by Ian McDonald
Alexia is seduced. And she adores it.
A rock in space, backlit against a half-Earth. The same sunlight casts geometric shadows: human hands have worked this rock.
Alexia Corta hovers over this engineered rock. She is floating in space. The human workings give scale. Alexia guesses it to be a kilometre or so in diameter. Space rocks are not her area. The rock turns beneath her. It takes her a moment to deduce, from the motion of light and shadow, that it is not the rock that is moving but her. Spatial orientation is not her area either. A thin line of darkness lies across the lit side of the space rock. An artefact? A shadow. As Alexia tries to work out what would cast such a shadow, she catches sight of the line of light. A vertical cable. She moves her head to follow the line and the presentation responds, swooping to latch her to the cable and sending her up away from the rock.
She looks upwards again, again the camera angle shifts and before her is the face of the moon. Between her and the Nearside under full sun is a glitch in her vision, like a floater in her eyeball. It’s hard to resolve the detail, light against light, but Alexia catches hints and glints of geometry: docking gantries, solar panels, power antennae, fuel tanks, environment modules, bots and builders and machine arms. Some kind of space station. The camera pans to give her a lingering look at space vehicles moored to the docking bays, helium and rare earth canisters, glinting chunks of meteoric ice the size of apartment blocks. Alexia’s sight swoops away from the space station back to the line and the moon beyond. Something flashes towards her, climbing fast, past her, gone. Alexia did not notice the point at which climbing up the cable had become flying along the cable had become dropping down the cable.
On the cycler from Earth, she had not recognised the point at which the moon went from the thing in the sky to the world down beneath her feet.
Alexia knows enough Nearside selenography to recognise that the cable is carrying her far south of the equator. She rides the space elevator down over Tycho and Clavius. Ever south: now the rimwalls of Shackleton throw their perpetual shadows across the polar basin. Alexia glimpses lights in the ever-shadow. A star burns brighter than all others: the Pavilion of Eternal Light atop its glass tower. Now the surface mess and clutter of Queen of the South slide into view: abandoned rovers and sinterers, obsolete environment equipment, comms towers and outlocks and the track-smeared grey of the regolith. Lunar cities, so wonderful, so architectural, so precise, inside are fashion-conscious teenagers who strew their detritus around their rooms. A string of bright lights breaks from the shadow of the rimwall into the light: a transpolar express arriving at the moon’s First City. Lower, closer. A dock opens beneath her, a black mouth. The presentation ends and Alexia’s lens clears.
She sits at a round conference table. The room is black. The table-top glows from within, the only lighting. It casts the faces of the gathered executives in dramatic mien. Here are the old men – mostly men – she met at the reception. The tall men of VTO Moon, the squat men of VTO Earth, the frail, noodle-men of VTO Space. Younger faces too. Among these she finds the women. Every face is solemn and unsmiling. It is the Vorontsov way. They think that Brasilians smile too much.
‘Very impressive.’
The solemn faces watch, unspeaking. They know she doesn’t understand what she has seen. A cable-car ride from space to the moon.
‘By taking the elevator to the pole we keep the equatorial orbits open,’ says Pavel Vorontsov directly across the table.
‘Our moonloop momentum transfer system will continue to operate in conjunction with the cyclers,’ says Orin Vorontsov to Alexia’s left.
‘For biological traffic,’ says Piotr Vorontsov to her right.
‘Ascent time to the counterweight is in the region of two hundred hours,’ Pavel Vorontsov says. ‘That’s an unacceptable exposure to ionising radiation.’
‘Shielding the ascenders to human-safe limits imposes an uneconomic mass burden,’ says Piotr Vorontsov.
‘Full specifications are in the appendices,’ says Orin Vorontsov, with a smile.
