Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  The VTO presentation team is in position, engineers and designer briefed and ready.

  What will you do? Alexia asks.

  The answer comes back at once.

  ‘Lucas says, see you in court.’

  The bafflement, becoming confusion, becoming fury on Amanda Sun’s perfectly made-up face is a pleasure to Alexia Corta. Lady Sun, seated at Amanda’s side, turns to Alexia.

  ‘You filthy little favelado whore,’ she whispers. ‘Sitting there in your suit imagining you’re quality. You are nothing but a ridiculous clown, a thief in stolen silks. You see this room? Everyone in this room laughs at you. Everyone in this room knows you are a joke. Iron Hand. Vainglory from the mouth of a four-year-old. Childish. Vain. Like all you Cortas. You are dirt and I will see you return to dirt. My only regret is that those fucking Australians did not finish the job, from that preening cretin of a CEO to his mewling brat.’

  ‘Sers,’ the public address announces, cutting short Lady Sun’s bile. ‘The Eagle has landed.’

  Lucas Corta crosses the floor to his seat. Every eye follows him, every body leans forward, rapt. The council chamber is as tense, as charged, as energised as a fusion containment vessel. Lucas waits for the growl of voices to subside. He stands, one hand on his cane.

  ‘Sers. I have reviewed my position as chair and president of the Lunar Mandate Authority and find that I have been compromised in my duty to conduct myself equably and impartially. Our legal system recognises bias and prejudice, but these must be evaluated and compensated for. I subject myself to evaluation pending compensation and therefore I must suspend myself temporarily from the functions and duties of the Eagle of the Moon and adjourn this vote.’

  He turns and clicks out of the Pavilion of the New Moon … Thunderstruck silence, then the tension fractures and the council chamber rises in shouting voices and yelled questions. Delegates are on their feet, jabbing accusing fingers but Lucas Corta is gone.

  Meet me, Lucas says.

  Hell yes, Alexia replies.

  Alexia scoops up her bag and bends close to Lady Sun’s ear.

  ‘Fuck you, old woman. We beat you, and we will beat you again, and again and again and then you will die beaten like a street dog.’

  Escoltas meet Alexia in the lobby and transfer her to the Eyrie where Lucas waits in his office, at his desk. Two glasses, a flask of his private gin in a cooler. He pours and pushes one glass across the desk to Alexia.

  ‘I know you don’t like it but drink.’

  She raises the glass.

  ‘Congratulations. A malandro move if I ever saw one.’

  ‘I bought a little time, nothing more. If I am to be saved by a malandro move, it must come from my sister, I think.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Alexia takes a polite sip from the glass. Neat gin. Flowery, astringent stuff.

  ‘The trial. Ariel issued the challenge, and she knows I have retained Mariano Demaria. Even if she replaces the zashitnik Abena hired for the preliminary hearing with Dakota Kaur Mackenzie, she still cannot beat my man. She has another move, one I have not foreseen and I cannot work out what it is.’

  ‘As long as you can push the vote back to after the trial …’

  ‘I’ve made sure of it. We go to court in forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Gods.’ Again, that invocation. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Can anyone ever be ready? Lê, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I find that liberating.’

  An entropic chill grips Alexia’s spine. It is a sobering realisation, the mark of adulthood: people in power are making it up as they go along. Alexia reaches across the table to take the flask of gin. It is deep frozen crystal, purifying and cold. Alexia tops up Lucas’s glass.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We wait. We listen to bossa nova.’ Lucas takes a sip, hisses in pleasure at the bite. ‘We drink gin.’

  Ariel smells it before she sees it: the electrifying blend of perfume, sweat, dust, printer-fresh fabric, hair products, make-up and shaving gels that can only be generated by one thing: a crowd. Her smile widens to a delighted grin as she rides the escalator up from Meridian’s private railcar station. The city has turned out for her.

  The impatient murmur becomes a rumble harmonised to the hum of camera drones as the ones at the front catch sight of the faux-feathers of Ariel’s Adele List hat, then an excited chatter, then exultation as she steps off the moving staircase.

