by Allen Steele
Almost self-consciously, Mister Chicago walked back to the stool he had vacated. “Cerebral damage was a risk I accepted when I purchased you,” he went, “but don’t fool yourself by thinking for a moment that I did this out of charity. To me, you’re an investment. You, Kirkland, your friend Yeats, all the others…you’re damaged goods. Even then you’re lucky, because most of the sleepers suffered neural damage so severe that, had I bothered to revive them, they would have been little more than vegetables. Even with you, one of the fortunate survivors, your talents and skills have been erased. Even if they weren’t, nothing that you once possessed, even if you remembered it, could possibly be of any practical use to me now.”
“Then why…” McLafferty stopped, then went on. “Why have you…?”
“Why did I purchase a collection of decapitated heads from a bankrupt company and have them reanimated in cloned bodies?” Mister Chicago shrugged. “Because I can afford to do so, just like I can buy a minor asteroid with a peculiar name…I don’t suppose you know what it means, do you? no?…and have it transformed into my private domain. Because it amuses me to have a space engineer mopping my floors, a poet stirring my soup, a once-wealthy financier tending my garden. Robots could do the same thing…”
He nodded toward the autodoc. “But everyone has ’bots. They’re cheap, inexpensive, always do as they’re told…but they have no history behind them. But you, on the other hand…you’re history in itself.”
“We make great pets,” McLafferty murmured.
“You…” Mister Chicago’s voice took a strident edge; he took a breath, calming himself down. “A century ago,” he said with great patience, “the people of your time did their best to ruin the only planet they lived on. You damned near succeeded, too. A few of you tried to find a way out through biostasis, in the conceit that the people of the future would receive you with open arms. Perhaps you thought you would be treated as ancient scholars, that we would even worship you as immortals.”
McLafferty wished he could deny this, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know what he had been thinking a hundred and two years ago. Perhaps he had been frightened of death and all that it represented. Perhaps he had only been disappointed with life.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“If you don’t,” his master said, “then neither do I, yet the fact remains. Only out of my grace do you live again…and only out of my grace are you still alive, after what you did to one of my guests last night.”
Pushing back the stool, Mister Chicago stood up once more. “And, yes,” he finished, “your assessment is correct. You make great pets.”
Picking up his cup and saucer, he walked toward the door, disappearing back into the shadows from which he had emerged. “And if I were you, I’d…”
“Keep on trucking,” McLafferty said.
Mister Chicago stopped. “Pardon me?”
“Sometimes the lights all shine on me,” McLafferty continued.
Hesitation. Mister Chicago glanced at sunlight streaming through the window. “Sorry? I don’t…”
“Other times, I can barely see.” McLafferty sat up in bed. “Goddamn, well I declare, have you seen the light?”
“What are you talking about?” Mister Chicago demanded.
“You asked me a question. Now I’m asking you one.” McLafferty shrugged, then glanced over his shoulder at his master. “You know the answer, don’t you, Cosmic Charlie? Strutting in style along the avenue?”
Long silence.
Then Mister Chicago melted further in the shadows, his footsteps hinting at dark puzzlement. “Get well soon, Mr. McLafferty,” his voice said, no longer as warm as it had been before. “You need to help the others clean up from my party.”
Then he was gone. Footsteps receding down a short corridor, finally disappearing.
“Go on home,” McLafferty whispered to the shadow. “Your mother’s calling you.”
He sank back beneath the cool sheets, his hands clasped behind his head.
Now the broken seashell was intact again. Before, he only had a few scattered pieces. Mister Chicago, in an unguarded moment of arrogance, had supplied the glue.
He would scrub floors. He would clean tapestries. He would water the flowers in the garden and rinse the dishes in the kitchen and rake the compost bins, and all the while he would smile and play the part of the barbarian imbecile.
Meanwhile, he would bide his time, and learn everything he could, starting with the map of the populated solar system in the Great Hall.
One way or another, there had to be a way off this goddamn rock: Asteroid 1985RB1, discovered in 1985 and formally renamed 4442 Garcia during a conference of the International Astronomical Union in 1995 in honor of a deceased rock musician. Because if Mister Chicago didn’t know the origins of the name of his own world, then this was evidence that he wasn’t as omniscient as he pretended to be.
Where there is knowledge, there’s hope. Sometimes all it took was a simple, long-forgotten song.
