Irontown Blues

Eight

My mother had never talked about her involvement in the big raid on Irontown that resulted from the Big Glitch. It was such a fiasco that I assumed she had spent the intervening years trying to forget all about it. But of course she couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault; all the investigative committees convened afterward agreed with that. She was exonerated. But in the only evaluation of the raid that mattered to her, she was guilty. And that was the court of inquiry in her own mind.

What I had hoped for in my visit was to pick her brains about Irontown itself. As someone who had been high up in the planning stage, I figured she knew things that might come in handy for me.

It turned out she did. But first, to my amazement, she wanted to talk about the raid and the Big Glitch itself.

“I was the one who suggested the operation,” Mom said, taking another hefty belt of her moonshine. “That damn place was a blot on the city, on the damn planet, even.”

“Technically, Luna isn’t a planet,” I said.

“Don’t get technical on me. You always did that, even as a child.”

She glowered at me. Relations between me and my mother can be strained at times.

“I wanted to clean it up. Clear out the squatters, liberate the area, bring it all back into the civilized world.”

I didn’t point out that “liberating” would not be the word the squatters of Irontown would have used for the operation. More like “invading.” Or maybe “evicting,” or “terrorizing.”

“One warren at a time, that was my original plan. Stretch it out over maybe a year, maybe even two. Take one neighborhood, clean it up, empty it out, and make sure no one could get back in. Then move on to the next one. Use a small force of handpicked officers, give them extra training, even some paramilitary courses to make sure we showed up with overwhelming force. One of the cardinal rules of police work.”

She didn’t need to tell me that. She often seemed to forget that I had been a cop, too, once upon a time.

“It was that goddamn mayor,” she went on. “Up for reelection, needed to do something that would get on the news feeds and show the voters he was actually doing something while in office. He wanted it quick and dirty and, above all, ‘cinematic,’ as he put it. He didn’t quite have the nerve to say he actually wanted violence, but it was made clear to me that no one would really mind it if things got bloody. No deaths unless the eyecams would show clearly that the officer’s life was in danger.

“He couldn’t just fire me, he’d have to go to the council, then get it approved by the CC. But he could make the job just about impossible if I didn’t give him what he wanted, so I gave in.”

She brooded about that for a moment. Took another belt.

“Hell, I’d meant to go in with nothing but stun pistols, happy gas, and dragnets, but found myself issuing projectile weapons. We had to get out the manuals just to learn how to use them. And it took another month of range practice before any of my officers could hit the floor without shooting off their own feet. I never did get very good at it.”

“You did the training, too?”

“I decided I had to go in with my troops. If they were going to have to do it, I wanted to lead from the front, not the rear.”

My mom had balls. I’ll give her that.

“Of course, no one knew at the time that the Central Computer was behind it all. I mean, naturally we knew the CC was a part of the raid. Back then, it was a part of everything. And we never even thought about how vulnerable that made us all.”

She took a third — or was it a fourth? — belt and scowled. I thought about prodding her but decided to wait it out.

“Next thing I knew, I was in nominal charge of the biggest paramilitary operation in Luna since… hell, since maybe ever.”

Once more she lapsed into silence. I found I was actually holding my breath. Anything at all might break into her mood and send her right back to the silence of the past. But she still went on.

“I don’t know at what point my leadership became just titular. Nominal, like I said. The mayor was the guy the public saw, the one who planned to get all the glory for cleaning the place out. I was to be the brains behind the operation. Just part of my job.

“Only I began to realize, as the thing snowballed and started careening out of control, that my participation was going to be marginal, or maybe even nonexistent.

“And one day the real soldiers arrived, with authorization straight from the CC itself. Big, ugly, nasty fuckers recruited from the dregs of Pluto and Charon, who didn’t take orders from anyone but the CC.

“I don’t mean to whine about it. I made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one being my failure to resign when I saw how it was going. In my defense, I never saw just how bad it was going to get, or I would have refused the order to start the raid. But I should have refused anyway. I guess in the end I was just too chickenshit to do it.”

“If you knew it was going to go bad, and went ahead anyway,” I said, “then that would be true. But you couldn’t have known.”

“The signs were all there. I was being paid to see things like that. But thank you for saying so.

“There was one other reason I didn’t speak out. I was afraid that the raid would take place anyway, and if the Irontowners would have known what was coming, they would have had time to prepare better defenses than what we were planning for.”

She suddenly threw her glass across the room. I was startled. Outbursts like that were not Mom’s style. I’d seen the slow burn often enough, growing up, but seldom the explosion.

She put her head in her hands, and for a moment I thought she was crying. Which would have been a first, in my experience. Then she looked up at me and slowly shook her head.

