Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

They would be better off without him.

  Tiago hesitated a moment longer, then stuck out a grubby patchwork hand. “I’m in.”

  The silent assistant accompanied Tiago up to his room and helped him to pack his few things while Suzuki paid the hotel bar bill. They walked out the door and right into Suzuki’s waiting car—not a limousine as Tiago had expected, but a BMW sedan, black and powerful and luxurious, with a customized driver’s seat and controls so that Suzuki could drive. Tiago sat in the passenger seat, clutching his backpack to his chest, and watched in silent terror as Suzuki zipped through Rio’s traffic like a football star dodging defenders on his way to the goal. He was beginning to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

  Soon they arrived at the airport, where they drove directly onto the tarmac, parking next to a private jet with Witherspoon’s logo on the tail—there wasn’t even any security or passport control. “The air hosts will take care of your needs from here,” Suzuki said, shaking Tiago’s hand as the assistant carried Tiago’s bags to the plane. “Thank you again for agreeing to join our team. I’m certain you will be very happy with your decision.”

  “I’m glad someone is.”

  Suzuki pulled down the wraparound sunglasses he had donned for the drive, peering at Tiago over their black horizon. “Please give my regards to Mr. Schwartz when you see him,” he said with what Tiago thought was a rather ambiguous expression. The assistant held the passenger door open, giving Tiago a very slight bow, then climbed into the passenger seat after Tiago vacated it.

  “Good luck!” Suzuki called cheerily, then waved and pulled away. The car’s engine had a low growl like some powerful forest cat.

  Tiago swallowed, turned away from the receding BMW, and allowed the air hosts—there were two of them, identical, with bright blue crystalline skin—to escort him aboard the plane. Within minutes they were airborne.

  Even Witherspoon’s money couldn’t make the thousands of kilometers between Rio and the House Secure, Witherspoon’s home and headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina, disappear. But the plane, though smaller than Tiago’s Rio hotel room, was even better appointed; all manner of food and drink was available for the asking, and Tiago’s seat folded out into a quite comfortable bed. He was also kept busy filling out forms, answering questions, and recording reassuring videos for his friends and associates so Witherspoon Holdings could manage his affairs while he was away. By the time they landed in the United States he was certain the air hosts knew more about his finances and other aspects of his personal life than he himself did.

  Tiago stared amazed at the sleek, gigantic aircraft parked on either side as he staggered, exhausted, down the jet’s rickety aluminum stairway. Witherspoon’s private “airstrip” was actually a full-sized airport, where dozens of enormous delta-winged Stormwings were being serviced, little electric Jeeps zipping back and forth towing trains full of five-sided silver cargo modules. All the modules were heavily scarred, obviously veterans of many, many trips. To the Moon? Tiago had no way of knowing.

  Again, there was no passport control. Tiago and his bags were ushered into the house—it appeared from a distance to be an American plantation house like the one in Gone with the Wind, but up close it was more like an office building, seven or eight stories tall and clad in white-enameled metal—and up to a luxurious suite where he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep without even removing his clothes.

  Tiago awoke wearing soft white pajamas. While he had slept, his clothes had been removed, cleaned, and folded, and were now lying on a chair next to the bed. He was both amazed at the level of service and disturbed that it had been performed while he was unconscious. Exactly as he finished dressing, a gentle knock at the door announced the arrival of an attendant wearing an expensive-looking suit-dress that nicely accommodated her enormous, misshapen legs, who escorted him downstairs to a conference room set with round tables and a breakfast buffet. It smelled delicious, and Tiago realized he was ravenous.

  Several more people, all jokers of one sort or another, entered the room as Tiago filled his plate from the buffet. One of the last to arrive was enormous—he had to duck under the doorframe, and barely fit through the double doorway. His skin was hard and gray, resembling rough-hewn rock or rhinoceros hide, and each of his arms was the size of a big man. “You can call me Hardbody!” he boomed, waving one enormous hand—it was bigger than a car tire, with rough gray nails resembling horses’ hooves. Tiago was annoyed by the man’s thoughtless commandeering of the room, stilling every conversation and drawing every eye to himself with his imposing size and the raw power of his voice.

