The Dark Side (8 page)

“Did you get my presents?”

“Who's speaking, please?”

“It's Fletcher Brass.” From the calypso music in the background he seems to be calling from somewhere tropical.

“Fletcher Brass.” The bureaucrat suppresses his annoyance. “What can I do for you, Mr. Brass?”

“You can thank me, for a start.”

“Thank you?”

“For those gifts you just received. You can't say I didn't put in some effort.”

“Well, we already have enough flags here, thank you.”

“Oh really? Do you have a flag as valuable as that?”

“A flag is a flag.”

Brass kind of chuckles. “And the golf balls?”

“I don't play golf, sorry.”

“You don't need to play golf to admire those balls. They might be the most valuable balls in the entire solar system.”

“Yes, well . . .”

“You just think about it,” Brass says. “And call me when you're ready. But in the meantime, it might be advisable to get some insurance—and
quickly
.”

So the bureaucrat returns to his paperwork, trying to banish the whole thing from his mind. But then the most ridiculous possibility occurs to him—so ridiculous that he's able to dismiss it almost immediately. Only it won't go away, and keeps buzzing around, to the point that he can't concentrate anymore. So he makes some phone calls, verifies a few things, consults some data—and then, trembling, barely able to speak, he makes a return call to Fletcher Brass.

“
How—how did you get them?
”

Brass, in the middle of drinking something, chuckles. “I'm not at liberty to disclose that,” he says. “But more importantly, do I get the contract?”

“Yes,” breathes the bureaucrat, “you get the contract.”

Well, that was the story, anyway. When a later expedition found Alan Shepard's golf balls still in the Sea of Tranquility, exactly where the astronaut had belted them in 1971, Brass was able to claim that he'd simply “deposited them back in the scrub by the fairway, as any ethical golfer would do.” And when a television crew ventured to the Apollo 11 landing site and discovered a Stars and Stripes that was not quite the pristine specimen Brass had supposedly sent in the velvet-lined case—the fabric was discolored by decades of cosmic rays, thermal cycling, and levitating dust—well, he shrugged that off with another semi-plausible explanation: that the flag had been in such lamentable condition when he'd found it that he'd taken the liberty of giving it a “cosmetic cleanup” before sending it on to Washington. And naturally it had “gotten a little dirty again” since he put it back in place.

Justus himself doesn't give the story much credence. He knows that interesting anecdotes are one of the most corruptible currencies in the world. So Justus has seen the flag-and-golf-ball story, in all its dubious glory, in Brass's autobiographies
Shining Brass
and
The Brass Age
, in the authorized biographies
Polished Brass
and
Gleaming Brass
, and even in the billion-dollar biopic
Brass
—the four-hour feature film shot on Purgatory soundstages and starring, in the title role, the wife-murdering Welsh thespian Lionel Haynes (happy to undergo extensive cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble the man who was offering him refuge).

Needless to say, the anecdote does not appear in the unauthorized biographies—all those muckraking testimonies written
by bitter journalists, ex-wives, and disaffected business partners:
Balls of Brass
,
Tarnished Brass
,
Corroded Brass,
and so on. In fact, the disparity between the official and unofficial versions would leave readers struggling to work out how much is real and what is wholesale fabrication.

The authorized versions usually begin with Fletcher Brass, the whiz-kid seventeen-year-old, going public with his very first business venture—carbonated coconut-milk drinks in distinctive brass-colored cans. The unauthorized versions meanwhile claim to prove, with documented evidence, that Brass's venture capitalist father actually underwrote the whole business as a tax dodge, that its supposed success was wildly exaggerated anyway, and that the original recipes were stolen from a struggling Filipino soft-drink manufacturer (which subsequently sued and settled out of court).

The authorized versions continue by covering Brass's other early success stories: aquafarms, holo-movies, luxury hotels, ultrasonic jets, extravagantly retro airships, brass-fitted cruise ships. The unauthorized versions focus instead on his unpleasant habit of bootstrapping fledgling companies with poorly paid, geed-up employees, reaping a lot of early publicity with bold statements and dazzling stunts, and then selling off the entire enterprise at a huge profit to some starry-eyed conglomerate—often the same rival company he'd mercilessly ridiculed on the way up.