  No handball team ever ran out to a reception like this. The station plaza is solid with bodies, pushing and craning to catch sight of the celebrity story of the year. Voices call her name, Ariel pauses at the top of the staircase to strike a pose. A thousand lenses capture her, a heartbeat later Ariel Corta in her Charles James suit, Ferragamo shoes, Guccio Gucci bag and deadly lipstick tops a million news feeds.

  ‘Get out of the fucking way,’ Dakota Kaur Mackenzie hisses, narrowly avoiding being pushed by the moving stairs into Ariel.

  Voices bay her name, craving a smile, a look, even a quantum of attention. Questions fall in barrages: Ariel pouts, smiles, lifts a gloved hand and snaps out a titanium vaper. There is a collective gasp, then rapturous applause as she takes a long draw and exhales plumes of fragrant vapour. Ariel Corta is back.

  ‘Isn’t it fabulous?’ Ariel whispers behind the smokescreen.

  ‘Your transport should be here by now,’ Dakota grumbles.

  A surge in the commotion: now Luna has reached the top of the stairs. The same beseeching voices call her name. A shout of ‘Show us the knife, Luna,’ is taken up with gusto. The knife, the knife! Luna clutches the case tight to her and moves to safety beside her madrinha.

  Silence sudden as depressurisation falls on Station Plaza.

  He is coming.

  Lucasinho steps off the moving staircase. He hesitates a moment, stunned by the size of the crowd. The crowd holds its breath. He is hospital-pale and thin, his hair is patchy from the treatments but he has shaved chevrons and concentric circles into the dark stubble. His eyes are dark and his cheekbones can shred dreams. He wears his old Moonrun pin on the lapel of his jacket. He stands surveying the crowd. He looks uncertain. He smiles. He waves. The crowd explodes. Ariel beckons him to stand by her side. The drones swoop, the crowd surges forward; security moves to protect Team Lucasinho. Voices shouting, faces looming, bodies shoving: questions questions questions.

  ‘Gods!’ Ariel shouts into the bedlam. ‘I’ve missed this!’

  Dakota harrumphs her way through the Han Ying hotel’s prospekt-level Armstrong suite. She frowns at the office, sniffs at the deep sofas and wide armchairs. Growls at the private spa with its sauna and five-person whirlpool. Rolls her eyes at the beds she can walk all the way around. Purses her lips at the personalised printer in every room. Sneers at the personal butler with such disdain that he flees.

  ‘This had better not be on the faculty account,’ she says to Ariel.

  ‘I booked it,’ Abena Maanu Asamoah says from the depths of an armchair the size of a rover.

  ‘Class is as class acts,’ Ariel says. ‘Perception is half the battle.’ She taps Dakota lightly on the wrist with the tip of her vaper. ‘And don’t worry about your academic budget; the gupshup channels are paying for all this. In return for exclusive content.’

  Ariel trickles two plumes of vapour from her nostrils.

  ‘I’m going to stick that thing up your hole,’ Dakota mutters. ‘And don’t vape in here. It’s antisocial.’ She puts herself between Ariel and the balcony. ‘And don’t go out there either. There could be a dozen drones waiting.’ To Abena, ‘And while you are congratulating yourself on your PR coup, have you had this place swept for security?’ She jerks a thumb at Rosario de Tsiolkovski, diligently working her way through the kitchen space in search of something to eat. ‘This is what you hired?’

  ‘Hey!’ Rosario de Tsiolkovski rou
nds on Dakota. ‘I’m the contracted zashitnik.’

  ‘You’re a ghazi-school drop-out,’ Dakota says. ‘The university wouldn’t have you.’

  ‘Don’t wave your doctorate at me,’ Rosario says defiantly. ‘I can take you.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Speed and skill takes size and pomposity every time.’ Rosario swaggers from the kitchen space. The two women face off. The zashitnik is a head shorter than the ghazi, but she radiates punk ferocity.

  ‘Girls,’ Ariel says. ‘Rosario remains Team Corta’s zashitnik.’

  ‘You do know Mariano Gabriel Demaria will carve her up on the fighting floor,’ says Dakota Kaur Mackenzie.

