Having left about 150 kilometers of tracks in the dust of this crater, and about twice as many in the dust farther south, the droid calculates that at his current pace—with most of his servomotors, actuators, and traducers running simultaneously—he will need to refuel on sugar and alcohol every 225 kilometers. And judging by the position of the sun—it’s holding at about ten degrees above the horizon—he’s certain to be traveling in darkness well before he reaches Purgatory. Meaning the temperature will plummet significantly. A thermostat will of course activate his internal heating systems, but the extremes of hot and cold on the Moon are twice as severe as anything on Earth. And such jarring shifts—a hundred degrees in seconds—can, if not precisely counterbalanced, crack plastic, warp metal, shatter ceramic. They can immobilize robots, blow their circuits. They can make them do strange things.
The droid has fail-safe systems, but he’s not confident they can be trusted in such conditions. So he’s decided that he would be much better off in an LRV. A vehicle like that would get him to Purgatory much faster and more efficiently. He actually spotted one in the distance well before he entered Gagarin Crater, but it was speeding in the opposite direction and he had no idea, at that stage, just how far away his destination would be. Nevertheless he figures he will come across a similar vehicle eventually—there’s sufficient human activity on Farside to make it inevitable—and this time he will not let it get away.
As he advances toward the ringwall he examines its terraced heights. Looking for openings. Looking for the lowest elevation, for the most economical route to get over it. A human being in such a situation would find the process strangely stimulating. But the droid does not find it stimulating at all. To the droid it is merely a calculation designed to get him as quickly as possible to his destination. And the destination, for such a self-motivated achiever, is all that matters.
Find Oz. And be the Wizard.
See El Dorado. Take El Dorado. Find another El Dorado.
The droid cares nothing for happiness. To the droid, expressions of happiness are merely a means of conveying superiority. Or domination. Or revenge. But he has a sizable memory. Most of it has recently been erased, true, but there remain tiny vestiges of past experience buried deep in his logic circuits and his sensorium. And if he were programmed to reflect on these experiences, he might find some of them—living in a city, serving a man, conferring with other droids—curiously satisfying.
But all that’s just a splutter of electrons now. Of much greater relevance are his recent experiences, none more than thirty-six hours old, of ascending various crater rims southeast of Gagarin. It was in performing these little actions, thanks to his inbuilt positive and negative reinforcement algorithms, that he acquired the skill of calculating time/efficiency ratios in lunar climbing to within a few points of error. And what his current survey of the talus slopes in front of him has determined is that the most favorable point has an elevation of approximately 950 meters and will take him approximately half an hour to scale. Considerable, no doubt—greater than anything he has attempted so far—but there’s not much he can do to avoid it. Other than go significantly out of his way—and that would be even more draining on his power reserves. So he negotiates the quickest path through some scree and springs his way diagonally to the first terrace, then to the second terrace, and with only a few slips and slides, unleashing mini-avalanches of slow-moving dust, he reaches the crest of the crater rim in a little over twenty-nine minutes—almost exactly as he calculated.
He stands for a moment at this lofty height, overlooking Gagarin’s enormous ejecta blanket—rocks and sand thrown far and wide by the asteroid impact—and sees many more obstacles ahead. Many more deeply shadowed craters and craterlets. But he will not be daunted. He will not wilt. He will never shy away from a challenge. As always, he has a sacred verse or two to guide him:
The greater the odds, the sweeter the victory.
And:
Losers make hurdles. Winners hurdle them.
Then, just as he is about to set off, he spots something. It’s actually beyond the horizon, at about three and a half kilometers and thirty degrees northwest. A puff of lunar dust rising from the darkness and sparkling in the sunlight. It can’t be naturally levitating, not at this time of day, so there’s human activity down there. A few scientists, perhaps. An expeditionary team.
But to the droid it represents the very opportunity he was counting on. The possibility of finding more fuel—or something even better.
He buttons his jacket, deploys his shit-eating smile, and begins his descent.
