Joker Moon Page 17

  All of his flesh was a greenish-gray color—no watery blue eyes for him, even. His body and foot constantly wept a substance Theodorus himself called Witherslime, but whether he called it that cheerfully or bitterly, Mathilde had never been able to determine.

  Some days he withdrew his entire body inside the shell and let a thick crust of the stuff dry over the entryway, sealing him off from the world. Other days, days when Alice had been proud to say that he was “making an effort,” he manipulated his features so that he even had the appearance of hair on his head. He wore specially made clothes that wicked away the fluids his body produced on those days, and gloves, so that he could shake a visitor’s hand without them worrying overmuch about cleaning up afterward.

  Today was a day that Theodorus had made an effort.

  He wore a black jacket and gray shirt, complete with a neatly knotted tie. Cream-colored gloves adorned his hands, and he dipped his head up and down as he glided to the center of the room, greeting his relatives, Mathilde supposed. He did not, however, break the silence.

  So she did.

  He did not see her approaching from the side, as he was keeping his head positioned more or less as a nat would—not that he didn’t have the option of twisting it nearly all the way around if he wanted. Mathilde walked up beside him and knocked on his shell.

  The people closest to her seemed shocked. One man looked like he was about to faint.

  Theodorus turned his whole torso around. Mathilde hadn’t grown much in the last few years; she was still short, still petite. He loomed over her.

  “It’s okay that you haven’t sent any notes,” she said. “But I hope you’ve been getting mine.”

  He looked so sad. But he reached into the pocket of his elegant jacket and brought out a squared-off package of papers bound in twine. They were printed with a gridline, and the jagged edges showed where she had ripped them from her orange notebooks.

  “I was just rereading them,” he said.

  “So you know how sorry I am,” she said.

  He bobbed his head. Really, his nods were more convincing than her own attempts, or Malachi’s. They were all three robbed of fluidity in the gesture by their physiologies.

  “This is all very charming.” The cold, thin woman, Mrs. Gaspar, was standing by Mathilde. “But now’s time for family business.”

  The crowd murmured its agreement.

  “What do you mean, cousin?” asked Theodorus.

  “I mean that Mr. Schwartz and his daughter should find their way home, because the rest of us have things to talk about. About your responsibilities.”

  “My responsibilities,” said Theodorus. There was an unusual note in his voice. Not sadness, but something equally deep and rich. “To the family? To you?”

  “Theodorus, no one here is under any illusions about what the wills are going to show. Henry and Alice never made any secret of their plans to leave you everything. But the wills hadn’t been changed to reflect … to reflect…”

  “To reflect this,” said Theodorus, gesturing back, the sweep of his hand taking in his shell.

  To her credit, Mathilde supposed, the woman colored slightly. “No, to reflect the fact that you are a minor, and that the courts will of course not allow you to run your own affairs, much less those of the companies.”

  Ah, thought Mathilde. She is related by money.

  “I’m seventeen,” said Theodorus. “I’ll have more rights this time next year. I’ll be fully empowered by the trusts to do whatever I want when I’m twenty-one.”

  “He’s read them,” said Mrs. Gaspar’s boorish husband. “He’s already read the damned wills.”

  “You’ll find that your dearly departed relatives kept no secrets from their son,” Malachi said from his place by the window. “You’re right, of course, Suzanne. They left him everything. If you’d like to take an early look at the papers, I’ve arranged for quite a few copies to be stacked on the billiards table in the front room.”

  Mrs. Gaspar—Suzanne, Mathilde supposed—gave Malachi a narrow-eyed look that matched the one he was giving her. “What game are you playing at, Schwartz?”

  Malachi didn’t answer though, because Theodorus suddenly roared.

  “Game? Game? My parents are dead and here you all are, circling while their bodies cool, and you want to talk about games?”

  Mathilde reached out and put her hand on Theodorus’s shell. Everyone else in the room shrank back, leaving the two of them in a widening circle of parquet floor defined by frightened rich people.

  Not all jokers had ace powers. Perhaps only a minority did. If Malachi had one, for instance, he’d never hinted at such. Mathilde was frightened enough of her own that she rarely thought about it, never experimented with it. Did Theodorus have one?