“God bless you, Jerry,” he whispered, and then he went back to sleep.
High Roller
We came into Nueva Vegas through the service entrance on the crater’s north side. Our hiding place was a pressurized cell inside a water tank carried by a cargo hauler. We played possum while the vehicle came to a stop and casino security scanned the tank; the water surrounding us blocked the neutrino sweep, and our skinsuits stealthed everything else. The tractor began moving again; we felt it enter the vehicle airlock, then it stopped once more and there was another long wait while the airlock pressurized and electromagnetic scrubbers whisked away the dusty regolith. We rolled forward again; another minute passed, then we came to a halt and I heard JoJo’s voice through my headset:
“Clear.”
About time. I’d been flat on my back during the forty-kilometer ride down the Apollo Highway from Port Armstrong, and my arms were beginning to cramp from holding the equipment bag against my chest. I reached up, found the hatch lockwheel, twisted it clockwise and pushed it open, then sat up and squirmed up through the half-meter manhole. Jen was right behind me; I crouched on top of the hauler and took her bag from her, then helped her out of the tank.
As we’d expected, we were in the garage beneath the crater. Rovers, buses, and various maintenance vehicle were parked all around us. No one in sight; the day-shift workers had long-since clocked off and the night-shift guys had already clocked in. JoJo was the only guy around, and he didn’t count.
In fact, JoJo wouldn’t count for much of anything until I reactivated him. Once Jen and I pulled our masks out of our bags and put them on, I climbed up to the hauler’s cab, turned a valve to bleed off the air, and unsealed the hatch. He sat behind the yoke, two meters of ceramic polymer, dumb as a moon rock. Had to be that way; if he’d retained his programming during the ride to the casino, it might have been downloaded at the security checkpoint and searched by the local DNAI. So his memory had been scrubbed before we left Port Armstrong, leaving behind only a well-buried instruction to transmit the all-clear once the hauler had arrived and his peripheral sensors didn’t register any body-heat signatures. He’d driven us here without even knowing it.
The next order of business bringing JoJo back into the game. I opened my bag, pulled out my pad, and linked it to the serial port on his chest. A double-beep from my pad, reciprocated by another double-beep from his chest; lights flashed on his cylindrical head, then his limbs made a spasmodic jerk.
“Reload complete. All systems operational.” Then his head snapped toward me. “Nice to see you again, Sammy. You’re looking particularly reptilian today.”
Good. He recognized me even though I was now wearing my disguise. “Welcome back, JoJo,” I said, then stepped aside so he could see Jen. “You know our partner, of course.”
“Yo, Jen! How’s it going, girl? Found any good cow pies lately?”
She wasn’t amused. “Say it again, tinhead,” she murmured, “and I’ll download you into a va
cuum cleaner.”
“Everyone, relax.” JoJo was just being funny, sure, but I’d like to find the guy who invented personality subroutines for AIs. “We’ve got a job to do. JoJo, can you modem the casino comp?”
“Let me work on it.” A moment passed. “Nyet. Too many lock-outs. I’ll need direct interface.”
I was expecting that. “No problem. We’ll try again once we find a comp.” I jumped down off the tractor; JoJo followed me, his slender limbs whirring softly as he unfolded himself from the cab. I locked the cab, then turned to him. “Gimme an eyes-up of the layout, basement only. Pinpoint our location.”
“You got it, chief.” An instant later, a holo of Nueva Vegas’s subsurface levels appeared upon the lenses of my mask. Our whereabouts were marked as three luminous points at the outer circle of a concentric maze of corridors, tunnels, rooms, and shafts. Nueva Vegas’s quantum comp lay within a sealed vault at the center of this maze, protected by umpteen levels of defense, both electronic and physical. Ever heard of Fort Knox, the place in Kentucky where the old USA once kept its gold supply back when gold was actually worth something? The DNAI had that degree of protection, and then some. Impossible to penetrate, or so I’d been told.
But then again, that wasn’t our problem. We were after bigger game.
I located the nearest service lift that went directly to the crater floor; it was only a few dozen meters away, down a short corridor. “Everyone ready? Got your stuff?” Jen nodded within her mask; JoJo blinked some diodes my way. “Okay, then,” I said, and picked up my bag. “Let’s roll.”
