The cleaning bot found him collapsed in the corridor of the outermost, Earth-gravity ring, three metres from the elevator door.
‘Five minutes longer and you would have asphyxiated under your own bodyweight,’ Dr Volikova said as she accompanied Lucas Corta’s crash bed up through the half-gravity intermediate ring to the lunar levels.
‘I had to feel it.’
‘And how does it feel?’
Like every muscle weak and melting. Every joint lined with ground glass. The hollow of every bone filled with molten lead. Every breath iron in lungs of stone. Every heartbeat on fire. The elevator had taken him down a well of pain. He could barely lift his arms from the handrails. The doors opened onto the gentle curve of the g-ring. A hill of agony. He had to step out. On the second step he felt his hips swivel. The fifth and his knees buckled, unable to hold him up. Centrifugal gravity pinned him to the wheel, breaking him breath by breath. Gravity was a harsh master. Gravity would never weaken, never stop, never relent. He tried to push himself up from the floor. He could feel the blood pooling in his hands, his face, swelling his cheek where it lay against the floor.
‘We talked about hypotheticals,’ Lucas Corta said as his crash bed docked with the AI. Diagnostic arms unfolded ‘I want to talk practicalities. I am a practical man. You said it would take fourteen months to prepare for Earth conditions. In fourteen months I will take a shuttle down to Earth. My passage is booked. In fourteen months I will be on that ship, doctor, with or without you.’
‘Do not blackmail me, Lucas.’
His first name. A small victory.
‘I already have, doctor. You are VTO’s pre-eminent expert on micro-gravity medicine. If you say it’s hypothetically possible, then it’s physically possible, Galina Ivanovna.’ Lucas had memorised the doctor’s first name and patronymic the moment she introduced herself as his personal physician, at the foot of this bed.
‘And don’t flatter me,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘You are physiologically different from terrestrial humans in a thousand different ways. Effectively, you’re an alien.’
‘I need three months on Earth. Four would be better. Give me a training scheme and I will follow it religiously. I have to go, Galina Ivanovna. Why should anyone agree to help me take my company back if I’m not prepared to sacrifice?’
‘It will be harder than anything you have ever attempted before.’
Harder than my brothers dead, my city burned, my family shattered? Lucas Corta thought.
‘I can’t promise success,’ Dr Volikova added.
‘I don’t ask that. This is my responsibility. Will you help me, Galina Ivanovna?’
‘I will.’
The bed’s diagnostic arms moved towards Lucas’s neck and arm. He raised slow, leaden hands to fend them off but the manipulators were quick, the pain of injections swift and sharp and clean.
‘What was that?’
‘Another abuse of my profession,’ Dr Volikova said, reading Lucas’s physiology from lens. ‘Something to get you going. You have an appointment.’
Light burned along Lucas’s Corta arteries into his brain. He came up off the bed as if it were electrified. His feet hit the deck. He was in no pain. No pain at all.
‘I will need a suit printed,’ Lucas Corta declared.
‘You’re properly dressed,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘Shorts and a T-shirt,’ Lucas Corta said with leaden disdain.
‘You’ll be better dressed than your host. Valery Vorontsov has an idiosyncratic sense of fashion.’
* * *
You’ll need these, the elevator crew said. Practise. It’s not as easy as it looks.
Lucas Corta pulled on the webbed socks and gloves. He pawed air, trod air. Vorontsovs. Always that sneer at the incompetence and inability of people trapped on worlds. Lucas was sick of being the incompetent man. He launched himself from the elevator into the hub. Even lunar leg muscles were too strong for the fractional gravity of the core. Lucas spread his hands, caught air in the webbing, paddled backwards against his direction of flight. He flexed his toes and spread his flippers as an air brake. This was easy. Instinctual. He came to a rest in the centre of the cylinder. The ship’s axis of rotation. Zero gee. Lucas spun slowly, a human star.
He kicked and pushed at air. He wasn’t moving. He convulsed his entire body as if the power of spasm alone might break him free from the gravity trap. Lucas could hear laughter from the elevator door. He convulsed again. Nothing. Lithe figures in fluorescents dived sleekly towards him from the further lock. Two young women in tight flight suits, hair carefully netted, bracketed Lucas and came to abrupt stops.
‘Do you need any help, Senhor Corta?’
‘I can get this.’
‘Hold this line, Senhor Corta.’
The woman in the pink suit fastened the line to her work belt and plunged away. The snap of the line almost tugged it from Lucas’s grasp. He was moving. He was flying. He could feel air on his face, in his hair. It was thrilling. The second ship-girl swam beside him. He noticed the vacuum cleaner on her belt.
In the lock to Valery Vorontsov’s private chamber he thanked the young women for the exciting ride.
‘Mind the branches,’ was their only advice.
Valery Vorontsov’s audience chamber at the heart of Saints Peter and Paul was a cylindrical forest. Lucas floated in a tunnel of twigs and leaves. He could not see the walls, so densely packed were the branches. Down there must be trunks, roots, the aeroponics that sustained this free-fall forest. The humidity, the notes of growth and rot were familiar to Lucas – the intimate perfume of Twé – but there were new notes he only recognised from his bespoke gins: juniper, pine, florals and botanicals. The forest was lit from deep among the roots, but the trees were adorned with thousands of bio lamps. Stars above, stars on either hand, stars below. It took a few seconds for Lucas to acclimatise to the gloaming, then he saw that the leaf canopy had been sculpted into undulations and spirals, crests and waves. A tree scape. Occasional solitary branches lifted above the topiary, trained and gnarled, holding a precisely trimmed raft of leaves like an offering. Lucas’s eyes adapted fully to the light and he saw a figure at the centre of the free-fall forest. Something glimpsed, half hidden by the leaves, slow moving, deliberate.
A line ran along the centre of the cylinder. Lucas hauled himself toward the figure. A man – no, he realised as he drew closer: a thing like a man. That had once been a man. His back was to Lucas, he worked diligently on the foliage with hand-held shears, clipping, snipping, shaping. A halo of conifer trimmings surrounded him. Lucas smelled fresh taints among the resin and leaf: urine. Fungal infections.
‘Valery Grigorivitch.’
