by Ian McDonald
‘The audio quality is extraordinary,’ he says, blinking out of the vision on his lens.
‘Thank you,’ says Kobby Asamoah. He is a vast man, tall and broad. Lucas Corta is a pale shadow next to him. He lifts a hand and the fly lands on it.
‘May I?’
A thought sends the fly from Kobby Asamoah’s hand to Lucas’s. He lifts it to eye-level.
‘You could kill us all in our sleep. I like it.’ Lucas Corta throws the fly up into the air and watches it climb up the shaft of light and green and dank chlorophyll until it is lost to vision. ‘I’ll buy it.’
‘Unit life is three days,’ Kobby Asamoah says.
‘I’ll need thirty.’
‘We can deliver ten and print the rest up.’
‘Deal.’
Toquinho takes the price from Kobby Asamoah’s familiar and flashes it up on Lucas’s lens. It is quite obscene.
‘Authorise payment,’ Lucas orders.
‘We’ll have them for you at the station,’ Kobby Asamoah says. His big, wide open face works again. ‘With respect, Mr Corta, isn’t it a rather excessive way to keep an eye on your son?’
Lucas Corta laughs aloud. Lucas Corta’s laugh is deep, resonant, like chiming music. It quite startles Kobby Asamoah. The ducks and frogs of Obuasi agrarium tubefarm five fall silent.
‘Who says it’s for my son?’
Heitor Pereira lets the fly run over his hand, tiny hooked feet tickling his dark, wrinkled skin. Whichever way he turns the hand, the Asamoah fly stays uppermost.
Lucas says, ‘I want twenty-four-hour surveillance.’
‘Of course, Senhor. Who is the target?’
‘My brother.’
‘Carlinhos?’
‘Rafael.’
‘Very good, Senhor.’
‘I want to know when my brother fucks, farts or finances. Everything. My mother is not to know. No one is to know, except you and me.’
‘Very good, Senhor.’
‘Toquinho will send you the protocols. I want you to handle it personally. No one else. I want daily reports, encrypted, to Toquinho.’
Lucas reads the distaste on Heitor Pereira’s face. He is a former Brazilian naval officer, cashiered when Brazil privatised its defence forces. He fell from grace with the sea and left it for the moon where, like so many ex-military, he set up a private security company. Those days when Adriana was tearing Corta Hélio from the ribcage of Mackenzie Metals were bloody days, of claim jumping and duels of honour and faction fights, when legal disputes were more quickly and economically ended with a knife in the dark. Lives pressed up close against each other, breathing each other’s air. Heitor Pereira has stopped many a blade for Adriana Corta. His loyalty, his bravery and honour are beyond question. They are just irrelevant. Corta Hélio has moved around him. But the loathing Lucas sees is not for that, not even the surveillance fly. Heitor hates that his lapse at the moon-run party has led him into a yoke and harness. Lucas can ask anything of him, forever more.
‘And Heitor?’
‘Senhor?’
‘Don’t fail me.’
An archipelago of dried semen lies across the perfect hollow of Lucasinho Corta’s left ass cheek. He gently lifts Grigori Vorontsov’s arm and slides out from the boy’s embrace. He stretches, tightens muscles, cracks joints. The Vorontsov kid is heavy. And demanding. Five times he had been tottering on the edge of sleep when he felt the prickle of beard against his cheek, the whisper in his ear – hey, hey – the throb of hardening penis against his inner thigh.
Lucasinho has always known that Grigori is hot for him – mad hot, Afua in the study group had said, in one of those girls’ games where you are never told the rules but are punished horribly if you break them – but not that he was such a consummate fucker. He could fuck for hours. Steady, deep, hard. A relentless fucker. And generous with the reach-round. He had hardly been able even to moan. Who would have known the passion inside the guy across the table, when they met up at their weekly in-person colloquium seminars? It was great, tremendous, the best sex he has ever had with a boy, but no more now, right? No more.
