Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “It’s actually smaller than your typical junk body,” said one of the techs with a small self-satisfied smile. Her name tag read SUMA and she had dark brown skin, wavy black hair, and five soulful brown eyes. “You’ve just never seen yourself from outside before.”

  Every piece of the suit, Suma explained as she snapped the two halves of the suit’s lower torso around his body, had been computer-designed and 3D-printed to fit his body exactly. This was standard procedure for joker space suits, but the fabrication of Tiago’s suit had been both more difficult, because it had to be skintight, and easier, because many of the joints and fittings that were the most finicky parts of the suits could be left loose, leaving the details up to Tiago’s power.

  Tiago slipped his hand into the suit’s giant arm. His own arm reached only as far as the suit’s elbow; beyond that was solid plastic, with ball-and-socket joints at the elbow, wrist, and fingers like a larger-than-life-sized artist’s model. As soon as the plastic touched his skin it became a part of him, and he raised and flexed the hand. The joints squeaked a little, but he’d never felt anything so smooth and clean. “This is amazing.” He tapped each fingertip rapidly against his thumb tip. “I could play the piano with this!”

  “We don’t have a piano that big.” Suma fastened the seal where the arm met the torso.

  “That’s okay, I don’t know how to play anyway.”

  The other arm and the legs were the same, but the head and upper torso proved a little more problematic. “It seems … claustrophobic,” he said, peering dubiously into the black padded opening. Once he had donned it, his head would be completely surrounded and he wouldn’t be able to move it at all.

  “Isn’t this what you are used to?” Suma was looking up at him now. With the legs on, his head nearly touched the workroom’s high ceiling.

  “Sort of. It’s different when I do it.” He usually started by pulling small bits of material onto his head, he realized, covering his face with leaves or scraps of paper before adding larger pieces. It took only a few seconds, but doing it all at once like this seemed weird and frightening.

  “Well … close your eyes, hold your breath, and just do it. I’ll be here if you run into trouble.”

  “Okay…” He gripped the suit’s upper torso unit with his giant plastic fingers, closed his eyes, held his breath, and jammed it onto his head. For a scary, disorienting moment he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe … and then his senses extended into the head, his plastic eyes opened, and he felt the antennae on the back of his head scraping the ceiling. The suit’s air smelled like metal and fresh plastic. “That wasn’t too bad,” he said with relief. Unlike his usual trash body, the suit had no mouth; instead, the voice of his flesh-and-blood mouth was relayed to a speaker in the chest. In vacuum it would be transmitted by radio to his coworkers.

  “That’s great,” said Suma, and he heard the sound both with the suit’s plastic ears and through a headset built into the upper torso unit. “Try moving around.”

  There were a few hiccups—some joints had to be adjusted, and Tiago found the suit’s radio, air supply, and other technicalities less than intuitive—but after a couple of hours Suma pronounced Tiago good to go. “Okay, just one more thing. Feel this.” She picked a half-meter length of I beam off a shelf and tossed it to him.

  Still unused to the lunar gravity, he fumbled the thing several times before managing to grab hold of it. It was very light—some kind of plastic rather than metal—but as it touched his plastic hands it felt very strange. His sense of touch extended through it, as it did with most plastics, but the feeling was odd and tingly. “This feels weird,” he said. “What kind of plastic is it?”

  “We call it regolene,” she said. “It’s not technically a plastic, but a rigidized polysiloxane … its chemical backbone is based on silicon, rather than carbon as in true plastics. There aren’t any hydrocarbons on the Moon, but we’ve figured out how to make a strong, flexible structural material from local resources. Most of the base is made out of it. Now the question is whether its chemical structure is similar enough to ordinary plastics for your powers to work on it.” She tapped the I beam’s end. “Can you feel that?”

  He could, but it felt more like a spark of static electricity than the tap of a fingertip. “Sort of.”

