“Well, that makes sense.”
“It does make sense, sir. Do you live here permanently?”
“I do.”
“All alone?”
“That’s right.”
“Then how do you contribute to the bottom line?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘bottom line.’ ”
“Are you an asset or a liability?”
“I would certainly classify myself as an asset.”
“To the economy?”
“To the world.”
The droid takes a while to process this answer. Eventually he says, “Then do you have anything else to offer me, sir, other than this fine coffee?”
“Anything like what?”
“Anything at all.” Still staring.
For a moment Dijkstra entertains the thrilling possibility that the droid has been sent by admirers; that he has been assigned the task of retrieving his manifesto and smuggling it back to Earth.
“Well, that depends. Do you know who I am?”
“I do not, sir.”
“The people who sent you, do they know who I am?”
“I have been sent by no people, sir.”
“You have no task to perform here?”
“I only want directions, sir.”
“Then you’re not here to take my writings?”
“Only if your writings can help me find El Dorado, sir.”
There’s no easy answer to that, Dijkstra thinks. But he has to accept that his dream, brief as it was, has no substance. And suddenly he feels mildly deflated. He wanted the droid to offer him something—some form of hope.
“Can I get you another cup?” Dijkstra asks—the droid is finishing his coffee.
“That is very generous of you, sir. But I must be on my way. Move. Move. While others sleep, move.” He gets to his feet.
“Perhaps I can offer you some sugar cubes, then? For your journey?”
“You are again very generous, sir. I will gratefully accept that offer.”
Dijkstra goes to his pantry, wondering why he is being so solicitous. His stores of sugar are rather low and fresh supplies sometimes take weeks to reach him. And yet here he is offering no-cost welfare, against all his principles. It’s almost as if he’s been manipulated. Or weakened, somehow.
When he comes back he finds the droid holding out his hand, still smiling. And when he hands over the sugar cubes he notices for the first time a dark red stain on the droid’s shirt cuff.
“Oh,” he says impulsively, “is that—What’s that? Is it blood?”
“It is not blood, sir.”
“It looks like blood.”
“It is not blood, sir.” The droid lowers his arm, so the cuff is no longer visible. “But that is of no concern to you, sir. You have been helpful to me. You have supplied me with coffee and sugar. You have not even charged for this supply. So you do not qualify as vermin.”
“Well,” says Dijkstra, chuckling evasively, “we all breathe the same air.”
The droid leans in close—so close that Dijkstra can smell the coffee on his breath. “Can you say that again, sir?”
“I said, we all breathe the same air.”
Dijkstra has not spoken sarcastically or mockingly. The expression has simply become a common saying on the Moon—both a half-ironic gesture of fraternity and an acknowledgment of the Moon’s most valuable commodity.
But the droid seems to read into it something much more meaningful.
“You say we breathe the same air, sir?”
“That’s right.”
“So we are rivals after all, are we, sir?”
“Rivals?”
“For air?”
Dijkstra almost laughs: The droid sounds offended—or eager to be offended. So he just says, “Well, I guess we’re all rivals in the end, aren’t we? Competition makes the world go ’round.”
And the droid, who’s about the same height as Dijkstra, continues to stare at him with his intensely black eyes—Dijkstra has never seen more soulless eyes. And Dijkstra, murderer of sixty-two people, is chilled. Because he conceives of a whole new scenario: that the droid has been sent by his enemies, all those miserable soft cocks and fashion victims on Earth, to prevent his message from getting out. To censor him somehow.
Then the droid blinks.
“Thank you, sir.” He thrusts out his hand again. “You are a worthy gentleman.” And they shake on it.
Dijkstra feels unusually relieved. “Well,” he says, “good luck on your journey.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I certainly hope you find El Dorado.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I hope you become a conquistador.”
“I intend to, sir.”
“Then I’ll open the airlock and let you out.”
“And I will be standing here, sir.”
