by Ian McDonald
Flavia makes food. It’s substantial, entirely vegetable like most lunar cuisine but it tastes thin to Lucasinho, like music from a guitar missing bass strings.
‘Is there something wrong with onions and garlic?’ he asks. ‘And chili?’
‘They are theologically improper vegetables,’ Flavia says. ‘They raise passions and stimulate base instincts.’
Lucasinho picks at his food.
‘Madrinha, why did you leave?’
Lucasinho was five when Flavia left Boa Vista. He remembers confusion more than hurt; an absence that filled quickly with grains of new normality. Amanda, his genetic mother, had quickly passed him to Elis, pregnant with Robson.
‘Has your father never told you?’
‘No.’
‘Your father and grandmother dismissed me and forced me to leave you and Boa Vista. I carried Carlinhos and I carried Wagner and last of all I carried you, Luca. Do you know what we madrinhas do?’
‘You are surrogate mothers.’
‘We sell our bodies, that’s what we do. We sell the very heart of our womanhood to someone else. It’s prostitution. We spread our legs and take someone else’s embryo into our wombs. You were conceived in a tube, Luca, and you were carried in a stranger’s uterus, for money. A lot of money. But you weren’t mine. You were Lucas Corta and Amanda Sun’s baby. Carlinhos was Carlos and Adriana Corta’s.’
‘You were Wagner’s madrinha too,’ Lucasinho says.
‘It’s the cruellest profession. If you had been taken away from me after birth, maybe that would have been easier. But the contract is that we don’t just gestate and birth you, we raise you. My life was dedicated to you, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I was in every way a mother, except one.’
‘You didn’t have a baby of your own. I mean, one you made.’
‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to spend every hour with children that you carried, that are yours in everything but genetics, but aren’t yours, and never will be yours.’
‘But you could …’
‘You can’t understand, Luca. You can’t even begin. The contracts are exclusive. The only children I was allowed to have were Corta sons and daughters. I love you, Luca, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I love you like you’re my own.’
Lucasinho’s head pounds. Pressure in the skull. Pressure behind the eyes. This is heavy stuff. Stuff he can’t factor, stuff that doesn’t play on any of the emotional processes he’s learned. Flavia is right. He can’t understand it. This is what adults feel.
‘And Wagner,’ Lucasinho says. ‘You keep saying “and Wagner”.’
‘You always were smarter than your father gives you credit for, Luca.’
‘Pai’s always said he’s not a Corta. Vovo can’t talk to him. As soon as he was eighteen he left Boa Vista.’
‘Leave, or was made to leave?’
‘What did you do?’
‘Wagner is half Corta. Half Corta, half Vila Nova.’
‘That’s you.’
‘Flavia Passos Vila Nova. Madrinhas are very well paid. Enough to hire an obstetric gynaecologist to fertilise and implant a different set of embryos.’
‘Vovo, Carlos’s …’ Lucasinho can’t say the words. Eggs, sperm, embarrassing. Moreso when they make you.
‘Carlos had been dead twenty years. There were still hundreds of sperm samples frozen. Carlinhos came from one. Then the gracious Adriana decided she wanted another child. A baby-toy, a last reminder of her dead husband. At the age of fifty-six she wanted another baby. And there was me, with nothing of my own! She didn’t deserve another child, a little late-life boy-toy. And it was so very simple.’
The saints, the orixas, the exus and guias fix Lucasinho Corta with plastic eyes. He feels itchy and self-conscious. The green biolight makes him nauseous. He’s sure it’s the green biolight. Not the immediate, terrible question he has to ask.
‘Flavia. What about me?’
‘Those are Sun cheekbones and Corta eyes, Luca. No mistaking.’ Flavia reads his confusion. ‘I said you couldn’t understand it.’