For such as Lucasinho Corta has received, what shall he give? Cake. Since his father cut him off he has little else to give. While Grigori snores Lucasinho searches the cooler. Almost as bare as Ariel’s, but there’s enough to bake up a batch of flourless brownies. Two batches. Lucasinho is thinking of his next bed. He can’t stay another night in this one. He can’t take it. Lucasinho drips a little of Grigori’s stash of THC juice into the mix. They had vaped it last night, sprawled across each other on the couch, sharing smokes and kisses. He glances back at Grigori spread like a star across the bed. So hairy. They say that about the Vorontsovs. Hairy and weird. Touched by space. Lucasinho knows the legends. House Vorontsov descends from Valery, the original patriarch, an oligarch who invested in a private launch facility in Central Asia. Wherever that is. They built the orbital tethers, the two cyclers that loop constantly in a figure of eight between moon and Earth; the BALTRAN, the rail network. Space has changed them. They have bred strange: weird, elongated things born to freefall. No one has seen a cycler crewperson for years. They can never come down. Gravity would crush them like decorative butterflies. But none so strange as Valery himself – still alive, a monster grown so huge, so bloated that he fills all the core of a cycler. The legends can never agree whether it’s Sts Peter and Paul or Alexander Nevsky. That’s how you know it’s true. Stories are always too neat.
Lucasinho waves his hand over the cooker panel to clear the glass, peers in at his batches. He glances anxiously at Grigori. This is not the time for the beast to wake. A few minutes more. And out and cooling. Lucasinho feels the shadow on his skin before the press of Grigori’s hair and muscles.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Baking.’
‘What, like?’
‘Brownies. They’re good. They’ve got hash in them.’
‘Do you always bake like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like no clothes.’
‘It connects me.’
‘I think it’s hot.’
Lucasinho’s heart sinks. Grigori is close and tight against him, getting hard. Is this boy made of cum? Lucasinho picks of a crumb of cooling brownie and turns to slip it between Grigori’s lips.
‘Sweet.’
Then they go back to it again.
Marina has a balcony. It’s small but quite addictive. At the end of each day she returns from her training group bone-weary and aching from the new things her body must learn for Corta Hélio and goes to her balcony.
The apartment Corta Hélio has assigned her is on the West 23rd of Santa Barbra Quadra so the drop from the balcony to the street, while not as high as the one from Bairro Alto to Gagarin Prospekt, is an overhang. The vertigo attracts her. And the sounds. João de Deus’s Portuguese-speaking streets have a different timbre from Meridian. Shouts and greetings; the look-at-me cries of teenagers, the voices of children buzzing up and down Kondakova Prospekt on big-tyred tricycles. Different voices. The hum of the moto engines, the elevators, the escalators and moving walkways, the airplant; different noises. The light of the skyline is brighter, the spectrum more yellow than Meridian. The colours of the neons cluster around blue green and gold, the colours of Old Brasil. The names, the words are exclusively Portuguese. Different, exciting. João de Deus is a compact city; eighty thousand people in three quadras, each eight hours out of phase with its neighbours: mañana, tarde, noche. In many ways João de Deus is an old-fashioned place, sculpted from the lava tubes that thread the skin of Mare Fecunditatis. Santa Barbra Quadra is three hundred metres in diameter and feels cramped to Marina. The roof feels close and heavy. She is a little claustrophobic. But there is not enough airspace for fliers and for that Marina is thankful. She hates those fit, arrogant aeronauts.
‘O bloqueio de ar não é completamente despressurizado,’ she says. She
tries to speak Portuguese around the apartment. Hetty has been programmed not to respond to Globo.
Daqui a pouco sair para a superfície da lua, Hetty responds. Seu sotaque é péssimo. Her familiar not only speaks better Portuguese than her, she does so in a perfect Corta Hélio accent.
Hetty breaks off her lesson.
Carlinhos Corta está na porta, she says.
Hair good, face good, straighten clothing, check teeth, fold unmade bed back into wall. Within twenty seconds Marina is ready to receive her boss.
‘Oh.’
Carlinhos Corta is dressed in a pair of shorts, footgloves and coloured braids around his elbows, wrists, knees and ankles. That’s all. He greets her in Portuguese. Marina barely hears him. He is a beautiful sight. He smells of honey and coconut oil. Beautiful, intimidating.
