by Ian McDonald
‘De …’ the zabbaleen begins but the Jack cuts her off with a roar.
‘I’m the Jack of fucking Blades!’
Click, hum, tap. Two bots step from shadows through curtains of teeming rain. Drops run down their glossy shells. They are fit, elegant, beautiful. Alexis remembers their beauty striking her when she went as Lucas’s representative to inspect them in the Guangzhou construction plant before shipping to low Earth orbit. Beautiful horror. She could vomit.
‘Ah,’ the Jack says. He turns. He turns away.
He turns to gain momentum. He spins, moves with lightning grace and in that flash there is a knife in a fighter’s armpit and his taser in the Jack’s hand. Aim, shot, one thought – less than thought. One action. The taser catches the bot in the air as it leaps, blades unfolding. It goes down in a thrash of short-circuited limbs. The fighter kicks in a circle, blood beating from the arterial wound. Blood sprays far in lunar gravity. The punishing rain washes it all down through the holes in the mesh.
The Jack crouches like a jaguar, a blood-hungry grin on his face. The second bot is in motion; the Jack flips away, the bot lashes out a blade-tipped leg. Machine speed, machine accuracy. It would have cut him spine-deep across the side had not something come spinning down from the upper levels. A bola: the lines tangle around the bot’s legs, weights spinning up with angular momentum enough to snap joints. The bot is down and kids are dropping, whooping and whistling, from the high levels to mob the downed bots, crack them open with hammers and wrenches and rip out their precious, twitching guts.
The fighters charge. The Jack is between them and the kids. A fighter moves to outflank, the Jack’s hand flashes and there is a knife hilt-deep in the man’s throat. A blade swings for the Jack, he is already underneath it, his other blade arcing to drive deep into the back of the woman’s knee. She goes down shriek-swearing. The Jack drops, slides across the wet decking and drives a foot into the kneecap of the other outflanking fighter, smashing the armoured kneeguard back with the full weight of his body. Ariel can hear the crack of shattering kneecap over the punishment of the rain.
‘Kids!’
How does he sense the fighter bearing down on him? By air movement, by the momentary absence of rain, by smell, by subtler fighter’s senses? He snaps the kneecapped fighter’s thumb back – another snap of bone – seizes the knife and ducks around the descending blade to slam it into the unprotected back of the attacker’s forearm. The attacker drops the blade, the Jack catches it before it clangs from the decking and drives it into the side of the fighter’s instep. And he’s on his feet. Empty hands.
‘Take your enemy’s weapon,’ he says. Rain has plastered his hair in streaming locks. ‘Use it against them.’
Again he beckons. Come on then.
The last standing fighter’s hand hovers over her taser. She shakes her head.
‘Wise,’ the Jack says. He tugs one knife from the back of the fallen fighter’s knee, the other from the dead man’s throat. He cleans them on the sodden rags of his shirt, breathes deep and with a snap Alexia cannot follow, reholsters them. ‘Take what’s yours.’
Deluge turns to downpour, to rain, to drops. The rain ends. Bairro Alto drips. The light turns them into a billion diamonds. The high city wears its jewels. Vapour wreathes from platforms and levels. The Jack climbs the staircase. Alexia withholds the jubilation. He doesn’t look at her. The Bairro Alto folk nod as he climbs up between them. He does not acknowledge them. No one speaks.
Down on the killing floor the zabbaleen move from the shadows.
Alexia finds him in his humpie, a tent of plastic sheeting strung from a stand of support piers. Rain water has pooled in the contours of the sheets. The Jack kneels, back to her. He is naked. With care, with precision, with tenderness, he cleans and sharpens his blades.
Alexia stands a long time, watching him. She has never seen a moon man naked. The physiological changes wrought by lunar gravity are elegant and at the same time repulsive. Near-human. Uncanny valley. Scars embroider every part of his skin. She guesses he is in his early twenties, though there is a self-possession, an ache in him of an old man.
‘Seen enough?’
Alexia starts.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I had an aunt wore that scent. Aunt Madison. Fucking hated her.’
‘I intruded, I’ll go.’
