Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “Let me help you, little one. We can talk to the commander—” There was a new man in charge now, an elderly joker who looked like Death himself, and went everywhere masked and cloaked. Aarti shivered at the thought of speaking to him—it would be a risk, would likely send the jokers crashing into her beautiful refuge, once they were reminded of her existence. But she had to do something.

  “No, no! Please,” the child hissed in a frantic whisper. “She’ll calm down in a few hours, when she’s had a chance to sleep it off. Amma always does. I just need a good place to hide.”

  Aarti made a decision. In the end, it was easier than she would have expected—perhaps she really had been alone too long. And she couldn’t deny that the artist in her had spent decades longing for an audience. “Can you be a little brave? It will take some time to walk down there, but I can show you an excellent hiding spot. No one has ever found it.” He’d have to wear his breather, so Sanjeevan couldn’t stay for long, but for a little while, her fairyland could be a sanctuary for him. Aarti would let him come back, as often as he wanted. After all these years, she could share her Moon, a little.

  The child straightened up, meeting her eyes. “I can be very brave.”

  “I’m sure you can.” Aarti extended her hand, and after a moment, Sanjeevan reached out and placed his small brown hand in her translucent gray one. “Follow me, little one—I am going to show you something wonderful.”

  Time passed. Aarti had started reading the news again, wondering what future would be offered to Sanjeevan and others like him. There were more riots in India, one after another, more dead. Yajnadar, I remember you. Horrific slaughter at one joker ashram, but elsewhere, things were even worse.

  Maybe these jokers had been right, to come to the Moon. Maybe they needed Her refuge as much as Aarti ever had.

  Thanks to the ace who could open portals in space—the universe was full of more wonders than Aarti had dreamt of, back in her student days at Oxford—tons of supplies, construction equipment, and workers passed through, and the jokers established another lunar colony. This one included an experimental agricultural station. They could grow food on the Moon, if all went well, make it truly self-sufficient. If Earth went up in flames, there would be a place where humanity—joker or otherwise—might survive.

  Aarti learned about the ice asteroids in her home in Bombay, when astronomers started talking on private message boards and then, abruptly, stopped talking. She looked for herself—thirty-one giant ice asteroids headed their way from deep space. Headed to her Moon.

  “I want to make a deal.” Aarti stood in the commander’s office in her natural form. A very old Indian woman, gray-skinned and moon-headed, in a re-creation of a silver sari that Yaj had picked out for her when they were both so much younger than she was now.

  “I am eager to hear it, fair maiden.” The new commander’s name was Dutton, and he had risen when she materialized in a flurry of dust.

  She snorted. “Fair maiden? Sorry, neither.”

  “I apologize,” he said, looking faintly embarrassed. “A bad habit, I’m afraid—the records refer to you as the Moon Maid, and Michael Sampson’s private journal waxed quite rhapsodic about your visit to him. For years, I’ve been thinking of you in my head as he did, wondering if we would see you again. It’s Aarti, correct? I read the older records, too.”

  His eyes were wary—yes, if he’d read the cosmonauts’ reports, so they should be. Dutton continued, “I take it the malfunctions we’ve been seeing in the agricultural station are your doing?”

  “What?” Aarti said, genuinely startled. “No, no. I haven’t interfered with your operations in years.” She couldn’t help chuckling, imagining how for the last years, every broken machine on the Moon had probably been attributed to her tampering. “I’m afraid that’s just machines being their typical obstinate selves, breaking down when you least expect it.”

  “You have some experience with them, I see. Not just a ghost creature of the Moon?” Dutton’s eyes were alive with curiosity.

  “I used to be a scientist,” Aarti said wistfully. “And I’m still an artist. That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  “We have no time for art right now, I’m afraid.” Dutton frowned. “I suppose we could hang some pieces on the walls … if we do that, would you pledge to continue to keep from interfering?”