“Irontown, Heinlein Town, who knew the difference? I didn’t even know about the Heinleiners until two days before the raid. And, of course, it turned out that’s what the raid was all about. The CC had it in for the Heinleiners, they had something the CC didn’t have, and that was intolerable to our big, friendly AI brain. The null field. The thing that made it possible for those fuckers to go without a pressure suit!

“Our maps were shit! The CC itself wasn’t sure where ordinary Irontown ended and Heinlein Town began. I couldn’t have cared less about the rest of Irontown. Let those rejects from society go their way in peace. But the Heinleiners were different. They weren’t losers, and they weren’t stupid. They were voluntarily separating themselves from society not only because they found it too restrictive but because of a paranoid theory that we had put too many of our eggs in one basket, so to speak.”

She frowned.

“Paranoid,” she huffed. “Who knew that they were the only ones in Luna who were right about the CC?

“If I had it to do all over again, I’d leave the Heinleiners alone. They weren’t bothering anybody but the CC. Sure, they were breaking the law, or some of them were, anyway, but as far as I can tell, they were being extremely careful with their genetic experiments.”

Once more she stopped and steamed silently for a moment. Then she relaxed. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she slumped.

“It was out of my hands at the end, anyway. The CC placed those mercenaries from the Outer Planets Coalition, those ‘sergeants,’ those combat veterans… placed them in charge. I was forbidden to even talk to my own cops, the ones who had been selected for the raid.”

“Then they can’t blame you for what went down,” I said.

“True. They never blamed me for it.”

But it ended her career. She saw what was coming and resigned before they could find a good reason to fire her.

“That’s all, Chris,” she said. “I can’t talk about it anymore.”

“Sure, Mom,” I said. “Here, let me get you another glass, and we can have one more drink before I go.”

It was the perfect opportunity for me to tell her about my experience of the Big Glitch. But like a dozen perfect opportunities before, I let it go by. I wasn’t sure I would ever tell her.

Did she need another load of guilt? No. But was she entitled to know what happened to her only child on that horrible day?

The jury was still out on that one.

Mom had never been one to share her thoughts and hopes and memories and all that heart-to-heart stuff. Her one great fear was to be seen as weak, so she cultivated the tough exterior. I was the only one who knew that beneath that hard shell… was another shell, just as hard.

It turned out that although she had heard of the fad of engineered “harmless” diseases and other disfigurements designed and intended to be disgusting to the general population, she didn’t know much about it.

“Before my time,” she said. “But it’s just like any number of other fads, I’ll bet. One of the things Irontown was always about was nonconformity. I understand every generation has things they do to flaunt their independence in the faces of their parents.” She glared at me over the top of her glass. I don’t know why. I had always been a good little girl as a child. When I decided, at the age of twelve, that I preferred to spend most of my life as a male, I was an obedient teenage boy. I didn’t hang with the “bad” kids, didn’t do anything to spite my mother. Could she have been disappointed in me because I didn’t rebel? That would be just like her.

“The most extreme rebels have gone to Irontown in the last four or five decades. It’s a fashion that just stayed around longer than usual. There have always been enclaves… I think the word is ‘bohemian’… There have been places for artists and misfits and people who wish to isolate themselves from the larger society.”

Her eyes lost focus for a moment, and I knew she was accessing data with her neural implant.

“Paris in the nineteenth century. A place called Greenwich Village in New York City in the twentieth. The Rocks in Sydney in the middle of the twenty-first. Places where people could band together and sneer at all the people who didn’t think like they did. There’s always been a bit of that in Irontown, along with the criminal element.”

That was a major concession from Mom. I had never heard her say a good word about the place, or even a neutral word. “Irontown” was a word she always spat out, like she didn’t want it to linger in her mouth.

“Leading up to the Invasion, there was a major fad for body modification,” she went on. “Again, it started in primitive cultures, with scarification, piercing things like earlobes or noses. Some cultures stretched parts of their bodies, like lower lips.”

“How?”

“You know they didn’t have anything like modern surgery. The modifications hurt, and the only way to stretch skin was to stress it over a long period of time.”

“Did they like pain?”

“There have always been people who want to be hurt, but it’s usually a sexual thing. I think the pain of tattooing and body modification was part of the rite, something you had to endure. I suspect that if they had the technology we have, most of them would have elected to avoid the pain. You know that childbirth used to be horribly painful, don’t you?”

“So I have heard.”

“You could die. Sometimes the contractions lasted days.”

I frowned at her.

“Do you think… I mean if you had to go through that… would I ever have been born?”

She laughed and took another swallow of her joy juice.

“Not really a fair question. Hypothetically… probably not. I don’t like pain any more than anyone else. But I told you before, I wasn’t even sure I wanted a baby at all for a long, long time. But having made the decision, I welcomed you into my life.”

