“May I ask where you’re from?”
“I come from nowhere, madam. There is only the future.”
Matthews and Jamieson exchange glances again. Jamieson speaks up. “Well, where are you going, then?”
“I am going to Oz, madam.”
“Oz?”
“That’s right. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Jamieson chuckles at the absurdity—she’s always felt so unglamorous—but at the same time feels instinctively sorry for Matthews. Until the droid adds:
“And you, madam”—turning to Matthews—“I would like to fuck you very much.”
This really is going too far. Part of what Matthews and Jamieson enjoy about being alone on Farside is that they’re so far away from the attentions of lascivious men.
“I’m sorry,” Matthews says, shaking her head, “did you just say . . . what I think you said?”
“I am one charming motherfucker.”
In any other circumstance Matthews might give him an earful. But she reminds herself that this is a piece of machinery. Possibly malfunctioning, like their heating unit.
“Well,” she says, shrugging it off, “be that as it may, we’re very busy here—I hope you understand that.”
“Did I catch you in the middle of something, madam?”
“You could say that.”
“Were you licking each other?”
“No, we weren’t licking each other.”
“But you were doing something important?”
“It’s important to us, yes.”
“Is this activity so important that you are unable to assist me in my time of need?”
“What exactly do you want from us anyway? Directions?”
“I have directions, thank you very much.”
“Then what?”
“Madam, you may notice some flecks of blood on my face and some bits of flesh in my hair. These are not from a human being. I was chopping up a turkey and some gizzards flew into the air.”
“That’s . . . very interesting.”
“So I would like to perform ablutions, if you do not mind. And I would also like to launder my clothes.”
“I can’t allow you to bring your clothes in here. But you can fill a bucket and wash them in the airlock. There are scrubbers in there anyway.”
“I am very happy to follow those instructions, madam.”
“And as for the hygiene room, it’s through that door.”
“Thank you, madam; I will use that room now.”
The droid promptly disappears into the bathroom, which is not much bigger than a construction-site porta-potty. Almost immediately the hiss of a high-pressure hand-shower is heard.
Jamieson looks at Matthews. “I don’t like it.”
Matthews holds up a hand. “It’ll be okay.”
“Ever heard a droid talk like that?”
“He’s probably just an L and P unit—you know.”
Matthews means a leisure and pleasure model. It used to be uncool for ladies to have servile robot lovers—it was considered degrading to the woman and, curiously enough, to the android as well—but then someone invented androids with attitude. They talked dirty. They were moody. They were demanding, especially in bed. One woman wrote a best-selling account of her experiences, Bad Boy, and now such salty-tongued fuckbots are all the rage.
The droid emerges, shiny-skinned, drying his hair.
“Thank you, ladies; that was most welcome.”
“Think nothing of it,” Matthews says. “Are you going to be on your way now?”
“I certainly am, madam. But may I make a request of you first?”
“Go on.”
“I see through the window that you have a pressurized rover. May I borrow it from you?”
Matthews smirks. “You want to borrow our VLTV?”
“I have a very long journey ahead of me, madam, and would much appreciate the use of a long-range vehicle.”
“Do you know how to drive a vehicle like that?”
“I was hoping you would instruct me.”
Matthews doesn’t glance at Jamieson, though she dearly wants to. She decides to lie. “Well, the VLTV is broken right now. So it wouldn’t be any good to you anyway.”
“Broken?”
“We’re repairing it, but it could take days.”
The droid is staring at her, and Matthews, trying desperately to maintain a neutral expression, wonders if he’s trained to read deception signals. But he doesn’t challenge her. And eventually he says, “I see also that you have an LRV.”
“We do.” Matthews is about to say that’s broken too but decides that would be stretching credibility.
“May I borrow that vehicle?”
“I don’t think so, sorry.”
“Why not, madam?”
“We need it for ourselves. We don’t have anything else.”
“I see.”
“If your trip was a short one, and you could have it returned promptly, then we could probably let you borrow it. But you just said you needed it for a long journey.”
