by Ian McDonald
‘Control!’ Denny yells. ‘We’re fucked!’
He scissors the two blades and sends a bot’s sensor-head flying.
‘We have target lock, Denny,’ says a voice from the glowing summit of Hadley.
‘Irina?’
‘It is. Stand by.’
‘We’re dying here.’
Far out across the Palus Putridinis, an arc of mirrors suddenly blazes brighter than the sun. The clouds of battle-dust render the beam visible, almost solid. It sweeps downwards, and another section of the array catches it, throw it on to another, to another; to focus it on the furthest VTO moonship. In an instant the heat-exchange vanes glow red. There are seconds before failure, heat overload and the fuel tanks exploding.
‘You dancer!’ Denny Mackenzie shouts on the control channel.
The ship’s crew reach a decision. Thrusters kindle, the ship lifts, the main engine burns and in a few seconds Orel is lights in the sky. All across the Marsh of Decay VTO ships lift clear of the mirror array on knives of blue fire.
The mirrors blaze with light and beneath them, not a human or machine moves.
‘The executive module!’ Finn Warne yells. ‘They left the executive module! The entire board of Taiyang!’
‘So they did,’ Denny Mackenzie says. ‘So they did.’ As if every brain and AI on the battlefield has come to that realisation at the same instant, the frozen paralysis shatters. Wushis, bots, engineers, rovers explode into manic motion. Fighting machines vault through the air like heroes of sword-wielding legends. Rovers send up geysers of dark dust as they spin their wheels. Denny sees machines go down under those wheels, sees a frantic wushi try, fail to get clear. The body cartwheels high over the rover to smash into the molten heart of one of Hadley’s mirror-weapons. It’s a retreat to protect the board: a rout.
‘Take the heat off them,’ Denny says. The sudden darkness as the mirrors tilt away from the sun is so intense it is almost palpable. ‘Cool heads make smarter decisions. Get me a channel to Taiyang, will you?’
‘You’re in, Denny.’
The blades unfold from their final stand. Eighteen. Eighteen of the thirty who roared their allegiance in Airlock Four. They form a ragged line, suits scarred and slashed, antennae lopped, face plates cracked, leaks bubbled with grey emergency sealant. Sonia Ngata rests the butt of her gauss rifle on the regolith. Finn Warne stands at Denny’s shoulder.
‘Taiyang: this is Denny Mackenzie.’ He is broadcasting not just to the Taiyang board and army, but to his jackaroos, to the control room, to the whole of Hadley. ‘I’ll accept your surrender now.’
NINETEEN
‘Does she wear that all the time?’ Vidhya Rao asks. Luna sits at the end of the table, arms folded on the glass. Her chin rests on her arms. Her living eye glares at the economist. Her dead eye is beyond knowing.
‘All the time,’ Ariel says.
‘It’s tattooed,’ Luna says.
‘It’s not,’ Ariel says.
‘I might get it tattooed,’ Luna says with steel.
‘You will not,’ Ariel says but the victory is not assured.
‘I need to talk with you,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Professionally.’
‘Luna, would you like to hear this?’
Luna nods.
Vidhya Rao dips er head. The escape from Meridian and the wrath of the Suns tested the physical resources of an elderly, scholarly neutro. Small praise to the parsimonious gods of economists, e had blacked from gee-forces just before the first moonloop release. E had been unconscious the entire relay, tether to tether to tether, juggled around the moon until the final tether deposited er into the docking clamps of the Coriolis tower.
Seventy minutes is a dangerous time for a seventy-year-old to be unconscious. University crash teams extricated her from the capsule and took her to the faculty. As soon as e could move and speak, e requested a meeting with Ariel Corta. E was invited to Ariel’s crater-rim apartment.
‘Congratulations on turning all of Meridian on its head,’ Ariel says. ‘My own exodus was disappointingly mundane by comparison. An early-morning wheel down Gargarin Prospekt.’
‘I had assistance,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘A sub-AI on Taiyang’s back-door into the Three August Ones using the persona of Lady Sun. It’s complicated.’