‘Don’t go.’ He pats the pillow of his bedroll. ‘If you don’t mind sitting opposite a ball-naked man.’
‘I don’t mind at all.’ She sits cross-legged on the pillow. Plastic stuffed with plastic shreds. The bed is a nest of rags. Water drips from the canopy’s imperfect seals. The Jack works with focus and diligence; blade to stone.
‘We’ve all got our voodoo,’ he says. ‘When I was a jackaroo I used to have to put on the right suit glove and boot first. Every time. After a fight, well, I’m not at my most sociable.’
‘I understand.’
‘I assure you you don’t, Lê.’
He holds up a blade, turns it to catch the light. Fire runs down the edge of the blade. He plays with it, spins, tosses, clever blade-tricks. It drops back into his hand. His right arm flashes out. The tip of the knife is a breath from Alexia’s throat. He does not look. She does not flinch.
‘I want to take you right here on this bed,’ she says.
He looks at her now. He grins. Light on metal: the blade is back in its sheath. Alexia unfastens her sodden shorts as she launches herself at him. She knocks him back and she is on top of him, saturated top off, unsealing her bra. She straddles him, pins him with thighs and hands to the nest of rags. The Jack struggles but she has Jo Moonbeam strength and he laughs loud and crazy and pulls her down.
They kiss. She cups his face between her hands.
She reaches down to cup his balls. Hairless, smooth as glass.
‘I got my own voodoo,’ Alexia says. ‘My men shave.’
‘Hun, everyone shaves,’ the Jack says. ‘You only need to get a pube caught in a sasuit once.’ Then he lifts her and Alexia gives a little shriek and he pulls her forwards. He bites her inner thighs; Alexia slides forward to straddle his face. She rolls her nipples between thumb and forefinger as he eats her out. She pants to the disco rhythm of the tip of his tongue across her clitoris. Muscles tighten, clench. Not yet. She lifts a leg, pivots to grasp his cock. It is long and curved to the left. She runs her hands up and down its shaft, spits in her palm and polishes the head of his cock. Jack gives a muffled fuck and directs his tongue to the exploration of her labia. He is eating her. Eating her. She goes down on the cock. It twitches in her mouth. She takes it as deep as she can without gagging.
Coraçãozinho. That had been her special name for that little triangle below the head of Norton’s cock where the magic happened.
Norton.
She flicks coraçãozinho with her forefinger nail. Jack gives a cry, then an explosion of laughter.
Oh so long since anyone laughed in sex. Since anyone laughed at all.
She looks round at him. ‘So moon man, what are the special tricks up here?’
He deftly rolls her on to her side, folds her left leg up, takes hold of her right, stretches it out and slips inside. She blasphemes in Portuguese. They fuck joyously. Positions, variations, time: Alexia has no idea how much or how many, until she is lying on her back, torso bent double, legs by her head – empilhadeira in Portuguese – and looks past Jack’s pumping hips to see three kids peeping under the still-dripping lip of the humpie.
She gives a shriek, rolls out of the piledriver and pulls damp bedding rags around her.
‘Oh hey,’ says the one she thinks might be a boy. ‘Just to say, whenever you’ve finished, would you like to come and see the water working?’
After the hotshop, the sleepover.
‘Will he be home?’ Haider asked when Robson suggested an overnight. Haider ha
s been introduced to Wagner and Analiese. Both made Haider welcome but Haider is uncomfortable around Wagner. Scared, is the truth. And Wagner has been cranky. Hyper, insomniac, ravenously hungry. Twitchy and temperamental and super, super fast and inquisitive. Robson doesn’t need to go to the surface to know the Earth stands at half-full.
‘He’s got a short-term Taiyang contract at Theon Senior,’ Robson says. ‘He’s away until the day after tomorrow.’
Haider is relieved. Robson is relieved too.
The apartment is small even by lunar standards. Robson’s annexe on the upper level, adapted from the work/music/study cubby, is smaller yet. The mattress fits it like a foot in a boot and the two boys lie like punctuation, a yin-yang.
‘So how do you do them?’ Haider asks, rolled on to a comfortable side.