  Hardbody, Tiago noted, required the assistance of two attendants to fill his plate and ate with a special utensil, a small metal shovel. Huge and powerful he might be, but those gigantic hands were not at all suited to fine work.

  After everyone had seated themselves, another elegantly dressed joker—a gray-haired gentleman whose head, torso, and limbs were drastically elongated—stepped to the lectern at the front of the room. Steel-rimmed spectacles perched at the top of his long, horsey face. “I’d like to welcome you all to the House Secure and the Joker Homeland Project,” he said. The projection screen behind him lit up with the Witherspoon logo, which was then replaced with an image of the Moon.

  For two hours he spoke, explaining the history, goals, and status of the project. The current habitation, housing a little under three hundred people, was about half prefabricated modules and half dug under the lunar surface, or “regolith.” The additional space needed by the thousands slated to arrive soon would be mostly underground—it was safer from radiation and micrometeoroids, and much larger spaces could be enclosed without the enormous costs of bringing materials up from Earth. “When I say ‘costs,’” the lecturer clarified, “you must understand that these include costs in energy, fuel, time, and opportunity as well as money … which, even for Mr. Witherspoon, is not unlimited.” The current group of new recruits, of which this roomful was just a small part, had been selected for their particular skills in subsurface excavation and construction, and would be going to the Moon as soon as the rest of the group had assembled—a matter of days, it was hoped.

  At the end of the briefing, one of the attendants—a bullet-headed man with a blubbery shape, but whose movements showed that the blubber was in fact solid muscle—touched his earpiece and came over to Tiago. “I’ve been asked to bring you to Mr. Schwartz,” he said. The stress he placed on the words Mr. Schwartz showed a great deal of respect, and also some surprise at the personal attention Tiago was receiving.

  Mr. Schwartz’s office suite occupied an entire floor at the top of an elevator that required the attendant’s fingerprint. It was a hushed space of thick carpet, wood paneling, and panoramic views over the airfield to one side and piney woods to the other. “Mr. Gonçalves!” said the occupant as he waddled across the carpet toward Tiago, extending a pudgy hand. “Malachi Schwartz. I am so delighted that you have agreed to join our project, and I wished to extend my personal welcome to you.”

  Schwartz was not an attractive man. Shorter than Tiago, he was hunched and round and bald, with gray skin, black lips, and no nose. His arms and legs were short and swollen, and his hand in Tiago’s was lax and spongy. But the nails were neatly manicured, his voice was smooth and reassuring, and his suit was impeccable. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Tiago said. “I understand that you are personally responsible for my presence here?”

  “I am indeed!” Schwartz replied, touching his fingertips together and backing away to inspect Tiago from head to toe. “I have been watching your career closely, young man, and I must say I have been very impressed with what you have been able to accomplish in such a short time.”

  Tiago pulled his gaze back from the depths of the man’s black eyes. “It doesn’t feel like so very much, sir.”

  “The best lack all conviction,” Schwartz pronounced, shaking his head, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The way he said it made it
sound like a quote, though Tiago didn’t recognize the source. “Come, come, dear boy, have some confidence in yourself! Your unique abilities, properly nurtured, could make you a force to be reckoned with!”

  “Thank you, sir.” But by comparison with the spaceplanes, extensive facilities, and tidy gardens visible through the broad windows, the ability to turn himself into a walking trash heap didn’t seem very significant.

  “We spend our days surrounded by things, Mr. Gonçalves, as well as people.” Schwartz touched Tiago’s elbow and looked up into his eyes with deep sincerity. “The man who can bend the inanimate to his will, as you can, has many more allies than most. Do not forget this.”

  “I will try not to, sir.” Though Schwartz’s touch was surely meant to be reassuring, and was not at all sexual, Tiago still found it somewhat disturbing.

