. They itched as he slowly closed the hand into a fist.

  What the hell?

  All the way back to the base Tiago wondered what he had just seen and what he ought to do about it. He should probably report it to someone, but … who would believe him? Even in a world of jokers and aces, even in a secret base on the far side of the Moon, the
idea of a Bollywood star wandering around on the lunar surface without a space suit was just too ludicrous to accept. And though the mysterious woman had looked completely real, the fact that she’d been imperceptible to his special senses seemed to argue that she had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination, and he’d found no other evidence of her existence—not even footprints.

  He paused at the air lock door, looking back over his shoulder at Dutton Ridge, and decided not to tell anyone. At least, not just yet.

  Weeks passed. He did his job, he ate and slept, and in his limited free time he explored the plain where he’d seen the inexplicable woman. He was far from the only person who chose to spend his Sunday mornings on EVA, but with his unique abilities he was the only one who could make it over the ridge and back on one tank of air. He showed the photos to a few people, but no one seemed to think there was anything particularly interesting or unusual about them. Looking at them dispassionately, he had to agree.

  After a couple of months—months during which the mysterious woman failed to appear, and Tiago had almost completely convinced himself that she had been only a passing fancy—there was a sudden power failure, affecting the entire sector, and the diggers got to knock off a few hours early. Tiago wound up drinking in the commissary with Hardbody, Bo, and the crane woman, a Russian named Vasilisa.

  “Does it seem to you that this is happening more often?” Tiago asked, sipping his beer. Even he, who had little experience with the stuff, could tell it was terrible.

  “Maybe.” Bo shrugged. “Before you guys got here”—he indicated Tiago and Hardbody with his bottle—“we were eating cold food by flashlight twice a week.”

  “Nuke plant stable for years,” Vasilisa countered. “Now, is three times in last month.” She held up her hand with thumb and two fingers spread. It was all the fingers she had. “Rumor says is sabotage.”

  “Sabotage?” Tiago gasped.

  Vasilisa folded her spindly metal hands together and leaned forward over the table. “Cameras see people where no people should be. Strangers. Breaking things.”