Dijkstra goes toward his control panel, experiencing a sudden flush of anticipation. Minutes ago he wanted to prolong his guest’s visit; now he’s just looking forward to being alone. But first he has to open the airlock. Which means he has to turn his back.
Which means that it’s only out of the corner of his eye that he registers movement—the droid picking something up. A wrench that’s been left on the workbench.
Dijkstra wheels around defensively, but it’s already too late. The droid, no longer smiling, is swooping down on him.
Dijkstra tries to raise his hands, but the wrench comes crashing down on his head. Crack. Crack. The droid is relentless. Crack. Dijkstra sees his own blood in his eyes. Crack. He falls to the floor. Crack. Crack. The droid is smashing his head in.
Crack. Crack.
“It’s good to have a rival,” the droid hisses, splattered with Kleef Dijkstra’s blood. “It’s even better to crack his skull.”
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
03
IF YOU’RE AN AVERAGE tourist, then the Moon is very likely a once-in-a-lifetime destination. You’ll take a shuttle from Florida, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, French Guiana, Tanegashima in Japan, or the converted oil rig on the Malabar Coast. You’ll probably be tempted to spend a few days at the StarLight Casino in low-Earth orbit: The Carousel Room, you’ll be happy to hear, is every bit as spectacular as its reputation. From there you’ll take the ferry to one of the Moon’s major ports, most likely Doppelmayer Base in the Sea of Moisture or Lyall Base in the Sea of Tranquility. You’ll check into one of the hotels: the Copernicus, the Hilton, the HoneyMoon, the Interstellar, or the Overview. You’ll spend a few days adjusting and/or recovering. Then you’ll probably go on a little tour of the local attractions: the amusement parks, the observation towers, the sporting stadia, the famous ballet theater. You’ll certainly make a tour of the Apollo landing sites, the domed-over Apollo 11 site in particular. If you’re really ambitious, you might even make a jaunt to the South Pole to admire the jawdropping Shackleton Crater, four times as deep as the Grand Canyon.
If, on the other hand, you’ve come to the Moon for cut-rate or illegal surgery, for contraband drugs, for illicit sex, for death sports, for high-stakes gambling, or simply to conduct an unmonitored conversation, your destination will certainly be Purgatory and its capital city of Sin, on Farside.
To get there, you’ll board the magnetically levitated m-train, or monorail, which in theory can reach its destination in just five hours, approaching speeds of a thousand kilometers per hour. In reality the train will spend half an hour just being tested and pressurized and shunted through a series of airlocks, and then a further two hours curling around the various factories, museums, communication centers, and radio towers that pepper the region between Doppelmayer Base and the lunar Carpathians. But once the track is straight and the land is clear, the train will start streaking at jet-liner speeds over the undulating grey/tan/beige terrain.
Looking through the heavily tinted windows you’ll see quarries out there, and robotic excavators, and conveyor belts disappearing into fla
shing metallurgies. You’ll see solar-panel arrays, flywheel farms, and microelectronics factories mounted on platforms. Not to mention trolleys and tractors and trenchers and scrapers and multilegged vehicles: all the vehicular accoutrements of grand-scale resource exploitation. You’ll whisk over the viaduct of the sun-synchronous harvest train, ten klicks in length, which crawls around the lunar equator laden with fruits and vegetables. You might even see a freight train flashing past in the opposite direction, so fast that it will appear as a brief streak of light. Then you’ll settle back as the m-train soars across the Sea of Showers, cruises across Plato Crater, dissects the narrow Sea of Cold, and enters the northern uplands, where the dust is brighter, the terrain more mountainous, and the shadows long and eerie.
Finally you’ll spot fields of radio masts and power towers on the horizon, and cranes and warehouses and shunting yards and a garbage heap of discarded machinery and drill bits. This, clearly, is a mining town. But it’s also the end of the line. It’s Peary Base at the North Pole—beyond which “there is only darkness.”
