King of the Worlds (24 page)

“I didn't have a clue what we were talking about until my next client, another well known actor whose name I'm not at liberty to disclose, came in and I told him, ‘Hey, I'm thinking of seeing Jade Astrophil pretty soon. What do you think?' He whispered, ‘Is she coming down?' and I said, ‘I was thinking of going up actually.' And do you know what he said then?”

“I'm sure I don't,” Dylan said.

“He said, ‘Is there a launch coming up?'”

In an instant, Dylan felt as if he'd grown a hundred feet taller. “See!” he said. “See!”

“I'm sorry, brother. I shouldn't have doubted you.”

To be sure, despite being sworn to secrecy, Dylan had eventually confided in Chad about his trip to the moon, but Chad had never believed it for a second. He'd seemed offended, in fact, that Dylan would try to pass off such a patent
story
on him. As if his
actual
success wasn't spiteful enough! Dylan, of course, had been offended in his own right.

“Fuck,” Dylan said. “You made me doubt my own sanity there for a while.”

“Well you can stop. That was my bad. You're plenty sane.”

“So Jade's in the moon? Go figure.”

Dylan wasn't sure what to make of this new information yet. Was Jade's being in the moon just an extraordinary coincidence? Or was there some invisible web of logic connecting her being up there to his once having been?

“Alas,” Dylan continued, “I'm afraid that can only mean one thing.”

“What's that?”

“She's a sex worker, if not an out-and-out slave.”

“I guess that does compute, doesn't it?”

“Inside the moon is the most heinous patriarchy humanity has ever known. It computes.”

“I see,” Chad said, about half as soberly as was called for.

“So what did you say when he asked whether or not a launch was coming up?”

“I told him I might be mistaken, and then he said, ‘I know Hef and them used to go up on odd days here and there, but I've certainly never been invited any day but First Friday.' So I said something like, ‘Yeah, I don't know. Are you going up First Friday then?' And he said, ‘I don't think so. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf with regard to all that. I'm sure it'll be good though.' I stopped pressing my luck at that point. I might have finagled a proper invitation, but it was starting to feel sort of dangerous.”

“Understood,” Dylan said. “I'll take over from here. Good work, Chad. I knew I could count on you.”

“No problem, buddy. It was easy. Now let's just hope I don't get assassinated.”

• • •

Dylan spent the next couple of days in Chad's apartment, omni'ing in sick to school and dreaming up schemes for how he could get himself back up in the moon. In theory there could be a RiboMate in the Grotto by now, but with all this talk of launches—and considering the Loonies' vested interests in secrecy, ritual, and tradition—Dylan felt pretty sure there wasn't.

Plan A: He would stake out some actor and trail him to whatever undisclosed location the launch was going to take place at. Unfortunately, though every kid these days had a
Crypsis suit,
36
the true invisibility cloak remained elusive.

Plan B: He would travel to the space/teleport in Selena City, rent a rover and try to make his way around to the far side and locate the entrance to the Grotto himself. Because it was shielded from radio interference from Earth, however, the far side, excepting the small outpost around the DeGrasse-Tyson radio telescope, was a vast desert. Moreover, Dylan had no coordinates to point him in the right direction. So that was probably out.

Plan C: He would go in disguise as some other celebrity, preferably a quiet one. He was an actor after all. But he'd been trained in interpretation, not impersonation, and pulling this off would require some heavy-duty makeup and prosthetics of the sort only a Hollywood insider could manage; needless to say, invoking such services would clearly pose too great a security risk.

Plan D: He would simply stow away somewhere in the rocket ship. A Crypsis suit
might
get him that far. Not only was the ship's precise location a mystery, however, but even if this strategy got him through the airlock, he could hardly rely on it to get him all the way to Jade Astrophil.

Plan E: Like Chad in search of medical records, his safest disguise was probably the one he was already wearing. He would go as himself.

He hated the idea. He had lately conquered his fear of returning to the geographical Hollywood, but returning to the
industry
was a different matter. He hadn't seen most of the glitterati in decades, and the thought of cavorting with them now, and confessing that he was a family man who taught high school, was almost enough to make him call off the search. Almost. But the cuts on Jade's wrists had gotten to him at least as much as they had Chad, and now that he had the
vesicovaginal fistulas
to reckon with as well, he could almost hear her plaintive, defenseless cries across the void.

Don't worry, Jade—I'm on my way,
he telepathized back, fully aware that one couldn't really get
out there
via
in here
.

So he got in touch with Terry Gilliam. And he did so, quite deliberately, via omni. Dylan had no idea how exactly the conspiracy involving the disappearance of Mei-Ling Chen/Jade Astrophil from Omni did or did not relate to the conspiracy involving a patriarchal utopia in the moon, but it was clear now that the two plots were intertwined, and since Omni was somehow implicated in covering up the former, it might be instructive to see what it would do with communications regarding the
latter.
37
Gilliam promptly replied:

Good God, man! I wondered if I'd ever hear from you again. It's been, what, a couple of decades? How are things on wherever-you-are-again?

All's fine here. I've just been a bit nostalgic lately and remembered you telling me
Once a Loon, always a Loon
. I thought it might be nice to revisit some old stomping grounds.

Trying to get back in the industry, are we? It's basically in shambles, but there's no better place to rub elbows than up there.

Not really trying to get back in the industry. Just trying to get the most out of life. Can you tell me how I can set up a rendezvous?

Sure thing, Dylan. There's a regular launch on first Fridays. That happens to be tomorrow. You want me to see if I can book you a spot? You'll have to depart from Earth,
of course.

That would be great. I really appreciate it.

