Joker Moon Read online

  “Whatever you say, Cash.” She squirmed, as if getting comfortable in the chair. “You were always straight with me.”

  If I hadn’t already feared that she was dying, that statement would have convinced me. I turned to Sampson with my best pleading look.

  “Cash, it’s a three-day trip back. Adding two hours isn’t going to make a difference. And we need to have proof.”

  Eva-Lynne’s clawlike hand grasped mine. “Go! I have a nice view here. I’m good.” I could barely hear her.

  Sampson and I sealed the air lock and went outside. As we hopped and slid away from Quicksilver, I had tears in my eyes. They don’t flow fast in lunar gravity, so my view of the landscape was obscured.

  Sampson took pictures. We both dug samples and poured them into cans that we sealed with taped lids, taking pictures of the before and after. I was the one who pried a solar panel off the relay station and brought it back to Quicksilver.

  Sampson was the first to emerge from the air lock into the cabin. “Cash,” he said.

  He didn’t need to add more. Eva-Lynne was curled up in my chair, cold and dead.

  I sat down and simply sobbed for a while. I wasn’t weeping for our time together, but for Eva-Lynne and her horrible childhood, her struggles. I may have uttered a word or two, I can’t frankly remember. But Sampson patted me on the shoulder. “You were good for her, and she for you.” And, being the man he was, he offered a prayer.

  Then we suited up again and carried her out to the surface of the Ocean of Storms.

  There, on a rise roughly halfway between the relay station and landing site, we buried her, marking the grave with a shipping tag that Sampson pinned in place with a knife.

  On the shipping tag were these words: She walks in beauty, like the night. The only poem I could remember at that moment, two lines scribbled in pencil.

  Then we took off. I found that sadness worked as well as sexual passion as a trigger for a lift.

  We touched down just before dawn at Goose Creek, settling onto a concrete pad normally used by helicopters.

  There must have been a hundred people waiting for us, a vast improvement over 1968, when Eva-Lynne, Sampson, and I slunk back to our sad little airstrip at Tehachapi. You could see the cars lined up—some of them shining lights onto the pad.

  “This is more like it,” Sampson said. “I could get used to this flying to the Moon. How about you?”

  “Twice is enough,” I said.

  “I think this time things are gonna work out better for you.”

  “For some kids, at least.”

  But it did turn out to be good for all of us, in some ways. Sampson seemed satisfied to have had his lunar flight confirmed. I got booked for actual lectures at decent fees, not just junior high school or carnival exhibitions.

  A good thing, since Quicksilver was going to a museum. (Which said it would buy the craft from me for an especially decent fee that I planned to split with Ridley.)

  As for Ridley, he volunteered to help with my “transition” to public speaker, but allowed as though it might be time for him to return to Minnesota and settle down there.

  We did return to the Witherspoons’ to say our goodbyes and collect whatever we’d left. Henry and Alice had been present at the landing, of course. Henry beamed and said appropriately congratulatory things, then went off with Sampson. I had one private moment with Alice, who was tearfully apologetic and sympathetic. “Poor girl.” She meant Eva-Lynne, I think.

  “She was turning,” I said. “At least she found a new home where she won’t be a freak. And her boys will be taken care of.” I had privately decided that my first trip would be to Las Vegas to meet Amos and Orson.

  “Cash, that sounds like one of those comforting fictions we tell each other.” Before I could get angry, she pointed to herself. “I’m just as guilty. It’s all I’ve been saying since I met her.”

  I had already suspected that the Neal “prize” was actually a Witherspoon gambit. What I learned from Alice was that the family had also taken out some huge life insurance policy on Eva-Lynne, payable not on her death (though that was the reason we originally told everyone she had died on the trip) but on her failure to return to Earth.

  “We all play the cards we’re dealt.” The motto of the wild card era.

  I left thinking that, for all her beauty and power and charm, Alice Witherspoon was more tragic than Eva-Lynne.

