Luna

by Ian McDonald

  Rafa punches concrete, hard. Blood sprays from his knuckles.

  ‘I know it was you!’ he bellows. ‘I know it was you! You want to put him in the chair of Corta Hélio!’

  On her return to Meridian Marina Calzaghe buys a window seat, top deck. Mountains and craters, great and dusty, short of magnificence, as she thought. She watches a telenovella on the entertainment channel. It makes no sense, it makes all sense. Love, betrayal and rivalry among the elite. This elite are rare-earth miners. It’s stupid and repetitive and badly acted. She watches it because she can. She sends a message home. Mom, Kessie: news news news. I GOT A JOB! A proper job. With Corta Hélio. The fusion people. Five Dragons. I can get that money to you. Hetty out-boxes it, then Marina goes into the train shopping menu to find a new skin for her familiar. Cute robot monkeys are cute but so very obvious. God with swords. Steam witch. Cyborg orca. Yes. She blinks buy and Hetty’s default form reformats into lithe liquid metal and black. Marina lets out a little ecstatic squeak. Money makes you free. She looks out the window again at the soft grey mountains and rilles, patterned with tyre and foot tracks, tries to imagine her feet out there with Carlinhos Corta and his dusters. The Cortas scoop up great buckets of dust, sift, sort it, extract the helium-3 and throw the rest away. Dirt work.

  Talk to Carlinhos, Lucas Corta had said. Marina ran. Post-crisis promises are forgotten if not redeemed instantly. Carlinhos brought her tea and sat her down under the dome of one of Boa Vista’s many pavilions to explain herself to him and Wagner.

  ‘So what’s your business?’

  ‘My postgrad degree was computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture.’

  There was a thing Carlinhos Corta did when he didn’t understand a thing. His lower lip sagged, just a millimetre, and the tiniest vertical line formed between his eyebrows. She thought it was cute. But when Wagner made that same frown, it meant he had dug deep beneath her words.

  ‘That’s making manufacturing more like biology,’ Wagner said.

  ‘Put very simply. I was studying how a solar-rich energy environment like the moon is analogous to a terrestrial photosynthetic dryland ecosystem like a tall-grass prairie, and how that might generate new manufacturing paradigms, and increase efficiency. Technology will always converge with biology.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Wagner said with tilt of his head, as if the weight of ideas had shifted him off balance. That’s your cute thing, Marina thought.

  ‘So have you any surface experience?’ Carlinhos interrupted.

  ‘I’ve been here eight weeks. I haven’t seen anything except the inside of Meridian.’

  Both Corta brothers still wore their sasuits. The hi-visibility beading followed the lines of their musculature. Marina inhaled their perfume of gunpowder moon dust and recycled body-fluids. Sweat of the moon. The boys were relaxed and easy in their dirty pressure skins. They filled her with hurt and longing in that same way snowboard gear and goggles made her soul tighten. Her friends, they boarded; up at Snoqualmie and Mission Ridge. They were snow kids. They had offered once to take her and teach her but a paper was due. Not an impossible paper, but a troubling one. It needed time. So she stayed in the apartment while they loaded the car and cried with loneliness when it drove away. She completed the paper but she would always be the Girl Who Missed Snowboarding. The offer never came again. Every time she saw goggles and gloves and gear in the stores, when the weather reported first falls up in the ranges; she ached with want and loss. Someone out in a parallel universe, snowboarder Marina existed; fresh and joyful. The decal-plastered sasuits, the helmets; they called her like rumours of snow. The opportunity is back again. Do not be the Woman Who Missed the Moon.

  ‘I want to work on the surface. I want to be up there. I can learn it.’

  ‘You need to learn a whole set of physical skills,’ Wagner said.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ Carlinhos said. ‘Report to the Corta Hélio Extractions Facility in João de Deus.’

  ‘I can do that.’ A subvocal whisper set Hetty on the task of finding accommodation.

  ‘Learn Portuguese,’ Carlinhos called as a farewell. Security was escorting huddles of guests and catering staff to the station. ‘And thank you.’