‘So you had Wagner …’
‘A boy of my own. That was all I needed. You Cortas, your pride makes you blind. It’s the first and greatest sin, pride. You would never have considered that Wagner might be the son of Carlos and Flavia and not Carlos and Adriana. Never. Arrogance and pride!’ Flavia lifts her hands, as if in praise, or denunciation. ‘And you would never have known except for Wagner going to hospital for that lung treatment. He developed a bronchial condition. Adriana was worried that it might be congenital, that Carlos’s sperm and her eggs had curdled and gone sour over the years. The hospital ran genetic tests. My deception was revealed in an instant. I had broken my contract, but it would have been the scandal of the century if the news networks had found out that Adriana Corta’s last child wasn’t hers. I took Corta money to be quiet, and a threat.’
‘Vo threatened you?’
‘Not Adriana. Her agents came bearing gifts. Helen de Braga showed me the money, Heitor Pereira showed me the knife. Wagner stayed at Boa Vista to be brought up a Corta in every way. But Adriana couldn’t love him. She looked at him and she saw something that was Carlos’s, but not hers.’
‘She’s always been distant around him. Cold. But my father really hates him.’
‘He’s wise, your father. Wagner is a threat to the family, I am a threat to the family, me telling you this is a threat to the family.’
Lucasinho’s heart leaps with panic.
‘Would he, if he knew you’d – Hurt you?’
‘He wouldn’t run the risk of losing you forever.’
‘Like that would bother him. I didn’t see him sending security to find me when I ran out of Boa Vista.’
‘Your father knows exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. He knows where you are right now.’
‘I fucking hate being a Corta.’ A sudden sweep of the arm clears the table of saints and votives. Flavia painstakingly replaces them.
‘Listen to rich boy. You run away and your friends throw you parties, your aunt throws you cash and your lovers throw a sheet over your ass and a roof over your head. You hate being a Corta? You hate never having to sell the breath in your lungs and the piss in your bladder? You hate never having to steal from recycle bots, knifing someone for a bag of manioc fries? Close your mouth. Your brains might fall out. That cake you brought? I would have cut you open for it, boy. Your family always hired Jo Moonbeams for madrinhas because we’ve got Earth bones and muscles. I was six months off the cycler, working in robotics development for Taiyang in Queen of the South when a micro-recession threw me out on to the street. I slept up in the roof, I could feel the radiation hammering through my body like sleet. I stole and I maimed and I sold everything I had and then I said never again. Never again. So I went to the Sisters because I knew what they were doing with genelines and the Mãe-do-santo looked me up and down and checked my medical records five, ten, fifty times. Then sent me to Adriana Corta and she put Carlinhos in me and I was never hungry or thirsty or breathless again. You hate having all those things? Mother and saints, you fucking ingrate.’ Flavia crosses herself and kisses her knuckles.
Lucasinho’s face burns with anger and shame. He’s tired of being told what he needs to do with himself. Wear this dress. Put on that make-up. Don’t be with that girl. Be a thankful son. Madrinha Flavia gets up from the floor and boils water in her kitchen cubby. Pestle in mortar, then a thick green smell fills the small room.
Lucasinho’s hand is on the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No. But you won’t go. You wouldn’t be here if you had anywhere else to go. And I don’t want you to go. Here.’ Flavia hands him a glass of herbal maté. ‘Sit.’
‘Orders. Everyone gives me orders. Everyone is so clever about me and who I am and what I want.’
‘Please.’
Lucasinho sniffs the brew.
‘What is t
his?’
‘Helps sleep,’ Flavia says. ‘It’s late.’
‘How do you know?’ The apartment has no clocks. The Sisterhood does not countenance them: clocks are the knives of time, slicing the Great Now into finer and finer divisions: hours, minutes, seconds. Continuity is the philosophy of the Sisters: time whole and undivided, existing all at once in a fourth dimension, in the mind of Olorum the One.
‘It feels late.’
‘Don’t like this,’ Lucasinho says, sniffing the glass with a scowl of distaste.
‘Who says it’s for you?’
Lucasinho drinks. By the time Flavia comes back from washing the glasses in the kitchen, he is curled up asleep on the sofa.