‘Do what?’ Robson asks. Water thumps and gurgles overhead, the air con is a constant bass rumble.
‘Magic tricks,’ Haider says.
‘Effects,’ Robson says. ‘Real magicians call them effects. Tricks are dishonesty.’
‘But they are dishonest. You deceive people.’
Robson considers for a long moment.
‘You make up stories.’ Haider has never let Robson read any of his stories, and even if he would, Robson isn’t a reader. But he does know Haider has filed megabytes of angst, fluff, hurt/comfort, shipping, slash and yaoi on to the network. He can break down and analyse the structures and tropes and character arcs of any telenovela until he sees Robson’s eyes flickering, which happens when he is playing a game on his lens. ‘Stories deceive people. They make people feel that these characters are real, that you have to care about what happens to them.’
‘It’s kind of true,’ Haider says. ‘Not literally true – truthy-true. True about how people are, how they feel, how they’re difficult.’
‘Effects are true that way. In the middle of every effect, there’s the truth. That’s the trick that has to happen, or there’s no effect. And it’s usually something very simple, something very straightforward. But you mustn’t see it.’
Now Haider considers a moment.
‘I see that. But how do you do it?’
‘Practice,’ Robson says without hesitation. ‘Actors practise a thousand times. Musicians practise ten thousand times. Dancers practise a hundred thousand times. But magicians practise a million times.’
‘A million?’
Robson has Joker check the mathematics.
‘Actually, more than a million times.’
That does give Haider pause.
‘I see you practise those parkour moves. You jump and fall, jump and fall, jump and fall. Fail and try again. Fail and try again.’
‘It has to burn into you. You take the shape of the move. Magic’s the same. But you don’t see the falls. If you see the fall, then you see the trick and there is no effect.’
‘I couldn’t do that,’ Haider says. ‘Can’t do any kind of physical activity that needs timing, or smart hands. Got no fine motor control. There’s something in my brain chemistry. It’s like a clock running slow, just that little bit behind everyone else.’
‘Whoa,’ Robson says. ‘So, like, you’re really living permanently in the past?’
‘Put like that, yes.’
‘Whoa.’ Robson feels Haider move against him on the bedroll. When he had been in Meridian, with the wolfpack, he had unrolled his own pad in a quiet corner of the living space, away from the communal bed. He wasn’t a wolf so he had never been expected to sleep with the pack, but he understood that he would always have been welcome. Here he is in Theophilus, doing the thing he never would in Meridian: sharing the bed with another person. Not even a wolf; a friend. It feels okay here; it feels safe. The first nights in Analiese’s apartment he woke up not knowing where he was, blundering around half awake. Screaming. More than one night Wagner had come in with him. Someone at his back. He’s safe here, away from the politics and vendettas of the Eagle and his court, buried in tiny, dull Theophilus, yet some nights he still wakes screaming.
‘My very first trick – effect – my husband showed me,’ Robson says. Robson has told Haider enough of his story to feed the curiosity and keep him safe. Tonight he needs to tell more. Tonight he wants to peel away the trick and show the truth. ‘His name was Hoang Lam Hung. I was married to him for a night. We had dinner and told jokes and he showed me how to do card tricks.
‘He was very kind. He would never have hurt me, or let anyone hurt me. Afterwards, he was my care giver.’
‘Afterwards?’
‘The annulment,’ Robson says. ‘My Tia Ariel went to court and ended the marriage. It was just like a hostage thing, really. Like when Bryce Mackenzie adopted me. Ariel wasn’t around then to get me out of that, but Hoang took me to Queen and told Wagner to take me in.’
‘There’s a lot in your life,’ Haider says. ‘Mine’s kind of boring.’
‘Boring is good,’ Robson says. ‘People say they want a life of adventure, like a soap, but no one can live like that. No one’s ever safe in soaps and adventures. Adventures kill people.’
‘Did, uh …’ Haider edges around the question.
‘People get killed? Yes. My mother. Hoang. My parkour equipe.’
‘Shit.’ Haider rolls on to his back and locks fingers behind head.