  Marina leans back in her window seat. The job, the apartment, the complete transformation of her life, is reflected in one tiny, imperceptible movement: she flicks up her chib in the bottom right corner of her vision and sees the O2 gauge in gold. She’s breathing on the Corta account. Marina is nearing the bottom of her second mojitka as the train pulls into Meridian and the airlocks seal with the doors. The escalators bring her up into the roaring, chaotic cathedral of Orion Hub. Every tea and water stall, every shop and outlet, every street food stand and service kiosk is brilliant with things she can buy. Then she remembers Blake, up there in the roof of the city, coughing his lungs up gobbet by gobbet. Orca-Hetty puts out bids to farmacias, contracts a price for a course of phage therapy. Multiplyresistant tuberculosis is a recent invader from Earth despite the strict quarantine, and not long finding a lodging, clinging like white mould to the damp, stagnant high ribs of the quadras, up among the poor. The stall prints out twenty white tablets. Little white tablets.

  Three bitsies for the express elevator. One bitsie for the escalator; riding up through the flat roofs and staircases and alleys of the West ‘80s and ‘90s. Beyond 110 nothing mechanical goes. She runs the rest of the way up into Bairro Alto, great tireless earth-leaps; whole stairways at a time. Here is the pissbuyer, here is our Lady of Kazan, still lightless and loveless. Here is the balcony from which she had envied the flying woman.

  The room is empty. Everything is gone: mattress; water bottles, Blake’s scraps and orts of things. Plastic spoons and plates. Empty to the last fleck of mucus, the last grain of dust. Skin flakes are precious organics.

  Surely she has come to the wrong house.

  Surely Blake has moved.

  Surely this can’t be.

  Marina leans against the door frame. She can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Hetty adjusts her lung function. Breathe. She shouldn’t breathe, oughtn’t breathe. Breathing undeserved air, while Blake is gone.

  ‘What happened?’ she shouts to the curtained doors and empty windows of the jostling cubicles. On the ladders and corridors, Bairro Alto turns backs to her. ‘Where were you?’

  I have footage, Hetty says and Marina’s lens overlays the empty room with bodies. Zabbaleen with their robots. Scavengers. She glimpses a foot, ankle turned out, at the end of a mattress. The Zabbaleen close around it and shut it out from view. The video has been snatched from a street camera so the angle is obtuse and the magnification grainy. The Zabbaleen come out with a hefty metal cannister in each hand.

  ‘Take it away take it away!’ she screams. Hetty kills the feed just as Marina sees the machines covering the door and window in vacuum plastic. Every last skin flake. Every last drop of blood. And there is nothing to be done. No appeal to be made. Blake is dead but, on the moon, death is no release from debt. The Zabbaleen sill collect on Blake’s chib accounts by viciously recycling every part of his body into useful organics.

  Coughing yourself to death, listening for the scritch-scratch of the Zabbaleen bots around your door, waiting for the coughs to fall silent.

  ‘Why didn’t you do anything?’ Marina shouts at the door and windows. ‘You could have done something. It wouldn’t take much. A couple of decimas from everyone. Would a couple of decimas have killed you? What kind of people are you?’ The empty doors, the turned backs, the shoulders hurrying away from her are her answer. People of the moon.

  The tram denies him. Refuses him. Defies him.

  Nothing has ever defied Lucasinho Corta before. For a moment the sheer affront paralyses him. He orders Jinji to open the lock again.

  Access is denied to you, Jinji said.

  ‘What do you mean, denied to me?’

  Access to the tram has been restricted from the following list of people: L
una Corta, Lucasinho Corta.

  He had thought his father was joking when he told Lucasinho that Boa Vista was under lock down. Protect the children.

  ‘Over-ride it.’

  I’m not able to that. I could inform security. Do you wish me to inform security?

  ‘Leave it.’

  Lucasinho had liked the idea of hanging around Boa Vista and João de Deus a while. Live the way you’re meant to live. No hurry about getting back to the university: his colloquium will fill in what he missed. That’s what it’s for. Now his father has locked him down and he has to get out. This is claustrophobia. Boa Vista is a stone intestine. He is locked in the gut of the beast, being slowly digested. He raises a fist to strike the defiant metal of the gate. Stopped. Has a sudden, brilliant, better idea.

  Carlinhos and Wagner came in through the surface lock. He can go out through it. And when he is through that lock, he can go anywhere. Everywhere. Away. Fuck lock-downs, fuck family security. Fuck family. Maybe not fuck his vo. She is old and not what she was, but she can still burn fierce and Lucasinho admires how she commands respect as naturally as breathing. And maybe not Carlinhos, though Lucasinho never quite knows what to say to his uncle, how to tell him that he thinks he’s all right. Lucasinho has feared for years that Carlinhos thinks him a dick. The kids aren’t even worth considering. The rest, fuck them.

