Wagner Corta has always thought gold cheap. Its colour is tawdry, its shine mendacious, its heft a fiction that equates weight with worth. Up in the sky hangs an entire planet hypnotised by the lie of gold. The acme of wealth, the spirit of greed, the final measure of value.
The moon is profligate with gold. Corta Hélio helium extractors threw away tons of gold every year in their exhaust plumes. Gold was not even worth the cost of its own sifting. Adriana Corta owned no gold, wore no jewels. Her wedding band was steel, forged from lunar iron. The steel ring on the Iron Hand.
The Church of Theotokos of Konstantin is a womb of gold. Gold the low door through which all must stoop to enter the presence of the holy icon, gold the walls and dome of this tiny chapel, gold the rails and lamps and censers, gold the frame of the tiny icon. The background of the icon is beaten lunar gold. Gold the cover over the lady and the child, only their faces and hands exposed. Gold the holy crown. The mother’s skin is dark, her eyes downcast, looking away from the needy, pressing infant in her arms. Wagner has never seen such sad eyes. The child is a monster, too old, a tiny old man; greedily reaching a hand across the mother’s throat, face pressed hard against the mother’s cheek. Browns and golds. The legend is that Konstantin Vorontsov painted his icon in orbit, his wood and paints brought up over many launches from Kazakhstan with the materials to build the first cycler. He finished it on the moon with a backdrop of gold dust from the Sea of Tranquillity.
The Church of the Theotokos is the perfect place to meet Denny Mackenzie.
And here is the golden boy, ducking under the low lintel, squinting as he adjusts to the bioluminescence. Wagner is disappointed that he is wearing a black Helmut Lang suit. Denny Mackenzie grins at the decor. Gold teeth gleam.
‘Tasteful.’
There is room enough in the Church of Theotokos of Konstantin for two men, no entourages.
‘So where have you hidden your wolves, Wagner Corta?’
‘Same place as you’re hiding your blades.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Denny Mackenzie opens his jacket to show the knife hilts, one in either holster. The hand grips are gold.
‘I don’t think so either,’ Wagner says.
‘Of course not. Do you think I’d come here without a bodyguard? You won’t see them, Wagner.’
Meridian is free and disputed territory in the Mackenzie civil war. Factions skirmish, blades are drawn, fights sprawl across the prospekts, Zabbaleen wash blood from the streets. Denny Mackenzie buttons up his jacket. He bends to peer at the icon.
‘Pretty.’
‘The theory is that the image has always existed. The artist just found it,’ Wagner says. ‘You see that patch where the gilding is worn away? Lips did that. Thousands of lips. Maybe millions of lips. You kiss the icon, the love is transferred to the Lady.’
‘Those Vorontsovs believe some weird shit. Three claims, Wagner Corta. You used one of them getting me here.’
‘Keep him safe.’
‘The boy?’
‘Would I claim for anything else? Keep him safe from Bryce. In the dark time. When the pack breaks up. When I’m away. Watch over him.’
‘I can do that, Wagner Corta,’ Denny Mackenzie says. ‘I give you my word on that. That’s two claims. You have one more.’
‘No,’ Wagner says. ‘Not yet. I’ll know when I need it.’
‘So be it. Our business is done, Wagner Corta?’
‘Done.’
Wagner remains in the tiny chapel. The icon of the Theotokos of Konstantin is set low, to bring to their knees everyone who would revere it or marvel at it or be baffled by it or simply seek solace from it.
I have made a deal with the man who killed my brother, Wagner tells the little icon. I have placed the boy I’m sworn to protect in the hands of my enemy. Do you condemn or do you forgive, Lady?
The icon says nothing. Wagner Corta feels nothing.
* * *
Lady Sun sighs at the castles and dragons. Banal. She rolls her eyes at the manhua princesses and great moments in handball. Technical but tedious. She walks through the grove of woven trunks and branches without a sideways look.
‘Now,’ she says, ‘this.’
The hollow cube is suspended from the dome by invisible lines. It seems to float in the air. The cube is hollow, its faces have been pierced with geometric patterns inspired by the Moorish architects of the Alhambra Palace. A light source hangs at the centre of the cube and casts a web of woven shadows across the two visitors standing before it. Lady Sun’s breath hangs in the air and in turns becomes a surface for the interplay of shadows from the worked cube.
‘Precision lasers,’ says Sun Zhiyuan. ‘Thaw, freeze action.’
‘I don’t want to know how the trick is done!’ Lady Sun snaps but takes her grandson’s arm and draws him close to her. Condensation from her breath is already freezing on the fur of her hooded cape. She shivers, though the cold is nowhere near as deep as when the ice field was first discovered. Water held as ice for two billion years in the perpetual shadow of Shackleton crater, while the peak of Malapert Mountain burns in eternal light. Ice and fire, darkness and light, the opposing elements out of which the Suns built the moon, lying next to each other. Three quarters of the ancient ice is gone, what remains is more than enough for the annual ice sculpture festival; for a hundred Zhongqiu. Castles and dragons. Dear gods.
This cube in its simplicity and geometric elegance pleases her.
‘Who made this?’ Lady Sun asks.
Her grandson names three kids Lady Sun cannot tell from the woman who hand stitches her shoes. Lady Sun walks around the Alhambra cube, through changing shadow-scapes, and thinks about her warm, softly lit apartments.
‘I believe that Lucas Corta is alive,’ she says.
‘That would be important news,’ Zhiyuan says.
‘For many reasons,’ Lady Sun says, continuing her orbit around the ice cube. ‘I had discreet enquiries made. Amanda tells me that the rover in which Lucas Corta died was never found. No body, one’s suspicions are naturally aroused. I had my agents run a satellite scan mapped against the range of a surface rover. They found it adjacent to the Central Fecunditatis Moonloop tower. The Vorontsovs are an endless trial of frustrations and obfuscations but my agents did find a record of a capsule launch at a time commensurate with an escape by rover from João de Deus.’
Lady Sun takes her grandson’s arm again and draws him round to the third face of the ice lantern.
‘Understand that discretion is everything. The evidence was slight, but evidence nonetheless, that Lucas Corta escaped off world by Moonloop. There is only one place he can go. If the Vorontsovs have been sheltering him, they are invested in keeping it secret. Too heavy a touch might alert them.’
‘Nevertheless…’
Lady Sun squeezes Zhiyuan’s arm. ‘I am a nosy old woman. It was quite irresistible. The Vorontsovs are certainly keeping something secret, in space and on Earth. Money is moving. Money walks with a heavy tread. Terrestrial corporations are forming new venture capital groups. VTO Earth has come to an agreement with the Russian government.’
Zhiyuan lets go his grip on Lady Sun’s arm.
‘That’s impossible.’
‘More than that. My whisperers inside the Chinese Communist Party have gone quiet. That concerns me. They are afraid. Conspiracies assail me. Earth contrives and the Eagle of the Moon finds his board turn against him? Lady Luna allows no coincidences.’
‘What do you suspect, nainai?’
‘Lucas Corta is coming to take back what was stolen from him. He will have his revenge on those who destroyed his family.’
‘Can the Three August Ones give us a foresight?’
‘I am reluctant to involve them.’ A tug on her grandson’s sleeve draws him on to the final facet. Lady Sun closes her eyes in the broken light streaming from the cube of ice. ‘We cannot act openly on this. Amanda will suspect that we know she lied to us about killing Lucas Corta. Her position on the board would be finished. She’s been humiliated by Lucas Corta once: that divorce. Twice she will not allow. Involve the Three August Ones, and the whole board will know.’
‘We have to know who we can trust. I will proceed discreetly and correctly. There will be no error.’
‘Thank you, Zhiyuan.’ Lady Sun links arms again. The frost is thick on the fur of her hood. ‘Now, I’ve had quite enough of this frozen hell. Take me back for a nice warm glass of tea.’
* * *
It’s a fantastic opportunity.
It’s true. Nothing more true. How is it then that the greatest truth sounds like the feeblest lie?
I have a chance – one chance Luca – to study at the Cabochon.
And he’ll say, Cabochon? And she’ll have to explain again that it’s the foremost political colloquium working on alternative models of lunar governance. And he’ll say What? and that will blunt it, blur it. Cuts should be fast, sharp, clean.
It’s a year. It sounds like forever, but it’s not. And it’s only Meridian, that’s an hour on the train. It’s a year, it’s not the end.
But it is the end. Colloquium relationships don’t work, her friends all say. Never have, never will. Break it off. He could come with me. Hands go up in horror. Are you insane? That’s worse. He’ll follow you round to all the political salons and cocktail parties and at some point you’ll catch him out of the corner of your eye and for a moment you won’t see Lucasinho Corta; you’ll see a pet; and beyond that a point when you’re ashamed of him and beyond that a point where you stop inviting him and a point where he no longer cares that you don’t invite him.
So it has to be over and it is over. That is settled. The next question then: How to tell him it’s over?
Familiar, her friends say. It’s the modern way. I can’t do that. He deserves better. Deserves better? He’s moody, he’s needy, he has no ambition and no self-respect and he’ll fuck anything with a pulse – and he has – and good sex and better baked goods do not compensate for that. And she says: Yes, and add infuriating, vain, trivial, bored, demanding, insensitive and emotionally illiterate. And hurt hurt hurt. Hurt more than anyone she has ever known, more deeply. Scarred to the bone. He needs her. She doesn’t want to be needed. She doesn’t want a dependant. You can’t let your life be trapped by another’s.
