by Ian McDonald
‘Oh Lucas, you shouldn’t have. It’s so expensive.’
Adriana Corta opens the tiny jar and breathes in the full aroma of the coffee. Lucas sees years and hundreds of thousands of kilometres roll across her face.
‘I’m afraid it’s not Brazilian.’ Coffee is more expensive than gold. Gold is cheap on the moon, valued only for its beauty. Coffee is more precious than alkaloids and diamorphines. Printers can synthesise narcotics; no printer has ever produced a coffee that tasted of anything other than shit. Lucas doesn’t have the taste for coffee – too bitter, and it is a liar. It never tastes the way it smells.
‘I will keep it,’ Adriana says, closing the jar and for a moment pressing it to her heart. ‘Something special. I’ll know the time. Thank you, Lucas. Have you called Amanda?’
‘I thought I might pass on it this time.’
Adriana passes no comment, not even a look. Lucas’s marriage to Amanda Sun has been etiquette for years now.
‘And Lucasinho?’
‘I cut off his money. I think Ariel gave him some. Dirty cash. What does it say about the family?’
‘Let him have his head.’
‘At some point the boy will have to take some responsibility.’
‘He’s seventeen. When I was that age I was running around with every boy and girl I could lay my hands on. He needs to run wild. By all means cut his money off – it’s good for him to live on his wits. It showed initiative, that trick with the escape suit.’
‘Wits? He’s not been graced with many of those. He takes after his mother.’
‘Lucas!’
Lucas winces at the rebuke.
‘Amanda is still family. We don’t put the bad mouth on family. And you have no right to be displeased with Ariel. Her seat in the White Hare isn’t even warm, and you’re compromising her position.’
‘We got the Chinese deal. We beat out the Mackenzies.’
‘I enjoyed that very much, Lucas. The handball shirts were a nice touch. We’re indebted to you. But sometimes there are bigger issues than family.’
‘Not to me, Mamãe. Never to me.’
‘You’re your father’s son, Lucas. Your father’s true son.’
Lucas accepts the praise, though to him it is bitter, like coffee. His father he has never known. He has only ever wanted to be his mother’s son.
‘Mamãe, can I speak in confidence?’
‘Of course, Lucas.’
‘I’m worried about Rafa.’
‘I wish Rachel hadn’t taken Robson to Crucible. And so soon after the assassination attempt. One could mistake it for conspiracy.’
‘Rafa’s convinced it is.’
Adriana purses her lips, shakes her head in frustration.
‘Oh come now, Lucas.’
‘He sees the Mackenzies’ hand in everything. Rafa’s said this to me. You know Rafa: good old Rafa, fun Rafa, party-boy Rafa. Who else might he say it to in an unguarded moment? Can you see the danger to the company?’
‘Robert Mackenzie will want payback for losing the Chinese deal.’
‘Of course. We’d do exactly the same. But Rafa will see it as another piece of Robert Mackenzie’s personal vendetta.’
‘What are you asking for, Lucas?’
‘Cooler heads, Mamãe. That’s all.’
‘Do you mean, Lucas Corta’s head?’
‘Rafa is bu-hwaejang, I have no disagreement with that. I wouldn’t want any diminution of his prestige. But maybe delegate some responsibilities?’
‘Go on.’
‘He’s the face of Corta Hélio. Let him be the face. Let him be the figurehead. Let him take the meetings and the pitches. Let him continue to sit in that chair at the head of the board table. Just, very subtly, move him out of making the decisions for the company.’
‘What do you want, Lucas?’
‘Only the best for the company, Mamãe. Only the best for the family.’
Lucas Corta kisses his mother goodbye: twice, for family. Once on each cheek.
Twenty kilometres downline from Crucible, Robson Corta-Mackenzie’s familiar wakes him with a song in his ear. The boy runs to the observation blister at the front of the car and presses his hands against the glass. To an eleven-year-old, the first glimpse of the capital of the Mackenzies never ages. The railcar is a Mackenzie Metals private shuttle, running out across the Ocean of Storms on the slow east line of Equatorial One: six sets of three-metre wide track; pure and shining with reflected Earth light, reaching out around the shoulder of the world, all the way around the world. A fast express, inbound from Jinzhong, seemingly leaps out of nowhere and is gone in a blur of light. Rachel finds the view from the front end of the shuttle nerve-wracking. The boy loves it.
