by Ian McDonald
‘Can you go back?’ Kessie won’t look at her. The two women sit in adjacent seats, worlds apart. ‘When you went up on the shuttle you said you felt like you were going to turn to lead and die. To do it again—’
‘I don’t know,’ Marina says. ‘If Lucas Corta could do it—’ She chokes on the memory, sudden and sharp as a bone in the throat, of Lucas Corta: trim, dapper, his beard neat, his hair brilliantined, his nails polished and his suit sharp as a Corta blade. Lucas Corta as she first saw him in Boa Vista, at the Moonrun party when she got the hosting job that had saved her from the slow suffocation of being unable to pay her Four Elementals. Late-capitalist asphyxiation. Go back to that, to not knowing who was paying for your next breath. Yes, more than anything. A dark speck turns circles in the sky: dead cells in the humour of her eye or an eagle?
‘You told me it almost killed Lucas Corta,’ Kessie says.
‘It did kill Lucas Corta,’ Marina says. ‘He came back. Lucas Corta is unkillable.’
‘You’re not.’
‘No, but I’m Earth-born. I’ve got the physiology. Train myself up.’
‘Is that what you were doing when you got run into the ditch?’ Kessie asks. ‘Is that why you were out today? Training?’
It is a bird, spiralling, wing-tips wide-feathered, feeling a path down through the air.
‘I hadn’t decided then.’
The eagle turns up where the river bends and glides in down the valley.
‘You’ve decided?’
‘I decided the moment I touched down. It’s ugly and its cruel and I was scared all the time and I was more alive in those twenty-four lunes than all my life before. This is shadows and fog, Kess.’
The eagle ghosts in, pulls up into a stall, feathers unfurled and drops on to the lip of the nest, scales and gore clenched in her claws.
‘Look,’ Kessie whispers. Heads appear over the eyrie’s rim, the eagle tears pale bleeding chunks from the fish for the open maws.
The hiking sticks are surer and more subtle than the crutches but Marina still takes the companionway to the fore-deck one fumbling step at time. Kessie is already at the rail. It’s a family ritual, to catch first sight of the Space Needle as the ferry rounds Bainbridge. It is never warm on the sound; Marina pulls her light jacket tight round her. In her years away the bland towers have shouldered in around the landmark building like bodyguards, even spread across Elliot Bay to West Seattle. An automated container ship negotiates passage out towards the strait and the ocean beyond; a cliff-face of moving metal. The ferry bobs across its wake and Kessie raises the cry.
‘She’s out!’
House Calzaghe had taken the ferry to the city at most twice a year – sometimes whole years had passed with them coming to Seattle and, though the first glimpse of the towers had been beacon of arrival, the sight of Mount Rainier had been the welcome. The long trips had become more frequent when Mom had been in hospital; sighting the mountain had become an oracle. If she stood high and clear, her snow-cap higher than any imagining, then all would be well. If clouds covered her, if it was raining, then prepare for setbacks and disappointments. But always: she. Rainier was a drowsing goddess, sitting head bowed over her city and islands.
‘She’s clear,’ Marina says but even over two years she can see that snows have melted deeper, the glaciers retreated higher. She can’t bear the thought of a snowless Rainier: a crownless queen.
The ferry swings in to the terminal and the passengers stream towards vehicles and exits. Kessie clears a path for Marina through the swarm of foot passengers but Marina finds the close press of bodies in the narrow walkway reassuring. The moon was people, all people, only people, all the way down.
The moto whirls them up between the dark towers. Every other pedestrian or cyclist seems to be wearing a breath-mask now. Another new and lethal bacterial evolution. Every moon-dweller’s great fear was of a new terrestrial disease arriving in the moon’s sealed cities and passing lung to lung through Meridian’s quadras, up Queen of the South’s high towers before medical resources could be mobilised against it. Plague on the moon.
VTO’s office is a glass and aluminium trinket in a prime site on the shore of Lake Union. Float-planes land and take off beside full-wall animations of cyclers over earth-rises.
‘Give me a hand here.’
