Luna

by Ian McDonald

  ‘We need peace with the Cortas!’ Duncan shouts after them.

  She sees Wagner in the chair and freezes.

  ‘Everyone in this bar is a wolf,’ Wagner says. She looks around. The two women at the near table, the group at the far table, the lone drinker at the bar, the handsome couple in the booth, turn and look at her. The bartender nods. Wagner indicates the seat opposite him.

  ‘Please. Something to drink?’

  She names a herbal cocktail unknown to Wagner. You were frightened before you entered this room, he thinks. But you became angry the moment you saw me. I can read this in the dilation of your pupils, the fixtures of your jawline, the lines on the back of your hand around the glass, the flare of your nostrils; a hundred micro-tells. Sometimes the heightened senses of his full-self overwhelms Wagner in barrage of impressions; sometimes their insight is as precise as a fighting knife. He can smell the components of her drink: a basil and tarragon spritzer with a dash of sours. The water is Peary ice-fresh.

  ‘You set that up well,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you. I worked hard at it. I knew you’d run background checks. Did you like the social profile? Minor shareholder in the Polar Lunatics. I actually took a position in the team, in case you checked that. I sold it back when my people told me you were at the door.’ He’s over-telling. It’s a danger in his light-self. Everything is there at once inside him: words fight for a place through the narrow doors of thought and voice. Mundanes are so slow.

  ‘You were never that diligent in the colloquium.’

  ‘Diligent. Diligent, yes. No. I’ve changed a lot since then.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. That’s your usual familiar?’

  ‘Everything is different when the Earth is round,’ Wagner says.

  ‘I am scared of you,’ Elisa Stracchi says.

  ‘Of course. Yes. I had to make sure you wouldn’t run. But I just want information, Elisa.’

  ‘I didn’t know what it was for.’

  Wagner leans forward. Elisa Stracchi flinches at the intensity of his gaze.

  ‘I don’t think I believe that. No, I don’t believe that at all. An assassination attempt on my brother? Bio-processors specifically designed for a fly-based neurotoxin delivery system? I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea who the client was?’

  ‘I do believe that you would carry out the same due diligence on your client as you did on me. From which I can conclude that the real client was concealed by a similar nest of shell companies.’

  ‘You sound like a fucking dick, Wagner,’ Elisa says. Her foot jerks under the table. It does not take wolf senses to read that tell.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. Who did you deliver to?’

  ‘Am I safe, Wagner?’

  Wagner wishes he could stop reading her face. Every unconscious muscular twitch and tensing triggers empathies and anxieties in him. Sometimes he wishes that he could just stop perceiving so minutely, reading so deeply. To stop that would be to stop being Wagner Corta.

  ‘We will protect you.’

  She flicks Dr Luz the address of a corporate upload box. Dr Luz interrogates. A shell company, now closed down. She must have known this. The question for Wagner is how many other shell companies and dead drops the file went through before arriving at an assembler. His thoughts are already scurrying along a dozen different paths at once. Wagner thinks of his full mind as a quantum computer; exploring possibilities in many parallel universes at once, then collapsing the superimposed states to a single decision. He knows what to do next.

  ‘Wagner.’

  It’s seconds before Wagner can refocus. Then, full seconds are instants to mundane folk.

  ‘Fuck you forever. Once a Corta, always a fucking Corta. No one’s ever said no to you, have they? You don’t even understand the word.’

  But she hesitates, just a second, just enough, when she turns to leave and finds the bar empty. Wagner doesn’t have the authority to hire private security on the Corta account. He can hire a bar out of his own pocket. And he can crew it with his friends, his family, his pack mates.

  That night he runs with his pack up into the roof of the city. Up there, as close as architecture allows to the light of the Earth, old service tunnels have been scraped out into chambers and vesicles. It’s a bar, a club, a lair. It’s like partying in a lung. The air is stagnant and stale. The bar smells of bodies and perfumes and cheap vodka with the polycarbonate tang of the manufactories. The light is blue, Earthshine blue, the music real not piped privately through familiars and so loud it’s physical.

