The family carried Caio in an improvised litter – a kitchen chair gaffer-taped between two bamboos – up eight flights of stairs. Like the Pope. Like an invalid brought to a faith-cure. They helped him to the edge of the rooftop spa pool and set him on the rim, his feet in the water. Then they left the roof to Caio and to Alexia.
She had the tripod, she had the screen, she had the ice-cream. Caju. Not Alexia’s favourite flavour but you had to go with what you could get and this was about Caio anyway. She sat beside him, feet in the cool, fizzing spa pool and they fed each other spoonfuls of caju ice-cream. Alexia sucked the little bits of nut from between her teeth. Then the moon came up and threw silvers across the sea and she pulled it down out of the sky on to her screen.
‘The dark bits are called seas, and the bright bits are the highlands,’ she said, zooming in on the Sea of Tranquillity. In days she had become the tower’s expert on the moon. ‘That’s because people used to think they had water in them. What they really are are a different kind of rock, the kind you get from volcanoes, and that does flow a bit like water, so seas is probably a good thing to call them. That’s the Sea of Tranquillity. There’s the Sea of Fecundity and the Sea of Nectar and the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Showers. There’s even an ocean, out in the west of the moon…’ She scanned the screen – the magnification was pretty impressive for a budget model. ‘The Ocean of Storms.’
‘But they don’t have storms on the moon,’ Caio said.
‘They don’t have any weather on the moon,’ Alexia said.
‘Can I see the big dick now?’
‘Certainly not.’ King Dong was legendary; a hundred-kilometre long cock and balls marked out in rover tyre tracks on the Mare Imbrium by bored surface workers. Time and industry had blurred it but it was still the defining image of human activity on the moon. ‘I want to show you the rabbit.’ Alexia zoomed-out the screen to frame the whole moon. She traced the ears of Mare Nectaris and Mare Fecunditatis, the head of Mare Tranquilitatis; drew in the outline of the great Moon Hare.
‘It’s not very good,’ Caio said.
‘Well, people are always seeing faces in things. In China they believe that the Jade Rabbit stole the formula for immortality and took it away to the moon, and he’s grinding out the herbs.’ Alexia sketches in the pestle of Mare Nubium. She twisted her fingers on the screen and turned the image upside down. ‘In the norte they see a face – the Man in the Moon? See it?’
Caio shook his head and frowned.
‘I see it now! It’s not very good either.’
‘And sometimes they saw an old woman with a bundle of sticks on her back but I’ve never been able to see that,’ Alexia said. ‘On the moon, they see a mitten. From a surface-activity suit.’
‘How can they see that if they’re on the moon?’
‘They’ve got maps.’
‘Oh yes. Of course they do.’
Alexia traced the mitt: Mare Fecunditatis the fingers, Mare Nectaris the thumb, Mare Tranquilitatis the palm.
‘That’s pretty boring,’ Caio said. Alexia had to agree that it was. ‘Even the rabbit is better than that.’ The tripod tracked the moon as it rose. The light on the rooftop garden was immense; the streets were dark again tonight, whole sectors browned out. We light the lights, that had been the boast of Corta Hélio.
‘Caio, I’ve been offered a job,’ Alexia said. ‘A fantastic job. Crazy money. Money to get us all out of here, enough money to make sure we’re never afraid again. The thing is, Caio, it’s up on the moon.’
‘On the moon?’
‘It’s not so crazy. Our Great-Aunt Adriana went. She went from this exact same apartment, all the way up there.’
‘Her family all got killed.’
‘Not all of them. People go to the moon, Caio. Milton went to the moon.’
‘Milton got killed.’
Alexia swung her feet in the cool water, kicked spray at Caio but he was not to be toyed with.
‘You’ve made your mind up, haven’t you?’
‘I’m going, Caio. But I promise, I promise, that I will get the best people to look after you. I will get you doctors and physiotherapists and your own tutors. I will look after you. When have I never kept a promise?’ She regretted the words the instant they left her tongue.
‘There’s not much I can do, is there?’
‘I wanted to show you what it was like, so you’ve an idea.’
‘Are we not enough, Lê?’
Her heart cracked.
‘Of course you are. You are everything; you and Mãe and Marisa. Tia Iara and Tia Malika and Tio Farina. But this place isn’t. I want more, Caio. We deserve more. We were a great family back in Great-Aunt Adriana’s time. There’s a way out of Barra, and I’ve got one chance at it. I have to take it.’
