Irontown Blues

Three

You would think that, this far into the Information Age, somebody would know when Irontown became known as Irontown, and why. And you would be wrong. I did a major search and found nothing but rumors and folktales and rock-rat legends.

It obviously isn’t really made out of iron. Irontown is made of steel, plastics, ceramics, and nanotubes, just like everywhere else.

Everybody knows where Irontown is, of course. Ask anyone; they can point you to it.

Except they can’t. Not really.

Its boundaries are vague. It’s not like you are walking down a decrepit, badly lit corridor, with the sound of water dripping somewhere in the distance and the smell of something rotting and the occasional screech of a feral bat — though you will usually encounter those things and more on your way there — and suddenly you find yourself in Irontown. There are no signs saying WELCOME TO IRONTOWN! no Chamber of Commerce placards announcing the presence of the Freemasons, Shriners, Tongs, Elks, and Yakuza, or inviting you to attend services at the Church of Elvis or Jay-Dubyas or Hubbardites.

What happens is the passage gradually grows gloomier, the lights more flickery, the smells more pungent, the people more furtive, until you begin to encounter some people you definitely wouldn’t want to take home to meet Mama.

To understand Irontown you have to go back to the very beginning, in the days just after the Invasion.

There were only five Lunar colonies when the Invaders showed up from interstellar space and forcibly and fatally evicted humanity from Earth. The total population was around seven thousand. Luna in those days has been compared to Antarctica in the early twentieth century, both in terms of population and the harshness of the environment. But at least at McMurdo Station you didn’t have to import or make your own oxygen.

Beyond Luna there were three bases on Mars, with less than a thousand inhabitants, and isolated research stations in the Outer Planets. They vanished as completely as did about eight billion humans on Earth.

One of the Martian beachheads quickly suffered a catastrophic failure. The same happened to one of the Lunar bases. So the total number of survivors of the Great Death was around five thousand. Those five thousand Founders contained the entire available gene pool of humanity.

The first decades were very, very tough.

It was touch and go, the people surviving from day to day. Everyone was required to work, and work very hard. Water had to be located and mined, in Luna and on Mars. Power plants had to be maintained. Food had to be grown. Sixteen-hour workdays were the norm, and twenty-hour shifts not uncommon. Some died of malnutrition or sheer exhaustion.

But they made it, those hardy survivors. It is no wonder that schoolchildren to this day sing of the pioneers, and that every year we commemorate the Invasion with defiant promises: Next year on the Earth!

It’s a pretty hollow promise by now.

As more and more babies arrived, more habitat had to be carved out for them, naturally. The earliest Lunar dwellings were rude, cramped, and hazardous. People began to move underground. Mazes of tunnels and rooms connected in a haphazard way, with little planning at first.

With the passing of another century, life had become easier than it had ever been, even on Old Earth. The population exploded, and more space was needed to accommodate them.

People demanded, and got, many more options in life. They no longer wished to live in tunnels and caves, no matter how luxurious. They wanted open spaces, as much as that was possible on an airless moon. And it turned out to be quite possible. The first disneys were built, ten miles across, twenty miles, fifty miles. Each contained a different ecology, patterned after the lands of Old Earth. Animals and plants were created from the vast DNA banks that had survived the years of crisis. The land inside the disneys was sculpted and furnished. When inside one, the illusion was complete. Except for the low gravity, you might imagine you were in Kansas or Congo, the Swiss Alps, the Sahara, a Pacific island, or the Russian tundra.

While this was going on, the vast canyons like the Mozartplatz were being dug. For those who were not interested in the sweeping vistas offered by the various ’Platzes, there was another option for living illusions: simulated neighborhoods like the one I live in.

Lunarians now live in a society so rich, so luxurious, offering so many options to just about everyone, that those few thousand Founders would scarcely have been able to imagine it. Energy is cheap and almost unlimited. Labor is mostly done by machines more deft and powerful than human hands. Standardization is a thing of the past. You can design your own clothes or furniture or bathroom or objet d’art and have it printed and delivered within the hour.

Tired of living in an environment that simulates a medieval castle courtyard? Prefer to live on a St. Louis street from the year 1900, but one doesn’t exist? Just put your desire up on a board and if you can find a few dozen, maybe a hundred others of the same mind, a developer will be happy to dig out enough space and fill it with clapboard houses with front-porch swings, big oak trees in the yard, and a dog named Spot.

Though there is no sign approaching Irontown warning you as you enter that “From here on in, you’re on your own,” there really ought to be. Or maybe “Here be dragons!” Or “Your remains will not be sent back to your relatives.”

Remember those ancient habitats, the no-frills corridors and caverns that the first, second, and third generations of Lunar survivors lived in? They are still there. No one ever bothered to fill them in, or wall them off. They are almost all abandoned, owned by no one, and yet still a part of the city. They have air and water and are kept at temperatures compatible with human life. But who would want to live there?

One answer is simple: losers.

Somewhere beneath every apparent paradise like the Mozartplatz, there exists a subculture of people who have opted out.

Some people are born criminals, sociopaths, violent offenders. They are just unable to learn to get along with others. They usually end up with long prison sentences. Many opt to go to Irontown when they get out, if they don’t force the police to kill them first.

Then there are the “tinfoil-hat” people: paranoids, delusional, what my mother used to call barking mad or fucking nuts. Many of them wind up in Irontown, where no one cares if they stand on a street corner and preach about the Galactic Emperor Xenu or warn of the end of the universe.

There are hoarders, people who fill their apartments with junk they can’t part with. They can hoard freely in Irontown.

There are some people who think of themselves as political refugees. The government is out to imprison them, and they feel safer from the forces of tyranny when in their little Irontown enclaves. Those at the extremes of libertarianism and capitalism and communism, anarchists, weird religious cults. Heinleiners.

There is a certain percentage of people who really dare not leave Irontown because they are wanted for a crime. The great advantage to them is that the police seldom visit Irontown, and only in groups of four or more, and only in search of the most extreme criminals.

Other than that, law enforcement leaves Irontown alone. The authorities turn a blind eye to the place, viewing it as an important safety valve for the world’s malcontents. Good luck getting a cop or a bobby to investigate a crime committed in Irontown.

Why, you may ask, as many people do, have we not stamped out crime and criminals, misfits, the disturbed and the insane?

The scary fact is, we could. Mind-altering techniques exist to turn the most obstreperous sociopath into a mild-mannered, productive, genial — though rather dull — model citizen. And, of course, if someone persists in psychotic behavior that threatens the peaceful members of the populace, they can be confined.

But a cornerstone of the civilization we fought so hard to establish after the Invasion is the sanctity of the mind. Unless someone asks for help, actually wants to have a spoon stuck into his or her cerebrum and have it stirred into a more average consistency, society is forbidden to interfere.

You have the inalienable right to do any fool thing you want to do as long as it doesn’t endanger others.

My going to Irontown was certainly a damn fool thing to do.

After dinner I nursed a bourbon and looked out at Noirtown.

Sherlock was curled up in his bed. But he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. He looked up again, took a few deep sniffs, then lumbered to his feet and ambled over to where I sat, bathed in the alternating neon glows of red, blue, and green. He used his muzzle to slip his head under my hand, and I found myself scratching him behind his big, floppy ears. He looked up at me again, mournfully.

There was no way to fool Sherlock’s sense of smell. He had detected the distinct odor of fear from across the room.