Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

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 marvelous 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 gray 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 gray dome of the stone sky. The cold, gray, shadowless light from the glowblimps, hovering overhead like lifeless jellyfish, floating dead in the currents of the air. The gray pallor of the unfertilized Lunar soil that billowed in endless cloaking clouds at the slightest breath of air. The gray, choking, dust-sucking thirst that followed the students as they worked down the razor-straight rows, carefully planting the lifeless seeds.

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

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 authorization, steal a neighbor’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-centimeter-band source. McGillicutty had completely missed that it was artificial; not just a source but a signal, a message . She uncurled from her fetal 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 Lunar 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 analyzing slime molds without further interruption.

Message Theory. The idea that there were certain irreducible concepts common to any technological civilization. A form of communication based on reference to those ideas ought to be readable to any other civilization. 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-centimeter signal was heavily encrypted. If it was a non human code, then presumably it could only be tougher.