Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  Michelle took Bastet’s head between her hands and stroked the fur between her eyes. “Look at me,” Michelle said. Bastet jerked her head away. Michelle took it again. “Look at me! I’m not going to be gone long! I promise. I’m just going to take care of what’s going on out there.”

  “You won’t come back,” Bastet said in a small, whispery voice.

  “Really?! Have you seen me?” Michelle would have laughed but inside, she was just as afraid as Bastet. It wasn’t from being hurt. She’d heard about the Righteous Djinn. The thought of him taking her power was terrifying. “I absorb missiles for breakfast!” she said with false cheerfulness. It sounded horrible, but missiles, missiles were easy.

  “You’re going to kill someone again,” Bastet said miserably. “I don’t want you killing anyone. I don’t want to kill anyone any more. Don’t go. Say you won’t go!”

  “I’m sorry,” Michelle replied sadly. “It’s what I do now.”

  Michelle stood with her feet planted wide, bubbles streaming from her hands toward the Caliphate Army. Bastet’s words were with her. You’re going to kill someone.

  No, Michelle thought. I’m going to kill a lot of someones.

  Parts of the Caliphate forces were positioned on either side of the Righteous Djinn. Rusty was to her left and Drummer Boy somewhere off to her right. Simoon had turned herself into a whirling dust devil, her form spinning tighter and tighter. She moved toward the Djinn and her sand began flaying his flesh. He screamed. She spun closer to him until the center of her dervish engulfed his body.

  Michelle heard Kate scream, “NO!”

  But it was too late, the Righteous Djinn had grabbed Simoon, and Michelle watched in horror as he drained her power. She reverted to her human form … and, in one simple move, he ripped her in two.

  Michelle felt as if she’d been punched in the chest. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Drummer Boy was mute for the first time ever, but Rusty kept saying over and over, “He killed her. Cripes, he killed her.” Sobek cursed in a stream of several different languages. Then they just stared, stupidly, at the tragedy before them.

  It was Curveball screaming that snapped them out of it. She was throwing her tiny missiles at the Djinn. Sekhmet jumped at him, her body aflame, fire sizzling all around her. The Djinn brushed Sekhmet aside and she spun through the air, landing heavily. He went for Lohengrin, who managed to avoid being touched by slicing off one of the Djinn’s hands.

  Michelle watched in amazement as the Living Gods began running for the Djinn, led by Sobek. It was madness. They were bound to die. If they possessed any powers, he would suck them dry. Drummer Boy yelled something at her, and Rusty started running toward the Djinn, too.

  A furious scream clawed its way out of her. Then she assumed her pose and began streaming the most destructive bubbles she could think of at the Djinn. Her fat dwindled at an alarming rate. Her bubbles hit him and blew up with as much anger and power as she could put in them. The Djinn continued taking enormous damage from all sides, but nothing seemed to faze him.

  It was Drummer Boy who finally stopped the Djinn. While the Djinn was dealing with everyone else’s attacks, Drummer Boy began pounding on his chest, sending sound waves across the desert that exploded the Djinn’s head like a soprano shattering a wineglass. Brains, bone, and ichor covered the ground and were strewn across both jokers and Caliphate forces. It seemed fitting that in a place where jokers held sway, a joker had saved them.

  But there was no celebration for Michelle. She ran down the embankment toward Simoon’s body. Lohengrin, Drummer Boy, Curveball, and Sobek were already there.

  Simoon’s body lay bloody and rent. Michelle didn’t have much fat at the moment, but she had enough to send a bubble wafting over to encase Simoon’s body. It took barely a thought to lift her. Michelle turned and started back to camp.

  Drummer Boy picked up John Fortune and, with Curveball at his side, dashed past Michelle. Michelle didn’t care. Slowly, the Living Gods began walking beside the bubble carrying Simoon. They surrounded her so no one could see her naked, brutalized body. Simoon was the daughter of Isis and Osiris, and that gave her special meaning to the Living Gods. She was one of them.

  “Who is going to tell her parents?” Michelle asked. Sobek was on her right, his rifle slung across his back.