‘Oh for God’s sake, you yelping ninnies!’ A new voice breaks in, a new face. ‘She doesn’t get it.’ Valery Vorontsov is the ghost at the feast, an homunculus hovering in every lens. He has been linked in from Saints Peter and Paul out on the far side of Earth, out of direct communication with the moon. On the top of the iron two-second speed-of-light delay, his avatar is being relayed through high-earth-orbit communication satellites, adding delay to delay. Valery Vorontsov is ten seconds adrift from the board room. ‘It’s a space elevator.’ The software presenting his avatar has edited out the colostomy bags, the long toenails, the semi-forgetful semi-nudity. But he still looks like a kite made from a flayed man’s skin. ‘You know what a space elevator is, don’t you?’ The ten-second time lag points up the rhetoric. ‘Do you know what is the most cost-effective way to transfer mass out of a gravity well? Lower a line and haul it up. Like a bucket of piss. So, it’s a long line – almost all the way to Earth – but that’s just engineering. Space elevator. In fact, space elevators. Why build one when you can have two? Economies of scale, so I’m told. One to the south pole, one to the north pole.’ The room gives Valery Vorontsov respectful time, then Yevgeny Vorontsov speaks.
‘Not even two space elevators, Mão de Ferro. Four.’
Alexia’s lens springs to life again. She is climbing away from the south pole, up over the vast pit of the Aitken Basin. The blazing star of the Pavilion of Eternal Light falls behind and beneath her, shadows lengthen, shadows merge into darkness. The great lantern of the Suns blazes above the brilliant arc of light, the terminator between lunar day and night. She rides the invisible line up over Farside, the endless, chaotic mountains, the craters, the small, isolated seas unseen beneath her. The ascender spins up its line high above Farside. The camera shifts; Alexia looks up into a sky more full of stars than she has ever seen. Higher, faster.
The moon dwindles beneath Alexia. The terminator is everywhere, a halo of light, then the sun spills around the moon and in her seat in the VTO boardroom, she gives an involuntary gasp. A city in space lies before her. The Earth-side port had amazed her. This staggers her imagination: this is ten times the size and complexity of the Nearside anchor point. Three ships, each a kilometre long, hang like hummingbirds above the open petals of heat-exhaust vanes. A flicker of thruster-blue: a tug, all fuel tanks and radiator vanes and solar panels, departs Farside, bound out among the worlds. The sun catches the VTO logo. The camera zooms in on bots and shell-suited figures on the dock surface, welding. There is always space-welding in these presentations. No windows. The camera zooms in on the gilded visor of one of the space workers. Reflected there, the moon, with the dark of the Earth behind it.
And back in the board room.
Now Yevgeny Vorontsov speaks. ‘The Moonport scheme. Simple, cost-effective transfer of materials between moon and Earth, and the moon and the solar system using four space elevators. The moon as the key to future development of the solar system. The moon as the hub of the solar system. Low-cost space vehicle manufacturing, expertise in robotics, cheap energy and a high-volume launch system. We could build it tomorrow.’ Light burns in Yevgeny Vorontsov’s eyes. Every Vorontsov eye is on him.
‘Why have you shown this to me?’ Alexia Corta asks.
‘VTO needs licences for sites at Queen of the South and Rozhdestvenskiy,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says. ‘Only the LMA can issue those licences.’ The representatives of Earth, Moon and Space nod their agreement. ‘Can we rely on the Eagle’s support in a vote in the council?’
‘I represent the Eagle, I can’t speak for him.’
‘Of course not. We expect you to persuade him,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov said.
‘More,’ says Pavel Vorontsov. ‘We expect him to persuade the terrestrials.’
‘The Eagle maintains a non-partisan position between terrestrial and lunar bodies,’ Alexia says, c
onscious that every eye is now on her. ‘Like your asteroid at the L1 point.’ The attempted joke dies on the table.
‘The Eagle may,’ Yevgeny growls. ‘Lucas Corta is moon-born. Dust in the blood. Dust will out.’
‘Memorise what you have seen,’ Orin Vorontsov says. ‘Know it like your own skin. We can’t allow any of this material out of St Olga. You have to be its advocate.’
‘He’s watched,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says. ‘I’ve seen the drones. Even on a secure channel we could not risk this material falling into the hands of the terrestrials.’
‘So what do you think?’ Valery Vorontsov interrupts, as he must.
