by Ian McDonald
Slowly and with great formality, Wagner removes all his clothes. He stands naked under the apex of the dome, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, a fighter’s stance. His body is a mess, purple, scabbed, bruised. Wolf love is fierce love. He breathes deeply and steadily.
‘Clear the glass.’
The dome turns transparent. Wagner stands naked on the surface of the Sea of Fecundity; the dust at his feet extends into the dusty regolith, marked with eternal footprints and tyre-tracks. Boulders that have stood in place from before life began. The distant rim of Messier A.
None of this is why Wagner has come. He throws his arms and wide and looks up. The full Earth shines down on him.
He has always known when the Earth was round. As a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old nestled deep in the walls of Boa Vista, he had lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep because the Earth light was shining inside his head. Ten, eleven, twelve, hyperactive and fractious and prone to dazzling flights of fantasy at full Earth. Doctors had prescribed ADHD medication. Madrinha Flavia had thrown it back into the de-printer. That child is Earth-touched, that’s all. No medicine’s going to put out the big light in the sky. Thirteen. The full Earth had called him from his bed, through sleeping Boa Vista to this elevator, to this observation dome. He had closed the door, taken off his clothes. Thirteen was the age when everything changed, his body deepening and lengthening and filling. He was becoming a stranger in his skin. He stood naked in the Earthshine, felt it tugging him, tearing him, ripping him into two Wagner Cortas. He threw back his head and howled. The lock opened. Wagner had triggered a dozen security systems. Heitor Pereira found him, naked, curled on the floor, shaking and yelping.
Heitor never said a word about what he found in the observation dome.
Wagner basks in the light of the blue planet. He feels it cauterising his wounds, easing his bruises, healing him.
Fractal curls of white cloud stream across the Pacific. The blue of Earth’s oceans never fails to tear Wagner’s heart. Nothing is more blue. He can never go there. His is a distant, untouchable god. The wolves are the outcasts of heaven.
Night has already touched Earth’s lowest limb, a hairline of darkness. Over the coming days it will climb the face of the world. The dark half of Wagner’s life is drawing close. He’ll leave this place, the pack will disperse, the nés become shes and hes. He’ll find new powers of concentration and focus, analysis and deduction; he’ll go back to Analiese and she’ll see the healing marks all over his skin and she won’t ask but the questions will always be there.
Wagner closes his eyes and drinks in the light of distant Earth.
Carlinhos has been hunting the raiders for thirty-six hours now across the Mare Crisium. They struck first at Swift: three extractors destroyed, five immobilised. The blast pattern of shaped charges was unmistakable. Even as Carlinhos led his pursuit bikes along their tyre-tracks, they struck again at Cleomedes F, three hundred kilometres north. A mobile resupply and maintenance base destroyed. Two deaths. Carlinhos and his hunters, his caçadores – crack dusters and bikers – arrived to find tractor and habitat punched through and through again with five-millimetre diameter holes. Entries and exits matched. Projectiles.
Two strikes, three hundred kilometres apart, in under an hour. No ghosts on the moon, but other entities can haunt a plugged and re-pressurised mobile base: rumours, superstitions, monsters. The Mackenzies are teleporting; they work deep Australian magic, they have their own private moonship.
‘Not a private moonship,’ Carlinhos says, flicking through satellite data. ‘VTO lifter Sokol.’ From orbit, the scatter patterns in the dust are clear. Carlinhos books time on the moonloop’s cameras and, on the second pass of Ascender Two, São Jorge spot an irregularity in the shadows of Cleomedes H crater. Magnification resolves the speck into the unmistakable shape of a moonship. ‘Mackenzie is flying them in.’
Carlinhos’s hunters saddle up and ride out. São Jorge has predicted that the most likely target is the Eckert samba-line; a flotilla of six primary extractors moving to the south-western end of the Mare Anguis. The caçadores hammer the dustbikes for every drop of speed until they see the running lights of Corta Hélio gantries lift over the horizon. Carlinhos insinuates his team into the shadows of the slow-moving extractors. São Jorge’s orbiting eyes report a moonship grounded just below the south-eastern horizon. Carlinhos grins inside his helmet and snaps off the safety locks on the knife scabbards he wore on each thigh.
Three rovers. Eighteen raiders.
‘Wait until they’re out of the rovers,’ he orders. ‘Nene, your team take out the rovers.’
