by Ian McDonald
Now that Crucible is slag on the surface of Oceanus Procellarum, the Sun-ring is the largest constructed object in the two worlds, a ribbon of solar cells one hundred kilometres wide, nine thousand long. At night it is a marvel, a black abyss full of stars: reflections of the sky above it. Stars and far blue Earth. So huge is the Sun-ring that even wan Earth-shine will generate one hundred megawatts of electricity. Under the light of the sun, the ring comes to life. It is easily visible from Earth, a black band dividing the moon like the hemispheres of the brain. It’s slept for two lunar years. Now the command goes from the Palace of Eternal Light. Buried processor chips warm and run through boot cycles. Arrays of solar cells switch on; segment by segment the moon-sized energy grid wakes. Taiyang substations measure and balance feed. Seventy exajoules of power course into Taiyang’s network. The Sun-ring is alive.
FIFTEEN
‘You’re late,’ Krimsyn says to Finn Warne. ‘He’s pissed off.’
These are the most words Krimsyn has ever said to Mackenzie Helium’s First Blade.
Bryce Mackenzie stands before the window, dressed only in a thong, bathed in laser light. Flickering red beams map the flows of flesh, fold upon fold, as if he has erupted fat from his pores like lava; the sacks of adipose tissue that press his thighs together, the heavy, pendulous breasts.
‘You’re late,’ Bryce Mackenzie says.
‘I know what they’re doing,’ Finn Warne says. Glances around the room to the rest of the board: Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie to Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie to Alfonso Pereztrejo. The moon has been a pestilence of political rumour since Taiyang powered up the Sun-ring. The Suns would only rush a project launch if their hands had been forced. ‘I have some people in the Palace of Eternal Light.’
‘Who?’ Bryce asks with a liquid shrug. The thong is unnecessary, his genitalia quite hidden by flaps of skin. The lasers wink out, the bots wheel to storage.
‘It would endanger them to give you the name,’ Finn Warne says. ‘They’re close to the board. They told me that Taiyang’s sales agents on Earth have been setting up meetings with terrestrial energy companies. Particularly in those nation states that don’t have representation in the LMA.’
Bryce’s eyes widen. He understands.
‘Clever fuckers. Clever clever fuckers.’
‘They can’t go solar, they don’t have the transmission satellite,’ says Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie, Head of Operations. Ever the old jackaroo – groomed, proud, trustworthy.
‘Sun Zhiyuan is on his way to St Olga with the full travelling circus,’ Finn Warne says. ‘I had some of the engineers run simulations; Taiyang could have a solar power satellite ready to beam power to a terrestrial microwave array in six lunes.’
‘They’re taking pre-orders,’ Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie says, Mackenzie Helium’s analyst.
‘They’ll give it away free,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘The first one is always free. And we’re selling gas for kids’ balloons.’
‘Why now?’ Alfonso Pereztrejo says. ‘They’re nowhere near ready. They’re still negotiating glassing rights with the university. And as you say, they have no means of getting the power to Earth.’
‘They have those computers that can predict the future,’ Finn Warne says. ‘What if they looked forward and saw something that scared them? Really scared them.’
‘Scared the Suns?’ Jaime says.
Attendants arrive, print-fresh clothing draped over their arms. They fuss around Bryce, trying fits, draping him, dressing him.
‘There’s more,’ Finn Warne says. ‘I’ve been talking to other sources. There was a high-level meeting between Yevgeny Vorontsov and his puppet-masters and Duncan. They agreed a joint development venture. Asteroid mining. Mackenzie Metals is moving off-moon.’
‘Is the deal done?’ Bryce asks. The dressers adjust the sit of his pants, the fall of his jacket. They slip shoes on to his petite feet.
‘The legals are drawing up contracts,’ Finn Warne says. ‘Signed and sealed by the end of the lune.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Jaime asks.
‘We do what any good business does,’ Bryce says. Swathed and suited, he addresses his board. ‘We diversify. Aggressively.’
Today she goes clothes-free.