Kessie holds Marina’s sticks while she shrugs off the jacket. Proud in her Corta Hélio T-shirt she hikes past the aspirant Jo Moonbeams in the lobby. Eyes catch, heads turn.
‘I’ve an appointment at the med centre,’ Marina says to the receptionist.
‘Marina Calzaghe,’ the receptionist says. He’s the definition of a VTO boy; tall, glossy, killing cheekbones. He squirts a location to Marina’s data assistant. ‘Welcome back. We don’t get much repeat traffic.’ As she grips her sticks he adds, ‘Like the retro shirt.’
The waiting area is busy. There will always be people ready to seek their fortune on the moon. Young people of all colours and nations, nervous and excited. The tests are psychological as well as physiological. Not everyone can tolerate the moon’s tight, claustrophobic society. Hopes will be crushed as well as elevated behind those white doors.
‘Corta Hélio.’ The young woman in the row in front of Marina and Kessie turned to take in her potential launch-mates and read the shirt.
‘Used to work for them,’ Marina says.
‘Which office?’
Marina jerks a thumb at the ceiling panels.
‘Head office. I was a duster.’
‘You worked up there?’
‘Two years. The maximum.’
‘So, I have a question,’ the woman says.
‘Ask away,’ Marina says.
‘If you went there, why did you ever come back?’
A white door opens.
‘Marina Calzaghe?’
The arms curl their fingers and fold into the cracks in the white walls. The panels close and seal leaving pure, sheer surface. Marina swings from the scanner couch. She left her hiking sticks by the door. It looks a longer walk back to them than from them.
‘Am I good, Doctor?’
Dr Jaime Gutierrez blinks back the reader lens over his eye.
‘Eighty-eight per cent probability of surviving launch,’ he says. ‘Maximum gee to orbit is two gees, effectively twelve gees lunar. It’ll not be comfortable but you’ve got good muscle armouring. You’ve been working out.’
‘The Long Run,’ Marina says, knowing that the doctor won’t understand and is too incurious to ask.
The doctor blinks his lens away.
‘One question: why?’
‘Is this part of the psychiatric assessment?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone go back. I’ve seen tourists and executives and university researchers and LMA staff on six months up, three months down rotation. But someone who’s worked the full two years? No. Once they’re down, they stay down.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come down,’ Marina says.
‘There’s someone, isn’t there?’ Dr Gutierrez says.
‘There is,’ Marina says. ‘But I had to come here to see it clear.’
‘Expensive moment of clarity,’ Dr Gutierrez says.
‘It’s only money,’ Marina says.
Dr Gutierrez smiles and Marina thinks she may have misjudged him. The door opens and Melinda is in the white room. Marina hasn’t given thought to her rehabilitation liaison since her tail-lights turned the corner of the dirt road and vanished behind the trees.
‘Are you finished, Jaime?’
‘She’s good to fly,’ Dr Gutierrez says.
‘I need a word, Marina.’
Marina follows her up the corridor, the tips of her hiking poles tick-tacking on the wood.
‘Coffee?’ Melinda asks as Marina settles herself carefully in to the sofa in the small,
bright room with high views over Lake Union. Low sofas are upholstered fly-traps to moonwomen. You can get in but you can’t get out.
Coffee arrives with a woman in a suit that reads government. She pours two cups of coffee.
‘Thank you, Melinda.’
She slides the cup across the low table to Marina.
‘My name is Stella Oshoala. I work for the Defence Intelligence Agency.’
‘I thought it might be something like that.’
Stella Oshoala stirs two sugars into her coffee and takes a sip.
‘You’ve been experiencing some hostility in the neighbourhood.’
‘Do you keep tabs on all the returnees?’
‘We do. Many returnees find assimilating back into the terrestrial lifestyle challenging. The moon often gives rise to unorthodox political ideas. Extreme libertarianism, a yearning for utopian communities, anarcho-syndicalism. Alternate takes on the legal system.’
‘All I was trying to do was fit in. Make a new life for myself.’