‘That’ll leave them marooned,’ Gilmar protests. He’s a veteran biker, built the first trails along Dorsa Mawson. Abandonment is the violation of all morals and custom. Dona Luna is everyone’s enemy. As you save, so you may be saved.
‘They’ve got a ship, haven’t they?’
The rover tags break into subtags. Raiders on the move.
‘Steady,’ Carlinhos says, crawling in the cover of Number Three extractor. ‘Steady.’ The tags are fanning out. Plenty of targets. Plenty of space. ‘Take them!’
Six bikes power up; wheels kick up dust. Carlinhos banks around the excavator and hurtles down on the nearest tag. The figure in the sasuit freezes in shock. Carlinhos draws a knife.
‘Gamma hutch,’ says Lousika Asamoah.
‘Hoosh,’ says Rafa Corta. ‘Gammahoosh. It’s French.’
‘French,’ Lousika says.
‘For that,’ Rafa says. ‘Gamahuche.’
‘I’m not sure I got that right. I learn better through practical experience. Hutch?’ She rolls up over Rafa, tucks legs under his shoulders with a small oof of exertion, squeezes his head between her thighs.
‘Huche,’ Rafa says and she comes down on his tongue.
Rafa has always loved Twé. It’s noisy and anarchic and its design makes no sense – a chaotic maze of habitats and agraria, where cramped tunnels open on to sheer drops of tube-farms and low-ceilinged apartments back on to glades of fruit bushes shivered with shafts of lights from sun-tracking mirrors. Water gurgles, the walls are moist with condensation, the air is rich with rot and nutrients and fermentation and the tang of shit. It is easy to get lost here; good to get lost. Ten-year-old Rafa, on his first trip to Twé, got gloriously lost. A quick turn took him away from crowds of tall people into places where only leaves and light lived. Corta and Asamoah security ran the tunnels, calling his name, bots scuttled along ceilings and through ducts too narrow for humans but all too enticing to kids. Software found him, lying on his belly trying to count the tilapia fish circling in an agrarium pond. He’d never seen living creatures before. Years later Rafa understood that the visit had been dynastic, Adriana feeling out a potential marriage between Corta Hélio and the Golden Stool. To Rafa it had been fish, all the way up, all the way down.
‘Here,’ Lousika had said.
‘Here?’ But she had already locked the door with her new Golden Stool protocols and wriggled off her dress.
The excuse had been João de Deus Moças against Black Stars Women’s. Robson was a life-long João de Deus fan and it was time to get Luna into the game. And because it’s Twé: we can see Tia Lousika, Rob; your mamãe, anzinho. Wouldn’t that be great? Lousika met them at the station. Luna ran the length of the platform. Robson showed her a good card trick. Rafa snatched her up in his arms and held her so hard she gasped and he squeezed tears from his eyes. At half-time at the AKA Arena the children went with security to get doces and Rafa slipped his warm hand between his wife’s thighs and he said, I am going to fuck you until you want to die.
Go on, she said.
So on the warm damp moss Lousika Asamoah straddles Rafa Corta’s face and he eats her out. Gamahuche. With his tongue he circles the head of her clitoris, coaxes it out to play with long strokes. Caresses it. Torments it. She grinds her vulva into his face. Rafa splutters and laughs. He nuzzles, he explores, he penetrates and w
ithdraws. He is fast, he is slow. Lousika dances with his tongue, matching his rhythms, finding off-beats and discords of shuddering pleasure. It lasts – seems to last – for hours. She comes four times. He doesn’t even pressure her for a mouth-job in return. This time is a gift.
‘I missed that so much.’ Lousika rolls from Rafa and lies on her back in the leaf-light. Fat drops of warm condensation roll down the soft grooves of leaves, hang like a pearl, swell and fall slowly on to her body. ‘Have you been practising?’ Lousika catches drops in her hand and flings them into Rafa’s face.
Rafa laughs. He was good. Fidelity was never in the nikah but there are rules. Never talk about lovers. Save the best for each other. After such a feast he’s exhausted. His jaws ache. He needs to rinse and spit but that would be unforgivable. He needs a break between courses. An entr’acte. High above, mirrors slowly track the long sun, throwing shadow across Rafa’s face.