  Especially fuck his father.

  The emergency suit-liners were not designed for third gens and it takes Lucasinho five minutes wrestling to pull it on. There is no room in the suit shell’s pressure pouch for his clothes. No loss. He can print new gear in João de Deus. He unpins his Lady Luna and packs her in the pouch. The emergency suit is a bulbous sci-fi robbie-robot, hi-viz orange, with flashers. Roomy enough inside for Lucasinho to move around. Jinji copies into the suit system and powers it up. On the surface he will be out of range of the network. Clamps clunk. Seals lock. Pressurisation hisses and fades.

  ‘Let’s take a walk,’ Lucasinho breathes. Jinji marches Lucasinho into the outlock. Lucasinho remembers his last outlock. Naked bodies. Knee to knee. Naked Abena Asamoah opposite him. The sweat evaporating on her perfectly curved breasts as the pressure reduces. He will have those breasts. Out there in the world. He will find them. He’s owed them. She has drawn his blood.

  He does not think about the inlock. The tangle of bodies, pulsing in and out of consciousness. The pain the red the black the pain. The scream of emergency repressurisation.

  The outer door slams open.

  Jinji controls the hard-shell’s servos and pushes the suit into a fast, loping run. Security will know a lock has been opened, a suit taken. They won’t know who had taken the suit, where it was going, how fast. They will work that out, but by then Lucasinho will be in, repressurised, out of the shell suit and lost among João de Deus’s crowds.

  You’re not so smart, Pai.

  Lucasinho steps out of the João de Deus lock and rides the elevator downtown. The suit will cycle out and jog back to Boa Vista under its own power. Emergency suits are too valuable to leave scattered around the Sea of Fecundity. A life might depend on it one day. It is almost as tough to pin the moon-run token through the pressure weave as it was to pull the skin-tight suit-liner on. He’s ruined its integrity. He hopes a life won’t depend on it one day. Hopes his life won’t depend on it. No: that was the last time Lucasinho Corta intends be on the surface.

  João de Deus is a half-made town; raw rock and low lintels, its prospekts and quadras tight and lean. Safety doors spasm and jerk, the sunline flickers. It smells of shit and body odour and environmental systems straining at their performance limits. The water tastes of batteries. Too many people, scurrying people. Always someone in front of you, in your way. Elbows and breath, ghosting through floating hosts of familiars. The signs and names, the handbills and graffiti are all Portuguese. João de Deus is Helium-ville, a frontier town. A company town and that is why Lucasinho is not staying here.

  ‘If you were my father, what would you do?’ Lucasinho asks Jinji.

  I would freeze your cash accounts.

  So Lucasinho heads to the station, not the fashion printshop.

  Suit-liners are commonplace in João de Deus, even acceptable. In Meridian Main Station, twenty heads have turned by the time he gets to the main escalator and up on to Gagarin Prospekt. Got to get out is this suit, even if he does wear it well? Could he persuade everyone it’s a new micro-trend? 1950s is so last lune. Surface-worker chic. Blue collar is the thing: so honest and now. He starts to walk a little big. Lead from the package, the lower belly. Swagger. He feels good. He’s done a thing. Because Boa Vista couldn’t hold him and family couldn’t keep him. Because he ran away, by his own cleverness and cool. Because he’s free. Because he is back. That’s not just a thing. That’s things. Lucasinho Corta feels more than good; he feels great.

  The waiter can’t hide the stare as Lucasinho orders a vaper and mint tea and stretches out in the café chair. Is it the suit or the muscles inside it? Lucasinho arches his back to tighten his stomach muscles opens his legs to show off the thighs. He likes to be looked at. I’m a rich kid in a suit-liner. I make this thing look good, but you can’t afford me.

  Lucasinho flicks the end of the vaper and inhales. THC coils cool in his throat. He feels the unwinding inside, the inner smile. He sips a glass of tea and has Jinji flash up the Boy de la Boy catalogue on his lens. By the time he has put a wardrobe together he is nicely high. Jinji flicks the order to a printshop. The order bounces back.

  Payment declined.

  Lucasinho falls off his high. It’s a long fall, and the hit at the bottom is hard.