‘Don’t tell anyone. They’re still looking for me. Even more now Tio Lucas is Eagle. No one knows who I am here.’
‘I won’t,’ Haider says.
EIGHT
Visitors call in an unceasing stream from breakfast to midnight. Neighbours who had never been neighbourly when she was just Marina the weird sciencey one but were curious to see the woman come down from the moon. Neighbours who had been friends, supporters, neighbourly forever, who thought it best to give Marina from the moon space to settle in. Friends. A car-full of college friends, come up from the city just to see her, nervous in their filter-masks of the trees, the fauna, anything potentially infectious. An explosion of noise and too much skin – Jordi-Rae, BFF, going straight to the room where they had spent so many hours as girls making up soap operas for their toys. Still working in the Ranger service. Still no significant other, girl or boy. Marina would have her stay longer, but she excuses herself when the door calls again and it’s Officers Dolores and Kyle from the Port Angeles police department.
‘Is there a problem?’ Kessie asks. Police have always been the enemy in the Calzaghe house.
Officer Dolores shuffles also uncomfortably but purposefully, as if looking for an excuse to play cop.
‘Purely routine.’
‘You have a routine for homecomers from the moon?’ Marina wheels into the living room. Ocean stands guard on her right shoulder, Weavyr on the left.
‘Just want to make sure everything is all right for you,’ says Officer Kyle.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘You are a recent returnee from a hostile nation,’ Officer Dolores says. ‘And you were employed by one of the leading corporations. You were a personal assistant to a prominent member of one of the leading families.’
‘Port Angeles PD seems to know a hell of a lot about me,’ Marina says.
‘She is not a terrorist!’ Ocean blurts. The air in the room crystalises. This could turn dark fast.
‘I’m sure the officers just want to make sure that people don’t get stupid ideas about Marina,’ Kessie says. ‘Fake news flies around the world while the truth is lacing up its boots.’
‘Exactly that, ma’am,’ says Officer Dolores.
Marina waits until she hears the crunch of yard dirt beneath the cruiser’s tyres before speaking.
‘They’ve been told to keep an eye on me.’
‘They do think you’re a terrorist!’ Ocean says.
‘What I do know is that you are a prize fool, Ocean Paz Calzaghe,’ Kessie hi
sses. ‘You don’t say things like that in front of cops.’
‘It’s all right,’ Marina says. ‘Come and help me with my physio.’ But it isn’t all right. The air feels dirty, the water tastes tainted. Every cobwebby corner has ears and eyes. The house has been invaded and she is being surveilled.
‘You wouldn’t think,’ Marina says as she hauls herself painfully to the walking frame, ‘that I used to be able to run twenty kays without a thought.’
‘Run?’ Ocean’s idea of exercise is rolling from one side of the couch to another. Marina takes a gasping step. Another. Another. Ocean follows, ready to catch any stumble.
‘It was this guy,’ Marina says. ‘Oh, but he was something. He’d have to be, to get me to go running. It was like a ritual. A religion. Bodypaint and really really tiny clothes.’
‘Marina!’ Ocean gasps.
‘I was going to tell you about the sex …’
‘No no no!’ Ocean wails, putting her hands over her ears. ‘Marina. If I ask, will you promise not to squick me out?’
‘Can’t promise. Ask.’ Five steps to the end of the hall, turn and back.
‘Is it true that up there – on the moon – no one cares if you’re straight or gay or bi?’
‘It’s true. No one cares, no one judges, we don’t even have the words for them in Globo. There are as many genders and sexualities as there are people. It’s about who you love, not what.’ End of the hall. It’s a complex shuffle of uncertain feet and walking frame to turn for the return trek. ‘It took me a long time to understand that, but it’s the absolute heart of the moon. Everything is a contract between people. Your dad. I haven’t seen him around.’
‘They’re having a trial separation. To see if they like it.’
Marina hears the anger underscoring Ocean’s off-hand replies.
‘On the moon, marriage is just another contract. Who, what, how long. Live with, live apart, sex/no sex. Open relationship, polyamory, ring marriage. You can be married to several people at the same time.’