Luna

by Ian McDonald

  *

  We came out of the moonloop dock – there was only one transfer tether then, in a polar orbit: one hundred and twenty Jo Moonbeams. It’s an old word that, one of the oldest on the moon. Jo Moonbeam. It sounds bright and wide-eyed and innocent. We were all that.

  Even before they officially welcome, the LDC planted the chibs on our eyeballs. We had ten inhalations free, then we started paying. We’ve been paying ever since. Air, water, carbon, data. The Four Elementals. You were born here, you won’t remember a time when you didn’t have those numbers in your eye. But I tell you, the first time you see the numbers change because the market has shifted, your breath catches in your throat. Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth any more than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. Then they pushed us into medical. They wanted to look at my bones. You don’t think about the bones. To Jo Moonbeams everything is new and demanding. You need to learn how to move – you need to learn how to stand. You need to learn how to see and hear. You learn about your blood, and your heart, and dust and how that’s the thing that is most likely to kill you. You learn evacuation drills and depressurisation alarms and what side of a door to be on and when it’s safe to open it. You learn when to help people and when to abandon people. You learn how to live on top of each other, breathe each other’s air, drink each other’s water. You learn that when you die LDC will take you and break you down and recycle you for carbon and calcium and compost. You learn that you don’t own your body. You don’t own anything. From the moment you step off the moonloop, everything is rented.

  You don’t think about the bones, but they tick away, under the skin, hour by hour, day by day, lune by lune losing mass and structure. Again, Sister, you were born here. This is your home. You can never go to Earth. But I had a window through which I could return. I had two years until my bone density and muscle tone deteriorated to a point where Earth gravity would be fatal to me. Two years. It was the same for all of us: two years. It’s still the same for every Jo Moonbeam who arrives at Meridian looking for the land of opportunity. We all of us face our Moonday, when we have to decide, do I stay or do I go?

  They looked at my bones. They looked at Achi’s bones. And then we forgot about them.

  We moved into barracks, Achi and I. The Jo Moonbeam accommodation was a warehouse with partitions to mark off your living space. Shared bathrooms, mess hall meals. There was no privacy, what you couldn’t see you could hear and what you couldn’t hear you could smell. The smell. Sewage and electricity and dust and unwashed bodies. The women naturally banded together: Achi and I traded to get cubicles beside each other, then merged them into one space. We held a little ritual that night and swore undying sisterhood over weird-tasting cocktails made from industrial vodka. Humans had been on the moon only five years and already there was a vodka industry. We made decorations from fabric scraps, we grew hydroponic flowers. We had socials and parties and we were the central point for the tampon trade. It was like a prison economy, with tampons instead of cigarettes. We had a natural social gravity, Achi and I. We drew the women, and the men who got tired of all the loud voices and the macho boasting: we’re the world-breakers, the moon-busters: we’re gonna take this rock and shake a million bitsies out of it. We’re going to fuck this moon. I’ve never been in the military, but I think it might be a bit like the moon in those early days.

  We weren’t safe. No one was safe. Ten per cent of Jo Moonbeams died within three months. In my first week an extraction worker from Xinjiang was crushed in a pressure lock. Twenty-four launched from Korou on my OTV: three were dead before we even finished surface-activity training. One was the man who had flown up in the seat next to me. I can’t remember his name now. We recycled their bodies and reused them and we ate the vegetables and fruit they fertilised and never thought twice about the blood in the soil. You survive by choosing what not to see and hear.

  I told you about the stink of the moon. What it stank of most was men. Testosterone. You breathed constant sexual tension. Every woman had been assaulted. It happened to me: once. An older worker, a duster, in the lock as I was changing into my training suit. He tried to slip the hand. I caught and threw him the length of the lock. USP Brazilian jiu jitsu team. My father would have been proud. I had no trouble from that man, or any other man, but I was still scared they would come as a gang. I couldn’t have fought a gang. They could hurt me, they might even kill me. There were contracts and codes of behaviour, but there were only company managers to enforce them. Sexual violence was a disciplinary matter.

