Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  This time Schwartz was alone in his office at the beginning, and the view from the tunnel showed a space-suited joker with enormous arms and pillar-like legs—she matched the description of the late Margot that Tiago had received from the other diggers. But the events played out similarly … except that Margot did not escape as Tiago and Hardbody had, but was crushed by falling rocks brought down by the forklift.

  And then the moth closed and opened its wings again, and another scene played out. And again, and again. It wasn’t always forklifts attacking, and it wasn’t always diggers dying, but it was always Schwartz, alone and silent at his desk while some machine or device suddenly leapt into murderous action.

  The crowd, and even many of the security personnel, grew increasingly outraged as the images piled up.

  “You cannot accept these lies!” Schwartz shouted. “This is mere fabrication!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the brick-faced security commander, nearly gently, “but I’m afraid this is only proof of something I’ve long suspected.” He glanced around at his subordinates. “Something we’ve long suspected.”

  On the moth’s wing, a spindly joker was being crushed between elevator doors while the image of Schwartz on the other wing smiled serenely, eyes closed. The dead person was apparently well known and liked, because the crowd shrieked and surged forward. The security guards repositioned themselves to protect Schwartz, tacitly leaving Tiago and Hardbody on their own recognizance.

  “Hey, hey, people!” the security commander shouted, his voice booming over the crowd. “Let’s not have a lynch mob here! Settle down!”

  They didn’t want to settle. But with the armed guards’ encouragement, eventually they did so.

  “I don’t know what’s really going on here,” the commander said once the situation had calmed a bit. “But I’m taking you, and you, and you into protective custody”—he pointed to Tiago, Hardbody, and Schwartz—“until we get the whole thing sorted out.”

  As the guards courteously escorted Tiago away, the moth fluttered along above him. But when they reached the door of the high-ceilinged antechamber and moved into the lower corridor beyond, she faded out, leaving only a sprinkle of moondust where she had been.

  Charles Dutton—the man after whom Dutton Ridge was named, and the new project manager—stared hard at Tiago across Schwartz’s desk. Dutton’s desk, now. “Are you certain this is what you want to do?”

  “I am, sir,” Tiago replied.

  Three weeks had passed since Schwartz had tried to kill Tiago and Hardbody. Three weeks full of questions, investigations, and negotiations.

  Schwartz’s many murders and other perfidy had been proven without question, and he had been placed on “administrative leave” and unceremoniously shipped back to Earth. Tiago didn’t know what Witherspoon would do with him and didn’t really care.

  The mysterious shape-shifting woman, whose name was Aarti, had left off her attempts at sabotage and begun negotiations with the jokers. Her desire that they leave the Moon was still adamant, but at least they were talking.

  And Tiago had decided to return to Earth.

  “You have been absolutely invaluable to this project,” Dutton said, patting a thick personnel folder. “Mr. Schwartz had the very highest confidence in you, and, paradoxically enough, your role in exposing him only reinforces that. Your mind as well as your particular abilities make you the exact type of person we will need going forward.”

  “I understand, sir. But there’s no place for me here.” He gestured around, at the metal and stone and regolene that made up the project manager’s office. “In the last few weeks I’ve realized that none of this stuff really even exists for me, or to the extent that it does it only causes me pain. I’ve never really been happy here. I belong back in Brazil, where the people need me and everything is made of … real stuff. Organic stuff. Where I can be myself and use my abilities for good.”

  “You’ll be missed.” Dutton extended his hand. “And if you ever want to return, you’ll be welcome.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Tiago took the hand and shook it. “But right now I just want to feel the Earth under my feet.”

  The Moon Maid

  PART VII

  November 2017

  SHE’D STARTED WITH NARNIA. Fourteen years ago, in a cavern deep beneath the Moon’s surface, far from any fear of discovery, Aarti began to paint. It was long, hard work. Painting came so much slower these days. But she had time. First a glowing ball of light, so she could see to work. Fiat lux. Let there be light! God’s first words to the universe.

