by F P Adriani
James was inside a UPG Communications room, and now he said to me over the audio-video line, “I was able to find out about that transaction for you. I’m not surprised: it was routed through Earth over to Diamond, but the money originally came from…an Earth-Moon bank.”
Blood was pounding behind my eyes, and, for a long moment, James’s pale face blurred before me. “Well, that’s no surprise to me too. So is there a name attached?”
“Unfortunately, no. That bank allows cash-in and cash-out transactions, for people who don’t want to maintain permanent accounts because they’re traveling, etc. And this was a one-time cash-in—no sender-account on file, only the name of the receiver. This person knows what he’s doing.”
I sighed and groaned and had nothing to add because I just felt so goddamn fucked.
James’s face seemed lost in thought. And I wondered if he was thinking, She’s so goddamn fucked.
But then he said, “Look, I’m making another communication to D tonight, and I need to know your favorite drink.”
“What?” I was still thinking about the other thing, that someone who’d probably been on the Moon wanted to kill me. Who the fuck was it….
“Your codeword to him?” came James’s voice now.
“Oh, purple tree juice.”
“Still your favorite, huh?”
“Yes. Not much has changed.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” James said, and he was slowly shaking his head. His eyes moved to somewhere below the video-screen. “Keep in touch when you’re there—let me know when the exchange has gone through.” Now his blue eyes rose up again. “And, watch your back.”
I snort-grunted.
And he added, in a softer voice now, “Don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything there.”
“Um, James, if you had more reach on the Moon, you wouldn’t need me to go and do this. What the hell can you do from here?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said.
*
Back in the hotel room, I found Tan dressed in his pajamas.
For cover, I put on the radio again and turned it up even more than the last time. Then I said, “You need to get dressed again. We’ve got to get shopping ASAP. Earth-Moon really is the key to what’s going on toward me. I was hoping somehow I could avoid doing this. But now I see that’s impossible, so we need some supplies for there.”
A frown changed his brow into a heavy wavy line. “Why are you so confident suddenly? What’d he say?”
“Someone paid V from a bank on Earth-Moon.”
Tan’s taut face looked as if he didn’t know what to say.
I spoke again, waving a hand at him. “While you get dressed, I’m going to look at the threats again.”
“Why! How many times are you gonna read them? You’re harming yourself.”
“Better I harm myself now than someone harms me later.”
I opened my case and removed the plastic bags; then I reread the scrawled sentences, and reread them, and reread them, until my fingers began dampening the plastic.
Tan hadn’t listened to my order; in his pajamas still, he stood by my side and watched me as I read.
I removed the letters from the plastic, folded one over and put the last two sentences one right above the other.
Then I realized something: I’d been overcomplicating the issue. I’d been looking for some grand hidden meaning.
But I now saw a parallel with the before dish-and-spoon and before June….
You’ll be dead soon before the dish runs away with the spoon.
I’ll see you soon when you’ll be dead before June.
Via the nursery rhyme, the Moon was before the dish and spoon. And what was before June? May. Maybe the clue was as simple as that. If it was a clue and not just some bullshit game. There was always a possibility that it was some bullshit game, and no one really intended to harm me.
But I just couldn’t take that chance.
Now I thought about May…what was the significance there? Off the top of my frustrated head, I couldn’t come up with a goddamn thing. I assumed May was probably Earth’s May, but I couldn’t think of anything I did as a Miscellaneous during a May that would warrant someone wanting to kill me.
For that matter, there were lots of colonized moons in the galaxy, so the moon I kept perceiving in the letters could possibly be referring to a number of moons and a number of things that had some connection to me, whether real or imaginary. I still could have been here near Earth-Moon entirely for nothing, with a capital N-O-T-H-I-N-G….
I threw the letters onto the coffee table and dropped onto my ass on the couch, pressing my face into my hands. “I really wish I knew what was going on—I need more answers!”
“Maybe you’ll get them on Earth-Moon,” Tan said.
I nodded up at him, a slow motion. “Maybe. Or maybe not—I just don’t know anymore.”
I thought of the courier job, how I’d first-instinct resisted taking it. However, as the courier file indicated, it was Dylan who had come across something about the new ring. And if my past involvement there was now endangering me, talking to him could lead to my finding who wanted me dead. My desire to do the courier job suddenly went up ten notches….
Thinking of the job-word made Nell pop into my head. Now I said to Tan, “I just realized I haven’t called Nell…could you do that before we go out? I told her I’d let her know when we got in-planet. But I don’t want to talk to her right now because I don’t want to bring her down. She looked so happy with Annie last time….”
“Don’t worry,” he said as he grabbed a clean pair of his pants from the dresser. “I’ll call Derek at The Citadel and see if she can contact me back from there.”
“Thanks,” I said on a sigh.
*
Tan wound up unable to reach Derek, and therefore unable to reach Nell. He left a message for Derek that we got here okay. Then Tan also paid for a text-only message to be sent to his mother’s house via the post-office’s print-out-and-deliver message service. Most people and places on Diamond couldn’t afford Communications rooms, so that post-office delivery service was a way to communicate between planets without the need for real-time coordination between both parties.