‘Get dressed,’ he says in Globo. ‘You’re coming out with me.’
‘I am dressed.’
‘No you’re not.’
Senhor Corta está acessando a sua impressora, Hetty says. The printer dispenses shorts (short) a bra top (skimpy) and footgloves. The instruction is clear. Marina slips them on in her washroom. She tries to pull the top down, the shorts up. She feels nakeder than naked. In her room is her boss and she doesn’t know what he is doing, why he has come, who or what he is really.
‘For you.’ Carlinhos scoops handful of green braids from the printer. ‘I’m giving you the colour of my orixa, Ogun.’ He shows her how to tie them around her joints, how much of a tail to leave hanging. The footgloves feel as if they are sucking her toes. ‘You can run, can’t you?’
Marina follows him down ladeiros. The staircases are narrow and shallow, difficult to jog. Passersby press in to the walls and nod greetings. She runs at Carlinhos’s shoulder along Third, parallel to the central Prospekt but three levels higher. Bicycles and motos whirl past. Marina smells grilling corn, hot oil, frying falafel. Music beats from tiny five-seater bars carved into naked rock. The skyline dims towards purples and reds. Carlinhos takes a left on to a cross-passage. Marina is now under artificial lights. From a T-junction main tunnel ahead she thinks she hears chanting voices. Then she sees a body of runners sweep past along the tunnel, their familiars a hovering choir. Bare skin glistens with oil, sweat, body-paint. Tassels and braids stream from elbows and knees, wrists and throats and foreheads. Singing. They are singing. Marina almost stops dead in surprise.
‘Come on pick it up,’ Carlinhos says and adds half a metre to his stride. Marina lunges after him. She is not a runner but she still has Earth muscle and she catches him easily. Carlinhos turns into the intersecting tunnel, a wide service way curving gently to the right. Marina is unfamiliar with this part of João de Deus. Ahead is the pack of runners, tightly bunched, a peloton. Under lunar gravity they surge and lunge like running gazelles. A rolling sea of movement. Marina hears drums, whistles, the chime of finger cymbals over the chanting. Carlinhos catches up with the back markers. Marina is two steps behind him. The runners part to admit them and Marina falls in easily with the pace.
‘Pick it up again,’ Carlinhos calls and pulls ahead. Marina kicks and follows him into the heart of the pack. Beats engulf her, their rhythm the rhythm of her heart, her feet. The chanting voices call to her voice. She can’t understand the words but she wants to join them. She is expanded. Her senses, her personal space overlap with the runners close around her, yet at the same time she is radiantly conscious of her body. Lungs, nerves, bones and brain are a unity. She moves effortlessly, perfectly. Every sense is tuned to its highest possible note. She hears the drums in her knees, her heels. She smells the sweat of Carlinhos’s skin. The play of the tassels across her skin is erotic. She can distinguish every hovering dust mote. She recognises a shoulder tattoo at the head of the pack and, as if her look was a touch, Saadia from her squad turns and acknowledges her. A wave of undiluted joy breaks through Marina’s entire body.
The words. She knows them now. They are Portuguese, a language she doesn’t fully understand, in a dialect she can’t comprehend, but their meaning is clear. St George, lord of iron, my husband. Saint strike boldly. St George has water but bathes in blood. St George has two cutlasses. One for cutting grass, one for making marks. He wears robes of fire. He wears a shirt of blood. He has three houses. The house of riches. The house of wealth. The house of war. The words are in her throat, the words are on her lips. Marina has no idea how they got there.
‘Pick it up, Marina,’ Carlinhos says a third time and together they move through the press of bodies and familiars to the head of the pack of runners. There is nothing in front of Marina. The tunnel curves away forever before her. Air eddies cool on her skin. She could run like this forever. Body and mind, soul and senses are one thing, greater and more perceptive than any of its elements.
‘Marina.’ The voice has been calling her name for some time. ‘Drop back.’ They peel from the lead position and drop down the side of the pack. ‘Take this right.’
