Irontown Blues Page 2

  I quoted her my standard rate, a point at which about half my prospective clients hit the road without hiring me. For some reason, many of them expect this sort of work to be cheap. Miss Smith didn’t complain. Usually, clients want to thumb payment to me, and they look surprised when I tell them I prefer cash. She had money at hand, in the form of a roll in her purse. She counted out my retainer and laid it on the desk.

  “I’ll itemize expenses, which you also pay for. If I have to go to Mars or beyond, I’ll check with you first.”

  She nodded. I escorted her to the door and watched her striding down the hallway toward the elevator. So did Sherlock, and after a cautious sniff of the air, he lumbered back into the office before I shut it. He resumed his customary position on the shaggy rug in the corner, first circling it a few times to get his bearings, then plopping down and giving a sigh.

  two

  I live in the twenty-mile-long artificial canyon known as the Mozartplatz. It was only about two miles long and a mile wide when it was first opened for business, and from then it kept growing.

  Many stories from Old Earth assumed that anyone living on the moon would emulate termites or ants, content to tunnel down into the living rock and conduct their lives without ever seeing much open space. And for the first explorers, hundreds of years ago, that was the case. It was cheap and easy to drill, and the layers of rock over your head protected you from solar storms and cosmic rays.

  But—surprise!—people didn’t like becoming moles. As soon as Lunar society grew rich enough to afford things beyond the daily struggle just to survive—and for quite a while after the Invasion, it was a close-run thing—a natural urge for some space took hold of the habitat builders. Thus the Mozartplatz, and a dozen others like it. But of the densely inhabited planets of the Eight Worlds, only Luna built down instead of up.

  It’s quite a canyon. Over two miles deep and up to three miles wide in places, each side is shaped into promontories and arroyos reminiscent of Earth’s Grand Canyon, if the canyon had been honeycombed with Indian cliff dwellings from top to bottom. At the bottom were lakes and parkland, with here and there a tall building. Trains ran along the trench and crossed on bridges. The sky was filled with various sorts of flying machines, including human-powered ones. Over it all was a quadruple layer of roof, nearly invisible, that turned opaque on a twenty-four-hour day/night schedule during the Lunar day, thus avoiding fourteen-day periods of light and darkness.

  When Ms. Smith left, it was getting on toward dusk. I turned off the phony view of a seedy alley in Los Angeles, 1939, and the glass turned transparent. I put my feet up and looked out over the city.

  It was dusk, my favorite time of day, when the roof took on an orange tinge. Many lights were coming on. It was a view I never tired of.

  My office is on the thirteenth floor of the Acme Building, a faux 1930s high-rise built in what was known as Manhattan Style, trimmed with faux wood and faux bricks. I chose it because I like the era, the time of Chandler and Hammett, Sax Rohmer, Rex Stout, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Stone gargoyles line the parapets and spew water when the rain is turned on. There is a turning searchlight atop the huge radio mast on the roof. The word “ACME” in red neon flashes from all four sides.

  I stayed at my window until it was almost dark, nursing a glass of bourbon. My chair creaked as I got up, and Sherlock was instantly awake, looking at me with the intensity only a dog who is about to play can muster. I let him suffer for a moment, then headed for the door.

  “Ready to go home, boy?”

  He was already in motion, plunging through the door flap and clattering down the corridor and hitting the touchplate that opened the stairway door. He was through it and on his way down before I reached the elevator.

  It’s a game we play. Actually, is it a game if he always wins? Because he does, you know. My dog always finds his way home faster than I do. I don’t know how he does it. I suppose I could find out if I fitted him with a tracker, but my feeling is that even a detective should have some mystery in his life. Besides, it would be cheating.

  Down at the ground floor of the Acme Building, I unchained my bicycle and swung aboard. The office is about a mile from the south end of the ’Platz, and my home biome is nearly at the north end, a journey of at least eighteen miles, but actually longer because of the serpentine route I was forced to take, avoiding lakes and other obstacles. Cycling almost forty miles a day is a bit too much for me, but simply boarding the monorail at the Acme stop was far too little. By biking a few miles along the path and getting off a mile short of my stop, I not only got daily exercise but avoided gym fees. It suited me fine.