  ‘Mariano Gabriel Demaria will carve both of you up on the fighting floor,’ Ariel says. ‘Unless you fight clever. Now go and get tea someplace. I’ve got my first interview in five minutes and I need to get the smell of testosterone out of the soft furnishings. Everyone except Lucasinho and Abena. You too, Luna.’ The girl scowls. ‘Elis, take Luna.’

  Madrinha Elis takes Luna’s hand and coaxes her towards the door.

  ‘Hey.’ In the corridor Rosario crouches at Luna-height. ‘Is that the knife box? Can I see the knife? I mean, like hold it?’

  Ariel hears Luna say, ‘No,’ and the bickering between ghazi and zashitnik moves lobby-wards.

  Dakota has heard of these fantastic creatures but she has never seen one until now. The wolf and his son are two pools of darkness in the hotel lobby. Guests and staff alike avoid them as if they glow with radiation.

  Of course Wagner Corta is not a wolf. He is a man with a specialised social structure for a neurological condition. And Robson Corta is not his son, though from what Dakota has heard Wagner has been more a father and mother to him than Rafa Corta and Rachel Mackenzie ever were. But they can be nothing other than the wolf and his son.

  The wolf burns with a tightly constrained intensity: Dakota’s trained perceptions show her a sharp insightfulness and honed faculties even she cannot match. He is in his light aspect, then. The boy: she has never seen a child more damaged. Torn in two and whip-stitched together, the sutures barely holding. Her heart goes out to them both, the wolf and his son.

  ‘I am Dakota Kaur Mackenzie. Ariel is very happy that you’ve come. Please follow me.’

  The glances of the other guests are brief, the whispers hushed but not so that Dakota can’t make them out. That’s him … the boy who killed Bryce Mackenzie. Needles in his eyes. His eyes …

  They move well, the wolf and his son. Like assassins.

  Wagner is taken aback by the intensity of the greeting. Dakota can see that he has not expected everyone to be there. Luna. Lucasinho. His sister.

  ‘Irmão.’

  ‘Irmana.’

  From the hesitations, the flinchings, the small moments of discomfort and unfamiliarity, Dakota fills in the gaps of the family history. Wagner was made the outcast, Ariel made herself the outcast.

  ‘The last time we met you were in a bed in the med centre in João de Deus,’ Wagner says to Ariel.

  Dakota raises an eyebrow. Weird family. Mackenzies are straightforward, to the face, speak your mind and your heart. Cortas, you never know where you are with them. One moment they love, the next they are radioactive ice. Resentments brood for years, for generations. She watches Robson embrace Lucasinho: these boys are beautiful and damaged and aliens to each other.

  Dakota slips close to whisper to Rosario.

  ‘A word. On the balcony.’

  Dakota closes the windows and breathes in Meridian’s unique fragrance. The noise of the prospekt beyond the screen of shrubs is warm and human.

  ‘Keep an eye on the wolf and the boy.’

  ‘That’s not my job,’ Rosario starts.

  ‘You won’t have a job if your employer is assassinated.’

  ‘Wagner and Robson?’

  ‘The kid killed Bryce Mackenzie. Smuggled the Five Deaths of Twé right into Bryce’s private slime pit bare-ass naked. When they found him there wasn’t a bone or organ in his body. Just a skin full of liquefying fat.’

  ‘They’re family …’

  ‘The people most likely to kill you are your family. Keep an eye open and a hand on the hilt.’

  What is a Blue Moon? Alexia asks and the bar-keep makes her one. The conical ice-cold glass, the house gin (fifteen botanicals), the slow pour of the blue curacao over the back of the spoon and the tendrils dropping slowly, monstrously into the spirit, twining and dissolving into sky blue; sunline blue; the globe of orange peel.

  She sips it, doesn’t like it.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘The Cortas are back,’ the bar-keep says.

  Alexia still doesn’t get it, but he’s late so she finishes it and he’s still late so she orders another and doesn’t get it any more than the first. She’ll give him until the bottom of this glass and then fold up the courage she flew to ask him for a drink and walk away.

  Nelson Medeiros recommended the bar and his taste is sure: low enough for swank, high enough for bairro-alto raw. The music hit her and she smiled: beats, rhythms she could move to. Feet to tap and head to nod. She took a seat at the bar and asked for the signature cocktail.

