Joker Moon Page 4

  A little scandalous, the relationship between mistress and servant, but they were old enough now that no one really cared, not even the neighbors who might suspect their situation. Aarti and Yaj walked through the city together side by side—they went to see movies, browse bookstores, even shop for clothes. Yaj liked choosing saris for her, filmy creations, blues and greens and silvers that complemented her gray skin. I am too old for such nonsense, Yaj. He only smiled and added another sari to the pile on the counter. He was spending her money, of course, but that didn’t matter.

  Even better, there were children in the house. Yaj had a nephew, Suresh, and Suresh had a wife, Saila, and four children. Yaj persuaded Suresh to come live with them and take over the bulk of the gardening and housework, which had become difficult for him to manage. Saila cooked for them all, and the children ran wild through the halls of the house. It pleased Aarti immensely to think that this house might eventually be inherited by four lower-caste little ones whom her parents would scorn. A fitting return for their bigoted ways.

  Her only sorrow was that Yaj couldn’t go with her to the Moon. Aarti tried to take him with her—night after night, she wished herself there, her body curved around his in the wide four-poster bed, only to awake there, entirely alone. Her power had its limits, and this was one of them—it was for her alone. So she hadn’t told him of her power. In any case, it would surely be impossible for him to believe. As the months passed, she found herself sometimes staying home at night. Aarti was tired when she spent her nights on the Moon, and she wanted to squeeze as much pleasure out of her days with Yaj as possible.

  Aarti heard the riot on the news—the crash of broken windows, shouts and screams. All India Radio covered it—in Delhi, there would even be TV footage, but that didn’t reach to Bombay yet. Massive anti-joker riots had broken out in Jyotiba Phule Market, though no one seemed certain what had started it. When she went to the kitchen, Suresh and Saila were discussing the violence in hushed tones. The children were still in school, thankfully.

  “Hundreds dead!” Suresh said as he chopped onions, tears streaming down his face, as they always did.

  “Thousands,” Saila said. She pounded the massive pestle into the wide mortar, grinding chilies for the week’s meals. “It started when one of them tried to go to temple, interrupted a wedding.” She wouldn’t use the word “joker,” thought it wasn’t respectful, living in Aarti’s house. Aarti couldn’t give a damn, and had said so, but Saila didn’t believe her.

  Suresh frowned. “I thought it was a funeral.”

  “No, a wedding. Some big muckety-muck in Parliament, and his father—”

  “Saila, I’m sure it was a woman, maybe his mother—”

  She sighed. “Oh, hush, husband. You don’t know anything.”

  They fell silent when they realized Aarti was there, listening in the doorway. Then Saila offered quietly, “Don’t worry, mistress. No trouble will come here.”

  “If it does,” Suresh added stoutly, “the gates are very strong, and I will beat the goondas with a stick!”

  “Where is Yajnadar?” Aarti asked. She was trying to breathe steadily, to seem unafraid. Mustn’t scare the servants. “Shouldn’t he be home by now?”

  Saila and Suresh exchanged frowning looks. “He went shopping, but you don’t think—”

  Aarti snapped, “Call me when he arrives. As soon as he arrives.” Who did she think she was fooling? She went back to her cold bed to wait. Hours passed, until at last a policeman came to the door to confirm what they all already knew.

  The body was delivered that night. Saila set it up in the back garden, washed and dressed in clean clothes, surrounded by flowers. Aarti knelt beside it, night and day, for almost a week. She wanted to weep, but since her card had turned, she’d been unable to; Aarti’s eyes were burning and dry. Finally, she succumbed to Saila and Suresh’s pleas that she allow them to take the remains away for cremation. What remained? Nothing, really—Yajnadar was long gone.

  Had Yaj been killed by a joker who assumed he was anti-joker? Or murdered by a nat who thought Yaj had been protecting jokers? Aarti could imagine both scenarios; in fact, she imagined them in great detail, picturing every moment of those interactions. She went to the Moon at night and painted the scenes, acting them out, though in her versions she was there, intervening at the right moment to save him. Aarti should have been with him—he’d asked her to go with him that morning, invited her as he always did.