  I boarded the train, folded up my bicycle, and found a seat. This time of day there usually was one, another good reason to linger at the office and let the rush-hour crowd thin out. Mozartplatz keeps a more or less nine-to-five workday, and varies the hours of sunlight or artificial light when Luna’s farside turns its back on the sun so that we have “seasons,” though we don’t go so far as to make it too cold or too hot, except in isolated disneylands.

  Darkness had fallen by the time I got off the rail at my stop. I biked to the down escalator and hopped aboard. It’s about a quarter of a mile ride to the 51 level, where I got off. I passed through a safety air lock, which I had only seen closed during monthly blowout drills, and into a nondescript tunnel with air locks every few hundred meters on each side leading to some of the thousands of Earth habitat re-creations that riddle the sides of Mozartplatz. At the third one on the right I slapped the palm reader and walked into another world, one that had never actually existed.

  Home, for me, is Noirtown, a medium-sized habitat popular with twentieth-century American reenactors. It is one long street, zigzagging here and there so you can’t see from one end to the other, themed to dates circa 1910 to around 1960. You enter at 1910, to find “automobiles” from that era parked at the curbs. None of them actually run, of course. Except for surface transportation, no one has owned an autonomous private vehicle since the Invasion. Turn the corner and you’re in 1920, then one more corner to the street where I live, in the 1930s.

  The architecture is a mix of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles buildings. I live in a two-bedroom flat on the second floor of a Hollywood Boulevard building above an Italian restaurant, the Monte Carlo. Outside my front window is a large neon sign that flashes on and off all night, in green, red, and blue. Which means that it flashes all the time, because in Noirtown, the sun never comes up. If I raise a window and lean out a little, I can see all the way through the 1940s, into the 1950s, where an oversized “moon” hovers over the jagged pagoda of the Chinese Theater. The moon never moves.

  The theater is phony, just a façade with a marquee that changes daily. Right now it claimed to be showing Ben-Hur, “Winner of 11 Academy Awards,” starring Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd.

  The restaurant is real. I eat a lot of my meals there. If you visit, try the minestrone. It’s the best in Luna.

  It rains a lot in Noirtown, which adds to the atmosphere. It was raining now as I made my way up the gloomy, worn wooden stairs to my apartment door.

  Sherlock was sprawled on his rug in the front room, pretending to be asleep but breathing too hard to be convincing.

  “How do you do it, old sport?” I asked, as I flung my gray fedora at the hat rack, missing the hook as usual. He lifted his head briefly, said Where the hell have you been?, chuffed noisily, and lay down again. I knew the answer had something to do with the hidden service passages that most of us seldom see, and that he was helped out by the little chip in his head and the locator app that contained a detailed map of the whole ’Platz . . . and it didn’t hurt that he was genetically augmented to be a lot smarter than any dog that ever sat around a caveman’s fire and waited for scraps to be thrown his way. Still, it just didn’t seem possible that he could be that fast.

  I once entertained the parano
id notion that he was actually two dogs, identical twins who hung around the apartment and the office just to fool me.

  Since it is always night in Noirtown and I won’t allow a timepiece eye implant—or any other sort of cyber enhancements—I always wear a watch. I consulted it now. Mickey’s little hand was pointing to the eight, and his big hand was just about to the one. Too late to really get moving on the Mary Smith case, but far too early for bed.

  I went to the Frigidaire and got a simulated beef bone. I tossed it to Sherlock, who lifted his head once again and regarded it with contempt, then got back to some serious sleeping.

  Time for dinner.

  * * *

  —

  I hurried down the street to 1940, Chicago, and an establishment called the Nighthawk Diner. It’s a big L-shaped lunch counter that serves a decent cup of coffee and okay brontoburgers, though they don’t call them that on the menu. Just about all the patrons order the blue plate special, which is whatever Whitey, the proprietor, decides it will be that day.

