Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  ‘You could land a moonship on these shoulders.’

  Lucas smiles.

  ‘Discreet but powerful. The Suns will appreciate that.’

  ‘I’ve never been to the Palace of Eternal Light,’ Alexia says as the railcar runs the Transpolar mainline south over the viaducts and through the cuttings of the La Caille craterlands.

  ‘You’ll be impressed. It’s built to impress. It’s very composed, very quiet, very austere and everyone there is afraid all the time.’

  ‘How was he?’ Alexia asks.

  ‘I thought of turning around and walking away.’

  ‘Lucas, that’s not what I asked.’

  He looks out at the silver-black desolation.

  ‘I saw a wonder, then I saw a horror. Then I saw a thing I thought I knew and didn’t know at all. I thought, they’re putting him back together, memory by memory, but they’re not his memories. They’re the memories of others, his social media self, the parts of his memory he gave over to machines. Is that all we are? What others remember of us? He’s still pretty, Lê.’

  ‘You showed me a picture of him, that time I came back to the Copa Palace.’

  ‘And I offered you the moon. He looks the same, Lê, but he’s not the same. Will he ever be the same or will the doubt always be there, that they built something that is not my Lucas Corta Jnr?’

  ‘When I go back to Earth, I won’t be the same, Lucas. Every part of the me who almost got killed in that suite in the Copa will be left here on the moon, and I’ll take the moon back inside me. Every hair and bone and cell.’

  ‘You’re going back?’

  ‘If I go back, I mean. If. Lucas. One more question. Who is Jorge Mauro?’

  That suspicious smile again. Alexia sees the fifteen-year-old, the ten-year-old, the five-year-old boy, who knows he must always be smart, be sharp, be secretive.

  ‘You spy on me?’

  ‘I look after you. You stayed behind after the reception.’

  ‘Jorge Mauro is my song, my sanity, my soul. I tell him what I will never tell you, Iron Hand. I would have spent the rest of my life with him but he was wise and would not have me.’

  Bossa guitar fills the cabin, whispered, invoking lyrics.

  ‘“Samba de Una Nota”,’ Lucas says. ‘Jorge’s group.’ He prepares martinis, viciously dry and cold. Alexia still cannot bring herself to love gin or bossa nova but she sips and the craterlands of the south speed past and she understands something of Lucas Corta’s towering, terrible loneliness.

  At Queen of the South they transfer to the Shackleton tramway. Alexia notes railcars at the private platforms: VTO red and white, the monochrome patterns of AKA, the green and silver of Mackenzie Metals. The tram silently carries her and Lucas under Queen’s great lava bubble, beneath the Aitken Basin to emerge on to a track cut into the inner wall of Shackleton crater. Lights blaze in a profound darkness that changes on a boundary sharp as a blade to blinding light. White and black. Ice and fire. Sun has never touched the deep recesses of Shackleton; primordial ice has lain there since the birth of the solar system, ice that fuelled the Suns’ and Mackenzies’ first steps on this world. The history of the moon is only eighty years deep, but it is passionate, bloody and magnificent.

  Alexia’s lenses polarise as she squints up to try and catch sight of the Pavilion of Eternal Light in the sun glare. It took her some time to comprehend the principle of a Peak of Eternal Light. The moon has virtually no axial tilt, so no seasons and no months-long days and nights at the pole. A sufficiently high mountain peak at the pole would never be out of sunlight. Water and constant solar power: humans of vision and spirit could build a world out of those. Malapert Mountain fails the Peak of Eternal Light test by a few hundred metres, but build a tower on top of it … And Alexia sees it, and her mental resistances fail. She is awed. A shaft of searing light rises into the black, tipped with a blazing diamond. A spear, challenging the universe. Earth and sun are invisible beneath the far rim of the crater: Alexia tries to imagine darkness obliterating the spearpoint, spreading down the shaft.

  The tram car enters another tunnel and moments later draws into a glass chamber. Locks seal; the Eagle’s escoltas form an escort.

  ‘Your ex-wife is here,’ Alexia whispers. She adjusts the fall of her gown, the set of her shoulder pads. This is stupidly complicated clothing.

  Amanda Sun greets Lucas with precision kisses. She is fierce in a fitted New Look suit.

