Luna

by Ian McDonald

  I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours, squatting in the shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand kelvin sunlight above my head. That’s time to realise the irony. That’s not a tradeable commodity here. I hid from the Mackenzies by working ahead of them; I lurked in the dark places of their capital. I rode a slow freight train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging on to a maintenance platform, not even room to turn around, let alone sit. I listened my way through my bossa nova collection. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries offline. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN. I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. The look on the BALTRAN attendant’s face when I came out of the capsule at Queen of the South was a thing to be seen. So I am told. I couldn’t see it. But if I could afford the capsule I could afford the shower to clean it up. And there are people in Queen who will happily clean vomit out of a sasuit for the right number of bitsies. Say what you like about the Vorontsovs, they pay handsomely.

  All this I did, the endless hours riding the train like a moon-hobo, the hypothermia and being sling-shotted in a can of my own barf, because I knew that if Achi had four weeks, I could not be far behind.

  We met in a café on the twelfth level of the new Chandra quadra. We hugged, we kissed, we cried a little. I smelled sweet by then. Below us, excavators dug and sculpted, a new level every ten days. We held each other at arm’s length and looked at each other. Then we drank mint tea on the balcony.

  We didn’t talk about the bones at once. It was eight lunes since we last saw each other: we talked, we networked, we shared. I made Achi laugh. She laughed like soft rain. I told her about King Dong, that the Mackenzie dusters and Vorontsov track-queens were stamping out in the dust, like boys would. She clapped her hands to her mouth in naughty glee but laughed with her eyes. So wrong. So funny.

  Achi was out of contract. The closer you are to your Moonday, the shorter the contract, sometimes down to minutes of employment, but this was different. AKA did not want her ideas. They were recruiting direct from Accra and Kumasi. Ghanaians for a Ghanaian company. She was pitching ideas to the LDC for their new port at Meridian – quadras three kilometres deep; a sculpted city; like living in the walls of a titanic cathedral. The LDC were polite but they had been talking about development funding for two lunes now. Her savings were running low. She woke up looking at the tick of the Four Elementals on her lens. She was considering moving to a smaller space.

  ‘I can pay your per diems,’ I said. ‘I have lots of money.’

  And then we talked about the bones. Achi could not decide until I got my report. The guilt, the ghost of doing something wrong. She could not have borne it if her decision influenced my decision to stay with the moon or go back to Earth. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be here on this balcony drinking piss-tea. I didn’t want Achi to have forced the decision to go to the medics on me. I didn’t want there to be a decision for me to make.

  Then the wonder. I remember it so clearly: a flash of gold in the corner of my vision. Something marvellous. A woman flying. A flying woman. Her arms were outspread, she hung in the sky like a crucifix. Our Lady of Flight. Then I saw wings shimmer and run with rainbow colours; wings transparent and strong as a dragonfly’s. The woman hung a moment, then folded her gossamer wings around her, and fell. She tumbled, now diving heard-first, flicked her wrists, flexed her shoulders. A glimmer of wing slowed her; then she spread her full wing span and pulled up out of her dive into a soaring spiral, high above Chandra Quadra.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I had been holding my breath. I was shaking with wonder. If you could fly why would you ever do anything else? It’s commonplace now; anyone can do it. But back then, there, I saw what we could do in this place.

  I went to the Mackenzie Metals medical centre and the medic put me in the scanner. He passed magnetic fields through my body and the machine gave me my bone density analysis. I was eight days behind Achi. Five weeks, and then my residency on the moon would become citizenship.

  Or I could fly back to Earth, to Brazil.

  That night the golden woman swooped through my dreams. Achi slept beside me. I had booked a hostel room. The bed was wide, the air was as fresh as Queen of the South could make and the taste of the water did not set your teeth on edge.

  Oh, that golden woman, flying loops through my certainties.

  Queen of the South hadn’t gone to a three-shift society, so it never went completely dark. I pulled Achi’s sheet around me and went out on to the balcony. I leaned on the rail and looked out at the walls of lights. Lives and decisions behind every light. This was an ugly world. It put a price on everything. It demanded a negotiation from everyone. Out at the railhead I had seen a new thing among some of the surface workers: a medallion, or a little votive tucked into a patch pocket. A woman in Virgin Mary robes, one half of her face a black angel, the other half a naked skull. It was the first time I met Dona Luna. One half of her face dead, but the other was alive. The moon was not a dead satellite, she was a living world. Hands and hearts and hopes like mine shaped her. Here there was no Mother Nature, no Gaia to set against human will. Everything that lived, we made. Dona Luna was hard and unforgiving, but she was beautiful. She could be a woman, with dragonfly wings, flying.