She probably really saw it that way. And it wasn’t entirely untrue, it just overlooked a lot of things.

She shook her head, looked vaguely disoriented. I sensed we were about three sips away from unconsciousness.

“Oh, right, body mods. The fad started somewhere in the depths of the twentieth century with simple piercing. Just about anything you could poke a hole through without dying, like nipples and labia and penises. Some pierced their tongues, which must have been exquisitely painful.”

“Not to mention the penis.”

“Some went further. They split the penis in half. Don’t ask me how those men pissed. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“Good. Of course those sort of things are pretty common these days, minus the pain those people must have endured. But if you go to Irontown you’ll see things more radical than that.”

“So… when you were setting up the raid, did you encounter any disease mongers?”

“I don’t recall any involuntary cases. That’s what you’re asking about, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I have a client who was given something that’s turning out to be hard to get rid of.”

“You know how she got it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out for her.”

She scoffed. I wasn’t sure if that was over the foolishness of M. “Smith” for getting infected, or at me for taking the job. She has quite a low opinion of my line of work, which I guess is traditional for a cop. In the books, the flatfoot is always threatening to take the license from the shamus.

I had just about concluded that it was a wasted trip — except of course for the pleasure of seeing my mother and scratching Tiny’s enormous nose — when she raised her eyebrows a little, which I knew from past experience was the sign of a lightbulb going off in her head.

“‘Ever’body go to Mistah Scrooge, ’cause Mistah Scrooge, he know ever’thing an ever’body.’” She blinked and burped.

“And that means… what?”

“Excuse me. Mister Scrooge is Mister Big in Irontown. At least he was back when I was chief, and I see no reason why he wouldn’t still be the man to see.”

“What was that, some sort of slogan?”

“Excuse me. Yeah, something like that. You go to Irontown and try to find out anything, that’s what they will recite to you.”

“So you think I should go there and ask around for Scrooge? Walk into a bar or something, start buying drinks for people?”

“No, I do not think you should do that. First… excuse me… first, you shouldn’t go into Irontown or Heinlein Town or Steelville at all. You’re just not equipped for it, my darling child, no matter how tough you think you’ve become from reading all those stories.”

I didn’t think I was that tough at all, but I had to put on some sort of front or I just couldn’t cope. Which she knew.

“You’re… you’re not quite right in the head, Christopher, and you know it.”

“Mom…”

“Don’t you deny it. Just look at you. Those ridiculous clothes, that hat, that silly dog that follows you—”

I got up and doffed my stupid hat at her.

“I won’t hear Sherlock insulted, Mother, not even from you. I’m outta here.”

“Sit down, Christopher. Sit down!”

I sat down. When my mother used that tone of voice, hardened prestupniks have been known to fall to their knees, sobbing and confessing their crimes. I was able to resist that, but not the command to sit down.

“Okay, I’m sorry I insulted your dog. You know I love that flop-eared goofball. Where is Mr. Holmes, by the way? He’s usually with you.”

“Last time we visited, Tiny tried to pick him up. Remember?”

“Oh, yes, I forgot. You know Tiny just wanted to play.”

I knew Tiny hadn’t intended to eat Sherlock, being a vegetarian and all, but try telling that to a dog who is about to disappear into that huge gullet. No, I figured that from now on if Mom wanted to pick him up by the ears (which he loves, by the way), she would have to come to him.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll accept that you are going there in spite of my advice. So let me give you some more. Do not go asking around for Scrooge. He has ears everywhere, and he is the most paranoid individual I’ve ever known. He doesn’t exist in any database, which is so difficult to do these days that I doubt there are more than a few dozen people in Luna who have accomplished it. Outside of Heinlein Town, of course. Those folks have been evading all databases including the CC for decades. So it’s impossible to confirm or refute his claim that he remembers the Invasion.”

Well, that startled me. It’s been a long, long time, and so far as I know the lineage of the Founding Families is all accounted for.

“That would make him…”

“The oldest living human, yeah. I go back and forth on whether it’s the truth or not. Longevity treatments were pretty primitive back then. And you have to take into account that he is an accomplished bullshitter, too. But I do know he is very old.”

She took one more belt of moonshine and, this time, suppressed a belch. I figured she was now one sip away from oblivion.

“So if I don’t go around asking where to find him, and he doesn’t exist in any database… how do I contact him?”

“Let me emphasize this: Definitely do not ask about him. People have been known to disappear if he thinks they are a threat to him. Think of him…” She looked thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment. “Think of him as like a boss of the Charonese Mafia.”