The man-like thing turned to confront the interruption. A life in micro gee had shaped his body as surely and irrevocably as he had shaped his forest. His legs were twisted spindles; ribbons of withered muscle. His chest was heroic in width and girth but Lucas could see from the way it filled the compression shirt that there was no depth, no strength in it. Ribs stretched the tight material. The breast bone was sharp as a blade. His arms were long and wire-sinewed. His head was enormous, a human face annealed to a skin balloon. A frieze of silver hair around the base of the skull only emphasised its size. A double tube ran from the occipital bones to a free-floating pump. A second set of tubes ran from his left flank to a cluster of full colostomy bags, turning in the zero gee.
This was what half a century in micro-gee did to a human body.
‘Lucas Corta.’
‘An honour, sir.’
‘Is it? Is it?’ Valery Vorontsov took a vacuum cleaner from his tool belt and with the deftness of decades sucked up the floating tree clippings. ‘I’ve never met another Dragon. Did you know that?’
‘No longer a Dragon, sir.’
‘I heard that. Nonsense, of course. It’s in the genes. This is a novelty for me. And for you.’
‘Valery Grigorivitch, I need to ask…’
‘Oh, hold your hideous asking. I know what you want. We’ll see if the universe lets you have it. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Always asking questions of the universe. Lucas Corta, have you ever seen such a thing as this?’
Valery Vorontsov waved his shears at the starlit forest.
‘I don’t think anyone has, sir.’
‘They haven’t. Do you know what this is? It’s a question I asked the universe. How would a forest grow in the sky? That’s a question to ask. Here is the answer. It never stops growing, never stops changing. I work on it; I shape it to my will. It’s slow sculpture. It will outlast me. I like that. We are such self-absorbed creatures. We think ourselves the measure of everything. Time will take away everything we are, everything we have, everything we will ever build. It’s good to think beyond our own lifetimes. Maybe my forest will last a million years, maybe a billion. Maybe it will end in fire when the sun burns. When I die my elements will pass into root and branch and leaf. I will become one with it. That gives me great comfort.’
Valery Vorontsov unhooked the collection bag from the vacuum and sent it flying down-cylinder. A Zabbaleen bot darted from the foliage to snatch the refuse and shepherd it to the lock.
‘My mother was a supporter of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now,’ Lucas said. ‘Their mission is worked out over decades, centuries even.’
‘I am aware of the work of the Sisterhood. You’re not a believer, Lucas Corta?’
‘It involves supernatural agency. It’s impossible for me to believe it.’
‘Hm. I hear you want to go to earth. That’s a desire, not a question. The universe does not owe us our desires, but it may grant a good question. What is your question?’
‘How can I take back what was stolen from my family?’
‘Hm.’ Valery Vorontsov broke off a branch tip, sniffed it, offered it to Lucas. ‘What do you think of that? That’s real juniper. All you’ve ever smelled is synthetic. Those Asamoahs, I know what they can do. They play with DNA. They swap genes around. Childish. I create an environment and let life respond to it. I grow real juniper in the most artificial environment humanity has ever created. No no no, Lucas Corta, that question will not do at all. The right question is, how can a moon-born man go to Earth and survive?’
‘Dr Volikova is developing a training scheme for me.’
‘If the re-entry doesn’t kill you. If your heart doesn’t give out in the acclimatisation suite. If you don’t die of sunburn. If a million allergies don’t swell you up like a colostomy bag. If terrestrial gut bacteria doesn’t turn you inside out. If the pollution doesn’t tear out your soft little lungs. If you can sleep down in that gravity hole without apnoea waking you every five minutes; between the nightmares.’
‘If we listened to ifs, we wouldn’t be dragons,’ Lucas said. The two men had subtly, unconsciously matched orientations to float face to face.
‘As you said, you’re not a dragon any more. You’ll be less than that on Earth. The Moon is not a state. The Moon is an offshore industrial outpost. You’ll have no papers, no nation, no identity. You will have no legal existence. You won’t know the rules, the customs, the laws. There are laws. They will apply to you but you’ll know nothing about how they work. They are like gravity. You are subject to them. You can’t negotiate with them. You have no power to negotiate.
‘No one will know who you are. No one will care that you’re the man from the moon. You’re a freak, a ten day wonder. No one will respect you. No one will take you seriously. No one needs anything from you. No one wants what you have. You’re an intelligent man. You worked this out while you were still in the capsule. And yet I find you here, with your plan and the favours you need from me and whatever it is you have that you believe can persuade me to grant them to you.’
Each of Valery Vorontsov’s refutations was a nail through a finger, through a foot, through a hand and a knee and a shoulder. Mortifications. Lucas Corta had never understood guilt or remorse. Pride was his virtue. Pride tugged against those nails, tore him free from them. Their pain was nothing to what he had lost.
‘I can’t argue with you, Valery Grigorivitch. I have nothing to offer and nothing to bargain with. I will need your support, your ships, your mass-driver and all I can do is talk.’
‘The universe is full of talk. Talk and hydrogen.’
‘The Asamoahs think you’re inbred monstrosities. The Mackenzies marry you for shipping rights but they engineer your DNA out of their children. My own family thought you were drunken clowns. The Suns don’t think you’re even human.’
‘We don’t need respect.’
‘Respect buys no air. I’m offering something more tangible.’
‘You have a thing to offer? Lucas Corta, who has lost his business, his family, his wealth and his name?’
‘Empire.’
‘Let’s have your talk, Lucas Corta.’
* * *
‘All the way?’ Dr Volikova said.
‘All the way,’ Lucas Corta said. The corridor curved steeply upwards before him. The ceiling was a low, close horizon. ‘Walk with me.’
Dr Volikova offered an arm. Lucas pushed it away.
‘You shouldn’t even be on your feet, Lucas.’
‘Walk with me.’
‘All the way.’
‘I am a systematic man,’ Lucas Corta said. Even in the lunar gravity of the inmost ring, each step sent wrenching pain from his ankles to his throat. ‘I have very little imagination. I must have a plan. A child walks before she runs. I walk the lunar ring, I run the lunar ring. I walk the intermediate ring, I run the intermediate ring. I walk the terrestrial ring, I run the terrestrial ring.’
Lucas’s steps were sure and purposeful now. Dr Volikova was a touch away. Lucas noticed a betraying flicker in her eyes. She was reading data from a lens.
‘Are you monitoring me, Irina Galinova?’
‘Always, Lucas.’
‘And?’
‘Walk on.’
Lucas bit down his smile of small victory.
‘Did you listen to that playlist?’ he asked.
‘I did.’
‘What did you think of it?’
‘It’s more sophisticated than I thought.’