  ‘Lucasinho looked well, I thought,’ Amanda Sun says, escorting Lucas across the soul-shrinking space of the Great Hall of Taiyang. Alexia’s heels sound like gunshots on the polished rock. She imagines she leaves a trail of sparks.

  ‘I thought he looked ragged,’ Lucas says. ‘Drained. Only natural. But then I know him better than you.’

  Shafts of light fall across the floor of the Great Hall, so bright they seem to hiss.

  ‘Senhor Corta.’ Sun Zhiyuan greets his guests. ‘Senhora Corta. You are most welcome.’

  Alexia recalls her last meeting with the Suns. They had come to dip the head to the new Eagle and scry what favour and denial they could expect. She had tried to bar Lady Sun because the Dowager of Shackleton had not been on her list. Mistake. She had been inexperienced. The Suns will not have forgotten nor forgiven. There she is, the old bruxa. She has always worn this 1940s style. The world has come round to her. The effete-looking kid at her side in the sharp suit must be Darius Sun-Mackenzie. Alexia tests her memory on the rest of the Great Hall. Lousika Asamoah with her animal entourage and AKA executives in the same beautiful kente that had impressed her beneath the Great Tree of Twé. Robert Mackenzie a dark star among his bright retainers. A posse of flamboyant Vorontsovs hail Alexia like a lost sister.

  No Bryce, Alexia whispers to Lucas across the room.

  He would have been invited, Lucas says. The Palace of Eternal Light is punctilious.

  Sun Zhiyuan raises his hands and the party falls silent.

  ‘We will be taking you up in groups, as space is limited in the lantern,’ he announces. ‘But rest assured, everyone will have a view of totality.’

  ‘I fought my way into this dress, for this?’ Alexia says. Her working of the room has brought her back to Lucas.

  ‘That’s not why we’re here,’ Lucas says.

  ‘And though you are all busy people, we’d be delighted for you all to stay for the reception afterwards,’ Zhiyuan continues.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ Lucas says and Yevgeny Vorontsov bulls his way through the guests to press Lucas on when he will put that business to a vote in the LMC.

  ‘I’m trying to decide if it would be better before or after you announce your off-world venture with Duncan Mackenzie,’ Lucas says but before Yevgeny can fluster and bluster, Taiyang staff, immaculate and androgynous, herd their designated lists to the Mount Malapert shuttles.

  Alexia has one clear sighting of the Pavilion of Eternal Light before the tram car enters the tunnel to the elevator hall. It is very much larger than she thought, a weave of spars and construction beams like a great Eiffel tower, gripping the summit of Mount Malapert, half in darkness, half in glowing light. The spear of God.

  The tram arrives in the elevator hall. The young Suns steer their guests with smiles and small touches.

  ‘Omahene Asamoah?’ says a Sun escort, showing Lousika Asamoah the waiting elevator car.

  ‘Is she taking her animals up with her?’ Alexia whispers. Lousika Asamoah lifts a finger and the raccoon curls up, the parrot tucks its head under its wing, the spider turns into a ball of wire and venom and the swarm dissipates.

  ‘Next car, our Mackenzie friends, please?’

  Duncan Mackenzie leads his bright young Ozzies through the lock into the second car, newly arrived.

  ‘Every Sun is brought here as a child to feel the power of the sun and understand the source of
their power,’ Lucas says to Alexia.

  ‘House Corta?’ a smiling, sexless staffer says. Elevator doors seal.

  ‘I’m excited about this,’ Alexia says as the car climbs. Through the spidery girder-work Alexia watches Shackleton crater resolve, its depths in darkness, its rim ablaze with light. Higher still and the surface furniture of Queen of South, comms towers and BALTRAN stations, power plants and docks and the long revetments of surface locks. Now she begins to make out the interlinked crater-scape of the Aitken Basin.

  A colossal explosion. The elevator car is shaken as if by a fist. Alexia reels into the Taiyang worker: then she is in freefall. The lights go out. The car is dropping free. Emergency brakes engage, Alexia hits the ceiling, then the floor. Lucas is on top of her, the Taiyang kid a tangle of limbs in the corner. She can hear emergency brakes screeching: unmediated metal on metal. Impacts, loud as gunshots. Cracks. A volley of blows beat on the roof. The elevator jolts. Alexia raises herself to her elbow, the elevator glass is crazed with cracks. She doesn’t know what’s holding it together. Beyond the webbed glass Alexia sees a bright cloud of tumbling sparkles arcing away over the foothills of Malapert.