  The Magdalena pack from Queen of the South has come to Meridian. They’re the oldest of the moon packs; from the dream-time they have been led by Sasha Volchonok Ermin. Né claims to be the oldest wolf on the moon; first to lift up ner eyes and howl at the Earth. First to claim the pronoun. Né’s a First gen, a head shorter than any of ner pack, but ner charisma lights the bar like Diwali. Wagner finds ner intimidating; né has no regard for him, thinks him a soft aristocrat, no true wolf. Ner pack are rough and aggressive and believe themselves true heirs of the two natures. But they give good party. Already fighters are lining up in the pit, stripped to skins and hankering to wrestle. Wagner is a talker not a fighter and he finds a cavity in the warren of tunnels equally distant from the cheering and the DJ where he holds three conversations simultaneously with a roboticist with Taiyang Moongrid, a broker in physics-limited derivatives and an interior designer specialising in custom woods.

  A Magdalena girl arrives on the edge of the conversations. When the Earth is round the wolves of the moon scorn mundane fashion: she is dressed in a lime-green suit-liner, be-scribbled by marker pens in the frenetic, spiralling, winding doodles of the Earth-lit visual imagination.

  ‘You’re small you’re sweet you smell good,’ she whispers and Wagner picks out every word from the weave of small talk.

  ‘That’s a look,’ he says.

  ‘It was a thing, then not a thing, so now a thing again,’ she says. ‘I’m Irina.’ Her familiar is a horned skull with flames flickering from its eyes and nostrils. Another look that was a thing, then not a thing, then a thing again. Wagner has always wondered where the short-lived fad for graffitied suit-liners came from.

  ‘I’m …’

  ‘I know who you are, Little Wolf.’

  She closes her teeth on his earlobe and whispers, ‘I like to bite.’

  ‘I like to be bitten,’ Wagner says but before she can haul him away he puts a hand on her breastbone. He can feel every heartbeat, every breath, every surge of blood through her arteries. She smells of honey and patchouli. ‘I have to go to my mamãe’s birthday party tomorrow.’

  ‘Then respect your Mom and don’t show her too much skin.’

  The two suits step in on either side of Lucasinho. He doesn’t know who they are but he knows whose they are.

  Lucas Corta sits on the couch where Lucasinho slept. Neat, precise, hands lightly resting on his thighs. Flavia crouches in a corner, among the saints. Her eyes are wide with fear. Her chest heaves, she visibly fights for every breath. Her hands flutter at her chest. Lucasinho has never seen this before but every moon-born know what it is. Her breath has been shorted. She is drowning in clear air.

  ‘Give her her breath back!’ Lucasinho yells. He crouches beside Madrinha Flavia, his arm around her.

  ‘Of course,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘Toquinho.’ Flavia takes a deep, rattling, whooping breath, breaks into coughing and choking. Lucasinho pulls her close. Her eyes are scared.

  ‘Wagner pays for—’

  ‘I made the LDC a better offer,’ Lucas says. ‘It seems a sensible precaution. If you don’t breathe, you don’t talk.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Lucasinho says.

  ‘You’ve been off the network so you may not know that we’ve scored a famous victory. Corta Hélio. Your family. We’ve staked out new helium-3 exploitation territories in Mare Anguis. The Court of Clavius has recognised our claim. I�
�ve secured the future for you, son. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Madrinha Flavia’s breathing is even now but still she cowers as if each breath might be her last.

  ‘Oh, yes. I almost forgot. Switch on Jinji. Go on. You might as well.

  Boot is successful, Jinji says. Full access to your accounts has been restored.

  ‘Feels good to have money and carbon and network, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Toquinho.’ The pattern of notes above Lucas’s shoulder spin. There is a spray of virtual notes.

  I’ve received a contract transfer, Jinji says. It’s the Four Elementals account for Flavia Vila Nova. Do you accept?

  ‘Your madrinha looked after you,’ Lucas says. ‘It’s only proper that you should look after her.’

  Do you accept? Jinji urges.

  ‘Flavia,’ Lucasinho says, ‘It’s your account. Pai wants me to take it over. I have to do that.’ Then, to his father, ‘I accept. It’s still your money.’

  ‘Yes. But I never did buy you a pet when you were a boy, did I?’ Lucas stands up, brushes imaginary dust from his trousers. A nod, the security suits move to the door. ‘One last thing. The important bit. The reason I came. You love parties. Everyone loves parties. I’ve a party invitation for you. Your grandmother’s birthday. Bring a cake. You’re good at cakes. I don’t care if you keep your clothes on or off when you’re making it, but it’s eighty candles.’