The authorized versions portray him as a fearless adventurer and thrill seeker who somehow found enough time to also be a champion of various social issues, a major sponsor of environmental campaigns, and a generous contributor to popular charities. The unauthorized versions insist that everything, all those eye-catching stunts and altruistic charity drives, were shamelessly contrived for publicity purposes alone, and were no match for all
the rampant price-fixing, insider trading, jury tampering, industrial espionage, and bribery of public officials.

The authorized versions find little space for any of Brass's romantic interests other than his second wife—the one who died in a boating accident—while the unauthorized versions devote pages and pages to his affairs with bikini models, porn stars, and other men's wives.

The authorized versions cover “The Brass Code,” his notorious twenty-page list of business ethics and philosophies, by listing only the more socially acceptable entries:
If the river bends, think about bending the river
;
Acknowledge when you're beaten, and never be beaten again
;
If you fall into a hole, turn it into a strategy
. The unauthorized versions, meanwhile, make great hay of Brass's secret code, the one shared with only his most trusted, high-ranking deputies:
If someone fucks you over, fuck them under
;
Shareholders are like nuns just begging to be screwed
;
You can't make an omelette without cracking a few skulls.

The authorized versions are especially rhapsodic when it comes to Brass's contributions to lunar development, crediting him with practically everything: the first m-train, the first solar arrays, the first operational mines, the first fiber-optic cables, the first emergency-supply depots, the first reliable ground maps, the first permanent settlements. The unauthorized versions, while grudgingly admitting that his place in lunar history is assured, contend that all these efforts, despite Brass's convenient amnesia, were underwritten by generous grants, tax breaks, mining rights, and incentive schemes.

The authorized versions claim that Brass was forced to find refuge on Farside owing to an outrageous campaign of vilification generated by rival businessmen with inordinate media influence. The unauthorized versions are more specific, identifying one scandal in particular that brought him down: three tons of
spent rods from a nuclear power station, fired into space by one of Brass's underfinanced waste-disposal companies, fell back to Earth—into the middle of the Amazon basin, no less—leaving thousands of acres of virgin rainforest irradiated, rare species poisoned and mutated, and two thousand natives dead.

The authorized versions end with Fletcher Brass as a triumphant exile, presiding over a unique and vibrant fiefdom; the biopic fades out with him sitting imperiously in a brass throne, wordlessly admiring the great lunar metropolis he's built from the ground up. The unauthorized versions are content to spend their final chapters covering Purgatory's lawlessness and corruption, the gang wars, the summary executions, the internecine conflicts, and the sordid rumors of underhanded deals with various terrestrial governments.

Nevertheless, it's the film's fade-out—the empire builder, good or bad—that's the last image of Brass that anyone remembers. It's certainly the image Brass himself designed to linger. There was a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to kidnap him shortly after the movie's release—as fabricated as any of his world-record attempts, if the cynics are right—which seemed to justify his withdrawal from the limelight while consolidating his new reputation as a recluse. It isn't that he's completely unseen—he still appears at press conferences and public spectacles every now and then, waving Mao-like to the multitudes—but the secrecy proved enough to magnify the myth, to make him even more larger-than-life, and to generate a few more wild conspiracy theories along the way.

Dynamic, heroic, visionary, inspiring, indefatigable, tragically misunderstood, and maliciously envied? Or narcissistic, deluded, irresponsible, grandiose, psychotically greedy, and strangely tragic?

Justus doesn't know. He read as much about Brass as he could before coming to Purgatory but he doesn't necessarily believe any of it. So he doesn't know if Brass is a charming rogue or a borderline psychopath. Nor does he discount the possibility that, in over twenty years of living on the Moon, the man has completely changed—for better or worse.

Justus tries not to be influenced by vested interests. He always makes up his own mind. And that's what he's intending to do, right now, as he prepares to meet Fletcher Brass for the first time.