  What?

  The network is down. The elevator crawls down to dock. So slow. So killing slow. If this maze of crackled glass blows she joins the bright glinting things spinning out over Shackleton.

  ‘The top of the tower,’ Lucas says.

  Alexia leans against the solidity of the elevator frame and peers up into tangled, bent, warped girders. The bright diamond, the lantern, she can’t see it. Why can’t she see it?

  ‘It’s gone,’ Lucas says. His brown face is grey. He scrabbles for his cane. For anything that might give him security. There is no security, nothing to cling to.

  ‘Who was up there?’ Alexia asks.

  ‘Duncan Mackenzie, Lousika Asamoah,’ the Sun kid says.

  Alexia swears in Portuguese. The elevator judders into the dock. The wait for the lock to seal and cycle is endless. As Alexia, Lucas and their Sun escort stumble out on to the concourse the elevator car shatters like a crystal trophy into a million glittering crumbs. Medics and bots rush to give aid and oxygen. Alexia tries to wave away the mask, the anti-shock infusions but the machines insist. She catches a glance from Lucas, his eyes above his own oxygen mask. Look. Lousika Asamoah sits on an upturned medical hardshell, vapour pluming from her mask. Her eyes are wide with shock, her animal retinue crouches behind her, restless. She made it down.

  Dragon security arrives, pouring out of the tram cars to tangle with Sun wushis. Nelson Medeiros and his escoltas surround Lucas, check him again for medical distress. The elevator lobby thunders with shouting voices. A shriek of noise cuts into every familiar. The network is up again, and ordering everyone to be quiet. Sun Zhiyuan stands with hand upraised.

  ‘Please. Your attention. There has been a major integrity violation. The lantern … the lantern has been destroyed. We don’t know the details but we can confirm that people are missing.’

  Voices babble, Sun Zhiyuan raises his hand again. No one wants to hear that shriek in their implants.

  ‘VTO has dispatched a moonship from Queen of the South and we are sending rover teams to the site. The terrain … The terrain is difficult.’ His voice falters, he is visibly sweating. Alexia has never seen a Sun flustered before. ‘We will transport you and your entourages back to the Palace of Eternal Light. If you require any medical assistance, do not hesitate to make yourself known to our staff. We will update you when we have more information. At the moment, this area is structurally insecure so I would ask you all to comply with our assistants and return to the Palace.’

  They have that information now, Lucas says on the private channel. They’re just trying to think how to manage it.

  ‘A bomb?’ Alexia asks when the tram-car doors have sealed and only Cortas and escoltas can hear.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lucas says. Nelson Medeiros nods.

  ‘An impacter,’ Nelson Medeiros says. ‘Not a bomb. A shot.’

  ‘Who has that kind of weapon?’ Alexia asks.

  ‘First thought, the people with the big space-gun.’

  ‘The Vorontsovs?’ Alexia is incredulous.

  The car emerges from the tunnel and Alexia again looks up. The Pavilion of Eternal Light is shattered, its top third missing, the shaft a shivered stump of jagged beams and twisted girders, stark in the resurgent light.

  ‘Why would they try to kill you?’ Alexia continues as the tram re-enters the tunnel. ‘They need you for their Moonport deal.’

  Lucas and Nelson Medeiros exchange glances.

  ‘It wasn’t Lucas,’ Nelson Medeiros says.

  ‘Who then? Duncan Mackenzie?’

  A nod.

  ‘But who would … Fuck.’

  ‘Fuck indeed,’ Lucas says and the car slides into the platform. The Great Hall is thronged with bodies and voices and desperate activity. A dozen security squads, Sun staffers, reporters and columnists hoping to peel back the smooth skin of Taiyang corporate communications, hungry lawyers with notions of lucrative compensation cases mill and shout. Dragons and executives. The network groans under slow heavy traffic. A chime on the common channel sends every hand to every ear. Sun Zhiyuan will speak. Bodies encircle him.