  I delivered a gift Moon rock to my “student,” which he accepted with unfeigned enthusiasm and even some tears.

  Theodorus’s room had changed in the time I’d been gone: he had filled it with plants, far more than I had suggested. (I had thought three might be a suitable number. He had obtained ten times that number.) “I guess anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” I said.

  We shook hands, promising to catch up again soon, especially if my new lecture circuit brought me back through Charleston. (As it turned out, it was many years before I saw Theodorus Witherspoon again.)

  If you can fucking believe this, Malachi Schwartz refused to pay me for my last five days as Theodorus’s sponsor! “But I was working for you!”

  “You weren’t living up to the terms of our agreement.”

  I think, now, that he would have given in eventually—he was just one of those individuals who wants a fight. But I didn’t care. There was more money to be made.

  There was one coda.

  A week after we landed, Quicksilver was transferred from its hangar to a big transport that would carry it to the Air Force museum in Ohio.

  Several scientists and folks from D.C. were there to collect our samples, too.

  A crowd gathered to see the little bird, and to meet Sampson and yours truly.

  Who should show up but Bertram Neal. He had a camera operator and sound guy with him, and had both of them aiming their devices at me.

  “Nice to see you conscious,” I said.

  “No thanks to you.”

  “Don’t ambush a twitchy joker.”

  “A liar.”

  I smiled. “I hope all of that is on film and tape, in case I sue you for libel and slander and anything else that seems appropriate.”

  “You could have faked all of it.” He scuttled around so that he could see Quicksilver. “Who could believe that that piece of junk could fly to the Moon?”

  “Twice,” I said, though I would have to admit—on the surface—that both flights did seem unlikely. Nevertheless, I kept wondering what motivated a troll like Neal, what kept him arguing against what was now overwhelming evidence.

  Assuming he actually believed what he said.

  “Come here and see some actual lunar soil.”

  I opened the can and scooped out a bit of moondust.

  “That could just be your honey’s ashes,” Neal said.

  Okay, too soon, too far, too stupid. My impulse control had not improved.

  I threw it in his face.

  The Moon Maid

  PART IV

  1981

  FOR MORE THAN A decade, no one disturbed Aarti. One might think that time would ease her pain, her grief. India was growing more tolerant of jokers—clothing restrictions lifted after mass protests, jokers coming into prominent positions as heads of corporations, elected officials. None of that mattered to Aarti; for her, the damage was done. Yaj’s sweet face stolen from the world, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes gone forever. Year after year, there was no one to touch her; she would not have permitted it if they’d tried. Suresh and Saila’s children learned to keep a respectful distance from the mistress of the house on the rare occasions when she left her room. She painted furiously, ferociously, on Earth—her lover’s face, the brutal, murderous crowd. The paintings grew darker, year by year.

  Then visitors came to the Moon once more. She went to bed in her room and woke up in her moon-palace, only to feel them immediately. Two humans, intruding on her Moon, and a jagged streak of fury raced through her. Aarti let the feel of them call to her, let h
er form dissolve to moondust and re-form near them. Oh, this ship she recognized, she remembered. How long had it been here, while she’d been wasting time in Bombay, waiting for the cruel sun to release its hold on her?

  The men in their suits looked like they’d been working for hours, their arms heavy with recording equipment. They were headed back toward the ship, and Aarti took a quick, deep breath—she would destroy them. Her arms were already raised, fingertips thinned to brush. But before she could paint their utter dissolution, the door of the ship opened again, and the men reemerged, carrying what appeared to be a body. A joker, Aarti saw. She thought it might have been a woman—there was a definitively female sense to her.