10
THERE’S A POPULAR STORY about Fletcher Brass.
It goes back to the days when he was lobbying aggressively for government contracts to mine the Moon’s resources. At the time he was repeatedly met with nothing but red tape and skepticism: Who is this jerk, this entrepreneurial clown? He’s claiming he can land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon? And he might already have done so? The man’s off his nut!
Then one day the Washington bureaucrat in charge of lunar development gets two parcels delivered by courier. The sender’s name is Fletcher Brass. The bureaucrat finishes his paperwork, blows his nose, and opens the first of the parcels. Inside he finds two golf balls mounted in crystal. So he scratches his head and opens the second parcel. And finds the Stars and Stripes, neatly folded in a velvet-lined case. But still he doesn’t know what to make of it all. So he repackages everything and puts it aside, intending to return it to sender, or maybe give it all to one of his kids. Then he gets a phone call.
“Did you get my presents?”
“Who’s speaking, please?”
“It’s Fletcher Brass.” From the calypso music in the background he seems to be calling from somewhere tropical.
“Fletcher Brass.” The bureaucrat suppresses his annoyance. “What can I do for you, Mr. Brass?”
“You can thank me, for a start.”
“Thank you?”
“For those gifts you just received. You can’t say I didn’t put in some effort.”
“Well, we already have enough flags here, thank you.”
“Oh really? Do you have a flag as valuable as that?”
“A flag is a flag.”
Brass kind of chuckles. “And the golf balls?”
“I don’t play golf, sorry.”
“You don’t need to play golf to admire those balls. They might be the most valuable balls in the entire solar system.”
“Yes, well . . .”
“You just think about it,” Brass says. “And call me when you’re ready. But in the meantime, it might be advisable to get some insurance—and quickly.”
So the bureaucrat returns to his paperwork, trying to banish the whole thing from his mind. But then the most ridiculous possibility occurs to him—so ridiculous that he’s able to dismiss it almost immediately. Only it won’t go away, and keeps buzzing around, to the point that he can’t concentrate anymore. So he makes some phone calls, verifies a few things, consults some data—and then, trembling, barely able to speak, he makes a return call to Fletcher Brass.
“How—how did you get them?”
Brass, in the middle of drinking something, chuckles. “I’m not at liberty to disclose that,” he says. “But more importantly, do I get the contract?”
“Yes,” breathes the bureaucrat, “you get the contract.”
Well, that was the story, anyway. When a later expedition found Alan Shepard’s golf balls still in the Sea of Tranquility, exactly where the astronaut had belted them in 1971, Brass was able to claim that he’d simply “deposited them back in the scrub by the fairway, as any ethical golfer would do.” And when a television crew ventured to the Apollo 11 landing site and discovered a Stars and Stripes that was not quite the pristine specimen Brass had supposedly sent in the velvet-lined case—the fabric was discolored by decades of cosmic rays, thermal cycling, and levitating dust—well, he shrugged that off with another semi-plausible explanat
ion: that the flag had been in such lamentable condition when he’d found it that he’d taken the liberty of giving it a “cosmetic cleanup” before sending it on to Washington. And naturally it had “gotten a little dirty again” since he put it back in place.
Justus himself doesn’t give the story much credence. He knows that interesting anecdotes are one of the most corruptible currencies in the world. So Justus has seen the flag-and-golf-ball story, in all its dubious glory, in Brass’s autobiographies Shining Brass and The Brass Age, in the authorized biographies Polished Brass and Gleaming Brass, and even in the billion-dollar biopic Brass—the four-hour feature film shot on Purgatory soundstages and starring, in the title role, the wife-murdering Welsh thespian Lionel Haynes (happy to undergo extensive cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble the man who was offering him refuge).
Needless to say, the anecdote does not appear in the unauthorized biographies—all those muckraking testimonies written by bitter journalists, ex-wives, and disaffected business partners: Balls of Brass, Tarnished Brass, Corroded Brass, and so on. In fact, the disparity between the official and unofficial versions would leave readers struggling to work out how much is real and what is wholesale fabrication.