‘You didn’t say it sounds like mall music. I’m hopeful.’
‘I hear the nostalgia, but I don’t quite understand the saudade.’
‘Saudade is more than nostalgia. It’s a kind of love. It’s a loss and a joy. An intense melancholy and joy.’
‘I should think you would understand that well, Lucas.’
‘One can have saudade for a future event.’
‘You never give up, do you?’
‘No I don’t, Galina Ivanovna.’
His joints were loosening, the pain easing, the stiffness working free.
‘Your heart rate and blood pressure are up, Lucas.’
He looked up the curving corridor.
‘I’m going to finish this.’
‘Okay.’
Another small win.
Lucas stopped.
On again, up the curve of the world. Lucas’s lungs were tight, his breath caught, his heart ached as if seized in a fist. Twenty metres ten metres five metres to the door to the med centre. Finish it. Finish it.
‘It’s customary,’ Lucas panted. His words were brief, tight gasps. He leaned against the door lintel and looked back up the curving corridor. ‘When offered. A playlist.’ He could barely speak. A hundred metres under his own native lunar gravity, and he was clinging, gasping, aching. The damage was deeper than he had imagined. Fourteen lunes of intensive training seemed insurmountable. ‘To offer a playlist. Of your own in return.’
‘The Bill Evans?’ Dr Volikova said.
‘And more in that style. I believe it’s called modal jazz. Curate it for me. Take me on a journey through jazzland. I’ll need something to get me through the training.’
* * *
He woke in his capsule, flicked the lights on. Creakings and rattlings. The sleep pod was shaking. The ship was shaking. The pod lurched. Lucas grasped the hand rails, gripped tight, tighter until his nails dug into his palm. The pod lurched again. Lucas cried out. He felt the world drop beneath him. There was nothing to hold on to. And this was no world. This was a ship, a spinning top of aluminium and construction carbon. He was a man in a pod in a wheel in a tiny ship out beyond the far side of the moon.
‘Toquinho,’ he whispered. ‘What’s happening?’
The ship dropped under him again. Lucas gripped the solid, useless hand rails. The voice in his implant was unfamiliar, strangely accented. Saints Peter and Paul was too small to run a full network.
I’m making a series of course correction burns, Toquinho said. My orbit is stable and predictable up to eleven years. Small periodic corrections every ten or so orbits push that window of predictability forward. These occur around the second perilune in a two-encounter orbit. The process is fully controlled and quite routine. I can supply schematics if you wish.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Lucas said and the shaking, the jolting, the terrible terrible feeling of falling into nothing forever ended. Saints Peter and Paul spun around the moon and the moon threw it towards the blue gem of earth.
Toquinho chimed. Files from Dr Volikova. Lucas opened them. Music: lunes-worth. A journey.
* * *
In the first three lunes Lucas explored hard bop; its language and instrumentality, its identity and tonality, its triadic harmonies and plagal cadences. He learned the names of its heroes. Mingus, Davis, Monk and Blakey: these were his apostles. He studied the key recordings, its Gospels and Acts. He learned how to listen, what to listen for, when to listen for it. He traced its roots in bebop and how it both revolted against that movement and sought to reform it. He ventured into heterodox realms where the distinctions between funky jazz and soul jazz and the divorce between west coast cool jazz and east coast hard bop became schisms in the musical cosmos. It was the worst possible music to train to. Lucas loved it. He despised training. It was difficult and boring. Carlinhos had evangelised muscle burns and dopamine highs and hormonal stress releasers. What lifted Carlinhos into the transcendental made Lucas paranoid and furious.
He came out of the gym blazing with rage, snappy with anyone who so much as glanced at him, went to bed aching and edgy and dreading the next day’s routine. Five hours. Six truths sent him back in the gym, Art Blakey on play. Carlinhos and his endorphins was dead. Rafa was dead. Ariel was in hiding. Lucasinho was under the protection of AKA. Boa Vista was an airless ruin and this ship, Saints Peter and Paul, was carrying stolen Corta helium-3 containers to the fusion reactors of Earth. So he trained. Hard bop was a place beyond the endless track of the treadmill, the ticked-off repetitions of weights, the indignities of toning. Hard bop was a time beyond the tick of days tocking into lunes. A year of this routine was endless; it must be broken down into a succession, not of sessions, sleeps, days, orbits, but of acts. A thing conceived, begun, worked through, completed. Then another. Then another. Quantised. The year-and-some would be measured not by the gradient of ever-heavier weights, ever better personal bests, nor the growing strength and resilience of his body, but by quanta of new music. After hard bop he would learn modal jazz, then move through free jazz to Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz which would circle back into his adored bossa nova. The next time he would listen to bossa nova, his feet would be on earth under an open sky. But in those first few orbits hard bop was a high, clear horizon; further and wider than any of the moon.
After half a lune he ran the inmost ring. All the way. After a lune he walked the intermediate ring, half an Earth gee, three lunar gravities. He walked without aid or support or pause and it took him an hour to complete. After two lunes he ran the mezzanine ring. After three lunes, Lucas Corta slept there. The first night he felt a brass demon crouch on his chest and shit molten lead into his heart and lungs. The second night, the third the fourth. After fifteen nights he slept a full night with only nightmares of being trapped beneath the iron ice of a steel sea. After that he slept in three lunar gravities every night.
The second three lunes Lucas Corta explored modal jazz – Dr Volikova’s passion. His steps into the music were more certain; he had glimpsed this terrain from another country and knew where its ranges stood, where its river flowed. Geographical metaphors had meaning for him now, for the progression to modal jazz accompanied Lucas turning his attention to Earth. Here was a subject to contain a lifetime. Geography, geology, geophysics. Oceanography, climatology and their daughter meteorology. The interrelationships of water, heat, spin, thermodynamics and the beautiful and chaotic systems spun out from such basic elements enchanted him. Rich, unpredictable, perilous. He loved to read the meteorological reports and see their predictions drawn out in white and grey across the blue eye of the planet before him. Lucas Corta was an avid Earth watcher. He observed storms and hurricanes wheel across oceans; dun plains change to green as rains swept them, deserts darken in blossom, marshes and sundarbans vanish under twinkling floods. He watched seasons creep out from the poles as he cycled around the planet, lune by lune. He watched snow come and snow retreat and the rich darkness of the monsoon spread across parched millions.