Caio’s cheek twitched. He looked at his feet in the now-still water. ‘I will come back,’ Alexia said. ‘Two years; that’s the time limit. Two years isn’t so long, is it?’
Caio kicked water, splashed the screen. Alexia had no right to tell him off.
‘Is there any more of that ice-cream?’
‘All gone. Sorry.’
‘Then can I see the big dick?’
* * *
Plastic carry cases and storage boxes blocked the corridor. Men in orange coveralls with three letter acronyms on their backs manoeuvred trolleys. Alexia, in Michael Kors and Carmen Steffens heels, squeezed between bulky pieces of white medical architecture and piles of cardboard boxes. The suite opened to her thumb. The interior was a grander confusion; coverall men packing and stacking, hotel staff standing by with helpless expressions.
‘What’s going on here?’ Alexia demanded.
‘Surprising, the amount of sheer physical material I have accumulated in three months,’ Lucas Corta said. He navigated his wheelchair through shuffling feet and shifting boxes. Alexia kissed him twice. ‘I rather enjoyed having things. It’s such a novel experience. On the moon we dump and reprint. No one really owns anything. The carbon you use for this sheaf of papers is carbon you can’t use for anything else. Locked up. Dead carbon. We are a planet of renters. I think I may have become a little avaricious in my amassing of the physical. Now it all has to go and I find I’m experiencing a sense of loss. I’ll miss this shit.’
‘No,’ Alexia says. ‘What is going on here?’
‘I’m packing, Alexia. I’m going back to the moon.’
‘Wait,’ Alexia says. ‘Shouldn’t your Personal Assistant have been informed about this? As some kind of priority?’
‘It’s on my orders,’ Dr Volikova says. Always Dr Volikova. Alexia knows better than to expect the doctor to update her on Lucas’s health. She’s known from their first meeting that the doctor does not like her, that she thinks Alexia is a grubby little opportunist. A malandra from Barra. Alexia has made sure that Dr Volikova knows the dislike is mutual. Give as you get: the iron rule of Barra. Alexia also knows that the doctor will not tell her the reason for this order unless she asks.
‘I’m to be informed of anything that impacts on Lucas’s work.’
The shifters and packers in orange freeze. A look from Lucas sends them on their business.
‘At least a dozen medical AIs in five continents are monitoring my health,’ Lucas said. ‘Four of them reached a consensus that I need to leave Earth within the next four weeks to have a better than fifty per cent chance of surviving the flight to orbit.’
‘Senhor Corta’s physiology has deteriorated in the past two weeks,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘Earth is a harsh mistress,’ Lucas said.
‘Can we speak in private?’ Alexia said to Lucas. He wheeled to his bedroom. Alexia closed the door. The familiar scanners and monitors, the breathing equipment, were folded away and pushed back. The waterbed stood alone, exposed, isolated.
‘Lucas, am I your personal assistant?’
‘You are.’
‘Then don’t treat me like your fucking niece. I’m not someone you’ve hired to stand around in a short skirt and high heels and make the place look pretty. You made me look stupid in front of those removal men. And who hired them anyway? That’s my job. Let me do my fucking job, Lucas.’
‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry. It’s not easy for me to delegate authority.’
‘I understand that, but when you’re back on the moon, if I understand what you’re going to do, you won’t have many friends. I will stand with you but you must trust that if I say I will do something, I can do it.’
‘Very well. I need you to leave Earth with me.’
You’re trying to throw me, Alexia thought. You’re watching my eyes, my throat, my hands, my mouth, my nostrils for any tell that I’m shocked. You engineered this whole show to see how I would react. You want to see if I’m the right stuff. Watch my eyes. They do not look away.
‘I’m leaving for Manaus tonight for pre-flight training. It’s the minimum necessary. I can confer online with my backers but there is work which must be finished up here in Rio.’
‘What do I need to do?’
‘I need to sign off on the bot design. I won’t be able to do that. You need to see them physically, what they are capable of doing. Press them for delivery. VTO Manaus is standing by for shipping to orbit but they will need twenty-one days’ notice.’
‘I’ll do this, Lucas.’
‘I’ll need you in Manaus five days before launch. The medical and physical examinations are quite rigorous. Your ticket is booked.’