You’ll spend as little time here as possible: The whole place has all the charm of a low-rent shopping mall. There’s a second-rate observation tower. A mass driver or rail gun, a kilometer-long stretch of curving electromagnetic rail that dispatches and receives payloads to and from Earth. And all the cranes, crawlers, and deep-drilling towers of the ice-mining industry. But not much else. So you’ll check into one of the utilitarian, low-ceilinged hotels, ascend to a closet-sized room (pressurizing an entire hotel with oxygen and nitrogen is expensive), and collapse onto a bed that’s about as big as a submarine bunk.
On the bedside table—if there is one—you’ll probably find a ten-page brochure, a traveler’s advisory warning you all about Purgatory. If you’re game, or just seeking amusement, you’ll give it a glance. “Extremely dangerous . . . exercise caution . . . restrictions on communication . . . eccentric local laws brutally enforced . . . death penalty imposed . . . high rate of sexually transmitted diseases . . . uncertified medical establishments . . . controversial procedures . . . hostile locals . . . visa and other entry and exit procedures change indiscriminately . . . tourists lured, targeted, and frequently killed.”
If that doesn’t give you second thoughts—and if you’ve made it this far, why would it?—you’ll continue your journey by heading down to the Peary Transport Terminus. But don’t expect to be traveling by m-train anymore: To preserve the integrity of its radar readings, no electromagnetic propulsion systems—or radio waves, cell-phone networks, or satellite technologies—are permitted on Farside. So you’ll be forced to choose among a hydro-powered coach, a minibus, or a cab, or, if you’re really wealthy, a chauffeured limousine. Then your vehicle, whatever it is, will steer around a few bends, into the lattice-shadow of the mass driver, through a gap in an escarpment of piled refuse—a sort of unofficial exit gate—and onto a hard-packed road of sintered regolith that’s rolled out like a ribbon across the pockmarked lunar terrain.
This is the Road of Lamentation, the official highway to Purgatory.
The regolith has been piled high by the side of the road as a sort of retaining wall, so at first there won’t be much to look at: an occasional crater rim or lunar mountain, the stanchion-mounted, color-coded pipelines of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and the crystal-clear cosmos itself if it’s nighttime and your vehicle’s shields are down. On the road itself there are regular solar-flare shelters, supply caches, emergency parking bays, and a couple of specialized sidings where tourists can turn in for a last glimpse of Earth. But for the most part the journey is numbingly monotonous—like traveling down a desert highway at midnight—except perhaps when there’s a crest in the road and the unballasted vehicles leave the surface and soar through the air for a few giddy seconds.
Past the seventy-fifth parallel, however, the Lamentation starts winding like a river, skirting the larger craters, and the camber of the road allows you to see more of the lunar landscape: notably more rugged and hummocky than most of Nearside. But even this becomes tedious after a while, and just when you start wondering if the journey is ever going to end—and just when your eyelids begin fluttering—you’ll be startled awake by the sight of a huge object at the side of the road, towering at least thirty meters over the traffic.
It’s a statue, spray-painted in glossy white, garishly illuminated at night with halogen spotlights, and looking like a winged angel standing on the bow of a boat.
It’s the Celestial Pilot, the one who carries lost souls to Purgatory. And it’s not the last statue you’ll see in this final stage. Just a kilometer farther on there’s a giant eagle, the one that transported Virgil in his dream. Then a colossal warrior—Bertran de Born—holding his own severed head like a lantern. Then a Roman emperor—Trajan—on a caparisoned horse. And finally a naked woman—Arachne—with eight spiderlike limbs. It’s a gallery of characters from Dante Alighieri and Gustave Doré, all designed to give extra mythological resonance to your destination.
Then the Lamentation will descend, and the lines of cabs, coaches, transports, and haulers will merge into a bottleneck at least half a kilometer long. And somewhere in the middle of this you’ll catch your first glimpse of Störmer Crater, the massive ramparts of the natural ringwall, illuminated by flickering electric lamps. And the entrance itself—ornate brass doors flanked by giant pillars twenty meters high and thickly decorated with faux-Renaissance bas-reliefs. And before you know it you’ll be passing through. The gates will be closing behind you. And finally you’ll be inside, shunted through a series of airlocks into the terminus. And the coach driver, or your chauffeur, or your guide, or an android, or an automated recording in a multitude of languages, will have a sobering message for you.