‘Three August Ones: like Fu Xi, Shennong and the Yellow Emperor?’ Luna asks, swinging her legs.
‘Like whatever they want to be,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘I detest them. Their intelligence is so alien to ours that they can barely communicate. At best they seem eccentric; at worst deliberately obstructive. Imagine a friend who only talks in riddles, or anagrams, or quotations from a telenovela you don’t watch. Perhaps they are sincerely trying to communicate, perhaps it is all games only they understand.’
‘What did you ask them?’ Ariel asks.
‘To generate forecasts of the Lunar Bourse five, ten, fifteen and fifty years after it goes online.’
‘What did they show you?’ Luna asks. This is magic, bruxaria, wonder-stuff.
‘Fifty years from now there is no life on the moon,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Human, animal, vegetable. The moon is a dead world run by machines making money. The cities are empty, cold and open to vacuum.’
‘Me too?’ Luna chirps.
‘Everyone,’ Vidhya Rao begins. ‘Two years from now, the terrestrials introduce engineered plagues from Earth. We have no immunity, our phages are powerful but our medical facilities are overrun. This is plague upon plague upon plague. Ten years from now there are only a couple of hundred humans alive on the moon, nearside and farside. The systems are breaking down, the machines are failing, the people are ageing, there are no new children being born … Fifteen years from now …’
Luna’s eyes are wide, her lips wavering, her nostrils flared.
‘Enough,’ Ariel says. ‘You’re scaring her.’
‘The Three August Ones assign probabilities to their prophecies. If the LMA pursues the Lunar Bourse, the probability of the total extinction of human life on the moon within twenty years is eighty-nine per cent, within fifty years one hundred per cent.’
Luna is grey with fear.
‘Ariel, is this going-to-happen or might-happen?’
‘The terrestrials are scared,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The Vorontsovs want to build a network of space elevators and turn the moon into the hub of the solar system. The Mackenzies want to mine asteroids and build space habitats. Both sides need Lucas Corta to endorse them but they don’t know where he stands. Then I propose my Lunar Bourse scheme. They like it. They like it very much. They like most of all that it is unimaginable wealth with no human input. They have everything they want. And I gave it to them.’
Ariel takes Luna’s hand.
‘Luna, anjinho, don’t be scared,’ Ariel says.
The girl shakes her head.
‘I’m not scared. I just want to know what I can do.’
‘Lucas has power, authority, the Cortas restored,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Everything but one thing.’
‘Lucasinho.’
‘You have what he wants. He has what you want.’
‘I remember saying to you that Cortas don’t do politics.’
‘What you said to me was, Cortas don’t do democracy.’ Vidhya Rao taps a finger to the folds of er right eye. ‘My external memory is flawless.’
‘Then it’ll remember that line came just after you told me I was some kind of Chosen One,’ Ariel says.
‘Our first meeting. Your first session of the Pavilion of the White Hare.’
‘And you’ve kept turning up ever since to pronounce doom and remind me of my special status. You clambered all the way to Bairro Alto to invite me to cocktails with the Eagle of the Moon and feed me that same old Special One nonsense. Is this why you’re here? Third time’s the charm? Fairy stories, Vidhya. Whether it’
s Canopus in Aries or your Three August Ones, it’s Fairy Stories. The universe doesn’t have heroes.’
‘Nevertheless …’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘You’ve always got an answer,’ Ariel says. ‘It’s all scripted whether I want it or not. What part of the telenovela is this?’
‘“Refusing the Call”,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘Consider it refused,’ Ariel says. ‘The moon stands, the moon falls: it will do it without me.’
Ariel sweeps from the room in a flurry of polka-dot jersey. Luna remains for a sustained glare, to let Vidhya Rao know the depth of her disapproval, before marching after her tia.
‘But you will,’ Vidhya Rao says softly to the empty room. Dust sparkles in the light from the window. ‘You can’t help it.’
Luna thinks she has been into every tunnel and shaft and duct in Coriolis, but Amalia Sun leads her into pipes and conduits strange to her.