  As with Malachi, Theodorus had never said. As with Malachi, Mathilde had never asked.

  Which left open a possibility. A possibility that everyone in that room was considering. Could he freeze their blood—however thin it might be—with a glance? Could he rob them of their youth, their looks, their vitality? Could he, in some way, in any way, harm them? Could he?

  Mathilde didn’t know.

  Maybe Theodorus didn’t know.

  A moment passed. Nobody collapsed. Nobody, thank God, caught fire.

  “I have had a very interesting conversation with my good friend Malachi and some of his associates,” Theodorus suddenly said. “I have been learning about something called juvenile emancipation. Do you know what that is, cousin? Do any of you?”

  Mathilde was willing to bet that there were at least a dozen lawyers in the room. Probably the dozen of them who were suddenly whispering to the people around them.

  “Even if you’re emancipated, you can’t run the companies,” Mrs. Gaspar protested. She was probably a lawyer herself.

  “That’s true,” Theodorus said, stretching up and out to look down at the woman. “But there are no ‘ifs’ about this, cousin, the emancipation is—what’s the French, Mathilde?”

  “A fait accompli,” said Mathilde. She hadn’t known anything about any of this, but she could tell which way the wind was blowing.

  “As for the companies, well, until I turn twenty-one, you’ll all just have to work with the court-appointed trustee.”

  The murmuring grew into a babbling, but then Mrs. Gaspar hissed her kin to silence.

  “Who?” she asked, simply.

  Theodorus turned and looked toward the window.

  Malachi was frowning at another drink. “Have you people ever even considered not putting sugar in your tea?” he asked.

  Star Ghost

  by Steve Perrin

  ALMAZ

  1981–1985

  FOR MORE THAN A year, things keep to the status quo. Yuri starts feeling the walls closing in on him. As pleasant as his dalliances with Anya are, every minute he spends in material form makes it more likely he will be caught by the erratically scheduled Constantin and, more important, more likely that the steadily leaking reactor might adversely affect him.

  Once, as Constantin is filling the station with his snores, he looks over Anya’s shoulder as she observes the approach of a large object in a slightly lower orbit. “I wonder…” he whispers into Anya’s earphones.

  “What?” she asks with a pensive lilt. Yuri usually says something like that before attempting to stretch the sleeping cocoon in a direction it is not meant to stretch.

  “I bet I can step over to that satellite and back.”

  “How?”

  “In energy form I am always maintaining my form as a standing wave, with very little movement compared to what my energies are capable of.”

  “Can you stop yourself? At the speed of light, you would be at the satellite in nanoseconds. You could overshoot into…” She checks their current orbital position. “… into the Indian Ocean.”

  “My reflexes speed up to match my speed. Or at least it seems so when I move around the station.” He makes an exhalation sound in
her earphones. “Only one way to find out.”

  Yuri directs himself away before she can make any more protests. In no appreciable time he is outside the station, controlling his movement to stop when outside the station. There is a slight problem; the station continues to move, leaving him behind.

  “Damn physics,” Yuri mutters over the radio wavelength.

  “Are you all right, lover?” whispers back Anya. “You don’t register on the radar.”

  “Not a problem,” Yuri reassures Anya, and himself. Using his own radar energies, he locates the speeding satellite and moves to its vicinity. As he appears next to the satellite, it moves on past him, but he can read the lettering on its side. Another Russian bird. He has no idea what it is.

  Yuri looks up with his radar. He attempts to use optical energies but space, even in the vicinity of Earth, is too big. The station is already kilometers farther along in its orbit. Using radar, he identifies its radar cross section and moves in its direction. He arrives and watches it move away from him. He speeds to the spot on the orbit just ahead of the station and it moves over and absorbs him. He stops himself once inside and realizes he is, in fact, constantly moving so as to stay with the station. “Damn physics,” he repeats.

  Anya chuckles over the comm-link.

