Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  His name, she’d learned, was Mike Sampson. His skin was pale pinky-white, that flushed red when he got excited or angry, which seemed to happen easily. Tall, clean-shaven, with bushy white eyebrows and a shaved-bald head. About her own age, but strong and fit still; he spent hours in the gym each day, maintaining muscle tone in lunar gravity. Aarti thinned herself to translucency and carefully observed him for a few days before making her move.

  She bumped into him in a corridor, her bulbous gray head deliberately bent over a tablet. “Oh, sorry! My big, bald head!” She was careful to inject some extra dismay into her voice. Damsel in distress, that was what she wanted him to hear.

  He chuckled. “No balder than mine—once your hairline recedes enough, you know it’s time to just let it go.” Then he frowned. “We haven’t met?”

  She shook her head, then shifted, mirroring his stance. A sign of sexual interest, she’d read on her computer back in Bombay—the World Wide Web had offered several “tips” on seducing a man. “I just arrived on this morning’s transport. You’ll find me on the manifest.”

  “People are coming through so fast these days.” His brow was furrowed. “I don’t remember…”

  “Anya Chakraborty.” She’d gleaned the name from the morning’s manifest list and checked it against the news. A wave of anti-joker sentiment had recently erupted in Delhi; blood had run on the dusty streets.

  “Oh, yes. I remember that name. Well, welcome to our glorious joker paradise.” Plenty of irony loaded into that as his hand extended to encompass the cramped hallway.

  “It seems pretty glorious to me, actually,” Aarti said, smiling through what she hoped looked like remembered pain. She really had no practice at acting, or even talking much to other people. Aarti shifted a little closer to him. The corridor was so small, after all. “Much more peaceful than Delhi.”

  His eyes darkened. “I was sorry to hear about what happened there. You’ll be safe here.”

  Sampson assumed that she’d come because of the killings, that she was one who had narrowly escaped. Aarti let her voice tremble a little as she said, “Honestly, I still can’t sleep at night. And I get so confused—” She let out a little laugh as she put her fingertips on his arm. “—I’m not even sure where my shelter is. Last night, I ended up sleeping on a couch in the common room.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” Sampson leaned closer, his hands reaching for her pad. A few taps, and a map came up. “There, see where it is?”

  How dumb could Aarti pretend to be? “I think so—thank you.” She couldn’t manage an eyelash flutter, she really couldn’t. “You’ve been so helpful. I’m very grateful.”

  “It’s my job to take care of all of you.” Sampson smiled, and then his eyes widened as she held his gaze for a little too long. Her fingers were still somehow on his arm, and they were a breath away from each other. “Maybe—maybe I should show you the way?”

  “If you’re not too busy, that would be wonderful,” she breathed.

  “Not at all. After you, Miss Chakraborty.”

  After that, it was almost too easy.

  He’d seemed oddly unsurprised that an eighteen-year-old girl would have any interest in an old man. Was he just arrogant, or did Sampson have this sort of thing happen to him all the time? Aarti supposed she should call him Mike now, after what they’d done together. His fingers tracing paths along her skin, and she was now practiced enough at simulated lunar sex that memory was enough to convince her Moon body that this felt good, though strange. No man had touched her since Yajnadar. No one had touched her at all, in fact. Was there such a thing as skin-hunger? Mike had dozed off, exhausted from their joint efforts, but Aarti wanted to wake him. She craved his touch.

  Maybe she’d made a mistake, shutting herself away from the world all these years. If Aarti had gone out among them, sought out other jokers, might she have had a different, richer life? Might she have had a host of lovers, married, had children and grandchildren of her own?