One thing he would not watch, and that was the Earth encounter, when the cycler exchanged personnel capsules with the orbital tether and dropped cargo pods for controlled splashdown. In his cabin he felt the shudder of capsules and attachments releasing, the jolt of transfer pods docking but he would never join the spectators in the observation bubble. He would not grace plunder with his attention. He never once looked back at the moon.
Early in the year of orbits Dr Volikova was transferred to Earth on leave to St Petersburg. Her replacement was Yevgeny Chesnokov, a cocksure thirtysomething who could not understand why Lucas disdained him. He was over-familiar, his manners would have had him knifed in any cafe in João de Deus and his taste in music was execrable. Beats did not make music. Beats were easy. Even Toquinho, in its limited state, could invent a new beat. Lucas had grown accustomed to the new, flat character of his familiar. One ship, one voice, one interface. If Toquinho now talked of itself as Saints Peter and Paul personified, its hesitations and pauses made that sound less than omniscient. The speed-of-light lag made real-time access to Earth’s libraries difficult but the cycler’s system held enough information for Lucas to structure his research. He let his geophysical and climatological knowledge of the planet lead him into the geopolitical. Earth was undergoing a climate shift; it underpinned every aspect of the planet’s politics, from decades-deep drought in the Sahel and Western USA to the perpetual storms striking north-west Europe, flood after flood after flood. Lucas could not understand the folly of living on a world that was not under human control.
He learned the power of the helium that had built his family’s fortune. Clean electricity, no radiation, no carbon emissions. Tightly controlled. Fusion reactors were few and expensive. Each nation guarded its power plants viciously – against other nation states, against the unconventional forces of the parastates and freedom armies and warlords dislodged by the droughts, the crop failures, the famines, the civil wars. At any time in the past fifty years, Lucas read, there were over two hundred micro-wars burning on the face of the earth. He studied long to try to comprehend nation states and the many many allegiance groups that challenged them. The moon survived by denying power to groups and factions. There were individuals and there were families. The Five Dragons – Four Dragons, he corrected himself, feeling that pinch of pain as a discipline to sentimentality – were family corporations. The Lunar Development Corporation was an ineffectual board of governors of an international holding company; designed to be at permanent loggerheads with itself.
States, with identities and sets of privileges and obligations and geographical boundaries where those stopped, seemed arbitrary and inefficient to Lucas Corta. The notion of being loyal to one bank of a river and the bitter enemy of the other was ludicrous. Rivers, Lucas Corta had learned, ran between banks. And there was no consent in any of this. Lucas could not understand how people tolerated their powerlessness. The law claimed to defend and oppress all equally but a cursory survey of the rolling news – Lucas had become an avid consumer of terrestrial current affairs, from religious wars to celebrity gossip – bared the old lie. Wealth and power bought a brighter class of law. Not so different from the moon in that. Lucas was no lawyer but he understood that lunar law stood on three legs: more law is bad law; everything, including the law, is negotiable; and in the Court of Clavius everything, including the Court of Clavius, is on trial. Terrestrial law protected the people but what protected the people from the law? Everything was imposed. Nothing was negotiable. Governments imposed blanket policies on the basis of ideologies, not evidence. How did these governments propose to compensate those citizens negatively impacted by their policies? Riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas.
These things Lucas asked Dr Chesnokov at the timetabled check-ups where he reviewed the data from Lucas’s many medical monitors. You love CSKA Moscow Football team and you love Russia. Which is the greater of those loves? You pay taxes, but the law doesn’t allow you any say in how they are spent, let alone the option to withhold them when you want to influence Government policy. How is this a good contract? Education, the legal system, the military and the police are all under the control of the state; health and transport are not. How is that a consistent position for a capitalist society? Dr Chesnokov went quiet when Lucas asked him questions about his government and its politics, almost as if he feared being overheard.
In time Dr Chesnokov cycled down and Dr Volikova cycled back for another tour of duty. She started at the sight of Lucas Corta in her office.
‘You’re a beast,’ she said. ‘A bear.’
He had forgotten how much he had changed in the two lunes she had been down on Earth. He had broadened ten centimetres. His shoulders sloped to his neck. His chest was two slabs of hard muscle, his legs were curves and bulges. His thighs did not meet properly. Veins stood out like lunar rilles on his biceps and calves. Even his face was square and broad. He hated his new face. It made him look like a duster. It made him look stupid.
‘Hate and Bill Evans got me there,’ Lucas said. ‘I want to walk the third ring.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No thank you, Galya’
‘Then I’ll be monitoring you.’
A new gravity, a new music. In the elevator he ordered Toquinho to cue up a representative free jazz playlist. Instruments beat around his head, flurries and skirmishes of notes, horns and saxes sharpened and abrading. His mind reeled. Here were challenges. Ornette Coleman summoned storms of triplets and Lucas felt gravity take hold and tug and test and tear at his great, brutal body.
The elevator door opened. Lucas stepped out. Shocks of pain struck each ankle. His knee felt as if a rod of hot titanium had been stabbed up through it. Ligaments shifted and twisted and threatened to yield. He gritted his teeth. The chaotic music was the hand and voice of a mad guru. Move. Two steps three four steps five. There was a rhythm to be found to walking in earth gravity, not the loose-hipped swing of lunar motion; a lifting and pushing forward and laying down of weight. On the moon it would have sent him soaring. In the outer ring of Saints Peter and Paul it just about kept him from the decking. Ten steps twenty steps. He was already further than his first foolish attempt on Earth-gee. Now he could look back over his shoulder and see that point vanish behind the horizon of the ring. The cycler was on the outward curve of its orbit; the outermost ring was thronged with Jo Moonbeams and researchers at Farside and a handful of business visitors, corporate agents, politicians and tourists. In a few days they would migrate up to the intermediate rim, then to the inner, lunar gee ring, where the spin and the low gravity and the effect of a new means of locomotion on the inner ear would flatten eighty per cent of them with motion sickness. They nodded to him as he strode past, arms swinging, face tight with determination. Steel bands compressed his swollen heart, blood pulsed red behind his eyes with every beat, his eyeballs felt as if they were sagging in their sockets.
He could do this. He was doing this. He would do this.
He could see the elevator doors up the curve of the ring. He calculated the number of steps. His heart surged with the small joy. Joy made him careless. The careful rhythm of his steps broke. He lost his balance. Gravity snatched him. Lucas hit the deck with a blow that drove every breath and thought from him except that he had never been hit so hard in his life. He lay paralysed by pain. He lay on his side, unable to move. Gravity pinned him to the deck. Earth people clustered around him. Was he all right? What had happened? He slapped away the helping hands.