  Aarti shook her head impatiently. “No, no. Look—you are bursting at the seams here, with far more people than you can reasonably accommodate, yes?”

  “God, yes,” Dutton said. His forehead was pinched, as if a headache had suddenly bloomed.

  Aarti continued, “You’re building as fast as you can. But what if you had a fourth settlement area, one that could easily hold hundreds of jokers, maybe thousands? It will need a little work, sealing it off and filling it with breathable air, but once that’s done…”

  Dutton was leaning forward now, eager. “What are you saying?”

  “I want a promise that the Moon is a refuge for all.” That was the nightmare that had started keeping her up at night. If things went dark on Earth—people could go dark so easily, their worst natures rising up to overwhelm them—what would happen to boys like Sanjeevan, who bore no visible mark of the virus? What if there was a joker girl on Earth, in danger, but in love with a nat? Would her Yaj have been able to join Aarti on the Moon? “I want to be sure that jokers will be welcome here, but humans, too. Anyone who comes in peace.”

  Dutton frowned. “I have no problem with that. But I won’t be here forever. This is not my decision.”

  Aarti shrugged. She wasn’t a goddess of the Moon, after all. There was so little that she could really do in the end. But she had to do as much as she could. “I know you can’t do anything about the future, but a promise that at least under your watch—”

  “Done.” The commander’s eyes were bright as stars now.

  “Oh, Commander.” Aarti smiled. “Let me take you to wonderland.”

  Within That House Secure

  XII

  MATHILDE NOTICED A POOL of hydraulic fluid on the tile floor outside the entrance to the library and made a mental note to check the seals on the mechanical system that held the heavy oak door shut. All of the systems in this part of the house were mechanical, and she tended to them herself.

  “Are you ready?” asked Theodorus, looming behind her. His voice, as it always did when they made these visits, sounded oddly timid.

  “For this?” she replied. “Never.” Then she inserted the appropriate key into the locking mechanism, turned it, and threw the lever that let the door swing open.

  The morning light streaming through the windows showed motes of dust floating in the stale air of the library. Mathilde remembered how Alice Witherspoon had insisted that this room be kept spotless, though it had been her husband’s domain. The thousands of books lining the walls had seemed mysterious, fantastical to her when she was a little girl. Now they just seemed … pointless.

  The books were too outdated to be consulted for anything of importance to the project. And nobody at the House Secure had time to read for pleasure anymore.

  Nobody but Malachi.

  He sat on a low chaise longue, a leather-bound volume held open on what passed for his lap.

  He looked up and said, “Ah. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’ve just been preparing my latest defense. Listen to this …

  ‘Earth rais’d up her head,

  From the darkness dread and drear.

  Her light fled:

  Stony dread!

  And her locks cover’d with grey despair.’”

  Theodorus took his usual place beside his father’s old desk. Mathilde went over to the fireplace, which hadn’t been lit in decades.

  “That’s William Blake,” said Malachi, “and what I mean—”

  “We know the poet,” Mathilde interrupted. “And we know what you mean to say. You mean to say nothing. You mean to prevaricate. As usual.”

  M
alachi sighed. He placed a bit of black ribbon in the book, closed it, and set it to one side. “Ask your questions,” he said. “The answers will remain the same.”

  “We know you killed at least fourteen people on the Moon,” Theodorus said. It had taken weeks to convince Theodorus of the truth of Malachi’s actions, more weeks to convince him to confront his old mentor and guardian. “We suspect you may have caused other deaths here on Earth, going back years. Including even your own secretary. You’ve done nothing to deny this, and you’ve done nothing to clarify why you did these … these monstrous things.”

  “And you’ve done nothing to show why we shouldn’t do what Clifford Bell and Troll and the others want us to do, which is to turn you over to the authorities,” said Mathilde. But she was looking at Theodorus. She was, again, laying her real accusation against him.

  “I have done nothing, nothing,” said Malachi, “for over thirty years, but work for the success of Joker Moon. I have done nothing that was not necessary.”