It’s physical pain to leave the runners for the cross tunnel, but the emotional hurt is crushing. Marina comes to a halt, hands on thighs, head bowed, and howls with loss. She hears the voices and drums and chimes of the runners disappearing into the distance and it is like she has been cast out of elf-land. Beat by beat she remembers who she is. Who he is.
‘I’m sorry. Oh God.’
‘Better to keep moving or you will lock up.’
She coaxes her body into a painful jog. The cross tunnel opens on to Third Santa Barbra Quadra. The skyline is dark, the quadra glows with low pools of street light and ten thousand windows. Marina is cold now.
‘How long was I …’
‘Two complete circuits. Sixteen kilometres.’
‘I didn’t notice …’
‘You don’t. That’s the idea.’
‘How long …’
‘No one really knows, but it’s been going on all my life. The idea is that it never stops. Runners drop in, runners drop out. We cycle through the saints. It’s my church. It’s where I heal, where I disappear for a time. Where I stop being Carlinhos Corta.’
Now the weight of those sixteen kilometres descends on Marina’s thighs and calves. She had only ever been a reluctant runner in pre-launch training. This is different. Part of her will always be out there, running in that ever-circling wheel of praise. She can’t wait to go back.
‘Thank you,’ she says. Anything more would tarnish the moment. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we shower.’
Analiese Mackenzie descends the spiral staircase from the bedroom into the entrails of a fly; exploded, expanded, enhanced and annotated. Wings unfold into vanes, eyes disintegrate into their component lens, legs and pulps and proboscis, nanochips and protein processors whirl around her head. At the centre sits Wagner, back turned, naked as he likes to be when he is concentrating, summoning and dismissing, enlarging and superimposing images in their shared sight. It’s dazzling, it’s dizzying, it’s four thirty in the morning.
‘Ana.’
She made no sound she’s aware of but Wagner has picked her out of the apartment’s background of hisses and hums and creaks. It starts with heightened sensitivities, restlessness, a boundless energy. This insomnia is something new.
‘Wagner, it’s …’
‘Take a look at this.’
Wagner leans back his chair, slips an arm around Analiese’s ass. His other hand spins dismembered fly around the room.
‘What is this?’ Analiese asks.
‘This is the fly that tried to kill my brother.’
‘Before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of us.’
‘Oh I’m sure of that.’ Wagner reaches out, pulls a knot of protein circuit out of the exploded fly and dismisses everything else. ‘See?’ He twists his hand, enlarges it until it fills the small room; a brain of folded proteins.
‘You know I’ve got no eye for this kind of thing.’ Analiese works in custom meta logi
cs and plays sitar in a classical Persian ensemble.
‘Heitor Pereira wouldn’t have known what to look for. Not even the R&D guys. It took me a while to find it but the moment I saw it, I thought, that has to be it, and I blew it up and it was, I mean, it’s written all over the molecules, it’s like she scrawled her tag all over it but you have to know what you’re looking for, you have to know how to see.’
‘Wagner.’
‘Am I talking really fast?’
‘Yes you are. I think it’s starting.’
‘It can’t. It’s too early.’
‘It’s been getting earlier and earlier.’
‘It can’t!’ Wagner snaps. ‘It’s a clock. Sun rises, sun sets. You can’t change that. That’s astronomy.’
‘Wagner …’
‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He kisses the hollow of her belly and he feels the muscles tighten beneath the honey skin, a thing he loves so hard, because it’s not tech or code or math; it’s physical and chemical. But he can feel the change, like the sun beneath the horizon. He had thought it was the fascination, the dedication that drove his mood, but he realises it’s the change driving his fascination. When the Earth is full, he can work for days on end, burning. ‘I have to go to Meridian.’
He feels Analiese pull away from him.
‘You know I hate it when you go there.’
‘It’s where the woman who made this processor is.’
‘You never had to make excuses before.’
He kisses her strong belly again and she slips a hand behind his head, lacing her fingers through his hair. Analiese smells of vanilla and fabric-conditioned sheets. Wagner breathes deep and pulls away.