  Your account has been frozen, Jinji says. A sick pit opens in Lucasinho’s stomach, full of wheels of rotating teeth. He looks around to see if anyone has noticed him jolt, gasp. The motos whir by, the crowds push along Gagarin Prospekt beneath the trees. No one one knows that in an instant he has gone from Dragon to beggar. No money, he has no money. He has never had no money. He doesn’t know what to do with no money.

  Lucasinho’s fingers find the plug Abena Asamoah put through his ear. When you need the help of House Asamoah; when you have no other hope, when you’re alone and naked and exposed, like Kojo … He turns it, enjoying the small pain of its tug on the scab. No. He is not that desperate yet. He’s Lucasinho Corta; he has charm, looks and hotness. These he can parlay.

  The four digits in his chib are huge and brilliant. They are the whole world: air, water, carbon, data. They can’t cut off the Four Elementals. Paying for air and data is a thing people who have to work do. Cortas have these things arranged. He can breathe, he can drink, he is connected, he has his carbon allowance. From that plan your next move. He can’t go to the apartment. His father’s escoltas are probably there already. He has friends, he has amors, he has places he can go. He needs clothes, somewhere to stay.

  He needs to go dark. Yes. This. His father can trace him through the network. So Jinji must go. That does make Lucasinho’s belly and balls tighten with fear. Off-network, disconnected. He hesitates to whisper the words that will shut Jinji down. This is social death. No, it’s survival. His father may already have identified his location from the failed payment. Contract security may already be on their way.

  He needs to pay for a vape and a tea.

  No he doesn’t need to pay for them. Like he did at Boa Vista and João de Deus, he can just walk away. What is the waiter going to do? Stab him? Raise a mob? He’s still a Corta. Lay skin on one Corta and all Cortas will cut you. There are no crimes on the moon, no theft, no murder. There are only contracts and negotiations.

  Lucasinho eases out of the chair and strolls across Gagarin Prospekt. Even in his fluorescent pink suit-liner, he disappears into the push of people and vehicles and bots. A few steps more and he is under trees. Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. As he walks he strips out commands and routines from Jinji, severs connections and clicks off utilities until he is left with an empty skin hovering over
his left shoulder. People get suspicious if they can’t see a familiar in their augmented vision.

  The walls of Orion Quadra rise on either side of him; tier upon tier, level upon level, lights and neons; Roman and Cyrillic and Chinese neons. Disconnecting Jinji has removed a layer of augmented advertising from the world but there are still physical screens and cute kawaii animations, looking down on him. Alone in Meridian without a bitsie to his thumbprint. Like poor people. Except he has friends up there, among the lights in the walls of the world. So, not like the poor people really. Fuck poor. He needs to get moving.

  All the moon is in love with Ariel by the time she arrives at the reception for the Chinese trade delegation. The LDC has hired an open belvedere on the eightieth level of the rotunda, the central axis where the five Prospekts of Aquarius Quadra meet. Vistas stretch for kilometres. Vertical gardens drop curtains of climbing plants over the open arches. Beyond them, lights drift across the voids.

  Ariel wears a Ceil Chapman cocktail dress. Every eye turns to her. Every human wants to orbit her. She can hear the whispers, see the heads nodding together. Attention is oxygen. She takes a draw on her long titanium vaper and advances into the party.

  The guests from the Five Dragons: Yao Asamoah from the Golden Stool; a reluctant, shy Alexei Vorontsov; Verity Mackenzie cradling a beautiful pet angora ferret, a biological one. It draws admiring attention. Wei-Lun Sun, orbiting at aphelion from the Chinese.

  The Chinese mission, all men, still ungainly and exaggerated in their movements. They make no effort to tune their bodies to the demands of lunar gravity. They don’t intend to be here that long. They bow and smile and shake Ariel’s hand and have no idea who she is except that she seems to be greatly celebrated. Ariel enjoys a small, sexual lower-belly prickle of excitement. She is the spy in the Ceil Chapman dress.

  The LDC grandees. Company managers and finance directors. Lawyers and judges.

  Judge Nagai Rieko nods over from across the room. Nods to the Eagle of the Moon. I’ve mentioned you to the Eagle, she says through her familiar. He approves. Ariel lifts a cocktail glass in answer. Welcome to the Pavilion of the White Hare.