The Luna Deception (7 page)

They wandered on along the cobbled path of the stone garden. Anonymous figures strolled past, sleek in second-skin EVA suits, or otherworldly in Victorian ruffles. Hats shaded polarized faceplates. Lorna wore a candycane-striped suit with joke antennae bobbling on his helmet. Mendoza felt conspicuous: the SHARESUIT / FREE SIZE stencil on his chest branded him an interloper in this exclusive setting.

The rich sought privacy outside, too.

But the “Back Garden” of Bloomsbury bore no resemblance to the rubbish dump outside Cherry-Garrard, where he had practiced shooting with Fr. Lynch. Ye-olde style lanterns marked paths between rock formations and sculptures. Aztec idols, a full-size copy of the Sphinx, a replica of the grand colonnade of Palmyra, lots of Rodin ... Mendoza would have liked to take the audio tour, but he needed to focus on Lorna’s conversation, so he just had the garden’s soundtrack playing in the background. Sounds of whistling wind and crunching pebbles alternated with snatches of flute music. Mendoza caught a phrase from Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons.

They came to a waterfall that oozed blackly down the rocks into a pond. “Liquid methane,” Lorna said. “They have to turn it off when the sun rises, or it would gasify.”

“Wow.”

They sat down on a stone bench overlooking the pond.

“So as I was saying, Dr. Hasselblatter ate your stuff up like candy. They used your graphics as-is. That’s how good they were. Unveiled them this afternoon, and so far, the silence is deafening.”

“That’s great.” Was it?

“A few Earth-based feeds have already started to mock him,” Lorna said confidently. “Won’t be long until the NEO feeds pile on. I’m telling you, there is an
insatiable
appetite out there for things to ridicule, revile, and belittle.”

“Then I guess our next step is to boost Angelica Lin’s campaign. As Hasselblatter fades out of the race, Lin will need to take up the space he vacates.”

“It won’t be a fade, so much as a crash,” Lorna cackled. “You got any ideas that might work for Angie’s campaign? She has a publicist, but the chick isn’t coming up with much.”

The surface of the liquid methane pond stirred. A string of robot ducks paddled out from under an overhang. Droplets of methane rolled down their metal plumage. There was a mother duck and five fluffy ducklings.

“Aw, there they are,” Lorna said. “C’mere!” But everyone else around the pool was also signalling the ducks. They paddled over to a trio of women in bustled spacesuits, who threw crumbs of ice to them. Stray ice chips floated on the methane. “There are koi in the pond, too,” Lorna said. “They run on the liquid methane. It’s fuel, after all. You were saying?”

“I think we need to acknowledge the daily realities of life on Mercury … speak to the needs of the colonists. The Wrightstuff, Inc. colonists can’t vote, since they officially don’t exist. But UNVRP has thousands of people on Mercury, and
they’ll
vote.” Mendoza reflected that all those UNVRP loyalists were going to get a shock when they found themselves living in the United States of America, version 2.0. He just had to trust that it would be a better life for them in the long run. “Angelica Lin needs to offer them realistic, believable solutions for their issues.”

“Realistic? Believable?” Lorna scoffed.
“Boring.
People want to be inspired. Angie needs a
vision.”

Mendoza’s mind was blank. All he could see was a city the size of a mountain trundling around Mercury’s equator, gliders swooping through the hot twilight like birds.

“Let me brainstorm,” he said.

“Do that. I’m relying on you, Mendoza. Let’s go back to my place and grab a bite while you think about it.”

★

Mendoza woke in the dark. He reached up, couldn’t touch the ceiling of his apartment. Waking up fully, he remembered that he was at Derek Lorna’s house.

Their discussion had stretched late into the evening. The trains ran all night, but it was a two-hour slog back to Nightingale Village, so Lorna had invited him to stay over.

10:18 blinked in the corner of his eye. God! How could he have slept so long? He was going to be late for work. He pushed off from the bed and hustled into his clothes.

His movements tripped automatic sensors that opened the curtains, admitting the most realistic daylight Mendoza had seen since he left Earth. The window overlooked a grove of bamboo.

He ventured out of the room. Despite his determination not to be awed, he knew he was trespassing in a world above his pay grade. A maidbot vacuumed the oriental rug in the hall. The furniture, the skirting boards, and the banisters of the stairs were all made of wood
polished to an antique sheen. A framed chunk of concrete on the landing brought Mendoza up short. It looked like a Banksy. It was a Banksy.

