The Dark Side (10 page)

“He might be a pain in the ass.”

“Of course he'll be a pain in the ass.”

“And what about the dust?”

Matthews thinks for a few seconds, then says firmly, “I'll take care of it.”

Now the droid is standing outside, still smiling. And looking as though he has every expectation of being allowed inside.

Matthews punches a button to open the outer airlock doors. The droid steps into the tiny, cubicle-like space. Matthews moves to a microphone.

“Can you hear me?”

The droid, now visible through a small observation window, hesitates—as if surprised by the sound of the voice. “I hear you.”

“We don't have much in the way of scrubbers here, and you seem to have picked up a bit of dust.”

“That is correct—I have certainly accumulated some dust.”

“Then we can't let you inside until you strip down first—do you understand?”

“That is perfectly reasonable,” says the droid. “I intend to wash my clothes, in any case.”

Matthews and Jamieson glance at each other. Matthews shrugs. Then the droid is disrobing, and the two of them discreetly avert their eyes. It's absurd, of course, but the more lifelike droids can exude a palpable sexuality. It shouldn't be an issue—Jamieson is fashionably asexual, and Matthews only likes women—but this droid is superbly toned, like one of those silicone-skinned love companions that feature so frequently in women's erotic literature.

A green light comes on—the airlock's pressurization is complete. Matthews checks that the droid is ready and then opens the inner airlock door.

The droid, wearing only some hipster briefs—disconcerting in itself, as humans on surface expeditions customarily wear thick, moisture-absorbing undershorts—steps into the shack, trailing the gunpowder stench of lunar dust. He takes a few seconds to survey the room, and eventually his gaze settles on Matthews and Jamieson. If he's surprised—all three of them are in their underwear now—he doesn't betray it.

“A great pleasure to meet you, ladies,” he says. “I hope I have not come at an inconvenient time?”

“No,” Matthews replies. “We were just preparing to suit up, that's all.”

“I see,” says the droid, and then appears to think a moment before he asks, “Are you whores?”

Matthews blinks. “We're not whores.”

“Are you nuns?”

“We're not nuns either.”

“Are you secretaries?”

“We're not secretaries.”

“Are you shareholders, then?”

“Shareholders?”

“Do you hold stock in any listed company?”

“Do we—no . . .
no
.”

“Than what are you, madam?”

“I'm a geologist. Jamieson here is a geochemist.”

“I see.”

The droid continues to smile. Standing there in his briefs, like an underwear model. It's all so bizarre that Matthews has to break the tension.

“May I ask where you're from?”

“I come from nowhere, madam. There is only the future.”

Matthews and Jamieson exchange glances again. Jamieson speaks up. “Well, where are you going, then?”

“I am going to Oz, madam.”

“Oz?”

“That's right. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

Jamieson chuckles at the absurdity—she's always felt so unglamorous—but at the same time feels instinctively sorry for Matthews. Until the droid adds:

“And you, madam”—turning to Matthews—“I would like to fuck you very much.”

This really is going too far. Part of what Matthews and Jamieson enjoy about being alone on Farside is that they're so far away from the attentions of lascivious men.

“I'm sorry,” Matthews says, shaking her head, “did you just say . . . what I think you said?”

“I am one charming motherfucker.”

In any other circumstance Matthews might give him an earful. But she reminds herself that this is a piece of machinery. Possibly malfunctioning, like their heating unit.

“Well,” she says, shrugging it off, “be that as it may, we're very busy here—I hope you understand that.”

“Did I catch you in the middle of something, madam?”

“You could say that.”

“Were you licking each other?”

“No, we weren't
licking
each other.”

“But you were doing something important?”

“It's important to us, yes.”

“Is this activity so important that you are unable to assist me in my time of need?”

“What exactly do you want from us anyway? Directions?”

“I have directions, thank you very much.”

“Then what?”

“Madam, you may notice some flecks of blood on my face and some bits of flesh in my hair. These are not from a human being. I was chopping up a turkey and some gizzards flew into the air.”

“That's . . . very interesting.”

“So I would like to perform ablutions, if you do not mind. And I would also like to launder my clothes.”

“I can't allow you to bring your clothes in here. But you can fill a bucket and wash them in the airlock. There are scrubbers in there anyway.”

“I am very happy to follow those instructions, madam.”

“And as for the hygiene room, it's through that door.”

“Thank you, madam; I will use that room now.”

The droid promptly disappears into the bathroom, which is not much bigger than a construction-site porta-potty. Almost immediately the hiss of a high-pressure hand-shower is heard.

Jamieson looks at Matthews. “I don't like it.”

Matthews holds up a hand. “It'll be okay.”

“Ever heard a droid talk like that?”

“He's probably just an L and P unit—you know.”

Matthews means a leisure and pleasure model. It used to be uncool for ladies to have servile robot lovers—it was considered degrading to the woman and, curiously enough, to the android as well—but then someone invented androids with attitude. They talked dirty. They were moody. They were demanding, especially in bed. One woman wrote a best-selling account of her
experiences,
Bad Boy
, and now such salty-tongued fuckbots are all the rage.

The droid emerges, shiny-skinned, drying his hair.

“Thank you, ladies; that was most welcome.”

“Think nothing of it,” Matthews says. “Are you going to be on your way now?”

“I certainly am, madam. But may I make a request of you first?”

“Go on.”

“I see through the window that you have a pressurized rover. May I borrow it from you?”

Matthews smirks. “You want to
borrow
our VLTV?”

“I have a very long journey ahead of me, madam, and would much appreciate the use of a long-range vehicle.”

“Do you know how to drive a vehicle like that?”

“I was hoping you would instruct me.”

Matthews doesn't glance at Jamieson, though she dearly wants to. She decides to lie. “Well, the VLTV is broken right now. So it wouldn't be any good to you anyway.”