When the tiny package had been delivered to her hand, brought by BALTRAN from Meridian, when she had found the two halves of the ear-spike inside, she had called the council of her abusua. They had not hesitated. The metal was the contract. She gave it back to Lucasinho and without a thought he slipped it through his ear, though its magic was used up. He still wears it. When he annoys her, when she hates him, she thinks he wears it to remind her that she owes him for her brother Kojo. That she will go on owing. That the debt is his to discharge, or hold. It is a small titanium hook in her freedom. She wants to shout: It’s our debt, not my debt.
She hates him now. Then she sees his eyes; those Sun cheekbones; his full, lovely boy-lips. The swagger, the sly smile that hides and displays so many fears.
Can he read? she asks her familiar. A card, a piece of writing would be personal but keep the necessary distance.
He has a reading age of six, her familiar replies.
What did those Corta madrinhas teach their kids?
No letter, no familiar-to-familiar fuck off. It will be face to face. She dreads it, she is already running the script in her imagination. He is faithless and needy and annoys her more than anyone else she has ever known but this much she owes him.
Book me a table at Saint Joseph, she orders. It’s classy and neutral and far enough away from her social orbit for friends not to be there.
She’s going to miss the cakes.
* * *
The bar on the train refuses to serve him. First he won’t accept it. The bar is polite but insistent. Then he shouts, Do you know who I am? The bar does but train bars have no facility for social status. Last he punches it, so hard he cracks the fascia. The bar reports damage and prepares a small legal claim.
I think you should go back to you seat, Jinji says. Passengers are staring.
‘I want another drink.’
I’d advise against that. Your blood alcohol is two hundred milligrams per hundred millimetres of blood.
He refuses out of petty defiance but it is a worthless rebellion, defying a familiar. On the way back to his seat he glares down anyone who dares make eye contact.
This is the third day of Lucasinho’s binge. The first day was chems. A dozen custom houses, twice that many narcotic DJs. His mind, his emotions, his senses spun from high to low to out to in; colours and sounds expanding and contracting. Chems and sex: armed with a bagful of erotics he went to Serpent House, where Adelaja Oladele the Master Edger lived, and a house of cute boys who welcomed his bag of sexy-highs like Yam festival.
His aunt Lousika called him, messaged him, implored him to come home until he shut down Jinji and locked himself into a bubble of bodies, sweat and cum. Taking himself offline was the only thing that stopped him abuse-bombing Abena over the social network. The second day, still descending ten different paths from ten different highs, he took what was left in his bag of treats round to Kojo Asamoah. Kojo made him tea, put him to bed, folded himself around Lucasinho while they shared out the last of the pharmaceutical treats and fended off all the questions about why his sister had gone to Meridian, why she didn’t think enough of him to stay, why nobody stayed, ever. By morning Lucasinho was gone. Kojo was relieved. He had dreaded having to blow him all night.
The third day Lucasinho went drinking. Twé was an ecosystem of tiny drinking places, from thatch shacks to pool bars to cubbyholes carved out of old rock, so small the clients fitted into them like segments of tangerine. Lucasinho was not a drinker. He did not know that there was a strategy to bingeing so he drank fast and freely and catholically. He drank spirits and stuff not made from printers; hand-made drink, banana beer and yam beer, pumpkin beer; Twé cocktails that were unlike anything else on the moon. He was a terrible, amateur drunk. He bored people. He forgot sentences. He stood too close. He took off his clothes in company. Twice he threw up. He didn’t know alcohol could do that. He fell asleep on a potential lover and woke with a headache he was certain, certain, would kill him until Jinji, in offline mode, told him it was dehydration and a litre of water would ameliorate it.
Then he woke up and found himself folded up in the seat of a high-speed train. Wanting another drink. Which the bar refused him.
‘Where am I going?’ Lucasinho asks but before Jinji can answer he hears a man’s voice speaking to a child, and the child answering, both in Portuguese and at the sound of the hummed nasals and burnished sibilants Lucasinho pulls his knees in to his chest and sobs silently, convulsively.
João de Deus. He is going back.
He’s the last off the train, the last through the passenger lock; the last standing, unsteady, on the platform of João de Deus station. So many times across this shining floor. To friends and amors and the great cities of the moon. To his wedding. To Meridian, when he ran away from the boredom and confinement of Boa Vista and he discovered that on a world as small as the moon all running away from is running to and that all he was exchanging was a small cave for a larger one.
‘How’s my eye make-up?’ Lucasinho asks. He remembers now, putting on the slap in Kojo’s toilet. Not the full ensemble; something to make him feel wild and fierce, something to mark that Lucasinho Corta is returning to João de Deus.
I’m offline so I can’t see, but your last application was three hours ago so I recommend a little touch up.
The washroom has old-fashioned mirrors. Lucasinho works as deftly as the alcohol in his brain will allow. He admires one profile, then the other. This 1980s retro really suits him.
The smell. He had forgotten it, but smell is the lock of memory and the first breath is all his nineteen years of being a Corta. Raw stone and the tang of electricity. Overworked sewage and the perfumes used to mask it, piss, cooking oil. The vanilla greasiness of printer plastic. Bodies. They sweat differently in João de Deus. The fresh sweetness of bots. Dust. Everywhere, dust.
Lucasinho sneezes.
So small. The prospekts are narrow, the roof so low he cringes from it. Twé obeys an architecture different from any other lunar settlement. It is a city turned on its end; clusters of slim silos a kilometre high, filled with green and true light bounced down cascades of mirrors, not the false sky of the sunline. Twé is a city of hidings and discoveries: João de Deus is open. Kondakova Prospekt, crossed by bridges and catwalks, stretches true before him the city’s hub.
They came through here, on the night of knives. Off the train, through the locks, across that wide station plaza. Ghost soldiers march past Lucasinho, hands on knife hilts. Scorch-marked walls and building fronts; the old Corta Hélio offices hollow like punched-out teeth. His father’s apartment; the finest sound-room in two worlds a mass of fused audio equipment and charred wood.
Santinhos hurry past on foot, scooter, motos. Eighteen months ago the whole moon knew his face. Wedding of the year! Stylish and cute Lucasinho Corta. Some faces turn, some double-take, most don’t even spare him a glance. Is it that they don’t recognise him, or that it is safer not to recognise him?
West 7 catwalk. Lucasinho stands and looks up. The Mackenzies hung Carlinhos’s stripped body by his heels from those girders. Arms and long hair and dick hanging down. Throat opened. They drove him to his knees with tasers, they closed in around him. So many blades. He could not escape. While Lucasinho hid in Twé, protected by the knives and living weapons of the Asamoahs.
Mackenzie Helium logos on office fronts, bots, the banners that drape fifty metres from the higher levels. A duster in a sasuit passes, fingers hooked through the faceplate of a helmet that carries a small MH on its brow. There are more white faces than he remembers. The hot-shops and tea-houses and bars chalk up their daily specials on the wall in Portuguese and Globo. English on the streets; Australian accented.
I can’t protect you if I’m offline, Jinji says, as if reading his thoughts. Perhaps it is. Perhaps its circuitry has worked its way through his skull into the folds of his brain, reading the spark of neurons. Perhaps it just knows Lucasinho so well that it has become an echo of his mind.
Lucasinho stops at the entrance plaza to the Estádio da Luz. New lettering, new name, new corporate identity. Ballarat Arena. Home of the Jaguars.
‘Jaguars,’ Lucasinho says.
Terrestrial members of the cat … Jinji starts.
A voice calls from a higher level; a hey! Lucasinho knows is directed at him. A second call, more doubtful. Lucasinho walks on. His destination is clear now.
The Boa Vista tram station has been screened off with sheeting, sealed with Do Not Cross tapes and the suit-helmet symbol of depressurisation warning. Even without the shuttering, Lucasinho couldn’t have gone there: Boa Vista is dead, depressurised, open to vacuum; locked behind many pressure seals. The foot of the wall is a rippling pool of coloured lights. Biolights, hundreds of them; some fresh and new, some pulsing fitfully on the edge of death. The minuscule lights – red, gold, green – catch on a host of small objects huddling along the lanterns. Closer, Lucasinho sees that they are cheap plastic prints of the orixas and their attributes – both their umbanda and their Christian aspects. The blade of Ogun, the thunderbolt of Xango, the crown of Yemanja.
The four icons are arranged in a triangle; Adriana at the centre. Rafa the apex, the lower points occupied by Carlinhos and Lucas. The images are small, hand-sized, devotional; the frames heavy and decorated with paint, jewels, more plastic votives. The luminescents cast a wavering light over the triangle of faces, over Lucasinho’s face as he squats to examine the other offerings left at the shrine.
A Moços shirt, ’03 season. A T-shirt, contemporary cut, carrying the image of a dust-bike: Serenitatis Endurance Race. Many knives, their tips snapped off. Music cubes which, when Lucasinho lifts them, play the old bossa nova his father and grandmother loved. Pictures, dozens of pictures: dusters and handball fans and wonderful pictures of the old days of the moon, when Adriana built a world. Lucasinho lifts them: the images are old but the pictures smell freshly printed. This bearded, smiling man is the grandfather he never knew, who died before even his father was born. Here are madrinhas with children in their arms and at their sides. Here are the faces of Boa Vista half-carved. These are gods that speak to Lucasinho, things found inside stone, emerging from raw rock. Here are two young women; one his grandmother, the other unknown to Lucasinho. Their heads are together, they smile for the lens. His grandmother wears a compression shirt with the Mackenzie Metals double-M logo. The other woman’s shirt carries a Ghanaian adinkra.