‘There’s an hour until Madrinha Elis comes back with Luna and Robson, and even then, I could just call her and tell her to keep them out for another hour or two. If I had a reason to? You know?’
Rafa rolls on to his back and blinks up into the mirror-dazzle. Lousika slides on top of him.
‘So what else have you been practising?’
Carlinhos holds the blade flat at arm’s length. The Mackenzie saboteur throws hands up in defence. Carlinhos Corta knows how to take care of blades and such a blade, so honed and loved, with such momentum has taken the right arm clean through just beneath the elbow. It’s not survivable.
Carlinhos puts a boot down and doughnuts the dustbike, lining up on his next target. São Jorge sprays vital signs all over his hud; breathing, blood pressure, adrenaline, heart rate, neural activity, visual acuity, salts and sugars and blood oh-two. Carlinhos doesn’t need São Jorge’s visuals. He’s blazing.
His dustbike cavalry has completed its first charge. Five Mackenzies down, the rest fleeing. The rovers are coming up at speed to evacuate. The raiding party has been routed. Carlinhos circles his knife hand in the air: round and at them again.
‘Leave them!’ Gilmar shouts on the common channel. ‘They’re running.’
The rovers unfold, Mackenzie raiders dump sabotage equipment as they pile into the seats and harness on. The dustbikes can easily match them. São Jorge superimposes an icon of the Vorontsov ship lifting off from over the horizon, swooping in for rescue. Let it come. A moonship is a battle worth fighting.
Two rovers accelerate away in arcs of dust; one of the raiders kneels by the side of the third rover, aiming a long metal device. The kneeler jerks: recoil. And Fabiola Mangabeira’s head explodes. Her body flies from the dustbike; the machine careers on, the dead woman spins in a spray of glass and fibre, bone and flash-frozen blood. Her name turns white on Carlinhos’s hud.
‘They’ve got a fucking gun!’ Gilmar cries. The shooter tracks another target. Silent recoil. Carlinhos’s hud tracks an ejected red-hot thermal clip. The shot takes Thiago Endres through the shoulder. Not a clean shot, not a head-shot; but a killing shot all the same. Sasuits can heal, but not this much damage, not this fast. Thiago spasms on the regolith, thrashing as blood sprays into vacuum and freezes in a thick glossy ice. Another name goes white.
The gun swings on to Carlinhos. He throws the bike over into a skid, slides across the dust. Then he sees Gilmar pile full speed into the shooter. Gilmar strikes true and hard. The shooter goes down under the wheels, arms and legs flailing; the bike bucks high, Gilmar holds it down. The massive tread of the drive wheel rips open sasuit, skin, flesh, ribs. The gun spins away.
Carlinhos sprints to his still-running bike.
‘After them, get after them!’
The third rover clamshells up and accelerates away. Carlinhos stands in the soft-settling dust, a knife in each hand, bellowing.
‘Let them fucking go!’ Gilmar yells.
Carlinhos walks to the corpse of the shooter. Fabric, bone, bowel. Carlinhos contemplates it for long heartbeats; the fragility of this goop and gore, the totality of the destruction. The moon makes any injury fatal. A woman, he guesses. They are often the best shooters. Then he raises his boot to stamp down through the helmet and crush the skull. Gilmar seizes his arm and whirls him away. Carlinhos leaps back, blades ready.
‘Carlo, Carlo, it’s over. Put the knives away.’
He can’t see. Who is this? His signs are off the scale. Red all over his visor. What are they saying? Something about knives.
‘I’m okay,’ Carlinhos says. The dust has settled. The rest of his team wait on him, standing at a distance between respectful and fearful. Someone has recovered his dustbike. The ground shakes; from over the horizon a moonship rises on diamonds of rocket-fire, lights flashing, three rovers clutched to its belly. Carlinhos stabs his knives at it; roars in two-bladed futility at the lights in the sky. It turns, it’s gone. ‘I’m okay.’ Carlinhos puts the knives away, one at a time.
Carlinhos learned to love the knife young. His guards were playing a game; stabbing the point of the blade between outspread fingers. Carlinhos aged eight could see the stakes and the appeal at once. He understood the small lethality, the simple precision, how there was nothing complicated or unnecessary about knives.
