Luna

by Ian McDonald

  At age thirteen Ariel Corta orgasmed after pulling on a sasuit. She hasn’t worn one since but its tightness, its unforgiving constriction and control of the body has permanently shaped her sex play. Ariel Corta has never told a soul about the sasuit come.

  The gag. A classic red-ball gag, matching her lip-gloss. She buckles it tight, tighter. This is for those times when she wedged half a bedsheet into her mouth to stifle the noises of her fabulous masturbation. It keeps the bubbles in the champagne. Ariel Corta squeals and begs into her gag. Beijaflor is outside verbal command but the familiar has played this game many many times. The dressing is complete.

  Ariel softly claps her gloves together. Haptics engage; she strokes each breast, hissing into her gag at the touch of thick soft fur. She circles each nipple, delirious with pleasure. The haptics realign and she squeaks at the touch of bristles. The gloves follow a random sequence: Ariel is down on her knees, drooling ecstatically as she introduces the soft sensitive folds of her vulva to bristles that become vinyl nubs, then gritty abrasives. Long slow strokes with her right hand; her left explores the terrain of bare skin between the tight-laced leatherwear. She is bursting; blood and bone and flesh and fluid held in check by taut leather. Now the haptics run different sensations on each hand. Ariel in on her knees, leaning back to allow her fingers access to her fierce little vulva. Sharp heels dig into her ass, she can feel her cheeks spreading on the padded floor. She is blaspheming piously into her gag. Beijaflor shows her herself, thighs spread, fingers working, face upturned and eyes wide. Her cheeks are streaked with saliva leaking from either side of the gag. Haptics switch to prickles: now Ariel’s fingers move for her clitoris for the first time. She shrieks freely and joyfully into her gag. The Solo has hypersensitized her clitoris, her nipples, her vulva and the rosebud of her anus. Each touch is an agony and daring delight. Ariel Corta is bellowing mutely now. Beijaflor swoops the camera around her: close-up on her fingers, her eyes, the pillow of thigh-flesh over spilling her tight boots.

  The foreplay lasts an hour. Ariel Corta brings herself to the edge of orgasm half a dozen times. But this is the foreplay. Sex is as ritualised as mass. A printer chimes, the haptics deactivate. Shaking, sleek with sweat and saliva flicked from her gag, Ariel crawls to the printer. Coco de Lune is the moon’s greatest sex toy designer. Ariel never knows what she will get until the printer chimes. All that is certain is that it will be customised to her body and tastes and that it will take many hours to explore its subtleties fully.

  Ariel opens the printer. A dildo, a set of polished anal balls. The dildo is long and elegant, a classic old school moon-rocket, complete with four stabilising fins at the bottom. Each fin control a different haptic field. A silver pussy-rocket printed to the dimensions of her vagina and vulva. Not a penis. Never a penis. Ariel Corta has never allowed a penis inside her.

  You’re beautiful, Beijaflor whispers to Ariel in Ariel’s voice. Love you love you love you.

  Ariel moans into her gag, lies back on the padded leather, opens her legs.

  Put it up you, in you, kilometres in you, Beijaflor says. Fuck yourself to death.

  Ariel works the self-lubing pleasure balls into her anus. Corset and collar hold her rigid, unable to see what she is doing to her orifices. Beijaflor shows her close-ups and whispers filth and insults in her own Portuguese. Ariel works the balls in, pushes them deep, hooks a finger through the handle. She tugs gently, feels the drag and grate inside her. At orgasm she will pull them out, perhaps slowly, perhaps all at once. Then one by one she will push them in again.

  She holds the dildo up before her eyes, panting in dread and expectation as her own voice tells her exactly what she is going to do with it, how deep and how fast and how long, every position and stroke. It will take hours. Hours. At the end, Ariel Corta will crawl from a sex room soaking with sweat and saliva and body fluids and creamy lubrication and slowly release herself from her binding leather. No lover, no body, no flesh can compare with the perfect sex she has with herself.

  Since the age of thirteen Ariel Corta has been joyously, enthusiastically, monogamously autosexual.

  The man goes low, swinging for her knees with the wrench. Marina dives away. Her strength and momentum carry her high, far. High and far are vulnerable. Momentum kills. Marina comes down hard enough to knock the wind out of her, slides, slams into a girder. The Mackenzie man knows how to fight. He’s on his feet, wrench raised to bring it down on her chest. Marina kicks out. Her boot connects with kneecap. The crunch of bone, the scream silences the dock for a moment. The man goes down, felled. Marina picks up the wrench.

  ‘Marina!’ Carlinhos’s voice. ‘Don’t.’

  The Mackenzie is tall, fit, male. She is short, female, but she is a Jo Moonbeam. She has the strength of three moon-men. She could crush this man’s ribcage with a single blow of her fist.

  How did the fight start? Like any fight starts: like a fire: combustible tempers, proximity, a spark, something to feed the ignition. Beikou Lock Control kept Team Corta in the holding bay while a Mackenzie Metals rover squadron docked and locked. The squad fretted: enough confining tunnels, foul air, old water. They wanted home. Patience frayed. The Mackenzie squad – all men, Marina observed – filed in from the outlock carrying the spicy smell of moon dust. As the squad leader passed Carlinhos: two words: Corta thieves. Patience snapped. Carlinhos roared and felled him with a head-butt and the holding bay exploded.