‘Look, a Ghan-class hauler,’ Robson says as the rail car skims along the flank of the long, ponderous freight train on the slow up-line. It’s quickly forgotten for, on the eastern horizon, a second sun is rising; a dot of light so brilliant and piercing that the glass darkens to protect human eyes. The dot expands into a ball, hovering like a mirage on the edge of the world, never seeming to grow closer or brighter.
We will be arriving at Crucible in five minutes, the familiars announce.
Rachel Corta shields her eyes. She has seen this trick many times: the dot will dance and dazzle, then at the last instant, resolve into detail. It never fails to awe. The dazzle fills the entire observation bubble, then the rail car moves into the shadow of Crucible.
Crucible straddles the four inner tracks of Equatorial One. The bogies run on two separate outer tracks; old-fashioned steel, not maglev. The living modules hang twenty metres above the line, studded with windows and lights, casting perpetual shadow on the track beneath. Above them are the separators, the graders, the smelters; higher than all of them, parabolic mirrors focus sunlight into the converters. Crucible is a train ten kilometres long, straddling Equatorial One. Passenger expresses, freighters, repair cars run under and through it as if it’s the superstructure of a colossal bridge. Forever moving at an inexorable ten kilometres per hour, it completes one orbit in one lunar day. The sun stands at permanent noon above its mirrors and smelters. The Suns call their glass spire on the top of Malapert Mountain the Tower of Eternal Light. The Mackenzies scorn their affectations. They are the dwellers in endless light. Light bathes them, soaks them, enriches them; leaches and bleaches them. Born without shadows, the Mackenzies have taken darkness inside them.
The rail car passes under the lip of Crucible into shadows and spotlights. Half-seen highlights become a freighter, disgorging regolith through a battery of Archimedes screws. The rail car slows: train and Crucible AIs exchange protocols. This is the bit Robson likes best. Grapples lock on to the railcar and lift it from the line to dock into a slot in the rack of MacKenzie Metals rail shuttles. Hatches meet, pressure equalises.
Welcome home, Robson Mackenzie.
Blades of light stab down through the roof slots, so bright they seem solid. The approach to the heart of the Crucible is guarded by a palisade of light; shards from the mirrors that focus the sun on the smelters. A thousand times Rachel has made the progress down the hall and every time she feels the weight and heat of thousands of tons of molten metal above her head. It is danger, it is wealth, and it is security. The molten metal is Crucible’s only shield from the punishing radiation. It’s a constant awareness for the people of Crucible: the molten metals above their heads, like a steel plate in a fractured skull. Balanced, precarious. One day a system may fail, the metal will fall, but not this day, in her days, in her life.
Robson runs ahead of her. He’s seen Hadley Mackenzie at the lock to the next compartment, his favourite uncle, though only eight years separate them. Hadley is the son of patriarch Robert from his winter marriage to Jade Sun. An uncle then, but more like an older brother. Only sons are born to Robert Mackenzie. It’s the Man in the Moon, the old monster still jokes. Through selective abortion, embryo mapping, chromosome engineering the joke has become a truth. Hadley s
coops Robson up into the air. The boy flies high, laughing and Hadley Mackenzie’s strong arms catch him.
‘Result with the Brazilian then,’ Hadley says. He kisses his step-niece on each cheek.
‘I really think he’s the child,’ Rachel Mackenzie says.
‘I hate the thought of Robbo growing up there,’ Hadley says. He’s short, wire and steel, knots of wrought muscle and sinew. Blade of the Mackenzies; deeply freckled from sessions in sun-rooms. Spots upon spots; a leopard of a man. He picks and scratches constantly at his pelt. Too long under the sun-lamps, working on his vitamin D. ‘That’s no place for a kid to learn how to live right.’
Message from Robert Mackenzie, announces Cameny, Rachel’s familiar. Hadley and Robson’s expressions tell Rachel that they are receiving the same communication. ‘Rachel, my love. I’m glad you’ve brought Robson home safe. Delighted. Come and see me.’ The voice is soft, still accented with Western Australian, and unreal. Robert Mackenzie hasn’t sounded like that longer than any of the three people in the lobby have been alive. The image in the lenses isn’t Robert Mackenzie, but his familiar: Red Dog, the symbol of the town that birthed his ambition.
‘I’ll take you up to him,’ Hadley says.
