Noir Fatale

by Larry Correia

  She said, “What’s your name, One K?”

  “One K?”

  “Your seat. I saw you. How do you want me to sign?”

  “Jason.”

  She smiled. “I’m Isis, Jason. But my friends call me ‘Ice.’” She swayed and wiggled her shoulders to music that wasn’t there. “You know. ‘Chill like ice cubes, sweet like ice cream.’”

  We get pop music six months behind Earth, so I didn’t know the song, but admitting that would make me out a stupid hick.

  So I filled the void with facts. “There’s no water on the Moon. So, there’s no ice.”

  Her smile faded, and her big blue eyes turned down toward the floor.

  She whispered, “I’m sorry. I was trying to say something you would think was interesting. Not make myself look like a stupid hick.”

  Then the human sea rolled over her and swept me away.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  Ten minutes later Mom and I rode the Centerline Passage slidewalk, northbound to our Kube.

  She said, “So, what did you think of the play?”

  “It was okay.”

  Mom said, “The girl was extraordinary. Variety’s reviewer wrote she was a precocious talent. That understated it, I think.”

  “She was okay.”

  “What was your takeaway from the show?”

  I had read the online synopsis. “That true love takes many forms, and triumphs if the will is strong.”

  “You read the synopsis.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I sat next to you. And I thought your takeaway was that the blue-eyed girl was flash.”

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  Mom tracked my wake cycles, and the next wake cycle was my forty-five-hundred fifth. And my worst.

  After I thought it through, I realized that the most exquisite female in the universe had hit on me. And I had not only doozed it up, I had hurt her feelings. It creeped me that Mom used a word like “flash.” And creeped me worse that she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  As I rode the slidewalk home after school, I set down my backpack and took out the playbill that I had tucked into the front pocket. Even though seeing her face would remind me I was a dooz.

  In purple ink across her picture was written:

  “I get one hour a day free, to scoot in the park across from the Ritz. If you’re interested, 16:00. —Ice”

  After her name, she had drawn a heart.

  I looked up at the chronometer, where Centerline intersected Aldrin. The big red one above the McDonalds advert. As I watched, the time ticked over to 15:46.

  A slidewalk slides fifteen kilometers per hour.

  On Earth, the fastest human-over-ground foot speed ever recorded peaked at forty-nine kilometers per hour, at the 2040 Reykjavik Olympics. Tested human-over-ground foot speeds in the Moon averaged twenty-four-percent improvement.

  Therefore, the fastest combined speed possible for a human running on a slidewalk in the Moon was seventy-nine kilometers per hour. Or, as Mom would say it, forty-nine miles per hour “in old money.”

  Even at that speed, I would arrive at the park entrance across from the Ritz at 16:02.

  At 15:59, I was fifty meters from the Ritz’s Portico, half-dead, when I saw her. She walked her scooter past the hotel’s doorman, crossing the slidewalk to the park via the overhead footbridge. He smiled, then tipped his top hat to her as she passed him.

  She paused at the park’s entrance, looked right, then left, saw me and waved.

  She said, “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  With my hands on my knees, I wheezed, “Just along the way home.”

  She said, “Do you work out on your way home every day?”

  Gasps punctuated my answer. “Moon. No days. Wake cycles.”

  “If you’re going to make obtuse corrections to everything I say, maybe you should just keep running.”

  I recovered enough to straighten, then shook my head. “No. Please.”

  She said, “Maybe we should just walk together instead.”

  I couldn’t speak, just nodded and gave her a thumbs up.

  She laughed. “I’m just as flogged as you are. Matinees suck it.”

  My jaw dropped.

  I’d never heard a girl drop the S-bomb before. But when she said it, it didn’t sound dirty. It sounded funny.

  I said, “If you had a matinee, how are you here?”

  “You’re smart. After the show, I skipped signing and my shower because I was afraid I would miss my scooting time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do I stink too bad?”

  She smelled like lemon and strawberry extract. Maybe she lied about skipping her shower. But only an idiot probes a witness’s truth and veracity by cross-examining on collateral matters.

  I just said, “No.”

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  The next day, Ice didn’t have a matinee. She met me at the park entrance, without her scooter, and looking flash.

  As we walked, she hopped and touched the sky with her fingertips.

  The Moon’s living spaces are covered in animated Threedee foil, two centimeters deep, laid over hewn rock. Triple-L says they’re visually indistinguishable from reality.

  Ice said, “I nearly bashed my brains out on this wallpaper the first day we got out of Quarantine. I don’t understand Quarantine.”

  I shrugged. “And I didn’t understand fleas. I didn’t understand them because of Quarantine.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my obtuse way of saying that you and I come from different worlds.”

  “‘Thank you, Captain Obvious.’”

  “What?”

  She said, “When I was eight, I played a precocious brat, in a sitcom, set in the two-thousand-teens. A grown-up character would say something self-evident. I would wait two beats, then say the line. The show only lasted two seasons, but I said the line so often in rehearsals and on talk shows that I think I still say it in my sleep. And it’s become my signature line.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I can’t imagine having my own signature line.”

