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  All in all, it wasn’t much of an opening. But it was enough for the smart cons to get rich, while the dumb ones starved. After a while, the inevitable happened, and one of the smartest, meanest convicts managed to muscle everyone else out of power and set himself up as the King of Tycho: Redeye Sid the First.

  That much was history—confirmable facts. The rest was half legend, half outright lie. Marcia had never quite decided which was which. The story went that Redeye Sid won the last open tract of Tycho in a poker game. A crooked game, some whispered. But no one could be sure, as Redeye was the only player to survive the game. Unless that tale was circulated by Sid to keep enemies in line.

  And then, in the tenth year of his reign, Redeye Sid dropped dead (or was poisoned) and left it all to his idiot (or perhaps mad genius or political malcontent) son Jasper, who listened to off-planet broadcasts a bit too often. More particularly, Redeye Jasper listened to the Purple Voice beaming down from NaPurHab. He got religion. Or philosophy. Or paranoid delusions. No one could ever decide which.

  Whatever the Purple was, it had earned itself a prominent place in any history of the irrational. What the Purps were for, what they were against, what their goals were—all those issues were meaningless to the Purps. Alienating themselves from society, offending the world and then protesting the world for taking offence, that was the Purple way. The Purples drenched themselves in anger, anger for its own sake, absurdity as an art and a political policy, the overturning of any and all existing forms. That was the closest the Purps came to a goal, a Naked Purple ideal.

  Marcia thought back to the allegory that named the movement: Get naked, paint yourself purple, and walk down the street. If people were surprised, shocked, offended, or merely amused, rail at them for their small-minded, bourgeois ways. If they accepted you and let you be, despise them for being blinkered, too narrow-minded to see the special and the marvellous in this world. Any reaction, all reactions, or no reaction at all were grounds for contempt.

  It was a formula for attracting the ostracized, ensuring that recruits would feel left out, rejected by the world. And it gave Purps a way to feel superior to the hidebound, workaday world, making sure they could be accepted only by fellow Purps.

  It was the sort of anger at everything that might appeal to the irrational heir to a mad kingdom. Like Jasper.

  As with all converts to the Naked Purple movement, Redeye Jasper was required to sign over all his worldly goods to the movement. Such goods and property included the Kingdom of Tycho. So the Naked Purple movement came into possession of its own country.

  By the time the Purples moved in, Tycho hadn’t, strictly speaking, been a prison for decades, but the Lunar Republic’s government still held to the same Tycho policy it had retained for generations: Anyone could go into Tycho Penal, but no one could come out. Even after a hundred years, there were mighty few loopholes in that rule. In effect, it was still a prison. The Republic was not in the least bit willing to change that policy for the sake of a bunch of habitat crazies.

  The Naked Purples declared themselves liberators anyway. They moved in, took over, and officially renamed the place Tycho Purple Penal Station. They made much of all the contradictions and tensions bubbling in that name—and in the city itself.

  The Naked Purples and a mob of former convicts living cheek by jowl inside a former maximum security prison was a sure formula for confrontation. The murder rate spiked high, even for Tycho, that first year. But, surprisingly, mostly convicts were dying. The Purples swiftly demonstrated their talent for survival and control, and the situation settled down a bit.

  Marcia’s parents met at Tycho Purple Penal, her father a second-generation convict, her mother one of the more combative leaders of the Purple’s nonviolent-aggression arm. Unless Marcia really concentrated, all she could remember of her childhood was one long screaming argument between the two of them, endless suspicion, and wild accusations. That sort of thing was considered a Naked Purple art form. And yet, like any child, she accepted her own situation as normal.

  Adolescence was at least more varied, hewing to the Naked Purple philosophy of education by extreme. Cloying doses of love and then random anger; overwhelming attention and then abandonment. Forced to live with the Naked Purple shock-value philosophy, the teenaged Marcia got a dose of it all.

  One summer (or what would have been summer if the environmental engineers hadn’t decided seasons were bourgeois and locked the thermal controls at twenty degrees centigrade) she spent under the grey stone dome of the abandoned main penal camp, sewing seeds she knew were dead into soil she knew was sterile.

  She could no longer remember the precise nuance of the particular nihilist-dialectic theory the experience was supposed to teach her, other than the futility of all effort, a central precept of the Naked Purple worldview. Everything had something to do with studying futility. The Purples worked very hard to convince themselves that work was useless. The details of why didn’t matter anyway. The whole point was that work was meaningless.

  All she remembered of that summer was grayness. Grayness, and her flat, defeated acceptance of the situation. The joyless unpainted grey dome of the stone sky. The cold, grey, shadowless light from the glowblimps, hovering overhead like lifeless jellyfish, floating dead in the currents of the air. The grey pallor of the unfertilised Lunar soil that billowed in endless cloaking clouds at the slightest breath of air. The grey, choking, dust-sucking thirst that followed the students as they worked down the razor-straight rows, carefully planting the lifeless seeds.

  And the grey, throbbing ache between her shoulders that never seemed to leave, the one product of her endless days of stoop labour.