J
USTUS HAS CERTAINLY BEEN
in the presence of famous people before: singers, movie stars, talk-show hosts, billionaires, mega-chefs, celebrity gangsters. Born performers, most of them. People who can charm and manipulate effortlessly, without even seeming to try. Because they know instinctively how to sell a package, to project an aura, to seem like creatures from some distant planet where people don't perspire or get pimples.

Fletcher Brass is like that. Presently he's holding a press conference on the progress of his imminent voyage to Mars. Behind him is a shimmering photomural showing images of the Red Planet, his Purgatorial rocket base, and his huge space vehicle,
Prospector II
. Owing to the microgravity and lack of atmosphere it's much cheaper and more efficient to launch spacecraft from the Moon than it is from Earth, and this is a point that he keeps
hammering home, either to address queries about the excessive costs or just to rub it in the faces of his terrestrial enemies.

“People ask why private enterprise is doing this, and not some government space agency,” he says smoothly. “And I just remind them of the year 1903. It was in that year that Dr. Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution, was awarded fifty thousand taxpayer dollars—a huge sum at the time—to develop and construct a steam-powered aircraft called the aerodrome. Perhaps you've never heard of it. Perhaps you've never heard of Dr. Langley either. But that's no reason to be ashamed. You haven't heard of him for a very good reason—because the aerodrome crashed into the Potomac and broke apart in its test phase. Not once but
twice
. The whole aircraft—the whole program—was a complete fiasco. And, like so many other government-funded projects, it was quickly and quietly scrapped.”

Brass offers a patronizing little smirk.

“But that's not why 1903 is so famous. It's famous because of what happened a few hundred miles farther south, at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. It was there that a couple of
self-financed
and
self-motivated
brothers, blissfully free of nosy bureaucrats and government grants, designed and constructed their
own
experimental aircraft. For under
one thousand dollars
. And
their
aircraft, ladies and gentlemen, you probably
do
remember. And their names you
certainly
remember. For their aircraft was called the Flyer. And their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.”

Smiles all around. There's a couple of reporters there—Justus recognizes Nat U. Reilly—and they're beaming like parents at a school play. But Justus himself is expressionless: He's read the same speech, more or less word for word, in one of Brass's autobiographies. And he wonders how the man himself, speaking in
a curious mid-Atlantic accent, manages to make it all sound so fresh and sincere.

“Ladies and gentlemen”—Brass is all senatorial now—“it's once again time for self-motivated and self-financed geniuses to take us where governments fear to tread. It's time for us to establish permanent human settlements on Mars, just as we did so many years ago on the Moon. It's time for practical infrastructure—not just probes, not just robots, and not just exploratory journeys. It's time to do something
unequivocal
. And let nobody underestimate the huge challenges—or for that matter the huge expenses—ahead of us. But then again I think that I, more than anyone else, have earned the right to quote Machiavelli”—laughter from Reilly and the others—“ ‘Make no small plans, for they have not the power to stir men's blood.' ”

Brass, who's either seventy-two or seventy-five, depending on the source, is wearing a superbly tailored navy-blue suit with brass-colored pinstripes. His brass-tinted hair—still thick as bear's fur—is swept back in a rolling wave. His skin is so smooth, tanned, and radiant that it shimmers like copper. And his eyes, the irises of which have been famously implanted with brass flecks, look lynx-like, mesmerizing. Even now, as his features contort into a look of well-timed dismay.

“But you know, I hear there are
still
people who are questioning the expenses of this voyage. Who still think that I'm hostage to irrational dreams or delusions—after all these years!” Sympathetic sniggers. “And you know what I remember when I hear that? I just remember all the money I've personally funneled into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. All those radiometers, spectrometers, reflectometers, all those interferometry arrays, poking into every corner of the cosmos, every sun, planet, moon, and black hole, hunting for any sort of signal, electromagnetic, infrared,
microwave, anything that suggests a flicker of intelligent life, a scent of civilization, the purr of a motor—anything at all! Millions, I've spent on those searches—
billions
! And what have we come up with after all this time? After all that investment? Nothing! Not a thing!
Not a goddamned thing!
”