  And why had she let herself give up her work? She could have showed her paintings, even taken up the study of astronomy again. Instead of locking herself away from it all, rejecting the world because it had, for a little while, rejected her …

  Oh, this was foolish! She was no girl now, to be daydreaming away in might-have-beens. Aarti had come here with a mission, to learn what she could from the commander. What was there to learn, really? Her prior qualms seemed insignificant now; she should just kill him and be done with it. Aarti lay her fingers across his sleeping throat, let them sharpen to razor edges. The work of a moment to slice through the carotid artery, so that Mike’s blood would pulse out, falling as tribute on the Moon’s surface …

  … well, on the floor of the shelter, anyway. The symbolism was muddied a bit. And Aarti was distracted again, her fingers refusing to make those small motions. Mike had been sweet with her, tender. His eyes bright, delighted that this girl, bulging gray head and all, was willing to lie down with him in the dim lights of her room. And wasn’t she lucky that the real Anya Chakraborty hadn’t walked in yet? Mike had been so happy that Aarti had offered her young body to his eager touch. For that, did he deserve to die? Would she kill Anya if the girl came in, a joker girl who had committed no crime at all?

  No. Aarti began carefully extricating herself from under his outstretched arm, and then caught herself, smothering a laugh. How long had it been since she’d laughed?

  For a little while, Aarti had almost forgotten who and what she was. She let herself dissolve—Mike would wake to find a pleasant memory and a scattering of moondust in his arms. As for Aarti, she’d go back to simpler methods. These jokers were reliant on their machines that sheltered them from the Moon’s harsh realities. If those machines failed, surely they would give up and go home again? It was worth a try.

  With that decision, a strange peace descended. Something that was wrong had gone right.

  Maybe now, Aarti could paint again.

  Within That House Secure

  VII

  MATHILDE WATCHED A SNAIL with a shell the circumference of a dinner plate crawl up the wall beside the security door. Its size, of course, did not discomfit her. She was used to large snails, after all. The speed with which it moved along the vertical surface, on the other hand, was disturbing. It was fast.

  The snail stopped at the keypad mounted next to the door. There were more sophisticated locking mechanisms available, such as those which read fingerprints or even performed retinal scans, and those types were in widespread use at Witherspoon Aerospace headquarters and others of Theodorus’s companies. Here on the estate, however, they made do with the numeric keypads. Theodorus did not have fingerprints, and the specialized anatomical structures within his eyes stymied most machine readers.

  The snail extruded a calcium spike from near its sensory organs, something else that happened at a pace that disturbed Mathilde. The spike grazed the keypad once, twice, a third time. Then the snail moved again, completely engulfing the mechanism.

  “What’s it doing?” she asked.

  “Wait,” replied Theodorus. “Watch.”

  The status light above the door flashed colors, flickering between the red that signaled that the door was closed and the amber that shone when a code was being entered. Then the light turned green and, with an audible clicking noise, the door unlocked itself and swung open. Slowly, Mathilde was glad to see, though that was hardly a comfort.

  “You’ve trained a snail to be a locksmith?” she asked. She knew she was being reductive.

  “Trained is hardly the right word,” Theodorus replied. He didn’t sound offended. He was, in fact, positively jolly, clearly pleased that the demonstration had worked as he’d planned.

  The locksmith snail detached itself from the keypad and slid back down the wall, leaving a trail that glistened in the green light of the door’s status signal. It stopped once it reached the floor and moved its head back and forth.

  “What’s it doing now?” ask
ed Mathilde.

  “Respectfully awaiting further instructions in a patient manner. A model employee, wouldn’t you say?”

  Mathilde ignored the jab. “And you communicate with it telepathically somehow? Like with the other … varieties?”

  Theodorus nodded. The locksmith snail glided off in the direction of the nearest greenhouse.

  Eyeing the slime left on the keypad, Mathilde said, “You know, I could have unlocked that myself without all the mess.”

  “Hardly as impressive, though, is it?” said Theodorus. “You know the code.”

  Which was a fair point, but Mathilde habitually carried a few tools around, and she was certain she could use them to open any door on the estate, though she couldn’t think of any she didn’t have the passcode for. She decided not to tell Theodorus any of that. Well, he knew about the tools. He’d funded the design and manufacture of more than one of them.