  But Achi didn’t know Brazilian jiu jitsu. She didn’t know any fighting art, she had no way to defend herself when the man tried to rape her. He didn’t succeed – a group of other men pulled him off. He was lucky. If I had caught him, I would have stabbed him. I was glad of those men. They understood that we had to find a way to live together. The moon couldn’t be another Earth. If we turned on each other, we would all die. I did think about finding that man and killing him. Cortas cut. That’s our name. Hard sharp fast. There are a million ways of killing cleverly on the moon. I thought about it long and hard: should it be secret vengeance, or should my face be the last thing he ever saw? I chose another way. I am many things but I am not a killer.

  For Achi’s attacker I used slower, subtler weapons. I found his surface-activity training squad. I made some adjustments to his suit thermostat. It would look like a perfect malfunction. I’m a good engineer. He didn’t die. He wasn’t meant to die. I count his frostbitten thumb and three toes as my trophies. Everyone knew it was me, but nothing was ever proved. I liked the legend. If it made men look at me with fear, that was good. Hanif was his name. He swore he’d rape me and gut me from his hospital bed. By the time he got out of med centre, Achi and I were out on contract.

  Achi got a contract with the Asamoahs designing ecosystems for their new agrarium under Amundsen. My contract with Mackenzie Metals took me out on to the open seas. She would be a digger, I would be a duster. In two days we would be parted. We clung to the I and A barracks, we clung to our cabins, our friends. We clung to each other. We were scared. The other women threw a party for us; moon mojitos and sing-alongs to tablet music software. But before the music and the drinking: a special gift for Achi. Her work with AKA would keep her underground; digging and scooping and sowing. She need never go on the surface. She could go her whole career – her whole life – in the caverns and lava tubes and huge agraria. She need never see the raw sky.

  I used all my charm and reputation but the suit hire was still cosmologically expensive. I contracted thirty minutes in a GP surface-activity shell. It was an armoured hulk next to my lithe sasuit spiderwoman. We held hands in the outlock as the pressure door slid up. We walked up the ramp amongst a hundred thousand bootprints. We walked a few metres out on to the surface, still holding hands. There, beyond the coms towers and the power relays and the charging points for the buses and rovers; beyond the grey line of the crater rim that curved on the close horizon and the shadows the sun had never touched; there perched above the edge of our tiny world we saw the full Earth. Full and blue and white, mottled with greens and ochres. Full and impossible and beautiful beyond any words of mine. It was winter and the southern hemisphere was offered to us; the ocean half of the planet. I saw great Africa. I saw dear Brazil.

  Then my suit AI advised me that we were nearing the expiry of our contract and we turned our backs on the blue Earth and walked back down into the moon.

  That night we drank to our jobs our friends, our loves and our bones. In the morning we parted.

  It was six lunes before I saw Achi again. Six lunes on the Sea of Fecundity, sifting dust. I was stationed at Mackenzie Metals’ Messier unit. It was old, cramped, creaking: cut-and-cover pods under bulldozed regolith berms. Too frequently I was evacuated to the new-cut deep levels because of a radiation alarm. Every time I saw the alarm flash its yellow trefoil in my lens I felt my ovaries tighten. Day and night the tunnels trembled to the vibration
of the digging machines, eating deep rock. There were eighty dusters in Messier.

  There was a sweet man; his name was Chuyu. A 3D print designer. Kind and funny and talented with his body. After a month of laughing and sweet sex, he asked me to join his amory: Chuyu, his amor in Queen, his amor in Meridian, her amor also in Meridian. We agreed terms: six months, who I would and would not have sex with, seeing others outside the amory, bringing others into the amory. We had nikahs even then. It had taken him so long to ask me, Chuyu confessed, because of my rep. Word about Achi’s attacker had reached Messier. I wouldn’t do that to an amor, I said. Not unless severely provoked. Then I kissed him. The amory was warmth and sex, but it wasn’t Achi. We talked or networked almost every day but I still felt the separation. Lovers are not friends.