  She grew up surrounded by all the alleged benefits of Purple living, starting with the search after truth through lies, of moderation through extremes and the creative tension of the permanent nonviolent riot. The endless confrontations with the unreconstructed convicts seemed nothing more than another aspect of the Purple ideal of sullen absurdity. Near-starvation would follow a season of compulsory hedonistic debauchery. Any artist who was celebrated today could count on being vilified tomorrow. The police were required to break the law on occasion, and the standard punishment for most crimes was doing a stretch in the police department. Fix a broken machine without authorisation, steal a neighbour’s property without leaving your own behind, dress conventionally, and you did time on the force.

  Marcia grew into puberty always fearing that Orgy Day was going to be declared again, praying that Celibacy Month would be randomly extended.

  And yet, in spite of all she had been through, for reasons that she could certainly not explain, Marcia MacDougal still not only wanted, but expected the world to make sense.

  No doubt that was a large part of why she had married Gerald, why she had loved him in the first place. Even though she could not share his religious beliefs, the fact that he had beliefs was a comfort.

  But Gerald was missing, along with the rest of Earth. Marcia felt something go cold in her chest at that fact, the reality she could not escape. With an effort of will, she once again tried to force her mind away from that chain of thought. She tried to focus on the problem at hand.

  They had missed something, she told herself again. All of the people struggling to find an answer. She had missed something. Her subconscious was stubbornly convinced that there was some key factor that they had all overlooked, something that might actually make some sense of it all. That was the message her inner self was sending.

  Wait a second. Message. That was it. The twenty-one-centimetre-band source. McGillicutty had completely missed that it was artificial; not just a source but a signal, a message. She uncurled from her foetal ball and sat up.

  Even if McGillicutty had missed the fact that it was a deliberate signal, few other people would.

  But had anyone even thought to try to decode the message? Would they be able to do so? Would they know how? She thought back to her days as a grad student at the Lun
ar Institute of Technology, back to the days when she had met Gerald. They had met in a xeno-bio course— one that started out teaching Message Theory, proposed techniques for communicating with aliens for the express purpose of getting such nonsense out of the way. That way the class could get down to analysing slime molds without further interruption.

  Message Theory. The idea that there were certain irreducible concepts common to any technological civilisation. A form of communication based on reference to those ideas ought to be readable to any other civilisation. She got up, went to her desk console, and started calling up reference files. Maybe it was time to give those old nonsense theories a test.

  Marcia knew she was facing an absurdly complex task. If indeed the radio source was a signal, it was presumably a message in an utterly foreign language.

  Unless, of course, it wasn’t aliens who had done this at all, but instead some bunch of perfectly standard-issue humans, crazies who had gotten hold of some very strange technology. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the Octal Millennialists had double-checked the portents, counted up by eight again and discovered they had made a mistake in their base-eight calculations of the date for Judgment Day. Suppose it had come due and they had decided to help it along. Or suppose some other tech-gang had dreamed up a way to hold the Earth hostage. That seemed impossible—but so did everything else about this disaster. If it was a human plot, then presumably that twenty-one-centimetre signal was heavily encrypted. If it was a nonhuman code, then presumably it could only be tougher.

  Simply to sit down at a computer console and plunge into the task without preparation was absurd. It was as if she had decided to crack the Rosetta stone in one afternoon.

  But she had a few distinct advantages over Champollion and the other Rosetta detectives: computers. In VISOR’s main computer system, she had highly sophisticated pattern-recognition programs at her command. The twenty-one-centimetre signal seemed to be binary in nature, a series of zeroes and ones, ideal for computer manipulation. The number-crunching side of the problem would be straightforward enough.

  But even with all that said, the task should have taken months, perhaps years to crack. If Marcia had been in a truly rational state of mind, rather than merely struggling to maintain a veneer of rationality over her panic and despair, she might have realised that, and never even made the attempt.

  It was perfectly ridiculous even to try.

  And downright absurd that she cracked the first stage of the message in fifteen minutes.

  chapter 11: Summoning the Demons

  Coyote Westlake woke up with a pounding headache, slumped in a corner of her habitat shed. What the hell had she been drinking last night? Lying there without moving a muscle, she carefully reviewed the night before. Wait a second, she thought. I didn’t have anything to drink. I haven’t had a drink in weeks. There was a very good reason for that: there wasn’t a drop of booze left in the hab shed or the ship.

  Clearly something was wrong. She had to think this out. But the reflexes of an experienced drinker had taught her to keep her eyes shut when she found herself in this sort of position, being careful not to move a muscle while she took stock of her situation. Getting up and moving was a quick invitation to particularly messy forms of vertigo—especially in zero gee. She lay still, eyes shut, and tried to remember.

  If she hadn’t been drinking the night before, then this was not a hangover. She had gone to bed early and stone cold sober, in a good mood even. Then what the hell had happened? She needed more data.

  She cautiously opened one eye, and then the other, and found herself staring at what seemed to be the forward bulkhead of the hab shed, at the far end of the cabin from her bunk. She was pasted, facedown, to the wall of the shed. She realised her nose was somehow both numb and sore at the same time, and the pain in her head was across her forehead. She must have slammed herself face first into the wall somehow. That, as least, would explain the headache—but how the hell had she thrown herself across the cabin? Even in zero gee, it was a hell of a stunt. Had she leapt out of bed during a nightmare?