It’s a leap forward on Alexia Corta’s quest to become lunar. She shied from the banyas: the idea of public hygiene is alien to her. Washing, cleaning, ablution, are private, rationed, a few moments in the metered shower under her own pumped water. Then she discovered there were wonders in those raw rock caverns carved deep into the face of the city. Hidden pools, steam chambers, bubbling baths and warm polished moonstone slabs where she could loll and sweat. Spa tubs of increasing heat, linked like ganglia by low-ceilinged tunnels where she could lie back in the scented water, bathed in ambient lighting and amniotic surround-sound allegedly streamed from a flying probe two hundred kilometres down in Jupiter’s storm system. She made the banya a daily habit but she still baulked at public nudity. It was not mandatory – nothing was mandatory on this world – but it was customary and she suffered agonies of guilt between private and social discomfort.
This morning she ordered Maninho to show her herself. In the skin. Hair down. She winced, looked away, looked again. Alexia understood too well the irony of feeling physically self-conscious in as exhibitionist a society as Brasil, but the enduring family narrative was that Cortas were workers not lookers. She had always worried that her hips were too wide, her ass too heavy, her boobs too small. The gatinhas from school bounced down to the beach after class in three triangles of lycra; she went for coffee, and took a table with her back to the ocean. Wanting so much to be the one in the sun. The moon taught her different. The moon gave her a movie-star dress and she had wooed and wowed St Olga. The bodies at the banya – young, old, large and small – taught her that no one was looking.
She looked at herself in her lens. And it was okay. It was good. It was her. Fuck it.
She booked a National Classic trim for her boceta, hung her bra and pants in her locker, slid her feet into the Havaianas, slung her towel over her shoulder, shook out her hair and marched to the steam room.
The call comes in the spa. Irina.
‘Ola.’
She is distraught. In bits. Teary. Where is she? She’s in Meridian. She needs her.
‘I’m in the Sanduny banya. I’ll book a private suite.’
Warm water, juniper-scented air, ambient light and guaranteed privacy are safe, centring, healing.
Irina Efua Vorontsova-Asamoah does not even wait for the water, the warmth, the seclusion to start to work.
‘They’re marrying me!’ she bawls.
There is no ready answer to that when you are naked and up to your neck in gently bubbling water.
‘Kimmie-Leigh Mackenzie!’
By the time it has all unravelled they have progressed from the warm pool to the cold pool to the sauna to the steam room to the cold pool to the warm pool again. Alexia’s skin feels three sizes too big for her and she understands Irina’s woe.
It’s the deal. The Mackenzie deal. The contract calls for a series of dynastic marriages to seal the agreement. Irina has been betrothed to Kimmie-Leigh Mackenzie, granddaughter of Katarina Mackenzie, granddaughter of Robert. The engagement will be proclaimed as part of the announcement of the Mackenzie Metals/VTO pact. The ceremonies will take place ten days later in Hadley.
‘Hang on hang on hang on. Married? Against your will?’
‘It’s part of the deal.’
‘But did you consent to this?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters if it makes it rape.’
‘I signed the pre-nikah.’
‘But you didn’t want to,’ Alexia protests. She learns one thing about the lunar way of life, accepts it, then she runs hard into something alien, brutal and harsh.
‘I certainly do not,’ Alexia says. ‘And what about her? Kimmie-what?’
‘Kimmie-Leigh. K-L. She doesn’t want it either but she’s a Mackenzie, I’m a Vorontsova-Asamoah …’
‘Do you know her? Have you even met her?’
‘She’s sixteen, in the Three Heavens Colloquium here in Meridian. Seems a nice kid. But my oko? My oko? For five years. Five years!’
Alexia almost laughs aloud.
‘Only five years!’
Irina is aghast.
‘I’ll be … twenty-two by the time the contract reverts!’
‘In five years a lot can happen. She could be dead. You could be dead. The deal might fall through, the contract might be annulled. You could cheat and be a renegade from both houses. Or you could fall in love. What I’m saying is, five years is nothing.’