‘Leave me alone.’
A medical bot came skirling along the corridor. That humiliation he would not bear. He pushed his torso up on wavering arms. Drew his legs under him. The transition from crouch to stand seemed impossible. The muscles of his right thigh fluttered and he was not certain his knee would bear him. The red eye of the bot accused him.
‘Fuck you,’ he said and with a tearing pain that wrenched a cry from him, Lucas Corta got to his feet. The bot circled in behind him like an attention-seeking pet ferret. He would have loved to have kicked it away. Sometime, not this time. He took a step. Acid pain ran from his right foot to his right shoulder. He gasped.
The step was firm. It was only pain.
The bot tagged along in Lucas Corta’s footsteps as he walked the final few dozen metres to the elevator.
‘You were lucky not to break something,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘That might have been the end of it.’
‘Bones heal.’
‘Earth bones. Jo Moonbeam bones. There is no literature on moon-born bones, with Earth-type bone density.’
‘You could do a paper on me.’
‘I am,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘But my bone density is Earth-type.’
‘Earth-type for a seventy-year-old suffering from osteoporosis. I’ll have to up your calcium regime again.’
Lucas was already building a plan on the foundation of the words ‘Earth-type’. Walk until his feet had the feel of it, his hips the sway of it. Walk more. Then walk three minutes, run one minute. Repeat until the pain was bearable. Walk two minutes, run two minutes. Walk one minute run three minutes. Run.
‘How are you finding the free jazz?’ Dr Volikova asked.
‘It demands you come to it,’ Lucas said. ‘It doesn’t compromise.’
‘I can’t approach it. Too much jazz for me.’
‘You have to work to find the beauty.’
Lucas didn’t like this music, but he did admire it. It was the ideal soundtrack for what he had to do now. The hard stuff. The stuff he did best, the stuff he had always done best, his one gift and talent. Scheming.
The governments would always be the most difficult so he worked them first. China of course, because it was China, and because of its long war against the Suns. The United States of America, for its wealth, its historic animosity to China and because no empire is quicker to defend its honour than a decaying one. Ghana. Not a major player, but it had seen what a handful of its bold citizens had built on the moon and wanted some. And Accra perennially wanted to one-up its larger and more powerful neighbour, Lagos. India, which had missed the moon-rush and still smarted from that failure. Russia, because of the deal he had done with VTO and because some day he might have to betray the Vorontsovs. To the governments of these nations the fall of Corta Hélio was a local fracas, only important in its effect on helium-3 prices. He would have to teach them to listen to him. There were channels, names to talk to who would give access to other names. Chains of names, the slow ascent of the political hierarchy. This would be difficult and entertaining. Ornette Coleman best sound-tracked this work.
While exploring the recording legacy of John Coltrane Lucas worked his way into the terrestrial corporates. Robotics, yes, but they were ten-a-bitsie and he wanted a business that understood his offer, in both short term and the long. Banking and venture capitalism: here he trod warily, for though he knew money and its ways he had never understood the frenetically complex instruments of finance and the ways they intersected in the global markets. These meetings were easier to set up, the people he talked to genuinely interested – delighted even – in the daring of the scheme. They would have researched him, known of his downfall. The destruction of Corta Hélio would have touched them. They would listen to a moon man prepared to give a year of his time and health to come down out of the sky to talk to them.
Every day, as the wheels of Saints Peter and Paul spun around the moon, he talked to power. Name by name he hauled his way into conferences and one-to-ones. In his berth he played off investors against speculators, government against government. Who to trust, and how much, and when to end it. Who to betray, and when, and how. Who was susceptible to bribery, who to blackmail. Whose vanity could he stroke, whose paranoia could he stoke? Meeting after meeting fell into place. He would need at least three lunes on Earth.
‘I’d prefer four,’ he said again to Dr Volikova. He was running the third circle every day now. He was a middle-aged man, past his prime, taking on a physical challenge that would give pause to a man half his age. That might yet kill him, or cripple him beyond even the power of lunar medicine to heal.
‘You need another month,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘Preferably two.’
‘I can’t afford two. I remember I told you I would leave for earth after fourteen months. There’s a window, one tiny window.’
‘A month.’
‘One terrestrial month from now, I take the orbiter down. And I will never get Ornette Coleman.’
The final month, as he had planned, he relaxed into Afro Cuban jazz. Here were sounds and rhythms warm to his heart, that made him smile. From here he could reach out and catch hold of the hand of bossa nova. He enjoyed the insouciance of the play-listed tunes but soon found the rhythm too prescriptive, too forward. When he exercised in the outer ring gym it forced him to its beat, which he hated. It seemed too frivolous for the work which engaged his last days: his own identity and security. Valery Vorontsov had made him an employee of VTO Space: VTO Earth’s judicious bribes had secured him a Kazakh passport. What little remained of his wealth was moved into forms he could access quickly and easily. Earth was suspicious of money in motion. At every step there were checks, questions, enquiries about money laundering. Lucas was affronted. He was not some petty narc baron or graceless minor despot. All he desired was his company back. Niggling, irritating work that was never done but always seemed to require some further identification or clarification.
‘My mother came up on this ship,’ Lucas said to Dr Volikova at his final pre-flight assessment.
‘Fifty years ago,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘It’s changed a lot since then.’
‘It’s just additions. Re-engineering. You haven’t got rid of anything.’
‘What do you want, Lucas?’
‘I’d like to sleep in the same berth as my mother.’
‘I won’t even begin to go into the psychiatry of that.’
‘Humour me.’
‘It won’t be the same.’
‘I know. Humour me.’
‘There will be a record somewhere. The Vorontsovs never forget.’
Ring three, blue quadrant, 34 right. Dr Volikova opened the private cabin. It was little bigger than the pod in which Lucas had arrived on the cycler. He pulled himself into it, lay in his clothes on the pad, for the struggle in taking them off was too much for now. The pad was soft and supportive, the cabin well-equipped and at every moment the only thing he was conscious of was gravity. Months of this to come. On the ship he could escape to the centre ring, even the inner, moon-gee ring when gravity grew too much to bear. There would be no escape on Earth. That scared him. The pod was close and comfortable. Lucas was a creature of small spaces, nests and chambers; he had lived his whole life closed in under roofs. That world down there had a sky. Open to space. Agoraphobia scared him. Everything scared him. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready. No one could be ready. All he could do was trust the talents that had brought him here, that had saved him from the fall of Corta Hélio.