Like his brothers and sister, Carlinhos Corta had been taught Brazilian jiu jitsu. He won’t apply himself, Heitor Pereira reported to Adriana. He jokes and play-acts and won’t take it seriously. Carlinhos didn’t take it seriously because it could not be serious to him. It was too close up and undignified and he loathed the master-pupil discipline. He wanted a weapon fast and dangerous. He wanted elegance and violence; an adjunct to his body, an extension of his personality.
After Madrinha Flavia found him printing out fighting daggers, Heitor Pereira sent Carlinhos to Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s School of Seven Bells in Queen of the South. All dark skills were taught here; thieving, stealth and assassination, confidence tricks and poisons, torture and excruciation, the way of the two knives. Carlinhos fell in among the freelance security and bodyguards like true family. He learned the way of one hand and two, of attack and defence and how to trick and blind; how to win and kill. He grew fast and lean, muscular and poised as a dancer. Corta means cut in Spanish, Mariano Gabriel Demaria said. Now it’s time to try the Bell Walk.
The heart of the School of Seven Bells was a labyrinth of old service tunnels, kept in darkness and hung with the seven bells that gave Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s academy its name. Walk the maze without sounding a single bell and you graduated. Carlinhos failed on the third bell. He raged for three days, then Mariano Gabriel Demaria took him and sat him and told him, You will never be great. You’re the kid brother. You’ll never command companies or budgets. You’re full of anger, boy, swollen like a boil with it. An idiot would tell you to use that anger but idiots die in the School of Seven Bells. You’re not the strongest, you’re not the smartest but you are the one who will kill for his family. Accept it. No one else can do it.
Four times more Carlinhos Corta took the Bell Walk. The fifth time he walked clear in silence. Mariano Gabriel Demaria gave him a pair of matched handcrafted lunar steel blades; balanced and beautiful and honed to an edge that would part a dream.
It has taken Carlinhos five years to understand Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s truth. The anger will never go away. He will never find a way through it. That’s therapy-talk. Accept it. Just accept it.
In the repaired base, Carlinhos plays with his knives, over and over, rolling them around his fingers, spinning them, tossing and catching them while outside vacuum-sealed corpses hang in racks, their carbon and water the property of the Lunar Development Company now. And he is angry, still so angry.
The Sisters have disappointed Lucas Corta. Toquinho has led him to an industrial unit on East 83rd of Hadley’s Armstrong Quadra. Glass and sinter, full-height windows, standard-fit partitions, functional utilities, quick-print catalogue furnishings, generic reception AI. Soft white, discreet full-spectrum lighting. The air is s
cented with cypress and grapefruit. It could be a budget beautician or a hire-by-the-hour developer farm. Hadley always was a cheap place, a budget boon dock. But Toquinho insists that this is the Motherhouse of the Sisters of the Lords of Now; their terreiro.
And they keep him waiting.
‘I am Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade Abosede Adekola.’ The woman is a short, rotund Yoruba, all in Sisterhood whites, her neck hung with dozens of bead necklaces and silver charms. Her fingers are busy with rings; she extends a hand to Lucas. He does not kiss it. ‘Sisters Maria Padilha and Maria Navalha.’ The two woman flanking the Mãe-de-Santo curtsy. They are younger and taller than the Reverend Mother; one Brazilian, the other West African. Their head scarves are red. Filhos-de-Santo of the Street Exus and Pomba Gira, Lucas recalls from Madrinha Amalia’s teachings.
‘We are a familiar-free community,’ Sister Maria Navalha says.
‘Of course.’ Lucas banishes Toquinho.
‘We are honoured, Senhor Corta,’ Mother Odunlade says. ‘Your mother is a great supporter of our work. I presume that’s why you’ve come to us.’
‘You’re direct,’ Lucas says.
‘Modesty is for the children of Abraham. I deplore your callous treatment of our Sister Flavia. To leave that dear woman in fear of her breath …’
‘The matter is out of my hands now.’
‘So I understand. Please.’
Sisters Maria Padilha and Maria Navalha invite Lucas to an adjoining room. Sofas, more budget-print furniture, soft-focus white. Lucas is defiantly bi-chromatic in his dark grey suit. He doesn’t doubt that there is a sanctum hidden deep behind these bland walls, and that no non-believer, and precious few believers, will ever see it.
A metal cup of herbal brew.
‘Maté?’
Lucas sniffs, sets it aside. Mother Odunlade sips decorously through a silver straw.