Irina sulks, then splashes water in Alexia’s face. Alexia bristles, then drenches Irina with a torrent of splashing. Irina shrieks, then the two women yell and laugh and throw water at each other until they cannot breathe.
‘Your hair,’ Alexia gasps, ‘looks like. Shit. And I’m puckered up like an old nun. What I’m saying is, is, get a fucking marriage lawyer. Let’s get a drink.’
Irina is still there three bars later. She is still there at the Ethiopian restaurant and she is still there in the morning folded around the bottom of Alexia’s bed, like a small sister or a visiting cousin. And she is still there, blinking big eyes and hung-over, when Lucas calls with the invitation to the eclipse party at the Palace of Eternal Light.
If she puts her right arm out and rolls on to her side, and bends this way, Luna reckons she can slide around this corner to the really good spy-hole in the roof of the med centre common room. She wiggles her arm up and around, for a moment her elbow jams against the roof of the access tunnel, then Luna grits her teeth, shifts her body weight on to her left side and the arm goes into the crawlspace. Then it is roll, flex, kick and she is through into the duct beyond.
Luna never thinks that she might get stuck, that familiar-Luna might have to call for help, that bots and engineers might have to dismantle half of Coriolis to get her out; that Luna might call and no one would come, ever.
In a few metres the crawlspace will open out and she can manoeuvre her arm down by her side and peer through the mesh into the common room. Tea machine, food machine, water machine, seats and spaces. People sitting around with that faraway look grown-ups get when they are with their familiars rather than the friends around them. Moving air strokes her hair, rustles her dress. Who’s in the common room today? Dr Gebreselassie, just leaving. Dr Donoghue and Dr Ray, just entering, talking together at the tea machine. A group of researchers: they’re not interesting. There is Amalia Sun, who came with Tia Amanda when she visited Lucasinho. She seems a bland, dull woman, sitting on her own with tea, involved with her familiar.
Who to follow? Luna invented her little game in the crawlspaces and conduits of Boa Vista, but it is so much better here. There are so many people here she can track without them knowing, instead of just some boring relative or security person. It makes her giggle, thinking she is up here, watching and they will never know.
Luna tracked every step her Tia Amanda took and not even her security knew she was there.
So, who to hunt today? Amalia Sun is the newest thing Luna has seen but she just sits and sits, busy with her familiar. The researchers finish their tea. Luna picks the least uninteresting and follows her into the main ring, down two levels to the neuronics laboratory – a drop down a service shaft, her ballooning dress slowing her fall – to the laboratory offices, another tight turn, but not as narrow as the passage from the scanner room to the common room. Luna’s dress snags on the misaligned edge of a panel and tears. She hisses in annoyance.
‘Now look what you made me do!’ she scolds the researcher.
Madrinha Elis holds up the dress. The tear runs from armpit to waist.
‘Scrambling.’
‘Exploring,’ Luna says.
‘And you’re covered in dust and dirt,’ Madrinha Elis says. Luna stands defiant in shorts and T-shirt. ‘Take a shower. You are a smelly girl. And …’
‘Wash that thing off my face?’ Luna grins. ‘I always do, madrinha.’
‘And put it right back on again.’
Luna skips to the shower. ‘I need that reprinted for when I go to see Lucasinho.’
Madrinha Elis rolls her eyes and tosses the torn dress into the deprinter.
‘Ola, Luca.’
Lucasinho is in his chair today. His smile is a thing of joy and light. Luna likes to talk to him in Portuguese, it seems to link memories in new ways, give him fresh words for speaking about himself.
‘Bom dia, Luna!’
‘Walk again today?’ Luna says in Portuguese. Lucasinho nods. He can walk without a stick now, and likes to test his body’s limits. The faculty has a small park and Luna and Lucasinho walk laps of its circular path. There is tall bamboo and sheltering leaves and overhanging branches and you can almost believe that you aren’t in a chamber under a low roof.
‘Look at the fish!’ Lucasinho says. Luna takes his arm as they walk down to the elevator.
‘Feed the fish!’ Luna says and takes a glass vial of protein flakes from the pocket of her grey dress. Lucasinho claps his hands in delight.