Fuck him. He got her. Alexia stifled a smile.
‘One more thing.’ Lucas reached into his Boglioli jacket. Alexia admired Lucas Corta’s suits. She had never seen him wear the same one twice. Always a flower in his buttonhole, always pink, always fresh. Always dewed, even on days when the heat on the Avenida Atlantica beat like a hammer on an anvil. A silver charm swung gently on from his grasp. ‘Please.’ Alexia crouched, bent forward as Lucas fastened the clasp around her neck. This was not a gift, this was not a jewel. This was a medieval knight receiving a grace. ‘This is a code,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s been in my family for generations. My mother gave it to me. I give it to you. If anything happens to me, if I’m unable to ask you for it, or consent to its operation in any way, use it.’
‘How … when…’
‘You’ll know.’
Alexia lifted the charm, a two-bladed axe.
‘The axe of Xango,’ Alexia said.
‘Lord of justice,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘My mother reverenced the orixas. She didn’t believe, but she did honour them.’
‘I think I understand that,’ Alexia said. ‘What does it do?’
‘It summons the lightning,’ Lucas said.
Alexia let the charm fall against her skin.
‘How could you be unable to ask me for it?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Alexia wheels Lucas back to the suite. The packers and shifters had marshalled the papers into boxes and the boxes into piles and the piles into ranks.
‘One question.’
‘Ask.’
‘All this stuff, where the hell did you keep it?’
‘Oh, I rented the suite next door as well,’ Lucas Corta said.
* * *
‘Come on,’ Alexia said and lowered the tail-gate of the pick-up. Cushions, a cool-box of Antarctica, insect repellent plugged into the auxiliary socket. Norton’s grin widened when he saw the foam mattress. Alexia pulled it across the back of the truck bed, hopped up and patted it. Norton turned the radio to a soft, late night burble and joined her. They pulled the cushions around them and sat side by side, legs hanging over the tail-gate, bottles in hands, looking down over the great glowing blade of lights that was Recreio dos Bandeirantes and Barra da Tijuca.
Alexia had discovered the hidden place under the eaves of the forest almost by accident, a smart turn on her way to a client that took her nowhere but this wide-spot on a service track into the Pedra Branca wildlife refuge. Pedra Branca was the last scrap of old growth coastal rain forest, battered and bleached by the environment changes, clinging to the hills above Recreio dos Bandeirantes. She got out of the pick-up; listened, breathed, looked far. She felt the shaded cool and the slow respiration of the trees. She saw a toucan flit across the high branches with a predated fledgling in its bill. She heard insects, far surf, wind. The endless traffic was muted to a low bass grumble.
Alexia loved her secret place, but she kept the taser to hand. Boys went feral here: on the run from the police, the gangs, the military, their families. The last time Alexia came up to Pedra Branca, the toe of her shoe had caught on a human tibia, dragged from deep forest by some scavenging animal.
She had thought long before bringing Norton here.
He was quiet tonight. She hoped the beauty had taken his breath and words. She hoped this was a different quiet from the five days he had not seen her spoken to her answered her calls answered his door, when she told him about the moon.
Alexia held up her beer bottle. Norton clinked it.
‘Do they drink beer on the moon?’
‘Liquor. They can’t grow barley there. And they don’t eat much meat either. And no coffee.’
‘You’re not going to survive long.’
‘I’m trying to wean myself off it before I go.’
She could barely see Norton’s face but she knew he had rolled his eyes again. She felt him settle back into the cushions.
‘This is beautiful,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
This is a gift for you, Alexia thought. My special place. She wondered who he would bring up here first, on the back of his scrambler. The meanness of the thought startled her.
‘Norton.’
‘I thought there would be something.’
‘I’ve got a launch window.’
‘When?’
She gave him the date. He was quiet again for a long time.
‘I’m scared, Norton.’
He was a silent, shadowed, unmoving mass.
‘At least put your arms around me or something.’
One arm. Alexia leaned into his body.
‘It’s only two years.’ Movement in the underbrush: the pick-up flicks up its lights. Small feet scurry, startled by the light.
‘Have you made your mind up about the business?’
This, again. Norton believed that he was the natural heir to Corta Aqua. Alexia had been creative in hinting – without telling him directly – that he would drain the business dry in a month.
‘I’m leaving it to Seu Osvaldo.’
She felt Norton stiffen with shock and anger.