  After that, Yuri gets more and more daring. An attempt to visit a geostationary communications satellite almost kills him. He returns to the station missing almost a third of his mass. Anya calls him “Blanket Man” as he huddles in her cocoon with her, imbibing several tubes of protein. “The Van Allen belts are murderous,” he explains when he can gather his thoughts and stop shaking. “I think I can get through them, but I have to be careful just what energy form I am using. It’s a good thing my reaction time speeds up with the speed I am traveling, or I would have been cut to shreds.”

  But within a few months, Yuri figures out what energies to switch to and is freely darting all over near Earth orbit. One trip to the Moon is exciting, but he has a hard time finding the station when he returns, so he only attempts one lunar trip.

  When he comes back from his Moon trip he is unusually closemouthed about it. Anya finds that he occasionally stares out at the Moon from one of the few portholes on the station with a puzzled expression on his face. All he says is, “The Moon has its own secrets.”

  Unlike the common practice for space crews, Constantin and Anya are just left in the station. Very few Star Gifted have the gift of being able to live with intense radiation. Besides the automated Progress capsules, an occasional Soyuz docks with the station. Mostly the crews are there to take care of some maintenance that telemetry showed is needed and neither Constantin nor Anya are checked on. On these occasions, Yuri keeps in the infrared spectrum, but he cannot resist the occasional sudden appearance and disappearance. The station soon gets a reputation of being haunted. Constantin grows more nervous as he hears the rumors, though Yuri avoids him adroitly after all of his practice. In 1983, Constantin insists that one of the visitors take Yuri’s space suit back to Earth.

  By this time, Premier Brezhnev dies after a long illness and a new face comes to the General Secretaryship, Yuri Andropov—former head of the KGB. The first speech Andropov gives extolls hard work and commitment to socialist goals. Constantin sneers and goes back to sleep, after drinking a bottle of vodka smuggled to him by a visiting cosmonaut.

  Fifteen months later, Constantin toasts Andropov’s death. The new leader, Chernenko, reverts back to Brezhnev’s policy of ignoring problems. Constantin gets drunk on the entire vodka ration for the station. But a year later, in 1985, Chernenko is as dead as Brezhnev and Andropov, and this new young leader Gorbachev is talking reform.

  And as Constantin sneers at Mikhail Gorbachev’s concepts of glasnost and perestroika, suddenly Earth’s sky is full of Swarmling fungi.

  “At last!” exults Constantin. He stays up for three whole days, sitting at the 20 mm cannon control console, looking for targets. He looks, and he looks, and looks again. Some drifting fungal scraps get within range, and are savaged by the 20 mm shot, but the entire Swarm event pretty much passes the Almaz station by. As far as Yuri can tell, the Swarm isn’t even avoiding the station. It just never puts any Swarmlings in the station’s orbit.

  Yuri, on the other hand, dives into the fight against the Swarm. He rapidly discovers that he can project his energy, but it takes a lot out of him, literally. It is more effective to just penetrate a Swarm warrior and turn his energy to heat. It still takes energy, but much less, and it is no danger since the very physical Swarmers cannot touch him.

  Initially he concentrates on the Swarm landing in Siberia, trying to defend three gulags near the landing site. Still in contact with Anya, only her warning gets him out of the area when the nuclear attack on the Swarm annihilates that landing site and the three gulags. Yuri can feel the radiation tearing at his current form and shifts. No telling what being in the actual explosion would do to him, and he is not anxious to find out.

  Tapping into the defense radio net, he speeds to the Ukraine, where the Swarm is attacking a much more populated area—unlikely to be the target of a nuclear strike.

  Winged Swarmlings are orbiting the area, fighting the aircraft and very few flying Soviet and Warsaw Pact Star Gifted. Charging into the midst of the fray, he keeps to his infrared form and burns several Swarmlings from within. At least one time he and his victim are targeted by a heat-seeking missile, but the physical explosion just shreds his target without affecting his immaterial body. Diving into another Swarmling, he applies his heat energy and suddenly this target disintegrates, and almost so does Yuri. The energy blast that hits him on several energy levels almost scatters his photons forever, but he manages to pull back enough to keep going.

