IF YOU’RE A TOURIST, the first thing you probably notice upon arriving at the Purgatory Customs Center is the rich retro decor: cherrywood paneling, pebbled glass, green-shaded lamps, brass and chrome trimmings. It’s very kitsch, and not likely to win any design awards, but to weary eyes it’s a welcome relief from the utilitarian furnishings of Peary and the sterile trappings of Doppelmayer and Lyall Bases. The second thing you’ll probably notice is the physical appearance of the officials checking your passport—they’re distinctly different from the “short-timers” staffing the desks on Nearside and most of Peary Base. Fluid redistribution and muscular adjustments make them look a little unreal, almost like cartoon characters, and when they walk it’s with a peculiar, sashaying style—what on Earth might be called “a pimp strut.”
Then, once you’ve been given the all-clear—not inevitable, as your visa can be rejected on the basis of minor technicalities—you’ll be ushered down a corridor to the courtesy bus transferring you to Sin (most of your luggage will be traveling separately). Once you get onto the crater’s winding tarmac, however, you might be surprised, even annoyed, at the speed of the bus—it’s agonizingly slow, even when the road ahead appears completely clear. But sooner or later an automated recording, or perhaps the driver himself, will enlighten you. All vehicles in Purgatory are forbidden from creating vibrations that might affect the readings of the interferometry arrays—all those modules and radar dishes, thousands of them across the crater floor, that together make up one immense multifaceted telescope with a resolving power infinitely greater than anything on Earth.
Of course, if you’ve done your guidebook reading you’ll know that Fletcher Brass personally financed two such arrays, one inside Störmer Crater, the other in Seidel Crater in the southern hemisphere. The former is intended for extragalactic observations; the latter is aimed at the inner galaxy. Both are above the 30th parallel, in regions just temperate enough to avoid the worst extremes of thermal cycling. Both are dedicated chiefly to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And both, as Brass himself is happy to point out, have so far discovered nothing. Not a squawk. Not a pin drop. Nothing.
But, as you’ll also know if you’ve read the right biographies, the huge expense paid off for Brass in unexpected ways. Because when terrestrial prosecutors started bearing down on him after the Amazon catastrophe, he was able to pull off a typically cunning trick. He moved himself, his loyal entourage, most of his belongings, and much of his liquidated financial holdings into Störmer Crater, effectively inside his own gigantic telescope, and claimed he was on privately owned territory.
And he was right. In the early years of lunar development, private corporations claimed all sorts of territorial rights on the basis of first possession—the argument being that anyone who went to the crippling expense of building a lunar base should at least get some real estate to go with it. But owing to the longstanding observance of 1967’s Outer Space Treaty, which in Article 8 forbids private ownership of real estate in outer space, corporations had to be content with exploiting the subclause that permits ownership of objects in space, including objects “landed or constructed on celestial bodies, along with all their component parts.” This was how Brass’s battalion of lawyers was able to claim that their client had exiled himself to an object—a giant telescope, 120 kilometers across—which was in effect his own legally recognized territory. And which came to be known as Purgatory.
So that’s the reason they’re so exceptionally sensitive about upsetting the telescopic readings—because any sustained breakdown might result in a legal challenge to Brass’s claim on the whole territory. Though even if this is explained to you—by an unusually candid guide, perhaps—you might choose to be skeptical, remembering all those rumors that Brass has worked out some secret deal with the United Nations Security Council, that he’s blackmailed presidents and prime ministers, or that he’s simply deployed his vast underworld connections to bribe and threaten lawmakers—all so the official status of Purgatory, no joke intended, can remain permanently in limbo.
In any case, after a couple of hours of this lugubrious journey—the sun, you might notice, doesn’t seem to have shifted at all—you’ll come to another crater rim: a crater within a crater, as it were. Much smaller than Störmer itself and festooned with doors and windows, this is your first sight of Sin, Purgatory’s roofed-over, Monaco-sized city. Here you’ll be shunted through more airlocks, disgorged into another cheesily decorated processing center, and directed down lamplit tunnels and up fast-moving elevators to one of the many hotels built into the so-called “Sin Rim”—the crater’s northern wall.
Most of these hotels have Babylonian names—Harran, Ninurta, Hermon—though some of the more recent ones show a more New Testament inspiration: Revelation, Fair Haven, Gethsemane. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, in any event, by the size of your suite. Even if your budget is mid-range, you’ll find a spacious room with suitably large furniture, impressive decorations, and a capacious bed with a heavily weighted duvet. If you open the minibar, you’ll find all the usual beverages, alcoholic and otherwise. If you call down for a club sandwich, you’ll find it not much different than similar fare on Earth. And if you turn on the TV, you’ll find a large selection of (censored) channels from Earth, along with the local news and movie networks (Brass gets repeated showings).