“I do indeed.”
“Then I’m sorry, we can’t help you.”
The droid is still beaming. Creepily. He looks from one to the other. “You two ladies need that LRV as much as I do, it seems.”
“We do.”
“We all cannot use it at once.”
“I guess not.”
“Of course,” he adds speculatively, “there’s nothing stopping me from just getting into the vehicle and driving away.”
“You might find that difficult.”
“And why is that, madam?”
“There’s a security key.”
“I did not know that, madam. May I view this key?”
“You may not,” says Matthews.
The droid looks at her, then at Jamieson, back and forth and back again. The subtle malevolence makes the room seem even hotter and stuffier. And finally he says:
“Then I salute you, ladies. You have bent me over and fucked me up the ass. Yes, I salute you, ladies. A real man always acknowledges when he has been beaten. So I salute you. And I bow to you.”
And he does bow, with a courtier-like flourish. Then, rising, he changes tone completely.
“And now, ladies, I will leave you. I will sponge the stains out of my garments within the airlock here, and then I will be on my way. I will not trouble you again. A real man knows when he has been beaten. Yes, I will definitely be on my way.”
“Well, it was nice knowing you,” says Matthews. “You can open the airlock by hitting that button there.”
The droid, still in his underpants, shifts toward the airlock door as Jamieson backs away. “This one, madam?”
“That one.”
The droid studies the button for a while, then presses it as instructed. The inner door hisses open. But he doesn’t enter immediately. He pauses for a few moments, looking at his rumpled suit on the airlock floor, at the dust, at the cleaning controls and vacuums. Then, very tentatively, he steps through.
Matthews lunges immediately for the button. And she punches it. Hard. And the door hisses. And starts to close. And Matthews and Jamieson experience an overwhelming flush of relief.
But suddenly a powerful, hydraulically muscled arm snakes out of the airlock. The droid, like a man in an elevator, is preventing the door from closing.
And then he sticks his head out. And he stares at Matthews and Jamieson with his jet-black eyes. And he grins—wolfishly.
“Excuse me, ladies,” he asks, “but do either of you know how to spell ‘surrender’?”
13
IF YOU’RE A TOURIST, the first thing you probably notice upon arriving at the Purgatory Customs Center is the rich retro decor: cherrywood paneling, pebbled glass, green-shaded lamps, brass and chrome trimmings. It’s very kitsch, and not likely to win any design awards, but to weary eyes it’s a welcome relief from the utilitarian furnishings of Peary and the sterile trappings of Doppe
lmayer and Lyall Bases. The second thing you’ll probably notice is the physical appearance of the officials checking your passport—they’re distinctly different from the “short-timers” staffing the desks on Nearside and most of Peary Base. Fluid redistribution and muscular adjustments make them look a little unreal, almost like cartoon characters, and when they walk it’s with a peculiar, sashaying style—what on Earth might be called “a pimp strut.”
Then, once you’ve been given the all-clear—not inevitable, as your visa can be rejected on the basis of minor technicalities—you’ll be ushered down a corridor to the courtesy bus transferring you to Sin (most of your luggage will be traveling separately). Once you get onto the crater’s winding tarmac, however, you might be surprised, even annoyed, at the speed of the bus—it’s agonizingly slow, even when the road ahead appears completely clear. But sooner or later an automated recording, or perhaps the driver himself, will enlighten you. All vehicles in Purgatory are forbidden from creating vibrations that might affect the readings of the interferometry arrays—all those modules and radar dishes, thousands of them across the crater floor, that together make up one immense multifaceted telescope with a resolving power infinitely greater than anything on Earth.
Of course, if you’ve done your guidebook reading you’ll know that Fletcher Brass personally financed two such arrays, one inside Störmer Crater, the other in Seidel Crater in the southern hemisphere. The former is intended for extragalactic observations; the latter is aimed at the inner galaxy. Both are above the 30th parallel, in regions just temperate enough to avoid the worst extremes of thermal cycling. Both are dedicated chiefly to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And both, as Brass himself is happy to point out, have so far discovered nothing. Not a squawk. Not a pin drop. Nothing.