“Welcome to Purgatory.”
04
LIEUTENANT DAMIEN JUSTUS IS being interviewed in his office by a reporter from the Tablet, Purgatory’s only official news outlet. The reporter, who sports the improbable name of Nat U. Reilly, is wearing a crumpled hat and a threadbare jacket with elbow patches. He’s chewing gum and taking notes on a tiny scribble pad with a pencil. But at least he has the good grace to be self-conscious.
“It’s the way we do things here in Purgatory,” he says. “Retro-style.”
“So I’ve seen.”
“We still roll the presses at the Tablet, you know that?”
“I’m no longer surprised,” says Justus.
Even the office that’s been assigned to him is like something from the 1950s: a groaning wooden desk, a filing cabinet with squeaky drawers, a Bakelite rotary-dial telephone, and on the wall a black-and-white photo of Fletcher Brass like an official portrait of Eisenhower. The police uniforms themselves—all midnight-blue wool, brass buttons, and peaked saucer caps—belong in a Dick Tracy cartoon. Justus expected as much in the tourist precincts, as part of the prevailing show business, but not behind the scenes as well.
“Anyway,” Reilly goes on, “you say your name is pronounced—how, again?”
“Like ‘Eustace.’ ”
“Sure you don’t wanna go with ‘Justice’?”
“I’m sure.”
“We like a good pun in our business.”
“And a bad one, it seems.”
Nat U. Reilly smirks and makes a note. “Justus it is, then. That’s Swedish, isn’t it?”
“It can be. Are you sure your readers will be interested in this, Mr. Reilly?”
“They’ll be interested in everything about you, Lieutenant. Why? Not in a hurry, are you?”
“I’ve had some bad experiences with the press before, that’s all.”
“We’re different up here.”
“I’m pleased to hear it.” In truth, Justus knows that Reilly is very likely a criminal, a fugitive from terrestrial justice, like most permanent residents of Purgatory.
“You’re from Arizona, that right?”
“From Nevada,” Justus says. “But I spent the last ten years in Arizona, that’
s true.”
“So you’re used to arid places.”
“Nothing as arid as the Moon.”
“And you’re used to casino towns.”
“If you mean Vegas and Reno, I spent some time in both; that’s also true. I was in Homicide then.”
“And more lately you’ve been in Narcotics.”
“I was in charge of a squad operating out of Phoenix, yes.”
“You ruffled a few feathers, is what I hear.”
“You hear correctly.”
“You arrested the wrong man.”
“I arrested the right man.”
“But I mean, you arrested a man with the wrong connections.”
“If you asked him, I’m sure he’d say he had the right connections.”
Reilly snorts. “But you don’t take shit from anyone, do you, Lieutenant? Not even a drug baron with his hand deep up the ass of the local legislature.”
“You put that very well.”
“You left not because you were corrupt, but because the system was.”
“You put that very well too.” To Justus it sounds as though Reilly has already written the article.
“You were told—in no uncertain terms—to get off Earth, is that right?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, if that was all there was to it—a threat to me—I wouldn’t have left.”
“They threatened people close to you, yeah? Your wife and daughter?”
“That’s as much as I want to say about that subject, Mr. Reilly.”
“But you knew—from experience—that they didn’t mess around, right?”
“I said, that’s as much as I want to say about that, Mr. Reilly.”
The reporter seems to stop himself from asking one very obvious question and moves on. “So you decided to come to Purgatory?”
“Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. I was offered a position here.”
“By QT Brass.”
“By the Department of Law Enforcement.”
“Which is controlled by QT Brass.”
“I know nothing about that.”
The Dark Side Page 2