“Broken?”

“We're repairing it, but it could take days.”

The droid is staring at her, and Matthews, trying desperately to maintain a neutral expression, wonders if he's trained to read deception signals. But he doesn't challenge her. And eventually he says, “I see also that you have an LRV.”

“We do.” Matthews is about to say that's broken too but decides that would be stretching credibility.

“May I borrow that vehicle?”

“I don't think so, sorry.”

“Why not, madam?”

“We need it for ourselves. We don't have anything else.”

“I see.”

“If your trip was a short one, and you could have it returned promptly, then we could probably let you borrow it. But you just said you needed it for a long journey.”

“I do indeed.”

“Then I'm sorry, we can't help you.”

The droid is still beaming. Creepily. He looks from one to the other. “You two ladies need that LRV as much as I do, it seems.”

“We do.”

“We all cannot use it at once.”

“I guess not.”

“Of course,” he adds speculatively, “there's nothing stopping me from just getting into the vehicle and driving away.”

“You might find that difficult.”

“And why is that, madam?”

“There's a security key.”

“I did not know that, madam. May I view this key?”

“You may not,” says Matthews.

The droid looks at her, then at Jamieson, back and forth and back again. The subtle malevolence makes the room seem even hotter and stuffier. And finally he says:

“Then I salute you, ladies. You have bent me over and fucked me up the ass. Yes, I salute you, ladies. A real man always acknowledges when he has been beaten. So I salute you. And I bow to you.”

And he does bow, with a courtier-like flourish. Then, rising, he changes tone completely.

“And now, ladies, I will leave you. I will sponge the stains out of my garments within the airlock here, and then I will be on my way. I will not trouble you again. A real man knows when he has been beaten. Yes, I will definitely be on my way.”

“Well, it was nice knowing you,” says Matthews. “You can open the airlock by hitting that button there.”

The droid, still in his underpants, shifts toward the airlock door as Jamieson backs away. “This one, madam?”

“That one.”

The droid studies the button for a while, then presses it as instructed. The inner door hisses open. But he doesn't enter immediately. He pauses for a few moments, looking at his rumpled suit on the airlock floor, at the dust, at the cleaning controls and vacuums. Then, very tentatively, he steps through.

Matthews lunges immediately for the button. And she punches it. Hard. And the door hisses. And starts to close. And Matthews and Jamieson experience an overwhelming flush of relief.

But suddenly a powerful, hydraulically muscled arm snakes out of the airlock. The droid, like a man in an elevator, is preventing the door from closing.

And then he sticks his head out. And he stares at Matthews and Jamieson with his jet-black eyes. And he grins—wolfishly.

“Excuse me, ladies,” he asks, “but do either of you know how to spell ‘surrender'?”

I
F YOU'RE A TOURIST,
the first thing you probably notice upon arriving at the Purgatory Customs Center is the rich retro decor: cherrywood paneling, pebbled glass, green-shaded lamps, brass and chrome trimmings. It's very kitsch, and not likely to win any design awards, but to weary eyes it's a welcome relief from the utilitarian furnishings of Peary and the sterile trappings of Doppelmayer and Lyall Bases. The second thing you'll probably notice is the physical appearance of the officials checking your passport—they're distinctly different from the “short-timers” staffing the desks on Nearside and most of Peary Base. Fluid redistribution and muscular adjustments make them look a little unreal, almost like cartoon characters, and when they walk it's with a peculiar, sashaying style—what on Earth might be called “a pimp strut.”

Then, once you've been given the all-clear—not inevitable, as your visa can be rejected on the basis of minor technicalities—you'll
be ushered down a corridor to the courtesy bus transferring you to Sin (most of your luggage will be traveling separately). Once you get onto the crater's winding tarmac, however, you might be surprised, even annoyed, at the speed of the bus—it's agonizingly slow, even when the road ahead appears completely clear. But sooner or later an automated recording, or perhaps the driver himself, will enlighten you. All vehicles in Purgatory are forbidden from creating vibrations that might affect the readings of the interferometry arrays—all those modules and radar dishes, thousands of them across the crater floor, that together make up one immense multifaceted telescope with a resolving power infinitely greater than anything on Earth.

Of course, if you've done your guidebook reading you'll know that Fletcher Brass personally financed two such arrays, one inside Störmer Crater, the other in Seidel Crater in the southern hemisphere. The former is intended for extragalactic observations; the latter is aimed at the inner galaxy. Both are above the 30th parallel, in regions just temperate enough to avoid the worst extremes of thermal cycling. Both are dedicated chiefly to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And both, as Brass himself is happy to point out, have so far discovered nothing. Not a squawk. Not a pin drop. Nothing.

But, as you'll also know if you've read the right biographies, the huge expense paid off for Brass in unexpected ways. Because when terrestrial prosecutors started bearing down on him after the Amazon catastrophe, he was able to pull off a typically cunning trick. He moved himself, his loyal entourage, most of his belongings, and much of his liquidated financial holdings into Störmer Crater, effectively
inside
his own gigantic telescope, and claimed he was on privately owned territory.

And he was right. In the early years of lunar development,
private corporations claimed all sorts of territorial rights on the basis of first possession—the argument being that anyone who went to the crippling expense of building a lunar base should at least get some real estate to go with it. But owing to the longstanding observance of 1967's Outer Space Treaty, which in Article 8 forbids private ownership of real estate in outer space, corporations had to be content with exploiting the subclause that permits ownership of
objects
in space, including objects “landed or constructed on celestial bodies, along with all their component parts.” This was how Brass's battalion of lawyers was able to claim that their client had exiled himself to an
object
—a giant telescope, 120 kilometers across—which was in effect his own legally recognized territory. And which came to be known as Purgatory.