They are gone. He remains, kneeling drunk among the votives. He is disgusting. He loathes himself. The icons reproach him.
‘Not you.’ Lucasinho tries to rip the picture of his father from the wall but it has been glued in place. He scrabbles to find an edge he can tug. A hand on his arm, a voice.
‘Leave it.’
He turns, fist balled to drive it deep into a face, a snarl on his face.
The old woman steps back, hands raised, not defensively, not in fear, but in wonder. She is knife-thin, dark, swathed in white robes, a white turban on her head. She wears a green and blue stole, many rings, more necklaces. Lucasinho knows her but cannot remember where. She recognises him.
‘Oh you, little mestre.’
She darts her hands forward, fast as a knife-fighter’s stab, and folds Lucasinho’s hands in her own.
‘I’m not…’ He can’t pull away. Her eyes are dark and deep and paralyse him with fear. He recognises those eyes. He has seen them twice; once at Boa Vista with his Vo Adriana, again at his grandmother’s eightieth birthday feast. ‘You’re a sister…’
‘Irmã Loa, of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now.’ She kneels before Lucasinho. ‘I was your mother’s confessor. She was generous to my order.’ She rearranges votives where Lucasinho’s feet have scattered them. ‘I chase the bots away – they know no respect, but the Zabbaleen remember the Cortas. I always knew someone would come. I hoped it would be you.’ Lucasinho snatches his hands from her dry, hot grasp. He stands up, and that is worse. This old woman kneeling in front of him horrifies him. She looks up into his eyes and it is like supplication. ‘You have friends here. This is your city. The Mackenzies don’t own it, they never could. There are people here still regard the name of Corta.’
‘Go away, leave me alone!’ Lucasinho yells, backing away from the sister.
‘Welcome home, Lucasinho Corta.’
‘My home? I’ve seen my home. I went there. You’ve seen nothing. You feed lights and chase bots and dust the pictures. I was there. I went down and I saw the plants dead and the water frozen and the rooms open to vacuum. I got the people out of the refuges. I got my cousin out. You weren’t there. You saw nothing.’
But he swore he would come back. His sasuit boots crunching the flash-frozen debris of a great house, he vowed he would bring it back. This was his.
He can’t. He doesn’t have it in him. He is weak and vain and luxurious and stupid. He turns and runs, sobered by shock and adrenaline.
‘You are the true heir,’ Irmã Loa calls after him. ‘This is your city.’
* * *
By the second, Lucasinho knows that Blue Moons are terrible cocktails. He finishes it and orders the third and the bartender knows the right way and does the trick with the inverted tea spoon, the tendrils of blue Curacao dispersing into the gin like guilt. Lucasinho picks it up and tries to catch the bar lights in its blue cone. He is back drunk again, where he wanted. His Tio Rafa created the Blue Moon but he knew nothing about good cocktails.
The bar is small, smelly, dim, booming with loud chart music and louder conversation and the bartender recognises Lucasinho but keeps professional discretion. The girl does not. They came in halfway through his first; two girls, two boys, one neutro. They’ve been glancing over from their booth carved from raw rock, glancing away when he catches their eyes. Heads down, furtive. She waits until the fourth Blue Moon to make her approach.
‘Ola. You’re, ah…’
Pointless to deny. He would only spark rumours, and rumours are legends that have only just learned to crawl.
‘I am.’
Her name is Geni. She introduces Mo, Jamal, Thor, Calyx. They smile and nod from their booth, waiting for a sign to join him.
‘Do you mind if I?’ Geni gestures to the stool, the empty bar space.
‘Yes actually.’
She either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.
‘We’re, Urbanistes?’
Lucasinho’s heard of this. Some extreme sport; suiting up and exploring old abandoned habitats and industrial plants. Abseiling down agriculture shifts. Crawling along tunnels with your O2 gauge running down in the corner of your eye. No interest. History, sport and pointless danger. He hates all of those. Too much like effort. Lucasinho slides back on his stool until he rests his chin on his hands, studying the half-drunk fifth Blue Moon. The bartender catches his eye; the flicker of silent communication says give the nod and I will get rid of her.
‘We’ve been out there. Three times.’
‘Boa Vista.’
‘We can take you.’
‘You went to Boa Vista?’
She looks less certain now; she glances over at her friends. The gulf beyond booth and bar is stellar.
‘You went to Boa Vista?’ Lucasinho says. ‘You went to my home? What did you do, go along the tram line? Or did you go down the surface shaft? Did you feel really proud when you touched down; like you’d really done something? Did you all do high-fives?’
‘I’m sorry, I just thought…’
‘My home, my fucking home.’ Lucasinho turns his fury on the young woman and it is hot and pure, fuelled by shame and self-loathing and Blue Moon. ‘You went to my home and you walked all over it and took your pictures and your movies. Look, here’s me in the São Sebastião Pavilion. Here’s me in front of Oxala. Did your friends love them and say that’s so amazing, you’re so daring and brave? That’s my home. My fucking home. Who said you could go to my home? Did you ask? Did you think maybe you had to ask? That’s there a Corta left to ask?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the young woman says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She is scared now and Lucasinho is so mean with alcohol and shame he adds her fear to his combustion. He smashes his Martini glass down on the bar, shattering the stem, spilling blue liquor over the glowing counter. He staggers to his feet.
‘It’s not yours!’
The barman has caught the woman’s eye but her friends are already leaving.
‘I didn’t mean…’ the young woman calls from the door. She is in tears.
‘You weren’t there!’ Lucasinho shouts after her. ‘You weren’t there.’
The bartender has mopped up the breakage and set a glass of tea on the counter.
‘She wasn’t there,’ Lucasinho says to the bartender. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’
‘So there he is.’ Lucasinho had given no more than a glance to the duster on the far side of the bar but now she looks up from her caipiroshka and speaks. The bar throws strong shadows up from her features. Her dark face is spotted white with radiation-induced vitiligo. ‘Mão de Ferro.’
‘What?’ Lucasinho snaps.
‘The Iron Hand. The Corta name. I gave your family twenty-five years of my life. I’m owed.’
Owed? is on Lucasinho’s tongue but before the word can be spoken the tiny bar is full of big women and men in fashionable suits and bulges in their jackets that hint at bladed weapons. Three surround Lucasinho, two cover the bar, one on each shoulder of the duster. Adinkra familiars. AKA security.
The squad leader sets a titanium ear-spike on the glowing white bar.
‘You forgot that,’ he says. The duster looks at Lucasinho, shrugs. ‘Come with us please, Senhor Corta.’
‘I’m staying…’ Lucasinho says but the guards haul him to his feet. A firm hand on his right forearm, another in the small of his back.
‘Sorry,’ the duster says as the Asamoah guards hurry Lucasinho out on to Kondakova Prospekt. ‘I mistook you for the Iron Hand.’
* * *
‘I thought you’d like the room with the window.’
Ariel wheels from the living space into the bedroom and around the bed. A bed, not a hammock. A free-standing bed. A bed wide enough to spread out every limb. A bed with space all around it. Space enough to move properly, freely. Compared with the moss-damp wooden home, rain dripping from its shingles, in which Marina grew up, the apartment on Orion Hub is a clutch of cubbyholes, intimate as a wasp’s nest. By Meridian standards, it is the pinnacle of desirability; low enough to be fashionable, high enough to escape the grosser smells and sounds of the prospekt. By the standards of the holes up in Bairro Alto, it is paradise.
‘Give me the traffic noise, right,’ Marina says. She sees Ariel crest-fallen and regrets the jibe. The apartment is magnificent.
‘Show me more,’ Marina says with what she hopes sounds like enthusiasm. Ariel’s court-room senses have been dulled by the excitement of the new apartment. On any other day she would have heard the insincerity like a temple bell.
There are two bedrooms, a living space and an auxiliary social space which can be closed off. An office, Ariel declares. There is a small separate room for whatever purposes require a small separate room.
‘That could be your new sex room,’ Marina declares, putting her head around the door to check the dimensions. ‘Soft flooring, new wall covering.’
Sex had been problematic up in Bairro Alto. Her disability and reduced station in life had not touched Ariel’s autosexuality. Times and spaces were negotiated. Marina donated her pittance of a carbon allowance to print up Ariel’s sex toys. Sex became a household joke, a third character in the family, with its own nicknames and vocabulary and code: Senhora Siririca and Ribbed and Exciting. Sister Rabbit – Marina had to explain what a rabbit was – was the household trickster deity and Senhor Girth kept up an ongoing rivalry with Senhor Depth. The conversation became easy but it never once crossed to Marina’s side of the tiny apartment. Who she was doing it with; who might she do it with; was she doing it all? Marina had in time accepted celibacy as the pledge of her watch over Ariel Corta. Most of the time she was too tired to even remember sex, much less engineer a fantasy. Now, as she closes the door on the small room in the vast new apartment, the possibility opens. She can think about herself.