That would be enough.
Before he fell into hard sleep, he recalled the faces. Lucasinho. So pretty, so lost. Ariel, in the crash bed in the med centre, after a blade came within a nerve of killing her. Carlinhos at Lucasinho’s Moonrun party, big and broad as the sky and smiling as he strode across the lawns, sasuit helmet under his arm. Rafa. Golden, always golden. Laughing. His children around him, his okos at his side; laughing. Adriana. Lucas could only picture her at a distance, in the doorway of the crèche, in her favourite pavilion among the stone faces of the orixas of Boa Vista, at the other end of a board table.
He slept then, and for the next four nights, in the old cabin. His dreams were heavy, sweat drains, scream dreams. They always would be, under alien gravity.
On the fifth morning, he went down to Earth.
* * *
The lock crew balked at his tie. It would float, it would choke him, it would be a hazard to others. Lucas drew the knot sharp and tight until it was a knife tip at his throat, in the late twenty-tens style. Three piece single breasted Thom Sweeney suit in mid grey. Narrow cut, three centimetre turn-ups.
‘I’m not arriving on Earth like some Bairro Alto up-and-out,’ he declared. He undid the bottom button of his waistcoat.
‘You will if you throw up all over it.’
The lock sealed. It seemed to take an age for the pressure to equalise with the transfer capsule. Dread beat in Lucas’s ribcage. The suit had been a distraction, a way to assert himself against the dread. A way to be Lucas Corta again. Thirteen lunes between worlds – one less than he had budgeted – thirteen lunes of geopolitics and global economics, of deal brokering and precisely manipulated bribes, of discerning and exploiting antagonisms, of relentless training, had focused down to this. The tip of the blade. Ship to capsule. Capsule to tether. Tether to SSTO. SSTO to Earth. In less than four hours it would be over. There was no consolation in that.
The lock opened. Lucas seized a handhold and kicked into the capsule.
Farewell indignity, functional clothing and mid 20th Century jazz.
The transfer capsule was a twenty-metre cylinder, windowless, completely automated. Ten rows of seats. Dr Volikova grabbed a handle and buckled in beside him.
‘You’ll need your physician.’
‘Thank you.’
Five more passengers, then the lock sealed. Always fewer going down than coming up. Safety announcements, either superfluous or ineffectual. Toquinho, linked to the capsule AI, offered Lucas views through the exterior cameras. He took one look at the blue world huge beneath him and switched them off. He cued up a long-curated play list of classic bossa. Tunes he knew, tunes he loved, tunes he had asked Jorge to play for him, in the best sound room in two worlds.
A series of bangs; lurches. Silence. The capsule was free from Saints Peter and Paul, a pellet of lives falling across the face of the blue world. He had studied this. He knew how it worked. It was all controlled falling. He asked Toquinho to show him a model of the transfer tether wheeling around the limb of the planet. The schematics comforted him.
Lucas had drifted into a doze when he was woken by a clank he could feel through the hull. The tether had connected. The floor dropped out of his stomach, gee forces took hold as the tether accelerated the capsule into a docking orbit with the SSTO. Lucas had made a tether transfer once before, escaping from the moon, when the Moonloop had snatched him from the top of the tower and slung him into a transfer orbit with the cycler. Acceleration had peaked at three, four lunar gravities. This was far beyond the Moonloop. Lucas felt his lips peel back from his teeth, his eyes flatten in their sockets, the blood pool in the back of his skull. He couldn’t breathe.
Then he was in free fall again. The tether had released the capsule and now Lucas was falling towards rendezvous with the SSTO. Toquinho showed him the orbiter; an improbable beauty of wings and streamlines like a living thing, quite alien to Lucas’s aesthetic of machines designed to operate solely in vacuum. The spaceplane opened its cargo hatches. Pulses from the attitude thrusters nudged the capsule. Lucas watched the manipulator arm unfold from the orbiter and latch with the docking ring. Lucas felt a tiny acceleration, as gentle as a domestic elevator, as the arm pulled him in. Space travel was tactile; clicks and thumps, soft jerks and brief jolts. Vibrations through his arm rests.
Lucas counted the numbers in his head. One hundred and fifty. The height of the SSTO orbit in kilometres. Thirty-seven. The number of minutes until de-orbit burn. Twenty-three. The number of minutes the ship would be in transit through the atmosphere. Fifteen hundred. The degrees Celsius which the ceramic hull of the orbiter would reach on re-entry. Three hundred and fifty. The speed in kilometres per hour at touch-down. Zero. The number of crew who could take the controls if anything went wrong.
The cabin shook, shook again, shook for a long time. The de-orbit burn. A fist of gravity seized Lucas’s head and tried to pull him into the ceiling. The deceleration was savage. The ship jolted. Lucas Corta’s fingers hooked the armrests but there was nothing to hold, nothing true and immovable. His heart wanted to die. He couldn’t take this. He had been wrong all along. He had been a vainglorious fool. A moon-man could not go to Earth. The killing Earth. Cries of deepest fear fluttered in his throat, unable to break the crushing gravity.
The shaking intensified; bounds and skips that threw Lucas into momentary free fall and then slammed him against his restraints hard enough to leave bruises, then a high-frequency vibration as if the ship and souls were being grated into powder.
He found a hand and seized it so tight he felt bones shift in his grasp. He held that hand, held it as the only sure and solid thing in a shaking, roaring world.
Then the shaking stopped and he felt gravity, true gravity under him.
We are in atmospheric flight, Toquinho said.
‘Show me,’ Lucas croaked and the seat backs and warning signs of the grey capsule were overlain by a window. He was high enough to see the curve of the planet. It went on forever, subtle and vast as a life. The sky above him deepened to indigo. Beneath lay veil upon veil of cloud, merging into a dull yellow haze. He glimpsed dusty blue. That is an ocean, he thought. It was so much bigger, so much more grand and aloof than he had imagined. The SSTO arrowed down through the highest cloud layer. Lucas’s breath caught. Land. A line of brown half-seen through cloud.