A suit of armor stood in the downstairs hall, complete with sword. Mendoza nodded to it. He felt stiff and rusty, too. He tracked Lorna by the sound of his voice to a room at the end of the hall.

Morning light flooded through open bay windows. Out in the garden, a bot watered plants. Lorna sprawled in a dressing-gown on the patio, yelling at someone about software evaluation methodology. He raised his eyebrows at Mendoza and pointed indoors.

Assuming he was being dismissed, Mendoza went back in. He glanced at the brag wall over the fireplace. (A
fireplace.)
Where most people would have had vids of themselves, Lorna had oil paintings. There he was receiving a decoration from the unofficial king of Luna, Faisal al-Saud. There he (or a lookalike phavatar) was dancing with the idolbot Marilyn Mauss. There he was conducting, or pretending to conduct, the Luna Philharmonic … That one offended Mendoza, and he was about to turn away when another familiar face caught his eye. In a smaller picture, Lorna stood grinning with his arm around the stooped shoulders of Dr. Ulysses Seth.

Dr. Ulysses Seth.

The acting director of UNVRP Mercury, whom Lorna dismissed as a has-been with nutzoid ideas.

Funny, in this picture they looked like friends.

“Not hungry?”

Mendoza whipped guiltily around.

Lorna indicated a sideboard where breakfast was laid out. Mendoza hadn’t realized he was expected to partake. There was enough food for half a dozen.

“I have to go,” he demurred. “I overslept.” He took a piece of toast and buttered it, because it made him crazy to think of all this real food going into the recycling.

“Oh, relax,” Lorna said. “Have you seen the garden? Grab a cup of coffee and I’ll show you around.”

Mendoza requested an espresso from the robot barista squatting on the sideboard. Balancing the cup on one palm, he followed Lorna out through the bay windows.

Rustic lawn furniture dotted the patio. Overhead, the high-spec sky of the Bloomsbury dome radiated the pearly light of a summer morning. The air smelt newly washed, no doubt thanks to gardener bots watering the greenery overnight. Half of the garden was taken up by the bamboo grove Mendoza had seen from his window. They walked in among the rustling stems. Springy, sweet-smelling moss cushioned their footsteps.

“I’m pretty sure there are no eavesdropping devices out
here,”
Lorna said.

Mendoza laughed. “I thought you had friends in high places.” He thought again about the picture of Lorna with Dr. Ulysses Seth.

“Sure, sure. Mayor Hope’s a friend. But I don’t want everyone knowing
everything.”

Mendoza sipped his coffee. It shouldn’t have been coffee they were drinking out here, it should have been buko juice or guyabano, something cool and sweet that tasted of home.

“I really have to go.”

“Of course. Of course. You can use my jitney to get to the station.”

“Thanks.” Mendoza wondered what a jitney was.

“Of course, you could always take the day off.”

“Well, we’re kind of busy at the moment.”

“Naturally. And the work of MeReMSG is important.” Lorna’s tone said the exact opposite. “But is that really what you want to be doing?”

Mendoza shrugged.

“I could use you on my team. Full-time; official. No more sneaking around behind La Dillinger’s back.”

Mendoza smiled and nodded. He realized that he had known this was coming. Why else had Lorna invited him to Bloomsbury? Given him a taste of this budgety lifestyle? Because Lorna knew he’d pushed Mendoza just about as far as he could without offering him anything in return. So here it was. A higher salary, better living conditions …

And a chance to figure out what Lorna wasn’t telling him.

He knew for sure that there was something.

(Lorna and Dr. Ulysses Seth, grinning, with their arms around each other’s shoulders.)

“Wow. I … I’ll have to think about it.”

“You do that. Now, the butler’ll show you where the jitney’s kept. You might be in for a surprise. Ever seen a horse?”

★

And then everything went to shit.

★

Mendoza had barely reached the office—sliding into his place with muttered apologies, cringing from Preeti Dillinger’s gaze—when Lorna pinged him. Because Dillinger was staring at him, he let it go to voicemail.

“Hey, pick up. I need you back here. We’ve got a situation. Goddamn it, Mendoza. Pick up NOW.”