But, as you’ll also know if you’ve read the right biographies, the huge expense paid off for Brass in unexpected ways. Because when terrestrial prosecutors started bearing down on him after the Amazon catastrophe, he was able to pull off a typically cunning trick. He moved himself, his loyal entourage, most of his belongings, and much of his liquidated financial holdings into Störmer Crater, effectively inside his own gigantic telescope, and claimed he was on privately owned territory.
And he was right. In the early years of lunar development, private corporations claimed all sorts of territorial rights on the basis of first possession—the argument being that anyone who went to the crippling expense of building a lunar base should at least get some real estate to go with it. But owing to the longstanding observance of 1967’s Outer Space Treaty, which in Article 8 forbids private ownership of real estate in outer space, corporations had to be content with exploiting the subclause that permits ownership of objects in space, including objects “landed or constructed on celestial bodies, along with all their component parts.” This was how Brass’s battalion of lawyers was able to claim that their client had exiled himself to an object—a giant telescope, 120 kilometers across—which was in effect his own legally recognized territory. And which came to be known as Purgatory.
So that’s the reason they’re so exceptionally sensitive about upsetting the telescopic readings—because any sustained breakdown might result in a legal challenge to Brass’s claim on the whole territory. Though even if this is explained to you—by an unusually candid guide, perhaps—you might choose to be skeptical, remembering all those rumors that Brass has worked out some secret deal with the United Nations Security Council, that he’s blackmailed presidents and prime ministers, or that he’s simply deployed his vast underworld connections to bribe and threaten lawmakers—all so the official status of Purgatory, no joke intended, can remain permanently in limbo.
In any case, after a couple of hours of this lugubrious journey—the sun, you might notice, doesn’t seem to have shifted at all—you’ll come to another crater rim: a crater within a crater, as it were. Much smaller than Störmer itself and festooned with doors and windows, this is your first sight of Sin, Purgatory’s roofed-over, Monaco-sized city. Here you’ll be shunted through more airlocks, disgorged into another cheesily decorated processing center, and directed down lamplit tunnels and up fast-moving elevators to one of the many hotels built into the so-called “Sin Rim”—the crater’s northern wall.
Most of these hotels have Babylonian names—Harran, Ninurta, Hermon—though some of the more recent ones show a more New Testament inspiration: Revelation, Fair Haven, Gethsemane. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, in any event, by the size of your suite. Even if your budget is mid-range, you’ll find a spacious room with suitably large furniture, impressive decorations, and a capacious bed with a heavily weighted duvet. If you open the minibar, you’ll find all the usual beverages, alcoholic and otherwise. If you call down for a club sandwich, you’ll find it not much different than similar fare on Earth. And if you turn on the TV, you’ll find a large selection of (censored) channels from Earth, along with the local news and movie networks (Brass gets repeated showings).
Should you be in town for an unmonitored conference you’ll be pleased to learn that all the major hotels have so-called “speakeasies”—lead-walled, soundproofed cells where external monitoring is impossible and electronic sweeps are conducted regularly. Purgatory is particularly proud of its reputation as a surveillance-free zone. Many high-ranking diplomats and businessmen come regularly to Farside to use these speakeasies, and many world-shaping agreements are said to have been thrashed out within the confines of Sin.
But inevitably, armed with a complimentary map—no GPS devices are permitted on Farside—you’ll want to explore the city. If you still haven’t gotten your moonlegs you might elect to hire a motorized scooter or to strap on some hydraulic walk-assist devices. You’ll be relieved to discover, in any case, that most of the tourist districts have heavily padded surfaces, and that the windows, should you fall against them, are made of lunar glass—the most unbreakable glass in existence.