  ‘Honoured guests,’ he says. ‘I have more information. We can confirm that the lantern of the Pavilion of Eternal Light has been destroyed in a targeted attack. We are still examining evidence, but what we know is that the Pavilion was struck at 16.05 by an object on a ballistic trajectory. There have been at least seven casualties; Robert Mackenzie among them. Our search and rescue have turned up a number of bodies in the debris field. We have no hope of any survivors. Our thoughts go to Mackenzie Metals in the loss of its CEO and its generation of brilliant young talents. Trams will be arriving to take you back to Queen of the South. The Palace of Eternal Light is now a major incident zone and I would ask you to vacate it as quickly as possible. This is tragic time for us and for Mackenzie Metals. Thank you.’

  And Amanda Sun is there, a guiding hand in the small of Lucas’s back.

  ‘I was afraid, Lucas.’ She steers him towards the airlocks. Wushis in sharp suits wait at a discreet distance. ‘I was so relieved when I heard you were safe. Oh, you are a sight. I wish I could offer some place for you to clean off the dust. And, Alexia, your lovely dress.’ The hated frock is torn where Alexia’s feet tangled with the hem, the ludicrous cinch between wrist and skirt ripped, seams split, the ivory fabric smudged with the black dust that works its way from vacuum into every part of the human moon. And her hair is a mess.

  ‘We have facilities on the railcar,’ Lucas says.

  Alexia tries to hang back. She has spied Lady Sun and her protégé being hurried through the crowd in the opposite direction by a squad of suits. They are fast and determined and brook no hindrance. Neither do the Taiyang staff who move her politely but firmly towards the tram airlock. Sun security creates a space for Nelson Medeiros to move the Eagle and his Iron Hand on to the railcar.

  ‘Remind me again,’ Lucas says as the car arcs around the waist of Shackleton crater. The black sky is filled with moving lights: moonships on landing burns. Lucas counts them. Every Vorontsov ship on the moon is over the Palace of Eternal Light. ‘Who wasn’t at the party?’

  SIXTEEN

  Every day, a new handle appears in Marina’s room. They start in the ensuite, at the toilet, in the shower, then they spread to her bedside, then to the closet, then around the switches and sockets, then sprout in a fungal line along the wall to the door.

  ‘Get rid of them!’ she rages and from the way Ocean and Kessie flinch she knows the responsible parties. ‘I’m not a fucking gibbon in the zoo! I’m trying to learn crutches. Is all.’

  She rages not because of their misplaced care, but because the hand-holds remind her too much of the tin
y apartment in Bairro Alto, three rooms scooped out of raw rock and cheaply sealed. They remind her of Ariel’s cableway of loops and lines strung across the ceilings; of Ariel hauling herself from her seat and swinging from room to room. Ariel, dressed and made up for the clients where the cameras could see, disreputable in borrowed leggings or track pants where she was not visible. The two of them trapped in their high exile, bitching and bickering and needing each other. Eighteen lunes, scraping and scratching. Only the foolishly optimistic or the terminally nostalgic would call that time happy. But the colours were bright, the tastes flavourful, the smells aromatic in a way that nothing is in this house. Damp, cold, softness, murk. Everything muted and hushed.

  In a night, like a trial from a fairytale, the handles are gone.

  Crutches are bitches. Marina can’t trust her weight, her strength, her balance. Her legs are too weak, her upper body is too strong. She is too moon-shaped. She swings up and down the hall, through the room, along the porch, a sweating, swearing circuit.

  On the third day she slathers up in sun block, pulls on a hat and shades and embarks on an adventure across the yard to the swing-seat. She makes it to the top porch steps, feels too tentatively with her crutches, loses her balance and goes down.

  Dr Nakamura scans her on the porch lounger while Kessie makes coffee.

  ‘You’re intact,’ she says. ‘Use the walking frame.’

  ‘That’s for old people,’ Marina says. ‘I am not an old person.’

  ‘You have the bones of a ninety-year-old.’

  ‘I have the heart and sex life of a nineteen-year-old.’

  Ocean sniggers and flees, embarrassed by her aunt.

  ‘Sit down, will you?’ Dr Nakamura says as Kessie serves the coffee.

  ‘You have that doctor-needs-to-have-a-serious-talk tone,’ Kessie says, but she closes both porch doors and sits.

  ‘Has Weavyr said anything to you?’ Dr Nakamura says.

  Kessie pours coffee. Every cup is still a shot of electric joy to Marina. She inhales the aroma. If only it tasted the way it smelled.