  “Come with me, love. I want you by my side.” Yaj had bent down, dropped a row of tender kisses across her forehead.

  “Do you have to go?” Aarti hated when he left her, counted the minutes until he returned.

  He chuckled. “I’m afraid I do, if we don’t want conflict in the household. If Saila didn’t insist on meat and fish for the children, I could live on rice and lentils forever. Rice and lentils and kisses.” Yaj kissed her lips then, first gently, then with a passionate heat that sent her arching up to meet him, her fingers clenching in the white sheets. Then he released her, smiling an invitation.

  Aarti didn’t want to face the crowds. She shifted instead so the sheet slid down a little, baring her breasts. “I’ll be here when you get back. Naked in this bed. Hungry.”

  “Witch. I’ll hurry,” Yaj said, and kissed her once more, and left.

  No more of his kisses, ever.

  Aarti couldn’t find the ones who murdered him. No way to know whether they’d been killed themselves, or swept up by the police, or simply disappeared in the streets, headed back to their homes. She had no power of perception here, no network of dust and instinct to tell her what had happened, what had gone so terribly wrong. All of her power was up there, on the Moon.

  The only way she could hurt them would be from up high. Oh, Aarti had thought of it. The night they took the body away to be burned, she fled to the sanctuary of her Moon. Fell to her knees in the thick dust, dragged her perfect brush-tip fingers through it, wishing that she could do more, feel more. Aarti wanted to breathe, wanted to sob her misery into the night, drown the Moon in a flood of grief.

  Aarti could crack the Moon in half, hurl pieces down, killing all of the humans, and herself with them. No way to fine-tune her aim, but surely she could take out Bombay, at least, be certain of getting every last rioter. Maybe most of Mother India. While she was at it, why not throw the whole Moon down, cause a global extinction event? Humans could slaughter an innocent, good man in the marketplace out of fear and hatred and sheer idiocy. Humans were too flawed to be worth saving; time to wipe the board clean, start over with fresh chalk.

  She was not so far gone. Not quite.

  But Aarti would reclaim the Moon, drive the vermin from it. If any other human came to her Moon, she would not hide between some veil of assumed morality. Yaj was beyond judging her now; she needed not worry about his good opinion. The Moon belonged to her, and if any dared to trespass upon it, Aarti would gladly see them burn. She would light the torch herself, with steady hands.

  Flat Man

  by Steve Perrin

  ALMAZ

  1979

  AS COSMONAUT PILOT LEONID Sumaroyov kills the last burst of the retro- rockets, Yuri Serkov flips off the straps holding him to the cosmonaut cradle modified to hold his virus-altered body. Yuri stretches his folded body out of the cradle, leaving him floating in midair between cradles and viewing ports.

  “Soyuz 22 has achieved assigned 350 km orbit.” Leonid reports back to Baikonur control, at the same time pushing Yuri away so he can look out to see if the other capsules are in place. They’re already on the radar screen, but Leonid only really trusts his eyes. “Please do not spread your fat ass all over the ports, Flat Man,” Leonid adds, this time with the mic off. The nat cosmonaut grimaces at his Soyuz-mate through his already flourishing mustache. Yuri ripples the offending body part in Leonid’s face and rotates himself away from the port. He’s entirely too used to the mocking nickname and intolerant snarl. The Takisian virus—or Star Gift
as the official Soviet line has it—makes his body shape twice as wide but only a third as deep as his fellow cosmonauts’. Some of his colleagues compare his hairless body form to Gumby, an American animated character, but Yuri refuses to see the cartoons. Despite his misshapen physique, he has a full set of organs and can maneuver weightlessly with the best of them, and he has some other advantages in weightless conditions.

  Spinning his body like a Catherine wheel and pushing off of the capsule’s overhead, Yuri brings his head to where he can join Leonid at eyeballing the rest of the capsules sharing their orbit.

  Three of the Almaz modules—numbered 3 through 5 because two previous individual stations had climbed to orbit, been used for a couple of years, then dived back into a fiery funeral—are already in orbit. Demerov and Olderov in Soyuz 21 had already tested 3 and 4 and reported the systems in good shape.