  It was what he always said. It was all he always said, as was shown now as he crossed his arms and stared off in the middle distance. Mathilde noticed that one side of Malachi’s collar was bent out and up away from his tie. Nobody was pressing his shirts.

  “And you would have gone on doing ‘necessary’ things for how long if that Indian woman hadn’t exposed you?” asked Theodorus.

  Mathilde raised her eyebrows. This was new. Usually, once Malachi shut up, Theodorus gave up.

  Malachi surprised her as well, rising to the bait. “She is a menace, and you need to have someone eliminate the threat she poses. She’s been responsible for acts of sabotage on our bases for years. She’s been wreaking havoc up there for even longer than that. The Russian base—”

  Mathilde interrupted him again. “She’s expanded our living space by almost forty percent through her deal with Charles Dutton. And she’s agreed to not interfere with our operations any longer.”

  “We don’t know anything about her!” said Malachi.

  “We know she’s the Moon Maid,” said Theodorus, somewhat wistfully. “She must be an ace of extraordinary powers to have made it to the Moon and lived there so long. Do you think she’s responsible for the appearance of that structure on the lunar surface in 1958?”

  They’d come in to talk about murders and now they were talking about flights of fancy from more than half a century before. Mathilde … she couldn’t stand it. “The asteroids will be landing soon,” she said, stalking over to the door. “We still don’t know if Towers is going to try something, and we’re spending our time talking to … spending our time harboring a mass murderer.” A mass murderer who was her father. Mathilde left both men behind her. Neither of them tried to stop her from leaving.

  They were a long time coming. But in the end, they came.

  That last morning, the Duesenberg dropped Mathilde off at the main gates. There was too much traffic on the grounds of the House Secure now—too much activity, too many people—for the ridiculous old car to wind its way all the way to the house.

  After she checked in and the gate cranked open, she signed out one of the bicycles kept at the guard station to finish the trip. Mathilde had a great appreciation for bicycles. They were an example of a fundamentally brilliant engineering application that had, really, been only marginally improved upon in the many years since the initial design and development. Not that she wouldn’t have appreciated a motorized ride through the busy grounds. Even in a sidecar, she thought.

  There were, according to Clifford Bell’s scrupulously kept logs, more than seven hundred people living on the former indigo plantation now, most of them jokers awaiting processing and transit to one of the lunar bases. She didn’t know whose department it was to keep track of how many new buildings had been put up for their housing, feeding, and training. Hell, it was probably hers.

  Come to think of it, she had been named in the suit brought by the county’s development board regarding unpermitted construction on the “historically significant” property. One of the many tactics their many opponents had adopted—legal challenges to activities ancillary to the main project. These had proven just about as effective as all the other tactics—regulation, bribery, threats, violence originating from everyplace from local police forces to terrorist groups to supposed “lone wolves.” Which was to say they had proven somewhat effective.

  Measuring those kinds of metrics, tracking the extent of whether and how much their opponents were hindering them via such methods, well, that wasn’t an engineering problem.

  It was the kind of problem Malachi handled. It was the kind of problem he didn’t talk about.

  She stepped through the bike’s down-swept frame, hitched herself up on the saddle, and pedaled away through the crowd.

  Mathilde came out every day now, unless it was a weekend that Oliver happened to be in town. Today was a Saturday, but he was in South America chasing down a problem in a refueling system. She wasn’t terribly worried about him. The launch facility down there was incredibly isolated and, after the last few years, very well defended. She doubted the local governments knew that the installation was guarded by mercenaries armed with equipment more sophisticated than anything their militaries carried. They probably didn’t care, either.

  “Isolation,” Theodorus had said, “is the key.”