  A staffer came along with a cart of cleaning supplies. “Yes, Mr. Witherspoon?” he asked. Mathilde was about to ask how Theodorus had signaled for the man, but then she recognized him.

  “Amos! It’s been forever!” she said.

  The man had scaly skin over a vaguely porcine face and was thus apparently incapable of blushing. Mathilde sensed that he would have been, though, had he been able.

  “Theodorus still has you cleaning up after his messes after all these years, does he?” she said, trying to find a way to make him comfortable. “How long have you been working here now?”

  “Not really sure, Miss,” he said. “A pretty long time.”

  “You can call up your hire date on the house system anytime,” said Theodorus, and Mathilde supposed he thought he was being helpful. She changed the subject.

  “And how are things going for Orson in the archives?”

  Amos shot a guarded look at Theodorus. “He’s not there anymore. He’s with all of them up there. Up on the Moon.” His voice nearly cracked on the last word.

  “We’ll leave you to your work,” Theodorus said, and began gliding away. Mathilde waited a moment before following him, wanting to say something more to Amos, not being able to think of anything.

  When she caught up with him, she said, “I can’t believe you split them up.”

  Theodorus said, “Orson has skills that are applicable to the current phase. Or at least adaptable.”

  Mathilde started to say something acid, but Theodorus went on.

  “And he was dying. He spent his entire life being slowly crushed by the rocky weight of his own body. Now he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  Mathilde wondered when a phase would come around that would require, or at least support, Amos’s skills. That, she supposed, was the question they were all working on answering.

  In recent years, as Theodorus had simultaneously grown more insular and work on the Moon project expanded, he had paid less and less attention to anything not directly related to the work. Setting aside, for now, thoughts of Amos and Orson, Mathilde realized she was glad to see that Theodorus had taken the time to design a snail that did something so relatively prosaic as open a door. His developing wild card power seemingly allowed him to coax snails into any task, at any size, and, now it seemed, with any speed. “That was a pretty fast one,” she said. They were moving toward Theodorus’s greenhouse lair now themselves.

  “Hmmmm?” Theodorus responded. “Yes, I suppose. For one of the terrestrial varieties, anyway. I’m working on speed right now.”

  This was a reference to the fifty or so gigantic snails Theodorus was slowly bringing along as part of the great work. If everything went as planned, those would ultimately prove far faster than any natural biological organism had ever been before. And they certainly wouldn’t be “terrestrial.”

  “We’re maintaining a pretty stately pace right now,” said Mathilde. She was raising a subject Theodorus didn’t like raised.

  “My power does not work on myself. I’ve told you this many times.”

  “Theodorus, you didn’t even discover you had a wild card power until after you were an adult, and as you just demonstrated, you’re still figuring out different things to do with it. I remember when you started experimenting with the snails, and I know you haven’t ever tried using it on yourself. I know you better than anyone. I know you’re afraid.”

  They came to the complex air lock that led into the greenhouse. Theodorus did not answer her, but gestured at the keypad, indicating that she should enter the code.

  She couldn’t remember it.

  Cahier No. 371

  14 July 2005

  Charleston, South Carolina

  In France, they are celebrating Bastille Day. Once, I would have written “at home” instead of “in France,” but now, so long an American, I am afraid my erstwhile countrymen would look at me askance as much for my atrophied accent as they would for the color of my skin. I am still, technically, a citizen of France. I am without a doubt a citizen of the United States of America. But more and more, I think of myself as a citizen of something else, someplace else. The Moon. Everyone and everything about me is now bent toward the Moon.

  There was a celebration at the estate today, as well. Theodorus announced that his preparations for the launches to the asteroid belt are complete. We await only their specific destinations, proof that bodies of the composition we need are out there somewhere. So much work has been based on the assumption that there are acceptable bodies.

