The Dark Side (39 page)

So he steers into the nearest parking bay, swings the police car around to face the road, and waits for the orange headlamps
to appear. He knows it's crazy—his only weapon is his zapper, and the lunar surface is no place for a shootout anyway—but he
needs
to face the driver down. Even if that means he scores a rocket through the front of his vehicle, puncturing it like a soap bubble.

And there they are, the orange headlamps, swinging around the bend. Justus begins fumbling for his emergency spacesuit.

There they are, heading straight toward him. Justus begins fitting his legs into the suit.

There they are, seeming to
accelerate
as the vehicle draws closer. Justus desperately hauls the suit over his torso.

And there they are
—

—flashing right on past.

Straight up the Road of Lamentation, like Justus doesn't even exist. A Coca-Cola® truck. A red-capped driver at the wheel, wiping his nose with a sleeve.

Justus lets out a sigh. He sits in place for a few minutes, regaining his senses. He disengages himself from the spacesuit. He takes a can of grape fizz from the icebox and slakes his thirst. And in no time he's back on the road, refreshed and alive.

A few hours later he passes into the polar region of oblique sunlight, elongated shadows, and bleached grey terrain. The sun is visible on the horizon. The temperature rises a hundred degrees in seconds. And the road signs are getting more promising:

Peary Base 350 km

Peary Base 250 km

Peary Base 200 km

Justus sees a line of coaches pulled over and he remembers something about a farewell point. Or a greeting point, depending on which way you're heading—the last/first sign of Earth. He actually catches a glimpse of the great blue orb, fifty times brighter
than the brightest full moon, before snapping his gaze back to the road.

Peary Base 50 km

Peary Base 20 km

Peary Base 10 km

Now he's on the outskirts. He sees the wall of metallurgical waste. The quarrying equipment. The radio masts and drill rigs. The rail-gun roller coaster.

There's a traffic bottleneck, just like the one at Purgatory, but he gives the police lights a spin and purposely flashes up the wrong side of the road, past the Coca-Cola® truck and into the airlock just seconds before it closes.

Still alive
. And determined not to waste any time.

Peary Base is full of the trapped odors of sweat, cleaning fluids, and oil smoke. Justus goes straight to the office of the Port Authority in the main plaza. Weeks ago, on his way in, he met a couple of the local officers, and he knows that many of them are terrestrial cops not quite tainted enough to get into Sin.

“Can I get a secure line to the South Pole from here?” he asks the officer at the desk.

“Of course.”

“What about a line to Earth?”

“Is this an emergency?

“Madam, it's the most urgent emergency of my life.”

A few minutes later he's on the phone to his ex-wife, using a special number provided by Witness Protection. But she's not answering. He rings four times in quick succession—that's usually enough to get her to crack—but the call keeps getting diverted to an anonymous voice mail account. For a moment he wonders if they've gotten to her already, or if she just realizes it must be him from the lunar prefix and is stubbornly ignoring him. Then he
glances out the window and sees the whole of North America in darkness—she's probably just asleep.

He leaves an earnest message on voice mail.

“Paz—please listen to me. I know I promised never to call you again, but please listen to me, okay? I want you to take Ruby and go hide. I want you to go immediately. There are things happening here—I can't say what, but you might be in serious danger. It kills me to say it, because you know what I've done to prevent that happening again—but there it is. Go hide. You know where. And tell Ruby I love her. There's no one I love more. Please tell her that.
Please
. That's all.”

He's gasping when he hangs up. Because it occurs to him that simply by fleeing Purgatory—simply by being alive—he's putting them at risk. He's right back where he started, but with nowhere to run. It's like the acid's been flung over his face all over again.

Then he rings the South Pole.

“Justus—just the man I wanted to speak to.” The Port Authority officer he called the previous day, an obnoxious fellow called Deke Hendricks, is an old colleague from Reno. “I was just gonna call, but you told me to wait until you did.”