“Your mom will probably be sad that she didn’t get to talk to you in person,” I said as Tan and I stood outside our room door and I resprayed that and the surrounding frame with the polymer.
“I know,” Tan said to me then. “But there’s nothing I can do about that right now.”
We left the hotel and spent over an hour doing our for-the-Moon shopping at a traveler’s supply store; we bought two moon-suits, dozens of moon-suit undergarments, two moon-phones, a So You’re Going To The Moon guidebook, and a bunch of other stuff we’d need, including some items for our new identities.
As we walked along the streets back toward the hotel, our big shopping bags in hand, I told Tan I wanted to have a talk with him out here because it was very unlikely someone would be listening.
We went to a nearby park and laid our bags on one of the benches. And even though he was wearing sunglasses, I could see a darker shadow of worry behind the brown lenses when Tan finally turned to me. “What do you want to talk about?”
“After I got off the line with James, I passed the complimentary news desk downstairs—and felt the need to stop and look at the newsfeeds for Diamond, for any news of the trial. There was none.”
“Pia, the sentencing will happen when it happens.”
I looked him directly in the eye—or, more correctly, directly in the eyeglasses. “And what will that mean? It’s been bothering me. A lot.” I lowered my voice to a near-whisper and stepped closer to him, till our faces were almost touching. “I’m a murderer too. What happens to him might affect what could happen to me someday.”
The worry behind his eyes intensified for an instant, but then he covered it with anger—too late; I’d already seen the worry, which confirmed my worry. Still, he now sai
d, “Bullshit. You only did what you did because he was a murderer first and killed your parents. He turned you into someone forced to improvise a life, and you wound up doing that in dangerous circumstances. ”
“How can you know all that? I might have turned into the same person anyway.”
There was a pause.
Then he asked, “You really believe that? Because I don’t.”
I felt tears sting my eyes, and I thought a moment. Then I said, “When I was a kid before my parents died, people used to call me sweet so much. A teacher of mine called me Sweet Pea.”
“That doesn’t sound like a nickname you’d give a budding murderer.” His hands closed around my wrists, and then his arms brought me close enough till it felt like nothing existed around us but sunlight, air and the motion of the Earth’s atmosphere. There was just me and Tan, two people, living in a moment on a planet in a universe. Tomorrow wouldn’t matter, neither would yesterday. For animals, there were really only moments to time your life by.
And in this particular moment, Tan kissed me, softly, tenderly; I felt on the verge of something…tears. They spilled out on a rush of buried emotions.
Now his hand grabbed my chin and pressed kisses over there, over my eyes, and over the wet below. “My baby,” his warm lips said between kisses.
“Your confused baby.”
“You’ll make things clearer—I know it. I believe in you.”
“I wish I did,” I said, sighing.
*
When we got back to the room, we removed the moon-suits from their shopping bags, read over the operating-instructions and then tested out the suits.
I’d had experience with other moon-suits years ago. But the type we’d just bought was supposedly even safer and more comfortable in construction, though I was pretty sure that comfort was relative: none of the suits were actually comfortable, and this type probably wouldn’t be an exception.
These particular suits were a bright sea-blue, and they had standard flexible boots and flexible breather helmets attached. But instead of the older and bulkier airtanks, small flexible poly-airtanks hung down over the back of the suits, which tanks slightly conformed to the wearer’s shape; that way, the tanks weren’t uncomfortable when the person was seated against something. There were also extra holding tabs on the suits, where more tanks could be attached for more breathing back-up….
“No wonder they were so expensive: the manufacturers thought of everything,” I said as I smoothed one of the suits over my body.
It was quite tight-fitting, but the very high-tech material was both very stretchy yet very resistant and supposedly wouldn’t absorb body odor or moisture; the suit also had a built in thermostat to keep the inside temperature even. The whole get-up would, however, require periodic venting, which could be done with the push of several wrist buttons that would temporarily expose ventilation fins and open valves below, so water could drain if necessary.
As per the instructions, I tested those; I tested just about everything. Then my fingers gently probed the diagonal cross-shaped series of snaps that trailed along the suit’s torso then down over the groin. The instructions said that when you wanted an airtight seal, you pulled on the helmet, slipped on the attached gloves, pushed the red button above the suit’s elbow, and then everything would easily become pressurized. But if you wanted to open the suit, pressurized or not, you had to push the front snaps in a specific series; it was a safety precaution in case you were pressurized and outside, and you fell against something or were hurt and accidentally hit a snap—so then you wouldn’t instantly lose the ability to breathe.
I now saw that this very safety precaution would make the suits a pain in the ass when you simply wanted to take a piss. You had to first push all the snaps in the same specific order, then peel down the snapped-together part to below your crotch, and then snap that and your moon-underwear up in a bunch in the back. And you just couldn’t comfortably take a shit in the suits; they’d need to be taken off all the way then….
“Damn,” Tan said once he’d depressurized his suit after testing it and had slid off his helmet half-way. “These’ll be awkward to live in day-to-day.”
