The Dark Side (11 page)

So that's the reason they're so exceptionally sensitive about upsetting the telescopic readings—because any sustained breakdown might result in a legal challenge to Brass's claim on the whole territory. Though even if this is explained to you—by an unusually candid guide, perhaps—you might choose to be skeptical, remembering all those rumors that Brass has worked out some secret deal with the United Nations Security Council, that he's blackmailed presidents and prime ministers, or that he's simply deployed his vast underworld connections to bribe and threaten lawmakers—all so the official status of Purgatory, no joke intended, can remain permanently in limbo.

In any case, after a couple of hours of this lugubrious journey—the sun, you might notice, doesn't seem to have shifted at all—you'll come to another crater rim: a crater within a crater, as it were. Much smaller than Störmer itself and festooned with doors and windows, this is your first sight of Sin, Purgatory's roofed-over, Monaco-sized city. Here you'll be shunted through more airlocks, disgorged into another cheesily decorated processing
center, and directed down lamplit tunnels and up fast-moving elevators to one of the many hotels built into the so-called “Sin Rim”—the crater's northern wall.

Most of these hotels have Babylonian names—Harran, Ninurta, Hermon—though some of the more recent ones show a more New Testament inspiration: Revelation, Fair Haven, Gethsemane. You'll be pleasantly surprised, in any event, by the size of your suite. Even if your budget is mid-range, you'll find a spacious room with suitably large furniture, impressive decorations, and a capacious bed with a heavily weighted duvet. If you open the minibar, you'll find all the usual beverages, alcoholic and otherwise. If you call down for a club sandwich, you'll find it not much different than similar fare on Earth. And if you turn on the TV, you'll find a large selection of (censored) channels from Earth, along with the local news and movie networks (
Brass
gets repeated showings).

Should you be in town for an unmonitored conference you'll be pleased to learn that all the major hotels have so-called “speakeasies”—lead-walled, soundproofed cells where external monitoring is impossible and electronic sweeps are conducted regularly. Purgatory is particularly proud of its reputation as a surveillance-free zone. Many high-ranking diplomats and businessmen come regularly to Farside to use these speakeasies, and many world-shaping agreements are said to have been thrashed out within the confines of Sin.

But inevitably, armed with a complimentary map—no GPS devices are permitted on Farside—you'll want to explore the city. If you still haven't gotten your moonlegs you might elect to hire a motorized scooter or to strap on some hydraulic walk-assist devices. You'll be relieved to discover, in any case, that most of the tourist districts have heavily padded surfaces, and that the
windows, should you fall against them, are made of lunar glass—the most unbreakable glass in existence.

In the arcades and galleries around the major hotels you'll see countless stores selling Purgatory's best-known souvenir items. These include authentic Pandia watches (those moon-faced wristwatches, precision-made by fugitive jewelers, that are high-priced collector's items on Earth), the local postage stamps (even if it's only for investment, you'll want a few packs of those), and of course Sin's famous multicolored crystal figurines (so delicate that they look like they'd break apart in your hand, yet so tough that they won't shatter even if you hurl them against a wall).

It's only when you venture a little deeper, beyond the malls, that you'll find the casinos and gambling dens, the hash houses, the fight clubs, the sex shows, the smorgasbord brothels, the main-street shops where you can buy brain boosters and transcendental drugs over the counter, no questions asked, and the deep-discount surgical centers where you can get your whole body “renovated” in under five hours.

You'll inevitably notice that many of the city's citizens—“Sinners”—seem to have undergone extensive cosmetic procedures themselves. Some, indeed, bear striking resemblances to old movie stars, supermodels, and other celebrities. Most seem wearily tolerant of tourists, but a few are openly disdainful and sometimes even aggressive. To more than a few tourists this is part of Purgatory's curious charm. The gambling district in particular is full of old-style saloons where you can swiftly find yourself in the middle of a bar fight, if that's your thing, but you should be aware that Purgatory's official hospitals, unlike the storefront surgeries, charge exorbitant prices for emergency treatments.

