Luna

by Ian McDonald

  ‘This is thorough,’ Rafa says. Sourness on his tongue and lips. Through his little fly Lucas knows of the private, furniture-smashing tantrums. The constant bodyguard, even among the waters of Boa Vista. The hesitation in Luna before her father scoops her up and throws her up into the air. Golden, affable Rafa is turning dark, ugly with sudden anger at parties and receptions. Berating his useless handball manager, his useless coaching team, his useless players. Lucas appreciates irony: the man who had no good word for his wife in life rages at her death. The news channels reported Rachel Mackenzie’s death as a catastrophic depressurisation event. A delicate lie. The press won’t press. Journalists who vex the Five Dragons suffer their own catastrophic depressurisation events. Report the smiles and the frocks, the affairs and the beautiful children, the marriages and the adulteries. Don’t tug the Dragon’s tail.

  ‘How soon?’ Adriana asks.

  ‘Twelve ZMT on Muku.’

  ‘Not long,’ Rafa says.

  ‘Long enough,’ Lucas says.

  ‘This is sound information?’ Adriana asks. Lucas sees her eyes darting over her own virtual lunar terrain. She has the highest surface hours of any living Corta, even Carlinhos. She may not have locked a helmet for ten years but once a duster, always a duster. She will be analysing the terrain, the dust cover, the logistics, the electrical effect of the moon’s transit of Earth’s magnetotail, the likelihood of a solar storm.

  ‘It comes from Ariel. A tip-off from someone in the Pavilion of the White Hare.’

  ‘Hell of a tip-off,’ Rafa says. Lucas hears an energy in his voice, an interest in his eyes. His muscles tighten, he draws himself up from his uncharacteristic stoop. The old gold light glows under his skin. It’s game night. The teams are in the tunnel and the crowd is in full cry. But he is still suspicious. ‘We have to act now.’

  ‘Delicacy,’ Adriana says. She presses the tips of her fingers together, vaults of a bone cathedral. Lucas knows this gesture well. She is calculating. ‘Too fast, we expose Ariel and I spend the rest of my years fighting my way through the Court of Clavius for alleged claim-jumping. Too slow …’

  The law on extraction rights is primitive: the steel law of placer stakes and gold rushes that shaped the North American West. Whoever stakes out the four corners of the newly released territory has forty-eight hours to lodge a legal claim and the licence fee with the LDC. It’s a straight race. Lucas has seen Rafa screaming, incoherent, transcendent at Moço games. This is the same thrill. This is what he loves: movement. Energy. Action.

  ‘What assets have we?’

  Lucas commands Toquinho to highlight extraction units around the target quadrangle. Orange icons lie at varying distance from north-west, north-east and south-east corners. The south-west vertex is dark.

  ‘I have the north-east Crisium units in motion. It will be hard to disguise it as a routine redeployment or a scheduled maintenance.’

  Lucas is jonmu: movement orders are not his to issue. Anger flickers; Rafa contains it. He passed the test.

  ‘My concern are the vertices.’ Toquinho zooms in the scale.

  ‘We have nothing we can get there in less than thirty hours,’ Rafa says, reading the deployment tags.

  ‘Nothing on the surface,’ Lucas hints. Rafa picks the ball up.

  ‘I’ll go talk to Nik Vorontsov,’ Rafa says. He dips his head to his mother and is in motion: decisions to be made, actions to be taken.

  ‘A simple call will save hours,’ Lucas says.

  ‘This is why I’m hwaejang, brother. Business is all about relationships.’

  Lucas dips his head. Now is the time for a small acquiescence. Let his mother see that her boys are united.

  ‘Bring this home, Rafa,’ Adriana says. Her face is bright, her eyes clear. Years have rolled from her. Lucas sees the Adriana Corta of his childhood, the empire builder, the dynasty-maker; the figure in the doorway of the berçário. Madrinha Amalia’s whisper: Say goodnight to your mother, Lucas. The smell of her perfume as she leaned over the bed. She wears it still. People are loyal to perfume in a way they are not to any other personal adornment.

  ‘I will, mãezinha.’ The most intimate term of endearment.

  Unseen, the spying fly disengages from its cranny and floats after Rafa.

  The bolt of electric blue hits Lucasinho square on the abs. Blue splat to join the red, the purple, the green, the yellow. Almost none of his bare body is unstained. He is a harlequin of colours, as bright as a reveller on Holi.