In the arcades and galleries around the major hotels you’ll see countless stores selling Purgatory’s best-known souvenir items. These include authentic Pandia watches (those moon-faced wristwatches, precision-made by fugitive jewelers, that are high-priced collector’s items on Earth), the local postage stamps (even if it’s only for investment, you’ll want a few packs of those), and of course Sin’s famous multicolored crystal figurines (so delicate that they look like they’d break apart in your hand, yet so tough that they won’t shatter even if you hurl them against a wall).
It’s only when you venture a little deeper, beyond the malls, that you’ll find the casinos and gambling dens, the hash houses, the fight clubs, the sex shows, the smorgasbord brothels, the main-street shops where you can buy brain boosters and transcendental drugs over the counter, no questions asked, and the deep-discount surgical centers where you can get your whole body “renovated” in under five hours.
You’ll inevitably notice that many of the city’s citizens—“Sinners”—seem to have undergone extensive cosmetic procedures themselves. Some, indeed, bear striking resemblances to old movie stars, supermodels, and other celebrities. Most seem wearily tolerant of tourists, but a few are openly disdainful and sometimes even aggressive. To more than a few tourists this is part of Purgatory’s curious charm. The gambling district in particular is full of old-style saloons where you can swiftly find yourself in the middle of a bar fight, if that’s your thing, but you should be aware that Purgatory’s official hospitals, unlike the storefront surgeries, charge exorbitant prices for emergency treatments.
Of course, it could be that you’ve come to Sin not for the knife fights, the combat sports, the kinky sex, the radical medical procedures, or even the chance to conduct an unmonitored conversation. It could be that you just want to see the city in all its glory. And even if you’re a veteran traveler, it’s still a bracing moment when you catch your first sight of the whole thing, the so-called “Hornet’s Nest” or “Pressure Cooker.” You’ll see a huge roof crisscrossed with girders an
d catwalks, pipes hung with vines and flowers, massive halogen lamp arrays that dim and brighten arbitrarily (to simulate cloud cover and sunlight), great oxidized brass pillars wreathed in spiraling foliage, geysering fountains and garden-stuffed terraces, huge statues of dragons and saints, and a ground-level maze of cafés, shops, and moonbrick homes—“ancient Mesopotamia by way of pre-Revolution Havana,” as one travel writer called it.
You’ll see a lot of Babylonian influences intertwined with cathedral Gothic. The architecture, indeed, sometimes seems to bleed from enameled bricks, cruciform tablets, and mustard-colored columns at one end of the street to churchlike plaster, lancet windows, and ashlar blocks at the other. The ornamentation is war chariots and striding bulls here, weeping saints and devotional statuary there. The cafés and nightclubs are called Kish, Ur, and Belshazzar’s Feast on one corner, and The Cloister, The Reliquary, and the Eye of the Needle on the next. The music too—that which drifts from dark doors and mounted speakers—is sometimes ancient harps and tambourines, sometimes cathedral organs and monk chants. In short, you can see it with your eyes, you can hear it with your ears: ecclesiastical chic slowly conquering the pagan trappings of old Purgatory.
In the very center of town, reaching up to the ceiling girders and visible from all quarters of Sin, is the famous Temple of the Seven Spheres. A huge ziggurat studded with lunar gemstones and paved in reflective tiles, this is Sin’s Louvre and Eiffel Tower in one—a must-see observation point, a creditable museum of the solar system, and a fixture of Purgatorial postcards and tourist guides. But it’s invariably crowded with sightseers and aggressive hawkers, and best visited off-peak.
You might be surprised, meanwhile, by the city’s weather: It’s consistently warm and often uncomfortably humid, even tropical. And since water vapor rises more swiftly in lunar gravity, and the molecules knit together more readily, natural precipitation is frequent within the Pressure Cooker. But the raindrops are both bigger and lighter than they are on Earth and, rather than hitting the ground with any force, just splat like slow-motion water balloons, releasing large volumes of liquid. It’s a surreal experience, to walk through balls of rain in Sin. It’s even more surreal during a thunderstorm, when lightning sizzles and flashes across the ceiling like Saint Elmo’s fire.
The Dark Side Page 8