A private banja. A separate spa, in which the water keeps running until you shut it off. Marina still can’t believe that the Four Elamentals graphics on her chib are gold and remain gold. There is a house printer. There is a food space and a chiller. The chiller is stocked with designer gins and vodkas, the food space with twists and mixers and botanicals, and the work surfaces with appropriate glassware.
‘Marina coracão, I’d adore a Martini.’
‘It’s just gone ten.’
‘Where’s your sense of celebration?’
Bairro Alto had been lean in pleasure. Anything that tasted of victory – a case, a deal, a new thing around the house – Ariel celebrated. Marina had recognised the point at which celebration slumped into dangerous drinking. It would have to be faced, some day, some place. Not in Bairro Alto. This is the place, but Marina cannot make this the day. This is a worthy celebration. She mixes two breathtakingly dry Martinis from a twenty-two botanical from Cyrillus. Ariel levers herself out of the wheelchair and drops into the yielding expanse of the lounger. The wheelchair scurries to a corner and folds itself down to a flat box.
‘What do we think?’ Ariel lifts her legs on to the couch, one at a time, sprawls out, Martini glass in hand.
‘I’m thinking, who lived here before?’ Marina says.
‘You nortes are such Puritans.’ She raises her glass. ‘Saude!’
Marina tips glass against glass. It has the ring of good crystal. ‘Tim tim.’
‘Since you ask, it belonged to Yulia Shcherban. She was a special economic adviser to Rostam Baranghani.’
‘The LDC Board Member?’
‘The same. She was recalled. There’s been a spate of recalls among the LDC ancillary staff.’
‘You’d think…’
‘I have mentioned it to the Eagle.’
‘And?’
‘He thanked me for my due diligence.’
‘Well, I do know it’s a seller’s market in personal security,’ Marina says. ‘Above and beyond the Mackenzies. If you’ve got any kind of history with the Dragons, you can name your price.’
Ariel sits up.
‘Where did you hear this?’
‘While you’re listening, we’re talking.’
‘Why didn’t I hear that?’
‘Because you’re sitting on Jonathon Kayode’s shoulder trying to work out if his lawyers will stab each other before they stab him.’
‘I should be on that,’ Ariel insists. ‘I’d have been on that. Anyone as much as belched in Meridian, I used to know it.’
‘You’ve been out…’
Ariel cuts in.
‘He’s fucked. His board is against him. His legals are trying to save their own asses. I’m the only one he trusts.’ Ariel takes a long draw at her Martini. ‘It’s all so polite and formal and discreet, but I read the faces. The LDC was constituted so that no terrestrial government could gain overall control. They’re unified now. Something has changed. The board will act to remove him soon.’
‘If he jumps before he’s pushed?’
‘The board will still put their stooge in.’
‘Fucked if he does, fucked if he doesn’t. What did he do to piss off his board so mightily?’
‘The Eagle of the Moon is a great big stupid romantic. He believes that the office of the Eagle of the Moon should be more than just rubber-stamping the edicts of the LDC and mincing around cocktail receptions. He believes in this world.’
‘When you say, he believes in this world…’
‘Self-government. Turn us into a state, not an industrial colony. He’s become political, the dear thing.’
‘That would piss them off,’ Marina says.
‘Yes,’ Ariel says. ‘I whisper in his ear and I take his money and his apartment and there’s not a thing I can do.’ Ariel throws herself back down on the lounger and stretches her arms wide. Marina scoops up the Martini glass as Ariel’s fingers lose their grip on the stem. ‘Which is a pity, because I rather like the big idiot. Enough politics. I want the vodka this time.’
‘Ariel, do you think…’
‘Get me a fucking vodka Martini, Marina.’
The glass, the ice, the chill-thick liquid. The homoeopathic drip of vermouth. Ariel’s casual arrogance never fails to wound. Never a pause, never a thought for what Marina might want. Never the consideration that Marina wouldn’t want the bedroom with the window. Never the notion Marina might not want to move into the apartment. Never the question about Marina’s life. Marina’s hand shakes with tight rage as she stirs the Martini. She does not spill a drop. Never a drop.
‘Sorry,’ Ariel says. ‘That was inelegant.’ She sips the Martini. ‘This is a thing of beauty. But tell me, what do you really think?’
‘I think that if the Eagle falls, try not to be underneath him.’
‘No, not the Eagle, enough of the fucking Eagle,’ Ariel snaps. ‘And the fucking LDC and lawyers and advisers and every little gimcrack political club and debating society and activism group. Now, tonight, I need you. There’s a Lunarian Society meeting I want to go to.’
‘You want to go to the Lunarian Society?’
‘Yes. The Cabochon political science colloquium is delivering papers on models for lunar democracy.’
‘Well, I’ve got your excuse. I’ve a ticket to go and hear a band.’
‘You’ve what? You never told me.’
Marina bridles. ‘I need permission to go and hear a band?’
‘What do you need to go and hear a band for? Do we even have bands any more?’
‘We do and I like them and I want to see one.’
‘Is this that rock stuff?’
‘I need to justify my taste in bands?’ Marina had learned quickly that Ariel, unlike her brother, had no appreciation of music and camouflaged her ignorance as disdain.
‘Here’s what you do. Drop me off, go and get yourself a cup of tea and have Hetty stream this … band. It’ll be just like being there. Better. You won’t have all those ghastly sweaty rock people in your face.’
‘Ghastly sweaty people in your face is what makes it rock,’ Marina says but Ariel’s incomprehension is so total, so manifest, any further defence of guitar-led music will only confuse. ‘You do owe me.’
‘I owe you so much that there is no possible hope of me ever repaying it. But I need to go to the Lunarian Society. I’ve no interest at all in ghastly zealous student idealism. No, I want to go because Abena Maanu Asamoah is delivering a paper and the last thing I heard she was fucking my nephew Lucasinho. And I’m concerned about the little fucker. So, will you?’
Marina nods. Family wins.
‘Thank you, sweetie. Now, third time of asking: What do you think?’ Ariel gestures expensively to the wide white room and sends vodka slopping on to the lounger.
‘I’m thinking how do I rig it?’
‘Ropes and nets? Handles on everything?’
‘I think of them more as mobility aids.’
‘I plan not to need them.’
There is only one scenario under which Ariel will not need Marina’s rigging of nets and lines to move around the apartment.
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I should tell you every detail of my deal with the Eagle?’
‘Walking is a bit more important than wanting to go and see a rock band.’
‘Do you think I would have agreed if walking wasn’t part of the deal?’ Ariel says.
‘I remember Dr Macaraeg said it could take months,’ Marina says. ‘That spinal nerves were a slow and painstaking job.’
‘It takes as long as it takes. But I’ll be mobile, Marina. I won’t need that.’ Ariel slops vodka toward the recharging wheelchair. ‘I won’t need you. No, yes, I will. You know what I mean. I will always need you.’
* * *
The hands over his eyes disgust him. Hot, dry, skin papery, rustling. He holds his eyelids tightly shut. The idea of those palms, that skin touching a naked eyeball brings a retch to his throat.
Motion ceases, doors open. The hands impel him a few steps forward, then fly from his face.
‘Open your eyes, boy.’
His first thought is to refuse; irked by the tone of command in the old woman’s voice, the touch of the old woman’s controlling hand on his shoulder, though he is a head taller than her. He had prickled with small rebellion when she ordered him to close his eyes and keep them closed the whole ride up in the elevator, as he had bristled when she snatched the vaper out of his hand. A ridiculous affectation. But rebellion costs, and more, he knows she will wait until he obeys her.
Darius Mackenzie opens his eyes. Light. Searing light. He closes his eyes. He beheld the light of Ironfall, the light of destruction. This light is so bright he can see the capillaries in his eyelids.
The pavilion is a glass lantern atop the slender elevator tower atop Malapert Mountain. Darius stands at the centre of the hexagonal floor. Tiles, struts, vaults and ribs, the glass itself looks blasted and weary, their structural integrity pecked away photon by photon. The ideograms on the elevator call panel are bleached almost to illegibility. The air tastes scorched, strained, ionised.
‘Every Sun is brought here at the age of ten,’ Lady Sun says. ‘You’re late being a Sun, but you’re no exception.’ Darius lifts his hand to shade his eyes, lets it fall. No child of the Palace of Eternal Light would ever do such a thing.
Not a lantern, Darius realises. The light of a lantern comes from within. This light comes from without; from a blinding sun perched on the very rim of Shackleton crater. Low midnight sun casts huge shadows up behind Darius like wings. Every dust mote dances. The Pavilion of Eternal Light is not a place where you observe the sun; it’s a place where the sun observes you.
‘Yeah, we had this in Crucible,’ Darius says.
‘Don’t be clever with me,’ Lady Sun says. ‘The difference is profound. Crucible had to forever follow the sun. The sun comes to us. Go, go on. Look at it. Go as close as you dare.’
Darius is not to be dared by old women. He walks without hesitation to the glass, presses his palms to it. The toughened glass pane feels frail. It smells of dust and time. He looks full on the sun, rolling along the edge of the world. The Pavilion is a Peak of Eternal Light, one of those legendary places across the worlds, all at the poles, where the sun never sets.
‘Fifty years ago a message came in the night. It was on another world, in another city in another country. I had awaited that message for years. I was ready for it. I got up and left everything and went down to the car that I knew would be there. The car took me to a private plane. Aboard it were my aunts and uncles, my sisters and cousins. The plane took us to VTO Kazakhstan, and then to the moon. Do you know what that message said, boy?’