‘Seu Osvaldo runs a gay gym. He is not a water engineer.’
‘He runs a successful business.’
‘He’s a fucking gangster, Lê.’
And what are you? Alexia thought.
‘He’s known and respected in the community.’
‘He’s killed people.’
‘He never killed anyone.’
‘That’s a fine point, Lê.’
‘He knows what to do and how to do it, Norton. You…’ She bit the words off at the head.
‘Don’t. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? Norton de Freitas isn’t capable of running your business.’
‘It has to be over, Norton.’ The break must be clean. No ropes, no handles, nothing tying her to Earth.
‘It’s only two years. That’s what you tell me.’
‘Norton, don’t do this.’
‘You go, and it’s one year, two years, three years and then you can’t come back at all. I know how it works, Lê. The moon eats away at you until you’re trapped there, no matter how much you want to come home.’
No promises, no placations, no offerings could help here.
‘I’m going to the moon. The fucking moon, Norton. They will put me in a rocket and shoot me into space and I am so scared.’
They sat side by side in the back of the pick-up, looking through the gap in the trees down on to the lights of the marvellous city. They did not touch, they did not speak. Alexia opened another bottle but the beer tasted sick and dusty. She flung it far into the dark.
‘Fuck it, Norton.’
‘Let me train you.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve looked at this. You need to be physically trained up to go into space. Let me train you.’
Norton’s offer was so incongruous, so silly, so sincere that Alexia felt a tiny bud blossom in her heart. Take forgiveness when you find it.
‘What kind of training?’
‘Core strength. Endurance. Weights and resistance training. Some running.’
‘No running. I’m a stupid runner. Things flap about. I walk. With great poise and dignity.’
She felt Norton laugh, a bass rumble through the frame of the pick-up.
‘We haven’t much time but I can certainly get you fit to get launch-fit. You’ll be toned, Lê. Pumped.’
Alexia loved the image those words conjured. She let her finger stray under her top to her belly. It was small, it was lean but it was skinny-belly. In a family of block-built aunts and uncles – Caio was a solid bollard of a kid, even Marisa was big-framed – she was the flagpole. The bean. Skinny-girl. Muscles down there. Abs.
‘That would be the greatest leaving present you could give me.’ Leaving. She emphasised the word. She did not want Norton to entertain any false hopes.
‘It will be hard work.’
‘This is me, Norton.’
‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Have you got proper footwear?’
‘I’ve got work boots.’
‘Shopping first, then.’
‘That is my kind of pre-flight training.’
Norton lay back on to the mattress, swathed in citronella from the bug-repeller. He linked fingers behind his head and looked up into the leaf canopy.
‘Do you know what’s good exercise?’
* * *
It was the same room. Lucas wished now he had left some marks, some subtle scratches that would positively identify this as the quarantine suite in which he had been housed when he first fell to Earth. The water tanks, the solar panels, the comms dishes, the mean wedge of yellow concrete, blue sky, dusty brown trees. There had been smoke in the sky these past fourteen days. He could taste it even filtered and purged by the air purifiers.
Earth was suites of rooms, opening into each other. Air conditioned, pastel-hued, lighting-controlled, dust-free and serviced, smelling of cleaning products, over-trodden carpet and memories of room service meals. Earth was a series of petty glimpses, framed views, held at a distance behind an aircraft window, glass, a car windshield. Constrained and insulated.
One time he escaped the suite, broke the window, when Alexia took him to Barra da Tijuca to see the apartment in which his mother had been born. Raw sky, long vistas. Sand in his shoes – he had panicked, and that embarrassed him now. Traffic, the open sky. Smell of the sea, of sun burned into sand; vehicle tyres and vehicle batteries, cooking, piss, semen, death.
Lucas Corta eased himself out of his wheelchair and staggered to the window to look out at the tiny slot of Brasil.
He saw his face in the window, a ghost reflection on the ghost of Brasil. It wasn’t the face of an old man, or a young man made old. It was a thing more horrific, the face of a man of middle-age dragged down by gravity. Every fold, every feature, every wrinkle and pore, the fullness of his lips, the upturn of his nose, his long, sensual earlobes, the hair of his beard, the folds of his neck, his chin, his cheeks, dragged down, weighed down, borne down, drawn down and out and attenuated. Bleached of all life, all vigour by gravity. Every piece of life and juice and fire in him leached out by the endless, unrelenting gravity.