Medics and academics and researchers greet them as Luna and Lucasinho stroll hand in hand along the sintered stone path.
‘Seven trees?’ Luna says. An ornamental Japanese maple is their lap marker. Lucasinho looks doubtful. He tires easily. Mental work is the hardest. ‘Seven trees and we can feed the fish.’
‘Okay.’
As he does every day, Lucasinho stops in a spot where light falls through gently moving leaves. He looks up into the dapple, lets it warm his face. His eyes are closed.
‘You look like an orixa,’ Luna says.
‘Which one?’
‘Oxossi,’ Luna says.
‘The hunter,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The Lord of Knowledge.’ His face tightens in concentration. ‘I’m trying to remember. Facing each other, from the tram station to the main lock. Oya and Xango. Oxum and Ogun. Oxala and Nana. Then Oxossi and Yemanja. Last of all, Omolu and Ibeji. It’s easy to remember Boa Vista here. Is that why you bring me?’
‘And I like the fish,’ Luna says. They walk on, smiling and greeting the well-wishers in Globo.
‘I’m starting to remember the Palace of Eternal Light as well,’ Lucasinho says. Fourth tree. ‘It’s all light and dark, big shadows and light so bright it’s like – real? Solid. Huge empty spaces. Echoes. Really really small people, but it’s the stone that makes them look small. Trams everywhere. I remember looking out of the window of a tram. What’s the name of that other city, the old city?’
‘Queen of the South?’ Luna says.
‘That city. I was on the tram, with my mãe.’
‘Amanda Sun,’ Luna says.
‘Mãe,’ Lucasinho says firmly. ‘I was on the tram, from the Queen, and we were going around inside this big crater, and it was all shadows and light. Like a cut.’ He slashes his hand through the air. ‘Sharp like that. Light, shadow. Mãe said, those shadows, they never end. I remember I was scared, but she put her arm around me and said look and there were all these lights in the shadow, and Mãe said, that’s our city. Light in the shadows.’
Six trees. Lucasinho has a lightness in his step, a certainty in his voice. Luna must trot to keep up with him.
‘I remember! Another time. There’s a room, all covered in beautiful cloth, and tiny windows, and the light comes in through the tiny windows and makes the cloth all pale. There was an old lady, and she was smiling and she took my two hands and my mãe said,
“Luca, this is your great-grandmother.”’
‘That old woman is Lady Sun,’ Luna says. ‘When was that? I don’t remember you meeting Lady Sun.’
‘I don’t know, I think just before I lived there. Seventh tree! Can we feed the fishes now?’
‘Luca,’ Luna says. ‘You never lived in the Palace of Eternal Light.’
‘Now this will not do,’ Lucas Corta says.
‘I rocked St Olga in it,’ says Alexia in the ballgown that had so seduced the Vorontsovs, so fresh it still smells of evaporating printer fluid.
‘What rocks St Olga will get the stone face in the palace,’ Lucas says. He wears a suit in a soft, vaguely iridescent grey which, on close inspection, reveals itself to be brocade micro-print. His tie is primrose silk, as is the band of his hat. ‘The Suns have standards.’
‘What is this anyway?’ Alexia calls as she goes back to pull off the dress, deprint it and print out the one that is very much her second choice.
‘The Suns host eclipse parties in the Pavilion of Eternal Light. It’s the only time darkness ever falls so they think it’s worthy of celebration. There’s an eclipse every month so people are always being invited to the Palace of Eternal Light. LMA, trade delegations, social influencers, society debutantes, academics. Tourists. Everyone is going to be there, so there is clearly something Taiyang wishes to announce.’
‘Everyone?’ Alexia wriggles into the new dress.
‘Heads of all five … four Dragons,’ Lucas says. ‘And the Eagle of the Moon and his Iron Hand.’
‘To do with the Sun-ring powering up?’ Alexia says. Right shoe, then left. There is magic and ritual to dressing.
‘Absolutely certainly.’
Alexia descends the two steps from the dressing room. The long drape of crepe, the mutton-chop sleeves, the tightly cinched waist.