  “Hmm. Come over here.” She walked him over to where another beam, this one about two meters long, was clamped in a device that seemed designed to test its tensile strength. “Touch this. Can you feel the strain it’s under?”

  Cautiously he laid a giant plastic hand on the beam. “I can,” he said. “It kind of … aches.”

  “Now try this.” Suma pressed a button; an electric motor whirred and the beam flexed.

  “Ai!” Tiago cried, jerking his hand away. The feeling had been as though someone very strong were trying to bend his arm bone in the middle.

  Suma frowned. “That was only three pascals of pressure.” She tapped her chin. “Still, at least we know you can do the job. We’ll … we’ll figure out how to make it more comfortable for you.” She didn’t seem entirely convinced. “In the meantime, you’re good to go. Report to air lock seven at 0800 tomorrow.”

  The next morning Tiago reported to air lock seven, where he found a work crew of jokers, all of them ready to do heavy construction work in vacuum. In addition to Tiago and Hardbody—who scratched himself disgustingly, sending hard gray flakes of skin drifting to the floor as the suit techs glued his helmet to his neck—there was a crab-like individual one meter high and three wide who didn’t need to breathe at all, a metal woman resembling a shipyard crane whose oxygen needs were provided by a small tank welded to the small of her back, and a burly misshapen dwarf whose telekinetic powers held an envelope of air near his body as well as giving him enormous strength. In this group Tiago was keenly aware that, although his parti-colored skin alienated him from society, his shape, size, and physical abilities were entirely within the norm—by comparison with his coworkers he was practically a nat. But once he had donned his suit he fit right in, and furthermore the air lock and other fittings were all oversized and designed to accommodate a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and abilities, so he didn’t have to watch his back and his feet all the time the way he usually did. For perhaps the first time in his life he did feel truly at home.

  “I’d like to welcome two new diggers to the team,” said the crab, whose name was Mike, gesturing with a claw to Tiago and Hardbody. His voice came from a small box glued to the shell behind his eyes. He sounded like the digital assistant on the smartphone Tiago had had back in Brazil.

  “It’ll be good to have you on-board,” said the dwarf. He had introduced himself as Beauregard but everyone called him Bo. “We’ve been understaffed ever since we lost Margot.”

  “What happened to Margot?” Tiago asked.

  “Ceiling cave-in,” said Mike, his eyestalks bending downward. “But sacrifices have to be made.”

  Tiago kept his opinions on that to himself.

  Once they had all been briefed on the day’s work and their suits, or equivalent, double-checked, the techs left the air lock and the large inner door swung closed with a definitive bang. Air pumps immediately began chugging away, and Tiago felt his ears pop as the pressure dropped. His plastic suit, too, felt the change, which came to him as a strange tightness in the skin. Tiago’s heart thudded—he trusted the techs, but no one had ever actually worn this particular suit in vacuum before and he knew that nothing mechanical worked 100 percent right the first time you used it—but though various parts creaked alarmingly as the suit settled into the lunar environment, all the seals held, and soon Tiago found himself standing in the dead silence of vacuum. “Radio check,” said Mike, his voice now sounding directly in Tiago’s ears, as did everyone else’s. “All right, let’s go.”

  The crane woman undogged the outer door and swung it open—Tiago felt the metallic screech of its hinges in his feet rather than hearing it with his ears—and they all trudged o
ut in silence. The construction zone immediately outside the air lock resembled the corridor just inside it, with workers spraying new plastic onto the walls just beyond that, but as they shuffled and bounced along the tunnel it rapidly changed character from “construction site” to “hard rock mine.” Half an hour’s walk brought them to a place where the walls were of rough broken rock, the lights were few and harsh, and thick dust lay everywhere. Space-suited jokers with grinding machines worked to smooth the walls, spewing chips everywhere in eerie silence. The air, strangely, was completely free of dust … and after a moment’s thought Tiago realized it was also completely free of air.