I hoped she was exaggerating, to scare me. If she was, it worked. I won’t pretend that those words didn’t make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It would have that effect on anyone who knew anything about them. The Charonese Mafia were legendary pirates, assassins, torturers, and just all-around blue meanies. They were said to eat their young, disrespect their mothers, chew up steel plates and spit out bolts, kick puppies, and not flush the loo after taking a dump.

Okay, I’m being facetious, maybe because making a joke about them helps to keep the actuality of them at arm’s length. It’s whistling past a graveyard, whatever that old expression means.

I don’t think most people could point to Charon on a chart. It’s a place good folks will never visit, so why should they clutter their minds up learning about the awful place? But I had done a little reading on the subject some years ago, and almost wished I hadn’t.

Charon is the largest of Pluto’s moons. If you think of Pluto as a good substitute for the Biblical Hell, which I do, Charon is the bottom circle. For a long time it was the place where Plutocrats, and some Martian, Titanian, and Cerean courts dumped their most incorrigible criminals. Transportation seems to be an irresistible urge in the human race. Ship them off somewhere and forget about them.

I understand that the descendants of transportees to Australia, which was a country in Earth’s southern hemisphere, were just like anybody else. Crime was no more prevalent down there than it was anywhere else. I also know that many, if not most, of those who were transported were sent for ridiculous offenses like being unable to pay bills. It wasn’t a population composed solely of child rapists, mass killers, bomb throwers, and the like.

Not so in Charon. You had to fuck up in spectacular fashion to get a ticket to that miserable ball of supercooled ice.

Since none of the Eight Worlds practices capital punishment, the minimum requirements for survival were provided. There was already plenty of water there, and power from the cryogeysers and cryovolcanos that litter the moon. Oxygen was dropped to the prisoners for some years, but later it could be obtained from hydrolysis of the water on the surface. Burrows were dug and basic tools and raw materials were provided for hollowing out more tunnels, on a much smaller scale than we have on Luna. Finally hydroponic farms were established, so the outside world could stop dropping rations. What I read was the prisoners subsisted on beans, broccoli, apples, chicken, and vitamin supplements for decades, until the orbiting prison guards relented a little and sent them other things to grow. You might expect that people would get a little grumpy on a diet like that, and you would be right. You could not have designed a better environment to breed people with little to no moral sense. There were no laws, no rules, no guards, no warden. Escape was impossible. It was pure Darwinian selection, where the strongest rose to the top and the weakest died. The most powerful bred. The rest… masturbated, I guess.

So, you put all these ingredients together and let them simmer for almost a century. About fifty years ago, we stopped transporting criminals. Since they were self-sufficient, “civilized” society turned its back on the inmates completely. Out of sight, out of mind. And good riddance.

Until the Charonese built a primitive spacecraft and landed on Pluto, about seventy years ago. It was a big surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. A lot of the technology needed to stay alive at all on a barren rock like Charon or Luna could be used to evolve better machines, just as happened on Earth before the Invasion.

It was a big dilemma. What to do with them? The crew of ten had been carefully selected, all of them descendants of transportees. None of them had ever been convicted of anything. The “ambassadors” claimed that there was a government on Charon, and they wished to be admitted to the Eight Worlds (which by then was a lot more than eight worlds, but the name stuck) as a full member. They wanted full rights to travel to any of the other worlds, even seek immigrant status there, just like any other citizen.

There were some who worried about them, but many more who sympathized with their plight. The final word was spoken by the Interplanetary Union Court. Charon was to be admitted to the confederation as a full member.

It wasn’t long before most everyone who knew about them regretted that decision. But since they deliberately kept a low profile, most citizens were only vaguely aware of the viper we had taken to our bosom.

“Scrooge is not Charonese,” Mom said, bringing me back from my distasteful reverie. I realized I was a little drunk, too.

“I just used that as an example to get your head turned in the right direction if you deal with him. Which I say again, you shouldn’t.”

“You know I’m going to try. If I can’t nose around and ask questions, what would you recommend as a way to contact him?”

“With a hundred-meter pole would be nice. With him at the wrong end of a shotgun would be nice, too.”

She sighed and leaned forward toward me. She started to speak, then stopped herself and actually looked to the left and to the right, searching for hidden listeners, something I had only seen before in movies where an actor is playing a crazy paranoid. Apparently satisfied that no spies were lurking behind a giant fern, she started again.

“I must be out of my head to tell you this, but maybe it will save your life. I won’t bother to swear you to secrecy, but I’m commanding you to never tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. Only three other people in the world know this, and two of them are dead.

“You were a cop long enough to know what a confidential informant is, right?”

“A fancy phrase for rat.”

“Squealer works, too. For many years, and including the planning for the operation in Irontown, Mister Scrooge was my mole. He fed me information. I met with him twice, and I know how to get in contact with him.”