  Aarti wasn’t so arrogant as to consider herself the god or goddess of the Moon … but on the other hand, she had been granted the power to create and to destroy. How lonely He must have been those first six days, until the animals arrived. And then humans, at last, someone to talk to. Beautiful and strong, free from sin. What a sad, misshapen lot we’ve become. Twisted in body. Sometimes Aarti still woke from the Moon and turned her head in bed, startled by how large it was again. She’d reach a hand up, trace its bulbous, bald shape.

  Then Aarti sighed, and let it go. The outsides mattered very little, after all. Her soul had gone black for a time, and now was, perhaps, lightening again? That was the question—could a person truly come back from what she had done? All her regrets were stones in her throat. Aarti had learned the names of the dead Russian cosmonauts. She whispered them to herself every night when she arrived on the Moon, surrounded by its stark beauty. Never forget. Her peace, her art, had been paid for in blood.

  Deep underground, Aarti painted the lamppost first of all, its long black lines stark. She filled the lantern with light, which spilled out through the immense cavern, first of a chain of them, far beneath the surface and even farther from the joker encampment. There was no trace of her left on the surface. After the lamppost, the trees. Tall, clothed in dark green, but let them be Moon trees, too, not mere copies of Earth’s wonders. Lewis had imagined a woodland not so different from the England he loved; Aarti created lunar trees that soared far higher, thinly branched and thinly leaved, providing a canopy of dappled light that filtered down to the dusty floor.

  When she finished the last tree, Aarti paused a moment, contemplating her creation. She had painted hard, concentrating fiercely, going over the strokes over and over again. It had taken her months to build her forest, but she thought, perhaps, it would last. The light of the lamppost shone steadily, and in a wild spattering of whimsy, Aarti painted a host of snowflakes swirling around her. No wind, no cold that she could feel. But snow fell in the woods, and Aarti tipped back her head and stuck out her tongue, to catch a melting snowflake. She was a girl in Oxford again, seeing snow for the first time, when everything was fresh and new and possible.

  The first signs of the stroke were almost imperceptible. Ten years ago, Aarti had gotten up to urinate, which her body compelled her to do at least six times a day now, often jerking her away from the Moon. They’d modernized the house decades ago, electricity and indoor plumbing, so it was only a few steps to the new bathroom adjoining her room. She might not even have noticed, but she decided to go down to the kitchen, help herself to a little mango ice cream. Saila’s niece—what was her name? Yes, Niru, that’s right—Niru was a dear girl, and always made sure to keep the freezer stocked with it. Aarti liked to open a cold bottle of fizzy Passiona and pour it over the top; she loved the tang.

  Aarti was listing as she walked down the hall. That was what she noticed first. Her left arm kept reaching out to balance against the wall. Without it, she might have fallen over. Light-headed, and Aarti might have written it off to some aftereffect of being dragged from her beloved Moon, the sudden shift in perceived gravity. But it persisted, and when she tried to spoon the mango-passionfruit slurry up to her mouth, her hand trembled. Aarti spilled all down the front of her blouse, and the humiliation of that—Like a child!—sent quick tears pricking to her eyes.

  Aarti made it back to bed, back to the Moon, b
ut she was shaken. The next morning, Niru called the doctor, and they made the arduous trek to the hospital. Aarti’s money was sufficient to ensure her a private room and a doctor who was studiously neutral, if clearly fascinated by her virus-shaped body. It’s definitely a stroke; that much is clear. If there are physical or cognitive impairments, they’ll probably smooth out in a few weeks. We’ll get you a physical therapist, if you like, to help with recovery. There’s not much else to do for it but rest. You’re seventy-nine, after all. At your age …

  The rest was implied. Aarti would probably be dead soon anyway. He’d clearly written her off, and was probably coveting her body, hoping she’d donate it to science and he’d get to do the autopsy. Hah! She would donate it to science; Aarti was still, after all these years, enough of a scientist for that. But he wouldn’t get his grubby paws on it.