  At Mike’s direction the team distributed themselves along the tunnel face, each working to extend the tunnel according to their particular abilities. The diggers had a few machines to help with the work—automated forklifts to do some of the heaviest lifting, and miniature self-driving dump trucks to haul rubble away—but they were only supplemental. Mike explained that they had tried robots, but they broke down frequently and were not very good at adapting to the constantly changing circumstances. Despite the expense of keeping human beings alive, jokers were better suited to this work than robots.

  Hardbody was clearly in his element, smashing the wall with his enormous fists and clawing the broken rock down and away with his shovel-sized fingernails. His great strength and size were complemented by an ace ability: anything he destroyed with his hands crumbled away to nothing, leaving almost no rubble to be hauled off. It was, Tiago reflected, a formidable and yet rather depressing ability—a power useful only for destruction, not creation, but one in which Hardbody clearly took considerable pleasure. It was good that the joker homeland had found a way to use this power for productive ends.

  Tiago’s role was to clear away rubble, shift equipment as needed, and shore up the ceiling and walls as his colleagues extended the tunnel. For the latter task he was provided with beams and girders formed of tough gray regolene, which he could feel fitting into place as he jammed them into position with his plastic fingers. Here, too, he realized, the homeland’s administrators had found a way to use everyone’s particular abilities to benefit all jokerkind, and though the stresses and strains he felt in the plastic were actually quite painful, he tried to take pleasure in being uniquely useful.

  After two hours of this Tiago was tired and aching. After four hours he was more than ready for a break—which came at five hours, but proved to be extremely brief, little more than a momentary lie-down on the hard, rubble-strewn floor and a drink of glucose and electrolytes from a tube near his mouth. Six, eight, nine hours … Tiago kept working diligently, egged on by his comrades’ tireless efforts and constant radio encouragement from Mike, who was also working as hard as anyone. Finally, at 1800, after ten hours of continuous grueling labor, Mike told them to knock off … which meant another forty-five minutes of cleanup and inspection to be sure nothing would collapse overnight and they’d be ready to go in the morning.

  Half-dead from exhaustion, Tiago dragged himself to the commissary and wolfed down a tasteless meal before collapsing onto his hard little bed.

  And then the alarm rang and he had to get up and do it again.

  Within That House Secure

  IX

  WHEN SHE WAS FORTY-FIVE years old, Mathilde Maréchal became somewhere around the 150th person to step foot on the Moon. Records of early attempts—the two landings of Cash Mitchell’s Quicksilver, the failed Russian attempt—were sketchy, at least compared to Witherspoon Aerospace personnel assignment files. If she wanted, she could call up the numbers and determine exactly how many of Theodorus’s employees had been up here before her, though she knew off the top of her head that there were about seventy on-site with her right now.

  She didn’t bother checking. She was busy. She was gloriously busy.

  The pump she was working on, its protective cladding folded back, was proving recalcitrant. She hadn’t yet been able to chase down the source of the blockage that had caused it to freeze up; she didn’t have one of the tools she needed, because, she now saw, the subcontractor who had manufactured the stubborn device hadn’t followed specifications in the type of closures that held its main body together; and, advanced and supple as the gloves of her suit were, she was still having trouble with fine manipulations. She’d never been happier.

  “Mathilde, are you finishing up out there?” The speakers built into her helmet were among the most advanced ever manufactured. It sounded like Oliver was standing right next to her. Early on, before people had complained about it sounding like callers were literally inside their ears, the fidelity had been even higher.

  “Not really,” she replied cheerfully. “Say, you wouldn’t want to run some hex key wrenches out here, would you?” She knew he’d say no. Oliver had agreed to come on this deployment because, he said, they never got to spend any time together on Earth, but he claimed he didn’t like the fit of the suit that had been specially built for him. Mathilde suspected he was a bit agoraphobic, uncomfortable under the starlit dome of the sky. He’d spent most of the time these first two weeks helping the teams running atmosphere to the new sublunar excavations that were being dug at a steady rate.