  “It’s for me to do,” he said, a tear slipping down his cheek. “I know them. It’ll be easier to hear it from me. As if something like this can ever be easy.”

  Michelle hadn’t known Simoon well, but they’d been part of something. Something bigger than themselves. And Simoon had been fearless in fighting for it. Michelle thought about the other lives that had been lost—King Cobalt and Hardhat had died early and the shock of that was still fresh—and the reason why, and a wellspring of sorrow filled her that would never run dry.

  After Michelle turned Simoon’s body over to the Living Gods, she went looking for Bastet. She found her staring at the battlefield where the Righteous Djinn’s enormous body lay. Around him were scores and scores of dead Caliphate soldiers, many of whom Michelle had killed.

  “I’m glad you killed them,” Bastet said. Her voice was icy, her body rigid. This wasn’t the Bastet Michelle knew. “Look at what they’ve done. They will never stop coming for us. We should have killed them all so they will never come back. So their blood will soak into this place as a reminder of who we are and what we will do to them every time they come for us.”

  “But I thought you didn’t want to kill anyone,” Michelle said. “I thought that you were sick of the killing. If they come back, you’ll have to kill more of them.”

  “Good,” Bastet said. Then she turned and walked to camp without a single glance back.

  But Michelle stayed and stared at the carnage.

  She couldn’t look away.

  Within That House Secure

  VIII

  MATHILDE CONSIDERED THEODORUS AND Malachi. She had never developed the habit of taking or keeping photographs when she was younger, and so hadn’t adopted the new fashion of snapping pictures of everything in sight with her phone, even though it was always to hand.

  But to judge by her memory, which was she thought trustworthy, which she was pretty proud of, in fact, neither of the two of them looked appreciably different today than they had ten or even twenty years ago. Could that be true?

  There was Theodorus, resplendent in a white lab jacket, shell burnished and gleaming. The last time he’d agreed to be weighed that Mathilde knew of was when he’d flown to that first meeting of joker leaders at Base One almost ten years ago. Then, he’d weighed about three thousand pounds, which was more or less what he’d told her he weighed after his card turned, at some point during their childhood. When had then been exactly? Why did it make her think of wooden elephants?

  Malachi was now seventy years old, but how could anyone tell? His skin, for all that it was light gray, was smooth. The fringe of hair around the dome of his skull was white, but it had been for as long as she had known him. With his hunched back, he’d never been spry, but he seemed to move as well as ever.

  The wild card took away, it could not be denied. But sometimes it gave, and in the case of these two men, at least, it seemed to have given in the form of longevity and vitality.

  Mathilde herself was now forty years old, and didn’t think she’d been gifted the same way her father and her friend had. She spent more time now than she ever had before in her life actually paying attention to her own body. A little thickness in the middle didn’t bother her—it didn’t seem to bother Oliver, either, or at least he’d never said anything—but even after all these years her one vanity was clothing, and the designers who made her outfits in New York and Paris on semiannual trips hadn’t been shy about pointing out that she was no longer a svelte twentysomething. “Vous avez un petit ventre,” her old friend Lars had admonished her, the last time he’d measured her in his workshop in the Seventh Arrondissement. He’d even poked her in the stomach. It hard
ly seemed fair. But then, what was?

  The hiss of the automated watering system sounded, and suddenly Malachi put the lie to her thoughts about him not being spry. He jumped up from the canvas chair where he’d been reading, whirled to hold his folded newspaper between him and the nutrient-rich water gently misting the foliage he’d been reclining under, and sputtered, “Must this happen every time?”

  His paper, Mathilde thought, was barely damp, but Malachi made a great show of holding it out at arm’s length and flapping it back and forth as if it were sodden. When neither Theodorus nor she offered him any sympathy, he harrumphed and dropped the paper to the greenhouse floor. “Now, would you just throw your newspaper on the floor if we were in someone’s library?” Mathilde chided.

  “I’ve never been in a library where water was sprayed all over me,” Malachi said.