  Schwartz released Tiago’s elbow and stepped back. “Thank you for coming to visit me in my luxurious prison.” He gestured at the office. “However, we are both busy men, and I won’t take up any more of your time. But I will be keeping an eye on your progress, and I will be joining you on the Moon in a few weeks. Until then, if there is anything I can do for you, do not hesitate to ask.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Again he shook the flabby hand, and the attendant, who had remained discreetly by the door during their conversation, ushered him to the elevator.

  As he descended to the ground level, Tiago considered what Schwartz had said. He had confidence in Tiago, even if Tiago himself did not, and as the one in charge of this whole impossibly ambitious operation he was obviously smart, influential, and powerful. If Tiago were smart he would not decline this man’s favor; he should, instead, work hard to fulfill his high expectations.

  Tiago may have failed at everything else he had ever attempted, broken everything else he had ever touched. But this time—this time, everything would work out for the best. And he would give every particle of his being to make sure it did.

  The next few days were extremely busy, with training, paperwork, exercise, medical exams, and fittings for space suits. The last of these was an interesting challenge for the engineers, as many jokers required a custom suit to accommodate their unique physique. Hardbody’s rock-hard skin was vacuum-proof, but he received a bubble helmet, cemented to his neck, so he could breathe. Tiago, who had spent much of his life building beautiful and useful things from whatever came to hand, was fascinated by the process, but his own suit, which he received in addition to the giant plastic body that was being fabricated for him on the Moon, was completely off-the-shelf.

  There was not much conversation during this time—they were all exhausted when they were not occupied, and even at mealtimes they were all too busy shoveling food into their mouths for chat—but when they did talk among themselves, Tiago felt himself the odd man out. Everyone else was excited about the project, all looking forward to the challenges that awaited them, all fully committed to building a homeland for jokers. They acknowledged that there was danger, but they were all certain the project’s scientists and engineers had done all they could to reduce it, and even if injury or death might await them they were prepared to take that risk.

  For his part, Tiago was much less sanguine. Although he agreed, in theory, that jokers deserved their own homeland, one designed and built for them and by them and separated from the nats and their mundane concerns, the technical difficulties of the project were daunting and the politics were worrisome. Even if they could manage to build a safe haven on the Moon, and keep it safe, how would the world react when they learned that an independent nation of jokers was literally hanging over their heads? Would there be opposition? Hostility? Even retaliation?

  Tiago’s negative attitude, he told himself, could almost certainly be chalked up to his deprived childhood and traumatic experiences in Kazakhstan. Of course he was reluctant to trust anyone, even a philanthropist like Witherspoon; of course he was worried about backlash from the nats. But with Witherspoon’s money and organizational skills, everything would work out well.

  And so he kept his concerns to himself. But still, during the brief moments between crawling into his luxurious bed and falling asleep, he worried.

  Then came the morning they were all awoken early and herded onto one of the Stormwings for the trip to the Moon. Each of them donned their space suit, settled into the seat, cradle, or rack that had been customized for them, and awaited launch. But the Stormwing launch was not nearly as dramatic as the nuclear-thermal rocket blastoffs Tiago had seen on television and in movies … the giant plane merely taxied down the runway and took off like a passenger jet, albeit faster, rougher, and noisier. But the thrust against Tiago’s back did not stop when they reached cruising altitude, instead going on and on for hours. Soon the blue sky outside the tiny round windows faded to black, and not long after that the ends of safety belts and other small unsecured objects began to float about the cabin. A few people threw up, and attendants came to their aid, but in general everyone remained secured in their places for their voyage, using the facilities for eating and elimination built into their suits. Large as it was on the outside, the spaceplane’s interior was much tighter than any commercial airliner; there wasn’t any spare space for wandering around, especially with everyone in bulky space suits.

  They all dozed on and off or listened to technical information on their headsets until the Stormwing entered lunar orbit. The change was nearly imperceptible to the passengers, except that there was half an hour or so of thrust, following which the craters of the Moon filled the tiny windows every few minutes as the craft rotated in “barbecue mode.” Some hours later there was another period of thrust, this one much shorter. “Deorbit burn complete,” came the announcement in Tiago’s headset.