  ‘Whoa,’ Lucasinho says as the hallucinogen kicks in. He spins, gets a shot off from his splatgun and then the world unfolds into millions of butterflies. He turns, grinning like a fool, at the centre of a tornado of illusory wings.

  The game is Hunting, played up and down and through the Madina agrarium, with bare skins and guns that fire random bolts of coloured hallucinogens.

  The butterflies open their wings and link and lock together. Reality returns. Lucasinho ducks under the fronds of a towering plantain. Rotting fronds mash to slime beneath his bare feet. He advances, gun at the ready, still wide-eyed and trippy after the blue. He has been shattered into diamond tiles, flown up the side of an endless skyscraper, watched the colours drip from the world into purple, been his left big toe for what seemed an eternity, chasing and being chased through towering cylinders of dappled light, sniped at from positions high among yams and dhal bushes.

  Fronds rustle: movement. Splatgun muzzle next to his cheek, Lucasinho ducks under foliage into a small, damp clearing, heady with growth and rot, a hidden nest.

  Something touches the nape of his neck.

  ‘Splat,’ says a female voice. Lucasinho awaits the sting of the inkhit, the trip into somewhere else. He came to the party because it was at Twé and he might meet Abena Asamoah. Guerrilla games were not Abena Asamoah’s fun. But it is exciting to chase and be chased, to be lost and a little bit scared at times, to beat people to the draw and shoot them, to snipe them so that they never knew what had hit them, and be hit in return. The gun against his neck is sexy. He’s at the mercy of this girl. Arousing helplessness.

  He hears the trigger click. Nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ the girl says. ‘Out.’

  Lucasinho rolls and comes up, splatgun levelled.

  ‘No no no no!’ the girl cries, hands held up in surrender. Ya Afuom Asamoah, an abusua-sister of Abena and Kojo. Leopard abusua. AKA kinship makes his head hurt. Her skin bears five colour-blots, right hip, left knee, left breast, left thigh, the right side of her head. Lucasinho pulls the trigger. Nothing.

  ‘Out,’ he says. The same call rings out across the tubefarm, down from the high terraces and the sniping positions in the solar array. Out. Out. Faintly, down the tunnels that connect the agrarium tubes. Out. Out.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Lucasinho says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ya Afuom says. ‘I had you on your knees.’ She looks him up and down. ‘You’re covered, man. You need a bath. Come on. This is the best. You’re not scared of fish, are you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You get them in the ponds. Frogs and ducks too. Some people freak at the idea of being touched by a living thing that isn’t human.’

  ‘I think this game is broken,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The more you get hit, the easier it is to get hit.’

  ‘It’s only broken if you’re playing to win,’ Ya Afuom says.

  The bar is set up on the decking. Drinks and vapers in plenty but Lucasinho has had so many chemicals through his brain that he doesn’t welcome any more. The pools are already full. Voices and water-splash ring up the shaft of the tubefarm. Lucasinho lowers himself carefully into the water. Do fish bite, do they suck, can they swim up your dick-hole? Mildly hallucinogenic skin-paint dissolves into the water; halos of red and yellow and green and blue. What does that do to the fish? What does that do to the people who eat the fish? He can’t imagine eating anything that’s shared water with him. He can’t imagine eating anything with eyes.

  ‘Hey h
a!’ Ya Afuom splashes in beside him. Hips, butts touch. Legs entwine. Bellies rub, fingers walk.

  ‘Was that a fish?’

  Ya Afuom giggles and Lucasinho finds he has a breast in his hand and her fingers cradling his ass. His own hands dive deeper through the blood-warm water, seeking folds and secrets. ‘Oh you!’ She has the best ass since Grigori Vorontsov. Then he’s hard and they’re touching foreheads and looking on each other’s eyes and she’s laughing at him, because naked men are ridiculous.

  ‘I always heard the Asamoah girls were polite and shy,’ teases Lucasinho.

  ‘Who told you that?’ Ya Afuom says and pulls him in.

  Abena. Glimpsed through tomato leaves. Moving from the bar towards the service tunnel.

  ‘Hey! Hey! Abena! Wait!’

  He surges up out of the pool. Abena turns, frowns.

  ‘Abena!’ He strides dripping towards her. His semi swings painfully. Abena raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Hi Luca.’