Twelve lines of moon dust. Twelve riders in V formation, cutting across the Eimmart K crater. Marina Calzaghe is three hours into the ride. Her ass has long since turned to rock. Her neck aches, her fingers are numb with vibration, she can feel the cold gnawing her sasuit and she cannot tear her gaze away from the O2 figure in the bottom right of her hud. It’s all been calculated: air enough to reach the location plus an hour. That’s time enough for the rovers from Mare Marginis to reach them and resupply. Three hours in, one hour to go, one hundred and eighty kilometres an hour – two hundred and twenty flat out but it chews battery life – and somewhere, up there, around the shoulder of the world, the Vorontsov fleet is barrelling towards Mare Anguis. The calculations say Team Corta will arrive at the furthest vertex five minutes before the Mackenzie/VTO transporters. Plus or minus three minutes. All worked out. Lucas Corta is precise in his calculations.
The first hour of the ride north from the rail stop is over jolting, jarring highland terrain; craters and ejecta and treacherous slopes that demand the focus of every sense, natural and cybernetic. The dustbikes’ massive drive wheels take the smaller debris with ease but every rock is a judgement call; run it, steer it. Call it wrong, wreck the wheels and the transmission and you are alone among the craters watching your comrades draw long lines of dust away from you. The lifeboats won’t come. They’ve been bought up by the Mackenzies. Marina grits her teeth at every rock and rille. Every rim sends a jolt of pain up her spine. Her back is a rod of molten pain. Her arms throb from holding the handlebars steady, steady as the bike bounds and bucks over the fearsome terrain. Her jaw is set rigid and she can’t remember when she last blinked. Marina Calzaghe is deliriously alive.
‘Motorbikes,’ she’d said.
‘Dustbikes,’ Carlinhos had corrected.
Eleven bikes, corralled on the flatbed car. Magnificent, potent things that showed their veins and wires and bones and gears; brutally functional and beautiful for that. Each was different, handcrafted and bespoke, metal surfaces engraved with death’s-heads, dragons, orixas, big-cocked men and mega-breasted women, flames and starbursts and swords and flowers. Biker aesthetic is changeless and eternal. Marina ran a gloved hand over a chromed flank.
‘Have you ridden one of these before?’ Carlinhos asked.
‘Where would I …’ Marina began and then remembered the game.
‘Do you think you could?’
‘How hard can it be?’
‘Hard. If something goes wrong, you will be left behind.’
There was no bike for her. The Jo Moonbeam would ride to Meridian in pressurised warmth and comfort. But with Paulo Ribeiro heading back to autopsy at João de Deus Team Corta was down a rider and the plan required every bike. The Mackenzies might pull something out of their asses yet. The more riders, the more flexibility.
‘Will you come?’
In Portuguese, it was an invitation, not a question. Already the train was slowing. Lucas’s plan was simple. Marina remembered him as the dark, serious man who had spoken the words that had saved her life: You work for Corta Hélio now. He had remembered a detail that even Carlinhos had forgotten: they were dustbikers. Lucas’s plan: rail all available dustbikes to the closest point to the claim, open the throttles and strike north for the Mare Anguis. Fire up a GPS transponder from each of the four corners of the territory. Four corners, eleven bikes.
‘I will,’ said Marina Calzaghe.
‘Here’s the contract.’ Hetty flashed it up on Marina’s lens. A cursory scan – so many clauses referencing accidental death – a yin and back to Carlinhos.
‘Keep with me,’ Carlinhos said on Marina’s private channel. Eleven bikes, four corners. So it would be her and Carlinhos racing Mackenzie Metals and all their spaceships for the furthest, final point of the territory.
Riders mounted up. Marina’s machine was a beast of twisted aluminium and crackling power cells. A chrome-etched Lady Luna regarded her from between the handlebars, her skull hemi-face grinning. The AI meshed with Hetty as Marina settled on to the saddle. The bike came to life. The controls were easy. Forward, back. Twist for speed.
Before the train had even come to a halt Carlinhos gunned his engine and leaped off the flatbed, soaring high and beautiful, glinting in the earthlight, to land beyond the furthest rail track. By the time Marina craned her bike down to the surface and learned how to keep the machine from performing terrifying, deadly wheelies, Carlinhos was over the horizon.
She locked in the bearing, twisted the throttle and steered up the dust-trails. A burst of speed took her into the formation and there, to Carlinhos’s left, was a gap in the arrowhead. Marina kicked into it. Carlinhos turned his blank face and nodded to her.