  “I think you might need to button that pump up and come on in,” Oliver said. “I’ve got something here I think you need to take a look at.”

  All these years later, and he was still couching his phrases. I think. I think. Of course, she was quite a bit higher up the corporate ladder than he was, though they had long since taken steps to ensure she would never be in a direct supervisory role over him.

  Not that that many people reported to her. It had taken quite a bit of negotiation and even a bit of intrigue to ensure that she still spent most of her time doing what she thought of as real work instead of “managing.” Theodorus and Malachi had, for once, been on opposite sides of that particular contretemps, and eventually Malachi threw up his hands, saying he had taught them both too well.

  “Will I get to use a hex key wrench on whatever you want me to look at?” she asked.

  “If you can find one big enough,” Oliver replied.

  Mathilde sighed. She stared down at the pump for a moment. Then, careful to balance herself in the still-unfamiliar light gravity, she gave it a kick. Her entire body rebounded, and she arced a few feet backward to land inelegantly on her backside. A tone sounded from the diagnostic program running on her wrist computer. The pump had unjammed.

  If only all my problems could be solved that way, she thought.

  Oliver was in the office suite somewhat grandiosely labeled COLONY CONTROL on the base schematics. It was in one of the first bunkers dug out by the teleoperated heavy tractors that Witherspoon Aerospace had been covertly delivering to Crater Mandel’shtam for almost three years. Which meant that the ceiling felt a little low. For all that the specifications for the bunkers had been planned out down to the micron and for all that the smart systems that directed most of the digging were among the most advanced in the world, it had taken actual people inhabiting the bunkers, working in them, living in them, to get a real feel for what was going to be needed up here in terms of physical space.

  Crater Mandel’shtam wasn’t that easy a place to define, consisting as it did of many overlapping and interpenetrating craters. But the overall area, the notional near-circle labeled on lunar maps with that name, was nearly two hundred kilometers in diameter, located 5.4 degrees north of the lunar equator on the Moon’s far side.

  As she stepped out of the shadow of the equipment node that housed the pump, Mathilde’s visor polarized against the battering sunlight. She reminded herself to pull a still frame from her suit’s video feed later to send down to Malachi, the latest salvo in her doomed battle to convince him to stop referring to the hidden base’s location as being on “the dark side.”

  If she did, though, he would just send her an audio file of that damned album again.

  “Are you humming ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ to yourself
?” asked Oliver as she walked into the office an hour later.

  “I really have no idea,” Mathilde said. “It’s just some prog rock thing Malachi keeps sending me.”

  “I will now refrain from talking about the difference between psychedelic rock and prog rock,” said Oliver, “in favor of expressing my amazement that Malachi listens to either.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t,” said Mathilde. “He just knows I won’t read any more poems about the Moon if he sends me those.”

  “Fair enough. That particular track is a little … lyrically underdeveloped for Malachi anyway.”

  Mathilde thought about what she’d been humming. “Oh! It’s the one that’s just screeching all the way through.”

  Oliver was yet another joker man in Mathilde’s life who seemed ageless. Except for what she personally thought was a rather rakish white stripe in the thick fur running from his right eyebrow back over his flat head, he’d hardly changed at all since they started working together, back at the beginning of the company.

  “And this is where I refrain from saying something about you being your father’s daughter and apples not falling far from trees. ‘Screeching’ is hardly fair. In fact—” He broke off and looked at her, then chuckled. “Okay, yes, it’s that one. Nice title though, you have to admit.”

  He was seated at a work console, so for once she had a couple of inches on him. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head, breathed in his scent. “I so admit,” she said. “Now, why did you call me in?”

  “I’ve been running some numbers,” he said, turning back to the console, waving her to a chair beside him.

  “‘Running Some Numbers,’ the Oliver Taylor story,” she said, but she looked at the screens he was pulling up. “What is that, a statistical forecast of some kind? Come on, babe, run some engineering numbers!”