  Yemanja wakes Adriana Corta with music: Aguas de Marco: her favourite. Elis and Tom cover.

  Thank you, she whispers to her familiar and lies under her light sheet, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the music, wondering why this tune, this morning. She remembers. It is her birthday. She is eighty years old today.

  Yemanja has chosen birthday dresses: for itself the triple-crescent of the moon herself and for Adriana: Pierre Balmain, 1953, a wingcollared suit, long-sleeved, a tight pencil skirt and an outsized bow on the left hip. Gloves. Bag. Elegant. Flattering on eighty-year-old flesh. Before she dresses, Adriana swims for twenty minutes in the endless pool. She venerates the orixas outside her window with gin and incense. She takes her medication and gags as little as she does every day. She eats five slices of mango while Yemanja updates her on her family’s business. A thousand concerns flock, but they will not land today. Not on her birthday.

  First to greet her is Helen de Braga. A kiss, an embrace. Now Heitor Pereira wishes her congratulations for the day. In her honour he wears a fantastical uniform, braid and buttons and shoulder pads that would be ridiculous did he not bear it with such dignity. An embrace, a kiss.

  Are you well? they ask.

  I am joyful, she says. Death gnaws at her, a little more gone each day and her succession is uncertain but she woke this morning aflame with joy. Joy in the small things, the particular fall of the sunline across the faces of the orixas, the creep of the water up over her body as she lowered herself into the pool, the sweet-sour musk of the mangoes, the rustle of the fabric of her party clothes. Marvellous banalities. There are still new sensations to appreciate in this small world.

  Now the grandchildren come running. Robson has a new card trick to show her: in the shuttle, anzinho. Luna brings flowers, a posy of blue that matches her dress. Adriana accepts them though her skin crawls at the touch of the once-living, now dead. She sniffs deeply – Luna giggles: Violetas have no smell, Vo.

  Next the okos. There is only one remaining at Boa Vista. Amanda Sun embraces her mother-in-law and kisses her on each cheek.

  The madrinhas now. Amalia and Ivete and Monica, Elis casting an eye over Robson, adjusting the knot of his tie, the set of his collar. Rafa, Lucas, Ariel and Carlinhos have long moved out of Boa Vista but their madrinhas remain. Adriana would never banish them from Boa Vista: Cortas honour their obligations. She would rather have them in one place, under her sky, rather than scattered across the world with their gossip and secrets. Like that other one. The faithless one. One by one the madrinhas embrace and kiss their benefactor.

  Last in line are the staff. It’s a long process, shaking the hands, acknowledging the good wishes for this auspicious day but Adriana Corta works assiduously; a word here, a smile there. Security falls in behind her at the entrance to the station. They form a dark-suited barricade between Adriana and her grandchildren, her oldest retainers, her people. Everyone, from her Director of Finance to her gardener, has reskinned their familiars in party shapes and colours.

  The station out-door swishes open. Hands reach for knives: Heitor Pereira had balked at holding the party outside Boa Vista but Adriana insisted. Corta Hélio would not cower inside its fortress. The hands fall away. It’s Lucasinho, with a small paper box.

  ‘Happy birthday, Vo.’ The box holds a cake, a green-frosted dome delicately decorated with a baroque lace of icing. ‘It’s Swedish Princess cake. I don’t know what Swedish means.’ Embrace and kiss. Lucasinho’s pierces dimple his grandmother’s skin.

  ‘With or without clothes?’ Adriana asks. ‘I do hope without.’ Lucasinho blushes. It’s quite adorable on him. ‘Are you wearing make-up?’

  ‘I am, Vo.’

  ‘That colour liner really brings out the gold in your eyes. Maybe highlight the cheekbones a little more. Play to your strengths.’ He is a sweet boy.

  The party will travel in two trams. Entourage first; Adriana, immediate family and security in the second shuttle. In the three-minute journey Robson shows his vo his new card trick – it’s themed around people evacuating a leaking habitat: court cards all escaping from the top of the deck – and everyone gets their fingers a little green and sticky with Lucasinho’s cake.