  Aarti crept closer, close enough that if the men turned, they would surely see her. She watched as the men dug a hole and buried the dead joker. Did they kill her? she wondered. They had brought violence and death to her Moon, just as she had feared, leaving a corpse behind to mark where they had been, to pollute the lunar soil. The strangeness of that stopped Aarti in her tracks, which meant that the men had plenty of time to climb into their ship and let the door close behind them. She raised a hand, half-heartedly, ready to paint their obliteration—but how to do it? She hadn’t thought this through. Aarti had never deliberately hurt anyone in her life. In the mad fury after Yajnadar’s murder, she’d been willing to slaughter anyone and everyone, but she’d never made an actual plan.

  Before Aarti could decide, the ship took off, leaving her alone again.

  She walks in beauty, like the night, read the words on the shipping tag that the intruders had left behind to mark the joker woman’s grave. Aarti stood above the marker long after the spaceship had left, wondering. Who were you? she asked the dead woman, silently. Were you human once? What were you to them? A pet, a child, a friend? Why did they leave you here? Do they mean to make my Moon a graveyard?

  Aarti could feel the tug of Earth upon her again—it was almost dawn in Bombay. But she was resolved—if the human ship came back, Aarti would destroy it. The joker woman might be the first corpse beneath the lunar soil, but she would not be the last. No humans on the Moon! They had the entire Earth to pollute and destroy; they would not wreak their horrors here.

  Within That House Secure

  II

  MATHILDE HADN’T KNOWN THERE were so many Witherspoons.

  Hundreds of people in dark, expensively tailored dresses and suits crowded the church. Those dozens taking up the front pews, many of them, shared other features in common as well. Widow’s peak hairlines on the men, watery blue eyes and patrician noses on both men and women.

  These were Mr. Witherspoon’s cousins and aunts and other relations. A rare only child in a usually fecund clan, Mr. Witherspoon had married another only child. Mrs. Witherspoon—Alice, Mathilde would honor their bargain in memory now, at least—Alice hadn’t had so many familial representatives at their shared funeral.

  Their only child, Theodorus, was not present. As he had done most things in the three years since his card turned, Theodorus chose to do his mourning in private.

  The service was long. At one point, when yet another minister stood to eulogize the couple, Malachi leaned over and whispered, “A three-preacher funeral. These Southerners.”

  Mathilde didn’t say anything in return. She tried to pay attention to what the men who spoke—they were all men—were saying, but her mind kept wandering to Theodorus. He was not alone at the estate, of course, not technically. He would be surrounded by his late parents’ employees, all those guards and secretaries and cooks and gardeners, excepting only James and Dorothy, the longest serving of them, whom Mathilde spotted on one of the back rows. But then, being surrounded by people didn’t mean you weren’t alone. At fourteen, Mathilde knew that very well.

  Organ music swelled and people began filing out of the church, one pew at a time, front to back. This meant that the many Witherspoons walked slowly past her and Malachi as they left. None of them glanced their way.

  It had been a plane crash.

  According to what she had read in the newspaper, Henry and Alice Witherspoon had been in their private jet with a crew of three, bound from Charleston to Washington, D.C. It had been a rainy day, but not a stormy day, so the lightning bolt that struck the plane shortly after takeoff was described as “rogue.”

  The pilot and another crewmember had been in the cockpit. The Witherspoons were in the passenger cabin with the third crewmember—a joker woman, as it happened. All five of them had been killed instantly on impact twenty-four miles north of the city. The crash site was closer to the Witherspoon estate than it was to the airport.

  The route from the church back to the estate did not go near there, but Mathilde stared out the car window in that direction the whole time. It had been hours since the service, hours taken up with watching the caskets loaded into long black carriages drawn by teams of black horses, then the slow drive to the cemetery, then the graveside service, where all three ministers spoke again, if a bit more briefly.

  Now many of the people who had attended were descending upon Theodorus’s house for food and conversation.

  “No,” Malachi had answered her, “they don’t call it a wake. That smacks of Catholicism, and they wouldn’t want that.”