  Tiago knew from his training that the Stormwing, its great delta wings useless in the Moon’s lack of atmosphere, was now falling toward the lunar surface like a rock. At the very last minute landing rockets would fire, permitting a gentle tail-first touchdown on a concrete pad near the joker habitat. It was something Witherspoon Holdings had done hundreds or thousands of times before, though the public knew nothing of this, but it still seemed risky. “How many of these landings have failed?” Tiago had asked during training.

  “Hardly any,” had been the response.

  “All hands brace for landing burn,” came the voice, entirely too calmly in Tiago’s opinion.

  The rumbling shove against Tiago’s back was more sudden, harsher, and stronger than the gentle push of takeoff, and his heart leapt into his mouth. But it lasted less than a minute, and then faded away, ending with a gentle thump followed by the steady light pressure of lunar gravity.

  “Secure and cross-check all systems for debarkation,” the voice said then, stated less as a command than as a simple statement of fact. Then, with a bit more animation: “Welcome home, jokers.”

  Home, perhaps, but not very homey. The new arrivals were issued coveralls in a rough gray fabric that looked and felt like something made from moon rocks, which is what it was. When those got dirty or wore out, they were to be returned to be recycled into new fabric; water was at a premium. Tiago was also given a tiny cabin, just tall enough to stand, wide enough to dress, and long enough for a bunk, which was set into the wall at the top of a short ladder. Behind the blank wall below Tiago’s bed was the bunk below, in the cabin next door.

  There was quite a variety of cabins, to suit the highly varied needs of a population of jokers, but Tiago didn’t envy those whose quarters were larger; no one had more space than they needed to turn around and lie down. The watchword was “equity” rather than “equality”; the ideal was to accommodate everyone’s unique requirements rather than trying, as the nat world did, to hammer every round, hexagonal, or amoeba-shaped peg into the same square hole.

  Even the administrative personnel, no matter how highly placed, had the same Spartan quarters and bland nutritious diet as everyone else. At least, so they were told; the administrators were housed u
nderground, while the new arrivals’ quarters were located in the prefabricated modules on the surface. These modules were the oldest part of the settlement, their plastic and metal scuffed and worn, and those who lived there were exposed to more radiation and greater danger of decompression than those who lived belowground. But, they were assured, this situation was temporary, and they would be moved below as soon as more space was available. Which was, after all, the reason they were all here.

  After breakfast on his first full day on the Moon—meals were communal and utilitarian, as were the bathrooms, which were segregated by size rather than by sex—Tiago was intercepted by a couple of technicians and taken to receive what he thought of as his “giant robot suit.” Walking in the low lunar gravity didn’t require a lot of effort, but it wasn’t exactly easy … the instincts Tiago had developed in a lifetime on Earth were all wrong now, and he tried to match the technicians’ shuffling gait so as to avoid caroming off the walls and ceiling. At least it didn’t hurt when he fell, which was often.

  The thing that was most surprising to Tiago was that working in lunar gravity wasn’t slow motion, the way it looked on TV … everything moved at the same speed as ever, except for the falling part. It wasn’t like moving underwater, it wasn’t like swimming, it wasn’t like flying, it was just weird and disorienting and a lot harder to get used to than he’d expected.

  The corridor was much broader and higher than Tiago would have expected, given the tightness of his own quarters, but he realized as a walrus-like woman humped into the elevator along with them that this was necessary to accommodate jokers of widely varied sizes who walked, rolled, or slithered in many different ways. The very large elevator also accepted speech commands, and had panels of buttons near the floor and ceiling as well as the usual buttons at Tiago’s chest level.

  Five levels down they found a large, chill workroom crowded with tools and equipment. Lying on a table under bright work lights were the pieces of Tiago’s giant robot suit. “It’s huge,” he said.