Of course, it could be that you've come to Sin not for the knife fights, the combat sports, the kinky sex, the radical medical
procedures, or even the chance to conduct an unmonitored conversation. It could be that you just want to see the city in all its glory. And even if you're a veteran traveler, it's still a bracing moment when you catch your first sight of the whole thing, the so-called “Hornet's Nest” or “Pressure Cooker.” You'll see a huge roof crisscrossed with girders and catwalks, pipes hung with vines and flowers, massive halogen lamp arrays that dim and brighten arbitrarily (to simulate cloud cover and sunlight), great oxidized brass pillars wreathed in spiraling foliage, geysering fountains and garden-stuffed terraces, huge statues of dragons and saints, and a ground-level maze of cafés, shops, and moonbrick homes—“ancient Mesopotamia by way of pre-Revolution Havana,” as one travel writer called it.

You'll see a lot of Babylonian influences intertwined with cathedral Gothic. The architecture, indeed, sometimes seems to bleed from enameled bricks, cruciform tablets, and mustard-colored columns at one end of the street to churchlike plaster, lancet windows, and ashlar blocks at the other. The ornamentation is war chariots and striding bulls here, weeping saints and devotional statuary there. The cafés and nightclubs are called Kish, Ur, and Belshazzar's Feast on one corner, and The Cloister, The Reliquary, and the Eye of the Needle on the next. The music too—that which drifts from dark doors and mounted speakers—is sometimes ancient harps and tambourines, sometimes cathedral organs and monk chants. In short, you can see it with your eyes, you can hear it with your ears: ecclesiastical chic slowly conquering the pagan trappings of old Purgatory.

In the very center of town, reaching up to the ceiling girders and visible from all quarters of Sin, is the famous Temple of the Seven Spheres. A huge ziggurat studded with lunar gemstones and paved in reflective tiles, this is Sin's Louvre and Eiffel Tower
in one—a must-see observation point, a creditable museum of the solar system, and a fixture of Purgatorial postcards and tourist guides. But it's invariably crowded with sightseers and aggressive hawkers, and best visited off-peak.

You might be surprised, meanwhile, by the city's weather: It's consistently warm and often uncomfortably humid, even tropical. And since water vapor rises more swiftly in lunar gravity, and the molecules knit together more readily, natural precipitation is frequent within the Pressure Cooker. But the raindrops are both bigger and lighter than they are on Earth and, rather than hitting the ground with any force, just splat like slow-motion water balloons, releasing large volumes of liquid. It's a surreal experience, to walk through balls of rain in Sin. It's even more surreal during a thunderstorm, when lightning sizzles and flashes across the ceiling like Saint Elmo's fire.

You'll probably be taken aback too by the quantity of animal and insect life. You'll see rats, of course, but also dogs and cats and squirrels and even a fox or two. There will be birds singing and squawking in the palm trees—parrots especially, which were smuggled into the city on Brass's orders and have multiplied exponentially. You'll occasionally stand on cockroaches and beetles and get bitten by mosquitoes and fleas, and in the less salubrious districts you'll certainly have to wave away flies. All these creatures, even the vermin, are tolerated and even encouraged in Sin, in order to make people feel more at home—and to avoid the trenchant sterility of places like Doppelmayer Base.

The shopping district of Shamash, the medical district of Marduk, the red-light district of Sordello, and the gambling and entertainment district of Kasbah are all in the northern half of Sin. In the middle of the city there are manicured gardens around the Temple of the Seven Spheres, giving way to a buffer zone of
overgrown parkland through which flows a filthy watercourse, the Lethe. Then, on the southern side, you'll find the palace district of Kasr, the residential quarter of Ishtar, and the industrial zone of Nimrod. The last is so nondescript that it's not even marked on most maps and tourist guides. Ishtar, officially off-limits to tourists, is best overviewed in the early morning from the artificial hill that divides it from Kasbah. You'll see five blocks of crumbling moonbrick houses, a good deal of refuse and smoke, much washing hanging out to dry, and, if you happen to be looking at the wrong time, probably a resident making obscene gestures or mooning you (mooning is suitably popular on the Moon). Kasr, on the western side of Nimrod, is named after the huge palace, built into the southern rim, that's the Sin residence of Fletcher Brass—though all you'll be able to see from a distance is an ornately decorated Babylonian facade. The Patriarch of Purgatory himself still makes an occasional appearance on its largest balcony, his amplified voice booming across the hedges, fountains, mazes, and statuary of Processional Park, the regal gardens that further separate the palace from the multitudes.