Darius wants very much to lick the window, taste the glass.
‘It said that a faction in the government was moving to arrest my family,’ Lady Sun says. ‘They wanted hostages they could use to leverage my husband. Even a Mackenzie must have heard of the name of Sun Aiguo. Sun Aiguo, Sun Xiaoqing, Sun Honghui. They built Taiyang. They built the moon. Learn history, boy: the Outer Space Treaty bars Earth’s national governments from claiming and controlling the moon – this is why we are administered by a corporation, not a political party. The terrestrial states have always envied our freedom, our wealth, our achievements. What they fear is someone else taking the moon, so they watch each other. Jealousy is an honest emotion, easy to manipulate. Jealousy has kept us safe for fifty years.
‘Every family has a fear; every one of the Five Dragons. The Cortas feared that their children would destroy their inheritance. The Mackenzies…’
‘Ironfall,’ Darius Mackenzie says, without thought.
‘Do you know what the Suns fear?’ Lady Sun says. ‘That the sun will go out. That one day it will dip below that horizon and never rise again and we will go down in the cold and dark. The air will freeze. The glass will shatter.’
‘That can’t happen,’ Darius says. ‘It’s astronomy, physics: science.’
‘So ready with glib answers. The day the sun goes out is the day the rules break. The rule that has protected us for fifty years; the day the terrestrial states realise they have more to gain by acting together than stalking each other with knives. This is my family’s fear, Darius; the call in the night. When it comes, everything we have built, everything we have achieved, will be taken from us because we have nowhere to run.’
‘Is this what you tell all the others you bring up here?’
‘Yes. I tell them that; the ones I think need to hear it from me.’
‘And you think I need to hear that from you?’
‘No. What you need to hear from me, Darius, is that Ironfall was no accident.’
He turns from the glass. Lady Sun’s face is impassive – Lady Sun’s face is always perfect, discreet – but Darius knows his obvious shock has pleased her.
‘Crucible was sabotaged. There was code embedded in the operating system for the smelter mirrors. A simple but effective routine. But you saw what it did.’
‘You are the coders,’ Darius says. Dust dances in the hot light around Lady Sun.
‘We are. Pre-eminently. Information is our business. But this was not our code.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘You’re not the Prince, Darius. You’re not the last heir of Robert and Jade. Duncan and Bryce are at each other’s throats, do you really think there’s a seat at their tables for you? Do you think you’re safe?’
‘I…’
‘You’re safe here, Darius. This is the only place you can be safe. With your family.’ Lady Sun has been moving step by unnoticed step, subtly steering Darius so that now she stands between him and the slow-rising sun. Darius squints into the painful light. Lady Sun is a heavy silhouette.
‘Do you think we’d let those Australian barbarians decide the succession? You’re not a Mackenzie, Darius. You never were. They know it. You wouldn’t have lasted six lunes. The Ironfall code, Darius; it was old code. Older than you. Much older.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t. It was the Cortas who killed your mother.’
* * *
Abena Maanu Asamoah accepts the applause with a coy smile. The Lunarian Society’s Erasmus Darwin Salon is full; the faces close. The audience was easy to read: the sitter-back-with-arms-folded in the front row, the sitter-forward-with-the-constant-frown in the second row; the head-shaker second row far right, the mutterers in the second row centre, the stifled yawner in the third row. The Lunarian Society printed out extra chairs but there are still listeners perched on the arms of the big old-fashioned seats, leaning against the back wall. She can barely see through the host of hovering familiars.
Abena is the last to present and the room has broken into private discussion as she comes down from the dais. Her colloquium mates press in to congratulate and adulate. Wait-staff offer drinks: small vodka, genever, cocktail tea. Abena takes a glass of chilled tea. As she receives compliments, accepts offers to speak, fields the questions of one persistent young man, she notices a disturbance in the room, as if people are making space for an object moving through them. A woman in a wheelchair: the wheelchair incredible, the woman unbelievable. Ariel Corta. Abena’s colloquium mates part to admit her to the circle.
‘Nicely done,’ Ariel says. She looks to Abena’s classmates. ‘Would you mind?’
Abena nods: Catch you later when we go on to the club.
‘Let’s go on the balcony. The decor in here nauseates me.’ Ariel rolls towards the pavilion above West 65th. ‘A few notes. Always have something to do with your hands. Lawyers and actors know this. You’re not about truth, you’re about persuasion. People believe body language when they won’t believe spoken language.’ She scoops a genever from a tray and thanks the waiter. ‘Second note. Work your audience. Before you open your mouth, pick your targets. Who looks frightened, who looks over-confident, who catches your eye when you check out the room, who would you most like to seduce. Target them with what you have to say that they want to hear. Make them feel like you are speaking to them personally. If they nod, if they adjust their body posture to mirror yours, you have them.’
Ariel pats a low padded bench by the balustrade. Abena accepts the invitation to sit. Voices burble from the rooms beyond, laughs and interjections spike drama into the susurrus of networking. The sunline dims to indigo. Orion Quadra is a canyonland of lights, the glowing nave of a stupendous, godless cathedral.
‘You take me away from my friends and then tell me everything I’m doing wrong,’ Abena says.
‘I know, I’m an arrogant monster.’ Ariel takes a sip of her genever and grimaces. ‘This is hideous stuff.’
‘How did you find my paper?’
‘You’re taking a terrible risk, asking me that. I could say I found it banal, naive and jejune.’
‘I’d still stand by it.’
‘I’m very glad to hear that.’
‘So what did you think of it?’
‘I’m a lawyer. I see society as sets of individual but interacting contracts. Webs of engagement and obligation. Society is this’ – she lifts her thimble of genever up to the cross-town lights – ‘in a Nicole Farhi dress. My problem with democracy is that I think we already have a more effective system. Your argument from terrestrial small states was fascinating, but the moon is different. We’re not a state; we’re an economic colony. If I were to make a terrestrial analogy, it would be with something enclosed and constrained by its environment. A deep sea fishing boat, or perhaps an Antarctic research base. We’re clients, not citizens. We are a rentier culture. We don’t own anything, we have no property rights, we are a low-stakes society. What’s my motivation to participate?
‘The problem with a democracy – even as elegantly constructed a direct democracy as yours – is free-riding. There will always be those who don’t want to participate, yet they share the benefits of those who do engage. If I could get away with free-riding, I certainly would. I only agreed to join the Pavilion of the White Hare because I thought it would give me a hand up to the Court of Clavius. Justice Ariel Corta has a nice ring to it. You can’t compel people to engage politically – that’s tyranny. In a society with low benefits to participation you end up with a majority of free-riders and a small engaged political caste. Leave democracy to those who wish to practise it and you always end up with a political class. Or worse, a representative democracy. Right now, we have a system of accountability that engages every single person on the moon. Our legal system makes every human responsible for their life, security and wealth. It’s individualistic and it’s atomising and it’s harsh but it is understood. And the limits are clear. No one makes decisions or assumes responsibilities for anyone else. It doesn’t recognise groups or religions or factions or political parties. There are individuals, there are families, there are corporations. Academics come up from Earth to Farside and tut and roll their eyes about us being cut-throat individualists with no concept of solidarity. But we do have what they would call a civil society. We just believe it’s best left to negotiation, not legislation. We are unsophisticated grudge-bearing barbarians. I rather like it.’
‘So: banal, naive and jejune,’ Abena says. ‘You didn’t come here to listen to political science students deliver naive banalities.’
‘Of course not. Is he well?’
‘We will keep him safe.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked.’
‘He’s with Madrinha Elis. Luna’s with her too. Sometimes Lousika, when she’s not up in Meridian.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked either.’
‘Okay.’ Abena sucks in her lip; a tell of emotional discomfort. ‘I think I broke his heart.’ Ariel raises an eyebrow. ‘I had to come here. A chance to study in Cabochon?’ Ariel’s eyebrow arches higher. ‘You don’t rate it, but it’s the best political science colloquium on the moon. And he got so clingy. And needy. And unfair. It was fine for him to have sex with someone if it made him feel better but if he needed me, he thought taking off his clothes and baking cake would solve everything.’
‘He is a spoilt little prince,’ Ariel says, ‘but he is very easy on the eye.’
The tenor of the voices in the room beyond shifts; the traffic tones from below change: people making farewells and taking leaves, arranging meetings and rendezvous, extracting favours and promises: motos arriving and opening to receive fares, groups setting out on foot to the nearest elevator, heading on.
‘I’ve kept you long enough,’ Ariel says. ‘Your friends look impatient.’ She pushes the wheelchair away from the balustrade back toward the mill of guests. The glass of genever stands half-drunk on the rail, perilous above the luminous drop to the trees of Gargarin Prospekt.
‘I can push you,’ Abena offers.
‘I push myself.’ Ariel pauses, half turns. ‘I could use a legal intern. Interested?’
‘Is it paid?’ Abena asks.
‘Of course not. Expenses. Tips. Access. Politics. Interesting times. Visibility.’ Ariel pushes on, throws back over her shoulder without waiting for Abena’s response, ‘I’ll get Marina to arrange it.’
* * *
‘It will hurt,’ Preeda the facilitator says. ‘It will hurt more than anything in your life.’
At the sight of the sixteen people in a circle of seats, Marina almost turns her heel in the door and walks away. It looks like a rehab group. It is.