  And so they isolated themselves. The overseas facilities were already far removed from any population centers, but Theodorus had meant more than that. Witherspoon Aerospace had cancelled all contracts with other entities—corporate or governmental—over two years before, and it was far from the only one of Theodorus’s holdings to turn inward. They only sold pharmaceuticals to themselves now. They only built things, made things, for themselves. They issued no press releases. The intent was to be forgotten about. “The Moon will grow green and blue,” said Theodorus. “But it will do so slowly. They’ll get used to it.”

  Mathilde doubted that. She didn’t think anyone had forgotten and she didn’t think anyone would ever get used to the idea of a joker-held moon.

  Anyway, forgetting seemed to her to be antithetical to the whole project. Why else would Theodorus have hung all those newspapers in the old game room, if not to remember?

  Mathilde ducked in there now. It was one of the few rooms in the main house that hadn’t been given over to executive offices and conference rooms. The large, wood-paneled chamber was empty of any furnishings besides a few benches and the incongruous-seeming billiards table at the center. Framed, track-lit newspapers completely covered the walls.

  The oldest one was a New York Mirror dated September 16th, 1946. The headline read, GAS ATTACK ON MANHATTAN.

  She walked around the room, as she had so often, pausing every couple of steps.

  The Los Angeles Clipper. May 9th, 1953. NYC’S JOKER PLAGUE SPREADS WEST.

  The International Herald. December 11th, 1967. JOKER ATROCITIES REPORTED IN LAOS.

  Headlines in French and German and Spanish. Cyrillic letters, Arabic letters, writing she wouldn’t even have recognized without the translating plaques in brass affixed below.

  24 JOKERS KILLED IN SYRIAN CAPITAL. ANGRY MOB ATTACKS JOKER SLUM IN CALCUTTA. LATEST VICTIM IS 7TH JOKER CALL GIRL MURDERED, SAY POLICE.

  Every part of the world was represented. Every year since 1946.

  Seventy-four newspapers. Seventy-four years.

  The last frame was different. It was a simple, open-topped plastic display and its contents were rotated every few days.

  The Washington Gazette. July 6th, 2020. NO ‘JOKER MOON’ PRESIDENT PROMISES.

  “Is that today’s paper?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Mathilde started. She would have sworn she was alone.

  Ah, she thought. It was Mollie Steunenberg, the fragile, powerful, dangerous woman who so much depended on now. The woman who could be wherever she wanted.

  “Hot off the laser printer,” Mathilde answered her.

  Mollie walked over, rea
ched into the frame, and pulled out the paper. She took a seat on one of the benches and began leafing through it.

  “A lot on the schedule tonight,” said Mathilde. “I’m surprised to see you up and about.”

  “Theodorus told me I’d probably have most of the night off,” Mollie said. “Something about delays. Up there.” She nodded upward, not taking her eyes from the newspaper.

  Mathilde reflexively looked to the left and down just a bit, in the direction she knew the Moon to actually be at that moment. She saw that it had been a while since anyone had polished the tile floor. Things are slipping, she thought to herself.

  “I’ve never understood how Dennis gets away with what he does,” Mollie said. She was reading the comic strips. “My dad would have yanked a knot in that kid.”

  Mathilde never read the comics. She just shrugged.

  “It says here the government wants to shut us down again,” Mollie went on, even though the paper was still opened to the last pages.

  Mathilde said, “Theodorus thinks the president is just saber-rattling. Trying to distract people from his problems with the Satterly Commission.”

  Mollie looked up, a confused expression on her face. “What?”

  A loud trill sounded, emanating from both Mathilde’s and Mollie’s wrist phones. Theodorus’s voice sounded, eerily doubled. “Please come to the control center immediately,” he said.

  Then a portal opened right beside Mathilde, and Mollie was grabbing her and pulling her along. Then they were elsewhere.

  Clifford Bell and Troll must have been with Theodorus when he made the call, because there was no way anyone could have beaten them to the control center, even if they’d been right next door. The portal Mathilde and Mollie stepped through winked into nonexistence behind them, and Mathilde immediately went and took her place at a station flanking Theodorus’s.