by Ian McDonald
‘I am a member of the White Hare,’ Judge Nagai says. ‘I have been for five years. Every year the White Hare drops two members. I am part of this year’s rotation. I would like to nominate you for a seat.’
Ariel’s belly tightens. A seat at the round table and here she stands in her underwear.
‘I’m honoured. But I do have to ask …’
‘Because you are an exceptionally gifted young woman. Because the White Hare is conscious of the increasing influence of certain elements among the Five Dragons on the LDC and desires to offset that influence.’
‘The Mackenzies.’ No other family is as nakedly ambitious for political power. Adrian Mackenzie, the youngest son of CEO Duncan, is oko to Jonathon Ayode, Eagle of the Moon, Chair of the Lunar Development Corporation. Robert Mackenzie, clan patriarch, has long campaigned for the abolition of the LDC and full lunar independence, free from the paternal oversight of Earth. The moon is ours. Ariel knows the political arguments and the players but has always remained disinterested. More than any other kind of law, lunar matrimonial law is a chaotic terrain of fierce loyalties, hissing resentments and unending grudges. It’s a volatile mix with LDC politics. But a seat at the hand of the Eagle … She may never have smelt moon dust on her skin, but Ariel is a Corta, and the spirit of the Cortas is power.
‘There are figures close to power who feel it’s time the Cortas gave up their isolation and became participating members of the lunar polity.’
Of all her family, Ariel has flown closest to political power. Rafa, bu-hwaejang of Corta Hélio, has economic power: Corta Hélio lights the night of Earth; Adriana, founder, matriarch of Corta Hélio, has moral power. But the Cortas are not universally adored among the older families. The Fifth Dragon; they are regarded as upstarts, crooks made good, grinning assassins, carioca cowboys. Cortas smile as they cut you. Carioca cowboys, helium hellions no more. This is their invitation to the table of power. This is the Cortas’ acceptance as a noble house. Mamãe will be scornful – who needs the approval of these degenerates, these soft parasites? – but she would be pleased for Ariel. Ariel has always known she was never the favourite, never the golden child, but if Adriana Corta is hard on her daughter, it is because she expects more of her than the sons.
‘So do you accept?’ Judge Nagai says. ‘Only I’d quite like off this wash-hand basin.’
‘Of course I accept,’ Ariel says. ‘What did you think I would say?’
‘You might have given it due diligence,’ Judge Nagai suggests.
‘Why?’ Ariel’s wide-eyed surprise is open and sincere. ‘I’d be a fool not to accept.’
‘Your family might have an opinion …’
‘My family’s opinion is that I should be back at João de Deus getting dusty and sweaty in a sasuit. No.’ She raises her martini glass. ‘Here’s to me. Ariel Corta, White Hare.’
Judge Nagai brushes her brow with her right forefinger. We may return to the recorded world. Ariel blinks Beijaflor back. The judge’s familiar Oko reappears. Judge Nagai leaves. The printer chimes. The Balenciaga party dress is ready. Beijaflor is already changing colour to match it.
Little Luna Corta is in a peony-print bubble dress. The dress is white, gathered at the hem, with a bold print of crimson flowers. A Pierre Cardin. But Luna is eight years old and tired of smart clothes so she kicks off her shoes and dashes barefoot through the bamboo. Her familiar is also Luna: a lime-green luna moth with great blue eyes on its wings. Luna moths are North American not South American, Grandmother Adriana told her. And you really shouldn’t give your familiar your own name. People mightn’t know who they are talking to.
Butterflies break from cover and swirl over Luna’s head. Blue, blue as the false sky, and wide as her hand. The Asamoah kids brought a party box and released them. Luna claps her hands in delight. She never sees animals in Boa Vista: her grandmother has a horror of them. Won’t allow anything furred or scaled or winged into Boa Vista. Luna chases the ribbon of slow-flapping butterflies, running not to catch them but to be free and floating like them. Air eddies, bamboo breaks whisper, carrying voices and music and the smell of cooking. Meat! Luna hugs herself. This is special. Distracted by the smell of grilling meat she pushes her way between the tall, waving canes of bamboo. Behind her, slow waterfalls cascade between the huge stone faces of the orixas.