  “As long as we’re in the neighborhood”—Yuri folds himself into his custom space suit—“we might as well check out Almaz 5.” The smell of the relatively unused space suit is a temporary relief from the already ripe interior of the Soyuz capsule. Sumaroyov reports their intent to Baikonur and Soyuz 21 and wiggles his Pingvin-clad body into his suit, and then the two check each other’s systems.

  Sucking the air out of the capsule into the air tanks, then opening their hatch, Yuri latches his line to the anchor point on the capsule and launches himself toward the nearest capsule, emblazoned with the number 5. “Good setup, Leon,” he radios back to the pilot who put them so close to the capsule.

  “Just my duty to the Soviet state,” responds Leonid in a not-quite-mocking tone. Whatever the Ukrainian’s real attitude toward the Soviet Union, Leonid took pride in his piloting.

  Almaz 5 holds the communications gear and the photography platform. Entering through the posterior lock, the two cosmonauts make sure all the pieces are in place, breaking out tables and shelves that had been folded for the launch. Yuri unpacks a camera and takes a few pictures of the assembled capsules and the camera seems to be in good shape. There’s no power to the capsule—the nuclear reactor intended to power the station is coming with the fourth and final unit.

  The two spacewalk back to their Soyuz 22 capsule, refill it with the already used air, and settle down to rest for the next day’s activities. It will take at least two days for the Baikonur spaceport crews to prepare the last two parts of their project, and that is working at incredible speed. The whole Soviet space station project has been delayed years while they worked out just how to launch so many payloads in such a short time.

  Leonid is cordial but uncommunicative. He combs his beard, reviews the next day’s instructions without his usual sotto voce comments that generally invite listeners to pitch in, reports their status to Baikonur, and puts on his sleep mask. Yuri doesn’t expect anything more. As the engineer, he is responsible for the connections that would turn the space station segments into the mighty Almaz Space Defense Station. The connection is his innovation and justifies his inclusion onto the team, but the other cosmonauts still have much of the usual nat prejudice against Star Gifts—even though he has been working with them for more than five years. He sighs and looks over his procedures for the central “tent” he devised. Soon his unique whistling snores join those of Leonid.

  Two mornings later, a combination of cosmonaut muscle and judicious use of the station’s maneuvering rockets arrange the three modules in a splayed fan arc with posteriors to the bottom of the arc and the anteriors pointing out like a fan.

  Yuri watches from his capsule as the station’s modules pass by. After all the effort to get them ready to be connected, the arc rotates right next to his capsule. Also, as it happens, the 20 mm guns affixed to each module seem to keep pointing in his direction when the fan rotation takes them there. Leonid Sumaroyov mutters under his breath in Ukrainian every time he sees one of the barrels go by.

  “They are not really aimed at us,” Yuri says with a smile.

  Sumaroyov looks at him with a sardonic grin. “What do you mean ‘us,’ Flat Man?”

  Yuri has long since become resigned that his fellow cosmonauts are often jealous of his adaptations to a space environment. And they don’t know the extent of it. Some aspects of his condition he is even attempting to hide from his Star City masters, though he can never be sure they don’t know everything and are just hiding it from him. Yuri prefers to think of it as a game.

  The cosmonauts cannot take up residence in the station because the modules are working on battery power that has to be conserved. The on-station cosmonauts wait for the fourth and final Almaz that is bringing up the largely experimental Kosmos-952 nuclear reactor. That and the third and final Soyuz with two more crewmen, including Mission Commander Andrian Grigoryevich “Iron Man” Nikolayev, are due the next day as the crews in Baikonur work steadily on the fastest turnarounds for a space mission ever so far.

  Yuri worries about the timing. Arranging multiton station segments, even in weightlessness, is tiring work in a space suit. Even resting, the cosmonauts use a lot of oxygen. Yuri’s oxygen dependency is less than normal cosmonauts’, but the capsules carry only so much oxygen and the module supply should not be tapped until the station activates. If a winter blizzard shut down Baikonur they might have to scrub the mission for lack of oxygen.