The authorized versions usually begin with Fletcher Brass, the whiz-kid seventeen-year-old, going public with his very first business venture—carbonated coconut-milk drinks in distinctive brass-colored cans. The unauthorized versions meanwhile claim to prove, with documented evidence, that Brass’s venture capitalist father actually underwrote the whole business as a tax dodge, that its supposed success was wildly exaggerated anyway, and that the original recipes were stolen from a struggling Filipino soft-drink manufacturer (which subsequently sued and settled out of court).
The authorized versions continue by covering Brass’s other early success stories: aquafarms, holo-movies, luxury hotels, ultrasonic jets, extravagantly retro airships, brass-fitted cruise ships. The unauthorized versions focus instead on his unpleasant habit of bootstrapping fledgling companies with poorly paid, geed-up employees, reaping a lot of early publicity with bold statements and dazzling stunts, and then selling off the entire enterprise at a huge profit to some starry-eyed conglomerate—often the same rival company he’d mercilessly ridiculed on the way up.
The authorized versions portray him as a fearless adventurer and thrill seeker who somehow found enough time to also be a champion of various social issues, a major sponsor of environmental campaigns, and a generous contributor to popular charities. The unauthorized versions insist that everything, all those eye-catching stunts and altruistic charity drives, were shamelessly contrived for publicity purposes alone, and were no match for all the rampant price-fixing, insider trading, jury tampering, industrial espionage, and bribery of public officials.
The authorized versions find little space for any of Brass’s romantic interests other than his second wife—the one who died in a boating accident—while the unauthorized versions devote pages and pages to his affairs with bikini models, porn stars, and other men’s wives.
The authorized versions cover “The Brass Code,” his notorious twenty-page list of business ethics and philosophies, by listing only the more socially acceptable entries: If the river bends, think about bending the river; Acknowledge when you’re beaten, and never be beaten again; If you fall into a hole, turn it into a strategy. The unauthorized versions, meanwhile, make great hay of Brass’s secret code, the one shared with only his most trusted, high-ranking deputies: If someone fucks you over, fuck them under; Shareholders are like nuns just begging to be screwed; You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few skulls.
The authorized versions are especially rhapsodic when it comes to Brass’s contributions to lunar development, crediting him with practically everything: the first m-train, the first solar arrays, the first operational mines, the first fiber-optic cables, the first emergency-supply depots, the first reliable ground maps, the first permanent settlements. The unauthorized versions, while grudgingly admitting that his place in lunar history is assured, contend that all these efforts, despite Brass’s convenient amnesia, were underwritten by generous grants, tax breaks, mining rights, and incentive schemes.
The authorized versions claim that Brass was forced to find refuge on Farside owing to an outrageous campaign of vilification generated by rival businessmen with inordinate media influence. The unauthorized versions are more specific, identifying one scandal in particular that brought him down: three tons of spent rods from a nuclear power station, fired into space by one of Brass’s underfinanced waste-disposal companies, fell back to Earth—into the middle of the Amazon basin, no less—leaving thousands of acres of virgin rainforest irradiated, rare species poisoned and mutated, and two thousand natives dead.
The authorized versions end with Fletcher Brass as a triumphant exile, presiding over a unique and vibrant fiefdom; the biopic fades out with him sitting imperiously in a brass throne, wordlessly admiring the great lunar metropolis he’s built from the ground up. The unauthorized versions are content to spend their final chapters covering Purgatory’s lawlessness and corruption, the gang wars, the summary executions, the internecine conflicts, and the sordid rumors of underhanded deals with various terrestrial governments.