Three and a half billion years ago magma burst from the living heart of the moon to flood the Fecunditatis basin; glugging slow in rilles and levees and lava tubes. Then the moon’s heart died and flows cooled and the hollow lava tubes lay cold and dark and secret, ossified arteries. In 2050 Adriana Corta came rappelling down from the access tunnel her selenologists had bored into the Sea of Fecundity. Her lights flashed out over a hidden world; an intact lava tube a hundred metres wide and high and two kilometres long. An empty, virgin universe, precious as a geode. This is the place, Adriana Corta declared. This is where I will create a dynasty. Within five years her machines had landscaped the interior, sculpted faces of umbanda gods the size of city blocks, set up a water cycle and filled the space with balconies and apartments, pavilions and galleries. This is Boa Vista, the mansion of the Corta family. Even on this celebration day the rock trembles to the vibrations of excavators and sinterers working deep in the walls, shaping rooms and spaces for Luna and her generations.
Today is Lucasinho’s moon-run party and Boa Vista has opened its green heart to society. Luna Corta weaves between amors and madrinhas, family and retainers, Asamoahs and Suns, Vorontsovs and even Mackenzies and people from no great family at all. Tall third-generations and short, squat first gens. Dresses and suits, turn-ups and petticoats, party gloves and coloured shoes. A dozen skin and eye colours. Wealth and beauty. Friends and enemies. Luna Corta was born to this, to the sound of falling water and the murmur of artificial wind through bamboo and branch. She knows no other world. On this special day, there is meat.
The caterers have set up electric barbecues under the overhang beneath Oxum’s bottom lip. Chefs poke and turn skewers. Greasy smoke rises up towards the skyline, set today for a bright blue afternoon with passing clouds. A bright Earth afternoon. Waiters ferry large plates of skewered meat to the guests. Luna places herself between a woman waitress and her destination.
‘Hey that’s a pretty dress,’ the waitress says in very bad Portuguese. She is short, not much taller than Luna, and square. She moves too much for the gravity. A Jo Moonbeam, fresh off the cycler. Her familiar is a cheap skin of unfolding tetrahedrons.
‘Thank you,’ Luna says, switching to Globo, the simplified English that is the common tongue. ‘It is.’
The wait-woman offers Luna her tray.
‘Chicken or beef?’
Luna takes a greasy, juicy beef skewer.
‘Careful not to get that on your lovely dress.’ She has a norte accent.
‘I would never do that,’ Luna says with immense gravity. Then she skips down the stone path beside the stream that runs through the heart of Boa Vista, pulling at chunks of bloody beef with her small white teeth. There is Lucasinho in his party clothes with his Dona Luna pin and a Blue Moon martini in his hand. His moon-run friends surround him. Luna recognises the Asamoah girl, and the Sun. Suns and Asamoahs have always been part of the family. It is easy to recognise the weird, pale Vorontsov boy. Like a vampire, Luna thinks. And that must be the Mackenzie girl. All gold.
‘You have beautiful freckles,’ Luna declares, butting in on Lucasinho’s group. She looks the Mackenzie girl full in the face. They laugh at her boldness, the Mackenzie girl most of all.
‘Luna,’ Lucasinho says. ‘Go and eat that thing someplace else.’ He makes it sound like a joke but Luna hears better. He’s pissed off at her. She is getting between him and Abena Asamoah. He probably wants sex with her. He is such a user. There is a line of upturned cocktail glasses at his feet. A user, and drunk.
‘Just saying.’ Cortas say what they think. Luna wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Meat, and now she hears music
. ‘I got freckles too!’ She touches a finger to her Corta-Asamoah cheeks, then runs on again. She darts over the stepping stones in the river in search of the music. She splashes up the river, kicking up slow-falling spray. Party guests coo and shriek and move away from the flying water but their faces are smiling. Luna knows she is irresistible.
‘Tio Lucas!’
Luna runs up to him and throws her arms around his legs. Of course he would be near the music. He is talking with the immigrant woman who served Luna the meat. She now bears a tray of blue cocktails. Luna has interrupted him. He ruffles Luna’s dark curly hair.
‘Luna, coração, you run on now. Yes?’ A little touch on the shoulder, turning her. As she slides away she hears him say to the waiter, ‘My son is not to be served any more alcohol. Understand? I’ll not have him drunk and ridiculous in front of everyone. He can do what he likes in private, but I won’t have him disgrace the family. If a single drop goes near him for the rest of the day, I will have every one of you back in Bairro Alto begging for second-hand oxygen and drinking each other’s piss. Nothing personal. Please convey this to your management.’