‘But that’s not true, is it, Marina?’ Stella Oshoala sets down her cup. ‘You’re going back. That’s unprecedented.’
Marina’s coffee no longer tastes of wonder and nostalgia.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to pay for your mother’s healthcare.’
‘I pay for her healthcare and you don’t talk about Mom.’
‘You can pay for your Mom’s care or you can go back to the moon. You can’t afford both.’
‘You’ve been into my accounts?’
‘You applied for a Earth-moon transit loan. Of course we’re going to be interested in that.’
The government woman is right. The figures don’t add up. Marina hadn’t calculated on moonflight costs rising, medical care costs spiralling. Now, as when Marina first came to this lakeside office for her pre-flight assessments, VTO was prepared to advance loans to potential moon-workers. Now as then, filled in the application in the dark, private heart of night. She was fearful of exposing her secret: moonworker Marina, long the pillar of the Calzaghes, might not be as rich as she thought.
‘All I want to do is cover all my responsibilities.’
Stella Oshoala looks at her shoes. Her mouth twitches.
‘You need to know that your loan application is unlikely to be approved.’
Marina feels gravity reach out and pull down every strong thing in her. The room swims. The floor looms at her.
‘What?’
‘VTO has not approved your loan.’
‘It’s only a hundred K.’
‘Hundred K or a hundred thousand, the answer would be the same,’ Stella Oshoala says. She takes a sip from her cup but the coffee has turned cold and stale.
‘I don’t understand,’ Marina stammers. Her world has imploded. Her every hope is falling into that hole in her heart.
‘A returnee who wants to go Jo Moonbeam again isn’t VTO’s idea of a safe and stable investment.’
Stella Oshoala makes eye contact.
‘I want you to do some work for us, Marina. For which you will be paid. Enough to cover your shortfall. More.’
And out of that hole comes anger.
‘You told VTO to turn down my loan, didn’t you?’
Stella Oshoala sighs.
‘You are in a unique position that my organisation would be negligent not to exploit.’
‘You want me to spy.’
Stella Oshoala grimaces.
‘That’s not a word we use, Marina. We’re interested in information. Updates. Insights. Our government is not one of the major players in the LMA. What’s happening up there is important but all we’re thrown by the Russians and Chinese is bird feed.’
‘Are you telling me it’s my patriotic duty?’
‘Those aren’t words we use either, Marina.’
Marina feels trapped in the deep, swallowing sofa.
‘Spy on my friends.’ The anger is red and hot and oh so joyful but she must keep it controlled. She bites back the words spy on my loves.
‘Your mother will receive the best of care,’ Stella Oshoala says.
Now the hot anger gives Marina the strength to push herself out of the suffocating sofa, across the room to her hiking poles.
‘We look after our own,’ Marina says as she slips her wrists through the loops and takes the grips.
‘I’ll leave it with you,’ Stella Oshoala calls, a parting shot as Marina stalks down the corridor. Tick-tack, tick-tack. A spy. A tout, a traitor. How dare she? The hurt and humiliation is doubly hot because the woman was right. She can afford to go to the moon or look after Mom. Or betray the family that took her in, raised her up from the dust, placed their trust and confidence – placed their lives – in her.
‘Good?’ Kessie asks as Marina swings past the lines of hopefuls with eyes full of moon, towards the car pulling in under the porch. ‘You were gone a long time.’
‘Sound in wind and limb,’ Marina says. ‘Give me a hand with this. will you?’ Kessie holds the sticks while Marina struggles into her jacket. It’s too small and too hot for the city but her proud Corta Hélio T-shirt feels like a brand of treachery.
Cloud has drawn in around Rainier. Fickle goddess. Marina turns her back on the mountain, on the Space Needle, on the thuggish towers of Elliott Bay. Traitor town. She grips the rail and looks across bay and sound to the mountains of her homeland. She zips the jacket up to her throat. Always cold on the sound. A good jacket won’t let you down.
The ferry has rounded the southern point of Bainbridge Island before Kessie says, ‘You are in one hell of a mood, sister of mine. Did something happen back there?’