No sweat, my friend.

Gilliam wrote back a few minutes later with the departure information:

Tomorrow's launch is full up, but could you be at Reno Spaceport at 9 am Saturday? They've got a secret pad there.

Sure.

The captain will meet you in Arrivals. They're making a special trip for you. You'll be traveling alone. I've already let the cat out of the bag. Hope you don't mind. I regret that I can't make it—my niece's birthday—but maybe we'll see you up there regularly from now on. There's no place like it.

I can't thank you enough, Terry. Not sure I'll ever be a regular, though I do hope to see you somewhere soon anyway.

Perfect. Dylan had some thirty-six hours until launch and Reno was some five hundred or so miles away. Unfortunately, before he hied to the moon and risked his life in an effort to save a fragile Asian sex slave, he felt he needed to see his family one last time. So en route to Reno, he made a quick detour of some 2,001 light years.

He could have told Erin another lie—something easy to digest, that he had another conference to go to maybe—but since he'd turned forty and a new leaf, things had been going well for them. They weren't having sex or anything crazy like that, but they were treating each other more like friends than enemies, and he didn't want to screw that up by violating her trust.

So he told her of the ongoing adventures in the Jade Astrophil saga.

“So let me get this straight,” Erin said. “You basically know nothing about her except that she wrote you some fan mail twenty
years ago?”

“And that Omni deleted her.”

“Possibly,” she said. She was skeptical about his eyewitness testimony, and of conspiracy theories in general.

“And that she now lives on the moon,” Dylan added.

“Right.”

And now she was just humoring him. He had eventually confided in her too about his time on the moon—omitting the bit about Fantasia, of course, and glossing over the part where he lied about going to Catalina—but she'd been as offended as Chad. Her brain simply refused to acknowledge any narrative that contradicted the official version of things, and the official version of humans on the moon began with JFK and NASA's Apollo missions and, finally, Neil Armstrong's small step/giant leap. It was no problem for her that she and her husband now lived in another sector of the galaxy from the one they'd grown up in, because
that
was a matter of record, but the possibility that very powerful men had terraformed a cavern inside a rock just 238,900 miles from Earth a decade before the formation of NASA was tantamount to saying that Columbus didn't really discover America:
nuts!

This sort of narrow herd-thought infuriated Dylan to no end, and they'd fought about it for years before he finally accepted that, evidence be damned, she was never going to believe him and he might as well stop trying. They'd reached a separate peace on the matter, more or less.

“So what are you hoping to accomplish by going up there?” she asked.

“I need to find out what's happened to her. She has disappeared from Omni, Erin. Do you understand what a big deal this is? She's been
rubbed out
, as if she never existed. You can't
do
that to a person!”

“Okay, so let's say I believe you. Let's say she's living in the moon. What's so bad about it? You made it sound like a paradise.”

“Okay, here's the thing about the moon, Erin. Basically the moon, the party cavern inside anyway, exists for the pleasure of very powerful, wealthy, and dastardly men. It's a paradise for them perhaps, but it's hell for women. They're slaves, in effect, and in addition to whatever cooking and cleaning they may do, many if not all of them are
sex
slaves.” He didn't go quite as far as to tell her he'd once invoked their services and enjoyed every shivering second. Nor did he bother to recall that Fantasia had told him she was very handsomely compensated, which just needlessly complicated things.

“I see.”

“I have to rescue her, Erin. I
have
to. Look at this letter. She says right here that I once saved her life. Well now she needs saving again, and who's going to save her if not me? No one else even knows she exists.”

“Okay, Dylan. I don't know where you're really going, whether you're having an affair or what, but I'll try to get my unconscious to believe you even if my conscious mind still thinks you're fucking with me.”

“God damn it, Erin! I'll bring you a rock, how about that? They'll murder me if I try to take a picture, but I should be able to pocket a rock, I think.”

“Fine, Dylan. We'll have a long talk when you get back.”

“But I'm telling the truth!”

“Good for you,” she said, clearly believing none of it.

At any rate, she would let him go. And he really did have to.

• • •

So Friday came and went and Dylan QT'd to Reno Spaceport. As arranged, the captain met him in Arrivals, just outside the frequent flyer lounge. He was a distinguished-looking, middle-aged gentleman in a blue jacket with yellow wings decorating the sleeve. It occurred to Dylan that he himself might now be called “middle-aged.”

“Hello, Mr. Greenyears,” he said with some kind of Anglo accent. “Very long time, no see. How have you been, sir?”

“I'm sorry, have we met?”

“Indeed we have. I had the pleasure of taking you up on your first jaunt some years ago.”

“Ah, yes, of course. Good to see you again.”

Dylan had no memory whatsoever of having met this man before. The loss was his; he'd been too full of himself in those days to take any real notice of the bit players who got him where he needed to go.

The captain ushered him into the posh lounge, which they evidently had to themselves.

“Nice,” Dylan said.

“Don't get too comfortable. We're just passing through.”

The captain approached a grand piano in the corner and played an unlikely melody until a secret panel opened in the wall. He showed Dylan through.

And there it was, in purple lights: that sleek, steampunk rocket ship erect on its pad, like some great brass vibrator for a Titaness. It was still far classier than anything NASA or PASA or any of the private space companies had come up with.

“She's just as I remember her,” Dylan said.

“Why then your memory is good,” the captain assured him. “Remarkably little has changed. Top-notch engineering. Leave it to
the Germans.”

He led the way up the mobile staircase to the hatch. The interior too was just as he remembered it, insofar as he did at all: red velvet seats, a mini bar, an old-school plasma TV.