‘I’m not sure I can do it justice,’ Alexia says. ‘It’s a hell of a thing to ask.’ She realises that she is not answering the question he intends. ‘I can’t understand it the way you do. It’s huge, it’s magnificent – I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t fit it all in my head. I don’t know if I can sell it right. I know how I feel about it – maybe I can sell the gut feeling.’
The VTO board room give Valery Vorontsov on the far side of the Earth his ten seconds.
‘That will be enough, Alexia Corta.’
He smiles. A ghastly, green-toothed smile.
Everyone around the board table smiles with him.
Wagner Corta eases back into the chair. The rover maintains a comfortable working ambience but he shivers at the touch of plastic to skin. Every nerve feels like ten nerves, every one of those ten nerves is frayed into a thousand conducting fibres. He tenses as those nerve fibres are stroked, then relaxes his full weight into the seat.
‘Turn me to it, Dr Light,’ he commands. The rover is old – little more than an airlock slung between motility units – without any AI more sophisticated than a recent familiar-interface patch, but reliable. Wagner hears the motors engage as a muted line in the symphony of machine noise: bips of sensors, whines of actuators, the breathing of the air conditioning and the drum of his heart, the susurrus of his respiration. He feels a shift in gravity too subtle for less tuned senses as a nearly unbearable tickle. It’s going to be agony out on the open regolith. The rover spins on its axis and halts.
‘Open her up, Dr Light.’
The front of the rover turns transparent. The light of the full Earth beams in on Wagner Corta, naked in the command chair of Taiyang 1138: Rosa. He cries out. Blue light beats into every cell of his body. Every nerve blazes. He hauls himself upright, stands in the Earth-light, turns to expose every part of his skin to the light. The small of his back, the palms of his hands. He scoops his long black hair over his shoulder to expose the nape of his neck. Every part of him is soaked in Earth-shine. His breath is laboured, orgasmic gasps. He shakes. His muscles can barely hold him upright. He collapses back into the command seat, panting.
‘Let’s go to work, Dr Light.’
Who repairs the repairers? Wagner Corta, the wolf.
He needs the work, not the money. Analiese’s Persian classical ensemble brings in enough to share happily with him and Robson. The distance is beyond price. Ever since he caught the old familiar shuttle at Hypatia Junction and Robson settled into the seat beside him, Wagner has dreaded the first wink of blue along the edge of the new Earth. Now it is intolerable. He thought giving up the meds would make it manageable, but with each Earth-rise the psychological shifts have grown more and more intense.
Take the meds, Analiese said. It’s too much to put yourself through, love. Take your meds.
In the deep of the night before departure for the Theon Senior job he slipped out of bed and padded down to the printer. The order was complex, the constituents required several stages of synthesis. He sat shivering, watching the apartment printer. The silence coalesced around him like crystal. When Dr Light told him the order was ready his heartbeat jumped and skipped. He gulped the meds down with water, shaking with heart palpitations, as the thickness, the uncertainty, the muddled fog, the indecision and lack of clarity divided and parted, yin and yang. He was two again. He was himself. Across two thousand kilometres he felt the pack call to him.
He was gone before Analiese and Robson were awake.
In the cramped cabin of Taiyang 1138 Rosa, Wagner Corta learns what it is to be a lone wolf. He roars. He howls. He descends into incoherent raving, broken by racking sobs dry of any tears. More than once he hits the outlock controls, seeking not to end the white fire inside but to get closer to his true soul, burning beneath the horizon with the light of ten thousand Earths. He bites deep into his wrists, his forearms, remembering the loving teeth of his pack-mates. Crescent Earths of bloodied skin. He chews a thumbnail into a ragged blade, twists it into skin and draws a jagged, bleeding line from each nipple to his navel. He sobs silently, muscles wracked, curled on the hard mesh floor, hour after hour. It is more terrible than he thought possible. He is in hell.
Twenty minutes to destination, Dr Light says.
He pushes himself to his knees, fists clenched against the floor panels, soaked with sweat, hair dripping. He is the wreck of a man, humanity burned away in the white. He can force himself to his feet because there is only the wolf now. Pain is the condition of the wolf. He stands.
‘Show me.’