  João de Deus is a working city and Adriana Corta would never sacrifice profit to declare a universal holiday, even on her eightieth birthday but many residents and contractees have taken a few minutes’ leave and turned out to salute the First Lady of Helium. They watch the fleet of motos ferry the Cortas down Kondakova Prospect and up the ramp to the hotel where Lucas has arranged the birthday lunch. They applaud, some wave. Adriana Corta raises a gloved hand in acknowledgement. Blimps in the shape of cartoon animals manoeuvre on hushed micro-fans through São Sebastião Quadra like a divine circus. Adriana looks up as the shadow of M-Kat Xu falls over her. She smiles.

  Heitor Pereira’s people have been working for days, discreetly securing the hotel. Since mid-morning they have been discreetly scanning the guests. Applause; turning heads. Adriana arrives in the middle of a cocktail reception, whirled from face to face, party dress to party dress; kiss to kiss. Her boys, her handsome boys in their best suits. Ariel is late, Ariel is always late for family. Lucas is visibly annoyed but he is not his sister’s keeper. This is a world without police, even family police.

  Family close and far: a warm embrace from Lousika Asamoah, always Adriana’s favourite among the okos. Cousins by blood and marriage; the Sores from Carlos’s side of the family and minor clans; allies by nikah. Society next. An apology has been received from the Eagle of the Moon – no Eagle has ever accepted Adriana’s birthday invitation. Adriana dances an elegant waltz among Asamoahs from Twé and immaculate Suns from the Palace of Eternal Light and Vorontsov grandees; houses lesser and petty, socialites and trend-setters, reporters and celebrities, amors and okos. Lucasinho’s moon-run cohort are here, self-conscious and remaining in each other’s social orbit. Adriana Corta has a word for each. Her social wake spirals off a hundred conversations and liaisons.

  Politics last of all. LDC bureaucrats and Farside University deans. Soap stars and chart musicians, artists and architects and engineers. Adriana Corta has always filled her anniversaries with engineers. The media: social net reporters and fashion commentators; sharers and content-creators. The religious: Cardinal Okogie and Grand Mufti el-Tayyeb; Abbot Sumedho and, all in white, a Sister of the Lords of Now. Irmã Loa curtsies to her patron.

  Ariel appears at her mother’s side. A kiss and an apology, which Adriana waves away.

/>   Thank you.

  If I’d missed your eightieth, you’d never have forgiven me.

  That’s not what I’m thanking you for.

  Ariel snaps her vaper to its full length and lets the party claim her. Adriana looks up in delight at the sound of music. Bossa nova. The party parts before her as she is drawn to its source.

  It’s the same band we had at Lucasinho’s moon-run, Adriana says. How lovely.

  Lucas is at her side. He has never been more than two steps away from her through all the social turns and pirouettes of Adriana’s progress.

  All your favourites, Mamãe. The old tunes.

  Adriana runs her hand over Lucas’s cheek.

  You are a good boy, Lucas.

  Wagner Corta slips late into the restaurant, still trying to get comfortable in his print-fresh suit. The dimensions are right but it sits wrong, tight where it needs to be generous, rubbing where it needs to caress.

  ‘Lobinho!’ Rafa greets Wagner open-armed and effusive. Crushing embrace, heavy back slaps. Wagner winces. Man-breath. Wagner can identify the constituents of every cocktail his brother has thrown down his throat. ‘It’s Mamãe’s birthday, could you not have shaved?’ Rafa looks Wagner up and down. ‘And your familiar isn’t familiar.’

  With a thought Wagner banishes Dr Luz and summons Sombra though everyone who knows he is of the two selves can tell he’s the wolf from his fidgeting in his skin, the way he looks as if he is listening to several conversations at once, the generous stubble on his face.

  ‘She missed you at the receiving line.’ Rafa scoops a cocktail from a tray and slips it into Wagner’s hand. ‘Just make sure you get to her before you get to Lucas. He’s not in a forgiving mood today.’

  Wagner barely made the express; savouring every moment with Irina. She had bitten him. She had sucked his flesh so hard she left bruises. She had pinched and twisted and made him cry out. She had tugged his skin with gentle loving teeth. The sex had been the least part of it, perfunctory, obvious. She awoke sensations and emotions new to Wagner. His senses rang all night. He picked up the suit from the station printer, changed in the train washroom, gingerly pulling shirt and pants over still raw wounds and bruises. Each tiny pain was an ecstasy. She had obeyed Wagner’s instruction and left hands, neck, face unmarked.