  Whatever it was, Mathilde now stood in one of the larger first-floor rooms. It was big enough to hold a dance in, and there was, in fact, a stately grand piano next to the fireplace. In her years of visits here, Mathilde had never heard a single note played on it, but she was sure it was kept scrupulously in tune. Alice would have seen to that. Mathilde wondered if it would ever be tuned again.

  Conversation in the room was low, except for a boisterous man who kept being hushed by his Witherspoon wife. Every time he spoke too loudly or let out a braying laugh, she whispered to him and he looked embarrassed and took a drink from the glass in his hand. Circulating servants kept that drink, and the drinks of everyone else present, full.

  Malachi walked over from where he’d been talking to an older man. The man followed Malachi’s progress to Mathilde’s side with those watery blue Witherspoon eyes. He didn’t look very happy.

  “Do you think Theodorus will come out?” Malachi asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Mathilde. “This is a lot of people.”

  “Relatives, though. Mostly. By marriage if not by blood. By money if not by law.”

  Years in to being an American now, and there were still things Mathilde didn’t understand about her adopted country. “You can be related to someone by money?”

  Malachi took a careful sip from the tumbler a passing waiter had just handed him, winced, and set it down on the windowsill. “Sometimes I think that’s the tightest kinship of all,” he said. “Why do you think we’re here?”

  Mathilde said, “I’m here because my best friend’s parents have been killed, and I’m sure he’s hurting. Weren’t the Witherspoons your friends?”

  Malachi’s shoulders were practically nonexistent, but he made the motion Mathilde knew was shrugging. “Yes, after a fashion. But they were always my employers first. And Henry in particular had his little ways of reminding me of that, always.”

  “Are we related to any of these people, then? In your way of seeing things?”

  “My way of seeing things…” Malachi repeated. The phrase obviously amused him for some reason unclear to Mathilde.

  The loud man who must have been related to the Witherspoons by one of the other bonds of kinship besides blood was suddenly standing before them.

  “Schwartz, right?” he asked. “Old Hank’s bagman. The man who knows the secrets. The man who knows where all the money is.”

  The woman Mathilde assumed was the boor’s wife was beside him, but she did not shush him this time.

  “I’m Malachi Schwartz, yes. I’m the CFO of Witherspoon Holdings if that satisfies your description.” He shifted his gaze from the man to the cool and silent woman next to him. “And of course, Mrs. Gaspar, I was a … confidant �
� of your late cousin.”

  “Why are you talking to her? I was the one who asked you who you are,” said the man.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said Malachi. “I’m used to dealing directly with decision makers. A privilege of my position.”

  The man reddened, but the woman, Mrs. Gaspar, put her hand on his arm and he settled. “And what exactly is your position, Mr. Schwartz?” she asked.

  “As I’ve just said, I’m the CFO of Witherspoon Holdings. Since you and your siblings hold twenty-two percent of the stock in that firm, I’m sure you’re well aware of that.”

  The woman flashed a thin smile. Everything about her was thin. Mathilde imagined even her blood was thin. “I wasn’t being clear. What is your position on the matter at hand?”

  Now what does that mean? wondered Mathilde, but if Malachi planned to answer—not at all a sure thing—the falling away of all the room’s conversations and ambient noises to silence robbed him of his moment. Theodorus had just entered the room.

  Mathilde had made several visits to the library and leafed through books trying to determine exactly what kind of snail Theodorus resembled, but of course there were no snails in all the world with whorled shells nearly seven feet in diameter. Theodorus, from the trailing tip of his glistening foot to the point where his human-appearing torso stretched out from his shell, was nearly twelve feet long. Without her having asked him, during the renovations of the house that allowed him the run of the second floor, he had volunteered the information that he weighed something on the order of one thousand pounds.

  Over the past three years, he had learned to school the motile features of his face with a great deal of control. If she looked him straight in the eye and ignored everything else, Mathilde could easily imagine what seventeen-year-old Theodorus would have looked like if he’d never been transformed by the alien virus.

  She couldn’t ignore everything else, of course. Nobody could.