He could not wait to go home to the moon. He could no longer imagine what it was like.
Earth was hell.
The trainer was different from the one who had made him Brasil-ready; a sullen young woman who willed death at Lucas each time she saw him in his vileness, but the sessions were as dispiriting as before, and so much more difficult. He would endure up to four Earth gravities at launch. Twenty-four lunar gravities.
There will be a crash team standing by in the cycler, Dr Volikova said.
Twenty-four gravities. No training could prepare for such abuses of the human body and Lucas looked at those minutes of burn with equanimity. The odds were tilted toward him living. That was enough.
He did not sleep the night before the launch. Calls to make, conferences to meet, details to scan and check. His allies were treacherous, this he understood the first day the careful agents of the terrestrial powers appeared in his virtual conference space. They had seen the wealth and power of the moon. They wanted it. They needed a face the moon would recognise, who knew that world, its laws and politics, its way and affairs. When he had served out his usefulness, when they had learned enough, they would turn on him. For now he needed to survive twenty-four gravities.
The rest of the night before launch he curated a playlist of João Gilberto to sing him to orbit. The whispered guitar chords, the murmured vocals, easy as prayers, were counterpoint to the thundering energies of space flight.
Adriana had adored João Gilberto.
He didn’t eat the morning of the launch. He drank water and swam. The same solemn young man in the bad suit who had wheeled him off the shuttle on to Earth wheeled him back, along the corridors with their frustrating glimpses of the worn-out world, into the boarding tube.
‘Abi Oliviera-Uemura,’ Lucas said. ‘I never forget a name.’
He left his walking cane, silver tipped, where the boarding tube met the lock.
Dr Volikova and Alexia were already strapped in. The flight was full: in addition to Lucas’s immediate staff, Lucas’s political partners were sending up diplomats and fixers.
‘Good morning,’ Lucas greeted Alexia. She forced a tight smile. Her terror was absolute. ‘Space travel is a routine affair, now.’
He tapped up João Gilberto.
He did not grip the armrests when the spaceplane detached from the boarding tube and pushed back. He did not look in small fear at Dr Volikova on his left and Alexia Corta on his right when the craft rolled out on to the taxiway. He did not brace himself when it turned at the end of the runway and opened up the turbojets. He did not gasp when the SSTO made its launch run and acceleration dropped an office building on his chest. He did not cry out when it lifted, and turned its nose up and up and up until he felt he was looking up the barrel of some space gun and then the big motors kicked in.
The SSTO climbed high over the Amazon. At fifteen kilometres the main engine lit. The rockets kicked the SSTO skyward. A planet fell on Lucas Corta. He gave a small gasping cry as the air was forced from his lungs. He could not take a breath. He tried to look at Dr Volikova, give her some small non-verbal plea for help, but he could not move his head and there was nothing she could do, pressed into her seat by multiple gees, skin peeled back from his eyes and mouth.
Help me, Lucas Corta mouthed. His heart was crushed in a fist of glowing iron, tightening with every beat. He could not breathe. He tried to focus on the music, identify the chord changes, lose himself as he did when jazz took him through the agony of training, down to Earth. Gravity crushed him. His bones were shattering. His eyeballs must collapse, his skull was failing. His heart was dying, piece by piece pinched off and blackening. In a centre seat of a VTO Manaus SSTO, Lucas Corta was imploding. The pain was beyond anything he had ever known, beyond even pain. It was annihilation. And it went on forever.
He saw Alexia’s head turned to him, her features smeared and blurred by acceleration, outlined in fuzzy black, shutting his sight into a slot, a pane, a glimpse: the little double-axe of Xango. She was shouting.
Medic! Medic!
Chega de Saudade whispered in Lucas Corta’s ears. The SSTO Domingos Jorge Velho climbed on pillars of fire. A column of smoke blew away on the wind over the rags of the Amazon rain forest.
* * *
Jorge-Maria brought beer and Orbison brought ice. Tia Ilia brought doces and Tia Malika brought skewers. Tio Mateo set up a barbecue on the balcony and made a great show of assessing wind strength and direction and coaxing flame from the least amount of kindling he could use. Wuxu from the 12th floor brought the music he kept playing that shook the building, the music nobody wanted to hear because what they wanted Wuxu for was his ability to flick streaming on to every screen in the apartment. He played his music anyway.