“You went to Seidel?”

“Not me personally, but there were a couple of guys in the vicinity. And you'll never guess what they found.”

“I'm listening.”

Hendricks has an annoying habit of drawing out important information like a suspense novelist. At great length he recounts the entire trip of the cops out to Seidel Crater, their difficulty locating anything in the darkness, and their surprise discovery of shoeprints in the regolith.

“So they followed these prints all the way back to the lab and fuck me, Justus, you should see the images they sent back. Two
bodies, ripped apart like rag dolls. One of the cops at the site—Skouras—threw up in his helmet. I almost chucked up myself, just lookin' at the pictures. But there was one survivor. When they searched around they found this emergency compartment in the storeroom—this dude had locked himself in with food and water, a Jap roboticist.”

“Hikaru Kishimoto?”

“Hey, you know him?”

“I know the name. Please—go on.”

“Anyway, it turns out that this tin-sucker and his buddies had been paid to reprogram a droid from Purgatory. All very hush-hush and dangerous. They were supposed to wipe—”

“Leonardo Black?” asks Justus.

“Say again?”

“Was the droid called Leonardo Black?”

“Say, you know that too?”

“I'm just catching up, believe me—please go on.”

“Well,” Hendricks says, “they had to wipe most of this Black's memories and behavioral circuits and replace them with new ones. The wit and wisdom of Fletcher Brass, can you believe that?”

“The Brass Code?”

“The what? Hey, man, you sound like you know more about this than me.”

“I don't know the full details, I assure you.”

Hendricks sounds a little uncertain now. “Anyway, this tin-sucker had the task of deleting the droid's inhibitors—dangerous, sure, but they thought they had the right safeguards in place. Only problem was, the droid was too cunning for 'em. He just waited until they were off guard and then cut loose—the tin-sucker was lucky to get out alive.”

“And what happened to the droid?”

“He's still on the run—the tin-sucker thinks he might be heading for Purgatory.”

“Purgatory?”

“That's what he says. He reckons the droid is programmed to rule, and rule like a ruthless CEO, so that's the place to do it—it makes sense. They even had a brass-colored suit ready for him, and were gonna change his name to Leonardo Brass. Can you believe that?”

Justus nods to himself. “So a homicidal android is heading for Purgatory?”

“The tin-sucker reckons he'll stop at nothing—assuming he can find the way, and assuming he can recharge his batteries.”

“Have you made any attempt to track him—the android?”

“That's what I'm trying to organize now. But he's got nearly a four-day start, and our authority doesn't extend beyond the equator. Plus the Farside comm line is just being repaired. So I was about to call up Peary Base and see if we could coordinate something—even without your permission.”

“I'll take care of it. I'm at Peary right now.”

“You're not calling from Purgatory?”

“It's difficult to explain.”

Hendricks snorts. “Well, you wanna let them know at Purgatory too, my friend. Because if that droid has found a way to get there, and no one stops him—shit, they might be in for a nasty surprise.”

“I'll do that too.”

Justus hangs up and stares into the middle distance. He thinks of his daughter. His responsibilities as a cop. The value of his own life. And last of all he thinks of QT Brass—everything she wanted to achieve and everything that she never will. And then his eyes refocus and he finds himself staring at a tourism poster for
the coming eclipse—the shadow of the moon just a small, pupil-like dot on the blue globe of Earth, the home planet looking like a giant eyeball floating in space. There's a tagline:

THE EYE OF THE WORLD IS WATCHING YOU.

Half an hour later Justus is back in the police car, heading at top speed back up the Road of Lamentation.