Nueva Vegas is built within Collins Crater, about thirty kilometers from the Apollo 11 Historical Site. A tour bus that will take you out there, and also to the Surveyor 5 landing site just a few klicks away and the Mare Tranquillitatis Battlefield Memorial a few hundred klicks north near Arago Crater. Most visitors don’t do that, though. Nueva Vegas wasn’t the first lunar casino resort, but most guidebooks consider it to be the best. The table stakes are good, and the payout is excellent; even if you don’t gamble, there’s vices you won’t easily find back on Earth. Not too many places where you can legally purchase a 250-gram bag of Moondog Gold, or hire a double-jointed google—pardon me, a Superior—to be your companion for the evening.
But it’s still a place for the rich. A cheap room near the crater floor costs 300 lox per sol; for this you get a bed, a passcard for the shower stall down the corridor, five complimentary chips and a discount coupon for the all-you-can-eat buffet. A two-room suite-complete with its own personal bath, private balcony, mini-bar, and free Continental breakfast—will set you back a cool million for a two-week stay. High rollers rate the best accommodations, of course: spacious apartments on the upper levels of the crater rim, with outside windows, catered dining, personal masseurs, an unlimited line of credit, and all the liquor, dope and sex you can take. If you have to ask how much that costs, then you have no business being there.
We were checking in on the budget plan. No room, no bath, no food. We weren’t planning to stay very long, though. Just a few minutes on the casino floor, and we’d be on our way.
The lift doors opened and we stepped out into a white-mooncrete corridor with low ceilings and fluorescent lighting. A ’bot carrying a platter of hors d’oeuvres squealed in protest as it swerved to avoid colliding with us. From the other side of a pair of swinging doors, I caught the aroma of cooked food. We’d found the entrance to one of the service kitchens. I noted the direction in which the ’bot was headed, and turned to follow it.
“Hey! What are you guys doing here?”
A short, rotund gentleman in a waiter’s tux and powdered wig emerged from a doorway, a magnum of champagne wrapped in a towel in his white-gloved hands. A wine steward, clearly irritated by our presence. “We’ve told you people a thousand times,” he snapped as he bustled up to us. “Entertainers eat in the employee’s cafeteria, just like everyone else.”
He’d mistaken us for one of the lounge acts. No wonder. I wore a lizard-head mask, and Jen looked like a giant housefly. They didn’t just conceal our faces; the masks also contained eyes-up displays, voice filters, and short-range com gear. We looked weird, sure, but in Nueva Vegas weirdness is the normal order of things. We fit right in.
“A thousand pardons, sir,” I said. “We just got confused, thought this was…”
“Is that the wine cellar?” Jen interrupted, her voice an insectile buzz behind her mask. “May we see it, please?”
The waiter regarded her as if she had just emerged from a bowl of potage Rossini. “You most certainly may not,” he huffed, not noticing that her right hand was within her bag. “Now, if you’ll please…”
“Oh, but I insist.” Jen’s hand came out of the bag; clasped within it was Pax Astra Royal Navy taser pistol. He barely got a chance to see what it was before Jen jammed it against his throat. “I’d love to see your collection.”
“R-r-right this way, madam.” The wine steward managed to keep from dropping the bottle of ’77 Sinai Planum as he hastily tapped his password into the keypad, then backed through the door.
The wine cellar was a small, cool room, dimly lit, with hundreds of bottles of expensive wines resting upon faux-oak racks. The waiter sat down in the corner next to the imported Bordeaux, clasped his hand together atop his wig, and wisely remained quiet while Jen and I pulled out our guns—two PARN particle-beam rifles, complete with laser sights—and attached smoke and pepper-gas grenades to our belts. JoJo went to the wall comp; opening a chest port, he pulled out a cable and hardwired himself to it, then went silent for a couple of minutes while lines of type flashed across the comp screen so fast that I couldn’t keep up with them.
“We’re in,” he said at last, his head swiveling toward me. “Ready to initiate final sequence.”
“Got it right here, big guy.” I reached into a chest pocket, found the diskette I’d been given. Another fail-safe; if we had been caught while passing through security, the first thing I would have done was push the auto-erase tab. JoJo pushed the diskette into the terminal, and I reached past him to tap an eight-digit code into the miniature keyboard. A green border appeared around the screen.