  About half the stools were filled with the usual assortment of residents and outsiders there to sample the atmosphere of the habitat. I made my way toward the end of the counter, where there are some booths, and the lighting is dim and spotty. On the way, I signaled to Whitey for the special and a beer. He nodded. Whitey is a man of few words.

  I had come to the Nighthawk hoping to find one of my best informants, a man I knew only as Hopper. The Hopster doesn’t exactly deal in anything illegal, but he knows most of the people in the ’Platz who do. He deals in information and seems to make a pretty good living at it. His clothes are always the best quality, favoring exotic embroidered silks from some Chinese dynasty. He tops it off with a Fu Manchu mustache. But he doesn’t look the least bit Chinese. He looks like a weasel crossed with a crocodile. His information is always good, though.

  I slid into the booth opposite him.

  “What do you know about leprosy?” I asked.

  “Always straight to the point, eh, gumshoe?” He smiled, showing two rows of pointed teeth. He always talks to me in hard-boiled dialect he picked up from reading old detective novels he read just so he could irritate me.

  “Ixnay on the abgay,” I said. “Why should I spend a lot of my time on a two-bit grifter? You’re already into my pocket for a lot of dough.”

  “All reet, Jackson.” He paused and looked thoughtfully at the tin shade of the hanging light fixture as Flo, the waitress, set a long-necked bottle and a glass in front of me. The cap was still on the bottle. I picked up the church key—don’t you just love some of those twentieth-century slang terms?—and popped the top off. Hopper watched as I carefully poured the cold golden liquid down the side of the glass. It came out with just the amount of head I like on my brew.

  “Leprosy, leprosy,” Hooper said, tugging on one side of his soup strainer and pretending he was trying to recall where he had heard the term. “Seems I’ve heard it’s going out of style with the sick set. It was big a few years ago. Now all the hip daddies and dollies are getting back to basics. Things like lupus, psoriasis, hives, even plain old acne. What used to be ‘entry-level’ bugs. Of course, there are always the hard-core sickies, the ones who go for the really dramatic disfigurements. Necrotizing fasciitis, erysipelas, seborrheic keratosis, really nasty stuff.”

  Hopper was eyeing me skeptically. “So what’s your interest?” he asked. “I never thought that was your scene.”

  “That’s none of your concern,” I said. “What I want to know isn’t who is taking it, or wearing it, or whatever these people call it. I’m trying to find people who are spreading it.”

  He drew in a quick breath. I think I had succeeded in shocking him for the first time in our relationship.

  “You mean involuntary infection?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Also, the bacterium seems to have been engineered to be damn near incurable.”

  His frown grew even deeper.

  “You’re talking some serious shit here, my friend.”

  “Be that as it may, I need to find out where to go to contact these people.”

  “I guess you know that the penalty for that is around a century in the icehouse on Sedna. Which means the nuts who do it are both crazy and ruthless. They would kill you without a second thought.”

  “Still, I need to know.”

  He said nothing. For some reason he seemed reluctant to give me the straight dope on this thing. But I could wait him out. To hurry him up, I laid some filthy lucre on the table.

  “I only heard of these folks recently,” he said. “I thought I had heard it all, but this one shocked me.” He scrawled something on the napkin. He held on to it for a moment. I pushed the wampum toward him. He shook his head and slid out of the booth.

  “This one’s on the house,” he said. I expect my eyebrows climbed almost to my hairline. This was not Hopper’s style.

  I looked at the napkin and felt a chill run up my spine.

  It was an address in Irontown.

  “Irontown,” I muttered.

  Flo slapped the blue plate special down on the table in front of me and gave me a funny look. The food looked like some kind of goulash. I pushed it away from me. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry.

  three

  You would think that, this far into the Information Age, somebody would know when Irontown became known as Irontown, and why. And you would be wrong. I did a major search and found nothing but rumors and folktales and rock-rat legends.