Should you be in town for an unmonitored conference you’ll be pleased to learn that all the major hotels have so-called “speakeasies”—lead-walled, soundproofed cells where external monitoring is impossible and electronic sweeps are conducted regularly. Purgatory is particularly proud of its reputation as a surveillance-free zone. Many high-ranking diplomats and businessmen come regularly to Farside to use these speakeasies, and many world-shaping agreements are said to have been thrashed out within the confines of Sin.
But inevitably, armed with a complimentary map—no GPS devices are permitted on Farside—you’ll want to explore the city. If you still haven’t gotten your moonlegs you might elect to hire a motorized scooter or to strap on some hydraulic walk-assist devices. You’ll be relieved to discover, in any case, that most of the tourist districts have heavily padded surfaces, and that the windows, should you fall against them, are made of lunar glass—the most unbreakable glass in existence.
In the arcades and galleries around the major hotels you’ll see countless stores selling Purgatory’s best-known souvenir items. These include authentic Pandia watches (those moon-faced wristwatches, precision-made by fugitive jewelers, that are high-priced collector’s items on Earth), the local postage stamps (even if it’s only for investment, you’ll want a few packs of those), and of course Sin’s famous multicolored crystal figurines (so delicate that they look like they’d break apart in your hand, yet so tough that they won’t shatter even if you hurl them against a wall).
It’s only when you venture a little deeper, beyond the malls, that you’ll find the casinos and gambling dens, the hash houses, the fight clubs, the sex shows, the smorgasbord brothels, the main-street shops where you can buy brain boosters and transcendental drugs over the counter, no questions asked, and the deep-discount surgical centers where you can get your whole body “renovated” in under five hours.
You’ll inevitably notice that many of the city’s citizens—“Sinners”—seem to have undergone extensive cosmetic procedures themselves. Some, indeed, bear striking resemblances to old movie stars, supermodels, and other celebrities. Most seem wearily tolerant of tourists, but a few are openly disdainful and sometimes even aggressive. To more than a few tourists this is part of Purgatory’s curious charm. The gambling district in particular is full of old-style saloons where you can swiftly find yourself in the middle of a bar fight, if that’s your thing, but you should be aware that Purgatory’s official hospitals, unlike the storefront surgeries, charge exorbitant prices for emergency treatments.
Of course, it could be that you’ve come to Sin not for the knife fights, the combat sports, the kinky sex, the radical medical procedures, or even the chance to conduct an unmonitored conversation. It could be that you just want to see the city in all its glory. And even if you’re a veteran traveler, it’s still a bracing moment when you catch your first sight of the whole thing, the so-called “Hornet’s Nest” or “Pressure Cooker.” You’ll see a huge roof crisscrossed with girders and catwalks, pipes hung with vines and flowers, massive halogen lamp arrays that dim and brighten arbitrarily (to simulate cloud cover and sunlight), great oxidized brass pillars wreathed in spiraling foliage, geysering fountains and garden-stuffed terraces, huge statues of dragons and saints, and a ground-level maze of cafés, shops, and moonbrick homes—“ancient Mesopotamia by way of pre-Revolution Havana,” as one travel writer called it.
You’ll see a lot of Babylonian influences intertwined with cathedral Gothic. The architecture, indeed, sometimes seems to bleed from enameled bricks, cruciform tablets, and mustard-colored columns at one end of the street to churchlike plaster, lancet windows, and ashlar blocks at the other. The ornamentation is war chariots and striding bulls here, weeping saints and devotional statuary there. The cafés and nightclubs are called Kish, Ur, and Belshazzar’s Feast on one corner, and The Cloister, The Reliquary, and the Eye of the Needle on the next. The music too—that which drifts from dark doors and mounted speakers—is sometimes ancient harps and tambourines, sometimes cathedral organs and monk chants. In short, you can see it with your eyes, you can hear it with your ears: ecclesiastical chic slowly conquering the pagan trappings of old Purgatory.
In the very center of town, reaching up to the ceiling girders and visible from all quarters of Sin, is the famous Temple of the Seven Spheres. A huge ziggurat studded with lunar gemstones and paved in reflective tiles, this is Sin’s Louvre and Eiffel Tower in one—a must-see observation point, a creditable museum of the solar system, and a fixture of Purgatorial postcards and tourist guides. But it’s invariably crowded with sightseers and aggressive hawkers, and best visited off-peak.