  He arrives with half a centimetre of Blue Moon left. Heads lean together: That’s him. Then who’s she?

  He slips on to the seat beside her. He’s different. Changed. She can’t put her finger on details, only generalities. Impressions. Deeper rather than wider. Slower but more profound. Present not restless.

  He winces at the music.

  ‘We can go somewhere else if you don’t like the music.’

  ‘I don’t like any music right now,’ he says, jerking a thumb roofwards. Beyond the sunline, through two hundred metres of stone, an Earth five days past full stood high over the Sinus Medii. This was the liminal place between the wolf and the shadow. ‘It passes.’

  Wagner Corta died that day, he said up in Boa Vista’s dusty observatory. I am not one person, I am two.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, getting up from the chair and stepping back. ‘Let’s do this right.’ He kisses Alexia on each cheek, the formal way. He indicates the seat.

  ‘Please,’ Alexia says and he sits again.

  ‘I apologise for being late. Robson wanted to stay later with Luna.’

  ‘Is he …’

  ‘Back in the hotel.’

  ‘You’re not with …’

  ‘The pack? No, that doesn’t work for him.’

  ‘I was going to say with Lucas.’

  ‘That doesn’t work for Lucas.’

  He smiles differently; guarded, rationing the emotion.

  ‘Robson wanted to go and meet up with some of his old traceur friends, from when he lived up in Bairro Alto. I told the escoltas not to let him out of the house.’

  ‘You have escoltas?’

  ‘The accessory of the moment. I would like a drink, Alexia Corta.’ In the abruptness is an echo of the swift bright wolf.

  ‘I’ve been drinking Blue Moons,’ Alexia says.

  ‘I’ve never got on with those,’ Wagner says and orders a caipiroshka. Alexia joins him: glasses clink and the music is a comfortable, pregnant pulse in her stomach. Conversation is lubricated by vodka but there are still long pauses while Wagner considers a question, odd asides and non sequiturs and intense picking apart of casual remarks. In the spaces, Alexia wonders if it is possible to love both the shadow and the wolf. If she had to choose one, which Wagner Corta would it be? Can anyone but a wolf love the wolf? Then she realises that another woman asked that same question and reached an answer. A woman he loved, who betrayed him and paid a hideous price. And now Alexia Corta turns these compromises and accommodations over in her mind.

  He’s looking at her. His eyes are wide and uncomfortable.

  ‘Sorry, mind wandering.�
� He won’t let that go. ‘Just thinking about tomorrow.’ Get him talking. ‘You’ve been, haven’t you?’

  ‘I was in the Court of Clavius when Bryce challenged Lucas.’

  ‘Do you mind? Can you tell me? What it’s like.’

  Wagner goes into himself for dark moments.

  ‘Fast,’ he says. ‘Faster than you can think. I’m fast – when it’s the other me – but not as fast as knives. Knives are faster than conscious thought. One mistake, one lapse of concentration and you are dead. There is nothing clean or honourable about it.’

  ‘Did you see … the result?’

  ‘The death? That’s the result. That’s always the result. Knives are drawn, someone dies. I saw Carlinhos drive a knife through Hadley Mackenzie’s throat and kick his blood up in his mother’s face. I saw him take the knife and become something I didn’t recognise.’

  ‘How can your law allow a thing like that?’

  ‘I’ve thought much about this. I’m not a lawyer, but our law prohibits nothing and permits anything, as long as it is agreed. If the law says you can’t fight to the blood to settle a case, then there is a thing that can’t be agreed and the law is nothing. But I think there is a deeper lesson, which is that the law allows violence to settle disputes to show that violence never settles anything. Violence comes back again and again, down years and decades and centuries and so many lives.’

  Four caipis down and Alexia no longer has any taste for a fifth. The bar is crowded with shadows.

  ‘We’ve a day of it tomorrow,’ Alexia says. Wagner reads her true.

  ‘We do.’

  ‘One question: where will you sit?’

  ‘Robson will be with Haider. I will be with you and Lucas.’

  ‘Lucas asked me to be second. I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Hold the knives, check your zashitnik complies with the judges’ rules. Arrange for the zabbaleen to take the body away, if necessary.’