Marina has come late – dawdling late – but the facilitator has done this many times and has sharp corners to her eyes.
‘Marina?’
Caught.
‘Yes. Hi.’
‘Join us.’
Sixteen people watch her take the seventeenth seat.
The facilitator rests her hands on her thighs and looks around the circle of faces. Marina dodges eye contact.
‘So, welcome. First of all I have to thank you all for making the decision. It’s not an easy one. There’s only one harder decision and that’s the one to come here in the first place. And this will be difficult. There’s the physical element, and everyone knows about that. That will hurt. It will hurt more than you think. But there are mental and emotional elements. Those are the ones that really hurt. You will question everything you think about yourself. You will walk that long dark valley of doubt. I offer only this: we’re there. We’ll pledge that: when any one of us needs that, we’ll be there for each other. Yes?’
Marina mumbles her response with the others. Her gaze is fixed on her knees.
‘So, shan’t waste time. Last in first up. Tell us something about yourself.’
Marina swallows her nerves and looks up. Everyone in the circle is watching her.
‘I’m Marina Calzaghe and I am going back to Earth.’
* * *
Marina’s first thought is that burglars have ransacked the apartment. The furniture is upended. Every glass and fast food container, every utensil is smashed or on the floor. The bedding is strewn far and wide, toiletries scattered. The place has been trashed. Marina’s second thought is that there are no burglars on the moon. No one owns anything to steal.
Then she sees the wheelchair on its side just inside Ariel’s bedroom door.
‘Ariel!’
Ariel is on her back amongst a pile of bedding.
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Marina asks.
‘What the fuck have you done to my gin?’ Ariel shouts.
‘I poured it down the shower.’
‘And the printer?’
‘I hacked it.’
Ariel props herself up on her elbows.
‘There is no gin in the house.’ It’s an accusation.
‘No gin, no vodka, no alcohol of any kind.’
‘I’ll go get some.’
‘I’ll hack your chair.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’
‘I’ll unhack it.’
‘You know jack shit about coding.’
Ariel collapses back into the pile of bedding.
‘Get me a drink. One drink. That’s all.’
‘No.’
‘I know, I know. But it’s always Martini hour somewhere.’
‘Don’t beg. It’s not classy. Here are the rules. There’s no alcohol in the house. I can’t stop you when you’re out, and I wouldn’t because that’s a lack of respect.’
‘Well thank you for that. Where were you anyway? Another one of your bands?’
‘Training.’ It’s not a complete lie. ‘Gracie Jiu jitsu. You never know when I’ll need to save you again.’
‘This, always this.’
‘Give me a fucking break, Ariel.’
‘Give me my fucking gin! Give me my fucking legs! Give me my fucking family!’ After a silence in which neither of the two women can look at each other, Ariel says, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You scare me. I saw the state of the place, I saw the wheelchair on its side, what am I supposed to think? I thought, what if I find her lying dead?’
Now Ariel can’t look at Marina.
‘Marina, can you do something for me?’
‘I won’t get you a drink, Ariel.’
‘I don’t want you to get me a drink.’
‘Call yourself a lawyer? That was a damn lie even to me.’
‘I want you to get in touch with Abena Asamoah.’
‘She delivered the paper at the Lunarian Society?’
‘The paper was simplistic democratist nonsense. But she’s smart and she’s ambitious.’
‘And she’s fucking your nephew.’
‘And her aunt, my erstwhile sister-in-marriage, is Omahene of the Golden Stool. And, while the patronage of Eagle gets me into LDC meetings, the patronage of Dragons comes with an altogether sharper set of claws.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I mentioned to her that I was looking for an intern. She’ll be an idiot to accept it, but I intend to seduce her. There’s a LDC meeting scheduled for Ku Kola. Invite her to it as my guest. Tell her it’s an opportunity to see how politics really works. Arrange the clearances, would you?’
‘Why do I do this?’
‘Because I have people now,’ Ariel says. ‘Tell her to dress better. And give me a hand up and help me clear up this mess.’
* * *
Every face in the lock looks up. Thirty, fifty faces, Wagner estimates as he descends the ramp. Wagner’s helmet is under his arm, Zehra Aslan, his junshi at his shoulder. Some faces down there are familiar, some over familiar. Most new. More new than he has ever seen before. Sombra runs through their résumés. A couple claim to have worked for Corta Hélio. Nice try.
The crowd parts. Wagner and Zehra walk to the front of Rover Lucky Eight Ball.
‘I can take four,’ he announces.
No one moves.
Wagner turns to the tall Igbo man whose sasuit is covered in Manchester United patches.
‘You. Jo Moonbeam. Leave.’
The big man’s eyes widen in rage, he draws himself up. He is a head taller than second-gen Wagner.
‘I’m surface certified.’
‘You’re a liar. The way you stand, the way you set your shoulders, the way you carry your weight, the way you smell, the way you wear that suit, the way you hook your fingers into the helmet, the way the seals sit. No. You’re a danger to yourself; worse than that, you’re a danger to my crew. Leave now, get surface hours and maybe the next time I see you, I won’t throw you out. And do not ever lie on your résumé again.’
The Jo Moonbeam locks eyes with Wagner, tries to stare him down but Wagner has the eye of the wolf. The big man sees the fury that burns there, turns and pushes his way through the crowd.
Nice touch of theatre, wolf, Zehra says through her familiar. But he is wolf no more, not now the dark is on the face of the Earth. It is his dark-side focus that spotted that the Jo Moonbeam was a liar.
‘Ola, Mairead, Neile. Jeff Lemkin.’ Wagner has glassed with the first three names before, the fourth is new to him but comes with exemplary recommendations from the VTO track teams repairing the destruction after the fall of Crucible. ‘The rest of you, thank you.’
When only his fresh Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball remain in the dock, Wagner runs through the mission assignment – glassing out east of Meridian on the Sea of Tranquillity.
‘Laoda?’ Zehra’s voice. ‘The speech?’
‘Sorry.’ Jeff is the only one who hasn’t heard it before but even he can tell that Wagner is rolling it out by rote. The speech, the specs, the order to suit up and strap in. The names of his crew rez up on his lens, the roll bars fold down over him and lock; the numbers wind down to zero pressure. Red light and green.
‘Zehra.’
‘Wagner?’
‘Take her out for me.’ He flicks her the drive HUD.
‘Sure.’
Zehra Aslan has been Wagner’s junshi for ten tours now and their relationship is as close, familiar and efficient as a well-contracted marriage. She runs system checks and files traffic plans while the crew of Lucky Eight Ball hook up to the inboard life support. Wagner has Sombra open a private call.
‘Wagner.’
He’s in Eleventh Gate, with tea, wearing apricot sports shorts with blue trim and a baggy T, his hair piled up.
‘Just making sure you have everything.’
‘I have everything.’
‘And everything’s all right?’
‘Everything’s all right.’
‘Well, if you do need something…’
‘I don’t.’
‘But if you do…’
‘Amal’s on it.’
Wagner remembers how he saw Robson last, under the canopy of the packhouse, Amal at his side. Amal’s arm around him. Wagner experiences again the stab of an emotion equal parts loss, jealousy and longing.
‘Well, that’s good.’
The dock is evacuated, the outlock door slides up. Zehra guns the motors and sends the rover up the ramp into the expanding slot of darkness.
‘Wagner, why did you call?’ Robson says.
‘Just to make sure. Nothing really. Well, I’ll be back in ten days.’
‘Okay. Be careful, Lobinho.’
Robson and his tea vanish from Wagner’s lens and as the rover rolls off the ramp on to the surface and throws up plumes of dust from its fat wheels, Wagner flays himself. Why didn’t he say it say it say it?
Love you, littlest wolf.
* * *
He snuffs out the bio light and sits in the deepest shadow at the furthest table. Hunched shoulders, downcast eyes challenge anyone, even the hot-shop owner, to talk to him. The horchata went cold long ago.
His thoughts march a tedious circuit. Nauseating shock. Scarlet humiliation. Shrieking outrage. Cold injustice. His mind rolls from one emotion to another, round and round like the stations of a pilgrimage.
You killed my parents.
Darius had rejected call after call. Fifteen. Twenty. That should have been the clue. Robson persisted. Naive Robson, stupid Robson, calling and calling, wondering why his old friend, his best friend, wasn’t picking up; imagining all kinds of businesses or sicknesses or family commitments that prevented him from picking up when the truth was that his friend, his best friend, had been turned.
I’m only answering this to tell you I hate you.
When Darius did pick up after twenty-five calls: naive Robson stupid Robson smiling, saying, Hey Darius, what’s going on?
That stupidity he hates most. The humiliation of it feels like something kicking its way into his stomach, to claw and eat things there.
Betrayers and murderers.
He is still trembling from the shock. He hears two things: Darius’s words and Darius’s voice. They are not the same. The words tumble in his head, the voice goes on and on. Darius spoke for less than thirty seconds and Robson has played it endlessly in remembering.
I will cut your eyes and lying tongue out, Robson Corta.
Joker cut the link and Robson ran from the packhouse.
His friend has turned against him.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’
Robson’s shoulders stiffen. He glances up. Ner.
‘I do not want to talk to you.’
‘Robson…’
‘You’re shit with me, you know?’
Amal pulls up a chair and positions it at an angle to Robson. No direct eye contact, nothing confrontational. Robson would stare ner to death if he could.
‘I will sit and I will wait.’