The ice went in the shower tray, the beer in the ice, the skewers went on the barbecue and the doces on plates that Marisa handed round the guests. The guests went on the sofas and Wuxu’s streaming went on the big screens and the small screens. The noise in the apartment was extraordinary. Relatives, friends and neighbours from four floors down to the top of the tower piled in to watch the Queen of Pipes depart Earth.
Shut up shut up shut up, this is it.
The launches were so routine now that they had been relegated to a minority interest channel interrupted by advertising every fifteen minutes. The apartment fell silent. Wuxu’s music thumped from the next room. Essen from two down snatched up a kitchen knife and went in to see him. The volume diminished but the music did not stop because no one could stop the music. The spaceplane rolled out on to the strip. The camera followed it until it dissolved into the heat-haze at the end of the runway. Nothing happened for so long someone asked Wuxu to check if the feed had frozen. Then a black dart appeared out of the silver heat shimmer, the heat haze. It hurtled towards the camera, then lifted clear. The whole apartment cheered. Up it went on a plume of fire. Then the feed cut to ads and the whole apartment jeered.
Alexia’s mother wept inconsolably.
Wuxu took his music and all the kids back down to the 12th floor where they danced until the evening brown-out.
* * *
The shuttle came around the limb of the Earth into morning and kindled into light, a needle of sunlit silver. The shuttle raced at twenty-eight thousand kilometres per hour into the dawn. The Earth was blue and bounteous, cloud-curdled; the OTV minuscule against the vast curve of the planet, a sliver of technology. A thousand kilometres aft, the tip of the tether wheeled down from higher orbit, hidden in the sun dazzle. The shuttle passed into full sun. Short-lived shadows cast through the windows and ports, moved swiftly across the flight deck, dwindling toward the zenith, growing toward evening in forty-five minutes. Sudden evening. The SSTO crossed the Sahara, twilit duns and russet. Solar farms five hundred kilometres below winked at the setting sun and went dark. Ahead the Egyptian night burned along the Nile, a serpent of two hundred million lights. Nothing could declare more clearly that Egypt was the Nile. Darkness fell over the Caspian Sea; webs of light reached out across Central Asia: cities and highways, industry and powerlines.
One hundred kilometres from transfer. The SSTO unlatched the transfer module. The shuttle burned thrusters in flickers of silent plasma, matching vectors with the tether. The crane arm lifted the module free from the shuttle bay. Light flickered red, the crane made small, final alignments as the tether descended. At transfer their relative velocities would, for a few moments, be zero. Red lights to green. The tip of the tether engaged with the magnetic lock as the crane unlatched. With ever-growing speed the spinning tether swung the transfer module up from SSTO, now glowing with blue thrusters as it made its distancing burn.
At the top of its cycle the tether released the transfer module. It flew out high and free across the face of Earth into a rising sun. In the heart of the sunrise, a black speck: the VTO cycler Saints Peter and Paul. The tether spun onward around the blue planet. The transfer shuttle’s only means of propulsion were clusters of docking thrusters. If the tether had thrown too hard it would miss the cycler and fly out, helpless, into space. Too soft and it would fall and burn across the morning sky in re-entry fire.
From twenty kilometres the cycler assumed a shape; a central spindle, rings stacked around it, environment tanks and manoeuvring engines at one end; the other a blossom of solar wings. A delicate moon-flower. Acceleration would snap the panels and spars like stems. Five kilometres. The tether threw true. It has never once failed in sixty years wheeling around Earth.
Vernier thrusters flickered again, turning the transfer module to mate with the cycle’s lock. The two spacecraft, like reluctant dancers at a wedding, flew out of the night into a new dawn. Sunrise burnished the VTO logos on the transfer pod’s belly to brilliant gold. Station keeping: the two craft held their chaste distance while final checks were made. Thrusters popped again. The relative velocity between the two craft was ten centimetres per second. Over the Sea of Japan the two craft met and docked. Clamps locked, seals pressurised. In the cycler lock, the VTO medical team stood by.
This could not be rushed.
The hatch opened.
The medics poured into the spaceplane.
* * *
Three days after the VTO cycler Saints Peter and Paul swung around the back of the Earth and out to the moon, Corta Aqua sent notices to all its customers. With the change of management it would be necessary to hire contract engineers to maintain the high quality of purity and supply. Regrettably, this meant that prices would rise. Just a little.