Lucas knew from his research that he was coming in across the coast of Peru, two thousand three hundred kilometres from touchdown. Beyond the brown of the coastal desert would appear the sudden dark of mountains; the spinal chain that ran the length of the continent. The Andes. Sun flashed from snow and Lucas Corta’s heart surged. Beyond the mountains lay the remnants of the great forest; patches of deep green among the lighter greens and golds of crops and the swatches of buffs and duns where the soil had died. Those plumes, strangely low and truncated to his eyes, would be smoke, not dust. Towering clouds boiled up from the baking land. Below lay the final cloud layer. Lucas held his breath as the orbiter dropped toward, then through them. Grey, blind. The ship jolted. Holes in the air. Then out, and Lucas Corta’s breath caught. Sun silver, then gold: the great river, yellow with silt. The SSTO followed the line of the river east, along a trellis of tributaries, tributaries of tributaries. Enchanted, Lucas tried to discern a pattern to the loops and meanders of the lesser waters. An alert from Toquinho, what had it said? He had not been paying attention. How many minutes to landing?
Another great river, black meeting gold, and at their junction, a blur of human activity. Thousands of sun-flashes as the shuttle passed over: a city, Lucas realised. His breath caught. A city, between the twin rivers, lidless, open to the universe, spilling across the earth. Huge beyond his imagining. Those webs of light when the clouds did not cover the Earth gave no hint as to the sprawl and appalling magnificence of the planet’s cities.
The spaceplane banked. Lucas gritted his teeth as gee forces played with him. The SSTO was circling, dumping speed for landing. He could hear the air out there, like hands on the hull. He glimpsed the long strip where this ship would touch down, the city, banked at an alarming angle, the meeting of the rivers. Black and gold waters side by side without mingling for many kilometres. Lucas found the effect charming. He did not understand enough terrestrial hydrodynamics to know if the effect was commonplace or spectacular. What were those moving objects on the waters?
Ten minutes to landing, Toquinho said.
‘Lucas,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘What?’
‘You can let go of my hand now.’
Over the city and the rivers once more, lower now. The spaceplane levelled out. They were committed. The landing strip was straight and true before him. Luca felt the wheels go down and lock. The spaceplane lifted its nose and dropped solidly on to its rear wheels, a lesser shock as the nose came down.
Earth. He was on Earth.
Dr Volikova stayed Lucas’s hand as he went to open his seat harness.
‘We’re not there yet.’
For what felt an aeon to Lucas Corta the SSTO rumbled over taxiways. He felt it stop. He could hear movements through the hull, feel inexplicable thumps and vibrations.
‘How do you feel?’ Dr Volikova asked.
‘Alive,’ Lucas Corta said.
‘I’ve arranged for a medical team and a wheelchair.’
‘I’m walking off this ship.’
Dr Volikova smiled and then Lucas felt the unmistakable lurch that meant a crane had lifted the capsule free from the orbiter.
‘I’m still walking,’ he said.
Lugs locked, locks spun. The hatch opened. Lucas blinked in the light of Earth. He took a deep breath of the air of earth. It smelled of cleaning products, plastics, human bodies, ingrained dirt, electricity.
‘Can I help you?’ Dr Volikova called from the hatch. The other passengers had left, as casually as shift workers sauntering off the Peary-Aitken express.
‘I’ll let you know.’
‘The clock is ticking, Lucas.’
When he was alone Lucas placed his hands square on the armrests. He took a breath of the breathed, cleaned air. He took his weight on his forearms, leaned forwards, pushed up. Thigh muscles took over: a crazy move. On the moon, it would have sent him soaring, crashing into an overhead bin. On the Earth, he stood. First the right hand, then the left. Lucas Corta let go of the arm rests and stood free. Only for a moment – the space was confined and he needed his hands to negotiate his way into the aisle. The weight was terrible, irresistible, relentless, waiting for him to lose balance and smash him down to earth. Falls will kill you, Dr Volikova had said.
And he did almost fall on that first step down the aisle. Gravity was not the spin-gee of Saints Peter and Paul. He had learned to walk in earth gravity under the Coriolis force of spinning habitat rings. The spin threw everything a fraction off. Lucas put his weight onto his foot and it was not where it needed to be. He staggered, grabbed the armrest, steadied himself.
He made it to the lock. The light blinded him. Beyond was a boarding tube. At the end of the tube, Dr Volikova, medics, a wheelchair.
He would not be wheeled into his new world. He inhaled a mighty draught of earth air. He could breathe. Breathe freely.
‘Lucas?’ Dr Volikova called.
Lucas Corta walked on, one slow wavering step at a time, up the boarding tube.
‘Cane,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘Print me a walking cane. Silver tipped.’
‘We don’t have your level of printing sophistication,’ a solemn young man in a bad suit said. Lucas squinted to make out his name from the badge clipped to his pocket. It ruined the line of the jacket, but it was a poor and cheap suit. Abi Oliviera-Uemura. VTO Manaus. ‘We might be able to find one by tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
Lucas stopped in front of a window. Heat buzzed from the grooved concrete of the apron and runway. The SSTO was a black dart, beautiful and lethal, a weapon, not a spacecraft. At the far edge of the field, further than any horizon on the moon, was a line of irregular darkness above a line of liquid. Toquinho would have magnified them for Lucas but Toquinho was a dead lens in his eye, dead air in his ear. Trees, Lucas surmised, rising out of heat haze. How hot was it out there? The light was painful. And the sky. Going up forever, so much sky, high over all. That blue. The sky was terrifying, dizzying. Lucas would be a long time reckoning with the agoraphobic sky of Earth.
He squared himself up.
‘So,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘Brasil.’
* * *
From the quarantine suite’s one window, Brasil was water tanks, comms dishes, solar panels and a slot of dun concrete, a hyphen of trees and a shaft of sky. Sometimes clouds broke the abstraction of blue, green, buff. This was the Amazon, the rain forest. It looked drier than the Ocean of Storms.
VTO refused to let Toquinho link with its network so Lucas was dependent on old fashioned, remote access to information. His contacts were messaging him daily; calls, conferences, physical meetings. I am safe, I am well, Lucas replied. I will be in touch very soon.
The daily fitness sessions were as dull and dispiriting as ever. He had been assigned a personal trainer, Felipe. His conversation was limited to moves, muscles, reps. The surgical mask he wore may have restricted his chat. The mask was at Dr Volikova’s insistence. Lucas’s immune system fizzed with a dozen inoculations and phages but he was still vulnerable to a hundred infections and pandemics. The sessions took place in the centre’s pool. Water is your friend, Felipe said. It will support body weight. It gives a good workout to all major muscle groups.