‘So sit.’
Né doesn’t sit.
Né snatches the glass of horchata and throws it. Né picks up the chair né is about to sit on, swings and lashes out with it at the figures that have arrived behind ner close and fast and without Robson seeing. Né tips the table over, throws Robson from his seat and pushes him down behind it.
The glass strikes a man in a Reebok tracksuit and sends him reeling. The chair trips another two men in Adidas. Amal head-butts the fourth assailant. The woman reels, shakes it off, seizes Amal by a fistful of clothing and hoists ner one-handed. Amal’s dark-senses alerted ner to the attackers but this woman has Jo Moonbeam strength. She balls her gloved right hand into a fist: strikes. Fused glass gas-seal cracks and chips. An Iron Fist. Robson has heard of these things: supple fabric that polarises on impact into a carbon hard as steel. The woman raises the fist again, drives it into Amal’s stomach. Things burst. Robson is already on his escape route.
The snatch squad has recovered and follows fast and close. Robson darts through the kitchen, tips over woks, pans, hot liquids. He hears the whine of a taser charging. He ducks through the vent and in a heartbeat is up the access ladder at the back of the kiosk. Taser darts clang against metal. He’s on the roof, now swinging hand-over-hand up the service pipe to Level One. Only a kid, only a traceur, can follow Robson’s escape route. He’s worked it out, he’s timed it but he’s never tested it with his body until now. He jumps, soars, grabs rail and swings himself up on to the safety rail of Aquarius West One. His escape won’t be complete until he’s three levels up, but he takes a moment, perched on the rail, to look down at his hunters, furious and impotent down on the hot-shop roof.
The drone bobs down into his eyeline.
‘That’s not fair,’ Robson says, then the taser barbs take him in the belly and send him flying into the middle of East One. He can’t breathe. Every muscle is dipped in molten lead, pulled so taut his tendons could shear from his joints. He’s pissed his shorts. The drone hovers an arm’s reach above his face. He could tear it down, if he could move even an eyelid.
Figures arrive on powerboards and carve to a halt.
‘Nimble little fucker,’ says the big man Robson recognises as Bryce’s head of security. The drone drops its taser wires and flies up. Robson can’t move, can’t breathe. Dembo Amaechi walks towards him. Robson is locked rigid.
Then bodies come down from the roof, over the railing, out of the side alleys. In a flicker of steel two of Bryce’s blades are down. The third drops his knife, shouts, ‘I’m not contracted for this.’ Turns, runs.
‘How are you, Dembo?’
Robson can’t turn his head to look but he knows the voice. Denny Mackenzie.
‘Rowan said you weren’t dead.’
‘Very much undead. Or is that non-dead?’
‘An oversight I intend to remedy now.’
‘That’s a smart line, Dembo,’ says Denny Mackenzie. Still, Robson tries to move. He can push himself away, skin scraping raw on the roadbed. ‘You always had a facility for the language. Me, I’m an undereducated jackaroo. Handy with a knife though.’
Away, away. The two blades clash. Away. Robson struggles to his feet. His legs won’t hold, he goes down hard on his hands. Up. Away. All eyes are on the fight. Mackenzie versus Mackenzie. This time Robson’s feet hold him. He limps to the next stage of his escape route. Aquarius Quadra wears its engineering on the outside; it’s one giant climbing frame. Robson hooks his fingers into pipework. They are numb but there is enough strength to hold him. He hauls himself up. And again. And again. It is the most difficult thing he has ever done. He rests a moment in the elbow of the Level Two pier and shakes the tingle out of his hands and feet.
A great blood cry. Robson glances down. One figure on the ground, one figure walking towards his hiding place.
Denny Mackenzie grins up at him, opens his arms.
‘Robson, come on down, mate. You’re safe now.’
Robson levers himself out of the elbow and squirms through the gap where the cable cluster pierces the Level 2 roadway.
‘Don’t make me come up there after you.’
You can’t, Robson thinks. It’s too tight for adults.
The voice rings up from below. Denny looks up the cable shaft. ‘Wagner asked me, Robbo. Look after him when I can’t.’
Robson climbs. Maybe if Denny had not used the hated nickname. Maybe if he hadn’t heard things break inside Amal that could not be put together again. Maybe if he hadn’t felt the spit and bile of Darius. Maybe then he might climb down. But he can’t be a Mackenzie and he can’t be a Sun and he can’t be a wolf. Two levels up, his escape route will take him to the East 4th Elevator. He can drop on to the car and ride that elevator up past the gardens of the rich all the way to the top of the world. There will be people up there for him.
‘I will find you,’ Denny Mackenzie calls. ‘You’re my debt, Robbo. And I pay my debts.’
* * *
He has always shaved his body hair, since puberty and his first hairs around his penis disgusted him. Total, from the crown of his head to the hair on his toes. Back crack sack. He works his body over again with the razor until he is perfectly smooth. He dries, lets his familiar show him himself. He slaps his belly. Still tight, the abs packed, the inguinal crease pronounced. Still got it. Last the oil. It is his own personal mix, from expensive organics, not synthesised. He works it slowly and painstakingly into every muscle fold and crease. The back of the neck, the head, the backs of the knees and the soft pucker of the perineum. Between the fingers. He gleams, he is golden. He is ready.
Hoang Lam Hung takes a deep, huffing breath and jogs on the spot, loosening muscles.
The shower cubicle door opens. Three Mackenzie Helium blades wait.
‘You’ve come to take me home to Queen of the South!’ Hoang says. ‘Have you any idea how bored I am of Lansberg?’ He shows his naked body. ‘I’ve shaved for Bryce.’ The blades look confused. ‘A joke.’ A bitter one, too.
‘Bryce isn’t happy,’ the first blade says. She is a short, well-made Jo Moonbeam, she carries a taser stick. ‘He wanted the boy.’
‘I’d never let Bryce have him,’ says Hoang Lam Hung.
‘It would be really better if you didn’t talk,’ the second blade says.
‘He breaks everything he touches. I couldn’t let the boy end up like me.’
‘Please,’ says the third blade. He carries cleaning equipment.
‘Sorry mate,’ the woman says and jabs the taser in Hoang’s belly. He goes down, jaws, fists, spine and sinews locked. Every muscle and nerve burns as if intaglioed with acid. He’s pissed himself. He’s shit himself. The woman grimaces in disgust as she and the second blade lift Hoang to his knees and drag him down the corridor. Cleaning blade moves in to deal with the mess. The Vorontsovs are meticulous in their cleanliness. Theirs is a world where a stray hair, a skin scale can bring down a space ship.
Hoang is fragrant and slick with body oil. The blades lose their grip on his sleek skin as they drag him to the outlock. His feet and shins leave oily marks on the soft-impact flooring. He can’t move. He can’t speak, can’t breathe.
Robson is in Meridian, with the pack, with Wagner. He’s protected. Hoang regrets lying but if he had told Robson the truth, that he had to stay, that he had to offer himself as a price, the boy would never have boarded the train.
The second blade punches code. The lock opens. Bodies surge forward; kids, five boys, three girls, all naked. Lips and cheeks are ornamented with smears of white. Through the pain Hoang recognises those streaks of battle-paint. Traceurs. Free-runners. Robson’s crew. Screaming, hands reaching, pawing, grabbing. The blades push them back with tasers and knives, shove Hoang in among them. A few stabs of the shock stick, a few kicks, smashed fingers and faces, then the second blade seals the lock. Green light. Dull, distant hammer of fists on metal. Counts ten. Hits the switch. The green light turns red.
In the antechamber the third blades sasuits up. He’ll go out there in a while and clear up the mess. The Vorontsovs and their clean environments.
* * *
The security woman looks into Abena’s right eye and Abena almost giggles at the cool thrill that runs down through her body as she nods her through. Elite access. This will never tarnish. The penultimate Gate of Anxiety is passed. The first Gate of Anxiety was whether Ariel’s offer on the balcony of the Lunarian Society was genuine. Her familiar, Tumi, called Marina Calzaghe. True. Abena thought Marina’s response terse. Perhaps she should have called in person, but that was so old. The second Gate of Anxiety was whether the LDC had a record of her in Ariel’s’ entourage. Tumi checked with the Lunar Development Corporation. Abena Muusa Asamoah. Assistant to Ariel Corta. Yes, you really are on the team.
The third Gate of Anxiety was the dress. Was Christian Lacroix suitably professional for a meeting of the Lunar Development Corporation, sufficiently fashionable to impress Ariel Corta? For dress read shoes make-up hair. Her colloquium mates had spent two hours that morning working on her hair.
The fourth gate she has just breezed through, into the lobby of the Lunar Development Corporation headquarters. It is all wood and chrome. Abena can’t begin to calculate the carbon budget. The lobby is crowded with the great of the moon, loud with their voices and customised perfumes. Big shoes and bigger hair, shoulder pads and eye shadow. The middle air flocks with familiars: the adinkra of the Asamoahs, the I-Ching trigrams of the Suns. The Vorontsovs seem to be favouring Heavy Metal imagery this season: umlauts and rust. Board members skin their familiars in the simple dot-and-orbiting-satellite of the LDC. She spots the Triple-Goddess sigil of the Lunar Independence movement before it is lost in the host of icons. Live wait-staff serve glasses of tea and small edibles which Abena declines, fearful of grease marks on her Christian Lacroix. She has chosen well; shoulders not the widest, waist not the narrowest. Now: Ariel. Abena scans the crowd looking for a gap in the social skyline that would indicate a woman in a wheelchair. No. She works the room again, and then again, and then finds Ariel at the centre of a knot of lawyers and judges, vaper in one gloved hand. Ariel beckons her with a wave of the vaper.