‘Where are you going?’ Luna whispers as she peers out from a vent eight levels down in the emergency stairwell. It had been a tough climb down the zig-zagging shaft; no opportunity to drop and land; familiar-Luna showing her the position of power lines that could flash her to nothing. Amalia Sun goes through a green-painted service door and Luna has to haul herself up in a tricky ninety-degree horizontal turn into the airspace between the wall-panelling and the gas-sealed stone. She hopes the airspace runs the length of this level: she has had to double back from dead-ends or deep drops or live power relays too many times since Amalia Sun got up from her seat – always the same seat – in the common room and Luna stirred from her long watching and followed. Familiar-Luna shows her an air-vent fifty metres down the airspace. Luna scampers, hands and feet, and arrives to see Amalia waiting at the door of a freight elevator.
Where to? Luna asks Luna-familiar. Amalia Sun has switched her familiar off, but Luna’s familiar can access the elevator’s rudimentary AI.
Park level, Familiar-Luna says.
‘Back up again.’ The freight elevator is slow and arrives a long way from the park door and Luna knows a cunning short-cut.
‘What are you doing?’ Luna mutters to herself as she takes the service ladder three levels to Level 12. She slips out of a cleaning-bot hatch, sprints down the corridor and takes the direct elevator, the one she uses with Lucasinho on their expeditions, which will deliver her outside the park entrance even as Amalia Sun is stepping out from the sliding doors. No one on the business of good takes such a long route through nothing and nowhere. It is as if the woman is trying to avoid being seen, trying to throw as much dust over her tracks as possible.
Luna is a daily sight at the park so she can stand in the entrance and watch Amalia Sun walk towards her, nod a greeting, and walk on along the corridor towards the yellow door with the biohazard markings.
‘Shitzer!’ Luna swears. She doesn’t have the clearance to go through that door. But there is a red door on the first cross-walk which will take her into the air-ducts, and they follow the layout of the clean room. There are only two ways out of the park-level biohazard zone, and Luna knows her prey well enough to make a good guess which Amalia Sun will take. She runs lightly along the trunking, ducks down a right into a lesser conduit and is peeping down through a vent to see Amalia Sun exit the door on to the stairwell.
‘Got you!’ Luna says. ‘I know where you’re going.’
She follows anyway, to be sure. Amalia Sun takes the staircase two levels up to the bio-fabricator level. Luna drops out of the roof to see Amalia Sun push open the door to the protein-chip printshop.
Dr Gebreselassie catches sight of Luna hovering in the door to her office, half in, half out. The door frame bisects her face.
‘Can I come in?’ says the human side of Luna’s face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dr Gebreselassie asks.
‘Why do you think something’s wrong?’
‘Because you never asked if you could come in before.’
Dr Gebreselassie pulls a chair out with her foot and Luna drops on to it and swings her feet.
‘So tell me.’
‘Okay,’ Luna says. ‘But first I have to ask you a technical question.’
Dr Gebreselassie has learned not to be surprised at anything Luna Corta says or does.
‘Ask.’
‘Technically, is it possible for someone to add memories of things that didn’t happen to Lucasinho’s protein chips?’
‘Technically, it is,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Okay,’ Luna says and tells Dr Gebreselassie about Lucasinho talking about his mother – which he never did – and when he lived in the Palace of Eternal Light – where he never lived – and all the good times he had with his Sun aunts and uncle and cousins – who he never knew. Dr Gebreselassie’s face grows grave. Then Luna tells her that she is an explorer and that she knows all Coriolis’s secret tunnels and corridors and walkways and how she used to them to spy on Amalia Sun and follow her strange long route through the campus all the way to the protein chip factory.
There Dr Gebreselassie holds up a hand.
‘Luna, hold it there a moment.’
The door opens. Dakota Kaur Mackenzie comes into the office.
‘So, Luna,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘I’d like you to tell Dakota everything you told me.’