  “It’s not that great. When I’m not rehearsing, or performing, or touring, or suffering through gymnastics and free weights, my parents homeschool me. So, I have no friends my age. I’ve broken each ankle three times. I haven’t eaten a french fry or a cupcake since I grew bumps, to keep my weight down. And all the money goes into a trust.”

  I said, “That sucks it.”

  Her jaw dropped. “I never heard a boy say ‘sucks it’ before. But when you say it, it doesn’t sound dirty. It sounds funny.”

  Maybe we were more alike than I thought.

  She said, “My agent swears at me like a gangsta. My gymnastics and lifting coaches, too. And all the dressers and caterers swear.”

  Maybe we weren’t so alike.

  “Why do your parents make you do it?”

  “They don’t. Going all-in on acting was my idea. After every injury or bad review that makes me cry, they tell me it’s fine if I want to quit.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “Because when your song stops the show, or your acting quiets the audience so that you hear people cry, the emotion rolls forward from way back in the cheap seats. Then it crashes over you, like a wave. And you know you’ve touched people. So I made my choice.”

  “Your parents expect you to take personal responsibility for your choices. And you do.”

  She stared at me. “Exactly. You really are smart. What do your parents tell you?”

  “Parent. My mother tells me the same…and to do the right thing.”

  I really didn’t want to dive deep on the parent subject. I said, “Do you like Earth?”

  “Compared to here? Uh, yes! This is like living in the subway. Not just commuting to rehearsals in it.”

  “Earth is even more crowded than here.”

  “Manhattan and Beijing and London are. But on the Serengeti, the only crowds are wildebeest. My parents bought a compound on the Sere
ngeti. We live there when I’m between projects.”

  “Are there fleas in your compound?”

  She laughed. “Only if you count fleas on the elephants that walk through.”

  “You have elephants?”

  “We don’t have elephants. We see elephants when they decide to walk by there. I like that.”

  “I’d like to see an elephant walk by here.”

  She pointed up and laughed again. “An elephant walking by here would bump its head on the sky.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jason, the real sky is so big that nothing can bump it. Sometimes, even in daytime, this Moon, that we’re standing in right now, floats in the sky. Like a white ghost. And there’s water everywhere. So much water cascades over the Victoria Falls that their real name means ‘smoke that thunders.’ And when you’re close to the Falls, the Earth shakes.”

  When Ice described Earth, it didn’t sound awful. It sounded like a place I ached to see. And, more than anything, ached to see with her.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  When I got home to the Kube following my fifth after-school walk with Ice, Mom was already home.

  As she punched in dinner, she said, over her shoulder, “You’re late. What’s the big attraction at the park across from the Ritz?”

  Kids in the Moon knew that, with personal device location systems, their parents could spy on them. I just assumed my life was so boring, and so much my personal responsibility, that my parent didn’t. But, apparently, the invisible cord was still attached.

  I said, “It’s a nice park for walking.”

  “Was it your idea—or hers?”

  Parental spying in the Moon was not limited to a tracking dot that identified a child’s phone. In the Moon, the public could access public surveillance cam records, so long as the cam surveilled a place where the surveilled subject had no reasonable expectation of privacy—like a public park.

  I said, “Mom, she’s nothing like my father.”

  Mom’s head snapped around from whatever she was doing at the kitchen counter.

  I knew all of Mom’s faces. This was the first time I saw the surprised face looking toward me. And also her sad face, at the same time.

  She punched dinner to warm and hold, then pointed to the kitchen table. “Sit.”

  She sat across from me, then leaned forward on her elbows. “I’ve never told you about your father.”

  “You never tell me about anything. I figured that meant I should look it up.”

  I began at the beginning.

  In the Moon, birth records carried no more reasonable expectation of privacy than walking in a park. And there weren’t many births to look up.

  Amanda Lin Cho was the name my Mom was born with in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. My father’s name, entered on my birth certificate in her handwriting, was Ricky Ringo Wallace, of Malibu, California.

  Finding “Ricky Ringo Wallace” was easy. Percussionist for Apocalypse, the American rock band, he was best known for his drum solo on the album Suck it!

  I clicked up a couple tracks. When Apocalypse said it, it definitely sounded dirty.

  Apocalypse’s 2058 tour stopped at Vancouver for one night only, in December.

  Ricky had obviously noticed an intriguing face in his audience, the way Ice had noticed mine in hers. I hoped that Ricky would do the right thing by an eighteen-year-old girl, who he had left behind to take personal responsibility for a questionable personal choice—a choice that was to become me. My hope vanished when I learned how he died.

  Two months before I was born, Ricky self-drove his gasoline-powered antique Maserati convertible off the Pacific Coast Highway. Top down, at two hundred seventy kilometers per hour. Buck naked, drunk, and lit up on blow. In the company of three similarly clad females…which challenged the imagination, because his Maserati only seated the driver plus one.

  I overlaid an online photo of Ricky with a selfie of me, using facial recognition software, which nailed it. Ricky was voted one of “Rock’s Ten Hottest, Rudest Dudes” in 2055, so I did have that going for me.

  That was bleak enough. Then I inferred the rest, from the 2050s world situation.