  Falling next to him is a tall, brown-haired man in an electric-blue ski suit. Suddenly glowing with light energy, he turns into a laser beam that fries yet another Swarmling. Becoming human again, he looks up, finds a higher target, and turns into a killing laser. Yuri remembers seeing the man in a smuggled copy of Aces! magazine. He’s an American “ace” called Pulse, who has the ability to turn into a laser. What is he doing in the Ukraine? Oh well, he is certainly blasting Swarmlings.

  Forming his visible body, displaying his cosmonaut uniform, Yuri hovers in midair and watches Pulse in action. With his finely attuned ability to perceive all electromagnetic wavelengths, he can see that the ambient light for a couple of kilometers around Pulse gets a bit dimmer every time he turns into a laser. The American is taking his light energy from the photons around him to allow himself to become a laser bolt. I wish I could do that, thinks Yuri.

  Almost depleted of energy after that friendly fire strike from Pulse, Yuri projects himself to a staging area for the defenders and walks into a mess tent in his visible form, now wearing the formal uniform of a Soviet Air Force captain. Momentarily baffled by the problem of actually picking up a food tray, he uses hand signals to indicate to a server that he should fill up a tray with something from each food tub and bring it to an empty table in the far reaches of the tent. Shooing the server away after his food is placed on the table, he sits and finally reverts to his material form, a much diminished, naked Flat Man. In the shadows of the tent, he eats his meal, assumes light form again, and gestures to the servers to bring more. They do, and leave at his urging. He sits to eat again.

  “You are really putting that away,” says a voice across the table from him. The words are in English, which Yuri is not fluent in. He looks up from his plates to see Pulse settling into the opposite chair with his own loaded tray. The blue ski suit he is using as a costume leaves an afterimage in Yuri’s eyes.

  “Do you always fight in the nude?” the man persists.

  “No English,” responds Yuri. He wonders what the American is doing in the Ukraine, but apparently he can travel at the speed of light and decided to come help out. Nice of him, but Yuri doesn’t need the exposure—particularly since he’s in his Flat Man form without clo
thes.

  “What’s your name?” persists the American.

  Good question. He needs something to identify himself and can’t use his real name. Oh well, since the station is rumored to be haunted anyway … “Zvezdnyy prizrak,” he responds. At the ace’s look of bewilderment, he thinks for a minute and translates: “Star Ghost.” He smiles at the American and quickly stuffs the rest of the stew and rolls into his mouth, ignoring Pulse’s follow-up questions. Even as he is chewing the last morsels he stands, converts momentarily to his uniformed visible form again, bows to Pulse, then shifts to X-rays and heads back to the sky.

  Yuri makes trips back to the station when he can. Constantin is getting more and more frustrated. Yuri notes that the Soyuz that Lead Man and Many Toes came up to the station in is locked to Almaz 4, and there are two Progress resupply capsules at Almaz 5 and Almaz 6. One capsule docked is reasonable since it takes time to unload them, but why are there two? Yuri puts it down to Constantin’s laziness and Anya’s disinclination to do all the work.

  The fight against the intelligent Swarmlings is harrowing, but for the most part they still can’t touch Yuri. He starts showing up on news videos, in his cosmonaut jumpsuit image. He has to become visible more often as more and more Star Gifted with powers that could affect him are getting into the fight. At one point, Yuri has to chase a Swarmling masquerading as Gorbachev through the Kremlin. Fortunately the heat signature given off by the Swarmling imposter is entirely different from that of a human, and also fortunate that by this time he has enough of a good reputation that the presidential guards believe him.

  Finally, the Swarm invasion comes to an end. Yuri is on his way to the Swarm Mother to bring the fight to the origin of the problem when he sees a peculiarly shaped spacecraft leave the shell of the Mother. Checking the radio emissions, he pieces out the message that the Swarm Mother is neutralized. His grasp of English has improved with having to coordinate with the worldwide opposition to the Swarm.

  On his way back to the station, he also learns that Gorbachev has authorized Hero of the Soviet Union medals for the station crew and a higher award for the mysterious Captain Star Ghost. Yuri is amused that the name he gave the American ace has gotten common usage.