Luna loves her Uncle Lucas, the way he gets down to her level, his little games, his tricks and jokes that are just between them, but there are times when he is tall and far away, in another world that’s hard and cold and unkind. Luna sees the look of pale fear on the immigrant woman’s face and feels horrible for her.
Arms sweep her up, lift her high, throw her up into the air.
‘Hey hey anzinho!’
And catch her as she falls soft as a feather, her peony dress up around her face. Rafa. Luna presses close to her father.
‘Hey hey, guess who’s just arrived. Tia Ariel. Shall we go and find her?’ Rafa squeezes Luna’s hand and she nods her head vigorously.
In her killing dress Ariel Corta steps out of the station into Boa Vista’s great garden. The layers of her 1958 Balenciaga float in lunar gravity like petals. A murmur passes through the throng of guests. Ariel Corta. Everyone has heard of Alayoum vs Filmus. Luna bounds up to her tia. Ariel snatches her niece up in mid-bound, swirls her around while Luna shrieks in delight. Now her madrinha, Mônica, arrives. Warm embraces, kisses. Amanda Sun, Lucas’s wife. Lousika Asamoah, Luna’s mother. Rafa himself, snatching his sister up into the air so that she begs him to mind the dress. His other oko, Rachel Mackenzie, is in Queen of the South with their son Robson. She never sets foot in Boa Vista. Ariel is glad Rachel is not here. There is legal between them, and Mackenzies hold grudges. Next: moon-run boy himself. He’s awkward, gawky with his tia in a way he never is with his friends. Her finger rests a moment on his Dona Luna emblem, drawing his eye to the matching token on her corsage: imagine me naked, frosted, running across the bare moon.
Next the family retainers: Helen de Braga, head of finance – she has aged since Ariel last came to Boa Vista – and old, upright Heitor Pereira, head of security. Last of all, Lucas arrives. He kisses his sister warmly. She is the only sibling Lucas considers his equal. A whisper: he wants private words. Ariel’s gloved hand effortlessly snares a Blue Moon from a passing tray.
‘And how is Meridian this season?’ Lucas says. ‘I just can’t get the time to make it up there.’
Ariel knows that her brother thinks her disloyal for choosing the law over Corta Hélio.
‘Apparently I’m famous. Briefly.’
‘I heard something like that. Gossip and rumours.’
‘More rumours than oxygen, more gossip than water.’
‘I’ve also heard that a delegation from the China Power Investment Corporation is coming in on the Saints Peter and Paul. The rumour is a five-year output deal with Mackenzie Metals.’
‘I’ve heard similar myself.’
‘I also heard that the Eagle of the Moon is throwing a welcome jamboree for them.’
‘He is. And, yes, I am invited.’ Ariel knows her brother’s information network is powerful enough to have found about her counsel chamber chat with Judge Nagai.
‘You always had a skill for social politics. I envy that.’
‘Whatever it is Lucas, no.’
Lucas throws up his hands in mea culpa.
‘I merely repeated a few rumours.’
Ariel laughs like silver but Lucas is tenacious, Lucas is steel, Lucas has her trapped. Then, in a gust of peppery moon dust, a saviour arrives.
Maybe more meat. Maybe juice to drink. Lucas has cornered Tia Ariel. Uncle Lucas is boring when he talks with his face so close to another person. Then her eyes, her mouth go wide. She gives a squeak of excitement.
A figure in a sasuit strides down the ravine. His helmet is under his right arm, his left hand carries his LS pack. His feet are booted and the skin-hugging sasuit is a bright patchwork of logos and hi-visibility strips, navigation lights and race badges. His familiar rezzes, pixel by pixel, as he enters Boa Vista’s network. He sheds dust; a slow-settling trail of silvery black.
‘Carlinhos!’
Carlinhos Corta sees his niece rush to hug him and steps back but she bangs into him, grabs his legs, sends up a huge cloud of dust that settles on her beautiful peony dress like soot.
Two steps behind Luna comes Rafa. He trades play-punches, knuckle-touches with his kid brother.
‘You came cross-surface?’
Carlinhos holds out his helmet in evidence. In his patchwork sasuit and bearing the spicy, gunpowder smell of moon dust, he’s a pirate at a cocktail party. He dumps his LS pack and snatches a Blue Moon, downs it in one.