  Moving cautiously to avoid the stomach-whirling nausea she still half-expected, she reached out with both her hands and pushed herself away from the bulkhead. She drifted back away from the wall—and then was astonished to find herself drifting back down toward it. No, not drifting—falling.

  She scrambled in midair and managed to swing herself around fast enough to land, rather awkwardly, on her rump rather than her face again. Falling? In zero gee? Not zero anymore. She would estimate it as about a twentieth gee or so.

  She sat there, staring at the cabin above her—above her—in utter bewilderment. Her bunk was bolted to the aft wall of the cabin—which had now become the ceiling. The sheet was caught by one of the restraint clips, or otherwise it would have fallen too. Now it hung absurdly down. She glanced around the forward bulkhead she was sitting on and found it littered with bits and pieces of equipment that had slammed down with her. She reached up and felt a bump on the top of her head. Something must have clipped her as it fell.

  She stood up, as carefully as she could, and tried to think. When she had gone to sleep, her hab shed had been bolted to the side of asteroid AC125DN1RA45, a tiny hunk of rock less than half a kilometre across, far too small to generate any gravity field worth mentioning. Maybe a ten-thousandth of a gee, tops. Now, suddenly, she was in a gee field hundreds of times stronger than that. What the hell was going on? Had someone moved her hab shelter for some reason?

  Her shelter was a cylinder about fifteen meters long. Or, now, fifteen meters tall, with Coyote standing on the bottom looking up. At its midsection was an airlock system. There were two viewports at the midsection as well, one set into the airlock and the other set into the bulkhead opposite. One port afforded a view of the asteroid’s surface, the other a view spaceward. What she couldn’t see through the ports she ought to be able to see using the remote-control exterior camera. The camera’s controls were set into the wall by the airlock.

  It took her two or three tries, and two or three crashes, before she managed to jump precisely enough to grab a handhold by the airlock and clip herself into place with the restraint belts intended for holding small pieces of cargo. She looked through the rockside port first and breathed a sigh of relief. RA45’s dark bulk was still there. She recognised not only the rumpled landscape, but her own mining gear. And there was the drill pit down into the rock’s interior.

  Then she looked out the spaceward viewport and discovered something was missing after all. Not on the rock. In the sky.

  In a horrifying flash she realised what she wasn’t seeing. Her ship. The Vegas Girl was gone.

  No, wait a second. There it was, a tiny blinking dot of light far to sternward, the Girl’s tracking strobe.

  How the hell could this have happened? She had left the Vegas Girl in a perfectly matched orbit relative to RA45. There was no way she could have drifted that far while Coyote was asleep.

  Unless she had been sleeping for one hell of a long time. She checked her watch and compared it to the time display on the hab shed’s chronometer. She even checked the date, just to be sure she hadn’t slept around the clock. But no, she had been out only a few hours. How far had her ship drifted?

  Coyote grabbed the radar range-and-rate gun out of its rack and aimed it through the spaceward viewport, lining up the sights on the Girl. It was a low-power portable unit, not really meant to work at long range. Normally she used it to establish distance from and velocity toward an asteroid, but it could track her ship just as handily. She got the blinking strobe in the sights and pulled the trigger.

  The gun pinged cheerfully twice to indicate it had gotten a good range and rate on its target. Coyote checked the gun’s tracking data display.

  And her heart nearly stopped. The Vegas Girl was over one hundred kilometres astern, and the ship was moving away at over three hundred meters a second.

  But wait a moment. The tracker just showed relativ
e velocity, not which object was doing the moving. She peered out the port again, and spotted the triple-blink beacon she had left on RA46, the last rock she had worked. She swore silently. RA46 was in the wrong part of the sky. She fired a ranging pulse at it and got back virtually the same velocity value. The Girl was stationary relative to RA46. So it wasn’t the ship moving. It was this rock. It was moving at nearly twelve hundred kilometres an hour relative to the ship! But how the hell—

  Good Golly God. She wasn’t in a gravity field—that was a one-twentieth-gee acceleration she was feeling. But for how long? Coyote knew that velocity could accumulate at a hellacious rate under even modest acceleration.

  Even so, she was startled by the results when she ran the problem. Assuming one-twentieth gee, that meant the rock had been accelerating for only ten or eleven minutes. Somehow, the numbers were the most frightening thing.

  But how the devil could a dumb rock accelerate that fast? Or even at all? Coyote sure as hell would have noticed if someone had landed on RA45 and rigged it for acceleration. The fusion engines required would have been twice the size of her hab shelter. Even if it had happened under her local horizon, it would have been a massive engineering job and she would have felt the vibration of the work rattling RA45. But even the high-end miners who routinely manoeuvred their rocks into more convenient orbits never got their boost up over one or two percent of a gee. Asteroids were just too massive to make any better headway than that. Even then, the vibration was nearly enough to shake the rock apart.

  Except this baby was cooking along at about three times that velocity without so much as a quiver. She hung in the restraint straps, staring at the range gun’s tiny control panel, utterly baffled.