  I have just looked at those last two words for twenty minutes, pen in hand.

  “Acceptable bodies.”

  That is what this is all about. I must remember that. Theodorus certainly never forgets it. We—all us jokers—have been made, or rather remade into unacceptable bodies. We inhabit physiologies that draw down hatred and violence that seems almost instinctive in the massive run of humanity. The astronomers and geologists tell us that the asteroids we’re looking for are, statistically, almost certain to exist. Theodorus has chosen to ignore the word “almost” in this case. More and more, he is a dealer in absolutes.

  Since he believes, absolutely, that we face eventual genocide, then I suppose I can’t blame him. Since I believe the same thing, I suppose I can’t blame myself. For whatever happens.

  The Sands of Mourning

  by Caroline Spector

  PART 1

  2007

  IT WAS HOT. NOT in a San-Diego-Hey-we’re-having-a-heat-wave-and-it’s-80-degrees way. More in a Jesus-it’s-130-degrees-in-the-shade kind of way.

  Michelle stared across the ocher desert. Heat radiated off it. She had had an ophthalmic migraine once and that’s how the air above the sand looked. Shimmery and wavy—a trick of the eye. Sometimes she thought she saw enemy forces advancing, but mostly it just hurt her eyes.

  A siren went off. Her heart started racing and her stomach knotted. They were under attack—again. Soldiers, Living Gods, jokers, and nats ran past her, cursing as they streamed by.

  “Bubbles! We have to get moving!”

  It was Curveball. She, Earth Witch, and Simoon were already racing past Michelle toward the end of camp where jeeps were parked. In the distance, the desert now had a smog-like haze above it.

  Michelle closed her eyes then opened them again, wanting to see anything other than the relentless desert and the oncoming pain. But she couldn’t escape it, so instead she dashed after the others as fast as she could, given her current size. The four of them were only teenagers on American Hero, but the softness of their youth had left them. Egypt and the war had made them harder people in just a few weeks.

  Michelle caught up with the others and tried to lug herself into the jeep they’d commandeered. It tilted to one side from her girth. “Shit! I’m too fat right now,” she said angrily as she started to climb out.

  “No, you’re not,” replied Curveball, impatience in her voice. “We need you! And we need you fat! You’re not going to make anything go boom if you’re skinny.”

  Michelle nodded, then stuffed her
self into the back seat. She ooched over until she was in the middle, her enormous girth spreading out. Simoon squeezed past Michelle’s knees and squatted in the middle of the front seats, and the jeep evened out some. Earth Witch slammed it into gear and it lurched forward. There was a shitty road half-covered in sand. It ran along the camp and Earth Witch headed for it. An army camp was just an army camp, even with Living Gods residing there.

  This wasn’t what Michelle thought being a hero was all about. It wasn’t supposed to be grit in your eyes and in your ass crack because sand went everywhere and got into every crevice of your body. Michelle was keeping as much fat on as she could and that made a lot more places for the sand to go and rub you raw.

  The war had been raging since before the group from American Hero had arrived in Egypt. She’d thought she was going to do good with her power, but so far, she’d only managed to blow shit up. She knew there was more she could do with her bubbles, but when the fighting came—and it did with mind-numbing regularity—her fallback was always making things go boom. And when things went boom, people died.

  Michelle closed her eyes and the memory of the first time she’d killed someone with her power replayed. The bubbles she had released then had risen glistening and iridescent in the sun. They were pretty, looking as delicate as Christmas ornaments and appearing as harmless … right until the moment they hit the Halo helicopter she’d aimed them at. Those beautiful bubbles touched the exterior.

  And they went boom.

  The left side of the copter exploded, sending pieces of half its occupants into the air. She could see through the gaping hole she’d made that the rest of the men were still belted into their seats. She distinctly remembered them wearing desert camouflage. At the time, she hadn’t even known there was such a thing as desert camouflage and for a moment, she thought, Huh, how about that?