  “You should use one of the tablets,” Theodorus said, lifting up his own wireless data pad. “There’s nothing in that paper that isn’t available on the network. And what’s on the network is more up-to-date. Real-time stock data, Malachi. I still can’t believe you aren’t hooked into a feed of that around the clock.”

  Malachi made an obscure gesture at the tablet. “Connectivity has costs,” he said.

  Mathilde looked at her own tablet. There were, in fact, columns of numbers running down one side of the display, but they didn’t show stock prices. Instead, the numbers, along with other data on the screen, reflected all the information that would have been at her fingertips if she had been sitting in the controller’s chair of a Stormwing launch facility. Actually, it was the data from three Stormwing launch facilities, one each in the Marshall Islands, the Maldives, and along the border of Colombia and Brazil. Eighteen years after she’d run the first manned Stormwing launch from a facility packed with personnel and equipment less than twenty miles from Theodorus’s home, she was running the launch of a trio of much-updated Stormwings simultaneously around the globe from a device the size and shape of a fashion magazine.

  While sitting in a canvas chair carefully positioned clear of any automated misters and keeping an eye out for any of Theodorus’s giant “security snails.”

  “Nevertheless,” Theodorus said—they were still talking about connectivity, apparently—“you’re going to have to get over your technophobia sometime.”

  “Sometime,” said Malachi. “How much longer now?”

  “A few minutes,” said Mathilde. “Everything is running smoothly at all three facilities. The information we’re getting from our satellites and from the Stormwing already in orbit indicate everything is ready to go. The ’wings will be up there in less than an hour, and three hours after that, they’ll launch the packages, and—”

  “And we’ll have well and truly begun the terraforming of the Moon,” Theodorus interrupted. He sounded delighted.

  “Yes, well, so long as everything works the way it’s supposed to,” said Malachi. He was digging in his briefcase for another newspaper. Mathilde wondered if it was a copy of the same one he’d dropped, whether he kept a backup, just in case.

  She understood the impulse. Backups were part of the philosophy of spaceflight, too. Thus three probes bound for the asteroid belt and the icy bodies Theodorus’s contacts in the Chinese space service had located several years before. Not that these three were redundant to one another. They would need a lot more than three ice asteroids before they were done.

  “Everything will be fine. Mathilde’s teams are the best in the world at this kind of work.”

  Mathilde let a rueful grin spread across her face. Her teams were pretty much the only people in the world doing this kind of work. At least they all hoped so.

  “It’s not them and their machines I’m worried about. It’s your contribution,” Malachi said. “The one we haven’t been able to test.”

  “Ah,” said Theodorus, but his enthusiasm was undimmed. “The rocket snails are already at twenty percent of their growth, hitting the projected rate exactly. By the time the probes latch on to the ice asteroids and they come out of dormancy, they’ll be among the largest living things ever born on Earth.”

  “On Earth, maybe,” said Malachi, “but not of Earth, not entirely. Your way of tailoring and growing all these specialized enormous snails is about the damned oddest ace power I’ve ever heard of, even without adding in the Swarm component, and I acknowledge that it’s been a boon for the project. I shudder to think what a purely technological solution to getting the asteroids back here would have cost—”

  “If we could even have engineered such,” said Mathilde.

  “If you could even have engineered such, yes,” Malachi rolled on, “but I wish you’d have come up with some way of running tests instead of simulations.”

  “It will work,” Theodorus said confidently. “The snails will come out of dormancy, convert the probes to the hardware components of their hybrid selves, and then pilot the asteroids back to the Moon. It will be a most impressive sight, I think.”

  Mathilde glanced at her tablet. “Well, whatever misgivings we may still hold, it’s too late now. Launch is in less than one minute.”

  “This is it, friends,” said Theodorus. “When joker historians on the Moon tell the story of our new world, they will say it began on the second day of July in 2008. As time was reckoned on Earth.”

  “‘As time was reckoned on Earth’?” Malachi repeated in a disbelieving tone. “Have you been reading science fiction novels again?”

  “Takeoff!” said Mathilde. Even after all these years, even though she was thousands of miles from the actual events, she still felt the old thrill.