“Locked and loaded.” I pulled out the diskette, snapped it between my hands, then tossed it into the corner next to the cowering wine steward. “Thank you, garçon. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Mind if we take this?” Jen was examining a bottle of cabernet sauvignon she had taken from the wine rack. “Or would you recommend the beerenaulse instead?”
“Th-th-the cabernet is quite…quite good, m-m-madam.” He was barely able to look up at her. “I don’t…I don’t think you’ll be d-d-disappointed.”
“Hmm…well, if you insist.” Jen gently placed the bottle in her bag, then slung it across her shoulders. I hoped it wouldn’t weigh her down too much. “Ready when you are.”
“Okey-dokey.” JoJo detached his cable, let it reel itself back into his chest. “I’m going to huff, and I’m going to puff, and I’m going to…”
“Save it for the civilians.” I raised my rifle to the terminal; one quick squeeze of the trigger, and the panel was fried out. I turned around and aimed my gun at the wine steward. “Okay, here’s the deal. You get to live, so long as you sit here quietly for the next few minutes and don’t make a peep. But if I see you, hear you, even smell you…”
“D-d—don’t worry about me.” His wig had become dislodged; his close-cropped hair was slick with sweat. “I-I-I’ll just sit here.”
“Good man. Again, we thank you.”
He nodded, happy to be rid of us. Then it seemed as if he mustered a gram of courage. “Y-y-you know, of course, w-w-where you are.”
“Sure. Nueva Vegas.”
“Well, y-yes, of course, certainly, but…” His voice dropped. “This is…this is Mister Chicago’s casino. This place…I mean, it belongs to him.”
I raised an eyebrow before I remembered that he couldn’t see my expression behind my
mask. “Yes? And…?”
“N-nothing.” He stared at me for a moment in bewilderment, then the corners of his mouth twitched upward, as if he was enjoying a private joke at our expense. “Nothing at all. Enjoy your visit.”
“Thank you. We will.” I looked at the others. “All right, let’s go.”
The corridor was vacant. I waited until Jen and JoJo had come out, then I closed the wine cellar door behind us. I could have scrambled the keypad, but the wine steward hadn’t given us any trouble. He deserved a chance to live. I left the door unlocked.
Our guns beneath our arms, we marched down the corridor, heading for a pair of double-doors at the end. The doors slid apart with barely a sound; light and noise rushed in.
The easy part was done. Now it was time for the tough stuff.
We came out into an open-air restaurant made to look like a Mediterranean café: plaster walls, watercolors of French street scenes, garden trellises cluttered with grapevine, tables covered with checkerboard cloths placed upon a red-brick terrace. Only a few diners noticed us as we quickly strode past them, and those who did were baffled for only a moment before knowing smiles crept across their faces. We had to be actors, on our way to a floor show somewhere in the casino. The guns? Obviously fakes. Even the waiters didn’t look at us twice. We exited the cafe without bringing any undue attention to ourselves, and now we were within the casino.
The floor of Collins Crater was nearly two kilometers in diameter, and the casino took up nearly every square meter of it. Thousands of slot machines binged and booped and clinked and clanged in a steady and omnipresent cacophony, while the holos that flickered above them—semi-nude women doing strip-tease, classic cartoon characters chasing each other with chainsaws, starships engaged in battle—were ignored by scores of middle-aged men and women hunched in front of the machines, slipping tokens into the slots, pushing buttons and yanking chrome handles, watching in single-minded fascination as apples and grapes and lemons scrolled past their sleepless eyes. Gamblers gathered around blackjack and poker tables watched as dealers slapped cards down on the green felt, collecting chips with smiles, surrendering them with muttered curses. Waitresses in skin-tight outfits and high-heel shoes circulated between the baccarat and roulette tables, delivering drinks and joints to players as they studied cards and tossed dice, collecting tips from winners and favoring those who’d just crapped out with disingenuous expressions of sympathy. Here and there, within small sunken amphitheaters, comedians went through their routines, magicians performed sleight-of-the-hand tricks; applause greeted Frank, Dean, and Sammy as they took to the stage for another sold-out show. Hookers and tricks negotiated with one another, cardsharps tried out their systems for beating the odds, drunks bemoaned their bad luck, and a few hundred dumbasses parted with their money and loved every moment of it, while smoke and sweat and liquor fumes rose to the opaque sky of the pressure dome far above, obscuring the security flycams that prowled above the gaming areas, their lenses watchful for any unusual activity.