Jellyfish tumble through indigo water, bouquets of blubber and poison.
‘I need you to lend me one hundred thousand dollars.’
‘That’s what it was about.’
‘What is was about, Kessie,’ Marina says, her knuckles white against the dark wooden rail, ‘what it was actually about, was the Defence Intelligence Agency trying to turn me into a spy.’
Wooden houses line each stony shore, dapper and wealthy. Beyond them rise the trees.
‘They don’t call it spying. I’d be an information feed. Feed them the Cortas and they’ll pay for Mom’s care.’
The engine pitch changes as the ferry lines up on Bremerton pier.
Kessie shifts uncomfortably at the rail.
‘I have to ask—’
‘The Cortas are the most egocentric, narcissist, arrogant – outright weird – pack of fucks I have ever met,’ Marina says. ‘And every second I am away from them, it kills me.’
Docking announcements blare on the speaker system. The ferry shudders as the bow thrusters open up. Dark waves lap high up the concrete piles and rubber buffers of the pier.
‘I don’t know, Marina.’
‘I have to move fast on this, Kess.’
‘Marina, I don’t know.’
The off-ramp scrapes up the concrete of the dock. Marina is the last one at the rail. She can clearly make out Kessie’s car in the lot, that will soon take them back between the mountains and the water to the house under the eaves of the forest.
TWENTY-TWO
Haider frowns, eyes flicking in concentration, nostrils flared.
Alexia understands that when you are scared, when you are headed into the worst thing in the world with no escape, no adjournment, you find deep engagement in your trivia. Your music, your chat, your beloved shows. But Gods, how many games of Dragon Run can one thirteen-year-old play?
The LMA rail car drives east from Hypatia Junction across the smooth black glasslands of the sun-belt. A landscape to drive the soul inward, to dark reflection and self-examination. Gods. She prefaced the thought: Gods. The lunar way. Gods and saints and orixas, the whole a crazed feijoada melding into s
omething strange, something new, something more. And she is part of this melting, mixing, melding. How long since she thought of home, of the green and blue of Barra, of the people of Ocean Tower who cheered and toasted her up into space, of gorgeous, vain Norton, of Marisa and Caio? Days of forgetting slip into lunes and one day you find years have turned and you cannot go back again.
‘Haider.’
No answer.
‘Haider.’
He looks out, focuses from game to Alexia.
‘Are they safe?’
Haider opens his mouth wide. Alexia sees nibs of colour under his tongue, in his cheeks. Red, green, blue, yellow, white. The black she can’t see, concealed in the darkness within the human body. It’s there, the last death of all.
‘Fuck’s sake, Haider!’
He spits the vials out into his hand.
‘Just trying it out. You never noticed me put them in, did you? I picked up some of Robson’s tricks. I’ve got this thought out. Can’t hide them up my ass because I’d never get them out without everyone seeing. This way, I slip them in when we get there, I slip them out again when I see Robson. All I got to do is keep my mouth shut.’
‘What if you swallow?’
‘They’re coded to Robson’s DNA. Only he can open them. They just go right through me.’
And you trust that?
‘How long to João de Deus?’
‘Ten minutes.’
‘Enough time.’ Haider settles in his seat, refocuses his eyes back into his game. Strange boy. Deliberately awkward, challenging others to come to him. She tried to talk, to engage him, to understand him on the rail ride from Theophilus. He rejected every approach. The quietness, the inwardness repel Alexia. She would never have him as a friend, but she is not thirteen, she is not a boy, she is not Robson Corta and to know a friendship you must see both parts of it. But he is a friend, the greatest and bravest friend Alexia has ever seen.
The railcar slows. The deceleration jogs Haider from his game. The LMA honour guard take up positions, swaying as the railcar takes the points on to the branchline to João de Deus. Four of the best non-Corta mercenaries Nelson Medeiros could recuit. They’ll last forty seconds if it comes to a real fight. They know it. The railcar is in the tunnel now, lights strobing, slowing as it brakes into the station.