  “Does everything look good?” asked Theodorus. He was holding his tablet up close to his eyes, and she knew that he understood everything on it just as well as she did. Or nearly as well, anyway, a petulant part of her added silently.

  “Green across the board,” she said. Then a dialogue box she’d never seen during an actual launch opened up on the screen. Simultaneously, her phone rang, and a low buzzing sounded from Theodorus’s nearby workstation.

  “What is it?” Malachi asked. He may not have known machines, but he could sense trouble as well as anyone. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the Marshall Islands launch,” Mathilde said, reading rapidly, now cursing the interface she’d been so happy with a few minutes before. She wanted to be doing something with her hands. “There was … something else launched from offshore immediately after the Stormwing. But we checked for naval craft.”

  “Submarine, then,” said Malachi. He walked over, looked over her shoulder. “Probably the same damned Chinese we bought the location of the ice asteroids off of.” He pulled out his telephone—the latest and most sophisticated available, despite how Theodorus had teased him, and went back to his chair. In a moment, he was speaking Mandarin in a low, angry voice.

  “He’s right,” said Theodorus. “That’s a missile launch. Somebody’s trying to shoot the ’wing out of the sky!”

  They were helpless, hopeless. The Stormwing was already accelerating at full thrust and its maneuverability was limited at this point. It would, in fact, soon begin slowing down as it prepared to switch from its atmospheric to its more powerful nuclear engines.

  She called up a simple plot showing two lines racing upward, lines rapidly coming together.

  “Malachi!” Theodorus shouted, panicked.

  Mathilde looked over. Malachi was on the floor, his chair knocked over beside him. One hand clawed at the damp concrete and the other clutched his phone in a white-knuckle grip. His humped back was arched in a painful-looking convulsion, his head bent back so far that she couldn’t see his face from where she stood.

  There were four people on the Marshall Islands Stormwing. She’d known them all for years.

  Malachi was her father.

  She dropped the tablet and shouted, “Tell them to cut the atmospheric engines now! Maybe it’ll overshoot!” She ran to Malachi’s side.

  And as
she went, she slowed to an inexorable crawl.

  People in Witherspoon Security uniforms rushed past her. She couldn’t tell if they were moving at supernatural speed or if the molasses pace she found herself keeping just made it seem that way. Then she saw Throttle, Clifford Bell, Theodorus’s ace head of security, and knew that it was both.

  A pair of guards crouched on either side of Malachi, not touching him but giving every appearance of attending him. Mathilde felt herself returning to normal speed and shot a furious look at Bell. He walked over, hands held apart in a gesture of peace.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Maréchal, but I saw what was happening on the cameras and came at once. Mr. Schwartz has standing orders for this situation and has made it crystal clear that we’re to follow his protocol when he seizes.”

  “When he seizes? Malachi’s not epileptic!”

  “It blew up!” Theodorus interjected. “Even before I could tell them to cut the engines the missile blew up short of them! They’re safe!”

  And then Malachi was shaking off the guards, trying to stand. Too much was happening at once. “What’s going on?” Mathilde shouldered the guards aside and helped Malachi to his feet. “Are you all right? What was that? Why does Cliff know about this and I don’t?”

  Malachi mimed taking a drink of something, and Bell spoke to one of the guards. “Go to the kitchens and get one of the electrolyte drinks Virginia brought.” The woman took off at tremendous speed, obviously still under the influence of Bell’s ace “throttle” power, which allowed him to gift others with super-speed, or, as had just happened to Mathilde, rob them of any speed at all. Mathilde watched her go, wondering through her shock if “Virginia” was Virginia Matusczak, Malachi’s relatively new secretary.

  The guard returned in an instant, and Malachi nodded his thanks. He now held a clear plastic container shaped and sized like a water bottle found in any service station drinks cooler. This bottle, though, was pasted with a pharmacy’s prescription label, and the murky contents clearly weren’t water. Malachi made a feeble attempt at unscrewing the sealed bottle cap, and Mathilde snatched it from him, opened it, and handed it back. “Drink!” she said.