‘Tell you something, after two hours on a bike, drinking your own piss …’
Rafa shakes his head in appreciation of lunacy.
‘It’s going to kill you, that dumb biking. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day the sun’s going to flare and you’ll be out on the surface on a dust-bike five hours from anywhere. And it will fry. Your. Carioca. Ass.’ Each emphasis driven home with a prod to the shoulder.
‘And when was the last time you were up on the surface?’ Carlinhos play-punches his brother in the stomach. ‘What’s that I feel? Belly. You’re out of condition, irmão. You need to get surface-fit. You’ve been to too many meetings. We’re helium miners, not accountants.’
Oldest and youngest Corta boys adore sport. Carlinhos’s passion is dust-biking. He’s a pioneer of the extreme sport. He developed the bikes, the customised suits. He’s cut trails all over the Imbrium Apennines and established the cross-Serenitatis endurance race. Rafa’s sport is safer and more enclosed. He owns an LHL handball team. They’re standing high in the Premier League. Rafa shares the mania with his brother-in-law Jaden Wen Sun, owner of the Tigers of the Sun. They compete with humour and ferocity.
‘You staying around after the party?’ Rafa asks,
‘I’ve awarded myself a furlough.’ Carlinhos has been out for three lunes on Tranquilitatis, winning helium.
‘Come to the game. You should see what we’re doing.’
‘Losing, is what I heard,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Where’s moon-run boy? I heard about the Asamoah kid. That was good work. If he ever wants a job on the outside, I could use him.’
‘That’s not in Lucas’s life-plan.’
Two steps behind Carlinhos is a second young man in a sasuit, dark as Carlinhos is fair, with beautiful cheekbones and narrow, hunter eyes.
‘Wagner, irmão,’ Rafa says. A second volley of knuckle-touching. Wagner, youngest brother, smiles coyly.
Luna clings to her Uncle Carlinhos’s leg, smudged and smutted with moon dust.
‘Let me see you!’ Ariel declares, arriving with her entourage. ‘Beautiful boys!’ She bends to kiss but does not touch. No smuts on this dress.
Lucas has arrived, tactically late. He greets Carlinhos politely but routinely. He gives his attention to Wagner. ‘I love parties. All those distant relatives we never see.’
‘Wagner’s here as my guest,’ Carlinhos says.
‘Of course,’ Lucas says. ‘My house is your house.’
&nbs
p; Naked hatred arcs between Wagner and Lucas, then Carlinhos takes Wagner by the elbow and whirls him away into the party.
‘Luna, run on with Madrinha Elis,’ Rafa says.
‘We’ll get some of that dirt off you,’ Madrinha Elis says. She is a strong-faced, strong-built Paulistana, a head shorter than the moon-born generations. Earth bodies make strong hosts. The Cortas let none but Brazilians bear their children. She takes sooty little Luna by the hand and leads her away from grown-up talk to look at the musicians.
‘Lucas, not here,’ Rafa says softly.
‘He’s not a Corta,’ Lucas says simply.
A hand touches the back of Lucas’s hand. Amanda Sun is at his side.
‘Even for you, that was rude,’ she chides. Amanda Sun is third-generation; moon-tall, taller than her husband. Her familiar is zhen: ‘Shake’, in deep red. The Suns traditionally skin their familiars in hexagrams from the Book of Changes.
‘Why? It’s the truth,’ Lucas says. Society was surprised when Amanda Sun moved from the Palace of Eternal Light to still-raw Boa Vista. The nikah hadn’t specified it. The marriage was powerfully dynastic. Checks, balances, annulment clauses were in place. Yet Amanda Sun came to Boa Vista and has lived there for seventeen years. She seems as much a part of it as the peaceful orixas, or the running waters. Society – some parts of that still care – think she is playing the long game. The Suns were among the first settlers; with the Mackenzies, they consider themselves old stock, true lunar aristocracy. For over half a century they have battled the hegemony of the Peoples’ Republic, which would use the House of Sun as their bridgehead to dominate the moon. All agree that the Suns never marry without consideration.
For the past five years, Lucas Corta has lived in his apartment in João de Deus.
The music – soft bossa-jazz – stops. Glasses halt on their journeys to lips. Conversations die; words evaporate; kisses fail. Everyone is transfixed by the small woman who has stepped out from a door between the enormous, serene faces of the orixas.