Abena recognises every member of Ariel’s entourage. Her stomach lurches in dread. These are the moon’s sharpest lawyers, the most respected judges, the most astute political theorists. Abena hesitates. Again Ariel beckons. Abena knows she won’t beckon a third time but what Ariel cannot see is that between her and Abena stands the Fifth Gate of Anxiety, the one she has never passed before. The Gate that asks, And who exactly are you? What do you think you are doing here? The Gate of the Impostor.
Abena swallows hard and steps forward. A hand touches her sleeve. She almost drops her tea-glass, turns to see the Eagle of the Moon. Jonathon Kayode is one of the few terrestrials who can stand eye for eye with her generation-3 height.
‘Delighted delighted!’ He pumps Abena’s hand. He is unaware of the strength of his grip, and he does not let go as he says, ‘New talent is everything, isn’t it?’ This he directs to Adrian Mackenzie, a pale shade at his side. Adrian does not shake Abena’s hand.
‘A pleasure, Madame Asamoah.’
‘I have Senhora Corta to thank…’ Abena begins but the Eagle of the Moon has moved to other greetings and salutations.
‘Darling.’ Ariel kisses her three times, then, to her party, says, ‘Let me introduce Abena Maanu Asamoah, of the Cabochon Colloquium. An able young politico. I hope to knock some sense into her.’ The entourage laughs and Ariel names them one by one. Abena recognises the names but hearing each one spoken is like a physical blow. ‘You’ve all got assistants, so why should I be left out? And she dresses better than yours. And is very much smarter.’
Social tides sweep the crowd toward the open doors of the council chamber.
‘Passable.’ Ariel scrutinises Abena Maanu Asamoah’s clothes and make-up. ‘Sit on my left, look interested and say nothing. You can lean towards me from time to time and pretend to whisper. And this.’ Ariel touches her left forefinger between her eyes but Abena can see the familiars wink out as the councillors enter the chamber. She can’t remember the last time she was without AI assistance. She feels as if she has no underwear.
The council chamber of the Lunar Development Corporation is a series of tiered rings. The Eagle and Board members occupy the inmost, lowest circle. Advisers and legal representatives, experts and analysts occupy increasingly higher rings by their status and importance. Ariel directs Abena to the second tier. Importantly low. Abena’s name shines from the surface of the desk next to Ariel. Her seat is high backed and expensively comfortable. Ariel occupies her wheelchair. Abena frowns at the pad of paper and the short wooden rod on her desk. The Eagle’s other representatives file in on either side of Ariel and Abena, but the Eagle, in the seat immediately beneath the two women, turns to nod only to them. The council chamber fills rapidly. The room buzzes with soft conversation; lawyers confer with their clients, lean over desks or crane round in their seats to greet colleagues and rivals. It looks quaint and archaic to Abena. This could surely all be conducted through the network, like the Kotoko.
‘We’ll get going in a couple of minutes,’ Ariel explains. ‘Jonathon will open with the formalities, there will be the minutes of the last meeting and the current agenda. It’s quite tedious. Watch the advisers. That’s where you really see what’s going on.’
‘What’s the mood?’
‘A little too friendly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I have no idea.’
Jonathon Kayode turns again in his seat.
‘Ready?’ he asks his advisers. Mumbles of assent.
‘Any last questions?’ Ariel says to Abena.
‘Yes.’ Abena holds up the paper pad and the stylus. ‘How do these work?’
* * *
In a Caron peplum suit, Marina sits at the end of the tea-bar where the bodyguards go and twirls her glass of mint tea. It’s the worst spot at the bar, but it’s at the bar. The tables are social death. The guards rate the LDC bar highly though Marina has no understanding of the points of lunar tea. She lifts the glass to study the twist of leaves within. Lunar economics and sociology in one glass. Unfeasible to grow tea or coffee economically in lunar tube farms. Mint runs rampant. You need chainsaws to keep it down. Impossible to make decent mint tea without true tea so AKA cut a few Camellia sinensis genes into the mint. Now AKA genetic science is sufficiently advanced to design a true tea that would grow luxuriantly in lunar conditions – even coffee – but the moon now has the taste for mint tea.
Marina always has loathed and always will loathe mint tea.
She sits among the bodyguards and dreams of coffee. Strong, sharp-roasted arabica, steaming hot, bitching with caffeine; good north-west coffee made slowly and with affection: the water poured from height to achieve perfect aeration, stirred – fork, not spoon – and left to sit and settle. It will tell you when it is ready. Lightly pressed. Two hands cupped around a craft-made mug, the steam of her breath mingling with the steam from the mug in a cold morning on the porch with the grey rain rattling in the gutters and sheeting down the galvanised chains the house uses for downpipes. The mountains hidden for days by deep cloud, the mist closing down perspectives and bringing the tree right to the edge of the house. The windsock limp and dripping, rain running from each end of the washing line to merge in the centre and drip. The shuffle and grunt of a dog. Music from three rooms away.
The creak of the boards under the wheels of Mom’s chair. Her asking questions questions questions at every television show: What’s happening, who’s that, why is she there, who’s that again? The atlas of car tyres: their unique sounds on the dirt out front; those they recognised and would open the door to, those they did not and hid from. The pentatonic voice of a solitary wind-chime placed to catch the east wind, the same wind that spun a flake of multiple resistant tuberculosis up over Puget Sound and into the lungs of Ellen-May Calzaghe. The east wind, the plague wind. Thick white coughing, endless, racking.
Marina’s attention snaps back to the LDC tea-bar. She drops the glass of mint tea. Every glass falls. Every bodyguard rises from their seats. Marina runs for the door.
Go to Ariel, Hetty shouts in her ear. Ariel needs you.
* * *
Armed mercenaries pour through the doors and down the steps on to the council floor. They swarm the LDC board, knives drawn, tasers aimed. A second wave bursts into the chamber and takes positions threatening the advisers, hands on hilts and taser holsters. A third squad of hired blades secure the doors. The council chamber is a roaring pit: board members, legal advisers, armed invaders.
‘What’s going on?’ Abena shouts.
‘I’m going to find the hell out.’ Ariel swings her chair away from her desk. A mercenary shoves the crackling blue tip of a shock stick at Ariel’s face. Ariel locks eyes with her, stares her down, defies her.
‘I can’t raise the network,’ Abena shouts. The invaders yell, the delegates yell, the LDC members struggle at the strong arms that restrain them. There is a centre, a still heart. Jonathon Kayode sits in his chair, hands in lap, eyes downcast. He turns to catch Ariel’s eye.
Sorry, he mouths. Then a detonation silences the council chamber like sudden vacuum. Chipped sinter falls from the ceiling, everyone ducks. A gun. Someone has fired a gun, a real gun. The gun-woman stands in the centre of the pit, weapon raised, aimed at the roof. It’s black and stubby and alien. No one in the council chamber has ever seen a real gun.
Now Jonathon Kayode rises heavily to his feet.
‘My fellow citizens. My dear friends. By the power vested in me as Chief Executive Officer of the LDC, I dissolve the board of the Lunar Development Corporation and place its members under house arrest as clear and present dangers to the stability, security and profitability of the moon.’
Voices from the pit and the tiers above bellow objections but the mercenaries have cuffed the board members and herd them towards the emergency exits. Faces are taut from screaming, tendons tight as torsion bars, mouths speckled with rage-spittle.
‘Can he do that?’ Abena whispers to Ariel.
‘He just has,’ Ariel says. She wheels into the centre of the pit. In an instant two mercenaries are on her, knife and taser. ‘I demand access to my client.’
The mercenaries are stone but the Eagle of the Moon halts two steps from the emergency exit. His face is grey.
‘Can I trust you, Ariel?’ Jonathon Kayode says.
‘Jonathon, what have you done?’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘I am your lawyer…’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘Jonathon!’
Four mercenaries cover Jonathon Kayode’s retreat through the emergency exit as the second tumult that has been building in the lobby breaks. Bodyguards, escoltas, blades and warriors overwhelm the mercenaries on the door and storm the council chamber. Shock sticks duel and parry, stab and shock. Bodies spasm and go down in gouts of body fluid. Guards and mercenaries slip and fall in vomit and blood and piss. It’s a dirty, chaotic fight where a dozen different contracts and interests clash and no one is certain which side is which. The delegates duck under desks, slide over chairs and huddle at the centre of the pit. Ariel seizes Abena’s hand.
‘Do not let go.’
Ariel glimpses Marina at the back of the fight. She carries a shock stick in each hand and sufficient sense to know when she is over-matched. Another gunshot, then a third. The room freezes.
‘This is not your fight,’ the woman with the gun shouts. ‘Disengage and we will release the bystanders.’
Abena’s grip tightens on Ariel’s hand.
‘They won’t hurt us,’ Ariel whispers. Mercenaries and bodyguards separate, the mercenaries retreat to the emergency exit. The woman with the gun is last to leave. The episode is over within one hundred seconds.
Marina powers down her shock sticks and conceals them in the clever holsters inside the jacket of her Caron suit.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘My client just staged a coup.’