  But so far the schedule has only slipped by five hours because of some weather back in Kazakhstan, where the rockets launch. Yuri has heard rumors that the Soviet Union has a weather-controlling Star Gift called Father Winter working on keeping launch days free. Perhaps it is true.

  Olderov in Soyuz 21 reports. “Orbit adjustment flares seen south 275. I think it’s the last Almaz module.”

  Sumaroyov touches the adjustment jets and the capsule swings so he can look in the right direction. Yuri looks over the pilot’s shoulder. “Yes, it’s adjusting per the program. Two more blasts and it should be right up with us.”

  “Unless it decides to ram us,” Yuri responds. The Salyut program had been plagued with misfiring rendezvous programming.

  “If it does, the chief designer will rip the programmers a new programming port.” Yuri grins at Sumaroyov’s witticism. The chief designer had died in 1966 and only then had the cosmonauts learned his real name, Sergei Karolev. He had been notorious for his responses to nonfunctioning hardware and software. He wasn’t very forgiving of malfunctioning cosmonauts and support crew, either. Now the cosmonaut corps invoke his old title as the ultimate punisher of errors in the program.

  The final module follows the program as best it can. Yuri has to spacewalk to it to attach a line and winch it into proper formation with the other modules, maneuvering the four modules into a roughly cruciform formation. By the time he is finished the Soyuz 23 has also arrived, carrying Mission Commander Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev, the third man in space and the cosmonaut who lasted longest in the infamous isolation chamber—which got him his Iron Man nickname. (Yuri had been pulled from the chamber after five days and got a pat on the shoulder. As far as anyone was concerned, he was still Flat Man.) With him is cosmonaut Georgy Grechko, who pioneered use of the Orlan space suit they are all using—though Yuri’s is highly modified. Nikolayev pronounces the preliminaries as properly completed and the team rests for four hours before starting the next, and hopefully final, steps of attaching the modules to one another and starting up the reactor to power the station.

  The second man in Olderov’s Soyuz 21 is Yuri Demerov, a nuclear engineer. He and Yuri have the job of setting up the Kosmos nuclear reactor that will power the station. Previous stations used solar power, but some military genius rightly pointed out that the solar sails made easy targets for an invader who wanted to cripple the station but leave the contents available for later use. Yuri is not convinced making it necessary to target the station itself improves the survivability of anyone in the station, but no one asked him.

  The two Yuris trained together for six months, but now they make the usual comments about men named Yuri bein
g attracted to the space program for the benefit of the other team members. Yuri Gagarin has a lot to answer for.

  First all of the cosmonauts maneuver the modules into the cruciform layout for the station, all posterior locks pointed toward the crux of the cross shape. Then the two Yuris enter the new station module, Almaz 6, and begin to unpack the small reactor. Yuri was surprised at the small size when they began training on the assembly, back at Star City. The cooling hardware and the shielding carry more mass than the reactor itself, largely due to the need for the special cooling fluid that the system has to recycle. All the parts are brand new and very polished and carefully labeled. Assembly goes quickly, even in space suits. Yuri notes apprehensively how many parts have “experimental” code numbers.

  “No problem,” Demerov responds. “It just means the parts worked so well that they didn’t bother to make production parts, they are just using the pieces meant for testing the models they didn’t have to fabricate after all.” Yuri is a spaceship maintenance engineer, not a nuclear physicist, but he has the distinct feeling that his fellow Yuri quotes the Party line.

  Soon enough, Demerov declares that Yuri has done everything he can toward helping get the reactor ready for the job; Demerov only needs to make some connections and throw a switch. “Don’t you have something else to do?” he finishes. As it happens Yuri devised the simple “tent” of fabric and cable that will connect the posterior docking ports of all four modules, turning them into a cruciform unit with their anterior docking ports extending out to receive future crew replacements, Progress resupply capsules, and any other space-going vehicles with the right docking mechanism. Naturally, the fixed 20 mm cannons guard each of the four anterior ports.