He made his excuses to Dhillinger: he shouldn’t have come into work at all, he felt sick, so sorry.

But he did not go to the employee clinic.
Or
back to Bloomsbury, as Lorna demanded.

Before he even reached the elevator, Lorna had left five more messages in his voicemail, sounding angrier and angrier. Lorna had also dropped enough hints about the ‘situation’ that Mendoza was able search the news feeds for himself and find out what Lorna was talking about.

Oh, holy
crap.

Instinct told Mendoza to stay out of Lorna’s way until the man had a chance to cool down. He went home to Nightingale Village. But as he climbed the zipshaft to his apartment, Lorna pinged him again.

“Fucking pick up! You broke this shit, Mendoza. I need you to fix it, or I’m going to fix YOU, and that is a fucking promise.”

Mendoza started to shake. He spent five minutes curled on his bunk in the fetal position, while his HUD kept flashing.
You have … 11 new emails from Derek Lorna!
The man was not only calling him every five minutes, but emailing him, too. This was crazy.

I need to hide.

The thought was not rational but it was all he had. He went out again. There was a pawnshop on the ground floor of his building. Mendoza felt as if everyone must be staring at him, although they weren’t. He resisted the impulse to lower his face. You couldn’t hide from the surveillance cameras. “Clothes,” he told the guy at the counter.

“Sure. I got a nice suit, better ‘n what you’re wearing. Dress code compliant. Need a shirt, too?”

“No … Not a suit.”

The clerk leaned across the counter and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Jeans?”

“No …”

“Denim,
man. Made on Earth.”

“No …” He had it. “A uniform. I need a uniform. A schoolmaster’s gown. Or … or a streetsweeper’s uniform. Or a coverall, like the Shackleton Railways staff wear.”

“They hand those out to employees, man. Recycle ‘em when they get too dirty.”

Mendoza backed away from the counter, through the stench of body odor and old clothes. The air was hazy with whatever vile vape the Nightingale Village pushers were selling this week.

“Come back if you change your mind about those jeans.”

Mendoza bumped into people, apologized, cleared the doorstep. In the comparatively generous headroom of the street, robot sparrows darted. They were surveillance bots, it was well known. Mendoza ducked into the corner grocery and bought some chocolate and a ReadiPak meal. Then climbed the steps of his alley. Upstairs again, he shut himself into his apartment and forced himself to eat the food, while he reviewed the disaster.

Exhibit A: the results of a poll conducted by the Inferior Space Election Commission.

Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter had surged into the lead. Throughout Inferior Space—the volume that contained Mercury, Venus, and the NEOs—61% of voters now said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for him. His closest rival, Zazoë Heap, garnered just 24%.

(Angelica Lin? 4%.)

Exhibit B: a slew of talk-pieces that used the new ISEC poll as a hook to discuss What The Spaceborn Really Want.

Apparently, they wanted a city on rails, a quidditch league, landscape art, and robot bison.

Mendoza groaned, clutching his head.

He knew what had gone wrong.

He’d gotten carried away. He’d put his heart into his work. And something had gotten into his freebie sim, something real, something wacky but just plausible enough to be attractive. The quality that the people in the content industry called
sensawunda
.

The kind of thing that voters reared on sims and immersion games drank up like mother’s milk.

No wonder
Dr. Hasselblatter had taken the bait. He had recognized, long before Lorna or Mendoza himself did, that this stuff was electoral gold.

“You have a new voicemail from … Derek Lorna,” said his comms program.

“Mendoza! What. The. Fuck? Am I going to have to come out to that recycling unit you call home, and drag you out of your fucking coffin by your toes? I WILL.”

Sweating, Mendoza thought:
I have to get away.

Yes, he was panicking. But sometimes panicking was the smart option.

I have to disguise myself and hide out until I can get a flight back to Earth.

But how, exactly, could he hide in Shackleton City? Even if he wore a Queen Victoria costume, his network connection would pinpoint his location. He could shut down his network connection, “go blind,” as they said, but he couldn’t turn off his BCI. It ran on a power cell implanted in his skull, fueled by glucose, the same stuff that fed his brain. As long as it was drawing power, they’d be able to locate it.

Which left only one thing to do.

Only one person he could trust.

He lifted his walking-stick down from its storage hooks and went out to Cherry-Garrard, where he sat in the church until it was time for kendo practice.