  ‘Hey Abena.’

  Ya Afuom slips in beside him, puts her arm around him.

  ‘Since when?’ Abena says and Ya Afuom smiles and presses closer. ‘Have fun, Luca.’ She drifts away.

  ‘Abena!’ Lucasinho calls but she’s gone and now Ya Afuom is gone too. ‘Abena! Ya! What’s going on?’ Some game of abusua-sisters. Now the air is chill and the semi is gone and the hangover of the multiple hallucinogen hits makes him shivery and paranoid and the party has soured. He finds his clothes, begs a favour to get a ticket back to Meridian and finds the apartment very full of Kojo and his new toe. Lucasinho can stay the night but only the night. Homeless fuckless Abena-less.

  Wagner is late into Meridian. Theophilus is a small town, a thousand lives on the northern edge of the great desolation of Sinus Asperitatis where only machines move. The rail link to the mainline went in three years ago, three hundred kilometres of single track; four railcars a day to the interchange at Hypatia. A micrometeorite strike took out the signalling gear at Torricelli, trapping Wagner – pacing, scratching his itchy skin, drinking glass after glass of ice tea, howling in his heart – for six hours until the maintenance bots slotted in a new module. The railcar was crowded, standing room only for the hour-long ride.

  Am I changing before your eyes? Wagner thought. Do I smell different, other than human? He has always imagined he does.

  The Torricelli strike has thrown out travel plans over much of the western hemisphere. By the time Wagner gets into Hypatia Station – little more than the junction of four branch lines from the southern seas and central Tranquillity with Equatorial One – the platforms are thronged with commuters and shift workers, grandparents on pilgrimage around their extended families. Tribes of children; running, shrieking; sometimes complaining at the long wait. Their voices grate on Wagner’s heightened senses. His familiar has managed to book him on to Regional 37; three hours’ wait. He finds a dark and quiet place away from the families and the discarded noodle cartons and drinks cups, sits down with his back against a pillar, pulls his knees up and puts his head down and redesigns his familiar. Adeus, Sombra: olá Dr Luz. The pillars shake, the long halls ring to the impact of fast-passing trains, up there. Zabbaleen robots sniff around him, seeking recyclables. Calls, messages, pictures from Meridian. Where are you we want you it’s kicking off. Train trouble. Miss you, Little Wolf. None from Analiese. She knows the rules. There is the light half of life, and there is the dark half.

  Dr Luz couldn’t book Wagner his usual window seat so he can’t spend the journey gazing up at the Earth. That’s good: there’s work to be done. He has to devise a strategy. He can’t arrange a meeting. One whisper of Corta and Elisa Stracchi will run. He’ll lure her with a commission, but he’ll have to make it convincing and exciting. She will do due diligence. Companies within companies, nested structures, a labyrinth of holding bodies; a typical lunar corporate set-up. Not too complicated; that too will spark suspicion. He will need a new familiar, a counterfeit social media trail, an online history. Corta Hélio AIs can fabricate these but it takes time even for them. It’s hard to be thorough when he can feel the Earth up there, tearing at him, quickening and changing him with every fast kilometre. It’s like the first days of love, like being sick with excitement, like the moment of euphoria at the edge of being drunk, like dance hall drugs, like vertigo, but these are weak analogs; none of the moon’s languages has a word for what it’s like to change when the Earth is round.

  He almost runs from the station. It’s small morning hours when he falls into the Packhouse. Amal is waiting.

  ‘Wagner.’ Amal has embraced the culture of the two selves more fully than Wagner and has taken the Alter pronoun. Why should pronouns only be about gender? né says. Né pulls Wagner to ner, bites his lower lip, tugs with enough force to cause pain and assert ner authority. Né is pack leader. Then the true kiss. ‘You hungry, you want anything?’ Wagner’s demeanour says exhaustion more eloquently than words. Change days burn human resources. ‘Go on, kid. Jose and Eiji have still to arrive.’

  In the dressing room Wagner peels off his clothes. Showers. Pads soft-footed to the bedroom. The sleeping pit is already full. He lowers himself in; the soft upholstery, the fake-fur lining caress him. Bodies grunt and turn and mutter in their sleep. Wagner slides in among them, cupping and curling like a child. Skin presses close to him. His breathing falls into rhythm. Familiars stand over the entwined bodies; angels of the innocent. The union of the pack.