  I had ten days furlough and my first thought was to spend it with Achi. I could see Chuyu’s disappointment as I kissed him goodbye at Messier’s bus lock. It wasn’t a betrayal: I’d said in the contract that I would not have sex with Achi Debasso. We were friends, not lovers. Achi had come up to the railhead at Hypatia to meet me and all the way down the line to Queen of the South we talked and laughed. So much laughter.

  Such fun she had planned for me! Messier was smelly and cramped, Queen of the South was intense, loud, colourful. In only six lunes it had changed beyond recognition. Every street was longer, every tunnel wider, every chamber higher. Achi took me in a glass elevator down the side of the recently completed Thoth Quadra and I reeled from vertigo. Down on the quadra floor was a small copse of dwarf tree – full-size trees would reach the ceiling, Achi explained. There was a café. In that café I first tasted and immediately hated mint tea.

  I built this, Achi said. These are my trees, this is my garden.

  I was too busy looking up at the lights, all the lights, going up and up.

  Such fun! Tea, then shops. I had to find a party dress. We were going to a special party, that night. Exclusive. We browsed the catalogues in five different print shops before I found something I could wear: very retro – it was the 1980s then – padded and cinched but it hid what I wanted hidden. Then, the shoes.

  The special party was exclusive to Achi’s workgroup. A security locked rail capsule took us through a dark tunnel into a space so huge, so blinding, that I almost threw up over my Balenciaga. An agrarium, Achi’s last project. I was at the bottom of a shaft a kilometre tall, fifty metres wide. The horizon is close at eye level on the moon; everything curves. Underground, a different geometry applies. The agrarium was the straightest thing I had seen in months. And brilliant: a central core of mirrors ran the full height of the shaft, bouncing raw sunlight one to another to another to walls terraced with hydroponic racks. The base of the shaft was a mosaic of fish tanks, criss-crossed by walkways. The air was warm and dank and rank. I was woozy with CO2. In these conditions plants grew fast and tall; potato plants the size of bushes; tomato vines so tall I lost their heads in the tangle of leaves and fruit. Hyper-intensive agriculture: the agrarium was huge for a cave, small for an ecosystem. The tanks splashed with fish. Did I hear frogs? Were those ducks?

  Achi’s team had built a new pond from waterproof sheetings and construction frame. A pool. A swimming pool. A sound system played Ghana-pop. There were cocktails. Yellow was the fashion. They matched my dress. Achi’s crew were friendly and expansive. They never failed to compliment me on my frock. I shucked it and my shoes and everything else for the pool. I lolled, I luxuriated. Over my head the mirrors moved. Achi swam up beside me and we trod water together, laughing and plashing. The agrarium crew had lowered a number of plastic chairs into the pool to make a shallow end. Achi and I wafted blood-warm water with our legs and drank golden bison-grass vodka.

  I woke up in bed beside Achi the next morning; shit-headed with vodka. I remember mumbling, fumbling love. Shivering and stupid-whispering, skin to skin. Fingerworks. Achi was curled on her right side, facing me. She had kicked the sheet off in the night. A tiny string of drool ran from the corner of her mouth to the pillow and trembled in time to her breathing. I see it still.

  I looked at her there, her breath rattling in the back of her throat in drunken sleep. We had made love. I had sex with my dearest friend. I had done a good thing, I had done a bad thing. I had done an irrevocable thing. Then I lay down and pressed myself close to her and she mumble-grumbled and moved in close to me and her fingers found me and we began again.

  My mother used to say that love was the easiest thing in the world. Love is what you see every day. That was how she fell in love with my father; every day she passed him, welding.

  I did not see Achi for several lunes after the party in Queen. Mackenzie Metals sent me out prospecting new terrain in the Sea of Vapours. Away from Sea of Vapours, it was plain to me and Sun Chuyu that the amory didn’t work for me. I had broken my contract, but in those days there were no financial implications of extra-contractual sex. All the amors agreed to annul the contract and let me leave the amory. No blame, no claim. A simple automated contract, terminated.