For some years Brass's daughter, QT, lived in a wing of this palace as well. QT—short for “Cutie”—is the daughter of a Chicago reporter who thirty-one years ago had a brief fling with Fletcher Brass. Raised by a maternal uncle after her mother committed suicide, QT was reportedly sexually molested at sixteen by her uncle's financial adviser—a man who was later found trussed up in an abandoned warehouse with his major bones smashed. Was QT responsible? Not officially—the whole thing was pinned on one of the man's former business associates—but QT didn't stick around till the music stopped. Before she could be interviewed by the police, she packed a suitcase and hightailed it to Purgatory, where she was welcomed by her father with open arms—the only
one of his four existing children to have made a permanent move to his lunar fiefdom.

But now it seems there's a schism—if your sources are good, you might have heard of that too. And in surveying Brass's palace you might wonder where QT currently lives. You'd probably assume she's been relegated to a smaller palace of her own. Or perhaps to a mansion in high-security Zabada, the exclusive enclave that's connected to Sin by an underground tunnel. So you might be surprised—even shocked—to hear that QT lives in a two-story place in Ishtar—a house you might even have seen when you overlooked the district from the hill. Security there is minimal, but such is the respect that she generates among Sinners that she trusts that all eyes are “looking out for her.” And in truth, she doesn't spend much time at home anyway. She very often sleeps in her office, which is located in the Sin Rim next to the luxury hotels.

QT is said to be ambitious. Obstinate. Focused. Ruthless. The peach, as they say, doesn't fall far from the tree. But somehow she's got something that her father, for all his magnetism, always lacked: She always finds time for a visitor, no matter how lowly, provided his purpose is not entirely frivolous. And that's why, right now, she's dropped everything—rescheduled her whole afternoon's itinerary—to welcome the new police recruit, Lieutenant Damien Justus.

Who's come, apparently, on a matter of the greatest importance.

Y
OU'VE COME ABOUT THE
murder of Otto Decker.”

She's sitting in a chair of burgundy leather. She's taller than she would have been had she remained on Earth but still no more than average height. She's buxom, like all female lunatics, but she's not flaunting any cleavage. She's blond—natural, as far as Justus can tell—and winsome, in a way that more than justifies her given name. She's wearing a stiff blue jacket and skirt with a white blouse, like something you'd expect on a modern-day nun. Her office itself, from its somber decorations to the mullioned stained-glass windows that overlook Sin, has the air of a mother superior's office in a convent.

“You don't waste any time,” Justus observes.

“Have you read the Brass Code, Lieutenant?”

“You mean the—”

“My father's laws—his little morsels of wisdom. That's right.
You're probably familiar with the published ones. Some of them, let's face it, are quite insane. But they've been influential on many people. Many,
many
people. And one of his better laws is this: ‘Time is the most undervalued stock in the world.' And he's right, of course he's right. He's so right you'd think it doesn't even need to be said, yeah? And yet there are still people who kid themselves. People who still believe, for instance, that you can't
buy
time. That everyone from the pharaohs to their peasants is given the same number of hours in a day. Well, that's not true and it's never been true. The rich live longer. They get surgery when they need it. They don't wait in queues. They don't have to sleep near noisy neighbors. They don't cook, they don't clean, they don't iron their clothes. They don't even have to raise their own kids or walk their dogs. They have space for
three times
as much experience as most people. And yet they still waste it. They can't help it. They become obsessed with irrelevancies. They marry wrong. They pursue quixotic schemes. My father is a prime example of that. But me, I'm a little different. I always make sure I've got a reservoir of time at my disposal and I treat it as untouchable equity. I don't waste it. I don't trade it. I keep it in a no-risk account with compounding interest. And one of the ways I do that is by getting to the point immediately. Even if that puts a nose or two out of joint. I don't mind. I'm just determined not to waste time. In fact, I'm wasting time right now by explaining all this to you.”