  I stayed on the hotel balcony until the roof reddened with sun-up. Then I went back to Achi. I wanted to make love with her again. My motives were all selfish. Things that are difficult with friends are easier with lovers.

  It was Achi’s idea to make a game out of it. We must clench our fists behind our backs, like Scissors, Paper, Stone, and count to three. Then we open our fists and in them there will be something, some small object, that will say beyond any doubt what we have decided. We must not speak, because if we say even a word, we will influence each other. It was the only way she could bear it, if it was quick and clean and we didn’t speak a word. And a game.

  We went back to the balcony table of the café to play the game. Two glasses of mint tea. I remember the air smelled of rock dust over the usual electricity and sewage. Every fifth sky panel was blinking. A less than perfect world.

  ‘I think we should do this kind of quickly,’ Achi said and her right hand was behind her back so fast I caught my breath. Now, the time was now. I slipped my small object out of my bag and clenched it in my hidden fist.

  ‘One two three,’ Achi said. We opened our fists.

  She held a nazar: an Arabic charm: concentric teardrops of blue, white and black lunar glass, like an eye.

  In my hand was a tiny icon of Dona Luna: black and white, living and dead.

  The last things were simple and swift. All farewells should be sudden, I think. I booked Achi on the cycler out. There was always space on the return orbit. She booked me into the LDC medical centre. A flash of light and the chib was bonded permanently to my eye. No hand shake, no congratulations, no welcome. All I had done was decide to continue doing what I was doing.

  The cycler would come round the Farside and rendezvous with the moonloop in three days. Three days: it focused our feelings, it kept us from crying too much.

  I went with Achi on the train to Meridian. We had a whole side row of seats to ourselves and we curled up like small burrowing animals.

  I’m scared, she said. It hurt, going back. The cycler slowly spins you up to Earth gravity and then there’s the gees coming down. She could be months in a wheelchair. Swimming, they say, is the closest a returnee can come to being on the moon. The water supports you while you build up muscle and bone mass again. Achi loved to swim. And then were the doubts. What if she had been mixed up with someone else and she was already past the point of no return? Would they try to bring her back to the moon? She couldn’t bear that. It would kill her as surely
as the Earth shattering her bones, suffocating her under her own weight. I understood then that she hated the moon. She had always hated it; the danger, the fear, but most of all, the people. The same faces looking into your face, forever. Wanting something from you. Wanting and wanting and wanting. No one can live that way, she said. It’s inhuman. I was the only thing that made the moon bearable for her. And I was staying, and she was leaving.

  So I told her the thing I kept secret: the thing I had seen out in Lansberg, that would make me a Dragon. It was so simple. I just looked at something I saw every day in a different way. Helium-3. The key to the post-oil economy. Mackenzie Metals threw away helium-3 every day. And I thought, how could the Mackenzies not see it? Surely they must … I couldn’t be the only one. But family and companies, and family companies especially, they have strange fixations and blindnesses. Mackenzies mine metal. Metal mining is what they do. They can’t imagine anything else and so they miss what’s right under their noses. I could make it work. That’s what I told Achi. I knew how to do it. But not with the Mackenzies. They’d take it off me. If I tried to fight, they’d just bury me. Or kill me. It’s cheaper. The Court of Clavius would make sure my family were compensated, but that would be the end of my hopes for dynasty. I would make it work for me, I would build a dynasty. I would be the Fifth Dragon. Mackenzie, Asamoah, Vorontsov, Sun: Corta. I liked the sound of that.

  I told her this on the train to Meridian. The seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And, I thought, this is the moon.

  Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold. There were eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors to see them off. No one left alone. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one drank it.

  Achi’s gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. My instructions were to open it after she was gone. The departure was so fast, the way they say executions are. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her mouth begin a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

  I tried to imagine the moonloop: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would the white cable be visible, seemingly descending vertically from the star-filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was snatched from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. All engineering, all process, all technical. So I kept the terrible emptiness from me, like charms. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the horizon.

  Then I went to buy coffee.

  Yes, coffee. The price was outrageous. I dug into my savings. But it was the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. The importer let me sniff it. I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

  I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it. I made it like I made this coffee, for you, Sister. You never forget these things.

  While it drew I opened Achi’s gift. I unrolled drawings, concept art for a habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces. The faces of the orixas, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies – she loved balconies – galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it: a habitation for a dynasty.

  This is Achi’s gift, all around you.