A capsule takes Rachel, Robson and Hadley to the head of Crucible; ten kilometres upline. The maglev drive of the capsule seems to Rachel to amplify the gentle but ever-present tremor of movement. The slow rock of the Crucible on its tracks is the heartbeat of home. Rachel Mackenzie was a reading child, and on those screens, among those worlds built of words, she sailed oceans of water with dire pirates and swashbucklers. In her world of stone seas, this is the closest she can imagine to being on a sailing ship.
The capsule decelerates abruptly and docks. The lock opens. Rachel breathes green and rot, humidity and chlorophyll. This carriage is a great glass conservatory. Under constant sunlight and low lunar gravity, ferns grow to stupendous heights; a green vault of fronds against the curved ribs of the greenhouse. Dappled light, tiger-stripe light: the sun stands unmoving, a hair off the zenith. The ferns all lean towards it. Among the ferns, bird-calls and bright flickers of plumage. Something is whooping somewhere. This is a paradise garden but Robson takes his mother’s hand. Bob Mackenzie dwells here.
A path winds between pools and softly gurgling streams.
‘Rachel. Darling!’
Jade Sun-Mackenzie greets her step-granddaughter with two kisses. The same for Robson. She is tall, long-fingered, elegant and delicate as the fronds around her. She looks not a day older than the one on which she married Robert Mackenzie, nineteen years ago. None of Robert Mackenzie’s offspring are deceived by her appearance. She’s wire and thorn and tight, sinewy will. ‘He can’t wait to see you.’
Robson’s hand tightens on his mother’s.
‘He’s been in a foul mood since the Cortas stole that Chinese output deal,’ Jade throws over her shoulder. She sees Robson glance up at at his mother. ‘But you’ll sweeten it.’
Robert Mackenzie waits in a belvedere shaped from woven ferns. Budgerigars and parakeets keep up an insane gossip of chirps and whistles. Robot butterflies flap lazily on wide iridescent polymer wings.
The legend is that the chair keeps Robert Mackenzie alive but one look tells the truth: it is the will that burns in the back of his eyes. Will to power, will to own, will to hold and let nothing be taken, not even his husk of a life. Robert Mackenzie stares down death. The life-support system towers over his head like a crown, a halo. Tubes pulse, pumps hiss and spin, motors hum. The backs of his hands are blotched with slow-healing haemotomas where needles and cannulas pierce the flesh. No one can bear to look more than an instant at the tube in his throat. The perfume of fern, the smell of fresh water, can’t hide the smell. Rachel Mackenzie’s stomach lifts at the taint of colostomy.
‘My darling.’
Rachel bends to kiss the sunken cheeks. Robert Mackenzie would notice any hesitation or revulsion.
‘Robson.’ He opens his arms to embrace. Robson steps forward and lets the arms enfold him. A kiss from the hideous old mummy, on both cheeks. Robert Mackenzie was forty-eight years old when he chose Mare Insularum over Western Australia and committed family and future to the moon. Too old to go to the moon. He would never survive the lift to orbit, let alone the slow gnaw of low gravity on his bones and blood vessels and lungs, the steady sleet of radiation. Leave it to the kids and the robots. Robert Mackenzie came and sunk the foundations of the moon’s million-strong society. This thing in the life-support chair can rightly claim to be the Man in the Moon. One hundred and three years old, a dozen medical AIs monitor and maintain his body, but its fuel is the same will in his pale blue eyes.
‘You’re a good kid, Robson,’ Robert Mackenzie breathes in the boy’s ear. ‘A good kid. It’s good to have you back where you belong, away from those Corta thieves.’ The papery claw hands shake the boy. ‘Welcome home.’ Robson tears himself free from the frail claws. ‘They won’t steal you back.’
‘My husband has been thinking,’ says Jade Sun. She stands behind him, one hand on the old man’s shoulder. The hand is slim, refined, nails lacquered, but Robert Mackenzie seems to sag under its tiny weight. ‘Is there any reason why Robson shouldn’t be married?’
Hi Mom, hi Kessie. Kids, if you see this, hi. I’ve been kind of quiet for a while. I have an excuse. So: as I said in my really rushed mail, I am working for the Dragons. Corta Hélio. The helium-3 miners.
I’m working for Corta Hélio. I just thought I’d say that again so you can appreciate it. What it means right up front is, no more worrying about oxygen or water or carbon or network, which is why I can send you this. I don’t think I can make you understand how it feels not to have to worry about the Four Elementals again. It’s like winning a lotteria, where you get to keep breathing rather than winning ten million dollars.