  The rover is lunar utility at its purest: a roll-frame open to vacuum, two rows of three seats facing each other, air plant, power, suspension and AI, four huge wheels between which the passenger frame hangs. Shit fast. Clamped in with her Surface Activity Squad, Marina jolts against the locking bars as the vehicle bounces up rilles, leaps crater rims. Marina tries to calculate her speed but the close horizon and her unfamiliarity with the scale of lunar landmarks gives her mathematics no anchorhold. Fast. And boring. Degrees of boredom: the high blue eye of Earth, the low grey hills of Luna, the blank faceplate of the sasuit opposite her – Paulo Ribeiro, says the familiar tag. Hetty flicks up in-suit entertainment. Marina plays twelve games of Marble Mayhem, watches Hearts and Skulls (a holding episode, as the writers maneouvre the series arc and characters towards the finale) and a new video from home. Mom waves from her wheelchair on the porch. Her arms are thin and blotched, her hair a grey straggle, but she smiles. Kessie and her nieces, and Canaan the dog. And there, oh there is Skyler her brother, back from Indonesia, and his wife Nisrina and Marina’s other nephews and niece. Against a background of grey rain, grey rain cascading from the overwhelmed porch gutter, a waterfall, rain so loud everyone on the porch shouts to be heard.

  Behind the blank mask of her faceplate, Marina cries. The helmet sucks up her tears.

  A tap on her shoulder. Marina unblanks her faceplate: Carlinhos leans across the narrow aisle of the rover. He points over Marina’s shoulder. The seat restraints allow just enough freedom to turn and take her first sight of the mining plant. Spidery gantries of the extractors reach up from beneath the close horizon. The squad mission is a scheduled inspection of Corta Hélio’s Tranquillity East extraction facility. Moments later the rover brakes in a spray of dust and the harnesses unclamp.

  ‘Stay with me,’ Carlinhos says on Marina’s private channel. She drops to the tyre-streaked regolith. She is among the helium harvesters. They are moon-ugly, gaunt and utilitarian. Chaotic, hard to comprehend in a glance. Girders house complex screws and separator grids and transport belts. Mirror arms track the sun, focusing energy on solar stills that fraction out helium-3 from the regolith. Collection spheres, each marked with its harvest. Helium-3 is the export crop but the Corta process also distils hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the fuels of life. High-speed Archimedes screws accelerate waste material into jets that arc a kilometre high before falling in plumes of dust like inverted fountains. Earthlight refracts from the fine dust and glass particles, casting moonbows. Marina walks up to the samba-line. Ten ext
ractors work a five-kilometre front, advancing at a crawl on wheels three times Marina’s height. The near horizon partly hides the extractors at each end of the samba-line. Bucket wheels dig tons of regolith at a scoop, moving in perfect synchronisation: nodding heads. Marina imagines tortoise-kaiju with medieval fortresses on their backs. Godzilla should be fighting these things. Marina feels the vibration of industry through her sasuit boots, but she hears nothing. All is silence. Marina looks up at the mirror arrays and waste jets high above her head, back at the parallel lines of tracks, ahead at the ridge of Roma Messier. This is her workplace. This is her world.

  ‘Marina.’

  Her name. Someone said her name. Carlinhos’s gloved hand grasps her forearm, pushes her hand gently away from her helmet latches. The latches: she had been about to open them. She had been about to remove her sasuit helmet in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Marina says, awed by the absent-minded ease with which she had almost killed herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just …’

  ‘Forgot where you were?’ Carlinhos Corta says.

  ‘I’m okay.’ But she isn’t. She has committed the unforgivable sin. She has forgotten where she is. Her first time out in the field and every word of training has fallen from her. She’s panting, snatching for breath. Don’t panic. Panic will kill you.

  ‘Do you need to go back to the rover?’ Carlinhos asks.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  But the visor is so close to her face she can feel it. She is trapped inside a bell jar. She must be rid of it out of it. Free, breathe free.

  ‘The only reason I’m not sending you back to the rover is because you said, I’ll,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Take your time.’

  He’s reading her biosigns on his hud; pulse rate, blood sugar, gases and respiratory function.

  ‘I want to work,’ Marina says. ‘Give me something to do, take my mind off it.’