“Well, you don’t have to. The Lunians don’t wear suits; they trust the structural technology of the colony enclosures.” I, however, trusted nothing. And neither, apparently, did Tan trust anything.
“I’ll bear the discomfort. I won’t ever walk around naked there.”
“I hope you don’t mean that literally,” I said as I slipped off my suit. I folded it in half and carefully pressed it into a special holding-bag. And as I moved, I eyed Tan’s still-suited body, eyed the sea-blue curves of his trim torso all the way down to his perfectly-shaped legs. “I must say, though, you do look hot—whew. You’ve got some shape and you can really see it in the suit—those narrow hips of yours!”
He rolled his eyes, but his cheeks had colored and his mouth had pursed into a half-smile.
I helped him remove his suit, and he laid his next to mine inside the bag. Then we put our clothes back on.
“So,” I said, “we really should get to the training-work now, my dear student.”
His dark eyes were rolling again, but now his mouth was fully smiling beneath.
He plopped down onto the rust-colored couch, raising one black-covered ankle to his black-covered other knee.
I turned on the radio and began pacing in front of him. “Okay, so here’s the thing: when you’re undercover and engaging with someone, the most important thing to always remember is to satisfy the person, but, whenever you can, avoid speaking in specifics, even when asked a specific question.
“Let’s try something: pretend I’ve come up to you and asked you your name and what you’re doing here in this restaurant, for example. Now you answer me without really answering me.”
“I don’t understand,” Tan said, and his tightly pursed lips looked like he really didn’t understand.
“All right—scratch that. Pretend you’ve come up to ME and asked me those questions and this is my response: my mom named me after her—and she always wanted me to become a chef!”
Tan seemed to think a moment. “But, a smart person would see you haven’t really answered what I asked.”
“That’s the point: when people are bullshitting, they’re not being smart. They’re satisfied with simple statements and answers. With other people, the ones who might…mean you harm—they can’t be put off so easily. That helps you spot them.”
“But then doesn’t that mean you can’t use being fake to your advantage with the dangerous ones?”
“Yes, most of the time,” I said. “But let’s never let it get to that point. That’s always your primary job: looking out for you. Certainly, no big organization will be looking out for you….
“But the basic idea is to maintain a layer of mystery around you, without you yourself ever seeming mysterious and then making people curious. Keep the focus off you, yet keep the perception of your mystery cover without revealing anything specific about you—this is particularly important where we’re going because people are used to other people not being forthcoming. They’re probably partying when they shouldn’t be, with someone they shouldn’t be. Maybe they’re cheating on a lover or a spouse—who knows! But you don’t wanna stick out by behaving like Honest Abe there….” Suddenly, I laughed, and Tan turned quizzical eyebrows on me. “I was just thinking that this is an interesting circumstance, me training you. It was once the other way around.”
His mouth twisted. “Shit happens, especially weird shit, around you.”
Now I laughed even harder.
When my laughing had waned, I said, “We really should go over a bunch of specific things about Earth-Moon.”
I handed Tan the Moon-guidebook we’d bought, and then I sat on the couch and began sharing some facts, a few of which he knew but most of which were a first for him—like that even though Earth-Moon was so close to both the UPG Headquarters and the ICFC
Headquarters on Earth, and so close to the Earth, period, the Moon still had an independent government.
That the Moon had plenty of money helped, and the majority of that money came from its two industries: mining and, especially, partying. Basically, if you really wanted to party, you went to Earth-Moon.
Most of the citizens there, the Lunians, either worked in mining or were servicing all the partiers. And when the Lunians weren’t working, they were usually partying with the visitors. Earth-Moon was just a crazy place.
Because its physical existence was so important to the Earth’s physical existence, mining on the Moon was also strictly controlled—by both the UPG and The Moon Council. The Council wasn’t crazy about sharing control, but, apparently, they felt that sometimes taking the UPG’s (usually undercover) help was necessary because there just weren’t enough Lunians interested in—or agreeable to—policing the place. The Lunians were all about having a good time.
The tension between the UPG and The Moon Council combined with the ICFC’s perpetual presence on all-things-economics meant that the Moon existed inside a friction-filled environment.
The ICFC maintained pretty tight control over the flow of money in and out of the place—or, more correctly, had to split that control with the UPG. But both sides were unhappy about that, both sides had supposedly become quite greedy about that—something that was not uncommon from the UPG but had been more uncommon from the ICFC, which had always presented itself as pretty straight-up. But then I knew first-hand that things-governmental weren’t always as they seemed.
“The tension between the three groups is moronic,” I said to Tan now as I flashed aggrieved eyes at the ceiling. “Damaging the Moon—changing it too much could possibly destroy here. I don’t know anyone who wants that to happen, so they should always be working together to prevent that happening.”
However, as usual, at first humans had operated in a short-term-thinking way toward the Moon, with too little protectiveness and too much exploitation of the Moon’s geological resources. That living and working inside the early primitive Moon colonies had been really rough didn’t help matters. But there was no excuse for being wasteful now because the one-hundred-percent-indoors Moon-living had come a very long way since….