Nevertheless, it’s the film’s fade-out—the empire builder, good or bad—that’s the last image of Brass that anyone remembers. It’s certainly the image Brass himself designed to linger. There was a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to kidnap him shortly after the movie’s release—as fabricated as any of his world-record attempts, if the cynics are right—which seemed to justify his withdrawal from the limelight while consolidating his new reputation as a recluse. It isn’t that he’s completely unseen—he still appears at press conferences and public spectacles every now and then, waving Mao-like to the multitudes—but the secrecy proved enough to magnify the myth, to make him even more larger-than-life, and to generate a few more wild conspiracy theories along the way.
Dynamic, heroic, visionary, inspiring, indefatigable, tragically misunderstood, and maliciously envied? Or narcissistic, deluded, irresponsible, grandiose, psychotically greedy, and strangely tragic?
Justus doesn’t know. He read as much about Brass as he could before coming to Purgatory but he doesn’t necessarily believe any of it. So he doesn’t know if Brass is a charming rogue or a borderline psychopath. Nor does he discount the possibility that, in over twenty years of living on the Moon, the man has completely changed—for better or worse.
Justus tries not to be influenced by vested interests. He always makes up his own mind. And that’s what he’s intending to do, right now, as he prepares to meet Fletcher Brass for the first time.
11
JUSTUS HAS CERTAINLY BEEN in the presence of famous people before: singers, movie stars, talk-show hosts, billionaires, mega-chefs, celebrity gangsters. Born performers, most of them. People who can charm and manipulate effortlessly, without even seeming to try. Because they know instinctively how to sell a package, to project an aura, to seem like creatures from some distant planet where people don’t perspire or get pimples.
Fletcher Brass is like that. Presently he’s holding a press conference on the progress of his imminent voyage to Mars. Behind him is a shimmering photomural showing images of the Red Planet, his Purgatorial rocket base, and his huge space vehicle, Prospector II. Owing to the microgravity and lack of atmosphere it’s much cheaper and more efficient to launch spacecraft from the Moon than it is from Earth, and this is a point that he keeps hammering home, either to address queries about the excessive costs or just to rub it in the faces of his terrestrial enemies.
“People ask why private enterprise is doing this, and not some government space agency,” he says smoothly. “And I just remind them of the year 1903. It was in that year that Dr. Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution, was awarded fifty thousand taxpayer dollars—a huge sum at the time—to develop and construct a steam-powered aircraft called t
he aerodrome. Perhaps you’ve never heard of it. Perhaps you’ve never heard of Dr. Langley either. But that’s no reason to be ashamed. You haven’t heard of him for a very good reason—because the aerodrome crashed into the Potomac and broke apart in its test phase. Not once but twice. The whole aircraft—the whole program—was a complete fiasco. And, like so many other government-funded projects, it was quickly and quietly scrapped.”
Brass offers a patronizing little smirk.
“But that’s not why 1903 is so famous. It’s famous because of what happened a few hundred miles farther south, at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. It was there that a couple of self-financed and self-motivated brothers, blissfully free of nosy bureaucrats and government grants, designed and constructed their own experimental aircraft. For under one thousand dollars. And their aircraft, ladies and gentlemen, you probably do remember. And their names you certainly remember. For their aircraft was called the Flyer. And their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.”
Smiles all around. There’s a couple of reporters there—Justus recognizes Nat U. Reilly—and they’re beaming like parents at a school play. But Justus himself is expressionless: He’s read the same speech, more or less word for word, in one of Brass’s autobiographies. And he wonders how the man himself, speaking in a curious mid-Atlantic accent, manages to make it all sound so fresh and sincere.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—Brass is all senatorial now—“it’s once again time for self-motivated and self-financed geniuses to take us where governments fear to tread. It’s time for us to establish permanent human settlements on Mars, just as we did so many years ago on the Moon. It’s time for practical infrastructure—not just probes, not just robots, and not just exploratory journeys. It’s time to do something unequivocal. And let nobody underestimate the huge challenges—or for that matter the huge expenses—ahead of us. But then again I think that I, more than anyone else, have earned the right to quote Machiavelli”—laughter from Reilly and the others—“ ‘Make no small plans, for they have not the power to stir men’s blood.’ ”
The Dark Side Page 6