You might be surprised, meanwhile, by the city’s weather: It’s consistently warm and often uncomfortably humid, even tropical. And since water vapor rises more swiftly in lunar gravity, and the molecules knit together more readily, natural precipitation is frequent within the Pressure Cooker. But the raindrops are both bigger and lighter than they are on Earth and, rather than hitting the ground with any force, just splat like slow-motion water balloons, releasing large volumes of liquid. It’s a surreal experience, to walk through balls of rain in Sin. It’s even more surreal during a thunderstorm, when lightning sizzles and flashes across the ceiling like Saint Elmo’s fire.
You’ll probably be taken aback too by the quantity of animal and insect life. You’ll see rats, of course, but also dogs and cats and squirrels and even a fox or two. There will be birds singing and squawking in the palm trees—parrots especially, which were smuggled into the city on Brass’s orders and have multiplied exponentially. You’ll occasionally stand on cockroaches and beetles and get bitten by mosquitoes and fleas, and in the less salubrious districts you’ll certainly have to wave away flies. All these creatures, even the vermin, are tolerated and even encouraged in Sin, in order to make people feel more at home—and to avoid the trenchant sterility of places like Doppelmayer Base.
The shopping district of Shamash, the medical district of Marduk, the red-light district of Sordello, and the gambling and entertainment district of Kasbah are all in the northern half of Sin. In the middle of the city there are manicured gardens around the Temple of the Seven Spheres, giving way to a buffer zone of overgrown parkland through which flows a filthy watercourse, the Lethe. Then, on the southern side, you’ll find the palace district of Kasr, the residential quarter of Ishtar, and the industrial zone of Nimrod. The last is so nondescript that it’s not even marked on most maps and tourist guides. Ishtar, officially off-limits to tourists, is best overviewed in the early morning from the artificial hill that divides it from Kasbah. You’ll see five blocks of crumbling moonbrick houses, a good deal of refuse and smoke, much washing hanging out to dry, and, if you happen to be looking at the wrong time, probably a resident making obscene gestures or mooning you (mooning is suitably popular on the Moon). Kasr, on the western side of Nimrod, is named after the huge palace, built into the southern rim, that’s the Sin residence of Fletcher Brass—though all you’ll be able to see from a distance is an ornately decorated Babylonian facade. The Patriarch of Purgatory himself still makes an occasional appearance on its largest balcony, his amplified voice booming across the hedges, fountains, mazes, and statuary of Processional Park, the regal gardens that further separate the palace from the multitudes.
For some years Brass’s daughter, QT, lived in a wing of this palace as well. QT—short for “Cutie”—is the daughter of a Chicago reporter who thirty-one years ago had a brief fling with Fletcher Brass. Raised by a maternal uncle after her mother committed suicide, QT was reportedly sexually molested at sixteen by her uncle’s financial adviser—a man who was later found trussed up in an abandoned warehouse with his major bones smashed. Was QT responsible? Not officially—the whole thing was pinned on one of the man’s former business associates—but QT didn’t stick around till the music stopped. Before she could be interviewed by the police, she packed a suitcase and hightailed it to Purgatory, where she was welcomed by her father with open arms—the only one of his four existing children to have made a permanent move to his lunar fiefdom.
But now it seems there’s a schism—if your sources are good, you might have heard of that too. And in surveying Brass’s palace you might wonder where QT currently lives. You’d probably assume she’s been relegated to a smaller palace of her own. Or perhaps to a mansion in high-security Zabada, the exclusive enclave that’s connected to Sin by an underground tunnel. So you might be surprised—even shocked—to hear that QT lives in a two-story place in Ishtar—a house you might even have seen when you overlooked the district from the hill. Security there is minimal, but such is the respect that she generates among Sinners that she trusts that all eyes are “looking out for her.” And in truth, she doesn’t spend much time at home anyway. She very often sleeps in her office, which is located in the Sin Rim next to the luxury hotels.
QT is said to be ambitious. Obstinate. Focused. Ruthless. The peach, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. But somehow she’s got something that her father, for all his magnetism, always lacked: She always finds time for a visitor, no matter how lowly, provided his purpose is not entirely frivolous. And that’s why, right now, she’s dropped everything—rescheduled her whole afternoon’s itinerary—to welcome the new police recruit, Lieutenant Damien Justus.
Who’s come, apparently, on a matter of the greatest importance.