Lucas slept oppressed by the smell of chlorine. The gravity was tough, the gravity was relentless but he knew this enemy. The minor afflictions fought with attrition. The deep, phlegm cough that brought up dark, dust-laden catarrh. The diarrhoea from the change in water and diet. The rhinitis and itchy red eyes from one allergy after another. The way he had to get up slowly to keep the blood from rushing from his head. The way his feet swelled inside his shoes. The wheelchair. The agony of having to bend down. How he couldn’t understand a word anyone said. It was not the Portuguese he understood, inflected with Spanish, loaned a hundred words and phrases from thirty languages. The accent was odd and when he tried to speak Globo, eyebrows raised and heads shook.
The meat in his meals, that gave him terrible cramps.
The sugar in the sauces, the drinks, the bread.
Bread. His stomach rebelled at it.
The certainty that his trainer, his valet, his young and charming VTO personal assistants were spying on him.
‘I need to work,’ he complained to Dr Volikova.
‘Patience.’
The next morning the valet told him to shower and shave and helped him dress in a decent suit. The valet arranged him comfortably in the wheelchair. At the door Lucas snatched up his silver-handled cane he had demanded. Once he swallowed his pride and accepted the wheelchair when he needed it, the cane assumed a theatrical character. The valet wheeled him along windowless corridors and down a boarding tunnel to a cylinder full of seats.
‘What is this?’ Lucas Corta asked.
‘An aircraft,’ the valet said. ‘You’re going to Rio.’
* * *
The clouds stunned him. They lay along the ocean edge of the world; stripes and layers that broke into bars, stipplings, hatchings, all moving on the very limit of his perception of change. He glanced away, to the lights coming on block by block, street by street, and when he looked back the clouds had changed shape. Skeins of lilac edged with purple; purple deepening to the colour of a bruise as the light bled from the sky, to indigo and blues for which he had no name and no experience. Why would anyone do anything else than watch clouds?
In the evening the heat will be tolerable, the hotel staff told him. The suite was comfortable and well appointed. Toquinho interfaced smoothly with the local network, though Lucas had no doubt that a dozen surveillance systems reported his words and actions to a hundred watchers. He worked solidly and productively, setting up conference calls and face-to-face meetings, but his attention strayed to the window, to the street and the heat haze that turned it and the vehicles speeding along it to quicksilver, to the ocean and the islands and the march of waves on the beach. He had never felt claustrophobic on the moon. This corner suite in the legendary Copacabana Palace hotel was gilded oppression.
Evenings, when the heat was less, he spent in the spa pool. Seek water, Felipe had told him. Lucas felt gravity slide from his shoulders as he shucked clothes that had never been weighty before and slipped into the balcony pool. He was out, in the air, in the world. The view was magnificent. If he shifted position to his right, he could see the favelas rising up behind him on the hills. In the waning dusk their lights, from windows and streets and staircases, were a straggling web of colours; a chaotic contrast to the strict pattern of the Copa, prim and tight between Tabajaras and the ocean. The web of lights was broken by patches of darkness where the slope defeated even the ingenuity of the builders of the informal shanty town. Or the power had outed. A million people lived in a handful of square kilometres. Their close presence comforted Lucas. The favelas, pressing closer every day by a house, an apartment, an extension, reminded him of the tiered quadras of João de Deus; the vast canyons, kilometres deep, of Meridian.
The waiter brought him a Martini. He took a sip. It did what a Martini should do obediently, obviously. It was the hotel’s rarest gin but it was still standard, mass-produced; a small-batch Martini but still a commercial vermouth. Mass drinks for mass markets. He could not enjoy it in the knowledge that nowhere else in the two worlds was anyone drinking what he was drinking.
The light was almost gone in deepening indigo. Lucas’s glass froze at his lips. Light on the eastern edge of the world, spreading from beneath the horizon. A silver lip kissed the ocean. Lucas watched the moon rise out of the sea. Every myth, every superstition and goddess: he believed them. Here was true divinity. A line of light reached across the ocean from moon to moon-man. The moon rose clear of the sea. She was in her waxing crescent: Ole Ku Kahi. The days of the lune were imprinted on Lucas as they were on every moon-born, but he had never understood them as he did now; as they were named, from the Earth, looking at the moon in her changing phases.
‘You are so small,’ Lucas whispered as the moon rose clear from the distraction of the horizon and stood alone in the sky. With his thumb he could blot out his crescent world, everyone he had ever known or loved. Lucasinho; gone. The seas, the mountains, the great craters; the cities and railways; gone. The billion footprints of humanity’s seventy years on the moon. Gone.
Lucas saw Lady Luna as his mother had seen her, almost a century ago: Yemanja, her personal orixa, throwing down a silver path across the sea and space. And this was all Adriana had ever seen, this one face of Dona Luna, ever changing but never turning away. His understanding flipped upside down. Earth was relentless, crushing hell. The moon was hope. A small, dim hope, blotted out with an upraised thumb, but the only hope.
A thread of cloud moved across the crescent moon, fringed silver. The sky expanded around Lucas Corta. The moon was not a bauble on the edge of the world. She was distant and untouchable. Cloud across the moon was beautiful and desolating.
Full dark now and the moon stood high and Lucas’s dark-adapted eye could make out the features of the reclining crescent. The mitt and thumb of Fecunditatis and Nectaris, the palm of Tranquilitatis, part of the wrist of Serenitatis. The suit glove, in lunar lore. The dark pupil of Mare Crisium, and how bright the south-eastern highlands. He could make out a bright ray from the crater at Tycho. These places, these names he looked at dispassionately, from an astronomical distance. Now he saw that tiny lights sprinkled the dark part of the moon. Sparks clustered along the equator; the settlements and habitats that followed the line of Equatorial One. That tangle of lights was Meridian at the centre of Nearside, the closest point to Earth. His eye moved south: a handful of sparkles in the darkness of the pole. Queen of the South. Scattered lights along the pole to pole line. With magnification he could discern individual trains. There, on the edge of the sun zone; those sharp lights in the dark would be the mirror farms of Twé. Crucible, the brightest feature on the surface of the moon, would not be visible in this phase, under the full sun around the shoulder of the moon.
Neck deep in sustaining water, Lucas Corta drank his inferior Martini under the lights of the cities of the moon.