Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Vespasian grunted. “Okay, I guess.” He shook his head and looked at the wall clock. “Jesus, those poor bastards on Pluto.”

“What do you mean?” Lucian asked.

“I mean the frigging speed of light. Think about it. Earth went poof ten hours ago. They sent the gravity wave five hours before it reached its target, went to bed, got up, and didn’t find out what they had done until then, five and a half hours after we saw it happen. We’re sending the word about the black hole now . They won’t find out about that until late tonight. It’s like it’s all happening to them in a dream on the other side of the Universe.”

Vespasian stared into space. “Terrible things happen, things you cause accidentally. You don’t learn the consequences of what you’ve done for eleven hours after it happens, and you can’t stop the terror once you’ve set it in motion. If you were the poor son of a bitch who had pushed the button in the first place, how many shocks like that could you take?”

The day the Tycho Purple Penal Fire Department burned down her parent’s house Marcia felt the purest joy of her life. The memory popped into her mind unbidden, and at first she wondered why. Then she understood. Her subconscious was reminding her how much she had already survived.

Remember , Marcia told herself. Remember the turmoil, the chaos you have survived to get here. You can survive this, too. Remember the strange and terrible way you escaped, and the joy you felt that day .

The moment came back to her. The black pall of smoke hazing over the dome’s interior, the gray ashes sifting downward, the firemen laughing and chuckling, putting away their blowtorches. And Marcia watching it all, tears of happiness in her eyes.

It was mere days before her eighteenth birthday, and the fire made her a homeless minor refugee in the eyes of the Lunar Republic, made homeless by an official act that was unquestionably not of her doing. She had a receipt from the fire department to prove that.

The fire was her ticket out of Tycho Purple Penal, because legal refugees were one of the very few categories of souls entitled to pass through the Lunar Republic’s security checkpoints, out of the asylum into the saner world outside.

Life didn’t get easier after leaving home. There were only two nations on the Moon: Tycho Purple Penal and the Lunar Republic. Getting by in the feisty Republic, confronted on all sides with the legendary touch of cheerful surliness burned into the Lunar character—now that had been a challenge. She was astonished to discover that she missed the parents she could never see face-to-face again. She spent far too much on videocalls to Tycho. But if life among the Naked Purples had any virtue, it was that the experience prepared you to cope with anything.

Gerald. Gerald . Earth had been taken, and Gerald, her loving, perfect husband had gone with the planet. Could she learn to cope with that ?

There had to be an explanation. They must have missed something, something that would make sense of it all. Marcia knew that. They must have. Even wrapped up in a fetal ball on her bed, struggling to block out the world, her mind demanded that she find the missing answer, make sense of the madness.

The desire to find sense in order to survive madness was a deep-seated reflex for Marcia, after being raised in the Naked Purple scene, struggling to be the ordinary child of extraordinary—even mad—parents. Whenever, as a child and a teenager, she had been surrounded by madness, she had clung to the hope, the urgently needed faith that the Purple weirdness was itself surrounded by a larger world of sanity. The sort of sanity and decency that Gerald had always represented. But no, don’t think of him now , she thought. Calm yourself . Sanity existed. She believed that, had to believe it now, just as she always had.

She had been born into the Naked Purple movement not long after it expanded from its orbital habitat into the former home of the Tycho Penal Colony on the Moon. After eighteen years of hearing only the Purple version of events, the straight version of history sounded strange to her.

Tycho Purple Penal Station had started out centuries before as the Soviet Lunar base, and had passed to the United Nations’ control with the final Soviet breakup. In the bad old days when UNLAC—the United Nations Lunar Administration Council—ran the Moon, Tycho had been made into a U.N. penal colony, and had rapidly devolved into the final dumping ground for the human refuse of the Earth, the Moon, and the Settlement Worlds.

Tycho Penal was specifically intended to be not only escape-proof, but reprieve-proof. No prisoner was ever sent there under any sentence except life without parole.

When the Lunar Republic was declared, eighty years before Marcia was born, the Lunar Colonists—the Conners—were very careful not to lay claim to the Tycho Penal Colony and environs. They were quite happy to let the United Nations administer the nightmare it had created for itself.

Even after the Republic, the United Nations let Tycho Penal stagger along a few years as a prison, until a resolution passed the General Assembly banning the placement of any more prisoners at Tycho. UNLAC was stuck with the bills for a prison populated with old men and women too mean to die. The costs of running the place rapidly got out of hand—until it dawned on UNLAC that it would be cheaper to declare the place a separate republic, and announce that all current residents were naturalized citizens.

The Lunar Republic promptly decreed that any bearer of a Tychoean passport found in the Republic would be escorted back to the Tycho border—with or without a pressure suit. Every nation on Earth, and all of the Settlement Worlds, refused to honor Tycho passports.

So the convicts—and, by this time, their descendants— were technically free, but legally they couldn’t travel.

Tycho was still tough to get out of illegally, for that matter. But the convicts could write their own laws, and own their own property. The Lunar Republic did allow some amount of legitimate trade, which provided ample cover for smuggling operations. It gave the convicts a window on the outside world.

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 offense, 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.