  It took her a few days to return to painting after the diagnosis. Aarti watched the jokers instead. That had become one of her favorite activities. She still ghosted to them, sabotaged an item here or there, but honestly, it was more to keep them on their toes at this point than anything else. Their small challenges, failures, and triumphs were endlessly fascinating to her now, a better soap opera than any she might watch on television or the internet. In truth, Aarti was fighting a rearguard action now, against the onslaught, when she bothered to fight at all. The joker spaceplanes kept landing, with their quantities of supplies, heavy equipment, mining machinery. More jokers arrived afoot, through portals opened by the ace called Tesseract. Aarti played with the notion of killing her, to close off at least one way to her Moon, but the spaceships would still come, and she could not face the thought of more blood. A city was forming, in glorious diversity of color, form, and ability. She wanted to see what it would become.

  The joker Tiago had gone back to Earth after she’d exposed Schwartz. His friend Hardbody had stayed. The jokers didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and now that they knew who she was, Aarti couldn’t hope to just scare them off with a little sabotage. It would take a catastrophic event to drive them away now.

  In America, those affected by the wild card had become commonplace enough to be seen as entertainment. Aarti began watching reruns of the old show American Hero, grew addicted to it—a show where jokers and aces battled in simulated combat for the amusement of the world. It was fascinating—only in America! But elsewhere, the television told a darker tale.

  In the Mideast, the Caliph ordered the Living Gods of Old Egypt and their joker followers to be exterminated. The gory bloodshed of that genocide, televised for all to see, was enough to terrify any joker. They called it “the Cleansing of the Nile.”

  How safe would Aarti be on the Moon, if such a thing came to India? If government goons broke into her home and killed her aging body? She had no Yajnadar to leap to her defense now—the servants would surely simply flee. How safe would little Anjali be against the mob? The child was nineteen now—how quickly the years flew by! Studying entomology in the States at Cornell; perhaps America would protect her, if a similar rabid fury came to India. Perhaps not.

  So powerful on the Moon, so helpless on Earth. Aarti could do nothing to assist the poor Egyptian jokers; she simply watched, bore witness, tears streaming unheeded down her face. When it was finally over, Aarti turned off the news, had the TV and computer on her desk moved to a guest room. Was the world turning against jokers for good? Would more slaughter follow? Did they not understand, these humans, what the murder of innocents did to your soul?

  Aarti was too old to endure such misery again.

  And she had grown fond of these jokers who had trespassed on her Moon over the years. Anya Chakraborty had turned out to be a small slip of a girl—beautiful as any Bollywood star, if you saw her from the right side, but the skin on the left side of her body looked like melted wax. It ran and runnelled from forehead to shoulder to hand, and presumably under her clothes as well. She had looked so sad when she arrived. When Aarti ghosted close enough, she heard the girl talking to her friends, in a mix of Hindi and English.

  “The boy wanted nothing more to do with me, of course. My professors started giving me worse grades, even though my work was just as good! And my father took back all my gold bangles; he said my sisters would get more use out of them, that no one would ever marry someone as ugly as me!” And then Anya was crying again, and the other young women patted her on the back helplessly.

  Anya’s family had cast her out, just like Aarti’s had, so many decades before. The similarities couldn’t be ignored, though their situations were very different—Anya’s family had been much less wealthy, and Anya had been left with few options. She could’ve stayed in school, finished her engineering degree, but this Moon had seemed like salvation to her.

  Aarti would have been tempted to play matchmaker, but that would have required her to leave her self-imposed isolation; after so many years, Aarti wasn’t sure she could break her habit of silence even if she wanted to. She just watched. Eventually Anya caught the eye of one of the new engineers. Sunil was tall, dark, and handsome—if by tall, you meant close to ten feet! He and Anya were soon engaged, and within a few years, they married and Anya gave birth to a little boy who bore no mark of the wild card … though of course the virus was there in his genes. He might look like a nat, but sooner or later his card would turn. What would it be like for Sanjeevan to grow up surrounded by jokers? To him, they would be completely normal. Might he be the vanguard of a new society, one built on peace and understanding? Aarti could only hope.