The bikers plunge down the long shallow crater rim of Eimmart K. Marina veers to avoid a corpse-sized chunk of ejecta. It’s sat there for longer than life has existed on Earth, she thinks. Dumb grey in-the-way rock. Out on to the dead sea-floor.
Carlinhos raises a hand but familiars have already cued the riders. Three bikes peel off from the left trailing edge of the arrows and steer east-south-east. Marina watches their slow-settling dust plumes. They will strike the south-eastern vertex of the quadrangle. Nine bikes now, racing across the dark flatland; a lop-sided wing. The riding is easy and fast and monotonous and full of traps; the worst kind, the kind that come out of yourself, out of boredom and familiarity and monotony. Flat flat flat. Monotony monotony monotony. This can’t be the fun of it. Flat flat flat fast fast fast. Why invent a sport just about going fast in a straight line? Maybe that is it. Men and their sports. Everything can be turned into a pointless competition, even going fast across a lunar sea-bottom. There must be more to it. Stunts, skills. What Marina understands of sports is they are all stunts, scores or speed.
At the designated way point Carlinhos again raises his hand and the trailing right wingtip peels off and cuts a westerly arc across the Mare. The south-east corner of the claim is fifty kilometres distant. The five remaining bikes race on.
‘Do you like Brazilian music?’ Carlinho’s voice startles Marina. She wobbles, recovers.
‘Not really. It all sounds kind of elevator-y. Maybe there’s something I’m just too norte to get.’
‘I don’t get it either. Mamãe adores it. She grew up with it. It’s her link with home.’
‘Home,’ Marina says but it’s not a question.
‘Lucas is a big fan. He tried to explain to me once how it worked – saudade, bitter-sweet, all that, but I didn’t have the ear for it. I’m very simple. I like dance music. Beats. Something physical, with weight.’
‘I like to dance but I’m not a dancer,’ Marina says.
‘When we get back, when we’ve got this, we’ll go dancing.’
At one hundred and ninety-five kilometres per hour across the Mare Anguis, Marina’s heart leaps. ‘Is that a date?’
‘I’m taking everyone else in the squad as well,’ Carlinhos says. ‘You haven’t seen a Corta party.’
‘I was at the one in Boa Vista, remember?’ Marina says, backing away, crestfallen. Flushing hot inside her sasuit.
‘That wasn’t a Corta party,’ Carlinhos says. ‘So, what music do you like, Marina Calzaghe?’
‘I grew up in the Pacific Northwest so it’s guitars all the way down.
I’m a rock girl.’
‘Ah. Metal. My squad, it’s all they listen to: metal.’
‘No. Rock.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘Big difference. Like your brother says, you have to have the ear for it.’
Forward radar paints an obstruction over the horizon. A detour would cost precious minutes.
‘You know a lot about me Marina Calzaghe – I like dance music, I follow the Long Run, I love my mother but I don’t like my big brothers. I love my kid brother and my sister I don’t understand at all. I hate business suits and having rocks over my head. But I still don’t know anything about you. You rock, you’re from the norte, you saved my brother: that’s it.’
The obstruction is an outcrop of rough highland terrain marooned when ancient basalts flooded the Mare Anguis basin. The transition is abrupt for the gentle, eroded moon, but Carlinhos shows no hesitation and steers straight for the rocks.
‘I kind of drifted here,’ Marina says.
‘No one drifts to the moon,’ Carlinhos says and his bike hits a ridge and goes flying, ten, twenty metres before splashing down in an explosion of dust. Marina follows him. She is powerless, abandoned; her heart chokes in panic. Hold it steady. Steady. Then the rear wheel touches down, she fights to hold the bike upright, then both wheels. Steer true. Steer true. She gasps with exhilaration.
‘So?’ Carlinhos’s voice on the private channel.
‘My mom got sick. Tubercular meningitis.’
Carlinhos whispers a Portuguese invocation to São Jorge.
‘She lost her right leg from the knee down and the use of both of them. She’s alive, she talks and gets around but it’s not her. Not the mom that I knew. Bits the hospital salvaged.’