  Marina has never been in a fight. She has seen them in bars, in student houses, at parties but she was never part of them. Here she is a target. These men want to hurt her. These men don’t care if she dies. The Mackenzie man is down and out of the fighting, burbling faintly in shock. Marina crouches – low is strong – scanning the room. Real fights are not movie fights. Fighters go to ground, tug and claw and try to smash each other’s heads in. Carlinhos is down, on his back. Marina grabs his attacker by the arm. The man screams. She has dislocated his shoulder. She picks him up by suit collar and belt and slings him across the dock as easily as if he were a piece of clothing. Marina spins, charges at the first Mackenzie she sees. She mashes the Mackenzie man against a stanchion. She stands, panting. She has superpowers. She is She-Hulk.

  ‘Where are the cops?’ she yells to Carlinhos.

  ‘Earth,’ he yells back, sweeps an attacker’s legs from under him. Carlinhos drives fist into face. Blood sprays from the crushed nose; slow falling red.

  ‘Fuck!’ Marina cries. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck.’ She throws herself into the fight. The seduction of power is horrible and juicy. This is what it’s like to be a man on Earth, to know that you will always have strength. She kicks, she grabs, she seizes and snaps, she smashes. And it’s over. Blood on the sinter. Burbling sobbing. Dock control has arrived and are holding the parties apart with tasers and knives but fights have half-lives and this one has decayed into pointing and lunging and shouting. The argument now is over who pays, who compensates. The legal AIs fight now.

  ‘You all right?’ Carlinhos asks. Marina smells violence from him. Her gooseflesh rises: he fought without restraint or passion, as if violence were another tool of his business. Out on the dustbikes, he had said, Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas is the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter. Marina thought he was speaking metaphorically. No. He is a fighter and a strong one. She is a little afraid.

  Marina nods. Now the shaking comes, the physical and chemical release. She hurt people. She broke bodies, smashed faces and she feels as pure and euphoric and alive as she did after Carlinhos took her on the Long Run. Elated and intense; dirty, itchy, degraded: a blood-slut. She doesn’t recognise herself.

  ‘The bus is here. Let’s go home.’

  The cold perhaps, or the subtle realignment of weight, or the tiny, careful noises that night amplifies, but when Sohni Sharma wakes she knows Rafa isn’t there. The sex had been almost an afterthought; cursory, due diligence. Come back to my club, he had said and perhaps she should have read the warning in those words.
Loud men, some drunk, in their own place and space, looking her up and down, weighing and assaying and slipping sly looks and eyebrow-raises and smiles to Rafa. Men who own things. Then the news came through about the deal – some new extraction rights, territory claimed – that not only annihilated Rafa’s bar-room darkness, but reversed it; turned it into golden light. The club was his. Drinks for everyone; all my friends, drink drink. Raucous and laddish and backslapping; crude and congratulatory: she was trophy and promise. To the victor the prize. Rafa’s arm around her all night, into the vanishing hours. The Professional Handball Owners Club was not a safe space but she stayed.

  Her eyes ache, her joints throb, she is as dehydrated as the surface of the moon. How bad is it to ride the moonloop hung over?

  Time. Oh five twelve. The sunline is a strip of indigo along the top of the world. She should move, get her stuff, get things together. Where is Rafa? Not in the bedroom, nor the ensuite, the office or the generous living space she tiptoes through, bare-skinned. The air still smells clean, washed. He’s on a chair on a shallow balcony, perched on the edge. The only thing he wears, against all club etiquette, is his familiar. He’s talking, voice low, back turned, a conversation not meant to be overheard. Overhear it she must.

  But Robson is perfectly safe. I swear to you. God and his mother. Robson’s safe, Luna’s safe; Boa Vista is safe. I don’t want to have to fight you. I don’t want to fight you. Think about Luna. She’ll be in the middle. Come back. Back to Boa Vista, coracão. You promised me it would only be for a little time. Come back. It’s not about the kids. It’s about me …

  Bare-skinned, barefoot, shivering with alcohol and a betrayal she expected but which still wounds, Sohni turns, walks away, dresses, picks up her few things, leaves the moon forever.

  In the end, Adriana orders Paulo out of his own kitchen. He is her cook, he has studied the technique, and printers have already produced the flask, the mesh, the lid and plunger. But he has never prepared it, tested it, even smelled it. Adriana has. He leaves with poor grace. The aroma passes through Boa Vista’s aircon. What is that thing?

  I think it’s coffee.

  Staff are lined up outside Paulo’s kitchen: what’s Senhora Corta doing? She’s measuring it. She’s boiling water. She’s taking the water off the boil. She’s counting. She’s pouring the water on to the stuff, from a height. What’s that about? Oxygenation, says Paulo. She’ll stir it too: the flavour develops fully through an oxidation reaction. Now she’s waiting. How does it smell? Not like anything I’d want past my lips. What’s she doing now? Still waiting. It’s a bit of a ritual, this coffee.