  Her painting continued. Narnia had grown beneath the Moon’s surface and merged with Middle-earth. Cair Paravel stood atop its cliff face, with waves crashing beneath and Reepicheep’s ship sailing away, in search of something he could not name. Aarti quite identified with the little mouse; in another universe, she thought they might have been friends. Not far away, a round green door sat in a hill—behind it a cozy home awaited, one full of cream teas and neatly pulled pints and the sautéed mushrooms rich with butter that she had loved as a student in England. Sometimes, all Aarti wanted was a little comfort.

  One world flowed into the other, and if Rivendell’s bridges were thinner and more fantastical than Tolkien had ever dreamed, Aarti had the Moon’s gravity to thank for it. Here, you might jump high and hard enough to reach the top of—well, not the Misty Mountains themselves, but perhaps the Iron Hills? If you had strong joker thighs, and long joker legs, anything might be possible.

  Her own creations joined the other worlds—palaces of crystal, silvered beaches where tropical sun lit palm tree huts, open to the breezes she conjured. No animals or creatures—Aarti couldn’t bear the thought that after she passed, they might fade and die, too. The beauty of the buildings, the fantastical world, would have to be enough, lifeless though it was. Was this art? It was very far from anything she’d studied on Earth, but it might, she thought, have some true merit.

  Aarti was building a fairyland beneath the surface of the Moon, and no one had any idea.

  Hundreds more jokers arrived, set to work. They were building another vast underground complex, where they might live undisturbed. They hadn’t discovered her wonderland yet, but now it was only a matter of time.

  If Aarti acted very quickly, she could still, perhaps, kill them all, and thereby deter more from coming. But would the nations of Earth even allow such a threat to remain on the Moon? How many would she have to murder to protect herself?

  An academic question at best. If there was ever a time when Aarti might have made the attempt, that time had long passed. Would refraining from killing be enough to win her a better fate in her next life, or would the murders that stained her soul condemn her to return as some wretched creature? She’d soon find out.

  The doctors were a monthly necessity now. A second stroke, a small heart attack. No signs of cancer yet—Aarti might have been spared that, at least. That first smug doctor had been succeeded by a better one, a young joker woman with four serious eyes on eyestalks
that extended when she was deep in concentration. The better to take in every detail, she liked to say. Aarti enjoyed her sense of humor. Maybe she’d let this one cut her old body open, when the time came.

  “Sanjeevan! Sanjeevan, come here this instant!” Anya’s sharp voice echoed through the cavern, catching Aarti’s attention. She’d come to check on her little family, as she thought of them; she’d grown increasingly worried about them lately. Sunil had developed a strange hunch in the last few years; for a tall man, he seemed surprisingly short as he hurried through the passageways. “Sanjeevan, when I get my hands on you—”

  “Don’t tell her, please.” The little voice piped up from near Aarti’s translucent feet. Aarti looked down to see, around the corner of an outcropping of rock, little Sanjeevan. Her attention sharpened; he looked thin, undernourished. His breather—worn for emergencies, if the air failed—dangled from a scrawny neck. There should be enough rations for everyone, including the children. What was going on?

  “You can see me?” Aarti whispered.

  He shrugged. “You’re not invisible. Just—sort of watery? I can see you if I’m paying attention. Please don’t tell her where I’m hiding.”

  Children were observant, and this one, perhaps, had been forced to be more observant than most. Now that she was paying attention, Aarti could see telltale indicators—the way Sanjeevan flinched away when she moved, the focused alertness of his gaze. If she could smell, she would wager that fear rose off the child in a palpable stink. Why would a mother treat her child so? Was it the resentment of a once-beautiful girl against a child who still bore no visible trace of the virus?

  Tempting as it was to assign some joker-specific motive here, there had been parents who abused their children throughout human history.