  Earth’s population had exploded past all predictions, and past twelve billion, in 2054. So, birth taxes trended, even in low-population-density democracies like Canada. Democracies don’t forbid questionable personal choices. They just tax the hell out of them.

  A young, single mother-to-be who had made one questionable personal choice had therefore confronted three more: a tax she couldn’t pay, an abortion she couldn’t bear, or a long-term indenture with Triple-L. Triple-L offered cradle-to-crematorium job security. Plus, a bonus for women who agreed to give birth in the Moon.

  The Moon needed expectant mothers. Not just because the Moon got two inhabitants for one price. Triple-L also got baseline data about subsurface Lunar births. That was why Mom texted my height, weight, and vital signs to Central Records each wake cycle.

  At that time, the only certainty about permanent residents on the Moon was that cosmic radiation exposure would kill them. In the Moon, that hazard vanished. Beyond that, Triple-L didn’t even know what it didn’t know.

  Mom sat silent for a long time after I shut up.

  Then she said, “Isis is attractive, talented. So was your father. So are you. So, her interest in you is as unsurprising as yours in her.

  “But, Jason, you have to understand, her world and your world are even further apart than Earth and the Moon.”

  “But that’s the point.”

  Mom smiled. “Vive la difference? Sure. She’s exotic to you. And you are far more exotic to her. But she will leave you behind. That’s the real distance between you.”

  Mom tapped the table, it lit, and she swiped until she stopped on a story, in an Earth entertainment ’zine called Variety, about a sixteen-year-old male actor. His photo showed him shirtless. He had muscles where I didn’t, in the way that Ice had bumps where my female classmates didn’t.

  Mom pointed at the story’s text. “The Moon is her tour’s last stop. Her next project is a feature film, acting opposite this young man.”

  I said, “That doesn’t mean she’s going to hypothetically fall in love with his pecs. That’s why they call it ‘acting.’”

  “No. But her broken heart will have healing opportunities that yours won’t. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the voice of experience.”

  “Mom, Ricky left you with more than a broken heart. Ice and I are placental mammals. And I’m the male. You don’t need to worry that I’ll be left behind, penniless and pregnant.”

  Mom smiled. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  I wrinkled my forehead.

  Ice’s signature line, about truths so obvious that they were self-evident, appeared to be better known than I thought.

  “Jason, what Ricky left behind was you. You are the most precious gift anyone could ever have given me. I don’t want to see you hurt by a fourteen-year-old femme fatale.”

  “Mom, Ice is barely even a femme. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl who’s precocious.”

  “And you’re a twelve-year-old boy who’s precocious. Girls grow up much faster than boys. The maturity delta between you and Isis is even greater than the chronological one.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning she knows what she wants from you—and how to get it. But what makes a regular femme into a fatale is less what she wants than how much you are willing to sacrifice to give it to her.”

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t die for her.”

  “I’m saying you should do the right thing.”

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  I sat with Ice in her dressing room, backstage at the Armstrong, before the show’s last performance, which was a matinee.

  Costume trunks stood open in the room’s corners, along with makeup kits the size of suitcases, all where the people who had dressed Ice and made her up, had left them when they left the room.

  It was,
I realized, the first time we had been alone together. We had never even touched, not so much as fingertips.

  But by next wake cycle every stitch, bottle, bangle, and false fingernail would be packed aboard the Upshuttle, Earthbound with its Lithium. And with Ice.

  It would be as though none of the last month had happened.

  The Frost Queen sat, staring into the mirror above her dressing table like a frozen statue, protecting her makeup and costume. And, I supposed, to get her performance game face on.

  I said, “Ice—”

  She raised her palm. “Stop! This is hard enough.”

  Close like this, I could see the skin-toned tubes glued to her forearms’ undersides. They connected her false fingernails to the pumps and projectors, concealed in her costume, that produced the illusion that she could shoot ice from her fingertips. Yet she had to perform spins and flips like a gymnast, while dancing and singing, and projecting emotion, as though the machinery wasn’t even there.

  I said, “Game face. Got it.”

  She said, “No. I’ve played the Frost Queen so often that I can be her in my sleep. But saying goodbye? Don’t say one word. I’ll cry, and my makeup will run. And my last performance will be my worst performance.”

  A guy wearing an earpiece and carrying a chipboard stuck his head in after rapping on the door jamb. “Ten minutes, Ms. Lavender.”

  That broke her tension.

  She stood, then turned in front of the full-length mirror opposite her dressing table. “What do you think?”

  With her hair upswept and her eyelids painted with purple glitter that would be visible from the cheap seats, she looked electric. Her costume accentuated her bumps, and it dripped jewels that bedazzled me.

  “What I think is that you look like a femme fatale.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. I’ll have extra scoot time after this last show…if you can handle it.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want you to take me Topside.”

  I cocked my head. “Topside? Why?”

  “I’ve been on the Moon a month. But I’ve haven’t been on the Moon. I haven’t seen the Earth. Or the black sky with the stars that don’t twinkle. Or the shadows so dark that you can’t see into them. And tomorrow—that is, next wake cycle—I leave. And I still won’t see them. The bus that Quarantined us, and that takes us back to the shuttle, doesn’t even have windows.”