  It obviously isn’t really made out of iron. Irontown is made of steel, plastics, ceramics, and nanotubes, just like everywhere else.

  Everybody knows where Irontown is, of course. Ask anyone; they can point you to it.

  Except they can’t. Not really.

  Its boundaries are vague. It’s not like you are walking down a decrepit, badly lit corridor, with the sound of water dripping somewhere in the distance and the smell of something rotting and the occasional screech of a feral bat—though you will usually encounter those things and more on your way there—and suddenly you find yourself in Irontown. There are no signs saying WELCOME TO IRONTOWN!, no Chamber of Commerce placards announcing the presence of the Freemasons, Shriners, Tongs, Elks, and Yakuza, or inviting you to attend services at the Church of Elvis or Jay-Dubyas or Hubbardites.

  What happens is the passage gradually grows gloomier, the lights more flickery, the smells more pungent, the people more furtive, until you begin to encounter some people you definitely wouldn’t want to take home to meet Mama.

  To understand Irontown you have to go back to the very beginning, in the days just after the Invasion.

  There were only five Lunar colonies when the Invaders showed up from interstellar space and forcibly and fatally evicted humanity from Earth. The total population was around seven thousand. Luna in those days has been compared to Antarctica in the early twentieth century, both in terms of population and the harshness of the environment. But at least at McMurdo Station you didn’t have to import or make your own oxygen.

  Beyond Luna there were three bases on Mars, with less than a thousand inhabitants, and isolated research stations in the Outer Planets. They vanished as completely as did about eight billion humans on Earth.

  One of the Martian beachheads quickly suffered a catastrophic failure. The same happened to one of the Lunar bases. So the total number of survivors of the Great Death was around five thousand. Those five thousand Founders contained the entire available gene pool of humanity.

  The first decades were very, very tough.

  It was touch and go, the people surviving from day to day. Everyone was required to work, and work very hard. Water had to be located and mined, in Luna and on Mars. Power plants had to be maintained. Food had to be grown. Sixteen-hour workdays were the norm, and twenty-hour shifts not uncommon. Some died of malnutrition or sheer exhaustion.
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br />   But they made it, those hardy survivors. It is no wonder that schoolchildren to this day sing of the pioneers, and that every year we commemorate the Invasion with defiant promises: Next year on the Earth!

  It’s a pretty hollow promise by now.

  * * *

  —

  As more and more babies arrived, more habitat had to be carved out for them, naturally. The earliest Lunar dwellings were rude, cramped, and hazardous. People began to move underground. Mazes of tunnels and rooms connected in a haphazard way, with little planning at first.

  With the passing of another century, life had become easier than it had ever been, even on Old Earth. The population exploded, and more space was needed to accommodate them.

  People demanded, and got, many more options in life. They no longer wished to live in tunnels and caves, no matter how luxurious. They wanted open spaces, as much as that was possible on an airless moon. And it turned out to be quite possible. The first disneys were built, ten miles across, twenty miles, fifty miles. Each contained a different ecology, patterned after the lands of Old Earth. Animals and plants were created from the vast DNA banks that had survived the years of crisis. The land inside the disneys was sculpted and furnished. When inside one, the illusion was complete. Except for the low gravity, you might imagine you were in Kansas or Congo, the Swiss Alps, the Sahara, a Pacific island, or the Russian tundra.

  While this was going on, the vast canyons like the Mozartplatz were being dug. For those who were not interested in the sweeping vistas offered by the various ’Platzes, there was another option for living illusions: simulated neighborhoods like the one I live in.

  Lunarians now live in a society so rich, so luxurious, offering so many options to just about everyone, that those few thousand Founders would scarcely have been able to imagine it. Energy is cheap and almost unlimited. Labor is mostly done by machines more deft and powerful than human hands. Standardization is a thing of the past. You can design your own clothes or furniture or bathroom or objet d’art and have it printed and delivered within the hour.