He looks long and hard at his self-image on the rover cameras. He looks like death. Dr Light shows him where to find water, sanitiser, first aid. Wagner Corta cleans, mends, seals. There is work to be done, work only the wolf can do. The dark side is focus and colossal, introverted dedication. The light side is inspiration, insight, flashing flights of genius; important attributes for the man who fixes the fixers. He was an analyst before he was a care giver, before he was laoda of Taiyang Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. He sees things, makes connections other humans cannot.
He pulls on his sasuit, savours the sensation of stretch fabric sliding over his sensitised skin. Gloves on. Preliminary systems check. He feels the rover brake to rendezvous with the damage maintenance bot.
It will always be like this, but he can do it. No one else can.
ELEVEN
Wang Yongqing is assiduous with the prints, studying each one equally and at length. Vidhya Rao waits with hands folded in the capacious sleeves of er gown. The terrestrial woman has no interest in 18th and 19th century CE lithography. If the LMA must meet Vidhya Rao on the neutro’s terrain, then the LMA will take control of the time. Anselmo Reyes and Monique Bertin are visibly bored already.
‘Such a bourgeois little sedition,’ Wang Yongqing says as she completes her viewing and the staff of the Lunarian Society Club show host and guests to the table.
‘Politics is a novelty with us,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘What’s the expression? “Let a thousand flowers bloom”?’
The sommelier brings water.
‘As long as the planting is harmonious,’ Wang Yongqing says. ‘Now, since I do not talk and eat, shall we do our business before or after lunch?’
‘You requested the meeting,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘You manage it as you wish.’
On the wall hangs the tiny William Blake print of a ladder between Earth and moon. Wang Yongqing has not noticed it yet, or if she has, commenting on it offers no political profit. At this table e entertained Ariel Corta when e prophesied the coming of these terrestrials.
‘Very well. Your Lunar Bourse proposal finds favour with us,’ Wang Yongqing says.
‘We’ve spoken with our respective governors,’ Monique Bertin says. ‘They concur. Enthusiastically. Financialisation is both a profitable and secure future for the lunar profit nexus.’
‘My company is willing to provide seed money to develop the project,’ Anselmo Reyes says. ‘We envisage a consortium of Earth-based funders and AI developers.’
‘Taiyang is far in advance of any terrestrial developers,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘It’s a question of control,’ Anselmo Reyes says. ‘Put simply, we want as little lunar involvement with th
e Bourse as possible.’
‘Earth-owned, Earth-run,’ Monique Bertin says.
‘Earth-run?’ Vidhya Rao asks. ‘Given the time lag?’
‘We will rotate workers in and out,’ Monique Bertin says.
‘This makes no economic sense,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘As my colleague said, we want as little lunar involvement as possible,’ Wang Yongqing says. ‘Ideally, none.’
‘In the short to mid-term we will appropriate Taiyang’s Sun-ring to secure an energy supply. In the mid-term, we will oversee the construction of a fully automatic Bourse along the lines of your proposal,’ Monique Bertin says. ‘In the long-term we foresee a move to full financialisation and a managed decline of the lunar population.’
‘Managed decline?’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘To a level that will guarantee harmony between the two worlds,’ Wang Yongqing says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Must you be so obtuse? Zero.’ Wang Yongqing unrolls her napkin and lays it neatly in her lap. ‘No human population on the moon. Now, shall we eat?’
The Iron Sea lies in the eastern limb of the Oceanus Procellarum. The name has no official standing. It is recent and informal. It is the nickname of VTO’s great marshalling yard; three-hundred square kilometres of track, shunting, maintenance and construction.
A small executive railcar in Mackenzie Metal’s green and silver moves across the switchgear of the Iron Sea, siding to siding to siding past kilometre-long passenger expresses, angular hulking freight haulers, track layers and maintenance bogies. The Mackenzie Metals smelter runs on its own dedicated rails, straddling two maglev tracks. The railcar runs in to a halt under the belly of the beast. The docking cradle descends and lifts the railcar entire from the line. Locks engage, seal and equalise. Every society has its unmeasured times; moments of waiting, endurance, or process that are universally ignored. On the moon, unmeasured time is time waiting for airlocks to seal and cycle.