Lady Sun turns the little metal cylinder over in her hands. It is the size of her thumb, heavy, cold and slightly greasy to the touch. Her fingers sense minute markings etched into the metal.
‘What is this?’ she asks. She has been disturbed, in her apartment, in her solitude and contemplation. Her temper is short and not sweet.
‘A note of credit from the University of Farside. Delivered by BALTRAN, to me, personally,’ says Amanda Sun.
Lady Sun holds the cylinder up before her eyes, strains to make out the engraving.
‘Such tiny writing,’ she tuts. ‘Credit for what?’
‘From the University of Farside, Faculty of Biocybernetics, School of Neurotechnology to the account of Taiyang: Carbon; fifty-one thousand two hundred point eight eight grams, oxygen; sixteen thousand one and twelve point six five grams …’ Amanda Sun says.
‘The chemical constituents of a human body,’ Lady Sun says and the chill of the metal invades her. She touches her hand to her chest. Her own trick of power, turned against her.
‘Yes,’ Amanda Sun says. ‘Amalia Sun.’
Analiese Mackenzie can remember the moment she realised that music is a demon. She had completed her twelfth repetition of the twenty-third gusheh of the seventh rastgah, the Rastgah-e Mahur, and saw blood on the strings of her setar. The taut steel strings had abraded the tips of her fingers down to raw flesh. She had not noticed.
She was fourteen when the setar took blood.
She had just turned thirteen when it made her love it. Just turned thirteen and riding Equatorial One back with her mums from the new surveyings at Rimae Kopf to Crucible. Looking out of the window. Flicking the channels on her entertainment. When a spray of notes like molten silver in her ear made her sit up. Strings, notes of metallic precision, talking to her, to her alone, to no one else on this round round moon, clear and precise. She understood everything they said, every emotion they summoned – elation, peace, control, awe, fear, mystery. Everything was limned in light; everything was clear.
‘Listen!’ she shouted, jumping down from her seat to wake her dozing mums. ‘Listen!’ She flicked the music on to their familiars. ‘It’s like … it’s like out there, in here.’
They listened. They didn’t hear.
That silver voice was that of the setar, an instrument of classical Persia. One could be made. Anything could be made on the moon. She learned the tuning, the fingering, the gushehs that built through sayr into the dastgahs into the magnificences of the ratifs: the symmetries, the asymmetries, the free-forms: all these on a carbon
setar strung with lunar steel. Later, when the setar had possessed her, she paid a stunning sum of bitsies to have one made, from wood, by hand, fretted with true silk, flown up from Earth.
She found other musicians who had been touched by this music. Not many, and they didn’t see what she had seen in the music: the harsh, beautiful, austere, brilliant nature of her world. But they had been possessed by the demon, and as she met musicians in other disciplines she saw that they too were demon-ridden: devotees, ascetics, perfectionists, explorers, obsessives. Her measure of wood and wire had possessed her, harried and driven her to perfect her relationship with it, to make it the centre of her life and need. Demon.
She loves the wolf, but she is married to the demon.
It is an abusive relationship.
Analiese completes the final dastgah and lets the note fade over the closing beat of the daf. She takes a moment in the silence after sound. Nothing and everything is here but she can no more stay here than in the womb. A breath and the applause breaks over her.
It always surprises Analiese that there is an audience for her music. A sizeable audience: second and third gen Iranians and Central Asians; Moonbeams and visitors from the Islamic Republic; music lovers, musicologists, musicians of other disciplines: the demon’s other lovers. On this tour, her first in over a year, she has noticed a number of terrestrials. LMA officials. Iran and the Stans have a piece of the lunar cake.
They are the most appreciative of audiences. Every concert at least one has come backstage to ask her about her instrument, her music, why a lunar Australian should be so enraptured with an alien music.
Her familiar informs her that tonight is no exception. Two men in the dressing-room corridor of the Queen’s Xian Xinghai music centre. A woman and a man. Not Iranians. White Australians.
‘Analiese Mackenzie?’ the woman asks.
‘I am.’
‘A moment in your dressing room, please?’