* * *
The spinning stars spun her dizzy.
The observation bubble was a toughened glass dome at the end of Saints Peter and Paul’s spin axis, large enough to allow two to look out at space. Two young VTO women in bright tight flight-suits had brought her up to the hub and told her to wait. Wait, Alexia had called back, but they were already swimming along the central hand-line, kicking forward on soft flippers. Should I hold place with the ship or should I turn with the stars? If she braced herself against the observation bubble’s rail the stars whipped by so quickly her head reeled. If she let go of the rail, spread-eagled and pushed herself into a spin, she still could not match the rotation speed of the stars and the apparent turning of the ship around her left her dazed, unable to focus and a choke away from vomiting.
Free fall and Alexia Corta were not a happy marriage. The muscles that Norton had painstakingly built around her core armoured her against the cruelties of liftoff but either over-operated or cramped when she tried to move in zero gee. Her feet, her hands and, most hideously, her face were bloated and tight. Her skin felt stretched and unclean, the lower air pressure in the cycler left her itchy. She could not control her hair, it went in her eyes, she inhaled it, was blinded by it, until a spacer gave her a net. When she tried to get around, her hands and feet moved like a small dog swimming.
She grabbed the handrail and pushed up into the dome. Alexia Corta gave a small gasp. She was floating in space. Swirling stars crowned her. If she looked down she could see the solar panels arrayed around her like the petals of a moon-flower. Beneath them were the nested habitat rings and if she pushed herself to the edge of the dome she could catch the edge of the comms and manoeuvring modules. She wheeled through space on a glass throne.
‘There’s a look, I suppose.’
The view had been so captivating that Alexia had not seen the figure approach. It hovered a metre from the guide-line, anchored by tethers and carabiners.
‘What?’
‘A Corta look. And a Corta impudence.’
‘Gospodin Vorontsov.’
The man shrugged and grimaced. A man, she thought; the figure was so warped, so attenuated and extended, so stretched out in tubes and tethers that gender is the last identification. Were those colostomy bags?
‘I am Alexia Corta.’
The man grimaced again, dismissed her outreached hand. He had subtly changed orientation to match her. Free-fall etiquette. Alexia remembered that.
‘You were a water engineer. That’s an admirable profession. Primal.
Everything comes from water and ends with water.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I hear he’ll live.’
‘He was clinically dead for seven minutes, sir. Your crash team got to him just in time. A severe myocardial infarction.’
‘I told him Earth would crush his heart. So you’re the last Corta.’
‘Lucas is in recovery, sir.’
‘You know what I mean. I was flying this ship when Adriana Corta went to the moon. Fifty years is a long time to wait for a Corta.’
‘Fifty years is a long time to spend in space, sir.’
Valery Vorontsov’s eyes flashed.
‘Weird and sick. Inbred idiots, riddled with radiation. DNA rotting inside. Not like us. Not like us at all.’
‘No, sir…’
‘That’s what they think. They’ve always looked down on us. The Asamoahs think we’re barbarians. The Mackenzies think we’re drunken clowns. The Suns think we aren’t even human. Pity. I would have liked to have told Lucas to his face. I’ll tell you instead.’
‘Sir, I’m only…’
‘The last Corta. You’ve got your gun.’ Valery Vorontsov laboriously hauled himself around on the hand-line. His colostomy and piss bags bobbed after him.
‘Sir!’
Valery Vorontsov stopped.
‘Lucas gave me something. A code.’
‘I am far too old for l’esprit de l’escalier,’ Valery Vorontsov said. ‘I simply cannot bear the sudden turns. Tell me what you have to tell me.’
‘It’s a command code. I don’t know what it does.’
‘What did Lucas say?’
‘It summons the lightning.’
‘You have your answer.’
‘He said if he was unable to ask me for it, or consent to its operation in any way, I was to use it.’
Valery Vorontsov sighed heavily and completed his manoeuvre. He pulled himself along the line, soaring glides metres long. From the elevator lock he called back, ‘Do you think the two worlds need a little lightning?’
* * *
The stars wheeling around her head, Alexia Corta lifted the axe of Xango the Just to her lips and kissed it.
You must trust that if I say I will do something, I can do it, she had said. Mão de ferro.
Alexia whispered the word of power Lucas taught her.
‘Ironfall.’