F
ROM ALL AVAILABLE EVIDENCE,
Decimus Persione is no lunatic. In scientific circles he's known as a highly respected seismologist and a peerless data analyst not given to making rash predictions. He's also a man who treats his career as a sort of priestly calling. There is no one, they say, who has traveled as far, or studied as much, in order to understand the temperament of the inner planet. It was Persione who predicted the great Istanbul quake—to within a half-magnitude and several days—by making the calculations, just out of academic curiosity, from half a world away. Since then his reputation has been further enhanced by scholarly articles, scientific expeditions, and well-received lectures. So Decimus Persione has no real need to be on the Moon. He has enough credibility to study the data, if he wishes to study it at all, from the comfort of his own office. He certainly doesn't need to put himself through all the grueling training and privations of a
lunar mission. And yet, when the opportunity came up, he seized it with surprising, even brazen enthusiasm. And so convincing was he in his explanation—that by studying the Moon's seismology in the field he would acquire an even greater understanding of similar processes on Earth—that no one questioned him, not even his loyal and unassuming wife.

But the truth is that Decimus Persione is secretly in love—or, more accurately, in lust—with his considerably younger colleague and former student, Akahi Nawahine. In short, he desperately wants to fuck her. So when he learned that Nawahine had won one of the three slots on the lunar-study mission, he applied immediately for the more senior role, and used all his administrative influence to secure it. Because he was damned if he was going to allow some other hot-blooded male—or female, for that matter—to spend nine months in an ICE (isolated and confined environment) with the object of his sexual veneration.

As it happens, Nawahine already has a partner of her own, some sort of track star, but after meeting that knucklehead (at a farewell party) Persione became even more confident that he could win over his Polynesian princess. And then, when the third member of the team had to pull out just two days before launch (owing to a sudden bout of pneumonia), it seemed to Persione further proof that Nawahine was
destined
to be his. After all, he's not in bad shape. He's ruggedly handsome. He wears about himself a great deal of authority. And in the past, attractive female students have offered themselves to him frequently. So ultimately it was not all that dissimilar to predicting an earthquake—notwithstanding a few degrees of error, a shift in tectonic plates seemed inevitable.

And for the first few months Persione followed his plan to the letter: make no advances, maintain a studied distance, and
let nature take its course. But Nawahine seemed so content with this frustrating arrangement that he began making remarks he'd hoped would not be necessary—admitting to loneliness, assuring her of his discretion, and even complimenting her on her beauty. “There may be no sun in the sky right now,” he told her during one long period of lunar night, “but I'll always have you.” She merely chuckled as if he were joking.

Eventually the painful abstinence, in combination with the frustrating proximity to her magnetic body—she maintains a terrific physique by working out regularly, something of a necessity in lunar gravity—made him become more audacious.

“There's a better way to keep fit,” he told her.

“And what's that?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“I'll pretend I didn't hear that.”

Shortly afterward he “accidentally” dropped his pants in her presence. And he “accidentally” rubbed against her with a half-boner. And whenever he spoke to her he stared at her with smoldering eyes, as if just by doing so he might ignite fires deep inside. But she was unyielding. She was impossible. She was cruel. He began to despise her as much as he adored her.

And then he hit her. He still doesn't know what came over him: cabin fever, maybe, or some psychological effect of Nocturnity. All he knows is that when she rejected his advances yet again, he suddenly couldn't tolerate it—her whole air of disdain. How could the bitch be so goddamned precious? After eight months together? As if she couldn't afford to give herself up—for just a few minutes—to gratify his burning needs!

“New night just arrived,” he said.

“Sure did.” She was kneeling, assembling one of the seismic instruments.

“Gonna be our last full night here.”

“Guess so.”

“You know, I'm thinking of getting a divorce when we get back.”

“That's sad.”

“Why is it sad?”

“I thought you loved your wife.”

“Not as much as I love you.”

To which she sighed. “Decimus—I thought I made myself plain. I thought . . .” But she couldn't even finish her sentence. She just shook her head, not even bothering to look up. And still assembling the goddamned instrument.

So he struck her. He had a titanium-frame flashlight in his hand and he whacked it against the side of her head. She wobbled for a few seconds and then collapsed, with blood dripping from above her ear.