  Adriana Corta depresses the plunger. A bronze crema floats on the top of the French press. One cup.

  Adriana sips her last cup of coffee. She pushes down the thought. This is a celebration, a small one, a private one, the true one before the gaudy carnival Lucas insists on for her birthday. Not this time, she whispers, to the Mackenzies and to death. But her life is filling with last things, like flooding water filling a tunnel. A rising level: or perhaps it is that her life is descending towards it.

  The coffee doesn’t taste the way it smells. For that Adriana is thankful. If it did, humans would never do anything other than drink it. Smell is the sense of memory. Each coffee would recall countless memories, boundless memories. Coffee as the drug of remembering.

  ‘Thank you, Lucas,’ Adriana Corta says and pours a second cup. The press is empty, only moist grounds. Coffee is precious stuff. Rarer than gold, Adriana whispers, a memory from her duster days. The gold we throw away.

  Adriana takes the two cups out to the São Sebastião pavilion. Two cups, two chairs. One for her, one for Irmã Loa. Adriana takes another sip of coffee. How did she ever love this earthy, musky, bitter brew: how did anyone? Another sip. It is the cup of memories. As she sips this coffee, she sips again her previous cup: forty-eight years ago. That coffee too had been a memorial. Her boys have been magnificent; their achievement in stealing Mare Anguis from between the Mackenzies’ grasping fingers will be moon legend for generations, but coffee will always bring her back to Achi.

  SIX

  I met Achi because free fall sex made me sick. It was all the talk during training. Freefall sex. It’s all they do, it’s all they want to do. It ruins you forever. After freefall sex, heavy sex is gross and ugly. Those Vorontsov Space people; they’re sex ninjas.

  They were matching us up even as we swam in through the lock. Those Vorontsov Space people. There was one guy: he looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the tether snatched the transfer pod away from the cycler and cut our last connection with Earth. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and a chance for life-changing sex; you don’t pass on that. I wanted to try it with this guy. We went up to the hub. There were bodies everywhere, drifting, bumping into each other. The men had to use condoms. You didn’t want to get hit by that stuff, flying. I said be kind and I did something worse than flying cum. I threw up all over him. I couldn’t stop throwing up. That’s not sexy. Zero gee turned everything inside me upside down. He was very polite and vacuumed it all up while I retreated to gravity.

  The only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. She would barely meet my eyes; she seemed shy and inward-gazing. Her name was Achi Debasso. I couldn’t place the name; it was like nothing I had ever heard before, but, like mine, it was a name rolled by tide of history. She was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family were Syrian Christians who had fled the civil war. She left Damascus as a cluster of cells in her mother’s womb. London born, London raised, MIT educated but she was never allowed to forget – you are Syriac. Achi was born an exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.

  Up in the hub our future co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet. And each time we met the whirling moon was a little bigger and we knew each other a little bit better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.

  She was a girl filled with ghosts, Achi. The ghost of having no roots. The ghost of being an exile from a dead country. The ghost of privilege: Daddy was a software engineer, Mummy came from money. London welcomed refugees like that. The ghost of guilt; that she was alive when tens of thousands were dead. Her darkest ghost was the ghost of atonement. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. This ghost rode her all life, shouting in her ear: Be useful Achi! All the way through grad at UCL, post-grad at MIT: Make things right! Atone! The ghost of useful sent her to battle desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it drove her to the moon. Nothing more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.

  If these were her ghosts, her guiding spirit, her orixa, was Yemanja. Achi was a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool – her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. She swam and surfed: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and slight but feared no wave. I grew up with the sounds of waves in my bedroom but never dipped more than a toe in the warm Atlantic. I come from beach people, not ocean people. She missed the ocean terribly, on the moon. She tuned the screens in her apartment to make it look like she lived on a coral reef. It always made me a bit sick. As soon as any new tank or pool was built and there was a chance for swimming, she would be there, stroking up and down through the water. The way she moved through it was so natural, so beautiful. I would watch her dive and push herself down through the water and I wanted her to stay down there forever, her hair floating around her, her breasts weightless in the water, her hands and feet making these tiny, beautiful movements that held her in position, or send her fl
ashing across the tank. I see her still, in water.

  She introduced me to her ghosts, I showed her mine: Outrinha: Average Jane: Little Lady Look at Me. Plain Jane and the Mermaid. They would need each other very much in the days and the months to come. The moon was a wild place then. Now she is old like me. But then, in the early days, she was the land of riches and danger, opportunity and death. It was the land of the young and the ambitious. You needed aggression to survive on the moon. She would try and kill you any way she could; by force, by trickery, by seduction. There were five men for every woman, and they were young males, middle class, educated, ambitious and scared. The moon was not a safe place for men, even less safe for women. For the women, it was not just the moon, there were the men too. And we were all scared, all the time. Scared as the moonlop spun up to meet us at the transfer capsule docked and we knew that the only way was forward. We needed each other, and we stuck, and we clung, in our suits, all the way down.

  The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.