  When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me. They say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. When I smelled the coffee I had prepared, I experienced something new. Not memories, but a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

  I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee.

  I drank my coffee.

  It still doesn’t taste the way it smells.

  SEVEN

  ‘Threw us around like fucking girls.’ Twenty monitors on Robert Mackenzie’s life-support chair peak into the orange. ‘One of them was a fucking girl.’

  The news had flashed down Crucible’s spinal chord, familiar to familiar: Duncan Mackenzie is leaving Fern Gully. Unprecedented. Unthinkable. Unholy. Jade Sun oversaw the delicate loading of her husband’s life-support unit into transit capsule. Her words were soft and kind and encouraging and left the ancillary staff pale with fear. The capsule sped along beneath the incinerating glare of smelting mirrors to Car 27. Duncan Mackenzie’s private apartments.

  ‘She was a Jo Moonbeam,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.

  ‘You offer any kind of excuse for this?’ Jade Sun says, always one discreet step behind Bob Mackenzie’s right shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s not the fight, it’s never a fucking duster fight,’ Bob Mackenzie says. His voice is a rattle of respirators, his lungs half moon from years of inhaling dust. ‘They bent us over and fucked it right up us. Have you see the social net? Asamoahs, Vorontsovs, even the Suns are laughing at us. Even the Eagle of the fucking Moon.’

  ‘We would never laugh at your misfortune, my love,’ Jade Sun says.

  ‘Well you’re a fool. I would if I were you. Fucking Brazilians on kids’ bikes.’

  ‘They got the jump on us,’ Duncan says. ‘It’s a set-back.’ You smell vile, Duncan realises. A sickly excremental tang, the sourness of urine, the thin disguise of sterilising swabs and anti-bacterial. His skin smells, his hair smells. Oils and caked sweats and exudations. His teeth smell; his vile hideous teeth. Duncan can’t bear to look at those yellow stumps. How much better one fast, sharp punch and knock them out so he would never have to look at them again. That would kill the old man. Punch clean through packboard-soft crumbling bone into the soft pulp of his brain.

  ‘A set-back?’ Bob Mackenzie says. ‘We’ve lost our entire north-west quadrant project. We’ll be five years getting our helium operation out from under this pile of shit. Adrian had the tip-off directly from the Eagle. Adrian is a greasy little weasel but he knows how to protect a source. Someone leaked it. One of ours. We’ve a traitor. More than anything, I fucking hate traitors.’

  ‘I’ve read Eoin Keefe’s report. Our encryption is secure.’

  ‘Eoin Keefe is a coward who’s never put his balls on the block for this family.’ One step behind Jade Sun’s right shoulder; a lithe, intimidating presence, is Hadley Mackenzie. Duncan det
ests his father’s presence in his private rooms, but he is patriarch, silverback, he has the right. Hadley he resents because his presence implies soft words and murmured decisions among the green fronds of Fern Gully, decisions to which Duncan is not party.

  ‘Hadley has replaced Eoin Keefe,’ Jade Sun says mildly.

  ‘This is not your call,’ Duncan says. ‘You do not replace my heads of department.’

  ‘I replace who the fuck I want when the fuck I want,’ Robert Mackenzie says and Duncan understands the vulnerability of his position.

  ‘This is a board decision,’ Duncan murmurs.

  ‘Board!’ Robert Mackenzie shouts with all the spit he can summon. ‘This family is at war.’

  Does Duncan see a small smile flicker across Jade Sun’s face?

  ‘We’re a business. Businesses don’t fight wars.’

  ‘I did,’ Robert Mackenzie says.

  ‘This is a whole new moon.’

  ‘The moon doesn’t change.’

  ‘There is no profit in fighting the Cortas.’

  ‘We’d have our pride,’ Hadley says. Duncan stands close to him; eye to eye, breath-close.

  ‘Can you breathe pride? Step out there and say that to Lady Moon: I’ve got my Mackenzie pride. We fight them the way we do best. We make money. Mackenzie Metals isn’t pride, Mackenzie Metals isn’t family; it’s a machine for making money. It’s a machine for sending profits back to all those investors; those fund owners and venture capitalists back on Earth who trusted you, Dad, to take their money to the moon and make it work for them. They’re Mackenzie Metals. Not us.’

  Robert Mackenzie growls in his stone lungs.

  ‘My husband is very tired,’ Jade Sun says. ‘Emotions are exhausting for him.’ Robert’s LSU chair turns and Duncan knows it is against the old monster’s will. The inlock to the transit capsule opens. Hadley nods to his half-brother and follows the slow-rolling entourage.