  I took a couple of weeks’ accumulated leave back in Queen. I called Achi about hooking up but she was at a new dig at Twé where the Asamoahs were building a corporate headquarters. I felt relieved. Then I felt guilty that I had felt relieved. Sex had made everything different. I drank, I partied, I had one-night stands, I talked long hours of expensive bandwidth with Mum and Dad back in Barra. The entire family gathered in front of the lens to thank me for the money, especially the tiny kids. They said I looked different. Longer. Drawn out. There they were, happy and safe. The money I sent them bought their education. Health, weddings, babies. And here I was, on the moon. Outrinha Adriana, who would never get a man, but who got the education, who got the degree, who got the job, sending them the money from the moon.

  They were right. I was different. I never felt the same about that blue pearl of Earth in the sky. I never again hired a sasuit to go look at it, just look at it. Out on the surface, I disregarded it.

  The Mackenzies sent me out to the Lansberg extraction zone and there I saw the thing that made everything different.

  Five extractors were working Lansberg. Have you seen an extractor? Of course not, forgive me. You’ve never been on the surface. They are ugly things, with their insides exposed; they were no more elegant then. But to me they were beautiful. Marvellous bones and muscles. I saw them one day, out on the regolith, and I almost fell flat from the revelation. Not what they were made for – separating rare-earth metals from lunar regolith – but what they threw away. Launched in high, arching ballistic jets on either side of the big, slow machines.

  It was the thing I saw every day. One day you look at the boy on the bus and he sets your heart alight. One day you look at the jets of industrial waste and you see riches beyond measure. The plan formed there and then, all at once in my head. By the time I made it back to the rover it was in place, every last detail, intricate and engineered and beautiful and I knew it would work straight out of the box. But for it to work, I had to put distance between myself and anything that might link me to regolith waste and beautiful rainbows of dust. The Mackenzies could have no claim on any part of it. I quit Mackenzie and became a Vorontsov track queen.

  I went up to Meridian to rent a data crypt and hunt for the leanest, freshest, hungriest law firm to protect the thing I had seen out on Lansberg. And there I saw Achi again. She had been called back from Twé to solve a problem with microbiota in the Obuasi agrarium that had left it a pillar of stinking black slime.

  One city, two friends, two amors. We went out to party. And found we couldn’t. The frocks were fabulous, the cocktails disgraceful, the company louche and the narcotics dazzling but in each bar, club, private party we ended up in a corner together, talking. Partying was boring. Talk was lovely and bottomless and fascinating. We ended up in bed again, of course. We couldn’t wait. Glorious, impractical 1980s frocks lay crumpled on the floor, ready for the recycler.

  I remember when Achi asked: What do yo
u want? She was lying on the bed and inhaling THC from a vaper. I could never take that stuff. It made me paranoid. And she also said: Dream and don’t be afraid.

  And I answered: I want to be a Dragon. Achi laughed and punched me on the thigh, but I had never said truer words.

  In the year and a half we had been on the moon, our small world had changed. Things moved fast in those early days. We could build an entire city in months. We had energy and raw materials and human ambition. Four companies had emerged as major economic forces. The four families. The Mackenzies were the longest established. They had been joined by the Asamoahs in food and living space. The Vorontsovs finally moved their operations off Earth entirely and ran the cycler, the moonloop, the bus service and were wrapping the world in rails. The Suns had been fighting the People’s Republic’s representatives on the LDC board and had finally broken free from terrestrial control. Four companies: Four Dragons. And I would be the Fifth Dragon.

  *

  I didn’t tell her about what I’d seen out there on Lansberg. I didn’t tell her about the data vault and the squad of legal AIs. I didn’t tell her about the brilliant idea. She knew I was keeping secrets from her. I put a shadow in her heart.

  I went to my new job, laying track. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. At the end of every up-shift you saw three kilometres of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. So bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eyeline too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. In ten years the rail lines would circle the globe and the Crucible would follow the sun. By then, I would be a Dragon.

  I was sintering ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. Ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my work-mix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.