I can’t tell you too much about how I got the job – it’s a security thing: the Five Dragons are like the Mafia, always at each other’s throats. But I can say that I am under the personal watch of Carlinhos Corta. Kessie, sister. You should emigrate. This rock is full of hot bodies.
I’m in a surface activity induction squad. Moon-walking. There’s a lot to learn. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. That’s rule one and it rules everything. There are ways of moving, reading signs and signals, being in or out of communications, analysing data from your suit and you need to know them or the one tiny thing you’ve overlooked will cook you or freeze you or asphyxiate you or shoot you full of radiation. We spent three whole days on dust. There are fifteen kinds of dust and you need to know the physical properties of each one from abrasion to electrostatic properties to adhesion. Like Sherlock Holmes learning his fifty types of cigar ash? There’s battery recharge times, lunar navigation – Jo Moonbeams misjudge the horizon and think everything is much further away than it is. And they haven’t even taken us up on the surface yet. And the sasuits. I know they’re meant to be tight, but are they sure they’ve got the size right? Took me ten minutes to get into the thing. Wouldn’t want to do that in a depressurisation. Put it on wrong and you get bruising where the seams pinch. Mind, if the environment deepees, bruising is the least of your worries.
I’m probably scaring you to death. But you get used to it. No one could live with that level of constant dread. But if you ever once get sloppy, it will have no mercy. Carlinhos tells me we usually have at least one death each induction squad. I’m being extra careful that it’s not me.
My squad: Oleg, José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience and me. I’m the only Norte. They look at me. They would say things about me but the only common language is Globo and I’m a native anglophone. They don’t like me. Carlinhos works more or less one to one with me and that makes me different. The special one. So the trainers think I’m a Corta spy and class thinks I’m teacher’s pet. The one who dislikes me least is Patience. She’s originally from Botswana but, like the rest of the squad, she’s been in universities and corporations all
over the worlds. Jo Moonbeams must be the most educated immigrants in history. Patience will talk to me and share tea. José wants me dead. If he could engineer it without him getting caught I think he might. He interrupts everything I have to say. I can’t work out if it’s because I’m a woman or a North American. Probably both. Asshole. The squad mentality is like a college football team. Everything in your face in your face in your face. Every breath you taste testosterone. It’s not just because it’s extractive industries; everyone is young, smart, ambitious and very very motivated. At the same time, this is the most sexually liberal society that has ever existed. Lunar Globo doesn’t even have words for straight or gay. Everyone is on the spectrum somewhere.
I’ll tell you what’s hard. Learning Portuguese. What kind of language is this? You have to make yourself sound like you have a permanent head-cold. Nothing sounds the way it spells. At least Portuguese reads logically. But the pronunciation … There is Portuguese pronunciation, and then there is Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation. And then there is Rio Brazilian Pronunciation. And last of all there is the Lunar Variant Rio Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation; and that’s what Corta Hélio speaks. I suggested Hetty translates everything: the looks I got. So, it’s time to learn Portuguese. Which means, adeus, eu te amo, e eu vou falar com você de novo em breve!
Lucas Corta spirals down as light and fragile as a dream through pillars of leaves. Water drips and runs, trickles and riffles, through the runnels and pipes that connect the tiers of grow-tanks. He spirals around the central column of mirrors, reflecting sunlight on to the stacks. Glances up: the green goes up forever until it merges with the blinding sun-coin of the farm cylinder cap. The agriculture shaft is a kilometre deep. The Obuasi agrarium contains five such shafts, and Twé lies at the centre of a pentagram of seventy-five such agraria. Lettuces, salad vegetables, packed so tight a beetle could not crawl between them. If there were beetles on the moon but there are none, nor aphids, nor chewing caterpillars: no insect pests. Potato plants the size of trees; climbing beans reach a hundred metres up the support lattices. The fronds of root vegetables; verdant banks of calaloo and aki. Yams and sweet potatoes; gourds and cucurbits: pumpkins the size of Meridian motos. All nurtured by the run and trickle of nutritionally enriched water, crossplanted and symbiotically managed in self-sustaining micro-ecosystems. Obuasi has never lost a harvest, and it crops four times a year. Now Lucas looks down. Far below, on the catwalks over the fish tanks, are two insect-figures. Ducks gabble, frogs belch. One of those tiny figures is him.